This is just a suggestion for someone out there who would like to do something for Fran's family. They live in a very remote village and use a bucket of freezing water for bathing. I thought they would enjoy having a couple of these to hang in a tree, and it might even improve their health in the cold weather.
You can see it here.
I have heard that this is the best brand, and that having two 3-gallon sizes would be better than one 5-gallon. These are small people, and lifting the 5-gallon to hang it in the tree might prove impossible. They live in the mountains where there is lots of sun, so I think it would function excellently for them. Their source of water comes from the mountains higher up, and is delivered through a pipe that the whole village uses.
If you would like to send one along, just let me know and I will make sure it gets to them. You can email me at lcassady@gmail.com.
Thursday, March 13, 2014
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
Well into the second semester!
I know Fran lives with me, but I rarely see her! She has been just as tenacious and dedicated this semester as last, and is confronting a variety of different situations that demand her attention.
One of them is a difficult teacher, which has forced her to find outside support -- never a bad thing. She had already turned the situation around as much as was humanly possible by visiting the teacher in his office several times to get him to actually teach her. In the classroom he simply puts difficult problems on the board and sits diffidently at his desk while students try to solve them. He's an older man, with health problems, so not much can be done. Fran's job is to pass the class, and she seems to have created a way to do that.
Her classes this semester include a Java programming class, business accounting, research, and integral calculus.
As summer approaches she is thinking of attending classes over the summer to keep her chops, and also to shorten the total time of her matriculation. Things do not get easier in this school, they get more difficult, and suck up more and more time. Last semester she attended classes 4 days a week, this semester it is 5. We have heard that they throw in weekend activities and projects in later years.
At Quaker meeting last week I had a fascinating discussion with an attender about the intricate caste system in Mexico, created by the Spanish friars, that included 35 or more castes. To drive the point home, they commissioned a series of paintings of family groups, showing people what to look for as they made sure to put everyone around them in their proper place -- the clothing, the color, the things of daily life. Today a main word of this kind of thinking is "muchacha" -- an indigenous girl who is basically brought in from the village to work as a slave for Mexicans who have enough money to pay (which isn't much). That is what Fran could have been, if she had not had the strength of will to find her way out of that oppressive system.
I found a few of the caste identification paintings and include them below.
One of them is a difficult teacher, which has forced her to find outside support -- never a bad thing. She had already turned the situation around as much as was humanly possible by visiting the teacher in his office several times to get him to actually teach her. In the classroom he simply puts difficult problems on the board and sits diffidently at his desk while students try to solve them. He's an older man, with health problems, so not much can be done. Fran's job is to pass the class, and she seems to have created a way to do that.
Her classes this semester include a Java programming class, business accounting, research, and integral calculus.
As summer approaches she is thinking of attending classes over the summer to keep her chops, and also to shorten the total time of her matriculation. Things do not get easier in this school, they get more difficult, and suck up more and more time. Last semester she attended classes 4 days a week, this semester it is 5. We have heard that they throw in weekend activities and projects in later years.
At Quaker meeting last week I had a fascinating discussion with an attender about the intricate caste system in Mexico, created by the Spanish friars, that included 35 or more castes. To drive the point home, they commissioned a series of paintings of family groups, showing people what to look for as they made sure to put everyone around them in their proper place -- the clothing, the color, the things of daily life. Today a main word of this kind of thinking is "muchacha" -- an indigenous girl who is basically brought in from the village to work as a slave for Mexicans who have enough money to pay (which isn't much). That is what Fran could have been, if she had not had the strength of will to find her way out of that oppressive system.
I found a few of the caste identification paintings and include them below.
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