Ultra run, art show, film to support Congo charity

OnTheGroundGlobal.org

SEACREST — Morning coffee was a special Congo blend as a crowd gathered in the offices of Amavida Coffee & Tea in Seacrest to hear about the company’s plans to aid destitute women in the region where the coffee originated.

“We’re hosting a 40-mile ultra run with On TheGround Global to raise funds for Project Congo, a gender equality and women’s empowerment initiative,” explained Casey Tindell-Trejo, Amavida’s marketing coordinator, in the lead-up to the meeting.

Amavida has long been associated with programs to educate and improve the quality of life of the coffee farmers with whom the company deals directly. Most of these have been in concert with On the Ground, a global charity founded by Chris Treter of Higher Grounds Trading Co.

Amavida has participated in On The Ground projects in Chiapas, Mexico, and Ethiopia, helping to provide potable water, financial training, and micro loans to those living in desperate conditions.

“We have the ability to take a very little amount of capital and do incredible stuff, see real impacts,” Treter said during a conference call. “We put in water projects (at Chiapas) at one-fifth the cost of what the Mexican government could do. This is real stuff. It works. It’s effective.”

The next projects on the agenda involve helping farmers and families in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where a constant state of war has lingered for decades, and where women — mostly widows — suffer the hardships. Several public events will take place locally to raise awareness and funds.

“The goal is to educate our community about what is going on abroad, and how we’re doing that through coffee — helping to create sustainable communities,” said Dan Bailey, founder and owner of Amavida.

The events planned through the fall and into the new year will include:

l Solstice Run: From sunrise to sunset Dec. 21, run 40 miles along Scenic 30A and nature trails around the towns to support Project Congo initiatives. No registration fees will be charged; instead, runners are asked to solicit pledges. Details: WinterSolsticeRun.org

Running a 5K for charity is laudable, Treter said, but “when you run 40 miles, you’re really bringing attention to something else.” In this case, he said, “Running is a bridge that provides an opportunity for people to pay attention to something that’s extremely important.”

l Paddle Run: Tentatively scheduled for Spring 2015, this will be a paddleboard event set on the coastal dune lakes of 30A.

l Project Congo Coffee: Amavida is bagging and selling a special blend of coffee grown in Congo; $5 per bag sold goes to Project Congo; each bag has photos from the region shot by Treter. Details: Amavida.com

l Art Show: Musician Cody Copeland is organizing an exhibit that will feature art created by locals on the theme of gender equality. (Date and location to be determined.)

l Screening “Virunga”: Amavida will host screenings of a documentary film about the Virunga National Park, one of the most bio-diverse locations on the planet, and home to the last of the mountain gorillas. (Dates and locations to be announced.) Park rangers protect this UNESCO world heritage site from armed militia, poachers and the dark corporate forces struggling to control Congo’s rich natural resources.

Treter, who has run ultra marathons for charity across Ethiopia, organized a Summer Solstice run in Travers City, Mich., that raised $30,000 for Project Congo. The money is being used at the coffee cooperative to boost education in gender equality and teach native women business skills. 

The money will also allow for micro-loans so the women can fund a business, raising their profile in their community.

The goal for Amavida’s Project Congo events is to raise $100,000.

On the Ground points to Zawadi Kaleura as an example of a real person the project will aid. Her husband drowned trying to cross a lake to Rwanda so he could buy sheet metal for the roof of their hut. Now she’s raising four boys in a region where constant conflict has destroyed the economy and killed nearly 6 million people.

Zawadi is a first year member of the Muungano coffee cooperative, but has only 700 trees from which she can harvest beans — not nearly enough to provide enough income to support her family.

Project Congo will provide a Gender Action Learning system and series of workshops for the area’s women to learn leadership, business and accounting skills, as well as micro-loans to help generate their own businesses and begin lifting themselves out of poverty. She said a micro-loan would allow her to buy and sell palm oil and soft drinks, making enough profit to maintain her home and send her children to school.

“If we could see the reality of our neighbors’ lives, we would take care of them — because we are a caring people,” Treter said.

Peace. 

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(This is my Undercurrents column for PanamaCity.com and The News Herald this week.)

One last ‘na-nu’ before you go

Mork calling Orson. Come in, Orson.

PANAMA CITY BEACH — In June of last year, a supermoon was in the sky the night author and screenwriter Richard Matheson died. A supermoon painted the night in brilliant shades of blue last Sunday, as well, the night actor and comedian Robin Williams’ took his own life.

It’s getting to be that I dread the next supermoon, which will hang over us on Sept. 9, and wonder what its tides will wash to the heavens.

