Letters to the Editor: National Geographic

Not that it matters, but I did feel compelled to write a letter to the editor of National Geographic today after viewing their story "Hope in Hell" about humanitarian aid. Here's what I wrote:

The picture of the devastation at the Superdome was an impressive reminder of the suffering that took place three months ago in New Orleans. More recently, I stood at the same site for twenty minutes taking pictures with a team of twelve disaster relief volunteers from Missouri Southern State University on the Friday afternoon following Thanksgiving without seeing a single person or car drive by. We took a group photo next to an abandoned boat, the only vestige of the chaos that thrived there in the days following the disaster, then quietly left the eerie silence of what the 'Big Easy' has become. The sheer lack of any activity was a telling sign of the volume of relief work that remains. Working with the Southern Baptist Convention and the
Red Cross we prepared forty thousand meals for the broken lives that remain... It was a drop in the bucket the size of a city.

My New Travel Blog

My new travel blog is up. It isn't complete, but it does exist. Look for me to archive all my travel journal entries in the near future.

You can find it at Smithing Link 2.

Disaster Relief: Hurricane Katrina

So, I spent the last week on a Disaster Relief Mission to Algiers (New Orleans), Louisiana assisting the Missouri Baptist Convention and Red Cross's efforts to help southwest Louisiana dig out from Hurricane Katrina. My plan at this point is to just start a new blog with all of my mission journal entries for the past 13 years in it, but for now the thing I want to remember (since it isn't in my journal yet) is that I did, in fact, appear on the local Fox TV station and our group got mentioned on National Public Radio. Of course, NPR blew the coverage by refering to our group as "students from colleges around the country" or some such gaff, but ours was, in point of fact, the ONLY student group on site, so we KNOW that we were the people the reporter was talking about. I am especially disappointed since I specifically told her the name of our school. C'est la vie, I guess. Never trust the media...

A letter to my wife

Mandi,

If you've read this, you've read the letter I just wrote to the children. I don't have a bad feeling about the trip or anything like that, I just want to make sure that in the unlikely event that anything did ever happen, that they will know how much I live them.

You're letter will be shorter. Not because I love you less, quite the contrary, I expect more of our love! You are the greatest love in my life. You are the reason I want to get out of bed in the morning, (and get in bed at night... wink, wink, nudge nudge). Seriously though, I love you as much as I know how and I have since before we were married. It is a love that cannot be measured by anything more than time itself and if anything has happened to me then you will know forever that our love is eternal. You make my happy, bring me joy, cause my heart to sing. In the ocean of life, you are my Aitutaki, my Bora Bora. I only wish your life is always as fulfilling as you always made mine.

Love,
Jon

A Letter to My Children

Alyssa, Nate and Anna,

I wish I had time to write you each your own letter...

In less than 48 hours I will be on my way to New Orleans to help out with the disaster relief efforts there. Travelling with me will be 11 students and a van load of people I don't know. Our goal is to help the people who have been so throughly devastated by Hurricane Katrina that even now, more than 6 weeks after the disaster they still don't have utilities. Its a modest mission: feed people DR workers and people whose kitchens still don't work. We've done all we can to ensure a safe experience, but one never knows...

Ultimately, the morbid reason for this letter is to make sure that if anything happens while we are apart, you will know how much you all mean to me. You are amazing children, far ahead of your peers in many areas of life. I love you all. I am proud of you all. I see hope for a bright future in each of your eyes. You have each,since the day you were born, been a source of joy and happiness in my life. You are often the reason I smile to myself when no else is there to see it. You are the reason I come home from work early sometimes. You are a blessing to me that I do not deserve and cannot repay. You are kind and gentle, intelligent and compassionate. My sincere hope is that you continue to grow in those qualities.

Regardless of the strange, sometimes harsh, twists of fate that life brings, I want you all to know that I will always love you. Nothing can change that, ever. Nothing that happens, nothing you do or don't do has anything impact on my love for you. You are precious. Never forget that. You are loved. Never forget that. Always remember, you are mine.

And more than that, you are God's. You will probably soon forget the song you now enjoy, "I am a promise..." But I love hearing you sing it. Your lives are full of promise. Not because of me or any other material edge you may have, but because God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. He loves you and want to have a relationship with you that will enable you to experience peace and hope and love and joy on a level that I could never provide. He loves you so much that He sent His son Jesus into the world to show you how to live and to be the payment for all the sin in your lives. And He says that you can have a relationship with Him if you just accept His Son into your life...

