crossthreaded

When you’re away from home, there are definitely certain things that you miss. When you are home and away from another country you recently visited, you also definitely miss certain things. I’m referring to foods mainly.

While in school in the U.K., I missed boxed crackers horribly. My mom sent me some, and they quickly became hits among my flatmates from Ireland, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Then my Filipino flatmate’s mom sent dried mangoes. I was hooked. After coming home, I found out that I can get them here, but my flatmate is unable to get Wheat Thins at home. Oh, the sadness.

So, that same flatmate also recently discovered Sun Chips that her sister sent her from California. The flatmate lives in Thailand now. Now I’m sending Sun Chips to Thailand. It’s insanely happy.

Then there’s my cousin in the Marines. He’s happy with Spaghetti-Oh’s with meatballs and some ravioli in a can. So now I’m sending two cans and a car magazine to wherever he is overseas. I love that you can ship just about anything you like that with the postal system, but I don’t think I am going to like the price I have to pay for such coolness.

A local church recently agreed to ask congregants to donate some household items to give to a local refugee resettlement agency. I had a couple of car loads of donations to haul off this weekend. When I counted everything up, it was amazing what was given.

Small appliances, sheets, dishes, blankets, and so much more. There were actually 34 kitchen/handtowels and hotpads. Someone also donated 13 handmade bed coverings. That blew my mind. These were obviously made to sell as they had their dimensions on pieces of paper in the corners of each one, stapled to the blanket material. Well, it seemed to me that they were made to sell. That’s a lot of time and effort someone went to to make those.

It was such a blessing to see the generosity of the people that live in my town. People I don’t even know, even in the midst of all the economic trouble around us, recovery from the holidays still in progress, the dead of winter, and the good Lord only knows what else, stepped up and truly gave from their hearts and their homes to give to people they don’t even know: people from situations, countries, and pasts they know nothing about. Now, if that’s not a testament to the goodness of humankind, I don’t know what is.

In reading Not on Our Watch by Don Cheadle and John Prendergast, I ran across a new word: divestment. The book is all about how ordinary people can help create political pressure to induce elected U.S. officials to pay more attention and take more against the genocide going on in the Sudan.

Divestment comes into the picture when people take their money out of invested funds that help to support companies doing business with the government of Sudan. I hadn’t thought about this at all as a possible way that I am directly contributing to the death of thousands and millions of people. I have retirement accounts. Well, I don’t have much money in them these days, but, the principle is the same: do I really want my money supporting a regime bent on wiping out people it doesn’t like?

The book lists a website: www.divestment.org that makes it incredibly simple with its screening tool to see if the mutual funds you have your money in are helping to support Sudan’s government. Not knowing much of anything about financial investing, I quickly figured out by looking at my retirement paperwork that I am invested in bonds as well. The bonds are not listed on www.divestment.org , but it refers you to another site that may be able to help. I e-mailed that site about my particular situation. I haven’t heard a response yet, but, hopefully I’ll learn some more information.

Entire public pension systems in California, dozens of universities and cities are divesting from businesses working with the Sudanese government. www.divestment.org spells out that they are careful not to list funds or companies that work to help the civilians of the country, only those that are helping feed money to the government.

Why don’t you take time to contact your financial advisor to see what’s going on with your portfolio?

We headed to the mountains last weekend for a change of scenery in my 2002, front-wheel drive Chevy Cavlier. That’s a little scary in itself. We managed to find some incredibly small mountain town called Jamestown. It consisted of a cafe, pretty nice post office, and a little park. The houses on the outskirts of town looked like something out of east Texas or Louisiana. They were different colors, wood showed through the paint in several spots, they leaned a little to one side, and there were a lot of trucks that looked like they hadn’t moved in about fifteen years.

We continued on up the mountain, brave explorers that we are, and found out quickly that when you go up a mountain here, you definitely go up. The pavement ended pretty suddenly at the top of the mountain, and then it was time to go down. I got a cool new GPS toy for Christmas, and all of the roads in the area seemed to kind of just spider out from a main road and just end. There are some brave folks who live in places like that.

Down the mountain we went again, in second gear and foot on the brakes most of the time. We whizzed (as much as possible with the 5-10 mph speed bump they plopped down in the middle of town) through Jamestown, and ended up back in Boulder. It was a sudden exodus from the mountains back into Boulder, and everything changed to city life so quickly, it was hard to make the adjustment from mountain man to Boulder.

I ate a brussel sprout once. It was green, round, and absolutely huge. It was the biggest green, round thing I had ever seen on my plate at dinner time. I had a lot of dinners behind me, too. I was nine years old.

This particular brussel sprout had a few tears on it, and maybe some snot, too. I’d been crying about it for a while. My mother told me I didn’t have to eat it, only try it. My grandmother said I needed to try it and eat it.

My favorite line as a child was, “I don’t like it.” This was even before I’d ever had one small bit of the food I claimed to despise in my mouth. The smell of a particular food usually did me in. If I didn’t like the smell, I wasn’t going to eat it.

Mama’s next line went something like, “Leyla, your grandmother says you have to eat the brusselsprout.” The tear fountain began gushing at that point. I think I boohooed about that brusselsprout for a good five minutes or so. I was the only one left at the table. I at that blasted brusselsprout only because I was forced to. Out of spite, I haven’t eaten another one since.

