Cold and Disconnected
I’m cold. It’s raining, it stays light out too late, and I’m cold. America can be like that at times.
We are back in the USA for about 6 weeks, and I am currently with Lisa and the boys at her parent’s house in North Dakota. It’s nice to see family again, but there are things about it that bother me more than I expected, and many of them have to do with summer.
Summer is supposed to be warm, but it sure doesn’t seem very warm to me. But more than that, with North Dakota being so far North, it’s the light that really bothers me. Cambodia is in the tropic zone, so the amount of daylight that you have from one season to another pretty much stays the same. I know that somewhere between 6:00 and 6:30 pm I know that the sun will go down. But here in North Dakota it’s not like that at all. In the winter the sun sets early, and in the summer, like it is now, the sun sets late. So it will be 10:30 pm and still light out! I can’t begin to explain how much that bothers me. It never used to, but for some reason, on this trip, it is driving me crazy. I suppose part of it is that I didn’t expect it.
Isn’t that the way life works? If you are tempted with big things, or facing big problems, it’s not that hard to do the right thing. But when it’s something little, annoying and unexpected, it’s harder to deal with. The Devil is in the details.
One other problem is that here in North Dakota there isn’t really much “connection”. Internet hook ups are kind of hard to find, so some of these posts over the next week and a half will be even less regular than usual.
Hostages and Revenge and Ugly Foreigners
By now the hostage crises in Seam Reip in Cambodia has been on most of the news networks. The details, however, have only now been coming out.
A few days before, a Korean restaurant owner had had an argument with a former security guard who was working for him as a driver. It isn’t clear what the reason for the argument was, but what is clear is that the Korean business owner slapped the 22 year old guard twice. This is a HUGE insult in most Asian countries, including Cambodia.
The guard was so angry and insulted that he decided to act in retaliation. He traveled 4 hours to Phnom Penh to buy a gun, and then returned to Seam Reip. He enlisted two friends, also former security guards, to help him. His plan is to take out his anger on the children of the Korean restaurant owner. His job had been to drive the children to, and from school each day, so he and his two accomplices went to the school with the intent of killing the two children. Unfortunately, the class they took over did not contain the two children they were looking for, so they began to improvise. The demanded money, guns and a van from the government, and to prove they were serious they killed a 4 year old Canadian boy who happened to be crying. During their attempted escape they were overpowered by local police and the entire drama came to end with a crowd of locals beating the kidnappers to a point where they appeared to be dead (although they all lived and are now in police custody).
There are three things I would like to point out from this event to help you understand the current conditions in Cambodia.
First of all is the Cambodian concept of “kum.” The closest English translation of this word is revenge, but that just doesn’t capture it completely. It is revenge multiplied exponentially, buried beneath the surface, and released at a time when it is least expected. Chances are that when the main kidnapper was slapped by the Korean restaurant owner, he probably meekly submitted and went away quietly. That is kind of the way most things like this start out. The anger, rage and desire for revenge is there, but they don’t let you see it. Then, later, when you aren’t expecting it, they come back and exact retribution.
The second thing is the slap by the Korean restaurant owner. Cambodia has many foreigners working here in all types of trades, and many have very poor cross cultural skills. In one sense, I am shocked someone could be so completely clueless as to slap an employee like that. But on the other hand, that is pretty Korean; they tend to be very class conscious and very blunt in the way they deal with things. But it’s not just Koreans, there are many foreigners who give foreigners a bad name here (including lots of “ugly Americans”.
The third thing is the crowd’s reaction in beating the kidnappers. There is a general undercurrent of frustration here with the police and justice system (and really with the government in general), and it is very common for crowds who catch any kind of criminal to enforce a kind of mob justice.
All of these observations seem trivial, however, when compared to the loss of life that it all resulted in; a 4 year old Canadian boy who had nothing to do with any of it, but was just upset enough to cry.
Starbucks, Lighting and Relationship Avoidance
As much as there are numerous things I dislike about Bangkok, Thailand, one of the things I do like is Starbucks.
