This is a great way to support street kids in Rwanda for whom we provide an education, meals, and medical assistance. It also helps with building a trauma-informed place for them.
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Tag: helping
The moniker “legend” gets thrown around quite a lot, but Nicholas Winton is the epitome of the word. What a man.
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In April 2016, I will be heading back to Rwanda to assist in caring for some kids at an orphanage in Kigali, the nation’s capital. My team members and I will be working with kids who have experienced trauma or who come from a difficult background. We will be focused on providing activities and experiences that teach forgiveness and lead to redemption and healing. Dr. Karyn Purvis, renowned child development psychologist, is fond of saying “Children were harmed in relationship, and the only way they can be healed is through relationship.” That is what this trip is about, to help these kids begin healing by engaging them. They need to know there are people who care about them.
You can assist me with this trip in two ways: one, by praying for me, my team, and the kids we are going to help; and two, by donating to my trip account with Visiting Orphans through purchases in their online store. Yes, you can shop, and help me go to Rwanda!
You can find shirts, hoodies, handmade necklaces and leather cuffs, bracelets, bands, and other charms. You can visit the store at this link:
Visitng Orphans Store
Shop to your heart’s content, and when you are ready to check out, follow these instructions so a percentage of the sales can be donated to my trip:
- On the main checkout page, beneath your billing and shipping address information, you will see a section titled “Donation Information”. Click on the button marked “Team member or ministry name”.
- This will reveal a drop-down menu, and a text box. In the drop-down menu, please select “Rwanda April 2016 Healing Trip (Leader: Higgins)”.
- In the text box for “Team Member”, please type “Christopher Turner”. It should look like this:
That’s it! These are some unique items you cannot find anywhere else, and they make awesome gifts!
patrickrhone / journal » Blog Archive » Remembering Rodney
Every year, on this day, I take some time out to remember my friend Rodney. Rodney committed suicide via a gunshot to the head on June 15th, 2002 after a long struggle with depression. He was a dear friend, Mac fan, and talented writer. I miss him dearly.
Every time Apple releases something incredible or posts record sales, I can’t help but think about how much he would have been enjoying it. That is, as much as depression or the medicines used to treat it allow you to enjoy anything.
Some who know me know that I live with bi-polar disorder (manic depression). I have spoken about it before. I have been hospitalized for attempted suicide myself many years ago.
There is no real cure. After many years of medication and therapy treatment that had varying degrees of success, I now use a combination of mindfulness meditation and non-violent communication to help me navigate through it. It has been the most successful of all.
That said, there are struggles. I would be a liar if I said that I don’t understand what it was that made Rodney ultimately pull the trigger. Despite having a successful job, a loving wife, a nice house, and being a respected writer for several sites, none of those things matter when the chemistry in your brain decides it is time to go and that it will never get any better.
This day also happens to be my wedding anniversary so it is always a bit bittersweet. In fact, I normally wait until the 16th to post this but, for some reason, that did not feel right this year. I guess because the fact is that he died today. That there is no glossing over it. That denying such is in some way denying that life is filled with both things gained and loss. That both are OK and deserve all of the emotions appropriate for each.
Finally, if you or someone you know is suffering from a mental disorder, I urge you to use compassion and empathy when speaking with them about it. But, please do so. Ask them to seek whatever help they can. Let them know how you feel.
Not sure what more to say other than thank you for listening to me fight through the tears once again.
Fuck suicide. Fuck it to hell.
P.S. The best way to celebrate a writer is to read his writing, most of which is linked or archived on Low End Mac.
Note: For a few who have asked, here is the book that has guided me on using mindfulness meditation to treat my mania and depression: The Mindful Way through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness by Mark Williams, John Teasdale, Zindel Segal, Jon Kabat-Zinn
Also, I would be an idiot for not mentioning… National Suicide Prevention Lifeline – With Help Comes Hope
I had the pleasure of several e-mail exchanges with Rodney, and had hoped to meet up with him at a Macworld Expo some time in those very early Aughts. I wouldn’t say we were friends, but I certainly miss his wit and writing.
I will echo Patrick: suicide is not the answer. There are people who want to help you. Please utilize those resources.
A tip for fellow writers:
I use Michael Tsai’s outstanding SpamSieve on my Mac to control e-mail spam. Based on the training I give the program, it actively and automagically sorts spam into a designated folder, leaving my inbox pristine and filled only with the e-mail I want to receive.
Now, what to do with all that spam collecting in that aforementioned designated folder?
Most folks would simply delete it all, and too bad if something found its way there that shouldn’t be. Some folks, myself included, would give it a quick going-over, to make sure their spam-filtering software hadn’t flagged a false positive: a “good” e-mail inadvertently labeled “bad”.
And an enterprising fiction writer would tap this new-found wealth for character names.
I mean, where else are you going to discover “Abdul Travis”? What a great name for a fictional character! (When I first saw that one, it sounded like something one would read in a William Gibson novel.)
So I created a new text document in BBEdit, gave it the oh-so-original title of “character names.txt”, and starting dumping in names from my spam e-mails.
I’m not sure how many pieces of spam I went through, or how long I did this, but the current document has 456 different names in it. And by virtue of receiving upwards of 5,000-plus spam e-mails a week, I always have a ready source for more names if I need them.
