Luanne's email to Emma

Dear Emma:    

Although I have never been to Africa, I have spent all my life farming and living in a small community. I don’t know if there are similarities in our lives, but I like to imagine I know some tiny things of your life, because I have met you and I have seen the love and care and determination in your face. I like to imagine that through you, I touch, however tentatively, the people in your home, that through our small efforts at connection, we make another slender thread tying the world together.

Like you Emma, I am a mother and nothing is more important in my life than my children, my grandchildren, my family. I would do anything for them, as you would for your family. If they were hungry, I would do anything I could to feed them. If they were menaced by disease or war, I would do anything I could to help them.

I also have two communities; one is my geographical community at home in the BC Interior, with friends and neighbours I have known all my life. When something happens there, if someone is ill, or has an accident, or gets sick, the community rallies. People bring food, raise money, run errands, or find some other way to help. We may not always like each other, but in a crisis, none of that matters.

I also have a wider community, my friends in so many different places in Canada, the US, and in other parts of the globe, my community of writers and publishers, my academic community, along with all the people I know or know about who are working in whatever ways they can to make the world a better place.

Information about the pain in the world comes into my life in many ways. My friends phone, or my aging parents, or my kids with their problems. When I check my email in the morning, a flood of information comes in from the various list-serves I belong to. Every day the media tells me of war, famine, land mines, women’s oppression, massacres, of suffering children, suffering families. I can do so little.

            I have also seen so much done that is good, and I have also done what I could–along with so many others like me–caring women and men of many races, many ages, many backgrounds.

            But what always stirs me to extra effort, what makes the connection, is knowledge, is personal, is seeing the faces, knowing the names, making a connection. I think human beings are like that–I believe we are all deep in our hearts, tribal people, clan-based people of one sort or another, sometimes our tribe, our clan, our family is widespread, the threads that draw us together are thin. But it is these threads that make us all family; it is the threads of knowing and understanding, that make us neighbours, that makes your village in Africa and my village in Canada neighbourhoods.

Sometimes there is so little we can do–the world is huge, the problems are huge, but where we can touch each other, we can and we must. I think about you so often. I know nothing of your village, or your people or your culture, customs, and way of living. But I know about growing food, about feeding people, about living in community. I hope you stay in touch with all of us,…here on the other side of our world. We send you love and hope.

In peace
Luanne Armstrong

Dear Luanne,

Thank you for this very touching letter. I was away to see a grandchild in hospital who had been hit by a car. Thank God, the driver was a former soldier who still remembered something about taking care of the wounded before determining who is in the wrong. That saved the girl's life as she was bleeding really badly, I am told. We also have very extended power outages these days–sometimes we have no power the whole day and the whole evening till after 9 pm. By that time, you do not feel like doing anything, thinking that there will still be power in the morning. But often, the power is switched off by five in the morning. The power company has said that this may go on well into April as the problem is big and probably involves ordering spare parts from all over the world with a delivery period of anything between 6-12 weeks or more! Today, we have had power the whole morning and I can read your letters more thoroughly and appreciate every word.

All I can say is that your observation is very correct. When I first came to Canada in 1988, I was already a mother and my youngest child was nine and yet, I felt so helpless and needed lots of mothering (Marcia knows what I am talking about. It wasn't any easier the second time around). Fortunately, it did not take too long for me to make connections and discover that the Canadian women who took me under their wings did the mothering so perfectly that in no time, I felt so much at home. I kept telling my family that I hear the women as if they are talking to me in my own mother tongue–there is a difference between local Canadian English and the kind of English we learn in Malawi which is supposed to be the official Queen's English. The Queen's English doesn't really allow us to express ourselves the same way we are able to when conversing in our mother tongue, something that seems possible when I am with my Canadian friends. This is what came to mind when I read the above passages. Thank you very much for this insight.

Love and Peace,
Emma