Greece, Photos from Mytilene

The Harbor
The boat to the right is a ferry that runs each night to Athens, 8 hour overnight.
Once refugees are ‘registered’…
not actually sure what that means, but I know if involves determining whether you are a refugee (with a protected status), or a migrant (with less protections/opportunities).
Anyway, once you are registered, you can buy a ticket on the ferry and go to the mainland.
This is not a lock-down situation. People are free to roam around, and many did. The camps that people stayed in while waiting to register were a few miles away, but people would walk or take a taxi into the city, and meander through the shops the same as I would, excepting that they carried on their persons the limits of their physical possessions.

Chapel

I tried buying a European made blazer. Very sharp looking. Was feeling the vibe, and wanted to put something slick over my Carhartts. But nothing I could find had sleeves long enough. I am not Greek-sized.

Hotel Loriet

The UNHCR (High Commissioner of Refugees) stayed at the Loriet. The actual hotel is behind this old house, which is facing the Aegean Sea. The house serves as the entry foyer, and ornate sitting rooms.
I was dropped off here 10 minutes after arriving, to meet my predecessor and other WASH actors. I was 90 minutes early for the meeting, so I walked in, asked where breakfast was being served, and made myself comfortable.
I pay my taxes. The U.S. funds most of the UN budget. I feel no guilt.
In the end, I had multiple meetings here with UNHCR to coordinate WASH work throughout the island, and plan for the 2016 response. I had no other free meals.

Greece, Photos from Athens

I had no idea when I took this photo how much this premise would be challenged in the coming weeks.
By and large, we are a nation of immigrants. My ancestors left somewhere to get here. Yours very likely did so as well.

United States	% of Pop’n
First Nations	1.6%
Kidnapped	13.2%
Immigrants	85.2%

Platia Monastirokiou (7th century) in the foreground.

Acropolis of Athens (5th century BC) in the background.

 

 

Hadrian’s Library (132 AD)

The steps up to Mars Hill, and Paul’s speech to the crowd from Acts chapter 17.

 

Sunset from Mars Hill

Acropolis at night

Greece, Day 2: I’m no George Clooney

I’ve done more traveling than most.
Mind you, I’m no George Clooney, but I consistently travel one leg and 47 miles short of obtaining my annual upgrade status with the cattle-car airline based in my hometown.
I’m told that in previous generations, such travel was a luxury. You weren’t taller than the ceiling, didn’t spend the flight with my Lombard crammed into my seat while simultaneously wedging your knees up under the wonder of all inventions, the seat-back tray (specifically design to be just large enough to make ‘eating’ an acrobatic event).
We didn’t expect much of a father back then, so you could leave without guilt.
You weren’t electronically connected to everyone you ever met, so you could even have a chippie on the other end of the flight with almost no concern for being cut into little pieces by your significant other when you returned home.
But I digress.
Traveling today… not so much.
When traveling today, prepare your mind for the unknown.
Lie to yourself: this must be what Jason Bourne’s life is like,
encountering a new adventure hour by hour with perfect calm and ease.I guarantee that a significant part of Bourne’s Zen-state training took place while earning a Gold status.
Forget packing your favorite swim trunks for the hotel pool cleaned monthly by Jimmy the front desk attendee, you’d do better to pack an extra layer of deodorant and a barrel of patience.
At the moment of writing, I am sitting between these two:
I broke Flying Rule #9: never book a flight in person. The ticketed agent takes one look at me and says, “He’ll fit”.
You take the red-eye, addicted to your very-own TV (such control at your fingertips). Should I watch Fantastic Four or lose at Chess?
Forgetting that you’re supposed to work the next day,
Forgetting that due to a technical issue, you will miss your connection, spend 8 hours bumming around with a $20 voucher, hallucinating that the accented PA voice just changed your gate and departure time so that you must check yet again the departure screen.
Forgetting that the new flight time arrives too late to catch your third connection, so you get to weigh the comparative advantage of clearing customs at midnight to catch a taxi to a hotel and then get up at 4:30AM to be back to the airport at 6:00AM for your last flight,
Or, you can walk the entire airport hoping to find its weakness, to find where the airport Interior Designer slipped up and accidently ordered a chair or two that are comfortable. Upon failure of said mission, heading into your second sleepless night, you are forced to acknowledge that lying down on 1/8” thick industrial-grade carpet last cleaned during the Carter administration is your best option.
But hey, you get to post the most-enviable Facebook check-ins.

