Traci’s Tracks <e-mail edition>
Issue #2 Mon, 2 Nov 1998

Second Issue? Didn't I do this 2 days ago?
Enjoy!

Dear Family and Friends,

Hello, again! I know most of you probably just received the last newsletter I wrote. Our email was having big problems last week, and it got really backed up. We were finally able to get some extra connection time and get it all caught up on Saturday. Hopefully the phone lines will agree with us this week, and we will be able to keep up with the email each day.

This was a good week. My class was fine. Music was fine, too, and of course very active. This week I am going to have the 1st - 5th graders all together so they can get used to what it sounds like with all of them. It could be interesting having all 48 elementary kids by myself, but I'm sure we'll all manage.

Wednesday night I babysat for the couple who lives behind me for a little while. They have two kids, Gabriel (3 years old) and Danielle (6 years old). I was quite entertained. Gabriel "played" the piano for me and sang "I'm in the Lord's Army" to the top of his lungs for me.

Last night (Saturday, Oct. 31) was the Fall Festival sponsored by the Junior Class. It was a lot of fun. I spent my time in the dunk tank. The elementary students took great pleasure in seeing how many times they could put me in the water. Some of those kids have good arms on them. I spend a lot of time crawling back out of the water, but it was much fun. Unlike being in a dunk tank in October in Oklahoma, it is very nice to be in the water here right now. It is getting hotter every day.

There are some praise items for some of the sick ones that we have had around especially the two with hepatitis. Richie was able to go back to school this week. He is able to go to classes and meals and other than that has to be laying flat. Larry Charter's blood count went from 4000 to around 100. I don't think anyone around here has seen it drop that much that fast. He is also better from having malaria. We still have several around on crutches and arms wrapped up, but I don't think we have had any new ones lately. Well, there might be one. The soccer teams went to Abidjan this weekend to play the International School there. I noticed one of the girls limping off the bus, but I haven't heard a report on it yet. Please pray that we can make it through the last 4 weeks of this trimester without anymore major illnesses or injuries.

Please pray for our computer system as well. We are short staffed this year and one area that we are missing having someone to work in is computers. We are definitely noticing this. We are having serious virus problems in the computer lab, which is also affecting computers all over campus and West Africa. The kids' parents often use our lab while they are here visiting their kids so they have unknowingly taken the virus home with them to their personal computers. Pray that we will be able to find all of the viruses and get them taken care of. There is more than one virus in our system. If you aren't familiar with computers and don't understand this, just understand that it can be a really bad thing and mess up things badly. One virus that we have will not let you save anything. The second you try to save a file the whole computer shuts down on you. There is another one that damages the computer every time you turn it on. Right now we have been unable to find a virus program to take care of the second virus that I mentioned.

Well that's about all for this week. Tonight we have our Christmas Choir Concert. Yes, I realize it is really early, but since our kids leave to go home on Thanksgiving Day we start Christmas early. We celebrate Thanksgiving with the Canadians in October and celebrate Christmas all through November.

In Christ,
Traci