Review of Interviews

I have been rather busy with all the activities here, as I help Jon prepare the poly-lingual audiobible app for launch, prepare for conferences, fix computers, start on the business project, and build relationships and Portuguese savvy. So I haven't had as much time as I would have liked to record and share the experiences. Instead of a comprehensive update (which is intimidating and takes more time than I have at the moment) I'm hoping to compose some vignettes to share a taste of life here.

    In preparation for a conference at Peniel (the primary church Equip Moz works with), Janie was to interview some of the leaders concerning the development of the church. I tagged along to help arrange the set.
We arrived at the open-air stadium that is the church building a bit early, before the other people involved. After exchanging greetings and news with the guys in the ticket booth/church office, we got keys to the storeroom and started collecting equipment. The first challenge was to find the perpetually-absent video camera batteries. (Earlier in the week I had heard an epic of hastily searching for it as a sermon was beginning.) The desertive battery was nowhere to be found, so we hoped Dino would bring it and went on to look for a computer. We couldn't find the needed computer, but we did find "the computer that never works for recording audio". I resolved to fix it in case another computer didn't materialize. The microphone would not connect at first: apparently it was dropped and the USB ports don't work right. One port constantly connected and disconnected with the associated sound (doo-ding! ... dee-doong! doo-ding!...), so I turned off ports in the device manager until I found the culprit. Once I got the mic connected I had to figure out why Audition wasn't recognizing it, nor recording, nor throwing any errors. After 30 minutes of poking around the settings I finally got the bitrate and sampling rate set in all three necessary places and it worked. Much rejoicing.
   We had most of the set arranged in an outbuilding by the scheduled time for the interviews. I tested the lights, and they didn't turn on, so I checked another outlet which also didn't work. Some investigation revealed that the prepaid electricity had run out, so Dino went to acquire more. In the meantime I did a soundcheck with the laptop, and everything was working properly. Eventually we had the equipment powered and the interviewee in position so I left to decrease background noise and tried fix a guy's phone. A few minutes later Janie ran up asking for me to come fix the computer as it stopped recording. I turned things off and on again, corrected yet another setting, and the mic worked again.
   During the interviews I joined a planning meeting of the Peniel media team in preparation for the conference. Dino, the team leader, assigned tasks, kept things moving, and translated for my benefit. At the end of the meeting, one of the guys went to tell the interviewers of a change in the plan. Apparently in a meeting only he had been privy to, a different direction was selected for the interviews, but no one had informed those actually doing the interviews. So Janie redirected the interview process midstream, and carried on.
    And the interviews were accomplished in (relative to how most things go here) a very smooth and successful process.
In other news, I found this valve in the middle of an intersection. Somebody had a bad time.