Logan

This….

….is Logan.  (Isn’t he cute??)

Logan was my assistant leader this past summer.  He was my right hand person.  He’d been on a couple of Teen Missions teams before as a team member, but this was his first time in a leadership position.

Logan was 18 for most of the summer (he had his 19th birthday a few days before we all headed home).  Despite his youth he maintained an air of leadership and “the kids” responded to his authority.  It would have been very difficult for me if they hadn’t.  (But I needn’t have worried…he did great.  Honestly, at this point of my life, having seen God always work things out, I don’t know why I bother ever worrrying about anything!)

Back to Logan.  Logan is a super-hero of sorts…

Logan is part man, part teflon.  Dirt didn’t stick to him, or to his clothing.  He also didn’t seem to sweat.  And his clothing never appeared rumpled.  Logan always looked fresh, smelled fresh, and appeared to have just put whatever he was wearing on.  In stark contrast, I would take my bucket bath and exit the bathroom already sweating with my clothes already damp and already smelling as though I’d just finished running a marathon.  This amazing ability that Logan had to look and be clean and fresh prompted the saying “Logan!  It looks like you just got here!”.  This was something that was yelled at him frequently over the course of the summer.  And he always smelled like he just got there, too, as he always had a bottle of Tag available to freshen up with!

I would be sweating in a light cotton T-shirt and lightweight cotton pajama pants.  Logan could wear a long sleeved dress shirt over a tank top with heavy belted pants on and not break a bead anywhere!  It’s a mystery, really.

Logan starts Bible College in a few days.  His school is in Florida.  His super-hero attributes will, I’m sure, come in handy down there in the swamps!   

Thanks, Logi Bear!  I couldn’t have done it without you!  Good luck in school!

…

Superman Wears Al Gore Pajamas

In response to my last post “Glass Houses“, a reader commented that “Superman Wears Al Gore Pajamas”.  I’d like to see this be Al Gore’s 2008 presidential campaign slogan!  What???  You say Al Gore is not running for president?  Are you kidding me?  He’s been running for president for the past eight years.  I’m just a-awaitin’ for the time to come when he throws his hat in the proverbial ring. 

Oh, and I’ve done an extensive search to try to corroborate this assertion that Superman wears Al Gore pajamas.  I couldn’t find one single item that had teeth to support it.  Sorry.  It appears that there’s no truth to the statement that “Superman Wears Al Gore Pajamas”.  I did find other sycophantical types out in the blogosphere writing the same thing, though.  And I must admit that I do love the imagery  …  while Superman sleeps, Al Gore is out saving the universe. 

Barf. 

No one should EVER love a politican that much.

…

Glass Houses

From an e-mail I recently received: 

House #1

A 20 room mansion (not including 8 bathrooms) heated by natural gas.  Add on a pool (and a pool house) and a separate guest house, all heated by gas.  In one month this residence consumes more energy than the average American household does in a year.  The average bill for electricity and natural gas  runs over $2400.  In natural gas alone, this property consumes more than 20 times the national average for an American home.  This house is not situated in a Northern or Midwestern “snow belt” area. It’s in the South.       

House #2

Designed by an architecture professor at a leading national university.   This house incorporates every “green” feature current home construction can provide.  The house is 4,000 square feet (4 bedrooms) and is nestled on a high prairie in the American Southwest.  A central closet in the house holds geothermal heat-pumps drawing ground water through pipes sunk 300 feet into the ground.  The water (usually 67 degrees F.) heats the house in the winter and cools it in the summer.  The system uses no fossil fuels such as oil or natural gas and it consumes one-quarter electricity required for a conventional heating/cooling system.  Rainwater from the roof is collected and funneled into a 25,000 gallon underground cistern.  Wastewater fro! m shower s, sinks and toilets goes into underground purifying tanks and then into the cistern.  The collected water then irrigates the land surrounding the house.   Surrounding flowers and shrubs native to the area enable the property to blend into the surrounding rural landscape.     

House #1 is outside of Nashville, Tennessee; it is the abode of the ”environmentalist” Al Gore.   

House #2 is on a ranch near Crawford, Texas; it is the residence the of the President of the United States, George W. Bush.

This is confirmed by SNOPES.com.  Feel free to check it out. Talk about your “Inconvenient Truths”. And you want to know something?  It’s not that I care that Al Gore has a energy hogging house, I don’t.  What I care is that he is spouting his environmental gospel, and yet he lives the life of an energy pig.  The other thing that bothers me?  That would be that the media would be all over this like white on rice if the guy out preaching green and living in the energy hogging house was the President, and the guy in the green house was Al Gore.  The hypocrisy here is maddening.  …

My Punk was Punked

I like taking pictures of graffiti.  I recently uploaded to Flickr.com a few of the graffiti pictures I took in Sicily this past summer.  I got an e-mail today from another Flickr user alerting me to one of my pictures showing up in someone else’s collection without my having been given credit for it.  Thanks to ablankface for letting me know that my “Pozzallo Punk” was hijacked!