Greece, Day 1: Moving Closer to Pigeon Forge

I am 17 years old, a senior in high school, venturing with a group of church friends to a youth conference in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee for a proper dose of Bible teaching, slushy skiing, and flirting. Which of these most sincerely motivated our attendance, I am not sure we know ourselves.
It is the last night there, the night where the musicians play "Just as I am" until every kid within 3 counties is pouring their hearts out to God and country and their nearest friend, I am there, praying, listening, and being called by God for His service.

Embedded in my cautious appraisal of this situation is a sincere heart and clear memory of God asking me to do for Him what he asked. What exactly that was, I couldn't say. A vision, hazy yet certain.

One year later, I declare “Civil Engineering”.
Four years later, I venture beyond our borders to discover the world I will one day save.
Two years later, I am a father, a future daddy of four, and completely out of control of my own destiny. I seek, pray, and search for opportunities to go with God somewhere, anywhere, to do something, anything.
And He is quiet. He certainly seems quiet.
Often I think of that night in Pigeon Forge, battling between one of the most real moments of my life, and the tumult of not doing what I am made to do, be what I want to be.
I love my wife.
I love my kids.
I struggle to prove that my longing for the breath of God in the grittier portions of His creation does not represent my feelings for her and the kids,
that I am not running away from them or the crazy-love life we have.
Many years later, the door begins to open.
A chance decision to escape for a weekend, see a friend, sit in the back of a conference and mind my own business, and I am asked to come to a desperate place with insurmountable challenges and use the most unlikely skills to help design a residential subdivision through the middle of a property so desperately unsuitable that the entire overpopulated community had avoided it for two hundred years of city sprawl.
4 months later, and I am there again, gaining clarity, sitting on the roof of an unfinished hospital on Ash Wednesday, the soot of Jesus' sacrifice marking my forehead, staring over a sea of desolation,
praying
and journaling
and listening.
And He continues His conversation.
He picks up where He left off 16 years before.
The beginnings of clarity.
One month later I am accidentally honest with a near stranger and find myself on a ledge, facing a decision, fear in my gullet.
Do I follow His voice? How do I know? How can I be sure?
And she walks to me, my faithful wife, while I am weeding and planting and generally wasting time in the garden. She walks up to me: "be the person I married."
And I do.
We do; she and I and God and a little bit of clarity, in a decision that brings me closer to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.
Four years later, the journey to Pigeon Forge takes me the island of Lesvos, Aegean Sea.

A Compatriot's Experience

The experience of a fellow eMi volunteer. I'm grateful he took more photos than I.

Pre-debrief

Rooftop view from hotel, overlooking downtown Tacloban. 

I'm 12 hours from finishing my time here in the Philippines and thought it worth sharing a bit of my experience.

There is a strange dichotomy here on the ground between a world devastated and a world recovering. I have watched streets of trash and debris clear away to small markets and shops, watched electricity being slowly extended day by day down the street, watched thousands of small actions accumulate into a little town on the Pacific. The place I am leaving is not the same as the place in which I arrived.

The people here are ridiculously nice, nicer than just about anywhere I've ever been. PHP is the 'South' of South Asia and I've been trying to teach them to say "y'all".

There is a current of faith within this community; much less blaming God here than would be expected. God is God, even in these days. PTL. 

Samaritan's Purse has overwhelmed me with the entirety of its work, in food distribution, medical clinics, building and distributing shelter DIY kits, etc. The WASH team has worked in 11 towns providing drinking water, and are digging wells for two of the temporary camps people will live in starting in two weeks. 

Santa with the kids. The local tradition combines Trick-or-Treat and Christmas, so that you give out candy or small change to the children.

Photo with my company vest on. Of course I didn't put the vest on just for the photo. I resent the insinuation. 

3,000 buckets distributed with Sawyer filters for individual families. Water treatment / chlorination systems installed in ten villages (permanent installs) and two temporary bunkhouses. Providing 'tapstands' allows people to collect potable (drinkable) water and return home. 

