Have you ever had to move? Even if you have not, you can probably imagine how hard it can be to leave behind favorite places and friends. What are some things that you would miss if you moved away from where you live? The time and place of the action is particularly important in this expert from the nonfiction book, To live in Two worlds. Lyn living and navajo reservation, but she can get better schooling elsewhere. Lyn must balance her love of home with her desire to get best education she can.
With 200,000 people the Navajos are the largest Native American tribe in United States. The Navajo nation has it own government, police force and education system.
The Navajo Traditionally lived in an area bounded by four mountains they consider sacred. Many believed that anyone who left this lands would meet misfortune. In 1864, the US Army forced the Navajos off their tradition lands and onto a reservation. Hundreds died of cold and starvation on the 350 mile journey known as the long walk.
Today the Navajo reservation, located in parts of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah, covers over 24,000 square.
Lynn was born on the Navajo reservation in Arizona. Her relatives helped her family by providing them with places to stay. As a result, Lynn moved around the reservation.
Lynn was happiest when they stayed with her grandparents. They lived in a hogan, the traditional Navajo one room which is made of logs and packed of earth. It also a holy place for the Navajo that must be built in a right way.
The Navajo community college in Tsaile, Arizona, has used traditional tribal moties in it's architecture. In the foreground is a hogan, a traditional home for Navajo in southwestern desert.
Lynn went in four different schools in different places on the reservation. but moving around did not cause a learning problem for her. She had grown to speak Navajo and English.
That was the beginning of new life in a new world for lynn. It was a world that kept opening up, expanding showing her new things.
The town was by far the biggest places she had .ever been in.These where supermarkets, department stores, restaurants, motels and many more. At first she was very homesick for her family and friends on the reservation. Lynn thought that she would be at the mission until she graduated from high school.
Fact: A Navajo learns the intricacies of electronic assembly at a plant on the arizona reservation.
There were times she would go with her grandfather for water. The hogan had no running water and every few days he would drive his old pickup truck to a windmill down the road and fill two wooden barrels. Upon their return to the Hogan, some morning Lynn would sit with her grandmother and help her grind con for bread or mush.
The day came too quickly when Lynn took a bus to Phoenix and boarded an airplane for the flight to texas. She had never flown before and she was so excited. When she arrived in the university she was whirlwind of activity that she had no time to be frightened. The teaching staff used methods and equipments that Lynn had never heard of, but after only a week she knew that she was reading faster and understanding more of what was happening to her. The other students in the program were a happy surprise her. These similarities made it easier for them to talk, to get to know each other, to relax together.
Almost before she knew it the summer program was over.
She learned some things about brandermill before arriving. She knew that it was prep school for children of rich people. The tuition fee for one year was several thousand of dollars.Lynn was lucky to get to that expensive school. But two weeks into the school terms was miserable. She was desperately lonely and homesick for her family and Navajo friends.
That place where so quite were everyone talks briefly and only talked about assignments and projects. Lynn were so lonely about that. By mid october Lynn was sure that she would Brandermill and return to the reservation. She went to the counselor to talk about that matter, the counselor ask her to stay in the brandermill, but lynn was not happy for that.
After that she forced herself to speak up in her classes, even literature class and it pleased and excited her that more than once the teachers praised her an answers, she began to talk with other girls and start to socialized. When Christmas break arrives but the flight in phoenix was so long and bored.
That night when she arrived she sat with her grandmother and talked about her experiences.
and again she returned in Brandermill and continue her studies there, and she's so proud that she is a Navajo.
Brent Ashabranner was young roamed the world by reading about it. Books gave him a way to be in two places at once the small Oklahoma town here he lived with his family and far away places he visited in stories. Years later an assignment with a foreign aid program took Ashabranner and his wife and children to africa. After that job he took to go in the Philippines. He's a famous author of "Morning Star, Black Sun", "Children of the maya".