Well, I promised some of you that I’d be updating this site during our time in Costa Rica, but time has been of the essence and I have been unable to do so. However, I have become the semi-official blogsperson and photographer for our team and we are updating the team site as often as we can. Please check it out here.

I.
Sitting at the bar at Primanti Brothers, a sandwich place at Market Square in the heart of downtown Pittsburgh, I overheard the conversation between another waitress and a patron.

One of them asked the other, in reference to the crowd of people outside in Market Square, “What’s going on out there?”

“I don’t know, something about… um… Dar… fur?”

“What’s that?”

“Not sure. Something in Africa, I think. Not sure though.”

“Here’s your sandwich.”

“Have a great day.”

II.
If you have seen photos of downtown Pittsburgh, they were probably taken from up on Mt. Washington. They were also probably taken on beautiful, sunny, warm days, which, talking to David, are all too uncommon.

On this particular occasion, the conditions could best be described as chilly, foggy, windy and drizzly. In other words, epic. David would say it was very Sufjan Stevens. I held up two umbrellas, challenging Wind to a duel, daring her to sweep me off that ridge and out across the river and to plop me down where she would. On this day, however, Wind was no match for the powerful tandem that is Gravity/Hoiland.

III.
Having descended from our misty perch, we carved out some time in the afternoon at Crazy Mocha, the coffee shop humble enough to boast “Pittsburgh’s Best Coffee.” Anna spent some time on the inter-web while David and I discussed theology and tattoos and the theology of tattoos.

Then we turned our attention to baseball trivia, including (but not limited to) the naming of every World Series match-up between the years of 1982 and 1995. I told him about the Mariners’ magical year in ’95. He told me about the Pirates back in the day when they had Barry Bonds and Bobby Bonilla and Andy Van Slyke.

Baseball was on our minds as we sat near the big windows in the coffee shop because we were monitoring the weather, hoping that the Pirates game wouldn’t be rained out.

IV.
I am not sure what the opposite of “chagrin” would be, but that is precisely what we were filled with as the skies cleared out and we joined the throng, making our way over to PNC Park for the ballgame.

We got ourselves some seats directly beneath (and slightly behind) the scoreboard. The sun was descending behind the stands along the first base line, and Anna let out a poetic lament: “The sun is deteorating my retinas.”

I didn’t mind the sun though, as it was the only thing keeping us warm. Once it had fallen out of view, taking pleasant temperatures with it, David and I set out on a lap around the stadium, which is the only real way to enjoy the middle innings of a baseball game if you ask me.

We had almost completed the lap when, in the middle of the sixth inning, the centerfielder tossed a ball over the wall to a group of fans that reminded me of a crocodile farm at feeding time, with outstretched arms in the place of snapping mouths. The ball sailed in slow-mo through the air, glistening under the bright lights, and music from Braveheart soared to new heights. Everything else went silent as a whole throng of Pirates fans leapt for the ball in unison. But on this night fate was on the side of the sojourner just passing through, and the ball now sits beside me as I type, with its blue ink and its scuff marks and the careful stitching of a woman in a hut in the Dominican Republic.

The Buckos were playing the Reds, which is nothing special, but it was Freddy Sanchez Bobble-head Night, which is enough to make any blue-collar steel worker with calloused hands and black lungs giddy as all get-out.

As David and I were making the rounds we discovered a fan who had a stack of probably fifteen bobble heads. “I’m donating them to kids in Africa,” he told us. “Figure, they can’t eat; at least they can play with bobble heads.”

This was probably the stupidest thing I have ever heard.

V.
Church this morning was in the cafeteria at the Goodwill Industries building. I went in skeptical for various reasons, and indeed felt out of place what with my lack of tattoos and piercings and greasy hair and all, but came away refreshed by - and thankful for - this light in what I take to be a rather dark place.

VI.
Pittsburgh, David tells me, had a population of 680,000 in 1950. Fifty years later, it had more than cut in half, down to 330,000. Not surprising, therefore, the city seems to have a certain hollow feeling to it. David also reminds me, however, that Pittsburgh was recently named the most livable city in America. As one who is a sucker for bridges and waterways and skylines and houses on hills and old churches and graffiti and grit, I won’t argue.

VII.
In reference to the description of the featured coffee of the day at the Starbucks at the service plaza off the turnpike on the way back home, I commented to Anna that as a Guatemalan, I like to think that I too am “mellow and well-rounded,” but I know this assessment is up for debate.

… just thinking about this.

I thought I was taking a risk, heading off to Cambodia for three months. After spending my formative years in a third world country, I had gotten a little too comfortable with my suburban American life, and it was time to go. It was time to go far, to leave the cave and regain my sight.

