Trouble in the Night
Other areas in the U.S. got hit much worse than Dayton Mountain, but it was still a shock to see the ruin caused by one (?) tornado. We also got more rain than usual - nine inches of it in one day.
Instead of Laurelbrook's Spring Picnic at Falls Creek Falls State Park, all the students and many of the staff members went to the New Harmony Road area to see what could be done to help the folks out there.
I didn't go to the worse section as it turns out, but that section was bad enough.
- A little Church of Christ church building (22 members in the church) had part of the roof and part of its siding blown off, a pew thrown against another pew, half the ceiling missing, windows blown out, and guttering and drinking fountain blown towards the parking lot.
- Just down the road from this church, a forest of trees had been blown over on the road, and power and phone lines snaked across the road.
- Almost directly across from the church, a relatively small house had its roof and all ceiling trusses completely removed. Most of these people's possessions had been violently thrown against a farm fence nearby.
- In a creek area, all of the trees for quite a distance had had their tops removed about 30 feet from the ground. The tops had been twisted off, and the trunks looked like so many pegs in a pegboard.
- A 100-year old barn stood across the fields with nearly half its roof off and the boards holding up the sheet metal roof exposed to the weather.
- A farm lane near the demolished house was blocked by a huge tree. The house nearby was missing a good part of the roof.
Most of the morning I spent directing traffic so that Laurelbrook's backhoe could clear trees and other debris off the main state rural road. About the time we were nearly finished with the forest of trees on the road, a state roads official turned up with a huge piece of equipment and finished the job.
I finished, for now, my part in the cleanup at noon that Thursday, but the images remain in my memory.
Labels: tornado
A Quick Look
While the snow swirls around outside, perhaps it is time to reflect on what has taken place so far this semester at Laurelbrook. We lost a couple of students this semester due to health problems, and two more at least are on academic probation, but the academy has retained the majority of its students for the first time in years - a great accomplishment.
Moves are being made to contain heating costs. A different (and bigger) furnace at the greenhouses will have the capacity to heat the elementary school and the apartments above it. Also there will be one (maybe two) wood furnaces installed near the nursing home so that facility will be heated by wood, too. This will save tremendously on the gas bills.
On the school web site, I decided to try something new. On dropbox.com, I put the audio files from Alistair Huong's meetings last weekend and linked them to the news folder on the school website. Already the boys' dorm has been able to let boys who missed the meetings due to vocational training listen and gain from Alistair's presentations. In the past few weeks, I digitalized the cassette contain E. A. Sutherland's 1946 Loma Linda talk. With all these running, it will be interesting to see how many people actually listen to them.
I have to go take pictures of classes since I'm inside due to the snow (my truck doesn't operate well in this white stuff).
Labels: school
Agriculture
Today we had another sermon by Mr. Bob (i.e. Robert D. Zollinger) on the importance of agriculture. And it is important, but not so important that everyone must worship at an altar dedicated to the farm manager. As Ruth B. Zollinger mentioned this morning during her Sabbath School program, chemicals are destroying our way of life, including our food supplies.
What are this discussion about "true" education comes down to is simply this - balance! There must be no part of the program allowed to trump another. Battle Creek College was entirely dedicated to academic education and all brain work so Mrs. White had to say something very strongly about the importance of agriculture to make it stick with the people in charge of that college. What she recognized was a principle that even our public high schools are beginning to realize - if your education includes a component of useful labor plus academics and values courses, you are on your way to achieving a balanced student lifestyle (there was an entire newsletter from Edutopia devoted to this subject just this week).
As even public schools are beginning to realize, knowledge of how to grow your own food is important. There is something about working with the soil that does transform a person. But to make that pursuit an all in all and put down everything else is not called for.
Also it has always been interesting to me that the foods grown are many times those the leader likes. By extension, everyone else must like them, too. It doesn't work that way, however. One time I threw out about 3/4s of a ton of squash because someone in authority loved that food and made sure it was grown. Everyone else didn't so the squash languished in the freezer until it got freezer burn. The other day I threw out quite a bit of okra for the same reason - although we have top-notch cooks, students and staff members (and perhaps their systems) are not used to eating this particular food. Yet we grow it and serve it - and throw it away!
Then too, why should flowers be the object of hours of attention by retired people and students they have assigned to them? Flowers look nice, and they certainly give a person plenty of opportunity to work with the soil. But are flowers what Mrs. White was discussing when she stressed the importance of learning agriculture techniques? I don't think so.
It all comes back to educational balance and common sense. Just because I think something doesn't make it truth. Just because I like something doesn't mean that it is the only thing to do. The Lord wants us to stay with the principles of balanced education and not run after everything we think we should do.
