Stranger in a Strange Land: High School
Today’s writing prompt is irresistible: Something you learned in High School.
I left my US High School mid-year to live in Germany, and to go to a US Department of Defense High School.
I learned that not everyone thinks the same way I think.
I learned that sometimes the way I think might even be wrong, or incomplete.
I learned that even within our own culture, there may be varieties of cultures and many different ways to do a thing, and that none is truly the “right” way, that there may be many right ways.
I learned to lean back and observe, before I ventured an opinion.
I learned to listen when someone said I was wrong. I didn’t have to agree, but it helped to get this other perspective (no matter how mistaken it might have been, LOL)
After high school, I lived a nomadic life, back and forth to university, then marrying a military man and being on the move for the next forty years. Some of my best friends to this day are friends I made during those high school years, people who have led very different lives, but who still share so much in common because of our uncommon heritage and our diverse views. Learning that kind of flexibility eased the way in later life, living in different cultures in Germany, in Africa and in the Middle East and finally, in the Deep South. I’m still learning! 🙏😄🙏
Today in the Strait of Hormuz
When you treat your friends badly and no one comes to help you when you screw up:
Prayer for the Feast Day of Saint Cuthbert
From today’s Lectionary readings:
Merciful God, who called Cuthbert from following the flock to be a shepherd of your people: Mercifully grant that we also may go without fear to dangerous and remote places, to seek the indifferent and the lost; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
What Iran and the United States Have in Common
I don’t think I ever met an Iranian woman I didn’t like.
The Iranian women I met – it seemed to me – were all gorgeous. They were educated, and they liked to read books and if you ever want to have a great conversation, look for the Iranian woman. I survived many a stuffy reception, finding intelligent women and talking books, or customs, or history.
So I shudder as I see our forces gathering for a potential strike on Iran.
I get it. Iranian men are smart too, I used to run into them in college, always talking engineering, as in huge national engineering projects, and, way above my head, nuclear physics. They are smart, creative, and great problem solvers.
Here is what makes me laugh. I don’t think the Iranian nuclear threat is the problem. I think Iran is too much like the USA.
Iran has a strong, unpopular leader who is particularly tough on uppity women (do you see where this is going?) and has an economy which is slowly tanking. Iran wants the population to be COMPLIANT and does not like civil protest. Iran is hard on student protestors, but especially hard on non-compliant women.
Our equally unpopular leader, equally chaotic, arbitrary, and cruel, envies the Ayatollah’s theocratic autonomy. Theocracy in Iran has all the power; they can jail people with impunity. They kill protestors with impunity. Not only are they the LAW, but they are above the law.
So how is that working out for Iran? Not so great. It hasn’t worked out so great since the overthrow of the Shah. When people don’t have a voice in how the country are run, they aren’t happy, and unhappy people have ways of resisting, and sabotaging the oppressive regime.
I think that all this massing of power and threatening to invade Iran is a distraction from our own orange leader’s problems with leading. After one year of his leadership, jobs are declining, people cannot afford health care, colleges are afraid to teach critical thinking skills, and we have poorly trained goons and thugs with carte blanche to invade people’s houses, shove demonstrators around, and to kill with impunity. Or at least that is how I see it. I have seen no accountability for the killing of Renee Good or Jonathan Pretti in Minneapolis, nor for the homicides in the “detention centers” which are like huge cattle corrals.
And to what point? As long as the Iranians are increasingly unhappy with their own leader, their leadership has big problems. When the leadership can point their finger at an impending danger caused by an encroaching bully, it rallies the people to the national cause.
Oh, but the power and the might makes the heart beat faster, and what a perfect opportunity to play with all our ships and planes and the great glory of it all, you know, like what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Oh wait! Another similarity! Our leader uses emergency powers because of an ALIEN INVASION! The Rule of Law no longer applies! We are overrun by our roofers! Our gardeners and landscapers! Our waiters! Our housekeepers! Our fruit and vegetable pickers! Our meat packers! Our teacher assistants! Our janitors! Our nursing home care-givers! Our teachers and professors! Our potential citizens, tempest-tossed, waiting by the Golden Door (posted on our Statue of Liberty, welcoming our fore-fathers to this country).
These are not the criminals and rapists our toddler-in-chief tells us he is saving us from; over 90% of those violently arrested and detained are NOT criminals, just people who will work hard to try to provide their family with a living wage and a roof over their heads, and enough food. Many are documented, going through the system. The system is failing them, and failing us, as a country. We are a nation of immigrants.
Like the Ayatollah, our leader seeks total control, including “protecting” our elections – protecting us from voting against him and his politics of hatred, inequality, and humiliation.
Do you think there is a long-term strategy in all this? Do you believe in the Board of Peace as a functional institute? Do you see anything here that is truly in the national interest of the citizens of the United States of America? All I see is a dance of chaos, self-enrichment, self-aggrandizement, vanity, and a grab for all the power.
