For Chanukkah this year I may have received the most meaningful gift I’ve ever been given. My family isn’t all that big on the gift-giving associated with that time of year. Like many people, it’s more about the time we spend together as a family than the price tags or the presents. We get simple things, like Dutch chocolate letters, an old tradition from my dad; or useful things, like teacups or socks or warm sweaters. And to be honest, this year I didn’t even want a gift. Everyone was happy and healthy, and that’s all that mattered.

However, my mom surprised me this year. When I was in high school she taught me how to knit, and I had spent many years slowly knitting colored squares with the intention of one day creating a quilt. She started making squares as well, and when I went away to university we stored the squares and the yarn in our guest room. Unbeknownst to me, my mom had taken on the task of sewing together not only squares that both she and I had made but added those to squares my dad’s mother had made as well: a three-generation quilt.

I was completely stunned. I knew that my mom must have spent countless hours painstakingly arranging all the squares and sewing them together. Her inclusion of pieces from my oma (“grandmother” in Dutch) gives the quilt an added meaning. My oma passed away when I was 14, just as I was beginning to know her. She and her husband, who died when I was 3, were both Holocaust survivors. I feel as if I’ve spent the rest of my life searching for pieces of them, tying stories, pictures, and memories together in an attempt to hold onto her.

I know a few people who have their grandparent’s pocket watch or a piece of jewelry belonging to a great-great relative. Or maybe it’s an old photograph that they carry in their wallet. These objects remain almost invincible to time, preserving the memories of their past owners and keeping them alive.

Aside from objects, stories that are passed from generation to generation also keep memories from dying. Also, sometimes people name their children after those who have passed on as a way to give honor to their memory.

As for my grandmother, I try to weave the stories my family has told me about her with my own memories as well as physical objects. Before she died, a Holocaust museum in Florida interviewed my grandmother. I listened to the tapes, searching for answers into who she was. She described her experiences about being in a line that separated the people who will live from the people who will die, and about where they slept, ate, and cried. Her spirit and determination comes through on those tapes so vividly, it’s almost as if she’s next to me and we’re having this intimate conversation. I want and need to keep her memory alive for my children and their children too.

In the meantime, the quilt lays on my bed, protecting me from the unknown secrets in the night and keeping me warm. My squares, which are sometimes slightly misshapen or hampered by mistakes, intertwine with those of my mom, pieces that are uniform, brightly colored, and cheerful. My eyes follow the stitches to my oma’s squares, neat, tightly bound, and of deep, rich shades of brown and orange that were popular in the ’70s. And maybe it sounds silly, but I know she’s there with me. It’s as if her soul shines through the yarn. Perhaps physical objects are our most powerful relics after all. Either way, they certainly keep our bodies and our hearts warm.

Rachel Van Thyn

Before I arrived in London, a local friend supplied me with a list of must-sees: Buckingham Palace, Harrods, St. Paul’s Cathedral. I diligently check items off the list, impressed, but uninspired. The last sight on the list is noted with two stars — Postman’s Park. The trouble is, I can’t find it.

I study my map, scanning street by street as if playing a word-find jumble, without luck. The persistent drizzle is wearing down my patience, so I stop a cabbie for directions. He points to a green speck on my map only a few blocks away. Then he puts his finger to his lips and drives off, and I sense that I’m about to be let in on a special secret.

The park is empty save for a woman smoking a cigarette, a black bird with a bright orange beak, and me. The bird lands at my feet and hops toward me, holding one foot up as if injured. Here, next to the noisy, crowded streets of downtown London, I finally feel I can get acquainted with the city Shakespeare called “this other Eden.” Postman’s Park, tucked between looming office buildings and steps from the hoards of tourists at St. Paul’s, is as humble as a park could get — no life-size bronze statues, no Sound of Music hills, no majestic elms. What it has is this: tidy lawns, blooming perennials, a few koi in a small fountain, and a series of plaques.

The plaques make this rather unremarkable park remarkable. Under the eaves of a loggia where the woman and I are sitting, ceramic tiles commemorate ordinary people who died trying to save the lives of others. “Edmund Emery from Chelsea leaped from a Thames steamboat to rescue a child and drowned on July 31, 1874.”“Solomon Galaman aged 11 died of his injuries September 6, 1901, after saving his little brother from being run over in a commercial street.”

