Summer time and Livin's not easy in this heat!

Vonda’s views June 21, 2010
Summertime, an' the livin' is easy
Fish are jumpin' an' the cotton is high
Oh, Ya daddy's rich an' ya' mama’s good lookin'
So hush, little baby, don't you cry
Mercy me! It’s the first day of summer as I write this. Its already so hot all I want to do is find me a kiddie pool to fillup and lay in it under a big shade tree with a cooler full of iced tea ( we live in dry counties so that is all we can talk about!) and a good book to read. Unfortunately for me and other adults I know, we have to put on work clothes and get out in this wretched heat plus humidity and work while the kids are able to sleep late and then get up and forage for some food in the kitchen and then go and get in a pool somewhere.
If you saw me you would know that I don’t do swimming pools in the day light hours. I am about as fair as one can be and not be an albino. And I just don’t do heat well. I have always maintained that I don’t like cold weather but I CAN put on enough clothing in the cold months to keep myself comfortable. Now in the summer time that thought cannot be reversed. You cannot take off enough clothes to get cool. You are still hot and sweaty and running around in your birthday suit is still illegal in Mississippi.
I was talking about the heat to a California transplant just last week. We were both working in a store and I asked him how he liked living in the southern part of the US so far. He said “what is the deal with this heat? It’s so Hot!” In true Mississippi fashion I answered him with “oh this is nothing. You just wait until the Dog Days of Summer hit. Now that is hot!” he looked at me with fear in his eyes at the prospect of even hotter temperatures.
The dog days haven’t even gotten here yet and my poor Mary the wonder pup and her remaining litter of girl pups are all laying around in the shade and lapping up cool water in copious amounts. Bless their little doggy hearts, when the Dog Days of summer do arrive they will be begging me to shave their already short hair off.
My husband gave them all a bath over the weekend and even though their daddy was a Labrador, they have their mothers’ absolute fear and loathing of the water. They will swim but and they don’t like it one bit. You can see the gears working in their little heads when they see a puddle. I can just visualize a little devil dog on one shoulder whispering ‘jump in! you know you want to’ while the little angel dog on the other shoulder is whispering, ‘you know you don’t like the water except to drink it. walk around it and go rest under the hydrangea bush’.
I understand their dilemma. Part of me wants to stay home and paint or read a book in the cool comfort of my home while sipping tall glasses of iced tea while the other part is poking at me telling me to get up and go on out in the heat and do some work because there are bills to pay.
Too bad Summer time can’t be easy for everyone and we just work in the cool hours and rest during the hottest hours and then get back at it after the heat of the day has passed. But then again this is the South and the heat of the day seems to go on into the night!

Another thought occurs to me as I contemplate this heat. Perhaps there is a reason the Bible Belt has so many churches. It’s hotter than blue blazes in the South. Maybe some folks realize this is as hot as they ever want to be!
One of these mornin's, you gonna rise up singin'
Then you'll spread yo' wings an' you'll take the sky
But till that mornin', there's nothin' can harm you
With daddy & mama standin' by

Anna Lives in our Hearts and our hearts do go on!

Anna leaving our house for the last time.


May 13th was a tough day for us. We had to take our exchange student, Anna, to the airport and say goodbye. My husband and I never in a million years would have thought that it would hurt us so much to say goodbye. But it did. We have hosted before and we loved them also but something different happened to our whole family this time when Anna arrived.

I remember when I first saw her photo on her application; I saw the spark in her eyes. We all looked at her application and essay and agreed that she was the one and we never looked at any others. I did place other students with other host families and we got close to those students also. But not like we did with Anna.

The moment she stepped off the plane last July we knew we were in for a treat. She had a bounce in her step and an “I can do anything because I have just flown half around the world to get here” attitude. We were driving back home and she was taking in the country side and making observations about things and the subject of the internet came up. My husband asked her if they had high speed internet in Armenia and she looked at him and said just so matter of fact, “We are not cavemen you know.” Scott said she had him at the point. For me it was a few days later as I watched her enjoying a BBQ chicken sandwich on one of our first little day trips. And so our adventure began

Hosting an exchange student can be a great experience for everyone. The student exchange program is a program in which a student chooses to live in a foreign country to learn, among other things, language and culture. These programs are called 'exchanges' because originally the goal was an exchange of students between different countries. No exchange is actually required, so a student is allowed to go to another country without finding a counterpart in that country to exchange with. Students live with a host family, who are unpaid volunteers and can be a traditional family, a single parent, or a couple with no children at home. Host families are vetted by the organization coordinating the program and the Department of State conducts a criminal. background check.

The exchange student typically stays for 6 to 10 months and sometimes they receive academic credit for their school time here. Some countries don’t accept the credits earned here and those students have to repeat that school year upon their return. The student do have that year of living here as an American which helps to increase their understanding and tolerance of other cultures, as well as improving their language skills and broadening their social horizons. Students are expected to integrate themselves into the host family, living as a natural child would, immersing themselves in the local community and surroundings, and upon their return to their home country are expected to incorporate this knowledge into their daily lives, as well as give a presentation on their experience to their sponsors and to other students that are thinking about coming to America with these programs.

I am not going to tell you that hosting an exchange student will be like a Disney Fairytale. For some people it is not. There are times when there are just unrealistic expectations on both sides. Things like culture shock and not realizing that life in America is not like the movies can come into play and most kids don’t have a clue as to the size of the US and they don’t understand why they can’t go to Disneyworld one day and the Grand Canyon the next. And our own ignorance of what life outside the US is like comes into play also.

That aside, I do heartily recommend that you try hosting a student one time at least. AYUSA is a great organization that we used and the Regional Representative live right in Vardaman. Truthfully I can tell you that for now our hosting days are over. This time it hurt too badly when we said goodbye. We have had a wonderful 10 months with a very extraordinary young woman named Anna from Armenia. She will live forever with us in our hearts.


Anna's plane taking off from GTR.

Saying goodbye to our exchange student Anna

Time is rapidly drawing near that I will be driving our exchange student, Anna, to Golden Triangle Regional Airport and watch her fly off into the blue sky back to her home country of Armenia. The past 10 months have been a wonderful experience for me and my family since Anna arrived to live with us for the school year to experience life in the USA.

It’s been an eye opening experience for her in many ways. She has found out that all American people do not agree with the political climate in the US and are quite vocal about it; especially at our house. I think that has been somewhat of a surprise. And ask her about sweet potatoes. The ones grown here are exceptionally sweet apparently; and we continue to ‘doctor’ them up by adding more sugar and cinnamon. She has enjoyed Corky’s Bar B Que, pizza sticks, grilled cheese sandwiches, and Bubba Gumps Resturant and Maharaja’s Indian Cuisine. There really isn’t any food that I can say is ‘typically’ American since all of our recipes and favorite food usually originated in another country to begin with.

She arrived with a list of things that she wanted to try and do and we have tried to mark off as many of those things as we could. We’ve had many adventures with her and our game plan turned into how many different states can she go to on a shoestring budget. She is even taking home a large wall map with all the places we have been marked. We succeeded in making it 16. Over Spring Break we hopped a bud and let Greyhound do the driving and went from Memphis to Arkansas, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois. Add that to Mississippi and Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, and Washington DC and she has been one very busy young lady.