I found this nice piece of graffiti work (and I’m not saying I think that graffiti should be applauded, I just like it as an urban art form as an idea, not as a defacement of property) in a park in Pozzallo, Sicily, ITALY.

…

High School Musical

I met this totally amazing woman this past summer.  She was the head leader of the Teen Missions’ Trinidad team.  Her name is Elissa.  I liked her right away because she was always laughing about something.  We were instant friends. 

(This is me and Elissa five minutes after we met…) 

Then, when I discovered that we shared a fanaticism, I knew we were friends for life.  That fanaticism?  The TV show “Arrested Development“.  (BTW, my brother Phil ALSO shares this fanaticism).  So, when Elissa told me about Disney’s “High School Musical“, I figured I should rent it.  Netflix delivered it to my mailbox yesterday.  I watched it at 2:00 this morning.

Five stars!  What a great production!  Kitschy?  Indeed.  Cheesy?  Most assuredly.  And 100% worthy of being added to your personal DVD library.  This movie is fun to listen to, fun to look at, and squeaky clean in a way I’ve not seen in a long time.  The main character, Troy, is absolutely precious.  I’m truly not sure how many young actors could have pulled this off without seeming, well, geeky and miscast!

 

This movie is not only fun, it actually has some really good messages that come across in a way that is actually effective.  So many times movies or T.V. shows that try to get a message through make me groan with their awkwardness.  Not this movie!  It’s allllllll good.

So go rent (or buy) it!  I give HSM my highest rating of No Blahs!    Thanks Elissa!!!!

Off to find HSM II! 

…

Featured Link!

Hey look!  BuzzFeed picked up my “Chicken” post and it’s a featured link on the webpage! 

…

Am I Gone?

This is what happens when you start doing things like scanning stuff into your computer.  You run across all kinds of stuff that trigger memories and then I’m compelled to blog on those memories.  I have soooo many other things to write about, and yet, I am writing about THIS!   

Five or so years ago, my friend Kevin and I took a trip back east.  Our primary destination was Houghton College in Houghton, New York.  Houghton is a small town about an hour south of Buffalo.  We both started out there as freshman back in 1983.  I only went for one year, but Kevin went on to graduate.  We were going back for our 15 year reunion.  I’m not sure how I ended up on the alumni list, but I am, and as such, I get invited to all the alumni stuff, like reunions.

I meet up with Kevin in Chicago and we fly to Buffalo where we rent a car.  As we are driving through town, we pass this funenral home that caught my eye.  “STOP THE CAR!!” I yelled.  “We’ve GOT to take pictures by that sign.”  I thought at first it was a joke.  But it wasn’t.  This funeral home was called Amigone.  Am I gone?  HA! 

This trip also took us to the Anchor Bar for some Buffalo wings where Buffalo wings were invented.  (Back in 1983 wings hadn’t yet become ubiquitous, in fact most people didn’t yet know what they were, and I discovered the delicacy in the basement snack bar of our student center.)  And we went to Niagara Falls.  While in Niagara, we decided to take a spontaneous trip up to Toronto since I’d never been there only to find that we arrived on the same day as the POPE and that it was World Youth Day in Toronto and there were tens of thousands of people in from out of town, and just TRY to find any hotel vacancies!  Good timing, huh?  Didn’t get to see the pope, but Toronto is sure a lovely town.  Had some really good Japanese food there, too.

What a fun trip that was! 

Hey!  That was five years ago.  I guess I missed the 20 year reunion this past summer!

…

One Reason Why I Love My Brother So Much!

But I’ll get to that in a minute.  I got my scanner working again today.  My scannner has a ghost in the machine.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.  Seems like it decides when it’s going to cooperate, or not.  I wanted to scan some tax documents in, so I gave it a try today, to see if it would work.  And it did!  So I’ve been spending much of my day scanning “stuff” into my computer.  I even scanned an entire scrapbook in.  The story on that?  Well, 26 years ago when I first when on Teen Missions to Haiti, there was a girl on my team from Mechanicsburg, PA named Rhonda.  This past May when I got the list of the names of the kids that would be on my team there was a girl named Ciara with the same last name as Rhonda, from a town pretty close to Mechanicsburg.  I wondered if they were in some way related.  AND THEY WERE!  Seems that Rhonda and Ciara are aunt and niece.  I decided to scan in some pictures from Rhonda’s and my summer together to send to Ciara.  But then I decided to just scan the whole scrapbook.

For the amusement of those who have only known me as an adult, especially for the amusement of the kids from my teams both last summer and this, here is a picture of me from that summer.  I was 16.  This was taken the day we mixed concrete and poured the floor to this house for 12 hours straight…

This one was taken the day we went to a chicken hatchery to pick up some chicks for our missionary.  I thought I was fat when these pictures were taken!  Crazy.

I think maybe some day I’ll do some posts on Haiti, my experiences there, and the way my life was fundamentally changed by spending a summer there.  Especially now that I have some visual aids at my disposal!

