Reader’s Digest ÊI once saw under Achievements on a CV: ‘former world’s youngest person’. It made me laugh so much I gave the person an interview. ÊOn a job application, my roommate wrote, “Can make threeminute ramen in 2:50.” He got the interview. ÊIn response to our posting for a software Reader’s Digest will pay for your funny anecdote or photo in any of our humour sections. Post it to the editorial address, or email: [email protected] developer job, a candidate wrote under Summary of Qualifications: “22 years of experience as web developer; BA in organizational management; spent too much time on the computer during childhood.” He was hired within the week. —reddit.com Sign spotted outside the Clays Mill Baptist Church in Nicholasville, Kentucky: “Whoever stole our AC units, keep one. It’s hot where you’re going.” —the christian post A French man who was fired in 2015 for essentially being boring recently won his lawsuit against his old bosses. The man was let go after refusing to join his co-workers after hours at pubs and elsewhere— outings that he said often ended in debauchery. Nor did he partake in the exchange of crazy nicknames. In siding with the ex-employee, the court ruled that the company couldn’t force its workers to be fun. —metro.co.uk If you have a small bladder, don’t think about taking a job with Anpu Electric Science and Technology. The Chinese company has a once-a-day toilet break policy. Need to pee again? You’ll be labelled a slacker and fined 20 yuan (`227) for every infraction. — And then there are the future bosses, who, during job interviews, hit you with absurd questions and demands like these: Ê“Sing a song that best describes you.” Ê“Using a scale of 1 to 10, rate yourself on how weird you are.” Ê“Who do you like the best, your mom dad?” do I rate as ewer?” e web recruitYOU’RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME! This 16 October, as you celebrate Boss’s Day, be very happy you don’t work for these bullies: ARTPARTNER-IMAGES/GETTY IMAGES he best our d e do vie se th r ev y —odditycentral.com the or your d Ê“How an interv —respons ment readersdigest.in 49
Reader’s Digest 52 october 2023
NO MORE By Patricia Pearson ACHES? HEALTH IT MIGHT BE IN YOGA CLASS when you first feel it—when did downward dog start getting so hard on the wrists? Or it could be at your weekly squash or tennis game that you notice your knees screaming back at you whenever you pivot. Chances are, it’s arthritis, which isn’t just an ‘old-people' problem: It usually kicks in between the ages of 40 and 60. By far the most common type of arthritis is osteoarthritis. It’s usually the result of decades of physical activity that wears down the cartilage in our joints. That’s the rubbery, frictionless tissue that acts as a shock-absorber between bones. After years readersdigest.in 53 illustration by Dan Page How we may (finally) be outsmarting joint pain
54 october 2023 Reader’s Digest of wear and tear, or an injury such as a fracture or dislocation, that cushion can harden and fray like a dried-out rubber band, causing the entire joint to become inflamed and painful (the word arthritis comes from the Greek arthro, which means ‘joint’, and itis, which means ‘inflammation’). Osteoarthritis, or OA, is diagnosed in two-thirds of people who experience any sort of joint pain. Women are more likely to suffer from it than men, for reasons that remain unclear. The World Health Organization estimates that 528 million people worldwide have OA, and an increase over the next decade is projected as the population ages. The joints that bear the brunt of OA are most often the knees, knuckles, base of the thumb, lower back and hips. Sufferers might notice swelling or even feel a grating sensation in the joints, and some people experience aching that’s deep enough to wake them up at night. Stiffness is common, particularly in the morning, and things like opening a jar or bending down aren’t as easy as they used to be. Fortunately, some innovative solutions may be on the way. HOW CAN YOU EASE THE PAIN? Maintaining a healthy body weight helps, since it’ll mean less load on your joints. Keeping extra weight off also minimizes your risk of getting OA in the first place. Exercise is often the first treatment doctors suggest. If you’re not already active, low-impact options like walking, biking or swimming are good ways to start moving more. Exercise helps ward off stiffness and keeps muscles supple around the joint. Yoga might bring relief, too, according to the Arthritis Foundation. Experts there also recommend seeing a physiotherapist, who can teach you some movements to improve mobility and increase your strength to support the affected joints. But most people find that these things don’t eliminate pain, or they help only if symptoms are mild to moderate. Over-the-counter pain relievers, such as ibuprofen and naproxen, relieve pain and stiffness, but aren’t a long-term solution because they can irritate the stomach. Doctors might prescribe an oral corticosteroid such as prednisone, but it can cause side effects such as weight gain, mood swings and high blood pressure, so it should be used only briefly. For some, corticosteroid injections can offer temporary relief, but two recent studies, one from the University “DIET HAS BEEN CRITICAL FOR ME. THE FEWER INFLAMMATORY FOODS I EAT, THE BETTER I FEEL.” ER I
readersdigest.in 55 Health of California, San Francisco, and the other from Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science in Chicago, found that they might actually lead to a progression of OA. Doctors may also recommend hyaluronic acid, which is injected into the joint to act as a viscous fluid replacement for the cartilage, like oil in a car engine. But it’s no cure. While the injection may temporarily relieve pain and even slow down progression of the disease, according to a landmark study published in the BMJ last year, it provides little to no long-term benefit for most patients. Another injectable treatment, which has been used since the 1980s to treat torn tendons and joint injuries, is platelet-rich plasma. Your own blood is removed, enriched with platelets and then injected. Some athletes have tried it for sports injuries—notably, Tiger Woods. But it appears to have mixed success, according to the American Journal of Sports Medicine, and much more research is needed to find out how to make it work better. So far, the only truly effective osteoarthritis treatment is a complete joint switch-out, whether it’s the replacement of knuckles, knees or hips. Millions of people around the world undergo the surgery, but the catch is that the new joints last only so long— 15 to 20 years—so many doctors don’t recommend it for anyone who is under the age of 60. HE FOUND POSITIVE WAYS TO LIVE WITH IT Ben Bebenroth, a Cleveland, Ohiobased farm-to-table chef, didn’t have much relief from OA pain until he underwent knee-replacement surgery. His osteoarthritis started when he was 15, after he injured his left knee in a snowboarding accident. For a long time, he self-medicated with alcohol and over-the-counter painkillers so he could keep up with his busy lifestyle and stay active. “I dealt with my pain that way for 25 years,” says the now 45-year-old, a former Marine. Aside from exercising and keeping his weight in check, he tried hyaluronic acid injections, steroid injections and even three arthroscopic, or ‘keyhole’, surgeries (sometimes recommended in cases where the OA was caused by injury). Nothing worked. Finally, Bebenroth underwent a total knee replacement at the unusually young age of 40. “When you reach the point of bone-onbone contact, you just grin and bear it until you can’t anymore,” he explains. Bebenroth knows it’s inevitable that he’ll develop some degree of arthritis in his right knee—that’s what happens if one joint takes the brunt of wear and tear when the injured one is long favoured—but in the meantime the surgery has allowed him to return with new enthusiasm to his work, and to the hiking and snowboarding he loves. He also avoids all sugar and alcohol, and supplements his diet with nutrient-
56 october 2023 Reader’s Digest dense, anti-inflammatory foods like turmeric and ginger from his organic farm, where he grows ingredients he uses at his restaurant. Featuring many foods from the Mediterranean diet—fish, nuts, beans, lean meats, lots of leafy vegetables—an anti-inflammatory diet is well established as being joint friendly. “Diet has been critical,” Bebenroth says. “The fewer inflammatory foods I eat, the better I feel.” Stretching, meditation and movement have also helped. “This way of living helps me move away from being in a reactive state, when you’re angry at your pain and end up soothing yourself with a sweet treat.” NEW HOPE Given how many people suffer from OA around the world, a lot of researchers are working on solutions—and are at last finding some. At Duke University, for example, researchers are planning to launch a clinical trial this year for a knee gel made of water-absorbing polymers that simulates cartilage. Using stem cells derived from our own bodies to treat arthritis also shows promise. In 2018, researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine managed to isolate skeletal stem-cells in adult humans, a significant step toward regenerating cartilage. “We thought skeletal stem cells existed for some time, but we weren’t sure,” says Charles Chan, an assistant professor of surgery at Stanford. “We used a technique called FACS, which is sort of like a jelly bean sorter. It allows us to separate types of cells based on the protein on their surface. There were around 100 types.” To understand which was which, the researchers transplanted the cells into mice to see what they differentiated into. Some turned into bone. Chan and his colleagues then discovered that they could foster the growth of new cartilage with these cells by sending them a new set of instructions. In their experiments, they created a microfracture by drilling a tiny hole in bone tissue. “This provokes skeletal stem cells to gush up in a blood clot,” Chan explains. “Left on its own, this would turn into scar tissue, or what we call fibrocartilage. It acts like a Band-Aid, holding everything in place. But it’s not as bouncy or slippery as regenerated cartilage.” What if, the team wondered, they somehow changed the chemical signalling that was telling the cells what to do? “We thought maybe we could interrupt the cells as they developed into cartilage on their way to becoming bone— coax them to finish their work at the cartilage stage,” explains Chan. The chemicals the team used to try this have RESEARCHERS ARE WORKING ON AN INJECTIBLE MEDICATION TO CURE THE DISEASE.
