Flying

So we get to do Ash's favorite thing again---flying in airplanes!

We leave here the evening of August 30th, and get to San Francisco a little after noon on....
August 30th!!!
Then we get the rest of that day to see San Fran, since our connecting flight doesn't leave until just after midnight. A one and a half layover in Cinci and we will be getting to Charlotte-Douglas around 10:48 am on the 31st.

Can't wait to see everyone and hear about what we have been missing in your lives!

perfect timing!

perfect timing!
Originally uploaded by BigBroRio

Come see some pics of us in New Zealand!

Sickly

There is definitely something going around here…people have been falling sick all around us. Ashley and I both fought through the flu in the middle of June, and it came back last week and got Ashley again. The youth conference we attended was like a flu-breeding ground, and almost every other person who attended wound up shivering and coughing for at least a couple days.

The conference started on Saturday and went through Tuesday morning, but Ashley was under the weather by Monday afternoon, and didn’t come out for the last morning. The camp started that same evening at a different venue, and I went out there on my own. It was the first time we have been apart for the night. Not sure which of us had it worse-me at the freezing-cold camp with a bunch of youth making noise, or her at home coughing up a lung and shivering…actually I guess there isn’t much comparison at all. She came out to camp for a little while the next day but headed back to the house that evening. Finally on Thursday she came out to stay.

The national youth conference was 180+ youth from New Zealand and Australia staying at a local boarding school. It was an intense experience for us, since it was up to us to prepare and facilitate three workshops for all the participants, a task which neither of us had ever tackled before. We spent a lot of time putting together the workshops, and along with a group of about five or six others, we did our best to empower these youth with a vision for service and teaching. It did not go exactly as we had planned, but it did go…

The Radiant Youth Program was very similar to the camp we attended in April-same venue, a lot of the same youth attended-but this time, Ashley and I were the “adults in-charge”. There were thirty-one of us at the camp total, including the cook, her helpers and the four study circle tutors. We were graced with the presence of a wonderful artist named Grant Hinden-Miller. He ran workshops on dramatic presentations and story-telling. And of course he played lots of songs for us-he has many albums out and I LINK TO GOOD SONGS!

Ash is still carrying around a painful, dry cough, while I am still doing my best to stay healthy. I ain’t 100%, but since I spent the past twelve days with sick youths, I feel pretty good, relatively speaking. Now we are staying at the National Baha’i Center for a couple nights, because there are some other guests staying with our host, Caroline. The center is very nice, and one of the Baha’is from South Auckland is letting us use one of his vehicles at the moment. We went to Muriwai Beach together-last time I went alone, but we decided to leave before the sun set, a decision I regretted later as the sky turned orange and purple on the way home. The nice part is that I get to see sunsets at all, right?

Read This Article Friends

A link to a very interesting essay on the financial collapse by an author who has a knack for putting things very simply…Justice St. Rain. I have read some of his books and enjoyed them all, I hope you will take five or ten minutes to read this and think about what he is saying…Go Here to Check It Out

Where we are At!

We are house-sitting for a neat family, David and his wife Nassim and their two children. David’s sister Tessa also lives with them. Our new address is 26 Benchmark in Waitakere City, Auckland. It isn’t far from Caroline’s house where we have been staying…her address is 170A Candia Road, Waitakere City.

We took a short road trip to the west coast of Auckland this weekend, to a little town/beach called Piha. I’ve got some pictures and I will get the video uploaded as well.
It is a great surf beach apparently, but wet suits are a must so who knows when I will get out there with someone.

We went to the Auckland Museum yesterday. We ran out of time upstairs in the War Memorial…Sam we saw a fighter plans…a Zero…it was given to the Royal New Zealand Air Force and it is in great shape. They craned it in to the museum when they were doing some renovations, before they finished the ceiling. The pilot and plane were scheduled for a kamikaze mission out of Indonesia near the end of the war, but the mechanics who were making the repairs stalled to save the pilots life. The pilot lives in NZ and is a Doctor at the University. I wish now we had gone to the War Memorial first, but the natural and cultural areas were neat too. Here, just like everywhere else, the Europeans/British made a bunch of treaties with the indigenous peoples (the Maori) and then broke them. It still is likely that the Maori fared better than most in this regard, but there are still a long list of atrocities committed by those early “settlers”. I need to research this history some more to even claim to know what I am talking about…

Ashley got sick last week…even though we took sulfur (homeopathic remedies) she was snotty and flu-like for about four or five days. And despite my best efforts right as it went away from her I turned it on! New Zealand cases of the h1n1 virus are starting to rise, so if it was that I wouldn’t be surprised. Our friend Hami also got sick right around the same time, then he jumped on a plane and flew to Papua New Guinea via Australia! It also might have just been a result of the intense daily pace we were keeping up with the teaching campaign…burn out.