So what does this have to do with my brother?  Well, as I am naming and saving a bunch of credit card statements to my hard drive after scanning them, my cell phone rings, and it’s my big brother, Phil.  He called to tell me that he had prepared a comment to my “Cool Hand Luke” posting, and was sending it right then, and he wanted me to read it!  So, he hits submit and two seconds later I am reading it back to him over the phone.  And it’s AWESOME.  (I know, God is awesome, maybe this is just super fantastic).  Here is what Phil had to say:

the whole christ thing in this movie has always bothered me. you sit there watching this really great movie and suddenly it warps into this christ thing at the end of the movie. it almost ruins the movie. in fact it does ruin the movie. the whole movie except for the last half hour or so of that christ thing is about luke’s way of confronting life. if i remember correctly, it opens with him cutting off the meters from parking meter poles while in a drunken stupor. his only way of “raging against the machine” is to preform this act of futility. he is immediately on the outs with the prison “tough guy” when he gets to prison which precipitates the fight scene in which he wins the fight by getting the s–t kicked out of him over and over and over because he refuses to stop the futile act of continually getting up. in the poker scene he wins the big pot with no cards in his hand by the futile act of continually “kicking a buck”. luke throughout the movie never gives up while committing his acts of futility. the futile act of paving the road at a breakneck pace(they’d just be out there again the next day paving away so why the rush) leads to a half of a day of doing nothing but relaxing. so what do we learn from luke in this movie until the christ thing muddies the clarity of this movie. the lesson of this movie is luke’s approach to his futile life. “rage against the machine”, never ever give up. and when you’re beaten down, with no hope, and there is no escaping your certain and inevitable demise, when you are spent and all that is left to you is nothing, you throw that at the world too!!! after all “sometimes nothing can be a pretty cool hand”. cool hand luke is one of my all time favorite movies-i don’t even watch that last half hour christ thing anymore.

And now, after reading Phil’s comment and discussing the movie with him, I now have a good understanding of what the movie is about, until it gets muddled by what my brother calls “the Christ thing”.  It’s about futility.  As Luke himself says “sometimes nothing can be a pretty cool hand.”  And THAT, ladies and gentleman, is what the movie is all about!  My brother is brilliant!! 

And THAT is one reason why I love my brother so much!

(We had a good laugh, too.  My brother is a very funny guy, but that would be two reasons why I love my brother so much, now wouldn’t it?!)

…

Cool Hand Luke

I was in the mood for a movie on this dark and cloudy and thundery afternoon.  My latest Netflix movie choice (“High School Musical”) has not arrived.  Netflix DOES have a “watch it now” feature.  So I scrolled through the movies that were available, and came across “Cool Hand Luke”.  It’s the character Johnathan Trager’s favorite movie in one of MY favorite movies “Serendipity”, so I thought I’d watch it.

I’m not sure what the message of this movie was!  And it surely seemed to be a story that was trying to get a message across.  There’s definite Christ imagery surrounding the character “Luke”.  The character at one point is laid out on a table in a crucifix position, feet crossed and everything.  The character escapes jail and is a hero.  He is recaptured and his spirit is broken and the other prisoners turn their backs on him.  He escapes again and seeks solace in a church where he refers to God as “my old man” and has a “why have you forsaken me” sort of conversation with the ceiling.  He ends up being shot and is driven away, to his death, smiling.  And he is once again a hero with the other inmates.  His final escape with his dying the way he lived – smiling - gives them some sort of salvation.  I’m not sure if that was the message.

In addition to all the Christ imagery are a parallel themes of how some just need to be free regardless of the cost.  Of how some need boundaries that enclose them tightly to feel safe and powerful.  Etc.

Regardless, there were two things that I loved about the movie.  Paul Newman was really good looking in it.  And the color palette that the director used was spectacular…all silvery blues and grays and  golds and browns.  Gorgeous.  See what I mean?

So, have you seen “Cool Hand Luke”?  What did you think of it?  What did you walk away from it with as far as “meaning” is concerned?  And did you appreciate the colors as much as I did? 

…

Locks of Love

On one particularly beautiful Saturday morning in Sicily this past summer, we took a train from Ispica to Siracusa (Syracuse) to see the sights (more on some of those sights in future posts!).  On the bridge from Siracusa proper to the island of Ortigia was this collection of locks.  Written on each of the locks were what could only be the names of lovers.

 

 

I’d love to know the history of this collection of locks hanging from this light standard.  I’m curious to know who started it and when.  I don’t think it could have been there very long or there would have been many more locks.  “How incredibly romantic,” I thought to myself.

A short time later we walked past a very tiny and most lovely beach on Ortigia.  From the minute I stepped off the train I loved Siracusa.  As we explored and saw more and more of the town, I fell head over heels.  Ortigia sealed it for me.

“THIS”, I said to myself “is where I want to come on my honeymoon, and I want to buy an apartment here”.  My goodness, if it was that romantic while I was there in the daytime with 14 teenagers and five, well, aging German men, I can’t imagine how over-the-top romantic it would be with a brand spanking new husband under a starlit Mediterranean night! 

Hong Kong.  Chicago.  Guanajuato.  Kinsale.  And Siracusa.  Another amazing city about which to dream of returning.

