Johanna Wilson and Tammey Shimon

Recorded May 21, 2022 36:09 minutes
0:00 / 0:00
Id: ddv001737

Description

One Small Step partners Johanna Wilson (73) and Tammey Shimon (64) share a conversation about their families and their life stories. Tammey talks about her career as an educator and her children and grandchildren. Johanna talks about working as a long-haul truck driver, as a survival skills teacher, and working in a children’s home in Mexico.

Subject Log / Time Code

JW talks about growing up in Kansas, and TS talks about growing up in the Texas panhandle. She also talks about the lessons that she learned from her parents who
JW describes her mother and father.
JW talks about her experience as a long-haul truck driver and how she ended up getting that role when women were not generally hired as truck drivers.
TS talks about her career as a teacher and about the most challenging aspects of that job. She also says that the most rewarding part of that job is connecting with students.
JW talks about going back to college and living in the dorm later in life.
JW talks about spending a night in jail in Muleshoe, Texas.
TS talks about her sons and her grandchildren.
JW talks about reconnecting with her high school sweetheart after fifty years. TS says that she is also dating her high school sweetheart.
TS talks about her therapy dog that she brings to school and about her passion for animals.
TS talks about her time working as a children’s director in a church.
JW talks about her work in a children’s home in Chiapas and about keeping in touch with children who stayed in that home.
TS and JW talk about their perspectives on immigration at the US/Mexico border. JW also talks about her work teaching English to people who are immigrants and refugees.
JW talks about her work teaching stone-age survival skills and how she came to that work.
TS talks about losses that her school community has experienced over the past year and about transitioning back to in-person school after the COVID-19 pandemic.
JW talks about her grandchildren.
JW and TS talk about the importance of connecting with people with different viewpoints and finding common ground.

Participants

  • Johanna Wilson
  • Tammey Shimon

Partnership Type

Outreach

Initiatives


Transcript

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[00:04] JOHANNA WILSON: My name is Johanna Wilson. I'm 73 years old. Today is Saturday, May 21, 2022. I'm in Wichita, Kansas. My conversation partner is Tammy, and we are complete strangers. We are one small step partners.

[00:32] TAMMY SHIMON: My name is Tammy Shimon, and I am 64. It is Saturday, May 21, 2022. I do live in Wichita, Kansas, and Johanna is my partner, and we do not know each other at all.

[00:55] JOHANNA WILSON: All right, Ben, should I go ahead? Yeah. Yeah. If you want to read Tammy's bio now. Okay. Tammy. Whoo. I lost my little scroller. Tammy grew up in a family that helped everyone. Thus I lived, and I'm speaking as Tammy, thus I lived, to help those that need help. I am a coordinator of sorts. I know a lot of people, and I make things happen when someone needs a leg up. I am recently divorced. My husband of 35 years left me and did not tell me why. I have taught school for 30 years and worked in a church. I have six grandchildren, two sons, one grandchild is one month old. They range from 17 to one month. I teach teenagers and love it.

[01:51] TAMMY SHIMON: Johanna was born to a liberal, atheist Kansas family in 1949. She is religiously curious and she remains uncommitted. She is respectful of all traditions. Vagabonded many years in the USA. Solo long haul truck driver, blue water sailor. Studied anthropology. Spent much time in southern Mexico. Taught Stone age survival a few years. Taught English to adult refugees and immigrants. Passionate about the wilderness, the environment, animals, and marginalized people. Fascinated by the sciences. Advocate of a single payer health care care. Wow, Johanna Awesome. What was it like in Kansas when you were born?

[02:46] JOHANNA WILSON: Boring. So by the time I was twelve, I knew there was more to the world, and I was determined to get out, and I did. And how about you? What was your growing up years like?

[03:03] TAMMY SHIMON: Well, I grew up in the Texas panhandle, and so my parents were a part of the Great Depression, and that's where they got the. They helped everybody. You know, everybody pitched in back then and helped everybody, so that just kind of went on. And my dad was the Good Samaritan. He picked up people on the side of the road and brought them home, and my mom fed them. He might have put them to work or gave them a place to stay. It was quite the life, growing up, of walking in and seeing different people of all nationalities sitting at my table.

