The Weekly Wrap-Up: February 22-26, 2021

This week has felt so strange. I don't think there's a day that has felt like the day it's supposed to. 

Of course, part of that might be the fact that I fell out of bed this week. Got a little dizzy and overcorrected. Oops. Just a few bruises; possibly one puncture. It's fine.

Sarah and I finished changing the training manual for boot camp. We had a nice meeting with our respective training teams, and I have great hopes for our training in May. 

Groups 2 and 3 of Indonesian are done and published. I'm back into Tamil. It's a frustrating language to format because it utilizes more characters and we have to left justify everything. But it will be nice to have more Indian languages available. 

Sorry I'm not a fount of information this week. Like I said, it's been a weird week. It'll be nice to catch up on some sleep this weekend. 

Bye!

The Weekly Wrap-Up: February 15-19, 2021

What a crazy week! We've had snow, freezing cold, but fortunately no power outages. I've been knee deep in snow at times, but I always have somewhere cozy to return to. 

This has actually been a pretty productive week, which I really hadn't anticipated. We had a snow day on Tuesday. The office was closed because we got a ton of snow and nobody could get anywhere. I live across the street, and I couldn't even get out until after noon.

The rest of the week has been good, if a little bit crazy. I was able to publish the first group of Indonesian, which I really wasn't sure I'd get to. The first group is always the most time-intensive, since you have to split two booklets. But it's done, so I can move on to the next group. 

Sarah and I decided that we were going to offer two more boot camps (I mean, other people signed off on it, but we all know Sarah and I are the ones who do the real work around here ;)). So, now that we've decided on dates for the training, we've been going through the manual to make sure everything is current and less ECC-centric in language. We've opened the training up to the wider world of OMS, so the verbiage needs to be a little more neutral. Plus, we've learned a lot from the last two boot camps we did, so we're taking that and making things a little easier to understand. It's still a ton of info to throw at people in three days, though.

Finally, my biggest claim to fame this week - I learned how to create a volume! We have been doing volumes for the VCP curriculum. It's basically a series of booklets that they use in each term. I did the second volume for French, which includes eight booklets. We also have to make the cover pages and the back page. It's a beast when it's printed, but it looks pretty good if I do say so myself. Lots of fiddly bits, though, so you need someone who can pay attention to detail. I hope I'm up to the task. There are eight separate volumes and about five languages that will need them. I'm happy to help with VCP stuff, but it definitely has increased our workload. 

And that's my week. I hope your week has been as productive and fulfilling as mine. I hope you have a great weekend as well. Stay warm!

Bye!

The Weekly Wrap-Up: February 8-12, 2021

Oh, hello.

How was your week? Are you keeping warm and healthy? I liked the snow at first, but now I'm over Winter. So done. Needs to go.

Right, enough small talk. Two more groups of Indonesian are done, and they've already sent them back with the seal of approval. So it looks like I will be publishing three groups in the coming weeks. I also did the presentation in staff briefing for the ECC report. We do the staff briefing every month, and each department rotates when they talk about the latest doings. This was our month, and I got drafted to give the report. It was pretty straightforward, and I managed to keep on topic for most of it. I'm not actually sure if it's easier doing this in person or on Zoom. There are pros and cons to both. Either way, it went well, and I take that to mean that I'll get saddled with this duty again at some point in the future.

Somewhere in the midst of this, I managed to write my first draft of a prayer letter. This one was not as difficult as I normally find them to craft. I usually use the first one of the year to sum up the previous year. But no one wants to think about 2020. So I found a creative way around that. You'll just have to wait to see it. 

And that's my week! Next week could be interesting if we get the storm they're predicting. We've already been told to use our discretion about coming in. It's hard to make an excuse when you live across the street, however. We'll see how it goes.

Happy Valentine's Day!

The Weekly Wrap-Up: February 1-5, 2020

Bootcamp is over! I can't tell you how proud I am of my little ducklings who led this training for 19 new trainers. The hope is that we'l be able to free up some capacity for future training events without relying on the same few facilitators and tech personnel as always. Realistically, even when travel does open again, we'll still be doing online events, and the more people we have who know what they're doing, the better. 

I learned a new thing this week! Part of our work with Village Church Planting involves creating volumes of Train & Multiply booklets. That means we combine several booklets into one larger book. We have 8 volumes that will ultimately be created, but it takes time. We have to have all of the booklets published before we can created the volume, so in anticipation of this, I had to publish the necessary booklets for Volume 2 of French. Then, I learned how to create a volume. It's not completely done, but I at least have a good idea of what I'm doing now. Like most things with T&M, it's complex but not complicated. 

The rest of the time, I've been working on Indonesian. We're close to publishing the first 3 groups, but you know me, I'm finicky. I'm moving as fast as I can. Fortunately, there aren't many changes to these booklets, so there are fewer things to check. Fun fact! Plural words in Indonesian don't just add an 's' or the equivalent like you would in English. Instead, they double the word. So instead of saying, "I bought pens and markers and binders," you would say, "I bought pen-pen and marker-marker and binder-binder." In some cases, because this takes up a lot of space, you can square the word. Who knew math was involved in langauge?

Other than that, things continue much as they have for the last few months. Three years ago, I was in the Philippines. It's weird to think about traveling now. I don't know when or even if I'll get to travel again. But in the meantime, I keep doing what I can. And I thank you for making that possible!

Stay warm!

Bye!