BY: Emily Siner

(Originally published in The News-Gazette, January 13, 2013)

Author’s Note:

When I first started talking to Rabbi Neuman, I noticed his way of speaking: philosophical, well thought-out, and at times very grand. I could tell he was used to giving sermons. I didn’t use a recorder – I had decided I didn’t want to use many direct quotes – but I would write down certain words or phrases he used that really resonated with me. Then, when writing the story, I incorporated his own words into my writing, even if I didn’t put direct quotes around it. That way, it was his voice telling the story, as if he was sitting down with the reader just as he sat down with me.

-Emily Siner

Some things he wants to remember; some things he tries to forget.

Isaac Neuman remembers a pretty woman who prepared the meals for the supervisors at St. Martin’s cemetery, an early Nazi camp in Poland. She took a liking to Isaac. “Stomarek,” she called him, a reference to the “one hundred marks” he had tried to hide from his captors. When they found the money, he had received a vicious beating. “Hey, Stomarek, come here,” she said and handed the 18-year-old leftovers from the supervisors’ meal. She would do this for him over the next year and a half. When he talks about her today, his eyes light up and his face breaks into a smile.

He laughs when he recalls a man named Joel Zolna, who sat next to him on a train to one of the last camps where he was imprisoned. The train slowed down as it curved around a mountain. Isaac was too weak to jump and run, and Joel couldn’t flee with his identification numbers painted on his coat. Isaac’s coat had the numbers sewn on, so he ripped them off and switched coats with Joel, who jumped off the slowing train and escaped. After the war, Joel would take Isaac out to nightclubs and concerts.

These are things Isaac, who is 90 now, wants to remember. He wants to remember every person who did something to lessen his pain.

“Sparks of holiness,” he calls them.

They lit the world in its darkest days.

Yet some things he can’t forget. He can’t forget the death and ugliness he saw as he was shipped from camp to camp, nine times. He can’t forget the boxcars or the beatings, the stifling heat, the burning cold. He can’t forget the cruelty that people showed. He can’t forget that they killed his brother, parents, six sisters, grandmother, mentor, aunts, uncles, and countless cousins and friends. The world was full of brutality and misery and stench. But despite it all, those sparks of holiness—they never died.

“Ani ma’amin,” he says in Hebrew.

“I believe.”

***

At the back of his house in Champaign, with a corner window overlooking a pleasant pond, is the study where Isaac spends most of his days. It is the study of a scholar: glossy leather armchairs, a wide desk in disarray, ten columns of built-in shelves holding books with titles such as “Sermons for the Seventies” and “The Rescue of Danish Jewry.” His rabbinic diplomas line one wall. He sits on a leather couch facing a TV and a picture of his son, David, shaking President Ronald Reagan’s hand. Piers Morgan is on CNN talking about taxes and gay marriage.

Isaac, who moved to Champaign in 1974 to be the rabbi of Sinai Temple, used to have more visitors. He has stopped encouraging them to come. It’s so hard to entertain anymore, and he has enough in his house to keep busy. He has his wife, who stops in his study for short conversations and a kiss on the cheek, and a caretaker who answers the phone when he’s busy (“Neuman residence”) and pours him mineral water or wine.

But most of all, he has his books. He takes them off the shelf as if they are old friends and stacks them on a side table. Reading takes his mind off the aches of his body, more so than whatever the doctor prescribes.

Yes, his body aches. His hands shake. It’s funny, when he was 60, he thought he was going to die in his 70s. He figured a human could only endure so much trauma and pain without skimming off a few years. But even after his second coronary bypass surgery at 73, he kept going. Always another birthday. Always another reason to keep living.

He moves to the kitchen for dinner – salad, chicken, peas, rice. He pushes up his sleeves before the meal and says a short prayer over bread. There, on his left forearm, are six numbers in dark ink: 143945. A souvenir from Auschwitz.

***

He was born in 1922 in Zduńska Wola, a Polish town of about 8,000 Jews living alongside 12,000 Poles and ethnic Germans. For the first 17 years of his life, Itsekel, as he was called, grew up as a pious boy studying Torah, Talmud, Midrash and any other Jewish text he could get his hands on. His teacher and mentor was Rabbi Mendel, a former soldier in the German army in World War I, legendary in Zduńska Wola for his wisdom.

The rabbi taught Itsekel about Judaism and life. He once told a Talmudic story, one of a second-century rabbi who stopped in the ruins of Jerusalem to pray. Elijah, the mystical Jewish prophet, met him outside and reprimanded him for praying in ruins. The story was supposed to warn readers to stay away from ruins because they might be unsafe. But Rabbi Mendel taught Itsekel his own interpretation. If you stand at the ruins of your civilization, he said, do not dwell. Your prayer should be short. Be careful, for it is hallowed ground.

Itsekel’s family fled Zduńska Wola when the German army invaded in 1939. They were less than 35 miles away when they turned back — escaping to Russia would be too difficult with eight children, they decided. They returned to a shattered world: broken windows, burned factories, ruined homes. Rabbi Mendel had been arrested and executed for studying Torah under the new Nazi rule.

***

Isaac was sent to his ninth and final concentration camp of the war in Ebensee, Austria, in April 1945, one month before the Americans came. He doesn’t remember much about the liberation. He was dying from starvation and tuberculosis. He weighed about 80 pounds.

He remembers the Americans setting up hospitals for the former prisoners and putting the new prisoners – the Nazi soldiers – in charge of caring for them. Isaac was brought back to health by doctors and nurses who had worn swastikas just a few weeks earlier. It was weird. At one point, the doctors sent him to the hospital psychiatrist, a former German officer, because Isaac’s hands wouldn’t stop shaking. The officer boasted that he had been trained in psychology by a disciple of Sigmund Freud. The Nazi officer, trained by an Austrian Jew. Isaac wasn’t sure if the officer realized the irony.

Some of the nurses assured him they had never hurt a Jew during the war. Someone asked: Did you ever care for Jewish patients? Well, no, they said, the Jewish patients never were brought to them. They only did what they were told.

Twenty years later, as a rabbi in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Isaac wanted to attend Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights march in Selma, Alabama. The board members of his synagogue tried to convince him not to go. They didn’t understand why he should risk his life for black people in the Deep South. Isaac reflected on his Biblical knowledge, his companion since the age of 3. There, in Exodus 12:49, he found words that rang deep inside him, clear as the Ten Commandments: “One law shall be given to you and the stranger who lives among you.”

Didn’t he know what it was like to be treated like a stranger in his own land? Didn’t he know what happened when fear stopped good people from speaking out? He didn’t want to be like the nurses at Ebensee, like the silent, good Germans.

He went to Selma.

***

Sometimes, people ask him: “Where was God?” Where was Isaac’s God between 1941 and 1945, in Junikowo, St. Martin’s, Fuerstenfelde, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Fuenfteichen, Gross-Rosen, Mauthausen, Wels, and Ebensee? What God would give Isaac dreams almost 70 years later about frantically trying to escape from guards and killers? What God would extinguish entire families, generations of memories?

People ask: “Where was God?”

Isaac believes God was in the sparks of holiness that radiated through the darkness, in the people who maintained their humanity in the brutality and misery and stench. There is good and there is evil in the world; that cannot be changed. He believes it is our job–not His–to seek the good and stop the evil.

People ask: “Where was God?”

Isaac asks: “Where was man?”

***

It is said that during the Holocaust, some Jewish prisoners sang this Hebrew text on the way to death camps: “Ani ma’amin, ani ma’amin b’emunah sh’leimah” — “I believe, I believe, with perfect faith.” Sitting on his leather couch, Isaac sings this song in the traditional melody, the one that his congregation at Sinai Temple sings every year on Yom HaShoah, the day of remembrance for the Holocaust.

Isaac knows it is hard for those who were not there to remember it well. He knows that the best way to remember is to listen to the stories of witnesses. Yet so often people only remember the cruelty. Yes, the cruelty must be present in every story, but Isaac wants to warn people: Be careful not to dwell on it. The Holocaust is hallowed ground. It is the ruins of a civilization.

He wants the world to remember it the way he does: Despite the hunger and thirst, brutality and death, ani ma’amin — “I believe.”

In the sparks of holiness.

They light the world even in its darkest days.

By: Megan Graham

(Originally published in The News-Gazette, August 1, 2012)

Author’s Note:

I tried not to make this a story of “disabled young man lives every day to the fullest even though he may die soon.” Because the story is not about how he looks to a tragic future. The story is about how he looks to the present moment, how he wills himself to wake up in the morning when has no idea how many moments will be left. The story is about a loneliness that he can’t fill because people are afraid of making him sick and maybe afraid of getting close to him. Mostly, it’s about permanently living in that space between childhood and adulthood—a space he may never truly be out of. Going forward, I know I have a lot more to learn. I need to ask the questions I want the answers to, not the answers that a subject gives me. I’m glad Chike and I had the opportunity to spend so much time together, even though I think his story was exhausting for both of us. It was hard for him to tell, and it was hard for me to hear. But it was worth it for me. I hope it was equally worth it for him.

- Megan Graham

In his old room in his parents’ home, a pretty house in the Cherry Hills subdivision of Champaign, Chike Coleman is poking through his shelves. He wants to find a Blu-ray disc, one of the beloved movies he bought in a half-off online sale from a site that sells independent films.

He moves aside tens of his prized jazz CDs, the Soapbox Derby trophies and the Hardy Boys books. The shelves are filled with 25 years of memories: books he has loved, model cars done in candy-colored lacquer, his University of Illinois diploma.

His high school and college friends — most 25-year-olds, for that matter — no longer live in the dust of their boyhood belongings. But after his fleeting years of collegiate freedom, Chike moved right back into this room, with its boxes of waterproof dressing and nonstick pads and bandages, bottles of hydrogen peroxide, soap-free cleanser and Clindamycin gel.

“It’s just kind of waiting,” he says. “Just like everybody else. Except your wait feels a lot shorter than everybody else’s.”

Chike glances at a photograph of him leaning back casually in his wheelchair, royal blue graduation gown draping his chest as he smiles broadly. He looks normal. He looks healthy.

Yet these are two things Chike will never be.

***

Chike — pronounced Chee-kay — was born with a rare genetic disorder: chronic granulomatous disease, an immune deficiency that hinders his body from fighting off fungal and bacterial infections.

The condition was once called “fatal granulomatosus of childhood.” But with medical progress — vaccines, surgical abscess drainage and better medicines — it is no longer necessarily fatal. One victim lived to be 63. Four out of five sufferers, of which there are only about 1,200 in the country, are boys. Many never live to become men.

Life with the chronic granulomatous is difficult, but Chike’s cerebral palsy makes it even harder. He cannot walk without a walker. He can suffer from multiple infections at once that come from any of the millions of invasives most people breathe in and fight off. They come without warning, and he often doesn’t know he has them until a doctor points them out.

“There’s absolutely no way to know,” he says. “It could get worse for me. It could get better right now. It’s kind of in the worse column, but…”

When he commented to a blogger with similar health problems, “My body is constantly fighting WWIII,” he wasn’t exaggerating.

Every day is filled with calculated risks:

— Does he balance on the legs of his chair to reach up and get a plate so he can make a meal for himself?

— Does he hoist himself up into the newly remodeled bath that is utterly dangerous when slippery?

— Does he climb out of his manual wheelchair in his room and down the stairs to his electric chair yet another time that day to get the one small thing he forgot downstairs, knowing full well he could slip and get a cut or bruise that could take forever to heal?

The answer is usually, “Yes.”

“I could be a germaphobe and still get hit with something.”

***

Chike has two very different kinds of days: neverending days at home and days out in the dangerous, dirty world. On the dangerous days, he catches the 8:25 a.m. bus. Some days he goes to film his three weekly TV shows at Urbana Public Television, two about film and one about sports. Some days he goes for physical therapy to keep his leg muscles loose.

Being out and about so much may not be wise. The Chronic Granulomatous Association says, “Remember, you cannot be too cautious with your health.”

People with Chike’s disease are not supposed to work with hay or grass clippings, go barefoot, play at a park with wood chips, go into barns, repot house plants, go inside newly renovated buildings or go near construction sites. People like Chike need to tell the doctor immediately if they have a fever. They are supposed to be vigilant, supposed to live in fear.

“You do end up playing that head game with yourself, worried that you’re not doing enough to keep yourself going,” he says. “I just can’t do that.”

As a boy, the wheelchair made Chike feel special, like a pint-sized celebrity. Girls couldn’t get enough of the boy with the wheels. In high school, though, he got looks, ones he viewed as saying, “What the hell are you doing invading the space of us normal people?”

The cerebral palsy, though certainly something he has struggled with, he at least understood. He was slower to grasp that he could die at any time. That realization came in pieces.

