The last time I looked, Travelers Aid helped people in train stations and bus stations who were lost or confused or needed a translator. The website still notes that history.
“Travelers Aid Family Services began in 1916 as an all-volunteer effort, one of hundreds of organizations that emerged around the country in response to the needs of the thousands of new immigrants arriving in the United States each day. The agency, which was incorporated in 1920 as the Travelers Aid Society of Boston, provided help with housing, transportation, and employment to new immigrants, stranded travelers, and the poor at Boston’s train stations and docks.”
I wish when I directed a stranded Amtrak passenger to the Travelers Aid office office this morning that today it has the deeper purpose of ending homelessness. Oops.
The traveler was a pleasant if anxious man in his 40s who had come up from Virginia to meet a flight his 14-year-old daughter was taking from Greece. Not knowing our wily ways up north, he gave money to another train passenger who asked for $10. After he got off the train, he realized his wallet was gone.
Amtrak police were surly and told him to go a Boston Police station to file a report — but didn’t tell him how to get there. He wandered around for a couple hours. Then he stopped me and asked where the police station was.
I am pretty wary of these hard-luck travel stories. People of all ages make them up on the subway (one woman has a different story every day about why she doesn’t have the fare for Fitchburg or Worcester), but the traveler was only asking for directions to a police station that I didn’t know how to find.
So I sent him to Travelers Aid across from South Station. At least there will be kind people there, right? Even if he isn’t homeless and doesn’t fit their new mission? I sure hope so. if you know anything about Travelers Aid today, please tell me.
A political analyst from Russia who has lived in the U.S. off and on for 20 years has written a book for Russians thinking of living in America, and it’s a knockout hit. It turns out that even Russians who are not planning to go to the U.S. find our culture deeply puzzling and want to learn more.
Reading about Nikolai Zlobin’s book in the NY Times is helping me understand how differently Russians see some everyday things. Live in a cul-de-sac with few neighbors? That’s a dead end. Very dangerous! Leave curtains open at night, and let people see what you’re up to? No way!
“In Russia,” adds Ellen Barry, “children are raised by their grandmothers, or, if their grandmothers are not available, by women of the same generation in a similar state of unremitting vigilance against the hazards — like weather — that arise in everyday life. An average Russian mother would no sooner entrust her children’s upbringing to a local teenager than to a pack of wild dogs.
“But of course much in everyday American life sounds bizarre to Russians, as Mr. Zlobin documents meticulously in his 400-page book, ‘America — What a Life!’
“It seems strange, 20 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, that ordinary Russians would still be hungry for details about how ordinary Americans eat and pay mortgages. But to Mr. Zlobin’s surprise, his book — published this year and marketed as a guide to Russians considering a move abroad — is already in its fifth print run, and his publisher has commissioned a second volume.” Read more here.
Photograph: James Hill for the NY Times Nikolai Zlobin, the political analyst and author, in central Moscow near the Kremlin.
The holiday concert last Saturday deserves its own post.
I learned about the Melrose Symphony Orchestra, the oldest continuous volunteer orchestra in the country, because my friend Alden began playing the oboe there a year or so ago and loves it. Saturday was the first time we got to a performance, and we were amazed by the whole scene.
Memorial Hall, remarkable for its size and its caryatid-supported honorary box, must have had a thousand people in it. It seemed like everyone of every age in Melrose had come, and a look at the program suggested that every business in town was a supporter.
The website says that “the mission of the Melrose Symphony is to give the citizens of Melrose and surrounding area an opportunity to participate in the joy of music.”
The conductor, Yoichi Udagawa, is determined to make classical music fun and accessible to all. He is not only an excellent musician but a real showman, drawing applause from audience members who have attended before as soon as he said he was going to tell a joke.
Alden told us the orchestra provides scholarships for high school students who often join up again after college. And he explained that the kids who were walking around before the performance and in the intermissions selling tickets were raising money by giving audience members a chance to conduct the last number, a jingle bell sing-along.
We also had music from Grieg and Vaughn Williams, so it wasn’t 100% holiday. But the guest star, Renese King, sang Gospel music with two talented nieces, a backup group, and a lovely young woman who danced sign language — and that really got everyone in the spirit of the season.
I have to say, I have lived in New England 30 years and have never seen a whole community rally around a cultural institution to this extent. Melrose must have a secret formula. I’d like to know what’s in the water.
Getting in the spirit: listening to carols on the radio, decorating the fat tree my husband found, attending my friend Alden’s holiday concert at the Melrose Symphony (a whole post on that to come), and baking cookies.
