~ 6 pm Pavo Bravo Street-Level (NOT Skyline) Turkey & Chorizo Chili  Accompanied by a 2004 Marques de Caceres Rioja and a 2006 Glen Ellen Chardonnay

~ 7pm Bullfeathers Brie and Tomato Basil Brushcetta and Proscuitto and Cantaloupe Bruschetta Accompanied by a 2006 Veramonte Cabernet Sauvignon

~ 8pm Y-Foo-Cado Salad with a Toasted Cumin and Lime Vinagrette Accompanied by a 2007 Tenuta Ca’Bolani Pinot Grigio and a 2007 Folie a Deux Menage a Trois Red

~9pm Poconos Pesto - Sun-Dried Tomato and Basil Pesto Accompanied by a 2006 Dancing Bull Merlot

~10pm Succulent Salmon with a Honey Soy Glaze and Mango Salsa Accompanied by a 2006 Smoking Loon Syrah and a 2006 Dancing Bull Sauvignon Blanc

~11pm Commander’s Palace Bananas Foster and Brownies Accompanied by a 2004 St. Annaliese Liebfraumilch

Here is a video of Davis with the Bananas Foster on fire.

~12am Champagne Toast

One of the highlights of the night was a video from Erica Murray about how she had dropped out of school and was in California to get a nose job followed by a montage of photoshopped pics of her and Britney Spears both sporting bald heads and causing general havok.  In reality Erica was in San Francisco receiving treatment for leukemia and preparing for a bone marrow transplant.  The rowdy night was interrupted by a poignant moment when, after the video, they brought up a live webcam link to Erica on the big screen and the whole auditorium went nuts. 

I often write about how technology has changed our lives and brought us together in ways unimagineable a few years ago.  Usually these ways are good, heart warming and fun, like tea parties between grandparents, video sharing on youtube or a way to fight flu epidemics.  But technology has also brought us together in times of difficulty.  I know this first hand from the way in which we shared our miscarriage with those of you who read this blog and from the other night when I read of Erica’s passing on her blog.  

Erica was my friend and while we were not super close I am grateful for the time I spent with her.  These past months I have followed her progress through her blog, followed the ups and downs as the bone marrow transplant appeared to be a success and was deeply saddened as she relapsed for a second time.  Given our moving about these past months it would have been so easy to lose contact and hear from a friend months later that she had passed away.  I am grateful that didn’t happen.  

Given that Fletcher is a school of internatianal relations our dispersal after graduation is even more pronounced than your typical graduate school.  My friends that I communicate most with are in Boston, Bosnia, Jerusalem and Hanoi.  But as I read the news of Erica’s passing I was once again grateful both for the strength of that community and for the ways that technology has allowed us to remain close in joys and in sadness.  Every single person’s Facebook status remembered her, her blog was a gathering place for sharing memories and condolences and tonight I was able to read the eulogy given at her funeral.     

Erica will be missed - by me and by the whole Fletcher Mafia around the world.  I am grateful for the life of Erica and for the ways in which I could still be a part of her life and her death even from so great a distance.  I am also grateful for the ways in which technology has allowed me to be a part of your lives and you of mine.  I am grateful for the chance to share in joys and sadnesses whether it be in a pregnancy in Eastern Europe or a miscarriage in Honduras.  For now, I will forever remember Erica’s smiling face on that web cam as she recovered from her “nose job.”

Our week of excitement continued with news the night before Thanksgiving of something more to be thankful for.  We submitted and had our offer accepted on a 3-bedroom starter house in a great old neighborhood in New Lenox, IL.  It’s in a fantastic school district and has a great library and park district with tons of programs for all ages.  We’re two blocks from the church we’ll attend and three blocks from the Old Plank Road Trail, a 20 mile biking, walking and running trail.  

We talked for a long time about what we wanted in a home and our highest priorities included good schools and outdoor playspace.  We chose a house accordingly, deciding in the end (after looking at many, many houses) to trade a bit of indoor space for an excellent school system and a great yard- a trade truly worth making.  It’s a simple little house with three bedrooms, a good kitchen, a combined family room/ dining room, a laundry room, a cute bathroom, an attached garage and a fenced-in backyard.  The house has been updated with a new roof, new furnace, new appliances, new carpet and wood laminate floors.  We have an attached garage which has good storage space and is great for shuffling kids into the car in the winter, and a great yard with lots of trees (as you can see from the photos).  Fortunately I have two sons (and a daughter) to help rake all the leaves from the seven maple trees!  Most importantly, it has a short driveway - helpful as I learn to shovel snow for the first time.  

