Job training

Periodically my wife gives me the opportunity to "try" her job, albeit in bite-sized samples. This weekend, out of necessity, my wife took the older girls to a wedding while I remained home with los tres diabolitos...I mean little ones. To make the experience more rewarding for me, she ordered up some nasty weather to insure lots of quality indoor time together.

Having enjoyed many such opportunities to learn my wife's job, I am under no illusions that it is easy, and those of you who read this surely have the sense that I am a little goofy...but today has been a bit out of the ordinary.

To set the stage, you need to know that by mutual decision, and with advise and counsel of the children (ok so we are also lazy, but humor me) we have left the arificial Christmas tree in place in the living room and plan to leave it there semi-permanently. The answer to why we chose to do this probably requires professional help to ascertain :-), but we did remove the decorations with the intent of decorating it for different holidays throughout the year.

So Gresham comes running into the bathroom - which I was using at the time - to tell me there was a bear in the tree. Now, we do live in the woods...sort of...and there have been occaisional little brown bears in the area, so my ears perked up a little. I said "which tree?", while trying to think through why a bear would not be hibernating right now. At this point Shaun joins us in the bathroom along with his sister, and all of them are chirping about the bear in the tree...in the living room! Now I was pretty certain we didn't have a bear in the house, but there was a hell of a lot of racket comming from the other room and when I entered, the Christmas tree was shaking. A loud shrill cry let me know the cat was caught in the light cords.

Now it is here I should tell you that I got a little bit of private enjoyment out of seeing the cat like this...she and I exist in a kind of "don't bother me, I wont bother you" way around the house, but I decided I should free her to spare the tree for another holiday season. Following her release the cat dissapeared and life got back to normal.

About an hour later after lunch, I managed to get 10 minutes to shower while the boys napped. As I was looking up to check for spiders (a different blog post - trust me), I stepped on something hard in the shower at almost the same time that shampoo began to run down my face making me close my eyes. As I was rinsing my hair it became clear that there were several small hard items in the shower...and when my eyes were rinsed the cat poop came into view.

While I can't prove it, I would swear that damn cat was sitting on the bathroom counter watching me have a conniption fit in the shower, and I do know for certain that all three children learned several new words to share with Mom on her return because on my wet soapy exit from the shower I was greeted by all three. Now I am off to the store for candy to buy their silence...anyone want a cat?

Traveling to Congo

I think we forget that there are many places in this world that are so very much worse off than where we sleep tonight - or maybe the reference frame is simply not there for most Americans. It is thankfully almost impossible to imagine the reality of many people who live in DRC - particularly women in the eastern parts of the country.

http://twitter.com/thousandsisters

This is the twitter address of a woman who runs an organization supporting women in DRC and she is there right now - tweeting about a situation going seriously wrong as I write this. I can assure you many people in this region will lose their life and for some possibly worse (and I can assure you there is worse) tonight...and tomorrow, and the next day - over and over like a twisted version of deja vous. This is the region of the country where the daughter I am going to get next week is from - and where both of her parents were murdered in this same conflict.

And no, the city of kinshasa (where I travel next week) is nothing like this region - I have never felt unsafe in the city. It suffers from crushing poverty, but almost no one has any weapons - they are all in the east on the front lines. In fact on the streets of Kinshasa, less than 50% of the police have a gun, and of the ones that do, only half have bullets - A testament to the incredible lack of resources necessary to fund basic civil services.

If you can steel yourself enough to read the tweets, please do. DRC doesn't have Bono and Bill Clinton lobbying for them - and while the 2-400,000 killed in Darfur is a scar on humanity, between 4 and 6 million have been killed in this region over the same time period. The numbers create a numbness that lends itself to a false sense of security and I encourage you to resist that.

I will travel with video and photo equipment next week - though there are STRONG cultural taboos associated with pictures - to try and convey a sens of the city and the country that has so captivated me over the last year.

Seat Warmers

So, I have this pretty cool car. It not only has seat warmers, but seat coolers - handy in the GA summers, trust me! I have recently discvoered a whole new use for these gadgets - and it has to date provided me with many hours of car fun and story fodder, and I have only known about it for a week.

As most of you know I have a teenage girl adopted from Congo who has been here only 5 months. Given the current socio-economic conditions in Congo, no children there have been in a car like mine (a nice lexus) - in fact my daughter tells me it is the same car the President of DRC drives - seat warmers/coolers are foreign to immigrants like my daughter.

So the other morning after another protracted silence and breakfast filled with "fine" or "whatever" (those with teenagers will immediately understand), I was enlisted to drive the girls to middle school on a very cold morning. Since there was no communication from my shivering daughter, I decided to do the good dad deed and turn on her seat warmer...something she did not notice me doing. Ninety seconds later, amid screams of "Daddy...my butt is on fire!!! Why my bottom...owwww...Daddy this make me have to go to bathroom..." and wild gesticulations in the seatbelt, I had to pull the car over - lest I kill us all in my fit of hysterical laughter.