Among his many dramatic roles, Williams portrayed Chris, the lead character in a 1998 movie based on Matheson’s brilliant 1978 novel, “What Dreams May Come.” In the film, as in the book, Chris finds himself in heaven after a car crash, then descends into his wife’s self-imposed hell to rescue her soul after she commits suicide.

“It’s not about understanding,” Chris says in one scene, “it’s about not giving up!”

By Tuesday, social media was filled with lists of Williams’ roles that touched people — beginning with his antics as Mork from Ork and continuing through his recent TV series, “The Crazy Ones.” Many of them quoted from “Dead Poets Society” or “The World According to Garp” or even “Mrs. Doubtfire.” Many commented on “What Dreams May Come” and wondered how a man who starred in a film with such a transcendent message could fall victim to his own darkness.

It’s a valid question with a gaping hole in it that defies an easy explanation because it’s a darkness that defies logic. It’s almost more incredible that Williams was with us for so long, considering the depression with which he struggled throughout his life. He was the quintessential clown, laughing in public, crying in private. Victim of a disease that so many fail to understand, he tried to cope by turning his pain into other people’s laughter.

After a friend’s post on Facebook quoted a line of dialogue, I was reminded of a scene in Steven Spielberg’s “Hook,” in which Williams played an adult Peter Pan who returns to Neverland in search of his kidnapped children. He’s a sad man with a broken spirit, on his knees in the sanctuary of the Lost Boys. One of the children removes Peter’s glasses and touches his face, finally turning up the corners of his mouth. The child sees the ghost of a smile on the man’s face and says, “Oh, there you are, Peter!”

Or the scene in “Bicentennial Man,” an often overlooked gem of a movie in which Williams played a robot that longed to become human. “To be acknowledged for who and what I am, no more, no less. Not for acclaim, not for approval, but the simple truth of that recognition. This has been the elemental drive of my existence, and it must be achieved, if I am to live or die with dignity.”

In his too-short life, Williams earned the acclaim, the recognition, even the approval. So many times, the wonder of his talent, his lightning wit, his giving spirit were acknowledged. But the mystery and terror of his condition didn’t allow him to internalize the love, left him perhaps feeling like a sham, not even a whole human being.

He said in interviews that addiction robbed him of his dignity, and the manner of his death has robbed him of it once again. Just as it has robbed all of us who were children getting laughs in the classroom by repeating Mork’s jokes from the night before, or who laughed until we cried while listening to his album, “Reality: What a Concept,” or who were moved by his performance in “The Fisher King.”

If this loss is to mean anything, and though we may never understand, we must never give up.

Na-nu, Na-nu. 

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(This is my Undercurrents column this week for PanamaCity.com and The News Herald.)

Writers' Jargon (7)

Writers have their own language. A shorthand, if you will. Outsiders (non-writers) think they know what most of these words and phrases mean. But they don't. Here, in a continuing series of posts, I will divulge the SECRET MEANINGS OF WRITERS' JARGON.

Synopsis: (thought experiment) If you could have told the story in a couple of pages, you wouldn’t have spent years writing 90,000 words.

Exposition: (legal term) The position your ex-spouse takes when suing for half of the earnings from the book you finally published after she/he left, citing emotional, financial and other forms of support during your years of work on the manuscript.

Preface: (noun) The youthful, hopeful, unlined features a writer puts forward before beginning work, as compared to the old, tired, bitter, wrinkled face he ends up with.

...to be continued ...

GCSC summer program reworks ‘Miracle’

Cover Artwork

PANAMA CITY — Summer has found Gulf Coast State College students molding something new out of a “miracle” story.

The GCSC 2014 Summer Theatre Project, taught by Associate Professor of Music Scott Kirkman and Associate Professor of Theatre Jason Hedden, is called “From Page to Stage, the Making of a Musical.”

In the six-week course, students formed an artistic team to adapt the novel, “Miracle of the White Leaves,” by Dr. Stephen Dunnivant, dean of GCSC’s Advanced Technology Center, and his daughter, Gina Dunnivant, with art by Gina Ricci. Students were tasked to produce a play script, create original music and design concepts for costumes, sets and props with a goal of preparing a workshop production at GCSC in the autumn semester, as well as a “world premiere” in 2015 at the Marina Civic Center.

“We've been trying for years to have them perform a free show for our elementary grades at the Marina Civic Center,” said Jennifer Jones of Bay Arts Alliance, who has been sitting in on workshop presentations this summer. “I’m a big advocate for adding the ‘A’ for ‘Arts’ into the STEM curriculum.”

