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.

The day after a good wash and wax.

You might be a real four wheeler if you have ever had 2 wheels off the ground and said “We’re in good shape.” You might be a real four wheeler if you have to get the wheel barrow to clean your driveway off after you wash your vehicle. You might be a really serious four wheeler if you have driven a vehicle for 10 hours straight …and never exceeded 3 mph.

Filling up the water filters at Mark Elwin's shop.

We’ve often done the first two on the list and we gave the third one a real go last weekend. Peter and Sandi had gone to look in the bush for their dog, Saydee, who is still missing. Now their four wheel drive Nissan Pathfinder is missing from the driveway. It’s not lost; we just can’t get it home. They went down a “road” they thought would take them to the main highway. It took them to a washout instead. If the road hadn’t washed out, it would have taken them to a dead end around the next bend anyway. Peter tried to turn around, but it’s been raining just about every day for what seems like weeks and he might as well have tried to drive up a steep, grease-covered stainless steel driveway.

Peter and I went back there Saturday morning along with an island friend named Jason. Poor Jason! He had no idea what he was in for! We only drove part way down the hill because we didn’t want to get our truck stuck, too. Peter had left their truck nearly crossways on the only spot below where I parked with any room for turning around, and it was really tight … and slick.

We decided that it was too slick and narrow to finish turning it around so, with lots of digging and rope pulling and fender pushing, we finally got it pointed downhill again. But it would not move under its own power. The mud on top of smooth rock was like grease on a sheet of glass. Since Peter was going to have to back up, up hill, over a very narrow culvert on a curve with no traction, we thought we should come back after things dry out a bit. So we hoofed it back up the hill to my truck.

There was plenty of room where I parked to turn around and then the fun began. I don’t think I got 50 yards up the hill before I got stuck. It took a few tries, but I finally got past that slippery slope. Peter and Jason followed on foot because, if I stopped, I’d never get going again. Soon I came to another steep, greasy stretch that took several tries along with some pushing and steering guidance from Peter and Jason.

Then I came to what looked like a wall of mud from where I sat. There was too little room and too little traction at the base to get enough speed to carry me up it and I lost inertia and started spinning several times. Each time I got a little farther, but I had so little control that on one trip back down for a re-launch, I was actually off in the bush, scraping paint and bending up my radio antenna. Eventually, I got about two thirds of the way up it and decided I was not going to get any farther. I set the brake and the others put rocks behind my wheels because I was sliding backwards.

We walked the rest of the way back up the hill and found a guy and his helpers who had a four wheel drive truck. They were happy to help — for a few bucks, of course. We had enough rope and tow strap to reach a fairly flat spot and hooked up the trucks. Nope! He and I just sat there with all eight wheels spinning. We unhooked and then he sat there on his own spinning his wheels on almost level ground. It took us a while, but we got him up to where he could get some traction. Then he took Peter to go get a big chain hoist and a come along from a friend. We hooked that up to my truck and spent the next three or four hours in the rain getting me up that last little bit of slope.

I had made the mistake of putting my bluetooth phone ear piece in my pocket when we began. It rained so hard and so long while we worked that the ear piece is totally dead now, even after several days of drying. My phone finally did start working again. But we were so wet coming home that, in spite of vacuuming, deodorizing, and running the seat covers through the washing machine, the inside of the truck reeks like … like … wet upholstery.

It’s now Thursday and it has rained every day since then. We had several hours of sunshine Tuesday and thought it might be dry enough to try again. But the sun doesn’t shine though all those trees and, once again, Peter just spun his wheels. Our friend, Mark Elwin knows someone with a back hoe, so that guy tried to help get it out this afternoon. That was my first time sliding sideways down a hill on a four wheel drive tractor with a bucket and a back hoe. Pretty thrilling to say the least. We hope to try again tomorrow, depending on the weather. So we continue to pray that things will soon dry out and that no one will damage the vehicle while it waits there in the jungle.

