Great news. Our friend the Rev. Dahn Gandell, who works with refugee kids in Rochester, N.Y., is coming to Pompanuck Farm the last few days of December, and she is bring some refugee children from Burma with her. They also play soccer.

The RISSE soccer team has a lot of kids from Burma, and Ali (from RISSE, the refugee and immigrant center in Albany) is eager for the two groups to meet. Ali says they intend to wear their new uniforms (above), we’ll see if a game came be conjured up.

The kids have called themselves the Bedlam Farm Warriors, not something I asked for. it is kind of cool.

i’m going to Albany tomorrow to meet with Ari and the soccer team. I’m also meeting with Mawulidi Diodone Majaliwa, I wrote about him a couple of months ago, he is a carver from the Congo who was forced to leave all of his tools behind.

You may recall the Army Of Good raised money to buy him some new tools, and we went out into the woods and helped him pick out some wood. He’s bringing some of his first carvings to our meeting at RISSE tomorrow. They will be for sale.

I hope to offer them on my blog and/or Maria’s blog this week in time for Christmas. This is exciting, you have given him the tools to honor the work his grandfather taught him, work he thought was lost to him.

I’ve also talked with Ali about helping the soccer team ice-stake on some Saturdays this winter at a n rink outside of Albany. It will cost about $7 a child, and I’m bringing a check for the first visit.  It will cost roughly $100 to get the team to the rink, depending on how many come.

Thanks to the members of the Army Of Good for contacting Ali about sending Ukelele’s for each of the kids, that could be wild. Also a check to pay for additional indoor soccer tournament fees this winter.

I am trying to focus our help on keeping the kids together and busy and active during an upstate New York winter, the first for some of them.

Most come from single parent homes, and there is little money or transportation for them. Few of the families have cards,  Ali is working with me to make sure they have healthy and fun things to do. He is their lifetime to the outside world, and few of them have seen snow or sub-zero temperatures.

In the hard part of winter, they will be stuck in apartments, I will work with Ali to get them out and with their friends. The federal subsidies that were available to them and their families are disappearing rapidly. They will need help. This is a major focus for me in the coming months, it will not take a lot of money to get them to movies, skating, practicing indoors, some outings.

I’ll keep you posted on all of these activities. This is sacred work for me, the true soul of America.

We’ve send them to see Spiderman, paid for birthday parties, soccer uniforms. I’d like to get them to some other movies.  I hope, with your help, to keep supporting them through the winter, and then again when soccer season cranks up.

This is so important, to see them together is to see how much they love and support one another. Their lives would be harsh and lonely with this connection.  Ali, my brother, is a saint.  He calls me a savior, but he is the one reaching out to these kids.

I want to keep helping him.

The December meeting with the children from Burma will also be important to them, they rarely get to see other refugee children from outside RISSE, they are already excited about it.

If you wish to contribute you can send a check to my post office box. P.O. Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816, or via Paypal, [email protected]. We have about $1,500 in the Mansion/Refugee Fund, thank you. It was getting low there for a bit. Please mark your payments or checks to Refugee Fund or The Mansion, or both.

All donations go into a separate account, overseen by a bookkeeper an an account. Every penny goes where it is supposed to go.