 

We contracted the formerly beautiful but now destroyed Oriental Hotel as a warehouse for supplies, including 10,000 shelter kits (wood, tarps, roofing), thousands of tonnes of food, blankets, buckets (see above), pumps/chlorine/pipe... just about everything you could imagine. I had no idea what I didn't know about disaster response. Samaritan's Purse has proven itself very qualified. 

Looking at a recently built septic tank in the government-built temporary bunkhouses. Not totally sure how the sewage is going to drain with the water table five feet deep - the problems of a extremely flat coastal area.

We miraculously found Richie the local well digger, who takes with an 8' piece of bamboo, splays out the end, and starts throwing it into the ground. After the hole is around 5-6' deep, he changes to this tripod with a pulley and hollow steel pipe. Throws it into the ground, scooping a bit of sand at a time, until he finishes, with a 30' deep well, lined with 4" PVC. We are completing our 4th of ~8 wells now. 

When a pump stopped working, after the community had built a cage around it, I was too large to fit through the bars. That's where our local engineering student hires come in handy.  John was in there around 90 minutes, taking the pump apart and back together with a 6" adjustable wrench. 

My kids on the drive home after a long day in the sun. Two very sharp local engineering students, without whom there is no way we could have accomplished  as much as we have. Every sentence, request, text, question, utterance from my mouth received a "Yes, sir" or "No, sir" response. It was humbling and humorous.  

I don't totally know what role I played in all of this. I have been helpful, I am sure, and maybe I will better understand why God asked me to do this some day in the future. But I am grateful to be here, and grateful to have whatever it is that I have and the means of giving it away. I inhabit the 'Knowledge Economy", best able to serve the folks by sharing that knowledge and helping them rest secure in a simple forms of security: water. 

I hope that I have honored God with my words and deeds while here, and pray for the handful that will stay on for months to come. I return home after a short jaunt, and they have a long haul ahead.  

Time and Money

In 1999, I spent 10 weeks in northern Thailand as a orphanage volunteer. On my second day there, I joined the director on a 7 hour 'tour' of the city, a thinly disguised shopping marathon from one landscape nursery to another pricing a half-dozen small trees to spruce up the home. AN ENTIRE DAY was used to save a very small amount of money (think of what you would spend to save you four hours shopping, half it, then half it again). Even as an unemployed college student, the amount of money we saved seemed silly. Just spend the money and let's get home.
This was my first of many lessons on the different values of time and money. In a world with limited physical resources, an agricultural community where the times between planting and harvesting are moments of patience, the people are rich in time and poor in money.

This world is turned upside down as I crossed the Pacific. In my daily life, it is of no consequence to spend money to spare me time, as time is money. For my U.S. readers, we work with tremendous vigor to obtain the income that will allow us to rest. For the other 85% of the world population, this path through life seems a bit silly.

Here in the Philippines, I wallow in the middle of these lifestyles, recognizing the limitations of what can be realistically accomplished in any given day, while still wanting to do so much more. It is healthy for me to take the long-view. As a wise mentor once told me,

Do not overestimate what you can accomplish in one year.

Do not underestimate what you can accomplish in ten. 

Yada Yada Ya 2,000liters Yada Yada Ya

A few weeks back, in the initial assessment of the Javier community (3,500 and counting), Sam Purse committed to provide a 10,000 water bag (bladder) with a chlorination system for drinking water. There are a number of handpumps supplying non-drinking water, but the community has historically had to purchase bottled water.

The community needed to build a 4m x 4m x 1m platform to place the bladder bag.
Upon returning a week later, the platform was pretty pitiful, and not strong enough to hold up the water. Apparently, it had been subbed out to the local elementary children.
Taking this to heart, the community went the extra mile, and built this beautiful, structural monstrosity:
The columns and slab are ~18" thick.



Later, in a fit of generosity, and in awe of the platform construction effort, Sam Purse decided to purchase a permanent 10,000 liter water tank for the stand. However, no tanks are to be found in any store in town, and it will be two weeks until they can arrive by boat.

