Check out the video below from the Travel Channel show “Man vs. Food.” If you skip ahead to the 6-minute mark, you’ll see a segment on this restaurant. The sandwich that the chef prepares in the video is the exact same sandwich I ate yesterday– complete with breaded beef, chorizo omelet, etc.  It’s seriously a LOT of food for one sandwich. And spicy.

The last two weekends have also been filled with adventure. I recently went south with four of the Phoenix JVs to visit the Jesuit Volunteer casa in Tucson, affectionately named “Casa Nacho” after Spanish Jesuit priest Ignacio Ellacuria There, we celebrated the birthdays of two of their casa-mates and went to the city’s fall “Club Crawl” which closed several blocks of downtown for a large party with lots of live music.

Last weekend, a few of us hiked up Squaw Peak on the north side of Phoenix– a beautiful and long hike into and around the mountains. Below is a short slideshow of our trek into the mountains and our dinner in Tucson.

peace,

glenn

trampling her morning shadow into the street,
her mother wide-eyed, hysterical, smoldering in the heat.

This world is violent, terrifying, faceless and mad.

There is glass scattered in the pavement scars,
one hundred tiny suns squinting back empty

There are remnants of a living room in an alley,
sofas gutted, wood bodies with splintering spines

There is an abandoned apartment half-collapsed,
hallways choked black by ashy arsonist hands

And along the gutter, there is a loose
cinder-block wall dressed in dirty lost clothes
and the slur-blurry graffiti of angry youth.

This is no home for a mother and child.

…

And what does a child endure in the reality
of such absence, such loss, such vulnerability?

Does it define her, diminish her?
Does it hold her imagination captive?

Have her words and dreams begun to grow
the dry sightless thorns of fear and mistrust?

Have the trees turned to lifeless jagged twisting wire
shadeless and shedding rust in stead of leaves?

Do the mountains shrug their shoulders,
hunch their backs and grumble in their sleep?

Has the endless wishing blue Arizona sky
become just another drained, indifferent face?

In these moments of crisis, she simply
continues to tug on her mother’s jeans,

following the lead of their shadows
and whispering hope to the heavy sun.

“Somebody will help us. Somebody’s got to help us.”

.

It is an outrage that even one child in the United States will sleep without a roof over his or her head tonight. In fact, about 1.5 million children will experience homelessness this year, according to a report from the National Center on Family Homelessness. (Click here for the organization’s stat sheet). According to the report, the United States has the largest number of homeless women and children among industrialized nations. This  must change and this vulnerable population should not be so easily forgotten.

Poverty in the United States is much more nuanced than we might initially realize. Not all the homeless are stereotypical “lazy bums” (1/3 of the total homeless population are families)– they can be mothers fleeing domestic violence, fathers working through painful divorce, a single parent struggling with mental illness (and no access to healthcare), families living paycheck-to-paycheck who experience sudden job loss or health issues. They are normal people dealing with various crises–many which our closest family or friends have dealt with too.

No matter how a person becomes homeless, each individual should be treated with dignity and respect. What I advocate is not a naive view of respect that ignores a person’s sins and struggles, but a respect that allows for deeper understanding and awareness by realizing our common joys and struggles. In this, we can begin to see the ways in which our humanity is intertwined and thus work together for the solution to homelessness in our communities.

So I urge you to educate yourself on what resources are available in your community for food, shelter, and counseling. Maybe you can choose to volunteer at an organization serving the poor and walking alongside the homeless. At the very least, I encourage you to consider the homeless, pray for healing and stability, and spread the word about the reality of homelessness in the United States.

Peace,

glenn

The last two weeks were an adventure. I took the Amtrak from Chicago to San Francisco with a night’s stay in Denver (because 52 hours on a train is WAY too long). Met a lot of interesting people along the way. I also got food poisoning in Denver that lasted 4-5 days. Toughed out the sickness to have a wonderful week exploring San Francisco and Yosemite. Met a lot of interesting people along the way, again. Then had a great weekend retreat with the Jesuit Volunteers at Camp St. Francis in Aptos. Met even more wonderful people. Flew to Phoenix via Los Angeles on Thursday. Got closer to overcoming my fear of flying. Met my supervisor, Billie at the airport. Got settled into Casa Sojourner Truth. Started exploring Phoenix. Roasted in the dry 105 degree heat. Watched a few hours of Friends on DVD (cell phones in 1995 were HUGE). First day of work as a Case Manager at CASS Vista Colina is on Monday.

I will add more when the time comes (perhaps by next weekend) and also include some photographs of my journey through San Francisco and Yosemite. Unfortunately, blog updates might only be weekly or bi-monthly, since I didn’t bring a computer to Phoenix and my only Internet access will be through the library, which limits my time to 75 minutes per day.

Well, I’d best be signing off in the next minute or two.

