His acoustic guitar floating with him, Hadfield’s well-rehearsed version did falsetto justice to the Bowie original:

“This is Major Tom to ground control,
I’m stepping through the door,
And I’m floating in the most peculiar way,
And the stars look very different today…”

At face value, the 1973 hit by iconic rocker David Bowie was a futuristic sci-fi ballad about Major Tom, a lone astronaut in space, but the deeper themes are about exploration of the human condition, the courage to be different, and the conflicting emotions of the detachment it takes to truly be free in this universe. 

Of course Hadfield left out the part where Major Tom reports problems to ground control, and even inserted his own name in the song a couple times.  Since its release and worldwide popularity, the whole team successfully came back to earth and Major Tom, err Chris Hadfield has retired from the space program, as planned.  Just like in the song Major Tom makes it back to earth and is celebrated by the press and his fans as a hero, but the real reward was a few solitary moments orbiting the earth and the view from the dark starry heavens that belonged only to him.  

My friend told me about this video last night and I was immediately moved by both the vulnerability and depth of it.  Coincidentally, I began listening to Bowie’s classic a few weeks ago as I write as an eerily-dreamy reminder that no one ever accomplishes anything important by keeping their feet on the ground.  

What really fascinates me is how unique Hadfield’s solo-above-the-stratosphere truly is.  He did something that no one, and I mean NO ONE, in the history of the earth has done.  That’s remarkable when you consider the thousands of years of mankind’s modern history and the fact that there have been 100 billion people on earth.  Think about that – there are infinite possibilities to create, to do something different, to be the conscious ground control in the mission of our own lives.  As time goes on you’d think that we as a race of artists and dreamers and explorers had LESS ideas to launch, but instead inexplicably we have more, exponentially it seems.  What a pure, weightless experience; to summon the courage to be an innovator and let your imagination soar into its own orbit.  Art, writing, music, creation, ambient knowledge - they keep expanding into previously dark and empty corners of our existence to give us warmth.  The democratization of ideas, our social web of conscience, people helping others a world away who they’ve never seen and will never know - interconnectedness like never before.  Somehow the world is getting bigger and smaller at the same time, spinning out of control but also hugged tightly by a gravity much bigger than ourselves.  

An excerpt from the book Pushups in the Prayer Room.  

My grandfather was lucky, some would say.  He wore thick eyeglasses so he was disqualified from fighting in the first Great War, though he was only 24 at the time, and he was too old to serve in the second.  So instead he settled into his comfortable career as the lone postmaster for the village.  My grandfather (called Opa in German) and his family, including my mom as an infant, survived the war because his postal route took him out to the countryside, and oftentimes the farmers would trade him a few eggs or some hard-to-get potatoes or turnips in exchange for good news. 

When Oma (my grandmother) was pregnant with my mom, the Allied forces strafed and bombed the village, so she had to run into the woods to hide, a bittersweet reminder that the liberators’ work was not done yet. 

When the war was mercifully over, times were still tough, and their village was in the French-occupied zone.  They lived in a little apartment over the post office and had to house a soldier, but he turned out to be a good guy and even brought my grandmother baby shoes for my mom when he returned from leave in France.  She also got care packages from the U.S. — aid sent from church groups and school children — with fancy pencils with erasers on the ends, candy, and chewing gum, which she tried for the first time.  Many were not so lucky, and the rape of young women was so rampant that the brave priest in town invited all women who didn’t feel safe to bring their bedding and sleep in the bell tower of the church.  Every night for months, he locked them in there and slept on a chair at the front door, making it known that the French soldiers would have to kill him to get in. 

They were not Nazis, of course, and not even Party members, but just poor, humble people trying to eat and raise their families, like most Germans were.  But one always wonders, especially as I was growing up in the United States as I did during the very end of the Cold War; a time where to be German or Russian was still met with lingering suspicion.  But then, one day I heard a story about my Opa that put all my worries to rest, and made me eminently proud like I cannot even verbalize.  People who’d been through war and seen horrible things usually didn’t talk about it, preferring to leave it in the past and do their best to move on, so these things weren’t the topic of many conversations in my family.  But I think I really knew my Opa for the first time, for he was already an old man when I was born, more through this story than I ever did in real life.  It was a gift to glimpse what kind of man he was, and I loved him deeply for it — and I hoped that some of his caring heart had been passed on to me.   

