Ninja vs Penguin

Penguin August 28th, 2007

Performance Anxiety
Today is the big day. Technosoft is going to come and demo what they’ve been working on for the last month and we’ll be able to ask them a few questions.

As the technical lead and pretty much the only true technical person on the team, it’s on my shoulders to evaluate Technosoft’s efforts, Neil’s analysis and suggestions, and to assist Hamadri by making my own analysis and recommendations. This is an extremely heavy burden, especially since we only have one day for it.

All morning, I felt nervous that I would do something wrong. Or I would say something wrong that would jeopardize the mission. Especially with Technosoft being here and their fear of us, I didn’t want to inadvertantly say something that they misconstrue as an attack. I also know that when I get serious and focused, the tone of my voice can become harsh and commanding. I want to try and help Technosoft help CSS. Not reprimand them.

The Lord is good, and he will carry me.

• India: Quick Update (2)
• India: Day 8 - The Lord’s Day (2)
• India: Day 7 - The Orphanage (1)
• India: Day 6 - Back In This (1)
• India: Day 5 - The D Train (1)

Tags: India, Trips

• Missions , Posts by Penguin
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Penguin August 28th, 2007

Bombing
Even though we don’t have a TV, we have Wenhai’s Blackberry. The first thing that we talked about was the bombing that happened in Hydrablast.

Hamadri and the girls were surprised that we knew about it already. How this will affect our flight, is still uncertain.

Hamadri’s Church
We had the option of going to an English speaking church, but it didn’t seem appropriate while we were in India. When Hamadri asked yesterday, I asked if we could go to his church. His church was in downtown Kolkata. Service starts around 9 AM, so we would have to get picked up around 8.

The driver picked up the girls and then swung by the apartment to grab us. Just as we were leaving the gates of Peerless Nagar, I was reminded that we were going to try and change our flight time. But I had forgot my ticket back at the apartment. Luckily, we hadn’t gone too far yet. I grabbed the envelope with my ticket in it and jumped back in the van. The humidity had sealed the envelope closed.

It was about an hour’s drive into the city. Even on a Sunday, the traffic was really bad. Hamadri said that during the weekdays, the traffic was even worse. Tons of smoke and dust was kicked into the air.

We arrived at the church around 9:20, the service had already started. The entrance was this short hallway breached by large double doors. The hall opened to a large assembly room with a platform at the other end. In the center of the platform was a small podium, where the MC stood and lead us in the program. Lined up in front were rows of green chairs occupied by worshippers. Just in front, and to the left of the platform sat a small female chorus of 6 or 7. To their left was the pianist on a Roland. In front of them was the electric drummer and the bongo drummer. To their left was a woman operating this odd box piano. We later learned that it was similar to an accordion. The left hand operated a lever that pumped air through the machine.

We hadn’t learned the words for Jesus or Lord in Bengali yet, so it was a little hard to pick out what they were singing about. But the music was lovely. Looking around, even though the hall wasn’t physically full, the room could hardly contain the hearts of these worshippers.

After the singing, there was a time of sharing, where people would stand and give thanks to the Lord for things that had happened during the week. The electric drummer surprised us all by sharing in very good English. He shared about how he went on a long trip by train. Normally, the trip would take about 20 hours, but there was a flood and the train before them had derailed. Luckily, they were safe, but there were no detours they could take. They were land locked and were stuck on the train for close to 56 hours.

During this time, they were in a portion of the jungle that was really dangerous. They gathered some of the larger guys and spent the night patrolling the aisles. And praying. There were no roads to reach the train, so they couldn’t be supplied with food or water. But thanks to the Lord, he was able to make it to his destination. When he was done, he grabbed the redeye back to Kolkata, got a good nights sleep, and made it to worship that day.

After the sharing, there was some more singing. And then the speaker. The man that spoke was the same man that presented while we were at the orphanage. He spoke with such passion and heart. As he spoke, I thought about my own life and how this could be one path. I thought about Power Point presentations. About Pastor Tim’s one point sermons. And about the stories that pastors tell. What would be my preaching style? What would be my signature?

