The Moth Radio Hour: Bearing Witness
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From PRX, this is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Meg Bowles, and in this hour, we'll hear four stories that bring to life the old adage, you live and you learn. Of course, that saying is true of most experiences. Our present is the culmination of our past. And our past is generally full of mistakes and epiphanies, the basic ingredients for any good story.

Our first storyteller, Alice Schaefer, was raised in Mississippi, the daughter of a fundamentalist Presbyterian preacher. She shared her story at one of our open mic story slams in New Orleans, which is sponsored by local public radio station WWNO. The theme of the night was Love Hurts. Here's Alice Schaefer live at the Moth. I am the third daughter of a violent fundamentalist Presbyterian preacher.

And I'm telling you this because I want you to understand that growing up, I knew that God is love. But if you cross him, he will set you on fire, send you to hell, and you will burn forever. But he does other things before that, like give you terrible diseases. One is leprosy. The Bible is full of stories about lepers.

They were all in rags. They couldn't go inside the cities. And they had to cry, unclean, unclean. But Jesus could lay his hands on them and cure them if he was in the mood. Leprosy, polio, and volcanoes were big fears of mine. And daddy and Jesus and hookworms. But leprosy ate away your nose, your fingers, and your toes.

Sunday school literature was full of pictures of lepers. One Sunday, the Sunday school superintendent told us a story about a little boy named Wilbur who bought a pig for $3, fed it, and sold it for $25, and gave all the money to the leper colony. The leper colony is where people with leprosy lived in the United States. And by the way, it was in Carville, Louisiana. Well...

children all over the United States heard about Wilbur and started saving their money until someone got the bright idea to make these little red and black pigs and they were called, they were little piggy banks and they were called Pete the Leopard Pig. You were supposed to fill them with pennies and send them back. Well, four pigs at least came to our house that day and why I don't know because we never had any money.

But my crazy daddy would put pennies in them every now and then. Satan's temptation. Pete the Leopard Pig. Pete did not have those little rubber stoppers on the bottom that you could get the coins out. But if you were clever, which I was, you could turn it over real easy, shake it, and a penny would slip out. I would only take one.

Okay, two. I would call my best friend Dickie, spelled D-I-K-K-I. We would hop on my bicycle and ride to the grocery store. The one across the railroad tracks down by the stockyards, which of course was forbidden territory. But they had the candy counter right up by the register. The whole bottom shelf was penny candies. The best buy was Kits. You got four little taffy candies for a cent.

The flavors were chocolate, strawberry, banana, and my personal favorite, peanut butter. Oh my God, what a treat. We were happy girls bicycling back across those railroad tracks. Until, until that night I said my prayers. And then I remembered, God and Jesus know everything.

They know I stole from Pete the Leopard Pig. They know I stole from the lepers. I knew I would be punished, and I knew how. Leprosy. Here's how you know you have leprosy. I learned it in Sunday school. You get little white spots on your arms and your legs, and if you stick a pin in it and it doesn't hurt, you know you have leprosy. Laughter

You know that you're going to lose your fingers and your toes, and I'll lose my nose, maybe my whole face. I was terrified. I could not look at my arms or my legs. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't pay attention in school. All I could think about was my leprosy. Finally, I got the courage to look, and there they were, the white spots. I had them.

I knew then that I had to do the dreaded test, the pain or no pain. The next day after school, I raced home. I went into my mother's sewing room and looked in her sewing machine drawer and found a pen, and then I sneaked into the bathroom.

Both doors, I sat down on the floor to do the dreaded test. I couldn't breathe. I held the pen over the spot, and then I prayed, God, dear God, please, please, please let it hurt. I promise I will never, ever steal from Pete the Leopard Pig again. Please let it hurt. Ow! It hurt. God is love.

