April 2

Hello, world.  I thought I'd throw out a few items of news for you.  There's nothing major going on at the moment from an external perspective, but I'll tell you about it nonetheless.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to a concert at the Rudolfinum, the premiere concert hall in Prague.  My friend Sarah, another teacher, had an extra ticket to see the Czech Children's Choir perform, and had been invited because one of her students was in the choir.  I also saw one of my former students there.  It was an interesting performance, with a lot of new pieces that had been written for that performance.  Gave me lots more insight on Czech culture.

The weekend after that, I went to Ostrava for the first time.  Ostrava is a city in the east of the CR, next to Poland.  Whenever I told Czechs that I was going to visit Ostrava, they all had the same thing to say: "Why?"  It is famous for being an ugly, industrial and mining city.  The reason I went, though, was to visit some teachers out there.  I had lots of fun.  I actually stayed in Frydlant, a small town close to Ostrava (which is considerably easier on the eyes, it being surrounded by mountains) with two married teacher friends, Aaron and Phoebe Williams.  On Saturday night, we went to dinner with a large group of people and then went to their school building, turned out the lights, and played sardines.

Last weekend, I went with a group of teachers (and one Czech) to the Skoda auto museum in Mlada Boleslav.  Skoda, the biggest car manufacturer in the Czech Republic, was founded and has a huge factory there.  We whirled through the museum and bought all kinds of Skoda memorabilia, emblazoned with it's unique, green, kind-of-birdy-looking logo.

April 16

Greetings to all of you from the Czech Republic,

When I last wrote, I had just left Gymnazium Nad Aleji and started to teach other places.  Since February, I have been teaching classes at Shell Gas and a nuclear research institute north of Prague.  I have also tutored several people.  One of them came to my flat four mornings a week, and four others I have been seeing once a week in Kralupy, which is a town that is also north of Prague.

I have also been seeing students from Nad Aleji from time to time, though not as much as I would like.  The main reason is that it is a rigorous school with ambitious students, and they are often busy with work or extracurricular activities.  I have had some good conversations with them, most often in tea rooms or pubs.  I also have played squash with a group of them.  In fact, I intended to play last Saturday, but they were all too busy.  Instead, I went to visit some teachers who live in Sokolov, a town in the western Czech Republic.

Sokolov is a three-hour bus ride from Prague.  On the way there, one passes through the rolling hills and green fields of Western Bohemia.  Just before Sokolov, the bus stops in Karlovy Vary, which is famous for its hot springs and spas.  Sokolov itself is an industrial town, with fully a third of it taken up by a chemical plant.  The central, and oldest, part of the town is like the center of any town in the Czech Republic.  There is a town square, which is dominated by a church (St. Jakub) and a plague column.  Most towns have one of these, erected several hundred years ago in memory of those who died of disease.  Outside the center, in the part of town developed in the Communist era, there are tall apartment buildings and another square, this one dominated by the House of Culture.  This is an auditorium built for meetings and cultural events, with a large brown freize over the entrance depicting a scene which looks like the workers of the world uniting.  Two teachers, Amy and Beth, live in the southeast part of town and teach at a gymnazium, and the other two, Jesse and Brian, live in the north (close to the bus station) and teach at a technical school.

Amy was not there this weekend, but Beth was.  Stacy, who lives in Prague but visits regularly because she and Jesse are engaged, was there as well.  On Saturday, we just wandered around Sokolov and enjoyed the warm spring weather, which has been a long time in coming.  Sunday, we went to a small Czech church, and afterwards had coffee with the pastor and his wife.  It was wonderful to meet such a godly man and his family here in the Czech Republic, which has such a secular society.  We were able to communicate, though he didn’t speak English well and we don’t speak Czech well.  At one point, when I was being quiet, his wife said that I was something in Czech.  He looked it up in his dictionary and pointed at the word for me, and it translated as “indecent.”  I was confused for a second, then thought that it was pretty funny.  In fact, we discovered, he had been pointing at the word above “indecent,” which was “shy.”

