May 12, 2014: Two week update
It’s unbelievable how fast time slips by. I can’t believe it’s been two weeks since I last posted. But we had the kids here, and when they’re around, they are the priority. So lots of things were back-burnered and it’s taken a while to catch up.
Now, I’m caught up just in time to go to Kenya (more on that later). There have been highs and lows. Let me start this week with the lows, so I can end on a good note. :-)
I’ll warn you now, this is a rather lengthy read because there’s some real messed up stuff to report. Bike crashes, bad medical reports, theft and jail time (again) but also some good stuff if you’re willing to slog through the bad stuff. That’s true of life in general, I suppose.
The doctor told me my cholesterol was through the roof. He said I’d have to make significant lifestyle changes and I should get an EKG and some other cardio tests in Kampala. I never could get them scheduled, but the lifestyle changes have started and they are drastic. I simply do not have time to be old. Twelve pounds gone so far.
I crashed my bike this week. It was a rather ridiculous thing. I didn’t eat dinner the night before and woke up jittery (blood sugar was pretty tanked) I straightened up the house because we were supposed to have guests that morning and by the time I finished that I was flatlined. I hopped in the bike and set out to the Keep in the rain to meet Jen and Declan for breakfast. I hadn’t turned the corner from our place and something EVIL bit my foot, shooting pain up my leg. I flinched, grabbed my foot, and the tweak in the handlebars and the front brake, which wouldn’t have done much on a dry road, started me sliding and next thing I knew, I was sliding down the road behind my bike in the muck and mire. I was an absolute mess, my right side shredded and more road rash than I care to admit. The bike wouldn’t start, so I walked it back to the house. Nothing broken but my pride and that nagging reminded that I’m not nearly as resilient as I’d prefer to be. The road rash will bug me to no end for weeks as it affected every major joint on my right side.
I closed the Computer Training Center today. I walked in to see how the iICT course was going and I was appalled at what I saw. Let me start by reciting the first three most important rules and reasons of the CTC:
1) No food or drink in the center. It’s bad for the machines, attracts bugs and greases up your hands.
2) No touching the laptops. There’s no reason to. Oil from your hands sticks to the keys and trackpad and can transfer to the screen. Then dust from the INTENSELY DUSTY Uganda air gets on the oil and the next time you wipe the screen, you may as well be using sandpaper. We provide USB keyboards and mice for the students to use. The laptops last longer and students are learning to use a real keyboard.
3) No touching the screens. Ever. See #2.
So I walk into the CTC and the first thing I see is a bag of popcorn open on a table next to a student. Then I see another student absently playing with the laptop trackpad while the teacher is talking. She wasn’t using it, just.. playing with it.. rubbing it.
I look around the class and I see my instructors on the brand new i5 laptops and they are using them without keyboards and mice, both hands on the laptop. If my staff can’t obey the rules, we have a problem. After class, I closed the center and we had a nice long meeting. Things are going to change at the CTC on a lot of levels.
On a relational level, we had some real relationship issues here. I can’t go into details, but I can say that it was earth-shattering on just about every level. All we could do was humble ourselves and evaluate our part of it. It’s always good advice to look more at yourself when you run into relationship problems than to look at the other person, even if it seems very one-sided in the beginning. To say this was emotionally obliterating is a COMPLETE understatement. Jinja is a very VERY lonely place.
“Ultra-rare spotted Leather”
“Ultra-rare spotted Leather”
Johnson, our lead craftsman, with our “gorgeous” leather.
Another fail this week was our leather order. We’re completely selling out of leather products, which is GREAT for the program, but we’re out of leather. We placed an order with the tannery EIGHT MONTHS AGO, and they finally call me to tell me our order is ready. I knew as soon as I saw it something was VERY wrong. See those spots? Fungus. So we’re waiting for leather again. They say it will be ready in two weeks. The last time they said that it took eight months. Sigh.
Now, for the last bit of bad news: Our technician, Sparks (on the right, black shirt) is in jail, AGAIN. The last time he worked with us, several laptops disappeared. Since he was the only one with the keys to the case, this opened up an investigation which revealed he had our equipment (not the laptops, but other stuff) in his house and in his video shop. He spent two nights in jail over it and we settled out of court at a law office. He admitted to his part of the wrong doing and agreed to pay a sum of 2.5 million shillings ($1,000) to compensate for the loss. All legal, signed and countersigned with a lawyer. His family stood in as surety. Obviously, he was fired. Two months later he came back and said he had no job and needed money. I gave him money, and told him I would be praying for him, but there was no way he could be trusted to work with us. Months later, he came back and I decided to give him a second chance. Jen disagreed. But I STRONGLY believe in second chances. Without second chances, I’d be dead. Literally. So I hired him back. Bear in mind he still owed us 2.5M.
