More on Loss

I keep remembering more things about that last day of normal. After school, my son handed me his papers, and on one of them (a handwriting sheet) he had written: "I am sad."

I asked him more about this, and it turned out that he had lost a tooth. It had fallen on the ground and nobody could find it. He was sad that his tooth was gone and that the Tooth Fairy might not give him what was rightfully his.

At the time, this was a loss that mattered to him, and so it mattered to me.

This morning I have been translating adoption documents, and in my current frame of mind what stands out to me is how much loss these children have suffered. Death certificates of parents, certificates of abandonment...it feels too much to bear in the context of so many children in Haiti who have now lost everything and everyone. These children, named in these documents, are so blessed to be being adopted by some of the finest people I know. What will happen to all the others?

These are losses that matter. Every life lost, every child left without parents, every dream that has died, buried under the rubble of an earthquake.

These losses matter to me. I believe they matter to God. I believe his heart is filled with pain, just as our hearts are, the hearts of all of us who love Haiti.

Night and Day

I thought I should write a post in the morning, when everything looks better. I'm not always in the depths of gloom. There are good things happening in the middle of all the horror.

It helps a lot to have something to do. I am used to being busy. What I wouldn't give for a pile of student papers to complain over! But today I have something useful; some friends started their adoptions in Haiti and now the earthquake has changed everything. The children are in the United States and their parents (one here with them, the other still in Haiti) are scrambling to do the adoption in English instead of French. I started translating some of their documents last night. Something I can do and do well.

My children are well and mostly happy. They are getting to spend time with their grandparents. They love the well-stocked libraries here. They are even getting to see snow (my daughter last saw snow when she was two years old and my son never has seen it). I laughed at my son yesterday as he was putting on gloves for the first time in his life. When he put on the second one, he was having trouble with it, and he sighed deeply and said, "This always happens!" (Always, as in, it happened with the first hand. He now has a lot of experience in the putting on of gloves, having done it once.)

I am seeing and spending time with dear friends who are taking care of me so well. Occasionally I even get to talk to my husband for a few minutes, or get an email from him of a few words. He is keeping busy and in some ways, I think it's actually easier for him and for the others in Haiti doing something about the situation, than it is for me. Yes, they are under huge amounts of stress and conditions are difficult, but at least they are contributing to something.

I am gradually getting to talk to friends from Haiti and hear their stories, either on the phone or online. These are wrenching and yet I know we need to talk about them. I talked to some friends yesterday who are going through their second evacuation, having left Rwanda during the genocide in 1994. Grief upon grief. Their kids are now grown, and we talked about how they handled things with them at that previous evacuation. It's the kind of thing nobody wants to have experience with, but at least their experience may help me now.

I see my students emerging on Facebook - yes, I'm Facebook friends with some of my students, which in happier days would have been a good subject for a post - writing things in Kreyol about how sad they are to leave their home or in English about their new schools, and how much they miss their real school in Haiti. But others are talking to their friends, even joking around a little. Yesterday I saw an exchange of insults among three of my students, and it made me a little happy. I know we are all mourning, but it's good to see some signs of ordinary teenage life from time to time.

I am hearing about how many people want to help. I hope it lasts; this is a long-term project we're dealing with here. Haiti is destroyed and must be rebuilt. The problems could hardly be exaggerated. And that's where my mind often seems to end up, especially at night.

Night is the worst, as it was when I was still at home. At least now I am sleeping better. I go to sleep with earbuds in my ears, listening to Greg Boyd or somebody else talking about God's love and goodness. I mostly sleep through the whole night now. I try not to lie awake thinking, but instead stay up as late as I can so that I am completely exhausted.

The sun always comes up in the morning, though, no matter how long the night is. Life goes on. It has to, for those of us who are left.

Leaving Haiti

I told my friend and employee that we were going to leave, and she cried. That was one of the worst moments. When I say "my friend and employee" it might sound strange. O. has been working in our home since we first moved to Haiti; I feel that we have grown up together. She helped me with my babies; I helped her with hers. We help each other in many ways. Our friendship is one of the things that gives me the most joy in my life in Haiti. But her story is not mine to tell.

We packed our bags. My children don't even own pants that go all the way to their ankles. (Trousers, for the British people I understand are now reading here!) We live in shorts and capri pants. We found the warmest outfits we could. My son wanted to pack his boxed Junie B. Jones set but I talked him out of that. My daughter was sad that she hadn't read all her Christmas books. I thought of photo albums, but realized that this is not permanent; I will be back to my home.

We stopped by the school in the morning and I said a few goodbyes. There was a lot of crying and hugging. My daughter went to her locker and got out a few precious keepsakes.

I worried about our drive to the airport, about what the children would see and whether I should shield their eyes. It turned out that they saw some terrible destruction of buildings, but there were no bodies visible. The bakery up the street from our house was open; that meant that they had worked all night. People were selling fresh bread out of large bags. Everyone seemed to be going somewhere; many people had Vaseline or toothpaste smeared under their noses to help them deal with the smell in the street. There was more activity than I had expected. It was difficult to look at the devastation of so many buildings. Many were flattened. Others seemed to have nothing wrong with them.

We saw some American friends who were still figuring out what they were going to do, and talked about what we had experienced, what stories we had heard. The same thing happened at the airport; as we waited in the damaged building with ceiling tiles and pieces of rebar hanging down, we shared stories. This is what we heard; this is what happened; this is who is all right and who is not. Whenever I saw a familiar face I would burst into tears. The new greeting was: I'm so glad you are alive. How is your family? How is your house?

I don't know how long we waited but eventually we took off. I felt I was escaping, running away, abandoning my friends and people I love. But as soon as I was sitting still in the seat of the airplane, with nothing else to do or think about, I fell asleep. I woke as we landed in the Bahamas; as the landing shook the plane, I thought I was in another earthquake.

It's all a blur: Florida, a rental car to Orlando, flying north on a ticket purchased by strangers. Hours in Atlanta; thankfully the television was showing a football game instead of the usually ubiquitous CNN, but an ad for the Red Cross came on with earthquake footage and I hid the children's eyes. People around were discussing jet lag. The woman across from us commented that I looked exhausted and I told her we had just come from Haiti. Everyone got quiet, as though our story trumped anything they could tell. The woman said that she had just come back from a cruise, and that when they had passed by Haiti, the captain had asked everyone for a moment of silence. Another flight.

And finally we were there; my dad was at the airport and we drove home through the streets of a different world from the one we had left that morning.

God-forsaken?

Coming to the United States from Haiti is always like coming to another planet. I've written about this many times; for example, here. When looking at the way people live, it's always difficult to think about the fact that not only do these two places exist on the same planet, but they aren't actually that far away from one another.

Those feelings are all magnified hundreds of times now. Instead of another planet, I have journeyed to another universe. Whatever progress Haiti was making has been demolished in less than a minute. Our lives have been changed forever. People who were already struggling to have basic necessities are in even more dire need. Haiti has always been challenging, but it has also been beautiful, and quirky, and fun. It has been colorful and never, ever dull. Now it seems simply broken, destroyed. Forsaken.

The title of my blog mocks me now. Is it really true that there's no such thing as a God-forsaken town? Is Port-au-Prince forsaken by God? Was God really there on January 12th when the earth shook? Is He there now as people suffer? I know the right answers to these questions but it is hard to believe them now.

It hurts me to see people post jokes about Haiti on Facebook, offering to donate unwanted politicians to help Haiti have a government, even consigning people they don't like to Haiti, where once they might have sent them somewhere else starting with H. As though the pain of Haiti really is in another world, felt by beings whose suffering matters less.

I must still believe, because I keep praying. Hymns comfort me, bypassing my brain and going straight to my heart. The faith of others buoys me, and I know at a deep level that God is present in the hands of those who do His work of healing and restoration. My counselor says I'm not losing my faith, that all my questioning is a normal part of the grieving I'm going through.

