dannypeck.net – Page 7 – An Occasional Ecuadorian

Forest Gump day

One of my favorite movie lines is in Forest Gump when he says “So I went to the White House again. And I met the president again.” I quote that line, or derivations of it, often to express that sense of repetition in my life. And sometimes it’s with that attitude of boredom that Forest Gump had. But sometimes it’s to express that same sense of irony the audience should feel upon hearing such a statement. Who would ever get bored of the White House? But I most commonly quote that line when I’m hosting a Quito Quest team during their first week on the ground. I have been to the Basilica and the Presidential Palace and Plaza San Francisco. So. Many. Times.

But even while I brace myself for the monotony, I can’t help but remember Deborah and Roberto taking me to all those places for the very first time. And I can’t help but be excited that I’m with a group of new friends who have that sense of wonder and excitement that I had eleven years ago, and who I will get to know through this day and the rest of their time on the ground.

Today I also had a small sense of terror in knowing that I would be delivering Partnership Orientation tonight. Partnership is the most important orientation we do with a team, and it can be something very powerful to hear. I’ve heard it three dozen times at minimum, and I’ve given it to several teams, most recently a modified version to my Costa Rica team from the NCCUMC youth ministry. But if I gave Partnership a thousand times I still don’t think I could stop worrying that I’d screw it up. It’s a lot of pressure and I want them to get it. This is the very reason I keep coming back to Youth World, because I think we live out Partnership so well here. So this was important.

I think it went well. The team asked good questions about it. So I could breathe a sigh of relief. And thinking and planning for it added a little but if a beak to the monotony of the same tourist day I do all the time.

But I also had a couple moments in debrief that made this day memorable. The first was when we realized that all seven students in this team are introverts. My tribe is here! The second was an observation by Brett about myself and Caroline. He said we kept pointing out changes in the city, where restaurants used to be, or where there is a new building. He compared it to the story of the Basilica, which is always under construction and never technically completed because legend says when the Basilica is completed, the end of the world will arrive and they don’t want that responsibility. The basilica has to change and grow to stay alive, and the city does the same thing. We all are either growing and changing or we are dying.

Leave it to a Sewanee student to make an observation I’ll be incorporating into my orientations from now on.

The Calm before the Team

I arrived in Quito late last night after a couple of very windy, bumpy plane rides. And though today has theoretically been about preparations for the team and for Youth World staff meeting tomorrow, it has also been about jumping into life with the Vivancos. So we’ve played with the kids a lot today. Lying in a hammock, watching the boys crawl through their tunnels in the back yard this afternoon, Caroline summed up the contented atmosphere here by asking “Does the team have to come?”

Old Posts

For a long time, my website maintenance has been taking what is actually broken and making it functional again, rather than worrying too much about content. With spare time and a functioning site, I’ve been able to go through my WordPress posts and discover some things. I had several posts, going all the way back to 2011 which were “Uncategorized.” All of them have homes in multiple categories now.

But even more fascinating, I had some posts which were written but never actually published. 31 Drafts, in fact, some of them dating back to 2008. Since I like those things to be seen, here are the seventeen that had enough content to publish, without having to scroll back through years and years of posts.

Some Random Photo Favorites was a post from June 2011 when I was spending the summer hosting Quito Quest teams. It had some great photos which were on my public Flickr page, but apparently I had some trouble with the formatting and although the content was all there, this post never came out of my drafts folder. It is posted now.

I had a Test post from the Apple Store which I did not actually publish, and instead just took a screenshot. But it was entertaining to see that one of the multi-pronged tests I did was logging into my own site and typing a post on an iPad- the first time I had ever even held one. This would have been around May 2o11, because I ended up purchasing an original iPad to blog in Ecuador in summer 2011, planning to sell it on eBay when I got home to the United States. I obviously got attached, because I have never not owned an iPad since. There was a similar draft of a test written from an iPod Touch, which I deleted.

Tolerance, the First Amendment, and Islam was something I wrote out of a sense of anger toward my former Representative, and on which I assume my 2010 self chose not to click “Publish”out of that same sense of anger. Well, 8 years is enough of a cooling-off period, and I think 2010 Danny was pretty smart. I made no edits to it before I made it public today.

