Here’s a powerful word.  GIRLPOD.

Have a girl?  Are a girl?  Want to make a difference for a girl?

Think about girlpods and ”Hope by 12″:  “When a girl who lives in poverty turns twelve her life is in the hands of others.  We HOPE to catch that girl BY the age of TWELVE and give her a healthy future.”

http://www.hopebytwelve.org/

Here’s another powerful word.   WATER.

Take a shower today?  Drink something clean and yummy?  If so, did you feel a sense of intense gratitude?

I remember visiting the very first library Ethiopia Reads opened and watching the hygiene program going on every Saturday for some of the kids who didn’t have a chance to wash their clothes or hair at home.  (This picture was taken at the mercato school where one of the newest libraries is going in.)

I also remember when Liz told me she was going to raise $150,000 to bring clean water to the area where her adopted Ethiopian son had been born.

$150,000?  The amount made us stagger back.

But she did it.  Her website says, “When the burden of water collection and water borne illness is lifted, girls can remain in school and women can invest more time on family life, agriculture and owning small businesses.”

http://www.mudulawater.org/

Hope is a powerful word.

The community center of AHOPE cares for Ethiopian children with HIV, and Ethiopia Reads will be helping with professional development for the library manager who will help spread books to those children and their community.  http://www.ahopeforchildren.org/

This week, five moms of adopted children from Ethiopia, one Ethiopian educator whose life was changed by books, and two of us from Ethiopia Reads sat around a table and talked about what we dream for Ethiopian children for 2012.

Dream is a powerful word.

Collaboration is a powerful word.

Thank you, Molly and Liz and Habtamu and Jennifer and Meghan.

Isn’t is amazing what we think we can do?

May we all be creative together as we share words and worlds.

If you could spend a modest amount of money or time and open the world of reading for the most brilliant, motivated, determined kids in your neighborhood, would you?

I think most of my friends wouldn’t pause to answer a big ol’ YES.

(The reader in this picture is the brilliant, motivated, determined young reader who was in my neighborhood once upon a time–my daughter, now in a PhD program in English literature.)

Many of my friends are teachers, librarians, writers…all of those avid readers…who have seen the thrilldom of watching the power of a book to open the world around and inside a child.

Pure joy.

And that’s the joy of volunteering for Ethiopia Reads (www.ethiopiareads.org).

I spent a lot of this week preparing for our annual board retreat that will happen in Denver next week.  I had a phone conversation with another I’m-hooked Ethiopia volunteer about a young Ethiopian man who will be part of planning conversations in Denver.  He was born into an unusual family in a remote part of Ethiopia and now has a masters degree and wants to figure out how to get books to young people in the area where he grew up.  His reading journey shows that even a thin lifeline will be grabbed by those with fierce determination and courage.  Lucky reader. Lucky us.

Yesterday, I spent an hour or more on the phone with Stephanie from Art Aid International who took this picture when she was visiting one of the libraries Ethiopia Reads planted in 2011.  An eagle appeared–no, literally–on her end while we were talking.

I feel powerful wings flapping around this particular chance to bring art and literature into the lives of kids.

How many readers in 2012 will see that brilliant, motivated, determined youngsters are in our neighborhood (even though they live in far-away Ethiopia) and we can spend modest amounts of money and time and get them books?

My experience tells me the answer is…a LOT.

Can you believe that in 2011 donors raised or gave money for a model school library in all but one of the eleven regions in Ethiopia?

I barely can believe it myself.

Stephanie volunteered in Ethiopia in December and wrote about this scene:

“Meanwhile, inside the library, a local Ethiopian artist named Aklilu was working with the kids on a project where children became the ‘canvas.’  They used what they found outside the school to turn themselves into beautiful flowers. The idea was to get them to think about the things around them every day that they can create with. They don’t have to wait for art class to be creative.  All one needs is imagination.”

A retreat takes imagination, too.

We’ll have to imagine outcomes and wrestle tough questions.

Should we set up literacy and library situations where we can have more control over quality or should we do what we can to work with overcrowded, intense government schools where thousands of kids are learning to read without ever holding a book?

Should we build schools in regions where there are none?  (Lots of money needed for that.)

Should we focus on improving schools?  (Money goes further, but can we make ENOUGH difference?)

