Child Slavery in the Chocolate Industry
Justice Is What Love Looks Like In Public
Published in the Sun January 27, 2013

Julie Clawson and her daughter Emma enjoy a fair trade s'more

“I don’t doubt that nearly all of us morally oppose forcing children into slavery…  No parent would request the kidnapping, beating, and starving of other children so that they could serve chocolate cupcakes at their child’s birthday party, but nonetheless, this is essentially what happens.”

 

The startling quote above is from Austin author Julie Clawson, in her book Everyday Justice: The Global Impact of Our Daily Choices.  She is referring to child laborers on Ivory Coast and Ghana cocoa farms who are trafficked and forced into slavery to satisfy the enormous appetite for chocolate in America and Europe.  Some of these children are kidnapped; others are sold outright by desperately poor parents in neighboring Burkina Faso and Mali.  The children are not allowed to attend school and often do dangerous work with machetes or apply pesticides without protective equipment.  UNICEF estimates that in Ivory Coast alone nearly 200,000 children are laboring illegally on cocoa farms.

 

Julie’s book doesn’t stop at slavery in the chocolate industry.  She also peels back the sleek marketing campaigns camouflaging some of our other voracious habits.  She discusses unfair wages for coffee farmers, seizure of oil-rich lands from indigenous people by energy companies, and America’s growing propensity to make everything out of plastic and then throw it all away after a momentary use.

 

Ever since I heard Julie speak last year I have wanted to meet with her, and finally the chance arrived.  Her two young children were back in school and Julie’s own studies at Austin Episcopal Seminary had not yet resumed.  In the driveway Julie’s car was plastered with bumper stickers advising that “Peace begins when the hungry are fed” and “Justice is what love looks like in public.”  Julie, who is 6’1” plus high heels, has a tiny stud in the left side of her nose.  On the dining table were two dozen Harry Potter wands in various stages of construction for an upcoming birthday party.  Over tea, I asked what lit her fire for social justice.  Why does an ordinary suburban housewife, even one with magic wands, think she has the power to fight global injustice?

 

Julie has no illusions.  She knows that poverty and injustice will not end just because she buys fair trade chocolate and coffee.  She explains that the end of poverty and injustice is not her responsibility, but she feels obligated to join in the struggle.  “I have to at least start somewhere.”  Living ethically is reward enough.

 

Julie’s mission is to explain to comfortable American consumers that our buying habits affect farmers and children on the other side of the world long after the heady rush from the chocolate bar or double latte has worn off.  It’s like voting with your wallet.  Do you want to vote for African workers to be paid enough to feed their children and send them to school?  Or does the cheapest product get your vote even if it means impoverished farmers and trafficked children?

 

Julie loaded her book with well-researched stories and, what seemed to her at least, common sense suggestions.  She was surprised by some of the reactions the book provoked.  A few readers were really peeved that this nasty information about child trafficking had diminished their rightful enjoyment of chocolate.  Another shock came when Julie was an invited guest on a Christian radio talk show and was admonished by the host that her concern about the living conditions of the child laborers sounded “too socialist.”  Taken aback by such an attitude, she responded that she was just trying to live out Jesus’ commands.

 

In 2001, US Representative Eliot Engel and US Senator Tom Harkin introduced a bill that would have created a “slave-free” certification process for chocolate products.  The industry was vehemently opposed, because to have a few chocolate products certified slave-free would expose the others as not slave-free.  To make a long story short, we ended up with a voluntary, non-binding agreement (the Harkin-Engel Protocol) that the chocolate industry would cut back on the “worst forms of child labor.”  So it’s not surprising that twelve years later very little has changed under the voluntary program, except that child trafficking is more secretive because it is now illegal in every country in which it occurs.

 

Since we don’t yet have a slave-free certification process for chocolate, Julie recommends buying chocolate that is at least certified fair trade.  A trip to HEB reassured me that there are several fair trade chocolate bars easily available:  Dove, Green and Black, and Newman’s Own.  There are also numerous sites on the internet to order fair trade chocolate.

 

Does a “Fair Trade” label absolutely guarantee that no children were exploited to make your chocolate bar?  Unfortunately, the system isn’t perfect yet.  As long as poverty and greed exist there will be people who cheat.  In 2010 a BBC crew went undercover in Ghana and found some children working illegally even on farms that were supposedly certified fair trade.  The journalist offered one skeptical little worker a Kit Kat bar and, as the boy took a tentative bite, a big smile spread across his face.  After years of harvesting cocoa beans, it was his first taste of chocolate.

