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February 02, 2009
1000AD
I picked up "The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium" (Lacy & Danziger, Little, Brown, & Co, 1999) and was amazed to realize that this place of organized trade, agriculture, and learning is in many ways more systemetized than South Sudan in 2009!
Did you know that in 1000AD, the Anglo-Saxons minted their own silver coins in a distributed network? The coins expired after 3 years to prevent people from counterfeiting them.
It's amazingly similar because to find someone 60 years old is rare in Sudan and nearly impossible to find someone who has reached 70 years old.
It's truly sad to realize that South Sudan may be between 500 to 1000 years behind the rest of the developed world.
On the positive side, I've observed in Sudan that people really know each other the way people in small towns know each other. That's something in common with 9th century England where most people did not use surnames because they did not need them! They have know each other all their lives and rarely traveled more than 50km from home. Relationships must have been deep and abiding. People must have been connected to each other as they tried to survive, fend off disease and Viking raiders, and wring a living out of the land.
One of the interesting things about being a missionary is that God causes me to constantly compare and contrast the world around me with the calling He's given me: Sudan.
More musings later,
Chris
Published at February 2, 2009 11:35 AM
