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Sumatra Updates

Although I've written very little, if anything, about Sumatra since I've returned home, I follow the news very closely. I've set up a daily Google Alert for the word 'aceh' and read news articles on the Web. I also have stayed in touch with some who are working in Sumatra, both via e-mail and instant messaging. The recent earthquake on March 28 hit the area very hard, and was an especially severe psychological blow to many who were just beginning to think that maybe life could could start to resemble something a little closer to what they once knew. The government, UN, and NGO resources are being stretched at this time, because the workload as greatly increased, and the focus has shifted to a different part of the region, the island of Nias, off the south-west coast of Sumatra. From what I've been told, this island has a higher population of Christians than other parts of Sumatra. Here's some recent information from Jonathan, who is working a the Pactec 'net café in Meulaboh:

"Here is another update on the new large earthquake off the coast of Sumatra. One advantage of being where we are [at the UN Base Camp in Meulaboh] is that the UN keeps a folder full of information about what is happening in Sumatra and there is lots of information about the latest quake and the efforts to assist the people there. Here are a few excerpts from the latest report that we have:

Now MAF and Samaritan's Purse are working together with the UN to help with some of the transportation issues and because of that all their aircraft have moved further south to a town called Sibolga where they can fly to Nias much easier. They are now helping to evac people to Sibolga for minor injuries and Medan for major injuries. Some of the difficulties facing the people is a real sense of hopelessness and shock that has caused the local response to be very minimal. One of the people from SP was there the day after the quake and he said there were about 4 people and one backhoe that was working to try and dig people out, and that was it in the whole city of Gunung Sitoli the largest city in Nias. There has been a large response from the UN and the NGOs working here since they have personel already on the ground in Sumatra. One other issue that is hampering efforts to help is continued earthquakes. We keep getting aftershocks, many of which are over 6.0 and the "small" ones are over 5.0. There have been around 25 - 30 of them since the main event. There is still much to be done both there and in Meulaboh. Please continue to pray for the people here as they face a very large task in overcoming the difficulties they have been given."

What Memories

We were over at Mike's and Carol's place the other night for dinner. It was fun to sit at their new dining room table and share a meal together. They finally have all of their shipment from the US, and their place looks good. When the career missionaries come down, they ship all the household furnishings, as they are exempt from paying import taxes on it that one time. But, it often takes a long time to get things through customs. Mike and Carol had an extra long wait, as import regulations changed just as they were sending their shipment. Carol, Ellyn, and I grew up together in PNG. It's amazing what Carol remembers about our childhood. I am fascinated to hear the stories she tells of our growing-up years in Ukarumpa. I wish I had a memory like that! I've written down many things about each of our five years here, and I'm going to enjoy going back and reading over them in a few years. I wish I had done the same when I was much younger.

Keep On Raining

I'm going to miss the rain when I leave Ecuador. The rain, the almost daily rain, is something I enjoy so much. Well over 200" of rain a year in Shell. Less than 15" of rain a year in Boise. I'm going to miss the warm rain.

Vacation

The boys are off for Spring Vacation this week. Well, we don't have Spring here, but since they are on a US school calendar, that's what we call it. We've had a bunch of rain this week, but that hasn't stopped Taylor. We had his birthday party last weekend, and he had three of his classmates over for some games, a movie, pizza, and a sleepover. Since we don't have the Dell's truck on our carport any longer, the boys were able to play plastic army men on the carport. We put four bags of sand on the cement, and it's a great covered place to play when it's raining. So Taylor has been playing there this week with our neighbor, Ryan.

Dustin has been busy on the computer. He's teaching himself Flash animation, and I've been teaching him to make web pages.

Backups Are In Order

I spent much of the day helping Larry get his notebook computer running again. It has XP Home on it, and Tuesday morning it wouldn't start up because of a corrupted startup file. He didn't have an XP Home startup disk, so I didn't even try to repair/replace the corrupted file, but instead did something different. We pulled the drive from his computer, and placed it in a drive chassis with a PCMCIA card so we could plug it into another notebook computer (thanks Dale!). With that done we copied off all of his date file, then re-installed his drive in his notebook, and ran the restore CD. It was a bit of a fight figuring out how to remove the CD drive, but once we did things went well. His most recent backup was about February 6, so he was glad we had success today. Let that be a reminder to everyone to back up quite often. Anyway, Larry is with a different mission, works on Bible translation, and I was happy to be able to help him recover some important files.

This Change Subject To Plan

We have a lot of thunder and lightning in the area, and the power just went off ten minutes ago. It's back on again. The electric company service has continued to improve over the past several years, and the power is rarely out for long when it goes out during a lightning storm. Chad and Dale are getting ready to head out for one more flight each this afternoon. The storm is just in the Shell area, so they shouldn't have much trouble getting the flights done as planned.

