Smoked Ribs Satay

Smoked Ribs Satay

For years Suzanne and I have been fond of Thai cooking, especially the street food called Satay. In Austin there is this wonderful, but expensive, restaurant we used to treat ourselves to, and we almost always ordered their Chicken Satay as an appetizer.

Over the past few months, I’ve been studying the art of Thai cooking and along with it, to make a pretty decent Satay, either chicken or pork. This is an adaption I call Smoked Ribs Satay. It has all the flavors of a pork satay, but the meat has the texture of ribs. Steaming the ribs after smoking them makes the meat tender and almost falls off the bone.

2 racks of baby back ribs (pork)

1 16” sheet of Wax paper

Extra wide heavy-duty aluminum foil

16x11 pan fitted with wire rack

Marinade:

1 can (14oz) unsweetened coconut milk.

4 tablespoons Yellow Curry Paste. If you don’t have an Asian store nearby that carries Yellow Curry Paste, Thai Kitchen makes a good red curry paste that works as well.

2 tablespoons brown sugar

2 tablespoons Thai fish sauce

1 tablespoon ground whole coriander seed

1 tablespoon whole coriander seed (not ground)

Combine the marinade ingredients in a large zip lock bag. Cut baby back ribs racks in half so they will all fit in the zip lock bag with the marinade. Marinate at least four hours, or as long as 24 hours.

Preheat a smoker (we prefer mesquite wood to smoke) to 250 degrees. Smoke the marinated ribs for one hour meat side up, keeping temperature between 225 and 275, ideally 250 but never above 300. Baste the ribs every 10-15 minutes with the leftover marinade.

After an hour, remove ribs from smoker and place meat side up in the 16x11 pan fitted with a bottom rack (we support the rack in the middle with a broken chopstick).

Top brown the ribs by placing under broiler for 10 minutes, then preheat oven to 250 degrees.

While oven is preheating, add ¼ inch water to bottom of pan and cover ribs with one layer of wax paper. Now seal the pan with aluminum foil. The wax paper separates the smoked meat from aluminum foil which will react and eat holes in the foil allowing steam to escape.

Steam ribs for two hours at 250, but no longer than three hours. Serve as a main dish with rice or an appetizer, then three ribs to a plate. Serve with plenty of warm Satay Sauce.

Satay Sauce

This wonderful sauce is expensive to buy. When Suzanne and I would order Satay at that restaurant of the same name in Austin, they were always tight with the sauce, and we asked for more, which they begrudgingly provided. This sauce is better, and much less expensive.

1 can (14 oz) unsweetened coconut milk.

6 tablespoons Massaman curry paste (there is no substitute)

2/3 cup smooth natural peanut butter

7 tablespoons brown sugar (or Palm Sugar)

2 tablespoons Thai fish sauce.

½ t cayenne pepper (optional)

Gently warm the coconut milk in a saucepan until boiling, stirring occasionally to prevent burning. Add the curry paste and blend with a wire whip until well blended. Cook for three minutes. Add peanut butter and stir constantly until smooth. Turn down the heat on low and stir in the sugar until smooth and well blended and cook for two minutes. Remove from heat and add fish sauce add if you like things spicy cayenne.

PS: if you need a recipe for homemade Massaman curry paste, let me know and I can send it to you.

The Last Holiday

[A snowman we built our first day in Ruidoso, which appropriated my hat and glasses]

We have just returned from what could be our last family vacation, or holiday, as Suzanne calls it. It is a time in my life where I have begun making lists of things I will and will not do in this life. Ski again – yes; learn to snowboard – no. Making lists seems odd for several reasons, but the fact that I am informally making these lists shows that I am cognizant that at some level that this life does end, that the time I have left is less than the time I have already lived, and knowing that there is a fear, or at least a healthy respect for not injuring myself, again. (read: green slopes).

This family holiday, was a gift from St. Phillips UMC, where a new appointment for me began January 1, but I was allowed the grace to start a week later so we could holiday. Thank you!

