The Bear Sounds Like Owen Wilson (Reportedly)

Marvel vs. DC vs. Zondervan

2007-03-13T23:28:00.000-05:00

I feel the need to follow up on my last post, partially because I feel like I left a lot of loose ends with what I said, and partially because I happen to think about the concept of identity pretty frequently as of late. Thus, I apologize in advance if I, as usual, seemingly meander a bit on and off topic.

Superman is bull-crap. Not just the comic books or the film series, but the entire concept itself. Bull-crap. The guy can chunk a runaway train toting radioactive isotopes into outer space, fly against the orbit of the earth so fast that he transcends the space/time barrier and reverses human history, and melt a titanium wall with his flatulence, but slap on a pair of plastic eyeglasses on him and you’ve got this incredibly muscular doofus with no social skills. Superman is like that kid that everybody knew of growing up who spoiled whatever make-believe game he was involved in by refusing to adhere to the phantom rules.

Me: “Bang! I shot you with my stick!”

Super-kid: “No you didn’t, I’m wearing a bullet-proof vest!”

Me: “Um, ok, but my stick, uhh…it’s a laser-stick. With guns on it. That are also lasers.”

Super-kid: “Well my vest also has a force-field built into it. And, it can cook macaroni and cheese. Waaaay better than that stupid macaroni that your mom makes with the ham in it.”

Me: “The ham is awesome, and my mom says it’s a good source of protein. Besides, I poisoned the macaroni and cheese, so now you’re dead. For real.”

Super-kid: “I know you poisoned the macaroni and cheese, but now I’m a ghost, so you can’t kill me and I have ghost powers. I just turned you into a butt. A girl butt. This game sucks anyway. I’m gonna go home and play Toejam and Earl.”

Me: “Yeah, well, my name’s in the bible! Both my first and my middle. Loser!”

The deal at stake is that, as a person, Superman adds up to this gigantic question mark. I can’t remember any point in the Superman continuum that you ever get the opportunity to actually see him reveal anything about who he really is on the inside. Alter-egos (and you can make the argument that Clark Kent is his false identity and Superman is the real guy if you want, I don’t care) and monologue thought bubbles aside, the only side we ever see of Supes is this blue and red beast of a man with a serious savior complex. Sure, he fights off armies of jellyfish robots and came back from the dead, but what does he do or think when he’s not pummeling something? Is he closed-off emotionally due to being insecure about his abilities, or because of familial issues? What does he, being nearly indestructible, think about life and death? What does he freaking eat?

I’m not going to lie: I read comic books compulsively up until I graduated high school, long beyond the point that such a habit is no longer considered socially acceptable. In fact, I wonder if one of the reasons comic book readers like superheroes so much is because they are forced to hide a portion of their identity (read that as, the fact that they are huge nerds) from the world in order to be accepted by society. This sort of behavior is actually a common denominator in the life of nearly everybody I know in some shape or form, but I’m getting ahead of myself…

When I was a kid, my allowance came in weekly increments of change that never really belonged to me; my pockets were more or less a form of pre-debt consolidation for the local baseball card and comic book stores. Every Saturday after baseball practice (or, as my Dad fondly referred to it, “Watch Jordan play tic-tac-toe in the dirt behind second base along with the shortstop”) or soccer practice (also lovingly referred to as “Watch Jordan run back and forth awkwardly because he doesn’t understand what the ‘wing’ actually does”), I’d visit the local comic shop down the street from my grandmother’s apartment complex to find the best means of spending what would have been my seed money for college. I’d spend hours digging through bins with my little brother, looking for back issues of X-Force and Shadow of the Bat, waiting for my father to get exasperated and go sit in the car so I could sift through something really bloody and masochistic like Spawn or Barbie. Keep in mind, Spawn was still cool at this point because they hadn’t ruined the character by making a movie with John Leguizamo in it yet.

Now, I’m aware that amongst other nerd obsessions that have recently become socially acceptable cultural phenomena – cardigan sweaters, Star Wars, and Dance Dance Revolution come to mind – comics have received heavy vindication (I hope) due to Hollywood marketability and sheer storytelling abilities. Batman, the X-Men, and the Fantastic Four receive credit where credit is due, but apart from the camp humor of watching guys with stretchy arms or adamantium claws, there are many truly fascinating graphic stories out there. Road to Perdition was this viscerally emotional tale about a mobster and his son that was adapted into one of the best movies Tom Hanks has ever done, and Neil Gaiman’s Sandman provoked more thought than any other piece of fiction I’ve ever read. Watchmen, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Maus, The Killing Joke. There’s a lot of good nerd reads out there. Pick a weekend, buy a couple at Barnes and Noble, and make sure to hide them from your roommate/spouse, for the sake of keeping up appearances.

Anyway, I’m just going to go ahead and admit that I’m a sell-out: my favorite superhero, by far, is Spiderman. And this, kids, is where I actually start to tie everything together. See, just like Tobey Maguire, and Stan Lee, and MTV, and your eight-year-old cousin will tell you, no matter how he’s packaged, Spiderman is a head case. He’s one of us. Peter Parker isn’t a case of ‘roid rage with a conscience, he doesn’t have a cool gun, and to be honest, his powers aren’t necessarily even all that cool. Peter is already suffering under the weight of insecurities regarding the nature of his existence, his masculinity, the death of his parents and subsequent “adoption” by his aunt and uncle, and his inability to find acceptance within the social realm he finds himself a part of when we first meet him. Forget the radioactive spider and the “with great power comes great responsibility” speech: the story is interesting because it’s ours. Let me explain.

I love Spiderman because I can forget that Peter Parker is Spiderman. Mask on or off, Peter is dealing with the complexities of becoming an adult, a husband, a father, a person in a world that is analyzing his every move. He faces social games, marriage, depression, guilt, infidelity, addiction, and mortality with the same fear and subsequent shame that many of us do; the only difference is that he fights supervillians and climbs the Brooklyn Bridge in what could feasibly be called his spare time. This is a guy who is at much at war with himself as he is with Dr. Octopus or Electro. Peter Parker has some serious personal demons, and his battles in costume make for an interesting parallel to the war that takes place within the confines of his soul. He wants so badly to reveal to the entire world just exactly who he is (and I’m aware that in the current storylines, he recently did – yes, I’m still a nerd), but the fear of the repercussions of judgment and further attack keeps him in stasis. And so he fights and fails as a man, fights and fails as a husband, fights and fails as a hero, and dies a little bit more inside with each issue.

Spiderman is fascinating because as much, if not more, of the story takes place in the relational realm, as opposed to the usual trend of “fight, fight some more, reveal even worse bad guy behind the plot, to be continued…” The whole mythology behind Spiderman begs the question: Can a man bear the strain of trying to maintain two identities at once? The conclusion is a compelling no, as is evidenced by the number of times that the character has been forced to temporarily walk away from one persona or another. The tension of trying to lead to lives at once destroys his marriage and his friendships (I’ve never had a friend get so mad at me that he dressed up as a goblin and chased me around on a hang glider), and he repeatedly reaches the threshold of tolerance, entertaining thoughts of abandonment or suicide.

I don’t think I really have to spell out the application point here. And please don’t take this as some indicator that I have some heavy sin issue in my life that I’m trying to allude to without confessing aloud; I wouldn’t abuse such a public forum to do so. I believe that we all, Christian and non-Christian alike, face this impossible and unnecessary battle of trying to pretend we don’t differentiate between the face that we wear on the inside and the perceived face that we wear for the outside world. The truth is that most of us are hurting, very deeply and very visibly, but we will fake whatever we have to in order to keep that from escaping. We wear one face at work, at church, at community group, at the dinner table, this carefully constructed facade that invokes, hopefully, a more than suitable abstract of someone who “has it all together.” We see the truth when we look in the mirror, when we pray, when we cry.

The character of Christ is assumed by any and all who are called to salvation by His glorious name, and yet…the deeply rooted fears in our hearts eat away at us, personal demons trying to convince you of anything other than an identity change at the foot of the cross. The bread and wine slowly, inattentively, are relegated to the back of our minds, muffled by the indictments of a past that is refuses to be forgotten:

“You’re too emotionally needy. Seriously, the only reason that you don’t feel like you can handle all these “trials and tribulations” is because you’re weak and pathetic. Jesus is already tired of you coming to Him with all of your shame and your baggage. No wonder your father left.”

“You gave up your virginity to him and you didn’t even love him; now he’s gone. Do you honestly think that God forgets that kind of thing? There are so many out there like you, and you seriously thought you were special. Not even close. Idiot. You couldn’t trust him; what makes you honestly believe that God will be any different?”

“Do you really think that you’re going to make a career out of this? You’re too stupid to make this decision, and you know that based on past failures. Let’s face it: you aren’t cut out to do the things you think you love to do. Maybe you don’t even love to do them, you’d just like to think you do. Are you confused yet? Good…”

The suit of fig leaves may have originated in the Garden of Eden, but Adam’s handicraft has yet to fall out of style. The beauty of that illustration is the sheer frailty of the veneer that Adam and Eve, that consequently we, apply to themselves, ourselves. Adam and Eve become aware of their nakedness, of their vulnerability before God and one another, and their first inclination is to cover it all up But leaves tear easily, and they still take the rough shape of whatever it is that they’re intended to cover. The shock and subsequent fear of being seen for what they really are – frail and weak – pushes them into full-on retreat mode, and the ramifications of this are still being played out in our churches and homes today. We prod and we poke at each other, and because we all want to appear perfect, that’s what we weigh ourselves against. The result is generation upon generation that come up short, scared, and defensive.

What I really intended to communicate in my previous post was this: I am constantly learning the same lessons from God over and over again, not because I’m stupid and not because I don’t understand the application of them, but because I don’t like what is being revealed in myself. I don’t like it when Scripture and circumstances collide in this thing we call life, and I’m suddenly revealed for who I really am in light of the message of the gospel. So I add more leaves to the exterior, do a little sewing, and return to my contented statement of concealment, from God, from family, from friends, from pastors, and resolutely, myself. I don’t want to face the truth about myself, I don’t think any of us do. I’m offended by the notion that I can’t save myself, and in a direct contradiction of my dependency upon the salvation of grace by faith alone, I’ll do anything and everything to prove that I can. And fight and fail, fight and fail, and end up where I was last week all over again. Somebody made a joke last weekend about the Christian life often feeling like that Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day; I’m not laughing.

I wish I had a repentant heart more often, a truly repentant heart. I wish I wasn’t so hard and arrogant that I didn’t have to be repeatedly humbled by my mistakes and big fat mouth. I wish I wasn’t so opinionated on things that I don’t really have an opinion on. I wish that I could speak with passion about the things that I care about, and mean hose things when I say them. I wish I loved myself as much as Jesus Christ does. I wish I didn’t worry so much, more than I think I do, or that I had more confidence in God to “provide me this day with this day’s bread.” I wish that I trusted myself more often.

The beauty of my situation is that wishes simply reveal the fears of an insecure heart. If a dead heart can be revived, a fearful one can certainly be comforted, and I’ve assuredly felt that in the last fortnight. Yup, I just used fortnight in a sentence, and its 2007. I have security in Christ, but I may very well have put Him inside a box, oh anonymous commenter. I’m currently experiencing the joy of “isolated authenticity of faith,” i.e. seeing the promises of God revealed outside of the context of a bible study or banging on a drum in the woods with a bunch of dudes in our underwear. Whoa, weird. Anyway, I thank you for your prayers for me, as I have felt the immense joy that I have come to associate with intercession for the pains of my heart. It’s not that, as the popular aphorism goes, “a ship’s course has been righted”; it’s that a portion of its weight has been cast off, freeing it to pursue the intended course from which it never truly deviated.

This morning was spent searching for a working ATM and enduring the stress of the immigration office, and the evening in a Nepali emergency room with one of the boys from the hostel, Prakesh, who broke his arm during an impromptu football match. The doctor asked me to help set Prakesh’s arm since I had proven my worth by crafting a makeshift sling out of a sweater back at the hostel, while a nurse requested that I simultaneously restrain a drunk man in the next bed from removing his IV because he’d suffered severe internal injuries after falling out of a tree. I’m not even going to begin to indulge you with a description of what that experience was like, not because you can’t handle it or because I’m running long, but because it didn’t define my day. What did was this passage by Adam Clarke I ran across in the waiting room after washing plaster and blood off my hands, and thus, I leave you with it. God is:

“…the eternal, independent, and self-existent Being; the Being whose purposes and actions spring from himself, without foreign motive of influence; he who is absolute in dominion; the most pure, the most simple, the most spiritual of all essences; infinitely perfect; and eternally self-sufficient, needing nothing that he has made; illimitable in his immensity, inconceivable in his mode of existence, and indescribable in his essence; known fully only by himself, because an infinite mind can only be fully comprehended by itself. In a word, a Being who, from his infinite wisdom, cannot err or be deceived, and from his infinite goodness, can do nothing but what is eternally just, and right, and kind.” (Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, 1894)

That there…that there’s my identity. My finite little brain is going to sleep a little more infinitely at peace tonight.

Tapai Ko Hunuhuncha?

2007-03-01T23:38:00.000-06:00

Who are you?

I don't mean that in the "Oh, I wouldn't consider myself postmodern, but I loved Garden State because it raises questions with no discernable answers" sense of the question, but I mean truly: who, in your heart, are you? Really? Do you know?

I've been chewing on that question for years, to some extent because I want to know the purpose for which I was created, but mostly because each time I come to a painstaking conclusion, it seems like I endure a drastic shift in character and tumble further down the rabbit hole. I think I've got myself figured out, and then circumstances and the revelation of sin cast new light on all these areas of my heart and character that I've completely failed to notice in the past. The apostle Paul, in a rather blatantly obvious statement when taken at surface value, really understood the tender need of the human heart for the exposition of sin when he wrote in Ephesians 5:13-14, "But when anything is exposed by the light, it becomes visible, for anything that becomes visible is light." (ESV) If God truly is "the Father of lights, with whom there is no shifting shadow," as referenced by James, then there really is no way to see into the depths of your own soul without the catalyst of the refinement that comes via the Holy Spirit. We cannot see these things on our own, for we are the willingly blinded when it comes to conviction.

If we are made in the image of our Creator, then we cannot really understand who we were intended to be before the creation of the world without knowing Him personally and intimately. Sanctification is the process by which we are purified, but as we are called to and drawn toward the Father, we gain a deeper understanding of who we are in reference to the working of His glory, and how deeply the nature of our flesh separates us from that working and that power. So it seems that each time I'm engulfed in the flames of trials, I come out a little stronger, a little purer, and a little more sure of just who and what I'm becoming.

Case in point: Jason and I have embarked on a teaching series based on the parables of Jesus with the orphans for our evening devotions twice a week, and I was reluctantly drawn to the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector (Luke 18:9-14). I say reluctantly because the first time I perused the passage, I knew that my teaching it would be as much for myself as for the children. As Christ presents the sory, it contrasts the Pharisee, whose holy exterior conceals a heart yearning for personal glory at the expense of God's, with a tax collector, who is so deeply moved by his enslavement to sin in his heart that he cannot bear to present himself in the temple to cry out in prayer. One raises his head toward heaven and touts himself as a saint; the other acknowledges his depravity with a broken spirit and self-flagellation.

As I worked through the meanings of exaltation and humility (no simple task when you're speaking to a mixed crowd of 6 year-olds and 19 year-olds), all I was really aware of was the bright red tint of my face and the shame I felt in the midst of the conviction of the very words I was speaking. A particular verse that has haunted me over the last six months is John 5:44, which poses the pointed question of, "How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?" The interior of my heart has been the site of an intense conflict between the righteous cleansing nature of the Holy Spirit and the depravity of my pride and self-exaltation during this most recent and current season of my life, one that will continue to rage as long as I glorify the work of my hands over the work of my Savior. That sucks. A lot. And as weak of a realization as that is, the words just will not come to express how bitter I feel over the way I've treasured my deeds and my reputation over the relationship that defines the core of who I am, who I am being transformed into. Somewhere in the midst of the humility that's being ground into this pitiful frame my soul inhabits, my heart is being changed; but that doesn't mean I feel it every day.

I've touched on it in a previous post, but I'll lay it out here again: when I hopped my intercontinental flight to the country of Nepal, my heart was very much in "Carve out glory for Jordan" mode. Very little changed in that regard for the first few months I was here, but God, in His infinite sovereignty, decided to teach me a lesson in humility through the physical pain of a month-long struggle with stomach bacteria and skin boils. Lying in my sleeping bag, half-delirious from ibuprofen overdoses and unable to even sit up due to the literal pain in my butt, I received some stern tutelage in the purpose of pain and the consequences that will always, always accompany sin. And my sins are legion, or at least they feel that way at times...

I don't feel like the same person anymore, and its encouraging to receive emails and letters from old friends (thanks Marquel, you really lifted my spirits last night) who unconsciously confirm the evidence of my struggles and subsequent victories. Writing may be catharsis for the soul, but the careful words of an interceding brother or sister speak more truth to me about what God hath wrought in me (I don't have any idea what the present tense of "wrought" is, else I would've said that instead). So keep those words of encouragement coming; I need them dearly right now.

This has been a tremendously hard week for me emotionally, and for no specific reason. I've felt very alone, which is surprising considering how immersed I've been in the makeshift videshi community of believers that Jason and I have gotten involved with through our church. Melancholy attacks at the most inopportune moments, and while I'm not a ball of energy by nature, scripture requires that I be engaged with community by necessity. The body was created to be interdependent for a specific purpose, just as the Church's body is likewise interdependent -- we need each other! So pray for my heart right now, as it is exhausted by the weight of emotional isolation from other believers and self-imposed exile from the presence of the Spirit. I don't have to live like this, and I don't want to. I need you beloved....

Bear out.

Ursa Minor

2007-02-21T23:38:00.000-06:00

Against my better judgment, considering the change of heart I've had regarding the whole Relevancy Movement, I've decided to release a Nepali iMix. Music is quickest insight into my heart that I can possibly give you, aside from blogs that stretch on for nine pages in Microsoft Word, so I beseech you to hear me out on this one. Want to know what it is that's burning in my ears (besides shallow compliments) as I'm wandering through the back alleys of Lagunkhel? Want to understand what it is that I'm thinking? Want to criticize the tar out of me? Here's your chance.

I'd post the sucker on iTunes, but three of the tracks aren't available and I'm too much of a perfectionist to settle, so you'll have to hunt 'em down yourself. Either way, here's what I'm listening to these days:

1. Groom's Still Waiting at the Altar - Bob Dylan
2. Last Goodbye - Jeff Buckley
3. Warning Sign - Coldplay
4. Your Heart Is an Empty Room - Death Cab For Cutie
5. How Life Can Turn - The Appleseed Cast
6. Old Soul Song (For the New World Order) - Bright Eyes
7. The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts - Sufjan Stevens
8. A Consistent Ethic of Human Life - Derek Webb
9. The High Countries - Caedmon's Call
10. I'm Nowhere and You're Everything - Chris Thile
11. When You Thought You'd Never Stand Out - Copeland
12. Breathe Me - Sia
13. My Enemies Are Men Like Me - Derek Webb
4. The Lark Ascending or (Perhaps More Accurately, I'm Trying to Make You Sing) - David Crowder Band

She Must and Shall Go Free

2007-02-21T23:27:00.000-06:00

Judging from the response to my last posting, I’m going to assume that the majority of you either enjoyed it or are still in the midst of the lengthy process that entails reading it. Regardless, I enjoyed writing it, despite my seemingly tongue-in-cheek candor, and yes, Gennie, all those details are etched in the framework of my mind.

Stream-of-consciousness is one of my favorite forms of writing because it reveals the true nature of the experience of a moment. Every instance, every second of your life has smells, tastes, sounds, an entire menagerie of feelings and intrusions into your soul that create a culture, of sorts, of the instantaneous. Some of these things are pleasant, some are obviously not, and deep in the recesses of our minds, they all merge together like a sort of cocktail of the inner-self. And no, I’m not a New-Ager, so shut up. We associate odors with places, emotional responses with sounds, cellular ringtones with friends and family (Kent Hodskins and “Rubber-Band Man” is a personal favorite). One second from now, nothing will be the same as it just was, forever lost to the world save to the interior of your brain, but somewhere deep inside of you, it resonates within your soul, springing back up when you least expect it. This is why, perhaps, you’ll encounter phantom urges, like the desire to call your grandmother after smelling shortbread cookies. Or it could just be something entirely scientific that negates that entire theory. What do I know? I sleep under a “Learn the ABC’s from Clifford the Big Red Dog” blanket at night.

The thing that astounds me is that God actually cares about each and every moment of my existence, and yours, be they awake or obscured by sleep. Existing outside the realm of space and time, He is intimately concerned with the thoughts, actions, and individual lives of every single human being that has ever walked the face of the earth, and He has all of eternity to consider each of us: how He crafted us uniquely and individually from the dust of the earth, if our capillaries are taking enough blood to our muscles, if our strength of character is strong enough to withstand the next trial that we will endure, if we should order a spicy chicken sandwich or just have a garden salad… You and I, we are of vast importance to God, be we Christian or no, because in spite of our natural tendency toward evil, he yearns for us to know Him just as he knows us. I don’t think my brain can handle that yet, having taken into consideration that while God created science, theology, energy, and the reticulated python, I spent my time in chemistry class scribbling battles between stick figures and the head of my professor, Ms. Kotulla (Oblongata), mounted on the body of a Shetland pony. Creativity, I have down; it’s the channeling said creativity into the formation of a fully-functioning universe filled with individualized souls that I haven’t figured out yet.

It freaks me out, because God could be doing something divinely important like stopping tsunamis or moving via the Holy Spirit to cause Westerners to stop caring so much about who wins American Idol, but instead, He’s interested in me, brushing my teeth, clad in a pair of sweatpants and a YMCA t-shirt in a dimly lit orphanage bathroom. And its not that God doesn’t have any business being involved in the situation – He did create the matter that forms every bit of substance in the aforementioned situation, myself included – but it just seems so… I don’t know… infinitesimal? My parents love me, but my mother doesn’t lie awake at night pondering over the thought of her son cleaning out his toaster or wiping up dog piss. I hope.

And yet God is there, every moment of every day of our lives, watching not as a passive eternal observer, but in anticipation that we will seek His wisdom and power to guide our thoughts, lips, and hands on a moment by moment basis. It’s that power and wisdom that produces real spiritual fruit, that makes those moments survivable en masse when they all go to crap. When I stop to think about it, really think about it, it’s this reality that makes it impossible for me to be anything other than a Christian; without a God that is this eternally interested in me, this compassionate, this powerful yet personable, I will not be able to make it through life, period. I was a wretch in every sense of the word before I met Jesus Christ, taking pleasure in my sin and agony in it’s aftereffects, to the extent that I wished for death, and tried to bring it upon myself multiple times. Peace, patience, kindness, etc? They sustain me and do not exist apart from God our Father. Thus, I am neither too humble nor proud to say that I cannot survive this life without a God who longs to guide me through every second of it.

I say all this because I find myself often examining my life through that lens, taking careful mental notes of the particulars of every given situation. One could say that it comes in part from the four years of collegiate journalism classes, but in truth, it’s out of a love for people. If God can love me in such intimate fashion, then it behooves me to love and show similar interest in those whom He has commanded me to love as myself. I’m not watching each moment of my life pass by with my notepad out, jotting notes as I go; I’m watching, laughing, living in community with the blessed handful that will pray over me, dance around me, worship with me, and pass by me. The hands that taught me to ride a bike have meaning, just as do those who hand me my Taco Bell order. The love apportioned to each is different, but if I show compassion to the one and indifference to the other, I am practicing contempt in its mildest form.

Details are my life, because they make us individuals and give substance to our memories. The depth and breadth of a life can’t be summed up as physical characteristics, nor can it be defined in narrow demographic terminology. For example, when I think about my friend Ben, I don’t just visualize his face and his personality, but I think about all things associated with him: the smell of fried eggs and bacon, chewing tobacco awkwardly and haphazardly hidden in the middle console of an Isuzu Trooper that itself feels reminiscent of the log cabin from White Fang, climber’s chalk, inappropriate dirty jokes, plaid shorts that fray at the edges of the pockets, red beard and red beer, laughter and longing. He’s more than a burly guy sporting a red beard, a student, an engineer-to-be. We are not to be defined by our occupations or our ages, because as people, we are more than our paychecks and birth certificates.

So as I sit in a coffee shop, in a bar, at work, on a bus, I’m learning the world around me rather than absorbing or being absorbed by it. The individual persons around me have their own stories, their own lives which are part of this great big meta-narrative that God is writing out in eternity. You are of vast importance to me because you have eternal significance in the eyes of Jesus Christ. The barista at Arsegas who spent three months of her life in Africa as an aide worker, feeling that she never truly aided anybody because she was sick with dysentery the entire time. Calvin, the security guard at the Olive Branch Mission in Chicago, who served as a personal body guard to the likes of Ozzy Osbourne and Kurt Cobain, and knows how to make near-perfect apple-flavored taffy. Bipin, a Nepali friend who accompanied Jason and I to Chitwan, and is related to roughly half the city of Bharatpur; he likes to wear his mother’s socks. Professor Brian Wilkie, who didn’t believe in “society” and died of a heart attack the semester after he purchased my Beaux and Arrows t-shirt (some Pi Phi function I never attended, bought the shirt at a flea market) in the middle of a class because it reminded him of his wife.

Taxi drivers armed with false smiles and dirty jokes. Professors with degrees and divorce papers in equal proportions. Agnostics who secretly fear God and missionaries who secretly don’t know Him. The elderly waitress at Wafflehouse who works the midnight shift because she’s afraid of being alone. The gang member saving up his wages from dealing heroin to go to law school. Female Maoists who admit they only joined the revolution for the free education and child care. Tibetan. Jewish. South African. Australian. We’re all beautiful and damaged, lugging our burdens through a world that cares for nothing other than a quick fix and a polished exterior. God loves His broken people, and so do I.

