Hertzler’s Outpost

Audrey in the Coffee House

Helping students stay awake as they study, keeping fresh coffee available, and cleaning up are some of the things Audrey is doing as part of her job in the Coffee House this summer. The brilliant neon yellow uniform t-shirts didn’t make her terribly excited, but she likes the job otherwise. Earlier she was doing a lot of babysitting during the day for staff member parents on the conference team, and I think she likes this job better.

Andrew, Computer Lab Monitor

Helping students log in to the computer lab computers, setting up printers on other laptops, and refilling paper in the printers are a few of the things Andrew is doing as part of his summer job as Computer Lab Monitor. Another high schooler had the morning shift (during classes) when the lab was virtually empty. Andrew got the busy shift today, but I think he’s enjoying it.

Cathy is a Registration Helper

Today about 800 600 staff members of Campus Crusade for Christ will go through registration for the Institute of Biblical Studies, CCC’s biennial summer Bible school. Cathy is a registration helper, and I have already done most of my work for the day on the Tech Team. We set up the ad hoc computer networks in two rooms and scrambled at the last minute to resolve a problem that kept the Finance team from working. Stuff like that. But things are running smoothly now, so I have a few minutes to post this.

Compared to the relative calm of the last three weeks, I think it will be a lot busier here for the rest of the summer.

The line of people waiting to register
goes around the building

Update: Why not 800? It turns out that about 200 people incorrectly indicated their arrival on this date! They must have clicked on “21″ thinking it was July 21, the time when most people will arrive for the main conference. Instead they were actually clicking on June 21.

CCC’s Conference Team getting
instructions – photo by David Nagy

This is the first time Cathy and I have joined CCC’s U.S. Staff Conference Team, but it’s about 30th year Campus Crusade has held our biennial U.S. Staff Conference here in Fort Collins, CO. But on Thursday we all did something for the first time, even the other long-time veterans of this staff conference team. We did a community service project.

The work was weeding and mulching in the Fort Collins City Park. You can see in the picture that our group is fairly large, so we managed to make a significant difference in the park’s landscape.

And compared to working with people and computers, working outside on landscaping is a downright pleasure!

Setting Up

It’s been ten years since I setup computer network cabling, but I ran enough in the last few days to make up for it. Andrew and I arrived in Fort Collins, Colorado on the Campus Crusade U.S. Staff Conference Advanced Team earlier this week to help unload trailers and build an operations office. The work is a nice diversion from my normal job.

I’ve always said, “When you work with computers, nothing is ever easy. When you work with people, computers are easy.” So I’m back to working with computers, and they’re easy.

This conversation, from a visitor on EveryStudent.com, ended well. It seems this visitor, like most atheists who are willing to respond on the website, was raised in a Christian home but rejected his family’s faith. Rather than argue with him, I told him about my experience knowing God. And I told him I didn’t want to change his mind unless he was looking for a different way to see things.

This was his response:
“Well thanks for the conversation Jerry. Sorry for having a rude tone with you, its just i’ve been yelled at and called mean mean mean names so many times for being atheist. Thank you for not trying to change my mind.”

This article was the start of the following email to me from a visitor on the EveryStudent.com site: “If god is perfect and creates imperfect beings deliberately, then why does he punish them for their imperfections.” And thus another conversation with an atheist begins…

Always Something Going On

My time in India went well. I gained a better understanding of how university students there think and how they use the Internet, and I had a good planning time in Bangalore.

Finally on my last day in country I began feeling comfortable, but I left with more questions about the culture than I came with. For example, Mumbai is home to 4 of the 6 richest people in the world, but it also is home to Asia’s largest slum. Why do the ultra rich live there? How can huge slums exist in the middle of a city where real estate prices are high?

My first reaction on seeing some of the slums was pity. But from two different sources I heard this story: As land owners develop a piece of land, they are required by law to build free housing for any slum dwellers their development displaces. In the past when this has been done, the displaced slum dwellers take their new apartment and rent it out to someone else while they move their slum to another location and continue living in it! Whether this is true or not, I don’t know, but either way it highlighted how far from my own culture I had traveled and how long it would take me before I had a good understanding of the mysteries of India.

Brain Masala

Fried brain masala with naan bread was today’s lunch. Hmm good. It had the consistency of tofu (the brains, that is), but the masala spices overpowered any flavor the brain itself had. It was a challenge getting my mind to eat brain. I can now check this off the list of things to do before I die. It wasn’t really on the list actually….

Today we got blocked from entering two campuses, so we didn’t get to talk to any students there. And on a third campus where we were welcomed by the administration, we were not able to talk to any students. So we didn’t connect with any students today, but we learned a lot about the difficulties of connecting with them in general. I think it illustrates the need to find other ways, like the Internet, to connect with students other than visiting a campus.