I think of the words of a friend at a retreat I went to in the fall. She was talking of her problems with back pain, a trouble that had sent her to bed for ten weeks. She questioned everything she thought she knew about healing, about God's purposes for her life. She finally came to the end of herself, and let go. She couldn't hold on any more. And she said that when that happened, she found out that she wasn't the only one who had been holding on. When she let go and gave up, God still held on to her.

Oh Lord, please keep holding on to me. Please keep holding on to our dear little Haiti, ti Ayiti cheri. Don't forsake us, I beg you.

Prayer of St. Augustine

Sent to me by my dear friend Janet.


God of our life,
there are days when the burdens we carry
chafe our shoulders and weigh us down;
when the road seems dreary and endless,
the skies gray and threatening;
when our lives have no music in them,
and our hearts are lonely,
and our souls have lost their courage.
Flood the path with light,
run our eyes to where
the skies are full of promise;
tune our hearts to brave music;
give us the sense of comradeship
with heroes and saints of every age;
and so quicken our spirits
that we may be able to encourage
the souls of all who journey with us
on the road of life, to your honor and glory.

Teens' Perspectives on the Earthquake

Article here.

Music Helps Lift Haitians' Spirits

NPR story here.

My Story, Continued

There are so many stories from this earthquake. Each family has its own, its tale of "What if I had been there a few minutes longer?" or "If only it had been different." I have heard many, many, and could share them, saying "One of my seventh graders..." or "One of the employees from school...", but Tara Livesay said it best the day after the quake:

There is no way to even begin to share the things we’ve heard and seen since 5pm yesterday. To do so would take hours that we don’t have to give right now. Some of them feel wrong to tell. Like only God should know these personal horrible tragedies.

(Tara is still in Haiti: you can read her blog here.)

Ultimately all I have is my own story, so I'll tell that one as best I can.

The morning after the earthquake, we went home. Our house seemed fine but it was still terrifying to be inside it. There were eleven people sleeping in our yard that first night, but one soon left to walk to Jacmel, where his family was living. I still don't know what he found when he got there.

That day was spent mostly hitting redial on my phone, hanging out with the people in the yard (including three small children, a three year old, a nearly two year old, and a one year old), listening to everyone's story again and again. Children pulled from under falling blocks, babies handed out of windows, a church collapsing full of people gathered to pray. I played games with the kids, found food for people, picked up some things off the floor (though it seemed pointless to do so, since surely they would just fall again, as the earth kept shaking and shaking).

Our plant manager came over and left with my husband, and they drove around doing whatever they could, finding out what needed to happen next. My husband came home and told me a little about what he saw, and cried. Someone went out to see what vegetables were for sale, and came back and told what she had seen, and cried. Trips were made to find relatives who hadn't been heard from, and people kept coming to the gate all day, reporting that they were alive, reporting on those they knew of who weren't.

That night we all slept in the kids' rooms, but I couldn't sleep at all; I fell asleep for a while because I was just exhausted, but soon woke up in a panic. The tremors continued, and even when they weren't going on, the earth felt as though it was moving. Early in the morning I went outside and prayed with the people in the yard, and felt comforted, a little.

Some time on Thursday morning, my husband showed up with four women with suitcases. They were a work team from North Carolina who had arrived in the airport minutes before the earthquake. They were waiting in the truck for the pastor who had come to pick them up. He had gone inside to check on some late luggage, and while he was in there the earth shook, and the ceiling started to fall in big chunks, and some people were hit, and he stretched out on his face on the ground and cried and prayed. Meanwhile the ladies at first thought the truck was shaking because the red caps (porters) were not happy with the tips they had received, until they saw the trees moving too, and realized what was happening. They spent that night in a field and delivered two babies (one of the women was a dentist but that was the most medical training anyone had). They said the people in the field praised God all night long.

We talked a lot, sharing what we had all been through, played games, shared food. Sometime that day I turned on a power strip upstairs to charge my cellphone (which had still never connected in spite of my constant pressing of redial). We still had some juice in our batteries; in this one very limited way, people living in Haiti were better prepared than people in the US would be, since those who can afford it already have backup to city power. We work with inverters, car batteries that charge up when city power is on or when we run the generator. Our wireless connection was on the same power strip so I decided to check to see if the internet was working, though I was sure it wouldn't be. It was. I started to send out emails. At that point the phones were not working and we were sending emails or Facebook messages to people within the country. I was able to talk to some people from my family. They had known we were OK from about 8 PM Tuesday, since a staff member with an AT&T phone had been able to get a text message to her mother with my parents' phone number. Even so, they were relieved and happy to get to talk to me.

The NC ladies stayed at our house that night. People in the US were working on getting them out of the country. On Friday they went to the airport at some point and returned because the flight didn't go. At some point on Friday my husband and I started talking about whether the kids and I should leave. We realized that resources were going to become a problem very quickly, and anyone who wasn't contributing directly to the relief efforts was just draining supplies. We went back and forth about it; there were arguments on both sides. The main argument for staying was that we have stayed several times when others have been evacuated, and we know too well that feeling of abandonment you have when others go. I didn't want to cause that feeling for anyone else.

Sometime on Friday a doctor came to the house. He is related to the family living in our yard and I knew him already. He had come from the south to check on the family and had found that there were many people where he was staying begging for help. He had the skills to help them but no supplies, and he asked if I had anything. I said I didn't, but when I went in the bathroom and started pulling out supplies, I had more than I realized. Ibuprofen, antiseptic wash, gauze pads, even a pair of gloves. He laughed and said it was like a pharmacy at my house. The NC ladies had some supplies, too, although they had used most of their stuff during their time in the field. I also wrote him a note to the nurse at school to ask her to give him some gloves.

At some point (I keep using that phrase, but really the chronology is very vague in my mind and I think I was mostly in shock during this time), my husband heard about some extra seats on the flight that the NC ladies were going to use. It turned out that a NASCAR owner, Rick Hendrick, had sent his private plane to be used by MFI for evacuating people. (Read more about that here.) My husband informed me that if he could work it out, we were leaving. I said I thought we should talk about it a little more and he said, "We aren't going to talk about it. You're going." (This isn't the way he usually talks to me.) He went over to school to make contact with the MFI people and see if he could get the children and me on the flight.

For a long time he didn't return, and finally I walked over to school to look for him. It was getting dark, and again I saw that our neighborhood was very much as usual. The only difference was that there were many, many people in the road, setting up to sleep the night there.

When I arrived on campus I saw people on the soccer field. The CRI trauma team had just arrived and I gave Theo, the leader of the team and one of our former students, a big hug. The overall feeling on the campus was one of peace. Peace and purpose. It was the first time I had felt peace since the quake.

I talked to my husband and found out we were to leave on the flight, and we could each pack a small bag.

I'll continue the story in another post.

Small Losses

All day my mind races with thoughts to share here, but then when I sit down to write, everything seems so trivial. I've noticed I've been using that word a lot lately; all of my concerns and worries seem so pointless and silly given that I'm alive, that my husband and children are alive, that I have plenty to eat and drink and am sleeping inside.

Today the children and I went to the public library. I haven't been able to read more than a page or two since the earthquake. My mind wanders and I can't focus. If you know me, or if you used to read this blog pre-January 12th, you know that a me who doesn't read is not the real me. It is one symptom of the displacement, the dislocation, the exile, the total disruption of my life and the life of my dear adopted country.

Boo hoo, poor me. Others have lost everything, and I can't read.

I didn't know what to check out. It needs to be intelligent enough to hold my interest, but no great dramas, please. I thought about the earthquake scenes in Corelli's Mandolin but then thought that would just be too much. I finally settled on a couple of Jane Austen novels - since they are so familiar, perhaps they will be comforting; something by Joanna Trollope, since her books are usually fairly calm, and something historical about Mozart. I also checked out The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, both for the familiarity of it and because I thought about it the night of the quake, and talked about it with my daughter as we were lying under the stars on the soccer field. We talked about the scene where the ship is moving into the darkness, and there is no hope and no way out, and Lucy calls out to Aslan and hears a voice say, "Courage, Dear Heart." We talked about it, and it made us smile, and perhaps gave us a little courage.

