days in the life of a
Previous POSTS
October 2008
October 1, 2008
ALL PACKED FOR INDIA!
Tomorrow, I'm off to India! Actually, I'm off to Indianapolis to fly to Washington, DC to fly to London to fly to Dubai to fly to Trivandrum, India where we will pile into a beat-up van and travel to our hotel near Hope Children's Home.
I'll be traveling with 9 other people, Dave and Vanessa from our church, along with 7 men from our former pastor Jim's church. It's a long, tiring trip, but I'm all packed and excited to start the adventure!
The most difficult part, as a woman traveling in India, is the cultural view of women as second-class citizens. That prejudice permeates every aspect of Indian life. Dressing modestly is critical, especially if we are to be taken seriously in the remote villages. Considering the hot, tropical weather and the nasty toilet facilities, I decided that skirts were my best bet. So I'm taking long, comfortable skirts and short-sleeved shirts to wear. Flip flops are the shoe of choice, and since shoes are always removed whenever one enters a building, they are easy to deal with. A few basic toiletry items and, of course, my Bible.
Indians don't believe in toilet paper of washcloths (and I do!), so I'm bringing both. Plus plenty of hand sanitizer!
A few gadgets...electrical outlet converters (although electricity there is sporadic and unreliable...hence the flashlight), battery-powered cell phone charger, and travel alarm clock.
CLEAN sheets for the bed, fanny pack, passport, and blanket for the plane ride and hotel...
...and snacks to be sure I don't starve while I'm there. I love the country of India, but the food is not good! And how much rice can a person eat??? The BreathSavers are for the long medical camp days in the remote villages. I'm not a gum-chewer, but I do love my mints.
A journal, Sudoku puzzle books, and some reading material to keep me sane on the torturously-long flights...
This is the FUN part...gifts for people at the orphanage! Photo books for my 2 sponsored girls, soccer balls (signed by the children in our church) and hacky-sacks for the boys, fingernail polish for the girls, and shower gel/body splash for the 7 housemothers. They will be so excited! They have practically no personal belongings, so anything (especially from America) is so appreciated and very special.
Keep our team and the trip in your prayers the next couple of weeks! Pray for our safety and health, smooth travel transitions, receptive hearts and minds of the villagers, and all the precious children at Hope Home! See you when I get back!
<---- Tamil Nadu state (green area) iswhere we'll be doing medical campsflying into here--->
Hope Children's Home ^
October 23, 2008
LITTLE BLACK SAMBO
Nothing in our lives are mere coincidences. I believe they are "God-incidences". I believe that God placed a love for India in my heart at a very early age, because my very favorite storybook as a child was Little Black Sambo.
Mama would read it over and over to me, and I never tired of hearing about this little boy in a faraway land. Although it never actually says so, the story is obviously set in India or Pakistan or Bangladesh or somewhere in that part of the world. It isn't a literary work of art, by any means, but it intrigued me nevertheless.
I don't know what happened to our original copy (copyright 1950), but during the civil rights tensions of the 1960s, Little Black Sambo disappeared from bookstores and library shelves. It seemed to have been wiped out of our society's literature. As an adult, I searched in vain for years in antique shops and rummage sales, hoping to find a copy for myself. It was only when ebay appeared on the scene that I was able to find this treasure, a nostalgic reminder of my childhood.
In some strange way, I related to Sambo. My mother was an excellent seamstress too, and I could only imagine how proud Sambo must have been to wear his beautiful new outfit.
Oh, and we must not forget the green umbrella (what child wouldn't love a green umbrella?!) and especially the shoes!
Purple shoes with crimson soles and crimson linings! And don't you love the little elf look, the way the toes curl up?
But why in the world would Black Mumbo and Black Jumbo let little Sambo wear his fine new clothes into the jungle?!
That part I never understood. We were only allowed to wear our fine clothes to church and school...not into a jungle!
