I work for a company called DigitalScirocco now. We do dynamic in-page content for websites. For example, here's some nifty technology news:
Edit: Well, that doesn't work anymore. Goodbye DigitalScirocco!
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Monday, August 24, 2009
Distance from Belgrade to Timsoara
A lot of people search the web for the distance from Belgrade to Timisoara, and they end up getting a page on this blog that's quite different.
For reference, I took the train from Belgrade to Timisoara in October of 2008. The length of the trip was four hours according to travel guides and train schedules I found, but the train (as many in Eastern Europe do) ended up being late. The trip actually took six hours total, and seven hours by the clock (there's a time zone change on the way).
I don't know the actual distance from point to point, but it's probably not relevant information. Trip time has more to do with logistics (conditions, delays, border crossings, checkpoints) than mileage.
For reference, I took the train from Belgrade to Timisoara in October of 2008. The length of the trip was four hours according to travel guides and train schedules I found, but the train (as many in Eastern Europe do) ended up being late. The trip actually took six hours total, and seven hours by the clock (there's a time zone change on the way).
I don't know the actual distance from point to point, but it's probably not relevant information. Trip time has more to do with logistics (conditions, delays, border crossings, checkpoints) than mileage.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Current Events
The blog sort of trailed off towards the end there. Ethiopia made internet access difficult, and the next three weeks I spent exploring Christianity in Israel and Italy were a little more rushed, absolutely amazing, and not something I ever got around to writing about. Whoops. I did spend Easter in Jerusalem and I did see the Pope at the Vatican, and perhaps I'll write a little bit about that later.
I arrived back in Seattle on the 20th of April, was picked up by a good friend, and whisked away to the secrecy of her and her husband's house, where they sheltered me from America for a couple of days. I spent the next week in Spokane, the week after that back in Seattle, a few days back in Spokane, a week in Lincoln, Nebraska, and am currently writing from Yellowstone National Park, of all places, where I've stopped for a couple of days as I return to Spokane. I'll be there for about a week, Seattle again for a few days to catch a Sounders game, back in Spokane for two weeks, and then it's off to the San Francisco Bay Area for the summer to work as an intern with Google. I've been...busy. But it's been great. I've put more than 3000 miles on my car since I got back, which is exactly what I wanted to do.
I'll come around to some (undoubtedly stirring) wrap up, but I don't foresee that happening in the next couple of weeks. I'm focusing my minds on other things in the hopes that it will form conclusive results of the last nine months while I'm not paying attention and then surprise me with a finished result. Preferably in .pdf format.
By way of proof, here's how I spent my morning, though I can't take credit for the photographs. They were captured by someone much more beautiful and talented than myself.
I arrived back in Seattle on the 20th of April, was picked up by a good friend, and whisked away to the secrecy of her and her husband's house, where they sheltered me from America for a couple of days. I spent the next week in Spokane, the week after that back in Seattle, a few days back in Spokane, a week in Lincoln, Nebraska, and am currently writing from Yellowstone National Park, of all places, where I've stopped for a couple of days as I return to Spokane. I'll be there for about a week, Seattle again for a few days to catch a Sounders game, back in Spokane for two weeks, and then it's off to the San Francisco Bay Area for the summer to work as an intern with Google. I've been...busy. But it's been great. I've put more than 3000 miles on my car since I got back, which is exactly what I wanted to do.
I'll come around to some (undoubtedly stirring) wrap up, but I don't foresee that happening in the next couple of weeks. I'm focusing my minds on other things in the hopes that it will form conclusive results of the last nine months while I'm not paying attention and then surprise me with a finished result. Preferably in .pdf format.
By way of proof, here's how I spent my morning, though I can't take credit for the photographs. They were captured by someone much more beautiful and talented than myself.
Lalibela and Environs: Incomplete Thoughts on Ethiopian Orthodoxy
I'm reaching back a bit here, but I should probably expand a little on my northern Ethiopian experience before I start to forget the details and have to refer to my notes. In truth, the experience is not so much in danger of being forgotten, being still relatively fresh in my mind; rather, my attempts to organize it mentally and narrate it back to myself result in my brain throwing up its hands in confusion because it lacks a beginning, middle, and end. My engineering instincts tell me to linearize it, but there’s simply no straight path that will fit a circular issue and no circle that will consent to lie down flat. I’m no storyteller, so I’ll concede from the onset that I have it all wrong.
The story of Simon the Cannibal is lesser known among the stories of Ethiopian saints. I hear that some monks are embarrassed to tell it. Simon was a normal man, details unimportant, who one day entertained a guest from a distant country. As Simon prepared the evening meal, the guest asked for meat. Simon, being a good Ethiopian host and therefore bound to consent to his guest’s wishes, prepared to slaughter a goat when his guest made a further request: he wanted human meat. Furthermore, he would settle for nothing less than Simon’s son. Simon’s son being killed and prepared (Simon was a good Ethiopian host), the guest asked him to take a bite. Upon eating the first bite of his son, a spirit entered Simon and he developed a hunger for human flesh. His victims eventually numbered in the 80’s, and local people lived in fear of being murdered and devoured. One day, a beggar dying of thirst approached Simon and asked for a drink of water. “Don’t you know who I am?” Simon asked him. “Haven’t you heard the stories about me?”
“I know who you are,” the beggar replied, “but I’m dying of thirst. Please, give me one drop of water, for Mary’s sake.”
Simon gave the man a drink of water, and the act, in the name of Mary, was enough to wash away all of his previous wrongs.
“At that time the Lord said to me, ‘Prepare two stone tablets like the first ones, and make a sacred chest of wood to keep them in. Return to me on the mountain, and I will write on the tablets the same words that were on the ones you smashed. Then place the tablets in the sacred chest – the Ark of the Covenant.’
“So I made a chest of acacia wood and cut two stones tablets like the first two, and I took the tablets up the mountain. The Lord again wrote the terms of the covenant – the Ten Commandments – on them and gave them to me. They were the same words the Lord had spoken to you from the heart of the fire on the mountain as you were assembled below. Then I came down and placed the tablets in the Ark of the Covenant, which I had made, just as the Lord commanded me. And the tablets are still there in the Ark.” Deuteronomy 10:1-5 (NLT)
The Ark of the Covenant was the symbol of the covenant agreement between God’s chosen people and God Himself. It was the original sanctuary of the Ten Commandments, the symbol of God’s living presence, and was placed in the Holy of Holies within the temple that was only open to the high priest on specific days. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church’s claim to currently possess the Ark in the ancient city of Axum is pivotal in Ethiopia’s cultural development from antiquity to the present. For Ethiopians the existence of the Ark in Axum is fact, not claim; for the rest of us, there’s not a lot of compelling reasons to disbelieve it.
I wasn’t able to go to Axum, but I did spend three full days in Lalibela, one of Ethiopia's holy cities south of Axum. Lalibela is known for its huge stone churches, which were carved straight down into the rocky hills in the area. Most of the churches consist of one single rock, and a few are completely free from the surrounding cliffs. It makes for an interesting impression, since the roofs of the churches are at ground level, and the floors are ten to 15 meters below.
Most tourists tend to hire a guide to show them around the churches for the day, but I usually dislike guides. You can learn a lot, but they sometimes have their own agenda and can be pretty rigid about what they want to show you. It's also nearly impossible to engage with people around you if you have a guide in your ear. Not taking a guide actually opened up a few possibilities for me, which was nice. The churches in Lalibela are divided into three complexes. The two northern complexes have a number of churches, with the easternmost of the two containing the oldest, some of which pre-date King Lalibela. The third complex is south of the other two, and only contains one freestanding stone church called Bet Giyorgis, dedicated to St. George.
I met Sebhat in Bet Golgotha, an Ethiopian Orthodox priest who was sitting in a circle of about ten other priests chanting in Ge'ez. I don't know how we got to talking. I was just wondering around the church and I found myself chatting with him. He was very excited to have found a white person who spoke a little Amharic, and he quickly decided that we were brothers. We conscripted a nearby tourist to take a picture of us at his request, and then he brought me back to the circle of chanting priests, told me to sit down next to him, and handed me a priestly staff as if all of this was perfectly normal. I was definitely the odd man out in the group of priests as they read through ancient Ge'ez liturgies. We sat there for a few minutes (I'm not sure how long) until Sebhat told me to go and to come back the next day at 9:00. I don't think being invited to sit in that circle is something that happens very often.
I met Sebhat the next day, like he said, and he seemed very impressed by my punctuality. He kept saying over and over "I said to come at 9:00, and you came at 9:00! 9:00 sharp!". He took me up to his house, about a ten minute walk away, and he shared his breakfast with me. He wanted to take me to meet his father and drink tea, but his father wasn't there, so after hanging around a bit for the morning and informing him of my plans, I left to hike up to a nearby monastery. He told me to come back at 10:00 the next day.
The next day in Sebhat's house, he showed me a few manuscripts he had and we talked, as much as we could with my limited Amharic, about Christianity. He showed me the large icon of Mary on his wall, and we discussed America. He said we was OK with American Christians - we're all Christians, he said, and we can be like brothers. "You love God also?" He asked.
"Yes." I said. He nodded.
"And you love Mary...good..." He trailed off. I nodded.
"...and Jesus", I suggested.
"Hmm. Yes, and Jesus." He replied thoughtfully.
I left Lalibela at 4:00AM on a crowded bus. By now, bus rides were becoming increasingly hellish, and I still had a couple of days (full, 10-12 hour days) on them before I got back to Addis. I made it back to Bahir Dar and spent the night there, deciding to skip some of the monasteries on Lake Tana after hearing that they were mostly new, unimpressive, and something of a tourist trap. Instead, I met a German traveler who was interested in seeing Tisissat falls (which translates to something like firesmoke falls), where the Blue Nile plunges over a cliff into the rocky gorge below. It's been dammed, which leaves only about 25% of the original water going over the edge, but it was still spectacular. We dodged the extremely annoying official guides and picked up a local kid to guide us around in exchange for his bus fare back to Bahir Dar. It was a pretty good deal for both of us, and I enjoyed taking the morning easy and not having to think real hard.
That afternoon I caught a minibus down to a town about two hours to the south, where SIM missionaries my family knows have been living for several years. I somehow ran into calendar confusion, which actually let me stay with them for two days instead of one; this turned out to be a huge blessing. As residents of the area, despite their whiteness, they had a great inside view into rural Ethiopian Orthodoxy that I would never have been able to grasp without their ability to bridge the gap for me. Rural Orthodoxy in their area (I'm doing my best not to avoid inevitable generalization) is fascinatingly, depressingly syncretistic, like a traditional animism whitewashed with a mask of Orthodox practice.
The first story the missionaries told me was a year when they were invited to the Easter celebration. The Easter lamb was slaughtered and the family was preparing it for a feast to celebrate Jesus' resurrection from the dead. During their preparations, a piece of the lamb's intestines were cut out, flattened, and plastered to the wall of the house. When the missionaries asked what it was for, the family replied that it was the annual sacrifice to Kali for a good harvest. If you're looking for a definition of syncretism, I think giving part of the Easter lamb as a sacrifice to another god qualifies.
The second story I heard was of their visit to an Orthodox woman's house in Bahir Dar. They were new to the area, and having trouble easing the religious tension between themselves and their Orthodox neighbors. They were excited and nervous at the opportunity to visit with this woman and potentially break the ice. She put a question to them at the door: how many gods did they believe there were? The missionaries were relieved to find something they knew they had in common, and told her that they believe in one. "Wrong!" She said. "There are two. God and Mary." And she walked over to a large covered icon of Mary on her wall and kissed it.
More recently, in the area where the missionaries lived, there had been some discussion among the local priests and elders about constructing a new church building. When one burned down (the events surrounding this were suspicious) building a new church became necessary. When Orthodox churches are constructed, there is a consecration ritual that is performed to sort of inaugurate or dedicate the new church. Relics are brought into the church, and a priest seals these relics inside the altar. Theologically, it's a symbol of the foundation of the church and the tomb of Christ. When this particular burned church had the altar opened to temporarily move the relics, it was found that the relics weren't actually there. Apparently this is pretty common - local thieves will steal the relics and sell them on the black market, often to other churches, who will buy them to increase the power of the church. The church decided to launch an investigation to get their relic back. To facilitate this, they hired the local witch doctor to divine its location.
The practice of Orthodoxy in this area creates something of a dilemma. Officially, the Ethiopian Orthodox church is reconciled with the Greek Orthodox church, which means that the two should both, at least on paper, be practicing sound Orthodox theology. In practice, however, this theology simply isn't being disseminated to the regular churchgoers. Most view the Bible as a book that's too theologically and intellectually advanced for ordinary people to process, and they rely instead on what priests, monks, or elders tell them - a practice that, of course, is encouraged by many priests, monks, and elders. There seems to be a problem with secret knowledge; higher things that 'holier' men are allowed access to that the public is shielded from. One of the primary goals of the missionaries I've mentioned is simply to provide Amharic Bibles to ordinary people so that they can read for themselves.
I worry about drawing conclusions because I generally consider myself too ill-informed to draw distinct lines. I should really say that I worry about sharing my conclusions, because I always come up with some kind of summary in my mind. So I'll share that summary, with the disclaimer that I made all of this up in my head.
Northern Ethiopia is one of the ancient Christian centers of the world, undoubtedly. Ethiopians consider themselves God's chosen people, and believe that by taking the Ark of the Covenant that they have stolen God's eternal blessing. If you talk to the heads of the Ethiopian Orthodox church, you'll find sound Christian theology, a theology which fails to reach the common people. Orthodox Christians are mixing tribal witchcraft into their belief system with the blessing of the priests, and church leaders are withholding knowledge from laymen. In general practice, Jesus is set off to the side in favor of an extremely Mary-centric worship - far more Mary-centric than any other branch of Orthodoxy or Catholicism that I observed. The proud history of stealing the Ark has resulted in a culture that values deceit, thievery, and dishonesty. And for all the blessing the Ark supposedly brings, Ethiopia remains one of the poorest, most corrupt nations in the world. Humanitarian aid projects fail so spectacularly that they appear thwarted, as if people are actively, intelligently, systematically dismantling the country. Interestingly, this isn't inconsistent with the story of the Philistine's brief possession of the Ark. I left Ethiopia wondering whether or not Ethiopia actually had the Ark, and whether or not the country was actually cursed by God for it. The answer to that is something I don't have.
The story of Simon the Cannibal is lesser known among the stories of Ethiopian saints. I hear that some monks are embarrassed to tell it. Simon was a normal man, details unimportant, who one day entertained a guest from a distant country. As Simon prepared the evening meal, the guest asked for meat. Simon, being a good Ethiopian host and therefore bound to consent to his guest’s wishes, prepared to slaughter a goat when his guest made a further request: he wanted human meat. Furthermore, he would settle for nothing less than Simon’s son. Simon’s son being killed and prepared (Simon was a good Ethiopian host), the guest asked him to take a bite. Upon eating the first bite of his son, a spirit entered Simon and he developed a hunger for human flesh. His victims eventually numbered in the 80’s, and local people lived in fear of being murdered and devoured. One day, a beggar dying of thirst approached Simon and asked for a drink of water. “Don’t you know who I am?” Simon asked him. “Haven’t you heard the stories about me?”
“I know who you are,” the beggar replied, “but I’m dying of thirst. Please, give me one drop of water, for Mary’s sake.”
Simon gave the man a drink of water, and the act, in the name of Mary, was enough to wash away all of his previous wrongs.
“At that time the Lord said to me, ‘Prepare two stone tablets like the first ones, and make a sacred chest of wood to keep them in. Return to me on the mountain, and I will write on the tablets the same words that were on the ones you smashed. Then place the tablets in the sacred chest – the Ark of the Covenant.’