Should we reach some communities with deep, inter-connected services or a lot of communities with a little bit–knowing even a little will surely be enough for some kids?

Can we find new creative ways to get books and reading to lots of kids?

We’ll experiment with all of the above in 2012 and hope to have some answers for 2013.

And while we experiment, we’ll feel the thrilldom you feel when you flip a last page and turn to someone and say, “Wow.  You have to read this!”

The thrilldom you feel when you watch a child whose mind seems to suddenly go…

CLICK.

The thrilldom of spending a modest amount of money and time and opening the world of reading for some resourceful, motivated, determined kids who share this earth with us.

Today is Ethiopian Christmas.  More memory.

In Ethiopia, my dad would head out in mid-December to survey the cedar trees that stood in a circle in the compound where our family, a nurse, and a teacher lived, the only English-speakers of my world.  He’d find a branch and saw it off.  That was the Christmas tree.  My sisters and I helped Mom put on the same glass ornaments, one or two crinkling on the concrete floor into a pile of glass splinters.  We’d use the same silvery icicles each year.  They got shorter and more crumped each year.  Dad would put a mirror in the middle of the table and pile cotton around it and bend pipe cleaners to create skaters.

Skaters weren’t part of our world.  They were from his childhood…the frozen rivers and ponds of eastern Oregon where he and his brothers would slip and slide and warm up by the flaming barrels.

My sisters and I read about ice and snow.

It made us scoop up handfuls of dried grass that the school boys left lying when they took the small scythes to the long grasses in the compound.   We polished slabs of cardboard with that grass.  When the slabs were shiny, we took more grass and created paths down the hillside.  We spent hours zipping down the paths.

Was this what it was like to ride a sled down the snow hills like in the books?

One of my sisters ended up settling in Minnesota.  My dad loved to visit during winter time and help her kids create snow paths down the hill.  In those years in Maji, though, snow was only a dream, only something to read about, only something that seemed magical and amazing and always far, far away.

The year I was seven and we spent one year in Boise, Idaho, I got to experience snow.  Somehow it wasn’t like the snow of my dreams, the snow of the books.

Snow came to stand for not fitting in, the awkwardness of life in the United States when we visited.

I was thinking about all of this in a book discussion group this morning, talking about the luminous book Cutting for Stone. 

“We come unbidden into this life,” Abraham Verghese writes, “and if we are lucky we find a purpose beyond starvation, misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the common lot.”

There is purpose to awkwardness.

There is purpose to isolation and feeling out of place and ill at ease.

Sometimes…

sometimes…

there is the dream of a different way.

Sometimes there are words and songs and speeches and the other small consolations.  May we all find the small consolations…and the dreams.

Ethiopia celebrates the turning of the year in September when the rains are over and yellow meskel flowers dot the fields, so Jan. 1 meant nothing to me growing up–in fact, nothing until I happened to have a baby on Dec. 31.   In those days, we were often in Kansas for Christmas.  Jonathan felt cheated not to be with his friends for his birthday.  A New Year’s Eve birthday tends to get swallowed by Christmas.

Two years ago, I flew to Chicago on New Year’s Eve so that I could do my first Lanie signing in the Chicago American Girl store on Jan. 1 and introduce my character to the world.

Even though I knew the American Girl Doll of the Year was a Big Deal, I was unprepared for what it would be like to see a character that had been born in my brain and my fingers all huge and sprung to life.  I was stunned to find that families had waited for hours in the Chicago cold for the doors to open.In the daze, I felt the flutter of monarch wings in the air, sending hopeful bits out into 2010.

http://www.ohio.com/news/local-news/girls-raise-funds-to-feed-tigers-at-akron-zoo-1.252634  A few days ago, I read this article about Lanie readers and knew that those monarch wings did, indeed, have some power.

That’s the thrilldom of writing.

It’s pretty agonizing, crafting a novel.  For me, anyway, it’s a series of missteps, stumbling along through the haze, laying down path and ripping it up again when I turn out to have gone somewhere unfortunate.  Right now, I’m mourning the fact that I won’t be teaching at the Vermont College MFA residency this January (because I have international speaking this spring and also want some space to get my own writing done for a few months) where at least I get to have the sensation of groping through the fog with others crazy enough to have a passion for this tough journey of writing fiction.

