Video footage showing a two-year-old girl in the southern Chinese city of Foshan being hit twice by vehicles while more than a dozen passersby did nothing to help has touched off of a painful round of soul-searching in the country and revived a long-running debate about the wisdom of helping strangers in the world’s second largest economy.
Taken from surveillance cameras set up in a Foshan market, the chilling images show the child, identified in local media reports as Yueyue, wandering alone into the street where she is hit and run over by a white minivan.
After pausing briefly, the van drives off, leaving Yueyue lying in the street. The footage then shows several people passing by without stopping to help the girl until, a few minutes later, she is hit by a second vehicle. Still more people walk past her without stopping — the final tally is 18, according to local media — until, finally, an elderly garbage collector drags her out of harms way and calls for help.
China’s state-run Xihua news agency reported Monday that police had arrested the drivers of both vehicles in connection with the incident, which happened on October 13.
A spokesman at the Guangzhou military hospital where Yueyue was taken for treatment said Monday that she in a coma. He refuted local media reports saying she was brain dead but acknowledged that she had suffered severe brain trauma.
A copy of the Southern Television Guangdong report on the Chinese video site Youku has been viewed more than 1.8 million times and drawn nearly 12,000 comments since it was posted Saturday.
The story was among the top five most-searched on Chinese search engine Baidu throughout the day Monday. It was also the most-discussed topic on Twitter-like microblogging site Sina Weibo, attracting more than 4 million comments by Monday evening.
Much of the online reaction in China has focused — as it would in probably any country — on the driver of the first vehicle, whom many said should be made to suffer the same fate as Yueyue.
But much of the debate, and most of the vitriol, has been reserved for the passersby who saw a two-year-old girl lying wounded in the street and refused to help her.
‘The two drivers are guilty and so are the first 18 people who walked by,’ argued a Youku user writing under the name Moyao. ‘Why doesn’t the country establish a law to punish those who refuse to lift a finger to help people in mortal danger? …When morality holds no sway over cold-hearted Chinese people, what else can we do but turn to the law?’
The sentiment was much the same on Sina Weibo, which set up a ‘Please end the cold-heartedness’ hashtag to organize discussion of the incident. ‘How has society come to this?’ read one post published under the hashtag by Weibo user Lu Yili. ‘As the economy moves forward, humanity retreats.’
This is not the first time the failure of people to help a stranger in need has led to a bout of introspective commentary on the Chinese Internet. On Friday, the same day Southern TV aired the Yueyue footage, the rescue by a foreign tourist of a Chinese woman who had jumped into Hangzhou’s West Lake in an apparent suicide attempt produced a similar outpouring. Why, many commenters wondered, was a foreigner willing to help the woman while Chinese tourists appeared to content just to stand on the shore and watch?
The apathy of the Chinese crowd is a phenomenon observed often, by foreigners and Chinese alike, in the recent years — an inevitable consequence, some say, of the country’s single-minded pursuit of economic growth.
But in dissecting the Yueyue incident, many commenters have pointed to another explanation: China’s lack of a Good Samaritan law to protect those who help strangers in need.
The potential consequences for those well-intentioned Chinese who chose to get involved was illustrated earlier this year by a bus driver who had stopped to help an 81-year-old woman he’d found lying injured on the ground only to have her tell police it was he who had knocked her over.
That episode, and others like it, have clearly been on the minds of many commenters in the case of the young girl.
‘This is a social problem, not a problem of individuals,’ wrote Weibo user AoB-9527. ‘It’s not cold-heartedness, it’s not being willing to lose out.’
A Youku user writing under the name Xiaodouban520 spelled it out in greater detail: ‘There are too many cases in which old people fall down, are saved and then turn around and sue the people who saved them… These people walking by didn’t dare help because they were afraid Yueyue’s parents would wrangle with them.’
Which raises the question: Would any of the people who passed the child by have stopped to help had they known there was camera footage to prove their good intentions.
China’s challenging of an Indian naval vessel in the SouthChina Sea is another step in its campaign to assert maritime claims in the region. Despite numerous spats with smaller regional powers, such as the Philippines, Vietnam and Malaysia, China has never before challenged Asia’s other rising power at sea.
