October

I can't believe that October is already 2/3 finished! Man, time flies when you have a pile of stuff on your plate.

October, as I just alluded to, has been a busy, busy month. To put it in perspective, it's the end of GES's first academic term, which means final exams, report cards & massive evaluations. Being the librarian, IT guy, resource manager & high school computer teacher, let's just say that there was a bit of massive multitasking going on. However, on top of the regular humdrum of end of term, the best possible thing decided to happen: our school's computer network was infected with a virus.

Now, usually, this wouldn't be a very big deal in most organisations, because most organisations run antivirus software on their computers (like GES does), but here's the catch: GES, being an institution with widely-available access to Thai-version software (aka "pirated") was "protecting" its computers with a non-functional antivirus software suite. Pretty much, this means that the computer would tell you that it had a virus on it, but it had no method of actually fixing the problem.

The type of virus that infected our computer network was a very pernicious worm, that would make copies of itself in every unprotected folder that it could find & then broadcast itself to every computer on the network 3 times every second, which meant that as soon as you cleaned one computer, it would be barraged by about 800 new copies of the virus by the time you blinked your eyes. The problem was manageable on staff computers, as they were advised to remove themselves from the wireless network, scan their computers, do a clean-up & sit on their feet until the problem was solved. The real problem came around when we looked at our file server.

All of GES's important documents— including everything from students' attendance & academic records right up to Ministry of Education accreditation requirements—have been residing on one computer on the school's network, using one consumer-grade hard drive. Now, consumer-grade hard drives are designed for what's called "light duty," aka, random access of files every once & a while. When the virus hit the network, it caused a burst of activity on the server, making the hard drive work non-stop for 4 days before I decided to finally pull the network plug as a last resort to ensure the hard drive didn't literally go up in smoke & GES lose all of its files.
After finally containing the virus, cleaning the file server & checking its hard drives, we discovered that the main hard drive on the server was reporting a projected end-of-life on the 10th of October—right before report cards were due. This called for immediate action, and I was sent on a mission to find some sort of solution that would both fix the problem _and_ ensure that the data on our hard drive(s) wouldn't be placed in such jeopardy again.

***NERD ALERT!! Pass the next paragraph or two, if you don't like computer jargon ;)***

For the computer nerds in the crowd, here's what my solution eventually became (due to budgetary constraints): a new motherboard with 2GB DDR2-PC2300 ram, supporting our current CPU (P4 Northwood) and upgr3adeable to a Core2 Duo on the future; 3 new 120 GB 7200rpm WD SATA-2 HDDs installed in the on-board controllers & designed to be configured as a software managed RAID-5 under XP Pro (using a registry tweak & some hex editing of disk management dlls).

Now, as I tried to put all this stuff together, everything went smoothly—even the XP Pro RAID-5 management... Until I rebooted. Turns out that due to SP3, the wonderful work-around to use RAID-5 in XP Pro had been compromised by the Microsoft guys, and every time the system rebooted, the array needed to regenerate. Uugh. Then I noticed something peculiar... One of the drives I had purchased for the array was reporting bad sectors. It was brand new! In fact, every time I ran chkdsk to fix the sectors, more & more clusters came back as reportedly "bad." I whipped out my S.M.A.R.T. log reader, looked at the drive details & discovered that the hard drive which was sold to me a "new" actually had about 160 logged hours on it. Hrm.. Something was suspect. At any rate, the drive needed to be returned because if it was already reporting bad sectors, the problem would only get worse & RAID-5 or no, the data was running a high risk of compromise.
Round two to the computer place, Pantip. This time, I commandeered our helpful & friendly Jack-of-all-trades, Mr. Mike—a Filipino missionary working at the school who is semi-fluent in Thai—to come with & help with the return process. A few hours later, and we were back at the school with a fresh drive ready to be thrown into the array.

Because the software RAID was initialising every time Windows rebooted, it became painfully clear that a different OS was needed. Thankfully, I had enough insight to purchase a Thai copy of Win2k3—which was originally going to be used as an experimental install for our new library database server—and with that, I tossed out XP & gave the file server a proper server OS. Night & day difference, let me tell you. Night and day! I had never before in my life touched a server OS, and now that I've seen what they can do... I am in awe.

