Great Pic

Fantasy Logo, 2011

Team Name:

The Nematotal Domitation.

Re: The Last Few Months

Hi.

The past three months, really, have been a blur. November and December were a scheduling nightmare from a tutoring perspective, trying to balance the different holiday schedules of four independent schools, and to plan for the craziness that has been January.


The day after Christmas I took off for two weeks in New Zealand to be in the wedding of my good mate Luke Amundson. It was a great trip, with lots of friends and loved ones all around to celebrate a beautiful couple. New Zealand wasn't a bad place to get a tan, either! We had amazing, gracious hosts the entire time, and were able to see a pretty good chunk of the countryside.


So great a trip, however, has its costs; for the past three weeks I've been charging full speed ahead. Not only did I miss the first week of school, but I also missed a week of work, which I have been fighting with all my might to make up. Why? Because we project a certain number of tutoring sessions for each month, which we need to meet by the end of the month or bad things happen. Sooooooo... I've just completed one of the more hectic three-week periods in recent memory, cramming four weeks of insane scheduling into an already-straining schedule. My evenings, after working until 8 or 9pm (there were finals in mid-February) consisted in reading biochemistry and watching podcasted lectures.


Speaking of which, in case I haven't mentioned it before, I have been taking the University of Washington's 440-level biochemistry course this year. I took BIOC440 last quarter and it went really well, and now I'm in BIOC441. Next quarter, Lord willing, I'll make a pass at BIOC 442. So far I'm loving it. We had the first midterm of the quarter today, so we'll have to see how it went.


PERSONALLY: I have felt drained by life lately, and I really feel the need to slow things down. There are many old commitments that I have made but failed to follow through on. There are many people that I need to spend time with, but have been too hurried. There are many people that I need to thank in writing, or to encourage with a quick hello.


In December I lost an old friend, Justin Key, to a pulmonary embolism. He was only 26, a graduate student at the University of Virginia in the Darden Business School MBA program, with a full life ahead of him. Or so we all thought... since his passing I've been thinking a lot about how short and fleeting life is. Why do YOU think that you will wake up tomorrow? Why do I? God has numbered our days, so we should make the most of every opportunity. Thank you, Justin, for being a good friend over these fifteen (or however long) years, for living your life to the fullest, and for leaving behind the legacy of a good name.


More to come. Here's a good one of JK, from another old friend.

Back Home

I'm back home now.

My flights from Lusaka -- Johannesburg -- London -- Los Angeles went really well. Jetlag management was decent; I tried to sleep as much as I could until London, then tried to stay awake from London to the West Coast. Having movies on the plane definitely helped!

When I got to L.A. at 2:30pm, the plane didn't really taxi in until 3:00. I had a flight to catch at 5:00 (from L.A. to Oakland), so that meant that I only had 120 minutes to get my checked baggage, make it through customs, switch terminals, check my bags again for domestic flight, and make it back through security. I made it with a full 10 minutes to spare!

So I made it in to Seattle at 10:30pm on Friday night, was in bed by 1:30am, and was up at 7:30 so I could meet my friend Sean Kelly in Seattle to pick up my tux for his wedding. Then a hair cut, wedding photos, and a super sweet wedding. The reception was great, too, with lots of good friends and fun dancing. When I went to the after party at Allison's parents house afterwards I was just about ready to crash, but I pushed myself for a few more hours... bed by midnight.

So congrats, Sean and Alli! It was quite a day, and I was glad I could make it back in time to celebrate with you. My prayer is that you would enjoy a long, happy marriage -- just know that you are loved and you will always have a community of friends to support you.

Work kicks back up on Wednesday, but I've got a lot of loose ends to tie up from my trip, so the next few days should keep me busy.

Salsa Adventures

A few days ago Steve and Stephanie asked me what foods I was starting to miss from back in the states. At the time I wasn't quite sure, but maybe thinking about it for a couple of days helped to clarify things. So today, as I was walking through the grocery store, I realized that I had a craving for corn chips and salsa. Which are delicious.

So I went to the chip aisle. The only corn chips they had were Doritos (in the super-sweet, non-U.S. flavors, of course), but that isn't really what I was looking for. Failure #1. Then I walked over to the aisle where there theoretically ought to be salsa. I wasn't expecting a grand selection or anything, but all they had was mango salsa. Delicious, but not what I was looking for... Failure #2.

On my way out of the store, however, I came across a pack of "chapaties," which looked strangely identical to tortillas, and an idea sparked into my head -- why not make chips and salsa?!? What could possibly be more delicious? What could possibly go wrong? How hard can it be? So I got a bunch of veggies and headed home.

