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119 pages

English

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Description

When people find themselves displaced, what do they do to re-create, their homes? And what does home mean to them? The lives in this book span a wealth of definitions.

Finding Home: How Americans Prevail is about people who have become dislodged from their center, the place they call home, and about how they have righted themselves. Everyday Americans elaborate on how they have solved problems our society hands us on a daily basis.

Included are the voices of vets and foster kids, single moms and laid-off workers, retirees and small business owners. These people are doing more than just coping. They are innovators in their own lives. They are prevailing.

Sujets

Vie de famille

Relations familiales

Social Science

Sociologie, société et politique

Informations

Publié par	eBookIt.com
Date de parution	25 mai 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780988347915
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Finding Home
How Americans Prevail

SALLY OOMS

Copyright © 2013 by Sally Ooms
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address below.

Lyrics to “More Than One Way Home” are copyright by Kevin Moore and John Lewis Parker and are used by their kind permission.

Cover Image: “Untitled, 1982” by Jerry Uelsmann; © by Jerry Uelsmann and used by permission.

Home Free Publishing LLC
P.O. Box 225053
San Francisco, CA 94122

www.findinghomestories.com
www.homefreepublishing.com

Published in eBook format by Home Free Publishing
Converted by http://www.eBookIt.com

ISBN-13: 978-0-9883-4791-5

Project management, design, and composition by Steven Hiatt / Hiatt & Dragon, San Francisco Copyediting: Steven Hiatt Proofreading: Tom Hassett Cover Design: Stewart Cauley Design

For all the people on these pages
who generously shared their stories.

For all those who are still on
the quest to find home.

For all those who are helping
them on their journey.

There’s more than one way home,
Ain’t no right way, ain’t no wrong.
Whatever road you might be on
Find your own way
‘Cuz there’s more than one way home.

Keb’ Mo’
Contents
Preface: Displacement as Mirror
1 Rough Start
Foster kids may endure five or six unsuitable placements, sometimes never experiencing a loving home. These twenty-year-olds, tossed about during their childhoods, are creating their own sense of home while reclaiming their lives through a college education. One woman takes her mother’s advice to “pay it forward” and, with others, rallies “round those who have been ‘fostered.’”
2 After Battle
It’s not unusual for combat soldiers to come back with altered perceptions about their homeland and changed feelings about their home scenes. Some find themselves wanting to disengage. Others are challenged to transform things in our society for the better. Post-traumatic stress disorder figures in heavily with attitude.
3 Last Stop
The big question for older Americans is whether to (over)stay in their longtime home or move to assisted living. There are pluses and minuses to both choices, as these retirees attest. A volunteer hospice coordinator talks about the Alzheimer’s patients she cares about.
4 Culture Shift
As an immigrant, the excitement of being at home in America is tempered with loss of one’s own culture. Through difficult decisions about which traditions and mindsets to keep and which to discard, newcomers enrich our culture and make us see ourselves in a new light.
5 Standing Their Ground
Determination is the backbone of home when one must fight to preserve it. Navajos on the western part of their nation will not give up the battle to overcome abuses of their land and their ways. Sometimes it means facing their own tribal government. Doing for themselves is one women’s co-op’s technique. An advocate for railroad workers gives insight into exploitation of Navajos. A formerly battered Taos and Zuni Pueblo woman in New Mexico relates how she combatted physical abuse and stood her figurative ground.
6 House/Home
Owning a house is a cornerstone of the American dream. One woman fights her way from house to house but has had to carry with her the destructive forces that keep her and her sons from being truly at home. Repeatedly on the cusp of foreclosure, she’ll do anything to keep this home for her family. A Santa Fe entrepreneur talks turkey about the wisdom of home ownership and details his organization’s successes in guiding middle-income people toward that investment.
7 Katrina’s Legacy
Mississippi and New Orleans residents long ago resolved to carry on, even before help was on the way to their torn-apart world. Things that have motivated them to remake their lives vary—family togetherness, community spirit, and love for their region. Here are their tales, along with those of a youth advocate in New Orleans whose organization is providing the stability of home for teens who have been in trouble.
8 Outsider Insights
Every homeless person has a different set of needs, desires, life experiences and beliefs. These people are locating solutions within themselves and through their advocates. One advocate traces the history of mass homelessness in America and tells us what it’s going to take to end this growing trend.
9 Homemade Green
A town-leveling tornado couldn’t conceivably be seen as a Godsend. Or could it? This worst tornado on record did inspire residents in a formerly pokey Kansas town to rebuild a modern miracle—a green-built destination. Architecture students got their feet wet in their profession while helping townspeople in this admirable undertaking.
10 Finders/Seekers
Perhaps one is never complete. Perhaps the journey is the home ground. A former TV network dresser and costume creator still is looking, but is grateful for a profession that made him feel he fit in. And a poet turned artist grappling with how he wants to present his authentic identity dares to pull people away their comfortable thoughts—and enlivens the discussion about who we all are.
Resources
Acknowledgments
Preface