We went to Disneyland, and that was a pilgrimage for me. My first trip to Disneyland was the year it opened in 1955. I can still remember all the rides and it still holds a sentimental spot in my heart even after all the changes and growth. Anna saw how it really was a fairytale place. We walked through La Brea tar pits and went into the museum there. We strolled Rodeo Drive and looked up at the balcony that Richard Gere and Julia Roberts stood on in Pretty Woman. We saw Las Vegas in the day light and it still glitters in that dusty desert. She saw the extremes that the US can be from farm land to hills; from river deltas to deserts; from ocean front beaches to majestic snow covered mountains; from salt flats to the birth place of grand canyons and colorful mountain ridges and land formations. She even slept through a California earthquake although I sure didn’t!

She has seen small towns and medium sized cities and megacities like Los Angeles and Chicago. She has seen the tallest building in the United States and several state capitols including Mississippi’s as well as our nations Capitol. She has seen that American people are not all rich and famous and that we are not all glitz and glamour like in the movies or on TV. And speaking of movies, she has seen more movies in the past few months than she probably will ever see again. She has stood on the beach of the Pacific Ocean at Santa Monica, stood on the banks of the Mighty Mississippi in Memphis and witnessed the power of the wind on Lake Michigan in Chicago. She has experienced the hustle and bustle of city life in LA and Chicago and the slower laid back sweetness of life in rural Mississippi and tent-camping on the banks of the Tenn-Tom waterway at Aberdeen.

We took several little day trips to do things, like ice skating in January in Tupelo and movies and up to Huntsville to the Space Museum and down to Jackson to see the Capitol. She was surprised to learn that the largest cities in states are not always the state capitol and not all state capitols have super tall buildings. What we consider old and historic here pales in comparison to her country. Our nation’s history dates back over 200 years while her nations history is over 6000 years with Noah’s Ark of 4000 years ago the part we usually think about.

She will leave here on Thursday and return to her land and her family and friends. She will finally be able to wake again and see Noah’s mountain from her bedroom window again. She will eat dolma and get hugs from her grandmother again. She will see her brother come home from the Army and take her college entrance exams.

So our year as a host family is now at an end and we say good bye to our Anna as she is leaving for even more of life’s adventures.
We will miss her very much and can only hope that she will remember us fondly and all the memories that we tried to make for her. She has been very much a part of our family since the day she arrived and we tried to figure out this tiny person’s personality. She arrived quite bubbly and full of questions and opinions and she leaves us pretty much the same; still opinionated and full of questions but there is a major difference now. There is a level of maturity. We know that what ever she sets her mind to do, she will achieve it. Good Bye dear Anna. We love you.

Beware of the Wolf you Don't See

Warning! Warning! If you don’t believe in terrorists or that we are still at high risk of being attacked on our own soil, then stop reading this column right now; because you won’t like what I think today. Now, if you get all hot and bothered about the current politics surrounding our safety and well being then by all means, read on.

This idea for this column started forming Saturday after we made a trip to Columbus to bring home all the ‘stuff’ that our college kid needed to move home for the summer. We took a little detour to Aberdeen Lock and Dam so our exchange student could see how an interstate waterway system functions. We discovered that civilians can no longer go to see the locks or dams up close. There are concrete barriers and chain linked fences and locks and gates and more gates with no admittance signs everywhere thanks to 9-11.

As we drove around the rest of the area and saw all the beautiful beaches and picnic areas and boat docks for the fishermen and on into the serene stillness of the camping area, I thought how sad it was that a place a such beauty was held hostage by some goof ball somewhere. THEN I heard the news on the radio about a suspicious vehicle being found in Time Square.

The Smoking Vehicle was seen by your Average Joe working class street vendor who noticed that a white male had parked that older model SUV, left the motor running and then took off down the alley. That was certainly suspicious behavior so the street vendor went to investigate and alerted the authorities about smoke emanating from the vehicle and, after pedestrians had been cleared from the area, a bomb squad discovered that the SUV was packed with what was intended to be lethal incendiary materials.

The device inside the SUV was described as "at the bottom of the food chain when it comes to explosives." The large amounts of fertilizer surrounding the gas and propane tanks in the car was good for growing plants but bad for explosions; BUT if the propane and gas had ignited, the SUV would have exploded in half, spraying shrapnel with enough force to kill innocent pedestrians enjoying a warm summer evening in a busy Times Square.

Now I am not a bomb disposal technician but I do think things through and puzzle through things and if that device "was" pretty crude and wasn't going to work the way they wanted it to” the first thing that crosses my mind about this is this was the one they wanted to be found. Unless Al Queda's bomb making skills have really gone down the toilet it was just too obvious and amateurish to have been their best shot.

It was the everyday entrepreneurs on the sidewalks that spotted the suspicious vehicle. The plot was foiled by sheer luck and quick-thinking civilians.

Now to my way of thinking, a vehicle packed with propane tanks, nestled inside some bag of fertilizer with timers attached , parked right in front of the Viacom building which is home to that highly irreverent Southpark cartoon that depicted Mohammed in a bear suit or something is pointing some racial profiling fingers.

This isn't rocket science people! This might have been a lone wolf act; it might have been a decoy. But it was still an act of terrorism against the American people and we all need to be as vigilant as that American Street Vendor who happened to be a Viet Nam Veteran. We need an active public who will never be intimidated or dependent on government protection. That street vendor in NYC ACTED and the police reacted....we need 300,000,000 active citizens to be more like him. That Patriot acted!

The cavemen with guns are NEVER going to stop and we must beware of the wolf we DON'T see.

Helllloooo! Is anyone else out there in the Universe? ET don't phone home

am a NASA junkie. I watch every space launch and landing that comes around. I waited for the double boom BOOM of the Space Shuttle as it flew over Mississippi on its way to landing at Kennedy on Tuesday morning. I love space exploration. But what if we are not alone?

I was watching a new documentary titled "Into the Universe With Stephen Hawking" Sunday night on The Discovery Channel. The British physicist says aliens are out there, but it could be too dangerous for humans to interact with extraterrestrial life. Why? The 68-year-old scientist said a visit by extraterrestrials to Earth might well be like Christopher Columbus arriving in the Americas , "which didn't turn out very well for the Native Americans. We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet," Hawking said. "I imagine they might exist in massive ships ... having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach.”

I mulled over what he was saying and you know…he is probably right. Throughout history, there have been UFO’s reported. People that see the UFO’s are regarded as nut cases by the people that didn’t have the experience. But just because you never have the close encounter doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Think Area 51.

Are we really so arrogant to believe that we….the inhabitants of the 3rd rock from the sun that we have called Earth…. Do we really think that we are the only intelligent life in the Universe? Is God so limited in His imagination that we are it?

I have to admit that I agree with Mr. Hawking. One only has to look through a telescope into the myriad of stars in the vast night sky and look at the million and billions of pinpoints of pulsating lights and realize that we are probably just one of several spots in the unknown swirling galaxies that are probably supporting some form of intelligent life. And they are probably not all lovey dovey and benevolent. When you factor in the 100 billion galaxies in our universe, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational. The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.

