Touching Hearts Ten Feet in the Air by Ava

Touching Hearts Ten Feet in the Air by Ava - August 2021 Scholarship Essay

Growing up I was always taught that impacting a community meant volunteering at a food bank, donating to a shelter, or supporting a youth based organization. For years, these were the only factors I used to contribute to my community. Not until many years later did I learn that while each of these efforts are important and vital in their own merits, they are not the only ways to give back. Having the ability to both brighten and change someone’s life can be even more impactful. Some learn this through conversations with friends or family. I learned this as I performed 10 feet in the air at a senior citizens home.

I never saw my stilt walking as anything more than entertainment. After all, doing tricks on wooden sticks isn’t revolutionary, and while it’s fun, I acknowledged that it wasn’t life-changing. I had long heard the folklore of the first stilt walkers from West Africa. Using their 10-15 foot legs, these creatures guided slave ships from Africa to the Caribbean protecting those inside. The story was nice, but never resonated with me. Thus, as I got wind of my group’s next performance, a senior-citizen charity event, I prepared to face it just like any birthday or wedding celebration. The center we were meant to present at had a majority Caribbean population like most of our events prior. What was different about this event, however, was that our audience had not seen their birth countries since their youth. Could you blame them? After 60+ years in a foreign country going back to your roots seems harder and harder. Many had forgotten about the sweet smell of breadfruit, the crisp sound of a steel pan, and most importantly the giants of the islands: mokojumbies.

After thirty-minutes of stretching and putting on our costumes, it was time to perform at last. As we crouched under the doors and onto the stage, we were met with the usual excitement of the crowd. Numerous spectators clapped and cheered us on, some even getting out of their walkers to do so. A few, however, stayed still. “You can’t win them all,” I thought. While it made me a bit uneasy to see some of our audience silent, I pushed these thoughts aside and continued our job; the show must go on. When both the music and our stamina died, we concluded the day and headed back to our rooms.

My teammates and I shared laughs as we changed back into our street clothes and dug into the complementary donuts provided by the staff. After we were done, some of the audience members came in to congratulate us on our performance. No stranger to such intrusions, I thanked them profusely for their kind words. One man spoke about how the performance reminded him of Trinidad Carnival, one of the biggest events a jumbie could be a part of. Another gentleman said that he hadn’t seen a mokojumbie since his teenage years decades before. His face broke out into a smile about twice the size of his story about being a stilt walker when he was a boy in Tobago. The woman in the room spoke of how beautiful it was to see girls performing the male-dominated tradition and wished that she had the courage to do it when she was young. Each of these stories were unique, but they all were inspired from the same place: us. I once again thanked them for their compliments and tales, and they headed back to their everyday lives. As they left the room, I realized that each had been a silent member in the audience.

While stilt walking certainly isn’t a story that many can relate to, brightening someone’s day certainly is. I did not know when I entered this medium-sized building in the Bronx that I would walk out changing someone’s life. I no longer look back at the story of mokojumbies as the protectors and heart of the Caribbean as fiction. That day we returned our senior citizens their forgotten culture, and for one day I gave back the one item every elder wants: their youth.