Women!

I am writing to you today from a women's event. All women. 5,0000 of them. 24/7.

It's not that I hate women. Or feminism. In fact, I admire and idolize strong women. I'm grateful for the work of feminism that allows me to do things I do today like vote and have a job with an office and a window and all that stuff. I really am.

It's more the "gynocentricity" stuff. I don't get into the pink jammies, doing our nails, singing kumba-ya. Maybe it's because I never had any sisters, but I've always been more comfortable around guys - or at least women who aren't afraid to talk about "bodily functions" like gas and poop and stuff.

I look around at all these women, doing girly things like shopping and hugging and talking, talking, talking, and I think to myself, "Ya know, I don't like women this much!"

And it doesn't help that this is the absolute poorest planned event I've ever been to - planned and executed completely by, you guessed it, women.

They're all so giddy and energetic, ready to sing or chat at the drop of a hat, and I just can't wait to get back to my hotel for some silence, some men-folk on the TV just to balance things out.

And what is it about women that they always have to tell you when they've got their periods? OK, so I sometimes talk about it, but I'm struggling with infertility, so it's really important for me to keep tabs on it all. It's the women who come up to you, maybe you just met them, and they lean in and go, "Sorry, I'm not my usual self. I've got my period." What do you say to that? "Uh, OK..."

And then there's menopause! I understand that these sorts of things kinda take over every aspect of your life, but I would just LOVE to go through one solid day without someone telling me they either have their period or are having hot flashes!

Maybe I'm just in culture shock because I've never been around this many women before. Slow women. Old women. Middle-aged women. Women who like to talk. Women who like to walk. Women with long hair. Women over there. It would make a great Dr. Suess book!

And I've never before seen so many jazzy scooters. If I ever get so fat that I need one of those, I think I'll run myself into a brick wall to try to end it all. Every two minutes, I hear the BEEP BEEP BEEP of someone backing up with their jazzy scooter. For some of the people on them, I want to yell, "Hey, if you get your ass up and walk, maybe you wouldn't need that thing!" I saw a couple of ladies who didn't seem to have any trouble walking at all - they'd park their little scooter and walk on over like there was nothing wrong with them. Granted, it's a lot of walking here, I'll give you that. My little feet are aching, that's for sure.

So, the one good thing, which is so cool it makes up for most of it, is that they have a "Red Tent" here. Yeah, I know what the Red Tent is (I read the book and forced others to read it, also). They described the Red Tent at this event as a place to relax, have some quiet, talk to a chaplain, etc. It took me a few days here before I made it over to the room in the convention center that was the "Red Tent" (no, it wasn't an actual tent).

The room had chairs, rocking chairs, soft music, a fountain, some sculptures and art, and a kind of tent thing in the middle - red fabric hanging down and then some spirals hanging from it with pictures of all kinds of women and quotes. Below the spirals were piles of rocks. Among the rocks were little pieces of paper, some with just words like "peace," "hope, "dream," and some with a prayer or meditation. Around the room, there were amazing quotes from all different women. It was really a cool idea! And the room was so quiet and peaceful and just had a soothing aura.

I guess not all women-stuff is annoying, there are some great things, too. You just have to find the women-friends who fit you. I'm glad I have some.

Got Gas?

It's nothing original to talk about gas prices - everyone is complaining about it as much as they complain about the heat in the summer and the cold in the winter!

I used to say that as long as a gallon of gas was cheaper than a gallon of milk, I'd be grateful that my car doesn't run on milk. Well, it's been quite a while since I've been able to find gas for cheaper than I can find milk! Think I could find a car that runs on milk?

And another thing, why oh why do they put the fractions on the gas prices??? I don't get it. First of all, it's always 9/10 of a cent. Has the U.S. Treasury EVER offered fractions of cents, ha'pennies, if you will? Secondly, have you ever seen gas for 2.98 and 8/10 of a cent? Or 7/10 of a cent?

