Technology

Every time I come back there is more new technology. This time it is computers on the phone. I have called places and computers answered. My years in Southeast Asia have apparently destroyed my accent. The computers usually can’t understand what I say. But that means that I usually eventually get to talk to a real person. Sometimes the voice just reads you a long list of buttons to push, after which another computer voice may tell you to push more buttons and so on. I have even been called by computers asking me to press one for English or two for Spanish. I just hang up. I guess if it doesn’t know whether I use English or Spanish, then it probably isn’t a computer I know. 

I noticed that the announcer at the SW airport is the same as the announcer on the Weather Channel. Maybe that’s the one they call Microsoft Sam. He is everywhere.

This is one of those changes that maybe isn’t so good. For example, if you are late paying your credit card, Sam will call you all day long until he gets you. He is not fooled by answering machines. He won’t leave a message until he has called at least 2 dozen times. Then he will finally leave a message. But he doesn’t tell you what he wants. He expects YOU to call some number and remember some impossibly long pin number to retrieve the message.

Maybe those call centers in India aren’t such a bad thing after all.

Travel – Southwest

My next trip was to the southwest. I was really looking forward to the warmer weather. In fact I initially packed as if I was going to the tropics but fortunately a quick check of internet brought me to my senses. It wasn’t THAT warm! Nevertheless it was pleasant to not be cold. I was able to leisurely walk around and see life up close at one of those legendary senior summer camps the area is known for.














Got some great pictures of palm tree cell phone towers and even a windmill cell tower! (Regular cell tower for comparison.)

I was also intrigued by a log cabin mobile home and an adobe mobile home I saw. There was a giant flea market too selling all kinds of stuff including cheap junk fron C--- like I can get in the third of my worlds. It didn’t seem very crowded compared to Asian equivalents, but that was good because the people were a lot taller and I wouldn’t have had my usual advantage of being head and shoulders above everybody else and able to breathe.
There was a steady rain all day and night before I left. It wouldn’t have been a big deal in the tropics but locals said it was extremely unusual and they seemed to have trouble driving in it. The next day that storm blew us all the way back to my home area, pushing us 100mph faster than normal. But somewhere along the way it froze. As we slid down the runway upon landing, we could see that we had landed in a winter wonderland. The winter wonderland continued falling and blowing all the way home in fact. This is the kind of weather that SUVs were made for with their 4-wheel drive and height. It’s probably why there are still so many of them around.

Travel - Northwest

I have been busy travelling recently. First I went to the NW corner of the country where all the fabulous scenery was hidden in the fog. It was dark and gloomy and rainy but brightened by numerous coffee shops on every other corner. I still kind of dread coffee shops, though. All the decisions. But at`least if you make your friends go first it gives you an extra minute or two to make up your mind. My cognitively challenged brother has developed a strategy to answer multiple choice questions – he always chooses the last choice. Hmm. Maybe I should try that at the next coffee shop.

It’s not just that you are confronted with 25 choices of basic coffee – most of which you have never heard of and have no idea what you might be getting in to. But you have to choose regular or decaf, or even a combo. Then it’s light, dark, or medium roast. (I wonder if anybody would like village char-roast??) Size is not something simple like small, medium, or large. In fact some workers are so snobbish that they pretend they don’t know the meanings of those words! If you’ve actually gotten that far, it is advisable to just grab your coffee and run. If you don’t, they will continue pestering you with questions: do you want milk? What kind and what flavor? Low fat? Do you want it heated? What about flavoring in the coffee? How many shots? Do you want to leave room for cream? Would you like something to go with your coffee?

Most churches in my home area have served coffee before or after the service for years. But in the NW they have latte bars in churches – and as a visitor I got a free latte!  I guess it’s caffeine buzz that keeps everybody in that city going during these gloomy months.

Winter

Winter is definitely here. There’s at least 12 inches of it on the ground and more in the air. It is colder than when I first arrived so I am adding layers to the layers. (If this keeps up I’ll soon be too fat to walk!) I am told that one of the Eskimo languages has 14 words for snow. Here we just use descriptive phrases since English has only one word so we add words like powdery, fluffy, wet, hard and dry. Sometimes it is sloppy to walk in, other times it is soft and quiets everything. But when it gets really cold it squeaks and can make the world pretty noisy.
 

Driving becomes interesting too and can be very much more time-consuming. Everyone slows down a little when it is snowing, and you would think that traffic would move along at a slightly slower speed, but for some reason when everybody’s “slowing down a little” is added up it becomes gridlock. I am sure there must be some obscure mathematical formula involved....

Products multiply

The numbers of products continues to muliply exponentially. I finally visited a large grocery store and counted 187 kinds of cold cereals (I did not count the cooked cereals nor the big bulk packages.) In the second of my worlds they still mainly have corn flakes and rice crispies. In the third of my worlds they have three more kinds plus now several imported cereals - mostly of the granola type. What was most apalling with the 187 were the candy flavored cereals!

I saw somebody drinking a vanilla zero coke(?) product the other day. Sigh! I suppose I should now go count the kinds of "carbonated beverages"! That's usually another entire aisle.

In the other two of my worlds it is the powdered milk aisle that is growing exponentially - they have milk drinks for all age groups. The differences are that some are flavored, calcium enriched, fat reduced, vitamin enriched, filled, or otherwise enhanced with some additives of some sort.

It is said that variety is the spice of life. On the other hand, is it worth it to spend so much time every day mulling over which product to choose for that day? Here's my list, so far, of rules for wasting less time on decision-making:

1. For grocery shopping, the best rule of thumb is, the less processed, the better. (that almost eliminates the cereal aisle right there, not to mention the soda aisle!) You don't waste much time reading the ingredient list on a bag of apples!
2. Go to smaller stores. You save time by not having to decide among so many products plus you aren't hiking 17 miles and will have energy left over for something more important.

Early impressions

Now that I've been here a whole two weeks I am well over jet lag and starting to look around.

It's Halloween, something I had quite forgotten about after all these years. Stores are decked out as well as people's yards. The local discount store has about half an acre of space devoted to costumes, decorations, candy, plastic Halloween treat buckets, etc. There's been a definite shift to the realistic or should I say surrealistic and macabre.

It is cold and blustery (50 F or 10 degrees C.) At least I think it's cold. But locals are running around with just a vest. I've even seen several women still wearing capris.

Interestingly enough, I can buy mutton and buffalo meat at the local grocery store, both guaranteed to be antibiotic free. But fish is pretty hard to find. Maybe I need to look in the freezer section! People seem to eat very little vegetables, unless french fries and chips are considered to be vegetables???? Most of the fruit I miss is no longer in stores. It's mostly apples, oranges, bananas, with a few pears. No berries, peaches, melons, sigh!

TV is full of SEX and, well, blasphemy. Every other commercial seems to be about viagra. Many other drugs are also advertised in commercials. I guess the purpose is so that people will run off to their doctors and ask for those things???

Next project: count the kinds of cold cereal....

It's cold!

I have now arrived in the first of my worlds, am pretty much over jet lag, and can finally connect to the internet. (Now the challenge will be to try to keep warm enough that my fingers won’t be too stiff to type!) My first impression was that I was arriving in a police state. There were signs up as we approached the immigration hall announcing that we were entering a federal something-or-other zone and no cell phones, cameras, recording devices were permitted to be used while in the zone. We lined up and even the citizens’ line which is usually fast-moving was real slow. We also got to watch a couple of officials, hands on hip, chew out an Asian-looking guy. Real welcoming sight....

After being duly intimidated, we got to pick up our luggage and waltz thru customs and on out into the frigid rain. Brrr!

Did I mention that it was cold? One way to keep warm is to keep moving. And that is what I have done, getting back into the swing of driving at high speeds in the rain on the right side of the road, and visiting folk, going to a conference, grocery shopping, etc.

Not only is it cold, it is dark. Now that I am over jet lag I will have to use an alarm clock if I hope to get up at a reasonable time! After years of using the sun as a clock, it's a bit disorienting to have such a short day! And it will only get shorter!!