Alice Schaefer says that as a child, her imagination was vast, but her fears were very real. Pete the Pig is still actively used in Sunday schools to help raise money for the American leprosy missions to treat children affected by the disease. There's even a monument in White Cloud, Kansas of Wilbur Chapman, the 10-year-old boy and his pig who started it all. To see pictures of Alice and to find out more about her and Pete the Pig, you can visit our website, themoth.org.

Our next story comes from Dawn Ross. Dawn is a software analyst in Silver Spring, Maryland, and proudly boasts that she is the mom of two fantastic kids. She shared her story at a Moth Story Slam in Washington, D.C., which is sponsored by local public radio station WAMU. Here's Dawn Ross live at the Moth. So, who moves to Arkansas on purpose? This crazy black lady does. Let me give you some context.

I've been a parent since before I was 17, barely 17, and being a parent has been a defining part of my identity for most of my life. It just so happens that both my kids hit pivotal points in their lives at the same time. My daughter, she graduated college with honors. Hey, now. My son graduated college and went on to Yale. Hey, now. Both in the same year, and I was left with an empty nest.

both my kids being in the awesomeness that they are said, "Mom, go out, do your own thing, don't worry anything about us." And then at that same time, I got this awesome job offer for a position in a Fortune 100 company in El Dorado, Arkansas. Yes.

So being a big city, East Coast girl, moving to a small town in the deep South didn't deter me at all. In fact, I was intrigued. I pictured myself with these Southern Bells who baked delectable apple pies and finger-looking fried chicken. I pictured hoedowns instead of clubs, a smaller scale of life and a slower pace where everyone knew your name and all your business. So are you all laughing at my naivete?

You should be, because El Dorado, Arkansas was not Mayberry. I realized this the first time when I went out to my first day of work, when I went out with my co-workers, my female co-workers, they all took me out to lunch, and they all were amazed that I didn't own a firearm. Then they went on to describe to me their firearms. It was the little pink Beretta to the Colt .45, which knocks it on her ass, but she loves it anyway.

I realized it when I saw my first five-foot Confederate flag waving proudly in the back of a pickup truck. The first of many, I might add, because that's a thing there. In fact, I think they must have contests to see who can mount the biggest flag on the back of their pickups. Flags which, by the way, can be purchased at the roadside Confederate flag stand. That's a thing, too.

Mind you, I didn't give up. I was determined to find that small town that I was looking for that you heard about in the country songs and that you heard about on TV. But the first phase of my disillusionment came the week before the office Christmas party.

Now, I've been having a conversation with a co-worker who was white, and she was a pleasant lady, and we had shared many conversations before. We'd share stories about our kids, stories about TV shows that we liked, co-workers we didn't. We also shared, a couple of co-workers joined our conversation, and then she related to us the story of something that had happened to her in the supermarket of a parking lot.

So apparently she got into a disagreement with a black lady and then this black lady must have cussed her out something awful because she said she had never been so offended in all of her life. Now, she also went on to say that it was her own fault. It was her own fault because she went to the supermarket on the wrong side of town. Of course I questioned her. Wrong side of town? What's the wrong side of town? You know what I mean. No, I don't know what you mean.

Oblivious to the disdain that is rolling off of me, and you could see the discomfort from the other white co-workers who were in this conversation with us, she went on to say, "Well, over there, they're not like the ones over here. Over there, they're articulate and well-dressed and have good jobs. And then I stop her and say, 'You do know I'm black.'

And then she realizes her mistake and tries to retract it and just digs herself deeper. And then the co-worker says, no, she doesn't really mean that. She doesn't mean it the way it sounds. Now, let me tell you all, I think all black people have an inner Malcolm and an inner Martin. The inner Malcolm, inner Martin responds in the turn of the cheek manner.

The inner Malcolm responds like the black lady in the supermarket parking lot. It took everything in me to find my inner mountain and not let the inner Malcolm out. Now, as word of the Good Ones incident got around the office, everyone was trying to be extra nice to me. And at the office Christmas party, people were clamoring for me to sit at their table.