So what’s the point of all this? Why invite you through this parade of characters for any reason other than a testament to my ability to remember the minute?

God loves Nepal and is in the process of redeeming it, that’s why. If my description of Kathmandu made you cringe, imagine what it’s like to live here, not temporary like myself, but to have been born, raised, and reared for death in a society that is hostile toward humanity and hostile toward the cross. The Nepali, having been born into one of the ten poorest countries in the world, face an uphill battle for survival that literally begins with birth: Nepal boasts some of the globe’s highest morality rates for both infants and their mothers. An average family of four lives off of less that $400 U.S. per year, eats meat only one day out of that year, and works day and night farming land that they will never own in the world’s only remaining feudal system. Social persecution hides behind the veil of Hinduism, with ignorance and fear permeating every level of the caste system which serves as the country’s backbone. Death is an escape from the pain of life here, a reentry into the pool of souls that awaits the reawakening of Vishnu and the destruction and reproduction of the universe.

The world views Nepal as this mystical, forbidden realm, a carefree playground for Buddhist monks and Hindu seers; thus, the myriad of tourists who traipse through the mountains and crowd the over-priced guest houses are caught off guard by the sheer desperation of the poverty they encounter. Child laborers and crumbling, vacant temples aren’t featured in the brochures, nor are leper colonies and vagabond immigrants. This is a land in which struggle and poverty have become part of the culture, to the credit of the strength and the hearts of its people. What is surprising is that despite the lack of money, health care, available work, and food, there is no overwhelming feeling of anxiety or desperation in the Nepali. They are, as a whole, joyful, light-hearted, and celebratory in the face of what drives the West to the brink of personal hell. To be Nepali then, is to bear the weight of an inextinguishable pain and endure it with joy.

Each time I take a micro-van back to my home in Godawari from the city, I find myself fighting the urge to cry as I watch daily life unfolding outside the window of my diesel-powered torpedo. Young mothers nursing their babies, knee-deep in the village bathing pool as they chat with friends; elderly women, backs permanently bent from decades of porting loads of rice on their shoulders, who kiss the hands of their nephews and neighbors, welcoming them inside for a cup of milk tea and biscuits; a crowd of unemployed men in their early 40’s, laughing as they play carom-board (a popular game that works like billiards, except with tiny discs) and share a package of cigarettes that has been graciously provided by the shopkeeper who is currently in third place. The buildings are drenched in a façade of mold and brick sweat, the streets buried in a fog of diesel exhaust and dust, everything in sight either unfinished or on the verge of condemned.

At first glance, this looks like a dying land, mired in crumbling structures and crumbling people. Step off that micro-van, however, and there is nothing to be heard but the giggling of local gossip, the laughter and singing of children. Between the broken homes and shops grow fields of poppies, the Technicolor yellow of the Land of Oz. Naked infants weave in and out of traffic, cackling at the top of their lungs as they chase after a neighbor’s puppy. Little girls accepting free chocolates from a shopkeeper who can’t afford to give them away, while their younger brothers goad bike tires down the street with a stick. I honestly find myself wondering at times if I’ve been transported into some sort of dream world that begins where Charles Dickens left off. Nepal is a country inhabited by the generous, exuberant poor, the sort of people who only exist in Oliver Twist or Newsies.

True, one could write all this off as some sort of escapism of the masses, a country full of people who have embraced absurdity as a means of intentionally denying the seriousness of their struggle. But the beauty is the openness of the people to the message of the Gospel! This is a country whose people have starved spiritually for ages, oppressed by the silent idols whom they daily pay offering to, and now, suddenly, the unknown God has made Himself readily available. The Nepali hunger for Jesus Christ like no people I have ever seen, in spite of familial oppression and social persecution.

One year removed from the collapse of the Hindu monarchy, the Church has completely transformed. What was once considered a taboo underground network of heretics is now a mobilized force of truth and compassion. Nepali Christians man government offices, care for the diseased and the incapacitated, operate children’s homes and health clinics, and share their faith with friends and family. I’m routinely surprised by the number of men I see who are intentionally involved in the local body because they often outnumber the women, a true inverse of the American church (unless of course, you count singles ministries).

The real triumph is that that the Nepali church is the Nepali church, unaffected in its cultural expression of the image of God by Western missionaries and Western standards. The charismatic movement has really taken off here because the Nepali are, by nature, attuned to the arts of emotive song and dance, but when you watch them worship, there aren’t traces of the seeds of foreign missionaries in their songs or teaching. This is the gospel at work, in a new language and a new culture. Nepalis had to invent new words to interpret the bible because language did not previously exist to describe things like grace, mercy, or agape love. There is light in the darkness here in the jaws of the beast, and it grows stronger each and every day.

In light of the pain and the sickness and the squattie potties, there is consistent encouragement here through the sheer amount of growth taking place in the hearts that comprise this land. A missionary serving on the Tibetan border recently returned with stories about attempts at evangelism that were met with enthusiasm by the hill peoples because Christianity is now regarded as “that Nepali religion.” Just this week, one of the boys in our hostel returned from a holiday with extended family in a remote eastern village to report that, after several years of prayer, over half the village has accepted Christ in the last month! The Nepali may need pastoral training and personal discipleship, but they are already mobilized enough to commission their own missionaries to surrounding nations or the purpose of church-planting. Praise God! There may not even be a niche for foreign missionaries in this country by the end of the next two decades!

So don’t stop praying for us, and by no means cease your prayers for the spiritual redemption of Nepal. Pray for Christian leaders to be borne out of the Newari and Chettri peoples, out of the Kham Magars in the west, out of the Maoists, out of the Brahmin caste. Pray for the bible colleges, that they would prepare a new generation of Nepali men and women to courageously pursue righteousness and teach the truth of the gospel of salvation to their communities. Pray for Christian marriages, that they would be built on a foundation of sacrificial love and honest communication.

Pray for Jason and me as our needs are many. As we begin work on designing a library for CWC, pray that we would find affordable furniture and appropriate educational material, and that the environment we produce would be conducive to the children’s studies. Pray that as we teach through the parables of Christ in our evening devotionals with the children, that the truth of God’s living Word would penetrate their hearts and minds and produce spiritual fruit. Pray for the bible study we are leading with the older boys, that their enthusiasm for Christ would be unwavering, and their commitment to spiritual leadership would result in a powerful ministry that continues long after Jason and I have departed. We will be trekking to Mount Everest base camp the last two weeks of March with a Sherpa guide who is a believer, so pray that our health holds up as we physically condition our bodies, and pray for our ministry as we hike: we are hoping to pass out bibles and materials in several villages along the established trail.

I’ll leave you without another recent photo-editing experiment, this one of some village boys pole vaulting into the Rapti River. Grace and peace to you all in the name of God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Bear out.

My fingers are tired

2007-02-09T04:36:00.001-06:00

Yessss! Marathon blogging is back!

And P.S. - Jason and I are safe again: Calm Returns to Plains of Nepal

A Day In the Life

2007-02-09T04:13:00.000-06:00

Big, big, BIG news, but I’m going to make you read all the way to the end of this column to get it. Unless of course you just scroll down to the bottom. Mouse turd.

The question I’m most frequently asked about Nepal, aside from the inevitable “So if they don’t use toilet paper, how do they…y’know…?” is the vague and unanswerable “What is it like?” Anyone who has spent time in an East Asian country, or anywhere outside the continental United States for that matter, knows the true and epic impossibility of trying to answer that vague inquiry without giving an answer that is equally vague in return. The oft-used, and predictably lazy response is, “It’s good, but different,” but I have a sheer dislike of describing things as such. The word good has evolved into the preferred fallback reply when no actual thought has been applied to the question at hand. For example:

“Hey dude, how’s married life?” “Oh you know, it’s good…but it’s really different.”

“Have you Diet Caffeine-Free Cherry-Vanilla Dr. Pepper yet?” “Yup, and it’s not half-bad…just different.”

“Haven’t seen you in while Mark. How’re you feeling since the operation?”
“Oh, you know… Getting my tubes tied wasn’t the end of the world; it’s just a little different, but nothing terrible. Just a little snip here, a tuck there… Hey, how ‘bout that Super Bowl, huh? Man, that Prince is just something else!”

I hope you get my point: we, the American public are in a gradual state of dumbing ourselves down in every conceivable manner. We’ve reduced our vocabulary to one word phrases and an astonishing number of acronyms; the typical college freshman can barely speak in a complete sentence that utilizes every part of speech, much less do his laundry without mixing the colors and whites. Our movies get louder and explodier (copyright Jordan Greenwald, 2007), our magazines compensate for lack of depth with full-color photos of Lindsay Lohan in rehab or fluff pieces about rapid weight-loss pioneers who are more marketing devices than people, and it should come as no surprise that the number one song of 2004 involved Usher screaming “Yeah!” every four seconds. Somewhere, Lil’ Jon’s high school English teacher is weeping underneath her desk, clutching a copy of Ulysses. Mashed potatoes was too complicated of a dish for us to make on our own, so we created a “Just Add Water!” version, and when that proved to still be difficult, we gave up and delegated the culinary arts to the microwave. Overall, most Americans no longer bother to indulge our brains because Walmart executives and Oprah do all of our thinking for us.

Now I could tell what Nepal is really like, but that isn’t a short story, and typically people just want a solitary adjective or an uplifting sound byte, as opposed to a lengthy narrative that is as provocative as it is disturbing. Nepal is a living, breathing, struggling amalgamation of humanity. It is beautiful, it is desperate, it is joyful, and it is ever-changing. The Nepali people preserved their identity as a friendlier Shangri-La, a country comprised of mystical Hindu farmers. After opening up the borders in 1951, Nepal revealed what it really is: whatever Western tourists expect and desire it to be. Nepali people, like other East Asians, are inherently and immensely hospitable; the difference is that the Nepali have been more than willing to sacrifice their personality for the sake of modernization to suit the needs of each and every tourist that sets foot in the country.

As the West has sought out the Nepal for its escapist curiosities and mysticism, so Nepal has sought the West for its prosperity and culture. Tourists come looking for truth and missionaries come promising it, but both leave behind their impression: Nokia phones and Harry Potter, coffee shops and cable Internet, Yankee caps and Britney Spears t-shirts. As we encourage changes that will best suit our travels, we destroy the cultures and societies we are making our various pilgrimages to. The irony is that the Nepali are people have become as much of a tourist attraction as the mountains and rivers (one brochure states “Come for the adventure, stay for the mystic wisdom of the Nepali shamans!”), when all they really desire is to either become like the tourists they cater to, or escape to the United States. Today, Nepal is a shell of what it was only 20 years ago, and in another 20 years, it will be a shell of something else. The lives and the people that make up those shells are what interest me.

So I offer you this, if your eyes aren’t already tired from reading my present thoughts that are in sore need of an editor: a look inside a day in the life of Nepal. You want to know what it’s like? Very well. Be forewarned: be it humorous or be it broken, this is not a land for the calloused heart. Nepal is equal parts anecdote and leper victim. Herein lies merely my perspective, but read on if you care to take a look inside a typical Kathmandu Monday.

Monday, 8:46 am, and I wake up to the sound of a Pekinese fighting a “Tibetan mountain dog” in the alleyway below the bedroom I’ve just regained consciousness in. The alarm clock is predictably not working, not because of shoddy workmanship, but due to the morning government-directed blackout; we’ve having two per day, for a total of six hours, for the last month due to a strain on the city grids. I rub the sleep out of my eyes with fingers too numb from the cold to feel, gradually coming to terms with the fact that I’m not in my own bed (though this room is really, really nice compared to my CWC lodgings). A perusal of the engravings in the stack of bibles on the nightstand confirm a decision that the freezing temperatures convince my brain took place in a different lifetime: Jason and I have spent the night, for a second consecutive evening, at a friend’s house in a southern Kathmandu neighborhood.

I slip my jeans and fleece back on, feet sacrificed to the cold because I’ve foolishly chosen to wear sandals on a weekend that began promisingly warm. Wandering into the den, I find Jason awake and perusing a Jonathan Edwards book, pretending to translate Olde English into Real English while he waits for the power to return so that he can Skype his sister on my laptop. We mutter the garbled greetings that have now replaced “Good morning!” after four months, and I sit down on the couch to listen to a Grove sermon on my iPod and read an old copy of Time magazine filched from our incognito host’s bedroom. Said benefactor, who will remain nameless for safety purposes, is on a month-long “debrief” (read that in missionary-speak as “vacation”) in Thailand, but his roommate, a 46-year-old Philippine missionary, is busy cooking oatmeal and ruining a familiar, but ambiguous Josh Groban song in the kitchen. Philippines are natural entertainers: they’re always entertained by themselves, even if nobody else is.

Somehow, the three of us manage to kill an hour taking turns seeing who can sing the most dramatic version of a serious song in a pathetic take on American Idol; our Philippine elder wins, in unsurprising fashion, by cooing yet another Josh Groban classic while mimicking the backseat love-making skills of Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic. Jason and I are nearly too shocked to notice that the electricity has been switched back on, but the 6,000 decibel warning of Instant Messenger signing itself back on brings us back to reality. While I’m washing the Philippine filth off of my face and brushing it out of my teeth, Jason delivers the bad news from the local Kantipur affiliate’s morning show: the labor union bandh, or strike, which shut down all the city buses and forced us to crash in Groban’s Nepali recording studio last night will be continuing today, and possibly tomorrow.

Bandhs, while frustrating to most visitors to Nepal, have become part of my everyday life in the last few months. Some bandhs are logical, some last for weeks, and some turn ridiculously violent without warning (please see my October post on the subject for a good personal example). This specific bandh is in response to Nepali citizens being allowed to ride on tourist buses to destinations outside the Kathmandu Valley, which is costing the crappy public buses (which constitute 95% of the country’s fleet) a lot of fares; naturally the appropriate response to lost income would then be to shut down all the country’s public transportation. All strikes are intended to send a message, and the message of this one is quite clear: “Bus drivers love burning tires.”

The situation sucks for the city in general, and I happen to be in a particular danger: my passport has been sitting in the Nepali immigration office for two weeks (government offices are open for precisely 6 hours a day, zero days a week), and there are hints from fellow American travelers that the employees usually don’t bother to hang on to such pithy items as passports for more than a couple days. I’ve made three trips to the office in the past week to retrieve my ticket back to the land of beef and Mount Rushmore, only to find that Nepal likes to inexplicably declare national holidays when the government workers don’t bother to show up for work. I nervously weigh my options while watching the tail end of the Colts-Patriots playoff game on satellite feed, Jason talking over Vern Lundquist as he at last completes that international phone call to his sister. I don’t have much of a choice; if my passport still exists, it needs to be liberated immediately, and since I don’t have any means of transportation other than my size nines, it looks like I’m going to be getting a good workout today. Please note: there is no such thing as an unexpected hike in Nepal, because if civil unrest rears its head in any form, it will spill out into the streets and screw everything up for everybody. Except on Saturdays; Saturdays are “holy” days.

Strapping my sandals on and stepping out the front door with Brian Hirschy’s hideous army green backpack in tow, I am assailed by two things: a Pomeranian that believes itself to be a Doberman, and a 30 degree increase in temperature. I am sweating in my jacket already, but I still can’t feel my toes. Locking the gate behind me, patting my pocket to make certain I have the receipt for my visa with me, finding my “new” iPod serving as a paperweight next to it; I pop in my headphones and turn on a John Piper sermon on Romans, partially to facilitate spiritual growth over the course of the next hour, and partially to insulate myself against what I’m about to hike through. Here’s my journey.

Leaving the neighborhood of Nakkhu, instantly forced to wade through two separate wedding processions that are winding their way through the narrow muddy streets. Each party is trailing a full Nepali brass band playing a form of folk music I last heard in the Borat movie (honestly), and with the two bands wearing identical red uniforms, I puzzle over whether or not one will end up at its final destination with two extra French horn players in tow. Nakkhu is one of the first areas of Kathmandu to be infiltrated by house churches, and since it is no longer illegal to be a Christian in Nepal, there is a large, outwardly expressive community of believers in the surrounding areas. Four churches, different denominations but decidedly charismatic, crowd the street corner. In a sense, its as if I never left Arkansas.

Six boys playing cricket in the street wave enthusiastically and shout “Hello!” at the overdressed videshi (foreigner) shuffling toward them. I smile and say hello back, enthusiastic not because the boys are so friendly, but because my feet have finally decided to accepting blood from their respective capillaries, and ask how the boys are doing this fine morning; they do not respond, not having yet learned a proper response in their English classes. I’m bid farewell with more cries of “Hello!”

I cross a bride spanning the river that marks the lower border of the city of Patan and hold my nose. The city of Kathmandu has been voted by an international environmental group as the #2 most polluted city in the world in the last week (#1 is Dehli, India, for those of you who are interested), and the river below is a perfect example of why. The banks of the river at the bridge are nearly 20 feet tall, the grass matted with settled dust as truck drivers have taken to dumping their loads into the river rather than waste petrol by driving to the designated dumping zone outside of the city. The water itself is infinitely black, sludge-like, with the smell of urine and toxic waste wafting from its banks; I count amongst the swirling rubble three diapers, a pair of bicycle tires, four living ducks and one dead one, condom wrappers, snack noodle wrappers, an Anaheim Mighty Ducks t-shirt, and two women washing their hair. The urge to vomit is stifled, eyes remaining close until I am safely a block away.

The street winds through several blocks of identical houses and identical shops. Three little girls play hacky-sack with a handful of interwoven rubber bands. Because of the bandh, there is no school today – teachers cannot reach their respective classrooms, and children’s buses are denied use of the roads. Sure enough, as I reach the intersection of Ring Road, the main street that tightly borders the whole of Kathmandu, an endless stretch of empty school buses extends beyond my sight lines. It serves as a chilling reminder of the last bandh I happened to get caught in, which left hundreds of children stranded on buses on this same road overnight, many of them below the age of seven. The number of children that go missing each year in this country thus becomes yet another Nepali conundrum, both utterly believable and utterly unimaginable; a recent newspaper bulletin established that in the month of January, 350 children disappeared in the Kathmandu Valley. These are the disappearances that were reported.

Trudging through the Tibetan community just south of Jawalkhel now, pausing to watch a group of street dogs viciously attack a puppy. A pile of refuse at least a foot tall has collected outside the gates of the Tibetan Labor Workers Union complex, left uncollected possibly as a slur by the Newari government against the not-so-welcome immigrants. A young boy, ankle-deep in the trash, is sifting anxiously through fruit rinds and rubble before, face beaming, pulling out a broken purple sandal and slipping it onto one of his now noticeably bare feet. I assume his shoes have dislodged themselves at the bottom of the trash heap, then recoil in horror when he pulls a out yellow sandal of a completely different style and slips it onto the other foot; the child, homeless, has just lucked into a “new” pair of shoes.

Three elderly women and an ancient man stumble, zombie-like in a circle around a Buddhist stupa, lifelessly and desperately whispering unanswered requests to the prayer wheels they obediently spin each morning and evening. Two girls laugh hysterically across the street, urging a puppy to leap back and forth across their jump rope. A shopkeeper stands outside his Ghurka knife emporium, smiling through his plaid scarf as he sips his morning cup of tea. A man parks a motorcycle on the curb in front of his shop, and the two embrace, sharing in the morning’s pleasantries; as I pass by, the motorcycle driver helps the shopkeeper light a stick of amber-scented incense, waving it prophetically over the knives that will likely go unsold this afternoon.

An open-air market awaits me just south of the traffic chokepoint in Jawalkhel, locals selling grapes, potatoes, and radishes that have brought in from the countryside, as well as stomach-ache remedies and condoms. An old woman throws a spoiled orange at a street urchin who has just failed at pinching some of her goods, missing his head with a pitch that would have been well out of the strike zone. Schoolboys whose parents sent them out the door despite news of the strike on the morning news have scaled the fences of the private soccer field on my left and are debating on the legitimacy of a goal. An ambivalent police officer, dressed in military blues, finds that his cries of disapproval have gone unnoticed by the infidel Ronaldos, and rather than climb the fence to scold them in person, he practices twirling his bamboo cane. The locals appear unimpressed, and hungry.

Traffic picks up here on the main streets of Patan, arteries coursing into the heart of Kathmandu. I follow the flow of traffic, opting not to walk on the non-existent sidewalk, feeling the phantom pangs of sensitivity in a right elbow that has been tagged by a half-dozen motorcycles or rearview mirrors, as each vehicle passes me by. This is out of character for me, as I often walk head-on into the surge of Suzukis and Kias: I like to be able to see the face of each person who comes within centimeters of potentially plastering me. The chances of surviving a pedestrian collision are not good. Nepali traffic laws dictate that, because there is no such thing as vehicle insurance in the country, if a pedestrian is injured in a vehicular accident, the driver at fault must pay for the injured party’s medical treatment in full; if the pedestrian is killed, the driver pays $1000 to the grieving family, and the matter is considered settled. Therefore, pre-meditated murder comes off necessarily cheap, and Westerners who stray too far into traffic are considered fatalities who “just didn’t understand our laws.” I hug the curb; I’m worth more than $1000.

Passing up Saleways, the Nepali version of WalMart, where Jason and I buy all of our Nutella and spaghetti. There is a Sega Genesis, circa 1990, on sale in the electronics department for $200. Time magazine is $3; Maxim is $13. Maxim is sold out routinely.

Sights of Patan’s shopping district: Nepal’s only Hallmark store. Maoist teenagers handing out pamphlets to motorists and asking for “donations,” despite the fact that Maoist leaders have promised an end to such practices months ago. A pair of police officers standing outside a German bakery munching on donuts, making the stereotype a seemingly international truth. Two competing hospitals strategically placed across the street from one another. A dozen Internet cafes, each promising “High-speed Axcess”; neither of the two that I glance inside on this afternoon have a single working computer. An Italian restaurant. Three pizza places. A Thai restaurant. Several Tibetan restaurants. A Mongolian restaurant. Not a single genuine Nepali eatery in sight – the owners are desperate to please Western visitors, and Nepali food is reportedly “too hard to make.”

A shop advertised as an “Optometrist/Dentist” that actually sells office chairs and bootleg DVDs. A three-story restaurant that offers “Free mixed drinks and kid’s meals during happy hour!” A clump of homeless adolescents and one child of six or seven huddled together in front of a bank, huffing aerosol fumes out of plastic bags; one boy appears to be breathing in spray paint fumes, as is evidenced by a swirling cloud of purple inside the transparent plastic bag he cradles to his face. Buddhist temples. Hindu altars. A cow grazing on a raised grassy knoll at the edge of a major intersection (Nepali traffic law #729: “A motorist who strikes and kills a cow must serve 19 years imprisonment”); the billboards above it shill Oranjeboom and Johnnie Walker Red.

My hip is aching as I reach the bridge into Kathmandu, following the flow of people past the entrance to the king’s palace and United Nations headquarters. A man with no shirt on smokes a cigarette on the roof of the Nepal Ministry of Agriculture building, glaring at the peons below him. Street vendors sell biscuits, cigarettes, chocolates, and more condoms. A man in a well-pressed three-piece suit hops out of an expensive SUV on one side of the street, then runs to the other side of the street and hops onto a waiting bicycle, pedaling like mad back in the direction he just came from.

Billboards proffer such products as Opti-bake Microwaves (“Yumm-teen possibilities!” shouts a girl in a chef’s hat), Choco-Fun candy bars (“Giggle! Giggle! Pinch! Pinch!”) and 2PM Noodles, whose television commercials have made claims that feeding your children said noodles will enable them to fly and withstand bullets. Two familiar faces grace the majority of the posters that graffiti and adorn the walls of local businesses and homes: Prachandra, national hero/villain and concealed leader of the Maoist movie, and the ambiguous construction worker whose face adorns the advertisements for Sukhar Cigarettes, the unofficially government-endorsed brand of choice. The construction worker is hard at work repairing a telephone cable that appears to be strung across the peak of Mount Everest, yet he wears no jacket. I am not the first Westerner to read Into Thin Air and be puzzled by such a depiction.

I pass Ratna Park, the open-air government celebration facility, pausing to watch adult men fly kites and children read newspapers, before hanging the turn that leads me into the immigration office. I am in luck – not only does the official in the visa office recognize me (he greets me with grin and, “Mr. Greenwald! We thought the rebels may have gotten you! Ha Haahhhhh!”), but he does not request a bribe in return for my passport. He hands it over without any fuss, reminding me that he’ll see me again in three weeks when my visa expires again. I am too ecstatic over this proof of my existence having not been thrown in the furnace to respond sarcastically, for once.

I stop over in the Kathmandu Mall, which is advertised as “Nepal’s Only Indoor Shopping Mall” despite the fact that three other malls now exist, wading through four identical floors of American brand clothing being sold as Nepali brand clothing (red and brown Yankee cap anyone?) before reaching the international food court on the roof. My interaction with the waiter follows as such:

“Can I have the Thai Barbecue Chicken with Bamboo?” “No Thai food today, sorry sir.”

“Can I have the Pork Egg Roll and Fried Rice?” “No Chinese food today, sorry sir.”

“Dhal Bhat Takhari?” “No Nepali food.”

