The KDU:
The KDU is AMAZING.
Or at least we
all thought so at the start of the year, when we were all coming from different
school-food backgrounds. The general consensus was, save a couple particularly
negative people, that the KDU was a mystical entity sent down from the sky to
miraculously provide us with delicious food every day, 4, sometimes 5 times a
day.
KDU Food
Quinter Food
Close-up of what they call "tater-tot casserole"
As time passed,
we began to forget the dark ages of life without milk lunch and with average
school food. So we began to forget how tremendous the KDU actually was. Let me
be the first to admit, over the past few weeks before I left for Kansas I was
right there along with everyone else scowling at the weird looking soup, or the
lumps in the cottage cheese. My eyes have been opened. Never again will I have
a negative word to say about our on-campus restaurant that has succeeded with
flying colors to bring fine dining to a cafeteria setting. I know I’ve already
shared a picture of the salad bar here in Quinter, but I’m going to share it again.
Think about what
we have, Putney, on an average day at our salad bar. Let me just name some
stuff.
-Corn salsa
-Beet salad
w/onions and yummy dressing
-Cottage cheese
-Greek salad
featuring fresh tomatoes from our local Putney farms.
-2 kinds of
salad dressing, at least.
Plus, think about where it comes from! Putney has a farm! We ARE a farm! Quinter does not have that opportunity.
Putney Produce
That’s not even
including all our baked goods. We always have bread and butter and peanut
butter and jelly and fluff. Plus usually we have leftovers from milk lunch.
I know I already
posted this picture as well but I am posting it again to drive the point home
to everyone.
See those milk cartons? That is what they have to drink here. If
you want water you go to the water fountain. Putney we have 4 kinds of juice,
and soda water, and iced tea and fresh milk that’s kept cold in a giant
machine, and we have cold fresh water in our juice machine. Plus we also have
hot tea available!!!! It’s an endless abundance of beverages, our cups
literally runneth over!
I still haven’t
gotten to our entrée(s)!!!!!!! Not only do we have a diverse range of flavors
and not only do we accommodate vegetarians and gluten free people, we also
feature cuisine from all over the world. Off the top of my head I remember in
the last few weeks I was at Putney we had South Korean food, Bhutanese food, African
peanut soup type thing, Japanese style noodles, and this week we’re having an
entire elaborate German food night at Putney! AND I can’t remember the last
time we didn’t have soup at dinner, two different flavors at least.
I miss the
tomato-cheddar soup SO MUCH. I miss the warm rolls and the hand made butter SO
MUCH, I miss the eggs and the pita pockets, I even miss the cream of rice.
I can’t even
begin to describe how much I miss milk lunch. These jelly donut muffins (Yes,
jelly donut muffins) still dance through my dreams. To see what’s on the menu
for this week, copy paste the link into your search bar.
http://www.putneyschool.org/content/kdu-menu
Jelly Donut Muffin a la Putney
It completely
blows my mind to think of the outstanding food we have at Putney, food that
every restaurant I’ve been to since I’ve arrived here can’t hold a candle to.
They prepare this food for upwards of 200 people, 4 times a day (5 if there’s
night snack) every day. We live at school, there’s no weekends off for the
cooks. They even offer food during most of the breaks!!! I cannot even begin to
comprehend how lucky we are that our “cafeteria food” is at such a high
standard!! I LOVE YOU KDU and I miss you with all of my heart and stomach.
Moving on…
This House:
The house I'm staying in is SO CLEAN. It's like nothing that I'm used to...
The Weekend:
Saturday:
I spent indoors
writing my blog. The last post I made took 13 hours to write, proofread, insert
pictures into, and then troubleshoot the pictures. That was my Saturday. I’m a
writer. To spend the entire day in the dark with my laptop and my word
processor makes for a pretty awesome Saturday. So yes, Saturday was awesome.
Sunday:
WOOHOO! Sunday
was awesome too. I woke up at 10:17 (I wake up on 10:17 on the weekends here
and 7:07 on weekdays. Exactly. Always. Every time.)
I was given the
official tour of Tom and Terra’s business. It was so vast and complicated I’m
not even going to bother to try to explain it. So I’ll push right ahead to what
I did afterward.
The ATV(s):
To make a long
story short…
This is called a
Razor.
It is
essentially a smart car without airbags and in a snazzier color. (I learned to
drive in a smart car) I did not, however, realize at first how similar the
razor was to a smart car. All terrain vehicles (4-Wheelers, razor cars, etc.)
Intimidate me. I just saw, once again, images of my spinal chord snapping in
half and poking through my skin. So Caitlyn drove me around in it first before
I agreed to take the wheel alone. Then I looked around and saw it had a gas, a
break, a gearshift, and a wheel, and I was ready to go. I envisioned it being
more like the cockpit of a commercial airliner at first, you know, the ones
with 1000’s of buttons, 100’s of which could kill a lot of people (including
yourself.) But once I realized it was basically a car I jumped in that thing
and I took off. I was livin’ in the moment the wind in my hair and my cares in
the breeze, I was going, like really going. Burnin’ rubber. I thought I was
being so badass. Until I looked at the speedometer and saw I was barely
clearing 10mph. The razor can go up to 70 mph.