My first impression is to fill in the blanks in my mind. I see a cobblestone road filled with horse-drawn carriages traveling in all directions and the Galaman boy darting after a ball. Solomon pushes his brother out of the way just as a carriage overtakes him. But then I feel a little cheated because I don’t really know if that was how the event transpired. There isn’t enough information. I want to know more — like how Solomon’s mother handled the news and if Mrs. Emery was proud of her husband’s bravery. Most of all, I want to know why. Why did Robert Wright of Croydon enter a burning house on April 30, 1893, to save a woman even though he knew there was petroleum stored in the cellar? Did he recognize the woman, or did he just hear cries for help and decide to act? But I will never get more than the paltry details written here.

These tiles were the brainchild of painter and sculptor George F. Watts, a socially conscious Victorian rebel of sorts who disliked the upper classes. During his own time, he was very successful and was called “the English Michelangelo.” In 1887, the Queen’s jubilee year, Watts wrote to The Times requesting a memorial be built to record examples of everyday heroism and self-sacrifice. Nothing came of the letter, so he decided to go it alone. He paid for the first 13 plaques to be built on this wall in the former churchyard of St. Botolph’s, still located at the west end of the park. After Watts’ death in 1904, his widow continued working to bring the total to 53. The most recent date I can find is 1927.

The black bird flies away, maybe to find someone willing to share his lunch. Then the woman stubs out her cigarette and leaves too, and I am alone. Her heels clicking on the stone path get fainter and fainter. I have that illusive feeling of being sealed and protected from the outside world — the sounds of the double-decker buses and salesmen hawking souvenirs cannot permeate the gates of the park.

It’s not hard to imagine Mark Tomlinson and Ellen Donovan and Herbert Maconoghu, each dead about 125 years from some heroic act, sitting along side of me. Theirs is an invisible weightiness, a presence here in Postman’s Park that forces me to wonder if I would come to the aid of another, no questions asked. Would I have what it takes to run into a burning building to save three children like Alice Ayers did? Could I jump into a river for a boy entangled in weeds like William Donald? Without the pressure of my life on the line, it’s easy to say yes, I would do the right thing. But I don’t know for sure.

Jacquelin Cangro

We are looking over the menu at a small restaurant on the beach in Beira, Mozambique. The borders of this city hang into the ocean; appropriately, Beira means “the edge” in Portuguese.

Although it is dinnertime on a Saturday night in the heart of the country’s second-biggest city, only one other table in the restaurant is occupied. Upstairs is a deserted discotheque; to the right is an empty pool hall. Our table is right on the beach, and the restaurant’s weak lighting barely illuminates the whitecaps as they break on the sand.

The menu is impressive: ten pages of pastas, meats, fish, and fancy drinks. Of the four people at our table, three of us have lived in Brazil, so we are naturally thrilled to see some Brazilian delicacies on the menu. When the waiter comes, we order only to find out that they don’t actually have any of those dishes available. Further into the ordering process, we find out that they don’t have much of anything. I politely ask for the pasta alfredo. “We don’t have that,” replies the waiter in a heartfelt, apologetic tone. I request the pasta with garlic instead. They don’t have that either.

“Which of the pasta dishes do you have tonight?” I inquire.

“No, that’s what I mean,” says the waiter. “There’s no pasta.”

Deterred, I reopen the menu and motion to my husband, Joe, to make his order. He discovers that there is no stroganoff, nor chicken, nor shrimp. Of the full page of fish dishes, only one is available. Joe takes some time to regroup.

“Do you have the vegetable salad?” I ask.

“Sorry, no.”

We all end up ordering pizza.

While we’re waiting for the food to arrive, Joe and I step out of the wall-free restaurant onto the smooth sand. A twelve-inch-wide piece of concrete juts out of the sand and leads out into the ocean. I walk on the concrete while Joe holds my hand, suspicious of my balance. We can see the concrete disappear into the sea and we stand there on the edge, deeply disoriented. It doesn’t feel like we are right by the shore. Waves rise up like monsters and crash all around us. We could be in the middle of the ocean, on a boat somewhere, lost at sea. I am dizzy from the sloshing and pounding and frothing of the waves. I could lose my balance, fall into the water and be lost forever. The stars glint and glimmer on the ocean’s dark surface; all at once, they are trapped by two vast skies. I tilt my head back to meet them, and my head swims with all the light — there is nothing so limitless as the African sky. If you’re not careful you could tumble into it, head over heels, heart over feet, to that blurry horizon where ocean becomes sky, where no one could ever find you again.

