Through the Lens

Today was the first photography class for the DHS students that I teach once a month. They live in a group home because for various reasons, the state now has custody of them instead of their families. I teach them geography once a month. We "travel" to places like Africa, South America, Asia and learn how people live in other cultures. We finished the semester with a field trip to the River Parks, and then a walk up the Council Oak Park to see the famous Council Oak Tree (where the Creek Indians settled Tulsa). We studied Oklahoma today, but more importantly, we took photos. I gave every kid a camera, and away they went. It was amazing to watch. In the classroom setting, they had been terrible...mouthing off, impatient, bored, listless, angry. But as soon as we got out and put a camera in their hands, they were transformed. Suddenly they were seeing life through the lens and expressing themselves. They had a purpose. They had a new way of looking at things. They had art on the brain. They say music can soothe the savage soul. Perhaps a camera can calm the heart of a lost teenager.

A Hope for Children

I'm learning about this organization, AHOPE. They have Children's Homes for HIV-positive children in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Through Worldwide Orphans Foundation's Barlow Clinic, the children are getting ARV "cocktails." Children are being given a hope for a future. If you click on their website (it's now in my links), you can see photos of the children. They are being given life. Someone is really doing something! For $30 a month you can sponsor one of the children who live in the orphanage. Or you can send a donation. Or you can take much needed supplies to the orphanage if you are traveling to Addis Ababa. So many ways to join in with those who are really doing something...

The Old Man

He's 12 years old. That's 84 years in a dog's life. He has arthiritis, and some skin problems. He's become terrified of thunderstorms and chews the siding on the house, the television cable, and anything else that seems to be a hassle for us to fix. He's originally a Phoenician, but moved to Oklahoma when he was about a year old. We've hauled him from house to house, and his living quarters have ranged from a hay-lined doghouse in the backyard run, to Colin's bedroom. He doesn't like intruders in the backyard, so he bites just about anyone who comes through the gate...unless it's a kid. Then his tail wags and I imagine that he wishes he could still run and fetch a ball or a frisbee. But those days are gone. His hips look like they ache, and he has hard time getting up these days. But he never complains. He never fails to wag his tail when we come outside, and if he's in the garage when we come home from being gone, he still prances around a little as if it's the most exciting moment of his day. When I think about it (and I don't think about it enough) I realize that I love the old man, and I'm going to miss him when he's gone.

"Thorns may hurt you, men desert you, sunlight turn to fog;
but you're never friendless ever, if you have a dog."
--Douglas Mallock

Searching...

I was looking for a book in the "Christian book" section of Amazon.com, but apparently their search engine was messing up. I typed in several things, then realized something wasn't right, so I typed in "Jesus", just to test it and this came up:

No results match your search for "Jesus" in Christianity

The Other Table

Tonight L. Kyle K. and I went out on a date. We do this every other weekend, at the same place, with the same server - we do not however sit at the same table since we feel it is important to keep a bit of variety in our lives. Unfortunately our conversation was hampered by the person(s) at the table behind us. They were talking about immigration. It was depressing. It seems that the woman who was doing most of the articulating (using the term loosely), was trying to define the American dream, which she believed was embodied in the couple with whom she was dining. They apparently had lived the American dream because they had a successful and decades-long marriage and two kids in college. Those are wonderful things, but I have to wonder if this is truly the American dream. Oh, I think those are goals that could certainly define a portion of the American dream, but these were very upper-class people, an attorney who made LOTS of money to support his stay-at-home wife. I kind of like to think that perhaps the American dream is more like the person who comes to this country because they are desperate to feed their family, so they take a very low-paying job, work their butts off so they can send their kid to college, eventually get their American citizenship and have a true and deep abiding love for this country. I'm not demeaning the lawyer's version of the American dream, but I really believe there is something to what is written on the Statue of Liberty - the part about the huddled masses yearning to be free. I don't think the lawyer was ever part of a huddled mass. Most of us weren't. The truth is, we don't really own this land. It was here long before us, and the people that settled it were, well...immigrants. So let's lighten up a bit about how entitled we are. Perhaps I'm a bit touchy on the subject because my precious daughter is an immigrant. I brought her to this country believing that we are actually a country of immigrants, and that she would be welcomed into the freedom that we all enjoy. Now she is called an American, as we all are. We should all be thankful.