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Edutopia, by the way, is a publication by the George Lucas Foundation, which is devoted to improving the public school system.
Labels: agriculture
Update September 20, 2010
We are in the midst of our school's Week of Prayer with Pastor London Lee from Ohio. He seems to be relating well to the students although there hasn't been, as far as I could see, much private interaction between him and any one student.
It's been an interesting year thus far with more students, less stacks of rules, and much more wear and tear on the principal and her husband. Her husband Charles seems to be living with his dislocated thumb and sprained ankle from the Fall Picnic at Falls Creek Falls State Park. A lot of the students seem to be a little resistant to studying, but that will probably change when the grades for various periods start coming out and parents get wind of their attitudes.
The weather is still hot without very little moisture.
A New School Year
The world has been in upheaval for quite a few months now since the banks started to tremble and fall so I guess it's normal for a small boarding high school to feel the shocks, too.
The real campus shocks started in June with the resignation of the president / high school principal. Next came the leave-taking of the chairman of the board. Then - more recently - the vice-president for operations, decided to leave in December. Among all these interesting events has been the slow departure of the business manager / treasurer who is ready for full and complete retirement. With all the changes, about twenty high school students are enrolled, down from about 45 the previous year. About half of these are children of staff members working for the place.
The lawsuit against the school by the U.S. Department of Labor claiming that the school wasn't a school but a money-making scam is continuing. The U.S. district court judge who originally tried the case frankly told the esteemed and thoroughly unhonorable department that it hadn't read its dictionaries too well. The school was, well, a school. But the department thought it had a terrific case that there was a cache of gold buried under the high school classroom building from working (not training) all those high school students so it elected to take the case to an appeals court.
So now what? To begin with, the institution does have a new head, a 1985 graduate who has been running a construction business for years. He's been picking up the pieces and trying to make some sense of the way the place has operated. To help him, he has two former presidents and one former board chairman (only two people, not three) living on the property he can consult. The high school section of the program has an acting assistant principal actually running the show while the acting principal works at his regular job at an accreditating agency and comes in now and then.
Unbelievably, things are knitting themselves back together - at least to human eyes. But it's really the Lord at work. Without Him, the past three months would have been the complete and total end of the place!
Labels: upheaval
The Aftermath and Dad's Estate
As I mentioned before, I went to a church service where I was right next to the woman whose mistake had a few weeks before injuried my dad so severely that he died a little over two weeks later. She was living in an assisted living facility whose manager I knew personally - he wanted to introduce me to her.
As politely as I could under the circumstances, I told him "no", that I didn't bear any grudge over Dad's death, but I wasn't ready to move on quite that quickly. I haven't seen her since.
Then the fun began. As per instructions from the church organization that had had the will made out, I went to the probate court to have it registered, only to find that if Dad owned any real estate at all his estate had to go through the probate court. That meant a lawyer, court fees, and all the rest of it.
It took us two months to get an appointment with a lawyer. Then the court clerk told the lawyer that since it was a "foreign" will (i.e. made out in Georgia to Tennessee specs) she (the lawyer) would have to file a document for the court to accept the will. It took the court chancellor (three months later) telling the clerk to file the will for this functionary to do what he was asked to do. As I said to the lawyer's clerk, I thought this was the UNITED States of America.
Now two and a half years later we are just about ready to get the chancellor's signature on the documents ending the estate. Considering that Tennessee and Georgia are now having words over water, I guess it is time to get this estate wound up before the argument creates more problems. I will be glad to have this behind me.
Labels: dad, death
Oh Death, Where Is Thy Victory?
I never met the elderly lady who took two hours of my day today. She lived alone in a small trailer set in a small yard in an older section of town at the foot of our mountain. Her trailer was heated by a small wood stove. Her husband is in a nursing home where she probably should have been, too. In the front yard, an old Ford pickup was parked at an angle with hay in the front seat and spilling out the slightly opened door to the ground. Bushes crowded close in around the walls of the old trailer so thick it was hard to walk around the trailer.
Now I never will meet her, for you see she burned to death this morning, and there was nothing I could do to help her, nothing that I or any one of the dozens of firefighters and crews who responded to the scene could do. Death apparently came suddenly before the fire actually started burning her body so the Lord apparently allowed her to mercifully die before the fire touched her.
There were more high-ranking police and fire officers than I have seen in quite a while. Her death brought her more attention than she probably received in her lifetime.
Was she ready for her life to be taken? I certainly hope so - and I hope we are, too.
