The best way to find yourself ...

 ...is to lose yourself in the service of others." - Mahatma Gandhi

It's very quiet here. The only sound is the clock's regular ticking off of seconds. But it's not an empty silence. It's comfortable and full of ease.

In the kitchen it looks like a snack bomb went off. Our condo association annual general meeting (AGM) was last night, and I like to set a good table for the 100 or so people who show up, so there are bits and pieces of leftovers piled on the countertop and table, a box half-full box of cookies, likewise two boxes of crackers, some chips in a bowl, all flavours dumped into the one bowl at the end of the evening. Bottles for the recycling, a 12 pack of diet coke which somehow was overlooked and never made it to the table. I have a job ahead of me there.

I remember the first AGM I attended here, three years ago. It lasted two hours and there was no place to sit. There was a lot of anger, a lot of shouting and the Calgary Police TACK Team, in full body armour, wearing helmets and carrying assault weapons interrupted the meeting when they burst into the lobby half way through the meeting, on their way to take down a drug dealer on the 4th floor. I remember wondering what we had gotten ourselves into!

But when they called for volunteers for the condo board I raised my hand. I figured it was a way to get to know your neighbours. Now fast forward three years.

The next year I insisted we provide chairs and refreshments, or as they call it in Canada, "a lunch", regardless of the time of day. Not only did enough people come out so that board members didn't have to go door-to-door begging people to come so they could make a quorum, the atmosphere changed completely from hostility to friendliness.

Last night had huge potential for frustration. We're switching to a new state-of-the art security system which is keyless, and all 186 owners had to attend to pick up their entry devices, a small tag that goes on your key chain. The pickup was badly organized by an inexperienced manager, which meant the owners had to stand in line twice for an hour or more to get their tags.

Despite this people were on the whole, cheerful and remained pleasant. The meeting itself was brief and ran smoothly. We pulled the food, soft drinks and coffee out, laid the table for a buffet and everyone dug in. There was laughter and the noisy roar of happy conversation.

Again and again people came to me all evening, introduced themselves and said how much they loved this, so much different than the old AGMs. Time and again I was hugged and kissed and patted and thanked for looking at this not as just a building, but as a community - with people from all over the world as neighbours and for valuing the diversity here, for fostering inclusion.

It was healing, it was what I needed. An hour before the meeting I learned my beautiful niece Susan had passed away at 3:00 of cancer. She was a wonderful example of how much one person can do in and for a community. I never knew her to be critical or negative, and she was a wonderful role model for me and to all who knew her. She was loved by many. I will write about her later, when I can bear to do so, but last night I was smiling through tears because I was following her lead - it's what she has done for the past five years.  

KIVA Loan for May 2014

This month's KIVA loan goes to the Faïda group, which is comprised of six married women who live with their husbands and children in traditional families. On average, they are 48 years old and have eight children. They all live in Kanadjiguila in the town of Mandé, Mali and know one other through relatives, neighbors, and friends.

This is a Group Loan. In a group loan, each member of the group receives an individual loan but is part of a larger group of individuals. The group is there to provide support to the members and to provide a system of peer pressure, but groups may or may not be formally bound by a group guarantee. In cases where there is a group guarantee, members of the group are responsible for paying back the loans of their fellow group members in the case of delinquency or default.

Each Faïda group member has a small business selling some product to her neighbours and members of her community.  Madame Mariam (the woman standing in the middle of the photo) sells high-quality women's clothing, a wrap-around traditional  garment called pagnes wax. Other members sell cloth, beverages, firewood and cooking oil.  Each holds a sample of her goods in the photo.

With the goal of growing their businesses, the group members decided to apply for a group loan from Soro Yiriwaso, a microfinance institution which provides underprivileged communities in rural and semi-urban areas of Mali access to financial services. They serve disadvantaged clients, particularly women, allowing them to access resources and services which otherwise would be out of reach.

This is Faïda group's first loan. Madame Mariam is known for the high-quality of the clothing (pagnes wax) she sells. She plans on using her loan to buy 20 pagnes wax at wholesale prices in the main market. She will resell these at retail prices to a clientele comprised primarily of women.  She hopes to earn an average monthly profit of 35, 000 FCFA (abt $70.00) that she'll put back into her business and use to meet the needs of her children.

Kiva lenders enable Soro Yiriwaso to expand and reach even more under served Malians involved in their own small businesses. We're happy to join others in supporting Soro Yiriwaso and the Faïda group as they work together to improve the lives of the hard-working people of Mali.

Time to buy a new hat

No pictures at 11:00.

I have a generous dollop of Native American ancestry, and every hairdresser I ever bothered with moaned about the thickness, the straightness, the intransigence of my hair. It grows at a rate of about 1/4" (.5 cm) a day so a "good" cut is days away from being a mess, and it will not take a perm. Trying to curl it using anything short of nuclear fission technology is doomed to failure. It has a mind of its own and has asserted its dominance since early childhood.

So, in 1998, sick and tired of messing with it and with hairdressers, I begged my son's fiancee to take the clippers to me and shear my head down to a half-inch of hair. I loved it like that and there it's been ever since. About once a month I get out the clippers and have at 'er.

I have cowlicks everywhere, three on the top of my head and three at the nape of my neck; left, middle, right. These require special attention in that I have to come at them from every angle of the compass to cut all the hair swirling around these vortexes.

 I was finishing off the vortex on the right side of my neck this morning. I lifted the clippers and the attachment fell off in my hand - you know, the little comb-ie whatcha-ma-doodle that keeps the blade at a set distance from your scalp. In this case 5/8ths of an inch or about 1.7 cm. I didn't know how long it had been since attachment and blade had parted company and I obviously can't see the back of my head, so I grabbed the mirror.

Some women love hats. I'm not much of a hat person. I have a knitted winter hat (Canadians call that a toque - pronounced like two with a k on the end.) Too warm for that now, unless I was going for the 'gangsta' look, which I'm not. I have a second hat which I rarely wear. I don't know where I got it or why I've kept it, except you can throw it in the washer and I needed a hat for when it's not cold enough for a toque and not warm enough to go without something on your head. It has a leopard skin pattern on one side and it's a brownish red on the other (it's a reversible sort of canvas material). I look terrible in it. Like I have a terminal case of leopard-itis or I'm a corpse washed-up on the tide.

The Annual General Meeting of the Condo Corporation is scheduled in a few days. We're expecting about 100 people to show up. I'm the president and have to stand up in front all those people to give the annual report. I have a two-inch wide, three inch long bald strip running from the nape of my neck straight up the back of my head.

Time to buy a new hat.

The goat whisperer

Way back in the mid 70s we lived on a small holding in the interior of British Columbia. Our little farm sat at a 30 degree angle facing west with a magnificent view of the Purcell mountains, and the Columbia River ran at the foot of our property. We had a cleared pasture and a garden spot and since the newly-weaned baby was allergic to cow's milk we decided we should buy a milk goat.

We ended up buying a white Saanen the size of a Shetland pony, whose name was Villanelle. Vill was not only as sweet and loving as the family dog but also provided a solid gallon of sweet milk every day which was so rich you could churn butter from it. We had all the milk the four of us could drink. I also made cottage cheese, cream cheese, goat cheese and yogurt from her milk, and it was heavenly.

