WHAT'S NEW THIS WEEK:

The barn is fully up. Next step, we have to build the interior and hook up the electricity.

All offerings remain as described below.

Not One Single Thing

Hey all! It’s Victoria.This week was my one-year anniversary of arriving at Turkana, and, as is almost always the case in adulthood, it feels like simultaneously more and less time has elapsed. Looking back over the last year, it feels nearly impossible to take a full account of it. When I’m standing on the front lawn, wrapped in a cozy sweater and smelling the warm, complex rot of fallen leaves, it seems like no time at all has passed. Conversely, when I’m upstairs sweeping the spiderwebs out of the corners, it feels like I’ve spent far more than a year on this particular activity already. When a friend asks how the year has gone, I’m left at a loss for words, as all these different measures of time collapse at once: it was very good in parts! Some parts were really brutal! It certainly all happened! But I don’t have a word that gets across just how much this year really was. Except maybe “Heterogeneous”.Chimamanda Adichie talks about this in her 2009 TED talk (still the standout of the medium) “The Danger of a Single Story.” I’ve been thinking about this piece almost constantly for a decade now (another measure of time that seems impossible), and it hit home for me again this week when my hometown, Sevier County, Tennessee, was in the national news for shameful reasons. At a meeting about protecting Second Amendment rights, County Commissioner Warren Hurst said, among other spurious things, that it was “ugly” to have “a queer” running for President. Of course, one commissioner's regressive homophobia is less of a totalizing force than the entirety of Western colonialism that Adichie examines. Still, these statements operate around similar fault lines--Flannery O’Connor knew this when she said “Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.” I feel a similar pressure in response to this event, a flattening of the reality of my home for people who would never have heard or thought about it otherwise. Sure, there were people who applauded Hurst’s statements. There were also people who walked out. He doesn’t represent me, or my family, or our thoughts about things, but in a very literal, political sense, he also does. We may or may not be related. I’ve heard a few calls from non-local citizens to boycott the local tourist industry as a result, including Dollywood, as if Dolly Parton isn’t an outspoken icon of queer acceptance and/or literal saint of whitetrash liberation. I’m frustrated by this seeming inability to separate a person from a place, the parts from the whole. My present from my past.This week, I was a bridesmaid for one of my dearest friends, celebrating a truly beautiful union in a gorgeous venue. It was also the week of my stepfather’s memorial service, which I couldn’t attend, and my last week of work for a job I wasn’t ready to leave. I went directly from a painful exit interview to the wedding rehearsal, which was a delight. I took six trains in an 80-hour window. I danced in gold cowboy boots. What was it, except for a lot of everything?The last thing Troy and I did before we left for the wedding was usher all the sheep into their brand-new, just-finished barn. We had hoped to have a sort of formal barn-warming, maybe a dance on the new concrete floors before the sheep had a chance to christen them with manure? But a rainstorm was coming, and timing was so tight, and we had to get everything el