Antioch Kitchen Sisters

Antioch Kitchen Sisters Each Wednesday, Antioch Kitchen Sisters cook, serve and deliver a meal to fifty neighbors in Cypress Creek Township Community in Bladen County.

Additionally, we include our Wednesday Message, which is also posted on our FB page. Please read it and share. In this Facebook space, the Kitchen Sisters hope to keep friends and followers informed of our activities, possibilities for friends/other sisters to volunteer, and the opportunity to donate food stuffs and money to our Project. Two of us are actual sisters and the rest of the sisters ar

e the women of Antioch United Methodist Church, who are working to make a difference in Cypress Creek Community. We are always interested in expanding our ministry and hoping at the same time that other church congregations will begin their own Kitchen Sisters' Project or Ministry. Contact us by phone: 910-588-4597, email: [email protected] or mail: 3980 NC 210 Highway West, Garland, NC for further information about Antioch Kitchen Sisters.

04/05/2022

What Historical Events Did You Fail to Fully Grasp?

On our way back from Charleston, SC on Saturday, where we attended a nuptial shower for our great niece, Sarah Campbell, having left Bladen County at 6:30 AM that morning, a day trip, Carlene and I began a discussion of slavery, race, and civil rights in America. Recently Carlene saw the PBS special about the Wilmington Riot of 1898, where riotous groups of white supremist, part of the 19th century Democratic Party, overthrew a duly elected city government of black and white Republicans leaders taking their offices for themselves, murdering Black citizens, throwing their bodies into the Cape Fear River, destroying the thriving Black businesses, and burning the newspaper. She remembered that before the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s that there had been other such riots, including the 1921 Greenwood Riot in Tulsa Oklahoma. As I was driving, I asked her to google other such events that the average person does not know happened because students do not read about them in history books. Within seconds Carlene was reading that each decade from the Civil War going forward had seen riots in every section of the United States. Were you aware of those?

As to why our North Carolina and US History books did not include these events, leaving countless students with incomplete information about slavery, race, race relations, and the destruction of Black institutions, one can only conclude that the majority race writes the history books, and feels extremely uncomfortable about the truth. I want to include three sources that cover the neglected history of Wilmington’s dirty little secret: “Wilmington’s Lie, a book by David Zucchino, which won the Pulitzer Prize, “Red Cape,” a PBS film with interviews with the cast, “Wilmington Race Riot of 1898,” a film by UNCA Ramsey Library Video Project. Other sources as well resources are now available, including a public park in downtown Wilmington, dedicated to the memory of those who died, in 2000 the NC General Assembly assigned the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources to research the events, which issued its report in 2006, also with a book, “A Day of Blood” by a commission researcher published in 2009, and finally after many years the downtown library in Wilmington no longer keeps the primary source material under lock and key so that information is no longer hidden from the public.

History cannot simply be about the convenient, the pretty, the lies that we tell ourselves, the feel-good, or written in the propaganda mode of the minority, the powerful authority of the majority, the racists, the sexists, the fascists, the weird. Historians must write history as accurately as possible, as inclusively as possible, from all points of view and references as possible, attuned to the economic, political, and social institutions as possible, with primary resources speaking their truth. Revision will be necessary from time to time, especially if facts were not known at the time of the event, if those in control hid or distorted the facts, or technology did not exist that would have given a fuller picture. But we must make every effort, if we are to thrive as a free society, to get the truth out there before the powerful covers it up, whitewashes, destroys it, distorts it, before we forget, demanding the truth, follow the facts where they lead, to right the wrongs, especially for those marginalized, annihilated, and rendered mute. Should editors, writers, historians, playwrights, novelists, essayists, teachers, ordinary people publish the good, the bad and the ugly, even if it offends the majority, offends one religious group or another, one political group or another? The brilliant writer of the Declaration of Independence, a flawed man by today’s standards, Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner, the father of five children with his slave Sally Hemings, nonetheless stated two truism about our society: we cannot exist without a free press, one that loves the truth and will publish the facts as they are known, and we cannot exist without an educated populace, one that studies history, all history, knows history and therefore has the knowledge not to repeat itself. Whatever we choose to call it, Critical Race Theory (CRT) is not the point, but seek to find the truth, teach the truth, teach thinking skills, teach honesty, teach curiosity, teach understanding, teach shared values, teach humanity, teach humility, teach kindness, preventing future “Wilmington” race riots, which some will want to cover up.

