teachable moments

So, I had some really cool teachable moments this week with my staff, and it worked out great to use them to my advantage! :) I’m sorry about the length of this blog, but there are too many details to cover, and it is a holiday today, you know. (Breakfast is cleaned up now, the cats are outside playing, the construction guys are here working on pouring the floor, Dwight is of buying more cement, and I am back on the couch in my robe enjoying the holiday)

Starting with Olga, my cleaning lady, who likes to give me advise on all things that I 'should be doing' all the time. A few weeks back I was given two large squashes, very gorgeous and rustic-looking. At the time, I was struggling that I hadn’t been allowed to have a pumpkin as a decoration for Halloween because the Christian culture is so against them. (don’t wanna offend the people I’m here to serve) Anyway, I had a special moment where God showed me that he was giving me some acceptable decoration squashes for my thanksgiving holiday, and it really mushed me up. Olga decided that I should cook them up and serve them warm with cold milk one morning, some traditional yummy treat, but I informed her that I wanted to save them as decorations. Olga rallied the support of Tonita, who works in the office, who agreed that cooked squash would be a lovely treat. So, this week, we decided to get rolling with the Christmas decorations, and I thought one squash would be enough decoration for today’s holiday, so I decided to let the ladies cook the big one. Naturally, I don’t want to get involved, but they were pushing for the squash, so I thought it would be cool to let them make the treat. Apparently she wasn’t thinking that she wanted to do it, but that I should do it. J But once I decided that the staff would benefit from such a delicious treat on thanksgiving week, I cant just let it go ya know, besides they were the ones pushing for it. It turns out she didn’t even know how to do it, and when the day came, she informed me that I should have cut up the squash and let it sit on the counter for a couple of days. I’m thinking, no problem, we’ll just postpone the treat, she can cut it up and set it out, and then in a couple of days she can cook it. So as the end of the day was approaching, I noticed she hadn’t prepped the squash. It took a little bit of insisting, but she prepped the beast, and it is now ready to cook. She has been so reluctant every step of the way and it is totally cracking me up, that she doesn’t want to do it, during her paid day of work, what she wanted me to do in my free-time after work. I have a feeling she might slightly slow down on suggestions when I made her do them. J maybe.

Yesterday I had another classic one with German, a pastor who works in the office, and is my right-hand man for the curriculum work. He checks all the Spanish, writes lessons, is figuring out the details for the OT timeline, does questions for the Bible reading, and I am slowly training him in layout in Indesign. I have kept the master documents of the new curriculum on my laptop this fall, since I didn’t yet trust my staff to accidentally mess with them. Our computers are all connected, and there is one folder for each curriculum, and it makes the most sense to have it all there, but then German could open the master document and mess something up, and I wouldn’t even know about it, and may not find it until after it’s printed. So, I have been protective of the main documents until he learned his way around Indesign. (people new to the program often make text boxes n stuff all over the place, which are invisible until you do something to them, so they have no idea what they have done) I have found German accidentally moving the layers of boxes… or ‘locking the position’ of a box, which later proves weird and awkward. So, when I ask German to do a specific layout job on the document, I have saved it in his folder, then when he is done, I save the new document back on my laptop as the master. This way I can always work on them and make changes, but he is stuck to specific assignments. I tried really hard to explain the importance that he not open an old document and fix stuff, because his work would be totally lost. I tried to explain that I had the main documents on my laptop, and that when he finished an assignment, and I saved it back to my laptop, his document became ‘old’ and no longer the main document. It’s kind-of a difficult concept to follow, but he was sure he understood, and didn’t need me to explain it any further. Till yesterday when he lost his work! J Man it hit him hard, he had just gone on his old document and fixed stuff he saw without my permission, without my knowledge… then we cleaned the folders by deleting all old documents. Before deleting, with both went thru all the documents looking for any changes, and neither one of us saw anything, so we deleted. After an hour and a half working on another project, we found his work in a final paged-out document, so we will be able to just copy it and paste it into the teacher’s book, and he will not have lost anything at all. But that hour and a half lesson was priceless. German learned first-hand the importance of not wasting time on an old document. J I also decided that I am now comfortable to put the main documents into the shared folder, and German realizes the importance of not touching them unless he has a need. J

Well, I’m not on my robe anymore, just received a pastor who was picking up an order and made another order. The fog outside is just barely starting to lift, but it is still 100% humidity. I have the windows open anyway, but it is getting the couch wet, as well as everything else.

So Ruben’s lesson yesterday was on valuing his time. He was working on a print project of laminated nametags for a women’s retreat this weekend. He printed the exact number needed, then made a mistake on two of them while laminating, and ended up wasting laminating film and time. I pointed out why Dwight always prints more than needed on the projects, in direct proportion to how many steps the project has. Because the goal is to make it thru each step, including the mistakes, and still have enough good product to cover the order, without having to back-track. It’s a different culture down here, everyone values the supplies MUCH MORE than their time. Labor is cheap and materials are expensive, and in many cases, it is cheaper to pay your workers to straighten nails than it is to buy more nails, but they can take the principal too far, and loose money. Ruben still didn’t think it was a good idea to print more than needed, so I got to point out how valuable he is to us. Paper costs us 10 Mexican cents a page, and Ruben costs 150 pesos a day… so he lost us money by not running extra… and it was really fun for me to see both Ruben and German do the math, and realize that I was right! It was a cool lesson for them because it was so positive, they really seemed to feel more valued, which is fun for anyone.
Well, I’m going to make a shopping list of final needs for my thanksgiving feast, and Dwight and I are off to the store. The weird thing is that everyone here is going about a regular day! Dwight said that while he was getting cement this morning, he noticed a new tent up and lots of people going there, and he thought it would be fun to at least check it out and see what was going on. Probably Christmas stuff for sale, but we will know soon.
Hope you are having a great holiday!!! Blessings, Kristi