Many people my age are thankful for there being younger people around to figure out things we oldsters fail at.<\/p>\n
Case in point, we received a text message from our former foreign exchange students, Phaedra Wouters and Ana Granado, asking us to join them for a conference call at 8 Sunday morning. This call differs from so many other kinds of calls we send and receive. We panicked, as the idea of being able to see the callers is a bit of a novelty.<\/p>\n
Sure, we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve talked (and seen) callers before, but we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve never fully understood how to prepare for such a call.<\/p>\n
First, this call involved three parties in three widely separate countries, Ana, Phaedra and us; second, it was to be on Skype, a program that lets us SEE the people we’re talking to, on our computers; and third, it was an international call, meaning that 8 a.m. our time in New Mexico equals 4 p.m. in Belgium and Spain, the home turfs of the girls we hosted all of the last school year while they attended West Las Vegas High School.<\/p>\n
What’s amazing is the ease with which our granddaughter Celina Trujillo was able to connect us to the callers. The technology is far too complicated for me, or even us, as we haven’t evolved much beyond the honey-toned “number, please” method of calling someone else, with the assistance of an operator.<\/p>\n
As I write this, one of my grandchildren is correcting me: “Hey Pompah, don’t you mean the kind of phone you needed to crank up to make it ring somewhere else?”<\/p>\n
No, granddaughter, and I definitely am not a contemporary of Alexander Graham Bell.
\nWe were amazed at the clarity of the connection. Really now, isn’t what happened to us Sunday akin to some of the stuff we used to read about in science fiction stories in our youth? Isn’t it close to a miracle to be able to see people you’re talking to 8,000 miles away?<\/p>\n
During the hour on the phone, by carting our equipment around, we gave our former exchange students a tour of the house, including the rooms they slept in, and re-acquainted them with our family cat, our “Meow-Machine,” and dog, “Hera.” And the girls, who themselves live hundreds of miles apart from each other, showed us around their homes.<\/p>\n
Thanks to Celina, we were able to see the others and ourselves on a split-screen image on my laptop.<\/p>\n
The conversation persuaded Bonnie and me to travel to consider a trip to Western Europe early next year to visit their students and their families early next year.<\/p>\n
Phaedra is a bona fide West Las Vegas High School graduate who was active in soccer and softball; Ana, only a sophomore then, played volleyball and softball. Members of the Kiwanis Club are familiar with both girls, through Ana and Phaedra\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s involvement with the school\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Key Club.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2<\/p>\n
There was quite a bit of traffic on my Facebook page this week as I forwarded a letter from Stanley Adam, our son in Denmark, as he described that he had lost two liters of blood when he suffered an abdominal aneurysm at home during Thanksgiving. He underwent two emergency operations to stop the bleeding, needed to spend almost a week in a Copenhagen hospital, with a couple of dozen staples holding his chest together, and was dismissed a few days ago.<\/p>\n
In his letter to us he mentioned the extremely simplified way the Danes (and presumably medical personnel in other European countries) handle such emergencies. My son did not need to sign a single document or prove he had sufficient funds and\/or insurance to cover his stay in the hospital.<\/p>\n
Although given his condition in the ER, he was unable to do much ooh-ing and ahh-ing, he mentioned in a later phone call that he was impressed that about 10 medical personnel were awaiting his arrival, with the surgeries being performed around 3 a.m.<\/p>\n
The forwarded message generated lots of reaction from people who know us. Many well wishers joined in the conversation. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s gratifying that many offered prayers for Adam\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s recovery, but, as usual, there are those who insist on politicizing medical matters.<\/p>\n
I send Adam’s message to alert his friends and relatives of the good fortune to have been in a country able to address the emergency so quickly. The message was not to evaluate whether Obama President-Elect Trump should be blamed.<\/p>\n
As for the part where my son mentioned leaving the hospital without having to pay one dollar (or kroner), one of the people who joined the conversation wrote that Adam “should pay his share, just like anybody else. It sucks.”<\/p>\n
As Adam’s dad, I responded that “the only thing that sucks is the critic’s “meager understanding of economics in parts of Europe.” I added that OF COURSE Adam and others pay their share, but they pay by having large chunks of their paychecks taken out to cover such things as emergency trips to hospitals.<\/p>\n
It has been heart-warming, however, to feel the genuine concern expressed by people, some of whom have not seen our son in a dozen years.<\/p>\n
There is, also, a bit of encouraging news in that Adam wrote to say he rode his bike for the first time in a couple of weeks. It tired him out a bit, he reports, but regardless, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a start.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Many people my age are thankful for there being younger people around to figure out things we oldsters fail at. Case in point, we received a text message from our former foreign exchange students, Phaedra Wouters and Ana Granado, asking us to join them for a conference call at 8 Sunday morning. This call differs […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1576"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1576"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1577,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1576\/revisions\/1577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}