I think one of these days, I'm gonna ask for my fraction of a cent back in change. Better yet, I'm going to calculate how many gallons of gas I've purchased in my life, and how many tenths of cents I am entitled to by the petroleum companies!

Here's how I figure it:
12 gallons of gas per visit = 1.2 cents
1.2 cents X approx. 4 times a month = 4.8 cents
4.8 cents X 12 months a year = 57.6 cents
57.6 cents X 14 years of driving = 806.4 cents

That's $8.064 those bastards have stolen from me! Just think, I've only been driving for 13 years, what about someone who has been driving for 25 years? Or someone who drives a whole lot mor than I do? And multiply that amount by thousands and thousands of cars and drivers, and that's a nice profit!

How do they get to do that and keep getting away with it? If I had a lemonade stand and started selling lemonade for 49 and 2/3 cents, wouldn't people want to know why? Wouldn't they throw a fit? And if I said, "Well, since we don't have fractions of cents, we'll just round it up and you can give me 50 cents."

In other words, it doesn't make a fraction of sense!

Courage to Hope

The following is taken from a presentation, with accompanying slides, that I did about my trip to China...

When people ask me about my trip to China, I often answer with one word: Intense!

Since a few of my colleagues have been to China, I was prepared for the conditions I would find. I was prepared for the different food, the squat toilets, not knowing the language, not having the conveniences of home. No matter how many questions I asked, or what people told me, nothing prepared me for how difficult it really was. I was shocked by the conditions, and yet surprised at how quickly I got used to it. After a few days, our favorite phrase became, “It is what it is,” meaning: just go with the flow.

While we did travel to some tourist spots such as the Great Wall, Tiananmen Square, the Terra-Cotta Warriors, and others, our most significant parts of the trip were off the beaten path, on the road less traveled. Had we just seen the tourist spots, we could have said we’d been to China, but it would be like someone from another country going to Disneyworld and saying they had been to the U.S.

As I reflect on my China adventure, the profound moments weren’t the lack of personal space, bartering for souvenirs, eating unidentifiable foods, a dust storm in Beijing, having my camera stolen in a market and how I got it back or even the view from atop the Great Wall (while that was spectacular!). What was profound for me was the feeling of being an obvious foreigner and being stared at everywhere we went. Our group was an intriguing mix of 20 women that included ages from 17-70, a disabled woman who walked with crutches, two African-American women, an Asian-American woman, and our guide, an American woman who now lives in China and speaks fluent Chinese, along with her daughter, half-Chinese. And, my mom! Personally, I started to feel like I was the largest person anyone in China had ever seen, and twice I was poked in the belly - to which I said, “Rub the belly for luck!”

Halfway through the trip, on our 20-hour train ride to southern China, I became particularly overwhelmed with the amount of extreme poverty in China. Poverty is everywhere in China, not just in certain areas of the cities or regions. It is in the tourist spots where we were harassed by people trying to sell us postcards and knick-knacks. It is in the markets where I witnessed people sitting on the ground picking through trash. It is in the cities, where every corner is inhabited, and every overhang is a home. It is in the garbage dumps, where I saw people living as we drove by. It is in the farms, where the farmers work during every hour of daylight, returning at night to their unheated one room shack. It was in every mile of that 20-hour train ride as I looked out the window and felt completely overwhelmed.

This kind of poverty can cause desperation. In the early 1990s in the Henan Province, provincial leaders discovered that they could make money by selling blood to pharmaceutical companies and hospitals. Blood collection centers were set up, and the move was seen as a way to help the finances of both the poor farmers in the Henan Province and the government, and to provide clean blood from a relatively isolated area of China. Henan Province has a population of 90 million people, 80% of whom are farmers. Farmers were paid $5 US for donation of blood or plasma, and many became regular donors.

