Table of Contents
Each section is summarized below. to learn more, click the title of the section that interests you.
Candace looks out toward the lake.
The land where Lamplight will take place is a plot that has been owned by the Waid family since the 1950s. The lakehouse that is being renovated for use by the program was built by D.C. Waid in 1953. When he passed away in 2016, the plot on which it rests was inherited by his daughters, Candace and Donna Waid. As well as Donna and Candace, who serve on Lamplight committees, Daniel Waid Marshall and Steven Thompson, both members of the Waid family, are heavily involved in the project. This section involves stories of the land from Candace and Donna’s childhood, as told by them.
The land as it appeared in August of 2017.
The idea for Lamplight came from putting two and two together. On the one hand, there was a vacant lakehouse on a beautiful lakeside plot. On the other hand, there was a network of educators with experience in running summer programs. This section sketches the origins of the idea and describes the models from which it draws inspiration, namely Highlander Research and Education Center and the educational programs of L.L. Nunn (founder of Telluride Association and Deep Springs College). This sections also includes recollections from the road trip that generated the idea.
Zakiya, Sally, and Kevin see the land for the first time.
Lamplight began as a series of meetings with friends and expanded into a continuing effort involving over 20 volunteers from around the country. A crew of four went on a second road trip to Alabama in the summer of 2017 to stay with the Waid family and discuss the idea with community leaders in Birmingham. Over the next year, the Lamplight team grew to include two experienced Alabama organizers (Zac Henson and Morgan Pennington) and the curriculum became more defined.
Steven, Kevin, and Spencer work on the land, Summer 2018.
Details about the pilot program will be released soon. Several team members spent their summer working on renovating the property and building connections with friends in the Guntersville area. As of now, Lamplight is primarily focusing on fundraising, outreach, and renovation.
Part One: Poppa and The Land
In this section, Donna and Candace Waid remember the land as it was during their childhood and share their visions for the future.
Donna Waid
Donna spent her childhood going up to the lakehouse on weekends. She tells the story of one trip below.
Daniel with DC Waid ("Poppa"/"Daddy") several months before his death in 2016.
Poppa used to keep his tools in coffins so no one would steal them.
The Lakehouse before renovation, appearing as Poppa built it in 1953.
"Most Snakes Aren't Dangerous"
I have such wonderful childhood memories of being there. We would have a big Fourth of July. We would have people in, and we swam and enjoyed the water and never worried about snakes. You know, we just, we would hear terrible stories about people [water] skiing and skiing into a snake.
But we — Daddy had taught us that most snakes aren’t dangerous and you need to learn which ones are and which ones aren't and make some noise because the vibration will scare most of them away. I think there are a couple exceptions but… At one point we had a pier going way out. And then we had a boat house and Dad and Mother and the two of us would go swimming every weekend. Well Mother didn't go because she didn't really know how to swim, but she went out.
This is one of the terrible stories of my childhood. Mother would take a bath and get all ready to go back to Birmingham and she would look nice, put on makeup and have shoes and her clothes would be nice and Daddy said, “I want you to go out for a canoe ride with me.” Well, we knew this was a big mistake but we didn’t tell Mother. And he took her out for this canoe ride and guess what he did? He turned it over. And he always swore it was an accident. He never meant to do it, but Mother came out of the waters sputtering and saying "Donald, you’re mean as a snake! You are mean as a snake!” and we're up there like saying, “Yes, Daddy, you are."
Dead Fish in the Corn
Um, but we had you know, we grew a garden, we planted things and Dad could do a great job of planting anything except corn, so we planted corn and we put dead fish in with the corn because that's supposedly what the Puritans did, or the Pilgrims. I can't remember which. But it didn't work for us. The corn was pitiful. It was no good. So we couldn't grow that, but mother loved for us to grow Irish potatoes, because digging them up was like treasure, buried treasure. “Let's dig up the potatoes.” I just have so many happy memories of all of us together.
Part Two: An Idea Takes Shape
This section traces the develop of the idea of Lamplight to two road trips in 2017.
The Long Haul
Daniel Waid Marshall
Daniel is in the Core Working Group at Lamplight. To the right, he describes the importance of Myles Horton's book The Long Haul to his teaching and the project.
Anyone who has seen me get excited about a book knows that I make everyone around me feel like they are reading it too. It was that way with Myles Horton’s autobiography The Long Haul on the road trip. Every other page I would insist that everyone stop what they were doing to hear what Myles had to say next (by that point, we were all on a first name basis with him). The Long Haul radically shifted the way I had been thinking about teaching and learning.
