Last week, a friend (whom I promised not to name) made a deal with me. The person would go have a medical test done that had been put off for a while – if I wrote a blog post. It was specified that I was to write a good blog post. Well, it’s certainly going to be a blog post, but I don’t know how “good” it will be. ;o)

I know that my long pauses between posts must make it seem as if I’d quit blogging … but I haven’t. In previous posts, I’ve commented that when “situations” are current, I find it difficult to blog. It’s far easier for me to write about things that happened a long time ago, and which have known outcomes. I guess it’s all part of how close you’re willing to let people come when you’re actually experiencing the situation.

Those of you who’ve been reading this blog know what happened at this time last year: my oldest son went missing, my computer died, we were burglarized twice within two weeks, I was in the hospital for almost a week due to some nasty gut problem, and my identity was stolen. That’s it in a nutshell, but nowhere near the entire scenario.

Last fall’s unpleasant events didn’t stop with the new year. Like the proverbial snowball, the issues just kept getting bigger, and picking up momentum as they rolled along. I began to write about things as they stand on several occasions, but it was always with the thought that things would eventually settle down, and that I’d be able to see at least some of the ongoing issues come to some sort of conclusion. That hasn’t happened. I find it really challenging to write about things that are ongoing … because it’s sometimes too hard to write objectively about something that you’re living every day. I didn’t want to write about what was going on, but I also couldn’t focus on casual posts while I was mired down … so I waited.

My friend maneuvering me into this position has made me do a lot of thinking. and I’ve decided that I should at least try to start writing about some of the ongoing situations. I figure that if you already know about what’s going on, there won’t be a reason for me to keep to myself and not blog, right? I will write about one of the most difficult issues in my life … if I can get that written out, then who knows what will come next … *cringe*

Okay – here goes …

Whenever I’ve blogged, I’ve been very careful about what photos you see of my home. The reason for that is that my home was here before the US became a nation, before Maine separated from Massachusetts, and before the Berwicks separated from Kittery. It’s ooooold! At one time, it was in the center of town, right near the corner church, almost directly on the main crossway. In the time since Berwick was settled, it’s gone through a lot of changes. The center of town moved three miles southwest, and became a quaint little village on the shore of the Salmon Falls river … and the old center eventually became a collection of farms, mostly dairies. This house was no exception. Doug milked cows twice daily when I met him … and he did it every single day of the year. This city girl learned a lot about farming. While I loved being in the country, being part of a working farm is another story completely. Culture shock hardly begins to describe it …

The first years here were a challenge. My father-in-law was born in 1914, in what became Doug’s and my bedroom. When I moved in with my three children – and one soon to come – I was shocked to see that the house was stock full of someone else’s belongings. Since we were only supposed to be there temporarily (until we built our own house somewhere on Doug’s parents’ vast expanse of fields and forest) I was asked to not bother the stuff that didn’t belong to us. All but three of the rooms, not counting the bathroom, were full of stuff … some all the way to the ceiling. Every cupboard, every closet (both of them), every little nook and cranny, had the abandoned belongings of people who died long before I married Doug. As the years went by, and it became apparent that we were not going to be leaving the farm any time in the foreseeable future, I got permission to open up the rooms in the rest of the house; our family of six needed room to finally be able to settle in. We put loads and loads of old furniture, knickknacks, cooking utensils, a foot powered Singer, dishes, rugs … on and on … into the attic, and slowly, over a number of years, we got control of the entire house.

Well, control might be too strong of a word, and might leave you with a false impression. It’s never been a comfortable place, my adult kids swear it’s haunted, and the disasters we’ve had in here, mostly due to the age of the house, and the poor repair it was in, are more than enough for several lifetimes. We were treated to everything from burst pipes (almost yearly), to rats falling through the ceiling on to my face in the dead of night (at least 4 times) … to parts of the house slowly caving in … ad nauseam … it was an absolute nightmare.

Twenty-nine years later … we’re still here.

I won’t go into a lot of detail about the house itself, except to say that I never tell local people where I live. Just imagine a house that’s well over 300 years old, which has had almost no maintenance in about 50 years, and you might begin to get the right impression …

Heating this 10 room monster is practically impossible. About 15 years ago, I translated a book from French into English for a Canadian company, and with the money I made, we bought a new furnace. The old one was a menace … it would make loud, rumbling “BOOMS”, covering everything in the house with soot with each new blast. The new one ran a lot quieter, and also kept us a little bit warmer … with the accent on “little”.

