Seth Godin keeps writing things that challenge me to live to the fullest, not settle for life in a small story.  He writes:

…a never-ending cycle of optimization can become a crutch, a place to hide when you really should be confronting the endless unknown, not the banal stair step of incremental optimization. While Yahoo was optimizing their home page in 2001, the guys at Google were inventing something totally new.

There are so many ways we settle for less. Another is competition. “Winning” is supposed to have value. Demagogues are people willing to “wreck the system” to win. Demagoguery seems to be on the rise. What is the bigger story? Godin writes:

What happens when you define a win as getting closer to someone who wants the same thing? Or when you define it as improvement over time? Or in creating trust?

He’s talking about love, at least in part. Winning is nothing if the story ends there. Movies that end with the cheers of the crowd at the end of the game conceal that point. Victories in the big and small games we play recede with time into nothingness, and so do we if we attach ourselves to them. Love creates bigger stories that ascend and expand as they go.

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Last night my wife and I drove to Santa Fe and attended the public viewing of Review Santa Fe, a portfolio review featuring 100 up and coming photographers. It’s an international event, and I felt fortunate to be here for it.  We were able to meet a photographer, Jerry Redfern, who has lived in Cambodia and worked in the surrounding countries. I also met his wife, a journalist who has written the best introduction to Cambodia that I’ve read. It’s very readable book I’d recommend for anyone traveling or planning to live in Cambodia. It’s called Cambodia Now.  She also writes an award winning food blog.

My wife came up to me midway through the event and invited me to see a picture that left her “breathless.” I followed immediately, wondering what kind of picture would have such an effect on her. She led me to Emily Shur’s table.  Last night she was showing a portfolio of images from Japan, forsaking the popular idea of Japan in favor of the “banality” that most Japanese see every day.

As she flipped through her stack of large prints, I did a double-take. I was looking at a picture of the apartment building where we lived for the past two years. Imagine the odds of that. Tokyo is one of the largest cities in the world. Our place was a five minute walk away a train station on the edge of the city, and she walked by and took a picture of our parking lot, and then we met and saw it in Santa Fe.

Here’s the photo as seen  on her blog.

White Buildings, Takao, 2009 (Emily Shur)

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I just read a chilling article in the New York Times about our prospects in the fight against HIV/AIDS.  They’re not good.

During the past 10 years we turned a corner. Cheap medications became widely available, and millions of people worldwide began receiving treatment. Before 2005, getting HIV was a death sentence for the majority worldwide, including more than 2 million children newly infected annually. Then there was hope. But will this hope be sustained, or are we turning a corner in the opposite direction?

…for most of Africa and scattered other countries like Haiti, Guyana and Cambodia, it seems inevitable that the 1990s will return: walking skeletons in the villages, stacks of bodies in morgues, mountains of newly turned earth in cemeteries.

What happened?

Simply put,  the number of newly infected people each year is exceeding the number we can treat. At the same time, funds for the fight are shrinking.  Besides the global economic crisis, donors have been redirecting funds to combat malaria and other preventable diseases that actually kill more people than HIV/AIDS.

It would be a terrible tragedy to return to the situation ten years ago when people were dying in such numbers and unimaginable conditions. I’ll be moving to Cambodia in two months, and I know children who are alive because they take ARV medications every day. When those programs started, promises were made that the plug would never be pulled.  You can’t give someone medicine and then take it away after a few years…can you?

The bitter truth is that we cannot save everyone. We’re slowly saving less and less. We must concentrate more on prevention, or the dam will break.

“You cannot mop the floor when the tap is still running on it,” said Dr. David Kihumuro Apuuli, director-general of the Uganda AIDS Commission.

There are no easy answers. Prevention versus treatment is more than just a debate to take sides in. Simply giving more money is not an answer. I recommend reading the full New York Times piece and Bill Easterly’s response for further perspective.

Living with HIV in Cambodia thanks to ARV medications provided by USAID funds

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Wayne Jacobsen on his blog today:

Until you know you are loved you will be sucked into every religious activity and performance treadmill that exists, hoping against hope that you can do the right thing to merit that deep affection from the heart of the Father. But you already have his affection! The great lie of the universe is that you are not loved by the Creator of all. The question is only do you realize how loved you are?

If you’re interested in hearing more about living loved and loving others, Wayne has a wonderful series of audio teachings called Transitions on his website in the audio library section, or from iTunes, or I’ve uploaded them all in one zip file that you can download here.

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I’ve written at length about Andong Village and Abraham Hang’s work there. Today I was glad to find his story online told well and at length. You can read it here.

A tidbit from the past I didn’t know:

When I saw this take place, I began to help the poor who were being ripped off by the gang. I created my own gang and we had automatic weapons to fight the bandits as I had become a soldier as well during that time. It was now 1998. I ended up killing the leader of the bandits and gang dispersed and ceased to oppress the people. I am the only one left alive from our original group of modern day Robin Hoods, because, as I thought at the time, my good luck came from the magical powers of a Khmer Witch doctor bestowed upon me.

Abraham on the road from the school to Andong Village

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