The view from Highlander today, reminiscent of the book.
I had always thought that the exciting part of teaching was the ideas. I wanted to share that moment of understanding with the kids — specifically, I wanted them to have all of the same moments of understanding that I once had. Basically, I wanted them to become little versions of me. While reading The Long Haul, things kind of flipped.
Myles insisted on people's right to come to their own understandings. He believed in everyone's innate ability to figure out the solutions to their problems; the job of the teacher is most of all to create an environment where people can come together and feel comfortable enough to struggle through their differences toward a common, workable solution. I began to realize that teaching wasn't about making up fake problems with ready-made answers, but about joining with students to come up with real, practical solutions to the real problems they and their communities are facing. The point of teaching was actually to set up a place where people could develop the capacity to not only have ideas, but to put those ideas into practice, to make them a real part of the world.
The Global South and the American South
Bassem Elbendary
"Bendary" was one of the four teachers on the first road trip that led to the idea for Lamplight. To the right, he describes his impressions of the South as an Egyptian.
I remember when Daniel first mentioned the idea of joining him on a trip to the South, how intrigued I was. As an Egyptian living in the US as a teacher at the time, my only exposure to American culture was merely within the confines of New York. I had always heard of how New York was not representative of America — “the real America” — and boy, what an experience that was, traveling through various Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama towns on our way to Birmingham.
Bendary walks the banks of the Mississippi in New Orleans.
I could write so much about Southern hospitality, the friendliness and the beauty I was exposed to, “both natural and humane.” But what struck me the most was grappling with the term poverty and what poverty really means. Egypt’s poverty (like any other global south country for that matter) strikes you in the face, it’s visible and very tangible ... it’s just there. You can see it in the unpainted informal settlements’ red muddy bricks around Cairo. You can see it in people’s worn out clothes that seem to have been exhausted by the enormous amounts of direct sunlight desiccating them... its marks are basically everywhere. If you’re poor, you can never own a car nor can you ever own a house.
These realities had defined poverty for me, but I soon realized that they also limited my understanding of it. While I would never claim to capture the real complexities of the South, I did come away from our trip with a few uncooked ideas about the appearance and lived reality of poverty.
Bendary inspects the infamous window at the Pickens County Courthouse.
Having a car doesn’t necessarily mean you can afford a house to sleep in. A car could be your only asset in the American south, which brought up many thoughts about the role of cars in forming American identity and culture.
Having a painted house doesn’t necessarily mean you can feed those who are underneath its roof.
In the South, racism does not save white people from poverty. Being white doesn’t necessarily mean that you live comfortably. Not to dismiss its realities, but it seemed like race existed as a last surviving social marker between the sons and daughters of the same socio-economic class. I know this might sound obvious but that’s not what the Northeastern discourse on race-politics has slowly embedded in me.
The Summer Road Trip
In the following months, a group of 5-8 interested people began meeting to figure out what this project could look like. We did the same things that we plan to have our student-organizers do: we told each other our dreams for the future, we did research to learn the facts on the ground, we began building relationships with people in the community, and adjusted our vision according to each new piece of information we gathered. On a whim, we decided on another road trip, this time from New York City to Birmingham and back in 5 days.
Time in the Car Together: >35 hrs in 5 Days.
(~30% of all time spent on the trip was in the car)
Notable Stops: Highlander, Birmingham, Guntersville, Asheville.
From left; Kevin, Barbara (our gracious tour guide/host from Highlander), Sally, and Zakiya.
Excerpt from a Report Back Email After the Summer Road Trip
"Next, we drove to Birmingham, where we hung out with Daniel’s family and made contact with local organizers. In each meeting, we made our pitch roughly along these lines: Here is this property, here are our skill sets and our networks. How best could we configure these to support you all? With these parts, what visions do you as local organizers have for a program? The needs and vision each person expressed sounded similar to conversations we have already been having: popular education, organizing cooperatives, supplementary education for public school students..."
Part 3: An Idea Gets Legs
This section describes how the idea of Lamplight began to be organized into reality.
On the Naming of Lamplight
Kevin Burns
Kevin was part of the first road trip and recently spent his summer in Alabama working on the land and doing outreach in Guntersville and Birmingham.
“Yeah we were supposed to write pitches, like how would you describe what we were doing, what the project was, and where it was, to somebody who didn't know, quickly, in a way that made sense to most people. A big part of that also was for us to have it make sense in a really clear way to ourselves. This was at an earlier point in the project so we were really just trying define it in clear terms for ourselves and then for others.
