Switching
Gears from Father to Son
When
power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man’s
concern, poetry reminds him of the richnes nd diversity of his existence. When
power corrupts, poetry cleanses.
John
F. Kennedy (1917-1963), Address at Amherst College October 26, 1963
I have composed 2792 Medinnovatiom blog post on health reform
and innovation. I am organizing these
posts into 12 books on the history of reform
and its various manifestations under the title of New Voice of Health Reform: The 3Rs – Rhyme, Rhetoric & Reality.
Today’s post has nothing to do with health reform
and medical innovation. Instead it
reprints a column from the Miami Herald on the work of my son, Spencer. Spencer is a poet and an Episcopal priest. He is hell-bent on salvaging the lives of
Honduran orphan girls by teaching them to express themselves in poetry and
watercolors.
This is his story, as told by Joan Chrissos in the
April 26, 2013, Miami Herald.
Poetry project of Honduran schoolchildren attracts Inaugural
poet Richard Blanco
Rev. Spencer Reece, a Miami Episcopal priest, is teaching a
Honduran girl how to write poetry in Our Little Roses in San Pedro Sula,
Honduras. Reece, a Fulbright fellow, and Richard Blanco, the poet who spoke at
President Obama's inauguration, are collecting the Honduran schoolchildren's
poems to be published in a book. Actor James Franco is producing a documentary
about the project.
“We live in a world that’s full of hate.” So begins the poem
of Katherine Marisol Murillo, a 15-year-old girl who recalls the circumstances
that led her to Nuestra Pequeñas Rosas, a haven in the middle of San Pedro
Sula, Honduras. It’s a city known for its maquiladoras (apparel plants)
and murder rate (No. 1 in the world), where abandoned children live in
cardboard boxes on street corners and find their nourishment from the charity
of others or the city dump.
“My mother is dead and I never knew my father. At the age of
6, I came here. I felt I was in paradise."
Katherine, whose poem is titled I Was Six Years Old,
is one of 30 students from the school at Nuestra Pequeñas Rosas — Our Little
Roses in English — who are being taught how to express themselves, often
scraping shattered souls, through poetry.
Their teachers: Spencer Reece, an award-winning poet turned
Episcopal priest, and Richard Blanco, the Columbus High and Florida
International University grad who delivered his poem, One Day, at
President Obama’s inauguration in January. The two are collecting and editing
the poems, written in English and Spanish, from the children. The plan is have
them published in a book of poetry, illustrated with watercolors from the
children, to be called, The Season of Singing Has Come (Song of Solomon,
2:12).
They’ve also teamed with a film crew producing a documentary
on the project. James Franco, the Oscar-nominated actor from 127 Hours ,
is the executive producer and singer-songwriter Dar Williams is composing
the soundtrack. They hope to premiere the film next year at the Sundance Film
Festival.
Reece, Blanco and director Brad Coley will appear Friday at
St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in Coral Gables to read the poems, preview the
film and raise funds for the documentary.
Reece, a Brooks Brothers salesman in an earlier incarnation,
is the visionary — albeit an accidental one.
He first went to Our Little Roses in the summer of 2010 to
learn Spanish. Reece was in the process of becoming a priest and would be
working under The Rt. Rev. Leo Frade, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of
Southeast Florida and the former bishop of Honduras.
Frade’s wife Diana
had founded Our Little Roses in 1988, after teaching in Honduras and witnessing
scores of homeless girls scrounging the streets. She started with a rented
three-bedroom, two-bath home and 26 girls.
Over 25 years, Our Little Roses has evolved into a walled
sanctuary in San Pedro Sula, showering hundreds of girls with love, respect and
perhaps most importantly, an educational ticket to transform their lives. (Full
disclosure: I have gone to Our Little Roses a week every summer with St. Philip’s
and my family for the past seven years.)
Shortly after starting the home, Diana opened a school,
beginning with one classroom. (The city of San Pedro Sula donated a five-acre
plot to build the complex in the early ’90s.) Today, Holy Family Bilingual
School has more than 250 girls and boys, including children from the
surrounding city. The two-story school spans preschool to high school, complete
with kindergarten graduations, middle school algebra and, this June, its first
high school graduating class.
Diana’s vision has been to change Honduran society one girl
at a time. Twenty-five years later, she’s doing it. The first generation of
girls have graduated from Honduran universities as teachers, engineers and
business executives. One of the girls, Jensy, who arrived at Our Little Roses
as a 9-year-old after her mother contracted AIDS, went to university in San
Pedro Sula, graduated and enrolled in dental school at the university. Today,
she is a dentist and operates Our Little Roses’ first dental clinic, serving
the girls and the community.
“None of these girls will go back to where they came from,’’
says Diana. “The only direction they can move is forward.’’
All this in a country that is the second-poorest nation in
the Western Hemisphere, behind Nicaragua, where thousands live in bordos,
shantytowns where children gather water from brown, brackish rivers and pick
food scraps from trash piles.
“Honduras?” Reece said, upon hearing of Frade’s
recommendation to learn Spanish at Our Little Roses. “I grew up in Minnesota. I
think, ‘Honduras? Where’s that?’ ”
Reece, 49, was on his own journey. A graduate of Wesleyan
University in Connecticut , Reece spent 12 years working for Brooks
Brothers, first as a salesman in its Mall of America store near Minneapolis,
then transferring to the Gardens Mall store in Palm Beach Gardens as assistant
manager.
By day, Reece, with his horn-rimmed glasses, receding
hairline and pin-striped suits, waxed eloquently about windowpane sports coats,
suede bucks and navy blazers with names like two-button classics.
