Today was an interesting day. The phone had rang last night and told me where to go.
The program was teaching disabled children how to ride bicycles. A local public school was holding the camp on their facilities.
On the drive there I thought about how courageous these kids are. This was the first day of writing about my experiences and it had good symbolism in starting things out. After about 20 minutes of meeting people and learning about the program kids started to show up.
Today my wife made two very special floral bouquets and we jumped in the car and drove them down to the elderly home where the kindness touched two people’s lives.
The local paper often has this home listed in obituaries. When we explained that we simply wanted to give these bouquets away, the staff member, Rose, looked at us with bewilderment. We asked her to present them to two people she felt could most use them, like someone without visitors whose day could be made brighter.
When she asked our name we said it was not important, she looked at us again bewildered.
These flowers were grown from a tiny little area we have for a backyard. (40×30 feet). Maybe five bouquets can be grown a year from it. Giving them away really made our hearts smile.
I ride motorcycles, have a few tattoo’s, and here I was carrying flowers! I didn’t mind one bit.
This would be such a nice project for gardening hobbyists to do. Just pick a location where your heart tells you to drop them off. Think of how many lives this would brighten. These elders have helped pave the road for the younger people to live on. Many were in wheelchairs watching the door. Some looked with hope in their eyes that maybe we were their visitors.
Share in this little way and your heart will smile, too!
Doctors Without Borders not only won the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize, but Kathleen Mahoney, one of its volunteers, a graduate nursing student at the University of Pennsylvania, was recently honored by the Points of Light Foundation for her work in Boa Vista, Brazil and the Javari region dealing with disease epidemics and other health issues.
“It was very difficult for me to imagine that this would be my daily routine,” says Kathy, “but now I can’t imagine not doing it. It has been an incredible learning experience.”
She trained local health promoters to diagnose malaria and to recognize and treat other diseases that plague their communities.
She would travel in a small plane to the mountains, and then hike on foot or take a canoe or horse to remote villages, carrying boxes of medicine and equipment.
Once she arrived in a village, Mahoney teamed up with local health workers. She taught them about modern techniques and in turn learned about native medicine, as they attended to patients together .
Doctors Without Borders launched the project in Brazil in 1993, to control a malaria epidemic brought on by mining in the area. The region, rich in gold, had attracted prospectors as well as their diseases, to which the indigenous populations had no resistance.
As part of a Doctors Without Borders team, Mahoney provided microscopes to nearly 40 villages and launched a training program for diagnosing and treating malaria. There is now at least one trained microscopist in each village, and since the project began, the number of annual cases of malaria in the area has been cut by almost half.
Both President Bill Clinton and former President George Bush are sending a congratulatory letter to Kathy as part of the award. The Points of Light Foundation is a nonprofit organization established to engage more people more effectively in volunteer community service.
(Photo by CIFOR, CC license on Flickr)
50% drop in Herbicide Use; 90% Decline in Insecticides
Concerned about the environmental hazards of landscaping chemicals used to achieve a typical golf course’s manicured appearance, some golf clubs are returning their fairways and greens to a more natural appearance, probably more like the way golf courses looked when the game began. After some adjusting, say officials at the Ivanhoe Golf Club, their members have come to appreciate the changes.
Workers in Belleville, Michigan will never forget hometown businessman Bob Thompson, who sold his successful asphalt paving business for $422 million.
He paid the taxes and then he took $128 million and rewarded the 550 employees at the plant.
Hourly workers who already had retirement plans received $2,000 for each year worked. Salaried employees that had no retirement plans were each rewarded with between one and two million dollars each.
When asked why he did it, Thompson said the short answer is that “It was the right thing to do.”
“People came into my office crying.”
But upon reflection he realized he did it for himself: It was an egotistical thing. “To have the esteem of your workforce – what more could you want?”
The farm boy who grew up to be an Air Force pilot started the business 40 years ago with an investment of $3,500. He says he was able to succeed because of the quality employees that made the difference between them and their competitors.
