Our First Thanksgiving in Akkaya Valley
“Eenie, Meenie, Miney, Mo”
Akkaya Valley Legend Recip Does the Deed
Llena met Recip at Akkaya Riding Stables
Recip Built a Mar a Lago Family Home
Thanksgiving in Akkaya Valley
Monthly Archives: November 2020
SEVEN YEAR ITCH
“If, money was no object, I’d be on a jet plane to Kathmandu.”
An architect can part with his money before the best fool has had a chance to think about it. Within one year I had spent all the proceeds from the sale of our farm, bought a $300,000 house with a Liar Loan (stated income) from Citibank, whose mortgage payments matched my combined Social Security and pension checks. My timing was superb, I closed on January 9, 2008. What was I thinking? A 64-year-old geezer in Eugene, OR with no income – after my direct deposit to Citi Mortgage – trying to go-up against 40,000 ‘barista’ college kids. You can only give blood up to age 65 and my iron level petered out before I got that far.
Now, in Eugene you do not pray about these things, you meditate and drink locally brewed coffee. If they find you in Starbucks, you must be from out of town. Taking action meant going to the library and scrolling through Craig’s List. Fortunately, my higher power knew that Craig and I were fellow alums from Case Western Reserve University and on the third day there appeared, “Teach ESL in China.” A month later, on the 28th of August 2008, I arrived in Zhengzhou (jung jo). At that time, life for old geezers in China extended to age 65 (since dropped to 60) so, I had to think fast because my birthday was a couple of weeks away.
This August, I began my 7th Mainland China year in Yantai, Shandong, which is akin to Norfolk, Virginia where Zhengzhou is more like St. Louis a big inland prairie city on a river while Yantai is a small touristy seaport city. Changing locales, arguably for a better lifestyle, got me thinking over my original three wishes – or the bullet points of my self-introduction to my ESL students and Toastmasters club audience. Ever the optimist architect, I left out the real reason – I had no place else to go. “I came to China because ….”
“I came to China because ….”
- I want to make all 950 million Chinese farmers rich
- I want to establish 1,000 Toastmasters clubs in Henan Province
- I want to find a Chinese lady over 40 who can speak English
In retrospect, I might have been a little overly ambitious:
- The average annual farm income has gone from $150 to $450 but 500 million farmers left their farms for life in the city. Caching, Marx, Groucho Marx that is, “tegory, we farmers are not so sure we want to take financial advice from a homeless guy from Eugene.”
- There are three Toastmasters clubs in Henan, albeit, 2 more than upon my arrival but still 997 shy of my enthusiastic forecast.
- I found her at a Toastmasters speech contest in 2011, she was over forty, a native English speaker, but she was not Chinese, but, but more importantly she said yes.
As a devoted trailing spouse, I followed her to Yantai, thus ending my six year sabbatical in Zhengzhou. The move gifted me with the time to reflect – she goes to work and I reflect – after doing the dishes, making the bed, and posting the day’s ‘iT’s in the Cards’ on www.zzconnect.com.
It was in one of these reflective moments, not quite near an epiphany, that I felt the expat “Seven Year Itch.” After my sixth miserable winter in Cleveland, Ohio, it did not take much of a nudge, to get me to move to Atlanta. After seven years as an undergraduate, they gave me a diploma based solely on my attendance record. However, even a longsuffering Virgo has limits to goal achievement, especially when I found myself trying to reinvent the Toastmasters wheel in Shandong Province.
Then there was the Korea thing, the cheapest place to exit the mainland at this latitude – an every 90 day requirement for tourist visa holders – was Seoul; instead of Zhengzhou to Hong Kong. I did not have the hot’s to live in Korea, like my old ‘wouldn’t it be nice to live on Lantau Island in Hong Kong.’ Howsomever, a 36-hour stay in the Itaewon Hostel was in Deng Xiaoping’s word, exhilarating. Africans, French, Italian, Azerbaijani, Afghani, Egyptian, Serbian and a Berber all hanging out in the cheap seats.
I asked this wooly haired guy, “Where are you from?”
“The Netherlands.”
“You don’t look Dutch.”
“Well I’m originally from Morocco.”
“Oh, good I can blather some of my 300 words of Arabic with you.”
“Not really, I’m a Berber and I don’t speak Arabic.”
