Leon's England Blog

***Doulos Trip***
Well it was 1.5 weeks ago and late on a Wednesday evening that it was decided between me and my boss that my work on the Doulos there in Singapore could come to an end ASAP. So 24 hours later on Thursday evening you found me heading to the airport to fly back to Carlisle. While in Singapore I actually spent very little time off the Doulos.


Teaching the IT department on the Doulos


Daniel, Pim, Jay Lee and Yuriy are my students

I was able to bring a lot of stability in the IT department for the first critical week after the news broke that the ship was going to be decommissioned. It then become increasingly obvious that much of the decommissioning of the computer systems was going to be much later than the first knee jerk reaction of the end of this year. This in practicality means that the IT systems will not be shutdown until late January or as late as even March. Because those plans were coming more into focus as my time on board grew, it did not make sense for me to continue my time on board until my original departure date of 14/12 (today). After the first flurry of work after the news broke, things had died down for work and I was not really doing much work anymore on board the ship. I therefore booked the soonest reasonable flight back to Carlisle. I might have to return the Doulos at some point. It is undetermined at this time.


Bonsai Garden

The Thursday evening I flew out I felt quite ill. I was so completely exhausted from a busy last day of work. There were also some personnel changes in the IT department that occurred the last day which I found quite difficult. So I had that on my mind and I was quite excited about returning home after being away for so long in a situation I had necessarily signed up for. All that had exhausted me beyond a point which I would have liked. I thankfully had no jet lag upon reaching Carlisle to speak about and actually felt completely rested after my flight back. It was a tremendous answer to prayer for me to not be tired when getting back to Carlisle. Because I came back to Carlisle early I was able to attend our office Christmas party the evening I arrived back in Carlisle and participate in the céilidh.

Photos from Doulos and Singapore
Photos from the Singapore Chinese and Japanese Gardens
Photos from the Singapore National Botanical Gardens
Photos from the Night Safari in Singapore

***Back in Carlisle***
Since arriving back in Carlisle I have been quite busy with work again. It has really been a joy to get back here. I was feeling lots of different pressures from all different sides when I was out on the Doulos. I had not made a lot of friends when I was out there which did contribute to that I think. I did not have many people to chat with about all that I was dealing with. The work I was doing there was much more dealing with political and people issues and not the technical side of things which I much more enjoy.
I have been in meetings every day since being back in the office for all the different computer projects I am working on. I am pleased to see how much progress has been seen in the past 5 days of work since being away for 4 weeks.

***US for holidays***

I had not anticipated being able to spend Christmas in the US since the original plans were to be on the Doulos until they reached Oman and then get back into Carlisle around 19/12. It would have been too late to fly to the US on an inexpensive ticket. This would have been my 4th Christmas in a row away from family so I am pretty happy to be there this year. Because of all the changes that have happened in the past month I now have the opportunity to go to the States. I will be pretty busy with family while there but let me know if you really wanted to meet up and we can see if it works into our schedules. I fly out tomorrow 15/12 to the US and will return to the UK on 28/12.

I am in the midst of an historic moment for OM. The ministry of OM’s ship Doulos will come to an end on 31st December 2009. The hearts of thousands upon thousands of Christians touched by the ministry of Doulos are turned towards Singapore where she is berthed for dry dock work.

Doulos is the world’s oldest ocean-going passenger ship, now 95 years old, with the hull built in 1914, just two years after Titanic. The ship is presently in Singapore and has been undergoing the annual period of dry dock and marine surveys. In spite of the all year round maintenance that has taken place, the amount of steel replacement and other repairs needed for her to continue sailing are overwhelming. These surveys are what brought about this revelation.

Early indications are that the work would cost over €10 million and take five months to complete. The OM Ships executive leadership team and board believes that is not appropriate to invest resources of this scale into the ship, since Doulos would have a limited ministry future.

Needless to say this has come as quite a shock to the community. It was very much a surprise to everyone as it was thought that we would be able to sail the ship at least through September, 2010. There are 295 people living on board the ship at present of which 2/3 of the community were on land based ministry teams in South Asia as the ship has been progressing through the dry dock work. Everyone is now back on the ship and they are coming to grips with the knowledge that after Christmas they won’t have a home or ministry onboard the Doulos.

