Walk in Quiet Places

Nick

Enjoy your Sunday with Family and Friends.

With Love

Nick

Walk in Quiet Places

Nick

Mohamed Bangura

A Young Man Finds Hope in a New Career

Like many youth in Sierra Leone, Mohamed Bangura finished his secondary education only to find that there were few opportunities for work in his community. He tried his hand as an auto mechanic, but couldn’t make it with older and more experienced mechanics already in his village.

With time to spare, Bangura began volunteering with Heifer’s Faroad Baka Women’s Agricultural Group. Mohamed put his mechanic skills to work helping run the group’s power tillers, enabling the women to break up the ground for planting crops. He enjoyed the work, but it was seasonal and Mohamed still had no steady source of income.

Mohamed considered farming himself, but he knew that agriculture was often a difficult way to make a living. His family had once raised goats, but when they were infected with a disease there was simply no veterinary care in the area and all of the goats died.

With his options at home fading, Mohamed began to think his only hope was to follow the well worn path of his peers toward the capital city, Freetown—contributing to the continuing drain of educated young people from rural areas.

The Foroad Baka Women’s Agricultural Group, seeing that they might lose one more young person to the city, offered Mohamed another opportunity. The women’s group convinced him to be trained as one of their Community Animal Health Workers. Mohamed, knowing that few of his peers had found work in the city and that even fewer returned to support their families, accepted the women’s offer.

Now Mohamed is empowered, the only male member of his community with animal healthcare skills. He is putting those skills to work to ensure that his community’s animals thrive and avoid the fate of his family’s goats. In exchange for the Women sending him for Community Health education, Mohamed provides their animals with care for free and sells medicine and care to the rest of his community.

“I am now permanently engaged in my community,” Mohamed says, “I see no reason to move to the city. I now have a means of livelihood for the rest of my life. I am grateful to Heifer.”

Sierra Leone Africa

Connect with Communities in Sierra Leone Mohamed’s story is just one among many that are a part of Heifer’s Integrated Livestock Development Project in Sierra Leone. Help fund this project and you will be connected to families in Sierra Leone as you receive regular updates on the project and follow its progress. Through this project you will help provide families with livestock, train Community Animal Health Workers, and educate families on issues such as HIV/AIDS, water, sanitation, and the environment.

 

Reprinted from the Heifer Newsletter.

Heifer International is the Charity I support.

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Have a wonderful Sunday with Family and Friends.

And Remember:

Walk in Quiet Places

Nick Grimshawe

Proof of Spring by Nick Grimshawe

Here is an wonderful inspirational quote to lift your day. I’ve also included a link below where you can down load the quote, print it off and take it will you to ponder and discuss with friends.

Nick

 

Awe is the deepest celebration of life. We marvel at the overwhelming nature of existence, and sense that by our aliveness, we somehow fit into the wonder we behold. We find clues in our relationship to the grand scheme of things in those moments when we reach out, in embodied experience, to embrace the “others” that make up the totality of existence. Empathy is the means by which we transcend ourselves, by exploring our relationships and connections with the awe of being.”

Source: The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis  by Jeremy Rifkin

Get a print ready copy at: http://www.prosperityrising.com/links/3566

Have an Awe Filled day and remember:

Walk in quiet places.

Nick

Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/defeated2k4/

Editor’s Note: I don’t usually pass on emails that I receive but this story is outstanding. I just had to share.
Nick

I try not to be biased, but I had my doubts about hiring Stevie. His placement counsellor assured me that he would be a good, reliable busboy. But I had never had a mentally handicapped employee and wasn’t sure I wanted one. I wasn’t sure how my customers would react to Stevie.

He was short, a little dumpy with the smooth facial features and thick-tongued speech of Downs Syndrome. I wasn’t worried about most of my trucker customers because truckers don’t generally care who buses tables as long as the meatloaf platter is good and the pies are homemade.

The ones who concerned me were the mouthy college kids traveling to school; the yuppie snobs who secretly polish their silverware with their napkins for fear of catching some dreaded ‘truck stop germ’; the pairs of white-shirted business men on expense accounts who think every truck stop waitress wants to be flirted with. I knew those people would be uncomfortable around Stevie so I closely watched him for the first few weeks..

I shouldn’t have worried. After the first week, Stevie had my staff wrapped around his stubby little finger, and within a month my truck regulars had adopted him as their official truck stop mascot.

After that, I really didn’t care what the rest of the customers’ thought of him. He was like a 21-year-old in blue jeans and Nikes, eager to laugh and eager to please, but fierce in his attention to his duties. Every salt and peppershaker was exactly in its place, not a breadcrumb or coffee spill was visible when Stevie got done with the table. Our only problem was persuading him to wait to clean a table until after the customers were finished. He would hover in the background, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, scanning the dining room until a table was empty. Then he would scurry to the empty table and carefully bus dishes and glasses onto his cart and meticulously wipe the table up with a practiced flourish of his rag.

If he thought a customer was watching, his brow would pucker with added concentration. He took pride in doing his job exactly right, and you had to love how hard he tried to please each and every person he met.

