The Harvest Time of Life: A Mini-Memoir

Last Sunday, Stuart and I celebrated the last day of August with one of our many bike rides in the hill/woods/lake country here in southwestern Michigan. We have enjoyed watching the grape vines become green, then produce fruit, and soon we will get to observe the harvest.  Next Tuesday another sign of the season arrives–all the neighborhood children will pile back into the vans and buses and trucks they so exuberantly escaped from in June. And so it goes.

Harvest is a good theme for all summers, but perhaps especially for the summer of 2009 in our lives. We celebrated 40 years of marriage and reflected on what we learned here. We helped prepare both of our children for their weddings, and now we are only a week away from the celebration of Anthony and Chelsea and only eight months away from the date Kate and Nik have set, May 1. Weddings celebrate the harvest of investments families and friends have made in their children and in the hope of future generations.

Institutions enjoy harvest seasons also. At Goshen College, where Stuart and I served together for 28 years, and where I was president for the last 8 of those years, harvest comes twice a year–at graduation in May and in the welcoming of the new class in August. The new “crop” of students at GC was large and enthusiastic this year to the delight of many.

President Jim Brenneman’s wonderful opening convocation address, which you can read here, focused on Healing the World Peace by Peace. President Brenneman has embraced the core values of Christ-Centered, Global Citizens, Compassionate Peacemakers, Passionate Learners, and Servant Leaders that the community adopted in 2002, four years before he arrived. Each president and administration gets the opportunity to start over–and needs to–but when some of the work deepens and grows from generation to generation,the fruit harvested deserves to be called heirloom. The core values simply named what Goshen College had been at its best in the previous century. They live on because the college continues to need, value, nurture, and support them.

Some of the joy seeds we tried to spread fell on rocky soil during the eight years of my presidency, 1996-2004. But a few other seeds hit pay dirt and continue to prosper and grow year after year. One tradition I especially loved was the applause tunnel. Here is the 2009 applause tunnel:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4FvBwD8IMA&hl=en&fs=1&]

Below is another Goshen College video. This one celebrates the love of soccer and soccer teams at GC. I love the blend of urban and rural (rapper next to a corn field), the willingness to claim peacemaker identity even on the field of “battle,” and the connection between music,  sports, and the “5 cores”–the five core values: May each new generation harvest them with as much creativity as the one now filling the residence halls, classrooms, and green spaces of Goshen College.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70hkaOCFq8M&hl=en&fs=1&]

Mini-Memoir: What I Learned from Students in Haiti and the Ivory Coast (on SST)

The question comes to me from a blogger in Orange County, CA, who has a following in her own blog from ex-patriots all over the world.  What did you learn from your students in Haiti and in the Ivory Coast?

First of all, you need to know about the Goshen College Study-Service Term (SST).  This program, begun in 1968, is unique in American higher education.  First, it is a general education requirement.  That means the vast majority of students study abroad for one semester.  Second, it takes place in a significantly different (not junior year abroad in Europe!) culture from that of the U.S. (right now that means Jamaica, Peru, China) and over the years students have studied in more than 15 countries.  And third, it includes some kind of service–a mini-Peace Corps-like experience.

My husband Stuart and I were faculty leaders in Haiti 1981-82.

We had another group of Haiti SSTers whose picture I could not locate.  Anyone reading this post who has such a picture–please send it!

Below is our Ivory Coast group (1993).

A number of our students during these three semesters are now our friends on Facebook. I invite them to make comments on what they now value about the experience, looking back.  Here are a few memories labeled by what I learned.

Curiosity

I was 33 years old, the mother of a 5-year-old and a recently minted PhD when our family went to Haiti.  I loved the country immediately and was heartbroken by it at the same time.  So much poverty and ecological degradation, yet so much beauty, joy, and spiritual energy.  When our first group of students disembarked, one month after our own arrival, Stuart, Anthony, and I were excited.  We rode with them from the airport to the unit house on the little bus driven by Danilo, our storytelling driver.  The students wasted no time in jumping into the new culture.  “Bon soir!” they shouted to bystanders as we pulled out of the airport driveway.  Soon they were kissing host family members on both checks.  And then they were whisked away.  They told us tales in their journals of how they learned.  Often it was from their younger “brothers” and “sisters” whose simpler vocabularies, patience, and curiosity turned them into great teachers.

Here’s one of those young teachers–Francesca–cavorting in the wild flowers with our son Anthony.

Courage

It takes a lot of courage to live in someone else’s home in a strange land, speaking their language imperfectly, and losing the comfort of the familiar.  As leaders, we had our own family around us and our own house to live in.  Students were quick to point out that they were subject to more culture shock than we were due to these facts.  They were right.  Of course, it takes a little courage to take on the responsibility of the health, wellbeing, and learning of 12-23 other people, but we didn’t argue about who was braver.  We helped each other focus.  There were mishaps of all kinds from the minor cuts and scrapes to some truly scary situations.  And some students were struggling with difficulties at home that we knew only superficially.  But every student taught us something about our own fears and how to face them.