***Info about the Doulos Ministry***
Over one million visitors come on board each year to browse the hallmark of the ship’s ministry—a large floating book fair with 6,000 titles in stock, including books for university studies, professional and career interests, history, science, economics, language learning, hobbies, novels, children's stories, biographies, dictionaries, atlases and a wide variety of Christian resources, including Bibles, study materials and books on Christian living.

The ships also bring aid and relief to needy people and places around the world. Crewmembers go ashore to provide medical aid, help construct schools, orphanages and homes, and give gifts of food, clothing and books. Teams also visit hospitals, orphanages and prisons to share God’s compassion and love. This is just a small picture into their ministry. They run conferences, evangelistic outreaches, mobilize Christians into action and exhibit God’s love to the nations of the world.

Since 1970, more than 40 million people have visited the ships during more than 1,350 port visits in 158 nations.

***What this means for me?!***
I came to the Doulos to train the IT staff on how to operate their systems and how to be better IT professionals. That role has now changed drastically to one of decommissioning the IT systems on board. The IT staff onboard are completely unable to cope with the task of this magnitude and complexity. I found out the definite news on Thursday, 19th of November and have been scrambling since then to work out a plan of attack on how to actually do this.

God has been in this trip. Thank you already for all your prayers. Even before this news I have seen God’s hand at work in a number of ways. One way was that I “accidentally” purchased a return ticket from Singapore when I had intended to purchase a one way ticket because the intentions were for me to return from Oman in the Arabian Peninsula. All the travel arrangements had not been booked yet for my return from Oman. So my accident has been used by God for good as I can now use the return leg of my flight.

Another thing is the fact that I am actually here on board the ship is remarkable. There is only a handful of people within OM capable of shutting down the IT systems on board. The others have families and could not be out here in such an indefinite situation as I find myself. Everyone on board is touched in some way with the IT systems and it is a comfort to the guys that I am here to help them through these final few weeks.

Thursday evening after the news was released I immediately began to work with the Ships IT staff back in Carlisle to come up with a 2 page initial plan of attack. Over the coming weeks leading to her final decommissioning we will need to lots of things to safely remove all IT systems apart from those required for her final sailing. I am uncertain when I might return to Carlisle because of this.

***Prayer Requests***

1. The crewmembers are most effected and don’t know where they are going? They can possible go to OM’s sister ship the Logos Hope. But many will need to think about other OM fields. This could means visas, language difficulties, and is going to be total upheaval. Many are still coping with why this has happened.
   
2. We have lots of work and not a lot of clarity for the timeline. The crewmembers might need to leave the ship before 31/12. They may be allowed to stay until 15/01. I don’t know when I can actually do many of the tasks that must be done for the decommissioning of IT systems.
   
3. I am burning the candle at both ends to try to coordinate with Carlisle on various things. They are an 8 hour time difference. I also still have work that must go on for my role with OM International and that is with a company in the US which is a 13 hours time difference. I need rest.
   
4. I need wisdom for everything that must be done. I have a lot going on right now in my life that I am trying to internalize and process.
   

Ezra Pound
translated from a poem by Latin humanist, Janus Vitalis of Palermo. I discovered this poem on a plaque while walking around all the Roman ruins in Rome.

O thou new comer who seek'st Rome in Rome
And find'st in Rome no thing thou canst call Roman
Arches worn old and palaces made common,
Rome's name alone within these walls keeps home.

Behold how pride and ruin can befall
One who hath set the whole world 'neath her laws,
All-conquering, now conquered, because
She is Time's prey and Time consumeth all.

Rome that art Rome's one sole last monument,
Rome that alone hast conquered Rome the town,
Tiber alone, transient and seaward bent,

Remains of Rome. O world, thou unconstant mime!
That which stands firm in thee Time batters down,
And that which fleeteth doth outrun swift time.


Temple of Castor

Well since I wrote my last update I have been travelling more than I have been in Carlisle.

***Past Travels***

I started my travels with an overnight trip to Birmingham to do some training. That went really well I think based upon the outcomes I am seeing. The one guy has really run with the training and put it into practice.

I was back for one work day and a weekend in Carlisle before I left for Brussels to prepare and teach OM’s IT systems administrator course. I was one of three trainers. The participants went away sobered on what has not been done in the past in their country and with a lot more knowledge on how OM’s IT systems operate. I feel that we come close to overwhelming them with critical information. It quite often is a steep learning curve for those that have no real background in IT and have become the go-to-guy for their countries. The Sunday of the training was a day of rest and relaxation. I borrowed some cycles and a participant and I cycled to a nearby town on Sunday afternoon. That was a real highlight for me doing the training. Otherwise each day of the training I was kept busy from morning until late in the evening.