Antioch Kitchen Sisters, Carlene Coble McIntyre (910-385-4025) and Emily Coble (910-588-4597) will return with another Wednesday Meal on April 13, 2022, as we remind you to return the washed containers to us at that time. Please continue to ask God for peace in Ukraine, to teach Putin right from wrong, to remind us that learning and truth-seeking is a lifelong endeavor.

03/29/2022

Car Warranties, Medicare Supplement Insurance, and Settling up with AT&T

If you own an almost new vehicle, which no longer has a new car warranty of so many years or 120,000 miles, with an outstanding loan or not, are of a certain age or not, then you must have received an offer from one of the sundry businesses offering an extended car warranty to insure your car against costly car repairs. These businesses have somehow secured the number of your home phone, cell phone, business phone, your email address and your USPS mailing address and they are relentless in their desire to save you from certain financial ruin by offering to sell you the best coverage on your vehicle against the possibility of calamity that your money can buy. First by robot calls then with a real person, someone’s child on the line, offers to save you from yourself and debtors prison in the case that your car should need a repair. One can easily ignore the emails and the mail that the carrier brings, but it is a game of cat and mouse avoiding the phone calls, because the caller’s company has mastered the game of cloning phone numbers, so that when you think that you recognize the number it is actually them again using an area code that is just like one of your friends living in Michigan, Texas or South Carolina, not to mention their ability to use area codes that are so familiar here in North Carolina like 336, 252, 910, 919 or 704.

At the same time, the new Medicare benefits that “Broadway” Joe Namath, the aging quarterback from the New York Jets, who attended the University of Alabama about hundred years ago, blast in the loudest possible voice just in case the Medicare recipient in the home also has difficulty hearing, that one maybe missing out on the latest benefit offered as part of the new and improved Medicare law. Again, these insurance companies, offering Medicare supplemental insurance have your numbers, all of them, but especially they have your mailing address, and they never give up offering to sell you that which they say, receiving Medicare entitles you. Well, if these benefits like dental care, eye care, the all-important catheter, and so many others, entitled to those receiving Medicare, then why are they sold? Should not Medicare include these anyway? Private insurances companies are wealthy enough without receiving money from the public trough.

Last week, instead of dodging phone calls from those concerned about my car warranty, and securing my entitled Medicare Supplement, I spent an inordinate amount of time on the phone, trying to take care of issues with Craig’s AT&T landline phone, internet, TV, cell phone bill, all in one. For over a year, Craig has not used his cell phone, and I understood from Claire that she no longer used the land line or the internet at our home in Raleigh, so upon looking at the large sum that I needed to pay, keeping me from the confines of debtors' prison, I decided to eliminate the internet, landline, and Craig’s cell phone. Well, that was the easy part, as I spoke to my new best friend in India named “John.” (I wonder if anyone in the upwards of 729,010,463 males, 51.6 % of the population of India is named John.) Calling Claire to report my accomplishments, after three hours on the phone with “John,” I discovered much to my chagrin that I had totally screwed up the situation, that she relied on the landline and the internet to order her groceries from Lowe’s Foods among other things, and only a callused mama like me could have done such a deed. Too tired to correct this terrible wrong then, I resolved to travel to Clinton, the nearest AT&T store, rectify, restore, and right the wrong done the night before. After hours in Clinton, I drove home thinking that all was well only to discover from Claire that she had neither the phone nor the internet and that groceries in her cupboard were low, but more importantly her three cats were measuring where to take the first bite from her person. Three days later, after another male from India named “John,” one named “BJ,” a female named, I think that she said, “Ignore” from Indonesia, another male from India named “Kenneth” and finally an American named “Sam,” I reconnected the internet and landline, lowered the TV bill by forty dollars for the next year, and canceled Craig’s cell phone. Only Claire’s sweet jubilant voice five days later confirmed that she had ordered, picked up and fed her cats and all was well, did I know for certain that all that help moved the corporate giant AT&T to ease my apprehension. Why had Craig not used his phone in a year, not cancelling it is a different issue.

