Day 46 ❦ Bring others closer by sharing gifts and memories

Day 46 ❦ Bring others closer by sharing gifts and memories

The Gift: Leather coasters from Argentina

I have had the opportunity to travel to some pretty fantastic places because of people that I have met through Rotary. I have already shared a little about the huge impact that youth exchange students have had on my family...their courage, optimism and openness to share themselves with the world...is humbling and awesome at the same time.

If you can imagine, a 15 - 18 year old child travels to another country, leaving behind their friends, family and everything that is familiar to themselves. They live with host families on whom they have to rely for their basic needs...but most importantly, they have to learn to rely and trust themselves in a way that most teenagers do not. The changes in youth exchange students are incredible to watch. We have had the chance to both host students and send our family members out-bound on exchange. Our oldest daughter went to France as a youth exchange student and was there during the attacks on the United States on September 11th . Our nephew went to Argentina as a 15 year old and that decision changed not only his life, but ours as well.

Toward the end of his year in Argentina our nephew Les and his host family invited me to come visit and I jumped on the invitation. There is nothing like visiting a country where you know the locals, where people are willing to show you their country from their own eyes and invite you into their lives...and the Vera Family did just that. I spent 3 weeks in Argentina and the Vera Family treated my like royalty, and probably more importantly, like family. We laughed, shared stories, cried, ate, celebrated and grew close despite the language challenges. My family grew as a result of my stay there and to my delight, they chose to send one of their sons, Facundo to the United States, to Minnesota as an exchange student.

Facundo fit right into our family and we loved hosting him, however, the Rotary exchange program requires students to move to several host families during their year. Although it is always hard to say goodbye to a student with whom you have bonded, the concept of rotating host families gives students an opportunity to interact with a variety of families which is really important to develop international understanding. But say goodbye we did and many tears were shed when we had to move Facundo to his next host family the Dalagers. Even though he was still in our town, actually, only one mile away, he was now going to be hanging out with a different family and immediately our house grew quiet.

Those first few days after a move are really hard on everyone, but we know from experience that we will all survive - that does not make things easier, it just prepares us for the time in the near future when our student leaves permanently to return to their native country...and oh, the tears that are shed then are awful.

Tonight we have been invited to a welcome party at the home of one of Facundo’s host families for the new Rotary exchange student who is from Norway. Facundo is gone...back to his home, his family in Argentina and we still miss him very much, he was very special and now he is back with his other family. I decide to bring a set of leather coasters I picked up while in Argentina and give them to the Dalagers so that we can commiserate, share our sadness, share our stories and in that remembrance become a little closer and warm our hearts with memories. And, as we warm our hearts we create space to begin to make new memories, share new experiences and open our hearts for our newest student who we welcome tonight.

❦ Bring others closer by sharing gifts and memories

Day 30 ❦ Share your heart

Day 30

The Gift: A farewell event

I have avoided writing about this for a while but today has come and I can not avoid it anymore. Today is the day that Nina, our exchange student from Denmark leaves. Now I know that I am writing this at the risk of having all of our other exchange students read this thinking that their departure was less significant. They were not. Nina just happened to be our student who left during the time that I was writing this and practicing the exercise of giving.

When our students arrive for the year and I greet them at the airport, they are tired, scared and usually a little bewildered. Here they are - in a new country with people they do not know, speaking a language that they do not get - and this is their new home, their new family for an entire year. At that moment a year seems like it will be an eternity, and there are certainly days when it feels like that on all sides of the exchange. But on that first day it is impossible to fathom how absolutely hard the next trip to the airport will be. Well, today is that day.

All of the new security at the airport has made it even more difficult because we used to be able to morosely sit around at the gate crying, waiting, and giving final hugs as the student boarded the plane. We would then all stand and watch as the plane’s hatches closed and slowly pulled away from the terminal tears streaming down all of our faces. One year one of our student’s friends arrived at the gate after she had boarded and begged boarding passengers to tell her that they were there so she could come out and give them one last goodbye (which both they and she did).

Now, we can not avail ourselves of this transitional, painful time. Now we get to stand and watch as our students get searched, wanded, as they strip off their shoes and belts, and have the pins on their exchange jackets confiscated. A stark contrast. Regardless, the final goodbye at the airport is hard beyond words.