 

 

Wind Energy at TECO-Westinghouse
Published in the Sun January 13, 2013

Turbine blade at TECO-Westinghouse

 Driving past the TECO-Westinghouse plant on Interstate 35, I always look for the two longhorns in the pasture in front of the rusty brown building, a small oasis of rural tranquility alongside the main artery of Central Texas.  Two weeks ago, instead of driving past, I was privileged to visit the plant to meet with Richard Fesmire, Director of Operations at the only TECO-Westinghouse facility in the United States, right here in Williamson County.  We met to talk about wind energy.

In 2006, TECO-Westinghouse teamed up with DeWind, a successful German company, to bring wind turbine production to the US.  Since that partnership was formed, TECO-Westinghouse has built and installed 110 of the enormous turbines, whose blades sweep a circle in the sky bigger than a football field.  Most of these turbines have gone to the Novus Wind Project in the Texas-Oklahoma panhandle area.  A few have been sold to projects in Chile and Canada, and one turbine was installed in Sweetwater, Texas for a wind technology training program at Texas State Technical College.  (Think green jobs of the future.)

About 3% of US electricity comes from wind power.  Texas has more installed wind capacity than any other state, and more than twice as much as Iowa, which is number 2.  On November 10, 2012 at 10:21 AM, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas set a new record for wind energy production.  At that moment 8521 megawatts of wind energy generation provided the state-wide grid with 26% of its total electricity.  From 2006 to 2010, wind energy generation in Texas quadrupled to 26 million megawatt hours, partially stimulated by the federal wind energy production tax credit, which essentially subsidizes wind energy producers 2.2 cents for every kilowatt-hour of electricity produced.  (The retail price for electricity in our area is 10 to 11 cents per kilowatt-hour.) 

The production tax credit was created in 1992 and has expired several times, but was always renewed.  It was raised to its current level in 2005, creating a boom in private wind energy investment to the tune of about $15 billion per year.  A law passed by the Texas legislature in 2005 began construction of 2300 miles of high voltage transmission lines to bring even more wind energy electricity from West Texas and the Panhandle, where the wind blows, to Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio, where people use it.

Mr. Fesmire shows me the hubs and rotor shafts for the D9.2 DeWind turbine, which is rated to produce 2 megawatts of power under optimal conditions.  His eyes light up when he tells me about the peak of TECO-Westinghouse’s turbine production last year.  After spending millions of dollars to develop the assembly process, his workers had the capacity to put an 80 ton turbine on a truck every 8 hours, each turbine requiring about 1000 man-hours of work.  “That was a lot of fun,” he admits.  So why is he speaking in past tense?  Why was nobody working on the assembly line on the day of my visit?

On December 31 the production tax credit was set to expire.  As the “fiscal cliff” approached, investors were afraid that this time the credit might not be renewed, so they waited.  Orders for wind turbines slowed to a trickle.  Mr. Fesmire had predicted that without the tax credit TECO-Westinghouse could build as few as ten turbines in 2013.  He hasn’t had to lay anybody off, because they are still building lots of motors for the oil and gas industries, but he had hoped to hire 35 more people to build turbines and wasn’t able to.

Fortunately, the fiscal cliff bill passed by Congress on New Year’s Day extends the wind energy production tax credit for another year, allowing Mr. Fesmire to feel optimistic, although he would like to see a longer range plan.  On-again, off-again policies are terrible for business.

Some people argue that wind energy should be able to stand on its own two feet without government support.  Sounds good, but the tax credits for oil and gas have been in place since 1916 and are permanently built into the tax code, so those industries are not plagued by uncertainty.  Also, the price we pay for electricity from a coal or natural gas plant does not include the long-term costs to society of carbon dioxide emissions and other air pollution, making those fuels look cheaper than they really are.  Burning coal for electricity is sort of like eating fast food:  it’s easy and cheap if you don’t count the cost of the heart attack down the road.

Richard Fesmire with rotor shafts for D9.2 turbine

Chevy Volt
Published in the Sun January 2, 2013

 “If you have a bathtub full of water, and you start emptying it one teaspoon at a time, eventually you are going to get it empty.”  Biology professor Mary Griffith used that metaphor to teach her community college students that petroleum is a finite resource.  No matter how much remains underground right now; someday the oil will be gone.  Petroleum is so important to the chemical and plastics industries, it doesn’t make sense to burn it up motoring around town.