Kitchen Sisters, Carlene Coble McIntyre (910-385-4025) and Emily Coble (910-588-4597) will return with another Wednesday Meal on April 7, 2022, as we remind you to return the containers to us at that time. Oh God, please grant us peace in our time, as we continue to pray for peace in Ukraine, regime change in Russia, and fewer calls from salespeople.

03/21/2022

When I was in high school about a hundred years ago, I remember taking the Kuder Preference Test, designed to determine students’ interest, and therefore, my interest of possible adult employment after high school or college. One question dealt with the scenario of being a passenger in a car and deciding to take more interest in people that might be along the highway or the farm scenery all around. I darkened the bubble indicating that I would look at the people, because I did not want this test to tell me that I should seek employment that had anything to do with a farm. That was then and this is now as I have been back on this farm for twelve years! Secretly, I find that I have paid attention to farms all my life because as the saying goes you can take the girl from the farm, but you cannot take the farm out of the girl. Rarely am I ever the passenger in the vehicle as I have always driven Craig and me on our forty-three plus years of marriage and car trips so I must look at the scenery in front of me, never to the side, as I drive while concentrating on being a defensive driver.

The years before I married Craig, I also spent hours behind the wheel, driving between the Northeast and North Carolina to visit my parents, a trip to Florida, trips to South Carolina, Virginia, the Piedmont and Mountains of North Carolina and Georgia to visit friends and family, where I noted the differences not in people but in farms. Then, when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Sierra Leone, West Africa, I had a driver’s license as I owned a 150 Honda Motorcycle and sometimes drove a Honda Civic vehicle belonging to the Italian Order of Priest who built the church/school/nuns’ compound, the Peace Corps houses and their own rectory in the center of Lunsar, in the Norther Province of my host country. While driving in Sierra Leone, the scenery was intriguing, but I needed to watch for people who were walking in the street, along the road, but especially baboons running across the road, path, with no one to hold up a crossing stop sign. The baboons would simply dart out in the road, as would unattended goats. The farms were small patches of upland or swamp rice, small casava, sweet potato fields and other cash crops, palm trees for tapping palm wine among other garden grown foods, with a “day farmhouse” located on the edge of the clearing. The people lived in village compounds where they took their first meal of the day, then walked to their farms to perform day labor, used their day farmhouse for rest during the heat of the day, and returned to their village compound at night for the evening meal, usually consuming only two meals a day. At home, I have a photographic memory of the corn in Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, soybeans in Indiana, Ohio and tulips and gladiolus in Michigan than I do of any city other than Chicago. Who cannot remember ranches in Texas and Oklahoma even from the air!