“Wow, a Berber, I only know Berber carpets are expensive, are Berbers like Bedouins?” I will have to Google it later.
My breakfast interview with the Afghani put everything in my expat heart’s perspective. “China is boring,” he said, all knowingly. I thought that was an interesting comment coming from an Afghani, maybe compared to the perpetual war zone of Afghanistan, any place outside of Syria might appear dull. Then I took him to mean, that after you have seen one Chinese temple, you have seen them all. I never wanted to visit the temples in China, after watching Po labor pushing his cart up the temple steps in ‘Kung Fu Panda.” The culture makes living in China exciting. They did not get the “inscrutable” rap for nothing.
Until, Tricky Dick sent me to Vietnam, I knew first-hand absolutely nothing about the outside world. Yes, I could name the seven continents or the capitals of North and South America but before, my all expenses paid tour of the South Pacific, I had no “when I” stories. You know, when I was in… If, I made it back from Vietnam, I planned to tout my ‘Red Badge of Courage’ to anyone who would or would not listen. Fortunately, my higher power protects children, drunks and architects so, he gave me a “Get Out of Combat Duty” Blue Badge instead.
I have no complaints, or even room to complain, because Nixon pulled the plug on Vietnam six months before I got to Okinawa. First impressions are good but when you are with a military tour group you don’t stay in any one place long enough to form an opinion. Yes, I had a good time in Hong Kong and the Philippines, a so-so time on Mt. Fuji and Japan, and my behavior in Taiwan was so bad, they asked me to leave. However, not hanging around more than a month or two in any location afforded me nothing but snapshots of what life was like in a foreign country.
Nixon let me go in 1971, they let him go in 1974, he went to San Clemente and I went for an extended stay in Sao Paulo, Brazil. This time I lived in a hi-rise apartment building, took the bus to work and got the inside scoop from my Brazilian, Uruguayan, Argentinian and Bolivian workmates. Linguistic studies show that in every culture at least 65% of societal conversation consists of gossip. The Portuguese speaking Brazilians, surrounded by nine Spanish-speaking states were masters of fofoca.
Other than Argentinians, I never met anyone who did not like Brazil or the Brazilians. Maybe it had something to do with their “world’s sexiest women” title but my impression was that their “God is a Brazilian” attitude, gave every individual, regardless of status, a light-hearted nationalist spirit. Compare that with our, “home of the free,” “In God we trust,” or “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Or, what I had always heard about China, “the Chinese are inscrutable” and “pretty clever those Chinese.”
My Karma Kefir Diet
Do you know the person who discovered cancer was Doctor Otto Heinrich Warburg?
He was a German Physiologist as well as a medical doctor, but something which gave him great fame was being the man whose research found the causes of cancer. Emil Warburg, his father, was a famous physicist. In First World War, Otto served as an officer, and he was also awarded with the Iron Cross for his acts of bravery. Since his family was Jewish that’s why he couldn’t serve in Second World War.
Amazingly Hitler let Otto work on his cancer research. In 1931, he won the Nobel Prize, and he would be a 47-time nominee for the same award in the years to follow!
Most of us know the above things about his life, but one specific side of his life is still hidden from many of us, and no one really talks about it too. Where people know him as a person who found the causes of cancer, similarly he wrote a book on its cure, named “Cancer: Its Cause and Its Cure.”
So the question is why didn’t we hear about this before?
Actually, his main theory related to cure had to do with alkaline environments. He found that cancer cells cannot thrive nor exist in alkaline environments and the more harmful, acidic things you put in your body, the more pleasing environment you have created for cancer to flourish.
“Cancerous tissues are acidic, whereas healthy tissues are alkaline. Water splits into H+ and OH- ions, if there is an excess of H+, it is acidic; if there is an excess of OH- ions, then it is alkaline.”
“All normal cells have an absolute requirement for oxygen, but cancer cells can live without oxygen – a rule without exception. “Deprive a cell 35% of its oxygen for 48 hours and it may become cancerous.”
According to him, the root cause of cancer is usually the deficiency of oxygen. An acidic state will be formed in the human body with a lack of oxygen, thus allowing cancer to thrive. Then the main thing is oxygen.