He remembers overhearing his parents talking about it with other adults and slowly understanding that something was terribly wrong with his body. As children his own age grew stronger, he began to realize all the things he couldn’t do.

He wondered in high school if he’d live to see his graduation day. The fears resurfaced in college, when he began to worry that he could die without saying goodbye to his parents, sister and friends. His deepest fear is that he’ll die tonight without time to tell them.

***

Chike spends much of his time in his bedroom on the Internet, often going downstairs only for meals.

“Even hermits gotta eat!” he says.

He blogs about movies and chats with friends he meets online. The Internet provides a mobility he doesn’t have in life. It even allows for a little bit of romance now and then.

“Ninety-five percent of the time I feel like I don’t have a chance with any girl.”

Online, that can be a different story.

One night, after perusing his OKCupid matches, he started up a conversation with a young woman whose virtual compatibility with his profile was too much to ignore.

As they chatted another night, she asked him his real name.

“Chike,” he typed.

“How is that pronounced?” she asked. “Does it rhyme with Mike?”

“No it does not. Chee-kay.”

And they quickly delved into his conditions.

“Frankly, I’m surprised my disability doesn’t frighten you.”

“I’m a bit concerned, I guess,” she typed. “But writing someone off completely because of that — well, that’s just plain mean.”

They chatted through the night, for nearly six hours. She took his phone number and said she would think about text messaging him. He really hoped she would.

Most of his free time, Chike listens to jazz — a favorite recording of Chicago jazz vocalist Kurt Elling and his trio is playing just now. He knows every inflection, scat and purr of this particular recording from 2006. He sings in his room, his left hand — his good hand — gripping the computer mouse, his right hand in its permanent position with thumb and finger forming an askew U, the three remaining fingers curled into his palm. As he sways his small frame in his chair, the pointer finger of his right hand hits the tempo up and down as if he is conducting.

He does the Louis Armstrong voice, deep and scratchy and round, with his eyes squeezed shut, his head bowed and a smile on his face. He does the Nat King Cole voice, smooth and silken and weightless, leaning back and tilting his face skyward. He pretends to smoke a cigarette, something he would never do in real life. His health is bad enough.

***

Every night before sleep, Chike allows himself five minutes for tears. “Five minutes a night,” he says. “That’s all I get.”

It’s never because of any particular difficult moment of his day or because of his terrible genetic luck. It’s because of the collection of millions of hardships and fears and uncertainties he feels at every moment, the awareness that at any second, during sleep or waking hours, some Aspergillus fumigatus or Blastomyces dermatitidis or Cryptococcus could creep into his body.

He wonders: Will I die in my sleep from something the doctors haven’t found? Or will medicine progress so that I might live long and healthy?

“I just keep going the best I can.”

The past few weeks have brought hope to Chike. The girl from OKCupid finally texted him back. She wrote, “Boo.” They’ve been chatting every day since, and he can’t stop smiling.

He also was accepted into the journalism graduate program at the University of Illinois. He’s expecting at least one new friend, some difficult classes and the rekindled independence of apartment life back on campus.

Of course, the apartment search isn’t going smoothly — nothing ever does. In the first one he toured, his wheelchair got stuck on a rainbow knotted rug and the chair wouldn’t fit in the bathroom. The second wasn’t much better.

“You know, I’m going into it with some trepidation,” he says. “Am I going to get through this without an incident?”

Yet Chike’s determined to stay optimistic, hoping graduate school will lead to a life beyond the walls of his boyhood room and the confines of his disease.

After all of it, he says simply, “I’m just grateful.”

By: Christian Gollayan

(Originally published in The News-Gazette, June 10, 2012)

Author’s Note:

I learned that intimate journalism could be more than just reporting the facts or gathering sensory details. When I was able to sift through my subject’s facade and get to the heart of who he is – his goals, longings and fears – and put that down on the page, I think that’s a part of intimate journalism, too.

- Christian Gollayan

He’s 6 feet tall barefoot, 6-feet-5 in his Jeffrey Campbell heels. He loves Lady Gaga and Andy Warhol and beautiful women who don’t care about what other people think.

He loves vodka. He takes it straight up, pursing his lips, keeping a composed face. It makes him feel as if he’s made of plastic; it’s reassuring. If he can keep a strong face after a shot, he can keep a strong face after anything.

His fingers are long and slender like a lady’s. His face is soft and angular. His eyes are almond-shaped with long lashes that flutter like butterflies. He loves bubble baths. When he shuts his mouth, his lips don’t fully close, giving him a permanent pout. He has skin like porcelain. Wrinkles are his enemies. He has trained his eyebrows not to move when he speaks. He likes having an expressionless face. He doesn’t want strangers to know him.

He categorizes his life through his outfits. It depends on how he feels when he wakes up in the morning. Different days he’ll feel happy, gothic, angry, butchy, vengeful or hopeful.

One recent Monday he awoke thinking Marilyn Monroe — old Hollywood glamour. He wore his high-waist checkered pants with a tight-fitted turtle neck and finished the ensemble with blood-red lipstick. He tries to stay away from classic-red lipstick. Every girl and gay guy wears that now. It has become the gay male version of a Plain Jane. He wants to be anything but ordinary.

He doesn’t want to be a woman. He just doesn’t understand why a man can’t wear lilac lipstick or velvet nail polish or sequined stilettos to his 9 a.m. class without getting stared at. No matter; he likes it when people look at him; he gets worried when they don’t. He likes it when he makes people uncomfortable.

He spent the past few years worrying about what people thought of him, whether they thought his voice was too high or he spoke with his hands too much. No more. Now every morning is a coming-out day.

He likes to use hard descriptions such as “marble eyes” and”leather hair.” He loves perfumes, particularly Britney Spears’ Midnight Fantasy. He wears it on his pretty days. He knows that some men he meets at campus bars would love to take him home for the night but never introduce him to their parents.

He doesn’t kiss on the first date. Or the second. Or the third. He was once offered a job as a go-go dancer in Chicago. He turned it down. He’s not that type of boy. A 50-something man on Facebook once offered him a weekend of dinners and shopping on Rodeo Drive. He turned the man down. He’s not that type of boy, either.

He is an Aquarius. He was born in 1991. A visual person, he doesn’t read newspapers and hates politics. They make his head hurt. He loves magazines because he can look at pretty pictures and not have to read anything.

He came to the University of Illinois as an art education major but soon realized he wanted to do photography. He is now a junior. His photographs for his classes contain thin 20-something models airbrushed to look like mannequins, like plastic. He hopes someday to see his work in V, Harper’s Bazaar or W with his name emblazoned on the corner of the page: Photographs by Gino Baileau.

That is his artist name. He started using that name when he became a photographer. He doesn’t like his real name, Gino Gusich. He hates the alliteration, the GG. He likes Baileau better. It means beautiful boy in Italian.

His mother and his grandmother called him that since he was a baby. He loves his mother more than anything.

+ + + + +

Gusich. It reminds him of his childhood in Melrose Park, that small, Italian community, a 20-minute car ride west of Chicago. Gino calls it the ghetto. He was raised in a house full of women: his two older sisters, mother and grandmother. The walls of his bedroom were covered with Britney Spears posters. He loved playing with his sisters’ Barbies. Gino’s parents separated when he was 5. His father was a Weekend Dad.

Gino was an ugly baby. His mother told him that he looked like a newborn alien because of his oversized head. Every day after preschool, he’d cry if his grandmother didn’t feed him two double-decker sandwiches. By middle school, he was overweight. His mother put him on a low-carb diet. By eighth grade, he was average sized. By high school, he was thin.

Gino Baileau doesn’t want people to see his grade school pictures. He is not that person anymore. He is now thin and angular and beautiful. Now, he tries to eat two meals a day. He admits he doesn’t have a healthy diet. Today, he had a can of Progresso soup, 60 calories.

Gino is wearing black H&M harem pants, 5-inch leather wedges and a red vintage blazer with a studded belt around his waist. He’s wearing black lipstick from MAC called Dark Night. His hair is wrapped in a black infinity scarf, and he’s wearing thick, rhinestone sunglasses. He just came back from his photography class. He woke up today feeling vengeful.

Lately, Gino’s been thinking about the people in his childhood who did him wrong. He says that kids in his grade school sold weed and ecstasy in the bathrooms. He remembers times he was threatened with assault in the boy’s bathroom or on his way home. He was an easy target, after all: that chubby boy who hung out only with the girls, talked with his hands, and who knew all the lyrics to every Britney Spears song.

He remembers a classmate in fourth grade who would find every opportunity to harass Gino, calling him “faggot” or “fat boy.” One day, after school, Gino’s mother asked if anything was bothering him. His mother always knew how he felt. He said, no, he was fine. Later, Gino overheard his mother on the phone with his father. His mother was asking him what she should do. Gino would never forget the advice his mother relayed from his father: Let Gino take care of it. Let him man up. Don’t let him be a wuss.

One day, during lunch, the classmate came up to Gino with that smirk on his face, Diet Coke in hand. Gino remembers the boy calling him a name. Something triggered inside Gino. He leaped from his seat and grabbed the boy by the neck and pushed him to the ground. Then Gino remembers taking the boy’s Diet Coke and sipping from it.

+ + + + +

To Gino, being gay is bravery. It’s a liberation of many things. Of sex. Of the way you act. Of fashion. He is an extremist, and if he says he’s gonna be gay, he’s gonna be gay all the way, which is why he wears what he wears to class, to the mall and to the bars.

He began dressing this way only nine months ago. In his mother’s house, he’d lose himself in the fashion blogs of Alexander McQueen, Terry Richardson and Marc Jacobs. He’d sneak into his mother’s and sisters’ makeup boxes and experiment with different looks. He loved how he could use pencils to elongate his eyebrows, how blush could highlight his cheekbones.

Gino never had a coming-out moment with his mother or sisters. They always knew. At first, his father said that Gino could be gay and still dress like a man. Gino then took his sister’s softball shin guards, embellished them with metal spikes, connected them with chains and wore the ensemble as shoulder pads. Gino remembers asking his father if he now looked like a man.

His father eventually came around to accepting him.

On Gino’s right index finger is a tattoo, in cursive — “liberate.” His right hand is often adorned in accessories. He sometimes wears his sister’s armadillo ring or spiked bracelets or his gold-plated bangle (he calls it his Wonder Woman cuff). They are his weapons. He never knows when he might need to use them, especially at the bars.

When Gino walks into a bar, it’s a spectacle. People he never knew come up to him and tell him how they love his fashion sense or how he’s beautiful. Strangers take pictures of him. He loves the attention.

One night, though, at Fire Station, a tall man by the bar looked at Gino a certain way. Gino paid no mind until one of his friends pointed the man out. Gino looked at the man, who made a gun of his hand and pointed to his head, pretending to shoot himself. Gino, in his nude-laced button-up shirt and fur stole that wrapped around his shoulders like a cape, made his way toward the man and asked what his problem was. The man called him a “devil” or a “demon;” the memories of Gino and his friends differ.

Gino believes men like that don’t expect men who wear lipstick or high heels or skin-tight jeans to stick up for themselves. Men like that expect them to just take it, maybe roll their eyes and sit back down like a lady.

Gino is not like other men, or ladies. He remembers looking at his hand, the same hand that had “liberate” tattooed on it. On his ring finger was his grandfather’s diamond horseshoe ring. Gino looked back at the man — and then punched him. Gino doesn’t remember much of anything else. He says the man came out of it with a horseshoe-stamped forehead. Gino walked away with two broken nails.

+ + + + +

Gino wonders if he will ever find a man who will love him for who he is. He is now getting ready in his apartment for another night out in Champaign, deciding what to wear. His bedroom is on a high floor overlooking the north side of Green Street.He is humming along to one of his favorite songs, Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” Tonight, he decides to wear a leopard-print blazer with ripped jeans and leather wedges.

Gino’s only been in one serious relationship, with a man who didn’t like how he dressed or his aspiration to be a famous fashion photographer. He gave Gino an ultimatum: Dress differently and choose a different career, or their relationship was over. Gino left him. After all, his favorite quote is from a Lauper song, which is now ringing through his room:

Some boys take a beautiful girl

And hide her away from the rest of the world

I want to be the one to walk in the sun

Oh girls they want to have fun

Gino can’t imagine growing old. He is 21, in the first blossom of adulthood, his heels now planted on the ground, wide-eyed and hopeful. Maybe he’ll make it as a high-fashion photographer in Chicago or L.A. or New York. Maybe he’ll get to work for Marc Jacobs or W or Sarah Burton. Maybe. Who knows what’s in the future?