In Guatemala as a Peace Corps Trainee in an agricultural corn growing project, naturally, farms were my focus and farmers were to be the agents of change. I lived for a brief time near these farmers, walking to and from the fields where I had begun to discuss opportunities for growing more uniform crops of yellow corn, and better w**d control. Becoming too ill to continue, I returned home with memories of lush farms, hardworking people, and living on the edge as farmers sometimes do, due to weather concerns, diseases, insects, costs of equipment, seeds, insecticides, and all other things out of their control. First with friends and later upon marrying Craig, I drove in Scotland, England, Italy, and Spain, where I was intrigued with the farmland, the scenery, the small villages with the outlying farms, not like here where people live on their farms. I have never traveled in Eastern Europe, Russia, or any part of Asia, which is far bigger than where I have looked intensely at farms. I long to travel to England to visit the Dales, to return to Umbria and Tuscany to gaze at the wonderful farms and marvel at the farmers, growing olives, wheat, and grapes.
Here at home while driving, I look to see crops growing, rotations patterns, new equipment, improvements, land clearing, and maintenance of ditches and ponds. And then here is the addition in the last ten years of donkeys, burros, in amongst the cows, sheep, and goats for the purpose of checking the coyotes, which have moved eastward from somewhere West of here. Antioch Kitchen Sisters, Carlene Coble McIntyre (910-385-4025) and Emily Coble (910-588-4597) will return with another Wednesday Meal on March 30, 2022, as we remind you to return the containers to us at that time. Meanwhile in Ukraine, while Putin’s Russian army, artillery, missiles, meg fighter jets, and chemicals, lobs, shoots, aims, destroys, strike, pummels cities, villages, and farms, attempting to subjugate the people of Ukraine, the civilian population struggles without water, food, medicine, heat, electricity, and a means to bury the dead, as the steady stream of Ukrainian refugees walks, rides the train, drives, into neighboring countries, compounding the humanitarian crisis. God grant them and us peace to travel again!

03/15/2022

Years ago, I heard two unkind jokes about West Virginia that went something like this: There are over one million and seven hundred thousand people living in the mountains and hollows of West Virginia and only fifteen last names, and West Virginia, where it’s expected that one of your marriages should be to first a cousin but it’s still not okay to marry a sibling. Well, amused at first, but then I heard the former joke applied to North Carolina, where as the joke goes that here, there are ten and a half million people and fifteen last names. I will not discuss the latter one, referencing marriage to a cousin, because my grandparents on the Coble side were distant cousins, meaning that I am related to myself. Recently, while visiting my dear friend Betty Ann Davis Carroll, who has had two health challenges this past fall and winter, I asked her about who is kin to whom in Cypress Creek and over Colly, where her mother’s people lived. The Smiths, Johnsons, Norris, and Motes are all related, have their own destinated family cemeteries, and favorite Baptist Churches, apparently.

That leads to the question as to the determination, of which cemetery that you would choose upon your need for one, as well as which Baptist Church you should attend while you are alive. Do you go with your Mama’s people or your Daddy’s people, because unless you choose cremation, your family can not bury you in both, but they could scatter your ashes in both? Now as for which Baptist Church, I suppose that you can attend all the Revivals, Bible Schools, and Homecomings, as Baptist do coordinate dates of events, but worship service is at eleven, limiting your choices each Sunday, I suppose.

Before all of Ohio, Pennsylvania and some of New Hampshire moved to Charlotte, the Triangle and the Triad and before every NC Mountain top had a Floridian looking down on everyone else, perhaps there really were only fifteen last names, among them would be all those so prominent in Bladen County, including the Britts in Bladenboro, the Clarks in Clarkton, the Registers and Priests in Elizabethtown and the Councils in Council. North Carolina remains the least Catholic, Jewish, and Greek, Russian, and Ukrainian Orthodox of about all fifty states, so that until the influx of those difficult to pronounce surnames from the afore mentioned states, all those fifteen names were pronounceable by all natives and by extension relatives. When I began first grade on my sixth birthday in 1951, more than three quarters of all my classmates had the last name of Smith, there was one Thomas, one Norris, one Johnson, one Rich, one Jernigan, one Russ, one Pridgen, one Coleman, one Davis, one Coble (me) and one Melvin, which was about the oldest name along the South River. Although all the afore listed last names, all except the Pridgen and me, were related to others in my class or in Hickory Grove Elementary School, Doris and I only had siblings to whom we were related. My only relatives were Patty and Scott, my sister and brother, who were in the sixth and seventh grades, respectively and a first cousin, whose daddy was a Cain from White Oak. Of course, my little sister joined me at Hickory Grove in 1953!