“So I made a chest of acacia wood and cut two stones tablets like the first two, and I took the tablets up the mountain. The Lord again wrote the terms of the covenant – the Ten Commandments – on them and gave them to me. They were the same words the Lord had spoken to you from the heart of the fire on the mountain as you were assembled below. Then I came down and placed the tablets in the Ark of the Covenant, which I had made, just as the Lord commanded me. And the tablets are still there in the Ark.” Deuteronomy 10:1-5 (NLT)
The Ark of the Covenant was the symbol of the covenant agreement between God’s chosen people and God Himself. It was the original sanctuary of the Ten Commandments, the symbol of God’s living presence, and was placed in the Holy of Holies within the temple that was only open to the high priest on specific days. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church’s claim to currently possess the Ark in the ancient city of Axum is pivotal in Ethiopia’s cultural development from antiquity to the present. For Ethiopians the existence of the Ark in Axum is fact, not claim; for the rest of us, there’s not a lot of compelling reasons to disbelieve it.
I wasn’t able to go to Axum, but I did spend three full days in Lalibela, one of Ethiopia's holy cities south of Axum. Lalibela is known for its huge stone churches, which were carved straight down into the rocky hills in the area. Most of the churches consist of one single rock, and a few are completely free from the surrounding cliffs. It makes for an interesting impression, since the roofs of the churches are at ground level, and the floors are ten to 15 meters below.
Most tourists tend to hire a guide to show them around the churches for the day, but I usually dislike guides. You can learn a lot, but they sometimes have their own agenda and can be pretty rigid about what they want to show you. It's also nearly impossible to engage with people around you if you have a guide in your ear. Not taking a guide actually opened up a few possibilities for me, which was nice. The churches in Lalibela are divided into three complexes. The two northern complexes have a number of churches, with the easternmost of the two containing the oldest, some of which pre-date King Lalibela. The third complex is south of the other two, and only contains one freestanding stone church called Bet Giyorgis, dedicated to St. George.
I met Sebhat in Bet Golgotha, an Ethiopian Orthodox priest who was sitting in a circle of about ten other priests chanting in Ge'ez. I don't know how we got to talking. I was just wondering around the church and I found myself chatting with him. He was very excited to have found a white person who spoke a little Amharic, and he quickly decided that we were brothers. We conscripted a nearby tourist to take a picture of us at his request, and then he brought me back to the circle of chanting priests, told me to sit down next to him, and handed me a priestly staff as if all of this was perfectly normal. I was definitely the odd man out in the group of priests as they read through ancient Ge'ez liturgies. We sat there for a few minutes (I'm not sure how long) until Sebhat told me to go and to come back the next day at 9:00. I don't think being invited to sit in that circle is something that happens very often.
I met Sebhat the next day, like he said, and he seemed very impressed by my punctuality. He kept saying over and over "I said to come at 9:00, and you came at 9:00! 9:00 sharp!". He took me up to his house, about a ten minute walk away, and he shared his breakfast with me. He wanted to take me to meet his father and drink tea, but his father wasn't there, so after hanging around a bit for the morning and informing him of my plans, I left to hike up to a nearby monastery. He told me to come back at 10:00 the next day.
The next day in Sebhat's house, he showed me a few manuscripts he had and we talked, as much as we could with my limited Amharic, about Christianity. He showed me the large icon of Mary on his wall, and we discussed America. He said we was OK with American Christians - we're all Christians, he said, and we can be like brothers. "You love God also?" He asked.
"Yes." I said. He nodded.
"And you love Mary...good..." He trailed off. I nodded.
"...and Jesus", I suggested.
"Hmm. Yes, and Jesus." He replied thoughtfully.
I left Lalibela at 4:00AM on a crowded bus. By now, bus rides were becoming increasingly hellish, and I still had a couple of days (full, 10-12 hour days) on them before I got back to Addis. I made it back to Bahir Dar and spent the night there, deciding to skip some of the monasteries on Lake Tana after hearing that they were mostly new, unimpressive, and something of a tourist trap. Instead, I met a German traveler who was interested in seeing Tisissat falls (which translates to something like firesmoke falls), where the Blue Nile plunges over a cliff into the rocky gorge below. It's been dammed, which leaves only about 25% of the original water going over the edge, but it was still spectacular. We dodged the extremely annoying official guides and picked up a local kid to guide us around in exchange for his bus fare back to Bahir Dar. It was a pretty good deal for both of us, and I enjoyed taking the morning easy and not having to think real hard.
That afternoon I caught a minibus down to a town about two hours to the south, where SIM missionaries my family knows have been living for several years. I somehow ran into calendar confusion, which actually let me stay with them for two days instead of one; this turned out to be a huge blessing. As residents of the area, despite their whiteness, they had a great inside view into rural Ethiopian Orthodoxy that I would never have been able to grasp without their ability to bridge the gap for me. Rural Orthodoxy in their area (I'm doing my best not to avoid inevitable generalization) is fascinatingly, depressingly syncretistic, like a traditional animism whitewashed with a mask of Orthodox practice.
The first story the missionaries told me was a year when they were invited to the Easter celebration. The Easter lamb was slaughtered and the family was preparing it for a feast to celebrate Jesus' resurrection from the dead. During their preparations, a piece of the lamb's intestines were cut out, flattened, and plastered to the wall of the house. When the missionaries asked what it was for, the family replied that it was the annual sacrifice to Kali for a good harvest. If you're looking for a definition of syncretism, I think giving part of the Easter lamb as a sacrifice to another god qualifies.
The second story I heard was of their visit to an Orthodox woman's house in Bahir Dar. They were new to the area, and having trouble easing the religious tension between themselves and their Orthodox neighbors. They were excited and nervous at the opportunity to visit with this woman and potentially break the ice. She put a question to them at the door: how many gods did they believe there were? The missionaries were relieved to find something they knew they had in common, and told her that they believe in one. "Wrong!" She said. "There are two. God and Mary." And she walked over to a large covered icon of Mary on her wall and kissed it.
More recently, in the area where the missionaries lived, there had been some discussion among the local priests and elders about constructing a new church building. When one burned down (the events surrounding this were suspicious) building a new church became necessary. When Orthodox churches are constructed, there is a consecration ritual that is performed to sort of inaugurate or dedicate the new church. Relics are brought into the church, and a priest seals these relics inside the altar. Theologically, it's a symbol of the foundation of the church and the tomb of Christ. When this particular burned church had the altar opened to temporarily move the relics, it was found that the relics weren't actually there. Apparently this is pretty common - local thieves will steal the relics and sell them on the black market, often to other churches, who will buy them to increase the power of the church. The church decided to launch an investigation to get their relic back. To facilitate this, they hired the local witch doctor to divine its location.
The practice of Orthodoxy in this area creates something of a dilemma. Officially, the Ethiopian Orthodox church is reconciled with the Greek Orthodox church, which means that the two should both, at least on paper, be practicing sound Orthodox theology. In practice, however, this theology simply isn't being disseminated to the regular churchgoers. Most view the Bible as a book that's too theologically and intellectually advanced for ordinary people to process, and they rely instead on what priests, monks, or elders tell them - a practice that, of course, is encouraged by many priests, monks, and elders. There seems to be a problem with secret knowledge; higher things that 'holier' men are allowed access to that the public is shielded from. One of the primary goals of the missionaries I've mentioned is simply to provide Amharic Bibles to ordinary people so that they can read for themselves.
I worry about drawing conclusions because I generally consider myself too ill-informed to draw distinct lines. I should really say that I worry about sharing my conclusions, because I always come up with some kind of summary in my mind. So I'll share that summary, with the disclaimer that I made all of this up in my head.
Northern Ethiopia is one of the ancient Christian centers of the world, undoubtedly. Ethiopians consider themselves God's chosen people, and believe that by taking the Ark of the Covenant that they have stolen God's eternal blessing. If you talk to the heads of the Ethiopian Orthodox church, you'll find sound Christian theology, a theology which fails to reach the common people. Orthodox Christians are mixing tribal witchcraft into their belief system with the blessing of the priests, and church leaders are withholding knowledge from laymen. In general practice, Jesus is set off to the side in favor of an extremely Mary-centric worship - far more Mary-centric than any other branch of Orthodoxy or Catholicism that I observed. The proud history of stealing the Ark has resulted in a culture that values deceit, thievery, and dishonesty. And for all the blessing the Ark supposedly brings, Ethiopia remains one of the poorest, most corrupt nations in the world. Humanitarian aid projects fail so spectacularly that they appear thwarted, as if people are actively, intelligently, systematically dismantling the country. Interestingly, this isn't inconsistent with the story of the Philistine's brief possession of the Ark. I left Ethiopia wondering whether or not Ethiopia actually had the Ark, and whether or not the country was actually cursed by God for it. The answer to that is something I don't have.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Passporting
I flew into Rome today from Tel Aviv. My flight was supposed to leave at 6:00AM, but a schedule change made it 7:20AM. That didn't really matter much either way, as transport to the airport required me to leave Jerusalem this morning at 1:45. Not a lot of sleep.
Entering Israel overland from Jordan, which I did on the 3rd of this month, took about four hours total. There was about 45 minutes of general standing around wondering what was going on on the Jordanian side, a short bus trip, and then about two and a half hours of standing around knowing exactly what was going on (nothing) on the Israeli side. After standing in line for what seemed like forever, not because of there being so many people, but rather because the Israeli agents kept leaving their booths, ignoring people to chat amongst themselves, going on break, or changing personnel (our line processed about 10 people in those 2.5 hours) we finally got up to the agent.
Here I was barraged with questions: what was I doing in Israel? Why was I there? Why was I in Jordan? What did I do there? Had I ever been to Syria? Lebanon? Morocco? Egypt? Yemen? Where was I going in Israel? Just Jerusalem? Why? Was I going to the West Bank? Why didn't I want them to stamp my passport? Etc. Etc. After all of this, my photograph was taken, and they took a fingerprint from both hands - the only time in my life I've been fingerprinted. When crossing the border into a rogue Russian-supported internationally unrecognized breakaway communist state is EASIER for me than getting into Israel, I think that's a problem.
Leaving the country this morning was no easier. I lined up for security, which happens before you check in for boarding in Tel Aviv. While in line my bag was electronically sniffed for explosives and I was asked if I had any sharp things. Then someone checked my passport, and asked me why I was in Israel, when I had arrived, why I was in Jordan before, where I had been in Israel, if I had any friends, what their names were, and then if I had any other form of ID. I gave them a student card. They asked for another, so I dug out my driver's license. Apparently I didn't look like my photos, probably because I don't usually take my driver's license and passport photos at 3:00 AM after eight months of traveling around the world. I was handed over to another agent, who asked me all the same questions again. She handed me over to a third (my line was getting visibly annoyed at the holdup) who asked me all the same questions again, as well as a few more regarding whether I was keeping in touch with anyone in Jordan and who I was traveling with. Then she flagged my luggage.
I ran my luggage through the X-ray, and then because I had been marked I moved over to another counter, where all of my luggage was unpacked piece by piece in front of me and, again, electronically sniffed and x-rayed. After this process I was allowed to get my boarding pass.
That done, my passport and boarding pass were checked again, I went through a metal detector, and had my carry on luggage sniffed and x-rayed. THEN I went through passport control.
The entire process took about two and a half hours. I suppose I should be thankful for the super early airport arrival.
For your convenience, I have created a table that illustrates the amount of time passport control has required for the two latest countries I've entered. Like a good engineer, I've compared apples to apples by keeping the units the same.
Israel: 10,800 seconds
Italy: 5 seconds
Hmm...
Entering Israel overland from Jordan, which I did on the 3rd of this month, took about four hours total. There was about 45 minutes of general standing around wondering what was going on on the Jordanian side, a short bus trip, and then about two and a half hours of standing around knowing exactly what was going on (nothing) on the Israeli side. After standing in line for what seemed like forever, not because of there being so many people, but rather because the Israeli agents kept leaving their booths, ignoring people to chat amongst themselves, going on break, or changing personnel (our line processed about 10 people in those 2.5 hours) we finally got up to the agent.
Here I was barraged with questions: what was I doing in Israel? Why was I there? Why was I in Jordan? What did I do there? Had I ever been to Syria? Lebanon? Morocco? Egypt? Yemen? Where was I going in Israel? Just Jerusalem? Why? Was I going to the West Bank? Why didn't I want them to stamp my passport? Etc. Etc. After all of this, my photograph was taken, and they took a fingerprint from both hands - the only time in my life I've been fingerprinted. When crossing the border into a rogue Russian-supported internationally unrecognized breakaway communist state is EASIER for me than getting into Israel, I think that's a problem.
Leaving the country this morning was no easier. I lined up for security, which happens before you check in for boarding in Tel Aviv. While in line my bag was electronically sniffed for explosives and I was asked if I had any sharp things. Then someone checked my passport, and asked me why I was in Israel, when I had arrived, why I was in Jordan before, where I had been in Israel, if I had any friends, what their names were, and then if I had any other form of ID. I gave them a student card. They asked for another, so I dug out my driver's license. Apparently I didn't look like my photos, probably because I don't usually take my driver's license and passport photos at 3:00 AM after eight months of traveling around the world. I was handed over to another agent, who asked me all the same questions again. She handed me over to a third (my line was getting visibly annoyed at the holdup) who asked me all the same questions again, as well as a few more regarding whether I was keeping in touch with anyone in Jordan and who I was traveling with. Then she flagged my luggage.
I ran my luggage through the X-ray, and then because I had been marked I moved over to another counter, where all of my luggage was unpacked piece by piece in front of me and, again, electronically sniffed and x-rayed. After this process I was allowed to get my boarding pass.
That done, my passport and boarding pass were checked again, I went through a metal detector, and had my carry on luggage sniffed and x-rayed. THEN I went through passport control.
The entire process took about two and a half hours. I suppose I should be thankful for the super early airport arrival.
For your convenience, I have created a table that illustrates the amount of time passport control has required for the two latest countries I've entered. Like a good engineer, I've compared apples to apples by keeping the units the same.
Israel: 10,800 seconds
Italy: 5 seconds
Hmm...
Sunday, April 12, 2009
A few pictures from Ethiopia
Here are a few general 'Ethiopia' pictures.
Bingham Academy, the school I went to for 4th and 7th grade.
Self explanatory, I think.
Typical load management in Addis Ababa.
The country south of Addis Ababa, west of Soddu on the way to Sawela.
Part of the road down to Makki from Jinka.
A Mursi girl at the missionary school.
Another. I liked her earplates - most are solid.
Another picture of Metser.
The road north, south of Arba Minch.
We passed a market.
Ethiopian Orthodox artwork on the wall of Birhanu Gebreselassie Church.
The priest there. He was a nice guy.
An orphan kid I met. He belonged to the church.
Tisisat Falls, which translates to something like "firesmoke". This is the Blue Nile.
Bingham Academy, the school I went to for 4th and 7th grade.
Self explanatory, I think.
Typical load management in Addis Ababa.
The country south of Addis Ababa, west of Soddu on the way to Sawela.
Part of the road down to Makki from Jinka.
A Mursi girl at the missionary school.
Another. I liked her earplates - most are solid.
Another picture of Metser.
The road north, south of Arba Minch.
We passed a market.
Ethiopian Orthodox artwork on the wall of Birhanu Gebreselassie Church.
The priest there. He was a nice guy.
An orphan kid I met. He belonged to the church.
Tisisat Falls, which translates to something like "firesmoke". This is the Blue Nile.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Filler Episode
There's too much to write down, as always. I figured that the couple days I had in London would be a chance to be super internet productive after something of a brownout for the last two months, but when I got here I realized that all I wanted to do was stare at the wall and do nothing. I succeeded in doing nothing, but I stared at a laptop screen instead.
