Professional Development to Start the School Year

                This summer, I went hiking, running, walking, bicycling, met with friends, spent time with family, and discovered joy was still possible. After the indignities of post-Covid teaching, I was delighted to realize it. This is not depression; this is not a midlife crisis: this has become a demoralizing job that has been taking a dump on my state-of-being.

              I’m back at school and have just completed three days of professional development. The gist of all back-to-school teacher training and this year too is ice-breaker, ice-breaker, work harder, care more. This year, same urgency: Ice breaker, ice-breaker; if you really cared about SFFEJ—that is, students furthest from educational justice—you would do more and work harder.
              The theme for this year is “Authentic Inclusion.” Inclusion refers to the integration of general population students with those formerly set apart in dedicated Special Education or multilingual classrooms. When I saw “Authentic Inclusion” as the year’s theme, I sparked with the phrase, because, for the first time, I’m going to be co-teaching a couple of ninth grade English classes with a Special Education instructor and an especially high concentration of Special Education students, in what our building is calling an inclusion block.
              Here’s how the school has supported authentic inclusion so far: I’ve never co-taught an inclusion block before; neither has my Special Education partner, who was given the assignment yesterday. Neither has the Social Studies teacher, who also has never taught Social Studies before. So, we’re new to the model, but we will have no training and no guidance and no word from administration. We will have no common planning period during the day and no dedicated collaboration time, and neither will there be any expectation that we should, in fact, meet to collaborate. Meanwhile, both 5th and 6th periods of the ninth grade block have the chockfull 32 students, of which a quarter have substantial behavioral and learning needs. This is just to say the inclusion block is no less packed than my other classes (which add up to 160 students). My co-teacher will also be co-teaching a tenth grade class, but the students on her additional case load are eleventh and twelfth graders. She coaches too, and will need to be at games on Friday afternoons.
              For these reasons, I was feeling nervous about the school year and prickly about the year’s theme before I arrived at the professional development days this week.
              Session one: MTSS. Multi-tiered Systems of Support. This included all the ways that we should be intervening when students are not successfully engaging—building routines, welcoming culture, then conferencing, communicating with families and school support teams, and warehousing each step as “data.” All this is fine. And here’s the data that show how we’ve been failing SFFEJ—students furthest from educational justice. The session devolved into pleas from teachers who last year tried asking for help from school support teams—administrators—but received no response nor follow-up communication.
              Session two: CSIP. Continuous School Improvement Plan. Roosevelt’s plan for improvement is to improve attainment and belonging among SFFEJ—students furthest from educational justice—especially in 9th and 10th grade. Seattle’s superintendent has added language called guardrails, which are marked by the phrase, “The superintendent will not allow,” as in guardrail number 5, “The superintendent will not allow any district department, school building, or classrooms to provide unwelcoming environments.” One teacher responded, then several more, about “inclusion,” and specifically the way our school has been ramping up inclusion blocks without forethought or training: If we really want to support our improvement goals of SFFEJ in 9th and 10th grade, then show care for these new blocks. Give their teachers training and time to meet.
              Session three: RP. Restorative practices. Restorative practices seem to mean building healthy communities and trust, and that, when harm falls within a community, starting with such trust to address the harms together. I believe in this. We were shown a chart with four quadrants falling along a Y axis of action and an X axis of empathy: Bottom left, low action, low empathy: Neglectful. Bottom right, low action, high empathy: Permissive. Top left, high action, low empathy: Punitive. Top right, high action, high empathy, the sweetest of sweet spots: Restorative. With restorative practices, we should care and we should push—what had previously been called warm-demander.
 
Punitive             Restorative
 
Neglectful          Permissive
 
              A teacher asked, Are you saying we should do this in the classroom, and in the building as a whole? The administrator said she had to think about that one. But for us teachers, much of what has changed in both the culture of students and administrations’ demands to it are plain: They have not been “restorative”; they’ve been permissive at best. And teachers think and feel this administrative permissiveness—occurring in action and explicit policy—has made our jobs more difficult, often oppressively so, and has degraded habits of communal behavior.
              Last year, a group of students gathered in the lunchroom for hours at a time, and we pleaded with administration to help us get them to come to our classes. All-staff emails piled on; and in a faculty meeting last December about teachers’ responsibilities to MTSS—multi-tiered systems of support—a teacher was cry-shouting from the back of the room, saying, What will you do? We’re just letting these students fail. The word from our principal was that these are students who’ve been traumatized by school, and that we must turn to restorative justice over models of disciplinary punishment or alienate them further. This is excellent, heartful mission thinking—except that restorative justice and effective dialogue didn’t seem to be happening either, and those students continued wandering the halls and staying for hours in the lunchroom all year. High empathy, low action. It’s little surprise that Black students’ surveyed sense of belonging fell once again.
              And the district policies are likewise permissive: Students, by policy, can retake any test or redo any essay for full credit; and if they cheat, likewise, see retakes and re-dos. There are no longer zeroes. Participation and absences in class are not permitted to affect class grades. All of these are rooted in an idea of “grading for equity,” where mastery of skills is the focus and anything that translates as behavior is bias-skewed. The theory is okay, but it means that community engagement and readiness aren’t skills or institutionally demanded of our graduates. Teachers suspect that the people who will most use the equitable grading practices of retakes and rewrites will be white, privileged students who further learn that they can bumble forth and other people will adjust to their ease in service to a customer-is-always-right bottom line—in this case, the grade.
              Administrators talk about restorative justice. But they’re talking about it as though their own permissiveness is simply equitable and just policy, even as they call for us to dialogue towards accountability. Teachers have been harmed by the lack of support coupled with the you’re-not-doing-enough message, as a result of which, teacher’s climate survey was so low in the Fall and worse in the Spring. We need to address the harms within the teaching community, too.
              Here’s how I think this professional development should have started three days ago: With an apology.
              We have so much we need to do to serve our students, and it’s especially important that we address and counteract systemic inequities within and outside of our schools. And you don’t have all the support you all know you need to do this work near effectively. Your class sizes are too big. You have too many demands on your very limited time, which we administrators tend to treat as a vast and generous resource. But we come together as a teaching community before school starts because we know this work is important, and together, we’re going to do what we can.