Everywhere we went, we were greeted with such hospitality and generosity. We’re just students and office workers from the states. There’s nothing special about us. Yet we’re treated almost like kings. If every church treated new comers this way, I think our churches would grow like crazy. Instead, we’re so eager to meet up with our friends or get stuff for our ministries done. I can imagine the look on a visitor’s face if they were treated like a king. They would have to ask, “What is it about these people?”

Before the message, we had gone to the front of the congregation to introduce ourselves. The electric drummer was kind enough to translate for us. They were surprised when we spoke a bit of Bengali. To give back a little more, we decided to sing the Bengali songs we knew after the message.

We stood before them again, staring with the English version of “This is the Day”. When we got to the Bengali version, music and drums accompanied us, and the rest of the congregation joined in as well. It was awesome to sing with them. When we sang our second song, we were at their mercy as they repeated the middle line twice, when we only did it once. We closed with our action song, which was really weak.

After the service, we greeted some people, shook hands, and were greatly blessed. The electric drummer came over and introduced himself to us as Kokesh, aka Joy. It turns out, that he was the worship leader for the church. He also worked in IT, so was very interested when I said that we were hear to help CSS with their software. It’s nice being able to connect with people solely on profession.

His wife motioned for Michelle and Alice to come to her. She was a fashion designer and wanted to adjust their saurees for them. This was the third time in three days they had to have their saurees adjusted. It just goes to show how difficult it is to put one on.

We talked to Joy for a bit and he was extremely gracious. We talked about some sight seeing opportunities in Kolkata. Victoria’s Memorial, of course, and the museum. The museum was the biggest and best museum in India. He also talked about the zoo, but suggested that we probably shouldn’t go because it’s really dry and hot there.

Emmy mentioned that we needed to get our tickets changed. The airport was a good 20 clicks away, so it would be a bit of a trek. Luckily, Joy travels a lot on Jet Airways and told us that there was an office only 3 clicks from the church. What a blessing!

• India: Quick Update (2)
• India: Day 9 - Boom (2)
• India: Day 7 - The Orphanage (1)
• India: Day 6 - Back In This (1)
• India: Day 5 - The D Train (1)

Tags: India, Trips

• Missions , Posts by Penguin
• Comments(2)

Penguin August 28th, 2007

I think I got a lot of sleep from Day 5, because I woke up really early. I went to pee around 4, and put on my iPod to try and fall back asleep. But I went through an entire CD before I started feeling tired again. Even with the eye mask, I would wake up every 5 minutes. I might as well just stay up.

Training
This was an especially big day of training. Everyone had two or three students per machine. Karen took some time to interview some of the older staff, members who have been serving with CSS for 16 years or so.

As expected, the students I had were not very computer literate. Luckily, I had someone who helped out a little bit. I decided to change my tactic. Instead of jumping straight into Excel, I first wanted to make sure they understood “plus” and the other English terms for the math they were used to. To illustrate, I used my fingers to create the illusion of addition or subtraction.

Once I established the English equivalent, I typed out the computer equivalent of each of these terms. I also tried to teach the concept of shift before moving on. They seemed to get it, so I went back to Excel to see how far I could get. I got through a little bit of addition, but I sensed there was still hesitation and some trouble, so I had them go back to typing.

After the paragraph, we went to Excel again. This time, it was much better. We spent some time on using the SUM function, but they eventually got it. The first hurdle they overcame was they kept clicking on the cell they were trying to put the total in. Invariably, they would end up clicking somewhere on SUM and move the cursor to the wrong position.

The next hurdle was selecting a set of rows. One of the students had some difficulty with this. But by the end, he had it down. I didn’t have Word installed on my machine, but I did have OpenOffice. I figure, the concepts of bold, ital, and underline were pretty universal.

Looking back, I don’t know how helpful this training is going to be. Yeah, sure they learn a little bit, but they don’t even have the basic computer skills necessary to operate the machine. Some of them don’t even know how to double click. I think going through basic computer training would help them a lot more than just learning Excel. Of all things, Excel should be the last things that they learn.

