stansted

i was in England for a brief period of time. three days to be exact. Friday Saturday and Sunday. well technically Sunday night as well. see our flight left at 7 am on Monday morning.

you do the math.

7 am flight. being international, must arrive 2 hours prior. estimated traveling time to airport, 1.5 hours. time to wake up and get things around and in the car, 15 minutes. so what time would the alarm need to go off?

if my math is correct (and i was an English major) it would be a 3:15 start. and who on this side of the planet would want to take someone to the airport at 3:15 in the morning, not to mention hitting London traffic on the way back.

thats a big no one. and the truth be told, i wasn't up for it either. so we went to the airport the night before. and we slept on the floor. on the cold, hard, dusty floor. all in all it wasn't the worst night i've passed. i think back to a night i spent in Madrid, waiting outside the bus station for a good 5 and a half hours. that was definately colder, harder and dustier. okay, so i didn't sleep loads but as long as you've got something to lay your head on...

which brings me to my main point. we weren't the only ones sleeping in the airport. i figured there would be a handful of other weary travelers and a couple of smart homeless guys. but truth be told again, there were MASSES of people. i am often a conservative guesser and but i reckon we were nearly touching 300 people. this is in lovely Stansted Airport by the way. if you don't know the size, well you can walk from one end to the other in about 10 minutes.

nothing personal against stansted actually. just its in the middle of nowhere, thats all. it faithfully serves the 70 people who live that side of london, which the other 3.5 million everywhere else are left with an eternal drive along Britain's busiest carpark. oh i mean road. oh i guess i didn't mention it. on the way, leaving the airport, we sat on that very road for 3 and some odd hours. bumper to bumper. who puts an airport at the end of a crowded road anyways?

but back to the airport, so people everywhere. hundreds of them. and what is more, some of them were professional airport sleepers. placing all joking to one side, we saw people on blow up matresses, with sleeping bags on top and about 4 pillows. who carries blow up mattresses, sleeping bags, and a 3 to 1 pillow to head ratio?!?!? obviously quite a few. and so to say its a sight i won't soon forget.

small airport, many people sleeping, or perhaps just trying to sleep. and a few, apparently smart souls snoring soundly away on their blow up mattresses in the middle of the Ryanair checkout line.

next time i'm going to Heathrow.

z z z

i've realized that the previous post was nothing more than an attempt at making myself tired so i would want to go to bed. occasionally i suffer this phenomenon where, tired or not tired, i don't want to go to bed. so i prolong the inevitable, doing meaningless tasks that have no eternal purpose, or even momentary for that matter. funnily, in the morning i always feel the opposite and ask myself what the heck was i thinking and why would anyone put off going to sleep?

i think it's connected with an subconcious fear of laying in bed for an hour, wide awake, not being able to sleep. but really, wide awake and not being able to sleep aren't that different.

obsessive compulsive paranoia comes to mind.

there's got a be a picture or at least something... anything!

nearly every time i sit down i don't know what i'm about to put down. i think it's what keeps this thing going.

but then sometimes i sit down and i just stare at the screen. or i type a sentence and delete it. retype a sentence and redelete it. till i either give up or go down a completely different line.

then there are the instances like what is happening right now. instead of giving up, i am just going to post what i've got down.

proverbs

a few i've stumbled upon.

I
he who lets offenses pass by,
creates ties of love;
he who does not, alienates his friends.

II
even idiots can pass for wise and intelligent
when they shut up and keep silent.

III
the fool has no desire to learn;
only the desire to flaunt what he already knows.

III
it's stupid and shameful
to respond before listening.

IV
what is at first easy to acquire,
in the end doesn't bring much happiness.

further spacing and a scorpion

the other day i stumbled upon a scorpion. yes a real live scorpion and it was carrying the body of a cockroach (previously mentioned) off somewhere... to eat it? (i dunno if they are carnivores or not.) but anyways it was my first experience with a scorpion in a live, anything goes environment. after a brief moment of incredulity, then a rush of adrenaline, and at last a brief panic attack, i analyzed the situation...

