keeping beed humble........WHAT!!!!

keep beed humble.......... you're killin' us beed. how do u keep someone with an ego this large in check?

well, u start with the two photos above. they hang on the wall in dahbeed's office. it's hard to see clearly in the bottom one but it is a little boy cradling his naked brother in his arms. beed did not take this photo, a lady from knoxville tennessee did and beed got a copy from her when we got back from honduras. it was taken in the capital city, tegucigalpa. to this day it remains one of the most pitiful images beed has seen.

the one on the top was taken in a little village in the southern part of honduras by the name of oropoli. beed did take this one. it was a beautiful little girl holding her infant brother and beed axed her could he take her photo and she agreed to but that mona lisa like smile is the best beed could get out of her. (u won't be able to see it, but trust beed, it was mona lisa like)

beed sent a story to a friend trying to explain why he is the way he is, in re, constantly a glass half full individual instead of a glass half empty. he departed from the third person in it and is not going to go back and change it for that reason. it's a story about something that happened in that little village of oropoli. there is a tragic element to it but there is also an uplifting element to it. and it is all true. anyhoo, here goes:

i can promise u that my life has been blessed already. i grew up in a broken home....a pretty rough upbringing. very, very poor. and God has blessed me with sooooooo much.

that is why i am always so positive on hilltopper haven......why i am always such a glass half full guy. my 20 trips to central america have really shaped me as a person. i was aware of how blessed i was already because of my travels during the marine corps......the poverty in egypt and kenya was stark....i had grown up poor but not the kind of poor that i witnessed in those countries.

i could tell u so many stories from my trips to c.a. one year we were in a small village named oropoli. i got to the clinic early and there was this pitifully poor couple waiting and i asked them what was up and they said their baby boy, around 2 years old was having convulsions...they feared he had been bitten by some type of poisonous spider and they had mixed up some homemade concoction but it had done no good. they wanted to know when a doctor would be in the clinic.

i had them wait and i ran back up to where the mission team was staying....everyone was still milling around after breakfast. i grabbed a doctor from tompkinsville and his wife (she was a nurse) and drug them to the clinic as fast as we could go.

they got an i.v. in him and said he needed to go to the hospital in the capital city.....over 4 hours away. a bunch of us took up an offering to pay for any medical bills. they took off in a jeep with the little boy in the nurse's arms.

the doc had been with us before but this was her first trip. i went to work in the clinic. several hours later they came back. the boy had been okay while they were driving the bouncy back roads (unpaved) but when they got on the highway he died in the nurse's arms.

she was so broken up as we all were. this was when little david was about the same age as that child. all i could think of was that if it had happened in b.g. i would have just rushed him to the hospital and not tried some homemade concoction and little dee would have been okay.

the next year we came back and we were actually working in the same village. some locals came to me because they knew i could speak spanish. this was late at night and they were looking for dahbeed cuz everyone in the village knew who i was. the locals learn early on who hablas and who doesn't.

they told me that there was a woman ready to have a baby and the local midwife was worried that there were going to be problems and could we get a doctor and nurse to help out. guess who was on the trip again?

the nurse that had the baby die in her arms. she and her husband went to the house and delivered a healthy baby. i just don't believe in coincidence.........you cannot convince me that God was not mending that nurse's heart.

the previous year she watched a baby die in her arms and that year she got to be part of bringing a new life into this world. so don't ever wonder why i am such a positive person.

p.s. i would love to keep a baseball bat in my office to chase some of our whiners at work off with. the AVERAGE salary around here is 20.00 dollars per hour. it's a climate controlled environment. the average job is not sitting in an office, it does involve some manual labor but it damn sure ain't working in the coal mines.

and beed promises u, he never tries to come off holier than thou to his co-workers (beed, holy.....that's another good one). but beed has a very low tolerance when one of them starts off on a rant about how bad this place sucks.

just beed's $0.02 worth.

the humble,

dahbeed ghandi ;-)