Speaking of books, I recognize some books from my classroom in this picture:



It was posted on the blog Ben and Katie in Haiti. This isn't a direct result of the quake, but of classrooms being cleaned out so that the rooms can serve as headquarters for aid. I don't even know what my classroom is being used for, but it's not for teaching.

Again, how can I grieve my lovely classroom when others have lost all they have? And yet I do. I spent six days a week in there for the past four and a half years. I gathered my classroom library with love. I collected everything I could to make my room a place where kids could learn and grow. I prayed for my kids each morning in homeroom. I don't know when I'll see those kids again.

I have pictures of my home after the quake but they seem silly - my bookcases fell down, while others were crushed under their roofs.

I told my kids that they are donating their bedrooms to earthquake relief, since aid workers and doctors sleep in them. They are donating their daddy for earthquake relief. I am donating my classroom and my husband. Not that we had any choice in any of these matters, but at least it makes us feel a little useful.

My losses are so small. The losses of so many countless thousands of others are so great.

From the Book Blogs

Children's books set in Haiti

Children's books about earthquakes

Earthquake Hymn

I didn't know that Charles Wesley wrote earthquake hymns.

What Use am I?

Here's a post I wrote back in 2008 while Haiti was going through terrible destruction from a hurricane. I expressed then that I am not much good in an emergency because that's just not what my skills are. Here's an excerpt:

This is something I think about a lot. I mean, what good am I in an emergency? I can just hear it now: "Ah, someone with a literature degree! Two literature degrees, you say! Just what we need right now in the middle of this crisis, in this country with a 50% literacy rate! Hurry over here, there's a text to be explicated! What a relief to have an expert on hand!"

Several have reminded me that while I am not a medical person and am not even in Haiti doing interpreting or other things I could do (and so wishing I could be helping), this is a long-term project we are dealing with here. Haiti is going to need help for a long time, and there are going to be kids to be taught and a new normal to be found. Right now my own children need me to keep life stable for them as much as I can.

The day we left Haiti, I was talking about this with the two other teachers who flew out with us and we were suggesting various skills we had that were completely useless at that moment - like helping kids with phonics, diagramming sentences, recommending a good novel. Right after the conversation a young girl with the work team being evacuated with us turned around and asked me what a word meant - she was reading what looked to be a school library copy of Ibsen's A Doll's House. I supplied a definition and had to laugh. See? You need vocabulary help - I'm there for you!

I apologize if this post seems trivial, but I want to encourage people who are feeling helpless like I am - this is going to be going on for a long time. There will be all kinds of help needed. Right now you can give cash. Later, maybe you can go and there will be work for all kinds of people.

I know many people have more questions about how we got out of Haiti and I am going to be posting on that. I am trying to get my thoughts in order and adjust to the new life I suddenly have.

God Bless the Haitian People

When I started this blog in 2006, I decided to be anonymous for many reasons, but one of the most important to me was that I don't like to be the kind of expat who whines constantly about life in her adopted country. While life in Haiti always had its frustrations, my family had chosen to be there and in general we were very happy. Many years ago I read a book about Africa that did not name the country it was describing and a preface explained that the author did not want to draw attention to the aspects of a developing country that the people there were trying hardest to change. As a missionary kid myself, I know what it is like to have outsiders criticizing the country that you love. I explained some of my reasoning here.

Now I am trying to draw attention to Haiti, and trying to encourage my few readers to reach out to the people there in their time of great need. I don't have lots of readers like Tara or Leslie (especially now she writes for Esquire) or Sean or Corrigan, but maybe some of my readers, who come here to read my book reviews or catch up on the latest in the highly important controversy over whether reading Twilight is good for kids (in other words the trivia which mostly fills this blog), will be able to think of Haitians as people just like them, except maybe stronger, more resilient, and more filled with faith.

That's how I think of Haitians. I know that they put me to shame with their faithfulness to God, their acceptance of hardship without complaining, their focus on people instead of on things. In those early nights after the earthquake, once we had started sleeping inside again, I would wake up in a panic, my heart racing, unable to stop crying. I would spend hours like that, and then in the morning as soon as I could without waking people up, I would go outside and pray and talk with the people living in my yard, people who had lost friends, family members and houses, and I would find myself encouraged. They woke singing each day, praising God for sparing their lives. Although they also woke in fear with each aftershock, they mostly slept peacefully because their trust was in God. And throughout each night I would hear others praying and singing, songs like "Showers of Blessing," which seemed wildly inappropriate to me, in the circumstances. How could they find blessing in the lives they were living? They were sleeping outside because they were afraid to go inside, and some had lost their homes. They still are sleeping in those conditions each night, under a tarp and a mosquito net.

When I left the country, I promised these people that I would tell about them, begging people to pray for them and to donate to the relief efforts. Pat Robertson may think they deserve what they get because of an incident in their long-ago history, but I urge you not to listen to him. Please, please, help these strong, beautiful, wonderful people.

One Week Ago

This time last week, my whole world changed. Today, I am living in a different country from the one I lived in then. My family is separated, my house is a place where relief workers and refugees camp out, my children are enrolled in another school and dressed in clothes that I did not buy. I am not going to work, even though a week ago I was in the early stages of new units with my seventh graders and my eighth graders, and they seemed to be going well. All my lesson plans still sit on my desk, but I am not there.

On Tuesday I read articles about tourism in Haiti with my eighth graders. We talked about the plans the Haitian government had to encourage tourism and how this would bring in revenue. The kids were working on feature articles and I had encouraged them to find positive things about Haiti that they wanted others to know about, since we've talked before about how the focus is often on what is negative about their country and "The Phrase": "the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere."

After school I read some emails, chatted with my mom online, encouraged my daughter to finish her homework, and then the two of us headed home. My son and husband were still at school. When we got into our courtyard, there was something out of place, and before going inside I fixed it. As I was opening the door (or getting out my key - my daughter and I remember this differently), the quake started. There was a loud noise like a very large truck, and the house shook, not just back and forth, but like a bucking horse. I saw the ground move like the waves of the ocean. My daughter was crying and yelling, "What is it? What is it?" and I was answering inanely, "It's all right! It's all right!"

When everything stopped, we ran inside and looked around briefly, noticing that a couple of our large bookcases had come down, including a huge one in the living room. If we had been in that room we could have been severely hurt or even killed by falling books. My daughter was crying and the woman who works for us held her and said, in English, "You're in the arms of Jesus."

I immediately started trying to call my husband on my cellphone but nothing went through. I grabbed my daughter and said, "We have to go find them." We ran back to school and when we neared the gate we saw my husband coming out. I asked breathlessly about our son and he told me he was all right. At this point I felt everything was over - we were all together, the damage in our neighborhood didn't seem huge, and everyone was safe.

I had no idea.

We gathered the students who were still on campus all together and prayed and talked about what would happen - how they should wait for their parents and not leave without checking their names off the list that was being made. We were all shaken, literally and figuratively, but there was some joking around and we were in pretty good spirits. One student asked if there would be school tomorrow and I said, "I don't see why not!"

People started to arrive on campus to pick up their kids or just because they had turned back since the quake had caught them in the road. Then we started hearing more details - the palace was down, Caribbean Market was down, other large buildings...I dismissed most of it, saying they were just rumors, unless the people had seen it with their own eyes, but gradually I was forced to accept that this was a very serious event. It seemed that our neighborhood was unusual in having little damage.

We spent that night on the soccer field, lying on a blanket and trying to keep warm. More people arrived: my son's teacher, workers from the Snack Shop, maintenance workers. Some gathered in a group and sang songs. Then injured people started to be brought - a little girl with terrible scraping on her face and a head wound, and a pair of underwear on her head for lack of a bandage; a young boy who had been hit on the head; a woman who seemed not to have serious injuries but moaned in pain so must have had something internal.