Anyway, you know the story...or, if you don't, you should! Little Sambo meets four different tigers on his walk, each threatening to eat him up unless Sambo gives them a piece of his fine new outfit.
And poor little Sambo is left wearing nothing but his lungi (yep, that's what that diapery/skirt thing men wear is called!) and running home crying to Mumbo.
Meanwhile, the tigers get into an argument with each other about which is the grandest, and while they are fighting amongst each other, Sambo sees his window of opportunity.
He calmly (brave little guy he is!) puts on his fine clothes and walks away...
...leaving the angry tigers chasing each other around the tree until...(this is the REALLY COOL part!)
...they all just melted away, leaving nothing but a great big pool of melted butter! The tigers ran themselves silly into a puddle of butter!!! Can you imagine?!
Well, lo and behold! Who should just happen to be passing by that tree, carrying an empty brass pot, but Jumbo himself. He scooped up that lovely melted butter into his pot to take home to Mumbo...
...who, in her thrifty, motherly way had just the perfect use for lovely melted butter--she made pancakes for supper! (Now, I wonder where she was able to get flour and eggs and milk and sugar way out there in the jungle, but being the super-mom that she was, she somehow came up with all the ingredients at just the right time!)
And, don't you know, those pancakes looked just as yellow and brown as the tigers! That was some special butter!
Once in a while, we would have pancakes for supper at our house, so I knew what an amazing treat that was for Sambo and his family! And, man, were they ever hungry!!! They put away 251 pancakes that night! And lived to tell the story! I guess Sambo was famished after his big tiger-encounters in the jungle!
October 26, 2008
ALIEN VISIT???
Friday night, three random things happened around the Gray homestead. None of them are all that unusual if they had happened alone, but the three of them put together make a very interesting tale.
Now maybe it's because Halloween is just a few days away, or maybe we've been watching too many scary movies at night (we get blitzed with those every October, don't we?), or maybe my mind just goes in crazy, odd-ball directions...but I think I've got a viable, plausible, (il)logical explanation to the whole sequence of events.
First, while sitting in the living room after dark, Kim and I heard a dog barking. Not barking, really...more like yelping. Like he was in pain and scared. Like a dog sounds after he's been hit by a car. At least, we thought it was a dog. It could have been a coyote, which we hear yipping quite often. I've never heard an injured coyote, but I suspect he could yelp like that, too. He sounded like he was out in the cornfield, just beyond our backyard, fairly close by. We rarely hear a dog barking, let alone yelping, so close to our house. We went out on the deck to check it out, but he continued his frantic, pain-filled barking just beyond where we could see. After several minutes, the barking stopped, and we went back to watching whatever scary movie Kim had turned to.
Later, while sound asleep in bed, I awoke suddenly to rapping on my bedroom window. Like someone was standing outside the window and knocking! I looked that direction (of course, it was pitch black!) briefly and saw nothing, so I turned over with my back to the window, lay very still, and listened for awhile. Nothing. I eventually fell back to sleep, wondering whether it had happened in a dream or was it real life?! When I told Kim about it in the morning, he smirked and told me it was the branches from the shrubs scraping the window in the wind, and that it would be very hard for a person to wade through those briary shrubs to get close enough to the window to rap on it. Of course, I knew he would not understand! He's way too rational for my ways of thinking!
The third occurrence was this. Some person/thing/creature flattened a path through the edge of our cornfield. Two different places (that I could see!), it looks like a truck (maybe?) has barreled through, knocking down cornstalks. Probably ornery kids with too much time on their hands, horsing around in their jacked-up trucks. Or...
I have another explanation!
ALIENS CAME TO VISIT!
They flew in on their magical spaceship from their alien planet-home, and stopped by our place to do a few crop circles and terrify the dogs/coyotes and rap on my bedroom window before traveling on to wherever aliens travel to.
Yes, that must be what happened! That explains everything!!! Mystery solved!
I'm quite the investigator, if I do say so myself! Without a doubt, CSI will be calling soon for my expertise.