By the time we wrapped up training, it was close to 12:30. We were supposed to wrap at 11:30 so we could get to the orphanage for the special program that they had prepared for us.
The Orphanage
Although we were late, we were blessed to see so many people had come to greet us. The orphanage and the children’s ministry had spent some time preparing a special program for us.

The first act was this little girl who performed a traditional Indian dance. She was dressed in traditional Indian clothing too. I wish the lighting was better, than I could’ve gotten some better pictures of her movements. They were really graceful and elegant.

Next, the orphan boys presented a song for us. I’m not really sure what they were singing about because it was in Bengali, but it was still a blessing anyway. Along with the song, they had some actions to go along with it. They were really cute.

The muslim children were kids from the muslim community. Some of them had become outcasts since they had become Christians. But through the ministry here, they’ve come to be welcomed and know the love of God. They also presented a song to us.

The children’s ministry was CSS’s leadership program. One of them came up and told the story of Noah and the flood. In English. I was rather impressed. Another came up and read from the scriptures. In English. And this cute little girl sang this song about calling Jesus on the telephone. It was to die for. As a group, they sang “This Little Light of Mine” in English for us.

The last thing that I remember clearly, was some of the orphan boys performing a drama for us. It was actually pretty involved, with dialogue and everything. The general gist of the story was, this boy drank some liquid and died. In order to save the boy, someone had to drink this other liquid. They would die so the boy would live. It was actually pretty good.

I wish I remembered all the presentations, but it was just amazing to see their eyes light up when we were there. To be an encouragement just by being there is amazing. What God is doing here is really wonderful, and I hope that he continues to bless their ministry.

Our Gift
In comparison, what we had to present wasn’t nearly as good. We had spent the previous night learning some Bengali childrens songs.

We opened by singing “This is the Day” in English, and then seguing into the Bengali version. We followed it up with two other Bengali songs that seemed to underwhelm. Even though they weren’t as impressed as we were by their presentation, I hope they were still blessed by the effort that we put forth.

I’m definitely glad we didn’t do the body worship. I think it would’ve been too little.

Broken Back
While we were enjoying the program, the driver went and grabbed us our lunch.

We sat and talked with the head warden responsible for taking care of the children and running the program. She shared with us how God was really moving and helping her serve. Even though she was pretty old, she had broken her back. Twice. Both times, to the point where doctors said that she probably wouldn’t be able to walk. Despite all that, through God’s touch, she was healed. Not instantaneously, but still miraculously. It’s not everyday you get to hear how God is doing amazing things.

Crying Girls
As we finished up lunch, the girls heard some crying coming from the hall. They peaked their heads out and saw 5 little girls huddled in the corner. At first, we didn’t know why thy were crying, and then we learned that they had left their mothers for the first time.

The girls grabbed their gauntlet of materials to try and cheer the girls up. They grabbed stickers, bracelets, and little plastic jumping frogs. The stickers and other items seemed to distract them briefly, but it wasn’t much. We didn’t know what else we could do, so we sang our the Bengali action song that we knew. We chose this song because the lyrics basically said, “you are my friend, I am your friend”

We didn’t know what else we could do, so we prayed for them.

After exhausting the materials that we had, Alice and Michille tried something a little different. Alice started quacking and doing other silly things. Some of them started to manage reluctant smiles. But the mood was still really somber.

If they only knew what was coming. If they only could see the future program that they’d be involved in at the new girls’ orphanage. The love that Jesus could show them.

Crafts
The girls had brought some crafts for the boys to make. The first item were salvation bracelets. Bracelets with 5 colored beads, black (for our sin), red (the blood of Jesus), white (made pure), green (we grow in our faith), yellow (to get to heaven). We made a nice little assembly line and they all really seemed to enjoy the bracelets.

Next, Michelle brought some Polaroids. Before she came on the trip, someone from her church had given her about 40 or so pictures. We would take pictures of the kids and then they would paste them next to outlines of their hands. Then they would write their names and age under the picture.

