A nation of Wealth

This Blog has an interesting map of US States renamed as countries with equivalent GDPs. Here's the image:

Pyramids in Sudan

The NYT has an article about the Sudan pyramids I visited last summer. It looks like they might not be around for much longer.

Read the article Here.

My new Nephew

Meet Ethan James Woodfin!! 9lbs. 4 oz. 14 inches long. My sister now has 2 boys. They are all doing great.

What the world eats

Click here to see what 15 different families from around the world eat in one week. Spoiler alert: The American families eat the most junk.

Bonhoeffer

I just watched an incredible documentary on the life of Deitrich Bonhoeffer. He was a theologian and one of the few German Christians who stood up against the Nazi regime.

Bonhoeffer studied at Union theological seminary in Manhattan and began going to the African American churches in Harlem where he was introduced to a new style of worship and faith in action. Can't you just see the blond hair blue eyed prim and proper German pastor sticking out in a Harlem Church service. Bonhoeffer identified with the resounding faith and close community the black church had in the midst of much persecution during that time.

He decided that he could not participate in the spiritual rebuilding of Germany after the war unless he also went through the present trials and tribulations. He made the difficult decision to return to Germany, knowing full well that it would most likely lead to his death. Bonhoeffer took the lessons he learned from the Harlem church and Adam Clayton Powell Sr. back with him to Germany where he urged the German church to stand with the persecuted Jews in their time of need. His outspokenness of Hitler and support of the Jews led to his eventual arrest and death in a German concentration camp.

Here are a few of his quotes which are amazingly applicable even today...

"I have had the chance to hear the Gospels preached in black churches. Here, one can truly spake and hear about sin and grace and the love of God, if in forms we are not used to. In contrast to the often didactic style of "white" preaching, the "black Christ is preached with rapturousness passion and vision".
--Letter to Julie Tafel, 1930

"Christ is really present only in the community. The Church is the presence of Christ just as Christ is the presence of God. But our church today is bourgeois. The best proof is that the poor working classes have turned away from the church, wheras the bourgeois - the petty officials, the artisans and the merchants have remained. When the comm unity is split, is Christ himself divided?"
--Sanctorum Communio, 1927

"The church has 3 possible ways it can act against the state. First, it can ask the state if its actions are legitimate. Second, it can aid the victims of state action. The church as an unconditional obligation to the victims of any ordering society, even if they do not belong to the Christian society. The third possibility is not just to bandage the victim under the wheel but to jam a spoke in the wheel itself."
--The Church and the Jewish Question, 1933

"The church is the church only when it exists for others. The church must share in the secular problems of ordinary human life, not by dominating but by helping and serving."
--Outline for a book, 1944

"We have for once learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled in short, from the perspective of those who suffer. Mere waiting and looking on is not Christian behavior. Christians are called to compassion and action."
--After 10 Years: A letter to the family and conspirators, 1942

"I discovered later, and am still discovering right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life's duties, problems, successes, failures. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously not our own suffering but those of God in the world. That, I think, is faith."
--Letter to Eberhard Bethge, 1944

Time

I'm addicted to Time's photoessays. There's a great one this week on street life in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

See it here

Forwarded to me from a friend.

You're an aid worker with 5-10 years experience under your belt. You earn a pittance but it works for you because you are non-resident at home so you don't pay tax, you are catered for on assignment so you don't pay rent and your mortgage is covered by the people renting your place because you are never there. You can't hold down a relationship for more than 3 months and you secretly know that despite what you tell him/her its really not because you're only ever there for 3 months... its because you're addicted to independence.

Things are ok now but you're approaching 40. Shouldn't you grow up?

Seriously though... what does the future hold? What *can* the future hold for us?

Option 1. You go back to a headquarter job. Instead of doing what you want to do, you now advise people who are doing what you used to do. You earn the same more or less as you did before, but your costs of living shoot skywards because you're now paying tax, rent/mortgage and utilities... You consider sharing accommodation and, bingo, you're a student again!

Option 2. You go work for the UN. Keep the job you love and the lifestyle that goes with it. Your salary jumps to levels that used to get you all riled after a few dirty martinis back when you used to work for "honest" down-to-earth INGOs. Now you're cynical about them all and aggressively defend your need to raise a nest egg to plough the way for the family/dog/cottage/brats you're planning. You've done your bit after all. You do this for a while before you realize you sacrificed the very dream you were once working towards.

