28.11.05

Home is where the heart is.

- tea fields, Rwanda, 8/13/05. Mwirirwe.
And when the day came and there
were none left to speak the dawn open,
to cast the windows wide at market,
start the razors in the saloons;
none to swat the dogs who followed too closely or
send the children for more water;
no man to lay the bricks against their wooden frames,
no young ladies to mix the clay and water, forming mud --
I thought to this moment, now,
in which the red hills would defy their stained and blood-soaked soil,
would once again allow the wind to rise amidst an ocean of tea
and, in so doing, send a bright
Good morning, good morning,
to all those found, still walking, on the Way.

22.11.05

Mature Audiences Only

Someone got Almost Twelve a tad bit earlier than I did*...




*If you're quite nice and I know you very well and you promise me oodles and oodles of french fries or bacon, I just may let you in on this little Curtis family joke. Better throw in some ice cream there, too, Skipper!

20.11.05

The History of the Joint Venture: Or, How to Land the Guy/Girl of Your Dreams -- Now with Real Miming Action!





First, we remained calm.












Second, we played it cool.














Third, we staged a cage fight.













Fourth, we figured it out. "Hey!" We said. "You're neat-o!" Because that is what Christians say when they get the strange, sudden desire to spend the rest of their days sharing bacon with strangers: neat-O!









Fifth, we bid our single days farewell.













Sixth, we apologized to our friends for getting all "Whoa, let's hold the camera out so that it looks like someone else took the picture!" on them. (Well, one of us did. The other one has clearly found some chocolate on her upper lip and is really going for it.)








Seventh, we issued a warning: cheesiness, full steam ahead!


















Je t'aime, mon petit pomme de terre. Long may you live to run after the sausage.


Love,
GB

( ! )

18.11.05

Sins of the Fathers

There's a saying oft repeated in the Old Testament, which I used to misread as something meted out as judgment: "The sin of the fathers shall be visited upon their children unto the third and fourth generation." How profoundly unfair, I would think.

I begin to see that this was more of a declaration of reality than a promise of divine retribution. What we do in our lives -- the simple acts that define us -- bear fruit for the future. It bore repeating because humankind, en masse, prefers to believe in temporality. (This is a topic for another day, but this also goes to the problem I have with utilitarianism's attempt to make itself into a moral argument: it rarely, if ever, removes itself from first-generation concerns, often serving as a means of placating a public that has little, if any, idea of how it should make decisions.)

How often we ignore this very simple doctrine of consequences! War is ripening in East Africa: deaths have occurred in protests about constitutional changes and flawed elections in the relatively peaceful states of Kenya, Ethiopia, and Tanzania. Uganda's President Musuveni, co-architect and supporter (some would argue) of the rise of Hutu Power, stifles protest in his own streets as he faces the most serious political challenges of his life. Sudan and Congo are hotbeds of death and unrest: 2.3 million are currently displaced in the DRC after civil unrest started by Rwanda's Kagame and Uganda's Musuveni invaded in 1998. Hundreds of thousands are dead. The good work being done in Rwanda will be unraveled, should war break out; Burundi will follow Rwanda's lead. This will, I'm convinced, be the unlabeled World War III: unlabeled because the "sin of the fathers" that so plagues Africa still haunts us today. The evil of colonialism, peculiarly unmentioned in the article above (that's sarcasm), persists in our own stubborn insistence that Africa's problems are its own: what do we care, or why should we care, if warring tribes decide to kill each other? Their deaths go uncounted; they are faceless, nameless hordes with unpronounceable names and unmanageable problemes. Let them solve it themselves, indeed. What will be their final solution, I wonder?

The article implies that Africa's problems are the result of democracies emerging out of dictatorships in lands plagued by poverty. That is only half true, and the half that is false contains the cause. To paraphrase a favorite author of mine, there is something one must factor in before one can figure it out: three generations ago, or perhaps four, the western world came calling. It killed Africa's best and brightest with abandon, enslaving entire peoples under the guise of the "holy calling" of the Hamitic myth; if it is plagued by social ills stemming from bad leadership, we cannot fail to acknowledge the dehumanizing aspect of colonial leadership and its deliberate restructuring of traditional systems of empowerment. When the colonial powers shrugged off their African burden, they washed their hands clean and missed the point entirely: what happened then spurs what happens now. And for our generation to ignore Africa in this moment is to repeat our ignoble history of selective inattention.

This is more than a rant. This is a shame-on-me for not doing more than this, for not pushing forward as strenuously as I could for change. I suppose, then, it's also a challenge: we must find ways to get involved. The Africans say they are hoping that no one turns to war; that seems so impossible right now that I can't imagine that hope being anything but futile.

