![[SFL logo]](http://www.sfl.org/sfllogo2.jpg)
News and Information about the People and Programs of SFL International
Skiing. Sharing. LearningThe mission of Ski for Light is to enhance the quality of life and independence of visually or mobility-impaired adults through a program of cross country skiing.
Hello SFL Community,
I hope that everyone is enjoying a safe and active summer. Those warm weather activities such as biking, hiking, swimming, and all the others, certainly help keep us fit and primed for making the most of the skiing and other activities of a Ski for Light International or Regional Event. In fact, I have grown to appreciate the motivation that I get to exercise in the heat and humidity of Georgia summers because I know that such exercise will allow me to spend more time on the snow when SFL comes around.
Since our last Bulletin, a great deal of work has been going on to keep SFL moving forward. Under the leadership of co-chairs Doug Boose and Judy Dixon, plans are in high gear for our return to Shanty Creek Resorts near Bellaire, Michigan for the 2016 Ski for Light International Week. There is one major change in the schedule for 2016. The traditional Sunday to Sunday seven-day SFL week has been shortened to a Sunday to Saturday six-day event for 2016. The dates are Sunday, January 24 through Saturday, January 30, 2016. The idea for a shortened event was briefly discussed during the 2015 Annual Board meeting as a way to modify the event and reduce the total cost. The idea gained additional support when the Nordic Director at Shanty Creek Resorts recommended that we hold our race and rally on Friday, rather than Saturday, because trail congestion on weekends makes it unwise and unsafe to attempt to hold our events. This is a one year experiment as a test of whether or not a shorter event week, with the corresponding lower cost for the week, would be preferable for most attendees. More information about the 2016 International Week is provided by Doug and Judy later in this bulletin. Be sure to visit www.sfl.org for additional information. The 2016 applications are on target to be posted online in August, and we will certainly send out an alert when that happens.
As I work with members of the Executive Committee, Board of Directors, and other Committee members, I am constantly reminded of the year-round work that so many do for SFL. Here are two brief examples.
Brenda Seeger just closed the books on the 2015 fiscal year and completed her first full year as our Treasurer. As a volunteer, Brenda functions as the Chief Financial Officer of this corporation. With input from our Budget and Finance Committee, Brenda manages the hundreds of details of an annual budget of approximately $300,000. Thank You Brenda and special thanks to past Treasurer Doug Boose for always being available to answer questions.
Larry Showalter and Bob Civiak have provided outstanding leadership and many hours of research in leading us through the process of selecting a professional manager for our endowment portfolio. The process of developing a request for proposals, screening potential managers, developing an investment policy statement unique to our needs, and making a final selection stretched over five months and required many hours of work from Bob and Larry. The Budget and Finance Committee also benefited from the guidance and experience of Eivind Heiberg. By the time you receive this bulletin, our endowment portfolio, with a value of approximately $380,000, will be managed by BTC Capital Management.
The fact that our portfolio has grown to the point that it is prudent to have professional management is a significant step for this organization. Much of the growth in the principal of our portfolio occurred under the leadership of past president Marion Elmquist and long time SFL participant Suzanne Brown as chair of our Endowment Fund Committee. In recent years we have also benefited from investment guidance from volunteer and former SFL guide Kate Scott. The annual withdrawal from the endowment fund now provides approximately $20,000 for our operating budget.
In the spring financial appeal letter, I asked for contributions to help defray some unanticipated costs of the 2015 event. Your generous response to this request was extremely gratifying and made this one of our most successful appeals. Thanks to all for your gifts and commitment to this organization.
Wishing everyone a safe and enjoyable summer and be sure to get your application in for SFL 2016.
I look forward to our 2016 Ski for Light event in my home state of Michigan, where we will again be skiing the beautiful lake effect powder snow that Lake Michigan lays down on the trails at the Shanty Creek Resort. I am honored to co-chair this event and to work alongside co-chair Judy Dixon and SFL president Scott McCall.
The trails that we will ski in 2016 will be significantly different and improved from our 2013 trails, and will offer a quality ski experience for everybody. The 5 kilometer course will be gently rolling, providing an enjoyable, welcoming trail for beginners as well as a place for experienced skiers who want to work on their skills so that they can learn to ski more efficiently, perhaps to ski faster, and/or to ski in a more relaxed manner. In other words, this could be a good year to learn to ski more like a Norwegian. The 5-K trail will also present a much more satisfactory ski experience for sit-skiers than in 2013. The 10 kilometer trail will incorporate more hills and will be a bit more challenging.
These changes are due in part to changes at the resort and also due to SFL's desire to offer a different skiing experience. Many found the 2013 trails to be a little too challenging. The resort has changed much of the indoor spaces at the Cedar River Village that we used as a trailhead and lunch facility then. Where we ate lunch and stored skis is now part of the large resort-wide ski rental shop for both downhill and cross-country. Many of the trails that we skied are now dedicated to snowshoeing and fat tire (snow) bikes.