[03:46] JOHANNA WILSON: Yeah, I think my father loved humanity, but didn't really like individual people so much. My mother, on the other hand, sounds like your father. She just was salt of the earth. Made instant connections with everybody in the store, in the grocery line. And because she had suffered quite a bit in an unusual childhood herself then was always open hearted to those that needed help themselves. So between a father who idealistically loved everybody and a mother who actually did, I also. I think we share that.

[04:24] TAMMY SHIMON: Great. So you were a truck driver?

[04:30] JOHANNA WILSON: Yes. Yeah, I wanted to drive. I was going to college in Florida and wanted to drive to see my sister in San Diego in the late sixties and the old beat up hippie volkswagen bus and kept breaking down and the truck drivers kept helping me out and I thought, that looks like a great way to make a living. So I dropped out of college with just less than one semester to go. And there were not any truck driving schools that would take women back then. So I learned how to hitchhike and learned how to drive truck better than any school could have taught me and finally got it. I won a job on a bet with the owner of the company and started driving truck when I was 21. And there was only one other woman, solo cross country driver at the time. It was. It brought me out of my shell, I'll say that.

[05:25] TAMMY SHIMON: That is awesome. I bet you saw and did a lot of things. How many years did you do it again?

[05:32] JOHANNA WILSON: Off and on for 20 years.

[05:34] TAMMY SHIMON: Wow.

[05:37] JOHANNA WILSON: When I needed money, I could just drive truck and I'd make so much money I just couldn't stand it. Then I'd go off and be a vagabond. It was a great life for me.

[05:47] TAMMY SHIMON: So did you finish your degree or.

[05:49] JOHANNA WILSON: No, I finally did. I crammed a four year degree into about 20 years, 25 years it took, but I did finish it and then got another. I got a masters. I do love going to school. I loved it. So that was always part of the adventure. And I would live in the. Even when I was in my forties, I lived in the dorm with the international women. Loved it. So I see that you love teaching, working with teenagers.

[06:16] TAMMY SHIMON: Yes. So your degree was in anthropology?

[06:20] JOHANNA WILSON: It was in a field of anthropology and linguistics. And that led me to a certificate, masters in teaching English to speakers of other languages. And I put that to work and loved it. I worked with refugees and immigrants and I. Oh, it was so fulfilling. I loved that work. I'm going to volunteer, get back into volunteering it. But you taught school. Did you teach high school?

[06:48] TAMMY SHIMON: For 30 years, except for about five years I taught 8th grade. And I was in a real small school district at that time in Texas. And it was a wonderful school to teach in. But I prefer high school kids over middle school. But I will be going to middle school camp with one of my grandchildren pretty soon, so we'll see if I survive.

[07:14] JOHANNA WILSON: Oh, my gosh. Well, my hat is off to you. I never worked in a public school system. Well, except the U of U, the University of Utah. I was adjunct faculty there, but most of my teaching was in the charity schools for the refugees and immigrants. And the only problem with that is they don't pay very well, but they are magnificent people. I treasured that time. You have a young heart, if you. If you can identify with those high schoolers. Tell me, telling me the most challenging part for you about working that job.

[07:58] TAMMY SHIMON: Cell phones, kids not wanting to get off their phones and wanting to be on them all the time.

[08:13] JOHANNA WILSON: And what was the most rewarding part for you?

[08:16] TAMMY SHIMON: Oh, you know, talking to kids every day when you don't know. Like, I had two girls this past week whose fathers had been shot.

[08:28] JOHANNA WILSON: Oh.

