Finding human connection

More and more people are buried in smart phones most of the time.  What if it gets to the point that the way you find interesting people is you just stand in a crowd an look out and 99% of the people are looking at smart phones but there is one other person looking out at the crowd.  You look each other in the eye and you know.

A visit with Michel and Kelsy at New American Pathways

It's Thursday.  I'm wondering if anybody, anywhere, has any idea what they are doing.  And if such a people exist, is there any possibility that I will ever meet them, or recognize them if I should meet them.  Or is the world just one giant lunatic asylum.

About 3 years ago I volunteered at Refugee Family Services.   They fixed me up with a Burmese woman named Teal who wanted someone to come to her apartment and help her with English.  I went over there weekly for several years. I became fond of her children, her son Wesley, now 5, and her daughter Ashley, now 3.   A year ago Teal passed her Citizenship test.  About that time her brother Thang Peng and his wife Moi Moi got refugee status and came to the USA.  I stopped working with Teal, who didn't really need me anymore and started working with Thang. I have been doing that for the last year.

There is not much support for volunteer ESL (English as a Second Language) teachers.  I took some classes, but didn't learn much.  I started looking at ESL videos on youtube and found some that were very useful as teaching aids.

There are thousands of ESL videos on youtube.  Most of them aren't very good but some of them are great.  The big problem is sorting through all of them and finding the good ones and then classifying them by degree of difficulty.

I built a web site to organize the ESL videos.  I added other things that would be useful to refugees, so they could go to one page and have links to a bunch of stuff that would be helpful.

It's not who I am underneath, but what I do that defines me

I just read "6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person" on cracked.com.
http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-harsh-truths-that-will-make-you-better-person/

As Batman said, "It's not who I am underneath, but what I do that defines me".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GurL-EflShY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQr6GrgSPnw

At the end of "6 Harsh Truths" the author David Wong challenges the reader to start mastering a new skill, today, even though it will be hard work and will take a long time to see results.  I am accepting that challenge.  This blog is a result of that challenge.

I am a good talker.  People like to listen to me.  They are often interested and occasionally impressed.  I am attracted to situations where I will have listeners.  Discussion groups, walks with friends, AA meetings.  Each gives me an audience.

I don't think I am a very good writer, but I do think I have the potential to become a pretty good writer.  If I just write here every day I will get better.

Trying to get google to find my new page

I use this page as a quick way to get google to find other pages


Tom Carr Final Wishes

Final Wishes for Tom Carr

http://mind.reallyfast.biz/FinalWishes.htm

http://youshouldkillyourself.blogspot.com

http://happinesspartyusa.mm.st/

http://atlantabuddhism.mm.st/BuddhistFriendsOfBillW.html

http://atlantabuddhism.mm.st/

Atlanta Buddhism

Buddhist Atlanta

http://truth.mm.st/VivekanandaHendrix/index.html

More about monkeys

The monkeys fascinate me.

I have seen two types so far. There is a type of grey monkey that avoids people. I have only seen them a few times, and they keep their distance. There is another type of monkey that is brown and is not at all shy or frightened around people.
Trees and buildings and the cabels on a cable bridge across the river are all the same to them. They seem to be totally at home living around people, seeing buildings and people as just an extension of their natural environment. They are more common than squirrels in America, but they are more aggressive than squirrels, and smarter. They will steal from you.

I watched a man with a cart full of bread make a delivery to a hotel. There was a monkey hanging on a drain pipe on the side of a building. The monkey saw the bread man but the bread man did not see the monkey. As soon as the bread man walked through the hotel door the monkey was down the pipe, into the cart, getting bread and then taking it back to the roof, where all the bread man could do was yell at it while the monkey peeled back the cellophane and had breakfast.

I was sitting in a cafe with an open window eating breakfast. Suddenly a monkey hand came through the window and grabed the salt shaker. He was probably disappointed and didn't care about salt, but it was red and probably looked like fruit to him.

Hotels tell you not to leave food in the room if the windows are open because it attracts monkeys.