Given that they are purchasing their drinking water, and to honor the effort the Javier community has made, we 'borrowed' an under-utilized 2,000 liter tank to serve as a temporary solution.
Now, I haven't learned too much of the local Waray language, but it didn't take a linguist to translate the reaction as we pulled up in the truck with the small tank.

Waray ako makabaro/intiende! Diri ak nasabot 2,000liters!

Ano hiton imo ngaran? 2,000liters ano imo ngaran? 2,000liter! Dagmit!

I believe that they were a bit underwhelmed (see photo 2). While I ran to the local plumbing supply company, I was told by my local assistant that there was much complaining, and many mentions of the easily translated !2,000 liters!
I suppose I cannot blame them.

Not all Flakes are flakey

As a rookie, I had no idea the size of this venture, and it has taken me 10 days to get my mind around it. The Samaritan's Purse DART team I am with is composed of 30+ people working in various areas of need:

Shelter

Medical

Food

WASH (that'd be me)

NFI (non-food items)

To make the above work happen, you have very essential support staff:

Program Lead

Logistics

Security

Transportation

Human Resources

Inventory

Every time a new person arrives here, they seem to already know a handful of other folks, essentially from previous assignments. SP has a large group of people working in Haiti and South Sudan, among other places. While only a few people here are full-time SP employees, the majority have dropped their jobs and left home, be that:

Canada,

the States,

UK,

Australia,

Cambodia,

Niger,

Uganda,

Ethiopia,

Myanmar

Many of these young’uns here have spent the past 4+ years bouncing from assignment to assignment, spending a few months back home with the parents or bumming a couch at a friend’s place waiting for the next call. If they were in just about any other profession, I would likely label them as ‘flakes’ who need to find their place, whatever that means.

Here, after working alongside people who have traded their roaring 20s to live in tents and take bucket showers, I have learned that not all Flakes are flakey.  

Vehicular Vulnerability

Roads in the developing world are much more lively and interesting than back home:

• buildings are two feet off the edge of pavement; 
• if you want a drink, you stop, jump out, hold up traffic and make your purchase;
• it is acceptable to text and drive... your moped
• its the dogs' responsibility to move out of the way
• honking is a friendly form of communication, usually translated "scoot over, or this game of chicken is going to end badly for us both."

Our form of transportation mimics our economic status and subsequent vulnerability. In the States, we fret over side air bags and have evidence-less laws preventing our children from sitting in the front seat. We discuss safety mechanisms with an air of 'ethics', questioning the dangers we expose our family to in our car purchases.

For the vast majority of the world, the dangers are much more evident. Within this society, the roads are filled with Land Cruisers (for the UN, of course), Toyota trucks, Suzuki mini-vans (not to be confused with minivans), motorcycles, mopeds, bicycles and walking. Citizens of the same community, but of clearly different levels of susceptibility to the inherit dangers of the roadway. For the first world vehicles, a crash damages the exterior and causes a delay. For the father on the moped, flip flops, no helmet, and the family hugging on behind you, a minor accident can have a major physical and economic toll.
There's no pithy statement to wrap this up; it is just an observation made from a few days riding through this land. 

Dirty Santa Failure

Just finished a White Elephant gift exchange here in the Philippines with the DART team of ~30 people. The lack of planning for said event, as well as to a dearth of time and being in a recovery-stage town, limited the gift ideas.
We had ten packages of survival food: protein bars, pasta, Gatorade powder... passing unnecessary goods from one teammate to another. Coming here, we tended to pack for the worst case scenario, which has thankfully not materialized.
Battling for supremacy were ten almost identical #Tingdog Tacloban t-shirts ("rise up Tacloban"), which has become the unofficial city slogan in this season. Apparently, everyone individually discovered the secret t-shirt shop two blocks from here.
I bought a hammock, and wrapped it in anticipation of providing an original gift amongst the crowd. My anticipation continued through the full event and then some, being the one gift not claimed by anyone, with a motherly nurse in the crown putting in two gifts just in case someone forgot. Apparently, my wrapping job was utterly unappealing.
I received a handgun, including laser sight and 10 bullets. It's pretty accurate, and has helped me waive down a few taxis, so I'm good.

