Who Cares About Haiti?

I am pleased to have been the recipient of the Ordre d’Honneur et de Merite, Haiti, 1934 –
JJ’s great-uncle, Henry D Barker, born more than 100 years ago in America, recounting his impoverished boyhood and subsequent career

In the here and now, JJ has a mom-friend who cares enough about Haiti that she carried the Christian gospel to children there last year, and is suffering with the Haitian people in the earthquake’s aftermath.

She is the mom of Favorite Daughter’s traveling companion to Europe last summer. The November before that, this devout conservative evangelical (but also well-educated medical professional and feminist, for a southerner at least) did a little traveling of her own and took the church mission trip to Haiti.

Here is her FaceBook status update today:

Presidents Team up for Haiti.
Wow, that is the spirit that makes America the great country that it is. It makes me proud to be a naturalized American and to be part of Americans helping Haiti.

So it seems to me we surely share American values and see truth, beauty and goodness much the same way, despite not sharing the same family, politics, religion or profession.

As for me and Haiti, I’d personally still look to education rather than religion to save it. My family history is all about the transformative power of hard work and sacrifice channeled through education, not prayer. My great-uncle D went on his Haitian education mission trip of sorts after growing up dirt-poor subsistence farming in the Blue Ridge Mountains, partly homeschooling in fact, then studying agriculture and textiles at Clemson back when it was an agricultural college and Air Force academy.

From other universities he later earned his master’s of science in agronomy and his Ph.D. — first in our family! — and I was raised on stories from my mother’s mother (Uncle D’s enormously proud little sister) about him and Aunt Pauline living in Haiti for years in what sounded like a tropical paradise, helping to change the world with his education.

In 1928 he wrote a book about it: Éléments du Botanique Général par Henry D. Barker, Ph.D., Chef du Department de Bontanique Service Technique.

In French.

Published in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Stamped right on the front cover.

I am holding that book in my hand right now because by default I am now the family’s historical repository as was my father before me — both of us also academic doctors, admired throughout the extended family as continuing generational examples of the importance of education, not just to enrich the individual or contribute to the family’s collective well-being but also for all of humanity, because learning and then using it for good is what we are meant to do. . .

Inside his book, it’s inscribed in his feathery old-fashioned fountain pen script:
“To my mother from The Author.”

And I also have here beside me Uncle D’s self-published memoir of his boyhood, inscribed in that same hand, to me! –
“to Jennifer whose grandparents Alice and Ira were born and raised in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Henry D Barker”

Here is what he wrote about Haiti in the epilogue:

One of My Favorite Unschooling Europe Photos

Seeds of Unschooling Europe Planted In Culture Curiosity

Favorite Daughter and her fond companion Kiki are home again. I have had my hugs and gotten some presents, though surely not heard all the stories yet. As they adjust to Florida time again and catch up on their sleep, I’m sitting here trying to adjust to Facebook and I just realized there is a category called “notes” where one can post blog-type essays. Favorite Daughter apparently has been doing this more than blogging at her own Cocking a Snook Too! in the past several months.

So in her Facebook “notes” I found the perfect precursor to the Unschooling Europe tour. This is EDUCATION, and while it can serve them well in school settings too, that’s only because some school settings really do still appreciate and reward real education.

Assuming that most thinking parents will not be FB friends of Favorite Daughter’s thus wouldn’t be able to read this there, I’m adding it as a permanent page here under “First Thinks First” — as unschooling culture commentary and the true beginning of the wonderful adventure they haven’t had a chance to tell me all about yet . . .

UNSCHOOLING EUROPE tag

Unschooling Europe, Unschooling Culture

The whole story of their adventure, how it started and why they went together, on their own, at ages 18 and 19 with no adult or group planning and supervision, can be read in their own contemporaneous words by clicking here and going back to the earliest post first, then reading forward chronologically.

But I think now it really started long before that, with the young women they were becoming, how they were thinking and feeling and engaging ideas and culture (and each other) on intellectually meaningful plains, refusing to settle for cultural crap and idiot answers to Life’s big questions. They unschooled Europe because they unschooled themselves first. Something like that.