I walked through Westminster Abbey this afternoon. The architecture is absolutely stunning, of course, and it was fascinating to see the graves of so many influential people. Wilberforce, Livingston, Darwin, Dickens. My engineering nerdiness made me stop for a moment when I saw James Watt, James Joule, and Isaac Newton.
The quiet of the place gave me a little time for thought, and I was at the point where I was dimly aware that I was, again, at that point of emotional/spiritual/physical exhaustion. When I got around to the Nave I saw a sign that mentioned that if you wanted to speak or pray with a chaplain you could request to do so. I realized that I hadn't really spoken to a pastor of any sort for a long time. I don't really have a home church at the moment, having been in transition when I left Seattle,
; and regular re-calibrating, if it can be called that, is something that I've missed for a very long time. So, figuring that a church is a church and that Westminster Abbey is as good as any, I asked for a chaplain and was led into a little room to the side of the beaten path (near the West exit) with an altar and a few chairs.
I talked with him for about 15 minutes or so. I told him a bit about what I was doing, that I was a long way from familiarity and tired of it, and that I had been more or less on autopilot for the past month. I mentioned that I was leaving for the Holy Land in a day or two and that even though I'll be there during Passover and Easter I just wasn't in the mood to care. He pointed out that I was sort of in a state of overload - quite true - and that he noticed that his congregation had a tendency to shift their minds into neutral on Sunday and not really engage, something that we do all the time. He noted that this opportunity to travel was a luxury, and would undoubtedly be a resource later, but advised me to give myself the luxury of reflection as well. I knelt at the altar and he prayed that I would find peace, joy, and purpose in God's presence. Those were all things I really needed to hear.
The burnout was largely northern-Ethiopia related. It was an intense couple of weeks for a lot of reasons, not the least of which was my method of travel: bus. Ethiopian buses have become synonymous in my mind with a sort of tuberculosis transmission vehicle; you get to spend about 12 hours crammed against some sick wreck of humanity (I think those types sat next to me because no one else would) with the windows closed and the curtains drawn on twisty, bumpy roads. The bus reservation system is as follows: show up before 5:00AM, commence fighting for a ticket at 5:00AM, load the bus immediately after getting a ticket, then sit while the bus idles in its own diesel fumes for about two hours until the driver shows up. It's just not pleasant. I spent a day (12 hours) on the bus from Addis to Bahir Dar, half a day (8 hours) from Bahir Dar to Gonder, another day from Gonder to Lalibela, another from Lalibela back to Bahir Dar, and another from Injibara back to Addis Ababa. That's a LOT of bus time. I'd like to say it built character, but I'm fairly certain that it was merely terrible.
I'll throw in some more detail on the northern Ethiopia excursion later, but I'll attribute the emotional/spiritual exhaustion to the cultural bombardment. My previous experiences in Ethiopia didn't make it any more comfortable or easy; rather, they gave me enough of an understanding to break through the surface tension of the typical top-skimming traveling experience and fall right into (what felt like) the thick of things. It was the most intense cultural interaction I've ever experienced, and I came out of it dazed and blinking. Ethiopia came together for me in a completely new way, and it was fascinating and disillusioning at the same time. Overload is the right word.
Naturally, I'm glad to have escaped to England (which I've taken to calling a 'proper country') because it's just comfortable. Diseases don't run out of the tap into the sink (the tap runs!), the toilets flush, people pick a side of the road and stick to it, the cars don't choke you with fumes, the stores have donuts, the pubs have beer that doesn't taste like seltzer water, the showers are hot, there are cool grey clouds and temperatures below 20C (70F), I don't have to squint under the equatorial sun, and all of the places have familiar-sounding names like Choreleywoodhamfordboroughgreenshirecombwell. It's quaint. Like a little island of happiness. It IS a little island of happiness.
So now you know where I'm at.
I walked through Westminster Abbey this afternoon. The architecture is absolutely stunning, of course, and it was fascinating to see the graves of so many influential people. Wilberforce, Livingston, Darwin, Dickens. My engineering nerdiness made me stop for a moment when I saw James Watt, James Joule, and Isaac Newton.
The quiet of the place gave me a little time for thought, and I was at the point where I was dimly aware that I was, again, at that point of emotional/spiritual/physical exhaustion. When I got around to the Nave I saw a sign that mentioned that if you wanted to speak or pray with a chaplain you could request to do so. I realized that I hadn't really spoken to a pastor of any sort for a long time. I don't really have a home church at the moment, having been in transition when I left Seattle,
; and regular re-calibrating, if it can be called that, is something that I've missed for a very long time. So, figuring that a church is a church and that Westminster Abbey is as good as any, I asked for a chaplain and was led into a little room to the side of the beaten path (near the West exit) with an altar and a few chairs.
I talked with him for about 15 minutes or so. I told him a bit about what I was doing, that I was a long way from familiarity and tired of it, and that I had been more or less on autopilot for the past month. I mentioned that I was leaving for the Holy Land in a day or two and that even though I'll be there during Passover and Easter I just wasn't in the mood to care. He pointed out that I was sort of in a state of overload - quite true - and that he noticed that his congregation had a tendency to shift their minds into neutral on Sunday and not really engage, something that we do all the time. He noted that this opportunity to travel was a luxury, and would undoubtedly be a resource later, but advised me to give myself the luxury of reflection as well. I knelt at the altar and he prayed that I would find peace, joy, and purpose in God's presence. Those were all things I really needed to hear.
The burnout was largely northern-Ethiopia related. It was an intense couple of weeks for a lot of reasons, not the least of which was my method of travel: bus. Ethiopian buses have become synonymous in my mind with a sort of tuberculosis transmission vehicle; you get to spend about 12 hours crammed against some sick wreck of humanity (I think those types sat next to me because no one else would) with the windows closed and the curtains drawn on twisty, bumpy roads. The bus reservation system is as follows: show up before 5:00AM, commence fighting for a ticket at 5:00AM, load the bus immediately after getting a ticket, then sit while the bus idles in its own diesel fumes for about two hours until the driver shows up. It's just not pleasant. I spent a day (12 hours) on the bus from Addis to Bahir Dar, half a day (8 hours) from Bahir Dar to Gonder, another day from Gonder to Lalibela, another from Lalibela back to Bahir Dar, and another from Injibara back to Addis Ababa. That's a LOT of bus time. I'd like to say it built character, but I'm fairly certain that it was merely terrible.
I'll throw in some more detail on the northern Ethiopia excursion later, but I'll attribute the emotional/spiritual exhaustion to the cultural bombardment. My previous experiences in Ethiopia didn't make it any more comfortable or easy; rather, they gave me enough of an understanding to break through the surface tension of the typical top-skimming traveling experience and fall right into (what felt like) the thick of things. It was the most intense cultural interaction I've ever experienced, and I came out of it dazed and blinking. Ethiopia came together for me in a completely new way, and it was fascinating and disillusioning at the same time. Overload is the right word.
Naturally, I'm glad to have escaped to England (which I've taken to calling a 'proper country') because it's just comfortable. Diseases don't run out of the tap into the sink (the tap runs!), the toilets flush, people pick a side of the road and stick to it, the cars don't choke you with fumes, the stores have donuts, the pubs have beer that doesn't taste like seltzer water, the showers are hot, there are cool grey clouds and temperatures below 20C (70F), I don't have to squint under the equatorial sun, and all of the places have familiar-sounding names like Choreleywoodhamfordboroughgreenshirecombwell. It's quaint. Like a little island of happiness. It IS a little island of happiness.
So now you know where I'm at.
Friday, March 13, 2009
Ethiopian Sticks
I don't want to write an update because it's going to take a long time and I'm lazy (getting lazier), but as pressure mounts it's becoming more clear that I'll never have any peace until I do. I don't think I'm trying to suppress any memories, but remembering how those things tasted might indicate that some memories really should be suppressed. Ick. There are some pictures in this update, but I must point out that the quality is dismal due to my attempts to make the file size as small as possible.
It's been about four weeks since I announced that I was headed off on a trip into the sticks. Well, there were TONS of sticks. Sticks here, sticks there, dry sticks, still growing sticks, people carrying sticks, houses made from sticks, baboons and monkeys shrieking from within the sticks - you name it. I have seen these sticks, and I have returned alive.
We were planning on heading out from Addis early in the morning. The hospital across the street from the guesthouse, however, was opening a new cardiac wing that morning (I would never trust my heart to that hospital) and the occasion merited a visit from some government VIPs. The government VIPs merited a large federal police presence, which merited a closure of the road into and out of the guest house. I noticed that something was up when I walked out of my room and was greeted by a guy in camo with an AK47. I sort of thought that using the guesthouse balconies to set up snipers was a little overkill, but they had the guns, not me. This surprise event resulted in a slightly later departure. They were nice enough, really, though the soldier who saluted me attests to the Ethiopian military's general sense of confusion.
The first day we drove to Sodo, about five hours out of Addis Ababa. We drove up to a part of the city where the gentleman I was traveling with (we'll call him Mr. F) knew some retired evangelists where living. Mr. F moved to Ethiopia some 35 years ago and was involved in supporting a lot of the pioneering evangelists in southern Ethiopia. Most of the people we met were evangelists he had worked with a long time ago, often trekking for days on end (flies carrying sleeping sickness make mules short-lived in some of the Ethiopian plain areas) into unreached tribes with a reputation for killing outsiders. They were pretty intense guys. We spent a couple hours that afternoon talking (I just listened, and drifted a bit when my Amharic couldn't keep up) and drank coffee with spiced rancid butter. There wasn't a ton of the butter in it, so it actually wasn't terrible if you're used to the butter taste. I tried to be polite (and I drank it all).
The next day we headed southwest to Sawela, a small town in the hills at the foot of a mountain range, where we spent the next night. One of Mr. F's first postings was at a station in the nearby mountains, but he used to have to fly into an airstrip at Sawela on a C47 (a US cargo aircraft used in WWII) and then spend hours going up the hill on mules, family in tow. We were able to drive up to the old mission station (an impressive development in itself) and poke around in the old houses. I took a photograph of a girl who was interested in what a couple of foreigners were doing there.
I also got a picture of the clouds that evening in Sawela. The mountains to the right are where the old mission station is, and the road we left Sawela on runs parallel to the mountains on the left, which continue south.
We were eventually going to go on to Jinka, the regional capital of Gama Gofa, and taking the road we were familiar with would have required us to backtrack to Sodo and then go over a section reputed to be in very poor repair, so we decided to a try a new road to Jinka that was under construction. Ha! You can already tell this is going to work out great.
Things started out well. The landscape dropped out of the low hills into a valley running south with high ridges hemming us in on either side. We crossed and re-crossed the new road, and everything was in good repair. In a town called Beyto we stopped again to visit another evangelist, then continued on. Our Ethiopian driver began asking locals for directions, wanting to know where the road to Jinka began. The unfortunate problem was this: there's an old road to Jinka that was in bad shape ten years ago and hasn't been worked on since, and there's the aforementioned new road that actually goes to Kako before going to Jinka. Locals confirmed that we were on the road to Jinka (they were quite correct) and individuals along the way reassured us that this was indeed the road (to Jinka) as we drove down something suspiciously resembling a cattle track. It soon became apparent that we were on the old road, but we pressed on. The valley we were traveling down at about 2500ft eventually opens out to the east; the new road goes through this opening and then circles around west to Jinka at about 4500 ft. The distance to Jinka as the crow flies from the southern end of the valley isn't especially far, but a narrow mountain range that peaks at about 7000ft blocks the way. Our road was more of the crow persuasion. Here's a picture of us going directly up the side of that high range, which I took out of the window of the car.
A good time was had by all, mostly because we didn't die. Had the road not been dry it would've been impassable.
We spent the night in Jinka at the Jinka Resort. The Jinka Resort is a new development. Jinka was the middle of nowhere ten years ago, and though that hasn't really changed, the place is now overrun by tourists who visit for a couple days to photograph local naked people. The "resort" would be a funny place if there was something funny about paying US-style prices for bad food and cold showers, but there isn't and so it's not. It's fascinating how even brand new facilities manage to be terrible. During dinner one of the staff approached us to sell us pictures of the Mursi tribe for the fantastic price of 50 USD per photo, and I employed my Amharic skills to inform him that this was ridiculous. Mr. F commenced to tell him a story (in his fluent Amharic) about how he used to trek through all of these hills for days on end, one of the first white people the Mursi ever saw, before the staff member was born. It's not always great to play the experience card, but the effect on the staff member was somehow satisfying. Among the town's other delights are younger males who have a habit of harassing foreigners (anything from yelling to throwing rocks), making for exciting walks down the local thoroughfares. Because of all of these things - dehumanizing tourists, bad accommodation, and unproductive youths - Jinka wins an award for sucking ten years ago and still going strong. I suppose there's something to be said for demonstrating consistency.
Gas was not to be found in Jinka while we were there, though some was available from black market shops like this:
I'm not trying to make a political statement here, but maybe the guy running a black market oil-based energy shack is. Institutions thusly named are to be found through the country.
The next day we drove a couple of hours from Jinka to Alduba, where SIM has had a station for quite some time. Alduba is in Bunna territory, and there has been various projects there including translation and literacy work, a clinic, and a veterinary service in partnership with Christian Veterinary Mission. The Bunna are nomadic herdsmen, so veterinary work for their sheep and cattle is very appreciated by locals. That was a place where my family spent a fair amount of time visiting and hanging out, and with the sun setting in the acacia trees and familiar sights and sounds a lot of good feelings came back. It was surprisingly refreshing; I didn't want to leave the south at that point.
The next day we drove about six hours. We passed through Jinka and then northwest; shortly after Jinka the road turns sharply down to a large plain at about 1000ft, which for Ethiopia is pretty low. Tourism has given rise to a couple of checkpoints along this route: first, a checkpoint where they charge you for entering Jinka (charging you to leave would be more appropriate), then another so that the federal government can charge incoming tourists a park entrance fee, then another so that the Mursi can charge a fee and force you to take along a Mursi 'scout'. I took to calling this guy Scout (I don't know his name) which he seemed to sort of enjoy. He hardly spoke Amharic - just Mursi - but he was a nice guy. We crossed the plain and went up a rise, then continued north past Mursi territory to Hanna, which is the largest settlement (and the most accessible) among the Bodi tribe. Few tourists go out so far - most just come out for the afternoon to photograph a few naked Mursi - and Scout was a little worried (though being a Mursi warrior he did his best not to let on). I can't blame him. We were planning on spending three nights in Hanna, and the Mursi and Bodi were at war not too long ago. Additionally, the Bodi culture's rite of passage for males is killing someone outside the tribe. Scout kept his AK47 close.
There were five evangelists living with their families in Hanna (there were originally ten), and all were from the Mali tribe in the neighboring highlands. There is already a strong Christian church among the Mali, and the Mali and Bodi are part of the same language subgroup though their features are quite different. For these Mali men to bring their families to Bodi land is a big deal, not only because of the general violence of the Bodi and the aforementioned rite of passage, but also because the land around Hanna is absolutely desolate; a blasted grassland marked by flash flood channels twisting through red volcanic rock. It's difficult to find water and nearly impossible to grow any kind of food in the thin soil and equatorial sun. The evangelists who had managed to stick it out so far were great guys (they would've left already if they weren't) but were becoming discouraged. The pressure of an environment like that - threats of violence and limited, expensive food - required the majority of their concentration, making it difficult to give time to the church.
It began to cloud up the first night we were there, and we saw storm clouds piling up in the high mountains to the west. A huge electrical storm passed away south of us as we watched the sunset. It was the end of dry season there, and people were trying to burn slash piles before the rain came. The fires turned the low, dark clouds red as evening came on. During the night the storm hit, driving rain through our uncovered window. It poured rain for several hours. I woke up the next morning and the world had taken on a general glow.
