What time is it? It’s summertime! It’s about time for Ice and Spice, the annual summer camp for high school students here in Tirana! My friends and I have been helping with this camp since the first time I came to Tirana, way back in 2013. A lot has changed since then! Albania Fried Chicken went out of business, but there’s now a legit KFC at the mall (Albania has only one mall). ...
It’s always great to go home. I’ve had multiple definitions of “home” over the years, but right now the place I most identify as “home” is Dallas. Having just spent 5 weeks there, I can totally confirm that is still the case. Since I’ve committed to a second year here, I felt the need to go home and ask my supporters to commit to a second year with me. This was the perfect time to do it, since my cousin was getting married on June 4. The only other opportunity I might have would be in August, and who really wants to go to Dallas in August? ...
This is my happy place Lake Lyndon B. Johnson, about 45 minutes west of Austin. A beautiful constant-level freshwater lake. My grandmother has owned a lakehouse here for more than 30 years. My family and I vacationed here almost every summer. If there were no Good News to preach, I would as much as possible spend my time here. Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain. ...
We’re moving into the spring now, and as I’m preparing to go back to Dallas for a 1 month fundraising trip, I thought I’d reflect on where we are after 6 months. Towards the Goal We have a growing number of contacts now, young professional believers who have been joining us for seminars and other activities. We’ve had a couple of vision casting meetings with them too. Word is beginning to get around that this is a place to continue what they were doing with student ministries. Most of our volunteers were formerly part of Jete Studentore (CRU’s campus ministry), which is a very good thing. ...
We got to see a really cool musical event this week! A big group of high school students from Colorado came to perform their evangelistic musical, “SHIFT”. CRU’s high school and college ministries invited a lot of students from all around Tirana. I even saw the Elbasan kids show up. Our young professionals all went and sat together near the front. It was pretty awesome to see how many people showed up! ...
I’ve posted a lot about the good times recently on this blog, but I thought with this post I’d let y’all in on the tough parts. Like any job it’s got ups and downs. Sometimes you work real hard for what seems like minimal gain. Sometimes you have all these cool plans and they get interrupted by something out of your control. Especially when your job is people. This past week was tough for me. It started out good, I had a couple good coffees and we planned our social meeting on Wednesday. Tuesday evening we had a bible study, and that was enjoyable. I’m feeling some progress on Albanian, but it’s still tough to understand native speakers. Wednesday we had our social meeting, and we had a bunch of people come, but the two people I specifically invited did not come. So that was a bit disappointing. ...
I’ve been on a serious docker/aws kick recently. I’ve learned just enough that it drives me to play with it. I spent a lot of my free time on it this week, and didn’t spend as much as I’d like on learning Albanian… This could be a problem… Anyways I might as well post more about what I’ve learned. I’ve been wanting to make my web server more robust, to where if it dies for whatever reason I don’t have to do anything, it’ll come back on a new instance all on its own. Unfortunately that’s a bit more difficult than you’d expect. Lots of moving parts. ...
I had some time off today so I decided to revisit how I’m hosting all my stuff. One of my issues with using Amazon’s container service is that they make you assign resource values to each container, and those are not flexible. So, I have to give each container high enough memory that it won’t die, but then I run out of space on my server real quick. Since most of the stuff I want to host just sits idle the majority of the time, this wasn’t ideal for me. ...
This past week I went to the STINT Mid-Year conference in Málaga, Spain. It was a lot of fun to hang out with a bunch of Americans! I didn’t know anyone when I got there, but by the end I had made several friends. The beachfront was beautiful, especially the late sunrise over the Mediterranean. I was excited to play a bunch of Ultimate Frisbee, since I hadn’t played for several months. ...
Here’s another technical post for y’all! I had some time this past weekend, so I took a look into the website I made a year ago for Reclaimed. The old version was made with Locomotive CMS, and hosted on Locomotive hosting. It was a good choice at the time, because we needed something fast. We wanted to deploy it before the 2015 super bowl. I’d previously looked into moving it to Wordpress or Drupal, but that would basically require redoing the whole site. More work than I’m willing to put in. But, just this past weekend, Locomotive v3 came out. I decided to try hosting it myself, because $20/mo is just a bit too much to be paying for a simple website like this. Plus, it would be fun! (or so I thought.) ...