Change of tactic

Today my kids had a hard time taking their naps. If they don’t take their naps they become unmanageable by about 6 pm or so. The problem today was that the voltage in our neighborhood had dropped very low for some reason.

Power problems are nothing new, but this was weird. There was just enough voltage to run the lights and make the ceiling fan slowly turn, just enough to tease you that it might feel good. There was no way the air conditioning in their room was going to work though. And they are used to having the AC on.

I warned them that I was in no mood to fight with them and the first time I had to come in to the room if they were not sleeping they would be in trouble. I stood there for a while, and kept reminding them that their job was to close their eyes and sleep. No talking, no whining, just sleep. They were both so tired that within minutes they were asleep and I quietly exited the room and went back to work.

About 20 minutes later my son got up and told me he needed to go to the bathroom. Thankfully my daughter was still asleep. He did his thing and went back to bed carefully.

About 20 minutes after that the power came back on full strength so I went in quietly to turn on their AC. My son was still awake, but he assured me he would sleep now with the AC on. And then the battle began. After numerous times in there threatening them with punishment, I conceded defeat and brought my daughter out of the room. By now she had had about an hour of sleep. I figured now my son needed some too.

I was not happy with either of them for not cooperating. Don’t they understand I have so much work to do? Don’t they realize the pressure I am under? I made my daughter sit in a chair in the living room while I went back into my office to work some more. She began crying a little, and then a little more.

It was then that I realized I had taken the wrong tactic. Scolding was not working. It was hurting her. She was so tired and yet she knew I was not happy with her. I went over and picked her up and just held her. She melted into me with her head on my shoulder and her arm hanging limply over my side. Within seconds she was back asleep. I lay down on the couch with her on my chest for a while. She was so peaceful. And so was I.

I eventually moved her onto the couch by herself and let her sleep for another half hour. When she woke up she was so much different than before. Happy and smiling. Much better than the crying and fighting.

Maybe I should try this different tactic more often. Lord, help me to remember the lesson learned today.

The crazy things done in a past life(style)

I was thinking the other day about how we look back at our lives and sometimes the strangest things pop into our minds. One thing that recently popped into my mind was when I ‘convertible-ized’ (also known as cutting the top off with an angle grinder) my 1980 Plymouth Volarie four door.

I had bought the car for only $400 expecting only to need it while I rebuilt the transmission in my 1985 Mazda Rx-7. Different story there. Maybe another blog entry.

After the car had served its purpose to me, I began to play with it. It had numerous problems, which were not at all helped by me removing a significant portion of the structural integrity of the car (the roof).

It had a major exhaust leak and sounded as much like a race car as a 6 cylinder Plymouth engine could. When you really stomped on the gas pedal the engine would jump violently (due to the broken motor mount) and then slam back into place. A few minutes later the temperature gauge would be pegged well above the ‘about to explode’ point. The fan belt had come off yet again in the violent shaking of a sudden acceleration. I got to be quite adept at putting that belt back onto an extremely hot engine not only in record time but in the middle of traffic.

As the seasons changed to fall my mom used to worry about the car getting wet inside. I told her it did not matter. She called me one day to tell me it was raining at home. “So” came my reply. I came home to find my junker car lovingly covered with a blue plastic tarp weighted down with half-filled milk bottles on the corners to keep it from blowing away.

One of my last adventures with that car was taking it to the beach for our church’s Family Camp weekend. I burned through two tanks of gas on the beach that weekend just taking people for joy rides up and down the beach and into the ocean at times. At one point we had 13 people on or in that car sailing down the beach at 60 miles per hour. The ride home was horrible though as the nearly two inches of sand accumulated over those days now blew around in swirls and into my eyes for the two hour drive home.

The car met its demise when we pulled the engine out and pulled the wheels off to put them into/on a friend’s car who had just blown and engine (and had crummy stock wheels, not the cool chrome ones I had). The carcass was towed down to the wrecking yard and a very generous $50 was paid for it by the scrap dealer.

I look back on that now and in some ways think that was the best $400 ever spent. The laughs and joy that car gave were immeasurable, not only to me but to the countless others who rode in it.

Back in the day

One of the highlights of our recent trip to America for me personally was getting the chance to spend an evening with four friends from high school. A couple of them I had known since Jr. High really.

The boys, we were inseparable at times. Uncontrollable at other times. But always there for each other if need be.

I was so glad to hear that the other four had carved some time out of their busy lives to spend an evening together. We only had one possible night to make it happen and they all flexed. Thanks guys, you will never know how much that night meant to me.

My wife had met a couple of the guys, but one in particular I had not seen in nearly 13 years. Even before we arrived at the host house I was beginning to recount stories and imagining how some of them might have changed. Even though we all graduated from high school together, we had kids ranging in ages from 16 all the way down to 6 weeks. My how our lives had turned out differently. As we approached the door, I told my wife I should time how long it would take before the infamous “Kevin flying out of the back of a moving truck” incident would come up.

Three minutes. That’s all it took.

