A Not So Boring Life

Above, a winged St. Michael wields the sword with which he has vanquished Satan, whose head dangles from the claw of an immense crab laying upon a pedestal in the shape of a double DNA helix.   A tranquil moon looks to the west and a smiling sun to the east. Next to the sun a lion and a lamb lie together.   Nine giraffes prance around the center. Flames arise from the base.   Circling the fountain are small bronze statues of animals designed by school children. In May of 1985, I was fortunate to be able to attend the dedication of the Peace Fountain on the grounds of St. John the Divine Cathedral in NYC.   I traveled there from Brattleboro, VT with Tom Boudreau, my Peace and Conflict teacher at the School for International Training.   The dedication ceremony was overseen by the Bishop of New York with over 1,300 persons attending.   The crowd was diverse, placing high-level church and government dignitaries alongside peace activists and curious s...

I hopped off the back of the pickup truck that had given me a ride from town to the place that I knew as the rural farming cooperative “La Quinta”.   There were a group of farmers sitting just off the road in front of a stone cattle pen.   They had finished hand milking about 20 or 30 cows and had sent the galvanized pails of milk into town for sale.   They glanced up at me as I hoisted my backpack and walked towards them, puzzling over this strange gringo. After nodding my hello, I began trying to explain to them, in a hesitant and very poor Spanish, the reason for my being there.   I wanted to know if I could stay there, as part of my internship with a university in the U.S.   (In my bad Spanish, it was probably something like “Me want living with you.   Me study boy”   I wanted to have the experience of living and learning from their experience of cooperative farming in the middle of a revolution and civil war – to write about their challe...

Sometimes, just getting out of your comfort zone opens up whole new worlds.  When I started at the School for International Training in Brattleboro, Vermont some thirty-plus years ago, the school held an orientation session for the small group of students who had come from all over the country for  the two-year, hands-on international development program.  The venue for the orientation was a rural campground near the school.  The day after our arrival at the camp, faculty announced that we going to participate in a “Drop-Off” experience that would challenge our ability to adapt to new and unfamiliar situations.  They gave us each a five dollar bill and a pack of candy Lifesavers and told us to bring along a sleeping bag if we had one.  They then loaded us into a few vans and headed out into rural Vermont and neighboring New Hampshire.  At various points along meandering country roads, usually at or near one of the tiny and isolated New England villages...