China’s assertiveness should come as no surprise. Its economic surge both encourages and enables it to take a more energetic approach to securing the raw materials and shipping lanes on which its future prosperity depends. Given that untold quantities of crude oil and natural gas lie beneath the contested waters of the SouthChina Sea, clashing claims are all but inevitable.
This makes finding a means of resolving such disputes all the more important. hermes birkin Ideally, this would take the form of a multilateral settlement of the competing territorial claims of the littoral states. The 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea – to which China is a party – provides the basis for such an agreement in the case of the SouthChina Sea. But progress has so far been stymied by China’s unwillingness to submit its extravagant claims to arbitration by third parties.
This hesitancy is part of China’s broader reluctance to accept a global rules-based system – whether this means laws to combat climate change or treaties governing shared rivers. It is also a pity. As a manufacturing hub with increasingly deep economic ties with the rest of the world, China has much to gain from the stability such a system provides.
Just as pertinently, Beijing’s penchant for sabre-rattling is not cost free. As recent moves by the Philippines and Vietnam to shore up their relationships with the US show, Chinese assertiveness tends to unite other countries against it.Balenciaga handbags Only a very narrow view of China’s strategic interest could construe its posturing in the SouthChina Sea as worthwhile.
While China needs to match rhetoric about its peaceful intentions with actions, the world needs to draw China into dialogue and international commitments. The notion of making China a “responsible stakeholder” in world affairs has a hackneyed ring. But it is still the best option available.
After airing doubts last week about the credibility of the woman who accused former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn of sexual assault, prosecutors now are no longer certain there was a crime after examining lies by Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s accuser, according to law enforcement officials.
Doubts among prosecutors are the latest indication that charges against Mr. Strauss-Kahn are headed toward dismissal, officials familiar with the situation said.
Assistant District Attorney Joan Iluzzi-Orbon, one of the lead prosecutors of the case, said it was unclear whether the woman could be a viable witness. ‘It would have to be that I believed every word that came out of her mouth, and that I believe in the criminal aspect of what occurred,’ Ms. Iluzzi-Orbon said in an interview.
The false statements included the woman’s whereabouts immediately after the alleged May 14 assault, an account of a previous gang rape and previously unreported admissions to prosecutors last week that she had earned money through a marketing business and had a second cell phone, according to officials and a court filing.
The woman maintains she was attacked, and there is physical evidence to support her account, prosecutors say. But given her false statements, prosecutors aren’t certain whether her sexual contact with Mr. Strauss-Kahn was consensual or forced, officials said.
Prosecutors for Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. haven’t decided whether or not to drop the seven-count indictment against Mr. Strauss-Kahn, 62, who has pleaded not guilty. He was released from house arrest Friday after prosecutors disclosed credibility problems with the alleged victim, a maid at the Sofitel hotel in Manhattan.
Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers say this is the first step to vindication, and they will move to have the charges dismissed.
Kenneth Thompson, a lawyer for the woman, a 32-year-old Guinean immigrant, said last week that her mistakes notwithstanding, she ‘from day one has described that sexual assault many times,’ and consistently. Mr. Thompson didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Prosecutors began questioning the woman’s credibility issues during the second week of June, three weeks after the alleged attack. Mr. Thompson called to say his client wanted to describe inaccuracies in her political asylum application — that she made false statements about brutal treatment by Guinean authorities. Mr. Thompson has said the woman made those statements so she and her daughter would receive asylum in the U.S.
After a June 9 meeting, Mr. Thompson refused to bring her for another interview with authorities until a week ago, June 28, because the woman was upset by questioning during the earlier interview, an official familiar with the matter said.
At the meeting last week, the woman admitted she had two cell phones — after initially telling prosecutors she only had one — and that she used the second one to call a man incarcerated in Arizona, the official said. In addition, after saying the hotel job was her only source of income, the woman acknowledged she earned money by referring customers to ACN Inc., a multi-level marketing business that offers Internet, television and phone services. ACN didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The woman also said she had been raped in Guinea but under different circumstances than those she had described earlier. ‘She was taken from her store to a jail cell by some military people, and she was then raped by two of them’ one after another, the woman said, according to an official familiar with her account. The woman added that ‘she never told anyone about that until this day.’
