The Cracked Acorn: Travels

“Let us, therefore, make every effort to do what leads to peace and to mutual edification.” Romans 14:19, NIV

Much of the world beyond our borders do not have the advantages that many of us have grown up with and have been exposed to the ever-changing technological advances that have changed the landscapes of our childhoods. I was fortunate to have work that required travel in other countries other than my own. In passing through many small towns and villages in Brazil, Ethiopia, Iran, and New Zealand, I saw the same picture. Other than New Zealand, I could not speak their language. I did see that others had a daily life and probably had the same desires, hopes, and dreams that we all have. There was the same chicken that ran across the road and the same thin dog that lay in the front yards of all the countries. Children tried to play in the road or had a car tire hung from a tree limb for a swing. I asked our liaison officer in Iran about all the loud music coming from the record stores. “What are they singing about?” He replied that it was all about lost love, pain, and hopes for a better life.”

My travels were a number of years ago, but I will venture to say that time in most of the third world countries is caught in a moratorium. If one were to travel there in 50 years or 100 hundred years, much of the daily life and condition will still exist. The Ethiopian land near the Red Sea in a harsh area and supports only those who can live off herding goats and cope with the searing heat and dry conditions. Brazil is a large country, much bigger when you travel into the interior and everyone will ask you the same question I heard at every truck stop, “Why are you here?” I guess they thought I was a crazy person to leave the USA. to travel to a place where electricity, telephone service, and refrigeration were limited.

The author of the following book, saw the same scene I had seen in other countries and he wrote down the following thoughts:

There was no heavy fighting around Danang ( for the rest of that summer. During the daytime, there did not seem to be any war at all. The rice paddies lay quietly in the sun. They were beautiful at that time of the year, a bright green dappled with the darker green of the palm groves shading the villages. The peasants in the villages in the secure areas went on living lives whose ancient rhythms had hardly been disturbed by the war. In the early mornings, small boys led the water buffalo from their pens to the river wallows and farmers came out to the fields. They plodded for hours behind wooden, ox-drawn plows, tilling the sunbaked hardness out of the earth. In the afternoons, when it became too hot to work, they quit the fields and returned to the cool dimness of their thatch huts. It was like a ritual: when the heat got too intense, they unhitched their plows and filed down the dikes toward the villages, their conical hats yellow against the green of the paddies. A wind usually sprang up in the afternoon, and in it, the long shoots of maturing rice made a luxuriant rippling. It was a pleasant sight, that expanse of jade-colored rice stretching out as far as the foothills and the mountains blue in the distance. At dusk, the buffalo were driven back to the pens. With the same boys walking beside them and whacking their haunches with bamboo sticks, they came down the dusty roads, their horned heads swaying and their flanks caked with the mud of the wallows. (A RUMOR OF WAR, Vietnam by Philip Caputo)