Me, Collin, & Caitlyn on top of mega gas tank
I am not a
thrill seeker by any stretch of the imagination. This experience confirmed that
for me. I enjoyed myself, however, with my enclosed vehicle that had normal
gears and a working seat belt. I zipped along at my moderate pace and took in
the view of flatness.
Tearin' up da road
There was a reason besides my inexperience and lack of
desire to “feel a rush” that made me go as slowly as I did. If you haven’t read
my previous posts, then you wouldn’t know this, but Tom and Terra my host
family people own a huge chemical business. I discovered through a “Insidious
Movie After Life” type experience with getting lost in their business that they
have a ton of huge scary buildings and things filled with huge scary chemicals.
So one wrong turn into a tank of anhydrous ammonia, or into their giant soup
can filled with gasoline and…
So I took it
nice and slow, developed the confidence to go up and down the hills and over
bumps and whatnot and I had an amazing time. I did run into technical
difficulties however. There was a few times the “check engine” light came on
and stuff, but Collin fixed it with his magical country man powers that allow
him to operate 4-Wheelers and ATVs with ease.
I don’t think
Collin completely trusted me to be driving by myself, because if I slowed down
a little bit or stopped to take a picture or something he would appear out of
nowhere right next to me banging on my window asking “Everything okay?
Everybody alive in there?” Which, although I hate to admit it, was very useful
5 or 6 times in a row because I ran into my share of issues and he fixed all of
them.
Kansas-isms:
There are some
little things that, I don’t know if they’re specific to Kansas or the Mid-West,
or what, but that I’ve noticed. The top three are…
-As I’ve
mentioned multiple times, they say “pop” not soda. This makes me smile every
time.
Dr. Thunder "Pop" (I had never seen this before)
-I have heard
the term “restroom” here more than I have in my entire life. Even little kids
say, “Can I go to the restroom?” It
hits my ear wrong whenever it’s said by anyone under 40 and outside of a
country club or board meeting.
-I think this is
all of the Mid-West, not just Kansas, but when they talk about Colorado, they
use a hard A. Instead of saying Color-ah-do they say colo-rad-oh.
-They say
“vehicle” really frequently, a lot more often than car. Like “With that bad hip
John, are you having any trouble getting in and out of your vehicle?” Or “I
told you there’s only space for two vehicles in there, that’s why it’s called a
two vehicle garage.”
The only time I
hear the term “vehicle” where I live is when there’s a drug bust or someone
resisting arrest on the high way or in the movies and the cops point their guns
and yell “Put your hands up and step out of the vehicle, now punk! Now!”
-None of the
restaurants here (accept Dairy Queen) have dessert available in their
establishment. I’m indifferent either way, but I found this very interesting. I
can’t actually think of a single restaurant in Rhode Island off the top of my
head that doesn’t have dessert on their menu.
-The people here
say “them” a lot. For example…
“Pass me them corndogs.”
Or if I say,
“Why are the dogs barking so much?” Collin might respond “Oh them is just
playing with the big dogs.”
Or for instance
when I asked Caitlyn about the girls and their super huge skirts, she replied
“Oh, cause them are Christians.”
Which brings me
to my newest…
The girls I
talked about earlier aren’t Christian.
When I asked
Caitlyn’s parents they said the girls were Mennonites, otherwise known as
Dunkard Brethren.
Oh, but before I
talk about Mennonites V. Dunkard Brethren another redaction… Remember how I
said TJ lived in Collier? He doesn’t. He lives in Collyer (note the Y in place
of the I), like the water tower that’s identical in every way to the Quinter
water tower.
Mennonites V. Dunkard Brethren:
To people who
are on the outside looking in (Tom, Terra, Caitlyn, myself) the Dunkard
Brethren and the Mennonites might as well be the same. To a Dunkard Brethren,
such as Marcia, who works here at Quinter High School, they are completely
separate religions.
To me, even
after having done all this research, I still think I can sum up the difference
between the Mennonites and the Dunkard Brethren in a few simple sentences. To
all you Vermonters out there, you know the West Brattleboro Arts community? And
how if you live in a certain place you can’t join the West Brattleboro Arts
community, you have to join the Brattleboro Arts Community which is for some
reason separate from West Brattleboro?
Well it’s like that.
They’re both
thinking the same thoughts and living in the same place and for reasons no one
actually fully understands, they insist on being completely separate and on being thought of two separate organizations with different members and practices, etc.
