recent observations

Couple of things. I’m making spaghetti while listening to BBC world. The headline is “d day” it’s January 5th, and I wondered what it was about. The news reporter went on how it is divorce day, the most popular day of the year for divorce. Reason being, the stress of the Christmas holiday! They had a divorce lawyer from Manchester on the phone for an interview. The lawyer talked about the long line outside his office of people wanting divorces, and how busy this time of year is for him. They estimated that 1.3 million people will get divorced in the U.K. alone. I was fascinated, and I stopped my food preparations and zeroed in on the radio. Over and over, they said the stress of the holiday, they even said the global financial crisis will instigate far more divorces than the past years, and that this will be a record year for divorce and break ups. I wish they opened up the news story for callers to weigh in with thoughts, but they never did. I was wondering what you all thought about “d day” and if you were aware of the phenomenon. Now, I’ve always been a bit blown away by the material nature of the Christmas season, and now hearing that the stress of this holiday results in mass divorce… dumbfounded. A penny for your thoughts?

Second thing, Obama is a phenomenon in East Africa if not all of Africa. I see his image everywhere I go. He is all over African clothes, cars, buildings, houses, streets, signs, merchant stands, everything. Tanzanians love him, Burundians love him, Nigerians love him, Rwandans love him, Kenyans… forget about it. Today I noticed a sound bite of Obama come on the radio whilst I was walking in Buj, and Burundians flock to the closest radio to listen to what he says even though they don’t really understand English. They flag me down to explain to them what Obama said. I take a few minutes to explain to them what the Obama sound bite was about as it was sort of obscure for Burundians to understand as it had to do with the 109 year old African American woman who voted and how she was alive a generation after slavery, and they explode into animated discussion, and pepper me with all sorts of questions about American history, and Obama, and money. They were furious when I said there was a time in the States when Africans couldn’t vote. Most of you are aware that the day Obama was elected has become a national holiday in Kenya. I was talking with some friends about this, and they told me that when parliament convened to make it a national holiday, there was a brief moment when they wondered why they should make it a holiday. Nobody put forth a very compelling reason but one member of parliament piped up: “Nigeria made it a two day national holiday” shortly after that comment, Kenya made it official. A few friends of mine in Kenya attending school laughed as they remembered getting out of school because Obama was elected. The whole nation, I’m talking Kenya, not America, went absolutely nuts. Kenyas’ son is Americas’ president.

Meanwhile in Burundi the small American community is torn. Some people think it’s America’s demise, others think Obama is America’s salvation. This seems to be normal behavior amongst Americans during any election. One thing is for sure: America is loved abroad again. Not in Palistine, and some middle eastern nations, but in Europe, in Africa, where Bush and America were once bad words never to be uttered (Bush still seems to be a bad word never to be uttered), now it’s all about the hope of America, it’s all changed simply because Obama is president. Every one of my European friends love Obama. In my life so far, I’ve never experienced this degree of positive American sentiment from the rest of the world. It always catches me off guard. I would never want to be Obama just for that reason. The global expectations on that guy, are unfair, and just plain not reasonable. Still, it’s far better to be loved than hated, obviously, but Obama is just a man, and to put so much faith in man, is always foolhearty. The good news though is when you follow a guy that unanimously, I think there is a lot of grace for when things don’t happen as intended. The world of Africa and Europe, seem unshakably hopeful. America and Canada as well, and I would imagine South America, and Mexico, though that’s just a guess. So buy your plane tickets fellow Americans, now is the time to travel abroad... except for the global econocmic crisis.

walking home

Saw two really poor kids as I walked home from dropping off Simons’ motorcycle on Sunday. I killed the battery so I had to fix the situation. So these two kids see a me coming, and it’s not long before they run up to me to ask for money… it was one of those times that I made the decision before I saw them that I wasn’t going to give any money. I had two 10 thousands in my wallet, and someone would steal it from them, plus there were many kids around and they’d all come flocking… and I gave some money to a Congolese refugee just an hour earlier, and I told myself that I already gave today… but that never works. The interesting thing is when the poorest people in the world come ask me for money, the first thing I think is how much I will get judged for not giving any money, or giving just a little bit of money. That because I’m now aware, now I've seen with my own eyes how bad, bleak, and desperate, most people on the planet live each day, I’m now in more trouble because I have knowledge, and money. I can’t play the: “I didn’t realize things were that bad” card. That’s a major card to have taken away, I keep thinking many of us in the West will try and play that card. I’m sure we all know it will never work, but that’s not the point. We think it might work if we bank on the grace card, and that’s all we need to give us daily peace of mind… and it’s peace of mind that we need to maintain a level of happiness in life, and all these abundantly poor, are keeping me from having comfort in my card, which is messing with my happiness. But these two kids have something I’ve not seen before. Each of them, in their hand carried a dead bird. I’m talking about one of those little birds that fly around in trees and bushes, and they tweet, and I remember thinking those are really small birds, you can’t eat those birds. So I asked them, “what are you going to do with those birds?” Of course they said they’re going to eat the birds. I felt really bad, and regretted asking. It was better if I just suspected they might eat the birds, but didn’t know for sure, but now I knew that they were so starved that they were going to eat these little birds that I thought were inedible. They kept walking with me and asking for money, and I kept wondering, “how hungry do I have to be in order to eat a bird like that?” I thought that I would eat grass, or leaves, before I’d eat a dirty little bird like that. I couldn’t figure out how they managed to kill those little birds. Neither of them had a home made sling shot and each bird wasn’t much bigger than a pebble that you sling at the bird to kill it. After about a hundred meters, the kids gave up trying to get money out of me, and they left me alone with my thoughts. For some reason, I pushed the guilt away and thought about my brother. I don’t know why, I just remember wondering about what he was doing. I pictured him framing a house in Bozeman, Montana, in the cold. Then I was wishing that I was back in America, but for a new reason that I never had before. I wanted to be in the States because I thought it was much easier to avoid everything there… I didn’t pin point what “everything” was, but I felt it, and I thought, “if I was in the States, I could avoid everything.” Then I thought that avoiding everything isn’t death, avoiding everything is a coma. It’s deciding to be brain dead to the world around you. I knew you could do that anywhere. I didn’t have to go to the States, but as soon as I realized that, that is what I wanted, I decided that was just stupid. Where do those thoughts come from anyway? Why is my mind doing that to me? So went I got home,I went into the kitchen, and poured myself a cold iced tea, then I went to the lab and loaded up a bunch of video footage, and started editing. I edited for a few hours until my mind could only think about the video I was making. It was a more comfortable thinking process. I guess I was self medicating. I’ll see those kids again. I know I will.