I am passing out assignments for the lab. I am about to start teaching about WPKG.


Teaching data destruction.


I cycled to Leuven with Trev.

I was pretty tired by the end of the training. That was why I decided to schedule a holiday afterwards so that I could be fully rested from the training and the busy summer months I have had. I knew I was going out to the Doulos in late autumn so I wanted t be fully rested before I went there.

I went on holiday directly from Brussels to Venice and Rome. My getting to Venice was very much a miracle as I should have missed the last train to the airport for my flight, but for the fact that my connecting train was late by 5 minutes. Even so, I dashed up the stairs to the platform and onto the train as the doors was closing. I was that close to missing the train. Thank you for your prayers during my travels.

Venice and Rome are two very different locations in so many ways. I was able to get some nice time with God and really relax and refresh during the holiday. I returned to Carlisle for 2.5 weeks of work before I head out to the Doulos. The holiday was done alone which was not exactly what I would prefer but how it worked out. Because I was alone in a country that I don’t speak the language I find myself doing a lot of introspection and reflecting. Venice is a very picturesque place and there was lots of time to just sit and enjoy the scenery. Rome was much more a sightseeing place. I felt more compelled to see the “sites” in Rome whereas in Venice there were no really big places you have to go see. It was just beautiful and interesting everywhere I looked.


Venice sunset


Coliseum

Rome Photo Gallery
Venice Photo Gallery
Belgian Photo Gallery

***Carlisle Work***
I have been working to sort through a lot of various bits and bobs at work before I leave again.

On the email side of things I have been testing a commercial spam filtering solution. It is critical for our organization to have an outsourced solution because we need the anonymity that is provided by routing our email through a system where thousands of other organizations also route their email. So far the testing is going well. We need to make a decision this week on whether to go forward with the solution I have been testing. Since we moved all the email to the US last month we have already grown by 100 to 1300 the number of mailboxes being used on the centralized email solution.

Since last year I have been doing most of the IT support for OM’s Ireland office. I have someone there who is pretty competent but I tend to do the more complicated things remotely. They recently purchased 2 new computers and I have been working the last week to get them all up and running.

***Doulos Trip***

But the major milestone in my life is a trip out to the Doulos for 6 weeks to return just before Christmas. The second OM ship is in dry dock in Singapore where I will join her in a week’s time. I have a number of IT projects to work on for them. They are without any fully skilled IT personnel at the moment and those in their IT department need training. I will be doing the training and working on trying to get through a good number of the IT projects that have been queuing. The IT department has some personnel issues that I will be walking into as well.

After dry dock the ship will be sailing to Phuket, Thailand and then across the Indian Ocean to Muscat, Oman. I anticipate the time to be quite a tiring trip even though it will be good fun to visit some of these countries.

***Carlisle Life***

My ankle is all better from what I can tell. Thanks to all who have been asking and praying. I have been unable to attend Ultimate Frisbee that much this autumn mostly because of my travels.

Last weekend I spent contacting those who financially supporting me. It was encouraging to see those that are committed to continue their support of me. I have a few more people to contact before I head out on this next trip. This weekend was spent mowing, raking leaves and clearing out all the garden beds of this year’s dead and dying organic matter.

Church is going well. People at church notice when I am away and are so nice to say that they miss me when I am away. We moved into new facilities at the beginning of the school year. Since the move we seem to have many more new people than normal each week showing up at the Sunday service. The Saturday I fly out to Singapore will be our church’s 5 year anniversary.

I am also in a new home group but I have yet to attend because I have been away so much. In the new home group I have been asked to work as an assistant home group leader. I am not really certain what my title actually means though. I am certainly not setting a good attendance example.

***Prayer Requests***

1. Safety in travels and that I draw closer to God during this extended time away from home.
   
2. Wisdom for all the difficult things I anticipate to have to work on when I get to the Doulos.
   
3. Endurance to get through the large work load I will have on the ship in addition to some work I will still do remotely back in Carlisle.

***Life Around Carlisle***
I had a really enjoyable visit to Sweden at the end of August to visit my friend Mona. It was only a short 3 day holiday but one which I quite enjoyed. I had never properly been to Sweden before and I found it quite relaxing. The scenery in the country was quite pretty and it was nice catching up with my friend.