Kamryn and I decided that we wanted to make our treat as a surprise for dinner, and Bradyn joined in a little bit later. Jennifer Rhoda hung out with us for a while taking pictures with my camera, talking on my phone, and wearing my backpack.



Anyways, the girls and I chopped up tons of tomatoes and onions and garlic and green/red peppers for the salsa, and we got the tortillas cut up into "chip" shapes. The recipe we found said that we needed to brush the chips with veggetable oil before baking them, so as I was working on chopping stuff, Bradyn and Kamryn found some oil in a cool little spray bottle, and we put it on the chips. I used three red peppers in the salsa, but made sure to take the seeds out first.

We finished up the first batch of chips, and the salsa, just as dinner was ready. But as we started to try out the goods, we quickly realized that some things were amiss:

1) First of all, the stuff that the girls sprayed on the chips is not what we thought it was. Somehow it made the chips really hot (as in spicy), so that as Kamryn tried her first chip, she started coughing and needed to drink a ton of water.

2) When I tasted my first chip, I realized that the salsa was VERY hot. I mean, hotter than Seattle weather right now. :) I was ok with it, but Bradyn could only have a little bit before needing a big glass of water. Soon the girls were actually crying because their mouths were burning so much. When we went back to the Allen's house Stephanie googled "chili pepper burns" and was able to soothe things a bit, but then at dinner Kamryn rubbed her eyes with some pepper juice on her hands. Ouch. That hurts like the dickens, so dinner was interrupted with some more crying.

So all that being said, an innocent chips and salsa surprise turned into a massive crisis with on-the-fly medical care administered via milk and yogurt and olive oil. Maybe next time I can try to avoid using the hottest peppers in the universe for a makeshift corn chip dip. Or maybe we can search for a "mild" recipe :)

Thoughts on Church

So far it has been interesting to visit the compound churches here in Zambia. I have been privileged to visit five congregations so far, each from a different suburb of Lusaka, ranging from 20 people in attendance to more than 300. Each experience has been different, but I have noticed some interesting common denominators that each church has shared so far.

(1) Church is between 2 1/2 and 3 1/2 hours long. One of the services I went to began at 9:00 and ended at around 1:00.

(2) When the leader of the congregation says, "Let us pray now for..." or "we are going to pray that...", what he/she means is that EVERYONE is going to pray out loud to God at the same time. So everyone audibly speaks their prayer to God together at the same time, the effect of which is a sort of a loud amalgam of voices.

(3) Visitors (or maybe just Muzungu's?) are given seats at the front of the congregation, sometimes with their own small table, and bottled water.

(4) When church is over, the pastor (or "man of God") exits first and stands at the front door of the church. Then the guests/muzungu's exit, shaking the pastor's hand, and form a line behind the pastor so that everyone in the congregation shakes everyone else's hand.

(5) Services are divided up into different chunks, and not everyone comes to everything. The first part is usually intercession -- church leaders meeting before the service to pray for the day, for the people as they make their way to church, and so on. Sometimes there is a Bible study after intersession, which is a time for the pastor or teacher/elder to lead the core of the church in a more personal "teaching" environment. There aren't a lot of kids or families at this if it happens. Then, as the women and children begin to arrive, there is a time of worship (sometimes led by a choir, if there is one), an offering, and a set of announcements (just like in the states) in no particular order. At around 11:30 there is a sermon... or two. The day's offering is usually announced at the end of the service.

(6) At one of the churches I went to there was a separate youth church, but it took place during the teaching time before worship. For the most part, the kids just hang out with the rest of the congregation for all three hours of church.

(7) Worship is usually in Nyanja and English. Sometimes the pastor will give the sermon in both languages at once -- speaking one sentence at a time in each language -- and sometimes the pastor will have an interpreter. Worship music may or may not have instrumentation apart from clapping.

(8) I have not yet had communion with a congregation here. Luke mentioned to me that there is often an afternoon service where the congregation will break bread together, but it is hard to tell if this happens in smaller, more impoverished congregations. If they do take communion, I have yet to determine the frequency -- is it once per month like in my congregation back in the States? Or only if/when they can afford bread and drink for an entire congregation? An issue like this is very interesting to think about in the context of poverty,

(9) There has not been as much "crazy stuff" as I expected, even in the pentecostal churches. No one has been slain in the spirit or anything like that -- the most common thing has been speaking in tongues. Women will occasionally holler during prayer times.

(10) There is no problem at all here with women pastors. It is very interesting to me how this happens everywhere in the world, when God's word is so clear on the issue. Just like in the States, I have seen far more women in the churches than men.

God is good... (echo: all the time!). All the time... (echo: God is good!).

Grasshopper

I took this video on my third or fourth day here, when I was in Makeni with Tyler.