So here, again in their own words, is how Favorite Daughter and her friend Kiki came to Unschool Europe. (Hint: there’s no curriculum or instruction for this, and no standardized test to measure it!)

UNSCHOOLING EUROPE tag

“French Cultural Project”
Sunday, November 16, 2008

I had to have a cultural experience for my French class, so I decided to have a fictional conversation with Kiki (based, of course, upon things we've said before). I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out, because it's very narrative, and stands on its own as an essay, so I wanted to share.

Kiki was a little surprised when I called her for a lunch date, because our next scheduled “girls’ afternoon out,” is next Friday, when she’s dragging me to give blood again. Kiki loves giving blood with a fervor that can only be felt by a pre-med bio-chemistry major with a latent sense of civic responsibility.

“Keeks,” I said, “I want to see you. We need to catch up, and it’s a complete coincidence that my French cultural experience paper is due on Monday.”

“I’m your cultural experience?” she sounded both flattered and delighted, which was my intention. “You are constantly my cultural experience,” I said. We met at Chili’s, our traditional haunt, and, at my request, proceeded to discuss French and American culture, with an emphasis on what overlaps and what doesn’t.

Among all my friends, Kiki is the most qualified to have a metaphysical discussion about culture, especially if that culture is Francophone. She is an ex-patriot while still actively American, a European trapped in North American skin. Her family hails from Belgium, and even though her bilingual mother and grandmother live here, she still has a handful of uncles, aunts, and cousins living in Fayt-le-Franc.

“They had to drag me out of there kicking and screaming the last time I visited,” she tells me.

Kiki was born in Chattahoochee, excelled in the American school system, and to all outward appearances seems like a perfectly ordinary American girl. Talk to her for a few minutes, though, and you start to forget she’s lived here for almost twenty years. She’s fluent in French, and she once mocked me for spelling the word realized with a “z” (“and you’re an English major!”), which led to a mutual discovery that she spells words as though she were British. She lives and dies with the results of the World Cup and Le Tour de France – perhaps her one true strain of American-ness comes out in her adoration of Lance Armstrong.

“Oh, I know a golden cultural moment,” she tells me now, “Do you remember that time you got confused about the difference between football and soccer?”

“Yes,” I sighed, “but I don’t understand why the story is known as the time I got confused. This is my country, you know.”

Whoever got confused, she’s right about the story. I think it almost perfectly crystallizes our cultural differences.

“Hey, Mer,” she prodded me in the lobby of a fancy hotel, “check out those hot football players.” I immediately looked at the TV in the bar, broadcasting the Miami game, marveling at her eyesight. “No, no, no, no,” she scolded, rolling her eyes and pointing at the team of uniformed soccer players standing a few feet away.

“Ok, two can play at that game, soccer girl,” I challenge as the waitress refills our drinks and gives me a funny look.
“What about that time you asked me who John Adams was?”

“I still don’t know why that bothered you so much.”

I hadn’t known why it bothered me so much, either, at first. It was a simple question, asked in one of Kiki’s most un-American moments: “Mom and I have been having a debate, and perhaps you can settle it,” she’d said, and, expecting something literary, my area of expertise, I asked her what was on her mind.

“Who was John Adams?” came the question, almost stopping my heart. “Mom keeps saying he was the first postmaster general of the U.S., but I’m pretty sure that’s wrong.”

A yawning abyss opened before me, and time seemed to slow. Who was John Adams? He was my all-time favorite founding father, for starters. He was a lawyer, a farmer, a revolutionary, a brave and honest man, a patriot. He was loud, he was principled, he was disliked, he was a framer of the constitution. I finally settled on the answer that I would have given had I been on a game show: “He was the second president of the United States.”

This did not seem nearly adequate. I wanted to grab Kiki, to keep her there indefinitely, until I could properly articulate everything this dead man, this name, meant to me. But part of me knew that I would never do it in a lifetime. There was no way to communicate all the paradigms and knowledge of a people, of my people, in mere words. It is something that must be lived.