My Opa had a good friend, a man named Herman Weil, who owned a successful clothing store on the main street in their village, Stockach.  Every Thursday night, they met with a few other gentlemen and played cards and drank brandy at a local restaurant, and Herr Weil’s wife was also friendly with my Oma.  Heir Weil was Jewish, and as the Nazi party overtook Germany, he was arrested by the dreaded SS officers and taken away late one night.  My Opa was distraught over his friend’s disappearance, and a little digging confirmed his worst fears: He had been taken to Auschwitz, herded into a rail car along with other Jews and prisoners of war and transported to the death camps in Poland where he likely faced starvation or the gas chamber.  When Herr Weil arrived in the concentration camp he was assigned a prisoner number that was tattooed on the inside of his left forearm.  If you want to read an accurate yet horrific account of Auschwitz, you will find none better than Night, by survivor Elie Wiesel, as he describes his first night in that same place:

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed.  Never shall I   forget that smoke.  Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.

Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever.

Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live.  Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust.  Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself.  Never.

And that is where Herr Weil found himself, in striped pajamas and tattooed, surrounded by walking skeletons with sunken black eyes who would fight in the dirt over a discarded scrap of rotten bread, awaiting a certain death. My grief-stricken Opa worked every angle, called in every favor, and leveraged every friendship up the governmental chain of command to try and help Herr Weil.  Opa was not a Party member nor SS, but a postmaster, but that held some pull in those days, so amazingly his campaign to beg, borrow, and barter for his friend’s freedom was successful.

But of course, Herr Weil didn’t know anything about this.  One day, his prisoner number was called over the loudspeaker at Auschwitz — which meant for sure that you were headed to your death at the gas chambers, or worse, subject to unspeakable torture or medical experiments.  Herr Weil thought he was a dead man, but when he arrived at the guard station they looked at him with disdain as they smoked their cigarettes and told him to “just go.”  He didn’t understand.  Just go, get out of here, they said, and they opened the smoke-stained death gates of Auschwitz and shooed him out of the camp.  He walked from the camp on shaky legs, expecting a bullet in the back of his head, but it never came.  He didn’t dare look back and when he was out of sight, he ran. 

Herr Weil begged some clothes and bread from a farmer and managed to cross the countryside out of Poland, back into Germany in secrecy, and then into neutral Switzerland where he was safe and reunited with his wife.  They were granted political asylum as refugees in America and arrived in New York City, where they remained for the rest of their long lives, never to return to Germany.  My Opa and Herr Weil kept in correspondence by writing letters back and forth, remaining friends, and Opa even got Herr Weil’s German social security benefits reinstated and made sure they were delivered to New York City.  But the two men didn’t see each other again until the summer of 1968, when my mom moved to America to make a new life for herself, and my grandparents came to visit her.  They all went to the Weils’ cramped, humble apartment in New York City to be reunited, a connection that was over 25 years in the making.  The two good friends, who used to play cards on Thursday nights, were old men by then.  Both were haunted by more memories of those war years than they wished to remember, scarred — like numbers tattooed on a forearm — by the things they’d seen.  The first time they saw each other since Herr Weil was hauled off to the gates of Auschwitz and certain death, they grabbed each other and embraced, collapsing into each other’s arms and weeping like babies for a long time, unable to speak.                

***
To read the "Sunflowers" part of this chapter, check out the book. 

If you happened to be in Moscow late on a winter night you might see them, shadowy figures bundled against the knife-sharp cold, homeless people walking all night long so they won’t freeze to death.  They may be riding the subway as long as they can before they’re kicked out, huddled by the exhaust vent of a restaurant to absorb some warmth, or just stamping their feet and looking toward the skyline, praying for the dawn to come which signals their survival…at least until night falls again.

And then a white van pulls up and smiles spread across half-frozen faces.  They swarm around it and gleefully welcome the volunteer workers who get out, distributing hot meals, wool socks, and basic medical care to them.  In the depths of winter, when deep freezes curse the city and the temperature can go as low as -15 degrees F for weeks on end, the help of the volunteers means the difference between life and death for many.  

Well, some people are bringing warmth to the humble residents of Moscow, in an unorthodox way – by jumping in the freezing river themselves, and donating the money they raise for that heroic (ok, bonkers!) act. 

It’s called the ‘Auski Cold Plunge’, a celebratory event and fundraiser to provide relief for the country’s homeless, during their Arctic winters.  Cold Plunge was started by founder Jessie Cummings in 2011 and has attracted plungers from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, UK, America, Israel, Russia, the Philippines and more.  In its 3 years, the Auski Cold Plunge for the Homeless has raised $40,000USD for charities supporting homeless people. Last year saw over 100 people take the plunge and do their part to help their brothers and sisters who are living on the streets.

Unofficial numbers gauge Moscow’s homeless population at about 100,000 but no one really knows.  They come to the city from all over Russia in search of work but often can’t get jobs, are robbed, can’t find family, or lose their documents and become trapped in the city.  Budgets for any social services are stretched thin or nonexistent, and there are only 8 shelters, and 1 bus driving around for a city of over 11 million inhabitants. 

