January 10, Ponchatoula to Mandeville
Again it was very cold and windy. My chest cold had progressed to body aches and a fever. Cindie, another walker, had the same symptoms. We walked on anyway. The walking was fairly unevent-ful. We walked along an isolated stretch of highway with almost no houses and very little traffic. At noon we huddled together behind an abandoned service station to stay warm. For the past three days, we have had cold rice for lunch, left over from the big pots Carole and Mercury got up early to prepare for breakfast.

Morishita was constantly smiling and doing things to make us laugh. While we were huddled in the weeds over our small bowls of cold rice, we looked over at Morishita who was wrestling with a collie almost as big as he was. The two of them were tumbling on the ground as if it were a sunny summer day. "It is the mind that gets cold, not the body."

Whether it was the mind or the body after all, I still felt miserable when we arrived at the church. It was locked, and the minister could not come to let us in for another hour. But we found helpful people everywhere. The manager of the supermarket next door came to talk with us and then offered warm space in his office. Cindie and I quickly took him up on the offer, though it was only after the church was opened and we had wrapped ourselves in blankets for a while that we finally stopped shivering. We were also warmed by the gigantic meal the people of the church fixed for us.

   January 11, Mandeville to Lacombe
Our number was down to a core group of nine. It was hard to say goodbye to the walkers from New Orleans and Baton Rouge who had been with us for the first 150 miles. We will especially miss the children, whose cheerfulness and constant activity kept our spirits high. They were especially attracted to the monks, climbing all over them during the breaks and playing games in the evening.

Last night about 2:00 a.m., a couple of police cars pulled up to the church. They thought we had broken in and would not be satisfied until they had called the minister. This morning we had walked less than a mile when another Mandeville police car pulled up. This time the police wanted to check everyone's identification and passports. This was when we learned that Mercury was in the country illegally. He told the police that he was Canadian and that his passport was in the truck along with the rest of our gear. Everyone else's identification checked out okay and the police let us go, warning Mercury to carry his passport with him at all times in the future. Just then Julia drove up in the support van. We quickly waved her on ahead and started off again. Mercury viewed himself as a world citizen and did not bother himself with such things as passports to cross artificial lines drawn across the globe.

When we arrived at Holly Retreat, the Catholic retreat house where we were to spend the night, I had some time to walk around the grounds by myself. I was struck by the obvious similarity between the Catholic and Buddhist monks. The host monks were chanting their prayers in unison in Latin while the guest monks chanted together in another foreign language. One group chanted in the sanctuary and the other in a guest cabin, but they recognized each other as co-workers.

During the evening we had good conversation with a priest about the activist role taken by Jesuit priests in Central America. Later he taught Mercury, who was a good guitarist, a few Catholic peace songs, including the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi. We were also joined by Michelle, a local newspaper reporter. She spent about an hour interviewing a few of us individually, and expressed regret that she had not known of the walk in advance so that she could have arranged time off to walk with us.

Later in the evening we called Pamela to get our schedule for the next few days. We got it and more information. Because of the incident in Albany and the lack of police protection there, Pamela had called all the mayors of the towns in Mississippi that we would walk through, asking for guarantees of our safety. She told them of the international reputation of the Nipponzan Myohoji Buddhist monks and that they had walked through Europe, the Soviet Union, India, Africa, and Central America without injury. She received positive responses from every town official.

Tonight I slept in a bed for only the second time since I left New Orleans.

   January 12, Lacombe, Louisiana, to Kiln, Mississippi (by car)
We woke up to the worst winter storm in the Deep South in sixty years. The ground and trees were covered with sleet and freezing rain. The major highways were closed. The water pipes in the cabin were frozen when we arrived yesterday. Now the electricity had gone out overnight. To make matters worse, Mercury had turned the gas heat off during the night. It was too hot for him, used as he was to Canadian winters. Of course, the rest of us were freezing when we woke up. We were unable to get the stove going again. Some people wanted to walk, regardless of the weather, but there was the problem of transporting our gear. The Catholic Sisters in Kiln were our state coordinators and also our hosts for tonight. They had already tried to come for us, but after a minor auto accident on one of the bridges they decided to go back. We resigned ourselves to the fact that we would just have to spend the day where we were. Some of us were sick and all of us were tired and out of synch. Neils and Carster were speaking in Danish. Carole and Mercury were using French. The monks were talking Japanese. Julia, who was facilitator for the week, was on the phone calling all our facilitators and coordinators. And I was wrapped up in bed, coughing my head off.

This morning was definitely one of the low points of the walk. Then help unexpectedly arrived. A minister from Slidell arrived with 15 shrimp po-boy sandwiches for our lunch and an offer to arrange transportation for us to Kiln. In another hour three more drivers arrived with another surprise. They had picked up Shima, a 35-year-old construction worker from Tokyo, at the airport. His relatively long hair identified him as a lay person, not a monk. He had left his wife and two young children with her sister in order to walk for disarmament for five months. His English was hard to understand at first and one of the other Japanese often had to translate for him.

We quickly got our gear loaded and were driven to Kiln. Our coordinator in Slidell, the " Spears into Pruning Hooks", had given us help when we really needed it and got nothing from us in return -- the meeting scheduled there had to be cancelled.

The sisters' convent in Kiln had burned down a few months earlier. They had made arrangements to stay overnight with friends so that we could stay in the trailer that was now their home. The storm had knocked the utilities out in Kiln also. The trailer had little heat and was lighted with candles.

People soon started coming into the trailer bringing food for the potluck supper. The electricity came on when we had formed a circle to give thanks. After supper we went to the Catholic church for an interfaith service. The temperature had finally gotten above freezing, but it was still raining. In such weather forty people came out from this small community to participate in a peace service with us. Afterward the trailer was full of people, standing among backpacks and suitcases, drinking hot coffee or tea and talking intensely about the need for disarmament.go to page 9