The twin.

I want to tell you a bit about a little town that died. Or was killed.

The town's name is Geamăna, which is the female form of "the twin." I don't know if there was a twin town somewhere, but it's located in the Apuseni mountains in central Transylvania. The Apuseni are shorter than the mountains we live in. They almost seem like hills--they're rolling mountains, one after another with pastures and trees all the way to the top. They seem friendly.

This is also the location of Roșia Montana, the little town that's been recently making news and protest headlines as an international gold mining corporation was trying to open a strip mine right near the city that would provide some jobs but also create a open pit of cyanide from the runoff. The Romanian parliament didn't allow the project to get started (mainly due to pressure from large protests all over the country), and now Gabriel Resources, the corporation, is looking into suing the Romanian government for wasting their time and money.

Kelly and I have been to a few of these protests in Cluj, and I have to say that we're not in favor of a multi-national corporation destroying a zone that's on the list to become a UNESCO World Heritage site and leaving behind a lake of cyanide that could leak into the Danube. It seems like a destructive way to make a quick buck, and we're glad that Romania said no. But, when we went to Roșia Montana this past weekend to do activities for the kids' tent at an activist festival there, we were very open to hearing the other side of the story. The town is divided as to what's better, and we wanted to hear everyone out (even though we didn't get the chance).

After seeing Geamăna, I think that I'm more glad that Romania said no.

Our friend told us about Geamăna on the night we stayed at the festival. She told us that it was a little town like Roșia Montana, but the corporation had been allowed to strip mine for gold. She said that when they were done, they moved everyone out (except for one old lady who still lives there) and flooded the valley to hold all the toxic waste from the mine. I've heard of things like this, but I'd never seen it, so we decided to find Geamăna on the way back home.

A teenager from the village before Geamăna helped us get on the right road, and after driving 20 minutes uphill, we arrived at the pass into the valley. It was a beautiful, sunny day, and the valley was still so green and lush, but there is a big, old, nasty-looking pipe that goes over the road. On the concrete support someone gaffitied "Don't forget Geamăna. Save Roșia Montana!"

It appears to be a valley like so many other valleys, but it's a lake in between the mountains, not more cute Transylvanian thatched roof houses.

But under the lake is where the houses were. Or still are. Our friend told us that sometimes you can still see the old church when the sludge is low enough. I'm not sure if this is part of the church, but it for sure used to be part of someone's life back when people lived in Geamăna.

We found the edge of the lake eventually. The picture, of course, can't capture how vast the dam is, but it's big. Probably 200 meters long, stretching from one side of the valley to the other, dividing the toxic from the natural, perhaps the cursed from the uncursed. I hope it holds. It kind of looks like they're trying to extend the dam into the lake.

All the trees that touch this lake are dead. They make a strange, sad barrier between the green-grey sludge and the vibrant, green forest that used to cover the whole valley. Again, I hope this line holds. The flooding began in the late 80s, so I have hope that the toxic waste has stopped where it is, but I wonder if it's creeping its way into the earth.

We also found the source. It's a pipe spewing grey water, presumably runoff from the stripped area up the mountain. Even though the trees right around the pipe continue growing, the leaves are covered in grey. We tried not to breathe while we drove past. And it's not just running, it's gushing out of a big pipe, down a grey gulley, into the grey lake. A grey lake that seems to be half hard on top from where the sun bakes the waste solid.

When we were leaving, we saw the old lady who still lives at the edge of the lake, at the entrance to her old village. We slowed down and said hello, but she didn't really look at us. I don't know if I could say hello to the people who came to take a quick drive around the village that I had lost forever. I think that it makes me want to say, "Don't forget Geamăna. Save Roșia Montana." Even though in this day and age, more and more people are moving out of the Romanian villages for the cities, and the inhabitants of Roșia Montana could make some money to move out if a strip mine opens, it still seems that it would be an awful waste of something so good for Roșia Montana to be covered by a pool of toxic waste. The water covering Geamăna reminded me of the water at Birkenau where the Nazis dumped ashes from the furnaces--a sickly greenish-grey color, and covering up something that too many people want to forget about. I'm not in a position of being desperate for money, but I still think that money isn't worth this.

For life in these wild mountains.

"Just a glimpse, Moses: a clift in the rock here, a mountaintop there, and the rest is denial and longing.  You have to stalk everything.  Everything scatters and gathers; everything comes and goes like fish under a bridge.  You have to stalk the spirit, too.  You can wait forgetful anywhere, for anywhere is the way of his fleet passage, and hope to catch him by the tail and shout something in his ear before he wrests away.  Or you can pursue him wherever you dare, risking the shrunken sinew in the hollow of the thigh; you can bang at the door all night until the innkeeper relents, if he ever relents; and you can wait till you're hoarse or worse the cry for incarnation always in John Knoepfle's poem: 'and Christ is red rover... and the children are calling/come over come over.'  I sit on a bridge as on Pisgah or Sinai, and I am both waiting becalmed in a clift of the rock and banging with all my will, calling like a child beating on a door: Come on out! I know you're there.

And then occasionally the mountains part.  The tree with the lights in it appears, the mockingbird falls, and time unfurls across space like an oriflamme....  I wait on the bridges and stalk along banks for those moments I cannot predict, when a wave begins to surge under the water, and ripples strengthen and pulse high across the creek and back again in a texture that throbs.  It is like the surfacing of an impulse, like the materialization of fish, this rising, this coming to a head, like the ripening of nutmeats still in their husks, ready to split open like buckeyes in a field, shining with newness.  'Surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not.'  The fleeting shreds I see, the back parts, are a gift, an abundance.

