I felt e need to re post the link for this video clip by Carol Burnett.

The best part of this video clip is at the very end where Carol Burnett screams “Merry Christmas”!

So click here  and go to Youtube and advance the video to about the 7 minute marker.

Merry Christmas,

I have been trying to get our Cuisinart Cappuccino Machine to yield a decent macchiato. I don’t think its the machine. It seems to be the grind, the time of the pull, and maybe the discovery of the real ancient secrets of coffee.

This afternoon I tried to get a grind out of our current burr grinder. It has an espresso setting and goes down to “fine” Well that’s just not “fine” enough. So I did some research and found that there are a multitude of coffee grinders available. But is that really the secret? Which grinder will yield the illusive “Turkish” powder that will allow the extraction process critical to just a single, one ounce pull, of this special coffee drink?

It was interesting to find out that grinding coffee is really a more recent development. It has also been pounded down to powder by using a mortar and pestle. So this is what I a going to try next.

Since I don’t have a real mortar and pestel, I will have to improvise. I am thinking of using a Starbucks tamper and an old dish.

Of course the fine folks at Kean make the best machiatto.

However this coffee skill goes back to places and people who have not to this day been industrialized. In the streets of Khartoum Sudan, you can get some of the best coffee. Its Turkish, spiced, available for a few Sudanese pounds. You sit in what we would call the gutter here in the US. While you drink the coffee or tea out of glasses. The sterilization of the cups happens, you hope, as each cup is poured and is exposed to the 200+ degree water.

The people hang out there in the late afternoons and just talk. That is the real point of good coffee isn’t it? Sitting there with friends, acquaintances, or better ye, complete strangers. People that we all have something in common with.

Its more about being with the people than it is about perfect coffee. But good coffee and people go together.

I will try to let you know of my progress toward the “good” macchiato.

Not too many were up including myself. After a day of job searching (another disaster), I was out fast asleep. Thanking God for His peace of mind.

As I got up at about 7:00am today I checked my tweets and saw that Hatta and Carlos Amezcua were up all night watching and tweeting the story.

It takes time to assemble teams of people for responses to disasters of any type. Especially near midnight on Friday in the US in Ca. News teams take time to put together too.

A local or regional disaster can then spread to global disaster in an amazingly short time. During the night there are those who are at vigil in prayer and warning others.

The night before our local community lost power for about 4 hours. Not really a big deal. But it could be if you were on a breathing machine and didn’t have a backup generator or something. And hopefully that system is tested in kicks in before you run out of air.

Praying for the people in Chile and their loved ones here in the US and throughout the world as they watch and pray.

Just getting word that Long Beach has had a drop in the harbors water. Where is it going? Out to sea.

So ate well we did! Here is a twitpic of the soups after baking in our cheap table top oven at 450 deg.

Hatta and I love French Onion Soup at Vie De France.

So we decided to try and make some FOS (Thats code for French Onion Soup).

Hatta found the recipe on line. I cut up 3 sweet onions. And we learned not only how to carmelize onions. Something everybody knows, right? Well not me, thats for sure. But carmelize we did. Took about 45 minutes. Then we learned how to brown the onions. Wow this is the key to FOS. Get the onions right and the rest is pretty simple.

Good lighting is so important to reading as well as drying your hair. See below. But if there just isnt enough light, they gotta go. Wah! I did so want these to work. 3 time 3 watts compared to 3 time 35 watts.

Signed: Waiting for the higher light output LED lights.

Trying something new.

We have a ceiling fan. Something that is supposed to keep you cooler.

So I saw these LED light bulbs at Walmart and decided to give them a try. Should put out cleaner light using 1 watt of electricity. The old bulb uses about 40. Not to mention the heat that 3 of them put out.

My wife will have to go back to using a hair dryer instead of the lights on the ceiling fan. And the ceiling fan can be used to cool now instead of spreading heated air. Hah!

About $15.00 each. Made by GE Part #73153 Bulb type GU10.

These bulbs and thinking like this are going to change the future of power. remember I told you that.

Notice the cleaner white light on the center bulb. Thats the LED

In times of uncertainty we can often find ourselves in a state. Our heart or inner being, where we live and breath, under attack.  Our confidence shaken. Our faith in question.

The apostle Paul knew that his time on the earth was quickly drawing to and end. So in II Timothy he was trying to transfer as much as he could to the young minister.

