Column: Creative Connections, by Sara Aeikens

Receiving a phone call recently about winning a trip to Mexico for four people piqued my interest.

After the representative informed us that we must listen to an in-home hour-plus sales spiel to receive our prize, I stifled my excitement and, with just a trace of disappointment, declined the offer. That interaction unrolled a series of musings related to my love of traveling widening of horizons and broadening cultural awareness, as well as sharing homes with far-flung and newfound friends. Some of these friends have stayed in our home in Albert Lea.

Sharing homes and traveling traditions started early. While growing up in Minot, N.D., our elementary school friends came to our backyard and helped pitch a clothesline blanket tent for overnights. Our folks traveled with us three girls in the backseat of our 1949 Studebaker all over our home state to bird watch with binoculars, explore lake-nesting areas of almost extinct whooping cranes and pick wild berries in the hills.

An extension of our statewide explorations resulted in a school year in Louisiana, while our dad instructed science in a college position exchange. Before he married, he taught science in a Presbyterian mission school in Tehran, Iran, for five years, so he wanted his family to learn about other customs and cultures. Back home, with the Air Force base nearby, our mother often invited “flyboys” for Sunday dinner, which meant we learned about their native states of California, Hawaii or New Jersey as we chatted around our old oak table.

As a high school graduation gift, my dad took two of us fresh graduates on the train to visit family friends in Manhattan and Maryland. A conglomeration of cultures assailed us. Tiny living spaces of some family friends resulted in my spending a night sleeping on a half sofa with my legs dangling.

On the sidewalks, we occasionally dodged garbage pitched out of upper apartment windows. A cacophony of languages filled the air as we walked through international marketplaces. Having tea with an Islamic family in their apartment introduced us to the custom of proper hand preference in food preparation versus personal hygiene activities. Different prayer practices came alive when we visited a mosque.

While at Macalester College, I found safe haven and quiet study time on weekends at the Persian-carpeted home of a former mission school student of my dad’s from Iran. Later I stayed overnight at the same family’s home in California. An earthquake caused the professor’s diploma that contained my dad’s signature to tilt at an odd angle on the office wall.

Another earth-quaking evening occurred in St. Louis while at a health workshop working on my master’s degree. This connection brought me into the black culture of an inner-city suburb, besides opening the opportunity for my hosts to visit Albert Lea and teach “learning through movement” exercises to teachers. Through conversations shared while staying at our home, they became better acquainted with some of the educational components of a rural Minnesota town.

After college graduation, joining the Peace Corps seemed like an extension of experiencing the world firsthand as my parents’ example had trained us to do. In the Venezuelan countryside, we volunteers traveled to each other’s rural and city stations, often bringing a hammock for sleeping in friends’ abodes or on a beach between two palm trees. At one point, I took a trip via Columbia to Ecuador to visit a college friend at his post.

The colorful handicraft markets are the main thing etched in my memory, topped only by the stories the Indians told of traveling hundreds of miles bare foot to reach the northern coast to attempt to cross the seas to sell their goods in Florida and return home.

After marrying, when Leo taught at Albert Lea High School, I connected with a science teacher’s family whose relatives live in Costa Rica. Peace Corps memories arose as my Albert Lea neighbor and I spent several weeks waking up to the rooster crowing and practically could pick oranges or lemons out the open bedroom window.

A trip to Hawaii resulted from a teatime conversation with a Clarks Grove friend. He connected me with his relatives on the northern shores of Oahu. His nephew stored dozens of surfboards underneath his home for teaching surfing. A 24-hour trip to Maui to experience an array of exotic flowering plants and trees gave me another contrasting lifestyle to one more of the islands. The glue that made this Maui excursion possible turned out to be a neighbor who lived a few houses away in Albert Lea from both my home and that of my Costa Rica and Hawaii traveling companion. Touring a nearby naval base on Oahu became a reality due to my three-minute conversation at a goal-setting workshop in the Twin Cities with a participant whose spouse worked on the base.

Having set goals for traveling with the purpose of community service including writing a periodic column for our local newspaper encouraged me to apply for a volunteer position in an orphanage in Lima, Peru. A Rotary friend recalled my plans and phoned minutes before a club luncheon to invite me to sit at her table with club guests from Lima.

One young woman training to be a veterinarian knew the global volunteer program that accepted me for a week of service and invited me to stay with her family a few days to experience an incredible music/water/light show before my journey to the ancient civilization of Machu Picchu.

In another coincidence that turned into a connection, Leo left our home for Germany only hours before a young man knocked at our side door inquiring in German to speak with Leo. Years later we ended up staying a few days with him in Germany. He took us on the Autobahn for a day’s visit in Denmark and joined us as our guest with Leo’s relatives on the tourist island of Borkum, Germany. We all spoke lots of German, strolled and sat on the beach and watched hundreds of seals lounging on a peninsula.

While taking a walk around Fountain Lake with a local woman living in Croatia, I learned it would be possible for me to visit her there. I was able to spend an entire week attending seminary classes translated into English. What a gift she shared by allowing me to learn about some of the struggles and hopeful history of the country and connect with its customs and culture.

One never knows when a chance meeting will lead to roads to be traveled.

 

Sara Aeikens is an Albert Lea resident.