Thursday, November 12, 2009

Malika - Day 11 - Some Clever Title

Woke up at 8 this morning and felt pretty good. I was sitting on my bed feeling the coolness of the fan until suddenly the power just shut off. ... Trust is an unusual thing. It isn't instantly gained, but once you have it you can easily feel disheartened if it is compromised. We, as Americans, have lots of trust. We have been conditioned to trust our credit cards, running water, electricity, etc. Senegal has taught me that trust in anything, except God, will leave me disappointed. Things are very unpredictable here; traffic may stop at any time, the water may stop running, your car may not start, and, like this morning, the electricity may go out without a moments notice. When I'm at home I trust in these things to work all the time. Of course I still trust in God but I've been conditioned so much to believe that if I plug something into the wall that it's going to work, no matter what. I now realize that if I expect something and it doesn't happen then I feel cheated and Senegal has certainly taught me to lower my expectations of my surroundings in order to keep my priorities straight. The one thing I haven't lost trust in is God. As a servant we are called to trust in our Lord and believe that He will be faithful to His word. He has not promised to make our lives easier but He has promised us that He will be glorified and that if we put our faith in Him and live by that faith we will be joined with Him throughout eternity. Ok, now it's time for breakfast and it better be there ... =) After breakfast I needed to do some accounting work based on the sales from last night. Let me say what a difficulty it was to go from Microsoft Office to Microsoft Works, but I trudged through it. =) I got Herma's sheet all ready for how much each guy in the shop gets based on the sales. Afterwards we had lunch and then I was able to show Abdulaye a quick tutorial on how to use Revit. I got through drawing walls, inserting doors and windows, and drawing roofs and then his brain exploded. He said he was ready to stop for the day and I don't blame him. ( I forgot to mention a humerous thing about our drive yesterday. While stopping for gas, we were bombarded with people wanting to sell us all sorts of items; oranges, limes, cookies, tea leaves, etc. Herma did buy some oranges from a lady and you would have thought that all the people selling oranges would have left us alone. Quite the contrary. It was funny to see Herma explain to her that we didn't need anymore. ) Dinnertime came and we were treated to barbeque chicken again. I enjoyed dinner even more than usual because I was able to fix a problem that I created with Herma's Internet. Everyone has been using her wireless capabilities and I wanted to download something and I thought it would be faster to use an Ethernet cord instead of the wireless. It wasn't working at first so I got the address to her router and started up the wizard. Unfortunately, I didn't have the username and password to connect to her ISP. So Jeebs was gracious enough to help me get a hold of them and ask for someone in English. I actually had to call them twice. In the end it all worked out but if I knew how to spell in French it would have gone much faster. ( BTW - if any one says the letter "jee" in French, they actually mean "j" ). After all that, watching LOST and getting to talk to my beautiful wife on skype, I'm ready for some reading, then off to bed. Good night world and "day-lehm bek".

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