But came the day when the milk began to diminish and it was apparent that Villanelle needed the "attentions" of a gentleman goat, and the ensuing arrival of a new kid to renew the flow. So we began to search for a billy to hire. We began shamelessly soliciting for billy goat sex up and down the valley. Trouble was, the valley was thinly populated, and few people had goats. Our newspaper ads and posters around town brought no responses. Finally one day an acquaintance named Carol stopped me in the grocers and asked if we still needed a billy. I said we did, and she said her aunt had one for sale.

Anyone who knows goats knows you can't keep a billy anywhere near a milking doe, because the milk absorbs the rank billy goat odor and is undrinkable. So we didn't want to buy a billy, we just wanted to load our pony-sized girl goat into our van (she liked a ride now and again), ferry her to a romantically-inclined billy, wait while they consummated their brief affair, pay $5.00 and take her home again. I asked if we could just bring our doe and pay for stud service.

Carol's lips went rather then at my suggestion. "The billy's for sale," she said flatly, handing me a piece of paper with instructions written on it. "Sunday at 3:00. Bring a stout rope and a trailer."

It was late October and cold, with a razor-edged North wind, when we set out. We didn't need a trailer, not for a goat. Our old Dodge van had a double row of seats and a cargo area big enough to hold a queen-sized mattress. What it didn't have was much of a heater, so we were all heavily bundled as we drove up the winding bench road. We eventually came to a hulking wreck of a house wrapped in a wide porch which had fallen completely away from the walls. 

We were met at the back door by a dour old woman. We had to climb a ladder to reach the door. She waved us through the large kitchen into an enormous empty room with a 10 foot ceiling. A crystal chandelier hanging in the middle of the room was festooned by years of spiders webs. The wood floors sagged alarmingly and looked as though someone had scraped them with a coal shovel. The staircase had collapsed.  Flowered wallpaper was visible in places, but all the way around the room it looked as though someone had stained the wallpaper dark brown with a wavering brush at the four foot mark.

"I was born in this house," she said, "I've never lived anywhere else, and now my niece is taking away my children and making me leave." She pointed to a 12 foot wide stone fireplace on the far wall. "My Daddy used to burn 10 foot-long-logs in that fireplace. This house was built as a stage coach stop, a lodge. People stayed overnight on the way to Vancouver - before they built the railway."

You could hear a car approaching. "That'll be her now," she said sourly. "She made me put my babies in the barn. They're gonna die out there!"

Carol climbed the ladder and poked her head and shoulders into the room. "I see you found it. Good. Have you seen the goat?"

"I ain't selling him!" The old woman shouted at her, "He's been mine all his life and I ain't selling my own child."

"Go back in the kitchen, Auntie," Carol said. "You know it has to be done." She turned to us, "Come."

The barn was in as bad a shape as the house. In it were about 50 sheep, five or six doe goats. But these were not the ordinary sheep and goats one saw grazing the lots and pastures of our neighbours. They were a quarter of the size of normal sheep and goats.

"Why are they so small?" our older boy asked, accustomed as he was to our goats. They look like babies!"

"They've had the same stock for 50 years," Carol said, "and they just let them breed indiscriminately. Every generation they got a little smaller, until they are about a quarter the size they should be. Some of them are a bit weird." She pointed at one of the ewes. "She gave birth to a two-headed lamb last spring. That one," she pointed at another ewe, "has an extra foot on her back leg. But here's the fellow you came for."

He was confined in a stall, and he looked back at us with a gleam of undiluted hatred in his yellow eyes. He was no bigger than a German Shepard, but he had the most enormous sweep of horns I'd ever seen on a goat of any size. It was hard to imagine how that three foot rack of scimitars didn't make him topple over on his face.

"Did you see the brown line in the parlour?" Carol asked, as we stood looking at this marvel of horns and malevolence. "The sheep, goats, chickens, ducks and geese lived in the house with them for 20 years. My husband and I shovelled four feet of compacted manure out of there over the summer. We scraped the floor with snow shovels," she shook her head. "We should have just set a match to it.

She's my grandmother's sister and we're the only family she has left. We lived in Toronto for years and only moved back this Spring. When we got up here to see her we were horrified. The road closes in November and you can't get in or out until May. No heat, no power, no phone, no running water, the house full of livestock, and she was starving. Her husband died two winters ago, and it was June before someone came to check on them. She didn't realize he was dead, she just thought he was having a good sleep. The porch fell off this winter and the building inspector says the roof will collapse next time we get a heavy snowfall. She'll die if we leave her here this winter. So we're taking her to town to live with us, and she hates us for it."

She sighed and waved at the billy. "Just take him, and get it over with. But he is a mean little bastard, so be careful."

We paid her the $10.00 she was asking and between the three of us we managed to get him into the back of the van and tie him securely. He would lower his head and sweep across with his horns, trying to catch the boys, but we'd tied him too far back.

But oh, what a STENCH! There are few things riper than a billy goat in full bloom. Cross a skunk with a sewage processing plant, dress with rotting fish, bring to 110 degrees and you come close, but not quite noxious enough. Cold or not within a mile we had all the windows rolled down and the fans blowing cold air full speed.  We were gasping for breath and had 50 miles to go.

The goat struggled and reared and bleated and swept across the back of the seat with his horns constantly, as if his smell alone was not enough to insure our sufferings. As we rolled along we all got progressively colder, and progressively more nauseated. Seldom have I ever had such a miserable ride.

And the billy? He was Satan incarnate, with murder in his heart and a vendetta the Mafia might envy. And he was so stupid Villanelle had to teach him about the birds and the bees goat-style. Once she'd finally managed to get him to do the billy goat deed one time she wouldn't let him anywhere near her. We decided we were either going to find a new home for him or kill the murderous little sod.

I had to be rescued when he climbed over the wall of his stall and came after me. My screams brought Tony, who picked up a 2 x 4 and smacked the goat between the horns as it reeled around to face him. Goat decided he'd best go graze and mind his manners.

A neighbour borrowed him to service his does, but the billy trapped his wife in a stall and broke her hand and all her fingers. The neighbour admitted that if the billy was his he'd have shot him. We wished he would have, because now we had to deal with him again.

We were desperate. We didn't really want to kill him but no one was safe with him on the farm. So we placed an ad in the little ad and classified paper that went up and down the length of the valley. "Billy goat - FREE - come and get him!"

That night the phone rang and a bass voice asked if we still had our billy goat and I said we did. The voice said, "I'll pick him up in the morning. I got a dairy herd and my old billy died on me." I told him to bring a trailer and a stout rope, that this was the meanest damn billy that ever grew horns. He chuckled a bit.

The next morning an enormous long-haired, red-bearded fellow in bib overalls sauntered down our drive and into the yard. "I'm here for thu billy," he said.

We had put the billy in a big leather collar and tied him in his stall with a rope on each side, so we could maintain control over him. Tony and I wrestled him out of the barn into the sunlight where the hippy stood. 

"You bring a rope?" I asked.

"Naw, I don't need nothing like no rope," he said. "Me and goats, we git along. Take thu collar off 'm," he said. He must have seen the terror on our faces. "Jest do it."

Tony held the goat's slashing horns while I dodged around trying to undo the buckle.
As soon as the collar was slipped the goat ran at the hippy, jumped his leg and started humping him. The hippy threw his head back and laughed. "I told you I's good with goats!" he said. He slapped the goat on the shoulder, and said, "C'mon goat," and that damned goat followed him up the driveway, no collar, no rope, like a labrador pup.

