Thursday, October 28, 2010

A Bloggy Day in Dar-ling-ton (County)

Today was Book Club Day and Saffron's Restaurant was all decked out for the season :)

Our book was.......The Mine and The Well.  I really liked it but couldn't contribute much to the discussion.  I read it right after the last meeting, a month ago, but I've probably read six books since then so.....its a bit fuzzy.  But I know I liked reading about mining and people living during the 1930's in West Virginia.  The leader (the town librarian) asks about character development and plot devices....I am silent.  But now when it comes to chatting up the new people and hopefully making them feel comfortable.... that I can do.
My children call me "barbra wawa" for Barbara Walters.  I never met a person I didn't want to interview.  (Well in all honestly....maybe a few).
Our group of about ten to twelve is a mix of native Hartsvillians (one or two)  long staying H'villians (that would me and a few others) and newcomers to H'ville.  Most retired, teachers, librarians, secty and one or two still working "youngsters" in their fifties.  Oh....and one fine addition from Darlington named Lucy :)  I took Lucy to the library after Book Club to pick up the books they had reserved for me....she had not seen "our" library before and was aghast that it is sooooo much finer than the Darlington Library.  Well Hartsville is a community of educated people with lots of money who put it in their library.  What is a better place?
One more word about books and then on to the best part of my day.  I picked up Jan Karon's latest book,
IN THE COMPANY OF OTHERS....wonderful....her best yet....go buy it or reserve it NOW!



Our son Wayne invited us to his church in Darlington to see the World Wide Singers.  These fourteen children from third world countries come to the USA for ten months.  They are from 6-10 years of age and they dance and sing worship songs with such energy and love for God it is amazing.  They travel on a bus with a married couple who parent them for the ten months.  Why?  To raise awareness and money for water wells in these impoverished countries where there is so little water people are drinking contaminated, dirty water and children are so riddled with dysentery they can't go to school and 29 children die every minute. 


This is Ronald....he and Josh (one of the other boys on the team) spent two night with our son and his family.  Ronald is from Uganda.  His father is in prison and his mother has five other children so his grandmother put him in a children's home sponsored by this group.  When they got to Wayne's house the first night...Ronald saw the basketball goal in the yard and said, " I always wanted to play basketball".  When he saw Gates' motorized Police car he said, "But now I want to drive a police car!"  He got his wish!  I hope they raise a ton of money for clean water.




2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Book Club sounds fun! Did you see a newcomer who looked like an older, much slimmer version of me? I heard the food was delicious!

Anonymous said...

Your book club sounds wonderful. Libraries are definately the best. We just recently had elections and Libraries were one of the platform topics. Some of the candidates wanted to reduce library funding!!