I’ve written probably thousands of stories and articles that have been published, starting with my days at the Call-Chronicle Newspapers in Allentown, PA, when I was first married to my wife, Lynn, of 57 years.  Articles published more recently included stories on the web written while working with American Baptist Churches USA and also writing for Living Lutheran, the periodical of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Writers can produce pieces and not get any feedback from them. I think hearing back from readers personally may take place more easily in local reporting. I am not sure.

I’ll relate two occasions when I did get feedback. One occasion was beyond amusing. The second one I’ll characterize as a remarkable outcome I learned about quite by chance.

When I was a young reporter, Lynn and I moved from a walkup apartment to our first house, a small Cape Cod-style dwelling in a village called Lanark outside of Allentown. The garage needed a new roof. Being of modest means, we enlisted two friends to help me put new green shingles on the roof over the old shingles. We had two wives helping by handing shingles up to us. Much to my surprise when we drove past the house quite a few years later well after we had moved away the shingles we had installed seemed to still be in place. That amazed me.

Some drinking was involved during this do-it-yourself initiative bordering at times on debacle. In short, I described a litany of mistakes we made during the effort in a self-effacing humor piece I wrote for Allentown’s Evening Chronicle. The city editor seemed to welcome these pathetic tales, such as when I tried to go through a window after locking myself out of the house. They ran with cartoons by a noted illustrator named Bud Tamblyn. The roofing piece was the first of its kind the paper had published. Readers seemed to enjoy these stories written at my own expense, perhaps because the news, even then, could be — humorless.

The next day a phone call was referred to me from the city desk. The caller identified himself as the head of the Roofers Union in the county.

“I want to thank you,” he said. “That story was the best advertisement for skilled, professional roofers the paper could have carried.” Then he concluded, “Is there any chance the story could run again next week?” I was laughing at my own expense. I had to tell him we don’t run stories like that twice.

The truly unimaginable story result happened after I wrote a piece about how newly independent Zimbabwe was recovering after a horrible war. I was on assignment for The Lutheran, magazine of the denomination known then as the Lutheran Church in America. I had never done reporting and photography out of a war zone and haven’t been to such a place since. It was 1981. I wrote how children had not been able to go to school for five years. Many schools and churches had been reduced to rubble from the conflict. The Lutheran World Federation was assisting in the rebuilding and recovery. But the truth was Zimbabwe simply had not enough classrooms, not enough books, not enough teachers and too many children wandering from place to place to find a school they could register to attend. Some children had been to four places or more, always rejected. But the sense of resilience and determination in the newly peaceful young nation was palpable.

After the story appeared in The Lutheran (circulation nearly 300,000), I took a train from Philadelphia to New York City for a meeting. During the trip a colleague introduced me to a couple she knew, Gail Altman and Fred Noll, both teachers from downtown Philadelphia. Fred and Gail told me they were glad to meet me. They had read my story and been deeply moved by it. Now they were on their way to the church’s national headquarters to receive training to devote a year of their lives teaching children in a little Zimbabwe town called Masase that I had written about. I was flabbergasted and deeply thankful that God had empowered me to write a story producing such a result. It was truly a remarkable outcome.

I have considered Neighbors Revisited to be a legacy book. What has made it so?

First of all, in researching the particulars for the book I “revisited” the meaning of “neighbor.”

The pure dictionary definition is someone who lives next door or down the street. As I contemplated the writing of some theologians, however, I got a different picture of the definition. Our neighbor is everyone really. No limits according to geography, race or religion. No limits at all. So the book title seemed to fit, even when I was writing about people halfway around the world. (Indeed, in my trip to the Philippines, Papua New Guinea and Indonesia, I flew completely around the world.)

A neighbor is one who serves as well. We are meant to serve and be served. It is a neighborly form of exchange. Reformer Martin Luther alluded to this in his pamphlet, Freedom of a Christian.

So when I used to have Homeland Security credentials to call on seafarers visiting the Port of Philadelphia and bringing us “stuff” we need (including bananas, automobiles and rock salt mined in Brazil), the crew members I visited were neighbors, often Filipinos, serving people like me living in the U.S. And because I came to learn of all the hardships they endured at sea to help people like me, I found it an honor to serve them back, with a dose of hospitality. They were so far from home and many had been away for a year. We truly live in a global “neighborhood.” We need each other. Each one of us is a piece in Almighty God’s holy and humongous people puzzle. If any piece is missing, the puzzle isn’t complete. Everyone matters to God. It’s as simple as that. I enjoy sharing that puzzle story with children.

