baymule
Garden Master
Good morning y’all! Coffee is ready! Still dark outside, waiting on daylight. Had a ewe due yesterday, evidently she didn’t look at the calendar. She is waddling, she’s so big. Got 2 more, one due tomorrow and one due Sunday.
You did some extraordinarily good work in the face of horrible adversity. No wonder it haunts your dreams.It reflects on my life.
I returned to school (1 of several times) in a graduate program after coming to know Hmong refugee families about 1980. They had escaped from Laos and spent several years in UN refugee camps in Thailand. Their English was very limited and I knew little about them despite that long war in SE ASIA and my schooling as an Anthropology major.
My research involved how family loss changed parenting values. Many of these people had been refugees in their own country for years with displacement because of the war. An example: one person had been a child when US airplanes bombed the family's village. The village was in a valley leading into North Vietnam. The Ho Chi Minh Trail. Then and there, the family had to make a choice, travel down river to Vietnam or move further inland to fortified villages supported by the CIA. They chose the later.
At the end of the war, and further loss of family members, the survivors moved to a place where no one had lived before and no one lives now. It reminds me of the displacement of Native Americans to similar locations 150+ years ago, except this was done by a communist government. They called their new community, "Chicken Sh** Town." More family died and this one person escaped from Laos with distant relatives.
That family was one where I volunteered as a tutor for the school kids. This was something that I had been doing for awhile, kids from about 10 to college students. It became rather time consuming and I would collect them together, drive off to a church with an adult program for English as a Second Language. We would set up in a Sunday school classroom and I would move around the desks as they did their homework, fifth grade through college freshmen.
Steve
I guess I should wrap presents that are on the sofa?
Coffee is ready. It’s boiled in a pot on the stove. Power is out, so no drip pot. It stormed last night, waiting on daylight!