digital

Virtual church

Virtual church

We are all in the boat! Over the years we’ve sent you email updates because our life takes place in such a different context that it was helpful to share about it. But now, in this Age of Pandemic, most likely our lives look very much the same. Travel is restricted. Only one household member per day is allowed to go out and then only for one hour and only if the purpose is listed as Essential; groceries, medicinal, to help an incapacitated family member, unavoidable civic business (law, court, fines, renewals, etc.) If the one family member who does go out does so for exercise, they must remain within 1 km (less than a mile) of their residence. And each time that household member does go out, even for exercise, they must have on them a self-signed declaration form with the current date, address, purpose of outing, and the hour they left (to make sure you stay within the 1 hour limit) or they face a fine if caught by roaming police. Wow. Welcome to our world.

So with these restrictions, what would happen about church? Of course it is essential… just not essential for broader public safety I guess. Very quickly people were jumping aboard the virtual church train!! And most often that happens with zoom. Even our church here in France started going digital.

Virtual church

Going digital has been a blessing, but also some care must be taken. Zoom for example has already been in trouble before for being underhanded in what they install, and most recently were caught sending info to Facebook, even if you don’t have facebook. Yikes! Because it seems to work the best, it is also being used the most. I prefer to avoid it when I can because of it’s track record. There are other options, some open source, such as Jitsi Meet and Kopano, and even Riot/Matrix I think has a video option. But how many of us are conversant enough to whip up our own server and install these free apps, and have it run well enough to manage 10, 30 or 400 participants!? Well, do what you can, and try to use other options. I think using zoom is going to leave many with regrets eventually.

Speaking of being online, one of the ways I’ve been helping others overseas is by setting up and managing websites and emails. If you find this is something you’d like to have, or indeed have to have with the Stay-at-home protocols, write me an email. I am sure I can help you out.

In the meantime, there is lots to do in the analog world! Like sitting outside and trying to burn out a stump!

Summer 2017

Here we are a the end of Summer 2017. It has been a full summer for us, and we hope it has been for you too.

Zooming along chinese roads chinese style!

We traveled this summer to a small village 18 hours north of us to visit a student of Shane’s, and her family. It was an arduous journey with many police checks along the way. At each one Michelle and I had to register at that station, and then stand side by side holding up our passports with the ID page visible so the police could take a picture. However, it was worth it once we arrived at the student’s home. Her family was initially nervous because they had never met, nor hosted, foreigners before, much less ones who spoke their language – Kazak. But it was a good time. Liberty and Van especially loved roaming around the property with the younger siblings and checking out the animals such as chickens, chicks, cats, dogs, geese, goats, sheep, and a sleeping guard dog. One highlight was driving for about 3 hours towards the border of Kazakstan in order to watch a 20 km horse race, and the riders were mostly boys aged 10-15.

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The racetrack

Speaking of Kazakstan, we finally made a trip over the border to visit Almaty. You may recall me spending summers there from 1997-2002. There is now no need for a visa for many nations, so we were glad to skip the lengthy visa application process and simply show up at the border! Previous years required the better part of a day to get out of China, and into Kazakstan. This time we were through both sides in…. 1.5 hours. Unbelievable how much more smooth the process is now. While in Almaty Liberty could visit her best friend from earlier Urumqi days.

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We stayed in an AirBnB residence beside a giant mall. Inside this giant mall was a Starbucks and a McDonalds. Now, you can choose to go to these places anytime you want, but for us, it was an amazing experience. The province we live in has had no familiar business like these for years. So it was a treat to order a Grande Bold, in Kazak, as well as Big Mac, in Kazak. It was dizzying really.

On the bus to the border

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Liberty and Van had a great summer, grateful for a break from home school. We all went on many bike rides around the city. Probably one of our favourite memories of this season will be of riding around dinner time (5ish pm) and then stopping for our evening meal at a restaurant, eating a meal, then continuing the bike ride as the sun slowly sets and the street lights come on. Ili is actually fairly bike-friendly, so there are many streets where we can ride on bike lanes. There are still people to dodge, and e-bikes zipping around, but overall it is a safe and fun type of outing. There is also a pond full of goldfish, a turtle, frogs, and it is a fun place to play around. Van also learned how to rollerblade, and Liberty got better at it.

The Pond

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BBQ on the riverbank

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Online life

One thing I regret about my early days here in Xinjiang was that I did not bring a camera. One reason for this is that I sold it to buy the one-way plane ticket! But another reason was that a foreigner walking around taking pictures would draw unwanted attention.

Well, that attention concern has never abated. But at least cell phones have cameras – so everyone is taking pictures! It is funny sometimes how people go about it here towards us. On one hand you have the bold impersonal approach – the person walks right up to us, sticks their phone in our faces and snaps a shot, then walks away. No greetings, no thank you’s. Another approach is the shy but stealthy approach – the person comes to us from the side, walking sideways, and with their phone tucked in their arm they sneak a picture. Then there are the friendly types who actually smile, say Ni Hao or hello, or здравствуйте, and make small talk, AND THEN ask for a picture. To those we most often acquiesce.

But what do we use to back up all our photos and videos? Let me share a number of free and paid-for services.

We use Flickr, and so use the Flickr app to backup photos, when on wifi, to our account. For this we paid for the Pro account which gets us 1TB. We also use Amazon Prime and their associated Unlimited Prime Photos backup. Then, just to be sure, we use Shoebox which has a nice feature of showing us weekly what we were doing 1, 2, 5, and 10+ years ago. Its a nice way to go down memory lane. Since I have a Google Nexus phone my pics also are automatically backed up to Google Photos too, once again only on wifi and when the VPNs are on. So that is at least FOUR methods on the cellphones alone. We also move the photos to our computers and external hard drives, which in turn get backed up online! We don’t want to take any chance.

When we want to print them out from here we so far have used Mixbook the most often, although some of the other services look like they have good deals from time to time.