***End Nerd Alert***

Of course, all this computer fixing stuff that I needed to do was considered high-priority, but I also needed to do it after business hours, seeing as I was still teaching & running the library from 7:30-5:30. Talk about late nights. And talk about doing all that as well as preparing my own grades for report cards (who woulda thought creating report card grades for 97 computers students would be time consuming?). Then, of course, there was the room provisioning/registration for overnight camp, the outstanding library fines reports that needed to be given to teachers so that delinquent fines could be collected before report cards were sent home, the negotiation of the new library software purchase, other software/hardware meetings regarding data security & numerous administrative hiccups along the way (apparently, high school students are required to have a computers grade, even if they're not enrolled in any computers class due to military service!).

Sigh. I'm glad that those weeks are finished. The first thing that I did on Friday after school was go out with a dozen of the other teachers to an Irish pub & celebrate the beginning of our break with a pint of Guinness, a huge bacon cheeseburger and a pint of Hoegaarden to finish off the evening. Delightful. Delightful & well deserved.

Other things that happened in October so far go like this:

• Two weeks ago, I was invited by the pastor of the same church up in Lopburi (small provincial town 2.5 hours north of Bangkok) to come back & preach again. I did. It went well, though there were less people in attendance that Sunday when compared to the one previous. Speculations were made that it might've been due to rice planting season.


• That same Sunday, I asked to try some barbecued rat... And the family with which I went to Lopburi bought me a whole rodent. I ate it with some of the teachers later that evening on campus. Rat tastes exactly like baby-back pork ribs. No lie. If you're a Facebooker, I've a video posted with us eating it.


• The term is over & many teachers have gone abroad, as per usual October breaks. My original plans were to go to Chiang Mai with a group of teachers, but due to the intensity of my past few weeks, I had absolutely zero desire to do stuff... And as a result, I'm staying in Bangkok for the break. The past 2 weeks of school typically had me in the office from 7:30 in the morning until 2:30 at night (no jokes, people. It was rough. My caffeine consumption went from 23 baht per week to 150 baht per day just to stay awake for those 14 days. This past Friday, we got back from the pub at midnight; I didn't crawl out of bed until 2:00 Saturday afternoon. That was an amazing sleep). I'm planning on laying low in the city until November, when the term resumes.

I don't know if there's much more to say at this point... If you're a praying person, you could pray that:

• the teachers return refreshed & encouraged from the much needed break
• the students, also, would be refreshed from the break
• our focus as an organisation would gravitate back toward a central goal of displaying Christ & that our daily/weekly activities would reflect that.
• over the break, teachers & staff would be spiritually revived & willing to go the extra mile to make the ministry potential maximised.

A special note/prayer request:

One of the families at GES—the very same that takes me to Lopburi—is looking to plant a church in their community, one that is directed on reaching the 16-26 year-old demographic. Being Bangkok, real estate is not cheap & they're having difficulties finding a space wherein the church could possibly meet: options—renting or buying—seem bleak, considering the financial situation. Many of the Christian students at GES don't have a church that they can attend, and this would be an amazing opportunity to meet the spiritual needs of the community. The idea is to run a café on the building's main floor as finance-generation for ongoing operational costs, have the second floor as a meeting space for the church & sub-let the third floor to students or others who need a place to live (for further finance generation / outreach [perhaps rent at an extremely low rate]). The problem is the start-up cost(s). If you all could pray for the Lord to work in this situation & provide a means for this project to be realised, that would be awesome. Furthermore, if you—any of you—know of any organisations or groups or people what would be interested in sponsoring/supporting or investing in such a venture, please let me know. I'm working with this family to see if we can actually make this thing a reality.

Thanks for reading this (again) novella. Your time & patience with my verbosity is greatly appreciated :).

A Knowingly Late Update…

Hi RSS feed services, webcrawlers / search engine robots & the occasional human reader!


Well, I'm going to apologise up front for this being a late update. It's been, I think, a month since the last time I enlightened you with details of my life in Thailand. Let's hope that this upcoming month won't be as scant with updates.

