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PART THREE

Precious People

 

 

Introduction to “Precious People”

 

            When sighted persons enter a store, they can quickly catch a glimpse of what kind of goods is offered; when persons with a little vision enter the same store, piles and rows of colorful and blurred items spread all around them. They must come close, very close to the isles in order to determine what the particular item may be. The closer they come, the bigger the item becomes. If they touch it, they know whether it is made of glass, of metal, of paper, etc; they also know whether it is powder or liquid or something solid. But the item still remains priceless and, in some cases, if the name of the item is written in letters that are too small, it remains nameless. An object obtains its price when on a usually orange rectangular paper there is a black dot. When it is looked at with a magnifying glass, the dot suddenly changes into a clear black digit, and there is nothing more but the black digit and the orange background in sight.

           

Looking at objects through a magnifying glass will cause them to look bigger; one can then have a close look at them, but at the same time, will not be able to see them as a whole. Instead, they are treated as fragmentary reflections of the whole. In the last part of the book, I want to focus on “People” in the very same way that I would look through the magnifying glass. Due to the fact that all the persons who create the third part of the book are so “Precious,” they deserve a close and more precise focus then other people do. These persons are so significantly different from many people in such a way as precious stones mark their presence when they shine brilliantly, leaving all the other stones behind, in the background.

            Their fragmentary aspect manifests itself in the fact that they are not described as they would be in a biography. Therefore, details such as when they were born, what they have done in their lives have been omitted, unless they build up a story that has to be told. Their portrait illustrates a fragment or several chosen fragments of their lives. The fragments that they have chosen to relate to me, portray their sensitivity, goodness, courage, and the wish to do something for others.  Having, developing and utilizing these characteristics makes them eligible for being “Precious” and noble, just like the precious stones, which shine so that they can be seen, admired, and assimilated  by others

 

The style in which the „Precious People” is written is significantly different from the other two parts of the book. While the impressions of my travelling in Asia have been the focus of the first part, and customs which I heard about or experienced have been the focus of the second part, in the third part I am not focussing on my own descriptions of people, but rather on what they themselves told me about themselves. In some instances I have chosen to write their stories in the first, and sometimes in the third person. My choice of narrating the story was subjective and depended mostly upon my own judgement of how to best present a particular story. What is important is the fact that I am writing their stories down just as they have been told during the interviews. Word after word, phrase after phrase, I am writing down the recorded words into the word processor.  

Some of the sentences, therefore, may have been constructed better. I did not, however, want to damage the style and change the vocabulary that the interviewed people were using when talking about themselves. Whenever I felt that an additional explanation was necessary, or whenever I could not refrain from my own reflections on a given subject, I have inserted footnotes or endnotes.

 

Moreover, I have omitted my questions to the interviewed persons. I thought they would distruct the flow of the story for the readers. I would prefer if the statements of „Precious People” were treated as their fragmentary life stories. All the interviewees were told that  I wished to omit my questions when writing down their stories and they did not object to that. I hope, therefore, that the readers will accept this way of portraying the lives of the „Precious” Ones as well.  

The first precious person which I would like to portray is Larry Campbell who has organized our trips (and trainings) in Thailand, the Philippines and Vietnam. It is thanks to him that we had a chance to experience many things that we would otherwise have never experienced without his support and personal engagement. The second precious person is Rustica Padafaf, called Baby, from the Philippines, who lost her sight at the age of eighteen and decided to devote her career to bringing help to the blind. The third person that deserves nobelty is Richard Burgos, also from the Philippines, who at the time when the interview was taken, was communications manager at IBM in Manila, and who has organized camps for blind teenagers. The camp’s objective was to teach them the most commonly used computer applications. The last person is ,in fact, a married couple. I treat them here as one person since I’ve taken interview with both of them at the same time. They have complemented each other’s answers in such a way that I could not simply separate them. This elderly American couple have been teaching the English language in a small Vietnamese town for over a year. They belong a large group of foreign missionaries who work hard in various Asian countries.  

I realize that my introductory descriptions of „precious People” are relatively short. I do not intend, however, to tell their stories in my own words; I simply want to direct the readers to the paths that their lives have been following. The largely missing parts of their stories will be told by themselves.  

 

Larry’s Story

 

Larry did not intend to work for the blind. This is his story though:

 

“After I finished my undergraduate work [in psychology] at the university I became a volunteer. I went to Jamaica and I went to work in a small rural village in Jamaica. And, amongst other things, I was responsible for the distribution of surplus food to poor people. And, I won’t go into the whole story about how I ended up going out to those villages, but, I needed basically to get to know each of the families that we were distributing food to. And so, one day when I was visiting families in the bush area, I saw this dilapidated little shack and I didn’t know what it was, it didn’t look nice enough to be a house. I wasn’t sure what it was but I went over and I looked in, and I saw a woman in there on a bed, and I called into her, and she set up and it was immediately apparent that she was blind.

And I asked her name and I started to chat with her and come to find out that she basically never left that little shack. It was up on stilts. People brought scraps of food by for her and she lived a pretty horrible life and totally isolated from the community, other than people coming by there to bring bits of food for her. And so the next day I—I couldn’t sleep much that night because I was just so disturbed at her condition situation she lived in--I went back and asked her if she would like to be able to leave that little check and she said yes but she couldn’t, and I said well, why, and she said because she was blind. And I said ‘Well, I don’t know anything about blindness but I see blind people who, you know, sort of walk around, they use these long sticks’ (I didn’t know they were called canes at the time). And I said ‘Well, I don’t know anything, but maybe together we can figure it out.’

So, I started basically to work with her, little by little. She became really quite independent. I just simply used my common sense to begin with, which, you know, much of the rehabilitation stuff is, nothing more that common sense. But when the common sense ran out I started to write to organizations in the United States and elsewhere, to ask for some additional material and help. Eventually that led to an offer for fellowship to go back and do my master’s degree in education and rehabilitation of blind and visually impaired people, which I became quite interested in through knowing this woman. So, that ‘s the story, basically.”

 

“Before the woman was able to do any big steps, such as earning her independent income, she had to work on the small ones,” Larry explained. “First of all, it took just a month or so of just basic movement, just to gather her strength back. Because this is a woman who had basically been bed-ridden for all these years, except to getting up and walking around the bed periodically.