The woman also told prosecutors she had not hidden in a hallway after her encounter with Mr. Strauss-Kahn, which occurred around noon, but had continued to clean before reporting the alleged attack to her supervisor, said the prosecutors’ court filing on Friday.
According to officials familiar with the situation, the maid never called her supervisor after the alleged incident but resumed cleaning a nearby room she had started earlier. She then returned to clean Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s room, they said, and ran into her supervisor when she went to get fresh sheets.
Late last week, prosecutors received a partial transcript of a tape-recorded conversation she’d had with the man incarcerated in a federal immigration detention center, law-enforcement officials say. The man had been arrested while trying to sell marijuana to undercover officers, one of the officials familiar with the investigation said.
During the call, the man asked her if she was OK. balenciaga handbags The woman said she stood to make a lot of money from the attack because Mr. Strauss-Kahn was wealthy. Prosecutors need to further investigate the recorded call, which has not yet been fully transcribed, one law enforcement official said.
Authorities also are looking into transactions involving tens of thousands of dollars in deposits to an account in the woman’s name made by men in different states, the official said. The maid said she had given the bank account number to the inmate in Arizona and wasn’t aware whether any of the deposits related to illegal activities. Investigators are trying to track who made large withdrawals from the account, the official said.
U.S. stocks ended moderately higher on Wednesday after a choppy trading day, with the Dow and the S&P 500 closing flat and the Nasdaq rising 0.61 percent.
The Dow Jones industrial average gained 7.41 points, or 0.06 percent, to 12,270.99. The Standard & Poor’s 500 added 0.25 points, or 0.02 percent, to 1,314.41. The Nasdaq Composite Index was up 16.73 points, or 0.61 percent, to 2,761.52.
The markets got lifted by the better-than-expected earnings result from JPMorgan Chase, the second largest bank on Wall Street by asset.
JPMorgan said its net income for first quarter climbed 67 percent as provisions for bad mortgages and credit-card loans fell, lifting investors’ confidence on the upcoming earning reports by other banks.
However, JPMorgan’s shares dipped throughout the day as investors focused on the contraction of retail banking. And the financial sector also slipped, with large market players such as Wells Fargo dropping 2.29 percent, Citigroup losing 1.1 percent.
Bank of America, the largest U.S. bank by asset, which is scheduled to release earnings on Friday, also slipped near 1.5 percent. Technology and utilities sectors rose, which led the tech dominated Nasdaq much higher. And among techs, shares of Google rose 0.99 percent.
This search-engine giant is about to report earnings after-the-bell Thursday. Riverbed Technology jumped after the tech firm raised its quarterly outlook. Zoom Technologies shares soared 31.45 percent after the company signed a license agreement with Qualcomm, allowing the Chinese mobile phone maker to develop and sell 3G products using Qualcomm’s chip patents.
Before closing, President Barack Obama delivered his plan for reducing the budget deficit by 4 trillion dollars over 12 years, which was regarded good for the economy and added energy for stocks rising.
In U.S. economic news, the Federal Reserve’s Beige Book indicated that the economy continued to improve at a moderate pace across most sectors during the period from mid-February through March. The sales at U.S. retailers rose 0.4 percent in March, posting the ninth consecutive monthly increase, according to a report released by the Commerce Department on Wednesday.
On the other markets, Oil prices rose as U.S. gasoline inventories tumbled 7 million barrels to their lowest level since last October. Gold advanced near to 1,456 dollars an ounce, while the dollar rose against a basket of major currencies.
Just a few weeks ago, Cairo was little more than an intriguing place to visit, at least for most investors. Many couldn’t find Libya and Tunisia on a map. And pundits and market prognosticators focused on earnings, not uprisings, to assess where the market was headed.
But reverberations from the upheaval in the Arab world sent stocks tumbling several days last week, as oil prices surged and questions were raised about a U.S. economy threatened by higher energy costs.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped more than 160 points on Tuesday alone, recovered spectacularly on Thursday and sold off again on Friday, ending the volatile week up 0.3%. Oil, meanwhile, hit $104 a barrel.
The sudden events have raised questions about the portfolios of investors and their ability to withstand surprises. Some political and economic shockers impact markets for short periods; others have longer import. Still others are buying opportunities, at least for the boldest investors.
