Having seen Avatar for the second time today, I have perhaps a responsibility to share some thoughts on it to validate my experience. Not that it's infinitely awesome and I couldn't wait to see it the second day in a row—yesterday's was a gift and today's was just 200 shillings ($1 = Ksh 75). But you should watch it. Don't necessarily pay 8 bucks if that's not in your budget, but see it sometime. It is a tale of corporation and nature interacting. It is the story of Dune, the story of resource grabbing, and the story of wealth. The main character laments, "I was a warrior who thought he could bring peace, but sooner or later we all have to wake up."
Click here to show/hide spoilersDune, the unique features of the planet are all part of a complex process. Avatar's Pandora had resources not connected at all to the way of life (as far as we know). I felt like this led itself better to imperialist allegory—undiscovered oil underground is typically entirely incidental (as far as I know) to the life of people above.
Avatar was more moving than I thought, especially living in a place where people fought in 2007 because they felt like land had been taken away from them for political reasons. And political reasons are never far removed from wealth, here as anywhere. The best roads in the country connect the commercial centers pretty well and the presidents' hometowns very well. We walked through a library yesterday downtown erected by "His Excellency, the Governor of Kenya..." in 1929 or something.
So, besides being mildly depressing, the movie pointed me to the press, to look out for such blatant resource-grabbing that has simply lost our interest in today's entertainment climate. I've been pointed recently to Southern Sudan and its border-drawing, coming referendum, and continuing conflict. I also add material to my story, my glasses. These processes are the backdrop for our world—corporations or governments reaching ends by uncreative means. So, this movie, in its cliche way, made me think that it would be a good idea to punch somebody sometimes. Cuz the bad guy just really made me angry. And his nose would be a small price to pay for the lives of people he would be unable to shoot down covering his face. I've been pretty idealist about this in the past—violence begets more violence is surely true. But I guess there are probably things worth fighting for. Not sure about killing for yet, but definitely fighting for. Fight the good fight, people. And don't kill the earth. She might kill you right back.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Merry Christmas!
It's Christmastime in the city. Nairobi does Christmas with Santas, break, and food. The santas range from the fat white Coke billboard to the African man dressed in a red suit, white beard, and red fuzzy cowboy hat outside Westgate; offices' breaks typically last from a week before Christmas to a few days after New Years'--we had a pretty typical one at the Across office from 18th to 4th. And the food is chapatti. Already before school closed the games teacher was worried about the soccer team's likely weight gain over break.
I've had most of December off from teaching, and I came to Nairobi to work with Across, an organization that works as a church and community resource in Southern Sudan, seeking Christ-centered transformation. I helped somewhat setting up a website. It is strange to work on a website, the face of an organization, with an organization whose face you've not seen for more than 3 weeks. But there was a surprising face--my boss was from Hollandale, MN, where we lived for four years ('96-'00). I mostly was just a reminder that the website was a priority. And I got to nag our web design company that we hired. I'll link to the website once it's live early January. Across was a very cool community to be a part of, seeing some people working hard on the theology and reason for Across' existence, seeing others giving this theology hands and feet as they worked with communities.
For we are the body of Christ. One body spread over many lands, many people, sometimes tripping over its size, sometimes timid in its rarity. And we remember this Christmas a body born to us, the Christ our betrothed whose body we now are. God-with-us makes us with God. May we be represent that remaker of the world in the peace that passes understanding, the joy that is complete, the hope of a way through the desert, and the love that will not let us go.
I've had most of December off from teaching, and I came to Nairobi to work with Across, an organization that works as a church and community resource in Southern Sudan, seeking Christ-centered transformation. I helped somewhat setting up a website. It is strange to work on a website, the face of an organization, with an organization whose face you've not seen for more than 3 weeks. But there was a surprising face--my boss was from Hollandale, MN, where we lived for four years ('96-'00). I mostly was just a reminder that the website was a priority. And I got to nag our web design company that we hired. I'll link to the website once it's live early January. Across was a very cool community to be a part of, seeing some people working hard on the theology and reason for Across' existence, seeing others giving this theology hands and feet as they worked with communities.
For we are the body of Christ. One body spread over many lands, many people, sometimes tripping over its size, sometimes timid in its rarity. And we remember this Christmas a body born to us, the Christ our betrothed whose body we now are. God-with-us makes us with God. May we be represent that remaker of the world in the peace that passes understanding, the joy that is complete, the hope of a way through the desert, and the love that will not let us go.