Mind you, I was not that popular before, but it was as if sitting at their table would mean that I'm not racist, I'm sitting there with you. But despite all this, we were all having a good time and enjoying the evening so much so that they didn't want it to end. And someone suggested, hey, let's go to the local bar in town.

Of course, I'm like, yeah, I'll go. And then as I went to a co-worker to ask what's the address of the bar, his mouth dropped open, he got red, his eyes got big, and the only word he knew was um. Didn't know what to say, so he just gave me the address and got away quickly. So I'm confused, I'm puzzled, because the atmosphere in the room was changed. Whereas before, no one could stop themselves from talking to me, now no one would meet my eye.

Finally, a good friend of mine pulled me to the side and said, "I don't think you want to go here." I'm like, "Why not?" She said, "It's a little rough." I'm from Philly. I can handle rough. She says, "No, no." She said, "They have a big old Confederate flag on the door. There's inappropriate signs on the walls, and I don't think the people are going to be that friendly towards you."

Now I sigh, and I'm sad, and as I'm looking around the room at all my friends who were going, and I'm looking at my friend in front of me who said she was going, and then I ask her the question. I said, thank you for telling me. I'm glad you didn't let me walk into a situation like that, but tell me, why are you going? To which she sighed, shrugged, and said, it's the only place in town to go. My disillusionment was now complete.

The story is now who moves out of Arkansas on purpose. This saner black lady, if a little sadder.

Dawn Ross lived in El Dorado, Arkansas for over two and a half years and distinctly remembers driving down the one main road as she was heading out of town for the last time. She said, I felt like I could breathe again, but it still makes me sad, particularly in the current climate of the United States, where it always feels like one step forward, two steps back. But my inner Martin is still winning. ♪

Dawn is a little worried about the reaction her ex-co-workers might have to her sharing the story. It's a conversation she thinks in hindsight should have happened while she was still in El Dorado. But it will probably happen now, and she hopes in the end the result will be positive. Coming up, a journalist learns the deeper significance of being an eyewitness when the Moth Radio Hour continues. ♪

The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and presented by PRX. This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Meg Bowles. Our next story comes from Dee Parvez, who fell in love with journalism at the age of 22 when she got a job working in a newsroom in Tokyo. She says she never looked back. A word of caution, Dee's story deals with some intense details of war. Here's Dee Parvez live at St. Ann's Church in Brooklyn.

So, summer of 2013, I was in Cairo, Egypt. I was on assignment for Al Jazeera and I was covering a major political upheaval. The president at the time, a guy named Mohamed Morsi, who was affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood Party, had been deposed and jailed in what his supporters said was an illegitimate military coup.

So they, in protest, set up these sit-ins, two of them, in the city. And it was this hot, crazy summer, really tense. And by the middle of August, the government finally did what they'd been threatening to do, which is to clear the sit-ins. But they did so with...

unabated violence. They started shooting at people in the sit-ins and the surrounding neighborhoods at around 7:00 in the morning and didn't stop until well into the night, until pretty much everybody was either dead or arrested. I've never seen anything like it. It was a massacre in broad daylight in a capital city of roughly 20 million. So the next day, along with a producer,

who worked in the local bureau and could translate Arabic for me. I went to a mosque where maybe 200 or so of these bodies were kept. And a lot of them were also burned really badly, and there was blocks of ice on top of them. And there was these family members going in and out of this mosque trying to identify their loved ones. It was intensely chaotic and emotional. So my colleague and I walk outside and we start talking to this woman.

And she says that her husband is among the dead, and she's shaking and in shock. And she's describing her last phone conversation with her husband when the shooting started. And, you know, she describes him as an engineer who was unarmed, and he was the father of her four children.

And, you know, my colleague is translating and I'm not even looking up. I'm just in my notebook, furiously, not wanting to miss a detail. And then he just stops translating while she's still talking. And I look up at him finally, which is, I think, what he was waiting for. And the look on my face is like, dude, what? And he leans in and whispers, now would be a good time for you to put an arm around her.