1- i am bigger than him.
2- i am faster than him.
3- i am stronger than him.
however,
4- i don't have a tail that i can jab into things leaving a poisonous trail.
but,
5- i do have shoes that i can use to squash his little jabby tail.
that being said,
6- i have nothing against the guy.
7- i hope he has nothing against me, other than the murderous thoughts i am thinking.
8- all he is trying to do is take some supper home to his scorpion children.
9- how would i feel if someone were to squash me while i was trying to feed my children? (not that i have children, but when i do...)
however,
10- my children will not be born with a tail with which they use to kill things.
11- it's not his kids' fault though that they do.
sidenote: i wonder if he used his tail to kill the cockroach? if that were the case than it would be a point in favor of the venomous tail. a small point, but a point.
moving on...
12- he hasn't cornered me.
13- i haven't cornered him.
14- there is nearly always a non-bloody solution if both sides are willing to work towards it.
15- we are 5 miles away from my house so it is highly unlikely that he will hunt me down tonight, come in through my open window, and stab me to death while I sleep, just for taking so long to decide how to maneuver this situation.

so we both went our separate ways. he to his home to feed the cockroach to his children, and me to my home to ponder how i would like to be treated if i had an awkward tail that instilled fear in 89 percent of gringos...

spacing

this is really just a post to get that ugly thing a bit further down the page so it's not the first thing one sees. that being said I'm going to have to write a bit more than this to move it along.

so an update ensues.

I've got short hair and no new teeth paranoia's. i am currently listening to my new Snow Patrol cd which I bought on iTunes. it's dang good. i haven't put on much weight I don't think, but then again, I don't feel as skinny as I used to. maybe that's cause it's been two weeks since anyone has made a comment. that's a pretty long time. cherries are in season in Spain. for those who don't know, Spain has the best cherries in the world. i currently have the pit of one in my mouth. I'm not chewing it cause they are pretty hard, but rather I've just got it there between my teeth and my cheek. it's like a comfort thing. june's a hot month. july and august are hotter but we aren't there yet. gets to be like 95 around here pretty easily. by the end its regular triple digits.

what else is new? well i am gonna be home for about 6 weeks in july and august. that's not new but it is coming up.

well I'm gonna leave it at that for now. i could think of more stuff to say but that would involve thinking for certain periods of time. what was written above came up spontaneously, and i feel like i might ruin the post to actually ponder what write. a pondered post deserves its own space.

la cucaracha

not to be gross or anything, but tonight we had a cockroach killing. now before you go all crazy and start saving their fur, let me just say they are pests. they are ugly, foul, with hairy legs, wings, and crunchy little bodies the color of... well why not just have a glance at the pic?
there is a drain outside of the house. at about 10 something at night Az made a trip out to the garbage bin to drop some stuff there. a few minutes later he runs up to the window motioning for me to come out. something about make sure you put some shoes on...
coming out of the drain of the house was nothing less than an army of roaches. big ones, little ones and all sorts of crunchy, dirty sizes in between. our neighbor had taken to spraying half a bottle of insecticide down the hole. what ensued could only be described as a massacre.
when it was all said and done we had taken the lives of between 150 and 200 of the suckers without suffering a single casualty ourselves. Az took one in the hair. I had a couple bounce off my arm, and Abby, well Abby didn't stick around too long. Az and the neighbor were dancing like lunatics, squashing the life out with the bottoms of their shoes while I was using a lethal right arm, armed with a flyswatter, to pick them off the walls. the downer with the flyswatter was that they occasionally bounced the little buggers back at you. and let me just say that they aren't easy to kill. more than one swat was often needed.

well after a good 20 minutes, no joke, they weren't coming out so fast. so we taped up the drain, finished off a few stragglers and swept the corpses into a pile on the road. all the while listening to the scratchings of few late comers trying to escape the now taped up drain. there was no sympathy floating about...

maybe the city will get those fumigators out here finally...

why not a random picture? i'm having trouble sleeping.