While Michelle took the picture, I would hover right behind her trying to make the kids smile. Most of the boys were pretty easy. But when we got to the new girls, there was nothing I could do to make them even crack a smile.

Closing Pictures
After they had pasted the pictures down, and they started developing, the kids got so excited to see their own picture slowly revealed. They jumped up and ran around around, showing themselves to us. They swarmed each of us in turn, holding up their constructed work.

We had a few Polaroids left, and took a group shot to leave with the orphanage. We also took one of our driver next to the van. When he saw the picture, our driver smiled and said, “Style.” Awesome!

As we were about to leave, the kids rallied around, trying to shake our hands. Too bad I had put my camera away and was carrying too much. By the time I pulled it out, the group had thinned a bit.

Then we were off to the girls’ home, which was under construction.

Girls’ Orphanage
When we arrived at the girls’ orphanage, we were swarmed by villagers. Everyone, even people down the street came out to see the foreigners. Most would stand at a good distance while we walked through the premises of the orphanage.

Even though it wasn’t complete yet, they are building furiously to try and get it complete sometime in September. The girls that we had saw crying earlier would be coming here. It was a really nice area. They had an gated courtyard where they could play. There was a big room where all the girls would sleep. And there was a quaranteen room for the sick.

If the boys’ orphanage is any indication, than this is going to be a great place as well. A home where destitute girls can come to know the Lord and be loved and cared for.

New Computer
It was back to the office. When we arrived, they were unpacking a new computer. This would be the machine that Technosoft would be demoing their software off of.

The computer operation was pretty ghetto. All the software, except for maybe drivers, were all pirated. They just had blank cds with serial codes written on the face with sharpie. A bit of sham, considering they were still paying for the software.

I sat down at one of the machines to make sure everything seemed to be in order. I tried getting to the networking, but it didn’t show up. They hadn’t installed the NIC drivers yet, so I asked them for the CD. Initially, the CD they gave me was throwing errors, saying that it wasn’t compatible with the operating system (Windows 2000 Advanced Server). Next, it was saying that the motherboard wasn’t compatible withe the CD. They insisted that the drivers were there and I managed to manually install the drivers.

In addition to the computer, CSS had purchased two cross over cables. I hadn’t much experience with cross overs, but I knew how they worked in principle. In theory, you should be able to just plug two machines together, set the IPs and it should act like a 2 computer network. But everytime I tested them, the machines wouldn’t detect media connected. I was able to jump on to Wikipedia at night to look it up, and I was doing it correctly. I’m not sure what was wrong with the cables though.

I told Sanjay that I could teach him a lot of stuff. But there were some things that even I didn’t know or was unsure of.

Meanwhile, the girls wrapped up compiling the stories they had collected from the villages. They were eager to get it done before we left so they could get it to Hamadri. He would take what they had gathered and flesh out the stories a bit more.

The computers that CSS had couldn’t read USB drives, so if we wanted to move anything, we would have to put the files on CD.

Michelle’s machine didn’t seem to have burning software on it. I knew that WinXP was able to write CDs straight from Windows Explorer, but it kept throwing an error. We dropped the file on a USB drive and tried it on Alice’s machine. But the software she had didn’t support mult-session, so it would complain that the CD was blank. We finally had to use my machine to burn the CD.

We printed a wopping 13 pages. We’re so used to printing everything, even for just proofs, but ink and paper here is pretty expensive. When we showed Hamadri, his eyes almost popped at the quantity that they had gathered. The girls had thought that he wanted all of them, and then he would pick 8 or 10 of them to flesh out. What he meant, was for the girls to pick them out.

Wenhai was working on my machine, wrapping up the Sanjaya’s Excel date conversion. He tried to be funny and changed my background to a picture of him rocking aviators. I promptly changed it back to my default black background.

Dinner
Emmy was pretty tired, but the prospects of internet after dinner kept her up.

Last night, we had went to Penguin Dhaba and saw some mice running around. To alleviate the girls’ fears, we went to Penguin Inn, the nicer of the two places.