[08:29] TAMMY SHIMON: And were in. One was in the hospital and the other one was in rehab. And she unfortunately had to take care of younger siblings and she could not come and take her finals. And it just breaks my heart because she had worked so hard and she was so talented as far as artistic ability. So just, you know, kids taking time to talk to me and telling me their story and what's going on in their life, that is, it's phenomenal for them to open up and tell me things like, my dad got shot last night or my dad and stepmom just had a fight and she left. And so now my dad's mad. You know, it's just unbelievable stories because you just don't know where each kid is at and where they're coming from.

[09:22] JOHANNA WILSON: Where in Texas did you live and work?

[09:26] TAMMY SHIMON: Well, the, I went to a college in Canyon, Texas, a university, and I have an animal science pre vet degree, actually. And then I went back to school because, you know, there were a lot of things back in the seventies that people didn't tell you. I needed to work at a veterinary clinic, as in high school, to get into vet school, and because everybody came to college haven't already done that. So I went back to school and got my teaching certification. My Texas certification says I can teach any level science in any subject. But when I moved to Kansas later on in 1999, I had to go back to school as an older student and get another degree, and I had to. And I specialized in biology at that time. And I actually drove and friends drove me to college after teaching all day for several years until, because they wanted a lot of hours still, which was crazy. Because I already had almost every kind of science class you could think of. But I had to go back to school as an older adult, and I lived in the dorm for, like, three weeks one time to take molecular and cellular science.

[10:51] JOHANNA WILSON: I lived in the dorm because as a vagabond, I just enrolled at the last unit. I went to eight universities, and the last university, the one I graduated from, I was doing long distance from where I was teaching desert survival school. And so I just decided to stay in the dorm. And since I was in my forties, they put me in the graduate women's floor. And since it was the University of Utah and most of the. At that time, most of the girls who went to college went to get their Mrs. Degree, they did not go on for graduate studies. So I was in with all these younger international women, and my plan had been stay in the dorm for just a couple of months, find an apartment in that city. I ended up staying in the dorm the whole time. It was the most vibrant environment. I really liked it.

[11:47] TAMMY SHIMON: Yes, I stayed one year. The first year I went to college, I stayed in the dorm, and it was fun. And I am. I still talk to my roommate at that time. We talk weekly all the time.

[12:02] JOHANNA WILSON: I'm still connected to my roommate. So you grew up. My father comes from Abilene.

[12:10] TAMMY SHIMON: I'm the top of Texas by kind of by amarillo, in a little town called Pam.

[12:17] JOHANNA WILSON: I spent a night in jail at Muleshoe, Texas.

[12:22] TAMMY SHIMON: Okay, I gotta hear that story.

[12:25] JOHANNA WILSON: Yeah. Well, that's when I was driving truck, and we had to carry on these thick binders full of legal papers. Texas is the only state in the nation that charges every truck to drive over a railroad track. And neither I nor the highway patrolman could find that paper in my sheaf of papers. Turns out it was there, but we didn't see it. So for not being able to find that paper, I got to go to jail in Muleschu. It was an experience. Made a lot of good friends. I had to see them the next day after I unloaded and was going to reload, and I took them donuts.

[13:02] TAMMY SHIMON: That's awesome.

[13:04] JOHANNA WILSON: I know. Mules shoe, Texas. That's all besides the point. I want to know more about your life. You held a marriage together for 35 years. Now you've got these two grown sons. Did your life turn out better or less good than you had expected?

[13:25] TAMMY SHIMON: Oh, I think. Oh, I think it was. I think it was good. I kind of, you know, I. I think about now, today, I have. I have these two grown sons. One is also divorced and remarried at this time. And he, they have, he has four kids and then my other son has two. And I did write that because when you were reading that, I was like, oh, that's what I wrote, like months ago because, well, no, actually, like, that would have been like over a year because the one month old is now a year old. So write that. But I didn't remember. But, you know, it's so close to the one I wrote today. It's cute, but no, I think it's a great, I wouldn't not do anything, you know, I didn't really want to move to Wichita and turned out to be a great experience. And I absolutely love Wichita. I live in west Wichita.

[14:32] JOHANNA WILSON: Where do you live in West Wichita?