Who knew the world has a goat whisperer?

The Three Stooges and first world problems

I read somewhere recently on the Interwebs some poor soul complaining of her (or his) distress over hearing the term first world problem applied to their complaint about someone cutting in line at the Starbucks, ending up in a bad seat at the movie, or rage over a poorly executed haircut. They felt as if the depth of their gut-wrenching waiting-too-long-for-my-latte tragedy was somehow demeaned by referring to it as a "first world problem". As if their pain wasn't real and important.

I'll tell you a secret. Although these situations may very well cause pain they are not "problems", first world or otherwise, they are irritations. If we always expect and even anticipate rudeness, the "hateful" look, the snarly service, we'll find it, but in reality what we are seeing is our own irritation reflected back to us. The biggest "first world problem" is that we are so self-centered that we can't see anything in the people around us except what is in us. 

Lots of people in the so-called "first world" have problems, but those named above are not among them. If you have terminal cancer, you have a problem. Life becomes very precious when you are told you have a limited time left with those you love.

If your nine-year-old has been hit by a drunken driver and is lying in an ICU on life support, you have a problem. Or, if you are like a young couple here, blessed with beautiful identical triplets, and all three diagnosed at two weeks with neuroblastoma, cancer of the retina. How do you cope with making the decision to have your babies' eyes removed? And how does a three-month-old baby cope with radiation and chemotherapy? That family has a problem.

If you're a single mother with two small kids who has just lost her job and has no money for next month's rent or this week's groceries, you have a problem.

The difference between an irritation and a problem is that you can choose not to be irritated, and your choice will make all the difference in your day, and your life.

When someone steps in front of you in line you can step back and quietly practice a random act of kindness. You can smile and check your inner ninja before it kicks you in the indignation. A two minute delay is not worth ruining a day for.

Larry, Curly and Moe

There are no really horrible seats in theatres anymore, unless you're sitting behind a Sasquatch. If you are, find another seat.

And hair grows. Although hair's a double-edged sword. When it looks exactly the way you want it could quit growing, but when someone has made you look like one of the Three Stooges you would sacrifice a chicken to make it grow an inch an hour.

Dealing with a real life-and-death problem requires courage and deep reserves of inner strength. Indulging in the habit of irritation turns you into a victim, at the mercy of your own bad temper. A moment's exchange can leave you stewing for days, weeks even, and can leave you a very unhappy person.

Rising indignantly to every snub, imagined or deliberate, is like turning your life into a rudderless dory floating on the tide. It gives control of your emotions over to circumstance, and relinquishes your power to others, even perfect strangers. Strength comes from choosing not to respond to trivial irritations.

And the day after I wrote this, this article was published in the New Yorker: Missed Connections for Assholes - Be sure and read the comments, which includes this little gem;

"Anyone who spends his day critiquing strangers, worrying about slight slights,

getting pissed about small talk and being bothered by other peoples clothing
or devices should gaze deeply into his own inner A-hole, you will find a mirror there.
 
I think that's what I just said, but with with less acid. 

"Do not let the behaviour of others destroy your inner peace." ~ Dalai Lama

The early bird gets the w

...wind up his tail. At least here! It's early in the day for me. I'm usually not even awake at this hour. However the man with the leaf blower which snarls like a logger's chainsaw went to work under our bedroom window about 8:15 and brought me from my dreams to shaky wakefulness.

On the plus side I think he cleared the leaves from my flower beds. On the negative side I think he cleared the emerging plants from my flower beds. Plants are tender and tentative when they first peek out after a long, cold winter. A leaf blower which directs 100 mph blast of wind at them and their surrounding leaf blanket, in which they are entangled, is not necessarily the best way to bring them on.

Outside the bedroom window

Besides, we've had snow all week. Can you believe it? Snow. It's been below freezing every night and the garden plants have stalled. They are no further ahead than last week at this time when I had purple crocuses and a single daffodil blooming.

I think the crocuses have closed up shop for the year, but the one daf is still out there shivering. The hopeful buds are beginning to look like the jilted lover who stands behind the curtains and prays to no one in particular, "Please, please, please…"

 Still, I'd only cleaned out the one bed, because it has rained or snowed since those few glorious days of sun and warmth we had a couple of weeks ago. So I've decided to view this morning's leaf-blower manufactured hurricane as a blessing. It saved me time and work, even if it has clipped a few plants in the bud.

There's a condo board meeting here tonight which means a fierce few hours of cleaning between now and then because our property manager is allergic to cats.  The cats will have to be confined to the bedroom for the duration, a confinement which they will protest with cat swear words and vigorous rattling of the door.

So I'm off, and that is not a reference to my mental state, I mean I'm off to clean house. I'm fine with the flowerbeds and their unexpected windstorm. Maybe I should droop around feeling poorly-done-by or be incensed by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune but angst and I don't spend much time together any more. I'm going to go with unperturbed which surprises the heck out of me, and I have to admit I like it.

A stitch in time 'til you're 109

According to certain US politicians one of the truly awful things about living in a country where medical care is universal is that "socialists" are always looking to economize, and old and disabled people are as disposable as punctured tires.

Well, our (Canadian) health care system is always looking to economize but they don't do it by sticking the disabled and 70-year-olds on ice floes. No, what they try to do is far more cunning. The wily rascals are constantly trying to find ways to keep you from getting sick or injured in the first place, so you don't end up needing their hospitals, or Saint's preserve us, their long-term care facilities.


They simply can't stand having grandpa sitting in a wheelchair in a government-funded nursing home, playing balloon volleyball with a bunch of widows who could be home hoarding cats or raising roses - they push healthy living, and with it the idea that you are better at home 'til it makes you think it could be a commie plot.

As an example; my own strength has been unreliable lately and I've become apprehensive that I cannot keep Mr. T from falling in the shower, nor have I the arm power and energy to anoint him daily head to toe with the special cream prescribed for his fiercely dry skin. At our last doctor's visit I admitted as much to our doctor who immediately set up an appointment with the clinic's social worker, and now we have a daily visit from a home health aide to give Mr. T his shower, and slather him with cream afterwards.

After the scrubbing and slathering are done the aide turns her (or his) attention to my needs, in the form of doing household chores I find difficult. So far this has resulted in swept and mopped floors, a scrubbed-down bathroom, and a spotless stove and fridge, which I find difficult to clean, especially the top of the fridge and the range hood, because I can't reach them without climbing on a chair, which I can't do any more.  

We are waiting on a home visit from the Falls Team, a physician, physiotherapist and occupational therapist, who will assess the husband's likelihood of falling again, based on past experience and whatever else they base it on. And the nurse comes every few weeks to check him over and make certain I'm not mistreating him. (He's in no danger.) 

And should you be really disabled, like our paralyzed neighbour upstairs, there are home health aides to do all your personal care, a homemaker to do all her cleaning, laundry, shopping, etc, and skilled nursing care is available to her here - in her home. As long as a person's medical needs can be met at home in 20 hours of care a day the health care system will provide the equipment and the care to allow a person to remain at home. My brother-in-law, who had ALS, was cared for at home until the final 48 hours of his life. 

There's a study somewhere that every dollar spent keeping a senior healthy in their own home saves the health care system $9.00 in  the end.  This is really the stitch in time that saves nine. And it's really what most of us want as we grow old, to be at home, that sweetest of places, however humble, and to be with those we love.

