Author: Harry Henry Julin

The Famine

Father’s words cut through the room like a knife. “No rice? Seriously?” His disbelief mirrored the worry etched on all our faces. “Go check it out for yourself!” Mother’s response was a mix of resignation and determination. Father flung open our rice jar, the last hope in the grim situation,

Two Better Than One

When asked by a friend why he wanted to get married, a young man gave a simple answer. “Two is better than one,” he said. Lijah (sometimes shortened to Ijah) felt incomplete on his own. To him, having a partner, particularly a spouse, made a lot of sense. “I’ve got

Survival in Three Words

HIS name was Niba Gibap. It wasn’t his real name, just a nickname his friends gave him that stuck for life. Niba loved school. Back in the early 1950s, he was called Raham, short for Abraham. Unfortunately, his parents were too poor to afford notebooks and pencils. One of his

The Soul’s Internal Struggles

‘The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.’ Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882); an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, and poet whose writings explored themes of individualism,

Lily of the Pond

‘Love is like a beautiful flower which I may not touch, but whose fragrance makes the garden a place of delight just the same.’ – Helen Keller (1880-1968); an American author, lecturer, and activist. She was deaf and blind at the age of 19 months due to an illness, yet

Tomorrow Might Not Come

In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years. Abraham Lincoln (1809 – 1861). He was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. DURING my childhood, I knew a man who

The Calculative Farmer

“The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at

The Brothers

“The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.“ Nelson Mandela (1918-2013). He was a South African anti-apartheid revolutionary, political leader, and philanthropist. I remember two brothers who were close to my family in the late 1950s. This was around the time

Where Memories Lingered

IMAGINE: What if you were unable to forget anything? What if you constantly remember every detail of every moment of your life? I posed these questions on an online forum a while back and some smart but argumentative members had a field day with the notion. From them, I learned

The Prettiest Girl in the World

‘In matters of the heart, beauty is subjective and resides in the eye of the beholder.’ – Margaret Wolfe Hungerford (1855 – 1897). She is best known for her popular quote, ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, which she coined in her novel ‘Molly Bawn’ published in 1878.