Brook Demmerle
A
challenge I overcame: Despite some sad things in life I always continue moving forwards.
A dream
for my future: If I could, to write something good.
A hope for the global community: That we could live in peace.
Brook joined Step 1 and the morning classes
with Flavia from my second week, and was a delightful and fun classmate, with a
cheekily impish grin about her! Brook was brilliant to share and compare
language observations with, and in our spare time excursions was full of
fascinating tales of her international travels and her work as a union
representative in Oakland California. A
tough sounding job which involves a lot of handling difficult emotions and
highly stressed individuals, it seems all the more impressive that Brook chose
to use her two weeks of holiday to invest in language study.
Brook was staying with a host family just
down the road from where I was at Carmen’s house, and on the couple of times I
popped round Clementine and his wife and son were very welcoming and chatty,
even giving Brook and I a ride to the north of the island where we all ate
fresh fish with our feet in the sand at Praia do Forte. They also drove us
through the mainly deserted streets of neighbouring Jureré, (where Brook and I
then spent the afternoon bathing in the sea and sun in a rare and welcome rest
from studying) pointing out the enormous holiday homes so huge they could
justly be called mansions and all braced in their absence of inhabitants with
24 security systems.
As well as her union work, Brook is an
artist who likes most of all to paint in oils, but for travel purposes was
working with watercolours on the Saturday afternoon I met up with her on the
shore Lagoa Conceição. Her mission to
find paper had led her to meet local artist Maia whose weighty surreal
sculptures we admired and whose studio/ gallery roof was hung with tiny
newspaper origami boats that he explained he always made in between larger
works. Because of arthritis he explained
he now mainly paints, and I was surprised to hear he prefers to paint in the
evening after the sun has gone down because the colours are more vibrant – I
guess in the daytime the sun is so bright it maybe bleaches out the colour.
Originally from the USA, Brook has lived
and traveled all over the world, including London and Guinea Bissau. She lived in Guinea Bissau for over a year, where
one of the languages spoken is also Portuguese.
Brook taught local children and remembers the tightknit communities and
that all adults could comment on and influence the behaviour of all the
children, meaning the children were held in a wide social net with many elders
supporting them and caring for them. This reminded me of Chaim Peri’s brilliant
book Reclaiming Adolescents: A Return to the Village State of Mind which inspired me to link Peri’s Village State of Mind theory with
attachment theory, in a presentation of the therapeutic power of belonging
during our Therapeutic Communication course with Kids Company last year. One of Brook’s reasons for returning to the
USA from Guinea Bissau was her health – she got both malaria and hepatitis,
which must have been really frightening, although she talks about it very
lightheartedly!
Brook writes that her personal dream is to ‘write
something good’, and it turns out she is already halfway there, having begun a
book in the years immediately after the Twin Tower bombings that postulated
humanitarian changes she foresaw as necessary for the USA in the aftermath of
the tragedy. For personal reasons the
book was put on hold and as it turns out she has noticed many of the
suggestions she wrote about at the time as having come into practice in the
intervening years. Still hugely focused
on human rights Brook would like to return to writing the book at some stage
when she has the opportunity.
Brook, what a pleasure to share those
Portuguese classes with you, you were definitely a fun classmate! I hope you
get a chance to keep using the language now that you are back home, and I hope
that you’re settling ok into all the changes at work. Keep enjoying your beautiful paining, and
good luck with the book-writing project!
Big love
:-)
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