“The Real Story of Thanksgiving”

Tomorrow we will have Thanksgiving dinner at the Club House restaurant, like we’ve been doing for many years. But this year, our children and their families won’t be with us, thanks to You-Know-What-19.

Today I’m meeting with Bismarck, the onsite director of FunLimon, and a half-dozen other local leaders to get an update on the progress made so far in bringing relief to the community and making plans for the future.

After Hurricane Nate in 2017, Number Three Son Michael, the stateside director of FunLimon, raised more than $100,000. Some of it went to immediate relief (food, water, seeds to help subsistence farmers get back on their feet, etc.), but most of it went to restore almost 400 wells in the local neighborhoods. These were good, deep wells by old-fashioned bucket-and-hole standards, but after Hurricane Iota, they nevertheless filled up with the polluted water running off streams and rivers.

Bismarck and David were able to clean 142 of the wells, but 228 of them had to be completely rebuilt.

“Seems sort of futile,” I said.

“It’s like breaking an arm,” Bismarck explained. “You put a cast on it. It’s fixed. But then the next year you break it again. What are you going to do? Not fix it?”

He’s right, of course. So that’s what we are doing for the time being. But I’m conjuring up a plan to build a network of modern, deep, pipe-and-pump wells and placing them in the local communities for common use. Problem is, new regulations would require us to turn over the ownership and use of such wells to the local government. And so I’m exploring the possibility of putting them on private property that we own so we can be sure they will not be converted later on to public utilities, in which case their future use could not be guaranteed.

Meanwhile, I found a video on YouTube, titled “The Real Story of Thanksgiving,” that I think