But lets back up a second, to understand who I am you have to know a little about my father. My dad is my role model. He was a civil rights worker who worked behind the scenes in Chicago during the 60s (most vivid in my mind is the picture of my dad and Martin Luther King Jr. that was in our home since dad worked on the march that brought Dr. King to Chicago) and at Operation PUSH with Jesse Jackson. He was a professor of Divinity at the University of Chicago where he included among his students the aforementioned Jesse Jackson and countless others. He was involved in Community Development and worked with the Community Development Corporation that, among other things, looked to provide affordable housing to low-income families in the Woodlawn neighborhood of Chicago. He was a minister of many sorts, ordained American Baptist but with standing in the United Church of Christ and Disciples of Christ. The only minister I ever remember him as was the Minister of Social Ministries at University Church in Chicago though that only scratches the surface of his ministries which also included a stint as chaplain at Denison University. He was a thinker who looked to expand socially constructed boundaries and include all people (he was a part of the sanctuary movement in the 1980s that, you will see eventually, was behind my current life.) He was a painter whose works still hang all over the walls or clutter up the closets of my mother’s home in Chicago. He was a writer whose book “Listen to the Crying of the Earth” reflects the passion for the environment that he developed late in his life. He was so many things, more than I could ever possibly think of writing here and more than my heart could probably take writing since my father passed away February 6, 1996 at the age of 83 after a battle with cancer. Of course that battle defined my father since he was told he wouldn’t live much longer after the operation failed to remove all of the tumor from his brain (he lived for 9 months after that) and the doctors also told him when he left the hospital that he would never walk again (he never used the wheelchair after he got home). My father was a fighter and he makes up a big part of who I am today, even now, 11 years after his passing.

I grew up playing in the hallways of Operation PUSH, on the trails in the Smokey Mountains of Tennessee, in the fields of our community 45 acre farm in Michigan, on the streets in the often crime riddled neighborhood of Woodlawn, in the Cascade mountains of Washington state at the tiny Lutheran Retreat Center of Holden Village where my family passed pieces of many summers and where I attended 6th and 7th grade, and in the offices of the Blue Gargoyle Volunteer Coordination program where my mom worked. This just names a few of the dominant places that come to mind when thinking about my childhood.

I attended Oberlin College, a small Liberal Arts College in Ohio that was a far cry from the hallways I walked at the inner city Southside Chicago high school of Kenwood Academy but turned out to be the perfect stepping-stone on my path to Community Development work. I graduated in 2000 with a BA in English, and a minor in Mathematics (what most people tell me is a strange combination.) During my time at Oberlin I spent four years half in and half out of that water. That is to say I was on the swim team and roamed various states and their fields with the Ultimate Frisbee Team aptly named The Flying Horsecows. I had two shoulder surgeries during that time due to a little over-zealousness in both my sports. I also DJ'd at the college dance club, tutored in Oberlin High school, received a fellowship to develop a tutoring manual, taught a class called "Juvenile Art and Poetic Spectacle", was a reader/note-taker for blind students at the Oberlin College Learning Assistance Dept., worked in the mail room, and worked as a lifeguard, just to name a few extra activities. After college, I spent the next two years helping to start and coordinate a community technology center there in Oberlin called The Bridge that offered free technology services and classes to all community members but most specifically low-income, senior citizens, and youth. My first year at The Bridge was through the Americorps *VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) program.

After two years at The Bridge I spent a year and a half basically driving across the country by myself, taking in the beautiful sites of the American country, passing time with old friends whose homes I might just show up at with little or no warning, and working a few odd jobs. It was one of those trips where I just set out with no real destination. I had places I wanted to end up at some point but if I was driving and, for example, in West Virginia saw a sign for a Glass Blowing Plant, turn right here, well, I was definitely going to turn. Or if I found myself in Vermont only miles from the Canadian Border I was definitely going to go to Canada even though I had to spend about 45 minutes at the border since they couldn’t understand that I was on a road trip and just wanted to go into Canada for 5 minutes to be able to say “I went to Canada!” Or if my mother just off handedly quoted the phrase “Go west young man!” well, you know the rest, I headed west. It many ways that was just another piece in my journey of self discovery. I visited 31 states (and Canada) and worked for the Community Technology Center Network based in Boston as a Resource Coordinator, as the Pool Hall Director and a cook at Holden Village in the northern Cascade mountains, at Dunkin Donuts in Clinton, NY, and as a web designer for a small business in Chicago. I ran a 50 mile run through the Cascades in 17 hours, climbed 3 mountains, visited both coasts...Somewhere among all that drifting, I found my way to Guatemala for the better part of 3 years and then attended Graduate School at the School for International Training in Brattleboro, VT. Obviously there is more to these last two sentences and I will work on them as soon as I can...