Unfortunately, the next day was just as hot as before. During the two full days we were there we made one trip about an hour to the west to see some other evangelists. Mr. F talked with them about their concerns and they prepared a meal for us. There was half-cooked corn mash, which tasted like an uncooked corn tortilla might taste and wasn't bad; a sort of mead made my leaving milk out to ferment a few days, which had cheesy chunks suspended in liquid you might find sitting on top of sour cream; and there was coffee leaf tea with salt, berberi (a hot red pepper) and ginger. I thought the tea (coffee?) might belong in the bloody mary family of beverages, though Mr. F was skeptical regarding its culinary merit. He liked the mead more than I did, or maybe I should say he didn't like it less. He's a pro.
The kids in Hanna were pretty fascinated with us. I don't think they had seen white people before, so when I had some down time (most of the time) I would go sit outside our place near the church, and they would crowd around me and touch my skin and my hair and sort of poke at me. They were funny, and they spoke to each other in Amharic, so I could hear their comments about how my skin was smooth, and how my hands were red, and how my eyes looked like a cat's. They seemed concerned about the scratches and bug bites that showed up far more clearly on my skin than on theirs, and they would trace the blue lines of my veins across my hands and arms with their fingers. I entertained them my pointing out similar bites and veins on their skin, and they were intrigued by the fact that we were more or less the same. They taught me some Amharic words I had forgotten like "sky" and "blue" and "cloud". The local Bodi people were really nice. Even though they didn't speak any Amharic, the women and kids would come by our room, invite themselves in, and sit down with us for a half hour or so. I wish people would do that in the States.
When we left Hanna, thanking the evangelists for profusely for their hospitality, we headed back down the road we had come in on (you can't go many other directions from Hanna) and took a spur of the road that runs about 20km east towards the mission station at Makki. We saw some dik-diks bounding across the road and some hartebeests in the distance as we drove. You may remember that my family lived in a place called Metser for two years while we were in Ethiopia; Metser is 30km north of Jinka, and the river that runs past the station at Makki has its source in the Metser valley to the northeast. Don't think that Makki is nice and cool because it has a pretty river - an average day was about 102F with 80% humidity. I took a photo of a dragonfly by the river, then left because tetse flies were ravaging my tender white legs. The result was an image of the Microsoft Windows Desktop Background persuasion. More on Windows later.
I had been hoping to return to Metser during the trip either by hiking in from Makki or by driving in from Jinka. The fuel shortage in Jinka had made us change our plans for driving in, so I had radioed the Makki station from Alduba to see if they would be interested in having me around for a while to hang out and maybe do some work. It was becoming clear that a trek from Makki to Metser would be logistically difficult, and equally clear that driving into Metser for a day was a low priority. Mr. F had decided to stay one night in Makki and then continue on to Addis, so I resigned myself to making up for missing Metser by hanging around at Makki for about a week.
The afternoon Mr. F was leaving I was talking with one of the missionaries (Mr. T) at Makki. The missing link in the transportation chain was between Jinka and Makki, where no transport at all runs; buses do run between Jinka and Metser, however, as there is plenty of market traffic between the fertile Metser highlands and the markets at Jinka and beyond. Mr. T mentioned that he would be driving to Jinka two mornings from then, and I suddenly realized that it would actually be possible for me to go back to Jinka that day with Mr. F, spend the night, catch a bus to and from Metser the next day, and then get a ride back to Makki with Mr. T. And despite the fact that going back to Metser was one of my biggest goals for this trip, I suddenly realized that a surprisingly large part of me just didn't feel like it. My sense of adventure had gone into some kind of deep hibernation - the biggest problem with comfort, like being a Hobbit - and I was genuinely apprehensive of testing my language skills and making my own arrangements without any backup. I took 15 minutes and a cup of coffee to realize that I was being ridiculous, and I ran to pack a bag motivated not by actually wanting to go but by the knowledge that I would absolutely hate myself later if I didn't. Thus I went, and 15 minutes down the road I realized I had just barely managed not to be stupid. I was more relieved than anything else.
I stayed the night in Jinka at the Norwegian mission (not the resort), had dinner with Mr. F and Co., then went to sleep so that I could wake up at 5:30 AM for the bus into Metser. I should note that taking a bus into Metser is a novelty. The road is only 30km (20 miles) long, but it used to take us anywhere from two to four hours by four wheel drive, sometimes with mud chains on the tires. Now, I'll have you know, for a mere 1 USD one can take a delightful early morning jaunt through the scenic town (read 'hellhole') of Gazer and arrive refreshed (read 'squished and smelling of humanity') in Metser an hour and a half later! I stepped off of the delightful contraption that served for a bus at the bottom of our old driveway at about 8:00 AM, and began walking back up towards our house on a hill. I made two friends on the bus.
My plan was to go unnoticed for as long as possible, because I wanted to walk around the area a bit and I knew it would be impossible once I stumbled into the quicksand of cultural interaction. It's not that I don't like interacting with Ethiopians - I do - it just has the tendency to change absolutely everything, and my memories of Metser were as a little kid running around doing whatever I wanted. Everything was immediately familiar, though oddly half as big as it used to be, and I made for the water hole in the river near our house. I don't know what made me think a white guy could walk around there without being noticed, and I had acquired a companion within about five minutes, but I went to the river anyway. See?
From there I went to our old house. It had been turned into a Bible school when we left, and I was happy to see that it was being well used. There was a regional church meeting going on that morning, where I met a gentleman I knew who was involved in the translation work there. I walked around the compound a bit and visited our old house, which is now more filled with dried corn than I remember it. Virtually nothing had changed, except for one disappointment; someone had had the ingenious idea to rip out the strawberry patch, raspberry bushes, passion fruit bushes, papaya trees, guava trees, and mango trees, and replace them with absolutely nothing. The sycamore-fig tree behind our house had also been cut down. Oh well. The house was still there, though it's dirtier than it used to be:
My whole family used to fit into that.
I stayed at Metser for the rest of the morning and a little into the afternoon, visiting a place or two and conversing with people we knew when we lived there. Everything except our mission station (not really ours anymore) was almost exactly the same. It was a great experience, though somehow not as wonderful as I had hoped. Sometimes there's more joy in the desire and memory of something than is inherent in the thing itself, though my opinion of Metser as the most beautiful place in Ethiopia remains unchanged. Fortunately the place isn't corrupted by tourists; apparently the Aari tribe is boring because they wear clothes. That's fine with me.
When I returned to Makki I got to work, which I figured was a fair way to earn my keep. My original ride back fell through, so I ended up staying for about a week and a half before returning to Addis. Living in Makki is a bit like living in National Geographic, honestly. The Mursi are pretty distinct culturally. Men are covered with artistic scars and shave patterns into their hair, and the women wear heavy brass jewelry along with clay lip plates and ear plates. They're also very nice, and would go out of their way to greet me and find out where I was from. I mostly did some odd jobs that needed to be done; I did a lot of screening and general improvement on Mr. T's house, and some other things that were closer to my area of experience. I overhauled one of the solar power systems, got the email system back in working order (it's super cool - it uses a 14K modem that transmits data over the shortwave radio), worked on a couple other computer problems here and there, and figured out how to hotwire a tractor before the starter seized and we gave up. There's failing technology everywhere, folks, and sadly, for most of the people I'm meeting, PCs are more of an affliction than anything else. I left the station right about when I was running out of easy work and facing the prospect of returning to repairing hot tin roofs in the blazing sun. The scratches on my arms are NOT from screening. They're from fighting off leopards with my bare hands.
I was impressed by the Mursi church. Mr. F had been one of the first missionaries to make contact with the Mursi tribe and a couple of the elders remembered him from way back. I sat in on a meeting of the church elders and tribal leaders as they discussed some of the problems they were having in the church. The elders were eager to do what the Bible said was right but they had no Bible translated into Mursi, and they wanted to ask Mr. F about some of their issues. One question was about whether a man with three wives who had become a Christian should divorce two of them, and another was about whether a man who had stolen a cow should be allowed to come into the church. The wife question is a common one, and Mr. F pointed out that one clear thing in the Bible is that God hates divorce. He advised that the man should keep all three of his wives, instead of throwing any of them out of his household. Of the Mursi and Bodi who have converted to Christianity, there are some very positive changes coming about in their lifestyles. Men with more than one wife will support all three of them and treat all of them well instead of favoring the youngest, and young men will only take one wife. Christians are more likely to send their daughters to school as well as their sons, and there were some eager attempts at reconciliation with other tribes. One of the Mursi pointed out that if Jesus were to come back, wouldn't he ask why they hadn't told the Bodi about Jesus? And wouldn't they be ashamed if they hadn't? He had found so much joy in his faith that he was excited to travel to hostile Bodi territory and share what he had found. Some people seem to believe that Christian missionaries are out to destroy local cultures and subjugate people, but this was a great example of Mursi who had found real joy in the gospel and were actively addressing destructive issues in their societies while remaining true to their culture and traditions.
I'm back in Addis now, and it's only took me three days to break the law and become a fugitive. It was simple, really. I spent some time at an SIM-affiliated office trying to help them set up their shiny new DSL connection (it's twice as fast as dial up, and surfing the web is akin to a slow, crappy wooden roller coaster that you don't quite trust) and in the process I poked around in the modem to check the settings. When I called Ethiopia Telecom to ask them what they were smoking, I learned that accessing the modem "is illegal in Ethiopia, sir". Oops? So instead of helping me on the phone they had to send a technician (When can I expect him? "I dunno") out here to flail around for half an hour trying to fix a 30-second problem. It wasn't frustrating. Not at all. It was sort of my fault for expecting things to work. The police showed up for a few minutes today, believe it or not, but I escaped their attention by sitting in a chair and staying perfectly still.
This brings me to my next topic, which is IT related in an attempt to balance out the lack of technology in the other environments I've described. I've been working in this office since the beginning of the week - mostly bumming around on the internet, reading, corresponding, and the like - and fixing various computer snags that have popped up. The office runs entirely on Apple hardware, and I haven't really worked on Macs before (how this qualifies me to fix problems I don't know, but I've managed) and let me tell you something: you should go out and get yourself a Mac. It'll make you happier because you won't need to call me to fix your computer, and it'll make me happier because...well, you won't be calling me to fix your computer. Macs are amazing because they actually work they way you want them to. I'll likely continue to punish myself with PCs for various hardware reasons, but for just about anything normal people do Macs are way more productive. Having experienced OS X Leopard firsthand, I will only reconsider when Microsoft discovers a method of turning their huge wads of cash into a decent operating system.
The fact that I've gone off on a tangential rant proves that I have nothing left to talk about. Thanks for reading!
It's been about four weeks since I announced that I was headed off on a trip into the sticks. Well, there were TONS of sticks. Sticks here, sticks there, dry sticks, still growing sticks, people carrying sticks, houses made from sticks, baboons and monkeys shrieking from within the sticks - you name it. I have seen these sticks, and I have returned alive.
We were planning on heading out from Addis early in the morning. The hospital across the street from the guesthouse, however, was opening a new cardiac wing that morning (I would never trust my heart to that hospital) and the occasion merited a visit from some government VIPs. The government VIPs merited a large federal police presence, which merited a closure of the road into and out of the guest house. I noticed that something was up when I walked out of my room and was greeted by a guy in camo with an AK47. I sort of thought that using the guesthouse balconies to set up snipers was a little overkill, but they had the guns, not me. This surprise event resulted in a slightly later departure. They were nice enough, really, though the soldier who saluted me attests to the Ethiopian military's general sense of confusion.
The first day we drove to Sodo, about five hours out of Addis Ababa. We drove up to a part of the city where the gentleman I was traveling with (we'll call him Mr. F) knew some retired evangelists where living. Mr. F moved to Ethiopia some 35 years ago and was involved in supporting a lot of the pioneering evangelists in southern Ethiopia. Most of the people we met were evangelists he had worked with a long time ago, often trekking for days on end (flies carrying sleeping sickness make mules short-lived in some of the Ethiopian plain areas) into unreached tribes with a reputation for killing outsiders. They were pretty intense guys. We spent a couple hours that afternoon talking (I just listened, and drifted a bit when my Amharic couldn't keep up) and drank coffee with spiced rancid butter. There wasn't a ton of the butter in it, so it actually wasn't terrible if you're used to the butter taste. I tried to be polite (and I drank it all).
The next day we headed southwest to Sawela, a small town in the hills at the foot of a mountain range, where we spent the next night. One of Mr. F's first postings was at a station in the nearby mountains, but he used to have to fly into an airstrip at Sawela on a C47 (a US cargo aircraft used in WWII) and then spend hours going up the hill on mules, family in tow. We were able to drive up to the old mission station (an impressive development in itself) and poke around in the old houses. I took a photograph of a girl who was interested in what a couple of foreigners were doing there.
I also got a picture of the clouds that evening in Sawela. The mountains to the right are where the old mission station is, and the road we left Sawela on runs parallel to the mountains on the left, which continue south.
We were eventually going to go on to Jinka, the regional capital of Gama Gofa, and taking the road we were familiar with would have required us to backtrack to Sodo and then go over a section reputed to be in very poor repair, so we decided to a try a new road to Jinka that was under construction. Ha! You can already tell this is going to work out great.
Things started out well. The landscape dropped out of the low hills into a valley running south with high ridges hemming us in on either side. We crossed and re-crossed the new road, and everything was in good repair. In a town called Beyto we stopped again to visit another evangelist, then continued on. Our Ethiopian driver began asking locals for directions, wanting to know where the road to Jinka began. The unfortunate problem was this: there's an old road to Jinka that was in bad shape ten years ago and hasn't been worked on since, and there's the aforementioned new road that actually goes to Kako before going to Jinka. Locals confirmed that we were on the road to Jinka (they were quite correct) and individuals along the way reassured us that this was indeed the road (to Jinka) as we drove down something suspiciously resembling a cattle track. It soon became apparent that we were on the old road, but we pressed on. The valley we were traveling down at about 2500ft eventually opens out to the east; the new road goes through this opening and then circles around west to Jinka at about 4500 ft. The distance to Jinka as the crow flies from the southern end of the valley isn't especially far, but a narrow mountain range that peaks at about 7000ft blocks the way. Our road was more of the crow persuasion. Here's a picture of us going directly up the side of that high range, which I took out of the window of the car.
A good time was had by all, mostly because we didn't die. Had the road not been dry it would've been impassable.
We spent the night in Jinka at the Jinka Resort. The Jinka Resort is a new development. Jinka was the middle of nowhere ten years ago, and though that hasn't really changed, the place is now overrun by tourists who visit for a couple days to photograph local naked people. The "resort" would be a funny place if there was something funny about paying US-style prices for bad food and cold showers, but there isn't and so it's not. It's fascinating how even brand new facilities manage to be terrible. During dinner one of the staff approached us to sell us pictures of the Mursi tribe for the fantastic price of 50 USD per photo, and I employed my Amharic skills to inform him that this was ridiculous. Mr. F commenced to tell him a story (in his fluent Amharic) about how he used to trek through all of these hills for days on end, one of the first white people the Mursi ever saw, before the staff member was born. It's not always great to play the experience card, but the effect on the staff member was somehow satisfying. Among the town's other delights are younger males who have a habit of harassing foreigners (anything from yelling to throwing rocks), making for exciting walks down the local thoroughfares. Because of all of these things - dehumanizing tourists, bad accommodation, and unproductive youths - Jinka wins an award for sucking ten years ago and still going strong. I suppose there's something to be said for demonstrating consistency.
Gas was not to be found in Jinka while we were there, though some was available from black market shops like this:
I'm not trying to make a political statement here, but maybe the guy running a black market oil-based energy shack is. Institutions thusly named are to be found through the country.