Visit to Yakama Nation

               Yesterday Hands for a Bridge and Roosevelt’s Native American Club climbed aboard a bus before seven in the morning. We’d return just before ten that night. The bus driver, Marvin, knew he was taking us to the Yakama reservation and mistakenly thought he could leave us and return at the end, but Polly disabused of him of this as we rolled away from the building: he’d be with us all day, through the numerous stops she and Lucy—the director of the Yakama Nation Peacekeepers—had planned for our group of thirty students and seven adults.

              Hands for a Bridge students were nervous. I’d passed along Lucy’s concerns that our group would come with stubborn preconceptions: she said she didn’t have time or energy to sooth feelings of guilt or discomfort. And Polly had told the group Monday that she was spending family status, bringing this group onto the reservation for a cultural tour.

              I’d prepared students with readings about the confederated tribes and bands, the 1855 Isaac Stevens treaties and the Land Allocations Act, the Fish Wars of the 1970s, some cultural values of Yakama peoples as told by a grandma, the Indian Child Welfare Act returning to the Supreme Court, missing and murdered Yakama women and children, the story of the Inaba family farms sold to Yakama Nation, and quick tours of and questions from tribal websites.

              Ultimately, students on the way home last night spoke of learning more on this day than in years at school—about the history where we live, about our relationship to food and land and people, about sustainability and stewardship, and about community and resilience.

              Our first stop was at fisheries in Cle Elum, where the Yakama Nation flag proudly waved. We learned that this fishery, among the several others run by the Yakama Nation, is funded in part by the Bonneville Power Administration—as a form of reparations to replenish the flow of salmon that suffers the seven dams constructed down the Columbia on traditional Yakama villages and fishing and spawning waters, including the Dalles dam that turned the sacred Celilo Falls into a lake.

              This first fishery was devoted to the Spring Chinook, and the second we saw, a newer facility, to Coho. Both were fed by well and river water, but the newer one used a sophisticated technology to re-oxidize water recirculated to draw less from the river. One of the students noticed the fry would excite near the surface when our guide stood near the tanks. Owen’s astute observation was correct: At the Coho facility, they drop feed on top of the water though it habituates fish to rise to the surface where they’re more vulnerable to hunting birds and other predators: in the Spring Chinook facility, fish are given their food from a belt that runs the bottom instead.

              Charlie wanted us to know, despite conceptions we may have had about Native Americans in harmony with nature, that he was a scientist, too. A student reflected afterwards that if settlers hadn’t encroached on traditional ways, we wouldn’t need fisheries to replenish and protect the salmon.

              On the bus, we discussed this close connection to the food that went in the body while we snacked from colorful plastic Costco pouches filled with snack cookies and processed fruit shapes not really recognizable as anything we see grow in the world.

              We thought more about our foods as we visited Inaba / Yakama Nation Farms. In the twenties, when people of Japanese descent were outlawed from leasing land, Yakama families invited them to farm on the reservation; and in the forties, before the Inabas were sent to an internment camp in Utah, Yakama held their land in trust. The Inabas returned; and over half a century later, they had a thriving farm. Now, just last year, the Inabas sold the farm back to the Yakama Nation—a joyous story of peoples’ resilient support of each other. And what we learned from Jonalee is that it is also a story of food sovereignty: when so many on the reservation have relied on commodity food, especially through Covid, access to healthy foods was scarce; and here, on this farm, they have a steady source of good produce, providing to the food bank Northwest Harvest before they ship it to market.