I don’t really think that it might be the perfect idea to be trying to communicate and let ET know that we are sitting here. Aliens might prove to be beyond human understanding. I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can’t even begin to understand. And they (ET) probably would not understand us. Just as I can’t understand quantum theory, there are aspects of reality that are beyond the capacity of our brains.

What if the visitors are predatory? Do we really think that we can outsmart them? After all, they are the ones that traveled through the time space continuum to reach us. If they have that kind of travel technology then they surely have weapon technology beyond our puny imagination.

So I will keep my telescopes handy and continue to star gaze and wonder. But I am not too sure that I really want to find out about any other intelligent life forms that might be out there. What if?

Jesus loves us equally. Is that a bad thing?

Vonda’s Views
April 5, 2010

Jesus loves the little children
All the children of the world
Red and yellow
Black and white
They are precious in His sight.
Jesus loves the little children of the world.

I can remember during my informative, inquisitive childhood years, learning this song in Sunday School. Various teachers each week would teach from the Holy Scriptures that Jesus loved us ALL. So I believe that Christ does love us all. That means he loves us all equally does it not?

Yet in recent days I have run across statements that people have made that appear to me to be exclusionary. Equality is not something they want or even believe in. Oh yes I would love to have equality of wages for men and women. I have long been an advocate of that. Especially when I once worked in an office where I was more qualified and experienced than my supervisor yet I was paid a lesser wage because I was a woman. No I didn’t fight it because that was not an option back in that time frame. I did move on though when the next best opportunity arose.

But what about equality in religion? Are there really people that believe that we are not all equal in God’s eyes? Sadly I think so from comments that I hear and from things I see in print.

Jesus died for all the children
All the children of the world
Red and yellow
Black and white
They are precious in His sight.
Jesus died for all the children of the world.

Is being equal such a bad thing? Is it wrong to have a vision of a day when every one is equal or is that some sort of evil indoctrination plot? When the time comes for each of us to meet our Maker, we all will be standing one on one in front of the Lord and he will be looking at us. Not at our skin color or whether or not we went to church every time the doors opened. It’s not going to matter if we helped out a local charity or gave someone the shirt off our back. Its not going to matter if we grew up in the 60’s and 70’s and was a hippie for a while or if we grew up so sheltered that we didn’t have a thought for ourselves.

So what if there was that girl in your class that got pregnant and had a kid out of wedlock? Did that mean you were “better” than her? What about the guy that wore his hair so long he tied it back in a ponytail yet you wore yours in a buzz cut? What about the guys that didn’t want to be drafted and your brother was and he died in Viet Nam? Is that “draft dodger” any less important in God’s eyes.

The point I am trying to make, in my small allotted space, is that religion, particularly the Christian Faith, is about Gods love for us, not about our love for God. He loved us FIRST. And he loves us just as we are. It is because of HIS love that we are changed and we come to love Him. Through that love we seek to change our ways and be more like Him.

Jesus rose for all the children/people
All the children/people of the world
Red and yellow
Black and white
They are precious in His sight.
Jesus rose for all the children/people of the world.

Jesus loves us ALL equally. So equality can be a good thing.

My Name is Corn Bread Junior and I'm Hongry

Vonda’s Views
March 28, 2010

The Great Spring Break Road Trip of 2010

The people that followed my ‘tweets’ of our Spring Break Trip to the west coast and back have been asking for more details of the trip. You know, little things, like would I travel by bus again, and was the trip really fun or did I just make it sound that way. Then there is the question of WHY did we do it straight through like we did.

Would I do it again? Yes yes yes I would and YES I would do it on the GreyHound Bus. Not that it was all glamorous or that I was sitting in the lap of luxury. It was just a great way and an economical way for us to take Anna to across the USA and to see as much of it as we could in 9 days.

There were all sorts of things that happened to us that I found amusing as well as semi alarming but it was also things that were eye-opening experiences for us.
Take for instance, our arrival in Dallas, Texas where we were to transfer to the Los Angeles bound bus; just before we pulled into the bus terminal, our driver began giving us instructions on picking up our luggage and taking it with us to the next bus and telling us how long we would be waiting before we departed on the next leg of the trip. He also told us that even though there is security in the bus terminals, not to leave our luggage unattended as the occasional homeless person or panhandler would come in and start begging for money. His advice was to not give them money, ignore them and call security over. He said sometimes they really were not homeless, just deadbeats looking for an easy target.

We were standing in line with our luggage waiting for the new bus when all of a sudden we heard this voice coming out of the crowd, “My name is Corn Bread Junior and I’m homeless and hongry! Will you give me a couple of dollars so I can get me some food?” Most everyone took one look at the guy and thought uh oh! Ole Corn Bread looked a mess. He had matted hair, was dragging one leg like it was injured or deformed and holding one arm like it was useless, nasty clothes and smelled to high heaven but I noticed his teeth and he had some pretty good teeth that he was flashing around so I was skeptical.

He disappeared into the crowd as the Security guards started looking his way. Soon we heard his voice again, “My name is Corn Bread Junior and I’m Homeless and sleepy and I need a couple of bucks to pay the Salvation Army so I can go get a bed and sleep.” Then he had a cup he would stick in your face and shake at you. I told him I didn’t have any cash on me. By this time, his body odor was really starting to get to people.

Our eyes were watering and some of us were trying to see how long we could hold our breath before having to inhale again. Then he made his final appeal, “my name is Corn Bread Junior and I’m homeless and I need to take a bath!” That one worked because she smelled like he had rolled in Catfish Charley and then got sprayed by a skunk! People were digging for pocket change and anything else they might have handy to put in his cup so that hopefully he would drag his smelly personage away from the terminal.

After he collected his ‘bath money’ he left and some of the folks stood watching him as he left. Sure enough, when he was out of the building, ole Corn Bread Junior started using the bad arm and hand to count his money and his bum deformed leg started walking straight and without a limp. He had seen his target and made the bull’s eye and some honest trusting people became skeptical cynics that morning.

Vonda’s Views
March 12, 2010

To paraphrase Dorothy in the Wizard Oz, “WE aren’t in Mississippi anymore girls!”

By the time this is published I will be on the second or third leg of our great Spring Break Road Trip to see America in 9 days. I decided that we would take the ‘south western’ route out to LA and see Dallas Fort Worth and all of the beautiful deserts through New Mexico and Arizona.

On the return leg of our trip we may have a large detour to make in the Denver area as several tons of boulders the size of semi tractor trailers slid down onto US 70 and that is the main passage through the Rockies. From what I have seen on the news, those are some pot holes that won’t be able to be patched with a little bit of cold patch! The detour is going to make the trip about 4 hours longer but it is also going to take us through the scenic route. As if there is anything more scenic than the Rocky Mountains!

I have an Atlas and I am marking all of the little places that we will be seeing and passing through and it will be fun for me to pass on to my kids a few things about the US. Geography and History has always been one of my stronger subjects.

In the mean time, if you are reading this on Thursday then we are already on the bus going through the Mojave Desert and it might be lunch time in Las Vegas where we will be stopping. I’ve never been there and it will be enough for me just to pass through the city and gawk a little at it.

