I was complaining the other day that I don’t have nearly enough time to write and tell people what I’m up to. Come to think of it, it is probably better this way, because at least now people know that I’m busy. And this way I don’t have to confuse you by writing into all hours of the night only to have you wonder, “When does TJ have time to write?”. Answer: I don’t. But I still like to, and many people have a real interest and concern in what goes on here, and I want to tell you about it.
As explained earlier, a large part of the reason there was no content for a while, and why future content may stay slim, is the increase of “workload”. I have a policy of never calling this here my work because it’s not my job, it’s my life. When I start calling it work, people have their own negative perceptions of word“work”, or the word “job” or the phrases “nine-to-five” or “Dolly Parton”. But nevertheless, let me tell you about my work.
Thermodynamically, work can be defined as the transfer of energy from one system to another through mechanical means. Now that we’ve established, primarily, that my fancy-pants engineering education was not a complete waste (I’m talking to you, Mr. Super-Siphon) let me tell you what that practically means. I work, teach, drive, lift, carry, wash, cook, preach, doctor, repair, dig, paint, and perform countless other verbs all through the day so that the lives of the kids that live here will be benefited. What does that look like on a predictable day?
I’m usually up at 5am, before you gasp in surprise, keep in mind three things. The first thing is that daybreak is at 5:30am and it’s pitch dark by 5:30pm. When it is dark its really hard to do stuff because of the whole I-can’t-see-what’s-going-on problem, so it’s important to get an early start on the day. The second thing is that we are in the tropics and the variation of days is very short. Right now we are nearing our shortest days of the year. During December, the longest part of the year, we have about 14 hours of total light, so it’s still not a big gain, especially coming from Seattle where we push 17hrs of day in the longest part of the year (but scratch at 7hrs in the shortest). The third thing is that the concept of time zones or hours is largely an artificial one here, if the time zone moved so that the sun came up at 9am, people would still get up and go down with the sun.
So I get up at 5am because it’s before anybody else is awake and it guarantees me at least 30 minutes of uninterrupted time to spend with Jesus. Usually, I get closer to an hour. Its nice. After that, anything can and will happen. So my breakfast of fresh bread, oatmeal, an awesome glass of tea, and my bible usually is the last guaranteed time of peace. It also guarantees that it is going to be dang cold! About a month ago we snapped into the cold season. Which means that instead of being 72degF overnight, it is now about 65degF (18C). These are the LOWS, not the highs. While folks back home in Seattle are probably scratching and clawing for temps like these, this marks bitter, bitter cold here.
I, however, have become pleasantly accustomed to the temperatures here, and it feels cold in the morning. How cold does 65deg feel? The first week of the cold (the overnight lows changed literally in three days span from warm to cold) I woke up around 4am and decided to make a cup of tea and start a fire for breakfast (we cook with wood). I put on pants and a sweatshirt, made a cup of tea and went to the kitchen. When I got there I found 4 other kids huddled around the fire that had beaten me to the task. That’s where we spent the next hour huddled together til the sun came up.
[Broken train of thought] The problem with writing stories/updates is I write the same way that I would orally tell the story, just with more punctuation and witty pictures (back when the internet worked). As such, I’ve noticed my attempt to tell you what my day is like ended up being a bunch of meteorological mumbo-jumbo. And instead of waiting till I get polished updates all proofread and crap, I’ll just going to throw them up and see how it works. Sorry for the incompleteness, but as of last check there are still only 24 hours in the day, expect on Mars, where there’s nearly 25 hours in a day. And speaking of Mars, I can see it in the morning, along with Venus and two other planets….
Til later, thanks for the prayers.
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