I know that Kiki feels the same frustration with me sometimes, usually for language reasons. I often ask her to tell me the story of her grand-mère, a woman made of steel who fled Belgium during WWII and somehow wound up walking barefoot through a Middle Eastern desert. It is our quiet ambition to someday write a bestseller based upon her bizarre experiences, and the title would be a phrase that Kiki cannot quite translate.

“In English, the closest I can get it is something like, ‘Muslims work in mysterious ways,’” she told me, “But, man, that isn’t quite right. It’s so much better in the French. So much more beautiful.” She looks at me, and I shrug, free and unburdened with the complexity that plagues the bilingual.

This is why Kiki and I work so well together: we make one another proud of our heritages. Not because each of us feels that hers is superior in comparison, but because in teaching someone about your culture, you experience it in a truer, fresher way than you could have by yourself.

“I remember the moment we really became friends,” I tell her now.

“Well, that’s one of us. Enlighten me.”

We were in a hotel room, on a trip with a larger group, thrown together as roommates by random assignment. Kiki, trying to be nice, pulled out a CD to play as we got ready to go out, and I got my first taste of Edith Piaf. Hers was a strangely enchanting music, not technically proficient or classically beautiful, but nonetheless compelling and rich.

“I like this,” I remember saying, “What is it?” Here, Kiki had a John Adams moment as she tripped all over herself to explain a beloved national icon. “My grandmother says that her voice is the sound of Paris,” was the phrase that stuck with me.

The next day, it was time to put on music again, and Kiki politely deferred to me.

“Kiki,” I said, “Put Edith on again.”

In that moment, our eyes met, cultures overlapped, and a friendship was formed, one that I feel truly privileged to be a part of.

Last Day in London With Darwin, Newton, Churchill — and Obama?

“Last Day in London and Subsequently the Trip”
Posted by kiki under England, London

Went to Madame Tussaud’s today…see accompanying photos.

Favorite Daughter and President Obama Enjoy Madame Tussaud's Together

Also went to the Evensong service at Westminster Abbey. The Abbey itself is absolutely gorgeous and just teeming with the graves of incredibly famous people. On the way in, we walked over the grave of no less than the likes of Charlie Darwin and on the way out the brilliant Isaac Newton and the portly Winston Churchill.

The service itself was breath-taking as well as a bit Phantom of the Opera-esque with the massive organ playing songs filled with entirely too many minor chords.

That was pretty much it because of the massive queue for Madame Tussaud’s in which we encountered this insufferable shrew with her adorable eight-year-old daughter. The woman had been waiting in front of us for about thirty minutes when

Penultimate Day in LONDON Full of Tours

“Tours, Tours, Tours”
Posted by Favorite Daughter (penguindust)

Sorry for the late update, folks, but we have been on tours literally all day.

Forgot to mention yesterday that we saw the Tower of London before the show! It was very exciting, because the whole Bloody Tower portion is dedicated to a discussion of who murdered or “disappeared” the two young princes. They presented some evidence, at which point we, the public of hundreds of years later, could vote on the matter!

As my brother was performing his (I’m sure) tip-top Richard III yesterday, we thought the conclusion was obvious: My brother did it. We explained this emphatically to people in line, and, judging by the vote counter, he was winning by a landslide.

After our two tours today, we may well be qualified to write Master’s Theses on the Tower of London, as both our tours – the NewEurope Old London City Tour and the New Europe Grim Reaper Tour – covered the Tower in some detail. We strolled along the Thames and got to see the reproduction Globe Theatre from a distance, strolled down Fleet Street, and traced the path of Jack the Ripper. We even saw the actual Ten Bells Pub where he stalked his victims, which is still a fully operational pub, complete with crusty English gentlemen smoking and drinking ale and doing whatever else it is they do in pubs.

Tomorrow we’re going to Westminster Abbey – for free! It costs about £15 to get in normally, UNLESS you sneakily attend their Evensong service, which they begrudgingly still hold open to the public. Ironically, Charlie Darwin is buried there. Hopefully we’ll get to sneak a peek.

