The birds

This region is a fantastic place to see all kinds of birds. I thoroughly enjoyed taking pictures of them but I have no clue what most of them are. If you know, please leave a comment!

 This brown bird was hanging out by the croco-diles. The WHAT? Oh yeah, that's the next blog...

 This dude's entire clan was also hanging out by crocodiles. Needless to say, I didn't try to touch the crocodiles!

I spent a long time watching the birds hovering above the boat's wake and then plunging down into the foam to catch a fish. Often when a bird snagged a fish, two or three other birds would arrive to contest his eligibility to keep it!

SPLASH!

Aren't they beautiful?

Mommy, can I have one PLEASE ?!?

These birds put spy planes to shame.

Look, they can even be carrier-based!

I am quite certain that this is a pelican. Unfortunately my camera was set to capture the scenery, not the blinding white of his feathers.

Flamingos! They were a long distance away but I still feel very privileged to have seen them in the wild.

So... the trip

I took approximately 500 pictures and videos on my recent trip down south. I usually take twice that many. What matters, however, is how many of the pictures are worth sharing with anyone. Fortunately  I have plenty of interesting photos in this collection. I am not even going to try to present these chronologically, so I have decided to make several posts around different themes.

People are always the most important. So, in this first installment, allow me to introduce you to some friends and strangers; some seen up close but most in passing.

I awoke one morning on the river. I got up before sunrise and got several photos of fishermen out trying to catch the early fish.

 

Here a fishing boat is coming into port.

As my boat arrived in port, this one was anchored just in front of us. I'm not sure what the guy with the bicycle was doing. He was crouched like that for at least 5 minutes. What is your best guess?

Can you find me in this picture?

Here are some of the guys I met down there. Great bunch!

Look! A Koala! A German Koala, no less... very rare.

We learned new multi-tasking skills.

On the way down the river we saw a lot more boats. I believe the yellow box in the middle used to be refrigerator insulation and now serves as an icebox to keep the fish fresh. I've seen guys in my city tearing apart refrigerators and I always wondered why.

Isn't cool how they make these boats out of logs?

Wow! I hope everyone without a jacket knows how to swim.

Gratitude

I recently heard a really fantastic sermon and I want to share one of the stories that the pastor told.

He said that over the holiday he and his family went to an island along the Northern coast. One morning he went out for a walk along the beach. For a long time he didn't see anyone else, just the birds and the ocean. Eventually he came upon a fisherman who had pulled his boat up on shore. As he approached, the man greeted him with "Donne-moi chapeau." (Give me [your] hat) He responded that he would love to give the man his hat but it was a special gift from his son, so he couldn't.

"Donne-moi argent." (Give me money)

This pastor knew the cultural differences, he was used to them, but he couldn't help being irritated. He pulled out his pockets and said, "See, I don't have any money. I've got some seashells in my pockets and if you want those you are welcome to them." The fisherman acted annoyed and said, "Donne-moi QUELQUE-CHOSE!" (Give me SOMETHING!)

The pastor walked away, utterly disgusted. The guy had never even bothered to ask his name, and then acted scandalized that he didn't give him a gift. As he walked he was grumbling about this when a thought struck him that almost knocked him to the sand- That was exactly how he often treated God. He too often rushed into prayer, asking God for this or that or the other thing and expecting God to answer PRONTO, even though he hadn't even tried to connect on a relational level. "Come on God, why are you slow? Can't you see I have important things to do today? Fork over the answers and lets get this show on the road!" Frankly, as the pastor noted, that kind of ungratefulness is sickening.

On the way back he came across another fisherman. He tried to walk around him but the man called out, "Bonjour!" Reluctantly the pastor stopped. The man proceeded to introduce himself and ask the pastor's name. Then he asked if the pastor would like to see his boat.

"Sure," the pastor said. So the guy showed him the boat, explained to him how the nets and tackle work, and made small talk for several minutes. The pastor was amazed at the contrast with the earlier fisherman. As they shook hands and parted ways the he was tempted to say, "Gee, could you please take my hat?" If hadn't been a gift from his son, he probably would have.