[Anna, Fox & Grace at Ski Apache]

Maybe I have a tighter definition of family holiday than necessary, but I have defined it as an extended trip with our three kids, driving in one vehicle, staying together in one place, and sharing the same experiences, activities and food. Some might call this a laboratory of human suffering[1], but I see it harkening back to the vacations we took with our kids before they were old enough to object.

[Steve & Suzanne on the drive up]:

This time we went skiing/snowboarding in New Mexico. Skiing is something Suzanne brought into our marriage, a gift she taught me the first winter we were married when we went visiting her half brother Mick in Denver. Every other year since we have gone to the mountains, sometimes with friends (Kim and Austin), her brother (Reg and Julie), our Sunday School class (The Genesis Class at University United Methodist Church), and in later years just as a family on holiday.

As a kid I can’t remember the last vacation we took as a family when my folks, Rod, Beth, Sheron and I would have loaded up in our white 1960s Chevy Biscayne and drove all night to Kansas. When it was happening, I wonder if my parents knew it would be our last time? Another thing I can’t recall is ever taking a family vacation that didn’t involve visiting family, or attending Dad’s professional convention, the American Society of Agricultural Engineers, or ASAE as we called it. Just saying the letters ASAE brings to mind exotic places, and face it when you’ve been raised in Iowa, even Duluth seems exotic. This too was a gift from Suzanne, the notion that a family holiday could be the sole reason for a vacation.

[A Chevy Biscayne station wagon, our family car growing up]:

I am guessing that last family trip together would have been the summer of 1968, a year after my brother started at Iowa State, and right before the rest of my family went overseas for a year. When we came back, it was my sister Beth’s turn for Iowa State and now with two siblings in college, I don't think the folks were able to get us together for a family vacation. There were trips with my folks after that summer, ASAE conventions in San Francisco, Baton Rouge, Minneapolis, Davis, California and other exotic places I can’t remember, but mostly I think of Kansas and visiting the Jagger and Buchele farmsteads and, at least at the Jagger farm, playing with dangerous fireworks (which were illegal in Iowa), and reading through the largest collection of comic books ever seen.

[Fox, Grace and Anna, on the way up]

Which is why I was so determined to remember this family holiday because in all likelihood, it will be our last. We are entering a season of launching, of losing our children to the young adults they are becoming, of watching them define themselves, or at least defining who they are not, and it feels sometimes like that who they are not, is to be part of this family. I remember that stage, and how gracious my family was during it, so I don’t take it personally, but will treasure this last family holiday.

It was wonderful, and at the same time bittersweet, seeing us all laughing together, eating long family dinners, watching Suzanne's intercultural movie picks and making fun of them, skiing or snowboarding the slopes and just enjoying intense family time. It was good. Not to get all theological, but I can’t help thinking that this must be what it is like for God too, when God sees his children playing together nicely, laughing, having fun, enjoying each other’s company and experiencing the wonder that is this creation. It was my prayer this past week riding up the ski lift, thanking God for the beauty of these mountains, trees and for this time set apart to remember what it is like to be family.

[Mountains of Ski Apache]

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[1] Term stolen from Bishop Joe Wilson, when he described family vacations in their RV, when their kids were growing up.

Goodbye to 2009 Thoughts

This past year has been one of great hopes and crushing disappointments, of fun and frustration, of learning more about the inner workings of my soul than most would ever want to know, and being humbled. We believers often used the word humbled, as a code word to express deep appreciation, using it when we feel that perhaps we don’t deserve the praise, or honors that are being bestowed; but it hasn’t been that kind of year.

“To become humble,” I have heard said, “is not to think less of oneself, but to think less about oneself.” It wasn’t that kind of year, either. So how to process the learning to think less of oneself without sounding all winey, when it really felt like a year of just getting used to my new station in life.

The Journey

This fall Suzanne and I lead small group at Church through ALPHA. The ALPHA Course is 10 week class designed for skeptics of the faith, but our group was mostly long-term believers from the Church. The lecture I remember most was the topic How does God guide us? We listened to a wonderful lecture by Nicky Gumble and then broke off for small group discussion. Somehow my group gravitates toward the question “What if all of life is journey?” I’ve wondering since, what are the implications of such a thought; how could that change the way I approach life? What if there was no destination, no purpose, no point to life other than its journey? That God gave to us this life as a gift to use here and now, complete with a set of guidelines to make the journey the whole point.