it's june now and time stops for no one.

i figure that sums up the recent blogging activity.

i'd like to express myself here. i'd like to explain what is new and where my life is headed. but. but it seems like the ink is dried up. that or someone has turned my pen upsidedown and the force of gravity is no longer drawing out the words. so either i need to get one of those pressurized pens or somehow get the pen back to rightsideup so gravity can do it's thing. maybe i'll opt for the second since pressurized things have the tendency of exploding on white shirts.

on the way to weddings in an elevator.

it's my screensaver right now. i thought i'd share.

plane tales

white lines in the sky speak
of places far away
and full of unknown.

they appear in the horizon
moving slowly but swiftly
over our piece of earth.

then slowly but swiftly
they dissipate back
into unbroken blue expanse.

leaving for only a short time
wisps of cloud that speak
of someone else's life.

resaca

i think i've had a posting hangover from all the Bolivia postings. after a barrage of information and pictures, there has been a noticable lack of material being uploaded. to make up for it i have put a picture behind the title. it's nice but by stretching the picture to fit the frame it really distorted the houses. the jury is out on the verdict still. i'm not asking for opinions on this, just saying that i might change it later.

but while it's there, take solace in the fact that i have made up for the lack of recent material by placing a nifty picture behind the title...

storytime

Due to demand, a photo is being posted. And no, your eyes aren't decieving you, there is a butterfly resting on my straw hat.

the Wizard of Oz

Several weeks ago I was asked to participate in a book fair. No, they didn't ask me to do a book signing or anything illustrious like that. Rather they asked me to read a story from my country to a bunch of elementary schoolchildren. In Spanish of course.

You don't know how hard it is to find a story that finds its roots in the US and amongst the classics as well. To start off with, most of the classics have been around for at least several hundred years. They are told down through the generations and become famous. Well the US hasn't been around that long. Nearly every story that came to my head find it's birthplace in either Scandinavia, Germany, France or England. The obscure eastern European countries seem to publish quite a few too. That all that made things difficult.

In the end, the only story I could find decently translated online or in the library here in Badajoz was, the Wizard of OZ. Okay, so I found more than that, but it had to be at least 25 minutes long. That got rid of most and left me with an American Classic I have never previously seen or read... Though I had heard of it!

So the previous two weeks were spent practicing reading to myself, alone in my room. Az or Abby would comment about hearing monk-like chanting coming from my part of the house. Also during those two weeks, I stumbled upon a costume and thought, wow, what a great way to keep the kid's attention. So a scarecrow I became. Unfortunately it was a woman scarecrow, with a fake butterfly sewn onto the hat, and plastic bags cut into strips to look like straw. Woman or not, in the end it passed.

Well the big morning arrived. Costume in the backpack and made my way down to the plaza. At 11 o'clock sharp a group of schoolkids showed up. And if I am allowed to say so myself, they were darn impressed with the wierd guy dressed up as a woman scarecrow speaking a mixture of Spanish and English at them. (The English was just to keep their interest.) Half an hour later I finished the story with Dorothy back home in Kansas, myself completely drenched in sweat, and most of the niños paying me absolutely no attention.

What can I say? 25 minutes is a long time to make some poor little seven year olds sit and listen to a story that maybe went a bit over their heads. But hey, it was an experience.

Oh yeah, when I finished I was asked to immediately repeat it. Whoever was supposed to tell the story during the half hour slot following mine, didn't show up. What the heck. "Once upon a time in a grey field in Kansas..."

Maybe one day I'll get around to watching the real thing...

I didn't take it but my friend did. Note the straightness of the pole. It is from Bolivia and is a good picture to finish that up with... for now.

At first exciting and slightly prone to showing off.
Taken home and laced up carefully,
they do not seem to fit right.
It is a generic mold with little character
that is only taken care of with a little
time and use.

Slowly the gleam is traded for comfort,
and the shine is replaced with wear.
Scuffs mark the corners,
the leather cracks and the soul wears.
The smell of the master takes hold,
while time and weather make their mark.
Character however only increases.
They become dependable and useful,
serving many purposes,
walking many miles.
Heat and cold, wind, rain and sand,
till their day comes.

