How I ended up deciding to hang around in a slum for two weeks

When I first became aware of the opportunity to go on this trip, I was excited and thought this would be great. Friends encouraged me. I got an application form and everything. Then ... I sort of forgot about it.

Then I went to church camp; our major focus was talking about how we could/should be doing something explicitly missional. There was a lot of discussion about overseas mission. What really struck a chord for me was the mention of how it can be transformative to the people who go.

Again ... I sort of forgot about it. Until I saw one of the Urban Vision people on Twitter talking about how they'd just got cheap tickets to Manila, and realised that I hadn't sent the form in and needed to do something, now. I decided on the spot that of course I was going and called up the guy organising it and sent some money for the tickets and stuff -- thankfully he had some idea I was keen so this wasn't completely out of the blue.

This sort of mirrors how I ended up joining Urban Vision myself; initial excitement, then trepidation, then it slipping to the back of my mind, then being asked and saying yes of course how could I do anything else?

What the trip is

It's billed as a "Slum Retreat". We're each placed with a family in the squatter community -- to live with them, see the routines of daily life, the struggles, the hard things, the easy things, the normal, mundane everyday things, even the boredom when there's nothing to do.

We're deliberately trying to avoid fitting the role that Westerners on mission trips are expected to take. We're there to learn, not to teach. There to live like they do, not stay in a hotel and put a roof on a school. There to have our hearts changed, not just our film exposed.

What I expect to get out of this

I don't know exactly how I'll react. I expect to feel stress, homesickness, boredom, confusion. But I'm hoping for a few things:

• hoping to experience a way of life and a level of poverty that is completely out of my field of experience and pretty far out of my comfort zone
• hoping to, as a result of being moved far far away from our western affluent consumer culture, to find Jesus in a new and meaningful way -- to see Christ in what Matthew 25:40 calls "the least of these"
• hoping this will better inform my activities as a member of Urban Vision, to continue to develop a relationship with the poor and marginalised that is based on humility and servanthood

Oh, and I won't be answering my phone

No phone. No laptop. No email. For the first week, no camera. I'm not going in order to twitter "look at me I'm in a slum" every 45 seconds. You'll all just have to cope without me for a couple of weeks. I'm sure you'll manage.

Up and atom!

Fly out early this Thursday morning. Back on Sunday the 26th of July. Your thoughts and prayers will be most appreciated.

Acting on a tip received from a friend at church, I travelled to Thorndon New World in search of custard, in square form, sandwiched between pastry and icing.

With remarkable success. Supermarket baking is usually a bit meh, but Thorndon New World's custard squares are almost exactly like the ones from my high school's tuckshop. The icing isn't chocolate coloured (don't think the taste is actually very different) but apart from that: the custard is just the right consistency, as is the pastry. A custard square you can eat without covering yourself with custard!

On a related note, I finished my two-and-a-half year time at Innaworks a week ago. My adoring colleagues took the opportunity to go in search of custard squares to present to me. They brought 13, from many different bakeries, and then stared at me, waiting for the pile to be consumed.

It was not to be, I only managed about 1⅔ squares before I began feeling slightly sick. Alas. But they were much appreciated.

A friend suggested that maybe the Hot Bread Shop in Hataitai would have custard squares. This sounded promising: I thought the only place hot bread shops had survived was Westport, along with service stations that put the petrol in your car for you (!) and give you useful advice on how to get to out-of-the-way places.

The shop looked promising: a low-end bakery with filled rolls, slices, pies ... and custard squares. I selected two items: a custard square, and a custard twist.

This is where things get disappointing. The custard in the square was insufficiently firm, although better than that from Mr Bun. And the pastry was overcooked, so it was too flakey and too hard. With better pastry, it would have been a halfway-decent custard square ... but it was not to be.

The custard twist, however, provided a welcome change: dough, raisins, custard and icing combined in a delicious if rather sugary treat. It didn't survive the clean-hands test due to the icing, but with plump raisins and the always-welcome taste of custard, it was a baked good worth eating.