Friday, December 18, 2009
Finances
Everything is in order—I have raised my money. If you wish to donate more, I'm sure that's fine with the YAV program—I think I have had to raise less money than YAVs last year because they raised more than they needed to. But the best way you can be supporting me now is with prayers. For I continue to need wisdom and understanding after my funds are complete. And stay interested! It is very encouraging to get comments on my blog or emails from people, reminding me of people I wish I could talk to more, sharing their lives with me when I cannot share in them as I am used to. And if you disagree with what I say, all the more reason to tell me about it. Thank you so much for your support so far. God is good. God has sustained me so far, and I trust the Lord to be in this place even when I don't know it, carrying me through and using me knowingly and blindly for the glory of the one already exalted.
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Newsletter 1
The sun set yesterday a little before 7. Just like the night before. Everyone knew it would be completely dark very shortly. No extended twilight here—the sun's angle gets pretty low a bit before 5, but it stays light until, sneakily, the sun leaves and all is dark. Someday I would like to see a good sunrise here, the sun of this world burning bright mere minutes after its heralds invade a dark world.
The past three months have seen orientation to Kenya and then orientation to our placements. One day we were living in a roomy but windy wing of a house in upscale Lavington, the next we moved out and moved in to our respective situations. As the sun rose on our real lives for this year, we began to feed ourselves, to have neighbors, and to begin our work with the students. Josh Orem and I are set up in an apartment that has two bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen, and a large living room, neighbors to other teachers and staff who live right on the school compound. Thrown into classes after observing one Kenyan math class (Josh doesn't even teach math), we have found the students at Icaciri Secondary respectful, hard-working, and fun.
The area is very rural, but much more thickly settled than American farm country. Agriculture here begins at the home, not at the industrial farm machine. So the Deputy Principal has 200 chicks in a little canvas lean-to behind her house. Our neighbor to the north sells us milk—every day since the rains started we get a half liter in our entryway. One of the men who works in the kitchen grows sugar cane for sale, and we buy our eggs from someone about 20 minutes’ walk away. In that 20 minutes of walking, we do not see just one crop growing for miles, waiting for a cultivator. Rather, many crops greet us, maize mixed in with the beans, bananas everywhere in little pits, nduma-arrow root-down between the ridges near water, all growing in what I would call people's yards. Grass is an exception to this rule—many people have begun growing swaths of grass to feed the growing number of cows, which are quickly becoming the most profitable use of land.
In Nairobi, the cows of the Maasai (to whom, if you did not realize, belong all the world's cows) roamed the street with us, sometimes causing traffic jams (Why did the cow cross the road?). When we did some gardening, even in our fancy neighborhood, we walked for two minutes to a place where the cows often slept to buy boleo ya ng'ombe (cow manure) from the man who lived there in the manure pit with the cows and his son.
The poor are separate here, but not too separate. Areas that began as British homes or Indian businesses are still rich, but no longer ethnically uniform. The poor are always with us. Every rich area of Nairobi has a poor area right next door. Kangemi is right down the road from where I am now, and Kibera is right by where we did some big shopping during orientation. The change is sudden. When we were on the border of Kibera, a primary school at the end of a market marked the beginning of the slum. And everybody knows it's there (except for the foreigners, of course). It's black and white, day and night—obviously, a white person is out of place in the slum but not in Village Market, an imperialist palace with mini golf, electronics, high hawker prices, and fancy landscaping. There is no twilit transition from rich to poor neighborhoods, just someone’s fence or a building on the border.
The ethnic diversity here is amazing. Most Kenyans seem to be very steeped in the traditions of their ethnic group, and I've heard from two different tribes that their tribe is the "backbone of Kenya." Big cities are mixed, but most rural areas are very uniform in ethnic composition. At our school the first day, a Form 2 (sophomore) told me with very serious eyes that he wished to be called by his Christian name; this after being introduced to me as "Maasai." There was something suddenly different about him in my mind—I had categorized him, accepting his classmates' view, which, with all my American history of racial tension, made me a bit ashamed. He's not actually Maasai, I discovered months later, but he is tall and runs fast. Obviously Maasai.
