Steve In India

home

2007-01-07T22:38:00.000-07:00

home Wednesday evening, God willing ... will try to post a trip wrap up before Hawaii.

thanks for reading, Steve

Mr Jones Retirement

2007-01-07T22:36:00.000-07:00

my buddy Mark put this up on You Tube. Wonder if he can sell it for $1.65 Billion

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9b5VHw_jnWQ

Quick visit to the local "men's beauty parlor" ...

2007-01-05T02:50:00.000-07:00

BEFORE

AFTER

The Work

2007-01-02T15:07:00.000-07:00

Music: Gin and Juice by the Gourds

My dad wanted me to write about my video production work here in India. (But Dad, it’s boring!)

But I suppose I should since that is what all you wonderful supporters laid out your hard earned shekels to send me here for.

So, I’ve been editing, working with Sebastian and his wife—she has joined the production team since last year. We are working on another video promoting the summer team camp run by the organization that takes place every year her on the national headquarters. The camp is really something, 5-600 kids from all over India and the world, praising God, praying in small groups, listening to speakers and attending workshops.

So, some of you who read this thing last year may be thinking to yourself, “Self, isn’t that what he did last year?” Well, the answer is yes. We must have done is so well that they want us to do it again—this time generic. Last year’s videos were more theme oriented. The trick is trying to put something together that will excite teens and their parents about this camp. I don’t really understand the American teenage culture very well, much less the Indian one. Sebi means well, but I’m not sure how his ideas will come across.

Needless to say, I’ve been a little frustrated. I think we did a rather good job last year and could easily clean it up a little, make it generic and move on. I’ve also been a little frustrated about the pace of the work, putting all the pieces together and getting it done, but much of that may just be my American mindset.

I have about 7 days of editing left. Please pray we are productive and all involved are pleased with the product.

Roe versus Homocide?

2007-01-01T03:28:00.000-07:00

Read a fascinating book called Freakonomics by a journalist and an economist. In the book they claim, some would say prove, that one of the main causes of the steep drop in the national crime rate in the 1990’s was Roe v. Wade (1973) legalizing abortion.

Chew on that two times.

Pipe Village

2007-01-01T03:25:00.000-07:00

We went back to the Pipe Village last week. For those of you who don’t know from last years blog and pictures, here’s some of my post from November 10, 2005

"Yesterday we visited the Pipe Village, near our base. What’s the “Pipe Village” you may ask. I did. It’s called “The Pipe Village” because they live in pipes. They live in pipes. Gulp.

So we went out to this village where a community of Indians actually live in big old broken sewer pipes. The village is located next to a pipe factory and the pipes that these people live in (I will try to post some pics) are left over from the factory. The men of the village labor at the pipe factory on a contract basis. They may make $2 for 10 to 12 hours of hard work. Even these people live in such utter poverty, I was told they were happy to have the opportunity to work. (This is not just the white conservative in me, it is the truth J) "

We’ll we went back, this time to show a version of The Jesus Film in their native tongue of Telegue. And afterwards they served us dinner. Just another example of the extreme hospitality from those with practically nothing.

Christmas Eve in Goa

2006-12-25T03:51:00.000-07:00

So we went to the beach for a few days of R&R over Christmas. On Christmas Eve we were having dinner on the beach. Now, we were definitely in a touristy area, though more popular among Europeans than Americans. What happened next made me grab a pen and scratch something like the following on a piece of paper, lest I failed to remember.

“On the beach, Christmas Eve, surrounded by palm trees dressed in Christmas lights, the ocean lapping soothingly on the shore nearby and what does the band play? Country Road (West Virginia), by John Denver.”

reminds me of last year when I bought a beach towel on the same beach that read in large letters “Florida”

Caroling

2006-12-23T18:42:00.000-07:00

sorry, it’s taken me a little while to get these posts up. I’ve had some internet access issues-SL

Saturday, December 23, 2006
6:42 PM Hyderabad Time
On Base

READING: The Jesus I Never Knew, by Philip Yancey
The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi by Salam Pax
IPod MUSIC: None

Last night we went caroling … FOR 7 HOURS. yea, 7, count um S-E-V-E-N. I’m not kidding. We were all on the bus by 6 pm and rolled back into campus at 1:15 am. Now this was not your typical USA sing-song experience, though come to think of it, I haven’t had one of those in years. Do we still go caroling in America? Anyway, instead of going house to house in a single neighborhood, we were all over the town. And this wasn’t sing two or three songs at a casual, finale with We Wish you a Merry Christmas and off to the next door, maybe their home, maybe their not. This was regimented. This was efficient. IN. OUT. BUS. Bing, Bang, Boom. Church leaders had a list of some 45 families from the church and we were going to hit them all, by-golley.

It was one traditional carol then a scripture reading from the Christmas story, then a prayer, (I got to read and pray sometimes), then yes we did sing We Wish you a Merry Christmas, then a cheer, then a blessing, then some snack and drink. Oh yea, they knew we were coming. We phoned ahead.

REPEAT 40 TIMES !!!—that’s a lot of snack and drink.

Santa was with us too (see picture). He must have been taking a break from packing up his sleigh and feeding his reindeer, but ya, the big St. Nick was there and he was a dancing machine.

There was a moment. It could have been tragic, a disaster of other-worldly proportion. IT COULD HAVE RUINED CHIRISTMAS for millions of little children.

As our posse—which by the way, kept growing and growing. First it was just the bus, but at our peak we had the bus, 2 SUVs and 3 or 4 motorbikes—sorry, now back to the story.

Santa was in the lead and as our group rounded the corner, heading to the next home, coming out of the home WAS ANOTHER SANTA CLAUSE with another group of carolers. Was this the end? The final battle of good vs. evil, or rather, good vs. good? No, we were lucky as no one was in the mood for a row. Our Santa, the real Santa, graciously and humbly rushed to the fake santa for a warm and jovial embrace. Then was the time in the show where they danced. And what a dance it was!

Honestly, though long, the night was quite memorable and enjoyable. It was experiencing the joy of the youth that made it worthwhile. For like the first 5 hours it was the TTC (Teachers Training Class, young people training to be teachers) that carried the crew. Their energy and singing was without bound. But about 10:30 or 11:00 pm even they got tired. Then the kids took over and their joy and singing carried us home.

As I have often noted many time on these pages and elsewhere, those with relatively little materially, believers in poor countries and poor churches can teach me, us in the west, much about the joy of the Lord and the miracle of being alive.

Maybe that’s one of the things Jesus meant when he said, “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.”
Luke 6:20 b NRSV

can you say "legacy"?

2006-12-21T23:12:00.000-07:00

World's oldest woman dies at 116
By Catherine Elsworth in New York

"The world's oldest living woman has died at the age of 116 in a nursing
home in Memphis, Tennessee.

Elizabeth "Lizzie" Bolden held the title for just over three months,
according to Guinness World Records, following the death in August of Maria
Esther de Capovilla of Ecuador, who was also 116 ...

According to
relatives, she leaves 40 grandchildren, 75 great-grandchildren, 150
great-great-grandchildren, 220 great-great-great grandchildren and 75
great-great-great-great grandchildren."

for full story click here
from The Telegraph.co.uk

Crazy to think about what kind of legacy some of us may leave

Let's Say "Thanks"

2006-12-20T23:45:00.000-07:00

http://www.letssaythanks.com
http://www.letssaythanks.com

This seemed fairly painless and worthwhile. Go to the website, click a few clicks and Xerox will print and send a post card to one of our troops abroad.

Number$ on a page

2006-12-19T18:33:00.000-07:00

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

6:33 PM Hyderabad Time

On Base

READING: The Jesus I Never Knew, by Philip Yancey
For One More Day by Mitch Albom
IPod MUSIC: None

40% portion of the world’s wealth possessed by the richest 1% of the population

500 thousands of dollars required to rank among the wealthiest 1% of the world’s population

37 millions of people who have this level of wealth around the world

1% portion of global wealth possessed by poorest half of the world’s population

--according to a United Nations study, reported in Time (Asia) -- TimeAsia.com and Newsweek (International) – NewsweekInternational.com-- December 18, 2006

Quarter-Life Crisis

2006-12-17T23:32:00.000-07:00

Friday, December 15, 2006

10:22 PM Hyderabad Time

ON BASE

READING: Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
by Barak Obama
IPod MUSIC: Dave Matthews Band—Live at Red Rocks (Disk 1)

It might be a quarter-life crisis
just a stirrin' in my soul

either way
i wonder sometime about the outcome
of a still verdictless life

am i living it right
am i living it right
am i living it right
why, why, georgia why

--from Why Georgia by John Mayer

I think I’m having a quarter-life crisis. Maybe it’s a one-third life crisis. I just turned 30 and I’m single. My work schedule that my main client offered me for next year has been severely cut back. (I’m not on salary. I get paid per event.) As I’ve been thinking and praying about it over the last few weeks, I assume if I was offered more work form any client, I would probably take the work, but I’m not sure I should—Is it too early to buy a sports car?

Looking back on my year, I was away from Denver for some or most or of 42 weeks on either business, vacation or here in India—something close to 250 nights. That’s a lot of hotels! Probably too much. I like my job, but I don’t love it. I think it’s pretty cool, but I’m not passionate about it. I want a job I love. I want a job that is meaningful and fulfilling, that I’m passionate about—not too much to ask for, is it?

Though this year hasn’t been bad. I’ve made some money. I’ve had some fun and been to some awesome locales. But it hasn’t been the healthiest year spiritually, emotionally or physically. I think I came back from India in a pretty good place spiritually, but it was hard (or impossible) to stay there solo. I think I need more regular worship and community—maybe therapy, HA!

I miss softball. I miss bowling. I miss being able to commit to anything on a regular weekly basis. I miss just the random hang out with my friends.

So the $64,000 question … What do I do now that I’m all growd up? I’m 30 and single, college-educated, virtually debt-free with manageable expenses. I can do anything. The world is my oyster.

My first choice is to become a professional poker player, but I really think that would be best to do part-time--at least until I actually break even for my lifetime. I’ll keep you posted.

Law School, some sort of other grad school, maybe for teaching; politics? All good suggestions, you say. (I’m fairly disillusioned with politics at the moment, but you never know—maybe I’ll run the Colorado campaign for Barak O’Bama. Can you imagine? Me, working on a the campaign of a Democrat?—what’s the weather forecast in hell?

Leave a comment with your job idea. Maybe I’ll put them all in a hat and say a prayer.

"Why do you go to India?"

2006-12-14T20:13:00.000-07:00

Thursday, December 14, 2006

8:13 PM Hyderabad Time--On Base

READING: Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
by Barak Obama
iPod MUSIC: KBCO’s Studio C Vol. 16

“Why do you go to India?” I was asked that twice in the weeks preceding my departure. My first, off the cuff, easy answer was that I go to help Sebi (with video production) and the organization. To try to make a difference. To affect at least one person’s life (or at least his workload.)

I go on to say that go to India to try to find do something with meaning. To try to justify the other 10 months of my year making a good paycheck and bad TV.

I don’t know.

Why do I come to India? Do I come to be fulfilled or do I come to stay fulfilled. Does it make me feel good about myself? Is it a vacation? Is it cool? Is it to get away from all the distractions at home? Do I come just because I can?

We’ll I can eliminate some of the above possibilities … It’s not a vacation, but it is kind of cool. Sometimes it’s nice not to have a TV or radio or cell phone.

Ultimately, I don’t know why I come to India. It seemed like the right thing to do. It seems like the right thing to do. To hopefully use my talents and time for God’s glory. To again remind myself what most of the rest of the world is like.

The first time I came, after the tsunami, I felt called. I wanted to do something besides send a check. I had the time. I had the means. I came. It was life changing or at least a worldview shaping. During my first trip, I was so impressed with the organization and the tireless, selfless, joyful Indians. I had more time off at the end of that year. I had a mission-minded church a great group of friends and a supportive family. I had awesome roommates to take care of my place. So I came back. And then I came back again.

India is an exciting place to be. In 10 years India and China will be the new economic superpowers (if they aren’t already). Though the poverty is extreme. And there is a huge gap between rich and poor here—so much more then the western world. God, the poor here are so poor. But, but, God is working and the organization is working, building, running, sponsoring Christian-based, English-language education for thousands of children, who God-willing with a good education and the English language can maybe, just maybe, pull themselves out of their extreme poverty like millions of others in this county.

I come to India to try fill a hole in me, a longing, a desire to do something meaningful, something that matters, so I won’t feel my life has been wasted.

Whoa ... that turned out a little heavy.

Silence (by Jars of Clay)

2006-12-13T23:51:00.000-07:00

Take, take till there's nothing, nothing to turn to.
Nothing when you get through.
Won't you break, scatter pieces of all I've been.
Bowing to all I've been running to.

Where are you?
Where are you?

Did you leave me unbreakable?
Leave me frozen?
I've never felt so cold.
I thought you were silent.
And I thought you left me for the wreckage and the waste.
On an empty beach of faith.
Was it true?

Cause I, I got a question, I got a question- Where are you?

Scream, deeper I wanna scream.
I want you to hear me, I want you to find me.
Cause I, I want to believe but all I pray is wrong and all I claim is gone.

And I, I got a question, I got a question- Where are you?

My Favorite Picture so far ...

2006-12-13T23:31:00.000-07:00

'Nuff Said

"Does India feel like home?"

2006-12-12T20:13:00.000-07:00

Tuesday, December 12, 2006
8:13 PM Hyderabad Time
On Base

READING: Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
by Barak Obama
IPod MUSIC: none

Before I left the States my Mom asked me if going back to India would feel like home. And I was like, “No.” (thinking, why would it?) But this is my third trip to the Subcontinent in less than two years. Last time I was here in Hyderabad for the majority of my 13 weeks. I didn’t really realize it before I got here but on my arrival it had only been 9 months since I had previously left. And no, Mom, India doesn’t feel like home, but some things are rather familiar.

Some things have changed here on base: They now sell Diet Coke at the general store. There is wireless internet, though its reach is limited and it doesn't always work. There are some sort wild turkey-like birds. There are a couple of new pieces of equipment in the edit suite.

But lots things are the same. A lot of the people are the same and I’ve surprised myself with how many names I've remembered. Apparently, I am not the same; though as I was recognized, several people told me I had put on weight. (All those restaurants and catered meals on the road this year didn’t do me any favors.) It wasn’t pointed out in a negative way, just in a descriptive, Indian sort of way.

The weather is tropical, lovely and the same. There have been some slight road improvements, but Hyderabad, or at least the Hyderabad I have seen so far this time is pretty much the same. The extreme poverty is the same, but still shocking, some of it close to base, some of it close to the 5-star hotels, great restaurants and other stomping grounds of the rich.