Glimpse into an Unexpected Evening was a fun night with the Casa G boys in May 2010.

New Writing Project was about an article I started for Youth World about a mentoring program at AAI. Interestingly enough eight years later, Dani, who was a high school student in the program at the time, now runs Quito Quest, so she’s effectively my boss when I come back to host a Quito Quest team.

I Promise I Can Feed Myself probably speaks for itself. Post from 2010, which I’m guessing was never published because I intended to add photos of other food to it as a went. I guess this post will be unfinished art, but it is public now.

Communication was about our weekend Quito Quest staff scouting trip to Riobamba, Ecuador in January 2010.

Not Atypically Not Ready was about the craziness before my Christmas travel back to the US in December 2009.

Christmas Party to Remember was about my experience with dehydration during the 2009 Youth World Staff Christmas Party.

Emaus Mission Team was about a group of Quiteños and Gringos who journeyed to a ministry site in the jungle in October 2009.

First Office Days was a quick update on the beginning of “real life” in Quito after I finished language school.

On Writing was a post with some musings after an interesting conversation with a guest I was hosting while he was discerning whether to join the Youth World team.

Preparations? What Are Those? was really an admission of how completely unprepared I was to get on a plane and be in a foreign country for a year.

T-Minus 3 was about my last couple of days in North Carolina and my prep before I moved to Quito for a year.

Table for Twelve is more unfinished art about Maundy Thursday 2009.

Afternoon at CFC was about a brief ministry experience in March 2009.

Sermonitos from October 2008.

Travel Prep 2018

March is here again, and with it come plane tickets and a host of technological projects.

First, my ancient iPhone 4s finally gave out. It has a hardware error stemming from an issue with the WiFi antenna. I cannot connect to WiFi at all, which means I cannot disconnect the phone from Find My iPhone, which means I cannot even reset it to factory defaults. Maybe I will get around to finding a SIM card with a data connection so I can fix at least some of these issues, but for the moment, it is simply out of commission. Enter, “new” iPhone.

My iPhone 4s was the first iPhone I ever purchased, and I purchased it Factory Unlocked (which was not a common, nor inexpensive thing back then) and it was with me through three US cell carriers until I finally switched back to Verizon and CDMA service, and a new iPhone 5s. The 4s then permanently became my Ecuadorian phone, replacing a refurbished 3GS I had purchased in the meantime, and I would just keep my Ecuadorian SIM card in it and add a few dollars to my prepaid account every time I was in the country. And the 4s outlasted not just that old 3GS, but the 5s as well. That phone’s battery exploded when I was in California in 2016 and I upgraded to a then-band new iPhone 7. So it has been the Ecuadorian 4s and the North American 7 until today, when my refurbished iPhone 6 arrived.

One of the things I have learned with all these generations of phones is that SIM cards keep getting smaller. At one time, I had what we referred to as the Nokia “Brick” phone (those indestructible candybar phones that we still give to our Youth World interns in 2018 because the cockroaches will be calling each other on them after the nuclear war). That phone had what most people would call a full-size SIM card in it (although that’s technically a “Mini” SIM). I purchased a SIM card cutter way back in the day to slice it down to fit in my 4s, which required a Micro SIM. And that card just got sliced down again with a new cutter into a Nano SIM for the iPhone 6.

Restored from the 4s Ecuaphone backup, it will be all ready to use when I step off the plane. Or at least it would be if I ever managed to have any saldo left when I finish hosting a team. Hopefully I’ll remember to turn off my cellular data instead of blowing through all my saldo before the team even arrives, which I may have done… two years in a row. My Quito Quest pareja, Caroline, gets a little frustrated with this phenomenon when all outgoing phone calls and texts have to be on her phone until we remember to send someone to the Farmacia to recharge my saldo. I could solve all of this by just using one of the Nokia phones. But what can I say? I am spoiled.

The other tech project has been updating my website. I generally renew my hosting and domain registration in February, so that has been done for a couple of weeks, but parts of the site have been broken for a long time. The DNS records were a little wonky, probably since I switched hosting providers years ago, or possibly since I added Google Apps. At any rate, if you got here by putting a “www” in front of my domain name, then my update worked.