              Central to the whole visit was our stop at the Toppenish longhouse, where we ate a feast prepared by five cooks, in a place we were pointedly told was a sacred home to the people. We ate a chicken barley soup, and fruit and vegetable salads; we were told how the women gather root vegetables during parts of the year, and Polly told us of the day or two each year that the military war-games land is re-opened to women elders for gathering—despite toxic leaching from artillery. Here we were served potatoes and camas bulbs and bitterroot, the latter of which was unpleasant going down but full of nutrients; we ate salmon and fry bread and elk, and finally huckleberry sponge cake. Before we started, Diane offered a prayer that welcomed us and awakened our gratitudes. She told us the most valuable thing we can give someone was their time, and we had come to them openly giving that; she told us if we take care of our relatives, they will in turn take care of us. She said that we must be humble before our creator, who has brought us to this place today. And she hoped that we will take what we experience into our hearts and be changed by it, and to be blessed by the laughter at our tables, because laughter is nourishing too.

              While we ate, Mersaedy spoke to us in a steady, unstopping flow of story and speech, of pain and resiliency, and of what these longhouses mean as churches to the people for gathering, and dance and prayer. People dress in ribbon shirts and often in regalia, formerly requiring moccasins to be permitted on the wash—the sacred earthen grounds running the length in the center of the carpeted walk of the longhouse. There was an unblinking intensity to Mersaedy’s manner and teaching, as she told us we were welcome, even when the Yakama people had come to harm by outsiders; how there were foods they’d share with white people, but not the bitterroots which were nevertheless ribboned across our plates; and how, in the sacredness of a longhouse, a community had to face each other.

              Perhaps this is why, when men lined up on one side of the longhouse and women on the other, and when we walked around each other —counterclockwise, Polly said, to rebalance the energy of the mechanistic clockwise—to shake hands twice with everyone in the tall room, we faced each other, very literally. We were told that if someone is hurting by someone else in the community, shaking hands is a way of bringing things close: if it is time to speak, it is time to hear—we look each other in the eyes and don’t escape those things that trouble our community but give them voice. A community faces and honors each other.

              Fort Simcoe is a place of pain and scarring. So when Diane gathered us in front of the captain’s quarters built not long after Isaac Stevens’ aggressions, and she gathered up in the blanket her son had earned as a dancer and wrapped herself in her son’s protection and began playing a wood flute, we took comfort and grief from the music. She introduced her sister, Robyn, who told us how long women, children, and people have gone missing or been murdered from the reservation—from the start, from the moments white men came to denude the lumber and mine the land, and mistreated the population left vulnerable by it; and then, ever since, as white and Native men continue to take advantage of the jurisdictional muddle that exists between Yakama and the feds, especially when the feds for these 150 years haven’t chosen to care. Robyn and Diane’s grandfather went missing. Their cousin went missing. And these cold cases have simply remained cold. Now Robyn and Lucy produce the War Cry podcast, exploring “stories, issues and historical connection about Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Men and LGBTQ 2 Spirit community members.” Robyn told us this: I’m here to tell you we have, as a people, gone through it. I as a woman have gone through it. I can wear my son’s protection but also know I wouldn’t want to burden him if something happened, and that I carry my fear around me like a blanket. But I am not a conquered woman. I have community, and friendship, and family, and our people and our land. I come to you in strength. I am not conquered.

              She was soon sitting beside her sister, laughing.

              Accompanying Robyn and Diane was a man in a large face mask who’d kept himself small. We hadn’t yet heard about the boarding school that was also on this site, though Robyn had explained how her grandparents had attended such schools, and had their practices ripped from them. Suddenly Mike emerged from his mask, telling us he wanted to play a game: These are cards. They’re what? Cards. Oh, they’re cards. These are scissors. They’re what? Scissors. We were to pass the questions and answers down our two separate lines in a race. Then he circled us up, began the cards and the scissors down two different directions, and then, dramatically, they both reached Makayla, who became lost in the four chains of communication she needed to speak and send two suddenly opposite directions. This, Mike said, was like the cultural demands being made at boarding schools. Then he asked us if we trusted him, as he snapped on two blue surgical gloves; he said if we trusted him, to close our eyes, leave them open if we didn’t. Then he started around with scissors: behind our heads, loudly, near ears and closed eyes, he’d SNIP SNIP!, and move on to the next person. When done, he said, This is a small hint of the boarding school experience. Finally, he told us the story of skunk, who lived in a city suddenly beset by fire. On his way fleeing the city, he saw the smallest of them all, hummingbird, flying off to the river and returning with a drop of water in his little beak. Skunk said, You can’t put out a fire with a drop of water! Hummingbird said, I’ll do what I can, because I don’t know what else to do. And skunk decided to join in, soon recruiting the other animals, who in turn, put out the fire. Mike asked us to process the story. Some spoke of the hopeful message of our small part; others spoke of the importance of coming together. My favorite response was from Olive, who said that we often celebrate the first leader, but the first follower is just as important.

              At our final stop, Yakama Forest Products, Polly introduced us to Steve, her youngest brother. When he spoke about being rejected as a half breed, one student, Theo, felt this especially deeply, and thought back to a Hindu story about Krishna choosing between the god of thunder and the mountain: he chose the mountain, because it was always there, a home. Steve reinforced the idea of what a sacred careful thing it is to take a life—a tree, or a plant, or a fish, an elk. We must care for our relatives as they sacrifice for us. We have a duty to those who nourish us.

