Shallow Trenches

While this page has lain dormant, I have been making plans for the upcoming year that will take me many miles from Winnipeg. For the potential few who learn about the happenings in my life from this blog, here is the official announcement: I’m going to Vietnam.

I will be participating in the SALT program of the Mennonite Central Committee for one year, from mid-August 2007 until the same time next year. SALT is a cross-cultural service program run by the relief and development arm of the Mennonite church that involves not proselytizing, but working within local communities and living within the cultural bounds of a foreign country. I’m not out to change the world, but to be changed by it. Please pardon the flagrantly lame cliché.

More specifically, I will be working with the Gioi Publishing House in Hanoi, editing first-draft English translations of Vietnamese documents. The job will not require knowledge of Vietnamese, but I’m optimistic that I’ll be able to gain a passable understanding of the tonal, largely mono- or di-syllabic language. Early efforts are proving that I have some capacity to pick up on the subtleties of tone and new vowel sounds, but lack the self-discipline to apply myself to studying.

Stay tuned for (hopefully) more frequent posts and regular picture updates here…

This year, for the season of Lent, I gave up using computers.

That is, of course, not quite accurate since I use a computer 37.5 hours a week at work, and short of quitting my job or taking an extended leave of absence, avoiding computers altogether could be construed as a fireable offence.

What I mean, rather, is that I powered down my laptop computer before Ash Wednesday began, and it remained tucked away in its case until Easter Sunday. My evenings and weekends were mouse-, keyboard-, and monitor-free. Not owning a television, this also meant watching few movies, and TV infrequently.

“What are you going to do with your time?” was the most common question I was asked, followed in subsequent weeks by, “Are you surviving?” Unsurprisingly (at least to me), my answers were consistently “plenty” and “of course,” respectively.

I am not a computer gamer. Nor would I consider myself particularly unimaginative or uncreative, so replacing the Internet with the Winnipeg Public Library wasn’t too great a stretch. I read half a dozen books, ranging from physics lectures (on quantum electrodynamics) to classics of literature (Madame Bovary) to interesting memoirs (Jonathan Franzen’s The Discomfort Zone). I listened to opera (Puccini and Verdi), rehearsed Bach’s Mass in B Minor for our Easter weekend performance with the WSO, worked on my bicycle, and wrote poetry and music. Occasions where I longed to boot up my computer were rare.

Am I boasting? Absolutely. Not with the intent to convice you that I am cultured, or a paragon of self-control, but rather to remind myself how fulfilling it has been to invest my time with more purposeful intent. (Okay, maybe a little bit of the former as well).

The laptop is back out of its case now, but it no longer has a home on my desk. I am hoping that by making the use of my computer deliberately inconvenient, I will persist in some of the good habits I have formed in the last month and a half.

From time to time, I take a break from wasting time reading about useless things to read about theoretical things. Like gravity.

I’ve never really understood gravity. I love the idea that any two bodies with mass attract one another, and enjoy the idea of calculating the force of gravity that I exert on the things around me. But what is the force? How does it behave?

The other day I found an analogy. It was in an article I was reading on scientist Ron Mallett, who is attempting to build the world’s first time machine. Unlike others who have set the same goal for themselves, Mallett is at least a respected physicist, and is submitting his theoretical mathematics to peer review, rather than selling them to tabloids. He concedes that time travel to a point in time prior to the invention of the world’s first functioning time machine would be impossible.

But the part of the article that grabbed me was this picture:

Gravity, it turns out, is not a force at all. It is nothing that can be likened to a magnet pulling two bodies together. Rather, as general relativity would have it, large concentrations of mass cause a bending of spacetime, which can be likened to a bowling ball on a trampoline.

Of course, I take this type of analogy for what it must inevitably be: a bad approximation of extremely complex mathematics. But it was nonetheless enlightening for me.

China Drafts Law to Boost Unions and End Abuse is a very encouraging article I came across the other day. After years of abhorrent working conditions in the sweatshops that help enable our high standards of living in the West, the Chinese goverment seems to be finally moving beyond the lax regulations that have led to exponential capital growth at the expense of Chinese workers.

Naturally, some of the wealthiest corporations in the world are outraged at this move:

Some of the world’s big companies have expressed concern that the new rules would revive some aspects of socialism and borrow too heavily from labor laws in union-friendly countries like France and Germany.

“This is really two steps backward after three steps forward,” said Kenneth Tung, Asia-Pacific director of legal affairs at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Hong Kong and a legal adviser to the American Chamber of Commerce here.

All in all, not a particularly surprising response. The article did, however, contain one point that surprised me:

The proposed law is being debated after Wal-Mart Stores, the world’s biggest retailer, was forced to accept unions in its Chinese outlets.

Apparently unionization is already further ahead in China than it is here in North America, at least in the retail sector.

It’s comforting to see good things arrive in the wake of tragedy. Donations can be made to support those Amish families affected by the shootings in Nickel Mines through the MCC website. The reasoning behind this quiet request for donations is simple:

…the Amish refuse any type of health insurance. The welfare state for the Amish is the support network provided by the extended family. (Times Online)

Times like these make me proud to identify myself with the Mennonite faith and heritage.

Donald Kraybill points out that…

In many ways, they are better prepared than most Americans to deal with such a tragedy. They have a huge family support network. (Times Online)