After giving them the money he asked one thing of them: “Tell your kids and grandkids about me’.”
Bob stayed on at the office to help the transition go smoothly. That same year, he and his wife, Ellen, founded the Thompson Foundation with $100 million from the sale of the Thompson-McCully Company.
The Foundation’s mission is to help low-income people rise out of poverty and become self-sufficient. In the beginning, the Foundation:
Although the Foundation serves a seven-county region (Wayne, Oakland, Macomb, St. Clair, Livingston, Washtenaw, and Monroe), the vast majority of its funds are used to serve those who live in Detroit, Highland Park and Hamtramck. The Thompsons intend to distribute ALL of the Foundation’s funds in the next 10-15 years.
Paris – Lance Armstrong became the second U.S. cyclist ever to win the Tour de France and wear the coveted yellow jersey to victory on the Champs Elysees.
The 2,287-mile Tour, with its mountainous terrain, is one the most grueling competitions in all of sports. Armstrong was not only riding with the first U.S. team ever to produce a winner in the 86 years of the tour’s running. He was also riding for the many cancer survivors who followed his comeback from a grueling disease.
“We heal each other all the time, and don’t even realize that we’re doing it.”
Healing comes out of a very simple human relationship – knowing your life matters to another person, and connecting to something larger and unseen. A great example of this was given to me via email shortly after I posted the above quote somewhere online:
The U.S. Navy set a goal for the year 2000 to reduce hazardous waste and emissions by 50%. At the Annopolis, Maryland Naval base the goal of waste reduction will be achieved by recycling or replacing high waste products with more efficient ones.
HURLBURT FIELD, Fla. — Good guys still exist, and one of them is an airman from the 25th Intelligence Squadron here, who recently returned more than $9,000 in found money.
Heading home in his car after a late-night training flight, Senior Airman Jason Baxter crossed an intersection that was well lit, and he saw what he thought was a book, maybe a Bible, lying in the road.
Looking in the first pocket, he found about six dollars and a driver’s license. But when he opened the second pocket, “There was a big wad of cash – hundred-dollar bills,” Baxter said.
Once he arrived home, he counted the money. There was more than $9,000 cash.
For some, the decision might be difficult. Not so for Baxter.
“Integrity is one of the Air Force’s core values, and I’m also a Christian.”
He immediately called the Sheriff’s Department and reported his find. “That’s just the right thing to do,” Baxter said.
The sheriff’s department sent a deputy to Baxter’s home who retrieved the appointment book and money.
Its owner, Karrie Jo Blakston, 19, and her boyfriend had withdrawn the cash earlier in the day.
They were going to use the money to pay for their wedding. Blakston had forgotten the appointment book on top of her car and driven away.
The deputy said Blackston was, “Elated, and thankful that there are still some honest people in the world.”
Esther Stevens’ dining table in Colorado Springs, CO, has become a makeshift operations center for getting aid to the victims of Hurricane Mitch.
“I’ve never done anything like this,” said Stevens, whose whirlwind flurry of phone calls in the days following the storm produced volunteers, medical personnel, supplies and even a plane for the devastated region.
“Everyone is desperate,” her friend said. They needed a brigade of workers, supplies, and could Stevens come up with some airplanes?
Stevens, who is studying to be a physician’s assistant, started calling people who might have contacts. As she made the calls, the web grew wider. Donations were coming in — to World Vision as well as to Stevens’ house. And an amateur pilot from Chicago was on standby to fly down, carrying extra fuel for trips to isolated villages.
“I feel for the country I was born in, where people give all that they have,” she said. “If you’re a stranded stranger and you need five dollars to take a bus to the airport, they will sacrifice their monthly wage to put you on the bus. That’s just the way people are down there.”
Once Stevens got going on the phone, help started coming from unexpected places. A call to Emma Gribble, a Colorado acquaintance, mushroomed. Soon after enlisting Gribble, Stevens started getting calls from Gribble’s home state of Kansas. One doctor told her, “Send me a list of whatever medical supplies you need. I’ll send it to any location you want.”