So if your checking account balance dips below zero…I have always seen that expressed as a negative number. As in -$20.32…and so when we were waiting for a direct deposit and I checked the balance via an ATM and saw $80.10 d, I assumed that the first of the three deposits (payment from our grape-picking) had been made. I didn’t even notice the little D. The next day, when the balance had climbed to over $200, and I checked online activity to see that NO deposits had been made, I realized we had a problem. Anyways, the short story is that they don’t put negative signs in front of the balance, they put any number of random letters, but generally an O and a D, to mean overdrawn. Anyways, although I spoke with our banker on the phone, and she actually offered to remove the fees this time, they are still there almost two months later, and no phone call to the bank has gotten a response as of yet. Every so often they tack on five more dollars as fee for being overdrawn. I went in and deposited enough money to cover everything except the fees ($20 times six transactions!) and still haven’t heard back from her. BTW she is on Waiheke Island so it isn’t really possible to just pop into the branch.

We are working to create four workshops, each ninety minutes long, for the participants at the New Zealand youth conference coming up in July. There will be four main talks, and after each one the workshops will help build upon the youths understanding of their role. Just so ya’ know…the talks are titled (some of these are really long titles):
• The Current State of the World, the Process of Disintegration, and looking at the relationship between this and receptivity
• Junior Youth and the JY Empowerment Program
• The Remaining Three Core Activities (Devotionals, Study Circles & Children Classes); Direct Teaching and the role of the youth
• Process of Integration, The Future of the World w/ Regards to the New World Order; The Beauty of Baha’i Administration

So all we have to do is six hours of workshops on that! They only asked us two days ago to do it…and the conference starts on July 4th! (NOT a holiday here!) Let you know how it goes!

Job Hunting

The job search is on. In the past few weeks, Ashley and I have applied for tons of jobs, rewriting our cover letters for each one, trying to find some work here in the capital city of New Zealand. Here are a few observations for those of you back in the states…

Although New Zealand is a “western” country, it is still a relatively small country, and most of the businesses here are small-businesses. Other than the evil American fast-food chains, Blockbuster video, some retail stores and car dealers, just about everything is mom and pop style.

A lot of hiring is done here by word of mouth. Larger companies have to advertise positions to meet standards and laws, but lots of jobs are awarded because of who-ya- know.

I guess none of this is really any different from the job market in lots of places…but I just received a rejection letter yesterday from a cleaning company…apparently I am little overqualified. Ashley also heard back from a company needing staff for their restaurant-same thing. Not to mention the tons of applications that we don’t get a response on.

I have been applying for a diversity of jobs, from receptionist and office manager jobs-which I had experience with at H & S- to customer service or sales positions. I have applied for a store manager position with a natural health store-I figure I have a good experience on both sides of that one, to work as a survey taker at local events-I figure I’ll just dance and gather a crowd and then Ashley can circulate and get the surveys filled out, or pickpocket everyone…;)

If I had a little (like two years) more experience with AutoCad I could have applied for a few jobs in survey companies, but no openings have been available at my level position. A surveying position was actually the first thing I applied for way back when we first landed on Waiheke, but as it was explained to me by the local surveyor: there are only a handful of large companies. Most of the surveyors are one, two or three person companies working out of their homes. Roofing companies are similar. So no luck there yet. I guess I could put my door knocking skills to work and start visiting homes for jobs.

Ash has been putting in apps with restaurants, hotels, a neat local coffee company called Roasted Addiqtion to be a processor (read: bag filler), and customer service stuff. No doubt that this search has brought school right back to the forefront of our minds, and we have been researching that as well. First thing will be to get her residency application approved, then we will know more.

Expansion in Auckland

Early this morning...at around 1 am on the 29th of May, we will all wake up and head to the local Baha'i Center to observe a Baha'i Holy Day-the Anniversary of the Ascension of Baha'u'llah...the exact time is 3 am I believe.

We just finished day five of the nine day expansion phase here in Auckland. It has been a huge learning experience, providing both Ash and myself with tons of growth opportunities and knowledge. We have knocked on the doors of homes-which by the way isn't a whole lot of fun...so be nice to them the next time someone comes knocking! We have gathered children together and started a class in one neighborhood, and we are hoping to get some of the parents to come soon as well. We have met people who are encouraging, people who don't want to hear it, and people who invite us in to have tea and talk. Tomorrow we are going back to talk with a man some more...he has questions and he feels pain for the suffering of others...I don't know if we will have any answers but we are both looking forward to talking with him some more.

"Gird up the loins of thine endeavor, tha thaply thou mayest guide thy neighbor to the law of God, the Most Merciful. Such an act, verily, excelleth all other acts in the sight of God, the All-Possessing, the Most High."

-Baha'u'llah; Gleanings from the Writings of Baha'u'llah, CLXI, p. 339