Holiday in Whangarei

Martin and I have just got home from a week in Whangarei visitng his parents.  I made it on one outing there: to the A.H. Reed Memorial Park - a patch of forest that includes a boardwalk up near the tree canopy!  It was lovely being there.  Martin also went on a few walks with Dad, including up their local hill - Parahaki.

Photos of those outings, as well as a few from around the house, are up on flickr.  There's also a kind of panorama from the canopy boardwalk here.  If you click on the photo it'll scan around the panorama, but using the mouse you can also look up to the sky and down to the ground.  That was Martin's first go using the fancy panorama feature on his new phone :-)

Incidentally, I remain quite stunned at how well I'm doing since I started taking the ribose back in August.  I've recently reduced my dose (standard advice is that you should do this after about 4 weeks but it was never the right time for me to do this until a week or two back...) and my energy levels have still remained high.  At least, high for me, that is!

Kiwi cards

I made the above cards yesterday for a couple of overseas friends.  I'm really pleased with them :-)

The desire to be heard

I've just listened to the BBC documentary Voices from the Ghetto, in which Polish Jews describe their daily lives in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II.  It's a sad account of what people can do to other people, but also a striking example of the strength of the human desire to be heard: to know that others know that you exist.

The texts read by actors in the documentary are a tiny fraction of the systematic records left by Jews of ghetto: recorded by individuals, copied in triplicate by a typing pool and periodically buried in metal cans to (hopefully) be found by posterity.  Such committment to the telling of their story!

In a funny way, it reminds me of Facebook.^*  Why else do people record the minutiae of their lives (or, indeed, post increasingly outrageous pictures of themselves) if not from a longing to be seen and heard?  They may not have such a terrible or important story to tell but still, I hear echoes between the two in that common desire to be seen, heard and known.

^* or, at least, Facebook as stereotypically used by teenagers...

The greatest commandment

A recent post on Paul Windsor's blog referred back to his 2008 reflections on David Kinnaman's book Unchurched.  According to research from The Barna Group, non-church-going American 16-29 year-olds perceive the Church as:

1.  too hypocritical;
2.  too focused on getting converts (outsiders 'feel like targets rather than people' p29);
3. too antihomosexual (for a staggering 91% of respondents - as 'hostility towards gays has become virtually synonymous with Christian faith' p92);
4. too sheltered ('Christians seem aloof and insulated', p124);
5. too political ('a movement that was bursting with energy to spread good news to people 20 years ago - has been exchanged for an aggressive political strategy that demonises segments of society', p153);
6. too judgmental. 

The thing that strikes me about Paul's list?  When outsiders look at us, they feel our hate.^*

It reminds me of my Saturday morning walks to my local Farmers Market when I lived in Pittsburgh.  En route, I passed by an abortion clinic.  A Christian group regularly picketed that clinic and aggressively accosted anyone they suspected might be trying to get to it.  I so hated the intimidating manner of the people who accosted me that sometimes I walked a much longer way around just to avoid them.  In no way did I get the impression that these were people who cared about me or my (possible!) unborn child: I just felt that they wanted to obstruct and oppose me and I wanted to get away.

It makes me really sad.

^* see points 3., 6., probably 5. and, to an extent, 2.

Manaiakalani Trust

There was a short piece on Radio New Zealand National this afternoon about the Manaiakalani Trust: an organisation that Hapara (where Martin now works) work with.  They make it possible for kids in a group of very poor schools in Auckland to have access to their own computers, and then use various forms of e-learning to help the kids catch up to their educational year-level and beyond!  It seems like the systems Hapara is developing really could give kids like those Martin grew up alongside in Thailand opportunities a bit more like those that his Kiwi connections gave him :-)

Anti-life activities

On Radio New Zealand Nation yesterday morning there was a report that the SAS are intending to hunt down and kill those Afghanis responsible for the recent deaths of New Zealand soldiers.  The Prime Minister has denied these reports, but the RNZ reporter appears to have had two somewhat independent sources for his story.  Couple that with the (necessary) secrecy around the work carried out by the SAS and I'm far from confident that the report is untrue.

I've just emailed the Minister of Defence (Dr. Jonathan Coleman) about this situation.  I feel very strongly that the New Zealand forces must under no circumstances be involved in carrying out such extra-judicial killings.  Should those suspected of killing our soldiers be found, they should be tried in an appropriate court.  Killing people because we assume them to be guilty of an offence against us is never appropriate.

I feel that this is an important 'pro-life' issue - up there with abortion - so I'm posting it here in the hope of drawing some attention to this matter.  So far it's only a rumour, and it's the first I've heard of New Zealand being accused of intending to do such a thing, but the New Zealand military really musn't get involved in carrying out extrajudicial killings.  The Afghanis who carried out the killings on NZ soldiers (along with any other Afghanis who are suspected of having done so) are made in the image of God.  Their lives were given to them by God, and we should only take them from them (if at all) in fear and trembling.  Our laws were developed in this understanding, and we should not lightly set them aside.

Should you wish to email the Minister of Defence yourself, his email address is jonathan.coleman@parliament.govt.nz.

Floating wick oil lamp

 

My parents gave me this pretty little candle jar for my birthday.  It was intended for use with a tealight, but that left the lower part of the jar in darkness.  So instead, I decided to burn oil in it, using a floating wick.  I made the wick following the instructions in this pdf and, after a little tweaking to stop the cork portion of the wick stand from burning, I think it's working rather well :-)

I've found that canola oil gives a very smoky flame, grapeseed oil is a bit smoky and olive oil is barely smoky at all.

My thanks to Anna and Aunty Elspeth for helping me test the lamp while Martin was away.