SermonsMennonites

Goodbye to my column

In 1998, Paul Schrag from the Mennonite Weekly Review called me and asked if I would be interested in taking over the “World Neighbors” column from Willard Unruh.  Every month since that time, I have written a column about countries on five different continents.

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I think doing so made me a better writer.  I found that I actually liked it when I was about twenty to thirty words over the limit, because cutting out those words invariably made the column tighter and stronger (Paul told me once that my columns were hard to cut, because I didn’t leave surplus words.)  I also enjoyed doing deeper research into regions that were in the news, and liked to look for the “behind the scenes” stories.  Once I had easy access to the internet (I take it for granted now, but I began this column at a time when I needed to go to the library to do web research) I would google “Mennonite” and the country involved to find out what Mennonite missionaries and aid and development workers were saying about political crises on the ground.  Then, I would look for other alternative news sources that were covering aspects of the story that the mainstream media was not.  (I remember once, in the buildup to the Iraq War, writing my column on Donald Rumsfeld’s friendly relations with Saddam Hussein in the 1980s.  After I sent it in, it turned out to be Newsweek’s cover story for the week.  When I wrote that I was bummed Newsweek had scooped me to assistant editor, Robert Rhodes, he said something along the lines of, “Don’t worry; no one reads that rag.”)

During the first week in December, I was at Evangelicals for Social Action conference, where I learned that Israeli authorities had just denied entry to one of my colleagues into Palestine.  I was also feeling anxious about my own entry, wondering whether Israeli authorities would give me a hard time because I had just left the country six weeks earlier in October.  And I was agonizing over a contest I had entered my novel, The Price We Paid, in, hoping in an almost sickening way that it would bring the manuscript to the attention of an agent.

Then I got the e-mail.  When the Mennonite Weekly Review had become the Mennonite World Review, I had been informed that my column would now be shared with two other people and I would thus be writing only three times a year.  This e-mail informed me that some plural entity had decided that World Neighbors needed a more “consistent voice” and they were asking another person to write it.

My first reaction was more annoyance than anything else.  My column had been taken from Willard Unruh and given to me (and I could tell from his final column that he had been a little hurt by it.) The editor could have just told me that he thought it was time for someone else to write it.  In a follow-up e-mail, he told me that he was trying to be diplomatic and that at fifteen years, I had been the longest running columnist in the history of the Mennonite Weekly/World Review.  And although I thought “diplomatic” was not the right word at all, the follow-up e-mail did make me feel better.ada91b0e4a970a7f023524.L._SX80_

The Mennonite Weekly Review giveth and the Mennonite World Review taketh away. Blessed be the Mennonite World Review.

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Yummy foods I have been eating in Palestine

by Markie

Hi kids!
I have been at SO MANY MEETINGS with Kathy the last two weeks. The team in Hebron has been learning about Nonviolent Communication and is in Bethlehem this week making plans for its work next year and it’s interesting if you’re human I guess, but I’d rather be out having fun.

So while Kathy’s in meetings I thought I’d talk about some yummy foods I’ve been eating.  IMG_9311

About a week ago, some German Mennonites stopped by and Kathy talked to them about Hebron, then they took us out to lunch at our favorite chicken and salad place!  Konrad, the leader of the group who’s wearing the shirt with the peace sign worked for Mennonite Voluntary Service in Cincinnati, Ohio.  I especially liked the pink salads!

 

IMG_9313IMG_9315The next night Gabriel, who’s from Santa Catarina in Brazil made some yummy macaroni and cheese for dinner and a special Brazilian dessert called brigadeiro made of cocoa, butter and condensed milk. Then he stuck eight spoons in it and we ate about half of it.  Gabriel finished the rest the next day.  Here’s a picture of Maarten an JoAnn eating some with me.

Cory had some days off and went to Tel Aviv in Israel and found some custard fruitIMG_9366 in a shop there.  It was her favorite fruit when she lived in India.  This one wasn’t really ripe, but it was still VERY yummy.  Cory says when they’re really ripe they taste and feel just like custard in your mouth.  I really, really, really want to eat a very ripe custard fruit.  Patrick, our teammate from Wales says they look like dragon poop.

Well, that’s all for now.  We had a day off from the strategic planning and stuff happened, but Kathy forgot the camera cord for downloading pictures.

Diary of Ralph

I’ve finished Ralph’s diary and have  interspersed his entries between the heavier prophetic writings of my character Shea, the Hosea figure in my novel.

I think Ralph’s diary entries serve a dual purpose.  They’ll help break up those denser sections and they’ll give another view of my narrator, Iz, and possibly make him less “static” as the agent said.

Ralph can ask the questions, how is it that Uncle Iz, a man I like and look up to, whose company I much prefer to that of my father’s, could cheat on my Aunt Shea?  How is it that Juanita and Hank, two people who share my faith, can care about my Uncle Iz, knowing what he did to my Aunt Shea?  Maybe in the answering of those questions, some readers will have the patience to stick with Iz until his later transformations.

Or not.  But I think maybe I can’t just change Iz to to please the ideologies of people I like or want to impress.

Now there’s the question, can I write authentically in the voice of a gay biracial Mennonite teenage boy?

I really want to send this section to my readers, but I know I need to let it sit for a couple days before I do that.  I’ll use the time to revise my timeline.