And this makes my little reporter's brain totally short circuit because I am not a touchy-feely person. I don't hug you for you to tell me your story. This is not how it works. But the look on his face was just clear. Get over yourself, be human now, and put your arm around her. So I really robotically kind of lift an arm to put around her shoulder. And the second my hand touches her...

she collapses into my chest. And she's a very, very tiny woman, very petite. But she just sinks into me and starts sobbing as she's holding on to me. And I've got my pen and paper. And it hits me really hard that this woman doesn't care what kind of reporter I am or what my stupid little rules are. She wants me to register what is happening to her on the worst day of her life. She wants me to bear witness.

to what's happening to her. And I should have known better, and in fact, I did know better. Two years prior to that, spring of 2011 was the start of the uprising in Syria, what is now the civil war. And I was sitting in the newsroom in Al Jazeera's headquarters in Qatar, watching this sort of grainy YouTube footage of unarmed civilians being mowed down by the Syrian military.

And at the same time, we had a government spokesperson on our airwaves claiming that this isn't really what was happening. It was a distortion of the truth. It was a conspiracy. And we couldn't confirm any of this because they'd already shut down our bureau in Damascus and they weren't issuing journalist visas. So what to do? Well, I'm a multinational. I have an Iranian passport. So my boss agreed to deploy me.

to Syria where I wouldn't need a visa to enter just to see what's going on. And remember, this is spring of 2011. Fly into Damascus and unfortunately for me at this point the Syrian authorities have already become super paranoid.

So they go through my luggage and they find a satellite phone, which is not a big deal. If you travel in that part of the world, you know that outside of major cities, you don't really have cell phone coverage. You can buy a satellite phone at any shopping mall. It's not spy gear. But this was enough for them to get really suspicious. So they strip searched me and found my American passport in the pocket of my jeans.

And in this passport was a stamp from Al Jazeera, my sponsored visa, right, for Qatar. It's what I needed to re-enter the country. And this escalated things. So they took me into an office. They sat me between these two guys on the couch, and there was all these other guys in this tiny office, chain-smoking and banging out some kind of report on me on their computers. And when that report was done, the two guys sitting on either side of me got up, and they strapped on a bunch of guns,

And they peeled me from the couch and they led me to the parking garage under the airport. And they sat me between them in the back seat with another armed man in the front seat and drove off into the night. We pulled into a compound, some sort of, there's like three or four checkpoints to get into this compound. So I assumed it was some sort of government building where they pulled me out of the car by my hair and

and threw me in front of a desk in this sort of dimly lit portable office. And there was all these men yelling at me. And I looked down and I saw that I was standing in a considerable amount of somebody else's blood. So they processed me for some kind of arrest, blindfolded me, handcuffed me, and ended up taking me to an interrogation with a man who told me to call him Firas. And nothing I said was...

you know, accepted by Feroz, that I was a reporter, that I wasn't part of some conspiracy, that I, he didn't even believe that I didn't speak Arabic. So I realized very quickly that truth had no currency there. They took me back to a cell. They handcuffed me again, blindfolded me, and took me to the cell. They took the handcuffs off, and they threw me into the cell, and I took off the blindfold, and I saw that I was in a cell that was absolutely covered in blood.

Like, so much that I didn't know where to stand or lean. So I kind of squatted in this corner and tried to sort of wrap my head around the hell that I was in. Maybe an hour or two later, a guy comes to the door, and he yells out my father's name, which is also printed on my Iranian passport. He yells out, You can't tell the difference between my name and his name, I guess.

So I get up and he blindfolds me and handcuffs me. And I thought that I was being taken to another interrogation, but he took me outside into a courtyard and slammed me up against the wall. And I could hear people being tortured a few feet away from me. And I could hear the guards, the mohabarats, just joking and laughing. And I could smell their cigarettes. They were just acting like regular employees on a coffee break. And I stood against that wall and

And I thought to myself, they're going to kill me. And worse than that thought, believe it or not, worse than dying, was the thought of dying like that, which is to say alone. Because I was alone. I couldn't locate the humanity in the people around me. And I knew that I was going to be an anonymous body. If I was lucky, they would throw me in a ditch, maybe. And, you know, my father, whose name was being called out in that place, would never have any peace. He'd never know what had happened to me.

