"Where the tree tops glisten... and folks, dressed up like eskimos"

Ah, so this is what a teacher's day off feels like! Pretty nice indeed! Well, as you've guessed the David School is closed today, the 12th of December, due to what the local news crews are calling "extreme weather". Heck, the public schools canceled yesterday when the first snowflakes began to fall. Yet there was little to show for it this morning as little of that snow accumulated. It turns out that the concern was focused on the freezing rain as a few years prior a school bus en' route over ice covered roads slipped over the side of a mountain sending it's valuable passengers to an unthinkably early demise. Since then schools on this side of the state have been hyper conservative in canceling classes.

Although we were very fortunate to avoid such a catastrophic event this year, we have had our share of accidents. In early October a car containing several of our seniors collided with a Floyd County school bus on their way to the school. Although no one was seriously injured, it proved to be a taste of things to come. Living on a road frequented at all hours by coal trucks weighing in at over 51 tons, Newton's law of inertia, coupled with the fact that drivers are paid by the load have proven to be a nasty mix as numerous trucks have flipped over bends in the road famous enough to be given names such as Dead Man's Corner. Only about a week ago I was rounding this same turn after a late afternoon house grocery run to see the hazard lights of two vehicles flashing. As I approached, I saw a large pickup truck flipped on it's side in a deep ditch between the road and mountain side. It was a fortunate situation as the other side of the road was a 40-50 foot drop. Ironically two of the trucks passengers were my students at the David School and there mother had been driving. After assessing the requisite bumps and bruises inflicted by the wreck, I provided a ride home after the tow truck was called. It was a lucky break for my students as I hear about far worse accidents on the local radio station each morning. Only last Tuesday night I was returning home from the college town of Pikeville, about a 40 min drive, to encounter a traffic jam on Hwy 23. As the highway was my only way back home through the mountains I found myself at the mercy of those in front of me. I only later found out that what I experienced as an annoying three hour delay was caused by a three car pileup that resulted in the death of two men in their 40s and a 7 year old boy. Four others were injured in the crash which was caused by an SUV that crossed to median hitting an oncoming truck. The other car was damaged by debris. And finally in the week leading up to Thanksgiving two of my close friends from CAP were hit by a drunk driver as they returned from work. The accident totalled both pickup trucks, but both girls were miraculously saved from serious injury. Hearing about the incident on Thanksgiving definitely gave me much to be thankful for!!!


Until I write again, thank you for keeping up with me on my Kentucky adventure and God Bless all of you this Christmas season!!!

Mike

WOW!! It has been way too long since I've last posted on this blog! This fact was recently expressed to me by one of my aunts back in Wisconsin last week and so I feel it's high time I dish out some info on my ongoing work in Kentucky.

Since my last post, the trees on the mountains around my home have fallen and the brilliant reds, oranges, and yellows of October have given way to the grey and brown hillsides of December. Uncharacteristic lake effect weather all the way from Lakes Erie and Huron have given us several early season snows and even caused a few 2 hour school delays (which are even more fun for teachers!). Weather typically craps out in late January into February I'm told, so it's safe to say that a fair number of the locals are freaking out at the prospect of "real" winter weather for a change.

Looking back over the last month and a half, several interesting developments warrant description. First would be "Fright Night", the school's Halloween fundraiser that brought in several hundred brave souls to our hollow. They were treated to a trip through a series of spooky themed classrooms modeled after various horror films including Friday the 13th and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. As the week leading up to fright night involved a group of college students from Notre Dame University staying with us and helping out at the school, it was the perfect ending to an exciting week to have their involvement in the night's festivities. My room was in close competition for top honors and involved the science room being converted into the stage for a production similar to the movie Hostel including a reception desk, three creepy hallways, a hidden sound booth, and an elaborately built operating/torture "suite". In all we had 10-12 folks staffing the room complete with a realistic kidney removal, live brain lobotomy, and numerous power tools, blood pumps, screams, and a surgeon in a trap-door jumping out to select his next victim. All this from someone who hates haunted houses!

Towards the end of October I was treated to a visit from my parents as they brought down a car to replace my father's Suburban which I had originally brought down in August. Coupled with dropping gas prices, the cars gas mileage meant that I could finally afford to drive around here! Although our visit was short, my parents were able to meet the staff and some of my CAP (Christian Appalachian Project) friends as well as explore the area a bit. We even went as far as the Virginia border to do some hiking at the Breaks Interstate Park, once dubbed 'the Grand Canyon of the Southeast'. Although my parents only stayed a couple of days, I was fortunate to make the long drive back to Wisco last week for Thanksgiving and was able to see a great number of my friends and family. The only downside was a short-lived cold that I had from Tuesday through Thursday, but fortunately I was feeling OK to drive up and back.

As our school ends for the year on the 17th, I look forward to spending more time during the holidays with friends and family in the days to come! It is interesting to reflect on the changes that have occured within me and how I view the world and what I feel is actually of importance or just unimportant. The prospect of living on a small stipend in a foreign place was once daunting, but now I find myself living very comfortably with a tremendously supportive group of friends. On my recent trip home for Thanksgiving I was asked more then once about how things were for me and those I serve down here and I found the answer a difficult, if not impossible task. I tried, mind you, to put into words the impoverishment, hardships, and lack of opportunities present in this often overlooked region of our nation, and failed. I found myself describing the statistics, and quite frankly, numbers fail to express the true nature of the conditions here. Donations to the school itself were so low in the last month that our stipend was paid late and there was talk among some of a possible closure. Yes, we often hear about villages in Africa of South America where large numbers of people are uneducated, or don't have reliable sources of drinking water, but it seems that when stories of these things occurring in the U.S. reach those Americans living outside of Appalachia, we push the reality of the situation away, perhaps out of our own ignorance, apathy, or some kind of unconscious national pride that wants to hold to a belief that we are a global super power that doesn't really have such gaping inequalities in how our fellow citizens live. On my trip home I spoke to many about my time in Kentucky, but only one or two of the dozens I spoke to were concerned enough to ask what they could do to help. Now that number is again probably due to my inability to express the need in the area, but in this age of uncertain economic times, it seems sad that those who have been living in a recession since the Great Depression are those that are now more then ever so easy to forget.

Signing out. God Bless You!

Mike