Wheeler Sparks

A composition and recording from early this year

Waiting On My Life To Start

 

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Though loved ones may only exist in our lives for a season, we do not forget them when they are gone.

Rubberband Song

She said “It’s my gift to you,”
Then put it over my hand and she laughed at me.
She would call it funny but I never really got the joke
and I wore that band ’til it turned black and broke

Oh how I prayed that it would last
’til the end of the earth
So I tied it in a knot and then I
put it on again until it wore too thin
to stretch around my hand.
Oh how I prayed that it would last
’til the end of the earth.
Oh how I prayed that on my wrist
you would see the way I feel.

Trespassing over old abandoned rock quarries and fields,
If I had been alone, I never would have had the guts to go
Where fireflies fought the stars above to give us light
the casualty was night
and grass up to her waste helped us to hide.
Oh how I prayed,
and I guess that if she never left my mind
it would last ’til the end of time.

The Story of a Sunburn

I spent a day on an island in an ocean of blue
the sun there was angry and strong.
I couldn’t help thinking of you.
Oh please hear me before you decide you know what I’ll say.
I don’t mean that you left me sunburned and peeling away
But I couldnt sleep on my back for days.
Remember the time we drove to the river at night
and we walked along in the dark
until we lost my car.

Oh we wondered the road that winds where the river winds too.
Each step away from the car but each one a bit closer to you.
Each step was closer to you.
They say we grow closed as we grow older,
we start to board ourselves in
And the light starts to hurt our eyes
when we open the windows to let it in.
I think it’s more like we search by the daylight
and when we’ve found enough we come in

‘Cause oh the freedom of day burned my pride away,
And the sun was too strong so the night was all I could long for.
And so that sunburn made me wish that I was with you,
to wind where the river winds too.

A Voice Calls Out

A voice calls out both loud and clear
from the desert sun and sand
“Prepare a road with your two hands!”

We shall go there, you and I
Beneath a desert sky,
To build a highway for the Lord to come again.

Raise the valley to the plains,
Every mountaintop must fall.
The road it must be straight
So all will see Him as He comes,
And all will know His name -
The one John the Baptist spoke of on Jordan’s banks
(Prepare a highway)

And all will see him as he comes again.

(The recording isn’t bad for living out of a backpack, right?

 

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Evidence tells me that, as my trip became more and more exciting, my website became more and more boring. Sorry about that. . . Still, I am loving my time too much to spend it on the internet - but I thought I’d include a copy of my latest quarterly report to the Watson people, having added a few more details so you can better understand what was going on. It kinda loosely summarizes the last few months. . . focusing on my trip to Karamoja. hopefully it’ll give you a better understanding of what I’ve been up to.

Dear TJW,
Sorry my letter home has been delayed and late in coming.

So much has changed since July and even since the last letter in January. Since my last letter, I believe I have matured in so many ways that are difficult to express on paper and even more difficult to convey using email. Uganda was an incredible place, full of the kind of adventure for which I expected and hoped. I must say, I was protected during my time there for I had many-a-brushes with danger, and I came to love the people there very much. If you recall, I requested staying in Uganda longer, potentially the rest of my trip, and the levels of my growth could very well have stagnated if I had chosen to do so.

See, I have done much thinking about the Watson and the experience with which I have been blessed. I understand this year is different for everyone, but I must say that as my year has unfolded before my eyes, I could not be more satisfied with the results it has produced in both my consciousness of the world and the knowledge of myself. Perhaps one of those most defining experiences came from my time in Uganda.

A friend of mine in Southwestern Uganda, with whom I was working to aid the Batwa pygmycommunities with an agricultural project and an independant cultural center, just happened to be a proffessional photographer. He’s just over sixty but moves and acts like a youngster - his coarse jokes often left me feeling a role reversal as I shook my head in a semi-embarassed but laughing disapproval. Steve, a photographer for over 40 years, was asked to photograph a celebration in Karamoja district of Uganda, in a small town called Kabong, a few km south of Sudan and west of Kenya. I asked him if I could come along for the just under two week excursion and after thinking about it for a few days, he agreed.

My draw for going was understandable - The Karamajong are perhaps the most fascinatingly vibrant ethnic group in all of Uganda. They have been largely unaffected by the developement of the rest of the country and their land looks like a separate country all together, void of the green fields and banana leaves that are such a signature part of the southern Ugandan landscape. Where we ended up, the mountains at the border ofKenya and Sudanstood blue behind thedry goldenand barren brush. At night, circularbrush fires, used by the people to enable the grass to grow-back faster, glowed orange through the darkness in virtually every direction.