Overall, I much prefer Cambodia to Thailand. Cambodia has a much more laid back feel to it than Bangkok. Bangkok clearly aspires to be a world class city, and in many ways it is, but it also has a bit of a disorganized and overcrowded overtone that leaves it feeling forced in some way. Cambodia, on the other hand, is much more laid back. And of course I speak and read Khmer, but am pretty much lost with Thai. But Bangkok does have many world-wide companies and services that are still absent in Phnom Penh. Within about a two block radius of the hotel I am writing this from I can find Burger King, McDonalds, Sizzler, Kentucky Fried Chicken, a large mall, an elevated train station, and most importantly, two Starbucks coffee shops.
We are here in Bangkok for an area wide Assemblies of God missionary retreat. So part of the plan is to relax and unwind. Lisa has here way of doing that. Usually it includes shopping (both window and real), or getting her nails done, or some such thing. I tend to have a very different system of relaxation. My idea of relaxation comes down to going to Starbucks, getting a big cup of coffee, sitting in one of their overstuffed chairs and spending a few hours reading a good technical instruction book (I’m currently reading through a really good one on professional lighting for video and film).
As I sat talking with Lisa yesterday about what we each found relaxing, I realized that as I get older I seem to be less and less of a people person. Not that I was ever a complete social life of the party type, but I seem to enjoy being alone more and more. The problem is I don’t necessarily see this as a good thing. As much as I might enjoy hiding out from everyone else and getting lost in a good cup of coffee and the details of professional lighting, I know that it is important for me to use this time to build relationships with my family and my fellow missionaries.
So what is it that I find so attractive about technical books? I think it is the concrete nature of it. It is all about A+B=C, it is hard facts, it is step one, step two, step three. Sure there is some “art” and skill involved in doing a good job at these various technical things, like lighting, but it is still pretty black and white and simple. Relationships are an entirely different animal! You have to decide what the other person is thinking and feeling. There are very few black and white things, mostly it is shades of gray. There is being polite or diplomatic. It isn’t at all easy, and it involves emotional investment and risk. There isn’t any of that in deciding where to place a key light and whether you should use a fresnel light or HMI. Hiding out in Starbucks with the lighting book, I have decided, may be more relaxing, but if that is all I do, I am taking the cowards way out and missing an opportunity to build relationships that will give me more than just lighting information.
The funny thing is, I find a similar tendency in my spiritual life with God. I’m ready to get up early, put in my Bible reading and prayer time, and move on. It’s simple. I read X number of chapters, I cover X number of topics in prayer, and I’m pretty much set. I want to reduce my relationship with God to a black and white set of formulas that leave no ambiguity or uncertainty. But the reality is my relationship with God is a RELATIONSHIP, and no real relationship is that simple. Paul said we work out our salvation with fear and trembling. Why? I think C.S. Lewis captured it well in The Chronicles of Narnia. In the first book, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, the children ask the the beaver if Aslan, the lion who represents Jesus in the story, is a safe lion. The beaver kind of laughs and says who ever heard of a safe lion. But they could be sure he was a good lion. Is God safe? Not exactly, but He is good. Any relationship we have with Him will be risky in some sense. So reducing it to X hours in prayer and Bible study is to avoid the relationship in favor of a set of rules and a dead religion.
So I don’t abandon my regular prayer and Bible study. It still has great benefits. But I have to make and effort to bring God into my daily situation and build a relationship on honesty, openness and time spent together. I can still have my Starbucks, but I need to make sure I take time to share it with both those around me physically, and the savior who is always with me spiritually as well.
Electro-Shock Therapy for Snakes (and other Animal Planet moments)
Yesterday, as I drove down a back road to our studio, I saw something that I hadn’t seen in a long; a man with a car battery on his back.
As I’ve said a number of times before, Cambodia has changed drastically since we first came here in January 1994. Back then, we would see things that just made you stop and stare. Of course, some of those things are still around, but we have just gotten used to them and we don’t notice as much anymore. But many things you just don’t see anymore. For example, one of my favorite Cambodia media related moments was when I first saw a public service message on TV telling people not to fish with hand grenades! I haven’t seen that in years! Another one that I haven’t seen in a long time is the electro-snake-fishing.
