Helping Students and Adults Explore History at the Source: My Dedication to Kim Eads

A special dedication to my longtime friend, Kim Eads, who passed away on June 9, 2022. Kim and I were colleagues and I knew her for over thirty years. But my fondest memories of Kim will always be the many educational trips we took student and adult groups on throughout the 1990's. We traveled across most of Europe, visiting some cities more than once and spent numerous summer weeks in Australia and New Zealand, educating students, sharing new cultures, and having fun. Kim was a tireless trip co-leader, getting up early and waiting in hotel halls long past evening curfews.

Prague is an excellent example. We were housed in a former Communist hotel with a number of other groups. One of our kids, the type to always break the rules, wasn't in his room. We were told he was after a girl from some other group. Kim knocked on the door of that other group. They reluctantly let us in, seeing we were teachers and traveling with the same group they were, EF Educational Tours.

The room, typical for most teenagers including our own, was littered with beer bottles and full ash trays. Someone was in the shower. Neither of us wanted to invade the privacy of a bathroom! Since we didn't see Bryan, our wayward kid, we left.

But Kim and I parked ourselves outside the door in the wide hallway, grabbed a table and two chairs, and played gin rummy for several hours. Finally the door opened. It was Bryan, amazed to find us siting there. We kept an extra eye on him for the rest of the trip and restricting him from any beer (although we allowed the rest of the group to have a beer with a meal).

 It was also in Prague that another teacher from Little Rock grabbed my arm at the elevator and told me some of our boys had just left the hotel. Kim and I looked at each other. We had not given permission. I rushed outside and ran to the back of the hotel. To my amazement, our guys were playing basketball with some neighborhood teens. This was what an educational tour was all about!

After a particularly grueling few nights in Budapest, Kim looked at me while on the bus to Vienna and said, "Want to call their parents and ask them to finish the trip with their kids so we can fly home?"

We had other great experiences - so many I could write a book. But I could always count on Kim. She also joined me every February as a faculty advisor in Boston at the Harvard University Model Congress.

After moving to Arkansas in 2000 to teach and pursue a graduate degree program, she had an accident at school that required knee replacement surgery. This didn't go well and ultimately she had several surgeries to correct problems arising from the first operation. She was in great pain and was forced to go on disability. Every time we talked she told me how much she missed the classroom and our foreign trips.. 

Kim was a dedicated, caring educator. She was the best human being I ever knew, never showing any negative feeling toward anyone.

She moved back home several years ago to care for her ailing parents but they passed away in late 2019. 

Kim and I often met at the Golden Coral when she came home to visit, to sit and reminisce for hours about our students, and adventures, and the many people we were fortunate to meet and call friends. I'll greatly miss her!

Kim and I at Neuschwanstein castle in southern Bavaria.
 

The historical equilibrium between obliteration and human existence has always managed to avoid the black hole of chaos. It has always been believed that good people are in greater abundance than bad people. Poets have given us this assurance. The mythological tales of ancient gods also point toward an ultimate goodness. Osiris would triumph for the people of Egypt. For the Greeks it was Olympus. And the Romans provided the Pax Romana which kept the peace of Rome for centuries. Every religion or belief system has a positive force, or "god" if you will, that ensures life will go on.

 But history shows us that there were anomalies. There were men motivated by blood-lust and conquest. Like Attila the Hun, Ivan the Terrible (or "Formidable." And so many others. Human life was cheap and the life of a peasant perilous.  The newly risen Christian Church offered graces to mitigate the death and destruction, but it never fully worked. Too often great numbers perished, as in the 13th Century Black Death or Plague that killed off half the population of Europe and came back several times. 

Meanwhile, Christians tolerated their own and persecuted others, like Jews and Muslims. The love of Christ never extended to the millions who populated vast swaths of God's creation. In short, without recounting in bloody detail the history of the Christian Church, it is very obvious that the words of Jesus, ostensibly the founder, have been drowned out by the clash of swords or the bombardment of tanks.

Nuclear weapons, indeed, any so-called weapons of pass destruction, are still waiting in the wings until some truly mad person releases them on billions of people. Is this the so-called sign of the end?

The wars all over the globe, large and small, clearly show that mankind has not learned from the past. And in the advanced, wealthy countries, people do not even consider the possibility of annihilation. 

They go about their business, championing sports, keeping the shop keepers busy, and patronizing the super heroes on vast movie screens. It is a tale of two worlds. No wonder we no longer teach history in many institutions.