The events in the Middle East are a useful reminder to consider steps that can help prepare a portfolio for unexpected events.
A few recommendations from analysts and financial advisers:
1. Hold more cash.
Cash will cushion a portfolio from shocks and provide dry powder to take advantage of unexpected troubles.
Even experts say they find it hard to anticipate the next development to rock the market. But one way they prepare is by assuming markets will be jolted from time to time, and having sufficient cash on hand when that happens.
‘Since the unexpected by default is not what one was planning on, it’s impossible to perfectly protect or prepare for it,’ notes Jeffrey Rubin, director of research at investment firm Birinyi Associates. ‘The way to do it is to always hold some levels of cash so that when that day comes, it will first cushion the decline in the portfolio, and second it allows you to take advantage of the weakness.’
Some advisers say investors should carry as much as 10% of their investment portfolio in cash, higher than a decade or so ago, when markets were less volatile. Money-market funds pay puny returns today, but some say investors should hold cash amounting to six to 12 months of living expenses.
‘Consider the worst-case scenario where equities drop 50%,’ says Jeff Fishman, who runs JSF Financial, a Los Angeles-based financial-advisory firm. ‘Can you sleep well at night? If not, you have too much equity exposure.’ And not enough cash.
Bob Treue, who runs hedge-fund firm Barnegat Fund Management, says ‘excess cash…allowed us to survive while our competition got wiped out.’ He says investors can ‘profit from the remnants of unexpected events’ by buying quality investments that suddenly become cheap as other investors panic and sell.
2. Diversify your investments.
The importance of diversification has long been stressed by financial advisers. The recent upheaval is a useful reminder of the importance of the adage to avoid placing all of your eggs in one basket.
‘You need to be diversified,’ says Matthew Tuttle, who runs Tuttle Wealth Management, an investment advisory firm. ‘Anyone with commodities was happy last week.’
But excessive diversification reduces any chance of outperforming the market, experts say. Mr. Tuttle recommends exchange-traded funds and notes that rise in value when markets quake and volatility picks up. Such funds can act as insurance policies, costing investors a bit when markets are raging but bailing them out when stocks tumble.
He’s a fan of the iPath S&P 500 VIX Short-Term Futures ETN (VXX), which tends to rise in value when the market’s volatility, and investors’ fear, jump. This fund has lost 70% in the past year, as markets have rallied, suggesting it can be risky and that investors should keep only a small portion of their portfolio in the fund — the portion aimed at protecting them from abrupt troubles in the market.
Mr. Tuttle likes this fund, which climbed last week, because it has a longer track record than some rivals that aim to do the same kind of investing, ‘so even though it has been pretty much a straight line down, we have a good feel for what we will get from it.’
Advisers say that an investor worried about unexpected, short-term events might place 5% of the value of his portfolio in shares of ProShares Short S&P500 (SH), an ETF that climbs when the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index falls.
3. Buy options.
Some individual investors shy away from using options because they can be risky. But more are embracing options strategies, not to amplify returns but to make their portfolios safer and steadier, especially in turbulent times.
Mr. Rubin of Birinyi recommends that investors sell ‘call’ options on individual stocks in their portfolios. How this strategy works: An investor can call a broker or go to an online broker and enter into a transaction to sell a call option on a stock in his portfolio, pocketing cash from that sale. The purchaser of the call option acquires the right to buy that stock at a specific, higher price. If it rises, the stock could be sold to the holder of the call option. If it drops, it won’t be sold. But either way, an investor will have received cash by selling the call option, cash that can act as a buffer for the rest of a portfolio.
This cash collected by selling a call option ‘acts as a hedge to an unexpected decline in prices,’ Mr. Rubin says. He recommends selling call options for the most volatile or expensive stocks in one’s portfolio, which have a higher likelihood of getting crushed by an outside event than a more stable company.
An investor looking for cheap insurance might also buy ‘put’ contracts, or options that pay off only if the market tumbles. Such an investment can act as a safety net, rising in value if markets suddenly drop.
Kenji Tada recalls the awful boom ringing through the suppression chamber of the No. 4 reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant when the earthquake hit at 2:46 p.m. on March 11.
