Thanksgiving Week

Thanksgiving was very enjoyable with its accompanying food, friendship, and fun, but I was given another reason to be especially thankful this year for all we are blessed with here in the United States.

I was shopping at K-mart the day before Thanksgiving for some ping pong table supplies for the youth at Trinity when I decided to take a detour by the boys clothing section to check out the Thanksgiving sale prices. Given my height and the typical lack of an available salesperson at K-mart, I was approached by a nice lady named Bonnie who needed help getting some boys' pajamas off of a high display rack. I got them down for her and what was expected to be a quick 5-minute "in-and-out" shopping spree transformed into a lengthy and I might add very enjoyable conversation. I thought Bonnie looked familiar, but couldn't quite place it. It turned out she was in the local Northern Watch newspaper recently having just returned from a mission to Swaziland helping with the orphans of a village there. She recently moved back to TRF after a lenghty hiatus (sound familiar?) to be nearby her only son who works for the Pennington County Sheriff's Department and her grandchildren.

It was enjoyable hearing about her history as she is a registered nurse by profession and, per her account, was one of the first infection control nurses in the United States, having been in the second infection control class of all time at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). She spent time on an indian reservation early on, which gave her experience dealing with poor to nonexistent medical environments with little to no supplies or equipment. She described having a rather small doctor there on the reservation who didn't have the physical stature to endure amputation procedures himself, so she would often have to performing the sawing of the limbs herself that were the result of diabetes and other injuries/infections. She also worked for many years as a nurse at Northwest Medical Center here in town before moving out to California.

I learned more of Bonnie's recent visit to Swaziland where she told me the story of a bag of chips. There were apparently around 80 young children gathered in the village for a special treat. A gentleman in the village had a single bag of potato chips, but it was one of those old bags they used to sell in the US vending machines before everything became "super-sized." There were nowhere near 80 chips in the bag to go around the 80 children, but it was like the fish and loaves of bread of long ago. Each child in an orderly fashion would approach the man, receive a chip or piece of a chip, say "Thank you, pastor," then quitely walk away for the next child to receive their portion. At the end of the dispensing of chips, there was not a single child who complained or asked for more (as I recalled Oliver Twist's famous statement). It was moments like that and seeing how little these children there have that motivated Bonnie to use her own savings to travel to Swaziland at the youthful age of 75 and help as best she could.

Bonnie attends the United Methodist Church here in Thief River, which supports her mission. Unfortunately there have not been many donations to help in her cause and I offered the space here on my blog site to share her story with whomever may be reading. Below I have posted Bonnie's picture as well as below that the original article from the Northern Watch newspaper. Please read through to the end where you can see how to help Bonnie in her mission. As we have allowed our turkey, dressing, and all the fixings to digest, here is a truly good example of something to be thankful for through the end of this year and in the coming year and consider perhaps sharing some of our bountiful harvest with those far less fortunate.

For a little background on Swaziland, The Kingdom of Swaziland is a small country in southern Africa (one of the smallest on the continent), situated on the eastern slope of the Drakensberg mountains, embedded between South Africa in the west and Mozambique in the east. The country is named after the Swazi, a Bantu tribe. It is a largely Christian country with a historically British influence as a British protectorate. It is not a country marked by civil unrest, unlike several other African countries engulfed in civil war in recent years. For more info, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swaziland.

Thanks for reading!