Yes, I have almost completed this school year, which has been very stressful for me and it is great to almost be through with it! I have waited so long just to be done with this and to put it all behind me. Right now, I just have one more test to take, which is taking forever for the people to send to me, for some reason. It’s an algebra test, and i feel that I should do fairly well on it, since I was able to understand it well. Anyway, it’s so awesome that I can just relax, although I can’t get the feel of it until I am actually 100% done and I have taken the test. And I wouldn’t have been able to do this without God, He’s the one who gave me the encouragement to keep on working at this!

Recently, there have been a bunch of people who came from Myanmar (formerly Burma) that have come to my church. Their government is really bad, and persecutes Christians and these people’s racial group, which is partly the reason they left. But anyway, they moved to Buffalo recently, and it is very fun having them around!

They are all extremely friendly, when I first met them, they smiled at me, shook my hand, and trued to talk despite their extremely limited English and heavy accent. There are some guys around my age who came, maybe a few years older, but they are all pretty cool. Very friendly, a few play guitar very well, and are very true Christians from what I have seen so far.

Of course, they are all very poor, they left Burma with just about nothing. Church members have to drive them to church (they don’t have cars), and I think we have rented a bus to take them a few times. But they are doing the best thing they can right now - learning English, which many people who come to this country are too ignorant to do. We have meals after church specifically so they can get some food, and our church has given them food, clothes, dishes, and toys to take home. 

It kind of makes me feel guilty knowing how they live, compared ot me. My family is just an average middle class family, but when some of them came to my house on day, they seemed awed at our house. they commented at how pretty it was, and my brother said one of them said “You live pretty good, huh?”. They must think we are so rich, when in reality we are just an average American family. It’s sad how undistributed the world’s wealth is, and Americans are so lucky to live so comfortably, and we often take it for granted and don’t think about the incredibly poor people in other parts of the world, or even in the city slums.

Anyway, we are hoping the kids will come to our church’s school; honestly, my church and school is having great financial trouble, and needs lots of money, but especially more students for our school.

To sum it up, these people provide a way to get a look at another culture, to become more aware of how each of us can help out in the world, and this could be God’s answer to my church’s prayers more more support!

Nowadays I have taken up sniffing turtle breath. It’s a good smell, and besides, it’s cool. Cool people these days sniff turtle breath, and in 5 years it will be even cooler, so if you start now, you will be one of the coolest people in 5 years or so because you were among the first to start sniffing it. All you need to do is find a dealer who gets it smuggled in from other countries (usually Mexico), and you can buy some. It comes with a device that allows you to sniff all of it without wasting any. Also, you can get your own turtle, but you need the right species, and if the police find out, you’re in big trouble.  You also will be much better off with the right instruments to collect your own turtle’s breath. I think I am going to get my own turtle this summer, but for now I’ll just buy my own.

Cool people sniff turtle breath!!!!

Oh, by the way: the movie Prince Caspian (one of the Chronicles of Narnia) came out this weekend, and I am hoping that I will be able to see it at a friend’s house sometime soon. I think it’s going to be great, even though they made some annoying changes to the story that weren’t in the book.

Well, I do homeschooling, and it is getting close to the end of the school year. I pretty much have everything done, except for about 2/3 of a semester of Algebra 1 left. This is the hardest subject for me; I really don’t like algebra because it gets so frustrating, and I can see no way it is relevant to the real world, and for the few ways it is, it’s definitely not worth learning. 

Earlier this year, I started doing really bad in algebra, but now I am doing better, and I have someone who can help me with it, too. I’m very relieved he can help me with this stuff (he’s really good at teaching math, he’s very friendly and nice, and he also was my music teacher, he knows how to play just about every instrument!). Hopefully, I can be done by early June, and I will make sure I enjoy this summer vacation very much. This has been a very stressful school year for me, and I have a new appreciation for free time.

This is the first presidential campaign I have actually been that interested in, and i have been reconsidering some of my positions on things. My parents are Republicans, same with most people in my school (well, it’s kind of my former school, but I still go there 2 days a week). But recently I have considered some of these things, and I am of the opinion that Obama would make a better president that McCain. Hillary is so ridiculous I won’t even talk about her. However, I think Ron Paul would be the best president, but he has almost no chance of getting the Republican nomination.

Here’s why I think Obama should be president:

1. He is against the War in Iraq, which I think is a useless, unwinnable war by now, needlessly wasting lives and billions of our dollars. McCain, on the other hand, seems more willing to go into war, and voted for extra troops in Iraq and stuff.

2. I know McCain is against gay marriage, but it doesn’t really matter. One, banning gay marriage isn’t going to keep people from being gay, two, a ban isn’t even likely to happen in the first place.

