Saturday Post -- 27/07/10

This week has very much provided a salient reminder of modern telecommunications and their hazards, Bolivian bureaucracy and its toe-curling awfulness….and, above all, my complete block-headedness!

On Sunday I attempted to set up a call with my parents. It became clear even before we got here that using Skype to call the UK from Bolivia would be about as useful as giving Ashley Cole a copy of ‘The Idiot’s Guide to Staying Married’. Therefore, Pater and Mater kindly obliged to dust down the old landline (remember landlines?). Alas, they were unable to get through – not, as we naturally suspected, because it was simply too much for the Bolivian phone lines to handle, but because our home phone seems to have forgotten how to ring.

The next day, Maicol kindly had our UK mobiles ‘chipped’ for use in Bolivia and, thus, numbers in hand, I skipped gleefully to the computer and emailed home immediately with our new contact details. On Wednesday afternoon I received a (as yet unconfirmed) ten-second call from a family member on my mobile, but the line was as clear as mud.

Such problems, as previously stated, extend to the realm of cyberspace. This week one of my TEFL assignments involved watching an hour-long video of a TEFL class, i.e., 6 ten-minute clips on YouTube. In order to access the fastest internet speed possible, I headed to an internet café in town. And, yes, it was indeed significantly quicker than our internet at home – a mere four hours were required to watch one hour’s worth of video!

This impediment, however, was as nothing compared to the setback which followed. The next day, ready to resume my TEFL studies, I looked in my bag for my USB stick. You can probably guess the next bit: I’d committed the cardinal sin of modern computing. Frantically I sped back into town, expecting disaster and encountering a situation that was all the worse for its bittersweetness. One of the guys at the café did, indeed, have the stick. Only, armed with a ‘finders-keepers’ mentality, he had taken it upon himself to re-format the stick. Containing three years of work. None of which, to my eternal regret, was backed up.

Well, at least he was kind enough to give me back my stick!

A hard, hard lesson. I seem to have one of these moments every year and I dearly hope I’ve paid my dues for 2010! At the same time, I was reflecting with Amanda that the vast majority of material on the stick was a bank of Scottish educational materials for classes of all shapes and sizes that I’d built up over the years. Was there, I wondered, something else at work in my ineptitude? The removal of another little safety net and a clear message from the Master that we are here in Trinidad to stay?

My panic and frustration this week has, thankfully, been balanced by Amanda’s deepening relationships with her colleagues at FT – proof of which can be found in their bestowal of a nickname upon her. A couple of firsts here this week – she finally had the chance to assist in the Tuesday afternoon ear surgery session which takes place at the military base here (this is on the other side of town, so transportation and the setting up/dismantling of equipment effectively add three hours to the procedure – this will be drastically reduced from March when FT’s brand new operating theatres open) and watched as Diego repaired the ear of a man who had damaged it when playing football. He had sustained a tympanic membrane perforation that was non-healing. So Diego performed a tympanoplasty (ear drum graft) and Amanda got to watch it up close as they have an observation attachment on the microscope used for micro-ear surgery. Secondly, she helped out at the first of the weekly school visits which are now taking place to determine the health and wellbeing of children in the vicinity, taking heights, weights and temperatures.

An area for which we would very much appreciate your prayers is our one-year visa application. Some of you may remember that the whole point of obtaining our 30-day visa before we came to Bolivia was to ease the process when we arrived here. Many’s the time over the past weeks that I’ve said to myself, “So this is the easier method?” We got the ball rolling on the Monday after we got here and we still have some way to go – there seem to be about 101 different layers of bureaucracy to wade through before you can even have a sniff of obtaining it. Thankfully, we have been greatly assisted by KC, without whose help we would be lost in the paper jungle.

An added complication is that, though we paid for a 30-day visa, arriving on 30th January, the London embassy, in their infinite wisdom, set our expiry date as the 18th of February! Now, we cannot be removed from the country and as long as we can prove our visa is pending then we are fine. However, there is a small daily charge for every day we stay here without a visa and, thus, we are facing an ever-increasing bill for our efforts (or, to be more precise, the non-effort of the Bolivians!).

Perhaps by next January we’ll have obtained our one-year visa! Nonetheless, we wait and trust in the Lord’s perfect timing. Now there’s a communication method that works the world over!

Prayer
• The ongoing visa application.
• Common sense (this one’s for Craig!).
• Craig’s sermon on 1 John 1:8-9 this Sunday (28th).

Praise
• Our deepening friendships with our friends and colleagues.
• Trials – they’re good for our perseverance.
• Amanda’s growing opportunities in healthcare.

¡Que Dios les bendiga!

Craig & Amanda