Food, Friends, and Fire

This post should have gone in awhile ago, but I was on a computer that lacked the pics. A while back our dear friends, Geoff and Joy Metcalf and their son Chris visited us from Australia. They had been missionaries here about 12 years ago.

Joy is a midwife specializing in neonatal care and during their time here, she helped us through many a situation at the little children's home working with marginalized infants. She and I are close....so close do I feel to this very excellent lady that when they returned home to Aussieland, I could not bring myself to go to the particular McDonald's where we had often met for coffee. Still have not been back. I would do anything to get this couple back on the field.

Geoff is the most practical of men. His friendship has meant much to us over the years....he is our instructor in Aussiespeak. He ramrodded the construction of their denomination's church building during their time here. A masterful piece of work. And, he makes the most delightful angel food cake that one could ever wrap their lips around.

Dennis, in the photo is, as ever, holding forth at the grill. It is much more about the fire than the food.

Pari

Pari. I wrote about her on our mission blog as well. Pari is a midwife. She learned the art as she apprenticed alongside our midwives at Shiphrah during the three years her husband was doing theological studes at the seminary just down the road. They are from Myanmar, Mizo tribal folk. Pari is one of the special people of the world. I treasure knowing her, wondering how it is that God has privileged me with her friendship. When she left several years ago to return to Myanmar, I was quite certain that we would not meet again this side of glory. When she came back to speak at a conference, I couldn't believe it. What a joy to be with her again. Parting, we spoke of "next time in Myanmar". Maybe. I have had two emails from her since her return. The first one told of how she had actually managed to clear customs with all her bits and pieces of luggage some of which held precious medical supplies...including about 100 syringes and needles.

Celebratory Flower

Today is a new day and a confident move into the world of blogging. I will see how I do with posting pictures of which I have very few. I managed to access the site on the first try. Amazing. For this inept tech bunny it is a miracle of not small proportions. So, I will celebrate with my signature flower....a Cattleya orchid that waxed beautiful right outside the kitchen window for a month before giving up to the ravages of time. No celebratory flower....will have to fiddle with the tech world a bit longer to figure out what I did wrong. This should be an encouragment to others who are technologically all thumbs. The flower later in the day.

Been a Long Time

This session had begun with the high hope of something creatively enticing and witty happening. Instead, what ensued was several hours of wrestling with modern technology. I had almost despaired of every being able to access the blog again, when amazingly the dratted thing actually worked. Now, the energy to wax poetic is gone, the hour is late, far too late and perhaps tomorrow will prove more amenable.

The Storm is Coming

It’s night. The wind is beginning to pick up a bit. As I stood out in the backyard, the wind chimes gave soft tinkling sounds. Every time I hear the chimes sound like that, it reminds me of the movie “Twister” and the musical sounds that came from the auntie’s metal sculptures, in the movie, a harbinger of The Big One.

In this case, it is also going to be a Big One. So the forecasters tell us. Schools were closed today as a precaution, although they could have opened. Nothing happened. At least not today.

Watching the windsocks twist mildly as the early bands of the storm begin to arrive, I realize that as it is with these storms, the wind doesn’t quite know which way to blow. We’ll have a mild gust from the east, and then several from the west, and then back to the east again. Right now, they seem to be easterly. It is certainly coming closer.

As Sara and I rinsed Paco with his nightly kakwate (boiled leaves that are a nice, natural anti-flea treatment), we felt the occasional spray of vaporized rain. Rain that has been blown to spray.

The storm, international name Durian (the stinky fruit), is coming in slightly from the south. That means, as I understand it, that we’ll get a much harder hit than if it were to pass us to the north.

The plastic tarps have been up on the lanai since this morning. Sara and I just moved the larger wind chimes that were on the front porch to the safety of the lanai.

As I write, within the last few minutes, the fine spray has now become real rain.

It’s here.

Remembrance

Following is a song written by my daughter, Mary. She sent it out recently in an email along with a link to a newspaper article regarding the continuing struggle that we understand the homeless as also human.


The night was the pain of the mourner.

We could hear the cries.

We could see the tears.

Where was our compassion?

Were we not also the idiots of our own fears?

Have not we seen the scar left on the brow?

Have not we touched the wound that sits and molds on the tip of our fingers?

We were the blind fools.

Our hearts had seen no light.

We were the mistaken.

We were the fallen.

We had stayed at the bus stop.

He had decided no more.

No more pain. No more crying. No more wounds.

Fear punished again,

And left us cold in shadow.

The night was the pain of the mourner.

We could hear the cries.

We could see the tears.

No more pain. No more crying. No more wounds... no more wounds

no more wounds...

http://www.journal-news.net/News/articles.asp?articleID=5097

A student of mine recently submitted a paper in which she wrote regarding a decision to help a househelper with her laundry:

"“we are human.” This thought captured my attention when I watched Oscar Romero in jail repeating this phrase and has played a key role in my learning this semester.

This thought humbles me and realigns my worldview every time I still myself with this phrase. It eliminates classes, races, social status. It humbles thoughts about saved and unsaved. It eliminates any self-appraisal that I have come to help someone or how I can change their life. “We are humans.” I see the world as my family and I can’t ignore the cries of the people going on around me. When I think this thought I don’t see myself as an American who can help people if I choose to, but instead I hear the cries of the hurting and I begin to hurt because my mother, my sister, and my brother are in need. When I let this phrase affect my worldview I see people who could be me, who are me in pain. They are not far off people that have adapted to their life, people who can’t think or feel. The poor is no longer separate and foreign, but I see my face in them, and I see their face in me. I can’t turn away and act like I didn’t hear them or that they are far away. Instead I feel a pull to walk with them because ‘we are humans,’ we are the same, we are all weak, we are all vulnerable, we all need a friend. "

Paulo Freire insists that our task in the world, our "vocation" is "to become fully human". We are learning, we are learning. We are not there, yet.

Gunfight at the OK Corral

It is an image that has been imbedded in my head for quite some while now....Donald Rumsfeld, George W., and Dick Cheney, all in jeans and casual shirts, striding down the lane at the Crawford ranch like so many gunslingers, toward waiting TV cameras. The occasion, as I recall, was to respond to an incessant call for peace from an upstart mom camped across the way whose son had been slain in a needless, devastating pissing contest engineered largely by these men.

My faith in the American people has been restored somewhat as of Tuesday. I was almost afraid to look at the results as they came in, fearing that once again, Americans were not going to deal with the obvious. But we did! As we travelled through out the U.S. in 2003 and again in 2005, I was dismayed at the insularity and what seemed to be a willfull refusal on the part of so many of my co-Americans to take a daring look at reality, creep out from behind a wall of fear that had been artificially constructed by the powerbrokers, and ask the hard questions of their government.

Tuesday's election said, finally, that we will no longer tolerate these gunslingers at reins of power in our nation. They are to get out of Dodge. "A little revolution is a healthy thing", said Sean Connery's character in "The Hunt for Red October". We've had a little revolution, a beautiful revolution, and our system of governance has come through for us.

I count myself as in Independent so my rejoicing is not that the Democrats per se now have a voice again. It is more that there will at last be another voice that the current administration is now forced to hear.

The ball is now in the Democrat's court. They will have to stop their whining and behave like mature adults. They say they realize that they were handed the Congress because the people are so, so sick of opaque dishonest governance, so, so sick of the rule of the moneyed elite who care not one whit for the health of the middle class, let alone the impoverished in our land of the free. Now, they will have to prove that they indeed take seriously the voice of the people. They should be terrified. Humble, open-handed reconciliatory governance is their only option.