It has been another month or so since I last wrote, and since I promised to try and be better about sending out more regular updates I thought it was probably about time to fill you in on all the exciting things happening this past month.

The first thing which happened was that I went to my first peace-building conference here in Egypt. One of the priests in a nearby town was putting together a conference and had invited a Canadian out to be the key speaker. Interestingly enough the priest didn’t even know that I had taken this new position as the Peace Coordinator but for some reason he thought that it would be good for me to be along. Anyway, it turns out this Canadian (Brice Balmer) was one of the original people working on developing restorative justice as a viable alternative to the current criminal justice system. It was quite interesting hearing him talk about his experiences and his insights, and it was also great to watch the Egyptians attending the conference begin to think about possible ways to contextualize the things he was saying.

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Ever since I can remember, I have enjoyed working with food. I believe this has to do with the amount of involvement I had with fresh local food, growing up in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. The Mount Hagen market was filled with fantastic fruits and vegetables and the gardens around our home were full of sweet potatoes, coffee, sugar cane and peanuts. The vibrant community gatherings that surrounded a special ceremony such as a bride price always included a pig kill. It is wonderful to have a whole community working together, each in their various capacities to make a huge feast. One of my first memories is of a large pig-kill in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, where my father was a missionary. At the end of this article there is a cute video of a traditional pig kill in PNG, which will give you a good idea of what my first mumu (ground oven) was like.

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Please sign a petition to stop hunting endangered wolves.

I have been wanting to get to Wolf Haven International for a while, so when our niece turned two we took the kids on a trip to see the wolves. Wolf Haven is just South of Olympia in Washington State and takes in wolves that have been kept as pets. I had assumed that the wolves were eventually released back into the wild, but once a wolf has lived around humans they can’t survive in the wild. Wolves are wild at heart so once they get past a certain age they are unpredictable (which is why they can’t be kept as pets).

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I’ve just had the most amazing weekend, and thought it might be of interest to others living here in Vancouver.

I wasn’t even aware of this until a couple days ago, but there is a great program here called the Vancouver Tourism Challenge, which is available to everyone working or volunteering in the tourism industry in the city. How it works is each spring participants are given a tourism challenge passport, which grants free admission for themselves and a guest to a whole slew of tourist attractions in the city and surrounding areas for the next month. By collecting stamps in the passport at enough of these attractions, they earn free admissions for the entire year, as well as discounts at restaurants, hotels, and being entered to win prizes.

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My life in here in Beba has been similar to the previous posts I have written. I am still living here at the church and teaching English in two different towns. I have a couple more stories about Egyptians that I find telling about the culture as a whole.

Both of them actually happened as I was travelling between one of the towns where I teach and the one where I live. As you may recall I have been taking microbuses between these two towns which they pack completely full of people and then go careening off down the road to try and make as many trips as possible in the day so they can make enough money to pay rent. They aren’t the wealthiest people, these microbus drivers, but they do seem to normally make enough to at least feed their families.

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I have had quite the exciting, travel-filled, and busy month which I will regal you all with presently. However, I have been thinking for the past few months that I need to talk about the generosity of the culture here. It really is quite remarkable the extent to which this generosity is a part of the everyday life of the people.

I wanted to make sure that I knew a little bit more about the culture before I talked about it, because I wasn’t sure how different my experience as a foreigner would be from the average Egyptian. Although my experience is certainly different as a foreigner, I don’t think that this takes away from the culture as a whole.

In Cairo, and probably some of the more touristy places where they are used to foreigners it is common for people to try and take advantage of the foreigner. So for the first month this was mostly my experience in Egypt. I had to make sure I knew how much things should cost so that I wasn’t charged extra for being a foreigner. And there are some touristy places, like the pyramids, or the Egyptian Museum where foreigners actually have a separate entrance price than Egyptians. I understand that these places take up-keep and that foreigners in general have much more money that Egyptians, so I understand why they have this policy, but it still meant that I had to be aware.

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Who can resist an open air market? In Shan State they have a very clever system by having their farmers market run on a five day cycle. So, for example, around the mystical Inle Lake, the market will be one day in Nyaung Shwe, the next at Mein Tauk, the next at the other corner of the lake as a floating market, etc. This way local farmers can sell their product without having to go too far afield, and tourist just love going to the different locations each day. It is a system worth considering bringing back to other areas of the world. The Burmese have been forced to maintain their traditional methods of farming and subsistence living, which may in the long run be a blessing in disguise for them and the rest of the world. If any of us want to know how to live really sustainably, I recommend following in the footsteps of E.F. Schumacher (author of Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered) by going to Burma and learning from them.

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One of the things about being broke all the time is that the best way to get places is to walk. Which is actually very good for you — mind and body-wise, and fortunately, we love it. While living in Wellington, unfortunately our laundromat was at the bottom of a huge hill so every two weeks on my one day off a week we dragged our backpacks stuffed with dirty clothes down the mountain and hauled our freshly folded clean laundry back up a steep hill. It sure felt great when we got to the top and flopped down looking out over the hilltops of Wellington.

Wellington really feels like the end of the world in many ways, being at the tip of the North Island of New Zealand. With the wind and waves of all of the mighty Pacific Ocean rushing through the narrow Cook Straight, it gets the most changeable weather and wild winds of any place I have ever lived. I loved walking around the coves and rock pools that made up the wild coast-line, each cove had quite different characteristics than the next.

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The first time I visited Burma/Myanmar was in December of 1995. We stayed in the YMCA in downtown Yangon (formerly Rangoon) and were harassed by bed-bugs all night. I remember the streets being particularly gray at that time, except for the bright blue, tiny little taxi’s that were the only vehicles tearing around the roads. This little trucks seem like little blue ladybugs and can still be seen today, packed into the traffic filled streets.

Since then I have had the opportunity to get to know the markets of Rangoon. Most tourists don’t stay long in Yangon, the more mystical tourist destinations are Bagan, Inle Lake or even Kyaiktiyo — the Famous Golden Rock Pagoda, and most tours follow a highly scheduled ten day whirlwind dash to these favorite sites.

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I took a biodynamic agriculture certificate course while living in Wellington, New Zealand. The course involved spending a week every few months on a biodynamic farm in Havelock North, New Zealand. As a result we were able to spend a bit of time road tripping across the North Island. Unfortunately we lost a lot of the photos we took when we had to get rid of our car, but we had a great time with friends in Tauranga and Napier.

I particularly love the Cabbage Trees of Aotearoa, they always make me feel like I am living in a Doctor Seuss book. New Zealand flax, and the massive ponga (ferns) are another of my favorite vegetation. It is always fun to see the sheep that New Zealand is famous for.

We had some amazing slow trips along bumpy dirt roads. It always seemed that every time we entered one of these mystical undeveloped sections of the road we would start seeing rainbows and double rainbows.

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