XII. Teachers

Late this morning, I arrived in Chennai (Madras), greeted by my old friend Mocharla Satya. Coming here is, in many ways, like coming home. Satya connects me to a past that stretches very far back in time and reaches into many parts of the world. All the pictures seen here were shot around Satya & Bjorn's house on the beach south of Chennai or at some ancient (some 2000 years old!) temples in the Southern part of the city.

There are special teachers in our lives. Some of these are individuals. Some of them are the intersection points of places and people; events and experiences that shape us in marvelous and unexpected ways. Between my first trip to India and the second, when the first minor truths of Indian famines were revealed during my two years working in Madras, I met one such teacher in my life.

Cole P. Dodge was a fellow master’s student at the University of Washington when we met in the fall of 1977. He was a bit older than me (by 4 years) and, by far, the more worldly of the two of us. He had escaped a confining life as a poor kid growing up in rural Eastern Washington state through a series of events that put him in the first (and one the very few) batch of Peace Corps volunteers in India in the early 1960s. I believe that he had not even graduated from high school before setting out for the other side of the world. Working in South India he met his remarkable wife, Marilyn, the youngest of seven children raised in a Mennonite missionary family here in South India. By the time we met, Cole and Marilyn had lived and worked through famine and war in Bangladesh, Biafra and Ethiopia and had adopted the third of their three children, Jorna.

Despite our differences, Cole and I had a few things in common. We were (and still are) impatient, especially on matters related to social justice. We were captivated by the call to national service and international cooperation embodied in the presidency of John Kennedy; and that call changed both of us – him more dramatically and more quickly than me. Also, we were both impatient to leave Seattle. By a serendipitous series of accidents we wound up living in Madras for two years, from 1978 to 1980. Marilyn’s brother, Paul Wiebe, introduced me to the fisher (Pattinavar) communities where I did my masters and doctoral field work. Cole and Marilyn introduced me to many seekers of spiritual and other truths, such as Satya. During those years we would see each other pretty frequently – twice a month or so.

Cole and I also both love games – he taught me how to play squash when we were in Seattle and he beat me many times on three continents over the years. Like most great mentors, Cole let me into his life. I recall playing chess and eating dinner, singing, and telling stories on warm tropical nights in Asia and Africa over the next decade or so – then disappearing into warm South Indian and East African nights with the bond of friendship strengthened and lessons learned that made life a little richer and easier to fathom. I have many pictures that evoke the wonder and beauty from those days, lovingly developed and printed by my Dad (who lived vicarious adventures through my life over those years and died nearly twenty years ago). Those photographs are now in South Carolina; so, I cannot post them here.

There was a deadly serious side to all this, especially as we moved on to Uganda in the early 1980s. As I have learned over the years, those people who actually do change the world in fundamentally important ways understand the gamesmanship and fellowship that underlies all human interaction and know that our time on this earth is short and will not be easy no matter what.