God is the same. And here in India, free from many of the distractions of home, I pray the continued growth in my relationship with him will be the same.

Who Knew?

2006-12-11T04:31:00.000-07:00

Monday, December 11, 2006
5:16 PM Hyderabad Time
On Base

READING: Heart. Soul. Mind. Strength: An Anecdotal History of InterVarsity Press
by Andrew T. Le Peau and Linda Doll,
Time (Asia) and Newsweek (International), December 11, 2006
iPod MUSIC: none

"We already know that some animals do not seem to age. Many cold-water ocean fish, some amphibians and the Amercian lobster never reach a fixed size; they continue to grow bigger, to be able to reproduce and to live until something kills them ..."

From: Can We Slow Aging?, Newsweek (International),
December 11, 2006
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15994157/site/newsweek/

The American lobster, really?

Jetlag

2006-12-09T07:09:00.000-07:00

Thursday, December 7, 2006
8:13 PM Hyderabad Time
On Base

READING: Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction
by David Kuo
and Time (December 11, 2006)
iPod MUSIC: Soundtrack from Last of The Mohecians

So, in theory, I think I had it right. But as we know a good theory needs to be practiced; a good plan executed.

I was in Chicago with my family for Thanksgiving, then to Orlando for a last week of work, then back to Chicago Sunday night and Monday for a Tuesday evening departure to India.

If you weren’t sure India was becoming an economic superpower, all you have to do is look at airline routes. Today, American Airlines flies from Chicago’s O’hare airport to New Delhi, India approximately halfway around the world—WITHOUT STOPPING!. On United you can go Denver or Chicago to Frankfurt then to Hyderabad (my final destination). My choice this trip was KLM Chicago to Amsterdam to Hyderabad. None of these routes were available even a year ago. (Last year, I flew Denver to Minneapolis to Amsterdam to New Delhi to Hyderabad, spending about 32 hours door-to-door.--This year was done in a breezey 24.)

Back to my jetlag prevention plan … I think I slept about the last 3 and a half hours of my flight from Chicago to Amsterdam. I had a 5-hour layover in Amsterdam and dozed off for about the latter half of it.

This is where my plan came in to action. I had a cup of coffee before I got onto the plane from Amsterdam to Hyderabad. Somehow, (God must have been with me) as I was one of the last people to board I handed my boarding pass to the agent, she handed me a new stub. “1-D” starred back at me, with my name above the seat assignment. “A new seat, sir.” she said, nonchalantly. A little more investigation on my part (reading the rest of the stub) confirmed what I already new … WORLD BUSINESS CLASS !!! YIPEE!

By the way, business or first class is simply the only way to travel internationally and you simply must try it, Darling.

Back to my plan … So after a lovely lunch of salmon, wonk fish, and shrimp as well as a glass or two of fine French wine I viewed the movie World Trade Center, which is very moving and a little eerie to be watching from a plane.

I had about 6 hours left, popped two sleeping pills and was out.

A nice snack before landing, then immigration, then waiting for a period that seemed longer that the entire 8-hour flight to get my bags, then breezing though customs, then 20 minutes to campus and I was in my room by 3:30 AM local time.

I’d had about 9 hours of sleep in the last 32 (not to bad). And it was 3:30 in the morning. I was feeling pretty awake, but if figured if I could sleep anywhere from the next 6 to 9 hours, I’d be up by lunchtime, stay up as long as possible that night and be good to go the following day. Two more sleeping pills and I was gone.

I think the first time I woke up it was about 12:45. "Fifteen minutes", I told myself. "I’ll get up then." 1:30, "just fifteen more minutes." 3:45, by now I starting to think I may never get up again. BANG. BANG. BANG on the door (darn, 5:45 PM). Maybe it’s not my door. BANG. BANG. BANG. “Steve?”. I guess it is my door. They wanted me to move rooms.

My plan was blown to sliverenes … and by the way, Ambient works pretty well.

Now it’s 8:54 and I’m wide awake and probably will be all night. So much for my plan to conquer that blasted jetlag.

What's so Amazing about Grace?

2006-12-06T07:39:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, December 6, 2006
7:39 AM Amsterdam Time
Amsterdam Airport

READING: Finished What’s so Amazing about Grace? by Philip Yancy
Started Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction
by David Kuo
and Time (December 11, 2006)
iPod MUSIC: Shuffle Songs

So, Philip Yancy visits my church as a guest speaker at the evening service about once a year or once every other year or whenever he has a new book out. Anyway, his last visit inspired me to dust off one of his better known works, What’s so Amazing about Grace? and to order a couple of his other books off of Amazon.com.

I finished Grace on the plane and would recommend it to all you out there in blogland.

Here’s a couple of passages that stuck out to me …

“Diviners in a desert, modern artists and thinkers search in vain for alternative sources of grace. ‘What the world needs, I am ashamed to say, is Christian love,’ wrote Bertrand Russell. Not long before she died, the secular humanist and novelist Marghanita Laski told a television interviewer , ‘What I envy about you Christians is your forgiveness. I have nobody to forgive me.’ And Douglas Coupland, who coined the term Generation X, concluded in his book Life After God, ‘My secret is that I need God—that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem to be capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love.”

What’s so Amazing About Grace ? – by Philip Yancy, page 279

“We cannot find Him unless we know we need Him”, wrote Thomas Merton.
Grace – page 272

“Author Tony Compolo, who makes a regular circuit as a chapel speaker on Christian college campuses, for a time used this provocation to make a point. ‘The United Nations reports that over ten thousand people starve to death each day, and most of you don’t give a sh--. However, what is even more tragic is that most of you are more concerned about the fact that I just said a bad word than you are about the fact that ten thousand people are going to die today.’ The responses proved his point: in nearly every case Tony got a letter from the chaplain or president of the college protesting his foul language. The letters never mentioned world hunger.”

Grace – page 201

Bon Voyage!

2006-11-29T14:08:00.000-07:00

Here's a letter I sent to my supporters ...

Hello All,

I want to start by thanking you all for your financial support of my trip. I ask for your continued support in prayer over the next 6 weeks.

My time in country is shorter this year (5 versus 13 weeks) but I hope to be able to jump right in and be productive. My main duties will be to assist Sebi, the "video production guy". I worked with Sebi last year and have a pretty good idea of what is going on and what he is trying to do. I don't know what this year's specific projects are, but last year we produced videos highlighting the ministries on the campus of the organization's national headquarters and we did a video reviewing and promoting a kid's camp as well as other projects. Often last year, Sebi would edit video during the day and I would edit at night. If we stay on that schedule this year, I could stay on US time and never get jet lagged.

I've been asked a few times about what I would like prayer for while I am India. Although it is cliche, my main request is the ability to be present. Like all of us, I've got a lot going on at home. For example, I've already received my schedule from my main client and let's just say it leaves much to be desired--but that is a whole other prayer request. (Okay, you can pray that I'm where God wants me to be regarding employment when I return :-) I desire to use my time in India, away from daily distractions to be in India, to be with God, to be a blessing to Sebi and the others I come in contact with.

Today, I am flying to Orlando for a job with another client returning to Chicago Sunday night and then to India Tuesday evening. I will be continuing my blog SteveInIndia.BlogSpot.com I can be reached by phone until Tuesday afternoon email thereafter. I will be posting pictures on KodayGallery.com upon my return.

Thanks so much for your prayers and support.

God Bless,

Steve

to be President

2006-04-26T12:18:00.000-06:00

“Any American who is prepared to run for President should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.”

--Gore Vidal

"Quit your worship charades ... "

2006-02-21T15:52:00.000-07:00

Isaiah 1:13-17 (The Message)

13"Quit your worship charades.

I can't stand your trivial religious games:

Monthly conferences, weekly Sabbaths, special meetings--

meetings, meetings, meetings--I can't stand one more!

14Meetings for this, meetings for that. I hate them!

You've worn me out!

I'm sick of your religion, religion, religion,

while you go right on sinning.

15When you put on your next prayer-performance,

I'll be looking the other way.

No matter how long or loud or often you pray,

I'll not be listening.

And do you know why? Because you've been tearing

people to pieces, and your hands are bloody.

16Go home and wash up.

Clean up your act.

Sweep your lives clean of your evildoings

so I don't have to look at them any longer.

Say no to wrong.

17Learn to do good.

Work for justice.

Help the down--and-out.

Stand up for the homeless.

Go to bat for the defenseless.

Culture Shock

2006-02-14T17:45:00.000-07:00

"How are you?"

actually it's a hard question to answer.

I returned from India on Thursday evening and I leave for work in Hawaii on Monday. Currently, I am experiencing "culture shock" or "re-entry trauma" or whatever you want to call it.

I'm manic, sometimes irritable, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes depressed. I want to inject everyone with my experience like when Neo learns to fly the helicopter in "The Matrix"--so I don't have to attempt the impossible of trying to answer the question, "How was your trip?" At the very least I want to grab them by the shoulders, shake hard and scream, "There's a whole world out there, WAKE UP!"

That's all I got right now.

I'm home

2006-02-12T16:49:00.000-07:00

I'm home. (Hawaii for "work" tomorrow)

more to come

steve

Super Bowl Monday

2006-02-06T03:09:00.000-07:00

OK, it was not a “Where were you when Kennedy was shot?” moment. Do people even ask that question anymore? Has 9/11 sandwiched between two wars in the Middle East on top of the fact that every year November 22, 1963 gets further away, slowly erased, or at least subdued, that pivotal moment in American history from our national consciousness.

Anyway, for me, today was a semnial television moment. It was more like June 17, 1994. I was on a high school mission trip in the Dominican Republic and I viewed a slow white Bronco (not John Elway) carrying an armed O.J. Simpson and former teammate Al Cowlings down a California expressway followed at a safe distance by dozens of black-and-white cop cars--broadcast live to the world on CNN.

Today, in Ahmedabad, India at 5:00 AM local time, I began watching the Super Bowl live on ESPN International.

I will always remember as a 9-year old, crying after Super Bowl XX because even though my beloved Chicago Bears destroyed the New England Patriots 46-10, my favorite player, Walter Payton failed to score a touchdown. I will always remember Super Bowl XXXIV and Super Bowl XXXV because I was lucky enough to be at the games in person. And now, I will always remember Super Bowl XL because I watched it live during the early hours of Monday morning, drinking “service” coffee and eating cold pizza ordered the night before with a group of mostly soon-to-be disappointed Seattle fans from Portland.

WARNING: NOT GOOD ENTRY

2006-02-03T09:37:00.000-07:00

So I know I haven’t written much in the last few weeks and again I apologize. I have been busy (good) and not in the blogging mood (bad).

Sometimes I am a perfectionist. When it comes to my writing, I want it to be good, no actually I want it to be much better then good. So it pains me that this entry will not be all that great, but I feel I owe something to anyone who cares enough to log on and read this blog.

Having said that, here is my half-assed attempt to begin summing up my time in India. I will definitely reflect and process and write more, hopefully better, from a beach on the North Shore of Oahu. J (Fruity drinks with umbrellas always get the creative juices flowing.)

With less than a week remaining in country, I have begun to enter transition mode between my worlds. Every trip changes, at least molds and refines me and my worldview. It’s hard to sum up for my experiences have varied. India is so big and she is so different, every state a new language and culture …

The images that the word “India” conjures up are diverse and often contradictory, suggesting that on must be the real India, and it’s only a matter of finding out which one. If only it were that simple! To understand India at all, you must be able to hold on to completely contradictory images, and realize that both represent the true India.

Gitanjali Koland, Culture Shock! India

I'm ready to leave, but my time has been good. I have seen God work in and through me. My biggest prayer request was to be used and I feel that I have been used some. The biggest blessing/feeling of actually being useful came from working with the video production guy (I didn't even know they had a video production guy until about a week into my trip). Being with the teams has been a good learning experience if I come back and do it again. I've got to observe and learn from the long-term workers here. Recently, I've gotten to work on some of their computer/email/communications/cell phone issues and we've resolved most of the technology issues. I enjoy troubleshooting, problem-solving and getting things done.

Probably the biggest thing I have learned or been reminded of is that I don't need to know what the rest of my life entails. I came to India not knowing if I would have a job or how much work I would have when I returned. A few weeks into the trip I received a pretty great schedule from The Golf Channel.

(I basically have mid November to mid-January or early February off. God-willing I will be somewhere abroad again. I’m still negotiating with mom a pre- or post-Thanksgiving Day departure :-)

I don't know if I'll ever be married, have kids or even have a "real" job, nor do I know if I want any of the three. But I know I don’t need to know now.

Once again I have been reminded that the most important thing, though I stumble often, is to love God and love others; to know Him and make Him known. All the rest is meaningless.

God about David

2006-02-01T15:18:00.000-07:00

I will be a father to him, and he will be a son to me. When he commits iniquity, I will punish him with a rod such as mortals use, with blows inflicted by human beings. But I will not take my steadfast love from him, as I took it from Saul, whom I put away from before you.

2 Samuel 7:14-15

writer's bloc

2006-01-28T09:44:00.000-07:00

I know I haven't written in my blog lately. I have been a slacker, but even more so, uninspired. The slums stuff was easy to write because it was moving.

I've been in Ahmedabad with a team from Minneapolis. Basically, we were in a school in the mornings and did medical camps in the afternoons. I haven't played a big part of the team but have been hanging around some with the team leaders, the Indian leaders and the long-term missionaries.

This morning a big team arrived from Portland. I will be spending my remaining time in country with them.

I have writer’s bloc. Forgive me.

I thank you all for reading, supporting me and praying

Quiz Answer (if anyone cares)

2006-01-17T10:15:00.000-07:00

The Palestinians are the largest per capita recipients of foreign aid in the world. According to the 2004 World Bank report they are suffering “the worst economic depression in modern history”. 75% are impoverished and the unemployment rates are 60-70% in Gaza and 30-40% in the West Bank. Without external support the Palestinian infastructure and basic services would not survive.

From The Hindu (India) January 6, 2006

The article blamed Israel for all of Palistine's problems. While I'm sure that is not completely true, it is definitely something to think about.

-sl

ever heard of the Lord's Resistance Army?

2006-01-11T10:21:00.000-07:00

from the January issue of Christianity Today
ChristianityToday.com

Deliver Us from Kony
Why the children of Uganda are killing one another in the name of the Lord.
by J. Carter Johnson in Kitgum, Uganda | posted 12/30/2005 10:00 a.m.

Sixty years after Allied soldiers liberated the Nazi death camps, the world stands silent in the face of another holocaust—one so horrifying that U.N. officials call it "one of the worst human-rights crises of the past century."

The perpetrators commit atrocities with such malevolence that even the most irreligious people familiar with their acts describe them as "unrestrained evil." The targets of the butchery are children. They rape, mutilate, and kill them with a rapaciousness that staggers the imagination. Worse, they compel children to kill one another and their own families, fighting as "soldiers" in an armed force deliberately composed of children.