[14:34] TAMMY SHIMON: Oh, my gosh.

[14:36] JOHANNA WILSON: After, after 55 years of vagabonding, I settled down in my piece of heaven is southeast Utah, the four corners area where I taught the desert survival school. And I got my dream home in my piece of paradise out there. And I'd been there eight years when I got a phone call after 50 years from my high school sweetheart. So I gave up paradise for my high school sweetheart five years ago.

[15:08] TAMMY SHIMON: And that is great.

[15:10] JOHANNA WILSON: It was a good decision. It was good. I've got a little piece of heaven right here in West Wichita. I, it was worth giving up everything I thought I wanted. Well, I do want, but this is, this is the more meaningful thing.

[15:25] TAMMY SHIMON: So you know what? This, this is getting to be even better every minute that I talk to you because guess who I'm dating right now. My high school sweetheart.

[15:38] JOHANNA WILSON: Better not be my high school sweetheart. You're kidding.

[15:45] TAMMY SHIMON: You're a little bit older than I am.

[15:47] JOHANNA WILSON: Yeah. Yeah. But he's cute.

[15:50] TAMMY SHIMON: Did you, did you graduate from a Wichita school?

[15:53] JOHANNA WILSON: Wichita east?

[15:55] TAMMY SHIMON: Oh, you did?

[15:58] JOHANNA WILSON: My mother graduated. Well, she didn't graduate. My mom didn't graduate, but she went to East High.

[16:03] TAMMY SHIMON: Oh, my goodness. And that's the IB school.

[16:07] JOHANNA WILSON: It is. I taught for a little while. I was, they didn't call it that at that time, but that's what I was in. And way back then, they wouldn't let us take typing class because we were going to be the bosses. We would have secretaries. And to this day, I can't type. They didn't know about computers. There was no way they'd know that was going to come down the line. But they didn't teach us how to drive a truck either. And that was a lot of fun.

[16:37] TAMMY SHIMON: Right? That is so interesting. See, and I love it that you say you love animals because that is my passion.

[16:45] JOHANNA WILSON: Well, I've got a little Chihuahua now that needs a new mom.

[16:49] TAMMY SHIMON: Well, I have a therapy dog that goes to school with me at high school. She's a black lab and she's right me. And she loves the kids. And this is what is so cool about. I have kids come in my room just to see the dog.

[17:05] JOHANNA WILSON: Right.

[17:06] TAMMY SHIMON: With the dog. I don't even know them. And they might even lay on her dog bed with them. But they need her to. They need to see her every day.

[17:16] JOHANNA WILSON: Yeah. Yeah.

[17:18] TAMMY SHIMON: It's really fun that I've got to. She didn't get to go during COVID because there was one dog in the world that had Covid. But she is. She is. She's phenomenal. She's become very, very good. And a lot of people have complimented that. Cause she's not on leash at all at school. And she turns eight next month, which is kind of sad, but I. She's doing well and she loves going to school.

[17:49] JOHANNA WILSON: I just heard her, didn't I?

[17:51] TAMMY SHIMON: Yeah. She's snoring.

[17:52] JOHANNA WILSON: Oh, she's snoring. I realized the other day I fostered, and I have fostered for years. And I think that learning to make a true one on one deep connection with an animal is the portal that lets us learn to do that with other people. And if you don't have a dog in your life, I guess maybe you get married and have children. I didn't. But the dogs and the cats. I think it's an important way to relate to all of the rest of life on this marvelous planet.

[18:29] TAMMY SHIMON: Yes, it is. And I have a cat at home, which a friend of mine. This is a crazy story, but I lived in sterling Farms, which is around the 21st and Tyler area, and she got a divorce first, and I got the cat. And she's actually the one taking care of the cat while I'm gone for a couple of days. I'll be back in Wichita tomorrow.

[18:56] JOHANNA WILSON: Oh. And I'll be leaving on vacation, so. From retirement. Yeah. I wonder if we can continue this conversation after this. Would you be willing to do that?