As I have written here before my folks on both sides of my family are from other places in North Carolina, where there are hundreds, thousands, of them living, since they migrated to Colonial America from Europe. There are tons of Scotts, Lamms or Lambs living in Eastern Counties of Nash, Johnston and especially Wilson. In Guilford and Alamance Counties in the Piedmont Triad area there are tons of Cobles and Fields, all my relatives. Here in Eastern North Carolina and most assuredly in Wake, when anyone calls into a waiting room, notifying me that it is my turn to see the doctor, begin the test, the x-ray, the ultrasound, or any of a myriad of tests that seniors must undergo, they call for Ms. Cobble. I quickly say, do you mean, Coble? The person indicates that I am the one and I get up and go in, puzzling, what is so difficult about the surname Coble, but then I remember that I am not one of those fifteen last names.

Antioch Kitchen Sisters, Carlene Coble McIntyre (910-385-4025) and Emily Coble (910-588-4597) will return with another Wednesday Meal on March 23, 2022, as we remind you to return the containers to us at that time. Please pray for peace for our Ukrainian brothers and sisters, where over three million have fled their homes, to live among their neighbors in Poland, Romania, Moldovia, and other Eastern European nations. They have surnames that seem that they might need a vowel, faces with fear, have relatives that they may never see again, and they are God’s children too, deserving of better.

03/10/2022

International Women's Day! Let's celebrate!

Who is the woman that you admire most? Is she someone that you have met? Is she someone physically close to you? Or is she one of a group of women whom you admire? Today is the International Women ‘s Day so I have been thinking about contributions women have made, and why only one day of the year are women relegated for celebrating, when we celebrate men the other three hundred and sixty-four? Also, since I have been thinking about this subject in preparation for writing this missive, I want to consider what I would like to improve before the next International Women’s Day in 2023, since we get only one day a year.

For many of you, I would imagine that the woman who first comes to mind as one to admire is your mother, especially if you are a woman. Personally, I owe so much of who I am to my own mother, Sallie Ruth Lamm Coble and I have reached the age where I have survived more years with her memory than I did with her physically in my life, which should give you some idea of how important she was in molding my character. Mama had a style, a grace, a kindness, a love of learning, a sense of adventure, confidence, and love of children, and plants. She read aloud beautifully, she could speak extemporaneously with command on a subject that she knew or about which she had read, she always championed the rights of those underprivileged, marginalized, or deprived of their rights. She died in 1980 and had she lived longer, the events of the last forty-two years would have deeply saddened her, but she would not have been surprised, frightened, or discouraged by those events either. She was wise, sought counsel with God through prayer, she was brave and reminded her children not to be afraid, and she was encouraging, helpful and hopeful for all that she met, looked for the best in all people, and she was optimistic, using flowers and plants for daily renewal of life’s being good.

In addition to the woman who gave you life, nurtured you, and guided you physically or through your memories of her, is there a woman, whom you admire that you have not met? For me that woman would be Eleanor Roosevelt, never elected to any office, but one who lived a life of public service, when many young women of her generation, station, class, and wealth lived cloistered, pampered, sheltered lives except when they were traveling abroad. Eleanor grew up as the niece of President Theodore Roosevelt, and became the wife of another, Franklin Roosevelt. Raised by her maternal grandmother Hall, because her mother died when she was a child and her father, whom she adored died of alcoholism soon afterward, Eleanor thought herself ugly, awkward, and unconfident, until her grandmother sent her abroad to study, where Eleanor met the teacher who recognized that she was very bright. Marrying her distant cousin Franklin, she became the mother of five children and when she discovered that her husband had a lover, offered him a divorce. If she had not experienced that devastating blow, she would not have become the leader for social, political, and economic justice that she did, because she channeled all her energies into notable achievements. Concentrating on service as her husband’s eyes and ears as he developed polio and never walked again, she left him copious notes of issues that needed his attention when he was governor of New York and later President of the United States, becoming his presence where he could not be, going into coal mines, traveling in every part of this country, going into city slums, visiting soldiers on the war front, championing labor rights, civil rights, human rights, women’s rights, and children’s rights, during the twelve years and few months that FDR was president. After his death, President Truman appointed her to the US delegation to write the United Nations Charter, with the hope of avoiding future world wars. Documents reveal that the successful outcome to that lofty endeavor was the presence, the challenging work, the diligence, the confidence, and empathy of Eleanor Roosevelt.