He slips into his heeled wedges. In a couple of hours, he will be at Red Lion, dancing on tables, being photographed by strangers, being told he is beautiful. And he will smile and say thank you and lose himself on the dance floor, what’s ahead of him a mystery.

By: Marisa Gwidt

(Originally published in The News-Gazette, May 28, 2012)

Author’s Note:

While reporting and writing this piece, I learned that stories are everywhere. A lack of story ideas is due only to a lack of observation.

- Marisa Gwidt

“Oh, boy,” Charlie High sighs as he watches a college student drag in four
heaping bags of laundry. “She won’t finish in time.”

It’s 9:50 on a Monday night at Starcrest Cleaners in Champaign. Charlie’s
supposed to lock the doors at 11. Yet here is this young woman, opening a
silver front-loader and preparing to toss in a load of darks. Charlie, 67
years old, hobbles over in cuffed, faded jeans and intervenes.

“Uh-uh,” he mutters to the student, shaking his head as though she were
about to make a grave mistake. “I recommend that one,” he says, pointing
to another washer outwardly identical.

“Really? What makes that one superior?” she inquires with a smile, already
starting to inch over in its direction.

The question clearly takes Charlie aback. His customers rarely engage him
— the Monday-through-Friday janitor — in conversation. Charlie removes his
navy blue Sturgis biker hat and thoughtfully smoothes his thin gray hair
with stout, pale fingers. He then replaces his hat and leans his short,
heavy-set frame against the recommended washer.

“It spins quicker,” he explains, pleased to talk laundry physics with
someone. “It’s never got a service tag on it, and the coins don’t jam.”

All evening, as he talks, Charlie keeps working — wiping, mopping, sweeping.
“I needed to keep busy, and this place is always busy,” he says as he
stops sweeping to pick up a piece of pink lint a woman dropped right in
front of him. “Hurt too much to think ’bout her not bein’ at home.”

“Her” was Charlie’s wife, Janet, of 36 years. She died of colon cancer in
2003. After Janet died, Charlie went on Social Security. But money was
tight, and so he took a job at the laundromat.

“Even if I had money, I would’ve kept workin’,” he said. “Thinkin’ ’bout
her all the time would’ve killed me. Nobody knows how hard it is.”

Charlie had never imagined illness could destroy such a beautiful, caring
woman.

“She’d grocery shop for widow ladies in town,” he remembers, teary eyed.

“It isn’t fair she’s gone. I don’t show it, but I still got a lot of anger
in me over the whole mess.”

Charlie makes his rounds at the laundromat. He empties the trash, ensures
that the 75-cent Tide boxes are stacked neatly in their wall dispenser and
wipes the blue droplets of detergent off the machines. From the corner of
his eye, he notices that a washing machine has stolen a quarter from the
student with the four laundry bags. He walks over to her and takes a
quarter out of his pocket. He has already forgiven her for bringing in so
much laundry at the last minute.

“Ya need dryer sheets?” he asks, shifting from foot to foot. “People’re
always leavin’ dryer sheets. They’re Bounce, not the cheap stuff.”

Long before his nights were filled with the hum of dryers and smell of
detergents, Charlie was a little boy living in Indianola — a tiny town
about 40 miles southeast of Champaign. Janet lived 15 miles away in
Broadlands. They went to different schools and met only briefly in the
spring of 1963.

“We met for a second at a school baseball game. Guess she remembered me,
’cause when I went to the Army, she asked Mom for my address.”

While Charlie was stationed in Oahu, Hawaii, as a tank repairman, Janet
wrote him several times a week. He became so excited to receive her
letters that he’d be in the camp’s main lobby at 4:10 p.m. when the mail
carrier arrived each day. Sometimes, he’d even get a care package.

“I liked her raisin oatmeal cookies,” he says, smiling. “I didn’t leave
those things layin’ around. The other soldiers would raid me if I did.”

Charlie disappears into the laundromat’s back room to fetch a dryer sheet.
He reappears and hands it to the student in a pleased manner.

“Thank you,” she says politely. When Charlie leaves her alone at the
washer, she sniffs the dryer sheet. It’s scentless, stiffer than it should
be, old, and she discreetly slips it into a nearby trash can.

Charlie got out of the Army when he was 21. After a long boat ride and two
flights, he sat down for a nice dinner with his parents.

“I don’t know what I ate ’cause I was thinkin’ about Janet the whole
time,” he says, as he fills a bucket with mopping solution. “I borrowed
Dad’s car and drove to see her.”

That night, more than three years after they had met, the young couple
went on their first date. They visited a hamburger joint and ordered root
beer floats. They were married four months later.

When Charlie’s on duty at the laundromat, he will help an old woman start
a washer. He will recommend the best-sized dryer for a man with an
oversized load. He will remind a mother to wash her white bathrobe
separate from her darks, asking, “Ya don’t want that pink, do ya?”

Charlie’s customers often roll their eyes in reply. Despite Charlie’s slow
movements, he’s alive in the laundromat. He doesn’t mind working. He has
worked all his life, mostly as a repairman and janitor.

He also likes his little laundry society. He knows all his regulars and
has given most of them nicknames: “Ammonia Man” (a guy who washes all his
clothes in straight ammonia), “M&M Girl” (a child Charlie gives packages
of M&Ms when she comes in with her dad), and “Bike Couple” (a husband and
wife who rig their bikes with special laundry-carrying baskets).

Charlie looks at the student with the four bags of laundry. He dubs her
“Allergy Girl” after he learns she’s washing everything in her apartment
because her doctors are worried about her recurring eye infections.

“I get some crazies here,” he says, laughing. “It sure keeps things
interesting.”

Charlie and Janet were as happy as two poor people could be. They quickly
had two sons and started building a garage and house in the small town of
Longview, about 25 miles southeast of Champaign. They ran out of money,
though, and never built the house. For the next 30 years, they lived in
the finished two-car garage.

“Believe it or not, we got two bedrooms in there,” Charlie says proudly.
They raised two boys in those two bedrooms. “Janet liked it because it was
small and easy to keep clean.”

In what little free time they had between jobs, they spruced up the house,
tended their “lot-and-a-half” lawn and spent time with their boys. Janet
worked as a beautician and was a social butterfly, always cheerful. She
liked to keep moving, even in her spare time. She got Charlie contributing
to the community: grocery shopping for elderly folks, helping them with
odd jobs around their homes, mowing their lawns. He liked to help but,
mostly, he liked tagging along with Janet.

“We didn’t do nothin’ big,” Charlie says, stopping mid-mop stroke. “We
just liked bein’ together. It was a real good life.”

It’s 10:50 in the laundromat. Charlie’s chores are done and most of his
customers have left. He opens a bottle of Diet Coke, sits on a table and
notices the time remaining on Allergy Girl’s dryer: 12 minutes. Charlie
knows she’ll then have to empty the load and possibly even fold it before
she leaves and he turns out the lights. He doesn’t care. Allergy Girl says
she’s sorry for taking so long.

“Hey,” he replies with a shrug and a gentle smile, “you do what you gotta
do.”

Charlie’s 36 years with Janet went too fast. When she got home from work
one day, she sat at the kitchen table and told Charlie she didn’t feel
right. A week later, doctors told them she’d likely be dead in six months.
She seemed fine for the first few months, tolerating the chemotherapy and
radiation well.

“It went to her brain is what it did,” Charlie whispers. “Near the end,
she couldn’t do anything for herself.”

For the last three weeks of her life, Janet was put into a nursing home.
Charlie visited her every day. On the last day of her life, she didn’t
remember anything.

“Who are you?” she asked him. The question still haunts him.

Clothes stop rotating.

It’s 11:02 and Allergy Girl quickly stows her clean laundry in her four
bags and heads toward the door. She stops to say good night to Charlie and
tells him she’ll be back soon.

“You be careful,” Charlie says, pointing a finger at her. He directs those
same words at most of his customers. It’s his catchphrase — the expression
of a man who seems to care more about his customers than they care about
him. Allergy Girl smiles, giggles and exits. Charlie locks the glass door
and “spot mops” the floor one last time.

“I miss her,” he says of Janet, “but I find ways to pass the time.”

By: Erin (Walsh) Gibbons

(Originally published in The Catholic Digest, October 2002)

Author’s Note:

When I interviewed Sister Miriam and the other nuns in her convent, what surprised me most was their candor. I didn’t think Sister Hannah would admit to having a hard time walking by a good-looking man, or Sister Miriam would open up about her strained relationship with her father. But I’ve since found that most people will be remarkably honest if you get outside of your own comfort zone and just ask the question.

Writing this story also taught me the power of detail. Some of it’s simply doing the legwork – being there at 4:30 a.m. for morning prayers so you can make note of the flickering candle and one of the nuns blowing her nose. But it’s also gathering enough anecdotes and color through the interview process so that – even when you can’t observe something firsthand, or it happened in the past – you have the authority to tell your subject’s story as if you were there, without having to attribute every sentence. I think that makes the difference between a straightforward newspaper article and a piece of literary journalism.

- Erin Gibbons

The houses on Robert Drive are still asleep. It’s 4:58 on a Friday morning, and the sun won’t start rising for another hour. For now, the neighborhood is dark and silent. Only a single window on the street glows with dim light. Behind the thin curtains, inside the old, plain brick house, a different kind of morning routine is already beginning.

Sister Miriam Palanos, cheeks still flushed with sleep, is the first to enter the small room that is a chapel. She takes her place on the kneeler in the back left corner and, eyes turned downward, awaits the others. Sister M. Jacinta Fecteau and Sister M. Veronica McDermott file in a few minutes after 5 a.m. and kneel quietly. Sister M. Hannah Minor, blowing her nose, is the last to arrive. Everything in the room is simple, including the women themselves. They are all dressed alike, with long gray habits and black veils hiding their hair. As the clock ticks methodically, the women face an altar covered with white cloth. On it sits a small candle, flickering wildly and sending spirals of smoke dancing toward the ceiling. Suddenly, Sister M. Jacinta speaks.

“In-the-name-of-the-Fath-er,” she says, a rhythm in her high-pitched voice that pierces the silence. “And-of-the-Son, and-of-the-Ho-ly-Spir-it,” the other three women answer in unison.

The house is a modern-day convent, and Sister Miriam and the other women who live there are Franciscan nuns. After morning prayers, they walk a few blocks to St. Matthew’s Catholic grammar school in Champaign, where they work. Sister Miriam teaches science, math and religion. At age 31, she has been in the order of the Sisters of St. Francis of the Martyr St. George for nine years.

With the average age of American nuns now 69, young nuns like her are increasingly rare. Although there were 180,000 nuns in this country in 1965, by 2001 the number had decreased to just 80,000. Some people point to the vows of celibacy, others to parents no longer encouraging their children to enter vocations, still others to the Church’s patriarchal hierarchy that may be turning away feminist-minded women. But whatever the reason, the graying of the convent is very much a reality.

What, then, makes a young woman such as Sister Miriam choose to enter the convent in spite of the trend? How, in an age of excess and extravagance, can she willingly live in poverty? How, in an age when more than half of married couples get divorced and commitment is measured in days rather than lifetimes, can she devote her life to Jesus, someone she can’t even physically touch? And how, in an age of quick fixes, instant gratification and Hollywood’s promises of romantic fairytale endings, can she find fulfillment in a quiet life of sacrifice?

“There are real things I’ve given up that are enjoyable to me,” Sister Miriam says. “But I don’t mind because I know I have someone in my life, Jesus, who is my husband. This is what he’s asking of me, and there have been many blessings because of it.”

Sister Miriam was religious even as a child, but she wasn’t always sure about her vocation. She was baptized Theresa Palanos in 1971 and grew up in a Catholic family in northern California. Her father was religious in the church-every-Sunday sense, but Theresa was influenced more by her mother’s deep spirituality. When she was a little girl, she would wake up early in the morning before school and run to find her mom, who would always be in her rocking chair, praying.

“What do you want to talk to Jesus about?” she’d ask Theresa as she climbed into her lap.

Theresa always thought of Jesus the way He’s shown in pictures – tall, with brown hair and a beard. As she got older, she began lying in bed at night and praying silently, talking to Him about whatever she wanted. She attended a Protestant grade school (because of the location) that emphasized this kind of informal prayer, and it wasn’t until she went to a Catholic high school that she even learned what a rosary was. She couldn’t get used to such standard, repetitive prayers at first, so she tried to put herself into the mystery of baby Jesus. Sometimes she would picture the Blessed Mother putting the baby in her arms, saying, Here, do you want to hold Him? And eventually the Hail Mary became background music rather than a rote prayer. Although most Catholics receive the sacrament of confirmation in the eighth grade, Theresa waited until she was a junior in high school, when she was sure about her faith. It was one of the most meaningful changes of her entire life, something that was hers.

