A Traveler

If it’s chariots or sandals,

I’ll take sandals.

I like the high prow of the chariot,

the daredevil speed, the wind

a quick tune you can’t

quite catch

but I want to go

a long way

and I want to follow

paths where wheels deadlock.

And I don’t want always

to be among gear and horses,

blood, foam, dust. I’d like

to wean myself from their strange allure.

I’ll chance

the pilgrim sandals.

-Denise Levertov

Kids helping kids

By RUTH MOON For The Sun

Nine-year-old Sebastian Nimako-Boateng knows from watching TV that U.S. armed forces fighting in the Iraq War are putting their lives on the line. So he wrote a note to thank them.

“War is really, really bad stuff. They’re risking their lives and could die,” the brown-eyed boy said. “That’s why I wrote that, because it’s just a way to tell them I’m thankful for what they did.”

Sebastian, a Naperville resident and student at Peterson Elementary School, was one of 100 students and parents who turned out at the school Wednesday night to put together school kits for Iraqi children and write letters for soldiers and children.

Sebastian’s letter reads: “Dear soldgier: thank you for going to war and risking everything. From Sebastian.”

That note is one of a stack of colorfully drawn notes sporting hand-drawn photos of rainbows, flowers and butterflies with notes for soldiers and children. Many are signed with the Arabic phrase “as-salaam alaikum,” which means “peace be with you.”

Elsewhere in the school’s common room, 7-year-old Avalon Dufkis sat at a kid-sized bench table drawing a purple heart-shaped flower on a blue piece of paper for an Iraqi child.

“They have no school supplies, and we’re trying to make them happy,” she said. “It would be really hard (to have no supplies).”

One wall of the common room was lined with boxes of school kits — containing items like scissors, rulers, pencils and notebooks — and other donated items such as blankets, winter coats and shoes for Afghani children.

The children put the kits together from items donated by parents and others. Event coordinator Diane Esser estimates the children put together 200 school kits, each worth about $15, and wrote around 250 letters.

The items will be delivered by Operation Iraqi Children, a foundation started in 2004 to provide school supplies and other items to children in areas where the U.S. military is serving. Soldiers distribute the items to children in need.

Esser called the event a “service learning program.”

“The idea behind it is to teach our children that there are children in the world who are in so much need, and we can help them and should — it’s our responsibility,” she said. “They get to learn about geography, the region we’re helping and current events in a delicate way. They want to help, and this gives them an opportunity.”

A better tomorrow

By RUTH MOON For The Sun

While most of Anna O’Connor’s peers are graduating from college and looking for jobs, the 23-year-old is at home in Wheaton, sleeping 15 hours a day and taking an intense round of chemotherapy treatment.

O’Connor was diagnosed at age 17 with neuroblastoma — a rare form of cancer that targets the nervous system and almost always afflicts very young children — when she went to the doctor for a check-up.

“It was shocking, of course, but at that time I thought, ‘Well, I’ll just do my year of intense chemotherapy, and I’ll be done, and that’ll be that.’ Obviously it wasn’t like that,” she said.

Her current treatment means she is in and out of the hospital and sleeps a large part of the day.

“There’s no way I can do a 40-hour-a-week job,” O’Connor said. “Even part-time would be hard — I have bad days. Last week, I was in the ER. It’s hard, but I’m just done comparing myself to anyone else my age. I can’t do that.”

She has tried every form of treatment offered for the disease and is now on a course of experimental chemotherapy. She has undergone 50 rounds of radiation. In the midst of treatment, she managed to graduate from Wheaton North High School and graduated from Wheaton College in 2007 with a degree in psychology.

Fewer than 1 in 20 cases of neuroblastoma occurs in patients older than 10, said Dr. Susan Cohn, who heads pediatric cancer research at the University of Chicago and finds the rarity of the cancer makes it difficult to study.

O’Connor has flown across country for treatments, none of which has been successful. Her cancer has never been in remission. Now she is taking three different oral doses of chemotherapy, one of which costs $40,000 per month. O’Connor’s father, Robert, estimates that the family has spent $75,000 to $100,000 on her treatment, and the cost without insurance would be in the millions.

O’Connor knows there are others who can’t afford to treat the disease — so she has formed Anna’s Hope, an organization that works to raise money for research and awareness.