Stevens called her parents in North Carolina, and they put her in touch with David Frost, a friend who happened to have jungle flight training. He is accustomed to flying without the benefit of air traffic controllers and landing on airstrips the size of driveways. Frost, 51, was ready to spend two weeks shuttling food, water and other emergency items from regional cities that now act as supply depots to villages that can’t be reached by road.
“The desire (to help) was there, but it took Esther’s phone call to get us involved,” Frost said.
Stevens called Transtainer Corp. in New Orleans about shipping rates. “I happened to find a very generous man who said he didn’t care how long things went on, he’d take supplies down there and do it for free.”
She is paying for the shipping to Louisiana, and she’ll have a huge phone bill this month, but that is part of her donation.
Hours before the final deadline, Pacific Lumber agreed to accept federal and state funds totaling nearly a quarter billion dollars in exchange for the Headwaters Forest, over 10,000 acres including the largest unprotected grove of ancient redwoods in the world.
Many people would be willing to donate a quarter for wildlife conservation, reckoned Norman Gershenz, a conservation biologist at San Francisco State University.
International Paper announced that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service approved its habitat conservation plan for the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker. This plan is the most ambitious ever approved under the federal Endangered Species Act in which a private landowner will expand and enhance habitat on its own property rather than simply maintaining existing populations.
Success is inevitable for one Toastmasters club formed in prison because the inmates, who create and maintain the club, support and nurture each other and self-esteem is achieved as a result.
Members of the Voices of Distinction Toastmasters club of Lafayette Parish Correctional Center in Louisiana wanted to give back to their community by showing youngsters the way to stay out of prison.
Their 90-minute presentation designed to emphasize the consequences of drug and alcohol abuse has been performed for 25,000 school children to date.
The program begins with the assembly witnessing inmates arriving in shackles and chains. The hush gives way to a dramatic play called Friends. Written by the Toastmasters themselves, the message reaches beyond prison walls and effects lives.
Find out more about Toastmasters’ success in prisons here.
A Letter From A Louisiana Judge
According to criminal justice sources, 95 percent of crime is committed by criminals who have already been to prison. Since those released from prison commit the vast majority of crimes and over 70 percent of those who go to prison become repeat offenders, it would seem that there would be a great deal of emphasis on reforming inmates while they are in prison.
There has always been much talk about rehabilitation, but there has been very little funding for educational or other rehabilitation programs in our prisons. How can we lower the recidivism rate without additional resources from the state?
Here’s how.
In 1986, I recommended to a self-help group of inmates at a Louisiana prison in DeQuincy that they start a Toastmasters club in the prison and I put them in touch with a local club. (*Toastmasters International is a non-profit organization made up of local clubs providing a safe and nurturing environment for members to foster the development of all types of communication skills, especially public speaking.)
I had determined, after three years of research, that inmates have very low self-esteem and very poor verbal skills and that people who do not like themselves and who cannot express themselves verbally resort to physical expression. They beat people up instead of talking out the problem with the other prisoners.
In 1990, an inmate from the prison club won the Louisiana State Toastmasters Speech Contest.
The really startling news, however, was that out of 60 inmate Toastmasters who had been released from prison from 1986-1991, not one had been re-arrested. Statistically, 70 percent should have been re-arrested within two years of release.
District Judge Robert Downing
19th Judicial District
Baton Rouge, Louisiana
The Toastmaster magazine (January 1999)
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Related Story:
A 68-year old New Jersey widow was so convinced of a young man’s innocence after reading a news account of his murder conviction that she spent seven years and $60,000 of her own retirement money to see that justice would prevail.
Priscilla Read Chenoweth, an editor at the New Jersey Law Journal, has a law degree of her own but little experience with criminal trials. Yet she began to reinvestigate the shooting because, she said, the convicted Luis Kevin Rojas also had little experience – in gangs, or violence. “He had no record, and nice friends,” she told the NY Times newspaper. “He had a reputation for peaceableness.”
