Customer Service?

Living in a foreign country always has its challenges. Being really far away from home. Dealing with a culture that is definitely not your own and is strange to you. But these things, with time, ease and become more familiar. There are some things though, that are harder than others. Customer Service. What wonderful two words. Words that mean nothing in Bolivia. Words that have a meaning so foreign to Bolivians that they cannot even grasp the concept. Two months ago while at the mechanic's our sunroof got broken. (The owner agreed to pay for the new glass, which is unheard of, but that is only because he lived in the States for a number of years and he knows the meaning of customer service. But that is not my story.) We took our truck to Vidcla, the automotive glass place in the city and placed our order. Remember this is the beginning of February we are talking about. They did not have the piece of glass we needed so they assured us their providers in Santa Cruz did and we would have it in one week. One week went by and we called. No answer. We stopped by. Closed up. We continued to call and stop by for the next two and a half weeks only to find they were still closed and no one would answer the phone. Finally we got in touch with them and they said that the shop in Santa Cruz was still fabricating it and it would be a little while longer. A month and a half after the initial order was placed (by the way, they had a down payment from us) and many phone calls later, we called to find out when the glass would arrive and the man said, "You just need to come to our shop so we can talk." We went to the shop and they told us that the fabricators were just now telling them that they no longer make any windows with tempered glass, which is what we ordered, but they only do the laminated glass, like windshields are made out of. So the truth of the matter was that they had probably never even placed the order for us until that moment a month and a half later. We told them to tell the fabricators to go ahead with the laminated glass and we were hopeful that we would have glass soon. A week after that, we received a phone call saying that they needed to measure the sunroof before they could place the order. What!! We went to them again and they took their measurements and told us it would be in Sucre in two weeks. Now we are hoping against hope that we really will have glass in one more week. Two months is a long time to wait on glass for your sunroof. Lying is an acceptable practice in the Bolivian culture and customer service? What is that!?

On a different note...I have been working on a correspondence class from BJU called The Practice of Counseling. We just covered a section discussing the heart. The theme of that section was, "The heart of the problem is the problem of the heart." I want to share with you three quotes from an author named Paul David Tripp that really impressed my heart. Most often people blame everything and everybody else for their problems instead of acknowledging a sinful heart. The Bible says, "for of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaketh." Luke 6:45b

This is what Tripp says.

"Jesus' point [Luke 6:43-45] is that a tree has the kind of fruit it does because of the kind of roots it has: we speak and act the way we do because of what is in our hearts. There may be no more important thing to say about how people function.... Here Christ calls us to humbly accept responsibility for our behavior. He calls us to humbly admit that relationships and circumstances are only the occasions in which our hearts reveal themselves."

"If a certain set of desires rules my heart, I will not want God to be a wise, loving, sovereign Father who gives me what he knows is best. Instead, I will want a divine waiter who delivers what I have my heart set on."

"Human conflict is rooted in spiritual adultery. My problem is not sinful people and difficult situations. My problem is that I give the love that belongs to God to someone or something else."