The next day we drove a couple of hours from Jinka to Alduba, where SIM has had a station for quite some time. Alduba is in Bunna territory, and there has been various projects there including translation and literacy work, a clinic, and a veterinary service in partnership with Christian Veterinary Mission. The Bunna are nomadic herdsmen, so veterinary work for their sheep and cattle is very appreciated by locals. That was a place where my family spent a fair amount of time visiting and hanging out, and with the sun setting in the acacia trees and familiar sights and sounds a lot of good feelings came back. It was surprisingly refreshing; I didn't want to leave the south at that point.
The next day we drove about six hours. We passed through Jinka and then northwest; shortly after Jinka the road turns sharply down to a large plain at about 1000ft, which for Ethiopia is pretty low. Tourism has given rise to a couple of checkpoints along this route: first, a checkpoint where they charge you for entering Jinka (charging you to leave would be more appropriate), then another so that the federal government can charge incoming tourists a park entrance fee, then another so that the Mursi can charge a fee and force you to take along a Mursi 'scout'. I took to calling this guy Scout (I don't know his name) which he seemed to sort of enjoy. He hardly spoke Amharic - just Mursi - but he was a nice guy. We crossed the plain and went up a rise, then continued north past Mursi territory to Hanna, which is the largest settlement (and the most accessible) among the Bodi tribe. Few tourists go out so far - most just come out for the afternoon to photograph a few naked Mursi - and Scout was a little worried (though being a Mursi warrior he did his best not to let on). I can't blame him. We were planning on spending three nights in Hanna, and the Mursi and Bodi were at war not too long ago. Additionally, the Bodi culture's rite of passage for males is killing someone outside the tribe. Scout kept his AK47 close.
There were five evangelists living with their families in Hanna (there were originally ten), and all were from the Mali tribe in the neighboring highlands. There is already a strong Christian church among the Mali, and the Mali and Bodi are part of the same language subgroup though their features are quite different. For these Mali men to bring their families to Bodi land is a big deal, not only because of the general violence of the Bodi and the aforementioned rite of passage, but also because the land around Hanna is absolutely desolate; a blasted grassland marked by flash flood channels twisting through red volcanic rock. It's difficult to find water and nearly impossible to grow any kind of food in the thin soil and equatorial sun. The evangelists who had managed to stick it out so far were great guys (they would've left already if they weren't) but were becoming discouraged. The pressure of an environment like that - threats of violence and limited, expensive food - required the majority of their concentration, making it difficult to give time to the church.
It began to cloud up the first night we were there, and we saw storm clouds piling up in the high mountains to the west. A huge electrical storm passed away south of us as we watched the sunset. It was the end of dry season there, and people were trying to burn slash piles before the rain came. The fires turned the low, dark clouds red as evening came on. During the night the storm hit, driving rain through our uncovered window. It poured rain for several hours. I woke up the next morning and the world had taken on a general glow.
Unfortunately, the next day was just as hot as before. During the two full days we were there we made one trip about an hour to the west to see some other evangelists. Mr. F talked with them about their concerns and they prepared a meal for us. There was half-cooked corn mash, which tasted like an uncooked corn tortilla might taste and wasn't bad; a sort of mead made my leaving milk out to ferment a few days, which had cheesy chunks suspended in liquid you might find sitting on top of sour cream; and there was coffee leaf tea with salt, berberi (a hot red pepper) and ginger. I thought the tea (coffee?) might belong in the bloody mary family of beverages, though Mr. F was skeptical regarding its culinary merit. He liked the mead more than I did, or maybe I should say he didn't like it less. He's a pro.
The kids in Hanna were pretty fascinated with us. I don't think they had seen white people before, so when I had some down time (most of the time) I would go sit outside our place near the church, and they would crowd around me and touch my skin and my hair and sort of poke at me. They were funny, and they spoke to each other in Amharic, so I could hear their comments about how my skin was smooth, and how my hands were red, and how my eyes looked like a cat's. They seemed concerned about the scratches and bug bites that showed up far more clearly on my skin than on theirs, and they would trace the blue lines of my veins across my hands and arms with their fingers. I entertained them my pointing out similar bites and veins on their skin, and they were intrigued by the fact that we were more or less the same. They taught me some Amharic words I had forgotten like "sky" and "blue" and "cloud". The local Bodi people were really nice. Even though they didn't speak any Amharic, the women and kids would come by our room, invite themselves in, and sit down with us for a half hour or so. I wish people would do that in the States.
When we left Hanna, thanking the evangelists for profusely for their hospitality, we headed back down the road we had come in on (you can't go many other directions from Hanna) and took a spur of the road that runs about 20km east towards the mission station at Makki. We saw some dik-diks bounding across the road and some hartebeests in the distance as we drove. You may remember that my family lived in a place called Metser for two years while we were in Ethiopia; Metser is 30km north of Jinka, and the river that runs past the station at Makki has its source in the Metser valley to the northeast. Don't think that Makki is nice and cool because it has a pretty river - an average day was about 102F with 80% humidity. I took a photo of a dragonfly by the river, then left because tetse flies were ravaging my tender white legs. The result was an image of the Microsoft Windows Desktop Background persuasion. More on Windows later.
I had been hoping to return to Metser during the trip either by hiking in from Makki or by driving in from Jinka. The fuel shortage in Jinka had made us change our plans for driving in, so I had radioed the Makki station from Alduba to see if they would be interested in having me around for a while to hang out and maybe do some work. It was becoming clear that a trek from Makki to Metser would be logistically difficult, and equally clear that driving into Metser for a day was a low priority. Mr. F had decided to stay one night in Makki and then continue on to Addis, so I resigned myself to making up for missing Metser by hanging around at Makki for about a week.
The afternoon Mr. F was leaving I was talking with one of the missionaries (Mr. T) at Makki. The missing link in the transportation chain was between Jinka and Makki, where no transport at all runs; buses do run between Jinka and Metser, however, as there is plenty of market traffic between the fertile Metser highlands and the markets at Jinka and beyond. Mr. T mentioned that he would be driving to Jinka two mornings from then, and I suddenly realized that it would actually be possible for me to go back to Jinka that day with Mr. F, spend the night, catch a bus to and from Metser the next day, and then get a ride back to Makki with Mr. T. And despite the fact that going back to Metser was one of my biggest goals for this trip, I suddenly realized that a surprisingly large part of me just didn't feel like it. My sense of adventure had gone into some kind of deep hibernation - the biggest problem with comfort, like being a Hobbit - and I was genuinely apprehensive of testing my language skills and making my own arrangements without any backup. I took 15 minutes and a cup of coffee to realize that I was being ridiculous, and I ran to pack a bag motivated not by actually wanting to go but by the knowledge that I would absolutely hate myself later if I didn't. Thus I went, and 15 minutes down the road I realized I had just barely managed not to be stupid. I was more relieved than anything else.
I stayed the night in Jinka at the Norwegian mission (not the resort), had dinner with Mr. F and Co., then went to sleep so that I could wake up at 5:30 AM for the bus into Metser. I should note that taking a bus into Metser is a novelty. The road is only 30km (20 miles) long, but it used to take us anywhere from two to four hours by four wheel drive, sometimes with mud chains on the tires. Now, I'll have you know, for a mere 1 USD one can take a delightful early morning jaunt through the scenic town (read 'hellhole') of Gazer and arrive refreshed (read 'squished and smelling of humanity') in Metser an hour and a half later! I stepped off of the delightful contraption that served for a bus at the bottom of our old driveway at about 8:00 AM, and began walking back up towards our house on a hill. I made two friends on the bus.
My plan was to go unnoticed for as long as possible, because I wanted to walk around the area a bit and I knew it would be impossible once I stumbled into the quicksand of cultural interaction. It's not that I don't like interacting with Ethiopians - I do - it just has the tendency to change absolutely everything, and my memories of Metser were as a little kid running around doing whatever I wanted. Everything was immediately familiar, though oddly half as big as it used to be, and I made for the water hole in the river near our house. I don't know what made me think a white guy could walk around there without being noticed, and I had acquired a companion within about five minutes, but I went to the river anyway. See?
From there I went to our old house. It had been turned into a Bible school when we left, and I was happy to see that it was being well used. There was a regional church meeting going on that morning, where I met a gentleman I knew who was involved in the translation work there. I walked around the compound a bit and visited our old house, which is now more filled with dried corn than I remember it. Virtually nothing had changed, except for one disappointment; someone had had the ingenious idea to rip out the strawberry patch, raspberry bushes, passion fruit bushes, papaya trees, guava trees, and mango trees, and replace them with absolutely nothing. The sycamore-fig tree behind our house had also been cut down. Oh well. The house was still there, though it's dirtier than it used to be:
My whole family used to fit into that.
I stayed at Metser for the rest of the morning and a little into the afternoon, visiting a place or two and conversing with people we knew when we lived there. Everything except our mission station (not really ours anymore) was almost exactly the same. It was a great experience, though somehow not as wonderful as I had hoped. Sometimes there's more joy in the desire and memory of something than is inherent in the thing itself, though my opinion of Metser as the most beautiful place in Ethiopia remains unchanged. Fortunately the place isn't corrupted by tourists; apparently the Aari tribe is boring because they wear clothes. That's fine with me.
When I returned to Makki I got to work, which I figured was a fair way to earn my keep. My original ride back fell through, so I ended up staying for about a week and a half before returning to Addis. Living in Makki is a bit like living in National Geographic, honestly. The Mursi are pretty distinct culturally. Men are covered with artistic scars and shave patterns into their hair, and the women wear heavy brass jewelry along with clay lip plates and ear plates. They're also very nice, and would go out of their way to greet me and find out where I was from. I mostly did some odd jobs that needed to be done; I did a lot of screening and general improvement on Mr. T's house, and some other things that were closer to my area of experience. I overhauled one of the solar power systems, got the email system back in working order (it's super cool - it uses a 14K modem that transmits data over the shortwave radio), worked on a couple other computer problems here and there, and figured out how to hotwire a tractor before the starter seized and we gave up. There's failing technology everywhere, folks, and sadly, for most of the people I'm meeting, PCs are more of an affliction than anything else. I left the station right about when I was running out of easy work and facing the prospect of returning to repairing hot tin roofs in the blazing sun. The scratches on my arms are NOT from screening. They're from fighting off leopards with my bare hands.
I was impressed by the Mursi church. Mr. F had been one of the first missionaries to make contact with the Mursi tribe and a couple of the elders remembered him from way back. I sat in on a meeting of the church elders and tribal leaders as they discussed some of the problems they were having in the church. The elders were eager to do what the Bible said was right but they had no Bible translated into Mursi, and they wanted to ask Mr. F about some of their issues. One question was about whether a man with three wives who had become a Christian should divorce two of them, and another was about whether a man who had stolen a cow should be allowed to come into the church. The wife question is a common one, and Mr. F pointed out that one clear thing in the Bible is that God hates divorce. He advised that the man should keep all three of his wives, instead of throwing any of them out of his household. Of the Mursi and Bodi who have converted to Christianity, there are some very positive changes coming about in their lifestyles. Men with more than one wife will support all three of them and treat all of them well instead of favoring the youngest, and young men will only take one wife. Christians are more likely to send their daughters to school as well as their sons, and there were some eager attempts at reconciliation with other tribes. One of the Mursi pointed out that if Jesus were to come back, wouldn't he ask why they hadn't told the Bodi about Jesus? And wouldn't they be ashamed if they hadn't? He had found so much joy in his faith that he was excited to travel to hostile Bodi territory and share what he had found. Some people seem to believe that Christian missionaries are out to destroy local cultures and subjugate people, but this was a great example of Mursi who had found real joy in the gospel and were actively addressing destructive issues in their societies while remaining true to their culture and traditions.
I'm back in Addis now, and it's only took me three days to break the law and become a fugitive. It was simple, really. I spent some time at an SIM-affiliated office trying to help them set up their shiny new DSL connection (it's twice as fast as dial up, and surfing the web is akin to a slow, crappy wooden roller coaster that you don't quite trust) and in the process I poked around in the modem to check the settings. When I called Ethiopia Telecom to ask them what they were smoking, I learned that accessing the modem "is illegal in Ethiopia, sir". Oops? So instead of helping me on the phone they had to send a technician (When can I expect him? "I dunno") out here to flail around for half an hour trying to fix a 30-second problem. It wasn't frustrating. Not at all. It was sort of my fault for expecting things to work. The police showed up for a few minutes today, believe it or not, but I escaped their attention by sitting in a chair and staying perfectly still.
This brings me to my next topic, which is IT related in an attempt to balance out the lack of technology in the other environments I've described. I've been working in this office since the beginning of the week - mostly bumming around on the internet, reading, corresponding, and the like - and fixing various computer snags that have popped up. The office runs entirely on Apple hardware, and I haven't really worked on Macs before (how this qualifies me to fix problems I don't know, but I've managed) and let me tell you something: you should go out and get yourself a Mac. It'll make you happier because you won't need to call me to fix your computer, and it'll make me happier because...well, you won't be calling me to fix your computer. Macs are amazing because they actually work they way you want them to. I'll likely continue to punish myself with PCs for various hardware reasons, but for just about anything normal people do Macs are way more productive. Having experienced OS X Leopard firsthand, I will only reconsider when Microsoft discovers a method of turning their huge wads of cash into a decent operating system.
The fact that I've gone off on a tangential rant proves that I have nothing left to talk about. Thanks for reading!
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Addis Ababa
I made it to Ethiopia, which I've been looking forward to for the past six months of my trip. It doesn't feel like home, I guess, but the idea of what home feels like is something I'll need to redefine anyway, so that shouldn't be surprising. Instead, it just feels normal. I got off the plane and felt normal, I met my dad and sister and some other friends at the airport and felt normal, and we drove to familiar places and ate familiar food, and that felt normal too. It was amazing.
Being back in Ethiopia has been great so far. Normally, this is a very difficult country for people to travel in. It remains extremely un-Westernized, few people speak English, and it's a very atypical country in general, even by African standards, with a very distinct culture, language, and geography. I've found that the language has come back to me very quickly, and I can understand most basic conversations, though my ability to articulate lags a little behind. I'm able to read about 75% of the written language, too. I'm also fortunate to have a number of connections here, which has already been very helpful in accomplishing some of the things I was hoping to do.
There are two ATMs in the country, and I figured out which one actually works the other day, which was great. ATMs have sort of spawned like rabbits in the rest of the world, and I've never had trouble finding one until now. I'm glad they have some here... otherwise, I would've had to like...wire myself some money. That's right - wire. Does anyone even do that anymore? It's on par with sending someone a message by telegraph in my mental technology hierarchy. ARRIVED ETHIOPIA STOP SEND CHOCOLATE STOP
You would think some things might change in 10 years, but Ethiopia's internet connectivity really hasn't. For some reason it took me threedays of trying various connections (and listening to the modem sound... eeeeeeeeeeeeeeagaaaagghghhhhhhh deeeeedodeedodeeeeedooooooo blaghghghgaldkgkdgjk) before I could connect to my Gmail account and try to catch up a bit. This is what happens when public services are controlled entirely by the government. I guess DSL lines technically are available, but they cost about $350/month for a 128k connection, and you can only get one if the phone company feels like running a cable out to your house. The government has also seen fit to capriciously block various sites, which they probably started doing when they realized that they could and that it might be fun, which means I can post to my blog, but I can't actually go and read it.
Further complicating my life is the fact that all of these computers use Internet Explorer 6, which is the software equivalent of a tin can and string telephone. I'd download a different browser, but that would take about two days. Maybe I can get someone to mail me a new on a floppy disk. The end result is that all of the web pages I load look like what happens to a birthday cake when you leave its box on its side and then sit on it. It's a disappointing thing when you have to wait five minutes for that to load. It doesn't look like I'll be putting up new pictures anytime soon. I'll try to stay in touch when I can.
