Cold air conditioning, a stubborn computer, and Redemption Hill

Walking around Singapore, you quickly learn one golden rule: look for the air conditioning! Temperatures here easily reach thirty degrees Celsius or higher every single day, and the tropical humidity makes you sweat after just five steps. For locals, stepping into a shopping mall right after a busy workday is completely second nature. Not necessarily to buy anything, but simply to cool down in the wonderfully chilled air for free. By now, I have happily joined in. As soon as my workday wraps up, I often wander into a cool mall or a covered square packed with food stalls to catch my breath. The food never gets boring either. I eat rice almost every day now, but with so many different cuisines and stalls, dinner is an adventure every evening (see the photo above of the covered food court in Holland Village).

Last Saturday was one of those days that will really stick with me. Two of my housemates spend hours in the kitchen every Saturday preparing huge pots of food for Sunday church. I pulled up a chair, and we chatted for hours about anything and everything. And naturally, whoever helps in the kitchen has to taste-test what is simmering, so we did our duty and tasted plenty! Everyday life on this side of the world is truly becoming familiar, though I do miss family and friends at times. Because we are six hours ahead of the Netherlands, you cannot just make a spontaneous phone call whenever you feel like catching up. When people back home wake up, my workday is already nearly over. It really makes you appreciate how precious a quick phone call or a familiar voice from home is.

On Sunday I visited Redemption Hill Church in Chinatown. Because dedicated church buildings are rare and extremely expensive here, this congregation gathers in a hotel ballroom. Right from the opening minutes, I felt remarkably at home. The atmosphere and preaching strongly reminded me of the well-known pastor Tim Keller: grounded, deeply rooted in God's grace, and very practical for everyday life in a bustling metropolis. After the service, I joined a group of young adults for lunch. We immediately got into wonderful, open conversations about how each of us experiences faith in a city where performance often takes first place. It was so encouraging to get to know new people so quickly and feel welcomed into the church family.

Back at the OMF office, things were anything but quiet. We are still hard at work searching for an affordable software solution to create reliable backups of all our central data. The package we considered last week simply turned out to be too expensive for a mission organisation where every donation counts. Thankfully, I came across another promising option today. I contacted the makers right away and hope to hear more tomorrow. I have also been setting up a new central computer to better secure our connections from the outside world. Lately, we have noticed more and more automated attempts from digital intruders trying to guess the password to our digital front door. We want to lock that door completely and replace it with a modern lock system: only those who genuinely need access get a direct, tightly secured line to their specific room, without the whole hallway being left open. That makes it much easier to sleep at night.

And then there is our old friend: the computer running our bookkeeping system. It stubbornly continues to give us headaches. Colleagues randomly get kicked out, cannot access their accounts, and even basic buttons in Windows suddenly stop responding. Today I spent hours digging in to track down the cause, and I finally found an important clue: a background program is secretly opening thousands of digital doors and forgetting to close them. It keeps doing this until the whole computer runs out of memory and completely freezes up. I still have to figure out which exact program is the culprit tomorrow, just as I need to dig further into the old archive files with the help of an external specialist soon.

Amidst all that troubleshooting, there was a wonderful bright spot at the office today. The Dutch colleagues from the administration team who visited Singapore last week for training had left behind a fantastic surprise for me: a supply of genuine Dutch stroopwafels. During our coffee break today, we opened the first pack (see photo below). A sweet and familiar bite of home on the other side of the world, it tasted amazing!

Plenty of work ahead, but also so much to give thanks for. Grateful for the warm welcome at church and the new friendships. Please pray along for wisdom with all the computer puzzles at the office, for a good and affordable solution for our backups, and for close connection with home despite the distance and time difference.