Students read their journals aloud in some of our meetings.  We would laugh and cry together, releasing fear and gathering strength from each other.  I remember stories about witnessing a beating, seeing vigilante justice in the streets, trying to explain complicated ideas in French and feeling like a fool, feelings of anger toward “ugly Americans” on cruise ships who tossed quarters into the ocean to watch the poor Haitians dive for them.  Students absorbed these shocks and found equilibrium in the midst of great change.  We admired them and found it easy to put our arms around them, literally and figuratively.

Humility

We were not experts in almost anything on SST.  We were not excellent speakers of French or Creole.  We were not anthropologists or comparative religion or literature savants.  We were instead immersed, like the students themselves, in reading as much as we could about the culture, making friends at the university with professors who lectured on their specialties to all of us.  We learned that we could be servants of our students in facilitating learning and that as they learned something new, we did also.

Students also learned humility.  The majority of them were white and the majority of the host country citizens were black.  The complications of navigating racial difference in this setting helped them become more aware of what it feels like to be in a minority.  The perceptions of America abroad, often created by television and movies, made it hard for our students to feel understood as individuals rather than types.  This, too, was humbling.

Love

The most important lesson our students taught us was love.  At the end of every semester, after students had returned from spending six weeks in the villages and towns outside the capitol city, they greeted us and each other with shouts of joy and tears of gratitude for all that they had learned.  They shared stories of looking up at the stars at night through the open roof of a shack and feeling wonder–wealth–in the midst of what would have seemed like deprivation before.  They told us of the farewells they had experienced as a whole village walked with them, carrying their bags to the bus station, and they marveled at the way their complicated lives had simplified when there was time to talk and walk and experience nature.  Sometimes they told us they felt wrapped in God’s love and in the prayers of friends and family even in the loneliest, scariest times.  Othertimes, they trusted us with the depth of their despair–another form of love. They thanked us for being their surrogate parents, cultural guides, nurses and doctors, guidance counselors, and friends.  We thanked them for their resilience, curiosity, comradeship, energy, and insight.

But we can never thank them, and the people of Haiti and Cote d”Ivoire who shared their lives with us, enough.  We lived enough in these three semesters to continue learning the rest of our lives.

Thank you, SSTers, wherever you are!  And I hope at least a few of you add your own thoughts below.

What have you learned from your experiences in a foreign land, whether on SST or in any other setting?

Mini-Memoir: How Long Have I Been Teaching Memoir?

How long have I been teaching memoir writing? On its face, the answer is, “not very,” but I can also truthfully say “about 40 years.”

How can both be true?  The recent teaching comes in the form of workshops I have blogged about previously– three sessions at the Fetzer Institute and two about workshops given at my church. Each of these experiences reminded me of how much I love the interplay between teaching and learning.

That love began in childhood with my admiration for and occasional adoration of some very good teachers.  There was Mrs. Lochner, in the sixth grade, who doubled as both the principal and a teacher at Fairland Elementary School in Manheim, PA.  She was tall, pulled her grey hair into a bun but not so tightly that wisps could not escape and form waves around her face.  When she walked, she might have been a general, striding across the battlefield, leather strop in hand.  Or a mother lion, moving so gracefully that one might forget those same liquid limbs have mawed other animals into meat in seconds.

Mrs. Lochner picked me to be a reader.  Every day I would open the book of the month to a new chapter and read to the whole class after lunch.  The book was The Wind in the Willows I wanted to be a teacher myself from that time forward.

I taught high school English for two years at Harrisonburg (VA) High School.  Then Stuart and I went to grad school at the University of Texas at Austin, where I taught in both the English and American Studies departments.  In each of these locations I taught writing, always learning myself along with the students.  I found that when I could get them engaged with their own interests, telling personal stories, they would write much better than if the were describing the pros or cons of capital punishment or other subjects remote from their view and their experience.

At Goshen College I taught English and women studies.  My favorite assignment in one of my most frequently taught courses was the personal essay, which is very much like a memoir, except that the essay still follows the thesis pattern and a memoir is more like a series of scenes.  I don’t remember any of the research papers my students wrote, and I graded into the wee hours of the night, but I do recall the personal essays–the wig worn by one student’s mother as she laughed at breast cancer and won, the way the stars looked from an outhouse at midnight in a foreign land, why Pepsi is better than Coke, a cathedral’s impact on a student’s vision and identity.

Goshen’s signature program is international service-learning in a “significantly different” (usually third world) culture.  Stuart and I led two groups of students:  Haiti in 1980-81 and the Ivory Coast, West Africa, in 1993.  All students write daily journals about their experiences, and we as leaders, read all of these. 

Here I am with son Anthony overlooking the denuded mountains outside of Port au Prince, 1981.

What have I learned from my students?  That’s a question I’ll answer next.  Have any other questions about memoir or about me?