Diane Morrow

Sakena Yacoobi and the Afghan Institute of Learning

Posted by Diane Morrow on August 23, 2011 in Blog, Healing Corridor

A little over a year ago I read Greg Mortenson’s Stones into Schools, the sequel to his Three Cups of Tea and was very moved by it. An American, Mortenson describes his work collaborating with Afghan communities to provide schools for girls, while, at the same time, weaving his narrative with Afghan history and the role of education in empowering women and transforming communities. I put the book on my independent reading list for my students and ended up telling a number of people that they had to read this book. Then, in April, along with countless others, I was disillusioned when Jon Krakauer (author of Into the Wild and Into Thin Air) published an essay exposing fault lines in the Mortenson story. I went online to discover what I could. A piece by Marc Maxson, a teacher who has done some work with Global Giving, caught my attention: The real sad part is that for every Greg that destroys our public trust in non-profits, there are 99 other legitimate organizations doing the same work that suffer from it. The public generalizes their distrust to other organizations. So I am here to tell you that the real Greg Mortenson – by which I mean a leader in Afghanistan who has put over a hundred thousand girls in school and never exaggerated her impact, nor the daily threats she faces on her life for doing so, is none other than Sakena Yacoobi. I happened to be reading Half the Sky at the time and then realized, aha, Yacoobi was one of the changemakers featured in the book. I can’t fully know Greg Mortenson’s story. At best, he seems to have stretched the truth in places as well as perhaps allowed his organization to grow faster than he was able to sustain. What I’ve realized though is that I can take what’s good from his book – his enthusiasm for the role of education as transformative in Afghanistan – and, rather than generalizing my distrust, simply transfer my enthusiasm. Thus far, everything I’ve been able to find about Sakena Yacoobi points to the integrity and wisdom of her work. Sakena Yacoobi is an Afghan Muslim woman, born and raised in Herat, who was able, with her parents’ blessing, to receive an education. She’s been paying this gift forward ever since. Unable to attend Kabul University because of violence, she came to the United States, completing college and then a master’s degree in public health. She was working as a health consultant and college teacher in the U.S. when, in the early nineties, she traveled to Pakistan to visit Afghan refugee camps. Moved by what she saw in the camps, especially among the women and children, she moved to Pakistan, eventually bringing her work into Afghanistan. During that time, the Taliban barred girls from receiving an education. She responded by organizing secret underground schools in people’s homes, eighty in all. In 1995, she founded the Afghan Institute of Learning (AIL), a grassroots organization whose mission is to provide education, especially to women and children. The AIL provides schools and teacher-training along with legal and human rights workshops. They’ve also expanded into health clinics and the training of nurse-midwives. Throughout, the emphasis is on training women to become leaders so that these centers...

The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry

Posted by Diane Morrow on August 16, 2011 in Blog, Healing Places, Healing Poetry

This is a poem for the middle of the night. Here are the first six lines: When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things His words make me want to respond in kind. To echo and borrow his rhythms: When despair for my life and the life of those whom I love grows in me and when I wake in the night and the fear is there like an old visitor, I go out to the kitchen and I make, again, a mug of hot cocoa, and I remember, if only for a moment, the breezeway in my grandmother’s house, the coolness against my bare feet, the way it led out to the patio and the small table there, the fence around the yard, and the flowers against the fence, hollyhocks and four o’clocks and lilac. I feel how that place is still present because I can remember it and with that I come into the peace of my grandmother’s garden. See also: The poem at...

