America Is Better Than This by Jeff Merkley

Author:Jeff Merkley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2019-08-19T16:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

ARC OF MY JOURNEY

MY EYES WERE FIRST OPENED TO THE BROADER WORLD WHEN an exchange student walked into my sixth-grade classroom. She was from our local high school, but had spent her summer in Japan. She told stories that seemed to me, a blue-collar kid whose universe was our neighborhood and the wilds of Oregon, extraordinarily exotic. Different food, different customs, different language, different everything.

Each year our high school sent one student abroad through the AFS (American Field Service) student exchange program. Only one student was selected to go. And to get a shot at going, you needed to study a language for two years, not because AFS would send you to the country whose language you studied, but because it was a commitment to understanding other cultures. I knew at that moment, sitting in my sixth-grade classroom, that I would take those two years of language and apply. To be able to travel somewhere around the world… Wow!

Five years later I was sitting in front of a woman who was interviewing me as a potential AFS student. She asked me where, if selected, would I like to go. I was confounded by the question, and responded that I had understood that you had no influence on where you were sent. You were signing up to go wherever AFS chose to send you.

“Yes that’s true,” the interviewer told me. “But I think it’s always very interesting to hear what the applicants have to say.”

“I’d like to go someplace that I’d never otherwise be able to go,” I replied. “I don’t want to go someplace like Europe because my impression is that it is much like America. I’d like to go somewhere entirely different, someplace I’d never otherwise be able to experience, somewhere like Africa.”

The utterance of that word, “Africa,” was to have a profound influence on my life.

Foreign travel was not a part of my world before I heard about AFS. I come from the small timber town of Myrtle Creek, Oregon. My father worked as a millwright—the mechanic who keeps the machines at the mill humming—at another mill down the road in Riddle. Those timber mills dotted the landscape in the first half of the 1900s, but in the 1950s they started to disappear. In some cases they ran out of timber. In many others, an investor or a larger company bought them out. And so it was that the mill shut down in Riddle and we moved to Roseburg, where my dad tried his hand at many different jobs from designing and building a rock crusher, to repairing logging machinery in the woods, to building houses.

With the economy hurting in Roseburg and my dad wanting to spend more time with his children, we moved again, this time to the much larger city of Portland where he located a machinist’s position with regular hours.

In my office is a photo of my dad, standing like a daredevil on the seat of a motorbike as he rides down the street. The picture is all the more remarkable when you know that as a child he twice lost the use of his legs.

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