Anna and Erin will be excited to be heading toward Chicago and our little excursion into the Sears Tower before getting back on the bus and heading to Memphis where Scott and Ariel will be waiting pick us up and bring us home. And as much as I love to travel and see new things, I will be clicking the heels of my red Crocs together 3 times saying “there is no place like home.”

Planning an adventure

Vonda’s Views
March 7, 2010

I love a good adventure story and now I am about to write one of my own.
I have been planning a Spring Break trip for the two high schoolers in my house. We started talking about this back in the Fall after our exchange student Anna arrived to live with us. Anna was trying to grasp the concept of just how big the United States is and we thought that it would be a great idea to take a cross country trip and see as much of the USA as possible in a short period of time. I started researching and came up with the idea of traveling by train or bus. There is nothing like letting someone else doing the driving and navigating while all I do is sit and watch the landscapes and cities go by.

We decided on Chicago and Los Angeles as our destinations; Chicago just long enough to go up in the Sears tower and then on to Los Angeles to see the Pacific Ocean and other points of interest. After contacting friends in the LA area and making arrangements for a place to stay then the fun began; how much money or how little can we make this trip for and just how are we going to get there?

While I really wanted to travel by train, the schedules just were not going to cooperate with us. I want to go out there one route and return on another so that we can travel through as many states as possible. While traveling by train is surprisingly very cost efficient, some routes are only traveled 3 days a week and as luck would have it, it was not the 3 days we needed. So the Greyhound Bus has become our mode of travel.

The girls have been researching all of the ‘free’ things that we can do while we are out there. There is the La Brea Tar Pits at Hancock Park and the Hollywood Star Walk of Fame; Graumans Chinese Theater and all of the Hand and Foot prints of the stars is nearby as is the Hollywood Sign and Griffith Observatory in Griffith Park. I would love to be able to look through that huge telescope into the cosmos! There are many other things that we want to do that will cost money. There is Disneyland and we can’t pass up going to the original Disney theme park. I want to go to the Pacific at Hermosa Beach which is where we lived in 1959 before my Daddy decided to move back to Mississippi.

Anna is from Armenia so we are going to go to visit the area of Los Angeles known as Little Armenia and my friends tell me there are many wonderful Armenian restaurants there so I will finally get to eat some Armenian food. We have found it amusing that Los Angeles has more Armenians living there than do in her native land.

I am busily trying to plan something on paper so we can cram as much as possible into every day as we will only have 4 days to see and do as much as we can On the way out there we will have meal stops in St. Louis and Denver and Las Vegas and then on the trip back we will have meal times in Phoenix and El Paso and Dallas before finally getting to Memphis. Its going to be a long ride but we will travel through 12 states seeing everything from the Plains to the mountains to the deserts and a little of everything else in between. I will be journaling the whole time and taking pictures.

I love adventures and taking a bus trip with a couple of teenage girls to LA so we can say we wet our toes in the Pacific should be a good one.

15 minutes of Fame

These days it seems like everyone is famous for at least 15 minutes. Or maybe its just five minutes but it sure does appear that everyone, especially young people are obsessed with being a celebrity. Look at all of the reality type shows on television now. People standing in front of so called industry judges singing (very badly I might add) at the top of their lungs trying for fame and fortune; or prancing up and down a runway or posing vogue in front of cameras aiming to be the next top model.

We sit glued to the television listening to people say that they want to have plastic surgery so they can look like some glamorous model or we hear these wannabe singers talk about living the dream and failure is not an option for them or they gush that they have worked all their life to reach this moment and most of them are not even past 20 yet!
Even in the sports arena, you see young people thinking that every one of them going to be the next great quarterback of the NFL or something along those lines. They all want to be rich and famous. What lofty goals our young people have now days.

Young people think fame is their birthright. They have a sense of entitlement that is bigger than anything I have ever seen. Kids (as well as some adults!) look at these reality shows and think “I can do that” and that becomes their life’s ambition. The majority of kids leaving schools today no longer want to be study to be doctors or lawyers or architects or teachers or rocket scientists or plumbers or electricians; they want to be famous. They want to be celebs; they think being a celebrity is the short track to wealth and happiness and they are firmly convinced that it will bring them everything they ever wanted. There is an entire generation WORLD WIDE apparently, that thinks if you have a lot of money and material things then you will be happy and they don’t understand that nothing worth having is going to come without a lot of blood, sweat and tears, work and scrabbling to the make it.

As a parent I have always tried to tell my girls that they can be anything they set their mind on but that it takes hard work and perseverance as well as being in the right place at the right time. I am a classically trained artist and a good one. I had the opportunity to work in a couple of major cities where the world of commercial art is strong but I choose a long time ago to stay in Mississippi. Would I have been rich and famous had I gone somewhere else? I can’t say. Maybe. Maybe not. Do I regret not taking the big leap? Nope. I had and still have the talent but having the talent isn’t the be all and end all of it. I was not cut throat enough to survive and I saw that pretty early on in my career. So I chose to stay close to home to be with family and to raise a family. Even now at the age of 56, I still am not cut throat enough for some things.

Watching all this debacle about the state of education in our state has made me think about a few things. I have never thought kids get a good enough education in our state. Not on the public level anyway. The teachers might as well be hog tied for all of the restrictions and for the things they are required to do. And how they do it with what little they get paid…well my hat is off to them. But I do get tired of buying reams of copy paper for each of my daughters’ classes. I have complained about that ever since they reentered the public school system.

I home schooled my daughters until their junior years in high school. Why? Because I could and because I felt that I could offer them a much broader education than they would ever get in the public school system. It was hard work for 9 years and we all learned a lot and did a lot of things. They sometimes thought I was crazy for the things that I presented to them to learn about but the one that is now a junior in college finally understands some of the things I was pushing her to learn. I knew when she got to the university level she would understand. Now both my girls are looking forward to their higher education and making plans for their future.

I haven’t heard the phrase ‘I want to be famous’ out of either of them but the spark is probably there. With a good solid education and a lot of hard work, hopefully they will have learned a good trade and have a worthy career and find their 15 minutes of fame and hold on to it. I just hope and pray that there are kids out there that still think being a nurse and doctor and a tech is good. There needs to be more respect for the plumber and the electrician too. Those are very worthy careers. It’s better to be a great in demand electrician and plumber than a mediocre singer or anorexic model.

Traveling with Teenagers on a field trip

I’ve said it before and I will say it again….traveling with a group of teenagers is like herding cats. It is always an adventure!

Last week, I and Donna Williams the Regional Director for AYUSA in Mississippi, took a group of 12 exchange students down to see our state Capitol and some of the other sights to be seen around Jackson. We left bright and early Tuesday morning and started picking up students. I had warned all the kids to pack light and only bring the necessary stuff . Just because I drive a 15 passenger van does not mean it has room for people AND luggage. It is sometimes an either/or situation.

At any rate we got everyone and their stuff into the van. The first little casualty of the trip happened down in Grenada. We had just picked up the last 6 kids and we stopped at a quick stop store for the last rest room break and for coffee. One of the girls, Julia, was sitting on the very back row and she decided to climb over the back of the seat and go out the rear door. IN the process of doing that her blue jeans ripped right in the rear seam. IT turned out that was the only pair of pants she had brought along on the one day trip. I told her we would just have to wait till we got to Jackson to purchase her some new jeans.

