Bind Us Together

Over January, I took a course called "Development Ethics in Jamaica." For two weeks, our class worked with local volunteers and workmen on expanding a basic school in the rural village of Bamboo, Jamaica.

On our final day at the Ebenezer Basic School in Bamboo, Jamaica, our work team arrived to find that the children and their teachers had waited for us to start their morning devotions in the adjoining church. The children sang—90 three, four, and five year-olds in school uniforms—and we sang back.


Later, after lunch, the school and the church threw a farewell ceremony for us. Near the end, Mrs. Carol White, the principal teacher at the school, called us up to the front of the church to present each of us with a small gift. Lined up on both sides of her were Mrs. White’s fellow teachers and the two churchwomen who had taken care of us for two weeks, Mrs. Williams and Auntie Lena. Each woman leaned over the communion railing to hug me, and the others in our team, tightly in turn.

Tourists do not get tearful hugs.


We circled up to sing spirituals. Mrs. Williams held my left hand and Auntie Lena gripped my right. We swung our hands up into the air each time we sang, “Bind us together, Lord. Bind us together, Lord, with bonds that cannot be broken.”

Tourists are not bound together with the people of the place they came to see.

Five Signs

Standing in the snowdrift
with five flashing construction signs,
I puffed my cigarette in the dark
when I thought it was my turn.

Ruthie

Then I said sort of, "Wake me when it thunders, Ruthie. Please. It's okay. I mean, wake me when it thunders."

That made her cry harder. Funny kid. But she wakes me now, that's what I mean. It's okay with me. I mean it's okay with me. I don't care if it thunders every night.

--J. D. Salinger, "Both Parties Concerned"

"The Last Thing I Want to Be is Forgettable"

I have to admit, when I first walked in the X last Monday, I was a little leery. For some reason, I knew right away that we were going to get in a circle and hold hands. Not that I'm opposed to that sort of thing, or anything, I just need a little time to warm up. It's not always easy for me to embrace new things. In fact, that is one of the things that I like about theatre: the perpetual challenge, the ongoing dare, the prodding, the danger, the cliff. In a way, I like that it is not easy . . . And then, my fears were of course realized, and I was holding hands with people I didn't know and there was this profoundly sensitive man asking us to reveal to the group something that really mattered to us. My heart started to pound. What was I going to say? Should I make something up? No, I'm not a very good liar (and I call myself an actor!). Should I say something that kind of matters to me, perhaps I could sort of say something general, like the election, and just sort of fudge my answer a bit so that everybody just nods in agreement (like, say something that everybody is supposed to care about) and then my turn will be over, and yes, I won't stand out, but this time that would be a good thing, I could blend in, and be forgettable.

No. That's not me. The last thing I want to be is forgettable.

So, right there I decided. I am going to try this. I'll say what's really on my mind. Fuck it. These people will know, but there's no freedom unless you're vulnerable first. So, I did it. Then I turned a corner. I realized, that sharing something intimate or important to me or something that really matters to me, doesn't necessarily have to be anything sexual, or a profound weakness of mine, or anything like that, it just needs to matter to me enough that I need to share it.

--Chase Korte

1982-2007

Embracing Skeletons

Sarah submitted this link to a Yahoo! News article from last week. It is a photo of "a pair of 6,000-year-old skeletons found by Italian archaeologists in a dying embrace."

Photos of Saints

While I was in Egypt during January of 2004, I traveled with a group of other college students deep into the desert to visit a Coptic monastery. The monk who greeted us had been a mathematician. Now, he said, he was searching for God. I suspect it wasn't so great a leap.

The monk took us down to the crypt. He showed us an ornate, brightly lacquered coffin. He said a saint was inside and that if we touched the coffin while we prayed, the spirit of this Coptic saint would do his best to see our prayers answered.

The monk stepped away to let us pray. We took out our cameras instead. Through the flashes, I caught sight of the monk against a shadowed wall at the back of the crypt. He looked so sad.

This One Small Box

I have this box. It lives quietly on the bottom shelf of my nightstand. It doesn’t get visited all that often, but it is a very important box. It is worth more to me than all the money in a Swiss bank. If my house was burning (and my son was safe) I would likely run back inside to rescue this one small box. It is the most precious non-living thing on this earth to me.

What, you might ask, is so special about this box? Well, the box itself is really no big deal. It’s small, brown, and rather ordinary with a worn-out AT&T logo on top. Other than the “Do Not X-ray” note on its cover there is nothing particularly striking about it, but this was the box my first Valentine from my husband came in. Inside this box are dozens and dozens of hand written love letters, the result of us being apart for four months very early on in our love-affair. This box contains my hard-evidence of the crazy, all-encompassing love that lived here on earth for a while. As I read the words of some of these letters I can’t help but feel that my husband misses me now just as much as I miss him.

So, when I find myself desperately lonely for this person I loved so much that has now left, I simply open up this box and read his words of our love. His words, written in his own hand, sustain me. I know for certain that they will, in fact, sustain me for the rest of my life. This box will help me remember to be hopeful, to remember that love like this does exist here on earth, if only for a little while. I am thankful that I was able to be a part of this love that was and am grateful every day for the gift of this one small box.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Contributed by Sarah.