World switch

I have been travelling so much lately that sometimes it’s a challenge to keep my worlds straight! I just arrived in world 3 a week ago after having been in world 2 for a month. Now I am about to leave for world 1 for a couple of months. This requires not only a major adjusment in packing because of climatic considerations, but also a major reshuffle of the mental filing cabinet.

If you think of the human brain as a sort of filing system, then you can think of information being stored in files. So a big part of this travel is to keep the appropriate file folders at the front. Since it's been two years since I was last in the first of my worlds I have to dig out and dust off the world 1 files. They no doubt also need to be updated.

The file folders for the first of my worlds are quite fat. I need to re-remember names of places, streets, and products and update what has changed. I have to try to get back into time-consciousness. I won't be able to depend on the sun for my clock. I will also be driving a lot more as public transportation is non-existant where I will be (but at least road-construction season should be almost over!). Plus the whole of social interaction is different.

Anyhow, I will try to update this blog as I land jet-lagged into the midst of world 1. Stay tuned! :-)

Proposals

The latest rage in the second of my worlds is proposals. I do not know where all the money is coming from, but everybody and their uncle seems to be writing proposals for funding. Even in the village they recently made a proposal for government funding to repair a roadside canal that has been leaking all over the road for the last 10 years, and to repair the road that has been damaged by the water.

A lady who teaches at a public high school said that her school had recently put together a proposal for a computer lab for the school. She had suggested asking for flash drives as well and they got them. Another village wrote a proposal for 2000 cacao seedlings and got them. This has now gotten them all excited about writing funding proposals for other things.

Friends in other areas though, were more gloomy about the current rage of proposal writing, citing many proposals wrtten, projects started and not finished, people neglecting their jobs, neglecting the maintainance of their farms or other livelihood because of the glitter of easy money through writing proposals. They fear a big let down when the free money stops, which inevitably it will some day.

A particularly hare-brained proposal I heard about at the provincial level is the plan to build a sugar cane processing factory in the driest village in the province which also happens to sit right smack on the main tectonic fault line. There is plenty of hot sulphur water available but not fresh water. There is currently no sugar cane available so the plan is apparently to deforest a large remote mountain valley and convert the whole thing to 10,000 hectares of sugar cane fields. That valley is currently only accessible by 5 hours of hiking from the end of the road so massive amounts of money will be required to build roads. Then all that sugar cane will have to be transported over major mountains to get to the dry village where the processing factory is to be built. Instead of building the factory on the coast downriver from the valley where water is abundant, they decided to cross over two ranges of higher mountains upstream and build it 30 km inland and then will have to transport sugar another 45 km to the nearest seaport.

The factory is also supposed to produce biofuel and other substances for a total of 7 products. Biofuel is the latest rage in the west and apparently there is big money available for funding. Usually the budget for road building is twice the actual cost because of all the pilfering that is expected to occur. So I can see the attraction of all that money and all that, uh, opportunity.

Fasting Again

15 September 2007

Once again it is the time of the annual fast. Economically, this time is a boon to merchants and a bane to household finances much as Christmas has been in the West. The local village market is already selling prayer clothes and Arabic-style month-of-fasting finery. Many people buy new prayer clothes at this time of year. This is sarongs for men and women, black hats and long-sleeved shirts for men and long white head coverings for women long enough to cover the arms too and leave only the face showing. Many people, especially professionals who have a lot of public events to attend this month, buy special Arabic-style finery to wear. This is ornate pantsuits with long-sleeved tunics or long dresses and fancy head coverings for women, and long fancy shirts for men.

Out in the village there aren’t many professionals so farmers at the local market would mainly be buying new sarongs, new headcoverings, new flip flops for everybody in the family plus a new outfit for everybody in the family but not necessarily Arab style. The women buy baking ingredients for the annual cookie baking: flour, sugar, shortening, eggs, spices, glass jars, cookie cutters and molds, maybe a new box oven to use on top of a kerosene burner. People often like to do home improvement at this time – paint the house, buy new appliances. Motorbike sales boom at this time of the year with special fasting-month terms of credit. Shops have later hours to accomodate the crowds.

It is the custom here to pay employees an extra month’s salary at their special holiday time. So Muslims get it now, Christians at Christmas, and other religions at their main holiday. But even so, people are scrambling for extra money at this time of year. So there are lots of door-to-door salesmen selling sarongs, prayer clothes, footwear, medicines, plasticware, and gadgets. Women have not been left behind. In recent years there has been an increase in the number of small stalls springing up where women sell cooked food in the late afternoon for the convience of folks who fast all day and don’t feel up to cooking. (Not only Muslims take advantage of the extra foodstalls!)

In recent years the government has started getting into decorating. Usually it has been lights, asking every household to put up a bamboo arch with lights or something of that sort. But this year they have lighted artifical coconut trees in the center of main roads! In the land of acres of real coconut plantations, it seems to me just a little bit bizarre! But what do I know? The locals seem to think it’s pretty cool.

Bureaucrats-in-training

14 September 2007

Communication is difficult in this place. It can partly be blamed on a lack of great infrastructure. But mostly it can be blamed on the human factor.

News flies faster by word of mouth here than it does on the internet. Yet, how accurate is that news? It would make a great research topic.

A friend of mine here has been applying to become a civil servant for years. She has submitted countless applications with countless supporting documentation. Yet it seems there is never an end to it. What people need to submit in the application process seems to be forever in flux. In fact it seems to be passed down word of mouth from the national capital, much like the old game “telephone”. Because no matter how diligent they are to submit all the requirements they’ve been told to submit, inevitably there is always some other thing that wasn’t submitted that nullifies everybody’s application. Perhaps the local bureauocrats weren’t listening attentatively and failed to pass on the complete list?

The central government claims there is a teacher shortage. So it agrees to hire temporary teachers at ¼ the salary with the promise that after a year they can appy to be civil servants after which they will receive full salary. But the years roll by and they are still hanging, having submitted their “folios” several times. If one was conspiracy minded one might just begin to wonder if it wasn’t all deliberate to save the government some money, as these people struggle valiently on at ¼ salary ever hoping, and at their own expense filing application after application, having to even make their own copies of the application forms and the folders to store them in at their own personal expense. Every time there’s another announcement about submitting new applications they spend more time running around getting copies and signatures and standing in lines than they do teaching. The local provincial level of government is very adept at diverting funds from the central government.

Finally, after 5 years one friend has been told that several of them have been accepted and will have a 20-day training next month (which they must pay for – 8 months worth of the “temporary teacher” salary they have been scraping by with.) After the training, it is said they will receive their official letter. For another whopping fee no doubt.

This is how new bureauocrats are trained. Is it any wonder if they too seek to milk the system to recup their losses when they finally get accepted?

My favorite airport

September 10 2007

Well, I made it to the village about midnight. It took three flights to get here. The airport just before this place is one of the noisiest places in earth. Just sitting in it for 6 hours is enough to exhaust you for a week! People jabbering, suitcases clackity-clacking, cell phones ringing and beeping - all on extra high volume. People don’t seem to know how to change their ringtones or maybe they just all like the default so it’s easy to tell who has a Sony-Erickson, who has a Nokia and who has a Motorola by the tone. Because it was so noisy, people had to shout to be heard on their cell phones. In addition kids were screaming, televisions and radios blaring, and of course the endless announcements: “For operational reasons flight XYZ will be delayed...”. And don't forget the noise of the jets outside.

When I first arrived there was no place to sit. Several plane-loads of passengers were still sitting there, their flights delayed because the vice president had been visiting and was leaving and as a matter of "respect" no other planes were permtted to land or take off until his party had finished their leave-taking ceremonies and departed. So I toured the bookshops with my heavy carry-ons. The coffee shops were full too but finally I spotted somebody leaving and managed to scoot in and grab their table and was able to have some coffee and swap my cellphone SIMs around. Finally planes started taking off and I was even able to find a seat right in front of the air conditioner! (It took over an hour before I got cold enough to move.)

