Life at a Relaxed Pace

2008-08-14 Alright, so it’s been a while. I apologize. Not much has been happening. I have been cleaning the house, the yard, the office, working on computers. Feels a lot like home. I have a wonderful view of a mountain from my house. I can sit on the rooftop and enjoy a nightly drink of Jameson and a beautiful view. The stars at night are wonderful.

Joe, my housemate, wrote a cool article in the La Puente monthly bulletin. Alamosa recently had a salmonella outbreak in their water supply. This caused a great deal of difficulty in the shelter. But the community came together to donate bottled water and help the staff deal with the hardships. Joe praised them for this but went on to quote a philosopher. The philosopher discussed gardeners who all came together to tend a beautiful rose, but the philosopher wonders, “who tends to the gardeners?” Joe’s response to this was wonderful. Man tends to man, we are all gardeners for each other. What a cool analogy. If we are growing well, we need little tending. But in times of stress we need to tend to each other until we are healthy again. Cool.

We attended a team building session. The individuals who are working here as volunteers are very special. Each unique, but each motivated in different ways. Each looking for something different, yet somehow very similar searches seem to be emerging. The session was held further up in the mountains west of Alamosa. There are some pictures on the side that I have posted.

I also attended a training class on homeless health care by the National Health Care for the Homeless Council. One of the things I learned from there is how essential having a safe place where you can sleep, eat, and call your own is to any recovery. The advocacy by this group is “housing first” basically saying that if we meet the lowest of Maslow’s hierarchy we can actually accomplish something with individuals. It’s an interesting concept to think about. It is astonishing how little I know of the difficulty of individuals in a homeless situation. I am humbled to think of how fortunate I have been and how much there is to do.

Hopefully we will start doing the work I came here to do soon. Everything helps, but I am excited and a little scared to start hearing stories and trying to help to the degree I can. Hopefully I will get to keep this blog up to date more often. I am sorry for those who can’t view the pictures on my blog. I am not sure what the issue is. I understand they work okay on FireFox. If any of you know where I can get a donation of older but decent computers, give me a hint. The ones in our office and what we use for training have a total memory of between 128 and 512 K. Needless to say the 128K machines are pretty slow. Since they are old machines, the cost for memory is sometimes pretty high.

Hope all is well in your lives. Till later my friends, all my love..