A Golden Memory

Z was for Zahara:
A heart of gold she had..
Heavy antimalarials
Left pain, sometimes bad.
Resolution bold she took,
Of the experience made a book.

Hot sub-Saharan weather;
Each tree they'd plant would wither.
Child and adult together
Kept Z and labored with her,
Scorched in the dry months, sweltered in the rain,
Came home, wrists burning,
Heart never daunted.
Experience service-learning
Really she wanted.

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Z Heckscher's name appears in third place (alphabetically) on the cover of the book I helped her write, but she was the first to have the idea of writing How to Live Your Dream of Volunteering Overseas as an improvement on Joe Collins' Alternatives to the Peace Corps. The two of them were well into the book before Stefano DeZerega joined the team. I joined the team before DeZerega did, as a typist, necessitated by Z's chronic carpal tunnel pain--but Collins and DeZerega relied on assistants, too, to get the book done. Through the magic of hard work and let's-say-rubbishy first drafts, they turned closets full of letters, survey forms, tape cassettes and floppy disks, into a massive reference book and web site.

Around the time the book was published, Z married just in time to have one child. After a year or so of difficulty and medical drama, the child grew up handsome and healthy. Despite financial losses due to excessive generosity, divorce, and never-ending pain from nerve damage, Z wrote other books, stayed in touch with the African village where she'd worked, and remained active encouraging other activists, writers, poets, and service learning volunteers.

The name Zahara means "gold." It was given to her because she was a natural brown-eyed blonde. She was beautiful, but dressed down her physical attributes. What people noticed was the radiance of a quiet, even nerdly, personality that was completely dedicated to practicing her Reform Jewish Humanist beliefs. Despite profound political disagreement, she's lingered in my mind as the definition of the phrase "schoene Jude," and she also comes to mind when I think of the phrase "heart of gold."