In this particular Cambodian “sport” the “snake fisher” straps on a backpack that has a small shelf on it. Sitting on the shelf is a large car battery. Attached to the positive and negative battery terminals there are two wires that extend to two long metal poles (I haven’t looked at them very closely, but I believe they also have some rubber strips wrapped around the end as hand holds). The person then wades into a rice patty or drainage ditch that is likely to contain small water snakes and puts the two ends of the metal poles in the water to shock any nearby snakes and bring them to the surface. They collect the snakes and cook and sell them. I don’t believe I have ever seen this particular method of sports fishing taught in a Royal Ranger book or at Boy Scouts or anything, but once you’ve seen it you don’t easily forget it!
At the airport this morning (on our way to a meeting in Bangkok, Thailand) Lisa was reading the newspaper and came across an article that once again brought up a host of memories.
When we used to live and work at the orphanage we had a house that was next to a swampy field, so we would get all sorts of odd animal visitors. We would find four foot long snake skins in the spare bedroom, live poisonous vipers in the living room or on the car porch, black widow spiders under our dining room table top, and all sorts of assorted mystery animals throughout the house that we would just kill and get rid of without ever knowing what they were. On our first furlough, we were watching a National Geographic special one day called “Living Nightmares” that focused on various poisonous nocturnal predators. As we watched were recognized over half of the creatures featured as being among the many animals we had killed in our house!
A couple months ago, just shortly before Lisa got our cat, I had killed a “rat” in our hallway (after a bit of a chase through three different rooms with a golf club). But it wasn’t like any rat I had ever seen. It had a strange pointed and tapered face and a oddly thick tail, but, I knew it wasn’t a mouse, so it was labeled as “rat” in my mind. But as Lisa was reading the paper this morning, she suddenly turned to me and said, “Remember that weird rat you killed? Did it look kind of like this?” And she proceeded to show me a half-page drawing in the paper that looked surprisingly familiar. “Yeah, I think that’s it!” I said. It turns out the article was about some animal specialist who found a previously un-cataloged species of rodent being sold in a market in Laos, and that was what had been in our house! Animal Planet hasn’t got anything on us!
So now we are in Bangkok, Thailand for about a week for a retreat. Here you still see some odd animal things. What other major city do you know where you can walk down the street and see elephants on the side walk? Sometimes you just have to stop and remember what an amazing world we live in and what amazing opportunities God brings our way.
Confessions of a Reluctant Cat Owner (and other reluctant confessions...)
I am a somewhat reluctant cat owner. I’m not really much of a pet person in general. I have had pets in the past; I had a dog growing up, and two different kittens during my 2 years at Southern Illinois University. But I can easily admit that these days I am lazy enough that taking care of myself and my family is pretty much all I want to do, and adding another animal to the mix isn’t something I went looking for. However, here in Cambodia it was pretty much a choice between the rats and mice or getting a cat, so we went with the cat. Actually “we” isn’t exactly true; it’s more that my wife Lisa and our two boys went for the cat. I had steadfastly said “no pets,” but one day I came home and there was a scrawny kitten in our house.
That was a few months ago. The cat, named Hobbes by our boys (in honor of their favorite cartoon strip, Calvin and Hobbes) is now well filled out and giving me a run for my money in the lazy and overweight category. And, I have to admit, it has been interesting to watch the way he has fit himself into our home. He has a pretty good idea where he fits in the “pecking order”. For example, he pretty much realizes that I’m the boss (which leads me to think he may be part corporate weasel, because he is always trying to “suck-up to the boss”). On the other hand, he doesn’t always see his role so clearly with other family members. With Lisa it’s an ongoing struggle that Hobbes hasn’t given up on completely. Then there is Alex, our youngest boy who is 7. Hobbes has pretty much decided that he ranks well above Alex on the dominate family member scale. A favorite family activity is watching Hobbes chase Alex through the house and launch himself through the air whenever he thinks Alex is cornered (it’s more fun than reality TV).
The one thing I have realized is that I definitely like cats better than dogs. Cats seem to be a lot more independent, and not nearly so needy. And in general they don’t seem to be quite as smelly. There are, of course, exceptions to that. Like the time Hobbes ate a two or three foot long string and a few days later, when the string “passed,” it got hung up in “mid pass”. The end result (no pun intended) was a cat spinning in circles chasing a string that was hanging half in and half out of his lower digestive track, and in the process slinging the fully digested remains of other things all around our kitchen and dining room! Not that given the opportunity a dog wouldn’t have done the same thing, but I haven’t actually witnessed any similar K-9 activities (please feel free to let me know if you have). But in general, I find myself to be more of a cat person.
