Launching the Journey: Orange City IA

etMOOC has finished, but it has started me. I went back to my opening post introducing myself to the group using PhotoPeach. I decided to retrace that introduction but in more depth, building upon some of the other posts that followed. So the story begins on an Orange City IA farm. I discovered QuikMaps, which is an easy interface in generating Google Maps.


I also discovered a wonderful video on YouTube about Anamosa, Iowa, which I have edited for smaller clips that capture my world growing up on a small farm.

I remember too well the dusty, itchy, bouncing baling of hay in the fields and the milking of cows who swung their tails through the dirty gutters into my face as I hoisted the milkers onto the straps.

This clip rather accurately captures my recollection of my assigned chores in the care of beef cattle, pigs, poultry and sheep.

I remember accompanying my father to livestock sales that were critical markets for the family income.

Many thanks to Michael Ten Haken for his YouTube capture of the annual Orange City Tulip Festival where local  residents conduct dances and walk the streets with rough replicas of market carts from decades ago in the Netherlands.

All of the above is important only as a background to the following posts about my sojourn to sub-Saharan Africa.