Happy Holidays and See You Next Year!

Happy Holidays, Friends.

I hope that you have a warm, safe, and joyous holiday. This week is the last time we will officially see each other until next year (that joke never gets old for me; not since second grade when I first heard it!).

Be sure to get out and enjoy the beautiful lights on these cold evenings like our Conversation class did on Wednesday evening. Take at drive to 4830 Greenspire Drive, Carmel and tune your radio to 90.7 and watch the light show! Check out the Japanese park, the gazebo and the fountain at Carmel's City Hall, One Civic Square, Carmel. There are many other beautiful places to see the Christmas lights. I hope that you take a drive and see the show!

Medical Professional Week:
A very big thanks to all the medical professionals that met with us to talk about health care in the United States and other countries. Dr Heather Schumman (family practice), Dr. Motoko Kataoka (dentistry/endodontist), Dr. Gonz Chua (general medicine and more!), Masami Yamamoto (pharmacist), Dr. Felicia (Fang Ling) Chang (opthamologist), Alan Wang (surgical), Joette Morris (OB GYN neonatal).Carla van Eyk (public health), and Melanie Guzzi (nurse who developed our handouts).

Top advice:

• Write down your questions; write down the answers to your questions.
• Present your written questions to the healthcare provider; you can even give them to the nurse during the prescreening so the doctor can see them before seeing you.
• Interpreters are available by phone at most medical facilities. You can request the doctor to call one and you can use the translator via phone conversation to help you.
• Talking to your healthcare providers is intimidating no matter what your language (even if it is English).
• Take a friend to help you with asking questions and listening to answers.
• Expired medicines should be disposed of even if it hasn't been opened; the chemicals change and are not effective and can be dangerous.
• Cranberry juice is great for urinary symptoms; you will still need antibiotics.
• Antibiotics must be taken the way they are directed. Take the full amount for the full time.
• If you forget to take a dose of medicine, take it as soon as you remember. If it is close to the next dose, then wait and take it then to stay on schedule.
• Common over the counter drugs with their product and ingredient name: Advil=ibuprofen; Tylenol=acetaminophen; Mucinex and Robitussin=guaifenesin. Choose drugs with only one ingredient. Check prescription medicines and do not overdose with over the counter medicines. Check over the counter medicines to make sure you aren't overdosing.

We enjoyed our holiday party at my house. It was so nice to get together and sing traditional Christmas carols and exchange white elephant gifts. If we didn't win a good elephant, we have our white elephant for next year!

We read the story of Jesus' birth (Luke 2:1-21, and Matthew 2: 1-12) that includes the figures in the nativity. We talked about the meaning of this story for all of us and for each of us at International Bible Study on December 16. While this was the first time for a few of us to hear and read this story, we found that the story is new to us every time we read it. After a year of living, we find that our lives are renewed by the astonishing story of a God who loves this world to come as a tiny baby to be familiar to us and to love us so that we can living relationship with Him. We are the reason for this amazing story.

We will resume classes and meetings the first full week in January beginning with our International Friends Meetings on January 6, 2015 with Bible Study at 9:00. Masami will bring her Mochi Maker and we will enjoy fresh Mochi and talk about our holiday experiences beginning at 10:30.

I hope that you have peace and joy this holiday and look forward to seeing you again next year.

Carolyn

Cookies, Nativities, and looking forward to our Health Care visitors

Hello, Friends.

Friday was a dreary December day! A great day to be baking cookies and addressing cards and preparing for the holidays. What are your plans? Are you going out of town? Don't forget to stop your mail! If you are leaving town, don't turn off your furnace. You can turn it down to a lower temperature, but if you turn it off, and the weather should turn, your pipes can freeze and burst causing your house to flood while your are gone. What a mess!

Since we are rolling into flu season, we will be having medical professional guests at our meetings and classes December 9 and 11. Bring your questions for advice for talking to you healthcare professionals and learn more about how to communicate about your health needs no matter what the country!

Carolyn

Tuesday's International Bible Study read John 5:16-30. Jesus is being persecuted (for healing on the Sabbath) by the Jewish leaders: this was mainly for his teaching and popularity among the people, but the Jewish leaders were afraid of Him. He made them look foolish and uneducated with His teaching. This is a wonderful lesson: Jesus teaches that God, His Father is always at work and ... [Jesus] too is working on our behalf (John 5:17). This is a comfort to us. Jesus goes on to explain how He knows what to do and what His work is. He tells the Jewish religious leaders to honor Him, just as they honor the Father...and warns that God has given Jesus the responsibility to judge us (a good reason to respect someone!) and that that judgment can lead to a death penalty, but Jesus assures us (and them) that if we believe what He says about God (that He is always at work on our behalf  because He loves us as as His children) and about Himself (that He is God's Son who has come to save us and give us life), then we have a good relationship with Jesus and with God. He is reliable!

We made traditional cookies at International Friends. We made gingerbread, sugar and shortbread and decorated them. We practiced having a cookie walk (not really!). I ended up with a lot of gingerbread...this is a good thing: I love it! I was told that they weren't to Asian taste. I also brought persimmon pudding to taste to our meeting. I misquoted the review for this: it was the same recipe that was in one reviewer's family for 130 years (not 300!). This is a very traditional Indiana style recipe. I hope that you have a chance to try it with your family.

Conversation on Wednesday, I brought the game of Jacks and we all tried this old fashioned game. The style that I have is difficult to find in the United States, because the jacks are small and metal and may be a dangerous hazard to very small children. We also made some traditional Indian cookies:
Nankhatai. We decided that these cookies are the same as the Japanese cookies Snowballs! I wonder where these cookies originated?

After classes on Thursday we painted our Nativities. Our pictures are posted as a private group on Facebook. To see this page, you need to be my "friend". Please "friend" me and let me know you want to be added to this group.

dreary: drab, uninteresting, boring
dreary December day: multiple words in a row in a sentence that begin with the same sound are called an alliteration. Alliterations call attention to what is being said and creates a musical effect, they make information easier to remember. When people choose a name or marketing people
weather should turn: the weather changes
[Jesus}: when reading and there are brackets [] around a word; it means that the writer is inserting a word to better explain what is being said when repeating a quote
persecuted: to annoy, trouble or harass someone
behalf: in the interest of someone, to speak for and support someone else
death penalty: put to death by law because of a behavior
taste: in this case the word taste is used to mean whether someone likes the way something tastes or
misquoted: repeated a fact or something that someone had said incorrectly
originated: started; where something began