It's quiet here away from my home in Joco. The only sound comes from my
music player which sings me "Llevame a la Cruz" by Hillsong, and I
yearn to pluck the strings of the guitar I left.
I love the stillness here, but I will grow weary of it after a few days
and will soon long for the clamor of my 13 person Mexican tribe.
Whispers of little voices on the wind, with their dozens of white baby
teeth showing, my heart will flicker and the flame will warm the depths
of my soul, renewing my spirit and showing me, once again, a glimpse of
Paradise.
Saturday, September 1, 2012
Friday, March 30, 2012
1944
Tiny flecks of the early dawn
float through the pane glass
waking me.
I try to cling to the fragments
of my quickly fading dream
but it's lost.
Shots are fired, and I recall
my surroundings--a dilapidated house
we took for shelter.
Clenching to my rifle, I stand
from the rubble floor, my stomach turning,
but my mind fully awake
and ready.
[Note: This is the first poem I've written in a year...don't judge me too harshly! :) ]
float through the pane glass
waking me.
I try to cling to the fragments
of my quickly fading dream
but it's lost.
Shots are fired, and I recall
my surroundings--a dilapidated house
we took for shelter.
Clenching to my rifle, I stand
from the rubble floor, my stomach turning,
but my mind fully awake
and ready.
[Note: This is the first poem I've written in a year...don't judge me too harshly! :) ]
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Catching the Wind
(I thought it would be fun to re-post this short story on my "art blog." I wrote this in 2010, when I was still obsessing about buying a sailboat and living on it. Don't fret, I still want to do this, I'm just not as obsessed as I used to be.) Not the best thing I've ever written, but it's fun nonetheless. :)
Catching the Wind
Sea water splashes against the side of my white sailboat as I get my bearings and steer her south-ward toward the Caribbean. Traveling at 6 knots, I feel like I will make it to Bermuda all in good time. The wind blows back my hair, and I pull it into a tight pony tail. The bright blue canvas above me stretches far into the horizon, and I look out at where the sea and sky collide. I can see fins rising up out of the water just off the starboard bow. The dolphins jump alongside my boat for a while until they venture back under the waves and disappear completely. I check my compass again to make sure I'm still on course and then look back out at the horizon. No land in sight. I go below to the galley, quickly make a PB&J and return to the deck to grab the helm.
A few hours pass and the sun gradually dips itself into the sea. A full moon is glowing above me now and the billions of stars twinkle in the blackness. I wander down into the cabin again and check my map. Thirty nautical miles until I would reach Bermuda. I glanced at the clock above the table and it reads, 8:00pm. When I get back to the deck, I watch the black ocean below, feeling a twinge of fear at the thought of a storm making the wind violent instead of calm as it was now. I pulled my jacket on over my head and began thinking about how beautiful Bermuda would be when I arrived and placed my feet on her sandy beach.
Hours passed and the only sound came from the waves below. The wind was chilling, my face cold from the salty splashes of ocean. The sails flapped and then suddenly stopped moving. I grabbed the edge of the sail and moved it back and forth. Nothing. I wanted so badly to reach Bermuda tonight, and it didn't look as though it would happen. My small sailboat bobbed like a message in a glass bottle thrown to sea. I walked to the bow and leaned out, looking at the cold water below me. My eyes drifted up and out. And that was when I saw it; the faint lights of Bermuda. I quickly jumped up and ran down into the cabin to make sure it wasn't a cruise ship that I had seen. When I had confirmed that my position was indeed correct, and that I was looking at Bermuda, I ran down to the engine room to start my diesel. It sputtered a few times and then wouldn't sputter at all.