3. I know McCain is against abortion, but I doubt there will ever be a ban on abortion. We have had Bush for 8 years, he’s a Republican, and no sign of any change for the better. However, on topics such as war, the president will easily influence things, as Bush did very much so during the Iraqi War.

4. Obama just seems to be the one who is the most reasonable. He has good ideas, and I just don’t think the Republican party handles things very well. I know I didn’t provide reasoning behind that, but it’s just my impression.

Of course, there’s no such thing as a good president anymore. You just have to go for the one who seems the least harmful.

Well, I got home from the camping trip last night, and it sure was a lot different than I thought it would be. Okay, so we get there, set up our tent that we eat in, we ate some spaghetti, then headed over to vespers. The adults were sounding a little mysterious, but I was too naive to suspect anything. Anyway, we sing at vespers, some guy talks a while, and he talks about refugees in Africa a little bit. Then, he announces out of nowhere “So, tonight you are going to sleep outside in boxes and see what it would be like to be refugees. Your refugee camp is right next to you.” I looked over, and saw that there was a fenced in area that had an opening with a sign above it that said “REEUGEE CAMP”. Apparently they had failed in spelling “refugee” correctly, but I had been sitting right by there for half an hour and hadn’t noticed. In my sudden confusion, the adults began herding us in like cattle in to the “refugee camp”. They wouldn’t let me go to the bathroom when  asked them. They seemed to think it was funny, but I didn’t think so at all. It was around 40 degrees out there, and the temperature was still dropping (I think it got down to about 30 degrees). 

They gave us each a cardboard box and our sleeping bag, and then we set up camp. Everyone else was real slow, so it took almost an hour to get everything set up. And I had to use the bathroom, blow my nose, get some warmer clothes on, and take my contact lenses out, but my Pathfinder leader wouldn’t let me until out club was all settled in. Finally, he allowed me to, and I felt much better. It was pretty warm in my tight sleeping bag, but the box actually made things more uncomfortable, and I wish  had just thrown the box aside. I fell asleep fairly quick, but the worst was still to come. 

I woke up at 6:00 in the morning, and wanted to keep sleeping since I knew they wouldn’t feed us for another 1 to 2 hours. But everyone else was making noise, and random people were coming up and steeping on my sleeping bag and feet that were hanging far out of the box. So I just got up, went to the bathroom and put in my contacts, came back, and people were lined up to eat. When I got in line, I found out the horrible truth!

All they were giving out for breakfast was one “biscuit”, which I heard tasted like toothpaste. I got mine soon, and examined it. It was hard, yellow, but I was so hungry I ate it. It was so gross, when you bit it it fell apart like ashes in your mouth, and it tasted like some little kid toothpaste. It didn’t even taste remotely like biscuits. After I ate it, I washed out the horrid taste with some water. I later found out that this was what they gave refugees, and that they were loaded with fat, calories, and minerals, and were made so that they would expand in your stomach once you ate them, to make you feel full. A while after I finished eating the “biscuit”, I felt like throwing up. They said we would get another for lunch, too.

Throughout the day, we had some activities, some worship programs, but I had a hard time enjoying them since I was so hungry. They focused on the needs of homeless people and refugees, and they were treating us so harshly to let us feel like refugees did. I guess I am now glad that I went through that to remind me of starving people in Africa and other places, but I wish they had at least fed us some lunch. By the time dinner came around, I was so hungry, and ate like a beast. Then we left, and I happily settled down and slept most of the way home. I honestly didn’t have that much fun (they should have at least fed us), but I am still glad I went. It just makes you think of what so many people have to live through every single day.

My church has a group called Pathfinders, and they are kind of like Boy Scouts except they do all kinds of activities and it isn’t just for boys. Anyway, this weekend there is a camporee where all the Pathfinder clubs across New York (except for NYC) will go to a place near Syracuse and camp on the property of this one high school. I don’t really like this high school, the private Christian school I used to go to would go on field trips there and there would be different activities there throughout the year, and I just don’t think it’s that great of a place. The bathrooms in the dorms look like they haven’t been repaired for 80 years, the toilets are rusty, the ceiling is hanging down, and it smells very bad in the basement. 

Anyway, I’ll be leaving Friday afternoon (today), when we get there we will probably set up camp and fool around all evening, maybe jump some members of a rival Pathfinder club (hehe ), and then go to bed. On saturday we’ll get up, eat, go to church, and eat again. Then, they will probably put us on a forced march in our uniforms, and I have no idea what I’ll do the rest of the time. But we will leave Friday night, but I have to hurry up and pack now.