Category Archives: family

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The long journey: Haiti to “home”


Well, it feels that way! 

But, gosh, I’m grateful that Lucy, my dog, and I are in Miami, still in the cozy hotel room where we spent the night.  We leave a bit later this morning to travel to Kentucky by way of Chicago.  It is an enormous relief to be this much closer to “home”–in this case the place where my family still lives.  I miss them!

In the meantime–a few more photos of Haiti, my other home.  Hope you enjoy!

"Pancaked" buildings are still a common sight in Port-au-Prince.

Camps of "internally displaced persons" are equally common. 1.3 million people are still homeless in Port-au-Prince.

Kathy with children in Cabaret, so excited by images of themselves displayed on the back of the digital camera, they knocked me to the ground at one point in the midst of their enthusiasm.

The view of Port-au-Prince from my other home in Haiti.

Hopefully, Sara will join me soon—home for the Holidays!

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A Frenzy of Freshly Pressed


I had a less-than-cool response to being Freshly Pressed.

I may have over-reacted.  I may have caused a scene.

For those of you who don’t know, for those of you who are just now tuning in, I blog from Haiti, where not a lot of positive things have been happening lately, what with the January 12th earthquake, Hurricane Tomas, cholera, and now the close-to-coup political uncertainty.

To distract myself from this atmosphere of never knowing what’s next, I began blogging again after a year away from posts and comments—from Search Engine Optimization and RSS feeds.

I poured indecent amounts of energy into my renewed foray into the blogosphere.  I was a down-right bloggerly drudge when it came to reading and commenting on the blogs of others. 

I wrote and posted—

Wrote and posted—

Commenting maniacally in between.

For three whole weeks—

Until Tuesday—

When I did my daily duty of checking Freshly Pressed, posted most mornings by 11 Eastern Standard Time.

I had developed a near religious devotion to this posting of posts, ten blogs featured each weekday on WordPress.com. I knew my duties as a devotee, arriving with the requisite ritual beverages (coffee and Coke Zero, of course). I knelt at the altar of blogging greatness— and clicked.

Strangely—the list of featured posts included one that had not only stolen the name of my blog, but the name of my post, as well.

This was a desecration.

A cardinal sin against the goodness that is Freshly Pressed!

Until it hit me.

Oh, may the gods of blogging forever bless the shrine of Freshly Pressed—for, in the name of blog, indeed,

I had been Freshly Pressed.

Heavenly choirs were singing as I twirled my Port-au-Prince kitchen dizzy—

Shrieking—

OMG—OMG

Twirling and shrieking—

Shrieking and twirling—a dervish of posting devotion.

And in this blogging frenzy, I did what any blogging diva worth her salt would do in such a moment.

I called my mother—

(Called my mother with the zeal of a six-year-old, just home from kindergarten, ready to show off her printing practice sheet, S’s marching capital and lower case across the page.)

“Mom, this is costing gobs of money, so I can only talk a minute, but I’ve been Freshly Pressed.”

“You’ve been what, Dear?”

“My blog.  My blog has . . . “

(How should I explain it?)

“My blog has won a prize.”

“Well, that’s lovely, Dear.”

“What kind of prize?”

(I dare not mention “Freshly Pressed.”  She’ll confuse that with French press or launch into a discussion of ironing!)

“It doesn’t matter, Mom, just a really cool prize.  You should hurry and check your email.  I sent you the link.”

“You sent me what, Dear?”

“The link.  The blue LINK!”

“Oh, the BLUE ink, yes, I know, Dear.”

“But wait, let me write that down.  I don’t want to forget—BLUE ink?”

(To better appreciate my mother’s memory issues see a post called “Airing Family Secrets via Haute Couture.”)

“Just go check your email, Mom.”

 You know how the story ends—

Not with my mother delightfully 72, trying to figure out this world that was once Smith Corona and is now Google, Facebook, Twitter. 

Rather with me—dizzy in my kitchen—reeling with the down-right, unabashed, writing-posting-commenting joy of it all—

The joy of FRESHLY PRESSED!

Yippee!

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Friends in Far Away Places: a meditation on “good-bye”


Saturday night our friend Kathryn came to dinner.  Sara cooked Pad Thai.  There was salmon pate and wine, and an evening on our deck with a friend we dearly love.  We had wanted to celebrate Kathryn’s recent milestone birthday—I won’t mention her exact age, just that she could pass for someone a good 2 decades younger.

But that’s not what matters here—not what matters most by any means. What’s more important is the fact of friendship, the fact that Sara’s worked with Kathryn in countless places around the world, and I’ve been with her in a good many locations myself.  What matters most is this benefit, this blessing of friendship—one of the unexpected perks that comes with Sara’s work in disaster response.  It makes things feel a little less disastrous.  It normalizes.

Travel to exotic places is sometimes made a little less pleasant by the day to day reality of actually living in uncomfortable locations, places our pampered American upbringings have not prepared us for.  But when it comes to folks we’ve worked with, there’s just no down side.  Sure it feels good to know that Sara’s work improves the lives of others, but when one gets down to the nitty-gritty selfish reasons I benefit from this arrangement, it’s really all about the people.

Since I’m not the one actually doing the work, since I’m the one sometimes forced by circumstances to set aside my career as a writing teacher to be with Sara in the field, I’m especially grateful for the folks we meet along the way, the ones we live with, shop with, cook with, cry with. 

I’ve gotten close to many of Sara’s colleagues, folks like Elizabeth and Minh, like Dee and Aileen, like Todd and Robin and Lesley and Jack.  But Kathryn, well, Kathryn has not only been one of my personal favorites—Kathryn is leaving us today—going back to the US to take a job with another international aid organization.

