Loving Christian, wife, boymom, daughter, sister, niece, aunt, friend, Texan. I dont use my head to fly the arrow, boy, I use my heart! *Yondu Udonta
Dallas, TX
Joined December 2015
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Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.
~Colossians 4.6
Yes, this!
This is what school used to be before they turned it into a therapy session.
High school boys in Louisa County, Virginia spend months in auto shop fixing donated cars. Then they walk a single mama out to the bay, slap a bow on the hood, and hand her the keys.
No TED Talk.
No “lived experience” panel.
Just grease, wrenches, and a woman who can finally get her kids to school without begging a ride.
One mom said that car helped her get her child back.
Because showing up actually matters.
That’s not charity. That’s competence.
Boys learning a trade. A family getting off the edge. A community doing what government PowerPoints never will.
Keep the gender studies.
Give me the shop class. 💯
How have i never heard this story? I am overwhelmed! How perfectly poignant and beautiful. The cows. Thanks you!
Nine months after September 11, a village in Kenya with no electricity, no running water, and no roads gave America the most valuable thing it had.
Fourteen cows.
This is not a joke. It is one of the most serious gifts this country has ever received.
Kimeli Naiyomah grew up in Enoosaen, a Maasai village near the Tanzanian border. His family was so poor they owned no cattle. Among the Maasai, that is the bottom. A family without cows is barely counted as a family.
At fourteen he ran away to a school where the lessons were held under a tree. He walked. He had no shoes, no books, no money. He asked to be let in anyway.
Years later he was a student at Stanford, in California, studying to be a doctor.
On September 11, 2001, he happened to be in New York City.
He watched the towers fall.
He was a Maasai warrior. Warriors are trained from childhood to run toward danger. He wanted to run to the pile. He could not help there. He did not know what to do with what he had seen.
Months later he went home to Enoosaen.
The elders had heard something on the radio. Vaguely. A place called New York. Buildings. Some of them had not heard at all. Nobody in the village had ever seen a skyscraper. Nobody had been on an airplane. The idea of a building a hundred stories tall, full of thousands of people, falling down, was not something the language had words for.
Kimeli sat with them and explained. Slowly. What a tower was. How many people. What it looked like when it came down. He told them what he had seen with his own eyes.
The elders listened. When he finished, one of them asked a question.
"What can we do for these poor people?"
Kimeli had already decided. He had saved money in America. He wanted to buy a cow, the first cow his family had ever owned, and he wanted to give it to the United States.
To the Maasai, a cow is not livestock. A cow is life. It is wealth, food, standing, survival. An elder explained it to a reporter in one sentence. A cow is the handkerchief we Maasai use to wipe away tears.
Kimeli asked the elders for their blessing to give his one cow to America.
Then, one by one, the elders stood up.
They wanted to give too.
In the end, fourteen families pledged fourteen cows. In a community of about ten thousand people who owned almost nothing else.
On June 3, 2002, the United States chargé d'affaires in Kenya, William Brencick, traveled to Enoosaen. A flight, then more than half a day by road across terrain that barely counts as road. When he arrived, hundreds of Maasai in red robes were waiting. Some held hand-lettered banners.
"To the people of America, we give these cows to help you."
The elders presented the fourteen cows. Brencick accepted them on behalf of the United States. He called it the highest expression of regard and sympathy.
Then there was a practical problem. How do you ship fourteen sacred cows to New York?
The answer the two sides arrived at was better than shipping them.
The cows would stay in Kenya. They would belong to the United States of America. The Maasai would care for them, forever, as America's herd.
They are still there.
The original fourteen have multiplied into dozens. Each one carries a mark carved into its ear, the outline of two towers. Their offspring fund scholarships for the children of the village. The U.S. embassy built a school there, and a water project.
When the story reached America, forty thousand people wrote letters to the village. A painting of the fourteen cows hangs in the 9/11 Memorial Museum. A children's book about them became a national bestseller.
Kimeli's own explanation was the shortest.
To heal a sorrowing heart, give something that is dear to your own.