When the dizziness is too much for me, I jump off the concrete and join Joe on the beach. We write notes to each other in the sand until the waves wash them all away and we’ve gotten our feet wet. We have been married for only a few months; every day is still a honeymoon.

The waiter beckons to us. Our pizza has arrived. Although we ordered different kinds, the food all looks pretty much the same.

As we are finishing our meal, two obviously intoxicated women stumble to the table next to ours. I don’t know what they’re on, but it is pretty clear what they’re after. They can barely sit up in their chairs, but they are making eyes at my husband. I am slightly angry, but mostly I am filled with pity. I try to imagine what I will do if they make my husband an offer; I can’t decide what exactly, but I’m certain it will be awkward for all of us.

A restaurant security guard comes over and asks the two women to leave the premises. One argues loudly with him; the other, with glazed eyes and frizzy, explosive hair, is slumped over the table like a corpse. The guard has to physically remove them both from the restaurant.

The waiter comes over to apologize. “Some people have no shame,” he laments.

While we pay the bill, I think about the two women and what their lives are like. Sometimes we are so quick to assume that people have made choices, when really life can be a blinding sandstorm of disappointment. What happened to these women? How did they get where they are at this moment? How can lives dissolve so quickly, like so many handfuls of salt cast into the open ocean?

As we leave the restaurant, we notice the two prostitutes in the street. The silent one is laying in the dirt as a puppy laps at the hem of her jeans. The loud one is standing over her, shouting something at the security guard who is watching from across the street with his arms folded over his chest.

We drive away into the night, moving west until we can no longer hear the rushing sound of the waves.

Three hours north of Beira is Gorongosa National Park, one of Mozambique’s remaining big game parks. A couple of months have passed since our first pizza dinner on the beach, and we are starting to realize the many ways that Mozambique’s civil war, which ended in 1992, still affects everyday life. I am no longer surprised by restaurants with long menus that only serve thin pizzas. As we have visited schools, orphanages, and health centers, we have seen the more vital ways that the civil wore tore down this country. People are still trying to build it up.
When we arrived at the park today, after a dusty early morning drive, we went in search of bottled water and found, instead, the park’s director.

“We don’t have any food here,” he said. “As you can see, we are still trying to rebuild.”

It didn’t take him long to explain that Gorongosa used to be the best game park in Africa — nay, the world. He said that before the war, people came from all over the planet to see Gorongosa’s animals. During the war, however, all the game parks in Mozambique were virtually destroyed. The rebels used one park as a base of operations and many animals were killed for food because local populations were starving. Since then, it has been difficult to draw tourists to visit the game parks. Most people go to Kruger Park or other famous game parks in neighboring South Africa, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe.

Despite all this, we are sort of tourists, and the clouds are perfect. The landscape seems to change and undulate as each moment passes. One minute we are surrounded by feathered trees, when suddenly the horizon comes into view and the tall grasses sway in the wind, ruffled like ocean waves. There are few animals, but I am content with the trees. Joe and I are riding on the top of a land cruiser straining our eyes for a glimpse of a baboon or warthog. We missed the lions — apparently, they are sleeping. We are searching for the elephants, but they are shy.

As we drive further along the dirt roads, bumping over potholes and brushing grasshoppers off our arms, reality fades away until I can remember it just vaguely, the way you remember how salty seawater feels on the back of your neck when you are living in the desert. I can’t remember what Africa is, or America, or even the planet Earth. It is just me, the husband that I am leaning on, and an azure sky that stumbles into the horizon and bumps into one especially tall gnarled tree. When I look closer I see that the tree is filled with monkeys.

What was apparent our first week here becomes increasingly clear as the months pass by: There is more than one kind of post-war reconstruction happening in Mozambique. Some people have dedicated themselves to attracting tourism to the game parks and nightlife, but the real and most vital kind of reconstruction is happening quietly, little by little, in individual homes. Things fall apart and get torn down; every moment is a good time to start the process of fixing. I have met social workers, teachers, volunteers, nurses, government officials, and aid workers who are dedicated to building up individuals and families and communities. They are the ones who will really reconstruct this country and every other country, and eventually, if all goes well and their wishes are granted, the whole star-speckled universe.