Perhaps the greatest atrocity is teaching these children that they spread this carnage by the power of the Holy Spirit to purify the "unrepentant," twisting Christianity into a religion of horror to their victims. It is spiritual warfare at its very worst, and it could not be more satanic.

Religion of Evil
The Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) is one of the larger terrorist organizations in the world. It has killed more people than many other violent groups, yet few Westerners have ever heard of it, since nearly all its violence is perpetrated in the border region between Uganda and Sudan in East Africa.

On a continent plagued with endless guerilla warfare, where war crimes are standard fighting fare, the LRA stands apart as an especially odious group. LRA crimes against humanity are so repulsive that its only former ally, the Islamic government of Sudan, jettisoned its relationship with the LRA to improve Sudan's international relations. (Credible sources in Uganda insist Sudan still supplies weapons to the LRA, however.)

What began in 1986 as a rebellion against the Ugandan government has metamorphosed into a military millenarian cult. Its reason for existence is to perpetuate the power of its leader, a ruthless witchcraft practitioner named Joseph Kony.

He claims to be fighting Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni's government on behalf of the ethnic Acholi people, who populate the nation's three northernmost districts of Kitgum, Gulu, and Pader. The Acholi have a longstanding grievance with the more prosperous southern Ugandans, much of it rooted in 19th-century British colonial policies that favored southerners in education and business, while relegating the Acholi to army service. However, the LRA attacks the Acholi, the very people they claim to defend, far more often than the Ugandan military.

Kony, 41, envisions an Acholiland ruled by a warped interpretation of the Ten Commandments. He uses passages from the Pentateuch to justify mutilation and murder. He promotes a demonic spirituality crafted from an eclectic mix of Christianity, Islam, and African witchcraft.

Any resemblance to these religions is superficial: While the army observes rituals such as praying the rosary and bowing toward Mecca, there is no prescribed theology in the conventional sense. Kony's beliefs are a haphazard mix from the Bible and the Qur'an, tailored around his wishful thinking, personal desires, and practical needs of the moment. Jesus is the Son of God. But instead of saving the world from sin through his sacrificial love on the Cross, he is a source of power employed for killing those who oppose Kony. The Holy Spirit is not the Divine Comforter, but one who directs Kony's tactical military decisions.

Despite dabbling in the Bible and the Qur'an, Kony's real spiritual obsession is witchcraft. He burns toy military vehicles and figurines to predict the course of battles from their burn patterns. He uses reptiles in magic rituals to sicken those who anger him or to detect traitors in his midst. He claims to receive military direction from spirits of dead men from different countries, including Americans. He teaches that an impending apocalypse will usher in "The Silent World," where only primitive weapons, such as machetes and clubs, will bring victory.

Brutality, Terror
Sadly, reports of LRA savagery are not isolated incidents. The children I interviewed in Uganda and southern Sudan who escaped LRA captivity, along with thousands of documented cases, demonstrate that these monstrosities are standard operating procedure. Nearly 90 percent of LRA fighters are enslaved children, kidnapped from their families. [Editor's warning: The rest of this section contains graphic descriptions of brutality.]

Under threat of death, LRA child soldiers attack villages, shooting and cutting off people's lips, ears, hands, feet, or breasts, at times force-feeding the severed body parts to victims' families. Some cut open the bellies of pregnant women and tear their babies out. Men and women are gang-raped. As a warning to those who might report them to Ugandan authorities, they bore holes in the lips of victims and padlock them shut. Victims are burned alive or beaten to death with machetes and clubs. The murderous task is considered properly executed only when the victim is mutilated beyond recognition and his or her blood spatters the killer's clothing.

At St. Joseph's Hospital in Kitgum, I listened as relatives of four adult LRA victims recounted recent assaults. Many surviving victims cannot speak for themselves, because their lips have been sliced off. With their mouths reduced to gaping holes, they gazed at me with what combat veterans call the thousand-yard stare.

Many don't survive an attack. In one case, the LRA attacked a 14-year-old boy who suffered compound fractures in both legs when beaten with pangas (large machetes). He crawled for a week to reach the hospital. But, despite the efforts of surgeons from Doctors Without Borders, the teen died the next day. He is buried outside the hospital in a grave marked with two sticks, his name unknown. Since 1986, the LRA is estimated to have abducted as many as 50,000 children. Many more Ugandans have been maimed and traumatized. About 1.6 million have been driven from their homes. The death toll from the conflict is estimated at more than 30,000 children.

During attacks, LRA fighters, themselves traumatized captives, abduct more children and embark on a trek through the African bush that mimics the Bataan Death March in barbarity. Adult commanders force children to carry supplies for up to a week, marching from dawn to dusk on bare feet, without food or water in the equatorial heat. Potable water is reserved for commanders. Children have been forced to drink urine or drink from muddy ditches to survive. Their feet become infected and swollen. Any child who cannot keep pace is killed. Any child caught in an attempted escape is killed. Children may be murdered for crying or failing to obey commands quickly enough. Moreover, it is the other children who must execute the transgressors, which is done by hacking them to pieces with machetes or burning them alive.

Commanders frequently compel children to kill their own siblings, lest family bonds supersede those to the LRA. Leaders demand every abducted child kill another child within a week of capture. Afterward, they're told they'll never be accepted by society because of their criminal acts, so they must stay with the LRA to survive. They coerce the children into identifying with their captors by emotionally blackmailing them with their own guilt.

The physical and sexual torture of children is a deliberate process intended to create killers without conscience. Tragically, it works. Most current LRA commanders were once abducted boys who, having been through this process, are now committed to Joseph Kony and his bloodthirsty vision.

Children Escaping in the Night
During my travels through the region, I interviewed several children who escaped captivity. All were acutely anxious, withdrawn, and could hardly speak above a whisper or make eye contact. They were terrified of re-abduction.

Mary was abducted at age 12 and remained in captivity for two years. She escaped during a firefight with the Ugandan army. The army treats escapees as victims, not criminals or prisoners of war.

Recovering in a hospital from a gunshot wound to the jaw, she told me, "I was shot by a commander for hiding behind a tree during battle." Mary insisted the children's accounts of captivity are true. "We were beaten all the time, sometimes with clubs, sometimes with pangas. I had to beat another girl until she died—the soldier said he would kill me if I did not make her die. I had to walk for a very long time, carrying heavy things. Once, I was too slow, so they beat me and said they would kill me. I saw them kill others for being too slow." Her badly infected foot was swollen to nearly twice its size.

The LRA takes most abductees to base camps in southern Sudan, where they are indoctrinated in spiritual darkness. Attractive girls may be used as sexual slaves. Men regularly rape them.

Plainer girls are, at times, used for what can only be called "murder practice." Many boys are frightfully traumatized when forced to rape women captured in ambushes. The children are regularly beaten to harden them for battle, some so savagely that they are disfigured for life. They work 12 hours a day with little food or water. Escapees told of eating leaves to survive.

Child soldiers are given rudimentary training with assault rifles to ambush the Ugandan army. Told the Holy Spirit will protect them if they apply holy oil to their bodies with the sign of the cross, they are ordered to walk upright into enemy gunfire. Children killed or wounded "deserve their fate" for exhibiting fear instead of faith in God.

David, 13, was captured by the LRA when he was 10 and held for about two years. Like other children, having killed others troubles him greatly. "I was captured with two women. The LRA gave me a panga and told me to kill one, or they would kill me. I beat her with it when she was on the ground. I kept cutting her and cutting her while she screamed." He began to cry and said, "I was always afraid they would kill me."

Despite the risks, most children attempt escape. World Vision operates the Children of War Rehabilitation Center in Gulu that ministers to escaped LRA children, giving them medical treatment, counseling, and the gospel. Desperate parents arrive at the center each morning looking for their missing children. If they do find them, their joy may turn to shock, seeing sons without limbs or daughters holding their own infants.

There are serious obstacles to social readjustment. Nearly all girls who escape the LRA have sexually transmitted diseases. They are all suspected of being HIV positive and viewed as sexually defiled. Their prospects for marriage are grim.

Joshua Obonu, director of the Kitgum Concerned Women's Association child rehabilitation center, explains: "Sex is not spoken about in our culture, and rape is a shameful thing, so they will not talk about it. The children will admit to killing people but not raping or being raped, unless they have many weeks of counseling."

Many families are wiped out in LRA attacks. Children who have escaped have nowhere to go. Children who do return to their villages often find the inhabitants unforgiving. Captivity interrupted their education and catching up is difficult. Children who grew up in captivity not only lack the ABCs, but also a basic knowledge of how society can work without constant violence.

Northern Uganda's nightmare is further compounded by the phenomenon of "night commuters"—children who are seeking to avoid the LRA's nighttime raids. Every afternoon, thousands of rural children journey alone out of the bush for several miles to sleep on the sidewalks of district towns.

Often girls are sexually abused along the way by boys making the same journey or by drunken men in town. Teenage boys roam the sidewalks in packs, bullying younger children. Children are beaten in the dark every night. But these risks are preferable to being abducted by the LRA. Few children carry any food during their nocturnal sojourn, which can last 16 hours from departure to return, and they are still vulnerable to LRA attack in transit.

In Kitgum, I witnessed several small children caring for toddlers in these conditions. After a restless night of defending themselves and a three-hour hike back to their villages, some of these children manage to attend village schools.

Slowly, more is being done to protect night commuters. Christian ministries are taking up the challenge. Wes Bentley, director of Far Reaching Ministries, which operates the Maranatha Children's Center 15 miles outside Kitgum, estimates up to 3,000 children per night come to the center.

"The sanctuary right now is just a place for kids to sleep safely at night. I suspect, including women and other people who need safety for the night, there might be 7,000 people inside." The center is a fortified compound encircled by fences topped with razor wire and protected by armed guards.

Political Solution Remote
The LRA rebellion has become a political quagmire. Although the LRA claims to be fighting for Acholi independence, it has no political platform or clear objectives upon which to base negotiations for peace.

Nevertheless, the Ugandan government and concerned intermediaries continue to attempt negotiations. The efforts of one woman in particular are heroic. Betty Bigombe, 51, a former Ugandan government minister who is also Acholi, has met with LRA leaders several times at great personal risk, trying to negotiate a settlement to end the fighting.

Currently a consultant for the World Bank, she has taken unpaid leaves and spent a small fortune in savings to help both parties navigate a peace process in one of today's most intractable conflicts. In an effort to save children by ending the conflict in any way possible, the Ugandan government passed an Amnesty Act in 1999, which shields from prosecution any LRA fighter who surrenders to the government. The act also offers surrendered fighters $150 in "starting over" money. Terms of the act extend to Kony and his top commanders. Experts agree that LRA leaders' recent discussions with Bigombe about ending the conflict were a huge step forward.

However, when the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Kony and his top four commanders on October 13, attempts to mediate the conflict broke down.

Ruth Kahurananga, World Vision's child protection officer with the United Nations, paused cautiously when asked about the indictments. "We are not against the ICC; however, the timing is crucial. We feel that the talks Betty Bigombe had started with some of the commanders in the LRA … were enabling some kind of political negotiation to happen. By the ICC indicting five of the top LRA commanders, World Vision is very concerned, because that is possibly not a guarantee to the end of the conflict."

In reality, there is evidence that the fighting has become more savage.

"Even looking at the history of the LRA, we have seen that especially when they think they are being weakened, they retaliate with a lot of violence, a lot of abductions, a lot of maiming," Kahurananga explained.

It is not just Kony and his lieutenants who are in jeopardy from the indictments. "We are also very concerned that those called as witnesses in future trials, especially children, are protected," Kahurananga said. "That they're given immunity from prosecution, and that they and their families are protected from retaliation."

Wes Bentley confirmed that the LRA's attacks are increasing and becoming more savage. "They've really stepped up their attacks in the last six months," he said. "Our center was attacked while we were building it. There have been a lot more killings and mutilations. We couldn't get it up fast enough, so many people were seeking protection at night."

Even while LRA terrorism directed against children has intensified, the U.S. government has not made the conflict a high priority. Many believe that without U.S. involvement, the abductions, killing, and maiming will continue.

In August 2004, the U.S. government enacted the Northern Uganda Crisis Response Act, which essentially calls LRA terrorism a great tragedy, offers limited support for a negotiated solution, and warns Sudan not to support the LRA.

Several congressmen visited northern Uganda to witness the devastation firsthand, but they were frustrated to see no end in sight. Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., said, "I will remain committed to stopping the horror that has stolen the innocence of so many Ugandan children."

The Bush administration has placed the LRA on tier two of its Terrorist Exclusion List, which means the LRA is judged not to be a threat to U.S. interests. "There are a lot of sympathetic [members of Congress], but no significant leadership to move the issue to the point where there are congressional hearings, and hearings are one of the first important steps to focus administration and congressional attention on the severity of the issue," said Rory Anderson, senior Africa policy adviser for World Vision. "Hearings will not happen unless people contact their members of Congress and demand it."

The people most familiar with LRA terrorism agree that the best hope for ending the carnage is putting it on the radar screen of the Western world.

Akello Lwanga, a physician, spent two years treating LRA victims at an internally displaced persons camp in Pader. "If Americans saw this on TV as often as they see the Middle East," he said, "it would stop."

"People need to see what's happening in northern Uganda," said U.S. ambassador to Uganda Jimmy Kolker. "The suffering of these children is unimaginable. Absolutely, it is important for the public to know about this as a step toward bringing it to an end."

Ordinary Christians can help stop LRA terrorism. Presenting the issue to churches, continuing in intercessory prayer over the conflict, donating to Christian agencies that work with Ugandan children, and pressing government officials for action all work to save LRA victims.

Michael Oruni, director of Uganda's Children of War Rehabilitation Center, told CT he was urging Christians to get involved: "Imagine your own child taken away, being raped as your family is killed in front of your eyes. If it were you, what would you feel like?

"Kids in Uganda—kids just like yours—are taken every night and enslaved, raped, mutilated, murdered. You can make a difference. Talk to your government. Help us."

J. Carter Johnson is a journalist based in Arizona.

How to HELP

Here are key Christian and charitable organizations that work with the victims of the lra conflict in northern Uganda.

Far Reaching Ministries
www.farreachingministries.org
951-677-4474

World Vision
www.worldvision.org
www.seekjustice.org
888-511-6548

Save the Children
www.savethechildren.org
800-SAVETHECHILDREN

Oxfam
www.oxfam.org.uk
www.oxfamamerica.orgp
800-77-OXFAM

Jesuit Refugee Service
www.jesref.org
202-462-0400

Write your congressman: www.house.gov/writerep

Kashmir is Still Bad, but there are Some Silver Linings

2006-01-09T08:16:00.000-07:00

Kashmir is still bad, but the disaster has brought some interesting entities together in the relief effort. Below are two paragraphs from the lastest Time (Asia) Magazine. But you should really read the whole thing.