readersdigest.in 57 Health prior approval and safety profiles from the FDA for other applications, such as Avastin for breast cancer. It worked. The result of their experiment in laboratory mice, and then in human joint tissue infused into mice, “is that you get a nice piece of cartilage,” Chan says. “It’s durable. And the subjects get dramatic improvements in their pain and their movement.” The team is now raising funds for human clinical trials, where they plan to start with OA in patients’ thumbs and fingers. If all goes well, they may be able to bring an injectable medication to market that doesn’t just ease the symptoms but actually cures the disease. INNOVATIONS IN REDUCING PAIN Meanwhile, the Melbourne Stem Cell Research Centre in Australia has conducted a number of trials on the use of adipose- (fat-) derived stem cells in the treatment of OA. Similar experiments are taking place in Italy and Ireland. The idea is to work with our mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), which are important for making and repairing cartilage and bone. They seem to have multiple positive effects, including calming inflammation set off by the body’s immune response and reducing nerve pain. “Patients undergo a mini-liposuction,” says principal investigator Julien Freitag, a Melbourne-based musculoskeletal specialist. Then, the fat tissue is transferred to an accredited laboratory, where the MSCs are expanded and injected into a patient’s joint; a second injection is given six months later. While it remains somewhat unclear exactly how MSCs weave their healing magic, says Freitag, “our clinical research conducted over the last nine years has been incredibly promising.” That research, which includes a randomized controlled trial and data collected from actual cases, shows pain reduction and improvements in joint function. “We are seeing significant benefit to patients, whether they have mild, moderate or severe osteoarthritis.” Given that other research centres are also deep into treatment research, a government-approved breakthrough therapy will probably emerge in the next 10 to 15 years. If it proves to be as safe and effective as it has been in research so far, millions of sidelined athletes will be able to get back out onto the field, or just enjoy everyday life more. Knocking It Out of the Kitchen Did not realize until now that “step up to the plate” was a baseball idiom. As a picky eater growing up, I thought it meant showing up to the table and tackling the meal as best you could. — @KARENCHEEE
B E N E A T H T H E SEA ICE 58 october 2023 NATURE A dive into sub-zero Arctic waters uncovers long-kept secrets by Meaghan Brackenbury from up here jill heinerth pulls on a neoprene balaclava and adjusts her thick rubber gloves. Wearing a dry suit, red helmet and 20-kilogram tank filled with compressed air, the underwater explorer stands at the floe edge in Tallurutiup Imanga (formerly known as Lancaster Sound), Nunavut, the eastern entrance of the Northwest Passage in Canada.
Nathalie Lasselin descends on a line from the floe edge near Bylot Island, Nunavut. readersdigest.in 59 Reader’s Digest
60 october 2023 Reader’s Digest Heinerth is joined by her colleague Mario Cyr, two Inuit guides and a six-person camera crew. It’s June 2018, and Heinerth and Cyr are going to dive beneath the sea ice and film what they see. “The floe edge is like a moving buffet,” says Heinerth. “Every day, as it breaks away, it releases ice and nutrients into the ocean. In the summer, polar bears and narwhals, belugas and eider ducks come to feed.” It’s the perfect spot to dive, but getting there wasn’t easy. During spring, the floe edge can move kilometers per day as it breaks up. The team—on snowmobiles pulling sleds called qamutiit packed with scuba gear—slogged through slushy top water and around growing leads (long cracks in the ice) until they found it, roughly 80 kilometers from shore outside the hamlet of Ikpiarjuk (Arctic Bay). Heinerth and Cyr—hailing from Ontario and Quebec, respectively—do one last check of their gear. They are each attached to a rope held at the other end by a guide. The rope helps the divers find their way back out through the ice. Through a tug from the guide, it also warns them if a polar bear is nearby. Tightening their flippers and popping regulators into their mouths, the pair jump into the frigid water and slowly sink beneath the surface. The transition between worlds is sharp on the senses, and Heinerth and Cyr move slowly and cautiously. The sub-zero water is cold on the uncovered parts of their faces, but they are used to it. Strands of green and brown algae, which feed small shrimp and zooplankton, hang from the craggy sea ice above. Luminescent jellyfish drift through the water, and a school of Arctic cod darts by. Below, the divers can just make out the white of a beluga pod passing through the darkness, watching the humans with playful curiosity. It’s remarkable to see this life up close, but Heinerth is most struck by the sounds. “The ice is cracking, popping and fizzing as it releases gas while it melts,” she says. “Bearded seals and ringed seals make this trill sound that goes several octaves. Narwhals click their teeth and belugas sing like canaries. All these animals will be speaking at once, communicating with each other.” The Arctic Ocean—vast, remote and under ice for most of the year—is something of a holy grail for underwater adventurers. Montrealer Nathalie Lasselin has been leading dive expeditions out of Mittimatalik (Pond Inlet), on Qikiqtaaluk (Baffin Island), for more than a decade with Arctic Kingdom, currently the main high-end operator in the area, and the only one that offers scuba diving. An experienced diver herself, Lasselin has explored underwater caves in rural southwest China and on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, and dove for 30 hours, covering a distance
readersdigest.in 61 Nature Jill Heinerth, up against the underside of the floe edge of 70 kilometers along the bottom of the St. Lawrence River to raise awareness about drinking-water sources. But the Arctic remains one of the most exciting places she’s had the opportunity to dive, she says. “I love that you can’t put a point on the map and say ‘This is a dive site,’ because it’s always changing,” says Lasselin. “The ice might be there today, but not tomorrow. Am I going to dive on an iceberg? On the floe edge? Near the shore? I can’t predict that.” Arctic dives aren’t cheap. Arctic Kingdom’s typical eight-day itinerary involves travelling from Mittimatalik by snowmobile to a camp on the sea ice of Tasiujaq (Eclipse Sound). From there, staff and guests venture out each day to check out potential dive sites. The average cost? Roughly $22,000 [`18 lakh] per person. Françoise Gervais, another diving guide, first ventured into the polar region in July 2014, after being asked to join a team of 10 women—Heinerth among them—travelling in northeastern Canada up the Labrador coast to an island off Qikiqtaaluk, then across the Davis Strait to Greenland, stopping to explore along the way. The group sought to highlight the disappearance of sea ice and the effects of global warming through photography, videos and conversations with people in local Inuit communities. Gervais soon realized that she was hooked on the landscape. When a job opened up with the company that all photos by jill heinerth owned the boat the group had char-