Stay tuned for the exciting (but not too exciting, I hope) conclusion. And take a few minutes to listen to our Audio Update which is below the photo gallery.

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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.

Before I start, I need to take a moment to thank our son, Jesse, for all his awesome help with some of the behind the scenes work on this blog. He handles the hosting and did the original design for it. He just moved it to a new server that’s much faster than the old one. I hope it makes for quicker page loads and a better experience for all our readers. Thanks, Jesse.

Now, how do you get soaked three ways in one day? Well, you can sweat a lot, you can get water sprayed all over you, and you can work outside in a driving rainstorm. There are other ways, but that’s what Peter and I did yesterday — much of it in the dark.

Method One

Peter was at the airport yesterday afternoon, still trying to get their luggage that has been wandering North and Central America for the past two weeks or so. Since Peter and Sandi flew standby, they have no leverage and Delta Airlines apparently assumes that no one who flies standby really cares if they get their bags. Anyway, Brigido came and told me in his rapid-fire, full-of-new-to-me Spanish words that the water tank was empty and the pump wasn’t pumping. Just perfect! We can’t get to the electrical problems because of the need to get our studio to transmitter link going and get the termites out of the furniture, but now we have to drop everything because we need water. Being a water utility for the neighborhood sure makes it harder to work at the radio station, especially when we are still under-staffed. Oh well. You do what you have to do. We’ve been having trouble for months with the fact that people are using more water than what God is putting into the ground and I expected that this was just a matter of the pump not having water to pump. Frederick Henderson had put in a very nice pump protector to keep the pump from pumping air and burning out. It’s been a huge blessing.

Not being a well pump expert, it took me a little while to come to the conclusion that the pump was actually running, even though no water came out of the pipe. By this time, I had already used method number one for getting drenched. My shirt and shorts were already sweat soaked and I hadn’t even started any real work yet. Assuming a hole in the pipe, I enlisted Brigido’s help in pulling the pump and pipe. Years ago we switched from galvanized pipe to plastic, so we can pull it up now with just a pulley. We used to have to borrow a block and tackle. Even so, it was all Brigido and I could do to lift the pump and 110 feet of water-filled pipe. That was a strong clue that the pipe was OK, so I was wondering what we would find when we got it all up. They don’t have real well pipe in Honduras, so we have to use regular PVC pipe with threaded adapters at each joint so we can take the sections apart as they come out of the ground.

Method Two

Peter got back from the airport, sans luggage and understandably frustrated, after Brigido and I had gotten the heaviest part out of the ground. It went much faster with three of us and we soon had the whole rig above ground. And that was the second way we got soaked. What happens to the water inside a vertical pipe when you unscrew it from the one below? Right! It squirts all over the place. Knowing that the tank was empty and that it would soon be dark, we really didn’t much care if it sprayed us. In fact, it was actually kind of pleasant since we were already soaked and that water was much cooler than the water that was squirting from our skin. Peter said, “Jerry, I think you wet your pants.” I said that I thought that it had been a team effort. We were both right. I wet them with sweat and we all wet them with well water.

We found no holes in the pipe. So why didn’t the pump move water? Brigido found us a big enough container of water to put the pump in it and I wired it back up with no pipes. When I started it, it ran, but didn’t pump a single drop. We took it out of the water and bumped it again and we could see the shaft from the motor to the pump spinning. We had a couple old pumps that were still operable, but not as powerful, so Peter went to fetch them and Mildred brought me up some wrenches so I could see if I could fix this one.

When I separated the pump and motor, I saw the problem right away. The splines inside the coupling had no teeth. There was no quick and easy way to fix that, so we tested one of the half horse pumps. It worked and we installed that one. Here comes the third way we got soaked. This time it was just Peter and me since it was long after supper time and we really didn’t need Brigido’s help anymore.