We’ve been in Kolkata for awhile now, and fried rice and chowmein was starting to get REAL boring. It was time to try new things. We tried this Thai Noodle, this Manchurian vegetable, tandori roti, shikh kabab, and this cheese and spinach dish.

The Thai noodles weren’t bad. A little spicy, a little sour. The Manchurian Vegetable was odd. The vegetables were like a clump. It didn’t taste bad, but it wasn’t expected to come in this fashion.

The cheese and spinach dish was really odd. Mainly, because it was dry. All we saw, were balls of fried stuff. We thought that it was cheese and spinach, rolled up inside. But when we cut it open, it looked like it was just cheese. It didn’t have much flavor, but the texture of the cheese was kind of odd. A little spongy, not quite like tofu, but similar in consistancy.

Wenhai had ordered a soup, but they brought the wrong one. We should’ve sent it back, but Emmy opted that we keep it anyway. I wasn’t sure who was going to have it. It sat there for awhile, and I decided that if no one was going to eat it, I would.

When the waiter came back, we told them that they had given us the wrong dish. It probably wasn’t a good idea that we had ate the first round of cheese that they brought out. When they brought out the cheese and spinach, we were all really surprised. It was essentially the same thing, a block of cheese, but only covered in this pale green spinach puree. The sauce tasted like spinach, curry, and other spices. Not exactly according to my tastes.

When we got the bill, there was a slight disagreement. Because we had ordered the cheese and spinach, essentially twice, they didn’t know that the first time it was wrong. It was our fault for eating it anyway. We got it sorted and left it.

Emmy commented that this seemed like a date place, because there were a few other couples in the restaraunt. Penguin was definitely a pretty nice restaraunt by Kolkata standards. So it would makes sense that you would bring a girl here. It also had AC, which was big plus.

One of the things that she noticed, was how they sat next to each other. The rest of us said that it was kind of weird, because if you wanted to talk to them, you would have to turn your head. And if you weren’t talking, and looking forward, you’d be staring out into space. I would think, if you were on date, you would want to be sitting across, that way, you could get lost in each other’s eyes. But that’s just me.

We asked if we were going to do any sharing, but Emmy dropped the hammer on that idea. She wasn’t harsh about it, but it was just funny how decisive and quick the response came.

Internet Cafe
So, it was to the internet cafe. I was already pretty up to date with the posts, and I didn’t have any urgent emails to answer, so I passed. The only reason that I went was because Wenhai wanted me to change his name from Day 3.

He didn’t mind what I had written, but he just didn’t want his name to show up in case his coworkers Googled him for dirt. The girls were interested in what this was about, so while we were waiting for a free computer, we pulled the page up on his Blackberry.

I was pretty tired already, and since we had a big day tomorrow, I wanted to get some writing in before turning in. I didn’t know how long it would take to get a machine, and since I only had to change one word, it seemed like a waste to spend all that time waiting. So I logged into NvP and tried to see if I could edit the post from his Blackberry. It was a bit of a struggle, but I managed to make the requisite changes, and we were off.

Tomorrow, we get to visit Hamadri’s church and maybe a little bit of sight seeing in Kolkata proper.

-Penguin

• India: Quick Update (2)
• India: Day 9 - Boom (2)
• India: Day 8 - The Lord’s Day (2)
• India: Day 6 - Back In This (1)
• India: Day 5 - The D Train (1)

Tags: India, Trips

• Missions , Posts by Penguin
• Comments(1)

Penguin August 28th, 2007

90%
After some antibiotics and a good amount of sleep, I’m back at 90%. Still a little tired and weak from lack of food and nutrition, but I’m ready to work again.

I grabbed my moleskin and my pen to journal. Before I could even get through the first sentence, my pen went dry. Fantastic. A writer without a pen. Useless.

Because of the D train, both Wenhai and I had light breakfasts. Bananas, apples, some bread with a little bit of really sweet jam. Not filling, but enough to hold us over.

While we were waiting for the driver to come pick us up, we played a little Rummy 500 and I won, 210 to 70.

