• Already

    I didn’t expect this until high school. Beth pulled a late night, last minute school project throw together tonight. If you’re keeping score from home, that’s a fifth grade, last minute project.

    We like to think we’re good parents. I knew she had “homework” that was due tomorrow. Somehow I didn’t catch on to the significance of this one being assigned a couple days ago.

  • Ranks of child soldiers swell again in Congo | csmonitor.com

    A friend of my wife’s parents is a priest from Congo. He came here shortly before the civil war began to become a pilot and study airplane mechanics, in order to serve the needs of his people back home. Since the war began, his parents, his siblings, and his bishop have been killed. He’s been waiting for the day when it is safe to return.

    This story is sad enough all by itself; but I read it and realized it’s been a ten year wait.

    Ranks of child soldiers swell again in Congo | csmonitor.com:

    Kitchanga, Congo – The prisoners are huddled in a classroom, on display for journalists visiting the rebels led by Gen. Laurent Nkunda. The setting is appropriate, because half of these soldiers are boys who should be in school but have been pressed into war.

    “[T]hey told us we were going to fight the Tutsis,” says Bahati, speaking in the presence of a rebel intelligence officer. “I’m 14, but there are many boys younger than me. It’s hard to know how many died in battle, but I saw two who died.”

    Nowhere has the use of child soldiers been as pernicious as in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But in the past three years of relative peace, militia groups as well as the Army were starting to send their adult soldiers into an integrated Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the FARDC, and to send their child soldiers home to their families. But a recent bout of fighting – a tangled conflict of local ethnic militias, Rwandan rebels, and the Congolese Army – is putting that progress at risk. Untold hundreds and even thousands of young boys and girls are being forced to rejoin the fight, or to fight for the first time in a war that few of them understand.

    denis.jpg
    Father Denis with Beth on her sixth birthday.

  • A gift of weather

    Every year there’s one morning in early fall (or occasionally late summer) when I go out to my car on the way to work and notice something different. Either the air is a little dryer, cooler or both. It’s not usually a big difference; just the barest of hints, a little promise that the long summer will eventually end. That morning came yesterday, and it was a nice surprise. It heralds my favorite time of year in Florida… the time of year when we start to enjoy the outdoors again.

    There wasn’t a whole lot of gift giving yesterday, especially with the big computer purchase coming earlier in the week. I’m not complaining. A new computer is a great birthday surprise… even if we were planning to get one later in the year anyway. Still, a pinch of cooler air on the first day of birthday season* made it nearly perfect.

    The high is only supposed to be 87 today! If I close my eyes and ignore my calendar it could feel more like November than September, with the holidays close by, the kids getting excited (infecting me with their enthusiasm), and the first blasts of cooler, Arctic air just around the corner (though quite a bit warmer by the time it gets here).

    Most of the next four or five weeks will be back in the 90’s again, but it won’t be long before cooler air brings all of our yearly visitors with it. We’ve turned a corner.

    I love this time of year.

    *Me, two sisters, mom, dad, my son, a nephew, a father-in-law, a brother-in-law, and an aunt all have birthdays between now and the third week of October; and that’s not counting anniversaries. If you have a large family that may not sound like a lot, but that’s almost everyone in my small family. I guess January was a particularly fertile time in my family.