[19:08] TAMMY SHIMON: Yes, I would.

[19:09] JOHANNA WILSON: Oh, okay. Well, we can find a little coffee shop or somewhere and I know that they can help us get connected. But while we're doing this interview, tell me more about the deep you. I see that you worked in a church.

[19:23] TAMMY SHIMON: I did, for ten years. It was kind of a fun story. I was teaching in a private christian school and the private christian school was going to go down. It was being a little mismanaged at the time. And so I met someone. I started attending a large non denominational church, and I met a man that was in the Wichita school district, and he was kind of a bigwig. He had been a principal and he was in central office, but he attended my church. And he said that the children's pastor had left and went to Kansas City, and he wanted to know if I would apply for the job, knowing that I was a teacher like he was at one time, of course, and he thought I would be a great fit for the job. So, long story short, after about 6 hours of interviewing and background checks and all that, I took the job as the children's director at our church. And it's, it's a quite large church, and I did that for ten years. It was very rewarding. I got to know lots of people and lots of kids, and it's so fun seeing the kids that were back then from about 2000 to 2010, know they're all graduating, they're in college, some of them are getting married. And that's the best part about teaching, too, is staying in touch with kids that you've taught over the years.

[21:01] JOHANNA WILSON: Yeah, I have been involved in, and I don't think I put it in this biography, I've been involved with a children's home in the very southern tip of Mexico. We're right by the Guatemala border. And I got involved when I was 17, and I just resigned from the board last year. But thanks to, and I've spent a lot of time down there, thanks to Facebook, I am still in touch, as you say, with those kids and their kids and even their grandkids when I was their house mother. It is the biggest joy of my life is that orphanage.

[21:46] TAMMY SHIMON: That is awesome. I visited, when I went to Haiti on a mission trip, I visited an orphanage there. Of course, there's so many in Haiti. And that was quite an experience going to Haiti because it's not anything which you can go across the border and go the Dominican. It's totally like America. But Haiti's still back in the dark ages, you know, and there's only a, like a 1% of people that are in charge and have money, and then the 99% are extremely poor. And I even have a friend that adopted three children from that orphanage that we visited and worked at in Haiti. So, yeah, it, that's, it's really a great experience to get to visit. And that's cool that you worked at an orphanage.

[22:42] JOHANNA WILSON: Oh, yeah. I've spent many years down there in that orphanage and never been out of touch. Let me ask a rather sensitive question, then, since you've been to Haiti and been to that orphanage and seen the situation that those people live in, and I think the situation I was in was not quite as bad as Haiti, but that state, Chiapas, is the most poverty stricken state in, in Mexico, and the stories are just heartrending. Tell me, if we share that background. Tell me your position or your thoughts about the crisis at the border right now with all of the immigrants. What would you do about that if you were in charge? Ooh. Ooh.

[23:34] TAMMY SHIMON: That is a loaded question. Yes, it is. Because, you know, it's heart wrenching to think about people all the different ways, just like they used to, to cross the border and people dying and there's so much sex trafficking. It's absolutely horrible. You know, I don't know. I don't know if there is a good answer. I do know a lot of people that have came over and are very successful in the United States, and I have been to Mexico City, which is one of my favorite places to be. I know a couple of missionaries down there, and I've done some mission work in Mexico City, outside of Mexico City, but I don't know if I know the answer to that question. But, Johanna, that is just a really a loaded question that I don't feel like I am even anywhere remotely able to even answer that question.

[24:41] JOHANNA WILSON: Well, I agree with you completely. Evidently, even the experts haven't been able to figure this out. How do we, how do we screen safely at the border? How do we handle those people in a humane manner at the border? How do we handle the influx financially, economically? What a headache. What a headache. But you feel once you've been on the other side and seeing how people live it, it starts you thinking, I do.

