Tuesday, June 30, 2009

The church is a broken institution made of broken people. Sometimes it seems all that any group of Christians ever does- myself very much included- is build caricatures of other groups of Christians to tear down. I find myself getting so angry at groups of Christians for being hateful towards other groups of Christians, only to realize I'm doing the same thing they they are.

I find myself torn between two points of view. One says if you love Christ you will love his church... the other says I love Christ, but not Christians, because Christians are so unlike Christ.

I know I love Christ, but some days I find it difficult to say the same about his followers. I guess the grace comes in the assumption that genuine Christians are progressing on a path to be more Christ-like? I know none of us are there yet... but how many of us are even moving in that direction? I'm not sure I can say I am.

Come Thou fount of every blessing
Tune my heart to sing Thy grace
Streams of mercy never ceasing
Call for songs of loudest praise
Teach me some melodious sonnet
Sung by flaming tongues above
I'll praise the mount I'm fixed upon it
Mount of Thy redeeming love

Here I raise my Ebenezer
Hither by Thy help I come
And I hope by Thy good pleasure
Safely to arrive at home
Jesus sought me when a stranger
Wondering from the fold of God
He, to rescue me from danger
Interposed His precious blood

O to grace how great a debtor daily I'm constrained to be!
Let Thy goodness like a fetter, bind my wandering heart to Thee
Prone to wander Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love
Here's my heart Lord, take and seal it, seal it for Thy courts above

Monday, June 29, 2009

Here is an article from BBC news on Bosnia. It wouldn't let me post it directly to the blog from the website, so I'm copying and pasting the text and pictures. It's by Paul Moss.

"Bosnia echos to alarming rhetoric"

They may have disagreed about politics, but the group of 20-something friends who had gathered for an after-work drink were all certain about one thing - they were Serbs.

"My father is a Serb, my grandfather is a Serb, I am a Serb. This is my nationality," said Vladislav.

"If we are looking at a football game," added Bane, "Serbia against somebody else, we are fans of Serbia."

These would not have been particularly notable declarations of identity, save for one crucial fact.

We were speaking in Banja Luka, a city in Bosnia, and all these people were Bosnian citizens.

But that meant little to Ivana, a trainee architect: "Bosnia is an artificial and silly creation, we naturally belong with Serbs," she said.

That "creation" was born out of the ruins of battle.


Everybody should be worried, this is the Balkans, and nationalist rhetoric here always leads to war

Svetlana Cenic, writer
At the end of the Bosnian Civil War, it was agreed that the country would remain a single nation.

However, the Serbs were granted their own officially-recognised region, known as the Republika Srpska.

It has its own parliament, and a fair degree of autonomy.

But now some fear this delicate constitutional compromise could be falling apart.

'Thinly-veiled threats'

The Republika Srpska parliament has issued a declaration, insisting that it has the right to make its own rules in certain key areas, like immigration and customs.



Milorad Dodik has hinted that he wants Republika Srpska to secede
That move was vetoed this week by Bosnia's High Representative, the internationally-appointed figure who still has executive authority in the country.

But the resulting row has left many worried about the country's stability.

"The way the Serb politicians speak is getting more and more nationalistic," says Svetlana Cenic, a writer and newspaper columnist.

"Everybody should be worried," she warns. "This is the Balkans, and nationalist rhetoric here always leads to war."

Svetlana and others are particularly alarmed by the pronouncements of the Bosnian Serb Prime Minister, Milorad Dodik.

He has made thinly-veiled threats that the Republika Srpska might secede from Bosnia altogether.

Any attempt at secession by the Republika Srpska would be seriously destabilising.

It would alarm the many ethnic Croats who still live in the region, as well as the Muslim population, known as Bosniaks.

It might also tempt the Croat region of Bosnia to contemplate a similar move towards independence.

But more than anything, secession would be resisted by the remaining part of Bosnia, with its capital in Sarajevo.

Hundreds of thousands of non-Serbs now live there, having been driven out of what is now the Republika Srpska during the Civil War.

'Betrayed'

And for those who remember this experience, like the actress Alena Dzebo-heco, independence for the Republika Srpska would be a moral outrage.

"The people who did the ethnic cleansing, they would get what they wanted," she argues.

"After everything my family went through - my uncle was in a concentration camp, my father was arrested.

"We would feel betrayed."

The ruling party in the Republika Srpska, the SNSD, has been playing down fears that it plans to secede - at least any time soon.

The speaker of the parliament, Igor Radojicic, said Mr Dodik, his party leader, was only responding to threats from Bosniaks.



He argues that they would like to take away the Republika Srpska's powers, and rule the whole of Bosnia directly.

"The fact is that Serbs are a minority in Bosnia, approximately one-third.

"There are fears that the Muslims might make decisions in favour of their ethnic group. So we are fighting to protect our autonomy."

There is certainly plenty of fear in the Republika Srpska that Muslims pose a threat.

