The rest of October passed by in what seemed like an eye blink. Diane organized another weekend with a different group of survivors. This time three of the children came with their families. They had arranged to stay for a few weeks and we made sure that we had the resources to ensure that they could continue their homeschooling. None of them had returned to regular school yet. A few of the women who had come to the last weekend came to stay for a week as well. Beside these groups, Mary had finally contacted a few survivors that frequented her soup kitchen and they were coming in to see how we could help them. Things were picking up at Hannah’s Home.
On the rescue front, Gabriel and Jenny had scoured all the accounts and had found twenty-one more buyers so far and were keeping Kevin and his FBI team very busy. The FBI was ecstatic about his results and the positive publicity that he was generating. Kevin had been given the authorization to expand his three-person team to twelve. True to his word, Kevin had informed each person that they freed of our offer of assistance and we were starting to get calls from a few.
Shauna and Diane had even gotten to go in on the aftermath of one of Kevin’s raids a few hours away and assist with organizing the survivors. All of them were college girls that had been abducted within that last three months. We chartered a bus to take them back to Hannah’s Home and we were able to care for all eleven of them until their families could pick them up. Of these eleven girls, three were still with us a week later. No one came for them and they didn’t have anywhere else to go.
On the home front, the football team was demolishing most of their rivals and I saw more of Bobby in class, at his games and at his practices than I did otherwise. Between his football schedule and my active life, finding time to go out on dates wasn’t easy. We facetimed a lot, but it wasn’t the same as seeing him in person.
I was getting to see a lot of Mark and Tyler though. They were showing up regularly at Kung Fu and the contrast couldn’t have been more acute. Mark was a geology major who needed to get fit. Tyler was going to be an apprentice blacksmith and he was a natural fighter. Tyler was focused, coordinated, and driven. Mark, not so much. He was just happy to get a good workout and learn something new. Mark put in his time and went home. Tyler often stayed and watched the higher levels sparring and he was fast becoming Uncle Magnum’s and Charlie’s favorite student.
“You’ve finally brought me a warrior, Abby! He learns like a sponge and he’s fast. I can’t wait ‘til he’s ready to spar.” Uncle Magnum’s pronouncement made me groan internally. Eva was going to have a field day with this news. I could just imagine what she’d say when she heard that Tyler might be at my house all day and at Kung Fu in the evening. Well, he would be at my house, if he ever asked dad about the apprenticeship and if dad said yes. Neither of those things had happened yet. Who knows, maybe dad would say no or someone else would ask to be his apprentice before Tyler did. Yeah, right!
My own Kung Fu was progressing slower than it had in the summer. Now that school was in full swing, I couldn’t secretly join Uncle Magnum and Sifu when they practiced in the morning. I also couldn’t practice anything that I’d learned from them until they ‘taught’ it to me. Going back to the learning piecemeal really sucked and the glacial pace was frustrating the hell out of me.
In contrast to the slow pace of Kung Fu learning, my books arrived from Gerry, by way of Howie, in the form of eight cardboard boxes a week and a half after I ordered them. Considering that Gerry had to order the equipment and set it all up, that was fast. I handed Howie the diamond and he helped me carry the boxes into my truck. A few hours later, in my room, I had my Matrix moment when I said to myself in awe, “I know German!”
I kind of got carried away after than and made that my go-to phrase every time I finished a book. “I know Physiology! I know Anatomy! I know Chemistry! I know clinical and internal medicine. I know First Aid!” I was Keanu Reeves on steroids. I was repeating these phrases at the end of each book and had anyone else been there, they would have gotten pretty annoyed with me. I didn’t care though. I was taking a week to learn what would take anyone else months or years to lean and I was retaining all of it. Once I’d finished scanning a book, I didn’t need it anymore. I could recite the whole book from memory, page by page, and in any order, and I could understand it.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
The process was simple. Each book was tied with a string, as I’d specified not to have the books bound. I would take out a book stack from a box, untie the string, and hold up the first page while I scanned it with my field. Each page took a second to scan, two or three if it had pictures on it, and then I’d go on to the next page. Page after page, until I was done. Some of those books were over six hundred pages long and I found that after each book, I needed a long break. I guess my field and my mind needed to shut down and integrate the knowledge.