62 october 2023 Reader’s Digest tered, she took it and stayed in the North for the rest of the summer. Within a year, she was guiding expeditions for Arctic Kingdom. Now, Gervais has done 30-plus Arctic dives. She once swam with narwhals as they dove under the ice. Another time, she and her diving buddy checked out a tunnel through a grounded iceberg. Covered in ridges and rivulets carved by waves, these massive hunks of ice can stretch 150 metres down to the sea floor—like a “cathedral under water,” says Gervais. And it’s not just recreational divers who come north seeking adventure. For scientists, it can be the research opportunity of a lifetime. It’s estimated that 80 per cent of the world’s oceans remain unmapped and unexplored, and that 90 per cent of marine species have yet to be classified. Nowhere is this truer than in the Arctic Ocean. One group collecting data to expand our knowledge is the British Columbia– based conservation organization Ocean Wise, which started sending small dive crews north in 2015. Working primarily out of Iqaluktuuttiaq (Cambridge Bay) when the sea ice was gone, crews would do two to five dives a day from shore or the back of a boat in open water. Swimming along the sea floor, divers took copious notes, pictures and videos of the species they saw, from jellyfish to sea anemones to cold-water corals. At times they used a tool called a transect (similar to a measuring tape), laying it out on the sea floor and counting how many of one species they observed within two metres on either side. Marine ecologist Jessica Schultz was a dive-team member for Ocean Wise in 2017 and 2018. She can’t get over how, roughly 285 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle, the summer waters around Iqaluktuuttiaq are as clear and bright blue as the tropics. She was particularly fond of diving around the Finlayson Islands, several hours by boat off the coast, where the rocky sea floor was a colourful explosion of life. Marine scientist Laura Borden has been to the Arctic during most summers since 2016—first with Ocean Wise, then as a consultant. She’s done dives near Aujuittuq (Grise Fiord), Tallurutit (Devon Island) and all along Tallurutiup Imanga. She compares the species she sees in the Arctic to those along the Pacific coast of her native B.C., where she has completed some 650 dives. Those species are often a lot larger in the North. “There are little animals called sea angels,” Borden says. “In B.C., they THE ARCTIC IS WARMING FAR FASTER THAN ANY OTHER REGION OF THE WORLD.
readersdigest.in 63 Nature may be an inch or so tall. But in the Arctic, they’re up to four inches. By their standards, that’s enormous.” Diving research in the North is slowly but surely increasing. Scott Johnson is the manager of field operations at the Canadian High Arctic Research Station (CHARS), which opened its doors in Iqaluktuuttiaq in 2019. The station has welcomed researchers from all over the world, offering services like a filling station for diving tanks. A permanent four-person diving team, led by Johnson, has also been recently added to the roster of research supports, and CHARS plans to have a fully operational seagoing dive vessel by the summer of 2024 to assist in travelling to survey locations. Now working on her Ph.D. in marine biology at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Schultz says she’s optimistic that facilities like CHARS can help research grow in the area—but she would like to see the work being done translated into real-life solutions for communities in the North. It’s no secret that the Arctic, warming four times faster than the rest of the world, is ground zero for climate change. NASA estimates that average ice coverage at the end of summer in the Arctic declined by 13 per cent per decade between 1979 and 2021. A 2021 report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted the Arctic Ocean would be “practically sea-ice free” in the summer at least once before 2050. Already, the animals and people living in the Arctic are being forced to adapt. So much of Inuit life relies on healthy and predictable sea ice—for transportation, hunting and recreation. The entire marine ecosystem hinges on the nutrients the ice provides. That’s why Heinerth—with Canada’s Polar Medal, her induction into the International Scuba Diving Hall of Fame and her bestselling memoir, Into the Planet—has made it her life’s mission to share her experiences with others. If people learn about the Arctic Ocean and its biodiversity for themselves, even if just on a screen or in the pages of a book, they might be inspired to take action in their own lives. For Heinerth, Arctic diving is about encouraging people to love and protect these things that she’s so fortunate to see. © 2022, MEAGHAN BRACKENBURY. FROM BENEATH THE SEA ICE, BY MEAGHAN BRACKENBURY, FROM UP HERE (JULY/AUGUST 2022), UPHERE.CA To See It Another Way The minute you start seeing your obstacles as things that are made for you, to give you what you need, then life starts to get fun. You start surfing on top of your problems instead of living underneath them. —ASHTON KUTCHER, ACTOR AND INVESTOR, ON RUNNING WILD WITH BEAR GRYLLS: THE CHALLENGE
WA L K I N G BAREFOOT With an ‘anyone-can-learn’ philosophy, Barefoot College is helping rural communities break the cycle of poverty through skill development and renewed self-worth by Naorem Anuja INSPIRATION 66 october 2023
readersdigest.in 67 Trained at Barefoot College, these rural women, based in remote Tilonia, Rajasthan, teach several others to become solar power technicians. Reader’s Digest
68 october 2023 O Of all of humanity’s assumptions about humanity, there is perhaps little that surpasses the prejudices the well-heeled have about the poor. Even when most admit to social inequities as the reason why the poor remain disadvantaged, there is often a litany of stereotypes that follow. But Sanjit ‘Bunker’ Roy is different, and so is the social experiment he has engineered in remote Tilona, Rajasthan—the Barefoot College. Set up in 1972, Barefoot College has been working to provide the only known cure for the issues that plague the poor: empowerment, especially of women. With practice as pedagogy, the Barefoot college “is in the process of exploding many myths by setting an example,” as Roy puts it. This is perhaps best illustrated by its Solar Mamas programme, where rural women are trained to build, install and maintain solar panels and batteries. After three to six months of training, they head back to their communities and implement the technology, bringing a reliable source of energy to remote villages and earning themselves a decent income. Many go on to train others in their own, and in neighbouring, villages. One such trainer is 57-year-old Leela Devi, who bends over her workstation while carefully soldering a circuit board during our interview. Having studied only till class 3, she never believed she could do this job. “The beginning was difficult. I told them that I am not going to be able to do this,” she says. But starting from learning colour codes assigned to different circuit components, she learnt the names of the various tools and instruments. “The first practical we did, was just about how to screw and unscrew things,” she recalls. Now, a master trainer at the Barefoot Solar Engineering Training Centre, where rural women from across the world come to study solar engineering, Leela has trained over 17,000 women over 20 years. The programme has created a global network of social entrepreneurs like her, and, in the process, upended societal hierarchies. Leela’s sense of confidence and self-worth too have Reader’s Digest Sanjit ‘Bunker’ Roy, started Barefoot College in 1972
readersdigest.in 69 come a long way. Having never stepped out of Tilonia in her life, her first trip out of home was straight to Zanzibar, as part of a five-member training team in 2009. Since then, she has been on solo trips to Germany and France as well. Founded on the philosophy that ‘anyone can learn’, Barefoot College has chipped away at the social exclusion that is the lot of those who lack mainstream education. Putting technology skills in the hands of those who often rank lowest in literacy and education, as well as in the caste hierarchy, the college works to leverage existing indigenous knowledge, practical, ancestral wisdom and the inherent capacities of its students. Apart from solar engineers, students at Barefoot go on to become health workers, architects, designers, water engineers and teachers. Its two campuses are fully solar-electrified, with geodesic domes and rainwater harvesting structures, all built by Barefoot engineers. Funded by various foundations, donations and the Indian government, the college also runs a school, an artisan non-profit, study centres, heath campaigns, a water resources department, a nutrition programme called Super Five, a sanitary pad factory, and a waste management programme. “There is a fundamental difference between hollow literacy and education with intelligence. And through the years, we have demonstrated at Tilonia that commitment and competence is all photos: manish rajput Inspiration Leela Devi, a master trainer in the Solar Mamas programme, solders a circuit board.