Book Review: Jesus Land by Julia Scheeres

I read this book hesitantly. In fact, it sat in my "to read" stack for several months before I decided to swallow hard and open it up. Since I am an adoptive parent, and our family is transracial, I wasn't anxious to read the story of what some might consider "a transracial adoption gone bad." The story is about a brother and sister, one child adopted, the other biological. Scheeres writes with candid honesty about the relationship between her and David, one of two African American boys her fundamentalist Christian parents adopted in the early 1970s when David was three years old. The description of her parents as fundamentalist Christians is not simply a dismissive point of reference, but an important part of this story since the reason Scheeres gives for their adoption decision is to show that they were color-blind Christians they were. The only problem is they weren't. Color-blind that is; I can't speak as to whether they were born again, but if actions are any evidence of such then I might be able to make a judgment. David, and their other adopted son, Jerome, lived in the basement of the family home, and were repeatedly beaten, ignored, berated and treated as if they had crashed in on some grim family party. The strangely comforting thing about this story is that Scheeres' parents seemed detached and resentful of all their children, including Scheeres and her three biological siblings. So perhaps this is less a story of adoption gone bad, then it is a heartbreaking story of parenting gone bad.
Scheeres, it seems, is the only person who seemed to truly love David, despite her own confusion about race and place within the family structure. With no one to guide her, she vacillates between loving her brother with abandon and protectiveness, and being ashamed of him and wishing that she had a "normal" family. Through the horrors of family life in the Scheeres' home, and then being shuffled to a Christian boarding (boot camp) school in the Dominican Republic, the love between this brother and sister wins out, although the story has no happy ending. I was left with both a feeling of hopelessness, and hope - if that's possible. It is the same feeling I have toward the ugliness of racism in our world: hopelessness that perhaps it will never change, and that we may never get to a place where we see beyond skin color, and hope that enough people will care enough to make it happen. If someone like Scheeres can do this with everything against her, then there is hope for the rest of us.

The news out of Guangxi Province in China was not so good yesterday. However, I suppose that depends on how you look at it. Villagers in this province rioted over China's one-child policy. They attacked government offices after officials imposed heavy fines on families who had too many children. Beijing allows urban dwellers to have one child, while rural families can have two...IF the first child is a girl. Locals accused officials of confiscating cattle, DVD players, crockery and other household goods in lieu of unpaid fines. One local man, Mr. Lu of Yulin village, said the riot started after the work teams bulldozed the house of a poor farmer who could not afford the fines. I've been reading reports all morning about the riots, and the horrific way the government sees fit to enforce the fines. I am encouraged that the villagers are standing up against the government, but then the government usually counters these kinds of protests by making life even worse for the people. I am inextricably tied to it because I know of a family who is affected by the one-child policy in this province. They are my daughter's birth family. I pray today they are safe.

Oklahoma's Route 66 Waterpark

In the interest of touting my home state (not always easy to do), here's a little tourist attraction entry. The girls and I traveled up Route 66 towards Claremore to hunt down the "big blue whale." The whale sits at the entrance of a giant pond that used to be a water park right off the old highway. It doesn't have a name, not sure if it ever did, but at one time it was a hot spot on Rt. 66. It sits abandoned, opened in the early 1970s and closed in 1988. The big blue whale has been featured in several books about Rt. 66, and so the girls and I headed up the Route with our cameras to get some photos. We were able to walk out into the mouth of the whale and see the ladder to the second level, and the slides coming out of each side of the whale. We imagined it as it used to be, although the other equipment that was part of the park is rotting, rusting and sinking into the water. Not much else to see but the whale and a gathering of colorful tables gathered at the water's edge. The old ticket building is padlocked and the ticket counter windows are boarded up. I agreed with one of the girls that it was a little creepy, but in a good way!
On up the Route we saw an old motel still in business. There are fewer and fewer of those along Rt. 66, so we took photos and will keep them. Someday the old motels will be gone, boarded up and abandoned like the old water park. Here's to Route 66 - still the Mother Road.

My Daughter's Kindergarten Class

School is almost out for the summer. This year, I've been the homeroom mom in my daughter's kindergarten class, and I am realizing how much I am going to miss all of them. They're a beautiful, diverse, tight-knit group of children. We don't live in suburbia, but we're not exactly urban either. We live somewhere in between...just ordinary city-dwellers, but we have been blessed to be in a neighborhood school full of children from all over the world. In this one class, we have children from Venezuela, Mexico, Turkey, Iraq and China, as well as children with Vietnamese ethnicity, and African Americans. They talk openly about their differences, and the things that make them the same. They respect each other's religions, dress (my daughter keeps mistakenly calling her friend's hijab a head job), and physical differences. I can honestly say that I completely don't relate to people who are more comfortable when everyone else looks just like them. I actually think that's a little creepy. I believe that God loves diversity because he is creative. He made a world alive with differences, not sameness. I love the different skin shades, the different hair colors, the different shapes of eyes and the different accents and languages represented in my daughter's classroom. And I believe that these children are learning to love the differences also because they have learned to love each other in a small, kindergarten kind of way. I pray that this year has given these 22 children hearts that long to unite, and not divide; to tear down walls instead of build them. Perhaps this is a lot to expect from one year of kindergarten, but it all has to start somewhere...doesn't it?