Towards morning, the moaning woman stopped moaning, and when the sun came up her family found that she was dead. They began to cry and scream, saying again and again in Kreyol, The Lord gives, the Lord takes, blessed be the name of the Lord. The words sound more tragic in Kreyol, more final and less churchy. I stood with the family for a long time but finally could not bear it any more.

That night I had hardly slept - perhaps half an hour total. It was cold. The aftershocks, some very large, were constant. Although I still didn't know the full extent of what had happened, I knew that life was not going to be the same for a very long time, if ever.

Overwhelmed

Right now I am completely overwhelmed.

Overwhelmed with grief and pain and fear. I am reading bad news about people I know and love. I am wondering if our dear Haiti will ever be the same again.

I am overwhelmed, too, by the kindness of strangers and friends. I left Haiti on Saturday with my two children and a small bag each, and now we are all dressed head to toe in other people's clothes, talking to professional counselors, being given things and bought things and encouraged and helped.

Overwhelmed, too, with guilt - why me, why is my family all alive when so many others are dead, why am I getting all this love and affection when others are still lying under buildings, why did I get to leave when others can not?

Leaving was such a difficult choice, because a huge part of me wanted to stay and suffer this with my Haitian family, but I was sitting at home taking care of my children, using resources others could use, distracting my husband from his relief work because he was worried for us. I have stayed through many crises in the past: a flight embargo, a US invasion, kidnappings, the departure of a president leading to days of violence and chaos - and yet all of these things now seem so trivial, leaving me wondering why we were making such a fuss.

I am overwhelmed by the idea of continuing with life, making choices, decisions, looking at the future. How? How, when people are still missing, and beloved friends are having funerals, and tomorrow promises to bring more of the same?

Facebook

If you know my name, friend me on Facebook - I am posting more there. Please keep praying.

We are alive

This is my first time online after the earthquake - guess I just outed myself about where I am. Please, please pray. Things are worse than anyone can imagine. Our whole family is fine and our house and school are standing and apparently undamaged. 14 others at our house.

Being Foreign

An interesting article from the Economist on the condition of being foreign.

Poetry Friday

Tricia is hosting the Poetry Friday roundup today at The Miss Rumphius Effect.

Chapel

OK, I'm not going to publish every word of the day, but here's another really interesting one, from an etymological point of view. I had no idea of this word's origin. You can subscribe to this list at Merriam-Webster's website.

The Word of the Day for January 6 is:

chapel \CHAP-ul\ noun
1 : a private or subordinate place of worship
*2 : an assembly at an educational institution usually including devotional exercises
3 : a place of worship used by a Christian group other than an established church

Example sentence:
The school required all of its students to attend chapel daily.

Did you know?
"Chapel" is ultimately derived from the Late Latin word "cappa," meaning "cloak." How did we get from a garment to a building? The answer to this question has to do with a shrine created to hold the sacred cloak of St. Martin of Tours. In Medieval Latin, this shrine was called "cappella" (from a diminutive of "cappa" meaning "short cloak or cape") in reference to the relic it contained. Later, the meaning of "cappella" broadened to include any building that housed a sacred relic, and eventually to a place of worship. Old French picked up the term as "chapele," which in turn passed into English as "chapel" in the 13th century. In case you are wondering, the term "a cappella," meaning "without instrumental accompaniment," entered English from Italian, where it literally means "in chapel style."

And the New Ambassador is...

The new Ambassador for Young People's Literature is Katherine Paterson.

Myrmidon

I knew about Achilles' Myrmidons but I never knew that this word has a negative connotation in English. I love learning new words. This one came from the Merriam-Webster Word of the Day email, which I get in my inbox daily. You can subscribe at the Merriam-Webster website.

The Word of the Day for January 5 is:

myrmidon \'MER-muh-dahn\ noun
: a loyal follower; especially : a subordinate who executes orders unquestioningly or unscrupulously

Example sentence:
The boss was more likely to offer promotions to her myrmidons than to those workers who occasionally questioned her tactics or proposed alternate solutions.

Did you know?
The Myrmidons, legendary inhabitants of Thessaly in Greece, were known for their fierce devotion to their king, Achilles, who led them in the Trojan War. "Myrmex" means "ant" in Greek, an image that evokes small and insignificant workers mindlessly fulfilling their duty. Whether the original Myrmidons were given their name for that reason is open to question. The "ant" association is strong, however. Some say the name is from a legendary ancestor who once had the form of an ant; others say the Myrmidons were actually transformed from ants. In any case, since the 1400s, we've employed "myrmidon" in its not-always-complimentary, ant-evoking, figurative sense.

Jon Scieszka Ends his Term as Ambassador for Young People's Literature

Here author Jon Scieszka reflects on his term as the first Ambassador for Young People's Literature and gives suggestions for getting kids to love reading.

Back to Work

The kids don't come until tomorrow, but I'm in my classroom today getting some last minute things done. Most of my preparation is done because I stayed two extra days after the kids left. This morning was also a dry run - can we really still get up, get dressed, and make it to school on time? Turns out that we are a bit rusty in our morning routines - too many late nights have taken their toll. And there are no more holidays until the middle of February!

Poetry Friday

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Read in 2009

I read 59 books in 2009. This doesn't count every read-aloud to my children or my students, though some of those are on the list. It also doesn't count books of poetry.

Books 1-4
Books 5-10
Books 11-14
Books 15-25
Books 26-32
Books 33-42
Books 43-46
Books 47-55
Book 56 (War and Peace! I finally finished it!)
Book 57
Books 58 and 59

Linked to this week's Saturday Review of Books.

One Little Word

I haven't chosen my One Little Word for 2010.

Here's 2009's One Little Word.

Theme Day - Changes

The DP Theme for this, the first day of January, is "Changes." Here's the picture from Paris, and here's a link to thumbnails from all the participants.

So far there aren't any changes for me in 2010 (but then, I have only been awake for an hour). Instead, there is more of the same: electricity problems. Last night the streetlights glowed brightly but there was no city power in our house. I didn't even bother calling the electrician.

Happy New Year!

Reading Update

It's looking like I'm not going to get any more books read this year, though I'm working on two right now. The last two books of the year were Ophelia, by Lisa Klein, and The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver.

Book #58, Ophelia, is billed as a YA title, or at least that's where it was in the bookstore. I thought it was for people a little older than my middle schoolers. I am always intrigued by retellings of stories that I know well. This one takes the story of Hamlet and tells it from the point of view of Ophelia, a character whom Shakespeare leaves frustratingly nebulous. I enjoyed her version of events.

And the last book of the year, book #59 - I really thought I could make it to 60 - was Barbara Kingsolver's latest novel, The Lacuna: A Novel. Kingsolver is such a wonderful writer and can make any subject interesting - look at what she did for vegetables in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. This book tells the story of Harrison Shepherd, a character who, the book jacket tells us, is "pulled between two nations." (Favorite theme alert!) At the beginning of the book he's a child in Mexico, living with his Mexican mother, who has left his American father. Later in the book he returns to the United States, but he is always a foreigner everywhere. He falls in with various famous people, namely Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Lev Trotsky, but unlike some books, his story doesn't feel like an excuse to tell theirs. Shepherd's life story, spanning the 30s, 40s and 50s, is richly detailed, and yet there is always a lacuna, for "the most important part of a story is the piece of it you don't know." At the end of the book Shepherd falls afoul of the "Committee on Un-American Activities," as did so many writers and artists of the period. I couldn't help but wonder whether the injustices done to Shepherd were in some way informed by Kingsolver's own experience with the type of criticism she has faced, as she too has been called "un-American" because of some of her writing questioning the status quo. I loved this book and I found it well worth waiting for. But I hope Kingsolver will write another one soon.