“My faith was always important to me, and I figured God had a plan for me,” she says. “I just never thought it would be a vocation.”

Theresa just couldn’t picture herself as a nun. She thought of nuns as old, boring and stiff. How could anyone normal want to be a nun? No, Theresa dreamed about getting married and having six kids of her own, maybe a Christina or a Michelle. She would have a two-story house with a white picket fence in California, right by the mountains. And of course, her wedding dress would be beautiful – long and all white, with a veil.

Theresa attended a small Catholic college, mostly to find a husband. She dated a few boys. She and her friend Joelle would walk by the vocation fairs on campus and wonder who would actually go to those things. But then a strange thing happened: People began seeing a vocation in her. During her freshman year, on the way to see a movie with a group of friends, a boy who was interested in her said, “So, I heard you were going to be a nun.”

“Excuse me?” Theresa said, shocked.

“Yeah, that’s what they’re all saying.”

They’re all saying? Theresa was upset. How was she supposed to meet Mr. Right if that’s what people were saying? Others approached her, too: the priest at her family’s parish, a Polish woman in her summer prayer group, Father Gus at school. Theresa couldn’t understand it – she didn’t see herself as an especially pious person. But slowly, the idea became less crazy. Theresa got to know a few young sisters at her college and realized that they were a lot like her – fun-loving, athletic, down to earth. They were normal, not at all like stereotypical nuns.

Then at the beginning of her sophomore year, when she was praying in the school chapel, an image of Jesus came to her. He told her He would let her know when He wanted her to start thinking about a vocation. When Theresa left the chapel, she had a sense of peace. She was young and didn’t need to worry about a lifetime commitment yet. That summer at mass, she got another sign. As the priest passed by her, carrying the Eucharistic hosts down the aisle for communion, she heard God say in her heart, No man will satisfy you but me. That was the answer to Theresa’s endless questioning. This is what she was made for. The next fall, she started actively looking into different religious communities.

Theresa’s mom supported her decision, but her dad just couldn’t understand it. Two days before she was supposed to leave for the convent, they went hiking in the mountains. Paul Palanos was a reserved man of few words, and most of the day passed in silence. On the car ride home, however, he finally spoke his mind. It was fine to be religious, but Theresa was going overboard. She had been brainwashed. Did she realize what she was giving up? That she would only see her family once every three years? He felt like he was losing a daughter.

“It would be easier for me if you committed suicide,” he told her.

They didn’t speak for two years.

Theresa entered the convent in Alton, Ill., and prepared for the sisterhood for the next seven years. Before making her final vows, however, she went through a dark time, a time of doubt. Had she imagined those signs from God? Had she just been on a two-year emotional hype? Was this really what she wanted? But she realized that now it was time for her to accept it all on faith, without dramatic signs from the heavens. Beyond the calling and the vows, it was about a person – Jesus – and her relationship with Him. Both of her parents flew out for the ceremony. Although things had warmed up a little between Theresa and her dad, they hadn’t had much contact in the seven years she’d been in the convent. He sat on the edge of the pew by the aisle, and when Theresa walked by, he touched her arm in support.
Theresa chose Miriam, Hebrew for Mary, as her religious name. Instead of accepting a ring from the convent, as is the tradition, she took her mother’s simple, 14-karat gold wedding band. To her, it symbolized her mom’s commitment to a marriage that had had both joys and sorrows. That’s what religious life would be for her, and she wanted the ring to remind her to be committed through the good and the bad.

Today, all 16 women who took final vows with Sister Miriam are still in the order – quite an unusual feat. There’s usually at least one in each group to leave. In this modern world, religious life certainly isn’t for everyone. All Catholic nuns take lifetime vows of poverty, obedience and chastity, and some communities are more conservative than others. Sister Miriam’s is one of them. Although many communities abandoned their habits and veils after Vatican II liberalized Catholic doctrine in 1963, hers held on to the tradition. Except during sleep, the nuns wear their habits no matter what they’re doing, whether it be playing tennis or going to the library. They can have occasional guests at the house, but they aren’t allowed to go out to socialize individually because it supposedly pulls a woman away from community life. They have to ask Sister M. Jacinta, the Superior of their house, for permission to watch any TV show other than the news. They can’t wear makeup, even to cover up the occasional pimple. But they’re nuns, not saints.

“There are different times when each vow has been a struggle,” Sister Miriam acknowledges.

Sometimes it’s poverty. Because of the expense of airfare, Sister Miriam can visit her parents in California for only two weeks every three years. It’s hard not being able to see them more often. She doesn’t want anything extravagant or excessive, but once in awhile she can’t help wishing she had some things that were her own. Sister M. Hannah agrees.

“You miss weird things – going to get a soda, wearing blue jeans, owning a cat, walking by a store and saying, ‘That’s really cute,’” she says. “I love music, so sometimes when I’m in a car, it’s hard not to turn on the radio to listen to Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull.”

Sister Miriam misses lying out to get a suntan. Sister M. Veronica had trouble parting with her shoe collection. But where individual expression is taken away in one area, it tends to manifest in another. So while habits and veils are standard, shoes – although they have to be black – allow for a little creative flair. The nuns also have fun showing their personal style with watches and pajamas.

But other times, they struggle with obeying the rules passed down from the church hierarchy. Their vow of obedience means they must work wherever their community decides and in whatever capacity. Sister Miriam was first sent to teach high school in New Jersey and was then called to St. Matthew’s three years later, where she had to wait for a teaching position to open up at the grammar school. It was hard for her to give up her independence at the beginning, and there are still times when she is asked to do something she doesn’t think is right for her. But ultimately, she and the other nuns see the church hierarchy as a necessary means for God’s will to be passed down to his servants. And although many women – including many nuns – have been alienated by the church’s refusal to even hear debate on the issue of female ordination to the priesthood, Sister Miriam doesn’t question it.

“It’s not that women couldn’t do it, it’s just not what God is calling them to do,” she says. “Jesus didn’t go by the standards of his time, but when he chose his apostles, he chose men to reflect his image.”

And then there’s celibacy. Don’t the nuns feel like they’re missing out on something?

“Sometimes it’s really hard to walk by a good-looking man,” Sister Hannah says with a laugh. “You have to tell yourself, ‘Just keep walking!’”

It all depends on how you’re wired, Sister Miriam explains. For her, sex isn’t a huge temptation. Sometimes she does feel like she is missing out on physical companionship – someone she can actually touch, someone who is committed to her. But she knows that chastity is an essential part of her relationship with Jesus.

“To be committed to this person, Jesus, I have to have these vows,” she says. “How can I be committed and love Him if I’m not chaste, if there are other men in my life?”

Sister Miriam sees all of these sacrifices more clearly than she did nine years ago. Then, as soon as something got difficult, she would start to doubt her calling and wonder if this was the life God wanted for her. But now, she knows that things happen. If she butts heads with another sister or disagrees with an order she’s given, it doesn’t take away from her commitment. That’s just life. It’s only through such conflicts that she will learn to forgive and grow as a human being. Besides, she’s a nun, not a saint.

And there are many good times to overshadow the hardships. There is friendship with her fellow nuns. Sharing common values and a life of commitment with the other sisters has helped Sister Miriam build the closest friendships she’s ever had, with a depth she never could’ve imagined. And there is laughter. Sister Miriam and Sister M. Hannah, who went to the same college and are now best friends, have a similarly sarcastic sense of humor, and like to tease each other. Sister M. Hannah, who grew up on the East Coast, makes fun of Sister Miriam for being from California and has also been known to break out the old childhood cheer, “U-G-L-Y, you ain’t got no alibi. You UGLY!” Sister Miriam retaliates by imitating Sister M. Hannah’s pronunciation of words like horrible – “harrible” – and teases her for dozing off during morning prayers. There are little indulgences as well – trips to Blockbuster once a month (“Anna and the King” was last month’s selection), a snowball fight after the first big snowfall of the winter, gift certificates to fast food joints and restaurants from some of the parents at school.

But more than that is the fulfillment that comes from touching people’s lives. Since she doesn’t have children of her own, Sister Miriam has more time to devote to her students at school. And she’s found that by simply wearing a habit, she has been able to help people she wouldn’t have been able to reach otherwise. They tell her about abusive husbands, losing touch with the church. They ask her to pray for them. “Every single time I go to an airport, I’ve had someone pour his heart out to me,” she says. “People just seem to seek me out.”

There have been other blessings, too. For her 31st birthday, her father sent her a card with a personal message inside: “Dear Toots, It’s time! I’ve changed my outlook and have come to appreciate and respect your life choice. And I am proud of you.”

“The sacrifices have brought my father to be a different person than what he was,” Sister Miriam says. “I’ve watched my brother change and come to his faith. I’ve watched so many beautiful things happen in my family and my religious community that I can say the sacrifice was worth it.”

Yet sacrifice, joy, commitment – these aren’t things Sister Miriam thinks about every day. For the most part, she just goes about her routine of praying, teaching and spending time with the other sisters. On school nights, after prayers, she usually passes the evening grading papers or reading a novel alone in her room. It, too, is simple: a desk and a nightstand, a bed with a cream-colored down comforter and light-blue jersey sheets that Sister Miriam got to pick out herself, a small closet that holds everything she owns. On one wall is a picture that Sister Miriam drew herself, before she made her final vows. It is a picture of her, wearing the wedding dress she imagined as a child and reaching out to take Jesus’ hand. Making this image concrete is what got her through that time of doubt. Sometimes even now, when she finds herself doubting, questioning, she looks at it and is reassured. Sometimes she still likes to think of Jesus like she did as a child, to see that kind face that makes the person she can’t touch a little more human, more tangible. But Sister Miriam’s doubts are rare now. Her faith is more mature and unwavering than it was when she drew the picture.

The change didn’t come immediately. It has been a journey, she explains, like circling to the top of a mountain. She has become wiser and more mature as she has gotten closer to the top. She still has a long way to go, she says, but she has reached the point where she is content with her life. No, it’s not the same kind of happiness she had when she first entered the convent, when she was blind to what lay ahead and everything was still new and exciting. Now, her eyes are open. Now, she accepts both the ups and downs of the life she leads.
“No life is easy,” Sister Miriam says with a quiet smile. “But this is the life I can be the happiest living.”

By: Courtney Greve

(Winner of the 1996-97 Department of Journalism’s Brody Creative Feature Article Writing Award)

Author’s Note:

Writing this piece taught me the importance of observation. Scribble down every detail, no matter how silly or small; you never know what will be crucial to the narrative later. Since the subject was a poet, it was crucial to capture not only his passion, but the rhythmic pace of his art. Finally, I learned to list questions to ask the subject later — a lesson that stuck with me.

-  Courtney Greve

People listen when he speaks.  They might not always agree with him, but they listen.  A platform to spread the good Word can be found in any room.  At least that’s what 19-year-old Kynshasa Ward believes as he prepares to take center stage at The Red Herring’s Thursday night open mic, where the odd assortment of people in the crowd tend to be more accepting of his churchy topics than your average Joe’s.  From his table for one in the back of the room, the University of Illinois sophomore can see everybody as they weave between cliques, lighting clove cigarettes and sipping cappuccino.  Body-pierced freaks and long-haired neo-hippies dominate the scene.

Kynshasa Ward knows he doesn’t really fit in with this rag-tag gang and that he will be one of the only people performing poetry.  He doesn’t think it matters.  He waits more than an hour for his chance to speak and during this time he wonders if God will speak through him tonight and if people will hear His message.

God is not the typical poetry topic for an artistic presentation at the Red Herring.  Mostly, performers strum on acoustic guitars and attempt to recreate a Beatles or Doors classic.  A rare brave soul might play an original song, complete with sour chords and forgotten words.  A performance poet stands apart.  Kynshasa only does spirited renditions of original pieces.  But there isn’t much of a poetry scene in Champaign.  So, for now, Kynshasa settles on the open mics, hoping he can make a few people think for just a minute.  He doesn’t worry about the audience reaction.  After all, once he starts, the entire scene will eventually disappear until his concentration is broken with the sound of thunderous applause.

“People have an idea about what poetry is from what they learned in school,” Kynshasa says. “It is a set and narrow view of poetry.  Some other people have an idea about what this whole spoken word thing is.  I perform it.  It is not spelled words on paper.  Poetry is jotted down thoughts or words in a journal for some people.  My poetry is about giving it to someone else.”

