Shallow Trenches

I’ve shown up in a few places around the web lately.  These links are mainly for friends and family who like to keep tabs on me.

• Rachel and Anna blog regularly about our shared experience in Hanoi with MCC’s SALT program.
• Erin, a SALTer in Cambodia, posted pictures of our exploits in Laos.
• Tim Nafziger, a young Anabaptist activist and writer, and Dale Suderman, a Vietnam war veteran, stopped by Hanoi on a recent tour through Vietnam.  Tim posted a blog entry about us. You can read about Dale’s reasons for visiting Vietnam here, and Tim’s here.
• Michal Garcia is a freelance photographer and friend of mine here in Hanoi.  He has let me use his big, expensive camera gear on a few occasions.  By a bizarre coincidence, we happened to meet each other in Luang Prabang, Laos on our respective vacations. Michal has posted pictures I took of him in Laos and at Minh’s Jazz Club on his blog.
• Just Massage, which I wrote about in an earlier blog entry, has a website featuring a picture of me receiving a Shiatsu massage.  You’ll just have to take my word that the back being massaged in the second picture on this page is mine.
• My friend, Lutheran vicar J.P. Cima has created a website for Hanoi International Church. I show up in a few of the photo albums, and many of the photographs in which I do not appear (only the good ones, mind you!) come from my camera.
• Anna, mentioned in point #1 above, is a communications officer with a small NGO in Hanoi.  As such, she occasionally uses her friends to promote various causes — like Just Massage in point #5.  Most recently she used the three Vietnam SALT volunteers as exemplary bicycle riders in a green transport campaign.
• After Tet I wrote a short letter to Charleswood Mennonite Church in Winnipeg, which was printed in The Grapevine, the church newsletter.  You can see a PDF of that letter here.
  

I have a new camera, a Canon Rebel XTi, and two prime lenses. People who know me can attest to my excitement about this.

New photographs will appear in the Photos section of this website. Click the link in the right sidebar to see my new albums.

Photos taken with my old Sony point-and-shoot can still be found at Picasa Web Albums.

Be careful when blogging, we are occasionally told, for you never know who your readers are.

This is good advice, if only partially true. I don’t know the names of the people reading my blog, but I am able to see where you’re coming from, what browser and operating system you’re using, and, in some cases, how you got here. It’s often very interesting.

I have had visitors from the following 21 countries:

• United States (46%)
• Canada (29%)
• Vietnam (10%)
• Hong Kong
• South Korea
• China
• Mexico
• Germany
• Jamaica
• Brazil
• United Kingdom
• Pakistan
• Nicaragua
• Sweden
• Taiwan
• Thailand
• Australia
• Tanzania
• Serbia and Montenegro
• Israel
• India

It’s fun trying to figure out who is visiting from these countries. I imagine most are fellow SALT volunteers from their various placements around the globe.

And unless you typed durksen.com into your web browser, or got here through a bookmark, I can see what you clicked that brought you here. For the most part, you are arriving via the MCC SALT blog list or my Facebook profile. But a few guests have arrived through a Google, Yahoo, or MSN search. Here’s what you put in the search box:

• Trenches in Vietnam
• Sentences with shallow
• American friendships are shallow
• TRAIN HORN IMPENDING DOOM [this is my favourite, especially because the capital letters heighten the sense that doom is actually impending.]
• American car horns honk in what musical key?
• Jet lag fly east west Taipei
• American cars and trucks in Vietnam
• Rooster horns for cars

I imagine most visitors from this category left disappointed.

The inaugural post of this new blog is here. There is a lot of work to be done before this website becomes what I have in mind. Hopefully it will become something interesting. The theme is courtesy of vanillamist.com, except for the rice plants in the title picture, which come from a picture I took in Vietnam.