Day: February 1, 2018

Michel and Ababele are trapped in a bind that is not of their making.

They need $500 each so they can be admitted to the RISSE special school for a month and learn enough English to be able to go to the public schools in Albany, where they live.

You met Sifa here a couple of weeks ago, she came to the United States four months ago, chosen by a U.N. lottery to come to America with her eight children. None of them had time to learn English or speak it, and they cannot be admitted to any American schools without knowing at least some.

This is urgent for them. Other than RISSE and its devoted teachers, hey have no way to advance into the American experience. RISSE, battered by federal aid funding cuts, is struggling to help children like Michel and Ababele, who our country has admitted but then abandoned, perhaps hoping to discourage others who are from what some call troubled “shithole” countries.

The options available to them at the public schools are not what they need for a number of reasons. They need to be in the RISSE after school program to get the instructions they need.

As you can see, they are not “shithole” people, they are quite love and hard-working, they are no threat to us.

They came to the United States from a United Nations Refugee Camp in Tanzania.

Sifa was in the camp (we brought them groceries a couple of weeks ago)  for 22 years. Her first husband was killed in the camp, her second husband was left behind when they came to the United States, he is struggling to get a visa to join his family in the United States.

The boys left their father behind, he may no be able to follow them to America now, He is precisely the kind of refugee the government says we don’t wish to admit to our country any longer.

Sifa is in a hard place. She has three small children at home, so she can’t go out and work. When you have more than two children, U.S. welfare programs cut off many benefits Last week, we brought the family $300 worth of groceries, and also got them snow boots and some sweaters and winter jackets.

But Sifa told us the most urgent need she faces is the need to get her two sons into the RISSE after school where they can begin learning English and assimilating to American life. She is determined they will have a better life that their parents.

Sifa’s children need to learn English and go to the public schoolsl, they have begun attending the after school program at RISSE, they hope to learn English there so they can attend public schools. (They have not been denied entry into the public schools, and do attend some public school classes, it is not enough for them now for a number of reasons.

Until last year the federal government subsidized after school tuition at RISSE as part of their refugee resettlement program, those funds have been eliminated, leaving RISSE with a staggering shortfall in tuition, more than $75,000.

RISSE is not the kind of place that kicks people out over money, but the lost funding has been brutal, for them and many children. They can’t afford to keep all of the refugee kids there without some money for supplies and teachers.

We can’t help all of those kids, but we can  help these two. Small acts of great kindness.

I’d like to take it on a month by month basis, hopefully getting them enough English language and other instruction so that they can enter the public school system. One month at a time.

I’d like to raise $1,000 for a month of school at RISSE, they have experienced and dedicated teachers there. I think we should be able to do that. That would pay the tuition for both boys, Michel and Ababela

The program offers classes in English, computing and also hot and nutritious meals. It brings students into a community, where they can find much of the support that will sustain them. It’s difficult to imagine these two boys in the public schools now, they would not be admitted.

My idea is to try to raise the money gradually, and over the course of the school year if we can. If these boys don’t get into RISSE, and can’t get the instruction they need,  their lives will be stalled, and ever more difficult and challenging.

It will take about $10,000 to keep these boys in school for a year, and give them the skills they need to start their new life. That’s a lot of money, I think it wisest to think one month at a time. It might not take them that long to learn what they need to know to move forward.

We raised nearly that much for Devota, the African refugee who owed a lot of money for loans she didn’t understand,  and she is immensely grateful.

Lottery refugees have no advance warning when their numbers are called, they simply get on a plane and come. They really have no time to prepare.

Let’s do the best we can for as long as we can.

If you wish to help Michel and Ababele with a months’ tuition at RISSE, please send your donations to me, Jon Katz. c/o P.O. Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816, or via Paypal, [email protected].  Please mark the donations “tuitions.” And thanks.

We got a new muzzle today, our third in our effort to find a muzzle that Gus can handle, and that will keep him from eating when he is out of the house and in the pasture. We found a very good one for Gus today, it came from BaxterBoo, a website selling all kinds of dog clothes, collars, muzzles and accessories.

So far, most of the muzzles we have tried have been too stiff and unwieldy, too close to the eyes, or too difficult to fit on the dog. This one works very well, we went through our acclimation muzzle drill, and the Short Snout Dog Muzzle by Royal Canin Canine Friendly ($20.)) seemed to be made by people who understand the snouts of Boston Terriers.