...the path to enlightenment

Last time I looked, an hour ago (the den has no windows) it was raining, but it's 3 degrees C (37 F) and at that temperature water has a personality disorder and can't decide whether to come down as perfectly acceptable rain (for the second of May) or to have a kick at the can and come down as snow.

Whichever god controls such things, if there be one, could you give us a break and just stick with rain? We need it, we've had a dozen large grassfires in the last couple of days. Last year's waist-high prairie grass is dry as tinder, though the soil beneath it is wet.

The wind gets a spark in her mouth and gallops across miles of countryside, devouring grass, sometimes catching livestock who can't breech a fence, charring the little prairie hens who will hunker down over their nests to protect their eggs, burning barns and occasionally destroying someone's home. Most prairie fires are caused by louts like the ones who caused five separate fires yesterday, riding along shooting Roman candles into the dry grass at the side of the road.

On a more cheerful note, the flowerbeds out front are full of purple crocuses and now the daffodils are beginning to bloom. Only two are in full bloom so far but dozens of spears with fat yellow bulbs are pointing at the sun crying, "My turn next! My turn next!". 

Though I've been down three or four times to pick up the garbage that's blown into the garden I haven't had any further time or energy to spend down there this week, though I can see weeds from here.

On Saturday evening the cold water tap in one of the top floor units blew off and the resident had a geyser on his hands. Since he didn't know how to turn off the water he called the fire dept, who also didn't know how to turn off his water. Thankfully, as soon as the water began to spill through the ceiling into the unit below the owner who lives in that unit ran upstairs. Thankfully she knew where the water shut-off was. I can't imagine living in a place for four years and never looking to see where the water shut-off is! 

Anyway, since I was the only condo board member home it was left to me to call in a contractor to pick up the water and then the company who does our flood repairs to take off the wet baseboards and set up fans. Unfortunately they did not come and tell me there were NO working electrical outlets in the hallways within reach of their fans, something I found out late on Sunday, when an electrician who had never been in the building and a clueless board member (that would be me) spent four hours exploring every mechanical room in the parkade and every storage and utility room on every floor looking for the breakers for the hallway outlets (without any success). Let's just say without further gory details that I walked the entire complex at least 10 times in three days and my legs finally said, "That's it! Do what you will! We're off on holiday! See ya!"

I sat for two days but yesterday had to go to the post office, pharmacy and grocery store. I invited my neighbour, who has no car, to come along. Between post office and grocery store we stopped and had lunch where we ran into an older man we both know. He has mental health issues and was homeless for years after his wife died. He's rather quiet, sweet and timid but he flies into a rage sometimes for the smallest reasons. My neighbour doesn't like him but he and I have a really good connection. He's always been a perfect old-fashioned gentleman with me. I've talked him down from his rages a couple of times and avoided the usual police intervention.

We invited him to join us. He was very pale and looked unwell. He said he'd been in the hospital for 13 days after having surgery and had just been released that morning. We talked and joked as we ate our meals and he really brightened up. Then we had to go. He lives alone, and has little positive feedback in his life. His loneliness and pain are so obvious. I hugged him and wished him better health and told him I hoped we'd see each other again soon. He always tears up when anyone shows him the least kindness.  

Today my legs are on strike again, and I am sitting. The house is a shipwreck. No sense in agonizing over it. I'm not even trying to row. What gets done gets done. What doesn't get done will wait for me. (Ain't that the truth!)  I learned patience by letting go of fretting over what needs to be done and waiting for the time it can be done.

Expectations and attachment to outcome causes heartache, whether it's what you can do or what others do for you. Expect that you will always be able to do exactly what you want, or that other people will always do what you'd like, or what you feel they "owe" you, and you will be continually unhappy.

"Whatever is happening is the path to enlightenment" ~ Pema Chodron

Jenlu and the Morning Star Group

An early bird catches a worm and these eight tribal women rise at the break of the dawn to do their household chores and carry on their businesses. They call themselves Morning Star Group. 

The village where they live is 35 km (22 miles) from the main capital town of the northeast Indian state of Manipur. Manipur's people include several different tribal groups who speak languages in the Tibeto-Burman family.

Jenlu, who is raising her hand in the picture, is the member who is profiled, but all members of the group share an equal amount of the KIVA loan, which comes to a little less than $250.00 US dollars each. They work together to encourage one another to keep their part of the repayment of the loan current. Should one fall behind the others make up the shortfall temporarily until the partner can regain her financial footing. 

Jenlu's house is located on one of the main lanes in the village. Previously Jenlu was a farm labourer but it is very hard work for a woman with a family to care for, so recently she opened a small grocery shop in the front of her house, facing the lane. In the morning farmers drop into the shop to purchase snacks to take with them to their fields. She also sells essential and everyday household goods like cereal grains, rice, cooking oil, cleaning supplies for the home and personal products like soap, toothpaste and shampoo. The village has very few shops and Jenlu is determined to run her business successfully.

Her husband is a farm labourer who works in the fields cultivating seasonal crops. While her husband is working in the field, Jenlu manages the shop and does her household chores, cleaning the house, cooking meals for the family and sending the children to school.

With the help of this KIVA loan, she will purchase more supplies wholesale for the grocery shop. She plans to purchase several large bags of rice, a large container of cooking oil, and other essential goods in large quantities which she can then sell in smaller amounts at retail prices for increased profit. She plans to expand the shop to the point where it can provide the family's entire income.

Looking to the future she knows working as a farm labourer will become too difficult for her husband as he ages and therefore, she is keen to make the shop as successful as it can be. She is happy and motivated to work with KIVA and wishes to continue working with the organization. She says, “Thank you so much KIVA”.

The other members of Morning Star Group are engaged in similar small businesses. Some raise animals, one weaves cloth, some farm and another has a small food business.  The KIVA partner WSDS-Initiative is an inclusive nonprofit that works with women across all tribes and minority communities in Manipur, located in the remote northeast region of India. Most organizations concentrate their work in the plains region of Manipur, but WSDS is among the very few organizations serving women in the isolated hills.

Political unrest and frequent economic blockades in the area make it very difficult to provide services, resulting in Manipur having the lowest penetration of financial services in the country.  Combine this with India's restrictive laws on loans from outside the country, and the women in this region have almost no access to the capital they so desperately need to expand their businesses. ALL it takes is $25.00 to give a woman like Jenlu and her family the chance to lead a life free from grinding poverty and deprivation. And the best thing is, you get your money back, it's not a hand-out but a hand-up. Become a KIVA lender today.

The devil and his defender

Time for a snuggle

My regular reader(s) will recall that there are two cats in this household, a now 18-month-old red mackeral tabby named "Hobbes" who is a devil in a cat-skin, and a four-year-old overly fat silver Chinchilla Persian called Smokey who, being delusional, believes himself the mother and protector of said younger devil.  

This comes in handy at times as Smokey knows it is forbidden to use the sofa as a scratching post, and has taken to "disciplining" Hobbes when he does it. Mostly though it's just a pain, and I mean that literally. Step on Smokey's tail and he will barely complain, step on Hobbes' tail, he will squall and Smokey will come over and bite you for your carelessness. 

Papa's chair, I owns it!

