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Show #2.5, p.] were really High Days. After a few days at Hat Rock a neighbor packed up my cartons of unopened and unanswered mail and a few clothes and drove me off - doctor's orders - to Sun City, Arizona, where, through the kindness of Ruth and Ira Stoughton, I loafed, wrote letters, and learned to walk again. Hany letters I must have missed, so if you have not heard please accept my thanks for Christmas letters, hospital get-well cards and welcome-home greetings! It is wonderful to be back at Hat Rock, bringing in communicants from outlying areas, talking with neighbors at the house and meeting the remarkable array of pilgrims who come from allover the country for a few hours of talk with Father Liebler. And it was a happy welcome-home to find our people all supplied with new quilted jackets by a generouG donor, eifts of pop, food, clothes and our first really new ,wringer washer for public use. l"riends to the north had added to their generous support a quaint p~p orean, money to pay for a special coating sprayed on the roof of our house to stop existing leaks and prevent future ones, and, just in time for me to enjoy it, a lavish parish dinner. As one of our beautiful young women said, "Isn't it wonderful, and I Guess it won't hurt us to overeat once a year!" . And a true story: One day, a young married man came to our doorway very early in the morning looking for his "little sister" who had disappeared. Toward noon the anxious parents came on the same errand. They had been our friends for about thirty years and assumed she would have come to us. It seemed it was a beautiful sixteenyear- old daughter who had been very happy about going to a foster home in another state and had enjoyed her second year of high school, last year. About an hour later the daughter arrived, carrying on her arm a large thick quilt and a water canteen, and she said she had had sandwiches. She explained that she was sorry to cause alarm, but that both parents were drunk, as happens so often, and theyaliays fight ~th her at such a time, as she is the oldest at home. Her older brother had told her that he knows how tough this situation is, as he and her older sister had been through it too. Their parents are alcoholics and they can't seem to stop drinking. She said that last summer she went to her brother's home, but he has trouble with his in-laws and her being there seemed to cause more trouble. So she went to her beautiful married sister in Blanding (a predominantly Morman town) who was good to her. The older sister found relief from home in a !'iormon foster home, was given a two-year concentrated course in Normon teaching, and helped to get into a Mormon University, encou~~ged to date and marry a cstaunch Norwen - and now she is busy having a baby a year. They have only one room, so the sister suggested that it might be better to try for a foster home. In this area, this means a Mormon home. It is a great honor for couples to be chosen by the church as worthy of being foster parents, and is well rewarded. So the girl was found a Mormon foster home in California, a nice home and a friendly school, but she suffered from homesickness, and finally told her foster parents she would have to leave. They begged her not to, on the grounds that, if she did leave, they would never be allowed another placement. Then began a sudden program of fascinating amusements - Disneyland, watching Hollywood movie-making, San Diego's Zoo and Sea World, &c. She stuck it out to the end of school, but with great joy came back to Navajoland and her family. The night before she came to us she had taken her Scout equipment and, by herself, climbed to the top of a rocky, uninhabited Mesa, crawled under a big rock and, in spite of frightening thunder and lightening, finally slept. She is now looking to the Mormon foster home as a safe refuge. I said to her, "I suppose when you get up on Sunday everyone in the house gets ready to go to the Normon church, and you must go with them. It would be pretty hard to do anything else." She turned her face away and hung her head. "Aren't there any kind Cmtholic homes?" she asked. My turn for hanging the head. |