This blog won't really give you much of an update on the Jaggers, but it may give you some insight into what life feels like for us at the moment. As you know, we have no car, no dryer, no real income, poor indoor heating, and are just lacking some home comforts. In a sense, then, life is more simple for us. But because it is more simple in a material sense, it has become more tiring and in some ways more challenging (I suppose this is no surprise to those who grow up in more rural settings). You may not be hearing from us as much as you or we expected because of this. Daily errands and chores are zapping a good deal of our energy and attention. It's hard to explain, but a friend of mine helped articulate some of the idea for me through her perspective on life in a small African village:
"I’ve been thinking about what you said about life being more “simple” in the sense that you don’t have a car or many of the luxuries you had in the States, but that it seems to do anything but simplify your life. I was thinking about the Ganza and they have what we normally think of as a “simple” life. That’s it. There are no cars, televisions, internet, sports to track, news to watch, weather channels to track, obligations to send emails or notes or call home, no papers or dissertations, it’s just life. But how does that play out? There are no washing machines so an afternoon’s work can be carrying the washing to the borehole or river to wash it by hand. Where we would turn the knob on the stove, they take a trip to the bush to cut and collect firewood then borrow hot coals from a neighbor and spend time staring and fanning the fire. Where we throw the pasta in boiling water, they plow the field by hand, dig the holes, plant and weed the field, harvest it by hand and carry it home in big baskets on their heads, baskets that they made by collecting and fashioning and carving out the wood to put the basket together. Then the women hit the wheat off the stalk, grind it, soak it, and grind it two more times on hands and knees before a grinding stone while taking pauses to nurse a baby. Then they put it on the fire and get a tricep workout stirring it. OK, I don’t need to keep going…but that’s what we consider simple. “Simplicity” materially results in the majority of our time being taken up with everyday tasks. There isn’t the same complexity of obligations and concerns, but the business and never endingness of the workload is just the same, often more. It’s funny isn’t it? We idealize simplicity but do we realize that it’s at the expense of the complexities of modern society? Are we really willing to give them up? I think in order to attain actual simplicity in a western society, we’d have to be total misfits in the society, totally counter cultural in the way we spend our time. The problem comes when we try to attain both simplicity in life while still maintaining life with all its modern complexities. That’s why it’s hard for you without a car. It’s more “simple” materially but while still trying to maintain complex social standards, the pressure mounts."
So, currently we are trying to live life in a complex modern way, but with fewer modern resources than usual. It's hard to know what God might be teaching us through this so early in the adventure...In any case, I a gaining a new understanding of humility, poverty, and priorities/necessities in life.
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