“Pizza?” “Oven is broken sir. You like chicken burger? We make with fries…”

After lunch, I head next door to the main branch of the Kathmandu parcel service to pick a birthday package sent by Jason’s little sister, Krystal. If you want to understand the intricate workings of a foreign post office, a highly suggest renting the movie Labyrinth; the building is an ever-shifting maze of walls and piss-poor lighting, staffed by disgruntled desk clerks and an army of warehouse gnomes who are on indefinite break. I’ve been coached on the process of retrieving my box by Jason, who has become a parcel office regular, but it’s still confusing: wander into one dimly lit room, hand over a photo-copy of an ID (two photo-copies if you’re that confused), fill out one form, head into another dimly lit room and pay money for another form, fill in two blanks, return to the first room, wit for your box to be rescued from the warehouse and sifted through for bombs and beef, go back to the other room, fill out the rest of the second form, pay money to one customs official, pay money to another, return to the original dimly lit room which has now grown smaller and dimmer, finish filling out the original form, pay more money, and run shrieking for the light. Have a nosebleed yet? Fear not, that’s the easy version of picking up a package; it gets more difficult if the office manager calls for a pause in activity for the employees to snack on yellow sponge cake and tea, government-provided of course. It is no coincidence that the only fat people I have seen in Nepal work in the post office.

My box contains mini-bottles of cranberry juice, birthday streamers, activity books for children, and some candy. Naturally, as I examine everything in the daylight in front of the building, I attract a crowd of a dozen nosy Nepalis, all eager to see what the videshi has had shipped in from a mysterious foreign country. There is a young boy, a leper, with stumps for both legs and both arms drawing pictures for willing pedestrians by holding a colored pencil in his teeth, and he plaintively asks me for money by repeating the chant of “Paisa, paisa, paisa...” I offer him a cranberry juice and he frowns. Realizing my insensitivity (“The kid has no freaking hands, how the eff is he supposed to drink it? Nice one Jordan…”), I unscrew the lid and hand the bottle to his mother, who is sitting next to him; the boy takes a sip and grimaces again, beginning to repeat “Paisa, paisa…” I walk away, bewildered, humiliated, and deflated. My box weighs 5,000 lbs.

I make it a solid kilometer before the weight of the box begins to strain my back to the extent that it is no longer comfortable to pretend that I am comfortable. Frantic searching for a taxi produces nothing – the solitary cab that I see is forced over to the side of the road by (you guessed it) brick-wielding strikers, who drag the driver out of the vehicle and beat him on the side of the street. No crowd gathers, as a sweaty American carrying a cardboard box is obviously more fascinating than a street fight.

I give up and haggle with a rickshaw driver, convincing him to cart me two miles for 200 rupees. When the driver has to hop off of his bicycle and push the contraption uphill for ten minutes, it weighs on my conscience. I offer to help him, but he snaps at me and slaps at my thigh; I don’t argue with him. Two boys on a bicycle ride along next to us, shouting “Hello!” at me over and over again, and when I finally respond, they call me mula sakh, a popular Nepali insult that roughly translated means “radish neck,” and ride away laughing. I find comfort in the story of Elijah and the bear that ate all those kids. When the rickshaw finally drops me off at the choke, I cave in and give the driver an extra hundred rupees and a cranberry juice; I am a horrible bargainer.

The walk back through Jawalkhel is too tiring to be comprehended or paid attention to. I play games in my head, trying to make up sudoku puzzles with no solution or remember the lyrics to Whiskeytown songs. The same old women and ancient man are repeating the same prayers as they aimlessly follow the cycle of spinning prayer wheels around the stupa in the Tibetan neighborhood. The little girls with the jump rope have disappeared, replaced by a massacred dog missing an ear and bleeding from open wounds in its cheek and side. Impromptu games of cricket and soccer rule the streets, cars seemingly having been permanently exiled from the city. Adult men holding hands dance to a Hindi dance version of that Celine Dion song from Titanic song in front of a butcher shop. The sun is setting, the games continue.

I pass Jason on the road home just before the bridge over that godforsaken water, and spend the rest of my journey home trying to figure out if he told me he was heading to a store to buy spaghetti or a spaghetti strap top. A crowd of children follows me all the way through Nakkhu, singing and kicking a soccerball, asking me if I know Avril Lavigne. Two boys sit in the dirt in front of the gate to my home away from home away from home, strumming a guitar and singing “How Great Is Our God” in Nepali. They smile and take my box from me, carrying it up the stairs to our apartment and giving me an awkward hug before running back down the stairwell, laughing all the way.

My Phillipine friend greets me with the admission that he thought I was dead, and I’m unsure whether he’s telling a joke or making heartfelt expression of joy upon this, my triumphal return. I doze in the den for a half hour before Jason arrives back with spaghetti (I knew he said spaghetti!), and we pop in a bootleg DVD of Stand By Me before, surprise! The power goes out! Bed time once again comes early in Shangri La, and I dream of a warm shower and driving a garbage truck for a living in a foreign country.

Still awake?

Okay, so I did promise big news, and since I try to stay true to my word, here you are:

Rina is a mommy!!!! It’s a boy!!!! Rina’s been pregnant since Jason and I arrived in Nepal, and she nonchalantly announced Tuesday morning that her water had broken and she was going to go to the hospital to “maybe” have her son. Santosh, her husband, called later on that night to announce that she gave birth to her son, who has the tentative name of Cillian (tentative until Rina comes to her senses and names the kiddo Jordan), just after 7:00. You would’ve thought that every child in the orphanage had given birth by the celebration – girls jumping up and down and hugging one another, boys pumping their fists and singing Nepali folk songs. Just goes to show you: Nepal is equal parts destitution and hope. Christ is alive here, and the pain is a credit to his glory. So take joy, the kids are alright.

Bear out.

The Nepal Photography Ethics Omnibus

2007-01-19T22:42:00.000-06:00

I have a confession to make: buying a camera, for me, may have been a mistake. Looking at my recent contributions, or more appropriately, lack thereof, to this journal of sorts, I see a growing trend. Rather than exercising my writer’s brain and painting a picture of linguistics and emotion, I’ve been quite lax in my willingness to simply compile a pictoral history of my time here in Nepal. This may not be a problem for those of you who are happy to be visual learners, but it’s provided a hidden angst for me: I have a lot on my mind and heart, and photographs simply don’t effectively capture a good portion of the things I’d like to express. Plus, Jason’s revealed proof to me that I am incapable of taking a serious picture – Mom, you were right.

Regardless, during our return trip from Chitwan (you can read a good synopsis of it on Jason’s blog located here: www.jasoninnepal.blogspot.com) , I devoted myself to reading Alex Garland’s trekking opus The Beach. Yup, it got made into a crappy Leonardo DiCaprio movie, but it’s a compelling book nonetheless, and the deeper I got into it, I kept laughing internally at the narrator’s keen insights into international travel, specifically here in South Asia (the tale takes place in Thailand). Anyway, the main character makes this comment about how when he travels, he never takes a camera with him because whenever he records a journey in photographic form, he inevitably comes to a point where the only memories he can drudge up of the entire experience are those captured in the pictures.

This might seem obtuse, but if you’re anything like me, taking pictures on vacations or outings is often times an afterthought. I’m wandering through a botanical garden or throwing a Frisbee at the lake, on the verge of leaving, when suddenly I’m struck with this frantic urge of “Oh-Jenga! SomebodysgottatakeaphotoforthesakeofposterityorI’llneverbeabletoprovetomyselfthatthesefriendsandthisplacewerereal.” Or something anxious and furious in that same vein. I fight that kind of internal loneliness that only seems to surface when I’m in a crowded room full of laughing, joyful people; suddenly, I’m struck with this attack on my ego and my heart that threatens that none of this, none of me is real, and it staggers me every time. So when I look at photos of holiday celebrations with family, high school bus trips to the Harvard campus, or collages of my summer spent in the ghettos of south Chicago, I’m wracked with the guilt of trying to recall, “Did I take this picture because it was meaningful to me, or simply because I felt the urge to take a picture?” I simply can’t remember, and it drains me trying to reminisce over whether or not my memories of people and places are anchored in the truth of the moment in which they took place, or if I’m attempting to rewrite my life experiences to provide insulation from pain.

The sheer barrage of photos I’ve taken and received from co-volunteers in Nepal is overwhelming. Seriously, I have something like 3000 on my computer, and the decision process of posting them online is excrutiating. Do I post:

a) photos of myself, marking the gradual transition from beer-drinking office employee to weathered, pseudo-bearded international missionary

b) photos of only the orphaned kiddos, eventually succumbing to favoritism and only
revealing those children with whom I spend the majority of my time, thus robbing you of the fullness of how amazing the children at CWC truly are

c) photos of what I think and hope captures the essence of Nepal, i.e. architecture,
mountains, lepers, homeless children, Hindu shrines, street dogs, etc., thus capturing the experience, but at the same time trivializing the people by converting them into a brochure designed to evoke an emotional response from you and myself

These are the things I wrestle with, all because of this stupid Canon IXUS 65. Silly, perhaps, but I’ve always had that tendency to over-analyze to the point of non-action. So here’s the deal: I’ll continue to post photos here, but I need to write, and by that I don’t mean venting, and I don’t mean putting together a travelogue. I hate the feeling of needing to have some sort of result or activity to report to America as proof that I’m worthy of attention, when in fact I spend most of my time reading books on the roof or pouring myself into thought over games of Solitaire on my laptop (I tried to delete it, but it’s impossible…seriously). After all, my ministry target is in school for seven hours a day, and unlike home, I can’t just drive to Best Buy or Chez Newell every time things get boring.

So, seeing as how I’ve managed to bore you to death by giving you a thoroughly wordy treatise on photography, blogography, and all things inbetween, let me simplify: I’m going to revert back to making blog posts at least once a week, cutting back on the number of photos a bit, and writing about the things I really want to write about. I’ve got this burning urge to just share about the gospel, about what you can learn about Jesus through pilo, about Nepali transportation, food, culture, and about the problems facing Westerners in international missions and aide work (because there are a lot of them). Here’s a hint on that last one: the American way is NOT the best way, as I’m finding out consistently.

One ridiculous prayer request before I log off: my beloved Chacos are on the verge of falling apart. I bought them my freshman year of college, 7 years ago now, and I never imagined they’d crap out on me. Regardless, a big split opened up in the sole where the toe strap cuts across underneath my foot, and I really, really want them to make it back to America. So as dumb as this sounds, pray for my sandals…I hate wearing socks and shoes.

Expect more from me soon. For now, here’s a picture of me running from a rhinoceros.

More Christmas Pics

2007-01-16T02:43:00.000-06:00

Here, you can see the full extension of my Santa hat.
Jason spent the whole night telling me how much I
Looked like Will Ferrell in that movie “Elf.”
Is that good or bad?

Lokendra and Dipesh kick off the dance party that followed dinner.
This is the most animated I have ever seen Dipesh, whom
Jason often describes as “an accountant.”

CWC in all its illuminated splendor.

In the weeks leading up to Christmas, Jason and I decided to tone down
our nightly devotional times and celebrate Advent with the children.
Every night, we read scripture and sang Christmas hymns by candlelight.
This picture is a collage of images taken during those devo times
that I thought captured the mood. At least it looks cool.

Come On! Let's Boogey to the Elf Dance!

2007-01-16T02:25:00.000-06:00

For those of you who are results-oriented,
Jason raised money to give the kids Christmas gifts.
That is a LOT of red and green wrapping paper.

Ground zero on Christmas morning.
Normally I hate shots of people opening their gifts, as this is often
the only memory captured in the vast majority of Greenwald holiday photos,
but I had to add this one.
That Spiderman doll is nearly as big as Bijay is!

After the carnage, I took a nap with the doll
our Austrailian friend Renee bought me.
The current time? 5:45 in the morning.
Mom? Dad? I’m sorry for each and every Christmas
I woke you up before sunrise.

The Christmas celebration at Calvary Church.
It’s pretty common in a Nepali church for people just to wander around
behind the stage while the pastor is speaking,
or for little kids just to run loose, as is evidenced by the little guy in the sport coat just aimlessly standing around in front of us.

It's Christmas (in January)! Let's Be Glad!

2007-01-16T00:27:00.000-06:00

Yup, I know I said I'd post more frequently some time back, but Jason and I decided to ring in 2007 with a much needed vacation to Chitwan National Park, which kept me away from a computer for over a week. So much to update you on, and so precious little time and clarity of mind to devote to it all.

Seeing as how January is officially half over, at least on my half of the globe, what better time could I choose to rave about Christmas in Nepal? This may actually be a good thing, as some of you may still have your trees and lights up. Don't read that as a joke, as a few years back, I came home from Christmas break around the 20th of January to find that my roommates (Jason and Taylor Wood) still hadn't thrown away our 7 ft tall Alleuvian Fir/raccoon retirement community. I think nearly all the needles had fallen out, but the decorations and lights were all still on the tree. What centerpiece could better express the feeling of "We're all in our mid-20's and too busy to bother with trifles like fire hazards."

But I'm off on a tangent here, AGAIN, aren't I? Christmas...in Nepal...right?

Let me get straight to the point: Christmas in South Asia is both a blessing and a lament, and I loved it for both reasons. To those here who are Christians, it is a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, a day of joy spent in worship and feasting, untainted by the commercialism and Pokemonism that drives the holiday back in the west. Read that as: NO GIFT-GIVING. To everybody else on the continent, Christmas is....Monday. Go to work. Drink tea. Go home to your family. Eat rice. Go to bed. Etc...

So while it was a bit depressing to see so many people out and about, oblivious of what Christmas means to so many millions of others around the world, I had a blast at the celebration held at Calvary Church, the spiritual body which includes our children's home in its body. We sang songs all day, or at least the kids did -- Jason and I just hummed along and pretended we weren't confused. I was the proud winner some sort of pinata game: participants pay 5 rupees and then take a blindfolded swing at a clay pot filled with candies. Having woken up at 5 a.m. to exchange gifts with the kids, I spent a good portion of the afternoon sipping on milk tea and napping out on the church lawn. And during the evening service, Jason and I led the CWC kids in a performance of a couple Western Christmas carols for the congregation.

But the best part my friends? Not Christmas, though it was fun (and highlighted with a spiritual possession that I'll be more than freaked out to tell you about if you email me and ask). I'm honest and conceited enough to admit that the highlight of the holidays for me was the Christmas party we threw in partial celebration of my 25th birthday. I can say with certainty that my Nepali birthday was without a doubt the best that I've ever experienced, due mainly to the fact that having been born on December 23rd makes it near impossible to celebrate -- somewhat difficult to be a glory-hog when you have to share the spotlight with the Saviour of the universe.

So I had my first legit birthday party in about 7 or 8 years, and it was a blast, complete with buffet line, bonfires, wine-in-a-box, cultural dancing, and a boombox blaring the Vengaboys. I'll let the photos speak for themselves

(l-r) Sonu, Dipa, Sushil, Sabita, and Gita
Sushil and Ishor played some Nepali Christmas carols for us,
while the girls spent most of the night trying to hide from my camera.
They don't look too shy here.

Some of the younger children crowd around the birthday cake.
We had to make sure it fed all 100 guests, so I got one that weighed 17 lbs.
What can I say, I like my chocolate.

(l-r) The bear, Rina (my "boss"), Umesh (towering over us all), Rajesh, and Yubrats
That goofy kid I'm clutching in front is Moses, Rina's apdopted lil' bro.
My santa hat is standing straight up because I was clever enough to stuff
a cardboard birthday hat underneath it. Awww, I'm so cute...

Laxmi (in the middle) performs a dance number with many of the older
girls set to the tune of a Nepali Christmas song.

Nabin (middle) is honestly the best dancer I've ever seen in person.
He spent weeks choreographing a routine for the boys to a Nepali folk song,
then threw in a bit with all the canes at the last minute.
Really cool to watch, and really fun. Great job guys.
PS. Note that half the guys aren't wearing shoes.
The temp was close to 34 degrees. Ouch.

Kathmandu "Fun" Park: Epilogue

2007-01-02T04:00:00.000-06:00

Last photo for the day, I swear. For the best viewing experience (and because I neglected to consider posting all these pictures in reverse order so they'd appear chronologically), I recommend scrolling down to the post entitled "Kathmandu 'Fun' Park I." I mean, if you want to, that is. Far be it for me to impose my will on anything other than ant farms.

Anyway, this last photo kind've puts things into perspective for the day. I hope you'll understand.

When we took the boys to the momo restaurant after exiting the park, I noticed these homeless boys playing with a puppy underneath a bridge. Those bags you see them sitting on top of are full of garbage waiting to be picked up by the Kathmandu Public Works Dept. The boy on the right is wearing an empty coffee can as a hat. At one point, both of the boys were digging water bottles out of the sewage below to sip on the drops of water remaining at the bottom.

This is Nepal. This is the conundrum and the ghost that defines my every waking moment in this country: for every CWC orphan Jason and I clothe and feed, for every child we take out to dinner or teach to play volleyball, there are thousands wandering the streets, destitute and dying. These boys are discovering joy in the bottom of a trash dump a block away from the nicest shopping district in the city. Nobody stopped to help them or offer them food or drink, not even me. And despite the perceived good I am doing here, I am haunted by the faces of leprous children missing limbs, crippled men, and homeless women cradling their starving newborns whom I pass up and avoid each and every day. My deeds are as filthy rags before the throne of God, and I will someday be held accountable for my lack of compassion.

Pray for the poor of Nepal, for the homeless, for the kicked-aside, cast-out, unemployed, and undervalued. Pray for the leper, the tax collector, the brothel owner, the enslaved child prostitutes, and the government officials. Pray for the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Muslim, the tribal healers and witch doctors, the taxi drivers, and the hoteliers. Pray for the Christian missionaries and the local pastors. Pray for Jason and I. None of us are holy save for the salvation found through the death of Jesus Christ and the gift of the Holy Spirit, so pray that God would draw the nation of Nepal to Himself and redeem this broken land.

Pray for peace in the continued battle between the government of Nepal and the rebel Maoist forces, and for the citizens who are affected by the ignorance of both parties. Pray for Rina, for the safety of her baby in the final months of her prenancy, and for the salvation of her husband Santosh. Pray for my body and for Jason's heart. Pray for the spiritual growth, physical safety, and mental maturity of the 52 orphans who find sanctuary in the Children's Welfare Centre of Nepal. Pray for our laptops, guitar strings, sleeping bags, and warm showers. Pray against crab spiders, pilo, and computer viruses.

Pray for 2007 to be a year of unprecedented victory for the Nepali Church, and a year of awakening for American Christians: some of us have been sifting through the trash when we're just out of view of the true kingdom at hand for far too long. I love you all, and may you have a blessed New Year.

Bear out.

Kathmandu "Fun" Park VII: Fun Park in 3D

2007-01-02T03:48:00.000-06:00

Man, this haunted house lived up to the terrifying exterior.
For weeks after our visit, I had nightmares about how much
Jason and I paid for kids to be spooked by paper towel
ghosts and black lights that didn't work.

We took all the kids to a small cafe for momos after leaving the park.
This smile took just about all the energy I had left at this point.

Yup, there were sheep wandering around in the middle of
downtown Kathmandu. The capital city of the country.
A block away from the king's palace.
And David loved 'em.

What trip to Kathmandu would be complete without
a GOAT riding around on top of a bus.
I love Nepal. Seriously.

Kathmandu "Fun" Park VI : Fun Park In Space

2007-01-02T03:37:00.000-06:00

Lakpa and I celebrate surviving the bumper cars.
And apparently, an angel appears off to my left.

I convinced Birendra to ride with me on the
Tilt-a-Whirl one time.
I can't tell if he liked it or not.

Oh, we thought we were finished, but there was one ride left:
The Morbidly-Grinning Cater Pillar of Doom.

If you look carefully,you'll discover 3 reasons this photo is funny:
1) Jason chooses to lift his arms on a 2 mph caterpillar ride
2) My face, contorted with fear, resembles a chimpanzee
3) See the inflatable castle in the background? Wow. Wow. Wow.

Kathmandu "Fun" Park V : Son of Fun Park

2007-01-02T03:07:00.000-06:00

Bumper cars...you knew they were inevitable, right?
Kumar essentially likes anything involving destruction.
Welcome to heaven little guy!

Jeez. Even when she's ramming into someone
at full speed, Sapana still manages to smile.
Too. Cute.

Pratap and Kerishma (foreground) brace for
impact with Bidhan and Amrita (background).
The girls were more excited about just
sitting in the cars than driving them,
so a bunch of the younger boys hopped in.
So much for women's lib.

I looooooooove the lighting in this photo.
Dorje just looks absotlutely beautiful.
I wish I was old enough to adopt. Or shave.

Kathmandu "Fun" Park IV : Fun Park Lives

2007-01-02T02:51:00.000-06:00

Jason and the boys waiting on "Columbus' Boat" to
kick things into gear.
Let me be frank: I hate this ride.

I told you I hated this stupid boat.
One of the four people in this photo threw up.
A plate of dhal baat to whomever guesses first.

Sapana and Amrita screaming away onboard
the "Rock and Roull."
Nope, that was not a typo.

Look! Jason's having fun!!!!
(Now if only he'd let go of the bar)
All kidding aside, I think this is the ride that made everybody sick.
Sweet. Let's do it again!!!!

Kathmandu "Fun" Park III: Fun Park the 13th

2007-01-02T02:30:00.000-06:00

Holy. Crap.
Sapana is the cutest little girl that ever lived. Evar.

BJ is in serious contention for second cutest child on earth.
He gets bonus points for riding the bike backwards.

I like photographing Rohan because he
has an inexhaustible facial library.
I don't even know what this one means...

David gives me photographic proof that
the yellow ducks are the WORST RIDE EVER.

Kathmandu "Fun" Park II

2007-01-02T01:22:00.000-06:00

Om Prakesh, as I've mentioned in an earlier post, loves life.
He also happens to be the only child enjoying this giant swing ride.
Pratap, sitting next to him, looks absolutely terrified.
And don't even get me
started on how hard Jason cried on this ride.
Ridiculous...

Rabin mocking me by pretending to call the Hogs in this mini-Jeep.
He got his come-uppance on the pirate ship ride.
(you know, the one that swings back and forth like a pendelum?)
Never saw a kid puke like that before...

I told Bidhan to act excited while he was riding the motor bikes.
"Look excited" must translate into "ride backwards and catch flies with your mouth" in Nepali.

Lakpa shamelessly whips out the Bronco Buster manuever.
Since the bikes were immobile, he wasn't able to pull off a 720 Madonna Reverse-Air Trump Stump. Pity, cuz he was looking totally PIMPED OUT in his Ninja Turtles t-shirt.
Rock on Lakpa. Rock on...

Kathmandu "Fun" Park I

2007-01-01T23:52:00.000-06:00

A month-long hiatus can be nearly as crippling to your readership as pilo can be to your backside, if this December has taught me anything. I’d like to firmly announce that Jason and I are, in fact, NOT dead, but in fact suffering post-Christmas-traumatic syndrome. Ten consecutive days of shopping and a Christmas celebration that involves waking up at 5 am to deal with demon possession are enough to do in any man I know (much less a bear). I’ll give a full written update later in the week, but for today, I’ve got a ton of pictures that have gone unposted partially because of sickness, and partially because Internet in the Kathmandu Valley is a punchline as opposed to a public service.

There are a vast number of stark differences between “This American Life” and “This Nepali Life,” as any guidebook or Wikipedia cultural reference point can attest to. Nepalis don’t have indoor heating, pedestrian protection laws, vehicle emissions standards, or Desperate Housewives. The Super Bowl isn’t even broadcast in this country! But for all of my yearnings for American customs, I’ve discovered that one concept transcends international borders: exam week. Well, that and the love story that is Titanic.

Nepali exam periods take place within a relatively approximate time period when compared with their Western counterparts, usually falling within the last week of November and the first week of December, with a second round scheduled on the cusp of summer. The difference is that everybody takes them: a seven year-old will test on computer literacy at the same time as a teenager, and from what I've seen, often get better scores. Schools in Nepal suck, period, and while I'm not ethno-arrogant enough to suggest changing them over to Western standards, something has to change in the educational system for this country to move forward: teachers grade on the basis of completion of assignments rather than understanding of materials, students aren't held accountable for plagerism or cheating, and according to the most recent figures I was able to find, only 14% of Nepalis above the age of 10 are literate. Thus, the tutoring aspect of the work Jason and I are doing here in the orphanage takes on a more deliberate and intentional tone: these children have to learn if they are to have any future at all.

So somberness aside, examination week (shorten it to "exam" and get corrected by 50 orphans) was surprisingly a refreshing time for both us and the kids. They tested from 9-11 each morning, came home and watched the required 4 hours of cartoons and hindi suspense movies, and then studied all night. Overall, the kids did very well on their tests, and as a reward, Jason and I agree to hire a bus and take the youngest of the orphans into the city for a visit to Kathmandu's only amusement park as a reward for their hard work. What follows is a pictoral history of the day...

This is Kathmandu Fun Park. Just try and hold back your enthusiasm.
That girl picnicking in the foreground certainly is...

The boys jockeying for position in the ticket line.
Those actually looking at the camera from left to right:
Kumar (who broke a food cart before we even got into the park),
Bhidan, Dorje, David, Pratap, Lakpa, and Naresh (getting his armband at the counter)

Is it some sort of contractual obligation that every amusement park in the world have some sort of "Ride the Big Dopey Yellow Duck" ride? The way the ducks' eyes are painted on, I can't tell if they're gazing heavenward in fear of a nuclear holocaust, or if they're in a drug-induced trance. Either way, I wasn't allowed to ride the ducks. Jerks.

Bumper cars, fairly self-evident. But look at all the scrapes and dents in these things, not to neglect the fair amount of dirt settled on them. Makes you wonder if Kathmandu is actually the future site of the Terrordome from that old Mad Max movie...

