Renewable: One Woman's Search for Simplicity, Faithfulness, and Hope by Eileen Flanagan
I love reading on my Kindle, love the ease of holding it and of marking noteworthy words, sentences, and passages. But every now and again I read a book that results in 47 highlighted notes, like this one, and then it takes me awhile to wrestle them into a review. I finished this book in early December and am just putting it to paper now. So, warning, this is long. 47 notes of long. No spoiler alerts needed, but if you want to cut to the chase, just read the last paragraph.
This book resonated with me on so many levels and so this review is about me, the reader, as much as it is about the author. The author and I were both Girl Scouts who loved camping who grew up to became Peace Corps volunteers. And it seems that our service has shaped us in many of the same ways. I began my own PC service in Jamaica in 1987, the year after the author, and I truly enjoyed everything she wrote about her work in Botswana. I particularly liked the concept of “buledisa”, which means that you always walk your guest halfway home, no matter how far away they live. Having lived in a yurt, I liked the rondavel, or round house, that the author lived in and the practicality of the natural building materials, much cooler than the newer cinder block construction. I marked the phrase, “Motho ke motho ka botho”, which means “A person is a person because of other people” and is a lovely concept to contemplate, the idea that it is interconnectivity and reciprocity that is at the core of culture, as it is for the Tswana culture in Botswana.
In this country where people simply help each other as needed, in Setswana, their language, there is no difference between borrow and lend. Imagine that. Having lived in other languages, where I could feed and clothe myself but never have a philosophical discussion, I could also appreciate the author’s frustration when her vocabulary was limited beyond everyday pleasantries. And I could totally relate when she winced whenever her students called her “fat and beautiful”, meaning it as a compliment, as that is also true in Jamaica where they love fat women and say, “Hey, fatty, lookin’ good from behind.”
I, too, lived without tv, shopping malls, car, and phone and didn’t miss them one bit. And, like the author, I am of Irish descent so understand the lessons from the potato famine and the importance of genetic diversity in our crops, particularly in the face of our current GMO situation. Having recently visited Scotland and Ireland and learned of the evictions of tenants in favor of sheep, I could relate to the author’s description of such. I enjoyed her comparison of the Irish proverb, “I scath a chéile a mhaireann na daoine”, which translates as “People live in each other’s shadows,” with the same sense of interconnection in the Tswana saying.
I was completely overwhelmed by American supermarkets when I returned home from my two-year service in Jamaica and nodded with understanding when the author’s friend becomes overcome by the chocolate chip cookie selection and leaves the store empty handed. I still wash and reuse tin foil and plastic cutlery and cringe when people waste water or food. And in solidarity with the author’s “Live Simply So Others May Simply Live” bumper sticker, I, too, used my PC readjustment allowance to buy a used Honda in which I moved across country with everything I owned. I still use my Moosewood cookbook and have always loved the Quaker faith. And I also had an inexpensive wedding and thought I had a simple lifestyle figured out, until I had kids.
Also like the author, I first started to write while my last child was napping and the first working title of my first book was just that, Naptime. I wasn’t very productive until she was in school full-time either but I had more kids than the author so that took me a bit longer to achieve. I also lecture my kids about how the students in Jamaica treasured even one pencil and used it down to the bitter end, even while I purchase new school supplies every year with a good deal of consternation. Maybe I’ll try her idea of bribing them fifty cents for each object they salvage next year.
Like the author, I started a Step It Up campaign here in RI in 2007 under the urging of Bill McKibben in response to global warming. And when I felt I was more a part of the problem than the solution, we moved our family to Costa Rica to live more simply. As for her failed attempt to reuse the basement dehumidifier water? I pour mine in the nearby washing machine as part of my wash water. And, yes, I hang my clothes on the line all year round, too.
I typically quote the Native American proverb, “We didn’t inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.” So I enjoyed the author remembering the less-famous second part of the Great Law of the Iroquois: “We must consider the impact on the seventh generation . . . even if it requires having skin as thick as the bark of a pine.”
And in light of current events here in America and urging not to normalize what isn’t normal, I enjoyed this passage, “Martin Luther King once argued that it was actually pathological for a person to become well-adjusted to a dysfunctional society. King challenged psychologists to help ordinary citizens deepen their capacity for what he called “creative maladjustment.” Speaking to a room of seventy Quakers who wanted to think about ways to lessen their own and their society’s environmental impact, Chase challenged us to become maladjusted ourselves, to reject the norms of a culture that was destroying the earth and its people. King’s framing helped me to be less self-conscious about my little oddball choices.” Here’s to the oddballs...
I understand the author’s worry that her PC experience was more than just “the youthful adventure of a white woman who chose simplicity as an exotic adventure” as it seems that could be true for both or many of us RPCV’s. And yet our youthful adventures, our glorified extended GS camping trips, have set us both firmly on a path, difficult as it may be to see or sustain sometimes. The third goal of the PC is to bring the world back home, and I think it’s true for all RPCV’s that we understand the irony of having left our country to discover different walks of life, which many of us learned to embrace, and yet much of the world still clamors for the things we’re willing to relinquish, as echoed by her Botswana friend, Mmadithapelo, “Well, you Americans have had all these things long enough to see the downside of them. We Batswana are just starting to enjoy them, so we still want to have what you have.” We understand the unsustainability of their desire.
Simplicity. Faithfulness. Hope. All are worthy elements of life and well worth the struggle. In closing, I think the author’s favorite quotation by Frederick Buechner, the Presbyterian theologian and uncle of my friend, is fitting to contemplate, “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” Clearly, I enjoyed this book and think it worth reading. Namaste.
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