The thought is not new, nor new to me. There is evidence that Ancient Israel, before their Babylonian exile held to this concept of the journey, with little thought to the afterlife, or as Simcha Paull Raphael writes in Jewish Views of the Afterlife, a “postmortem judgment associated with Sheol,” or a “philosophy of an individual soul”[1]. But 70 years of exile in a land where such beliefs were held to brought about an early shift in Jewish theology, at least according to Simcha Paull Raphael. But what if the Israelites had it right? That the point of life is the journey, that we are to make the most of life before the frost comes.

Part of that journey was remembered during the first of the Christmas Eve services at Wellspring. It was that feeling of sacredness. I was serving the people communion, something that much of the time isn’t in the repertoire of that church’s pastoral responsibilities. When I talk to retired pastors, Communion is that thing they talk about missing the most. So here I was on my last day, tearing off a large chunk of bread and placing in the hand of a child too young to understand its meaning.

“This means Jesus loves you very much and wants you never to forget that.” It was a first and last for me there, watching the wide eyed the child take the host, nodding his head, or hearing her say yes and I remembered how that once familiar feeling of sacredness warmed my soul. It has been too long. Is this what it feels like for retired pastors?

How, Not What

I wonder if Barbara Brown Taylor misses it. Author of Leaving Church, and more recently An Altar in the World, she left parish ministry in 1998, a year before I started, and eight years before I knew she had left it (she was still publishing her books as if she was still serving). The week before Christmas I was reading about her call, how she had been pleading with God, asking

“What is it you want me to do?”

When her heart was finally ready to listen, God spoke,

“Anything that pleases you,” God said. “Anything that pleases you, and belong to me.” [2]

She writes:

“at one level, that answer was no help at all, the ball was back in my court…whatever I decided to do for a living, it was not what I did, but how I did it that mattered. God had an overall purpose, but was not going to supply the particulars for me. If I wanted a life of meaning, then I was going to have to apply the purpose for myself.”

This understanding of Call, was a revelation to me, it is not so much what I do, but how I do it that matters to God. God wants me to emphasize the how, over the what. Its not that the what does not matter, it does, in fact it informs the how, but the what you do never takes on primary importance over the how you do it.

Its like the what is the melody, and the how are the words. It is the words that give meaning to the melody.

It’s the how we live our lives that give meaning to what we do while living them.

The what is the wrapping paper, and the how is the gift inside it, and longer after the wrapping paper ends up in the fireplace, it is the gift we will remember.

Cognitively, I really connect with this understanding of Call, but experientially, my mileage has differed, mostly from being a weed. My father says “A weed is just a good plant in the wrong place.” In other words, it is lost, or misplaced and I think that ties in well with what Ms. Taylor wrote about consenting to be lost (previous blog post), “since you have no other choice.”

No matter how hard that weed tries, how God honoring that weed is, how well that weed functions, at that end of the day, it is still a weed…a good plant in the wrong place. It is not a reflection on the garden, or on the weed itself, both are good and at the same time, ill-suited toward each other. I hope this is the lesson (or humbling) I was to learn this past year; it is not a class I want to retake.

I came to Wellspring thinking I could fit in anywhere, do anything and that as long as I belonged to God, all would be well with my soul. It didn’t matter what I did, just how I did it; it wasn’t the melody that mattered, just the words.

I was appointed to do music, something I loved, but had walked away from as a main source of income 25 years earlier. “When the music you love to play becomes the music you have to play to pay the rent,” Ms. Taylor writes, “your heart can suffer from alienation of affection.”[3] I imagine when she wrote those words, music was for her a metaphor but for me there was nothing metaphoric about it. She adds “people know when their gifts are being wasted, and this knowledge can eat away at the soul like a cancer.”[4] It wasn’t the gift of music wasted, it was not having a place to use all I had learned, over a lifetime of experience. It happens to musicians, they get put in a box, like that is all they are or can do. Cancer, is an apt metaphor, errors or genetic mutations duplicating or spread throughout the body disrupting its more healthy parts, in other words leading to a “alienation of affection.”

