World Beginnings

  Gradually, I have been cleaning and tossing old memories because they mean nothing to anyone but me. The picture above is my first husband, our son Steven and his two children Erik and Hope. Thomas Leroy Witcher was born in Choctaw County, Mississippi, in 1945 to the poorest of poor families. His father, Booker, was elderly when he married Bessie, an illiterate fourteen-year-old girl. Together they had seven children. Old Booker had given up the drink and became a fervent religious convert in his dotage. The family had so little to eat, his mother canned peas and beans, and there was certain to be at least one fly in each jar. The family joke was that was all the meat they had to eat.  Thomas and his sister Maybelle were the only ones to make a life for themselves. Maybelline attended Belhaven College, married a fellow student, and they became missionaries. Thomas attended the local junior college for a semester and dropped out to join the army. One summer day in 1966, a fri...

  We showed up at the ruin of a house in   Chapala in June 2019, armed with cleaning supplies, mops, brooms, and buckets, called to help via a local Facebook group. Beyond the wall was filth and chaos defying description, and in the middle of this inferno was Jose, scooting around in the dirt, dragging his useless legs behind him. Clad in a shirt and in a diaper, clutching a corn tortilla. He was almost eight years old and grossly underweight. How he was even alive was a miracle, milagro. Locals had long been aware of Joe's plight and his tragic family circumstances. His great grandmother, Anita had taken him in after his mother was found in an unmarked grave, a victim of all too common drug wars, and his father, though unlisted on his birth certificate, was in prison on drug charges. At this point, Jose was very young but it soon became clear he could not walk so he joined the dogs and cats on the ground eating what he could find or was tossed his way. No one worked in the fa...

Years ago, my first volunteer job was at a telephone crisis center in Jackson, Mississippi. During Christmas, the director hosted a party for the volunteers and quietly mingled, asking each of us if we believed in Santa Claus. Later that evening, he addressed the group and reflected on his question. He explained that those who believed in Santa were the ones who still had hope. I often think back on his words. Around the same time, I worked for the Mississippi branch of the American Medical Association (AMA). One year, a group of us decided to adopt a family from the Salvation Army Christmas Tree, and we brought gifts to a young single mother and her toddler. The next year, the office wanted to do something bigger. I volunteered to visit the family the Salvation Army matched us with. After meeting a couple of families who didn’t move us, we requested another. We never called ahead—most people didn’t have phones anyway—because we wanted to see the “real family.” What happened next ch...