In Praise of Diversity

Well, this has been a great diversity awareness week for Natalie. One of the children in her class at school has two mommies... yesterday at the birthday party there was a woman in a wheelchair... and today the neighboring African-American church shared our church service with us. Back before the Civil War, someone in our community gave land to the slaves to have their own church (previously they had been worshiping in the balcony of our building). After the Civil War the two groups continued to stay in their own churches and to this day you have two Methodist churches side by side -- a stone's throw from each other -- and ne'er the two shall meet. Unfortunately, they have been having problems with the roof on their building falling in and have been forbidden to enter it until it is repaired, so we have offered to share our building in the interim. It has been the best community building thing for the two churches and I'm glad that we attended the joint service today. It was a very good experience for Natalie.

I went back this afternoon to start setting up my classroom. Found out that they are expecting me to have 15 students (instead of the 12 I had previously been told) and so I don't have enough main lesson books. I made an emergency purchase at A Child's Dream Come True for ten more books. I hope they come by the end of the week! Usually she is very good about shipping.

I will post the Sunday School curriculum for this year later on, in case people are interested in the stories I'm picking. Day One will be a review of Creation (we'll read The Dreamer by Cynthia Rylant) and the introduction of our service project for first quarter -- earning enough money to adopt a gorilla. Last year we did an aluminum can collection for our fundraiser and, although the children gathered over 1500 cans, we only earned a measly one cent per can. This year I found out about a potentially much better project, involving worm poop, and I will research it and then post more details.