Yesterday I met Brian Colombo who will be working on the radio stuff and sitting in on the training. He's an interesting character to say the least. Once I found out he went to LeTourneau, it all made sense - I know lots of guys at school like him. After talking to him for a while I think he's pretty cool. Yesterday was also a parade. It was kind of a military thing so there were tanks and soldiers in cammo just dripping with sweat. The kids from the academy also marched. Some of them had white gloves and when they walked they brought their arms up until they were parallel with the ground then swung them back down: it was pretty stupid looking. After the parade was over, all three of Venezuela's fighter jets kept doing these fly-bys (actually I don't know how big their air force is). It was neat. The past couple days I've just been going over the training materials and kinda experimenting with a side project in PHP3. Josh did all the training today and I'll do it tomorrow.
Last night I slept pretty well, a change from the previous couple of nights. Today Tom and Brian and I went grocery shopping. I was amazed at the large selection of rice and the small selection of spices. I guess most South Americans just don't like stuff hot, but Tom says the Indians have some spicy stuff, including a sauce made from fire-ants (turns out they're good for something!). I trained Bruce on the system most of the day. He's coming along, but it just doesn't come natural to him. Fortunately the system pretty much runs itself so he won't have to do anything but change the CD for backups. I find it hard to communicate a lot of what I know about computers. I learned it over the course of months and years and we're trying to teach it in a week. Well, it's late and I'm tired - out.
Boy, I guess I've been slacking. Now I don't even remember what happened Thursday and Friday. Well, maybe a little... We've been training Bruce and that's been going so-so. I think a lot of the material we go over is stuff he doesn't really need to know. He's not going to use it unless there's a major problem, by which time he will have forgotten most of what he needs to know to solve the problem. Not that training Bruce is wasting time, but I just don't think it's going to work out as everyone plans. But anyways... Last night there was an MAF staff meeting at the Cedegren's. We piled 6 people (plus driver) into a 1970-something taxi to get over there because Bruce Wied had the truck and was nowhere to be found. The meeting was short and then we watched the new MAF fund-raising video. It's very cool - very exciting. Today we went to Tobogan [toe-bow-gone] which is a natural water slide in a river. It was awesome. This whole country just sits on a couple huge boulders which are very smooth. Moss grows on the rocks and they get very slick. At this place you just climb to the top (without slipping and falling), sit down in the water and push yourself a little to get you going. You can slide about 50 feet or more. I somehow managed to get a large piece of sand embedded in the ball of my foot, however, which limited my sliding experience to 3 or 4 runs. That's okay, I still had a lot of fun. One thing I noticed is that the girls here seem to be more modest than American girls. They're also very friendly with Bruce Wied (or maybe it's the other way around). Everywhere we go he gets into a conversation with a local girl. I'm sure he just likes to practice his Spanish ;)
I ended up going to the Spanish-speaking church again today (because that's where the ride was going). A construction team from North Carolina flew down this week to work on the school building behind the church, so they were there. One of them, Claude, was a pastor and was invited to speak. Dan Whitehead translated into Spanish. Claude was very race conscious - almost to the point of making it a bigger deal than it really is. He wasn't derogatory in any way, but to me it just doesn't seem necessary to note the fact of different race repeatedly. But that could have just been my perception. I also met Emily, who came down with the team. She's actually from Tennessee and will be a senior in high school. They'll be here for another month so I think I might try to get to know her a little more.