And I've never felt so alone in my life. So after about almost 20 minutes maybe of shivering against this wall and waiting to be shot in the head, I get pulled off and taken back inside. And I keep thinking, well, okay, all right, they didn't kill me. They didn't kill me now, but they're going to kill me. Because why, why, why, why would they let a reporter not cover a street protest but see and hear all of this and live?

Of course I'm going to write about it. Why would they do this? I'm going to die. They're going to kill me. I'm going to die. And this was on a pretty tight loop in my head as they throw me back in a cell. And I can hear people being tortured inside this compound, outside this compound. The voices all kind of echo and come and go and blend in. And then there's this one voice that stands out.

And I can't exactly figure out why, except that he sounded obscenely young. He sounded like a kid, like a teenager, a boy. And I could tell that there was more than one person hurting him. And he was just howling. He was swearing he didn't know things. He was swearing to God he hadn't done anything wrong. He was calling out to God. He was calling out to his mother.

And I couldn't take it anymore after a while. It was brutal. So I put my hands up to my ears to just try to block it out. And the second I did that, I felt such shame because I realized that this kid was in his own far worse version of the wall. That's where he was. He was alone. He was dying alone. That's what was happening. And so I pulled my hands down just to do what I could, which is to hear him.

I couldn't call out to him to say, I hear you. You're not alone. Couldn't identify him. I didn't know his name. I couldn't contact his family. Couldn't do anything. All I had, all I had was the ability to bear witness just in that fashion. The kid was, you know, choking on his own blood in his own country and nobody was going to know. I felt that that was kind of like the least I could do. So I listened to him for a while and every scream was excruciating. It was like a

It was like a hole was being cut inside me with every one of them. And then rather abruptly, his voice just stopped. So a couple of days later, the Syrians decided that, you know, maybe it wasn't a good idea for them to permanently disappear an Iranian citizen because they have a good relationship with the Iranian government. So they sent me to Iran via extraordinary rendition for additional questioning for another couple of weeks at another prison there.

And much to my surprise, eventually the Iranian authorities freed me and sent me back to my family, which was great. I needed the time off a little bit, but I didn't want to not be working. I didn't need to go to a spa and to breathe alpine air. What I needed to do was get back to work because not being busy and not working meant the wall was always there. I could feel it.

And I wanted to push back against that feeling. And I couldn't wait to get back to work, so I did. The second I could, I flung myself back into my job. Every assignment. If they didn't give me the assignment, I would fight for it. Egypt, Libya, nuclear meltdown in Japan, didn't matter. I was doing it. And I succeeded a little too well in pushing back against that wall and that feeling. And what I did...

in doing so, was I also built a distance between myself and the things I was reporting on, the people I was reporting on. But when that woman in Egypt fell into my chest and started crying, in that second that it took for her to fall into me and cry, she destroyed that distance, entirely eradicated it. And I was back at the wall, and the boy's voice was in my head. And

As painful as it is, I realized that that was necessary for me to bear witness fully to what's happening to someone beyond the couple of paragraphs they might actually get in a story. And as much as some stories will leave a mark, sometimes that's just what it takes. Thank you.

That was Dee Parvez. Dee says, "I still can't believe I was lucky enough to survive when so many have not. The fact that I'm neither dead nor waking up in a cell every day is not an earned privilege." Dee is currently based in Washington, D.C., covering U.S. foreign policy. She worries that it's become even harder to report from places like Egypt and Syria, where the space for journalism continues to shrink.

