Paul Aladin remembers it snowing in October. When he arrived in the United States in 1994, “My first question was, what is this? Somebody tell me, this is called snow. I heard that word in my country many times but never figured out what it is.”

Paul was just 25 when he made the decision to leave his parents and seven younger siblings in Haiti and come to the Midwest, but it is clear that he approaches life with an inner balance not even harsh North Dakota winters can shake: “It does not mean that snow is a bad thing, it means that this is how the temperature is in this part of the world.”

Paul was joined by his brother Ricot for a conversation during StoryCorps’ visit to Fargo. Paul is the founder of United Hearts for Haiti, an organization working to build schools in and around his hometown. Improving education is, he says, “the number one priority,” the first step toward healing a traumatic history.

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Our first weekend in Fargo was packed with events for Pride Weekend. From a special roller derby bout to a block party culminating in a parade through downtown Fargo, the Mobile Team stayed busy trying to keep up with everything between interviews! Even busier than us was The Pride Collective. The Pride Collective organized all the events for Pride Weekend and also helped us invite members of the LGBTQ community and allies from the Fargo-Moorhead area to do a StoryCorps interview.

Nelson Richardson came to the MobileBooth during our second week in Fargo with his partner Denis Timm. The couple recently moved to Fargo, which for Nelson meant moving back home to the Midwest. Nelson grew up in Minnesota, spent a few of his teen years living in a monastery in California, and as a young man ended up living in New York City.

He met Denis there through a dating service called Brunch Buddies. Nelson explains: “You paid a fee and you got a list of six numbers.” The six numbers were from other men who had also signed up for the service. Nelson arranged dates with the first six numbers and didn’t find anyone he liked. During the second round of numbers, Nelson met Denis.

At the time Nelson lived in Manhattan and Denis lived in Brooklyn. Denis remembers arranging the date: “People that were in the ‘city’ would never come out to the boroughs, and I remember speaking on the phone and he agreed to come to Brooklyn and meet me at my job … It was a big plus for Nelson.”

Denis recalls one other thing in particular about their first date: Nelson’s shoes. “Those shoes were old, beat up – they looked like big clunky Uggs. And he had on nice dress pants and a decent shirt and he had these shoes on. It was like wearing a tuxedo with flip flops. It was just so incongruous, it was so weird. But that was Nelson. And Nelson is still weird.”

For Nelson, being weird was mainly a problem for him when he met new people. He describes himself as intensely shy. But in the end, Nelson found he couldn’t help himself around Denis: “One time we had a car trip and I said, ‘You know I do think I like you very much.’ But it was a very tentative statement … We had to give it time. And we did, and now it’s 24 plus years.”

In our last week in La Crosse, Wisconsin Public Radio hosted a Listening Event and reception at the Pump House, to celebrate everyone who came and shared their stories with StoryCorps. It was a wonderful event that gave us all a chance to connect with others in the community over tasty treats graciously provided by the People’s Food Co-Op.

John Gaddo of WPR played a few locally edited excerpts from interviews highlighting the range of stories in the La Crosse community. Over the past month we heard from teachers, nuns, veterans, soldiers, activists, new parents, grandparents, immigrants, Peace Corps volunteers, doctors, and more. People shared their stories of trips, journeys, and discovery; leaving home and finding home; growing up on the farm and growing up in the city; first meetings, first loves, and first partners; finding strength in family and friends in difficult times, and their hopes for the future.

During the event it became clear that the conversations started in the StoryCorps MobileBooth didn’t stop when the recording ended. Participants spoke about sharing their CD and starting new conversations with their loved ones about one another. Library Director Kelly Kreig-Sigman also announced that the La Crosse Public Library will be receiving a full archive of all the stories recorded in La Crosse in the coming months so residents will be able to listen to each others stories whenever they want to.
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Harriet Miller & Monica Wehrle, Fort Wayne, IN

While StoryCorps’ new team of Facilitators and Site Supervisors were training in our Brooklyn Office, our two Mobile Booths were preparing for their next stops in Fort Wayne, IN (East Booth) and La Crosse, WI (West Booth). Working with the Mobile East Team in Fort Wayne during their first week of recordings, I facilitated a conversation between business and life partners Harriet Miller and Monica Wehrle who talked about organizing an exhibition game with the former players of the Fort Wayne Daisies in their efforts to promote equality for women through the Fort Wayne Women’s Bureau.

A week later I joined our West Booth Team, new Site Supervisor Eloise Mezler and new Facilitator Jackie Sojico, for Opening Day in La Crosse, where we are partnering with WLSU Wisconsin Public Radio and the La Crosse Public Library in downtown.

Participants come up to the booth on Opening Day in La Crosse, WI.

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In the past month, people from all over New Mexico have come to StoryCorps’ Mobile Booth in Albuquerque to record a conversation.

Here are your photos! Feel free to download and print your high quality portrait, or email your photo to anyone you’d like. Visit StoryCorps’ Flickr album to find and download your photo directly.

In Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Chimayó, people have talked about family, history, and heritage in all kinds of ways. We’ve heard from teachers, mothers, master adobe builders, curanderas, pueblo leaders, activists, artists, and beyond. People have talked about having children, getting married, building homes, red chile, green chile, migration, genealogy, and living in New Mexico for 12 generations. They’ve talked about losing loved ones, maintaining culture, and finding strength in family and friends when times are hard.

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On Friday, June 4th the MobileBooth West team headed north from Albuquerque for a day of recording at the Chimayó Museum in Chimayó, New Mexico.