Jumping up and down like a runner before a race, Butta, as he is professionally known, psyches himself up for the big event.  When he is introduced, he shuffles his ragged-edged papers and pulls the poem he’s performing to the top of the stack.  The ink spots and illegible words look like the doodles of a day-dreaming school child.  Sometimes Kynshasa can’t even read the messy papers, but he only needs key words to remind him of the important themes.  It doesn’t occur to him to be nervous.  He wears a white T-shirt and khaki pants.  It’s typical attire for a college student, except his shirt has a message:

JAZZ

ROCK

SKA

RAP

SOUL

HOUSE

+ GOD

MUSIC

On his head, a yellow and black striped hat covers his newly forming dreadlocks.  His upper lip balances a thin moustache and a goatee supports his lower lip.  Six friendship bracelets are tied loosely to his wrist and he has a story for each.  He slowly strolls to the stage, adjusts a music stand to prop up his poems, politely greets the audience and then bows his head.  With his right knee bent and his hands clenched to his chin, Kynshasa silently asks the Creator to allow His words to flow through his lips.  This moment of hesitation has gotten the attention of the talkative audience — silence for the first time all evening.  Now, with the deep bass of a throbbing speaker, he squeezes his eyes shut and bursts into the opening lines of “The Whispers in a Crowded Room Finally Found a Microphone!”

DAI-LY I see MA-NY in a state of MEN-TAL CAP-TIVI-TY

Less of an ADDICTION and more of a RELIGION

Too many PEO-PLE worshiping their many different IDOLS

and ICONS

and DIETIES

Whether it be brown leaves when smoked

White powder (sniff) when snorted

Green paper when spent

Brown liquids when consumed

Or even easy-to-swallow tablets

The question is, who do you all pray TO?

Kynshasa’s eloquent and calm voice has gradually heightened to match that of a well-trained Southern preacher.  Yet, the word “preacher” leaves a bad taste in Kynshasa’s mouth.  He fears it elicits a stereotypical image of a black man standing at a pulpit, pointing his finger and demanding certain behaviors from his parishioners.  No, Kynshasa Ward is not a preacher.  But he does see himself ministering to his audience — in layman’s terms, he’s helping people to see the light.  As a devout Christian, he uses the Bible as a sort of  “instruction manual” and believes its every word.  He does not affiliate himself with any particular religious denomination for the same reason he dislikes the word “preacher”— it’s a bad stereotype.  Instead, he attends the Assembly of God Crossroads Campus Church in Champaign every Sunday, because it is non-denominational and because he felt the Holy Spirit the first time he entered the building.

It was during the summer of 1996, while at a Christian Youth Conference, when Kynshasa first accepted the Holy Spirit.  A woman began talking to some of the kids about being baptized.  Kynshasa didn’t think he was ready.  “If not now, when?” the woman asked.  At that very moment, he made the decision to profess his faith. Being baptized meant he had to change his life.  No more lying about why he stayed out so late on a Tuesday night.  No more impure thoughts about the girl sitting two seats ahead wearing a skirt that showed a bit too much thigh.  No more ignoring his mother’s requests to go to Sunday service with the family.  He admits he still struggles with even the simplest of God’s laws.  The difference now, he says, is that he would rather obey them than experience the guilt that comes when he disobeys them.

In the next few years, Kynshasa’s poetry and faith became intertwined.  Today, he believes that God is the essence of his every poem.  The poem he chose to perform this night is more than a personal insight into the evils of addiction.  With a touch of humor, it criticizes people for living vicariously through the fictional characters on TV, rather than living their own lives:

For the past year I have been attending meetings regularly

TWICE WEEKLY, in fact, to assist me with MY withdrawal

From the WORST substance abuse known to mankind:

Television

TELL———LIE———VISION

tell—A—vision

To all the WEAK-MINDED, sponge for brain zombies you can find

Broadcasted for BREAKFAST-LUNCH-DINNER

And see how fast they get full

Kynshasa wants people to think about what they consider entertainment.  In his TV-land, ABC stands for “Absolute Brain Control” and LSD is really “Laser Satellite Dishes.”  Television pollutes the brain and sends children the wrong message about sex, violence and drugs.  Rap music shares many of these messages.  He used to listen to rap.  In fact, he began rapping in the third grade.  It was easy to think of a few words that rhymed and then find an idea to go with the words.  But after he accepted God into his life, he began to think about the evils rampant in Rap music.

So he started writing poetry.  At first, he exchanged poems with a girl he had a crush on.  Her encouragement was enough to prompt Kynshasa to show his work to one of his teachers at Morgan Park High School on the South Side of Chicago.  Gradually, he was asked to perform at assemblies, churches, retreats and demonstrations in Grant Park.  In Chicago’s poetry scene — Lit-X Bookstore in Wicker Park and the Guilt Complex on Broadway — Kynshasa found inspiration.  He met famous performance poets such as Q. Lenear and Danny Buey and began to imagine himself on stage, too.

But college had to come first.  He entered the University of Illinois as an engineering major, but found the long hours of studying left no time for writing poetry.  And he wanted to explore history, philosophy, literature and music.  God blessed him with the ability to understand even the most complicated math, so he became a math major. He believed there must be a reason for this gift: he has been called to teach.   After graduation, he plans to be a math teacher and a poet.  Neither gift can be ignored.  His poetry is another way he can teach others:

In fact television is the only invention we put in our HOMES

and allow folks to speak to us

who we would not normally ALLOW in our homes

Believe me, the TV is intoxicating

With mixtures of mind pollution, of mind brainwashin’

Excuse me, I mean Baywatchin’

Mr. Spelling’s Melrose Waste of Time

Like Beverly Hills 902 one more episode is ONE TOO MANY

By dropping names of pop culture into his poetry, Kynshasa keeps the audience’s attention, gets some laughs and connects them with something familiar.  Most people make fun of these television show and then watch them each week when no one is looking.  Kynshasa thinks God is looking.  As he finishes his last stanza, the Spirit within him rises and his surroundings vanish.  He is on the stage with his elbows bent and his hands gripped together above his head.  Right now, it is more than poetry — he is engulfed in a confessional to the Creator:

People leave their televisions on so they won’t feel alone

See, with any form of media,

there is always that pressure in feeling connected  

But nowadays too many of us are being infected

Once the needle is injected

Instead of LOVE

Instead of bedtime stories

Instead of FAM-I-LY conversations

Our families are being raised on ABC

I realize the minute, the INSTANT, that those resistors and diodes and electrodes

In the back of the IDIOT box, appropriately termed,

You have committed CEREBRAL SUICIDE

I compare it to a BULLET to the HEAD

No, no, more like a CRACK PIPE to the LIPS

The on and off switch on the 150 LB. Zenith remote control

is the lighter

SO PLEASE, not for me, BUT FOR YOU

DECIDE if you would like to get HIGH 

and thus POLLUTE your mind,

and thus BRAINWASH your mind,

and thus RANSACK your mind,

and thus DESTROY,

and thus KILL,

and thus VAMP,

and thus POLLUTE,

and thus BRAINWASH,

and thus DESTROY YOUR MIND — FOREVER!

And before Kynshasa has finished the last syllable, the audience is applauding, whistling, shouting.  One woman yells, “Praise the Lord!” Strangers walk up to him afterward, after he has come back into this room, and shake his hand and give a hug.  They were moved.  They were impressed.  He barely breaks a smile.  The attention after a performance always bothers him.  He doesn’t want praise.  After all, he can’t take any credit for the words God gave him to speak.

“I said what I came to say,” he says.  “I prayed that my message was received by someone.  I think it was.”

By: Carey (Checca) Sullivan

(Winner of the 1996-97 Department of Journalism’s Brody Creative Feature Article Writing Award, also published in the C-U Octopus)

Author’s Note:

Professor Harrington showed his students not only the art of literary journalism, but how to sort through details to find those that would pull readers further into the story.

For this story, I spent a week in a rural Mayan village volunteering and reporting. I shot photos of the clinics, volunteers and locals. I took copious notes. Many of the details, scenes and interactions were edited out because they were, ultimately, unnecessary. With Prof. Harrington’s help, I learned good writing comes from choosing the right details and words, and then rewriting until it works.

This piece was recognized with the Marian Boruck-Brody Award.

- Carey Sullivan

FOG HANGS LOW in the branches of the orange trees in Othon P. Blanco, a Mayan village far into the rainforest of the Yucatán Peninsula. The morning’s cool breeze carries the conflicting scents of ripe oranges and rotting vegetables across the village’s dirt streets and into its plaza. A 5-foot-long brown sow waddles slowly down the road, sniffing garbage strewn across it. I walk in the opposite direction on my way to breakfast. A skinny brown dog sleeping in the middle of the street looks up as I pass then goes back to sleep.

“Buenos dias,” a few of the men gathered outside the corner store say.

“Buenos dias.”

The dark, mustachioed men, wearing rumpled polyester pants and shirts unbuttoned to the tops of their stomachs, sit on a bench fashioned from a board resting on concrete blocks. From their perch, shaded by the store’s palm-frond roof, the Mayan men watch as 67 gringos, living in the village for the next 10 days, wander in to a cinder-block kitchen. Inside the bright blue doors of the kitchen, I grab a plate and fill it with watermelon slices, papaya and scrambled eggs. Underneath the palm-roofed dining hut, I sit with the other gringos at tables covered with bleach-sanitized red-and-white-checked oilcloths.

“Our family strung crepe paper up in our room,” says Monica Heseman, a nurse from Decatur, Ill., and one of my roommates in the home of an Othon family. “And our señor hired one of those tricycles with the basket in the front to carry our bags to his house. There were about 10 bags on there, and the tires almost looked flat.”

“Hey, my family’s got a shower,” says Ted Dodd, a nursing student from Cleveland.

“A shower? Wow!” Monica says.

As it nears 7 a.m., the crowd in the dining hut begins to clear. Dishes are scraped and dumped into wash tubs. Dogs are shooed out one last time, and small bands of Americans make their way to dental and medical clinics set up in the village’s schools or to where they are pouring concrete for the floor of a new clinic.

I HAVE COME TO MEXICO by way of Intercambio Cultural Maya, a group of American volunteers who operate free clinics and undertake construction projects in a poor Mayan village one week each winter. The gringos are mainly Midwesterners — nurses, doctors, dentists, students and other comfortably affluent Americans. I’m one of the Midwesterners — a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who grew up outside of Joliet. In exchange for my fledgling journalism skills and the promise to produce two newsletters for the group, Intercambio has paid my way. I’ve looked forward to this trip for eight months, and I’m excited to live with and help these poor people. My parents questioned me: “Do you really want to do this? It’s going to be hard work.” Sure, I told them, but it’s not going to be too hard. It’ll be like camping out for a week with a bunch of friends. I’ve never really roughed it — lived without flush toilets and running water — but it can’t be too hard.

By 9 a.m., more than 100 people from Othon and the surrounding villages have lined up outside of the medical clinic’s wrought-iron gate to see the seven “American specialists” that the white banner spanning the main street advertises.

“I don’t want to see the little doctor,” one villager says in Spanish, referring to a Mexican doctor whose clinic is 60 kilometers away. The Mexican government provides free health care, but the villagers must pay for medication, which often is too expensive for them to buy. In the six days in which Intercambio’s clinic is open, its medical team will see more than 750 villagers and give away $7,000 worth of vitamins and medicine.

Entire families wait in the shade of orange trees across a narrow street from the clinic. A short, round Mayan woman wears a huipiel — a white dress with gardenias embroidered in bright blue around its collar and hem. Sisters wearing mud-splattered cotton dresses edged in lace and tied with pale satin sashes push their younger brother up and down the street in a stroller that has a board for a seat. A young woman’s white skirt is stained yellow with urine from her undiapered baby, who rests on her hip.

Inside the clinic gate, physician Ted Barnet, who works with lung transplant patients at the University of Illinois at Chicago Hospital, hangs out in a courtyard in well-worn khakis, white Reeboks and a gray T-shirt. He chain-smokes Marlboros before returning to the examination room. His translator for the day, Mimi VanEe, a young college student from Iowa, brings in 40-year-old Paulino Cataneda.

“What’s your problem?” Mimi asks Paulino, who sits on a child-sized bench and holds a brown baseball hat between his knees. He speaks and looks at Mimi, then at Ted. Mimi translates: “Sometimes when he reads his eyes water.”

“When he reads for how long?” Ted asks.

“After an hour it gets really bad. He also gets bad headaches — so bad that he doesn’t feel like working. He says he lies down in his hammock.”

Ted prescribes aspirin for Paulino’s headaches and medicine to combat his worms and tells the man to find among the eyeglasses that Intercambio brought a pair that clears his vision.

“I knew walking in the door what he needed,” Ted says after Paulino has left. “I added worm medicine, which we give to everybody. But it gives him a chance to tell his story. Everyone wants to show their scars.” Ted again steps out of the examination room and into the cement courtyard and lights up another Marlboro. He has traveled 4,000 miles to listen to people’s stories. “It shows, that I — that someone — gives a shit.”