On Monday, I returned to Prague and taught a class at Shell Gas.  This class is made up of four women, all at least ten years older than I am, who are beginners at English.  This is the class that I struggle with planning for and teaching the most, since I have discovered recently that I am not a very good teacher of beginners.  Part of the reason is my poor Czech skills, but I think that that doesn’t make the biggest difference.  I am simply not that good at building language skills up from the ground.  I understand grammar, and can explain why a sentence is made the way it is, but as I said, constructing language skills from nothing is not something I am good at.

On Tuesdays, I go up to Kralupy and tutor four people, one at a time.  The first student, Emilie, is married, has two children, and sells paint for a company.  She studies English because many of her clients cannot speak Czech.  The second student, Petr, is 24 and studies English because he is pursuing a career in business.  He is not bad; he studied it when he was in his teens.  The third student, Katerina, is also 24 and works for a consulting company.  She is pretty advanced, and I bring various news articles for us to read and discuss each week.  The final one, Martina, just turned 30 and works in Human Resources for a telecommunications company, T-Mobile.  She studies English because her boss is American and thinks she knows more English than she actually does.  This lends an element of desperation to our lessons sometimes, but she usually calms down by about halfway through.

Here is an interesting side note: both Katerina and Martina studied to become elementary school teachers, but neither of them could afford to do it.  Both are single, and it is virtually impossible to subsist in this country as a single person on a teachers’ salary.  They have both been driven into the realm of business for this reason.  Katerina seems to be coping with it better than Martina, but I can’t help but think that all the pressure that Martina is under could have been prevented if she were allowed to pursue her calling.  Communism had a great many faults, and I would never recommend any country’s going back to it. . . but Eastern Europe hasn’t exactly entered a golden age of capitalism since it ended in 1989.

Four days a week, I used to tutor Vaclav, who was without a job between late January and April 1.  He started as the manager of a radio station on that day, but before that, he wanted to learn English.  He got to be all right at English, and we are still friends.  Last Friday, he gave me tickets (which he had gotten for free from work) to the concert of a very popular Czech band, Cechomor.  It was a great concert; the arena was packed, and they played for two-and-a-half hours.  Vaclav has invited me to spend the weekend at his cottage in a little village in South Bohemia, and I will probably go in a couple of weeks.

Fridays, I teach three classes at the nuclear research institute.  The students there are all very advanced and otherwise intelligent; they are all mathematicians and physicists.  Each week, I send them an article and we read it and discuss it in class.  The articles have been on a myriad of topics: SUVs, Mardi Gras, the war in Iraq, North Korea, the trial of a man accused of murdering a doctor at an abortion clinic, Ted Turner and Time Warner, college basketball, religious feeling in America during times of war, police detectives who search the internet for perverts, and others.  These are by far my favorite classes.  I most enjoy teaching English when I am really teaching EVERYTHING.  This is also why I enjoyed teaching literature so much when I was at Nad Aleji.  If Christianity is the truth, I feel, then it is relevant to all things.  A Christian need not be afraid of discussing anything, because everything points to the organization of the world, the fallenness of mankind, and the love of God.  These articles, no matter which topic, have given rise to some very good discussions.

All of my students know that I am a Christian, but none of them are Christians, and none of them know that I am a missionary.  The word missionary, I feel, has some unpleasant connotations in the minds of many Eastern Europeans, who have been evangelized heavily from all sides for the past 14 years.  There may be places in the world where being known as a missionary would help, but it would only hurt here.  One day in class at the institute, when we were discussing American religious feeling in times of war, I made a joking comment about spreading the good news of American capitalism.  A student, Pavel (who is atheist and frequently makes disparaging and dismissive statements about Christianity), then said, “Ah, so you are a missionary!”  To which I responded, “Yes, Pavel, that’s it EXACTLY.”  Even though we were using the same word, in Pavel’s mind (and the minds of most people I’ve met here) “missionary” meant something different.  It meant “imperialist.”