[25:16] TAMMY SHIMON: My eyes were opened. A friend of mine that I'd gone to church with, she was a nurse, and she went out and worked on the border between Arizona and Mexico. And she said that just like I hear from everyone, there's a lot of bad press, because, number one, there were tons of nurses and tons of doctors at the border. There were huge tents. There were places for the immigrants to shower and bathe. There was food, there's healthcare. So I think that sometimes it gets a bad rap. And this is somebody that was sitting there telling me stories about what happened, but everything was accessible to them. It was not like sometimes the press tells us that, oh, you know, they were sneaking over and da da da da da. But she did tell some horrible stories about people jumping the fence and almost dying and different things like that. But there is healthcare there. Families are not necessarily split up, but they do it by gender. So let's say I'm married and I have a daughter and a son, and my husband is with me, too. The man and the son would go to a tent and the woman and the daughter would go to a tent, which makes sense.

[26:52] JOHANNA WILSON: It really does.

[26:54] TAMMY SHIMON: Yeah. And they all get screened, you know, she said lice was unbelievably out of control, but so I feel like she told me, you know, that really, I think we're doing a good job at the border trying to provide for these people. I just think it's overwhelming and sometimes it gets a bad rap.

[27:19] JOHANNA WILSON: I agree with you. Our side doesn't have the answer. We don't have perfect reception committees set up for them. It's such a difficult situation, and I think it's been that way for all of mankind's history. There have been groups of people, like Joseph's brothers were sent down by his father to ask for help from Egypt. There are migrating peoples all the time. And that's, as I say, I taught English to. It was immigrants and refugees and the hard stories. And yet those people still had such a hard work ethic and such a positive outlook.

[28:04] TAMMY SHIMON: Yeah, absolutely. They are very hard workers. So what I want to know about is this stone Age survival.

[28:11] JOHANNA WILSON: Oh, I love that.

[28:12] TAMMY SHIMON: How did that get started?

[28:14] JOHANNA WILSON: Well, I've been off vagabonding by myself, and I went all over America and up into Alaska and all the way down through Mexico. And I thought I wanted to vagabond right on down to South America. But I've learned that I'm a detail person and it took me 18 months to hitchhike through Mexico. And I did this all hitchhiking. I had $200. I was gone a year and a half, and I. I missed out on some good adventures. And one of the good adventures was in the northern state of Chihuahua. In Mexico is a canyon that is bigger than the Grand Canyon. Not as beautiful, but very remote, very tough country. And the Indians who live there are very remote, very basic, close to the earth kind of people. And I couldn't go down to visit that because I didn't have survival skills. And I had promised myself the next time I ever got back in the states, I'd sign up for a school that I tried to get in before, but they have a waiting list of about year, and I don't plan my life that far ahead. So when I did get back. I did get in, and it was a marvelous experience. It's one month of hell. And they asked me if I'd come back to be an instructor, and I had to think about it very hard. And I, you know, I went ahead, of course, and accepted it, and I was dubious about my own ability. The other instructors had pursued outdoor degrees, and all I had going for me was attitude and explained to me that. And then I was 30 years old. They were all younger than me, but they said, you know, you're not going to be making life and death decisions by yourself. You've got these experienced people around you. You'll learn on the job. Oh, it was the most marvelous experience of my life. I did it for about five years, maybe eight years total. In the summer. I, like an idiot, I taught desert survival in the summer, and I drove trek over the mountains in the winter until I figured out I had that backwards. So then I started teaching survival year round the calendar. And it just. It teaches you what it is to be a human being.

[30:42] TAMMY SHIMON: Wow.

[30:43] JOHANNA WILSON: And I'm sure there are a lot of people who live in some awful circumstances learn. I'm thinking about the people in Ukraine. I'm thinking about the people in Syria, Tigray region. But this teaches you what it is to be a human and what human culture and tribes are about. It wasn't really about starting fire with just two sticks.

[31:10] TAMMY SHIMON: Oh. So was this at a university that you learned it or who taught you?

[31:16] JOHANNA WILSON: This was a school that was started for university kids that were getting into trouble and morphed into a private school that was taught in those desert canyons in the high mountains of southern Utah.

