Well I have to admit my weakness now....I am a bit of a "BBC Newsnight nerd" and in my ignorance I thought it would be like cutting my arm off to not get my daily dose on Newsnight ;-) But funny how quickly one adapt to things... we have been without TV for around a year and we just found other means of keeping busy instead.
Studying Spanish and preparing meetings in Spanish + preparing return visits and Bible studies for others in another language is one of these things that takes a lot more of our time now. Because it's not easy digging into the deep things of God in a 3rd language.
Studying the Bible in English takes time in itself.... but doing the same in Spanish is even more of a challenge.
But admittedly there are things similar to TV that kept me going on the education / knowledge level; and it's podcasts which are freely accessible everywhere on the internet.
To keep my IT knowledge up to scratch I watch a lot of technical podcasts. When we manage to get wifi access somewhere I download episodes to watch on my laptop at leisure in the evenings.... The reason why this is important is because when I go back to work again I need to know and be current regarding what happens around IT, computers and technology.
Equally on the spiritual side its fantastic to have our www.jw.org site because it helped us so much. Both in our ministry but equally to keep ourselves up to date with current developments + having access to ALL our literature in ANY language we needed at the time when we learn a new language.
For example really helpful to have 1x English and 1x Spanish WT side by side. We are very grateful that the organisation provided this to the global brotherhood... a truly practical tool that really helped us on the ground here :)