They range from the kind of sober political argument advanced by the Parliamentary Speaker, to more lurid anxieties, whipped up in part by sensationalist newspapers.

"Osama Bin Laden has operations in Sarajevo," one well-educated man told me.

Others insisted that the Serbs were in the vanguard of the struggle against Islamic fundamentalism - this despite the fact that Bosnian Muslims tend to be relatively non-observant.

It is 17 years since the Bosnian Civil War began, sparked off by each different ethnic group believing that the others were trying to take over, and that they had to fight back.

The risk is that these fears, and the inflammatory rhetoric that tends to drive them, may be gaining ground once again.

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Well timed, National Geographic. I appreciate it.

Thank you, Jessie, for alerting me to an article about Serbia in July's issue of National Geographic. It is informative and, unlike Noel Malcom's "Short" History of Bosnia and "Short" History of Kosovo, a readable length. I sincerely hope I have a chance to visit Kosovo/a while I'm there. I also hope there isn't any violence in Belgrade (or Bosnia, Kosovo/a, or anywhere else) while I'm there... or ever again. Perhaps that is wishing too much, though.

Here is the link to the article. There is a very nice series of photos as well: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/07/serbs/carroll-text

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

I don't wanna grow up, I'm an MVS kid...

I didn't realize how firmly planted in childhood I am until this week.

I'm house-(and dog)-sitting for a family from church this week, and it has been great. My house in Baltimore is great some of the time, but I am loving the quiet of the suburbs and the independence of living alone. I had no idea how anxious the neighborhood and, yes, the housemates make me until I had a chance to live my regular life but removed from RHHP... what a difference. Having an adorable dog around doesn't hurt, either. I've loved doing my own grocery shopping (I want some sunflowers? Great! I can buy some sunflowers!) and all my own cooking (dinner when I'm hungry, all foods that I like) and being able to be in the kitchen in my pajamas without a bra on (no middle age conservative male refugees to offend!). The one downside is that I have been making and drinking whole pots of coffee. At home I use a single-serving maker or a french press, but this family has a big, fancy coffee maker and I can't help but use it to its full potential. Clearly at 23 I am not yet mature enough to monitor my own coffee consumption.

So what defines adulthood? Paying rent? Having a job? Having self control over delicious caffinated beverages? Right now I don't pay rent, I don't pay any bills, and I don't make any money. Once a month Heather hands me $50 in cash. I spend it on what luxuries I want (coffee or drinks out, fancy soap...) and once it's gone, it's gone. If I need food I write it on a list and it magically shows up Monday afternoon. If there is something wrong with the unit car I take it to the shop and hand over the Magical MVS Credit Card, for which I never see a bill. Same with if I get sick- I don't have health insurance, but if I get hit by a bus or get swine flu, the Mennonites pay for it. For all intensive purposes I live right now the same way I did when I was 14, except I think my allowance may have been higher then.

Next year will be more of the same. I will handle my own money, but it still won't be MY money. I will take X amount of money and give it to the landlord. I will take X amount of money and it is all I am allowed to spend on food. I will get X amount of money as a stipend to spend on coffee, alcohol, and fancy soap. Baby steps towards adulthood... baby steps.

When I get BACK from Serbia I'm still not sure if I will meet societal expectations for adulthood. I am most likely going to try to do an Americorps position in Minneapolis so I can earn an education award to go back to school. I will make my own money that I can spend however I want, but it will only be about $900 a month, and that's BEFORE taxes. After a year of THAT, I am now 80% sure I want to go back to school- nursing school, to be exact. I will take pre-requisites at a community college or online while doing Americorps, and then spend the education award to work towards a nursing degree. Originally I wanted to go to nursing school so I could work towards being a midwife, but now I mostly want to go to prove wrong a friend who strongly implied I wasn't smart enough to do it... spite is a great motivator.

This is all to say that my post-college life isn't exactly how I (or my parents- sorry guys!) imagined it. Volunteer for a year... volunteer for a year abroad... volunteer for another year (but KIND of get paid!)... go back to school (there is an intensive 16-month program for a masters in nursing designed for people with a bachelor's degree in something other than nursing at the University of Minnesota that I would love to do) and then do some MORE school to specialize in midwifery.

What do I want to do after that? I will be 27 or 28 by the time it is done, specialization and all, and will have never had a "real job". So what would the next step be?

Why, volunteer with MSF or CPT, of course.

Friday, June 19, 2009

Low income countries have an infant mortality rate NINE TIMES HIGHER than wealthy countries (like the US). I don't think rich babies are worth nine times more, though.

