floating down the nile

lianne and i are back from our nile adventures. we leave on saturday for another week for some more excitement. we have about four more trips this summer...and then, i'm off to new york, then seattle, and finally home!

when i get a chance, i will post pictures from this past week. we visited quite a few more temples, ancient egypt style....wore big hats and big sunglasses (it was very hot)...ate a lot of food...held little crocs, poked bigger ones, slept on mud brick roofs, rode camels, swam in the beautiful nile of southern egypt (unlike the not-so-beautiful nile here in cairo), relaxed on faluchas (mini-barge/sailboat/egyptian style boat things), walked through a botanical garden (similar to the ones in hawaii, actually.....minus the sandy desert in the background), ate more food, and relaxed, relaxed, relaxed......

and now, i'm paying the consequences of eating a lot...WITHOUT washing my hands consistently....not a good idea. further details, unnecessary.

"empathy at a distance" the plight of the electronic nomad

"The forms of our media, regardless of their content, have the power to shape our minds and our messages."

Taken from "Our Nomadic Existence: How Electronic Culture Shapes Community" by Shane Hipps.

Hipps looks at Marshall McLuhan who argued that the message and medium are connected (more specifically that the medium is the message), contradicting the popularly accepted belief that it's not the method of getting the message (the medium) across that's important, it's the message itself. In church, it's said something like this:
“The methods change, but the message stays the same.”

Hipps looks at media and, as McLuhan did, poses questions rather than articulating answers about technologies affects on communities and individuals.....if you want to read the full article, let me know and i'll email it to you!

The effect is a paradoxical one. Electronic culture does opposite things at
the same time. If oral culture is tribal, and literate culture is individual,
then the phenomenon of the electronic age is marked by what I call the
tribe of individuals. We live in a confused state of being characterized
by a deep and growing desire for connection and community and the
ever-increasing experience of an electronic nomad. It’s the isolating
and thin existence of electronically wandering the globe, glancing off
one another, but never really connecting or encountering the other.

The paradoxes go on. If oral culture is empathic, and literate culture is
distant, the electronic age is marked by empathy at a distance. This is
a condition that emerges when our TVs and computer screens flood our
living rooms with images of planetary suffering: from September 11 to
the Tsunami to Darfur to all the other ongoing famine, genocide, wars,
and starvation in the world. While this allows us the opportunity to
extend compassion to these far-off places, it actually has the opposite
affect. There is an immediate outpouring of support followed by a
detached, clinical numbness.

The end result is apathy and inaction. This is not our fault; it’s not
because we are bad people. The human psyche isn’t designed to
withstand all the weight and trauma of global suffering without shutting
down. Numbness and exhaustion are natural reactions. This experience
of horror and empathy, followed by shutting down and feelings of
helplessness, is the condition of empathy at a distance. And it didn’t
exist prior to the electronic age. The reason this matters is that the
spiritual habit of empathy at a distance also finds its way into our local
communities. It becomes increasingly difficult to muster local activism
and genuine concern for others when global suffering has already
cauterized the nerves of compassion.

Shane Hipps is lead pastor of Trinity Mennonite Church – a missional, urban, Anabaptist congregation in Phoenix, Arizona. Before accepting a call as pastor, he was a strategic planner in
advertising where he worked on a multimillion dollar communications plan for Porsche. It was here that he gained his expertise in understanding media and culture. Shane is a sought after speaker, host of the “Third-Way Faith” podcast
on Leadershipbuzz.com and author of
The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture:
How Media Shapes Faith, the Gospel
and Church.

Check out: Fermi Project

Closing thought:

"Science today has given us improved means to attain some of our damnable ends. That's not true of all science, that's not true of all of the means so do not take that as an extreme; but it is true that some of our technologies have made us more sophisticated in our evil.
Ravi Zacharias

living with lianne

typical day unfolds:

5:55am - Janean wakes up
5:56 - Janean turns on the water pump and takes a shower
6:02ish - Lianne rolls out of bed, sits on the couch, eats toast, yogurt, and fruit.....half asleep
6:15ish - Janean finishes shower, puts clothes on, walks into living room...Lianne still half asleep
4:53pmish - Lianne can't correctly annunciate the Arabic word for "arrange"..but is convinced she's saying it right. but she's not. Janean and Arabic teacher laugh because instead of "btizboty" she's saying "btizbooty."
4:57ish - Lianne is still convinced she's saying it right and is now arguing that i'm saying it wrong. Which, at the time, I wasn't.
4:59ish - My turn comes.....and of course, I say it wrong. We all laugh.
9:10ish - Lianne and I enter the store to buy phone credit. I say, "Oh, look, they're showing Castaway on the T.V." Lianne argues, "That's not Castaway....that's...I forget what she said...some other movie..." I argue back, "No it's not!" And then this weird music starts playing and the guy yells, "YELLLLAAA!!!" It was a commericial for Mobinil or some mobile phone company! We were both wrong......we both laughed.