 

Mary believes that her faith requires her to be a good steward of the environment, so when electric vehicles became available she wanted one.  But Mary has family in Colorado and takes frequent road trips.  At this point in time, long road trips are not practical in a pure electric car, so she decided on a Chevy Volt, a plug-in hybrid.  The Volt has a lithium ion battery, and Mary can drive about 44 miles around town on a dollar’s worth of electricity.  But if she wants to go to Dallas or Colorado, off she goes.  When the electricity runs low a gasoline engine kicks on automatically and takes over without her having to do a thing except drive.

 

Mary insists I take her Volt for a test drive.  I settle into the leather seat and hit the power button.  Some other-worldly music plays like a spaceship booting up.  The dashboard displays the range remaining for both battery alone and gasoline.  Over the lifetime of the car Mary is getting 73.4 miles per gallon.  She apologizes for the 73 mpg number; it would be higher if she hadn’t gone to Colorado so many times.  In less than a year she has put 17,000 miles on the car.  The only maintenance has been to rotate the tires.  Sometime in the next 2 years she will need to get the oil changed.  I back out of the driveway with the guidance of the rear view camera.  We head out to Hwy 195 and Mary urges me to floor it.  She has had it up to 85 mph and knows it could go faster.  She claims the Volt is the most powerful car she has ever had, but I just take her word for it.  Electric cars do have amazing acceleration – sort of like turning on a circular saw.  We discuss the purchase price of a Volt.  She points out that a wide array of luxury cars (and trucks) cost far more.  Mary’s preferred luxury is the reduction of her personal greenhouse gas emissions.

 

When Mary first got her Volt, she wrote a letter to the editor of the Sun extolling the virtues of her new car.  She wanted to share her enthusiasm.  In response she received an anonymous letter in the mail.  Someone banged out an angry diatribe on a small piece of paper, photocopied it, and sent her the photocopy as if he (or she) was some sort of secret agent.  The writer accused her of using batteries that would someday end up in a landfill, and berated her for not paying her fair share of the road tax.  (In reality batteries that are no longer adequate for an automobile still have 70% of their capacity remaining, and can be used to store energy for household solar arrays.  When completely depleted, they can be recycled.)  Until receiving the letter, Mary had no idea that electric vehicles had political opponents.  I asked if she is afraid this column will provoke another letter.  She hesitates, but finally decides she doesn’t care.  She enjoys driving a low emission vehicle and likes saving money on gasoline.  Mary believes electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids are the wave of the future, and she is proud to be an early adopter of an innovative technology.

Nissan Leaf - A Perfect Urban Ride
Published in the Sun December 15, 2012

Lisa Davis loves her Leaf

Fellow eco-nerds with similar buying habits, Lisa Davis and I met at HEB stocking up on Seventh Generation recycled paper towels.  Lisa had seen my column about driving my Nissan Leaf to the Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center (a trip former editor Ben Trollinger referred to as “Toad’s Wild Ride”) and introduced herself as a fellow Leaf driver.  I asked if she has had adventures with electric driving, but she denied any drama.  “It’s a regular car.  People need to know that.”  Her Leaf was a Christmas present last year, and the thrill has yet to wear off.  An electric car is the ideal vehicle for driving around town.  There are no tailpipe emissions of carbon monoxide, particulate matter, or ozone to smog up our urban air.  In addition to being good for the environment, Lisa loves her Leaf because it is loaded with amenities and big enough to hold her husband and two sons, all over 6 feet tall.  The Leaf is quiet and smooth, but when she steps on the pedal it takes off like a rocket.  Curious people ask her how fast it will go, but she doesn’t know.  She’s had it up to 80 mph.  She wonders if maybe I’ve gone faster, but alas, I am a boring driver.

 

Lisa admits that when she first got the Leaf she suffered from a bit of charge anxiety; the fear of running out of electricity before getting home.  The first time she took the car to Austin, she stopped at the Nissan dealer in Round Rock and topped up her charge.  She needn’t have worried; she had plenty of juice for the return trip.  I have taken my Leaf to the Austin airport and back on one charge, but that is about the limit of range at highway speeds.  Driving around town at 30 to 40 mph it will go 100 miles, but since people rarely drive 100 miles around town, it’s not really an issue.  When you get home you just plug it in and charge up again.

