Letters (October 18, 2017)

Thanks for the

flowers on D Street

I don’t know who the fairy is that plants and takes care of the four barrels of flowers along D Street, next to the ATM machine, but I want to give you a hearty “thank-you.” I have enjoyed them for many years.

I live on Wilson Street, so very often I have opportunity to go by there. Every time, it brings sunshine and joy to my nature-loving soul.

Someone out there is putting forth the effort to plant the flowers every spring and continuing the effort to keep them alive and beautiful.

May blessings be yours for this act of love and kindness. I will look forward to them again next spring.

Thank-you, again.

Clara Toews

Hillsboro

Human-ness views from rural Peru

It’s different here; the difference makes me think. As I write this I hear roosters cawing in the chill Andean morning mountain air and dogs barking in the streets. There aren’t many sounds of cars or planes.

I look out from the roof of my three-story field house and see narrow streets dividing a intense juxtaposition of buildings. Fresh produce is sold in the streets in a highly informal manner. I can hear a mixture of Spanish and Quechua as a man bargains for an avocado.

There’s no heating or air in the field house, and the Internet is so poor that my family may only hear from me once every few days; uploading only a few photos to social media or email or submitting a short article to a hometown paper may take several hours.

It’s all different here, though also the same in numerous ways. The houses are different, but are not any less lived-in; they are still homes. The food is different, but it still fills me up and satisfies my hunger.

The roads and transportation are different, but they are nevertheless trodden and ridden, taking people throughout their networks, their lives, across the globe.

The land is different, but it does not fail to make me feel in awe of our wondrous world.

The people look different, speak different, and have different customs and culture, yet they are people, nonetheless, struggling to survive, to make it, loving, caring, talking, sharing,displaying those very humanistic elements that I, too, embody.

In this way, though I felt foreign, I also felt a part of a greater humanity; a part of the over-arching membership encompassing all of humankind.

Jakob Hanschu

Manhattan

Editor’s note: Jakob Han­schu, a 2015 graduate of Hillsboro High School and now a junior in anthropology and geography at Kan­sas State University, was a recipient of a $5,000 Mark Chap­man Scholarship that took him to the Sondor Bioarch­aeolog­ical Field School in the Andahuaylas Province of Peru, where he gained firsthand experience in archaeo­logical excavation at the Sondor site.

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