I will get to have an Ethiopia Reads board retreat in Denver, though.  Just as it’s precious to have fellow writers around for the journey, I’ve learned that a huge part of my satisfaction as a volunteer is fellow volunteers.  2011 was a year of getting to know Stephanie, an artist who travels to Ethiopia once a year to do art with kids in the Tesfa schools that will now also have libraries and literacy projects, thanks to families like the amazing Angelidis family in Seattle.  Stephanie and I were agreeing that getting to share the art forms we’re passionate about makes all the volunteer hours a joy.  (Well, okay, it makes MOST of the volunteer hours a joy.)

Readers love to share a story that has made their hearts go pitter pat.

Have you ever said to a friend, “You HAVE to read this book”?

Have you ever giggled with a friend as you shared a story?

Have you ever been part of a book club?

Have you ever given one of your favorite books as a present to someone else?

If you’re a reader, I’m sure you have.

That’s the pleasure of Ethiopia Reads (www.ethiopiareads.org)

In 2012, I know there will be new volunteers, new donors who open new libraries and help ship books and provide the funding for professional development so that authors and teachers in Ethiopia get to grab hold of new skills to share books.  I can’t wait to get back to my own stories and to also see story power floating out into the world, rippling on.

http://fregenetfoundation.org/

“What was Seattle like??”

Adjectives fail me.

First of all, the dinner was sold out, which so rarely happens in my world.  Ellenore, the organizer, had set a goal of 100, but 170 people bought tickets.  Bidding on auction items was brisk and cheerful.  The room was full of dancing and poetry and Ethiopians and Americans who care about reading and art and kids and, well, about Ellenore and her family.

People give to people.

One of the zingy things about being a volunteer for Ethiopia Reads has been meeting fellow volunteers.

In Ethiopia, I notice that people still seem to be on a default setting that one’s life will get better if a patron comes along to bestow good things.  After all, Ethiopia had a society for centuries much like the medieval societies we study in school…and I’ll bet the serfs in Europe never sat around the fire chatting about how they could pool their money and ideas and skills to make things better.

We talk about America being the land where the individual can succeed.  In some ways, as many emigrant families will tell you, it still is that way (for a lot of individuals)–because some of the systems that squash people around the world are a little less entrenched, here, than they are in a place like, say, Ethiopia.

Most of us in America don’t live in villages, for example, where our families have lived for so many generations that the patterns and antagonisms and frustrations are entrenched and seem hard to ever overcome or change.  Class and ethnic tensions certainly are real in America, but we still have more wiggle room than in a lot of places around the world.

It’s true that a lot of individuals in places like Ethiopia are longing to come to America even now when things are relatively tough here.

People everywhere are pretty determined to make their children’s lives better.

But that story about America as the place where individuals pull themselves up by their bootstraps?  My research for Bicycle Madness, featuring the real-life reformer Frances Willard (who learned to ride a bike in her fifties with her skirts down to her ankles to show what women could do), convinced me that America is the place where a lot of people really GOT IT that ordinary human beings can put their resources together to make things better.

The power of ordinary people working together.

Frances Willard and the other reformers in the late 1800s were determined to make America live up to its rhetoric.  Children were working in factories.  (Their little fingers were helpful for many of the machines.)  Women had no way to support themselves and their families if men let them down (taking themselves and their wages off to the saloon, for instance).  Frances Willard and other writers and speakers and photographers worked together to spread the stories and images of suffering, struggling people–and they brought change.

Ordinary people holding hands can bring change.

That’s what Seattle was about.

The event was held in the Norwest African American museum–a place that fit it delightfully well.

Ellenore and her team of volunteers had gathered lots of cool stuff for the auction.  People donated those things.  People bought those things…and other people just raised the paddle to make donations.  (Ethiopia Reads board member Frew Tibebu won the stay in the apartment in Paris and I can’t wait to hear what the trip is like for his family.)

The totals aren’t in, yet, but I know the event met and exceeded Ellenore’s goal of $25,000 to bring reading to the mercato school and community around it.

Reading is one of the ways to share the power tools of the world.

When Stephanie, who just did her own fundraiser for art in the school, visited Ethiopia this month, the kids used themselves as the canvas for one project.  My brother and I, in our brief talk at the event, paired some of Stephanie’s photos with the words of a teacher who traveled with my brother last summer.