Three acute issues need immediate attention before the next celebration of International Women's Day rolls around again. Equal pay for women for equal work, childcare for families, and for women of color, an effort to lift the issue of racism into greater public awareness, which adds another layer that women of color must rise above. Antioch Kitchen Sisters, Carlene Coble McIntyre (910-385-4025) and Emily Coble (910-588-4597) will return with another Wednesday Meal on March 16, 2022, as we remind you to return the containers to us at that time. Please pray for peace for our Ukrainian brothers and sisters, where one in twenty has become a refugee.

03/01/2022

Tonight, as I sat down to write my weekly missive as an Antioch Kitchen Sisters, today’s news events have begun to weigh heavily upon my consciousness, as reports that Russia has made good on its threats to move yet again, against its neighbor, the sovereign democracy of Ukraine, specifically claiming that Ukraine is conducting genocide against the Russian speaking minority in two provinces of Ukraine. Russia’s Vladmir Putin, the authoritarian leader, with more than twenty years of provoking incidents, taking land from other neighboring countries, threatens invasion, with almost two hundred thousand Russian soldiers, great air power, tanks, and missiles to avenge the trumped up “wrongs” done to these two provinces. Within those two provinces, Russia has separatists that have provoked incidents for years so that now the fake incidents have provided a false cover for Putin’s design on its southern neighbor, which possesses rich minerals, great wheat farmland, and a genuinely industrious people with their own democracy.

I wrote those words last week, but I could not write anymore, because struck with sadness, bewilderment, and anguish, I could understand that this would not end well for the Ukrainian people. In the last seven days, the brave peoples of Ukraine have made Molotov cocktails, taken to the streets tossing them at Russian tanks, taken up weapons in efforts to defend their homeland, following the example of their elected brave democratic leader, President Volodymyr Zelensky. Women and children have continued to walk, run, drive, and board trains for the border, trying desperately to leave their homeland as the Russian army approaches in a forty-mile convoy headed to the capital city of Kyiv.
Who is behind this atrocity, this evil, this invasion of a sovereign country, targeting the civilian population with incoming missiles, people who have done nothing except exist, thrive, and foster democracy in the shadow of the Russian Bear? Surely it is not the Russian people, who like the Ukrainians are Slavic, and share a common heritage with Russia, from centuries past. In Russia, those with access to the facts have taken to the streets in major cities to protest the actions of their government. Who is their government?

In a word, Vladmir Putin, the authoritarian president who has increasingly shared power with not even his oligarchs, bullying his way into power, becoming a billionaire with money hidden in banks all over the world. Putin is an evil bully at best, and at worse a cold-blooded killer, whose following is among the rural people, the most conservative, the least educated, those only having access to his controlled press, spouting his line of propaganda. However, protesting is the most that Russians can do with Putin controlling their lives, as he jails demonstrators and murders his opposition.

I can only imagine the terror, the horror, the carnage, the destructions of a civilized country, which has a history, a sophisticated society, where Christianity has existed since the ninth century. I have always had a healthy fear of individuals walking in either direction on NC 210 Highway, which runs by my farmette and slipping into my farmhouse through an unlocked door. Imagine hundreds of an enemy surrounding your farm, occupying your country, depriving you of your liberties, because you and your compatriots have chosen to live in a manner different from this enemy. The West, including the United States, and Japan have joined together, attempting to strip Putin and his cronies of their wealth, the country of a pipeline delivering oil and natural gas to Western Europe, and access to the world’s banking system, among other measures. Will it be enough to stop this monster, who threatens nuclear war over his insistence that Ukraine belongs to Russia and by extension to him?

Antioch Kitchen Sisters, Carlene Coble McIntyre (910-385-4025) and Emily Coble (910-588-4597) will return with another Wednesday Meal on March 9, 2022, as we remind you to return the containers to us at that time. God does not condone bullying, even among children, much less adults who are so flawed as to take the lives of innocent children, and women. Pray for the Ukrainians, pray for their leader/s, pray for the refugees who have fled into Poland to escape the rampage of the Russian Army. Pray for peace, as this humanitarian crisis grows, shamefully destroying lives and a civilization.