So on August 30 in the middle of the night I set out down the long tunnel at Newark International Airport, away from family and friends and familiarity, and walked willfully, yet nervously, into the arms of the great unknown.

At the time it seemed like truly risky business.

But this was before I got there and realized that the time of preparation before the trip was ten times more stressful than actually being there, and before I was slapped in the face with the realization that the idea of safety as we know it is largely a figment of our imagination.

Within the first few weeks of my time in Cambodia, I heard from a friend of mine back home who was mugged by my next-door neighbors, the ones who’d always be hanging out on the front steps when I’d get home from work. Then came news of the tragic Amish school shooting, which made front page headlines in the Cambodian newspaper, along with a map of the area that showed the school just a few miles from my parents’ house.

So there I was in Cambodia (which is not necessarily synonymous with safety in the first place), hearing accounts of senseless violence from “home sweet home,” along with reports of a military coup in the country to the west and a typhoon just to the east.

And in a way, this was nothing new. I did, after all, grow up in Guatemala, where the fact that my first fifteen years were spent in a nation engaged in civil war seemed normal to me. And I did travel to Kenya in the summer of 2004, just days after the State Department issued a warning, urging Americans to stay out if they knew what was best for them.

If your instinct is to tell me that the kind of thing I am advocating is analogous to walking across an LA freeway with a blindfold over my eyes, I’d challenge you to reconsider. There is a big difference between the risk of venturing into parts of the world or parts of your city commonly (often ignorantly and wrongly) deemed unsafe, and the risk of jumping off cliffs into quarries when anyone can tell you this has been a recipe for all too many needless deaths.

While both kinds of activities are risks, one is senseless, and one is right. Both are risky because you never know what will happen. But stepping out of your comfort zone is something God calls all of us to, and it is right because it is sometimes only by venturing into the unknown that we can come back home with new eyes, able to see the often disturbing (but no less real) truth that we don’t have control over much of anything, no matter where we are. And when we go to these places, the idea that here is safe and there is risky will be exposed for the backwards lie that it is, along with the lie that we, and those like us, are mostly saints, while they, whoever they are, are mostly demons.

There may have been a time when it was less crucial to know anything about the outside world. But today the outside world has come inside, to the point that there is really no longer any inside and outside, but rather only side-by-side.

So, as people called to love our neighbors, we’d do well to get to know them. And you just can’t do that in a cave.

(this is me musing.)

I currently sit in a remarkably comfortable easy chair in a room at the Hampton Inn that I am sharing with four others here in St. Louis. A busload of us arrived here in town around noon today for Urbana. This is a conference put on every three years by Inter Varsity Christian Fellowship and they are expecting somewhere around 25,000 college students from North America and around the world.

This is a photo taken just moments ago. Do not underestimate the difficulty in taking a photo with one’s left hand.

Say what you will about McDonald’s, they are doing their best to revamp the atmosphere in their restaurants.

This is what a bus full of tired people look like after riding through the heart of America in the night.

This is Brian, a Texas native. The light you see in the vicinity of his face is an apt metaphor for the wisdom e’er emanating from his mouth.

In this photo I would like to direct your attention to two things. One, Brian is reading (which explains the sunspot above). Also, please note Dan the Bus Driver’s killer shades.

This is Beau soon after waking up.

This is a huge cross you can’t miss from the highway. Less obvious is the tiny little independent Baptist church it belongs to. Also, the van ahead of us is from Lancaster and has “Urbana or Bust” painted on the back. We spotted them by chance somewhere in Indiana or Illinois and proceeded to journey the rest of the way together.

DAY ONE: Phnom Penh to Chau Doc

Boat at dock

Cruising down the Mekong

Chau Doc at night

Internet café, Chau Doc

DAY TWO: Chau Doc to Cantho

Breakfast at hotel in Chau Doc

Exploring floating villages by rowboat

Farming some sort of plant

Little feller with a pixie stick

Front of mosque

Carpet in mosque

Wee little cat

Old feller having a smoke

Back to dock in rowboat

Overlooking the Cambodia-Vietnam border

Lady Chua Xu Temple

Hungry critter at croc farm

A whole slew of juvenile crocs

Soup that tasted like spicy fruity pebbles

Hotel in Cantho

First time bowling in a communist country

The dragon fruit given to Buddha, then given to me

The monk who gave us the fruit off the altar

Cantho at night

DAY THREE: Contho to Ho Chi Minh City

Floating market

No minimum age to operate a boat apparently

Making rice paper

Cruising through the delta

Tour guide Hip with a water snake

Sautéed frog with curry

DAY FOUR: HCMC walking tour

Intersection in HCMC

Fish in Ben Than Market

Beans in Ben Than Market

Jesus among other gods, Ben Than Market

Uncle Ho and City Hall

Reunification Palace

View from top of Reunification Palace

War Remnants Museum

US Army tanks, War Remnants Museum

Protest poster, War Remnants Museum

Barbed wire, War Remnants Museum

Notre Dame cathedral

Inside Notre Dame

DAY FIVE: Cu Chi Tunnels

Unbiased documentary on the war

One entrance to the tunnels

Jon inside the tunnels

Listening to one of many semi-historic spiels from Tour Guide Bean

Ride on a moto across town

Front of our hostel

In the lobby at the hostel

HCMC at night

Photos from Vietnam will be coming in the morning, but first things first.