Unfortunately, Steve’s hesitation to allow me to come along was perhaps just as understandable - Karamoja is one ofthe most dangerous areas in Uganda as well, not excluding the LRA’s reign on the Northwest, because it is frequently terrorized by the romanticized Karamoja “warriors. ” As a matter of fact, a number sources ensured me that, despite its proximity tothe Sudaneseborder, the LRA never extended its acts of terror to Karamoja because they would have been no match for the killers that are born and bread there. The warriors make private transport through the hot and dry dirt roads a terribly risky mode of transportation. Unfortunately, there were a few instances where that was the only mode of transportation available, and we had to pay an embarassingly low price hiring a few Ugandan soldiers to risk their lives accompanying us (around two US dollars each).

I can’t say quite what the draw was to going, knowing full well the danger, but I shall try to explain. In the book, “We Wish to Inform You That Tommorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, ” the author writes perhaps one of my favorite quotes of all time. “This is what fascinates me most in all of existence: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real. ” The reality is, once I returned safely, I knew exactly why I had gone, though it was not so easy to express in words.

The main purpose of the warriors, and the some 40,000 illegal weapons spread throughout the district, is obtaining cattle from surrounding villages. The cattle are used as a dowrey (one hundred for every marriage) as well as for sustenance. The warriors are not an army, they are a sporadic group of youngsters that learn at a young age the ability to fight and, when necessary, kill efficiently. They not only battle with one another, among various villages andcounties, but withopposing tribesacross the mountains in Kenya, the UPDF (Ugandan People’s Defense Force), and any private vehicle that dares to cross their territory. The only other white people we saw that far north were driving SUV’s with “U. N. ” printed boldy on the side. Even these stopped once we passed the dreaded Lobell, a pass with rock over-croppings that hung high above the flatlands, from where the warriors scout out potential attacks on coming vehicles. A little girl in our flat-bedtruck screamed and cried as we approached.

They are an awe inspiring people - dark black skin, high and well-defined cheekbones, almost bubble-like raises on the skin of their faces, shoulders and chest, which are created using the thorns of the acacia tree and serve as a sign of beauty. Sometimes called the “massai of Uganda” though far more warlike now than their Tanzanian counterparts, both dress using bright colored sheets and adorn themselves with vibrant beads and jewelry. However, the ethnic pride expected to encounter, and did on some cases, had been largely swallowed by the gaping mouth of poverty that continues to eat away at Northeastern Uganda. One raid in particular about which I heard, ravaged an entire county of more than six thousand cattle when eight hundred warriors (half with machine guns and the other half with clubs and spears) poured in from another country in the district.

On one occasion, we asked to take a picture of several warriors, who sat watching their village celebrate, cool anddistant from the festivities. They said we could only take their picture if we purchased them a goat. Needless to say, we did not press them on that matter. For the warrior, the world is divided into three people: Friends, enemies and people that don’t belong there. Sometimes, maybe not that irregularly, the first and third parties get caught in the conflict. I met a few people helping in the area, including Father Angelo, a Catholic priest from Italy that had lived in the area for over 40 years. Many of his brothers and priests had been killed while aiding the Karamajong.

The stories from those few days filled many pages of my journal. However, they filled much more than that. For the first time in my life, I truly tasted the effects of war. I smelled them and saw them with my own eyes. Karamoja was in a terrible drought for over two months and, as we caught various buses and UPDF military trucks across the brush, we passed dry riverbed after dry river bed. During times of drought, the Karamajong drink a mixture of cow’s blood and milk to sustain themselves, eating once every few days a meal of sorghum or porridge.

I returned from my time in Karamoja having learned more about poverty than four years of economics classes taught me. Everything I saw was poignant, moving and emotionally taxing, but also left me with a new and keen understanding of the world. These people, prostrate and hungry from the effects of internal warfare, neglected by the nation and, save the World Food Program, the world, had been caught in a visciously complex maze of developement and resistance. On the one hand, they need the same thing as every impoverished community needs - education, infrastructure, resources. However, it becomes so much more complex than that when you begin to understand the root of their problem.