The problem with this old house is that when you heat, you’re heating the outside. This house is so leaky that it’s hard to keep a candle lit. The new furnace did it’s best, but we were still very cold in here. Snow that came in through the cracks didn’t melt on the floor. I thought it was a terrible thing ….

… until 4 years ago. Our oil furnace was costing us over four hundred dollars for three weeks’ worth of oil. There was no way that we could continue to fork over that kind of money. Four years ago at about Christmas time, we shut down the furnace, and it’s been turned off ever since. The first year without the furnace, we had 1 kerosene space heater. The only way to get warm was to get right up against it – and burn on one side while freezing on the other. The second year, my friend Joanie gave us another kerosene heater, and that year we had two of them going. They didn’t do much overall, but we could go stand in front of them to warm up. Last year, we discovered that the reason Doug was so sick every winter was because of the fumes being given off by the kerosene heaters. We turned them off permanently.

About then, my oldest son acquired a wood stove from a friend who was getting rid of his, and with a lot of shifting things around, he installed it in the kitchen. It’s nowhere near adequate, even for just the downstairs, but when someone actually gets it going, the kitchen becomes quite warm, so we have one room we can take refuge in. The wood stove also has a lot of downsides: it frequently won’t get going, needs constant attention, is messy as the dickens, etc., but it’s much better than nothing at all.

We’re going into our fourth winter of not having central heat. The bathroom is often in the 40’s as a high … (try to take a shower in that!) … and sometimes it’s too cold to stick my hands out from under the covers to type.

But … there’s light at the end of the tunnel, after 29 years …

My oldest son is slowly, but surely, converting the old cow barn into a home. Once it’s done, it will be a dream house … and best of all … it will be warm! We have to laugh whenever we realize that moving into the barn is going to be a step up for us!

This is not the entire story, but it is a start. To not give anyone eyestrain, I will stop at this point, and share some pertinent photos. As the barn turns into a house, I would like to share the transformation with you. Now that you know that I live in the Munsters’ mansion, I no longer have a reason to be careful to not mention it.

So – there’s at least one reason that will never again prevent me from blogging …

This afternoon, I found two emails in my inbox … one right next to the other. One came in at 2:33 PM – that one was from Pattie, the Domesticator. The second one came 3 minutes later, and it was from Vijay.

Both of them were comments that were forwarded to me from the blog.

Pattie’s comment:

Ok….it’s been a month since my last comment….A Month!

Are you coming back? I miss you *sniff*

And Vijay’s:

A little more than a month since my last comment.

Anyone see a parallel here? Maybe a theme, even? I bet they discussed this on the sly before posting, eh? I mean, DUDE! Three minutes apart, even! If it were a baby, it would have been born seconds later! ;o)

Seriously though … I apologize to everyone for being gone so long. In the past, I’ve written some starkly honest posts, but the really intense posts, full of raw honesty, dealt with things that happened many years ago. Time had dulled the edge of the associated ouch, and I could write about the horrible events of the past from the perspective of someone who’s seen how the story ends, and has gone over it so often that the area is largely numb. I could use my past as a tool to perhaps free someone else in the present, because it was a course I’d already graduated from.

However, the position I find myself in right now is not quite as cut and dry, and I’m not at all removed from the situation by the anesthetizing ministrations of time. Worse still – I have no idea how it all ends.

Being that I’m not as brave as a certain Australian doc we all know and love, I haven’t got any real revelations to share. I will just say that the events of last fall, which piled up on top of some rather difficult ongoing circumstances, followed me like a pack of pertinacious black hounds into a long, dark, cold, and paralyzing winter. You would seriously not have wanted to read anything I’d written over the winter, believe me.

The gentle, but vibrant, hues of summer, and the sun’s healing warmth, are bringing me back to life a bit again. It’s like taking a long drink of cold fresh water after crossing a seemingly endless desert. As affective as the summer is, however, I know that it’s only a partial (and temporary) reprieve from some very serious and ongoing situations. Blogging with any regularity would be very difficult for me right now. Please continue to be patient with me – I don’t intend to be gone forever.

Thank you all for your concern. It’s been a shelter from the cold for me, even when I couldn’t reply.

Next week I have finals in my current course, and the week after that is one of the two free weeks the school gives us every year. If possible, I will take a bit of that time to do some patient blogging.

It’s been over a year since I’ve added a chapter to the Emanon’s Journey blog. It’s been a very difficult story for me to relate, up until now. In my daily life, the events which happened to “Emanon” are very far behind me, out of mind, and a world apart from my current reality. Writing about those days means reliving them – tearing myself out of where I am now, and dropping myself into a place that is sometimes painful beyond telling.