70 october 2023 Reader’s Digest not gauged by institutional degrees,” explains Roy. He can say this with some authority. Roy himself attended some very elite institutions—Doon school and then St. Stephens College—only to end up helping lakhs of Indians cock a snook at formal education. After a life-changing trip to Bihar in 1965 when the state was battling a devastating famine, Roy knew that he wanted to live and work in rural India. Despite the family displeasure that followed, he got a job with Catholic Relief Services to dig 500 irrigation and drinking water wells in Ajmer, Rajasthan. “I was now exposed to the most extraordinary skills and knowledge that very poor people have. I started respecting water diviners, traditional bone-setters, midwives and well drillers. That was when the idea of the Barefoot College was born.” Roy believes accepting education in all its expressions and the ability to intelligently identify effective, practical skills and traditional knowhow, is the future of rural India. The Barefoot approach of demystifying technology and nurturing the abilities of rural folk has produced a deep emancipatory impact on those associated with it. 30-year-old Phoolmanti came from Gaya as a part of a four-member team in 2013 to be trained as a solar engineer. After six months of training, when she went back, her life’s circumstances had altered. Her husband in jail, she and her four young children had nowhere to go. Turned away by family, she decided to head back to Tilonia. “I borrowed `1,000 on 10 per cent interest to make the trip here. I didn’t know how to get on a train, so I had to pay a man from the village his wage for the four days he would have to miss work to accompany me here.” Now, a solar engineer and trainer, Phoolmati is able to send her kids to school and put food on the table. She says Roy saved her life, “I had never thought it possible that I would be doing something professional like this.” Roy points out that this has been the abiding challenge in his life’s work: “To build confidence in the people who were providing technical services and to convince them that they were as competent as any paper-qualified graduate or engineer.” This self doubt is understandable and perhaps all the The sanitary pad unit works to provide menstrual-health products and awareness.
readersdigest.in 71 more reason why the Barefoot College’s philosophy is a route to social inclusion. “They have been told all their lives that they are second-rate,” Roy explains. “So it is critically important that they understand the context and strength of their abilities. Over the years, it is amazing to see the transformation of a hesitant human being to a confident, skilled worker—a symbol of why degrees do not matter.” Through the years, several social and policy changes have been afoot owing to the experiments in Tilonia. Its initiatives have led to governments replicating and expanding several of the bottom-up ideas that the Barefoot college pioneered. From night schools— designed to help children, who were expected to help out with household or farming work, continue their education—came the Rajasthan government’s Shiksha Karmi (Education Worker) project, which has facilitated the schooling of over 2,00,000 children. Barefoot was also behind a public interest litigation regarding minimum wages for famine relief workthat resulted in the 1983 Supreme Court judgement mandating that no site in Rajasthan pay less than the minimum wage. Barefoot’s solar programme, initiated in 1996—long before ‘going green’ and ‘sustainability’ The College communications department employs the art of puppet theatre to bridge the gap between rural folk and development needs. These performers travel across the country and the world, establishing dialogue with communities.
72 october 2023 Reader’s Digest became policy buzzwords—has expanded across 96 countries, with the Ministry of External Affairs funding the travel and training for women to become Solar Mamas. Today, the 50-year-old Barefoot College is on the cusp of transition. In June this year, Roy, now 77 and ailing, handed over the reigns of the organization to Sowmya Kidambi, a social development specialist, who was instrumental in establishing India’s first independent society for social audit. She took on the role on the condition that the organization allow her to do so pro bono. “I am looking forward to the challenge of running an NGO”, she says, but adds that just four months into the job, it is clear that the field of social work has undergone a sea change. “The sector has shifted gears; it has corporatized. And this means that it often ends up missing the ‘social’ element of the work.” This disconnect, she observes, has hurt smaller, grassroots organizations that find themselves struggling to compete for funding. In Roy’s life and legacy, Mahatma Gandhi looms large. Gandhian principles of self-reliance, austerity, of awarding dignity to labour and to those at the bottom of the caste hierarchy who often perform it, have all found home in the Barefoot approach. With our national imagination often focused on the aspirational middle class, the times we live in do seem anachronistic to these beliefs—as if India no longer lives in its villages. But, no matter how swift the winds of change, the pilot light that is Barefoot has spread across the country. Twenty-two organizations started by Barefoot alumni across 14 states have organized under the umbrella of SAMPDA (Society for Activating, Motivating, and Promoting Development Alternatives) to spread the Barefoot ideology and pedagogy through their work. After all, the Barefoot experiment offers lessons to anyone who is seeking answers on how to change the world. to learn more about barefoot college, visit barefootcollegetilonia.org Sowmya Kidambi joined Barefoot College after her stint as Director of the Society for Social Audits, Accountability and Transparency (SSAAT), Government of Telangana.