The trip down went pretty quickly. We had decided to spend the night in Canton because the rooms in the motel there were not as expensive as in Jackson and the budget was already tight. We arrived in Canton and checked into our rooms and we unpacked the van and everyone quickly got ready to go on to the Capitol to meet State Rep. Jim Beckett. Jim had a arranged a tour for us so we needed to get there quickly. But before we could go there was the matter of replacing those jeans. I was not about to let that child go into the Capitol with her a large portion of her leg hanging out.

Trying to find a Wal-Mart, when you aren’t looking for one, is nearly impossible. But I did find a Kohl’s. The second I pulled into the parking lot all the other girls shouted ‘SHOPPING’ and Donna and I were shouting NO! I got out with Julia and we headed into the store. I told her it would be a fast trip. I spied the jeans in the junior department and steered her in that direction. We found the one pair in her size, she tried them on, I approved of them, she paid for them and we were back out the door and in the van in 15 minutes.

Then we were going to grab a quick lunch and that was when Donna discovered that she had left her wallet back in Canton in the room. So we drove back to Canton to retrieve the money, Julia put on the new jeans and we raced to eat some lunch and then to the Capitol. After driving in circles for what seemed like forever, I finally found a space large enough to park the van in that was close to the Capitol building. We started walking and then everyone had to take pictures and more pictures and by the time we got inside we were late for our tour. We were beyond late actually and our tour guide was not a happy camper.

She warmed up after hearing the convoluted story of the ripped pants, search for a store, the hurried pants search and the forgotten money. She gave the kids a very good tour and they sat in the gallery of both the Senate and the House and they asked questions. I just took pictures to document the events and kept to the back of the line to make sure we didn’t lose anyone!

After we left the Capitol, we were invited to dinner at a friend’s home out in Brandon on the Ross Barnett Reservoir. I relied on the GPS to get me there with some directions and landmark advice from my friend. We found her home and the kids were treated to a beautiful view, some great food and Mardi Gras fun and a few games of billiards. The adults hung out in the kitchen discussing the joys of hosting international exchange students while watching kids from 9 nations talking and interacting.

After a great dinner we returned to our motel rooms and had a good nights rest and the next morning went to the Museum of Natural Science before heading back home. It was a quick trip and we wanted to do more but that will come another day. For the exchange students, their time here is rapidly coming to an end as most will start going home in May. Donna and I are already looking for family’s to host students for the 2010-2011 school year. If you have ever thought about hosting, now is the time to look. I am already looking forward to planning trips for next year’s group of kids.

Taking them places may be like herding cats, but it’s a fun thing to let the cats out of the bag as they learn what life is like for teenagers in Mississippi USA!

Snow Days and the natives are getting restless

Ya’ll staying warm enough? I’m wearing layers and a cap pretty much 24 hours a day. I discovered that there is warmer air in my upright freezer than outside my kitchen door. And it has been a mad race to keep the pipes from freezing and to help the dog have drinking water with out her little tongue being frozen to her water dish! I’m trying to figure out why I should bring in my yard dog so she won’t freeze to death in this bitter cold, yet the tiniest of birds can survive without any help from me and they stay in little stick nests up in the branches of bare trees!

The kids were all excited to have ‘snow days’ just two days after the winter break was over. Parents all over the area could be heard groaning when they heard those words on the weather report because you know you can only have so many days of kids being home before the natives get a full blown case of cabin fever and start attacking!

I was working in the Amory area all day Wednesday and it was about 7:30 in the evening when I decided I might need to pick up some bread and milk before I left that town. So I ducked into the Piggly Wiggly there. Unlike most people apparently, I really was out of those two items. As I was shopping, a gentleman came in and grabbed a carton of milk and stood in line. Pretty soon he was joined by a second man with milk and then a third. See the pattern? It got better. One man turned to the other and said, my wife called me and told me bad weather in on the way and to pick up some milk. The next guy said,” me too.” The third man just grinned and held up his milk and a loaf of bread. Then a fourth man gets in line with bread and milk and he said, “my wife called me too. We don’t even drink milk!”

I just chuckled at them and went on buying my ingredients for making the menu for the week” chili, a chicken pie, stir-fried chicken and stewed potato soup. The shelves were pretty bare as I tried to find all the things on my grocery list. There were no loaves of bread so I just bought bread mix and decided to bake my own. The poor little girl that checked me out said that it had been busier than the day before Christmas.

After I paid and got back in the van with my purchases I chuckled at the logic of buying a carton of milk and a loaf of bread to prepare for bad weather. Why is it when we hear the words snow storm that we buy things that we don’t even use? And just how far does one expect to get with a single carton of milk and a loaf of bread? I thought that might have been a little male logic going on there.

I was pleasantly surprised to see the white stuff on the ground the next morning. It threw a monkey wrench into my work week but it was nice to have a snow day and to cook the nice pot of chili and the chicken pot pie. The hot bread and fresh lemon cake and steaming mug of coffee helped me get over the fact that pipes might be freezing and that there were teenagers upstairs and the natives were getting restless!

dealing with the downhill slide of the holidays

Blogging from Bruce
Vonda Keon


Well I don’t know about you but, whatever holidays you celebrated in November, December, and January, they're over now. All of that special food that we slaved over the stoves to cook has been eaten and the decorations are slowly coming down. The New Year is here, though I haven’t decided how I should see it. Should I see it with hope or fear, it is totally up to me.

In most of the western world, January is a month of coming down. We have spent November and December gearing up, getting ready, anticipating days off from work, travel, good food, and good times with people we love. Then January comes, and that's all over. Not only that, but the bills for all that hope and anticipation and fun start arriving and we have to go back to our normal daily routine. It's no wonder if we sometimes look up and ask if the holidays really meant anything after all. Because even if the holidays were stressful, the days after bring on even more stress!

We are now in the Season of Letdown. Seasons of letdown are difficult for the human spirit. They just are. The truth is, our lives cycle and recycle all the time, though we don't often notice because we're too busy experiencing the feelings of wherever we are in the cycle. We are constantly going through ups and downs. We cycle as individuals, as family groups, as business groups, as friends, as a culture, as a country, and as a world..

Right now for me it's almost a relief to say, "It's January, and I'm on the downward side of the holiday season cycle. It's normal for me to feel tired, a more than a little overwhelmed with everyday life coming back at me, and even a little sad. I sat down on New Years Day and tears just started welling in my eyes. I never could figure out why. I had enjoyed a wonderful day with family and we ate great food. The tears just happened of their own accord.

When I get in such a mood I find that I have to find my quiet space and hole up in it for a while. I have been over stimulated by the sights and sounds and smells of the holidays. I have been overwhelmed with the constant searching for the perfect gifts. I have been inundated with the various duties my four part time jobs have thrown at me! The only way I can make it through the downside is to sit and reflect and recharge my ‘batteries’ so I have to take time to be quiet and to contemplate or write or read some of numerous books I have. When I remember the good times I find it much easier to be content in the present time.

