Tad's Life

Our life is filled with visitors again. Yesterday morning, Jane and Jonathan went to the airport to pick up Luke, a Taylor student on his way back from a summer in Nigeria. He was here in Senegal first for a couple weeks with that team that Allison helped orient. He went on, solo, to help out with a school in Nigeria for another month. His flight home is tonight.

It’s the last team of the year. It will be a blast, I’m sure. They seem like great folks. But I’ll be glad for a long break from this side of my life.

// posted by Tad @ 12:20 PM 0 comments

We finally got back home an hour later and settled for omelets and peace and a shower!

// posted by Tad @ 10:52 AM 0 comments

I’ve spent a bit of time with the books and with handing out money in the last couple days. But I’ve also gotten to play electrician. We have been doing some major stuff to the dormitory this week. But we had a deadline. The young singles from the big AG church here in Dakar were supposed to have a two day outing today and tomorrow. We were replacing and reinstalling the louvered windows after painting the bedrooms last week. We were also installing new screens all along the alleyway, on the back of the building. Unfortunately, that required some cement work (messy) and late yesterday afternoon the maids were hounding us to get done so they could get in and clean! Guests were coming in the morning!

Of course, with a group of young people, we should know better. It’s 1:30 in the afternoon and we still have seen neither hide nor hair of them! All that stress for nothing.

And, of course, the electricity company added to our adventure. All those screens (16 in total) needed holes drilled in them and in the wall to mount them. Pierre Marie interrupted my peanut butter sandwich lunch with word that the dormitory had no electricity. Hm… We had it at the house. The office had it. So, I left my bread toasting and went over to have a look. Immediately, I remembered that the masons had exposed some wires the week before and had had to redo a section of plastic conduit (yes, under that new cement in the photo!). Well, I jumped right in and eliminated a couple of other possibilities and moved the circuit breaker to a more convenient place while I was at it. I asked Jean if Albert, the mason who fixed that patch, knew anything about electricity. You can guess the answer! I also rigged up a long extension cord from the breaker out to Pierre Marie so he could start drilling in the meantime. Then I spent most of the afternoon reworking and jerry-rigging the electric wiring in the dorm to keep from having to ask the masons to open up that wall again when we had guests coming in less than 24 hours. Of course, testing my modifications got difficult when the electric company cut power again. And that also made drilling holes kind of tough. We had to abandon the hammer drill for the battery powered portable drill. But in the end, sweaty and dirty though I was, I took care of electric stuff while Pierre Marie mounted his screens and Patrice fixed the louvered windows and Jean and his masons reworked the window frames out back. We even got done in time for Yvette and Rosette to get the place cleaned up.

// posted by Tad @ 1:25 PM 0 comments

We’ve read about the power problem in Queens, with thousands of homes without power for many days now. We are in complete sympathy. Our power company has granted us many opportunities to share that experience lately. We have been without power almost daily for a week or so. It has not been unusual to have the power off from 9 in the morning until 4 in the afternoon. Yesterday that was the case. And then last night, around 10:30, as we prepared to pack up our 15 visitors to take them to the airport, we found ourselves in total darkness. Well, that’s not quite right. The airport nearby gives off quite a glow. And the lighthouse has emergency generators.

Well, for that matter, so do we! We have a little 5000 Watt (that’s 5 KVA to you technical types) gasoline generator. It’s quite noisy, but it does the trick for powering the offices so we can work on our computers and be productive. It’s not good enough to refrigerators and all the rest, so we only power up the one circuit. We’re so used to using it over the last few months, though, that it has a permanent home on the property and a fairly convenient hook up. We’ve put it back by the banana plants to isolate the sound and there is a long electrical cable running back to our electrical supply closet semi-permanently! I have an electrical outlet on the electrical board that doubles as a hook-up when the power is out.

The funniest outage was last Thursday evening. We have been so frustrated that we’ve gotten serious again about getting an automatic generator large enough to power the whole facility. Hervé contacted his good friend and mine, Kevin, an electrical systems guy. He and Hervé stopped by that night around 8 and we sat at the kitchen table eating some pizza (Jane’s home-made) and talking about how big a unit we would need and what options we had and all that. And, of course, suddenly we were in total darkness!

Do you have candles at your house? And candle holders to allow you to wander around with them? Do you know right where to find matches so you can get your fingers on them in the dark? We do!

// posted by Tad @ 3:39 PM 1 comments

I preached today. This blog has been almost exclusively about building and fixing since I started last month, but I guess that that is because it has been a season of work teams. They have dominated my life. It’s not all I think about or do, of course. Though it does allow photos much more easily than time thinking through the implications of Jesus’ parable in Matthew 15:10-11! That’s the one where he says that it’s not what goes into the mouth that makes a man unclean, but what comes out of it. No, that isn’t a statement about hygiene! It’s a parable. He is talking about our spiritual lives, our readiness to be with God. Jesus’ radical view was that what counts isn’t the outside: rituals, disciplines, self-control. He identified the issue as the “heart”, i.e., the inner man with its thoughts, attitudes, thinking, motives and all that. That’s where behavior comes from and the real question is how to deal with that inner you so that it is “clean.” That’s what I talked about this morning.