A village that had never seen a skyscraper, that could not have found New York on a map, that owned almost nothing, gave America the one thing it valued most.
Somewhere in Kenya tonight, there are cows with towers carved into their ears.
They are ours.
They were given to wipe our tears. 🇺🇸🇰🇪
Kimberly K. B. retweeted
At Ground Zero, after the last living person was pulled out, the search dogs stopped eating.
So the police did something nobody had written down in any manual.
They climbed into the rubble, lay down, and pretended to be alive.
More than 300 dogs worked the World Trade Center site. They came from every corner of the country, on trucks and in cargo holds, with handlers who had been trained to do one thing. Find people who are still breathing under the ground.
That is what a search and rescue dog is built for. Not bodies. Life. They are trained on live human scent. When they find it, they bark, they dig, they light up, and the handler rewards them, and the whole thing means something.
The last living person recovered from Ground Zero was a woman named Genelle Guzman-McMillan. She had been buried for 27 hours. A dog found her.
She was the last.
After that, the dogs kept going out on twelve-hour shifts, across sixteen acres of smoldering steel, at temperatures that burned their paws, and they found nobody.
Nobody.
Day after day.
The handlers noticed it first. The dogs were changing. Their tails were down. They were not eating. They would come off the pile and lie flat and not look at anyone.
A veterinarian named Cindy Otto, who spent ten days there working night shifts to care for the animals, put it plainly. The dogs had been sent to find life, and every day they were finding the opposite.
It was breaking them.
An NYPD officer named Famiglietti described what happened next.
They pulled everybody off the rubble. Then they asked for volunteers.
The volunteers, police officers, went out into the debris and hid themselves. Under beams. In voids. Curled up in pockets of concrete. They were told to lie down like they were hurt. Then the handlers sent the dogs in.
Picture that.
A grown man with a badge, a man who had spent the last week pulling friends out of that same pile, lying down in it on purpose. Face down. Holding still. Waiting for a dog.
And the dog comes over the top of the wreckage, and catches the scent, and barks, and digs, and finds a person who is warm and moving and alive.
And the handler says good girl, good boy, and the whole team celebrates.
They called them mock finds.
They did it for the dogs.
They did it so the dogs would remember what they were for.
One of those dogs was a two-year-old golden retriever named Bretagne. She came from Texas with her handler, Denise Corliss. It was her first deployment. They worked ten days at Ground Zero. They found no survivors.
But firefighters would come off the pile, stone-faced, not speaking, and see the dog, and something would break open in them. They would kneel down. They would put their face in her fur.
One day a man walked up to Bretagne and started petting her. He told Corliss his best friend loved golden retrievers.
Corliss asked where his friend was.
The man pointed at the pile.
"He's in there somewhere."
He kept petting the dog.
Bretagne went on to work Hurricane Katrina and Rita. She retired at 10. She was the last known surviving search dog of 9/11.
On June 6, 2016, at age 16, she was carried into a veterinary office in Texas to be put to sleep.
Outside, a dozen firefighters from her fire department stood in a line in their dress uniforms, in the heat, and saluted as she went past.
They draped her in an American flag on the way out.
Three hundred dogs went into that pile looking for the living.
They found one.
And when they could not find any more, the men they worked beside laid down in the rubble and let themselves be found, so the dogs would not lose heart.
That is the whole story of Ground Zero, really.
Nobody could save the dead.
So they saved each other. 🇺🇸
This.
25 years ago this morning, I was packing for my first trip as a pilot for American Airlines when Suzi came in and told me an airplane had hit the World Trade Center.
I assumed a small airplane, bad weather. Then I turned on the television.
Crystal clear morning in New York. I stood there holding my young son Matthew, going through my mental aviation checklist on how this could've happned... and the second airplane hit.
I knew we were under attack.
Flight suit. Boots. Raced out to Naval Air Station Fort Worth. Through the gate before the base went to Threat Condition Delta.
I was supposed to spend that day flying Americans to Miami.
I spent it strapped into an armed and running F/A-18 Hornet at the end of a runway, prepared to shoot one down.