I went back to the stern of the boat and sat down near the helm, watching and waiting. I thought over and over in my head, "Please, please. Just a little wind. Come on you can do it, wind." I sat, hoping for wind and watching Bermuda's distant lights, imagining a festival in Saint George's. Thirty minutes had passed when I finally felt a breeze. I walked to the mainsail and pulled it back. My sails flapped and finally filled themselves with the surplus of wind. I was off again heading for the lights in the distance and for adventure.
 |
| I took this in California, somewhere just outside of San Diego, I believe. |
Catching the Wind
Sea water splashes against the side of my white sailboat as I get my bearings and steer her south-ward toward the Caribbean. Traveling at 6 knots, I feel like I will make it to Bermuda all in good time. The wind blows back my hair, and I pull it into a tight pony tail. The bright blue canvas above me stretches far into the horizon, and I look out at where the sea and sky collide. I can see fins rising up out of the water just off the starboard bow. The dolphins jump alongside my boat for a while until they venture back under the waves and disappear completely. I check my compass again to make sure I'm still on course and then look back out at the horizon. No land in sight. I go below to the galley, quickly make a PB&J and return to the deck to grab the helm.
A few hours pass and the sun gradually dips itself into the sea. A full moon is glowing above me now and the billions of stars twinkle in the blackness. I wander down into the cabin again and check my map. Thirty nautical miles until I would reach Bermuda. I glanced at the clock above the table and it reads, 8:00pm. When I get back to the deck, I watch the black ocean below, feeling a twinge of fear at the thought of a storm making the wind violent instead of calm as it was now. I pulled my jacket on over my head and began thinking about how beautiful Bermuda would be when I arrived and placed my feet on her sandy beach.
Hours passed and the only sound came from the waves below. The wind was chilling, my face cold from the salty splashes of ocean. The sails flapped and then suddenly stopped moving. I grabbed the edge of the sail and moved it back and forth. Nothing. I wanted so badly to reach Bermuda tonight, and it didn't look as though it would happen. My small sailboat bobbed like a message in a glass bottle thrown to sea. I walked to the bow and leaned out, looking at the cold water below me. My eyes drifted up and out. And that was when I saw it; the faint lights of Bermuda. I quickly jumped up and ran down into the cabin to make sure it wasn't a cruise ship that I had seen. When I had confirmed that my position was indeed correct, and that I was looking at Bermuda, I ran down to the engine room to start my diesel. It sputtered a few times and then wouldn't sputter at all.
I went back to the stern of the boat and sat down near the helm, watching and waiting. I thought over and over in my head, "Please, please. Just a little wind. Come on you can do it, wind." I sat, hoping for wind and watching Bermuda's distant lights, imagining a festival in Saint George's. Thirty minutes had passed when I finally felt a breeze. I walked to the mainsail and pulled it back. My sails flapped and finally filled themselves with the surplus of wind. I was off again heading for the lights in the distance and for adventure.
Friday, April 22, 2011
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Chibi Friends
This picture is pretty large so some of it is cut off here. But I wanted my friends to see it since they are in it. (^-^). From left to right: Savannah, Me, Karye, Hailey, Holly (in bubble cloud: Nathan)
Back from Africa
Non-Fiction
Written by Erin in November 2008
It was somewhere over Egypt that I opened my eyes and stopped my attempt at sleep. When we changed planes in Ethiopia, about five new parents had received their adopted babies, and they had all somehow managed to congregate near the middle of the plane where I was seated. It was like any other plane: unstable pullout table, phone booth bathrooms, and uncomfortable chairs. The only way of reaching slight comfort was to be privileged enough to have a window seat. I didn’t have a window seat. My neck hurt from trying to sleep upright; my head bobbled back and forth. Air flowed through a small, circular vent above me, and I turned it off to keep myself from freezing. I asked a flight attendant for a blanket and she came back with a very thin cloth that read Ethiopian Airlines. A large woman was sitting a few rows behind me and couldn’t keep her children quiet. The children cried and complained about how the seats were uncomfortable. The large woman threatened to spank them the entire trip back to the States. My friend Elizabeth sat next to me, sleeping soundly next to the window.