I always thought I was called to work with the world's poor- the "poorest of the poor', if possible. Now that I'm going to Serbia I'm struggling with what it means to be a servant to people whose primary burden is not poverty (although Serbia certainly has more than its share of poverty)but violence. The more I read about the history of the region, the more confused I am. My questions are not so much how people can do these things to each other, because quite frankly, I understand the tendency to react to pain by hurting other people. What I don't understand is how people can live through the things that these people have lived through. Maybe I'm just being a pessimist, but I'm not as shocked by the violence and the hate as I am by the strength and the perseverance of the people. I'm almost afraid to meet people my age who grew up in Belgrade. When I was 13 I was thinking primarily about glitter eye liner and the boy whose locker was two down from me. When people my age who grew up in Belgrade were 13, they were living through the bombardment of their city (by my government!). What does that even mean? What do you do when bombs are falling? When actual bombs are being dropped on your city, what do you do? Do you go the basement? If you live in an apartment building do the people in the basement apartments let you in? Do you stay where you are? Eat dinner and try to talk about something else? My closest point of reference for something like that would be sitting in the bathtub in the basement hugging my dog during thunder storms, which, needless to say, is not even on the same graph as a war. I have so many questions... so many questions.

Lord, give me a humble heart. Make me a servant. Use me to lessen the suffering, Lord, but if I can't change the suffering, use it to change me. "Let my heart be broken by the things that break the heart of God".

Wednesday, June 03, 2009

Bwana Asifiwe!

I haven't really thought a ton about Kenya the past few months, but lately it's been making a strong comeback in the competition for the forefront of my thoughts. One of my best (and prettiest! Hi, Katie!) friends from college just got back from 8-ish months in Tanzania and a few weeks in Kenya, and I got to hang out with her this week. She brought me a can of DOOM, which is this insanely strong insecticide that is sold in Kenya and almost for sure not FDA approved. It kills giant roaches immediately on contact, and since the roaches in Baltimore are the size and strength of the ones in Kenya, I asked her to bring me some. I am shocked and delighted that it got through customs, and have used it to spray down my closet and the corners of my room where I have seen roaches. I also sprayed a circle around my bed and have the can sitting on my nightstand for any emergency roach spraying needs. I've been sleeping much better since then, probably both from the peace of mind and the fumes.

The cool thing about Katie being back, other than the pesticides and getting to hang out with her, is getting to hear about her travels and live a little bit through them. I have this problem where I think everyone else's life is infinitely more interesting than my own, so I enjoy sitting down and living vicariously through my interesting friends. Even just thinking about Katie in Kenya (and, to some extent, Tanzania, too) makes me think about my (very short) time in Kenya and the things from that trip that changed me, and the things from that trip that I've since forgotten. When I first came back I thought almost constantly about the dead babies I saw, the starving kids, the slums, the poverty, the pain. After a while I only thought about it sometimes, like when I would hear a baby cry or throw food away. When I started thinking about it this week, I couldn't remember the last time I had thought about it. While I was talking with Katie I was also cleaning my room and putting away clothes, and I kept thinking, oh my God, when did I get this many shoes? Why do I have so many shirts? Why do I need so many books? When did this become my life? Where did that girl who was so passionate about clean water sources for economically poor communities go, and why does she now care so much about nail polish?

Another reason I've been thinking about Kenya is that we just got a new client at work who is Kenyan. I was perhaps a bit overly excited when I found out and I think I might have scared him a little, but I'm going to make it up to him by bringing in some of my Kenyan chai. I might even make him some ugali and chapati and cabbage and oh... I'm excited.

The other country on my mind, clearly, is Serbia. I am getting much more nervous about moving, my main thought being "WHAT AM I DOING??" and my secondary thought being "WHO MOVES TO SERBIA??". The more I try to learn Serbian, the more I realize that Serbian is a really hard language to learn. They use the Cyrillic alphabet sometimes and the Roman alphabet sometimes, but the Roman one isn't the English one, it has all these EXTRA letters, and is missing a few, too. They all make different sounds, and some of the Cyrillic letters look like Roman ones but aren't the same. Also, Serbian not only has formal and informal forms, as well as nouns with genders, but it also has cases for the nouns. If a noun is the subject of the sentence it is in the nominative form, if it is the object it is in the accusative form, if it is possessive it is in the genitive, if it is the indirect object it is in the dative. And of course, just to mess with your head, the plural forms of the cases are different from the singular ones. And then they change the alphabet. And then you offend people if you call KosovO KosovA and vice versa.

To make myself feel better I formulated a 4-part fool-proof plan to make friends in Belgrade.

Part 1 (stateside): Buy lots of clothes from H&M to fit in. Ignore Kenyan memories about excessive spending and possessions. Try not to think about sweatshop labor.

Part 2 (in Belgrade): Smile a LOT.

Part 3: Bake a lot of cakes, cookies, bread, and anything else with a strong, welcoming scent. Keep all apartment windows and doors open. If necessary, place small fans in windows to direct scent of baked goods into the street and apartment building. Welcome and feed Serbians who follow their noses to my house.

Part 4: Marry hungry, handsome Serbian man. Steal his friends. Be doted on by his Serbian grandmother.

I'm pretty sure this will work, and it doesn't require memorizing any more crazy Serbian words and grammar. Check and check.