"But the quake has changed everything. The necessity of coping with the devastation in Azad Kashmir has strengthened the precarious cease-fire and forced the Pakistanis to open up. On the mountainsides where thousands of refugee tents have sprouted between collapsed buildings, the U.S. military is delivering drinking water to camps run by "Axis of Evil" nemesis Iran; U.S. and NATO soldiers flirt with Cuban nurses. But the most surreal partnership of all is between the U.S. military and Islamic militants from groups like Lashkar-e-Toiba, branded by Washington as terrorists. Bemused to find himself at daily briefings in Muzaffarabad with U.S. and NATO military commanders, one Pakistani militant leader, Haji Javed ul-Hassan, remarks: "This is not a battlefield, it is a battle of relief."

Yet the three main Kashmir militant groups Lashkar-e-Toiba, Hizbul Muja-heddin and Jaish-e-Mohammad have also used the earthquake to stage a comeback there. Ex-guerrillas now deploy their motorized rubber boats, on which they had trained for commando maneuvers, to ferry passengers across the Neelum River where bridges have collapsed. Immediately after the quake, militants were first on the scene in many villages, getting there far quicker than the Pakistani army, and they applied their expertise in first aid to save injured people pulled from fallen buildings. Their knowledge of the saw-backed ranges along the Line of Control has made it possible for them to reach quake-struck hamlets bypassed by the big aid agencies."

A Little Quiz Today

2006-01-07T07:07:00.000-07:00

7:04 PM Hyderabad Time

READING:
DEVOTIONS: A Long Obedience in the Same Direction by Eugene Peterson
MUSIC: iTunes shuffling songs, currently 50 Was to Leave Your Lover by Simon and Garfunkel

A little quiz today …

I’m going to bet that not many of you will get this except my father because he’s the smartest man in the world (or a least who reads this blog). Maybe Marcy will get it because we had an “animated” discussion on this a long, long, time ago (but I don't even know if she's reading this). When I read this in the paper yesterday it really surprised me …

Who are the largest per capita recipients of foreign aid in the world?

Make your guess by leaving a comment. I’ll give the answer in a week. Go ahead and look it up if you must but at least let everyone know you cheated.

I’ll give the answer in a week.

Peace,

-SL

"the Poverty of Dignity"

2006-01-06T02:14:00.000-07:00

I've been editing. Sorry if this bores you, but I find it fascinating ...

More fromThe World is Flat by Thomas Friedman

"The world’s poor do not resent the rich anywhere nearly as much as the left-wing parties in the developed world imagine. What they resent is not having a pathway to get rich and join the flat world and cross that line into the middle class …"

"Then came 9/11. And America transformed itself from Puff the Magic Dragon, touching people around the world economically and culturally, into Godzilla with an arrow on his shoulder, spitting fire and tossing his tail around wildly, touching people’s lives in military and security terms, not just economic and cultural ones. As that happened people in the world began to say, “Now we really want a vote in how America wields its power”—and in many ways the whole Iraq war debate was a surrogate about that."

“The important task of enlisting the people’s power to influence globalism—making it more compassionate, fair, and compatible with human dignity—is way too important to be wasted on crass anti-Americanism or left in the hands of only anti-Americans.”

--YARON EZRAHI,
Hebrew University political theorist

“The revolt against holders of power is not a revolt of the poor against the rich: ordinary people are far less prone to resent other people’s success than intellectuals suppose. It is rather an expression of the fact that the reform of the state has not gone far enough.”

--Prapat Bhanu Mehta,
head of the Center for Policy Research in Delhi

In a November 5, 2001, article in the National Review, titled “Under Our Very Noses,” (Adrian) Karatnycky (president of Freedom House) makes the following argument: “The key (9/11) hijackers … were well-educated children of privilege. None of them suffered first-hand economic privation or political oppression.” And none of them seem to have been raised in a particularly fundamentalist household. Indeed, the top 9/11 operatives and pilots, like Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, who shared an apartment in Hamburg, all seem to have been recruited to al-Qaeda through cell and prayer groups—after they moved to Europe.

…It has always been my view that terrorism is not spawned by the poverty of money. It is spawned by the poverty of dignity. Humiliation is the most underestimated force in international relations and in human relations. It is when people and nations are humiliated that they really lash out and engage in extreme violence …

Most American blacks, I am sure, had little doubt that O.J. Simpson murdered his ex-wife, but they applauded his acquittal as a stick in the eye of the Los Angeles Police Department and a justice system they saw consistently humiliating and unfair to them. Humiliation does that to people. Bin Laden is to the Arab masses what O.J. was to many American blacks—the stick they poke in the eye of an “unfair” America and their own leaders. I once interviewed Dyab Abou Jahjah, often called the Malcolm X of Belgium’s alienated Moroccan youth. I asked him what he and his friends thought when they saw the World Trade Center being smashed. He said, “I think that if we are honest with ourselves, most of the Muslims all over the world felt that … America got hit in the face and that cannot be bad. I don’t want to make an intellectual answer for that. I’ll give it very simply. America was kicking our butt for fifty years. And really badly. Supporting the bullies in the region, whether it is Israel or our own regimes, [America] is giving us not only a bleeding nose, but breaking a lot of necks.”

“Self-cure starts with self-realization and confession. We should then run after our terrorist sons, in full knowledge that they are sour grapes of a deformed culture … The mosque used to be a haven, and the voice of religion used to be that of peace and reconciliation. Religious sermons were warm behests for a moral order and an ethical life. Then came the neo-Muslims. An innocent and benevolent religion, whose verses prohibit the felling of in the absence of urgent necessity, that calls murder the most heinous of crimes, that says explicitly that if you kill one person you have killed humanity as a whole, has been turned into a global message of hate and a universal war cry … We cannot clear our names unless we own up to the shameful fact that terrorism has become an Islamic enterprise; an almost exclusive monopoly, implemented by Muslim men and women. We cannot redeem our extremist youth, who commit all these heinous crimes, without confronting the Sheikhs who thought it ennobling to reinvent themselves as revolutionary ideologues, sending other people’s sons and daughters to certain death, while sending their own children to European and American schools and colleges.”

--one of the best known and most respected Arab journalists, ABDEL RAHMAN al-RASHED, general manager of the London-based al-Arabiya news channel, written in Al-Sharq Al-Awsat (September 6, 2004), after a series of violent incidents involving Muslim extremists groups from Chechnya to Saudi Arabia to Iraq

DECEMBER PICS ARE UP!!!

2006-01-03T02:03:00.000-07:00

DECEMBER PICS ARE UP ON KodakGallery.com

Please email or me or leave a comment if you do not receicve an invite to view. I think if you saw my NOV pictures, you should already have acess to all my albums.

VOTE on the BEARD!!! does it stay or does it go???? vote here ... YES or NO

-sl

Two Stories From the Slums

2006-01-02T03:23:00.000-07:00

3:15 PM Hyderabad Time

READING: The Good News About Injustice by Gary Haugen
DEVOTIONS: II Samuel
MUSIC: Nothing

From Time Magazine, December 26/January 2 (click here to read the whole article)

"The man who dies rich dies disgraced." --ANDREW CARNEGIE

At least once a year, Bill and Melinda Gates like to take what they call a "learning tour" of the places that civilization has largely forgotten. On Dec. 6 in India, on the most recent of such visits, they left the five-star Taj Mahal Hotel in New Delhi, to which they had flown on their private jet the night before, and took a 20-minute drive to a slum colony in an area called Meera Bagh.

On the way there, through rickshaw traffic jams and past lumbering cows, a local doctor briefed them on the slum's 9,000 residents and five health-care workers. Melinda listened intently with her eyebrows raised, as she almost always does, while Bill interrupted to ask the kinds of questions you would expect from a capitalist billionaire. "Who owns the land?" (The doctor wasn't sure, but probably the government.) "How much do the health-care workers earn?" (Ten dollars a month.) "Is that a full-time job?" (No.)

Once they arrived, they strolled through the narrow alleys lined with staring children. Bill, in a black fleece pullover and khaki pants, stuck his hands in his pockets and squinted into the sunlight, not unlike a man walking down the fairway at Augusta. Several times they stopped to talk with families. In unit No. 774, they found Sushila and Suraj Naik, who live in the windowless space with their daughter Puja, 3, and a tiny new baby called Liza. The Naiks welcomed them, offering them the only seat in the unit--on the double bed that took up almost the entire room. The space was lit by a single bare lightbulb. Through an interpreter, the Naiks patiently answered all the Gateses' questions.

Sushila, dressed in a red sari, smiled broadly the whole time, showing improbably white teeth. Yes, her daughter Liza was born here in this room a month ago. Her husband is a carpenter. They pay $13 a month in rent. Melinda held Liza for a few minutes, and then she and Bill got up to go. "Very impressive," said Bill, using his default version of thank you. "Namaste [goodbye]," said Melinda, holding her palms together and bowing slightly.

After the Gateses returned to the hotel, I went back to Meera Bagh to talk to Sushila. She was giving her children a bath, but she stopped to play hostess to yet another foreign inquisitor. I sat on the bed, and she stood beside it, discreetly breast-feeding Liza while Puja, the toddler, hid under her sari.

I asked Sushila whether she knew the names of the people who had visited that morning. She said that she did not but that they were very nice. I told her the man in the khaki pants was the richest man in the world. Sushila smiled and said it didn't matter that he was the richest. All foreigners were rich compared with her, she said.

Story #2

One day a group of us were walking through the slums, just looking around minding our own business. A woman dressed in a sari came up to me and stuck out her hand. Now, this was not all that unordinary. Usually it was teenage boys, sometimes girls and men, but often Indians want to shake hands with us foreigners.

My first instinct was to shake her hand, so I did and she walked away a little more animated than normal to a group of her friends. The group of women were talking fairly loudly and I could tell they were talking about me. So I asked my guide what was up.

He said that most of the women didn’t think you would shake their hands, like you were some sort of “white god” or something. But the one woman said no, he’s just a person, he’ll shake my hand. I can prove it. And she did.

The "Slums"

2005-12-26T01:33:00.001-07:00

12:45 PM Goan Time

READING: The Good News About Injustice by Gary Haugen
DEVOTIONS: Daniel 9
MUSIC: How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb – U2

Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday were spent visiting the various schools and Bible studies and neighborhood “slums” of the organization’s work in Bombay.

I want to start by describing the slums because I guess I really didn’t know what slums were or not having been in the “slums” of India, didn’t know what to expect and I assume the same concerning you.

I don’t know, maybe “shanty town” gives you better context. I forget what they are called in Peru. The Spanish word barrio comes to mind, but I’m not even sure what that means exactly.

The slums are similar to what I experienced in Peru, but everything is much more dense, more compact. So many more people, more trash, more dogs, more everything.

Generally, the small one or two room “houses” are made of brick and wood. Sometimes the walls are corrugated metal. The floors are dirt or brick or sometimes even some form of ceramic tile. There is usually electricity in the slums though power outages are periodic. Most houses had a ceiling fan and some had TVs.

I traveled to Bombay with one of the other volunteers. Six of her friends from the UK (that’s the United Kingdom--England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Whales, etc.--one is Irish and another French, but they all live in or near London.) After our daily visits to the slums we spent time “debriefing” and “processing” our experiences. It was helpful to go through these experiences together. Listening to some of their responses to what they saw, heard, smelled, felt allowed me to realize some of the reasons I may or may have not felt what I did or thought I should have. For instance, some of them said it was not as bad as they thought it would be. They said they weren’t as shocked or heart-broken as they had expected to be. To some extent I felt the same way but was not sure why.

One of the conclusions we came away with is that the attitudes of the people transcended their physical circumstances. We saw very little despair in the slums. Granted, we went to a Christian church and mainly visited people who were followers of Christ. We met people whose children were receiving a relatively good English language education for free. We met people that over time had developed personal relationships with our guides. We met people who had put their faith in God. But even though a small percentage of the slum-dwellers were Christians, the overall attitude was normalcy or better, sometimes even joyful.

The people were proud of their homes. They were excited for us to visit, talk, drink tea and pray with them. There was a sense of ownership (though, I am not exactly sure who owns what) of their dwellings. There was much cleaning, much sweeping, much hair and body washing. Some of the slums are different than others. After one of the Bible studies, I was walking down the cobblestone pathway between homes. The pathway was clean, the brick houses were painted soft pastels and other colors, the roofs of these houses were made of arched brick tile, there were all these flags and banners strung above the roofs. I kept thinking this is kindof nice. How can this be “nice”? I’m in the slums of Bombay. It made me think of Venice, albeit a cramped, tiny Venice with open sewers and no boats, but Venice nonetheless. Of course, I’ve never been to Italy.

Another reason the slums may not have seemed so bad to us is that we visited during the prime season. The weather was not so hot, maybe the high-70s where in the summer, 110 degrees plus is common. It was also not during the months of monsoon season where floods are constant and unstoppable.

This is getting long, so I will wrap-up. Some of the slum-dwellers came from the country, so this was a step-up. Some were just happy to see white people. But, as one member of our group commented something to the effect of that there is nowhere in the west where if rich people from a far off land or planet came to visit would they be treated with such hospitality and kindness as we were.

The sense of community in the slums was almost palpable. It seemed that everyone’s children were everyone else’s children. The older (still very young by Western standards—like 5-years-old) took care of the younger children while the father was off at work and the mother was working or cooking or cleaning or taking care of the house.

Though we are all human and all live on the same planet Earth, the slums of Bombay are a different world. There are defiantly some things that are objectively better in the west, health care, sanitation and education come to mind, but as I am always reminded when I visit the developing world, we in the West have a lot to learn from them and a lot of which to be envious.

The Poor You Will Always Have With You

2005-12-22T02:27:00.000-07:00

2:57 PM Bombay Time

READING: The Good News About Injustice by Gary Haugen
DEVOTIONS: Daniel 9
MUSIC: America: A Tribute to Heroes

So the preaching went fine on Sunday. (My dad asked how I was chosen to speak. I think it was because I was white, male and visiting.) I spoke on David being a man after God’s own heart. I opened with a couple of illustrations and then traced four aspects of David’s character through four stories in First and Second Samuel. I closed with his prayer of Psalm 51. I think it went well. I don’t know how my illustrations translated but the English speakers said they liked the sermon.

Monday we went sightseeing in Bombay. We visited The Gateway of India. It is similar in significance to The Gateway Arch in St. Louis—actually, I guess the arch is our version of The Gateway of India.) December’s pictures will be up in early January. We had lunch at a nice restaurant. We went to The Hanging Gardens where nothing was hanging, but I think the name of the place has something to do with the plants hanging in the ponds.

