A week after my last update and less than two after arriving here, China is fast becoming one of the most interesting countries I have visited in terms of culture. I have seen cheap restaurants before, but it's really cheap here which means that it's hardly worth eating in unless you have a thing about cooking. Although I do like it, I can get past that and have visited some of the dozens of food stands and restaurants that line the 15 minute walk from home to the school since arriving here. This evening, for example, I had nine assorted veggie kebabs from a stand (these actually make you forget that you're not eating meat) for the princely sum of about 40p.

Shortly before leaving for Tenerife, I managed to take both my bike and my unicycle out of action. This was quite unusual for me, as I'm quite careful with my bike. Firstly a car rolled over my unicycle wheel (which taco'd the rim, but everything else was fine) then I hit a drain on my bike and managed to crack my frame (it was an old bike, but it did surprise me that the frame went rather than the wheel). Since I've been back I've been trying to sort out both problems, firstly by buying a second-hand road bike (I haven't actually taken a picture yet, but this is almost exactly what it looks like. The only major difference is the clip pedals.)

The next job was to fix my unicycle wheel, using a new rim and spokes. It took me about an hour and a half, and it's still not quite true, as I don't have the proper stand to fine tune it.



First I had to string up the spokes on either side, alternating sides after each set to keep the wheel roughly true.















This is more or less what I was looking for, but the spokes were still very loose, so I needed to tighten them all up a few turns.


















It seems the best way to do all of the adjusting up to now is to rest the wheel on your lap, as the weight of the hub is in your favour.








The wheel still had some uneven parts, so I then attached it to the forks to do some lateral and vertical truing.



It's still not perfect, so I'll take it to a mechanic's tomorrow before it's ready to ride. I'll probably buy a truing stand at some point so I can finish the job myself next time.

Labels: bike mechanics, bikes

Apparently the film 'the Linguists' has just had its first screening in Washington DC. As a linguistics student myself, I've always felt vaguely guilty about not being especially concerned about language death (or at least relative to other concerns in the world). The loss to a culture's richness and to linguistic study are one thing; but I would consider fluency in a major language (along with inevitable reduction in local languages) generally to be a good thing, even if this means some language death. I really don't see how insisting on language purity is going to help many indigenous people, it seems to be often just a romantic ideal by the west. Of course, in many cases language death is a cause of a sort of cultural imperialism, and a language is very important in the identity of a people, but I'm still not going to see this in anything like the same way as the death of an animal species, for example.

Labels: films, language death, linguistics, linguists

Tolerance in the world?!

What a mess we live in as humans in this world! On the one side you hear secularists telling us that we as Christians should be more tolerant of other faiths and not so judgemental. Actually, Jesus Christ himself teaches us not to judge each other but to love all with His love which he showed us by example in that he spent a lot of time with the worst of society and had quite a range of people groups in his closes twelve friends.

I find it horrific what is happening then to our Christian brothers and sisters living in areas where they are being persecuted to the point of even massacred in this day, when we have so called global human rights laws and organisations like the UN who are to promote these rights and step in when they aren't being carried out.

Let us remember those in Darfur who are still in crisis and the millions living in exile.



Let's also pray fervently for our brothers and sisters in Orissa, India. One of our friends wrking near there sends this terrible story:

Fr. Edward Sequeira, a priest belonging to the Society of Divine Word (SVD), was one of those who was seriously injured when his mission station was attacked by the mob in Orissa.

Currently recuperating at Burla Medical College Hospital , Sambalpur, Fr. Sequeira, upon gaining consciousness, narrated the story to his brother Commodore Valentine Sequeira who writes:

A large mob of more than 700 people were returning after attending the cremation of Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati who was killed along with four others Saturday evening by suspected Maoist guerrillas at his Jalespata ashram.

The mob was chanting anti-Christian slogans and when they reached Padampur in Bargarh district, they attacked the orphanage where Fr Edward lived.

Ms. Rajni, a 20-year-old student who lived in the orphanage and was also working as an auxiliary nurse in the orphanage confronted them.

When Fr Sequeira arrived at the spot, the mob locked him and Rajni into separate rooms, and ordered the children to vacate the orphanage. The mob then ransacked Fr Sequeira's room, poured petrol on him, Rajni and set the orphanage on fire.

"I was engulfed in flames, I could hear the cries of Rajni and the mob was cheering and shouting through the windows," recalls Fr Sequeira.

He however, managed to crawl to the bathroom, beat out the flames and closed the windows.

"When I started to suffocate I found a crack on the wall that was damaged in the attack and kept my nose there to breath some air. All the while I could hear the cries of Rajni from the next room where she was writhing in agony. After sometime, there was silence and I thought she must have managed to escape from the room," recalled Fr Sequeira.

Unknown to Fr Edward, the girl was burnt alive and had breathed her last.

People from the neighborhood who heard the cries of children rushed to the rescue, broke the walls and brought him to safety. That is when the mob attacked him again outside the orphanage and beat him up mercilessly till he became unconscious. He was initially rushed to the hospital at Padampur and later with the help of local officials was shifted to Burla Medical College Hospital , in Sambalpur.

Release by


Madhu Chandra

Regional Secretary

All India Christian Council

Lord, have mercy!

I've just finished watching the film Zulu, which got me thinking about other similar classic scenes in cinema history. Here are some of the ones I've seen:

1 The Alamo (Davie Crockett at the Alamo)


2 Hoth (The Empire Strikes Back)


3 Helm's Deep (The Two Towers)


4 Rorke's Drift (Zulu)


5 Thermopylae (300)


There are probably other candidates, but that's all I can think of at the moment.