Reader’s Digest readersdigest.in 73 Reader’s Digest will pay for your funny anecdote or photo in any of our humour sections. Post it to the editorial address, or email: [email protected] AS KIDS SEE IT “I’ll pass on the markers—crayon is my medium of choice.” My two young children were watching me assemble a swing set. Tightening the screws was difficult for me, so I asked their father to come and help. He swaggered out, grinning like the hero and tightened the screws. My threeyear-old blurted out, “Mommy makes things and Daddy screws them up.” — DALE JEWETT Me: “Where are your dirty clothes?” My 10-year-old: “On the floor.” Me: “Where should they be?” My 10-year-old: “On the floor where you can’t see them.” — @XPLODINGUNICORN cartoon by Susan Camilleri Konar
76 october 2023 Reader’s Digest
Drama in Real Life By Robert Kiener THE GAVE UP FAMILY T H AT N E V E R readersdigest.in 77 DRAMA IN REAL LIFE D O C T O R S S A I D T H E R E W A S S L I M H O P E F O R T H E B A B Y B O R N W I T H O N LY HALF A HEART illustration by Zachary Monteiro
78 october 2023 It seemed so real, thought Rob Velez about the dream he’d had the night before. Lying in bed after waking from a long night’s sleep in his home outside London, England, he smiled as he remembered the wonderful scene. He had been holding his newborn daughter in his strong arms. As she looked lovingly into his eyes, he was so overcome with emotion that the tough 50-year-old former US Marine had started crying. He’d never felt this much love for anyone. Amazing, he thought as the morning sun streamed through his windows. This was more than a dream. He threw back his covers and got dressed. He had to tell his partner of four years, Zofia Fenrych, what he had learnt from his dream. Fenrych, a 40-year-old homeopathic therapist, listened as he told her about his dream. “You’re pregnant,” he said. “We’re having another baby.” Fenrych laughed. They had a daughter, age two, and both had 16-year-old sons from previous relationships. “No way I am pregnant,” she said. “Honey,” he said, “we are having a little girl. I saw her. And she will be beautiful!” And to prove it, Velez zipped downstairs to the pharmacy to get a pregnancy test kit. An hour later, two red lines appeared on a Clearblue pregnancy test strip. Fenrych was indeed pregnant. She screamed in delight and they embraced. “We’re going to have a beautiful daughter,” he said. “I know. I saw her last night.” four months later, in February 2022, the couple went to the doctor’s office for a 16-week ultrasound. They held hands as the sonographer moved an electronic probe called a transducer over Fenrych’s abdomen. A twodimensional image of their baby, whom they had already named Dorothea, appeared on the nearby screen. “We saw her tiny fingers and toes and watched as baby Dorothea, my dream daughter come true, actually moved,” Velez remembers. “She was sucking her thumb. Then both of us let out a shout, as it looked like she waved at us. She was so tiny, so beautiful!” The sonographer kept moving the transducer, then suddenly stopped. “We have a problem,” she said. She called in a paediatric expert from a hospital nearby. An hour later, after studying the sonogram, the expert dropped a bomb. “I am so sorry,” she said. She explained that the baby had hypoplastic left heart synReader’s Digest
readersdigest.in 79 drome (HLHS), a rare, often fatal, condition. Dorothea had only half a heart; the rest was undeveloped. And because of that she had little chance to survive. “Her best advice was that we elect to, and I’ll never forget the word, ‘terminate’ the pregnancy,” says Velez, choking back a tear. “This was the moment that everything—our entire lives— changed forever.” Never. That was the response both Velez and Fenrych had when they heard the doctor’s advice to have an abortion. “ ‘Forget about it!’” I shouted at the paediatrician,” recalls Velez. After digesting the news, Dorothea’s parents decided to enjoy every day they had with her. They took day trips to the seaside and visited nearby parks where they would walk for hours and keep up a steady conversation with their unborn baby, explaining what they were doing and seeing. On one trip to a botanical garden, as their toddler, Batsheba, screamed with joy while she chased ducklings, Fenrych caressed her own belly and told Dorothea, “See, your sister is having so much fun.” At home, Fenrych would play the piano, her son would play the violin and Batsheba would sing to her unborn sister. “We wanted to include Dorothea in everything,” remembers Fenrych. Velez, who had been stationed in England as a US Marine when he was younger and had moved back there for his job with a global financial services company in 2014, was now employed at a private equity firm that worked with health-care startups. He pulled every string he could to get a second opinion, only to hear the same diagnosis and the same suggested medical path: Terminate the pregnancy. Obsessed with saving his daughter’s life, Velez quit his job and devoted all his time to researching HLHS. He and Fenrych dipped into their savings to survive. He wrote countless messages zofia fenrych Zofia with daughter Batsheba a few days before baby Dorothea was born. Drama in Real Life
80 october 2023 Reader’s Digest to doctors, surgeons, specialists and hospitals around the world, hoping to find someone who could help. A foetal echocardiogram at 24 weeks revealed even more bad news: In addition to HLHS, Dorothea also had a severe blockage in her heart. Their baby had only a five per cent chance of survival, Velez and Fenrych were told. Then they found out about a complex and risky in-utero foetal operation that might repair her heart. But since no one in the UK could carry out the surgery, the couple looked elsewhere, eventually finding a paediatric surgeon in Texas who agreed to perform the procedure. But it would cost more than $4 million [`33 crore]. To raise the money, they started a publicity campaign, doing countless media interviews. Velez also wrote scores of letters to celebrities and, as he remembers, “every billionaire I could think of.” But they only raised about $80,000—far from what they’d need. As the days ticked by, their chances of saving their unborn baby’s life looked more and more hopeless. look closer. It was in the middle of the night when Velez heard the voice in his head. He was sitting alone in his home office despairing that he’d failed his family. Am I going crazy? he thought. Now I’m hearing voices! Look closer, the voice repeated. “What are you talking about?” he answered aloud. “I’ve tried everything.” Look closer to home. Fine, thought Velez, I’ll try again. He Googled ‘impossible cases’, ‘miracle surgeon’, ‘UK paediatric expert’ and ‘HLHS’. Almost immediately a link to a Facebook page about Dr Guido Michielon, a cardiothoracic surgeon, popped up in the search results. Velez pored through the page, reading message after message from enthusiastic parents thanking Michielon for “saving our baby’s life,” “giving us hope,” “changing our lives” and more. Even more remarkable, Velez discovered that the Italian-born surgeon was an expert in HLHS and had done more than 2,000 open-heart procedures with a special focus on neonatal surgeries. How did I miss him? Velez wondered as he wrote an email to the Londonbased surgeon, describing Dorothea’s issues and including medical notes and copies of her sonograms. Within hours he got a reply: “I am in Italy now but will be back this Friday. I’ve moved you to the top of my appointment list.” Five days later, at the end of a long Skype conference call, Michielon gave the anxious parents the news they’d been praying for: “I can help you. I will THE DOCTOR EXPLAINED THAT HE HOPED TO BASICALLY “REWIRE” AND “REBUILD” HER HEART.
