My "Tiny Eden" Page

“Tiny Eden” - The story behind it.

As we all know, the most vital lessons in life, especially in school are the ones that are the most boring ones. However at times we do have the luck to have teachers that change their way of teaching in regards to the dry knowledge of the subject.

Take “History” for example. How many groan by the mere thought of the word and remember endless hours of pounding dates into one’s head of important battles or from when to when such and such period of empires lasted and how long Queen Victoria ruled and so forth. For some reason I had always had history teachers, for the exception of a few years in between, who had the golden touch to make history come alive. From those teachers I learned that history is not a list of “dates” but an incredibly complex and interwoven web of multiples.

One of the most remarkable teacher I had was during grade 6 to 8 who had been a retired Army officer who’s carrier had been spent for most of the time in the hellholes of the many war-torn countries whose ceasefires were now controlled by the UN- peacekeeping forces. His skill was to take an event that happened in the middle ages for example and compare it with a similar event of today and relate us the similarities as well the differences. And foremost he also made us understand that behind each conflict were also economic interests. He made us aware to look at a war of expansion not just as a grabbing of real estate, but had us look at what was on or in this land that made it so desirable to be conquered.

This method of teaching was then later in HS and University underlined with how much a single event can change also society. How customs and ideas change because of politics and other seminal events.

When I began writing, I realized that each subject that I touched had for sure tones of books, points of views and research papers backing it up or contradicting it. Yet how can any human being understand the entire knowledge of a world? If we want to know all then we would not have the time in lifespan to actually research all sides to every issue.

Due to my professions, both as a pilot but also as an engineer I was lucky to have spent time in many countries of this world, rich and poor, free and under dictator-ship. Since most assignments were NOT in the well-maintained tourist towns of the said nations but mostly in places one could hardly locate on the map, I quickly became accustomed to let the local people “guide me”. With this I mean that on the weekend there was no beach to visit or any pyramids to climb or churches to admire. Often those places were 100’s of miles away. So the weekends were spent with the assigned translators and their respective families. This exposed me to the reality of their countries conditions as experienced by them in person, not as written up in the economic charts of the world banks.

The longer I got exposed to such life, the more my writing changed. And very soon I was able to embed social reality into stories. More and more I began to realize what a simple political decision some 7,000 miles away could mean in actual events on a country and its people. As for instance the simple decision to move a factory from country “A” to country “B” because of a better tax condition. It might only affect the lay off of 1,000 workers in a country of 10 million. But to see the impact on just “One” such family in a country of 10 million and an unemployment rate of 35% brought politics home to me on a personal level.

As I said in my work description, the final “Tiny Eden” was in the end maybe the 50th attempt to the same idea. I was finally able to embed all my experiences and put it in a story of a simple “You and Me” account. Also the story is fiction, most events are based on true events that I have witnessed over the years. Change the location, the age, the time and so forth and it makes a story. And in the end it makes the reader understand that politics affects us all, it is always personal. It is just the story of a man crash-landing on an uncharted island and the native boy who opens the man’s eyes.

Just a “You and Me” story, that nevertheless had already had it’s impact on the lives of a few that read it.