The brown monkeys are all over the place. The youngest ones I have seen are about the size of a squirrel with long legs. They stay close to their mothers. The adults get to be about the size of a medium sized dog. The big males will occasionally show their teeth and act threatening, but I think it is usully a bluff. People are still bigger than they are. The most fun ones to watch are the playful young ones that don't stay with their motheres any more, but play like kittens, making amazing 20 foot jumps from tree limb to roof to telephone pole as they chase each other and play.

I read in the newspaper about a town where a baby monkey got caught in an electric wire and was electricuted. All the local monkeys thought the humans were killing the baby and thousands of them attacked the people in the area.

It seemed like a good idea at the time

A blog giving the details of my Indian journey seemed like a good idea when I was sitting in Atlanta with a high speed internet connection and it was fun to play on my computer.

There are internet cafes in Rishikesh but the connections are very slow. Also, I just don't feel like sitting in front of a computer screen typing. I am in a different state of mind. I feel like wondering around aimlessly and looking at monkeys and talking to spiritual seekers and looking at the river.

So all is well, and I will enter some stuff here from time to time, but don't expect much until I get back to the USA. Then I will probably write a lot.

Monkeys, cows and an elephant

There are monkeys all over the place. They are on the roofs, crawling up and down the drain pipes, running along the cables of the cable bridge over the Ganges, hanging out on the steep bank outside the restaurant where I had lunch, and I guess there are some in the trees, although I haven't seen them there.

It is fun to watch them. They seem a lot like people.

There are cows in the streets. Everybody knows about the cows in the streets in India.

The thing that surprised me most was an elephant going down the street in Delhi. Cows I can deal with, but elephants are so big. I didn't know they came into the big cities. A guy was sitting on the elephant. I guess he was kind of like a truck driver.

I leave Tuesday

Everything is packed. Everything is done. I feel restless, excited, nervous, ready to to roll. I don't know what to do with myself. I wish I could just go get on the plane and leave right now.

Tsunami - The Horror

I am still here in Atlanta planning my trip. I leave in 10 days, on January 11. For the last few days we have all been watching the death toll from the Tsunami. The last number I saw was 140,000 deaths, but it keeps climbing. Millions of people are homeless, with no food or water, surrounded by rotting dead bodies.

Please help with a generous donation. A few dollars can save a life. If you have an account at amazon.com you can go to http://www.amazon.com and make a donation to the Red Cross with one click. There are plenty of other good organizations to donate to. Two that I think are particularly good are UNICEF at http://www.unicef.org/ and Seva at http://www.seva.org/.

I still intend to go on my trip. For a while I considered canceling the trip for two reasons. The first reason was a feeling that it was disrespectful to go as a tourist to a country where so many have recently died, and so many more will die. However, everything I read on discussions on the internet says that people in the effected areas really want tourists to keep coming. If the tourist trade stops because of the Tsunami that will just be one more blow to the local economies.

The second reason I considered canceling was fear of disease. We have all read about the great chance of various epidemics caused by the disaster. However, I will be up in the North West part of India, in the foothills of the Himalayas, in Rishikesh. This is almost 1000 miles away from the nearest area hit by the Tsunami, so there is not any danger of increased risk of disease.

Life goes on. I am corresponding with lots of people in India. Even in the effected states in Southern India, in those areas that had not been hit, New Years Eve parties went on with great gaiety and people danced late into the night.

Rishikesh

The first place I will be staying is Rishikesh, where the Ganges comes out of the Himilayas. This is an Indian holy place where it is illegal to eat meat. I lived here for several months in 1977. I am very curious to see how it has changed.

Pictures of me and my woman

This is the truly wonderful woman who I am blessed to have in my life. Her name is Katherine Durant




Here is my great grandfather. He is the man in the middle with the mustach. He was the mayor of Savannah when this was taken.

Reading and working on my feet

I went to Dr. Li Liu today for accupunture on my ankles. It seems to be helping. I finihed reading "Snakes and Ladders" by Gita Mehta and started reading "Holy Cow, An Indian Adventure" by Sarah Macdonald.

At this point I am just learning to use this blog software. I know I am not saying much of interest. Once I get closer to departure this will get more interesting.

6 weeks to go

I leave for India on Jan 11. Just over 6 weeks to go. I am very
excited, reading a lot about India every day. My ankle is not
perfectly well, but no matter what I am going. If I go as a guy who
can't walk much, so be it.