Until next time– peace, love, happiness–

Glenn

I’m heading out to San Francisco via train (something I’ve wanted to do since I was a kid) with a stop in Denver. Orientation begins in 12 days just outside of San Jose, so I have ample time to explore places like San Francisco and Yosmite–and certainly a lot of time to spend in prayer and reflection. Until August 11, when our five-person community moves into Casa Sojourner Truth in Phoenix, I’ll be sleeping on trains, buses and cheap hostels and I won’t have much internet access.

Also, I am not bringing my laptop to Arizona (!). But I will find ways to update this blog, post some pictures and keep in touch.

If you’d like to send some snail mail, my address will be:

1931 West Hazelwood Street

Phoenix, Arizona 85015

Until next time–

Peace,

Glenn

So, to anyone who might read this blog: feel free to contribute, debate, question, or just say hello.

Before I sign off, I want to direct your attention to a few of my friends and former housemates who are currently living and working abroad.

Stephanie Guertin: She’s working in Port Elizabeth, South Africa for Grassroots Soccer, an organization that “uses the power of soccer to educate, inspire, and mobilize communities to stop the spread of HIV.” Check out her blog right here.

Elizabeth Benninger: She’s working with children in Lavender Hill (a township in Cape Town, South Africa) and is the Director of Programmes for These Numbers Have Faces in the community. She recently wrote a blog about her experiences with the children in Lavender Hill.

Andy Marshall: He’s working as a teacher in Moshi, Tanzania through Jesuit Volunteers International for the next two years. You can go to his blog if you click on the link to the right. Or you can just go to freespiritrunner.wordpress.com/

Steve Mozug: He’s teaching in Daejeon, South Korea for a year and you can check out his blog right here.

Well, that should be it for this post. Until next time– I wish you peace, love and happiness.

Glenn

Only 10 weeks.

Already 10 weeks.

It feels like it’s been years and it feels like it’s been no time at all. It’s a strange thought, but it makes sense. We’ve learned and changed so much, individually and communally and that makes this time seem like years. We also still have so much to learn and so many opportunities to apply what we’ve learned already. And that makes it seem like no time at all.

These last 10 weeks, we haven’t grown in minutes, hours or days but in moments of joy, spells of confusion and periods of adjustment. But I guess growth has never been about a measure of time, but more about what happens during that time. And after that time? Is time really a limitation to growth, learning and change? Is it ever “too late” to learn? Is it ever too late to change? And if time isn’t a boundary to change, could a moment of deep, inexpressible joy in a lifetime of pain change everything? 

All right, I’m starting to let my mind wander… but before I get too far off track (and forget to do my homework entirely), I must add that our spring break was a great experience and I have posted some pictures from the trip. Our week back at school after break was not so great as most of us had papers and books to catch up on. So we spent most of the week cramming as much homework as we could into a short amount of time.

If growth is measured by what I did during those hours, I must say that I didn’t grow as much as I could have and could have used my time better. Although I was doing schoolwork, it meant little to me because I rushed through my work and didn’t appreciate it. I shouldn’t confine my schooling to the last minute. 

Lesson learned (after 15 years of school?). Well, I guess it’s never too late to learn, eh? Why not now?

Peace, 

Glenn

For our break (spring break pt. 2!), we leave Friday morning to take a bus to Durban and Port Elizabeth. We will stay there a few days and most of us (except Steve and I) will bungee-jump off a bridge. Then we will fly to Johannesburg and stay there for a few days. Finally, we will go to Kruger National Park on a safari. 

Hopefully by then, we will make it in one piece (hopefully without any dangerous elephant or cheetah encounters) back in Cape Town by Sept. 7th.

Peace.

Glenn

Laughter broke the silence of

my quiet walk—

a small light-skinned boy beside

a young dark-skinned man

rowing together on an old

creaky wooden bench,

their oars breaking the green

skin of the Indian Ocean

to find the blue blood of the

Atlantic surging underneath.

At first, I noticed their bench

was anchored to the ground,

resting on the brow

of a bluff’s fixed gaze

and their oars were too short

to reach the water (in fact,

their hands were empty).

But they had entered another world

and the ground swelled with water,

the moist lumps of grass

in the field filling with

the ocean’s breath and rolling

crashing beneath their squeaking

groaning boat, an unfastened

rope trailing behind in the water

like an open hand waving

goodbye to the shore.

—and watching them row with

their oars stirred my silence to Laughter

and I called out to them in their distant world

as they rode the heaving chest of the ocean

(they turned to me mid-row and waved)

—and I wondered if we break into Laughter

or if Laughter breaks into us—

climbing over the walls of our shut eyelids

and prying them open

squeezing through the cell of our silence

and unbolting our lips

breaking us free, with fear and pain untied behind us

—and for a few short moments

living in the world as it should be.

–I wrote this poem draft today, reflecting on a young man and a child I saw in Simon’s Town almost a month ago. They were sitting on a bench in-between rain-showers, imagining they were in a rowboat and I started laughing. They turned to me and waved and I waved back. I was struck by the suddenness of laughter after I’d spent all afternoon walking alone in silence. It was a small moment, but a memory that still lingers with me a month later- even through all the things that have happened during those four weeks.

Glenn