Seing God at Work

I think I shared with many of you that I've wanted for some time to go on a missions trip overseas, but I felt that I couldn't justify the expense. I don't mean to denigrate short term missions trips, and I'm sure they do serve the local church well (when they're done properly), but for a pretty long time they just haven't really grabbed me.  As much as I'd like to be changed by the experience, and as much as I want to encourage the community of believers, I've also wanted very strongly to serve, and to serve in a way that a local national could not.  And my impression has been that - at least in my case - it would probably do more good for the money it would cost to send me on a short-term trip to end up in the hands of people who are already on the ground, rather than to get me there for such a short time.  With such a mindset, I couldn't ask people to support me.

Well, when I was considering going with eMi, the thought occurred to me that here was a trip for which I could probably justify the expense.  This was not only because it just seemed to fit so well with what God has been doing in my life, but also because I would be using some pretty unique skills, that could maybe justify my $1,500 plane ticket from the States.  In some sense, I've been worried that this is a dangerous way to feel.  It's like..."Here I am and God is going to use me to do awesome things!"  Who am I to say that?

But over the past few weeks, I've actually seen God using my skills in very specific ways to meet needs in the eMi Uganda office - and not necessarily the skills that I expected to be using.  Sure, I've been using my training as an engineer to think about water and wastewater systems, but a lot of that has been stuff that I'm learning on the job (there's been a ton of learning, and I love it).  But I've also been using a lot of the skills that I picked up from graduate school, of all places!  For one, I've been put in charge of editing the report for my project, which includes putting together sections from all of the volunteers on the team.  I think a couple years ago this would have sounded dullsville, but it comes pretty naturally after writing my Masters thesis - and I actually kind of enjoy it (especially when I'm editing other peoples' writing rather than my own.  This is going to be a super impressive document, and I only have to write 1/10th of it!) At one point, I asked the project leader whether or not we were using the Oxford Comma, and he said "Wow, just the fact that you asked that question means that you're the right person for this job."

But also, some weeks ago I was talking with my supervisor, and he told me that because this project was so large, and at such an early stage, it was very research-intensive, and that it was very well-suited to my skillset.  That was really cool to hear!  I've even been able to use some of my chemical engineering background while researching possibilities for iron treatment on-site.

Finally, I've had extra time, so recently I was given a new assignment: to work on the draft of the civil engineering design guide.  We have one professional civil engineer on staff, and this has been on her plate for almost five years, and she's leaving at the end of the term.  So she really wants to get it done, but she's also swamped with work.  And most of the outstanding things are straight up research assignments - again, my forte after three and a half years in graduate school.  I spent a couple of hours looking for rainfall data one Thursday, and found a pretty neat dataset that might make finding precipitation data easier for anywhere in the world - she was really excited when she saw it.

So.  Once again, it seems like God is taking my questionable career choices (in this case, going straight through graduate school instead of stopping to get some experience, until now) and using them to fine-tune me for a role He wants me to play.  And all I can say to that is...well, it certainly wasn't my idea for this to happen.  God set this up, not me.  So I can be grateful that He is using me, even when it feels like I'm just kind of stumbling along.

But that's not all, because this goes both ways.  Being at eMi has really blessed me - both professionally and personally.  Seeing the examples of the North American staff here - whether they're here long-term or just for a year - has given me new insight into what it means to be a missionary.  Seeing the examples of the project trip volunteers, who were only here for two weeks, has given me new insight into what it means to be a professing Christian while also a Stateside professional engineer (when I go back through our project archives, I keep finding some of these people!).  Seeing the examples of our local staff has given me hope for diverse partnerships in the Body of Christ.  And all of them are wonderful role models for Christian living.  Also, I've by and large enjoyed the work I've been doing - while still getting distracted by interesting research problems - and still recognizing that it's work, and it can't save me.  So I'm learning about my own temperament and inclinations in different areas of work as well.

I don't know what's going to happen after this term, but right now it feels like God has brought eMi and me together very purposely at this time, in this place, and given us very complementary needs and gifts.  And that's a really cool thing to see.