I continued to look back at the large woman and her children, but she took no notice of anyone else on the plane. I rolled my eyes and whispered to my other friend, Jonathan, who was seated nearby playing cards. “I can’t go to sleep,” I said, pointing to the large woman in the back.
“Yeah, I gave up on that a long time ago,” he laughed. “Wanna play cards? There’s a free seat over here.”
“No thanks,” I replied. “Maybe I’ll fall asleep if I watch a movie.”
“Good idea.”
The small TV flickered in front of me. There was a digital map of the plane flying over the Mediterranean Sea. I leaned over to look out the window. It was dark. I searched through the seven channels and thought that it was odd to see American movies on the screen again. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, we had a small TV that played French cartoons and awful Swahili music videos. My friends and I would sit around the TV early on Thursday mornings, after our breakfast of tea, bread, butter, jam, and cheese. Thursdays were our free day, our weekend. We sat around the TV, intently watching the cartoons. We couldn’t understand anything apart from bonjour and merci, but we got the general idea. When the cartoons went off, the Swahili music videos began. Many of them were similar and looked like they had been filmed with a home video camera. The videos consisted of bad lip syncing, tropical backgrounds, and dizzying camera movements. They played constantly throughout the day. One night my friends and I had eaten dinner later than usual when suddenly American music videos appeared on the television. We ran from the table and watched as if to soak in our American pop culture. We had watched Congolese television for the past two months, and we were ready for the better quality. But I wasn’t sure if it was right of me to want it so quickly. After I chose a movie, I realized that I was headed home and knew that I wouldn’t be back for a long time.
By the time I finished the movie, we had landed in Italy to re-fuel. We all sat in the plane for the next forty-five minutes, waiting. I tried to sleep but not five minutes had gone by when the attendants began offering us small covered plates of Ethiopian plane food. One of the attendants was repeatedly nudging me, and I woke up to find the clear, covered plate in front of me. Square yellow bread and cheese was in one space of the tray, while a spicy meat roll and normal green salad was in another. “What to drink?” she asked dumbly, as though she had done nothing to disturb me. Food was obviously more important than sleep. I wanted so much to yell at her, saying that I didn’t want the food, that all I wanted was thirty minutes of rest. But I was nice and told her that I wanted the apple juice. I usually took the food even if I wasn’t hungry, just to have something to do. I ate out of boredom.
As we sat in the plane eating the food, a group of Ethiopian girls, all wearing the same bright blue windbreakers, did back-bends for some of the passengers. The adults who were accompanying them were telling the nearby passengers why they were traveling to America. They were a gymnast team competing in a competition somewhere in America. The man talked for a long time.
When the plane took off again, I went to the telephone booth-sized bathroom to brush my teeth. There was a line of little girls. I finally got to the bathroom, brushed my teeth, and went back to my seat, putting on my headphones. We were soon flying over the Atlantic Ocean, something familiar.
When we reached Washington, D.C., I whispered to Jonathan again.
“How long have we been awake?”
He counted in his head for a few minutes.
“Um, about forty eight hours.”
“Really?”
“Well, we only got a few hours of sleep the night before we left. So we’ll say three hours of sleep in forty-eight hours. And we still have the entire day ahead of us.”
I groaned. My head hurt. The children were still crying.
By the time we reached Kansas City I was delusional. I couldn’t remember landing in Kansas. When we reached our hotel for our debriefing sessions my friends and I had to stay awake the rest of the day. My head bobbled as I tried to pay attention to the session, which didn’t happen. My team and I had been awake for sixty hours. We went to our hotel rooms, and I crumbled onto the bed, falling asleep instantly.
There were four of us on the DR Congo team. We had all signed up to go to Africa through an organization that sends college students on overseas summer mission trips. We stayed with the Ibanda’s, a Congolese family, and taught the surrounding community how to prevent AIDS and HIV. We taught English classes and Sunday school classes while also visiting surrounding Congolese universities.