I also enrolled him in the iICT course (which costs around $600) for free. I wanted to do more than give him a job. I wanted to give him a real second chance.
That’s when things started going sideways. Against our policy, he took in an iPad, attempted to repair it, failed and ruined it. So he was into us for another $400 which I had to pay out of pocket. Then a customer brought in a Mac Book Pro. I had him take it to Kampala to an Authorized Repair facility and he came back saying that they needed to order a motherboard. The customer paid $600 for the board. Sparks came back and told us that it would be a couple of weeks. This turned into months and when I started asking questions he said the repair place said they would repay the money $200 at a time. That’s when I knew something was up. I called the place. They hadn’t ordered a motherboard and hadn’t seen sparks or the machine. They asked for the job ticket number which sparks couldn’t produce. One excuse lead to another until I knew he was lying. Eventually he produced $200, but the repair facility said it wasn’t from them. That’s when he stopped showing up to work and started getting hard to reach. Other things started falling apart. He had taken $60 from a Keep customer to copy DVD’s but never did the work. Then he took out $95 credit on our account with a local computer shop for a phone and camera. Then we found out one of the new i5 donated laptops he was rebuilding was missing. After some investigation, we found out his landlord was looking for him also, saying that he was 9 months behind in his rent.
At this point I was baffled. Why on earth would he resort to this when he was basically living on grace? Why wouldn’t he have sat down with us and had a conversation about what was going on? Why resort to his old ways?
I was baffled but I could relate. I had done the same thing over and over again myself with God. But after getting some good counsel I realized that we are not God. We can forgive, and we can give second, third and four-hundred-ninetyth chances but he didn’t just wrong us, he stole from our customers and the businesses we rely on. We had to use donor money to pay those debts and our donors aren’t paying for Spark’s theft and stupidity. I had no choice. I went to the police. They spooked him and he ran. Then we had to pay to have him tracked. A month later, they found him and Friday, they called me and told me to come to the station.
There he was sitting on the floor.
“Is he the one?” the officer asked.
I simply said, “He is.”
The first words out of Spark’s mouth were angry. “I didn’t steal that laptop,” he barked.
I was stunned. Normally a Ugandan in this situation would start with “Sorry, Sorry, you forgive”. This means, “I admit it, I’m caught. Have mercy, forget all about it and erase all memory and consequences”. But this response floored me.
Had had no less than than six counts against him, and his play was to argue one of them? In that moment, I saw real darkness in Spark’s heart. I realized that he was not sorry. He felt he was unjustly accused, and he was inconvenienced by this whole thing. He was not sorry for the other five things, but rather belligerent about the one things that wasn’t a slam-dunk case against him, and a minor part of the case at that.
Sparks chose his fate at that point because I knew that he needed to be in prison. I knew that this second brief incarceration hadn’t changed him. I knew that if I settled, he would do it again, and we would never see a shilling of his debt. He would be ripping someone else off sometime very soon.
I also knew that from a spiritual standpoint, I had no choice. Had I seen remorse, and a willingness to turn his life around, it would have resonated deep within me and I would have gone easy on him because really, that’s what God expects of any of us. I’ve found out the hard way that we can be belligerent all we want but we are guilty and cut off until there is true repentance, sincere regret, remorse and a turning away from sin. My Mac’s dictionary even includes this spiritual element to repentance: “each person who turns to God in genuine repentance and faith will be saved.“ Had I only seen that, I would have sought a way to commit him to repayment and avoid jail time while ensuring that he stays straight and repays his debt to the donors, customers and businesses he stole from.
I was more devastated and saddened by his attitude than I was by the crime. That night, I received a text from him: “Papa really is this the way i will be treated how a father can discipline his son. Am sorry for not appearing at work but am really sturving [sic] thanks”
My response: “I tried to help you. I gave you kindness and mercy. I gave you work, money, a second chance. I am not falling for your lies anymore. Call your family. They need to settle your debt in cash or we go to court, they pay the money and you stay on jail.”
I also immediately texted the officer in charge of the case and asked that Sparks be fed, at my expense.
He completely missed the point and couldn’t even see why he was in jail. Keeping him in jail was the best thing for him. He was far from repentance, and was deep in denial.