Unlike Neo and his process of learning Kung Fu, I wasn’t actually downloading knowledge and skills directly into my brain. I only had the written word and pictures to work from and I’d need to supplement my learning with actual application of the knowledge. For example, I could now read German as I knew the grammar and vocabulary, but I would have trouble understanding or holding a conversation in German because I’d never really heard the language being spoken, other than a few phrases in movies or internet parody videos. Until I could supplement the information in my brain by watching movies in German or listening to German language podcasts, I’d be mispronouncing words a lot. The movies and podcast practice would help me go from translating the German to English in my mind to being able to think in German. It was a subtle difference, but one that was crucial if you wanted to master a language. It was the difference between learning a new kick and actually being able to use it effectively in a fight.
Regardless of the limitations, learn-by-scan was incredible and after the first day of cramming in books, I slowed down and decided that one or two books a day were enough. I’d scan one before school, and one right before going to bed. Within a week I had finished all the books and started working on my next list of books. I wondered if there was a limit to how much information I could pack in my brain and I questioned whether I really wanted to retain certain books in my head. Did I really want to be one of those obnoxious people that could quote passages from Shakespeare’s plays or from popular poetry? “It is the east, and Juliet is the sun and I, I took the road less travelled, quoth the Raven, Nevermore.” Ugh! That really wasn’t my thing.
The bible was another book option that I wasn’t going to take. Too much information on who begat whom and how many cubits long certain buildings were. There were so many options that it was hard to know where to continue my studies. I could become an expert in almost anything or even everything. I needed to narrow my focus. Over time, I might get to it all. For now, I’d continue with my medical homeschooling because it would enhance the information that I was getting from my people scanning.
A few more languages wouldn’t hurt either. Not being able to understand Spanish in Venezuela had slowed me down and as I travelled to other countries on foundation business, I would run into that problem more and more. Spanish and French were at the top of my list, but Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, Arabic, and Yiddish interested me as well. I didn’t fool myself into thinking that I’d need Yiddish for the foundation. I just wanted to understand all those strange sayings that my grandparents would spout out and laugh over occasionally.
I did some more searching on the internet and created my next list of books to consume. While I waited on them to be printed, I downloaded several Hollywood movies that had been dubbed over in German. I would work my way up to authentic German films. ‘When Harry Met Sally’ sounded so different in German. Fortunately, I now knew enough to be able to understand most of it and I corrected my pronunciation of so many words. The German language has some extremely long words with unfamiliar combinations of vowels and consonants and it would take a lot of practice to master the language.
Watching the movie did show me another area of the language that I was lacking. While the books taught me the vocabulary and grammar of the language, the use of idioms, adages, and curses were sadly lacking. Certain phrases in the movie were composed of words that I understood, but when taken as a whole had an entirely different meaning. That led me to another internet search. This time, I copied all the information onto a word document and sent it to Gerry to get printed.
One of the more complete German language sites that I’d visited to get these colloquialisms had a button next to each word and phrase that allowed you to listen to how it was properly pronounced. My Neo envy kicked in and I began looking for ways in which I could scan sounds. If I could manage to do that, then I could simply listen using my field and integrate the proper pronunciation with my book scanning knowledge. I tried all the ways that I could think of and I tried several ideas that I got from the internet when I searched about sounds. Nothing worked. I got to watch tons of very cool videos about sound waves, but in the end I gave it up as a lost cause. I just didn’t know enough about sound engineering.
Oh. I facepalmed at what I’d just thought to myself. This new ability was going to take some getting used to. I quickly added a list of three sound engineering textbooks to Gerry’s ‘to-print’ list.