Blog Downtime
I think my blog was busted for a little bit the last day or two.
Sorry?
Sorry.
Archive for April, 2009 — Page 2
Lake Malawi
Dear ones,
Sorry it’s been a while since I’ve written in my blog. Though I’m sure you haven’t been pining away for a blog entry (except my mom? love you, mom!), I’m offering an official apology to those who will accept it.
So with that said, over the long Easter weekend (in Zambia Friday and Monday around Easter are public holidays) I went to Lake Malawi in Malawi. Malawi border Zambia to the East and has a fairly well-developed bike culture, and so our weekend trip was part pleasure and part work. We left Thursday morning with a slew of people (and a Zambike and Zambulance) in our pickup truck, one 750cc motorcycle, and 3 people, 2 motorcycles, and 15 Zambikes on the back of our flatbed Canter truck.
With more than our share of vehicle issues on the way there (broken down motor bike and a diesel leak in the fuel line of the Canter), we made it to Lake Malawi after 19 hours of travel. We had stopped in the Zambian border town of Chipata, dropped off the 15 bikes and the Canter and the three of us in the Canter rode on the two motorbikes… Me on the back of Dustin’s bike, holding on for dear life. We went to bed exhausted after enjoying the waves and the already-risen full moon over the eastern horizon of the lake.
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We awoke not too early but not too late Friday morning and had breakfast on the sand (the cottages we stayed in are right on the beach and owned by one of our best friends’ church ministry group… a nice perk) and then played bocce ball on the beach and relaxed most of the day. In the evening we met up with some people that Dustin knew through a friend and we went innertubing behind the World Food Program boat that is docked in Lake Malawi for some reason. My feet got a little too much sun this day, but it ended up being ok because i made sure they were sunblocked really well the rest of the weekend.
Saturday, we woke up a little too early and after breakfast we went to go play paintball with the people we met the previous evening. It was pretty fun and a little painful, and afterward we had a crazy braai. A braai is a Zambian barbeque, and we had so much meat I could hardly stand it. I had 2 sausages, a hamburger and a (smallish) steak. And salad. It was terribly tasty and terribly tough on my stomach, but overall it was perfect after a day of paintballing. How weird is it that we’re living in third-world Zambia and we just got back from a vacation to a huge lake where we went innertubing and paintballing. So weird. In the evening we went over to the nicer resort-ish area of the bay to check it out, and nothing much happened.
Sunday was Easter, so we went to a church there on the property we were staying at, and I had one of the oddest Easter mornings ever… the church was just so pleasantly awkward and multi-cultural. I actually spoke for a litle bit, Vaughn and Dustin both led a song each (in Bemba), and all in all, it was a great Easter morning.
We just relaxed the rest of the weekend, and left Monday afternoon, saying goodbye to our incredible and fun hosts, Tim and Laurie.
We ended up in Chipata Monday night at a bed and breakfast called Mama Rula’s where we heard there was the biggest steak in Zambia (from the owner of the Zambian John Deere franchise… you better believe that we followed this guys steak advice!). The steak was indeed large and quite tasty.
So now, we’re back at home, back to work, and we’re done with the rainy season and headed into the cold season. It’ll be weird to not really have a warm summer this year. I think I like having seasons (as indistinct as they might be in Southern California), and to be skipping the warm months is a little bit of a bummer. Life goes on, I suppose.
Thanks for sticking with me on this blog… I hope I didn’t lose any readers by not posting for a while. I’ll hopefully have some pictures from the Malawi weekend up here soon. I’ll let you know via blog post.
Hearing What You Want to Hear
I think one of the biggest problems in the world aside from poverty, hunger, racism, sexism, etc. is that people don’t truly listen to one another and observe rightly what’s happening around them.
It’s not like people are dying left and right because of this or something but I really believe that relationships would be stronger and last longer and people would be more happy and would live better lives if we all learned to see and hear with the intent of perceiving correctly and not seeing and hearing what they want to hear.
I guess I’m asking people to be less self-involved and to understand others better. It’s being perceptive to what another might be thinking and feeling and it’s a way of life that takes effort and isn’t too easy for a while… But given rough practice it can become second nature, to the point that empathy, sincerity and understanding become a part of who you are and how you live in the world.
