During this season of giving, we reached out to Rick Reece—a Maple City native and member of Coach Don Miller’s 1977 Glen Lake state basketball championship team—who nearly 20 years ago founded Village Focus International, which empowers communities in Laos. Reece lives in Laos with his Lao wife Nalin (whom he married in 2001 at a ceremony at Old Settlers Park in Burdickville). They have two children, Alan and Annabella.
You don’t really know where you’re from until you’ve been somewhere else and come back. That’s because anything is only itself in relationship to some other thing. A day is only a day in relationship to the night. An apple stands for every fruit until you’ve tasted a mangosteen. America isn’t America until you’ve been to El Salvador.
Who would have thought that Istanbul would remind me so much of where I grew up above Sleeping Bear Bay? Everywhere you turn there’s a vista of turquoise water; and a pinkish tinge to the light, that I’ve never seen anywhere except on the Leelanau. If I don’t stop and think for a minute, the Bosporus and the Golden Horn, could almost be the Manitou Passage and Pyramid Point.