This beats all.

I generally try to avoid McDonalds in other countries. Why eat the worst of American culture somewhere else? But this one was too hard to resist, and my Indian friends wanted to eat there. A Chicken Maharaja Mac. Just sounds funny.

Over lunch I learned why cows are sacred but not chickens, how students pay for university, how the caste system works and where foreigners fit into it.

Before and after lunch I learned how students use the Internet in India, but there were no surprises there. Google, Facebook, and lots of time online were consistent among the thirty or so students I talked with.

Bangalore Street

After arriving in Bangalore at 12:30 am today I was surprised at how functional I was the rest of the day – until 4:30 when my brain decided it really wanted to sleep. After a 15 minute nap I headed out for a walk on the street near where I’m staying. It was quite a contrast to the quiet office I worked in all day!

Everyone that I stopped to photograph was really friendly. They all smiled back at me, and two guys even asked me to take their picture. I feel much more comfortable here now than I did 12 years ago.

Breakfast and lunch today were curry, as I’m sure dinner will be as well. It is being served now, so it’s time for me to eat.

I’m sitting here with my friend, Sam, showing him how to use a WordPress blog.

Jerry and Friends, Bangalore, India

My upcoming trip to South Asia got me digging out some old photos of my last (and only) visit there back in 1997. It was my first trip outside Western culture, and it was quite a memorable experience. I returned with far more questions than I had left with.

At the time, Bangalore was a developing tech center for the world, and the U.S. was outsourcing a lot of work there. But nothing I saw resembled any high tech center I had seen before. It was all quite unfamiliar.

This was also where I had my first mango. I was hooked after the first one. My friends sent me back home with a whole bag of big, tree-ripened mangoes, but the U.S. customs agent in Atlanta confiscated them and wouldn’t even let me eat one before he tossed them in the trash. Now the best I can usually do is find dried mango at the grocery store; the fresh ones just aren’t the same.

I’m hoping my next trip there will leave me with a better understanding of how this part of the world thinks and lots of opportunities to eat their delicious food!

I posted a few more of my photos from 1997 over on Flickr.

One of the things I’m working on this year is an effort to help our ministry in South Asia make better use of Internet media to reach spiritually interested people there with the message of Christ. The project includes other aspects of helping them apply technology to accelerate their ministry, but this one aspect looks the most interesting at the start.

In talking with our U.S. staff members who are already involved in that part of the world I learned that there are others who are making an effort to reach one of the key cities in this area. This is a combination of U.S.-based ministries and South Asia-based ministries, and they are meeting in Indianapolis next month to talk together.

So this looks like a good place for me to jump in and see what we can do to use our Internet sites to help connect with students in this area. EveryStudent.com/india and StartingwithGod.com/india are two of the sites out there, but it’s really too early in the process to say for sure.

In 2005 in Budapest, Hungary and again in 2007 in Bangkok, Thailand, about 100 CCCI staff members from around the world gathered at the MinistryNet Conference to discuss how they could move Campus Crusade’s evangelistic presence on the Internet forward. Literally tens of thousands of people have indicated decisions for Christ as a result of the initiatives that came from the leaders who attended these conferences and who were inspired to proclaim the gospel on the Internet in their language.

While the dates and location for MinistryNet 2009 have not finalized yet, it looks like it will be in October in either Bangkok or Turkey. Turkey has the lead right now, but we are waiting for bids from the two locations before a final decision.

Tom and I did much of the work planning MinistryNet in Budapest 2005, but this year I am heading up the plans for both the logistics and the program. Cathy is helping me, too, along with a couple other conference planners. I am excited about doing this project!

The Time of My Next Meeting

In about 9 hours I’ll have an Internet-based conference demonstrating features of a new system Campus Crusade is developing to help our volunteers respond to visitors from our evangelistic websites. It’s part of my new job helping our staff members in various parts of the world understand what their options are for reaching people in their areas with the gospel.

This diagram shows the time this meeting will occur in each of the locations where someone will be tuning in.

The Team – Ivo, Beni, Bartek, Andrey,
Galin, and me

This is the team of men leading Campus Crusade for Christ’s outreach on the Internet in Eastern European languages. They help publish websites about who God is and what it might be like to know him – in languages spoken by over 200 million people. They all lead teams of volunteer email mentors who answer visitors that write in from their sites. Sometimes they have the privilege of meeting personally with these visitors, and other times they build a relationship across many time zones to places they could never go otherwise.

Pray that God continues to accomplish his purposes through them.