Even though I try new recipes, I find the sugar cookie recipe John got in nursery school to be the most reliable, and I love the worn cookbook he made, held together by yarn, and his scribbles on the cover.
I especially love this line in recipe: “use good-sized cookie cutters so children can be successful in handling shapes.”
Here I am working away. Please note my five golden rings, Suzanne’s creation.
Mark Guarino has a nice story in the Christian Science Monitor about a Chicago woman of great determination.
” ‘Pollinate’ is a word that Brenda Palms Barber likes to throw around when talking to people about her work.
“She pollinates jobs for recently released inmates looking for a second chance. She pollinates faith among the people who take a chance in hiring them. She pollinates an upswing in North Lawndale, one of the most impoverished neighborhoods in Chicago, about five miles west of downtown.
“She also pollinates honey. At least that’s the job of the bees she has spent five years raising.
“Indeed, Ms. Barber has brought swarms of bees to the city’s West Side, using them to foster job creation among a stigmatized group of people who live on the bottom rung of the economic ladder: black males who exit the state or county prison system with little formal education or job skills….
” ‘We have to be their first employers,’ she says. ‘We have to prove to society that people who did bad things, people who need second chances, can be positive in the workplace, that they will be loyal and hard-working and honest employees.’ “
Photo: David Harold Ropinksi/Sweet Beginnings
Brenda Palms Barber’s honey-products program has hired 275 ex-offenders since 2007. After 90 days, they shift to the outside workforce.
It took me a while to get into twitter, but I’m hooked now. In fact, some readers of this blog follow me by way of @LunaStellaBlog1 instead of signing up for e-mails. (Luna & Stella is Suzanne’s company.)
The abortive revolution in Iran showed me the power of twitter and was a turning point for me. I still know the date by heart, June 20, 2009. If you searched on #Iran, the tweets came so fast with offers of new servers when sites were blocked in Iran, with up-to-the-minute photos and recordings, with citizens getting the word out that I got hundreds of tweets per minute and the U.S. president had to ask twitter not to do maintenance one night because it was a critical time of day in Iran.
Now I learn a completely different thing about twitter. It seems that people have been writing fiction in 140-character bites and that the practice has matured to the extent that twitter fiction is ready for a festival.
Writes Jennifer Schuessler at the NY Times, “The participants, some two dozen published and neophyte authors from five continents chosen by a panel of American publishing insiders, are posting in five different languages, often with input solicited from readers. The Iowa-based writer Jennifer Wilson is posting photographs of gravestones and then writing ‘flash fiction’ in response to epitaphs submitted by followers. The South African author Lauren Beukes is writing mashups, gathered under the hashtag #LitMash, based on ‘incongruous suggestions (the weirder the better!),’ according to the festival’s showcase page.
“The French fantasy novelist Fabrice Colin is writing a serialized story of five strangers trapped on a bus. And an anonymous Chinese author is contributing ‘Censortive,’ a story exploring the limits of free speech in the People’s Republic, tweeted out in a series of late-night installments.” Read more here.
I read the Anatole France short story “Le Jongleur de Notre Dame” in high school French class, and although I have retained only a fuzzy memory of the details, I have a pleasant feeling about the ending.
A poor juggler (jongleur) goes into a church wanting to show his gratitude for something to Mary but feeling he has nothing to offer. Standing before her statue, he decides to present the thing he knows best: juggling. Just when church’s clergy appear and are about to reprimand him, they see the statue bend and reach out to receive the juggler’s gift.
I have blogged recently about gifts that serve a second purpose, like TOMS shoes, which gives a pair of shoes to a needy child when you buy shoes for yourself. Now Suzanne says that Luna & Stella will donate $5 to the Homeless Prenatal Project for every purchase now through December 24. Use the code ANGEL12.
I am still looking for your suggestions about gifts that do good. I myself ordered three of Dancing Deer’s charitable gifts this year. Ten Thousand Villages is, as a fair trade retailer, pretty much all about doing good.
And if you live in Rhode Island, please consider supporting the Granola Project.
The Puritan thinker Roger Williams got fed up with the rigid Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and went off to found the state of Rhode Island and advocate for freedom of religion.
Recently Lucas Mason-Brown, a Brown University math major, worked with a small group of undergraduates to crack the shorthand code Williams used while making notes.