It began when Rojas, an aspiring engineer, was sent to prison at 18, charged with second-degree murder for supplying the gun in the 1990 shooting death of a teen in Greenwich Village. Chenoweth learned of a letter-writing campaign by 150 of Luis’s classmates to the judge insisting the teenager’s involvement was impossible. She was impressed, and something moved her to take action.
She thought she would help with fundraising. But when she realized the appeal was being handled clumsily by a lawyer-friend of the Rojas family who was not investigating the evidence, Mrs. Chenoweth went to work reading transcripts, interviewing witnesses and filing motions with unwavering tenacity.
The mother of three and grandmother of five worked alongside her daughter, Leslie Estevao, who first brought her mom’s attention to the case. They enlisted a retired New York City police detective, Dennis O’Sullivan, whose busy past time is unsolved murders, to contribute to the crusade. He even put up his own house to gain Rojas’ release on $50,000 bail.
A second retired police officer, Mike O’Connor, was enlisted. He and Estevao, who began calling herself the “kitchen-table detective,” located a key witness to establish a Rojas alibi, a transit officer who remembered seeing Mr. Rojas just miss a train leaving the station the night of the murder. Records indicate the train departed no later than 2:03AM, leading to the conclusion that Rojas could not have been a half mile away at 2:07AM when the incident occurred.
Jethro Eisenstein, a former criminal lawyer, also donated his services, and won an acquittal this October from a Manhattan jury in the State Supreme Court.
Luis had spent a third of his life in prison. His mother died during the stay. Mrs. Chenoweth received Mother’s Day cards from him and offered as much emotional support as she could. “I really admired the tremendous patience and courage he displayed during his time in prison. He never whined to me.”
If our definition for a Good Samaritan covers the bases of kindness, generosity and helpfulness, Priscilla Chenoweth surely wins the title with a Grand Slam.
Two thousand prisoners and their families will receive assistance, 2,000 more orphans around the world will be helped, 2,000 poor people will receive clothes, and 2,000 businessmen will be approached to sponsor students abroad.
The United Arab Emirates Red Crescent has produced a plan of action for the Millennium Year, and among the numerous activities promoting the Society and helping those in need, at least 20 included the magic figure of 2000.
Do you want to give an imaginative gift and feed hungry children in Chicago or Shanghai at the same time? Now you can give the gift that keeps on giving for generations.
Heifer Project International (HPI) provides income-producing animals to people in nearly 40 countries. Shoppers buy an animal in honor of a friend or relative and send the recipient an attractive card describing the gift of hope being given in his or her name.
Gifts of animals, such as chicks, goats, sheep, rabbits, pigs, fish, bees and heifers, along with training in their care, are given to low-income families around the world. Holiday gift-givers can provide egg-bearing chickens for hungry kids in Kenya, or a milk-producing goat for a family in Peru. And there’s more: Every family who receives your gift will give one or more of its animal’s offspring to another family in need.
In 1957, Esther Craig set a goal of contributing a cow a year to the Heifer Project. Since she retired, raising money for HPI cows has become a year-round project. To raise the money to buy the animals, she pots plants and crochets, picks wild berries for jams and jellies. At 80, Esther says, “I just can’t imagine children without milk.”
Heifer Project International also has funded projects in 35 states and educates Americans about world hunger and the role of livestock in sustainable development.
For instance, in Chicago, worms are raised by inner-city teens in order to produce organic fertilizer to sell at Chicago’s Farmers Market. Catfish, raised in 55-gallon drums, are donated to local food banks. Kids have an alternative to gang activity, and as a bonus, learn business basics. Heifer Project’s three U.S. learning centers are visited by thousands of people each year.