When I began working with her, she lived in a very, sort of, dangerous area cause there were a lot of severe drop-offs and cliffs and gullies. And so I cut down bamboo and just sort of built a little barrier on the ground so that she would know. I made her a cane out of bamboo and then I laid down large pieces of bamboo as sort of a border do warn her: “don’t go beyond that point because there is a drop-off” and I would work with her usually two evenings a week, I would go there after the end of the regular day, sometimes three. And she, obviously. Was the most motivated student because she practiced constantly, I think, from the time I left till the time I came back. So if I would go back and say ‘well, let’s review,’ she’d been reviewing twenty four hours a day, I think, since I last left.

Eventually I taught her how to make a backyard garden, I taught her how to move about independently, and just, kind of, look after some basic things around this little, it wasn’t even a house, this little shack which she lived in. And eventually I taught her how to get to the nearest standpipe where you get water, cause there was no running water in the area. So it was about a half mile maybe, through this very narrow footpaths, which were in a pretty treacherous terrain to get there. But I eventually taught her how to walk to the standpipe to draw water, to be able to bring it back to her house. But I cautioned her never to go at certain hours of the day because that’s when the most foot traffic was on: the farmers were going to there fields and the women were going to the standpipe to draw water for washing clothes. So I gave her certain times of the day that would be best for her to go there so she wouldn’t encounter other people and therefore, you know, slip off the path.

And, one day I was coming down the main road and I saw her there with other women of the village and I thought ‘O my God, she’s been waling on this road during the wrong time,’ so I, started to get out of my vehicle to scold her about, you know, ‘I had told you not to come at this time because…’ and suddenly I realized that this woman was socializing with other women for the first time in many, many years and that she needed more than she needed the water.

So, eventually, I went back many, many, many years later, I was in Jamaica and went back to the village. At that point there was electricity and a paved road and telephone service and so forth, which there hadn’t been when I lived there, to look for her. But apparently what happened is, well, not apparently but what did happen to her is that she became involved in a women’s small program that helped set women up in to small businesses, and she had been a seamstress before she lost her sight. This program purchased a small pedal-powered sewing machine and she started to make some income repairing clothes for people in the village, and eventually became so successful that she moved to a larger town, which was about thirty miles beyond this village, and had a little business for herself, and she was doing quite well. She was living quite independently and, you know, earning her own income.”

 

Larry doesn’t keep in touch with her. Actually, he’s never seen her again since the time he worked with her, since he left Jamaica, which was back in ’66. He just knows from the people in the village that he talked to that she is living in Spanish town now and has this small business of her own and is doing quite well.”

 

After Larry had returned from Jamaica, he began his work and studies related to the blind and visually impaired people. He did his master’s degree in education and rehabilitation of blind and visually impaired people and following graduation he took a job in Western Pennsylvania where he worked with school age children. He was there for two years and then moved to Connecticut to do similar things there and then became involved as the assistant director of that school. Larry adds, however: “But I had always—from the time that I lived in Jamaica—I had always fantasized about an opportunity to live and work in other countries, but never saw any way of  combining my professional background and that together.”

One day he got a call from the Helen Keller International from Hank Roberts whose wife he knew (his wife was on the faculty of Hunter College in New York City and she had placed some graduate students with him for an internship and they became quite friendly, and, he thought, she liked the work he was doing in Connecticut very much, and must have mentioned to her husband that he had lived and worked overseas). And in 1977 they called him to say that they had a position.

In the meantime he’d gone back to the university to work on his PhD and then ended up staying there and teaching, training teachers for about five years. But then he got this call from Helen Keller International saying they were looking for someone who had a background in education and rehabilitation and who also had some experience in living and working overseas. And so they asked him to come to New York for an interview, which he did. He admits: “I absolutely hated New York City, I just thought ‘No, this is not where I wanna be’ until Hank explained—Hank was the director of the organization—he said ‘Well, let me explain New York City to you in a way that might help.’ He said: ‘New York City is like a series of villages and every neighborhood, every three or four square food-area is like a small village. You’ll get to know the grocer and the cleaner and so forth and so on and you’ll feel just like you do in a small community. And then beyond that, the rest of the city, with all its wonders and all its wickedness, and you can, you know, use it to the extent you wish.’ And it was an absolutely perfect description, I think, of New York City, because that’s really what it was. And I loved New York City. In fact, the twelve years I lived there, ten of them I thought it was no place to live except New York City.”

 Anyway, Helen Keller International was based in New York City, that’s why Larry moved there, but he spent most of his time overseas, developing primerly education programs initially and then later both, programs in education and rehabilitation. And then he worked some in the area of blindness prevention as well. So that’s essentially how he got started.

He worked there for twelve years, then went to the Perkins School to start the international program there. He was there for five years, then moved on to Overbrook School for the Blind, where this will be the tenth year. “And that’s where I met you, guys,” he adds. 

            “The program at Perkins School is a program which brings teachers from other countries for one year program studies, and now they have outreach programs, which focus mostly on deaf-blindness and early intervention. Overbrook,” Larry explains “is similar in a sense that we did have the international student program—that’s how it really got started—and then moved in the direction of the outreach services that you are aware of now because you do some training in those programs. And we do still provide short-term training programs for teachers and other professionals who wish to come to specialize. We’re in a more particular area.”

 

If Larry would have to choose only one country in which he would like to work with the blind and low vision people, he would have real difficulties. “I always enjoyed my work in Tanzaniya—that was an enjoyable place to work,” he adds. “Indonesia is quite a fascinating country to work in, just because of the variety of subcultures within the country. It’s a country stretched over thousands and thousands of islands, a huge archipelago, very interesting. Many languages, many different ethnic groups. I just enjoyed that very much. I also liked the Philippines. Just, I like the Philippinos, and I enjoy working there. So that would be a hard choice. Probably I’d end up in Southeast Asia, with an air-conditioner, though.”

 

Larry cannot imagine himself as a psychologist working in the office after so many years of traveling. “The experience in Jamaica turned out to be a turning point,” he explains. “You know, things happen in a strange way in this life, and I’ve always seemed to be, sort of, in the right place at the right time. I’ve not really purposely sought outcomes; they just, sort of, been there at the right time in the right place. It’s all worked well.”

 

There was a time, about nine or ten years ago, when Larry felt that traveling was getting too much. “I didn’t have any roots anywhere and I knew thousands of people all over the world, but I didn’t know my own home community,“ Larry admits. “So, yeah, I did want to quit, but I quickly abandoned it cause I realized I’d be bored to tears in no time. I came very close to actually accepting a job here in the state of Maine, with the state government and I literally went up to pick the paperwork to sign up for this job, and I realized, as I was sitting there, that I would probably be a very unhappy person if I were working in a state bureaucracy.”

