8/6/2024

JRB,

Did you miss me? My road trip with my 90-year-old mom prevented me from writing.

FYI - we ate dinner in Huntington, WV & spent the night in Ashland, KY. Both have seen better days. Huntington has a 6-block vibrant area, but the rest of the city needs some TLC. Ashland has a casino/fun complex supporting a few hotels on the outskirts of town, but the downtown is a dead zone. I can understand why the folks who live in the Ohio River Valley feel lost & forgotten, but I don’t know how we can replace the coal industry to liven things up.

We saw plenty of corn & soybeans as our Ways App took us through farmland on a County Road in Ohio. Crops are looking good! If prices are decent, the farmers should be having a good year. Speaking of farmers, what’s going on with the Farm Bill? I don’t have access to internet at the moment, so I can’t look up its status.

SOW, my mom & I want to know what you are doing regarding your promise to improve rural access to the WWW. She got the runaround from the local provider, Brightspeed. She called them a week or two ago asking them to turn on the internet. They claimed they could do it even though she wouldn’t be here yet. They failed to follow through & when she called them, the person in the Phillipenes told her the request was “on hold.”

Her phone connection then went dead because phone service here is spotty, so she had to call back, tell the robot several #s & sit on hold for more than 30 minutes. The hold message suggested she go to the webpage to fix her problem, adding salt to her wound, given that she was calling so she could get access to the internet.

After repeated attempts she finally completed a conversation with a person who provided a lame excuse about why the job was on hold & promised we would get access in the next 2-48 hours.

Internet for rural folks will never be profitable. We need something like the USPS to address the situation. Please continue to work on this!

Pray for Burma,

BYBS,