There is no other safety net for these homeless men and women, mothers and children.  In fact, during a recent 3-week cold spell, 200 homeless people died and on average about 30 succumb every month.  That means in one of the most expensive cities in the world one human being dies from something as simple and preventable as cold, every single night.  The volunteer workers drive around each morning and inevitably find corpses that they can’t shake from sleep, frozen stiff.  They desperately need our help, so please get involved and spread the word – you’ll be saving many lives and bringing warmth to the spirit of men, women, and children, who are counting on you.

This year’s Cold Plunge is February 1st, at 11am on Bezdonnoye Lake, Serebryany Bor, Moscow

If you’re in Moscow or nearby, and you’d like to take the plunge, contact Auski to register, recruit a team of your wild friends to do it with you, and start raising donations.

If you’re not ready to plunge, you’re a chicken, you can still help in a number of ways:

1.    You can come along and volunteer – register people, help teams, navigate the bus. You also can just cheer along and watch others plunge and get your pictures taken at the photo booth.

2.    You can come to the after party at Katie O’Shea’s, which will start at about 3pm, and buy artworks by homeless people.

3.    You can donate a prize for the after party raffle – it’s an extra source of income.

4.   You can donate money on http://www.gofundme.com/6c0l60 any amount is much appreciated

5.    You can help us get paintings from Caritas to Katie O’Shea’s – we need your car and a couple of hours. If you can do so, please email Anna and Tommas on [email protected]

6.    You can spread the word and get all your friends to come along!

If you are willing to help in any way, please contact us at [email protected] or call Anna at +79261489042 (Russian and English) or Tommas at +79629126439 (English)

Participants must register – https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1dqGzKL7QTAJB321QsWj1SlMUPVLyy95XYrdxRJTRV6g/edit#

Luckily, I Googled “Floating villages, Cambodia” while I was waiting for him in the lobby because several notices came up warning tourists.  There are a few villages and two of them, Kompong Phluk and Chong Kneas, are the most popular with tour guides because they are closer to Siem Reap.  However, based on the reviews these authentic floating communities had become nothing more than well-organized shakedowns, with someone begging, selling, or demanding a donation every five minutes.  My driver was hesitant to take me all the way out to Kompong Khleang, the less popular village still almost untouched by tourism, because it was much further out on a bad road.  But he complied and we set out on impossibly bumpy dirt roads with soil so red it looked like crushed bricks.  

Kompong Khleang certainly did not disappoint.  The village, home to about 1,800 families or 6,000 total residents, is on Lake Tonlé Sap, Cambodia’s immense central lake that covers about 7,400 square miles when it floods (Lake Tahoe is only 191 square miles!)  The Lake receives the water from every river and tributary on the peninsula, from rivers way up north in China to the Mekong delta in Vietnam, making it a flood plain that swells enormously during the wet season.  The lake is Cambodia’s greatest natural resource, making it unique among other neighboring Southeast Asian countries and the largest fresh water body.  More than three million people live around the lake, 90% of them earning a living from fishing or agriculture, especially rice that grows hearty in the flood plains.

Nearly half the fish consumed in Cambodia come from this very lake, and it holds over 300 species of fish, as well as snakes, crocs, turtles, otters, and 100 species of birds like storks and pelicans.  But life for people in the countryside here is hard, a fight for survival among extremes.  They are so desperately poor it’s hard for me to comprehend through a western paradigm, and the majority of each and every day for them is just trying to secure food and shelter.  There are only two seasons in this part of the world (and near the equator) – the dry season, December through June, and the rainy season the rest of the time.  During the rainy season the water level could rise 20  to even 40 feet high, completely submerging villages.  

So the residents who live near the shores of the lake have to live there to make a living and eat, but also have to endure epic floods for months.  The solution is that they build floating villages to survive.  That could really mean two things – there are houses built on along the banks of the lake on giant stilts – sometimes 30 feet high – and residents get in by long ladders.  Other people live right on boats, or floating pontoon structures that look like extremely primitive houseboats.  So when the floodwaters rise, their houses rise right with it.  They have whole families living in one-room bamboo hovels on the water, and you’ll see cooking fires, general stores, schools, and even medical clinics floating along.  

There is actually a big class divide between the inhabitants who live in stilted houses, which are considered higher class (even though they are just simple one room bamboo huts, themselves) and the floating village people.  But when the lake rises every rainy season, the floating villagers move right along, while the water could come right up to the floorboards of the stilted houses,  or even partially submerge them.    

People hang their laundry out on their floating homes, burn cooking fires, jump in and bathe by the banks of the lake, send their kids to school on boats, visit their Pagodas, dry small sardine-like fish on huge racks, set up fish farms contained in water, haul in catches with huge nets, and harvest crustaceans they can eat and seashells by the bag they can haul to the next town and sell.  Even little kids row around long canoes or sometimes even sit in the water in 5-gallon buckets!  

