Lost in Translation

Yesterday afternoon, Sue got a call from one of her ESL students, wondering if I would be willing to do some translation at one of the firms out in the industrial district of Bauru. She figured it would take about an hour, there would be no technical language involved, and I’d be paid for it.

I when I finally found the place – no name or number on the building – I went in to find a guy from England who’d come to fix on of the huge machines. His name was Clive, he owns the company that builds the machine and he’d been here about a year ago to put the machine together. However, there was only one guy who learned how to run the machine, and the company has three shifts running 24 hours thus two guys who didn’t know what they were doing with a million dollar machine. And that was just one of the problems in this situation.

As we talked, Clive asked what I was doing in Brazil. When I told him that I was a missionary, he responded with “Well, I guess that works.” I’m not sure what he meant or if he was expecting an engineer-translator or what. Anyway, the machine was cool, the guys were good to work with and it was an interesting break from routine in spite of some technical terms that were thrown in. One hour of translation turned into three hours, though they wanted us to stay into the next shift (fortunately, Clive had been traveling and working for twenty-six hours already so the answer was no to that and the machine shut down until this morning). In the end, I left with no cash in hand. The manager invited me to come back and translate for the week Clive was here, but I explained that I really did work (even though only a missionary), and just couldn’t accept the offer.

I’ll be finishing up the series on Signs of Life during the next three weeks, and the third Saturday folks from church will be divided into groups and going out on Christian service assignments in the community. Our small groups are doing smaller scale service assignments as well. It’s fun planning the assignments, but will be interesting seeing how many come out to really do them.
Hopefully, we can be motivational!

Life is pretty normal, and there hasn’t been much to take pictures of.. Maybe October will be better. My wife reminded me that we did go to the flower feira on our day off so she could look at flowers for an upcoming wedding she’s decorating for. Here’s a shot.