And they are set aside.
For they are temporary,
a short season and their time is up.
No longer will they travel,
no longer will they walk.
They are difficult to give up,
the memories and journeys have been many.
But they have served their master well.
All good things in this life,
along with that which is not,
are brought to an end...

So the next can begin.

bolivia pt. VI

So it has taken me a while to get around to writing about we actually did in Bolivia. Really it is more about being than doing. One can only do so much, but in being a lot more occurs. So most of the time we just tried to be. We talked with people, we spent time with people, we ate with people, and of course we listened to people. In the end that is what it was about, getting to know life in Bolivia.

But that is hard to convey in words.

So I will just mention what we actually did.

We woke up early. The sun came up around 6. However at 5.15 the roosters starting their crowing. At 5.25 it was the dogs joining the. Around 5.40 or 5.45 the monkeys and parrots started in with their bit. Given that most animals in the village have free reign, quite a few found their way to a spot just outside my window. And at 6.00 to finish it off, the loudspeaker just down the road started giving the local announcements. So and so in such and such a street have killed a cow this morning and are selling meat... So by 6.15 there was no other option than to join the world and make some noise.

We ate. The food was different. I mean different, different as in different. There are differences between Spain and America and England's food, but Bolivia is different. But it was equally as good. That is to say I really liked it. Things like platano frito, yuca (in many shapes and forms), of course your meats and fishes, but in different forms. There is loads of fruit. Out back there were grapefruit trees, lemon trees, lime trees, mango trees, coconut trees (also known as palm trees), and some others that I'm probably not remembering. Of course not all are in season at once but a fair amount were and there is nothing quite like freshly squeezed lemon/limeade. We had freshly squeezed grapefruit as well, but with a large quantity of sugar. That reminds me, they also had sugarcane and coffee plants. See pics below (that's me with the coffee).




Food wasn't everything. We did some sharing. During the course of 8 days we were involved in 10 meetings. A couple on Sunday (one of which I preached), a prayer vigil, an open-air evangelistic meeting, a normal prayer meeting, an good Friday service, and some other bits. In all but two we either Desmond or I shared. On one particular day there were a couple of youth activities. In the afternoon we had a bible-study and shared a meal together afterwards. Then in the evening it was a social type event. Everyone invited loads of friends and in the end there were about 60 youth there. At the beginning I shared briefly just some things that God had done in my life and then during the second it was full-on games. By the end I was drenched in sweat. Humidity and running around with teenagers seems to leave one in that state.

We walked around the village and explored. Watched the women washing their clothes in the river. They seemed a bit shy at first, but they had no reason to be as they were still clothed. Hugo and I would cruise around the village in his car, him hanging out one side and me the other. On my side groups of little boys would accumulate suddenly, staring unabashedly at the white gringo who dropped in from outer space. We went for a swim in the river. It's called the Black River but its clean. Not of predators though, you can get cayman that reach 21 feet, but they generally stick to small cows and large dogs for their diet. Anacondas and other types of water snakes, eels, but not the Princess Bride type, piranhas, and so on. People have generally learned to live alongside these creatures that God has created and no one really gets hurt. Except for the creatures, but only when they try something. Then its a machete removing the head or the crack of a gun finishing it off. We saw none of these things however, which is why we have to go back in the dry season.






We took some horses and went traipsing around the jungle to see some of the land that Hugo works with. Hugo carried the pistol and I the .22. Again nothing threatened us and left me feeling like I wasn't getting my money's worth. Again, it's worth mentioning that it's not a true trip to the jungle till you've have to fight off predators trying to take your very life. Or at least something to give you a good story when you get home, even if you do have to spice it up...