Then we went to a big mosque on the oceanfront. This was moving because I saw a side India I had only read about and not yet seen. Walking the half-mile brick sidewalk we encountered many handicapped and severely maimed people. There were people missing limbs, people with body parts deformed and people with other ailments. I guess they were Muslim—many were chanting and praying. I guess they made enough begging to have people take care of them allowing them to survive, but I am not sure how. It was numbing and heartbreaking all at the same time. I have written before about feeling an “infinite smallness”, a phrase I stole form the Salman Rushdie newspaper article. The enormous size of India’s humanity is so overwhelming and here, on the outskirts of this place of religious significance, were the absolutely lowest of the low. I guess it has always been this way and probably always will be this side of heaven. The disciples ran into beggars at the entrance to the temple. Jesus said the poor will always be with us. All I could do was walk by, observe and pray, sometimes all three of which seem useless.

2005-12-21T00:22:00.000-07:00

Lost in the Translation?

2005-12-17T12:58:00.000-07:00

11:10 PM Bombay Time

READING: Culture Shock! India by Gitanjali Kolanad
DEVOTIONS: Daniel 9
MUSIC: Forest Gump Soundtrack

So after working until 4 AM on consecutive nights, I completed the main portion of the summer camp video. It feels good to get something done. This one turned out pretty good and the boss was pleased. It’s Saturday night here and the sermon is written. Only God know how it will go. I don’t feel very nervous yet. I think it’s fairly well written, but I have always been a better writer than a speaker. I didn’t sleep very well last night (new surrounding maybe) and I’m not sure how I will sleep tonight, but we will see.

I am in Bombay. Two of us flew here from Hyderabad Friday night. I just hung out today writing the sermon and reading. Tomorrow is church. This week we will be working with the slum outreach teams. The teams use combination of evangelization, Bible study, medical care, microloans and microenterprise to improve the lives of the people living in the slums. I’m not sure what my role will be, but I’ll let you know.

There was a somewhat comical, somewhat sad, maybe tragic is the right word (or maybe it was harmless and I’m just jaded) incident that took place on Wednesday. I don’t know how well it will translate from my mind to my blog, but I will do my best.

Wednesday was the annual Christmas program at the school on base. This year it coincided with a visit of a team from a church in Atlanta. After welcoming the team and several songs, skits and dances from the Indian kids, an American pastor from the group stood up to address the students. The first thing he did was tell some kids who were standing against wall to sit down and pay attention because what he was saying was very important. Now I think I had been told prior that they group was from a Baptist church but three sentences in to the pastor’s talk, he removed all doubt. It was the old fire and brimstone Jesus loves you, you are going to hell if you don’t believe number, conjuring up wonderful memories from the church I sometimes attended during grade school and it’s AWANA program.

Oh wait, I almost forgot and I don’t think this is the pastor’s fault, but the school on campus is an English medium school meaning that all but the youngest kids spoke and understood English but for some reason there was a translator up there translating the pastor’s English into the native Telegue (hopefully, this sets up a little of the comedy later).

So anyway, this guy is giving the salvation message to these kids, some of them are already Christian, some of them are not, but all of them attend a school that is supported and staffed by almost all Christian teachers, teachers who have, can and will develop real relationships with the students and lead them toward Jesus.

Toward the end of his talk, the teachers directed some of the students out to prepare for the next skit, but the pastor stopped them, “No one should be going anywhere,” he said. “This is important.”

A little later when he had all kids standing up praying the salvation prayer he wanted the kids to repeat after the translator in Telegue but of course, a vast majority of them understood English and repeated after him in English while the translator was speaking in Telegue. A lot of it was just jumbled noise, but I’m sure some of the kids got saved twice that day.

I don’t know, maybe I’m jaded, but I don’t think that is the way to reach kids that go to a Christian school.

Preaching on Sunday

2005-12-14T01:29:00.000-07:00

So I'm preaching on Sunday. It's one of the excuses I'm using for not wrtitng more on this thing. Please pray for me in preparation and delivery these next few days. I'm supposed to lead devotians next week, too. I guess I should start looking into that ... I want to steal the devos I heard on a trip to Jamaica, but the leader can't seem to find them. Bummer!

And my sister respectfully requests that if you leave a comment on this blog, please sign it.

-sl

Christmas Spirit?

2005-12-11T23:00:00.000-07:00

I haven't really thought about Christmas too much this year which is good and bad, I guess. No materialism or shopping or other American crap, but also not much reflection on what it is that we are remembering and celebrating. My reminders of the holiday are the Westerners here saying I can't believe it's X amount of days 'til Christmas. Yesterday, in church, the sermon was from parts of the Christmas texts, but I was in and out of consciousness.

Most of the kids in the teachers training program left this weekend on their holidays so campus seems emptier. The school Christmas program is next week. I'm here until Friday. Then 5 days in Bombay with the OM team in the slums, then Goa for Christmas and some R&R.

I've been away from family on several Thanksgivings and one Christmas before but never both in the same year. It has always been harder for me to work on Easter, I think, because it is less commercialized in the States and so it has been more spiritually significant for me. But this year I won't be working, just continued separation from family and friends.

I finished up the English church video church project. It feels good to be productive and busy even though I am not very happy with the video camera footage I shot or the overall project. The boss is back and we will continue to work on the larger and significantly more complicated summer camp project. I will suggest to him that he edits during the day and I will edit at night in order to complete the project before Christmas. (Maybe by then, I'll feel comfortable with the editing software.)

I received my golf work schedule for 2006. It is pretty close to perfect and a huge answer to prayer! (21 events--which is a good number--2 weeks in Hawaii, 2 weeks in Mexico and several other cool places in the continental U.S.) I finish up my season mid-November, opening up next winter for another mission opportunity.

F.Y.I.-- I will be returning to the States Feb 9 or 10, a little earlier than planned to allow me to rest a few days before traveling to Hawaii.

Peace,
-sl

"Where you have hope, you have a middle class."

2005-12-07T23:06:00.000-07:00

11:20 PM Hyderabad Time

READING:
The World is Flat, by Thomas Friedman
Culture Shock! India by Gitanjali Kolanad

DEVOTIONS: Daniel 9
MUSIC: None

So, I’ve been fairly busy editing this week. It is going well, although the learning process is slow and sometimes frustrating. I’m almost done with my first project for a church in England and hope to continue working on the summer camp DVD this afternoon. I promise to write more about India soon, maybe next week after the boss gets back and assumes control of the equipment. I have lots of things to write about in my head, but for now you are stuck with more Friedman.

FIRST 2 RANDOM QUOTES …

We were sitting around at dinner discussing the young Irish gentlemen’s world travel plans for the year ahead.

“I really wasted my 19^th year,” one of the older volunteers said, exasperated.
“Where were you?” she was asked.
“Therapy.”

"After being notified of the situation and after researching the matter ... I came to the conclusion that I was not drafted by the A's."

--BILL RICHARDSON, New Mexico Governor, retracting the biographical detail he had maintained for nearly four decades: that he had been drafted to pitch for the Kansas City Athletics in 1966 before an injury compelled him to bow out of baseball

(Time.com)

Today more various and a little more random passages from The World is Flat. This time on the developing world:

In 1977, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping declared, “To get rich is glorious,” and opened the Chinese economy. He dismissed those who questioned China’s move from communism to free markets by saying what mattered was jobs and incomes not ideology. Deng tossed over decades of Communist ideology with one sentence: “Black cat, white cat, all that matters is that it catches mice.”

More open and competitive markets are the only sustainable vehicle for growing a nation out of poverty, because they are the only guarantee that new ideas, technologies, and best practices are easily flowing into your county and that private enterprises, and even government, have the competitive incentive and flexibility to adopt those new ideas and turn them into jobs and products.

From The World Bank

In 1990 there wee 375 million people in China living in extreme poverty, on less than $1 per day. In 2001 the number was 212 million. If trends hold, in 2015 the number will be only ("only"???--I guess it's all relative) 16 million.

In South Asia—primarily India, Pakistan and Bangladesh—the numbers go down from 462 million in 1990 living on less than one dollar a day to 431 million in 2001 and down to 216 in 2015.

In sub-Saharan Africa, by contrast, where globalization has been slow to take hold, there were 227 million people living on less than $1 a day in 1990, 313 million in 2001 and, and an expected 340 million by 2015.

“Where you have hope, you have a middle class.”

--UNAMED SENIOR CHINESE GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL

And that is why it is no wonder that the children in the developing world—the unflat world—are ten times more likely to die of vaccine-preventable diseases than are children in the developed flat world.

“The most important health-care system in the world is a mother. How do you get things in her hands that she understands and can use?”

---RICH KLAUSNER, a former head of the National Cancer Institute who now runs the global health programs for the Gates Foundation, on the development of drugs and delivery systems that presume a broken health care system and therefore can be safely self-administered by ordinary people in the field.

Bush's Moon Shot

2005-12-05T11:07:00.000-07:00

DAY 35 – 11:07 AM Hyderabad Time

READING:
The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman
Culture Shock! India by Gitanjali Kolanad

DEVOTIONS: Daniel 9
MUSIC: Caedmon’s Call – Share the Well

So, I don’t know if you enjoyed or found interesting my last post, but I find that kind of stuff fascinating. Pretty much my weekday days have been spent working on video production which is great but not much to write home (or in your blog) about. We are working on the summer camp video and last week I shot tape with the mother of one of the other volunteers for a short video about the organization for her church and small groups. I will have three days alone with the editing computers, as the Indian I am working with will be traveling. I know all the theory and have ideas as far as what I want to do but have never really physically “edited”. I have sat in on and produced numerous pieces but have never actually touched the keys. Please pray I learn the machine quickly and am productive this week.

So back to the boring (or fascinating) stuff ...

This remainder of this post comes from a great book I am reading, The World is Flat by New York Times Foreign Affairs Columnist Thomas Friedman. It’s a riveting book and I recommend it to all who want to broaden their knowledge on globalization, world affairs, world business and economics.

Today’s passages are on modern America …

The assumption that because America’s economy has dominated the world for more than a century, it will and must always be that way is as dangerous an illusion today as the illusion that America would always dominate in science and technology back in 1950 …

Getting our society up to speed for a flat world is going to be extremely painstaking. We are going to have to start doing a lot of things differently. It is going to take the sort of focus and national will that John F. Kennedy called for in his famous May 25, 1961, speech to Congress on “urgent national needs.” At that time, America was recovering from the twin shocks of Sputnik and the Soviet space launch of a cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, less than two months before Kennedy’s speech. Kennedy knew that while America had enormous human and institutional assets—far more than the Soviet Union—they were not being fully utilized.

“I believe we possess all the resources and talents necessary,” said President Kennedy. “But the facts of the matter are that we have never made the national decisions or marshaled the national resources required for such leadership. We have never specified long-range goals on an urgent time schedule, or managed our resources and our time so as to ensure their fulfillment.” After then laying out his whole program for putting a man on the moon within ten years, President Kennedy added, “Let it be clear that I am asking the Congress and the country to accept a firm commitment to a new course of action, a course which will last for many years and carry very heavy costs … This decision demands a major national commitment of scientific and technical manpower, material and facilities, and the possibility of their diversion from other important activities where they are already thinly spread. It means a degree of dedication, organization and discipline which have not always characterized our research and development efforts.”

In that speech, Kennedy made a vow that has amazing resonance today: “I am therefore transmitting to the Congress a new Manpower Development and Training Program, to train or retrain several hundred thousand workers, particularly in those areas where we have seen chronic unemployment as a result of technological factors, in new occupational skills over a four-year period—in order to replace those skills made obsolete by automation and industrial change with the new skills which the new processes demand.”

Amen. We have to do things differently.

Later Friedman writes (emphasis mine) …

We have way too many politicians in America today who seem to … go out of their way actually to make their constituents stupid—encouraging them to believe that certain jobs are “American jobs” and can be protected from foreign competition, or that because America has always dominated economically in our lifetimes it always will, or that compassion should be equated with protectionism. It is hard to have an American national strategy for dealing with flatism if people won’t even acknowledge that there is an educational gap emerging and that there is an ambition gap emerging and that we are in a quiet crisis. For instance, of all the policy that the Republican-led Congress could have made in forging the fiscal year 2005 budget, how in the world could it have decided to cut the National Science Foundation by more than $100 million?

Later (again, emphasis mine) …

To be sure, it is not easy to get people passionate about the flat world. It takes some imagination. President Kennedy understood that the competition with the Soviet Union was not a space race but a science race, which really was really an education race. Yet the way he choose to get Americans excited about buckling down to do what it took to win the Cold War—which required a large-scale push in science and engineering—was by laying out the vision of putting a man on the moon, not a missile into Moscow. If President Bush is looking for a similar legacy project, there is one just crying out—a national science initiative that would be our generation’s moon shot: a crash program for alternative energy and conservation to make America energy-independent in ten years. If President Bush made energy independence his moon shot, in one fell swoop he would dry up revenue for terrorism, force Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia onto the path to reform—which they will never do with $50-a-barrel oil—strengthen the dollar, and improve his own standing in Europe by doing something huge to reduce global warming. He would also create a real magnet to inspire young people to contribute to both the war in terrorism and America’s future by again becoming scientists, engineers, and mathematicians. “This is not just a win-win,” said Michael Mandelbaum. “This is a win-win-win-win-win.”

I have consistently been struck that my newspaper columns that have gotten far and away the most positive feedback over the years, especially the young people, have been those that urged the president to call the nation to this task. Summoning all our energies and skills to produce a twenty-first century fuel is George W. Bush’s opportunity to be both Nixon to China and JFK to the moon in one move. Unfortunately for America, it appears as though I will go to the moon before President Bush will go down this road.

a European Cow Makes $2.50 a day

2005-12-01T00:00:00.000-07:00

DAY 31 – 12:00 PM Hyderabad Time

READING:
The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman
Culture Shock! India by Gitanjali Kolanad

DEVOTIONS: Daniel 9

MUSIC: None

Please pray for the World Trade Organization meetings in Hong Kong December 13-18. From Time Magazine (Asia, November 28^th)(click here to read entire article)

“The meeting is billed as critical for wrapping up a new multilateral trade accord, the ninth since 1947. This one is known as the Doha Development Round because it was conceived four years ago in the Qatari capital and is supposed to give a special boost to poor countries. But at a moment of rapid change in the world economy, with China emerging as an industrial colossus and India and Brazil starting to throw their weight around, the stakes in Hong Kong are higher and the pre-meeting positions more intractable than ever. Talks on freeing up agricultural trade are stuck as usual, and without a breakthrough there, little else can happen. Following recent inconclusive talks in London, expectations for Hong Kong are being drastically scaled back. "Unless a miracle happens, I don't see anything emerging in Hong Kong. Nobody I know believes a deal can be struck," frets Jagdish Bhagwati, a specialist in the economics of trade at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Pascal Lamy, the director-general of the WTO, acknowledged as much this month when he said that too little progress has been made even to have a full draft text of a new trade accord ready for Hong Kong.