The Sidney Awards

An award for the best magazine essays of the year.

And here's the second batch. (Added December 29th.)

I Vowed Not to Write Another Bethlehem Christmas Story

Article here.

Christians in Iraq Celebrate Christmas under Threat

Read the article here.

Book #57

After the heavy lifting (both figurative and literal) of War and Peace, book #57, That Old Cape Magic, by Richard Russo, felt as light as a piece of fluff. Still, there was something wonderful about reading a book in a couple of hours and not having to contemplate free will and the law of necessity even once.

Jack Griffin, a protagonist who will seem quite familiar to readers of Russo's other books (of which I am one), is a retired screen writer who now teaches screen writing. He's followed his parents into an academic career, but his memories of his parents and his childhood are mostly negative. He's trying to write a short story about a summer the family spent on the Cape while he was a boy. He's going to weddings, including his daughter's. He's dealing with his marriage to Joy.

I didn't enjoy this as much as I have others of Russo's books. (For some reason I kept thinking of Anne Tyler the whole way through - the characters had her kind of whimsical feeling to them.) Usually Russo writes much more evocatively of places and his books have more depth to them than this one. But maybe I'm just comparing him to Tolstoy!

I Finished War and Peace!

At long last, I finished reading War and Peace! All 1386 pages. It's Book #56 of the year.

I both loved and hated this book. The parts about the characters were wonderful. Tolstoy writes great party scenes and great domestic scenes and great battle scenes. His descriptions and dialogue are vivid. His characters are completely believable and complex (reportedly he based them on his friends and relatives).

Unfortunately, Tolstoy fills hundreds of pages with his musings - mostly about history. Why Napoleon and other leaders aren't as important to events as they think they are, or as most historians think they are. How free will works. What an idiot Napoleon is. Why the Russians are superior to all other peoples. Why Russian peasants are superior to all other Russians.

Then there will be another couple of hundred pages of gripping narrative.

And then back to more about Napoleon and free will and history and the Russians.

It's not that what he writes in this vein isn't interesting in itself, but it slows down the story to a halt, and honestly by the third time I read his theory of history, I wasn't at all interested any more.

When I finished the book, I started reading A.N. Wilson's introductory essay to the Modern Library edition, and while I haven't finished it yet, I have learned that Tolstoy's wife copied out the whole book no less than seven times in longhand. A moment of silence for her, my friends. This woman was a true saint. (She also bore thirteen children.)

I'm glad I read this book, but I don't think I will be rereading it any time soon. In its own way, though, it is an unforgettable novel. Marya, her father, Pierre, Natasha, and poor little Petya will stick with me.

Poetry Friday: War and Peace

So I've been reading War and Peace as long as I can remember. Actually it's only two months but that's a long time to be reading the same book. I WILL finish it. I've read a thousand pages and I only have three hundred left.

I don't know of any poems about that particular book, but Billy Collins' poem about Anna Karenina seems appropriate.

On Closing Anna Karenina
by Billy Collins

I must have started reading this monster
a decade before Tolstoy was born
but the vodka and the suicide are behind me now,
all the winter farms, ice-skating and horsemanship.

It consumed so many evenings and afternoons,
I thought a Russian official would appear
to slip a medal over my lowered head
when I reached the last page.

Here's the rest of it.

For the record, I liked Anna Karenina. I even like War and Peace, at least large chunks of it. It is just so endlessly long.

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup, at Susan Writes.

Incarnational Thoughts

This is a blog post from China, reflecting on the way sheep smell and other Christmas issues.

How to Remove Staples from your Feet

This is important information. Well, it could be. Should you have staples in your feet. That need to be removed.

Poetry Friday: Nostalgia

I have been looking recently at some old photos of my children, and feeling nostalgic over the sweet babies they were. It's probably a common feeling this time of year, as we look at photos of first Christmases and take out ornaments which have survived, somehow, from those years. How easy life seems back then, back when I could meet their every need, when I always knew where they were, when they wore whatever I put on them.

Of course, I'm conveniently forgetting the inexplicable crying of a pre-verbal child who couldn't tell you where it hurt, the sleepless nights, the days of limited interaction with another adult.

Nostalgia is that way, and Billy Collins has written several poems about it. One is entitled "Nostalgia," but the one I was thinking of this week is the one excerpted below:

Lines Composed Over Three Thousand Miles from Tintern Abbey

I was here before, a long time ago,
and now I am here again
is an observation that occurs in poetry
as frequently as rain occurs in life.

...

...the feeling is always the same.
It was better the first time.
This time is not nearly as good,
I'm not feeling as chipper as I did back then.

Something is always missing -
swans, a glint on the surface of a lake,
some minor but essential touch.
Or the quality of things has diminished.

...

And when we put down the book at last,
lean back, close our eyes,
stinging with print,
and slip in the bookmark of sleep,

we will be schooled enough to know
that when we wake up
a little before dinner
things will not be nearly as good as they once were.

...

Nothing will be as it was
a few hours ago, back in the glorious past
before our naps, back in that Golden Age
that drew to a close sometime shortly after lunch.

You can read the whole poem here.

The Poetry Friday roundup is at Random Noodling today.

Yet Another Twilight Article

This one is by a teacher who loved the Twilight series and suggests ways to use it with students. You can read it here.

How Far Does God's Love Reach?

This morning in church we sang "The Love of God" and it made me think of my post about the words here. During this Advent season I am glad that God's love reaches all the way down to where we are, however low and far off from Him that is. "There is," after all, "no such thing as a God-forsaken town."

Poetry Friday Yesterday

Here's yesterday's Poetry Friday roundup. School is crazy right now, with the end of the quarter coming and today's all-day Christmas event. I am just trying to get through it all without losing my mind. Maybe after it's over I'll be able to come back and read some of the postings!

I'm A Tale of Two Cities

Hmm, don't know about this one. I haven't even read this book, and now apparently it represents me. Some of this is true but I don't distrust the French.

You're A Tale of Two Cities!

by Charles Dickens

You find it challenging to be unequivocal, often tempering your
statements with contradictory or mitigating concepts, just to be sure. Nevertheless,
it's clear that you live in remarkably extremist times and have seen some rather
dramatic things transpire. You are particularly distrustful of the French. While you
find it difficult to part with things, you would gladly sacrifice a carton. Sewing
makes you very nervous.


Take the Book Quiz II
at the Blue Pyramid.

War and Peace Update

This weekend I passed the 800th page of War and Peace. This is notable chiefly because on my last War and Peace post a commenter informed me:

"Like they say, the first 800 pages are pretty slow, but after that it picks up.

Actually, no, it doesn't."

I am enjoying the book, but I have to admit that there are many parts which are quite slow, particularly the digressions on nineteenth century Russian politics. However, I do want to find out what will happen to Natasha. What was she thinking?

Greg Boyd Series

I have been listening to the sermons here. I don't know how to link you directly to the one I listened to today, but if you scroll down you can click on various ways of watching or listening to it. It's called "A Touch of Reality." I haven't listened to all the ones in this series yet but so far I am enjoying them very much. They are part of a series on God's heart for the poor, but "A Touch of Reality" is about people who are invisible - people who don't feel real because nobody ever notices them - and how we can reach out to them. There are lots of ways of being poor.

Saturday Review of Books

Today's Saturday Review of Books is here.

Poetry Friday: E-Mails from Scheherazad

After I read The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, by Mohja Kahf, I had to read more from this author. (I wrote here about how much I loved that novel, and how I felt a sisterhood with Kahf in spite of our different backgrounds and different religions.)

I was not disappointed by her book of poetry, E-mails from Scheherazad. From the first poem, "Voyager Dust," Kahf writes beautifully about what it is like to be from more than one place, describing helping her mother wash her scarves:

She'd hold one end, my brother or I the other,
and we'd stretch the wet georgette and shake it out
We'd dash, my brother or I, under the canopy,
its soft spray on our faces like the ash
of debris after the destruction of a city,
its citizens driven out across the earth.
We never knew
it was voyager dust.