Being any kind of “pet person” is not something I expected. I guess I see myself as more of a reluctant, and some cranky (Lisa would probably add “crotchety”) pet owner. None the less, Hobbes is here, so we need to make sure he is taken care of properly. For example, there are a lot of cats around our neighborhood. But these aren’t your run of the mill house cats. Both dogs and cats have a bit of a different pet role in most Cambodian homes. Yes, they are the family pet, but they are usually allowed to roam free, especially at night, when they more closely resemble something you might have seen Steve Irwin wrestling on Animal Planet. In the past we have literally had a pack of “neighborhood” dogs kill and eat a pig outside of our house (trust me, that’s a sound you don’t want to wake up to in the middle of the night). And these days, or more precisely, these nights, it seems the tin roof over the shed of our next door neighbor seems to be the sight of the world championship of “Ultimate Cat Fighting”. Hobbes, on the other hand, is an indoor cat (or so I keep telling everyone). I figure that if he is out roaming the neighborhood, who is keeping the rats away? Most days we do let him out some, but we try to make sure he is back inside well before dark. Then there are days like today.
Sometimes he does end up getting left outside. The first time that happened I had to chase a big cat away with a stick that had Hobbes by the throat, and typically that’s the way it goes; Hobbes gets into some fight and is generally the loser. Then we spend twenty to thirty minutes trying to get him off the roof and back in the house. Tonight I was just sitting down to write this post (although, what I was going to write about probably wasn’t as interesting as this) when Lisa came in to say Hobbes was outside and she could hear some cats going at it. So we went out to try to find Hobbes and there in our front yard he was going at it with a black cat we had seen around that was actually a bit smaller than Hobbes, so for once Hobbes was winning. My first thought was “Hey, that’s great, go get ‘em Hobbes!” But, I knew we had to get him back inside. So I succeeded in getting the black cat chased out under our gate, and then it was just Hobbes sitting there. Here is where I got really stupid. I picked him up.
At this point, some of you are probably saying “yeah, so what’s the big deal?” A few hours ago I probably would have been one of you. But now I’m in the camp of all the other people who are reading this and saying, “boy, that was really stupid.” See, Hobbes didn’t realize fighting time was over, and he proceeded to lay into my hands and arms! He went for one of those kind of death grip bites on my arm and wouldn’t let go! By the way, have I mentioned that he has never been de-clawed (how would he catch the mice and rats?)? I think, all in all, I turned out to be louder than the cats when they were fighting by themselves.
So now I’m typing this post wearing a ripped up and blood spotted t-shirt with an ice-pack on my arm, which, by the way, smells like hydrogen peroxide. Do you see why I don’t consider myself a pet person? Apparently Hobbes never heard the bit about not biting the hand that feeds you.
But seriously, I realize he was caught up in the moment, and did something that was probably against his better judgment, and attacked someone who was trying to protect and care for him. Sounds kind of like me sometimes. I can’t count the number of times I got caught up in the moment and said or did something stupid that only hurt those who were trying to help or protect me. Whether it was my parents, a brother or sister, a friend, my wife or God, it’s happened more times than I like to admit. Sometime later tonight or tomorrow I know Hobbes will come and hop up in my lap while I’m watching TV or working on the computer to just sit and be there with me (I’m the only one in the family he does this with; I guess it’s kind of our thing). And we will be fine; I don’t hold this kind of a thing against him. He’s just a cat, and cat’s make mistakes (like eating string in the first place, but I digress). Thankfully, God doesn’t expect us to be perfect either. How do I know? How else do you read the prodigal son? He is ready and waiting and longing for us to come back, even when we have lashed out at Him, hurt Him or run away from Him. So when we come back, things will be ok, too.
It’s funny the things you notice with pets…
Upgrade Faith
In the wonderful world of media production, computers have taken over. We produce all of our video and audio projects digitally; our video footage is shot on a digital camera is stored digitally on computer hard drives, our audio projects are recorded straight onto a computer hard drive through a 8 channel digital audio interface, and all of our editing is done computer based non-linear editing systems. It’s really pretty incredible what you can now do.