I think that is what weeds do, and why we hate them so. They spread.

Well the long wait is over, the Wellspring journey has ended, and now we wait for another year and another journey to begin at St. Phillips United Methodist. The excitement between these journeys has been Christmas, and soon a family ski vacation. The journey continues.

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[1] Simcha Paull Raphael, Jewish Views of the Afterlife, p57, 2009

[2] BBT,An Altar in the World, p110.

[3] BBT, p116

[4] BBT, p113.

Steve@50 – part 3 The year of Enculturalization

Steve@50 – part 3 The year of Enculturalization

It has been raining here for weeks now, the San Gabriel has filled with water and driving past it, I too am filled with hope that things are about to change. In missionary training, I am told it is called the end of the year of enculturalization, meaning that first year when the missionary is not active in the work they will do, but active in integrating with the new culture. I’m told it is often one of the hardest years, to be in a place that has so many needs, and yet being unable to do anything about it, other than to be present. In pastor training, its called that first year, or the Honeymoon, when wise pastors won’t change anything, at least until they understand exactly what they are changing, and why. They too are learning the culture of that new church. Sometimes if feels like you are just sitting around, and the words of Will Rodgers come to mind who said that “Even if you are on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.” So being run over is not a function of right track or wrong, but of just sitting there, even if that is exactly what you are supposed to be doing.

As I said in the first of these Steve@50 posts (which is on the blog: www.buchele.blogspot.com if you’re reading this “note” on facebook), I talked about finding myself in learning to cook Indian food. It was a process that started long before I needed it, and isn’t that just like God to prepare me.

It was during our first year in Ghana (April 07) when Suzanne discovered a love of Indian food; so I bought an Indian cookbook. After several tragic attempts, I asked our friend Veena, who makes the most amazing Chai, if she could teach me to make Dal. We invited friends over, and she patently taught me, giving me a glimpse into its process—albeit it a short lived one—soon after I was back to my tragic ways. Another year, another cookbook that yielded similar results. Now a third year, but back in the states and seeking purpose and meaning in my life, I picked up yet another cookbook, and started with Dal. I figured if I was ever going to master this process, I needed to master Dal, so we ate nothing but Dal for weeks until I could make a fairly decent one.

Here is what I learned:

1) Cooking Indian Food take time, like three hours, plus that last hour when you just let the food rest and the flavor changes.

2) You can’t hurry the onions. When the recipe says brown the onions, it means fry them for 30 minutes at least, over medium heat, stirring constantly until they are really brown.

3) There are no short cuts. (see #1) When I was a programmer, we used to say “Nine women, no matter how smart, intelligent, or clever can’t make a baby in one month,” and that is the same way with Indian food, you can’t hurry it.

4) Good food is meant to be shared among friends.

I cooked my way through Classic Indian Cooking, inviting friends over to dinner as often as we could without over Dal-ling them. For my 50^th, Suzanne arranged a celebration of friends (from a life two lives ago) in Austin. Suzanne and I spent most of the day cooking, and when our friends arrived, there were jobs for the men and children, while the wives sat at the table and talked. The kids made Naan, rolling the dough out and cooking it outside over a wood fire on the smoker. The men gathered in the kitchen, cooking the vegetables, and talking about manly things.

Then we gather for the blessing. It happens every time, it could be my mother-in-law’s pot roast, a Thanksgiving feast, or a gathering of friends who are now holding each other hands, encircling the kitchen or sitting around the table. I look around the room, into the eyes of friends, or family and I see their faces in the eyes of their children. It is a room filled with gratitude and each time I can’t think of a place I’d rather be, even when I am not sure, in the greater scheme of things, exactly what I am doing here.

The practice of being lost, writes Barbara Brown Taylor, “consists of consenting to be lost, since you have no other choice.” This consenting itself “becomes your choice, as you explore the possibility that life is for you and not against you, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary.”[1]

So that has been my choice of late, to choose to be lost, even when I know exactly where I am, just not why God put me here.

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[1] BBT, An Altar in the World, p80, emphasis mine.