Next time: a chance for supermarket baking to redeem itself?

In the before-time, when I was but a lowly high-school student, the tuckshop at my high school sold Custard Squares. They were delicious: the icing was just right, the pastry was of the correct consistency, and the custard was at the optimum point between liquid and rock. They wobbled as you held them, and it was possible to eat one without having to wipe custard off yourself afterwards.

Many years later, the supply of custard squares in Wellington is at an all-time low. Most bakeries don't sell them, and when you can find one it's often a poor example of the cuisine. The squares that are available tend to have awful pastry, icing, or custard -- and usually, at least two of them are wrong. Therefore I have taken it upon myself to go forth and find the perfect custard sqaure.

We start our journey at the closest place I could find to work that sells them: Mr Bun in Cuba St. The closer Mr Bun on the corner of Taranaki St and Manners St didn't have any. But the array of high sugar foods at Cuba St was vast. I could combine my custard square with a chocolate fudge ball and some lemon meringue pie. Casting my fears of the quality of this food aside, I made my order, and took this banquet back to my office for consumption.

Unfortunately my fears were realised. The lemon meringue pie was awful, the fudge ball was too doughy. And the custard in the custard square was insufficiently firm. Any pressure on the pastry pieces caused it to squeeze out, which tends to coat any item near the square with custard. Unfortunately, to eat a custard square you must apply pressure to the pastry sheets -- and then the custard goes everywhere. Also the custard itself tasted really awful -- I don't know how they managed it.

So Mr Bun wins on location, but loses on custard square. I'm going to have to look further afield.

I've had a computer since I was eight. Started with a ZX Spectrum, which I taught myself to program in BASIC. Eventually got a PC, an XT with 640K of RAM, and a flakey hard disk drive. Upgraded to a 286, and then a 386. Around this time more computers appeared at home, and we got a LAN, initially running Compex ReadyLink, then upgrading to Netware Lite. Our server was a 286 with 60MB of disk. Windows 95 came out, and I managed to make it work with Netware Lite.

Then I discovered Linux. Ended up convincing Dad to let us switch our network server to it, initially running mars_nwe, which faked the IPX Netware protocol, allowing us to access the server from our DOS or Windows 95 machines.

In 1999 we got a cable internet connection via Saturn and Paradise net. We could download our 512MB month's quota at a whopping 512 kilobits per second. And upload at 128k. We had a static IP. And I started messing around with running a webserver and mailserver on our network server, by now a 486 DX4/100 with 2.5GB of disk. I'd taught myself HTML a few years prior, now I learnt perl and built some simple CGI scripts.

The computers multiplied, and I began acquiring more, installing Linux and setting up an extra LAN in my room, routed back to the house's 10base2 backbone network. I ran an extra mail sever, and extra web servers, and experimented with Java servlets, Roxen, Courier and Cyrus.

I became involved with the VUW computer club, Interface in 2002. They had a PC they'd mean to use as a webserver but it had never gotten a home or a network connection. I arranged these through the university, and set up the machine with some other students. We acquired more hardware, and in 2003 I set up what I believe was the first wireless network in an NZ tertiary education institute that was usable by students, SWANS. Originally our access points were discarded machines (old PowerMacs running Linux, or old 486 laptops) with wireless cards in them that could be coaxed into access point mode with a special driver. We had coverage of the undergraduate computer science labs, and the university Quad via a laptop perched on an office window.

The computing empire grew at VUW. I finished my BSc Hons year, and embarked upon an MSc, which meant I got an office. A research project provided me with my own cupboard to house machines, and the Donald/Interface computing empire at VUW grew.

I left home to flat in Karori with friends (including a former Interface president) in early 2005. The computers came with us. The garage housed a table covered with them. I hosted several for friends who didn't have space or decent internet. We unsuccessfully tried to start a wireless community network, NZWired.

Around this time, the price of renting dedicated servers in the US was dropping, and a group of friends got together and rented a box in the US, partitioning it with UML. Eventually we switched to Xen. We outgrew the first box, and switched to a larger box at a different provider, and I took over paying the bills. I found someone who would rent me a cheap box in the US at the then ludicrously low price of USD20/mo, and so ended up with two machines in the US.