Autumn Plum Torte
We are watching the farmer’s markets for the first of the Italian plums, those elongated plums that show up around this time of the year. We are getting eager for Pflaumekuchen, or Autumn Plum Torte.
It’s really more like a pie. And I hate to tell you how easy it is to make.
This is my mother’s recipe:
Autumn Plum Torte (Pflaumekuchen)
1/4 Cup Butter
1 T Sugar
1/4 t. salt
2 eggs
1 c sifted flour
10 – 12 purple prune plums
1 c sugar
1 T Flour
Dash nutmeg and cinnamon
1/2 cup half and half
1. Cream butter and sugar, add salt and 1 egg yolk. Blend well, add 1 cup flour, mix well.
2. Press mix into bottom of greased 8” pie pan.
3. Cut plums in half or quarters; place cut side up on top of mix. It is pretty if you make a kind of circular pattern out from the center.
4. Combine sugar, 1 T flour and spices. Sprinkle over plums.
5. Beat 1 egg and 1 white, add half and half, pour over top.
6. Bake at 425 for ten minutes, then turn down to 350 for 40 – 45 minutes, until custard sets and plums are cooked.
The smell as it is cooking is divine. You can serve it in wedges, warm or cold.
You can also double this, and make it in a 9 x 14 pan, to serve to larger groups. It goes FAST!
Oh! The People You’ll Meet! (Apologies to Dr. Seuss)
Under the category of Stranger in a Strange Land, things change. My generation revolted (and were sometimes revolting) and rioted and demonstrated against the VietNam War and for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion. We marched. We made documentaries. Oh, we were so idealistic.
AdventureMan, my husband, was a warrior from the beginning, and fought in that unpopular war. When he returned home, people were harassing returning soldiers, even spitting on them.
Emotions have calmed through the years, and many surviving fighters in that war, men and women, have had a tough time dealing with their participation in the war. We often see homeless veterans here in Pensacola; the homeless find Pensacola comfortable, and temperate. You can sleep rough most of the year.
My husband keeps his eye open for fellow vets. When he sees someone with a VietNam vet bumper sticker, or wearing a VietNam Vet bill cap, he’ll go over, shake hands, and swap old war stories. It can be a very moving moment for both parties involved. War-fighting is intense. There are things you don’t forget. There are things you do forget, and years later, they come back in dreams, not good dreams.
And there are also fraudsters out there. Some are well-meaning, well enough, or just oblivious. Some are trying to fake an experience they didn’t have.
We had a homeless man here in Pensacola we helped occasionally. When he told us he had also been in the military, AdventureMan started talking with him and soon started looking very confused. “He’s never been anywhere near being in the military,” he told me, “No one in the military forgets where they did their basic training or can’t remember where they were stationed.” Nothing makes a person mad like someone straight out lying.
Other times, it isn’t so manipulative, it is just ignorant. In the local Apple Market, AdventureMan shook a man’s hand and asked where he’d been in VietNam and the man just looked foolish and said, “It isn’t really my hat, a friend gave it to me.”
More recently, out at Peg Leg Pete’s on the beach, as we were leaving, AdventureMan stopped to talk with a man wearing a 7th Cav hat. But no, he had never been in the 7th Cav; he had been in the Navy, and he was a Cowboy Re-Enactor. He also looked sheepish.
People are tribal. The like association. Kids wear Nikes because they want to play basketball like Michael Jordan. Some people wear Florida State hats because they hope Florida State wins the big game, not because they have ever set foot on the Florida State campus. Or Hawaiaan shirts, or turquoise squash blossom jewelry, or Yosemite sweatshirts (me), because of the association. It’s just the way we are, expressing ourselves with tribes, aspirational or not.
It’s a bad idea to give an impression, knowingly, which may be easily discovered to be false. I had a friend once who found an old sorority pin in a thrift store and wore it as costume jewelry. I told her it was a bad idea, that sororities inspire deep loyalties, and wearing a pin to a sorority that you don’t belong to could damage your reputation. I think she chose to wear it ironically.
Living in Doha, where designer copies were cheap and plentiful, one of my Japanese friends told me that she would NEVER buy a copy; that people who know what details to look for would know you were a pretender. Once you got that reputation, you would always be known as a person who couldn’t afford the real thing. I listened and learned!
AdventureMan says, “Be careful what you wear because of the message that it sends. If you didn’t earn it, don’t wear it.” His Dad was a SeaBee, but he would never wear his Dad’s insignia. People may not be trying to fool people, but people will see what you are wearing and make assumptions.
The majority of people wearing military memorabilia actually have a legitimate connection to that unit, and greeting them results in truly wonderful moments of sharing and camaraderie.
Also – if you believe no women were serving in VietNam, you need to read Kristin Hannah’s book, The Women. Women served as nurses, medics and doctors, as Red Cross workers, and in administrative roles. Although not in combat, they served their country and were shot at, wounded, killed, hit by explosives, died in helicopter evacuations. They suffered PTSD and were treated as poorly as the other wounded vets that came out of that war.