The site was also running a WordPress theme that was at bare minimum 5 years old, and had survived heavy coding updates I did to it throughout that time. The bulk of those coding edits were to incorporate a head image randomizer, the thing that makes the top image change every time you visit the site, click “Refresh,” or go to another page within the site. This option is now something that’s built into the WordPress software. I was just doing it before it was cool, thanks to some PHP script found and then reworked by Mike Turner. The result of all this was that as the underlying software has changed and modernized, my theme would not even display my blog posts on the front page anymore. Obviously, you’re reading this, so I’ve corrected that error. For the moment, I have done this mainly by changing to a less archaic WordPress theme. It will probably change again as I get annoyed at searching for post dates off to the side. But at the moment, I am simply happy that there is no quest required to access my content, or even my site anymore.

Photos from Sewanee QQ Team 2017

Springtime Web Maintenance

I so rarely check look at my own website when I’m not in Ecuador, that the most common occurrence for the last several years is for me to find it totally broken when I do bother to check on it. So if you notice the face-lift, that’s why things are different. I logged on last night, and lo and behold, the front page simply wouldn’t load.

I chalk it up to laziness on my part in updating. Somebody found a flaw in WordPress and exploited it so that the theme I was running got messed up. I switched themes, and most of the content is back. But it doesn’t look like “me” around here at the moment.

I tell you that to tell you this. Once the school year starts and I return to a normal schedule, my plan is to begin a youth ministry blog, and split my website into two sections. One for my Ecuador writings, and one for my musings on the oddities of working with students and getting a paycheck from Jesus. So that face-lift will continue, but hopefully that’s a reason for me to actually create content here more often. And keep my website updated. And not get hacked. Again.

Keep checking back.

Rhythms of Refreshment

I’ve begun writing some thoughts/devotions/articles for my youth group emails, and the one that went out today just seemed more like something that I would typically post on my blog. So here it is.

About this time nine years ago I began telling people that I was going to Ecuador for two weeks out of my summer. Most people seemed to think that was pretty cool. This time eight years ago I began telling people I was going back to Ecuador to work for the entire summer, and the reaction tended to be more impressed. Seven years ago I began telling people that I was moving to Ecuador for an entire year, and people at that point began to be concerned for my mental health. These days I find myself in conversations where I’ll say “I just got back from a couple weeks in Ecuador,” and someone will say “Oh, I didn’t even realize you were gone.” Ecuador, Youth World, and hosting Quito Quest teams have all simply become a part of the rhythm of my life.

This year, it was Phil Payne who made an observation about this phenomenon. Phil is one of the Directors at Youth World, and many years ago was my boss in the Short Term Teams department. He was asking me about my time off from church and working with Quito Quest this year and I joked about it. I told him that I think “Pastor Joe lets me come down here for a couple of weeks each year so I can get my fix and he doesn’t have to worry about my moving away from North Carolina.” Phil’s response was “That’s a smart senior pastor.” And Phil (who would much rather that I did just move down to Ecuador) elaborated that this continued experience effects the way that I minister, the way that I teach the Gospel, and the way that I perceive God and his work in my life and his world. “You get refreshed here and you take that back to your regular context.”

Hosting Quito Quest teams is certainly not a vacation. It’s been described by one former staff member as “The most work on the least sleep you’ve ever gotten in your life.” But connecting to God and his people outside your routine is refreshing in a spiritual sense, even when it might not be in a physical sense. God speaks to us wherever we are. He teaches us wherever we are. But our environment can change our perception. I hope that you look around during your spring break. During your vacation or stay-cation or regular routine and actually become aware of what it is that God has to teach you in this season. Look for God’s rhythms so that you allow him to refresh your soul.

Emaús Pics (2016 Day 1)

I like words enough that I don’t always agree that a picture is worth a thousand of them. But here are a baker’s dozen for those of you who do.

The team getting ready to start their day.

Welcome Sewanne team (and Caroline, Danny and Josh)!

One of the walls in the Sunday School room, which was painted 3 years ago by my youth from E.C.

Another one of the walls in the Sunday School room, which was painted 3 years ago by my youth from E.C.

