Day 35 ❦ A gift can be a wonderful remembrance

Day 35

The Gift; African necklaces galore!

My friends from college and their girls are staying with us for a week while driving back from a family reunion in North Dakota and we are just loving having them here. I think that one of the greatest thing about having company is that you get to be a tourist in your own backyard. I am not sure why I need to have company to do the really fun things here, but I tend not to - so while Cheryl and her family are here we are going for it - off to the Zoo, the Nature Center, the Mall of America and my favorite...The Spam Museum! Now before you laugh - Spam is one of the products that drive the economy in my town which is home to the World Headquarters of the Hormel Foods Company, which makes Spam - all of the Spam in the world is made here - so Spam is a pretty big deal here.

The Rotary banner from my club that I use to exchange with other clubs when I travel says “Spamtown” USA on it and the streets are lined with banners flying from the light poles announcing to the world that indeed, we are Spamtown. The Spam Jamboree is a highlight in the community hosting Marion Ross and Tom Brokaw as guests. So going to the Spam Museum seems like an appropriate tourist activity when visiting Austin, Minnesota. The museum is really a fun place to visit and people from all over the world come to the Spam Museum- it is something, however, you can only take so much Spam. The last display in the museum is a television playing one of Monty Python’s skits about Spam...where to a marching beat they say Spam Spam Spam Spam over and over and over again and so after several hours at the Spam Musuem we walked home to the marching beat of Spam Spam Spam Spam. Have I mentioned yet that my friends are vegetarians?

After being inundated with canned meat products we needed a pallet cleanser and decided to have a fire and tell camp fire stories, getting back to basics - the kind of thing we would do when we were broke college students; sit around a fire in our backyard, drinking gin and tonics on a hot humid night telling stories laughing all night long.

And tonight laugh we did, and then the stories turned to my experiences in Africa and the mood grew somber. I shared some of the conundrums faced while there - child slavery, poverty, children dying in our presence, pregnant children, sorrow,  pain, sickness and despair. But I was also able to share stories of hope, courage and triumph and as the tension eased my giving moment revealed itself.

While I was in Ghana at Street Girls Aid I bought a bunch of necklaces made by the girls as a means of developing a trade and making an income...in fact, I bought every necklace they had in stock. Street Girls Aid is really a hopeful shining example of building self worth, empowering girls and restoring dignity and so I brought out an African basket filled with necklaces and asked each person there to choose one to take as a remembrance of the hope that they represented. When I went back to Baltimore several years later to visit my friend Cheryl, she and her daughters greeted me each wearing the necklace that they chose that night.

❦ A gift can be a wonderful remembrance