…

Two Moons?

I recently started to receive e-mails about there being ”two moons on August 27th”.  Have you gotten any of them??  Because of cloud cover I didn’t get to enjoy the Perseid meteor showers, so I was a little bit excited about Mars being so close to Earth.  (I LOVE space stuff).  I was ready to get out my datebook to make sure I didn’t miss THIS event.  But then, I thought, no way that a planet would get close enough to Earth to look like a moon.  Sooooo, I snopes.commed it.  Sadness.  It’s not true.  Sorry!    Save your time.  Save your excitement.  Here’s what Snopes had to say about it:

Two Moons on August 27th

…

Do It Anyway

It’s lyrics time again at Blah Blah Blog.  My latest is by Martina McBride.  Here are the words:

ANYWAY

You can spend your whole life building something from nothing
One storm can come and blow it all away
Build it anyway
You can chase a dream that seems so out of reach and you know it might not ever come your way
Dream it anyway

Chorus:
God is great, but sometimes life ain’t good
And when I pray it doesn’t always turn out like I think it should
But I do it anyway, I do it anyway

This world’s gone crazy and it’s hard to believe that tomorrow will be better than today
Believe it anyway
You can love someone with all your heart, for all the right reasons, and in a moment they can choose to walk away
Love ‘em anyway

Repeat Chorus

You can pour your soul out singing a song you believe in that tomorrow they’ll forget you ever sang
Sing it anyway, sing it anyway

I sing, I dream, I love, anyway

 

Wanna see the video and hear the song?  Click HERE.

 

And do it anyway… 

…

Did You Hear The One About…

Thanks to Tara, my assistant leader from my Sicily team this past summer, I have a new favorite joke!

“Did you hear the one about the dyslexic devil worshipper?”

Clicker HERE for the punchline! 

…

Where Is Iz?

I was adopted this summer.  “She” showed up the day that we did at the Camp in Ispica.  She was sitting behind a fence that separated the camp from the property next door.  She attached herself to our team almost immediately.  She was fearless and always underfoot.  Initially I attempted to keep her out of the kitchen, but it was a losing battle.  And she would sit on the floor and look up at me with the most soulful eyes begging me for a taste of that beef, that chicken, that turkey, that tuna, or whatever else it was that caught her nose’s attention.  (She particularly loved melon rinds.  How bizarre is that?)

I missed my cat, Mew Ling.  So sue me.  I started to feed the skinny gray kitty.  She needed a name.  The girls first came up with Etna, which I thought was really a cute name.  But it didn’t stick.  Isabella, and then eventually Izzy, and Iz, did stick.  And Izzy somehow became my cat.  She had been abandoned by her mother along with a couple of siblings.  The next door neighbor sort of took them in and occasionally fed them.  But only Izzy came over the fence and made friends with us.

Last summer I missed my cat tremendously.  But I had Abner to keep me company, to make me laugh, and to have deep grown up conversation with.  It was a pretty lonely summer for me this past summer.  I was the only head leader.  My assistant leaders were both very young.  All the adults that were at the camp spoke either Italian or German.  Some spoke a little English, but not enough to easily have more than the most simple of conversation.  I think God sent Izzy to me to keep me company and to alleviate my aloneness.  She did a great job of it, too.  It seemed to me like it was her personal mission to be my companion.  And I know that God loves me enough to take the time to arrange something like that for me, too.

At first Izzy never made any sounds except purring.  It was a couple of weeks before I heard the most faint little mews coming from her.  I don’t know if she was abandoned so young that she didn’t know how to meow or what.  When she finally did “learn” to talk, it was so pitiful sounding I couldn’t help but want to make sure I did whatever necessary to make sure she was safe and healthy.  I got sucked in by her situation and her phenomenal cuteness.  I was a goner and it didn’t take long til I was crazy for this kitty.

I think Izzy thought I was her mother.  She would snuggle up to me or snuggle down in my clothes and find a little wrinkle of fabric and suck on it.  For hours she could do that.  I once woke up with a huge wet spot on my shoulder.  She had been sucking on the back of my shirt for who knows how long.  She’d play all day with the kids, following them out to the work site and playing with them into the evening hours.  But when it was time for bed, most nights found Izzy in my room and on my bed.  Since no one was allowed into my room without my being in there, Izzy would retreat there when she needed alone time.  I would often find her stretched out (or curled up) on my bed in the afternoon taking a long leisurely uninterrupted nap.

Izzy’d come when I’d call her, too.  I’d make a very loud long kissing sound, and if she was within hearing distance, she come running like a gray flash.  Sometimes I’d do the sound when she was being held by one of my kids just to see all the acrobats of her twisting and twirling and trying to get down.  It was fun to watch whoever was holding her to try to hang onto her as long as possible.  It was like watching someone trying to hang onto loose Jell-O! 

Izzy liked to hang out in the kitchen.  Probably because she knew she’d be able to get food out of pretty much anyone, especially me.  She got stepped on a lot.  Eventually she found a place she could hang out without getting crunched.  She’d curl up with the pots and pans in the kitchen island.

