Dr. Jedidiah's Diary Episode #80: Gerel, the Light like a Strong Candle in the Wind

Dr. Jedidiah’s Diary

Dr. Jedidiah is a psychiatrist who loves traveling, meeting new people, and exploring different cultures as a single father who lost his perky self for the last decade. During those hard years, he has met hundreds of, thousands of people from various walks of life around all over the world. Meeting new people and listening to their  ones through the formal encounter groups or being truly honest with himself. Here is Dr. Jedidiah’s monologue that has left him with some food for thoughts in life…. or a fodder to justify his own mistakes in the past.

 

Episode #80. Gerel, the Light like a Strong Candle in the Wind

It was around the winter solstice when I met Gerel. I had been working as a volunteer shrink for those with mental illness in collaboration with the local artists in the inner city of South Side of Chicago. Since it had always been my goal in life to reach out to some hidden, marginalized, and ignored group of people in the shadow of our society, the brutally cold winter in bitter neighborhood did not ever seem to deter me from going all out in our project of Saving and Savoring the Neighborhood. My counterpart artist in the project was such a quiet woman named Gerel, which she said referred to “light” in Mongolian.

 

 

Albeit she was silent most of the time of our preps and discussions for helping out the needy folks in the ghetto, her paintings and graffiti exhibited inside our temporary clinic were telling how deeply she was involved in this project. Every single piece of her painting depicts this city as a nightmare of small people shedding dark colored tears to be shown through the big or small crevice in the walls of huge skyscrapers. I could hear and see Gerel shouting for help and begging for love even in her abstract artworks. Each time we met up, she would only say a few words, if any. “We should be their elytra. The vulnerable and displaced people from their home need some protection.” I thought over and again what she meant to say and came to realize that we could start small by becoming the needy folks’ protective covers through our own presence to raise and be their voice even in that so-called grand scheme of their city’s gentrification, which would make it clearly displayed between the two strikingly different worlds of the haves and the have-nots.

 

Gerel’s paintings and graffiti showed the day-to-day microaggression that befell the existing neighborhood in that poverty-stricken area and emphasized their pain inside with the big Tsunami of city developing going at full throttle. Beside one of Gerel’s artwork was placed a short piece of poem written by a mother under depression that I’d counseled for half a year there.

 

Until the Day Comes

by Ginger Brown

 

My baby doesn’t cry

‘cause I always hush her.

One day I came to learn

my baby never asked me why.

I looked at my little girl and said I was proud of her

waiting for her to say a word in return.

But I saw her eyes not shiny but dry;

 ‘Who killed my baby?” I yelled in anger,

Finding myself against the grim look of cold wall so stern.

Stop looking at me awry;

I pray the day will occur

When my baby in me is finally seen for you to discern.

 

 

  

Expressions

    1.  in collaboration with…: to work jointly with others or together especially in an intellectual endeavor        

    2.  inner city: the area near the center of a city, especially when associated with social and economic problems

    3.   to deter somebody from doing something: to turn aside, discourage, or prevent from acting   

    4.  to go all out: to make every possible effort

    5.  elytra: plural form of elytron, which is one of the pair of hardened forewings of certain insects, as beetles, forming a protective covering for the posterior or flight wings.

    6.  in the grand scheme of something: in the overall/ larger scheme of things

    7.   gentrification: a process in which a poor area (as of a city) experiences an influx of middle-class or wealthy people who renovate and rebuild homes and businesses and which often results in an increase in property values and the displacement of earlier, usually poorer residents

    8.  the haves and the have-nots: people who are rich and the ones who have little money and few possessions

    9.   microaggression: a comment or action that subtly and often unconsciously or unintentionally expresses a prejudiced attitude toward a member of a marginalized group (such as a racial minority)

   10. to befall somebody: to happen to somebody

   11. at full throttle: at full speed