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. :-)