The trip back to Phnom Penh had all the makings of an uneventful six hours, but such was not in the cards today, my friends. The ride itself wasn’t bad. The A/C actually worked really well, but the condensation from it started dripping on the German in front of me while the Russian guy behind me talked on and on about the going rates for girls in Asia and about opium and “happy pizza.” Otherwise the bus was fine.

The border crossing was what I didn’t account for. Since I am not just passing through Cambodia like most of those on the bus, I needed to get a business visa instead of a tourist one, which meant I needed to fend for myself while the bus company people took the rest of the passports inside in order to cut through all the red tape. I waited in extra lines and filled out extra forms. I was asked if I had a copy of my immunization record and as I did not, I had to pay a dollar, knowing full well that this was just an easy way for government officials to line their pockets. I looked the guard in the face and laughed as I handed him the dollar bill, shaking my head, trying to shame him a little bit. I went through an x-ray machine where the attendant was talking to a young lady and didn’t bother to glance up at me or my bag even once. But by the time I got through all of this and emerged outside, the bus was nowhere to be found.

Being stranded at the border with half your luggage, very little money, and no one who speaks English is a potentially very stressful place in which to find oneself. I stood there figuratively scratching my head, trying to conjure up a solution. A guard with no idea about much of anything motioned for me to walk down the road, and seemed to indicate that my bus was around the corner, but it was not. Finally, the bus company guy, the one we unknowingly paid off to get us through the border, came running up and instructed me to get on a moto, so I did and about a mile down the road the bus was pulled over, waiting.

We’re supposed to love our neighbors as ourselves, and we are even supposed to love our enemies. I know this, or at least I nod my head when people say things like that. Nodding your head is easy. Actually loving people is hard. Especially when you come face to face with corrupt border officials who can have their way with you and will do what they want, and the bus leaves you behind, or you hear a guy talking about getting “ripped off” when they charged him $40 for two hours with a girl. In these moments you wish you could just throw those verses of Scripture out the window and strangle some people or at least punch them in the face. I believe there is such a thing as righteous anger, but I guess I am just trying to figure out how to love like God loves and hate what he hates. And this is no easy task.

This morning we hopped on a bus headed for Cu Chi tunnels with some new found friends from France and Mexico who we met during breakfast at the hostel. The bus trip was about an hour and a half each way. The tunnels were interesting; an extremely complex system of underground passageways allowing for the Victor Charlie to maneuver here and there right under the noses of the South Vietnamese or the American troops, undetected. Clever little rascals. But I won’t write much about the tunnels because our tour guide will be more interesting for you. The guy’s name is Bean (at least phonetically), and he talked just about incessantly, editorializing freely and repeating himself quite a bit. At one point he said not to ask us about his experience fighting in the war because it is too painful to remember and he wants to forget, but then he proceded to tell us (without our prompting) more than we could have ever wanted to know. He told us the story in pieces, so I’ll do my best here for you. The story goes that he fought for the South alongside American troops as a member of the Navy. He was an officer on a ship and American troops saluted him, he said. Later the story had him in the Coast Guard, where he flew the helicopter and then somehow also managed to be the guy at the door yelling “Go! Go! Go!” as troops parachuted out. He was not on the ground, he told us, so he never went near the tunnels. Later in the tour, however, he told us of leading reconnaisance missions deep into the jungle to find dead American soldiers so their bodies could be sent home. He would have a flashlight in one hand and a gun in the other, and he showed us how he would yell, “Billy, go that way!” and “John, over here!” At one point he claims to have worked for John Kerry while he lived in New York, though he moved back to Vietnam because he couldn’t stand American food. He was sure to let us know that his dad was an ambassador to the United Nations. Tour Guide Bean loves his country, but he hates his job. He will retire next year, at which point he plans to sit in his hammock and finish the book he is writing. He told us the title and encouraged us to be on the lookout for it in Australia and Europe and America, and wherever we were from.

Upon returning from the bus trip Jon and I went looking for one of the things in HCMC that we missed from the walking tour yesterday: the Jade Emperor Pagoda. We wandered for an hour or more in pursuit of the place but in the end, the search proved futile. At one point I told Jon I found it, but what I saw turned out to be the Prudential Insurance building.