Merry Christmas 2000 and may your New Year be filled with blessings.

This year has not been as indecisively Gushing or Boring as the election end runs and screen passes, but it has had both my sister and I traveling to vote rich places. Marlene and her friend Marsha, who runs the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, flew to China to do a boat tour down the Yangtze River before the world’s largest Three River Gorges damn floods a huge valley. Five hundred million people live in the river basin so the few remaining Baiji Yangtze River dolphin, including the one in captivity, are being crowded out. (For those of you who know my dolphin affair – you can guess my feelings.) Good story at: www.discover.com/area/exploration/threegorges/

Marlene was amazed at the number of people, their politeness, their pay scale of $1.00 per day, the rudeness of some Americans who felt entitled to demand more from these hard working people. She also learned first hand how China dealt with a government official who stole money. Chop-offa his head.

Earlier this year I went to visit buddy Dick Shenk and his Private Eye roomie in Barios San Jose, Costa Rica. They love the “perda vida” and the women seem to love these affable gringos – even when PI Magnum uses his crudest down and dirty cop talk to tell them to move on. Of course, they hang around because sometimes they don’t understand his gringoese and the rest of the time they think he’s funny – as do the women, who also hang around a lot. Dick tells me Costa Rica has the highest per capital traffic fatalities in the world. He almost let me add to that number when I became the designated driver back through unlined jungle mountain roads during a dead of night monsoon with truckers and suicide drivers wanting to pass. It didn’t seem to matter to them that cliffs ringed one side of the narrow winding road while overgrown mountain trenches lay hiding on the other.

July and August put me on a real trip. I spent several weeks doing what I had wanted to do for years when I did a Global Village Habitat for Humanity home building project in Polonnaruwa, Sri Lanka. The villagers we worked with were wonderful and helping turn their leaky, little mud hut into a simple red brick house was only a token of what those beautiful people deserve.

After the A team (in front of Jananandana family’s house) went home, I went on to India to see if any of my Peace Corps work of decades ago remained. One of my pleasant surprises was to sit in the orphanage office of Fr. Nelson II, which in my previous India life I sometimes shared with Fr. Nelson I, and hear the words come from the door behind me. “Sir, sir. It is you. It is Sir Dwayne. I recognize you.” Hubert, and Albert who we met a few minutes later, were two of the kids whose heads I once rubbed, were now running the boys program. When I was working with the boys, there were about 70 sleeping on the floors of the newish three stories. The Pope had adopted the school and just started to purchase beds. Today there were beds for over 270 boys and overhead fans had just been put in. And I swear the boys at the orphanage, as well as in the Worli Chawls where I lived in the first part of my India PC soujourn, were the same kids’ faces, but seemingly better fed.

For more on these trips and other stuff go to http://www.dwayne_hunn.tripod.com/

I use my Excel earning to help fund my non-profit ventures so please consider checking Excel’s phone, cell phone, internet, pager, etc., for your telecommunications services at http://www.myexcel.com/ or call me.

Hope you and yours are blessed this year. Dwayne