Gruff and I waited while the Spads of the 457th FS got airborne, scheduled to launch when they ran out of gas. By the time the did, all air traffic was on the ground.
2,977 innocent people were murdered by 19 al-Qaeda terrorists.
Souls jumped from the towers, because falling through a clear September sky was better than burning alive.
First responders climbed up while thousands ran down.
Father Judge, a Catholic priest and FDNY chaplain, walked into hell to pray over the dying and became one of its victims. They carried him out and laid him on an altar.
25 years later, Americans are still dying from what they breathed at Ground Zero. Veterans still carry the wounds you can see and the ones you can't.
This country has forgotten why.
NYC elected an avowed anti-American immigrant Muslim socialist as mayor. Michigan's nominee for senate closed his campaign beside a man who said America 'deserved 9/11' and that we brought it on ourselves.
People running for office in a country they hate.
We raised a generation to be ashamed of this great country. They will not defend it. And a generation that will not defend a country will eventually accept whatever replaces it.
I am for religious freedom. I spent 15 years defending the document that guarantees it, I started my own church.
But the moment your religion leaves its lane and comes into mine - the moment it claims the right to kill me for not believing what you believe - it is not a faith anymore. It is a political system with a body count. Its own law. Its own courts. Its own mandates on what women can and can't do.
Ask a girl in Kabul about her schooling, ask a Christian in Saudi Arabia where his church is. There isn't one in the whole country. 15 of the hijackers were from Saudi Arabia.
We let them build here. They do not let us build there. That is not tolerance, it's an invasion.
Europe has fallen.
The Constitution is not a suicide pact.
Contrary to what the pope thinks, there is such a thing as a 'just war'. This is it.
25 years ago this morning I sat at the end of a runway in a loaded fighter, waiting for an order I prayed would never come.
Many said we would never forget. They did.
I never will.
Fight's On.
@NoFallenHeroes @SuziNFH
Worth rereading every time. God bless all of those heros!
I reread this every year.
I cry like a baby every year.
Todd Beamer died a father, husband, and hero.
Todd: Hello… Operator… listen to me. I can’t speak very loud. This is an emergency. I’m a passenger on a United flight to San Francisco. Our plane has been hijacked.
Lisa: I understand. Can they see you?
Todd: No. There are three that we know of. They have knives — razor knives, like box cutters. Someone announced from the cockpit there was a bomb. It sounded fake.
Lisa: Your name?Todd: Todd Beamer. United Flight 93.Todd: They killed one passenger in first class. They forced most of us back. Fourteen of us here. Five flight attendants. The guy with the bomb ordered us to sit on the floor.
Lisa: Are you okay?
Todd: We’re going down… wait. No. We’re leveling off. We changed directions. We’re flying east again.
Todd: A guy named Jeremy called his wife. She told him two planes hit the World Trade Center. Lisa, is that true?
Lisa: I have to tell you the truth. It’s very bad. Both towers are gone. A third plane hit the Pentagon. Our country is under attack. I’m afraid your plane may be part of their plan.
Todd: Oh God. Lisa, will you do something for me? Call my wife and my kids. Promise me you’ll call.
Lisa: I promise.
Todd: Our home number is… You have the same name as my wife. Lisa. We’ve been married ten years. She’s pregnant with our third child. Tell her I love her. I’ll always love her. We have two boys — David, he’s 3, and Andrew, he’s 1. Tell them their daddy loves them and he is so proud of them. The baby is due January 12th. I saw an ultrasound. We still don’t know if it’s a girl or a boy.
Lisa: I’ll tell them. I promise, Todd.(Lisa patches in the FBI.)
Agent: Todd, your plane is on a course for Washington. Best guess is the White House or the Capitol.
Todd: I understand. I’ll be back.
Todd: Everyone knows this isn’t a normal hijacking. We have decided we will not be pawns in their plot.
Lisa: What are you going to do?
Todd: Four of us are going to rush the one with the bomb. Then the cockpit. A stewardess is getting boiling water. We’ll take them out.
