Narrative Based On Service Learning Journal

Narrative Adaptation

It was nearing sunset when out plane landed in Santiago, nearly 24 hours after our initial departure from Pittsburgh. Planes do not make the best hotel rooms, and so we all stood outside of the airport, faces a blank daze of exhaustion, as we waited for our bus. The chrome-lined vehicles that arrived may have been state of the art in 1950s America, felt entirely alien to us. While a group of smiling men bailed our few possessions and suitcases of donated items into one bus, we tried to settle into the other. Unfortunately, here I learned my first and easiest lesson about people of my home nation—we’re large. Every seat on the bus was filled, with padded boards suspended between isles as auxiliary seating. With every jostle in the road the entire mass of people swayed as one.

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Creative nonfiction is a genre all its own, an expanding form of literary writing.

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Narrative—A story, my story. I lived it.

“I was very touched by your service learning journal. It is one of the most insightful reflections on a first-time international experience that I've read in a long time—maybe it's at the top of the list.”

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Soon enough the reader begins to ask, “Do I trust this voice?” Often, the best way to anticipate this question, to win the reader’s confidence, is quite simple: just tell the truth.

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In Altoona, a railroad town in Pennsylvania, whose days of prominence and glory are long past, my feet shuffled through tangled undergrowth. The rubber soles pause at the edge of a fallen piece of carved sandstone, one of many forgotten names in the old graveyard. My great-grandfather had emigrated from Ireland, drawn by the metal woman’s torch, promise of prosperity as hollow as she. He settled there amid the tiny rolling mountains indicative of central Pennsylvania. No images survive of this man, the father of my grandmother. As a child, I listened to my grandmother’s stories of him, remembrances tinted with a child-like affection. He stands clearly in my mind, one eye ocean blue, the other an empty socket set in his laughing face, a thick gentle hand marred by a middle finger clipped short just above the first joint. One eye, part of a finger were a small price to pay for the high wages of the Pennsylvania Railroad shops, the largest hub of railroad research, development, and repair in the entire world. He died in the heat and steam of an engine repair shop.

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Build tension. Make the reader ask: is this grave at your feet his? But I don’t know. I never found out where they buried him, so what do I tell them? That I though it was a clever introduction to me, to death? Be honest.

Do you trust this voice?

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If you take the trouble to write the full scene, the reader really sees what occurs, and if the reader sees what occurs with his or her own eyes, it becomes real. And your reader is convinced.

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Sitting on the idling bus, back pressed against the lumpy seat, I began to write—I told myself that it was from boredom and so continued to observe, refusing to think. “People around me are desperately trying to learn Spanish. A bit late to start if you ask me, but who am I to tell. I’ll probably be freaking out this time tomorrow b/c I can’t understand the language. Oh, well, we shall see.” My writings do not show the fear gnawing at the edges of my mind, defying my attempts to ignore it. All that I knew about the Dominican Republic at that time was that it was off the coast of Florida, swimming somewhere in the well-explored waters of the southern Atlantic Ocean. Distracted by the first woes of a college freshman, I’d never even begun to research my destination. The bus shuddered as the doors swung silently closed. A soft, foggy silence settled in the crowded bus, broken only by the occasional falling pencil or frantically muttered word of poorly pronounced Spanish.

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We use the word discovery to indicate the deeper subject or ideas that underlie a work of creative nonfiction.

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As we pulled onto orphanage property, a whirling dance of confusion began. The bus was immediately surrounded by a huge group of children shouting, “Americanos!” Their rolling, rhythmic dialect of Spanish, was more beautiful and incomprehensible than anything I had ever heard in an American classroom. When the sun was up, the bug-phobic, complaining college women and I toured the orphanage and surrounding town. “Compared to the kids we live like kings here, sure it’s weird to have mosquito nets, but the kids don’t have them at all, our showers are cold and we limit water use, but at least our showers are inside, not just four walls and a drain that is outside. I’m trying not to think about all the stuff that I have at home.” Childhood remembrances of Earth Day and episodes of Captain Planet aside, I had never really considered that I might be part of a throw-away culture. At an on-campus protest, the signs informed me that, America is home to 5% of the world's population, yet it consumes 1/3 of the Earth's timber and paper; making paper the largest part of the waste stream at 37.5% of the total waste stream, and Americans toss out enough paper & plastic cups, forks and spoons every year to circle the equator 300 times. In touring the village of Esperanza, I saw what I had considered garbage put to use in the most unconventional and artistic ways. Broken glass formed colorful murals and security systems when set in the top of concrete walls. Painted plastic packing skids walled in gardens, keeping the plethora of free-ranging goats from attacking the few struggling plants. I wondered what these builders could do if “I could only transport to them everything that I’ve thrown away as junk in the last few weeks.”

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Memoir will occasionally focus on life-changing or tragic events.

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We taught in Dominican schools, walked in the community, shoveled gravel and built buildings, and came home laughing. Those few could speak passable French were working with imported Haitian sugar workers in communities known as Bateys. They returned home every day, their silence a closed window against our laughter. I begged to trade places with one of the Batey volunteers. I wanted to understand the void that seemed to surround them. Red fingers of sunlight were just reaching into the cloudless sky as we traveled past fruit and sugar plantations to reach Batey Two. The bus coasted to a stop at the edge of wide grass field, hovering at the edge, as if afraid to tread on the dirt and refuse that lay beyond. The houses, built of crushed gasoline cans, made pinging noises in the light wind. Children ran shoeless on the field—shirtless bodies displaying swollen bellies and sores, the hallmarks of malnutrition and disease. We toured their hospital, an empty shack with a dirt floor. It was a building made to house death, a mausoleum where one stored the living when there was no longer any hope. It was the poverty of commercials and fundraising drives, to be safely confined behind television screens. In 2005, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child has expressed concerns about Haitian children being denied access to education and medical care, but no real action was taken. The children ran just beyond the door of their death hospital, laughing in its shadow. The strong, refuse-coated building would survive much longer than they. It is because of the turgid Dominican bureaucracy, difficult transportation, and ignorance of the importance of documents, most cane cutters do not register births with authorities, children will be nationless, paperless, these people do not exist. It is indefinitely difficult to place the blame. International human-rights groups blame the Dominicans, but the Dominicans are not alone. The United States has been silent on the issue. I looked for their graveyard, wondering how many markers I would see. But if they had one, it was well hidden from my eyes.

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Creative-nonfiction seems to beg the question, “Why would anyone care?”