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Craigslist is my friend. I browse it daily, just looking for stuff to do or stuff to buy or sell. It’s dangerous, really. So, when I found a set of table and chairs that are just what I wanted, I roped my husband into driving an hour to pick it all up. I got it for $50 less than what was listed. I was pretty thrilled.

Well, we live in an apartment. Now what? I have an eat-in kitchen that barely had room for our round table. Now I have a six-person formal dining table and chairs in an itty-bitty space. So, we dismantled our old table and hauled it upstairs to our back bedroom.

Now this back bedroom really doesn’t serve much of a purpose except to hold a bed that people rarely sleep in, and my huge hope chest and a bookcase. There’s a nightstand and t.v., too, stuffed in that room somehow. On top of all that, I like to put boxes and boxes of refugee household items that are donated through a local church and that I pick up through Freecycle, and, you guessed it, Craigslist. 

Now I had a table, four chairs, and about 6 boxes of stuff the church just called me to come pick up this week. I went to a nearby town on Monday to pick up some more stuff that a lady wanted to donate. Of this last load, my husband and I trashed things like used plant pots, straws, and plastic silverware. There were several great items, however, so I brought home some more boxes. 

My poor husband agreed to clean out his truck and spend all Tuesday night hauling this table and chairs, and all the boxes down to Denver to drop off at the refugee resettlement agency storage unit. We were going to meet halfway with a representative from the organization, but, of course, their truck broke down, and so on to Denver we went. 

Just as all the boxes were finally unloaded and the table and chairs were safely inside the storage unit, the guy from the resettlement agency ran back into grab a box of pots and pans. He still had to go and finish setting up an apartment for an arrival of refugees that night. He’d been trying to get two apartments set up all day, but the truck kept breaking down. It was now about 7:30 p.m. The family would likely arrive the next day, and the boxes of stuff were being put to use immediately by some very tired people who were going to experience peace and a bit of security for the first time in a long while.

I suppose that there are very good reasons for FHA loans to have the maintenance and care standards that they do. For one thing, if a house is dilapidated, a person who is a first-time home buyer likely won’t have the money to fix it up. That can bring property values in the area down.

Something I’m learning, however, through the process of our home buying experience is that houses that first-time home buyers can afford are ones that need a lot of work. We keep running into the worry that FHA won’t approve a loan on a house that we like because the paint on the house might have lead in it, or the roof or heating systems need to be replaced/significantly repaired. I don’t want to move into a dump, granted, but it’s still frustrating that we can’t find a place to live that’s our own that we can afford for having to worry about whether or not our loan will be approved.

I work at a non-profit and my husband isn’t a corporate climber, either, so we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, it seems. Houses in the price range we can afford in this state are generally in need of a lot of repair and in, to quote our realtor, “dicey” neighborhoods. We lived in Texas before moving here, and it’s amazing the difference in what you can buy for the same amount of money between the two states.

We found a great little, Victorian house in town to buy. It was within our price range, but all of the down payment and closing costs would have stretched us pretty thing financially. The backyard was beautiful, with fruit trees and flowering bushes. There were wood floors, too.

The owner counteroffered and wanted an answer from us by noon today. We were going to have to work with our banker and realtor to figure out some last minute changes to the offer they made. Between all of the back and forth negotiating and the stress this house would put on our finances, coupled with some health issues we’re working through at the moment, we decided last night to forego this beautiful little home. It’ll be good for someone else, Lord willing.

So, we keep looking and hope that God throws the perfect house and opportunity into our laps.

We are still looking for a house to buy. We looked at one on Monday that was built in 1910, and it’s only 900 square feet. I adore the Victorian look it has, along with it’s original wood trim around the doors and windows. The backyard is huge, and it was supposedly landscaped by a master gardener. It has wood floors, too!

On the back side of the house, however, up high near the roof, there is a section of what you might think to be some siding painted blue. The blue is very bright, like the sky this time of year. The pictures make it look fine and well done. Up close, however, the siding magically disappears into a few rows of asphalt shingles put up on the side of the house, slathered in that bright blue paint. Creative and resourseful, that’s all I have to say.

I began an online course in Teaching English as a Foreign Language last night. Taking the online course was a hard decision to reach. There doesn’t seem to be any accreditation body for online courses in teaching English, so that kind of limits the reputability of the course certificate-granting companies.

I thought about taking a course from my local community college that could last a semester to a year, depending on how many classes I could take at once. It was only about 15 hours worth of classes, but I like to sleep a lot, and I have to work full-time. I don’t know how some people can go to school and work full-time, but I can’t without being exhausted, grumpy, and useless. On top of that, I like to shoot for making A’s whenever possible. That wouldn’t happen in that course, probably.

The community college course would have been the best option for me as I want to teach English to adults in this country, not travel to South Korea or another country and teach English to children there. The certification requirements for most positions teaching English to Adults in the States are more stringent. The community college course is actually a “Teaching English as a Second Language,” which is supposedly a bit different than teaching it as a foreign language. There is some flexibility in all this, though, and I am counting on it to be beneficial to my own circumstances.

I took as many hours (100) of training as I could get in this online course, though there are 40 and 60-hour options as well. Weekend courses are also available at conferences in the States from the company I am taking my course from. I have an individual tutor to provide feedback through e-mail, and that really helps a lot with getting new ideas and perspectives.

