carastrauss's Xanga

If He didn't die, he can't be raised

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 12:27:35 GMT

I realized over Easter weekend that the resurrection, as glorious as it is, is utterly empty without the crucifixion.

My Bolivian church has many good points, but their Good Friday service isn't one of them. I sign up for the Passover dinner expectantly, but my shy hopes were thoroughly dashed. Instead of a true Jewish Cedar meal, or even a thoughtful reflection on the darkness and horror of the crucifixion, we ate pita and lamb, had a hurried Communion, and left the church laughing and joking. No candles. No "It is finished." No reflection on what it might have been like to have no hope.

Without awareness of death, there is no joy in life. So Sunday morning, when we all got up at 5:30 to watch the sunrise and praise God, the singing bordered on dirge music. People stood in a circle shivering and staring at the ground, croaking praise-songs half-heartedly. My friend Kathy turned around to a few friends and growled, "COME ON, people! We might be dead, but Christ is risen!"

In fact, Good Friday was only "Good" for me because of what happened after the uncerimonious lamb. A few of us visited a friend whose mom is dying of cancer. Since her mom couldn't make the service, we brought prayer and worship to her. While we read psalms and prayed with her, we all cried and passed tissues around like popcorn. Death sat down and joined us in our little circle. But he didn't scare us.

Because something in this imminent death makes me appreciate Christ's resurrection even more than usual. I'm always most joyful when rising from sorrow.

Friday, February 29, 2008

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 12:52:08 GMT

Yesterday, during my tango lesson, I got maybe closer to movie life than I ever have.

My elegant teacher was showing my a particularly fancy toe twist when....

BOOM!!!

She never flinched, never lost eye contact, finished showing me the move and then shook her head slowly: "Those Ponchos Rojos. (sigh) They're always so dramatic. They've taken the Parlimentary building to demand that Congress makes a decision on autonomy soon. They're setting off dynamite to make people nervous."

Nervous? "Ponchos Rojos? That violent Communist anarchist group that lynched up those four dogs last October and cut their throats to threaten their opponents? The group against the autonomy decision?" Heck, yeah I was nervous.

She sighed politely again. "Yes."

"They're in the Parliment building that's half a block from here?"

BOOM!!!

"Yes. Now take these two steps backwards, dragging your left foot softly behind you..."

"They're throwing dynamite, and we're dancing tango?"

She stopped dancing and looked me straight in the eye. "Cara, when tango stops, everything stops."

BOOM!!! Ba-BOOM!!!

"Now try the Americano and two figure eights with your partner..."

And we danced the night away.

Gift Givers/Life Filler

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 10:45:35 GMT

My Servant Team is finally here, after a brief snafu involving the left engine of the American Airlines Miami-La Paz flight bursting into flames.

This Servant Team involves a first. Two actual, genuine genetic males! Both emphasize the fact with their impressively bushy beards.

The other night, we were all heading home on a crowded bus, and I hear a precocious Bolivian girl ask one of our bearded boys,

"Excuse me sir..."

"Yes?"

"Are you Papa Noel (Santa Claus)?"

"No, sorry, I'm not."

"Well, then, are you Santo Cristo (Holy Christ)?"

Bearded white men in Bolivia can evidently be only one of two people: A jolly materialistic gift-giver who chortles for the rich, or the Savior of the world who asks for your life and cries for the poor.

Saturday, January 26, 2008

Sat, 26 Jan 2008 13:13:49 GMT

I know only what other immigrants have told me. That no matter how much money and how beautiful the life and the city and the weather it never quite feels like home, and why one piece of ground smells different from another no one knows, but it does and no matter how familiar it gets it will always be ground, never grounding. You get there--the other place--only to discover that home is deep in the innards and can only truly be removed by surgery, complicated emotional surgery, and nine times out of ten there are unforeseen complications and there is haemorrhaging and scarring and a dull ache like a cramp that flares up on cold damp days or hot days, beautiful summer days when everything is pleasant enough except when the wind blows. And even the trees speak a different language.
--Alison Wearing Honeymoon in Purdah

But when home is African rain
and explosions of crape myrtle in Charlotte
injera be wot
the Southern Cross and Cassiopeia
Banyan
guavas
my old Saturn
Grandma's Jewish coffee cake and blueberry muffins
the combination of rock and chalk
most of all my family
things that have disappeared and things that have grown
there is no special ache
just restlessness.

Flight of the Condors

Sat, 26 Jan 2008 12:39:06 GMT

Last weekend, a few of us went to the mountains.

January is the worst time of the year to climb. Lots of rain and sleet and snow and avalanches and other things you don't want falling on your head. But we went, because one of our Kiwi interns teaches mountain climbing, and I rarely pass up free instruction.

So on Saturday we got there and set up camp. It rained. Sunday morning we got up at 3am and climbed a cute little glacial peak. It snowed all 9 hours we were climbing. That afternoon it hailed.

Monday, Sal and I let the boys climb their own killer peak, while we went off and did one of our own. Theirs was taller, but we got the better deal, I think. Because after we summitted, as we were rounding a (wrong) corner, two massive condors lept off a rock a couple meters away and soared off.

I have never seen condors in the wild. They're stunning.