              In the end, this was resounding message: replenishment, sustainability, responsibility, and care, Students realized they’d walked in with preconceptions about reservation life looking like alcohol and despair; but what they were shown was embracing community and industry, spirituality, strength, and welcome.

              Marvin our bus driver accepted a dinner from us at the burger joint where we’d stopped, and in the end, accepted too the pendant a student made for each of our speakers, tamarack bark against cedar in a resin, holding the piece of life precious against the skin.

With thanks to our hosts: Thank you to Charlie and Simon of Yakama Nation Fisheries; to Jonalee of Inaba / Yakama Nation Farms; to our gracious cooks at Toppenish Longhouse, and to Mersaedy, Diane, Robyn, and Mike; and to Steve of Yakama Forest products. Special thank you to Janine of Hands for a Bridge, Lucy of Peacekeepers, and Polly of the Burke Museum, for the planning, coordinating, and wrangling that made this event possible. And a resounding thank you to Polly for sharing so deeply and with such pride, and guiding us through the experience towards our own reflection and heart.

Dunluce Castle, Giant's Causeway, Dark Hedges, Dublin

   

    

 

Final Day at School, Derry/L'derry

               On the last day of February, we rushed to Oakgrove’s Tuesday morning assembly in our five taxis—well, six, because the first driver wouldn’t clear his newspaper for a fourth passenger, so we had to wait an extra forty minutes for another cab—most of us arriving just in time to see John honored before the gathered body with a congratulatory cake and speech for becoming the permanent principal.

              Over and over again, our students were awed by his care and laughter and enormous kindness, and wondered what it would be like to have such a principal. We would see this in full force over the course of the day, especially in the evening, when John would juggle between playing the generous host to our students, confronting a student, his parents, and the police in his office for a full hour, guiding staff through various other emergencies that had occurred through the day, and welcoming Oakgrove Hands for a Bridge alumni for the evening’s potluck, interspersed with his ridiculously disarming whale sound that he called out in equal parts to focus attention and to enjoy himself.

              This would also be our day of farewell at the school.

              Roosevelt students recited three poems before all the students seated on the floor of the hall, two by Seamus Heaney and one by Gwendolyn Brooks. They got through it in the morning, but when called upon to do it again before the HFB alumni that evening, some had to laugh their way through their contributions. That’s okay—John had said his students had been intimidated by the confidence of the American students, and a stumble would reassure Oakgrove, show it all possible.

              But how our students did lead, with marvelous poise and such joy later that morning, as we met Fountain Primary School across the fence and just the other side of the city’s 17^th century walls, in the Protestant neighborhood and its Tory red, white, and blue kerbs. For decades, they’d been joined by Long Tower Primary, the elementary school on the nationalist side. This morning, the children were in the gymnasium together when we arrived, watching a video about dirt and butterflies. When they turned around and their teachers cleared the tables, Roosevelt students led raucous games in a big circle before splitting into smaller groups, which is when I cried a few times, more than the night before: watching Taylor lean back on the wall and laugh as he took such full-bodied delight in the little ones (wee ‘uns), watching Karen pat-pat the floor in gentle, lovely encouragement, and above all, watching face after face—ours, Oakgrove’s, Long Tower’s, Fountain’s—share unadulterated delight in one another, an entire room enchanted by the moment.

              At the Hands for a Bridge alumni potluck and final evening with Oakgrove friends later that night, students pulled each other into a single tight hug on the stage. Two alumni from the very first class summoned them to the front of the stage to acknowledge their sorrow but to show, their laughter and physical closeness the signal of it, that enduring friendship is here.

Theater of Witness

               Yesterday ended in the upstairs sitting room of St. Columb’s House, everyone crying, one after the other launching into more. It’s that time in the trip, feeling close, getting moved, missing home but also not wanting to leave.

              And today was the day we met with Ann and Kathleen, an event we knew in advance would greatly affect us all. Students had seen a ten minute Ann and Kathleen's Theater of Witness video, knew how they had collaborated with an American to create a narrative of their experiences to be staged, knew that Ann was with the IRA the same time the IRA had killed Kathleen’s husband, and that night after night they nevertheless shared the stage to tell of it.

              But it was one thing to see segments of their performance on Youtube (here's the full 1:22 show, I Once Knew a Girl), and quite another to be in the room with their stories and be enfolded in their laughter and enduring friendship. They left us open-hearted and exposed, and, later that night, reach out to each other in a precious vulnerability.

              Before Ann and Kathleen arrived, Theater of Witness sent us Kieran and Fionnbar to warm us up with theater and drumming workshops. The energy of the twelve years with ours half again as old is something very sweet, the younger ones squirrely and energetic, looking up to the doting older ones and their willingness to try something new and goofy. This collaboration and play is part of the politics; the reaching the ears and hearts of audiences in a darkened theater is another.

              Ann, Kathleen, and one longer to Theater of Witness, James, joined us in an English classroom for that part of it. Ann told us to be part of our journey; it might be a bit challenging for yous, but you’ll be all right in the end.

