The Kenyan dairy farmers have had a bumper year. It's been the consensus among the farmers in the know that dairy cows have recently become more profitable than traditional cash crops--which in Gatundu district means coffee. But with the nice rains and the fast-traveling news of the bandwagon, there is too much milk. The dairy association cannot buy all of it. Some is just going bad without ever leaving the farmers. Our prayer this morning in church was for God to give the farmers a way out.
Many times when I am scared that I won't finish something, I think of ways out. The train was good for that at Emory. "If I hopped on the train," I would think to myself, "I could be halfway across the country by the time my paper due and my teacher notices my abscence." But I dismissed such thoughts every time. As important as it is to cultivate creative responses to struggles, that crosses the line to escapism. But isn't that what God gives us? An escape? A lifeline? A place to run to when the world presses in?
"Come to me, all who are weary and heavy laden," Jesus says, "and I will give you rest." Read on: "My burden is light and my yoke is easy." We have a way out plain and simple. Come to Jesus and what do you get? A yoke. You get strapped in to a plow to work. The escape of slavery is labor. You don't escape slavery by being your own master, but by choosing your master. Because the human heart is a shrine for a master. A factory of idols, JC the lesser said.
But anyway, I usually see the gospel not as a way out but a way forward. When God opens a door, it goes somewhere. When Jesus quizzed Peter about love, the response was not "today you'll be with me in paradise," as it was for the man condemned, but "feed my lambs." It continues a path of discipleship. The hope of Christianity is not escapist, but redemptive.
I need to seek ways to express this. Part of it can be in my relationship even to myself. A pursuit of excellence (whether in music, fitness, teaching skills, Kiswahili) better reflects the glory of a God redeeming his Creation than mediocrity. And God gives us grace to pursue such things. That's my next project--avoiding mediocrity. Dr. Nelson of Emory Concert Choir, thank you. I was dubious before when I heard you attempt to incite us to abandon our lack of effort, but now I follow your argument a bit better. Mediocrity is not acceptable. Excellence has many forms, just as people do--we must use our own unique gifts and talents, not cookie-cutter ones. This is the way forward to a diverse future.
Love you all.
Battery dying.
Peace.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Comfortably Numb
My fever was over 100, I discovered Friday on my phone's unit converter after leaving the nurse's room. I then waited to be called to the doctor with the other ER patients. I sat and had some fizzy fever-reducing tablets. Earlier in the day, I lay out in the sun because blankets in my room weren't warm enough, but equatorial rays toasted me comfortably. I was nearly Pink on one side before I turned my head--gotta keep both cheeks even. "Hello?" I'd been called and couldn't quite hear the directions over the loudspeaker. Hesitantly walking to the door I thought I was supposed to go through, a doctor quickly found me and sat me down. He checked things off the clipboard as we talked, and gave me a ticket to go to the lab and get tested for...malaria. Oi. So back to the waiting room I went to queue at the barely-manned counters. I prevented fainting by sitting down on the floor for part of the wait. It was nice and cool. And not even wobbly, like it looked from far away. But eventually, I got to the front, paid my dues and headed for the lab.
Just a little pinprick and an hour's wait for results, and it was back to the doctor. No malaria. Grr. I was almost disappointed. I'd had a bad fever for the whole day, a debilitating illness, and it's just an infection? Not even one worthy of cipro? I went home with my amoxicillin and tylenol, happy to have found the simple solution and wondering if it was mostly in my head.
When I was a child, I had a fever. When it was pretty springtime (or occasionally in the fall) and the flowers of Minnesota or Michigan woke to greet the world, I would be ill. Sinusitis would take over my breathing for a couple days, but invariably I would miss a week or two of school. Every morning I would feel terrible and not able to go to school. Then, a couple hours later, I'd wish I weren't "sick" so I could go ride bike or play. In the evening, I'd be almost well, eating and joking, but then after dinner I would begin to deteriorate, sniffly and pitiful as I went to bed, not expecting to go to school in the morning. I often wonder how much of that was my own expectation interfering with my body's healing. Did I expect to be sick in the morning? Did I want to just skip school for a week?
