Hi everyone. Sorry for the outage if you tried to get to the site in the past 24 hours. There was a power outage in New Milford, CT where our home and our web server resides. You can read more about that in Cathy’s blog at http://trips.schrull.us
Today we stayed at the compound while I worked on getting MS Office installed on Elisha’s new computer. I purchased it for him, but let me tell you, it’s hard to install in Tanzania. Microsoft is pushing their live Internet installation these days, which is fine when you live in the USA with plenty of bandwidth. But out here in Kasulu, it takes a long time to install. I’m hoping I’ll have him finished by the end of the day.
This morning I had the chance to “preach” at morning chapel, which was attended by the DWT staff and also the Diocesan Council, which is meeting this week at the compound. I say preach, but really it was more of a short scripture sharing and a testimony based on the scripture. I chose Proverbs 3:5-6 which says:
Trust in The Lord with all your heart,
Lean not on your own understanding,
In all your ways acknowledge Him
And He will make straight your path.
I then shared about my experience of the Lord’s guidance back in September of 2001 when I was preparing to go to a worship leaders conference in Mobile, AL. This was during the infamous September 11th AKA 911 week. I’ll write out the story later for you. What was apparent was that it touch a number of hearts in the room. Cathy and I have spent years in the Faith Alive ministry which is all about sharing our story of faith and trust in The Lord with others.
Tomorrow we head out to a village called Shunga. There will be a big celebration there because it was 100 years ago the German Missionaries brought the Gospel to this region. There will be choirs and worship. Cathy and I will sing at some point. It’s going to be a big event from what I am told. We even have printed polo shirts to where commemorating the occasion. We will be sure to take pictures and report on the event tomorrow evening.
The peace of The Lord be with you all.
Bill
As the title says, the days are going fast. Today was no exception. Though we did have a very relaxing morning at the compound. That was good. We are on vacation after all. I felt the urge to work, but Internet speed was just slow enough to make logging into the company network unworkable. Must be that I was meant to slow down a bit and just enjoy the surroundings. So I did. I walked about the compound and talked with folks here and there. Cathy stayed in the room and read as she loves to do. After lunch we hitched a ride down to the KBC with Andrea, our German missionary friend. I worked a bit on some small clean up items. I also found out from Elisha that one of the Nettop PC’s we installed last year had a problem at one point and needed to do a windows install fix-up. It was working, but it lacked the proper drivers to connect to the network and get on the Internet. So I grabbed the driver CD we left here last year and got that working again. It was a simple fix.
I have to say again. I really like it here. I’m looking forward to a time when I can stay a bit longer and offer some technology courses to the students. They are so eager to learn and we have so much we can share from the resources of knowledge and experience we have been bless to have. I’m really grateful for the years I’ve had to work in I.T. I have spent countless hours, often on my own, just exploring computer technology. It is great to be able to pass it on to others.
Tomorrow, I’ll spend some more time with one of the teachers Reginald, showing him how the network and computers work. Elisha, who has been our on-site “tech” for the past two years is heading home to Burundi next week. We will miss him very much. He kept things running well. So we are trying to spend time with Reginald to take over Elisha’s role as the tech and overseer of the KBC computer systems. He seems to pick things up quickly and his english language skills are quite good, so I think they will be in good shape. One of the things I’ll do with him is setup Skype on the admin computer. That way we will be able to talk or at least text chat over the Internet if any problems arise.
That’s it for today. We head off to dinner soon at Canon Daniel Nyugwa’s home. It’s always a pleasure to spend time with Daniel.
Bill