readersdigest.in 81 Drama in Real Life Dr Michielon and his patient after one of her operations. operate on Dorothea after she is born and stabilized.” He explained that he hoped to basically “rewire” and “rebuild” her heart and veins days after she was born. And, instead of costing them millions, the operation, called the Norwood Procedure, would be fully covered by the UK’s National Health Service (NHS). Velez and Fenrych were ecstatic. But they were jolted back to reality when the surgeon warned, “A child with HLHS has a very low chance of survival. And Dorothea’s complications are even more severe than most. We will do our best. But please remember, the odds are not in our favour.” on 7 july, at london’s Royal Brompton Hospital, surrounded by a 20-strong team of medical personnel and a bank of beeping monitors, baby Dorothea was born by Caesarean section. Velez, dressed in surgical scrubs, stood alongside Fenrych and peeked over a curtain to see his newborn daughter. “Look!” he said joyfully. “She has a full head of hair!” The medical team rushed Dorothea into a resuscitator unit and placed an oxygen mask on her tiny face. A priest Velez had asked to come along hurriedly baptized her as she was being scanned. As he left the operating room, Velez noticed a group of doctors looking at a screen that showed a sonogram of his new baby’s heart. Minutes later, the chief surgeon, Dr Alain Fraissé, told Velez, “I don’t know how to explain this but, somehow, there are four or five new veins in her heart that have appeared out of nowhere.” He explained that these veins, which no one had seen on earlier scans or MRIs, were helping drain her heart. In other words, they were keeping her alive. He sounded astonished. zofia fenrych Michielon came out and hugged
82 october 2023 Reader’s Digest Velez. “She is stable and she is beautiful. Congratulations!” the mood shifted dramatically on 12 July, when Velez and Fenrych met with Michielon and his team at the hospital to discuss the Norwood Procedure operation, which was scheduled for the next day. Velez instantly sensed there was something wrong. The normally ebullient physician seemed distant and didn’t make eye contact. A hospital administrator delivered the bad news: “We’ve decided that there is such a small chance your baby will survive the surgery that we cannot allow it to go forward.” The room fell silent. Velez could feel his own heart beating. And if she did survive, the administrator continued, “There’s a very good chance she would suffer irreversible brain damage.” Velez looked at Michielon for help. He was looking at the floor. The administrator said, “We recommend compassionate care.” “You mean we should let her die,” said Velez curtly. “After we’ve come this far?” “You know I want to operate, but I cannot without the support of my team,” said Michielon. Velez’s fighting spirit kicked in and he went into what he called Marine mode. “We’re not going down like this,” he told Fenrych. “Not after all we’ve been through.” He went home and sent blistering messages to the hospital CEO and the hospital attorney. One said, “Who are you to play God?” Velez reached out to a well-known human rights lawyer who had a successful record fighting for NHS patients. Velez told Fenrych that he was ready to chain himself to the prime minister’s office at Downing Street if he had to. “The pressure was on,” he says. “The US First Marine Division had landed at Royal Brompton Hospital!” Twenty-four hours later, the hospital administrators relented. The operation would take place. As ill as Dorothea was, her parents never gave up hope. zofia fenrych
readersdigest.in 83 Drama in Real Life the next morning, at 7:30, Michielon, assisted by three paediatric cardiac surgeons and a team of nurses, began the delicate open-heart surgery that would reconstruct the right ventricle of Dorothea’s heart so that it would pump blood to both her body and her lungs without the need of the malformed left ventricle. After Dorothea’s chest was opened, she was hooked up to a heart-lung machine that would take over for her heart and lungs while doctors operated on those organs. Surrounded by flickering monitors and the gentle whirring of the heart-lung machine, Michielon began the intricate, precise procedure to build a new, larger aorta by joining the pulmonary artery to Dorothea’s existing aorta, which was just one millimetre wide. This is time-consuming, pain staking work; a baby’s heart is only about the size of a walnut, and Dorothea’s veins and arteries were so tiny, “really a hair,” says Michielon. He needed to wear highpowered magnifying lenses to see as he expertly cut and sewed vessels together. The hours dragged by as Michielon and his team performed the delicate surgery. Their last step was to install a shunt from the right ventricle to the pulmonary artery, connecting them to direct the blood flow to the lungs. Nearly 11 hours after he and his team began, Michielon finally began to relax, as he double-checked his work that had essentially re-plumbed this newborn’s faulty heart. By late afternoon, Michielon, exhausted and still dressed in scrubs, found the parents in the waiting room. “Looks good,” he told them, smiling broadly. “She is stabilized.” The three embraced in a celebratory hug. Rob Velez and his “dream girl.” photograph by Tilly Nelson
Zofia with her two little girls. 84 october 2023
readersdigest.in 85 Drama in Real Life Within minutes, Velez and Fenrych were startled by the screech of emergency alarms. A team of doctors and nurses rushed into the room where Dorothea was recovering from surgery. People shouted orders. A doctor yelled, “Cardiac arrest!” The alarm kept wailing. After a few minutes, a nurse dashed out to tell them, “Dorothea’s heart has stopped. She’s had a heart attack. We are trying to revive her.” Ten minutes later the nurse returned with the same message. Fifteen minutes later she came back: “We’re still doing CPR; we’re trying to get her back.” An agonizing hour later, Velez and Fenrych were ushered into the ICU. They were shocked to see their tiny daughter tethered to a dialysis machine and a life-support unit that helped her heart pump blood. Her chest was covered with dried blood and was swollen from more than an hour of CPR. She was battered and bruised, but with the help of a bank of high-tech machines, she was still fighting to stay alive. Velez and Fenrych reached beneath the network of tubes and lines that were keeping Dorothea alive and held her hand. When Velez felt his daughter squeeze his index finger in her tiny hand, he told her, “You are a fighter, you did it. You’re going to be okay.” for the next five weeks, Velez and Fenrych rarely left Dorothea’s side in the ICU. They talked to her, played music for her and caressed her. On 26 August Fenrych’s birthday, doctors removed Dorothea’s breathing tube and took her off the ventilator, moving her to only light breathing support from a CPAP machine. She would need a second open-heart operation in a few months, and doctors warned her parents that to survive that surgery, Dorothea would need to put on weight and get stronger. She was then moved out of intensive care—and amazed hospital staff by gaining more than a kilogram in less than two months. Dorothea’s heart was working well and her oxygen levels became normal. On 14 September she was taken off the CPAP machine and began breathing for herself. Dr Michielon performed the second surgery on her heart on 24 November, and declared her prognosis excellent. On 21 December, Dorothea finally went home with her parents, just in time for Christmas. She had defied the odds and lived up to her well-earned nickname: the miracle baby. Today, says her proud papa, she is a chubby, healthy baby who is constantly smiling and laughing. “You know, right after we found out we were having a baby girl, we named her Dorothea. That’s derived from a Greek phrase that means ‘gift of God’,” he explains. Velez pauses and smiles as he watches Batsheba, now age three, snuggle up next to her baby sister on their couch. “We sing happy birthday to Dorothea each morning, because every day with her is a miracle.” photograph by Tilly Nelson
86 october 2023 Reader’s Digest
PHOTO: ©GETTY IMAGES MY STORY readersdigest.in 87 By Sara B. Franklin from longreads.com In my darkest days, gardens have offered the promise of new life Planting Seeds Hope of On Saturday, 14 March, 2020 the day after public schools and our twin three-yearolds’ daycare closed in our town in New York’s Hudson Valley due to the Covid-19 outbreak, I sent the kids to their sitter one final time, frantic for a couple hours to get a few things done before I turned myself over to motherhood, all day, every day, for the foreseeable future. There were piles of laundry to do, a shopping list that needed tending, urgently. But I found myself drawn out into the garden, still covered with mulch for its wintry slumber. Poking around, I saw early signs of life; the rhubarb had poked its rippling, fuchsia crowns out of the damp earth, and the tiny frills of wild nettles were several centimeters high in the rangy, untended back corner. The chives,
88 october 2023 too, had suddenly shot up in the preceding days’ warmth. It seemed too early, I thought, running back in my mind over all my years of planting. But then, this was the winter that never was, the deep freeze that never came. The unease has been around us for months now. The geese came home early, turtles are resting on logs already, the frogs out in the beaver pond the first week of March: a full month ahead. I wasn’t ready, but the earth was ready; the plants were telling me so. So I pulled my box of seeds from the kitchen shelf. Out back in the shed, I wrangled a sharply-tipped hoe from behind a mess of bikes and lawn chairs. In the garden, I knelt over a bed, pulled aside the browned grass clippings from the last mowing of the fall, made two shallow rows, and dropped seeds into the ground—tiny, almondshaped lettuce seeds and those of kale and collards, like burgundy poppy seeds. It might be too early, I thought as I sprinkled the harbingers of life into place, but it’s worth a shot. Anything hopeful, right now, is worth a shot. I should know. I’ve been here before, in another time, another life, it seems. I woke the morning after my mother took her last breath, on 8 March 2008, and I padded down the stairs of my childhood home in the weak late winter light. I was emptied out, exhausted, bewildered and totally unmoored. I was 21 years old. Before coffee, and without thinking, I reached for a packet of seeds; I’d ordered a whole season’s worth when I suddenly moved home to help my mom—who’d finally given up her battle with pancreatic cancer—die, planning to revive the vegetable garden she’d tended when I was a kid. The garden had sat, abandoned, in recent years, and had become overrun with weeds. I envisioned the cathartic pleasure of ripping all those invasive weeds out, turning old manure into the dirt, pushing all my fury and confusion back into the earth as if to purge myself of it. That morning after her death, so many months sooner than we’d anticipated, I went through the broken screen door and onto the back steps where I’d stowed the gardening supplies. I emptied a few handfuls of cool, loamy potting soil into a plastic seed tray, and carried it back indoors. Gently, I pushed a pea seed, wrinkled and grey-green, into each compartment, then nudged a bit of soil over their tops. I took the tray to the kitchen, sprinkled the whole thing with water beside the faucet, and set it on a sunny windowsill. The impulse had come from Reader’s Digest THE GARDEN, NOW, IS THE ONLY PLACE I CAN FIND A POOL OF STILLNESS.
