Just thought I'd post so I don't lose my site. I like it. Hope to hear from some of yall.

JMJ                                                                          IHM

To whom it may concern on Xanga (and elsewhere this posts get imported): I'm now a married woman and it's the best ever.

Michelle K

JMJ                                                                                   IHM

Three years ago in March I made a mission trip with a part of my senior high school class.  We went to San Lucas, Guatemala, where we worked with the Christian Foundation for Children and the Aging.  CFCA, as it was called, worked to provide immediate relief to local poor Guatemalans as well as providing them with long-time investments such as education for their children and land from which they could earn a living for themselves.  While we were there we helped to prepare some land for planting corn.  It was riddled with huge tree stumps and rocks.  The rocks were easy enough to move, but the stumps had to be dug up completely, their roots chopped as far from the actual stump as possible, and the whole massive stump-root combination pried from the earth.  Needless to say, extracting each stump took a tremendous effort, usually an hour or two of work for a team of four or five people.  The amount of work I and my classmates did to remove the tree stumps always impressed me and made me feel good about the work we did down there, providing the manpower need to help these poor Guatemalans get back on their feet.

This morning as I walked home from class, a tractor with a huge contraption that looked something like a circular saw was parked across the street from my house.  I don't know what it was called, but if I had to call it something, I would name it a tree stump sander.  Two men stood by watching as a disc, probably 6 inches thick and 3 feet in diameter ate up a tree stump and turned it into mulch in a matter of minutes.  All that was left for them was to fill in the hole.

The incident caused me to recall the work I did in Guatemala, and in some sense I was hurt and offended, because this machine in some way seemed to de-value the work we had done.  If we had possessed such a machine, we could have cleared that field in a half a day instead of the 3 or 4 days we spent doing hard labor; even after those days it wasn't completely finished.  Then, as I considered the meaning of the offended way I felt, I realized that it was instead a feeling of undeserving privelege.  The people who really could have used that machine to better their lives have no possibility of accessing it, while we in Manhattan, KS use it to make our lawns more aesthetically pleasing.  It seems like a shame and a waste to me.  I am also astounded that the work I did in Guatemala is still impacting my life and the way I see things here in the states.