OKANAGAN VISITORS

My son and his wife come up from the U.S. for a month every summer to visit with family and friends. They stay in a lovely spot where they can enjoy the sounds of a bubbling brook and the sunny skies of our valley. In the afternoons they drive to town to visit family and friends. While his wife goes shopping with friends he stops by to help me with some chores; light bulbs that need replacing and today will install new window blinds.

Sunday morning he picked me up to attend Grace Bible Church. It was so crowded we got jostled close to the front. The orchestra instruments were tuning up and two from the young peoples group arrived on stage to announce the activities slated for the following week and introduce a visitor. I didn’t recognize either of them and was checking the program leaflet when a familiar voice made me look up. It was my grandson, but what happened to his hair. My son explained later that he had challenged his office mates at Kal Tire to contribute a total of up to fifteen hundred dollars for charity (The Heart and Stroke Foundation), he would have his head shaved. Earlier a short film had been made showing hair clippers racing through several stages of hair fashions finishing up with one called the “smooth dome” style. His office friends kept their bargain and so far more than seventeen hundred dollars have been raised for The Heart and Stroke Foundation.

When I was clearing out my files recently I found an article I had clipped from The Morning Star dated August l, 2004. It recounted a story about a local resident, Lisa Hanson who experienced her first mission trip to help underprivileged children in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. The trip was organized by the Alliance Church that pictured an orphaned boy of about eight wearing a donated hat from here. Volunteers learned Spanish here before leaving to help a Mexican protestant church that runs a school called School of Champions where they get a meal at the end of the day and the family gets donations of clothes brought by the volunteers. The children are eager to learn English and Math and later are able to qualify for jobs in the tourist industry. Sometimes parents live nearby in hovels and with their children can make up to three dollars a day. One family of five children had been abandoned there and are known as Children of the Dump. Our son tells us that he is amazed at the amount of funds that both Canada and U.S. have given to Haiti after the recent earthquake disaster.