Not only is that airport noisy but it is minimally cooled. They have a special smoking lounge but the air seems to get recycled into the general atmosphere anyway. So it is not the most pleasant place to have to spend 6 hours and today my respiratory system is feeling it. However, there has been a small improvement, they painted the translucent glass partitions in the women's bathroom! It is no longer see through!

Rants from the mayor

The mayor of this city has a weekly television appearance where he can rant about his current annoyances. It is kind of like giving public warning. Since the show is on Sunday afternoons that means that the Monday paper has a rehash of the highlights.

A few weeks ago he was ranting about the slow (ie non-existent) progress on replacing the bridge that collapsed last April. The latest word is that construction will start some time this month and will hopefully finish by next March.

This week the mayor is annoyed because a certain hotel in town does not comply with the mayor’s smoking ban which states that there is to be no smoking in public areas and that businesses must designate smoking areas. The hotel apparently has a lot of Korean guests and Korean businessmen are reputed to be big time smokers. So the mayor’s rant included coments about how Koreans also had to obey the law. Well, actually the hotel feels that it DOES comply with the law because it has declared the entire hotel a smoking area. Unfortunately for the hotel, the mayor is not impressed and has threatened to close it down if it does not comply.

The other noteworthy rant this week was against the boys who sell durien candy at the bus terminal. It seems these young lads have adopted a new business technique. They board the busses and sit in the seats with their wares. Then they insist that when the passengers board and wish to sit down they must first either buy a box of durien candy at double the normal price or else pay the boy a fee. I guess it is a seat warming fee? Anyway the mayor ordered the terminal officials to stop the boys’ illegal activity or the officials would face his wrath.

Remember that in this country, the mayor is king. Stay tuned for more rants from the mayor...

On-going saga of crashed plane

Remember the mysterious plane crash nine months ago? (See posts of January 5 and 25 and February 1.) Well, after months of dithering over who would pay for it, a US or Cypriot salvage ship (depending on the reporter) was finally hired by the airline to go retrieve the black boxes. The ship was equipped with sonar, underwater cameras and an unmanned robot capable of going as deep as 6,000 meters (20,000 feet). The ship arrived in the region last week. It took a few days to finish the last paperwork details before it was finally permitted to proceed to the crash site. It sounds like it was almost overladen with rubber-necking officials, local and foreign, as it churned its way to the site. Nevertheless it finished its mission in short order. Today it was announced that both black boxes were retrieved from a depth of around 2000 meters. Local papers mentioned that other wreckage assumed to be from the plane was also retrieved from the sea floor but that no human remains had been spotted. After 9 months I suppose not. The black boxes were immediately sent to the US and some reporters opined that they would be read within the week and analyzed within a month. I’m not holding my breath, but I am very curious as to the findings.

Sina's Feet

In case you were wondering, Sina's feet are better now after having kept them wrapped in banana leaves all week. Hmmm, maybe we could patent it???

Another war

There’s a war going on south of here, with government troops fighting against rebels. (Actually this sort of off-and-on skirmishing has been going on for years, decades even. But a couple of months ago the rebels beheaded nearly a dozen soldiers so the government sort of feels it can’t just let that go. Thus the current war.) We are told that the rebels may try to take it out on civilians so we should expect security will be tighter here too.

They took the unusual precaution of starting to check baggage on passenger ships now. For their efforts, the other day they found a guy bringing a sack of bananas and sweet potatoes on a ship travelling to the capital. And deep inside the sack was also a grenade and another explosive. It’s part of the local culture to bring a gift, especially food, for those you are visiting or for those at home when you return from a trip. But not usual at all to bring them explosives.

Bus bombings in the rural areas occur all too often as well. A couple of weeks ago a local pastor was killed when a bomb went off in some baggage at a bus terminal. He was standing near the pile of bags waiting for his wife to return from the ladies’ room.

Two other bombs were found and defused this past week. Some of these bombings are thought to be related to extortionists who plant bombs in buses when their demands aren’t met. Only explosives experts can tell extortionist bombings apart from rebel retaliation bombings. For the dead and injured, it’s all the same. Passengers are mostly gratified to now have their bags checked before being allowed to load them on the bus.

Things I do not understand

There are some things I still do not understand.

Today I got a series of frantic text messages from the second of my worlds about Sina. Sina is semi paralyzed. 30 years ago she was playing Tarzan and fell off of a jungle swing and damaged her spine. She recovered to the point of being able to get around with two long sticks. But in recent years her legs have gotten weaker and she has more difficulty walking at all. She’s really into warm water compresses, pehaps it makes her legs feel better or maybe she feels it will have some healing powers. But since her legs have gotten weaker, she also has less sensation in her feet. She has burned herself several times with water that was too hot. Last year she burned her feet and decided to treat the foot with local herbs to make it heal faster. So she applied the herbs and wrapped the foot in plastic for several days. I ended up treating her for the beginnings of gangrene in the tips of two toes. Thankfully after two courses of Cipro, ands lots of exposure to the air they did eventually heal. (I don’t think you want to hear about the smell!!)

Well, it seems she has once again burned her feet. Although by now she has a lot of experience with how long it takes for burns to heal, she wanted it to happen faster. So she allowed somebody to come and try a “new treatment” on her: one liter of salt mixed with 1 liter of kerosene plus the equivalent of a liter-sized chunk of ice. They soaked her feet in it. They said at first her feet got hard like ice and then after the ice melted they swelled and blistered. So now her state is MUCH worse than at first and she is in a lot of pain. So they are texting me asking what to do.

Why, oh why would they do such a thing??!!! Did they think “magic” would somehow offset the innate characteristics of the ingredients??? Normal skin would blister with such treatment, how much more burned skin!!! My friend here says maybe it’s because they didn’t go to school. But I don’t recall ever having any teacher telling us not to soak our feet in ice, kerosene and salt, do you?

Maybe there’s a lesson in there somewhere about trying to force things along faster than they’re meant to go?

What is normal?

I was writing to a friend who is in the US for a couple of months and told her things seem normal here. But what’s normal?

Normal here means that you expect to have your bag checked every time you go to the grocery store, the hospital, malls or any biggish store. When things are “tense” you might even get a pat down at the malls. You can expect as many as four searches (two x-ray and sometimes up to two hand searches of bags) at the airport not including the security check of the car you arrive in.

Normal also means that if you should bother to look up the weather forcast on the internet it would invariably say 60% chance of rain and thunderstorms. I am not actually sure what that means. It certainly doesn’t rain 60% (14.4 hours) of the day. But it does rain on far more than 219 days (60%) in the year. In fact it typically rains for at least a short while almost every day. So, I am not quite sure what exactly it means to say that there is a 60% chance of rain.

Normal means you can spend a fair amount of time standing in lines at ATM machines because most things are still paid for in cash. Some big stores take credit cards but since the system is off-line so often, it is usually much faster to pay cash. You also spend a fair amount of time standing in lines to pay utilities. They do not have a system for mailing checks or automatic deductions, but the telephone company does have a cool touch screen machine you can use if you pay by check.

Normal means that the rich have body guards – even when they go to the dentist.

Normal means that aside from the school year, you keep track of the passage of time by what fruits are in season.

Normal means that your doctor keeps your medical record on index cards. Normal means that you can get lab work and most tests done today, or tomorrow at the latest, and you can pick up the results the same day or the next.

Normal means that traffic flows better without traffic cops.

Normal means that at least one of your neighbors raises roosters for cock fighting. (So you never need an alarm clock.)

Normal means that somebody in the general neigborhood is having a party with BIG speakers on any given evening, though a recent city ordinence has limited most of it to before 10pm on school nights.

And normal means that it is not smart to use illegal drugs in this town. Killings of drug users and pushers still occur weekly by mysterious perpetrators.

The Church of the Attitudes, Er, Beatitudes

Our visit to the Church of the Beatitudes was very memorable. In addition to all the signs, we had a nun shouting at us, and a rude group of Yankees behind us. 15 minutes before it was their turn to use the "celebration site" they were already making comments in LOUD voices like, "They said they know there's another group coming but they're still sitting there." And while our devotional leader was closing in prayer, "Come on, amen, already! Amen, already!"