Now that January has arrived I have to start focusing on other things and other people. I have work to do and hopefully some trips to plan an escape from the daily life. Focusing on these things allows me to find contentment. Focusing like this can be difficult, when the time is still so close to what was exciting. I have had to develop a Meditation Mind. In meditation, practitioners are asked to focus and relax. When they find their minds wandering, they are asked to simply recall themselves to the focus. This kind of mindset can also serve well in focusing on the present, if you find your mind wandering; simply bring it back to the task at hand. Repeated practice allows our minds to attain focus easier and hold it longer.

If you're down after the holidays, I hope you can find the quiet space and time so you can focus and help you out whenever you're in the downward part of a cycle.

The Silence of the Holy Night

As the Advent of Christmas is fully on us, two of my senses are overwhelmed with the sights and sounds or Christmas: All of the blinking Christmas lights and then the music. I love Christmas music. Some of songs make me laugh and some of them make me cry but they all make me happy when I hear them. I love sitting in our van listening to the music that our Christmas lights are synchronized to. But there are some people that can’t get the full effect our light displays because they can’t hear.

I have been fortunate that throughout my life I have a wide variety of friends. Not just male or female, young and old but I have had the pleasure of friendships with people from many different cultures and backgrounds. I have learned a smattering of words in several languages and how to cook some really wonderful foods. I even have friends that are a bit out of the ordinary. I count among my friends someone who is blind and a few who are deaf or hearing impaired.

I was visiting with one of my dear friends who is hearing impaired and we were watching my lights and I realized that for her, it was just lights randomly blinking. She could not hear the pure musical tones to Silent Night so what was the huge attraction of the blinking lights?

My deaf friends live in a silent world that most of us think we long for. There are days when I just don’t want to hear anything and every little noise wakes me up or gets on my last nerve. And I suffer from Tinnitus so I always have a high pitched sound going on in my head that really gets loud at times. I never have total silence with that going off in my head.

Today, (Sunday), I had some Christmas gifts that I had to work on and this article to write and I thought I would block out everything to stop me from being distracted from people walking around overhead and dogs barking and the washing machine churning and the heater coming on and going off. Then there was a football game, the girls fixing a meal, more laundry, the sound of the hot water going through the pipes making its crazy knocking sounds and the squeak in my chair. Toss in someone upstairs singing slightly off-key at times and there is a cacophony of pure racket.

I keep earplugs handy so I popped some into my ears and blocked out the external sounds. Alas the tinny ringing is still going strong but I could not hear anything else. No cell phone, no tv, no washing machine….silence. ahhhh.

But is it really so wonderful? Just think about not being able to hear. You don’t hear everything going on around you. Unless people are directly in your line of sight and you see their lips moving, you don’t realize or catch everything that is going on around you. People behind you might say something and when you don’t respond, they don’t take the time to figure out that you don’t hear. Or even worse, they KNOW you can’t hear and they treat you like you don’t have good sense.

I have seen this happen with my dear friends. People take advantage of their deafness or say ugly things about them right in their presence knowing that they don’t understand. They don’t even try to communicate with them. That is almost too much for me to bear. I am trying to learn to better communicate with her and I am slowly learning another language called Sign because I know that I am a hard person to try and lip read. And I with help from my friend I know that I will learn more and more of her language and her silent world.

As I sit here in my self-imposed sound deprivation I realize that for my friend, Christmas has always been about the Silent Night. It is in the silence that we hear the whisper of Gods voice. My friend has been blessed to truly know the holiness of the Silent Night.

Thanksgiving gets the short end sometimes

Although sometimes it does get the short end of the wishbone where holidays are concerned, Thanksgiving is pretty high on my list of favorite holidays. There's nothing to compare with waking up to the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade with all of the huge balloons, spending a lazy day with family and gorging ourselves with the most amazing meal that we have looked forward to since last year!

Thanksgiving is another one of those things that we Americans do that no one else in the world does. Our Pilgrim forefathers were so thankful that they had survived the long year of 1621 in the New World that they celebrated the bounty that they had and gave thanks to the Lord for it. Although they did have a three-day feast in celebration of a good harvest, and the local Indians did participate, this "first Thanksgiving" was not a holiday, it was simply a gathering and it wasn’t repeated the next year.

The harvest of 1621 was a bountiful one. And the surviving colonists decided to celebrate with a feast -- including 91 Indians who had helped the Pilgrims survive their first year. It is believed that the Pilgrims would not have made it through the year without the help of the natives. The feast was more of a traditional English harvest festival than a true "thanksgiving" observance. It lasted three days. They didn’t have pumpkin pies because they would not have had flour or sugar left and large bowls of mashed potatoes would have been unheard of because the potato was thought to be poisonous at that time.

Governor William Bradford sent "four men fowling" after wild ducks and geese. It is not certain that wild turkey was part of their feast. However, it is certain that they had deer meat. The term "turkey" was used by the Pilgrims to mean any sort of wild fowl.

One of the exchange students living with us asked me, in all seriousness, when we would go and find the turkey for our thanksgiving dinner. When I said that the next time I went to the grocery I might get a turkey breast, I noticed the confused look on her face. It took a little while to register with me that she thought we would go out and hunt for turkey. I explained to her that most people ‘hunted’ their thanksgiving turkey in the frozen food section of the local grocery stores or better yet would call the stores’ deli or call Joe’s Market and order the pans of dressing and the turkey already cooked to perfection.

I know it was a big disappointment for her that our family didn’t have a turkey to carve or big drumsticks to gnaw on or the wishbone to pull because it’s our family tradition to have chicken and dressing and baked ham. We only eat Moms dressing twice a year and it is always worth the long wait. The feast was good as always and we had a good time feasting on sweet potato casserole and corn salad and other side dishes and hot rolls and then finishing off with slices of pumpkin pie and sweet potato pie or a big slab of my sisters strawberry cake.

Now that Thanksgiving is officially over, I can concentrate on Advent and getting my home ready for Christmas. I can decorate my trees and put out my Christmas village and start bringing out my figurines and light the Advent candles each week as Mary and Joseph make their way around the room for their final destination of the stable and the manger and ready our home and hearts for the coming of the Lord. I won’t need a wishbone for that.

Thankful for my Freedom

Blogging from Bruce
November 22, 2009

Vonda Keon

This is the time of year when people start thinking about what all they are thankful for in their lives. Thanksgiving is something that is truly unique that we Americans can claim as our own. I‘ve been involved in several discussions with different exchange students lately about why we do things the way we do in our country because they come to our country sometimes with a very romantic idea of what life will be like in America. Sometimes they are disappointed after they arrive because life here is not quite what they expected. But I can give them all kinds of reasons why it is good to live in the United States.

There are some things in America that give me cause to shake my head in wonder as to why our elected officials act the way they do. And there are times when I have to wonder if things will ever really change among people of different races and ethnic groups; i.e. the group of hooded protesters on the Ole Miss campus on Saturdays game day. I was glad to see photos of another group of protesters that chose expose their faces and to turn their backs on the hooded ones. The kids that turned their backs on hate were not hiding their identity. Those kids are the true future leaders. In America we have the FREEDOM to peaceful protest. We may not agree with each and every group that is protesting but at least we can protest something and make ourselves be seen and heard.

In the United States we can travel from east coast to the west coast and from the Canadian border to the Mexican border of this huge country any time we choose and we don’t have to have papers or pay bribes just to go from one state to another. We have the FREEDOM to hop in the car to go to an amusement park in another state or to travel to our nation’s capitol to see the sights.

