I am still having problems with my internet connection at home. My ISP has switched the telephone company it uses for its Tennessee POP locations, and I have a sneaking suspicion this may be part of the problem.
So I’m stealing a few brief minutes while waiting for a phone call here at work to post my favorite Blogger Idol entries for last week, with the theme “Travel.” Sorry they’re late.
This week’s topic in the non-competitive “Blogger Idol” showcase is “Travel.” Anyone who knows me has gotten an earful about my travel experiences over the past couple of years. Some of the following will be old hat to my regular readers — after all, my first blog, which morphed into this one, was originally intended as a place to tell some of my mission trip stories. But I’ll at least try to approach this from a new angle.
I will probably ramble. Feel free to skip ahead.
Prior to 2003, the sum total of my international travel had been a couple of hours in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, a tourist trap just across the border from Laredo, Texas. But in the past two years I’ve taken missions trips to Nicaragua and Kenya, and I’m now trying to raise funds for a return trip to Kenya in August 2005.
It was in 1993 when I first became involved in domestic missions, through Mountain T.O.P., which places volunteers into the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee. I learned a lot from Mountain T.O.P. about flexibility, and about how God can use you when you get out of your comfort zone. But even so, I told myself and others that I would never be any good at foreign missions. I never thought I’d be able to spend a week in a dirt-floor shack or eat strange foods cooked over a fire. After all, I’m the type of guy who prefers concrete swimming pools to lakes or ponds.
But in August 2002, one of my Mountain T.O.P. friends, Gail Drake, invited me on a Nicaragua trip through LEAMIS International Ministries, the interdenominational missions group Gail founded with the Rev. Debra Snellen. I agreed — and I’ve never looked back.
Because our topic here is “travel,” I’ll set aside for purposes of this post the theological reasons for, and implications of, foreign mission trips. I will instead talk about what foreign travel has meant to me.
LEAMIS strongly believes in placing its short-term volunteers in private homes. In Kenya, our host pastor, the Rev. Paul Mbithi, said that made us different from other short-term teams he’d dealt with before founding New Life Restoration Centre. Those teams stayed in hotels. They came to the church or other work site during the day, and then they went back to a western-style environment at night.
LEAMIS believes that staying with families yields an entirely different attitude and a different type of experience. In Kenya, staying in homes didn’t involve much sacrifice. Pastor Paul had placed us at his own townhouse and at the homes of two of his other members from outside the Kibera slums. Even when some of our team members asked about spending a night in the slums, Pastor Paul would not allow it. He said it would be a security concern not only for the team members but for the family with which we stayed — the neighbors might assume that the western visitors had left gifts or money and might try to rob our hosts after we had departed.
So we were crowded, but in conditions that approached western-style comfort, somewhere between Nairobi and the slums.
Even so, there were reminders that we were in the developing world. Our clothes were washed by hand, just as they had been in rural Nicaragua a year and a half earlier. Our hot showers, at least for those of us downstairs, came courtesy of a scary-looking electric “widowmaker” shower head. And the gray water as the shower warmed up was saved.
In Nicaragua, even when we were holding our debrief at a nice, western-style hotel, we were told not to flush the toilet paper. The septic system could not handle toilet paper, so it was placed in a little waste basket next to the toilet. (Talk about a hard habit to break!)
That’s a lesson I keep trying to teach myself. Resources are precious. Here in the states — especially this week, the ground zero of American commercialism — resources like water and electricity and sewer service seem unlimited. I hope that my foreign trips are helping to teach me otherwise, although I’ve got a lot of unlearning to do, and I may not get there in this lifetime.
Of course, Pastor Paul’s townhouse seemed like the Ritz-Carlton when compared with Teresa Sanchez’ home in El Triunfo, Nicaragua, where I had spent a week a year and a half earlier. Frank Schroer and I lived in one end of a rickety dirt-floor shed while Teresa and her family crowded into the other end. We had no hot showers or indoor plumbing in El Triunfo. “Showering” meant standing on a couple of boards over a mud puddle in a little enclosure on the back of the house. (It wasn’t a complete enclosure; if someone had been standing in one particular corner of the back lot, the bather would have been in full view.) You dipped out some chilly rainwater and poured it over yourself, lathered, and then rinsed again. Of course, all this rinsing caused mud to spatter onto your shins, and so you had to rinse them separately when you were through.
And let’s not talk about the outhouse. I’m still trying to forget the outhouse.