Later in the article

(The World Trade Organization) has delivered some stinging blows to both the European Union and the U.S., including rulings that some of the most contentious subsidies they pay to their farmers, on cotton and sugar, are illegal. Absent a Doha agreement, says Stiglitz, "the best hope for developing countries would be for them to use that rule of law to push back at the U.S. and the E.U. Once they have shown that subsidies are illegal, they can then come back to the bargaining table."

There's no question that the multilateral system governing global trade remains inherently unfair, tilted in favor of the U.S. and the E.U., which have long set the agenda. Failure to correct the flaws means that the politics of trade will just get nastier. The global economy stands to lose out, too. It's widely assumed that new tariff cuts and the removal of trade barriers would substantially boost growth. Estimates of the size of that boost vary widely, from labor union economists, who say it would be minimal, to the University of Michigan, which figures a reduction of trade barriers by even one-third would increase global economic output by $574 billion a year.

An accompanying story discussed the issue of Western farm subsidies that distort global prices. (click here to read entire article). It’s really good. You should read the whole thing.

By far, the biggest problem Diarra (a cotton farmer in Mali, a country in West Africa) faces, though, isn't environmental or even in Africa. It is 5,000 miles away: the $3 billion or more the U.S. pays its 25,000 cotton farmers in subsidies every year. Washington uses taxpayer money to guarantee American farmers a price—currently about 72¢ per lb.—whether it rains or bakes and no matter what happens on the world market. By contrast, in 2003, when Mali's cotton farmers earned 42¢ per lb., Diarra says he made a profit of $480, which he used to buy four cows and send his children to school. In a bad year such as this one, when Diarra expects to make just 32¢ per lb., he will lose money and fall further into debt with the government cotton company.

That sinking price makes a huge difference in West Africa, where more than 10 million people depend directly on cotton to pay for food, school fees and housing. The crop provides Burkina Faso and Mali with half of all their export earnings; in Benin it accounts for 75%. "If there is no cotton growing in Mali, Mali doesn't work," says Demba Kébé, an adviser to that country's Minister of Agriculture.

U.S. cotton farmers aren't the only ones feeding at the government welfare trough. According to the Environmental Working Group, a Washington lobby outfit, last year the U.S. doled out more than $12 billion in subsidies to its farmers on everything from corn to sugar to tobacco. The Europeans spew out subsidies, shelling out $53 billion. With cotton, as with other crops, all those subsidies distort global trade by encouraging U.S. farmers to produce more, which drags down world cotton prices and hurts farmers such as Diarra. "I don't blame the Americans, but I want them to allow me to make a profit," he says, sitting on a broken metal chair with his 3-year-old son Diakaridia wriggling on his lap. "I want to be able to take care of my family, to be able to feed them, to clothe them and to be independent of anybody."

The latest round of talks at the World Trade Organization (WTO) was supposed to make Diarra's modest wishes come true. Launched in 2001, the Doha "development" round is intended to thrash out new trade arrangements for agriculture, with a specific focus on reducing the rich world's subsidies and opening Western markets to the developing world's producers. In return, the vision goes, the developing world will allow more access to its service industries, such as insurance and banking.

Thus far, the talks have gone nowhere. Two years ago in Cancún, Mexico, they collapsed after developing countries refused to open the door to their service industries until they got a favorable deal on agriculture. Trade ministers will try again in Hong Kong in December. But the prospects aren't promising. The WTO boss, Pascal Lamy, said that he would have to delay a draft deal because "there is not a sufficient level of convergence."

Later in the article

In a world of perfect Ricardian economics, West African cotton growers would be thriving. That's because they can produce and trade high-quality cotton more cheaply than just about anyone—for about 31¢ per lb., compared with 68¢ per lb. in the U.S.

But the subsidies U.S. cotton farmers receive help destroy any advantage West Africa's farmers have. Since the mid-1990s, when U.S. exports of subsidized cotton began growing—according to Oxfam, U.S. sales went from a low of 17% of the world export market in 1998 to 41% in 2003—the world cotton price has dropped by more than half. The International Cotton Advisory Committee, which promotes cooperation among cotton-producing countries, estimates that developing-world cotton growers, including Burkina Faso, Brazil, India, Mali and Pakistan, have lost $23 billion over the past four years to Western subsidies.

THIS IS A GOOD PART HERE

The irony, says Oxfam, is that annual losses in export earnings in most West African cotton-producing countries are comparable to U.S. aid donations. Burkina Faso, for instance, received $10 million in U.S. aid in 2002 but lost an estimated $13.7 million in exports because of U.S. cotton subsidies.

LATER IN THE ARTICLE

U.S. cotton growers are correct in saying they are not alone in the subsidy sweepstakes. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, rich nations spend more than $280 billion a year on agricultural "producer support." The U.S. is a piker compared with the European Union, which, when non-cash payments and other aid are added in, spends more than three times as much coddling its farmers.

THIS IS MY FAVORITE PART

World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern estimates that a European cow receives $2.50 a day in subsidies, while 75% of Africans live on less than $2 a day.

Hope of coming to any sort of an agreement in Hong Kong seems dim. "It does appear to me that we will not make as much progress in Hong Kong as we had hoped for,” said Mike Johanns, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture. So all we can do, I think, is pray. Pray that the countries of the world will work to level the playing field, open up agricultural free trade with the developing world that may begin lifting them out of poverty.

More Quotes

2005-11-30T15:24:00.000-07:00

DAY 30 – 3:24 PM Hyderabad Time

READING:
The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman
Culture Shock! India by Gitanjali Kolanad

DEVOTIONS: Daniel 9

TV: CNN International

This week I’ve been working on the summer camp video production project, so not too much to report, but I have some quotes and passages building up over the weeks, so I’ve decided to share them here …

“We have the power to shape the civilization that we want. But we need your will, your labor, your hearts, if we are to build that kind of society. Those who came to this land sought to build more than just a new country. They sought a new world. So I have come here today to your campus to say that you can make their vision a reality. So let us from this moment begin our work so that in the future men will look back and say: It was then, after a long and weary way, that man turned to the exploits of his genius to fill the full enrichment of his life.”

Anybody know that one? Anyone? anyone? Bueller? Dad?

It is from LYNDON B. JOHNSON’S 1964 “Great Society” speech.

“It’s not that we are becoming more Anglo-Saxon. It’s that we are having an encounter with reality.”

--FRANK SCHIRRMACHER, German newspaper publisher, commenting about the need for German workers to retool and work longer hours

“Seek knowledge even unto China.”

--saying of the Prophet Muhammad

“First we were afraid of the wolf, then we wanted to dance with the wolf, and now we want to be the wolf.”

--CHINESE BANK OFFICIAL, on China’s relationship with the United States.

“Even if you are on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.”

--ROY ROGERS

Out of clutter, find simplicity.
From discord, find harmony.
In the middle of difficulty, lies opportunity.

--ALBERT EINSTEIN

“To build may have to be slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless of a single day.”

--SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL

“It’s kind of like virginity. It’s hard to get back.”

--JOHN ZOGBY, pollster, on Bush’s chances of regaining public trust, based on the previous experiences of embattled Presidents such as Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.

“It was a big mistake. The American government made several errors … one of which is how easy it would be to get rid of Saddam and how hard it would be to unite the country.”

--BILL CLINTON, former U.S. President, speaking in Dubai on the Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq

“He is the one who made himself the Vice President in favor of torture.”

--STANSFIELD TURNER, former CIA chief and president of the Naval War College, criticizing U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney last week on his efforts to water down proposed anti-torture legislation.

MY FAVORITE:

“Women make more money these days, they’re calling the shots, they’re more powerful. And let’s face it, it’s hard to meet someone.”

--HEIDI FLEISS, former “Hollywood Madam” on why she struck a deal to open a Nevada brothel that will cater exclusively to female clients.

15,000 Lunches ???

2005-11-26T21:31:00.000-07:00

DAY 26 – 9:31 PM Hyderabad Time

READING:
The World is Flat, by Thomas Friedman
Culture Shock! India by Gitanjali Kolanad

DEVOTIONS: Daniel 8

MUSIC: Stone Temple Pilots – Core

So last night at about 10, on my way out to play this board game to pass the time before the Colorado/Nebraska game, I passed by the dining hall. The mess is usually vacant at this time of night, but tonight it hopping. It seemed like everybody on campus was hard at work putting together scores of bag lunches assembly-line style. The lunches were for this rally the following day to garner support for a constitutional amendment giving Dalit Christians equal rights (more on this a little later). The goal was 15,000 lunches. Only about 1,000 were completed.

After my Thanksgiving (my family was eating turkey on Friday this year) call home. I rallied the troops waiting to play The Settlers of Cattan and we jumped in.

Basically, the process entailed cooking massive amounts of rice in huge cauldrons over wood fires. (I took some pictures that will hopefully be viewable by the end of the month.) Then the rice was cooled. Spicy lemon-leaf-bean-something-or-other sauce was added to the huge batches of rice. The rice was cooled again to not melt the baggies in which it was placed. A small packet of spicy pickle was added. The bags were tied up and placed in boxes of 50-75 meals.

Repeat …

15,000 TIMES !!!

At 2 AM local I hooked up to the internet via laptop and cell phone to get the radio broadcast to keep updated on the Colorado/Nebraska football game during breaks in lunch packing. KOA-AM (Denver) blocks internet broadcasts of Colorado football games so I could only get the Nebraska feed. For those of you who don’t know the game was not pretty and listening to the Big Red homers in the company of a fellow voluntter NU grad did not make it any easier.

I retired about 4:30 AM well into the fourth quarter with the game way, way, way out of reach. (Colorado some how, some way sneaks into the Big XII Championship as for the second year in a row Iowa State goes into the final Saturday of the season with the championship game on the line and loses. This year the Cyclones squandered a 11 point lead and missed a field goal in overtime to grasp defeat out of the jaws of victory allowing the Buffs to get steamrolled Saturday again by Texas on it’s crusade to the national championship.) But the lunch packing continued until 11 o’clock the next morning with like something just short of 13,000 lunches. UNBELIEVEABLE!

Approximately 25,000 Indians, mostly poor Dalits, showed up to increase awareness of the upcoming Indian Supreme Court ruling on giving Dalit Christians the same rights as others who have converted to different religions from Hinduism. Many speakers from many political parties and other Christian Dalit leaders put on record their support to legal and parliamentary action to give Dalit Christians the rights that Hindu Dalits, Buddhist Dalits and Sikh Dalits enjoy today.

One Dalit leader said of the rally, "It was historic because we came out openly in the public square and bluntly laid down our position for the … government and the Congress Party that they should not count on the political support of the Dalit Christians if they are not willing to give support on this matter. The time for waiting is over -- 50 years is long enough. We as Christians need to stand and up act and this rally is the beginning of our public agitation and movement."

The ruling was supposed to be made two days later on Monday, but the Supreme Court adjourned delaying the ruling once again. Although the delay is disappointing, as this and other rallies across the nation have shown, the movement has caught the interest and involvement of many people of influence.

Please pray for Dalit human rights and freedom.

"An injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

--Martin Luther King, Jr.

Not a European Teenager's Diary on Holiday During Gap Year

2005-11-25T20:23:00.000-07:00

DAY 25 – 8:43 PM Hyderabad Time

READING:
The World is Flat, by Thomas Friedman
Culture Shock! India by Gitanjali Kolanad

DEVOTIONS:
Daniel 8

MUSIC:
Pulp Fiction – Soundtrack “Zed’s dead, baby. Zed’s dead.”

So I realize that my blog may sound more like a European teenager’s diary on holiday during gap year, but the fun stuff is so much more interesting to write about. Alas, this entry will be more work oriented, lest my supporters begin to question where there hard-earned money went.

Last Thursday and Friday and today I logged tape for the video production guy here. For those of you who don’t know, logging is watching video and writing down what is on the tape at the corresponding time code. It is a somewhat tedious process but the work more than makes up for itself during the editing process. He has 22 tapes he shot from a Christian summer camp they ran for teenagers from all over India and other parts of the world last summer. We are working on putting together a DVD highlighting the camp and promoting next year.

I count it a blessing that I hooked up with this guy, as I did not know about his department before I arrived. He is basically a one-man-band. From what I understand, he is basically self-taught and has learned a lot in the few years he as been producing videos, but he definitely has a ways to go. The good thing is he is very cordial and willing to learn from me (scary, I know). You can pray that we work well together and communicate well. Pray that I grasp the vision behind the projects and get a good idea of what the projects need to be and who our audience is.

Monday morning we left campus on a three-day trip to visit a rural village and dalit school. As the eldest male, I was “leading” four other foreigners on this relatively short adventure. I was told the village was about four hours away, the car would meet us on campus at 8 AM, we would have the same car and driver the whole time and we can come home any time on Wednesday. I was given a couple of contact numbers and wished good luck.

Monday morning it took us a little while to track down our car as it was waiting for us at an adjacent building, but as they often say here, “No problem,” and we were on our way. Being the good leader I am, I called ahead for directions. When the driver said he had directions, I didn’t bother paying attention to my notes, I was too engrossed in my book and then my slight case of motion sickness. When the driver told us we were about half-hour away, I called the manager of the school for final directions. Voicemail. We got to town and I called again. Voicemail. I called my other contact number and gave the phone to the driver. Apparently, there were two locations with the same name, a small city and a village. We were in the town. We were supposed to be in the village. We were 45 kilometers away, “No problem.”

We finally arrived at the school only about two hours behind schedule. The school greeted us with a lovely assembly including an interpretive dance and also showered our group with flower petals as we ran a human gauntlet of students. It was rather nice. After school we walked around the village a little bit.

The boys stayed with the family of a village leader including two adorable students from the school. That night after dinner, we looked though photos of our respective families. The family was so giving it was embarrassing, but there was a shortage of beds, bedding and space. To call our sleeping arrangements tight would the understatement of the year. We developed a saying, “What happens in the village stays in the village.” So, I have vowed to not disclose any more on this subject, but let’s just say that during the many weeks of mission experience in my life, I have never been this far out of my comfort zone.

On Tuesday we split up and taught English, math and health classes as well as told stories, taught songs and answered questions. The nurse in our group discussed the village’s health with the school manager as we look to eventually train and equip a community health worker in every dalit school village.

Tuesday night we showed the family and other onlookers the internet via laptop and cell phone. It was probably the first time many of them had ever been online or seen the net (how cool—or actually rather sad, is that?). We googled the village and it came up with an article about a local hero, who was actually my other contact numbers.

