RyanJHale.com

Updates at on China Trip at SeventyTwo

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 00:23:15 GMT

I've been doing several updates on our trip to China at the SeventyTwo site if you'd like to take a look. There is a lot for me to write about yet, but there is a recounting there of one of the most significant things that happened on the trip. Hope you can check it out!

http://www.seventytwo.org

Overheard in the Hale Family

Fri, 05 Oct 2007 12:18:38 GMT

Yesterday, Gina had taken Hannah to her piano lesson and had Ellie with her. They needed to do a little shopping afterward, so they went to the store. Ellie, still a month before her second birthday, has been potty training for the last several weeks and has gotten pretty good at managing to keep things dry, although you have to keep her on a pretty regular schedule and not allow her to go too long between trips to the bathroom.

While they were in the store, Gina thought that it would be a good time to take Ellie to the restroom because it had been a while. Now, with Hannah, this was a major challenge because of the "flush-by-itself" toilets were a significant issue. Hannah never was too excited about loud noises or just surprises in general, so that happened to her one time that the toilet flushed while she was sitting on it and that became a block for her throughout the rest of her potty training time. Several strategies were employed to make sure that darn toilet didn't flush by itself while she was sitting on it!

So yesterday, Ellie is doing her thing, and it happens to be a flush-by-itself toilet. Predictably, it flushes in the middle of her working everything out, so she looks at Gina and starts babbling, questioning what is going on. Gina explains that this toilet flushes by itself and shows Ellie the sensor and how it works. Gina then quickly received a study in the personality differences between our two girls. Ellie evidently understood what was happening and calmly turned around to the sensor and said, "Thank you!"

Growth of SeventyTwo

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 12:47:43 GMT

It is both exciting and somewhat daunting to see the work ahead of us with SeventyTwo. It is a new non-profit organization that I formed earlier this year to work with orphans around the world. It has been exciting, even now in the very early stages, to see how this work can be effective and help kids who have no families of their own.

We have been working with Jane Marcum over the last few weeks to understand more about our first opportunity in China. Jane has opened a home that is currently serving 38 kids in the town of XinMi, about an hour outside of Zhengzhou, China. Our intention is to come along side of her and provide resources including sponsorship of individual kids, resources for the ongoing operation of the home, and possibly expand out into neighboring towns and cities with work there. These kids have mostly come from the countryside where their parents may have been killed, maybe in mining accidents or other tragedies, or possibly they have been abandoned because of the economic pressures that many of the rural Chinese are feeling right now. Some of the kids have been found living in dirt caves cut out of the side of a hill or in homes where, like one story, a parent used to live but is now locked away because he is a danger to society. It is difficult to describe the horror of some of the stories of the individual kids and imagine that they would be able to recover from it, but as an extension of God's hand, Jane has worked with the authorities, found the kids, and brought them into the home in XinMi where they truly are thriving. The whole process reminds me of the picture of my wife in a garden where, if a plant has been failing in one place, it wilts to almost nothing. It has turned brown and has nearly died. She then takes it to a new place and provides nutrients and water, a new environment, and over time, the plant returns to strength, becomes green again, and is healthy. That is what I am seeing that Jane does with these kids and that is what we are going to be a part of and help out. To me, it is a picture of hope where there was no hope. It is a new life where there was no life.

We're going over to China in October to become oriented to the work happening there. Right now, Gina and I are going along with a couple of other ladies who we're excited to have with us! Genieve Grube and her sister Kaitlin have incredible hearts for God and are tender to what he has in store for them.

Meanwhile, Matt Grube, who is our lead pastor at the new Misseo Dei church where we have been going for the past few months, was at a seminary class in California where he met a lady named Heidi Lum from Hawaii. Heidi has a work called Advocates for Africa's Children which is an organization that works with kids caught in the AIDS crisis in Swaziland. They are a relatively new organization, working in Africa over the last year or thereabout. I have been in touch with Heidi who has been providing me information about how we can be involved with what they are doing. In Swaziland, they are not keen on opening orphanages but instead bringing abandoned children into homes in a fostering or adoptive situation. The problem is that the resources for individual families are scarce enough as it is that many families wouldn't be able to take care of any more children than what they already have.