Ezekiel excoriates false prophets as those who have 'not gone up into the gaps.'  The gaps are the thing.  The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time like a once-blind man unbound.  The gaps are the clifts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fjords splitting the cliffs of mystery.  Go up into the gaps.

I go on my way, and my left foot says 'Glory,' and my right foot says 'Amen': in and out of Shadow Creek, upstream and down, in a daze, dancing, to the twin silver trumpets of praise."

(from Annie Dillard's A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

These lives matter.

Over the last few months, I have been reading, heartbroken, the all-too-frequent news from the US about the racism-inspired violence, police brutality, and other injustices that are faced by our black brothers and sisters in increasing number.  In the face of the horror, I have been moved and thankful for the Black Lives Matter movement, those brave and truth-seeing people willing to stand up and cry "No!" in the face of systems that are broken and entrenched.

And I have been thinking a lot about the phrase "Black Lives Matter," especially in the face of those who push back with "All Lives Matter."  I mean, of course they do.  No one is disagreeing with that.  The lives of middle-class white small-town Iowa kids matter too, and of course there are those from my small town who slipped through the cracks, who were never told that they mattered, who didn't know they were loved (or still don't), and their wrecked lives and insecurity are proof that people failed them, too.

But for the vast majority of "us" -- we the privileged -- we already knew we mattered, and the world treated us that way.  By the grace of God and the systems at work in the world, we got a good ol' public school education that told us we could grow up to be "anything we wanted to be."  We had parents who came to watch us play pitiful viola solos and told us that our effort mattered, we had teachers who knew our names and coaches who cheered us on and friends who reminded us our lives (in all their excruciating teenage drama) mattered.  We saw people who looked like us on the news, in college brochures, in suits & ties receiving rewards on the international stage.  We knew that our lives mattered already, intrinsically, and they could matter in a big way.

And it would be wrong, of course, to take that away.  The Black Lives Matter crowd isn't saying that it's wrong that some kids know they count and have hope and a future -- it's wrong that all kids don't know that.  But what's especially wrong is that it's mostly black kids who don't know that.  It's not all kids of every stripe, or all lives across the board, that are missing the security and confidence of being told -- verbally and in every observation -- that they matter, that they have possibilities, that they'd be missed if they were gone.  It's those who are outside of the systems of power, who -- for so many reasons, and such a long racist history -- don't hear that at school, or on the media, or in the workforce, or maybe even at home.  Of course every life matters.  But we don't need to remind people to care for those who are already well cared for.  Black Lives Matter points out that black kids also need to know their value.  They also need to know they're precious.  They also need to know that the world would ache with missing them if they were gone.  They need to know they have a hope and a future, that the Creator of the universe made them special, that He adores them, that He sees them, that He knows their names and far, far more.

And all of this is making me think of the kids at the cantina.  Granted, the situation of the Roma (gypsies) in Romania can't be fairly compared to the situation of African-Americans in the United States.  The history, the way the systems work, the political forces at play... I know they're different.  But if we're talking about groups of people who are ignored and considered that their lives are less valuable, and the need for solutions that are complicated and wide-ranging and deep -- we've got something in common going on.  So here's what it's made me think about.

There are these little girls at the cantina whose mom is clearly unable to care for them well.  They are dirty and stunted, mucus constantly dribbling out of their noses, raggedy sweaters hanging from their skinny little shoulders even in the midst of summer, because they seem to be the only clothes they have.  The five-year-old barely whispered and couldn't even feed herself using silverware when we first opened the cantina a few months ago (now, there's a new light in her eyes and she has mastered the art of using a spoon... she is undergoing this beautiful transformation from a silent, scared waif to an actual child, who giggles and looks at you with bright, flashing brown eyes, just because she's finally getting enough food).  Her younger sister, though, is still a long ways behind.  She's three, and still needs to be spoon-fed, and isn't yet totally in control of her bowels because she usually just walks around without pants, going whenever she feels the need in their tiny dirt yard.  Her eyes are glazed over and she stares blankly at you when you talk; she hasn't yet found her voice.  A week ago, I happened to be outside her house when her mom began to yell at her, and this tiny little girl just stood in the door, wailing heartbrokenly at the top of her lungs.  Crouching down to try to calm her didn't work, but as soon as I scooped her into my arms, she was quiet.  Instantly and completely.  And clinging to me like she'd never let go.

That was all it took -- lifting this little wisp of a girl who doesn't weigh a thing, holding her in my arms, whispering in her ear, and she calmed down.  She stopped crying.  For a minute, she knew she mattered.

And so here we are again, in this situation that is so unfair.  I walk home from the cantina past hundreds of kids who are playing and laughing with friends and holding hands with their moms and generally being cared for -- even if they live in an economically depressed small town with imperfect parents and a lousy school and a corrupt mayor.  Their lives matter, a lot -- the life of every single kid in Lupeni matters.  But these little girls, these ones who live on the margins in every way -- they are the ones who I want to raise a placard for.  They are the ones who are forgotten, or brushed away.  Their stories are blamed on something else -- parents who are lazy, bad moral character, poverty (but not its root causes), whatever.  And I just want to scream and say "No!" in the face of it -- to cry out that These Lives Matter, that these forgotten ones matter, and to pray for mercy and grace and truth.

So please pray with me for a day in which all kids will grow up knowing that they aren't the center of the universe, but that they are seen and known by the Creator of the universe.  And He adores them.  Not enough to accept them blindly to do whatever they want, to let them run and wreck our lives, but enough to die for them in order to remake them as His beautiful sons and daughters, the ones they were created to be.  They matter to Him.  They have to matter to us.  Especially the ones that currently don't.