She also sees it happening in the U.S., which means there are more and more untold stories. We met Dee Parvaz when she called the moth Pitchline, and I'll never forget the first time I heard her recount the story you just heard. A shorter two-minute version, but the details she chose and the calmness in her voice really caught my attention.

We hear hundreds of pitches, and there's a team of us who listen to all of them. And of course, they aren't all as harrowing as Dee's. But if you have a story you'd like us to consider, my advice is not to worry about writing out a perfectly polished piece to read, but rather, just tell us the highlights, the details that make the story unique to you. If it's funny, tell us the craziest moments. If it's more intense...

Tell us the biggest challenge. And don't forget to tell us how you felt, both physically and emotionally. It's the emotion people relate to. We all know what it feels like to have your heart race or your stomach drop. But most importantly, just be yourself. Tell us the story the way you would to a friend over dinner.

Hi, my name is Gary Weinstein. I live in Greenwich, Connecticut. My wife and I have three daughters. Our middle daughter, Kate, has Asperger's syndrome. She has difficulty with social interactions and impulsivity, and I have been determined to get her a driver's license, a

big challenge for some of the problems that she has uh... we gave her extremely uh... a lot of teaching many many extra hours and signed up for her road test before the road test i said to her kate is imperative that you act normal

you really have to work on acting normal the instructor is going to see you for a very short amount of time i don't want them to prejudge you and she said to me that stop yelling at me look at the dog cowering in the side of the room i can take it but the dog camp the appointed day came and we waited for her to be called they called her name she jumped up from receipt and immediately laid down on the floor

i said quick get up the instructors coming over what are you doing she said all my back hurts of the doctor said to lie down when my back hurts i said get up now you got act normal she leaves twenty minutes comes back with a big smile on her face i asked what happened she said wait me instructor will tell you instructor said kate did great she passed so i grabbed her in the middle of the motor vehicle bureau and i held her in a waltz like position and i danced up and down the whole length of the

Motor Vehicle Bureau with tears in my eyes saying, Kate, you did it, you did it. The whole time she looked at me and said, Dad, Dad, not normal, not normal. Dancing in the middle of a motor vehicle, not normal, must stop. Okay, so when you're ready, just go to our website, themoth.org, look for Tell a Story, and you can find all the information for how to do it, as well as a few more tips and tricks for how to pitch. ♪

In a moment, we'll hear how one man fights for his dream of flying in space when the Moth Radio Hour continues. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and presented by PRX. This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Meg Bowles and our last story comes from Leland Melvin.

After receiving a Bachelor's of Science in Chemistry, Leland was drafted by the Detroit Lions to play professional football. After an injury cut his NFL career short, Leland pursued a master's degree in materials and science engineering from the University of Virginia. He's your classic underachiever. He was eventually approached by NASA and encouraged to apply to become an astronaut candidate. And his dream of flying in space was sparked.

He shared the story of his experience at an evening we produced at the Alice Tully Hall of Lincoln Center in New York City. The theme of the night was Bound and Determined. Here's Leland Melvin live at the Moth. I was peering into a 30-foot deep 5 million gallon pool. I was an ass can. That's NASA speak for astronaut candidate. And I wanted to see if I had the right stuff.

We were training to do a spacewalk in this five million gallon pool. And I was in this suit that looked like a cross between the Pillsbury Doughboy and a Michelin Man with a helmet on. They start lowering me down into the pool. I get to about 20 feet. And I realize that this little styrofoam block that cost about $2 that's in my helmet is not there.

That's used if you're the kind of person that needs to squeeze your nose to clear your ears. Well, you can't reach your hand in the helmet, so you press your nose against this to clear your ears. The technician forgot to put mine in. At 20 feet, I tell the test director to turn the volume up in the headset. From that point on, I hear nothing but static, like, "Khh" in a white noise.

