Day 16

Thursday, June 5, 2008

NOTE to E-mailers and Commenter’s: I would love to respond to everyone, but the Internet experience is so massively frustrating. It takes between 8-10 minutes to get my email to load. It takes usually 2-3 minutes to get a three sentence reply to an email to send. The keyboard I have access to at Tangaza is broken as is the one near me at Flora. I know there are misspellings and errors, but just smile a look the other way. If I get a better connection I will try to respond to everyone I can. I have decided to focus on getting the big email and the blog done each day that is possible. Only after that can I try to respond to individual emails. It is not disinterest on my part, it is just the near impossibility of the situation that keeps me from responding. So many of you have written, please do not stop. The offers of encouragement mean so much.

E.T. Phone Home
I called home to talk to Cindy and the boys. I got up early here 6:15 AM and got ready and then called home at about 6:35AM, which translates into 10:35PM on Wednesday night. I got to hear their voices and there is some real healing in that. It was not long enough, but it made this day so much better.

Tangaza
We had one less person today so everyone had a seat. I sat in the very front for the first time. Again. I saw a bunch of new things from this different perspective. I think it is a metaphor for my journey. “Sit in a new seat, you might see something new.”

Polygyny
No body needs to write and tell me it is misspelled. This is the technical term for many wives. This morning we had an interesting presentation on the nature of these multiple marriages in African society by both a man and then a woman. It is odd how this has been the focus of so much energy by Christians in Africa. The Africans point to the Old Testament and the great heroes of the faith. The Christians point to a couple of passages in the New Testament. The arguments rage. Not much is agreed upon.

African Culture: An Overview
I felt so much better in class today; I stayed awake with much less problem.
We studied death for the first half of the class (What are the traditions and celebrations around death, what are the mourning rituals, how things get back to normal) this led to teaching about evil and what causes death. The second half of class we looked at governance and the issue of elders in the community and the concept of the economy.

Debate
We had a very interesting afternoon class in which we watch scenarios from African cultures and then gathered in four groups to debate and discuss the issues. I was in group three. We debated the whether African Religion and Christianity could find common ground on the way they solve problems. It was so great. People from all over Africa and the world having an intense hour-long debate in which we discussed the differences and similarities between the two belief systems.

Library
After returning to Flora, I went straight to the local library to read. I got in my seat by 4:00PM with the book on AIDS I had been reading. I skipped some sections, but finished at about 6:00PM. The book is on the cause of AIDS. It is an exhaustive search for the beginning of the AIDS virus. It conclusions and reasoning seemed sound and better presented than anything I have seen before. It was thorough and frightening.
Its premise is that the HIV virus made the jump to humans in Central Africa in the 1950’s with experimental polio vaccine that had been prepared using chimp organs. If it is true it is one of the colossal blunders of all of medicine. If it is not true, then we dodged a bullet because we are messing with forces we barley understand. The extent of experimental medicine that went on at that time is chilling, especially when we find that “volunteers” were often people with mental retardation, military servicemen, and poor Africans.

Books
I have been struggling with some sources for my paper, but today at Tangaza I hit the jackpot. I found exactly what I needed. After dinner I read and studied and took notes. One chapter is about Ethiopia. It is the best short summary I have read to date about the worldview of the people of Ethiopia in the area we are serving. Finding this obscure article in an obscure book already makes my African Journey a success.
With the help of these books I completed section two of my paper. I can’t do the last section until after the weekend so I will edit tomorrow afternoon, reread what I have done and try to polish it some more. I talked to one person who had not yet started, and was so relieved at the progress I have already made. The rough draft is due next Wednesday so Monday and Tuesday will be tough next week. I plan on turning in the completed finished paper so that the last few days will only involve very minor revisions.

Computer
I have been struggling with my computer to run my bible study program. I have tried everything. I got Chris Stapper and Steven Patterson (thanks guys) involved in trying to solve the problem. Nothing seemed to work. On a total whim I plugged the external DVD drive into the computer and it instantly began to work. After 15 days of total frustration I was so happy, but so confused. The DVD has nothing in it, but it makes the computer work. And they told me that Apple computers made sense.

Half Way
Today marked the halfway mark of the class. I am already starting to prepare for the next phase of my journey. I have been diligently sorting through my 3000 Nouwen cards. I organized them by theme and purpose and had gotten to a major stopping point. I knew I needed 365 cards to make the year long devotional work out, so I was interested to see if I was way over or way under.
I counted the cards. When I dealt the last card in my primary pile I said 360 out loud. I have a pile of secondary cards that has 50 in it, so I must have missed 5 that will make it into the final calendar. I was really pleased.
Mind the Gap
Kyle