In Nicaragua, there was a definite language barrier. No one at the church, not even Pastor Luis Gutierrez, spoke English, so most of our conversations had to go through translators — our resident missionary, Amanda Van Deman, or one of our team members, Michelle Schussler. But in the evening, when Frank and I were at home with the Sanchez family, there was no translator. We got by on pidgin Spanish, teaching the Sanchez family how to play Uno and Jenga and trying to be as polite and observant as possible.
In Kenya, a former British colony, almost everyone we dealt with on a regular basis (and all of our hosts) spoke the King’s English. Our worship services were translated into Swahili, so there must have been some people in the congregation with limited English. But at no point did I ever have trouble communicating in English — except for two days when I was working with a group of teenagers from a school for the hearing-impaired!
When I talk about my mission trip experiences, I often run into what seems like a contradiction, and I’m often afraid that I fail to do it justice. The contradiction is that people living in dire poverty — whether rural Nicaragua or the crowded Kibera slums — show an amazing positive attitude. It’s easy to take a condescending attitude towards this (”They don’t know any better”) or use it as an excuse not to help (”They’re happy the way they are.”) But that’s wrong. The people in both places have television; they can see what the rest of the world is like. And their poverty has heart-breaking consequences for health, education, hunger and security. They are not happy because they “don’t know any better.” They are happy in spite of their situation, not because of it. And we still bear our full responsibility to help improve their situation when we can.
But the contentment I saw in El Triunfo and Kibera is a humbling thing for an American to take. We are — I am — perpetually discontented.
That’s part of what travel does to you. You think you’re going to learn about other places and people, but you end up learning things about yourself. I learned that, with God’s help, I was capable of getting out of my comfort zone. But I also learned about how very far I have left to go to become a citizen of God’s world.
Just like last week, not long after I posted some of my favorites I found another one that needed adding. In That Number has jumped into the Blogger Idol fray.
This week’s topic in the non-competitive “Blogger Idol” showcase is “First Dates.” Entries still haven’t closed yet, but here are five that have caught my eye so far:
There are a couple of entries that I haven’t been able to look at due to broken, inaccurate or mis-formatted links on the main Blogger Idol page. My own entry, of course, appears somewhere below.
This week’s topic in the non-competitive “Blogger Idol” showcase is “First Dates.” I’m 42, and yet I have far less experience in this topic than a lot of 17-year-olds. I’m still single, and a year-long relationship that broke up a couple of months ago was the longest one in which I’d ever been involved.
Conveniently enough, however, I speed-wrote the first draft of a novel during November, as part of National Novel Writing Month. I’m getting ready to try to rewrite it and see if it’s any good. My protagonist, Miller Todd, has some qualities in common with me — including his age and the fact that he’s pretty much an idiot at romance — but he’s different from me in some other important ways. In the novel, he has a crush on the woman who lives in the other half of his duplex. Here — with a little bit of encouragement from a friendly, and married, co-worker — he finally works up the courage to ask her out.
When Miller got home, Kathy was kneeling at his front door. She was startled to hear his car pull into the driveway.
“Miller!” she said. “I’m sorry. I got a piece of your mail by mistake, and I was trying to slide it under your front door. But you have really good weatherstripping, and it wouldn’t go.”
“You should have just put it in my mailbox. I would never have known.”
“I don’t like opening someone else’s mailbox. Isn’t it, like, a federal crime?”
“I would probably not have filed a complaint.”
Eddie’s car pulled up to the curb. He leaped out.
“Hi, Eddie.”
“Hello, Miller.”
“Eddie, this is my next-door neighbor, Kathy Barrow.”
“Hello, Kathy. Pleased to meet you.”
“You too.”
“The two of you have something in common. Eddie is our plant controller, and –” he shifted his gaze from Kathy to Eddie “ — Kathy is an accountant. You two talk shop for a second while I go get Eddie the papers he came here for.”
Miller ran into the apartment and picked up the stack of center paperwork he had left on the coffee table and pulled out a few pieces that explained the project.
Don’t think.
Don’t think.
Don’t think.
Don’t think.He went back out the door to find Kathy wearing a Predators cap.
Don’t think.
“You forgot the cap you bought at the pro shop last night,” said Eddie, “but I told Kathy it looked better on her.”
Kathy grinned sheepishly, took the cap off and handed it to Miller. Was she really embarassed?