The mercato school captured our hearts.

Each little face drawing your eyes.

Look at me.

See me.

Saying, “I am significant.”

What makes someone like Ellenore brave enough to believe she can make up a fundraiser auction?

What makes her determined enough to give up most of her own pre-Christmas preparation time to put in the time to something like this event?

What made artist Yadesa Bojia contribute his hours and two paintings to spread joy in the mercato neighborhood where he grew up?

What makes all the volunteers of this world believe that they should give up the time they could be spending with their families and businesses and hobbies and instead believe they can help spread clean water and food and health care and education in places where those are precious and rare?

It’s baffling.

And powerful.

And sweet.

I want a good night’s sleep before a big Seattle event that is bringing together children’s book authors (and their books), adoption parents and Ethiopian-Americans to create a literacy project in a school sandwiched between an intensely busy market and warehouse district and a desperately poor residential area of Addis Ababa.  Dana Roskey writes, “Thousands live in a shanty-town of tiny houses made of sheets of corrugated iron, sharing unsanitary community toilets. Most of our families live on less than $20/month, supported by fathers doing day labors, or by single mothers who bake bread or do laundry for a living. Some families are homeless. Some parents and a few of the children have AIDS. Most of the children are malnourished when they arrive.”

I want to be asleep right now.

Instead, there’s just enough nervousness around all the details of the event that my brain is chugging away at 4 in the morning.

As I stared into the darkness, I thought about this photo and that mother.

Worried.

When I was a young mother, I worried.  Sure, we had the time and money to take our kids camping–and my memories of what that did for them and for us are a big part of why I gave my Lanie character such a longing to go camping.

But I remember one camping trip where my husband found some berries he was sure would be fine to eat–and I carefully didn’t eat any in case I had to end up driving everyone out of the wilderness to a hospital to save their lives from the poison berries.

(They were fine.  I missed out on some great berries.)

I loved camping when I was a kid.

In Ethiopia, we camped by waterfalls and lakes where flamingoes filled up the sky and by a lazy brown river where my dad swam around a bend and came face-to-face (as he always told the story) with a water buffalo.

I worried every time he told that story.

Sometimes I show this picture of my niece and her son on a Kurtz family camping trip and say, “It was more fun to be the kid camping than to be the mom camping.”

Part of that lack of fun was how much work it is to prepare and how much work it is to take care of kids far from home and how much work it is to clean up everything after you’re done.  My dad invented some pretty good systems for all of that (partly so he could coax my mom to go camping).

She was the one in our family, as Lanie would say, with the inside genes.

But it’s not just the work.  When we camped in Ethiopia, my mom would gasp when we got too close to the edge of a cliff, and we would laugh and tell her she was being silly.

As soon as I had kids, I knew that stomach-swooping sensation that comes from watching someone you love standing close to the edge of, oh, say the Grand Canyon.

And here in the U.S. we usually have railings around places like that where families gather to see the beauties of the earth.

What is it like to be a mom in a place where really it’s impossible to protect your daughter from danger?

Dana writes that what the staff of the mercato school is proudest of “is simply that the children have a safe place to be. When most of these children start their first school year, they are stunted, glum, and lethargic. After a few months, they are smiling and playing, and they have recovered some body weight.”

Thanks to some vibrant volunteers, the kids also have art in their lives.  One wrote this week about doing art with kids who were working with color paint for the very first time.  Another group of kids experimented with using themselves as the canvas.  Stephanie writes that art has the power to change lives and spread smiles.

Now that the Tesfa Foundation (www.tesfa.org) and Ethiopia Reads (www.ethiopiareads.org) are collaborating, those kids will also feel the power of reading and writing and stories of hope and determination.  The world is full of true and invented stories of hope and determination.  They can make us strong.

That’s what the Seattle event is all about.  Making books and reading and writing stories possible for a worried mother’s daughter.

Now I have grandkids to worry about.

Who decided children should be so teeny and helpless when they come into this world?  How can we even stand all the dangers they might face?

All I can cling to is the words of this season…that the light comes into the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it.

Amazing goodness and strength bubble everywhere, too, right along with worry and pain.

Seattle will be the latest proof of that.

Now the four of us are all grandmas!