Speaking of plans, things didn't go as planned last week when Bruce and Dale went out to the south repeater to do some work. They flew to Visui where they were planning to land, and found a trench across the runway. The people from the village there were running some electric cable from one side to the other. So they had to land at Makuma instead, and start walking from there, adding a couple hours to their hike. While they were up at the repeater, the people in Visui finished laying the cable, and filled in the trench. Thankfully the guys were able to take off out of Visui, and avoid walking all the way back to Makuma. If they had to go back to Makuma, it would have meant spending the night there, and flying home the next day. As it was, they didn't start down from the repeater until about 4:15 PM, and just barely made it down to meet Dan in enough time to fly back to Shell.

What's Happening?

I feel like I've lost motivation to post here. It's fun to let you know what is going on when interesting things are happening. But that doesn't seem to be the case lately. Nevertheless, life goes on. Monday I drove up to Quito with Chad and Curtis. They were going up for appointments with the DAC. Curtis had several tests to take on Monday, Tuesday, and this morning. Chad also had a couple tests to take, and a check-ride. Chad is working getting his permanent license. He was on furlough when the other guys finally got their licenses all worked out, so now it's his turn to jump through the hoops. In addition, he has some extra tests because he needs to get his instructor pilot license and his instrument instructor pilot license. I was up there to work on the LAN and some of the computers at the Avant dorm, where four of the MAF kids live while they attend the Alliance Academy. They had several problems that needed my attention. Fortunately I was able to figure out all of them. I headed back to Shell on the bus at 8 AM Tuesday morning, in time to work a few hours in the afternoon.

Today was a fun day, as I worked on a variety of things. I finished installed OS X on a Macintosh G4 for Dawn. Tonight I grabbed the last update for that, a 100MB file. She'll be very happy with the improvement, as she was using OS 8 prior to this. It's hard to find a web browser for OS 8 that works well with the web sites of today. Speaking of old stuff, I also configured an old PCMCIA modem card for Patricio. It's a 14.4 K modem card, but I could only get it to connect at 2400 bps!! Fortunately he doesn't get all that much mail, so I think he'll be OK. I also put a limit on his account, so he won't be able to receive messages greater than 100K. That way he'll survive when his friends send him large Powerpoint forwards. They are fond of that sort of thing around here. I also helped Oscar update his subscription of Norton Antivirus. I paid for that on-line with my credit card, since he doesn't have one. But, we were't able to finish the subscription renewal for reasons I couldn't figure out. I'm waiting to finish working with tech support on that one tomorrow.

Finally, I worked with Reinaldo on a Powerpoint presentation. He had come in with his laptop, wanting some help with a message that kept popping up. Reinaldo is from Colombia, and is a missionary to the Woarani indians. He was given a nice laptop last year, but the OS is in English, so he sometimes needs help figuring things out. Once we took care of that message, he showed my the Powerpoint slides, and asked about adding a sound track to that. After I told him I could do that, he brought me the CD, and I went to work. In the end he had five CDs, each with the Powerpoint file and the soundtrack, so they can easily be played in any computer. He'll be sending them to the US to a supporter and several other churches. He showed me one more project he's working on, and now I'm helping him with that too.

I guess that about covers it for today. Thanks for being interested in the work that goes on down here. Oh, I should mention that Bruce and Dale went out to work on the south repeater today. They are fighting an on-going problem with the equipment, one which I won't try to explain. Suffice it to say, it's a pain to have to hike four hours up a jungle mountain and a couple hours down each time this problem happens. I heard from Steve that when they arrived at Visui, the airstrip used for that hike, there was a large trench going across the runway! That meant they had to land at Makuma and start the hike from there, adding several more hours to the hike up to the repeater. My guess is that they didn't get home tonight, although at 6 PM we still had a plane out flying. If they made it down the mountain, it was probably as far as Makuma, where there is almost always a hot shower, a hot meal, and a soft bed waiting for pilots or hiking MAF guys who happen to be stuck out there for the night. I'll let you know more on Thursday.

One final thing--today is Taylor's tenth birthday. We're having his party on Friday night.

More Energy Please

Yesterday was my last day taking anti-malaria meds. I hope I pick up some energy from here on out, since there are side-effects to those medications. It's not like me to go to bed by 11 PM, and take short naps at lunch, and that's where I've been the past couple weeks. Guess the good news is that it looks like I didn't get malaria while I was over there. I'm still wishing I was there, and went as far as to ask my managers if I could go again in April, since there was a need. But yesterday I realized I'd better not pursue that. It's too close to the date of our departure from Ecuador, and I'll need to be around to train and assist one or two guys as they prepare to take over some of the basic tasks I perform. Also, it's not the easiest for the family if I'm gone another month, especially Taylor. He did tell me that if I was to go again, that I had to take him. I wish I could, as that would be a neat experience for him to have. Anyway, I've been a bit depressed today, knowing I can't go back to help again.