He takes another drag and exhales.

“I do a lot of high-tech medicine,” he says of his work in Chicago, “and I use a lot of technology to get where I’m going, which is a good thing. But it leaves me out of touch with the stethoscope, the history and a good physical. You can’t do that in the States because it’s not acceptable care. Here, this is a step higher than what is already available, and I can help people who can’t otherwise get care.”

OUTSIDE THE MEDICAL CLINIC, red dust blows wildly with the breeze, and I turn to shield my eyes. I imagine that I can feel dust sticking to my sweaty arms and legs, on my neck and clogging the pores of my face. Young turkeys drink from a puddle of dirty dishwater outside a home made of thin tree trunks wired together. Ahead of me, I see what look to be Chinese lanterns hanging from a house’s palm roof. They glitter as they bounce in the wind, catching sunlight and tossing a sparkle onto one side of the house. I look closer and find that they are soft drink cans that have been cut vertically and squashed until the middle is pushed outward. Just then, Charlie Sweitzer barrels down the street in Intercambio’s old blue Suburban and honks at me.

“You want to go to Candelaria with me and pick up some supplies?”

“Sure.”

I throw my backpack into the Suburban’s rear seat and climb in the front. Intercambio uses the Suburban to carry supplies to each village visited. When Intercambio isn’t using the Suburban, Intercambio’s contact in Mexico, Ramone Celis and his staff in Cancún, use it.

After rolling down the window, I pull my reddish-brown hair into a ponytail and wipe the sweat and humidity off my face with the sleeve of my already sweat-soaked shirt.

CHARLIE IS ONE OF THE ORGANIZERS of Intercambio and is one hell of a guy. Sixty-one years old, 6-feet tall, with a full white beard and a ring of wiry hair around his head, Charlie is a pastor at McKinley Presbyterian Church in Champaign, Ill. The church serves a congregation consisting mostly of faculty members, their relatives and a few students. Sixteen years ago, he met Celis, a Presbyterian minister from the Yucatán, and they began working together to bring groups of Americans to the Yucatán for work projects. “We didn’t know what to expect,” Charlie recalls. “It’s a wonder nobody died.”

Intercambio Cultural Maya — Mayan culture exchange — makes two trips to the Yucatán each year. There’s a construction trip in the summer and a combined medical and construction trip in the winter. Intercambio is invited to a village by the village’s elders.

“Crap!” Charlie says suddenly. “We’re almost out of gas.”

“Where’s the gas station?”

“The next town — José Maria Morelos.”

The gas station, however, is out of gas, and the attendant doesn’t expect more to arrive before 7 p.m. A 7-year-old boy on a rusty bmx bicycle tells us he knows where we can get gas. Charlie gives him 10 pesos (about $1.25) to show us the way. The boy rides his bike as fast as he can down a dirt road and turns right. A few blocks later, he stops in front of a plain-looking house. Inside the one-room house, three 55-gallon drums of leaded gasoline are lined up against a wall, 5 feet from two hammocks in which the family members sleep. A mother and her 10-year-old daughter pull out plastic hoses and buckets and begin siphoning gas with their mouths.

“Bitches, hurry up!” yells the father. He’s as tall as I am, 5 foot 3. His hard eyes meet mine with an angry look. He frightens me.

“What do the gas fumes do to their bodies?” I ask Charlie.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Kill them, I guess.”

Charlie retreats across the street to avoid the fumes and sits in the window of a cinder-block house that is under construction. I follow. “But Charlie, we’re helping to kill them,” I say. “Aren’t we here to help people?”

“I don’t know how to answer your question,” he says. “If they don’t sell it to us, they’ll sell it to someone else. They’ll die whether or not we buy gas from them.”

Barefoot and wearing a dusty pink dress, the little girl helping to fill our gas tank runs a full bucket to her father. She picks up an empty bucket sitting at his feet and starts running back to the gasoline drum. Halfway to the house she slows and flashes a toothy grin at me. She runs to the drum and again starts sucking on the hose to fill the empty bucket.

“Ven aqui con un alguno mas!,” her father yells angrily. “Come here with another one!”

By the time we leave, four more cars are in line for gas.

OTHON B. BLANCO is an ejido — a village created by the Mexican government to farm specific crops for export to the United States. Othon seems prosperous. Every home, whether it is built of cinder block or the narrow trunks and branches of rain forest saplings wired together, has electricity and a television set. The television sets seem to be on all day — and tuned to Speedy Gonzalez, Mexican soaps or “Married with Children,” dubbed in Spanish. Ninety percent of the village homes have dirt floors. Few have gas stoves. Most families cook over an open wood fire. Many of the houses have one room for cooking, another room for sleeping and another small, private bathing niche attached to the house. In the sleeping room, brightly colored cotton hammocks hang parallel to each other. To cross the room you have to duck under each hammock.

This afternoon, my 72-year-old señora sits regally at the kitchen table. Her gray hair is softly swept back into a bun near the nape of her neck and it shines in the light from a naked bulb that hangs from the center of the room. She looks at me and smiles when I step into the room. “Buenas tardes,” she says. Then she offers me one of the 50 or so freshly picked oranges that sit beneath the kitchen table. I ask her where I can get water for my bath. She slowly rises from her chair and fills a blue plastic bucket with warm water that has been heating over a wood fire in the kitchen.

“Monica, how do I do this?” I ask from the bathing niche.

“There’s a chair in there,” my roommate hollers. “First of all, you just sponge. And then when you wash your hair, you can pour it over your head.”

“Carey, is there enough warm water for me to share with you?” asks another of my roommates, Erin Lacey, a dental student from the University of Iowa.

“Sure. Wear your sandals, though. It’s pretty muddy in here.”

I scrub my armpits two and three times, trying to get the acrid smell of wood smoke, rotting garbage and sweat off my skin. I don’t think it washes off.

“Erin, will you smell me? I don’t think I smell clean.”

She leans over and sniffs my arm.

“You smell like soap to me.”

I lean forward and smell my towel. It stinks. Every day, I hang it out to dry on a clothesline, which happens to be on the other side of a fence that pens in my family’s five pigs.

AT THE DENTAL CLINIC, a Mayan woman sits in a wooden chair. Her bright pink dress is splattered with blood. Blood runs out the left side of her gauze-filled mouth. She rests her head on a makeshift headrest fashioned from a roll of paper towels taped to the chair.

“I’m trying to pull three of the woman’s teeth, but I can’t get her mouth very numb,” Erin says. “She has an infection in her gums, and I can’t give her any more Novocain. I feel so bad.”

Erin puts on a pair of sterile surgical gloves and covers her nose and mouth with a blue mask. Her clothes are protected from the blood by a purple lab coat. She inserts a pair of stainless steel dental pliers into the woman’s mouth and firmly twists the pliers back and forth. Twist, pull, wipe the blood. Twist, pull, wipe the blood. The woman’s eyes are wide with pain. Her back is arched and tense. But she stays quiet. Twist, pull — POP, and the tooth is finally out. Erin rushes to press gauze into the gaping socket,  then takes a moment to examine the tooth. It has rotted down to the root. It’s not even good enough to put in her jar of alcohol and take home to Iowa to practice drilling and filling.

“We’re sacrificing teeth that in the States could be saved easily,” says Joyce Garton-Natte, a dentist from Fort Dodge, Iowa, and head of Intercambio’s dental clinic. “You have to realize that the main value here is to be free of pain. It’s a value system that I haven’t justified in my mind, except to know that we’re so shorthanded. It’s the only value system we can work under. It’s a risk coming down here, not knowing what you’re going to encounter. But I think you’ll discover that there are really some more important things than money. I’ve had my washer and dryer for 26 years and I thought, ‘Well, I deserve a new washer and dryer.’ But then I ran into a man who had no washer or dryer and I thought, ‘I don’t need a new washer and dryer until this one completely conks out.’ We certainly live richly compared to people here. And since I’ve been coming down, I’ve been doing a lot more free dental work at home because the need exists there just as well.”

Across the room from three dentists pulling and filling teeth, Shirley Beaver, a hygienist from Southern Illinois University, cleans teeth. In English, she slowly explains to her patients how to use a toothbrush and dental floss. The villagers, who speak Spanish or Maya, pay close attention to her words and mimic the way she shows them to brush. They seem to understand. The children among them, happy to have new toothbrushes, can’t wait to use them. They brush their teeth — and the walls, the dirt floor and the flea-ridden dogs.

“There’s a big garbage problem,” says Janet Short, a nursing student from Case-Western Reserve University in Cleveland. “And one of the big things is not only are there dogs, but there are pigs also. And they are a big proponent of disease because they eat the garbage. And then their excrement — that’s how worms are spread. A lot of kids don’t wear shoes and they’re playing in the street with all of this trash and all of this feces from the animals. That really puts them at risk.” Janet is working to teach the village women to pen up their families’ pigs and to wear shoes.

THE FAMILY I LIVE WITH seems pretty cleanly — which is, to be honest, a relief. Unlike many people in the village, they keep their pigs out of the kitchen. They drink bottled water and have a refrigerator. But they don’t have a flush toilet. Instead, they have an oval-shaped zone in the backyard that is littered with crumpled pages from a catalogue and screened from the view of the house and street by dried palms strung horizontally across vertical sticks. Erin and I refuse to walk in there. It’s raw sewage. No way is either one of us going to squat in that. Instead, we squat behind the narrow trunks of orange trees beyond the backyard.

“Erin, I can see your white butt!”

We both giggle like Girl Scouts camping out for the first time.

“Oh, be careful of your feet,” Erin says.

“I am. Doesn’t it smell?”

“Ugh!”

“Oh, look! I peed on my shoe!” I yell, and we both laugh.

“Oh, I did too!” Erin shouts. “Do you have any Kleenex?”

More laughter.

From my precarious position, I can see three village dogs watching us. We stand and zip up our Levi’s. Erin heads quickly back into the house, but I take my time. I listen to my family’s green parrot sing from its cage. I look for a ripe orange to pick from a tree. I stop, turn and look back. The dogs are eating our leavings. I turn my face away. I can’t help it. I vomit.

IN INTERCAMBIO’S KITCHEN, our cook, Geraldo Garia-Acosta, has four Intercambio people chopping onions, green chiles and tomatoes and mashing avocados. Geraldo wipes sweat off his forehead with his handkerchief, then walks across the room to rinse his hands in bleach water. He crosses the room to a stove, adds milk to refried beans and stirs. He pushes up his sleeves and mixes the chopped vegetables with the avocados.

“I need two limes,” he says. “Jeff, will you please pick some sour oranges form the tree outside? Thank you. OK. Squeeze the limes and oranges in here. Please hand me the milk.”

He adds milk and stirs. The guacamole is ready. I snatch a few chips full of guacamole before the rest of the gringos come to dinner. Beef kabobs, refried beans, grilled tomatoes, chips and guacamole are our Yucatecan dinner tonight. And Geraldo has prepared a special treat — chocolate truffles made with rich Parisian chocolate.

Before dinner starts, we throw scraps of vegetables into a garbage pile that sits under a row of thick-leaved trees. From the kitchen, I watch a crowd of pigs rummage through our newest scraps. Dogs and children, both with hungry eyes, stand in the kitchen doorway, watch us fill our plates and wait for handouts. During dinner, as we again eat at our tables covered with bleach-sanitized oilcloths, Charlie, Geraldo and I can see children digging through our garbage pile with the pigs. I clean my plate and leave to follow the children from the pile to their house across the street. It’s one room made from narrow tree trunks and branches. Two young brothers sleep together in one of four dirty, tattered hammocks. Smoke from an open fire rises to the palm-frond roof and leaves it black with soot and the air thick and dirty. Children wearing only underpants peer in the door to see the gringa talking with their mom.

“Hola. How are you?” I ask the señora in my broken Spanish.

“Fine. Please, sit down,” she says, motioning to one of the hammocks. After checking the hammock for crawling things, I sit.

“How many kids do you have?”

“Nine. Annie here is the oldest. She’s 15.”

“Wow! Nine kids,” is all I can think to say. I rack my brain for some-thing intelligent to say in Spanish, but I come up empty-headed. “What are the names of your other children?”

The señora tells me the names and ages of her other children, then starts talking about something else in rapid Spanish. I can’t understand a word. I smile and nod. In a pail blackened by the open fire, small orange squash — the type I’ve seen my family cook for their pigs — toss and turn in boiling water. “Do you have pigs?” I ask the woman.

“No,” she says.

Back in the kitchen, I tell Geraldo and Charlie what I’ve seen. Geraldo hands me 10 pesos and sends me to buy four pounds of tortillas from the nearby store. He fills a pot with leftovers and helps me carry the load of food to the woman’s house. One child in green underpants runs into the house and cries, “Mama! That gringa is here!”