Steve@50 part 2 – Walking a Dry Riverbed

Steve@50 part 2 – A Walk in a Dry Riverbed

Conventionally, lostness has to do with location, and not knowing where one is in relation to the rest of the world, but the lostness I feel is knowing exactly where I am, but not what I am to be doing here. Is it the same question God ask of Elijah in 2 Kings 19, “What are you doing here?” except the roles are reversed, and I am the one asking “What am I doing here?”.

Elijah had prayed for the rain to stop, and it stopped raining for three and a half years. I’m not sure who prayed here, but up until a few weeks we were experiencing an exceptional drought (exceptional being two stages past extreme). I woke up one Saturday morning and went for a walk in the park near our house. It hadn’t rained in so long; I followed the dry riverbed of the San Gabriel, walking on dry bedrock well below the usual water mark, or put another way, I would have been completely under water in normal circumstances. I had the feeling then, not a voice I could hear, but a thought that said to me, “this is my church, and the water my spirit.”

I noticed a few ducks scrambling over to a muddy puddle to sip what water there was, and like the drought they were experiencing, I understood it to be today’s church, squabbling over its little puddles of what is left of God’s spirit; there has been no fresh outpouring in so long. God designed the riverbed to be filled with water, and here it was dry, almost as if God’s hand of blessing had been withdrawn, that God’s Spirit had been diverted, that God’s Holy Spirit did not rain down on it, nor wish to enter what is called the church today.

Why, I asked. Now many of you know I’ve been walking the more conservative side of the road these past 10 years, believing I was still in the middle, but somewhere the road shifted, and today I find myself not so comfortable with what I once believed. We were told it was the way to grow your church, to believe these things, be inviting to these people and we did, and it did. But I am not sure we helped people the way the church was designed to as that more conservative way of the faith did not always help the living of it. We were sold a bill of goods, a set promises that can not deliver. I’ve tried to live that way, by those books, by the ideals or purpose driven notions and failed. What I have learned is

a) It is near impossible to live that way, and life feels like a failure, and guilt ridden.
b) When I do manage to ratchet down my humanity and live that way of life, it is joyless (and if there are small periods of joy, it is from condemning others who can’t live it)

So I’ve had a bit of a conversion, and sharing this with a friend who had not lost her way (and didn’t give up on me when I had). I now see empirically what she’s always known, that God’s kingdom invites a larger set of people than I could have imagined and I guess that is contributing to my sense of lost-ness too. Where is the box?

It is a lesson people of the faith have learned, or had to learn throughout the centuries, that a life of faith is lived by more than a set rules, but by a shared love of all peoples. I have found that subtle switch enough to let me live more faithfully than I have in a long time. It is amazing what love can do.

At the end of the walk, I laid flat on my back in the dry riverbed looking up, arms out stretched and confessed. I asked God to show me a new path, let me learn its ways by walking it, let me swim in this riverbed called the church, swiftly flowing with God’s spirit.

Steve@50 part 1 – Finding the Path by Walking It

Steve@50 part 1 – Finding the Path by Walking It

I am now 50 years old, and a month, and a day. Ouch.

Before I turned 50, I heard one of those sermons that keeps working itself out in my thoughts, specifically, it was the introduction to the sermon where Dr. Beverly Jones, the Chaplain of Southwestern University was remembering a cathedral she visited years ago in Europe, how she noticed a labyrinth built into its stone floor of the narthex. It was a room crowded with tourists rushing their way to see the sanctuary, and she looked down and saw this ancient stone path.

Dr. Jones talked of following the labyrinth to see where that experience led her; how it felt to follow a path oblivious to those pushing toward a view of the Chancel. She spoke about walking a path that others do not follow, know about, or see, and how we are still called do it, even when we don’t know where it will lead us. Quoting ancient wisdom “we find the path by walking it,” she said, and I knew it to be true to my soul.

