Sleeping orphan

Peniel
Originally uploaded by Bad Fishie

I was taking pictures of orphans for sponsorships and this one smiled at me while we were filling out her papers. After I took her picture for the file she fell asleep in this woman's arms. When I asked if I could take a picture, the woman misunderstood and tried to wake her up for the photo. Fortunately, she went right back to sleep.

Dung Beetles

Dung Beetles
Originally uploaded by Bad Fishie

I saw these dung beetles at a game park on Saturday. They were completely fascinated with their ball of dung. I am not interested in dung. Well, maybe I am a little interested if it is a very perfect ball. If the crap is in a very perfect sphere, densely packed and beautiful, I have been known to become fascinated with it.

One thing Americans do better…

There are acceptable substitutes for just about everything but lawn mowers.
Granted, my grass was very long, but it took me three hours to mow my lawn with the borrowed plastic electric mower in the picture. The blade has a small swing, the bag is small, and it is underpowered. It is a vile color.
When the container came, I blessed the lawn gurus in my native land. Made of metal, the beauty that we shipped has a 4 horsepower gas engine with a big swing, a big bag, and it's painted red. I haven't offered to mow the neighbor's lawns yet, but I'm tempted. It decadent, egotistical, and a great joy to be pushing that much muscle all over the yard.

Keys Again

Lately I'm finding that the absorbing problems of life are not the big things, but the small irritations of trying to learn to live gracefully in another culture.
Chief among these frustrations is the sheer number of things I have to carry in my pockets. I have five remote controls for various doors and gates, three keychains, an electronic ignition key, a wallet, a flash drive, an iPod, and a cell phone. I am always juggling all this jingly stuff (I need this keychain and the black remote to start the car and I need this remote and the silver set of keys to get into the office.)
I am considering getting a man-purse. I have rejected out of hand the idea of a carabiner on the belt buckle with iPod and phone holsters. I am a self-respecting geek. But a man-purse is still a stretch. They have those cute little wrist loops, I could find myself at the mall, say, swinging the wee bag along like Little Red Riding Hood.
Maybe a satchel of some sort- then I could pass for a Canadian, or maybe a hip Swede. Of course, then I would need a moleskine which I know I wouldn't use. I barely even use a blog.

I expected...

Okay, so we're in Africa and there's tons of stuff I didn't expect. I didn't expect Ubuntu Linux to be such a great friend. I didn't expect bananas on pizza (it's not as good as it sounds.) I didn't expect to have to do Information Technology as much as I do. I have to authenticate myself a lot. I counted twelve times that I have to use a key, a security remote, or a password between the time I get up and the time my computer boots at work in the morning. I didn't expect that.

I also didn't expect to love the smell of the red dirt, the goosy sound of the hadida ibis birds at 5:30 in the morning, fresh flaky bread at the Super Spar bakery and butterier butter. I didn't expect to shop in a mall that could house Vintage Faire Mall in Modesto twice over. I expected more iPods, fewer cell phones, cheaper cream cheese, more expensive steak. I didn't expect to get hooked on rugby so fast. And some people tell me cricket is even better. We'll see.

September 10 is our departure date

and I'm not counting down. I have to go to my calendar and count days to see that it’s... 24 days away. I should be counting down. I’m excited, I'm tired of living in other people’s houses, I haven’t had a workstation in six weeks and I haven’t had a computer of my own in a week and a half. I should be counting down.

I feel guilty that I don’t know the countdown at any given moment, as though that means that I am not sure we should be taking off.

Well, I am excited, and I won’t count down.

I remembered one of my most embarrassing moments this morning. I was running a television camera at a large church on Mother’s day. I skipped breakfast and halfway through the service I passed out on the lap of some poor lady.
What’s strange is that I remember when I woke up there was a circle of faces over me and someone was wondering if they should loosen my tie because it was tied so beautifully. I have never thought about how unlikely that comment was until this morning, and now I wonder if someone actually said it, or if I’ve fabricated that part of the story and stored it as an actual memory.
It was a very good knot, though.

Carrying my homelessness on my back

I'm what they call a third culture kid- and as a category, we tend to make home out of wherever we are. I am also finding that I carry a sort of homelessness around too. I don't seep into the earth that I inhabit. I am shallow-rooted.
It is a good thing when it is time to move (now is one of those times), but I long for a place and time when I love where I live and I won't have to worry about needing to move away or having the place change and become something other than what I love.
Home and Homelessness share the same uneasy space in me. This tension, I think, is universal to one degree or another, but I think that we who follow Christ have a hope of resolution in time, or at least beyond it.

