I had one of those moments this afternoon when I asked, “What are we even doing here?!” I’m afraid our nice stretch of “easy living” came to an abrupt halt today.

I drove up to the transmitter site this afternoon to investigate a problem on the AM and our part time guard met me on the road before I got all the way up there. He had lost my and Peter’s phone numbers and was sure eager to tell me something. His Spanish isn’t as easy to understand as Romel’s. Even so, I knew there was a problem, so we drove on up the rest of the way together.

Entry Point

First, he took me around to the back side of the compound where the razor wire was hanging down the wall. Someone got up there and cut it, which is pretty hard to do. Juan said he discovered it when he walked his circuit Thursday morning but didn’t know how to reach us. He had not tried climbing over the wall to investigate, so neither of us knew what we would find inside. I still figured everything was OK inside. The FM was on the air and sounded good. The AM was off but I was assuming a simple malfunction. When I unlocked the titanium padlock on the gates, I saw our catastrophe.

Demolished door

Whoever got over the wall had a sledge hammer or something. They just demolished our heavy duty security door on the transmitter building and it was standing open with parts laying on the ground. Juan was not around when it happened. We assume it was Wednesday night. Juan had been working full time for the cell company that owns the towers across the road but, since they haven’t paid him in three months, he wasn’t working there anymore. That meant he had to come from his house several times a day or night to our transmitter site to check on things. The guard who actually was across the road said he did not hear anything. That’s impossible unless he’s deaf. Someone beat on that door very hard for a very long time to inflict that damage.

Fixing razor wire bare handed. Yikes!

Inside, the place was pretty much ransacked. The first thing I saw was a big box on the floor that was supposed to have extra antenna cable in it. It was empty. My nice complete set of screwdrivers was gone. The video monitor for the AM computer had been shoved way out of place and all the cables were tangled up, but everything was still there for that system. The only things wrong were that the monitor only displayed one color and there was no audio from the computer or the control console. I didn’t know yet which was the problem. I had called Peter and when he arrived, he investigated that while I patched the breach in the razor wire. Not fun when you don’t have gloves with you! Peter found that the power cord to the control console was partly unplugged, so that got the AM back on the air. We’ll figure out the monitor later.

Gotta get a new door ASAP!

Then we started making short term plans. We got the door so it would close most of the way and not swing in the breeze. Juan said he would sleep there inside the compound tonight. Peter and I stopped on the way home and ordered 210 feet of 5/8″ rebar. I’ll use that to make the heaviest duty screen doors you ever saw for both buildings there. We’ll have to see if we can order a new security door tomorrow or Monday. Then we need to brainstorm ways to make the place even harder to get into.

All in all, even though this is a huge hit to the radio station finances and intensely discouraging for a while, I’m curious about one thing. Once they were in, they had all night to throw stuff over the wall with no one to stop them. So why did they leave? Clearly that was a God thing, but what did He do? Something else to try to remember to ask Him when I get to heaven. In the meantime, I’ll be doing lots of measuring, drilling, cutting, welding, painting and stuff like that. Peter said he can help much of the time, so that will definitely speed things up.

I don’t think I’ll write much today. It’s our anniversary. We went to Gio’s for lunch. If you’re not familiar with them (and you probably are not, since they are local), they are arguably the most high falutin’ eatery on the island. We’ve eaten a couple times at their restaurant up in French Harbor. They recently added a new location, just a mile down the road in Flowers Bay. So Mildred and I walked down there and spent a pile of money on a really special dining experience. I wish I could share the flavors. The best I can do is share some pictures. As usual, I’ve tossed in our HRGS Audio Update at the bottom of the post.

[Show as slideshow]

Vacation! That starts with “V!” And that rhymes with “C.” And that stands for “catastrophe!!” (My apologies to Meredith Willson, Franklin Lacey, Marion Hargrove, and everyone else involved in The Music Man, but my line rhymes better even if the meter is a bit off.)

At least it’s starting to feel we need to ban the “V” word. If you hang around this blog at all, you probably know that on August 30, while Peter and Sandi were in the States on a three week vacation, lightning hit and destroyed our studio-transmitter link. We had just gotten everything working again and Mildred and I were packing Saturday morning to take a two week vacation in the States to catch our breath when, BANG!! As I was making a Facebook status update telling about the tremendous thunderstorm we were having and not being sure if our plane would be able to land to take us to Ohio, there was a big crack, fire came out of a wall receptacle next to Mildred, and we heard the neighbor scream. … And the radio went dead.

Not again! Yes, again. We had to leave for the airport in two hours. So I gave Peter a crash course in all the things I figured out after our last event. But this one is even worse. There were all sorts of network anomalies.  We think one of the devices that convert audio to digital is also bad, which was messing with the network. But mainly, we’re pretty sure the brand new data radio is dead, too. And there is no internet. That’s extra bad because much of our radio programing arrives via FTP download from the Internet.

So Peter has a huge mess on his hands and he readily confesses to not being a tech geek. I talked to him on the phone Sunday night and he has us back on the air. He was making the changes to network paths needed because of moving the FM broadcast computer to a remote location. Now he is seeing about getting another data radio ready to go. Praise God that the home office was able to send us two of them last time!

What we know, or think we know, so far is that our firewall/router is totally dead. That’s located in our house. I dug out an old router before we left and got the network running before we left for the airport. At least one network switch is toasted (at our house). Our home phone is fried. The new data radio at the station is out of commission. And probably one of the analog to digital converters is dead or hurt badly. This looks like it was very nearly a direct hit on our house, since so much of the damage is right there. There may be more, but I didn’t have time to check everything before we had to leave.

