My time in Colombia is drawing to a close. Almost all of our group have flown home now. I leave today and the last two people leave tomorrow. As always, I'd value your prayers for protection on my health and on my luggage as I make the long trip (24 hours) from Bucaramanga to Bogotá, then on to Madrid and finally back to Málaga.
The photo above shows our KKI international leadership team and some of our Colombian hosts on a day when many in our group were able to do some parasailing above the city of Bucaramanga. It's a sport that's very cheap here, compared to European prices, and so several of our people were glad to be able to take advantage of this opportunity. Although it looked like a lot of fun, I decided it probably wasn't wise (because of my lung weakness) for me to be up there, sky high, flying through the cold wind. Instead, I added an extra day to my stay here, so that I could make an afternoon trip to the famous Chicamocha canyon, where a 30-minute cable car ride takes you down the valley, across the river, and up the other side to a small park with a monument and a museum to the indigenous tribes of this region. They also sell the famous edible ants and Colombian coffee that this place is famous for.
In just a couple of hours, I'll be heading to the airport, and I'll be home in Spain by the weekend. A particularly "urgent" prayer request at the moment is that, since I arrived in Colombia, there has been a problem with my computer. I've been unable to open any documents or applications, because everything is unresponsive. It seems to be some sort of corruption on the start-up disk, and I've been unable to repair it in a way that makes my computer functional again. (It might simply be that the laptop is getting old and needs to be replaced with a newer model. Sadly, these things don't last forever.)
This is rather a stressful situation to find myself in, as it means that I'm unable to open any of the documents I've worked on over the past three months: manuals and handbooks that need to be printed for the LDC, curriculum I've been writing for summer outreach, my teachings in Spanish for next week's coaching workshop, and all the powerpoint presentations for the teachings I've prepared for this year's leadership development course. (Of course, I do have all of these things on a back up disk, but if it turns out that my computer can't be resurrected and I need to buy a new one, it'll mean that I'm not able to open all those old documents on a computer that has much newer software.)
Could I ask you to join me in praying for a solution? Perhaps the computer can be saved/ repaired and all the documents with it. But if not, it would be wonderful to have some sort of temporary "resurrection" or some way of getting all those documents (the work of the past ten years) into a format that can be accessed and worked on again in the future. Time is short, as I'm supposed to be teaching in a retreat next week with a leadership team from Sweden, then the Spanish coaching workshop, and shortly after that we go right into this year's LDC.
I don't know the answer; I don't know what's possible, but I'm praying there will be some kind of solution that won't mean the loss of so many resources and other documents. I've been aware that the computer is showing its age, and I already have the money to replace it; it's more the contents of the computer that I'm concerned about losing.
But for now, I'm packing my suitcase and getting ready to leave Colombia very soon. Thank you for your partnership in prayer during this South American missions adventure.