Mohamed Packed Kefir
I met a lot of very interesting people in the goat business. One such character was Tarak Tucan, A full scholarship student at Rice University, son of a Norwegian mother and Jordanian father, raised in a prep school environment, and into Nutra-ceuticals. Tarak visited his family in Jordan this August and smuggled real live Kefir grains through Boston’s Logan Airport in his backpack thermos bottle. He was keeping the Kefir in distilled water at his Houston apartment and came sixty miles out to our farm because he needed our raw goat’s milk to complete the fermentation process.
The grain, more like a mushroom, resembles spongy cauliflower buds or wet popcorn turns the milk into a 1-2% alcohol champagne fizzy yogurt like drink. This 5,000-year-old Kefir culture originated in the Caucus Mountains of Russia. Mohamed in 600AD never traveled anywhere without his Kefir. I sensed an opportunity in this Kefir stuff. If we could get everybody hooked on drinking Kefir, they would have to buy a lot more of our raw goat’s milk.
Kefir Oxygen Cancer Connection
I just finished reading Klaus Kaufman’s “Kefir Rediscovered”, available from www.hoeggergoatsupply.com, it has as much info as Dom’s website with a different perspective. Most informative to me is his comparison of yogurt to kefir. Analogous to grapes and wine, yogurt is wine and kefir is champagne. The health benefits are all in favor of kefir, while yogurt is simply a more digestible form of milk. Kaufman’s reasoning for this is the mirrored molecular composition of kefir and yogurt.
The yogurt good ship “Enterprise” rotates left or counter-clockwise, while kefir goes right in a clockwise direction. They are both lactic acid cultures comprised of the same number of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen elements only mirror opposites. Kefir acts like a door latch, locking into the cells to deliver oxygen for curative benefits as well as nutritional ones. The Russians use kefir for cancer treatment because the runaway cancer cells are starving the body of oxygen. The primary reasons for drinking a pint of kefir a day are
1) Transient Yogurt – Kefir sticks to your immune system
Both kefir and yogurt are cultured milk products but they employ different methods to deliver their cargo of beneficial bacteria. The digestive enzymes in yogurt help digest the yogurt and only the yogurt. Kefir comes with a load of excess enzymes that attach themselves to the walls of the colon. The yogurt nutrient express is gone in 24 hours, while kefir’s stay is indefinite. A healthy immune system is at least 70% dependent on a healthy intestinal tract.
2) 30 plus good bugs for Kefir – a mere handful in Yogurt Kefir contains 30 – 35 major strains of friendly bacteria not commonly found in yogurt, Lactobacillus Caucasus, Leuconostoc, Acetbacter species, Streptococus species. Kefir is a turbo charged energy-anti-biotic-colonic cleanser drink. Yogurt is a mild nutrient rich drink that pre-digests the lactose helping the body better assimilate the good stuff and if it’s raw it’s all good.
3) It’s the Yeast – it puts the fizz in Kefir It also contains beneficial yeasts, such as Saccharomyces kefir, Torula kefir, which dominate, control and eliminate destructive pathogenic yeasts in the body. They do so by penetrating the mucosal lining where unhealthy yeast and bacteria reside, forming a virtual SWAT team that housecleans and strengthens the intestines. Hence, the body becomes more efficient in resisting such pathogens as E. coli and intestinal parasites. The www.bodyecology.com lady got into kefir because the friendly candida yeast in kefir destroys candida albicans the yeast infection culprit.
4) Digestion – If Kefir Can’t Digest It – Forget It! Kefir’s active yeast, good bacteria and excess digestive enzymes provide more nutritive value than yogurt by helping digest the foods you eat. Constipation is a thing of the past. If you drink Kefir at night no acid reflux and insomnia.
Because the curd size of kefir is smaller than yogurt, it is also easier to digest, which makes it a particularly excellent, nutritious food for babies, invalids and the elderly, as well as a remedy for digestive disorders”.
The Kefir you buy at “Whole Foods” or health foods grocers is by law made with pasteurized milk, most often cow’s milk. I have made Kefir with fresh from the cow milk, homogenized store bought milk, skim milk and of course our fresh, raw goat’s milk. There is no comparison – anybody can taste the difference. Kefiring pasteurized milk helps make the milk digestible but it can’t reincarnate cooked carrier enzymes. Kefir helps you assimilate the remaining active ingredients of retail milk. This is the reason why you can’t kefir Ultra-Pasteurized milk, there are no active ingredients.
Where the Karma Comes From
tegory66@gmail.com
Dharma and the 4th Turning
