My First Week in Dallas! (non-GIAL)

Kinda jumbly at parts because I just wanted to write things down since I have basically not written anything about my life in a public space for months.  oops.  Anyway...

A not-so-good introduction to Dallas, as it took a while for my luggage to come, and I was worried I wouldn't make the 2 hours of public transportation in time to arrive by 5 p.m. and talk with the office people about whether they had received my check payment and if they had any other info for me. So I took the Super Shuttle, which initially they estimated was gonna cost ~$30 which I thought wasn't terrible.  Then I found out that since we were going to a residential area, that was gonna cost ~$50 but i nope'd the heck out of there when we got to Downtown and spent just $20.  Then I took a 2-hour pass for $2.50 to get to GIAL.  It was still another mile away from the bus stop, and as I reached the last .6 miles or so, the road that led to GIAL did not have any sidewalks.  I started laughing at the utter patheticness of my situation as I was in around 95 or 100 degree heat, mild humidity (less humid than Houston for sure) but with the sun beating down on me as I dragged 40 and 60 lb luggage with a 15 lb backpack on the dirt and grass on the side of the road and the only sleep I had gotten last night was the few hours I was on the plane, and the only food I had eaten was at 6 a.m. CT and this McDouble sandwich at 3 p.m. CT that I had gotten after I missed the first train because both the electronic booths passing out tickets on my side of the tracks were broken.   And I was not going to make it by 5 p.m. because I had like 12 minutes to go and once I was at GIAL, I still needed to figure out where the Guest House is.  Fortunately, a guy pulled over and asked if I needed a ride, and I was like, YES PLEASE.  I made it on time, fortunately, so all was good.  I could see God looking out for me there!  phew.

I also tried to get groceries... too bad the nearest grocery store was 2.5 miles away.  But I lugged all that stuff back with my superglued Bolivian "Puma" backpack and got my workout for the week.  haha.

That was Wednesday, and on Friday, after extensive research, I spent 4 hours on public transportation and 5 miles walking to buy a car. (2 hours of transportation and 2 miles of walking were kinda unnecessary though, as I went to the auto place that had the cars I wanted, only to find out that the address they listed online was a different one.  The actual one was on the other side of town and another 2 hours of transportation/walking.  =\ ) When I got to the place, I tried out two '97 Honda Accords which were $1,600 and $1,800 each and probably sketchiest cars I will ever drive, and probably sketchier than any car you will ever drive.  The $1600 had a broken windshield wiper, the cruise control was broken, it made strange sounds while I was driving it, and even the little button on the gear changer (generally that silver-colored button that you press to change gears from P) was missing, so I dug my thumb in there to find how to change it.  And from the NMVTIDS report (2 dolla here!  but it gives way less info than Carfax/Autocheck... i just didn't want to pay that much for those vehicle reports.  And read this article if you don't know what those are.), which I later confirmed with the auto sale owner, there had been at least a 40,000 mile odometer roll back.
That all I could maybe deal with (bargaining points to drive the price down), even if I felt pretty unsafe already just from test-driving it... but as I was taking it into a shop for a pre-purchase inspection, I happened to notice that there were no keys in the ignition.  I was like.  wut.  I told the person I was taking it for an inspection, how could they forget to give me the keys??? How could I even drive this car back/have an inspection on this car?  Furthermore, how was I even driving this car right now??  Sketch.

So I drove it back and got the white Accord, which likely didn't have an odometer rollback and had good mileage.  It felt safer, but the brake still felt a bit heavy, and when the owner first started up the car, it made horrible screeching noises because the fan belt for the A/C was about gone.  I drove the car into the auto place I was gonna have it checked at (i just looked for the closest one that would give me a reasonable rate/time... $90 and a hour.  there was one place that apparently did a really through job they said, but they charged $250 and spent half-a-day!  I didn't need that kind of quality for my car...) and waited.