Method Three

We didn’t have any waterproof connectors for the motor leads so I made some while Peter gathered a few other tools we’d need. Just as I started connecting the cables to the pump, the skies opened up. Peter held the flashlight and I made the connections, while we both endured the chilly downpour. It was so wet and my fingers so numb and wrinkled that I was having trouble hanging onto stuff and, even under a hat, my glasses were so wet I had to look over them. I finally got all four connectors crimped. Now we just had to heat the shrink tubing. Anyone up for operating an electric heat gun in a deluge? Didn’t think so. But God is not without mercy and right about then, He turned off the faucet. In a few minutes we felt safe enough to heat the shrink tubing. After that, it was pretty straight forward. We had everything ready to run about 7:30 or so and I started the pump.

Since we’ve had quite a bit of rain lately and the roughly 10,000 gallon tank was empty, we decided to run the pump hard for a while. We set it to run for about 10 minutes and then wait about two minutes for the water table to recover. Meanwhile, we began gathering our tools by flashlight. While collecting our stuff, we noticed that the pump was stopping before the timer ran out. The flow switch was shutting it down. We had pumped the well dry in less than ten minutes! And that was with a pump half the size of the one we’d just taken out of service and a well that had probably been resting for at least 12 hours.

Money is dry this AM, but the wallet is still damp.

Peter and I spent the better part of the next hour playing with timer settings to try to get water out of the ground as fast as we could. By 9:00 we had settled on a little over two minutes on and a similar time off. We watched that for several cycles before we went home to our suppers. I don’t know what Peter had, but I really enjoyed my pizza, even though Mildred had to reheat it in the microwave while I hung up my sopping clothes and emptied my water logged wallet. The pizza had started to look a little like a store bought pizza but it still tasted great.

Please pray that people would conserve better, that we would get more rain, and that we would make a wise decision about whether to invest in a rain collection system. It would probably help, but it would be very expensive, so we don’t want to spend the money and add to our maintenance load unless we need to. At the same time, we’re thankful that the new shingles on our roof passed the straight down rain test and that the test didn’t come 36 hours sooner. I’m also glad that after removing the battery from my phone and letting the phone dry overnight, the red light went out and it works again! On top of that, Peter checked the water tank about 7:30 this morning and it was about 70% full, which is much more than I expected.

What a week so far! Getting diagnosed and treated is often a frustrating labyrinth of going from here to there and then back again for something no one told you that you needed. That gets multiplied when you add in a bit of a language barrier and then the cultural differences. But hey! I survived. Praise God for that!!

Entering the Maze

This is pretty long, but I think it might give you some insight into what it’s like to live here, so follow me into the marvelous maze of medicine, Roatán style. Monday at about supper time I started experiencing pain in my lower right abdomen. Moving certain ways or pressing on the area brought a sharp, but not unbearable pain. It was still there Tuesday morning, so I drove over to Clinica Esperanza. With God’s amazing help, our friend, Peggy Stranges (aka Nurse Peggy), has built from scratch what I think is the finest medical facility in the islands — it costs about $2.50 to see the doctor and get your medications, but it’s free to those who cannot pay. It started ten years ago with her just treating a few people two or three days a week in the storage room under her little beachfront house in Sandy Bay. Now it’s huge!

Clinic Shopping

I got to the clinic at 7:30, just as they were opening. There were already what looked like 50 people waiting plus eight or ten in line at the reception desk. So I went across the road to the clinic at Anthony’s Key Resort. It’s not free, but is still very affordable and great quality. When I got there, there were already about ten people ahead of me and the doctor hadn’t even arrived yet. But I had an ace up my sleeve, or maybe I should say in my wallet. At Clinica Esperanza, if you give a donation of roughly $25, you become next in line. They call it “Express Care.” Thinking that if this was appendicitis it might not be wise to loiter, I went back to Esperanza.

By then the line at the reception desk had dissipated and I was soon in an examining room. First, a nurse practitioner examined me and then my friend Dr. Raymond Cherington came in. They both checked me over pretty thoroughly, asking lots and lots of questions. They suspected appendicitis, but the symptoms were not clear enough to send me to surgery over in San Pedro Sula on the mainland. Instead, they sent me out for blood work. Dr. Raymond asked me to go see him at his private clinic when I got the results after four o’clock.