Unfortunately, proper precautions were not taken as many scrambled to set up illegal blood collection stations. Sometimes, the blood collection station was nothing more than a centrifuge, plastic tubes that were reused many times, and needles carried on a tractor, offering door-to-door collection services. The same needles were used on many donors. As people began to get sick, they didn’t know what was wrong with them. By 1996, independent research found that between 67% and 84% of people tested in different villages were HIV positive. By 2000, the latency period of the disease was coming to an end, and farmers began dying.

Between 500,000 and 700,000 people in the Henan Province are estimated to have contracted HIV/AIDS through the sale of their blood. In the village where we visited, the population consists of approximately 3800 adults, mostly wheat farmers. 1500 sold their blood – about 40% of the population of the village. Of the people who sold their blood, over 60% contracted HIV. 30% of them have already died.

On World AIDS Day 2003, when Global Ministries East Asia and Pacific executive (and my colleague) Xiaoling Zhu learned of this situation, he made arrangements to travel to the region with our colleagues from Child Sponsorship and HIV/AIDS ministries.

There, they learned that there were many orphans of AIDS. These children were forced to stop going to school so they could either work or stay home to help their families. The children had watched their parents die horrible deaths as a result of untreated AIDS. Many families lost one parent to AIDS, while the remaining parent was also infected and unable to work.

Within months, a video was created called “Courage to Hope” and programs began in a few of the small villages in the Henan Province that were affected by HIV/AIDS. Global Ministries began a Child Sponsorship program in the area, which provided assistance to families with children, based on HIV/AIDS status and annual income. Their basic needs, such as health care, food, and school opportunities were funded through child sponsor donations of about $1 a day.

Partnerships were established with government agencies and medical schools and hospitals. Global Ministries offers financial and program support to bring help, medicine, and hope to the people in the region.

Since the Global Ministries programs began in 2004, two schools have been built, homes have been erected for families suffering HIV/AIDS without an income, medication is being provided, children are able to attend school, and a small loan program for farmers has been established.

Our journey to the Chengliu village took us down a long road – a road less traveled. We walked for about 1 mile, through the narrow village paths and wheat fields, until we arrived at the Chengliu school. As we entered the large field, we were greeted by applause from about 500 villagers. Most of our group burst into tears. We were here to witness the struggles of these amazing people – and they were clapping for us? It was one of the most humbling experiences of my life.

We were seated on one side of the field, where the children’s’ crude wooden desks were lined up, with their narrow benches for us to sit. From our seats, we could see the old brick school to our left, and the new modern school straight ahead, almost complete. The old school had no windows, no doors, and walls that were falling apart.

The school children were dressed in their brand new red uniforms and they gave us a beautiful performance of singing, dancing, sword maneuvers, and readings. We laughed and cried and smiled out at the beautiful faces of the children and families of this village.

One young girl read to us a very moving letter of thanks. Her letter speaks as a thank you to both her child sponsors and to everyone involved in the projects of this village. Xiaoling tearfully translated the letter to us as she read.

Click HERE to read the letter.

After the performances, we walked around the school grounds. We saw the conditions that the children attended school in, even in the winter. The children gathered around us and giggled as we took their photos and showed them on our digital cameras. We presented the headmasters with books and school supplies. We saw the new school, which awaits more funds to be completed. We learned that of the 400 children that attend Chengliu Elementary School, 1/3 come from HIV/AIDS affected families. 86 of the children are part of the Global Ministries Child Sponsorship program – however, only 10 of the 86 have sponsors.

Of all the places we visited in China, this rural village was the place where I saw the most smiles, the most friendliness, the most openness, the most joy. And yet, it was the place where people had few reasons to be joyful. I wept nearly the entire day, not out of sadness, but because, as I’ve struggled with hope in my life, I found hope in the villagers’ smiles and the children’s faces. The women placed their babies in our arms and we all giggled together. We laughed at how the children behaved just like all elementary school children behaved.

The people of rural China are desperately poor, and struggling with the horrible affects of HIV/AIDS. They have few reasons to hope – and yet they are filled with hope. I said to myself, “If these people can hope, how can I not have hope?”

Where the BLOG have you been???