 

“There’s advantages and disadvantages to everything. And one of the advantages, of course, is to have lived and worked in so many different cultures, to have met so many interesting people—I mean I wouldn’t have met the two of you if I hadn’t been involved in this work—and just thousand and thousand and thousands of people like you. On the other hand, I think, eventually you pay a price for that, because, you know, at some point I will retire from this work, and the question is: “what do you do then?” I mean you  come and sit in a small rural community where you really don’t know very many people because, you know, you just simply haven’t been there for very long. So, it poses its challenges. And that’s a very important transition that I’m starting to make now. I mean I trying to sort of think that through and plan it, so that I don’t end up, you know, sitting around feeling sorry for myself and being unhappy with my retirement years.”

 

Larry said he would probably end up doing similar projects to what Trudy and Andy Ooms [1] have been doing in Southeast Asia. He adds: “I don’t think I’m gonna just all of a sudden one day come and sit and rock on this porch. I mean, I think I would like to continue to travel some and be helpful where I could for short periods of time and perhaps, you know, do, not full-time work, but some part-time work in various places. I’ll just pick agencies that I know are doing good things and might be able to use some help for  a month or two or three or four and just volunteer to go there.”

 

Baby’s Story

 

Baby lost her sight within only four months (between December ’88 and March ’89), at the age of 18, [2] before the school year ended. She got an eye infection which has developed into glaucoma and has damaged the optical nerve. The medication did not help. She has her own eyes, though, because she does not feel any pain. [3] The color of her iris has changed, however, from blue to grey and deep brown.

 

She wanted to get a B.A. in political science and liked very much to draw, but when she lost her eye sight, drawing was out of the question, and when one teacher dropped her,   she did not continue her studies at the university.

Instead, her mother and herself were going to different quack doctors, natural medicine doctors, that is. One quack doctor told her to shave her hair so that her eye sight could return. She did not, of course, take this advice seriously. But the infection  of her eyes became worse because the quack doctors had suggested to put lots of herbs on the eyes.

Then they tried to find some “regular” doctors in Manila

 

Baby was supposed to graduate from the college in 1991. She did not do that because of the sudden loss of her eye sight. Still, she listened to the graduation ceremony of her classmates on the radio and began to cry. She thought that maybe if she hadn’t gone to college at the time, she wouldn’t have been blind right now. Her mom was crying too and said she would not stop finding help, and decided to bring Baby to Manila. Baby got acupuncture treatment there, but there was no change of her eye condition.

 

Ate [4] Mila, who has been working for Resources for the Blind in Manila, was visiting a mother of a visually impaired child and heard about Baby by chance. She advised her to go to the Medical Center and have an eye examination again. The infection had developed into glaucoma already and there was no help. “Don’t lose your hope,” Ate Mila told her, “you can still go and finish your studies in college.” A guide in the office [at RBI] would help her adjust to the college. Ate Mila has also encouraged her to attend the summer camp for the blind.

 

It was Baby’s  first contact with the blind. She was amazed when she first met the blind kids, because they seemed to lead a “normal life”, that is, they were going to high school and college. First, she felt sorry for them (forgetting her own blindness), but then thought that even if they are blind, they seemed “like normal people” and were quite happy with their situation. Still, she has not accepted her own disability when she came back from the camp. Then one day a counselor told her: “God has a plan for your life and he still loves you with your eye condition and he does not forget about you. Christ died for you, for all the people, because he loves us. So, because of him we can find salvation. We can be with him in heaven when we die.”

“If I would be given a chance to choose an illness,” Baby told the counselor, “then I’d prefer to have cancer. [5] The doctor would tell me ok, you have three more months to live. I’d use the time to do ‘good things’ so that I would be ensured to go to heaven.”

The counselor replied: “it’s not the ‘good works’ that would get you to heaven, but the acceptance of God. Who believes in him ‘shall not perish.’” That’s when Baby accepted her disability.

 

Before Baby became blind, she was going to the church, but Jesus was hanging on the cross then and she was far away from him; she did not have an intimate relationship with him. Now she admits: “He’s living because he arose from the grave after three days. He knows what I’m doing, he can see me.”

 

A year after she met Ate Mila for the first time, Baby decided to finish college. That was in 1993. After three semesters of studying political science, however, she switched to social work. She graduated and passed her board exam and got a job at RBI. This accomplishment has also helped her to strengthen the relationship with her sister who had been embarrassed by her. During all the years that passed between the time when Baby got blind and her graduation, the relationship between the two sisters was not good. Her sister was crying upon hearing the news of Baby passing the exam. When she came to Manila, she kissed her for the first time in years. “That happened downstairs. When she was here at the office,” Baby recalled. “The treatment of her sister,” she admitted,“ has challenged her to become independent and to have dreams for her life.”

 

At RBI, her task is to go to different provinces, look for the blind people and talk to them, in order to help them in any way possible. She does an interview and the assessment of their needs. She has to decide how she can help them and to which social workers she should direct them. The social workers perform various tasks, i.e. enable people to study or they find donors of wheelchairs, etc.

 

Sometimes they have a list of people who are blind in the community. Baby goes to their houses and introduces herself as a social worker (they trust her and let her into the house, they know the role of a social worker). If she wouldn’t introduce herself as such, they’d think she’s a blind beggar and would not let her in. Now she can use her Braille’n’Speak [6] to take notes. Before, someone had to type it for her. Tomorrow she’d be on the radio interviewing the blind.

 

“When I first open my eyes, the person I want to see is God,” Baby says. She does not wish to have another chance of seeing anymore. She has accepted her disability because she sees that there are so many other blind people who have gone rough the same experience and she feels comfortable to be a part of the blind community.

 

She still remembers colors. She used to draw and make some lettering, a kind of calligraphy, the drawings of nature. When she got blind she was frustrated she could not draw anymore. “But you know what,” she adds, “God gave me another chance to make art. “I can make flowers out of ribbon, where eyes are not needed but the hands.”