02/14/2022

Letter Writing

Do you write letters or notes when someone gives you a gift, does something kind for you, remembers your birthday, to relay and relate news to family and friends, or when life has dealt someone, you know a hard blow? In the days before, electronic communications of the sort that we now have, the only way to communicate our feelings, sentiments, and emotions across the miles or next door was in the form of a letter, either posted in the United States Postal Service or hand delivered. Among high society in the Gilded Age, servants hand delivered the notes from the sender to the addressee and then the next day, the recipient answered as expected. For those not so well-heeled, those who had left the East Coast to fill out the places between the East and West Coast and for those who had left Europe, Asia, East Asia for life in America, writing letters was the only hope of communicating as visits back to where setters originated were rare and highly unlikely.

Great letter writing requires time, the ability to put a subject and verb together in a sentence that match in number, make the sentences coherent, interesting, timely, and with knowledge of one’s audience. The late, former First Lady Jackie Kennedy was a great letter writer, using her signature light blue stationery, the same color of Air Force One, which she also chose, as she never failed to remember friends and acquaintance on special occasions, thanked folks for simple kindnesses, and fostered the legacy of her late husband, the martyred President. Even before, folks stopped writing except for the one or two lines that some take the minute to write on Facebook, Twitter, or any other modality of social media, Hallmark had made a card for that so that writing became more obsolete.

This past weekend, my wonderfully talented niece Roberta, a first-rate letter writer, playwright, published author, and teacher, called to say that she had found THE LETTERS, which I understood meant that while working to clear out the garage of the house that she just sold in Edenton, NC, she had found the letters that I had written to my dear sister, her Mama, Elmina while I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Sierra Leone, West Africa. A year or so before she died in 2014, I called Elmina, asking her if she had kept the letters that I wrote to her during those two years, a half a world away, and a foreign culture in most aspects. She told me that she would look for them, which she did and unable to find them where she thought that she had put them, she related that she must have thrown them out. Disappointed, even as Daddy had kept the letters that I had written to Mama and him, returning them to me almost the instant that I returned to Bladen County in 1976, I remembered that letters to Elmina contained more frankness, more detail, more feelings, emotions, and graphic descriptions, but not enough to get me send home if I had offended the sensibilities of the sensors in either my host country or the one that sent me. In the early days of Peace Corps, an international incident occurred when a volunteer wrote a postcard home to his parents that the host country had found offensive, causing the country to threaten to send all PC Volunteers packing! Henceforth, that incident became a category that instructors taught to Trainees!

As a volunteer teacher, with a secondary job of helping a British Volunteer in Service Oversees, nurse midwife, deliver babies, with only Voice of America and Ivonne Barclay, a radio hostess in Monrovia, Liberia, as my sole entertainment, aside from my playing cards with Ruth and Laura, doing crossword puzzles with Ruth, and riding my 150 Honda motorcycle, I wrote letters! I kept a log, recording the date, the number, and the recipient of my over a thousand letters written, with Elmina receiving the most letters from me, as she was the only sibling who bothered to respond. She wrote me weekly, an act of love that I will never forget. So, with great anticipation and with Roberta to thank as she saved these letters from the landfill, as they were put out by the street to be taken away, when she picked up the boxes, which housed them and stored them until this past weekend.

Antioch Kitchen Sisters, Carlene Coble McIntyre (910-385-4025) and Emily Coble (910-588-4597) will return with another Wednesday Meal on February 23, 2022, as we remind you to return the containers to us at that time. The Christian convert Paul, wrote letters, which editors of the Bible included, to the peoples of the Mediterranean with whom he had built friendship, helping to keep them in the Christian fold. Antioch Kitchen Sisters write a weekly, folksy missive in friendship, love, respect, seeking God’s blessing upon our mission and upon you, our friends!

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Garland, NC
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