To say that September has been a busy month would be a bit of an understatement. Professionally and personally alike, much has transpired in the 9th month of 2008. Here's a play by play:

• In my computers class, we started work on the final term projects—Photoshop collages. They were assigned the first week of September & they're due the last week of the semester (next week). Students being students, 85% of them hadn't even begun thinking about the assignment until this past week.


• We (the foreign administration & I) successfully canvassed for the school to invest in a digital library cataloguing tool—a huge improvement over the nonexistent catalogue that they currently have "given" me.


• I've begun organising/updating the fiction section of the library with reading level codes. The previous system was cryptic for Thai students to follow & it made (makes) for confusion when someone other than I tries to re-shelf books. The current tagging on the books classifies levels from lowest to highest thusly: JE, E, JF, F… And maybe even N after that. ESL people routinely get confused by these codes, which is why I'm beginning to phase in reading level codes by using regular polygons: easiest being a triangle, the hardest being a 6-pointed star with a + in the centre. I think it's a good system, but only time will tell….


• I've received a library assistant! Hooray! This means that the relatively simple tasks of checking in books & re-shelving items won't take up so much of my day. Instead, I can focus on organisation, streamlining & my IT responsibilities. The downside, as to which I previously alluded, is that re-shelving has been hit & miss—not only with "which books belong to which collection" but also _where_ individual books are supposed to go. I'm patiently learning longsuffering as 2 or 3 times a week, I spend a few hours of my evening re-organising the entire collection. If this pattern persists into this week, I think I'm going to have a chat with her, just to clear things up.


• The school's computer network has been growing & as a result, is experiencing growing pains. The consumer-grade components that we're using are beginning to fail, but the school seems unwilling, at times, to invest in the proper equipment their infrastructure. This problem is compounding (see the next point) & I'm getting to the point of having to sacrifice security & stability for a consistent "almost fully working" network environment (which includes internet)


• Due to Thailand's customary software piracy, the school's computer network got hit by a virus this past week which crippled pretty much everything. I say that this happened because of piracy, because the "purchased" antivirus software that the school had installed on its computers kept the computers safe from viruses as well as a screen door keeps out -40 degree winds. Our main server (where all of our teaching resources, term grades & student records) was riddled with over 13,000 (no exaggeration, folks) copies of the same virus as it gleefully spread through & infected every folder that it had time to traipse through. My entire Friday (minus teaching time) was devoted to damage control & reparations. We're still in the process of purging the network from infection…


• Last weekend was our Professional Development weekend. It was an interesting & good time, which gave us opportunities to learn & grow (if even only a little bit).


• There has been restoration in a couple of my relationships over here. Over the past couple months, two of my relationships had suffered. The first was with one of my former students, a girl who considers me her big brother—a feeling which I reciprocate. She had become increasingly distant over the past few months, owing to her being rapt by her new boyfriend. As 16 year-olds go, it's common for people that age not to understand that balance & maintenance is needed in order to keep healthy relationships in your life. Thursday last week, she had become a little overwhelmed by the realisation that not only had she inadvertently pushed me away, but also her other closest friends. We had a good, long talk & I was able to counsel her through understand why others were feeling the way they were. Her relationships now are on the mend, owing to her good efforts & humble spirit. It's awesome. I love her & I love watching her grow.
  

What's Ahead

That's mostly what I've done in the past month. Things on the horizon look something like this:

• I've been asked to speak again at the church in Lopburi, a city 2.5 hours north of Bangkok, where I met the formerly quadriplegic guy. That goes live tomorrow (probably at/before the time you read this). —I just got back from there, actually. It was good times. The pastor of teh church heard that I was interested in eating rat, so he bought me one. It's in my fridge as we speak & I'll be eating it in about a half-hour!


• This upcoming Friday will be a "work day" for GES Staff wherein we prepare for report cards, which get sent out in 10 days, and for school accreditation tasks. I, no doubt, will be busy working in the library & on other resource initiatives.


• Report cards go home in 10 days, which means that our October Break is just around the bend. I may go up to Chiang Mai for a few days with some other teachers to visit a mutual friend (Mink, for those of you who know her) that's stationed up there with Compassion International. During that break, I'd expect that I'll have enough time to write back to all of the personal correspondence that has accumulated on my desk & in my e-mail / facebook accounts. I apologise for the delay, but if you can hold out for another 10ish days, you should get a treat in your mailboxes.

