A (not so) gentle reminder

My computer crashed the other day. It shut down a few times on it's own, gave the blue screen of death and then upon trying to reboot notified me that it could not find the hard disk drive. Crap!

I tried and tried to get it going - not really knowing what I was doing. I tried to do a system restore with a really old back up disk I had - nothing worked. I was frustrated. I was mad. Mad at myself for not backing up my system regularly. I have all my really important working documents on a USB Drive, but I still had a lot of things like music, tv shows, pictures and all my uploaded emails on my hard drive. After hours of trying, I finally had resigned myself that I may lose everything. Fine. But the second problem is actually getting it back to working order, even if everything is lost. I don't have my start up disks here and I really don't know if I trust anyone here to work on it. That means sending it back to Canada. Luckily, a group is coming down next week, so I can send it back with them and then have my parents bring it back down at the end of January when we meet them in the DR. But still, that's a month without MY computer.

The truth is, i'm upset about the inconvienence of it all. No longer can I look at and write responses to nicely organized emails offline, instead I have to get on the internet (which has been working at a snails pace lately) and search through the 3000 unsorted emails that occupy my yahoo account. I can't listen to my music. I can't what my tv shows when I just want to relax.

It hit me yesterday, when we were at the beach with friends (seemed like a good distraction from the computer problem), that what I was trying so hard to avoid had found me. You see, in Haiti, you can keep yourself very removed from the materialism and consumerism that is so much of a North American Christmas. I found it very refreshing. But, it turns out it can find you here as well. I had put so much of myself into the computer, I had forgotten what really can give life and joy. Not things, but God's love and the relationships of family and friends around me.

And so, I think I've been able to let go of the frustration. Life will go on, maybe a bit differently, but that's okay.

May God bless you deeply this Christmas. Joyeux Noel!