Blog Reentry - Lessons from Abroad Practiced at Home

At this point in our returning, there is no doubt that we already incorporate new behaviors - now in our reentry - learned abroad.

We have new characteristics which we gained abroad last year. These are parts of ourselves reinforced or conditioned to draw out our urgency to do work on our own home continents - Las Americas.

We are still drawn to the connections which our experiences strike chords of in conversation.

This unfortunately already dims as the foreign gets blended with the shocks and learning curves in our own culture.

It is good to be home.

Some of what we were introduced to in our travels has new manifestations at home. For example, couchsurfing and blogsherpa. Both of these, a website and a blog, opened doors for us as we made acquaintance and broadened networks.

Our own websites for our honey service year @ shutterfly and blogspot dot com have worked for sharing photos and composition across the globe. There is facebook. There are others we will join; and, we aim to do more with utilizing the abstract engagement of social networks and other shared interests.

So, what next? How do we continue to draw out lessons taken from abroad to practice at home?

We are searching for the themes taken from outside our normative parameters of society which we can account for and be intentional about continuing. Whether this means new projects, shared ideas, or a slow filtration from our blogging into cyberspace, we are being met with impossible limits. It is in these new limits which we aim to plunge into.

Our story is a collaborative effort at writing about what pleases us, how we are learning, and what works.

Stay tuned.

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Bearing the Real Costs: Relativism and Absolutism

This is a dialog built from conversation we have with fringes, elites, and mainstream power (individuals as we encounter them) between North Africa and Europe; in Spain particularly.


[Scene: There is a light breeze blowing through apartment curtains, a long porch patio of the 5th floor is bathed in bright summertime light of 9PM sunsets. It is cooling and football is on TV.]

“There is No Relativity. In suffering, there are only Absolutes,” he says to me.

I have an Uncle who has grown more resolute with old age. He does not accept our modern age’s use of relativism to lessen human acts which outrage him. He can become incensed with inhumanity.

“I was twelve and we had escaped our country to Havana,” he told us, “when we first saw the images of the Russians' discoveries in the Nazi concentration camps...we could not believe it.”

“I have friends who are survivors,” he went on, “I can assure you, there was nothing relative to theirs and their families suffering. What they lived was a pure horror - brought on by others.”

We could not agree more. I try to say as much, "As we have visited places of suffering from slave castles of Africa, mass graves of Egyptian pyramids, festering and old war zones on a Cambodian/Thai border, in the Balkans, in the horn of Africa, in our own town - from sites of mass starvation or disasters in Ethiopia, to the Concentration Camps of Serbia, the one characteristic that has united them is that the suffering which took place was absolute."

"I cannot stand this modern tendency to use relativism to dismiss people's pain!" he says.

I tell my uncle, “We relativize suffering then diminish it with our media. We teach violence to our youth. Our children see 20,000 acts of violence on TV and videos before they are seven. What craziness!!”

My uncle is elderly, he does not realize this much desensitization exists from TV and video games. His was a liife of full experience. While fiction and radio existed, a priori experience was valued above all else. He makes this case. Again, we agree but unconvivially....

“Human suffering, murder, violence and war are personal acts of outrage. They affect people’s lives.” I say to him.

I realize I am not aware of the absolute in suffering. There is absolute suffering in inhumanity.

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Modern Day Travelers

We are modern-day travelers. We have access to thousands of guide books and references and translating devices, although we rarely choose to use them. We save digital maps to our laptop and backup our blogs to a hard drive. Our connections to friends and family are nearly instantaneous, thanks to facebook and gmail and skype. We travel with gifts of literacy and insight and American passports. Our visa and mastercard debit cards combined with worldwide ATMs rarely leave us in a financial lurch. Our bright white skin opens doors to privileges and places that many cannot access. This shared journey brings with it a deepening of humility, a greater sense of empathy, and a larger connection to people of the world. It brings understanding of injustices and discriminations.

This act of traveling gives me so much perspective, but it also takes some perspective away. With the act of deepening my perspective, it actually serves to foreshorten it.

Being constantly in motion allows meager time for reflection, for processing. Traveling allows for so many experiences, so many new thoughts and visions and ideas and sensory influx that sometimes it becomes a blur. Sometimes my body takes charge and says “Stop!’ Take an afternoon and just sit. Just think. Stop moving. Sit in a straight-backed chair and stare at the wall. Spend some time on what’s inside, rather than what’s outside.

It’s strange, because those that follow a path to perfection, or achieve greatness in thought and spirit focus truly on the moment. The time is Now. In the very act of thinking about the Now, it is already past. There it went. But to live in the present and be cognizant of the Now is the thing that many great spirituals aspire to. Traveling provides that opportunity. Recognition and perception are fleeting, for you move on to the next new and foreign and amazing thing in an instant. And when this pace is maintained, reflection is hard to achieve. Our trip to Aneho was three days ago, a lifetime of experiences have elapsed since then. Why would we and how can we write about experiences that are in the past? The inability for us to “live-blog’ is difficult. It’s hard to compare. It’s hard to revisit thoughts and ideas and perceptions when they feel so distinctly in the past, and when what you once thought is now colored by what you are experiencing now. For this reason, I keep a journal. But its pages are empty of the flashing thoughts and images and ideas - how do you write when you are bumping down a gravel road before the sun has even risen?

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