Start with a Toothbrush

I want to take some liberty to fast forward a little bit.  I will come back to the “proposal” but I want now to tell you about one of the more interesting parts of our lives.   Before we had children Deb and I took on the responsibility of being in charge of the resettlement of some Vietnamese families.  The sponsoring was done by River Terrace Church in Lansing, Michigan.   Our job was to furnish an apartment and help introduce these families to our culture.  Of all of the challenges we had faced before, we found ourselves busy with this and we recall helping organize this and getting things set for them to come to the USA.

Deb spent countless hours preparing an apartment and then more hours arranging medical appointments,  English classes,  and filling out the needed paper work for them  to get started here.  Different people in the church would donate furniture, food and needed things to get things set up.  When you start from scratch a project of this nature can be a real adventure.  The family of 5 arrived at the Lansing airport and each of them carried off of the plane a small sack. It looked to me that the contents of the sack were nothing more than a toothbrush, toothpaste and just a very few other items.  There was no luggage.

The father of the family was a gentleman by the name of Mu Ho.  To this day he is the only person I have known that could spell his entire name with 4 letters.  His children were quite young.  They had been flying and traveling for several days and before that had resided in a refugee camp.  I think the way that this worked was that as the Vietnam War was concluding these people, and many like them, found themselves on the wrong side of the fence.  They had been detained in one of these camps for quite some time.  Needless to say they were very tired.   The car was soon filled with excited talk in a language that seemed to me to be the fastest I had ever heard. On the way to a new life……..

Deb had taken great care to arrange the bedrooms. When she does something, she does it right.  I remember her sewing some curtains for them and the place looked pretty nice when she had it done.  We dropped off the family and they spent their first night in their new home. We came back in the morning and to our surprise they had all slept in the same room and it appeared that they had slept on the floor on some of the bed linens that had previously been on the beds. We had the place stocked pretty well with food.  Mu, in very broken English asked me if I could do one thing.  We went to the store and I just could not figure out what might be needed. Apparently, the human body just cannot take a huge and immediate change in diet.  He walked out of that store with a 25 lbs bag on his shoulder.  I explained that the American word for what he had on his shoulder was “rice.”  He did not know much English.  I do remember him saying to me  “dank u, rice is nice.”

Today, Mu and his wife live in a house they own in Grand Rapids.  They have nice cars and their family has thrived.  Shows what you can do even if all you start with is a toothbrush.  We have maintained loose contact with them over the years and with several other families that we assisted with resettlement.  Allow me to tell a few of these stories the next time.  They might bring a smile or as they say, a way for me to let you know that there is always a little Humor in the Storm.

Stan the Man