Actually, despite the attitudes, it is a very beautiful place. The church is very attractive inside and out and it is located in a lovely spot, with manicured lawns, trees, flowers and a wonderful view of Lake Galilee below.

Yad Vashem

One of the first things I did on my trip to Israel was to visit the Yad Vashem holocaust museum. In fact, I went almost as soon as we landed, despite having been travelling for over 30 hours with little sleep!

The memorial park consists of several buildings and is spread over 45 acres of park land. We quickly visited a few of the monuments, because we wanted to get in on an English tour of the museum which would be starting in a hour. One was a children’s memorial which was more a work of art than anything else. You entered a darkened building with glass walled corriders inside looking in towards the center which had tiny pinpoints of light, perhaps mulitplied with the use of mirrors in the darkness. A disembodied voice quietly read out names and ages of children who died in the holocaust along with the name of their hometown. They say over 1.5 million children died.

The Holocaust History Museum was a relatively new partially underground building. It in itself was a work of art. The beginning of the exhibitions was in the darkened underground part and the guide said that symbolized the horror of the holocaust. But the end of the tour was in a lighter section of the building that opened out onto an overlook on the hillside looking across a valley giving a panoramic view of Jerusalem. That symbolized the light and hope that came out of the darkness as Jews were finally allowed to live in their own land.

The museum was arranged in more or less chronological order so we got the feel of the increasing darkness as early signs of what was to come in the form of the signs
of the times and ominous warnings to Jews in Europe. Most of course couldn’t believe it and continued to live as they always had. The guide emphasized how Jews were lulled into going to the camps meekly. They couldn’t believe their homeland would do this to them. Then there were exhibits of the roundups, the ghettos, the camps. The museum had many artifacts such as clothing, diaries, books, and personal belongings of Jews who had been rounded up and sent to camps. There were photographs of people and documentary footage of some of the horrors taken by the Nazis themselves such as bodies being bulldozed.. They used footage of starving Jewish children to show Germans how subhuman Jews were to let their kids starve.There were also videotaped interviews with survivors of the concentration camps as well as written comments from diaries and journals. And how Germans and others turned there faces away and didn’t want to believe it. Not only Germans, but also Americans, the British, Australians.

Near the end of the building was a large exhibit called the Hall of Names. It is a large domed chamber with bookshelves from floor to ceiling half filled with ledgers. The ledgers were filled with testimony pages – each one with the name, address, and any known facts about someone who died in the holocaust. They said they had accumulated 2.5 million names so far submitted by friends and relatives and were appealing for more before the memories were lost. The dome was covered with photographs of men, women and children who had died.


Although I was beyond fatigued, I found the exhibitions as a whole profoundly disturbing. Not just because of what had happened but the realization that it could so easily happen again, and probably will, not just to Jews but to others too. In fact, on a smaller scale in many places it is already beginning - the dehumanizing and marginalizing of certain groups of people, aided by the press and government and religious and civic leaders. While the masses turn their faces away, not wanting to see. God help us!

Pictures: 1. mine 2.and 4. from http://www1.yadvashem.org/ 3. from http://robsreg.blogspot.com/

Talisay

I feel like I’ve been gone a long time! I guess it has been nearly 3 months. The talisay tree in our back garden has reached unprecedented heights. Our poor neighbor in the back must be getting annoyed- he was out there this morning with a ladder trying to whack off a few of the lower branches overhanging the wall. (He has sort of taken over the alley behind our wall as part of his personal property and hates sweeping up the leaves, though the season for that has already passed.) Sigh! We have been pestering the landlord since December to trim the tree and so have our neighbors on the left. The shade is pretty nice, though. It makes it about 10 degrees cooler out back. Plus we have LOTS of birds hanging around. Some of them, the wagtails, have taken lately to bathing in the cats’ water dish, much to the cats’ annoyance! That particular type of bird bobs and wags it’s tail constantly. Extremely attractive to cats! But when they have young they mercilessly dive-bomb any cat or dog in the neighborhood.


But back to the tree. Talisay trees are popular shade trees because they tolerate poor soil and grow easily. They can be cut back every year and will grow again. They have big leaves which they shed once a year, making it a pain to clean the mess at the time but at least it's only once a year. They are common shade trees on beaches around here. As I was looking for a photo to post here I found out that these trees are called tropical almond trees and the fruit is supposed to be edible. I have never seen anybody here eat it, maybe because it looks like it would be a challenge to get the husk open. But those pesky bats (which are STILL hanging around under the roof and, uh, dripping down the wall) have accumulated quite a pile of the fruits under my window. Hmmm. Guess it's good to know in case of emergency that I have a food stockpile outside. I'll have to look a little closer and see if the bats have figured out how to open them....

Racket emanating

Nowdays you never know what to expect when you go to church. The other week I went to a small church in the middle of what a few decades ago was dense jungle, but now is a sprawling town in the middle of a swamp with no jungle in sight. A lot of places are getting these electronic keyboards these days. This church was no exception. I soon had to roll up wads of tissue and jam into my ears to make the acoustics bearable. The keyboardist seemed to think his job was to drown out any sign of human vocalizations. He even played during the prayers, loud enough to drown them out too. The sermon was also broadcast around the neighborhood, though I did not detect any signs of a crowd gathering outside to hang on the preacher’s words. In fact the two guys across the road digging a ditch continued their work oblivious to the racket emanating from the church. This was not a charismatic church either. (Those can usually be heard in the next county.) I must confess. I have sometimes wondered if the noise could possibly play a small part in some of the church burnings that occur in this country....

Leaving river town

I have just finished two weeks in this river town. The skies are beginning to get hazy as the rainy season ends and the annual smoke season is about to begin. People I talked to about the smoke all seemed unconcerned about it. They seemed surprised that it affected the next island over. They knew a neighboring country had been complaining in recent years but seemed unaware that it affected anybody else. In fact they talked bout times when they couldn’t see a meter in front of them with the same sort of pride that people in the first of my worlds would boast about it being so cold their spit froze before hitting the ground.

The event I was helping with was attended by people from three local ethnic groups. One thing I appreciate about people in these areas – they are not inhibited. They are who they are and don’t seem to angst over not being like somebody else. They may be envious over somebody else’s acquired goods, but not over others’ talents. If someone can sing, great! If they aren’t so good at singing, it doesn’t matter, they sing anyway.

At the closing ceremony, one older man prayed an incredibly long prayer. It must have lasted almost half an hour, and he covered everything! I don’t think there was one thing he didn’t pray for. Some folk in the audience were starting to smile as he would take a breath and start in on yet another topic. But he was very, very serious. In fact he was pacing back and forth facing away from the audience as if he were in God’s very presence, oblivious of the rest of us.

As we parted, most of the folk were facing two days of travel to get home. This province is more or less flat but is crossed by 7 parallel rivers flowing from north to south which have no bridges. So in order to travel, you have to go down to a big city on the coast and then go east or west to the river you want and then up the road (if there is one) or up that river. So they would take a 5 hour bus trip to the big city where they would spend the night. Then the next day some had a boat trip to their river, others could take a bus which would cross the rivers near the coast and then turn north to their home village.

I too had a two day trip to get home, zigzagging around southeast Asia following the air route hubs. I spent the night in an airport hotel in a small country in between. But my travel was by air and definitely much more comfortable than travelling by bus. (Plus, that airport has a wonderful English book store!)

Big lazy river

Well, here I am at last in the smokey place! Actually at this time of year it is not yet smokey. It is still the rainy season although it doesn’t necessarily rain every day any more. It is very, very flat here with a big lazy river winding through. From the air the ground appears green and covered with bushes, but with no particular crops nor any forest. The place where the town is located is very sandy and while not particularly swampy right now, there are plenty of frog noises and wetland grasses. I am told that much of the land isn’t really producing anything. The forest has been cut down and even efforts at reforestation have failed because of the annual burning season when fire spreads from one place to another and gets into the peat where it can smoulder for months and is difficult to extinguish. Locals burn off the land to provide a bit of charcoal to fertilize the growing of a few vegetables but they say the soil is not very fertile. Repeated burning probably doesn’t help the fertility either. Since arriving last week, I have several times been served oil palm heart cooked as a vegetable, so there must be some oil palm plantations in the area.