What You Can Do

• You can pray for the staff. We're in the end-of-term crunch, which means accumulated stress. You can also pray for teachers' safety as they mostly go on random crazy trips throughout SE Asia during October break. You can pray (and please do, fervently) for the spiritual environment at GES. It's difficult on even the good days to be mindful of the foreign staff's personal primary objective of ministering to the students & their families for the advancement of the gospel—even if the upper echelons of the school have other objectives for us in mind. I'm pretty sure that you could ask any Christian staff member here & they'd say that we're not really supported by the school spiritually. It's produce produce produce, without the invest invest invest. Pray, also, for our students—that they'd be willing to take the risk of becoming a cultural pariah in order to gain the love & spirit-filled existence of communing with Christ.


• If you want to know more, now is a great time to ask me questions, as I should have a lot of free time in the second half of October with which I could get back to you ;).

Thanks for your patience & willingness to be involved—if even from a distance—in my semblance of ministry in Thailand.

Broken Backs & Drowning Men

Well, it's mid-September already, and the usual goings-on over here keep up at their pace. I won't bother you with repeating those details which take up the majority of my day, but what I will do, oh faithful readers, is I will tell you about some highlights in the past few weeks.


Lopburi

There is a Thai family who sends their three children to GES that I've become relatively close with over this current school year. My connection with them originated while I was teaching high school last year. The oldest daughter in this family was the highest performer in Grade 10 last year, and, because of many similar interests, we struck up a pretty good friendship. Since last year, our friendship has grown & it's absorbed the rest of her family, to a point where now they kind of consider me as a part of their family (the eldest daughter calls me her big brother; the youngest daughter refers to me as her second father and the parents see me as a close family friend). It's pretty awesome, I won't lie. From them, there is no shortage of smiles & hugs & brightened faces as I wander—often haphazardly—in & through their lives. Their love for me & their love for God has truly been a blessing to me, and it makes my impending departure 7ish months from seem all the more difficult.


I was asked by this family to go on a trip with them to a rural province called Lopburi last weekend, which is a 2.5-hour’s drive north outta Bangkok. They wanted me to come & visit a church with them up there that they've been visiting semi-regularly over the past year. Having no reason to turn them down, I decided to take them up on their offer & see what this church was like. A couple other teachers were also invited, and three of us went with this family on Saturday morning to Lopburi for a weekend.

While in the van, driving up on the highway, we were asked if we could maybe share something with the church on Sunday. At first, this was a total of 15 minutes to be shared by all three of us Farang (white people), but as the conversation progressed, it turned into the other two teachers sharing a 15-20 minute testimony each & I, sharing a 40-45 minute sermon. Despite this being a pretty short notice to prepare a message, I was thrilled. It's been close to 4 years since I've been asked by a church to speak, and although 45 minutes seems a bit daunting for a 24-hour notice, I reminded my6self that 50% of that time would be spent translating my English into Thai for the congregation. Sweet.

When we got to Lopburi on Saturday, we spent the rest of the afternoon & evening doing touristy stuff—visiting the old palace/museum & then going to feed the monkeys at the famous "monkey buffet" location at Lopburi City's centre.


Monkey Madness

It was kind of fun to feed random monkeys individual sunflower seeds as they came swarming in over rooftops, walking on power lines & then crossing streets at crosswalks to come to the city centre—a smallish park that contained the remnants of a decaying temple some hundreds of years old. The monkeys would wander up & pluck sunflower seeds from your fingers if you only showed them a single seed at a time, but they'd live up to their notoriety as being greedy animals when you displayed several seeds at once. Without hesitation, the biggest or strongest monkey around you would shove all the others aside, grab the stack of seeds in your hand and then shove them in his mouth, waiting expectantly for more. Others, not being so patient, would get the hint that you had the seeds somewhere in your hands & would begin to climb your legs & torso, meticulously searching for any cache of food that they could find.