Masatsugu Hoshi recalls dust as thick as smoke; his friend Takuya Bamba remembers the lights going out in the basement of the No. 4 reactor. Kenji Mougi and Matsuo Watanabe saw asphalt split and cracks open in the roads threading through the complex.
Their stories — some of the first personal accounts from the ground — give a more textured view of the goings-on in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex during the hours after the quake hit. The tales underscore the enormous destructive power unleashed on the plant. But they also paint a picture of a facility that was disciplined and orderly, and that seemed to have survived the initial battering of nature quite well — until a tsunami destroyed its backup generators.
For Mr. Tada, a 29-year-old employee in the Fukushima branch of Tokyo-based Tokai Toso Co., the first hint of the quake was a gentle rocking. At the time, he was shrouded in a white protective suit and mask, deep in the bowels of the plant’s No. 4 reactor. The reactor had been shut down for a major overhaul, and Mr. Tada had been scanning the surface of the suppression chamber, which lies below the container surrounding the fuel rods, for signs of corrosion.
When the swaying started, then grew more violent, Mr. Tada grabbed at some hanging pipes to hold himself upright. Then came the terrible boom, magnified in the doughnut-shaped chamber. The earthquake knocked out the plant’s regular power, but Mr. Tada and his three companions in the chamber made their way out by the emergency lighting — the tsunami that destroyed the plant’s backup generators was still an hour away.
Mr. Tada emerged into a crowd of several hundred other workers, all heading toward a handful of exits from the reactor building. But he said there was no panic. Managers from plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. had shown up, and were directing workers into lines to file out. ‘I thought it was amazing,’ Mr. Tada said, referring to the orderliness of the departure.
Not everyone’s evacuation went so smoothly. Mr. Hoshi was building scaffolding at the turbine in the No. 5 reactor when the earthquake hit. The 25-year-old laborer already knew about earthquakes and nuclear power plants; he had been working at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant in the Japan Sea region of Niigata when a magnitude-6.6 quake struck in 2007.
In the March 11 quake, ‘the walls started crumbling and dust as thick as black smoke filled the room,’ Mr. Hoshi recalled. There was a shock, the lights went out, then a boom that sounded like an explosion, he said.
‘I was in a panic,’ Mr. Hoshi said. ‘I thought, ‘This is bad. I’ve got to get out.’ ‘
Mr. Hoshi fled to the workers’ changing room, where he slipped out of a company work outfit and into his own clothes, grabbing his wallet and keys.
While Mr. Hoshi was fleeing reactor No. 5 as the quake hit, his friend and neighbor, Takuya Bamba, was straightening up the first floor of the basement of the turbine building at reactor No. 4, putting away safety belts and other items used at the plant.
After the quake subsided, the workers grabbed flashlights and made their way to the exit, Mr. Bamba recalled. Normally, workers leaving the Fukushima Daiichi plant get tested for radiation contamination before they leave. But Mr. Bamba said workers simply streamed out of the building after the quake struck.
Mr. Mougi, 40, and Mr. Watanabe, 59, were already outside when the quake hit. The two laborers for nuclear-site construction specialist Hokuto Kogyo were working in different yards of the complex — Mr. Mougi unloading metal pallets from a truck with a forklift and Mr. Watanabe heading off for a break.
Both felt the earth buckle and saw cracks form in the asphalt, some so deep that Mr. Mougi had trouble getting back to three other members of his crew who were working in a neighboring yard.
All left the site without realizing just how much worse the tsunami would make everything.
According to the Daily Telegraph on February 11, the Blue Cross, an animal rescue center in Southampton, UK, is struggling to rehome a cat, because it looks like evil Lord Voldemort from the Harry Potter films. The abandoned cat, named Charlie, had to have its ears and nose removed after suffering from skin cancer.
New York prosecutors are poised to file civil fraud charges against Ernst & Young for its alleged role in the collapse of Lehman Brothers, saying the sizable seven accounting firm stood by while the investment bank deceived investors about its financial health, people familiar with the matter said.
State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is close to filing the case, which would mark the first time a major accounting firm was targeted for its role in the financial crisis. The suit stems from transactions Lehman allegedly carried out to make its risk appear lower than it actually was.
