“It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants.”

The J: “It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?” The quote comes from Thoreau and raises a good question that we should occasionally check in and ask ourselves.

Let’s address the elephant is the room. I’m bad at writing these. I have goals to write but haven’t had very well defined plans obviously. I don’t like being a liar but that seems to be how it is with these blog post promises. I had every intention of writing a blog the next day but it didn’t happen. I have a reasonable explanation. I had to do things for the IRS. In the end it was for the better aka bigger return, so that was worth it. I know I said I would post about politics a day after the last post, but we had a nice RPCV from Uganda passing through town and we spent our free hours talking with him about similarities and differences in our service. (Our infrastructure is better).

The next three month gap I can only really account for 1.5 months of because we were traveling with loved ones. The rest of it was just me being torpid and anxious to start blogging again. Shout out to both our families for visiting and driving us around.  It was a wonderful time and it was fun to be kept again.

“Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.”

The J: Albert Einstein to say the obvious was a very intelligent man. He also summarized the core belief of Peace Corps which had its 56^th anniversary on March 1.

Though we constantly tell ourselves, and anyone reading this, that we will be better and start writing more blogs, the habit hasn’t really taken hold. This is all really to just say we have much to cover and only a short while to get there.  I have a half page of ideas I hope to discuss sometime, but I will just talk about a few events.

Let’s start with a brief recap of the biggest festival/holiday of the year here, New Year’s. During communist times it was the largest holiday people celebrated because it wasn’t associated with religion. Religion was made illegal under the communist rule and persecuted. People would come together and try and celebrate with whatever small excess they were able to save. This usually wasn’t that much more than usual due to the many flaws with communist systems that have been tried over the years. (Hopefully a post for another time). Today they put American Thanksgivings to shame with what excess they can. They have “Babagjyshi i Vitit te Ri” Old Man of New Years which is basically Santa but he comes on New Year’s and is pretty much just as unrelated as normal Santa from religion and Christ. By which I mean very unrelated. Now people come together to eat too much food and desserts (usually baklavas) and then dance and shoot off fireworks all night.