This afternoon we went to a very unique riverside park which has rows of little huts on stilts with dock-like walkways connecting them all. (The stilts are for when the river floods.) You can rent one of the little huts which comes complete with a mat on the floor to sit on and a low table for food and a few pillows and a wastebasket. You can buy food and drinks there or bring your own. There was a built-up sandy play area for kids, or you can go fishing or just sit and enjoy the shade.

We sure seemed to be the attraction today. My friends have lived here for several years and they said they’d never seen anyting like it, they were amazed! Shortly after arriving, a woman (a stranger) came over to our hut with a couple of kids and wanted to know if it was okay for her young daughter to “salam” us – she takes your hand and kisses it and puts it to her forehead. They were all smiles so what can you say? Then a bit later a couple walks into our hut and said they wanted to practice their English, though it was soon apparent they were J witnesses, a novel experience in itself in this part of the world! My hosts sent them packing as politely as possible. When we were leaving, another family came up and wanted to take pictures of us and them with their cell phones. I was starting to feel like somebody famous – he, he, he!

While there, we also went to see some animals that were caged there, most had been rescued from fires, and included alligators (or crocodiles? – I don’t know the difference), monkeys, sunbears, hornbills (big colorful knob-schnozzed birds with eyelashes), and some other largish creature that was too fast for a sloth and kind of whiskery like a wolverine or something. Outside of town there is also a rescue/rehabilitation place for orangutans.

The river was the main means of transportation out of here until a few years ago when they built a bridge over a big swamp and thus made it possible to drive down to the coast all year round. Sometimes during the worst of the smoke season they do have to close both the river and the road due to poor visibility. The river is still very much in use for transporting goods and people in long narrow motorized boats.

No doubt people as well as the wildlife here are experiencing big changes in their lives as "civilzation" encroaches, the forest disappears, and roads are built. Cell phones seem to be as rampant here as everywhere else. :-)

Close yet far away

Another impression is how close yet how far everything is. As the crow flies, it is a small country and nothing is very far away. But the problem is that very little of the land is flat, and what is flat, is sloping at an angle. So to go from point A to point B requires descending and ascending, perhaps multiple times. It is not a place for people with weak knees! In addition, buildings tend to enlarge by going up rather than spreading out.

Fate of empires

One thing that impressed me on this trip was history. You could be sitting in a coffee shop that was built on the ruins of something from the Ottoman era, which in turn may have been built on something from the Crusader era, which was built on a Mameluke ruin, which was built on a Byzantine ruin which was built on a Roman or Hasmonian ruin which was built on something from the Israelite monarchy era destroyed by the Babylonians. And that might have been on top of ruins from the Canaanite period – or even earlier! Some of the Roman ruins are impresive indeed – and Herod the Great was no wimp when it came to building projects either. Massive marble columns, raised platforms acres in size, bath houses, swimming pools, aquaducts and water storage. But as mighty and glorious as it once was, it has all collapsed and broken into shards and dust now. Really truly sobering when you start thinking about what the probable fate of current empires will be...

Barbie's Dream Church

Barbie's Dream Church?????





(Actually, it is a Greek Orthodox church near Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee.)

There and back again

Just got back this afternoon from a grand 2-plus week study tour. I did NOT have my laptop along on this trip. In fact, I had to take it to the computer ER this afternoon because after 2 1/2 weeks of not being used it didn't want to boot up. (Still not sure what the problem is but we found that if you just punch a bunch of keys at random it will eventually kick it into "boot" mode. Don't you love these technical fixes??!!)

I have not had time yet to process anything or write anything or download photos, but one of the guys on the trip DID bring his laptop along and sort of kept his blog going. So, for your interim reading pleasure may I recommend Robert's blog:

http://robsreg.blogspot.com

I will be rushing madly about for the next few days trying to get photos downloaded, things put away and also getting ready for another trip already on Sunday - my second attempt to go to the "smokey" place. More later, if my computer cooperates!

Little boy that heals

June 3

Last night I arrived at the border town, if a seaport can be called a border town! Tomorrow I will fly back home to the third of my worlds for a few days before travelling to a world I have never been to but have heard about all my life. But more on that later.

It seems that in this area there is a little BOY with healing power. He is elementary school age and just started healing recently. He goes to school in the daytime and then has healing sessions in the afternoon until about 6pm. His family is Muslim but when he heals Christians he uses Christian type prayers. I was told that here too is a growing pile of wheelchairs and crutches left behind by people who were healed. The people telling me about it said that it shows that God can use anything.

Fuel conservation

Every kind of travel has it’s own adventures, though if you live here long enough you more or less get accustomed to it. Like air travel. After a series of recent plane disasters, it was noted that it was rather difficult to always determine who was even on the planes because despite a law requiring everyone to show an ID so that the name on the ticket and the list are the same as the name on the ID, it still wasn’t being practiced and so the passenger manifest lists are usually inaccurate. A hue and cry was raised and this practice was reinstated. How long did it last? Yesterday only passengers travelling on the national airline were advised to show an ID and it was checked at check-in, and again before boarding. But I wasn't riding the national airline and my ID wasn’t checked anywhere. (And no, it’s NOT because I’m famous!)

It is said that pilots are offered incentives to decrease fuel consumption. This is one of the factors thought to have contributed to a recent crash. One way to conserve fuel is to land at high speed and stand on the brakes rather than taking the time to circle around a little and slow down. This particular crash occured when the plane landed at very high speed and overshot the end of the runway, plowing up a nearby rice paddy.

Another way to conserve fuel is to avoid turning on the ventilation and air conditioning systems for as long as possible. Every flight I was on this trip was waiting far too long for my comfort before they turned on the air. These are tropical countries and the planes are always packed. People here are accustomed to heat. But one flight was particularly bad, over half the people in the plane were madly fanning themselves with the handy emergency instruction cards from the seat pockets. Several were starting to stand up and move into the aisles. Two people even got up and headed for the door as though to exit the plane – or maybe they went to shout at the pilot. It was at that point that the pilot FINALLY turned on the air. Nothing like the smell of fellow travellers’ fungus infections and heated up stale sweat-scented clothing...

Tides

Something really weird is going on. The tides have been very unusually high recently on the western end of the Indian Ocean – that includes the western and southwestern edges of Indonesia (the south coasts of Bali and Java) and includes the areas hit by the tsunami, the west coast of Sumatra, the Andaman Islands (owned by India) and the west coast of Thailand. In some areas in Java, people’s houses which had never flooded before were flooded 3 feet deep. They say it's in part because of the moon and maybe the SW monsoons, and maybe low pressure area. But they also say it's never been that high before. But why isn't the north side of Bali or the east side of Sumatra also having high tides???? Isn't the tide basically water sloshing back and forth? How come it's high only in certain areas???? The moon is full everywhere....

Little girl with healing power

Ever since I arrived in the area last month, people everywhere have been talking about a little girl in a village who has been healing people. The village is located right in the middle of the area which saw a lot of conflict in recent years.

It all started in January this year. The little girl’s mother was sick, some say with cancer. One version of the story is that a man in white appeared to the girl one day on her way home from school and told her how to heal her mother. She went home and did it and then began to heal others too. Word soon got out and people began arriving from all over the island and from other parts of the country. Some are said to have come from as far away as Singapore.

The little village has been flooded with people, most of whom camp in the village square. There’s a short video being passed around that someone filmed in March, interviewing some folk who said they had been healed. Several were young people reported to have been deaf and dumb, some from birth. They say that stacks of crutches and wheelchairs are now piling up from people who were healed. Although the girl is Christian and says that the healings are by the power of Jesus, people say that far more Muslims are being healed than Christians.

There is no charge for the healings. But not everyone is healed. It has been reported that some people are told to go and make restitution, or they are told that because of some certain sin they can’t be healed. Others seem to have partial healing. Some say it is a process and that depending on your faith it will become more complete later. Some say that if you start disbelieving the healing is reversed. (The one person I personally know who went and got healed, died three weeks later.) Although a large number of those who go are elderly, it has also been reported that some are told they should not expect healing because they are already old and everyone has to die. But other elderly come back able to walk a little after years of using canes or wheelchairs.