Saurees
After dropping us off, the girls went to the market to buy some saurees. They had no idea how to put them on, so they had some one at the office show them.

Saurees consist of three pieces. There’s a blouse that covers the top and a slip to cover the bottom. The actual sauree wraps around the body.

To put the sauree on, first you tuck one end into the slip, and tuck it all the way around, counter-clockwise. Then you leave a good amount of slack before throwing the remaining fabric over your left shoulder. With the slack, you fold about 4-6 pleats, depending on the length of the sauree, and then you tuck this in. Again, with the fabric over your shoulder, you make about 3-5 pleats and then pin it to you shoulder. The entire process is fairly complicated. When they asked how they went to the bathroom, they were told that they had to take it off.

Morning Training
Every morning, we would be training some of the office staff and some of the field officers on how to use Excel. This morning, we had a lot of interested parties, so some of us had two students per computer.

The student I got was pretty computer illiterate. I tried explaining the cells in Excel to him, and that took a good several minutes. When I tried to teach him how to add two cells together, he didn’t know how to enter “+”. This prompted me to try and teach him about the keyboard. If he didn’t even know the basics of typing or using the computer, how could he be expected to learn Excel?

The whole concept of shift was extremely hard to explain when all you can do is point and type domonstrations. Luckily, one of the staff came over and explained the concept to him. As an exercise, I had him type out two paragraphs, not much longer than this one. It took him almost an hour, hunting and pecking the keys.

Finally, I was able to teach him a little bit about the mouse. How to click, right click, and double click. He was okay with the single clicks, but when it came to the double clicks, he kept holding the button a little too long. It seems to be a trend among first time computer users to not fully understand double click. Or at least they have trouble executing it well. He didn’t fully get it, but he made a lot of progress, and I was really proud of him.

After training, Michelle and Alice went to some more villages to take pictures and write down stories for the website. As they gathered more and more material, the site was growing larger. I didn’t know if they had PHP running on their web servers, so the safest route was to make static pages for everything. Hopefully, we’ll still be able to finish everything.

The rest of us tried to figure out what we could do back at the office. Karen suggested that she sit down with Sanjaya to go over the reports. Emmy was confused. She thought, based on the conversation that we had yesterday, that there was no point. It took some time trying to explain how the database, software, and reports were seperate in some ways, and dependant on each other in other ways. I don’t think she fully understood, and it might have been the way that I was explaining it. Without knowing where the disconnect was happening, it was hard to try and rephrase it.

I think part of it comes from our backgrounds. As an accountant, all Emmy cares about is the reports. From her point of view, the reports should dictate the way the software is made. In some sense, this is true, but there’s not much we can do about that now because the software has already been developed. She viewed the reports that needed to be generated as sufficient requirements for software developement. The reports were just a subset of the overall requirements for the software, which were never given to Technosoft.

Trying to feel useful, Karen started looking at some of the reports and the Crystal Reports book that she brought, but without Sanjaya, it would be hard to try and figure out what was working, what wasn’t, and what the report was supposed to be showing. Still she did her best to keep occupied.

Wenhai sat down with Sanjaya to work on some Excel stuff. But they were extremely hampered by the electricity constantly going in and out. Eventually, they were able to burn the file they were working on and move to one of the laptops.

Emmy went outside to with one of the staff to walk around and look at some of the local shops.

There wasn’t much I could do, so I just did my best to occupy my time waiting for lunch. Solitaire, hearts, spider solitaire, typing of the dead, minesweeper, all good distractions. I wish there was something I could do.

Coming to America Early
There had been some talk before we left about leaving India a day early. Emmy, Karen, and I are all on the same flight. Or original departure was going to be Sep 1, 8:30 PM. We weren’t planning on doing any work on Friday anyway, so we thought it might be better to leave a little bit earlier. Emmy had stuff she had to do with her house. And with classes starting, I didn’t want to be too jetlagged.

For the two of us, it’d be pretty easy, because we had direct flights. But Karen had to connect with Continental to get back to Chicago. Being in a third world country, without access to a lot of the information, it would be pretty hard for her get her flight changed.

