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The cathedral on Guatemala City's central plaza
Today I experienced the Guatemala of the upper class. We went to a well-equipped church and ate lunch at a shopping mall with some of the same designers you’d see in Scottsdale Fashion Square. The Wal-Mart is down the street, as is the supermarket. It takes two gates to get through to the house where I’m staying. It is beautiful, green, clean and peaceful.
My host family, headed by my colleague Victor and his wife Elizabeth, made sure I understood I was seeing the “top of the heap” in the first part of the day. Read the rest of this entry »
I arrived in Guatemala safely tonight and am very happy to be staying with some old friends from FH Bolivia who are now with FH Guatemala.
At the Miami airport, during our lengthy layover, I booted up the computer to work on a Power Point. But it wouldn’t even give me the dialog box to enter my password. I powered down….powered back up….again, it was frozen, no recognition of the mouse…
I had dropped the computer out of my lap on the plane (true confessions time) and I thought, well, that was the end of my hard drive evidently. So I ran a diagnostic on the hard drive, which gave me a renewed appreciation for how long it takes the IT team to see if there’s a problem with your hard drive. It took pretty darn close to two quarters of the Cardinals-Saints game, which thankfully was on a huge TV screen near the power outlet I was borrowing.
Meanwhile my mind was doing flips. OK, so what if I’m computer-less for three weeks? Can I do this? And I started running through Plan B, and Plan C. Then Plan D. I got to about Plan G when it occurred to me that I have an IPhone, so I posted a prayer request on Facebook.
I do not know if it is Biblically sound to lay hands on a piece of tech equipment but I did just that for a few minutes, and prayed over my hard drive.
The diagnostic came up totally clean so I thought, what the heck, let’s try it again.
No problem. It booted up. Yay God.
But in that 90 minute interim, watching little progress bars grow, I realized that without the computer I would have to be more dependent on people in Guatemala for help. And in the end that wasn’t a bad place to start. I can hide behind technology, especially if I’m tired or overwhelmed. I’ve already apprised my travel-mate Jewel Anita that taking photos is one of my coping mechanisms if something hits me emotionally, when I’m on field visits. If you tell me to stop I could get a little feisty.
I ended the whole session knowing that if the computer died, so what? It’s not about the technology anyway, it’s about relationships, and being vulnerable is the first step to developing relationships.
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