Sometimes I wonder if living with Lianne is a glimpse of having a younger sister or having a husband!!! Not that she's manly (or I, for that matter :) ......I've had a few roommates, but living with Lianne is like an ongoing comedy. She's so playful and.......young and lively...with stupid jokes and when we poke fun at each other, I'm the dry, sarcastic, witty humor, and she's like "Yeah....well......you're STUPID!" "Ouch, Lianne...that really hurts. Did you think of that on your own..." and this is how it goes. Both smiling and laughing at how silly we are......Lianne with her crazy ideas and me with my "old, tainted, grandma ways" as she would say.

Living with Lianne is a lot of fun. We're both usually really busy and tired. So our idea of fun is dodgeball in the house (sorry Taunt, our landlady), roasting marshmellows with candles, bonfires on our deck, popcorn fights, dough darts in the kitchen, gingerbread houses in February, talking about randomness, and all in all, just living our lives together.

I had no expectations of who I'd meet when I moved to Cairo. Living with Lianne, though, has definitely been one of my highlights.....the majority of my memories have her somewhere in the picture...whether she's making sand angels in every desert we travel to, trying to convince me that it would be funny to throw things at people as we drive by them on the street, throwing food on the walls, making odd noises at the wrong moments, or whatever else she does to make me roll my eyes and chuckle......our age difference (four years) brings us together rather than keeping us apart.

i will never forget "that one time i lived with lianne"! :)

i love you roommate, teammate, classmate, sister, friend....accomplice ;)

P.S. and it was Obama who called that reporter "sweetie".....not OSAMA! :)

two suitcases and five agains

after a few weeks of mentally processing all of my belongings, going through what i have, what's important, what i want to take, what i want to leave, etc. etc. etc. etc. etcccccc..........

i finally packed my bags. i just got up, went through everything:

everything i want to take with me- on the bed
everything i'm leaving here- on the big pile under my window
everything that i'd like to take but don't mind leaving- between the bed and the two suitcases

don't get me wrong. i will, at some point, unpack these bags and refill my now empty closest. afterall, i still have about three months left.....besides that, i'm going to need at least one of the suitcases in less than two weeks since i'll be traveling again. then after that, i'll travel again. then again. then again...and then again...(that should be five "agains") and finally, i'll begin my adventure home...which is going to be a two week adventure.

amidst the packing, i'm reminded of how easily i become attatched to things. when i pick up certain things, i see the face of the person handing it to me. i remember the laughing....i hear the jokes. i think of the bad days that we went through. usually, these memories make me happy....but lately, they just remind me of how short our time together has been.

our lives are so short. there are a lot of sad, painful circumstances. there's so much sufferring. may we remember to be just the tiniest reflection of hope. the simplist reminder of joy. each person we meet is telling a story...a story full of many, many things -- things that have made him/her laugh, cry, sick, sad, furious, gleaming, hopeful, lonely....so many things. but under all of these things...no, through all of these things, we are.

we are here. we are here now. may today, through whatever things you're going through, you look at someone and see through his/her irritating habbits. look beyond his/her shortcomings. may you look at someone and see him/her as a person. just as s/he is. just as we are.

and may, by the grace of God, you love him/her as s/he was created to be.

close your eyes...and walk.

i'll be walking on a sidewalk and get a random urge to close my eyes and continue walking. i have no idea why. do i do it? well.....in spurts. close my eyes. walk. peek. close my eyes....weird, i know.

besides little bites from tiny, black ants, things here continue to be busy and exciting. two weekends ago lianne and i went with one of the teachers from my school to her church, St. John, to celebrate Palm Sunday (last weekend was the Egyptian Easter). she's coptic (the oldest, existing church). we slept in and ALMOST missed this wonderful opportunity.

last weekend, we spent three days travelling through the western desert. we slept under the stars, swam in springs, visited the white desert, black desert, crystal mountain, english mountain...it was non-stop adventure. needless to say, we came back sun-kissed and glowing!

in other exciting news, our landlady finally took care of our broken toilet seat. eight months of roller coaster toilet rides and we're back to normal. exciting stuff, i know.

other than that, just praying about my post-egypt plans. my life feels like dot-art. all these littlte, colorful dots all over the canvas....at some point, i'll see the bigger picture, until then....i'm just living, one dot at a time.

ps. i dropped my external hard drive, which houses all of my music and more importantly ALL of my pictures from this year! :( i hope it's fixable.......there is some serious tragedy potential.