Most of the ethnic trouble comes when politics happens and a President does good for his people and no one else's. But this is changing, too, on the ground level. The tremendous loyalty I saw last month as the Harambee Stars lost to the Nigerian footballers, three goals to two, I had assumed carried over to political loyalty. But then a Kikuyu a few weeks ago, whose Member of Parliament is Uhuru Kenyatta (son of Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, first President of Kenya), from Kenyatta's hometown even, listed the son as a primary suspect in the 2007 post-election violence. I cannot speak to the allegations, but it was a surprise to hear his countryman calling him out. The winner-takes-all style of elections may be losing favor as Kenyans, seeking a new constitution, are sick of corruption. One evening, long after the sunset (at a little before 7), and then the next morning in worship, the boarders at Icaciri had changed the words of the Michael Jackson song in Free Willy.
"Father, your people are dying,
They're dying of corruption,
And they need your help...mmm."
Josh and I went to Gatundu Presbyterian one Sunday, to a sparsely attended English service. We then visited a friend in the hospital, returning some time later to bring greetings also to the worshippers at the next service. We could not have pushed into the back of the church for the press of people, all praying and singing in their mother tongue. But we went around to a side entrance and were ushered to the front. The matron of our school, who had invited us, encouraged us to present a song when we introduced ourselves. We went up, following a skilled choir, silently coming to the center and introducing ourselves. Our English was likely understood by all but the oldest and youngest among them, for we were brief. And we sang the same song we had sung with the full complement of YAVs at Meru town, "They will know we are Christians by our love." Two foreigners up front, singing in a language whose service draws no one, choosing a pitch too low for both our ranges, enunciating like Americans, difficult to understand, gave what they knew to a church they did not know. And God gave something, too. For the rest of the service, Mercy, the matron, kept telling us how they were repeating to each other "We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord," the opening lines of the song. There we stood, visitors unable to even participate intellectually in the goings on, singing about being one. And somehow we were. We knew with the churchgoers that even if there is a sharp, sudden distinction between our skins, between our country's GDPs, between our descent, or between our language, the day is ours together. The same Spirit draws us to our mutual redemption, into one body for the glory of God.
The past three months have seen orientation to Kenya and then orientation to our placements. One day we were living in a roomy but windy wing of a house in upscale Lavington, the next we moved out and moved in to our respective situations. As the sun rose on our real lives for this year, we began to feed ourselves, to have neighbors, and to begin our work with the students. Josh Orem and I are set up in an apartment that has two bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen, and a large living room, neighbors to other teachers and staff who live right on the school compound. Thrown into classes after observing one Kenyan math class (Josh doesn't even teach math), we have found the students at Icaciri Secondary respectful, hard-working, and fun.
The area is very rural, but much more thickly settled than American farm country. Agriculture here begins at the home, not at the industrial farm machine. So the Deputy Principal has 200 chicks in a little canvas lean-to behind her house. Our neighbor to the north sells us milk—every day since the rains started we get a half liter in our entryway. One of the men who works in the kitchen grows sugar cane for sale, and we buy our eggs from someone about 20 minutes’ walk away. In that 20 minutes of walking, we do not see just one crop growing for miles, waiting for a cultivator. Rather, many crops greet us, maize mixed in with the beans, bananas everywhere in little pits, nduma-arrow root-down between the ridges near water, all growing in what I would call people's yards. Grass is an exception to this rule—many people have begun growing swaths of grass to feed the growing number of cows, which are quickly becoming the most profitable use of land.
In Nairobi, the cows of the Maasai (to whom, if you did not realize, belong all the world's cows) roamed the street with us, sometimes causing traffic jams (Why did the cow cross the road?). When we did some gardening, even in our fancy neighborhood, we walked for two minutes to a place where the cows often slept to buy boleo ya ng'ombe (cow manure) from the man who lived there in the manure pit with the cows and his son.
The poor are separate here, but not too separate. Areas that began as British homes or Indian businesses are still rich, but no longer ethnically uniform. The poor are always with us. Every rich area of Nairobi has a poor area right next door. Kangemi is right down the road from where I am now, and Kibera is right by where we did some big shopping during orientation. The change is sudden. When we were on the border of Kibera, a primary school at the end of a market marked the beginning of the slum. And everybody knows it's there (except for the foreigners, of course). It's black and white, day and night—obviously, a white person is out of place in the slum but not in Village Market, an imperialist palace with mini golf, electronics, high hawker prices, and fancy landscaping. There is no twilit transition from rich to poor neighborhoods, just someone’s fence or a building on the border.