Home Life

2006-12-11T00:51:00.000-06:00

Bidan here is my unofficial sidekick: he follows me everywhere I go, offering to carry my backpack,throw away my trash, chew my food for me, etc. We constantly play this game where we make angry faces and ask each other, "Brother, why are you looking so serious?" The first person to crack a smile or laugh gets bodyslammed, or in my case, bearhugged. I like this picture because a) I was actually able to catch the ping pong ball in flight for once, and b) because Bidan's facial expression gives the impression that his life is in mortal danger if he doesn't complete this serve. Bidan, I love you little buddy!

Om Prakesh seems to have descended from one of two ethnic backgrounds: elvish, of the North Pole variety, or Marvin the Martian. He is the most excitable child I have ever had the pleasure of knowing. Om Prakesh goes wild over just about anything and everything: Power Rangers, Rey Mysterio Jr., Nepal, America, global warming, giraffes, Noam Chomsky...you get the point. At first, I thought that Om might suffer from ADD, but I quickly realized that God has seen fit to award him with an overabundance of joy. He is in love with life! It's such a great feeling to play with Om, because his spirit forces you to come alive: I'm almost 25 years old, but Om makes me believe that there is a good possibility that I am, in fact, the Green Ranger.

Sushil and I got the opportunity to bond over an afternoon spent in town getting his glasses fixed: he had a run-in with a school bus that cracked one of the lenses, and I took him into Patan to see about getting it replaced after my ankle finally healed. Sushil and I both share the same prescription, so we've now taken to sharing the glasses whenever he's at home so that I can see the Himalayan mountains when it's clear in the morning. Sushil became a Christian seven years ago and was nearly disowned by his family in the process. Soon after Sushil's conversion, his sister accepted Jesus as well, and the two began to pray that their parents would recant their Hindu culture and join them as brothers and sisters in the Lord. After six years of constant prayer and tearful visits to home, Sushil's parents received Christ this last spring and have begun to share the gospel with the rest of their small village. CWC's ministry reaches outside the walls and the Kathmandu valley, all because Sushil remained faithful in his hope for the salvation of his family.

P.S. I'm really proud of how cool this picture turned out. In light of my pride post, feel free to e-buke for bragging about my l33t B&W photography skills. Rawr.

Look, I know how to hold a baby! We've been taking care of Rita here for the last month as she awaits the finalization of her adoption by a Spanish couple. I had honestly never held a baby before until this moment, but in the last few weeks, I've become somewhat of a professional. Rita almost never cries, and is always smiling and laughing; she sticks her tongue out a lot, which is a good sign, unless that tongue waggle is followed thereafter by a cascade of baby throw-up. I haven't mustered the courage to change a diaper yet, but there's hope for the future: Rina's baby is due in mid-February, meaning that I'll plenty of opportunities to practice my poo-wiping skills in the months to come.

Boys Night Out II: The Revenge

2006-12-10T21:24:00.000-06:00

OK, so these pictures are a little outdated, i.e. third week of November, but I could hoarde them all for myself, right? So I'm opening my heart, and my hard drive, and sharing some a little Nepali joy. Jason and I have taken two groups of the older boys out to dinner: Jason posted photos from our first Boys Night Out (the imfamous Lips Dance Restaurant Incident), so it's my duty and pleasure to bring you Boys Night Out Part Deux.

This time around, we hit up a little place called Jazoo's in Jalwalkhel, which is basically referred to as the "Whitie District" by the Nepali locals: the vast majority of the neighborhood's population is comprised of Westerners working for national NGOs, or Westerners pretending to work for national NGOs. I love meeting fellow crackers who refuse to tell what they're doing in Nepal or who they're here with, especially the ones who glance back and forth nervously when I engage them in personal conversation.

Anyway, Jazoo's right? Most of the boys, aged 13 to 15 this time around, spent more time in the bathroom trying to spike their hair up with water for Glamour Shots than they did around the table with Jason and I, but we had fun anyway. I was nursing my ankle pilo at the time, but a Coke and 4 extra-strength Tylenols gave me back my precious, precious smile. I tried to teach the boys how to play the Sculpture Game (if you've ever been a camp counselor before, well, you get the idea...), but alas, my puny mind games were no match for the Hindi music videos playing on TV. Jason smuggled in some brownies from the German bakery downstairs (it's called Makoo's...what's the deal with all the restaurants ending in -oo?) for dessert to satiate his sweettooth. Dinner for 15 guys was AGAIN under $50, so for those of you who are in need of financial planning, send me an email; we'll work a budget out for you.

From left to right, this is Sagar (a.k.a. Big Sugar), the Bear (complete with short-lived Ben Casey facial hair), Kumar, and Surya. Keep Sagar in your prayers: shortly after Jason and I arrived in Nepal, Sagar developed a nervous disorder in his right hand that kept him from being able to completely straighten out his fingers. When Rina took him to see a doctor, tests revealed that he is in the early stages of leprosy. He's received treatment that is impeding the spread of the disease, but leprosy is highly contagious via contact of skin or bodily fluids, so literally everybody in CWC (Jason and I included) could potentially contract it. I'm determined not to treat Sagar any differently, mainly because I still can't beat him at ping pong after three months, but it's scary to think of what could potentially happen to Sagar or any of the other orphans, and the question of quarantining a child in a leper colony is not one I'm ready to face.

Once again, left to right: Ghalsang, Prokash, and Roshan. Ghalsang, is without a doubt, the funniest kid in the hostel; he and Jason engage each other in rap battles on the walk to school, and he's mastered the art of competitive name-calling (Chimpanzee Brother is my favorite). Prokash is relatively quiet, but very physically affectionate when he's not busy at the dart board Jason and I bought at the Kathmandu Mall. On this particular night, I was really impressed with Prokash's kind spirit: he could've had anything off the menu, but he chose to eat momos (a really cheap Nepali snack--fried dumplings with meat inside them), and when they finally came, Prokash ate one and shared the rest with his friends. I got him another order and he did the same thing, refusing to eat part of anybody else's meal; what a servant's heart... As for Roshan, well, this is the most animated you'll ever see him, as he normally sleeps for 16 hours a day.

See, I told you Ghalsang was a goofball. Here, he unwittingly does his best "offensive Jerry Lewis" impression. The glasses were formerly filled with banana lassis, a sweet foamy drink that's really similar to a milkshake, save for the fact that it's made from curd. Mmmmm, sweet sweet curd... Just like mom used to never make. Ever.

Everybody wanted their picture taken with this fish tank, though I'm not really sure why. Ishor, pictured here, is actually 17, but missed out on the meal last time we took the older boys out, so Jason and I invited him along and let him order basically one of everything on the menu. Well, actually, Jason just told him that as a joke, but Ishor took him seriously and ate four plates of food. Ishor comes from a small village in the countryside, and according to what he told Jason, became a Christian after missionaries visiting his home cast out demons that had been wailing in the countryside.

Sleeping Bear, Sault Saint Marie

2006-11-26T22:39:00.000-06:00

Hibernation and honeymoons, like all good things that include massive amounts of sleeping and the appropriate gruntings, must come to an end. And thus, I break my three week silence.

Shocked to see an update? I’m rather shocked to be typing it, personally. I’ll give you a moment to still the beating of your hearts, waiting for the color to return to your cheeks while you curse me for the burning hot mocha you just spilled on your blouse (Dad, you wear blouses?). More than likely, many of you have been eagerly awaiting some sort of eulogy by Jason commemorating my life and times, a video montage of my greatest moments with the proper Boyz II Men accompaniment. Alas, I've disappointed you. My return marks the release of the Playstation 3, heralds peace with Maoists, and boasts of an end to the massive amounts of Nepali illnesses I've been battling throughout the last three weeks.

In all truth, it’s been a struggle to coerce myself into sitting at my laptop long enough to write anything worth reading; November has been a constant battle with my physical health, my heart, and my pride. Don't worry, all will hopefully be explained by the end of this post, but it may take some time. Fortunately, that's a luxury that I have in plenty.

Let me preface this update with a pretty obvious, but recent and penetrating truth that has been revealed to me: I am a prideful, arrogant, cocky, willful lover of self. I've always had, as Chris Thile sings, "an appetite for my own myth." This "mythos of Jordan," if you will, was something I worked hard to establish as a college student, and even harder to perpetuate as I entered the adult world. My exploits, from being pulled over by four cop cars for allegedly robbing Casa Taco, to a near-death experience giving plasma, were offered up to my tiny immediate world in such a way that it became my hope that I would become important enough to enter the realm of urban legend. I allowed this, and of course preferred it, because it gave me the opportunity to be known by my stories rather than my character. It is, after all, much easier to cultivate a story than a relationship (and a lot less stressful). So, I circulated my life as opposed to sharing it with people, and in the process, I fell in love with myself.

Pride is the wellspring of all sorts of other forms of personal desolation, and as I'm finding out, it’s the source of a vast amount of various forms of sin in my life. In my flawed thinking, I'm too strong, too smart, too witty, too cultured, too pious, too good to succumb to the pettiness of sin. I’m above lust, deception, idolatry, bigotism, prejudice, and condemnation. I know better than my parents, better than my friends, better than you who read these words of mine, better than God himself, in matters of decisions to be made about the direction of my life, how to spend my money, how to live, how to love, matters of politics, popular culture, and classical Russian architecture.... You name it, and in my mind and my heart, I secretly believe that I'm better than you at it. And even if I'm not better than you, there's something about me that makes me conveniently more interesting or exciting than you. And the truth of it is? I'm nothing, aside from what God chooses to make of me, other than skilled at the careful elaboration of clever adjectives, and lucky enough to get attacked with bricks in a mini-bus.

Part of the reason I came to Nepal was that I wanted desperately to distance myself from the sickness in my heart; I was tired of trying to be liked by everyone and known by no one. I can count my good friends on one hand, and I've hated myself for being unsatisfied with that. I was tired of finding my identity in the contents of my iPod and my wall of DVDs, tired of living through stories about me rather than living in fellowship with the people they were told to, and tired of feeling that I had to invoke the guise of somebody I only happened to be in random situations in order to feel like I mattered to anybody. Sound familiar? That's because it’s the basic premise of Saved by the Bell: ordinary kids who only matter because of the fantastical events taking place around them. Seriously, who ever went to a high school where oil well sprung up on the football field? I graduated with Amy Lee from Evanescence, but she at least had the talent and presence of mind not to write something as awful as “Friends Forever (Friends Until the End).” Zak Attack, may you rest in peace.

So here I am in Nepal, my net worth held within the fabric of a massive backpack that doesn't even belong to me (thanks again Twood!), hoping and believing that I will no longer suffer under the weight of the sin of pride. And wouldn't you know it, the forces set against me know exactly how to spring that trap again. When I stepped off the plane in Kathmandu, I found my strength in the wellspring of support and love given to me by my family, friends, my church, former co-workers, and even complete strangers. I relied on this blog to give me a creative outlet, a source of sharing and a "little" (ahem) venting, and a means of staying at least somewhat American for nine months. I was in desperate need of the grace of children, and so I also relied on the orphans of CWC to help my heart heal and my mind mature. And in my reliance on these things, instead of God, pride didn't just keep its foothold; it gained strength and momentum.

I started receiving emails from both friends and strangers that, while meaning to be encouraging in nature, mainly communicated a solitary message: "I heard about what you're doing, and I just wanted you to know that that's awesome, and you are so good for doing it." Sounds ridiculous...just emails, right? Well, what if you start getting 30 of them a week? What if 50 orphans lavish you with compliments about how attractive you are in your sunglasses and Puma jacket ("Ohhhhh Jordan brother, you are soooooo handsome today!") for 24 hours a day? What if the rather large local newspaper in your home state publishes an editorial about orphanages and quotes a portion of an article you'd written in the same paragraph as some info about Madonna? What if you notice that your blog gets 400 hits in a week, with multiple compliments about how great of a writer you are (by the way, you don't have to stop telling me that)? What if you start believing all these messages about yourself? I did.

If anything else, it becomes easier to orchestrate popular belief about yourself if the only way anybody can keep up with you is by reading your Internet rantings; you simply share the good parts and omit the bad. I tried to avoid this by sharing both successes and failures, but in doing so, I mainly just found myself repeating a refrain of, "I'm so honest about my mistakes, I'm so good at being transparent with you, please just love me anyway" So I become either so prideful that I omit my failures, or so prideful that I practice false humility. Hence my struggle in being an unbiased journalist: the topic of me is the one in which I am the most biased! How can I not have an opinion about myself? Everything I write, everything I offer to you, is then both truth and a desired and fostered belief that I wish for you to hold about me. And if I don't like part of it...well, I control what falls under the backspace guillotine.

My struggle is then twofold: the yearning to tell you what’s happening with us here in Nepal so that you’ll pray for me (and admire me), versus keeping goings on to myself and depriving you of information, and in the process both starving my insatiable thirst for recognition and stifling my need for spiritual support from across the Pacific. So pray for my heart right now; I’m healing, but it’s a lengthy process. I stare at Microsoft Word and yearn to spew out multiple articles because I love to write and I love you, but I can’t will myself to do it when the subject of Jordan keeps supplanting the subject of God and His glory. I’m tired of inserting myself as the main character in a meta-narrative that isn’t about me, and I’m tired of dumping all my problems onto Blogger and letting you sort through them for me whilst assorted Nepali orphans yank on my bhoka dhari (goatee).

I'm not the first missionary to struggle with the aspect of loving myself for and because of the work I'm doing, and I most assuredly won't be the last; but missions is not an occupation for the prideful, and it is not the glamorous trench fight that we envision it to be. This life is hard, the stakes are heavy, and the environment is hostile. If you watch war movies even semi-regularly, you’ll notice that soldiers rarely stop in the middle of an intense battle to admire their medals or count out on their fingers how many of the opposition they’ve gunned down; most of them are too busy crawling on their bellies, praying against shrapnel wounds, gunfire, and the occasional leech bite. I’ve lived with two Marines, and I think both of them would agree that if you have time to stop and admire the battlefield, you’re either a megalomaniac or eager to get shot in the head.

I'm learning one of those lessons that you assume to know, but don't understand until you're in the field, getting your teeth kicked in: ministry, like an orchard, takes more than effort to produce fruit. Apple trees need years to mature until they reach a fruit-producing stage, and likewise, nine months, much less two, on foreign soil is barely grazing the top layer. This doesn't mean that there's no work to be done during those early seasons leading up to the initial harvest, but I, in the futility of my thinking, honestly believed in the depths of my heart that I would step off the plane in Kathmandu and be horded by a throng of wailing, garment-rending Nepalis desperate for a young American to tell them "'bout that Jesus!" With my mouth, I profess wanting to be a forgotten but God-fearing laborer, but in my heart, I yearn to be a John Elliot or a Hudson Taylor; nobody publishes the journals or writings of a forgotten soul in a forgotten orphanage in an unknown country. So shame on me...

So, you’re thinking, “Great, I appreciate all of what you’ve shared Mr. Bear, but in spite of that, where the heck have you been for the last three weeks? Why haven’t you at least posted a quick update letting us know what’s going on in the orphanage? Why can’t you communicate more succinctly?” Well, I really can’t inform you as to what’s been going on in the orphanage because I’ve barely been involved in it for the majority of November. I’ve been either bedridden or temporarily crippled for nearly all of the last three weeks. So much for “no news is good news,” right?

The first weekend of the month (Nov. 3-5), I was sidelined with a stomach flu that kept me in bed with a fever and minor delusions, due in part to the fact that I fell asleep watching A Scanner Darkly. I took some meds, got some rest, and by mid-week was feeling good enough to resume normal life. No worries, right? Flu is seasonal, and I usually get it bad enough once a year to stick me in bed for a day or two. So while I was terribly frustrated that I couldn’t spend any time with the kids in their first weekend back from holiday, I made do with the situation.

The following Saturday morning (Nov. 11), I got really nauseated while eating breakfast, enough that I trashed my peanut butter toast and wandered around on the roof for a half-hour to get some fresh air in my lungs. I went back downstairs to read in my room for a couple minutes, but the nausea came back even worse, and I was overwhelmed with the urge to poop. To spare you the details, I literally spent the entire day in the bathroom; I counted 17 trips to the beloved squattie potty. I fought diarrhea up until about five in the evening, when my temperature shot up to 102 and I passed out in my sleeping bag. I woke up a few times to throw up, and I recall watching the Scooby Doo movie on my laptop; in my weakest moment, I cried at the scene where Shaggy gives Scoob the “you’re my best friend in the whole wide world and I’m sorry I didn’t trust you, so let’s run away before the gigantic Scrappy Doo monster devours our souls” speech. I get emotional when I’m sick.

I stayed in bed all of Sunday, hiding from the sun and from food; for some reason, whenever I get sick, I adhere to a “starve a fever, and while you’re at it, starve everything else just to make certain” philosophy. When Rina found out that I hadn’t eaten in 48 hours the following morning, I discovered exactly what a furious and irrational pregnant woman looks and sounds like. She tossed me in the car and made me go to the international hospital in Thammel. For those who know me well, this is a drastic measure: I HATE going to the doctor, partially out of a fear of being naked in front of a stranger, and partially because I always expect to find out that I’ve somehow contracted HIV or bubonic plague via impossible means. At this point, I was too weak and too tired to argue, though Rina did enjoy scaring me with AIDS stories on the way into the city. (“No Jordan, seriously, my friend, I know this guy, and he got a note on an airplane that said ‘Welcome to the World of AIDS.’ And he died. Of AIDS.”)

The hospital visit turned out to be fine; in fact, the only difficulty I had to endure was providing a stool sample for the hospital lab with no food in my stomach. My doctor, an endearing Israeli pilgrim, told me I had a bacterial infection in my small intestine that had probably come from eating undercooked food (gasp! Here? In Nepal?). Her prescription: take Ciprofloxacin, which I had already stocked up before leaving Arkinsaw, to counteract the infection. The only unnerving news she had for me was that my weight had dropped to 156 lbs—meaning that I’ve lost 20 lbs since I boarded a flight out of Fayetteville, 12 lbs of which had been shed over the course of two days. I don’t mind a shrinking waistline, but hearing of rapid weight loss like that scared the crap out of me.

Thus far, pretty standard stuff right? Go to East Asia, eat the private parts of a goat, get a stomach illness; seems pretty straightforward to me. So one would assume that pooping out a dozen pounds is punishment enough for one week, and anything above and beyond that would fall into the range of cruel and unusual (but humorous) punishment. And I am such a glutton for the cruel and unusual…

The morning after my hospital visit, I woke up with little bites all over my butt, and two big ones on the inside of my right thigh and my right ankle. They were a little itchy, and the bigger ones had a little red “eye” in their respective centers, leading me to believe that they were spider bites. Believe it or not, I was actually excited to think that I had been ravaged in my sleeping bag by a crab spider in my sleep, as it gave me the opportunity to write about the continuation of our battle with the wretched beasts. By Friday morning, my ankle had swollen up to the size of a golf ball and was oozing like…like…like something gross and oozy. I bought some medicine from a pharmacy in Kathmandu for spider bites, skeptical of its plausibility as a cure given that the pharmacy was run by a 13-year-old boy—no changes by Sunday night, and the swelling was even bigger, now nearly the size of a tennis ball. It is at this point that I am beginning to think that I may not have run afoul of some sinister arachnid after all, but by no means am I willing to make a second hospital trip in one week.

I asked around to all the kids in the orphanage, and sure enough, they knew what I had: pilo, popularly referred to in the U.S. as an abscess. For those who don’t what an abscess is, it happens to be yet another bacterial infection, this type being of the skin—circulated by unclean drinking water, utterly preventable and utterly painful. I popped the pilo on my thigh and doused it in antibiotic cream, but my ankle refused to respond to medicines and hurt so badly that I couldn’t walk come Monday morning (Nov. 20). I took some pictures, but most of them are too gross to post on here, plus I’d prefer to keep the few readers I still have. See, I do have a heart!

So here I am, physically weakened from one bacteria in my stomach, and crippled by another in my ankle. Leave it to Nepali orphans to save my foot. Birendra told me he’d had a pilo in each of his knees right before Jason and I arrived in Nepal, and he offered to make me a special local medicine that he swore would heal it overnight. I wasn’t in much of a position to refuse treatment, so I told Birendra to bring it on. And his solution? A poultice made out of a black mountain spice that is commonly ground up and mixed with fermented rice to make Nepali whiskey. We fixed up a little bandage out of our whiskey cream and some toilet paper, and behold! Within hours, my foot was rapidly shrinking, and my pilo turned into the Mt. Vesuvius of skin wounds. The little bacterial eye is still in my ankle, but it’s on the verge of popping out, and more importantly, I can run and jump and kick and dance and skydive again. Praise Jesus! Praise Nepali whiskey!

Thus is the end of my battle with mysterious Nepali diseases. I ask you to pray for my health and my immune system fervently, as it seems to be the main nature of the spiritual attack against my person here. Jason has routinely struggled with financial concerns (email him at jboxhayes@gmail.com and ask him what he thinks of Nepali bicycles for a good laugh), and I’ve been stuck in bed for three of the last four weeks. I find myself frustrated with God a lot, questioning why I’ve been brought here if it’s just to lie in bed, watching bits of DVDs on my computer in-between trips to the bathroom. I have honestly considered caving in and rebooking my plane tickets to come back home, but the fear of failure and the expectation that God has greater plans in store if I remain faithful have kept me in line.

It is difficult to justify calling myself a missionary when I can’t even get of my sleeping bag to visit with the children I was called to this country to minister to, but in my darkest of times, I remember my discipler and spiritual father, “Pedro.” Pedro and his family moved to another East Asian country several years ago to faithfully follow a calling that had been tugging on their hearts for nearly 10 years, and it did not go smoothly. Life was dark, painful, and lonely for Pedro and his family for their first two years abroad, filled to excess with struggles against the forces set against them. In the spring of 2005, Pedro was stricken with a mystery disease that went undiagnosed by multiple doctors in multiple hospitals in multiple cities.

Pedro and his wife were terrified that his life was in danger, and no specialist they visited could give them any answers as to the sickness that thrived within his body. Their prayer letters were heartfelt and moving, crying out for prayer support from friends and family, but they were lacking in fear: Pedro and his wife had supreme confidence that God was their savior, their comfort, and their sovereign protector, and they would never be forsaken by Him. I was both shocked and overjoyed then on the day that I received an email update proclaiming that Pedro had been healed completely, almost as quickly as he had taken sick. God has since honored Pedro’s faithfulness, as he continued to minister even in the midst of his search for treatment, and today, his ministry in East Asia has begun to thrive—I receive weekly updates of multiple brothers and sisters being born into faith in Christ through the ministry team he now leads.

So I end all the crap in this post with joy and peace. I am imperfect, I am impatient, and I am incapable, but God has brought me to Nepal in spite of, and perhaps because of these things. My heart is mending, my body is healing, and I am maturing in my faith despite my struggles and my complaints. With Thanksgiving behind us (and I hope all of you had a wonderful holiday!), we have begun preparations for Christmas: putting up decorations and lights in the orphanage, teaching carols during devotional time each evening, writing letters to Santa, and so forth. Jason helped set up an Angel Tree collection with his family back in Arkansas, and through the help of his church and family, we’ve managed to raise nearly $3000 to spend on winter coats and Christmas gifts for the children! Praise be to God, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual (and financial) blessing in Christ! The kids have asked me to help them organize a nativity drama for them to perform at their church on Christmas morning, so I’ve got my hands full finding a way to fit 50 kids into a manger, though the movie Love Actually did give me some ideas—apparently both Spiderman and an octopus were present at the birth of Christ.

I apologize if the nature of this article seemed to be a downer, but please don’t take it as such; I’ve had a hard month, but God has remained merciful to me in the midst of my weakness. As my strength is returning, so too is a larger measure of faith, and I will not cease to proclaim the goodness and glory of God the Father, even with pilo peeking out of my ankle. I’ll give a more cheerful and in-depth update of goings-on within the next few days, as well as a response to those of you who emailed me to celebrate the Nepali government signing a peace treaty with the Maoists last week. Thanks for reading, for sticking with me, and for not emailing me trivial Razorback updates. I leave you with your final Nepali language lesson for the week: Jai Masih, which means “Praise the Lord.” Impress your friends…

And yet again...

2006-11-01T23:49:00.000-06:00

This is my backyard...impressive huh?

Durbar Square (Patan) at dusk

A villager, having trekked to Kathmandu for Desai,
appeasing the monkey deity, Hanuman

Jason posing with a "holy man"
(quotes added for sarcastic effect)
Notice who's skulking in the background...

Look mom, I've lost weight!

2006-11-01T23:25:00.000-06:00

And yet more photos, mainly for the sake of taking up what was formerly black space...

A big hug for Rajesh, who is either camera shy or comatose

Top: Manesh (Muh-neese), Rohan
Middle:The Bear, Porkash (Pork-oss)
Bottom: Ishor (Eee-sore), Dinesh (Dee-ness), Nabin, Lokendra

Rina and her husband Santosh,
posing while I ignorantly sort through shooting modes

Birendra, doing his impression of Mos Def
(Jason doesn't see it, but c'mon, the resemblance is there)

"And Shadowfax shall show her the meaning of haste"

2006-11-01T22:08:00.000-06:00

Ok, so admittedly, the title has nothing to do with today's post, but I just finished reading Return of the King, and that's positively one of my favorite quotes from the entire series. Maybe a good song title for Sufjan as well, if he ever finishes with all 50 states and moves onto mythical realms. Regardless, since I have at last finished the series for the umpteenth time, I make you this vow: no more LOTR (ROTK? Twood?) references for at least a month. My apologies to Kent Hodskins.

I'm still trying to figure out the best means of posting pics with our incredibly slow Internet here, contemplating the joys of Flickr and trying unsuccessfully to download Picasa, which I hear gives you a quicker upload time here on Blogger. As it is, it takes nearly 20 minutes to upload one teeny photo of anything on here, so bear with me (not a bear pun again, I know...sorry). Anybody with any suggestions should email me at jordan.greenwald@gmail.com; your input is most appreciated.