The story goes like this (highly condensed version):
We were out raising trouble, or trying to anyways, having fun like most young men want to on a Friday night. I, in my brand new white goose-down ski jacket that my mom had just bought me the day before after much begging on my part, found myself in the back of a pickup going down a steep hill, looking over the cab of the truck at a car playing ‘chicken’ with us. Somehow by the grace of God the two drivers swerved enough at the last minute to avoid a collision.

That is when one of our friends, also named Kevin and who was driving, decided he was going after said car that had just nearly cost us our lives. He slammed on the brakes and cranked the wheel of his red 73 Ford pickup around. The resulting motion combined with my standing position and momentum resulted in me flying out of the back of the truck and onto hard pavement.

The next thing I remember was my friends all standing over me while I gasped the kind of gasp where no air is actually going in or out, but your chest is heaving up and down like an elevator. The guys were all standing over me and one of them was saying repeatedly “He’s dead! He’s dead!”

I am pretty sure the first words out of my mouth were “My mom is going to kill me! She spent a lot of money on this coat.”

Turns out that I was fine, literally not a scratch on me. Bruises that would hurt for weeks, yes, but no scratches. And somehow, by God’s grace not even a smudge on the coat.

I wore that coat for two more years.

As the night went on, I looked around the room and saw all of our wives talking at the table. Their lives have been thrown together by this crazy group of men. Our kids, all twelve of them, were playing together throughout the house and having a ball.

We told story after story. One thing that struck me as quite amazing about this night was how similar all of us remembered even the details of the various stories. That told me that those times were not only significant to me, but to them also.

I laughed so hard and so long that night that I left with a headache. But I left with such joy at the chance to see long-time friends and to remember what happened . . .back in the day.

Exciting trip to the airport

About midnight on Friday night I needed to take someone to the airport. This is not unusual since most international flights in/out of our city arrive and take off between midnight and 4 am.

We loaded the suitcases into the car and drove uneventfully to the airport, arriving at the international departure area. We uneventfully unloaded said suitcases and said goodbye to the departing person. And then the eventfull-ness began.

I walked around to the driver’s door of the car, which I had left running since we were only dropping the person off which should take a minute or two at the most. To my complete shock and horror the driver’s door was locked, with the keys obviously inside the ignition since it was still running.

This began a frantic walk around the car checking every possible way into the car, all of which were locked securely. Since we were stopped in the middle of the main traffic lane I knew it would be not more than another minute before we began attracting unwanted attention by the dozens of traffic policemen who were standing nearby shooing people along the driveway area.

I began to mentally prepare myself to throw an elbow through one of the windows (I chose the elbow since I assumed it would hurt less, give me good leverage and was less likely to do major damage than a hand or my head would sustain) to break in so we could get going. I saw no other way out of the situation at the time.

Then out of the crowd comes an average Indian man. There was nothing unusual about him. He walked over to the door, saw my predicament and quickly went into action. He grabbed a pen from one of the now approaching traffic policemen and used the cap to pry off the molding on the top edge of the door where the window meets the main part of the door. He had it off within seconds.

He then proceeded to shove this molding down inside the door between the glass and the door, wriggling it around with a deftness that was impressive. This was his version of a slim-jim. About 3-5 seconds later I heard the most beautiful sound – “Cachunk!” as the door locks released allowing me entry back into my car.

I thanked him for his help, more than happy to pay to replace the now malformed window molding rather than face the ire of the traffic police and their questions. From the time this man appeared until he blended back into the crowd again was not more than about 30 seconds I think, but he had helped me immeasurably. I quickly got in the car with my friend who had come with me and we made our way home . . . . uneventfully.

Note to self – the remote locking system automatically locks ALL doors as soon as the driver’s door is closed when the car’s engine is left running. Be careful.

Stranger in a strange land

Found the following quote in a book by Bernard T. Adeney titled “Strange Virtues: Ethics in a Multicultural World”.

“Strangers have no inherent right to credibility or trust. These must be earned. Legitimation is a gift from the host. Unlike a citizen, who has a right to be there no matter how obnoxious or foolish he is, a stranger/guest is dependent on his host for the right to remain. Thus the guest is always subordinate to the host. This is a moral relationship that is usually enforced politically through the necessity for visas and restrictions on foreigners. Unfortunately, it has not always been so enforced. In the past those with power came and did whatever they wished. One of the worst things a guest can do is to take away the rights of a host to be the host.“ Pg. 132.

This applies not only to our situation where we are ‘guests’ in the culture we live in, but I think it has some applications for the current immigration issue facing the United States.

A good reminder to remember our place and to always seek to be good guests, especially by letting our hosts retain the role of host.

Choices

Through a series of events that have been happening these last few days I have been reminded once again of the massive impact that one person can have on any number of other people. The choices we make necessarily affect many people around us, and likely in ways we have never dreamed of, whether we like it or not.

A careless choice, a selfish choice or even one not fully thought through, can wreak havoc on other peoples’ lives with irreversible damage. The hurt caused can be magnified when issues like deception are added into the mix. Even things that are often thought of as ‘personal’ decisions will impact other people, and therefore we must at the very least consider how to mitigate that impact, or even to delay the decision until others can be involved to whatever measure they should be.