We had the home inspection yesterday and all went well with everything checking out.  Everything is on track for us to close on the house in the middle of December and we should be moved in with plenty of time to spend Christmas in our new home.  We have lots of pictures up here if you’re curious and below is a video tour I took when we were there for the home inspection.  I’ll send our address and phone number once we’ve moved in (don’t want to get too ahead of ourselves).

Note:  The photos above are panoramas that I put together from a composite of 5-10 photos for each picture.  It was a fun little project and a good way to really give a sense of the house which is sometimes hard in smaller photos.  As always full size images are available over at the photo galleries.  

The Google Foundation works on figuring out innovative ways to use technology to solve real world problems.  They ran a pilot project where they tracked google searches for flu symptoms and then compared the results with data for the Centers for Disease Control.  The results were startling.  

They’re working on ways to scale this up and work to use it for early warning system for pandemics or bioterrorism.  Really interseting stuff.  To read the whole article click here.

The other article on Skype and webcams was interesting if only because it mirrors our experiences exactly.  Our kids have become so accustomed to skype and communicating by webcam and it has really been interesting to watch.  Maggie knows the Skype ring and runs over to the computer when she hears it.  Jacob and my mom one time played imaginary baseball by video chat.  He wanted to play so I told my mom to throw the ball and she threw it and he pretended to hit it without even thinking.  Erika and her mom used to have breakfast together by Skype and chat while they went about their morning routine.  Amazing.  For more stories of grandparent/grandchild tea parties click on the story here.

I start work on Tuesday so we’ve started house hunting in earnest.  I’ll stay with friends in Chicago during the week and on the weekends come back to South Bend where Erika and the kids will stay with her parents until we’ve lined up a house (which will hopefully be soon).  We’re very excited to start this new phase of our life so stay tuned for more updates.  

Brief Job Description

ISPCAN, a professional, international non-profit organization, provides education, research, practical training, information and technical assistance/consultation to help protect children from abuse and neglect world-wide (www.ispcan.org).  ISPCAN members, professionals in Medicine, Mental Health, Law, Social Services, Education, Sociology/Research, Advocacy, NGO Leadership and Government, are committed to preventing and treating child maltreatment. This position is focused on developing and supporting education and training programs of child protection professionals around the world (especially but not limited to Argentina, Brazil, Cameroon, Colombia, Congo, India, Kenya, Malaysia, South Africa, Thailand). Training programs are both national and regional and focus on child protection issues relative to the population/ geographic area.  

The full-time Training Program Manager will manage the Developing Country Training and Capacity Building initiatives, as well as more general Training Resource related projects.  The role includes supporting training country project leaders in the design and content development, monitoring/evaluation of and reporting on their projects.  He/she will work full-time in the ISPCAN Secretariat office, but also manage related work at national, regional, and international meetings, as well as work with country projects on-site. 

So with that background information in hand we now arrive at the scene of our tale.  We had been at the Finca with our guests for about a week and arrived in San Pedro for an overnight hotel stay.  We stayed at a place called the Microtel which is part of a U.S. chain.  It was an upscale place with all the Holiday Inn amenities you might expect including the continental breakfast.  Davis, fascinated by the fact that it seemed so American after being in rural Honduras, was convinced he could flush his toilet paper (this, clearly, being the ultimate symbol of luxury).  After many attempts to dissuade Davis he decided to call down to the front desk and ask if he could flush his toilet paper down the toilet.  The response was a befuddled:  Why would you want to do that?     

Betsy retold that story to me the other day and talked about how she always uses it in class as the most perfect example of what is normal to one person being so completely foreign to another.  Davis thought it was so outside the norm to put his toilet paper in a trash can at the side of the toilet.  The man at the front desk couldn’t possibly conceive of why he would want to flush it down the toilet.  

After the election it seemed as if the flood gates opened up and it was ok to talk about race and how significant Barack Obama’s election was for us as a nation.  My own reflections have left me without any clear sense of what, in terms of race relations, this election means for us as a nation, me as an individual or for the relationship between two people on a subway car in downtown Chicago.  But what I am sure of is that for Michael, Jacob and Maggie the election of Barack Obama has forever changed what is normal for them and for generations that will come after them.  I imagine them and their children being interviewed in an exit poll years from now as and being asked if they considered race in their decision of whom to vote for and responding in befuddlement:  Why would I want to do that?

And below are some video previews.

In about an hour I’m heading to the airport.  While this certainly marks a turning point in our lives, it also marks a turning point in this web page.  Gone are posts like the last one about raging rivers, malaria and installation of running water (at least I hope those aren’t part of our experience in Chicago).  Quite frankly this web page will be getting pretty boring pretty quickly.  So consider this your fair warning and feel free to click unsubscribe if you’re on the e-mail version, we won’t be offended.  I make no excuses for the forthcoming posts about my lawn, the softball team I’m itching to join and the Bears chances at the Super Bowl.  