Option 3. You find something suitable in the commercial sector and live
happily ever after. (By the way, if you're a logistician, forget it).

Option 4. You retrain and change course. You take a massive pay cut. Your skills and experience in aid work go unused. You marry someone named Steve/Janice and drive something practical that "gets good mileage".

Option 5. You write your memoirs and someone makes a movie out of it
starring Leonardo De Caprio. You become an even more arrogant git, lose all your friends, and make a lot of cash. (This can happen to only one of us by the way).

Option 6. Remember the lonely, jaded expat sat at the bar in [substitute 3rd world capital here], letching over young local girls and making snide remarks about your naive ways? Welcome to your future...

Suggestions for further career options welcome.

Are we the new gypsy? I have visions of huge bands of ex-aid worker
families roaming the European countryside in caravans (plastered in no-gun stickers of course), scratching out a life by erecting latrines and taking stock counts.....and maybe seeking charity door-to-door...

Is there an aid agency out there that *doesn't* bang on about work/life
balance and how it cares for its staff? Is there an aid agency out there that actually has a program for actively rehabilitating serial aid workers back into western life? How could it work? How (if at all) is the situation different for our colleagues from Southern countries? How can we save our dignity, our salaries, our relationships and at the same time stay in the work we love and avoid wasting our skills and experiences....?

cheesy i know

But still....It's awesome.

An unstoppable Force

I'm selling a ton of old books because..well..I'm poor and unemployed and have about 6 gabillion dollars worth of school loans to pay back. As I'm thumbing threw Erwin Raphael McManus's book "An Unstoppable FOrce" I came across a passage I underlined a long time ago:

"It was easier to be certain you were right when you had never even heard of an opposing position. It was easier to be sure you were right when you felt you were in the majority position. It was easier to believe everyone else was wrong when you didn't know him or her personally. The idea that people without Jesus are going to hell went down far too easily for Christians who only knew Christians."

More Maps

Here's a snapshot of many of the communities I visited last summer in the Nuba mountains. Not all are villages. If you can read some of the waypoints you'll see things like "Nice Tree" "Good Camping Spot" "SPLA Checkpoint" All things to remember when I go back to South Kordofan Inshalla.


















This map is the area around Khartoum and the route I took to visit the Pyramids north of the City. Now THAT was an amazing night.

John 6:27

This has been appearing everywhere in the city:
















It's on buses, billboards, and little stickers like appears above. I looked up John 6:27 and it says:

"Do not work for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you, for on Him the Father, God, has set His seal."

Hmmmm what could it be?? Turns out it's part of a campaign promoting the new Die Hard 4 movie.

Yippie Ki yo KiYaea Not sure what John 6:27 has to do with anything. I guess I'll have to see the movie

Costa Rica revist

A few of my friends are going to Costa Rica this week.

I'm jealous.

A few months ago my roommate and I were able to hike through the rainforest in Corcovado, CR. Here's a map of the route we hiked overlayed on Google Earth, it's kind of spotty because my GPS was on the fritz.




And here's what I looked like in San Jose when I came down with a nasty stomach bug. My roommate snapped it when i was asleep on a park bench. To let you know how nice Costa Ricans are (and how bad I looked) a homeless lady actually came up to me and offered to give me money!!! I said "no thanks I'm just a little under the weather"...so then she asked if she could have some money. I wish I had gotten a picture of us both.

Tony Tony Tony has done it again

The economist this week has a great essay by Tony Blair reflecting on his time as prime minister. I've always liked Tony Blair, here's a snip:

"It is said that by removing Saddam or the Taliban—regimes that were authoritarian but also kept a form of order—the plight of Iraqis and Afghans has worsened and terrorism has been allowed to grow.

This is a seductive but dangerous argument. Work out what it really means.

It means that because these reactionary and evil forces will fight hard, through terrorism, to prevent those countries and their people getting on their feet after the dictatorships are removed, we should leave the people under the dictatorship. It means our will to fight for what we believe in is measured by our enemy's will to fight us, but in inverse proportion. That is not a basis on which you ever win anything."