Are We Listening?

Hardy and I have been watching The Book of Negroes, a six-part  TV miniseries . Based on a novel by Lawrence Hill, ( 2007) it depicts the harrowing journey of Aminata Diallo from Niger, West Africa to South Carolina in the United States, and her return home after being forced into slavery as an eleven-year-old child.  I read it in 2009, and in light of what is happening around us, this is a good time for me to read it again.

Lawrence Hill uses Aminata's voice to emphasize the importance of story-telling. In the novel, Aminata says:
"I saw things that the people of London would never believe. They cannot know what we endured if we never find anyone to listen. In telling my story, I remember all those who never made it through the musket balls and the sharks and the nightmares, all those who never found a group of listeners, and all those who never touched a quill and an ink pot."

Slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire in 1833 and in the Americas in 1865, but racism continued to flourish. Although Lawrence Hill's novel was published in 2007 and won acclaims and awards worldwide, it did not seem to change the plight of people of color much. They are still being discriminated against, even by those who are supposed to set things right, our law enforcement officers.

As a young child, African civil and human rights activist Ella Baker (1903-1986) listened to her grandmother's horror stories of life as a slave. She wrote: "In order to see where we are going, we must not only remember where we have been, but we must understand where we have been".

If story-telling brings to our memory those who endured and causes us to think about the events that happened in their lives, we can begin to understand and thus change can occur. But why does it happen so slowly, and why do we continue to repeat the same mistakes? Probably we aren't listening.

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I am writing the story of my childhood for my grandchildren and sending it to them a couple of pages at a time. One grandchild reminds me when I haven't sent anything for a while, so someone is reading and that makes it worth my while.

Last week our extended Winnipeg family of ten was together at a cottage near Lac du Bonnet, about 90 minutes northeast of Winnipeg. Unfortunately, our Ontario family with half of our eight grandchildren could not join us because of the coronavirus pandemic. There was a glimmer of hope early on, but Manitobans wisely decided it was not yet time to open the borders. We are still hoping that we can see them in October. We have stories to tell each other!

"Beyond the Face of Fear"

Growing up in a Mennonite village in the Paraguayan Chaco I had little exposure to the outside world. There were no stores and the only time we experienced a small window into that other world was when MCC sent Christmas packages (in which even the toothbrushes, toothpaste and soap were exotic items to be marveled at) or when our Oma sent us parcels from Canada.

My world expanded shortly after I turned nine. That year our family travelled to Asunción

(the capital city) to wait for our visas so we could join my Mother's relatives in Canada. Our family of eight (soon to be nine) spent several months in an MCC house there with a number of other families. I remember going on excursions with my Dad, especially to the markets. I saw a beautiful doll the size of a baby, and more than anything, I wanted that doll for myself. I begged and pleaded, but my Dad sadly shook his head, telling me we could not afford such luxuries because we had "Reiseschuld" (travel debt). I heard that word many times and I hated it !

When we finally received our visas and were on an airplane going to Rio de Janeiro, we had another experience that broadened our horizons. The stewardess passed out a delicious treat in a little decorative cardboard container wrapped in silver paper. When you unwrapped it and smelled it, it was as if heaven was at your door! The chocolate was divine! Then there were little packages with small white-coated squares of different flavors, which we could chew but shouldn't swallow our Dad told us. They were called Chiclets. We were amazed!

Behind me sat a girl about my age and she had a doll on her lap similar to the one I had seen at the market. She was travelling by herself and the stewardess was solicitous toward her. They spoke Spanish with each other, a language I did not understand. I wished I could ask the girl to be my friend, maybe then she would let me hold or even play with her doll for a bit. I had no words, so I just got up from my seat and went to her. Tentatively I reached out and touched the beautiful doll. The girl jerked her doll away from me and rang for the stewardess. I could not understand the words but they certainly sounded angry and accusatory and I went back to my seat, hurt and ashamed.

When the stewardess returned with treats for everyone, she deliberately passed me by and I got nothing. That was my punishment.

I was reminded of this rather traumatic event in my own life by a recent article in the Winnipeg Free Press (July 7, 2020). The article was about a white woman in New York's Central Park who had let her dog roam unleashed in a secluded bird-watching section of the park. This was against the rules. When she was reminded by "an African-American man" to keep her dog on a leash, she became belligerent and wouldn't comply.