 

When I’d go to my room to do paperwork, or whatever, Izzy liked to jump up on my shoulder.  Why do you suppose she would do this?  I have no theories.  But it seemed like she was very interested in whatever I was doing and liked a good view.

 

And we all absolutely loved her.  Me especially.  And I had to leave her behind.  Sad day.  I had been hoping to bring her to Colorado to live with me.  The missionary’s son said he’d help me get her if it was possible.  It doesn’t look like it is.  Even if I could arrange to get her to a vet there in Sicily and get a certificate of health (a requirement of British Airways), British Airways makes all animals travel as cargo.  They don’t offer cargo services from Catania, Sicily.  The only way I could get her to the U.S. IF I had a certificate of health, would be to have her fly out of Rome.  I guess Iz is staying in Sicily. 

I’m worried that Izzy has no one to feed her.  I wonder if she is trying to get into my room at night.  Do you think she wonders what the heck happened to all of her people?  I feel terrible that we had to leave her behind.

Stupid.  I know.

She’s just a cat, afterall.  Right?

…

Cheap Gas?

While driving to our hotel in London where we’d stay for a day and a half before heading home to the U.S., one of my kids said “Wow!  Gas is even cheaper here than it is in Sicily!  We should move here!”.  I looked over to see what gas price she was referring to and saw the price listed at the local gas station as 99P, or 99 Pence (just about 1 Pound), per liter.  I quickly did the math… 1 Pound X the exchange rate of 2.2 USD to a Pound, X approximately four liters to a gallon = approximately $8.80 per gallon for gas. 

The gas in Sicily was 1.35 Euros per liter.  The math… 1.35 Euros X the exchange rate of 1.4 USD to a Euro X approximately four liters to a gallon = $7.56 per gallon for gas.

After explaining to my kids about what gas REALLY costs in London and in Sicily, we all decided we were pretty glad to live in America where gas was relatively cheap.

Now, if you live in America, put down your $4.00 Starbucks ($4.00 for 16 ounces/one pint X 8 pints in a gallon = $32/gallon)  and stop complaining about how expensive your gas is. 

Adjusting for inflation, gas now costs about what it did in the 1970′s and 80′s.  Except back then you could only buy it every other day…

…

A Note From Barb

While I was in Sicily this summer, I was sent an e-mail from Barb Peterson.  Barb and her husband Doug run Teen Missions, Zambia.  I worked with them last summer when I was on the Zambia Foot Washing team.  [The e-mail ultimately arrived in Sicily by way of snail mail when my sister printed it up and mailed it to me after it was sent to HER by a coworker of the Petersons who weren't sure what my e-mail address was while in Sicily (I didn't have one) so she sent it to my sister!]  Some of the content I have shared here already.  Much of it is new.  I thought it appropriate to share it with you. 

Dear Linda,

We miss you here in Zambia this year!  The FW team is out there.   
They have a shorter time this year than last.  They will be at  
three spots.  Of course, one of them is Connie’s Heart.  I think  
it is their last stop.
I just sat and talked to Simon (He was the facilitator at Chiwala  
last year and you met him there.)  He is at Funda (Connies Heart)  
with Richard Chileshe, a newer intern.

Here is a small report of the things he has shared with me this  
morning.  I trust that it will bless you because something very  
good is going on there.

1)  Twins:  Matilda and Sandra live near the unit.  They are 6  
years old.  For the last two years Matilda was not thriving.  She  
had lost all of her hair.  She was very thin and the  mom (her dad  
is dead) thought it was witchcraft.  Simon said, no it is  
malnutrition.  He put her into the mothers seminar even though she  
is not a baby.  Her hair has grown back and she is now thriving.   
She is coming by the unit and telling all the little kids to pick  
up things and keep the place clean. Simon says she is a real  
little organizer.  In just three months time there was this  
change.  It probably saved her life   He said the Nutrition  
Seminar food is now finished, but the moms have learned a great  
deal and are so thankful for the help.

2)  There is a girl named Esther Sandasanda.  She is in Grade 9 at  
the Catholic school called St Mary’s.  She is 14 and stays with a  
lady she calls grandma.  The lady has 4 orphans of her own and  
took in Esther out of pity.  But she is not preferred, as the real  
family’s orphans are.  She is sent to the field alone or to  
collect wood alone and the villagers have always taken advantage  
of her.  She walks 38 k’s to school and then boards there for the  
week.  She is to bring a small bag of mealie meal each week.  One  
week she failed to bring it and so was taken advantage of for not  
being able to do so.  She was raped by 5 guys.  She told Simon and  
he called in the police and 4 of them were arrested.  He now  
supplies her mealie meal for school out of his own money.  She had  
no shoes for school so he gave her his own tennis shoes.  Now all  
Simon has is “tropicals”.  (thongs).  When the school asked  
recently who takes care of her, she said Simon.  He is the only  
advocate she has ever had.  He said she still needs a lot of inner  
healing.