According to Martine Powers in today’s Boston Globe, here, translation of the notes was an achievement that had resisted scholars for centuries. No major insights about Roger Williams were revealed, but some were confirmed.
For example, the notes show that Williams was against baptizing Indian children — a new example of how adamantly he opposed pressure to convince anyone of any religious belief.
In an earlier AP article in the Herald Online, Erika Niedowski writes, “College history professor emeritus J. Stanley Lemons and others at Brown started trying to unravel the so-called ‘Mystery Book’ a few years ago. But the most intense work began this year after the university opened up the challenge to undergraduates, several of whom launched an independent project.
” ‘No one had ever looked at it systematically like this in generations,’ Widmer said. ‘I think people probably looked at it and shrugged.’
“Senior math major Lucas Mason-Brown, who has done the majority of the decoding, said his first instinct was to develop a statistical tool. The 21-year-old from Belmont, Mass., used frequency analysis, which looks at the frequency of letters or groups of letters in a text, but initially didn’t get far.
“He picked up critical clues after learning Williams had been trained in shorthand as a court stenographer in London, and built his own proprietary shorthand off an existing system. Mason-Brown refined his analysis and came up with a rough key.” Read more.
AP Photograph The preface page of the Mystery Book from Brown University’s John Carter Brown Library. Lucas Mason-Brown, a senior mathematics major, helped crack a mysterious shorthand code developed and used by religious dissident Roger Williams in the 17th century. The handwritten code surrounds the printed text on the preface page.
There are people who want to grow crops but have no land and people with arable land that lies fallow, and never the twain shall meet.
Oh, wait a minute.
“Susan and Paul Shay bought their four-acre dream spread years ago, with the idea of returning some of the land to farming,” writes Michael Prager at the Boston Globe.
“Meanwhile, when Seona Ngufor immigrated to America 10 years ago, she held onto the idea she would take up farming — as in her native Cameroon — if only she could get access to a farmable plot. …
“They were brought together by an unusual matchmaking service that uses geographic information system mapping data to pair would-be farmers with property owners who have extra land.
“The matching service is the work of the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project, a nonprofit organization in Lowell that trains farmers in organic growing and helps them find a plot to work. …
“New Entry uses GIS mapping data to screen for potential farm plots. The map sets contain a long list of criteria to distinguish individual parcels. … The system is so sophisticated it can pick out suburban homesteads with large patches of unused land, so New Entry was no longer limited to looking at obvious candidates, such as existing farms. …
“Once New Entry identifies sites, it approaches agricultural officials in the towns involved to work with landowners interested in turning over property to farmers.
“In Groton, for example, New Entry and the town’s agricultural commission hosted an information session with property owners. …
“ ‘There was a lot of information, a lot of resources,’ said Susan Shay, 63, a programmer and analyst at a medical malpractice insurer in Boston. …
Program director Rebecca Weaver “brought Ngufor, 56, who had taken the New Entry training program, to meet the Shays. …
“The Shays were so eager to see some of their land used for farming that they drove an easy bargain: rent of $1 a year, in exchange for a free go at whatever is growing.”
To see how New Entry’s maps identify potential farm space and to read the whole story, see the Globe article, here.
Photograph: Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff
Susan Shay (left) leased land she owns in Groton to Cameroon native Seona Ngufor for farming. Ngufor has just completed her first growing season.
Suzanne pointed me to a special story about a high school classmate, Taishana Lewis, whose gratitude to the EMTs who saved her brother’s life led to a career change.
Melissa M. Werthmann wrote about it in the Boston Globe today.
“A worried sister called her younger brother one warm June night in 2009 to see if he wanted a ride home. There was no answer.
“Taishana Lewis soon learned that Matthew Lewis-Grant had been shot five times while leaving a barbecue. Thanks to the efforts of Boston EMS responders, Lewis-Grant survived the drive-by shooting.
“Now his sister is determined to give someone else the same chance. Grateful for her brother’s rescue and inspired by the commitment of emergency responders, Lewis graduated from the Boston EMS Academy today.
“ ‘I’d like to be able to give back what was given to my family and hopefully give someone that same reward of getting their loved one back,’ Lewis said. …
“Lewis-Grant, 25, now lives in Florida, but made the trip back north to see his sister graduate as an EMT and pin the badge on her at the ceremony, she said.
“ ‘He’s excited,’ she said. ‘He’s super-proud.’ ” More.
Photograph: David L. Ryan/Globe Staff Taishana Lewis, with son Tyler Lewis looking on, gets her badge from her brother, Matthew Lewis-Grant.