The people were all amazed to see a tourist as I was enthralled by how they lived, but their big smiles and warm vibe never ceased to amaze me.  On the way out of town my driver stopped so I could take a picture of the rice fields and flood plains from a bridge, and I encountered a group of kids and a family who welcomed me.  I bought a bag of candy at the storefront next door and shared it with the kids, who all happily posed for a photo, waving and flashing the peace sign.

Norm   :-)

It started humbly – first, they built the latrine, as Sarin told me, and then they dug the well.  Water and sanitation are the most important things here, he explained.  What started out as a one-room bamboo structure and 50 students in 2005 has now grown leaps and bounds to a whole compound with half a dozen nice cement buildings, tin roofs, and a sandy courtyard with trees, flowers, a flagpole in the middle, and plenty of chickens running around.  Thanks to funding by the Spitlers, donations by other foreigners, and tireless work by Sarin, the school new serves about 500 local children grades K through 6. 

They now get a first class education, a huge advantage compared to most of their parents and villagers who have no schooling at all because of the civil war and the need to work in the fields.  The school provides them with one new uniform, school supplies, books, and a new backpack.  I saw plenty of photos of the children holding those gifts on their first day, the backpacks adorned by the Arizona Diamondbacks logo because it was the baseball team who donated them.   Brand new bicycles have also been donated by a corporation and each child who graduates 6th grade receives one of their own.  This is crucial because the only chance to continue their schooling is a middle school 9 km away.  Without a bike to ride there, almost all of the children would drop out and go to working the fields – or be recruited into the sex trade.

They teach the kids the usual subjects here but with a special emphasis on foreign history and English, topics that will help them get jobs in tourism – the only opportunity that gives them a chance of escaping poverty.  The school also instills in them lessons about being a responsible community leader in their village.  

Indeed, when the kids were released from class and filed out the front gate, they were ecstatic to say "hello" and "How are you" and "goodbye" to me in English, huge smiles on their faces.  A few peace signs were mixed in and one little boy even ran back just to slap me a high five.  These kids are friggin' Golden, I'm telling you, and to be able to do one very small thing to help them out and feel the glow of their appreciation was one of the best feelings I've ever had.    

But my warm and fuzzes aside, these folks face some huge problems in their lives.  For instance, most of the people who live in their village are focused on just having enough food and shelter every day, so trash containment is a real problem.  Uneducated and without the luxury of making smart environmental choices, most of the villagers just dump their trash in fields or rivers or by the side of the road.  So the school teaches the children a better way and has each of them collect a quota of discarded water bottles and plastic bags.  They stuff the bags into the bottles and then affix them to a wire frame, forming the internal structure for a wall that can be cemented over.  

They also get involved with rebuilding local dirt roads because during the rainy season everything floods and the roads get washed away, prohibiting everyone’s access to town.  While I was there I made a humble donation to the school, which Sarin explained could be used to finish building the playground, which was just a bumpy dirt lot because they’d ran out of money to continue construction.The kids only attend school half days so there are no meal programs (and not enough money to fund them, anyway) but they do enlist the local children’s hospital from Siem Reap, the next big town, to come give checkups to the kids once a year.  It costs them $1 per child but for most of them it’s the only medical care they’ll ever get.  

Many of the kids need pills and medicine because they have parasites. He explained that most of the villagers had only simple one-room huts without even outhouses.  So people just went to the bathroom in the bush.  The problem is that during the rainy season everything floods and the sanitation of the rivers and creeks is compromised, which all mixes in with bathing water and even drinking water if they don’t have a well.  The children are barefoot so they end up walking in the water and get ringworm and other parasites often.  It costs only $300 to dig a new well, but most families will never see that much money on hand in a lifetime.  

Sarin, raised in an orphanage and then a refugee camp when he was young after his father was murdered by the brutal Khmer Rouge regime’s genocide, was only able to learn English and become a tour guide because Buddhist monks took him in and gave him an education.  He is now married and has two beautiful children who will never know hunger or want for anything.  His life’s work, and that of the school, is to empower these children through education so their lives might be better, too. 

So the school isn’t just about giving these kids a basic education but the only lifeline most of them have to the outside world.  It gives them hope, laughter, joy, self esteem that they can have dreams and accomplish something in their lives.  It’s all at once the center of the village, a sanctuary for their youth, and a chance to heal the community who’s scars run deep, but who’s future will be better because of the warmth of the Cambodian people and the generosity of strangers. 

If you'd like to get involved or help out, visit their website at: http://www.spitlerschool.org/
Or drop my an email any time [email protected]

Thanks so much everyone - this means a lot to me.


Norm  :-)