There's a power bar plugged into the wall beside Tony's chair, and the resulting tangle of wires. Hobbes has a fascination with wires, and has to be stopped from playing with them constantly.

Yesterday the little devil was swinging from the wire of the overhead lamp. I yelled at him to get down, and he did, but dove immediately into the tangle of wires and came up with one in his mouth.

I yelled at him from my chair. He just stood there looking at me, daring me to stop him.

I got up from my chair and started toward him, scolding him as I went. I'd just bent over to tell him what a naughty boy he was when Smokey snuck up behind me and nipped my ankle. Just lightly, he didn't break the skin or even leave a mark, but his message was clear, "Don't scold my baby!"

Now, this is too much. Protective when Hobbes is squalling because he's been hurt or he's scared he's going to be hurt (i.e. nail-clipping) I understand, but now we can't tell young Lucifer to behave? I don't think so.

Smokey knew he'd crossed the line. After he bit me he scuttled away as fast as his 3/4 length legs would carry him. I caught up with him in the kitchen, grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and tapped his nose with one finger. "YOU do NOT bite your Mama!" I told him, "You are a bad, bad boy."

When I let him go he ran to his cat tree and climbed to the top platform to sulk, or feel sorry for himself, or whatever he felt like feeling. I on the other hand was secretly delighted. He loves his "baby" cat with all his stout little cat body and soul. He lets the baby inspect his dish of tuna (and turn up his nose at it) before he eats, he moves aside and lets the baby eat kibble from his dish.

Smokey and his Papa

Normally these are signs that a cat is submissive, and is allowing the dominant one first choice, but this is not so. Smokey likes to lie on the sofa. Hobbes likes to creep onto the sofa and lie next to him, or even end to end, or just with a paw touching. This irritates Smokey to no end, as the sofa is his, and he does not like to share it. So after a period of grumbling he will get up, roll Hobbes over, grab him by the throat and hold him in this very vulnerable position. Hobbes offers no resistance, after 15 or 20 seconds he will  reach up and wrap his "arms" around Smokey's neck in a hug. Smokey then usually grooms Hobbes' ears and face, then kicks his butt off the sofa.

So there is no question Smokey is dominant, but he's going to have to learn he is not dominant when it comes to us. He's carrying the motherhood and protection theme a little too far.

The flowers that bloom in the spring tra la!

My apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan (and maybe the weatherman), but I'm humming a little tune myself today. The temperature is 10 C (50 F) and we have bright sun. Woo-hoo! A few hours of
warmth brought those crocus buds out all over the flower beds. There are 10 or 12 clusters of purple blossoms so bright and cheerful that they are easily visible from our second story windows.

I went down about 1:00 (what a difference from yesterday's blizzard!) and worked in the first bed to the right as you approach the building. This is the one which gets the most sun and therefore is farthest ahead of any of the beds.

There was a single dandelion, which I yanked out, but happily as I pruned back old growth and cleared away leaves I found that at least one of the roses I planted last year survived. Sadly the one the landscaper took his gas-powered trimmer to in the fall appears to have died of outrage. In this climate you do not prune roses in the fall but in the spring. He was only supposed to neaten up the shrubs but he got a bit enthusiastic with those trimmers. By the time I got downstairs to shoo him out of my flower beds the damage was done.

But there are some Oriental poppies coming up, and several shasta daisy plants. It looks like some of the white swan echinaceas may have survived and surprisingly several of the dusty miller made it through the winter, when they are sold strictly as annuals here.

So far no signs of life from the sage or the "Little Rocket" ligularia, which you see in this photo of last year's bed. I followed the directions on the ligularia's pot, which said "plant in full sun, water sparingly" and now I'm reading that ligularia likes shade and wet feet. sigh…. That is a spectacular plant. I'll look for another one and plant it in a more suitable location this year.  What I'll put in its place is a question - maybe some very well-staked delphiniums.

I pulled back all the leaf litter which was mucky with mud and pruned the potentilla. I've finally got the potentilla down to nicely shaped four foot globes, when they were eight feet of mostly dead wood with green tips to begin with.

By this point I'd had it. My feet were beginning not to pay any attention to what my brain was telling them to do. I just about did a face-first header onto the sidewalk when I caught my toe on the edge of the walk. Thankfully there's a bench there and I grabbed it.  I'll leave the rest for another day.  

If you can't trust your weatherman….

Who can you trust? If I'm going to be paranoid about "the government" I know which branch I wouldn't trust with Grandma's recipe for pound cake.

I'm pretty sure the people over at Environment Canada have it in for us, or maybe they just have a weird sense of humour.

It was a reasonably warm plus 4 C (39 F) yesterday afternoon so I went out to inspect the flowerbeds on either side of the main walk. There are still some lingering snowbanks and the newly-exposed grass is the most awful mess you ever saw, grey and slimy-looking.

The flower beds are covered with a carpet of sodden leaves and sad stalks and sprigs of last year's growth, but there are also many green spears of purple crocus popping up (some with fat purple buds).  The osteospermums are emerging and the heartleaf bergenia (aka elephant ears) looks as if it didn't even notice we had a winter. The other thing that's up already are dandelions, lots and lots of dandelions.

Despite these early birds, I'm sure we've lost a lot of plants this winter. Time will tell but we had record cold for weeks on end and almost twice as much snow as usual. The snow from the walk gets shoveled onto the flower beds, which in itself isn't bad, but it's laden with the salt that's put down to melt the ice on the walk, and that is most definitely not good.

But, since the weatherman was predicting a warm sunny 13 C (55 F) tomorrow I decided to run to the WalMart this afternoon. The weather man said there was a chance of showers, but the temperature was supposed to stay well above freezing. So when I went out about 1:00 I was surprised to find that it was snowing very lightly; tiny flakes which couldn't decide whether they wanted to be rain or snow.

However, by the time I'd finished my shopping I realized my trust in the weatherman had once again been misplaced. Here I was, no hat, no gloves, in a flannel-lined windbreaker, and there was a blizzard blowing outside, with huge, globby flakes falling so thickly you couldn't see more than 100 feet ahead of you and a howling wind which just stood still and blew from every direction at once.

I loaded my shopping into the car, then got out the snow brush and cleared the windows and the side view mirrors, all clotted thick with snow. In that three or four minutes I was soaked to the skin. By the time I had my seat belt buckled both side view mirrors were completely clumped over again. I rolled down my window and cleared the one on the driver's side with a handful of tissues and directed some unladylike phrases to the one beyond my reach.

I know the route home, and how to avoid driving it where anyone can come up on my right. It would have to do.  Nonetheless half way home I had to pull over, get out and clear the side view mirrors (and the side windows) again. It's like the car was a magnet and we were driving through a storm of iron filings. But that's spring snow for you, half snow, half Elmer's Glue.

The weatherman has now changed his prediction for tomorrow to partly cloudy and 9 C (48 F).  I'm not sure whether to trust him or not. With his record we may have an iceberg headed our way. 

The Thermometer Has Fainted!

For the first time since … well, I am so old I don't last remember when it was +9 C (48 F ) outside, and it's forecast to be 17 C (62 F) tomorrow, though I have lived in Calgary long enough to know that weather forecasters here are given to hopeless flights of fancy when their brains begin to thaw out after four months of -35 plus (or rather minus) 20 degrees of wind chill. 