As participants from Chimayó and nearby Cundiyo arrived to record, many recognized relatives in the photographs hung on the museum’s walls.  The building itself is a traditional adobe structure that opens on to the Plaza del Cerró–a Spanish colonial settlement established in 1740.  An irrigation ditch or acequia runs by the front of the museum and is part of the system of waterways still used from colonial times to the present to irrigate the land around Chimayó.

A longtime mayordomo or caretaker for one of these acequia‘s, Samuel Vigil, recorded a conversation with his grandson, Mario.  At 85, Samuel continues to be the volunteer organizer for the cleaning and maintenance of the collectively owned acequia.  Mario grew up with his grandfather in Cundiyo and asked Samuel to share stories about his own childhood in the small town.  Mario currently works as a teacher while living on the family’s land in Cundiyo where he plans to stay and carry on the traditions he was raised with.

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I have always been an avid singer–a choir geek through and through. Being on the road with the Mobile Booths makes it somewhat difficult to be part of a musical ensemble, since I am jumping from city to city every month. Therefore, I often live vicariously through StoryCorps participants who come in to talk about their own musical experiences. I was overjoyed when 10-year-old Julian Picazo came to the MobileBooth in Reno, Nevada with his violin teacher, Caroline Karl – known as “Miss Karl” to Julian.

Julian picked up the violin in second grade. His father, who plays the guitar, encouraged him to play. Julian remembers, “When I started the violin, he told me not to quit because he knows that it’s really fun. And so do I. I said don’t worry, I’m not going to quit. I love playing the violin.” Now Julian and his father teach each other songs, and Julian has even started teaching his little sister to play the violin as well.

Julian’s love of the violin is abundantly clear. As he tells Miss Karl, “I don’t want to miss any single day I can. I don’t care if I’m on vacation or not, I just want to go to violin class. I remember this day I was really, really sick. I didn’t go to school, but I did go to violin class!”

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After bidding farewell to sunny Fresno, CA MobileBooth West traversed the Sierra Nevada and Donner Pass to land safely in Reno, Nevada. “The Biggest Little City in the World,” Reno is famous for its bedazzling casinos and breathtaking landscape. In the midst of this city’s bright lights and April snowstorms, people came downtown to record conversations.

MobileBooth West in Reno

For one of the first conversations of the week, Reno local and Moscow native Sacha Gousev came with friend Kim Palchikoff to talk about his life-long circus career as a master juggler with the Moscow Circus.

Sacha Gousev and Kim Palchikoff

Sacha fell in love with the circus at the age of five when his parents took him to see his first show. “Moscow Circus is a little different than American circus,” Sacha explains. “It’s kind of like . . . du Soleil, you know? It’s a big, big production. It’s not like here, with clowns walking around and selling ice cream and stuff. I was pretty amazed. I remember jugglers. Especially jugglers.”

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Bidding a fond farewell to Los Angeles, MobileBooth West recently headed up and inland to Fresno, California. Nestled in the heart of the Central Valley, Fresno welcomed StoryCorps with some of its legendary greenery. Radio Bilingüe, our broadcast partner, greeted us with a bag of tangerines from the sound engineer’s tree. A farmers market bustled next door as MobileBooth West set up for a month of Historias recordings with Fresno’s Latino communities.

Our evening listening event was a hit. Hugo Morales and Lourdes Oliva Medina of Radio Bilingüe welcomed everyone to Arte Américas while our community partners—many accompanied by family and friends—introduced themselves.

Snacking on ceviche, taquitos, and aqua fresca, people settled into chairs as StoryCorps’ Anna Walters played some favorite clips from past StoryCorps conversations. Martin Pereyra López, representing the Union de Ex-Braceros e Inmigrantes, ended the evening with an unexpected concert, playing a song he wrote about his time as a bracero in the valley.

MobileBooth West couldn’t be happier to be in Fresno, where participants are sharing multigenerational stories of family, migration, education, the campo, and the Fresno that pulsed at the heart of California’s Chicano and Farm Workers movements.

I was finishing up my last days in the New York City offices in early January before shipping out for our East Los Angeles Historias stop, when I received a phone call from Shifra Teitelbaum, director of a youth organization in South Los Angeles named “youTHink.” She was interested in getting her youth involved in Historias, our initiative to collect stories from Latinos. After a few hours, we had made a plan to record for a day at Southern California Library — a people’s library dedicated to documenting and preserving the histories of communities in struggle for justice.

Recently those plans became a reality. At the library, students from youTHink came with family members and friends to talk about their experiences living in Los Angeles. Iabeth Briones came with his brother, Eliseo Monclova, and talked about the time he spent living on the streets with his mother.

“I remember we lived in a car for a while and we were parked across [from] my favorite taco spot [called] ‘Chavelitas’, and we were there for one or two weeks. I was the smallest one and I slept in the back seat with all of that space and I think it was a way that [mom] was still trying to give me the best that she could by trying to keep me comfortable. I’ve always been with my mom, but I never really grew up with a father and I always looked at my mom as a pillar of strength. She kept us going and we kept each other going.”

Iabeth is currently a junior in high school and he’s also a poet. He has recently begun attending workshops with Street Poets Inc., an organization dedicated to the creative process as a force for individual and community transformation.

I want to give a special thanks to Shifra Teitelbaum for bringing this wonderful day of recording together, and to the Southern California Library for allowing us to record and for answering all of my questions about this very unique independent library!