              James was a former UVF terrorist, he said in his video segment—with a Bible in one hand and a gun in the other, it’s death or glory. He looks back on thirty friends murdered. But Teya Sepinuck of Theater of Witness chased a story out of him that even his family hadn’t known, and then, it was a tremendous weight gone.

              As Ann’s video played, she herself sat directly below the screen, one ear towards us and eyes cast down, explaining that she had been a twelve year old dating an eighteen one—how he’d showed her a gun and she’d thought it exciting, joining the IRA herself at eighteen. The night she was supposed to engage in a violent action, she’d had a brain hemorrhage instead. Soon she’d replaced the IRA with drugs, then an abusive marriage, existing within the damage of a culture that doesn’t get talked about here, she said, and back then, I didn’t know better. The narrative she told, and retold, again and again on stage, and that now replays before her as she attends the workshops where she listens again and again to her narrative on video, was multiplied by her stoic sitting presence before us, eye contact withheld.

              Kathleen Gillespie told us how she’d met her husband at sixteen, married at twenty. Her story is a love story and a grief love story, where adoring kept on, and now Patsy still looks on—her parking angel, she told us, always there to help her find a place for her car. Mr. Gillespie had been a civilian worker in the kitchens at Fort George, just trying to support his family. In 1986, he was kidnapped for it, and made to drive a van of explosives into camp. That time, he got free. And he’d be forgiven for thinking lighting wouldn’t strike twice. But one day two armed men came into their home and said, If everyone does what we say, then no one will get hurt, and, Kathleen said, I was stupid enough to believe them. Patsy was chained to a van with a thousand pounds of explosives and it blew up, tearing Mr. Gillespie to pieces as well as five British soldiers. He’d yelled out to the soldiers, Kathleen told us: Run! The van’s fucking loaded! For years, Kathleen said, she wouldn’t go out of the house without makeup, because she knew those IRA men were still out there, and she had to be strong. But for the sake of her own physical health, I had to let go of my hatred and anger, deciding to give it to God. She joined peace and reconciliation efforts, sitting in the same room, at times, as the provos. But, she thought, if I can’t even sit and listen to their stories, how can I expect others to do this work?

              With their videos through, Ann, Kathleen, and James laughed together. Taylor had found that unnerving and somehow misplaced. But I didn’t feel that way at all, I’d told him: this is some hard earned laughter, and as much as their pain tells a story, so does their friendship and their joy, the victim of IRA, IRA, UVA together.

              Ann said that in order to sit in the same room with someone like Kathleen, she had to be nudged, because she felt Ann would hate her, and she also didn’t know she had a story worth anything. But now, she told us, I know my worth. She became brave enough to know she wanted a change.

Thank-you note to Ann

              Their work with Theater of Witness is about giving value to their pain, and it’s about making their stories heard. But as I saw Kathleen hold Ann’s hand, or watched the two of them quietly pat each other in support, I saw much more to what they’ve done, and continue to do, on stages and in workshops and in each other’s kitchens. This is true heart work, and storytelling, in a darkened theater or under the fluorescents of a church meeting room or class, does something different than a written word or panel. It hit us for that reason.

              One of us asked, How do you find it in yourself to continue to live?

              Oh, our hearts, to hear that.

              But they responded, each of them, without judgment and tremendous wisdom and grace, and each of us on the trip responded too, and did all day and night. I am who I am because of the trauma in my life, Ann said. What does it take to see the humanity in another person? It’s when you see yourself in your own pain: that's when you can start treating yourself better. Understanding what happened, James said, is a way of accepting others, and of accepting yourself.

              This is why we tell stories. And this is why we witness them.

              Later that night, we returned again and again to the moment we all opened, and we continued to let ourselves spill out, crying until we laughed.

Conversations we otherwise wouldn’t dare begin

              We were gathered in a circle in the main hall of St. Columb’s House today. John Harkin shared his introduction to Hands for a Bridge and we shared how the program has been meaningful to us.

              John has already explained why he doesn’t plan ahead, because plans go afoul whereas, if you go with the flow, things tend to work out.

              In 2006, in October, John received an email from Doug, a mental health worker at Roosevelt. He read it poorly but saw Seattle, students, February visit, and wrote back Yes, of course. Had he actually read the message and seen that Roosevelt was asking to visit for over a week and needed places to stay, John would surely have said, Sorry, there’s no way. In the next few months, Doug would call the school, but John would never make himself available. By January, Doug was more insistent: There’s a man from Seattle on the line for you, and he says he won’t hang up until you’ve actually spoken. When John spoke with Doug and realized what he’d actually agreed to those many months ago, he simply said, Yes, yes; it’s all arranged; I just need to work out the fine details. Then he rushed students into the library and said, Americans are coming in only two weeks and need sixteen homes for multiple days and I need volunteers and family permissions by tomorrow. Sixteen hands came up. And the next day, the sixteen permission forms.

              When things are meant to be, they will be.

