Don’t Know What To Expect

Dearest Rachel –

This may be my third time down here in Honduras, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I know what to expect from any given day. There’s a fairly regular weekly schedule (complete with the fact that I tend to be “on” on Wednesdays for my class; not sure why, exactly), and certain activities are de rigeur at some point during the week when you’re here (such as the cultural activities and pila-building), but the individual days aren’t always so predictable.

But we’re not here to sightsee, we’re here to take care of business; quite literally, in my case. The café on campus seems to be having difficulty in reporting its financial activity, which is right up my street. The problem is, while I have details as provided from the leadership back in Chicago (and according to them everything ties out to the bank statements, so it’s reliable), I can’t compare it them to the summary numbers being provided on site. So I need to talk with whoever is handling the transactions down here, to see if I can’t figure out how everything matches between them, and fix where they don’t.

But she isn’t on campus when we arrive, so I’m left cooling my heels for a bit. Or perhaps not, as another member of the business team has the summary for July already. So I send word back home, hoping to get the details for the month from Chicago to compare, and I’m not disappointed, as I get it back within only a few minutes.

Unfortunately, it’s just as disconnected from the local summary as the last few months have been, and it just serves to deepen the mystery. So I have to continue to wait for the young lady in charge of the café to appear, hopefully some time in the early afternoon. In the meantime, I keep running through the calculations, hoping I can come up with some insight as to why the differences exist.

Then again, on a cumulative basis, the totals are fairly close; one could be forgiven for thinking that the bulk of the difference is between the amounts in American dollars and in Honduran lempiras, and the fluctuation between the two throughout the course of the year to date. This line of though is buttressed when Nurian and Luis join me in the office. Luis joined the staff just in June, and keeps details roughly the same as the leadership team in the States has (but in the local currency rather than dollars). And in each of the last two months, there has been something specific that he treated differently than the folks in the States; but once that difference is factored out, everything is sorted out.

Which is something of an oversimplification; it took the three of us no less than an hour (and closer to an hour and a half) to arrive at this conclusion. Between the attempts to converse and translate on top of the search for the transactions that stood out, locating the various sources of this difference and that is something of an ordeal. By the time we’ve gotten June and July explained to our mutual satisfaction, I really don’t want to even try to delve into the relatively niggling discrepancies that seem to exist in previous months – especially since, these being prior to Luis’ arrival on staff, there might not even be data of a sufficiently granular level to compare to the material I have from the States. I have to conclude that the cumulative numbers are close enough to pass for now, and hope for the best.

Even so, it’s weird to spend so much time in the office; while it’s literally enough to give me a headache to figure out (thank heavens for ibuprofen and those who know where it can be found here!), it feels like I haven’t spent any time actually doing much.

***

Toward that end, Just One is hosting an outreach involving the men of the community. The idea is that this is meant to serve as a small-scale version of the Man Camp weekends hosted in mid-autumn at camp (which have exploded in popularity, along with what they call ‘Girls’ Getaway,’ since your departure). Now, I’ve never bothered to go to Man Camp, myself – between the fact that I’m not into camping in general, and the associations I have with the place, I’m just as happy to leave my slot at any of these to another who would be more eager to be there – so I don’t know what to expect here, either. It does involve socializing, which is my weak spot – again, like with the office work, I think I’d almost rather be building pilas.

I will say that, as outreaches go, there does seem to be a number of fellows who are in less need of the gospel than some of us who came down to serve here. I meet one older man (although now that I think about it, he’s probably a decade or more younger than me; life’s just that hard here) who has fostered (or perhaps adopted) several orphans over the course of his life, and another who offers his blessing to our being here; “God will reward you for all that you do here,” he tells me, and I find myself internally reacting much as I did to Dad’s assertion these several years ago. I appreciate what he’s saying, and his evident gratitude, but it feels like even so much as acknowledging this possibility would negate it from coming to pass. You can’t expect a reward from God; that would suggest that you thought you’d earned it.

That said, from my (still relatively distant) vantage point, it seems like things went well. This may have been a first time, but it will probably not be the last. The only thing in question is if it will happen once a year or twice, since we have teams arriving in January and February as well as July and August. Of course, that’s not my call, and for that matter, we’ve dispensed with programs in the past that have been well-attended, because they didn’t achieve the real goal of reaching souls, so I’ve no idea. I’m sort of glad that decisions like that aren’t up to me.

But with that having been said, honey, I’d ask that you keep an eye on those who do make such decisions, and wish for them wisdom. They’re going to need it, every bit as much as I do.