POSSIBLE ILL WINDS

Early Tuesday morning, the remnants of Hurricane Jeanne approaching us today with "possible damaging winds and tornadoes," severe thunderstorms, four inches of rain.  Not something to look forward to.  However, nothing like what Haiti is going through, continuing horror.  I feel close to the situation in Haiti because I have so many Haitian students.  They are not able to focus on learning English grammar at the present, their attention is on the number of bodies being pulled from the flood waters back in their homes.  I have two brothers in two different classes who have lost seven family members as of their last contact with people in Haiti.  Contact is difficult because phone lines are out to the areas that were hit the hardest and travel to places outside the areas is difficult. 

G's brother-in-law died last Weds night, and I drove her to the train station in Wilmington to catch the midnight train to Boston (which can't help sounding like a song lyric) to be with her sister.  The funeral was yesterday, in Amherst, and G will stay with her sister til the end of the week.  It's wonderful that she could get time off from work to do this, she has been such a support and lifeline during this difficult sad time. 

So I'm a Lone Ranger, taking care of the animals, getting the yard mowed before four inches of rain come to shoot it back up around my ankles.  Will it ever stop growing this fall?  I made it through the first week of two jobs, but was certainly exhausted by Friday afternoon.  Not sure I can keep this up.  I'm loving the work, which is really nothing like "work" at all.  Spending several hours with these kids helping with math problems, reading questions, spelling words, sentence writing, even science projects, is a lot more fun than it is work.  But it's still exhausting.  There are several who are recent arrivals from Latin America and speak little or no English.  With them I'm trying to do some ESL, just to help them survive.  Doing advanced math problems with a seventh grader who has had one year of schooling in her native Guatemala is not a possiblity.  Teaching her English is first priority.  Now that this county has a 50% hispanic population it needs to start taking ESL in the schools a good deal more seriously.  This kid will drop out of school when she's sixteen, she's fourteen now, go to work in the poultry industry and be lost in the cosmos.  Unless she learns English very soon.

I know I'm supposed to be Keeping the Faith and believing that Hope is On The Way, but politically right now I feel a lot like Lady Liberty looks in the drawing to your right.  Dejected and pissed.  I'm keeping on keeping on, nonetheless, oh yes.  Final push for voter registration coming up the next two weeks, and phone calling starts big time.  A story that raised my spirits last week: I had a call from La Esperanza, the Hispanic community aid center, that there was a woman who'd come in and wanted to register to vote.  I grabbed my clipboard and ran over.  When I asked if she was a citizen she proudly pulled her citizenship certificate from her bag.  I told her I believed her, didn't need to see proof - but took it anyway.  The date on the certificate was the day before. She had JUST become a citizen and the first thing she wanted to do with her citizenship was register to vote.  As, I'm happy to report, a Democrat.