[31:31] TAMMY SHIMON: Oh, wow. That's. That is. Oh, I gotta talk to you more about that. I love that. Yeah, we will.

[31:37] JOHANNA WILSON: We will.

[31:39] TAMMY SHIMON: I love that.

[31:41] JOHANNA WILSON: Well, and we've got a lot to.

[31:42] TAMMY SHIMON: Talk to, environmentalists also, so that's good.

[31:47] JOHANNA WILSON: Yeah. And we have a lot to talk about. Animals. And I want to meet yours.

[31:52] TAMMY SHIMON: Yes, I also have. I have two snakes that are in my classroom, and they are quite different. But it's been a real stressful year since January. My department head, his daughter was killed, tragically, in Colorado. She was only 20. And then my ta, who I taught as a freshman, and then I had him as a sophomore also because I teach an integrated science class, and then I teach biology. He was my ta this year. He died tragically just about a month ago, too. Accident. He was a young man. He was just 16 coming to school. And then just the other day, we had a teacher at our school die young from cancer. Had a stomach ache and losing weight and didn't think anything about it until it was. The pain was kind of unbearable and had stage four stomach cancer.

[32:50] JOHANNA WILSON: So.

[32:52] TAMMY SHIMON: So it's been a real hard year and trying to get the kids back into, um, this post Covid. Everybody's talking about the post Covid. Um, because most of them didn't do much when they were at home. A lot of parents did not make sure that they were doing what they were needing to be done. Some of the kids were very well disciplined, probably about 2% of them, but what some of the rest of the kids were not. And so they're behind, and we talk about it all the time as educators of how far behind the kids are today. And they don't remember things that happened two years ago when they were in school. They have no idea about the rock cycle that was taught, you know, when they were 7th and 8th grade. So it's been. It's been really, really hard teaching.

[33:46] JOHANNA WILSON: I can't. I can only imagine it's harder if you're a parent and a teacher. My head is off to all of you.

[33:54] TAMMY SHIMON: Yes, it's. And these teenagers. I have three teenagers. Well, one son, one grandson, just graduated from high school Northwest, and he's going into the army on Monday. He's going to do the reserves, but he'll be gone till December. So kind of bittersweet. He has looked forward to this all of his life. His dad was Navy and he's was an ROTC. So exciting. Monday I'll be at the recruiter's office as he leaves for. He's going to Fort Jackson, which I think is South Carolina, so. But he's very excited about it, and it'll be the best thing for him to do. But teenage years are tough. They are tough.

[34:43] JOHANNA WILSON: Yeah. Yeah. We did troubled teenagers on this survival program. We had a separate program for the troubled teens. And I loved it. Loved it, loved it.

[34:52] TAMMY SHIMON: Oh, good. We do have a connection there, too.

[34:57] JOHANNA WILSON: My closing words be what I learned on survival. And primarily it was, we're all in this together, and nobody gets there till we all get there. And our country's gotten so divided, we've gone exactly opposite that. And that's why I'm talking to you. And I do hope we can get together for coffee and get to know each other better.

[35:18] TAMMY SHIMON: Johanna it has been a pleasure meeting you, and I thank you so much for your time, and I am so, so excited to meet you. And I do think that we. We have to. We have to learn how to get along with people and love people next and really do meet them for where they are.

[35:38] JOHANNA WILSON: I agree. And we learned on survival. You may not like everybody in your group, but you love every one of them.

[35:46] TAMMY SHIMON: That's right.

[35:47] JOHANNA WILSON: That was a lesson.

[35:49] TAMMY SHIMON: Thank you again.

[35:51] JOHANNA WILSON: Thank you for your time. Really. I'm so glad they matched us up. And I really do want us to get together and learn more about each other. We may not agree, but we can sure like each other.

[36:01] TAMMY SHIMON: That's right. Absolutely. Thank you.

[36:05] JOHANNA WILSON: Thank you.