For instance the
church here on Main Street split off from a larger Brethren church because they
were having disagreements, one of the most controversial being they couldn’t
agree on a rule about hats…
But Mennonites
and Dunkard Brethren, to be clear, do not hate each other. They just don’t want
their group to be confused with the other group. Marcia helped me pick apart
the differences that to me, seemed trivial, but to the Dunkard Brethren are big
differences. Marcia is a Dunkard Brethren. I at first thought she was a
Mennonite because she wears a head covering, similar to the Jewish Yarmulke in
appearance.
I’ve spoken to
three Dunkard Brethren today (I think…) one being Marcia, and the others being
Grace and Hans. Grace is the name of the blonde girl I spoke about in my last
post. Hans is her equally as adorable brother. When I got on the bus today I
sat down next to them and asked them some questions, starting with things to
get them comfortable with me (what’s your favorite color, etc.) And before I go
into what they told me about their religion, let me tell you what they told me
about themselves.
-Grace’s
favorite color is pink.
-Hans’ favorite
toy is Legos.
-Grace likes
Kansas “for now” but wants to move to Colorado because “That’s where her
cousins are going to go to.”
-Hans wants to
be a fire fighter or a farmer when he grows up.
-Grace wants to
be a cheerleader when she grows up.
I had done some
reading about Mennonites the previous night on the official Mennonite website,
as I was still operating under the assumption that Grace and Hans were
Mennonites. So I had some idea of what questions to ask. My first question that
strayed from the mundane small talk questions was addressing that Grace never
wears pants. I told her I thought her skirts were so cute, and I loved them,
and I asked her what brought her to the decision to wear the skirts all the
time. The response I got was,
“We’re not allowed to wear pants.”
I was unsure if
“We’re” meant “Women in my religion” or “My family.”
I was staying
alert to see how much she had actually been taught, as well as how much of what
she had been taught she understood. So I was listening for key words like “God”
or “At Church” or “Because women…” but she stated everything in simple terms. I
thought I would get something along the lines of “Because that’s what Jesus
wants.” Or something like “Girls aren’t supposed to wear pants.” Something to
tell me she knew she wasn’t wearing pants not just because her parents didn’t
like the style but because of religious purposes. I’m not religious, not many
of my friends are all that religious, so I know nothing about at what age kids
begin to learn about what religion they are, what traditions they practice
associated with it, and why. For this reason I was approaching this topic with
the utmost caution, and letting her answers lead me into my next question.
Because there was no mention of God in her initial response, my next question
was more direct.
I figured if she
didn’t give me a confident, relaxed answer to this next question it was time to
change topics back to small talk. I just asked outright “Do you have a religion?”
She seemed unfazed. She had the same glossy look as when I asked her what her
favorite food was. She gave an answer but… At that very moment a God damn 18
wheeler truck drove by us making a super loud noise so I didn’t hear what she
said. But it didn’t feel appropriate to ask a second time, I can’t explain
exactly why, but I just felt like I didn’t want to make it seem like what
religion she was, was important to me. So I said, “Do you go to church?” Grace
and Hans both enthusiastically responded at the same time. “Yah, we go to
Church.” I followed up with, “Do you like Church?” (Again let me reiterate I
know nothing about raising religious children. I assumed, and I could be wrong,
that if they were super conservative that they would have been taught that they
like Church. Whether or not they actually enjoy it.) Grace responded, with a
note of hesitation, “Yah.” Hans replied, “You get used to it.” Grace added,
“It’s really long.” Hans nodded in agreement, then looking deep with thought
Grace replied, “The last Church was like almost 80 hours.” I tried not to
laugh. I failed.
So on the way
back from school that day, I made a huge
faux pas. Huge. I sat with Grace and
Hans again. I asked my question again. Hans is about 8 and Grace is around 6,
just to make sure we all understand that. They are in 3rd and 2nd
grade. They obviously come from a conservative religious family, that’s not up
for debate. I asked, “Does your religion have a name?” They looked at me all
confused. Then, to my shock horror and embarrassment little blonde Grace looks
at me and goes… “What’s religion?”
The entire front
half of bus fell silent.
I should have
taken that as an indication maybe it was time to shut my mouth. Did I do that?
No. Do I ever do that? No. So I got half way through trying to communicate to
her what my question was with rushed clumsy words, as I could feel multiple
pairs of eyes on me. Understand where I was coming, I didn’t think it possible
she didn’t know what religion was. I thought she might understand the concept
of religion but not the exact word “religion.” Wrong.
Grace turned to
her older sister who had to be in 4th grade at least and says “What
is she talking about? What’s religion?” The older sister shrugs her shoulders
like she doesn’t know either.
I moved on from
that as fast as humanly possible. I felt so bad. How was I supposed to know
that these kids who are in grade school who come from a family conservative
enough to keep their daughters from wearing pants haven’t been told what
religion is?! That raises a whole bunch of other questions in my mind that
aren’t my place to ask, not on this public blog post, and definitely not to
this poor little girl. But wow… She really doesn’t know what religion is.
