Home Thoughts From Abroad

Orchard Road in Singapore is like Toronto’s Bloor Street or New York’s Fifth Avenue or London, England’s Oxford Street. It is a wall to wall shopping extravanganza, and at this time of year is all dressed up to the nines and absolutely packed with people. Pam and I went down there last night to see the lights, stoll along the avenue with the crowds and get a bite to eat.

We had spent a couple of hours at the new TWR office visiting with staff and participating in their open house and dedication service of the new space. They had a lovely potluck lunch with lasagna and scalloped potatoes, roast beef and gravy, a nice time of fellowship and a gift exchange. It was good to vist with them, share in their celebration and discuss a few plans for projects in the new year.

Orchard Road is delightful and pretty, but there is no place to have a nice meal. You’ve got to explore the little alleys and cul-de-sacs that lead away from the street to find a decent place to eat. After a couple of false starts, we found a lovely spot that offered some great Indian food – our favourite cuisine – and had a very pleasant evening under the stars with a warm breeze coming in off the Straits.

Just shy of midnight we packed it in and caught the MRT and bus back home to Blossom and McDaniel’s place and were up early this morning, Christmas Day, to get in a couple of Skype calls with our kids and grandkids. Now we are off to church at St. Andrews, Singapore’s oldest Anglican church, for their Christmas Day service. We wish all of you, family and friends, a very warm and mellow Christmas. May you all be encouraged in your heart by the love of those around you this day, and may Christ dwell in your thoughts to bless and light your way in the year ahead. Thank you for your continued friendship and your interest in our lives as we seek to serve the Lord in Asia.

Somewhere back in the colonial days a Scot by the name of William Cameron wandered off into the boonies of central Malaysia and discovered the highlands and valleys that still bear his name. Others followed, and finding the soil and climate suitable, introduced tea plantations using cuttings and expertise from Sri Lanka and India. A commercial enterprise and a desirable resort location ensued. We took the opportunity yesterday to make another trip.

We took along a couple of friends to split the cost of the car rental and to get them out of the city to a place they hadn’t seen yet. I have mentioned in these posts before how much I enjoy driving, so you know I was looking forward to getting out myself. My Dad learned to drive from Raymond Mays (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Mays ), the leading British driver of his day, and remained an extraordinarily competent driver to the end. I don’t claim to be anywhere near as good as Dad was, but I’m no slouch either, and the Highlands are as good a workout as you can get locally.

Getting out of KL is always a bit of a trick, but through dogged determination to avoid the congestion, we have found the Guthrie Corridor, a little known and underused expressway that takes you 40 kilometres north of the city before joining the E1 that goes to Ipoh and Penang. The E1 itself is wide and pleasant with plenty of rest stops along the way, but Highway 59 that winds its way to Cameron Highlands is 60 kilometres of switchbacks along narrow tarmac with no shoulder and a sheer drop on the downhill side.

The worst problem though is the trucks that lumber up the road and the scaredy cats that dog their heels all the way up. The trucks are not that big a problem; leapfrogging six cars to then get by the truck is more so. The trick is to get an early start so there is not much traffic coming downhill. You also need to take advantage of the dogleg-left-then-right switchbacks that allow you to see the maximum distance up the road. There are no straight stretches, so this is the best place to pass. The worse possible place to remain is behind another vehicle, because then you are placing your safety in the hands of that driver’s competence, and that vehicle’s brakes! The whole exercise requires maximum focus, and I guess that is why I like it. I don’t enjoy video games; they are much too boring and repetitive. Give me a challenging drive any day.

Although my Dad was my instructor, I learned most of my competence driving cab for two years in Toronto. It was that experience that taught me that the safest and least frustrating thing to do was not to drive with the traffic, but to drive just slightly faster. This enabled you to weave in and out of the traffic much like paddling a canoe though the rapids. If your boat is going the same speed as the water around you, you cannot steer; you have to be going a little faster than water to direct the boat. The same is true for traffic. You don’t want to race through traffic; that is dangerous and stupid. But you do want to be able to steer safely through it. I could tell you all about mirror placement too, but then I would be getting tedious, wouldn’t I!