Digital, computer based editing has been around for awhile. Our regional media office for the Assemblies of God World Missions department is located in the Philippines, and they bought their first digital editing system almost ten years ago. To do it they had to buy a specially built computer, as well as the editing software. All in all, if my memory serves me correctly, it ran them about $40,000! Just this past year, they stopped using that system. They now have gone with a new digital editing system that uses a pretty standard PC (although it is admittedly a high end system) and an editing program that runs about $600. So for a tenth of the cost, they are getting better performance and results. We use the same system here. The problem is upgrades.
I actually use a number of editing programs; for general video editing we use Vegas, for video compositing we use Ultra, for authoring DVD’s we use DVD Architect, for creating interactive DVD’s we use eDVD, for detailed audio editing we use Sound Forge, for music creation and editing we use Acid, and for shooting new video we have just started using DV Rack. And of course I also have a wish list of other software and hardware that we would like to get in the future. But that also means I get a ton of upgrade offers every month. In fact, this past week I spent $200 for an upgrade on 2 of our most used programs. Sure that’s a lot less than I would pay for a new program, but it starts to add up. It seems like every other week there is some new breakthrough or some new format that requires another upgrade. So where do you draw the line? How do you decide if the latest upgrade is really necessary?
This is actually a pretty common dilemma that it seems most Cambodians struggle with. The amount of building going on around the country is amazing. There are new houses, stores, restaurants, hotels and businesses going up on almost every major street in Phnom Penh. But at the same time, you can drive down the street and see places that were beautiful showplaces two or three years ago that I would now consider to be a real dive. The typical pattern here is that someone puts a lot of money into building this great place, and then they run it without any ongoing upkeep investment, and within a few years it is run down, worn out, and ends up closing because people don’t come back. The business that keeps re-investing and upgrading their facilities is the exception here, not the rule. Most don’t understand the long term necessity of ongoing investment, maintenance, upkeep and upgrades.
The same thing goes in the video and audio media world. When we first came to Cambodia 11 years ago you couldn’t get a DVD anywhere; everything you bought in the market (i.e. all the pirated movies) was on VHS tapes. Likewise, everything we produced was analog media on VHS or cassette tape, and editing was done with a number of physically connected SVHS tape machines. Now you would be hard pressed to even find VHS tapes in the market. Everything is DVD, I couldn’t give away our old SVHS editing system if I tried. If we had not invested and stepped up to producing digital programs, we would be out of the game. And even though the upgrades I am currently facing are incremental advances, if I were to ignore them I would be left behind in a few years. Does all this affect our day to day ministry? Yeah, it actually does.
One way it has impacted us is that now media in general is much more accessible here, so more missionaries and pastors realize the value of Christian media in both evangelism and discipleship. So we have a lot more people regularly partnering with us. The other way it impacts us is that we are trying to not only keep up with the change, but move to the front of the wave and be a part of leading future trends and direction. So, for example, that means that at the Cambodia Cassette Bible Institute we are looking at MP3 digital format for the lessons to use in possible internet download formats. It means looking outside the box of what has already been done and finding new and innovative ways to bring the gospel to people in a way that captures their attention and their imagination.
And faith is no different. In about 8 days we leave for a missionary retreat in Thailand. What is the point of going to meetings and retreats and all that? It’s the same as the need for maintenance and upkeep in a business; without continually re-investing, things begin to break down, get run down and eventually close down. Why do you keep doing daily Bible reading if you have already read the entire Bible (probably more than once)? Well, why do you paint a room, even when in the past it has already had a number of coats of good paint? Because if you don’t it gets dull and dirty and starts to crack and flake off. So you keep reading the Bible because if you don’t you faith starts to get dull and dirty and cracked and starts to flake off. Face it, life is all about upgrades.
So every couple months I shell out a couple hundred dollars for the latest version of whatever software it is that is offering an upgrade this week, and every so often I find myself at the alter, “paying” whatever it cost for another faith upgrade (for those fluent in “Christianese” that means “seeking the Holy Spirit for a spiritual refreshing”).