The man began to record the incident on his phone; that is when she called 911, claiming that an African-American man was threatening her and her dog.
Not so many years ago, this black man, calmly insisting a white woman should obey the law, would have been lynched for even daring to approach her in this way. Most likely he would have also been accused of molesting her.
However, the woman was charged under an existing false-report law which doesn't reference race. "It also inspired New York state lawmakers  to pass a law that makes it easier under civil-rights law to sue an individual who calls a police officer on someone 'without reason' because of their background, including race and national origin."
The woman apologized after being charged and fired from her job.

When I read the article, I knew exactly how Christian Cooper, the man in New York City's Central Park, must have felt, and I was happy for the woman's apology (probably given under duress), saying she had "reacted emotionally and made false assumptions about Cooper's intentions."

I never received an apology.

I was blonde and fair; the little girl with the doll was dark and so was the stewardess. The misunderstanding occurred because of a language barrier, but also because of a lack of sensitivity on the part of the stewardess. 

Racism exists at all levels by the people who are in power and it is hurtful!

Life Is Worth Living

"Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact."      (William James [1842-1910], in the conclusion to his essay "Is Life Worth Living?")

Because I was so young during the years of the biggest upheaval of my life as a refugee (1943-1947 -- see previous two blog posts), I can't recall any part of them. My parents rarely spoke of that time, but some stories were passed on to us.
Mom had mentioned that Wanda Kellermann, a young teenager, often babysat us while we were refugees in southern Germany. Wanda really bonded with my younger sister Irma, a one-year-old at the time. Mom had a picture of Wanda with Irma taken just before we left the refugee camp to go to Paraguay. Wanda was inconsolable when we left and wept bitterly. She and her widowed mother and sister stayed behind but were able to emigrate to Canada a few years later. That is all I knew about her.

A picture of Wanda and my sister Irma

One day while visiting Helen Penner, a close friend of ours in Waterloo, Ontario, she mentioned that she had just finished chatting with her best friend, Wanda Kellermann, in Winnipeg. My ears perked up at the name. "You know Wanda Kellermann?" I asked. "Yes," replied Helen, "she and I were teenagers in the refugee camp in Germany. We were best friends then, and have remained so to this day." I asked Helen for Wanda's phone number.
After we had returned to Winnipeg, I called her and my sister Irma and I went to visit her. Wanda has suffered from severe arthritis all of her life. The malnutrition she experienced during her teen years most likely contributed to make it worse. "Life was not easy as refugees," she told us, "but I will never forget the people I bonded with during that time." One of them was my grandmother, Katharina Kroeger, in her mid-forties at the time. Apparently my grandmother had taken an interest in the young people in the camp, taught them hymns and conducted Bible studies with them. Wanda talked about a Christmas celebration my grandmother planned that had made it the best Christmas of her life!

Since I'm currently writing stories about my early life for my grandchildren, I contacted Wanda again recently to ask her some questions about life in the refugee camps. She told me that, since attending regular exercise classes, her arthritis pain has diminished and she is able to get around much easier and  is doing much better. She said she had an autograph book from refugee days and in it were several pages from my grandmother and my mom. She wanted me to have them. I received them in the mail on my birthday a week ago.
Just like my grandmother gave Wanda the best Christmas ever, so Wanda gave me the best birthday ever. And she didn't even know it was my birthday!

A card from Wanda

Wanda writes: 
Dear Elfrieda!  Thanks for the phone call about Zimmern (the town to which we were assigned as refugees). It aroused many good and sad memories. It was a hard time -- but a very blessed time too. God was very near us, all the times. I found my old autograph book. I tore out 3 pages from your Grandma, and your mother, they are very dear to me. And one picture of "Irmy" as a one-year-old. 72 years ago -- a lifetime lived through. Very hard but blessed times. May God bless the future. The best to your family and Irmy. Love, Wanda

        

Autograph pages my grandmother and my mother wrote and illustrated for Wanda

A book to which I've referred over and over again while writing the stories of my life for my grandchildren is Peter and Elfrieda Dyck's Up From the Rubble. I'm so grateful to the Dycks, not only for saving our lives and those of thousands of others (see my last three blog posts) but also for writing this book. They strongly believed in the value of each life they encountered!

