Of all the projects I’ve been involved with since I left daily journalism, one of the more intriguing is HomeStories, a spin-off of the Out of Eden Walk, a non-profit where I’m a board member.

The Out of Eden Walk is journalist Paul Salopek’s amazing 24,000 mile trek around the world, tracing man’s odyssey out of Africa to the far corners of the earth. He started in 2013 in the Rift Valley in Ethiopia, the reputed site of the Garden of Eden, hence the name Out of Eden Walk.

Paul embarked on his epic walk to champion “slow journalism” and shows readers how much they miss when information moves at warp speeds in a media world that prizes speed over substance.

By slowing down and walking the globe, Paul, through words, videos and poetic narratives, paints a portrait of a complex world that struggles, sometime successfully and sometimes not, with everything from war to locating a jug of water. He shows that we do, indeed, miss much with the digital gadgets that bring “news” to our fingertips instantly. Paul is now in China. I’ll write more on his venture later in my Substack column, Five W’s.

Five W's Substack

After Paul started, the Out of Eden Walk’s board decided to see if we could replicate Paul’s experience on the local level in Chicago, where Paul spent many years as a reporter and correspondent for the Chicago Tribune.

Originally, we encouraged Chicagoans to walk around the city’s rich mix of neighborhoods to see if they could gain insights about the places they live or visit. We did several community walks with adults and even more through school programs. My colleague, Bill Parker, a stalwart of the project, and I learned so much more about the city in which we lived. But we wanted to reach more people. We began searching for a new approach.

Salopek suggested we focus on something everyone’s learned from engaging with people as we walked Chicago and the globe: How the concept of “Home” meant different things to different people in different places.

“Perhaps your home is not a house,” Paul wrote, “but a special place, such as a street corner where you played as a kid, or a park where you first fell in love in one of the city’s seventy-seven neighborhoods. Maybe home is a church, mosque, or sidewalk market where you wandered when you arrived in Chicago as an immigrant and heard someone speak a language familiar to your ear from among the one hundred and fifty-three that roll off the tongues of the area’s nine million citizens. For some, a workplace can feel like home. Hopefully, home is a joyful place, but it can be a sad one, too. Inevitably, home is more than a mere location. It’s also a story, one of hope or fear, triumph or tragedy, comfort or stress.”

We quickly learned that the concept of “Home” defies a generic definition. Younger and old participants wrote about their feelings of home, not just descriptions of their addresses. Many contributors became emotional, some philosophical. Personal histories, cultures, hopes and dreams were revealed in short snippets of text. People talked about what made them tick.

Geography is central to Salopek’s global walk and our activities in Chicago. Both projects focus on understanding our fellow citizens, whether they’re close neighbors or faraway strangers. For centuries, maps have helped humans locate each other. We created an interactive map where people could post their HomeStories on a website where others could easily read the postings.

The project got a booster shot when Tracy Crowley, a high school educator in suburban Chicago and an early fan of the Walk, became our Chicago manager and helped spread the word about HomeStories among teachers, such as Anne-Michele Anne-Michel Boyle, a magnet-school teacher in Chicago. Not long after Tracy took charge, Covid descended upon us, eliminating many in-person activities like our community walks and posing severe challenges for schools that suddenly needed remote learning programs to engage their students.

Homestories Map

Tracy, Anne-Michele and a growing network of other teachers immediately saw the educational potential of HomeStories. HomeStories began as a local project, but soon attracted interest around the country, particularly in schools. Eventually it went global, with postings from every continent.

A great example surfaced when Tracy and Anne-Michel, linked high school students in Chicago, Dublin, Ireland and Ukraine in a fascinating discussion that brought the violence of the war home to a disparate group of high schoolers.

Indeed, just minutes before the students prepared to gather on Google Meet, an air raid siren blared in Lubny, where the Ukranian students had assembled, warning of incoming missiles. Yulia, Nikul, a teacher in Ukraine, sent a WhatsApp message saying her class had to head for a shelter to wait out the attack.

“In Chicago,” Boyle and Crowley wrote in National Geographic magazine, a major sponsor of the Walk, “we waited it out, too, unable to help and worried sick about our new friends. About an hour later Yulia messaged that everything was clear, they were headed back to their classroom, and they still wanted to meet with us.
“The next 40-ish minutes were beautiful. From 5,000 miles apart, students took turns exchanging their HomeStories. Some were heartbreaking, some were comforting, all were inspirational illustrations of resiliency.
“We are thinking of you all in Ukraine,” wrote Aileen, the teacher in in Dublin. “We have a few (Ukrainian) students that joined our school in Ireland in recent weeks. We hope this awful war ends soon.”
Yulia, the English teacher in Lubny, joined in, writing about her city’s thousand-year history and her homeland’s beautiful seas and mountains. “My home is Ukraine,” she added. “I am in realizing how much damage and misery it suffered these days. At the same time, I truly believe that we are approaching victory with every single day.”
Anne-Michele wrote back, “I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to deal with so much uncertainty and sadness every day. Your resiliency, strength, ability to focus on the positive are beyond inspiring. Україна в моєму серціБережіть себе! (Ukraine is in my heart. Take care.)”
“We wrapped up the video conference in hearty song,” Boyle and Crowley wrote. “Yulia played the guitar, and we all sang “Добрий ранок, Україно (Good Morning Ukraine)” to each other, loudly and deeply felt. Translated into English, the song concludes: “Good morning, Ukraine! You’re everything to me in my life. Wake up, Ukraine! It’s time to get up, it’s time to find!”

HomeStories shows that innovation can occur in journalism by mixing the old with the new. Reaching out to people and getting them to share their stories is as old as reporting itself. But putting it on an interactive map where everyone can share those experiences makes HomeStories a fresh and different idea. And that’s exciting news.

—James O’Shea