M. Morrel and God’s Providence

Count of Monte Cristo:

After being stripped of almost all his dignity and wealth (partly from his unrelenting pleading for Edmund Dantes release – putting him in league with a “Bonapartist” – and caring for Dante’s dying father), Monsieur Morrel, the former ship owner who employed Dantes, finds himself with one last hope of paying his mountain of debt and saving his family. That last hope is the return of the ship Pharaon which is already a month delayed. Here’s what Dumas writes for Morrel’s response to news of the ship:

“The ‘Pharaon’ has then perished?” said Morrel, in a hoarse voice. The young girl did not speak; but she made an affirmative sign with her head as she lay on her father’s breast.

“And the crew?” asked Morrel.

“Saved,” said the girl; “saved by the crew of the vessel that has just entered the harbor.”

Morrel raised his two hands to heaven with an expression of resignation and sublime gratitude. “Thanks, my God,” said he; “at least thou strikest but me alone!”

Sure he’s a fictional character but how many of us could utter that praise when faced with such depths of sadness, despair, and lost hope. I for one get mad when whatever I think I deserve doesn’t come to me (when even as trivial as driving, relationally, monetarily, etc. etc.). The idea that I should praise God for allowing myself to be the object of misfortune so that others may be spared flies straight in the face of my self-entitled, prosperity-minded notion of Providence I so routinely fall back into.

Haiti Recap Part I

It’s been almost a month since returning from Haiti and I’m still not entirely sure how best to describe the week there. First I would like to thank everyone who joined with us in this trip, through prayers, encouragement, and funding. Check out our photos to see some images – I’ll be getting a DVD of the images come Sunday and will put a smattering up on my Flickr and here with some descriptions.

This was my second time in Haiti, the first being in September of 2006, in fact 8 of the 14 of us on the trip were return travelers – a fact that made this trip run very, very well detail and tension wise. We flew into Port-au-Prince about mid-day and didn’t fly out for Les Cayes until later afternoon, so by the time we arrived at Pastor Luis’ (the house we stayed at for the week) it was already dark. We woke up very early on Sunday to attend a 6:30 am worship service at the downtown church where Pastor Mike Hsu gave the message with Pastor Luis interpreting. I’m always amazed by the way the Haitians worship – I normally feel like a very stiff white guy, but in Haiti that feeling is even more pronounced. The services go for hours complete with shouting (Merci Jesus! Alleluia!) from everyone involved, Meg put it very well – they have a yearning desire for the Lord that we just don’t quite get. I must confess I’m a bit nervous and out of place in the services – I grew up in pretty intense conservative fundamentalism – and I can learn a thing or two from the way Haitians shout and scream for their savior (I’m thinking of a number of Psalms that do the very same thing).

Group Shot of our Team

We spent most of the Sunday in services (Les Cayes – Cambry – back to Les Cayes) and resting at Luis’ house. That Monday we organized some of the medications we brought down (around $43,000 worth if I remember correctly) and hauled them off to downtown Les Cayes to hold clinic. A little bit of anarchy ensued – first day is always interesting, but we got the pharmacy set up, Matt, Rich, and Meg set up their clinic spots with translators and we were off to the races. I believe a lot of the people that went through were members of the downtown church in need of medical assistance. We saw lots of worms, high blood pressure, diabetes (Rich had a lady who was in the middle of a diabetic ketoacidosis episode – blood glucose hovering at a sky high ~600 mg/dL !). Rich also saw a patient he treated at the clinic two years ago who had cardio myopathy – she was looking great, and the meeting I think really strengthened the minds of the team as to noticing that what we do does make a difference.

During the downtown clinic

The next day we were informed we would not be returning to walk-in clinics but would spend the rest of the week visiting orphanages. We again loaded up meds and drove off toward Casa Major. This orphanage had about 180 orphans, most all of whom had a scabies infection and fungal infections (ringworm predominately). We devised a system that we would end up using for the rest of the week – Ann and Carla gave albendazole (worm med) and a multivitamini along with a hug and kiss – Rich checked their heart and breath sounds – Matt checked their ears, throat, nose, etc. – Meg with a few others applied topical creams to fungus infections – Craig and Gene gave each child a Tylenol/Motrin along with any prescribed antibiotic or other med – anyone not helping with the medical gauntlet was playing with the kids. One of the boys I was hanging out with had me teach him to count to 200 in English, showed me a book of his drawings, and had me draw him a picture and write out how to count to 200 in English (word-wise obviously).