3)  There is an area a ways away from the unit where the chief  
didn’t want TMI in their area because we were “satanists”.   We  
found out  that the chief was JW and also into witchcraft.  But he  
was coming to a JW conference and had an accident on the road.   I  
think he was on a bike.  He was seriously injured and so was the  
girl that was with him.  People told him, “The only help is at  
Teen Missions.”  So he was taken there and Simon dressed his  
wounds and the passenger’s wounds, too.  He healed up.  He came  
back and said, “Who are you people?  You are good people.  We want  
you, too.  We heard the wrong thing about you.  Will you come?”

4)  The government health people came by and gave out 100 free  
treated mosquito nets around the Funda area.  They didn’t have  
enough.  So they came back to the Unit later and said to Simon,  
“Are you able to give out the rest of the 200 to those who need  
it?”   So he became the distribution point for those nets.  They  
probably came from USAID.   I heard on the news that Bill Gates  
Foundation was distributing them through USAID in Zambia.

Praise the Lord , as maybe the health dept will use more and more  
of our units….we should talk to them (if we ever have time!)   
They are getting to know us as they came here to the base last  
year.  They were “selling” us the nets that time….we said, hey,  
you get these free because we also hear the news!  The next ones  
they brought us were free or at least a reduced price, I can’t  
remember.  We are seeing a real big decrease in malaria this  
year.   I feel like writing the Gates Foundation but know they  
don’t have time to read letters, even of thanks, probably.

5) The Foot Washing team will be at Connie’s Heart on the last  
stop.  Just want you to know that that this is  really point of  
Light for Jesus!  Simon can’t wait to get back.  He is injured  
because of twisting his knee in soccer.  He is using Soccer as an  
EV tool.  He says over 70 have been saved out there through  
this….he didn’t have the count right now.  He is holding Bible  
studies and the number has grown from 70 to 140 already.  He is  
also ministering to a Baptist pastor who has had no training.

6)  People are very cold.  Some of the kids sleep only with a  
chitange around them and then get down into feed sacks or mealie  
sacks for warmth….One boy only had shorts and Richard Chileshe  
the other facilitator gave him his own  T shirt.  Theses are the  
only clothes that that boy has.  Many of the villages that Simon  
and Richard tare visiting when they ask where are your clothes  
kept, they say, what we are wearing are our only clothes.

I gave Simon some personal money and said go buy some things.   
Whatever you want to take back that you need most. Blankets,  
sweaters, sweatshirts, or whatever. I didn’t want him to go back  
empty handed.  Then  I said you can also get some shoes for  
yourself.  He said, “No, I want to spent it on the kids.   I can  
use my tropicals.”  I want to get word to the FW team to give  
Simon some shoes when they get there!!!  Doug wears 13′s so that  
was not an option.   He has to go about 20 k’s to his place from  
the road where he has hitched a ride with whatever vehicle he can  
find going there.   And he is walking around on this sprained knee.

Linda, what blessed me most of all, is that he looked at me and  
said,” I have to get back there. “(not stay and nurse his knee— 
the xray showed it not broken)   Then he said,” Barb, I love my job!”

Simon is an orphan who took care of about 18 other orphan kids as  
he grew up.   He lived with his grandma and an invalid  
grandfather.  He has this call and compassion for the people out  
there who are hurting.   The intern gal at Muchinchi came in last  
Spring after her first stint in the bush….and with a smile on  
her face, said, “You don’t even have to pay me”….   She was  
saying that the joy she was getting was reward enough.. What a  
privilege to be where God wants you to be and do what God wants  
you to do.  These young people are tasting that joy.

Just hoping you will be encouraged by what is happening at  
Connie’s Heart.  It is making a difference.

 Love you and have a great summer.
 Barb

I am encouraged. 

I heard many stories about what is happening in Funda (at Connie’s Heart) while I was at Boot Camp in June.  When Teen Missions first went into the Funda area to survey the needs and find out what the situation was there in regards to numbers of orphans, etc., the local people did not believe that they would be coming back.  But they did go back, and built the unit and started to minister there.  When Teen Missions did come back, one of the chiefs said, “God MUST have sent you, because nobody else knows we’re here.”  Wow.  I later learned that even school teachers won’t go that deep into the bush, so there are no schools there for the children to attend.  They have begged Simon to teach them, and so, in addition to all his other work there, he has started a little school. 

Back in Florida at debrief I was able to see pictures and hear stories from the team members that went to Connie’s Heart this summer.  As deep as my loss was, the joy that I have from what has been born of that loss is incomprehensible. 

I am feeling the pull to return to Zambia to work very strong on my heart and in my soul.   

… 

SHCOOL SUPPLIES

Now, now, before you get all excited because I missed so blatant a typo, please consider THIS sign posted on a main thoroughfare through my town: 

 

“Stuff the Bus” is one of the latest feelgood programs going around the United States.  Many of the local businesses and media outlets are trying to collect school supplies for the public school children.  “So that they can learn”.  You know what???  You don’t need a bunch of school supplies in order to learn.  What you need is motivation, both in the kids and in the parents and in the teachers.  We really do need to stop throwning money at this problem called the public school system.  I doubt that the reason this sign looks the way it does is because not enough kids had their own box of crayons. 

