I always thought people owned chickens had hens, ya know? Maybe a rooster or two, but majority hens. So far we have counted six roosters living next door to us at the orphanage, and they start their pandemonium at approx. 4:30 every single morning. So of the few rooster farms that exist i live next to one of them, good fun. The girls are beautiful and not just on the inside they are truly breathtaking with their dark skin, wide eyes and 36 identical little ‘bob’ hair cuts. They are by no means shy they rushed the song-tow (taxi) we arrived in on Sunday and they have been either hanging around my neck or begging me to spin them ever since. They are shockingly self sufficient and it seems to me that they would run the orphanage themselves the minute the staff disappeared. They look out for one another and are very possessive of us. I am P- Kim to them which means “big sister” Kim and mags is P-Maggie, which sounds an awful lot like P-Ma-gee…I’m having great fun with that ( i always point to her and say “that’s peemagee", she loves being called that. we went to church with the girls on Sunday morning and it is so very strange to be the minority, to sit and not understand a word of the sermon… i realized during this moment how important it is for me to not only know that God is here in their lives just like he is ours back home, but to witness His presence here first hand. There is so much genuine unadulterated darkness here that the light is so easy to see. It is a very heady and refreshing thing to feel.
Today we are in the city while the girls go to school… there is a special concert tonight in the village where we live (Doisoket), and apparently the pastor announced that Eve, Gina, Maggie, and I would be singing a song at this ceremony. We are by no means a musically gifted group we will probably end up singing bad medicine by bon jovi Capella.
whelp, there are dogs everywhere and around every street corner is some atrocious smell i never knew existed just waiting to gag me… every night i lay down and try to sleep just knowing that this was the blessed day i got lice… Eve and i spent 3 hours last night putting together a shelving unit for our room only to have Gina walk by and explain in four words or less why we did it completely wrong (leaving out all the wooden pegs), and that we would have to take the whole thing a part. My arms are covered in blue ink (all the girls wanted to sign me, and they can be very dogmatic when they set their minds to something).I have never imagined I could feel so full, so in love with life, so sure of my Savior, and so certain that this is what it’s all about anyway.
Thank you all for your continued support and prayers…much love,
is about all i know how to say right now, i am in shock!everything is so amazing and tragic and beautiful and sad all at the same time. we were on the planes for over 36 hours and arrived yesterday to no baggage. i felt pretty sick and have had a glass of soy milk and some broth from some soup that looked like a shredded jellyfish, mmmmm…my favorite. we stayed in a hotel last night and it was beautiful. mags and i shared one twin bed while eve and Gina shared the other… we slept wonderfully until mags and i woke up simultaneously at 4:30 wide awake. the people here are very stoic and prideful, they stare but dont want you to know they are staring so its like the weird corner of the eye thing and quick look away as soon as you glance their direction. we have laughed none stop and i expected nothing less. we have been talking about the girls over coffee all morning long and we will be introduced this evening at the killing of the fattened pig (yippeeee!). i cant wait to meet the girls, i feel so strongly about them already just hearing their names, stories, and all the silly things they do. i have no anxiety about anything right now which such blessed affirmation that i am supposed to be here. all i have felt since my arrival is gratitude and peace despite all the disturbing things i have already witnessed. the hardest thing without a doubt is going to be the language barrier. it really cuts down on the jokes, i feel like my smiles and nods are misunderstood, and its just beginning. thank you for your prayers and i’ll be in touch…. much love.
The Gilman News Media Empire is expanding. My good friend Kim Spradlin recently moved to Thailand to work in an orphanage run by Thailand Ambassadors of Christ, a project of the New Horizons Foundation. The orphanage currently cares for 36 Thai girls. Kim has graciously agreed to let me syndicate her e-mails back to the states.
How concerned should I be that the wonton soup at Lucky House smelled EXACTLY like a wet dog? At first I thought the guy next to me maybe worked at the pound. Nope, it was the soup. I’m going to try not to think about it.
I just discovered the music of Amy LaVere through the Live from Memphis website. She plays upright bass and sings the old-timey stuff. Her new album, This World Is Not My Home (great title) comes out Jan. 15th. If you buy it directly from Archer Records she’ll autograph it and won’t even charge you shipping.