But like any Calgarian the slightest sign of Spring thaw is enough to send me reeling to the bookshelves for my stack of gardening books, and to have me feverishly checking what kind of plants will grow here, beyond the ones I have planted (which have surely succumbed to the God-arful winter we've just had). Ah, and a gardener's lot 'tis a hard one here.

Tulips do well, but all winter I've seen ominous little tracks in and out of the snowpiles over my garden beds, and I'm not including the size 11 clodhoppers of the e-jit who lives down the way on the first floor and is too dumb to find his hallway door, but who tramps out his patio door, across the frozen lawn and through my carefully tended flower beds to the sidewalk. Goodbye ferns, hostas, and coral bells because I'm sure the lout has smushed yer roots to moosh. He kicked the fence aside every time I put it back up. I weeps.  

But back to the dainty claws of the squirrel that I suspect has been raiding my bulb larder all winter. It's probably one of the reasons I'm getting fewer, and not more, tulips each spring, when they should be multiplying like mice in a grain bin.

But the thing that springs most vigorously anew each spring in the heart of the gardener is hope, and with it new gardening plans. I won't deny I've had some problems the last couple of years. Aside from the stinkos who can't be bothered to walk around, rather than through the flower bed, I lost half my plants the first year to drought. Worse, the landscape company hires kids who don't know a weed from a flower. I fell last July just as things began to bloom, and could not be out in the garden to supervise. So if it had a flower on it they left it. If it wasn't flowering they pulled it. Which means the yellow alfalfa and Russian thistle were left to get six feet tall and they pulled the day lilies and the thymes, the Oriental poppies and the blue catmint the minute they quit flowering. 

I keep wandering off track, what I'm really trying to tell you what my plans are for this year. The building's main entry is in an inside corner which faces northeast. It gets ferocious morning sun for three hours, sun that would peel an egg. The rest of the day it is in stygian gloom. The right side won't even grow grass, it has just a thin slick of green moss, the slimy-looking stuff that grows on the bottom of old wooden buckets and under your grandma's porch.
 

The sidewalk was formerly flanked at that point by seven foot high shrubs of an indeterminate variety which hung over the sidewalk by three feet and dripped black aphid snot all summer. Last spring we dug them out and I replaced them with some beautiful sages and a Midnight Lady Ligularia. All in all I had a decent showing of flowers in the beds, and a magnificent showing of weeds.

This year I have decided to tackle the beds themselves. I'm going to add a row of barberry shrubs at the back of the bed which is being used as a walkway. Barberries have a beautiful burgundy leaf which will tie in nicely with the burgundy leaves of the flowering plum tree nearby, but they also have inch-long thorns and not easily traversed. Specifically I want to plant either Berberis thunbergii ‘Rose Glow’ or  Berberis thunbergil 'Cherry Bomb' because both get about four feet high and have a lovely fountain shape, as opposed to the ground-hugging varieties which only get about two feet high. The bigger and thornier the better.

But the beds are where I want to make the biggest changes. Once all my perennials have emerged I want to place landscape cloth down and cover the beds in mulch and rock. I want to place larger stones along the edges and an occasional larger grouping in the beds themselves where I can tuck in some alpine plants. And that right back corner? I'm still thinking about what to do with that, but from the nearest downspout, I'd like to run a dry stream bed into the flower beds.

Big plans, now I just need to twist some board member's arms for the money and hired labour to do all of it. :) 

It's Not Only Justice Who's Blind

Okay, today I'm working off a riff, or I think that's what I'm doing - my ability to use cool slang is somewhat limited so I may just be planting my foot firmly in my mouth saying that. But I read a blog called Rolling Around In My Head and today's post included the following paragraph. It will probably make more sense if you read the entire post, so you can do that here.

"I know that I wish some people would allow people with disabilities the honour of having expertise in our own lives, having voices which need to have prominence in some areas and having vital information to add to any discussion about disability. Too often I see disability discussed as either a professional or parental concern. While those viewpoints are valuable, I don't disagree there, but they have to be tempered by and sometimes seen as secondary, and sometimes negated by the voices that speak from lived experience."

Cartoon by Kim

Reading this makes me think back to a conference for patients with a certain group of inherited neuromuscular diseases.  Experts in these diseases are booked as speakers. These are scientists who study the genetics in the lab, clinicians who see and treat patients, therapists, you get the drift.

A major complaint among patients is that the description of symptoms found in medical journals and textbooks is too limited. While descriptions used to be broader and more accurate, a few doctors with their own agendas have overwhelmed the field in the last 20 years. Their work has made it much more difficult to get a diagnosis, which is devastating to patients, because until you get a diagnosis you don't get treatment, and when you don't have treatment the disease slowly but progressively destroys your muscles.

At this particular conference an expert was standing before the audience expounding on his views. He is not a clinician, in other words he does not see patients or treat them. He studies muscle fibres removed from genetically engineered mice and draws his conclusions from what happens in a petri dish to a single muscle fibre.

He said, "Patients with (name of disease) have no problems with speech or swallowing."

The moderator stood up with her microphone and interrupted him. "Excuse me Dr. X. Did you say patients have no problems with speech and swallowing?"

He looked at her and said, "Yes, that's what I said."

She turned to the audience of perhaps 150 and asked, "Can I have a show of hands of patients with X who have problems with speech and swallowing?"

About 30 hands went up. She turned back to the speaker. "Dr. X," she said. "Are there any questions you'd like to ask these patients?"

He looked at her for a second before saying, "No," and continuing with his presentation.

Patients are not given the respect of having expertise in their own lives, of having vital information to add to the bank of knowledge about their own illness. We are too often told we cannot have this symptom or that one because the doctor says we don't. Progress is negated by "professionals" who not only have no physical experience with what they study, they refuse to listen to patients who do.

I think medicine has it wrong, at least in my field. It's justice which is supposed to be blind, not medicine.

A Right Livelihood?

“Right livelihood,” is one of the cornerstones of Buddhist philosophy. That’s basically how you make your living and how you produce goods and services. The primary rule is that you harm no one, and increasingly it is interpreted to mean that you cause no suffering and no harm to the environment. There's a compelling and thoughtful discussion on "Right Livelihood" on Bill Moyer's blog here that is worth the few minutes it takes to read.

And never was it more needed.  Our rampant consumerism and growing inequality between rich and poor could lead to the collapse of Western civilization according to a new NASA-funded study written up at The Guardian’s Earth Insight blog. The study looked at the factors that have caused civilizations to collapse in the past and makes a compelling argument that we may be headed in that direction.

By investigating these past cases of collapse, the project identified the common factors which explained civilizational decline, and which may help determine the risk of collapse today: namely, Population, Climate, Water, Agriculture, and Energy.

These factors can lead to collapse when they combine and generate two crucial social features: the scarcity of resources compared to the size of the population and the division of society into two classes; the Elites [the rich] and the Commoners [the poor].

These two social factors have played “a central role in the process of societal collapse,” in all such cases over the last five thousand years. Currently, these factors are seen in our own global society at high levels with "Elites" based largely in  industrialized nations increasingly consuming  the greater share of the earth's resources, leaving the workers who do the physical labour that produces the wealth allocated only enough resources to maintain life at subsistence level.
  
In the scenarios the researchers studied, the “elites” were the last to feel the effects of the collapse, which, at first, were only apparent to those beneath them on the social ladder.