SFL will be using the nearby Schuss Village at Shanty Creek as our trailhead and lunch spot. The terrain south of the Schuss Village trailhead traversed by the resort's 5K Pine Cone Trail is gently rolling and suited to our needs. The 10K will utilize much of the Pine Cone Trail with additional segments providing more hills.
I look forward to visiting and skiing with both old friends and newcomers during the 2016 SFL event at the Shanty Creek Resort.
Once again, we will hold the perennially popular Silent Auction at the 2016 event in Michigan. As always, we will have items donated by our corporate sponsors as well as those from generous event attendees. Popular items range from homemade raspberry jam to backpacks, jackets, and other outdoor items from brand-name manufacturers.
But in recent years, the number of items in the auction has increased while the amount raised has decreased. The increased number of items has meant a significant increase in the time to prepare the auction. This has necessitated a huge effort on the part of the auction volunteers who must process each and every item from writing descriptions to creating an appealing arrangement on each table.
New Gift Guidelines: To help make the auction a better experience for everyone, we are introducing some new guidelines for this year's silent auction:
Be assured that everyone's generosity to the auction is much appreciated, but we must also manage the auction in a way that is sustainable and does not place an unreasonable burden on a few generous volunteers. If you are unsure about the suitability of an item you are considering for donation, please feel free to contact me at Judy@judydixon.net.
We have lost a very special SFL friend. Arne Landvik-Larsen was larger than life. His radiant smile embraced everyone he saw - and he embraced everyone he saw with wonderful and liberally distributed hugs. His warm caring manner was the embodiment of Ski for Light's giving spirit. Everyone recalls those huge hugs. The morning walk to breakfast from our rooms would stop and start as he would ask every woman along the way, "Have you been hugged by a Norwegian today?"
Arne's first Ski for Light was in 1977, early in our organization's 41 years, and he adored being a guide and sharing his love of cross-country skiing. He attended the International Week for more than 25 years, until health issues interfered. He was a member of the SFL Board and was in charge of ski fitting at the beginning of the week. Once he and another New Jersey guide drove a hundred pair of skis cross country to that year's SFL venue. Another year, he awoke early and used his skis to create tracks for us to ski in.
What he loved most about SFL was being available to offer a hand to everyone, on the trails and off. He was the founder of the fictitious (some say), whimsical New Jersey Mafia of which I was a proud card carrying member. The SFL week party began when we all assembled at Newark Airport - ready for fun! Together we established Athletics for Blind Leisure Enthusiasts (ABLE) bringing outdoor activities to the New Jersey-New York area.
What you may not have known about Arne is that he left Norway as a teen, joined the Merchant Marines and later the Air Force. He was extremely proud to be a US citizen, helped to build his church, was married to Daphne for 64 years, had five children and 21 grandchildren/great-grandchildren, and loved flying his six-passenger plane.
Farewell my dear friend Arne - you will be remembered by so many people for your huge hugs and huge heart.
Editor's note: I recently read longtime SFLer Jeff Pagels' wonderful memoir, "Always Climb Higher" and came away exhilarated by the range of his adventures and ambitions, and proud to be a part of the same organization as this Paralympic Gold Medal winner. But I was also curious: what drove this clearly outdoorsy man to do such a bookwormy thing, and how did he go about it? So I asked him. Here's his answer:
After sharing my life as a wheelchair user for more than 25 years and also sharing or observing some incredible adventures, my wife Jane began bugging me to leave a written legacy for the grandkids. It took me a few starts and quits, but I finally started writing an outline of what memories I wanted to record. I read what I could find on writing, took a writing class and followed - or tried to follow - a few key suggestions. One was to write a bit every day (which I did not do well with), another was to put something down on paper even if it made no sense at the time. A third was to talk to other authors which I did. Fellow Ski for Lighter, David Fisichella, who is author of "Seven Tenths" a great book about his adventures sailing with his oceanographer wife Amy, gave me quite a bit of advice. But it was not until I spent many weeks in a nursing/rehab facility following surgery that I really started putting words down on paper. After all, there was not much else to do, I spent hours typing and editing my own work. One advantage was that I have over the years written quite a few "stories" about certain adventures. I dusted those off, refined them, and added those as chapters. After my second tour of duty in a nursing/rehab place, I really had the guts of my book down. But patience was a big part of producing the book: in total, it took about 5 years from the first word to actual publication. I decided to self publish, which was much easier and cheaper than I ever thought it would be. The buzz word for this kind of publishing is "Indie". Nowadays, self- publishing is a very popular way to get your book to market. I used "Createspace" which is part of the Amazon.com Empire. With this program, it is possible to do the entire publishing project at zero cost or you can pay for different items if you want. For example, if you want a professional editor to review the document you can purchase that service. You can also pay for help marketing and for an artist to create cover art (or choose from hundreds of cover options available for no charge). Usually, an editor will charge about one cent per word to edit. I got lucky and found a friend of a friend's friend who took a liking to me and did the edit free of charge. The Createspace process also includes a spot on Amazon.com and the e-reader giant, Kindle, to sell your book. You can set your own price and those companies take a cut of each book sold and deposit your revenue in your bank account usually every 60 days. You can also go to your member dashboard to review charts or graphs of books sold, where sold and what your revenue is. Although its time consuming, selling your book directly to buyers is the most profitable way.