“You’ll have to excuse Mr. O’Neill. He was raised by wolves in the Yukon. By the way, Eddie, your wife called. She wanted me to remind you to take your anti-flatulence medicine at least 20 minutes before you get home.”
“Wow, Friday night really is Miller Time.” He turned to Kathy, grinning like a man who’d just won the lottery. “It was very nice meeting you.”
“Same here.”
Eddie drove off.
“So … you went to a hockey game last night?”
“My first. Eddie was like a parent taking his little boy to Disney World for the first time. He had to show me everything, explain the rules, what have you.”
“Did you enjoy it?”
“Thoroughly. Have you ever been?”
“No, but some people at the office were talking about a game they went to last month. It sounds like fun.”
Jump on in. The cold water takes your breath away, but you’ll get used to it pretty fast. The only way to do it is to jump on in.
“Maybe we could go see a game.”
“Maybe we could.”
“I’ll check the schedule and see what home games are coming up. I’ll try for a weekend.”
“Sounds like fun,” she said, as Miller tried to identify what sort of geology would make the earth spin that way. “Oh – here’s your mail.” She handed him the envelope.
“Thanks. I guess I’ll see you at the heart walk tomorrow.”
“I suppose so.”
“Maybe I can pull some strings and get you two paper cups of water.”
“I don’t want two cups of water. I’ve seen the porta-potties.”
Miller was expecting the other shoe to drop any second now. Perhaps Kathy was feeling the same thing; both of them made relatively-lame excuses for important business they had to attend to, and they headed for their respective ends of the duplex.
As Miller stepped inside, he walked back to his kitchen table. There, on the table, were the souvenirs he’d bought at Thursday night’s hockey game: a puck, a T-shirt and a little toy Zamboni.
He had not, he was fairly sure, purchased a cap.
I hadn’t seen this one yet when I posted the links below, but it definitely merits inclusion:
Here, in no particular order, are some of the other blog entries I’ve enjoyed from the first week of “Blogger Idol 2,” with the theme “All I Want For Christmas Is … ”
My own entry, of course, appears somewhere below.
NOTE: This is my first entry in “Blogger Idol,” a non-competitive blogging showcase which challenges bloggers to create an entry on a common weekly theme.
Do you ever wonder whatever happened to the gold?
Through the 1990s, I labored on a perfectly awful Biblical novel, something I really didn’t have the background to do well. (The novel I’m now trying to rewrite is much better, because it’s much closer to home.) The novel was set in the period between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, but Mary the mother of Jesus has a couple of flashbacks while mourning her son.
One such flashback was to the arrival of the Magi — not on Christmas night, as Hallmark Cards would have you believe, but some time later, after Mary and Joseph and their newborn baby had settled in a house. The wise men present the stunned parents with chests full of gold, frankincense and myrrh.
I also had Mary recall the flight into Egypt, and I hinted there that Joseph had to dip into the gold to pay for and support the three of them on their journey.
We have no idea how much gold the Magi are supposed to have given the Christ child — but the assumption seems to be that their gifts were extravagant, fit for a king. And yet, as far as we can make out from the sparse Biblical accounts, Mary and Joseph lived simple lives and raised Jesus and his brothers in a backwater community.
So, what happened to the gold?
Many of our favorite Christmas presents over our lifetime do not turn out to be keepsakes. Especially our childhood presents — chemistry sets which are tried a few times and then abandoned, or needlessly-complex toys that break and can’t be easily repaired, and other trinkets or gadgets so faddish that they are soon forgotten about. Clothes go out of style as well — the shirt or tie or dress that looks so good one year may look silly and be abandoned in the closet (or given to a thrift store) a few years later.
Much of the joy of Christmas comes in the moment of discovery, in that heady experience of opening the present and enjoying it. The excitement is, in some strange way, tied to self-worth: someone, whether Santa Claus or Mom and Dad or your spouse, loved you enough to try to figure out exactly what you wanted and scrimped and saved to make it possible.
Even a bad or awkward gift can be touching in its own way, if you have a clear sense that the giver meant well and tried his or her very best.
I don’t know what to expect for Christmas this year. I am still single at age 42, and it looks like I’ll probably stay that way. So my days of take-your-breath-away Christmas presents are long gone. But it’s still a wonderful experience to open my gifts and see that my parents, siblings, nieces and nephews love me. And it’s still a wonderful experience to find ways to let them know that I love them.
Who can ask for any better Christmas than that?
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