Poetry as Inspiration

By Alisha

While Micah is spending time with his family in the States, I’m in the midst of end of the school year festivities. School is ending this week and students will have summer vacation during the months of January and February. That means graduation ceremonies and other end of the year celebrations are keeping me busy. I was even invited to be the godmother of one of the students in our youth group for his high school graduation.

Yesterday I attended an event in one of the communities outside of Chota where we have a youth group. The communication teachers put together a really interesting event. The teachers and students honored an elderly community member by putting together a poetry recital using the poems written by the community member. It was a really great idea to use poetry composed by a community member in order to inspire the students to write poetry and express themselves though art. It was also really touching to see the joy it brought to the author to see his poetry preformed at the local school. The poems were simple and about daily life and struggles. Topics included the corn harvest, discrimination, corruption, and tuberculosis. If I can get my hands on some of the poems I'll try and post them.