But now we were back in America and didn’t want to speak of Africa right away. I wanted to push it to the back of my mind. I wanted to be an American again. But Milly Ibanda’s voice pushed its way into my head: This is the problem we have in Africa. We had seen children running shoeless and hungry through the streets. They stayed far from the orphanages because it was easier to steal than to wait in line for necessities. Some churches had no roofs, only tarps to keep out the rain. This is the problem we have in Africa. Rebel soldiers hid in the jungle, waiting for the right time to begin another war. The water from Lake Kivu was contaminated, yet the people had no choice but to drink it. Children felt through our pockets for Congolese Francs or candy as we walked in the streets. This is the problem we have in Africa.
It was somewhere over in Africa that I said that I wanted to change things. I wanted to help the beautiful people of the DR Congo. It was that summer that I said I would do something about the poverty there. But time away has been difficult. I forget about things I never believed I would forget, and I flip through my journal to remember. I can’t remember the taste of passion fruit or sugar cane. I have forgotten some of my friends’ voices, but I can still see their faces. A lady from English class was so excited that she could say, “Goodbye, I am going to the store to buy food for my family. See you tomorrow.” She never thought that she would ever learn English. I remember teaching a toddler how to walk and teaching him to say hi and bye in English. I remember him climbing down from his mother and walking toward us, waving and saying bye-bye as we walked into the airport. As I sit here, thinking of these people and the memories I have kept of them, I wonder when I will be going back to Africa. And I hope it’s soon.
Written by Erin in November 2008
It was somewhere over Egypt that I opened my eyes and stopped my attempt at sleep. When we changed planes in Ethiopia, about five new parents had received their adopted babies, and they had all somehow managed to congregate near the middle of the plane where I was seated. It was like any other plane: unstable pullout table, phone booth bathrooms, and uncomfortable chairs. The only way of reaching slight comfort was to be privileged enough to have a window seat. I didn’t have a window seat. My neck hurt from trying to sleep upright; my head bobbled back and forth. Air flowed through a small, circular vent above me, and I turned it off to keep myself from freezing. I asked a flight attendant for a blanket and she came back with a very thin cloth that read Ethiopian Airlines. A large woman was sitting a few rows behind me and couldn’t keep her children quiet. The children cried and complained about how the seats were uncomfortable. The large woman threatened to spank them the entire trip back to the States. My friend Elizabeth sat next to me, sleeping soundly next to the window.
I continued to look back at the large woman and her children, but she took no notice of anyone else on the plane. I rolled my eyes and whispered to my other friend, Jonathan, who was seated nearby playing cards. “I can’t go to sleep,” I said, pointing to the large woman in the back.
“Yeah, I gave up on that a long time ago,” he laughed. “Wanna play cards? There’s a free seat over here.”
“No thanks,” I replied. “Maybe I’ll fall asleep if I watch a movie.”
“Good idea.”
The small TV flickered in front of me. There was a digital map of the plane flying over the Mediterranean Sea. I leaned over to look out the window. It was dark. I searched through the seven channels and thought that it was odd to see American movies on the screen again. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, we had a small TV that played French cartoons and awful Swahili music videos. My friends and I would sit around the TV early on Thursday mornings, after our breakfast of tea, bread, butter, jam, and cheese. Thursdays were our free day, our weekend. We sat around the TV, intently watching the cartoons. We couldn’t understand anything apart from bonjour and merci, but we got the general idea. When the cartoons went off, the Swahili music videos began. Many of them were similar and looked like they had been filmed with a home video camera. The videos consisted of bad lip syncing, tropical backgrounds, and dizzying camera movements. They played constantly throughout the day. One night my friends and I had eaten dinner later than usual when suddenly American music videos appeared on the television. We ran from the table and watched as if to soak in our American pop culture. We had watched Congolese television for the past two months, and we were ready for the better quality. But I wasn’t sure if it was right of me to want it so quickly. After I chose a movie, I realized that I was headed home and knew that I wouldn’t be back for a long time.