Some pictures to make this post more visually appealing:

A candid view of my desk.  I took this one spontaneously because I was looking at some building details when my mentor asked me to look up electricity prices in Burundi, and I just felt like an engineer, you know?

This is the view out of my office window.  Actually, it's out of my window - my mentor, with whom I share an office, has his own window, too.  I am living the dream!

A Slice of Work

Hi, friends!

I've gotten some requests to talk about the engineering work I'm doing while I'm here - which sounds perfectly reasonable to me.  I've been trying to distil all my responsibilities, and to be honest with you, it just doesn't make for exciting reading.  So instead, I will take you through some of the stuff I did today.

Our workday starts at 8.  After turning on my computer, and talking with Phil (my officemate and mentor) while my computer starts up, I check my e-mail and organize my to-do list.

At 8:30 we have an office devotion. Everyone in the office gathers in our central meeting room, and depending on the day, it might be a Bible study (we're about to embark on the book of Ezra), a description from three staff members of what they do, a discussion that the leadership wants to have with everyone (today, we reviewed the last quarterly update to come out of the global office) or, on Fridays, a worship service with MAF,* with whom we share our office. Wednesdays we pair up and pray with each other.

Today, I spent a good part of my morning finishing up the second draft of the report for my project. All of our volunteers have written sections relating to their areas of expertise, and to what they did on the project trip two months ago, and I have been compiling them into one document, editing, asking questions, and adding appendices.  My graduate education is actually very useful for this part of my work!  So I think I was adding sections about well siting and turfgrass this morning.

One of the most critical things to come out of the report is a land-use plan for the campus:

This is how we are envisioning the 332 acres of land that Hope Alive! owns.  (Actually, it's one option - we have another one in the works, which has more concentrated development).  For scale, the property is probably about 1.5km from the top-left to the bottom-right (or, it's more than three times the size of the UR River Campus).  All credit to this goes to the architects and the agricultural team :)

One of my primary roles as regards this plan has been siting the boreholes that will provide water to the campus.  This is an important thing to consider early on, because they cannot be very close to each other, or to the property boundary, or to any wastewater sources. I made a picture with a 50m buffer around the property boundary and any buildings I thought might generate wastewater, and used it to site the five boreholes we estimate that we will need. However, I got the scale wrong, and my picture ended up being very restrictive.  Today, I finally fixed the scale and was able to re-site my boreholes.

This was actually super exciting for me, because I got to move one of the boreholes to a much higher location.  We want to put storage at each well location, for security reasons, and we also want to tie all of the storage tanks together so that the entire site is serviced by one connected water main.  There are some good reasons to do this, such as better water quality (the water is less likely to sit stagnant in the pipes) and more redundancy if one pump fails.  However, it means that all of the tanks have to be at the same elevation.  Therefore, boreholes at low elevations require super-tall tank stands, which are expensive.  Today's exercise allowed me to reduce the tallest stand from 11 meters to 8.5 meters (I asked Phil, a structural engineer, if an 11 meter stand was okay, and he laughed at me).

To actually figure out how tall the stands need to be, though, you have to model the distribution system.  We have a neat program called EPAnet 2 that lets you sketch out the proposed system, with tanks, pumps, pipes, junctions, and demand nodes.  You can then simulate the flow of water through the system.  Since we have a gravity-fed system (no pressurizing pumps), we are particularly concerned that each building has sufficient pressure to operate at peak demand.  Therefore, I had to change the elevation of my tanks until they were high enough to provide good pressure everywhere in the system under the worst-case scenario.  That's what's displayed in the picture below:

Here the blue rectangles are reservoirs that represent my boreholes and tanks, and the multicolored dots are demand nodes at different pressures.  The pipe colors depend on the velocity of water going through them.

One of the other people from the project team wanted to look at the model and make some suggestions (she has much more experience with this than I do), so I spent some time this evening wading through my models and making sure I had given her the right ones.