But at least now
I have a bus buddy. I was so tired today I had to just sit by myself in the back
and listen to music, but she grabbed me and said “You can talk to me some more
if you want!” I told her I had to sit with Caitlyn but would talk to her on the
way back. I did that because it is evident the bus ride this morning will be my
last bus ride in solitary with my headphones. But I don’t mind because I love
Grace and Hans. She even saved me a seat today which is apparently a very big
deal.
Grace has these
huge chocolate brown eyes that are a physical explanation of the saying “The
eyes are windows into the soul.” She has such an expressive face, but her eyes
tell the whole story. I could tell if she was bored, or happy, or confused. She
must have double jointed eyebrows or something. Also, her pupils change size
just like that. They’re all narrow and indifferent when I’m asking her about
her favorite things to do in school, and then when I start talking about
cheerleading they morph into flying saucers.
One of the
things that stuck out to me on the Dunkard Brethren site was that in their top
list of beliefs it said “We do not believe in the use of music during religious
services.” And Terra said that Mennonites don’t have radios in their cars (if
they’re very conservative.) Henceforth I asked about music and TV. In response
to the TV question, (I asked her straight out if she ever watches TV) she said
no without hesitation, as did Hans. I asked “Do you listen to music?” She
scrunched up her mouth really small and thought for a second or two… “Nope.”
She said, after having left me in suspense.
After Grace and
Hans I had the opportunity to talk to Marcia. Marcia is the receptionist at
Quinter High School and she wears the signature Mennonite/Brethren head
covering. So I decided to go to her office to ask some questions to a source
who would definitely know what religion was.
In retrospect, I
should have started the conversation with Marcia something along the lines of
“I sincerely hope I’m not being too forward, but would you mind if I asked you
a few questions about your religion?” I didn’t do that. I didn’t think ahead
with this one. I just got up, and walked there, and I winged it. I don’t even
remember specifically what I said, I just started babbling at her. I know the
first thing I said. Because it was my second faux pas of the morning. I was
trying to explain why I wanted to ask her questions about her religion. I
didn’t know when I started this conversation that both Brethren and Mennonites
are denominations of Christianity. So I said, “Because my host family told me
about how you’re not Christian—“ And of course she cut me off with “Who said
I’m not a Christian?” I quickly realized my huge error. I hurriedly explained to
her how clueless I am about this whole thing and how that’s why I’m asking her
these questions.
I honestly
figured she would want to tell me all about her religion and what they believe
and why it’s right. I thought about my experience with super religious people
and that was all in the form of TV preachers screaming “Repent, repent, repent!
God loves you!” and door to door Bible Salesmen. I thought the theory of
religious people wanting to knock on your door and talk to you about God was a
quality that most conservative practitioners of a religion would possess. Within
about 30 seconds of my asking her questions she suggested I go look it up on
the internet first. But, as I explained to her, the school had a firewall that
blocks about 85% of the internet so I can’t look up anything without my phone,
which was out of battery. I didn’t ask her much as she bore the facial expression
of… How do I explain this…
So I spoke to
Marcia, and I now have the perspective of a 7 year old Brethren and a 40 year
old Brethren. The most important things I learned from Marcia are…
-Mennonites and
Dunkard Brethren are different religions.
-They are both
denominations of Christianity.
-They both
follow The New Testament down to a T.
-They are both
centered around the belief that Jesus Christ was the son of God, was crucified
on the cross, died for our sins, rose from the dead, and some day will rise again. (I knew Christians believe Jesus
rose from the dead, I was unaware any forms of Christianity believed Jesus was
going to rise again.)
-The fundamental
beliefs are the same, one of the biggest differences is the method of Baptism.
Mennonites sprinkle the holy water, while Brethren are immersed in the holy
water.
-Neither
religion believes in women wearing pants.
-Both religions
believe in adult-Baptism, which is essentially waiting until the person being
Baptized has a full understanding of the religion before everything is
official. Baptism usually starts around 13, but sometimes older, in these
religions.
-Mennonites have
a larger overall following than Brethren.
Turns out I had
reason to be confused about Amish and the Mennonites.
Want to hear
something extremely off-putting and ironic? The Amish have a WEBSITE. They have
the official website of the Amish. Apparently Mennonites are so often mistaken
as Amish the Amish have a whole section about it on their WEBSITE. If you don’t
know, Amish people are best known for the fact that they don’t use any
electricity…or the internet. Yet they have a website. This strikes me as so hypocritical and wrong because you
have to stop and ask yourself, who’s updating the Amish website? Who can sit
there in good conscience and type into a computer paragraph after paragraph
about how their religion strictly forbids using the internet? Anyways… This is
what I learned from their website.
-Amish and
Mennonite were one and the same until the 17th Century. The Amish
split off from the Mennonite due to what they saw evolving as “Liberalizing
trends.”
-Mennonites have
many different denominations of their own. “Old Order” Mennonites are the
closest to Amish. They don’t drive cars, they dress plainly, and they speak
Pennsylvania Dutch (as do the Amish.)