Dr. Matt at Casa Major Orphanage

Carla at Casa Major Orphanage

The drawing in the notebook

Wednesday we headed down to Port Salude. This was a little newer orphanage with about 200 orphans. Very similar to Casa Major in that most had scabies and fungal infections. Chad Hall and I got the idea to teach the kids kanna, kanna, zwa (duck, duck, goose). At the time I only knew chee-ta (sit down) and sek (circle) but they caught on really well and it was off to the races for Chad and I (we got picked a lot).

Kanna Kanna Zwa!

I think I’ll stop part I there.

New Features

I’ve added a few new link categories to the side pane of VeniatRegnum. If you’re using a feed reader (like Google Reader) awesome but you won’t be able to see these until going to the actual site.

First is I’ve added a “Just Finished Reading” section, pretty straight forward, once I’ve finished a book I’ll move it from Currently Reading to this section. I’ll put up posts about the more impacting reads I complete, but realizing I really don’t have a lot of time to spend on the blog means not all will get posts. Still you can now check out what I’ve just read (and since I read more that I update the blog, some works never even get updated into the Currently Reading). Ask me about a particular book if it catches your eye and I’ll let you know what I thought of it.

I also added a “Listening To” section. Here you’ll find the bands I’ve recently discovered and am enjoying/exploring. This won’t be necessarily a list of my favorites, but more of a journey along my musical exploration. Again, some of these artists/bands may be posts, but most probably will not.

On a side note – I’ve used various things like the Living Social site before to put up lists/reviews of books, movies, and music before – but stopped when I started blogging – be nice if WordPress joined up with Living Social and incorporated some widgets…

Dark as the Winter Day

I’ve experimented a bit with a darker desktop and theme for the past few months, reflecting the bitter cold and short days of winter here in Nebraska.

As you can see it’s heavy on the black and blue – white text. It’s very easy on the eyes and makes staring at the computer for an hour or two very bearable. I’ve shied away from darker themes in the past being that they’ve always seemed really misplaced and tacky to me, but this one has left me very impressed.

I’m also very impressed with the new Conky configuration I’ve patched together from other inspiration, along with some weather and Rhythmbox additions. Here’s my .conkyrfc if you want it.

• Desktop from Digital Blasphemy
• Conky desktop monitor – .conkyrfc
• Xfce-dusk user interface
• Black-White 2 Vista icon theme
  

Haiti Medical Trip

I returned last night with a group of 14 from Grace Chapel from Haiti where we were along the southern coast of the country doing medical missions for seven days mostly to area orphanages. Having just returned, I’m still processing a lot and will be putting together a more comprehensive post of the trip, but for the meantime we’re in the process of consolidating photos from the trip using Shutterfly – here’s the link to our page:

http://haitimedical08.shutterfly.com/

Brothers Karamazov

A couple of weeks ago I finished my journey through Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. While I have not the capabilities or desire to do a complete review of such an immense and breathtaking work, I will attempt to highlight a few of the aspects that have lingered with me since turning the final page.

What struck me the most with this novel (and with other Russian literature) is the intricate attention given to exploring the humanity and beliefs of the characters. Nearly every major character in the book is given lengths of time in which Dostoyevsky explores and navigates through the often conflicting and labyrinthine passages of each’s soul. While I am by no means even a novice in Russian philosophy and history, and I know much of this human exploration pulls very deeply from such, the human nature depicted by Dostoyevsky in The Brothers still impacted me very intimately here in modern America. The “everything is permitted” vantage points very intricately interwoven into Karamazovian nature (Fyodor, Dmitri, Ivan, even surfacing at times in Alexei) is the foundation for much of what occurs in the story’s plot, and in many ways is the real drama separating this from just another “who done it” mystery/trial novel. The real conflict is exposed as an internal battle within each of the characters rather than a mere external disagreement between father and son(s).

This battle of internal forces is what captivated me and held me to the progression of this story. Dostoyevsky heavily relies on dialog to convey the story and even when progressing in narrative he does so through dialog by means of an external narrator who maintains a personal (he’s a villager in the same town as the Karamazovs who experienced the story both first hand and through gathering details) conversational tone. This lead to very interesting exchanges, my favorite of which was Ivan’s conversation with a devil (which was also himself). I was transfixed to the unfolding conversation as Ivan wrestled with various expressions of himself (the base/depraved portion portrayed by the devil, and the loving/kind/truth fearing portion portrayed by himself) during his “dream.”