I feel for Sparks. I know he’s in an earthly hell. I actually ache for him because I’ve been where he is. I stayed in that self-dug pit for a long time, starting in denial, then in anger and rebellion towards God for “putting me there”, then in anger at everyone else imaginable for “keeping me there” and then finally after making things even worse realizing that the pit was mine, and I dug it and it was my choice to get out and God’s promise to be the crane to pull me out and keep me out. Psalm 40:2 had become my life’s game plan. He brought me up out of the horrible pit, out of the miry clay. He set my feet upon the Rock and made my steps secure. He gave me a new song. I want that for Sparks, more than anything I want a happy ending for Sparks and his whole family. But I can’t force that on him. No one can. He needs to decide to stop digging, and look up.
He’s headed from Jinja police station jail and will be remanded into the prison system tomorrow, where he will await trial. And in my heart I feel like every ounce of the weight of that. I’m praying for that guy seriously.
On to better news.
I met with Jon Dunette (you may remember him from the blues at the Keep concert) and since he’s leaving Uganda, he’s looking for a place to offload all the guitar equipment he brought over. Knowing how hard it was to get strings and accessories (a $5 pack of strings sells for $30 in Kampala!), he brought them over and was selling them at cost. In short, we’re buying the lot, selling them at a slight markup and putting the profits in a pool that will go to performing artists at the Keep.
My friend Dan Ritson is here again from Canada, and he’s teaching a course in anti-virus and basic PC maintenance. We loaned him a desktop PC setup for the course and helped as best we could. More on that later.
I spent a good amount of time helping Jaja Barb (who’s currently back home in Canada) purchase a vehicle from a missionary family in Jinja. This consumed quite a bit of time as we had to check out the vehicle, get mechanics involved, get the paperwork in order, take possession of the vehicle, etc. It was fun to watch because the vehicle was simply AMAZING, better than anything I’ve ever had the privilege of riding in, and it was at a great price. However, it was beyond her budget and she committed to using her pension money to buy it. The next day, a lady contacted her and said she felt led to tithe the money she made selling her house and it was the exact amount she paid for the vehicle.
Our “banana boat” sundae. Huge. For 4+ people.
We had an ice cream social at The Keep! This was something we considered doing for a long time, especially since we have 100+ litres of ice cream on site at any one time. It ended up being a lot of work. We had three flavors of ice cream, and Jen made a “Sundae menu” with a lot of cool sundaes to choose from. The coolest thing though was the “build your own sundae” sheet with dozens of different toppings and options. This was no easy feat. It’s really hard to get most “normal” things in Jinja, but esoteric things like ice cream toppings are especially hard to find. Jen made up homemade hot fudge and whipped cream, and we used toppings we brought from the US and what we could find in Kampala and Nairobi. It was pretty surreal having a distinctly American event in Jinja with customers, toppings and ingredients from all over the world.
Jen and I were slinging ice cream for two hours straight and we were sticky and exhausted, but it was worth it. Everyone that came had a great time, and we received nothing but rave review for the sundaes. We even treated our staff to a MASSIVE banana split. Some of them had never eaten ice cream before. I’m sure we put more than one of them into a sugar coma. I’m sure we’ll do the social again, but for now we’ll do it once a month. :-)
I played around some more with the TP-Link routers this week. It seems there’s quite a demand for the OpenWRT RACHEL/GCFLEarnFree solution. I thought there might be. After all, it’s a sub $100 educational solution that’s really tough to mess up and dead simple to use. I build two router these past two weeks.
I also built and configured a standard router for Good Shepherd’s Fold, a great group outside of Jinja. They’ve been struggling with poor Internet for years now. I brought back a bunch of gear to help them last year and it turned out it was all the wrong frequency. Then I was told that a heavyweight from AT&T was coming to visit and that they were going to get his help to address the problem. But recently I found out that guy never came and they’re still struggling with internet speeds because of poor 3g reception. So I built an MR3040 (the unit with the built-in battery) for them to test 3G strength at the top of their water tower. If it works, I’ll figure out how to waterproof it and mount it up there with a solar rig.
I also continued to rebuild the i5 machines for the CTC. Right when I think I’m getting on top of the build, I find something else I need to add. The most recent addition is the Digital Literacy Standard Curriculum, a course put together by Microsoft that teaches .. you guessed it .. digital literacy. I love this program because it’s free, it’s developed by the same company that makes the OS and software (always a plus) and it has a certificate test which provides passing students with a real honest-to-goodness certificate from Microsoft. I haven’t used it yet, but I’m putting it on the machines in case it fills a need.
Our “banana boat” sundae. Huge. For 4+ people.
Levi, our barista, made me a draonccino. I smiled. Levi is quite talented.
That’s about it for now. There’s lots more to report but these are the highlights and quite frankly this is already longer than any but the most dedicated reader will undertake anyhow. Thanks for reading, for your awesome support and see you next time.