They start raising me out of the pool and I look at the connection to the pool deck, which is the yellow cable. And I think maybe that cable is actually kinked and they're going to fix it when they bring me up to the top of the pool deck. I get up there, they take my helmet off. The doctor, Rich Mikulski, starts walking towards me and he's just moving his lips and I'm thinking, why is this guy playing with me? And he gets to me and he touches my right ear.

and he pulls his finger back and there's a river of blood just starts coursing down the side of my face. At that point, I realize that something's kind of wrong, right? And they take me to the showers and my head starts to violently turn. I fall to the ground and I violently throw up. They rush me to the hospital, the Houston Medical Center, and they do a battery of tests. And the next thing I know, I'm rushed into the OR

and the world-renowned surgeons are now going inside my head into my ear to look to see if there's anything that they can see that caused this problem. As I wake up from the anesthesia, I see three doctors' faces that don't look good at all. They couldn't figure out what happened to me. I'm laying in the hospital bed, and the only way I can communicate with the outside world is through these yellow legal pads.

I can still talk, but I can't hear anything. And I get these notes written to me. And at one point, there's a note that says, you will never fly in space. One of the yellow legal patent notes comes to me from a friend and it says, remember what Jeanette said. And I'm thinking about this note. And if you back up four days before this accident, I was in Virginia and this woman sought me out to tell me

that something was going to happen to me. No one's going to know why this happened. You'll be healed of this. You will fly in space and you'll share this story with the world." I'm like, "Okay, thank you." So at this point in the hospital, that note is the only hope I have to hold on to. I get released from the hospital at about the three-week point and I'm still, you know, severely hearing impaired in my left ear.

But now I can start hearing things and as I lay in my bed at home in Houston, Texas and the air conditioner handler kicks on, I have earplugs in and noise-canceling headsets because my brain is starting to rewire itself to hear again. It feels like ice picks are going to the side of my head. My hearing gets better and I'm functional. I can talk to people. I kind of hear what they're saying. And NASA's trying to figure out what to do with me.

They don't want to release me. They are trying to find a job that I can do that doesn't require diving or flying or doing something that requires hearing because I'm truly medically disqualified by NASA standards. So they put me in the robotics branch, which is basically playing a big video game where you have hand controllers, you have a monitor, and you can run the robotic arm into the space station, but it doesn't hurt anything. You can just fly it around like a video game.

And then they asked me, since my parents were both educators, they asked me, "Do you want to go to Washington to work in this new program called the Educator Astronaut Program?" And I agree, and I fly to Washington. In this program, we're trying to inspire children to nominate their teachers to become astronauts. And I have to tell them that it's a round trip, not a one-way trip for your teacher, so you're not getting rid of your teacher. They're coming back home.

And so we're doing this program and Space Shuttle Columbia is launching off to the cosmos. And I'm there in DC, we're kicking off this program, and I decide to drive from Washington DC to Lynchburg, Virginia on Highway 66. And my boss, who is new to education, new to NASA, she says, "What does it mean when the countdown clock for the Columbia

is now starting to count up. I knew at that point that something was seriously wrong. And I did an illegal U-turn on 66. I started back to the headquarters and I turned the radio on and there were eyewitness accounts of large pieces of debris falling over the West Texas sky looking like a meteor shower. I got to headquarters and they dispatched me

to David Brown, who was one of the mission specialists. I went to their parents' home that was outside of DC in Washington, Virginia. And when things like this happen, we go into this mode where we take care of our friends and our family. And I get to the home, and I knock on the door, and I go in, and David's mother, Dottie, is there, and I hug her, 'cause I'm there to console them. I hug her, and we both start crying. I make my way over in the living room,

to David's father, Judge Brown, who's in a wheelchair. And I reached down to hug him, and he looks up at me with the same sparkling blue eyes as David, and he says to me, with tears in his eyes, he says, "My son is gone. There is nothing you can do to bring him back. But the biggest tragedy would be if we don't continue to find space to honor their legacy." He's already thinking about the legacy of his son,

And I'm medically disqualified and I'm trying to figure out how I will fly to honor that legacy. I am torn. I'm trying to figure out what I will do. A few days later, we fly in the NASA jet to the different memorial services. We take off and we land. And I noticed to my right, there's a person sitting next to me on every flight taking notes. His name is Rich Williams.

