Nov 1, 2018

A women is singing beautifully just outside of the EyeforOthers- XS4ALL Computer Class Room @ Ritchie. She is distracting me from a focussed attempt to set up the latest PC I brought into South Africa yesterday. Her singing is like a bird. What a peaceful happiness she has in her beautiful voice. I wished I got distracted this way more often…

Last night Ton brought me to my “place to stay” for the coming two nights. Elbé’s home. Elbé is an almost fully paralized women, permanently in a wheelchair and looked after by Lia. Her car got hit from behind by a truck almost exactly 15 years ago.

Lia cooked a wonderful dinner for us, and we got to talk. They talked Afrikaans, me Dutch. How much both Elbé and Lia enjoyed the company of Timo and Jeroen from XS4ALL last week. How these guys fixed their own breakfast and completely took care of their own. Just like Ton always did. Ton used to make these gigantic meatballs in trying to “sell” the real Dutch food to Elbé in the 3 years he stayed at her home. Now Ton has this beautiful house together with Antoinette on the grounds of her son Jaco. We talked about Elbé’s beautiful daughter and went all over her old photobooks to see what she herself looked like when she was young. Elbé talked on and on. About her trip to Belgium and The Netherlands in the late ’90s, her faith in God, the bible studies given at here home and her preference for the faith according the Pinkstercommunity. About the accident, the fact that the owner of her rental home wants to sell her house with nowhere to go for her, and how she still thanked the Lord for all the small improvements in her physical situation that still happen. It was not until after 8:30pm when we finally decided to go rest for the night.

There was no running water in Elbé’s house. Something “with the new watertank or the pump”. Earlier that day, Lia and I gathered all pots, pans and buckets and went to the church to fetch water for the night. Lia needs to wash Elbé everyday, but didn’t see the lack of water as a very big problem. I got one bucket of water for cleaning up after me in the toilet, to shave and wash. And guess what: that’s no problem at all if you put your mind to the right order of doing things!

They next morning I asked what the water problem could be. Lia had already called Ton though with a cry for help. Calling Ton? Is that the solution? So I asked Lia to let me look at it. The waterpump displayed an error message that did not go away after powering down&up, nor by all possible resets I tried. So I asked Lia what she suggested we do now. Calling Klaas was the only alternative she could think of. I took pictures of the pump make an model and left for the training center.

The internet offers solutions to all problems. This is what we are here to teach! Find solutions to the problems you have, without having to rely on others. Certainly not always call Ton or Klaas right away.

I found the installation instructions and how to fix the problem with the pump on YouTube. Then Neil walks into the computer room. Happily informing me that he fixed Elbé’s waterpump problem by quickly pressing the reset button three times. The happy convergency of the Online & Offline world!

;

Kind regards,

Paul

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