I Was Right- The First Time

Well, that couple is no longer interested in our house, so we've all relaxed a little, and stopped packing. Whew. We'll probably end up unpacking what we've packed so we can keep using it.

Last week we lost electricity for two days because of a bad early-spring slush storm that knocked down quite a few power lines. Being without power is mildly annoying to me because it is too much like camping, which I detest. Thankfully, the power came on just in time for Dad's birthday dinner, though it didn't come on soon enough so I still had to make dinner on the wood stove.

Also last week- my first trip to the Capitol to volunteer for my favorite State Senator. I only took one wrong turn on my way there, but even that made me all flustered. I spent the day writing letters of response to constituents. It was enjoyable, and I'm looking forward to going back next week.

Tonight we are expecting our grandparents back from their winter home of Texas, attending a Biblestudy, and picking up our co-op health food order, while Dad is going to a Tea party and Jen is in Lincoln. I'm also cutting out some skirts for Jen's ballet students for her upcoming recital, which she is stressed about. Life seems so much busier now that spring has begun... if only I had some money to pay for all those upcoming events.

My life is booked.

After a fairly normal and slightly boring winter as I get into spring, it seems there are no free days left on the calendar. Why? Well, it seems that when people come to look at our house, they come in batches. We had a lady surprise us yesterday when she called and said, I'm two minutes away, what's your address? I'm coming to see the house!

Thankfully the house was fairly clean, so we only had to semi-frantically clean instead of full-out-panic frantically clean. A couple(unmarried, no children) is coming to see the house tomorrow. They say they really love it(from the pictures) but I'm thinking once they see it, they'll realize it's not their type. Our house is a old family house that lacks some of the comforts that many Americans are used to, like heating and air conditioning.

Besides that, a cold is going around and Jen and I are on the campaign trail again. This week is also the beginning of a really exciting volunteer job for Jen and I, that I will have to tell you about later.

New Friends

So the sixteen foreign students came to our town last week, and all lived to tell the tale. No one got left behind, or run over by machines at CVA, or eaten alive by chickens at the farm, or died of eating cafeteria food at the school, or were mortally offended by their host families. Whew. I was so nervous all day Wednesday that I got a headache, but once the students arrived I just had to go with the flow. Thursday was interesting. Our day started at the PUBLIC SCHOOL, which I had only been in a handful of times, and only once for academic reasons(I took the PSAT there). The students were divided up and given tours of the school, stopping every now and then to talk to students in class, and then we sat in on different classes. Unfortunately, the class I sat in on was the Algebra class for seniors. I've been out of high school three years now and I have forgotten most of the Saxon Algebra I learned, so I didn't get much out of that experience. We had lunch at the SCHOOL CAFETERIA, which was also a first for me.

After lunch we drove ON A SCHOOL BUS to the new Central Valley Ag building outside of town. It is an amazing, state-of-the-art facility that would be worth touring on a more in-depth level, and that's something coming from me because I'm not all that interested in farming. But by that point the girls were getting tired and bored and all the students stopped so often to take pictures that it took some effort to get everyone from point A to point B. Especially since I am not a very naturally authoritative person, and especially with my peers.

Next we visited a small farm, and by that point both guys and girls were tired and bored, and from there we went to main street, which I probably should have just skipped since in the end we were late at the meeting place.

It was a stretching experience, and I won't be volunteering to do it again anytime soon! It was stressful to find host families, it was stressful to be totally in charge of sixteen college students(really nice kids, it wasn't their fault) for almost two days, and it was kind of(maybe) a little stressful to have Dad as a boss(After the first two weeks of calling people about hosting and getting only refusals, the pressure started building)??

People in town know I was home schooled, and they know I am living at home and not going to college, so there are stereotypes to fight and I wanted to prove my responsibility and maturity. Even though people may think I look 12 or 16 (Come on, people, do I really look like I'm 12? Please!), I really am 21. Anyway, I probably didn't prove anything besides I can get stressed easily, I'm not used to a school setting, and I can't effectively herd college students, but I hope to some people I was a witness for Christianity. That would be a better goal than proving my age.

Americans can be very selfish

I feel like I've called half the town this past week to find host families for a group of students coming to visit. 16 college-age students from Oman, Yemen, and the United Arab Emirates are coming to stay in our small town for two days to learn about rural Nebraska living, and I volunteered to organize their time here. I knew of enough people interested in hosting that I thought it wouldn't be hard to find eight host families to take two students for only two nights... but it turns out all our usual hosts were busy! And then I got stressed out and started desperately calling everyone I knew of that wasn't a wierdo, and still all I got were refusals, and most of them were for the wrong reasons. I'm sorry to say I got kind of annoyed with that. Why aren't Americans more hospitable? If you are a Christian, it should not be a strange or weirdly inappropriate thing to invite people into your home, to serve them, to make new friends. It is perfectly ok to have your children give up their beds for a night or two so guests can be comfortable. It would be appropriate to cancel your card party or come home early from work to minister to these young Muslims from another country. How many Nebraskans get the chance to meet a man from Oman, or a young lady from the UAE? What a chance to witness this will be, for those who are selfless enough to accept it.

So there's my rant for the week. I still have to find one more host family, really fast, because one of the families got sick. And that IS a good reason not to have guests!

A Patriot and a Lady

Eliza Lucas Pinckney:
This well-educated, capable, and courageous lady took over responsibility for her father's three South Carolina plantations while he was away fighting a war and her mother's health was in decline. A widow when the Revolutionary war began, both her sons fought for Independence.
What a lady!