International Orphans

My Mother's Day Jewelry

My Mother's Day gift this year was perfect. It was beaded jewelry. Actually, I didn't get any beaded jewelry - it was a symbolic gift through OxfamAmerica. The card says: "Making handcrafted beadwork allows HIV-affected women in Africa to support their families. By producing jewelry, handbags, and other accessories from beads, these women have a chance to create their own sparkling opportunities, as well as hope for the future.
Oxfam allows you to give a gift to someone that doesn't clutter up their house with more junk, but instead allows those who might not have much junk (or even a house) to feed their family and themselves, and as the card says, have "hope for the future." However, my wonderful husband did require my children to drive to the bookstore and buy one Putumayo CD for me - "Songs from Wineland", which I highly recommend. I'm just impressed the three of them agreed on something!

Revolutionary Book Toss

My oldest daughter wanted me to come upstairs last night to see what she had done in her room. I walked up and saw bags and stacks of books in front of her door. She informed me that she had determined it was time to give away something that she thought she "couldn't live without." We are both book people, she and I. I have shelves overflowing with books, and it's very rare that I give any of them away. I can get rid of clothes, shoes, household items, toys, etc, but not books. I kind of treat them like they are sacred, and so does Erin. Here's the deal: she's been reading a book I just finished called Irresistible Revolution, and now she's all messed up. It sort of did that to me. I went back and forth between wanting to give a copy to everyone I know, and wanting to hurl the book across the room. It was convicting, thought-provoking, beautiful and...kind of a little life-changing, maybe? If I sound hesitant, it's because I have yet to give any of my sacred books away, or do anything yet that shows I am ready to loosen my grip on my "stuff". I'm praying about this though. When I read scriptures in light of what it means to be disentangled from the world, I find that the Bible seems to make a whole lot more sense. We view things from our consumeristic, materialistic culture and so it's hard to get a handle on the whole idea. I'm working on it though. The book is by Shane Claiborne. I highly recommend it.

Compassion International

We have three Compassion children in three different countries. One lives in the Philippines. We have sponsored James Bryan since he was eight, and now he is fourteen. It's been truly amazing to exchange letters with him and watch him grow. He always sends us a picture he has drawn, and copies of his report card. He's quite the student, and one picture I have of him shows him wearing about three medals around his neck for various scholastic competitions he has won. Really cool.
Albalania lives in the Dominican Republic. My daughter Erin has sponsored her for about four years. We were working a Compassion table at a concert, and Erin saw the picture of Albalania. She picked up the packet and told me she wanted to sponsor this little girl. If you could see the picture, and if you knew Erin, it would all make sense. This little girl had attitude. She's wearing a frilly yellow dress, hands on hips looking at the camera with a face that says, "Take this picture already, I've things to do!" Erin loves attitude, and she's been exchanging letters with Albalania ever since.
Kyle (husband of mine) sponsors Teshome, who lives in an AIDS infected region of Ethiopia. He's our newest child, and just turned 17 in March. They have only exchanged a couple of letters and in each letter Teshome has talked about how "affected" his town is with HIV/AIDS. Kyle is hoping to visit Teshome in Ethiopia in October...or maybe sooner. We're blessed with all the children in our lives, whether they are under our roof or in another country, on another continent.

Furry versus Scaley

Every time we go to the zoo, it's the same thing. Alison is only mildly interested in the cute, fluffy animals, or the colorful odd-looking birds (by the way, aren't pink flamingoes supposed to be pink? These look coral...think I like this color better). But when we enter the Southwest Desert exhibit, she is frantic about finding the snakes. Once we're there, you can hardly pull her away. She wants to know everything about every snake. I know nothing about snakes, so the best I can do is read the panels and hope she doesn't ask too many questions. I never like to stereotype, especially when it comes to gender. All boys don't like sports, and all girls don't like dress-up and princesses. But my little girl does. She loves fancy shoes and painting her nails and Barbie dolls (ugh). She does tea parties well and wants to take ballet just for the tutu. Yet she has somehow found it in her very girlie girl heart to make room for snakes...and bugs. She has dozens of books about them and hunts for them in her backyard. When we found a little garter snake in our house once she talked about it for days, and I thought I certain look of longing in eyes - perhaps wishing for the snake to return? So once again at the zoo last week, the snakes were IT. Coral flamingoes, black bears, muddy rhinos, grazing giraffes - big whoop.

Note to Self

"Do one thing every day that scares you." - Eleanor Roosevelt