Also today, I spent some mentoring time with Phil. We're allowed to count up to 2 hours per week of this toward our work requirement - eMi holds discipleship as one of its core goals, and this is one very tangible way they back it up.  Afterwards, I met with our staff civil engineer to talk about the eMi East Africa Civil Engineering Design Guide, which I am doing some work on.  We talked about precipitation data, wetlands, and water law, among other things.  Finally, I went back through the architectural program (read: the list of all the rooms in all the buildings that we're planning for on the site) and updated my water demand calculations.  This was primarily because I allocated water for building cleaning based on floor space, but hadn't updated it to the most recent numbers.  (No picture for this - it was all excel spreadsheets).

There you have it!  To be honest, this was a kind of exciting day for me - I spent yesterday entirely on the report.  But that's the way work is, even here at eMi - there are some exciting days and some less-exciting ones.  But by and large I am very happy with the work that I get to participate in here - both in terms of what I do, and in terms of what it's for.  God has certainly blessed me in my professional life here.


*http://www.mafint.org/

Excuses

So...I apologize that it's been so long since I've posted! Live has been wonderfully busy here - but that's no reason to neglect you, friends. There's a ton to say - and you're certainly not going to get all of it - but I figured I would catch you up by giving excuses for why I haven't been able to put together a post for the last two weeks.

...however, I'm realizing now just how long this post is getting, so you're going to get one week of excuses, and maybe you'll get another one later - if I decide it's not too boring.  Let me know your thoughts.

Also, I realized that I never introduced the other interns to you.  Because it's gonna be awkward if I don't refer to people by name, here's a picture of us:

 From left to right: Me (you know me, probably), Shivan (Uganda), Andrea (Ontario, Canada), Siima (Uganda), Tyler (Oregon), and Pesh (short for Patience; Uganda)

Got it?  Okay, so, starting on Saturday, March 5th, I couldn't write a blog post because...

Saturday - I went to the beach with Tyler, Shivan, Andrea, and Joel - I know I'm immediately introducing a person you don't know, but Joel was part of a visiting Canadian survey duo that stopped by for two weeks after working in Kenya for a month.  He and Ben (who will show up later) were both here with eMi last year, and they had decided to take 6 weeks off of their respective jobs and do a bunch of survey work for us.  Pretty cool that they got to take 6 weeks off, though they agreed that working largely fieldwork-related positions in Canada during the winter probably helped make that possible.  Also pretty cool that they spent those 6 weeks doing more work.

We didn't swim in the lake (I looked, and the water was waaay too green for this algal bloom researcher to consider), but they had a pool, and there were some pretty picturesque palm trees nearby.  I brought a copy of Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology because I was asked to lead one of our morning devotionals at work.  We've been going through the eMi* statement of faith, which is based off of the Lausanne Covenant, and the section they gave me was:

"We believe in the deity of our Lord Jesus Christ, in His virgin birth, in His sinless life, in His miracles, in His vicarious and atoning death through His shed blood. We believe in His bodily resurrection, in His ascension to the right hand of the Father, and in His imminent and personal return in power and glory. (John 3:16; I Corinthians 15:3-4; I Peter 2:18-24)"

So I don't know about you, but I counted at least eight statements of belief in those two sentences.  Fortunately, Phil had done the previous statement about the Trinity, so I didn't need to handle "the deity of our Lord Jesus Christ," and I was free to focus on the other seven.  So I sat next to the pool and read about the Atonement.  Preparing for this took up pretty much all of the next day, too.

I don't have pictures of the beach because, unknown to us, they had a no camera policy - we narrowly avoided having our cameras confiscated when we entered.  However, here's a nice picture of Lake Victoria from the week before:

No lie, this lake is a significant part of why I chose to apply for this office.

Sunday - after going to a local church, I worked on the next day's devotion (see above).  Other than a brief walk and an even briefer run shortly before dark, that is all.

Monday - Mondays are Intern Bible Study days!  This term, we basically come up with difficult questions that we wanted to talk about.  The idea is that a person takes one related set of questions, and spends a week on them.  The next week, we discuss a Bible character related to the questions.  The result is that every single one of our studies is challenging - and wonderful.  This week was the character study associated with the question "What is Hell?"  So we talked about Satan.  And demons.  You know, normal Bible study stuff.  We actually had a really good discussion about our different cultural viewpoints of demons. As I come from a Pentecostal background but currently attend a fairly Reformed church, I'm already straddling cultures with this topic, and it was great to see it with another few pairs of eyes.