All you need to do to begin that relationship is accept Christ. Say, "God, I know I do wrong things. I can't stop myself and I know that hurts you, that justice requires me to pay you back for all the pain my wrongs, my sin has caused. And I'm asking you now to bring Jesus into my heart. Thank you for letting Him be the one ultimate payment for my sin. My life is yours, thank you for giving me life in Jesus your Son. Amen."

And its not so much the words of that prayer that count, but the attitude of your heart. Give yourself to Jesus, submit to His authority in life, and watch what God does with you. You'll be amazed. And I'll see you in heaven, my dearly loved ones.

Love,
Daddy

Poop stories

I know this is pretty gross, but 1) I am a guy, and 2) working in missions--collegiate ministry is a mission field--over the years has equipped me with some fascinating scatalogical narrative, which I find a use for at least once or twice a year (usually at a men's retreat or on a mission trip). So, here they are...

Chicken Mole
During my senior year in high school my church, Emerald Bible Fellowship, took the youth group to Mexico for Spring Break. It was a trip the church made every year, this one happened to be my second. For most of the week everything was normal. We went to a missionary compound and did various work projects all day, then hung out with locals at night. We also worked on building a church. The trouble began at the end of the trip...

To show their appreciation for all our hard work, a group of ladies who lived near the mission decided to make dinner for us and several other groups that were woking in the same area. The dinner was served just prior to our leaving the area. Our plan was to eat, load up the vans and head for Anaheim, CA, where we would sleep in before spending a day at Disneyland. That was our plan...

It was Friday night. Dinner was Chicken Mole. The only problem is that mole sauce has to be served immediately after it is made or it spoils, and you can't taste the difference between spoiled mole and unspoiled. The ladies slaved away all day preparing that meal and it was good. Mole is delicious. Then we loaded up the vans and headed North. I'm not sure how far we got over the border, but it wasn't long before the first rumblings of trouble began...

There were 120 people on the trip, travelling in 22 vans. Not long after dark one of the girls in the van I was in complained of a stomach ache (translation: diarhea). We were in the middle of nowhere and she was desperate, so we stopped the convoy so she could scamper out and do her business in a ditch beside the road. (I should mention that we were in a rural area, not on a freeway. There were open fields for miles in every direction at that point.) She was embarrassed, so it took a few minutes. By the time she returned, another person had complained and I knew that I was in trouble myself, although I hadn't mentioned it yet. Still, we needed to keep moving, so we sucked it up, got back on the road and kept driving.

A few minutes later the calls for relief were beginning to multiply with varying intensity. I was the third or fouth to complain, but within half an hour the radios we used to communicate between vehicles were filled with chatter of scatalogical significance. But we were still in the middle of nowhere and toilet paper was at a premium. A decision was made to take the next available exit that offered any kind of civilization. In the meantime, I scored roll of TP from one of the ladies driving our van, Echo Lowery. Echo was like a second mother to me and that night I'd have kissed her. Not every van even had a roll.

The only thing we could find within a reasonable (immediate) time was a church. I don't remember the name or denomination; it didn't matter. All that mattered was me getting out of the van and into nearby bushes. Before we had even rolled to a stop, the doors to many of the vehicles swung open and men, women, boys and girls scampered in the shrubbery in the lawn and flowerbeds around the church building. I was the first one out...

There was an island of shrubbery in the middle of the church lawn. It provided a good 360-degree screen for me as I dropped my pants, prayed not to hit my shoes and let out a monster of a hershey-squirt. (Pardon my French.) I was done in less than a minute. To my surprise, however, I couldn't get out of the bushes; I was completely surrounded by fellow students who had been desperate enough to park their pooh at the edge of the island. I handed off my roll of TP to one desperate soul who hadn't been able to secure anything to finish their business. I can't even remember now if it was a boy or a girl. Our need to "take care of business" overrode any reservations we might have had about pooping in front of the opposite sex. It was dark and we were truly desperate. I will never forget the image of a classmate being chased down the road, pants around his ankles, by a friend who was waving a dollar bill and yelling, "Wipe! Jamie, wipe!"

88 of the 120 in our group were sick that night. Many of them on the lawn of the church. By the time we were finished it looked like vandals had completely defiled the property. The second wave of poopers had to use open lawn, because the bushes weren't safe to walk in any more. It was a sight to behold.

Epilogue: A van of the sickest people was left at the nearest motel, the rest pushed on to Anaheim arriving at 6am. More than six hours off schedule. One girl left a Bible at the church, and was able to explain the situation to a custodian she met there when she went early the next morning to pick it up. The church was glad to be of service, and pleased that there was actually a reasonable explanation for why so many people would poop on their property on a Friday night...