That sermon began an interesting conversation in my mind with Barbara Brown Taylor’s latest book, an Altar in the World. Taylor talks about the spiritual practice of lost-ness, how she set out to be married, and ended up divorced, to be healthy, ending up sick, to be a village priest, and now teaches college. I think of my own journey, musician, computer scientist, pastor, and now 30 years later back to being a musician, working in a church. Like Taylor, it is a path “no one in their right mind would have chosen” , but whose treasure outweighs the “projected wages in the life I had planned.” Esteemed philosopher Guy Clark observed the same

Sometimes you write the songs, sometimes the songs write you.

We went to see the movie Julie and Julia a few weeks ago, a wonderful movie that chronicled the story of a historical Julia Child set against the modern day blogger Julie Powell as she cooked her way through Julia’s first book. Similarly lost, both Julia and Julie found their way in the art of French Cooking. It was a lostness I understood, a movie I totally connected with, because I’ve been finding my way in the kitchen too, not a French one, but an Indian kitchen, through the teachings of another Julie, Julie Sahni, and her wonderful book “Classic Indian Cooking”. If the ancient wisdom says we find the path by walking it, then I’ve found my path by cooking it. It has been a delicious adventure.

The Pastor’s Privilege: A Tribute to Jerry Barnes

Jerry Barnes died earlier this week while driving a school bus that collided with an 18 wheeler. That’s about all I know about how he died. What I have been thinking about this week is how he lived. At his memorial service, we heard stories of how Jerry loved fishing, never met a stranger, always had a winning smile, a man who didn’t let the circumstances of life define his attitude toward it, a person who, when judged by the quality of his friends, was indeed very rich. All true, but what keeps coming back to me this week is how he invited me into the sacred moments of his life.

Jerry was a good salesman, and being that, he had an innate ability to make people feel good about who they were. It wasn’t hollow or undeserved praise, it didn’t have really anything to do with what you were doing, you just felt better about yourself when he was around, and as I think back on it, that’s what I enjoyed most about being invited in those sacred moments.

The story always starts with when you first met them, and for me, it was visiting Jerry and Janet in their home in Morgan’s Point after church one Sunday afternoon after they had visited that morning. I’m sure one of my kids in tow. I brought them a mug, and stayed too long, we fed the deer, but what strikes me about that day is the people I met at their house and how in the years to come, we would see each other these sacred moments.

Like when Janet’s body died, holding her hand, along with Gayla, and the kids in that hospital room after her mind had been taken from a stroke earlier. It was just a shell, but we stood there, thanking God for her life, for the mother she had been, and love she had given the world and wondering about the huge hole she would leave in Jerry’s life, one that the church and good friends would try to fill. A sacred moment, a privilege to be there, and one that made saying good-bye at the memorial so much more authentic. I think back to that service and something I heard about the foods that Janet loved to cook, but her favorite thing to make was, reservations.

Or their daughter Heather, when she married Chris in that amazing castle in Burnet, as Suzanne and I were invited to witness it and feel much like one of the family. Or like when Jerry fell in love with the future Mrs. Janet Barnes, the second. How watching those two fall in love reminded us what it was like to be in love. And they were. Each had lost their soul mates a year or so earlier, and found in each other, rest from those empty places in their hearts. For a while they were together and made each other whole, but once healed from that brokenness, I guess, that which had brought them together was not enough to keep them together, and so that marriage ended. Still it is a favorite memory of mine of watching them hold hands in the parking lot after church and almost skip across it.

At the memorial service, I wondered was it me, or just the office of pastor that Jerry had invited into his life. We were not that close but I had been a part of so many sacred moments, and this being one more, I wanted to be a part of it—for my sake—and I know, when I want something for reasons like that, its never good. So I wondered when seeing his kids after the service, would they remember? Kim saw me first, and she rushed over and gave me this deep hug, saying “Steve…” Then Cal, with that great smile of his father’s, saying, “hey, I remember you!” Or Heather introducing me to her two children, both beautiful and handsome. I knew that even if it was just the office of pastor, I was the one who sat in it, and to be invited into a family such as this, and to share in some small part of the lives of the children of Janet and Jerry Barnes was indeed a privilege, and one I am deeply grateful for. I got all that from one good hug.

As much as I want this to be about me, about the pastor’s privilege, it is really just a tribute to the way of Jerry Barnes and how he touched my life and maybe yours. I would like to close with a poem by David Swing, that I’m told that was one of Janet’s favorites, and we read it at her memorial.

