AGATHOS

Believe it or not I can actually be serious some times. This is one of those brief moments.

Michal and I are planning a trip for the fall to South Africa. We will be working with an organization called Agathos (meaning "Good") based out of Seattle Washington. The Agathos Foundation is a fairly new organization working in southern Africa (South Africa, and later this summer, Zambia). We will be flying to South Africa in August for a 4 month term. Please be praying for us as we prepare to go overseas.

[ Image Courtesy of International Missions Board ]

Spore

Okay, so this video is really long (over 30 minutes), so I guess I will try to summarize. There is a new game coming out from Electronic Arts called Spore. When I first heard about it I thought it sounded lame, and when I first saw the graphics for it at the EA website I thought it looked like a kid game. It is neither lame nor a kiddie game. You start off in a fairly two dimensional world within a drop of water. You are almost at the cellular level and you simply swim around eating other cells. The game evolves from there to "creature" level, to "tribal" level, to space mode (one of the coolest features of space mode was the Genesis tool that allows your UFO to turn a barren planet into a lush, livable world). The scope of the game is huge and the guy who is demoing this video keeps making references to the other games that Spore is like. Sim City, Space Invaders, Civilization, Risk etc... This game is awesome.

A Bedtime Story

Lady in the Water

I just watched the new trailer for M. Night's new film, Lady in the Water and I have one question... why the heck is he in the trailer? That's right, M. Night Shyamalan who, like Alfred Hitchcock before him, makes "cameo" appearances in all his films (the drunk-driver in Signs, the supervisor in The Village etc...) actually is in the trailer for his new film. Now that's just corny. The new film looks cool. I think it is a great idea to not really show anything in the first trailer and then go all out with the second. It really makes me want to see this film.

There are many who don't like the Shyamalan Method, the way that M. Night films make you think one thing and then twist it. If you've ever seen one of his films you know what I mean. It's the feeling you have, after seeing a film, that you want to tell someone about it but if you do then you will give everything away. Talking about his films (with people who haven't seen them) ruins them.

Water of Love

WARNING: Random Post

I really need to leave the office, but how can I? Dire Straights' Water of Love just started playing on Pandora. I can't just stop it, "that would be sin". Before Dire Straights it was Bruce Springsteens' Atlantic City, the song that I made this station to hear. Hopefully the next song will suck so that I can go home...

Illegal Immigrants Returning To Mexico For American Jobs

© 2006 Copyright, Onion, Inc. All rights reserved

MEXICO CITY—As dozens of major American corporations continue to move their manufacturing operations to Mexico, waves of job-seeking Mexican immigrants to the United States have begun making the deadly journey back across the border in search of better-paying Mexican-based American jobs.

"I came to this country seeking the job I sought when I first left this country," said Anuncio Reyes, 22, an undocumented worker who recrossed the U.S. border into Mexico last month, three years after leaving Mexico for the United States to work as an agricultural day laborer. "I spent everything I had to get back here. Yes, it was dangerous, and I miss my home. But as much as I love America, I have to go where the best American jobs are."

Reyes now works as a spot-welder on the assembly line of a Maytag large-appliance plant and earns $22 a day, most of which he sends back to his family in the U.S., who in turn send a portion of that back to the original family they left in Mexico. Like many former Mexican-Americans forced by circumstance to become American-Mexicans, Reyes dreams of one day bringing his relatives to Mexico so that they, too, may secure American employment in Mexico.
Despite the considerable risk illegal immigrants face in returning across the border, many find the lure of large U.S. factory salaries hard to resist—at 15 percent of the pay of corresponding jobs in America, these positions pay three times what Mexican jobs do.

Still, the danger is very real. When 31-year-old illegal Arizona resident Ignacio Jimenez sought employment at an American plant in Mexico, he was shot at by Mexican border guards as he attempted to illegally enter the country of his citizenship, pursued by U.S. immigration officials who thought he might be entering the country illegally, and fired upon again by a second group of U.S. Border Patrol agents charged with keeping valuable table-busing and food-delivery personnel inside American borders.

"It was a nightmare," Jimenez said. "Many became disoriented and panicked, and some were mixed in with immigrants going the other way across the Rio Grande and ended up swimming to the wrong country."

He added: "My cousin almost drowned. They fished him out and sent him back to wash dishes at T.G.I. Friday's."

Many say the trip across the border as illegal Mexican-American emigrants offers them a chance to land the American jobs in Mexico they never have been able to get as illegal Mexican-American immigrants in the U.S.

"It has always been my goal to have a good American job," Johnson Controls technician Camilla Torres, 27, said. "Many Mexicans now see Mexico as the land of opportunity. Mexicans will not stop trying to get here, no matter how much the Mexicans wish we would not."
Indeed, the trend of illegal re-emigration is causing great resentment among the local Mexican population, and tension between Mexicans and illegally re-entered Mexicans—dubbed repatriados—continues to build.

"I hate these Mexicans, always coming back here to Mexico from America and taking American jobs from the Mexicans who stayed in Mexico," said 55-year-old former Goodyear factory manager Juan-Miguel Diaz, who lost his job to a better-trained repatriado last March. "Why don't they go back to where they went to?"

Still, Jimenez, Reyes, and hundreds of others say they have no choice.

"The American Dream is alive and well in Mexico," Reyes said. "If I work hard, save my money, and plan well, I will be able to send my children to a good school—and who knows? If they study hard, perhaps they will get jobs someday at the new plant General Motors is building in China."

See original Onion Article here
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