Packing up

As most of you know by now, Agnes and I are in the final stages of preparing for three months in Carlsbad, New Mexico. We intend to spend a few days at the Temple Gardens Spa in Moose Jaw with Cynthia and James before driving for three days and arriving in Carlsbad on New Year’s Eve. While we’re away, a friend of friends will be sitting our house and cat.

Primarily, we’re going to New Mexico for a long vacation, although we have enrolled in the Service Opportunities for Older People program and will be doing some volunteer work while there. What that will be will be determined when we get there.

I’m also looking forward to spending three months in “AMERICA.” We talk about the USA a lot in Canada, and we have numerous stereotypical images in our minds when American subjects come up, and I’d like to dispel some of those. My suspicion is that they’re just as faulty as American assumptions about us. We’ll be worshipping with the Carlsbad Mennonite Church while there (at least that’s our intention) and so would hope also to learn something about what it means to be an Anabaptist in a nation at war in Iraq. (Come to think of it, Canada is at war in Afghanistan; what’s it like to be a Mennonite in Canada living with that fact?)

I just read a book to which I was prompted by the death of Augusto Pinochet. You can find a review I wrote at http://ca.blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-l0ypcCo2fql7qv1hXvc-?cq=1. It was worth reading, especially if you are interested in human rights issues and/or Latin American politics.