The joys of Ethiopia are not its technological capabilities, but there are many other things to keep one entertained. I remember when I moved back to the US from here as a kid; I was annoyed that I could never find a rock to throw at things that I needed to throw rocks at. These are the natural pleasures of man - rocks and trucks and dirt and food with lots of meat - and they're all available here. After a few days of worrying about not being able to keep up with my urgent online life, I realized that nothing in my life is actually urgent. Life moves much more slowly here, and it's nice to be able to kick back and go with the flow. Trying to do something other than the flow is really the only thing that'll get you in trouble here, so I guess I don't have any other choice.
I remembered a scene in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness when the main character, Marlowe, visits a doctor before preparing to leave for West Africa. The doctor advises him to avoid irritation more than exposure to the sun. Nothing produces mental darkness - the kind that creeps up on you without you realizing it - like prolonged irritation does. To be honest, India irritated me immensely. Ethiopia doesn't. I'm realizing how hard the five weeks I spent in India really were now that I'm out.
I spent the last week with my dad and sister, and was able to spend a couple of days attending the leadership training my dad was doing with local Christian church leaders from a number of denominations. It was a very interesting thing to be a part of. Prospects for the rest of my two months here are looking good so far. On arrival, I was fortunate to find that a good friend of our family is going to be spending two weeks traveling around southwest Ethiopia, and leaving on Thursday. He's planning on visiting some of the furthest places accessible (accessible is a generous term) by four wheel drive to encourage Christian evangelists in those areas. Southwest Ethiopia, near the Kenya/Sudan border, is one place that remains 'real' remote tribal Ethiopia. You may have seen pictures of tribes like these - try a Google image search for "mursi tribe" and you'll get some idea. My family used to live that area, and I've been dying to go back and take another look since we left some 11 years ago. Incredibly, he was looking for a buddy to go along on the trip with him, so I'm going to be spending those two weeks visiting all the places in the south that I had hoped to go to. I was hoping to visit one or two of them if I got lucky.
PSA: I'll be out of touch with technology (correspondingly very in touch with the real world) from the 12th through the 26th. If the world ends you can get a hold of my parents. They'll try to get in touch with someone in Addis Ababa, who will try to get in touch with someone relatively near me by short wave radio, who will try to get in touch with me if I show up at their place in the next couple of days.
Following my trip to the south, I plan to spend at least a couple of weeks in northern Ethiopia. Northern Ethiopia remains predominantly Ethiopian Orthodox, and I'm hoping to spend some time in traditional rural areas as well as the historical heart of Ethiopian Orthodoxy in Axum and Lalibela. No one does Orthodoxy the way it's done in Ethiopia, and it should be fascinating.
I love this country. The coffee is incredible, and if I could describe it properly you would be jealous. Unfortunately (or fortunately for you) it wouldn't make any sense unless you've actually been here.
Being back in Ethiopia has been great so far. Normally, this is a very difficult country for people to travel in. It remains extremely un-Westernized, few people speak English, and it's a very atypical country in general, even by African standards, with a very distinct culture, language, and geography. I've found that the language has come back to me very quickly, and I can understand most basic conversations, though my ability to articulate lags a little behind. I'm able to read about 75% of the written language, too. I'm also fortunate to have a number of connections here, which has already been very helpful in accomplishing some of the things I was hoping to do.
There are two ATMs in the country, and I figured out which one actually works the other day, which was great. ATMs have sort of spawned like rabbits in the rest of the world, and I've never had trouble finding one until now. I'm glad they have some here... otherwise, I would've had to like...wire myself some money. That's right - wire. Does anyone even do that anymore? It's on par with sending someone a message by telegraph in my mental technology hierarchy. ARRIVED ETHIOPIA STOP SEND CHOCOLATE STOP
You would think some things might change in 10 years, but Ethiopia's internet connectivity really hasn't. For some reason it took me threedays of trying various connections (and listening to the modem sound... eeeeeeeeeeeeeeagaaaagghghhhhhhh deeeeedodeedodeeeeedooooooo blaghghghgaldkgkdgjk) before I could connect to my Gmail account and try to catch up a bit. This is what happens when public services are controlled entirely by the government. I guess DSL lines technically are available, but they cost about $350/month for a 128k connection, and you can only get one if the phone company feels like running a cable out to your house. The government has also seen fit to capriciously block various sites, which they probably started doing when they realized that they could and that it might be fun, which means I can post to my blog, but I can't actually go and read it.
Further complicating my life is the fact that all of these computers use Internet Explorer 6, which is the software equivalent of a tin can and string telephone. I'd download a different browser, but that would take about two days. Maybe I can get someone to mail me a new on a floppy disk. The end result is that all of the web pages I load look like what happens to a birthday cake when you leave its box on its side and then sit on it. It's a disappointing thing when you have to wait five minutes for that to load. It doesn't look like I'll be putting up new pictures anytime soon. I'll try to stay in touch when I can.
The joys of Ethiopia are not its technological capabilities, but there are many other things to keep one entertained. I remember when I moved back to the US from here as a kid; I was annoyed that I could never find a rock to throw at things that I needed to throw rocks at. These are the natural pleasures of man - rocks and trucks and dirt and food with lots of meat - and they're all available here. After a few days of worrying about not being able to keep up with my urgent online life, I realized that nothing in my life is actually urgent. Life moves much more slowly here, and it's nice to be able to kick back and go with the flow. Trying to do something other than the flow is really the only thing that'll get you in trouble here, so I guess I don't have any other choice.
I remembered a scene in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness when the main character, Marlowe, visits a doctor before preparing to leave for West Africa. The doctor advises him to avoid irritation more than exposure to the sun. Nothing produces mental darkness - the kind that creeps up on you without you realizing it - like prolonged irritation does. To be honest, India irritated me immensely. Ethiopia doesn't. I'm realizing how hard the five weeks I spent in India really were now that I'm out.
I spent the last week with my dad and sister, and was able to spend a couple of days attending the leadership training my dad was doing with local Christian church leaders from a number of denominations. It was a very interesting thing to be a part of. Prospects for the rest of my two months here are looking good so far. On arrival, I was fortunate to find that a good friend of our family is going to be spending two weeks traveling around southwest Ethiopia, and leaving on Thursday. He's planning on visiting some of the furthest places accessible (accessible is a generous term) by four wheel drive to encourage Christian evangelists in those areas. Southwest Ethiopia, near the Kenya/Sudan border, is one place that remains 'real' remote tribal Ethiopia. You may have seen pictures of tribes like these - try a Google image search for "mursi tribe" and you'll get some idea. My family used to live that area, and I've been dying to go back and take another look since we left some 11 years ago. Incredibly, he was looking for a buddy to go along on the trip with him, so I'm going to be spending those two weeks visiting all the places in the south that I had hoped to go to. I was hoping to visit one or two of them if I got lucky.
PSA: I'll be out of touch with technology (correspondingly very in touch with the real world) from the 12th through the 26th. If the world ends you can get a hold of my parents. They'll try to get in touch with someone in Addis Ababa, who will try to get in touch with someone relatively near me by short wave radio, who will try to get in touch with me if I show up at their place in the next couple of days.
Following my trip to the south, I plan to spend at least a couple of weeks in northern Ethiopia. Northern Ethiopia remains predominantly Ethiopian Orthodox, and I'm hoping to spend some time in traditional rural areas as well as the historical heart of Ethiopian Orthodoxy in Axum and Lalibela. No one does Orthodoxy the way it's done in Ethiopia, and it should be fascinating.
I love this country. The coffee is incredible, and if I could describe it properly you would be jealous. Unfortunately (or fortunately for you) it wouldn't make any sense unless you've actually been here.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Mumbai and Ahmadabad
I haven't written in too long - just haven't been spending much time online. So.
I made it to Mumbai a bit more than a week ago, and it was a bit of a mixed bag, especially at first. I arrived at 5:30AM just coming off of my Goa-inspired personal freedom high into a mission guesthouse, a pre-planned schedule, and a church leader of some sort sitting on the other bed in my room, cigarette in hand and cigarette burns on his blanket. We were both a little confused as to why he was there. It was too early to process such things, and despite the fact that my bed apparently had no linens available for it, I left the room doors open to get rid of the acrid smoke and went to sleep for half an hour. I woke up to the arrival of linens (and more chain smoking from my mysterious buddy), covered the bed, and went back to sleep on it until breakfast. From there, I went straight to a drop in center (run by an organization called Oasis) aimed at helping prostitutes escape prostitution in the neighboring red light district. It was about five minutes away by foot.
I find that most days after an overnight train, especially one arriving as early as that, are a bit hopeless...kind of like walking around in a plastic bag, where all the sounds are muffled, and everything is blurry and distant, and you don't quite feel like you're in the world so much as watching it through a window. I can't answer a barrage of new people asking "how do you like India!??" on a day like that with anything but an apathetic nod and "uh...it's good. I like it." I was not convincing.
It's a great ministry they're running there, and I was super impressed, but...I just wasn't in the mood to appreciate it, I think. Sometimes life is like that. I went on prayer walks with the Oasis staff around the district, watched as they talked to prostitutes, visited the brothels with them and prayed for people, and helped them out with some stuff they needed done at the office. And I felt guilty because I wasn't floored by compassion like I should've been. I felt a bit like an emotional bullfrog, sitting on a log, disinterested in the world, and just watching it pass by with bugged-out eyes.
I spent two days at the drop-in center, helping where I could. The next day I visited an AIDS clinic called JSK, and spoke with a very interesting guy - a Canadian guy whose family had been in India for four generations. We hit it off, I thought, and it was great to hear about what their ministry is doing. I don't have time to go into details of that, but I will say that it was amazing to talk with someone who so well bridged the intense cultural gap between India and the West. From there I got to spend an evening and morning out of the city somewhere. Maybe I'll talk about that later. But JSK clicked with me, and I loved hearing about what they're doing.
Mumbai is connected by these crazy suburban trains, and my longboarding skills finally came in handy for me. I didn't place myself carefully in the rush to get off the train when we arrived at the station I needed, which meant that I was still on the train when the rush to get on happened. Longboarding often involves leaping from a quickly moving platform on to pavement, and that's exactly what was required of me (in flip flops) after I fought through the crowd and disembarked as the train picked up speed. I hit the ground running and would have gone down pretty hard had not an Indian guy, hanging out the door of the train, sort of grabbed my neck and held me up, allowing me to decelerate. At that point I decided that Indians are really super nice people. Now if someone will just explain to me why the trains give hundreds of passengers about ten seconds to get off/get on the train at each stop...
Anyway, I felt like I finally got comfortable being in India somewhere between being...tenderized during rush hour on the train and hanging out the open door, looking out over the city during slack time in an almost empty car. Those are two distinct smells - the smell of cuddling up to about to about ten Indian men simultaneously and the smell of flying past a slum with the wind in your face. I never felt at risk, I never felt like I was going to get robbed, and instead we all just laughed at the ridiculous white guy who refused to buy a first class ticket even though he could afford it.
In Ahmadabad I met up with a wonderful family who welcomed me into their home, and simply got a chance to relax, hang around, do a bit of shopping, and just exist with cool people. It was a recharge that I needed.
I'm in Delhi now, planning on flying out to Ethiopia early on the 1st, where I'll meet up with my dad and sister for about ten days before heading out on my own. My dad's work brought him there anyway, so it'll be a nice chance for us to connect after...well, it'll be six months at that point.
Those of you praying for good health are rockstars - please don't stop. I've gotten sick once in half a year. Not bad. I'm knocking furiously on the desk.
I made it to Mumbai a bit more than a week ago, and it was a bit of a mixed bag, especially at first. I arrived at 5:30AM just coming off of my Goa-inspired personal freedom high into a mission guesthouse, a pre-planned schedule, and a church leader of some sort sitting on the other bed in my room, cigarette in hand and cigarette burns on his blanket. We were both a little confused as to why he was there. It was too early to process such things, and despite the fact that my bed apparently had no linens available for it, I left the room doors open to get rid of the acrid smoke and went to sleep for half an hour. I woke up to the arrival of linens (and more chain smoking from my mysterious buddy), covered the bed, and went back to sleep on it until breakfast. From there, I went straight to a drop in center (run by an organization called Oasis) aimed at helping prostitutes escape prostitution in the neighboring red light district. It was about five minutes away by foot.
I find that most days after an overnight train, especially one arriving as early as that, are a bit hopeless...kind of like walking around in a plastic bag, where all the sounds are muffled, and everything is blurry and distant, and you don't quite feel like you're in the world so much as watching it through a window. I can't answer a barrage of new people asking "how do you like India!??" on a day like that with anything but an apathetic nod and "uh...it's good. I like it." I was not convincing.
It's a great ministry they're running there, and I was super impressed, but...I just wasn't in the mood to appreciate it, I think. Sometimes life is like that. I went on prayer walks with the Oasis staff around the district, watched as they talked to prostitutes, visited the brothels with them and prayed for people, and helped them out with some stuff they needed done at the office. And I felt guilty because I wasn't floored by compassion like I should've been. I felt a bit like an emotional bullfrog, sitting on a log, disinterested in the world, and just watching it pass by with bugged-out eyes.
I spent two days at the drop-in center, helping where I could. The next day I visited an AIDS clinic called JSK, and spoke with a very interesting guy - a Canadian guy whose family had been in India for four generations. We hit it off, I thought, and it was great to hear about what their ministry is doing. I don't have time to go into details of that, but I will say that it was amazing to talk with someone who so well bridged the intense cultural gap between India and the West. From there I got to spend an evening and morning out of the city somewhere. Maybe I'll talk about that later. But JSK clicked with me, and I loved hearing about what they're doing.
Mumbai is connected by these crazy suburban trains, and my longboarding skills finally came in handy for me. I didn't place myself carefully in the rush to get off the train when we arrived at the station I needed, which meant that I was still on the train when the rush to get on happened. Longboarding often involves leaping from a quickly moving platform on to pavement, and that's exactly what was required of me (in flip flops) after I fought through the crowd and disembarked as the train picked up speed. I hit the ground running and would have gone down pretty hard had not an Indian guy, hanging out the door of the train, sort of grabbed my neck and held me up, allowing me to decelerate. At that point I decided that Indians are really super nice people. Now if someone will just explain to me why the trains give hundreds of passengers about ten seconds to get off/get on the train at each stop...
Anyway, I felt like I finally got comfortable being in India somewhere between being...tenderized during rush hour on the train and hanging out the open door, looking out over the city during slack time in an almost empty car. Those are two distinct smells - the smell of cuddling up to about to about ten Indian men simultaneously and the smell of flying past a slum with the wind in your face. I never felt at risk, I never felt like I was going to get robbed, and instead we all just laughed at the ridiculous white guy who refused to buy a first class ticket even though he could afford it.
In Ahmadabad I met up with a wonderful family who welcomed me into their home, and simply got a chance to relax, hang around, do a bit of shopping, and just exist with cool people. It was a recharge that I needed.
I'm in Delhi now, planning on flying out to Ethiopia early on the 1st, where I'll meet up with my dad and sister for about ten days before heading out on my own. My dad's work brought him there anyway, so it'll be a nice chance for us to connect after...well, it'll be six months at that point.
Those of you praying for good health are rockstars - please don't stop. I've gotten sick once in half a year. Not bad. I'm knocking furiously on the desk.
Monday, January 19, 2009
Breakfast
Tea: $0.20
Banana Shake: $0.60
Scrambled Eggs: $0.50
Lemon Crepe: $0.50
Chocolate Croissant: $0.60
TOTAL: $2.40
So it was a good Monday morning in Goa.