I cannot get the personalized training from the local college program practicum, but I am going to volunteer to be a class aide for a teacher of an 8-week English course offered through my local adult education center. I have also tutored and taught English as a volunteer off and on for a few years. So, I’ll have a different route to the practical experience necessary to teach English.

The International Rescue Committee reported this week in its e-mail newsletter that refugees have been pouring into refugee camps in Pakistan during the latest flare-up of the conflict between the Taliban and government troops. It reported that 65,000 people came last week alone to these camps, and that between five hundred thousand and one million individuals are expected to be displaced before the conflict significantly subsides.

The 65,000 that arrived in camps last week is about three-fourths the population of the town that I live in. Even the 500,000 at the low end of the estimated persons displaced is nearly five-sixths the size of the town that I went to graduate school in.

 What is most awful about the worldwide refugee situation to me is that most  refugees had no part in the reason why they were forced to leave home. They don’t want to be stuck in camps and away from home. They didn’t make the choice to leave.

There are a lot of people and not a lot of resources to provide for them during the violence.With the lack of money people have to donate, and the fact that, because it’s so far away, it doesn’t seem real or relevant, I wonder what impact the International Rescue Committee and other aid organizations can have. I’d rather them be there than not, but I wish I had the knowledge and money to donate to make a difference in their work with the latest wave of refugees in Pakistan. 

I am by no means technology super-savvy. I can generally work my way around computers and their various paraphrenalia after fighting with them all for a few hours. This has led me to trying out the latest modern marvel available for download at my public library.

I can download audio books, CDs, and movies from the library’s website. Wow! That’s awesome! I absolutely love the library, and now I can take my books with my after I download them to my mp3 player. I can walk to work and listen to a book. Amazing, in theory.

The trick behind all of this is that the files have to be in mp3 format, which the book that I downloaded wasn’t. I had even erased all of the songs on my mp3 player so that there would be room for the book. I had tried to see if the memory card in my digital camera would fit in the player, but it was too big. So, all my music is now gone.

I got the book to the mp3 player, only to discover I couldn’t listen to it because the files weren’t in mp3 format. I tried to download a file converter. That didn’t work either as I have to pay for the service to do that. I don’t want to do that. So, I am now trying to delete the book from my mp3 player and put my songs back on. The computer keeps telling me that there is an error for each song that I try to put on my mp3 player. It’s been sweetly repeating the same message for several days now. I am about at my wit’s end with technology. I think I will turn on the radio in my car and go to the library, sink into a big cushiony chair and read a tangible book this evening.

As a student in Glasgow, Scotland, I ran across a couple of articles on a group of young refugee musicians called Fugees United. They pooled together their musical talents and tried to raise awareness of the plight of refugees in the U.K., Europe, and around the world. I don’t know that much about them, but their efforts to rise above remained with me.

Refugees in the U.K. are definitely not the political and social darlings of the country. They are despised by many, but there are a precious few that understand where they come from as much as a foreigner can and really try to welcome them into the country.

 I volunteered with a charity called NCH in Glasogw to “befriend” a young refugee. Basically, I worked as a bit of a cultural broker, to introduce the refugee to life in the U.K., and to help her practice her English. I worked at it, but I didn’t get very far. It was she that showed me how to ride the bus, pointed me in the right direction when I was about to go the wrong way on the subway, and showed me about life in Scotland.

 Here’s a video of them in George Square in Glasgow:

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I wouldn’t have thought that you could take the face from a dead person and put it on what is left of the face of another person that used to have one. Apparently, I am a bit behiand the times. This has been done four or five times already.

One of the latest ones occurred at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, where a lady whose face was shot off with a shotgun by her husband received a face transplant. She’s undergone 30 or more surgeries, had several skin grafts from her thighs, and even had part of a rib removed to build her a new jawbone.

Can you imagine what she must have gone through? The simple answer is probably, “No.” Her husband then proceeded to shoot himself after he tried to take her out. God does do some amazing things. This whole procedure is a modern-day miracle. This woman can now breathe on her own now that she actually has a nose, and she can also taste cookies and pizza again!

Read here for more information: http://uk.news.yahoo.com/4/20090506/twl-shotgun-face-transplant-unveiled-41f21e0.html

I met with a lady who volunteers with the organization for which I work. She’s certified to teach English as a Second Language. She went to our town’s local community college to earn this certificate. I’m wanting to do go through the same program.

Tthe desire to pursue a similar career began to grow in me after I saw the dedication to a specific area of helping refugees that the teachers and administrators at the adult education center had where I used to enroll my refugee clients in English classes.

This particular volunteer also works at my new local adult education center, and she confided that she is thinking of leaving her job someday to pursue teaching ESL in the classroom again. She also wants to be able to work abroad some. We talked about teaching English in refugee camps, and I pointed her in the direction of the refugee resettlement agency I worked for for more information and possible future opportunities.

It was powerful to see a lady older than myself really want to get out of her office, out of teaching teachers, and back into the world and into the classroom. That is a strong message to me for my life, to know that it’s not always the best thing to want to climb the ladder in my career. The students and the refugees are the ones who make it possible to truly enjoy one’s job as and ESL teacher.

I’m hoping that I am able to pursue that path as well in my own career and make it at least part my life’s work.