So skip those fancy character-naming programs, fiction writers. You’ve got a wealth of names right there in your e-mail client.
I remind him to watch the cars, to look the drivers in the eye and make sure they see him. His brothers and I sit in the minivan while he goes to the curb and waits for a chance to walk out to the girl. Finally a car stops to let him pass. The girl’s face is turned down; she sees nothing but the ground. I watch my son’s narrow shoulders as he crosses the drive, and I am praying that no harm will come to him, not now or ever, that someone who is this loving will be spared the pain of the world, which is when I remember that it is Christmas, the time when we celebrate precisely the opposite, the coming of pure love to suffer for all we who sit with faces turned down, not even knowing what to ask for, knowing only in our crusted-over hearts that anything will help.
Dr. Wess Stafford, President and CEO of Compassion:
“The cure to cancer might be in the slums of Kenya or Indonesia.”
In other words, you don’t know what the children of today are capable of tomorrow, how God may use someone like me, someone like you, now to change the lives of scores, hundreds, thousands, possibly millions, years from now, just because we help change the life of one child today.
Please consider sponsoring a child.
In preparation for the mission trip I’m going on next week to build houses in Juarez, Mexico, I picked up a Panama Jack cowboy hat at Wal-Mart earlier this evening for a mere ten dollars.
Click on the photo to see a larger version.
The Juarez trip can be tough on gear (the boots I wore last year won’t be making a return trip), but I figure for ten bucks, I won’t worry if the hat doesn’t go another year. (And yes, a backup hat will be packed, just in case.)
I was a little miffed to learn the Rangers offer a downloadable calendar for the season, only as a comma-separated .csv file. This is fine and dandy if you’re running Outlook, as apparently the Rangers front office does, but it’s not so good if you’re one of the millions of people–and trust me, there are millions–not running Outlook.
The .ics calendars I found online weren’t quite up to my expectations, either. I ended up taking one and heavily modifying it, notably adding all of the away dates, since this particular one focused only on home games. You can download the calendar by clicking on the link below:
Simply unzip (decompress) the downloaded file, and follow your calendar of choice’s method for importing a calendar. The .ics format is an open standard, so pretty much any modern calendar app–yes, including Outlook–will read it.
The following landed in ye olde e-mail inbox earlier today, penned by talk radio host Laura Ingraham:
Megan pulled a three-ring binder out of her bag and showed me a photograph of herself and her husband. Young–they’re both 21–with big smiles on their faces and obviously wildly in love. “That’s what he looked like,” she said with a somber face, “He was such a cutie-pie, always buying me little stuffed animals and writing the most thoughtful notes the entire time he was in Iraq.” Then she showed me the photo of her husband receiving the Purple Heart on Wednesday from President Bush at Bethesda Naval Medical Center. As President Bush pinned the medal on Mike, he lay unconscious in the ICU, having suffered a traumatic brain injury caused by a piece of shrapnel that pierced his temple.
“This is my Mike now,” she said, rubbing her eyes. He is completely blind and to alleviate a terrible cranial pressure build-up, doctors had to remove the front of his skull. Since being wounded several months ago, Mike has never regained consciousness and suffers from terrible seizures. “That’s my guy,” she repeated, before she went on to tell me about how they met and fell in love.
For whatever reason, I kept thinking about the fact that some person somewhere carefully assembled the IED that would eventually maim Mike and many others. They are often packed with nails, hunks of lead and screws to cause maxim human suffering. When they explode, the contents rip through flesh and bones, shattering countless dreams in the process.
How to comprehend this level of evil and the physical and emotional agony it causes? This young woman and her husband should be out buying their first Christmas tree together, going to parties, raising a glass to their future. When I asked what she was doing for the holiday she said, “I’ll be here with Mike. I would never want him to be alone on Christmas.” They had been married for about three months when Mike was wounded.
In these days before Christmas, Megan and other military wives and moms gave me a precious gift. They reminded me that true love requires sacrifice–sometimes seemingly unbearable, heart-wrenching sacrifice. They are living out their love in big and small ways. Many have moved thousands of miles to relocate to the hospitals where their husbands, wives, sons, and daughters are being treated. This takes an enormous emotional and financial toll, yet they do it for love. When they are not at the hospital bedsides of their wounded warriors, they sit for hours a day in waiting rooms across the United States, hoping for good news–or at least no more bad news. They pray with each other, cry with each other, and yes, even manage to laugh with each other as they hope for a day when they can return to “normal life.” Yet for the families of our most seriously injured troops, they know they will have to get used to a “new normal,” much different from the life they knew before.
As we are about to celebrate Christmas spending time with our families and friends, let us all do our best to live up to the true spirit of this season–and make it a time filled with love, faith, gratitude, hope, charity, and, yes, let’s try for some peace on earth. Let us remember the military families and our wounded heroes who will spend this Christmas at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Brooke Army Medical Center, Bethesda Naval Medical Center and other medical facilities across the nation. As we rush around stressed out because we “haven’t found the perfect gift” for so-and-so, these families hope and pray for gifts that cannot be wrapped up: a hand that squeezes back, a smile, the first step on a new prosthesis, or a positive medical report.
They need our prayers and support at Christmas and every day. Please give what you can to any of the wonderful organizations that support our bravest and their families.
Merry Christmas.