Reflections

Everyone´s life story is unique.  If I say that my life, like most peoples, is a Rubik’s Cube of random happenings waiting to be twisted and turned into ordered patterns, then  the stories in From Village to Village are a beginning. 

Our personalities are formed and shaped not just by genetically determined traits, but also by the people we've met and the choices we make. Each one of us is the sum of our experiences and wear them like a necklace composed of a variety of stones, some ordinary and dull, others shining jewels, rare and valuable.

In order to know who you are, you have to know where you came from. My parents and grandparents were more or less strangers to me. I knew almost nothing about who they really were, little about their origins, and less about what they thought and felt. Originally my idea was to chronicle my life so that my children and grandchildren would know who I was and at the same time help them to see not just the apparent and superficial, but give them a glimpse of the private and inaccessible, the banal aspects of my life as well as the extraordinary. 

We all have dreams. I was lucky and could follow some of mine; others were like brightly colored birds that were out of reach high in the treetops that flew away as I watched, with only the rustling of the leaves as a reminder that they were once there.

 When I was growing up, I dreamt of seeing other cultures, mountains, great forests, the oceans. I wanted to be a participant in the life that I knew lay beyond the confines of the housing project and town where I grew up.  I wanted to see the sky but felt there were too many things blocking the view.  I wanted to change  and it seemed at times, as though those changes when they came, were like separate incarnations.