Sunset in Sweden


Visiting a fortress in the harbour of Gothenburg
dungeon


I went with 2 colleagues to Yorkshire to attempt a 3 Peaks Challenge. I made it to the top of the first peak but then my ankle started bothering me quite badly and I had to go back early to the car and waited for the others to return. I still got some nice photos and enjoyed my day out. We had brilliant weather for the walk.

Yorkshire Dales in the background


Me, Bernd and Andrew


Limping along without a boot because of the pain my boot gave me viaduct and me carrying my boot


I have been playing a lot of Ultimate Frisbee here in Carlisle. I am playing on a team that practices twice a week. We quite often go afterwards to the pub for drinks. Sometimes during the week we will get together to go to the cinema, go on a walk or otherwise hang out together. They are a good group of people and I have had a few opportunities to talk about my Christian faith with a few of them. My experience with people here in the UK is that evangelism is very relational and I hope to be able to soon invite some of them to a few activities that church is planning this autumn.

***Work***
I have been really busy with support calls from various fields in OM over the past month. Nearly every day I work with Ireland and have spent a few late nights working with Mexico and Brazil. Throw in some work for the local team and the Netherlands and my time has been spent working on servers that span the globe.

When I am not doing support for OM fields I have been finishing moving mailboxes from Carlisle to the US. This week Wednesday I moved the last mailbox. We now have 1200 mailboxes in the US that amount to 430 gigabytes of email data. So the major part of the migration is all done now and there are just a few bits and bobs to sort out. I went back through my email and discovered that we first started discussing a centralized Exchange service in of August 2006. Now 3 years later after lots of research, discussions and implementation we have a centralized email server. So you can imagine that I am over the moon with getting that done. I am now spending time working with fields to get them moved off of using their local Linux based email server to Exchange. I have a lot to document and many people asking questions and training to do for Exchange. I am actually down to Birmingham for 2 days next week to teach two of our area IT directors how to use Exchange and how they can migrate 300-500 of their missionaries in their area to start using Exchange.

Now that we are centralizing email we can start to investigate going to a single email address format for everyone of something@om.org instead of something@field.om.org. This would really simplify things for the organization if we could operate under the one name space. I have begun thinking through all the implications and practicalities of what that would mean for the organization. There is still much to work through on that question, but probably in the 2-3 years OM will move to a single name space for their email addresses.

I have also been researching a method for email distribution group internally to OM. We have currently been using Yahoo Groups for sending emails to all our OM'ers but this has not been a good policy because of security concerns. Yahoo Groups are not secure and we email confidential data on those lists which is not good. Now that we have a centralized email service we can more simply implement such a solution that is all internal and secure within OM.

As well, now that we have so many people using Exchange for email we recognize that we need a good way to manage all these mailboxes. The Microsoft solution is a bit of a mix bag for our purposes unfortunately. We are therefore looking at ways to do all the administration through a web page. Three weeks ago a new guy, Johan - a young man from Sweden, joined the team. He has begun working for me to investigate possible solutions to this management question. Johan has been a good help already to me.

***Leaving OM? Yes or No?***
I have been praying about this question for some time. I have not felt God leading me back to the US at this point in my life. This is now the third time I have decided to stay longer with OM. This time around I am not setting an end date although will continue to re-evaluate this decision at appropriate intervals. What this does mean for me is that I will need people to continue supporting me financially and in prayer. I am much appreciative of those who do support me. But it is a concern that will need to be addressed fairly quickly before I head out on various trips this autumn.

***Travels***
I am doing a bit of travel this autumn. Most of my travels are work related but I am fitting in a one week holiday to rest and rejuvenate. My travels start this upcoming week with a trip to:
Location Date* Purpose
Birmingham, England 30/09-01/10 teaching Exchange (email) management and terminal services
Brussels, Belgium 05/10-14/10 teaching IT administrators at our yearly sysadmin training course
Venice, Italy 14/10-/17/10 holiday
Rome, Italy 17/10-21/10 holiday
Doulos in Singapore 06/11-TBD** teaching IT staff and doing some project work
*European date format of day/month
**Either 3 weeks or 6 weeks. The Doulos is one of OM's ships

***Prayer Requests***

1. Continued opportunities to witness to those playing Ultimate Frisbee
   
2. Safety in my travels
   
3. Stay close to God while travelling
   
4. People will desire to support me financially in my continued ministry with OM