there's a small group of us in "chodee without borders" (sort of like "brotherhood without borders") and we've been busy lately planning our activities. most of us live in the same county but it's hard to get together so most of communication and collaboration is via cyberspace. yesterday we had a converence call that went well and today we attending a meeting to ask for some help from others and that went well too. i am not sure really how to talk about this group, and i will blog about it much more later, but i don't want to accidentally step on someone's toes and jeopardize our mission at large that we want to achieve. each of us are okinawan-descent, whether it's we who immigrated or our parents, mostly i think we are all 2nd generation. we are trying to help those abroad in latin america who are also okinawan-descent. (so 'without borders' is that we can share our brotherhood no matter where we are living because we have the same common denominator.) those people are 3rd and 4th generation and their okinawan identity was recently re-awakened and they are trying to form together to learn their roots, the culture they came from, the history, and so forth. so in a way we are both teachers and ambassadors of our shared culture. it's a very large task that we have volunteered for. perhaps this is not the best word and vocabulary is escaping me right now. anyway, we are having to deal with the cultural differences of where we came from and where we all live now. plus the language barriers. overall, i think things are going well and we are all getting excited.