 

The electricity to run the car costs about 2 ½ cents a mile.  (Gasoline costs 8 to 20 cents a mile, depending on whether you drive a gas sipper or a gas hog.)  No gasoline engine also means no oil changes.  About the only maintenance required is rotating the tires.  And cleaning the windshield.  Lisa and I both noticed that when you never go to a filling station, your windshield gets really, really dirty.

 

A curious person, Lisa once tried to deliberately run down her battery, just to see what would happen.  With about 8 miles of range left the dashboard started flashing warnings and the nice GPS lady offered directions to a charging station.  If a careless driver ignores the warnings and keeps driving, the Leaf will eventually enter what is called “turtle mode,” in which speed and acceleration are limited for one last mile, allowing a safe exit off the road.  Lisa tried to reach turtle mode in her neighborhood, driving round and round the block, but she got bored before the car ran out of charge.  Finally she just drove into her garage and plugged it in.  Sometimes she charges up at the Georgetown Recreation Center charging station, where the electricity is complimentary.

 

Lisa is sold on electric driving, but what about the general population?  Jerry Crider, the electric vehicle specialist at Round Rock Nissan, told me that hesitation about the new technology is being overcome by an attractive new lease deal from Nissan.  You can now lease a Leaf for 36 months with $2000 down and $249 a month.  That is a pretty good deal considering it costs about $200 a month just to keep an SUV fueled up.  A lease avoids the hefty purchase price of the Leaf, and after 3 years the customer can trade up to what will surely be new and improved electric technology.  Jerry has leased four Leafs in the last month alone.  So far nobody has come back to say they really prefer gasoline.

 

My next column will be about a delightful lady, Mary Griffith, who wanted to drive electrically but needed a car that could take her back and forth to Colorado.

What's Up with the Yellow Bags?
Published in the Sun December 1, 2012

“Bag the Bag” it’s called; a bright yellow stuffer bag designed to hold plastic bags, six pack rings, cellophane, and other film plastics for Georgetown’s new single stream recycling.  When the bag first showed up with my 96 gallon recycling bin I was incredulous.  Surely we didn’t have to buy special bags just to recycle other bags?  Couldn’t we just stuff all our bags into an old grocery bag?  The idea of a special bag just seemed so wrong to me that I made an appointment to speak with Verna Browning, a representative of Texas Disposal Systems, and Rachel Osgood and Gary Hertel from the city of Georgetown to learn the reason for this apparent travesty of sustainability.

 

It turns out there is method to their madness.  Plastic bags cannot be thrown loose into the recycling cart for two good reasons:  they fly everywhere on the slightest breeze creating litter, and they jam up the mechanism of the sorting machines.  So bags must be bundled together into a package big enough to stay put.  Unfortunately, a regular grocery bag filled up with other bags will tear open when it is compacted in the truck, and then you are right back where you started, with loose plastic bags.

 

The stuffer bags are tough enough to stand up to the collection process.  When properly tied shut, tiny perforations in the bottom of the bag allow air to escape so they don’t explode when compacted.  Upon arrival at the recycling center, workers can easily recognize the bright yellow bags and pull them off the conveyor before they go into the sorting machine and cause mechanical problems.  The yellow stuffer also identifies the bag as recycling.  A tied off grocery bag could just as easily be filled with diapers or doggie poo.

 

My original “Bag the Bag” has been hanging in my kitchen for over a month and it is still not even half full.  It now contains 22 bread and newspaper bags, the plastic wrapper from a bundle of paper towels, and some Saran wrap.  There are no grocery bags because I have reusable bags for the grocery store, and the few bags I do get line my small trash cans.  When it is finally full, new stuffers are available (for free) at the municipal utility office at the corner of Industrial Drive and Leander Road, at the Garden-Ville outlet near the soccer fields on Walden Drive, and at the Sun City Social Center Monitor’s desk.  Yes, they are free.  The original plan was to charge 25 cents a bag, but apparently citizens were on the verge of mutiny, and in a spirit of cooperation the city decided to absorb the cost.