This old dragon tree (its real name is Dracaena Marginata) often reminds Hardy and me that life is worth living even when we get old and bent out of shape! We received it as a tiny plant from one of my  sisters when we moved to Winnipeg from Kitchener, Ontario in 2008. It got all straggly looking after I had taken it outside one summer; it looked like it was about to die and I wanted to throw it out. Hardy is a keeper and begged me to keep it, so it went into our bedroom. It somehow revived and even had another shoot growing out from the bottom and two 'babies' along the main stem!

And a lilac bush I planted five years ago bloomed for the first time this spring! I told myself that we would not leave this house until that lilac bloomed. And now it has. And we are still here.

"Grief can be the garden of compassion. If you keep your heart open through everything, your pain can become your greatest ally in your life's search for love and wisdom." 

(Jalaluddin Rumi, 13th-century Persian poet, Islamic scholar, and Sufi mystic)

Telling the Story

Each and every life and time has its stories, waiting to be remembered, to be told, to be written or dramatized, to be put to music and dance, to be illustrated!

While no one knows what the literary world will look like on the other side of the COVID-19 pandemic, David A. Robertson (a Swampy Cree bestselling author of children's books, novels and graphic novels) writes that he is certain it will remain just as vital: 

Stories will always be important. I think they'll be even more important than they were before because of how we'll interact. We'll need more of them -- they teach us, connect us, create community, do all these things we'll need. And they document. There will be a lot of stories written about all of this. That's important too. (Winnipeg Free Press, April 9th, 2020).

I have tried to educate myself about my grandparents' stories. Most of these were transmitted orally or written in the family Bible or in small birthday books; some came through photographs haphazardly pasted into albums. How they even managed to keep these photos throughout their time of wandering the world and how they kept their sanity remains a mystery to me.

I wish I had more stories! And as I read the historical background and historical novels about that time (see my April blog post) and place my grandparents and my parents into that time period, I'm gradually beginning to understand what happened to them and to imagine how they must have felt.

Translating old letters and articles from German into English for people eager to know their family stories has also been helpful. Recently I transcribed and translated letters from Mennonite parents in Russia written to their young adult son who had just emigrated to Canada in 1926. There is so much love and yearning on these faded, yellowing pages sent from the parents to their child, so much longing to embrace him once again. I also translated a diary of someone's grandmother living as a refugee in Germany during WWII with her three teenage children. She is in survival mode and life is tough! So much courage!

Sample of one of the documents I translated

My grandmother and my parents kept their sanity in these turbulent times, times so difficult that they would rather forget them. "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" is a saying I heard quite often. And I survived as well but remember very little, probably because I was too young and my world too unsettled.

Now my grandchildren are clamoring for stories. They are at home during this COVID-19 time, trying to do their school work online, missing their friends. Sasha and I decided we would write each other stories and mail them. Our printer is broken and we haven't been able to get the right part for it at this time and so I needed to write my stories by hand. It occurred to me that my grandchildren don't even know how to read cursive writing, so I would have to resort to printing!

I had made a promise and knew someone was waiting, and so I began. What stories could I possibly write for her? I decided to write what I knew and remembered from the very beginning of my life. And so I began ... block printing on a sketch pad, and even adding little drawings with pencil crayons! It is no longer a chore but something I look forward to doing each day after breakfast.

As I write, I discover things about myself. My life has never been boring. I was thrown into this maelstrom of events before I was weaned from my mother's breast. I had no choice in the matter, as none of us do! My safety net was my family and as long as that remained intact I would be alright. My father, himself orphaned at a very young age, knew this, and did his utmost to keep us together. The only time we were separated from him was when he was drafted into the German army in January 1945, just before the war ended. He returned to us in May of that year, an emaciated skeleton, greeting a two-month-old daughter who was born in his absence.

The final stretch of the long road on which my father returned to us after his release as a POW

The biggest miracle in my life is that through all this turmoil we never lost each other. I believe this is what will come through in my stories for Lena Kate and Daniel, and for Sasha who asked me to write them. 

"Through memory, love transcends the limits of time and offers hope at any moment of our lives."                                                                    (Henri Nouwen, Daily Meditation, March 23, 2020)

Be Not Afraid

As soon as the Coronavirus became a serious issue in Canada, my mind went right back to 1953. That was the year I became very afraid. I can still feel my stomach muscles tightening with fear.

