Category: Memories

Children of Ethiopia

One of the most memorable trips I have taken past was to Ethiopia. There have been few trips that have left such a mark on my inner most being. Aside from the level of poverty I witnessed, it was the simple joy that the children displayed in the face of such hardships.

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My partner and I decided to join a Humanitarian group that was bringing aide to the Great Rift Valley village of Sheshamene. We brought medical aide, new baby packages, hygiene kits and items needed for fresh water filters.  There were twenty of us in the group including doctors and nurses, engineers and workers.

The drive through the Rift Valley was beautiful and aside from a small village of round mud huts and the procession of women walking along the side of the road with jugs of water on their heads, the abject poverty was not apparent. The road soon turned off and we were on our way to the village. The closer we got the more people we encountered… the children appeared out of the bush and ran along side the bus for the last mile smiling and yelling hello.

The next week we would be living in a makeshift tent village surrounded by armed guards and bramble bushes to keep out the hyenas and other nocturnal beasts that roamed the plains. We assisted the hundreds of villagers… some walking days to get medical aide from our doctors. We went into the village and built raised stoves with proper ventilation, helped them with drip irrigation, and showed them how to build clean water filters.

This trip changed my life forever.  It always amazes me that people can live in such conditions and still find something to smile about… something to live for.  The children and adults alike loved to swarm around us to get their pictures taken with our digital cameras and then would want to see their pictures in the small screen. The youngest children would walk with us and hold our hands and smile up at us with their big toothy grins. I saw things and experienced things that no person should ever see… things beyond our “fixing”.  It made me grateful for what we have… made me sad for the seriousness of these peoples short tortured lives.

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via Daily Prompt: Swarm

Mr Jiggles… a Childhood Memory

When I was a very young child, I am guessing 4 or 5, we had an old black man who lived in a small little shack situated on the edge of the drainage canal by the truck yard. I remember he seemed quite small compared to other adults I knew, and in Baltimore, in the late 60’s, the fact that he was a black man in a predominately white neighborhood, stood out more than anything.

Mr Jiggles was a kind old man and would sit on his porch swing in the heat and humidity of a summer evening and play his harmonica. The sound of the harmonica would drift over the sound of the traffic from the main street. Beside his house he had an old truck tire full of dirt that he grew tomatoes in. I remember he would wonder up and down the alleyway selling them for 5 cents a piece. Maybe that is how he made a living since I can’t ever remember a time when he wasn’t sitting on his porch swing.

The memories of a child. The tainted memories from an era of hatred and bigotry, instilled on me by the adults I looked up to.

Mr Jiggles… now that I look back… had a very hard life. My memories of him are nothing more that those mentioned above. If I was to meet this kind sole today, I wonder if I would have the same impressions of this gentle little man? Would I pity him? His life was simple… yet incredibly hard… but he always seemed happy.

The last memory I have of Mr Jiggles was a city crew tearing down his little shack and chucking all the items from inside into a garbage truck. Mr Jiggles was gone… his music could still be heard late in the evening, on a humid summer night… if you sat still enough and listened.

Daily Prompt

via Daily Prompt: Jiggle

Stock photo from The West Virginia Gazette

The Fear Factor

If anyone our age tells you that they are not afraid to do something new, give up everything they have, quit their job, sell their homes, cash out their retirement accounts and leave whatever family and friends they have, I’d say they are not centered in reality.

As human beings we resist change. People cling to religion because it is a constant in their lives. They stay in their homes till they die or they can no longer live alone.

We are at a jumping off point that is like jumping off a 700 foot cliff with a wing suit as safety equipment. Oh… and with no prior training. Do not hesitate. Yes websites, blogs, Facebook and many other publications exist that make this journey a bit more manageable… but the actual “doing” is scary as hell!

Twenty years ago even thinking about doing this would have been a daunting undertaking. Where do you start? Where is it safe to cross a border? Where is it safe to spend the night? What do you need to cross a border? The world was a huge unknown for the most part. The US state department made you so afraid to venture into other countries. As a visual learner, I find the task at hand much easier to comprehend. The how to exists out there. YouTube, Blog sites, Facebook pages for expats, AIRBNB, VRBO, where to go and how to manuals are everywhere.

When we were younger this would’ve been an absolute thrilling notion, like when we hit the road back in 1993/4. Cell phones were new on the market and very expensive (for what they were). IPads were a futuristic concept. Hell a portable laptop computer was even just a glimmer in someone’s imagination. We were kids… we threw caution to the wind and just did it. Ahhhh… for the innocence of youth…

This time we have so many options… some more fraught with danger than others. Could we be happy settling down in some mountain town in Ecuador, Columbia, Peru? Become beach bums in Nicaragua, Honduras, Belize, and Thailand? Travel the world from ‘point A to point B’ with no time limits? Will our vagabonding lifestyle be possible as planned? Best made plans are often laid to waist when put into action… still we continue to put one foot in front of the other. I continue to wake with butterflies in my stomach, that’s the “more mature age” jitters… The Fear Factor

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