Business side of things over and done with!

I had a great weekend, as is usually the case unless I am hunched, weepy-eyed and shuddering, over my beloved squattie potty. No such disaster as of recently however. Having at last gotten over my third Nepali cold, I took Saturday morning off from wading in my velvet orphaned sea to go on a prayer jaunt/stroll/trek through some of the local villages. Before leaving the States, Mike Compton (my Barnes and Noble Elijah) happened to give me a metallic prayer guide that has taken up permanent residency in my wallet; as I sauntered through unfamiliar territory, I spent some time praying over the spiritual darkness that I had been encountering in its various aspects.

Prayer walking in Godavari and Budhakel, the composite villages that comprise CWC’s locale here in the southern Kathmandu Valley, is no easy task, what with my being a rather auspicious white American. Having been in town for nearly two months now, one would presuppose that Jason and I would at last no longer be cultural oddities here, but such thinking is only pseudo-true. There are those in Godavari that view us as having become part of the local community, such as Shavir, a café owner who supplies me with Mountain Dew, and “Uncle Sam,” an older man who stops Jason at least once a week to recruit him to come aid in the building of a hospital. I must not look physically imposing enough, as Uncle Sam has never asked me much of anything other than, “Where is your tall friend?” As if I wanted to build a hospital anyway. Jerk…

However, most of the locals still view us with curiosity and a certain measure of contempt: interesting enough to mock and laugh at, but not so much that they will bother to pursue conversation beyond casual greetings, which are often followed by a joke at our expense and a roar of Nepali laughter. Factor in our being followed by throngs of schoolchildren who yell “Hello!” only to giggle and run away when you respond (I know Hirschy, you warned me, you warned me…), and getting some time alone becomes next to impossible. I’ve toyed with the idea of pepper spray, but then I’d be a mean stupid fat American. The Brett Harkey Game remains a good diversionary tactic, so Brett, I apologize in advance if you in fact decide to visit Nepal, and find that you already have a reputation of being an elusive scamp here. I promise not to mangle anybody in your name, scout dropout’s honor.

Anyway, I wandered about 5 miles away from home along a road running southwest parallel to the river until at last my patience and the pavement ran out. I crept off the pathway and through some brush, discovered a small stream where many of the Budhakel villagers go to bathe and do laundry. I took a seat on the bank and spent a good hour in some much-needed prayer, contemplating the nature of my ministry here and lamenting my failures in a broken relationship with someone I miss dearly (Alex Trebek, if you’re going to get that nosy). I thought I was alone, so I spent some time singing praise songs, the lyrics of old worship favorites from high school such as “Refuge” and “Use Me” seeping back into my heart, and finding that I really meant the lyrics. So I cried, a lot, and kept singing. And then noticed the four naked children who had been bathing around the bend of the stream the entire time I’d been sitting there. Awk-ward.

Public nudity is a perfect catalyst for the cessation of vocal worship (and this may very well be the funniest sentence I’ve ever taken the pleasure of writing, so cherish it). Thus, I wiped my face, pulled out my journal, and spent some more good time putting my thoughts for the morning down on paper. A woman and her two daughters approached while I was writing, settling further upstream to wash their clothes in a shallow pool, and I took the liberty of snapping a few photos while I prayed over them. This one just happened to be my favorite:

So why is this the first photo I’ve posted here in my blog? Because this tiny family was beautiful to me. Because they broke my heart. And because they are a perfect representation of the entirety of Nepal’s people to the American Church: small, poor, oppressed by government and political extremists, fragile, compassionate, graceful, fearful, and utterly lost. My being at that stream may have been the only opportunity this woman and her tiny precious daughters may ever have to hear the message of salvation set forth in the gospel, and I lacked the language skills to communicate how much the God of Jesus Christ loves them. It was the first time the sheer inadequacy of my ability to share the gospel via anything other than actions was really made clear to me, and I do the moment no justice in saying that I wept bitterly over my circumstances. So do be so kind as to pray for Jason and I in our feeble attempts at language acquisition, so that the children whom God chooses to change through our ministry here in Nepal would mature into bold, passionate believers who pursue evangelism without ceasing. Because I happen to suck at it.

Jason spent the afternoon being tutored in the ways of rice harvestry with some of the old boys, and in turn taught them how to throw knives in the style of Indiana Jones. Granted, I don’t really recall ever seeing Indy throw a knife at anybody, but c’mon…if anybody would, it’s him, right? The entire process is a tiring one, as the entire field has to be cut at the root via scythe, after which the individual grains of rice must be separated from the husk (is that what rice grows on?). Most farms in America have a big threshing machine to do the work for them, but not the Nepali: they throw all the rice stalks onto a tarp and then beat the living crap out of them with a big flat rock. Since the vast majority of Nepali don’t own vehicles, transportation of the rice back home is a back-breaker, in the literal sense, as well; the rice is filtered into 50 pound bags and then carried on the back with a contraption resembling a papoose (remember 3rd grade history class come Thanksgiving time?) that is held in place by a strap bound around the forehead. So imagine carrying 150 pounds of rice held in place by leather wrapped around your precious face, and say a little pray for the Nepali farmer next time to you enjoy Uncle Ben’s.

The boys finished the entire field in the span of two afternoons, so as you can imagine, they were completely physically spent by the end of the day. So what better way to celebrate than a feast? Jason and I had been rudimentarily planning a means of getting to hang out one-on-one with the older boys outside of the orphanage for a few weeks, so we decided to honor their hard work by taking them out to dinner and a Saturday night on the town. Rina agreed to take us into Kathmandu for the night, so we miraculously crammed 10 grown men into the beloved Gypsy, which seats four comfortably, and headed into Thammel.

Jason has graciously permitted me to tell this portion of the evening’s story for myself, and for that, I give him a massive praise of thanksgiving. Why? Very well, I shall tell you: I accidentally took our boys into a strip club. Not like a Hooters or anything, but a freaking strip club. Hear me out in my entirety before canceling your subscription to my blog. Please?

Rina took us to King’s Road, a strip of high-priced (for Nepal) shops and international restaurants aptly named for its proximity to the royal palace. Driving down the street, I saw a sign for “Lips Dancing Restaurant and Bar,” and knowing that a lot of the older guys really like dancing, I assumed that it was a restaurant with a dance floor. Being an Arkansan, whenever I see a billboard with a big set of lips on it, I think of country-western radio stations that sport “Trisha Yearwood Power Hours”; this is not the case in Nepal. Jason and I climbed the stairs up to the third story of the building as signs directed us, but a dark entranceway with a strobe effect coming from deeper inside threw us off; surely this could be it… The sign said it was a restaurant…

There were three Nepali women dressed nicely at the door beckoning us to come in, and when it was obvious that Jason and I were a little perturbed by the look of the exterior of the place, they goaded the guys to come in and take a seat. The guys had no qualms about going inside, so I figured things were safe and I followed them in. Whereupon I saw a woman in a bikini dancing next to a pole on a stage raised up above darkened tables covered in cloth napkins and fancy menus. Gurgle. Hard swallow. Burning of bile from a forthcoming vurp in the back of my throat. I have made a horrible, terrible, no-good, very bad mistake.

The guys all ran eagerly to a table in the front of a restaurant, thinking that I had revealed my true lecherous self. I made an effort to shield my eyes, running up front and grabbing everybody by their respective collars and doing my best to punt them back in the direction of the front door. The manager of the “dance restaurant” followed me out, yelling at me in broken Nepali and English, apparently upset that I am easily offended by half naked women who do not answer to Mrs. Jordan Greenwald. I fail to respond, as I am too busy following the boys and Jason, who is laughing hysterically at my ignorance, with my face in my hands, burning the neon red of a Budweiser sign.

We roam the block looking for a better place for another ten minutes, and I refuse to take part in the decision-making process due to my apparent tendency for choosing dining establishments of ill repute. And Nabin makes certain to make jokes at my expense for the rest of the evening, all the while planting subtle seeds that I should take him back to Lips in the near future. I officially hate Nabin at this point. But seriously, what kind of country allows a gentleman’s club to be built within a 30 second walk of the front gates of its royal palace?!?!

The night gets better, don’t worry. Jason and Umesh (CWC’s resident poet and cheater at cards) find a really sweet restaurant built around a massive tree that rises up out of the center of the building, providing a towering canopy and partial balcony. Half of the boys order pizza for the first time, and I end up giving impromptu lessons on the dos and don’ts of how to eat that first slice (“Do not dip your pizza in your glass of water like Rajesh here”). I settle for the same order as Sisan and Sushil: a half chicken smothered in Nepali barbecue sauce with steamed vegetables, homemade bread, and the obligatory side of fried rice. Birendra goes for the steak sizzler, as he has never tasted beef before; how this place sells such a meal in a country where eating a cow is punishable by a 20-year prison sentence, I do not know. We order a round of lassis, which are milkshakes made with curd, and the ever popular momos, dumplings filled with spices and meat or vegetables. For dessert, a few boys have milkshakes, while the majority order ice cream for the first time; Jason and I split a German cake resembling tiramisu and some sort of “pyramid cake,” both amazingly satisfying.

Umesh entertains us for the night with jokes, which he refuses to translate into English for the benefit of myself and the Jason. We fake our best rich American laughs, purposefully timing them before the jokes have reached their conclusion so we look like idiots, and before long, the entire table is in tears. This is easily the biggest meal I have had in nearly two months, and Sushil and I take the opportunity to puff our bellies out and impersonate pregnant sumo wrestlers. Dinesh spends the rest of the night asking me how my “chicken baby” is doing, and this apparently becomes the funniest thing CWC has ever heard, since I am still being pestered about it a week later. When the bill comes, Jason pulls the old “I don’t have my wallet, so I guess the meal is on Rajesh” gag, but forgets that this is the first time most of these guys have been taken out to a restaurant; Rajesh’s eyes get huge, and he starts sweating, innocently believing that he has just been made into an indentured servant by the empty plate of fried fish sitting in front of him.

Total cost for ten guys to eat a full course dinner, complete with appetizers and dessert, at one of Nepal’s finest restaurants? Fifty bucks. Unbelievable. So if you’re curious where your support money is going, eight orphaned teenagers got to go out and dine like kings (literally, I saw King Gyanendra’s photo and endorsement of the place on the wall), honored for their hard work and leadership. Money well spent, and easily the most enjoyable dinner I have been given the honor of hosting in a long time. The boys spent the entire car ride home thanking us profusely, save for the silent moments where we tried unsuccessfully to frighten a sleeping Birendra (think of that part in Out Cold when they put the drunk guy in the car and spin it around).

Life this week has returned to normalcy, as I can best place it. All of the children have returned from the holiday break at last, and school has officially reconvened; this of course means that Jason and I have to relearn faces and names, and I am besieged by an army of young boys who all want to wrestle with me and give me the infamous “Nepali Lock” (a swift crunch of the male reproductive organ…imagine my joy). With the kids being back in school, we get a lot more free time during the day that was formerly spent entertaining bored orphans. As a result, I’ve managed to read all the way through the copy of Superfudge I found in the CWC library, and halfway through Catch-22, which is turning out to be the funniest book I’ve never read. I’m listening to a lot of Wilco, a lot of Caedmon’s Call, and a smidgen of Red House Painters. I try to invest my free time in language studies and writing letters, but mostly just end up missing Fayetteville fall, family, and friends.

And this is where I leave you. Do be so kind as to email me and tell me about your Halloween costumes and/or parties; Jason and I dressed as American aid workers, but I don’t think anybody noticed. Pray for our hearts and for winter, which is quickly descending upon us. Pray for swift acquisition of the Nepali language, and that the younger boys would stop falsely teaching me cuss words as the names of plants and animals. Pray for the salvation of our 55 orphans, and for clarity of message as Jason and I begin to teach them a series on the creation of the earth in our evening devotions.

That’s it, the end. Stay classy America. I’m the bear?

The Bear Crumbles Under Pressure

2006-10-26T01:19:00.000-05:00

Due to the frequent demands of many a visitor to my blog, Gennie Davis in particular, I have indeed caved in and purchased a digital camera: the HP IXUS 65 to be exact. So for those of you who have continually addressed a desire to see what Nepal, and my emergent jawline, look like, I'll just be expecting a sizable donation of financial support in the near future. Or a nice email telling me how r0x0r5 I am.

You have my sincerest apology for the lack of photos over the last month. I "accidentally" packed my digital camera and left it in a box in storage befure leaving the States, electing to let Jason be my cub reporter/photographer for the duration of our international journey (get it? I'm the bear. Jason's the "cub? Get it? No, you suck). I'd be the mouth, and Jason would be the eyes. However, despite my totally 1337 writing skills (and complete lack of bias or journalistic integrity), sheer flair with language pales in comparison to visual stimuli. Or some such. Add to that Jason's camera being stolen by a former CWC orphan, and the posting of photos becomes an impossibility. Thus, we both purchased cameras just to err on the safe side; well, and I really wanted a nice one. In all honesty though, Jason, being the better bargainer given his past travels in Russia, probably got a better deal. Bah...

So coming in the very near future: photos, photos, and even longer, wordier posts. That's right. If I must be forced to empty my checking account for the sake of your living vicariously through my traipsing halfway across the world (how many verbs was that in one sentence), then I'm gonna make you pay for it with your lunch break. Imagine your own maniacal laughter here, as my throat hurts from tuk-tuk exhaust too much to provide sound effects at the moment. If my wordiness and prolonged Eggers-ian sentence structure was difficult to keep pace with before, then you best get yourself some Xanex. I'm going James Joyce from here on out: we're talking epic status, if in fact a visit to the Patan hospital for hepatitis innoculations can be described as such. Plan on seeing consistent and constant use of my favorite piece of punctuation, the ellipsis, in the near future...

Enjoy your respective mornings, afternoons, teatimes. I miss you all, but our separation is a pleasant one, in the eternal perspective. No Maoist attacks yet, but I doubt they've forgotten us, even though calendars are in short supply in their little forest shanties. Continue praying brothers, sisters, and assorted household pets. Bear out.

"You Can't Hide, Standing Under These Stars"

2006-10-25T01:08:00.000-05:00

With the spirit of October beginning to wane, it has become official: I am pining for the oaken halls of Cain’s Ballroom. Apples, pumpkins, the trees of I-540, and the inevitable costume party at which my costume will fail to be recognized (Ashton Kutcher and Richie Tennenbaum both failed to register with anybody but the Twood the last two years): these are all but afterthoughts in light of how I yearn to hear Martin Sexton in person once again. For now, the hills of Godavari must continue to suffer under the anxiety that accompanies my off-key wailing of “When Paula Sparks Up,” the piano melodies of Billy Joel and Death Cab for Cutie echoing throughout a forgotten valley.

So it is that with falsetto somberness that I begin what is in fact my most joyous of updates since arriving in East Asia. No, Jason has not been devoured by a komodo dragon, though I do thank those of you who have in fact been praying fervently for just such an occurrence (I can think of one Dallas seminary student in particular). No outrageous events for the most part, at least in my opinion. No miraculous recovery of my beloved iPod, though it has started to drift in and out of lucidity now and again, reviving long enough to spurt bits and pieces of Counting Crows during the longer bus rides before slipping back into a comatose state.

No, my joy has been made complete because Jason and I have at last discovered a church here in Nepal; not just any church mind you, but one that has a service in English! I won’t lie, I was bored to tears in the Nepali church the children attend here. Sitting through a worship service given in a foreign tongue is fascinating enough as long as it remains an isolated event; prolonged exposure to hour-long sermons in routine fashion becomes an exercise in tedium. I found myself harkening back to my elementary days in the back of the First Baptist sanctuary with my parents, chewing on my sweater collar and reading “Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile” while the adults nodded along with Brother John. In my confusion over whether the pastor was teaching out of Zechariah or Redbook, a desire to play with my mother’s car keys or watch band began to simmer in the depths of my soul. After several weeks of not attending a worship service, period, and living my community out through isolated rooftop worship sessions and a library worth of mp3 sermons, I was about read to admit defeat, resigned to being an isolated Christian in a subversively hostile country.

Thus, Jason and I nearly danced (I’m not allowed to, as per the aforementioned Baptist background kept me from learning such skills as a child) when Rina told us that she had at last discovered the location of the international church Jason had been pestering her over without ceasing for the last month. While I’m not at liberty to share the name of our newfound body, I can assure you that it is a beautiful representation of the menagerie that is God’s character: the service we attended included Nepalis, Indians, Americans, a British couple, Malaysians, Australians, Phillipinos, Turks, Canadians, Chinese, Tibetans, a group of tourists from Singapore, and even a South African. I'm now of the impression that looking upon God is much like looking through a kaleidoscope, if'n that makes any sense. The pastoral staff is completely comprised of Nepali men, though there is an American who serves as an associate pastor over the English services.

Following the worship and the message, we were immediately approached by said associate pastor, a New Yorker, and a Mississippian aide worker; naturally, the first subject of conversation, as is always in America, was Bill Clinton (dear God, NO, I do not know him personally). “Flintstone,” as I will refer to my new congregational shepherd, invited Jason and I to accompany him and his wife (“Wilma” shall be her new name) to a local coffee shop for lunch. Flintstone and Wilma shared that they have been living in Nepal as missionaries for over five years now, astounding considering how difficult it is to get a long-term visa in this country! However, with Wilma’s nursing background and Flintstone’s experience in the alternate universe that is professional engineering (he looks like Eric Dacus’ father, eerily enough), the two found it simple to get jobs in the city: God at rather obvious work.

Oh, and what a coffee shop we found! Wireless Internet (soon), big comfy chairs, cinnamon rolls the size of Jason’s torso, and a honest to God WESTERN TOILET. Oh, oh, and the best part? Aside from an amazing menu that includes banana pancakes, beef sausage that doesn't leave a displeasing yak aftertaste, and cheesecake, these guys make freaking MEXICAN FOOD! Holy intercessory prayer of the American saints Batman! Salsa! Jason and I returned the following afternoon for breakfast burritos that rivaled the birth weight of most newborn infants, fresh-made pico de gallo, and a sit-down visit to the restroom. I wept on that toilet seat, and I am not ashamed to admit to it. The real treasure of the afternoon was the browniecino: a frappucino mixed with brownie mix, with a $1.25 price tag to rival the Arsegas and Starbucks dominion. I support local business, but I just happen to now be in a new locale.

Aside from the utter shock of finding a menu that is seemingly tailored to serve every food I miss from America, I received another surprise in our fellowship for the afternoon. Flintstone and Wilma introduced us to a group of about 10 other American missionaries, all of whom have been working in Nepal for prolonged periods of service. We received more warnings, councils of spirit, and sage advice than one lunch provides room for the absorption of, not that it mattered as I was too shocked by having a clear conversation in my own tongue to notice. The bacon in my sandwich didn’t help any either.

Jason, as is per his routine, sized up our sisters with the inevitable wedding ring glances that single 25-year-old men are prone to, I being far too mature to submit myself to such frivolities (I have the involuntary spiritual gift of celibacy). “BLT” was particularly helpful, beautiful, Canadian, and married, much to the Jason’s dismay. BLT spent eight years working as a volunteer in children’s homes in Nepal and India, and her experience has and will continue to be indispensable to us in our time here. Particularly, she was persistent in advising us avoid seeking the introduction of changes into the pattern of leadership at CWC, and to take care that we don’t undermine Rina and Mommy’s authority in our attempts to help improve the children’s lifestyle.

BLT told us about the growing horrors of the children’s hostel business here in Nepal that she had witnessed firsthand: crooked businessmen starting orphanages to gain government grant money, and then erecting shoddy prisons under the guise of children’s homes and staffing them with bitter and abusive employees. Just days before, she told us, a group of 35 orphans had been dropped off at a local hospital by the police, nearly beaten to death and suffering horrible burns: they had been horribly abused and locked inside their hostel by the owner, who then torched the building (children still inside mind you) to collect the insurance on it. Absolutely sickening, and according to BLT, its becoming a fairly common practice.

The subject of being burned alive was quickly picked up on by the lone Nepali believer who had joined us for lunch; forgive me for failing to remember his name. “Teacher” shared with our table how he had formerly been the principal of a private school in a remote village in the western half of the country. Teacher was approached one afternoon by a group of Maoists (see previous post, or http://www.bbc.com/ for info) who demanded that he pay them tribute for protection. Teacher refused, so the Maoists Rock Bottomed him into unconsciousness and torched his office with the 25 gallons of gasoline they’d conveniently left in the hallway. Teacher came to and managed to escape, while on fire, through an uncovered ventilation shaft in the ceiling. The school was burned to the ground, and Teacher spent nearly two years recovering from burns that covered 35% of his body. He showed us his scarred, tattered legs to drive the point home. No sad ending to this story though. Teacher is wildly optimistic about his future working in the city as a tutor and mentor for at-risk youth, in spite of his quiet demeanor, and he’s also a fellow believer, so you, oh reader, will get to share a pint with him sometime throughout the course of eternity.

After dessert and coffee, Flintstone gave me directions to two local Christian bookstores and invited Jason and I to join him this Thursday morning for a men’s discipleship time. In the meantime, he promised to find us some local contacts to build shelving for the art room Jason and I are casting vision for, as well as for blankets and comforters for our children. Flintstone, thou art the connection to inner Kathmandu that I have been praying for.

Jason and I visited the bookstores that afternoon, finding enough bibles at an incredibly cheap price to personally give one to each of our orphans. The other bookshop primarily houses educational fare, but I grabbed a copy of Catch 22 and 12th Night; Jason salivated over the massive library of Sweet Valley Twins and Nancy Drew, but settled for Freakonomics (at my suggestion) and To Kill a Mockingbird, amongst others. This place has everything by the way: I've got future plans to back and pick up some science and geography texts, as well as a collection of classical literature, Shakespeare, and R.L. Stine (I'm sorry, but I loved those stupid Goosebumps books as a 6th grader). And if any of you have a copy of Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing or Superfudge sitting at home, please, please send them!

So there you have it: a multitude of casual prayer requests, and one rather massive spiritual need, answered in the course of one afternoon. However, despite all the goodness, we still need continued prayer. I'm sick with my third Nepali cold, and the exhaust fumes from the city are starting to give me massive headaches every time I come into town. Rina has been sick with the flu for the last 2 weeks herself, and because she's only three months from her delivery date, her doctor refuses to allow her to take any meds, so pray for swift and full recovery. Jason has been struggling with irritability with some of the younger children, so pray for healing of his heart and mind. The rest of our children return from holiday this weekend and return to school next Monday, so pray for their safe return to us, and our renewed efforts to care for them with respect and compassion.

Our biggest priority at the moment however is the Maoists. There was an armed conflict in the city this morning, or so went local rumors, that held up traffic for 2 hours. On top of that, Maoists have been visiting all the local children's homes to announce that they will be stopping by to sing and dance in return for sizable "donations" in the near future; I'm not making this up, its apparently tradition within yet another of the Hindu festivals that ends today. We thought that CWC had been overlooked after receiving no word for several days from any Maoist messengers, but a letter was delivered Sunday while Jason and I were at church announcing that they would be stopping by in the very near future.

In light of the story I heard from Teacher, this stirs a new fear within me: what happens when the Maoists find out that there are Americans working within CWC? They have been demanding tributes from trekkers in the mountains of upwards of $300 per person, and I will not, and cannot afford to, pay them anything. Will we be harrassed, terrorised, or burned to the ground? Please remember us in your prayers, and like the Passover angel, pray that the Maoists conveniently forget to visit us again, or are transformed by the message of the gospel of our salvation if we must come face to face.

More news to come in the near future...

Godavari (For the Unemployed and Underpaid)

2006-10-19T00:15:00.000-05:00

Well, great. Thus far, my time in Nepal had been relativly uneventful, at least from the perspective of a white soccer mom in Northwest Arkansas. Well, save for the whole goat slaughter thing. So much for safety. This’ll be the blog where you guys start telling me to come home.

I’m pretty foolish when it comes to seeking out adventure. I’m the one who always wants to see the Ozark Spook Light on a school night or break into the abandoned insane asylum in Conway (if it in fact exists), the one who wants to collect road kill around Lake Wedington for the purpose of prank retribution, the idiot who is actively seeking out the gang members in inner-city Chicago to tell them about Jesus. I don’t have much foresight when it comes to determining what could and could not cause me bodily harm. I refuse to go sky-diving, but I’ll eat the private parts of a freshly killed farm animal or give my testimony to a subway car full of strangers on their way to a Cubs game. And even if I don’t go looking for trouble, it seems to find me out anyway, in the form of neighborhood meth labs, police busts on Casa Taco robbers (ask Eric Dacus if you don’t believe me), and elderly neighbors with broken hips. All this to say, I’m a magnet for outlandishness, which wouldn’t be as much of a problem if I wasn’t also prone to exaggerations. And somewhere, Hunter Goff is rejoicing at my admission.

Ahem. Now that you’re adequately prepared for the ridiculousness that is myself, its storytime. Again.

Tale #1: Say Yes! To Mao!sts!

So, a quick recap on the events of the last week, or at least the parts that don’t involve me sitting on the roof reading a book or sleeping in the TV room to the lullaby of Hindi soap operas. Friday, I ventured into town to email the church and attempt to begin answering the 100+ emails that littered my inbox. Making my way through the marketplace of Lahgunkel, playing the iPod Commercial Game for what would be the final time, I noticed that there was a lot of tension in the air; not that Kathmandu or Patan are places of relative calm or anything mind you. Eventually, I discerned that something was rotten in East Asia, as a loud voice shouting frantic repeated statements in a foreign language drowned out Conor Oberst in my earbuds. Curiousity got the better of the bear, and I changed course to see what was going down.