Banana Shake: $0.60
Scrambled Eggs: $0.50
Lemon Crepe: $0.50
Chocolate Croissant: $0.60
TOTAL: $2.40
So it was a good Monday morning in Goa.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Kerala
I'm in a new place since I wrote last. I'm down in Kerala state, in the city of Trivandrum. This is the area where St. Thomas landed and started his ministry. It's very tropical - there are coconut trees everywhere (Kerala means land of coconuts) and bananas, and even elephants walking down the road. It's humid, but not very hot this time of year. It's actually very comfortable. I've spent the last couple of days doing some interesting things. The first day I got here I mostly chilled out. The next, I familiarized myself with the ministry at the organization I'm staying with - they primarily do research on evangelism. The director found out I was a computer expert (his words, I just nodded) and asked me to spend some time teaching his staff how to use MS Word and stuff. They already knew the basics, so I just covered some points on technical writing for an hour. I don't know how helpful it was, but they were nice about it, and there might've been one or two useful things. It was nice for me to have something to do.
Yesterday I left here for a school about an hour and a half away, where I spent the night. The director, Bishop Moses, and I spoke for a while. I got to meet his family, and tour the school, and even share and pray briefly this morning with the students. They're doing something very interesting there. It's a long explanation, but I'll embark on it nonetheless, and try to keep it on the brief side.
Hinduism is very much a cultural fixture in India. Among other things, the Hindu religion provides some simple definitions for organizing society, which form the roots of the caste system. To put it simply, castes are organized by what part of the god Brahma that they originate from (head, torso, thighs, feet) with the lowest group being the untouchables, who do not come from any part of Brahma at all. As Hinduism teaches that the world is an illusion, and that only the gods are reality, this means that the untouchables don't even have a stake in the reality of the universe. They are, by definition, inconsequential. The different tribes and people groups that compose this untouchable class are also called dhalits.
When the British left India, they required India to draft a constitution. The constitution was supposed to provide equality for everyone, and to that end, the dhalits where given basic constitutional rights, like land ownership, along with guaranteed representation in various parts of society - political offices, schools, universities, and the like. These are actually reserved seats, or vacancies, that are required by law to be filled by dhalits.
Now, there was a clash in values between the Hindu culture and the requirements of India's constitution. Christianity comes into play here. Dhalits began to embrace the faith in huge numbers, mostly because the gospel of Christianity espouses that everyone is equal before God, and that Jesus came for every person from every caste. For the dhalits, Christianity represented the first system under which they actually had inherent value as individuals. It freed them from the oppression, both cultural and physical, that they had been under for centuries.
The Brahmins and other high castes, who had considerable influence in Indian government, were practically concerned about these mass conversions. The reason India never had a flourishing slave trade, or needed one, is because the dhalits have supplied that slavery for years. Dhalit conversions threatened to undermine the status quo. So, the Brahmins put pressure on the government, and in 1950 managed to (illegally) amend the constitution by presidential order so that the basic rights described earlier were only available to dhalits (called "Scheduled Classes" in India's constitution) who are of Hindu religion.
That's a little silly, if you think about it. Only dhalits who are Hindus are entitled to constitutional rights, and only dhalits who are Hindus are forced to the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder by their own religion. Effectively, that means that the dhalits are back where they started. Over the years, Sikhs and Buddhists have been able to secure rights for themselves as well, but only to the end that the constitution now provides the aforementioned rights to dhalits who are of the Hindu, Sikh, or Buddhist religions.
As a point of clarification, every Indian's caste and religion is a matter of public record. If we did that in the States, imagine those things being stamped on your driver's license.
Christian influence in India has been around for a long time, and some of the results of that influence are good systems for education and healthcare in Christian communites. Christians dhalits, on the whole, tend to be much better educated and qualified than their Hindu counterparts. It's as much an issue of mindset as anything else; the Christians practice an enabling religion that isn't self-oppressive. Now, there are all these vacancies reserved for dhalits in universities and government organizations, but they can't be filled by Christians, because that would be unconstitutional, and they can't be filled by other dhalits, because there aren't any who are qualified.
You see the difficulty of this cycle.
Bishop Moses' school has more than 700 students, about 80% of whom are dhalits. The school is run by dhalits for dhalits, because these children have little or no educational opportunities elsewhere, and no means of bettering themselves or their communities. The school is mostly run by donations, because members of these communities really can't afford to send their children to other schools. The school is run on an international medium to enable students, when they graduate, to be competitive with students not only from India, but from anywhere in the world. Logistics aside, this is one of the only means in the world for dhalits to raise themselves out of the oppressive society in which they live.
I'm a cynic. I usually don't like 'projects.' I'm generally pretty critical and pretty skeptical. But I was deeply moved by being able to visit the school and understand what an incredible work of transformation people are doing there. It was pretty amazing. I'm often of the opinion that Christians cause as much trouble as anybody else (we're all people, after all, and people suck a lot of the time), and it was nice to see something very positive.
If I messed up my facts, feel free to correct. I am only a "computer expert", not a guru (ha! India joke!) when it comes to religious and social structures.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Bangalore and Chennai
Hello! I haven't had much of a chance to get online lately, and the time I have spent has involved replying to emails and trying to keep my logistical life from falling all to pieces. Geeze.
I landed in Bangalore on the 30th, and I spent a few days there before coming out to Chennai (on the east coast) yesterday. Chennai has some historical significance - St. Thomas was martyred and buried here. I was able to see both of those sites today.
My schedule through India has been planned out rather well, thanks to some help from a friend of my dad's whom I'm staying with in Bangalore. I'll be returning to Bangalore tomorrow for four days, then heading on to Trivandurum. I'll move north from there to Goa, Mumbai, and Ahmadabad before cutting over to Delhi on the 29th. I'll leave for Addis Ababa from Delhi on the 31st or thereabouts.
I'd write more, but I'm pressed for time. Wanted to point out that I am alive, and doing ok, but running a bit tired. On the positive side, I feel like I'm back on a sort of pilgrimage after a couple of weeks of delightful, but aimless downtime in Hong Kong; on the negative, being a nomad for five months has produced a deep mental/emotional/spiritual/physical exhaustion. I would appreciate your prayer in that regard. Let me know how I can pray for you. My new prayer list 2.0 (a fresh page in my journal) is just waiting for you to tell me.
My blog now gives me the option to type in:
Hindi: हिन्दी
Tamil: தமிழ்
Meleyalem: മേലെയലേം
Kannada: ಕನ್ನಡ
Telegu: తెలేగు
I landed in Bangalore on the 30th, and I spent a few days there before coming out to Chennai (on the east coast) yesterday. Chennai has some historical significance - St. Thomas was martyred and buried here. I was able to see both of those sites today.
My schedule through India has been planned out rather well, thanks to some help from a friend of my dad's whom I'm staying with in Bangalore. I'll be returning to Bangalore tomorrow for four days, then heading on to Trivandurum. I'll move north from there to Goa, Mumbai, and Ahmadabad before cutting over to Delhi on the 29th. I'll leave for Addis Ababa from Delhi on the 31st or thereabouts.
I'd write more, but I'm pressed for time. Wanted to point out that I am alive, and doing ok, but running a bit tired. On the positive side, I feel like I'm back on a sort of pilgrimage after a couple of weeks of delightful, but aimless downtime in Hong Kong; on the negative, being a nomad for five months has produced a deep mental/emotional/spiritual/physical exhaustion. I would appreciate your prayer in that regard. Let me know how I can pray for you. My new prayer list 2.0 (a fresh page in my journal) is just waiting for you to tell me.
My blog now gives me the option to type in:
Hindi: हिन्दी
Tamil: தமிழ்
Meleyalem: മേലെയലേം
Kannada: ಕನ್ನಡ
Telegu: తెలేగు
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Hong Kong
Well, it's been two weeks since I've updated, so I figured I would get the old fingers moving and crank another one out. And crank I will; no careful editing or frilly prose on this one. No sir. Speed is key here - after two weeks without posting anything, I'm sure a number of you are simply panting for an update. Such is my literary appeal. I see I'm up to three 'followers' now, and I would like to thank the two of you who must have become followers more recently. You are the wind beneath my wings, or at least the ones stoking the blazing furnace that is my ego. Ahem.
I arrived in Hong Kong about a week ago on a through train from Beijing. It was a 24 hour trip to get here - one of the faster and more comfy trains I've been on. Leaving from Beijing meant that I backtracked a little bit - I took a D train out of Qufu to Beijing, which is a sort of bullet train. It got up to around 250km/h at some points (that's 155mph), so it was much shorter than the overnight train I took before. I managed to read Around the World in 80 Days from start to finish on the trip - it was weird because they kept talking about places I'm going to and places I've been already as if they were overwhelmingly exotic.
The through train to Hong Kong, like I said, was pretty schnazzy. Lured into a false sense of confidence, then, I ventured to the restaurant car (I just involuntarily shuddered) for dinner that evening. The menu was in Chinese, so I ordered by pictures. Apparently I selected the Unwanted Pork Pieces with Celery in Terrible Sauce, which distinguishes itself in my memory as the only Chinese dish (calling it Chinese is a stretch) that I didn't like, and in fact abhorred. It was one of those nightmare meals that leaves a worse impression afterwards than the actual event of eating it. The ok-tasting parts I picked out went down fine, though, and I slept ok, and roused myself the next morning for my arrival in Hong Kong. I'm staying with a wonderful family here, which is a very fortunate thing; that evening I began to feel strange; I later began to feel downright awful; I spent the next day creating a sort of beaten path on the marble floor between my room and the bathroom. I felt a little better the following day, and proceeded out of doors with Willie, the patriarch of the aforementioned family, to acquaint myself with Hong Kong. I did acquaint myself with the city, and I also had opportunity (and compulsion) to acquaint myself with Hong Kong's fine public restroom facilities. I am happy to report that they are pleasantly well-maintained.
Another day and a finished course of antibiotics later I was feeling much better, and still am. I'm surprised I didn't get sick sooner.
Hong Kong wasn't really a planned stop, and I certainly wasn't intending to spend two weeks here, but that's what ended up happening. My plans to return to mainland China sort of fell through, and I ended up without enough time to really make it where I wanted to go and back in time to catch my flight to India, which is on the 29th. Hong Kong is a crazy place, though. It might be the most developed city I've ever seen. Of course, anywhere outside of the U.S. where you can actually buy Dr. Pepper is a distinguished location, so that should give you some idea of what I'm dealing with here. I had a bit of culture shock as I stood in an enormous shopping mall and looked around at all the stores. I've been sort of away from places like that for quite a while.
Hong Kong is also a very interesting blend of culture and history. It was actually a British colony until 1997, and was and still is a huge center for international trade. Everything is in English, so it's easy to get around, and it's certainly a departure from mainland China in terms of feel. I also had a chance to visit the neighboring island of Macau this afternoon, which was a Portuguese colony for about as long as Hong Kong has been British. Macau was, among other things, the rallying point for Christianity in the Far East: Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries were trained in Macau before being sent to China, and around 8% of the territory is still Catholic. It was interesting to see some standing Christian history in (what is now) China. So, despite these places being off my planned route, I'm still getting a chance to see something I'm interested in.
I arrived in Hong Kong about a week ago on a through train from Beijing. It was a 24 hour trip to get here - one of the faster and more comfy trains I've been on. Leaving from Beijing meant that I backtracked a little bit - I took a D train out of Qufu to Beijing, which is a sort of bullet train. It got up to around 250km/h at some points (that's 155mph), so it was much shorter than the overnight train I took before. I managed to read Around the World in 80 Days from start to finish on the trip - it was weird because they kept talking about places I'm going to and places I've been already as if they were overwhelmingly exotic.
The through train to Hong Kong, like I said, was pretty schnazzy. Lured into a false sense of confidence, then, I ventured to the restaurant car (I just involuntarily shuddered) for dinner that evening. The menu was in Chinese, so I ordered by pictures. Apparently I selected the Unwanted Pork Pieces with Celery in Terrible Sauce, which distinguishes itself in my memory as the only Chinese dish (calling it Chinese is a stretch) that I didn't like, and in fact abhorred. It was one of those nightmare meals that leaves a worse impression afterwards than the actual event of eating it. The ok-tasting parts I picked out went down fine, though, and I slept ok, and roused myself the next morning for my arrival in Hong Kong. I'm staying with a wonderful family here, which is a very fortunate thing; that evening I began to feel strange; I later began to feel downright awful; I spent the next day creating a sort of beaten path on the marble floor between my room and the bathroom. I felt a little better the following day, and proceeded out of doors with Willie, the patriarch of the aforementioned family, to acquaint myself with Hong Kong. I did acquaint myself with the city, and I also had opportunity (and compulsion) to acquaint myself with Hong Kong's fine public restroom facilities. I am happy to report that they are pleasantly well-maintained.
Another day and a finished course of antibiotics later I was feeling much better, and still am. I'm surprised I didn't get sick sooner.
Hong Kong wasn't really a planned stop, and I certainly wasn't intending to spend two weeks here, but that's what ended up happening. My plans to return to mainland China sort of fell through, and I ended up without enough time to really make it where I wanted to go and back in time to catch my flight to India, which is on the 29th. Hong Kong is a crazy place, though. It might be the most developed city I've ever seen. Of course, anywhere outside of the U.S. where you can actually buy Dr. Pepper is a distinguished location, so that should give you some idea of what I'm dealing with here. I had a bit of culture shock as I stood in an enormous shopping mall and looked around at all the stores. I've been sort of away from places like that for quite a while.
Hong Kong is also a very interesting blend of culture and history. It was actually a British colony until 1997, and was and still is a huge center for international trade. Everything is in English, so it's easy to get around, and it's certainly a departure from mainland China in terms of feel. I also had a chance to visit the neighboring island of Macau this afternoon, which was a Portuguese colony for about as long as Hong Kong has been British. Macau was, among other things, the rallying point for Christianity in the Far East: Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries were trained in Macau before being sent to China, and around 8% of the territory is still Catholic. It was interesting to see some standing Christian history in (what is now) China. So, despite these places being off my planned route, I'm still getting a chance to see something I'm interested in.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Pictures. Of China. China Pictures.
This is update is because...why the heck not.
This is part of the city wall in Qufu.
A doorway at the temple of Confucius. It was a little foggy that day.
I met a friendly kitten.
There were some cool reliefs at the temple.
Selling art.
Some red pillars.
The second in the series of Lots of Similar Red Things in a Row. These are altars.
Old Chinese ladies are amazing.
At a mansion where historically important people lived. The signs weren't always coherent.
Well, I guess when you put it that way, it's pretty easy.
I took a picture of myself taking a picture of myself in a mirror.
This security camera looked ready to zap you if you made a mistake.
This is a picture of China. See?
The shoe repairman.
The fish guy.
The fruit lady.
The coal guy and his amazing motorized contraption.
At least they had the decency to shroud the bird.
Spices.
The village to the west of the university.
A field right next to the village.
Me with some mini-crab-on-a-stick. It was...crunchy. Very crunchy.
This is part of the city wall in Qufu.
A doorway at the temple of Confucius. It was a little foggy that day.
I met a friendly kitten.
There were some cool reliefs at the temple.
Selling art.
Some red pillars.
The second in the series of Lots of Similar Red Things in a Row. These are altars.
Old Chinese ladies are amazing.
At a mansion where historically important people lived. The signs weren't always coherent.
Well, I guess when you put it that way, it's pretty easy.
I took a picture of myself taking a picture of myself in a mirror.
This security camera looked ready to zap you if you made a mistake.
This is a picture of China. See?
The shoe repairman.
The fish guy.
The fruit lady.
The coal guy and his amazing motorized contraption.