Worry not, we’ll still strive to keep it pretty updated because though we will be in Chicago we will still be far away from many of our family and friends.  Actually now that I think of it the posts may not be so boring after all.  While I’m accustomed to rampant corruption, tropical diseases and always carrying my passport, I’ve never mowed a lawn, shoveled snow or taken by kids to ballet class.  I think the second set might cause me more difficulty than living in the third world ever did.  

So, stay tuned for adventures from suburbia.

At the Finca I got a bit of nostalgic for rainy season.  If you’re a normal person rainy season isn’t particularly fun.  You’re wet all the time, clothes never dry hanging on the line, mud and mold become a normal part of your life.  But as a Finca volunteer it’s also a time of relief from the hot sun, you get to make daring rescues of trucks stuck in mud, electicity goes out and prompts candle lit dinners, water systems break prompting bucket showers, rivers rise and you see t he true power of nature and feel it’s effects in ways that just aren’t possible for most of us city dwellers.  So while I didn’t like getting soaking wet walking back from getting a beer with the vols, I certainly appreciated the chance to remember those times at the Finca with fond memories.  

As I took the bus back to Tegucigalpa on Monday I began to see the picture with a broader lens.  As we continued on I noticed more and more fields flooded, more rivers raging and more landlides being cleared from the highway.  I picked up a newspaper and began to read of the effects of 10 d ays of rain across the country.  knew that when I got to the office on Tuesday that likely we would be responding to an emergency.

So what happened?  Essentially we had about two weeks straight of rain which caused widespread damage across the country.  It just got to the point where the ground was so saturated that there was nowhere for the water to go and mudslides and flash floods were the result.  About 75% of the roads were damaged to some extent with 72 bridges or river crossings destroyed and another 169 damaged.  34 people were killed mostly when rivers rose and destroyed their homes (2,200 homes destroyed and double that many damaged. Thousands fled their homes for shelters and 250,000 acres of crops were destroyed.

COPECO (the government agency responsible for emergencies) coordinated both the national and international response and at least from my point of few had a decent handle on the situation.  As I had suspected I was busy at work on CRS’s response to the emergency.  We work entirely through local partners and in emergencies the partner with whom we work the most are the local Catholic dioceses.  My role during  the emergency was to take all the information funneled to me and turn it into money.  The dioceses would communicate with us and give us an assessment of the situation an our team here in the office would evaluate where, what and how much we needed to get into the field.  Within the first 24 hours we got out a situation report to our headquarters and another 6 hours after that we were working on drafts of the emergency proposals.  In all I wrote three proposals for things like blankets, mattresses, water, cooking kits, hygeine kits and medicine.  We were able to get the proposals approved pretty quickly and get the materials needed into the hands of the dioceses so they could respond to those in need.  

So worry not, I certainly wasn’t slogging through rain choked streets (the photos here are from the newspaper).  And while I spent most of the time in the office writing it was certainly an interesting experience.  We’re just hoping for no more rain any time soon.

Family and Friends,

We really thought that our lives would start settling into a more predictable pattern, but indeed that has not been the case.  Our time here in Honduras has been interesting and exciting to say the least and we are writing to say that it is nearing its end.   We write to share this with you because you are family and we wanted you to know that we are back in the states.

The past two weeks have been a flurry of emotions as we found out that we were pregnant and then yesterday found out that Erika had had a miscarriage.  The miscarriage is the immediate cause that is bringing us home, but there are so many other factors including the security situation here, the frequenc with which I travel and the path that this lifestyle has set out before us.  In the end we decided that this lifestyle is not for us and we’re now in the process of moving towards our next step. 

The miscarriage has sped up that timeline somewhat.  While the medical care we have received in Honduras thus far has been of high quality, after consulting with midwives and doctors both here and in the states we have decided it would be better for Erika to head back to the US.  Erika is healthy and coping well (both mentally and physically).  It is simply out of an abundance of precaution that she is returning so soon.  It also made sense that if we were thinking a change was in order that now might be an opportune time.

We are all returning to South Bend tomorrow (Sept 25).  Erika and the kids will stay in South Bend while I return to Honduras Oct 2 to finish up work on November 1st.  Our trajectory from there will likely take us to Chicago where we’ll settle more permanently.  There is so much that went into this decision and it’s so hard to put in an email.  In the end we just wanted to share this with you so that when you ran into us at a Notre Dame football game it wouldn’t be a surprise.  While we are sad to be leaving Honduras and what in my case was a really great successful job we are also excited to be moving closer to our family and friends in Chicago more permanently.

We have lots of transitions ahead and the next few months will be a bit crazy even by our standards.  We hope you will keep us in your prayers both from a distance and in person and we hope to see many of you soon.  

Love,

Michael-John and Erika