I’m probably the worst blogger
in the very short history of blogging. Most of the time I can’t think of
anything interesting to write about. That probably seems absurd to many of you.
I realize that. But after a while things start feeling normal. If you had a
blog to describe the day-to-day activities of your life, what would you write
about? A trip to the grocery store? A Friday night out-to-dinner with friends? Your
sleeping patterns? Sometimes, what I want to write about is just too long and
intense and I don’t have the patience or desire to sit and type. Let alone
having to relive the experience. Finally, I have to admit the main excuse is
just that I’m rather lazy when it comes to blogging.
Recently, I read a passage in
Barbara Kingsolver’s book The Poisonwood
Bible that does an excellent job at summarizing my excuses. The book is a
story of a Baptist family who uproots their life in Georgia to move to the
Belgian Congo in 1959. The following passage is told by one of the daughters,
15 year old Leah:
I wish the people back home
reading magazine stories about dancing cannibals could see something as
ordinary as Anatole’s clean white shirt and kind eyes, or Mama Mwanza with her
children. If the word “Congo” makes people think of that big-lipped cannibal
man in the cartoon, why, they’re just wrong about everything here from top to
bottom. But how could you ever set them right? Since the day we arrived, Mother
has nagged us to write letters home to our classmates at Bethlehem High, and
not one of us has done it yet. We’re still wondering, Where do you start? “This
morning I got up…” I’d begin, but no, “This morning I pulled back the mosquito
netting that’s tucked in tight around our beds because mosquitoes here give you
malaria, a disease that runs in your blood which nearly everyone has anyway but
they don’t go to the doctor for it because there are worse things like sleeping
sickness or the kakakaka (referring to
cholera) or that someone has put a kibaazu
(referring to a spell) on them, and anyway there’s really no doctor nor money
to pay one, so people just hope for the good luck of getting old because then
they’ll be treasured, and meanwhile they go on with their business because they
have children they love and songs to sing while they work, and…” And you wouldn’t
even get as far as breakfast before running out of paper. You’d have to explain
the words, and then the words for the words.
With all that said, I am making
it a goal during my second year of service to update my blog more regularly.
Lets say a minimum of 1 blog per month. I think that’s reasonable. Unless of
course the internet at my office stops working and my source for posting blogs is
no longer available and when I walk to the telecommunications building in the
hot sun they tell me a technician will be over sometime today and I go back to
the office and sit there all day waiting for the technician and it’s 2pm and I
really want to go home and eat lunch but I can’t leave the office because what
if the technician shows up in the 30 minutes that I’m gone to lunch…You get the
idea. But really, this exact thing happened to me a few weeks ago ;)