-If someone has
been ex-communicated from the Amish Church or “placed on the Bann” they may
join a Mennonite Church instead.
-Mennonite is
considered to be a progressive take on Amish.
-Old Order
Mennonites (the closest to Amish) generally allow electricity in their homes.
I could go on
literally forever about the differences and similarities between, but I won’t. I
have noticed, however, thanks to all this reading, that there are definitely
more than a few girls at the high school for whom skirts and dresses aren’t
just a style choice.
**Side note. As
I am writing this I am overhearing a conversation of one of the girls in a
skirt, she is a high school Senior. She’s talking about how she was forbidden
by her mother to read The Hunger Games or Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.
Back to skirts…That’s
really interesting to me, as I did notice right away they never wore pants but
it never even crossed my mind it could be for religious purposes…
Chap Stick:
My lips were
really chapped when I first got here because it’s super dry. So I wrote to my
mother describing how much my lips were bleeding (I won’t go into detail.) I
asked her to send me the most intense healing Chap Stick available on the
market. I did not specify any quantity in particular.
I have received
several separate packages in the mail since I got here 8 days ago, containing a
grand total of 87 sticks of Chap Stick.
I have 4 sticks
of Bert’s Bees Chap Stick. The rest is a crazy intense Chap Stick that was made
for 2nd degree burn victims. It says so right on the tube. All 82
tubes. They all came in their own separate little packaging, so to get them to
fit in my suitcase to take home I have to cut the packaging off all 82 tubes of
Chap Stick. They have huge disclaimers on the sides about how they’re for burn
victims or people suffering chapped-ness the level of severity of burn victims.
It’s got a thick protective seal around the tube even after you’ve removed its
external packaging. The seal has several medical caduceus’ on it in vibrant
red.
It’s bad enough
that I know that I’ve received all
this Chap Stick, but to makes things worse, the first package I received which
contained 40 tubes of my Chap Stick, came on a day my host family was expecting
a package. I didn’t tell them I had ordered anything, so they did the logical
thing, which was to open the package that came to their house in their mail.
This happened while I was at school. When I returned I was writing for my blog,
tuning in and out of the conversation when I heard “Tom I don’t understand why
you ordered so much Chap Stick.” “I told you I didn’t order it!” Then Caitlyn
walks in, “Mom, whoa, why do we have all this Chap Stick?” So that was really
fun to have to explain to everyone.
On the bright
side now my lips are soft, smooth and medicated.
Now I know how you feel刘叔同!
Being in Kansas
and having a host family has given me a much deeper insight into how 刘叔同/Shutong and all the other international students
must feel at Putney when they go on break and have to stay with a host family. I
understand a lot about when Shutong stayed with us over Thanksgiving now that I
didn’t understand then. I know I’ll never fully understand what they’re going
through, but essentially these past few weeks I have been…
-Staying in a
strange house (to say the least considering the chemical company in their back
yard!!)
-Living in a
place I’ve never been to before and knew almost nothing about.
-Staying in a
place where I don’t speak the language fluently.
-Where a lot of
the food seems really strange to me, but having to try to express that without
offending anyone.
-I can’t really
call my family (It’s really expensive to call China, some of my Chinese friends’
phones don’t even have numbers attached to them. They just use Skype and
WeChat.) Here I’m at school most of the day and then I can’t really have a long
frank discussion in my host family’s house because…
a. I’m really busy with my blog and
my Putney stuff.
b. I already feel like I’m being
super anti-social spending entire days and huge portions of after school
barricaded in my room working on my laptop so to spend any time by myself
that’s unnecessary (such as taking a long phone call) isn’t ideal.
c. I have terrible reception here.
I’ve managed
several calls thus far.
-I have a lot to
study and get done that requires me to be by myself working online and alone. I
can’t multi-task or have TV in the background or anything because then the work
isn’t the quality I need it at. (When Shutong was staying with us she studied a
lot of English. She was taking an online course. She spent a huge portion of
the day by herself studying English and watching Chinese TV and stuff.)
-I am having
total culture shock. Even when I don’t have work to do there are times I just
want to be alone and listen to my music and watch Netflix (now I know why she
was watching Chinese TV all the time.)
So all this
craziness is multiplied by 100 for the international students. I’ve been in
Kansas for less than two weeks, I go home in three days. Ha hasn’t gone home at
all since school started in September. She spends every break living with her
brother in his dorm room at Columbia. She cannot go home until the summer. She
doesn’t have a working cellphone. She is the only native Vietnamese student at
Putney. She is the only person at Putney who speaks Vietnamese. I cannot even
begin to imagine that. I can’t wait to run for International Ambassador at
Putney this spring.
Bobbi’s Montage:
Bobbi is joining
the National Guard. She is entering basic training this summer. The below video
is Bobbi’s instructional video on how to do three different types of push-ups
correctly. (Video edited by Phil Shaw Media)
Phil Shaw Media
Graphically Designing Your Dreams
Peter:
Peter is my best
friend. We went to middle school together.