Poetry by night
By night, he wrote poetry. He submitted poems to The New
Yorker, poetry journals and myriad literary competitions. For 23 years he
wrote, his only recognition coming from an estimated 1,000 rejection letters.
One night 10 years ago he picked up a message on his
answering machine at his Lantana apartment. It was from Louise Glück, the
Pulitzer Prize winning poet. She called to say that a collection of Reece’s
poems, called The Clerk’s Tale, had won the Bakeless Prize for new
authors awarded by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference at Middlebury College in
Vermont.
“When I got the message in January, I had just folded down
the cashmere sweater table at Brooks, closed down the store after the Christmas
rush, got into my beat-up Dodge Neon without AC,” he wrote in an email from
Honduras. “I must have gotten home by 11. I played the message again and again.
I could not believe it. I thought I was the runner-up. I could not put into my
head I had won.’’
Pivotal
call
Shortly thereafter, he received another phone call, this
from the poetry editor of New Yorker at the time, Alice Quinn. The magazine
wanted to publish the collection’s namesake poem, The Clerk’s Tale,on
its back page on Father’s Day 2003. It begins:
“I am thirty-three and
working in an expensive clothier, selling suits to men I call “Sir.”
These men
are muscled, groomed and cropped —
with wives
and families that grow exponentially.
Mostly I
talk of rep ties and bow ties,
of
full-Windsor knots and half-Windsor knots,
of
tattersall, French cuff, and English spread collars,
of
foulards, neats, and internationals,
of
pincord, houndstooth, nailhead, and sharkskin.”
Seed
planted
The poetry prize and New Yorker poem planted a seed in
Reece. When he was in his early 20s, Reece earned a master’s degree in
theological studies at Harvard Divinity School. He thought about the priesthood
but wasn’t ready.
He still wasn’t sure and continued to work at Brooks
Brothers. He began, however, to volunteer at hospice.
“I realized one day at hospice that I had once wanted to be
a priest but I’d forgotten about it. … I wondered if it was still possible, if
it wasn’t too late. Sometimes in middle age we realize we lose sight of some
original intention and wonder if we can reclaim it.”
In August 2009, Spencer worked his last day, a Friday, at
Brooks Brothers in Palm Beach Gardens. On Monday, he began studying at Berkeley
Seminary at Yale Divinity School in New Haven, Ct.
While training to be a priest, Reece took a post as chaplain
at Hartford Hospital. One night a mother and son from Puerto Rico were rushed
into the emergency room. The boy had been stabbed 25 times in the chest in a
gang-related fight. He died the next morning. Reece tried to console the
distraught mother, but she spoke only Spanish. He spoke only English.
He called up Frade. “This is not going to work,” he told
him, “for me, a nearly 50-year-old gringo, to return to your diocese and not
speak Spanish.”
Frade responded: “I have just the place for you.”
In the summer of 2010, Reece spent two months at Our Little
Roses. He picked up some Spanish, talked with the girls, but said he felt
“pretty useless.”
The night before he was to return to Miami, he had walked
around the complex several times and was going upstairs to his dorm room to
pack his bags. He noticed one of the girls waiting for him at the bottom of the
stairs. Her name was Wendolyn.
“I heard that you are leaving tomorrow,” she said.
“Yes,” Reece answered. “Do you want to tell me something?”
She looked up at the stars, then looked at him and
whispered: “Don’t forget us.”
“It chilled me to the bone,” Reece said. “I think it
resonated really deeply because I had a cousin who was murdered at a very young
age.”
On the flight home and for days and weeks thereafter, he
mulled over how he could honor her wish.
“I’m not a social justice person, I’m not even that smart …
but what I did know was something about writing,” he said.
Spanish
studies
He applied for a Fulbright fellowship, proposing he would
write a book of poems about Honduras, including translating Honduran poets. He
was a finalist but didn’t make the cut. He then won a grant to study Spanish in
an immersion program in Spain.
After becoming more adept at Spanish, Reece reapplied for a
Fulbright. This time, he proposed he would teach the Honduran schoolchildren
how to write their poems. He enlisted Blanco, whom he had met years
earlier at a poetry reading at Books & Books.
“Spencer’s enthusiasm in the project has been contagious,”
said Blanco, who encouraged Reece to reapply for the Fulbright. “I told him
that everything I’ve ever gotten in my life is the second time around.”
Back
together
Reece won the Fulbright and is spending a year at Our Little
Roses, teaching eighth- to 11th-graders to write poetry. Blanco will join him
there later this year.
Reece also reached out to Franco, who had made a movie from
Reece’s poem.
“I worked with Spencer previously adapting his poem The
Clerk’s Tale into a beautiful movie,” Franco said. “We became friends
during that process. After he was ordained, he went to Honduras and he
discussed this project with me. It seemed like another great combination of
poetry and film for a great cause, so I was happy to be involved with it.”
Teaching poetry to teenagers hasn’t been easy, especially given
where the girls have come from. Their back stories sting. Stories such as the
4-year-old girl and her 11-year-old sister left on the sidewalk by their
mother, who told them to wait for her return. She never came back. Or the
toddler who was beaten and locked in a barrel. Or the children whose mothers
died of AIDS and who have never known their fathers.
‘abandonment
issues’
“This is not an ordinary student population,” Reece said.
“These girls have been through abuse and abandonment issues beyond what you can
ever imagine. But they are writing poetry.”
And pouring their souls into it.
Said Katherine, “I just opened my heart and all that stuff
came out.”
Tweet: Spencer
Reece, a poet and an Episcopal priest,
is teaching Honduran orphanage girls to express themselves in poetry