I went back to the AKR clinic and got right into the lab there. I gave them some blood and I was even able to give them the other little sample the doctors wanted. I went back for the results a little after four and then drove to Coxen Hole and found Dr. Raymond at his clinic. He put me on a clear liquid diet, prescribed Cipro, and said he knew a good surgeon that he wanted to have check me out. He couldn’t get her to answer her phone, so he said he’d call me when he talked to her. I thought it would be the next day. Nope!

Falling Down the Rabbit Hole

Dr. Raymond didn’t want to take chances. He called a little after 8:00 last night and asked me to meet him at the municipal hospital emergency room. The surgeon wasn’t there, of course, so we talked to the ER staff for quite a while. They ran some more blood tests. Dr. Raymond saw that we were communicating pretty well, so he went home about 9:30. I’m sure he’d had a long day. Me too! I had gotten up at 4:30 and needed to do so again today.

Well, they poked and prodded and inquired for another hour or so. Then they wanted to admit me for observation. I couldn’t see any reason for that. The pain wasn’t all that bad and wasn’t getting any worse. My white blood cell count was back down to normal. Besides all that, a hospital is a great place to get an infection. So, around 11:00, they pumped about 60 cc of an anti-spasmodic drug into the back of my hand and sent me packing with instructions to come back at 7:30 in the morning to get x-rays and see the surgeon. I asked about how to pay and they said I could pay when I came back in the morning.

Hospital Encore

I dragged myself out of bed at 4:30 this morning to check the early satellite downloads and make sure our programs were set for the first few hours of broadcasting and then went back to bed till six. I noticed that my pain was greatly reduced.

When I got back to the hospital I gave them some more blood and then got my x-ray. This time I had to pay up front. The blood test was about $2.00 and the x-ray was about $2.50. Those are not typos; there is only one digit in front of the decimal points. How do they keep the cost so low? Take a good look at the picture gallery below and you’ll probably figure out one way they save money. Neither process took very long, so I was soon back in the ER with the results. I even got to visit with one of our listeners while we waited in lines together. I think that is when I told them that I was feeling considerably better. The surgeon still wasn’t there, but the ER staff looked things over and declared that I do not have appendicitis. They just don’t know what it is. I asked how and where I should pay for the charges from last night. They said, “You don’t.” “Really?!” “Really.”

While it appears that the staff has excellent medical knowledge, their system is pretty alien to a linear person like me. The way it seems to work is that several patients stand at the counter while the staff asks questions of one or the other patient, then they discuss things among themselves and then move on to another patient. They sort of grazed among us, and would occasionally go back behind one of the curtains to check on someone in one of the beds. It was all a little mystifying because I was often unsure of whether they were working on my case or someone else’s — and they were talking right in front of me. They got the job done, but I was bewildered most of the time.

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Keeping an Eye on Things

Because of the terrible traffic and parking at the hospital, I had parked at Dr. Raymond’s clinic and walked the few blocks to the hospital. Just as I got back to the truck, Dr. Raymond pulled in. He was a little dubious of the hospital’s verdict, but told me to go into the pharmacy and get a few days more Cipro and we’ll just keep an eye on it. So, I think I’m in the clear, but no one is sure yet. One thing I do know, the King of the Universe knows all about what’s going on and He’s keeping a really close eye on the situation.

I can’t say I was worried about  the prospect of having an operation over in San Pedro Sula. I hear they give good care and my friend, Jeremy Dyck, said he’d be happy to come along to help with Spanish and be my hospital advocate. But, with Peter and Sandi in the States for the next two and a half weeks, the timing could not have been worse. It’s always interesting how God works these things out for His chosen ones. It makes it almost fun to be between Pharaoh’s army and the Red Sea.