We are in the process of moving. As of this writing, we have moved from our beautiful home to a town 4.5 hours away. I have been working in a different job, for the same university, these past four months.
We put our home on the market and finally closed on it this past Thursday. We loved our home. It was perfect for us, because we are consummate entertainers (so I’m told), and we have the absolute pleasure of having our grandchildren with us at least one month during the summer. We’ve had that pleasure since each was four months old.
I do realize that, it’s not the actual structure of a house that makes it a home. Though, that adds greatly to how one uses the structure. What matters most are the memories we build in our homes. Friends and families help us make those memories, so I have no doubt that when we find a new home, we will begin to build new memories. In some cases, with friends and family, we pick up where we left off, only in a different location.
For one month, until the house that we plan to rent while we make decisions on the purchase of a “new” home becomes available, we are sort of homeless. I will continue to stay at the AirBnB at which I’ve been housed since November, and my spouse will live in town from which we’ve moved, as he wraps up his job of many, many years.
The bittersweet process of selling our home last Thursday was compounded by another sad and heartbreaking event: the loss of our Scottish Terrier, Fiona. Here she is.
Fiona has just turned 14 years old. I wondered if the commotion and frenzy around moving confused her, but she became ill and died about fours hours later. Scotties are a special breed. They have wonderful behaviors and can be very possessive of their family members, a.k.a. “Owners”. We are crushed by her passing, but we have the fondest of memories.
Right now, I’m eager to find a home to call our own and to begin the process of settling into normalcy of cooking, entertaining, and sharing good times with my spouse and our dog, Jitsu. She’s a sheep dog: 3/4 Border Collie and 1/4 Australian Shepherd. Here she is:
Here, Jitsu, is pictured with a young admirer who will have nothing to do with me, but love my dog! Most people love this dog, because she is friendly, loving, and funny. She even smiles! Yes. Jitsu talks, too. Here’s her famous smile:
I have a lot to catch up with more writing about foods, intercultural relationships, and life. Hopefully, I will catch up with the bloggers who have been busy writing.
I am a geographer specializing in human systems. My passion is studying underrepresented populations so that I can assist in their integration into the communities in which they live. I studied Human Ecology because it is a wonderful blend of the disciplines of geography, anthropology and sociology. No matter the context in which I find myself, I am an observer of humans in their environments and how the influences in those settings build and nurture sense-of-self, sense-of-place, and sense-of-direction in educational, familial, and community settings. My work focuses on the cross-cultural and intercultural traditions of multi-lingual populations acculturating into their receiving communities and being successful in educational arenas of higher education. This work includes gathering, analyzing, and writing about health, well-being, and environmental/social connectedness in their communities. My research focuses on Minority-majority, rural, Midwest communities. My role as director of intercultural learning and academic success at Kansas State University allows me to discover more about myself as I work with others in their paths to self-discovery in their own interactions with students and families who come from different parts of the country and the world all converging in educational spaces. Recently, I lived, worked and played in Southwest Kansas, a region marked by Minority-majority populations centers (56% – 68%). Some of my research results are used to address poverty, low educational attainment, poor health outcomes, and cultural norms in multi-cultural settings. I work to assure a representative sample for my research, so I engage in multi-lingual research (English, Spanish, Burmese, French, Tigrinya, and Somali). Building trust and relationships is the key to my success as a multilingual researcher. Presently, my research takes me in the micro-communities of populations represented by nine African countries (Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, Kenya, Senegal, Uganda, Ivory Coast, Somalia, and Cameroon), seven Latin American countries, and six Asian countries. Yes, it is rural Southwest Kansas, and many of the densely-settled and frontier rural communities act as receiving centers for refugees and other displaced populations, because of the availability of jobs.
I am the recent recipient of National Geographic Society’s Research and Exploration grant to introduce Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to females of color. This inter-generational, intercultural class hosted middle school, high school, and adult females who learned the basics of GIS with a variety of applications from remote sensing to city planning to Google Earth, and to Pokémon GO! By the time the young ladies finished the class, they were able to build cities, map their communities, log trips from their countries of origin to the Midwest. I am in the mid-year of the grant funding, and my target for completion was July 2018. I have new funding to extend this work to new cohorts.
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Human Ecology: People, Foods, Travel, Culture, and Social Justice 