Last year around Christmas my husband visited Southeast Asia on business and came back with descriptions of Christmas trees decorated from head to toe with written words on strips of paper.
That got me thinking about a new stealth project, one I hinted at here.
I printed out the quotes below and covered the paper with sticky plastic. I will put one set of quotation strips on our Christmas tree, but the first strips are now posted here and there around town. We’ll see what happens to them.
Feel free to use the lines here for a stealth project of your own, with or without sticky plastic. Or send some other quotes that I can use. If you are really ambitious, you might put strips of poems at the bottom of a poster headed something like “Help Yourself to Poetry” so people will be encouraged to take one.
“The roses had the look of flowers that are looked at.” T.S. Eliot
“The endlessly changing qualities of natural light, in which a room is a different room every second of the day.” Louis Kahn
“God inhabits the praise of his people.”
“Flowers have their agendas.” Mark Jarman
“I’d like to have a hand in things, what’s going on behind the screen.” Kate Colby
“I don’t know where I’m going but I’m on the way.” Carl Sandburg
John knows a good blog topic when he sees it. This tip he gave me is about minimally invasive education, which brings learning to the poorest of the poor.
According to wikipedia, “Dr. Sugata Mitra, Chief Scientist at NIIT, is credited with the discovery of Hole-in-the-Wall [HiWEL]. As early as 1982, he had been toying with the idea of unsupervised learning and computers.
“Finally, in 1999, he decided to test his ideas in the field. On 26th January, Dr. Mitra’s team carved a ‘hole in the wall’ that separated the NIIT premises from the adjoining slum in Kalkaji, New Delhi. Through this hole, a freely accessible computer was put up for use.
“This computer proved to be an instant hit among the slum dwellers, especially the children. With no prior experience, the children learned to use the computer on their own. This prompted Dr. Mitra to propose the following hypothesis: ‘The acquisition of basic computing skills by any set of children can be achieved through incidental learning provided the learners are given access to a suitable computing facility, with entertaining and motivating content and some minimal (human) guidance.’ ”
And of course, I have to say a word about the program’s appearance in Bhutan, since Suzanne loves Bhutan.
“One of the major projects that HiWEL is in the process of executing is for the Royal Government of Bhutan. The project is part of a large Indo-Bhutan project formally known as the Chiphen Rigpel (broadly meaning ‘Enabling a society, Empowering a nation’). Chiphen Rigpel is an ambitious project designed to empower Bhutan to become a Knowledge-based society.” Read more.
Photograph: HiWEL Playground Learning Stations in Dewathang Gewog of Samdrup Jongkhar District in Eastern Bhutan.
As we have mentioned before, Detroit is finding creative ways to deal with empty buildings and loss of population.
Jay Walljasper at Shareable adds his take.
“Stories of Detroit’s emerging comeback often highlight the city’s attraction to young hipsters. According to plentiful media reports, well-educated twenty-somethings are streaming into the Motor City to test out new ideas, explore art and music projects, or launch D-I-Y revitalization initiatives.
“You can spot a number of once-dormant corners of the city now pulsing with activity thanks to young entrepreneurs. …
“While a new, more positive narrative about Detroit is welcome, there are problems in focusing entirely on idealistic young adventurers swooping in to save the city – it reinforces the stereotype of native Detroiters as hapless, helpless, and hopeless.
“The truth is, locals have been working hard for years to uplift the common good in Detroit, which drew the interest of outsiders. And newcomers aren’t the only ones stirring up excitement around town. Good People Popcorn, for instance, was started by two sisters and a cousin, all of whom grew up here. Sarida Scott Montgomery, one of the founders who is also a lawyer and executive director of the Community Development Advocates of Detroit, says people are often surprised she grew up in the city. ‘Not in the suburbs,’ she says, ‘but in Detroit itself.’ …
“Allyson McLean, who grew up in the Detroit suburbs and has worked on brownfield redevelopment in Pittsburgh’s Urban Redevelopment Authority and on strategic planning for the Department of Homeland Security in Washington D.C, is back in town aiding real estate development in low-income communities with the Community Investment Support Fund.
“ ‘Now that I am back,’ she says, ‘it’s frustrating to hear from friends I grew up with who have no plans to ever return. … They have no idea what they’re missing in their hometown.’ ”
Photograph: Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor Dewayne Hurling loves Detroit and is thrilled to have renovated a beautiful old home in the Boston-Edison neighborhood of the city.
