The Air I Breathe

Maybe you've been couped up inside all day, or you live in a big city and the air quality is not so good. You think everything is okay, no problems. But then you walk outside or you take a trip to the beach or mountains, and you realize that the air you had been breathing was polluted and stagnant. Your lungs burst with new life. The clean air is so much better than what you've had.

Today I breathed that fresh air again. I met a guy named Larry who has had a hard go of it recently. I got to talking to him and we continued on and I was able to help him and his family out some. It was like I got to breathe again for the first time in a while. That fresh air hitting my lungs and remembering that this is what I am supposed to breathe. It is what I am made for. My lungs were meant to breathe fresh air, not smog-polluted, coal-sooty air. It is so good to breathe that fresh air.

Yet, we always seem to return from our vacation in the clean air and return to 'life' in the midst of the thing that poisons our lungs. Why do we return to that which we know is no good for us? It'd be nice to breathe fresh air all the time. It's what we were made for.

Brazil

Why are you reading about Brazil on a China blog? Well, because Felicia and I will be traveling there in July for a few weeks of training. We will be in a town outside of Rio, and will be taking some field trips into the favelas in the big city. Favelas are the equivalent of slums there with squatters living in crammed homes on public land and are run by organized crime. I saw a program on Discovery Channel about Brazil and learned the life expectancy of males in favelas is 25 years old. Sad.

The town we will be in is Teresopolis and, although it will be the middle of Winter, the highs will be around 70. I have been trying to convince Felicia that this is our 10-year anniversary get away, but she isn't falling for it, yet. Anyway here is a photo of the town we will be in:

And here is a photo of Rio de Janeiro from above Christ the Redeemer. The statue is 120 feet tall:

What Are You Thinking About?

Sometimes I sit here and think, 'I spend a lot of time thinking about stupid stuff.' Not that I only sometimes think of stupid stuff, rather I only sometimes think about the stupid stuff I always think about. Where do my thoughts wander to? A friend was sharing the other day that Atlanta is the number 1 city in the U.S. for human trafficking. Really? I sit around and think about what I want for dinner, what is happening in the sports world, how can I avoid American Idol, why is gas so expensive, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and the city I live in is the highest in the U.S. for human trafficking? My, how I waste my time. I think it is easy to think we live in a "cultured" and "civilized" society, but we are no better off than the rest of the world. We just ignore it here and keep to our sheltered group of friends and we don't step out and see the unspeakable injustice happening around us. I do it every day. It makes life easier to avoid the dirty part of where we live.

This isn't an attempt to make you feel bad about what you think about, rather, just to spur you on to comtemplating what really is important. Knowing that people are being enslaved next door makes what I normally think about pretty lame. Anyway, just something to think about.