Pensacola New Year’s Sunset over the Bayou
We moved to this house at the beginning of COVID. You wouldn’t think it was a great time to go house hunting or to move, but it worked for us. Almost every day, I thank my husband for moving here (he had said “No more moves!” but COVID made things different.) Almost every day is a sunset – not unlike this one, but no two are identical. Every day. It never fails to thrill my heart. Happy New Year!
Diwali: A Light Sparkles in Dark Times
Today, Labor Day, when dark events are taking place in our country, shutting down the light of liberty and democracy, we got an unexpected invitation – to a Diwali party, coming up in a couple months.
We are so honored. And we know Diwali; we were living in Al Fardan 1, in Doha, Qatar, when an Indian neighbor invited all the residents of Al Fardan to come over for Diwali. We didn’t know what Diwali was, and our internet was dial-up and irregular, but we asked around and were told, with big smiles, to go and find out.
The night of Diwali came, and we walked to our neighbor’s house, along with many of our Al Fardan neighbors. We could see it long before we arrived – thousands of candles set out in patterns in the yard, lining the sidewalk, leading us inside, to more lights and a feast of sweets, platters of sweets, all illuminated by gleaming candlelight.
Such open-hearted hospitality. Such generous sharing. No one was excluded; everyone was welcome, and there was plenty for everyone.
Our neighbors’ beliefs were different from ours, and yet, I believe all such generosity, freely given, springs from the same spirit.
We can’t wait for this upcoming Diwali.
When the News is Personal
MARTYRS OF THE SUDANS
(16 May 1983)
Photo From the Episcopal News Service
The Christian bishops, chiefs, commanders, clergy and people of Sudan declared, on May 16, 1983, that they would not abandon God as God had revealed himself to them under threat of Shariah Law imposed by the fundamentalist Islamic government in Khartoum. Until a peace treaty was signed on January 9, 2005, the Episcopal Church of the Province of the Sudan suffered from persecution and devastation through twenty-two years of civil war. Two and a half million people were killed, half of whom were members of this church. Many clergy and lay leaders were singled out because of their religious leadership in their communities. No buildings, including churches and schools, are left standing in an area the size of Alaska. Four million people are internally displaced, and a million are scattered around Africa and beyond in the Sudanese Diaspora. Twenty-two of the twenty-four dioceses exist in exile in Uganda or Kenya, and the majority of the clergy are unpaid. Only 5% of the population of Southern Sudan was Christian in 1983. Today over 85% of that region of six million is now mostly Episcopalian or Roman Catholic. A faith rooted deeply in the mercy of God has renewed their spirits through out the years of strife and sorrow.
From the proposal before the 75th General Convention
We have a friend in South Sudan, Manyan Debid Mayer. We met him with a delegation of African Journalists here in Pensacola looking at Freedom of the Press with Gulf Coast Diplomacy. He came to our house, with two other African delegates, shortly before Christmas, and we had a lovely and memorable evening together sharing our stories.
Manyan Debid told us about his childhood, as the Janjaweed attacked in Sudan, and how very suddenly, often in the middle of the night, an entire village would have to evacuate, carrying only what they could carry on their backs. It was chaotic, terrifying – and deadly. Villages would be burned and razed to the ground.
The villagers would run towards the missions in Uganda for safety. Sometimes families got separated. The children found shelter, and care, at the missions while they waited to be reunited with their desperate parents. At the missions, the priests would teach the children the basics, using a stick, and drawing letters, shapes and numbers on the ground. Manyan Debid, now a journalist, got his start with those very basic lessons at the mission churches.
We Americans know so little. Few even know where South Sudan is, or that it is a separate nation from Sudan, one of the newest nations in the world.
I got caught in a comical situation as I tried to wire funds to Manyan Debid once during continued difficulties in South Sudan. I went to my bank and asked them to wire x amount of money to my friend. They looked at me oddly. They called the bank manager, and had hushed conversations. The manager came in and interrogated me very gently, asking how I know this person, did he contact me over the internet, how often did he ask me for money, questions that were none of his business – except, as it turns out, it was. They thought I was an old lady being scammed by some internet scammer. Did I even know, they asked me, that Sudan was on the restricted countries list?
I explained equally gently and firmly that South Sudan is a separate country from Sudan, and how I knew this man, how we had met in Pensacola through a visit arranged by the Department of State, how he had been a guest in my house and that we had corresponded as friends, on Facebook for years. They didn’t believe me. They didn’t believe there was a separate country called South Sudan. At the end, I finally had to tell them it was MY money, and that I could send him this amount and even if it were a scammer, it would not hurt me. Very reluctantly, they wired the funds to my friend.
Manyan Debid and I are still in touch. Today, he is a working journalist in South Sudan, still bravely facing the forces who would like to take South Sudan, and all its oil wealth, and destroy the existence of South Sudan.
There are still martyrs in South Sudan. And most Americans don’t even know South Sudan exists.
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