Keys

In Orwell's 1984, the government was trying to simplify the English language with the ultimate goal of reducing it to a single word. I don't know about language, but I want to do that with keys. I want one key that will get me into anything I need to get into.
Since my family is moving around right now, I have a fluctuating keyring. A borrowed house key finds its way onto my keychain for a couple of weeks or months, then is returned to its owner. Occasionally I borrow a car and pick up an extra key for a while. I feel my keyring in my pocket when I walk now. It isn't a stable shape any more and it tends to poke and bulge.
Yesterday I handed over a work key I'm not going to need any more. One by one the keys to the cars, the office, my parents' house will get sold or returned and when I get on the plane to Africa I will have an empty keyring with just a flash drive on it.
I don't know how to feel about that. I should feel light and free, but today I just feel like the doors of my life for the last 15 years will be closing and locking behind me and I won't have the keys to open them again. I will have no keys, no means of opening locked doors.

Great News

I’m finding that I don’t want to know what’s going on in the world so much any more. An average television newscast has an astounding amoung of deep tragedy. Any one “bad news” item would be catastrophic in my family. How am I supposed to process it all with any semblance of empathy? The only options I can see are callousness or ignorance. There’s enough tragedy on my own street to keep me busy.
I don’t want to drop out completely, I care about what happens to the world, what happens to people, but I can’t handle every child that drowns in a swimming pool in the United States. I can’t process every murder/suicide rampage and train wreck. This is the downside of RSS feeds. All the disaster of the world shows up on my desktop in real time. If a father burns down his house with his children inside in New Jersey, I know about it before the ashes are cool.

Finishing

I have an aversion to finishing. I like to keep my options open- something better might come along. I might get a better idea, or I might get stuck with something I don't want. This is also the classic male failure to commit. I did get married though. I wouldn't recommend waiting too long on that one. It's worth it.
By the way, I'm an INTP. If that doesn't mean anything to you, congratulations! You aren't in a box.

I invented

I invented the concept of density. Minus the mathematical formula, I figured out that the ratio between mass and volume could be valuable to know. I was too late by a thousand years or so. I also invented postscript before it was actually made by Adobe, but I had the idea. My dad invented turbo and also a rocket platform. He was disappointed to see that someone was already doing turbo. NASA ended up building a rocket platform, but not my dad's.

I don't speak up enough. I invented this thing where On-Star collects traffic statistics between points for live, extremely accurate route predictions. Someone probably already thought of that.

We are the Experts

I've worked in media at a church for almost fifteen years and we have made just about every boneheaded mistake possible. I have personally made horrible typos, I have sometimes created bland art, lousy video, flat websites. I have missed deadlines.
The team at the church has had at various times mediocre administration, self-serving individuals, lapses in focus, petty infighting, and feuds with people working at cross-purposes.
God seems to be completely unaffected by all of this. When He decides to speak to someone, he does it in spite of all our screwups. We have often come off of a weekend bloodied and battered, with nothing having gone right, and we'll get a note from someone in the service thanking us for speaking into their lives, for bringing them into the presence of God. I don't believe we have any such power. It may be that God blinds people and deafens them to what we are doing and speaks to them directly sometimes.
And still we aim at excellence, even though it doesn't seem to make a difference, like Milton said, "God doth not need either man's work or his own gifts..."
So why bother if there is no strong correlation between our effort and the results? Because God made us for something, and the better we do that thing the more pleased He is. And when I'm doing what I'm designed for, the more fulfilled I am.
So there's another tension- excellence vs. trust.

More nametags

I was at a baptism one time where the people being baptized (baptizees?) had adhesive name tags. When they came out of the water, their nametags had soaked off, so when it was done there were ten or fifteen name tags floating on top of the water. It was an interesting picture of the idea of "dying to self", but I've noticed as well in my experience as a follower of Jesus that I become more uniquely myself as I follow him. The life of faith is full of tensions, this is the tension of conformity vs. individuality.

I wore a name tag last night. I had my real name on it, although that did not seem to be in vogue. When I left with Angela I took off my name tag and her name tag so we would not be embarrassed elsewhere and I stuck them together back to back. There was something intimate and comfortable about that - sticking my name and my wife's name together, even if it was only to throw the tags away.

I remember another time name tags spoke to me. Maybe later today.

Motion Sensors

There have been large sections of my life that consisted mainly of reacting to everything around me. I think I could have walked by a motion sensor without triggering it. I wasn't making any decisions or any sort of difference.

