Diary Day April 04, 2022
J76 Diary
Note: The following is a transcription of an interview with J76 reporting on activities on April 5, 2022. It is lightly edited for clarity.
Yesterday, I got up at 6:30 AM, which is about the time we get up every day. I normally have devotions prayer and then breakfast. I get dressed at the same time. After I read the Bible or my devotions or whatever, I look at emails and that can be overwhelming first thing in the morning. I try to catch up so that I don’t get behind. Yesterday was one of those days that I was behind. As I was checking my email I got a call asking if I could pick up a child from Northside School. And I said, of course, I can do that. I started to look for my keys to go and get him. Couldn’t find them. I had gone away on Sunday and I thought I left them in the car. So, I called C and said, “Hey, I can’t find my keys.” He said, where are they? I said they were in the car. And, I said, can you pick up this young man at Northside school? He said, I’ll do that. So, he went ahead to do that. And I was frantic looking for those keys because I needed to get the car to use for something else. And I finally just said, give me your keys and he did. I used his keys rest of the day. And he picked up K and brought him to our house.
I knew that I was responsible for getting food together for the meeting that we have on Tuesdays from 4 pm to 6:30 pm. That was to be a taco bar. So this young man said he would like to stay with me to help because his mom who normally helps me was ill and not able to. And I was thankful for him to do that. So, he helped me to cut up the ingredients for the taco bar and we realized we didn’t have everything. So, we went to Aldi to get that. It would’ve been a lot easier if I just gone by myself, but he felt like he wanted to go and help me, you know, my God, that was quite an experience. So, he shops at Payless and I just was going to Walmart. I mean to Aldi. So we came back and he really did help me with that, but I was able to talk to him and share with him the importance of education. He’s an eighth-grader, homeschooled. And he was at Northside yesterday to take some tests. So it was a really good opportunity for me to be able to explain to him how important the reading is and the writing. And I just shared some of my—because I had not been able to do that before—explained to him how difficult it was for me to go to college and how important the reading and the writing was. So that was a really powerful time for me to be able to share with him. I love being able to talk to the young people and explaining to them. I asked him, what was he reading? And he told me about a poetry book that one of the students had written in the neighborhood. And I said, that’s good, but there are a lot of other books you should be reading.
And, I encouraged him to read at least 15 minutes a day. I said, research says that if you read 15 minutes a day, you’ll be a good reader. And he thought, oh, oh, I said, well, it’s important. And so I want you to start doing that. And I would be glad to give you some of my books. He said, well, I have a, a library full. I said, but are you reading them? And re-reading them. It was a good opportunity for us to have a conversation.
So, I had a meeting at schedule for 2:30. So he finished cutting up the things that we needed, the ingredients and the vegetables.
And then I met with the MOM’s board member because we’re going through some challenging times right now at Motivate our Minds. So that was an hour and a half, and it was a good time to be able to share with this board member because I had just recently resigned from Motivate our Minds because I didn’t feel like the mission was being taken care of or worked with. And I thought, I needed to do something different. And I had asked them—the board—to take my name off of everything. And so this board member came to talk to me at our home and we were able to have some good conversation going forward to see what I should be doing next.
After that I was a little late to the meeting, I went to the mapping event that Ball State is doing in our community. And I was there until 6:30 pm and I just stayed there to lockup.
Then I cleaned up and came home. And that was the beginning of the evening for me. I did some Googling for people that I wanted to check out and research. And then I shared with another person who came by to use our computer. And that was just the way our days go a lot anyway.
This is kind of how our life goes almost every day. We feel like if we can help people no matter what we do that. I think we were on the computer until 10:30 and I said I’m going to bed and I left her up using the computer.
That’s kind of the way it was yesterday and lots of days are like that. It’s just about trying to help people to help themselves and that’s what our lives are. At last, any day it would be similar to this. It wouldn’t always be the MOM’s situation but that’s what we do.
Oh and then I did forget, I needed to get something to Ball State One Day and I forgot almost and then I thought I better get on there and I had to work on that to do donations and so I had to do that. That was part of my day too.
Interviewed By: Prof. James Connolly
Transcribed By: Muhammad Hafeez ur Rehman