That is what my current classes are like, and now I will tell you why I haven’t sent an update for a while.  I’ve just been getting to know my new students, so not much has been happening from an external point of view.  I was just beginning to go deeper in my relationships with students at Nad Aleji when I left, and since January I have had to start over.  I have been taking longer to get to know my new students, as well, because (except for Vaclav) I don’t see them as frequently.  I try to hang out with Nad Aleji students as much as possible, but they are very busy, so what can you do?  One response to this situation could be frustration, and that has certainly been a temptation at times.  But I honestly feel that God had a purpose in having me leave Nad Aleji, and even though I’m not quite sure what it was, I still trust that it was the right thing.

To finish, here are a few prayer requests:

Please pray for my students.  Pray that they will feel the need to explore the claims and truths of Christianity.  Many of them are busy and unquestioning; please pray that they will be made uncomfortable, and driven to ask questions about the meaning of life.

Pray that I have enough money to finish the year.  As I said, I don’t teach Vaclav anymore, so that creates a big hole in my week.  I may have a proofreading job soon, and am looking for a few more teaching hours to get me through June.

Pray that enough teaching spaces will be found for the teachers next year.  At the moment, there are still a couple of teachers without schools, and ESI is trying to convince schools to have them come.

Finally, pray for faithfulness and discipline for me, and unity and perseverance for the teachers as a whole.  Many of us are tired, and find it difficult to focus on ministry or even lesson planning.

April 22

I went to Krakow, Poland, for the Easter holiday with a few other ESIers. I took the Wednesday night train with Sarah, and we got there on Thursday morning at about 6. Since the person we were staying with was not going to meet us at the train station until 9, we decided to walk around. Since we were carrying everything that we had packed for the weekend, we shortly decided to sit down on a bench. A few minutes later, two other ESI teachers from Hungary, Dave and Dawn, WHO WE DID NOT KNOW WERE COMING TO KRAKOW, walked by. Very eerie. Very "Twilight Zone." Here are some more examples of things like that that happened this weekend: Meghann lost her camera case while a group of us were walking down the street. Five seconds after she noticed it was missing, a boy walked by HOLDING THAT SAME CAMERA CASE. We were going to meet Peter, a friend from Prague, on Saturday, but he couldn't get in touch with us because his phone wasn't working. So he was in Krakow with no place to stay, and decided to go to McDonald's to eat away his pain. He was praying for a way out of his situation, when he looked out the window and SAW US WALKING DOWN THE STREET. We had gone to a coffee house earlier that same night, and I ordered lemonade because I didn't feel like drinking coffee. Five minutes later, I was given the lemonade by THE SAME WOMAN I HAD ORDERED IT FROM.

Here are some other highlights. The thing that impressed me the most about Krakow, and I suppose Poland in general, was the religious atmosphere. Coming from such a secular place as the Czech Republic, it was unusual to see packs of nuns and priests roaming the streets as I did in Krakow. Of course, I'm sure that religious feeling was high, as it was Easter weekend, but it was still amazing to me to see people actually filling churches. On Sunday evening in the main square, we came across a group of young priests and nuns. The priests were playing instruments and singing, and the nuns were dancing. The nuns didn't dance alone for very long, but began plucking people to dance with from the gathered crowd.

On Saturday, when we were joined by John, Meghann and Amanda, we went to the Wieliczka salt mine near Krakow. The mine was amazing, but the most interesting part about the tour was our guide, who had worked as a miner there for 26 years and spoke several different languages.

Sunday we went to Wawel Castle and Kazimierz. Kazimierz, the Jewish quarter, was populated at the beginning of WWII by 70,000 Jews. The current Jewish population in Krakow is about 100. Schindler's List tells the story of what happened to them.