The suit, led by Mr. Cuomo, New York’s governor-elect, could come as early as this louis vuitton bags. it’s part of a broader inquiry in to whether some banks deceived investors by removing debt from their balance sheets before they reported their financial results to mask their true levels of risk-taking, a person familiar with the case said. The state may seek to impose fines & other penalties.
Lehman Brothers was long one of Ernst & Young’s largest clients, & the accounting firm earned approximately $100 million in fees for its auditing work from 2001 through 2008, say people familiar with the matter.
Mr. Cuomo’s office has sought documents & information from several firms, including Bank of the united states Corp., which earlier this year disclosed two transactions that were wrongly classified. Jerry Dubrowski, a Bank of the united states spokesman, said the bank’s practice is to cooperate with any inquiry from regulators.
it’s feasible that Ernst & Young will try to settle before any suit is filed. The firm declined to comment. A spokesman for the Lehman Brothers estate also declined to comment.
U.S. officials condemned the release of a quarter-million diplomatic messages Sunday by the website WikiLeaks and pledged to review how U.S. government agencies protect sensitive information.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said the people who released the cables were ‘criminals, first and foremost,’ and Attorney General Eric Holder said the U.S. was looking to prosecute those deemed responsible.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the leak an ‘attack on the international community.’
The Defense Department, which has also seen its documents released by WikiLeaks, is focusing on shoring up its computers and networks. New measures include disabling small portable drives on many military computers, better physical oversight of classified material, and accelerating the deployment of software that can detect unusual data access and downloads.
Restricting access inside the government to sensitive information could help prevent future breaches, but it would also hamstring recent government efforts to share more crucial information among agencies. The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were facilitated in part by government agencies’ inability to share critical information.
‘To the extent you start restricting that information, you keep it out of the hands of some people who could really use it,’ said Steven Pifer, a 25-year diplomatic veteran, former ambassador to Ukraine, and arms-control expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
Another possibility for securing diplomatic communications that worries some former diplomats: Classifying more dispatches as top secret. That would route them through different networks with smaller audiences. None of the quarter-million cables WikiLeaks released were classified ‘top secret’; only 15,000 were classified ‘secret.’
That would reverse a trend in recent years of seeking to classify only those data that really needed it. ‘Overclassification would be a total abuse of the system,’ said David Shinn, a 37-year State Department veteran and former ambassador.
Authorities haven’t named a suspect in the latest release of documents. But in July, the military charged Army intelligence analyst Pfc. Bradley Manning, a soldier working in army intelligence in Iraq, with illegally taking secret State Department files and disseminating a classified video, later released by WikiLeaks, showing a U.S. military helicopter firing on people in Baghdad. Pfc. Manning is in custody in Virginia.
All my life, I’ve had this recurring dream that causes me to wake up feeling strange. In it, I am a little girl again, rushing about, trying to get ready for school.
“Hurry, Gin, you’ll be late for school,” my mother calls to me. I am hurrying, Mom! Where’s my lunch? What did I do with my books?”
Deep inside I know where the dream comes from and what it means. It is God’s way of reminding me of some unfinished business in my life.
I loved everything about school, even though the school I attended in Springfield, Ohio, in the 1920s was very strict. I loved books, teachers, even tests and homework. Most of all I longed to someday march down the aisle to the strains of “Pomp and Circumstance.” To me, that song was even more beautiful than “Here Comes the Bride.”
But there were problems.
The Great Depression hit the hardest at large, poor families like ours. With seven children, Mom and Dad had no money for things like fine school clothes. Every morning, I cut out strips of cardboard to stuff inside my shoes to cover the holes in the soles. There was no money for musical instruments or sports uniforms or after-school treats. We sang to ourselves, played jacks or duck-on-the-rock, and munched on onions as we did homework.
These hardships I accepted. As long as I could go to school, I didn’t mind too much how I looked or what I lacked.
What happened next was harder to accept. My brother Paul died of an infection after he accidentally stabbed himself in the eye with a fork. Then my father contracted tuberculosis and died. My sister, Margaret, caught the same disease, and soon she was gone, too.
The shock of these losses gave me an ulcer, and I fell behind in my schoolwork. Meanwhile, my widowed mother tried to keep going on the five dollars a week she made cleaning houses. Her face became a mask of despair.