The meeting room upstairs. This just had a concrete floor (and a hole in the roof) during my last visit.

Snack time!

Bending rebar “como varón!”

Bending and tying together rebar.

Up close working on the rebar.

I gave up flipping llapingachos and let Caroline handle it.

Obviously the most important activity of the day.

The Ecuadorians showed no mercy to the gringos during soccer.

The soccer game from above.

The House of Caroline and Danny

Emaús was the very first ministry site I ever visited. So it’s extra fun to go back. But I got that time warp feeling (that I’ve written about multiple times before) when Michelle asked me how I was feeling about serving there.

There are things that are the same, like the rhythm of the day and some of the people who are there. There are things that are different, like all the construction and the fact that Nancy is now the priest there instead of Lourdes. There is history there in which I’ve participated both strictly in the ministry sense and in some more tangible things like the murals my students painted in the Sunday School room.

But one thing that is definitely the same is the level of hospitality. I remember the first day I ever went to Emaús. We had a quick devotion that morning and got to work. Lourdes was walking around with a dustpan and her apron on, cleaning up the sawdust behind all the people who were building tables and cabinets. It wasn’t until she put on her stole 8 hours later for Bible Study and Holy Communion that I realized she was the priest in charge, the person with authority at this church. Up until then, she was just one more of the welcoming, servant-hearted people who smiled and worked with us.

In very much the same way, Nancy got us started today with devo and instructions (after she and Anita came running up to the bus to hug Caroline and myself) and then she jumped into the kitchen for the next 4 hours to start cooking us lunch. The maestros and volunteers were the same way. They taught us quickly, and then jumped in alongside us all, working and talking to and laughing whether the person next to them spoke the same language or not.

By 11:00 snack, Emaús had become a part of the team. They were incorporating this experience into their memories and experiences and their understanding of the world and life and the Gospel. This community has a way of grabbing ahold of you because of the way it exemplifies a biblical community.

When we got ready to leave this afternoon (even with two more ministry days at this site) it was a long process of saying “Good-bye.” Nancy told the group (through my translation) that “This is the house of Caroline and Danny. And now it is your house too.” I thought this was accurate. Emaús didn’t become my home over the 9 years I’ve been going there or throughout the time that I lived in Guajaló. It became a home for me when I first stepped through the door to be met by the love and acceptance and smiles and hugs of the entire congregation. The group doesn’t have the history there that I do or that Caroline does. But it’s home for them now. This is not because of the amount of time they’ve spent in this place, but because both these communities choose to embrace each other in love.

Snot and Tears

When we arrived at El Refugio today and got our orientation to the property and the programs, John told us about Shoeless. It’s something that El Refugio does/teaches about being aware of Gods presence as Moses did in Exodus 3. When God told him to remove his shoes, it wasn’t that the ground on which he stood had suddenly become holy. It was that Moses was becoming aware of it.

Today was a long day of orientations and solo time. A couple of people even said they didn’t think we would do a debrief tonight. And the debrief we did was not the one we planned. But full of hotdogs and cuy, we launched into what began as a simple recap of our day.

What continues to amaze me about Sabbath time at El Refugio is how seriously the teams take it. With this and most teams, we are about halfway through our time on the ground when we go to the property. So the group should be tired. But they’re not disengaged. And as scary as three hours walking around the mountain and listening to God might seem to some, people really do it. So that’s a huge amount of time to process not just what they’ve seen today or this week, but to really begin listening for what they are supposed to do with all of this post-field.

This meant our “simple recap” of the day of and of solo time quickly became 18 of us sitting around the campfire crying our eyes out as we processed where we were and where God was bringing us. Several years ago there was a joke during Quito Quest training that a “successful” debrief meant crying. This is certainly not necessarily the case, but the whole group being able to go to that deep a place emotionally is one of the possible side effects of doing solo time and debrief with the correct attitude. It wasn’t successful because we cried. But we were crying because it was successful.

The issues and the discoveries and the celebrations that came about through that time aren’t things that should be written in a (relatively) public forum like this. Suffice it to say that there were issues worked through. There were discoveries. There were celebrations. There was support. And there was God’s presence. Which is, of course, there all the time. It’s just that we became aware.