Smiling

I wasn't there as Andrew and Suzanne got to work putting some finishing touches on the health post at the mission school this week, but from the looks of it, it was quite the event.

First, a line on the wall had to be measured for the blue latex paint. Latex paint has a shiny finish that helps keep the walls clean. Very important in a rural health post!

Nice to see people smile as they work :)

Then there was the tedious job of puttying the windows. First, you have to "moosh" the putty with your hands until it gets soft. When it's soft and pliable it's easier to work with (hence the term "like putty in my hands"). Then you push it into the corners along the glass and smooth it with a putty knife. Not as easy as it sounds, but in my opinion it's GREAT fun. And if Andrew isn't enjoying his putty session, he's hiding it well under that smile.

And just to make sure the jobs get done right, a throng of school kids gather to keep a close eye on things. Such excitement over the new healthpost!

Suzanne busy with the task of putting the blue latex paint very nicely where it should be. I'm guessing that in between strokes with the brush, there were a few headache pills passed out and wounds bandaged as well.

And after more than a year of planning and construction, the moment of truth as the bridge is tested for the first time. Many hours of hard work went into getting things to this point and I bet the guys were smiling pretty big as they drove over this ravine for the first time ever!

Hard work pays off.

I got to do a bit of smiling this week too, albeit not until I had put in some hard work as well. I launched into several promotional projects that involved video editing. At the time I thought "this can't be that hard..." but since I'd never done it before, I was in for a surprise. It took many hours of selecting and cutting and pasting and exporting and inserting and reviewing and then re-doing the process again.

At one point, I moved a bunch of video files from one hard drive to another in order to create space for more video files (they're real space hogs!) ...big mistake though. Turns out they wre "source files" and the computer couldn't find them, so I had to start all over again. Yeah. I definitely wasn't smiling right then!

But finally, after much work, I burned my first little production. It's a humble start, but it's a video update nonetheless so here it is:



And last but not least of the smiles this week was when I was in the office meeting with Patti Green (SAM office administrator, below)...

and a lady with a beautiful smile arrived. She said she wanted to give a special gift to the work and asked "Which program needs help the most?" Well, I took the opportunity to tell her that the infant milk program could sure use some help since it currently has more babies in it than ever before.

She thought this was a good plan and smiled beautifully again. We all smiled.

And I think God was smiling too.