Displacement as Mirror
The evening of May 20, 1957, when I was ten and still in pigtails, I ate a chicken pot pie upstairs in my parents’ bedroom. My parents were entertaining friends from out of town in the dining room. I tried to watch the TV Western my father and I had an affinity for, but the local station kept interrupting the program to air the weatherman’s report on tornado sightings in the Kansas City vicinity.
We lived in the center of the city in a house that my great uncle had built, a two-story with a basement and an attic. Forty-foot elms lined the streets. I wasn’t allowed to watch much television, but I had seen The Wizard of Oz at least five times.
The weatherman’s predictions became increasingly dire: a monster tornado was headed for the city. I ran downstairs to tell everyone that the television said we should all go to the basement. Since my parents were inured to tornado warnings and knew that predicting where a tornado was going to hit was an inaccurate science at best, they told me not to worry about it. There had been plenty of false alarms that season.
I went back upstairs and listened to the weatherman some more. He wasn’t fooling around. I hung my head out a window. Everything was calm. Too calm. That is one of the signs of an approaching tornado. I was convinced we should go to the basement.
Back in the dining room, my parents and their guests were laughing and filled with bravado. Everything was going to be all right, they said. My father had a theory that tornados never went through the center of cities, a belief that was dashed the next year when one swept through downtown Topeka. The couple visiting from New York State smiled at me and were as cavalier as their hosts.
Upstairs again I listened to the reports and I thought, “What do people from New York know about tornados?” The weatherman was passing on information from eyewitnesses who had called him and given him an idea of where the tornado was on the ground. The wind started to kick up outside our house and after about twenty minutes the elm trees began to bow.
I pleaded with my parents this time. “Come look at the trees,” I said, jabbing my fingers against the dining room bay window. The lights went out at that point, leaving the party in candlelight. The flames wavered a few seconds from the breath of an unseen source. It alarmed me, but it just seemed to excite the grown-ups.
I felt my way to my room and snatched up my dachshund, a flashlight and the transistor radio I had received for Christmas. I thought I knew where in the laundry room I was supposed to be when the tornado struck: next to the wall on the northeast side.
It smelled like mothballed blankets and dank wall plaster. I sat on a chair I dragged from another basement room, one that people used when they talked on the phone down there. I had lifted the receiver of the phone briefly and heard no dial tone. That increased my terror. My dog, Madel, stayed close, her hair brushing my legs. I could still hear the wind. Now there was the splat of furious rain and hail as it landed in the window wells. Mostly I heard my own rapid heartbeat in my head.
No one came to join me, and the tornado did not hit us. I went back upstairs about half an hour later when the weather calmed down, the lights flashed back on, and my mother called for me to come get some dessert.
But in those thirty minutes alone in the basement, I had time to imagine my family and their friends being ripped away from our house. Our house itself gone. My home. Everything I loved was up there. The people I loved were not protecting themselves. I was powerless. The tornado had all the power, and it would decide whether it would take my parents and my house away or not.
It decided to go to the Kansas City suburb of Ruskin Heights instead, where it killed forty-six people. No doubt some of them were other people’s parents. I read the papers and looked at the photos of the high school and junior high in complete wreckage. One gym wall still stood. From the letters that once spelled “RUSKIN,” the tornado had left the letters spelling “RUIN.”
There were so many stories about the capriciousness of tornados. One house in a block would be left intact while all the others were completely demolished. One woman claimed a tornado whistled in and tore away most of the clothing in her closet, b