              Since then, Roosevelt has come back every year, save the last three. And John has brought students from Northern Ireland three separate years—2007, 2009, and 2012. And in both schools, John said, things are done differently because of leadership and legacy of Hands for a Bridge experiences, similar to the trees we planted the other day in Ness Woods. Small changes are meaningful.

              For our part, many spoke about closeness and trust among an unlikely variety of students; they spoke about stretching their comfort zones and their confidence pushing out of them due to the program. Chloe spoke about the expansion of empathy she gained over the classroom readings by actually meeting people in the conflict zones we studied. It’s a wisdom she knows will extrapolate. And I spoke about what it’s meant as a teacher to plan readings and experiences for a class in collaboration with decades of experience and rituals and mission among people across three continents for whom they’re deeply meaningful.

              Halle asked John what value comes from Americans being included in these tense conversations that might have more meaningful dialogue partners locally. John told her that our presence provides an occasion to speak about subjects that wouldn’t come about otherwise. Students here who wouldn’t set foot in the Free Derry Museum do so because they’re going with us. And at Roosevelt, a visitor from Northern Ireland asked, Why is everyone here at Roosevelt so racist, pointing to the completely segregated lunchroom when an American objected: it provoked useful meditation and investigation that wouldn’t have occurred without the outsider. Halle further reflected that, for Americans included in conversations here—because we don’t have a stake in conversations—questions can safely be received from us. We come from a place of curiosity without an agenda, and this allows people to answer honestly.

              The program facilitates conversations people otherwise wouldn’t dare begin.

Below: John and Roosevelt students at the end of the day.

Omagh, Enniskillen

              The fact that I’ve been with students so much of this time is wearing on me tonight. But I’ve left all of them and their thirteen buddies from Oakgrove, downstairs while I sit here with Barbara, cups of tea at hand, my ears too plugged up from the bus to take sudden screeching.

              Today we rode to Omagh and met Kat, whose father, Michael Gallagher, was the central figure of a movie my class had watched back at Roosevelt. Kat’s brother, Aiden, was one of 29 killed in a bomb left by the Real IRA to disrupt the Good Friday Agreement just then passed. We read poems and left remembrances and daffodils at the memorial, and did so too at a traffic circle in Enniskillen.

              There, John Harken quoted Rev. David Cupples, a minister who had to lead a service immediately after what was also called Inneskillen’s Poppy Day Massacre in 1987: "Faith is a refusal to panic." John has turned the other words, "All contact leaves a trace," into this one he gives at morning assembly: Our contact is never neutral—we either help or we harm. 

              On that day in 1987, Cupples also gave this prayer: May your life be the triumph of love over hate, hope over despair, and life over death.

    

From the Argument of Force to the Force of Argument

               When Jon McCourt left the main hall here where we’re staying in the St. Columb’s Park House last night at nine, our kids were thronging him. They didn’t know nor did I the quality and experience of the man John Harken had brought to us.

              He’s flown throughout the world to share his story, which is that of a children’s home and the high profile campaign he led to end their abuses, and no less the arc of murderous violence to peace—what he names as the argument of force to the force of argument. What follows is my record of his talk.

              When I stood on the street with a machine gun in my hand at 17 or 18, there was no other option. I turned 70 in December. The last 54 years of my life have been dedicated by the years before that. I grew up on the west side of the River Foyle. And since then, I’ve traveled the world. I’ve visited many of recent history’s conflict zones—Russia, Chechnya, the Balkans.

              I left the children’s home at 13 years of age. All the ten years before that I was shut behind a gate, behind a wall, behind a fence. They called people like us outsiders.

              This is how I arrived. At three years old, Ballykelly was the northern-most, western-most air force base in all of Europe. My father had been on a mission in the Second World War and was shot down, and yet he decided to join the air force again only to be hit by a car. When my older two brothers told my mother what had happened, my mother went into early labor, and she too ended up in the hospital. With no parents at home, we were sent into care. This was the decision of the parish priest and meant to be temporary.

              I’ll never forget the crunch of the gravel on the driveway in to the children’s home. This was a 280 acre farm, with huts in the back of a great, big Georgian house. When we arrived, one brother went up the stairs, another brother went down, and I went in through the front door. I didn’t see my brothers again for eight years.

              Every kind of abuse happened in that home. And every kind of abuse, I had either experienced myself or seen happen to someone else. The Sisters of Nazareth considered us defects of society, called us bastards. What we experienced at their hands caused a third of the children to take our own lives.

              As for myself, I learned that if I was sitting and reading a book when the nuns came into the room, they’d overlook me. I felt guilty that they went on to hurt someone else, but was glad in the moment at least it wasn’t me. The home averaged 120 children a year with two nuns running each of the three separate blocks. We all learned to keep our mouths shut.

              I learned the life of surviving and deception.

              It was a great teacher, Betty Johnson that got me interested in words on the page and in stories. I might have read a book twenty times, and I could just open the book to any page and just love where I was in it. I was fortunate to be a pretty good student; so when I left in 1965, I was ready for school outside. School was a breeze for me. Then, when I was 16 or 17, I started working with a friend’s father, one of the top welders in the country.