The pastor went on to say that gratitude is the soil out of which all of the fruits of the Spirit can grow. Without gratitude, those gifts will be stunted at best and may not grow at all. He gave us a challenge, which I have taken up at least once or twice a week. I'd like to do it every night. The idea is to each night think about one or two times during the day when I was ungrateful or lost my focus on the Lord and pray about them. Then I pick two things for which I am grateful and take some time to really focus on those things, contemplate how God has shown His goodness to me through them, and thank God for them.

My goal is to one day be able to say with Paul that "I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation." (Phil 4:12) Contentment and gratitude are the products of a life lived with a focus on God, not on circumstances. That is the secret to contentment, and even joy and gratitude, in the midst of hardship. Such a life is not natural for anyone, but anyone can learn it. Paul himself said "I have learned the secret." My prayer is that I will have the desire and discipline to learn it as well, and I think this little exercise is a good start.

For some great thoughts on gratitude in hardship, check out the latest post at intimate submission. Click here.

I'm back!

As you may be aware, I just got back yesterday from a lengthy sojourn in the south of the country. Some day soon I'll write about it, but to be honest life has been a little crazy since I got back and I'm having a hard time readjusting. However, I finally managed to get my fireworks video from New Year's Eve uploaded to YouTube. I hadn't even realized that it actually succeeded in uploading until Aflocka commented on it. Here is the link to the pyrotechnic spectacle:

How, you ask...

do I destroy the disks by hand?

Glad you asked! It goes something like this:

A twist to the left...

 A twist to the right...

 And that would be enough to crack a cheap disk to pieces. 3M, Sony, and Verbatim disks sometimes needed a little Swiss love to convince them to open up.

 It is then fairly simple to remove the magnetic disk and hub.

The hub is easy to remove from most disks. When the glue is good it's trickier.

I put 3 or 4 of these disks together and start slits in them with a scissors, then rip them into pieces by hand (no straight seams!)

This is the final product. The magnetic part gets tossed into a trash bag along with pieces of a hundred other disks. I have uses for the rest of it...



The plastic bodies (metal door optional) are very useful as shims to get my furniture up to the correct height. Maybe now I won't slouch so much at the computer.

The safety tabs, once they have the ends removed with a fingernail clipper, can be painted to make fantastic little pieces for one of my board games.

The metal pieces are extreme- ly useful. I just don't know yet for what. In the mean time they sit in a box by my desk, looking pretty.

Disk Busters- No Myths Here!

Yesterday I was given the job (and pleasure) of destroying a bunch of old 3 1/2" floppy disks. You know, the type that went with your Apple 2+. I distinctly remember when those things went out of style. It happened in the course of about a month. One month I had two boxes full of lost disks in the computer lab where I worked, and the next month... I still had two boxes full of lost disks. The difference was, nobody was asking for them anymore. Instead everybody was wandering around with these magical little thumb drive thingies that cost $20 for 500 MB.  Pretty soon I had two boxes of lost disks AND a box of lost magical thumb drive thingies.

But that is neither here nor there. The point is, I was asked to dispose of these disks in the easiest way possible that would nevertheless make sure that nobody could get at whatever information may have been on them. I was going to use a supermagnet but I didn't find one, so I went with the next best option- mutilation by hand.

This method was slower and less efficient but exponentially more fun. In the process I also discovered that not all floppies were made alike. Some brands were much better than others. Sony was obnoxiously difficult to destroy, while cheapo Memorex disks shattered into delightful splinters with minor provocation. Here, in ascending order, I have rated the disks on destructibility:

3M
score: 1/10
very tough and hard to break. The glue that holds the magnetic disk to the center hub was strong as well, to the point that I sometimes ripped the disk trying to remove the hub.

SONY
score: 2/10
Also very tough to break. The plastic was more brittle than 3M but it was thick enough that I had to bend it really far in order to make it snap. The glue was very strong.