Then there were the voices of folks from six African and Asian places who had taught me so much. I did not want those voices to be lost. I wanted them to speak once more on my book’s pages. And so I revisited them once more, writing about them — again.

We live in such a time of polarization, of divisions between cultures. I have tried throughout my life to embrace people different from me and learn from them. I believe God wants us to embrace each other that way as we strive to be good neighbors. As I approach my 80th year and draw closer to departing this earth, I want to celebrate the meaning and importance of diversity as an opportunity for learning from and teaching each other. Knowing the folks I have met on these pages has been such an incomparably rich blessing. And if any words I have written have made a positive difference, it is only because God gave them to me to use.

 

I have been blessed to work as a photojournalist in a dozen countries and 30 U.S. states. Memories abound.

For example, in anticipation of the 400th anniversary of the Augsburg Confession I visited more than a dozen sites connected with the life of Reformer Martin Luther. I crossed from West Germany to East Germany in an experience that was especially emotional.

But one day in my journalistic life stands out — so much so that I think of it almost every day. It was a pivotal factor in deciding to write my book Neighbors Revisited, a church journalist’s life lessons learned from people of other cultures.

It was the 22-hour period of time when I visited a village in Papua New Guinea called Nomane in that young nation’s Central Highlands.

We live in a highly transactional culture. For example, when I used to visit a drugstore to purchase shampoo (I don’t need it anymore), I would pick up what I wanted and, often in a preoccupied state, pay for it at the checkout counter while barely noticing the cashier.

On the Papua New Guinea day in question in 1985, burdened with a heavy camera bag to take black and white color photos, I flew with a mail plane pilot in a single engine Cessna to Nomane, landing on the side of a majestic peak on a muddy airstrip.

I had plotted out my schedule over 22 hours ahead, some of which would be spent sleeping (hopefully). As a deadline-oriented writer I wanted to get a jump start, meeting the village evangelist Manape Nokul and telling the story about how, counter-culturally, he had persuaded his neighbors to move their village from high terrain (where you could be more protected from your enemies) to lower, more fertile ground especially suited for farming. I learned from a pastor who grew up in Papua New Guinea that moving was a special problem because villagers feared spirits that they believed would hang out near the river they were moving toward. In the book I titled this chapter “How faith moved a village and how a village moved me.” Years later the title still seems especially fitting.

I quickly learned from the German missionary who hosted me that jump-starts wouldn’t work in the village. “You have to spend time with the leaders first. You have to have a meal with them and let them ask you questions,” Phillip Hauenstein explained. (“But that will take so much time,”) I said to myself.

But I yielded. I ate meal of tinfish, as they called it (tuna in a can, a delicacy saved for feasts) and baked potato. The questions to me poured forth. “Where did you come from? How did you get here? What is your home like? Are there farmers where you live? What is your family like? What do you think of our village?” Around 11 p.m. the questions and answers ended. Except for one. “What would you like to do here?” they asked. I said I wanted to meet and talk to Manape. I wanted him to tell me the story of the village and talk about the faith of the villagers. I wanted to take lots of pictures. I knew they had just started farming with a water buffalo. They had only had metal tools for 40 years. Especially, I said, I would like to take a photo of the villagers together.Would all of this be OK? I asked. They all nodded.

Phillip and I said our good-byes and headed off for bed in his bungalow. It began to rain — very hard. I thought that the persistent rain might wreck my plans for the next morning. “Don’t worry,” Phillip told me. “It often rains here at night. It will be a beautiful day tomorrow.” I listened to the rainfall on the bungalow roof as I tried to sleep — fretting.

As Phillip predicted. the next morning dawned with a clear sky. We made our way to the village.

No-one was there. I panicked. What is happening? “I think I know,” Phillip mused. “Follow me.” We walked up a curvy ribbon dirt trail to the top of the village. There, positioned perfectly for a photo before a picturesque hut were all the villagers. Dear friend, you have probably taken photos where you have to arrange the subjects suitably, move them closer together, tall ones in the back etc. Especially if you are photographing a lot of people.

I needed to do nothing of the sort. They had listened to me so carefully. Everything was perfect. I took out my cameras and began to shoot. I had tears in my eyes.

The whole day went like that. The additional pictures took half the time they would have because the villagers had planned for me. Manape’s interview worked efficiently because he had heard my questions the night before.

These villagers some would describe as “primitive” were not at all transactional. Because they had come to know me so well first my assignment was easily and completely fulfilled. I had learned a special lesson about hospitality and the embracing of a total stranger. The experience changed me.

As I said good-bye to the village at 2 p.m., boarding the Cessna once more, I found myself asking “Who are the primitive people anyhow?”