Back at school today, I feel and act fully recovered, but I wonder out of habit, is it real? Did I really just get better immediately from my terrible sickness? I know that's what antibiotics do, but was I really needing to be that sick? I probably exagerrated a bit. But then I devalue my own experience, my own feelings about it at the time. I cannot function without trust in my senses, but I know they're broken, too. I don't perfectly see the world. I've got all these bits of me between me and das Ding an sich, that I'm just used to looking through. My eyes cover themselves. But experience is real, perception is real. "Is there anybody in there?" I have to assume you are real, too. For sanity's sake. But I must question my self-deceit, as I seek to live and experience and perceive truly and fully. I must tell myself truth if I am to tell others anything like it. Devaluing experience in general leads to escapism or Buddhism. If the world was good, if very God calls it so, I wish not to escape this world but to purge my illusions about what is truly good. To shine light. But I can't even tell which parts are false, whether I'm doubting unnecessarily or convalescing overmuch. I want to make sure I am not avoiding the world for the sake of escapism or timidity, but I need fresh eyes to see which parts are worth surgery.
Just a little flavor of the philosophical stuff I like to play with. I trust in the light, which will bring all things into itself, into knowledge of self, other, and God. God's good world is all around us, but it is broken. The world is beautiful, good, enjoyable, but we must not affix ourselves to the brokenness but to God's repair. He's still working on me--I'm not done dying--kids under construction--this is not how I am--Christian soldiers...with the cross going on before. "Behold, I am making all things new."
I saw a bright kid the other day who had just been given enough money to attend secondary school. I saw a poor mother who had just come to the hospital with no money for pills, but she was grateful for her son's diagnosis. I saw a bullying episode defused by a few quick words. I read a packet on proposed changes to Kenya's Constitution. I am glad to not be sick anymore, because I miss things when I'm distracted by myself.
Just a little pinprick and an hour's wait for results, and it was back to the doctor. No malaria. Grr. I was almost disappointed. I'd had a bad fever for the whole day, a debilitating illness, and it's just an infection? Not even one worthy of cipro? I went home with my amoxicillin and tylenol, happy to have found the simple solution and wondering if it was mostly in my head.
When I was a child, I had a fever. When it was pretty springtime (or occasionally in the fall) and the flowers of Minnesota or Michigan woke to greet the world, I would be ill. Sinusitis would take over my breathing for a couple days, but invariably I would miss a week or two of school. Every morning I would feel terrible and not able to go to school. Then, a couple hours later, I'd wish I weren't "sick" so I could go ride bike or play. In the evening, I'd be almost well, eating and joking, but then after dinner I would begin to deteriorate, sniffly and pitiful as I went to bed, not expecting to go to school in the morning. I often wonder how much of that was my own expectation interfering with my body's healing. Did I expect to be sick in the morning? Did I want to just skip school for a week?
Back at school today, I feel and act fully recovered, but I wonder out of habit, is it real? Did I really just get better immediately from my terrible sickness? I know that's what antibiotics do, but was I really needing to be that sick? I probably exagerrated a bit. But then I devalue my own experience, my own feelings about it at the time. I cannot function without trust in my senses, but I know they're broken, too. I don't perfectly see the world. I've got all these bits of me between me and das Ding an sich, that I'm just used to looking through. My eyes cover themselves. But experience is real, perception is real. "Is there anybody in there?" I have to assume you are real, too. For sanity's sake. But I must question my self-deceit, as I seek to live and experience and perceive truly and fully. I must tell myself truth if I am to tell others anything like it. Devaluing experience in general leads to escapism or Buddhism. If the world was good, if very God calls it so, I wish not to escape this world but to purge my illusions about what is truly good. To shine light. But I can't even tell which parts are false, whether I'm doubting unnecessarily or convalescing overmuch. I want to make sure I am not avoiding the world for the sake of escapism or timidity, but I need fresh eyes to see which parts are worth surgery.
Just a little flavor of the philosophical stuff I like to play with. I trust in the light, which will bring all things into itself, into knowledge of self, other, and God. God's good world is all around us, but it is broken. The world is beautiful, good, enjoyable, but we must not affix ourselves to the brokenness but to God's repair. He's still working on me--I'm not done dying--kids under construction--this is not how I am--Christian soldiers...with the cross going on before. "Behold, I am making all things new."