Over time, we learned that he lived with his mother, a widow who was disabled after repeated surgeries for cancer. They lived on their Social Security benefits in public housing two miles from the truck stop. Their social worker, who stopped to check on him every so often, admitted they had fallen between the cracks. Money was tight, and what I paid him was probably the difference between them being able to live together and Stevie being sent to a group home. That’s why the restaurant was a gloomy place that morning last August, the first morning in three years that Stevie missed work.

He was at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester getting a new valve or something put in his heart. His social worker said that people with Downs Syndrome often have heart problems at an early age so this wasn’t unexpected, and there was a good chance he would come through the surgery in good shape and be back at work in a few months.

A ripple of excitement ran through the staff later that morning when word came that he was out of surgery, in recovery, and doing fine.

Frannie, the head waitress, let out a war hoop and did a little dance in the aisle when she heard the good news.

Belle Ringer, one of our regular trucker customers, stared at the sight of this 50-year-old grandmother of four doing a victory shimmy beside his table.

Frannie blushed, smoothed her apron and shot Belle Ringer a withering look.

He grinned. ‘OK, Frannie , what was that all about?’ he asked..

‘We just got word that Stevie is out of surgery and going to be okay.’

‘I was wondering where he was. I had a new joke to tell him. What was the surgery about?’

Frannie quickly told Belle Ringer and the other two drivers sitting at his booth about Stevie’s surgery, then sighed: ‘Yeah, I’m glad he is going to be OK,’ she said. ‘But I don’t know how he and his Mom are going to handle all the bills. From what I hear, they’re barely getting by as it is.’ Belle Ringer nodded thoughtfully, and Frannie hurried off to wait on the rest of her tables. Since I hadn’t had time to round up a busboy to replace Stevie and really didn’t want to replace him, the girls were busing their own tables that day until we decided what to do.

After the morning rush, Frannie walked into my office. She had a couple of paper napkins in her hand and a funny look on her face.

‘What’s up?’ I asked.

‘I didn’t get that table where Belle Ringer and his friends were sitting cleared off after they left, and Pony Pete and Tony Tipper were sitting there when I got back to clean it off,’ she said. ‘This was folded and tucked under a coffee cup.’

She handed the napkin to me, and three $20 bills fell onto my desk when I opened it. On the outside, in big, bold letters, was printed ‘Something For Stevie’.

‘Pony Pete asked me what that was all about,’ she said, ’so I told him about Stevie and his Mom and everything, and Pete looked at Tony and Tony looked at Pete, and they ended up giving me this.’ She handed me another paper napkin that had ‘Something For Stevie’ scrawled on its outside. Two $50 bills were tucked within its folds. Frannie looked at me with wet, shiny eyes, shook her head and said simply: ‘truckers.’

That was three months ago. Today is Thanksgiving, the first day Stevie is supposed to be back to work.

His replacement worker said he’s been counting the days until the doctor said he could work, and it didn’t matter at all that it was a holiday. He called 10 times in the past week, making sure we knew he was coming, fearful that we had forgotten him or that his job was in jeopardy. I arranged to have his mother bring him to work. I then met them in the parking lot and invited them both to celebrate his day back.

Stevie was thinner and paler, but couldn’t stop grinning as he pushed through the doors and headed for the back room where his apron and busing cart were waiting.

‘Hold up there, Stevie, not so fast,’ I said. I took him and his mother by their arms. ‘Work can wait for a minute. To celebrate you coming back, breakfast for you and your mother is on me!’ I led them toward a large corner booth at the rear of the room.

I could feel and hear the rest of the staff following behind as we marched through the dining room. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw booth after booth of grinning truckers empty and join the procession. We stopped in front of the big table. Its surface was covered with coffee cups, saucers and dinner plates, all sitting slightly crooked on dozens of folded paper napkins ‘First thing you have to do, Stevie, is clean up this mess,’ I said. I tried to sound stern.

Stevie looked at me, and then at his mother, then pulled out one of the napkins. It had ‘Something for Stevie’ printed on the outside. As he picked it up, two $10 bills fell onto the table.

Stevie stared at the money, then at all the napkins peeking from beneath the tableware, each with his name printed or scrawled on it. I turned to his mother. ‘There’s more than $10,000 in cash and checks on that table, all from truckers and trucking companies that heard about your problems. ‘Happy Thanksgiving.’

Well, it got real noisy about that time, with everybody hollering and shouting, and there were a few tears, as well.

But you know what’s funny?
While everybody else was busy shaking hands and hugging each other, Stevie, with a big, big smile on his face, was busy clearing all the cups and dishes from the table..

Best worker I ever hired.

Plant a seed and watch it grow.

At this point, you can bury this inspirational message or forward it fulfilling the need!

If you shed a tear, hug yourself, because you are a compassionate person.

Well.. Don’t just sit there! Send this story on! Keep it going, this is a good one!

The End

Enjoy this Sunday with your Family and Friends.

Nick

The Simple Truths of Appreciation with DVD Movie – $ 15.95 The Simple Truths of Appreciation is a beautifully crafted gift book that incorporates amazing photography, powerful quotes and inspirational stories about how we can make a difference in the lives of others. Barbara Glanz has created an instant classic that takes you on a journey through 10 key principles of appreciation. If you’re looking for a great gift to recognize someone special or to simply say “Thank You”, then this is the perfect gift.

Courtesy of Merlin