Eliza and Camille

I was talking on the phone the other day to my sister Eliza. Eliza is a painter who just recently got back from studying art in Iceland to graduate from Wellesley and start her new job as an artist assistant to two artists. While on the phone, Eliza was telling me how a woman had stopped by the studio the other day and mentioned that she might like to offer Eliza a teaching position, teaching art at a prestigious New England preparatory school.

It’s funny because Eliza and I never really want or wanted to teach, but we both frequently find ourselves in teaching positions. While I sort out what projects to pursue and what environmental tasks to take on, I am teaching English two days a week at the primary school in Kawaza. While I try to quiet my 45 students swiping at my face for the chalk I know is there, Eliza is considering the task of teaching teenagers how to create, mold, sculpt, paint, and draw their visions. I told Eliza when she sulkily mentioned on the phone that she never wanted to teach, that she should feel honored, that a woman who she barely knows, can imagine Eliza teaching and inspiring students, among the crisp changing colors of leaves and carefully placed bricks of New England no less.

Though of course I have always loved my sisters, it took moving oceans away from them to know that I actually feel honored to know them, not just as sisters, but as woman who kick ass whether it be on canvas or on a running track. When I was looking over my other post I noticed I had written about sacrifice and the need there is for people today to sacrifice for each other. All of the people around me are almost sacrificers out of necessity. They sacrifice a lot for the survival of their own.

I was talking with a woman in Bolero who was telling me how its very odd to her that people from America seem very intent on not taking from anyone and on giving gifts after gifts are given and never really being comfortable in just receiving without giving back. She told me the other day to stop thanking her because I was going to get tired of it. She told me: “You are here as my guest, so I will give to you and I don’t need anything back.” This woman buys her oil in small packets each day and only enough tomatoes for one meal, but within her pure day-to-day mostly unsustainable actions, is a tightly sewn in sustainable sacrifice. She shares her day-to-day tomatoes with me, no questions asked and no expectations attached.

I feel for the most part this way of sacrifice is not really a part of society in the U.S. and when it comes about it usually comes with a lot of guilt, a favorite emotion of mine. Guilt that pushes us to run out to get a bottle of wine after a free dinner or to continually offer money for a meal that someone already offered to pay for. As a frequent buyer of “guilty wine,” I thought about whom I sacrifice for without attached expectations, guilt, and repayment. I sacrifice for my sisters and the guilt they never make me feel. I sacrifice for Eliza who has always known what she’s wanted, and has carefully constructed her dreams through painting and organic farm fields. I would sacrifice anything for her confidence she continually restores in herself and others. For the unapologetic views she professes through words, paintings, and drawings. For her creations, her canvases, and muffins. For her future of having more and more people fall in love with her surreal oil swirls of color and for the one who will be lucky enough to fall in love with the artist herself.

And to Camille a sacrifice of it all for a woman whose commitment to all she is passionate about not only inspires but also most likely evokes a little fear as she moves with a force that threatens any in her way. To her sassy way of being that challenges not only her running competitors, but all she relates to and speaks to. To her effortless style and blue eyes that look as if they have gulped down all the beauty of blue. To who Camille runs her beauty and Eliza who captures it in a landscape both painted and farmed. Both deserve a preservation that not only preserves what is directly around them, but that preserves the whole they are a part of including small countries in Southern Africa.

I think that maybe constructing a home is learning how to build a home anywhere while at the same time knowing you’ll sacrifice all you got for the home you already know. I work for home in part by preserving the home I know that is so carefully constructed in two incredible women, their parents and in all of my family. I know I sacrifice for them and hope that from that I will know how to make a wider sacrifice, a kind of wider sacrifice that is ladled out when one cooks tomatoes in oil and serves them to strangers.

Tags: camille, eliza, malawi, peace corps, sacrifice, sisters