Bolivia
So, back when the earth was young (Summer 1993) I went on a mission trip with Campus Crusade for Christ to Cochabamba, Bolivia. Now, normally when you go someplace where the water is suspect you just drink it bottled. But when you're in country for over 6 weeks, you make mistakes... EIther you brush your teeth to vigorously, or you eat fruit that's been washed, or you take ice in your coke, et cetera, et cetera. In my case it was probably all of the above, but who cares, since we all (there were 14 of us) in the same boat, er, bathroom, within a week. By the end of the second week our normal breakfast conversation centered on the consistency of our pooh, which was usually the color of black ink, had the viscosity of the water that had caused our sorrowful condition, and came out at Mach 1. Before we were done that summer, at least three people had pooped in their pants. I, fortunately, was not among them. However, I came as close as a man can come to pooping in his pants without actually doing it...

I remember sitting at a table about four weeks into our mission, sharing a coke with a Bolivian friend on the campus of La Universidad Mayor de San Simon, when the urge struck. And when I say 'urge', I mean URGE!!! I set my coke down, turned to an American friend named Judson who happened to be nearby and told him to lead me to the nearest restroom immediately. I knew I was in good hands with Judson because he was the first one of our party to poop his pants (perhaps 'oiled' himself' would be better, given the nature of our pooh) and had made a religious habit of knowing the exact proximity and vector of every restroom within half a mile thereafter.

Judson ran. I followed. When the restroom came into view across an open quad I sprinted. As I passed Judson I realized my one problem; TP. Public restrooms in Bolivia do not stock TP. If you go in without any, you won't find any inside. Normal protocol is to purchase TP from the little old ladies who habitually loiter just outside the public restrooms and sell TP on a stick. You don't buy the roll, just enough to get the job done.

Problem: I didn't have time to slow down for the TP lady. Solution: I threw my wallet over my shoulder and yelled at Judson to 'pay the lady' for me and bring in some TP. It was close, but I made it, and eventually Judson came through with the potty paper. What a relief...

Never Trust a Fart
I made Mandi swear she would never share this with anyone... On my honeymoon, sitting in a lounge chair at a resort on Rarotonga, talking with my new bride about who-knows-what, I actually uttered the phrase, "...I just pooped my pants." It wasn't huge, just a little hershey stripe, but it was definitely more than a fart. There, I've said it. I'm not proud of it, but it did happen. I blame the fish...

Beans, Beans, the Magical Fruit
When I was very young, perhaps 5 or 6, we lived on a hill in the woods. 834 South 71st St. in Springfield, Oregon, to be exact. And it was a wonderful place to grow up. We could ride Big Wheels down the road in front of the house, wander through the woods looking at nature, play Cowboys and Indians around the yard or build dams in the spring that flowed nearby. Of course, living so close to nature has great benefits for a young boy. For instance, he can snack on blackberries without going in the house, or eat the beans that magically grow in the yard after the deer graze awhile... Yes, I ate deer poop. In my defense, I was very young and at such a tender age poop and beans can look a lot alike. I developed a tapeworm for my troubles, which I pooped out at some point much later. Mom was pretty grossed out by the whole affair, but what's a childhood without magic beans?

Lake Troy
So, after a long march and an even longer drive out of the woods and back home after a weekend camping trip, a friend of mine, Troy Klaus, created perhaps the single greatest toilet overflow I've ever seen. Why he didn't go in the woods, or at the gas station, or at his own house, I do not know. What I do know is that after dropping a prodigious log in our own toilet, he wiped with something like a half a roll of TP and flushed. Water poured out of the toilet, then out of the bathroom. It was amazing how much water came from that one flush. It was as it the valve was stuck. Anyway, we named the resulting puddle "Lake Troy." And as good a guy as Troy was to be with, tenderhearted and considerate, with an easy laugh and an infectous smile, I will remember him more for that one defining, poopy moment.

Ron
For some unknown reason an old college buddy of mine, Kenny Sargent, one day decided that the little piece of poop that just wont flush (you know, the piece that just swirls around, but won't follow the main body of the bowel movement down the pipe). Kenny decided that that little piece of leftover piece of pooh needed a name. And I don't know what philosophic meandering his brain went through to arrive at that conclusion, but once the decision to name the offending particle was made Kenny acted swiftly to cal l it "Ron." I don't know anybody named 'Ron' that Kenny was upset with, and I asked him what 'Ron' had done to deserve such a namesake, but no answer was forthcoming. Did Kenny even know a 'Ron'? I can't say. All I know it that I'll never see the McDonald's clown in quite the same way.