Blossoming

The foam eraser

Alisoun and "It's

Possible"

Each day seems more amazing than the last. There were so many synchronicities and satisfactions today. Our favorite interpreter, Sharon, has a beautiful voice and writes her own music. She wrote a song just for us: “Imagine what a difference we could make together, if we join our hands together as one”. The melody and rhythm are addicting. Paul, the film maker, corralled one of the students who is an exceptional drummer and taught him how to record by listening to Sharon on earphones. The result could very well become a hit. It will be in the video that is being made to accompany the interview Lori had with Jessica Ortner from the Tapping Solution. Our PLR Ambassadors came up with twelve benefits they had received from tapping (EFT), showing depth, insight and gratitude. They chose the top five, and then chose the five students who speak the best English, and those students came up to the camera, said their name and the tapping benefit. Then one girl who started out so shy, demonstrated the entire tapping process for an e-mailing list of 300,000 people with clarity and confidence. All of us were crying to see the transformation from naïve, shy, isolated, self-doubting, hopeless young people to vibrant, confident, creative, hopeful leaders. They have become a team, supporting one another by going to visit one student’s ill mother, doing tapping with them when a student has a problem, feeling incomplete when one is missing (only one student has missed one day), and the local students inviting the homeless ones home to meet their families. Several of the students have lost all family members except a few cousins or one sibling, and two have lost all known family members. Some do not know their birthdays because there is no one to tell them and they were too young at the genocide to know. Two of them have almost constant pain from their injuries and diseases—although the neck pain of one has gone away and the other has a reduced level of pain after tapping on those issues. They look forward to the Energy Medicine Daily Routine (simplified so they can teach others) every morning and report feeling calmed and ready to learn afterward.

Alisoun and I had a group of 33 high school students in the afternoon to begin teaching them to become peer counselors. They are so enthusiastic, and so eager to help other students and us. We use a regular classroom which is an experience in itself. I mentioned before that the blackboard eraser is a torn piece of foam mattress. The board has ripples and sandpapery places and slick places, and you can’t get all of the past writing off. Everything within six feet of the board is covered with chalk dust, and whoever erases the board coughs for several minutes. The chalk breaks after a few sentences when it hits one of the rough spots. It is hard for the students to see what you write because the board is so white from the layers of chalk still there. We gather small pieces of chalk from the floor by the board to use, as there is no chalk tray. Since there are almost no books and definitely not a book for each student, everything has to be written on the board. The teachers have to be dedicated to the students, or they would not continue under these conditions.

We stayed at the school until 6:30 tonight to have a Skype call with Pacific Grove Middle School in California tonight. The call did not work, but the students were prepared with Sharon’s song, a cheer we use (It’s Possible), and thank yous for their T-shirts and crystal heart necklaces. We will try again for the call. We used 19 of the solar book lights to illuminate the area next to the computer enough to do the call at dusk. The two two-foot fluorescent light bulbs in the library were not enough to really even read by (and the power went out for about thirty-minutes). The solar lights are one of the products the students will be selling as part of their cooperative business venture. Tomorrow we continue with the peer counselors and the PLR Ambassadors will make a matrix of all the skills that each member of the group possesses to start their creative process to decide on what business ventures are best for them.

Project LIGHT is working! When you walk into the room we use for training you can feel the hopeful, magic energy that everyone together has created. It truly is an international, intergenerational, interracial co-creation.