I returned to the gift box a couple of hours after we finished the Dirty Santa exchange, and my gift was missing. I'm looking out for a horizontally-lounging Westerner, and have my last bullet saved for him.

Texas Roadhouse, Tacloban Franchise

Samaritan's Purse is utilizing the property of the former Oriental Hotel (adjacent to MacArthur Landing Park) as a warehouse storage property. The current state of the property prevents its use for much else.
A few of the kinder-hearted ladies here among the volunteers set up dinner for everyone, along the beach, with carols and prayer.
Dinner was catered by Steve from go-big-or-go-home Houston, Texas, who runs the local Texas Roadhouse. Steve lost a part of his restaurant, all of his Expat customers, but seems to be confident that he'll make it through this intact.
Traditional Christmas dinner: burgers, corn dogs, cole slaw, cucumber salad, onion rings and chocolate cake. Don't forget the Coca Cola.

The Bowling Christmas Experiment

Christmas is aimed to be the most benevolently wonderful moment of the year, the point in time where God fully reached out to His creation to bring us into the fold.

I have been a Christian my entire adult life, but have never quite captured this sweet essence of Christmas; rather, I most honestly associate December with obligatory obligations, deadline stress, busy to the point of feeling unhealthy, eating to the point of being unhealthy, and the yoke of how.I’m.supposed.to.feel.

Maggie and I endeavor to develop a simple and pure relationship between our nuclear family, Christmas, and Jesus, the latter being the most difficult portion to include in the experience. It is neither easy nor fully implemented. At a minimum, I hope that our children more naturally associate this month with Jesus than I do.

I am away from home this Christmas (to be immortalized in my soon to be released Country song). The typical challenges of being away are magnified this week. For Maggie and me, this is our most service-oriented Christmas yet:

she where she is, and

I where I am.

I hope that our experiences help us embed the soul of Christmas in our reality.

I hope that my absence from home and my presence here will help deepen my shallow appreciation for this sacramental celebration.

He's earned the right to preach to me.

Sunday morning at a local church, 25% destroyed by the storm, but (seemingly) safe enough to meet in. The pastor, standing next to his backpacking tent, which he's living in because his house was destroyed: One of the most difficult parts of the Christian life is that being a Christian does not prevent life's tragedies. Surely if God loves us, He would not take away what we love, who we love.

He then opened the scriptures to 1 Peter, chapter 1, verses 6-7:

In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that your faith - of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire - may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.

His response:   Therefore, as a believer, all trials and tribulations have for us a purpose:

To grow our faith...

To purify our character...

To encourage others with our testimony...

To rest in the knowledge that Jesus is Lord.

Our faith has value, endures through devastation. The pastor encouraged me with his testimony. 

Me and TC

Me and TC took the chopper from Cebu City to Tacloban. It was a bit short of fabulous. The only thing missing were some drug runners shooting handguns from 300 yards away and busting a hole through the window.

It was about an hour in the air, flying over a few islands and open water. On the eastern hillsides, trees were blown over like sticks, all in one direction. On the western slopes of Leyte Island, the trees were standing, with all of the palm branches permanently oriented westward like a compass.

Let us hope

Let us hope that I have already made the biggest mistake of my trip, which included leaving my laptop and cash-laden Carry-on bag in the taxi van from the hotel to the airport a few moments ago.
It doesn't much matter whether you realize 30 seconds or 30 minutes too late, when your newly issued local mobile doesn't yet have any minutes and you have no idea who drove you to the airport anyway (how often does one obtain the contact information of one's drivers? Not often enough, I will now always say).
I borrowed a phone from another volunteer, called the hotel, to plead my case to a very nice lady adept at the art of whispering. Excuse me, Cebu blind people who sing at the airport for our small change, let me go outside, dodge the honking horns, and wedge the mobile into my ear canal so that I could just make out that since the hotel did not schedule the taxi, it does not know who took me. Pretty sure I made her repeat this conclusion three times for good luck before finally hanging up in a lightly subdued panic.
Searched old emails and found the name and number for last night's driver, who I awoke (dropping us off at the hotel at 2:30am last night, he had the good sense to be asleep at 6:40am when I called for help). Taximan Pip said he'd call dispatch.
I wait.
Wait.
11 minutes, 13, 17.
I call Pip back, but the mobile network won't connect.
Try again: no network.
Again: no network.
Amidst some fervant prayer, where I commit one of my daughters to a convent, I try again: no network.
21 minutes after hanging up with Pip, 38 minutes after hanging up with the hotel, 41 minutes after realizing my mistake, the unnamed hero, Mr. Cebu Taxi 2013, calls out my name from across the parking lot, and we rush to each other with... Well, nevermind what happened next.
I have my bag, and now await my last flight.