 

 

Richard’s Story

 

Richard agreed very readily to help organize the camp for the blind. Because what actually Randy [7] was asking was just a facility, a classroom with PC’s in it. “At the time he asked me only for 20 PC’s,” Richard explains, “and I thought that was something that IBM could readily provide, you know, because we had learning facilities at IBM, and it was easy to talk to the manager, she also readily agreed. The other thing was that it would provide us a venue to position IBM as a provider of technologies for the blind. Because, in fact, we were only ourselves beginning to realize that, yes, IBM does have accessibility centers, one in Texas in Austin, another one in Japan and when I contacted them they were very willing to help us out. So, from my communication’s perspective I thought it was a good vehicle to position IBM as a leader in the IT industry, and not only that, as a leader who cares for the community and especially for people with disabilities. If you visit our website, which is www.ibm.com/able you will actually see that there are available technologies for people who are visually impaired or hearing impaired or dyslexic. So we are breaking the frontiers not only in terms of developing technologies for the mass market, but also in developing specific technologies which will respond to the requirements of people various kinds of disabilities. So I felt it was a wonderful opportunity, and it turned out to be so!”

 

Richard worked with blind people in the past. When he was in college he volunteered  to help out in a home for physically disabled. So, it was a house for people in wheelchairs  but there was also a house for very young kids who were blind. This was in Bagio and he was helping out there. And on weekends he’d go there and walk the kids through a part and talk with them, tell them stories. “So,” Richard admits, “work with the blind is not something too far away from my concerns, you know.”

 

Because IBM doesn’t have much in terms of resources themselves for projects like ‘Computer Eyes’ [8] , they were glad to cooperate with Resources for the Blind. It was a great opportunity to do something worthwhile for the community. “And I noticed that people who witnessed this event  went out of their way to do their own thing. the G&G Technologies [9] gave us free booth space for three weeks! I mean, that we a highly commercial venture and they gave us that opportunity for free! I mean, if they did not respond for this invitation, to this opportunity with the same generosity and they would have charged us,” Richard explains.

 

“I had my own detours,” Richard admits. “I never really planned to work for IT. In fact, my first job was a language teacher. I taught Spanish at the university level. I spent some years studying in Spain and it was great, except that in 1986 with the assumption of the new government they took Spanish out of the curriculum and I had to look for another job. And so I worked in government, I worked there eight years, I had a very nice time. I worked in Los Bagnos, which is a university town, about sixty km from here, and I liked the place very much. It was wooded,  it was very near the lake, it was very near the mountains, so it was very pleasant, it had its own hot springs and all.”

Then he was recruited as chief of staff of the minister of science or the secretary of science and technologies, he worked there for a year, then was hired by Sun Mircosystems as their marketing manager; from there he moved to Hewlet Packerd. where he worked as PR for about two years; and then he moved on to IBM, where he has worked for about two years and a half.

 

Richard left HP, because they were realigning,  and there was opportunity for him to get a job there, but he didn’t want it; he didn’t have to do it. Instead, he took a long vacation. He went to Australia with his dad and his two sisters, and they visited another sister who was living there. “So we stayed with her through winter,” Richard recalls. “It was a very nice time to be together, just to be taking long, morning walks around the lakes in Canberra, they said Canberra was a boring place, but, you know, I think ‘boring’ is the state of mind, wherever you are if you’re boring, you will be bored, you know.  So, we met a number of good friends there, we had a really good time.”

Five months into Richard’s vacation, IBM gave him a call! They set up an interview and finally they asked him to come back home, which he did. One of his friends sent him an email to say that there was a vacancy in IBM because their communications manager had retired or something, would Richard be interested in the job; he said, “Let me think about it because, like, I have been in the IT industry for about five years or so and it has been very hectic, you know how it is. You have to study all the time, you refresh product information every three months. It can be very tiring. So, with IBM I had about 16 points of concern, can you imagine? I had 16 in my mind questions about working at IBM. So I sent these questions to a friend of mine, who used to work for HP and is now working for IBM, and she patiently responded to all my questions and encouraged me to reply. So I sent in my application and my resume. I didn’t know that she was going to earn from that transaction. So she earned money, because there was a program at IBM: if you submit a resume, and it’s a good resume, you get money! If the person is hired you get more money! So you see? IBM is that kind of company. It’s taking care of its employees.”

 

“There is something about giving away,” Richard adds. “Sometimes these days we’re so jaded, because people just want to sell, just want to get something out of any transaction. But when you give, many times you also get. And sometimes what you get is more than what you give. In the case of Resources for the Blind, when we had the “Computer Eyes” project last year, we benefited not only the kids in the program but also the IBM’ers. You know, they thought it was such a great program! They were very generous with their financial contributions and they sent us a lot of emails to say: ‘Hey, Richard, you did a great job and you should continue this, because we should be selfless,’ you know, things like that. Emails, which, I think, reinforced our need to be connected with other people.”

 

“We need a more humane face to the corporate world,” Richard admits. “Sometimes it’s so glassy… you know if you work for a multinational company it’s like you live in a glass tower, you know? But what is the glass tower—it’s really people who are there. And when you appeal to them they are very generous in fact! So, “Computer Eyes” gave us an opportunity to benefit not only the blind students but also IBM’ers, to provide a channel for their own giving, for their own generosity.”

 

For Richard, it is natural to be happy to have a chance to help other people. “The fish takes to the water, so, naturally they like it. It’s just the natural thing to do,” he explains. “I mean, we talked to the media people and they tell us: ‘I want to be there, I am very interested in this project.’ And in fact they come, they forward us really nice article. We’re in this news magazine that they distribute for free on the MRT [10] . We’re there today. We have the whole page. Very often people don’t know how to help or where they can go to, to help.”

 

“So also,” Richard adds, “like, Enquirer—and I must mention this—they have an editorial policy. They had to make a common decision that at least once a week they will feature, on the front page of their newspaper, a story that builds, you know, that encourages people, inspired them. The Philippine Daily Enquirer, it’s the leading newspaper in the Philippines. They’ve been very hard-hitting, you know, so they criticize government programs, politicians, and all this, and they are very critical. And they came to a point where they realized that people need something more than a critical perspective. People need to be inspired. When they read the newspaper sometimes they don’t read the newspaper at all, anymore! Because they’re just sick and tired of  all these negativities. So why don’t they write about these positive things for a change? So now, you will find in the Enquirer, at least on a Sunday when people are more relaxed, you’ll find a story there that builds up, inspires other people. And there has been a number of stories about blind people there.”

 

“Unfortunately,” Richard admits, “outside of Metro Manila there are very few community newspapers that you can really speak of. But I’d say that given the breakthroughs in technology, that sooner or later the visual impairment will just be one of those things. Because the blind can really do so many other things.” 