The ethnic diversity here is amazing. Most Kenyans seem to be very steeped in the traditions of their ethnic group, and I've heard from two different tribes that their tribe is the "backbone of Kenya." Big cities are mixed, but most rural areas are very uniform in ethnic composition. At our school the first day, a Form 2 (sophomore) told me with very serious eyes that he wished to be called by his Christian name; this after being introduced to me as "Maasai." There was something suddenly different about him in my mind—I had categorized him, accepting his classmates' view, which, with all my American history of racial tension, made me a bit ashamed. He's not actually Maasai, I discovered months later, but he is tall and runs fast. Obviously Maasai.
Most of the ethnic trouble comes when politics happens and a President does good for his people and no one else's. But this is changing, too, on the ground level. The tremendous loyalty I saw last month as the Harambee Stars lost to the Nigerian footballers, three goals to two, I had assumed carried over to political loyalty. But then a Kikuyu a few weeks ago, whose Member of Parliament is Uhuru Kenyatta (son of Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, first President of Kenya), from Kenyatta's hometown even, listed the son as a primary suspect in the 2007 post-election violence. I cannot speak to the allegations, but it was a surprise to hear his countryman calling him out. The winner-takes-all style of elections may be losing favor as Kenyans, seeking a new constitution, are sick of corruption. One evening, long after the sunset (at a little before 7), and then the next morning in worship, the boarders at Icaciri had changed the words of the Michael Jackson song in Free Willy.
"Father, your people are dying,
They're dying of corruption,
And they need your help...mmm."
Josh and I went to Gatundu Presbyterian one Sunday, to a sparsely attended English service. We then visited a friend in the hospital, returning some time later to bring greetings also to the worshippers at the next service. We could not have pushed into the back of the church for the press of people, all praying and singing in their mother tongue. But we went around to a side entrance and were ushered to the front. The matron of our school, who had invited us, encouraged us to present a song when we introduced ourselves. We went up, following a skilled choir, silently coming to the center and introducing ourselves. Our English was likely understood by all but the oldest and youngest among them, for we were brief. And we sang the same song we had sung with the full complement of YAVs at Meru town, "They will know we are Christians by our love." Two foreigners up front, singing in a language whose service draws no one, choosing a pitch too low for both our ranges, enunciating like Americans, difficult to understand, gave what they knew to a church they did not know. And God gave something, too. For the rest of the service, Mercy, the matron, kept telling us how they were repeating to each other "We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord," the opening lines of the song. There we stood, visitors unable to even participate intellectually in the goings on, singing about being one. And somehow we were. We knew with the churchgoers that even if there is a sharp, sudden distinction between our skins, between our country's GDPs, between our descent, or between our language, the day is ours together. The same Spirit draws us to our mutual redemption, into one body for the glory of God.
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The contrasts of the movie were intentionally drastic. In the first five minutes, the shuttle takes people in from orbit, passing over verdant jungle with huge trees on low gravity to a mechanical octagonal fortress of metal, concrete and looming towers. Technology, fueled by resource-seeking industry, meets natural, balanced life. The life on the planet is so advanced that the trees together make a world brain, and touch-sensitive phosphorescent plants light the path of the Na'vi, the people, at night. The Na'vi can even interface with the network of trees to upload memories or with animals to ride. I assume millenia of deliberate selection have caused this outcome in an already condusive biology, compared with the millenia of science and progress that consumed Earth by this time. The fire that Jake lights as soon as it becomes night leads to unneccessary wildlife death, and the first spat with his future lover. Such symbolism of nature and technology swept through the entire film—James Cameron stayed general enough that different people saw different things. There was intentionally no direct connection to specific situations—natives did not dress or speak exactly like Zulu or Cherokee or Maya.What people saw in the movie was not always universal. Yesterday when I saw it someone saw mostly an environmental message—don't mess with the Earth, she'll kick back. But I had been entirely in imperialism mode—people were deliberately pushed aside because they couldn't have understood the "wealth" they were sitting on. A tree thousands of years old was destroyed, the ancestral home of thousands of people, for millions of dollars of ore. But the processes of environmental destruction and of imperialism are the same. Human life and animal life are both consumed in the furnace of technology and resource-grabbing. It makes me wonder if the shareholder model of business is flawed because we don't see what our money does. I wonder, too, at the press that came out of Pandora. I assume that it would be very expensive to get there, so in the absence of professional journalists, the company could filter information however they saw fit. Or, after a flurry of interest initially, future information was not as interesting, not as profitable for the press.