The healings are now “organized” so that Friday is the day. People travel up on Thursday and spend all day Friday hoping to get healed. One eyewitness I talked to had gone and taken her grandmother. She said that the person is asked three times (by the girl’s mother or a preacher) if they believe Jesus heals. You are supposed to answer yes. Then you are told to sing “God is powerful”, a song that is sung over and over and over by everybody up there. Then you are told to walk or talk or whatever, depending on your ailment. People are encouraged to pray according to their own practices, (ie Christian or Muslim) and to believe.

The “power” seems to have moved from the little girl now to her mother. She was reported to be worried that her daughter can’t lead a normal life what with people starting to follow her around and touch her all the time. So somehow the mother took over, it is said.

It is quite controversial, many people pro, many others think it is a fraud. One thing for sure, it is providing hours of conversation…

Floods

Monday May 7, 2007
Today it looked like more rain so I hurried and put on my soggy shoes and went into town as I had several errands to run. I left my computer at a friend’s house and then headed off to meet somebody I needed to see. When I got to that part of town there were police everywhere, traffic was crawling, and lots of people were standing out on the road. I wondered if there had been another bombing! When I got to the office I asked what had happened and they said that the neighborhood between there and the river were flooding. As I crossed the bridge on the way to the next stop I was apalled at how huge the river had become. I have never seen it that full. It was near the top of the concrete retaining walls that were built a few years ago. Apparently the tide was coming in at the same time the river was carrying all that water from the previous days’ rain. Downstream from the bridge towards the sea there were giant waves like you’d see in the sea. Police were on the bridge waving traffic on and telling people not to stop. The sidewalks were full of gawkers. The little mosque on the river’s edge on the other side was just about to flood. When I crossed back again a couple of hours later, about noon, there was water filling the street just before the bridge, you had to pass through it to get to the bridge. The concrete retaining walls were only a few inches above the water and were breaking in several places, you could see water pouring over the broken places.

Later I heard that my friend’s house - which had never flooded before - was thigh deep in water. The water had started coming up about 6:30 in the morning as she was getting the kids off to school and getting herself ready to go off to teach. She texted her brother to come to town and help, so he went to town with his car. He had to park it on the main road but they were able to wade out and load up some things to take to a niece’s house. Other things they stuck up above the ceiling. He said there were other houses flooded much deeper. He saw all kinds of debris being carried along including motorcycles, refrigerators, and even a wardrobe tumbling along in the current. The police tied 3 ropes across a place with a particularly strong current so that any people being carried away could grab the rope, if they missed it there was a second and a third rope they could try for. Meanwhile police were on standby with a boat and rubber inner tubes to help rescue people. (I was impressed to hear that they actually were doing something useful for a change!) People were saying what a good thing it happened in the daytime and not at night. And also a mercy that the sky cleared up and it didn’t rain anymore.

Unfortunately my friend put her cellphone in her pocket and then forgot about it as she was in and out of waist deep water salvaging their things. So the cellphone is now ruined.

The nearby Salvation Army office was putting up a tent and getting organized to cook rice and noodles for lunch for flood victims. Some of their staff were busy helping people rescue their things, or accompanying any injured to the nearby hospital. They expect the water to be high for a couple of days and then there will be a huge mess to clean up. One lady I talked to said rather heartlessly that it wasn’t really a humanitarian crisis, that those people shouldn’t have built their houses so close to the river. Maybe so, but on the other hand this IS the worst flood ever. Many of those places have never flooded before. I suppose all the chopping down of forest up stream also contributed significantly.

More Rain

(for Sunday May-6)

Today we went on my motorbike up the mountains to visit some folk in another village. The thing I especially like about driving a motorbike is that I can sit up stright! I can also enjoy the scenery better because you have a pretty unlimited range of vision. Amazingly, none of the folk I wanted to see were there. Some seemed to have gone off to a wedding in a remote area, and others???? We had planned to go to another village too but it started raining and the clouds were hanging low, completely covering the mountains. It looked like it was going to rain all day so we decided to just head back home. There’s a stretch of hairpin curves that is especially prone to landslides so it seemed better to not wait, because the more it rained, the more likely a landslide would be. It rained hard the entire way back, I had to stop several times to clean the fog from my goggles. We had rain ponchos but they don’t cover your legs and so eventually the water soaks its way up your pant legs. Since I was driving and got the rain pelting in my face (no windshield), the water also drips down the front of your neck and inside the poncho so eventually you are wet all over. Arriving home in the valley it was raining hard there too and was unusually cool. In fact I was getting down right cold what with the wet clothes and all. It rained all that afternoon and night and since the power went off at sunset everybody just went to bed.

Why travel is so exciting

Wednesday May 2, 2007

We finished last night so today I prepared to leave. There are only 5 cars servicing the area and three of them were still trapped on the other side of the landslide further up the road. Since the other two were down in the city, there would be no vehicles going down that day. So my computer, my bag and me were loaded on a motorbike which someone else drove. It stopped raining that morning for awhile and the sun came out. I didn’t have a helmet to wear so I just tied a scarf on my head. (To hold my brains in in case we crashed???) It took an hour and a half to get to the next town where there were cars available and during that time the sun shone brightly. Unfortunately, a scarf isn’t much good at providing shade so my face became quite, uh, ultra-violetly challenged.

Arriving in that town we stopped first at the agent to buy a ticket. We were told the car would leave at 2 or 3 or something and would pick me up. Didn’t sound too iminant so we went to a friend’s house to wait and hopefully eat something. Unfortunately the mini-bus actually came at 2 shortly after we arrived so I literally only got a bite before I got in the car. My seat was in the very back and I couldn’t sit up straight because the seat was high and the roof low. (The front seat, which was lower and had more head room, had already been booked so I was kind of stuck.) Fortunately I was by the window so I focussed on breathing and looking at the scenery and avoided thinking about claustrophobic topics. The mini-bus puttered around the town picking up passengers for about another hour and we finally left. It started raining again about then which at least kept it cool. We passed through several places with evidence of a recently cleared landslides. About an hour down the road the gal next to me got car sick so she flung herself over me to get to the window. We traded places – just in time. It wasn’t so bad cuz I could lean forward or use one of two other methods of scrunching to avoid my head whacking the roof on the bumpy road. (Method 1: sit back and hunch your upper back. Method 2: scoot forward and sit on your tailbone and scrunch your lower back.) The driver stopped from 5:15-6pm to eat and so I was able to sit on a sack of cacao beans on the floor by the door where I had plenty of head room to sit straight and rest my back. We then started the last hour and a half of the trip. Once again my neighbor got car sick so we did a quick switcheroo. Though by this time my back was starting to cramp, I managed to get out at my stop without help :-) and have since been reflecting on the advantages of motorbikes.

Snake tales

Of course in places where electricity is limited and TV does not yet control life, there are many alternative means of entertainment. One of these is the telling of stories. Today the topic was snakes.

There is a kind of rattlesnake that can be deadly poisonous, causing bleeding. It is the most beautiful snake, they say, having blue and white rings. They say its tail stinks and it attracts flies which it then catches and eats. The tail makes a noise. One way to kill this snake is to tie a lit cigarette on the end of a long pole. Touch the cigarette to its tail and it will then bite itself (and presumably die from its own bite?)

There is also a black snake which is perhaps even more feared. It can be 3 meters long or more and is poisonous. What makes it scarey is that unlike other snakes, it doesn’t move away when people come across it, instead it is aggressive and will come after you.

The most, uh, incredible snake is the one that supposedly turns into a chicken or a bird when you come close to it. So you don’t really ever see it. In fact, the teller of the story admitted that he hadn’t heard of anyone who had ever actually seen this type of snake. But he still believes it really exists.