UNSCHOOLING EUROPE tag

London Matinee Report from FavD

“Billy Elliot: Oh. My. God.”
Posted by penguindust under England, London

So Billy Elliot is amazing.

It’s kind of hard to articulate how amazing, but I’ll try.

If any of you saw the performance at the Tonys –- the one with the tap dancing and the police shields –- know that the whole show is that intense and that good, and heartwarming and funny to boot.

How talented are the 12-year-old boys playing Billy Elliot, you ask? Let me say, in ten years of dancing and seeing shows, I have never heard taps, in my entire life, as clean as the taps I heard today. Anyone remember that amazing kid who tap danced in The Boy From Oz? Yeah, the kid we saw today was about fifteen times better than that. At everything.

The show is a heartbreaking and heartwarming tale set in parallel: a young boy in a tough coal mining town wants to dance ballet, and his dream matures as the town dies. It’s the story of a kid, it’s the story of a community, and it is filled with some of the most spectacular choreography, design, talent, and storytelling you will ever see.

The whole message is ‘be yourself.’ One of the slogans of the show is, ‘if you want to dance, dance.’

The musical is incredibly organic and natural as it chronicles Billy, his family, and his town coming to terms with

London Bookshops Addictive, Our Traveling Girls Learn

“Busy Day in Londontown”
Posted by Favorite Daughter (penguindust)

We started off this morning by going to the British Museum, and, for those of you planning travels in the future, we cannot recommend it highly enough. This is the museum that houses the Rosetta Stone, and about a million mummies, and artifacts from the world over, and – this is the best part – the museum has been totally free to the public since the 18th century.

A donation is recommended, but, trust us, after you see this museum you’ll want to cough up five pounds or so. Still cheaper than the Louvre.

Then we spent the early afternoon searching for an elusive book that Kiki wants to read on the way home, and we realized something, something both about London and about ourselves: London bookstores are more addictive than heroin. They are vacuums where time and space are suspended, places with spiral staircases and good papery smells. We spent a lot of time in them, just enjoying being there.

Then, in what may be the most exciting achievement of the day, we purchased tickets to something. I’ll avoid telling you what until the end of the post, just for suspense’s sake.

To cap off the day, we went on another of our free walking tours with the redshirts. My, but they are fabulous. We were treated to a springy, nervous talker named Ed, who loved cricket and kept us apprised of the Ashes score via the text messages he kept receiving from a friend.

Delightful things he told us:

Nell Gwynn was a famous actress, but she was more famous as the mistress of Charles II. Charles has many mistresses, in fact, he used to cut through Green Park next to Buckingham Palace to see them, scooping up armfuls of flowers as he went.

Legend has it that the queen, who was no fool, ordered gardeners to pull up every last flower in the park out of spite.
There are still no flowers there.

Anyway, most of Charles’ mistresses were French Catholics, and the protestant public wasn’t very happy about this. One day they saw a coach coming down the road, obviously headed in the direction of a liaison, and surrounded it, shaking it and throwing things.

Jolly Old LONDON (and Cheeky Young Beefeaters)

“Jolly Old London – Beefeaters and all!”
Posted by kiki under England, London

After a wonderful last night in Paris, complete with send off party at the Eiffel Tower, which I saw glitter, we left for our last port of call on this epic voyage: London. We were quite tired when we arrived so we stayed in for about a half hour and then we decided that Magnums and exploring were in order. So we set off toward St James Church and then quickly realised that London is actually a lot smaller than Paris and distances on maps are not deceptively small. So we found ourselves at Buckingham Palace and marveled at its beauty and Beefeaters.

But the Beefeaters at Buckingham Palace proper are nothing. They are behind the fence and you can’t see them very well. So as we wandered aimlessly down the road away from the Palace we saw more, vigilantly guarding a cordoned off area and generally looking pretty cool.

(They were babies – couldn’t have been more than 23, and trying very hard to look older. – M.)