Now normally, I would call a vehicle armed with massive dual loudspeakers spewing political jargon out of place, but being that Nepal is a country that just underwent massive political upheaval, I’m willing to call an insurgency a spade. Or whatever. The motorized voice weaved through the crowd, never slowing, never ceasing with repeating lines of Hindi chatter. I nudged an elderly man at a kitchen supplies store, pointing toward the commotion with a raised eyebrow: the international sign for “I’m a scared foreigner, please explain what the heck is going on.” I got a tired shrug in response, followed shortly thereafter by a sentence in which I could only understand one word: “Maoists.” Great…

For those of you who are ignorant of the socio-political structure of Nepal, or current affairs that don’t involve Kevin Federline and Jessica Simpson, let me break down the recent history of the country. Starting I believe in 1995, a group of political dissidents from the former Communist Party of Nepal united under the leadership of a man known as Prachandra to form the Maoist Rebellion. Over the last 11 years, the Maoists have pledged themselves to a “people’s war” against whatever Nepali government system happens to be in power, claiming to be fighting on behalf of the people; in reality, the Maoists conscript their soldiers from frightened villagers in the countryside, burning farms and destroying the homes of those who don’t support their anarchist agenda. If that weren’t enough, political instability, including a drunken murder-suicide by the crown prince in 2001 that wiped out most of the royal family, the rulership and deposing of a wicked king, and a chaotic fledgling democratic parliamentary system have weakened Nepal’s international presence and crippled attempts to improve the lives of its people in spite of the conflict. Nearly 30,000 Nepalis have been killed in fighting over the last decade, numbers that while seemingly innocuous compared to crises in Darfur, Sudan, and Uganda, have gone widely unnoticed in the Western news media. And…breathe Jordan, breathe….

So, Maoists. Bad news, right? Well, I’m never one to let a political rebellion get me down, so I continued on my merry and Jason-less (at home playing with orphans) way to the Internet café. After spending an hour unsuccessfully trying to catch up on baseball play-offs, life within the Grove, and several failed attempts to call my folks on Skype, I happened to notice that the buzz outside was growing. I popped my head out the window to check to see if Durbar Square was on fire yet, and to my delight, a political demonstration had broken out. There was a crowd of around 500 people (how’d I miss that?) gathered in the square around a makeshift stage, upon which were several men dressed in camouflage engaging in a roundtable debate with what appeared to be bureaucrats. The Internet, for once, had lost its interest.

I packed up my laptop and ran outside, assuming that I was the only one in the area praying fervently for a riot to break out (just so I’d have something to tell you about). I pushed my way through the crowd a bit, straining to see what was going on; our friends in camo (I always refer to people in fatigues as friends in person, mainly because I enjoy being not ridden with bullet holes) were shouting in the faces of who I was now sure were government officials. In America, we call this civil disobedience; in Nepal, its referred to as Friday. I bumped into a Nepali student fluent in English, who explained that a) the conference was a scheduled debate between city officials and Maoist spokespersons regarding disarmament and city council representation, b) the crowd was frighteningly pro-Maoist, and c) as an American, this was a pretty stupid place for me to be. I agreed, and moved through the crowd to get a little closer to the action. Mistake.

As I was pulling off my patented “swim” maneuver, as taught to me by my former discipler and mentor, Warren Sapp, a guy in green/black fatigues (topped off with a Kurt Cobain t-shirt, nice touch) stopped me and asked if I was from America. I nodded, not really paying attention, and he continued to explain that he was a freedom fighter, just like America. Oh. Piss. I looked around, hoping that I could find a friendly face in the crowd to duck away from this guy, my first flesh and blood Maoist, but most of the people nearby were more interested in seeing me work this out for myself than the debate taking place onstage. The guy said something about blood and mispronounced the word “tyranny,” and suddenly, I was being asked for a donation to “support the people’s revolution.”

As I make it a point not to support international terrorism (save for sending Texans overseas as international students), I assured my new communist friend that “I’d love to give you money, but I’m not in the habit of committing treason.” Not the first time I’ve uttered that sentence in my life either. Maoists don’t like being told no (unless “no” is immediately followed by “more government that serves the needs of its people”), so my friend asked me again politely. He was kind enough to give me a friendly squeeze of the shoulder as well, just in case I misunderstood his request as a, you know, demand for money. I am now scared.

Unfortunately for you and your co-workers, and fortunately for myself, there’s no real resolution to this story. Maoist stooge #1 and I stared at each other for all of about 10 seconds before somebody onstage said something incendiary, and he lost all interest in me as he turned to yell back in response. I squeezed back through the crowd, who were now seemed rather provoked and a bit closer to riot stage, and literally ran all the way back to the bus park. For those of you that are sticklers for details, I must admit: while terrified, I did have the presence of mind to stop and by a Fanta. It cost 11 rupees, the equivalent of 15 cents. There’s that lack of common sense I mentioned rearing its ugly head.

Ok, so that was pseudo-interesting, right up until it tapered off there at the end, right? I mean, you were expecting something exciting, like that knife fight from the Beat It video, or a Brad Pitt cameo. No such luck, not even snake dancing. No twist ending, no Jordan taking his shirt off, not even really all that funny. Stay seated and open another Nutri-Grain bar. This one gets violent…

Tale #2: To the Workers of the Katmandu Valley Region, I Have an Idea Concerning Your Predicament

Nepali transportation will be the subject of a post in the near future, as its something that I’m dying to write about, but it plays a vital role in our story today. There are multiple ways of getting around Nepal, but the most common are via tuk-tuk (think of a motorized tricycle with a covered pick-up bed on the back) and mini-bus (Jason most accurately described these as “that big white van that gunned down Doc in Back to the Future”). Jason and I take a mini-bus any time we need to get into town, as it’s the only means of transport if Rina isn’t taking our car, the beloved Gypsy, into the city that day. Ten rupees gets me crammed into a vehicle that should comfortably seat 15 people, but is instead packed with about 24, all of whom believe that I am the biggest, fattest, stupidest American that has ever lived; I know, because they tell each other these things and laugh at me. Joy.

Occasionally, as in every two weeks or so, there is a labor union strike by drivers of the Kathmandu Valley taxis that shuts the city down completely. Taxi drivers blockade all the streets leading in or out of the main urban areas, turning away all vehicles that try to get by via force. When this happens, its like a national holiday; businesses don’t open because the owners can’t get to work, schools are closed because the teachers are trapped at home, and fat, lazy American volunteers sleep a little later than usual. Even the rumor of a labor strike can shut the city down, forcing me to pause and wonder if somewhere, there’s a very bright 12-year-old pulling the strings so he can stay home and watch Power Rangers with his younger brother all day.

Tuesday morning, I awoke with plans to run into town and catch up on my emails, as I’d found several unread messages in my inbox the day before that were over 2 weeks old (Shaun and Erin, so, sooooo sorry!!!). Rajesh stopped by our room to announce that his college classes were cancelled that day because of a possible impending strike; thus, plans for the day were changed. Jason was particularly frustrated, as he’d been planning to go to Thammel to shop for a new camera (his was stolen several weeks ago by a former CWC child with a penchant for kleptomania). After eating breakfast and sullenly revising our plans for the day (I really wanted to eat a meal in town that wasn’t dhal baat), Rajesh visited again to tell us that the tv was now announcing the strike had been called off. Jason immediately grabbed his wallet and ran out the door to catch a ride into town, leaving me behind to some personal business (I always use the restroom before going into town, because home is where the toilet paper is).

I ran all the way to the bus stop, which is over a mile away and up a huge hill, but Jason was gone, and no running mini-buses in sight. Now, I should’ve picked up right away that something was up: two of the MBs, as I’ll now be referring to them, were parked up the street, the drivers playing soccer inbetween the lanes, with a large crowd of riders watching the traffic coming from town anxiously. Two passengerless MBs rumbled by without even slowing to pick up new fares: this is NOT normal, as there is usually a kid hanging out the window hunting down people who need a ride on the “sidewalk.” One bus finally slows long enough to allow about 30 of us onboard, but the diver refuses to talk to or look at his passengers, whom I notice seem agitated, but not with the long wait or with sitting in each other’s laps. Worry is brewing in my stomach like coffee.

Driving into town is normally similar to a Grand Theft Auto joyride: swerving around motorbikes and dogs, weaving inbetween tankers and fullsize buses to gain those extra seconds needed to pass up another MB and get more fares in the city when the current passengers are kicked to the curb. Today, there is hardly any traffic on the road, and a ton of pedestrians. Something is wrong here…

We’re about 5 blocks from the Lahgunkel drop-off point, when the driver slows the MB to a crawl and turns back to us at last, shouting some orders as the doors open. Since I have yet to get a grasp on most of the language here, I’m clueless, but my fellow pilgrims are officially pissed. The people in the front row of the MB are physically escorted off by a firm grip of the shoulders, yelling and cursing (I’m assuming here) the whole way. As for the rest of our merry crew? Mutiny. Refusals to pay, angry shouting, and an attempted swing at the young boy working as the driver’s assistant: we’re getting close to small-scale riot here. The driver suddenly becomes more concerned with getting reimbursed for the 25 people still in his vehicle, and agrees to continue on into the city.

Now at this point, you’re thinking, Jordan, why are you still in that bus? I am wondering that myself as we start to move forward again, gripping the seat in front of me enough that I tear the stitching on the seat cover a little. In my defense, I honestly thought this had all been a dispute over several people not having money to pay the driver, as the protocol for such a grievous offense is to open the door and boot the sod out in the middle of nowheres at full speed. This is not the case today, but I don’t find that out for another 12 seconds.

The driver speeds up considerably more than is necessary, and as we round a corner at 45 (breakneck speed for Nepali traffic), I see the reason for all of our troubles: a picket line. Fantastic, the strike is on. A group of eight angry men are strung across the street, armed with clubs and sour faces; red dust pockmarks the street between our slowing vehicle and what will be our final destination, suggesting some earlier violence. Unbeknownst to me, Jason had been turned around before he got to this point and was taken back up to the orphanage. I am not so lucky.

Our driver slows to a crawl, and an eventual stop 10 feet from the armed labor union members, leaning his head out the window to shout at them; they comply with what I can once again only assume is more cursing, slowly advancing on our idling coffin. The driver is squirming in his chair, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel, and keeps looking up into the rearview mirror at us in the back. Something is going to happen, and I have a very bad feeling about it.

The man who seems to be the leader of the union strikers reaches the MB and places his hand on the driver’s rearview mirror (right side of the vehicle mind you), leaning up to have some words with our coachman. Surprise! Our driver, in a decision that proves to be his undoing, has been playing possum; as the strike leader leans up, Steve McQueen up front floors the accelerator and we pull away, the mirror nearly getting wrenched off in the striker’s clenched brown fist. Several of the passengers cheer, thinking we are going to pull away and make it into the city. We are free!!! We are Jason and his Argonauts, besting the Cyclops! We are unstoppable, unswayable, rulers of the Nepali highway! We are…being attacked with bricks.

I am sitting in the very back corner of the bus when the first brick hits the front side panel, immediately follow by a second that nails the windshield dead center, caving it in without shattering it, cracked into a thousand shards reflecting the coming onslaught into a kaleidoscopic barrage. Bricks begin hammering us from all sides, and one smashes into the rear fender on the other side of my knee; I can feel it reverberate through my chair. The seats are too close together for me to kneel down, so I scrunch my chin into my chest and lean my forehead against the seat frame in front of me; I am not praying, I am cursing, and very loud at that. The burnt red hailstorm continues, miraculously without another broken window, and for some reason, all I can think about it how badly I want Mexican food right now. Other passengers are screaming, a little girl is crying, and I am meditating silently on Flying Burrito Company and pico de gallo.

Just as the attack is reaching its crescendo, it stops; our driver has admitted defeat, stopping the MB and jumping out of the driver’s seat with his hands in the air. He is immediately grabbed by three of the labor union members and dragged off the street, never to be seen by Arkansan eyes again. The rest of us are physically pulled off the bus , myself almost getting grabbed by the hair before the angry striker realizes I’m an American and gives me a polite bow. He winks and says something in Nepali which I now roughly understand to have been, “Enjoy your stay in Kathmandu.” I am not amused, and I’m officially stranded in town.

Its another 15 minute walk to Lahgunkel from our MB, which is officially smoking from under the hood, looking like a defeated Autobot. I hike it into town, hoping I can still find an Internet hub that happens to be open in the tourist attraction that has become a warzone. And nothing is open. Every shop, every restaurant, every fruit stand is vacant; even the street vendors and trekking guides are thankfully absent. I make the most of my opportunity and wander around the square, admiring the ancient architecture without the teeming sea of market traffic swarming underneath temple archways and thatched roofs. I inform the few wandering British and German tourists, who are ignorant of the day’s events, having stayed in a nearby hotel, to which they mostly reply “Bullocks!” and snap photos. I watch bronze workers crafting a metal statue of a six-armed pig god, which looks nothing like Tusk. And I get hungry.

Fortunately, as I begin the six mile hike back to the orphanage, I find an Internet cafe. However, I fail to accomplish anything as an Indian girl named Rachel (I know, I didn't know it was an Indian name either) introduces herself as a Christian; she invites me to come to her church the following weekend and teach their high school ministry. Great. About the time I leave the cafe, I discover that traffic is moving again, so I board another MB with about 30 schoolchildren. I ride the rest of the way back with them asking me my name and whether or not I have a girlfriend, eventually falling asleep on the shoulder of a young boy, and as I drift off, I realize that I never sent the emails I came to town in the first place for. I dream of Mexican food and bricks.

Games Nepali Bears Play

2006-10-17T02:40:00.000-05:00

I'd like to lighten the mood (given my somber closure yesterday) and offer some levity by enlightening you as to what exactly it is I do for fun here in Nepal. Ahem. Those who know me pseudo-well would be wise to refer to me as mischiveous, and that is no different in international territory, though I'm not prone to pranking houses because I don't like being chased by foaming wild mutts. Hence, here are several of the games that I've invented to primarily amuse myself since arriving here:

1. Scaring Jason: This game can take several forms, the lamest of which involve pretending I don't have the key to our room or moving something of Jason's around in order to stimulate fury at the thought of Prakash, our resident orphan packrat, rifling through Jason's possessions. A more subtle and humorous "Scare the Jason" tactic is to mention creepy things before we go to bed, involving, in no particular order: crab spiders, the girl from The Ring, Bill Engvall, Edward Loveless' chest hair, Bono in a Superman costume, and myself marrying Jason's sister, Krystal. Last night however, I discovered the most satisfying method of "Scaring the Jason." Are you ready? Sure? Ok, here goes...

Jason, as do most human beings, has to go to the bathroom regularly. Surprised? I know I was. So, one must wait until Jason, in a half-sleep stupor and clad in his mighty boxer-briefs, wanders down the hall to the restroom with his headlamp. The scarer, myself, must then hop out of bed and crawl underneath Jason's bed, pushing his guitar case as far back against the wall as possible to make room. The scarer then waits eagerly for Jason to return, still half-asleep and now surprised that his ministry partner is no longer in bed asleep. Jason will routinely look back down the hall and shine his light around, thinking that said roommate must have gone downstairs to pee or make a rice sandwich or something, and then re-enter the room, deadbolting the door for no apparent reason. The Jason will saunter back over to his bed, pausing for a moment before his conscience gets the better of him, and he kneels down to check underneath.... At which point I yell "Mehhh!" in the voice of that scary little Japanese boy from The Grudge and grab Jason's leg, leading to him mentioning once again how much he hates me.

2. The Hook Count: This one may seem irrelevant, but I enjoy it. Two weeks into our Nepal stay, I began to notice that Jason is a frequent quoter of Hook, the "What-if-Peter-Pan-grew-up-into-the-Genie-from-Alladin?" movie beloved by nearly every kid born between 1981 and 1985. So I started counting on Sunday, October 1. In two weeks, Jason has quoted Hook 12 times, not quite once a day, but pretty close to it, usually in spurts of three quotes. His favorite? "Play...play!" which I believe comes from the part where the twins on skateboards keep throwing basketballs and Robin Williams' gut. Ah, to be a child again, believing that this movie was real... By the way, is there any point in this movie when Julia Roberts is on-camera that she doesn't burst out into that "Bwa-ha-ha!" cackle of hers? Creepy...

3. The Cheap Orphan Scare: Who amongst you, oh loyal 7 readers, doesn't know what a cheap scare is? Very well then, I shall tell you. In a horror movie, when Sarah Michelle Gellar is cautiously sneaking through an abandoned Snickers factory, hiding from bad scriptwriters, and she opens a closet door, only to have a cat jump straight out at the camera (complete with loud cat "rawr" noise) for no apparent reason: that friends, is a cheap scare. The main character turning and bumping into her boyfriend, who shouts menacingly, "HEEEEEYYYYY...who wants licorice?" Also a cheap scare. You get the idea, I hope (though one wonders how all those cats keep getting locked into pantrys and airtight secret vaults...). Anyway, I enjoy hiding around corners and jumping out to scare orphans as they walk through the Welfare Centre's halls in the evenings: the sun is setting, and the interior lighting is just right, having reached a Hitchcockian dimness that just begs for a stupid American to do something absurdly mean and pointless. I am going to be a horrible father some day.

4. My Big, Fat, Nepali iPod Comercial: First off, I can no longer play this game as my iPod has given me the big iFinger and decided to leave me to myself while out of the States. I have my suspicions that foul orphan play was involved in Grizzlepod's death (Prakash again), but no evidence means this will remain an unsolved mystery. Robert Stack, where are you?!?!

Regardless, though this game is on hiatus until I find a way to get a new music device or just up and steal Jason's, it remains my favorite. And before I go any further, I though of this before Jessica Gudondo mentioned it in her blog. So no comparisions or claims of idea theft, 'kay? Ok, so, the makings of my own iPod commercial... Rather simple really...

I hop off the mini-bus in Lahgunkel and pop in my headphones, turning on a danceable song such as Josh Rouse's "Its the Nighttime," Ryan Adam's "Dance All Night," or "The Groom's Still Waiting at the Altar" by Bob Dylan. "Last Goodbye" by Jeff Buckley gets an honorable mention only because its commonplace to namedrop Buckley to sound cool these days (I'm looking at you Liv Tyler, you dirty liar...) Anyway, crank the volume on iPod nearly all the way up, and then dance like a maniac down the street between chamberpot salesmen and banana vendors, singing the lyrics at the top of your lungs. If you want to really make a scene, as I often do, you can hop up on the steps of a building, kicking your legs until a group of young women walk by, jumping down to take one by the hand and spin her around while her friends laugh (and secretly wish that the handsome, fat American had chosen them). Jason denies that any of this has happened, but I maintain that its one of the specific purposes for my often coming into Kathmandu or Patan alone. Its fun, its hilarious, and it can often be an ace in the hole when it comes to bartering for a better price with shop owners. Love me, hate me, I'm leaving my mark on this country.

5. The Brett Harkey Game: This one is relativistically simple. Though I'm currently sporting the infamous "Greenwald Chinstrap," when I wear my hair teased up in the front, I bear a striking resemblance to my favorite worship pastor. Brett and I dress similarly (mainly brown plaids I think) according to Jason, and we share that "he looks kind've chubby, but I know he isn't" physique. Or at least that what I hope we look like... Anyway, this game involves me introducing myself to people I don't want to talk to, i.e. trekking guides and kazoo salesmen, as Brett Harkey. I listen to their schpeil and then just wander away, yelling "Chris Tomlin!" at the top of my lungs. Please note that this game is in its trial stages and is subject to change. Other candidates for this game include Matthew Perry, whom I've already been mistaken for once, that guy from Third Day, and Tyler Durden.

Ru-fee-ohhhhhh!!!!!!!!!

The Post Where I Catch Up on a Lost Week and Mention Jesus a Lot

2006-10-16T00:10:00.000-05:00

I'm quickly finding that if I don't visit town often, my inbox fills up (especially after making a massive request for coats and magice markers) and people begin to believe that I either a) hate them, b) ignore them, c) am using my support money to purchase drugs and Johnny Cash bootlegs, or d) have been kidnapped and devoured by Maoist insurgents. I am more than pleased to assure you that none of these elements are entirely true (I purchased sleeping pills to counteract the lip-smacking and sleep mumbles of one Jason Hayes), though I did have my first run-in with the Maoists last week. But more on that later...

So I received my first e-buke this week from a dear friend who expressed his frustration that Jason and I didn't take advantage of the goat sacrifice as an opportunity to share the gospel. Old Jordan would've gotten defensive and angry, and launched an offensive about "how much I talk about Jesus, and jeez, I mean, I'm freaking here in Nepal, aren't I?" However, it appears Old Jordan is dead, officially. Instead, I felt the warm pangs of conviction that are quickly becoming daily occurences as commonplace as, oh, say, emitting carbon dioxide. Funny how quickly spiritual arrogance breaks down under the weight of isolation and the discipline of washing your boxers in a stream inbetween grazing cattle.

So Broken Jordan examined his heart and his ministry and found both to be lacking. Not non-existent, just not intentional; like, I should be cleaning up the kitchen and putting out that grease fire I started, but Greys Anatomy is just sooooo good this week unintentional. Jason and I talked it up a bit, having both received the same email, and came to the conclusion that while the work of our hands and the speech of our lips are full of grace and compassion, they're lacking the desperation of the need for the healing touch of the Holy Spirit in a dying land. Not that much different from being in America of course: for comfort's sake, I'd rather talk about politics or baseball or breast feeding, anything other than confronting somebody with frank talk about Jesus. Blegghh... I suck as a missionary.

So we're changing things up a little bit, getting more intensive with biblical disciplines and sharing the gospel instead of ancient Jordanic wisdom (which for the record, has proved to be pretty rife with errors anyway). Most of the kids from CWC are still away visiting what family they have for the remainder of the Desai holiday, so its been a blessing to have that much more time both to ourselves (boring though) and to spend with some of the older boys we're honing in on. These specifically being the ones you can pray for:

Nabin: My little Nepali playboy... Nabin is 17, and acts it to a point. He is highly intelligent and speaks English pretty fluently, to the extent that he's actually been tutoring me at night as I study Nepali. He's athletic, a purty swell dancer, and much like Augustine, he likes the ladies. His father is dead, and his mother is very sick, leaving him with little family save for extended relatives, and no male mentor in his life.

During the course of our studying together, we've gotten to engage in a lot of good personal conversation; Nabin has a lot of questions about women and dating, two subjects in which I am an utter failure, but he enjoys hearing about all of my mistakes (and Jason's near marriage). Regardless, I sprinkle our conversations with a heavy dosage of Paul and Peter. Nabin is very open to hearing about Christ, and agrees with a lot of what the bible has to say, but he's very hesitant to respond because his grandfather, who is just about the only blood relative he has left, has threatened to exile him from the family if he becomes a Christian. Exile is bad in Nepal, to the "You're dead to me!" extent. So pray for Nabin and his family, that God would will Nabin to himself and work through him to change the hearts of his grandfather and their village; that Nabin's fears would be abolished in the peace of the blood of Christ, and that the longings of his heart for purpose and family would be met in the word of truth, the gospel of our salvation.

Rajesh: Rajesh is 19, a pre-med student at one of the local colleges, and one of the pillars of leadership in the Welfare Centre. According to Rina, he'd been shy and reclusive during the time that he's lived at the Centre (11 years) until Jason and I arrived. Rajesh's parents abandoned him and his brother and sister when they were all very young, and the three were placed in separate orphanages in the Kathmandu valley shortly thereafter.

Rajesh was the first guy to open up to Jason and I, stopping by our room to talk and ask for guitar lessons, cracking jokes while cooking dinner with us upstairs, and mispronouncing the word "fish" (fissssss). Rajesh has some obvious wounds, but he quickly latched on us as men of peace and a source of friendship. He translates for us when we lead devotionals for the younger children, even though he has serious doubts about the validity of the Christian bible. In talking with Rajesh, I've learned that his biology and physics classes have led to him having some distorted and wary views on the interaction between science and the bible, and that a lot of things he's been taught have been biased and uneducated opinions passed off as fact (flies did not come from snakes). However, Rajesh hasa confidence in him that leads me to believe and hope that he will be my brother in Christ before I leave this country: he's so anxious to hear about God, and he actively seeks out and challenges my knowledge of the bible and its historical and scientific accuracy. I love a skeptic, as I used to be one myself, so pray that the resources and wisdom that God has granted me would lead to the joy of salvation in Rajesh's life. Pray also that as Rajesh considers medical schools, that God would provide a sponsor and a visa so that he can receive an education in America or England; Jason and I long to bring him home with us. And that he would learn to say fish correctly, as its driving me insane.

Birendra: I love this guy; looooooooooove him. Like the Mouth of Sauron, Birendra is often the physical embodiment of the words of Rupa and Rina at CWC: they speak, and Birendra gathers up the orphans and directs traffic to ensure that things happen. He's quiet, trustworthy, dependable (both his parents abandoned him, so he took up a job to support his incapacitated grandparents, often giving up his meals so they could eat), articulate, and compassionate. In other words, he's Eric Dacus, minus the Eric face and accompanying Eric noise which consonants and vowels fail to capture.

Nepali guys are very physically affectionate with each other, holding hands in public and occaissionally kissing each other on the cheek, and so it is a blessing to me that years of friendship with Ben Casey and interlocked toe love with Hirschy prepared me for Birendra. Birendra is always, always touching me somehow: falling asleep on me in a mini-bus, holding on to my thigh while we watch Mr. Bean, rubbing my shoulders while I eat dinner. This wouldn't be so odd if he wasn't 18, but I'm getting over my aversion to physical touch (I'm a hermit, remember?).