“This country will never develop until the raids stop, “Father Angelo told me, “because the pockets of poverty are constantly shifting as various communities possess and then lose their cattle.” As this happens, each community loses all its provisions and welfare simultaneously, and crawls through the followingdays eating dry sorghum and drinking bitter beer made from the same. They starve and thirst, until their warriors find another community to raid (since their attackers are expecting a backlash, they attack another community who is unprepared, making it quite difficult to decide who to help and how to help them).

Sometimes the raids virtually stop during the rain season, leading one to think perhaps a steady water supply could aid developement. However, the raids are so steeped in tradition that it might take more than that to make the warriorsever consider stopping completely. “They come to peace talks and then leave early in order to get out to the bush to raid another settlement,” Father Angelo continues. It is their duty as men. A boy is initiated as a man, and covered in white sheep skin for a week to purify him following his first kill.

Perhaps the warriors are over-glorifed by romantics such as myself. Steve, my photographer friend, stated audaciously, “They’re just a bunch of thugs with guns and nothing else to do.” Perhaps they are, but they are also respected and feared by all who enter their land, and even by those who refuse to enter. Maybe they are thugs, but they seek battle and engage in it without hesitance. They live for war. Whether their cause be just or unjust, the connotation postitive or negative, that makes them warriors in my eyes none-the-less.

Without letting my whole report contain information from a week of my journey, suffice it to say that UPDF is mostly making matters worse - demanding the weapons of the Karamajong and then neglecting to protect the communities or failing to do so against the primitive yet far superior bush warriors. We witnessed a number of warriors imprisoned because they failed to submit their guns to the army.

As is customary there, in something of a right of passage, I grew from a boy to a man in Karamoja, not by taking a life but by observing it. I aged, having understood, smelled, seen and tasted poverty in the most base and degrading sense, and accepted a personal responsibility not to leave the world without trying fight such circumstances wherever I may be called to do so. While the Batwa pygmies, with whom I lived in SW Uganda for several months, are suffering and starving, the Karamajong are suffering, starving and killing one another in an effort to survive. That last category makes an immeasurably large difference in quality of life -war is most certainly man’s greatest disease.

This was the most difficult period of my Watson experience, and perhaps the most defining one. For such a long time, I longed to see people exist in this way because I dont think I really believed it was true. My mind could only imagine what was, in fact, real. And now, I feel I can progress toward helping wherever my Lord calls me to serve. It is no longer a fantasy or novelty, but rather a painfully tangible reality. That reality has changed the way I view everything in the world, not to mention my place therein.

From Karamoja, I spenta little less than two weeks with my brother, returning for a few final days with my friends near Bwindi Impenetrable Forestand taking a short excursion to Zanzibar.

In South Africa, I attended a praise and worship service on friday nights in one of the “colored” communities (the South Africans have given this name to the people who are too white to be black and too black to be white) that was ripe with enriching gospel music heavily rooted in the jazz tradition. In fact, all the musicians at the service were also jazz artists and, after allowing me to play one night, they offered to connect me with some musicians in the Cape Town area to help me learn.

Cameron Ward has been playing guitar for four years, but he sounds like he’s been playing for twenty. Jimmy Dludlu, the South African jazz movement’s Jimi Hendrix, bought Cameron his first guitar because he saw he had “unusual promise” at the age of 16. Now 19, Cameron was my teacher and became a close friend of mine, and he really helped me to break through in my understanding of jazz. My time in South Africa for writing music and studying jazz guitar was a huge blessing. After my time in Karamoja, the improved standard of living in Stellenbosch was something I welcomed without hesitation.

In South Africa, I first began to experiment with fasting as a method of worship as well as a way of developing my own self-discipline. Strangely, fasting opened an entirely new way of viewing the world of poverty and understanding the suffering of others. When we finally met up in China, Adam Jarczyk and I had the opportunity to fast for a day in the plains of Litang, beneath 6,000 meter moutnains at an altitude of over 4,000 meters. Talk about a bonding experience.

I will have much to write about Southwest China, now often considered to be more Tibetan than many parts of Tibet proper, and the experience has been nothing less than rewarding. However, I am still learning much and have not had the necessary time to process all I have seen and done. Today, I played basketball with some Tibetan monks at their monastery in the mountains of Xinong, a small town south of Gonze in northern Sichuan. It was a hillarious juxtaposition of old and new to see them dribbling and shooting in their red and gold robes with shaved heads and bare feet or sandals. “Yao Ming” they said, and pointed at the tall and skinny monk who seemed to be the best among them. I will say, it made for some incredible pictures that I will get to you when I have the chance to upload them from a high speed computer.

