Another Day; Another Week; Another Month

Time is a funny thing. It seems to accelerate the longer you experience it, and living/working at GES is no exception. 2009 is already 1 month down—that's 8% of the year already, and I swear that I was just in Canada last weekend!

All that being said, there have been quite a few interesting things happening over this past month & especially in the past week. Here's the condensed version:

Library & IT stuff

With the addition of my new helper, Ann, who's volunteering with is from Taber, the book cataloguing project has begin to take off with a bit more oomph. Alone, I was averaging 40 title records per day; with her help the past two weeks have seen 450 & 300 title records created! Definitely an improvement, but I don't think it will be enough to complete the digital catalogue by April.

I discovered, in my tinkering with our library software, that Phase II of our project—which I thought would be a mindless snap—is actually more involved. Phase II will involve bar-coding every copy of every book in the library, and originally I thought that this meant scanning the ISBN & sticking on a bar code to identify the copy with the title. To my chagrin, it looks like the software also requires a call number to be applied to the book for record-keeping. Thankfully, Ann & I have been working on this already (originally as a method to streamline res-helving for non-/low-level-English speakers, but now a veritable requirement for the database) & the extra step in Phase II should proceed without much pain.

(Warning: nerd alert. Read the following only if you're interested in computers & IT system management)

I'm furthering my knowledge of Microsoft server technology by creating a network-based installation source/image for our workstations via MS's free Windows Deployment Server download. The current version of WDS has been designed for Vista deployment, so there have been a few snags along the way to get an XP image deployed through this solution due to differing bootstraps for the two versions of windows. Today, I finished configuring the PXE server to load WinPE successfully, only to be hampered by PE's 'image capture' utility refusing to recognise my system volumes. Booting PE outside of the image capture configuration, I was able to create an image through the command line with ImageX. My next step(s) in this project will be to create an answer file for the hardware independent image to automatically install itself on remote machines. In the end, my several month "hobby" should make the 90 minute/machine OS & software deployment process complete in 20 minutes per machine (even faster if I'm able multicast... Not sure if WDS supports it though... Maybe Ghost instead).


Church ministry

I actually got a chance to go to the new church plant dealie that I've been asked to work alongside last week. It was a fluke arrangement, since the things that were prohibiting my attendance got rescheduled out of nowhere. I visited the church on Wednesday night for their Bible study & Sunday for the morning service. Here are some details:

• The church is situated in a community close to a huge temple school & a light-industry factory that employs over 200 people. We meet in a small, one-storey house that has four rooms: one for an office, one for services/meeting, one for a guy who needs a place to live to stay in & one for eating/welcoming. The eating/welcoming room is pretty much the atrium for the house, as the front door opens right into it. The hope is to keep the building open & occupied throughout each day for the eventual purpose to have neighbourhood dwellers drop on by whenever they're bored.



• So far, the church seems to have 13 members: the Thai family who started it up (6 people), the pastor & his family (4 more), Aaron, Lorrie (my American compadres from GES in this venture) & myself. We had a planning meeting on how to proceed with the church's mission & vision last week Wednesday, but not much has happened since (almost as if we're all busy already).



• In all honesty, there are a couple of things that make me uneasy about this church plant. 1.) it's a Thai church & although they do an excellent job of translating for us, inevitably there are things that get lost in translation which makes communication & planning a bit more difficult. 2.) This may be related to #1, but I get an uneasy feeling that there is some information—whether to do with the church or concerning the relationship(s) I have among the members of this Thai family, I'm not yet sure—that is being kept from me. I find myself being a little suspicious about something going on that is being deliberately hidden. Now, whether it's because "I shouldn't have to worry about it" or some other non-issue, there nonetheless is something leaking through the body language of certain members that makes me wonder. 3.) I find myself acutely aware that it would be foolish to enter into a working relationship with this church for an extended amount of time if I would be the only native English-speaker. Thankfully, Aaron & Lorrie have been recruited alongside me, but they're even more unsure where 2009 is going to take them than where I find myself when looking forward. The Thai pastor, when preaching last week brought up this very point in his sermon. When Jesus sent out the Seventy to go & preach in His name, proclaiming the Kingdom of God, He sent them out in pairs—never alone. The pastor's comments on this decision resonated with Ecclesiastes 4:11-12, where we're told that there is strength in numbers. In all honesty, I don't think that I could survive in Thailand without some strong sort of English-speaking interaction until I became fluent in Thai...

Students & Relationships

This past few weeks, one of my students in Grade 10 has shown a huge surge of interest in Christianity. His name is Tony, and he's fluent in English, owing to a couple years of elementary schooling in the USA. It's one of those things where you never thought things would happen, really. He said that the reason he started to become interested in Christianity was because of something I had said after a life group (a youth group type thing after school on Thursdays) game about talking to God & having a dynamic relationship with the Creator of the Universe. He asked me this week to pray for him because he wants to find God & experience Him. Pray with me for him, would you? Pray that God would indeed reveal Himself to Tony. That would be awesome.

On the other side of the spectrum, it has become strikingly clear to me that we as a staff have fallen into some bad habits—myself included. I've started to become acutely aware of a certain level of un-edifying gossip passing around from teacher to teacher. It's unfortunate, because such activities do nothing to build community, and I must confess that I also have been party to such activities. Expressing exasperation with certain colleagues to other colleagues just for the sole purpose of venting. Pray that this unhealthy environment would become rectified.


Future considerations

As I've been instructed to proceed in my life as if I were to work with this church plant indefinitely, I submitted an intention to stay for another year at GES. The school was supposed to come back to us with an answer either within 2 weeks of our submitted form or by the 1st of February, whichever was later. I received an e-mail on Friday informing me that these decisions would be delayed for another week (for now—that's my pessimistic attitude shining through). One of the conditions for me to stay in 2009 & help with this church plant is being able to stay in Thailand. Legally, in order to do that I'd either need to be married to a Thai girl, or I'd have to have some sort of employment. And there ain't no Thai girl in the works (or at least that I know of yet. Ha!). GES really is my only shoe-in, as all schools now require an education degree at very least (I'd get excepted at GES because of being hired before the law "came into effect") for employment, and my degree isn't a very attractive one in the eyes of most other employers. So, one of the big factors on whether I stay another year or not will—hopefully—reveal itself before my next update.


Summary

Okay, I'm tapping out. Pray for these things:

• Thank the Lord that Tony's showing interest in Christianity. Pray that God reveals Himself to this Grade 10 student


• Pray for revealed information & solidified intentions with this church plant: where they want to go & what they have in mind.


• Pray for healthy relationships & constructive communication patterns among staff—and all relationships, really.


• Pray that God would make it 100% evident on whether or not He wants me here another year or not in the next week or so through this re-hiring decision.


• Pray for my back! The chair that I use in the library is broken, and my back has started to notice this in the past week. It has started to vocalise its protest by means of sharp pains that occur usually in my lower back, yet they're not isolated there: some days the pain's much higher up my spine. You would think that this would be an easy fix: get a new chair, but practically all the unused chairs on campus right now are broken, and the school I doubt would be willing to spring for a new one (we need approval from the school's owners now to spend 6 baht [that's 18 cents] whenever we need to print something for class in colour).

I think that's it. Thanks, again, for reading what I thought was going to be short. Another installation with life-changing news by Valentine's Day!