Uncle Louis

Last weekend, I ate breakfast with good friends at Uncle Louis Cafe in Duluth. It's a hole-in-the-wall kind of diner. It's a place where you can get a full breakfast for five bucks, never see the bottom of your coffee cup, and cheer on the latest challenger to the pancake-eating record (eight or nine cakes) tacked to the wall behind the counter.

Even though I moved away two years ago, the purple-haired waitress at Louis still knows exactly what I want.

She was scribbling my order down as she approached the table. "You havin' your usual?"

"What else would I order?"

"You know, we changed things up a little bit since you've been gone. You can get french toast instead of pancakes, if you want."

"I'll stay with the chocolate-chip pancakes."

"Alright, but chocolate-chip french toast is pretty good, too." She scribbled something more down. "You going with the hashbrowns today?"

"You know it," I replied.

She eyed me skeptically. "You sure? Remember you didn't finish it last time."

"That was months ago." I grasped for any shred of redeeming evidence. "I'm hungry enough."

"Alright, alright," she said.

The purple-haired waitress returned a half-hour later to clear the plates from our table. She shook her head when she saw mine.

"You did a shit-job eating your breakfast."

"I'm sorry. I'll start training on the weekends."

"You said that last time you were here and you still didn't finish."

I threw my hands up. "You're right. I'm a bum." I shook my fist in the air and cried, "I coulda been a contender. I coulda been a contender."

She laughed, leaving behind a tab, written in that secret diner script, for the four of us to puzzle over and split.

It's getting really beautiful, now

I wrote the following on a napkin from a fast food restaurant last April. It also appears in the opening pages of the 2006 Liner, Hamline University's yearbook.

"It's getting really beautiful, now." I say that to myself whenever things start to fall apart. Like a mantra with the intake of every breath.

In the slipping of one moment into the next, in the dissolution of present circumstance, the shards of what I hoped mattered glimmer. With a new start, there I am in them. A thousand little parts, each image still unmistakably me.

I could gather them up, build something and cast a shadow. But there's something worth noting right now. It compels me to stand still, breathe, and let the pieces rest undisturbed for a few moments longer.

Chapel Ceilings

Scattered throughout my little black notebooks are pieces of a story I made up about Michelangelo, the Renaissance painter. It takes place when he's older and stuck at a stuffy court banquet.

A snobby moralist is lamenting over the decline in art, spittle drying on chapped lips. "I mean, these artists, they paint prostitutes and bowls of fruit, of all things. What happened to the divine in art?" He gestures, sweeping his bored audience's attention to Michelangelo, "What happened to the Sistine Chapel?"

Michelangelo doesn't look up from the shapes he's drawing on the table with beads of spilled wine. "I could paint the Chapel," he says, "because I painted the pears and the prostitutes, all of them, like they belong on a chapel ceiling."

Most of this is in Italian, of course. And none of it actually happened.

Half-Marathon

On March 31st, I am going to attempt to run a half-marathon. My goal is simply to finish without walking, but I have decided that it is a good idea to prepare myself so I don’t die trying. For the past few weeks, I’ve been running in the afternoons after school. Normally, I like to run by myself, listening to my discman and working off the stress of the day.
Last Thursday, I started to run just like any other day. I was ready to go with my music, and looking forward to a nice, slow 5K jog. However, right before I reached to main dirt road, a 15 year old girl came running after me. “ke nyaka go kitima le leina,” she said. (I want to run with you). She was wearing a tank top (and no bra), a wrap-around skirt, and had no shoes. I agreed to let her come, thinking that she would last about 100m, then turn around and go home. So we started to run. She was running rather fast, and I had to struggle to keep up with her. Again, I thought that she would tire of this pace and turn around in no time. But she kept running. Fast.

We passed the stream with the goats and cows drinking. We passed Koko (my 71-year old host mother), who was out herding the goats. And we kept going. Pretty soon, I heard little voices behind us. About 8 small children, none over the age of 9, were sprinting after us. They also wanted to run. However, I knew that they wouldn’t be able to keep up. Chasing after us was a fun game, and they would quickly tire of the long jog. …wrong again! Somehow, these children (also without shoes), managed to run the rest of the way with us. They were sweating and breathing hard, but each one kept up—and they were going faster than me!!

So here I was, out of breath, running very fast so that I would not be beaten by a bunch of kids without shoes, as many of the villagers watched on. When we were about 1 km from home, we once again passed Koko. This time though, she raced out to the road and started running with us!! It was quite the spectacle for Jakkalskuil to see: a white girl, a bunch of shoeless kids, and a grandmother in a long dress, all running together on the dirt road!!

will admit, I was very skeptical of this rag-tag group of running partners, but now I’ve found that they are the best incentive I have, and will help me to not only finish the half marathon, but run rather fast as well!

Contributed by Erica.
For more stories from South Africa, visit http://ericainsouthafrica.blogspot.com/