The Evangelical Church in Bansko

Last week I was in Bansko, Bulgaria meeting with several of the CCC ministry leaders from Eastern Europe who are using the Internet to reach students. My goal was to hand off the job I have been doing in the area to them.

We met in an evangelical church founded in 1868 by American missionaries. It started under the reign of the Ottoman Empire and, ironically, had more freedom then than during the period of control by the Soviets. We spent two days in this antique building planning how to use the Internet to reach more people in this part of the world with the gospel.

Bansko, Bulgaria looked like a cross between Hungary and Colorado, and it was cold. The rest of Bulgaria (that I saw) looked like Hungary, so it felt quite comfortable.

One other unique thing about Bansko is that it has its own language, Banski. It is not a dialect of Bulgarian either, but is related more to Macedonian. Only about 15,000 people live in this village, so there are not many Banski speakers.

All in all, it was quite an interesting place.

bo3a

For breakfast my friend, Galin, introduced us to Бoзa (”bozsha”), a slightly fermented grain drink that is traditional here, along with topnitza, a cheese-blintz sort of thing. He said this was typical school breakfast fare for kids.

The drink smelled like bean soup but tasted sweet. Kind of like drinking buckwheat pancake batter that had gone bad. I couldn’t do more than a few sips. I guess it’s one of those things you have to grow up drinking to like.

StudiuBiblic.ro

With 26 translations of EveryStudent.com going, we still have just a few translations of our follow-up site, StartingWithGod.com. One thing we did to try to make it easier to produce new translations of this site was to create a tool so our translators could enter their text directly onto the site. Our Romanian language site, StudiuBiblic.ro, is the first one produced using this tool.

The idea of using a tool like this for producing new translations wasn’t completely successful. Our initial version proved too difficult for a non-experienced translator to use, and some more features need to be added before we can produce multiple new versions simultaneously. So the future of this tool is unknown at this point.

Today I have no more appointments, but it’s just as well because I have plenty of work to catch up on. Starting last Sunday I had a week of catching up with friends, meeting new people and telling about what God has done through our work recently. These weeks are always one of the best parts about what we do. It’s energizing to look back and tell people about how God used their investment in this ministry to change lives.

KoveliStudenti.com, our Georgian site

That would be the Georgia that lies just south of Russia, as apposed to the Georgia that lies just south of Tennessee. We’re building an EveryStudent.com site for this language, KoveliStudenti.com, and we’re finding the Georgian alphabet to be a bit of a challenge to display in a normal web browser. There aren’t many Georgian fonts out there, and even fewer that work on both a PC and a Macintosh. Georgia uses their own unique alphabet, and since they are a small country there is not as much developed for the Internet in this language. While this is a difficulty for us now, we anticipate this will give us greater visibility later as our site will be one of a smaller number of sites in this language.

After we figure out how to produce this site, advertising it will be the next challenge. Google, our main ad supplier, does not offer Georgian ads, so we’ll have to be creative.

European EveryStudent.com Leaders

A meeting room with people, not very exciting except for what we accomplished.

[Later I realized this post was completely out of context. Dan (standing) and I organized this meeting in Paris to get our European EveryStudent.com leaders further ahead in how to get students to their language version of EveryStudent.com in their countries. We gave them a general overview of why to use the Internet to communicate with students (as apposed to spending your time on a university campus trying to meet students in person) and how to use online advertising venues like Google to get students to these sites. And other things. Everyone left with a renewed motivation, a better understanding, new relationships, and good examples to make EveryStudent.com a priority in their campus ministry plans.]

Westminster Christian Academy

Today I am speaking at the Westminster Christian Academy chapel service. It would be fun to tell stories on my friends who are now teachers there, but I won’t. I’ve been back to my high school before, but going back to speak in chapel is a little different. It reminds me of the chapel services I sat through, some incredibly boring, and some that I remember to this day.

Here are some places I intend to mention:

Meant4More.com – a place to find out more about a relationship with God.
EveryStudent.com – the site I help produce
EveryStudent.com promo video – this is a variation of what I played in chapel.

Google’s Gifts

Really. Not only did they send me a greeting card, they also sent me two gifts. Receiving them reminded me that my Campus Crusade Visa card directed quite a bit of advertising dollars their way this last year, but even at that I see the incredible value they provided in directing spiritually interested students to EveryStudent.com.

One gift is a 2Gb USB drive. The unique thing about it is that it came in the form factor of a credit card.

The other gift was a gift card – of sorts. It’s actually an opportunity for me to direct a donation from Google to any public school classroom project of my choice.

I am quite pleasantly surprised. Well done, Google. Thank you.