Missionary Gas

Three weeks ago we suffered the modern missionary's nightmare: a bust computer. Yes, okay, I know the apostles and Augustine managed pretty well without such things, but... I headed for Monterrey, a commercial centre that was a money laundering focal point for drug barons not too long ago. It's now pretty legal and consists of about 80 computer shops. I chose a respectable looking establishment, told the technician what I wanted including proper software. "We only provide illegal copies" he said, and explained the reason: "The police don't investigate home computers". I then remembered my computing experiences in Moyobamba near the Peruvian selva, where houses, that just about had electricity, could have the most expensive of software. And yesterday's paper reported that the majority of computers in Colombia run with pirated programs. I don't have the heart to enquire where some of my students get their expensive software from. But it motivated m...

Yesterday I met three different students. One cried, one apologized and one folded my baguette in half. The one who cried was 30 years old and had just been told he'd badly failed. But he didn't cry because he failed, it was because of the reason. Three pressures demanded his attention: seminary studies, the pastoral work of his church and his two young children. And his life was starting to fall apart. The second student has a moustache and normally looks as if he's in the dentist's Waiting Room. He apologized to me for having to miss our next class. He was being sent by his denomination to a part of Colombia where a new guerrilla group was threatening local pastors. Documents had to be prepared to seek their defense. In Colombia you don't pack your own shopping, usually a helper does it for you and then carries it to your car or taxi with the anticipation of a tip. The third person was one of these as well as being an electrical engineering student. He was a short...

Christians from the USA must be the most generous donors in the world. Even in small ways we experience their kindness. BibleWorks Software in the US produce a book-sized laminated sheet of regular Greek and Hebrew verbs as a crib for students. At the end of last year Jim Barr kindly sent me a package of them and it was marked as being of $2 in value. - They arrived at the beginning of January in Bogotá. But this attracted the attention of Customs Officials who charged an import duty of $1 and sent me a bill. - As we didn't spend $300 to fly down to Bogotá to collect them immediately, the Customs fined us an extra $1 for storage. - Olwen went to pay the money in the bank but after a long wait the cashier said she didn't know how to fill in the form. - The next day I put on my Indiana Jones hat and went to another bank whose cashier filled out the form and the money was paid. - We phoned Bogotá again who said they would be sent to Medellín, but after 6 weeks they hadn´t arrived....

Colombia's best known international figure lives in an unknown place in the jungle. She hasn't been seen for six years, and reports say she's lost her appetite, has hepatitis B, a tropical skin disease and is dying. So famous is she that when there was possibly more news about her whereabouts, the unprecedented occured, and radio's football comment hour was cancelled. Ingrid Betancourt was born in Bogotá on Christmas Day, 1961, but grew up in Paris. In 1989 as the violence in Colombia heightened, she decided to return to her country and make a difference. The daughter of an ex-Miss Colombia and having a missionary zeal she became the most popularly elected Senator in 1998. She had founded the Green Oxygen party and her first notable achievement was the distribution of condoms, and the second was to say that she was going to be like a condom against corruption. Radical stuff in a corrupt and Catholic society. By 2002 she had become a presidential candidate. But then it a...