That year, I had my first connections and clashes (that I can remember) with my strong Grandma Kurtz.

She had to be tough to get through her life.  I ran into that toughness when I took my seven-year-old self out with my grandpa and a couple of cousins and one cousin loaned me her socks so I could wade with her brother in some kind of muck.  Grandma found out and was cross and made me wash the socks.  That side of my family farmed in Idaho and Eastern Oregon–here I am with my cousins on the farm when I visited the United States again five years later.  (I’m on the swing.)  It was a rollicking, fun place to visit.  I remember chasing rabbits in the sagebrush and wading in the irrigation ditches.  But my grandma remembered a time when snow blew into the house and her children ran downstairs shivering to the sagebrush fire.

Grandma Kurtz lived to be 99 years old and still in her own house.  My dad grew up in a family of five boys and one girl, and that one girl was right across the yard to help her mom.  Here is grandma with one of her sisters.  When my older sister gave me this photo, she commented that she hoped we would someday be sisters sticking together to the end just like grandma and her sister.

So far, my sisters–my brother–and I are sticking together.  We all like gardens and writing and reading and singing together around a guitar or a piano.

We like orange spirals, the rolls Grandma used to make.

What kinds of things ripple through your family?

Stories and songs and laughter and toughness ripple through mine.  At Thanksgiving this year, we sat around talking about how many teachers we have in the family, too.  We like school.

My grandma had a chance to go to college at the College of Idaho, where she played basketball and studied.  She was a curious, determined person who was always interested in learning more about all kinds of things.  My dad struggled with school.  But he still thought it was important.  He still loved stories–and he was smart enough to marry my mom, a great reader, who turned him into a reader, too.

My mom grew up in a much tougher, sadder family than the one my dad grew up in.  Like the family I gave Lanie, the newest character I created, she was born with inside genes, and she loved books and words and ideas.  Her reading gave her great hopefulness and gave her a certain toughness that helped her survive and thrive.

I never knew either of my grandmas well.  After all, we grew up in Ethiopia far away from them.  And my grandkids might end up growing up in Ethiopia far away from me, too.

That’s the dream.

No matter what happens, I hope they have a life full of family connections.  It’s precious to me that they got a chance to meet my dad before he died.  It’s precious that they feel loved by their aunts and uncles and cousins.

It’s precious to me that they have families across two continents.

My granddaughter in this picture (with her other grandma) has a legacy of tough determination running through both sides of her family.

What will she carry forward?

I’m not sure, but I love her fierce little eyes.

I also love, love, love it that I’ve had a chance to share some of my favorite stories with her and her little brother.  I love having kids–and now grandkids–who feel connected to some of the same sweet folks I feel connected to including Wilbur and Winn Dixie and Junie B. Jones and Judy Moody and Pippi and Peter Rabbit and Despereaux, the tough ones that won’t be kept down no matter what.

Roads are full of people.

And animals.

And distractions of all sorts.

In North Dakota–rural state that it is–my kids had the opportunity to be fully licensed drivers at 14.  I, having spent my teenaged years in Ethiopia, didn’t get a license until I was 24 or 25.

I mention this as a tiny bit of excuse for why my heart went thumpity-thump this morning when I had to drive into downtown Portland.  And park.  And figure how to feed the meter beast.

The world is full of big terrifying things–but plenty of small things can get you, too.

When I was seven and lived for a year in Boise, Idaho, my dad, who had flown in the Air Force during World War II, got his pilot’s license for a small plane.  My little sister Cathy used to go with him as he put in his flight hours.  (She now works for the FAA.)

He always seemed invincible, whether roaring a Jeep up the side of the mountain to get to Maji or, later, flying in, landing in airstrips where I had the sensation of dropping right out of the sky onto a thin band of land carved out from the thick brush.

But he wasn’t.

And we all aren’t.

That plane crashed on an airstrip in Mekelle, Ethiopia and never took to the skies again, although those of us in it…gradually…did.

We’re fragile specks on the face of this earth.  In order to keep on living full and curious and sumptuous lives, we have to block out what we know about that.  I was tempted to take the bus this morning–which would have been fine except I knew in my deep heart I would only be doing it because I was afraid to drive.