In the US we have all extremes of terrain from the deserts to the beaches and oceans to snowcapped mountain peaks and volcanoes. We have vast rolling hills and forests and wide open spaces of green grass and fields of grain and fruit orchards. We have enormous rivers and the delta land around them and deep canyons and inland lakes.

We don’t have to worry about someone on the west side of the county shooting a rocket at the east side of the county. We don’t have to worry about land mines or suicide bombers. Let’s hope and pray that we never have to worry about that.

In the United States a kid can grow up to be anything they dream of if they work hard enough because the opportunity is there if the desire is. We aren’t stuck in some caste system where you are what your father and grandfather was. Everyone has the FREEDOM to get an education.

No, life here is not perfect by a long shot. We don’t live in Utopia. We have hungry people and homeless people and people looking for jobs. But we also help the homeless and the hungry and the unemployed. We have the FREEDOM to help those that might not have much to be thankful for. We have the FREEDOM to worship in the church of our choice. (Or for some, the FREEDOM not to worship.)

The bottom line is, in the United States of America, We have a great many things to be thankful for. But the one thing that sets us apart from other countries is that we have FREEDOM. As you gather round your Thanksgiving table look at all you have; your feast, your family, a roof over your head, a clean bed to sleep in, clothes on your back, the relative safety you live in. Be thankful for your FREEDOM.

Christmas Trees and the Exchange Students

Having two exchange students living under my roof is always a challenge. There are constant questions that I must give explanations to. Foods, culture, styles of worship, and what things mean. It’s a learning process for everyone. This past weekend was a good learning experience about Christmas in the USA.

Here we are, hot off the Halloween night of Tricks and Treats, going full speed ahead into Christmas like a runaway train on a slippery down hill slope. They want to know about Thanksgiving but its Christmas that is at the top of the list now. I took them to the different Christmas open houses in town and they were amazed at the Christmas trees. I have not given the themed trees much thought. In a past job I was the Visual Merchandising Manager for McRaes if you can remember that incarnation of Belk’s. The last year I worked there I decorated 72 Christmas trees for the Pre-Christmas Harvest Sale. I worked for weeks on those trees, wrapping the branches with hundreds of strands of lights and then coming up with a myriad of themes for the trees.

After that particular year, I would get my tree up and get the lights on it and that was about it. I could not bring myself to put another ornament on a tree. Thankfully I married a man that would decorate the tree and I would sit back and direct. As my children got older they would put the ornaments on the tree. When they were little it was very heavily decorated on the lower half of the tree until they grew taller.

A few years ago I finally found a color scheme I liked and once the tree was decorated I left it like that and put the tree on the corner or the living room behind a screen and left it up; for three years. All I had to do at Christmas was uncover it and plug it in. Then this past spring, my darling daughters undecorated my tree.

So what does this have to do with Christmas Open House and my exchange students? Well they saw all of the beautiful trees and the multitude of decorations and color schemes and themes and they were asking questions about it. Anna was looking at one tree and it had ornaments shaped like candy on it and little red shoe ornaments. She asked “what does a red high heel have to do with Christmas?” Amjaad was fascinated by the pink trees and white trees and gold trees. Both girls said back in their home countries they use live green trees. And they don’t do themes like we do. Anna said she mother might look at one of our trees with all of the decorations and ribbons and sprays and ask ‘Where is the tree?”

They came home and decided to try their hand at decorating my tree. It has a lot of lights on it already so all they have to do is start looking through all of my ornaments and deciding how they want to do it. They are really looking forward to helping Scott as he starts putting up our Christmas Light Display for this year.

We Americans just don’t realize that no one does Christmas like we do. We are a bit over the top in our country with the blending of the secular Christmas and Religious Christmas. Bright, sometimes gaudy Christmas displays sit along side the simple Christmas manager scenes. “Holly Jolly Christmas” and “Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer”are “Rockin a Round the Christmas Tree” right up until “Silent Night” turns into “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” and “What Child is This” is born in “O Little Town of Bethlehem”.

Yes we do start earlier and earlier each year it seems. That is the secular part of it along with the stress of getting presents that eats away at the pocketbook. The Christian part of Christmas is still the same here as it is in Bethlehem, where Amjaad is from and the place of Jesus birth, and in Anna’s home country of Armenia which is the oldest Christian country. You may see Christmas Trees decorated with fruit or butterflies, or flamingos or red shoes or classic round ornaments. The trees may be traditional green or not so tradition lime green or pink or purple or white or gold. But the theme is still the celebration of the birth of The Christ

Part two of Its the Future are we there yet?

In my childhood I rode my bike all over the town of Bruce, with my parent’s blessing, and wearing a helmet never occurred to me or my parents. Now I see kids on tricycles in their own yards and they better be wearing a helmet, or his parents are guilty of child abuse. The mere notion, (that was alive and well when I was a kid), was that life is risky and certain bad things are just going to happen from time to time. Well, that thought is gone today. Now life must be safe, and anything that makes it unsafe must be done away with, or at least severely punished.

Manufacturers of anything are sued into oblivion every time one of their products is even remotely involved in an accident, because their product isn’t safe enough. The greatest cost in manufacturing a step ladder is to offset the cost of the inevitable lawsuits brought by those who hurt themselves using it. How dare ladders not be made 100% safe, no matter how it’s used or misused?

It hasn’t been that long ago that a man had the RIGHT to risk his own life and even be a damned fool about it if he so chose. Not any more. Now, every time something tragic happens as a result of adventurers doing adventurous things, such as a death or injury during a mountain climb, there follows the cry to outlaw said activity “for their own good.” Safety must be imposed on the foolish and daring for their own good.

I suppose that if the powers that be had their way and could play Big Brother Nanny, they would manipulate and work behind the scenes and fiddle with our destinies because they are totally motivated by the desire that everything be 100 percent safe. Every thing would be designed to keep everyone safe from anything that might possibly cause them harm.

If the Big Brother Nanny had his way, there would be no sharp corners or no splinters or no cracks in pavement for us to hang our toes. All cars and highways would be safe because they would be able to control our cars by computer and an alarm could go off in some far away room and warn BBN that we were going over the speed limit and they could just shut down the engine. Or better yet they might watch and see how many hours we had driven and they would decide that we might be too tired to drive so they start sending out the message that we need to pull over and sleep.

A small segment of the American people have already shown themselves to be willing to trade freedom for safety. The government already regulates us, in case we make stupid choices. We are taxed so we don’t spend our wealth in foolish pursuits. The demand to MAKE US SAFE has already created groups that will frown upon all adventurous individuals as dangerous and insane! Gone are the days when you could just go to the doctor and have surgery. Now he has to worry if he will be sued for NOT curing what ails you. We are on a terrible path to safety above all else. And that my friends means more control over our lives.

I don’t know about you, but I believe in free choice. The good Lord gave us a brain and he knows that we only come to him freely of our own will and not because he has manipulated us. I once decided to fold myself up and squeeze my rotund butt into a 55 gallon plastic drum and roll down the hill between my house and my Moms. Why? Because it seemed like it would be a fun thing to do. I broke a rib doing that but I didn’t sue the manufacturer of the plastic barrel from not putting a warning label on the thing. I just wrapped my ribs and took Tylenol and sat up very straight for a few days. Did I learn a lesson? You bet I did. I learned that I wanted to do it again but the next time I wanted padding in the barrel with me!