Bowling 2011 Roadtrip – Day 11: The Line

At 11:00pm tonight, as I headed to the bathhouse of our campground to brush my teeth, I happened upon a couple (the wife holding a flashlight and the husband a wet-nap), as they were wiping the derriere of their Shitzu.
I’m not sure what to say.
I realize that pets have increased their individual value in modern days, and I don’t want to open an avenue of discussion on the appropriateness of $X000s surgeries to extend the life of a pet who is more at peace with their death than we are, but at some point, if you are on vacation in your motor home, and are forced to get out of bed to manually wipe you dog’s ass…
There must be a line somewhere, somewhere very near here.

Bowling 2011 Roadtrip - Day 7: Welcome to America

Walking stride in stride down the thoroughfare of Mt Rushmore’s viewing area with a Japanese couple. He is speaking in rhythmic tones, rather interesting to listen to, which is why I am eavesdropping. Every 5-10 seconds, the cadenced Japanese is interrupted with “Crazy Horse” (a similar sculpture to Mt. Rushmore not far down the tracks). The tone is not “Crazy Horse”, as in “Hey, Crazy Horse, come on over for a Sunday lunch” or “You know Crazy Horse, he’s crazy.” But rather, “CRAZY HORSE, you b*st*rd! I will get even if it is the last thing I do.”
This continues for 4-5 repetitions, while the wife listens quietly to her husband’s obvious disagreement with this long-dead Sioux, until the next discernable statement is “Water Slide”, said without the same vigor, at which point two random Japanese children come out of the woodwork yelling “Yeah!” It is like a scene from a Miyazaki film.

Bowling 2011 Roadtrip - Day 6: Don’t be a Poser

Tonight was the 2nd time I have been fooled by the promise of sweet tea. One should know that foreigners do not know how to make sweet tea, and that when you leave the homeland, you must make do with unsweet or whiskey.
I blame myself: I know the rules and had every logical reason to question my ears, but when a restaurant claims they serve sweet tea, and you’ve driven a long way with four kids, you get weak-minded, and make mistakes that would embarrass your forefathers.
I also blame the communists who invented Gold Peak products, developing their syrup-based ‘tea-beverage’ in a Siberian industrial lab and distributing their non-carbonated soft drink to unknowing restaurateurs around America. I give the Frenchies a pass; no one is gullible enough to pass off Nestea as anything other than what it is.
I realize the temptation to drink non-brewed tea; your tea-fast has weakened you, and the waitress smiles so nice, and it seems rude to ask if the tea is brewed or some hostile upstart; I implore you to hold strong and stay faithful to the Luzianne of our parents, grandparents, and the Disciples.

Bowling 2011 Roadtrip – Day 6: South Dakota, You Are Welcome

In typical Bowling-fashion, we bypassed the Rapid City metropolis with its two modern hotels for Hot Springs, town of 891 people on the far end of Mt Rushmore. We also decided a Teepee would be an adventure within an adventure. Allen Guest Ranch was happy to oblige.
It is safe to say that Allen’s website was a bit misleading. Clocked at 0.43 miles from the cinder-block bathhouse (measured via the car odometer by my wife), the teepees where not exactly what one would call ‘clean’, ‘not-musty’ or ‘infestation-free’. I spent the first 20 minutes grabbing and tossing grand-daddy long-legs from the inner walls; an activity repeated every two hours throughout the night.
And since we decided to camp in a tube with a hole in the roof and another on its side, it rained 1.5” as soon as we unpacked and began to set up. I suppose if we had washed our car, a monsoon would have happened upon us. For a high desert town that receives 14” of rain per year, I do believe we deserve your thanks.