I saw a bright kid the other day who had just been given enough money to attend secondary school. I saw a poor mother who had just come to the hospital with no money for pills, but she was grateful for her son's diagnosis. I saw a bullying episode defused by a few quick words. I read a packet on proposed changes to Kenya's Constitution. I am glad to not be sick anymore, because I miss things when I'm distracted by myself.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Memory
The children were tested this week. From Wednesday to Friday, we "invigilated" our own exams and other teachers' as the students spent an hour or two forging 20% of their term grade. Another 20% comes in the next set of exams and then the final 60% for the final exam. High pressure and heated competition forge students whose choice between welding apprenticeship or medical school might be shaped by a single day's work in a classroom. These students know they compete for few national university spots, so any time they spend doing anything but study they feel they have wasted. Or so a recent University graduate said to me yesterday. There is certainly little opportunity for the boarders to do anything else. After supper, they go back to class to study on their own until bed. Saturday, we have elitist class--extra fees, extra attention. It's not all bad. This most recent Saturday we measured the height of the flag pole with clinometers we had fashioned from our protractors.
As I try to get an angle on the extremely hard-working students, I continue to have English barriers. Besides obvious things like speaking loudly and slowly in front of a group, individual communication is not usually smooth. Forget puns, especially if they're thrown in haphazardly, and move more toward big gestures with silly voices or innuendo. A pun takes too much explanation, and only interesting double meanings justify explanation. A student the other day, a couple hours after I took a picture of her at her request, said to me, "You will remove those for us later?" She gave me no preface but a glance at the camera--"picha" or "snap" in the sentence would have clued me in. Ms. Wacera was nearby, and I was grateful she knew what the student meant. I couldn't even tease afterward with the difference between delete and develop, because the student had only just learned the word "develop." But I tried [to lose the game].
Here I am, taking pictures in a new place far from home--far enough to actually learn something from the Christmas letter I received for the first time--and things pass on. There is a melancholy guilt, a wistful Sehnsucht, attached with leaving. Even if you only leave your own culture because you don't fit and want to blame not fitting on culture shock, you miss things. I love my home, my people, our ways (well, mostly). And glimpses of "how we do things back home" tend to float unbidden through my mind when emptied.
The year is half over--half full, I guess, of opportunity for growth. The relationship building now has a possibility, a responsibility to grow deeper than simply exchanging cultural notes, but I am not yet Kenyan. It is still comfortable and easy to get stuck on talk of home. I have to remember how to move past this--when in a new place, the things and people that mattered before just do not compute here. But some things always matter. The language describing these things changes, as do the customary smokescreens, but everyone loves talking about things they love with people they love. I think it is better to want to know what someone thinks because of their personhood, not their nationality.
Josh put a sad CD on before he left. These ramblings are totally his fault. The Fray. Blame them, too. And probably Canada, but I don't remember why.
I remember you, people back home. And I miss talking to you, and being a part of your lives. But not enough to leave now. Jesus makes life here, too--abundandantly as he tends to, and I am a part of other lives I am not yet ready to leave behind.
As I try to get an angle on the extremely hard-working students, I continue to have English barriers. Besides obvious things like speaking loudly and slowly in front of a group, individual communication is not usually smooth. Forget puns, especially if they're thrown in haphazardly, and move more toward big gestures with silly voices or innuendo. A pun takes too much explanation, and only interesting double meanings justify explanation. A student the other day, a couple hours after I took a picture of her at her request, said to me, "You will remove those for us later?" She gave me no preface but a glance at the camera--"picha" or "snap" in the sentence would have clued me in. Ms. Wacera was nearby, and I was grateful she knew what the student meant. I couldn't even tease afterward with the difference between delete and develop, because the student had only just learned the word "develop." But I tried [to lose the game].
Here I am, taking pictures in a new place far from home--far enough to actually learn something from the Christmas letter I received for the first time--and things pass on. There is a melancholy guilt, a wistful Sehnsucht, attached with leaving. Even if you only leave your own culture because you don't fit and want to blame not fitting on culture shock, you miss things. I love my home, my people, our ways (well, mostly). And glimpses of "how we do things back home" tend to float unbidden through my mind when emptied.
The year is half over--half full, I guess, of opportunity for growth. The relationship building now has a possibility, a responsibility to grow deeper than simply exchanging cultural notes, but I am not yet Kenyan. It is still comfortable and easy to get stuck on talk of home. I have to remember how to move past this--when in a new place, the things and people that mattered before just do not compute here. But some things always matter. The language describing these things changes, as do the customary smokescreens, but everyone loves talking about things they love with people they love. I think it is better to want to know what someone thinks because of their personhood, not their nationality.
Josh put a sad CD on before he left. These ramblings are totally his fault. The Fray. Blame them, too. And probably Canada, but I don't remember why.
I remember you, people back home. And I miss talking to you, and being a part of your lives. But not enough to leave now. Jesus makes life here, too--abundandantly as he tends to, and I am a part of other lives I am not yet ready to leave behind.
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