Birendra has a beautiful innocence to him, to the extent that I nearly convinced him that the book The Indian In the Cupboard was a true story the other night. He has a heart for children, and does more to look after the younger orphans than Jason and I are willing to do. He's a leader in CWC, a voice of comfort to the younger and lonely children, and a reminder of my need to embrace peace rather than wrath. Pray for CWC to find the money to send Birendra to college, possibly in America, for biblical perspective to aid Birendra's compassion, and for our conversations to be teeming with the presence of the Holy Spirit. I desperately want to enjoy heaven with this guy, and I want you to meet him there.

As for me? Spiritually, I'm doing well, as the free time has allowed me to invest a lot of myself into the Word. I've been working on memorizing the book of Ephesians and portions of Colossians, and Jason and I are about to embark on an inductive study of Romans. Which means this will probably be the last coherent blog you see for a while. I've been listening to a sermon series on church history by Tom Nelson and taking notes...fascinating to see where you and I that are brothers and sisters in Christ have come from, and I highly recommend you engage in such a study yourselves. And I started reading Dallas Willard's The Divine Conspiracy again, a book which I almost insist on every believer I know owning, which I believe Mike Harper would agree with me on since its the only thing he and I talked about for nearly a year.

Pray for my health: I've been sick nearly half the time I've spent here in Nepal thus far, and I'm really suffering under the strain of insomnia (I don't like hating Jason because he can sleep and I can't). For that matter, pray for the health of my parents. A good friend informed me of how he was attacked while in China last year through the physical health of his family, and I fear the same for myself; my mother has already been to the hospital once since I got here, and I have recurring nightmares about my father having another heart attack. I can't handle the strain of a sick parent, despite my levity with the subject of death in regards to my beloved iPod.

Pray for my heart: I've been really burdened with loneliness here in the last week, as well as grief over some dead relationships. I miss the Grove, I miss sandwiches, I miss Guster, and I miss Jake Newell. This is not an easy life here, and I don't mean the living in poverty and being covered in sniffling, giggling orphans 24 hours a day. I came to the realize this weekend that life at home is changing without me: people are getting married, moving away, buying waverunners, having twins, etc. And I'm here, isolated in a foreign country and reduced to words on your laptop monitor, the blatherings of a post-modern madman lost in the Nepali wilderness. I feel loved, immersed in prayer, and supported by every living being I know that's not in a coma, but I also feel so alone at the same time. Pray for me to get over myself and focus on having an eternal perspective, enjoy deep fellowship with God through the workings and the groanings of the Spirit who lives in me, and to stop listening to the Heartbreaker album so much (Call Me On Your Way Back Home is killing me right now).

I love you all, I miss my family, and I have a craving for salsa. They have this incredibly spicy condiment here made out of Nepali tomatoes, chillis, and gram marsala, and its close in texture, but really salty and so hot it chokes you. I can seriously only eat a teaspoon of it on my rotis (baked tortillas) at a time. Anyway, I've lovingly nicknamed this concoction "Nepalsa," just for future reference, but its a poor substitute for La Huercha. So take your community group or your wife or your roommates, or for that matter, an international UA student, out for chips, salsa, and a margarita (non-alcoholic for those of you who still have issues with my love for beer) on me. I'm good for it.

P.S. Jason still hasn't shaved. Gross...

A Death in Nepal

2006-10-15T23:40:00.000-05:00

I wish I had better news for you, but it's been a hard, hard weekend: a death in our Nepali family. I'd like you to share in my grief, so here's a brief eulogy for the departed that I've written up...

Alas, alack, alas! My brother, you were so young, less than 2 years, barely a vapor in the course of human history, and yet... You changed my life. In my darkest of hours, and the moments of insane joy, you were there to share, and even encourage me in my laughter and my tears. We danced. We were a public spectacle together, the laughing stock of Garland Ave. and the Durbar Marg in Kathmandu. Driving across the country, pounding I-40, you were my solace and my ministry partner. You imparted words of wisdom to me in the form of John Piper and Ryan Adams ("I'm as calm as a fruit stand in New York, and maybe as strange"). You understood me better than any could ever aspire to, and you anticipated my moods and my wounds better than I was often capable of. Some would say that outwardly, you lacked any expression: cold-faced, sterile, white, small and unassuming; but they didn't get to know the interior of you like I. I will miss you terribly, and when your replacement arrives, I will try my best to cling to my memories of your touch and your digital soul. It is with a heavy heart, and a heavy FedEx package, that I deliver you back to your Father, Apple Inc. Godspeed iPod... Godspeed...

Cut the Lights! Guerilla Blogging!

2006-10-08T23:22:00.000-05:00

I alluded to a power outage in my last post, and it dawned on me that not having electricity is a blessing in disguise of sorts. One of the painful lessons that I’m being taught even in the early weeks of my time here in Nepal is that many of the things that we as Americans consider to be necessities are luxuries to the least of God’s people. And I could go off on a tangent about American spending saving habits measured against our lack of heart and aid for the Third World, but that would go against the meaning behind this post. So I won’t. Lucky us.

Anyway, I find it funny that most of things I can’t even function without in America are mere afterthoughts here in Nepal. No electricity? No water? No television? No Internet? No worries. We eat by candlelight. We gather water from mountain streams and boil it in on our solar cooker, a gigantic dish with solar panels that will be subject of a future post. We go without bathing (some of us longer than necessary). We read books and climb hills and chase chickens through a neighbor’s rice field. We go to bed when the sun goes down and we wake before it rises the next morning. Or at least the orphans do.

All this to say, I’m taking a renewed pleasure in the simple portions of the living experience that is humanity. Sitting on the roof of the Centre, I’ve taken an interest in watching life unfold in the farmlands and communities below me (kind’ve feels like being Batman sometimes, except ; I contemplate who these families are as they plant their fields, fly the kites, swing from bamboo playgrounds, and play futball in the dirt roads. How does God see these people? Where are they from? What do they think, feel, believe? How are their marriages, their friendships? Are they joyful? Do they cry? How does this lifestyle reflect a picture of the Creator that I’ve never seen before?

They work so hard for so little. The family of five (Gramps included) spent a week harvesting and replanting their entire cabbage patch from sunrise to sunset each day, and they did it together. Laughing, eating tomatoes from the vine, chasing a rogue rooster through the carrots; it was beautiful. Nowhere are the stresses and slaveries of the American lifestyle that so many of the urban Nepalis yearn for. No cell phones or cable bills, iPods or ESPN.

Jason was listening to a John Piper sermon the other day in which Piper alluded to the fact that the things we pursue in our personal times are the portions of our lives that bring us freedom or enslavement. How very true… The world we strive for seduces us, sedates us, and in the end, it kills our hearts minute by minute, day by day. My hobbies are not inherently sinful, but my idolatrous lusts for entertainment and knowledge have taken up a cancerous partition of my heart. And now I see a community untouched by these things and I find…peace.

I’ve made it a point to begin pursuing the spiritual disciplines of prayer and meditation each day. Scripture memory, which was once a chore, is now a joy to pursue. Waking up on the other hand; still working on that. I read a lot in America, but rarely did I truly savor the experience. Here, without the distractions and the constant fear of being watched and found out, the whole process takes on new life. I read through Judges and felt the reluctance in Gideon’s heart and the encrusted dirt and dim torchlight of the earthen vessels he and his army bore into the camp of the Philistines. And I started reading the Lord of the Rings again.

It’s official. If you want to travel the mines of Moria and the golden heavens of Lothlorien, one needs do it by candlelight. No car alarms, laptops, or Take Two Video commercials seeping under door from the next room. Make some tea, light on the cream, heavy on the sugar and some ginger. Quiet rooms, quiet hands, quiet hearts. And a single, thick candle. That’s the way we do it in Nepal.

So with the power out (and with every head bow and every eye closed), I read all the way through the book in the course of two days. And I loved it, again, and again, and again. So I leave you with a fitting poem that one of the Shire’s best wrote on my heart during my travels through Middle-Earth.

Recited upon the beginning of a journey far more perilous than that faced by Jason and I, but no less life-altering, I thought the words of a hobbit matched our wonderment more than sufficiently. Big ups to Bilbo, Shire 4 Lyfe…

Upon the hearth the fire is red,
Beneath the roof there is a bed;
But not yet weary are our feet,
Still round the corner we may meet
A sudden tree or standing stone
That none have seen but we alone.
Tree and flower and leaf and grass,
Let them pass! Let them pass!
Hill and water under sky,
Pass them by! Pass them by!

Still round the corner there may wait
A new road or a secret gate,
And though we pass them by today,
Tomorrow we may come this way
And take the hidden paths that run
Towards the Moon or to the Sun.
Apple, thorn, and nut and sloe,
Let them go! Let them go!
Sand and stone and pool and dell,
Fare you well! Fare you well!

Home is behind, the world ahead,
And there are many paths to tread
Through shadows to the edge of night,
Until the stars are all alight.
Then world behind and home ahead,
We’ll wander back to home and bed.
Mist and twilight, cloud and shade,
Away shall fade! Away shall fade!
Fire and lamp, and meat and bread,
And then to bed! And then to bed!

Bilbo Baggins

The Post Where Some Orphans and I Kill a Goat

2006-10-05T01:37:00.000-05:00

I know, the title of this post makes you want to cancel your hairdresser appointment and call your friends to tell them about "some crazy bear guy," but please, read the post below this one first. For the sake of the children.

Ok, right, so... It's been a week since I posted last. Not quite sure where to begin, so I'll just jump into what should have started as a weekend recap. Right. Here we go!!!!

Friday, September 29, 2006. We escape the orphanage!!!! This weekend marked the beginning of Desai, which is the Hindu version of Christmas, without the presents but with a heavy measure of animal sacrifices. Ah Desai, where the streets literally run red with the blood of ritual sacrifice, and people are warm and twice as nice!! I was a little disappointed that we didn't receive any Desai carolers ("Oh Silent Night (Of Praying that the Rat Goddess Doesn't Devour Our Souls")) or fruit cakes, but maybe next year...

Jason and I accompanied Hildi (whose name I have officially spelled 5 different ways since meeting her) to Thamell, which is more or less the tourist district of Kathmandu. Tons of western faces, Europeans in those three-quarters pants they're so fond of, and trekking guides. Oh, the trekking guides, as far as the eye can see. Four or five on every street corner, each promising to take you to the peak of Everest for only $500, hawking cheap hotel rates and "first-rate" climbing gear, often of course mislabeled (The Nerf Face, Mountawn HardDrive, Patagiardia).

We checked into a reasonable hostel (only $4 a night! shoestring budget does not exist here!) and headed down to the military fairgrounds to watch a ceremony officially blessing the beginning of Desai. Things were running slow, so we wandered the streets for a little bit; Jason was beseiged by holy men offering the tika (see post from last week re:Jason's tika concerns), Hildi was chased away from a ring of snake charmers by a man with a python around his neck, and I just dodged trekking guides. Since most trekking guides refuse to take no for an answer (or 15 nos for that matter), I made a game out of the whole process by seeing how outlandish of an excuse I could give for why I didn't need one. My favorites included "I'm sorry but the rest of my family was devoured by a group of cannibal trekking guides," and "How dare you! My father lost his arms and his spleen while trekking! Begone!" Jason did not approve, of course.

The ceremony was pretty interesting, and extremely hot. Since King Gyanendra was dethroned in April and no longer controls the Neapli armed forces, this marked the first Desai in nearly 300 years that the king did not preside over the ceremony. The royal marching band played the national anthemn, and then a commanding officer led the army in what turned out to be a literal wave of gunfire; rifles went off in a Baum Stadium wave around the length of the field in a U, followed by several volleys that came out of opposite sides of the parade grounds. The finale came with about 15 cannons being fired into the air while the band played again. Really cool stuff, even if we had a hard time seeing through the crowd and the fence (commoners are not allowed inside, and foreigners? ha!); very reminiscent of Independence Day celebrations from when I was but a little bear, save for the animal slaughter that would follow.

We shopped around for the rest of the afternoon at the various touristy places in Thamell. There's an official North Face dealer there (please don't hate me Dacus family), so we stocked up on gear. I got two pairs of really lightweight trekking pants, a sleeping bag, and a waist pack: less than $200!!! I love this country, its official. More snake charmers on the street below, and I managed to leave my camcorder in the North Face store "by accident." We ate dinner at a little cafe we'd discovered earlier in the day that was run by some Nepali guys, a Canadian girl, and a Vietnamese teenager. The Loss Time Cafe toyed with my heart by offering chicken spaghetti on its menu, but alas! They lied, they lied!!!! I settled for fried rice with mutton and a glass of wine. Can somebody please tell me what mutton is anyway?

I managed to get myself lost in the dark on the way back to the hostel when Jason and Hildi ducked into a shop, so for those of you who plan on visiting Southeast Asia in the near future, I give more subtle advice: DO NOT GET LOST IN THE DARK BY YOURSELF IN A FOREIGN COUNTRY. I wandered alone in the dark for a while, looking for familiar streets (which isn't easy in a country where none of them are labeled) and praying that I not get mugged and stabbed in a gutter in Nepal because it would be really expensive to mail my body back the staes for burial (and it would probably be covered in pee and foreign postage by the time it got home). I managed to flag down a rickshaw driver and get him to take me to the only landmark I could remember: Club Lava, a joint down the street from the hostel which I later learned is actually a gay bar. Beautiful. So I'm being carted around the dark alleys of Thamell by a ricksaw driver who thinks I'm gay, and really, REALLY wants to sell me weed. The driver kept asking me if I wanted some hash, so I tried the old Ray Ellen "the only thing I smoke is chicken on my George Foreman" joke; no laughter. I finally told the guy I was a music video director and I was filming at Club Lava that night, and no, I'm not gay. More offers for hash. Sweet.

Upon arriving back at the hostel, I found Jason and Hildi hanging out, divying up my few possessions and devising a story of how I ran away to join a band of gypsies. Turncoats... I had a coke with a Dutch tourist in the hostel's restaurant before we went out for the night. Being that it was Hildi's birthday (23, yesss!!!!), we took her out to a really cool bar (at her request Mom) that played Oasis for at least an hour. Hildi called two of her friends she'd met, a sociologist from Cameroon and Edam, from Ghana. Sociologist and Edam took us to a Nepali casino, where I played slot machines and watched drunken Indian tourists dance with each other to the live music by the buffet. Nepali and Indian men loooooove to dance with each other, and by dancing, I mean of the interpretive sort. As in acting out each and every lyric of each song with each other. Erin, Ashley, I'm thinking of you and Long Black Veil.

Ok, so I'm in a Nepali casino, random, awkward... We leave the casino, Jason obviously up waaaay past his bedtime, and go to some sort of trekking bar called the Tom and Jerry. Hildi is demanding cocktails, but I'm not even paying attention: the walls are covered in tshirts of expedition teams that have peaked Everest and come back to celebrate in the bar, and some of the shirts are 60 years old! Fascinating stuff, I think I even found a couple with Rob Hall's signarature on them (go read Into Thin Air, then you'll understand). It was like looking at artifacts in a climbing museum, except most museums don't serve alcohol or number dancing Ghana muslims amongst their patrons.

On Saturday, we went to the Durbar Square in Kathmandu (there are like 3 Durbar Squares in the Kathmandu Valley, each one being a temple/tourist district with really intricate architecture -- I'll post photos soon) in the hopes of seeing some of the sacrifices, but we found out they don't start until Sunday. Crap. So we took pictures of Hindus, I shot some videos of people offering tikas to the monkey god and another six-armed demon, and watched women feed the largest flock of pigeons I have ever seen. Holy men are littering the streets at this point, leagues and leagues of them offering tikas and flowers and blessings, and they all want Jason. We pack up and head back to CWC around noon, and the mini-bus ride back is miserable since I am now carrying a shopping back with North Face gear and a sleeping bag in it, as well as the second pack I bought. I am not a smart shopper.

Sunday morning, I'm suffering from a severe sinus infection I came down with over the weekend, bad enough that I'm having trouble seeing, but I have to get up: today is sacrifice day!!! Here's what you've been waiting for friends, the Goat!!!! It's Desai tradition apparently that Hindus sacrifice a goat on the Sunday of Desai, and while we are a Christian orphanage, several of the children are Hindi and desire to take part in the festivities. So Rina buys us a goat and leaves it locked up in the storage room downstairs all weekend. I saunter downstairs with my video camera, all confident because I'm a bloody American and I've seen the first three seasons of the Sopranos! I can handle goat death!!!

Wrong. Incorrecto. The opposite of courage. The goat is tied to the front gate, and he knows exactly what's going on. Nepali children are used to killing chickens for dinner, so the kids are unaware that anything extraordinary is happening here; they're here to see me and Jason in our moment of despair. And despair it is. Birendra and Rajesh (pronounced Rah-jeece), two of the older boys who happen to be my favorites, are saddled with the job of actually killing Mr. Goat. Rajesh, who doesn't eat red meat, is noticeably uncomfortable. Birendra sharpens his knife and plays up the whole butcher role for the camera, obviously trying to freak Jason out by talking about the best way to deliver a killing stroke, and warning me to "watch out for the spray." The boys wrestle the goat down and pin his head on a rock; the goat is madly bleating like itwas being forced to sit through a Murder She Wrote-a-thon with it's grandparents on a Friday night. Annnnd.....

I'll spare you the gore. It was gross. Really, really gross. The boys collect a full bucket of goat blood, the animal still kicking away. I try to pretend I'm not bothered by cutting away from the carnage to film Jason's reaction; face covered, walking in circles, telling me how much he hates me. I'm good for about 4 minutes before the goat smell hits me. I start to sway a little bit and switch the camera off, feeling the impending blackout. Things start getting hazy and purple, my head gets heavy, and I stagger away, almost puking, almost screaming, almost passing out. But I don't. I stumble into a flower bed and find a way to sit down that doesn't involve pitching face forward into a brick wall. I make Jason film me hiding from the goat under the shade of the building, just for posterity and journalistic integrity. I'm a coward. And goat meat sucks.

Jason heads back into the house to drink water and pray, but the boys convince me to come back and watch the skinning. The goat's already been beheaded, but Birendra is now reinflating its lungs by blowing in a straw down its esophagus. GROSS!!!!! They shave the goat with boiling water and some of the metallic cups we drink out of, and gut it. The younger boys talk me into eating some of the lesser, not so well known goat parts with them for good luck: the tail for agility and wisdom, a lung for compassion, and the penis for..."stamina." That's right. I flew to Nepal, bought a sleeping bag, worked in an orphanage, and ate a roasted goat penis. My grandchildren will be so proud of Pappy Bear some day...

So all in all, a pretty typical Nepali weekend. Some dal bhaat with goat meat (Jason hates it, I'm too sick by this point to care), snake charmers, Desai, and drug dealer/rickshaw pilots. Pretty standard fare I should say. Ah, but the twist... There's always a twist... That majestic goat phallus that I partook of? Improperly cooked, but of course. I spend all day Monday in bed with horrendus diarrhea, cursing goats and reproductive organs and Desai. And the power goes out. For three days. And because the power is out, our water pump stops working, so we have no water; or at least no cold water, because everything in our emergency tanks has to be run through the solar heater. Nobody tells me this of course, and just when my goat disease finishes its course, I decide to take a shower. A shower in boiling hot water. Dinner that night? Goat meat again. I go to bed early, reading The Fellowship of the Rings by candlelight.

And they all lived happily ever after, even the goat, who though dead, achieved a measure of suitable revenge in my intestines. I love Nepal!!!!!

The Weak (and time-constrained) Doxology Post

2006-10-05T00:53:00.000-05:00

Another week, another mini-bus into Laghankel (the home of Durbar Square and my favorite internet cafe), and another belated post to this, the story of my life. For the last 5 days.

But first, a statement of faith!!!!

It's come to my attention that several of you who have read my blog have had some concerns about my consistency of faith, my cynicism, and whether or not I am in fact a Christian (oh I know you, I know you well...). May I please take this opportunity to qualm your fears and/or judgments of my character.

I am Christian, but not of the atypical American "go to church, eat my vitamins, and drive an SUV because God wants me to be a good steward of the earth's resources and consume them before He returns" archetype. I believe that man is naturally sinful and deserving of death in his judgment before God. I believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God, the fulfillment of the Law, and the only means of receiving salvation. I am a Calvinist, in the order of Hunter Hall ("the more people I share the gospel with, the more predestined people I meet"). I am not a sinner saved by grace; the Bible is clear that my identity is that of a priest, a saint, a child of God, a brother and friend of Christ, and the only reason that I can say these things is that God called me to Himself and by faith, I received Christ into my heart.

I am filled with the Holy Spirit, though I am not always abiding in Christ. I screw up, not necessarily everyday, but on a consistent and massive basis. I am foolish, I make rash decisions, I am brutish, hurtful, cruel, and deceitful. My flesh is evil, but it does not control me. I make terrible decisions to give into often enough in my various lusts for things other than God, but He continually calls me back to Himself. My joy has been made complete in Christ, and I treasure Him. I do not read the bible or pray nearly as often as I should, and I make many selfish decisions that have often hurt the people whom I love or have loved the most. But I have been purchased and made willing slave of the gospel of Jesus Christ. I love God, and because His law is written on my heart, I have the capacity within me to love others as He has loved me. I don't do it often enough or very well, but it's there. So...yeah.

I am a failure in many aspects of my life, in regard to what capitalism and popular culture and sexologists might have to say about me. I've spent my money and my time on stupid, selfish things. I don't live up to my word. I lie, I occasionally gamble, and I really like beer. But I am not subject to the judgment of the world, no matter how painful that judgment might be at times. I am emotional, but not led by such emotions (except when it comes to the Chicago Cubs). I hurt, I laugh, I smile, and grieve, but I do all these things in the knowledge that they are reactions, and they are beautiful because God has gifed me with them.

As for my pessimism, please recall that I've never left the United States before (though I once saw Canada over the border of Michigan), and thus, my ethno-centrism has been turned up to 11 since I came to Nepal. Culture shock, she is a painful, humorous bride, but she be mine. So please don't pick me apart as I pick apart what I see each day. It's all new to me (as I may very well be to you), and pooping in a hole in the floor is enough to turn any man's thoughts to criticisms. I'm overcoming my ignorance, but if I didn't give my thought process to you in full, I'd be a liar, wouldn't I. This is a journey; you don't get wiser about other people groups overnight unless you drink a pot of copy and memorize the encyclopedias your parents bought you when you were 12.

I'm a fool, but I please don't be confused; I love the Nepali people. They are beautiful, both physically and spiritually. Their customs are different than our own, their traffic system is insane, and their food gives me diarrhea, but they are the creation of the God I serve, and they are part of the mosaic of his character. They are graceful, intelligent, bold, funny, tender, tragic, and poor. They are crushed under the weight of poverty and a yearning to be western.

For those who think that all I am is a voice of humor broadcast throughout cyberspace, please be aware that I grieve for these people. For every homeless mother I can buy baby formula for, there are hundreds that I pass on the street and avoid sharing glances with. I passed a boy with gnarled legs and one hand that was pushing himself along in a gutter begging for change, and I gave him nothing. My heart is so hard and so broken here, I can't explain it. So many sick, wounded, hurting, dying, and separated from the God they need so badly, and I have neither the funds or the kindness within me to heal them. So share my life or delete my emails, love me or despise me, the choices are yours. I do not apologize for the voice God has given me, even if it is often more tongue-in-cheek than many are accustomed to (Paul once recommended some dissenters to permanently castrate themselves, and that still made into the New Testament).

In the meantime, please pray for us. The burden, much like the One Ring, is oh so heavy, and I often long to give it away to someone much stronger than myself. But God chooses the weak to shatter mountains and deliver the oppressed, and it is a certainty that He has chosen Jason and I to be voices in the wilderness here. The days are hard but fun, the nights are sleepless, and the food is spicy. Very spicy. I love you all, and I need you in my life. Have a Dr. Pepper with lime for me today!

The paradox of international cinema

2006-09-27T00:43:00.000-05:00

Much like at home, everytime I get ready to finish a story, something new, creepy, and utterly interesting pops up. You'll be lucky if you ever hear the end of how I arrived in Nepal, though I promise that should I return to finish that tale, you'll much appreciate it. As for today: American film vs. Nepali film!

Ok, so, as much as I've tried to avoid the temptations of American culture here in Nepal, I've discovered that when you don't know how to communicate, what better way to drown your sorrows than the bootleg dvds for sale in the marketplace. Pirated Pirates of the Caribbean 2, oh sweet and not-so-bitter irony!!!! Jason and I took it upon ourselves to purchase a slew of movies for the orphanage after discovering that entertainment fares not so well for Nepali children. We get cable for some reason (no true indoor plumbing, but we get Showtime and Starz, go figure), so the kids watch a LOT of tv. Sounds like America, or at least Lafe, from what I hear. Anyway, when the options are only soft-core psuedo porno movies, Hindi music videos, and Evil Dead II, something must be done.

And it was, sort've. Jason, being the good parent, stocked up on a lot of Disney movies and both of the Ice Ages, which were packaged in some sort of Faustian bargain with Garfield the Movie. Watch it with a crucifix and a Roman priest present. I however, being the indulgent fat uncle type, stocked up on all the really good American movies I'd missed in the last few months. And Miami Vice, just because it was there. So all this boils down to the viewing of Flight 93.

If you want to be a jerk, you can call this a September 11th column, but it ain't my friend, it ain't. My memories of The Day in 2001 involved going to Spanish class and then staring in shock at my tv for about 4 hours inbetween classes wathcing the events unfold. And then leaving for Best Buy since it was a Tuesday and the new P.O.D. album was released that day. Yes, that's right, I forsaked the quintissential media moment of my generation for Satellite and Here Comes the Bomb (Ready of Not). I am a pretty crappy American. But I digress.