Despite the amazing differences, every place is strikingly similar to all the others. Wherever you go, there are happy people and sad people and empty restaurants and blue skies and, occasionally, eternally tall trees filled with noisy animals. There is nowhere in the world like Mozambique, and by that I mean it is just like home.

Melissa Lambert

Amman, Jordan, is on its way to becoming a modern city in the Middle East. High rise buildings dot the landscape, and Mercedes and BMWs shoot through traffic circles. In the basements of every high rise and apartment building, you will find a “boab” who is sharing his living space with the tenants’ cars. The boab is a jack of all trades: he is a 24-hour live-in doorman, the building’s guard, a maintenance man, a personal grocery shopper, and the car washer. Indispensable but nearly invisible.

My name is Abu Hassan. People laugh at me because of my small feet. They are almost a size 4. No matter how I try, I can't hide them. I wear sand-colored open-toed sandals, like the ones we have back in Egypt. But here, in Amman, I wear sweatpants and not a long gallebeya, my traditional Egyptian robe that conceals my feet.

What's my daily routine? It's simple really. I wake up before the sun rises and wipe down each of the cars in the apartment building. There are 18 in total and they are all lined up. The six-story building is old and badly needs to be sandblasted. It's not nearly as nice as the one my son Mohammed works in down the road, but both buildings have the same owner. He is fair and occasionally generous.

I have my own room on the ground floor right beside the elevator, more space than I ever had in Egypt. There, we were six, packed in a tiny room. It was always filled with flies. The flies crowded around our babies' eyes when they slept, especially in the summer.

Now I have an entire bed to myself. I even have an extra one for when my son visits. There are no bugs, and I own a small black and white TV.

After washing and polishing each car early in the morning, I come back to my room and put my copper kettle on my small stove and wait until it whistles. I snatch it off the flame just as it is about to fully let out its piercing song so that I don't wake up everyone in the building. I mix in five spoons of sugar and dunk a tea bag that seeps its ochre goodness into the boiling water.

The glass warms up my fingers, which are rigid from the cold cleaning water outside. Unlike Egypt during the winter months, it snows here in Amman.

After my break, I sweep the entire entrance to the apartment building. The 14 pesky kids who live here leave little piles of candy wrappers in every nook you could imagine — between the cracks in the pavement, the grooves of car tires, and the tops of the entrance bushes. Every day I am forced to go on a trash hunt to keep the place spotless as they giggle and watch. As soon as I've cleared the entire area, they run to their school buses, leaving whirlwinds of dust and trash behind them. And I have to start sweeping all over again.

If it's a good day, the foreign woman on floor two may ask me to clean her apartment or help her fix things. She tips well, perhaps an American trait. She's clumsy, speaks broken Egyptian Arabic, and has a strange talent for breaking things.

She asks me to come up once a month to help her with repairs. I never know what to expect.

Last time, she had somehow ripped her curtains off their hooks. I've never known anyone who managed to do that. The time before, she had yanked the handle off the toilet. It took me a week to figure out that one. She then cracked her wooden bed frame in two. And one time she blew up her glass coffeemaker.

I call her Ruru, and that's what the kids call her too. At least she's able to distract them, by playing football with them after school so that I can get about my business.

Best of all, she loves my tea. She comes by once a day to chat, and I laugh. From her stories, I can tell that she's not just clumsy at home; she takes her klutziness into the world. Over tea and sometimes a tobacco waterpipe, or sheesha, she tells me stories — about her experiences at work and her convoluted attempts to buy things.

She calls pillows "beans." And when she tries to say "beans," she uses the word for "money" instead. Her Arabic is mangled, but she talks with her hands and reminds me of being back home in Egypt.

Ruru lived in Cairo for three years and has carried our humor with her. She seems to trust me more than others, because I can understand her even when her words make little sense.

Ruru is friends with the apartment building owner, so I feel extra kind towards her. I always put an additional scoop of sugar in her tea, even though she says it will make her lose her teeth. In return, she brings me treats. She knows what my favorites are: dried apricots and strawberry milk.

I pray that Ruru marries someone good. Someone who can fix many, many things.

Rhian Kohashi ORourke