After work, we were invited to dinner at the home of a former colleague, Arti, which was a real treat.  Arti, her husband, Rejin, and their daughter, Ampa, were wonderful hosts.  Ampa, shown above is 3 and a half and is delightful.  She was very talkative and was telling us all about her first day at school.  Her school year started today.  Arti explained that Ampa, at age 3 and a half, speaks 4 languages: English, Hindi, and two dialects spoken in the home areas of Art and Rejin.  Eventually, she will also pick up the Karnataka official language as well.  I’m doing good just to speak English, and this 3 year old speaks 4 languages.  She switches from language to language with amazing ease.  I didn’t ask, but I was curious as to what language she thinks in.  

Arti and her family are vegetarians, and we had a wonderful meal with two different kinds of rice, yogurt, chips, and spicy pickles.  I’m starting to get hooked on vegetarian cuisine.  The great thing about Indian vegetarian is that it is so flavorful and has such variety.  I’ve always lived under the misconception that vegetarian food has to be just a bunch of salads with little variety.  

It looks like I’m going to be adding a new section to my Evernote cookbook for vegetarian meals.  

Arti and her family live in a high rise, in a fairly new gated community.  She explained that she and her husband have purchased a plot of land and are working on designs for a house to be built there.  The community where she lives is very nicely designed with green space and two swimming pools.  Ampa showed us her room and the balcony off of her room which has a great view of the city of Bangalore.  It was after dark when she took us on the tour, but it would have been a great place to shoot some photos of the city.  

As we were leaving, Arti gave me a gift, a small, gold plated replica of the urn they use in their worship of their gods.  Arti explained to us that in the home, there is usually a small room dedicated to use for worship of their gods. The urn is filled with oil and lit.  The urn is  beautiful and I was very touched by her gesture.  

We left Arti’s house about 9pm and as we drove back to the hotel, I was also struck by the fact that so many small shops are open so late at night and people are out and about at that time.  Bangalore is a city of about 8.4 Million people and streets can be very narrow with lots of pedestrian traffic.  As you drive through the city, you hear the sounds of car horns, motorbikes, and the auto rickshaws, called tuk-tuks.  Depending on the traffic and the weather it can often take hours to go just a few kilometers.  There is also lots of foot traffic along the roads.  It feels as though the pace of life here is very different than what I’m used to back in the US.  People would be very upset of it took them  an hour and a half to get to work in the morning, as it did for Vivek on Monday.  Whereas, I think that here, people accept the situation and move on with life.  

I also noticed that people on the sidewalks were stopped and engaged in conversation.  My brain always tries to fill in the blanks with situations like that, so I’m left wondering were they were friends who had just bumped into one another?  Were they discussing the controversy about the Indian Cricket association that was in the newspapers here?  Maybe they didn’t know one another, but had just stopped to chat about  the day.

The other thing that strikes me about this city is its age.  You get a sense that it is very old.  I did a quick check on Wikipedia and Modern Bangalore begins its history in 1537.  Wikipedia also says that after several centuries of rule by Southern Indian kingdoms, it was finally captured by the Cholas in 1024, so this place has been occupied for over a thousand years.  US history (with the colonization of the country) is only about 400 years old, though native American civilizations do go back much longer than that.   

Well, it’s time to get ready for a new day and new adventures here.

I’m in Bangalore, India traveling to meet with my co-workers on our work plans for the 2nd half of the year and we had some extra time to explore the city before we start the work week.  

It’s a long flight from my home to Bangalore, 18 hours in a airplane, not counting the time spent in transit between planes and stuck waiting out weather delays, of which we had quite a few this time.  

As I’ve said in other postings, I love travel since it gives me a chance to experience other cultures and parts of the world.  This time of year in Bangalore is quite nice since we are between the hot season and the start of the monsoon season.  Temps here are in the low 80s during the day and upper 60s at night, though it’s very humid.  

We got in very late on Saturday morning (about 3am local time) and didn’t get to the hotel and into our room until about 5am.  It’s a good thing that we allowed for an extra day to recover.  It would be very difficult to come off of that and then go right to work.  

Today, we are spending some time with one of our colleagues who is going to take us to his church and then off to do some site seeing.  

Church was packed.  The service we went to today was the third of four for the day.  Many of the songs were the same ones that I had sung as a kid in my Mom and Dad’s church.

After church, we went to the Rewind restaurant for lunch.  Great food and music (mostly stuff from the 80′s but that’s ok with me, I love that stuff).  I’ve tried so many new dishes this time here.  Just great stuff.  We had squid with coconut, pork in chilies (pretty hot spice-wise, but very tasty), fish curry, and chicken stew in coconut milk.  There were 4 kinds of “breads” to go with the meal, two were made from rice and were cooked like pancakes.  One had an egg cooked in the center, so you put the meat and sauce in the middle and used the outside to dip in the yolk.  Another was more like a pancake that I’m used to.  The best part was lingering around the table talking and trying all the different dishes.  

