Daniel’s Recent Dabblings

Mission work is by its nature often varied. When your job description is assisting your parents, it can be even more varied than average.
Yesterday, submitted my application for another two year work permit here. Meanwhile, dad got the new vehicle registered, road-worthied, etc…
My main jobs here are in order of importance not frequency, Bible school teacher, book publisher/printer, electrician, computer technician, building assistant and cook/message taker. Most weeks I don’t leave the compound except on Saturdays and Sundays, I spend my time studying, supervising workers, preparing lunch, holding down the fort while writing blogs like this one.
My current main project is to reprint one of the courses we use in our Bible School, “The Journey of Israel.” This was the first book we printed when we set up the bible school in 2001. At that time, we didn’t have a CD burner, so it was backed up on floppy disks using Mwbackup, which came standard with Windows 98 (we actually got a CD burner not too long after doing this book, so it appears to be the only book we don’t have backed up on CDs). Of course our machines are now using XP, which has a backup that is incompatible with mwbackup. So how do I get the files unpacked so I can fix the 10-15 spelling mistakes and typos we have in the book? Well first I resurrected a derelict Pentium1 that has been out of use for good reason for a couple of years, got Windows 98 installed, had hardware problems, managed to persevere (this all took the better part of a morning, including periodic power outages which we experience around here). Discovered the old dinosaur had a serious problem with its floppy drive, which prevented it from reading any floppies. I then moved the hard drive to another computer so I could boot in 98 and hope for the best. That sorted out all the hardware problems, and I would have been all set if the floppies that had the backup on it were actually still good. Malawi is for electronics what Outer Mongolia was for Roman soldiers and the Eastern front was for Germans… Between the humidity, temperature fluctuations and dust (obscene amounts of dust), the floppies were no longer working. We still have the hard copy masters that we used to run the book last time, so I took those retyped paragraphs in Word, printed them out and then used scissors, glue and typex to get them onto the masters. Since the leading and paragraph lengths are slightly different, it is not a perfect fit. Some small corrections I ignored, because my fix, would be worse than the mistake it is fixing. The others are okay. It goes against all my DTP training to do this (my parents didn’t notice the difference until I showed them), and kind of stuck in my craw, but I’ve had some water and I think I’ve washed it down now . Tomorrow having given plenty of time for the typex and glue to dry I will run the book.
Now is one of the best times of year to run the book, because with the colder ambient temperature, the rubber roller that does the paper feeding on the Risograph doesn’t jam as much. Jamming results in half printed pages, and much frustration for the person operating the machine, punctuated by heart-felt cries for divine assistance and patience to get through it all.
So if anyone reading this was ever wondering I wonder what sort of challenges missionaries face, maybe you’ll have a little better idea now.