Our family arrived in Canada from Paraguay in 1952, when I was 9 years old. We children began our schooling in a little country school where most of the children and the teacher were Mennonite. The school was a 20-minute walk from the farm where we lived that first year. There were so many new things to learn for a little Mennonite girl who came from a tiny village in the middle of nowhere. Even this small country school seemed huge. People spoke differently, dressed differently, and did strange things. Recess was difficult because we now had to relate to peers who were not as understanding as the teacher. However, there were two girls who were kind to us. They were sisters and they took my younger sister and me under their wings. Their names were Barbara and Margaret; I felt safe with them.

Then the scary thing happened. The word polio became part of our vocabulary. We heard that it was a crippling disease and that we could catch it from other children who had the virus. Barbara and Margaret were no longer at school; they had caught the polio virus. Maybe they would die or they might be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of their lives. Fortunately, they survived and came back to school but by that time we had moved into town and no longer went to that country school. However, occasionally we attended church functions there until our family found a church in town. I never went near Barbara and Margaret, afraid that if they would touch me, I would get polio. At the same time, I felt guilt. They had been nice to me during a difficult time and I completely abandoned them. I wish that I would have been able to talk to someone about this, but I was too ashamed and embarrassed to mention it to anyone. I still feel the guilt!

Years later, in 1965, when I attended Canadian Mennonite Bible College in Winnipeg, we were all assigned "deputation work." My assignment was to visit a woman in one of the local hospitals. She was in an iron lung, her body from the neck down completely enveloped by it. She was one of an estimated 11,000 people in Canada who were left paralyzed by polio between 1949 and 1954.The disease peaked in 1953 with nearly 9,000 cases and 500 deaths -- the most serious national epidemic since the 1918 influenza pandemic. In 1955, the Salk vaccine became available, eventually bringing polio under control (Wikipedia).

It seems that periodically we need a reminder that we are not in control. This coronavirus pandemic we are now experiencing is one of those reminders. Hopefully, a vaccine will be discovered to stop this outbreak, but in the meantime how do we conquer our fear and anxiety?

Our church secretary sent us a little hand-washing song to the tune of "Happy Birthday." It is a simple prayer, like the ones my mother taught me to say at bedtime and it has a strangely calming effect on me. I sing it almost every time I wash my hands:

God protect us each day,

As we walk in your way,

In the footsteps of Jesus,

  Our strength and our stay.

This COVID-19 virus is also a reminder of our common humanity. As Parker Palmer says in a recent interview: " 'America First' is a very stupid idea. Coronavirus teaches us that we are all interconnected." I've already noticed this interconnection in our neighborhood. Several people have offered to buy groceries for us, leaving a note in our mailbox. Also, during the recent huge and unexpected snowfall, two different people came to shovel our driveway.

Parker Palmer also said,  

"Violence is what happens when we don't know what to do with our suffering."

I have been thinking about that statement in light of what happened during my grandparents' time in the 1920s in war-ravaged  Ukraine. They became the victims of people finally fed up with the suffering they endured at the hands of the elite. During this time of self-isolation I have plowed through a rather dense history of that time period, The Russian Revolution by Sean McMeekin, recommended to me by a Dutch friend. I could only manage a few chapters at a time but I learned a lot. I rewarded myself by reading a novel, The Secret Wife by Gill Paul, also set in that time period, about a young Russian general who meets Tatiana, the second oldest daughter of the Romanovs and falls in love with her. A good read!

I have also begun writing my diary again, which I neglected for quite a while. Hardy and I have been reading some of my old diary entries and they are quite interesting.

Above are two pages of my diary from 2001, written while I was in the throes of preparing for my PhD defense. At the same time, our youngest daughter was getting married and we had become grandparents for the first time. We both can't believe what a busy time it was and how we managed everything!

Hardy has put several puzzles together since Christmas and during our devotional times is always checking different versions among the many Bibles we have on our bookshelves, often enjoying reading a passage from the Plautdietsch (Low German) translation as well as from Peterson's paraphrase The Message and comparing the texts with his own work on the Kikongo translation.

Our grandchildren keep in touch by sending us amusing videos of their artwork and their pets, and of course also calling us on the phone. The first picture below is one of Sasha's creations and she herself is reflected in the second window.