If we’re going to do this, we’re going to have to do it soon. We only have about a week left.

Something Different for Lunch?
The girls got back pretty late, but they brought food, which made it okay. They had stopped by a new place to get some south Indian food. They had a bag of the sour manto, two bags of sauce, and some rolled fried bread, which seemed to have some veggies in it.

In addition to the southern fair, we got sound chicken clear soup, fried rice, and fried noodles from Penguin. The lunch was one of the lighter ones we’ve had.

Interviews
After lunch, the Michelle and Alice typed up the stories that they had collected so far. Meanwhile, Wenhai went through Sanjaya’s Excel file, converting all the dates so that they were consistant. Some dates were in mm/dd/yyy, others were in dd/mm/yyyy, and there were even some using just yy. Excel doesn’t contain any easy function to detect this, so it was a long tedious process of going through each row and checking them against the data around them.

Karen and I took interviews of the staff. The staff were excited and scared. They weren’t used to speaking so much English, so they were really nervous. They all said that their hearts were beating real fast. Some of them also thought that they were being interviewed so that they could keep their jobs. I think this really affected their answers, because they were all glowingly positive.

Karen got most of the staff that could speak English fairly well. The subjects I had required a fair amount of translation. I couldn’t help but think back to the scene in Lost in Translation where Bob is at the shoot and the director is telling him stuff, and the interpreter reduces it to a few words.

Interviewing was a bit tough. I would ask a question and get an answer that was completely unrelated. I would ask another question. And I would get the same answer. Michelle, Alice, and Emmy had come up with the questions. I think when they were developing them, they didn’t realize that the nuances in the questions may have been lost of them. Afterwards, we were told that they thought we were asking the same question over and over. It would make sense that we were getting the same answers back.

Bengali Children’s Songs
Tomorrow, we’d all be visiting the orphanage, where they would be presenting something to us. There would be villagers from everywhere coming out to see the foreigners.

We didn’t want to just receive, so we had to come up with something that we could present to them. The options we had were, sing a song, do the body worship, or come up with something else.

We were limited, because we didn’t know what would be available to accompany us. We were pretty sure there was no guitar, so singing would have to be acapella. Not that we knew how to sing acapella. If we wanted to do the body worship, we had to figure out a way to play the song. We couldn’t rely on the laptop, because it wouldn’t be loud enough.

God is good and provided a third option. One of the staff was a Christian and said that he would teach us some songs. It turns out, it was the same guy that I had taught how to double click! Small world.

He sang one of the songs, and we were all just lost. We wouldn’t know where to begin to write it down. Hamadri took him down stairs to write it down. We were surprised when they came back with three songs. We looked at each other, unsure whether we’d be able to do it. But we vowed to do our best.

As he sang the songs, we looked at what was written on our papers. We all started searching for pens or pencils to mark up the lyrics. We had to change the romanization to something that we were hearing.

Afraid that we would lose the melody to the songs, we all grabbed our digicams and took video of him singing. There was also one song that had had motions. Luckily they were easy, but still, we wanted to do our best so we got everything on video.

It seemed like an eternity, but we were able to get the songs down to a point where it was good enough. We could continue to practice later.

Singing on the Bus
On the way back, we did our best to practice the three songs. Some were harder than others, and we kept losing the melody. But we did pretty good and I think we were able to sufficiently memorize them.

It must’ve been a sight, to see a van roll by with a bunch of foreigners singing in Bengali. At one point, a truck honked at us, and we joked that it was because of our awful singing.

Now, I can add Bengali to the languages I have successfully butchered.

Dinner, Testimonies
This was the first time that we’ve been able to have dinner together as a whole team. This whole week, Emmy was too tired to come out. And yesterday, I was too sick to come out. It was nice to sit down and fellowship as a team.

Since we had a small lunch, we ended up ordering a lot of food. Alice had a bowl of soup and chocolate ice cream. Which was hilarious because the guy asked if she wanted it together. As in, did she want the ice cream in the soup. I think he was amused by the juxtaposition of the hot soup and the cold ice cream.