Anyway, Flight 93... Go to Blockbuster, rent it and watch it now. And I say that jokingly about a lot of things, but I'm really quite serious. Cast with a bunch of unknowns and several government and FFA administrators playing themselves, this might honestly be one of the most honest ficticious treatments of a historical event I've seen in a while. And by fictitious, I of course mean the drama that plays out onboard the plane that was not described via phone calls to loved ones, but truly lived out in moments of abject terror and human triumph.

The people are REAL, and the terrorists are not Jerry Bruckheimer morons with machine guns and flannel shirts. I truly believed that the actors onboard the plane existed, and as the drama unfolds with the pilots finding out about the WTC tragedy mere moments before being killed by the hijackers, you really get to see the intensity and the chaos of the whole event. The last 20 minutes of the movie are the most absolutely intense and stirring thing I've seen in recent memory, with the passengers banding together and launching a desperate attack against the hijackers to take back the plane. Visceral, shaky, heartbreaking...the last shot of the movie is a mass groping of bloody and sweaty hands frantically grasping at the controls of the airliner. 5 hands, then 20, 50, 150... So desperate and sickening, and beautiful. I cry at movies. I cried a lot at this one. So watch it, please, if for any reason, so that I will have something shared with friends at home. And call your parents, they love you very much.

So great, right? All we do in Nepal is play and watch movies that make us cry. I spent the rest of the night in bed listening to the forgotten Derek Webb cd, I See Things Upside-Down; it's the one that never sold because it doesn't sound like Christian music is supposed to, doesn't make you feel all sexy and confident in your spirituality. Anyway, the lyrics go...

I've got faith in the bank and money in my heart.
I've got a calloused place where your ring used to be, my love.
I've traded naked and unashamed,
for a better place to hide, for a righteous
mask, a suit of fig leaves, and lies.

I thought the cattle on a thousand hills were not enough to pay my bills,
and I fell in love with those who proved me wrong.
And now I want a broken heart...

And I cannot look you in the eyes to check the knots on my disguise,
And I fell in love with fashion in the dark.
And now I want a broken heart...

I've got alibis for every pry,
A substitute to do my time,
Does your heart break?
Is it enough on both our parts?
And now I want a broken heart...

Anyway, I can't really explain my mood or the stirring that song wells up inside me, but it happened, and if I'm going to be honest with this thing, then I must share all, must divulge all, must vomit on this keyboard. But I think you can peel the feelings associated with the song out of the lyrics, at least if you have a heart and can read. And none of this has nothing to do with movies or Nepal (or does it...) or bootleg dvds, but there it is. Go download the album, sit somewhere quiet, and hug your mug of tea while you read through Colossians and contemplate the nature of our savior and our need for true repentance and brokenness. Meh.

Whew. Movies, right? Right?

So yesterday, with most of the kids out of the orphanage for a week to visit families for a massive Hindu festival going on this week (I'll explain later, sorry), we thought it would be a great idea to take the remaining handful of kids who really have absolutely no family to the movies. So several mini-buses later, we were in Patan with a dozen orphans for my first (and last) experience with the Nepali movie culture.

American movie theaters are...well, almost like temples in and of themselves. Brightly lit, snack counters every six feet with the over-sized Mr. Pibbs that make you need to pee right at the climax of any movie you happen to be sitting in (which really, really sucks if it happens to be in the midst of Lord of the Rings), massive seating beholden to an altar on which Tom Cruise sacrifices our group integrity to his shirtless chest. You get the idea. Anyway, Nepali movie theaters? Cisterns. Fallout shelters. Cement craters with refreshment stands.

The theater is hidden behind chained link fencing, as though customers are being sent into government reprogramming camps, with each individual viewing room underground. Everthing's made out of concrete, dark, sweaty, beads of water running down the walls. Credits roll before the movie to the tune of incredibly loud synthesized blather, though the children love it. And the movie? Where to begin...

I don't know the title. I don't know the actors. I don't understand the language. But dear God, I know it was bad. The basic plot for said film was that two brothers lived together in poverty until one got married...evil boss man opens up rift between brothers over the false belief that she was two-timing her husband for his brother. Husband finds out that evil boss man took his father's land when he was very young, and attacks evil boss man; evil boss man's thugs get the best of husband and kill him, throw wife and brother out into the cold. That took 2 hours, and I was bored to tears. Then...the movies over? Yes? Yes?

Nope, just intermission. The second half of the movie involves the widowed wife wandering around and getting crapped all over by every human being she meets. Seriously, she was weeping inconsolably for at least 45 minutes of this movie. Oh, and by the way, she's pregnant. Manages to later give birth to a healthy baby boy even though she hasn't eaten in 4 months and has been slapped around and thrown to the floor, landing on her belly every single time, at least 25 times. Brother-in-law eventually saves the day, gives a lot of impassioned speeches, and turns into a ninja at the end of the movie. Seriously. Out of nowhere, he turns into a killing machine and murders every antagonist that appeared in the entire film, even some midget town crier. Evil boss man gets pummeled with every stick weapon known to man, and then hung in a tree by the widow and ninja brother-in-law. And then his dead body is dragged through the townsfolk. End of movie, beginning of massive audience applause. What?!?!?! Where AM I!!!!!

Not to be ethno-centric, but let me break this film down for you. It starts out like a bad Walter Matthau comedy done Mexican television style, rife with bad physical humor and goofy "whizoo" or "boink" sound effects. Just think of the Bee Guy from Simpsons. Then the violence. Everybody fights in this movie, but the shocker is the sheer amount of physicality against women. At least half of the punishment in the film was men slapping, punching, kicking, or bodyslamming helpless women, one of whom I've already mentioned was pregnant. What the heck kind of culture have I settled myself into here, when this is the children's matinee movie???? I could go on for quite a while: pointless close-ups ( in groups of threes) of characters' eyes accompanied with a "bwishhhhhht" sound whenever said character gets totally pissed; the random song and dance numbers shot like George Michael music videos that just come out of, like, NOWHERE; the background passers-by in city scenes who don't understand that a commercial film is being shot, and choose to dance around like idiots or hump bicycle tires or whatever; the grainy film quality, full of little orange tears in the film that made the screen look like it was leaking carrot juice. Oh, and I left out the dead dog lying in the alleyway INSIDE THE THEATER when we exited.

Friends, I am not in America anymore. Will somebody please send me season 2 of Lost on dvd and some hand sanitizer?

Next time: Jason fights in a gladiator ring to save the life of an Indian princess! Crab spiders kidnap the prime minister of Bangladesh!! And dhal baat!!!!

A welcome diversion from your daily breakfast

2006-09-25T00:03:00.000-05:00

So, in spite of the fact that I have an ongoing story to complete, I'd like to take time away this morning to examine the complete awkwardness of family interactions in Nepali culture and my hatred of the caste system. Case in point:

(By the way, Hogs 24-Bama 23. Sloppy. Houston -- scholarship kicker please? I've met a few Nepali orphans who could accurately boot the besneezes out of the ball and would really benefit from the free American education. And shoes.)

OK, so, yesterday, being Sunday, we had a big "Couple who has been married for over a year have their parents finally meet each other and everything goes wrong" celebration. I think that was pretty self-explanatory. No Robert De Niro or Mr. Jingles, but we had enough weirdness to compensate.

Rita, a Christian, and Santos, a Hindu (equally yoked, what?), have been married almost a year and a half, but the folks have never interacted. Partially because they come from different castes, Santos' being the higher, and thus, Rina's family is looked upon as being sub-human. Like, breathe through gills and live below the earth's crust with the Morlocks sub-human. Rina has met Santos' family before, but apparently things didn't go quite well and she hasn't seen them since. And you thought your in-laws (or milkman, if not yet married) were bad.

Rina seems to take it in stride however, and had mentioned to us earlier in the week that her husband's folks were coming by on Sunday for lunch. I think back to my American experiences, making the oft mistake of assuming. If you plan on traveling to East Asia in the near future, please don't assume. You will be made a fool, and probably end up eating yak excrement as a joke. Nevertheless, the last time I recall meeting a girl's parents, it involved barbecue, her grandfather farting in my face, and me getting tipsy off of heavy margeritas and hiding that from said flame and parents rather well. I think.

So Sunday rolls around, and upon waking, I find that Barnum and Bailey's has set up a temporary rest stop in the pavilion in front of the orphanage. A grand tent, complete with wait staff and seating for 50, has been set out, Rina is decked out in a golden sari and brass jewelry, and the orphans have been rushed off to parts unknown, i.e. school. Rina and "Mummy" (her mom and CWC's founder, Rupa, as we affectionately and obediently refer to her) are frantically rushing around the house, fluffing pillows, spraying air freshener to rid the orphanage of our stank, refluffing the pillows, preparing flowers, waxing the floors, and refluffing the pillows yet again. Rina gives me a stack of saris and a dress shirt to gift wrap with approximately one square foot of wrapping paper. I lay hands on the wrapping paper and pray fervently, and lo and behold, more wrapping paper--brought by one of the children because Rina forgot it. Feel free to continue thinking of me as a miracle worker though.

The guests begin arriving in an armored Mercedes, and by guests, I mean Santos' entire family. Grandma, grampy, uncle Buck, crazy aunt Whatever-Her-Name-Is. All of them. Carload after carload, I count at least 20, but still, his parents are not here. Jason and I bide our time by sitting on the floor in the television room with rest of Rina's family upstairs, purposefully not talking to each other. Rina's family ask us questions about America like, "Is it nice?" and "You are from America, yes?" One woman begins breast feeding; Jason promptly leaves the room, while I take the opportunity to peruse the photos on the walls for the fortieth time. Breast feeding=gross. Baby birds eating=gross. Yak butter=gross.

Everybody finally shows, and we make a big pomp and circumstance by giving all of Santos' family a flower and a tika (that red smattering of rice and paste on the forehead that every Hindu in your 6th grade World Cultures book had), uttering the Nepali welcome of "Namaste" to each. One of the older orphans, Ramesh (Charlie Luu 2.0), informs me that the way I am greeting each person by bowing is offensive, even though this is the way he taught me 10 minutes ago. I am the butt of an orphan joke. AGAIN.

Upstairs, we all sit on the floor in a circle, Jason and I in the corner with Hilda, a German girl who is also working with us as a volunteer. Everyone else, including us westerners, receive the tika, and for the rest of the day, I have to deal with Jason jokingly asking me "Is this a sin?" Later that night, I kill him in his sleep. If you are reading this, please send me a new, living volunteer partner. Preferably a pretty southern one, of the female persuasion, who enjoys Ryan Adams and Cubs basbeall.

Waiters bring in appetizers such as excrutiatingly hot potatoes, drumsticks, fish sticks, and some sort of vegetable hush puppy. And Coke! And Mountain DEW!!!!!!!! I am His beloved and He is mine, thank you Jesus! Meanwhile, nobody talks; nobody. Santos' family look like they would rather be getting tortured with olive oil and a hyperactive ferret. One lady in green, whom I will refer to hereafter as "Miss Judy", looks sour enough to be a representative of the Slugworth candy factory. She makes a mental note to stare at me and frown constantly, unless I look at her, in which case she quickly averts her eyes as if she were some sophomore college girl who didn't want me to know she was looking at me. But I know Miss Judy... I know... I contemplate throwing my vegepuppy at her, but I am here as an observer first, assassin second, and Christian somewhere down the list. So no misbehavior, for Rina I tell myself.

Rina is paraded in in all of her golden beauty (and yes, even pregnant, she is quite beautiful), and meets the fam. Mummy gives each of the women in Santos' family my poorly wrapped miracle gifts, which are tossed in a pile and later nearly left behind, and Rina trails behind, stopping at each woman to touch their feet and then press her hands to her lips. The women break character for about a minute and all laugh, as though this is all some cruel joke at Rina's expense. Then, when Rina is done humiliating herself, its back to stern lunchlady mode. Miss Judy is not pleased.

Everybody heads downstairs for the meal under the giant tent. Oh, did I mention its been raining nonstop for three days at this point? So the rugs which our tent is made out of are soaking wet, the ground is soaking wet, but still we eat. The two families do not speak to each other, no cordial words, no hellos or goodbyes or "Hey, thanks for the mutton curry!" at any point. Santos' folks stuff their faces full of peanut butter marsala (not American peanut butter, but some horrific butter made of peanuts; Jason gags on his and chooses to eat 3 lbs worth of pita bread instead) and curds and whey before retreating to the Decepticon Mercedes for their return to Mordor. Once the family is gone, the orphans and released from the house to join us, and for once, the party takes an upswing. The kids are laughing, chugging the cold water, tossing hunks of mutton at each other. Jason and I retreat upstairs when we hear some American music, but alas!!!!!! Bryan Adams!!! Backstreet Boys!!!! Wham???

So there you have it. Meet the Parents, Nepali style. No toking on Puff the Magic Dragon, although the potatoes do have a hallucinogenic effect to them. Add in some Bryan Adams crooning of "Everything I Do, I Do For You," and what more could you want? How about social ethics and lovingkindness? Or toilet paper? Oooooh....FORKS.

I love you all. Email me, pray for me (been sick over the weekend with a stomach virus, language acquisition sucks, cynicism ::surprise!!:: with the culture, not sleeping, etc...), pass my blog on to your friends. And God's sake, come visit us!!!!!

Join me next time for: Greed, deception, and an airport greeting straight out of H.P. Lovecraft!

Welcome to the Dheli Airport! Would you like an uncomfortable seat with your extra-long wait?

2006-09-23T04:54:00.000-05:00

Isn't the point of having a blog the constant upkeep of it? Oops...missed that one. So, its been a month since I posted, but seeing as how its been a month since anything of substance happened in my life, I think the two kind of even themselves out. For those that are seriously interested (mom), my last month in America was mainly bland. Lots of satellite TV (Gremlins 2 at 3 in the morning? Yes, I DO think so...), lots of "this is seriously my last beer before I leave dude" with Ben and Brian, lots of putting off of the support raising, lots of...tedium. So there's that. I've been in Nepal for a little over a week now, and the blog, she needs an updatin'. So grab a cup of coffee and a powerbar, curl up in your precious recliners, and gather the children. Thus begins the tale of an awkward furlough in the Forgotten Country...

I'm of the opinion that if you're going to leave behind country and kin for a year, the best way to do so is to be pissy over breakfast. What better way to say, "Farewell, you gave birth to me and came to all my crappy tee ball games and sat through my saxophone solo at band concerts in PA's lower gym, you put me through college and taught me to read and how to shop for bananas and let me chew on your sleeves during church when I was young, and I love you I love you I love you!" than to scowl at the table and complain about how nobody is ready, and yes, my laptop is charged up. I have been in better moods, and I have been in worse, so to describe my attitude upon leaving America, I would have to say: surly. Pitiable. Grousey. Cancer-inducing. I am wicked son, a lazy friend, and the future leader of America. Crap.

Final day in America.... A drive to Fayetteville one last time, spent silent in the Accord's backseat spent reminiscing about the Pig Trail last fall and world geography and how much I hate flying. Lunch at the Marketplace Grill with the family and Jake Newell, who shows up for hugs, kisses, and a free wrap of some sort. (pssst. I had a steak. No beef in Nepal you know. Just for the record, it was a Cajun ribeye. Medium. And I didn't eat the baked potato, watching my caloric intake) The purchase of a picture frame in Tuesday Morning, aptly named, because that's when their shoppers usually leave in bewildered fashion after getting lost in the store of over the course of a weekend. At the airport a whole 2 hours early so that....Oh. Crap.

Our flight has been postponed. Take an earlier flight or wait a day. I've only been waiting, oh, 2 months now to leave. So tired of people thinking I'm dead, in Limbo, in Denmark, wanting to know why I'm still in Fayetteville, and YES, I've gotten all my shots. "This earlier flight, when does it leave?" asks the Jason. "In 25 minutes," says the underpaid and confused United Airlines attendant. "Oh," say Jason and I. "Oh," says Jessica Gudino, who will be joining us on the first leg of our flight. "Oh," say Jason's father, step-mother, and my father in unison.

So we leave in 25 minutes. American Airlines is verrrry understanding, to the tune of charging Jason an extra $260 for his 2 extra bags of charitable items for the orphans. "Oh," says Jason. "They're for orphans." "260 please," replies the attendant. We pay, or that is, Jason pays, I just hold the card. And stress. I'm sweating, my bag hurts my shoulder, and I don't want my father to carry any because he had a heart attack in an airport, and dear God, Dad! I can't handle you dying today! I got a yellow fever shot that turned my shoulder brown for this. DO NOT DIE.

3 minutes to take pictures. Shaun supervises, and for a moment, he is more of a mother than my Mom is. My parents do not cry. Jason's parents bawl, or at least his mother does. Jason's sister Krystal is weepy. Shaun is weepy. Jessica is weepy and has already retreated to the flight lounge. My brother does not cry, as he has been asleep in the car and barely understands what is happening. My family's parting words? I have no earthly idea, something about unicorns and taking care of the legacy.

We are stopped in security, all our bags searched. Of course. My shoes have to come off, while the guy behind me line, who just told me how great I am for "doing the Lord's work," curses out a guard for having his travel toothpaste trashed. American Christianity, goodbye!!!! The plane has left, I am thinking. Jess is off on her own, stretched across my seat and hers, eating my peanuts, charging vodkas to my Visa card. No, she's probably hijacked, held at bay with a straight-edge ruler and calculator battery. Lucky, I am thinking. The guard gives me back my shoes, unlaced. Of course. Jess wore Chacos, smart girl.

The plane is still here. I run into an old friend from Camp Timberline (the Hirschy-Jordan saga continuing to run full circle), we trade life stories, hers is better, and I brag to Jess about how many beautiful married women I know. Plane boards, silent flight to Chicago, Jason takes pictures, I practice asking for the American embassy in Nepali. In secret, I also learn the phrase "My friend here is an international terrorist. Please you make arrest of him. I scared."

O'Hare airport in Chicago for an hour layover. I love this city, too bad all I see of it is fluorescent lighting and overpriced Chili's Airport 2Go. Jess begins crying in the airport, the meaningful kind. She is preparing herself to "be mean" again since she is re-entering Europe. I pray for her while thinking, "Efff. Aren't missionaries supposed to be joyful and excited? I am screwed. And I smell already." With every head bowed and every eye closed (every being Jess), I change shirts in the airport. I call Hunter Goff back and leave him a message. I call my mom, she starts crying over the phone. Crap. Jess hears her crying via cell phone, begins crying again. I. Am. An. Idiot.

I sleep nearly the entire trans-Atlantic flight to Germany with my feet on my bible. The food is good, but I don't remember it. The in-flight movie is "Over the Hedge," so I play Guess-the-celebrity voice while Jason sleeps. Garry Shandling, tough one. Let me know if you figure out the exterminator. German airport is busy, we part ways with Jess, she is no longer crying, and board another flight to India. Germany looks nice, all 12 seconds of it. Never got to see the gigantic lake Garrett Lewis always obsessed over. Sleeping on the plane all the way to India as well. Shouldn't I have been reading or praying or something? Scratch that, bible gets left on the plane when we disembark. Way to go moron. (I packed 2, but the backup is NIV. I'm a bible snob, deal with it) And now....the Indian airport in Dheli.

Welcome to Hell. No, scratch that. Not hell. My bad.

Welcome to Purgatory. The 12th century Catholic church was right, the place exists. Not quite hell, thanks to the bathrooms and Subway shop, but pretty close to it. How to describe, how to describe... Jason and I try to go through customs, but are refused because we don't have Indian visas. Instead, we are ushered into the Transit room by a uniformed officer who has us fill out our baggage information in a ragged logbook. No computers, no Microsoft Excel, no nerdy lady with a Virginia Slim cough and disapproving stare. A ragged logbook. Made out of human flesh. Ha, just kidding...its more of a spiral-bound.

We are ushered into a nightmarish Underworld of Hindi madness and Escher-esque bewilderment. No one will help us. The information desk is unmanned, and the few men on duty look around frantically as if they are making up answers on the spot while looking for somebody more official-looking to send Jason and I chasing after. I go into the bathroom and come out weeping inconsolable: holes in the ground. Jason buys an Italian BMT for something along the lines of $4 US because he has to have exact change. I visit the Subway later and find that the price has been raised to $13 US. Salami inflation, it ruins entire continents and endangers the international fast-food deli market. I try to haggle with the owner, and somehow the price goes up to $350. I suck at this.

Jason and I wander from bench to bench trying to find a place not already occupied with sweaty people or sweat pools left behind from said sweaty people. I am not a Christian. I am an airport critic, and I hate this place. Jason wanders around looking for people to tell us where our bags are and how we are supposed to leave without boarding passes. I pretend to read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius while secretly judging all the people in the airport and imagining different ways in which I will punish the Subway owner when I rule his country. Annnnd....this post is running long. Polly Dacus long. To be continued...

Next time: Escape! Grand Theft Auto Kathmandu!! Dhal Baat!!! At war with the crab spiders!!!! Orphans and tyranny!!!!! And some stuff about Jesus...

Worth of a man?

2006-08-16T16:53:00.000-05:00

One weeks sans JB Hunt. I have no income, no groceries, and according to the light in my Jetta's dashboard, no windshield wiper fluid. (For those interested, that sucker's for sale too; just needs wiper fluid and a little love) I gave away all my food and my dishes, put all my weathered particleboard furniture into a storage unit, and sold/gave away everything I had in our garage sale last weekend. My net worth in garage sale dollars? $355. And some change, I didn't really bother to count.

Garage sales are a funny concept. I've done a few with my mom before and actually made some pretty decent money. I sold a 12 year-old kid my Nintendo 64 and a couple games for about $200 a few years back and thought I'd found a wellspring of future income opportunities. WRONG. Let's look at the "bargains" I gave away this weekend:

$3 DVDs, including such timeless classics as Chicken Run and bootleg copies of the 2nd and 3rd seasons of Alias

New cable modem, $5 (which apparently is the going rate at garage sales)

Ping pong table that refuses to ping or pong or move around, $15

Gift bag of 150 assorted CDs, $5

Ugly plaid chair, $5, paid for in damp legal tender by a scary lesbian who pulled said cash out of her bra -- I am terrified to spend/touch this money

"Jesus is My Homeboy" trucker hat, $1; regaining my dignity, PRICELESS

Windows XP, $10, purchased by a man who somehow managed to buy nearly everything I had for less than 50 bucks; said gentleman tried to buy our curtains, refrigerator, dog, and the neighbor's Honda CRV; he is a Methodist minister; got stuck in our garage waiting out a rainstorm, during which I opportunistically sold him an Eddie Bauer raincoat for $1

offers on big screen TV and home theater system = 0

offers on Jason's 55 gallon fish tank = 1, made by aforementioned scary lesbian woman

offers on Jason's dog = 6, one person offering a gym membership in a barter

number of posted signs = 2, both of which fell down within 30 minutes

moment of the day = dookie-braided guy who rode off on his bike with Jason's coffee maker shouting "Jesus done made my day!"

Malachi to Matthew

2006-08-04T21:29:00.000-05:00

Funny how opening remarks are rarely used to communicate anything rather than a desired emotion or temporary image of self-actuality. What happened to simplicity? "Hi, I'm (insert name) and I'm writing to share with you about..." Instead, we give and get all this gibberish referring to what we'd like people's first impression of us to be, shaping and influencing their perception of our character based on what information about ourselves we choose to release or share. I know, because I'm doing it right now.

In a sense, I'm making my first real visit to the core of my personhood since the day my parents bought me a television. Selling everything. Moving halfway across the globe. Really beginning to pray and cry and celebrate and repent for the first time. So if you plan on reading further, then welcome. You get to figure this out with me. I believe in spiritual rebirth, but that doesn't happen to be what I'm experiencing at the moment. Rebirth implies the death and resurrection of a spirit; I've already experienced that in my lifetime. I'm in the thick of something that's more than a transition and less of a self-discovery. I'm at the moment in a Cameron Crowe movie when an Elliott Smith song fades in, bridgind the gap between empty vessel and self-actualization.

So all this makes me sound somber and empty, which couldn't be further from the truth. Despite the fact that I've worn out my welcome and my reputation here in Fayetteville, I'm tasting and living a type of healing that I've never had before: submission, sacrifice, and fulfillment. I've lived a life of idolatry for longer than I can bear to admit to, and God has been faithful to cut off each of these from my life. Worship of Campus Crusade and self, worship of romance, worship of material wealth, of wisdom, of entertainment, of accumulation. I have been a slave to these things, and many more. My pride and my passivity have carved out an empty altar in my heart, but that altar is burning.

So I don't know how to tie all of this together without writing out a 45 page blog that nobody I know will ever read, much less digest. If you have in fact decided to devote yourself to understanding me within the context of what I share here, please know that I love you. I mean that. I love you, and thank you for keeping up with me, for praying for me as I hope you will, and journeying across the world with me in my heart. I will not lie here, I will not exaggerate, and I will not hold back. I am opinionated, and I am educated, and I am a fool were it not for the Holy Spirit. However, the world has been changed as much by the hearts of wise kings and prophets as much as it has been by foolish tax collectors and fishermen. I've never collected taxes before, but I have devoted a year to hiring truck drivers, and I think it's a fair consensus that the two occupations are conjoined somehow.

So I'm quitting my job, selling my possessions, and moving to Nepal to work in an orphanage. The whole situation screams of twenty-something wanderlust with a hint of "Seven Years in Tibet." I'll give you the full breakdown of my decision process, my motives, and the extent of the emotional/spiritually journey in a later blog because its all just truly beginning. For now, know this: the path I've chosen isn't a lark or an escape. I'm not reacting on a whim. Jason (the beautiful roommate) and I have devoted the last six months of our lives to pondering the meaning and the timing of why God has called us to this country and to the Children's Welfare Center. I've weighed the costs, I've measured the heartbreak, and prayed for strength and wisdom without ceasing. I'm as prepared and unprepared as one can possibly be. Time to plunge.