A Man Comes into a Canyon

A man comes into a canyon and makes it his own. With the cunning of his mind and the courage of his heart he makes it his own. With one leg of bone and one leg of wood he kills the mighty buffalo and he has what he needs for food and clothing and shelter. He keeps the canyon his own when he kills the evil one that would despoil it, the blood-drinking one of the mountains. It is his and he has made it so. But he has not done this alone.

… In his hand is a knife that was made far away by another man, a knife that was given to him by an old one, a great one. In his mind is the knowledge to make fire and weapons and clothing and to find food and to provide shelter, knowledge given to him by those who taught him when he was a boy and those who showed him by their own doing when he lived among them.

By himself he is nothing. Only the courage is his alone. All of those others are with him, even in his canyon, and he cannot ever be free of them, for what they have given is with him and is part of him, and without them he could not have made the canyon his own.

Jack Schaefer
The Canyon © 1953

I am self-driven, motivated by personnel excellence. I seek to learn, and do so. I work harder, longer, and sometimes smarter. And in its own way, my life is the American dream.

But in this dream,

(while I bring an essential ingredient to its progression)

a string of people and circumstances,

personal and abstract,

trivial and divine,

have allowed, helped, and lead me to where I am.

Focusing on my immediate vicinity, I see my elevated accomplishments. But in moments of rare consciousness (as when reading the above), I am reminded that the knife in my hand was made far away by others, that the knowledge I have was given to me, that I am surrounded by those who showed me how to live through their own lives.

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business—you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen.

President Barak Obama
Roanoke, Virginia
July 13, 2012

Our President is a bit obtuse in making these declarations, reinforced through multiple speeches throughout his recent campaign. In one very real context, his statements were dangerous and forbidding, reminiscent of the most powerful speeches of a century past, speeches that led over half of the world’s land masses down a dark path of humanistic socialized self-annihilation. I doubt, however, he intended to portray said images. Likely, he recognizes, like me, that even the best of us are surrounded by a great cloud of encouragers, supporters, enablers. There are very few islands among us.

My knife is sharp, solid, and ready to work. As I go about my life, succeeding when I can, I will rely on those before and aside me, and commit to prove reliable to those aside and behind me.  

A Compatriot's Experience

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

We Would Do Well

We would do well to recognize that it’s coming, life, bringing with it the good, bad, and all that is in between. Tragedy and failure arrive on the coattails of our own botches, from our proximity with others’, and from the seemingly random acts beyond our comprehension.

We would do well to prepare ourselves, body mind soul, for the imperfections of our life and the lives around us.

We would do well to wrestle with God over these issues and the questions that arise when we face them. Or in reality, the one question: why? He can handle it, the wrestling. We are not His first opponent. As our Creator, He is familiar with our struggles, knows where we came from, where we are, and where we will be.

When we walk through this life, ignoring our impending losses, suppressing previous pain and disappointment, lulled to sleep by the pretense of the good life, we are propagating shallow roots, like velvety-soft moss, easily lifted by outside forces.

Why, Lord, WHY!?! Dare God to prove His mettle in the days of darkness. Plead for His understanding, coming to grips with our past experiences of loss while preparing for life upcoming.

Our God, the God of good tidings and blessings, is too small. Search and find (be found by) the God of all time, place, and elements of life, the One who understands failure, tragedy, and death, who can bring peace to us amidst the full measure of life, who can deepen our roots.

We would do well to prepare ourselves in the days of plenty for the meagre moments, the times of tragedy, seeking answers to difficult questions before we desperately need them. 

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.