I of course did the proper thing by telling her that cars like this - particularly Dad's car - could tell if someone had a bad attitude, and would punish the offender by burning their butt!

Car rides have taken on a whole new meaning over the last two weeks, though I suspect my fun is coming to an end - a byproduct of her more technologically savvy sisters educating her on Dad's car...and more importantly his 12 year old sense of humor :-)

Traveling Movie

...OK, its not exactly a movie about traveling in the sense I engage in most of the time, but the HBO movie Taking Chance is something very special indeed.

The movie is based on a real life story written by a Marine Colnel escorting the body of a young soldier named Chance Phelps home to his family after he was killed in action in Iraq. Let me be clear to action junkies - this movie is subtle and quietly in your face as opposed to non-stop, and it makes no statements outright with regards to US involvement in any war; rather this is a film designed to make you think...and feel, and that is an almost unheard of rarity in modern Hollywood. There are litterally dozens of slightly variant storylines moving along through the film and all of them intersect around this real life young man taken so very early.

This is not a mutli-million dollar big screen event - it was however well produced by HBO for direct to cable viewing. Those looking for a strong anti-war message will be as dissapointed as those looking for a "gung-ho" mantra - Taking Chance is neither. It will perhaps best speak to the hundreds of thousands of people who grew up in families with military ties, though I imagine everyone who sees it will come away touched.

So this will be on my IPOD for the trip to DRC next week - I hope you get a chance to see it.

Please sell crazy someplace else....

Without pointing too many fingers at people who are going to read this one day....

With any collection of 8 people (soon to be 9) living under one roof, politcs and cliques develop. When you add the respective families of origin to the mix, the show becomes the stuff of wonder - a very long running telenovela. According to the lastest episode - as narated by my mother, my wife has a drinking problem, I am embezeling money, and our children are delinquents. Now one of these is of course true, but the bail policy on jeuveniles is very generous in GA, so I am able to handle that on most days.

To truly appreciate the story, you need to understand that my mother rarely if ever leaves her house, and my father is rarely home. This gives her at least 16 waking hours to ruminate over - well - anything. So when my wife doesn't call her back within a day, or finishes an email for 10 minutes after she arrives for a visit, the clear conclusion is a drinking problem. When the children are non-comunicative as teenagers...delinquents; and when I am taking a trip to some exotic locale - embezelment.

With six children, a job, and minimal help, it makes complete sense to me why my wife might need to hide from all visitors for a few years...my children, well, I told you part of the comments were true; and well, lets just say I get paid well.

Fairness dictates that I mention this is only half of the crazy pills - we get it from all sides, but here is the kicker: we do a GREAT job of creating crazy as hell - all on our own, so, like extra ice cream and cookies for my fat belly, sell it down the street...lol.

SO...the real family crime blotter should read - Husband with a drinking problem from dealing with extended family and teenagers; a wife guilty of hiding from, well, whoever the hell she wants; and well there are still those jeuvenile delinquents...

Damn, maybe she is right, we are a lost cause :-)

Heading to Kinshasa, part 2

...so another departure change and I now leave on Wed night the third of Feb.

I have an additional bag I have been asked to carry TO Kinshasa and now I have been asked to bring an additional one home - a first for me :-)

All of these bags should prove fun as I get to retrieve them and re-check them on each leg of the journey...a side effect of my frugality and use of FF tickets on several different airlines.

Passport is back with a new Congo Visa, and I am thinking about packing for a week in West Africa. The hardest thing about this part of the world for me is that there is not a target or a wal-mart to buy what you forget!

Counters for today are:

Days to departure: 11
# of bags I have been asked to carry: 4 (and one extra on the way home)
#of times dates have changed: 5

'til next week

Travel planning

For old readers, welcome to the new location of my travel blog and for new readers...well enjoy. My next trip is the first week of February to Congo (DRC) to pick up our 7th child - Joceline. I am also traveling on behalf of my wife's non-profit agency One Small Step (www.onesmallstepfund.org ) and visiting several orphanages and agency contacts along the way.

Being the industrious traveler, I chose to use FF miles to try and get to and from Africa - being old and fat, I chose to try and do this in Business class. 450,000 miles later; 8 flights on 3 different airlines; 27 hours of travel one way...perhaps some money on a coach ticket would have been a bit easier.

So as all trips of this nature have three counters (days to departure, number of bags to take, and number of times dates have changed) here they are for fun:

Days to departure: 16
# of bags I have been asked to carry: 3 (note to readers: I have ONE personal bag - a backpack)
# of times dates have changed: 4

Keep an eye on the counters until departure on Feb 2!