Strange Thought
I had a strange conversation with some Zambians today. They were talking about how Zambia kinda sucks (which is super common here), and Tehillah, our administrative manager said that she had heard that slavery and all of the colonialism and other junk that’s plagued this continent is because of the way that they’ve worshipped idols and they’ve been so unfaithful to God throughout the ages. The other Zambians in the room agreed that this was possible but they weren’t sure.
I don’t think that’s what happened. I don’t really have anything to back it up, and perhaps I just want to believe this, but I don’t believe that God would persecute these people in that way.
Food for thought perhaps… Any ideas out there? Please comment here and let me know your thoughts.
Competition
I’m not driven by competition.
I don’t mind losing, I don’t mind being mediocre, and I don’t get a rush from winning.
Some people HATE losing, would rather not play than be mediocre, and absolutely live for winning. I think the place/type of competition isn’t even important to these kinds of people… the competition is enough in itself. Football, business, dating, board games, the venue doesn’t matter, the point is to be better, to learn faster, to kick more accurately, to excel and succeed.
My point in writing this post isn’t animosity of any sort, it’s just an honest understanding and realization of myself that I was faced with today.
The people I’m living with here are inherently competitive. It’s soccer, bocce ball, soccer tennis, ping pong, always something. Even rumba music lessons, the next business opportunity, and the next night of dancing feels like competition. I guess the items in that last sentence aren’t competition, but rather a pursuit for more and a lack of contentedness. It is in no way a bad thing, but I just know that it isn’t me. I am, in a multitude of ways, a very content person.
I can hang with all of the competition to a certain point… I’m pretty secure and know that I don’t have anything to prove. I know that my value is exterior to my being and my actions, and this makes living and acting outside of my comfort zone doable. There is a point every once and a while, though, that I reach and I just shut down to putting forth the effort to join in. I recede into the background and just need to be me for a while before jumping back into life outside of comfort.
I suppose it’s all a part of learning to be me. This is the biggest reason that I don’t feel grown-up yet… I don’t totally know who I am. The good news, I guess, is that I’m learning and growing and striving to become more myself and not who other people are projecting onto me to be.
Also… new pictures!
The Last Two Days
The last two days I’ve done two great things.
On Wednesday evening, Vaughn and I went to a church in town and we met up with a friend of ours named Abbyshai (I think that’s how you spell it?). Abbyshai is a keyboard player that plays for a bunch of Zambian gospel artist, most notably Matthew Ngosa. We spent an hour playing a Congolese rumba and he taught Vaughn and I both. He sat at the drums and played three great rumba beats that Vaughn learned over the hour and he put on the bass I was playing and showed me three different, corresponding rumba bass lines, and i played along with Vaughn the best I could.
I’ll be honest… After playing bass “professionally” for almost 2 years, I felt incredibly stupid and inadequate playing the rumba. It was honestly such a different mindset and way or playing that I had to relearn so much about how to use my fingers on the bass. He was telling me to use my left thumb the play the 5th of the chord and this actually started hurting my hand so I just stopped playing that note in the lines I was playing.
It was great to play some music though and to do it with Vaughn was great. I really do miss playing music.
Then, yesterday morning, I geared up to go looking for bamboo. I went by myself on Dustin’s motorcycle in search of a bamboo source for our new bamboo bikes. For those of you that don’t know, we’re partnering with Craig Calfee to produce bamboo bike frames made in Zambia with Zambian materials. We will actually be exporting these bike frames and selling them in the US as a big income generator for Zambikes.
We are pretty much all set to be building bikes and will be here in a couple of weeks to get us going. The one thing we’re lacking is the source of 1-2″ straight bamboo, so after hearing that there was a lot of bamboo in a certain area just outside of Lusaka, I went to go check it out.
In the end, I didn’t end up finding any significant sources of bamboo, but I talked with a bunch of farm owners and pretty much just had a lot of fun by myself cruising around on the motorbike through rural farms looking for bamboo. I (figuratively) ran into an ostrich, a beautiful sky, and some small deposits of bamboo (all pictured below), but no bamboo that we’ll be able to harvest for use making bikes.
That’s ok, though. I had a GREAT day.
Click on the strangely vertically-arranged pictures for their full-sized versions.