readersdigest.in 89 somewhere beneath consciousness, a desperate bid to catalyze new life in the immediate wake of death. Time had been frozen those past few weeks, as we spent idle, torturous days by my mom’s bedside, waiting for death to come for her and also desperate to keep it at bay. Pushing seeds into soil, I felt myself calling down the spirits of time, begging them to bring me back into their folds: please, let me rejoin this life. I’m emptied out, but I’m not done. Now, 12 years later, I can’t seem to leave my garden. Something about the scene is so reminiscent of those days when we were awaiting my mother’s death—immediate family only, no one coming in, no one going out. Time was leaden, then, swimming as if through oil, distorted and heavy. Now, too, all of us, hold our breaths for the next death toll, the latest confirmation of encroaching shutdown and pending isolation. I scroll aimlessly and endlessly on my phone as the kids stack broken bricks in the yard, or watch too much TV, or whine for my attention. I hardly hear them. I should be present to my children, I want to be, I admonish myself. But I’m hanging on the edge of time, waiting for something definitive to happen. Nothing comes, of course. Only the expansion of fear and regulation, a looming mass of edgy uncertainty that’s taken all of us into its hungry maw. I n the garden, on another unseasonably warm day, I straighten my body momentarily to ease the ache in my back. I’ve been shoving the pitchfork into the cool soil to turn it up over itself for upwards of an hour now. My fingers are caked in dirt, two knuckles broken open and bleeding. I relish the tiny hurt. The garden, now, is the only place I can find a pool of stillness, can channel something of reality. My children run about the yard wielding sticks and plastic construction equipment, suddenly feral with the dissolution of routine and socialization. The dogs are delighted and surprised to have us home all day, and they leap about, pulling a rubber toy back and forth between themselves and growling gustily. I crouch again, pull at early weeds, stomp a shovel into mulch, and turn earthworms into the compost pile. I need things here, in this garden, to hurry up and show themselves, to tell me we’re still moving forward, somehow, in this sudden suspension of time. I need to believe it’s a pause, not a cessation. Come on, I seem to be saying to it all, come on. We’ve got mettle to prove. We’re not ready to go yet. sara b. franklin is a writer and professor of food studies and oral history at new york university gallatin and at wallkill correctional facility via the nyu prison education program. she lives in kingston, new york, with her family. longreads.com (march 2020), copyright © 2020 by sara b. franklin My Story
90 october 2023 LIFE’S Like That Like That When my son entered his teenage years, he became interested in girls. My husband has handled it wonderfully, explaining everything in an open, honest manner, paying the proper respect for women and placing the answers within the framework of our religious beliefs. So when I found my son in the game room eyeing a TV screen full of bikini-clad women, I called for my husband. “Honey, your eldest son is up here watching the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Special!” My husband, up to the challenge, shouted back, “What channel is it on?” —Kathy Elliott Our dog knows way too many phrases now, so my husband and I have resorted to talking like Victorian nobility to get anything by him. “Have you taken the dog on a brisk adventure recently? Would you escort the canine to the backyard, forthwith? Has he supped yet?” — @Awritesinger Although English is my friend’s native language, you wouldn’t know it by some of the things he’s said, such as … “Sorry, you can’t speak with him today; he’s excommunicado.” “Most people are indelible for the Food Stamp Programme.” “He’s not well liked; you could say he’s got social astigmatism.” —Gerald Murchie Jews light special candles called yahrzeit as memorials for the recently departed. So when I visited a friend’s house and saw he had four yahrzeit candles lit, I became concerned. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said. “What are you talking about?” he asked. Pointing to the candles, I asked, “Do you know what those candles are for?” cartoon by Tyson Cole
readersdigest.in 91 Reader’s Digest “Sure,” he said. “Four for a dollar.” —Donna Eidinger Every fall,my brother’s neighbour would rake up his leaves and pile them in the bed of his pickup truck. Unable to wrap his mind around why the guy would do this, my brother finally Reader’s Digest will pay for your funny anecdote or photo in any of our humour sections. Post it to the editorial address, or email: [email protected] My three-year-old’s favourite game is Restaurant, which just entails her putting on a chef’s hat and me ordering dessert. No matter what I order, she says, “We don’t have that.” — @raoulvilla Before our young daughter went off to her Sunday school class, she told us she needed money. “What for?” I asked. “I need to give it to my teacher,” she said. “Miss God.” —Donna Wenzel As he was putting his six-year-old daughter to bed, our son, a pastor, told her, “I love you. And Jesus loves you too.” She replied sleepily, “And I love you two guys.” —Mark Berrier On Easter Sunday, upon seeing Jesus on the cross above the church altar, my three-year-old granddaughter experienced a moment of confusion, shouting, “There’s the scarecrow!” —Charlene Kennedy During Communion, when pieces of bread were passed around, my three-year-old grandson asked hopefully, “Does it come with chicken?” —Francisca Yoder HE WORKS IN MYSTERIOUS WAYS athuristock/getty images asked, “Why don’t you bag your leaves instead?” “My way’s better,” said the neighbour. “I just drive around town until they’re all gone.” —Patrick Bryan My mother-in-law’s friend was ill, so she went to the doctor. “How are you feeling?” the doctor asked. “Lousy, how about you?” she asked. “I feel good, thanks.” She replied, “Who’s your doctor?” —Janet Cox You can’t scare me. You’re not my wife starting a conversation by saying “Just so you know ...” — @raoulvilla
S A I L I N G BACK IN TIME My journey on a historic schooner By Susan Nerberg FROM C ANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC TRAVEL TRAVEL 92 october 2023
readersdigest.in 93 Reader’s Digest The Lewis R. French, built in 1871, still sails Maine’s Penobscot Bay.
