Travel risks

The President is withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/withdrawing-the-united-states-from-the-worldhealth-organization/

Here is the link to write to the President: https://www.45office.com/contact/

I am writing daily, just not for the Ragtag Daily Prompt. Here is my short note today:

Dear President Trump: I strongly disagree with withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization. One function of that organization is travel clinics. If a person is traveling to another country, they can find out what illnesses are present there and get immunizations and advice to avoid getting ill. This also helps physicians treat people who have returned from another country. The physician can contact a state health department which is in turn connected to the World Health Organization. This is a foolish, dramatic and unscientific decision on your part. I suggest that you reverse it immediately or resign as President.

________________

The question I have, is he closing the borders to United States citizens too? Without the travel clinics, who get information about each country from the World Health Organization, aren’t even our own state department employees at higher risk for illness? My son was an exchange student to southern Thailand. At the time he went, there was Japanese encephalitis. He was there two years after the tsunami. He got vaccinated for Japanese encephalitis before he went and he also took medicine to avoid malaria. So, are we not going to send or accept any more exchange students?

I strongly disagree with the decision to leave the World Health Organization and our country is on the verge of crazy.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: verge.

Time marching

This is a tintype. “Tintype photography was invented in France in the 1850s by a man named Adolphe-Alexandre Martin. Tintypes saw the rise and fall of the American Civil War, and have persisted through the 20th century and into modern times.” — from here.

I do not know who this young man is, nor the year. I asked my maternal uncle before he died and he denied any knowledge of the person. He was the family historian and archivisit.

However, I have four tintypes in the box of china doll furniture clothes and accessories. My sister and I received a box of jewelry and the tintypes from my Great Aunt Esther Parr. She was my maternal grandmother’s sister and married Russel Parr. Her maiden name was White, a daughter of George White, the Congregationalist Minister who ran Anatolia College in Turkey and then moved to Greece. My sister and I divided the box of jewelry and the tintypes. There were eight so we took turns picking. We used them for dollhouse portraits, not realizing that they were real photographs. I wonder if the tintypes are from the Parr side of the family.

Last month I was missing my father on February 12. I was a month off. His birthday was today, Malcolm Kenyon Ottaway, born in 1938. I miss him now, too.

I will label more photographs, since I appear to have inherited the maternal family paper archive. There are people that I don’t know, though, and my parents are gone. My mother’s siblings have died as well. I am so glad I still have my father’s sisters.

Ask your parents about the pictures and the objects they keep, before they are gone and you lose the story. Time marches on.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: March.