There were a great many other anomalies which did not fit into Hobson-Lenin. Why, in Latin America, did the phase of capitalist investment follow, rather than precede or accompany, Spanish colonialism? Why, in this vast area, were the capitalists in league with the political liberators? Then again, some of the ‘exploited’ or colonized countries were themselves residual empires. China was the creation of 3 whole series of imperial dynasties, without benefit of ‘finance-capital’. India was a product of Mughal imperialism. Turkey had been expanded from Ottoman Anatolia. Egypt was an old imperial power which, after its breakaway from Turkey, sought to be one again in the Sudan. There were half a dozen native empires south of the Sahara run by groups and movements such as the Ashanti, Fulani, Bornu, Al-Haji Umar, Futa Toro. Ethiopia was an empire competing with the European empires in the Horn of Africa, before succumbing to one of them in 1935. Burma was a kind of empire. Persia, like China, was an imperial survivor from antiquity. Colonialism itself created empires of this anomalous type. The Congo (later Zaire) was put together by the Berlin Conference of 1884—5, and survived decolonization without benefit of any of the factors which theory said created empires. So did Indonesia, a product of Dutch tidy-mindedness, assembled from scores of quite different territories. Conspiracy theory shed no light on any of these cases.58
I tend to think of national and ethnic identities as fairly inelastic, changing imperceptibly over time, but of course that’s wrong. I’m an American and a Texan, two identities that were scarcely formed 200 years ago, much less defined to any significant degree. The common, well at least my own, view of imperialism is that it is doomed to failure, something we learn more from watching Braveheart than from studying history. Johnson’s point is that imperialism is often successful, yet over time we forget the former entities and come to regard the new creation as legitimate and even natural or inevitable. The means used to achieve those ends are often swept under the rug of assimilation or paved over by a collective sense of history that prefers to forget events that don’t cohere with our accepted identity or reinforce the legitimacy of our perceived status in our societies. This process of selectively forgetting is itself a form of culture-making critical to the formulation of a stable state, paving over old alliances and forming new ones.
Yet another idea that I was just not quick enough to have first - Selling options on tickets (at face value) for sporting events that are likely to be sold at a heavy premium by scalpers.
I’ve just started reading Paul Johnson’s Modern Times, The World from the Twenties to the Nineties. I think I have a comparatively good grasp of history, but it’s amazing to realize how much I don’t know about the world I’m living in, particularly about events in the last century. If I had money to burn I would hire Johnson to sit next to me while I read the paper each morning and explain the historical context and significance of the day’s events. Or maybe he could just do a podcast. There are some rather obvious reasons why historians concern themselves mostly with the past, but I wish news organizations were a little more historically-minded.
How many controversies are floating aimlessly these days, untethered from their historical context, creating a whole industry in blather and self-righteous indignation? As a Christian, I suppose I should be outraged at the separation of church and state. As it turns out I’m rather pleased that the state has so little to do with my church. When Jefferson wrote coined the phrase in a letter to the Danbury Baptists, England’s King George III was still the Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Nothing against Anglicans, but I’m not so big on vestments. Though I suppose it would be somewhat romantic to be known as a persecuted dissenter.
Stepping down from the soapbox…
A comment Johnson made about imperialism got me started on all of this, but I’ll save it for a later post.
He’s also apparently a veteran Contra player. If you have no idea what the joke is here, congratulations, you’re not half the dork I am. Move along. Nothing more to see here.
Everyone wants to hear my New Year’s resolution. Why? Do they have something in mind, but they’re hoping I’ll come up with it on my own? Last year was pretty good. There were some things I probably could have done without (hurricanes, &tc), but on the whole, no complaints. It could have been a lot worse. How did I manage such a relatively carefree existence? I resolved not to resolve.
This year my resolution is the same as last. Please stop asking me what my resolution is. YOUR New Year’s resolution should be to read my blog, every day. If that sounds like an lot of work, subscribe to my Site Feed with NewsGator. Whatever I accidentally accomplish in the next year will be pure grace-given happenstance. If I lose ten pounds, it’s most likely from some tropical wasting disease, or maybe I’m playing more tennis. If I meet the girl of my dreams, it’s highly unlikely that it’s through any scheme of my own. If I save a treed kitten, I probably just broke it’s fall. You get my drift.
What, after all, is a New Year’s Resolution, but our first opportunity to fail. It’s possible, intrepid resolver, that you will succeed, but it’s not likely. Why should this be? Here’s my theory - things that we are forced to RESOLVE are precisely the things that we don’t really want to do. It’s something that is either too hard, requires free time we don’t have, or is something we would like to know how to do or be known for doing, the actual doing of which we want no part of. If we really wanted to do these things, we wouldn’t have waited until New Year’s Eve came around and we were too tipsy on Champagne to realize what we were committing ourselves too.
If you want to accomplish something, don’t resolve. Just do it.
The winter olympics in Torino, Italy are a little more than 40 days away. That got me thinking about great moments of winter olympics past which, for me, center on cross-country skiing and Men’s 4x10 km Relay and the epic battles between the Norwegians and Italians. Most of you, of course, have no idea what I’m talking about. If you watch the winter olympics at all, it will be all alpine events, snowboarding and that most <sarcasm>exhilarating</sarcasm> of all sports, figure skating. The
4x10 relay will be shown at some ungodly hour, if at all, but if you have Tivo, I highly recommend you check it out 19 February.