Stay tuned. Read the article. Start thinking.

17.11.05

My Humps

34 days until I say goodbye to Boston
15 hours until I say hello to lasagna
30 days till finals are over
21 days till finals begin
11 hours till a quarter-century
7 days till my own bed
8 days till brunch with the Big Three: Karly, Aimee, and Jana
8 days and one afternoon till my brother and I spend some QT together
36 days until this one hops another plane
60 days till our second go-round at joint European adventuring
2 days till post-church Coffee Date Night with Irene, Dorothy, et al
8 hours to sleep

The thought of Peter staring Laura down while singing "My Humps"? Timeless.

NOTE TO THOSE WHO LIKE TO KNOW THESE THINGS, AKA BETSY: I'll most likely be out of commission for a bit. Finals Season, Lo, It Hath Returned, and I am Undone.

8.11.05

Still Listening: Bartender

He wrote a song once about the good love, the good wine.
I want to know how often (and when)
His notes, or any other's, will carry the weight of these two things into my world.

I want to document them, keep them on file;
prepare for their arrival, if these things can be known.
Make my house into a home so that,
When they arrive,
There are the tiniest of tokens bearing witness to past visits,
Memories called up to make a bridge from
What’s happened before to what’s happening between.

As for love, well—
I want to give it my favorite seat,
Make it comfortable in my red slippers,
Pull the corners of the blanket down around its shoulders when it gets cold.

7.11.05

Food for thought.

It's not every day that one finds similar political souls wandering the halls of evangelical Christianity. While not the most cogently stated or comprehensive argument I've read regarding this administration's actions, it gets to the heart of what's so troublesome about them. Check it out.

Also, if you're a BC Law student, stop into East Wing 400 between 3:30 and 4:30 to hang out with your friendly local Christians. Peter and I went nuts in the grocery store last night-- nuts!! It's amazing how many Oatmeal Creme Pies you can buy for $40.

4.11.05

Kumbaya

Jessica: Hey, remember how our tire fell off in the mountains on the road to Cyangugu Province?

Bryan: Yep. [Eloquent male response.]

Jessica: I still can't believe how dark it was that night. Remember how Kayijuka would turn his flashlight onto the road every once in awhile, and we'd be surprised to see about five or six people sitting there watching us?

Bryan: Yep.

Jessica: And remember how Sheila kept calling us from Kibogora to find out what was taking us so long, even though Andy had clearly told her we were all right and on our way, and we all thought she was being overly maternal?

Bryan: Yep.

Jessica: And remember how Rachel and Patty and I started throwing rocks into the forest to pass the time, and Kayijuka asked us what we were doing?

Bryan: Nope.

Jessica: "American citizens should exercise caution when traveling through the Nyungwe Forest on the Butare-Cyangugu Road. Travel during the hours of twilight and darkness is not recommended. The Embassy does not recommend camping in the forest at this time. Regionally, one of the many Hutu extremist rebel factions in the Great Lakes region has committed, and continues to threaten, violence against American citizens and interests."

[Silence. And then...]

Bryan: Where did you read that?

Jessica: The State Department.

[Silence again. Even more silence. And then...]

Bryan: I totally took the guitar out and started singing worship songs when that happened, didn't I?

Jessica: Yep.

2.11.05

Captain v. Obvious

Law school textbooks are ridiculously expensive; in protest of that fact, I refused to pay full price for anything I could find outside of the bookstore. My books would have cost me around $800, had I not been such a heroine for the cause; as it stands, I spent about $250 by purchasing books on Half.com and from 3L friends. Of course these books come in imperfect shape; and while dealing with someone else's underlining, highlighting, and book briefing is not as big of a deal to me as saving $600 dollars, it can make for some entertaining--and sometimes frustrating-- reading. One can learn a lot about a person through what they doodle in their books, the notes they leave to themselves, the Supreme Court justices they deface. Mostly what you learn from paging through these things, though, is that being in law school doesn't make you de facto intelligent. (Well, duh!)

My Evidence textbook is classic. I am its third or fourth owner, which puts some extra degrees of separation between me and the very lovely person who owned it first. It's clearly seen better days: the original owner was a fan of random highlighting, writing down wrong answers in the text, and arguing with the author in truly unhelpful ways, such as the following: "What?" "This doesn't make sense!!!" (Which, true.) My favorite comment, though, was the one I found last night while going back over hearsay. Next to an excerpt from a newspaper article about a pet wolf that had allegedly bitten a small boy, this person wrote the following:

"Wolf = NOT A HUMAN."