a new goal for year 2

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 ;)