One day I said to her, “Mom, I’m going to quit school and get a job to help out.”
The look in her eyes was a mixture of grief and relief.
At fifteen, I dropped out of my beloved school and went to work in a bakery. My hope of walking down the aisle to “Pomp and Circumstance” was dead, or so I thought.
In 1940, I married Ed, a machinist, and we began our family. Then Ed decided to become a preacher, so we moved to Cincinnati where he could attend the Cincinnati Bible Seminary. With the coming of children went the dream of schooling, forever.
Even so, I was determined that my children would have the education I had missed. I made sure the house was filled with books and magazines. I helped them with their homework and urged them to study hard. It paid off. All our six children eventually got some college training, and one of them is a college professor.
But Linda, our last child, had health problems. Juvenile arthritis in
her hands and knees made it impossible for her to function in the typical classroom. Furthermore, the medications gave her cramps, stomach trouble and migraine headaches.
Teachers and principals were not always sympathetic. I lived in dread of the phone calls from school. “Mom, I’m coming home.”
Now Linda was nineteen, and still she did not have her high school diploma. She was repeating my own experience.
I prayed about this problem, and when we moved to Sturgis, Michigan, in 1979, I began to see an answer. I drove to the local high school to check it out. On the bulletin board, I spotted an announcement about evening courses.
That’s the answer, I said to myself. Linda always feels better in the evening, so I’ll just sign her up for night school.
Linda was busy filling out enrollment forms when the registrar looked at me with brown, persuasive eyes and said, “Mrs. Schantz, why don’t you come back to school?”
I laughed in his face. “Me? Ha! I’m an old woman. I’m fifty-five!”
But he persisted, and before I knew what I had done, I was enrolled for classes in English and crafts. “This is only an experiment,” I warned him, but he just smiled.
To my surprise, both Linda and I thrived in evening school. I went back again the next semester, and my grades steadily improved.
It was exciting, going to school again, but it was no game. Sitting in a class full of kids was awkward, but most of them were respectful and encouraging. During the day, I still had loads of housework to do and grandchildren to care for. Sometimes, I stayed up until two in the morning, adding columns of numbers for bookkeeping class. When the numbers didn’t seem to work out, my eyes would cloud with tears and I would berate myself. Why am I so dumb?
But when I was down, Linda encouraged me. “Mom, you can’t quit now!” And when she was down, I encouraged her. Together we would see this through.
At last, graduation was near, and the registrar called me into his office. I entered, trembling, afraid I had done something wrong.
He smiled and motioned for me to have a seat. “Mrs. Schantz,” he began, You have done very well in school.”
I blushed with relief.
“As a matter of fact,” he went on, “your classmates have voted unanimously for you to be class orator.”
I was speechless.
He smiled again and handed me a piece of paper. “And here is a little reward for all your hard work.”
I looked at the paper. It was a college scholarship for $3,000. “Thank you” was all I could think to say, and I said it over and over.
The night of graduation, I was terrified. Two hundred people were sitting out there, and public speaking was a brand-new experience for me. My mouth wrinkled as if I had been eating persimmons.
My heart skipped beats, and I wanted to flee, but I couldn’t! After all, my own children were sitting in that audience. I couldn’t be a coward in front of them.
Then, when I heard the first strains of “Pomp and Circumstance,” my fears dissolved in a flood of delight. I am graduating! And so is Linda!
Somehow I got through the speech. I was startled by the applause, the first I ever remember receiving in my life.
Afterwards, roses arrived from my brothers and sisters throughout the Midwest. My husband gave me silk roses, “so they will not fade.”
The local media showed up with cameras and recorders and lots of questions. There were tears and hugs and congratulations. I was proud of Linda, and a little afraid that I might have unintentionally stolen some of the attention that she deserved for her victory, but she seemed as proud as anyone of our dual success.
The class of ’81 is history now, and I’ve gone on for some college education.
But sometimes, I sit down and put on the tape of my graduation speech. I hear myself say to the audience, “Don’t ever underestimate your dreams in life. Anything can happen if you believe. Not a childish, magical belief. It means hard work, but never doubt that you can do it, with God’s help.”
And then, I remember the recurring dream-Hurry, Gin, you’ll be late for school-and my eyes cloud over when I think of my mother.