It would have been tolerable if that was all that the monkeys were going to grab. But, monkeys are monkeys & there's a reason why Curious George was called curious. It just so happens that monkeys like bright, shiny things (we were warned to remove all jewellery before getting close to the monkeys for this reason), and while there, monkeys made off with my Thai mother's sunglasses, scampering off & playing with them—though not really knowing what they were for. And then, I saw a monkey out of the corner of my eye make a quick, low leap up toward my lower torso. Thinking that he was going to jump on me to try & find food, I braced myself for the animal's landing. But it didn't land. All I felt was a tug against my waist & I heard a little snap as the monkey started to run away with a small green & white thing in his hand. I checked my waist & noticed that my key-ring, which I always have fastened to my belt loop with a karabiner, was missing a very important item: my USB flash drive.

Stupid monkey. He knew that he had done something wrong too, because whenever I went up towards him—even offering food—he would quickly scurry away, just out of reach. I gave up chasing him when he decided to climb up atop the ruins, perching on a spire as he gnawed on my precious data.

Sunday Church

The church on Sunday was amazing. The people were friendly & the congregation had a life to it that I have not felt from a body of believers in years. All of the people who attend are dirt poor, coming in by a shared pick-up truck that collects the members as far out as 70 km into the rice fields. After the service, we all sat on the floor of the empty apartment/townhouse & ate lunch together. There, I heard a couple of amazing stories.

One of the church members was (is) a guy who is about my age, I think. Four years ago, he & his sister were in a severe car accident that left him with a serious spinal injury. Simply put, he broke his neck & was paralysed from the neck down. Now, his mother is a 75+ year old woman who's partially blind from cataracts. This frail lady now had to care for her 6-foot something, 200+ pound son, as he lay in bed unable to move, chew, go to the bathroom or do any of the things that we take for granted. Along with all of this, she had to continue to support them by working in the fields.

After three years of taking care of her son in his quadriplegic state, she met the church's pastor, who told her that his God, his Jesus was able to help her & her son. She was a bit skeptical, since the Buddhist temple in Lopburi—one that recognises the existence of a god—also said that their god could help her, and asked them to give her money to receive their god's blessings. She had been doing so for a while, but no amount of money given to that temple ever changed anything in her son's status. So, she asked him if he was serious. He told her that he indeed was serious, but that his God and his Jesus would only be able to help if she really believed that He would. She said that she did, and bringing her son to the church, the pastor & the congregation began to pray for her son.

I wasn't really told any of the details, like how long it took or what happened or how they prayed. All I was told was that after they prayed, the man who was unable to chew for himself could now move his arms & his legs. After they prayed for him, he was physically able to crawl around on his hands and knees—something that hadn't been a possibility for almost four years. He praised Jesus.

Every Sunday after that day, this son would crawl out from his house & start down the road to go meet the truck that would take him to church. There was nothing that would stop him from going & meeting with others to worship Christ. And each day that passed, his muscled began to get stronger & stronger, until one day, he was able to stand & walk again.

On one of these days, as this guy was walking again, he stumbled & fell into a deep pond that was beside the road. He was all by himself & he didn't have enough strength to swim or to pull himself toward the water's edge. All he knew was that he was sinking & that there was nothing that he could do to save himself. So he cried out, "Jesus, save me!" and he felt something like a man's hand grab him from the water & pull him on to the land. When he looked around, he didn't see a single person, and because of this, he knew that Jesus had come to his rescue.

It's a pretty awesome story. I would have had a hard time believing it, if I hadn't seen the vicious scars around his neck, clearly indicating that there indeed was severe trauma inflicted on this man's body. Today, he walks almost completely normally; a small shuffle is present in the gait of his right leg. He now is working as a recycler, gathering scrap metal & plastic, which he sells for money, bringing in about 100 baht a month (that's about $3).

I was and still am humbled when I think about this story. I think I (we) often forget the power that our God has available to us, as we push Him off to the margins of our lives.

Pray that we, at GES, would hold fast to the truths of Christ & that our faith in Him would take precedence in our actions & daily motivations. I ask that you pray for us to continue to strive for unity & to strive for seeking Him above all things.

More next time. I've another broken back story to tell then. Thanks for your prayers: they're much needed.