Eventually I finished (well, handed in my thesis, anyway) my MSc, and started at Innaworks. The computers at VUW were handed over to other students, and I discovered that full-time work left me with less energy to spend on sysadminning toy machines. The box shared with others in the US suffered from neglect, both sysadmin-wise and billing-wise, and cheap VPSes (virtual private servers) became cheaper. The shared server got shut down. I ended up getting a cheap VPS to host my mail and began to look at the pile of machines in the garage a bit more seriously. I consolidated my servers in the garage down to one machine, and there things sat for a while.

In the mean time my desktop PC was getting a bit old and proved incapable of driving the new 24" LCD I'd got. I discovered that the Asus EeeBox was capable of driving it, and also would mount nicely to the back of the screen. It wasn't too fast, but my needs weren't that great. I was now down to three computers that I regularly used at home: a server, the EeeBox, and a laptop.

In early 2009 I ended up joining Urban Vision, and moved into a flat over the road from the Arlington council flats in Mt Cook. The computers came along but most stayed off. The servers that I ran at home had had their functions transferred to a virtual server in the US; important things (mail) went first, less important things (this blog) took a few months to come back. Gradually I got rid of the more saleable ones. I finally got around to getting rid of most of the virtual servers in the US that I wasn't really using much anyway in the last week. I'm now down to two. And one laptop (on loan), two Eee PCs (anyone want an Eee 701?), and the EeeBox desktop. I haven't worked out what to do with my old file server and its couple of terabytes of data, and I've got an old Athlon XP 2600+ desktop machine that I really should find another home for. And there's a menagerie of wireless routers and other embedded Linux devices. And a pile of hard disks. But I'm (almost) all better now. Next step: getting rid of the remaining unused PCs, and trying to find something to do with my accumulated cache of computer parts and cables.

I moved in early February (more on that later), and the server hosting this blog came along with me, and it's spent most of its time at the new place turned off. But finally (!) it's been moved to a server in the US. So once again you can all read of my exciting exploits, as relayed infrequently in blog form. Revel in the wonders of the search for the perfect custard square! Be amazed by tales of living in a Manila slum! (well, after it's happened, anyway) Marvel at my exciting new job! Be dumbfounded that I actually get around to blogging about any of it! Wonder if this paragraph will ever end, and if I can ever write a sentence that doesn't end in an exclamation mark!

The last few months of my life have been ... interesting. In a good way. I'll have to tell you lot about it some time.

My four-way cigarette lighter multiplug is no longer passing sufficient electrons to light up the LED or power anything I plug in to it.

And I didn't bring a soldering iron or screwdriver with me on this trip. That'll teach me to disregard basic packing principles.

Task for tomorrow: find a shop in Wanaka that sells cigarette lighter multiplugs. Or drive back to Queenstown (ha, not likely). Or give up and assume my GPS navigation thing (a Garmin Nuvi 260) will go flat somewhere between here and Haast.

Oh: the reason for the GPS being useful on a road with virtually no intersections -- you can see upcoming spots that have potential to overtake the person in front of you who's only doing 100kph :-)

Yesterday Victoria University of Wellington conferred both my MSc and BSc (BSc Hons I got in 2004 ... it's a long story).

!!!!!!!!

Also I'm catching a ferry for the South Island this evening, where I will do, er, southern things. Including visiting such exciting places as Methven, Murchison and Waihopai. Oh, yeah, and also Queenstown, Te Anau, and the West Coast and stuff.

Er, as the rest of the blogododecahedron has no doubt already informed you, Google Maps now has Street View in NZ. Some things you might like to ogle:

• Telecom Satellite Earth Station, Warkworth
• US Spy station, Waihopai
• Fiordland Lobster Co, Jackson Bay
• View of Westport, from Denniston
• End of the sealed road north of Karamea
• Awful puns in Bulls

This might actually be useful in planning my December holiday. Alas, there's no street view of Methven.