Amazon will print as many books as you want to order at the much-reduced price than what they sell for on their web site. Another distribution outlet I accepted was the Federal Library of Congress "talking book" program which many Ski for Lighters know more about than I do. The book is available in that format free of charge to qualified visually and/or physically disabled readers. I did part with some hard to find cash to have my book "professionally" reviewed. As I said earlier, you can buy whatever publishing service you want. I used Kirkus to do the review. To my dismay, they really did not have much nice to say about "Always Climb Higher"! In hindsight, I should not have spent the money. One drawback of self-publishing is that many bookstores will not carry your book. They feel, and rightly so, threatened by the self-publishing industry. I undertook this project with no grand dreams of becoming a best seller and I do doubt I will write another one. Dave Fisichella told me that he makes enough money in a year to afford a nice meal for his family at a nice restaurant! For me, I hope to clear enough to take my grandkids to McDonalds! It is popular these days to utter the phrase, "It's the journey and not the destination that is important". That is probably true, but part of the destination is remembering the journey.
When I finished this book writing journey I was happy to learn I did have lots of memories to cherish and keep cherishing. As mentioned, "Always Climb Higher" can be obtained as a talking book from the National Library Service's BARD website, as an e-book on Kindle, or as a hard copy at Amazon.com.
You can also get a signed hard copy directly from me by contacting me at JCPagels@att.net.
Editor's note: Veteran SFL guide and sort-of retired educator Joan Holcombe was on her second trip to Nepal as a teacher this spring when a powerful earthquake devastated that country. Joan brought the SFL volunteer spirit straight to the people of the village where she was teaching, ignoring calls for her to leave for the safety and comfort of Home. I asked her to tell us a bit of the story of her time there helping the villagers begin to rebuild. While she did that, in true Joan fashion, she devotes most of her vivid account to the continuing challenges facing the shaken but determined people of the village that she came to know so well.
It was the longest 53 seconds of my life, and will remain with me forever. I was on top of a high, steep ridge, 40 miles east of Kathmandu, Nepal, with my sister and another teacher-colleague from the U.S., when the earth heaved deeply beneath our feet, accompanied by a freight-train roar. April 25 changed life dramatically for so many people in this tiny country.
We three American retired educators had returned one week earlier to the village of Koshidekha, Nepal for our second volunteer stint, where we had planned to teach English and work with faculty on new ways of teaching. Following the earthquake, against all advice from the home front, we decided to remain in the shattered village to help any way we could. We stayed for a full month. There was much to do as the fear and panic gradually moved into survival mode.
Our first order of business was caring for the children. With the school officially closed, we offered to open the doors and provide a safe place and a tiny bit of normalcy. We invited children to join us for informal daily classes while parents faced digging out homes and making their way out of shock. In the afternoons, a few teachers came to the school grounds to share their sad stories with us. When international aid finally began to trickle in after at least ten days, we assisted in distributing food, tents, and clothes, helping the international volunteers and the organizing local leaders. Medical services are normally limited in this village. Following the earthquake, however, our three regional health care assistants (no doctors for many miles around) treated minor injuries and sent out those in dire need to a regional hospital three hours or 50km away. Given the dire state of the roads, we imagine the pain suffered by those who were transported with broken bones and serious injury. Five died in our village as a result of the first quake, and many were injured. Much of their livestock, critical to their livelihood and nutrition, were buried and killed in the collapsing of their homes.
Our village of Koshidekha, like so many, has been essentially reduced to rubble. One hundred percent of the people of our town remain still unable to live in their homes. To add to the trauma, the region endured continual, random aftershocks each day and night, plus a second large earthquake on May 10. Our nerves were edgy and bare. With no electricity throughout the region, limited water supplies hauled from a few of the remaining community wells, carefully rationed food supplies (rice, potatoes, lentils, oil, and salt), we waited and watched for aid to come. We tried to sleep for our first nights under tarp tents with 28 others, cheek to jowl, until we were able to move into an unscathed part of the school grounds. As we walked the hillsides after our school sessions each day, we found all villagers setting up their makeshift tents and starting to salvage tin to build more enduring shelters to hold them through the impending monsoon rains.
