Today was the perfect storm at EBS: the first day of residential courses AND the second payment date of the semester was Friday, which means most students spent the weekend trying to find the funds to pay this morning before class. A busy day, and for most of our students, a hard one.
We started the week out with Staff prayer, which is proving to be SUCH a good and special time, and as we all headed out, Junior and Simeon suggested that any staff who wanted to could give 100 gdes ($2.30) to help students who could not find the money for their payment. When I finally found chairs for all of my first year students, Simeon came in and let the students know that if any of them wanted to give 100 gdes, they could, too.
I didn't think anyone would go for it, especially when they had all just scraped together the money themselves, and the students being first year, but when they saw the money the other classes had collected, I was shocked to see so many of them pull out wrinkled bills and add to the pot.
By the time my class was finished, an envelope stuffed with bills was on my desk, with instructions to help anyone who needed help in the Emmaus community, from the Emmaus community.
Again, this may not seem like a big deal. In the end, it was only about $100, no amount of significant money to much of the world. But after many years of attending churches with little to NO tithing, very little teaching on giving, knowing how hard it is for our students to find their tuition money...it WAS a big deal. a huge deal. Being able to help some of our students this week...because of many of our staff and students this week? AWESOME.
These are culture changes...Biblical thinking, Biblical culture. So fun to be a part of the transformation...so thankful you are, too!
These guys got off safely this morning, which means that tonight is our first night without visitors in over five weeks! Bittersweet....we had such a special group here!
Kevin (far right) has been working his magic on the generator situation this past week, and I wish I could give a more technical update for those mechanically minded out there!
We had a ton of wiring and programming issues that he entirely corrected, as well as installing new parts, reprogrammed inverters, got a lot closer to diagnosing our generator issue...bascially, things are a LOT better than they were...we have our back-up generator and inverters working together again, we have power pretty much 24/7 again, Phil doesn't have to manually switch everything over 6 times a day...so much better!
So, all that is left to do is figure out for SURE what is wrong with our best, most efficient (well, was best) generator and get that FIXED and we are good to go!! THANK YOU, NewTribes and NorthRidge, for working together and making it possible for Kevin to genius our situation!
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