I live in an interesting neighborhood where a few businesses are being started up several blocks away.  I like the sensation of people carving out those spaces, taking that kind of risk, providing a chance for some people to pay their bills and other people to gather and talk and see their neighbors out and about.

Story provides a kind of neighborhood, too.  When I read a magical kind of book like the one my author friend Toni created out of the lighthouse world of coastal Maine  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/books/review/gifts-of-grace.html?_r=2 I feel as if I’ve been lifted right into that lighthouse, that family, that Christmas.

Family.  Community.  Friendship.  Story. Not exactly enough to keep the terror at bay.

The threads are thin and feel as if they could easily snap.

But they are what we have–and today they feel precious.

The gift of focus  appears when there are physical hardships that have to be overcome–and when the simple act of preparing shelter or food for a family is all-absorbing.

We know we should stay in the moment.

But can we?  Do we?

I know the gifts of being part of a disaster.  At first there was such a narrowing of attention.  Living in the day.

Later, I got to experience the pouring out of other people’s generosity and sympathy and care.

My own capacity for compassion and empathy grew, too, through experiencing the flood and having to walk away from a house and a neighborhood where so many memories and sensations were woven through.

What about failure?  Horrid failure?  The act of writing knocks the stuffing out of most people I know, including me.  It’s a much harder art form than I knew when I began.  I fail over and over again.

But there are gifts in the failure and the hair-tearing-out frustration.  I pay much better attention to the physical world when I’m writing a book.

I pay attention to the sensations inside of me, too, and to the patterns that compell and propel me through my days.  I always have something useful to do with vulnerability and humiliation.  Shaping characters who come up against obstacles and don’t do well with them is a big part of what fiction (and creative nonfiction) is all about.

Other Vermont College MFA faculty and I find ourselves saying to our writer students that it’s SUPPOSED to be hard.  What a mountain we’ve all set out to climb!  No easy, smooth, happy people need apply for the artist’s life.

Sometimes interesting words pop into my head as I think about my volunteer life with Ethiopia Reads.

You need joy.

They need books.

Want to trade?

Children everywhere need safe places to read and think and dream.

They need adult models in their lives and in the pages of books.

They need encouragement to believe in telling their own stories and finding roots and windows through other people’s stories.

 The other volunteers and I do what we do…we donate our time and money because (as this coffee expert said at one of the DC fundraisers) it gives us joy.

Yes, it’s hard.

The money is always tight.

The choices make our brains hurt.

We often want to respond to far more children than we’re able and the need is never-ending.

But I’m thankful for the toughness because it comes hand-in-hand with joy.

I ended up with four of them.

Sister relationships fill up my books and my author presentations–and now I’ve moved out to Portland where most of them live.  Feelings too deep for words are connected in weird and wonderful ways with those sisters.

My only older sister reminded us of this picture recently.  It makes me think about what novelists struggle with: human beings often wear their personalities and moods on their faces and in their bodies.  Older sister was the one, as someone said to my mom in Ethiopia (when that sister was only four), who was born a lady.  The expression on my face says irrepressible and mischief to me.  Note that I’m leaning on my older sister.

I basically wnated to be my older sister.

The sister a year younger than me looks cute and poised.  She still is.  It was thrilldom last year when she managed to get one of her boys to the Minneapolis American Girl store.

Sister Number Four looks dazed.  She’d probably been napping and her personality isn’t on her face–except that she looks calm and not easily flapped.  She’s deep and emotionally strong.  I used to wash her hair in boarding school–and she spent her college years living in the Illinois town where I had temporarily settled.

(Both that doll and the orangutan tee-shirt on the table will be part of an Ethiopia Reads fundraiser in Seattle on Dec. 17 to help kids in Ethiopia get books.)

When my brother wrote his first novel (first to get published, anyway), he created a scene where Pup gets all dressed up in finery, much to his digust.

Older sisters can be that way.  (Thanks to my son www.jkgphoto.com  for this one.)

So even a fun and funny book like The Pup Who Cried Wolf still embodies some of what the author knows about real life often from his or her life.

When we write and when we read, it may be partly about entertainment and distraction.  More often, it’s about deep connection–to our own lives and to the lives of other human beings.  That’s part of the power of being a reader.  Through mysterious connections in our brains, we empathize.  We see possibilities of how to live.  We come to know our sisters and brothers all over this wide and wonderful earth.