They asked for a blog...

To begin, as usual, a weather update:

In the last couple weeks, the weather has gone from snowing and uncomfortable, to really really nice, to hot as hades' underpants. But the forecast for tomorrow says...snow!

My keyboard is at the school. And as some of you know my laptop's keyboard has a few keys that don't work, including my spacebar. So I'm "CONTROL V" pasting every space. I hope you all can appriciate the time and energy that I'm putting into this blog. I assume that if you're still following this late in the game, you do.

School let out. It's so strange to be here in my town with absolutely nothing to do but walk around. I want to enjoy this last month, you know, be fully present, but it's sort of difficult. My mind is elsewhere in a far away land, where the morning bells ring with liberty. Kid's Day was on the first of june. It's the one day of the year when there are no drunk people wandering around, and kids don't go unnoticed. In fact, they get whatever they want. You'll see them everywhere, leading their parents around saying, "I want icecream or candy or pop or a toy," whatever, and the parent just buys them whatever It's a fun day to in Mongolia.

Our close of service confrence was actually really informative and surprisingly fun. It was good to see my M-nineteens one more time before I say goodbye to most of them for good. I'm sure I'll keep in touch with a couple of them, but as with the end of all of life's chapters, you leave behind friends that were there for a season.

:/TEAR

You may have seen it already, but there is a rather amazing COS picture of our group on facebook.

Now is the time to cope with saying goodbye to my friends here, my ger / this amazingly beautiful town, and the end of my service as a peace corps. It's a lot. Plus, I'll be dealing with readjusting to freedom, ahem, I mean USAmerica. Some of it I'm looking forward to, but honestly I could die happy if I never saw another roadside billboard or got the latest pop tramp's song crammed down my throat. I would love to live in a world where money and business were not the bottom line or where people weren't looked at by those in charge as consumer slaves. But hey, I'm a dreamer, and it was nice to escape the heart of the beast for a little while. I got to see that there is a land where who you are is not defined by what you do. I saw a market economy where, for the most part, greed and competition are not the driving forces. I saw a people who aren't possesed by their possessions. And I saw a news system that didn't throw words like "terror" and "crisis" around to boost ratings. All in all, it was a two years well spent. Mongolia has it's problems and I'm glad to be headed home, but still I'm not looking forward to breathing the air of control and indebtedness that was so thick in america when i left. You can't really imagine how refreshing it is to live in a place for a while where the day isn't split up into 15 minute intervals until you've lived it yourself. I thank God that places like this still exist, and I'm praying that there will always be places with a different vision of the world. Because the possibility of the western way of life imperically taking over everywhere is a very real and frightening scenario.

This leads me to some final thoughts...things I've learned from my experience. Poverty is only a state of mind. Yes, some places are plagued by severe famine or water shortages, and we should do everything in our power, and a lot of things out of our power with God's help, to put an end to that kind of poverty. But in many places, poverty is only an idea given to us by people that can profit from such an idea being out there. We buy into the fear of not having enough, which in America means usually not having enough excess. This fear actually drives us into both debt and a sort enslavement to THINGS. We desire to be independant and own our own land, not because there is any inherent virture in land ownership, but because somewhere down the line we were told that it is important to own land, and we agreed. But land ownership is aristocratic territory, and we, the common man, will lose a game played on their home turf. This individualism and privitization in our blood drives us away from community. Even if we use our resources and possibly invite the homeless into our home{a noble thing indeed}, we're still stuck in that awful "I'm having THEM into MY home". Instead of the more accurate, "we are family, and this home belongs to you as much as it does to me." In Mongolia, you belong to the land, not the other way around.

In fact, Christians, would any of you say that you own your particular houses if Jesus walked in the door? Or would you readily offer Him the keys and say, all of mine is yours. But Jesus also said that the way you treat the worst off is how you are treating Him. In fact, by most any standard of definition, Jesus WAS homeless.

Don't get me wrong. There are a lot of attributes that are amazing and unique about the States. It's my home and I could never feel more at home anywhere on Earth. We have a standard of "niceness" common to most Americans that surpasses anyone else I've encountered, and we maintain that generous spirit even though it's the source of a lot of how other nations try to take advantage of us. The list could go on.

So...My mission for "readjusting" into the states will be to find a way to promote community and subverse individualism in every way I can. But the question is, can i resist the pressures of the American life? Will i fall into chasing the American dream? I've been thinking of how I will spend my six thousand dollars in readjustment, and most everything I've come up with has been ways to spend it on myself. I think I really need some sort of mentor to look to. Or someone willing to keep me in check.

I don't know how interested you all are about these things, but they are the things I'm most dealing with at the moment. Any other revolutionaries out there? Holla at me.

Love and peace brothers and sisters