              I was in class for the first time with real, live Protestants. They weren’t trying to convert me at all; they just wanted to talk about girls and books and sport, which suited me fine.

              In the school, there was a room where you could get coffee and cigarettes, and I saw a poster for a civil rights march in Derry. Back at the home, I had the shit beat out of me and I was locked in a cellar just for reading the newspaper, and here was a civil rights march. And what was that? Civil rights? That’s Martin Luther King stuff. What are we talking about here, in Derry?

              So I ask about it, and start talking to a guy about housing, talking about jobs, about votes. My future’s already made out: I’m working with a welder, living in a place with a couple others. But I’m curious. I arranged to meet a Protestant friend across the river. We’re standing and chatting, and I realized the crowd there was going to a football match, not the march.

              Then I saw the grey trucks. I never saw so many police men in my life. Where I grew up, people weren’t afraid of police—they were afraid of the priests: if something went wrong, we didn’t go to police—we’d go to the priests. I heard a roar, and the roar I heard was police beating people at the march and firing their water cannons into the crowd. That was my introduction to civil rights in Ireland.

              By the time the march reached Guild Hall, the crowd had dwindled down to a hundred people as others went to the hospital or went home for dry clothes. A man was speaking about houses and jobs, and I was getting bored. 

              But then another man starts talking about Guild Hall, and he’s starting to make sense: At the partition of Ireland in 1922, Catholics made up 70% of the island. But gerrymandering ensured majorities were maintained by Protestants in the North. And here in Derry, too, gerrymandering of the North Ward versus the South Ward meant we had a nationalist majority by population but a unionist majority by council. Particularly after the Second World War, money was allocated for public housing, but they weren’t building houses for Catholics, and because only householders could vote, they kept Catholics out of the votes. As a direct result of that, I spent ten years in a children’s home. It took my mother ten years to get enough points to get a house and therefore to get us back.

              So I started marching; I started protesting; I started making signs and placards. I also started getting beaten by batons. I turned the other cheek, but at some point, there’s no cheek left to turn. I decided I couldn’t lie down anymore: I had to stand up.

              So then I started throwing stones; and that led to building barricades. From 1969 to 1972, we closed off the whole neighborhood of the Bogside to protect ourselves.

              This was not a religious conflict. This was a class conflict. This was a political conflict with religious fault lines.

              Well, one day, the police went into a home and beat someone to death. That was the first death. We strengthened our barricades. The police showed up and rocks were thrown. An armored car drove right at our barricade but it stopped him. We beat the police right out of the Bogside.

              But then the big green trucks came. The British army had arrived! Some people were so welcoming, they brought tea right out to them. But they were there to turn the bayonets on us and finish what the police had started. And that’s the day I joined the IRA.

              I lost friends and went to many, many funerals. And I was right in the middle of Bloody Sunday. On my right, a sixteen year old boy was shot. On my left, a bullet went through a man’s nose, but the adrenaline kept him moving forward. The third guy was on my sport team. I saw a soldier shoot him, put a bullet right through his spine—the soldier walked over and put one into his back. 

              All it took was eighteen minutes. Eighteen minutes to turn this insurrection into a war.

              Three thousand people died as a direct result of Bloody Sunday. If it hadn’t happened, we could have finished this in the seventies. 1972, as you may know, was the bloodiest year of all. 497 people died. For you, that’s not many; the number of people who die in automobile accidents in America alone will dwarf that. But we’re a small nation of a million and a half people, and everyone knows everyone else. Everyone is someone’s friend and brother.

              They brought their war to us, and I didn’t care what the costs would be after this. I became actively engaged.

              But in 1976, I became sick with a lung infection because of the chemicals that had been used on us, and I was sent to a hospital on the other side of the border because they’d treat me there. I spent three months, a good long time to have a think. There had to be an alternative to war.

              By 1976, the old structure of the IRA had changed. The old guys had retired. I could leave. I had no control over the war. When I came back to Derry in 1977, the police who’d harassed me now left me alone.

              I wasn’t interested in all of Ireland. I was only interested in what we could do in Derry. A place burned down because a minister there had shaken hands with a priest was now rebuilt as a home for prayer and reconciliation, and this became a place for me.

              Here’s what I had been thinking: What is the greatest of all the commandments in the Bible? It is to love God with your whole heart and to love your neighbor as you love yourself. But what if you don’t even love yourself? The idea puts things in a very human context: you have to have your own self worth before you can begin to love another community.

              So I began to look to things that could be fixed in my community, removing the rubble and burnt out cars, painting over the graffiti, fixing fences and fixing the gates. That’s where it started. One day people see you with a gun in your hand and the next it’s a paintbrush and you’re talking peace. How do you make peace? You do it by engaging with people. I needed only a few things to do this, some rubbers and buckets of paint. I’m standing and painting, and people walk over and say, Jon, what are you doing? And then they start to helping. This is Tom Sawyer stuff, because soon enough, people are doing the painting. People are wanting to engage. They’re wanting to make change. And they’re starting to show up with their own paint brushes.

