Things Go *Boink*

Sometimes, a week starts off with a *boink* experience and then it keeps going that way.

For me, it started off with trying to buy an MCEL starter pack from a street vendor for a pay as you go line. (For those of you who don’t know what this is, it’s a cell phone SIM card. MCEL is the Mozambican owned cell phone company.)

Me: “How much are your pay-as-you-go SIM cards?”
Vendor: “I’ll make it Mt. 100” (Mozambican money)
Me: “Ok, so what’s the normal price?”
Vendor, smiling sheepishly: “Mt. 80”

I paid the Mt. 80 but we all had a good laugh about his unpolished sales tactic. We laughed even more when a 2nd street vendor (his friend) rushed breathlessly up to us to offer his MCEL start up packs, too. When I asked him how much he was charging for his, he looked at his friend and said, “What price did you say?” ☺

Another boink this week happened yesterday. I was busy working on something inside when I noticed a pair of hornbills hanging out in the trees in our backyard. In my opinion, these are the clumsiest and most comical birds God made, so if I get the chance to photograph them from so close up, I most certainly do.

I hid behind the window curtains with only the camera lens peeking through so as not to scare him off. While I was busy snapping shots, he promptly spread his wings, and pushed off into flight…directly into the windowpane where I was standing. *BOINK!* He wasn’t going very fast, and he was a big bird with a humungous beak, and the hit hardly seemed to faze him. He just used the impact of it to change direction and flew straight back into the tree. He sat there for several minutes with a look of utter disgust. (Mind you, hornbills are born looking that way…it’s part of what makes them so comical.) And once he’d recovered from his boink, he flew away.

The biggest boink of the week though, happened when Dwight sat down to do up a thank you presentation, using video, for an annual event that generates the bulk of funds for our child feeding program.

Mug of fresh coffee in his hand, he settled in behind his desk, ready to put audiovisual media and creativity to work! Then from the dining room I heard, “Ohhh nooooo! ….Aaaarrrgggghhhh! My computer crashed a few months ago, I’ve lost the video editing program I need to do this!” Oh no, indeed. Especially because the time available for us to do this was short.

Turns out the big boink had other smaller boinks too.
1. The original program disks were in Canada, so no re-loading it.
2. The internet-downloaded copy made the computer shut down with a scary error message.
3. Even upon rebooting, the program wouldn’t work anyway.
4. This kind of software is not available locally.
5. The sound track we chose was in m4a format, and the program only recognized mp3. (Though we managed to work around this.)
6. The archaic version of Ulead Video Studio we happened to have on hand couldn’t seem to maintain photo or sound quality.
7. Boink, boink, boink!

Some things went right though:
1. The video footage worked great.
2. The school kids were cute and so patient as we took tons of pictures of them, both candid shots as well as many of them lining up in formation to spell “T-H-A-N-K-Y-O-U”











3. Hey, the fact that we have a reason to say “thank you!” That's a real good thing.

4. And can I just slip in here on a somewhat unrelated note, to say that the health post is looking amazing! Can’t wait ‘til it’s done!

Anyway, although it may not be Hollywood quality, in the end, we managed to get the presentation done.

It’s a simple message, really. Just, "thank you" to all who make it all possible.

Enjoy your (Canadian) thanksgiving everyone, and we will enjoy ours as well.