“Miracle of the White Leaves” is the tale of a monk, two children, and the youngest daughter of Europe’s greatest king, destined to bond with unexpected allies no larger than your finger. Together, these unlikely heroes plant the seeds to unite a continent and save civilization in its darkest hour. Originally a screenplay, the elder Dunnivant refashioned the tale into a novel.

“It’s really fantasy-oriented, set in the time of King Charlemagne, so it also has the historical element,” Jones said of the work.

>>Link to the Amazon page for 'Miracle of the White Leaves'<<

The summer program was open to GCSC students and community members with interest and skills in writing, storytelling, singing, songwriting, instrumental music, acting, dance, choreography, design, photography, costuming, videography, sound recording and visual art. The entire process was documented on video.

>>See a promotional video about the project<<

“We had 18 students registered in the class and two community collaborators,” Hedden said. “We will do a workshop production for fourth- and fifth-grade ESE students from Bay District Schools, and then the world premiere for 2,000 third-graders in April 2015.”

The show at the Civic Center will be part of the Very Special Arts Festival, an annual enrichment activity for students with learning challenges, Jones said. The Civic Center will also host a finished, full-scale musical production for the general public.

“The 2014 Summer Theatre Project has been, by far, the most fascinating, exciting, memorable college experience I’ve ever had,” said participant Jenny Hammond, who received her associate of arts degree in Liberal Arts at GCSC this year, graduating Magna Cum Laude. “I am so happy to be a part of something that will touch so many others if only for 50 minutes of their lifetime. It will be something that stays with me for years to come.”

Jacob Walsingham, a Mosley High School student dual-enrolled at GCSC this summer, said the class taught him that it can take “a lot of trial and error to make your ideas come to life.”

The Dunnivant family lives in Panama City Beach. Before joining GCSC, Stephen Dunnivant taught middle school grades in Bay County, where he has lived for more than 35 years. He has worked at Gulf Coast for more than 17 years.

The son of a musician, his early years were spent traveling from the mountains of upstate New York to the cotton fields of Arkansas. He credits his mother, Evelyn Audrey Beardsley, with instilling in him the joy of reading.

“Like so many sons, he grew up listening to stories from his mother,” Stephen Dunnivant’s Amazon biography states. “One day, an uncle in Arkansas sat in awe watching Audrey read to her children. He told her later that he had never seen anyone do that before. While this was the 1960s, sadly, many parents still do not read to their kids.

“As it was in the 8th and 9th century so long ago, education is the only enduring escape from poverty and ignorance.”

Peace. 

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(This is my Undercurrents column for PanamaCity.com and The News Herald this week.)

Keep watching the skies!

PANAMA CITY BEACH — A tropical front moved across the beaches early in the week, and I had the fortune of taking our dogs for a late night gallivant just as the clouds broke.

Stars like diamonds stood out against a deep black sky behind billowing cobalt thunderheads. I watched the creeping pinpoint light of a satellite or high-flying jet cutting a slow arc among them, and felt filled with childlike wonder.

I vowed in that moment not to fall prey to the ever insistent specter of self-reflection and recriminations that I felt building up as my lifeline rolled closer to marking its fifth decade. That long on the planet makes it easier for a brain like mine to look back and ponder all of the things I regret, all of the things I didn’t do and never will, all the people I miss.

Instead, I promised to do the more difficult thing, to spend these next days peering ahead, focusing on all the alternative timelines yet to be created, the infinite possibilities, events and accomplishments that still could happen, stories yet to be told, the people still with me and those I have yet to know.

To stare past the cloudline and into the deep unknown, where stars sparkle and uncharted worlds spin, and even my bad eyes can view with the power of hope and imagination.

On the morning I sat down to write this, I learned that Ernest Spiva, a man I considered a friend — though in truth, we barely knew each other — had passed away. He was 77, which meant he was 27 when I was born and nearly 55 when our paths first converged.

Before he retired, he liked to call me up on any given day and open with, “This is your conscience speaking.”

I had the opportunity recently to read the stories of Ernest’s youth in an unpublished manuscript he called “Growing Up on Grace.” And while he enjoyed looking back and telling funny tales, he never failed to encourage those around him to think about their futures. I think that’s the takeaway he’s left me with, at least in this moment.

I joke about having outlived my own “sell by” date, knowing I should have paid for the extended warranty when I had that cardio bypass, or looking in the mirror and seeing only bad hair days in my future. I toast to absent friends and loved ones. I tweet to anyone who will listen to “tell those punk kids to get off my lawn.” But all of that’s a front, and especially hollow when exposed before the vault of heaven.