Putting myself into the right frame of mind has to be possible for me at the time, or I simply can’t write about it all. Hence – the long pause between chapters.

The chapter that comes after this one will make a transition from the earlier Georgia/”running and hiding” days, to when I met Doug, my husband. It should be a considerably easier chapter to write, and should not take me nearly as long to complete.

Those of you who haven’t read anything over on Emanon’s Journey yet, please don’t begin with this newest chapter. Try to begin at the beginning, which explains what the blog is all about, or at least begin with the “story” itself: “Such a Rainy Night in Georgia – Part 1.” That will give you more of an idea of what the blog is all about. Jumping into this latest post cold and unprepared … will just make it hard for you to understand what’s going on.

Years ago, I began to write an autobiography, knowing that if I could set things down the way they all happened – the abuse, the kidnapping, etc., that I would make a fortune if I could get the completed telling into the right hands. In less than a week, I abandoned the project. It was too painful, too difficult to relive. The immensely abbreviated version on the Emanon blog is difficult enough in the telling, although decades have passed since my first effort, and the events seem almost unreal – like someone else’s memories – when I think of them. Writing about them in detail, however, is another story, and unfolding those details as would be necessary in a book – is impossible for me.

And so – here I am, stretching my boundaries. Much of this is stuff that my closest friends don’t have the details of. How much easier it is to share the most painful, devastating details which a person’s memories harbor when doing so through the written word – especially when launching that word onto a large, nameless, faceless sea … than it is to sit in front of one quiet,attentive listener. There can be an amazing amount of anonymity and privacy in such a public medium.

Please forgive me … I didn’t mean to cause speculation and worry …

I’m not gone …

A bit of what’s going on: my son and his wife just moved home the day before yesterday … yesterday I put most of the day into preparing for a final I have to take today … also yesterday, my mother-in-law was admitted to the hospital back at home for CHF, and once I finish my final I’m going to have to drive down to Dover to check on her … and I’m printing out and preparing my material for a new course that begins tomorrow.

And yes, there are other things going on too. I won’t pretend that the business with TNT has had less of an impact than it has. I’ll be more forthcoming in a later post … I’m afraid I’m going to have to settle myself a bit first, though.

For TNT … and for all of you, because you’ve all been involved, and I believe that you all deserve to know how things went down: the gig was up when TNT’s “friend” contacted me anonymously with information, begging me to not say anything to TNT, and telling me that TNT is, indeed, an 18 year old girl. No … it wasn’t because of what this “friend” said, because I don’t pay attention to anonymous commenters or emailers … it was because the IP address came from the same IP address as TNT … exactly. It’s either from the same private network, or perhaps even from the same computer. I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that several parties in this drama have been the same person from the outset, although I can’t be certain of that.

My hope for TNT … Erin, or Jessica, or whatever her name may be … is that she take that desperate need for love and attention, and find someplace to put it where she will be accepted for who she really is. She’s a brilliant young lady, and needs to channel her talents and energies into something constructive – perhaps even into medicine, since she did such a good job pretending to be one.

As a community, we need to learn from this. First of all, trust and love are never wasted, even when the trust is misplaced. I don’t mean that you should open your wallets to the next Nigerian scam … or agree to meet with an anonymouse in a dark alley after midnight for a cup a tea … what I do mean is that, even if the person you’re responding to with care and love is misrepresenting him or herself, the love is still not wasted. There’s a needy human being at the other end. We all misrepresent ourselves, even when we use our real names – perhaps it’s in something as simple as being silent when we want to speak, or saying something is “OK” when it really isn’t – but at one time or another, we all “go” there. We should still, after all of this, be able to reach out to each other in a love which is tempered by the understanding that we may not always know exactly who it is we’re loving … but that it shouldn’t matter anyway.

Secondly … when I read someone else’s blog, I have no idea if they’re who they say they are, or are doing what they say they’re doing. Very few people have any idea if I’m who I say I am … for all any of you know, I could be, as Dr. Flea speculated before we met, a big hairy biker with tattoos and chains. In order to gain something from blogging, and from belonging to a blog community, we have to suspend disbelief, and ingest the blogs and their posts with a spirit of adventure, and a willingness to expand ourselves. Each thought we absorb which we’ve never considered before is our gain – even if we later reject it. Nothing is wasted, unless we close ourselves off from each other – and then, really, blogging becomes a pointless treadmill exercise.

