the long and winding road...

We decided that the best way to help you to understand the roads in this part of the country was to take a video of what it looks like to drive the roads.

A few things to keep in mind while watching this:

• This road is the quickest route between Frakes and Middlesboro (a town akin to Tunkhannock--maybe a little bigger--or Cortland--minus the university), and EVERYONE uses it.


• There are memorials on trees alongside the road.


• The scenery and the views are beautiful on this stretch of road, and it can be distracting.


• On one side of the road (where we were driving), you're up against the mountainside. On the other side, you're right next to a steep drop-off.


• There are no guard rails at any point on this road.


• This road is in good shape, and it's wider than many roads around here.

The song you're hearing the back ground is "Henry Lee" by Dick Justice. I apologize for the poor quality of the video--if I can figure out how to make it better, I'll fix it.

"It's a southern thang, y'all wouldn't understand"

I observed this quote and the confederate flag on a shirt at the local fall festival this past weekend. I'm not sure what to do when confronted with the symbol, which is very prevalent in the area and just today observed on an employee vehicle. I want to yell at people and tell them to stop being racist, but I know that this would be fruitless. A southerner may argue that it is a symbol of southern pride, I would counter that It would be difficult to find a proud black southerner who would raise it. To me this still makes it a symbol of southern white pride.

At the same fall festival I observed at least three interracial couples in attendance. I was pleasantly surprised by this and wondered if I had not given enough credit to the progression of the south.

I would be interested in your thoughts for a Yankee that just doesn't understand.

On a lighter note, more cultural observations:

• There are an abundance of bright fake plastic flowers at the cemeteries.
• If you go to Knoxville Tennessee on game day there are 100,000 people wearing volunteer orange.
• There are many old trucks, in various stages of repair and disrepair.

the library

As my Aunt Barb mentioned in her comment on my previous post, it turns out that I have become THE librarian for the Henderson Settlement Library.

This. Is. AWESOME.

The librarian (Elizabeth) who was running the library up until she left about a month ago did an amazing job of getting the library into shape. This is not a public library, mind you, nor is it part of any public library system. It is a two-room, backwoods library, but because of Elizabeth's expertise and some funding for the after-school program, this library is fully functional, complete with barcoded books, and OPAC, a special collection, and connections with the public school.

In the four days that I've been here, I've done the following:

• visited the elementary school to give away books for the RIF program to kids from preschool through eighth grade
• supervised volunteers (workcampers here for the week) in sorting through a massive pile of donated books
• connected with librarians from three schools within the school district so they can look through donated books to see if there are any that they can use
• figured out how to take care of Henderson's portion of the payment for the RIF books
• pawed through donations to see what would and would not be appropriate for inclusion in the collection
• downloaded MARC records and put them into the computer system
• processed books and put them into the collection

In the next few weeks, I think I'll start planning the story times that one of the staff members does for the Raising a Reader program, and eventually, I might get to do storytimes myself. This is really exciting to me! The one thing I have to work on, though, is paying attention to what sorts of materials I should include in the adult portion of the library--I've been spending so much time with children's literature, and I haven't paid any attention to what adults like.

One of the unique problems of this particular library is that the collection size is limited by weight. See, the building that holds the Community Center (part of which is the library) is very old, and the floor is not that strong. In fact, it's wavy.

Another interesting problem is donations. When I arrived at the Community Center on Monday morning, the hallway outside of the library was littered with boxes upon boxes of books that had been brought by workgroups. When I went into the library, there were about ten bins full of children's books and three tables stacked with books that had been donated to Henderson Settlement. Some of it's good--some of it's terrible. I'm learning, though, that the give-away shelf out in the hall does get picked through on a regular basis, and the school librarians are happy to come and look through the children's books because their book budgets are tiny.

Have I typed too much? I'm just so excited about this!

hills are awesome.

I am feeling a small burn in my legs from walking up so many hills. Maybe I'll stop growing out of my pants this year!

first impressions

Today was our first day of work, I worked on the farm watering mums, feeding bulls and working in the garden. We spoke with the director Sunday night and this morning he gave us a tour and introduced to us more people than we will remember. I may not be working solely on the farm, I will work a few different places and see where I am most useful. The director is interested in the possibility of "cleaning house" and getting rid of junk everywhere, I may also do some development work or other social work type duties, it seems up in the air right now and that is ok. Oh, and I may get to coach a youth basketball team, I remember playing one season of youth basketball and I was rather poor...check that, very poor, but in the haymow I was akin to Michael Jordan.

Here are some cultural observations that I have noticed since we got here on Saturday.

• There are many four-wheelers on the road used as transportation.
• Sometimes there are gunshots to be heard.
• The road signs have bullet holes in them. (good to know what they are aiming at)
• Everyone waves while driving...everyone.
• Everyone is related, not stereotypical related, just related.
• 3 of 12 stations on basic cable are continually preaching the word of God.

There will be more cultural observations in the future I'm sure.

the eagle has landed.

I am finally writing from HENDERSON SETTLEMENT! Hooray!

We arrived this afternoon and promptly unloaded our full, full, full car. I have to say, though, that I'm quite proud of the car. Even loaded down (as you can see in the pictures below--check out how low the back is riding), it still got 34 miles to the gallon!

So. Like I was saying, we unloaded our car into our new apartment. It's not the Zoochi House, like we were originally expecting--it's above the administrative offices, and it's bigger than the Zoochi apartment--bigger than our apartment in NEPA!

Here are some pictures of the apartment:

the living room

the dinette

our bedroom - please note the quilt made of polyester fabrics.

Oh. And we found these random things among the supplies in the apartment, too:

we're on our way

Off we go!

We left from my parents' house around 7:30 this morning, our car laden and riding low from all of the stuff that we packed into it. (Pictures of that will be posted at some point--don't worry!)

We'd already decided that we were going to do the trip in two days, so we weren't rushing, and we took my dad's suggestion to travel along part of the Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park. It's beautiful--I would recommend it to anyone who's got some extra time to mosey through Virginia. We stopped at the Byrd Visitor Center and learned a little bit about how the Civilian Conservation Corps helped build this and other national parks.

Plus, I got to see my CCC boyfriend, Iron Mike.
Right now I'm typing from a motel just south of Roanoke, Virginia, where we've stopped for the night. We're going to leave early-ish tomorrow morning, and hopefully we'll be in Frakes by the middle of the day. I'm not sure what our internet situation will be right away, but you can be sure that we'll let y'all know as soon as we figure it out!

It's still not feeling real to me yet that we're going to be in Kentucky for a year. I realized the other day that we're going to have to go through that whole new-job-where-you-have-to-learn-how-everything-works transition time--I haven't done that in a few years. Other than that, we've been too busy for me to obsess about how things are going to be....actually, that's probably a good thing, since I haven't been getting anxious about it!

So. If our internet is as easy as we hope in Frakes, we'll be able to have some Henderson Settlement pictures up soon!