One of the ways AFA has been addressing these problems is by working with the local Christian churches to start new micro-businesses that will provide funds to families who bring orphans into their homes. One example of the micro-business is starting a chicken farm where the chickens would be raised and sold in their local market. The churches are taking on the businesses to make the small money necessary to take care of the orphans in their area.

I really like this strategy because it partners with the local church to help solve the problems that the Church should be working to solve. It is also a strategy that provides renewable resources because after the initial investment of a few thousand dollars, the ongoing business will be able to provide for the needs of the kids being taken in by the community. There is other work going on here as well, but this is one of the strategies of the group.

I would like to plan a trip to also go to Swaziland some time soon. I'll need to work with Heidi and AFA to understand more about what this would look like, but that is definitely something that we'll plan to do.

At this point, I think it is time for us to begin raising money for the work that we'll be doing with these and other kids. We're pending 501(c)3 status, but I have reason to believe that we'll receive the full approval soon. I'll be posting more information over at the SeventyTwo website at http://www.seventytwo.org and showing you all the different types of work where we will be partnering. I've been providing some blog-style updates there as well, so be sure and watch that site if you're interested in seeing the ongoing details.

Revamp of T1 Host

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 12:52:29 GMT

I've had in mind for a while that I'm wanting to revamp T1 Host. Instead of offering many different types of services, I'm wanting to focus in specifically on the Manila Website offering, especially since that is what most of my customers use from T1 Host and it is where I have the most expertise and understanding to provide help to my customers. Manila also provides the most flexibility in terms of offering good solutions to most customer needs. Those all seem like great reasons to me to just decide to get rid of most of the other services and offer Manila, almost exclusively.

To that end, I have been working on a series of movies that will help people understand how you can use the software to develop your website. I find that most people pick it up very quickly, but it does take a little orientation because it isn't the same as most websites. Certainly, there are a lot of high-end technical aspects to Manila, but it can be used easily by most people, even those who would not consider themselves "technical" at all. Those are the folks that I have in mind in my initial round of movies, but then I will turn my attention to some of the higher-end usability questions for Manila so you can fine-tune your website and use many of the functions available that most never utilize. After that, I will work through all of the web designer features and show how to create one or multiple templates, include style sheets and javascript, and utilize macros as you become more and more sophisticated in including automated inclusion of content into the template for your site.

For now, I have published the first version of the first movie. You can see it by clicking the link below.

Launch Movie!

New Church: Misseo Dei

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 13:08:30 GMT

Our family has been a part of a new church called Misseo Dei which is part of what is becoming a new network called Sentralized. We've really been enjoying this place as a community where we can land and be a part of what is going on. It is led by Matt and Genieve Grube who we've known for a while through other churches that we have been a part of, but never really that well. I think Matt is 30 now, and especially for a young guy, I think he has really been doing a great job of leading our little church toward something that I think is sorely needed in the St. Louis area.

Right now, we're a small church meeting on Saturday nights in what you might think of as a house church, although we get together in a small fellowship hall in a church here in the area. One of the things that I really like, though, is the concept that church is much more than what happens during the meeting once a week. For example, a big thing that we do is what are called Outbreaks. These are what you might think of as service projects that happen at least a couple of times per month, although lately there has been one each weekend. We've been working with a women's recovery home that is run by a drug counseling center here in the area. We've done some other things as well like working with the Urban Farming folks in St. Louis (see the video I did on that outing) among other things. Clearly, we hope to do good and serve our community but I also think that one of the main things about this is the intrinsic value that comes for those within the community. I think it sets a great precedent and creates a culture that we would like to set from the start within the church.

Matt is going to do some vision casting and set some definition around who we are as a community and where we are going over the next few weeks. I think I could probably guess many of the points that he will make, but I'm definitely looking forward hearing what he has to say. More to come...