After lunch we went to the state government buildings and tried to get in to see them, but they are closed on Sunday and it would be a security risk for us to go much beyond the guard entrance.  They guards were nice enough to let us snap a couple of photos there.

We ended the day back at our hotel for some chai tea. A long day, but packed with great experiences.

I’m entering a new phase in my life.  I’m becoming a member of the Sandwich Generation: the generation where my parents who have retired are starting to need more help with health and living issues, and where my nearly grown children require assistance with housing and expenses.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to help both my parents and my children.   My parents have done so much for me and they will continue to do what they can to help out whenever I have a need. The time has come for me to help them more.  Meanwhile, my children through no fault of their own are struggling to make ends meet in a world economy where most are struggling to find satisfactory work that can support them.

How did we get to this situation?  First off, the world economy is still struggling to bounce back from the Great Recession.  That event impacted both my parents and my children.  First, with my parents, they are worried about the investments that are funding their retirement.  Declines in the companies that they invested in are pushing the values of their retirement accounts lower, meanwhile, my children have been working to find meaningful employment.  My son felt that his best course was to go back to school and work on an advanced degree.  My daughter has also going into a training program that should provide her with an occupation that will allow her to support herself.  Both take time and money.  My parents are doing ok, their house is paid off and they live frugally on their investments.  But declining health has them both worried about the future and what will happen.  The trigger for them was this week.  My mother has been relatively healthy.  Sure, she has some a few minor issues to deal with, but this past weekend she had an incident of heart trouble.  She’s in the hospital and the cardiologist is confident that they will be able to treat her and get her back on her feet.  Meanwhile Dad has had his second cataract surgery and has other major health issues.  He’s doing well now, but that doesn’t always mean that there won’t be problems in the future.  Also, my wife’s father passed away a couple of years ago and her mother is the same age as my father.  Hello, Sandwich.  I’m reminded of the Blues Brothers’ song Rubber Biscuit where you have a Wish Sandwich–you have two slices of bread and you WISH you had some meat.  I could wish for time and money to help solve these issues.  Both are in limited quantity.

My google search resulted in over 5 million hits on the Sandwich Generation (what?  where else would a person working in High Tech turn to gather information about a topic?).  Many repeated the same type of information.  An article from Kiplinger magazine stated:

Nearly half of Americans 55 and older say they expect to provide support for aging relatives and adult children, according to the Retirement Re-Set study by SunAmerica Financial Group and Age Wave, a research group that tracks the financial and cultural impact of the graying of America. “Family assistance has become the new retirement wild card,” says Age Wave founder Ken Dychtwald.

And an article from Reuters also reported:

Here’s the bottom line: More than 60 percent of young adults ages 19-22 receive financial help from their parents, according to a 2012 study co-authored by Patrick Wightman and Robert Schoeni at the University of Michigan. The tally comes to about $7,500 a year when help with rent, transportation and college tuition are included.

As for elder care, the sandwich generation faces frightening costs. More than 10 million Americans currently need long-term care, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Today’s average annual cost of nursing home care is $72,000; assisted living, $38,000; and home health care services up to $30,000 a year, according to Kaiser Health News. The U.S. Census Bureau says the number of Americans aged 65 or older will double to more than 70 million by the year 2030.

And, thus, we have the Sandwich fully laid out. YIKES!

So, what do I do (beyond the obvious-help out my parents and my kids)?  First off, my wife and I need to make a plan.  We need to look into Long Term Care Insurance for ourselves so that we don’t put a burden on our children.  Next, we need to make sure that we are both on the same page when it comes to dealing with the stress that this puts on us. I believe that life hands you challenges that you can handle one of two ways: let the challenge beat you, or you can beat the challenge.  I’m going to go at this one using the second approach.  And, I think that we need to meet this challenge with as much good humor as possible.

Also, I have 3 sisters who can help out with my parents, and one of my sisters lives in the same city as my parents. I’m very cognizant of the added stress this places her as she and her husband are usually the go to people when problems arise.  I want to make sure that she’s not shouldering all the responsibility for our parents.  The four of us need to share this and help each other, and our parents out.

Next, my wife and I need to make sure that we are taking care of each other and support each other.  We don’t need to face this alone.  We need to find outside resources who can help with our parents, like the local Area Agency on Aging.  They offer information and programs to assist elderly parents.  We need to make sure that we understand what’s offered and what we’ll likely need.

Finally, I gotta get those darn kids off my dime–Actually, I’m not to worried about them.  They are both great kids and want to be independent and making their way in the world.  I think that’s just going to be a temporary issue until they can get through their education programs and onto their rest of their lives.