We have our own spirit. That is what makes me me and you you and everyone else who they are. We are beings in physical bodies temporarily until we put on immortality. Hopefully that immortality will be spent in heaven. However that option is up to everyone. There is another place, sad to say, not prepared for us. Hell was prepared for the devil and his angels. So do all you can to stay out if it.

Our spirit is what the Lord is interested in. We should be too. Paul actually said “May the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit.” So keeping yourself near Jesus as much as possible would seem to be the goal.

When you are with someone you can pick up a lot of information about them just by listening. Listen to Jesus with your spirit. Your spirit and the spirit of Jesus, communing with one another.  It is interesting that Paul didn’t say may the Holy Spirit be with your spirit. That probably would have been fine, depending on your doctrine or dogma. But Jesus came to the earth in person as we see in the gospel of John. He wanted to be with His creation. And still and always will.

Do you have days when you feel confident? When you do feel confident, where is that source of confidence coming from? It may be from your job, bank account status, car you drive. Or is it because you have spent time on a spiritual level with Jesus? That is where you want to get your confidence from. Jesus. Time with Him, in His word. Prayer and fellowship with Him.

Faces of despiration

Well the answer of course is “it depends”. It depends on what changes people can and will allow everyone to go through. Thank God that not everyone needs health care at every moment of every day.

What I am saying is that there are many people that are healthy right at the moment. Of course that will change. There is not an option for that. We will all get sick of something at some point. Or need health intervention for some affliction or emergency. But until that time you can and should pay into the health care system the same as private insurance.

Of course the government can and should be involved in health care. After all they should care for the health of all their constituents, right?

In Africa in most places health care is non existent. In other words if you are pregnant and need a C section. You are probably going to die.

After spending a recent month in Safe Harbor’s Midigo Health Center, a level III hospital about 100 yards away from Calvary Chapel Midigo. You can see a working model of health care. I don’t know too much about medicine, I just see people getting the health care they need. Free.

Free, not to say without cost. There is a cost. This health center is funded mostly by the efforts of Christians who want people to live and have some access to health care in this remote area of the planet. Live so that they can hear the gospel. Live so they can be who they are. But you can’t hear the gospel if you die first because your appendix burst. Or malaria got the best of you.

Pastor Trent Douglas Presenting Medical Gift on Behalf of Christians in America.

While in Midigo the Ugandan government Ministry Of Health visited the Health Center. The occasion was a Christian group from the US came with a sizable donation of medical items and a team work in the health center. This isn’t the first time that the Ugandan Ministry Of Health came to visit. In fact they were the ones that made the closed hospital available for Safe Harbor to use many years back. When Dr. Juventine did a clinic under one of the mango trees that are on the property.

On this visit they offered to recruit 2 Ugandan doctors and raise Midigo Heath Center to level 4. 

It seems as each party works together. The Christians, donors, the Ugandan government, a member of the community that just brings a bunch of Avocados to give Dr. Juventine, a group from the US with medical supplies. All things are working together for the glory of God.

It seems to take people like Dr. Juventine and Dr. Elizabeth, Christians, Government and people. All working together. Not to say that it has to be Christians only. But in this case that is what has been happening. You see the population in this area is mostly Muslim. 

Hundreds Gather For Medical Presentaton

Should or can health care be free? It seems it can be. Is it socialized medicine? I don’t think so. It just seems to work when everyone involved does what they are supposed to do. It isn’t without cost as I stated before. Some medicines do come from the Ugandan government. They want to have a part in someting that is working and has positive results.

Can everything be treated? No. There are heart patients that are not going to make it because the specialization isn’t there. The facilities are just not there. Maybe one day. After more working together. This work has just been growing and growing.

If you would like to know more about Midigo Health Center. Please contact Safe Harbor International Relief. www.safeharbor.us

On July 9th a young lady about 17 years old named Agnes needed an operation. Dr. Juventine asked me if I wanted to come in and observe? I said yes. One reason was that I had my appendix out when I was 14. I can remember that I was too big of a child for the children’s hospital and not quite and adult, so they decided to operate on me at the children’s hospital. They had some difficulty due to my size and a lack of surgical tools, gowns for etc.

So my heart went out to this yound lady. Who had to have her operation here in Uganda.

We scrubbed and dressed.  Dr. Elizabeth prepping.