Or...maybe...it was a crazy group of teenagers, plowing through our cornfield, running over the dog's tail, and causing me to awake from a bad dream where someone is rapping on my bedroom window.
The world will never know....
October 28, 2008
ANOTHER GRAY FAMILY ENGAGEMENT
Aren't we just full of big announcements?! Here's another one...my father-in-law, Kenny, is engaged!
As most of you know, in February 2007 Kenny lost his wife of 52 years, Peggy, to the devastating disease ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease). Kenny was a rock through the 2 years they struggled together against the horribly debilitating effects of ALS, tending to her needs and caring for her with a patience, love, and compassion that amazed all of us.
Peggy was a very special lady, a fabulous mother and wonderful mother-in-law, and a beloved grandmother to her family! We all miss her terribly, but no one has suffered such tremendous feelings of loneliness as Kenny has, struggling to go on without his life-mate.
So Kim and I were thrilled when Joyce came back into his life! Actually, she has always been a good friend of Peggy and Kenny's, having gone to school with them and kept in touch all these years. Joyce has suffered through some very tragic events in her own life, and she was lonely for companionship too. So Kenny and Joyce began "talking" (as the kids would say!), then "hanging out", and eventually dating.
Joyce is a lovely lady, classy and beautiful inside and out. Our family really bonded with her, as she and Kenny joined us for our family vacation on Emerald Isle last summer. She was a lot of fun to be around, and our kids loved her spunkiness and sense of humor! Joyce is truly interested in our children and, most importantly, she cares so much for Kenny and the two of them have fun together.
Life is meant to be lived and shared! I'm so glad that Kenny and Joyce have found each other, and companionship and happiness together. We wish them all the best and welcome Joyce into this crazy Gray-clan with open arms!
Congratulations, Kenny and Joyce! We LOVE you!!!
October 30, 2008
CUDDLY, COZY COCOON
Brrr!!! It's getting COLD outside! And when it starts getting cold outside, my hibernating instincts begin to take over and I am obsessed with being warm and cuddly and...well...COZY! And the coziest things I know of (besides my husband!) are my flannel sheets. So, when the wind starts howling winter our way, I pull out the flannel sheets and get ready to cocoon through the next few months.
My entire married life I yearned for flannel sheets on my winter bed. But Kim flatly refused, saying they would be too hot and he wouldn't be able to turn over. I think he was afraid he'd be stuck on a big old flannelboard, like teachers use in school (do they still use flannelboards in this technological age?!). Every year I mentioned it, and every year he poo-pooed my idea. Until, one Christmas morning, he SHOCKED me when one of my gifts was a set of FLANNEL SHEETS!!! If he'd have given me one of those Victoria Secret million-dollar diamond bras, I couldn't have been more surprised...or thrilled! Okay...maybe that's a wee exaggeration... but I was very excited with my new cozy sheets!
I feel sure it was his mother, Peggy, who wore him down. Every time we talked about it (well, truthfully the subject didn't come up very often, but the time or two it did..) Peggy planted herself staunchly on my side and extolled the virtues of flannel sheets. Not just any old flannel sheets, but L.L. Bean flannel sheets! She swore by them, that they were the absolute best and worth every penny (they aren't cheap! But can one really put a price tag on cozy?). So in a weak shopping moment (or maybe he didn't have any other ideas...), Kim broke down and gave in and bought me a set of flannel sheets. And life has never been the same since!
They come in SO MANY beautiful patterns and colors, I'm thinking of expanding my sheet repertoire. I really want this cuddly Christmas set...I mean, how cute is that? There is a definite risk involved, though. I may NEVER want to crawl out of my cozy, cuddly cocoon!
But, hey...what is life without taking risks?! BORING!!! So I may just have to order me some Christmas tree flannel sheets. But for now, I'm perfectly content snuggling up in my soft, warm, cozy nest of cream-colored flannel sheets.
Just looking at them makes my eyes heavy...I think it might be time for a nap!