Today people are tired and traumatized. Having endured two major earthquakes, over 300 continuing aftershocks, and now, the monsoon rains for the next three months, they must continue their lives as farmers and workers. The people of the villages are facing a long and arduous recovery.
These hard-working villagers, dedicated to the traditional ways of Buddhist and Hindu beliefs, remain subsistence farmers living on terraced, steep hillsides and use the most basic tools, growing whatever food for their families and feed for their animals they can. Mothers carry water home each day from small community wells. Children and older men help the women farm the fields with oxen pulling simple wooden plows. Electricity is always sparse. Toilets are squat-holes in the ground outside homes. The sickle is the main tool; it dices the potatoes and skins the cucumber, trims bamboo, constructs homes, and slaughters the chicken or goat.
Costs for rebuilding are daunting. Most people have no income, savings, or earning power. Many of the men of working age head for Kathmandu or a foreign country to support their families. With few financial resources, no insurance, and a limited work force, there is great difficulty in purchasing and bringing building materials and equipment to the region, clearing debris, and rebuilding.
We three American women went to Nepal under the auspices of two organizations: HealthCare Nepal (HCN), and the Nepal Children's Aid Center of Kathmandu. Both groups help children to stay in school. HealthCare Nepal (501(c)3) gives 98% of its funds to its regular services, providing health care in rural schools and communities, including water collection systems, toilets, and volunteer medical and dental clinics; now it is giving 100% of the donations for earthquake recovery to provide emergency support. Together, these two organizations are working hand in hand with local leaders and villagers to bring food relief drops as well as school texts, clothes, and supplies for all children whose homes were destroyed. They will also rebuild damaged school buildings. Not a penny has been wasted.
This village faces an uncertain future. If you wish to help, please let me know or directly contact HealthCareNepal.org. All contributions are welcomed! If you give my name, all your funds go directly to Koshidekha.
Ski for Light, Inc. is loosely affiliated with nine regional organizations around the United States that share our name. Many of the same people are active in SFL, Inc and in one or more of the regional organizations. Each of the regional groups conducts winter trips and/or weekends in its area, including teaching and guiding visually and mobility impaired adults in cross country skiing. Most, if not all, also train new guides. Several of the regions have other activities for visually impaired and physically disabled people, including snow shoeing and alpine skiing. Some of them have summer activities as well. You do not have to live in a particular region to attend its events. The easiest way to learn about all of the regional activities in one place is to visit the Ski for Light Regional Roundup webpage at www.sfl.org/regional.html. However, we do not always have the most up to date information on our page. Eight of the nine regions have their own websites, a list of which follows.
Puget Sound Regional Ski for Light does not maintain a website, but
you can get the latest information by e-mailing Deng Kong at
DKong@seattlelh.org
In 2015, the Gibney Family Foundation generously provided a grant to SFL Inc. to foster closer relations with the regions and to attract new skiers and guides to our international event. Anyone under the age of 45, who has never attended an SFL International, or who has not attended one in at least five years, may apply for a grant through the regional organization closest to their home. If the region agrees to sponsor them with at least $200, that will be matched by an additional $600 toward the cost of attending the SFL International. Five of those grants remain available to attend the 2016 event at Shanty Creek, Michigan.
Our thanks go to the following companies that have provided products or services to help support Ski for Light. Many of these companies have stood behind us for years - and we're grateful. Be sure to think of our friends when you're gearing up for your next adventure.
JanSport * Acorn * Blue Ridge Chair Works * Camelbak * Clif Bar * Columbia * Cowbells.com * Crazy Creek * Dansko * Darn Tough Socks * Eagle Creek * Fox River Mills * Haiku * Honey Stinger * Hydro Flask * Kavu * Leki * Live Eyewear * Olly Dog * Patagonia * PEET Shoe Dryers * Peppers Polarized Eyewear * Polar Bottle * Powertraveller * Ruffwear * Sierra Designs * SportHill * Tiger Tail Massagers * Toko US
Special thanks to: Fram Lodge #3-564, Sons of Norway
The SFL Bulletin is published three times a year. It is available in
ink-print or via e-mail. If you wish to change
formats, please send your request to: bulletin@sfl.org
The current as well as past issues of the Bulletin are also available online at www.sfl.org/bulletin. In addition to an online edition that may be read in your browser, you will find a downloadable pdf version of the current issue.
For future Bulletins, remember that your contributions and feedback are always most welcome. You may submit articles as e-mail or as a word attachment; if you do not have e-mail, you may send a typed article through the mail. Send all items to:
Peter SlatinThe deadline for the Fall 2015 Bulletin is October 15, 2015. We look forward to hearing from you.
Ski for Light, Inc. is a registered trademark. All rights reserved.