I worked on some linux server maintenance today, and took care of some log files that were growing too large. Some of those required me to configure a log rotation file, which was a good review for me. Also, the problem I had yesterday with re-boots on the Windows 2000 server has not resurfaced today. Changing the power supply did the trick. We had some nearby lightning yesterday, and today I had to give out a modem and a hub to a couple of the MAF guys, as they were affected. I really don't like losing equipment to lightning.

Start Again

Even thought it rained much of yesterday, by 3:30 PM a couple of the guys were able to get off the ground and get a group out of one of the Waorani villages. Today the weather was much better, and all the flying got done that needed to be done.

I fought a problem with my linux server, where it would spontaneously re-boot every once in a while. By the middle of the afternoon, I remembered a similar problem with the Windows 2000 server that happened a while back. After thinking about it for a while, I decided the problem was likely the power supply. The power supply tested OK with the volt meter, but I changed it anyway. I also went up into the attic and found the old power supply from the Windows server. I had changed it exactly a year ago, and it too tested OK, but when I replaced it, the machine stopped re-booting on it's own. The linux server has yet to re-boot today after I replaced the power supply.

Rain Magnet

Middle of the week here, and the days are flying by. Yesterday I went and got water for the MAF staff. Ron normally does that, but he couldn't yesterday since he's up in Quito helping with a work team there that is working with an MAF who lives in Quito. The rest of yesterday was spent working on nagging computer issues around the hangar. In the evening I worked some on the Summit Adventure web site. I've been doing their web site for them the past six or so years. Most of that work is done late in the evening, when other responsibilities are done. The thing is, I can't seem to stay up as late any more, without being really wiped out. Something is changing with my body, because I used to be able to stay up late for days in a row, and just keep on trucking. I have mixed feelings about that. Staying up late is a great time to get things done, but I know I should be getting more rest than I do during those times. Now I'm having to stop sooner, and not getting as much done.

The rain is pouring down. The day started off nice enough, but the weather has totally closed down. Dave tried to get out a couple times, but the airport was closed each time he tried. I'm not sure, but I'll bet the weather is fine out in some parts of the jungle. Shell seems to be a magnet for rainy, cloudy weather.

Weekend Wrap-up

I've been working on a quarterly newsletter the past few days. That's just about done, and tomorrow I'll send that off to the MAF US office for final approval and printing. We really have a nice system available to us, where we send an electronic copy to the MAF office in Redlands, and they print it out and mail it for us. Many missionaries in foreign countries do not have that sort of option, but need to print it, stuff it in envelopes, and mail it out themselves.

Now I'm starting to work on my taxes. I do those online at TurboTax.com. Hopefully I have all the necessary forms, and I'll be able to get that done this week. That's the plan anyway.

We just finished watching recorded episodes of the Amazing Race. I think there were two races this season, and we just watched the first one. Very fun stuff. I always want to be a better person when I watch that show. Somehow those stressful situations have the ability to bring out the worst in people, and I can see some of myself in the way some of the racers act under stress. I don't want to act that way at all, and these shows are good reminders of that.

Now we're off to Chad's and Andi's to watch American Idol and to have dinner. Ellyn has made chimichangas and we're taking those over for dinner.

Sumatra Photos

The photos of my trip to Sumatra can be found here.

If you've come to this page from a link to the Tsunami Relief archive entries, you'll want to read from the bottom to top of the page, as the entries are in reverse chronological order.

The Fox

Shortly before I left for Sumatra I came across a change I wanted to make to the MAF network here in Shell. However, I've learned never to make big changes, or even small ones, to a working system in the days before I leave town, even if I'm only going to be gone for a day or two. Last night I had the chance to make the change I wanted to using the directions at this page. Given all the security issues with the Internet Exploder, er, I mean Internet Explorer web browser, I've recently grown very unhappy with it. The browser on the PC at home that my two boys use has been hijacked, and is a mess. I really haven't felt like spending hours to clean it up, so I've been having them use Mozilla Firefox. The Firefox web browser has been steadily eating into Microsoft's share of broser users, something that brings a smile to my face. I've been using the Macintosh version of Firefox since summer of '04. In the past few months HCJB has required the use of Firefox, and is blocking Internet Explorer on their LANs as a way to minimize the security risks posed by its use. So last night I tweaked the proxy server on my linux machine, and in less than ten minutes had it configured to block the use of Internet Explorer. Too cool! I've temporarily set things back the way they were, and today I'll be sending out an e-mail to my network users letting them know that Internet Exploder's days are numbered on our network! If you're still not using the Firefox browser, what are you waiting for?