In a couple of days, we are getting an even more expensive dog muzzle from a San Francisco firm, it cost $46 and is basically a wire mesh covering that keeps off the dog’s eyes and lets him or her see clearly. It attaches to the collar.

The muzzle issue is important for us, because it’s lethal for Gus to go into the pasture and eat all the stuff out there, which he does. That could be disastrous for a dog with megaesophagus. With a muzzle, Gus can lead a nearly normal life.

Sheep and rabbit droppings make him quite ill. Today, he was a farm dog again.

Today’s experiment went well. After 10 minutes, Gus was running all over the place.

I took Gus to see Dr. Suzanne Fariello today, we went over the last couple of weeks. I told her Gus seems to be digesting his regular food well. Whenever he eats anything outside of his diet, he regurgitates or vomits it.

His weight is stable – 15 lbs. He had another acupuncture treatment.

At one point Dr. Fariello asked me “is this something you and Maria can live with?” And i said  yes, it is.

Gus has good days and bad days, depending on what he eats. He is always foraging,  inside and out, there is only so much we can do. Today, we tried our third muzzle, this one might work. (more later.) The sense of  crisis around Gus’s megaesophagus is easing.

He is on two medications, now one, herbal, one to promote rapid digestion. We are use to days when there is no spitting up, and days when there is some. We understand this is the new normal, he might get better, he might get worse, he might stay the same. Nobody really knows, not Dr. Fariello, not us.

We don’t have need of a Bailey Chair at this point, and it is good news that Gus is handling his regular food now, it does not appear to be getting caught in the swollen esophagus. Everything else he eats does. It is a matter of texture, says Dr. Fariello.

So we are all settling in with disease, it is somewhat disruptive and time-consuming, but we have adjusted to it. Beyond this illness, which seems less severe in Gus than in many other dogs, this has become normal. Most nights, he sleeps in bed with us.

He loves to play, he loves sit quietly by the fire and meditate. We love having him. We feed him three times a day, and two or three times a week, has has accidents.

We are adaptable, and so is he. We are better for this, wiser, more confident, more loving. There is nothing more to know or do at this point. And we are becoming super-competent at clean up.We’ll try out the new muzzle so he can go outside and on walks without eating.

Gus is healthy, she said, strong heart, good weight, good body condition, alert and active. He is, she said, a “fire” dog in terms of Chinese medicine, he is sensitive and intense. That is all true.

This is part of life with animals of course, it isn’t all cute and fuzzy.

We figured out that the Gray Hen, our most beautiful and dignified hen, was suffering from BumbleFoot, a painful infectious disease that chickens can get when a would or scratch becomes infected. I’d heard of it but didn’t think of it, Maria saw the hen’s feet were turning in, and she couldn’t walk or hop into or out of the roost.

There are some surgeries for Bumblefoot, but we didn’t want to go down that path, not for a chicken. We could see that she was in pain, and we realize now that the infection had probably been spreading for weeks, even months.

Maria carried her out of the roost and put her in the barn on a haystack. She lay down. I shot her four times with a .22 rifle, twice in the head, twice in the heart. I guess I’ve become good at this, she was dead instantly.

Maria carried her out into the woods and returned her to nature, to the coyotes, as is our custom.

This is a kind of ritual on a farm, chickens are not pets, and I am grateful we can end  her suffering, something we can’t do for one another or for our mothers and fathers. I don’t have deep feelings for chickens, but I was fond of the Gray Hen, there was something regal and very industrious about her.

She lay an egg just yesterday.

We have no plans to get another hen right now. We have two chickens left.

“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let y our affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand, instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.” – Henry David Thoreau.

Last weekend, Maria and stayed in a nice hotel in Salem, Mass., it was her birthday and we went there to see a Georgia O’Keefe exhibit at the Peabody-Essex Museum. We had planned to go out on Saturday night to the best seafood restaurant in town.

I had made all kinds of plans for the weekend, I wanted to give my girl a great birthday. I wanted to buy Maria a first-class dinner (wine and all) on her Birthday.

Simplicity is becoming a passion of my mind, but perhaps not yet a natural state. I sometimes forget myself.

The trajectory of our lives together has been towards simplicity, sometimes by choice, sometimes by circumstance. The simpler our lives grow, it seems, the more we love our lives. Creativity is a religion to us, and creativity is about change and openness.

And in a way, simplicity of thought.

We had walked through the town all afternoon and were tired, so we took a nap together in our hotel room. When we woke up, it was around 6 p.m. I felt some urgency. I hadn’t made any reservations. We started to get dressed up to go out, but I thought I ought to call and see if the restaurant was crowded.