I read a number of “stuff the bus” websites.  Many of the events are sponsored by school systems.  That’s just weird to me.  I think all school systems need to be harshly audited and NOW.  I want to know where all the money is being spent.  Once I see that the fat has truly been trimmed, then I’ll decide if I need to dig deeper into my pockets for crayons.  And all the sites had some sort of mention that the items collected go to low income families and the like.  Now just how is THAT decided?  I’m sure that there will be lots of kids who come from families that don’t qualify as low income but won’t be coming to school with shiny new backpacks because they can’t be afforded.  Unless every single kid that needs a new backpack is getting one, there are kids that will be left out.  That’s bad.

As for me, for now?  I already gave at the tax man’s.

…

Ian Coogan, Everyday Hero

Ian is a particularly amazing person.  He was one of the members of my team this past summer.  For the first few days of Boot Camp, Ian was pretty certain that he was going to go home.  It wasn’t exactly his choice to be there in the first place.  But he changed his mind and decided to stay.  So he sent for his guitar.  And when that guitar showed up, so did the real Ian.  Music makes Ian alive. 

Even blurry, this picture is worth the cost of admission! 

Ian is the front man for a band out of Chico, CA.  The band is called Everyday Hero.  It’s like a retro christian punk rockish sort of band.  I’m not sure how Ian would describe his band.  (Here’s a link to Everyday Hero’s MySpace page – click HERE to go there!)  But Ian and his guitar are comfortable in more than that genre. 

I spent the vast majority of my awake hours in Sicily in the kitchen.  Some of my favorite times were when Ian was out in the big hallway or down on the porch playing the guitar.  His music would keep me company and make me smile.  Ian’s music was, I think, my favorite thing about this past summer.  There was one song in particular that I could listen to him play for hours.  I’m not sure what it is I love about it so much.  It’s lyrical and delicate and makes me want to close my eyes and lose myself in it.  I asked him to play it for me one last time at the airport in Orlando while we were waiting for flights.  He obliged!  Even though he is “competing” with a hundred other voices and overhead announcements, his talent and the beauty of this song is unmistakable.  I hope that maybe some day he records this.  I’d pay goooood money to get my hands on it.  Here’s Ian’s command performance. 

Thanks, Ian, for staying and sharing your summer with me and the rest of the Sicily team.  And thanks for sharing your gift with us and for being soooooooo generous in that sharing.

Miss you!  

Ian.  One of my Everyday Heros.

…

The Sicilian Obsession

If Americans are obsessed with sports and the French with all things fashionable, then the Sicilians are obsessed with the dead.  Just down the road from the camp where we stayed and worked this summer, there was a large cimitero (cemetary).  I’ve been to cemetaries in the United States.  Rarely, unless a funeral is in progress, are there many visitors.  Not so at a Sicilian cemetary.  This cemetary had a constant stream of visitors.  And on the weekends, you would be hard pressed to find a parking place, though parking was plentiful.  Widows dressed in black stood out to me.  I asked our missionary Vincenzo what the length of time was that these women wore black.  Sometimes for a year.  Often for many years.  Every day spent in a constant memorial of death.  Everywhere, women dressed in black.

And in Sicily, you don’t just bury your loved one in the ground.  That is only for the poorest of the poor to do.  No.  Every family has a family crypt.  And families will do without, and scrimp, and save, in order to have the best crypt that they can possibly afford.  And these crypts are not like your average American crypts either.  They really try to outdo the Joneses.  You need to spend at least 50,000 Euros to get a respectable crypt.  The exchange rate of USD to Euros was just about 1.4:1 when we were there.  In USD, a respectable crypt would cost you right around $70,000.  That’s not even for a really nice crypt.  That is just for one that you don’t have to be completely embarrassed about.  Before I left I put this picture in a post:

I had initially believed it to be a view of the city, Ispica, from our campground.  Now that I am home, I recognize it as a view of the cemetary taken from the road from Ispica down to the campground!  It looks very much like a city with a cathedral, but it isn’t.  Each of those buildings is a crypt!  I was so fascinated by this cemetary.  And each town had a similar one.  The road signs even included signs pointing down the road you’d take to get to the “cimitero”. 

Though all very different, each of the crypts had things in common.  You could enter them as they were chapels.  There was an eternal light on inside and pictures of the loved ones that were entombed there.  There was an altar, a place to pray.  Some had large quantities of fresh flowers, others had permanent plastic or silk flowers.  Very few of these crypts looked like no one had visited in some time.  I had to resist the urge to enter the ones that were unlocked.

Between the poorest famlies and those families who could afford crypts were the families who could only afford a place in these large banks of community crypts.  Each of these crypts also had a picture, two vases for flowers and an eternally burning light. 

Not speaking Italian, I initially wasn’t sure what all these papers plastered up all over the place were significant of.  After learning a little Italian, and having my overgrown curiosity get the better of me, I finally set out to find out what they were.