Todd: Would you pray with me?They pray the Lord’s Prayer. Then: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.
Todd: God help me. Jesus help me.Are you guys ready? Let’s Roll.
We remember you, Wells!
911 Hero - THEY DIDN’T KNOW HIS NAME.
🅱️ THEY REMEMBERED THE RED BANDANA.
On September 11, 2001, Welles Crowther was working on the 104th floor of the South Tower. He was 24 years old, an equities trader and a volunteer firefighter.
When the tower was struck, Welles made his way to the 78th-floor sky lobby where injured and frightened people were trapped.
He covered his nose and mouth with a red bandana, found a usable stairwell and began leading people out.
He carried a badly wounded woman on his back. Then he went back upstairs.
And he went back again.
Survivors later described a calm young man in a red bandana who kept returning to help people escape. Welles never made it out.
His remains were recovered in March 2002.
Months later, his mother, Alison, read about the mysterious rescuer. She knew immediately. Her son had carried a red bandana since childhood.
When survivors were shown his photograph, they confirmed it was him.
That is how a mother learned what her son had done in his final hours.
Welles Crowther could have spent those moments trying to save himself. Instead, he used them to save others.
Remember his name - Remember the red bandana.
Welles Remy Crowther: 1977–2001 🇺🇸
Love this story!
Interesting history I read on fb. 👇
August 21, 1883. Just after six in the evening, the sky over Rochester, Minnesota turns the color of a bruise. Twenty minutes later, a third of the town is gone. Thirty seven people are dead. More than two hundred are bleeding in the streets.
Rochester had no hospital. Not one.
So a convent school on the edge of town emptied out. The nuns walked into the wreckage in full habits, and a woman named Mother Alfred Moes, an immigrant from Luxembourg who had come to America with almost nothing, sent word to the only doctor in town who could handle that many wounded.
His name was William Worrall Mayo. He was 64, an English country doctor, a hard skeptic on the subject of religion.
The sisters took over Rommel's dance hall and turned it into a hospital overnight. None of them had ever been trained in nursing. They learned it standing up, with Mayo giving orders and the injured laid out on the floorboards.
When the last patient was gone, Mother Alfred went to see him.
She told him Rochester needed a real hospital. A permanent one. She said she had seen it, a great hospital rising out of the cornfields on the west edge of town, and that she wanted him to run it.
Mayo told her the truth. A building like that would cost $40,000. Well over a million in today's money. He said no congregation of schoolteaching nuns could possibly raise it.
She did not argue with him. She simply told him that if he would take charge of the hospital, the sisters would take charge of paying for it.
Then she went out and did it.
For six years, her sisters taught school and handed over their wages. Every dollar. She bought nine acres of farmland. She hired the builders. She oversaw the plans herself, and when the money ran short, she found more.
Saint Marys Hospital opened on September 30, 1889. Twenty seven beds. Thirteen sisters, none of them nurses by training. Dr. Mayo, now 70, walked in as chief of staff with his two sons, Will and Charlie, beside him.
Those two boys built their surgical practice inside her building. Patients started arriving from Chicago, then from every state, then from overseas. The brothers formalized the partnership in 1919 and gave it their family name.
Mayo Clinic. Today it treats more than a million patients a year and is ranked the best hospital in the United States.
Mother Alfred Moes died on December 18, 1899, ten years after the doors opened. She never saw what it became.
The Mayo brothers always said it plainly. Their father did not want the hospital. The nun did. She built it, and then she handed them the keys.
Millions of Americans have made the drive to Rochester with someone they love in the passenger seat. Almost none of them know that the whole thing started with a 54-year-old woman standing in tornado wreckage, refusing to accept a no.
Pc: Dutch Valkema.
My father in law got the best treatment for colon cancer at the Mayo Clinic. Amazing hospital.
Kimberly K. B. retweeted
Literally how I try to police. 1 Timothy 5. Love this. If you are in law enforcement or any service profession, this is the way. It works.
Now I must have one!
They all just pass out! It's music!
instagram.com/reel/DcOkaT9Di…