 

If you remain skeptical about the yellow bags, you do have alternatives.  You can still take grocery bags, bread bags, and newspaper bags back to the grocery store.  I went to HEB incognito (which is easy for me) and asked two separate employees who were taking out trash if the grocery bags that get collected actually go to recycling.  Both assured me that they really do.  Unfortunately the grocery store will not take other kinds of plastic wrappers or cellophane, nor will they take those turtle-strangling six pack rings.  Another alternative is just to trash your plastic bags.  Recycling is, after all, voluntary.  Just remember that whatever goes into your trash bin ends up in the landfill.  It does not get diverted to recycling at the dump just because it is recyclable.

 

Several choices exist for yard waste as well.  If you continue to put yard waste in black plastic bags it will go into the landfill, no exceptions, where it uses up space and squanders a valuable resource.  If, however, you would prefer your yard waste to be composted and turned into mulch, bundle it into four foot lengths or place it in compostable bags and set it on the curb on your yard waste day.  I went to Home Depot to check out the bag situation.  Jim Glennan, a Home Depot employee and a recent transplant from the Chicago area, showed me a huge box in the Garden Center where you can get 5 compostable bags for $1.88.  He says this time of year they sell like hotcakes.  He also pointed out that in Illinois recycling was free but he had to put a sticker costing $2.80 on each and every yard bag or garbage bag that he discarded.  He liked that method because he could save money by not throwing anything away.  True, but it seems like an awfully pricey sticker to put on a bag of garbage.

 

For people who really don’t want to buy yard bags, Ms. Osgood suggested using a large generic trash can that looks different from the TDS bins and labeling it “YARD WASTE” in giant letters.  Your leaves will be composted au naturel.

 

For answers to almost any question that you could possibly have about Georgetown’s single stream recycling, go to http://recycle.georgetown.org/.

 

 

Nothing for Christmas, or Maybe a Llama

Published in the Sun November 17, 2012

The busiest shopping day of the year is Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving.  Now if you are one of the people who really enjoys cruising the mall for Christmas bling, read no further.  There is nothing in this column for you.  But if you, like me, have a bunch of relatives who always buy themselves everything they want the minute they figure out they “need” it, and if battery-powered plastic widgets from China already fill every nook and cranny of your children’s rooms, shopping for more unnecessary stuff may seem like a strange way to celebrate a spiritual holiday.

 

Every year my family proposes cutting back or not giving Christmas gifts, but then we chicken out.  I’m sure it has happened to you.  You make a pact with somebody not to give gifts, and then on Christmas Day she shows up at your door with “just a little something” and you stand there like the Grinch.  Or maybe the adults in the family draw names for each other but everybody gets something for the children.  Then on Christmas morning the poor children open one gaily wrapped package after another for two hours and then collapse sobbing into a pile of wrapping paper when the frenzy is over.

 

Surely there are acceptable alternatives to buying gifts that end up in the back of a closet.  I have tried giving those Christmas cards announcing that a llama or water buffalo was donated to Heifer International.  If, en route to South America, the llama actually stopped by the honoree’s house, this would be a quite interesting gift, but without such a visit I suspect the recipient just wonders why I didn’t donate livestock in my own honor and give him a more immediately useful bottle of Scotch.

 

The Friday after Thanksgiving has another designation as well.  It is also known as International Buy Nothing Day, a campaign by Canadian-based Adbusters Magazine inviting people to go cold turkey from consumer culture for 24 hours by not buying anything.  No lattes, no movie tickets, no groceries, no gasoline, no shoes, no Christmas presents.  Buy Nothing Day has a website that explains the concept.  They suggest such alternative activities as a “Whirl-Mart,” in which you and your friends parade through certain big-box stores pushing empty shopping carts.  Or you could offer to cut up your friends’ credit cards.

 

As I perused the website I found myself wondering if there are Buy Nothing Day T-shirts.  I clicked on the shopping tab and received only a snarky admonition, “What?  Shopping already?”

 

After some reflection I came up with a plan that doesn’t involve embarrassing myself at a retail establishment.  My family members are forewarned and invited to retaliate appropriately.  I am going to celebrate International Buy Nothing Day by not shopping.  That won’t take long, so then I am going to sit down with a homemade cup of tea and list some gifts I can make.  Some of these will be cookies, some will be photographs, some will be artsy-craftsy.  Some may end up in the trash, but what difference does it make?  Expensive store bought items can end up there too.

 

I’m also going to buy gifts at the Christmas Stroll from local artists.  I get something unique and the money stays in our community.  Some of my family will get vintage items from antique stores.  My daughter and her husband don’t need another household gadget and would probably prefer a few evenings of babysitting.  Some lucky soul may still get a llama.