Some of the poems are funny, such as "My Grandmother Washes Her Feet in the Sink of the Bathroom at Sears," or the title poem, "E-mail from Scheherezad," in which we learn that she and Shahrayar aren't together any more, but that she is still telling stories; after all...

You must remember: Where I come from,
Words are to die for.

In a couple of other funny poems, she imagines the Odalisques from all the paintings in the museums of the world jumping down and expressing their views about the Orientalism they represent.

Others of the poems made me cry, such as "Snowfall on the Colossal Ruins," where Kahf describes snow falling in Amman on thousands of Iraqi refugees sleeping in the Roman amphitheater

nightly, this winter of the year 2000,
this tenth winter of the sanctions.
The proud, the dignified,
the ones you might have met in gracious homes
by appointment, bringing with you flowers,
fruit, or any small token,
to avoid arriving empty-handed...

In "The Fork in the Road" Kahf explores the idea that the immigrant has to choose between her two homes, either going to Syria to find the memories of her grandfather or to a graveyard near Indianapolis to look for

the little white coffin,
the boy with the blue
Mediterranean eyes,
the one we lost in the new world

and could not stop to find.

She ends this poem with a two-line stanza: "Which do you want, choose./ You only get one journey."

In "The Passing There," she tells about being chased out of an Indiana field by a farmer as she was playing there with her brother.

The man who owned the field was no Robert Frost
although he spoke colloquial. "Git
off my property," he shouted, "Or I'll-"
The rest of what he said I do not care
to repeat. It expressed his concerns
about our religion and ethnic origin.
He had a rifle. We went on home.

She goes on to imagine a watchman back in Syria chasing children out of a vineyard, yelling at them using their names, and

our parallel-universe Syrian selves among them,
hearing their names called among the others,
Yaman and Mohja, running home
and getting there, skin bright, panting,
getting home.

I read this poem aloud to my family and had to stop several times because the tears were choking me, so perfect is the description of being from two places:

My brother knows this song:
How we have been running
to leap the gulch between two worlds, each
with its claim. Impossible for us
to choose one over the other,
and the passing there
makes all the difference.

I think, though, that in spite of all these poems that I love, my favorite is "Finding Poems for My Students," in which she describes choosing poems to read in class:

I run to you, pockets full of poems.
I select: This poem will help you pass a test.
Here is one that is no help at all,
but is beautiful; take it, take it.

She doesn't mind that her students don't always appreciate the offerings she has worked so hard to bring them, because she imagines one day that those poems may resurface for them, and be exactly what they need. As Mohja Kahf's poems have been for me.

I want to quote pages and pages of this book, but instead, I will send you to buy your own copy.

Today's Poetry Friday roundup is at Becky's Book Reviews.

And More Thanksgiving

The feeling sorry for myself theme continued today as I stayed home with a sick child instead of attending festivities as planned. I did get a container of food, including two pieces of pie, so I didn't go hungry. I was disappointed, though.

Still, it was fun to play a game and read with my little one, including that holiday classic Arthur's Thanksgiving, in which we learn that the turkey is "a symbol of togetherness and Thanksgiving" and that "today, when we think of Thanksgiving, we think of turkey." We do not learn much about the spiritual dimensions of the holiday.

I won't deny enjoying the turkey (what little of it I managed to scrounge), but I am glad that there's a bit more to Thanksgiving than that. I missed out on the togetherness this year, too - but God's blessings are still overwhelming, and He is always good, whether I am grumpy or grateful.

"Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows." James 1:17

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving isn't a local holiday, but we do get Thursday and Friday off at our school. That means today is the last day of school until Monday - definitely something to be thankful for.

Mostly I have been feeling a bit sorry for myself, because my family in the US is getting together and doing all kinds of fun things, and I'm not there. So to help get myself in the Thanksgiving mood, here are some things for which I'm thanking God, in no particular order.

1. My family
2. The chance to have an education
3. Plenty to eat and a safe, dry place to live
4. Work to do which, while often difficult and deeply frustrating, is seldom dull
5. My students (see #4)
6. Good health
7. Electricity and running water - not available to many people in this world, even in the sporadic form in which they are available to me
8. Leisure time
9. Friends
10. God knows my name

Happy Thanksgiving!

I Love Lunch!

A friend told me about Improv Everywhere a couple of weeks ago, but it was just this morning that I really checked it out.

Watch this. I dare you to get through it without smiling.

Twilight Again

I finally saw the Twilight movie, and predictably, it was disappointing. While I find the books very funny in the way they juxtapose the strange vampire lives with the normal world of an American high school, the movie is deadly in earnest, dark, and brooding. Everyone is constantly sighing and gasping, but not speaking much, or at least not very articulately. In the book we are privy to Bella's angst-ridden thoughts, but in the movie we can only hear her gusty breathing and the occasional outburst of a few (usually inane) words.

Probably the biggest problem for me, though, was that it was much harder to suspend disbelief when the story was in front of me in full color. I could never really lose myself in the narrative. I thought the script was embarrassing in places and everything was so dark - literally dark - so that at one point when Charlie handed Bella an object, I couldn't even tell what it was. It turned out to be some pepper spray with which to protect herself, but it looked like a flashlight, which would have been more appropriate.

I did like the prom scene, one of my favorite scenes in the book because it's so funny, but the humor comes across much better in the book. I know Meyer's writing has been criticized a lot, but I thought the books were very entertaining and quite atmospheric. The movie, in spite of some nice scenery, did not come close.

Why they Love Twilight

This just in, from my NCTE Inbox of the week: James Blasingame answers the question.

Articles

These are a few articles I've read recently.

Andrew Sullivan wrote an open letter to former President George Bush in the October issue of the Atlantic. You can read it here. It's about how the United States lost the moral high ground about torture. One passage that will stick with me is this one: "Every dissident in every foul tyranny on Earth, imprisoned and tortured by men and women far less scrupulous than you, now knows something he or she never knew before your presidency: America tortures too. What this will do to the march of freedom you believe in is yet unknown. But my view is that by condoning torture, by allowing it to take place, and by your vice president’s continuing defense and championing of torture as compatible with American traditions, you have done enormous damage to America’s role as a beacon of freedom and to the rule of law."

The other two are on a much less weighty topic: children's literature. Both are from the October 19th issue of the New Yorker. (I know, I'm a little behind in my magazine reading.)

The first one is about picture books, and specifically how their portrayal of kids and parents has changed, so that now parents are presented as tentative people, afraid to exercise authority over their bratty children. Most of the books that he refers to I haven't read, since my children are past the picture book stage, mostly, but this is a hugely entertaining article. You can read it here.

The second one is about how (some) YA books are "created" by committees. I found it eye-opening and a bit disheartening. Sadly the article is only available to subscribers, so check it out at the library or I'll loan you my copy if you live in the same country as I do!

Emergencies

Once you've been living anywhere for a while, you get the routines figured out. You have friends, a support system. You figure out how to get where you need to go, how to get your needs met, how to speak enough of the language for your purposes. Things are basically fine.

Until there is an emergency.

In the United States, we're very used to having someone to call when there's an emergency. Even though I personally have never had to dial 911, I know that when I'm in that country, in the event of a fire, or a crime, or a medical crisis, I could, and a calm voice would talk me through what to do. That's not the case in many (most?) places in the world. In an emergency, you find out how very much on your own you are. Yes, we trust God to be with us and He has protected us many times, but human services are less reliable than He is.

When we first moved to this country, an expat church sponsored a seminar to help newcomers learn what they needed to know. There was a lot of useful information, but one thing that has stuck with me even as I hope I'll never need to know it is that if you call the fire department, you'd better call a water truck too, since the fire engine might not have any water. People we know had a fire, and the truck did get there eventually, but not before driving about for long enough that the flames had pretty much destroyed the whole kitchen. And really, you can't blame the fire department, since most of the roads aren't marked.