The wealth of the Elite means that they are protected from the worst effects of the collapse until much later than the Commoners, allowing them to continue  with business as usual despite the impending catastrophe. The same mechanism, they argue, could explain how historical collapses were allowed to occur by elites who appear to be oblivious to the coming catastrophy. 

As Marie Antoinette is said to have remarked when told the peasants were rioting because they had no bread, "Well, let them eat cake!"

For an increasing number, there is neither bread nor cake, nor hope.

Read the entire article at The Guardian.

A Wedding Day

This month's KIVA loan goes to Manushak, who is in her late 40's.  This is the second time we have loaned money to Manushak. She paid the first loan back in full and on time and we are happy to make this second loan for a very special reason.

Manushak is a widow who was left with three children to raise alone. She has no higher education and over the years she has worked very hard to give her children a decent life, doing all kinds of work. She worked in a factory and in a kindergarten. For several years she sold clothing from a booth in the market. Now she has her own small business selling fruit and vegetables at the city wholesale market.

Manushak’s daughter is now married and lives with her husband. Her younger son is a student. Her elder son helps Manushak selling fruits and vegetables in the Kapan market. He also financially supports his mother and younger brother by using his car to provide taxi service.

Manushak is very proud of her son. He has grown up to be a very kind, decent and solicitous person, and he feels a great responsibility for providing his mother with good living conditions. Manushak asked for a loan of of about $1,000 in order to pay for her son’s wedding reception, and to buy gifts for him and his pretty bride. She wants to make their wedding day memorable and wonderful.

We are proud to help this loving mother provide a happy day for her family.

Free from Suffering

There are days when the world's pain is almost too much to bear. The news this past week has been horrific, and promises to become even worse.

In all of these terrible situations there are good people, people motivated by love, working quietly behind the scenes to ease suffering as best they can but we ask ourselves again and again, "Why do we hate each other so much?"

What is it in us which can so easily be manipulated to dislike, mistrust and despise each other? This isn't just a problem at the national and political levels. I've had ample opportunity in the last year to see how small, initially compatible groups of five or six people, working on a common goal, can be twisted into a ball of razor wire by one person determined to cause chaos, who does not mind sinking to lying and deceit to achieve their goal.  

Power, or even the illusion of power, is addictive. Lots of people get a dose of crazy when they are given power, even in a relatively small group. Without an extremely skillful leader discussions soon degenerate into power struggles which have no relevance to the issues, especially when you have a person who constantly stirs the pot of controversy.

Having served on two boards of directors in the past several years I have deep compassion for politicians and diplomats who strive to keep the peace when faced with power-crazed ego-maniacal autocrats, dictators, tryants and warring tribal leaders.

Which is why I found the following hymn of compassion from Lewis Richmond's book, Aging as a Spiritual Practice so very useful.

May I be filled with loving kindness
May I be free from suffering
May I be happy and at peace

May we be filled with loving kindness
May we be free from suffering
May we be happy and at peace

May all beings be filled with loving kindness
May all beings be free from suffering
May all beings be happy and at peace

Of course we know that we ourselves, the "we" of our families, and all beings are not filled with loving kindness, nor are they free from suffering, happy and at peace.

But this is what we long for, for ourselves, and everyone, even those who sow discord. Acts of cruelty and hate do not bring peace, but deeper suffering to those who inflict them. Even a "victory" won by violence brings guilt to the perpetrator. Guilt may be hidden under bravado, but the pain it causes is still there.  

And this is my prayer for all, from the Taliban strapping on a belt of explosives to the board member who sows discord and mistrust to further a personal agenda.

May we all be filled with loving kindness
May we all be free from suffering
May we all be happy and at peace

Because if we were - truly - how could we hate?

Wrestling with fear and anger

The Buddhist monk Thanissaro Bhikkhu writes, “The Pali word for forgiveness — khama — also means ‘the Earth.’ A mind like the Earth is nonreactive and unperturbed. When you forgive me for harming you, you decide not to retaliate, to seek no revenge.

You don’t have to like me. You simply unburden yourself of the weight of resentment and cut the cycle of retribution that would otherwise keep us ensnarled in an ugly samsaric wrestling match. This is a gift you can give us both, totally on your own, without my having to know or understand what you’ve done.”

This is a hard concept for Westerners to wrap their heads around. We've been brought up to believe that justice is only served when you can exact "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth".

Even if we don't take this concept literally we have the cockeyed notion that by staying angry with someone who has angered or wronged us we exact some cosmic payment from them, when it's exactly the opposite. Our anger and bitterness exact a toll on us, on our level of satisfaction with life, and even with our health.

We've all met people who can't let go of a grudge, a slight, an exchange of heated words. Years later they are still fuming as actively as they were five minutes after the incident happened. They are never free, they constantly rehearse all the ills done them over the years.

I experience this to some extent myself, and have to watch myself when I start leaning in that direction. Because my two primary genetic illnesses are "invisible" without careful examination, I've been on the receiving end of some pretty vicious remarks from physicians who were not well-informed on my disorders.

Because of many negative experiences I now have a real reluctance to go see the doctor, even when I need to do so. I keep thinking about those people who were cruel to me, and I wrestle with fear and anger over the years when I had no treatment, and doctors who called me a sympathy seeker, or a faker. But I'm working on it.

What a relief it is to be able to lay that burden aside. It doesn't mean I believe that what these people did was right, or that I do not still feel hurt when I think of their cruelty. It's just that when I do think of those times I visualize those feelings of resentment and bitterness as anchors chains I'm dragging behind me with each step and I make a conscious decision to let go of the chains of and allow them to drift away, carrying their emotional baggage with them.

I wasn't to blame for what happened, but the past is gone, and it can't be changed. I am now setting myself free from their guilt. This is a gift I'm giving myself.

Adventures in Genealogy - Autosomal DNA

Most family trees have a few nuts

Several companies now offer Autosomal DNA tests for genealogical purposes. An Autosomal DNA tests looks at the ancestral DNA of both parents of the person being tested. This means you see both Mama and Daddy's parents, grandparents and those before them, and also the descendants of the great-great-great grandparent, etc.

So you don't see only a straight line of descent, but you also may have matches with people who descend from your 3rd great-grandmother's sister, whose married name you do not know, and whose 4th great-grand daughter's married name you do not know.  

Autosomal DNA is the long-time genealogist's dream come true, if you know how to use it.  Personally I can't rave about it enough. It's allowed me to identify the parentage of my 3rd great-grandfather George Perkins, confirm a long string of ancestors I'd done the paperwork for, confirmed that I am 1/10th Native American, and that ancestry is shared between three different grandparents. It's allowed me to confirm that my 3rd great-grandfather Levin Clark was Nanticoke Delaware, as we believed all along. I've learned that Winston Churchill was my 10th cousin as was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Now, along with my pirate Haymans I have a 9th or 10th great-grandmother who was convicted as a witch during the Salem witch hysteria. And at some point in Colonial America I have a set of great-grandparents, one of whom was Native and the other African, parents from South Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa. One of my next quests is to locate that couple if possible.   

Unfortunately most of the people I've encountered haven't a clue how to use Autosomal DNA. Those who have done genealogy a long time usually grasp the concept more quickly, but those who are just beginning and thought a DNA test would provide an easy trip to the genealogical heaven of royal ancestry (or whatever their goal) is have learned:

1) that autosomal DNA does not come with surnames attached.

2) the family tree is not built by the test.