And what a dress:

The three-piece, gold, silk damask Colonial dress dating from 1750-1780 is made from silk cultivated from silk worms that Eliza Pinckney raised on her South Carolina plantation. She commissioned the dress during a trip to England in the mid-1700s, and it has undergone one or more alterations since it was originally created.

Eliza's story is inspiring and really interesting, and I am hoping to read more about her in the future. I hate using inter-library loan, but in some cases there's no other way to find the books you're looking for.

Change of scenery

I took a quick trip up to Sioux Falls, SD, on Thursday afternoon to babysit overnight for a friend and to get a change of scenery. The trip up here was awful, with extreme winds blowing across the flat SD fields(Who says NE is flat? SD is flatter!), icy highways and blowing snow. I've been told that every time I come to Sioux Falls, it snows. It must be true!

The babysitting itself went fine. The only annoyance was an inside dog, which I am not used to. And I don't like dog hair- I guess I have dog-hair-phobia, which I don't know the scientific name for. I got to take care of a little girl for once, though, and she was really cute until about 2am last night after several hours of her crying hysterically every ten minutes. I would go comfort her, she'd go back to sleep, and ten minutes later we would repeat. Around 5am I just took her into my room. So it's gone well, and even though we got more snow yesterday I am hoping to get home safely in my tired state and go to bed early.

What NOT to do in your free time: watch this movie

I recently saw part of a movie on TV called "Iron Jawed Angels":
"Iron Jawed Angels is a 2004 film about the American women's suffrage movement during the early 1900s. It was filmed in Virginia, produced by HBO Films, and released in 2004."

I have to say that the filming was good and the actors were good, but beyond that not much of the movie was what I would call good. The heroine of the movie, Alice Stokes Paul (1885 –1977) "was an American suffragist leader. Along with Lucy Burns (a close friend) and others, she led a successful campaign for women's suffrage that resulted in the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920."

Born into a Quaker family, Paul was well educated(or some would say, brainwashed), spending almost ten years in different colleges and eventually completing a PhD in political science in 1912. Her dissertation topic was titled "The Legal Position of Women in Pennsylvania".

Some history from Wikipedia:
Paul's "focus was lobbying for a constitutional amendment to secure the right to vote for women. Such an amendment had originally been sought by suffragists in 1878. However, by the early 20th century, attempts to secure a federal amendment had ceased. The focus of the suffrage movement had turned to securing the vote on a state-by-state basis. When their lobbying efforts proved fruitless, Paul and her colleagues formed the National Woman's Party (NWP) in 1916 and began introducing some of the methods used by the suffrage movement in Britain. Tactics included demonstrations, parades, mass meetings, picketing, suffrage watch, fires, and hunger strikes. These actions were accompanied by press coverage and the publication of the weekly Suffragist. In the US presidential election of 1916, Paul and the NWP campaigned against the continuing refusal of President Woodrow Wilson and other incumbent Democrats to support the Suffrage Amendment actively. In January 1917, the NWP staged the first political protest to picket the White House. The picketers, known as "Silent Sentinels," held banners demanding the right to vote. This was an example of a non-violent civil disobedience campaign. In July 1917, picketers were arrested on charges of "obstructing traffic." Many, including Paul, were convicted
and incarcerated at the Occoquan Workhouse. In a protest of the conditions in Occoquan, Paul commenced a hunger strike. This led to her being moved to the prison's psychiatric ward and force-fed raw eggs through a plastic tube. Other women joined the strike which, combined with the continuing demonstrations and attendant press coverage, kept the pressure on the Wilson administration. In January, 1918, he announced that women's suffrage was urgently needed as a "war measure." Wilson strongly urged Congress to pass the legislation. In 1920, after coming down to one vote in the state of Tennessee, the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution secured the vote for women."

The history of Woman's suffrage is something I had not thought about a great deal until now. I tried to find out if the movie was historically accurate or not, and the only thing that seemed to be inaccurate about it was Paul's love-interest, stuck into the movie, for what reason I don't know. You'd think in a feminist movie they could do without men. It disgusts me that the 19th Amendment was brought about through political pressure and antagonistic tactics, not by any reason or logic, and Congress passed the legislation just to get off the hook.

And I do disagree with the idea that women should have the right to vote. When America was founded, though the qualifications for voting differed from state to state, only land-owning male citizens could vote. John Adams was an advocate for responsible voters:

"The same reasoning which will induce you to admit all men who have no property, to vote, with those who have,.... will prove that you ought to admit women and children; for, generally speaking, women and children have as good judgments, and as independent minds, as those men who are wholly destitute of property; these last being at all intents and purposes as much dependent upon others, who will please to feed, clothe, and employ them, as women are upon their husbands, or children on their parents..."

The qualifications for an eligible voter was a State's rights issue, and by 1850 the last state had repealed the land-owners only law. But the point is, our founders didn't want mob rule, or a Democracy, where every individual votes, but a Republic, a country full of little family and state governments.

But which is the Biblical view: for or against votes for women?

"Reformed churches have generally believed that the New Testament presents voting as a leadership/representational issue that was only appropriate for men(1 Cor. 14:34-35; 1 Tim. 2:11-12, 1 Cor. 11:3-16) and this New Testament practice was simply the continuation of the Old Testament practice of voting by heads of households."
(Download the free PDF booklet "Universal Sufferage" here)

I think it hurts the family to undermine our Biblical family leadership- the Dad. And while I did learn quite a bit doing research on this topic, prompted by watching this movie, I think its messege is not worth two hours of anyone's time.