 

If your family has an interesting way to combat consumerism over the holidays, please send me an email.  I’ll have plenty of time to check email on Buy Nothing Day!

Straw Bale House Arises from Ashes of Bastrop Fire
published in the Sun November 4, 2012

On September 4, 2011, Charlie and Carol Jones were relaxing at their hilltop cabin near Bastrop.  Charlie had just talked to the sheriff about some small fires in the area, but had been reassured that the fires were under control.  It was a windy day, and a door blew open, so Carol got up to close it.  She came back and told Charlie that she smelled smoke.  They both went out to look around and noticed burning embers blowing across the deck.  A massive cloud of smoke was roiling up the side of the hill.  Carol threw the dogs in the truck and Charlie grabbed his guns, the computer, and a box of family photos.  Hightailing down the hill toward the main road, Carol remembered their neighbor Jess, who was out of town, so she called to tell him what was happening.  Jess is lucky to have a friend like Carol, because he had not left town after all.  He was holed up in his computer room, unaware that his home was about to be incinerated.  By the time Carol and Charlie reached the road, five minutes after they first smelled smoke, the entire hill was an inferno.  They stopped to take pictures, because they couldn’t believe what they were seeing.

A few days later, when the Joneses were allowed to go back home, they still had hopes that the cabin might have been spared.  But when they reached what had been their home, Charlie said, “It was like the top of a volcano.”  The ground was still smoking.  Not a single tree was left unburned.  The cabin was nothing but ash; even the metal sleigh bed was twisted like a pretzel by the heat.  The only trace of their previous life was a wind chime tinkling in the breeze, and a large iron sugar pot in the yard that was home to a collection of goldfish.  Amazingly, the goldfish were still alive.

Thirteen months after the historic fire, the hill is covered with yellow flowers, and a few green shoots are emerging from blackened oak stumps.  Charred pine trunks stud the landscape.  Charlie and Carol are temporarily staying in a nearby RV park, but today they are the center of a small energetic crowd on top of the hill.  The Jones’s new straw bale home is being built by a very unorthodox construction company:  Clay, Sand, and Straw, owned by Austin architect Kindra Welch and her husband, John Curry.   The workers will be living on site until the house is finished.  A tent city occupies what was once the front yard.  Outdoor showers and composting toilets are hammered together out of scrap lumber.  Under a tarp, a gypsy kitchen provides three meals a day.  John is chief cook and bison potato stew is a specialty.

The new house has been framed and roofed, and volunteers (who paid for the privilege of learning straw bale construction) are helping the crew install the large bales that will insulate the walls.  Kindra, her hair tied back under a blue bandanna, is instructing the volunteers how to fit and secure the bales.  After all the bales are in place, the walls will be plastered inside and out, creating a beautiful, cool, and fire-resistant wall.  No drywall required, no siding.  John is supervising volunteers (when he is not cooking for them) and goes everywhere with a small boy peacefully strapped to Daddy’s back.

Kindra Welch installs a straw bale

 

Kindra got her degree in architecture from Rice University, and was comfortably installed in a fancy architecture company in New Jersey, earning the big bucks.  But Kindra was restless sitting at a computer for nine hours a day, and unhappy with the sort of buildings that her company was turning out.  The goal was to build fast and cheap without concern for quality or durability.  She wanted to build houses that people would actually want to live in.  Chucking the six-figure salary, Kindra loaded her belongings into a truck, and headed for the west coast to learn to build with cob, an environmentally friendly mixture of clay, sand, and straw.  After two years living out of the truck and learning natural building techniques, she came back to central Texas to share what she had learned.

Kindra’s dwellings are unique, stunningly beautiful, and energy efficient, so it is not surprising that she has developed a reputation.  For Carol and Charlie’s new home, she has salvaged timbers from the burnt forest.  Two branching trunks, still etched with char, arch over the entrance to the new front porch, a testament to new beginnings arising from devastation.  Carol and Charlie lost almost everything in the fire, but they weren’t hurt, and some surprising good things have come out of the disaster.  Although they miss the trees, they now have a stunning view in every direction.  More significant, they have a new community of supportive friends.  Charlie has only praise for the Clay, Sand, and Straw people.  Just thinking about how much they have helped his family brings a tear to his eye.  “You just won’t find a finer group of people.”

Charlie and Carol Jones