During the day and along the car ride back, we all got bit by a ton of mosquitos. Wenhai had brought some White Flower Oil. It’s this Chinese medicine you put on bug bites to stop the itching. I’m not sure how it happened, but Michelle managed to knock the bottle off the table. When it hit the floor, shards from the cap flew everywhere. Luckily, the bottle was still in tact, but the cap was pretty much ineffective.

After dinner, we went around and shared about our testimonies. The trend seemed to be, that even if they went to youth group or grew up in the church, it really wasn’t until college that they found their faith. This is not to say that youth group or a youth program isn’t important in the development of their faith, but goes to show the importance of college in a person’s personal development.

Internet
Then it was off to the internet cafe to connect. While we were waiting, a young man came up to us and started asking a few questions. He asked us what we were doing, so we told him about CSS and microfinance. When I told him that I was a technical consultant, his face lit up and he offered his hand, declaring that he was an engineer too. It was hilarious that we could connect with a total stranger based purely on our career background.

I knew the internet cafe was ghetto. Of the three computers that we had tried so far, only one CD drive worked. The other two failed to read the CD. Even the one that worked, the button was missing and you had to push your finger into the hole to get the tray to eject.

It was nice to spend some time on the thread and pretend I was back in the states. I eventually got in contact with Ninja and we were able to chat over Gchat.

Humidity Kills
We got back to the apartment, and I began to unload some pictures from the CF card to my laptop. After about 30 pictures or so, the CF reader just stopped. The lights went dark and the drive couldn’t be read. I had left the CF reader out on our table, so my guess was that the humidity got to it.

I’m going to have to be more careful with my other electronics. I don’t want my iPod or my NDS to die before I get back to the states.

-Penguin

• India: Quick Update (2)
• India: Day 9 - Boom (2)
• India: Day 8 - The Lord’s Day (2)
• India: Day 7 - The Orphanage (1)
• India: Day 5 - The D Train (1)

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Penguin August 28th, 2007

I didn’t sleep well. The D train woke me up around 2 AM to let some off. I woke up again at 6 for the early commuters. Wenhai and I took turns dropping. It got to the point where I decided it would be a good idea to take some Levaquin. I normally don’t like taking medication, unless I really have to. But since our nutrition was already pretty poor, I didn’t want things to get worse.

Either taking the Levaquin was the best idea or the worst. I already started feeling nautious, so I wasn’t sure how I would be the rest of the day.

When we got to the office, we sat down with Hamadri to try and come up with a plan of action for our remaining time. When we had come, we didn’t expect to work with the new software or the new server.

There had been some question about the need to move to SQL Server in the first place. It turns out that Hamadri’s organization had grown to the point where certain collection points were too far away. It wouldn’t be practical to drive the receipts back for entry. What he wanted, was to create a server and have the these connect remotely to update the server. This poses a new set of problems.

In either case, there was some argument between Emmy and I about what we could and what we should do until Technosoft came on Monday. She was very insistent on documenting the process and sitting with them to see how they did everything. From my perspective, the software was changing, so until we saw it, there wasn’t much we could do.

The move from Access to SQL Server wouldn’t change the underlying data structure, but it would change the way that the software interfaced with the data. The problems that they had would either be fixed, be the same, or new problems would arise.

Because of the uncertainty, it would be difficult to create a concrete plan of action. Instead, my recommendation was to teach them how to check the software for bugs and to report it back to Technosoft.

In the mean time, we could still check the reports against their existing database to see if they were correct, even if the data was not.

After our discussion, I started feeling chills. I was pretty sure I was coming down with a fever. It wasn’t long before I had to lie down and rest.

That was pretty much the rest of my day. Eventually, I got home and went to sleep. The D train really took me for a ride.

-Penguin

• India: Quick Update (2)
• India: Day 9 - Boom (2)
• India: Day 8 - The Lord’s Day (2)
• India: Day 7 - The Orphanage (1)
• India: Day 6 - Back In This (1)

Tags: India, Trips

• Missions , Posts by Penguin
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