A Day in Latvia

Because I’m creating a new program, there isn’t much routine to my days. I’m most often working from home which is not my best setting – I’m easily distracted and because there aren’t a lot of urgent tasks I don’t feel motivated to work very hard. I’m a project oriented person and much of what I should be doing now is simply studying and organizing to get ready for training to begin. I know that once the training program opens, I’ll be so busy I won’t have the luxury of distractions. But, that’s when I’m at my best, so I look forward to it.

So, here’s what I did today. I’m getting the application forms for training ready, but as with most things that doesn’t involve a lot of work by me. It mainly requires finding people to translate from English to Latvian, Latvian to Russian, Swedish to Latvian to English to Russian, etc. This is the biggest frustration about my work, because I have no control over the quality or even the ability to double check. So, the applications arrived from Sweden and I had first to find a Latvian who can read Swedish and translate it to Latvian. Then, so that I could know what the forms said, it had to be translated from Latvian into English. Getting that done has taken several months. Once I had an idea of what the forms said, I had to do some editing (in English) to make them appropriate for our needs. Today I sat for a couple of hours with Henrik and went over all of the documents. He is Danish and reads some Swedish and has good English skills. He read through the Swedish forms while I attempted to decipher the Latvian and made changes on the English. Then I have to have the Latvian corrected. And by the way, we are having the forms translated from Latvian to Russian, too.

While we were in the middle of today, it seemed like just a normal day. But, when you think about what we were trying to do – it’s pretty funny and in my more cynical moments, I would say it’s ridiculous to think that we could have any kind of acceptable documents from our work. But, we are all we’ve got. I mean there are others who could have replaced one of us at our skill level, but no one who is expert in what we were doing.
This was just a taste of what I’ll be trying to do when I get applications turned in, written in Latvian and Russian. And then I can’t even think about how I’ll handle homework during the training program! This is a miracle of God’s grace and probably, patience! and we have to have those kinds of miracles every day if this is really supposed to happen.