The Semana Santa Slowdown

What is Semana Santa? That’s Spanish for Holy Week. It’s when almost every business closes, phones don’t get fixed (But to be fair, they haven’t worked for several weeks, so maybe we can’t blame that on Semana Santa.), and seemingly most of Central America comes to Roatán and clogs the streets and beaches and jams the cell phone service. Under these conditions it’s pretty hard to accomplish much on the tower project. To top it all off, the winds have picked up, making it much more pleasant around here but also making it impossible to get the antennas aligned. But we still stayed occupied.

We have much of the work done for the transmitter building air conditioning. Frederick is working on a modification to make it automatically restart after a power outage. Somehow we wound up with one that you need to manually start when the power comes back on. I’m not sure why anyone would even build one like that but, to make a long story short, we got one by mistake. It’s a used machine and there’s no taking it back, so Frederick is making an external control to start it up without us going up there every time we have a blackout. When he’s done, we can connect it to power and charge the system with coolant.

I’ve been working on the equipment rack, which is more or less complete now. The next step is to secure it to the floor and run conduit to it from the breaker panel. But for that, I need some electrical supplies and some things we had shipped down from Tampa. Of course, even though they are right here on the island, we can’t get any of them until next week.

Earlier in the week, we had pretty good weather for aligning the antennas and Peter spent many hours up on the tower. When he was over halfway done, we discovered that the compass he was using was malfunctioning. So two days of work went right down the tubes there. Now, with the windy conditions, we are trying to find ways to make forward progress while we can’t work on the antennas. Sounds pretty gloomy, doesn’t it? I confess that we are just a little deflated by the struggles of this past week. But we are far from discouraged. God has a good reason for what He has allowed. He just hasn’t told us what that reason is.

Mildred is still settling into her new duties handling the HRGS finances. She is also starting to personalize her work area. I’ll have to get another picture when she gets done with that. The one below still looks like Marlies works at that computer.

Yesterday, Mildred generated the monthly listener contact report. It looks like Request and Dedication is heading for another record-breaking year. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but projecting the first three months out over the entire year indicates an annual increase from 27,099 last year to somewhere around 33,000 listener contacts this year. So, even though our long days working on the tower project have cut into our available time for face to face ministry, it looks like God is increasing the impact of Radio HRGS through an ever expanding listener base.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned this on the blog for quite a while, but one thing we really appreciate is the constancy of our financial supporters, especially in these difficult economic conditions. We have even received some surprise increases from individuals as well as some wonderful special gifts. But we have noticed some drop-off and we just learned that in September we will be losing some rather significant support. It’s wonderful that these supporters can give us advanced warning of the change. We’ll just have to trust the Lord to provide the finances we need in order to continue this ministry. After all, that’s what we’ve been doing all these years, so why change now? Right?

Paul said in 2 Corinthians 4:8, “we are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed but not despairing; …” Of course, Paul had a much tougher life than any of us, but like Paul we can rejoice even in adverse situations. We know we are where God wants us to be and doing the work He has asked us to do. If you think of it, would you pray for Mildred and me – and all the staff here – for the endurance we need to get this new transmitter site into service and then that we would be able to finish up all the loose ends we’ll need to deal with in order to finish the facility once it is in use. Pray, too, for Mildred as she works on wrapping her brain around the financial system here and doing extra studio work to cover for Peter and me.

[Show as slideshow]