Yesterday we (the tech team) stayed at the hotel and tested all the remainder of the computers. Of course, this required moving all of them from D. & M.’s room to the Bruncas room (what kind of name is that for a room anyway?) which was a lot of heavy lifting even with the baggage carts to move them. In the end we got them all tested and the room cleaned back up, but not until an hour after “lights out” time.
But in all that testing, we were having fun. All the really broken equipment got named with funny names in sharpies so we wouldn’t accidentally mix up one of the items from the “irrecoverable damage pile” with the “good pile”. And then we were dragging around all the broken monitors by their “tail”–“walking the dog”–we explained to Ceasar, the staff-person from the hotel setting up for breakfast, in Spanglish that the monitor was a dog and then he was laughing with us.
The tech team is a little “different” than the other groups. We don’t tend to follow along with the other groups as closely–we have a little more freedom, being a small group–like we went out for lunch yesterday again (the other groups had only PB&J for lunch), and to the market a couple times during ministry time and me and Leslie went for a swim till we got kicked out of the pool because it was raining too hard–but when we’re there finishing and then cleaning up till 11:30 after having been up at 6:30 in the morning, you don’t feel an unfairness about it–we just get our free time distributed differently and are doing work a lot of people don’t want to be doing.
Yesterday we had our first real rainstorm that was more than a drizzle. We also had power-outtages in the Market when we were there, and the rest of the day in that building when we went back for dinner. Not that I was entierly sorry when that meant we got switched from eating at the downstairs restaurant to the upstairs one that has more menu choices (ie. fish or vegetarian instead of just chicken or beef) and required eating in shifts so we ate later and it was pretty much just the tech team hanging out because naturally, D. the trip coordinator made us the last group–she knows computer people are by nature night owls and woudln’t mind having the last dinner compared to say, the construction team that is famished.
So, even at the meals we were having time to get to know the other geeks better–and not only are they computer geeks–but computer geeks who are Christians and computer geeks who go on missions trips. Way cool. And I still think its weird (but cool) that half of the tech team is from San Diego so their comparisons of San Jose Costa Rica to TJ and Fudruckers and other such local San Diegian things are understood.
Even though we are doing a lot of work, I really feel like I’m on vacation on this trip, and feel thankful for that.