Tuesday - This Tuesday was International Women's Day, which is a national holiday in Uganda.  All of us interns still reported to work, but afterward I figured I'd cook something for the lady interns, so the day was occupied by shopping and by cooking.  They requested soup, so I made one of the two soups I've ever made by myself - a version of Zuppa Toscana from the BudgetBytes website that Suzy put me on to last semester.  It went pretty well, even though there were some pretty serious delays that resulted in a 9:30 PM dinner.  I got to use collard greens that were growing right in our compound - freshest greens I've ever had!

Wednesday - So there's a cultural institution in Uganda known as the "Pork Joint."  I had observed instances of this institution before, but the previous week Ben and Joel mentioned that Hope, a Ugandan national who works HR in the office, is a huge fan.  Apparently they convinced her to seek out a local pork joint (the office moved in August, so even the long-timers are still getting their bearings).  Anyway, today Tyler, Joel, Ben, Hope, Hattie (another Ugandan who works with eMi as an architect) and I tried out a pork joint in Entebbe.  It was basically an awning under which a couple of guys were roasting skewers of pork over an open fire, and it was delicious.  We had some great conversation.  I got a little lost on my way there, and on the way back I found myself in the fullest matatu I've ever been in.  Matatus are minibuses with the maximum possible number of seats, given the Pauli Exclusion Principal, and they constantly ply the main roads for customers.  I would venture a guess that this one was carrying 19 people, which is a stretch even for them, but it was late and we didn't want to separate on our way home.  Overall, it was a wonderful adventure.

Thursday:  All I know about this evening is that my journal entry cuts off before I was finished.  I think I was probably working a little late, trying to finish a paper based off of my Masters Thesis, and then I got called over for our Intern Safari Meeting, which happens on Thursdays.  We get one day off per month, and we can bank them, so the tradition is to take several of them and go on a long trip somewhere in Uganda.  We're planning on visiting the Western and Southern parts of the country at the beginning of May.  There's lots to plan for, and we're being kept to task.  This meeting went pretty late, actually - I think it started around 7 and finished around 9:30 - but we got most of our itinerary planned out, so it was very productive.  You'll hear more about this later, I'm sure.

Friday: Friday is officially movie night at the intern compound, but we haven't held to this schedule in about a month.  This Friday, we were invited to dinner with staff family from North America (most recently from Colorado, I believe; also, I tried to spell their name and then gave up.  Sorry.)  John works in HR - for us and for the eMi global office - and his wife Janelle does many things, among which are homeschooling their four children and volunteering with local ministries.  First off, I want to say that their house has a spectacular view - I wanted to spend all my time there on their porch:

Second, they were awesome.  It's been really cool to visit the missionary families here and see how they live, how they raise their kids, what kinds of books they read (their libraries have been so impressive!), and how they ended up where they are (namely, in Uganda).  Stories about this last one have varied considerably: this particular family has been in missions for a long time, just not always with eMi in Uganda; by contrast, the Vanderfords seemed quite happy living in Flordia where Scot was a residential architect until God called them here - they arrived this past summer and are leaving shortly after we are, and are no less interesting or hospitable (in fact, our last true movie night happened at their place).

We rounded out the evening by playing games - I took notes on how to raise kids to be board game geeks.  The finale was an 8-person game of Dominion, which I would have anticipated being a disaster but ended up being very engaging.  All in all, a super fun night, but not one conducive to writing on blogs.

So.  There you have it.  You'll have to take my word for it that similar things happened last week.  Life here is very full, in very good ways - I feel very blessed to be here.  Thank you for your prayers and your support!

Speaking of life being full, it's past time for bed, so I'll close out now.  Hopefully, it won't be another month before you hear from me again!

-David Wit




*This is the proper capitalization. I'll use it when I feel like it.