Where is home

The answer to the question of where home is is pretty obvious to some people.

For a young child, home is where the parents are.  For others, home is where they go to after school or after work, where they were born, where they grew up, where they normally live, etc.

Karl Dahlfred says that it is not so easy with missionaries.

At the early stage of living in a foreign land, "home" is where they have come from.  They have stories from "home" that the locals do not relate to.

Then, when they return for their home assignment, they have stories from abroad that their peers at home do not relate to.  When people talk about how nice it is for them to be "home", they get a funny feeling, as they agree with the person, and also see it to be nice where they were settled for their mission.  The early stages of home assignment is nice for catching up with family and friends, but once that has happened, there is also a longing to be back out there with the friends that they have in their place of ministry.

In a sense, these guys are home at the place they return to, to an extent.  To another extent, home is where their ministry is.  And in another sense, these guys are at home in neither place, as the worlds have changed in their absence.  They are like third culture kids, who are not exactly of the culture of either place, but have a unique culture of their own.

(And to a sense, there are variations of these too - as people have different "home culture" and "host culture" experiences depending on where they live and where they serve.  Some missionaries have served in more than one host country - so that would be yet another phenomenon.)

I reckon this phenomenon is not limited to missionaries doing overseas service.  Expats managing multinational organisations abroad, school teachers abroad, etc. would probably relate to this equally well.  Also immigrants, refugees, and other people who have moved to live in another city or another state.

What do you think?

Are such people ever at "home" anywhere?  What does "home" mean in their context?  Can they ever be "home"?

Attraction and racial stereotypes

Vesko Cholakovv gave his blog the title "Rules of Attraction: Why white men marry Asian women and Asian men don't marry white women".

I disagree with his summation.  I have seen many Asian men who have married white women.  Especially those of Cambodian men who have married British women.  I appreciate that what he wrote is a generalisation, but even so ...

Cholakovv's blog lays reason to sterotypes.  Movies, television, etc. influences the decision.  The way characters are depicted in our entertainment impresses upon society the stereotypes that the authors or producers either believes in, or wishes the society to conform to.  The entertainment industry mostly originated from white American society, which felt the need to protect themselves from the Asian and black-skinned immigrants who would seek marital partners from their kind.

Three stereotypes were introduced:

1. That black men are aggressive and hyper-masculine, while Asian women are perfect wives because of their docile, submissive and obedient behaviour.
2. That Asian men are desexualised math brainiacs while black women are too aggressive, independent and outspoken to be attractive wives.
3. That white men and women are in a position of power and consequently desirable globally.

Although there would be exceptions to this rule, the subtle power of influence from media gets society to behave in a way where men and women subconsciously finding people attractive or not, and end up choosing their marital partners based on these stereotypes.

Of course, society is changing, and there are more deviations to this stereotype today compared to before.  Movies are also less likely to depict their characters based on these stereotypes compared to the past.  And Bollywood, Korea and other nations are injecting entertainment that are not based on white society.

Do you think our choices are based on racial stereotypes which are based on our entertainment industry?  Why or why not?

What should we believe about other people, if not what we have learned about them?  How do we shake off the influence of the subtle messages we have absorbed?

What do you think?

Choices

How do you make your choices along life's paths?  What would you choose in order to advance your career life?  Your marriage?

Do you make these choices based on what is good for you?  Or what is good for other people?

Are the choices based on your talents?  Or what you wish to learn?

I have read a few interesting articles recently that seem to give some advice on this matter:

• Practice does not make perfect all the time.  It isn't always about what you want to achieve and how you strive for it.  It is also about what you have been gifted to do.  Some people can try all they want and not achieve in something ... although these people are likely to be good at something else instead.
  
• Focus on God.  You can screw up your life by giving into temptations.  By being distracted from what you are called to do.  Worship God, identify the distractions and put them away, and be responsible for your own spiritual health.
  
• The best part about life is realising why something didn't work out.  We are happier when things work out, of course, but there are lessons to be learned along the way.  Eg. friends we shouldn't trust, goals we shouldn't aim for ... don't feel like a failure because it didn't work out; instead, learn from these lessons.

Do you think so?  Do you think such advice is right?  What would God want to teach you?  Are you willing to learn?  How will you make your next set of choices now that you have read this?

Food distribution

I found it shocking to read that people were arrested when they tried to feed the hungry.  Apparently, the city find the poor and homeless to be an eye-sore, and do not wish to help them in this way.  How uncaring?

(Perhaps the city doles out welfare and assumes that to be enough.  I do not know.)  Meanwhile, equally shocking in the other extreme, is the cost that food distributors pay to put the "halal" label on their brands.  They claim that they do not pass on this cost to the consumer, but in the interest of having some profit and staying in business, it is hard to imagine how this is possible.

This sounds as bad as food distributors dumping their excess stock so to keep their prices high, rather than to use it to feed the poor.  What is our world coming to?

Having said this, I also see that some hotels and bakeries do feed the poor.  Supermarkets discount their day-old bread, while some other businesses donate the left over stock to charities and not-for-profit organisations rather than dumping.  I cheer this behaviour.

How about you?  Can you see the sense in this?  Do you think God would be pleased with the way we handle money and our attitudes towards the poor in our society?

How dumb are we

Whirlpool designed a "smart" washing machine, but nobody is buying it!

Apparently, following the trend of the Internet of Things, the smart washing machine can be connected by Wi-Fi and be accessible from an iPhone app.  One can start or monitor the washing machine by sending signals across the internet, and the device can sms or email the user when the wash is complete.  It costs only USD1699, but hardly anybody at this point in time is wanting to buy one.

Who needs to control or monitor one's washing across the net?  One still needs to be physically present to load or unload the wash.  Or have another person attend to the task on one's behalf.  Besides being trendy, how useful is it to have such a device?

Will it win an Ig-Nobel prize the way the way the software that detects a cat walking over a keyboard did?

Maybe it is not that silly.  But it does beg the question.  Are we inventing things to follow a trend, without really solving useful problems?  Has ICT gone crazy, solving problems that nobody needs solved?  Do we really need data everywhere, and data mining to follow trends?  Are we doing anything really practical, or has effort gone into marketing useless gadgets?

Do we really need smart watches, electronic tablets and computer-spectacles?

Or are these instruments actually useful?

I remember once not needing a smartphone, but I now realise the benefit of having one.  I am happy with 3G, but understand the trend is going towards 4G.  We used cameras and phones as different devices in a previous era; I am not sure that combining the two devices is actually a good thing, but see that this is where the world has become.

What do you think?  Do consumers buy dumb things because it is fashionable to?  Or are we really more astute?