At least they had the decency to shroud the bird.
Spices.
The village to the west of the university.
A field right next to the village.
Me with some mini-crab-on-a-stick. It was...crunchy. Very crunchy.
Monday, December 8, 2008
A Chinese wedding and reflections on old age
I went to a Chinese wedding on Sunday, which was definitely something that one might term a 'cultural experience'. I was invited along by the friend whom I'm staying with in Qufu; the bride and groom were friends of hers, and what's one more foreigner when there are already a couple going, right? Another teacher, came along as well.
We arrived at the church at about 8:15, just in time for about two more hours of the service. I didn't mind that, actually. It was pretty cool to see and experience a service in China, despite not being able to understand it. My friend was kind enough to translate bits and pieces for us, so I caught the general idea. At about 10:15 the service broke up and began to morph into a wedding ceremony, which apparently is pretty typical. And so the fun began.
I counted about four occasions when a typical American bride would have just called the thing off right there. Since the three of us were treated as special guests, we were put in front where we could watch the chaos unfold. The bride and groom came down the aisle and proceeded to stand awkwardly to the side of the stage until some room was made for them to sit down on a bench. The pastor took about 30 minutes to preach a sermon on marriage, during which the groom's cell phone went off. He, of course, went outside to take the call. He, of course, was still outside when he and his bride were called up on stage. He, of course, had to be brought back inside by someone who ran out to fetch him. That was occasion #1.
Occasion #2 happened a little bit later and was also cell phone related; specifically, the cell phone rang again. While the couple was on stage. Getting married. Occasion #3 was when he tried to pick up said call and accidentally dropped/threw his phone halfway across the stage. Don't worry, though - a friend finished the call for him. If I was the bride, I might've been angry on occasion #4 - my newly married husband hurrying off the stage at the ceremony's conclusion to talk to the friend who picked up the call to see what it was all about (and get the cell phone back), but I am not a Chinese bride, and she didn't seem bothered in the least. These things are what we call cultural differences, and they are also the explanation for the four little boys who were allowed to run around at the front of the stage, try to jump on the stage, and point rubber bands at the bride during the entirety of the ceremony. Chinese children don't wear diapers, and the slits in the little boy's pants that resulted in them exposing themselves to everyone gathered is another example of a cultural difference. It was an eye opening (and then immediately closing) sort of experience.
At the end of the ceremony, after the happy couple walked down the aisle and out of the church (not side by side, but with the groom about four feet in front...the general attitude was apparently that they didn't want anyone to think they liked each other), a student behind us asked Lisa if I was her father. Lisa is a couple years older than I am. Yes, I have a beard. No, I am not 50.
The following is an explanation for my recent Facebook status, in which I revealed that I had imbibed eight (eight!) shots at a Chinese wedding. For one, they were very small shots. For two, those people straight up tricked me. It happened like this. Everyone toasts the bride's parents. When they came around to our table, they brought wine and small shots of something, they tell me it was bai jiu, for the toasting. My friend, sitting next to me, had to take one sip of wine. That seemed reasonable enough, and I figured I would try a shot, just to see what it was like. So I took a shot. Hold on though - it was communicated to me that I should take two, one for the bride's mother and another for her father. I am not a rude person. I took another one. Great, they said, now another take two for the bride's mother! Wait a second, didn't I just...? Oh well. Two wasn't so bad (how wrong I was!) so I figured two more wouldn't hurt. Haha! So I took two for each of them. But really, they pointed out, for the mother one ought to take four shots. Oh. Really? Well...I am not a rude person. And what's six shots when you've already taken four? I took two more. And then, a few minutes later (this is where they get you), the bride and groom came around for their toasts! And again, my friend only had to drink once. I figured I would continue on the trend, you know, prove my manliness, take another shot, seven is a lucky number, whatever. I took another shot. Everyone was impressed. It was communicated that I should take one for the bride as well; I am a gentleman, and have no trouble drinking to a lady. That shot taken, everyone seemed excited for me to take another, and at this point, there was no apparent reason. Take another one, they said! For all I know, they talked to each other before coming in and decided to try to make me drunk by pretending it was the culturally appropriate thing to do. I called it quits after that.
They were really small shots.
We arrived at the church at about 8:15, just in time for about two more hours of the service. I didn't mind that, actually. It was pretty cool to see and experience a service in China, despite not being able to understand it. My friend was kind enough to translate bits and pieces for us, so I caught the general idea. At about 10:15 the service broke up and began to morph into a wedding ceremony, which apparently is pretty typical. And so the fun began.
I counted about four occasions when a typical American bride would have just called the thing off right there. Since the three of us were treated as special guests, we were put in front where we could watch the chaos unfold. The bride and groom came down the aisle and proceeded to stand awkwardly to the side of the stage until some room was made for them to sit down on a bench. The pastor took about 30 minutes to preach a sermon on marriage, during which the groom's cell phone went off. He, of course, went outside to take the call. He, of course, was still outside when he and his bride were called up on stage. He, of course, had to be brought back inside by someone who ran out to fetch him. That was occasion #1.
Occasion #2 happened a little bit later and was also cell phone related; specifically, the cell phone rang again. While the couple was on stage. Getting married. Occasion #3 was when he tried to pick up said call and accidentally dropped/threw his phone halfway across the stage. Don't worry, though - a friend finished the call for him. If I was the bride, I might've been angry on occasion #4 - my newly married husband hurrying off the stage at the ceremony's conclusion to talk to the friend who picked up the call to see what it was all about (and get the cell phone back), but I am not a Chinese bride, and she didn't seem bothered in the least. These things are what we call cultural differences, and they are also the explanation for the four little boys who were allowed to run around at the front of the stage, try to jump on the stage, and point rubber bands at the bride during the entirety of the ceremony. Chinese children don't wear diapers, and the slits in the little boy's pants that resulted in them exposing themselves to everyone gathered is another example of a cultural difference. It was an eye opening (and then immediately closing) sort of experience.
At the end of the ceremony, after the happy couple walked down the aisle and out of the church (not side by side, but with the groom about four feet in front...the general attitude was apparently that they didn't want anyone to think they liked each other), a student behind us asked Lisa if I was her father. Lisa is a couple years older than I am. Yes, I have a beard. No, I am not 50.
The following is an explanation for my recent Facebook status, in which I revealed that I had imbibed eight (eight!) shots at a Chinese wedding. For one, they were very small shots. For two, those people straight up tricked me. It happened like this. Everyone toasts the bride's parents. When they came around to our table, they brought wine and small shots of something, they tell me it was bai jiu, for the toasting. My friend, sitting next to me, had to take one sip of wine. That seemed reasonable enough, and I figured I would try a shot, just to see what it was like. So I took a shot. Hold on though - it was communicated to me that I should take two, one for the bride's mother and another for her father. I am not a rude person. I took another one. Great, they said, now another take two for the bride's mother! Wait a second, didn't I just...? Oh well. Two wasn't so bad (how wrong I was!) so I figured two more wouldn't hurt. Haha! So I took two for each of them. But really, they pointed out, for the mother one ought to take four shots. Oh. Really? Well...I am not a rude person. And what's six shots when you've already taken four? I took two more. And then, a few minutes later (this is where they get you), the bride and groom came around for their toasts! And again, my friend only had to drink once. I figured I would continue on the trend, you know, prove my manliness, take another shot, seven is a lucky number, whatever. I took another shot. Everyone was impressed. It was communicated that I should take one for the bride as well; I am a gentleman, and have no trouble drinking to a lady. That shot taken, everyone seemed excited for me to take another, and at this point, there was no apparent reason. Take another one, they said! For all I know, they talked to each other before coming in and decided to try to make me drunk by pretending it was the culturally appropriate thing to do. I called it quits after that.
They were really small shots.
Monday, December 1, 2008
Potpourri (for $600, please, Alex)
Written content was promised, and written content I will deliver. I never promised coherency.
Turns out cilantro is awesome. Some people don't like it, and that is, quite simply, ridiculous. I've happily encountered it in deep fried mushrooms, deep fried doughy-eggy-oniony breakfast concoctions, and fried (just fried - they took it easy on that one) bread stuffed with egg, peppers, and, well, cilantro. Chinese food continues to impress at every opportunity. I've hardly had the same thing twice, and I've liked everything I've eaten so far. All of it. It's really cool to be in a country where people spend a little bit of time being creative with their food instead of just shoveling it down immediately after boiling water renders it sufficiently malleable. I think the big bowl of friend grubs I saw this morning is proof. I'm gaining weight, mom. Are you happy? At this rate I'm going to haul about ten pounds of China across the border when I leave.
I have this problem writing, and I have this problem in conversations: when you meet tons of new people all the time, you get the feeling that you're telling one person the same story ten times. I've developed an aversion to storytelling because I feel like I'm becoming senile, and constantly regaling one person with that story about that one time I was in someplace doing whatever. I keep rereading what I've posted before to make sure I'm not re-writing an earlier update. When I made my way down to Qufu last week it was an adventure of the usual variety. I went to the central train station in Beijing to get my ticket, and the process took about twenty minutes; the ten minutes before that were spent just finding the ticket office. The ticket agent didn't speak English, but I never really expected that she would. The happy difference between here and a place like Russia is that she was all too willing to help. I had written down the train number, destination, and date that I wanted, but the destination proved confusing. Mandarin is a tone language, and between the five different vowel tones, there are 25 different ways to pronounce "Qufu". Being a foreigner, of course, the only way I could pronounce it was the wrong way. Mandarin is hard! After engaging the assistance of two other ticket agents and a bystander, we decided that I was, indeed, going to Qufu. We then commenced a game that combined elements of Guesstures and Pictionary to establish exactly what kind of ticket I wanted. Yes, I want to sleep, not sit down. Put me in this kind of place with six beds, please. Stick me up on the top - I drew a picture of the bunks. Perfect! There's how much money I need to pay. Thank you! Smiles all around! So I ended up on the top bunk of the triple stack in a hard sleeper for the eight hour overnight train, paid about $25 for it, and was a very happy camper. That might sound sort of like a long and annoying process, but I've got time, and it really was sort of fun. Chinese people are really, really nice. Between that and the $0.50 price tag on my breakfasts, I'm falling in love with this country.
I never remember my dreams. The best I can usually do is to have something happen during the day that clicks on a light in my head and reminds me of something I dreamed a night or two before. Then I'll get the tiniest piece of a flashback, but I can't reconnect the flashback to anything more tangible than a vague feeling or fleeting impression. Other times I might remember the last five seconds of my dreams right before I woke up, and then I have a moment to watch it melt away, diluted in the overpowering reality of consciousness. I can't hold on to that even if I want to. The other night I dreamed that I had gone back home, or close. It was Christmas, I was driving back to Spokane, and for me that means I was eastbound on I-90. It was dark, and I was driving through those hours of featureless road after the Cascades. I could see the street in front of my parents house, too; the snow on the ground, and the snow falling, and the light coming from the decorated Christmas tree in the front window. And I got the feeling that something wasn't right. My conscience started nagging me (you can never get rid of it, even in a dream), and it told me that four months wasn't enough, that I hadn't finished yet. I couldn't keep driving home and feel good about it. That's all I remember of my dream, and I think it ended there. If it hadn't ended I would've turned around, or maybe it ended there because I did. Sometimes it takes a dream to understand how you really feel about something that confuses you while you're awake. You sort of teach yourself something that you'd never have learned if you tried.
I guess what brings those three paragraphs together is the feeling that I've formed a rhythm. Things I've learned, and experienced, and felt for the last four months coalesced into an outline of something sometime around October, and after that materialized it's slowly become more and more defined. In Greek philosophy, Theseus' paradox deals with the identity of something after all of its component parts have been replaced, one by one, over time. I don't know if I'm a different person now, and if I am, I couldn't tell you when it happened, or to what degree.
Turns out cilantro is awesome. Some people don't like it, and that is, quite simply, ridiculous. I've happily encountered it in deep fried mushrooms, deep fried doughy-eggy-oniony breakfast concoctions, and fried (just fried - they took it easy on that one) bread stuffed with egg, peppers, and, well, cilantro. Chinese food continues to impress at every opportunity. I've hardly had the same thing twice, and I've liked everything I've eaten so far. All of it. It's really cool to be in a country where people spend a little bit of time being creative with their food instead of just shoveling it down immediately after boiling water renders it sufficiently malleable. I think the big bowl of friend grubs I saw this morning is proof. I'm gaining weight, mom. Are you happy? At this rate I'm going to haul about ten pounds of China across the border when I leave.
I have this problem writing, and I have this problem in conversations: when you meet tons of new people all the time, you get the feeling that you're telling one person the same story ten times. I've developed an aversion to storytelling because I feel like I'm becoming senile, and constantly regaling one person with that story about that one time I was in someplace doing whatever. I keep rereading what I've posted before to make sure I'm not re-writing an earlier update. When I made my way down to Qufu last week it was an adventure of the usual variety. I went to the central train station in Beijing to get my ticket, and the process took about twenty minutes; the ten minutes before that were spent just finding the ticket office. The ticket agent didn't speak English, but I never really expected that she would. The happy difference between here and a place like Russia is that she was all too willing to help. I had written down the train number, destination, and date that I wanted, but the destination proved confusing. Mandarin is a tone language, and between the five different vowel tones, there are 25 different ways to pronounce "Qufu". Being a foreigner, of course, the only way I could pronounce it was the wrong way. Mandarin is hard! After engaging the assistance of two other ticket agents and a bystander, we decided that I was, indeed, going to Qufu. We then commenced a game that combined elements of Guesstures and Pictionary to establish exactly what kind of ticket I wanted. Yes, I want to sleep, not sit down. Put me in this kind of place with six beds, please. Stick me up on the top - I drew a picture of the bunks. Perfect! There's how much money I need to pay. Thank you! Smiles all around! So I ended up on the top bunk of the triple stack in a hard sleeper for the eight hour overnight train, paid about $25 for it, and was a very happy camper. That might sound sort of like a long and annoying process, but I've got time, and it really was sort of fun. Chinese people are really, really nice. Between that and the $0.50 price tag on my breakfasts, I'm falling in love with this country.
I never remember my dreams. The best I can usually do is to have something happen during the day that clicks on a light in my head and reminds me of something I dreamed a night or two before. Then I'll get the tiniest piece of a flashback, but I can't reconnect the flashback to anything more tangible than a vague feeling or fleeting impression. Other times I might remember the last five seconds of my dreams right before I woke up, and then I have a moment to watch it melt away, diluted in the overpowering reality of consciousness. I can't hold on to that even if I want to. The other night I dreamed that I had gone back home, or close. It was Christmas, I was driving back to Spokane, and for me that means I was eastbound on I-90. It was dark, and I was driving through those hours of featureless road after the Cascades. I could see the street in front of my parents house, too; the snow on the ground, and the snow falling, and the light coming from the decorated Christmas tree in the front window. And I got the feeling that something wasn't right. My conscience started nagging me (you can never get rid of it, even in a dream), and it told me that four months wasn't enough, that I hadn't finished yet. I couldn't keep driving home and feel good about it. That's all I remember of my dream, and I think it ended there. If it hadn't ended I would've turned around, or maybe it ended there because I did. Sometimes it takes a dream to understand how you really feel about something that confuses you while you're awake. You sort of teach yourself something that you'd never have learned if you tried.
I guess what brings those three paragraphs together is the feeling that I've formed a rhythm. Things I've learned, and experienced, and felt for the last four months coalesced into an outline of something sometime around October, and after that materialized it's slowly become more and more defined. In Greek philosophy, Theseus' paradox deals with the identity of something after all of its component parts have been replaced, one by one, over time. I don't know if I'm a different person now, and if I am, I couldn't tell you when it happened, or to what degree.
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