Now, on a personal note … my inbox is stuffed with over a hundred unanswered emails, and I want everyone to know that I’m really touched by your care and concern. I’m not sure how I’m going to get all of those emails answered … or how long it will take once I begin to do it, since I’m going to be very busy for the next couple of days with finals, a new course, and my dear mother-in-law, whom I love to distraction, sick in the hospital. I just wanted everyone to know that I’ve seen the comments, read the emails – and that some of you touched me deeply enough to help me through a box of tissues over the last couple of days. Thank you. From the bottom of my heart, thank you.

Every morning, I get between 150 and 250 emails as soon as I run my email client. For the last month, when I go in to do my daily spam-delete at the end of the day, there have been between 481 (on July 2,) and 1453 (on July 16.) My filters are pretty good, and catch quite a few of the spams, but I still end up with about 50 or so in my inbox that I have to actually look at, and sort through. I’m sure I’ve lost some valid emails, because over the course of a day, I have to sort through so many that sometimes I know I’m not really seeing what’s there.

This morning, I was starting to “fuzz out” as I kept hitting my Thunderbird email client’s “spam” icon, over and over, getting rid of the emails my filters had missed. One email didn’t look like the others … and my finger paused for a moment just above the little red trash can that would have marked the email as just another piece of “spam.” I glanced at the email, fully expecting it to be a Nigerian Scam, which always comes in looking like a private email. It took me about 2 seconds to rule that one out … it had none of the telltale marks. I looked over the rest of the email … one link, lots of clear, carefully written text, no attachments … and interestingly, a few Chinese characters. Although I do receive Chinese spam (yes, I really do! It’s from leaving comments on a Chinese friend’s blog) … this obviously wasn’t typical.

I started to read a few words at random … crematorium … torture … organ trade … whoa!

I started at the top … and was horrified by what I was reading. On clicking the link, I was taken to a news site called “The Epoch Times” … and realized that the email I’d received was a text cut and paste of that article. I have no idea who sent it to me. I’m going to cut and paste the article into this post … and let all of you judge the veracity of its contents. I fully expect to end up on China’s internet ban list, and if so, I’ll miss Ingrid and my other Chinese blog friends, but if there’s any truth to this stuff, bringing it out into full daylight is the right thing to do.

Original article can be found here.

A reporter from China who worked for a Japanese television news agency and specialized in Chinese news recently escaped to the United States after being wanted in China for reporting on controversial issues. (The Epoch Times)

[ Warning: graphic photos below ]

Falun Gong Practitioners a Cheap Source of Black Market Organs

In recent years, international organ buying and selling markets have had extreme shortages. As the world’s most populous country with the death penalty, China is beginning to use lethal injections so the executed person’s organs cannot be given to hospitals for organ transplants.

Since China’s illegal organ trade business has been internationally exposed, the United States Congress has held numerous hearings. The international society has requested that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) follow the “use of the dead or executed persons’ organs” statute announced in 1990. The statute stipulates that a criminal’s organs only be obtained if the person or his or her relatives gave permission, or if the corpse is unclaimed.

Due to fewer channels for obtaining human organs, the prices of organs have been high for long periods of time. Since the CCP has ordered the 6-10 Office, a branch specially established to persecute Falun Gong practitioners, to “kill Falun Gong practitioners and call it suicide” and “to ruin their reputation, bankrupt them financially, and destroy them physically,” the organs of Falun Gong practitioners who have been tortured to death have become a source of cheap merchandise for this black market.

Doctors and Merchants Involved were Deceived

An insider told The Epoch Times that the doctors and merchants involved in the purchases of Falun Gong practitioners’ organs were told that the organs were from Falun Gong practitioners who “developed insanity from the practice and died” or “became evil after practicing and murdered other people, and therefore were sentenced to death and shot by the authorities.” Therefore, the involved parties never found a problem with it nor did they have any moral criticisms about it. Since Sujiatun Concentration Camp sells the organs at cheap prices, international organ buying and selling representatives try to find ways to contact and make deals with Sujiatun. Overseas Chinese also contact relatives in Shenyang City in hopes of buying a cheap kidney from Sujiatun Camp.

Some private hospital and health systems workers know that it is possible to buy organs of Falun Gong practitioners from Sujiatun Concentration Camp, where the human organs have no traces of lethal injections. An eyewitness claimed that locals of Sujiatun District regard it [the organ buying] as taboo and are very cautious. The average person there would not even raise the matter.

