A way out

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.

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.

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.

Zanzibar

So, we had a weeklong retreat on the beautiful island of Zanzibar. Coming from an East African country where people will happily show you around town, but become very angry if you don't pay them afterward, we were welcomed to the island and shown to our hotel by a few guys who were just walking the same way. We stayed in lovely St. Monica's hostel, atop old slave chambers, two below-ground stone rooms where up to one hundred fifty slaves were housed before being sold in the adjacent market. The market, closed in 1863 at the urgings of Livingstone, is now a church of coral and lime. Made over a period of many years, the unskilled workers who began by installing some columns upside down, finished the cathedral with a clever, complex, arched roof. This was visible from our window and our balcony. Arab features accent many of the buildings there, swoops at the top of walls and keyhole-framed doors.
We had various activities--a spice tour, a round table discussion about Christian/Muslim relations on the island, a tour of the cathedral, and swimming with dolphins. They were all valuable experiences. The ITC group did prove to be good resources as we went. Having done some research, their special interest in HIV/AIDS was a keen aid to our discussions. They were all intelligent. We went our separate ways for most of the trip, but it was good to have some new people around to bounce ideas off of. We got to see and taste many spices at a spice farm. Cinnamon bark, cloves, jackfruit, peppercorns, and many more fruits and spices overwhelmed our tongues for an hour and a half as we walked around in the humidity. We then saw the sultan's baths, created for the sultan of Omar, who moved the capital to Zanzibar because he liked it so much. I probably would do that too. It was just a relaxing, welcoming place. Every beach we saw was picturesque, and most people we met were personable and easygoing.
More peaceful still were the dolphins. There is a place on the coast where dolphins are rather common early in the morning. So at 6:30, we left Stone Town, drove for an hour (on the way seeing some red colobus monkeys, the island's only "African wildlife" of note) to a beach on the southeast side of the island, grabbed some snorkel gear and two people to man the boat, and motored out into the blue Indian Ocean. Josh, with a year on the swim team, was in our boat as was Whitney, who doesn't usually like to touch water with anything higher than her calf, and Nicole, the one who had been pushing to "swim with dolphins" all week. We drove for a long time before seeing one fin peeking out of the water. The guides told us not to jump in yet. It was just one. Soon, we found a few. We saw them coming up for air together. Two or three fins broke the surface and dove again just below the surface. The guides said "This side!" and we jumped. Except Whitney. She watched. But she entered the water later. It was magical to swim ferociously, assisted by flippers, behind a dolphin lazily scooting through the water. A few times, I followed them as long as I had breath. I was not a huge fan of the snorkel tube. I just used the goggles. We came back tired and exhilarated by a powerful experience.
The islanders have not had power since December. All the businesses which need it use generators or have closed for the time until the mainland repairs the line. There were cheap places and touristy places side by side, and the touristy ones had lights on.
The lights stayed on all night the second night we stayed in Dar es Salaam. Having just returned from Zanzibar, we were tired, and we were grateful they left the generator on at the Kurasini Catholic Retreat Center--the heat was oppressive. The fan was only a minor consolation, but it was a help. We packed and prepared for return bus ride on Sunday Jan 17, which turned out to be not quite as long as the 16 hour trip we had endured on Monday. The next morning I left early for Gatundu to teach again. It is good to be back with our friends.

Zanzibar was great!

I have posted some pictures on my flickr, but don't have enough internet time to tell you how wonderful and restorative Zanzibar was.

Time to eat

Happy New Year from Kenya! School has begun--we went back Wednesday for three days of remembering students' names, rejoining the company of our fellow teachers, sharing stories about holidays, and even a little teaching. But now we are back in Nairobi, preparing to leave in the morning for Zanzibar! Tomorrow is our first retreat as a YAV group. We go to Zanzibar in conjunction with ITC, the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta, GA. They seem like a cool bunch so far--we worshiped with them this morning and had dinner with them Friday. They will be good resources on this retreat as we discuss how God is working and study the structures that we have seen. I heard two of them preach this morning, and wish to commend to you some of the things I heard (but I cannot reproduce all the magnificent alliteration of both speakers. props to them).

Today we remember Jesus' baptism, and ours too, hopefully. Baptism is an inauguration into a new way of being. We are anointed into the presence, the purpose, and the power of God--the indwelling of the Holy Spirit through a path Christ walked, with the approval of God the Father. Not merely to heavenly peace, but to power through the indwelling of the divine. As in, the God of the universe, holy and mighty, who has come to us as a person, comes in us wandering people to make us new and air out our dank spaces. The purpose of baptism is not merely to enrich a single person, but the whole body of Christ. Growth is no isolated incident. It must be systemic.

The second message encouraged us, like Naaman, to humble ourselves to God's transformative power. It comes to us through simple means of grace that can seem simultaneously too easy and too mystical, and obedience is the way to healing. Pride will keep us unclean, as we refuse the gracious gift of God for our well-being.

Both sermons pointed me to a Gospel that was vital and relevant. Encouraged by Pastor Edward Furi of PCEA St. Andrews (among others), the Gospel's immediate importance has been on my mind recently. Obviously, the promise of God is not merely for the life to come. It is life here, too, but in FULL. It is prosperous by God's sanctified definition--not necessarily by your own or your boss's or professor's incomplete longings. It is for peace and joy and justice in God's good world, not just in heaven or in the new earth. The Gospel is now. God gives peace today. And all we have to do is jump in.

Take the plunge. Seek the light. Be anointed again in Spirit and Truth this New Year. Take up wholeheartedly the means God gives you to know and to love God and neighbor. May the one by whose help we have come empower you for his life-giving mission. Today.

A whole new world

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 spoilers

Jake Sully, paraplegic ex-marine, arrives on Pandora, a planet orbiting a gas giant after waking in orbit from five years of cryosleep. Replacing his late twin brother at the last minute in the Avatar Project, he gets a big blue body to drive around the jungles of this dangerous, untamed, primitive world. While he lies in his coffin with neural apparatus surrounding him, his avatar, who looks almost like a native but is mixed enough with his DNA to have his face, climbs trees, leaps around and tames wild beasts. Basically, he goes native and doesn't wish to do recon any more on his people. But it is too late—he has known the whole time that Home Tree sat on the largest deposit of unobtainium the company had found. The destruction and revelations make Jake an outcast from both corporation and tribe. The revelations continue—the trees are like neurons of the brain of the deity of the people, who rallies the animals as the clans rally for a final stand against the corporation's security forces.
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.

The one thing this movie did not do was connect the wealth dots. In Dune, 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.