It looks like we will be working on this one for quite a while even after Mildred and I get back to Roatan in two weeks. Please pray for Peter and Sandi as they try to get as much stuff working as they can. Pray for us, that we can still get some rest in spite of all that’s going on with the ministry that we pour our hearts into. I find it very hard to disconnect and really be in the moment here with family in Ohio, knowing all the things Peter is trying to deal with at the radio station.

Ohio soybeans ready for harvest.

All of that is mingled with the excitement of spending some time here in Ohio with friends and family. Jesse and Kristin are driving up from Florida as I write this, so we will get to see them too. They plan to celebrate their fifth anniversary at Niagara Falls, but will spend lots of time here on the farm with us, too. Along with the trials, God is heaping on the joys. Both are blessings. In a recent conversation with my friend, Travis Mitten, we concluded that, as the saying goes, God is good all the time. It’s not that He manifests His goodness only in the things we like; He manifests His goodness just as much in the things we wish He had spared us. But, like children who resist taking a bath or brushing their teeth, we just don’t always know what’s good for us.

Resident Visa!

It’s here at last! Well, sort of. Our lawyer in Tegucigalpa has our resident visa cards now. He was so excited that he even sent us scanned images of them. Normally, he would put them on a Sosa flight to Roatán and we would get them next day. But this time, all he has to do is meet us at the airport in Tegus tomorrow. That’s because …

Vacation!

Yes, we are going to take a little vacation. Our friends, the Mittens, who lived and served here with us and had to leave for medical reasons now live in the mountain city of Siguatepeque. Mildred and I have never taken an in-country vacation in all our years here, so we are finally going to do that tomorrow. We are very excited about going to visit the Mittens and doing some sight seeing with them. They need to be in Tegucigalpa tomorrow to work on their resident visas, so we will fly there and meet them at the airport. Our lawyer will also meet us to give us our official cards. At least that is the plan. Once we make all those connections, we’ll all eight (Travis and Emily have four daughters.) pile into their seven-passenger SUV to go to their house in Siguatepeque.

While visiting the Mittens, we’ll make the drive over to Copan for everyone’s first ever visit to the Maya ruins there. You can only begin to appreciate our excitement about that! Expect pictures. Maybe a video, too.

When we get back from Siguatepeque, we have two days to get ready for a two week trip to Ohio. Mildred’s dad has been having a really tough time with his heath and we just felt like it was time to go see them again. We are looking forward to catching up with them and lots of other family during that brief visit. A few days after we get back here, we will be seeing some dear friends from Tampa who are visiting on a cruise ship. We love showing off Roatán to our friends, so that will be big fun.

STL!

STL stands for studio transmitter link. You probably remember that that’s what took the lightning hit several weeks ago while Peter and Sandi were on vacation. Today, we finally got things almost totally back to normal. It took a couple weeks or so to get the replacement data radio sent here. Then we ran into several technical snags. But yesterday we got all the snags cleared away and this morning we finished putting the desk together for the FM computer.

Since we had no link to the transmitter, I had had to take the AM and FM computers to the transmitter building about 20-30 minutes away (4-5 miles in a straight line) and we then had to take programming up there every day and could not do any live programming. Once we got the link and desk ready as of this morning, Peter and I went up and grabbed the FM computer and brought it down here. We are now running normally on the FM, just like before the lightning. Yay, God!!! The AM computer is still in the transmitter building, but that does not really affect our operations. Here’s a quick little video I slapped together showing the practical conclusion of our STL replacement saga.

Click here to view the embedded video.

We have been unusually dry lately, so we should welcome the rain, right? Well, I’m trying to welcome it, but the timing might have been a little better. The rain is hindering our efforts to kill termites. How does rain make it hard to kill termites? Well there’s a little story behind it all.

Termite dung heaps

Several years ago, when we remodeled the studios, Peter had custom desks made for them. Soon after we installed the desks, we found that they were infested with some sort of wood boring insect. After all sorts of unsuccessful efforts to exterminate them, we still didn’t even know for sure what they were. No one seemed to be able to tell us, since we never saw the bugs, just the piles of little white pellets they ejected from tiny holes in the wood. Even the local Truly Nolan technicians were stumped. I finally started my own research project. Thank You, Jesus, for the World Wide Web! Our little desk eating mess makers are dry wood termites. I can’t believe the pros didn’t know that! When I asked the local pest control company about it, they said they do not treat dry wood termites, because they have never been able to kill them. That’s encouraging!

Termite defecatorium

After more study, I settled on heat as being the best way to get them out of the desks. But how could we heat them without taking them outside, and how could we take the broadcast computer desks outside without going off the air? There are big bundles of cables that pass though various holes in the desks from here to there. Well, God made a way when He used a lightning bolt to blow out our data link radio and forced us to move the broadcast machines to the transmitter site. At least, that’s my theory.

Disassembled desk

This week, I disassembled the desk for the FM computer and had plastic ready to wrap it in so we could set it out in the sun. We had a little sunshine yesterday and I proved that we can generate enough solar heat inside the plastic wrapping to kill the little vermin (30 minutes at 120 degrees F.). But we’ve only had a couple hours of sunshine, so everything is just sitting and waiting for the return of the sunshine that has been ruling over these islands for the past several months. So we are ready to have a furniture baking parade in the sun, but it’s raining on our parade.

Nearly empty studio

And not just on our parade. Today is September 15th, in Spanish, Quince — Independence Day in Honduras. There was a big parade this morning in town. It looked like the weather was going to be hot and sunny. It’s our day off, so I grabbed the trusty Nikon and headed for town. As I left, I noticed that Peter had part of the desk sitting out in the sun. It was hot when I got to town. But that didn’t last long, as you will see in the little video I put together to give you some of the flavor of an Independence Day parade — Roatán style.

Click here to view the embedded video.