Stories

For many years we talked about saving the stories of people in Iowa Yearly Meeting (Conservative) before they died. To have a way to share these stories, I created a blog named Quaker Stories on WordPress:

https://quakerstories.wordpress.com/

Since then, other opportunities to save and share stories have arisen. One project relates to the Nandi tribe in Kenya. IUPUI anthropologist Jeanette Dickerson-Putman has made several trips to Africa. Recently her interest relates to why the violence occurred after the elections in Kenya in 2007. The Nandi tribe was most involved in that. Jeanette found both the Nandi elders and the youth felt tribal knowledge was not being passed between generations, and partially accounted for the violent response after those elections. Jim Lemons, who has done a lot of work in Africa, mainly around the Kenya Mothers and Babies Hospital, introduced Jeanette to me. I suggested the story website might be a way to help address the Nandi problem. Jeanette recently returned from Kenya, where she was able to show some Nandi the Nandi stories we had uploaded to the story website for that purpose. This photo shows Nandi viewing the stories website on a cell phone in Kenya.