Dostoyevsky is adamant in his introduction that Alexei is the hero of his story, and maybe it was this prompting and maybe it was the progression of the novel, but I came to love Alexei very dearly by the end of the novel. His honesty, subtle wisdom, and brotherly affection were superbly woven by Dostoyevsky. It is very evident Dostoyevsky truly loves Alexei through his writing and his character serves as a true tribute to Dostoyevsky’s friend Vladimir Solovyov.

On another note, I also greatly appreciated the edition which I read – the translation was very fluid while apparently staying very close to the feel of the original Russian and contained an extensive and very helpful assortment of footnotes. One can gain an even fuller appreciation for Dostoyevsky’s brilliance by noting all of the various literary techniques (mocking his contemporaries by placing their views in various characters and quoting vast amounts of current literature), and the notes serve as in invaluable source for cross referencing / translating portions of the novel.

The breadth and scope of this novel’s insight into humanity still has my mind turning with aspects of each character. I initially felt quite disappointed when the novel simply ended without a real definite form of conclusion, but have since grown to greatly appreciate the ending as it leaves the novel as a continuous experience in which I must face the reality of humanity portrayed in Dostoyevsky’s characters as a small episode of the larger scope of human nature which transcends the historical and literary constraints of 19th century Russia.

Better Coffee

Newsweek has an article featuring a couple of simple tricks you can use to get your home or hotel drip coffee maker to make better tasting coffee. Coffee may very well be my favorite drink, my wife and I get our beans from Costa Rica through Cafe Britt and every morning and most afternoons the air of our home is laden with sweet coffee aromas. Read through the comments on the Newsweek article as some of them have some interesting ideas that might be worth a shot.

Also:

• Health Benefits of Coffee – WebMD I don’t really ever use WebMD as a health info source, but the article has some interesting findings
• Coffee Health – Coffee Risk via Harvard Health

Mint Menu in XUbuntu

I was inspired by a post in Help for Linux to replace my default XFCE4 application menu with mintMenu. The instructions were for regular Ubuntu (Gnome) so they needed a little (very little) modification to get mintMenu up in XUbuntu (XFCE).

Follow the instructions exactly, except for the “Add to Panel” and selecting mintMenu – here is where XUbuntu users need an extra step. First you need to install the xfce4-xfapplet-plugin (you can download it from the site or just use Synaptic). Now right click on your panel, choose “Add New Item”, and pick XfApplet from the list. Another dialog box will come up and pick mintMenu from that list.

XUbuntu needs this extra step using XfApplet to sort of serve as a gateway through which Gnome plugins can integrate into the XFCE environment. It’s an extra step but an easy one and well worth it for a more visibly appealing and robust application menu.

Slight Disappointment

OK, it’s not really that big of a deal, but I was all geared up and excited to replace my Linksys’ wireless router firmware with a much better open source replacement this evening when I fell from the cloud of nerdy hopes and aspirations to the cold terrain of realistic limitations.

Being fall break and having some hours off of my new job, I was blessed with some leisure time today which I was planning of filling upgrading my router to use Tomato. After downloading the firmware, and trying to upgrade it in my router, it failed. Which made me return to Tomato only to find the firmware is for use in WRT54G v1-4 (mine’s v6) – oh well there are other options, enter DD-WRT once again I was all excited until reading through the documentation for my v6. I usually don’t get scarred away from trying risky installations, but this page sent shivers down my back.

Oh well, the default Linksys firmware is working quite well. So what if I can’t do Quality of Service manipulations, block advertisements through my router, or boost the power of my signal. My wife will probably be quite relieved that I didn’t tinker around with something that isn’t broken in the first place.

WW – October 8, 2008

• Heavy Metal Jr. – via You Tube. It’s a little long (25 min) but by the end I was in stitches, I love the look on everyone’s faces once they show up at “The Gig”
• Cassiopeia a Java based Carcassonne computer game. Looks like a great replica of the board game, just wish it wasn’t Java, I’m struggling with getting it to work, at all. Anyone know of another cross-platform non-Java version of Carcassonne?
• Health Care in the Next Administration – David M. Cutler, Ph.D., and Gail R. Wilensky, Ph.D. (NEJM)
• Access to Quality and Affordable Health Care for Every American John McCain (NEJM)
• Modern Health Care for All Americans – Barack Obama (NEJM)
• AIG Executives Visit Posh Retreat After Bailout via NPR – I also heard in the car this afternoon that AIG is getting $37.8 billion more on top of the previous $85 billion that apparently they’re spending in part on spa trips.
• Set Up Universal Ad Blocking Through Your Router via Lifehacker – I think this will be one of my Saturday projects this weekend.