 

Trudy & Andy’s Story

 

Andy: We saw an ad in a magazine that said “Teach English in China” and we both mentioned it to each other. I thought about it a long time and then one time Trudy said: “Have you seen that ad, would you be interested” and I was kind of waiting for that signal. And I said “Oh, yes!” Not really, I didn’t have to convince her, cause she was ready for me to say ‘yes’  I’ve been hoping she’d bring it up but I didn’t want to force a decision on her. Actually I prayed. I prayed and I said: “Lord, if Trudy ever mentions this ad, that’s a sign from you that I should pick up the phone and say ‘how do I apply.’ So, after about a year, cause it ran every month or so on a magazine, after about a year and it came so, we did it, we rang, I figured I’ll pick up the phone and fill out the paperwork until you see that this won’t work and then you know, that would be the sign that it wasn’t meant to be, but it worked!

 

 

Trudy and Andy intended to go to China to teach English. Their tour guide in China had told them that there are many people who come to China to help build schools, build houses, build anything, but that there was a great need for English teachers at the moment. Trudy and Andy did not have the ability to help build houses, but they did have the skills to teach English. They had applied to go to China and couldn’t get a visa for Trudy to go there, so the agency, the English Language Institute China, told them that they also had openings in Vietnam, would they consider that. China and Vietnam are considered alternative or creative access countries because they don’t allow missionaries to work there, but they do allow people who are Christians to go there and work. That is how they ended up in Vietnam instead. But they had traveled through China and Tibet to have some idea of what Vietnam would be like as far as the standard of living, what’s available, and all that. 

 

The fact that the U.S., where Trudy and Andy come from, and Vietnam, where they have decided to help, have been at war did not stop them. “In fact,” Andy admits: “the fact that we had been at war was almost a plus. In other words, we felt even a greater need to help if we could. We really would like to help those people, that country improve. I don’t feel guilty or I don’t feel personally responsible for the war, but, I would like to see the countries be friends move on instead of brood over their past.”

 

The Vietnamese people, on their part, were happy to receive Trudy’s and Andy’s help. The Vietnamese know that they were Christian, and that was OK. They just could not preach. But they knew what Trudy and Andy stood for and in many ways they admired that. They just didn’t want them to preach it, and that’s OK. They also add:

 

Andy: And some of their people may be Christians, but they… it isn’t easy. It’s technically legal

 

Trudy: And they do have churches there. 

 

A: for their own people, yes.

 

T: And we could go to church there.

 

A: But they feel that it will hurt their job opportunities, and the government won’t  think properly of them and so on, and so on. It isn’t truly easy to be a Christian there at all.

 

 Well the camps, they were reeducation camps after the war ended, which is called reunification, the war ending in reunification, same thing, and people who supported the South were sent to camps for that reason alone and some people who are Christians got sent to reeducation camps for that reason alone.

 

T: And they’re still in existence. There are still people in some reeducation camps, but not as much as used to be. And, so, it’s a really nice country to be in, it’s one of the most beautiful countries I think I’ve seen in Asia and the Vietnamese people after the reunification war have a very difficult life: there was a lot of starvation, a lot of… things just were not working, they’ve just got far behind, they’re far behind in their medical care, in anything. And this is now a country that has all these negative things around, all this famine, and that, and become part of the world, of becoming more open to trading, to having tourists come through and also better the lives for their people. And they’re working very hard at that, and they have felt that English is one of the things they must absolutely learn. Up until five years ago, the second language in Vietnam was Russian, and they just overnight changed it to English, and so there is a great need for English teachers all over. Many of the students we come in contact with never ever have heard a native speaker. They had learned the pronunciation of English, by how the pronunciation guides  that come in dictionaries and we’re guessing at that they’d never heard it spoken. There’s just not the equipment there to even have tapes or anything.

 

A: And there are some Russian teachers now who aren’t being employed now as Russian teachers. They don’t need as many as they used to, so they are learning new skills.

 

T: And it’s a hard-working country. The people work tremendously long hours: they start their day at five in the morning with exercise, with whatever, they’re at their jobs early, and they go till ten o’clock at night, you know, it’s just tremendous amount of work. You know, for the amount of money they earn they just work very, very hard.

 

…very, very high unemployment, which they have somewhat solved by the creation of very specific tasks, so you will have ten people taking your tickets and each person does  one little task of issuing a ticket. That way ten people have jobs, which, from a Western point of view sounds like a terrible waste of labor. But for them it’s working very well because everybody shares in at least some income. And that is how, even though the unemployment is high, it’s still better than if they started, you know, letting everybody do multiple tasks.

 

***

 

T: Most of the foreigners do not travel by themselves; they travel either with hiring a tour guide or with tour groups. They very much discourage traveling on your own. They make it very difficult to do it that way. You can’t seem to get tickets right and then you can’t seem to get the connections to places, you can’t seem to find the hotels, so most people travel with a guide. I don’t know… The students told us that they were pretty sure that somebody was hired to keep track of us during the day. I don’t know… we were in such a small city I think almost anybody knew exactly where we were, there were ten foreign people living in the whole city and we were not very different.  So… I don’t know. Maybe they do it maybe they don’t. But yeah, I do think they do keep a very close track of foreigners. It’s the only country I’ve been in where they keep your passport or, even if you visit a private home overnight, you must register with the police with your passport number and your visa number.

 

A: And I think particularly Americans may be more so, but all foreigners, and the local authorities, you know, the local powers—every city has its what in the old days were called the party—they call them the local authorities, likes to know what’s going on, so they make sure they collect a lot of  data. What they do with it I have no idea. A lot of it is boring, you know, “Trudy went to the market, “Andy went to the ball-swallow  play.”

 

And people who supposedly follow the foreigners are not bad paid. I think maybe some of them are veterans or pensioners and it’s a way of giving them income that maybe they really, really need.

 

T: One of the things that is not conjecture, I mean that we know for sure is all of our packages, no matter how big or how small, every single thing was opened and checked. There was not any hiding about, they were cut, they were taped with the government tape, as well as were some of our letters. And anything objectionable according to their standards, whether it was a certain type of music, a certain type of tapes, for instance you had sermon tapes sent to you from your church, they were mailed back to the States. Our videos were watched before they were allowed to come through. And, one of them accidentally came through without anything on it and there was a note on there that “this tape is blank.” So it’s not, you know, it’s not even hidden. It’s like, “Hello there!” or, you know,  “Good letter!” or something. It’s just… they try to be very personal and all of that, having checked your mail.   