Maybe someday it’ll creep into my food repertoire, which is very small. Only in the last 3 years or so have I actually begun to enjoy salad (only Caesar, with ranch dressing on the side. I still don’t like Caesar dressing.), cooked tomatoes and bell peppers (on the pizza my husband makes), and cooked onions, celery and carrots, provided they’re mixed with lentils, a bunch of vegetable broth, and penne pasta.

I just finished reading An Ordinary Man: An Autobiography by Paul Rusesabagina, the man who was the inspiration for the film “Hotel Rwanda.”

I’m still trying to get my head around what he wrote. There’s no way to imagine what he saw, felt, smelled, experienced. However, he writes so openly and simply that even the most complicated experience or thought is communicable, at least in essence.

Having worked with Burundians and a few Rwandans that have resettled as refugees in the United States, I still had little understanding of the specific stories the people I worked with had about the atrocities they witnessed from which they fled. When I read this account, I had a slightly better understanding of the politics at play in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, as well as the groupthink mentality that distorted so many so quickly. Also, just to read a personal account opened my eyes a small bit.

800,000 killed in 90 days, or so. 1,268 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were sheltered in the hotel Rusesabagina managed. Words were his weapon of choice to save those in his hotel. They are still his weapon through his book. He clearly and openly discusses the lack of responsibility and action on the parts of the UN, the U.S., Rwandans, and others.

One New Year’s evening a few years back, I was waiting for my friends to return home so that the festivities could begin. I was in New Waverly, Texas, which boasts the best pie in the area, served at the Waverly House restaurant.

It was about ten o’clock at night, and I wandered into St. Joseph’s church. A service was being held, and I just took my place, amazed at the beauty of the sanctuary and what was going on around me. I ended up taking communion, without realizing what a huge insult that was given that I am a Protestant.

I drove back through New Waverly a few weeks ago while I again waited for the same friend to come and have lunch at Waverly House restaurant with me. I drove by the white church, and read about its history on the state historical marker sign out front. The area has a large Polish population, and the church was built to reflect its European heritage. It was a place of familiarity for the new immigrants, with the same customs and rituals they were used to at home.

I didn’t go inside this time, but I stood outside awhile, enjoying the peace and beauty that only God could build.

I just watched “Open Range.” Those datburned free grazers done come in and encroached on ranchers’ lands. Kevin Costner and Robert Duvall blow the whole town to smithereens with the help of the local blacksmith high on a Cuban cigar.

I never have liked westerns much. I am a Texan. I love my state near ’bouts much as any true born ‘n bred native, but, I tell ‘ya, western movies are awful. This one had to of been set in Colorado, what with the mountains and all in the background. It was even better than watching the scenery in “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,” which I have to admit, I watched religiously every Saturday night at 7:00 p.m. Then Chuck Norris came on after that, so I had my western education dose every week.

Despite the scenery in “Open Range,” the movie is awful. The acting is bad. The moral lessons it tries to teach about the difference between justice and revenge (which still ends up in people dead all over the place in the mud) and the difference between killin’ and murder (which Costner admits is like “splitting hairs,” really end up only confusing me. It’s hard to see where the line is between Duvall’s character, Boss “Bluebonnet” Spearman, who usually stops short of killing a wounded man, but who has no problem shooting him in the first place, and Costner’s character, Charley White, who wants to kill anything that moves just about (but who hates himself for being that way).

That was about as deep as I wanted to get with trying to undestand the complexities of the old cow pokes. Boss is an old cantankerous feller who wants to raise up Button, who he took on as an orphan to employ, and White just needs to chill out. There’s layers in their characters that I could detect, but the acting was just too bad to make me really care enough to try very hard.

I’ve been thinking about how to get more in-kind household donations for refugees. Small things like blankets, pillows, pots, pans, towels, etc. are huge when they are given to a family that has nothing.

The greatest thing about finding these kind of donations is that people don’t have to actually give money for a donation, or buy anything new. It’s just stuff people tend to have a lot of sitting around the house. So, are people with these things in their house the audience to appeal to? I can’t really see me getting too much out of a large store or chain. There’s a lot of protocol to follow with asking for donations from them, too.

I wonder if thrift stores that have excess stock would be willing to give up their inventory to refugees. They are often local, and it would be easier to make person-to-person contact with managers/owners.

I haven’t had much luck with the two churches that responded to my request for donations. I followed up with them before Christmas, and haven’t heard back much of anything. They agreed to help out where they could, but nothing was specific, really.

Craigslist didn’t elicit much response either. Freecycle has been my friend, especially as people are on there trying already to get rid of what they have. I don’t have to do much work in asking. When I have asked, though, Freecyclers have been really generous.

Do you have any ideas?

Between Vernon and Childress on US287 in Texas, a small town called Quanah sits quietly on the plain. Named after Quanah Parker, the last Comanche chief in the United States and friend of Theodore Roosevelt, the town seems pretty calm compared to its namesake.

As I drove with my husband to my parents’ home over the holidays, I remembered visiting a museum that talked about this man as a child. I think I must have gone with my grandparents. I remember being fascinated at his story.

His mother was a white woman, Cynthia Ann Parker, who was captured in 1836 at Parker’s Fort, Texas by Native Americans. His father was Chief Peta Nocona. He grew up and lived between the two worlds. Quanah was a battle chief, never losing a fight to a white man. Eventually, after seeing signs indicating he should surrender, Quanah brought his people to live on a reservation. He was a tough businessman, and accumulated a lot of wealth in his dealings with white men. He even invested in a railroad. He refused to give up polygamy or peyote, too.

There’s more to this man than what I remember in the museum, or what I can read online. He’s more of a cloudy, but powerful memory to me.