So, once more, I’m entering a new and challenging phase of my life.   Back when my son first started middle school, one of the guidance counselors there asked if we enjoyed riding a roller coaster, cause living with middle schoolers was a lot like that.  To be honest, all of life is like that.  Sometimes you are going up the hill and sometimes you are coming down the hill.  The only way to handle it is to sit back, relax and enjoy the ride.

Links for further information on the Sandwich Generation:

• Area Agency on Aging
• Carol Abaya’s website on the Sandwich Generation
• Article from the Washington Post with statistics.
• more advice from Senior Living on ways to cope with the stresses of being in the Sandwich Generation
• Are we Overstuffing the Sandwich Generation?

Please take a look.

My Journey in …

By Michael D. King

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One of the more somber things that we did in our visit to Haiti was to stop by the site of the former Hotel Montana.  The hotel is gone now, swept away in the earthquake that claimed so many lives on January 12, 2010.   Tom, one of the men who was part of our group, asked to stop by there to pay his respects to a colleague and friend who was killed when the hotel collapsed in the earthquake.  On the day of the quake, 220,000 people in Port au Prince died and over 300,000 were injured.

The memorial was simple and solemn. The area is fenced off and stands on the brink of the hill overlooking a beautiful valley.  At one side stands a tower with a bell.  Next to it is a tree trunk covered in ferns and other plants.  These ferns are air plants which means that they don’t need soil to grow.  They live off of the moisture and nutrients they take in through the air.  I thought it was a fitting plant for the memorial. They keep watch over the site and continue to grow so long as there is air and moisture. Off to another side is a shaded area with benches so that you can sit and think about the loss of life that happened that day. During our visit there I didn’t see any other memorials to the victims of the earthquake (thought that doesn’t mean there weren’t any, we just didn’t see any).

Tom told us that his friend was there on business and it was by happenstance that he made the trip.  Another colleague was supposed to be on that project, but couldn’t make it, so Tom’s friend went instead.  For me, it really drove home how fragile life is and how quickly it can end.  Though, I’m guessing that Tom’s friend was happy being there and helping the people of Haiti.

Chemen Lavi Miyo, or the Road to a Better Life, is a program supported by the Haitian Timoun Foundation that is targeted toward women who are at margins of society.  To be a member of the program, the family must be headed by a woman who does not have any income generating opportunities.  She must have small children who are unable to attend school, and she does not have access to food and healthcare.

We spoke to three women who were in the program and got to learn about their progress in the program. You could see the pride in their faces as they told us about their homes, assets, and families.  We were invited into their homes so that they could show their water filtration system.  The smiles on their faces was heartwarming, knowing that they were on the path to earning money that would allow their children to go to school and provide them with the bare necessities of life.

To learn more about this program, visit the Haitian Timoun Foundation website and click on the link for the CLM project.

I’m still working through all the photos that I took during my time in Haiti.  Today’s installment is scenes from the streets of Haiti.  There is still a lot of  damage to houses and roads from the earthquake in January 2010.  There are also a lot of open air market areas where people set up shop on the sidewalk and sell foodstuffs, clothing, shoes, auto parts, you name it.  There’s a block in Carrefour that is a solid city block of auto parts dealers. You could build an entire car from all the parts.

Enjoy!

On our way back to our hotel in Jacmel, we stopped at the Tetkole school.  This school rescues children who are living on the streets and provides them with a home and schooling.  It’s a small school right now with only a few children there, but Verbo has big dreams and he is working to increase the size of the school.

In the image of the two boys, one of the boys was working on homework using a pencil that was about 1 inch long.  It had been sharpened down to a nub.  I had a pencil in my camera bag that was about half the size of a full pencil, but about 5 times the size of his pencil.  I gave him my pencil.

One of the things I noticed frequently as we traveled around Haiti was that school children would be working on homework in any free time they had.  You’d see them sitting outside their homes with workbooks and papers busy learning.  I suppose that in a country with such a small portion of the population able to go to school, the ones who do get to go really take advantage of it.

The band you see in these images was playing a concert for us.  The first song they played was the University of Wisconsin fight song.  The director had attended Wisconsin.  I asked him to learn the Ohio State fight song so that when I come back next year I could hear them play that.  Somehow, I doubt that will happen.

The hand prints you see in the images were on many walls at the school.  They are the hand prints of the children who were attending the school.

On Wednesday afternoon we stopped at the Pazapa School for developmentally delayed and deaf children.  We arrived right at their time for outside games.  The teachers led them through several games. One was where we formed a line and were butterflies flying up and down.  The next game was catching a ball.  The teacher would call out a name and the student would catch the ball and toss it back to her.  Then they did a dance circle, where she would call out a name and the student would go into the center of the ring and dance.  The last game was musical chairs.  Everyone sure looked like they were having a lot of fun.  I guess kids are kids the world over and play is just part of being a kid.