 

***

 

T: We were in Vietnam year and a half. The people [in Asia] are very loving, very kind, very gentle and at the same time, especially with the Vietnamese, they are probably known as some of the most cruel or difficult people in America. I mean they games and things that they do in America, they’re known for that. So the contrasts are so very great with them. I don’t know much about the Philippines, this is a project [11] that we’ve been aware of for a lot of years, so it’s kind of nice to be able to maybe do something with it for a while.

 

A: You’re right though, Asia is fascinating. It’s difficult, life, standard of living life as compared to America, although the Philippines isn’t too bad, but the traffic is and the pollution is quite a bit worse than we’re used to, but it’s fascinating. It’s fascinating part of the world. And so is Europe and I suppose Africa, which I know nothing about. But Asia is very, very fascinating.

 

T: Just so many people, so many differences. You know, people will live in very nice houses to people who live in, you know, little huts and who will stand on the sidewalk and wash themselves, some things, you know, just the contrasts that are in Asia probably are stronger than in any place we have ever visited.

 

A: And every country is really not like any other country in Asia, as you get to know all of them. There is really… there are similarities, but there are huge differences. So, we feel a little bit driven to do this because we have been very fortunate in our lives. You know we got our children off and they are self-employed, I mean they are self-supporting, and yet we are young enough, I have some time because I took some early retirement, we have good health and if there is somebody that needs help and maybe we can contribute, that’s fine. If someone said: “Everyone in Asia is now taken care of, no problems, you can go home and not worry about it,” that would be fine, too. But, you know, if we can help somebody we feel, we should, and it’s not a terrible, terrible sacrifice. We enjoy it. Not everything, but we enjoy… we have the curiosity about other country, so it’s great, we can come here and see some things and learn some things and just be able to help other people.

 

T: And by living in a place for a while you get integrated into the community, you know how people really live, you know, not just the people that get shown to you on a tour or for a few weeks. So, eventually, I think, even here [in the Philippines] we will get to know local people differently from that. And just it gives you a real appreciation  of a different lifestyle, different acceptance of things.

 

We did make friends with the local people in Asia. We email to them now, they all have our email address and I wrote to them and so I’ve already begun to get emails. One of them was telling us about a job that she had just gotten and another one is, you know, concerned about her son…[] So, I think we’ll stay in touch with some, some maybe for a short time, but I think there will be a few that will be for a long time.

 

A: It was real hard to leave, I’ll miss those students, but I’ve got other things to do; they will not likely leave Vietnam so they can remember that time in their lives. But they came by a few days before we left and there was a lot of tears and letters, a lot of very supportive letters in a very strong language how they will miss us and all that—it was real emotional, the last few days. You know, they are just wonderful people. I just love them, my students. Our students and our friends.

 

And it didn’t take long [for students to share their problems with them]. You know, they are students far from home and they miss… they are family oriented and they miss their mother and father, so when they see an older person who is friendly and willing to talk with them, they were very ready to talk and they didn’t need to overcome an anti-American feeling. They’re very interested in America, they seem to love people from America.

 

T: Or at least were willing to put aside any feelings they had just to be able to meet us as people. And after a while they learned to see us as people separate from being Americans. And I think we had the same thing. I had one student that I tutored in English, and she was in the ninth grade, and her family does not speak any English, and I speak very little Vietnamese, so to do things with them was always a big challenge. And yet, they really wanted us to participate in their family life. And part of what the mother did—since I didn’t charge for the tutoring—was, she would give me cooking lessons in  Vietnamese cooking. She’d give me cooking lessons, once every two months. She’d buy all the ingredients and would teach me to make a different dish,. Which is real challenge, because she spoke some English, I spoke no Vietnamese and the sign language got to be quite good. But her daughter’s English improved to the point that by the time we left, her daughter was an excellent translator. So it was really amazing to see the difference from somebody who could barely speak when I started with her a year and a half, to being a very confident translator of English into Vietnamese, and Vietnamese into English; of what her parents said, she would tell us, and what we said she would tell them. And I know I will stay in touch with her either through writing… She will be moving to another city, so even if I’d gone back I would now be in touch with her. Cause she will be going to Ho Chi Min City, they have better schools there, she will do her high school there and hopes that she will be good enough in English to be able to study abroad somewhere.

 

I’m sure they would check the email correspondence between me and the girl, for instance. You have to be careful what you write in messages, and you don’t want to write anything negative on the government, I stay away from politics, I don’t know anything about politics and I don’t want to know anything about it. I don’t know much about politics in the States either, so, you know, that’s not so much different. But many everyday things… you know, there’s many things you can discuss without being real political. And there’s many concerns people have that you can still share. So, I don’t know how much they check on the email, I think that may be a random thing, but I think, I’m not sure how safe email is for anybody in the world and that’s always been a concern for everybody.

 

A: The government too is puzzled, like your first question, “why do these people come here?” You know, life is more difficult here than the life in America, they’re quite puzzled, and therefore suspicious.

 

We’d stay away from Christianity, for instance

 

T: from, you know, there’s specific words [12] that Christians use, they have their own language, and I have always objected to that. I think you can be just as Christian without using all those special words. So, we just talk the same I always do, you know, my mother, how is she doing, her daughter’s things, you know, what’s happening with her, you know, is she going to have her cataract’s surgery, is she not, you know, I’ll ask how her family do. So it’s everyday things you’d talk normally with your family about or with other people about. And the same, as I would discuss Christianity with anybody I’d just say “I don’t do that because I’m a Christian” or if I get asked to do something. But I don’t have a big need to use of these special words. And if people would see me, when they would come in to my room and I was reading my Bible they would say “What are you doing?” I’d say “I’m reading my Bible, I do that everyday.”  Because that is what I do, but I do not have a big need… you know, only I would just answer their questions, and that’s OK, you can answer the questions

 

A: In class we knew that two or three reports would have been made to the university if we stayed into controversial territory, so we avoided it. But, at Christmas I would say Christians celebrate Christmas for this reason and so do I because I am a Christian and at Easter, I would say that. But if I went further and said: “And you aught to too, and you are to come over tonight and let me explain to you why,” you know, it’s going too far. And we weren’t there for that. We weren’t missionaries; we were teachers. Best teachers we could be.