I will head to Mongolia in a few weeks, but for now I will continue to head north towardsYushu prefecture. We’llsee what’s to come.

Grace and peace,

Wheeler

The Deconstruction of Babel

Come let us build a tower that will reach the sky
Oh as we raise this city, men will come from the East
and we will build a name

But I never ask for much
’cause I have all I need.

Don’t you wonder how I
can get by with my time
never saying a word?
It’s cause I never ask for much
and I have all I need.
So I don’t need your tower to the sky,
The grass withers and the flowers die.
Your tower will fade too, in time.
I don’t ask for much
’cause I have all that I need.

Oh, you can build your name,
but the Lord has given me mine
and I have all that I need.

 

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As I arrived to Egypt, the bustle of Cairo was overwhelming at times, and my experience was quite different than in Morocco. I have been living in Maadi, a small international community outside of downtown Cairo that is known for a strange combination of diversity and affluence. It is a completely different world than the old medina in Fes.

As a matter of fact, it would be easy to forget it is Cairo, if not for the armed guards in the streets with machine guns and everybody driving with their headlights off at night. The pyramids, deserts, jallabas (robes for men), and mosques help me remind me as well. The traffic poses a much bigger threat than almost anything else - there are no speed limits, traffic lights or stop signs; lanes are optional and crossing the road on foot is a very dangerous game of dodgeball. It’s like where I lived in Morocco, only with cars, not donkeys.

A big difference from Morocco, is that around 10 percent (or more) of the population is Coptic Christian here, and most of the mosques are open for non-Muslims to enter outside of prayer times. There are ancient churches as well as mosques, and an old Coptic Christian area of the city as well as an Islamic one. I have traveled around Egypt a good amount – Luxor, Alexandria and the Sinai peninsula. I have also spent some time at the Mother Teresa orphanage in Garbage City, helping out especially with their Christmas celebration for all the children in the surrounding area.

From Muqatam (Garbage City)

What I Am Learning and Doing:

I have spent significant time writing new music and learning much about myself in this way. The result of an email from a very respected person, I began thinking about the connection between science and art. Since then, I have come to understand that the two are inherently inseparable. For me, understanding the science of music – what makes it appealing to our minds and what makes one sound distinct from others - serves as a kind of artistic catalyst for me, enabling me to create something new. The more I come to understand about the mathematical side of music, the more I begin to define my artistic expression’s direction. Simply put, by defining what it is that sparks my creativity (the science of a particular interval, rhythm or sequence), I actually open up a multitude of opportunities and possibilities to create something new (art). Rather than sitting and waiting around for a creative lightning bolt to strike the firewood, I am trying to teach myself various ways to build a fire.

Visual aid: Think outside the box, ride your camel outside the boundaries.

In this way, I enable myself to create my own muse rather than waiting for it to reveal itself to me. Waiting for inspiration enslaves me to my work. Thinking outside the box helps me master it. For example, when you get writer’s block, you are supposed to keep writing in order to overcome it. If you concentrate on changing the structure of your sentences, using fresh images or even disrupting the rhythmic flow of your paragraph, you have a much better chance of tearing down the wall. Music can be treated similarly - rhythms, melodies and harmonies can be broken into words, sentences and paragraphs. You just keep writing… which I had the time (and solitude) to do in Egypt.

Speaking of time in Egypt, mine was perhaps even more of a cultural experience than Morocco, even though many parts of the two cultures are very similar. I was involved with the national community here through projects like the orphanage in Garbage City. But the most constructive use of my time was with the huge Sudanese refugee population, who fled their home to escape the Darfur genocide.

There have been over 450,000 people killed and more than two and a half million people displaced as refugees. The stories from the Sudanese are harrowing - boys told me about sleeping with their families under trees in the middle of the wilderness, staying awake in order to be ready to run. Some of the refugees left their loved ones back home and now have no way to return to them. Others fled to Cairo with their families, but now have difficulty providing meals for them each day.