VERBATIM
score: 3/10
The plastic was very similar to that of 3M but perhaps slightly more brittle. The glue was strong.

MEMOREX
score: 3/10
The plastic was identical to that of 3M- a real beast to open sometimes. The center glue was weaker though, making it easier to remove the hub.

IBM
score: 5/10
The plastic is thin, flimsy garbage that shatters easily. The hub glue was strong.

NO-NAME DISKS
score:6/10
They shatter nicely and the strength of the glue tends to be less than impressive.

MEMOREX COOL DISK
score: 9/10
This is the ultimate destructive experience! A simple twist sends cracks all through the diskette. A violent wrench makes it shatter into fragments. How, you ask, can anything be more destructable?

FUJIFILM
score: 10/10
The plastic is fragile, but no more so than IBM. What makes this one so scandalously weak? The glue- or lack thereof- is what really sets this disk apart. I am quite certain that some of the magnetic disks had fallen off of the hubs before I ever even touched them!

Village

I'm off on another hairy adventure tomorrow morning so I figured I had better post some pictures from my last one before I go. Undocumented adventures are adventures that have not yet been milked for all they are worth, and it would be a shame to not milk a good adventure.

However, if I try to organize it into a neat, logical, chronological story I will never get it posted at all. So here, in no particular order, is an abbreviated account of my saga:

The ride down was 15 hours long. The beginning of our trip consisted of weaving through black people dressed in black and wandering along crowded city streets in the dark. The end of our tripped consisted of bouncing along for 3 hours in the middle of wilderness, trying to guess the depth of the gullies and holes in front of the truck by how long it took our headlights to illuminate the bottom.  This picture was taken about 2/3 of the way into the journey, when we first began to see mountains. You will notice that we are driving on the wrong side of the road. If you look in the lower right-hand corner you'll see a sizable pothole. A significant stretch of the journey was on road like this. Fortunately it was a weekend and there was not much traffic. Weaving across the road is more exciting when massive trucks are coming at you from the opposite direction!

 Here is where we stayed. The center building is the kitchen, dining room, and general hangout. The huts around the perimeter are individual rooms.

I stayed in the hut on the left. My coworker is sitting in her doorway to read because the power didn't come on until 6:30 at night.

Here was my front door. The stone hopping went pretty smoothly as long as I wasn't carrying anything or it wasn't dark or I wasn't too sleepy.

Here is my room. On the right is an extra bed frame. It was uninhabited for the first day or two. Then my friend P moved in with me when he arrived from town. The window looks like it is covered with cloth. That's because it is. Not the most secure, but it did keep the mosquitoes out.

Here was the sink and shower in my hut. I am guessing that at one point there was running water, but no longer. I showered by dipping the small brown bucket into the large blue one on the floor and pouring it over myself. The bucket served as my faucet also. The water in the bucket was super frigid in the mornings. Our African friends taught us to draw water from the nearby well in the morning. Because it was in the ground all night it was much warmer.

The toilet was in a separate hut. We flushed it by pouring water into the toilet bowl from the barrel in the corner.

It was truly a beautiful area. I spent most of my free time wandering the hills and taking pictures. Here you can see my friend N riding up the trail on his motorcycle.

The village is nestled into the most hilly part of the country. Even though it hadn't rained in several months all of the trees were still a lush green.

One of the things I really appreciated about the village was the dark night sky. I love stargazing, so whenever I get out of the city I take full advantage of clear nights. I think the moon was tinted red because of all the dust in the air.

I am not sure which planet this. Somebody want to help me out?

Here it is again, in the middle of a starfield. It's fascinating to be so much closer to the equator. I can see the Southern Cross and other constellations that I never saw back home.

Moonlight silhouettes... so pretty!