Burns poses by the push mower near the lake.
For me the pitch — my pitch — had like two main purposes, which was my favorite thing with the project at that point especially having just done the road trips was the property and I really wanted to highlight that I feel like it was the main draw, you know, and I thought it would be great to bring people into it then highlight all of this amazing work folks have been doing in terms of what would actually go on at the camp. So I really wanted it to be kind of a romantic vision of the property in the cabin. So I went all out I think with the descriptions there. And the other point was I really wanted to get a name that was like short that you felt like after you been to the camp you could say, ‘Oh yeah, I went to Lamplight,’ or, ‘I'm going back to Lamplight this summer.’ I wanted a name like that and Lamplight was my favorite name.
So I wanted it to be something simple and catchy and sounded cool. And yeah I was totally convinced that I could get one of those from a Halo map or a location in Fallout and I did so… I was pretty proud of that.
Burns lets out a cackle by the lake before kayaking out into a brewing storm.
Burns confronts some unfortunate wasps.
Then there's meeting after, which was great. We had all these pitches and I was feeling like mine was gonna to be what I wanted to be, which was, you know, mine’s gonna be a little bit more story-like, a little more romantic than technical, although looking at it now it’s like half gobbledy-gook on the technical side. But during the meeting, all of the different pitches were not labeled with people [authors]. And we were like: ‘Alright, let’s take 5 minutes to read the pitches.’ And we start were reading and reading and people were like, ‘Hmm... Oh good,’ and then everybody starts laughing and I know instinctively that they got to my pitch. My pitch is being read and everybody’s laughing and they’re like ‘Who wrote the tumbledown cabin? Who’s that? What’s the beaming bejeweled sunroom?’ and I was like ‘Ohhh... I think I overdid it, I went a little bit too far.’ But at the time, I was like, this is a good pitch, this is really good. And… uhh.. Yeah, it was quickly laughed out of the pitch-making process, probably rightfully so, but you know it’s still…”
Daniel: “But, the name?”
Burns: “But the name, the name stuck. We got the name. Lamplight. I’m still very proud of that name.”
Zac joined the team in the spring of 2018. Here, he discusses his background and hopes for the Sand Mountain Cooperative Education Center, which will host Lamplight as its first program.
The Winter Retreat
in january of 2018, an 8-person crew gathered in snowy ithaca, NY, to sketch out a plan for the next phase of the project. below is an account and some photos from that weekend.
Pablo Uribe drove through a blizzard to make it from New Haven, CT to the retreat in Ithaca. To the right, he recounts what he found when he got there.
I remember the drive to the winter meeting really well. I had left New Haven early because I knew there was a storm going on in Ithaca. On the drive, all I could think about was our vision for Lamplight and the logistics for the weekend ahead. In that way that happens on long drives the two strains of thought started blurring together in my mind. The practical question: Will we cook together at the house? shifted into a daydream about what a Lamplight meal will feel like. The concern: Are we going to get through the agenda? led to wondering about how students and staff will make decisions next summer… that kind of thing.
As I got closer, the snow started picking up. It was enough to make the ride a little tense for this West Coast driver… I thought: It is not always easy to travel to Ithaca… but I’ve got a good reason to press on. The tricky road conditions gave me just the adrenaline I needed to jump right into the flow of things. I dusted the snow off of my jacket and changed into sneakers. Someone had made soup. I think we were talking about different renovation plans for the property...
One of the things we worked through toward the end of the weekend was the tag line description of Lamplight, “At Lamplight..." After a spirited weekend in which we clarified our plan for the following year, and after hours of tinkering with every word and sentence clause on that tag, we were a wild kind of happy when we settled on something!
The winter meeting at the Telluride House was a really important moment for us, I think. We had communicated over e-mail and had a lot of video conferences but now we were together in person, really feeling each other’s commitment to making this happen. Just that feeling gave us confidence, you know?
Part 4: The Home Stretch Begins
In this section, members of the lamplight team describe the work they did this summer and what remains to be done.
Spencer Pritchard is a teacher of Black Studies and History at Berkeley High School in California. He has served on the Curriculum, Renovation, and Outreach Committees and spent some of his summer working on the land in Marshall County.
An Ill-Fated Cookout
To commemorate a month of hard work, Members of the Lamplight team organized a cookout by the lake. Sadly, it rained, but not before some fun was had.
