Wednesday, July 10th appt with Rising Sun newspaper

Today is Wednesday and we have an appointment with The Rising Sun Newspaper editor. V.  Thambiran. He is the guy in the left middle with the glass of wine. I found this photo online. They were not celebrating our visit...ha. The building was very nice. They had animals engraved in rock on the front of the building and inside was a modern sleek office with shiny black floors and pretty Indian young women manning the round modern reception desk. We were taken up a circular staircase to Vivaga's office. As soon as we sat down, he started talking about the community and how there are many Christian churches, but he is Hindu and he believes everyone can believe what they want, but they need to help those less fortunate and act like Christ, by serving the people. He then started talking about how so much propaganda is spread by the outside media that Chatsworth is a dangerous place, but that is just not true. He said, "When you go to an Indian's home, they invite you in and offer you tea and biscuits right? We looked kind of vague, because we haven't been to an Indian home, so he asked one of the girls from the office the same question and she said, Oh, they would invite you in and give you tea and biscuits. He then asked us if we ever saw any crime there and we admitted we had not, so he said, "You can walk anywhere on the streets here and no one is going to bother you. There is no crime, at least not any more than anywhere else. It is quite safe here." Then we told him a little about the concert and he said that it sounded good and gave us his card. He said he liked the guy at the youth centre...He is a good man and told us when we sent our press release he would print it. He said he also had a story about our last wheelchair giveaway in his newspaper. He is an interesting man and we enjoyed him a lot, even without the kind of reception that is in this photo.

We came back and worked on the press release and I found a place online that would do flyers for 1/3 of the printing places here, the flyers are bigger on glossy paper, so instead of paying the equivalent of $325 for 4000 1/4 page flyers, we are paying $125 for 5,000 1/2 page flyers...good bargain hunting. It takes longer to get them printed, but it will be well worth it. We are trying to get our PA council on board to find ways to hand them out to different neighborhoods and organizations. Did I mention that this is a lot of work?

We also got an email from Lisa at Lotus giving us the names of the wheelchair recipients so we can let CE Mobility start making the chairs. Unfortunately, when we got the names she had two organizations listed. One had the names of the six people getting chairs and one just said 20 chairs. Our contract is to give to individuals, not institutions, plus we have the wheelchair giveaway and we want recipients to be there. It would not do, so we made appointments with the two groups getting chairs for Thursday, so we can go and see what is going on. This concert and wheelchair handover has my moods going from happy to sad to mad, depending upon the day. Elder Kyle calmed me down and said just wait until we meet with them, because I was grumbling that we were going to all this trouble and no one was going to show up for the wheelchair distribution or concert. But, I calmed down, wrote a nice positive letter to Lisa at Lotus and decided to wait until tomorrow and see what we find.

Wednesday evening we went out to dinner with Elder and Sister Holt. We enjoy them and haven't been to dinner, when not working on Public Affairs, hardly at all, so we went to the Ocean Basket and all had king fish and chips (fries). and salad, except your dad who had fish and calamari. It was good, but the company was even better. They are a very nice couple from Canada. Sister Holt works at the front desk in the Mission office and is less than a year older than me. Elder Holt works in the mission office on the car fleet that the church has going for all the missionaries and is about two years younger that Elder Kyle. He worked for a feed manufacturer (for cattle) in charge of a sales region for most of his life. They lived out in the country. We had some great conversation and got to know each other a bit better. Another busy day.