They came back to tell me that it was in really bad shape.  Like really bad.  Like so bad that even though there was a state inspection sticker on it, it wouldn't pass state inspection.  So bad that one guy said he was surprised I made it here in that.  The guy who had been handling my transaction began listing off all the problems, and there were so many that I began to zone out (not to mention I didn't understand like most of it).  He later gave me a photocopy of the inspection, and here're the ones I can read, which are half of the problems:  parking lights are out, battery hold down, belt oil soaked and slinging oil, valve over leak, transmission fluid overfilled, check engine light on, possible timing belt problem, cruise control broken, left tire cracked, radiator fan not working, transmission has multiple leaks.
It would probably cost as much to repair the car as it would to buy it.

Great.  That was really my last option, especially as we were nearing the closing times of both auto places, and this would mean that I would have to pay another $90 for another inspection on some other day and that car might not even work out, and UGH.  Maybe I can't get a decent car for such a low price?

Fortunately, after asking for my budget, if I just wanted a cheap car that ran well, he mentioned that they had a car that had none of those problems, and even better mileage than this car.  He showed it to me and it was a 1995 Acura Integra that had about 100,330 miles that they fixed up and were selling for $2500.

So after driving the Accord back, I walked the mile over, test-drove it, looked over the paperwork and bought another 2 dolla report for it, and bought it (my haggling failed, as it was hard to point out anything bad besides the slight dent that the guy had already pointed out to me, and since he had a list of all the repairs they had done on it [new 4 tires, new timing belt, so many new things done just a couple weeks ago], and apparently it wasn't listed yet and he was gonna sell it for $2700 [or so he says...], and that people would snatch that up immediately).
Unfortunately, apparently you need liability insurance already to drive a car, and I didn't have that.  So I couldn't drive it back, but I was at least able to make the last bus back to GIAL, so it was only 2 additional hours of public transportation and 1 additional mile instead of 1 hour of transportation and like 4 hours of walking.  Still, I had been sweaty to that nasty point when your sweat has like dried on your clothes and you have white lines on your shirt from the salt in your sweat--you know what I'm talking about?  Yeah, not pretty.  I had tried to clean myself up when I was at the auto shop waiting for the pre-purchase inspection.  There's my workout for the month, I guess, haha.  
Anyway, I got car insurance and will hopefully be picking up my Acura on Tuesday, today!  (just picked up my car--radio needs a code, but it seems alright... although I just checked kbb.com and it seems to be not a good price for what I paid for.  =\  I could've sworn when I was about to buy it and I was checking kbb.com, that it was actually around the right price.  Ah well.  Fortunately, a new friend and classmate offered to drive me over there, so I saved me a bunch of time.)


Went to a great church on Sunday--Mountain Creek Church, which is pretty much the closest church that I could go to which has its own facility.  I enjoyed it a lot, and was treated to lunch by one of the congregation members.  Although I found out at the end that it's a charismatic church (pretty orthodox in its beliefs though) so that'll be interesting to explore more.

Some highlights were that a couple girls got up to the pulpit and talked about the pro-life bill that had passed (she had been at Captiol praying and listening to the bill) and about the Trayvon Martin trial and just the fact that justice looks different.  Ok, I am absolutely butchering what they said... let me try again.

While I do think that a fetus is a human being and thus abortion is murder and a violation of fourteenth amendment rights for the silenced, I am wary of how pro-life people typically approach this issue.  There's that George Carlin quote that pretty much sums it up, "Boy, these conservatives are really something, aren't they? They're all in favor of the unborn. They will do anything for the unborn. But once you're born, you're on your own. Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to nine months. After that, they don't want to know about you. They don't want to hear from you. No nothing. No neonatal care, no day care, no head start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, no nothing. If you're preborn, you're fine; if you're preschool, you're fucked." And this great spoken word poem:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOV7RyHjl5c.  I just watched that again--really really good.  The amazing kind of poem that inspires you to want to write poetry that's just that incredible and emotionally-charged.

Anyway, it boils down to, sure, abortion is bad and no one is pro-abortion and wants to kill all the fetuses, but when you don't set up an infrastructure for women with unplanned pregnancies, when the only legislation they have is poverty and no education and terrible jobs and no way out, how can you say that is life?  That is a societal injustice when people cannot take care of their children because of financial reasons.  They truly have no choice.