Is the adventurous spirit dying in people? We are in the future minus the jetpacks and flying cars and pretty soon minus the freedom to decide if we want those adventurous things. Why can’t we continue to use free choice in all aspects of our lives? If Freedom to choose is good enough for God then it ought to be good enough for the Big Brother Nanny state. I’ll be willing to bet they don’t believe. What do you think?

The moving around of foreign exchange students. It just happens

Since the rumor mill is abuzz in this little town, I am sure that everyone knows, that as a CR for a Global Youth Exchange program, I moved an exchange student this week. As a matter of fact there were 4 kids moved within the state in the last few days. Last year the same thing happened. And next year there will probably be someone that is relocated or sent home. Its not a big deal unless someone makes one of it.

The exchange student program offers these kids an opportunity to come and live with people from very different backgrounds from their own. Most of them have traveled within their continents but they all dream of coming to America. They come here to a land where there are many viewpoints and they have to adjust to a lot of things when they get here. They are using a language that is not their native language but they have learned it well enough to get here and then they find that what they learned is not nearly enough. They are hit with new tastes in foods, different weather, a different home, a different type of school system. They are away from their home church or they come from a country where they don't go to church and they are now in the heart of the Bible belt. They miss their Mom's hugs and Dad's pats on the head. They miss their festivals and celebrations. If in their country they greet each other with a hug and kiss on the cheek, they are surprised to find that here people just smile and shake hands and say hello. There are hundreds of little things that are different and they all of a sudden add up to one big culture shock.

When they first arrive here it is fun to see the differences and to learn how to do things differently. Sometimes, and its usually about the 2 month mark, they get tired of having to remember how to do so many things. They start to feel that everything is different; nothing seems familiar any longer. Nothing is comfortable. Anyone who travels, for any length of time to any place, experiences this and its called "culture shock".

Culture Shock means that your mind is tired of having to think about everything. You are tired of have to figure out if something you are doing is right or wrong. When you get tired you brain stops trying to understand and you withdraw. Instead of adjusting you become quiet and you think of home and all that you are missing. You become confused at things and maybe angry and then you feel isolated. You start to think that people don't like you. They don't seem to be treating you the way you imagined that American Moms and Dads would treat their children. You want to be a member of the new family but you feel like an outsider. Your host family is usually hitting the culture wall too and even though they should realize that you are having difficulty, they don't because they are trying to deal with their own type of shock. Thus the misunderstandings start and bad feelings can happen.

There are many signs of Culture shock. Your eating patterns change. You either eat too much or too little. You sleep more than usual. You start having headaches. You feel helpless and like you are stuck someplace far from your family and friends and time is going so slow and the end is not in sight.
You get angry for no reason or for things that really aren't worth getting angry about. You start thinking that someone might hurt you, or take your things or take advantage of you because you have heard of other students that have had bad experiences. You are horribly homesick and you just want to go back home to what is familiar.

When hosting an exchange student many things come into play. Sometimes expectations are too high on both sides. And when the culture shock hits, the host family doesn't always recognize it for what is and the child is then considered by some to be difficult. Oh I should know! I had two students last year and one of them had me climbing the walls for a little while until we worked a few things out. After we sat down and worked through the issues that both of us had, it was smooth sailing and we all had a wonderful experience. And those girls were very much considered members of our family and we felt great sadness when we put them on the planes to send them back to their families.

Now there are times when the host family and the student just won't mix like oil and water. It just happens. The function of the Community Rep is to keep close tabs on the student's progress both in the home and in the school and community. There are questions that we ask of the Host Family and the student and the schools on a regular basis and we can usually identify a problem and try to work through it before it escalates into something that can't be fixed. And we have to turn in a report after each conversation. If the incompatibility becomes too great and starts creating chaos, we are responsible for going and getting the child and moving them to another home because that is what the State Department and the Overseas Partners tell us to do. We are just doing our job.

Incompatibility is not a sin. It is no one's fault. The kids are not ungrateful. They are usually extremely sad and feel that they have failed at trying to fit in and be a member of the host family. It causes them great pain and shame. Incompatiblity just happens folks.

And the truth be told, when the child is moved it's usually an unspoken relief for everyone involved. So let's just leave it at that and put this to rest and shut down the rumor mill. That is best for all parties concerned. The children that I have placed are my first concern and responsiblity.

Its the Future. Are we there yet?

Do you remember all those interesting books and comics and movies of your youth about what the future would be like? At Disney Land in California there was a section called Tomorrowland and it had the ‘House of the Future” and what an interesting sight that modular unit was. Then there were the jet packs and flying cars and instant foods.

There was real talk of traveling to the far reaches of Outer Space and building colonies and living there while all we were sitting at home watching Science Fiction cartoons like the Jetsons and other programs like Star Trek and later on Battle Star Galactica and now there is a complete channel devoted to Sci-Fi.

So I ponder this thought. Have we not arrived in the future if we don’t have jetpacks and flying cars and household personal robots? THEY told us we would have these things in the future so when do we get to the future?

As I pondered this dilemma I started thinking that on the one hand we have these wonderful new devices called lap tops and flat computer screens you can play games on, just like they did in the Legion of Superheroes — which is definitely in the future, and we are already blessed (and/or cursed) with so many other technological wonders probably were not imagined by those who designed our future so long ago, but we don’t still don’t have the jetpacks and the flying cars. So does that mean we are not in the future yet? Are we just stuck in the perpetual now waiting for permission to say or go into the ‘future?

As I thought long and hard (and that squeaking, creaking high pitched whining sound you have been hearing is my thoughts) the realization that we have arrived in the future hit. The jetpacks and flying cars are out there as promised. There is the Moller Skycar. In 2007, Moller announced that the M200G Volantor a precursor to the Moller Skycar, capable of hovering 10 feet above the ground using 70% ethanol and 30% water for fuel and traveling up to 50 MPH would hopefully be on the market in the United States by early 2008. Depending on demand, Moller says, the M200G Volantor could cost under $100,000 and I will tell you right now it is never going to put on the market.

Why? Where are they? Why isn’t there one in every driveway? Well here is the depressing part, folks. We don’t have them, NOT because there isn’t any entrepreneur willing to make them. We don’t have them because “Some body” rejected them. “Some body” collectively said, “No thanks.” And why is that? Because “Some body” said they’re not safe.

I grew up with a “Crop Duster” Dad and lived around all manner of flying aircraft all of my life. I studied airplanes and have always had an interest in flying and the earlier airplanes and cars of our past were everything but safe. But airplanes and motor cars were invented and introduced to the public in a more adventurous age; when people didn’t think or stress about safety to such an obsessive degree. We want more safety, Nay! we expect and demand it now more than we did then. If cars and airplanes were introduced for the first time today they’d never get government approval. They’d never be able to jump through all of the regulatory hoops any new product has to overcome today because “Some body” would be out there braying about how unsafe and dangerous they are!

Need any more examples? I’ve got a few more of them. I show you in Part Two next week.