By the time I finished the movie, we had landed in Italy to re-fuel. We all sat in the plane for the next forty-five minutes, waiting. I tried to sleep but not five minutes had gone by when the attendants began offering us small covered plates of Ethiopian plane food. One of the attendants was repeatedly nudging me, and I woke up to find the clear, covered plate in front of me. Square yellow bread and cheese was in one space of the tray, while a spicy meat roll and normal green salad was in another. “What to drink?” she asked dumbly, as though she had done nothing to disturb me. Food was obviously more important than sleep. I wanted so much to yell at her, saying that I didn’t want the food, that all I wanted was thirty minutes of rest. But I was nice and told her that I wanted the apple juice. I usually took the food even if I wasn’t hungry, just to have something to do. I ate out of boredom.
As we sat in the plane eating the food, a group of Ethiopian girls, all wearing the same bright blue windbreakers, did back-bends for some of the passengers. The adults who were accompanying them were telling the nearby passengers why they were traveling to America. They were a gymnast team competing in a competition somewhere in America. The man talked for a long time.
When the plane took off again, I went to the telephone booth-sized bathroom to brush my teeth. There was a line of little girls. I finally got to the bathroom, brushed my teeth, and went back to my seat, putting on my headphones. We were soon flying over the Atlantic Ocean, something familiar.
When we reached Washington, D.C., I whispered to Jonathan again.
“How long have we been awake?”
He counted in his head for a few minutes.
“Um, about forty eight hours.”
“Really?”
“Well, we only got a few hours of sleep the night before we left. So we’ll say three hours of sleep in forty-eight hours. And we still have the entire day ahead of us.”
I groaned. My head hurt. The children were still crying.
By the time we reached Kansas City I was delusional. I couldn’t remember landing in Kansas. When we reached our hotel for our debriefing sessions my friends and I had to stay awake the rest of the day. My head bobbled as I tried to pay attention to the session, which didn’t happen. My team and I had been awake for sixty hours. We went to our hotel rooms, and I crumbled onto the bed, falling asleep instantly.
There were four of us on the DR Congo team. We had all signed up to go to Africa through an organization that sends college students on overseas summer mission trips. We stayed with the Ibanda’s, a Congolese family, and taught the surrounding community how to prevent AIDS and HIV. We taught English classes and Sunday school classes while also visiting surrounding Congolese universities.
But now we were back in America and didn’t want to speak of Africa right away. I wanted to push it to the back of my mind. I wanted to be an American again. But Milly Ibanda’s voice pushed its way into my head: This is the problem we have in Africa. We had seen children running shoeless and hungry through the streets. They stayed far from the orphanages because it was easier to steal than to wait in line for necessities. Some churches had no roofs, only tarps to keep out the rain. This is the problem we have in Africa. Rebel soldiers hid in the jungle, waiting for the right time to begin another war. The water from Lake Kivu was contaminated, yet the people had no choice but to drink it. Children felt through our pockets for Congolese Francs or candy as we walked in the streets. This is the problem we have in Africa.
It was somewhere over in Africa that I said that I wanted to change things. I wanted to help the beautiful people of the DR Congo. It was that summer that I said I would do something about the poverty there. But time away has been difficult. I forget about things I never believed I would forget, and I flip through my journal to remember. I can’t remember the taste of passion fruit or sugar cane. I have forgotten some of my friends’ voices, but I can still see their faces. A lady from English class was so excited that she could say, “Goodbye, I am going to the store to buy food for my family. See you tomorrow.” She never thought that she would ever learn English. I remember teaching a toddler how to walk and teaching him to say hi and bye in English. I remember him climbing down from his mother and walking toward us, waving and saying bye-bye as we walked into the airport. As I sit here, thinking of these people and the memories I have kept of them, I wonder when I will be going back to Africa. And I hope it’s soon.
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