My apologies to my loyal readers (all 2 of you) out there who have been missing my special blogs. You know, I went to China and all that, and it's just been tough getting back into the swing of things. I've been wanting to blog the 1 1/2 journals I filled up while in China, but that's probably not going to happen, so back to real life.

Tonight, what's on my mind are URINAL CAKES. Yes, you read that right.

The week after I got back from China, spouse and I were out in the backyard and we saw a big-ass raccoon in the neighbor's trash. It jumped down and came toward us. I did that motion where you lunge toward it to scare it off - and it stopped for a minute, then kept coming! This raccoon was a little too bold.

The next week, I was in the dining room, and the cats were gathered by the sliding glass door to our back deck. Then I saw what had grabbed their attention - the bold-big-ass raccoon was right up next to our house on the deck, getting into the garbage (sometimes we just toss it out onto the deck until we are outside next to take it to the cans...) I hit the window and even opened the door to shoo him away, and he didn't so much run off as waddle off like he was bored.

That same week, one of our neighbors approached me about the raccoon. She said she and her husband thought it was living in the garage. Her husband had shot at it with a BB gun when it got into their trash and it ran into our garage. Of course, she also had to comment on the holes in our garage making it easily accessible. I told her I had seen it and spouse and I were talking about what to do (which we were).

She mentioned some remedies she read about - from putting anti-freeze on bread to using mothballs. The anti-freeze idea reminded me of being in high school and coming home one day and finding a raccoon in the driveway that was barely moving. Later, when my brother and I poked at it with a whiffle bat, we found that it had died there. We called the city, and they said there wasn't anything they could do about it, so my brother and I got a snow shovel and shoveled it unceremoniously into a big black trash bag, tied it up, and put it on the tree lawn the next trash day. I really didn't want to have to go through that again.

I thought about calling the city, because sometimes the city's animal control can do something, like set up traps and release the raccoons in the park (or whatever they do with them, I don't want to know). But I was certain he was not living in our garage.

Last week, spouse was trimming the hedges outside that belong to our old fart of a neighbor who never trims them. The old fart talked to him and told spouse about how he had raccoons in his attic and he had to call a pest control dude. The mystery of where they were living was solved.

Last week, we went to the garden store and I checked out the various animal deterant sprays and powders and such. They were pretty expensive, so over the weekend, I tried a "home" remedy that our neighbor had mentioned - mothballs. It seemed better than the "coyote urine" at $20 a bottle, and definitely not as depressing as the anti-freeze idea.

I bought 4 boxes of mothballs from the discount store for 92 cents a piece. I was laughing at the packaging, which didn't seem to have changed in 6 decades. Also, I got quite a few stares at the 4 boxes of mothballs sitting atop the other "normal" items. What's up with that? Why do people look at what is in other people's carts? I don't do that - who cares?!?!

I got the mothballs home, busted open the box and the plastic bag inside, and threw them around the perimeter of the garage and under the deck. I was careful not to touch them - who knows what kind of caustic substance mothballs are made out of?

Last night, I heard the old fart neighbor talking to a lady walking her dog. He said the pest control dude put up some traps, but that they didn't catch anything. He said, "$70 for nothing!" Mmmm, maybe it was the mothballs!

Now, with a few days of a sunbaked garage, our entire yard smells - not like the mothball smell I'm accustomed to, but like URINAL CAKES! That weird, amonia-like smell that I remember from working as the janitor at a church. Oh, how I hate that smell! I can smell it faintly even now, in the house!

That's the story of the URINAL CAKES and why it smells like them at my house. But ya know what? I haven't seen a raccoon around here lately. Or any moths.

NOTE: I just learned from the all-powerful internet that both certain kinds of mothballs and urinal cakes contain the chemical paradichlorobenzene, which is why they smell the same. Also, some dude figured out that, based on his weight, he would die if he ate a urinal cake, but he would probably be OK if he ate 1/4 of one.

I also found an extremely bizarre entry on Urinal Cake Art. Check it.