O’Connor paints 1 1/2-inch ceramic squares with a cheerful daisy design, fires them and adds necklace or key chain closures, then sends them to anyone who donates $25 or more through her Web site, www.annabanana.org. So far, she’s raised $7,000, plus more than $650,000 from speaking engagements.

“I feel like God’s given me this gift to be able to speak, because everyone else who has it is 2 years old. It’s these voiceless children who are suffering, and I’m one of the only ones who can even speak on behalf of neuroblastoma,” she said. “I’m not going to wait to help raise money, I’m going to do something now and push to raise money now, because children are dying now — I’m dying now.”

Taking Heat

While some take action, most evangelicals in the global South remain lukewarm on climate change.

U.S. evangelicals’ slow warming to creation care raises the question: how concerned are evangelicals in countries considered ground zeros for climate change disasters?

World Evangelical Alliance (WEA)-affiliated umbrella organizations in high-risk countries (as identified by Western environmentalists) have not been as vocal on climate change as their World Council of Churches counterparts. But evangelical bodies in several developing nations are mobilizing members as they prioritize the problem among other issues such as evangelism, persecution, and HIV/AIDS.

“In the West, you hear climate change being described as a threat. In my country, it is not a threat—it is already happening,” said David Kamchacha, disaster rescue coordinator for the Evangelical Association of Malawi (EAM). The Association of Evangelicals in Africa (AEA), to which EAM belongs, says changing weather patterns threaten the sustainability of longstanding rural communities throughout southeast Africa, and local churches are the grassroots organizations that people turn to for help.

Churches in the global South rank climate change low on their list of priorities, said Brian Swarts, national coordinator for Micah Challenge USA.

“There’s an awareness of the issue,” he said, “but a lot of [churches] don’t have the desire or capacity to address it.”

One such country is Sri Lanka, where evangelical churches are struggling in the face of persecution and anti-conversion laws.

“There is an ongoing civil war and we have a huge internally displaced population,” said Godfrey Yogarajah, general secretary of the National Christian Evangelical Alliance of Sri Lanka. “As we struggle with mere survival physically, climate change is not on our agenda presently.”

By contrast, Osvaldo Munguía of Mopawi and Mark Halder of Koinonia lead evangelical taskforces on climate change in Honduras and Bangladesh respectively, where increasingly violent storms claim crops, livestock, and lives each year yet local evangelical churches do not recognize climate change as a significant problem.

“Climate change issues are not as compelling to church leaders because the [Bangladeshi] church is not very strong,” Halder said. “Pastors are very much engaged in evangelical work … rather than county-level social, economic, and political issues.”

While Bangladesh and Honduras deal with an excess of water from increased storms, Africa faces the opposite problem. An estimated 75 million to 250 million Africans are projected to face a water shortage by 2020, according to the Evangelical Environmental Network.

Climate change is already negatively affecting the African poor as crop yields decrease, mud huts are decimated by increased rainfall, and schools and clinics are destroyed by changing weather patterns, said Stephen Mugabi, executive secretary of the AEA’s Commission on Relief and Development.

The evangelical church is crucial to Africa’s response to climate change, Mugabi said. The AEA is planting trees and providing food to affected people in Uganda, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe.

Kamchacha is doing the same in Malawi, where he said rural areas have become increasingly disaster-prone. With the help of Tearfund, a British aid organization that has become the poster child for evangelical work on climate change, Malawi evangelicals proactively build dikes to fend off floodwaters and plant drought-resistant crops.

“When [in the West] you talk from theory and your knowledge is from books, you have time to delay,” said Kamchacha. “In my country, we cannot afford to delay. We need to act now.”

Original article here.

Loo.uh.vull

… is where we played our first tour concert and are spending the night. We had a minuscule break after dinner in which I explored the neighborhood. All of the houses in it are on the National Registry of Historic Places, and were gorgeous. I forgot my real camera, unfortunately, so these are all iPhone photos retouched in Photoshop. I’m impressed with the photo quality — wasn’t expecting them to look decent.

Trash can in an alley.

There were two of these lions, one on each side of the sidewalk to an apartment building. The next building down was named "Camelot."

One of the many creative front porch settings I saw. One good thing about the South is it's warm long enough that it's worth it to find nice porch furniture. I love the toile contrasted with the brick.

I'm not sure what you're supposed to push against, but I can't resist graffiti pictures. And the color looks a lot better in Photoshop — not sure why it faded out when I uploaded it.

And the ultimate question, Who are you?