My Delightful Wife, whose voice you often hear at the beginning of these episodes, is super

invested in teaching English to people who are making their way to this country for the

first time. She's part of the Literacy Council here in Rapid City, South Dakota, and she

volunteers a bunch of time. And this year they gave her a special award at the Literacy Council Picnic. It was a clock. It's a clock. This is something like the great job at helping people learn English award or something like that. It really was a pretty big honor. It was a very emotional thing to be there for the whole event and to hear people say wonderful things about a woman,

obviously I think is wonderful. And one of the things that my wife does in the process of that is she

does these conversation classes. And in the conversation classes, she takes a whole bunch of people

from all over planet Earth, different ages and political views and socioeconomic status.

People are here for different reasons. I mean, some of the people in these groups are here because

they have unbelievable amounts of money and they've come here because of the incredible

expertise that they have or their spouse has.

There's a job opportunity here.

Other people here are refugees from war-torn parts of the world.

So there's all kinds of reasons that people would even show up at this class that they have called conversation class.

And she's walking people who have close to zero English through the very

beginning baby steps of learning this new language. These classes are a fascinating picture of the

global community in which we live and I'm so proud of what she does and how she handles these things.

But one of the things, when you get people together from all over the world, you're going to have to

anticipate is that some of them aren't going to like each other because of tensions beyond

their control in the larger world. For example, as I'm recording this, there's been a longstanding war

between Ukraine and Russia. And it's been ugly. And those of us who are outsiders to that,

I don't think we totally understand the tension there. It goes way, way, way, way back. I mean,

the Ukrainians are the ancient Scythians, right? The

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