              These are the things that make the difference.

              We started planting trees, but then we’d come back and the trees had been pulled up. The kids are pulling up the trees. So I just walked over to the boys, just to talk to them, you know. I said, Give us a hand and plant these trees. And so they did. At one point, I saw these two kids beating the crap out of each other, and I said, What’s going on? And one of the boys said, He tried pulling up my tree!

              The argument of force will get you so far. But there has to be a point where the force of argument takes over.

              I went to Stormont for thirteen years to make the argument for an inquiry into abuse. And when it happened, when it was revealed what happened, when we looked into every single institution where children were placed, there were lots of tears, lots of disbelief. It was my greatest impact, and it happened with words.

              There’s nothing you’re hearing from me that you can’t take back to Seattle. What did I learn? How do you make a people feel like they’re worth something? There is the potential for what happened here in 1968 to happen in any city of the United States. Walk into a different community, it's awkward and scary, but it’s what makes a change possible.

Planting Seeds

              Roosevelt students didn’t know that they’d be leading two lessons when they arrived today. They had one hour to figure it out.

              Sixth graders were first, those cuties, and because John Harkin was insistent our workshop occur in the foyer of the school, we were soon blasting the premises with noise, our students building rock-paper-scissor trains and shouting names. A couple scouts were sent from upstairs to find out what in Heavens’ name was going on and returned with word that, Oh, it’s the Americans. I would have tried to tamp it down, but if John wanted us there in the foyer, right in the heart of the entrances and exits of the school, I figured he knew what he was getting. And indeed he did, smiling to see us so boisterous and joyful and bringing Oakgrove along, future HFBers, leaders, and healers.

              Our kids divided the crowd into smaller groups and then led more games and facilitated gently probing questions. I was so proud to see the Roosevelt students at work, taking charge and stepping up to the leadership, assured and inviting.

              Roosevelt was more
practiced explaining, playing, discussing with the second group, the eight graders; and when it was over, the accompanying teachers were disappointed that we weren’t taking kids for a double lesson, for all of the reasons.

              Two of our students said after the first lesson, I’m not sure what they got out of this. I was surprised anyone felt this way. I said that we weren’t doing this for the intellectual content or exchange of information: this was about getting students out of their comfort zone; this was about bonding and inclusion, and about being with you. It’s also about modeling bravery and leadership, and no less about warming up their experience with school (though students do seem much better connected to their community here than we back home). We were just playing, but those year eights and tens are likely to remember the experience with both curiosity and fondness.

              After lunch, we went to Ness Woods to plant trees. John was surprised by the number and variety of Oakgrove kids who suddenly took an interest in walking the muddy peat and planting trees.

              But oh, the sweeping countryside and heavy gray sky atop it. I’m only sorry our students missed the chance to perform Seamus Heaney’s “Digging” on the hill with their spades.

What do you call this country? What do you call this town?

              This morning, we teachers were tasked with meeting in the canteen with students whose instructors were out today. One of them was Protestant; the other four Catholic—which broadly represents the proportion in Derry/Londonderry. The boy were all pals. They’d tease each other, as they did me by asking what do you call this city, what do you call this country. But they said it didn’t matter to them much, the way it fiercely continued to do for their grandparents.

              Yet, when I probed further, they made clear there were neighborhoods they couldn’t without getting beat up. Well, this is what I want to know about, I said to them: What does it mean that you can call each other pals but can’t necessarily walk together into the same neighborhoods?

              The answer isn’t top of the mind. I’ve been asking many students why they’re here, in a religiously integrated school. Students rarely present this as a philosophical or political choice. Some had siblings here, or find it close to home; also, there’s no entrance test. One left St. Mary’s because it was too judge-y. Too judge-y? "It’s an all girls’ school,” a boy said, as if that explained it.

              Later, we heard more: Young People Leading Change brought us onto the open floor of the theater, where we first played mix-and-mingle games with the juniors (the young ones), and later engaged in the serious conversations with the older students, serving in many ways the same purpose. In these dialogues, which included discussions of identity, drug use, racism, and the police (a good segue for me to tell students that our visit to the police tomorrow couldn’t possibly happen tomorrow because of the shooting of an officer while he was coaching children in Omagh), the Oakgrove students and the Roosevelt students were separated to decide what they wanted to tell the other group about where you live. The older students described continued self-policing in communities by paramilitaries knee-capping drug dealers and “pedos,” and also continued separations and tension of religion.

              In the evening, we walked to the cultural center and crashed an Irish folk dancing class, outnumbering them with our students and the three Oakgrove kids who tagged along. They patiently taught us a couple steps and let us join for twenty minutes before we walked home, full of fiddle.

              Before that, some of the sixth form had joined us before dinner at a men’s homeless shelter, where some remained up to fifteen years, well past the statutory two allowed in public shelters. James, the man running the place, left us with these thoughts: If you put kindness out into the world, even if you don’t always get it back—if you’re open, and honest, you may not be able to help everyone or be thanked for what you do, but you can have a life you believe in.