I became involved with the Maadi Community Church projects, which are directly responsible for development and aid programs to more Sudanese refugees than the UN. Many of the Sudanese my age have been here for as long as seven years, unable to find jobs or enroll in school due to their refugee status. The result of their displacement is the formation of gangs and ghettos (which are segregated and verbally, or sometimes physically, persecuted by Egyptians). “Depending on who you ask and what their criteria is, Egypt is currently the home of between 29,000 and 500,000 refugees,” according to the Maadi Community Church website.

The church helps directly and indirectly by supporting schools, training teachers, and even providing vocational and adult literacy training for non-school age refugees. Through volunteering to help with youth medical screenings, giving music lessons or just taking time to really listen to their plight, I realized just how far even a little help can go. I attended their worship services weekly and even visited a school to talk to the students about music through a translator. I only wish I could have done more. Needless to say, the church’s efforts are making a difference and, as of now, I would like to return to Egypt to become involved at a greater capacity following the conclusion of my Watson year.

Honestly, my heart goes out to many of the places my Watson year will never take me since I am not permitted to travel to many of the countries that need the most help. Maybe it’s the whole forbidden fruit philosophy - that what you can’t have draws you the strongest - but having made a friend who lives in Gaza doing non-profit work and teaching English and having been invited to Sudan by many of its people (who insist that in the coming years Sudan will once again be a strong nation), I can’t help but feel as though I want to get involved as well.

I have encountered aid and relief programs to Iraq, Pakistan, Congo and Eritrea, as well as those in Palestine and Sudan. If the suffering in the world tells you there is no God, certainly the organized and effective outreach and development aid programs which combat such suffering across the world offers a rarely acknowledged opposing argument! Many men I met have devoted their entire lives and families in order to ease the suffering of others.

Being here in Egypt was perfect for me because it enabled me to get involved and to see what a difference can be made by even one willing soul, without putting my life at unnecessary risk. Still, I find myself wondering, “Is it normal for me to desire to live in places like Palestine or Sudan, to put myself in danger in order to help others?� or “Is the fact that I long to better understand the suffering of the world a less-than-subtle form of masochism?�

The truth is, I long to better understand the suffering of our world so that I can better understand the solution. Each part of life teaches us to appreciate the other. When we are suffering, we cry out to remember the days of peace. I have never truly suffered, and I have therefore never truly appreciated peace. However, it is not enough for me to witness suffering, I want to experience it for myself and to battle it on the frontlines of our world. Why? Christ calls us to rejoice in suffering. How can I do that if I have never truly experienced it?

For example, there is a difference between reading a travel book and visiting the actual country. In the former, you miss so much of the ugly pictures, unfriendly faces or garbage piles. What’s more, you lack an understanding of the country and, until you set foot on the soil, it remains nothing but a series of loosely connected photographs and words that are pieced together by various expectations. Suffering is a part of life that all too often we claim to know when we do not. In reality, I have no idea what it means to suffer for Christ and rejoice in it, but it is something I long to learn.

Sure, what I write scares me to some degree. But my time in Egypt has taught me that we are able to fight for those who are physically suffering in so many amazing ways and on so many different levels. I wonder, “In what capacity will I fight?” I have no way of knowing right now, but my heart goes out to those in harsh conditions and I believe I have the necessary drive to accomplish something with that desire. The only thing I love more than being around people who are different than I am, is being around people who are different and who also tremendously need help and care that I have the ability to provide.

I no longer view my Watson year as a finite adventure but as the doorway to a full and flourishing life, defined by continually facing what is uncertain, intimidating and unpredictable with a vigor that is inevitably rewarding. The Watson has trained me to think in a way that is unconventional to our world – to view the earth and its people as a solitary whole, unconfined by countless boundaries, cultural differences, plots of soil and ocean waves. If I cannot know the wonders my next six months hold, why should I expect anything less from my own life?

As I board a plane for Uganda tomorrow, my project has not changed in any drastic ways. I am still fascinated by people and the stories of their lives, and how these stories are connected to their music and art. However, for the next sixth months, my eyes will be open, as I look for long-term service opportunities with which to become involved following my amazing one-year opportunity. I will also be looking more closely for ways that my music project can overlap with local service projects or educational programs, and two months of service to the Batwa people in Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, Uganda could be a perfect match.

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.

James 1:27

Posted by Wheeler at 10:32 AM. Filed under: Egypt

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The creation of music is a rare right of passage binding impression to melody, flesh to soul, the tangible to the intangible. For the next twelve months, I seek to write, play and experience music with people in the context of other cultures I do not know as intimately as my own.
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