Collecting and Responding to Poetry with Naomi Shihab Nye

Posted by Diane Morrow on August 9, 2011 in Blog, Healing Poetry

A video arrived in my email box a couple of weeks ago, courtesy of The Academy of American Poets: One excerpt in particular strikes me: I can never imagine how someone would fall in love with poetry and stop reading poems. But I think that people often talk themselves out of a bit of responding, which I also think is as important as collecting. We collect poems that encourage us to think in a way we need to think, or look at the world. But then we also allow ourselves—whatever our circumstances, or whatever our past history with writing—to write a little bit. I love that. The importance of collecting. But then to take it the next step. To write a little. To allow ourselves to write a little. Whatever our circumstances. I think something happens when we write in response to a poem—at least I’ve noticed this in myself. For one thing, I read the poem more carefully. I begin to hear the words and rhythms of it inside my head. The poem becomes more a part of me. I think there are a number of ways that we get “talked out” of responding to poetry. Sometimes we’ve had bad experiences with this in the past (and mostly with teachers, I’m afraid). Sometimes we think the experts own it—or that we could never know enough to respond. But we do know enough. My high school students, for instance, know enough. I know enough. We all do. At the very least, we each contain a storehouse of experiences and perceptions (we’re the expert on those) and we know enough to begin to make connections from the poem to this storehouse. Or we know enough to begin to make connections to other poems—or to books or movies or to a fragment of overheard conversation. We know enough to ask questions. To wonder about a poem. To speculate. I wonder what she was thinking when she wrote this. I wonder what she was feeling. I wonder who she had in mind as she was writing. I wonder why I chose to collect this poem. I think something powerful can happen when we begin to collect and respond to poetry. When we begin to keep notebooks—or folders with scraps of paper. When we begin to intercalate our own words between and among the words of the poets. And then when we begin to share these. See also: A Secret About What A Poem Can Do to Us. A piece about Michelle Bloom’s song, Last Night As I Was Sleeping, which shows what can be created out of a response to a poem. The Academy of American...

A Secret About What a Poem Can Do to Us

Posted by Diane Morrow on August 2, 2011 in Blog, Healing Poetry

I am returning to Antonio Machado’s poem, “Last Night As I Was Sleeping,” because I found yet another interpretation of the poem. In this case, not a different translation but a kind of collaboration with the poem to create something new. Michelle Bloom, a singer songwriter, has taken the poem and transformed it into a song. She’s used Robert Bly’s translation, but then twice, between stanzas, she’s inserted a chorus that she herself has written. She introduces her song this way: Inspired by the idea of making a moment, a “We” out of the quiet, internal act of reading a poem, this song seemed to come out of a dusty road in the Spanish countryside that Machado walked with the children he taught in a one-room schoolhouse. In the chorus I imagined Machado or The Poet, Universal, to suddenly interrupt the poem and turn toward the reader, eager to tell us a secret about what a poem can do to us, how it becomes not words on a page, but a living moment, embodied. I love this idea of an imagined interruption. She imagines Machado or a Poet interrupting. At the same time, it’s she herself interrupting and offering us something new. How lovely is that. She’s taken the “quiet, internal act of reading a poem” and used this to add another layer to the poem. That secret hinted at—what a poem can do—if we begin to sing it ourselves, and feel it. See also: Last Night As I Was Sleeping The audio and lyrics for her song are no longer available. The photo is from her her old site, All Things Bloom. She does have an album on...

Last Night as I Was Sleeping

Posted by Diane Morrow on July 26, 2011 in Blog, Healing Places, Healing Poetry

Twice recently I have come across this haunting and joyous poem by the Spanish poet, Antonio Machado. In the translation by Robert Bly it begins: Last night as I was sleeping, I dreamt – a marvelous error! – that a spring was breaking out in my heart. I said: Along which secret aqueduct, Oh water, are you coming to me . . . Looking around a little, I’ve seen some differences in the translation–especially in the second line. The original Spanish word translated as error is ilusion and can also be translated as vision. I dreamt – a marvelous vision! – a blessed vision! – that a spring was breaking out in my heart. Either way – so many possibilities here. I love the idea of the water inside. It reminds me of a retreat center I visited once. The place was a house with a central courtyard and in the courtyard was a garden with a pond. I’m not a good meditator. But I tried a couple of meditation sessions there and when I did, and sometimes in the weeks and months after, I found myself imagining having that kind of courtyard inside my own self, with a pond. In Machado’s poem I like the idea that the water is moving. A spring. A secret aqueduct. Full poem can be found here. Photo from...

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