Tuesday night was another night that “stayed in the village”.

Wednesday the school had exams for a couple of hours. Then our group did an hour of teaching songs, reciting Bible verses, performing a drama and playing games based on the concept of obedience. Then we had lunch, said our good-bys and were on our way.

After 2 plus weeks in India, I think I am getting used to the crazy driving, but our driver was particularly aggressive. I rode shotgun on the way home to attempt to hold of another case of motion sickness. The trip home was not too bad, but about 45 minutes from home as we began to get caught up in Hyderabad rush hour traffic we got passed by a silver SUV. That’s a little odd, I thought. That’s the first time we’ve been passed the whole trip. Moments later the driver stated the same fact. Wow, nine plus hours in the car. We probably passed 200 vehicles of all sorts and got passed only once.

It’s about 9:45 PM Friday now. We are staying up for the Colorado/Nebraska game. One of the volunteers is a NU grad (N is for knowledge!) It is played at 2 AM here. 4 hours of this board game called The Settlers of Cattan, a game we’ve gotten hooked on, then internet TV or radio broadcast of the game.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING AND GO BUFFS !!!

An Answer to Prayer

2005-11-20T21:08:00.000-07:00

DAY 20 – 9:08 PM Hyderabad Time

READING:
The World is Flat, by Thomas Friedman
Culture Shock! India by Gitanjali Kolanad

DEVOTIONS:
Daniel 8

MUSIC:
Steve’s CD –(a collection of Christian music from Anna G., formerly Anna O.)

“$5.4 Billion pledged for Pakistan,” read the headline. “50 Nations to Raise Money for Rehabilitation of Quake-Hit People,” continued the subhead. Really? I thought. That’s pretty amazing. That’s about all we can ask for. That’s what I had asked for from God in prayer. It’s really great too see such a specific answer to one of my prayers. I won’t really go into the details, but the gist of the story follows …

Pakistan had organized a day-long international conference to raise money for the reconstruction and rehabilitation of the 3.3 million people affected by the earthquake. An estimated 75,000 people died and an equal number of people were seriously injured.

Those of you who have been following this story or read the article by Salman Rushdie in an earlier post know that the money had been slow to come from the West and the rest of the world. On Saturday $5.4 billion dollars in the form of grants and soft loans was promised Pakistan from the world. The damage caused by the quake is estimated at $5.2 billion.

The single largest donor was the United States, which pledged $510 million, including $156 million already. Saudi Arabia pledged more than $340 million, China $300 million, Iran $200 million and India $25 million.

Overwhelmed by the response, Pakistan President General Prevez Musharraf said that all finances would be utilized transparently on improving the lot of the quake’s survivors.

In related news, at the same conference and counter to the Rushdie article, Pakistan and India officials suggested that a resolution of the Kashmir issue could once and for all come about through this tragic earthquake.

Pakistani President Musharraf said, “I take this opportunity and forum to appeal to the President and the Prime Minister of India, to the government of India, to the entire opposition in India, to the people of India at large … let us together solve the Kashmir issue once and for all.” He said that fleeting opportunities did not come along everyday and if leaders failed to grasp fleeting opportunities, they failed their nations and failed their people. He continued, “Therefore, let success and happiness emerge from the ruins of this catastrophe, for the
devastated people of Kashmir, let this be the Indian donation to Kashmir.”

Indian Minister of State for External Affairs E. Ahamed responded in kind saying India was ready to resolve all issues including Kashmir through dialogue “in an atmosphere free of terrorism and violence.” The minister said it was very encouraging to see that people in both countries came forward to help the victims of the tragedy and contribute to their relief. “This spontaneous outpouring of sympathy and goodwill for the victims of the earthquake gives us strength and motivation to work for greater people-to-people contact and confidence building measures between our two countries,” he said.

Now, I know that politicians talk is usually worth less than the paper it is printed on and I know that maybe even without out the prayers of Christians everywhere the world may still have anted up to save the tens of thousands of lives left hanging in the balance after the earthquake as the impending Himalayan winter approaches rapidly.

But, BUT isn’t our God a great god? A God who gives hope in the darkness of despair and hopelessness. A God who gives hope in my own desperation and sense of infinite smallness. A God who can use the horrific tragedy of a tsunami or an earthquake to make himself known and to bring peace to countries that have historically hate each other. A God who answers prayers. A God who answers prayers.

PRAISE GOD!

Happy Birthday to Me

2005-11-19T14:02:00.000-07:00

DAY 19 – 2:02 PM Hyderabad Time

READING:
The World is Flat, by Thomas Friedman
Culture Shock! India by Gitanjali Kolanad
Everyone is Normal Until You Meet Them by John Ortberg

DEVOTIONS:
Daniel 7

MUSIC:
KBCO Studio C vol. 16

Today is my birthday. I am 29. Don’t feel bad because you forgot. Only Megan M., Heather W., Lori G., KBCO and most of my immediate family remembered. But the people here knew and we’ve are doing some fun stuff to celebrate.

To begin the celebration, last night we (me and the two Irish lads) decided to take out the Indian young men that are apart of the “Teacher Training Program” here on base. These are guys in their early twenties who are training to teach in the dalit schools. Now we knew that cultural norms would require this to be a male-only escapade (unmarried men and women do not really socialize here especially at a ‘night out on the town’ or whatever). But it was still sort of funny as we asked the guys if they wanted to go out for dinner. The boys asked there leader and he said it was fine, but “…there are three sisters among us. They cannot come!”

Later at Pizza Hut after appetizers, pizza and soda, me and the Irish boys decided to order dessert. We repeatedly asked the Indians if the wanted any dessert. No one seemed interested. That was a little strange, I thought as I ordered for us foreigners. A few minutes later we were told that they were unfamiliar with the word “dessert” and had no idea what we were talking about. After it was made clear to them that we meant ice cream, cake or apple pie, they promptly ordered.

So after the bus ride home from the restaurant, “good-nights” said, I retired maybe at 11:30. Some time passed (I was unaware of how much because I was asleep) and I hear a bang at the door. “What?” I barked. “It is Benu,” came the reply. “What do you want?” I growled from my warm bed. No answer. Through my foggy and yet unawake head I realized that he was still outside the door and would not be continuing this conversation through my closed door because it would be deemed rude. I don’t have to tell you what I deemed being woken up in the middle of the night. So I got up groggily, unlocked and opened the door. There were a dozen Indians and two Irish men at the door. I attempted to quickly close the door, but Benu jammed his foot in the way, blocking the door as they sang heartly “Happy Birthday” and some other Christian version of “He’s a Jolly Good Fellow”. Then they prayed for me. It was rather quite nice. Before I fell asleep I looked at my watch on the bedside dresser. It was 12:05 AM (5 minutes into my birthday).

This morning, Saturday, I awoke to the normal blaring steam whistle, typical of a factory or coalmine, announcing breakfast. Now it was 7:30 AM on Saturday on my birthday and with no responsibilities on this day, I thought it might be nice to sleep in a little. But I head some voices coaxing me out and I figured something might be up. So I got out of bed, quickly dressed and opened my door. There was a full, door-sized banner, birthday card signed by all and taped to the doorway blocking my exit. Luckily it was only scotch tape and not to difficult to escape. When I entered the dining hall, I was once again serenaded by the crowd to another “Happy Birthday”. Some of the girls had prepared a special breakfast of pancakes with syrup and scrambled eggs. There were more cards, surprisingly suspicious, but one from “Mum and Dad”, another form all my pals at the work and even a card from Mark Warner who said he would remember me when he got to the White House. They also presented me with two gold fish.

There was a wedding reception on campus so dinner was extra special.

And tonight India beat South Africa in cricket

This has been quite a happy birthday.

Tomorrow is supposed to be a special lunch at some hotel.

Next week we are to take a road trip to visit a village and a dalit school.

"Good Day, Sunshine!"

2005-11-16T21:19:00.000-07:00

DAY 16 – 9:19 PM Hyderabad Time

READING:
The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman
Culture Shock! India by Gitanjali Kolanad
Everyone is Normal Until You Meet Them by John Ortberg

DEVOTIONS:
Daniel 6

MUSIC:
KBCO Studio C vol. 16

Overall, today was a good day. I am tired, so I will be brief, but here are the highlights:

***We spent the morning in one of the Dalit Schools. Ben, one of the other volunteers, and I played Around the World and did some art in both second and first grades.

***After lunch I met the video production guy. After being here two weeks, I didn’t even know there was a video production guy until about three days ago. We’ll today it seemed to just click. This may be why I am here or this is part of the reason I may be here or this may be a big part of my day-to-day activities when I am not helping out, whatever it was encouraging and an answer to prayer. Praise God!

***In the afternoon we ran some errands and did a little shopping.

***After dinner we played badminton and cards. I hope to get some reading before bed. The Volcker report on Iraq’s Oil-for-Food-Programme is really big here. I still haven’t quite figured out how India is involved, but it has been in the papers the whole time I have been here.

***Finally, I’ve told some of you, but figured I better make it official (and interested too see who actually reads the entire blog.) I wrecked on the bike three days ago. We (yes, I had a passenger) were cruising down a two-lane road (one lane each way) on a typical crazy Indian traffic afternoon and a SUV is trying to pass a truck (BOTH COMING TOWARD US) on this particularly narrow stretch of road. So rather then clip the SUV we veer to the LEFT (the correct) side of the road where the pavement ended. The bumps in the dirt were too much for the poor little Honda Hero and we went down. Luckily we weren’t traveling extremely fast and it all happened pretty quickly. I suppose it could have been much worse. I cut up my palm pretty bad and my passenger scraped and banged up his knee and the bike took a few scratches to the exhaust pipe. But we got up, dusted ourselves off and were on our way.

QUOTES:

“If you talk to God, that’s a prayer. If God talks back to you, that’s schizophrenia.”

--OSCAR CRUZ, outspoken Philippine bishop, referring to President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s claims to have had conversations with God on political issues.

“I’ve gained no wisdom, no insight, no mellowing. I would make all the same mistakes again, today.”

--WOODY ALLEN, director and actor who turns 70 next month on aging ungracefully.

Pray for Kashmir

2005-11-15T23:01:00.000-07:00

DAY 15 – 11:01 PM Hyderabad Time

READING:
The World is Flat, by Thomas Friedman
Culture Shock! India by Gitanjali Kolanad
Everyone is Normal Until You Meet Them by John Ortberg

DEVOTIONS:
Daniel 6

iPod MUSIC:
Various U2 (It’s actually on my computer this time, not the iPod.)

PLEASE PRAY FOR KASHMIR AND DONATE MONEY !!! see the links and article below.

by Salman Rushdie (yea, him)
The Hindu (India) November 15, 2005

The calamity in Kashmir is a wound on a wounded body. It is death arriving in awful majesty in a place where death has become a grubby, ugly, everyday affair. There has been so much man-made death in Kashmir that, if one believed in God, one might say that God had become competitive and decided to show the killers – the killers in uniform and the terrorists cloaked in secrecy – what a real killer can do.

There has been so much man-made agony in Kashmir – so many young men have been broken, so many women vandalized, so many villages smashed, there have been so many explosions, so much loss, so much blood on the no-longer-virgin snow, the raped, defiled snow – that the bitterness of this natural disaster is not the only beyond bearing, it is obscene. The earthquake is a hammer blow launched against a people that have already been smashed.

And now, as if to finish things off, the Himalayan winter is setting in, and the greatest calamity may lie ahead of us, not behind.

The Kashmir winter is beautiful, but it is also cruel. To look upon the valley in it’s coat of winter white, the frozen ice-sheets of its lakes, the pale air pregnant with the promise of snow, is to feel tears of beauty freezing in your eyelashes. To contemplate the mighty surrounding Himalayas, wrapped in whiteness like an immense Christo artwork, is to learn, again and again, the salutary lesson of human smallness.

“If there is a paradise on earth,” the Emperor Jehangir wrote long ago, “it is this, it is this, it is this.”

In Kashmir’s high valleys, too, was born the legend of Shangri-La. But the real Kashmir is not a place where men and women live as immortals, safe from the ravages of time. Paradise in winter was always ruled by cold-hearted gods. Today, more than ever before, Kashmir is Death’s dominion.

The messages from Kashmir keep coming and the note of desperation in them grows louder all the time. Millions of people are homeless – the number may be as high as 3 million, on both sides of the so-called Line of Control (the India/Pakistan border) the scar of history slicing across the troubled province’s face to divide its India-ruled and Pakistan-ruled sections.

On the Pakistani side, according to the regional Prime Minister Sikander Hayat Khan, 70,000 injured people are in need of attention. But many roads were destroyed by the quake, many others are impassible because of landslides and mudslides, and the Red Cross reports that relief helicopters have sometimes been unable to land because the throngs of desperate people scrambling toward them have been so large. And the United Nations says that, unless more funds are received at once, its fleet of helicopters will have to stop flying in the next few days.

The decision of the Indian and Pakistani governments to open the Line of Control to assist the relief effort is belated, but welcome nonetheless. Without an immediate increase in relief funding, however, it will soon look like a useless gesture. If winter-proof shelters cannot be built in the next month or so, Kashmir will become an icy graveyard in which literally hundreds of thousands of people will freeze to death.

In spite of all the difficulties, the relief effort is taking place. National relief agencies, private charities and many other humanitarian bodies are getting medicine, blankets warm clothing and tents into the affected areas.

But, as one Kashmiri journalist wrote to me, “Nobody can survive the winter in the border villages in a tent.”

Meanwhile, the world seems to be suffering from compassion fatigue. After the eastern tsunami and the Western hurricanes, this is not incomprehensible. But the people of Kashmir deserve better then they are getting. They certainly do not deserve to be subjected to a kind of “political test” of aid-worthiness.

Yet, ever since the day of the earthquake, people in the United States and Europe have been asking me and many others the same politically loaded question: Will the disaster “help”? Will it enable India and Pakistan to sink their differences and, at long last, to make an end in their long Kashmir quarrel?

It has been hard to avoid the conclusion that Western attitudes toward aiding Kashmir depend to some degree the answer to this question being “yes”. Alas, the answer is “no”.

India and Pakistan are still mired in mutual suspicion, as the saga of Indian helicopters reveals: India offered them, but Pakistan refused to accept them unless they were flown by Pakistani pilots, which India in turn refused to accept. Meanwhile the quake victims went right on dying.

Moreover, as the recent murder of a moderate Kashmiri politician showed, and as the bombs in (New) Delhi would seem to confirm, there are Islamist groups who remain determined to sabotage any improvements in Indo-Pakistani relations.

As long as those groups find sanctuary in Pakistan, a peace settlement will be impossible.

All of which should be irrelevant to the matter at hand. For more than half a century the world has turned a blind eye to the political problems of Kashmir. It must not now turn its back on the Kashmiri people.