      

                          

I try to go for a walk every day and just before the big snowfall at the beginning of April, I discovered the pussy willows beginning to bud, so I know spring is coming. It will be different from what we expected but we will survive.

               

And how have you been and what have you been doing during this strange time of self-isolation?
How do you keep fear at bay, in yourself or in your children and grandchildren?

Here is an example from our Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, addressing our children:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBBjz16J-nU&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR13wYkakbwiGN-ksLfvEf9wBL9cyypP6HfnghrpWDQqtqemCogogQA-NPc

My Heroes

As children, my sister, my cousin and I often played that we were on a huge ship crossing the ocean. The large veranda of my cousin's house was always the ship.

I love the song "Barges," about someone sitting by the window watching ships sail by and longing to travel along with them [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dF2i6RQUqAE].

However, sometimes travelling by ship can be a nightmare. I sometimes think about the Titanic, the British passenger liner that sank in 1912 the year my father was born. Then, in more recent times, we read stories of people, desperate for asylum, crowding onto small makeshift crafts without food or water, just looking for a place that is safer than the one they come from. Many die at sea -- either of malnutrition, lack of water, or by drowning. No one seems to care for them or about them.

Lately, with the onset of the Coronavirus, cruise ships have been the center of attention. People who just wanted to enjoy a holiday in an ultra-luxurious environment, suddenly find themselves stranded at sea with no place to go, hoping they will not test positive for the virus. Once they are taken off the ship, they still have to spend time in quarantine. For people who are accustomed to having everything they need and want, this is quite a hardship!

Our family also made a perilous journey by ship in February 1947, thirty-five years after the sinking of the Titanic. My father made sure our family secured passage on an old Dutch passenger ship, the Volendam, which finally departed from Bremerhaven, Germany for Paraguay, South America, with over 2,000 refugees on board.
Recently, Hardy and I viewed a new documentary about that experience, called Volendam: A Refugee Story. This is part of my story and that of my family.

I didn't see myself, my brother or sister on the cover of the video (nor in the film itself), but we were there, somewhere! I was almost four years old when I experienced what is probably the biggest adventure of my life, but strangely, I remember nothing about it. It must have stayed in my subconscious, thus my fascination with ships!

My parents did not talk much about this adventure when we were growing up, but I do remember a picture that I often gazed at because the people on it looked so beautiful. Their names are Elfrieda and Peter Dyck, a young couple, just married three years and working for Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) in war-torn Europe. For a newly married couple, they carried a lot of responsibility, helping to set up refugee camps in Germany for thousands of Mennonites who had fled Ukraine and other parts of eastern Europe.

These refugees were now in danger of being sent back to a country that branded them "enemies" and would send them to Siberia and other remote places where they would endure hard labor and starvation. Like the boat people of recent times, we had nowhere to go. However, we did have people who cared about us and MCC worked hard to find a solution. Paraguay was the only country ready to accept us, and people desperate to flee the Communist regime were willing to go there (even to the wilderness of the Chaco). Peter and Elfrieda were able to secure a huge Dutch freighter, The Volendam, and filled it to overflowing with refugees.

Elfrieda and Peter Dyck

The Volendam with C.F. Klassen, Elfrieda Dyck's older brother

Some of our family's passport pictures: My sister (right) is not happy. She was just having a meal when she was interrupted to have this picture taken. (If you look closely you can see she is holding a spoon in her hand!) She knew, from a very young age, what was most important for survival! I am the smiling girl in the middle.

Our family before boarding the Volendam

In the Mennonite Heritage Archives I found this photo of people on board the Volendam and I think I recognize my dad helping to move what looks like bales of some kind. This is symbolic of the life he lived, working hard to keep his family safe and happy.

In a previous blog post entitled Hunger (May 30, 2017), I wrote about the famine in Ukraine around the time my mother was born (1921) and how American Mennonites formed a relief organization (MCC) to help the starving Mennonites there. A young man by the name of Clayton Kratz (1896-1920), was one of the Mennonite relief workers. He mysteriously disappeared and was never heard from again; to this day no one knows what happened to him. He gave his life in the service of MCC. Without his willingness to help, at the risk of his own life, my mother, a toddler at the time, and thousands of others like her, would  have died of starvation. I and many others owe our lives to him.