When you throw into the mix cross-cultural issues, the potential for damage exponentially increases.

And so, a re-doubling of efforts to consider the impact we are making by the choices we make is a necessary step. May I always be careful to consider how my choices affect others, and may I always have the guts to make the ‘hard’ decisions.

Computer woes

So in the last couple of days we seem to be having some computer woes. Thankfully not our personal computers, but ones we connect to regularly for our work. The server in our development office has been down for two days now, and is in the process of being rebuilt. Still not sure what happened there, other than the machine telling us it was experiencing ‘kernel panic’ when it tried to boot up.

Now this morning I find out that our email server is also having trouble. Not being able to send or receive email qualifies as trouble to me.

Perhaps we take too many of these things for granted. Or maybe we rely on them too much. Not that I am going to give up email or my computer.

Electricity woes

Last night was a very long night for us. Around 1 am the power went off. This in and of itself is nothing new. The kids got out of their beds and came into our room as usual, and we all laid there, sweating like crazy, waiting for the power to come back on.

Hours went by.

Finally, about 4:45 am I realized I heard what sounded like the elevator in our building working. How can that be when there is no power? Hmmmm. I came out of our room to discover that apparently it was only our flat that did not have power. The whole rest of the building was working fine.

I decided to venture downstairs to see what the problem was. I discovered that the main panel on the ground floor where the power meter is located was standing wide open. The watchmen (security guard) informed me that during the night something went wrong with the meter so they removed it and would come back around 10 am to fix it.

10 am came and went with no signs of any repair man coming. We inquired again, this time to be told that apparently the problem was on ‘our side of the meter’ and we would need to get our own electrician to repair the problem.

All the while we have a battery backup systems that powers our internet and wireless network connections, which are shared with our office in the same building, were beginning to shut down due to how long it had been running on its batteries. I had to do something fast. I had already physically exchanged two of the battery packs and was running out of fully charged batteries to replace them with.

I sent one of our guys to the electrical shop for 20 meters of heavy duty wire and two plugs for the ends of that, and quickly made an extension cord. I dropped that extension cord out the window of our flat and then went down to our friends flat downstairs and pulled the cord into her place. She had power and I had a key, so I decided that we needed to ‘borrow’ some power for a while to keep our network running.

After all this running around we finally had power back to the network. Crisis averted. At least the guys in the office could keep working.

Now on to the main power problem. Turns out that two of three main leads coming from the panel downstairs has shorted together, and burned. That meant replacing the three main circuit breakers plus some lengths of wire used to connect them to the rest of the system.

By 1:30 pm we had power back to our house. I double-checked to be sure that everything was indeed working. At one point we had every single electrical device in our house running all at once just to be sure.

My biggest frustration in all of this is that if they had told us at 1 am that we would not be getting power back until at least mid-morning we could have gone down to the guest house flat we have in this building and slept in air-conditioned peace. But instead we lay there all night sweating and swatting mosquitoes. I feel bad for my wife who has yet to get more than about 3 hours of sleep on any given night since we returned home. Hopefully she gets some good sleep tonight.

Jet lag

It is now 4:40 am and I have been awake for a couple of hours now. After returning to India from the US on Saturday morning, we began the process of settling in. Within 12 hours all of our suitcases were unpacked and the stuff that was in them was put in its rightful place. Everything was in order . . . . . except for our sleep patterns.

We have done this trip more times than I would like to count, and in some ways it gets easier each time to readjust. For some reason this time it is taking longer for me to get back on to a normal schedule. I realize it has only been two days, but I often am doing fine by now.

So why the additional struggle this time? No idea. I am not all that frustrated by it because in my head I know what is happening. That knowledge does not, however, help me stay awake at 3 in the afternoon when I can hardly keep me eyes open.

Hopefully it gets better soon.

Heading home

In just a few short days we will be heading home . . . to India. We have been in the US for about two and a half months. Here are some stats from this time:

•10 cities* (Detroit, Holland, Denver, Boise, Portland, Kalama, Jacksonville, Richmond, Virginia Beach, and Minneapolis)
•9 states (Michigan, Colorado, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, Florida, Virginia, Minnesota, Wisconsin)
•13 flights totaling nearly 16,000 air miles
•Roughly 9000 miles driven in rented and borrowed cars
•Approximately 180 meetings with groups and individuals

What does all that mean? It means we are ready to go home. We have been on the road long enough and it is time to sleep in our own beds for a while. I realized the other day that due to a series of circumstances that I have only slept in my own bed for 6 weeks of this whole year so far. That needs to end.

The other thing that all that means is that we have a massive number of people who love us and have showered us with their love, patience, kindness, generosity, and grace as we visited them and tried our best to help them understand what we are doing in India.

We have enjoyed all of this. We will also be quite happy to be home again. . . .in just a few days.


* a city is counted as a place where we stayed overnight at least one night