Jacqui Banaszynski, a former reporter from St. Paul Pioneer Press wrote a story about visiting Ethiopia in 1985, during a great famine. He was struck by the singing that these people carried out every night in the face of such horror, he kept wondering how these people could in sing in the face of the unbearable horrors of 1985 – until he realized it was storytelling.
He writes: “It was how they carried their history and culture and law with them. It may have been my first conscious awareness of the power, history and universality of storytelling. We all grew up with stories, but do we ever stop to think about how much they connect us and how powerful they are?”
Bedtime stories. Tales of ghosts, struggles, love and despair. Movies, books and theatre plays. Singing for your kid or reading out loud for the person you love. Stories are all around us and they carry our culture and history with them. By some stroke of biological wonder did we become emotional beings - the art of telling good stories has been the heart and soul of our society ever since.
Whether it is in Africa in 1985 or right now. Stories is what makes us human and make us stay that way. They are what gives meaning to life.
Jonathan Harris collects small stories from life and he try to use the internet to tell them in a different way. I will leave the rest of this story to him.