I had been working in situations as just a “go for” for Dr. Juventine before. We first worked together in Southern Sudan’s oil fields. We landed on a 2 day relief mission that missed it’s landing point. Patients had to walk to where the plane left us and didn’t arrive until about midnight. He worked all night as a few of us tried to help. I got to hold the flashlight as he looked into peoples wounds. Some of them from the war. I can remember a man cam up to Dr. J after standing in the long line. He had his eye shot out. It was gory. Off and on since 1997 we have found ourselves working together in various ministry situations. So I took the opportunity and went in to observe and film as best I could with my Blackberry Bold 9000 set for low resolution. And a Flip  Video.

It was also a great opportunity to see the new Operation Light in use. (Thanks so much to all of you who donated to this light through Safe Harbor International Relief last year.)

The operation took about 2 hours. Nurse Anette did the anesthesia and Dr. Elizabeth closed. She has a special suturing technique that will leave Agnes with almost no visible scars. It is her specialty.

If I get time and $20. I might upgrade my blog and post some of the Flip Video of the operation. I have the whole procedure in segments. It’s not for the squeamish.

However there is hope for the deprivation. You can blog your experiences when you get back to so called civilization.

Understanding Uganda is really a study in human nature. You really cant come to a true understanding of a country or its’ people entirely. However you can make certain observations. In missions work there are books written that talk about the goal of becoming 150% people. People that go to the mission field, usually for a longer than 2 week period, and try to understand the language and culture to the point that they are 100 percent themselves and 50 percent the other culture.

I have experienced this on several trips. After being somewhere for more than a few weeks coupled with the idea that naturally crops up in my head everywhere I go, What would it be like to live here? I start to look and ask questions about staying permanently.

But am I really a 150% person if there is such a thing? Or is this just something that occurs in missionaries as a routine?

I would like to share with you one observable truth. That people are people everywhere. Including yourself. Things are not really that different on the other side of the world in Africa than they are here humanly speaking.

One day this past July I was out with the Calvary Chapel Westgrove High School team in a soccer field across from Calvary Chapel Midigo. We were doing an outreach in the form of sports for the big kids who were playing soccer. And launching stomp rockets with the little kids 3 years old say up to 11. I was asked to work in the stomp rocket lines.

The stomp rocket line was really a mob of about 100 kids. I quickly lost site of the soccer game going on not far away and was being pulled in every direction by kids trying to get a shot at launching a stomp rocket.

I was working with several of the High Schoolers from CCWG. No matter how you organized or tried to direct the kids, it was chaos. Pushing, shoving, two or three at a time getting into to the launch areas, we had two areas. To the point where as one kid would stomp the rocket, one of us working the loader didn’t even have a chance to get out of the way, thus getting a rocket in the face.

After about 10 minutes of this, you can either start to develop anger at kids who are just trying to have a good time, or you can try to find a better way for them to process through the lines. Figuring that the reason we came to minister was for them to have a good time, I started to study what was going on and try to make the lines process more efficiently.

So we set up the 2 lines with one of us as a physical barrier to prevent crossing into the launch area. This helped keep the launch area clearer. Now the problem of kids just cutting into the lines. The older ones having size advantage also being from a culture where the male is dominant over the female. And size does matter. We started policing the older kids. Making them go to the end of the line if they cut in. This prompted some anger in them as this wasn’t what they wanted.

Then I noticed the little ones doing the same thing, cutting in. Taking advantage of the weaker ones. We just kept rewarding those who cut in line with a trip to the end of the line.

Then it struck me that the weaker ones had a smile on their face. Someone was defending them. Pretty soon the lines were processing all the way through without too many problems and everyone had not only one turn at the stomp rockets, but multiple turns. There were still violators of course. But we kept the peace. A seemingly new social order was established and all were having lots of fun.

We did this for about 2 hours in the hot afternoon sun. 

So this is what I meant by Understanding in Uganda. You sometimes need to go to the other side of the world to gain understanding in some area of life.

The next time you find yourself in a line, look for that bigger person who is in charge of the line and see if they will keep the bigger kids in order so the little ones get a fair shake. Or maybe you are the biggest kid in the line and can do whatever you want at the gate of the airport. God is everywhere and sees you even if you don’t get caught. So behave yourself and act like the person of 150% caliber that your size and stature lead people to believe about you.

Or maybe you too can go to some far place and learn something more about yourself and your own culture as well as a little about someone elses.

So if you are not saved and have personal relationship with Jesus Christ, don’t go on a mission. What would you be bringing to these so called “lost” people? A new social order?

In Jeremiah chapter 9 verse 24 the word of God says “But let him who glories glory in this, that he understands and knows Me, That I am the Lord, exercising loving-kindness, judgment, and righteousness in the earth. For in these do I delight, says the Lord.”