If the flow of aid does not increase at once, it is probable that more people will die in the earthquake’s wintry aftermath than perished in the quake itself. It is entirely possible that the final death toll will be greater than the tsunami’s. We may be looking at the greatest natural disaster in human history.

But in this case we have the power to avert it. In this case we can send the money to fly the helicopters, tend to the sick and build the winter shelters. If we do this people will live. People who have already lost everything, people whose homes have been destroyed, whose children have been killed in their ruined schools, may yet be prevented from losing their very lives.

If we accomplish this, it will be a great good thing. If we fail – because we are tired of disasters or because Kashmir is far away, remote and quarrelsome, and doesn’t feel like our business – well, then, shame on us. Shame on us who have our homes and our children and cannot care about those who don’t.

I do not want to believe, however, that this avoidable catastrophe will be allowed to occur. But time is very, very short. There is not a day to lose.

PLEASE PRAY FOR KASHMIR AND DONATE TO THE RED CROSS SOUTH ASIA EARTHQUAKE RESPONSE AND DEVELOPMENT

www.redcross.org

The Next POTUS

2005-11-14T21:15:00.000-07:00

DAY 14 – 9:15 PM Hyderabad Time

READING:
The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman
Culture Shock! India by Gitanjali Kolanad
Everyone is Normal Until You Meet Them

DEVOTIONS:
Daniel 6

iPod MUSIC:
nothing

you heard it here first, write it down, Monday, November 14, 2005 – 9:15 PM Hyderabad, India Time…

Mark Warner, former Democratic Governor of Virginia will be the next President Of The United States.

"An angel equipped with a pair of 50-calibre machine guns and a nose cannon ..."

2005-11-13T16:06:00.000-07:00

Sunday, November 13, 2005 – DAY 13 – 4:06 PM Hyderabad Time

READING: The World is Flat, by Thomas Friedman
Culture Shock! India by Gitanjali Kolanad
Everyone is Normal Until You Meet Them by John Ortberg

DEVOTIONS: Daniel 6

iPod MUSIC: Last of the Mohecians soundtrack (It’s actually on my computer this time, not the iPod.)

JUST QUOTES AND OTHER TIDBITS TODAY:

A Baghdad Diary
From The Deccan Chronicle (Hyderabad, India), November 10, 2005

“Just because you’re not paranoid doesn’t mean there out to get you, and someone’s definitely out to get us (journalists based in Baghdad, covering the war in Iraq).”

“(At a US military base in Baghad) There’s a souvenir stall which sells, among other things, hefty silver spoons ordered by Saddam from Christofle in Paris for the Republican Palace emblazoned with the Baath party eagle, a bargain at $15 a pop. I (this journalist) have laid in a supply for future Christmas presents.”

MY FAVORITE QUOTE (from the same article):

“But there is nothing as thrilling as flying in a Black Hawk. To avoid ground fire they fly low and fast, so that you can see car numberplates and shirts on laundry lines billowing as you past. I think this is what it must be like being an angel. An angel equipped with a pair of 50-calibre machine guns and a nose cannon to visit catastrophic retribution on the unrighteous.

THINGS I READ ABOUT IN THE PAPER TODAY …

THE SUDAN: an US deputy secretary of state got into a heated shouting match with a local official at a refugee camp.

MAGIC SPEED BUMPS: in London they are developing and installing electronic speed bumps that automatically flatten for cars traveling the speed limit and grow for seeders

“iT”: a new computer given to the underprivileged people in the world en masse.

MORE QUOTES:

“It’s not easy to host all these countries.
It’s particularly not easy to host, perhaps, me.”

-GEORGE W. BUSH, U.S. President, in a press conference in in Mar del Plato, Argentina, site of a 34-nation Summit of the Americas, where anti-Iraq protestors, calling Bush a “fascist” and a “terrorist” threw Molotoc cocktails and set a building on fire

“The difference from after the Miers nomination was like being at morgue versus being at a combination of a wedding reception, Super Bowl party and bar mitzvah.”

-JORDAN LAWERENCE, member of the Christian conservative Alliance Defense Fund, on Bush taping Judge Samuel Alito--four days after Harriet Miers withdrew her nomination—to replace Sandra Day O’Conner on the U.S. Supreme Court

“I’m saying maybe you put them on TV and cut off a thumb.”

OSCAR GOODMAN, Las Vegas Mayor, in a televised interview, on how to stop graffiti artists defacing the city’s freeways

As a result of China’s drive to succeed, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates argued to me, the "ovarian lottery" has changed—as has the whole relationship between geography and talent. Thirty years ago, he said, if you had the choice between being born a genius on the outskirts of Bombay or Shanghai or being born an average person in Poughkeepsie, you would take Poughkeepsie, because your chances of thriving and living a decent life, even with average talent, were much greater. But as the world has gone flat, Gates said, and so many people can now plug and play from anywhere, natural talent has started to trump geography.

"Now," he said, "I would rather be a genius born in China than an average guy born in Poughkeepsie.”

Thomas Friedman from The World is Flat

"Always tell the truth, that way you don’t have to remember what you said."

Mark Twain

“Fortune favors the prepared mind”

Louis Pasteur

"They live in pipes ..."

2005-11-10T12:14:00.000-07:00

Thursday, November 10, 2005 – DAY 10 – 12:14 PM Hyderabad Time

READING: The World is Flat, by Thomas Friedman
Culture Shock! India by Gitanjali Kolanad
Time Magazine (Asia edition) Noveber 14

DEVOTIONS: Daniel 5 (still)
iPod MUSIC: KBCO Studio C vol. 16 (It’s actually on my computer this time, not the iPod.)

Yesterday we visited the Pipe Village, near our base. What’s the “Pipe Village” you may ask. I did. It’s called “The Pipe Village” because they live in pipes. They live in pipes. Gulp.

So we went out to this village where a community of Indians actually live in big old broken sewer pipes. The village is located next to a pipe factory and the pipes that these people live in (I will try to post some pics) are left over from the factory. The men of the village labor at the pipe factory on a contract basis. They may make $2 for 10 to 12 hours of hard work. Even these people live in such utter poverty, I was told they were happy to have the opportunity to work. (This is not just the white conservative in me, it is the truth J)

We were taken to The Pipe Village by a pastor who has started 3 churches in the area. The other two churches were in areas near a rock quarry. Here the families break rock by hand. The men break off the larger pieces of rock with big mallets and the women break the big rock pieces into smaller pieces. We were told for about a weeks work the families may get $20. One of these villages had a new church paid for by a western organization.

Today, I began my “cultural liaison” duties by picking up two young men from Ireland at the airport. They will be in India for 3 months teaching at some of the Dalit schools, among other things.

QUOTES:

That religion which allows one to touch a foul animal but not a man is not a religion but a madness.

That religion which says one class may not gain knowledge, may not acquire wealth, may not take up arms, is not a religion but a mockery of man’s life.

That religion which teaches that the unlearned should remain unlearned, that the poor should remain poor, is not a religion but a punishment.

Excerpt from a speech by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar

Anxiety

2005-11-09T17:54:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, November 9, 2005 – DAY 9 – 5:54 PM Hyderabad Time

READING: The World is Flat, by Thomas Friedman
Culture Shock! India by Gitanjali Kolanad

DEVOTIONS: Daniel 5

iPod MUSIC: The Black Crows – Greatest Hits (It’s actually on my computer this time, not the iPod.)

Those of you who know me know that I do not worry very much. Of all my faults, I count it a blessing to not be a worrier. Having said that, occasionally I do go though periods of anxiety. I’ve been going through one of those periods for about the last 2 days (nights actually). The last two nights I’ve actually had dreams about this anxiety-causing issue. There is really not much I could do about this situation. I have put in my time and done my best, but now, it is out of my hands. All I can do is give it to God through prayer and wait and have dreams. So anyway, I’ve been praying and waiting and having dreams. I’ve tried my best to give this to God, put my faith in him and trust and be patient.

So I’ve had these dreams. This morning I got an email regarding this issue. This email could have come at any time or never come at all. Though the source of the email has not always been trustworthy, it was encouraging. I feel it was God showing himself to me at the exact necessary time I needed to be shown him. Once again he was telling me not to worry. Trust him. While in India, concentrate in India. Home and the future will be fine as long as you abide in me.

Praise God!

QUOTES:

Every mornig in Africa, a gazelle wakes up
It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed.
Every morning a lion wakes up
It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death.
It doesn’t matter if you are a lion or a gazelle.
When the sun comes up, you better start running.

African proverb

Oh God, when I am wrong, make me easy to change and when I am right, make me easy to live with.

Church

2005-11-08T13:54:00.000-07:00

Tuesday, November 8, 2005 – DAY 8 – 1:54 PM Hyderabad Time

READING: The World is Flat, by Thomas Friedman
Culture Shock! India by Gitanjali Kolanad
DEVOTIONS: Daniel 5

iPod MUSIC: Tom Petty – Wildflowers (It’s actually on my computer this time, not the iPod.)

Sunday was church. There is a church here on campus and it was “Junior Church” (Sunday School) Sunday. The service was centered on the youth. There was everything from songs from the children’s choir to recitation of Bible verses to a drama. The highlight was when some of the kids got up to say the books of the Bible. Children of all ages had been working on it for some time with the reward of chocolate being promised upon successful completion. Now, the size of the reward was reverse proportional. So the cutest thing, when a 3 ½-year old stood up, perfectly recited all 66 books in order and received “big chocolate”.

This week I am helping with a pastors’ conference. It is for all the pastors in the denomination in this state. The organization and denomination brought in 5 speakers from the US and UK to speak to, encourage and train the 150 or so pastors. Some of these pastors are from very rural areas of India and are serving God and their villages on a shoestring budget. One pastor in particular works 3 days a week as a day laborer, 3 days a week meeting with and evangelizing his village and Sunday preaching. Many of these pastors are threatened by the anti-Christian movement, threats include the raping of wives and breaking of legs if they continue their ministry. Please pray for India and specifically the Christian pastors of Utter Predesh.

QUOTES:

The Lord said to him, “What is in your hand?” He said, “A staff.” And he said, “Throw it on the ground.” So he threw the staff on the ground, and it became a snake; and Moses drew back from it. Then the Lord said, “Reach out your hand, and seize it by the tail”—so he reached out his hand and grasped it, and it became a staff in his hand—“so they may believe that the Lord, the God of their ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, has appeared to you.”

Exodus 4:2-5

The images that the word “India” conjures up are diverse and often contradictory, suggesting that on must be the real India, and it’s only a matter of finding out which one. If only it were that simple! To understand India at all, you must be able to hold on to completely contradictory images, and realize that both represent the true India.

Gitanjali Koland from Culture Shock! India

Motorcycles

2005-11-05T00:44:00.000-07:00

Friday, November 4, 2005 – DAY 4 – 11:44 PM Hyderabad Time

READING: The World is Flat, by Thomas Friedman
DEVOTIONS: Daniel 3
iPod MUSIC: Simon and Garfunkel – Concert in Central Park It’s actually on my computer this time, not the iPod.

So I have officially ridden motorcycles on 4 continents (North America, The Scared Valley in Peru with my sister, Agina, an island off of Greece and now Hyderabad, India) well maybe they weren’t all “motorcycles”, maybe motorbikes or mopeds or Vespas (for you Saved fans, all two of you out there.

Jackson, the husband of the volunteer coordinator and IT project coordinator for the organization I am working with, knew I ride a motorcycle back home, so basically he has lent me his bike for my time in Hyderabad. Now this “motorcycle” is a late model Honda CBZ Hero 135 (cubic centimeters, a small bike)—with a kickstart, but it has a little zip and can get me around.

Riding in India makes any bike exciting. So I rode around a little during the day (very exciting and fun and definitely doable, since I was following Jackson on another bike. We had some close calls, but no big deal—don’t worry, Mom and Anna and Cameran, I’m wearing a helmet) and then tonight I rode to Jackson and Samantha’s house, following one volunteer in a rickshaw with the other on the back of the bike because Friday is pizza, sitcom, movie and Desperate Housewives night. Now their place is not all that far away and this would be the second time I had been there today, but on the way out in the dark the other volunteers informed me they would be spending the night and not returning to the complex with me.

“Oh really,” I thought. I wish I had known that before I had decided to take a motorbike out in a new city in a foreign country in the dark.

So we ate pizza and watched sitcoms and a movie and Desperate Housewives and then I decided to stat the trek home.

I got directions from one of the volunteers: “Here’s the easiest way, there’s some speed bumps, but it is the way I would go: Right out of here. Left to a “T”. Right. Left to a “T” and then Right. Then your on the main road. Take a Right at the statue and then follow that down to the complex on the right.

Whatever, dude! But I really had no choice. OK, God, here we go. Now, I’ve got the riding the bike part down, now it’s the staying on the LEFT side of the street I need to concentrate on. Stay on the left, Stay on the left. Look RIGHT first when turning RIGHT.

Right Turn. Left. Speed Bump. Speed Bump. Right Turn . Speed Bump. STAY ON THE LEFT. Left Turn. LOOK RIGHT. Right Turn. Main Road. Pass on the RIGHT.. OK, no statue, but that looks like the intersection where I turned on the way here. Turn Right. OK. Pick up speed. I hope I’m going the right direction, what if I’m not. I wish this stupid headlight worked better. Would I ever be able to find my way back to the apartment? Will I end up spending the night on the side of the side of the road? I hope I’m going the right way. I guess I’ll find out soon enough. Street Lights would be nice. How we doing, God? I’m insane. Ain’t it cool? OK this looks familiar. OK. There is the complex, on my right across a large cement and grass median, the main road and a frontage road. Great! There it is, but how do I get there? Where do I cross the median. Literally, seven minutes later in the pitch black dark, I find a place to cross the median, turn around and head back to the complex.

I made it, but it was crazy! That’s all I can say. I was hoping to pray more on this trip, but hopefully, during the rest of the trip, it will be more for others and less for me.

Earlier in the day I met with Samantha, the volunteer coordinator for a brief orientation. I now have a broader idea of what the time here will look like, a somewhat better idea of what I will be doing, at least for the next two weeks and a better overview of the organization with which I am working.

I came to India with the hopes of working with the several western short-term teams, medical and otherwise that come to India as a sort of cultural liaison, logistics coordinator. It looks like I will get to do some of that down the road. Eventually, I think I will be helping coordinate logistics for incoming teams, assisting team orientation, working alongside the teams when they are here and helping with debriefing as the go.

This week there is a conference of international pastors the I will be helping with however I can and next week I will be at one of the Dalit (lower castes, “untouchable”) schools, observing, teaching and assisting with some video production.

I will write more about the organization I am working with later as I experience much more firsthand.

TTFN,

-sl