We had a very pleasant day, including tea, shopping and a fabulous lunch and then drove home in a torrential downpour with about ten feet of visibility. I had already chosen a safer route out of the Highlands knowing that I did not want to be on the downhill side of Highway 59 going home. Highway 181 is a new road to the north of the Highlands with paved shoulders, but even still it was a 1500 meter drop in the space of 40 kilometres, so there was a lot of driving to do. Once we got to the E1 things weren’t much easier. Within a short space of time we encountered an impasse: a bus had skidded in the downpour and done a 180 into one of the huge ditches that line the roads over here. The passengers were huddled in the pouring rain and although it didn’t look there were any injuries, there was a bit of tricky driving to get around the emergency vehicles and negotiate the Malaysian drivers who seem to be at a bit of a loss when the unexpected happens around them.

We found the link back to the Guthrie without any trouble and the exit off the Federal Highway to our own neighbourhood, despite the total lack of signage. I was fortunate to catch a vehicle coming out of the very rare parking spots around Taj Curry House where we intended to get a bite of supper, and pulled into the narrow spot with one swing, no mean feat with all the cars doubled parked, and edged within an inch of the curb. My passengers thanked me for a safe trip through tricky terrain and were effusive in their praise of my driving. Pam’s comment after thirteen hours of driving? “Not parked too square in that spot, are you!” Ah well, no man is a hero to his wife.

Marx wrote over 150 years ago that the capitalist system would collapse on its own in the near future, torn apart by cycles of boom and bust that would grow in intensity until the whole facade fell in. He might have been a guilty of some overstatement, or I might be guilty of misunderstanding the nuances of his central thesis. I am no economist, and certainly not a Marxist, but the latest global downturn shows no signs of abating in the near future. Recently Ireland, formerly thought to be an economic tiger, has had to come mewling to the EU for a bailout, and Portugal and Spain look set to follow suit. The American economy still struggles with plus 10% unemployment – enough to provoke a backlash at the ballot box in November – and other Western economies are not faring much better.

Yet the very rich don’t seem to be suffering much, as a recent Canadian study shows. In fact the top 1% of the rich take a whopping 30% of our country’s wealth, squeezing the middle class lower on the economic ladder. This is not the anomaly that it seems to be, but rather a return to the historic economic picture that has characterized mankind since Babylon. Those of us who have grown up in a post war world would be advised to study human economic history. The middle class, from which democracy and civil liberty arose, is a relatively new institution, and might already be passing away as suddenly as it appeared. As many of Christian liberties are tied up with civil liberty and democracy, Christians in particular ought to pay attention. To be obsessing about gay marriage and abortion policy while quite literally the farm is being sold right under our feet, is particularly near-sighted and naive. We are being played by clever politicians – the window dressing of the rich – while the store is being robbed.

I could go on, but there is plenty of information out there about this and you don’t want this sound like a screed anymore than I do. Besides, I am more interested in what the proper Christian attitude ought to be. The first thing is to realize how this will affect your children, and seek to ameliorate the damage. Know that they are being played just as you are. The distractions of sport and entertainment, the drive to buy trinkets and squander what precious little resources they have; your children are just as much under pressure to do this as you are, and they both more susceptible and less able to help themselves.

That is where our responsibility comes in. Those of you who are middle class contemporaries with us have lived through the most egalitarian economic times in all of recorded history. We have been financial comfortable in a way that this coming generation will never know. We owe it to them to help them get established. They basically have no chance otherwise. When we were starting out a house cost about a year’s gross family income. Now it is three to five times a family’s gross income. We paid the 5% necessary in downpayment to get a first mortgage without having to borrow a cent. Now the downpayment is 20%, and the house prices are astronomical. Your children will not even so much as get a foot in the door if you are not prepared to help.