Early one morning I got up and climbed the "mountain" behind my hut. It wasn't terribly tall but I found it to be much steeper than I had expected. I had to switch from walking to moving along on all fours, and soon I was doing more climbing than hiking. Unfortunately the rock face was covered with loose gravel, and dry grass was growing on top of that. The combination made it very difficult to keep my footing. When my feet slipped I would try to grab at the grass but it would pull out and I would start sliding down the hill. I had to move slowly and carefully, keeping my center of gravity as close to the hill as possible.

It was a bit of work but totally worth it. The dust and clouds kept the sun hidden until about half an hour after sunrise, so even though I got a late start I was able to get into a good position before the sun appeared.

 

The valley was criss-crossed with miniature smoke clouds from dozens of cooking fires.

At last the sun came out!

Far below you can see the village, with the church on the outskirts.

Here is another picture of the church, taken from a closer hill during some down time on the second day.

Guys in discussion under a tree. In the heat of the day, the shade of a large tree like this is a welcome comfort.

My word, there were some cute kids there!

This is too cool! A John Deere and a Case sitting next to a hut. When I was little I had a model tractor just like that John Deere. It is surprising, the things you find in a village like that. At one point we realized that we had forgotten some important documents. We wandered into the village and asked around to see if anyone had a computer. We ended up at a hospital, where a friendly young nurse said that yes, he had a computer that he ran off of the solar panels at the hospital and he also had dial-up wireless internet that he pulled from the nearby cell phone tower. So we had our friend in the city email the documents to this our new friend. We then when to a local government center to ask the man there if we could use his printer (it was the only printer in the village, as far as the nurse knew). The man went into his office and came out with an HP inkjet in his arms. So we carried that back to the hospital and hooked it up. Unfortunately our friend the nurse couldn't get his little laptop to connect to connect to the wireless modem, so we couldn't install the driver for the printer. Off he went to borrow a computer from one of his coworkers and soon he returned with a beautiful, big laptop. Unfortunately, it was all in Portuguese. He said that if I could figure out how to change the language to French that would be wonderful because the owner of the computer doesn't speak Portuguese- it was a gift from his father-in-law in Brazil.  Sadly for the owner, and also for us, I couldn't figure out how to change the language.
I popped in the DVD and started clicking through the menus, choosing whatever option struck my fancy because I had no clue what the buttons said.  That may be part of why it took nearly an hour to install the driver. The other cause was probably the fact that the poor Fujitsu was made to run XP and somebody had installed Windows 7. It was probably also crawling with viruses. But finally, finally, we got the printer installed and could print off our three sheets of paper. It had taken us 2 days, 2 laptops, 2 wireless modems, one printer, one nurse, and one government official, but we finally got it done!

This is one of the pastors from a nearby village. He is playing a traditional instrument called an item. Instead of having a reverberation chamber built in like a guitar or violin, you use your mouth as the reverberation chamber and open or close your lips to change the pitch.

On one of the first nights there they were burning away the grass around the huts to keep away the snakes. We took pictures in the fire, little knowing what was about to happen...

On the second to last day there a wildfire broke out on the hill that I had climbed earlier. In a couple of hours it was a serious threat to the huts at the foot of the hill, including the ones in which we were staying.

Fortunately the people have lots of experience with wildfires. Every year there are nearly 9 months of no rainfall so wildfires are almost an annual event. Here the boys are beating out the fire as it approaches a hay field.

Soon the fire was under control. Life went on as usual in the huts nearby.

Something about this hut reminded me of Hobbiton.

This building is much more strange. I was told that a rich Frenchman built it for his wife but she never actually came to see it. So there it sits, right on the edge of the city soccer field.

Dusty roads, take me home... this picture was taken on the way back home. There was lots of dust and several more grass fires. Between the two it was a very hazy morning.

We saw tons of animals, mainly birds, monkeys, and baboons.

Isn't the little one cute?

What a handsome baboon!

We saw a lot of these birds on the road. We realized that the wildfires were chasing them away from their nests. It was pretty sad actually.

There were lots of other small adventures, and one major one- a flat tire. But it's already 10:00 and I haven't started packing for my next trip, so I'll have to save that for another day.