The Stone Crematorium Often Emits White Smoke

Sujiatun Concentration Camp is in a hidden place, surrounded by many trees. One eyewitness said, “Now, some roads are blocked in Shenyang City and vehicles are not allowed to pass. There are obstructions on the roads similar to those on the road to Sujiatun. The average car has no way to get close to the camp. In order to avoid suspicion and trouble, we rode in a truck that transported coal to get closer to the concentration camp. We saw the camp crematorium emitting white smoke. No one was around the area and the atmosphere was very scary. A local told me that every time they pass by, they always see smoke emitting from the crematorium.”

Prisoners’ Corpses Immediately Cremated after Organ Removal

In the past, international media exposed the secret theft of human organs in China to the international society. The law-violating Public Security Bureau, judges and doctors colluded to steal organs from the dead for transplants and large profits.

The organs of some Falun Gong practitioners who were tortured to death were excised. Mysterious holes in blood vessels and cuts on the remains have attracted serious attention. The photo is of Falun Gong practitioner Liu Yufeng, who was beaten to death. (www.clearwisdom.net)

The Chinese criminals are often not permitted to contact their family so no one will go to claim the body after the execution. This way, the organs can be removed and the corpse quickly cremated. The CCP requests medical personnel involved to secretly perform the operations, and their operation vehicles cannot have any hospital logos. The doctors are also forbidden to wear their operating clothes on the execution grounds. In addition, the security guards monitor their organ removal surgeries and then cremate the body immediately after.

Sujiatun Camp is Very Crowded, but Its Population Kept Secret

Currently, Shenyang has many corpse factories and private hospitals purchasing human organs for resale on the international market. The Sujiatun concentration camp has shifted more than 6,000 Falun Gong practitioners and gathered some doctors for the organ removal surgery. In order to eliminate potential evidence, the bodies are cremated.

A person who worked at the concentration camp said the workload is ever-increasing. The authorities are continually transferring Falun Gong practitioners there and the jail is crowded and full beyond imagination. It is clearly a place a person cannot live in or withstand to see.

China currently has the largest organ trade of any country.

Wang Bin, a 44-year old Falun Gong practitioner from Heilongjiang Province was mercilessly beaten to death by policemen Feng Xi and others at Daqing Men’s Labor Camp on September 24, 2000. Afterwards, his heart and brain were removed, and the remains were placed in the morgue of Daqing People’s Hospital. The photo is of Wang Bin’s scarred body. (www.clearwisdom.net)

Dead Falun Gong Practitioners’ Organs “Missing”

During the middle of last June, according to a report provided by practitioners of Falun Gong, organs of Falun Gong practitioners who were tortured to death during their imprisonment were stolen for transplant.

According to a related people’s investigation, blood holes and knife scars were found on some Falun Gong practitioners’ bodies that were tortured to death. Some were autopsied without their family members’ permission and some victims’ organs were excised. Informants revealed that doctors of the Drug Rehabilitation Centre in Baiyun District, Guangzhou City openly “directed” thugs who torture Falun Gong practitioners, “Don’t beat them [at the] waist, the kidneys can be used.”

On February 16, 2001, Ren Pengwu (male, 33 years old), Falun Gong practitioner in Harbin, was arrested for sending materials exposing inconsistencies of the self-immolation case. He was imprisoned at the Second Detention Center in Hulan County, Heilongjiang Province. After five days, on the morning of February 21, he died. Without his family members’ agreement, under the guise of legal appraisal, the police excised all Ren Pengwu’s body organs, from gullet to genitals, and then illegally cremated the body.

Yang Ruiyu, female, was originally an employee of Taijiang District Property Management Bureau in Fuzhou City. On July 19, 2001, she was abducted from her work place by public security staff. She died three days later due to abuse while in custody. The body was sent under police escort all the way to a crematorium. Yang Ruiyu’s husband and daughter were not allowed to approach the body. According to witnesses, there was a hollow hole about the size of a fist on Yang Ruiyu’s body.

The Falun Gong Clearwisdom website has urgently made a call to the international community to pay close attention to the case of Chinese Falun Gong practitioners’ organs being stolen. It also called on relatives of victims and people committed to justice to keep records of all evidence of individuals and organizations involved in the crime for the purpose of future lawsuits.

Related Articles:
Worse Than Any Nightmare—Journalist Quits China to Expose Concentration Camp Horrors and Bird Flu Coverup
Secret Chinese Concentration Camp Revealed
Tell the World about Sujiatun