When I moved to
Vermont there was a very short list of people I wanted to keep in contact with.
There was an even shorter list of people I absolutely had to stay in touch with if I was going to survive moving to
Vermont. His name was at the top of that list. He is one of the most supportive
people alive on the planet, definitely one of the most hysterical, most
intelligent as well. He’s an unbelievable football player and his has
impeccable taste in music. I can’t imagine what the state of my iPod would be
if I hadn’t known him. I definitely wouldn’t have stayed at the school I
graduated 8th grade from if he hadn’t been there, and I would have
regretted leaving. I wouldn’t have made it through half the things I did in
middle school if I hadn’t had him there to support me. I didn’t feel like I
could relate to anyone at school before he showed up. I can’t imagine what my
life would be if I hadn’t met him.
Because we’re both
so busy all the time I almost never get to see him anymore. I have seen him two
times since graduation (Over seven months have passed since graduation.) I miss
him more than anything else I left behind in Rhode Island. I am blessed with
the fact that he texts, so even though we can never manage to be in the same
place I can talk to him whenever I want to. The reason I’m bringing him up now
is because the few times things have gotten to be too much here and I just
don’t know how to handle it, I’ve messaged him and he’s cheered me up within a
matter of minutes. Even though I never actually told him I was upset in the
first place.
He’s pretty much
the only teenager I text with who ever asks me how I am and means it. He’s one of the only people my age I know who
has made a point to tell me my problems matter and he’s always going to be
there for me and it means more to me to know I have that than anything anyone
could have ever done for me or said to me. Having him to turn to has made this
entire thing 100 times easier and more enjoyable. Talking to him can change my
entire day.
He doesn’t
actually read my blog :-) but that’s ok because he knows all this already.
I just needed to
explain why I haven’t actually said anything about being home sick or too
overwhelmed.
He’s why.
Okay—Now I can tell
you about the…
Emergency Bus Drill:
Driver explaining the windows to us when we were back on the bus
Apparently a bus
recently flipped over somewhere and none of the kids knew how to operate the
emergency exits and it was a whole chaotic episode. So today a ton of busses
had to pull over on the side of the road and explain how to use the emergency
exits. I had headphones in when the “drill” part was announced.
I was so groggy
this morning that it was only after I was outside of the bus that I realized we
weren’t at school and I had just exited the bus through a window.
It was really cute
actually. When I realized what was happening I started taking pictures and
watching… The Kindergarteners were too short to get out through the window and
so we had to lift them out! It was adorable. Then everyone who was one the bus
had to line up against a building for the bus driver to practice not losing any
kids during an emergency.
Remember how I
said I didn’t want to post a picture of Grace because I was nervous about
posting a picture of a small child I didn’t really know? Well good news! “Coincidentally”
Grace ended up in my picture of all the kids on the bus. By coincidence. So I
won’t tell you who she is, see if you can pick her out of the crowd, little hint--she may or may not be wearing a green jacket.
It was cold when
we had the drill. When the drill was over and it was time to get back on the
bus she just stood there. I said, “Come on Grace we have to get back on the
bus.” She said “I can’t I’m frozen.”
Western Movies:
I mentioned
earlier they watch a lot of black and white Westerns here. I really enjoy them.
I’ve watched a lot over the past few days. I have watched enough black and
white Westerns now that I can tell you what happens in every single one ever
made. I can do so in a few short sentences.
Cowboy: Hey you,
Other Cowboy! I don’t like what you’re doing in my town!
Other Cowboy:
Well guess what? I’m gonna keep doing it anyways!
Cowboy: No
you’re not!
Other Cowboy:
Yes I am!
Cowboy: Well I
guess that means one of us has to die.
Other Cowboy:
Yep.
Cowboy:
Alrighty, let’s go out in the street and shoot at each other until someone
dies.
Other Cowboy:
Sounds good to me.
*bang* *bang* *bang*
Townsperson: Oh my God somebody’s dead!
Other Townsperson: Is it the main character of the show who is dead?
Townsperson: No it’s not.
The end.
Where Are All The Cows?!
Everyone said I
was going to the heart of “Cattle Country.” I expected this to mean that I
would be seeing a lot of cows whenever I drove around. That there would be huge
clumps of cows grazing and being herded and all that good cow stuff. I have
seen almost no cows since I’ve gotten here.
The mysterious
thing is I know they have to be here somewhere because a lot of beef is
produced here and cattle auctions happen every week multiple times a week. So
they’re somewhere… Don’t know where…
Castle Rock Printers:
My excursion
today was to Castle Rock Printers, a small Quinter based operation that edit
and print the local newspaper The Gove County Advocate. They also print
business cards, envelopes, and letterhead.
If that’s not
already cool enough for you, they do this printing on the oldest operating
printing press in the country. This thing was a behemoth of a machine that made
a really cool noise. There was a giant roll of white paper that they printed
onto and I saw the real etching things that roll the ink onto the paper. It was
radical.