We quickly fell in love with one who we have aptly named Smirks. As his name suggests, he does not have the traditional Beefeater stoicism. He kept shooting his eyes in our direction and grinning like a Cheshire cat. But his stealth training paid off in the fact that, though he smirked cheekily at us at least five times, we failed to acquire photographic evidence.

After spending at least thirty minutes having lovely conversation about Smirks and his Senior Officer right next to them as if when they go on duty they suddenly become deaf to idiot tourists, we mosied down to Trafalgar Square where we had our dinner.

The Sherlock Holmes [Pub & Restaurant] just roped us in and we were quickly in love with it. We had traditional English meals: I had Shepherd’s Pie and Mer had ham and eggs and chips.

With the enthusiastic support and help of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s family, the pub was filled throughout with various artefacts and pieces recording the adventures of the Master Detective, including such diverse items as Dr Watson’s old service revolver, original cartoons and the stuffed and mounted head of none other than

Favorite Daughter Safe in LONDON for Last Week of Adventure

She just called.
They have tickets to see “Billy Elliot” on the West End — Dance as Cultural Power of Story, what else?

UNSCHOOLING EUROPE tag

Last Tango in Paris for Favorite Daughter and Friend

“Overheard on the Train from Versailles to Paris”
Posted by Favorite Daughter (penguindust)

12-year-old girl: Ugh. I could have done that tour. Everything they told us about the French Revolution, I already knew. We learned it in school.

Me: (raised eyebrows)

12-Year-Old Girl’s Father: What I don’t understand, is, why didn’t Marie Antoinette’s father send an army over?

12-Year-Old Girl: He did, he did. But they got defeated, by Napoléon.

Me: (crying due to silent laughter)

**************

“Last Tango in Paris”
Posted by kiki under France, Paris

Today was our last day in Paris, and we didn’t even spend the day in the city. We took the train to Versailles and saw the magnificent château.

Versailles, the city, was delightful and clean. It was a welcome change from the hoards of tourists crowding the streets and sites of Paris. We walked from the train station to the château and proceeded to wait in line for about an hour while being continually accosted by the voice of a woman who desperately wanted us to know that we could get in for free if we were EU citizens under 26, and that if we wanted to see the SUPER SECRET PRIVATE apartments of a couple of the Louis-es and Marie Antoinette then we would need to book a guided tour.

But finally we got our audio guides and started to walk our way around the ornate palace. We started out at the intricate and grandiose chapel built by Louis XIV. It is the highest part of Versailles Château because Louis believed that he needed to do that to honour God. Pretty nice gesture in my book.

We then saw

Talk About Strange Bedfellows, Where Better Than PARIS?

“Just Another Day in Paris”
Posted by both kiki and FavD under France, Paris

[Kiki starts]
After a thoroughly enjoyable night with our fellow travelers from around the world, we were rejuvenated in our desire to explore Paris. So we set off this morning after getting our fill of crusty baguettes and confiture at the free breakfast at our hostel. Our first stop was Père Lachaise Cemetery to see all of the incredibly famous people who are buried there.

After walking around aimlessly in the labyrinth of mausoleums and sepulchres that is Père Lachaise we finally decided that a map would be a good idea. We got a free map at an office in the cemetery, helpfully labeled and annotated so that one could find the famous graves.

[Mer taking over]

The graves are many and surprising, so our first move was to make a list of the specific ones we wanted to visit. We made an ambitious list that included, on my end, Jim Morrison, Gertrude Stein, and Oscar Wilde, and, as far as Kiki was concerned, Jean de la Fontaine, Edith Piaf, and Fredéric Chopin. Kiki was moved in particular by Piaf’s grave and the many holocaust memorials, and I was thrilled by the tribute paid to Oscar Wilde – fans have taken to adorning his grand headstone with lipstick kisses. It seems to have become something of a tradition.

To continue our dead people tour, we went to Napoléon’s tomb, which is also a war museum. We were impressed by the comprehensive WWI/WWII exhibit, which included an army-issue coat from the WWI still covered in the mud of the trenches.

[Her brother the budding military historian will be thrilled by THAT!]

Napoléon, let me assure you, is