Three of the younger children stand mesmerized as I spoon meat into their pots. The older brothers and sisters peek warily inside the door. I smile as the señora thanks me, but I cry as soon as I step outside. I’ve never seen poverty like this. The kids don’t have clothes or shoes or toys. Giving them our leftovers will help them tonight, but what happens when they’re hungry tomorrow and after we leave Othon? I can’t handle it anymore. I can’t watch people eat our garbage while I eat Parisian chocolate. I go to my hammock and fall asleep.

I WAKE WITH TURISTA — Montezuma’s revenge. I can’t make it to the backyard. I’ve lost all pride. I squat next to the front wooden gate that faces the street and hope no one walks by. Though it’s already 65 degrees and humid, I wrap myself in my sleeping bag and settle into my hammock. I’d really like a flush toilet. I haven’t felt clean for three days. No matter how many times I scrub my body, I still think I smell. I get the dry heaves every time the dogs follow me into the backyard. I’ve discovered that my neighbors have a flush toilet in a small building outside their house. I’ve started sneaking into their bathroom at night. My clothes are caked with red dust. I’d give almost anything for clean, soft clothes. The filth is everywhere — in my shoes, my socks, even my sleeping bag.
Three more nights here. I can’t wait to leave.

“Vivian, I’m sick of the dirt and the dust and the dogs. Aren’t you?”

“After seven years, it seems less of a chore,” says Vivian Dau, a school nurse from Iowa. As we sit in the shade on wooden chairs in the courtyard of the medical clinic, I ask her why she keeps coming back. “It’s two weeks, not even two weeks. The time in the village is the most uncomfortable as far as living conditions. And the dust is just there. I think, when you look back at this, it won’t be as much of a discomfort as it is now. It’s just a matter of getting through it, Carey. This has made me realize — well, have an awareness of — diversity of culture. Now my husband and I are much more tolerant of other people and much more intolerant of intolerance. We’re both in our 50s, and I think we assumed at this age we’d be slowing down, not experiencing new things. For us, it has been the opposite. It’s such a joy that we found we can grow and learn more about ourselves.”

Vivian leaves to test a urine sample. I think she’s a bit too sappy about Intercambio, but this is her seventh trip. She certainly understands better than I.

“Carey, are you feeling better today?” asks Patricia Higgins, a nursing professor from Case-Western University.

“Yeah,” I say. “Hey, thanks for the 7-Up and crackers yesterday.” Then I ask Patricia why she participates in Intercambio. Her answer is surprisingly direct.

“As a community health nurse, I consider my community to be the world.”

We’re finally leaving the village. I’m just four hours away from a shower, a flush toilet and a hotel room in Merida, Mexico. When I was gathering up my luggage this morning, I was so relieved to hear our two charter buses roar into the village. Our señora gives me a hug and kisses my cheeks. She shakes my hand and says something in Spanish that, once again, I don’t understand. I load my luggage into the old blue Suburban and run to use the pit latrine behind the dining hut. An old man who has been watching us from the village plaza all week is standing outside the latrine’s chest-high walls. He’s urinating. I turn around as fast as I can, walk into the dining hut and wait for him to leave.

BACK HOME in Urbana, back to my normal life: a hot shower, clean clothes, no stench of rotting vegetables or excrement. I’m shocked at how relieved I am to be clean again, but in the next few weeks, a small part of me begins to wish I were back in Mexico. My hammock was comfortable. I met interesting people every day. I ate oranges I picked from the village trees. From the comfort of my apartment, it’s easy to forget about the children who dug through the garbage, to forget the care I took to avoid the piles of dung in the road, to forget how repulsed I was by the filth. But now, America is newly repulsive in its own way. My apartment is twice as large as the house of the nine children who were digging through our garbage. I have more clothes than I can even wear. I have leather shoes that cost $100. If a villager had shoes at all, they usually were a pair of $1.50 plastic sandals.

But for all the compassion I felt for the people of Othon P. Blanco, for all my new sensitivities about American lavishness, I am still thinking about replacing my worn out Nikes with a new pair of $85 running shoes. I feel guilty and greedy because I know I could get a good pair of running shoes for $50 — maybe less if I cruised the clearance racks. But the $85 ones are comfortable and supportive, and blue is my color. I’ve got only one pair of feet. Shouldn’t I take care of them? Wouldn’t the Othon villagers buy shoes like this if they could afford them? I must look like an idiot standing in the Lady Footlocker with my mouth hanging open. Should I buy them and have well-supported feet? Should I buy less expensive shoes and give the money to Intercambio or save it to go on another Intercambio trip?

I LEAVE THE MALL and go to see Charlie at his church at Fifth and Daniel streets. “How can I justify spending $85 on a pair of running shoes,” I ask, “when I know that money could help someone who really needs it?” Charlie rubs his balding head.

“I don’t have an answer,” he says. “There are two ways rich people seem to respond to poverty. The first one says, ‘To hell with everyone else but me. I worked for the money. I’m going to do what I want with it. If only the people down there worked.’ That lets us off the hook too easily as to why I have so much and someone else has nothing. The other one is to give everything away, join the poor. That’s what most Christians mouth but don’t practice. Ultimately, I guess, if you give everything away, it just evaporates. Somebody else has to take care of you then.”

“But what’s the point of Intercambio if I don’t know what to do now?”

“Well, there are two purposes. One is to educate North Americans, and particularly university students, about how 90 percent of the Third World lives. And the methodology is experiential education. You went and saw; you lived there. I don’t know what you’ve learned, but I’m not responsible for what you’ve learned. You’re responsible for that. I’m only responsible for getting you there safely, getting you home safely and putting you in a context where all you can do is learn. You take people down there to do good for others, but you pirate the education. They don’t even know they’re being educated.”

I persist. “But what am I supposed to have learned?”

“Hell, I don’t know what you should learn.”

“Well then, what have you learned?”

“Oh, I’ve learned you can do something. It may not be much. It may not last very long. You know that woman you carried food to across the street? If you had gone over there empty-handed at meal time, she would have found something to feed you even though that meant less for her kids. Where do you see that happening around here? Carey, life is a series of compromises. You will always have to choose one thing over another.”

For the next few days, I think about what Charlie said and what I saw in Othon. Then I buy the $85 shoes.

By: Kavitha Cardoza

(Originally published in the C-U Cityview, August 2-8, 2002)

Author’s Note:

There were many lessons I learned but the main one was the power of asking questions. Even if you know nothing about a subject, you can learn about it by asking the right questions. It also taught me not to be nervous about going into a situation that was out of my comfort zone/I knew nothing about because that’s what journalists do! And I use those lessons every single day.

- Kavitha Cardoza

 

By: Megan Graham

(Originally published in The News-Gazette, August 1, 2012)

Author’s Note:

I tried not to make this a story of “disabled young man lives every day to the fullest even though he may die soon.” Because the story is not about how he looks to a tragic future. The story is about how he looks to the present moment, how he wills himself to wake up in the morning when has no idea how many moments will be left. The story is about a loneliness that he can’t fill because people are afraid of making him sick and maybe afraid of getting close to him. Mostly, it’s about permanently living in that space between childhood and adulthood—a space he may never truly be out of. Going forward, I know I have a lot more to learn. I need to ask the questions I want the answers to, not the answers that a subject gives me. I’m glad Chike and I had the opportunity to spend so much time together, even though I think his story was exhausting for both of us. It was hard for him to tell, and it was hard for me to hear. But it was worth it for me. I hope it was equally worth it for him.

- Megan Graham

In his old room in his parents’ home, a pretty house in the Cherry Hills subdivision of Champaign, Chike Coleman is poking through his shelves. He wants to find a Blu-ray disc, one of the beloved movies he bought in a half-off online sale from a site that sells independent films.

He moves aside tens of his prized jazz CDs, the Soapbox Derby trophies and the Hardy Boys books. The shelves are filled with 25 years of memories: books he has loved, model cars done in candy-colored lacquer, his University of Illinois diploma.

His high school and college friends — most 25-year-olds, for that matter — no longer live in the dust of their boyhood belongings. But after his fleeting years of collegiate freedom, Chike moved right back into this room, with its boxes of waterproof dressing and nonstick pads and bandages, bottles of hydrogen peroxide, soap-free cleanser and Clindamycin gel.

“It’s just kind of waiting,” he says. “Just like everybody else. Except your wait feels a lot shorter than everybody else’s.”

Chike glances at a photograph of him leaning back casually in his wheelchair, royal blue graduation gown draping his chest as he smiles broadly. He looks normal. He looks healthy.

Yet these are two things Chike will never be.

***

Chike — pronounced Chee-kay — was born with a rare genetic disorder: chronic granulomatous disease, an immune deficiency that hinders his body from fighting off fungal and bacterial infections.

The condition was once called “fatal granulomatosus of childhood.” But with medical progress — vaccines, surgical abscess drainage and better medicines — it is no longer necessarily fatal. One victim lived to be 63. Four out of five sufferers, of which there are only about 1,200 in the country, are boys. Many never live to become men.

Life with the chronic granulomatous is difficult, but Chike’s cerebral palsy makes it even harder. He cannot walk without a walker. He can suffer from multiple infections at once that come from any of the millions of invasives most people breathe in and fight off. They come without warning, and he often doesn’t know he has them until a doctor points them out.

“There’s absolutely no way to know,” he says. “It could get worse for me. It could get better right now. It’s kind of in the worse column, but…”

When he commented to a blogger with similar health problems, “My body is constantly fighting WWIII,” he wasn’t exaggerating.

Every day is filled with calculated risks:

— Does he balance on the legs of his chair to reach up and get a plate so he can make a meal for himself?

— Does he hoist himself up into the newly remodeled bath that is utterly dangerous when slippery?

— Does he climb out of his manual wheelchair in his room and down the stairs to his electric chair yet another time that day to get the one small thing he forgot downstairs, knowing full well he could slip and get a cut or bruise that could take forever to heal?

The answer is usually, “Yes.”

“I could be a germaphobe and still get hit with something.”

***

Chike has two very different kinds of days: neverending days at home and days out in the dangerous, dirty world. On the dangerous days, he catches the 8:25 a.m. bus. Some days he goes to film his three weekly TV shows at Urbana Public Television, two about film and one about sports. Some days he goes for physical therapy to keep his leg muscles loose.

Being out and about so much may not be wise. The Chronic Granulomatous Association says, “Remember, you cannot be too cautious with your health.”

People with Chike’s disease are not supposed to work with hay or grass clippings, go barefoot, play at a park with wood chips, go into barns, repot house plants, go inside newly renovated buildings or go near construction sites. People like Chike need to tell the doctor immediately if they have a fever. They are supposed to be vigilant, supposed to live in fear.

“You do end up playing that head game with yourself, worried that you’re not doing enough to keep yourself going,” he says. “I just can’t do that.”

As a boy, the wheelchair made Chike feel special, like a pint-sized celebrity. Girls couldn’t get enough of the boy with the wheels. In high school, though, he got looks, ones he viewed as saying, “What the hell are you doing invading the space of us normal people?”

The cerebral palsy, though certainly something he has struggled with, he at least understood. He was slower to grasp that he could die at any time. That realization came in pieces.

He remembers overhearing his parents talking about it with other adults and slowly understanding that something was terribly wrong with his body. As children his own age grew stronger, he began to realize all the things he couldn’t do.

He wondered in high school if he’d live to see his graduation day. The fears resurfaced in college, when he began to worry that he could die without saying goodbye to his parents, sister and friends. His deepest fear is that he’ll die tonight without time to tell them.

***

Chike spends much of his time in his bedroom on the Internet, often going downstairs only for meals.

“Even hermits gotta eat!” he says.

He blogs about movies and chats with friends he meets online. The Internet provides a mobility he doesn’t have in life. It even allows for a little bit of romance now and then.

“Ninety-five percent of the time I feel like I don’t have a chance with any girl.”

Online, that can be a different story.

One night, after perusing his OKCupid matches, he started up a conversation with a young woman whose virtual compatibility with his profile was too much to ignore.

As they chatted another night, she asked him his real name.

“Chike,” he typed.

“How is that pronounced?” she asked. “Does it rhyme with Mike?”

“No it does not. Chee-kay.”

And they quickly delved into his conditions.

“Frankly, I’m surprised my disability doesn’t frighten you.”

“I’m a bit concerned, I guess,” she typed. “But writing someone off completely because of that — well, that’s just plain mean.”

They chatted through the night, for nearly six hours. She took his phone number and said she would think about text messaging him. He really hoped she would.