It was crowded, very – there was a three-hour wait to get in. I started to panic a bit, my plans were coming undone, I started calling other restaurants and  found one that could take us in a half hour. I went on my UBER app to see if we could get a ride there, the restaurant was farther away than the others.

I saw there were Uber cars all around the hotel.

We started scrambling to get dressed again, and then Maria looked at me – she is the Queen Of Simplicity – and asked, “do we really want to go out?” My first reaction was yes,  of course. It was her birthday, we had to go out and get a big dinner, we had to eat something, I couldn’t see coming all the way on her birthday to spend the evening in a hotel room where there was fresh lobster all over the place.

And she loves lobster.

But then I thought about it. I saw that might have been my idea of a birthday once, but it wasn’t really hers.

Did we really need to go out? The idea of staying in this cozy room on a cold and windswept night with someone you love was also appealing. Did I really need to spend more than $100 for a fancy birthday dinner. Maria never needs to go fancy, that is not a present for her, rather for my own ego.

Would we be hungry? We got out a snack bag we take on trips, we just grab from our modest supply of crackers and fruit and  stuff them in a bag. One of our few remaining vices are tiny bags of organic cheese puffs, we both love them and crave them. We always share the bag together, there are about 10 puffs per person.

I gave her birthday presents – two funky hats I found on Etsy.

We had three pieces of sugar-free dark chocolate, an orange and some surviving wheat pretzels, some water from the tap.  We sat in our underwear happily munching on our own unique birthday meal. It was, in fact, special.

Maria got up and went down to the lobby and came back with two small glasses of sherry from somewhere. We smiled and munched on our simple meal – I thought of Thoreau on his long hikes eating berries and rice.

As the minutes  went by, we felt better and  better about our decision. First, we saved $100. Secondly, we got to read and snuggle up on a cold night. The sherry was warming and good.

Third, we didn’t have to sit in a noisy and crowded restaurant for an hour, and then walk or Uber back to the room. Beyond that, Maria was happy as a clam to stay in the room and talk and read, and so was I.

It wasn’t the fancy dinner I had planned for her, it was actually much better. We both had good books to read, lots to talk about,  and we had plenty of time to love one another, which we did. I think love is really about being and feeling known as much as anything else.

We both grasped the message of the evening. Less is more, the cardinal rule of good writing.

When we got back, we went out and bought a bottle of sherry and at the end of every day, we sat on the farm before our wood stove fire and we toast one another and have some sherry, just like British royalty in the 19th century, and the captains of the Royal Navy even today.

A good way to cap a birthday weekend. Small is good, simplicity is better.

More and more, I am learning to live small. Yesterday, a good and thoughtful friend asked me if I had considered making the Army Of Good a 501 charity, easier for tax deductions and fund-raising. I appreciated the thought, but I knew it would be a ruinous idea for me.

So much paperwork, answering to a board of directors, filing elaborate state and local tax returns, getting told what to do by contributors. I know what I need to do, and who needs to have it done.

The paperwork is already bad enough for me, I have a bookkeeper and an accountant keeping track of all the money we receive and where it goes.

The beauty of this work for me is that it is small. I raise small amounts of money from people who are not especially wealthy  and use it to commit great acts of kindness. It is just right, and that is because it is small.

Smallness is permeating my life. I am in no rush to write another book for the first time in my adult life. I have my blog.  Do I need it?

I do not need to get foundation grants for my work or take out loans. Smallness is manageable, even spiritual. And this year I have learned that small acts of great kindness are perhaps the wisest and most effective kinds of acts.

I don’t wish to burn out. I don’t want to burn out the Army Of Good. We fill the holes in people’s lives, we don’t perform miracles or transform reality. I need to stay small and simple. I am finally knowing something about myself.

Sitting in the hotel room, holding my wonderful wife, munching on our cheesecakes, I saw once again that we don’t always need what we think we need, bigger is not always better. Sometimes, I make myself richer by wanting less.

Sunday night, I picked up my Thoreau biography and felt especially affirmed. “As you simplify your life,” he wrote, “the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.”

I have learned some hard lessons in my life, as most of us do, and so they are precious to me. I will not forget them.

I have learned to live in the present, not to launch myself on every wave, or ride every wind to the sky. I will find my eternity in every moment. Many people I know are always looking to another land, but for me, there is no other land, there is no other moment than this, no other life than this.