94 october 2023 STANDING BESIDE THE tall ship’s mainmast, my shipmate and I reach as high as we can. With a nod, we grab the halyard—the rope used to raise the mainsail—and pull hard, throwing our weight to the wind. “Heave!” Just as our knees are about to hit the deck, two of my fellow sailors—we are 20 passengers in all on this three-day cruise—spring into action, grabbing the rope and taking their turn pulling it down. “Ho!” And so we go, back and forth: “Heave!” “Ho!” “Heave!” “Ho!” Slowly, the mainsail rises up the mast until it’s flapping in the breeze, waving goodbye to the port of Camden in the eastern US state of Maine. Captain Garth Wells gives us a thumbs up. But when we start looking for a comfy spot in the sun to relax, Brent, the first mate, shakes his head. “Foresail!” he yells. We haven’t finished our work just yet; time to hoist up sail number two, on the mast in front of the mainsail. Luckily, it’s a bit smaller. As the Lewis R. French, our 30-metre, two-masted schooner, sails out onto the glittering Penobscot Bay, cellphone reception cuts out. “There goes connectivity,” says one of my fellow passengers, a man in his 50s from Arkansas, as he stows his phone with a sigh. It’s hard to tell if he’s miffed or relieved about losing access to social media. The only wavelengths at our disposal now are the ones beneath our feet. As Camden’s white clapboard houses and tidy gardens, with hydrangeas the size of apple trees, blur into the background, we leave behind other modern conveniences. Built in 1871, the Lewis R. French was designated a historic landmark by the US National Park Service in 1991. As America’s oldest schooner, the ship operates much as it did in the 19th century. It has no electric motors, not even a winch for hoisting its 280 square metres of sails and weighing the 77-kilogram anchor. There’s no fridge—our food and beer are kept cold in ice boxes on deck. The Lewis R. French is a time machine that connects me and the other passengers with the rhythms of centuries gone by. It syncs us with the ebb and flow of daylight, with cool sea sprays, creaking masts and twinkling stars. The tempo is laid back enough to help overcome my feelings of reluctance—not quite fear—about the sea. A landlubber born and bred in Sweden’s boreal forest, I’ve always preferred to sniff the salt-sprinkled air from terra firma rather than spending time in, or on, the waves. When Captain Wells explains that this boat was made for cruising the relatively calm waters closer to the shore, (previous spread) ben keller, courtesy of the lewis r. french Reader’s Digest
carrying cargo from port to port rather than plying the open ocean, I feel relieved. “We think of her as an 18-wheeler carrying everything from lumber to fish and Christmas trees,” he says. Cruising on a windjammer, as these traditional sailing ships are known, along Maine’s coast is like seafaring with training wheels. THE LATE-SUMMER BREEZE propels us forward, and soon the swell lulls us passengers into a state of relaxation. The four-person crew, however, doesn’t rest. First Mate Brent and the deckhand, Oona, are coiling ropes neatly so no one stumbles over them—this, I learn, is called ‘faking the lines’. (I’m adding a lot of sailing lingo to my vocabulary on this trip.) In the galley below, Derek, the ship’s cook, is well on his way to becoming a hero in our eyes, baking bread and making potato-leek soup using a woodburning stove. Captain Wells, manning the wheel, scans the horizon. A nautical chart held down with a magnifying glass is splayed beside him. He grew up sailing, and after working as a mate on the French for five seasons, he bought her in 2004 with his wife, Jenny Tobin. I ask where we’re going. “In that direc- alejandro palavecino, courtesy of susan nerberg tion,” he replies, pointing toward Travel readersdigest.in 95 The Lewis R. French during a stop along the Maine coast.
96 october 2023 Reader’s Digest Clockwise from top left: First Mate Brett and passengers raise the sails; the town of Camden, Maine; one of the other ships in the Maine Windjammer Association fleet; lobster is served on Hells Half Acre.
readersdigest.in 97 Travel Vinalhaven, one of the biggest of the nearly 2,000 islands scattered across Penobscot Bay. That’s about as specific as he gets. “I don’t think I’ve ever ended up where I planned to go when first setting out in the morning,” he says. “You never know where the wind will take you.” It’s part of what makes this trip so great. For many of us, our day-to-day lives are hyper-planned, from meetings to workouts to dinners with friends; even a ‘spontaneous’ beer with a buddy might not happen unless it’s in the calendar. Here on the water, we literally go with the flow. That doesn’t mean modern devices have been completely banished on board. Captain Wells keeps a GPS and a radar in case of an emergency, as well as a VHF radio for communicating with other boats. And while passengers are asked not to make calls on their cellphones (some do get spotty service), using them for things like taking photos is permitted. There’s even a generator to power lights in our sleeping quarters and the ship’s two ‘heads’—bathrooms in landlubber lingo—one of which has a freshwater shower. The Lewis R. French also comes with a yawl boat, which hangs from the rear. Equipped with an engine, it can push the schooner in calm weather, sort of like a reverse tugboat. But we don’t need any help today—thanks to the steady breeze, we’re making good progress through the Fox Island Thoroughfare, which separates the islands of Vinalhaven and North Haven. The fishermen who live on Vinalhaven are descendants of the 19th-century crews that made Penobscot Bay one of the first commercial lobster grounds in Maine. We drop anchor just off the tiny island of Hells Half Acre, close to two larger islands called Devil Island and The Shivers. I prefer not to imagine how they might have gotten their names, focusing instead on the promise of the all-you-can-eat lobster bake that awaits us on shore. Hells Half Acre, I discover once we are shuttled ashore in one of the rowboats from the Lewis R. French, has a misleading name; it’s more like heaven. The beach we land on is draped with rockweed, a type of seaweed found along the northern Atlantic coast. Higher up, we step on a slab of granite that’s been shaped by the tide into a smooth, terraced ledge—perfect for hanging out and playing Frisbee. Derek barbecues hot dogs, hamburgers and veggie skewers over a portable grill and hands out cans of Moxie, the alejandro palavecino, courtesy of susan nerberg state’s official soft drink. It tastes like I DISCOVER THAT HELLS HALF ACRE HAS A MISLEADING NAME; IT’S MORE LIKE HEAVEN.
root beer mixed with a splash of wintergreen, bubble gum and bitters—I take a sip and conclude that you probably have to be a local to enjoy it. Captain Wells and Oona plop lobsters and corn on the cob into a cauldron filled with boiling sea water. Once the shellfish have turned as red as the setting sun, they’re poured out on a bed of rockweed. We gather around, sit on the beach and dig in. IF ANYONE THINKS THEY ate too much on Hells Half Acre, where we anchored for the night, the following morning presents an opportunity to burn the extra calories. It turns out that getting ready to sail again takes considerable muscle power—in the absence of a winch, the anchor has to be lifted manually. When the call goes out for volunteers, I raise my hand, along with three others; after gorging the previous day on not only lobster but also Derek’s sourdough bread slathered with butter, I feel I need a workout. I take my place at the cranking lever, which moves like a seesaw. With two of us standing at either end, we start pushing in turn, up and down, up and down. It’s heavy going; First Mate Brent explains that the anchor is lodged in mud, which offers the best holding power. “If it rests on rock, which is marked on the nautical chart, the anchor might drag across the seafloor, causing the boat to drift,” he says. Sand is not as firm as mud, and the anchor can slip if there are waves, another cause of drifting. As the anchor slowly rises, we quickly discover that mud makes for tricepsbusting work. Our arms are burning alejandro palavecino, courtesy of susan nerberg 98 october 2023 Captain Wells at the helm of the Lewis R. French.