This past week I had a few unplanned encounters with life in Macau. The first was a visit to a local tutoring center for primary school students. Tutoring centers are clustered around every school in Macau. Parents pay for their kids to do homework and study in the centers after school and on weekends. Many times they are staffed by college students who supervise and instruct. The kids can spend as long as 4 hours or more a day in these places. I call them homework factories. The atmosphere is just like a factory - but the product is supposed to be good grades. Some friends of ours have taken over one of these centers. Their heart is to create a less stressful and more humane environment. We were visiting with them to discuss ways that we might be able to help. I'm not sure what we are going to do. What I am sure of is that the pressure-cooker atmosphere of that place overwhelmed me. Pressure. Stress. All on the shoulders of 7 and 8 year olds.

Later that same day I spent about 3 hours at a meeting for gambling addicts. Three hours with folks who's lives are stressed out by their addiction. People who's families are being torn apart by fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters gambling away their lives. People under the pressure of incessant opportunities to gamble. In fact as the meeting for these folks was taking place we could hear the clink-clack of tiles from a nearby place as people played mahjong - gambling. One fellow even commented about how hard it was to concentrate because of the sound - the sound of temptation calling him to surrender to the addiction again. Pressure. Stress. All on the shoulders of families.

Macau is a city under stress. The culture is changing before our very eyes. Sometimes it just becomes more clear than others.