It seems that years ago the people of Boston sent emergency aid to Nova Scotia, and now every November, Nova Scotia sends Boston a Christmas tree.
Geoffrey Agombar writes in Canada’s Annapolis County Spectator, “All Nova Scotians are familiar with the legend of Boston’s speedy and heroic support when just week’s before Christmas 1917 two ships collided in Halifax Harbour leaving 2000 dead, thousands injured, and flattening surrounding buildings. Every year since 1971, Nova Scotia has sent a big thank you card to the city in the form of a 12-16 metre tall Christmas Tree.” More.
Canada Online has a story by Susan Munroe: “For more than 40 years it’s been a Christmas tradition for the province of Nova Scotia to ship one of its biggest and best Christmas trees to Boston to thank the people of Boston for the emergency assistance they provided after the Halifax Explosion in 1917. Relief from Boston was the first to arrive the day after the horrendous explosion which killed 1,900 people and wounded another 9,000. The New Englanders were also the last to leave.
“The 2012 Christmas tree is a 70-year-old, 15-metre (50-foot) white spruce donated by Paul and Jan Hicks from Jordan Bay, Shelburne County, Nova Scotia. On November 13, hundreds of children from local elementary schools attended the Christmas tree cutting ceremony, where Nova Scotia storyteller Bruce Nunn read from his book Buddy the Bluenose Reindeer and the Boston Christmas Tree Adventure.
“The tree was loaded onto a flatbed truck and made its way to Boston. It arrived on November 16, and was escorted by the Boston Police Department to the Boston Common where it is being installed. The Christmas tree will be the focal point of the annual Boston Common Tree Lighting Event on November 29. The ceremony will be televised and is expected to draw a live crowd of about 30,000. The ceremony will feature two performances from the Nova Scotian percussion ensemble Squid, and remarks from [a representative of the ailing] Boston Mayor Thomas Menino and the Deputy Premier of Nova Scotia, Frank Corbett. The RCMP and Santa Claus will be on hand, and there will be fireworks too.”
Update 4/20/13 — After the Boston Marathon tragedy, Nova Scotia is making a $50,000 donation to Massachusetts General Hospital. Read.
There is a new WordPress blog that hopes to create an online business benefiting an impoverished part of the world. It’s called Life Out Of The Box.
Bloggers Quinn and Jonathon write: “We left the United States in May 2012 and moved to Nicaragua to create a business that gives back to the community. Since we moved here, we’ve been traveling all over the country to find various handmade products by the people of Nicaragua and ultimately develop a line of products that we can sell overseas. Buying and selling products from these local artisans will not only help their local economy, but will also expose people overseas to the beauty of an unfamiliar culture.
“Life Out of the Box is a product for a product business. For every product that we sell overseas, we will give back a product to help educate the kids here in Nicaragua. Sell a product, give a product. One for One. We want to give the kids a useful product that will allow them to have the opportunity to live their life out of the box and pursue their own dreams. So far, these products include a variety of notebooks, agendas and pencils. We are both very connected to education and believe that it’s the best place to start in helping developing countries. It’s the root of where change can start – where kids can learn and develop their own skills to improve their country’s economy, help their families and go on to teach the next generation.
“While we’ve been traveling around the country looking for products to sell, we have also been working with various non-profit organizations to find out how we can make a difference. Overall, our journey has been very exciting and fun and we hope that you follow us in our pursuit of living Life Out of the Box.”
After Thanksgiving, the couple had a “soft launch” of their store, here, and would appreciate feedback. My own feedback, as one who knows very little about marketing, would be to show a greater variety of products, perhaps on interesting backgrounds like sand or flowers. Also, I see a price but nothing about how to order. I realize they are just getting started.
Jonathon and Quinn could probably learn from talking to successful social enterprises like Toms Shoes and Serrv. Toms Shoes gives footware to needy children (“with every pair you purchase, Toms will give a pair of new shoes to a child in need. One for One”).
Serrv is a nonprofit selling crafts from all over the world. They’ve been doing this for more than 60 years, so they have a long track record, and their catalog has capsule interviews and photos of the craftsmen and women — making a great personal connection! I just got myself couple things from Serrv.
At the winter holidays, people often like some of the presents they give to serve a dual purpose and benefit those who need help most. I wish the best of luck to Jonathon and Quinn.
Photograph of Quinn with friends: Lifeoutofthebox.com
John knows a good blog topic when he sees it. This tip he gave me is about minimally invasive education, which brings learning to the poorest of the poor.
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