Then there was a time a friend called us in a panic because armed men were breaking into her house. We called the police again and again, but they never answered. She lived close enough to us that we could hear the shots her fiance fired outside her gate. After stealing many of her valuables, the men left.

But the medical category is the one where I have the worst stories. There is good medical care where we live but you have to pay for it up front, and if the situation is an emergency, you'd better hope you are near to the doctor, because getting anywhere fast is a challenge. I have often heard, after motorcycle or car accidents, "He wouldn't have died if he had been in the States and received care right away."

Now you have a chance to contribute to buying an ambulance for a birth center in Haiti. Although the center is staffed by midwives who are very competent to deliver babies without a hospital getting involved, many of the women are high risk; in fact, many would risk out of midwife care in the States and would have to deliver with an OB. Therefore, these midwives are likely to have to transport fairly often. They need a reliable vehicle that they can fit out with medical equipment. To this end, a team will be running a marathon in Florida in January. Pick a runner to sponsor or just send a donation to the team. You can find out much more, including beautiful birth stories and information about the runners, by clicking the button below.

In an emergency, like a high risk childbirth, these women need help. They are tough and strong and live lives I could not survive, but they need some extra care at a very vulnerable time. Please help!

War and Peace Update

So on this, my second attempt to read War and Peace, I have reached page 505. (If you follow that link you'll find that this paperback book weighs three pounds.)

It is a bit heavy going (get it? Heavy?), mostly because of the often-remarked-upon Russian naming system. Not only does each character have multiple names, depending on who is addressing them, but there are also multiple "little princesses," "little countesses," and "princes" both old and young. I would very much like a chart of who everyone is and how they are all related, but when I began Googling in an attempt to find such an item, I encountered mostly spoilers, which I didn't want at all.

Anyway, the main characters are pretty much fixed in my mind now, and I'm moving forward. Here are some impressions so far:

* The battle descriptions are wonderful. I usually don't like reading about fights of any kind, but these accounts seem to me to have the perfect combination of fear, confusion, valor, cowardice, and noise. Then I love the way the characters later recast their experiences and turn them into tales of battlefield exploits.

* It's fascinating to read about Pierre and Andrey as each in his own way attempts to do good things for the serfs under his care. I could relate to this, not because I've ever owned legions of human beings and had power of life and death over them, or anything, but because our efforts to help the poor are so often fruitless, or bear completely different fruits from what we had intended.

* While everyone says this is a good translation, I am very much aware that I'm reading a translation and that I'm not getting the full flavor of the original. An example is the "religious pictures" which I'm assuming would be icons, and somehow "religious picture" doesn't have the same connotation at all.

Water

Poetry Friday: November

When I read poems like this one, I give thanks that I live in the tropics, where November is beautiful and warm and I can go to the beach, as I did last weekend. I am happy if this is the closest I get to gloomy November chill. Yet there's something irresistible about de la Mare's melancholy.

November

There is wind where the rose was,
Cold rain where sweet grass was,
And clouds like sheep
Stream o'er the steep
Grey skies where the lark was.

Nought warm where your hand was,
Nought gold where your hair was,
But phantom, forlorn,
Beneath the thorn,
Your ghost where your face was.

Cold wind where your voice was,
Tears, tears where my heart was,
And ever with me,
Child, ever with me,
Silence where hope was.

Walter de la Mare

Here's the Poetry Friday roundup for today.

Theme Day - Doorways

It's the first day of November, and the DP Blog theme for this month is Doorways. You can see thumbnails here. As the poem I posted on Friday shows, you never can predict what will come through a door!

Favorite Podcasts: Sermons

I am something of a connoisseur of sermons, and there are many available as podcasts. Here are some of the ones I've been listening to lately.

The chapels from my alma mater are online. Maybe yours too, if you attended a college with such things as chapels? Try the college website.

So far I like the preaching at Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Yeah, that's where Rob Bell pastors. I kept reading about what a heretic he was so I downloaded a bunch of his sermons to see for myself. So far I haven't heard him say anything heretical. (Understand, please - I'm not saying he's never said anything heretical - but in what I have listened to, I have not heard it.) He also has lots of great guest speakers (some of whom may be heretics, for all I know, but I have heard no heresies). Find these on iTunes under Mars Hill Bible Church or go to the church website here. (And here's hoping I put enough disclaimers into this recommendation to absolve me of all blame.)

I love to listen to Andy Stanley speak. You can look for him at iTunes under North Point Ministries, or check out the church website here. And Andy's a guaranteed non-heretical, fully evangelical guy.

Saturday Review of Books

Here.

Poetry Friday: The Door

The Door

Out of it steps the future of the poor,
Enigmas, executioners and rules,
Her Majesty in a bad temper or
The red-nosed Fool who makes a fool of fools,

Great persons eye it in the twilight for
A past it might so carelessly let in,
A widow with a missionary grin,
The foaming inundation at a roar.

We pile our all against it when afraid,
And beat upon its panels when we die:
By happening to be open once, it made

Enormous Alice see a wonderland
That waited for her in the sunshine, and,
Simply by being tiny, made her cry.

W.H. Auden

Poetry Friday is hosted at Biblio File today.

Dress Up as a Poet

Sooner or later just about everyone has the urge to dress up as a poet, right? I got an email with some helpful suggestions and I thought I should share it with you. You can see the ideas here.

Tuesday

I went to a retreat this weekend and had a great time. I took no work with me at all and just relaxed. While I was there someone asked me about my writing. "You write every day, don't you?" she said.

"Um, no," I said, adding that I would like to be someone who writes every day, but that I'm really not.

But why not? It's clearly just something I have to make time for if it's important to me. Nobody else is going to do it for me.

So, last night I wrote a poem. Actually I didn't even write it from scratch - it was something I had worked on before, and I tinkered with it some more and "finished" it. And then kept getting up every twenty minutes to fix something else about it. I love doing that kind of messing around with a draft, but it takes time and energy that I often don't have after I've spent a couple of hours reading student drafts and responding to them. I am going to keep trying to write - perhaps not every day, but more often than I have been.

I have some students working on short stories this quarter. We have been talking about their main characters. Today I had some useful conferences with kids who have worked out details of plot - mostly gory ones. It is fun to hear their imaginings. One kid told me today that Stephenie Meyer's ideas for the Twilight saga came to her in a dream. Don't we all wish that would happen for us? A dream with all the plot details, and then fame and fortune? Yes, it would sure be nice.

Boy Year

The Book Whisperer is having a Boy Year.

Is it True?

Good stuff over at Stuff Christians Like this morning.

Running for Haitian Women

Tara just got done running a marathon and raising over $60,000 for Medika Mamba. (I told you about that here.) Now she's at it again, this time with a team. They are running a marathon in twelve weeks to raise money for an ambulance.

Read all about it here.

Reading Update

So here are the latest books I have gulped down.

Book #47 was Troy by Adèle Geras. This was named a Publisher's Weekly Best Children's Book of the Year (to name one of the children's book awards listed on the back) - but it is not at all for children. Much as I like retellings of the Troy story, I didn't like this one. It took the epic tale and turned it into a story of some young people who just happen to work for, or run into, or otherwise be aware of the principals. This author handles the whole supernatural element of the Iliad by having characters run into gods, have conversations with them, and immediately forget the whole thing. At first I bought this but I tired of the device pretty quickly.

Book #48, A Northern Light, by Jennifer Donnelly, is not really for children either, but I feel a bit more comfortable putting this one on my shelves than the last. Mattie Gokey is sixteen and lives in the Northern Woods of upstate New York. Mattie wants to go to college, but she promised her dying mother she would take care of the family. She wants to be a writer but she wants to get married. She gets a job at a hotel and there is a witness to some events leading to a mystery; this part of the plot is based on a true story. The book is really about expectations of women, and whether it's possible to have it all. Although it's set in 1906, I think this is still a pretty timely theme. I found Mattie a believable protagonist, and appreciated her struggle, leading to no easy answers.