And though this makes me sad—(sad for only selfish reasons, I might add)—it’s a great development for Kathryn herself, since she’ll be headquartered in the same city her daughter and grandson live in, the same city several other of our friends have also settled, friends Kathryn too has worked with in many places on the planet, from Thailand to Tanzania.

I already miss the year we shared with Kathryn in Vietnam—months living together in Hanoi, days shopping in the Old Quarter, mornings walking West Lake, a 30 hour train traveling the country south to north. 

Here in Haiti she’ll be missed by many more than simply Sara and I—and our dogs, wagging, barking, licking kisses to” Auntie Kathryn,” whom they adore.  Here she’s loved by both Haitians and expats alike, people who have come to Port-au-Prince to participate in the recovery—come from places as far away as Alaska or Alabama, India or Indonesia, Eastern Europe or Western Africa.  

Kathryn is loving. 

And accordingly—she is loved.

The bottom line is this—

When working far from family, far from the comforts and conveniences of home, we’re thankful for the exquisite blessing that is friendship—friends who comfort, friends who share our homes and become like family.

 We’re grateful for the Kathryn’s among us—

— even when we say goodbye!

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Re-naming America?


(I know I’m supposed to be blogging about Haiti and I promised a post today about the Port-au-Prince airport—but, I swear, the issue I address below is an “event horizon,” of sorts.)

In case you missed it, yesterday, BabyCenter.com posted its list of top 100 names for 2010—an annual event that’s more than making a name for itself!

So—I hate to ask a seemingly indelicate question.  But—What’s up with baby names these days?

Why are the first names of most newly-born kids in the US names that merely decades ago would have been nothing other than good, old-fashioned last names?

Why are we so obsessed with family names, we’ve nearly abandoned the sacred tradition—centuries, rather millennia in the making—of assigning “Christian names” to our newly hatched Madison’s and Mackenzie’s?

I know the American “family” is in decline.  I know many now say America a “post-Christian” nation—(which is itself a misnomer, I might add).  Does this underlie the confusion? 

Seriously!  What’s up?

Why is every Tom, Dick, and Harry now named Taylor, Devon, or Yale? 

And what about these names with oblique, more often than not overt, allusions to the aristocrats of academia? 

My own nephew, born last month, is named “Rhodes”—God bless his little, “high-IQ-ed” heart.  I know his grandfather is a professor, and his aunt, yours truly, spent WAY too many years not making NEARLY enough money in academia—(thus, the high dollar move to blogging)—but that’s a lot of pressure on a little guy!  How’s that for a “you-better-make-the-grade-or-else” kick-in-the-ass?

Now, I know I should keep my family out of this.  I know my brother could and probably should kill me. (But he has a really great sense of humor; his name is “Tyce,” by the way, if that tells you anything about the DNA of naming in my family.)

I know, as well as you do, that a rose by any other name should smell as sweet, but what about poor “Baby Rose?”

Why has she morphed into little “Reagan?”  Yes, I kid you not; she’s number 66 on this year’s list of most popular girls’ names in the US.  I love the old Gipper as much as the next left-leaning, non-Bible-toting, “doesn’t-give-a-hoot-about-Hollywood,” Democrat in America.

But—PLEASE!

Enough is enough!

My mother called me “Kathryn” for a reason.  I was named after my grandmother, her first name, I might add.  And there were a total of three “Kathy’s” in my kindergarten class—I was born in an era, now sadly past, when “normal” naming still happened in America—was right up there with good breeding!

Speaking of breeding—does it say anything about all that’s vogue in naming that my dogs are “Ralph” and “Lucy?”

What’s next?

BabyCenter.com has itself used a “top-secret algorithm” to determine what names will climb in popularity next year, and according to the “online parenting and pregnancy destination” the boy’s name “Max” is predicted to “gain momentum in 2011”—climbing from its current spot at number 46.  Are the sons (and daughters) of America already being named after their canine companions?

Or am I barking up the wrong tree?

(And tomorrow—I’ll yap about the Port-au-Prince airport—I promise!)

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Airing Family Secrets via Haute Couture


Two days ago, on her 72nd birthday, my mother shared her newest mnemonic device.   And I thought, in all fairness, I should pass along the technique, in case you want to remedy your own memory deficits by adopting my mother’s method.

This all came up when I asked my mom to call us in Haiti during our family’s annual let’s-celebrate-mom’s-birthday-event scheduled for yesterday afternoon.

When I asked my mother to make the call, she said, “Well, I’m afraid I’ll forget.” 

I reassured her that she didn’t have to worry.   I would email my sister and ask her place the call. 

“No,” my mother declared confidently. “I’ll just clip a clothes pin to my lapel.”

“Really,” I replied. 

“Of course,” she claimed.  “Someone is bound to ask why I have a clothes pin on my blouse.  And when they do, I’ll remember we were supposed to call you.  It works every time.”

“Every time,” I said, dumbfounded that my mother had used the technique enough to have gathered such data.

“Always!”

“Wow,” I added.  “I think I’ll have to blog about that.”

“Oh, you should! It works really well—-and everybody has an extra clothes pin hanging around!”

“Sure they do . . . “

. . . but—-for those of you whose laundry habits have surprisingly not carried the clothes pin over into the 21st century or, god forbid, who lack the sartorial daring to add clothespins to your accessory repertoire, my mother claims the piece-of-paper-in-the-middle-of-the-living-room-floor technique works almost as well.

But, of course, I wouldn’t want to hang all  my family’s dirty laundry out to dry.