packing

The first name I remember from the emails and letters my sister wrote during her time of voluntary service in Haiti was that of J–. He and my sister worked with Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), and in the years following we have celebrated from afar as J– passed the stringent high school exams, received a promotion at MCC, married, and had two children.

When I went to Haiti last August, J– came to pick us up at the airport, despite the fact that he'd just taken an accounting exam and had likely been up long before dawn to attend a men's Bible study. Later that week J–'s wife prepared a delicious meal of chicken, potatoes, bean soup, rice, and grenadine juice. She had hauled in water so that we could wash our hands, and purchased ice for our drinks. We'd spent the entire week thinking about water, or lack thereof: my sister was researching the affects of floods and mudslides in a rural watershed, although such calamity was hard to conjure in a land that hadn't felt rain in six weeks. The sight—indeed, the touch and taste—of a basin of water and a block of ice melting in an insulated cooler, was generous not just of deed but of thought.

Months ago, my sister applied for an additional grant to study post-disaster situations in Haiti. All too ironically, she was awarded the grant the day of the January 12 earthquake. I'm tagging along once again, and will be heading to Port-au-Prince at the end of the month. J– and his family, like so many others, have lost their home. Tents are scarce, and I'm hoping to bring as many as Delta's weight limits allow. If you or anyone you know is interested in donating money for waterproof tents or tarps, please be in touch (sara.versluis@gmail.com). Alternatively, if you're in my part of the world, and have a serviceable tarp or tent that's been itching to feel the Caribbean air, I've got some suitcases waiting to be packed.

all the news I need

To be fair, it seems to be a southeastern Michigan thing, this tendency for the weather, proportional, perhaps, to the number of drivers who cannot handle the snow. NPR reports on the snowstorm in DC, and then breaks for a local update on all the accidents around town. It is my first winter in the fleshy palm of the mitten. It snows rarely here, I have learned—so much so that we are inexperienced in the physics of brakes and ice.

Which explains our abiding interest in the weather.

I pick B– up from the senior center; she attended a program for those with memory loss. She spent part of the time worrying about the weather: if her son would make it from the Detroit suburbs, if they’d cleared the roads yet, what to do about her dog. She knew, because the roads were glistening, that the salt trucks had come through.

"God grabbed me and put me outside and I am alive."

My sister, Anna, is posting messages from friends and former co-workers in Haiti. She lived in the country in the late 1990s, and worked for RNDDH, a Haitian human-rights organization. Furthermore, she studied land change and use in a rural watershed as part of her doctoral dissertation, and continues to travel to the country for geography-related research.

yele

The Bob Corbett Haiti listserve warns that it is “a very active place...this is not a list for the faint-hearted and there is no digest version.”

It is, however, a preeminient source of current information about Haiti, in English, and the last 50 hours have lived up to its disclaimer.

Gleaned from the list...

Richard Morse, proprietor of the famous Hotel Oloffson and founder of the band, RAM, is tweeting.

Conversely, according to a woman at CHF International, an aid organization out of Maryland, President Preval and other leadership have little or no access to phones, as of 2 p.m. Thursday. “We just got off the phone with the Haitian Ambassador to the UN, and they are in an urgent need of 5 satellite phones for the President, Prime Minster, Minister for the Interior the Chief of Police and the Haitian Ambassador to the UN. The communication is severely limited and their ability to talk to each other as well as the US and other coordinating agencies is compromised,” she reports.

Someone at the UN base writes that,

AAWSM, observed

I am in the habit of trawling for stories; when my friend said "salmon" and "collective" and "Ann Arbor", I knew it was a keeper.

Wild Salmon Minyan

Now what to do about that salmon fillet in my freezer...

there ain't no rest for the wicked

This is, I'm sure, how George Eliot spent her days.

Peek into the weekly schedule of a writer who has influence, and you will notice that she's focused on platform growth. Very likely her planner is full of commitments, appointments, and deadlines, including scheduled time to write. You'll probably notice a steady stream of tasks to help her increase visibility, such as her speaking gigs, Web editing, and curriculum, flyer, or book development. Once you start working on developing your platform daily, your writing career will gain momentum.