Usually papers this small don’t have their own press, because usually there’s about 10-15 people working with each printing press. Small papers don’t have the money for that many employees, so most send their paper to be printed by printing companies. But somehow they make it work at Castle Rock Printers, despite the fact it’s just the printing press and the three devoted Castle Rock Printers. The paper goes out tomorrow so they were very busy printing today. Never a dull moment! As I said, there are three people on the job. There’s…
Usually papers this small don’t have their own press, because usually there’s about 10-15 people working with each printing press. Small papers don’t have the money for that many employees, so most send their paper to be printed by printing companies. But somehow they make it work at Castle Rock Printers, despite the fact it’s just the printing press and the three devoted Castle Rock Printers. The paper goes out tomorrow so they were very busy printing today. Never a dull moment! As I said, there are three people on the job. There’s…
Linda: Circulation
Manager & Head of Advertising
Tom: Editor and
printing press operator
And
Roxanne (But
everyone calls her Roxy): Publisher
They began by
telling me the basics about Gove County Advocate. It’s a small town paper that
serves the several small towns of Gove County.
Grinnell pop.
259
Quinter pop. 918
Grainfield
pop.277
Park pop.126
Gove pop.80
And a small
portion of the township of Oakley.
But that doesn’t
mean those are the only towns with subscriptions to the Gove County Advocate.
Those are just the places you’re most likely to find stores that carry the
paper. (Which sells for 75 cents on the dollar today by the way.) They have
subscriptions all over the country, even some in Alaska. I asked how that was possible,
and who in Alaska would care what activities the community center is hosting in
Gove County, Kansas. She explained that if someone is born and raised in such a
tight-knit community such as Gove County, that if they grow up and move away
they still want to keep in touch with what’s going on. Or people have kids or
grandkids living here (it’s not uncommon for achievements of the local sports
teams etc. to be reported in the paper.)
I asked some
basic questions about the paper, and something they said stuck out to me. They
said “We’ve just had a big change in the number we produce. We’ve dropped down
from producing 1600 papers a week all the way down to 1580.” I didn’t think I
had heard that right either but it turns out I had. Their “big change” was a
whopping 20 papers. I’m not claiming to understand it, but I respect it, and
I’m glad I had the opportunity to understand how important that business is to
them. Because when you think about it if they lost 20 subscriptions and they’re
getting paid 75 cents for each one, and they get let’s so 35 cents out of that
75 as income, that’s $7 a week difference in income which is $28 less in income
every week, and $1400 less income over the span of a year. That could be a
house payment or a car payment or a months worth of dinners they’re losing off
those 20 papers. I didn’t process that at all when I first heard that.
Every week they
fill 13 sacks that they take to the post office in Quinter and another on in
Collyer and they hit the stores and homes in Gove County first, then slowly
make their way across the state via the US postal system over the course of a
week.
Putney
Sustainability Committee, you should just go ahead and skip this paragraph.
They end up
having to throw away on average 100 newspapers a week due to errors in their
ancient printing press and other small anomalies like that. After spending so
much time at super green Putney with our net zero gym it made me kind of
nauseous to watch all that paper be thrown into a trash can.
Besides the printing
press and putting out the paper, they also they also run a Kinkos type
operation out of the building that houses the printing press. The most popular
item they sell now is printer ink cartridges as people have only very recently
begun to discover the convenience of home printers here.
A little more
about Roxy and Tom, they, like all the other professionals I’ve had the
pleasure to visit these past few weeks, are just great people. If I ask them
what time I have to leave (so I can coordinate important things like getting my
blog posts written) They all have consistently responded “You can stay all day
if you want.” These people who are at work are telling me, a clueless blonde
girl, that I can stay in their place of business all day. That’s kind of amazing
to me.
Tom was the
first of the pair to get into the newspaper business. Tom grew up in Oakley,
Kansas on a farm. But he had awful hay fever, so much so that he wasn’t able to
work in the fields. So when Tom was 15, the age he would have started doing
serious farm work, his parents told him he had to go out and get a job. So he
went out to a paper called the Ainsworth Star Journal and got a job as a linotype
operator.
Around the same
time Tom was getting his job at the Ainsworth Star Journal, Roxy was growing up
in Long Pines, Nebraska. She was going to school 30 miles from the nearest
school, which was located in the, as Roxy put it, “large town of almost 2000
people” Ainsworth, Nebraska When Roxy was in school she met a boy named Tom who
was a linotype operator (see where I’m going with this?), they fell deeply in
love, and they got married.
Roxy wasn’t too
enthusiastic about going into the newspaper business at first, but she needed a
job and Tom loved newspaper so she took a position with the Ainsworth Star
Journal as a bookkeeper. The Star gave Tom stock in the paper, and all as fine
and dandy. After a few years had passed and Roxy and Tom’s two sons came into
the picture, the major stockholders of the Ainsworth Star Journal wanted out.