3) that they should pray they have an avid genealogist in the family who has a well-researched and documented family tree, and that they can be induced to share it.

4) that it takes hard work and a good deal of time to find the match between two persons or families who are more than two generations apart.

5)  that there very well may be a "surprise" or two  (i.e. illegitimate child, adoption, or a racial heritage one did not expect) in one's tree. 

So how do you start if you have tested and don't know where to go next?

1) Register with Gedmatch and upload your raw data. You'll be given a kit number when you register. Write it down.

2) Build a spreadsheet. This can be a table in a txt document or any spreadsheet program. Unless you organize your matches and keep track of them you'll soon be drowning in a sea of jumbled information.

Here are the headings I use on my spreadsheet:

chr #  beg  end cM  snps  GM#  OCM  Name  Notes

chr# is the chromosome number the match is found on. Your matches should be put on in order beginning with chromosome 1.

The "beg" and "end" are where the matching segment begins on the chromosome and where it ends. These should placed on the sheet in order from the lowest number of beginning segment to higher, so on chromosome 1 my first match is at 2,492,640 and ends at 247,174,776. The next match starts at 3,669,635 and ends at 7,490,355. The third begins at 4,058,815 and ends at 11,694,927. These are always ordered by the position of the beginning segment.

If your relationship is a close one you will probably share segment matches on more than one chromosome so OCM stands for "Other Chromosome Match". I share segment matches on seven or eight chromosomes with several close cousins. The OCM column is how you keep track of that.  

In the SNPs column record the number of Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (single units of DNA) you share. Under 500 is insignificant, unless you know the person is related. Since SNPs are shuffled with every generation you lose the larger segments in a roughly calculable order.

You share about 50% of your SNPs with each parent, 25% with each grandparent, 12.5% with each great-grandparent. In theory by the time you are back to your 3rd great-grandparent you expect to see only about 1.5% of their DNA in an unrecombined state and this may be too small for the tests to pick out. In practice this does not always work out. Some DNA segments seem to stick together for a longer period of time. I have a robust match with a man who shares a set of 8th great-grandparents in Bath Somerset UK in the mid 1600s. Despite intense searching we can't find any other shared ancestry. Our 7th great-grandparents were a pair of brothers.

On the other hand I have a very small match with a 2nd cousin I know well, whose great-grandmother was the younger sister of my grandfather. I do not match her brother at all, though my son does.

On the spreadsheet GM# stands for GedMatch number. GedMatch is so useful that I can honestly say I'd not have accomplished much of anything without it. For one thing anyone who has tested with any of the companies that do autosomal testing can upload their raw data to GedMatch which gives you a pool of several million people. GedMatch generates a fresh list of who you match every time you log on, showing you where you match them, who *both* of you match (this is called triangulation), how many generations apart you are, and about two dozen different utilities unavailable elsewhere. These are all free of charge. The site is run by volunteers, but be fair. When you sign up donate a few dollars to cover the costs of running the servers. I appreciate their services so much I donate to them on a quarterly basis.

The Name column should be self-explanatory, this is the name and e-mail address of your match.

Notes - here's where I put the relationship once I have worked it out. Usually relationship and last common ancestor(s).

Keep in mind that a match from a couple (say gg-grandparents George and Betsy) could be from either (or both) of them. To separate out whether the segment came from George or Betsy you need to find a descendant of George's parents or sibling, who was not married to a relative of Betsy's. For example when I finally confirmed the parents of my very elusive 3rd great-grandfather, George Perkins, it was through DNA matches.

First I matched segments with descendants of two men who were documented in census records and his will as sons of Jacob Perkins and wife Elizabeth Cole Perkins. Then I was able to identify which DNA belonged to Perkins by matching segments with a descendant of Jacob's great-grandfather, Isaac Perkins who had no Cole ancestry, and I identified the Cole ancestry in the same way, by matching segments with a Cole relative of Betsy's who had no Perkins ancestry. (It probably goes without saying that I really love analyzing data.) 

The spreadsheet will be "thinly populated" to start with, but as you begin to identify matches it becomes clear that people who match the same segments as your "Smith" cousins A and B are going to match the Smiths or one of their ancestors. It becomes a process of you and your match comparing trees for common ancestors.

As a rule I won't work with someone who is unwilling to meet me halfway and do their share of the research. Nor will I play 20 questions with someone who won't give me a basic dropline or is unwilling to let me see their family tree. Here's an example:

Background: From sharing genomes months ago and GedMatch I know this person's ancestry lies within my father's maternal line. Our exchange went like this:

Them: Can we share genomes?

Me: We shared our genome information months ago. We match on Chromosome 17, these segments xxxxx - xxxxx. That segment matches my father's maternal line. Are any of the following surnames familiar to you? [list of surnames]

Them: I have a Kelly from Ireland. You have a Kelly on your profile. Was your Kelly Irish?

Me: I have only one Kelly in my tree. She was born in Dorset UK in 1747. I recently found their marriage certificate and learned she was the 2nd wife of my 4th great-grandfather. They were in their 60s when they married and had no children. So she couldn't be our match.

Did your ancestors live in any of these places? [I listed the places my father's maternal family lived (all in southern states) including Carroll County Arkansas.]

Them: Were your Carroll ancestors Irish? I have Irish Carrolls.

Me: I have no Carroll ancestors, that was a location, Carroll County Arkansas. Do you have a dropline or family tree I could look at?

Them: I have a tree on Ancestry.com. It's private. You can't see it.

Me: I'm sorry I can't be of any more help.
--

I was so frustrated by this I got up and vacuumed my floors. So it's all good. I was going to try to mop too but no one else asked me another sufficiently exasperating question, and I ran out of energy before I got to the mop bucket. Now I have to sweep again before I can mop since the "enfant terrible" has, as usual, rolled in the litterbox and carried clay litter everywhere. I don't need to do his tree to know he's got a bit of the Devil in him. 

But, if you are interested in learning how to do genomic "mapping" I'm happy to answer questions. Please feel free.

February's KIVA Loan

Our KIVA loan this month goes to Sharifa, a 34 year-old married woman with four children. She and her family live in a sector in Jordan called Wihdat. Several years ago her husband was called to serve in the Jordanian military, which put a great financial pressure on the family.

Sharifa decided to try and help solve the financial crisis she and her husband were facing by opening her own business. She decided to start a small food market in front of her house, where she now has been selling food products for two years.

She now needs to buy a larger quantity and variety of products to expand her business and earn more profit in order to improve the family's living conditions and to provide her children with a good education. But she didn't have enough money to expand her business, so she has applied for a loan from Jordan's National Microfinance Bank, which is funded by KIVA.

Jordan is a small country located in the heart of the Middle East’s Levant region. Regional instability has caused Jordan to be excluded from global investments for decades. Additionally, a lack of natural resources—including water and energy—places tremendous strain on the Jordanian economy, over 80% of which consists of small one and two person businesses, largely in the service industry. Despite their importance in the economy, many of these businesses are excluded from the banking sector because of their size.

Microfinance institutions like National Microfinance Bank offer their clients an opportunity to enhance and expand their businesses. NMB also offers its services to other underprivileged peoples in Jordan, providing them with loans to pursue educational goals and improve their homes and livelihoods.

We are so fortunate to be able to help hardworking mothers and fathers provide for their children. Please consider becoming a KIVA partner!