Sunday

Sunday April 29

As expected, there was a church service this morning. They easily spent more time collecting offerings (four all together) and reporting on finances than anything else. In addition, before the service they had an auction. It is common in this area for people to donate agricultural products and then auction them off as a way to make money for the church. Today there was rice, coffee, lots of chilies, some squash and cucumbers, and even a couple of chickens. But despite all the money matters there was a very nice sermon and lovely singing.

I noticed a huge number of of infants in church. I was told that there had been a population explosion the past year. Apparently the entire batch of a commonly used injectable contraceptive was defective. They didn’t know it was defective until, well, nearly everyone using it got pregnant....

It was raining again this morning but stopped by 9am. Started again by 5:45pm. A huge crack appeared in the road going out of here. Very deep, you can step across it but the small car tires here will probably get stuck. (Somebody later on chopped up a banana tree and filled the crack.)

There was a big landslide on the road between here and the town at the end of the road so cars can’t get thru. They will probably need a bulldozer to clear this one, not just a bunch of guys with shovels. If it takes awhile, what they do is cars come to the landslide and pick up passengers there. There may be cars stuck on the other side of the landslide to bring people to the landslide, then they walk and haul all their stuff across. This landslide is bigger than most - they said it took 6 people to carry a motorcycle across it whereas it usually takes 4. Maybe they had to really lift it high.

Rain

28-April 07

Went to a home service this afternoon. (They have them on Saturday afternoons to get ready for Sunday.) Rural houses can have some pretty interesting decore. Like this house – pictures of Jesus alternating with pictures of sweet young chesty things on all four walls of the living room. We as guests sat in aqua plastic arm chairs with garish flower pattern in the plastic. There weren’t enough fancy chairs for everyone so others sat on wood benches or on regular plastic stacking chairs borrowed for the occasion.

It continues to rain heavily every day, most every afternoon and evening. When it rains a lot the water gets cloudy. The bath water today looked like coffee with milk. Even the drinking water (which is boiled to sanitize it) looked like weak tea. (Maybe that’s why people here drink so much coffee? Aside from the fact that they grow it themselves!) It has been overcast and seems dark all the time. This village has power every evening from 6pm-12pm but I am usually so tired I can only benefit from about three hours of light

Landslide

4-24

I did finally get picked up on Monday at almost 6pm after waiting at the same place about 2 hours again. The trip was an adventure. We didn't get going until almost sunset so much of the trip was in the dark. Way past the farthest village I usually go to we had to stop because the road had become a raging river with big stones and all. We backed up about 1/4 mile to a dry spot and waited about 45 minutes to see if the water would go down. It did, we saw a couple of vehicles coming from the opposite direction so the driver knew it was passable. He paid a couple of guys about 15 cents to trot ahead of us so the driver could judge deepness and more or less which way to go, avoiding the biggest rocks. (This in a 4-wheel drive vehicle). About an hour later we came to a landslide in the middle of the forest. We were parked about an hour when the driver came back and said it would be awhile yet. I was just trying to get myself psyched up to maybe have to spend the night sitting in the car holding my computer. We were in the middle of the forest with no houses nearby, and it was raining. All of a sudden I heard somebody call my name. It was two guys from the village I was heading to!! They had driven down from their village and parked on the other side of the landslide. They helped carry my bag and computer. I felt a bit like being miraculously and unexpectedly led out of prison in the middle of the night as I bid my travelling companions good bye and we slogged barefoot through the mud of the landslide. I could see then that it was going to take a LONG time to clear They had cleared enough for a motorcycle to go through and that was still mid-calf deep in mud. The rest was nearly waist deep. On the other side we climbed into a small pick up and began the last hour of the journey. My feet were coated in mud halfway to my knees but as it dried it was like wearing boots- kept my feet warm. So a bit after 1am, I finally arrived. (The car I had been travelling in didn't get through the landslide until about 9am the next morning! Did I mention that it was carrying several jerrycans of gas and the fumes were a wee bit strong? Was feeling a bit toxic already.)

It has rained heavily parts of every day. It's cool but not frigid. You can easily wear your clothes 2 days in a row without smelling :-) But my feet are rotting from being wet all the time. The checking is going well and we should be able to finish on Wednesday. SO I should be able to leave on Thursday. Hopefully the return trip will be less adventurous than the going trip.

Another funeral - the 100 day commemoration

Have been off the net for awhile so am posting some stuff I wrote already

4-22-07

Well here I still am. Yesterday a neighbor and three others took me to the pick up spot for my trip up to the remote mountains. But by 5pm (sunset is at 6pm) no one had showed up and everybody figured that nobody would show up that late. It's about a 5-hour trip and the last three hours are mostly through forest so most of the trip would be in the dark. Generally people don't like to travel in the dark because there could be a landslide or a tree down or some other problem that is more difficult to deal with in the dark.

Fortunately I had the cellphone number of a student in town who is from the area so I texted him and by 8pm he had arranged with another driver who is going up tomorrow to pick me up at the same pick up spot around 2:00pm today. Sigh! I hope it happens. 2pm is a hot time of day to be hanging around a rural intersection... That spot is abut 5 km from my village.

Meanwhile the 100-day funeral is gearing up. The main event will be at 3pm today so I will just barely miss it. But last night I was able to hang around and talk with a bunch of the folk here. There are dozens of relatives from outside the area here to help. But of course they all have to be fed too so some ladies have been making cake for three days now - for coffee breaks and for newly arriving folk. They killed two cows so lots of local ladies were here during the evening and night helping cut up meat. The men did the butchering. The lights went out shortly before dark. We had two new fancy emergency lights with LED bulbs and that helped. There were also two kerosene pressure lamps. Somebody went and borrowed a small gasoline generator that cranked out 1300 watts. They just plugged it into the wall and it ran everything except the water pump. Since the dishwashers eventually ran out of water, somebody had to go around and unscrewed half the lights so that the pump could be turned on.

Many of the relatives are from cooler mountain areas so they just spread some big mats out on the floor in the house and on the terrace and in a couple of open huts. Quite a few few chose to sleep out in the open where it was cooler.

Kids. I remember as a kid at family gatherings how much fun we had running around with our cousins, more or less unsupervised by adults who were all busy. Well they do here too only there are a lot more of them! Adults generally ignore them until somebody cries, or, like yesterday, several preschoolers decided to have a screeching contest inside the house to see who could hurt the others' ears the most. Some adult quickly intervened :-)

This morning there’s a group putting little chunks of meat (beef) on skewers and sticking the ends of several skewers into pieces of banana tree trunk to be grilled. Others are preparing chickens. Another group is grating coconut to use to get the oily milk used in cooking. Others are still cutting up meat. Some ladies are peeling and cutting papayas, agar cubes (like jello), young coconut to make a fruit salad. Still others have cut up some vegetables and ground spices. Others are getting the giant rice pots going on the long fire. Some guys are putting up a tarp “fence” out front to keep the dust down this afternoon when the wind starts up. It’s a busy, smokey semi chaos. The kids aren’t going at full speed yet, probably because they haven’t eaten yet.

Just got another text confirming I will be met at 2pm by a blue car with a driver named Pila. (Short for Pilatus!)

Funerals

The day after the death, Alma's sister-in-law arrived at the house with her family's donation to discover that no arrangements had been made about the body. So she talked to the local government official who in turn arranged with the funeral home to do a "subsidized" embalming. The funeral home then sent a vehicle over to get the body. Alma's mother and the sister-in-law accompanied the body and the mother signed the papers, and a down payment was made. They then went home and several hours later the body was returned to the house already embalmed.

The plan is to keep the body at the house for the next nine days while the expensive burial site is being readied (the cement has to dry.) A lot of people believe that the spirits of the dead can come back and make the living sick, so it would be foolhardy in the extreme to NOT fulfill the dying wish of a person, in this case, to be buried in the expensive cemetery. The in-laws understand this as well as anybody.

So what do you do with a body in the house for nine days? You set up tables so neighbors can come over and drink and gamble. The deal is that the winner is supposed to contribute a portion of his winnings to the family of the deceased. Meanwhile the family of the deceased has to feed the visitors. The idea is that eventually the income will exceed the outlay. Having a lot of people around also ensures that nobody has to be alone with the corpse.