Being the wet season, the village was basically an island, with water up to a horse's belly or higher outside of the village. This means that it's either by river or by plane that people come and go. It also means that the men aren't going out to work their fields. It's a lot of down time, but a lot of time to talk and get to know. It was amazing just to experience life with people there. Next time will be in the dry season, that will bring the flexibility to travel to the other communities nearby and see and share what God is up to there. Especially since Hugo and Erika spend a lot of Saturdays in those villages working with children and youth. That next time might not be much more than a year away...

un articulo

Entrar en un cierto país por primera vez, diferente al tuyo, es una experiencia única. Al pisar la tierra, tu mundo se abre y no saldrás la misma persona, porque llevarás un pedazo de ese país contigo por donde vayas. El mundo que veías antes en las fotos o tal vez en las noticias no es el mismo mundo que encuentras esperándote al respirar su aire. Todo se convierte en realidad. Las comidas cogen sabor, las casas ya son hogares y las caras desconocidas llegan a ser amigos.

Pasé más que dos semanas en Bolivia. Conocí dos lugares en particular, Santa Cruz y Baures, que está situado en el Beni. Son dos extremos, Santa Cruz, una ciudad de grandes proporciones y Baures, un pueblo tranquilo, medio aislado de las preocupaciones que siempre nos persigue. Muchas personas, que ya cuento como amigos, me abrieron sus vidas. Las dos semanas fueron intensas en el sentido de que las amistades llegan a ser bastante profundas en poco tiempo por pasar mucho juntos. Compartiendo la vida de mis amigos en Bolivia, comiendo su comida, durmiendo en sus casas y escuchando a sus corazones me afectó mucho. No ser afectado significaría no ser humano, puesto que somos designados a compartir quien somos. Por más que nos abramos nuestra vida, más nos enriquezcamos.

bolivia pt. V

So why did I go to Bolivia? There are a facet of answers I could give: I was asked to go, I am one to take opportunites to travel, I have friends there, etc.

Ah a combination of a lot of things is what it boils down to. But at the end of the day, or thought process, it was because God opened up a door. I think often we don't see the repercussions of our lives. From our viewpoint it is difficult to see the ripples that spread outward from ourselves. A friend of mine recently wrote about people who have affected her life and questioned whether those people actually have realised it. She mentioned that people are in your life for a reason and I agree. God places people in our lives, sometimes for a season, and sometimes for slightly longer term. Those people may or may not always know it, but God uses them for his purposes in our lives. Just as God places people in our lives, he places us in the lives of others. When ripples collide with something else they inevitably come back.

Hugo and Erika entered my life just over two years ago. I only knew them for two months. They were some of my first friends I made after coming to Spain. They took care of me, and treated me well. My Spanish was pretty limited and their English was non-existent, so our conversations didn't explore the depths. But there was a connection. Then after just two months they returned back to their home in Bolivia. They had come to Spain to work for a period, save money, and try to jump start their life in Bolivia (which by the way is likely the poorest country in South America). So after just two months they were no longer part of my life.

However ripples were set in motion and two years later, to the month, we met again, this time in Bolivia on the other side of the ocean. One of the last things we had talked about was how amazing it would be for me to see their home in Bolivia and know what life was like there.
This time was different, deeper, because while their English was still non-existent, my Spanish had vastly improved. This time conversations went deeper and language didn't limit so much. Thinking about it however, it wasn't language that either hindered or fostered the relationship, it was a connection on a different level that God brought about.

I don't know what will come of it all in the future. I do know that God has put them and Bolivia in my heart now. I am not the same person now who entered their country. What is clear is that there are ripples. Ripples that go both ways, ripples going out from me and ripples coming towards me.
God is doing something in Boliva. There is an openness in the people to hear about him. There is a desire to seek and know him. When you share about who God is, you can see him working in hearts. I went there to give and share, and like always, I recieved far more than I could have ever given.

So I went to Bolivia because God opened a door. And when God opens a door it is for a purpose. The purpose of God works both ways. It is to bring about things in us as well as to use us to bring about things. So I am excited to see where the ripples end up. I am excited to see what God is going to do through that friendship in the years to come. Whatever comes of it, no one will be unchanged by it all if God has anything to say.