They agreed to give the paper to Tom, under the condition they kept the
previous owner’s alcoholic son under their employ. That didn’t work out for
very long, and eventually with the son and the failing paper it was just too
much, so Roxy and Tom started looking for work with another paper.
After searching
for a little while they found a newspaper listed under “publication for sale”
the Gove County Advocate.
They came down to Quinter, where the paper is based out of, and put money down on the paper on July 16th 1983, Roxy’s birthday. They left the Ainsworth Star immediately and settled into their new life in Quinter. Or at least Roxy and the boys did. She moved right away to get the kids settled and into school, while Tom stayed for a while longer to tie up any loose ends left at their old place of work. They’ve been working at the Gove County Advocate for 31 years.
They came down to Quinter, where the paper is based out of, and put money down on the paper on July 16th 1983, Roxy’s birthday. They left the Ainsworth Star immediately and settled into their new life in Quinter. Or at least Roxy and the boys did. She moved right away to get the kids settled and into school, while Tom stayed for a while longer to tie up any loose ends left at their old place of work. They’ve been working at the Gove County Advocate for 31 years.
They built a
nice life for themselves and their kids in Quinter. So nice that none of them
actually left Kansas. One of their sons still lives in Quinter running a
massive feed lot. Their other son lives just a few hours out of Quinter in
Kansas City working for Farmland Industries. Are you noticing the agricultural
trend yet? Farmland Industries is a huge company, and their son is in charge of
the hams. It’s his job to figure out where the hams need to go and how many of
them are needed. Not just in Kansas, not just in the United States, but hams in
China, Sweden, you name it. His busiest time of the year is Easter and
Christmas.
Tom and Roxy have
several grandchildren at Quinter High School, and a grandson at K-State who is
a music major specializing in vocals. He has an unbelievable voice. Tom does as
well, Roxy was grinning ear to ear talking about how well Tom sings.
We had this
conversation on the way to Collyer’s post office. Everyone talked about Collyer like it was the
other end of the world. It was 6 and ½ minutes from the middle of Quinter to
Collyer.
Collyer:
Collyer was cute
and uplifting, and also soul-crushingly sad. It was such a small town that I
could see every as we were driving into it, despite the fact that everything
here is completely flat.
It’s unfortunate
because Collyer looked like it had once been a bustling, beautiful place to
live. But now where it appeared cute ranch style houses and corner stores used
to reside, there is only the mere husk of a building. Boarded up windows,
graffiti, and black patches where people burn the buffalo grass. There was some
truly haunting remains there. The crumbled down pieces of the old grade school,
long since forgotten. It was moved into by some truck hoarders who had filled
where once there was a playground with abandoned trucks, piles of flat tires,
and military tanks (I don’t know how they got them, but there they are.)
The residents usually all get work in WaKeeney or Quinter, since there’s no work to be found in town. They stay because the housing is affordable and the taxes manageable.
The residents usually all get work in WaKeeney or Quinter, since there’s no work to be found in town. They stay because the housing is affordable and the taxes manageable.
Roxy was telling
me about the brighter days of Collyer. Back when she was in high school the
place was bursting with life. There was a dance hall that Tom used to frequent,
there was a grade school, a high school, and even a private Catholic school,
which is amazingly uncommon. There isn’t a private school within 2 hours
driving distance of Quinter. There used to be a restaurant, a couple bars, a
super market. Not anymore. Now there’s only two businesses in the entire town.
An auto repair shop, and a grain elevator literally identical to the one in
Quinter.
Another sad
disturbing thing? Directly across from the school yard that now houses the
trucks and tires is a cemetery. They have a cemetery right next to a grade
school. You could see it from the classrooms, it was looming up at the kids
trying to enjoy their recess. Collyer was mainly Catholic, the private school
they had was Catholic. They even have a separate cemetery for Catholic people,
separate from the normal cemetery. Roxy is Catholic but even she remarked on
how that perplexed her. She said the way she figures it the town is so small
and the community so close there’s no reason everyone shouldn’t be buried
together.
We passed a
large Catholic church in Collyer. It’s where Roxy and her husband attend
Church. But, and this is something that shocked me, the church has to share a
priest with another church. There is a shortage of priests in the Diocese! I
didn’t think that was even possible. It boggles my mind how many churches have
to be in existence that they have to share
a priest.
U.S. Post Office Collyer, Kansas
That’s All Folks:
Well, that’s all
folks! That’s what’s happened since I last wrote. I’m loving every second I
spend here, but I’m also feeling more and more ready to return to Putney. I’m a
bit anxious about the catch up work I’ll have to do (this trip could be the
beginning of the end of my high school career haha.) I’m just in a constant
state of glazed over culture shock at this point. Thanks for reading, tell your
friends, share the link, and stay tuned for the next step in my Quest to
Quinter.
Yours In Kansas,
--Amelia
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