St. Mary's is a 14th-century church with two uneven spires on the main square. Every hour, from the taller of the two spires, a trumpeter plays the hejnal to the four winds. The hejnal was a call to warn of invasions. According to legend, a trumpeter was playing this call in Krakow to warn of the Tatar invasion when he was cut short by an arrow in the throat. For this reason, when the hejnal is played today, it is cut off with a hiccup in mid-note. Charming story, isn't it?

Friday we went to Auschwitz, Sarah and Dawn and Dave and I. It was the second concentration camp that I had visited (after Sachsenhausen near Berlin this winter), and probably the last. It was good to visit two, I think, so that they could be compared. There were more similarities than differences, and the most important of the impressions I got were similar. The first of these impressions was that this sort of thing could happen at any time, and to any person. I don't just mean that any person could be killed in this way; I also mean that any person could be the killer. The second of the impressions was that ideas can be heartless, and they can kill. The only differences between the two camps were in the degree to which these ideas were carried out, in the number of people killed (it was good, at Auschwitz, to not only see numbers. The most emotional part of the time there came in a room full of pictures of the dead, with their names, birthdays, dates of arrival in the camp, and dates of death).

On second thought, for that reason perhaps a visit to another concentration camp, or to them all, could be warranted. I once saw in St. Petersburg a memorial to those who died as a result of the Communist regime (it was outside a Party building in which tortures and executions were known to have taken place). On the base of it was a quote by the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, which read, "I wish that I could remember them all by name." I, too, wish that I could remember them, though that would be a hopeless cause even if I could visit all concentration camps or all the camps in the Gulag Archipelago. I know that I can't, although it is in a way comforting to know that there is a Person who does.

April 28

Lately I've been reading a book called The Politics of Jesus, by John Howard Yoder. I've felt that a lot of what he says in this book is true for a long time, but it is still amazing to hear him say it. To find out what I mean (and whether you agree with what it says), read it.

Anyway, I found a quote in there yesterday which states as well as anything one of the main reasons for my coming overseas to be part of a small group of teachers. It's actually not from Yoder, it is a quote from J.H. Oldham:

"The first indispensable task is to restore substance to the human person through the revitalization of personal life in the living give-and-take, the mutual obligation and responsibility of a society of persons. If our diagnosis is true, the world cannot be set right from the top but only from the bottom upwards.
There is no way of restoring substance and depth to the life of man except by living. . . . Human living is living in relations with other persons and can acquire meaning and depth only in those relations. Since the number of persons with whom an individual can have direct and close relations is limited, the art of social living has to be learned and practiced in small groups, of which the family is the chief. . . .

The church is concerned with the primary task of recreating a true social life in two ways. In the first place, its greatest contribution to the renewal of society is through the fulfillment of its primary functions of preaching the Word and through its life as a worshipping community. It is the worship of God that is the source of all genuine renewal. It is only in response to the demands of His perfection that it can reach out to new tasks. It is His grace and truth which in the last resort guarantee and sustain the personal and cultural values which are essential to the health of society.

There is nothing greater that the Church can do for society than to be a center in which small groups of persons are together entering into this experience of renewal and giving each other mutual support in Christian living and action in secular spheres. Such groups will find their vital inspiration in Word and Sacrament and in the fellowship of such gatherings as the parish meeting."

J.H. Oldham, "A Responsible Society," in The Church and the Disorder of Society.

April 29

I have a question for everybody that I thought of this morning:

Why, in shaving commercials, has everybody shaved already? I've seen computerized graphics of hairs the size of apartment buildings being mowed down by the "patented lift-and-cut system," and I've seen square-jawed, clean-shaven men who for all I know take hormones so they can't grow anything on their face, but I can't remember anyone actually shaving.

If you can come up with a satisfactory answer to this question, I will get you. . . something. From Prague.
(In case you were wondering, I did indeed think of this while I was shaving.)