And I got to do it in English! I was invited to fill in one of the 10 weeks while John, a missionary friend of mine, is in the US. How strange. Jane asked afterwards if it was nice to teach in English and I realized it hadn’t felt much different. If anything, I was more worried about misspeaking because there were a number of missionary colleagues in the small congregation and others whom I didn't know at all. Well, I guess I always worry about saying something that isn’t right, or is only an opinion and not core, crucial biblical truth. But as I prepared this message and as I gave it, I was wanting very much to only say key things that I know are true.

Don’t ask me how it went. I never know. I felt at ease and spoke with confidence and energy. But did my thoughts come across clearly? On the other hand, this is a small congregation, a cell group really, and they have a custom of discussing the sermon together with the speaker for 10 or 15 minutes afterwards. That was great and many people spoke up. We had a great talk about repentance and faith and spiritual “brokenness” and dependence and all. I suppose that that indicates that I did communicate and they were engaged.

My real failure came afterwards, in the informal, social interactions. Is it shyness or fear or self-focus? ("I'd say it's 'd', sir. All of the above.") Whatever it is, I did it again. I missed an opportunity to talk to a couple people about the topic of the sermon. They took the initiative. I just didn't stand still long enough to listen, to ask the key questions, to do the spiritual inquiry that God was giving me the opportunity to do. Argh!! Forgive me Lord Jesus. Transform me.

Hmm.... This blogging is dangerous.

// posted by Tad @ 9:32 PM 1 comments

They leave tomorrow night and tomorrow is a day for unwinding and last minute shopping. Some of the younger guys might be inspired to do a little work here, but I’m not pushing it.

It’s amazing to see how much progress we made while they were gone. The painting in the library and office is finished up. All five bedrooms in the dorm are painted. The patio and retaining wall in front of the library are done. The screen doors are up. (Well, just. That was yesterday that Pierre Marie came to put the screening on.)

Of course, the list of things to do now or in the next few weeks is still a full page long, including the mess in the electric supply room. But most of it is funded one way or the other, thank the Lord. And all of it will be fun to do!

// posted by Tad @ 9:18 PM 0 comments

Yesterday was filled with more catching up and following through. The dorm painting continues at a good pace. Mbaye’s crew is working steadily and Patrice and Ndiaga are emptying rooms ahead of them. Jean’s guys have almost finished the patio. I got out a drill and some hand tools and screwed the Ethernet boxes to the wall here in the office and down in the little cubbyhole we’re turning into a cyber-spot.

We also had a nice long conversation with Paul by Skype. They’re in the US this summer. Cleveland, I think it was yesterday. Anyway, they’ll be traveling back at the end of the month with a team, so we were trying to iron out some details and make sure our communication was clear. It was great to hear his voice. The Internet is so wonderful!

Jane had that team over in the morning. While the Cedarville students helped her with the talibé, I gave Larry, their WorldVenture guide, a tour of the property and had another good conversation with him about missiological stuff.

Well, Jane took a taxi and Jonathan and I had some leftover pizza before heading out. The sun was on its way down, but we had enough light to find keys and shoes and all. As we went over it looked like rain, with a lot of wind and dark clouds. But the weather held. Unfortunately, no one else was there at school. Jonathan had called ahead to double check, but as we drove, the kids called the game off. We didn’t know at first and learned how to turn on the court lights (after I set off the emergency siren!). We also kicked the ball around a while, but eventually Jonathan had to go off and find out where everyone was and got the bad news. It was quite disappointing for him. He was really looking forward to it. The players are an older crowd and it is exciting for him to be stretched in his skills and accepted by the high school guys.

What was unexpected for me was a chance to have father – son time. I’ve been so busy, Jonathan and I haven’t been hanging much. So we had the car time. And then we stopped for a Coke on the way home. In Ouakam in the end. We just sat on a bench outside the little store and watched the traffic and I bored him with recollections of when I was 11. (The first lunar landing was in ’69 when I was 11! And I told him how my grandfather Hampton used to share my room when he visited and snore so loud I was in awe.) It was a lovely cool night with a strong wind to keep the mosquitoes away.

We got home to complete darkness. The power was still out. We lit candles and continued a conversation about Genghis Khan. Jonathan has been learning history through the computer game “Age of Empires.” We tried to look him up in an old history textbook that I picked up from Gene Toombs.

It was one of those precious times of relaxing together that God gives if we’re not so preoccupied that we miss them.

// posted by Tad @ 8:11 AM 0 comments

Today is a working day for the team and us, their hosts. One sub-group is in Ouakam with Jane, touring it a bit to see the church building and to meet a family in their own home and to see the market. We try to give visitors an exposure to life in the city for normal people in a normal neighborhood, if we can.

The other three sub-groups are here continuing work on painting the ITES library and office, clearing brush and doing some electric rewiring.

By God’s grace, there is even someone who is a computer tech person working on some dead equipment we have, trying to see if there is anything salvageable in the mix! And what timing! Our computer at the house picked this week to lose contact with its mouse. This lady, Ginny, and Venetta worked on it for their first few days. They think it is actually a hardware issue with the mother board, though we reformatted and reloaded everything before we were sure!

// posted by Tad @ 1:13 PM 0 comments