This holiday season, don't forget the writers in your life.  If you are, however, considering a gift subscription to Writer's Digest, may we suggest, instead, titles such as The Atlantic Monthly, or Granta, or the Virgina Quarterly Review*?

*If you fear such titles will allow you to peek into the nose of said writer and see snot,  Kleenex makes a great stocking stuffer.

the voice that launched a thousand ‘whys?’

Helen Thomas was in Ann Arbor this evening for a brief reading. (One man at the post-reading Q & A reported that he’d seen her at a restaurant earlier in the day, the exact location lost under Thomas’s quizzical gaze and his growing embarrassment. “Maybe it was someone else,” he mumbled, although with a profile as distinct as Thomas’s, this is hard to imagine.) Southeast Michigan, going through a bit of a Nazareth complex these days, is happy to claim her—the daughter of Lebanese immigrants, she was raised in Detroit, and proof that, although the Detroit Free Press no longer lands on stoops seven days a week, and the Ann Arbor newspaper does not come at all, yes, good journalists can come out of the Motor City.

Thomas, born shortly after the conclusion of the War to End All Wars, began reporting from the White House on Kennedy’s first day in office, and, not coincidentally, on each and every war that followed. Of today’s, she unequivocally condones withdrawal. “George W. Bush wanted to be a war president,” she said, pausing for a very trenchant silence. “And he was.” As for President Obama, she wishes him to have more courage—an improvement we might wish upon all our psyches, although certainly one most critical in a man about to send 36,000 more troops into a land war in Asia.

[title removed because it most likely involved a fish-related pun]

It takes us roughly 20 minutes to unload 80 boxes of frozen fish from the back of the refrigerated semi-truck parked in front of Kmart.  The floor of the truck is slick with condensation, and I concentrate on not falling by imagining the spectacle: two boxes worth of sockeye salmon scattering into the air, a pause, then 35 pounds of solidly frozen seafood raining down at 9.81 m/s².

The fish fills two station wagons, one S.U.V., one pickup truck.  Yes, it smells a bit fishy.  The recipes, however, are mouthwatering: dill and sour cream and coconut milk and fennel pollen, the latter of which sounds as if it belongs in a magician's incantation.

The fish is bound for residential freezers throughout Ann Arbor; local orders and delivery are coordinated by members of the informally-organized Ann Arbor Wild Salmon Minyan. We shall save the wit and why of their acronym for another day.

persephone, on the road

The eighty-year-old woman I work with has a small dog who has been her near-constant companion since her husband's death early this year.  He follows her everywhere, nearly dissolves when she is gone, and defends her against friend and foe with every fiber of his vocal chords. 

It is a symbiotic relationship.

On a semi-weekly basis, I drive to the grocery store, where they have the long plastic vegetable bags and twisty ties best suited for picking up and securing fresh feces.  I walk nonchalantly past the tomatoes and the pomegranates and the sweet potatoes, scan the room, and pull as many bags off the roll as I can before I start to feel sheepish.  The twisty ties come off in a clump. 

My traveling companion is waiting for me in the car, with the doors locked.  (Years ago, in California, a man climbed into the driver's seat while she was waiting for a friend in the store, and he drove off, despite her protestations, and would have proceeded to kidnap her had she not jumped out of the vehicle when it slowed for an intersection.) 

My purse bulges.  I unlock the doors and start the car.  "Forget about the seat belt!" cries Thelma to my Louise.  "Just drive!"

of a certain age

Living as I am, in a state with a fifteen percent unemployment rate, I am grateful to be partially employed, especially as I have found myself in a situation in a position that lets me zip into handicapped parking spaces in pursuit of all sorts of errands. [I am working for a family whose mother recently moved in with them. This means, on any given day, I find myself at the library, the hardware store, the doctor's office, the candy store, the laundry room, the nail salon ("an eye-opening experience for the nail care neophyte" reports yr. correspondent), the veterinarian, the Secretary of State.]