When a student leaves their family and friends for a year, it is courageous and hard for all - but in the back of everyone’s minds, the student will return, albeit changed. When that same student leaves us to return home - we  know that we may never see them again and it tears up my heart every time. Several of our students have returned and I hold on to that hope of seeing all of them again. Nina is no exception. We are all going to miss Nina and the ride to the airport is quiet and miserable with an underlying excitement that is natural since she will be returning to family and friends she has not seen for a year. Hugely conflicting emotions swirl in the car.

We have learned that the more people at the airport, the more difficult it is for the student as they begin their long journey home, having to deal with the travel part of the experience, focusing on checking in, getting their luggage straightened out and making the emotional shift. So today, it is only my oldest daughter, Alison and myself who are taking Nina to the airport. There are extended moments of quiet and reflection and we accept those awkward moments. Nina is torn between talking about things and people she will miss while talking about those she is looking forward to seeing. So we naturally settle on talking about food. The love of good food is such a universal concept. She lists all of the food she loved while in the United States and what she will eat first when she is home. The two hour drive to the airport goes by quickly.

As a way of breaking up the tension, we go to my favorite eating experience near the airport - Rainforest Café. It is a great place to go as a distraction with thunderstorms raining down, apes grunting, elephants bellowing, and dolphins playing. For desert we order a volcano which is a huge pile of ice cream, chocolate, brownies, whipped cream all with a sparkler on top. A great way to go out. Off to the airport, lots of waiting, lots of haggling with airport personnel and baggage handlers, dealing with the other exchange students and their sad friends and families, and finally they all clear security and all we can do is wave from a distance and know that they are now on the next part of their trip. The emotional cost of the day is huge. I have to remind myself that the depth of the pain is in direct proportion to the depth of the love. Today the gift is both giving and receiving love.

❦ Share your heart

Day 28 ❦ A simple gift can influence world peace

Day 28

The Gift: Three Deecha Dolls

Deecha Doll (Dee-cha)
A child's imagination takes shape...
...outside the lines.

Deecha Dolls were first introduced to me in the fall of 2002. Created by a woman in Wisconsin, they are soft cuddly creatures that resemble children’s depictions and drawings of themselves and their favorite animals. My Rotary Group Study Exchange team used them to make connections between Minnesota/Wisconsin and Ghana school children. Just before we left in the spring of 2003, several of us took the Deecha Dolls into third, fourth and fifth grade classrooms around the state and asked school children to tell the Deecha Dolls stories of their lives and to write those stories for the Deechas to pass along to children in Ghana. I have some spectacular pictures of third graders holding the Deechas in their laps while they read the stories of their lives to the stuffed creatures.

We took the hundreds of stories with the Deechas to Ghana and shared the stories and Deechas. The Ghanian school children then wrote their own stories for us to bring back and share with the students here. All of the stories are moving and this exercise really opened my eyes to the ease of solving world tensions. I have several Deecha Dolls left from the experience that I use when I do public speaking engagements about my experience.

This afternoon, my daughter Shannon invited Julia (the girl from yesterday’s story) to come over and play. After a while there were several little girls running all over the yard, laughing, screaming, running and playing. Watching Julia and the other kids was very emotional. I decided that I wanted them to remember this closeness and bonding and when they came back inside - I gave all of the girls playing in my yard a Deecha and asked them to share the story of this day with the Deecha as a witness to happiness and an oracle for peace.

❦ A simple gift can influence world peace

Day 27 ❦ An ordinary item can be a lasting gift

Day 27

The Gift: A disposable camera

I know I have mentioned my trips to Africa more that once in this journal, and I will make no apologies for that. Africa was a life changing influence and each trip I took changed me in ways that I am still discovering. On my first trip, one of my goals was to meet up with a little girl named Julia and her older sister, Adjoa. Julia had lived in an orphanage where two people from my town were working (Emma and Jacob) and they fell in love with her as their own daughter. She went to live with them in their home in Ghana and they raised her and cared for her. After five years, when their second  mission service was complete, they needed to come back to the United States and were forced to leave little Julia (then six years old) behind. They took great care to set Julia up with her sister, renting them a place to live, paying for their schooling, food, books and living expenses - but they were still thousands of miles away. It was very hard on Mama Emma especially.