They are paper memorials to the dead.  Placed by the family of the loved one for years and years to come after their death.  They could be found everywhere, even pasted to the fronts of people’s homes.

I am not sure why the Sicilians are so preoccupied with their dead.  I have a theory, but had no method with which to test the theory.  Sicily is a mostly catholic nation.  The type of catholicism practiced there is quite different from the catholicism practiced elsewhere.  It more resembles polytheistic religions when it comes to the number of individuals that are on the receiving end of worship.  The worship of saints is pervasive.  In most of the cathedrals I visited, in the most prominent spot hanging over the altar was not Jesus, as you would expect…there were statues of Mary, as though she was the most important element of their worship.  Nearly every weekend there were festivals celebrating Mary of This and Mary of That.  There were statues of many and varied saints in every town.  People were often seen to stop by and pray to these saints.  Sicilians, it seems, have lost their belief in Jesus.  Perhaps having a cultural memory of the truth of Jesus plays out in their anxiety over having lost that truth and now, not having the hope of Jesus, are left with the fear of eternal loss.  They fear that their loved ones are not going to heaven, but they don’t know why their fear is so great.  They have ancient memory of having known the truth, but they no longer do.  They try to remember and pray their loved ones into heaven instead of being able rest assured in the knowledge of the saving grace of Jesus Christ.  It’s worse to have known the truth and lost it than it is to never have known the truth (2 Peter 2:20-22).  And, if they are so anxious over the fate of their loved ones, how much more so are they anxious over what their own fate will be when they, too, die?

The small church that we went to work with was the only evangelical christian church in the three towns in the area.  The only evangelical church for a population of nearly 100,000 people.

Sicily is a very beautiful, and very sad place with the dead present everywhere.  The island where the early Chrisitan Church once flourished, and where the Apostle Paul once walked and taught, has forgotten Jesus.

Pray for Sicily.

…

Day Two, and a Half

So I’ve been home now for two and a half days, or so.  It feels as though I never left.  Not an unusual phenomenon, but it always surprises me just a little bit when it occurs.  Here’s the thing that is so weird to me.  It doesn’t work that way in reverse.  When I leave home and am gone for two and a half days, it doesn’t feel like I’ve never been at home.  It only works when in the obverse.  Just a random musing.

My laundry is finally done.  Even though we were able to wash all of stuff at debrief in the washers, I felt compelled to wash absolutely everything again when I got home.  Nothing every feels truly clean until it’s washed at home, and, in my case, double rinsed.  And, because this is how my life works, the minute I jumped in the shower this morning the DHL guy showed up with my new AC adapter/power cord.  I had to drive wayyyyyyy over to the DHL facility this evening to pick it up.  Cool thing…the Dell guy who helped me out is a computer consultant and sales guy who is living and working in Panama City, Panama.  He waived all the shipping fees even though I ordered it for overnight delivery.  Saved me like twenty bucks!

I have been working on touching bases with friends and family.  My family is big.  It takes days to 1) find them all, and to 2) talk to them all.  I caught my sister Whitney at work yesterday.  She told me where to find her son, Mitchell.  I called my Mom and she put Mitchell on.  He didn’t know who I was at first, but when I told him, he sighed and said “Auntie LOU!  I’ve been missing you SO MUCH!”.  How cute is THAT???  And then later, he called me back.  He told me “Auntie Lou, I forgot to tell you something…..I know how to tie my shoes!”.  Two months seems like a really short time until you see how much a five year-old changes in that span of time.

Other changes that took me by surprise?  Exubera.  A really bad name for a drug that I am skeptical of at best.  Inhaled insulin.  Exubera??  Shouldn’t that be the name of some kind of anti-depressent or something?  I’d been hearing about it for years, but had no idea it would hit the market this summer.  What else?  My brother has a girlfriend!  My little brother.  When did THAT happen?  Oh, and I opened up my huge piles of mail only to discover that the 77th birthday party invitation for my uncle Jim said it was a surprise!  I wrote to him from Sicily and I believe I mentioned the party and how I wished I could have been there to celebrate (he turned 77 on 7/7/7!).  Aaaaand I’m pretty sure he got the letter before the party.  And what’s the deal with Barak saying we should pull out of Iraq and attack Pakistan?  Is he kidding?  There are so many things wrong with that plan that I cannot even begin to write about them at the present time.

Now I’m going to watch some FOX news to see what other nutty things are going on in the world.  And I’m going to start to process all the nearly 2000 pictures and videos I took this summer.  Stay tuned.  I’ll be sharing my summer soon.

One last item of business.  Due to the particularly vile content and large amount of spam comments I recieved to my blog in my absence, I have reluctantly changed my settings to require my approval on any comments left.  Rest assured that non spam comments will not be screened out (unless their content is foul, and that almost never occurs).  I just need to make sure that no one wanders into my blog and finds links to things that no one should be looking at!  ESPECIALLY not as a link from my blog!  Sorry about having to do it.  I had hoped that I could leave my comment forum wide open, but have found that I cannot do so any longer.    Pretty sad.

…