Secondly there is the propaganda angle to deal with. The rich will tell you that they have made it on their own and that if our children were strong and independent they could too. But that is a huge lie. In order to get started in business the rich lean heavily on their parents who understand that they only way to be rich is to start rich. The fiercely independent young buck fighting through odds to make it in the world is just another marketing idea of the rich to keep the poor in their place. Only the poor and middle class get no help. That is why they remain poor. We have to help our children and especially help them to see through the propaganda. The Bible teaches that parents are to lay up for their children, not the children for their parents (2 Cor. 12:14). Be a Biblical parent: help your children get started in life.

Thirdly you have to teach your children the value of money. The rich buy assets with their money, the poor buy liabilities. You have to show through your example that buying assets is the way to go. Don’t indulge in trinkets yourself; be self disciplined and instruct your children to be the same. They may not listen at first and you may have to bail them out of their nonsense before they ‘get it.’ So bail them out. Presumably they have learned their lesson and are ready to choose a more rational route through life. You don’t have to leave them in poverty as punishment. Surely ‘not provoking our children to wrath’ (Eph 6:4) means helping them financially when they need it, and most importantly, not rubbing your help in their faces either.

Finally, be patient and loving. Know when to offer to help and when to be supportive. Keep strong in yourself and keep fighting to be healthy and industrious. Yes, it turns out that life is a lot longer and harder than we imagined when we were younger. ‘Do not be weary of well doing,’ since it is not only for your children that you labour, but for the Lord (Gal 6:9). Be informed about the world and the forces that are seeking your hurt and the hurt of those that you love, and be proactive in your response. Seek to educate yourself and others around you, for these are important issues and there is something for you to do. Commit yourself to be an agent of change to as many people as you can help, and may the Lord help you.

I am not what anyone would call a fashion plate. Fashion costs money, so basically I’m agin’ it. Education, travel, mortgage reduction, yep, they are legitimate expenses. Fashion not so much. But with a wedding on the horizon, only a fool would stand between his wife and her need for a gown for the occasion, and my mother didn’t raise no fools.

So here we are off on just about every other weekend looking for wedding gowns. And let me tell you, it has not been easy! First off, there is no such thing as a ‘mother-of-the-bride’ dress. I don’t know what they wear, but they don’t make any dresses for them. The sweet little girls in the wedding shops all look at you with their eyes wide as if they are going to cry because they have no idea what you are talking about, and they hate to disappoint a customer over here. So we have stopped asking. Instead we ask, ‘do you have any evening gowns?’ Well of course they do, dozens of them in all sorts of colours and fabrics, from Chinese and Indian traditional outfits, to classic Western gowns; a truly dizzying array of choice in style.

However there is no choice when it comes to size. Everything we have looked at is a size 2. Now there was a time when Pam was a size 2, but that was many years and several kids ago. Pam is not overweight by any stretch, but neither is she Asian. Everyone over here is a size 2; young, old and in-between, all the women are size 2. That is how the dress shops can get away with carrying just one size. If you are no longer a size 2, then you have a seamstress to make your clothes. It is all very simple, very cut-and-dried, and impossible to get around. So we have given up looking.

Instead we have gone looking on the internet. I don’t know why we didn’t just start there, it would have been a whole lot easier on my feet. Pam, with help from her sister-in-law Syl, found some excellent options.  So now the plan is to print off the pictures (yeah I guess you could say that is a kind of plagiarism, you got me there), buy the fabric locally and find a first-rate seamstress to make the dress to fit. Any of our local readers know of a good seamstress?  The beauty of that is that she can then chose the colour and adjust the designs as needed.

Local or not you are all invited to weigh in on your choice. No prizes for the winner, and Pam is not bound by your choice – she IS the mother-of-the-bride, after all – but it would be kind of fun to see what you think. Personally I would like to see Pam wear something Asian. It is where we now live, and there are some gorgeous saris out there, but I know I am going to lose that argument, and that is fine. What am I going to wear? I think my daughter would like me to wear something really shiny, I’m not sure why, so I am looking for that. I’ll keep you posted on my progress.