Memories of Adventure

Ten years ago this month, I left Yakima, WA and winged my way to Seattle, San Francisco, Tokyo, Bangkok, and finally Kathmandu, Nepal. It was a long trip but I was heading for adventure. I had signed up with Adventist Frontier Missions to work on a project in Nepal doing community development projects (digging latrines, wells and such.) and ended up as the acting country director for AFM Nepal. The experience was interesting and certainly worthwhile, I wouldn’t have traded it for anything.

Less then 2 weeks after I arrived in country, I picked up Dr Tim Howe, his wife Lynn, and their 3 boys, Paul, Barry, and Jon. The Howe’s had come to fill in at the clinic for 2 months and provide some medical care for the Huwas Valley, where our project was located.

Those first two months in-country for me were filled with new sounds, new sights and new smells. I spent many hours listening to the villagers tell me about life in the Huwas, and how we could help. I also spent a lot of time traveling between Kathmandu, the capital, and the Huwas, a two day journey by bus and foot (10 miles walking). While in Kathmandu, I was responsible for renewing the contract with the government to operate in Nepal. That meant shuttling papers back and forth from one government office to another. And lots of waiting!

But I always enjoyed my time back in the village. Life was quieter, simpler and for the first two months, the Howe family was there as well.

This past Friday morning, I saw a headline online titled “The Adventures of a Young Hospital CEO” and it caught my eye. Upon loading the page, I realized the article is an interview with none other then Paul Howe. He is now married, has completed law school and is working as the CEO of the Gimbie Adventist Hospital in Ethiopia at age 25. What a fun read. It certainly brought back many memories of our time in Nepal and it is great to see the Paul is now serving others in his work. The article is an interesting read and if you want to read more from Paul, he has a blog at http://gimbieadventisthospital.blog.co.uk/

Comments

I have had problems with either not knowing that I had new comments or not realizing they were in the moderation queue. So this weekend, I setup two things that should help alleviate that.

First, I turned off comment moderation. But I didn’t just do that alone. I also added Mollom, a content moderation service. Mollom is a webservice that will monitor your content, comments and form submissions and present CAPCHA or just plain block the content if it feels that it is spammy.

The second thing I did was to enable comment notification. How, you might ask? Drupal 6 has actions and triggers built in and this was my first experience getting to play with them. Over the weekend I found an article on how to setup comment notifications in Drupal 6 using triggers and actions and it really was easy. So now, everytime someone leaves a comment, I know what was left and I can respond quickly, if need be.

Neighborly

This evening, Lisa and Kyle made some fresh chocolate chip cookies to share with a friend of hers that lives near by. As the kids were starting to eat, we saw the neighbor sweeping again in front of our house and decided to take him a few cookies. We’ve taken some before and he really likes them. So I ran and grabbed a plate, stuck some warm cookies on it, wrapped it foil and headed out the front door. I didn’t expect to be gone for an hour. Now most people have friends or even neighbors that they can talk to for that long. But if you knew this neighbor, you would realize that this is quite a length of time, at least by our experience. He has always been cordial, just not overly friendly. We chatted about the weather, discussed the nice temperature, and then started talking about the new sprinkler system that is just about complete in the school across the street. Then I asked him if that had always been a ball field. It was a leading question, I’ll admit, because I had seen old plot maps for the area at the city and knew that the whole area was originally plated to be houses but I really did want to know the answer and this neighbor has lived here almost his entire life. I got my answer, though, as well as a complete history of the area, a detailed recounting of the history of each of the houses on our block, and some strong words about the wealthy family that runs this town. Opinionated? Of course. I walked out the door knowing that. But what I wasn’t expecting was that we would talk so long. This is one neighbor that we have struggled to get to talk to and he rarely has a good attitude (we can count on one hand the number of positive comments we have heard from him in the last 4 years, at least before this summer). And all that from a few plates of cookies over the years. This morning, our pastor was talking about witnessing and praying for your neighbors. And as I was standing talking to mine, I realized that this was exactly where God wanted me to be standing that moment and that it wasn’t just chance that we had fresh cookies cooling on the counter. I was talking. Not about me but about something that they cared about and knew lots about. And boy was he ready to share. Thank you, Lord, for working things in your timing. Help me to be a light for you in my neighborhood today! Now, what are you waiting for? Go make some cookies!

The Law of the Garbage Truck

I recently received an email from my sister with the following story. While reading the story, it hit me how true this story really is. I googled around to try and find the source of the story but couldn’t. Hope you are blessed by it as I was:

One day I hopped in a taxi and we took off for the airport. We were driving in the right lane when suddenly a black car jumped out of a parking space right in front of us. My taxi driver slammed on his breaks, skidded, and missed the other car by just inches! The driver of the other car whipped his head around and started yelling at us. My taxi driver just smiled and waved at the guy. And I mean, he was really friendly.

So I asked, “Why did you just do that? This guy almost ruined your car and sent us to the hospital!”

This is when my taxi driver taught me what I now call, “The Law of the Garbage Truck.” He explained that many people are like garbage trucks. They run around full of garbage, full of frustration, full of anger, and full of disappointment. As their garbage piles up, they need a place to dump it and sometimes they’ll dump it on you. Don’t take it personally. Just smile, wave, wish them well, and move on. Don’t take their garbage and spread it to other people at work, at home, or on the streets.

Tiny Ducks

My niece, The Dancer, wrote a post about how she likes tiny things… flowers, little collectibles, etc. So I wanted to share with her a picture of a tiny duck family that recently landed at our house.

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Dataloss Warning: Google Analytics Drupal Module

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I had read about it a few weeks back but it wasn’t till I logged into my Google Analytics account tonight did I notice that my stats had flat-lined on one of my sites. Gone. So it appears that the module author decided to reverse the way the role tracking features work. Instead of having you check which roles shouldn’t be tracked, it changed to tracking only the roles that where checked. In the grand scheme of things, it makes perfect sense, but when I upgraded to that module, there was no warning message.

It appears that that has now been fixed.

I wouldn’t have known about the issue except that I saw a post on the Drupal Planet from Norio.be.

So, be forewarned: Check your Google Analytics accounts if you have updated your modules. The offending version is the change from v 1.3 to v 1.4.

My New Website

Welcome to my new website. I’ve wanted to build this for a while but just never took the time. Now, with Drupal 6 recently out, I figured there wasn’t a better time to make some time to play with the new version and build a website, so here you have it. There probably won’t be anything too profound here, just a place to post my random thoughts and interests. Over time I will be adding more to the site. I want to eventually add FeedAPI to automatically import content from around the web that I write and produce so it becomes a ‘Brent tracker’. On the sidebar you will find links to sites I find interesting. I hope you enjoy them too.