When I was a kid, I watched a black-and-white sci-fi/monster film called “The Thing From Another World.” Produced by Howard Hawks, it starred James Arness as the “intellectual carrot” (i.e., alien plant monster) terrorizing soldiers and scientists at a remote arctic station.

The film ends with a reporter broadcasting the story of their harrowing adventure and exhorting other reporters: “Tell the world. Tell this to everybody, wherever they are. Watch the skies — everywhere. Keep looking. Keep watching the skies.”

It’s good advice, even if you don’t expect to catch an invasion of walking plant creatures. Maybe you’ll spot a satellite or a shooting star. Maybe you’ll see something even grander.

Keep watching the skies. Keep looking up, not back. The past will take care of itself. The future needs your attention.

Peace.

(This is my Undercurrents column for PanamaCity.com and The News Herald this week.)

Writers' Jargon (6): The Guest Edition

Writers have their own language. A shorthand, if you will. Outsiders (non-writers) think they know what most of these words and phrases mean. But they don't. Here, in a continuing series of posts, I will divulge the SECRET MEANINGS OF WRITERS' JARGON.

Since this expose' began, some of my writerly friends have suggested some secret meanings from their own private stash, and here they are:

Hero's Journey: the delusion that as a writer, you're following some mythic path that will make you a more complete person. (Thanks to Mark Boss)

Purple Prose: the words you use to describe an idiotic book critic and their questionable ancestry. (Also from Mark Boss)


Beta Reader: a friend who hasn't opened a novel since high school that you rope into reading your un-edited, 300,000-word rip off of James Joyce. (Mark Boss)

Writer's vocation:  lifelong; unpaid; computer keyboard skills required. (Thanks to Marty Sirmons)

...to be continued ...

Pyramid delivers arts, crafts, magical performance

LYNN HAVEN — A special event marking the 20th anniversary of a special program will offer guests the chance to purchase art and see a main stage performance of “The Magic Carpet Ride” on Saturday.

This is the second year The Pyramid Players will perform at the Kaleidoscope Theatre, 207 E. 24th St. in  Lynn Haven. Doors open at 5 p.m. with an exhibit of art, archival prints, crafts and jewelry created by the members of Pyramid Panama City, a non-profit organization serving more than 100 adults with disabilities.

The play begins at 6 p.m. Admission is free, but donations are suggested. Some of the artwork and other items will be available for purchase.

Pyramid Panama City opened in June 1994, along with four sister programs located throughout the state. It serves adults with a wide range of abilities, needs and interests, and is best known for its innovative visual and performing arts programs. Statewide, Pyramid currently serves more than 700 people.

The Pyramid Players are all adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities whose true talents shine through on stage.

“It has been a privilege to see our students grow through the arts and other training,” said Marilyn Yon, co-founder of Pyramid, in a recent news release. “All they need is someone to believe in them and give them the tools and opportunities.”

“The Magic Carpet Ride” is described as a family-friendly magic show and play in one that will carry viewers on a worldwide adventure to meet favorite magicians, including Harry Houdini. The performance showcases the acting skills of the Players with the added attraction of magic. Add some singing, a little dancing and the promised hilarity of the Pyramid Clown Troupe, and you have the makings of an evening that will entertain the inner child in anyone.

Additionally, the show will provide the audience with a glimpse into the talents of a group of people whose ability to contribute to their communities too often goes unrecognized.

“Pyramid’s students face many challenges in their lives.” Panama City Director Cindy Coleman said. “Performing gives them the opportunity to demonstrate their abilities.”

According to information provided by Pyramid Panama City’s performing arts coordinator (and Kaleidoscope Theatre regular) Rachel Eiland-Hall, cast members learn that their hard work and dedication permit them to excel, not only on stage, but also in their personal lives. The demands of performing allow The Players to stretch their talents and improve everyday skills.

They develop clearer, more expressive singing and speaking voices, and improve coordination, balance and rhythm. They also learn responsibility to each other through commitment to months of demanding rehearsals.

“They put in a lot of time and hard work rehearsing for the show, which allows them to learn their lines and dances, but they are also learning to work as a team toward a common goal,” Coleman said. “I never cease to be amazed at what they are able to accomplish.”

And that’s the magic secret to success, isn’t it? It only looks easy because you put in so much hard work before the curtain opened.

Peace.

(This was my Undercurrents column for July 18 in The News Herald and at PanamaCity.com)