I think it's better if the lights turn on when I walk by.

Distance

The personal cost of missions to me has always been separation from family. As an MK myself I'm familiar with being away from family. When I was growing up in Ecuador, we were always away from extended family. We did construct a kind of virtual family that served as a good substitute, but there are some things you can't replace. After I graduated from high school I went to college in the States, and I was with extended family, but away from immediate family. I talked to my parents sometimes using a quaint old technique called a "ham patch." My dad had a ham radio and he would call another ham operator in the US who would make a collect call to me. Then he would "patch" the call from radio to telephone.
A conversation sounds like this:
"I love you, Mom. I wish we could be together. Over."
"Oh, I know, Honey. Just thirteen more months and you'll be meeting us at SFO. Over."

And at the end of the conversation, "Over and out" then hanging up the phone with your ear numb from pressing it to the earpiece, suddenly far away again.

Now there's e-mail and Skype and video chats, but they are just band-aids on the curse of distance. I think Heaven won't have distance.

For the geeks: Dad had a cubical quad antenna on his one kilowatt transceiver. This antenna was designed by an HCJB engineer in Ecuador in 1942.

I was an English major at Cal State Hayward with an option in creative writing. That meant that I had to take a poetry class. I had always known that I wanted to write short stories, but I had never had any interest in poetry, either reading or writing it. I was also a little jaded about poets. They seemed to be wispy discontents or irritating romantics. Except for Stevie Smith, of course, and Theodore Roethke.
So I had to take a poetry workshop and we talked for a week about writing a poem and finally I had to actually write one and workshop it. Here's how a workshop goes. You make ten copies of the poem and hand it out at class, then everyone packs it in their backpack and you don't hear anything about it until the next class meeting. Then the students and the teacher critique the poem, usually constructively, saying what worked for them and what didn't.
I wasn't a poet, so I couldn't write a poem, but I was a writer, so I could pretend to be a poet writing a poem and that's what I did. I pretended to be meaningful and observant, clever, wise, and artistic. I pretended to take it very seriously. It turned out okay, so I wrote another one like that, and another.
Later, at another college, I won a prize at a poetry competition. Still, I waffle about calling myself a poet. The word is loaded. When I swim I'm a swimmer. When I write a poem I'm a poet.
It's like that with being a missionary. We're telling people we're missionaries raising support and it sounds strange. We haven't gone anywhere yet, we haven't done anything missionarylike, except ask for money. Don't you have to earn money before you ask for it?
The word is loaded. Missionary. Lifelong Christians immediately award you a couple of ranks. Recently a pastor we were meeting with asked my opinion about a church matter as though my opinion had some weight. My friends outside of the church are politely mystified. Why would I align myself with something so anachronistic? It's the uncool version of the Peace Corps, with cultural assasination and legalism thrown in. At best it's harmless and ineffective. At worst it's self-righteous imperialism.
I grew up around missionaries, so I know the best and the worst. The best were better than most people know (or would even believe), and the worst were evil, but not evil of the imperialistic sort. I never met missionaries like the caricatures in Michener's Hawaii. The worst missionaries I knew were just like messed up people anywhere- always trying to escape some trouble that they ended up bringing half way around the world with them.
My wife says becoming a missionary is a change of venue. We're going live like we've always lived, we're just going to do it in Pretoria.

AIDS

Apart from the physical horror of AIDS, the stunning complexity of the HIV/AIDS problem is enough to freeze my blood. Any solution will have to span almost all aspects of life; economic, social aspects (especially in the areas of stigma and respect for women and children), medical (hygiene, prevention, and treatment), morality, and spirituality.

I suppose it is unpopular to drag morality into the mix. It's kind of an all-or-nothing proposition, though. Either you address the moral issues related to AIDS, promiscuity, child molestation, and rape as part of a solution, or you don't. If you don't you end up trying to treat symptoms instead of causes. Maybe those "moral" issues are important to solve in and of themselves. They are each dehumanizing in their own way. AIDS provides additional motivation to address them, especially because it spreads the effects of certain behaviors to innocent bystanders, especially children, who have made no "moral" decisions at all.

Today I wore a T-shirt with a red ribbon on the front and a stylized cross from my church on the back. I never know how to feel about that, like maybe the front of my shirt and the back of my shirt are in opposition to each other. I know it looks like that to some people. I suppose I hope that someday I will know instinctively that being a Christian and working to fight AIDS are not only compatible, but inseperable. I am sorry for every excuse I have made about this.