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[ Florence Nagawa ] For the first time in twenty three years I found myself, this September, with no children at home. Charlie was off to college (NYU, a great interdisciplinary program called The Gallatin School) and Willy--though he’s got another year of high school--was enrolled in a semester-long program , also in New York, called City Term. My daughter Audrey’s back in college at Santa Cruz, so she at least was on the same coast as me. But really, even if they live close by, everything changes when the place you live is no longer the place they keep their CDs. I’m happy to say all three of my kids are thriving, out in the world. Much as I love to have them close by, I love it, too, when they have adventures, and all three are doing that.
Still, the rhythm of life around here has changed dramatically over the last few months. I took advantage of the new freedom that came with the absence of kids at home to take a number of trips--to Barcelona and Amsterdam, this summer, to promote translations of my memoir there, and to the east coast, to visit old friends and take in a few days on Cape Cod, and to New York, Michigan and Florida, to teach writing classes and speak. But the trip that stands out most searingly in my memory of the thousands of miles I’ve travelled over recent months was the journey I made (not only over miles, but cultures) to Africa this past August. I was sent there by Redbook magazine to write a story about the inspiring work being done there by a group of HIVpositive women, called The Memory Project.
As you probably know, AIDS infection has reached epidemic proportions in Africa, leaving a tens of thousands of children--some of them HIV positive, but many not-- orphaned. The scale of the tragedy there seems so great that it was hard for a person like me, reading about it from the comfort of my Northern California home, to conceive of, and harder still to imagine any significant way to address the kind of devastation going on there. That’s what this tiny but growing group in Uganda is doing. The women -- all of whom live with death sentences of their own, mostly as a result of infection from their husbands, who practicied the tradition of polygamy there--have begun to make books, for their children, recording the story of their lives, their heritage and traditions. In addition to making their own memory books, these women travel through the countryside educating others about the dangers of HIV, and helping others like themselves to preserve their stories for the next generation.
As a person who has spent her life engaged in the endeavor of personal storytelling, I was so moved by the work of these women. I spent a week in Uganda, visiting families whose lives had been touched by AIDS, as virtually every family there has been now. My article about that trip, and the profile of one particularly brave and hopeful young mother there, appears in the December issue of Redbook magazine, on the stands through mid-December. I hope you get a chance to read it. Meanwhile, I wanted to share with you some beautiful pictures, taken by the photographer who accompanied me on my trip, Louise Gubb, of the women and children I met there. (A small note here: while the magazine has launched an initiative to collect funds for Save the Children, in Africa, I am personally organizing an effort on behalf of the families I met there, to whom I will be sending a Christmas package of shoes, books, soccer balls for their kids and other basic household necessities in the weeks to come. While any personal contributions to this package will not be tax deductible, I will include in my own check any monies members of this community wish to send their way. If you’d like to send a contribution, however small, contact our web-mistress Myrna for details. In Uganda, even five dollars goes a very long way.)
And while we’re on the subject of Christmas, I want to alert you to the fact that hardback copies of my memoir, At Home in the World, are now available through this website at a great low price. All proceeds of sales go to support the hard work of our webmistress, Myrna Uhlig, whose work on behalf of this site is supported solely through the sales of items in the Joyce Maynard Catalogue. So take a look and stock up for the holidays. Without Myrna’s help, this discussion could not exist. Here, as in Uganda, we celebrate the value and uniqueness of every individual’s story. So how about it? What’s yours?
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As
those of you already know who’ve been around this site in recent months,
I’ve scaled back my presence here for a while. Partly that came out of
a need to focus on work, and partly my desire to give myself a little
private space. But I wanted to check in with you, as this treacherous,
wonderful, difficult, magical season approaches. 
That’s
it for now. Still hard at work on my new novel, with my children scheduled
to spend Christmas with their father, I’ll be holed up writing again for
most of this month, so you may not be hearing much from me, but you know
I always come back here, and even when I’m silent, I always check in to
see what everyone’s been thinking about.