 

A: We wouldn’t generally touch on those subjects.

 

T: What we would do is, you know, we would tell the students that we pray before meals and we would just pray the same as we always do, which we talk to our father about these things and just use the same words, but not use the “salvation” and “you must believe this” and “these are the points of salvation and everyone has done that.” You don’t go into that. But we did let them know who were the Christians on campus, so if they wanted more, they knew were to go and do that. They knew where the church was.

 

A: And we told our friends in America not to send us theological or political confidence, because it’s no use. We went through a lot of trouble to get place there and our visa, and to get our visa pulled because our friends couldn’t behave, wouldn’t profited nothing. And they… some forgot. And we sent them something saying “watch out what you’re sending in your messages” and then they’d know what we meant. 

 

T: But, you know, there are a lot of Christians who feel a great need to constantly praise the Lord and for them that is right, but it’s not something we have ever done, so we just didn’t have as much of a problem with that. And I think it makes you think about being a regular person and make your life talk for you.  It’s a matter of that you can say all these things and if you still behave wrong, no one is gonna believe you anyway. So, to me it was much more important how I behaved than what I said. Because you can tell me you love me and if you act badly I won’t believe you anyway. But if you don’t say anything and act very loving, I would still know that. So to me the actions were much more important: being available to the students, being respectful of who they were and what their country was, was a good way to let them know how I felt about things.

 

A: And we don’t want to send a message that only Christians are good enough to do stuff like this. Many non Christians help other people in wonderful ways. We happen to be Christians and that’s part of the motivation, but we do not criticize people who aren’t Christians who go to countries to teach or to help with visually impaired and you know do the many, many things that various organizations do.

 

T: I think we’ve thought about that a whole lot that our actions would be very important, especially when you can’t talk openly because talk is so much easier to do than to actually do it.  So that’s why we just felt very comfortable there, not at all like people were watching us all the time or that we had to be super careful, because we were living as we had always lived.

 

***

 

T: I think so (we’d go back to Vietnam if someone sent us). I really would. We did not leave Vietnam because we did not like it; we couldn’t think of any other place there that we wanted to teach, and where we were living, it’s a pretty tough living situation. Not because it was not adequate, but it is four strangers coming together, living in a house for a whole year, sharing your kitchen, sharing your living room, sharing your students, sharing everything. And it’s not the easiest  of situations to be in. And it just kind of felt like we needed a break from that much togetherness. Some of the other schools let you have your own apartment-type thing with your own kitchen; all we had was our own bedroom with bathroom. So everything else had to be communal. And it just gets very difficult, when you come from a culture that prices privacy very highly to going into a culture where privacy is totally unknown, and then to live in a situation where you also have more use, it gets to be overwhelming. After a while you feel like you need a break from being that much together to being a little bit more separate. Here [in the Philippines] we will be and do things, but we will have our own place. So, you know, there’s times when we can just be on our own and we can, kind of, recharge our batteries.

 

A: It is possible that within a year or two we will be so heartsick over our friends in Vietnam and these wonderful students that we’d wonna go back. But maybe not super likely. Because for one reason, we’ll probably have new friends here that we’ll hate to leave. So it comes a point more of what’s the most interesting work and so on, but I would hate to predict. Two years ago I wouldn’t predict we’d be here, or a year ago. Two years ago I wouldn’t predict we’d be in Vietnam. And here we got a year and a half there.

 

T: And to start another place new in Vietnam just, I don’t know, it just didn’t appeal to us. There wasn’t any place where we wanted to go to that we though would be a good place to do it. Most of the other places that ELI has schools up in the northern part of the country, around Hanoi, and there is a big difference between the South and the North as far as how people talk, you know, how they relate to that, so it just felt in some ways like starting all over again and, I don’t know, I guess we just weren’t up to it. We needed more of a break.

 

T: You know, at the time that was kind of a mutual thing of one of us being discouraged and the other one carrying it on. And it probably was in some ways a little tough on our marriage  because in Vietnam it is not considered a good thing for a husband and wife to show any affection to each other in public or anything. And that’s not something we were used to, so that was quite a different thing for us to have to be careful of how we did things and what we said.

 

A: And in America we had plenty of space, of our own hobbies and interests. I’d go fishing and Trudy would go quilting club or something; there we were living in a small room year on, day and night, week after week after week. It’s difficult sometimes. Not all the time, but sometimes, sure. We were totally together, instead of having each kind of an own life and we could come back, you know, we’d do our own thing for two or three days and talk and do something together and then we do our own thing, you know, very little room for tension.

 

T: And here we’ll be separated again as far as doing different work so maybe it will be a nice break for both of us.

 

A: But I believe that we were led to go to Vietnam in order to make it even easier to come here. Because, for one thing, we won’t be so dismayed by some of the negative aspects of living in Asia, if any, and, we’re ready for about anything and in some ways it’ll seem a little bit easier.

 

T: We’ve heard that from other married couples that are doing that, that each one, you kind of take turns in being up and being down with these things, and that it’s not always that easy. And we have not completely cut our ties with English Language Institute. English Language Institute publishes, three times a year, a “Teacher’s Edition,” which is a magazine that is sent to teachers in Vietnam, teachers who teach English, with methods for teaching, book reviews, short stories, that type of thing, and I am continuing to do the proofreading for that magazine. They email it to me on my yahoo and I do the corrections and I email the corrections back. So we’ve not lost touch with the agency and the things as such. So that is part of what I am continuing for them. And that is something I enjoy, and they said they agreed to my proposal that I’d continue with that.

***

 

A: And they were able to get replacements for us. So there will still be the same number of teachers in the city we were in.

 

T: And this time, it will be three women, which will be very good because about ninety percent of the students that they teach are women. So it will be much easier to make connections with them and to talk with them and do things together with them.

 

A: A lot of these are young, unsophisticated---they call themselves girls, 18 to 20—from villages far away, they’ve never been away from their family and the first two months of school they live in a very crowded hot barn, and many of them cry themselves to sleep every night cause they miss their mother that much. This is something that a North American doesn’t understand so strongly. And so they are looking, you know, in a sense, a mother replacement. And that could be a teacher. And I got a little bit of that since I’m old enough to be their grandfather. So you know, I was kind of a grandfather figure. But really they are just looking for adult women that they can feel being contacted by, someone to talk to.