And as I descend in the airplane, I squeeze my nose and I clear my ears like I usually do, even though I don't have any hearing in my left ear. When we go to the services and I'm trying to figure out what my next steps are because this education program is over, so I'm ready to transition back to Houston to figure out what I'm going to do as a semi-deaf astronaut. Rich Williams calls me in his office and he says, Leland, I've been watching you. I believe in you.

here's a waiver for you to fly in space. And so I fly back to Houston, I go to flight medicine, and I wave this waiver like, you know, I got some ice cream, I guess. And I hand it to the flight docs, and I soon get assigned to a mission in 2005. As I'm sitting there, three and a half hours before launch, I'm thinking about David's legacy.

3, 2, 1, liftoff! Space Shuttle Atlantis is now careening to the cosmos. We're shaking, we're rattling, the screens are pretty much unusable because our heads are moving so fast from the buildup of G's. The solid rocket boosters get jettisoned after two and a half minutes and the shuttle is turning and six and a half minutes later, we are now floating in space.

I undo my five-point NASA certified seatbelt and float over to the window. And we're currently flying over the Caribbean Ocean, and I almost need new definitions of blue to describe the hues that I see. I exhaust my vocabulary with azure, indigo, turquoise, cerulean, navy blue, light navy blue, dark navy blue. I'm trying to figure out ways to describe these colors, and I need about 20 more definitions to do that.

My job is now to install the Columbus Laboratory, which is the $2 billion tinkertory piece of hardware that goes on to the space station. I use my robotic skills to safely install it. And next, the commander of the space station invites us over to break bread. She says, "You guys bring the rehydrated vegetables. We'll have the meat."

And so we float over with this bag of vegetables and we get to the Zarya service module. It's like someone's home. You can smell the beef and barley cooking. We're watching the planet go by at 17,500 miles per hour. Going around the planet every 90 minutes, seeing a sunrise and a sunset every 45. Breaking bread with people we used to fight against. The Russians and Germans are on this mission.

And it's like a Benetton commercial, African-American, Asian-American, French, German, Russian, the first female commander sharing a meal by floating food to each other's mouths all while listening to Sade's "Smooth Operator." This is the moment, this is the surreal moment where I have this cognitive shift. I get this thing called the overview effect or the orbital perspective.

And I look out the window. We were flying over Virginia, my hometown, and my family's probably breaking bread down there. And five minutes later, we're over Paris where Leo Eihart's family's breaking bread and Yuri's looking off to Russia. This is the moment, the moment that changes me. I remember what Jeanette said. I remember what David Brown's father said. We honored their legacy. Thank you.

Leland Melvin has flown two missions on the space shuttle Atlantis in 2008 and 2009 and has logged over 565 hours in space. You may have seen Leland's now famous official NASA portrait that features him and his two rescue dogs, Jake and Scout, who he secretly smuggled into NASA for the photo shoot.

If you haven't seen it, you can find it on our website, where you can also learn more about Leland and all of the storytellers you've heard in this hour. That's on our website, themoth.org. That's it for this hour. We hope you'll join us again next time for the Moth Radio Hour. ♪

Your host this hour was Meg Bowles. Meg also directed the stories in the show. The rest of the Moth's directorial staff includes Katherine Burns, Sarah Haberman, Sarah Austin-Janess, and Jennifer Hickson. Production support from Emily Couch.

Moth Stories Are True is remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Our theme music is by The Drift. Other music in this hour from Duke Levine, Regina Carter, Andy Summers and Benjamin Verdery, and Bill Frizzell. You can find links to all the music we use at our website. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by me, Jay Allison, with Vicki Merrick at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

This hour was produced with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Moth Radio Hour is presented by PRX. For more about our podcast, for information on pitching us your own story and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.