Let us learn to be content with what we have.

Let us get rid of our false estimates, set up all the higher ideals—

A quiet home

Vines of our own planning

A few books full of the inspiration of genius,

A few friends worthy of being loved and able to love in return.

A hundred innocent pleasures that bring no pain or remorse

A devotion to the right that will never swerve,

A simple religion empty of all bigotry, full of trust and hope and love—and to such a philosophy this world will give up all the joy it has.

God Speed Jerry, and thank you.

Returning to Ghana #4 - A visit to Eric's Village, part 1

Returning to Ghana #4 - Visiting Eric's Village, part 1

For years it seems like I've been talking about visiting Eric's village, the one he grew up in. Eric was born in Kumasi, but was raised in Adenkrebi, about an hour north of Accra. This is the photolog from that visit.

So Eric warned me that it was a lonely place, that there was nothing there, and he wasn't kidding. I think for me, the best part was watching how people welcomed him. The closer we got to Adenkrebi, the more people recognized him, and yelled out his last name as we drove by. This is the road to Adenkrebi, the one that turns off the main road.

This is Eric's oldest brother. Notice the heavy coat. Its rainy season and we're out side Accra on one of the hills that surround it to the north. Its maybe 70 degrees, and he had a coat on.

Here is the "town drunk". Eric tells me again that if I want the truth about anything or anybody, ask him. Because he is the drunk, nobody pays any attention to him, and he sees and hears everything. (click here for more about "town drunk")

Here is the kitchen, located in the courtyard.

To the left of the cooking area, will be water collection barrels, capturing rainwater from the roof. They barrels are 55 gal. steel barrels with concrete on the inside so they don't rust.

Outside the building I see a familiar site, a new bore hole pump, except it isn't locked, and looks--- I don't know--lonely. I've seen many of these pumps, and usually people rush to show me it works, or I see people lined up to use it, but this one sits alone, overlooked, idle. I see it was installed May 17, 2008.

I ask about it but the subject changes and we move on. Later we walk by it again, and I ask again. "It is spoiled," I am told, and I wonder, how long did this pump work?

I wonder if the Rotary Club of York, Maine knows this. Visiting their website, I find a picture of it working a year ago, but today its spoiled. [website]

I am told the more sustainable bore hole projects are set up on a nominal fee based use system. Each gallon of water pumped accrues some nominal fee. The money collected from that fee goes into a maintenance fund so that when something breaks, there is already money saved to have it fixed. I've spoken to a few Christian organizations wanting to drill bore holes, and install pumps, and I always ask them if there will be a fee for the water? The answer is always "NO!" it will be free!

"What happens when the pump breaks...who will pay for it to be fixed?" I ask. Not always, but often this is a question that has not been asked, and usually there is no answer except the water will be free. Charging money for water seems cruel to these organizations, but it seems to me even more cruel to give someone a well with no plan for its maintainability. I don't know the setup for this bore hole in Adenkribe, but I suspect it was not fee based (there is no lock on the pump) and today, a year after it was installed, it sits idle, unused, broken.

There are stories passed around the expat community of cars, bicycles, pumps, generators, other things that require ongoing maintenance being given to a community, or a household. When they become broken, the expat gets a call saying "Obruni, your __________ has spoiled, come fix it (or send us money to have it repaired)" I wonder if the York, Maine Rotarians received such a call. I've emailed their president to let him know, and wonder what he will do.

This is the Presby Church in Adenkribe. Its the one Eric was raised in. Outside there is a bell tower built by some Germans.

Eric tells me it rings three times before the worship service. 45 minutes

before, so people know to come in from the fields, 10 minutes before to let people know its time to leave, and when worship starts.

Inside the worship area:

Here is the most alarming part, the white Jesus. I ask Eric about it, and he says "Your people gave us these pictures of Jesus..."

I don't know if I should laugh or cry. I believe that one should never take away or explain away a belief system, or understanding without having a better one. What sort of picture could you replace them with? I mean I understand I'm in no position to say or doing anything, but if I were, what would I do, I wonder.

Comments are most welcome!