 

T: Some of the boys too, but for women there especially, in the city where we lived in, women are very suspect if there is only one of them with a white man, and it hurts their reputation, it’s considered bad. So they always would come in groups of two, three or four people, so one person could talk, whereas if there is all women there, they can talk alone. Right. They always have to come in groups. You don’t ever come alone as a woman if there is a white man in the house.

 

A: If I was home alone, a girl wouldn’t come in by the door and I’d say I’m here by myself, and she said “I’d come back another time” I knew exactly what she meant.

 

T: So for that reason, having three women teachers is going to be a great help for the women students.

 

A: Ninety percent of the English students are women.

Some boys did look for a father figure, there were some very sad things with that too and some nice farewells and some gifts, and some guys, I was really close to, I thought, and they seemed to act that way. We were at the football games for example together and I would help students form any class. If I was teaching a first year, a third year could come by and say they have trouble with my translation class, “Can you help me?” Of course, I helped anybody, any time cause I didn’t have much else to do. You know, I didn’t have American newspapers to read. But the boys don’t wonna be teachers so much. And so most of the students in the teaching school are female.

 

***

 

A: Buying English newspapers is not possible in that city. But, yes, you can do that in Ho Chi Min City and Hanoi, in the tourist neighborhood. Well, they’re very small market. In the city we were in there were only five Americans total. So it isn’t worth shipping newspapers. In Ho Chi Min City, as far as I know, I don’t know for sure, but I presume, in Ho Chi Min City a Vietnamese person can buy a newspaper, although American, you know, Wallstreet Journal or USA Today, but I also expect that somebody would mark that down

 

T: And it’s very expensive for them.

 

A: Oh, I forgot, yeah

 

T: That is probably the biggest deturn for them buying a newspaper is the great expense. It’s like 15.000 for a newspaper, which is almost a day’s wages for some people.

 

A: Outside of the big cities it’s an average day’s wage. 15.000 dong to the dollar.

 

T: So it’s almost a dollar which for us doesn’t seem like a huge price but for them it’s just tremendously high.

 

***

 

T: Yeah, because we lived more in a countryside[we did have a chance to go to the countryside]. Quy Nhon  is a small city. So it was surrounded by the countryside. The minute you left it you were out in the countryside and in the rice fields and fishing boats and all that. We had to have permission to leave the city, to leave Quy Nhon.

 

A: And we’re sure there are many provinces that we would not be allowed to go through. Maybe there’s military, maybe there is ethnic groups that have problems, there is some reason you cannot go anywhere. But there are a lot of places left and some beautiful places, and some very interesting places: natural wonders, Houlong Bay is world famous United Nations world heritage sight, it has beautiful rocks and mountains cropping out of the sea for kilometer after kilometer, you go on a boat ride and stay on an island. And the Mekong River, south of the Ho Chi Min City, it’s just very fascinating trip. You know, the floating markets on a river, and the millions of people who live in that river, the little kids jumping at that dirty old thing everyday of their life and having a great time, adults standing in the same river with a bottle of shampoo. It’s great, it’s many, many things to see.

 

***

 

T: We had to learn some Vietnamese, just because where we were, not many people speak English. In Ho Chi Min City you can go to the big markets that many tourists come through, all the market people know at least some English enough to be able to sell you. The markets where we were, nobody knew any English, so it was a matter of being able to buy our fruits and vegetables and meats and our everyday things that we needed, that we had to learn Vietnamese. There are no grocery stores there; everything is open-air stoles.

 

A: Life ducks and chickens

 

T: You pick out your chicken and they’ll clean it for you.

 

And you wouldn’t always get the accents right. But they would know us cause we would try to use the same person every time and they would know what we liked to buy and, you know, you can use body language, you can do pointing. I also used small business-size cards, blank cards and on one side I would write the Vietnamese word for what I needed, on the other side I would write the English word. So I would try to pronounce it in Vietnamese, they would try to pronounce it in English. So, if everything came to worse they could at least take a card from me and see in Vietnamese what I wanted, and then they would correct my pronunciation.

 

A: We are fortunate that they used roman letters in their language instead of characters, like some other Asian countries. So, once we knew a few words, like for “bread” or for “soup” or whatever, when you’re driving along you can tell which place to stop at for what. So that was very helpful and that made it easier to learn many words and try to pronounce them.

 

***

 

T: I think our next project will be here [in the Philippines] . Andy is gonna work with Randy for a while to see, maybe having up another project and I will probably be working  at Faith Academy as their school nurse. So, a job opening came open this week so I applied for that.

 

A: Actually I wanna see if I can help Randy do anything. Whatever he wants. Because I think he’s got a lot of excellent employees, but a lot of the decision-making and so on is on his shoulders he’s stretched a little bit thin. And just if I can help, fine, I don’t want to be a boss at all, I just want to help.

 

 

Fresh Mint

 

Fresh Mint has crept in from our garden

Crept right between the lines of our faces

As if to efface them from the world.

As if to efface them

As if

 

Fresh Mint has crept in from our garden

Crept right into the deepest sense of our words

As if to mute them from the future

As if to mute them

As if

 

Fresh Mint that has crept in from our garden

Has intoxicated our minds with its mintiness

With the freshest scent of mint on earth

With the freshest scent

With the freshest

 

With our faces effaced, our conversations muted

Our minds are becoming mintier and mintier

As the intoxication overpowers us and we can’t control it

Can’t control it

Can’t

 

Vanilla Fields

 

Vanilla fields

Everyone yields

To your enchanting aroma

 

Your potent scent

Will put an end

To any kind of dissonance

 

Stronger than potion

Then any emotion

You put the spell upon us.

 

Vanilla fields

Like slaves we yield

To your enchanting aroma

 

We come closer

Ever closer

Towards the scent’s source that haunts us.

 

V a n I l l a f I e l d s

E v e r y o n e y I e l d s

T o y o u r e n c h a n t I n g a r o m a

 

Fields vanilla

Yields one no

Aroma to your enchanting.

 

 

Cinnamon

 

Cinnamon-

Your strong scent

Your bitter-sweet blend

Has turned my senses numb

With the sweetest pleasure,

With memories to treasure

Such as Proust in la Madeleine has found.

 

Cinnamon-

You made me sin

- I indulge myself in

plunging into memories.

Those bitter and sweet

Full of joy mixed with grief

- A blend of childhood stories.

 

Cinnamon-

Your scent has brought

The memories of

Things dwelling in the past

Your scent has seeped

in me too deep

To put my memories at rest

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

© 2006 by Marzipan Witch