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.