For More Information Contact The Heifer Project: 855-948-6437
Visit their website at www.heifer.org
With so many things to do in the holiday season, it is difficult to stay in the moment, to take time to really BE with the people around you, rather than thinking ahead or comparing it to the past. This moment is called the “present” for a reason – Give it to yourself today…
Many Christmases ago I began a metaphysical study of the bible. Meta means beyond; I looked beyond the physical or literal interperatation of the stories found there. What I found was a marvelous map, which, when studied can show us the ways that we all evolve in consciousness (what we believe, think and feel). The bible, from front to back, illustrates the movement of your individual consciousness from one that is steeped in fear and judgement to one based in love and compassion.
The Christmas story represents the manifesting into our daily lives of that consciousness of love. The birth of a realization.
By the time 22 Pakistani sailors had made it to safe harbor off the tip of Texas on the eve of Thanksgiving in 1998, they had no fuel, no power, no water, no passports, and were starving. They had been surviving on one hope—to make it to U.S. waters.
The Bankruptcy
The 740 foot cargo ship, the Delta Pride, and her crew were shipping bauxite for their Pakistani employer, Tri Star Shipping. Suddenly, they were left to fend for themselves in a Mexican port when Tri Star went bankrupt and severed their radio connection. Mexican shipping agents gave the crew some food and water, but took their passports and ship’s papers as collateral until harbor fees were paid, which effectively marooned the ship. For more than five months the crew lived on rainwater, boiled rice and the few fish they could pull up via milk crate.
The Prayer
Dying without any water, anchored at open sea with no one to help them, the Muslim crew began to pray. Captain Maqsood Ahmed tells what happened next. “Because we prayed to God, He sent Hurricane Mitch to us and brought many tons of water and fish! For many people the hurricane was very bad, but for us it was a blessing.”
Then the captain found a ten dollar bill in his drawer. “I don’t know how it got there. I had no money for many months!” Instantly the words,“ In God We Trust” caught his eyes. “I never paid any attention to these words but this time they were so attracting to me. I felt in my heart that this was the answer to my prayer, like advice from God…go to the United States and people can help you out there.”
The Escape
By buckets they amassed the dregs of low fuel tanks and fired a torch to heat the heavy fuel to get them started. Two days into the journey they had so many problems with the generator the captain wanted to turn back. But the engineer said, “No. We’ll keep these engines running.”
The Rescue
“It was a real escape story!” said Captain Eddie Max Stovall, III, from Port Isabel, Texas, who heard their pleas for help on Thanksgiving Eve. He called them back on his radio and within a few hours had turned it into a rescue story. He formed a coalition of locals, the Propeller Club of the United States and the Int’l Seamans Club to collect $500.00 worth of food and water, which he delivered to them the next morning in his boat. Stovall told Good News Network they were so weak from hunger, “They couldn’t even lift up the heaving line and the gallon of water attached.”
As a seaman, Stovall’s heart went out to them. His bride’s did too. Just married that same week, she felt strongly that the homesick sailors, who had been away from Pakistan for 18-27 months, should get a chance to talk to their families again. So they hired a radio operator to patch 22 calls home. Ahmed recalls, “Families were crying, children were crying because they didn’t know if we were alive or dead.” The marine operator then called the Stovalls back to say his boss would cover the charges.
“This is just… you know, people don’t believe in miracles. But I believe,” said Maqsood Ahmed, “I believe now!”
Investors were found to pay the necessary attorneys to place liens on the ship, the first step in selling it to raise the two years back wages due the crew and money to transport them back home. The process will force them to rely on their friends in Port Isabel for another 2-6 weeks.
“We’ve Come Home”
For the 36 year-old captain, the ordeal has strengthened his faith in God. He cites the example set by the United States, “Many countries believe in God but they don’t declare it on their currency!”
The ordeal has also sealed his love for Americans. “There’s a feeling that we’ve come to our home,” he told GNN. “This is a country of immigrants. I’m an immigrant here! he added, with laughter.“The people are so loving and so caring.”
“We found more friendly people here than in other countries. More open-hearted. They cooked their food from home and local churches brought it. And because I came in very desperate conditions, I had nothing to give them except my love.”