I briefly thought about darting after them, jumping up to grab their clawed feet, and letting them drift down the mountain, me in tow, back to camp. They were that big. You know in Rescuers Down Under, when that cute Ozzie kid gets to ride on the golden eagle's back? Ok, they weren't quite that big, but Monday was the first time I thought, "Hmmm, I should try that some time." =)

Quote of the Day

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 14:01:43 GMT

"¡Que freaking frío! " --Andrea Baker

Friday, January 11, 2008

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 10:36:44 GMT

I hate meetings. They’re mind-numbing, dull, exasperating, dreary, eyeball-scratching, leg-twitching, maddening as an itch on your toe, and tedious as watching airport TV. I hate sitting still in a chair, doing nothing with my hands, watching the clock through eyelids propped open with pencaps.

Now, within this ranting, the astute reader may detect traces of the dread middle school disease, ADHD. Problem is, I did fine in school. So maybe I picked it up while I was teaching middle school. Who says ADHD’s not contagious? It certainly spread like Ebola when I lectured on conjunctions and participles.

We’re in annual ministry planning meetings right now. They drive me raving mad. Now, I was raised in an evangelical tradition where I attended religious services of (exactly) an hour and a quarter no less than three times a week. I am blissfully conditioned to sitting still for an hour and a quarter.

But hit an hour and a half, I start shifting in my chair. My bladder is suddenly full to 110% capacity. Wall mold is oddly fascinating. Every part of body starts itching uncontrollably.

I also start watching other people, wondering how they resist the urge to stand up, scream that the Antichrist has inhabited this meeing, and dash from the room. Instead, we all have our sanity-rendering habits during meetings. Wes takes copious notes, and doodles when there is nothing to note, to keep, I can only assume, from picking his arm hairs out of their follicles one at a time. Andy bites his nails and folds his bottom lip like a fish. Heather picks the ends of her hair. I clean the dirt from under my fingernails and bite the skin off my lips till they bleed. What a bunch of sick, sick people.

I’ve looked for the solutions. If I could only crochet during the meetings, or mix pastry dough under the table. If only I could doodle masterpieces that would later be praised as “a shocking new talent, Picasso meets Dilbert.” But I’m afraid the situation is hopeless. The meetings will go on, and my sole comfort is the third season of The Office.

Prayers of the young

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 09:13:55 GMT

Yesterday I was painting baked Christmas ornaments with my 5-year-old "nephew" Eli, and he asked his mother if he could watch Land Before Time VI again, which I got him for his birthday (yeah, yeah, so I compromised quality to be the "Fun Aunt." Haven't we all?).

"No, Eli, you've watched enough TV this week."

"But movies make me better."

"Really?"

"Yeah, they make me pray more and eat my food."

"Which movies make you pray more?"

"The dinosaur movies."

Man, do I wanna hear those prayers.

Noteworthy

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 10:50:45 GMT

As we were having our weekly staff meeting an hour ago, a parade passed just below our Center window. Not unusual.

What was unusual was that the President of Bolivia, Evo Morales, was leading the parade. No bodyguards. No bullet-proof limos. Just the President walking among the people. Walking. A couple feet below us. It was kind of exciting to see.

Late but never gone

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 10:09:28 GMT

I've been putting off writing this blog for a long time. It seems too big and too heavy to put in one blog entry. But the time has given me a little space. And people wrote me to say they saw the pictures on CNN or Reuters, and I started to feel like the world was still out there, outside our tragic red light zone. And if the world still exists, it can respond. And if it can respond, it should know what to respond to.

The only problem it, I don't know how we're supposeed to respond to this. My last week in language school, I got a call from Heather. She was in our center in El Alto, and she was watching from the fourth story a protest play itself out in the Red Light District directly behind our center. They were dragging things out of the brothels and burning them, she said. She could see smoke and hear people chanting. She had been the one to call the police two hours earlier. The police had seemingly baby-stepped the 7 blocks from their station to the protest, and two hours later they were doing little more than crowd control.

What happened, as I saw it on the news in Cochabamba the next day at breakfast, was that the "Good Neighbor Society" got tired of the the bars and brothels and the violence and delinquency they brought to their tidy little neighborhood. So they stormed the streets in broad daylight, banging down doors and walls of brothels and bars, dragging out furniture, mattresses, TVs and DVD players, and burning everything they could get their hands on, including one of the brothel owner's cars. Some of the girls came to our center to hide and pray and wait for Andy to drive them home.

I couldn't breath as I watched the video footage from 350 kilometers away, in my middle-class host family's house. I saw one of my friends dragged from the brothel and her sweater torn off of her as she tried to fight through the crowd and get away. There was a bestial glee on the faces of the mob.

In response, the women who are my friends went on a hunger strike. It didn't last too long, but long enough to get BBC's attention. You can read more in detail about it here:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/oukoe_uk_bolivia_prostitutes

To retaliate, the girls refused to have their weekly medical checkups and STD tests. Some sewed their lips together to confirm their (short-lived) committment to the hunger strike.

The most tragic part is, nothing much has changed. The girls went back to work a few days later. Since they don't have mattresses, they now work on the cold concrete floor or on the bare metal bed frames. They clients still come, but have to do a secret knock of some type and are let into the brothels one at a time. Which means when Andy and I go to the streets on Thursday, it will be harder than ever to get in and visit our friends.

When I got back to El Alto, I took a day tour of Calle Curasco.

"We want a city without delinquency."

The remains of a former bar.

Some people have asked if our work will be more dangerous as a result of this. I think our friendships with the girls are more timely and urgent than ever, our help is more appreciated, and our vision is more relevent. But we're taking care of ourselves and keeping our center low-key. I think our main danger (as always) is from the crazy barking dogs and the possibility of freezing to death as rainy season comes.

But please pray. We are held and protected and lifted by your prayers.