Clayton Kratz

While doing some research for this blog post, I discovered that six-year-old Peter Dyck was one of the children who, like my mother, benefitted from the first MCC relief program in Ukraine and likely would have died had food aid not been available. His family emigrated to Canada shortly after. When he decided to work for MCC as a young man, he was simply expressing gratitude for the help he had received as a starving child -- by helping others as he had been helped.

My 12-year old granddaughter, Lena Kate, who lives in Ontario and likes to chat with me on the phone, recently asked me a question that made me pause and think for a while. She asked, "Oma, are you and Opa rich?" We chatted for a little while about what it means to be rich. From a global perspective we are wealthy because we have a home, a car, food on the table and clothes to wear. Lena Kate doesn't think of that as being wealthy because she takes these things for granted. When we were refugees, we weren't so fortunate. But we children never felt like we were poor because we had our parents, our grandmother and our uncle with us. They looked after us. And they had MCC, with people willing to risk their lives to help us survive. Yes, Lena Kate, Opa and Oma are rich! And you have a rich heritage!

Clayton Kratz and Elfrieda and Peter Dyck are my heroes!

... And of course my courageous dad, Bernhard Neufeld (1912-2005)

"My Life Flows on in Endless Song"

As the second-oldest of eight children and the oldest of five sisters, I grew up in a busy household. Our mother definitely did not play with us nor did she read bedtime stories to us. But when we were little, before our younger siblings came along, she would sit and sing to us at bedtime; she knew many beautiful German folk songs by memory. Four of us slept together in a bed that was wider than it was long, and the baby slept in a buggy. It was cozy.

I loved these songs and also the hymns we sang in our little church, located right in the middle of our village in Einlage, Neuland Colony, Paraguay. I clearly recall singing at the top of my lungs one day when my mother told me I should stop singing because I didn't know how to sing properly. She was probably annoyed because there was always a lot of racket with seven noisy children swarming around her while she was longing for some peace and quiet.

But the message I understood was that I couldn't sing.

I believed it because mothers know everything (at least that is what you think when you are a small child!).

As a result of my mother's criticism, I decided that if I couldn't sing I would do other things and I would do them very well. And so I became an overachiever and a person desperately afraid of failure. I worried what people would think of me and that they would judge me unless I was perfect. I always received accolades and compliments for poems I memorized and recited on church holidays such as at Easter and Christmas. I had no stage fright until we came to Canada and I discovered I spoke with an accent.
People at church were not accustomed to long recitations in German and, sensitive as I was to failure, I could feel them mocking me. Later on, in high school, I had problems with geometry. My mathematics teacher was one who loved to call his students to the board and ridicule them when they failed to understand what he was asking them to do. At the time I didn't realize that it was he who was a failure as a teacher and not I as a student!

Failure is a feeling long before it becomes an actual result. It's vulnerability that breeds self-doubt and then is escalated, often deliberately, by fear, writes Michelle Obama in her book Becoming: A Guided Journal for Discovering Your Voice (based on her best selling memoir Becoming).

I did sing in church choirs as a young person, always making sure to stand beside my friends Donna or Katie who had strong alto voices, as I did not think I could harmonize on my own.

Just recently, in one of her sermons, our middle daughter talked about all the music we had in our home when she and her siblings were growing up. "Someone was always singing or playing an instrument or listening to music," she noted. 
It surprised me, in a pleasant sort of way, because I have never considered myself musical although I love to sing.  I found my voice again as a young mother. My mother's songs all came back to me. Babies who needed soothing did not criticize. Their father, Hardy, also loves to sing and often played his mouth organ. Our oldest is a natural songbird and when her teacher told me she had perfect pitch, something inside me glowed.  The three siblings often  sang together. I have a distinct memory of a fellow missionary "auntie" teaching them Peace is Flowing like a River and how much they loved singing it. During home leaves, they sang  in the churches we visited. When my mother heard them singing, she was moved to tears. For me this was an unexpected and loving gift from God.


   
        
  


I just finished reading my blogger friend Marian Beaman's memoir Mennonite Daughter: The Story of a Plain Girl. Without bitterness or malice, she shares about some very painful things that happened to her at the hands of people close to her who should have supported rather than punished her. We all make mistakes, even with the best intentions. And there is forgiveness. And there is healing in telling our story.

Michelle Obama again: If you don't see that your story matters, chances are no one else will either. So even though it isn't always easy, it's important for you to find the strength to share your truth, because the world needs to hear it.