First Time Here?

The problem with blogs is that as soon as you post something new, something old gets pushed farther back into the archives. I've directed lots and lots of new readers to this blog in the last few weeks but all you'd find on the front page is a few random posts about Sarah Palin, another about some third-grade students in South Carolina, and a picture of a big stack of books.

To remedy that, I have here a list of links to a collection of posts that does a better job summarizing the sort of things I've been up to in the last year. If you've been a faithful reader for the last year, you can ignore this post. But if you're new, I encourage you to click on a link that interests you and read more about my first year as an overseas missionary of the Episcopal Church. The links are the underlined and coloured bits of text.

I preached a sermon before I left summarizing my take on the word missionary. I preached another this past month, linking that word to my experience.

A major pre-occupation of mine this past year has concerned the distinction between being and doing.

I spend a lot of time interacting with people who have HIV and AIDS. There are numerous stories on this blog about them but a few of them are Fumanekile, Pakama, Nosisi, and Nosipho.

I've been working on starting a small micro-credit program in Itipini.

I work with a group of high-school students after school and have started a book club with them.

My guitar-playing makes me popular with the pre-school children.

I've reflected a lot of what it is like to work in another culture, how loneliness keeps creeping into my life, how concepts like isomorphic attribution play out in real life, if mission work really is a "noble pursuit", what it is like to be male in Itipini, what "the accident of birth" means, and what it is like to be a member of a non-English language church, among much else.

There are pictures of people in Itipini all over this blog and I've posted an album to Flickr.

I also was blessed to have two great trips, one to Uganda and the other to Lesotho.

That's only a brief dip into the 278 (and counting posts) on this blog but hopefully it will give new visitors a chance to orient themselves.

Remember, you can also join my monthly e-mail newsletter list by sending me an e-mail.

And I keep updating this blog - so that means you need to keep coming back and reading it!