Alma's mother has not been idle. In addition to continuing to pressure the in-laws to find more cash, she managed to talk a local politician into donating a sack of rice (elections are coming up next month) and his rival donated some food also. Alma's husband's boss also made a largish contribution, which to the husband's annoyance has been spent on juice for the visitors and flowers (a LOT of flowers) and a fancy tent insteed of going to pay the funeral home or the cemetery.

So maybe in the end Alma will get her wish after all.

I am off tomorrow to the second of my worlds and one of the things I will do there is attend a funeral.

The sad story of Alma

Alma was an only child. Her parents indulged her terribly. Everything she wanted, she got, though her family was not particularly well off. After Alma’s father died several years ago Alma continued to live with her mother and grandparents. Three years ago she got married and insisted that they live with her family. They now have a 2 year old daughter.

While Alma was pregnant she showed signs of kidney problems and the doctors told her to quite eating junk food, avoid salt, and quit drinking Coke, of which she was quite fond. But Alma was always accustomed to do what she wanted to do so she ignored the advice. In January this year she was hospitalized. with a blood creatinine of over 900 Umol/L (normal is 53-97). The doctors found both kidneys shrunken and non-functional and said that there is nothing they can do unless she wants to go on permanent dialysis.

The family of course cannot afford dialysis and there is no insurance or government subsidy here for catastrophic illness. Her previous employer, like many, had not paid her social security so she didn’t have any help from that either. The doctor said dialysis would have to be 2-3 times weekly for the rest of her life plus medications. In addition she would have dietary restrictions - not that she had ever shown much interest in restricting her diet.

Alma was by then quite sick. She had stopped urinating and was instead losing water through other orifices. They took her home. Then three weeks ago she had a dream in which her dead father appeared and told her she needs to live for the sake of her child. So she insisted that she be taken back to the hospital and put on dialysis. Her mother was willing to sell her rickety house and the small plot of land it stands on, though it is unlikely that it would bring enough to cover very many weeks of dialysis and so would only postpone the inevitable. (And then they would have nowhere to live.)

Alma was readmitted to the hospital but her condition deteriorated there, so in the end they took her back home. Alma’s husband had taken unpaid leave from work because of the hospitalizations but feeling the pressure of all the accumulating debt went back to work despite his mother-in-law’s protests that he should stay at his wife’s side.

Poor Alma. In death as in life, her first thoughts were for herself. She asked her husband to never marry again. Her dying wish was to be buried next to her father in an expensive cemetery some distance away that requires expensive vault and coffin. She never seemed to be concerned about where money would come from, and continued to eat and drink what she wanted. These last two weeks she has been mostly semi-comatose. Today Alma died, at age 32.

Alma’s in-laws are upset and some are having nightmares. Alma’s mother has never been shy about demanding money from them for the wedding, the baby, the hospitalizations, medicine. And no doubt she will now demand they take out more loans to pay for the expensive burial. The in-laws feel very stressed at the debt they have already incurred and upset at what seems to them to be extravagance. In fact, the local community fund has offered to pay for burial but Alma’s mother refused because the fund will not pay for the expensive burial in teh expensive cemetery.

I never met Alma. I know her story through her in-laws, who are obviously quite biased. But surely there was something loveable about Alma. Her parents certainly loved her. Even now her mother continues to try to indulge her last whim. Her husband also loved her enough to stay until the end, and it can’t have been easy to watch. And surely her daughter loves her. As for me, I feel very, very sad. I also feel a bit of relief that it is over, yet also some exasperation at the inability of Alma’s mother to see the real burden her need to indulge has caused to others. I also feel angry that employers can skirt the law by only pretending to pay the social security and then when a worker needs it finds out they can't get help because it’s not been paid. Although Alma didn’t seem to be a great candidate for dialysis because of her lack of compliance, yet it distresses me that she really didn’t have a choice because there is no way they could pay for it.

If only we lived in a perfect world....

Summer

It is summer. Schools here are on vacation. This has several implications for life over the next couple of months.

1) Traffic is considerably less congested because school kids aren’t going to and from school morning and afternoon, nor home for lunch.
2) Lines at the supermarket aren’t so long now at noon. During the school year kids flood into the stores over the lunch hour to buy junk food and junk drinks, just at the time the cashiers are taking off for their lunch breaks.
3) Jay walkers are all over the place so driving bcomes more hazardous.
4) It’s quieter in the early morning and the water pressure is stronger because fewer people are trying to bathe and wash clothes at the same time.
5) During the day it can be much noisier as kids are out and about all day. One neighbor’s grandson has apparently moved in for the holiday with his electric guitar which he practices all day long. He certainly does need the practice since what he plays is not exactly pleasant to listen to, (no recognizable notes or rhythm) but I sure wish he would turn the volume down a bit! (Is it legitimate to pray for a brownout??)
6) Some places, such as churches, are less crowded because many people are out of town, but other places, like beaches, are more crowded.

If it is hot people say it’s because it is summer. If it is rainy people say it is because it is summer. My personal observation is that it is always summer – it is always hot and rains often. But at this time of year you can hear people advising us to be sure to drink a lot because it is summer. Be sure to keep cool and bathe often. There is a special watermelon and menthol shampoo that is sold only in the summer. Advertisements for junk drinks center around it being summer. Ads for hair and skin care do too.


So, it is summer. Deal with it.

Cellphones

The friend with the toothache has survived. She took a different antibiotic and that solved the problem. The reason I didn’t hear anything is because she lost her cellphone. She had it in a shallow pocket and thinks it fell out somewhere on the way to town.

Cellphones are definitely part of life in this the third of my worlds. To not own a cellphone is almost worse than not having a television. Texting is by and far the most popular use of cellphones. It is very cheap and you can buy refill cards or electronic loads at any shop. Even low income folk who can barely afford to hold body and soul together will often have a cellphone. People buy fancy skins and cases for them. They are constantly looking for new ringtones and screensavers. As technology improves many now have the capacity to send multimedia images back and forth and many people now have phones with cameras. Malls have recharging stations. Photoshops have machines for downloading and editing camera pictures.

I went cellphone shopping last week to try to get a phone that can be connected to a laptop by cable and can act as a modem for downloading email. I was amazed at the fancy PDAs which also happen to have phones. Or the top notch digital video cameras with photo editing software that also happen to have phones, or the tiny music factories complete with speakers, headphones, and additional memory cards that also happen to have phones. I finally found a relatively low end phone at 1/3 the cost without most of the bells and whistles – though it does have a plain camera and ear plugs and FM radio capability. (Like I really need to walk around all day with a cellphone plugged into my head!!!)

I was indeed able to get it connected as a modem for my laptop and downloaded email. On my next trip to the second of my worlds I hope to get it to connect there as well. (I will need to buy a local SIM card, but it should be possible to connect as long as the signal is strong enough.) It’s not very fast but it is adequate for getting email. And it is at least as fast as the internet cafes in the town nearest the village. I am looking forward to being able to sit in a field hut in the middle of a rice paddy and download email! The marvels of modern technology....

Spirits can push you?

Did you know that spirits can push you? Last week Marilyn was in the washroom at the factory where she works. This washroom is a small bare room with a concrete floor and a faucet with a drainage channel for the water. (Many employees also use this room as a bathroom because the regular bathroom is apparently never cleaned and the smell is rather overpowering.) The floor of the washroom has become somewhat slimy due to algae growth, etc. Marilyn was squatting by the faucet washing something when suddenly one of her feet slipped and she fell over landing partly in the drainage channel. She was soaked with the slimy water and friends had to help clean her off before she went home to change clothes. One friend suggested that a spirit had pushed her. (I would personally have blamed the slimy floor and the rubber flip flops, but what do I know?)

It is said that there aren't as many spirits in the city as there are in the country but when a spirit bothers you it means that you need to make an offering. To determine what kind of offering is needed, you must visit a seer who will tell you whether a couple of boiled eggs is enough or if you need to kill a chicken, or, if really serious, a pig.

Marilyn decided to ignore the suggestion.