“There is always something to miss, no matter where you are.” – Sarah
Anna and Caleb live in a lonesome house in the prairies back in the days before electricity and piped water and telephones. They pine for their Mama, who died a day after Caleb was born, and their Papa silently longs for a wife. So Anna and Caleb’s father, Mr. Jacob Witting, decides to put an advertisement in the newspapers for such a companion. And Ms. Sarah Elisabeth Wheaton responds.
“To the pond and back – to the pond and back – nearly a full day of walking altogether. This was Nya’s daily routine seven months of the year. Daily. Every single day.”
In A Long Walk to Water, not one, but two Sudanese children fearfully and desperately endure the worse conditions conspired by humans and nature. Nya lives where water is scarce and seasonal, and access to this life-giving elixir is dictated by the vagaries of an ancient tribal war. Twenty years earlier when Salva was Nya’s age, he fights for survival in his war-racked country. Sudanese of one faith are aggressors, using violence to oppress, extinguish even, the lives of the non-believers and the less powerful.
Based on true events, these are stories that attest to the strength and resilience of the human spirit. These are stories about our common humanity. Continue reading
“This was the garden. It didn’t look like much, but it meant everything to its gardener.”
M: Do you think this picture book should be on our blog?
B: Yes.
M: Why?
B: Because it is interesting, cute but sad as well. Continue reading
“It was planting season, which was especially gruelling. The mud stuck to their feet like glue and each seedling had to be painstaking planted by hand. When the hot sun burned overhead, Minli’s knees shook from weariness.”
Minli lives a hand-to-mouth existence in a dusty brown village, nestled in the shadows of the aptly named Fruitless Mountain. The little girl is barely nourished by the grains of rice that her parents coax from the poor land. However, her spirit is sustained by the stories that her father regales her with each evening. These stories have been handed down like precious family heirlooms from so many generations before that they sparkle with magic and the fantastical, and surely, must be ancient figments of an overactive imagination.
Or perhaps not.
Stories That Stay With Us 