Work, work work

Here's what we did yeaterday: Agnes spent about six hours in Elena Yoder's office reorganizing her professional library. Elena is a spiritual counsellor at the VistaCare Hospice, a place that provides services to the terminally ill and their families. I worked in a community kitchen preparing a meal (actually, I made up 90 cups of cottage cheeze and fruit), serving it to about 90 homeless and disadvantaged, swept and mopped the dining room. I helped take down Christmas tree decorations for VistaCare from a tree out on the Pecos riverbank and in the late afternoon, Rudy and Bruno Friesen and I met with people from Habitat for Humanity to plan for Wednesdays when I and they will be working on a house in progress, siding it, putting on soffits and some inside work. Agnes and I will also be working at a nursing home in the activities area and I will be visiting a retired former pastor who lives there on a weekly basis. We will also work some days in a place similar to Valley Action Abilities in Rosthern and a food bank.
We had a great time last night when we first had a group supper at the place where the Friesens are staying and then went to a church member's place to see the movie, An Inconvenient Truth, in which Al Gore makes the case for action on global warming. The conversation after - about the failures of the Bush administration, the state of the ecology of NM and so on - was exhilarating. We've met so many great people here already. It's been a treat.
The weather yesterday: Sunny and 73 degrees F (22C). Light breeze. Eat your hearts out, snow shovellers.
New Mexico is the poorest sister in the confederation of the United States . . . except for Alabama. There are important issues here not totally dissimilar from those in Saskatchewan. The population is stable - or somewhat declining - at one million; in order to generate economic activity, they have welcomed the project to bury nuclear waste in Eddy County and after huge demonstrations, the military base at Clovis was kept from closing. NM faces a constant water shortage. Our hosts last night have lived in Montana, Wyoming and now NM, and we compared notes on out repective "homelands." We concluded that the great plains are a region far more than the American midwest or the Canadian prairie provinces are. That whole region east of the rockies is facing economic challenges that are similar and we could certainly learn from one another.
I'm bound to my one-hour time on the computer here at the Carlsbad Library and I'm almost out. My cell phone seems to be working here if you need to call us on an urgent matter, and we are on line pretty much every day. Our mailing address is G. Epp, 4324 Taos, Carlsbad, NM, 88220.