Today we traveled from the capital city of the country to the town near where the workshop will be held. I say “we” because I traveled with a colleague who will be in training by assisting at this workshop so as to be able lead more workshops in the future. Actually, he’s already done two workshops of this type, but before we developed the "best practice" approach, so he’s really just learning the details of the best-practice formula that has been developed.
The plan was to travel by bus, so someone at the SIL office in the capital city got us tickets. We were told that there were three buses each day—one at 6am, one at 8am, and one at 2pm. So we arranged with a taxi man to pick us both up at the SIL center at 7am. When we got the bus station around 7:15am, however, we were told that the first two buses had already left! When we asked what time the third one would be leaving, we were told “around 9:30am.” Turns out that was the cultural way of telling us something close to what we wanted to hear rather than the absolute truth.
It was some five hours later when we finally began our journey, so our expected arrival for the early afternoon in order to be able to hold a planning meeting at 4pm turned into a 7:30pm arrival. The meeting would have to wait until Sunday afternoon.
Looking on the bright side, though, we got here safely, even if it was later than we had hoped and planned for.
Also, thank you for praying for my sleep schedule to get sorted out. I had a good night of sleep before we traveled, and it’s cooler here tonight because it rained earlier in the day.
Kevin Warfel
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