I've been waiting for a year for the sequel to The Hunger Games, and I read Catching Fire in a few hours and now have to wait at least another year to find out what happens next. This is what you get when you read living authors and get tied up in their series! I never used to do this. I blame it all on Harry Potter. Oh, the book? Catching Fire, book #49 of the year, was just as breathless as the first book. I couldn't put it down and my heart thumped madly the whole way through. My students are going to LOVE it.

Book #50 was a much more sedate reading experience, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, by Sven Birkerts. This was recommended by my friend Janet; here's her great review. Like her, I most enjoyed the chapters about reading and was less interested in the ones about technology and how it's ruining everything. I loved Birkerts' own autobiography of reading and it made me think about writing my own. I will definitely reread this one because there is a huge amount to think about in these pages.

I really did gulp this next one, book #51: Rules, by Cynthia Lord. What a wonderful book! I started reading it at bedtime on a school night and didn't stop until I was finished, nearly 200 pages later. Catherine is twelve and has an autistic brother. She loves him but he is embarrassing. He doesn't know how to act. She decides to help him out by creating rules for him. I thought about this as a read-aloud but, though I want to share it with as many of my students as possible, it really isn't a book to read aloud. It's about different ways of communicating, and there are font changes all through that are for the eye and not the ear. The rules that Catherine makes for David. The word cards that she writes and illustrates for the boy she meets when she goes to occupational therapy with her brother (he can't speak and points to word cards to communicate). The quotes from Frog and Toad books that David uses to express his emotions. The book is funny but it also made me cry. Highly recommended.

In 'Tis, by Frank McCourt (book #52), one of McCourt's teachers tells him his writing has "gusto." It certainly does, and yet the book left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. It covers a lot of the same time frame as Teacher Man (reviewed here) and since all the parts of 'Tis I liked best were the teaching parts, I could have just skipped this one. McCourt's wife asks him at one point what he would do if he weren't Irish, and I was on her side in this, as in much else. She gets tired of him standing her up night after night because he was out drinking with his friends. She even sensibly breaks it off with him more than once. He complains constantly about his sad childhood in Ireland - and sure, it was sad. We got that in Angela's Ashes. The part I disliked the most in this book was when McCourt was in the military (during the Korean War, but stationed in Europe) and was sent to Dachau to do laundry. We see McCourt so emotional over Dachau that he can't eat (and this is an event for the boy who was constantly "starving with the hunger" in Angela's Ashes). Then on the way back with the clean laundry, the soldier boys stop at a refugee camp and pay the refugees with coffee and cigarettes for sex. OK, I guess this is all very honest and human, but it just made me feel sick.

Book #53 was Andrew Clements' Lost and Found, a quick, fun read about a pair of twins who are tired of being treated as a unit. When a clerical error results in only one of them being registered in their new school, they decide to take turns attending. Clements is the father of identical twins and he does a good job of creating two believable brothers.

I've now read lots of Caroline Cooney's books. She is a favorite with many of my students. This one, book #54, was Diamonds in the Shadow, about African refugees with a complicated past. It's exciting and fast-paced. It also treats Africa as a monolithic Place Where Bad Things Happen, but that seems like an ungenerous quibble to make about a book which will make teenagers aware of things that most of them have never thought about before. It really stood out to me because I have an African student at the moment who is sensitive to that label and I won't be able to use this as a read-aloud. This is a great story, though.

Book #55 was also recommended to me as a book for children, just like the one with which I started this post. I'd say it's for older readers because of the relationship in the story. The book is Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow. It has blurbs on the back from Scott Westerfeld and Neil Gaiman, but it also has several techie names I haven't heard of. Marcus is seventeen, and spends much of his time playing games which are a combination of computer games and real-life running around San Francisco. (His handle is "w1n5t0n" - Winston, get it, get it? This is Little Brother, and that was Big Brother? OK, I'm glad you get it.) Marcus and his friends are out playing one of their games when a huge terrorist attack takes place on San Francisco, and the rest of the story is about Homeland Security trying to make everyone safe by taking away their liberties. It's very timely, and very entertaining, but due to the aforementioned mature themes I really don't think I can hand this to the guy in the front row whom I had in mind for it - maybe in a few years.

Now I'm back to attempting War and Peace again. Last time I got over 300 pages into it, and wasn't even a quarter of the way through, and took a few days off from it, and then felt I had lost my train of thought and would never be able to tell all those Annas apart again. I remember a weekend in graduate school when I read two 500 page 19th century novels - in French. I can't really do that any more, now that I am not in driven-graduate-student mode any more, and now that I have children. And now that I spend hours of great reading time blogging...

Of Clothes and Books and Having Too Much

Last night I read that my friend Alana is going to try something new. She's been interested for a long time in simplifying her wardrobe and she's written before about her attraction to a "uniform." Then the other day she read an article about a woman who wore the same dress every day for a month. She started exploring the idea and found that several people had tried similar experiments. But I'll let her tell you about it.

Let me say up front that I have no intention of trying such a thing. I live in a very hot, humid climate, and often my clothes don't make it through a whole day, let alone more than one day. One of the women Alana linked to wrote that she washed the dress that she wore for a year "after every two or three wearings." Nothing lasts two or three wearings for me. Also, I don't have reliable enough water and/or electricity to be doing a load of laundry every single night just so that I can streamline my clothing choices. I think I would be using resources incorrectly.

And then, of course, there's the fact that I wore a school uniform for eight years of my life - four different school uniforms, in fact, including one supremely ugly one which included a tie.

However, all that said, I do find the concept fascinating. Here are some great quotes I gleaned from Alana's links:

"I challenged myself to reject the economic system that pushes over-consumption, and the bill of goods that has been sold, especially to women, about what makes a person good, attractive and interesting. Clothes are a big part of this image, and the expectation in time, effort, and financial investment is immense... [so] let's stop agreeing that the best way for women (in particular) to 'express themselves' is by purchasing new wardrobe items and putting together daily outfits." (from LittleBrownDress.com.)

"Perhaps, on a larger scale, we would waste less of the world’s resources if we were captured in wonder by the curve of a carefully crafted cup; the joyful noise of a neighborhood waking up in the morning; the blessed figure of a human being beside us at the kitchen table. We would no longer be animated by a surface curiosity, a desire to entertain ourselves when we get restless. Aliveness to reality in the active knowing of the God-given character of a thing can satisfy us. It is how we can relate to it on a human level, lovingly." (from The Dress Project.)

Wow. Clearly this goes beyond clothing.

I don't think I have a problem with owning too much clothing (though my husband might disagree), but I do buy way too many books. I should cut back on that. And I would if I lived somewhere with a nearby public library.

But it's about more than how many books I own. It's about how I read. Recently I read The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, by Sven Birkerts. Among many fascinating facts, I learned, in an essay called "The Owl has Flown," about the history of the way people read. People used to read "intensively." Up until about 1750, anyone literate who owned books would only own a few. These would be read over and over and over; they would be memorized. I don't read much this way, with the exception of the Bible, which I have read many times. Mostly I read "extensively." Birkerts describes it this way: "Newspapers, magazines, brochures, advertisements, and labels surround us everywhere - surround us, indeed, to the point of having turned our waking environment into a palimpsest of texts to be read, glanced at, or ignored. It is startling to recall the anecdote about the philosopher Erasmus pausing on a muddy thoroughfare to study a rare scrap of printed paper flickering at his feet."

I read like a starving person - gulp, gulp, gulp, and on to the next book or article or website. I have a huge pile of books I am going to read. Maybe it would benefit me to read less, but more intensively.

Hmm.

It's the same concept: we have so much - and that includes me, living in a third world country as I do and constantly aware of how much more I have than so many around me - that often we don't stop to appreciate and fully enjoy what we do have.

I'll be following Alana's project with interest.