Most of his free time, Chike listens to jazz — a favorite recording of Chicago jazz vocalist Kurt Elling and his trio is playing just now. He knows every inflection, scat and purr of this particular recording from 2006. He sings in his room, his left hand — his good hand — gripping the computer mouse, his right hand in its permanent position with thumb and finger forming an askew U, the three remaining fingers curled into his palm. As he sways his small frame in his chair, the pointer finger of his right hand hits the tempo up and down as if he is conducting.

He does the Louis Armstrong voice, deep and scratchy and round, with his eyes squeezed shut, his head bowed and a smile on his face. He does the Nat King Cole voice, smooth and silken and weightless, leaning back and tilting his face skyward. He pretends to smoke a cigarette, something he would never do in real life. His health is bad enough.

***

Every night before sleep, Chike allows himself five minutes for tears. “Five minutes a night,” he says. “That’s all I get.”

It’s never because of any particular difficult moment of his day or because of his terrible genetic luck. It’s because of the collection of millions of hardships and fears and uncertainties he feels at every moment, the awareness that at any second, during sleep or waking hours, some Aspergillus fumigatus or Blastomyces dermatitidis or Cryptococcus could creep into his body.

He wonders: Will I die in my sleep from something the doctors haven’t found? Or will medicine progress so that I might live long and healthy?

“I just keep going the best I can.”

The past few weeks have brought hope to Chike. The girl from OKCupid finally texted him back. She wrote, “Boo.” They’ve been chatting every day since, and he can’t stop smiling.

He also was accepted into the journalism graduate program at the University of Illinois. He’s expecting at least one new friend, some difficult classes and the rekindled independence of apartment life back on campus.

Of course, the apartment search isn’t going smoothly — nothing ever does. In the first one he toured, his wheelchair got stuck on a rainbow knotted rug and the chair wouldn’t fit in the bathroom. The second wasn’t much better.

“You know, I’m going into it with some trepidation,” he says. “Am I going to get through this without an incident?”

Yet Chike’s determined to stay optimistic, hoping graduate school will lead to a life beyond the walls of his boyhood room and the confines of his disease.

After all of it, he says simply, “I’m just grateful.”

By: Dan Petrella

(Originally published in The St. Anthony Messenger, April 2011)

Author’s Note:

The most important lesson I learned from doing the story was not to give up too soon. I originally started interviewing a different subject. He was a younger student who ended up pulling out because he was concerned about the time commitment. I was about to move on to a different topic altogether when the folks at the Newman Center put me in touch with Marcus Slavenas. His life experiences ended up making the story so much richer than I ever could have imagined.

- Dan Petrella

ON SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2003, Marcus Slavenas got the phone call that changed everything. He had just finished work and saw that he had a voice mail from his dad: “Please call me back, Marcus.”

From the sound of his father’s voice, he knew someone in the family was dead.

When Marcus called back, his dad gave him the bad news: His younger brother, Brian, had been piloting a CH-47 Chinook helicopter that was shot down near Fallujah, Iraq. Brian was dead, along with 15 others.

Marcus went home and threw a fit, throwing chairs, making so much noise that his downstairs neighbors called the landlord.

His Own Iraq

Rewind a few years, to Marcus’s own time in Iraq. Lance Corporal Marcus Slavenas was a 20-year-old Marine in a special ops unit during the Gulf War. He hadn’t prayed much since he stopped going to a Methodist church in seventh grade.

In late January 1991, his team was positioned at an observation post just south of the Kuwaiti border, near the city of al-Khafji. When mortar explosions started, he crawled under a nearby Humvee and prayed, over and over, “Please, God, get me out of here.”

During the rest of his time in the war, Marcus continued praying, often repeating one plea: “God, get me through this war, and I’ll go to church every week for the rest of my life.”

Angry at God

He got through the war, but it would be nearly two decades before Marcus would keep his promise. He grew angry at God, blaming him for all the injustice and suffering in the world. He began to wear, under his shirt, a silver inverted pentagram pendant as a satanic sign of his hatred toward God.

When his younger brother was killed in Iraq, though, Marcus started going to Mass. He was hesitant at first. But, over time, he says, he was drawn in by the Church’s moral clarity, its capacity for forgiveness, and the love and acceptance he felt there. After years of procrastination, the reluctant Methodist-turned-“true Satanist” began to keep his promise. Now, at age 40, he snapped the Satanist pendant in half with his bare hands.

A Family in Strife 

Rewind again. Marcus’s parents had divorced when Marcus was in junior high school, and their youngest son’s death cast a very public spotlight on the divisions in the family. Ronald and his oldest son, Eric, wanted full military honors for Brian, but their mother, Rosemarie, refused.

The dispute was covered widely in Chicago and in media nationwide. Calvin Trillin, well-known nationally for his books and magazine contributions, was moved to tears upon hearing a report about Brian’s death on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition. He wrote a reflection on the family’s differences of opinion for The New Yorker magazine in March 2005.

In the end, no American flag draped Brian’s casket during his funeral at Faith United Methodist. After the casket was lowered into the ground in the cemetery next to the church, Rosemarie told reporters she blamed President George W. Bush for Brian’s death. “He was not a soldier,” she said. “He was my son. George Bush murdered my son.”

After the funeral, Ronald and Eric held a separate ceremony at the nearby Genoa Veterans Home. The service featured many of the military honors that Rosemarie banned from the funeral, including a 21-gun salute and a helicopter flyover.

Although Marcus was also critical of the war his brother had died fighting, he attended the military ceremony. But it was the night of Brian’s wake that stands out most in Marcus’s memory.

“Right from the very beginning, I had feelings of his spirit,” recalls Marcus. When family members and friends were coming to town for the visitation, there was a huge windstorm, with gusts up to 50 mph. “It was just like he was flying out that day. He was a helicopter pilot, and he came, he flew through, and then he was gone.”

Darkness and Light 

Now, all these years later, in the wake of his brother’s death, Marcus reflects on his own life for St. Anthony Messenger. “I did nothing good on my own,” says Marcus, who still wears his hair in the high-and-tight style of the Marine Corps. “I don’t know why, but he doesn’t just reveal himself to us like this,” he says, snapping his fingers. “God has revealed himself to me, and I have no choice but to accept what is…true.”

But that choice didn’t come easily. Marcus had never wanted to go to church during childhood. His father, Ronald, only went occasionally “for show,” Marcus says.

During high school, Marcus started drinking and partying, a lifestyle that continued through much of his adult life. After graduation he joined the Marines. He was looking for adventure and wanted to follow in the military footsteps of his dad and his older brother.

After his Marine enlistment ended in 1992, Marcus spent two years each at Northern Illinois University and the University of Illinois, studying applied mathematics and physics.

Then he went to study in Berlin, Germany, where his anger at God came to a head. Walking down the street in Berlin one day, he pondered all the sickness and suffering and death in the world.

Where is Jesus? he asked himself. I don’t see him walking around, helping people. I don’t feel his presence anywhere. All I see is people just struggling to hang on with whatever they can come up with to make it through what’s really a horrifying situation: life.

When he looked at the world around him, he thought, Why doesn’t anyone point the finger right at the Creator of it all and blame him? These thoughts didn’t lead Marcus to doubt God’s existence. He believed God had created a world that was “an engineering marvel but a moral catastrophe.” He started abusing drugs and alcohol. And he started praying to the devil to overthrow God.

After a year back at home from Germany, though, Marcus explains, he had steady work and his life was straightening out. But Brian’s death sent Marcus into a tailspin. For the first month or so, he awoke each morning to the reality of his loss. “You’re asleep and you’re somewhere else, and then you wake up, and you’re like, Oh, no, back to this horrible nightmare.”

Soon, Brian’s death pervaded his dreams as well. In one particularly vivid dream, Brian appeared with a sunken face and said good-bye before leading a medieval army, outfitted with swords and shields, into a battle from which he’d never return. In other dreams, Brian was a young child.

“We’d be doing something together, and then he’d go off and there’s no finding him.”

Marcus went back to drinking. Sometimes he got too drunk to go to work. He quit his job.

“I basically spent that year driving around from family member to family member to friend and,” he admits, “usually drinking beer or something along the way.”

Marcus hated God. Yet after moving back to DeKalb in early 2005, he decided to go to Mass. He went to the chapel on the Northern Illinois University campus, looking for a truer understanding of his anger at God. He wanted to confront God headon.

What he found surprised him—no finger-wagging priests preaching fire and brimstone. As a former Methodist, he didn’t know all the parts of the Mass, but he experienced a warm, loving
presence in that chapel.

Slowly, his anger at God began to fade. As he continued going to Mass over the next year, he often felt as though the priests were speaking directly to him.

‘Something Good’ 

For the first time in many years, he started praying to God again. And, much to his surprise, it seemed as though his prayers often were answered.

Before he went to an awards night at nearby University of Illinois in the spring of 2006 to give out a scholarship created in his brother’s honor, Marcus prayed that something good would happen for him that night. “I was really kind of down-and-out right then,” he recalls.

Something good did happen. At the dinner, held in the ballroom on the second floor of the student union, he sat next to Martin Ostoja-Starzewski, a mechanical engineering professor who uses MRIs to study the effects of mild trauma on the human brain. The two hit it off and, two weeks later, Marcus joined his research team.

Late in 2009, Marcus decided to enter the Catholic Church officially. He started attending weekly classes at St. John’s Catholic Newman Center at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) to prepare him to receive Holy Eucharist.

A Deepening Faith 

At a Friday afternoon Mass around that time, when the lector read a prayer for the dead, Marcus, standing in the ornate chapel with its marble columns and towering stained-glass windows, felt suddenly struck by his brother’s presence. “It was a physical experience, knowing—experiencing, I guess—that my brother was there, that I can pray to him and he can pray back for me,” he says. “It just took the worries away, kind of about life in general.”

From his experiences at church, he came to understand more deeply. “The point is, have faith,” he tells St. Anthony Messenger. “You don’t have to build up your whole life exactly and know what’s coming because there is a greater purpose to this. That’s really what it’s all about.” That’s the conversion from a “God-hater to a Godlover,” he says.

As Lent started last year, Marcus decided it was time to go to Confession. Sitting on a couch in the lobby of the Newman Center before going into the confessional, he was terrified. I’m 39 years old, he thought. My sin pile reaches to the sky! When he stepped into the confessional at the back of the chapel for the first time, he sat down face-to-face with Msgr. Albert Hallin.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” Marcus said. “This is my first Confession.”

“And you’re scared to death, aren’t you?” the monsignor asked reassuringly.

“Yes, I am.”

Marcus told him about all the sins in his pile, how much he had hated God. Msgr. Hallin, a former Navy corpsman with gray, thinning hair, was unfazed.

“Your sins are forgiven,” he said. “Go in peace.”

Stepping back into the chapel, Marcus felt an emotional high. But it was later that night, lying in bed, that the true weight of the experience hit him.

There was no more need to ask for forgiveness for what he’d done before, no need to question his past. “That sin is gone,” he affirms. “God took it and it is gone. All I have to do right now is look to my future.”

By now he was a catechumen, preparing for his reception into the Catholic Church at the Easter Vigil, high point of the Church’s year.

A Vigil of Welcome 

At St. John’s, Mass began in the brick courtyard. With bluish twilight settling in, the congregation gathered around a bonfire as Msgr. Gregory Ketcham, the Newman Center chaplain, blessed the four-foot-tall Easter candle.

After the blessing, the congregants walked in procession into the darkened chapel in silence. Inside, light radiated from the small candles the people held in their hands. They took turns reading Bible passages, recounting the Christian story from creation to the Resurrection.

Because he was baptized and confirmed in the Methodist Church as a child, Marcus watched from his pew while some of the other new members were christened, each leaning over the font as Msgr. Ketcham poured water over their heads, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Marcus and the others already Christian would become Catholics later in Mass, just after they
proclaimed their faith, renewing the promises of their Baptisms.

“Do you reject Satan?” Msgr. Ketcham asked.

“I do,” answered Marcus.

“And all his works?”

“I do.”

“And all his empty promises?”

“I do.”

“Do you believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth?”

“I do.”

“Do you believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was born of the Virgin Mary, was crucified, died and was buried, rose from the dead and is now seated at the right hand of the Father?”

“I do.”

“Do you believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting?”

“I do.”

The chapel was filled with the smoky, sweet smell of incense and the solemn melody of the choir and pipe organ. The monsignor dipped his thumb in holy oil, rested his outstretched fingers on Marcus’s head and administered conditionally the Sacrament of Confirmation, making a cross on his forehead and saying, “Be sealed with the gift of the Holy Spirit. Peace be with you.”

Marcus, who had come so far, who was lost but now was found, softly affirmed: “Amen.”