Wilderness Blues- Ramblings from the Great Land

   I like to watch movies, though for over forty years I never went into a movie theatre. We didn't have a movie theatre in Hoonah, so we never got to see the latest releases. However, that changed when we moved to Wasilla. They have a large movie theatre here, a big honking thing with something like seven screens. On Tuesdays, they have $5.00 matinees, so if something comes on that I want to see, it doesn't break the bank.   Last week my wife and I went to see a movie titled  The Sound of Hope.  It's a true story about the people in the town of Possum Trot Texas, a small town in East Texas without even a traffic light. The people who live there are predominately African American and for the most part they are desperately poor.   I believe there is only one church there, the Bennet Chapel, pastored by W. C. Martin and his wife Donna. They have two children, a son who was born mentally handicapped, and a daughter. Life was hard for them, struggling to make e...

A Haitian boy in the market Children in school at Danita's Children Dauphly Francia Dervilus Robenson Talabert  I received a lovely color pamphlet from Danita's Children  a couple weeks ago. Danita's Children is an organization down in Haiti that runs an orphanage, a school and most recently a hospital on the compound. In 1998 Danita Estrella came to the Dominican Republic with a group of doctors in order to translate for them. Several weeks later she traveled to Haiti. When she saw the orphans, the people sleeping in the streets, the abject poverty, her heart was broken. Two months later she said goodbye to her family and moved to Haiti by herself. She opened a home for orphans and one month later she had fourteen children she was caring for. She started a charitable organization called Hope for Haiti and has since renamed it Danita's Children.I'm no...