When Emma found out that I was going to Ghana, she contacted me and asked me to try to connect with Julia and make sure that she was okay. Additionally, she gave me gifts to give to Julia and Adjoa. I was pretty excited about this - but little did I realize that our meeting in Ghana would be so life changing for so many.

One of my team members and myself arranged to meet Julia and Adjoa at the convention center in the capital city of Accra where we were having meetings - and I cried when I first met Julia in person - she was so small, innocent, and vulnerable. Fortuitously that day was her seventh birthday. We talked and laughed and cried and took pictures and I gave her all the gifts that Emma had given me to give plus many that my team had put together for both of the girls. It was really emotional. It was very very hard to say goodbye to Julia that day and my heart wrenches now just thinking about it. That pain was nothing compared to the meeting I had with Emma upon my return. It was so hard to see the grief on her face, missing Julia, knowing how far away she felt from her, unable to protect her and care for her. Little did I know that a plan was hatching.

When I found out that I had received a grant to return to West Africa I called Emma right away and was given some incredible news. She had set in motion the visa proceedings for Julia to come to visit over the summer break. In Ghana it takes about six months to get a visa hearing to visit the United States and it turns out that Julia’s visa hearing at the United States Embassy is on a day that I will be in Ghana! This coincidence does not escape me. I am going to represent Emma and Jacob at Julia’s visa hearing.

The incidences surrounding the day of the visa hearing warrant an entire book by themselves, and I will save them for another time and simply tell you that after six hours on the day of the visa hearing Julia was one of the few Ghanians out of the hundreds that day to successfully get a visa to come to the United States. Julia is coming to America!  Julia is coming to Minnesota! Julia is coming to visit Mama Emma and Uncle Jacob! That one experience made both of my trips to West Africa worthwhile. Just thinking back to that day is a gift for me to think about.

So, how does this long story of the re-unification of Julia and Mama Emma fit into this journal? Today, I am going over to Emma and Jacob's home to welcome Julia to Minnesota. She is actually here in Minnesota. It is almost impossible for me to believe and I can’t wait to see her with my own eyes. Shannon (who is the same age as Julia) and I go over to meet her and give to her as a gift a camera to take pictures so that she can share her memories with her sister Adjoa when she returns to Ghana at the end of the summer. The first picture she takes is of me.

❦ An ordinary item can be a lasting gift

* The names of all of the people involved have been changed in this story but all events occurred as shared

Day 26 ❦ Today, share a new memory.

Day 26

The Gift: Two photo albums

Over the course of this one hundred days you may notice the theme of photos. I take photos all of the time and with all of the technology available am so appreciative that they are so easy to take. I can use my phone, webcam, a variety of cameras - but more importantly - I like to print them out...in fact, I love to print them out on photo paper, as pages in photo albums, on cards, anywhere. I think if I got into scrap booking I would be dangerous but I stop at photo albums and giving people envelopes of pictures.

Despite the ease with which I can take a photo, I can just as easily lose that same photo and I think that is one of the things that drives the gift today. How often does a computer crash? A phone is dropped into water and all photos disappear? A camera battery dies and now real photo printing no longer exists for all of those negatives I have stored. But an even greater thing drives my craziness for taking and giving photos in photo albums...I have only 2 photos of me as a child and I miss being able to connect visually with that part of me.

There are few words to describe what it is like to lose your childhood at nine when the Sheriff stands at your door with a lock and announces to the world that you no longer call this place home and that all of your belongings will be sold to someone who can pay for them. My life and photos all put up for sale in the blink of an eye. Now granted, I may not particularly want to revisit those times in photos, but as an adult, I would like to just once peer into the eyes of that little girl and see if I can remember who she was, what she was thinking. I would love to be able to pull out photos of me and compare them with those of my children and their children like we can with my husband’s photos. I would love to be able to laugh about the silly things, blush at the embarrassing things and coo over the cute things captured in photos - but that was taken away from me as it has been for many children whose homes have been foreclosed on, who have lost everything in floods, fires and devastation. All we can do is move forward to provide opportunities for others to be able to laugh, blush and coo over the pictures of their lives. And, that is what this gift is about today - I gave 2 photo albums filled with photos of wonderful memories to our exchange student and oldest daughter so that they can look into the eyes of a child whose experiences are vast...and remember.

  ❦ Today, share a new memory.