Eleanor Roosevelt kind of rocks

So there's this quote credited to Eleanor Roosevelt that says, "You wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do."

It's been an interesting day. Extremely busy (like every day) and drama-filled too (like every other day... at least.)

So Nick got a threatening message on his phone this afternoon. Actually two of them but they both said the exact same thing--

"do you think you are haitien i am not Danny i not working now and you just wait ..."

First of all, before I get to my point, I just want to say that while we were immediately a bit alarmed by this message, we also laughed a bit. Because why? Because it's STUPID. It would be like me trying to send a hate message to a Haitian (oops, sorry, a "haitien" person) in Kreyol. I am sure I would mess up the grammar, totally diffusing any thought of threat. It would have been way scarier if it was in Kreyol like the last threats we had after everything blew up a few months ago. But though we tried, Nick and I just couldn't stop ourselves from laughing.

HOWEVER... (second somewhat hilarious thing) the person that sent the message didn't use a blocked number. Now, I have never sent a threat to someone, but if I was going to, I'd learn how to use the Digicel feature that makes your phone number "private" when calling someone like the last threat-ers used. (This is, actually, how we learned this feature existed.) We tried not to, but we laughed about that too.

We knew, however, that with 11 kids in our custody, we had to follow protocol and Nick had to go to the police. When he arrived at the police station the situation became clearer to us.

It turns out that another organization had to fire some people and they (the fired people) thought Nick was behind it. This brought us to our third round of the giggles. Seriously, 2 things about that were ludicrous.

First-- it cracked me up that people actually pass their time with conspiracy theories about us-- like we're these puppet-masters running all of Haiti (or at least Jacmel.) Seriously people-- we barely speak the language. Our orphanage has EIGHT extra kids in it. Eight. That's it. We're not exactly on the forefront of influence. And not for nothing, Nick and I are swamped with situations in our own sphere-- things like innocent children getting beat by their "owners" dropped at our doorstep, reactive attachment disorder, leading teams, having a nearly-month-long string of house-guests, doing lessons 3 hours a day with our kids (cause yeah, we had to go and make that our "rallying cry" grrr...)... etc, ad nauseam... We can barely keep our heads above water with what's on our plates. Actually, we CAN'T keep our heads above water-- our house looks like a bomb went off in it (at all times) and we're doing all we can to lessen our responsibilities.

Second-- and this is the jist of what I was getting at when I thought of this post-- we honestly don't care that much. The thought that we'd try to throw our weight around (and by the way, I have a lot of weight these days-- dang anti-depressants) to make someone else loose his/her job is JUST SO ARROGANT. I have held my tongue A LOT over the past several months when lies/half-truths (aka- lies) were being told because it JUST wasn't my business. People would call me or email me and say, "Hey, have you seen the news? What a freakin' liar. Aren't you going to say anything?" And I'd just say, "Nope, really not my issue anymore." Because it just isn't. People are going to do what they are going to do. All the junk going around-- it's just not my business. And the thought that I'd care enough about crap like this is arrogant and absurd.

Which brings me back to the ever-wise Eleanor Roosevelt, "You wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do." It never even crossed our minds to try to have these people fired. Not even once. Wouldn't have the pull to do it even if we wanted to. But as it turns out, we didn't need to-- their lackluster performance did that for themselves. Failure is hard to swallow. I know blame-shifting when you experience a failure is human nature, but sorry, not going to take the blame on this one.

Get over yourselves people. My life doesn't revolve around you.

PS- It appears that "honest, spirited missionary Gwenn" and her "ridiculous blog" (direct quote from a hate email) has made a comeback... gonna go do a gut check now so this post might disappear or be edited if I'm convicted. But hey, "honest, spirited missionary" works for Jamie... :) (Check out the link-- it's kind of hilarious.)