Fit to Serve-Half and One Literary
- Mar 30
- 2 min read
I published this blog post celebrating the publication of a particular essay from my memoir, Strings in our Hands: A Memoir for My Community of Teachers.
On campus today, I attended a talk by Daniel Wilkinson, author of Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting in Guatemala. A full circle moment. Others in the room who don't know me yet were surprised that Guatemala was part of my story. Sometimes, I surprise myself that I forget the same.
I knew I had read Wilkinson's book. I knew it was the first book from the Peace Corps suggested list. I knew these things because of the motorcycle. I knew I had mentioned that reading list in my memoir and I opened the Google doc. Edit. Find. "Reading list." One entry.
After accepting service in Guatemala, I tackled the reading list. Those writers traversed the winding, unpaved roads on motorcycles or scaled hidden trails with guerilla fighters.
Wilkinson was one of "those writers" and today I shook his hand.
We can try to tell a story. We can think for years a story will never have a listener. It took fifteen years for this essay to be accepted, and it's still relevant, especially to me.
Wilkinson said the same about his own.
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**Photo credit--Illustration by Nicole Kharjana
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I sat up straight during the taxi ride through Guatemala City. I leaned forward onto my rounded backpack, never against the car window as I had before I had mailed the Peace Corps application in the grocery store parking lot. For months, thick dust and smoke had been the usual travel companions. Water, rain specifically, was worse. One week ago, I had followed government protocol in a hurricane that caused a national state of emergency. Or, I ran away.
This had to be a crazy dream, me, who never really wanted to go anywhere, taking on a project like this so far away and unrelated to teaching in everyone else’s opinion. Moving towards that goal or gray humid exhaust caused the same sensation. Nausea. My feet had winced against while clumping through rubble laced mud up to my knees. I could still turn around, but I hadn’t turned back in a week. No, six months. Maybe one year. Actually, fifteen years when I had decided I wanted to be a teacher.
The first requirement of Peace Corps service in country had been an aspiration statement. “What do you expect from Guatemala?” the blank piece of paper had prompted.
“My goal is actually quite simple, to feel as though I have done everything I possibly can to be an effective teacher. That is why I am here.”
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