So the first girl reminded us to look at others with the eyes of God and see them as broken people like ourselves.  She mentioned how she was really promiscuous growing up and that one of the leading causes of that is fatherlessness and how we had to have compassion.  Her underlying message was one not of condemnation, but of love, and that she had been praying and felt that we needed to change how we were viewing and handling things.  Justice isn't how we've been doing things.  Justice looks different.  It looks different because He is different. I liked all of that.
From reading their website, I knew Mountain Creek was big on pro-life, but still not sure if they seriously partner with other organizations which support women with unplanned pregnancies.  Maybe they feel like it's better to focus on the anti-abortion side?  I think i'd disagree there.  It's like focusing on outlawing gay marriage and forgetting about the LGBTQ population.  What she said was a good step though.

Then, a second girl, who was black, asked to speak a bit, and she talked about how the African-American community was on the verge of rioting from the Zimmerman verdict, but how even though it was easy to get angry at what happened, that, like the first girl said, justice looks different.  That willingness to forgive and to not react violently... it brought me to tears and kinda solidified my desire to go to that church.  You could debate as to whether the imbalance that led to situations like the Martin case is "justice," but really at the end, God will judge everything, and He is the only perfect judge.  Looking back, that whole forgiveness deal was a great segue to what this guy who was invited to the church was gonna talk about, which I've written below.

The pastor then gave a pretty brief sermon, mostly for the sake of a guy who came to speak, Peter... something... but he had a really intense testimony.  Probably the most intense one I'll ever hear (the pastor of the church, who's probably around 70+ since he just celebrated his golden anniversary, said something to the effect that it was the most incredible testimony he's heard).

I'll give a short version.  He was born in a Nazi death camp in 1943 and was experimented on, but he doesn't remember that anymore.  Fortunately, he and his mother were liberated, but his mother passed him to this stranger before leaving, a Polish woman who was on the train with them as it was being liberated.  His mom promised she'd be back for him. After camp, life was even worse, as he was raped, tortured, and almost killed multiple times as a child by the KGB, and he eventually met up with his mom, and left his Polish mom (another shocker for him, since he didn't know that he had a German mom), even though his Polish mom was so good to him (she wanted him to go meet his mom though; she was Catholic and she'd made an oath to God to take care of him) and had endured so much persecution for taking care of a German boy (they had to live in the sewers; or maybe that was just their state of poverty), and she even offered herself to be raped by the KGB so he wouldn't get executed by a gun that they put in his mouth.

His mother in the meantime went to a US military base and she had married a black man in the US.  When he went to the US, he was still beat on by other kids (stepfather's race, and probably cause he didn't speak English either at the time).  His stepfather became an alcoholic and he ran away from home and was picked up by a Missouri (or Mississippi?) guy who would eventually become the state representative.  Life was good for a while and he lived for like 40 years in Florida, but then his half-sisters wanted him to spread their mother's ashes over the death camp.  He was like, No way, but eventually he went back.

While he was there, he felt that God was telling him to forgive them so that God could forgive his trespasses (Matthew 6:14), and he was like, What the hell did I do wrong?  But eventually after arguing over it with God, he said he forgave them, and then the Holy Spirit descended on him and he was able to pretty much became a Christian I guess.  Hmmm, I'm a little fuzzy on the details, but in any case, it was some pretty supernatural forgiveness going on, since he didn't sound bitter or angry at all during his testimony.  And he called us each to forgive and also to receive healing and prayer from the hurt that we had received, from whatever abandonment had happened to us.

Like I said earlier, after church, the head of missions pastor took me out to lunch with his wife and their daughter, grandson, and two close newlywed friends joined us.  That was nice to have a hearty meal after three meals of just eating bread (lol), and to have a ride back to GIAL.  As I was walking to Mountain Creek, in fact, someone else had stopped and given me a ride for the last leg up the hill, and offered to take me back to GIAL.  Also really nice.  =)


Finally, today as I was eating lunch with other students, I heard a, "NO WAY!" and looked up and saw Selena Y from Houston!  I had seen her name on the list of Guest House meal people, but I just thought it was some random Asian girl, and thought it was funny that I also knew a Selena Y.  She's apparently doing an internship with Wycliffe and is here until the beginning of August.  She sat with my classmates and we all just chatted for a bit.  Nice to see someone I know.  =)