On PBS’s Stories from the Stage, a Lawrence Middle School English teacher recalls the 2018 Merrimack Valley gas explosion and fire, and the lessons learned about the lasting rupture of the Immigrant City catastrophe.
This is part of the story of Gladys Wangesi Gitau Damascus.
Airing Mondays at 9:30 pm, the show begins filming in front of studio audiences in May. The theme of the episode is “In the Name of Justice”.
In an interview last week, Gitau-Damaskos traced her career as an immigrant originally from Kenya who moved to Lawrence when she was 12.
Reflecting on how art, writing, and activism are inherent in her identity, she regains her footing in the aftermath of an event that shook the city and claimed the life of one of her students, Leonor London, 18. has been helpful.
Her road to a PBS show began in April with an unexpected inquiry from a broadcaster emailed to Exposed Brick, Lawrence’s literary magazine she co-founded years ago. .
The show wanted a story. She pitched a gas explosion and the story from the stage wanted it.
She assembled the script, memorized it, and the next month, May 25, she walked to the edge of the stage and delivered it to an audience at Cambridge Studios.
She thought it was about the students, but when she told it, it turned out that it was also about how the events affected her.
Gas explosions are overshadowed by the COVID-19 pandemic that has disrupted jobs, derailed schools, ravaged lives and killed more than one million people in the United States, causing more than 97 million cases.
In both disasters, Lawrence was hit particularly hard. The explosion of Columbia Gas and the silent virus delivered a series of body blows that shocked Laurentian.
Until the arrival of the pandemic in March 2020, Gitau Damascus remained anxious at his parents’ home. She rents this house and she lives with her husband William Her Damascus, who is a math teacher at Lawrence High School.
Before that, in September 2019, a year after the explosion, a gas leak in South Lawrence evacuated 150 homes and businesses, renewing fears of gas explosions.
“So I felt unsafe inside the house. Then the pandemic forced us to stay at home. So it became like the only place I felt unsafe. Now , I have to stay here, because it’s dangerous outside.”
It was not safe outside. It was not safe inside.
She needed a safe haven — and found it through art and writing.
One of her projects was the poem “How to Sleep Again After Your Neighborhood’s Random House Burns”.
She read the poem at a hearing called about the Columbia gas disaster.
The verse is also included in a song by Merrimack Valley band Monkey Knife Fight, recorded at Cambridge studios in March 2021.
The song “Pressure” by Felipe Collazo, featuring Gitau-Damaskos, is about a gas explosion from a Laurentian perspective.
Her poetry is formal and personal, delivered as first-person public service announcements.
“How to Sleep Again…” lists 17 aids for rest in numerical order.
“1. Learn how to breathe, feel like the ground is shaking because of the constant excavation, melt in a Salvador Dali painting. Count to ten if you need to. “
She gives yet another list:
“16. Remember Leonor and his audacity. Remember how hard you worked to turn into the man he wanted to be when he didn’t believe you were his next-door neighbor until you met him in the park one summer.” You started on the wrong foot, but the last time you spoke he told the other students not to bother you too much because you were his teacher. rice field.
In her poems and PBS articles, she urges people to seek what they have lost and what they need, and to those responsible for their situation to recoup the loss.
Her needs included housing, transportation, reimbursement for spoiled food, and a gym membership so she could shower.
She lived in the same house she grew up in, right next to Spark Academy where she now teaches, the same middle school she attended in her early teens, then South Lawrence East Middle School. was called.
A Lawrence native and resident of Lawrence, Collazo knows Gitau-Damaskos for their community work, including organizing the Bread and Roses Heritage Festival.
Her poem about the explosion reminded him of the heavy and frightening experiences they and others had gone through and how they helped each other survive the ordeal.
“People tend to forget that,” Collazo said in a phone interview. “It can happen anywhere, so it’s important to remind people.”
He will be seeing his friends on Monday night.
Gitau-Damaskos says it is important to document what happened at Lawrence in the public record.
She traced her activist beginnings back to Lawrence High School and found herself a non-regular student.
She is a hard worker, a member of YDO Lawrence, and started a newspaper, What’s Good in the Hood.
She learned everything she could about how undocumented students attended college.
It wasn’t easy. Allen Shire, a calculus teacher at Lawrence High School, linked her with others who faced similar dilemmas.
She graduated from high school in 2012 and found a university in the west to accept illegal students.
In 2016, she graduated with a degree in Political Science from Whitman College in Washington State. A year later she was teaching in the old public school system.
The following year, on September 13, 2018, she had just finished a school event and noticed an online statement from someone in New York saying, “Pray for South Lawrence.”
Why South Lawrence?
Sirens and helicopters, online posts and news reports, and calls from principals about the student’s death followed.
This is the beginning of her story about Lawrence’s gas explosion, which must be remembered, and is the story Gitau-Damaskos tells.
