Silent Echo By Evan Fowler, a young J-Walker from Louisville Kentucky

A silent echo rings through the world

Every time a child dies of starvation, AIDS, a bullet.

For every mother who mourns her child, a vibration, a frequency is sent over the earth.

 If we want to we can pick up the reception and listen, even though it may be hard because we can’t dance to it, or sing to it, or tap our feet with its rhythm.

We can only cry.

When we choose to tune in, to open our ears to the silent echoes that each child

leaves behind, we can help bring them out of silence, and into full-throated ringing, that the world can not longer ignore.

 J-walking has helped me to open my ears to the sounds that, until recently, I didn’t realize I wasn’t hearing. Through J-walking I have learned about other people in situations that I can barely wrap my mind around; children serving as soldiers, living in the streets, and left as orphans by AIDS or genocide, women being enslaved and forced to practice prostitution, and men struggling through drug and alcohol addiction. My eyes were opened to the fact that my life choices do not affect only me, but also every living thing on this planet. The foods I eat, the stores I buy things from, the trash I throw away, and the people I associate myself with all have a ripple effect, which could touch the life of a boy in India who makes my shoes or a tree in Brazil that was cut down so that I could buy a piece of furniture made with exotic wood.

I believe that programs like J-Walking are essential to raising peoples’ awareness about issues like poverty, violence, and exploitation of the earth and its people. When these issues are discussed and reflected upon by individuals from different backgrounds with different interests and diverse knowledge during J-Walking sessions, new perspectives are brought to each person’s attention without fail. When all of these new views are compiled, the seed for future involvement and problem solving in these issues is planted. J-Walking and other, similar programs no doubt inspire people to examine their lives and change them for the better. Justice Walking has prodded each of us who participated to push ourselves to improve our world through awareness, prayer, and action. This desire to help will stay with us long after we are finished with our meetings at Crossroads retreat center and our visits to the after-school refugee program at Arcadia, carrying over into the outside world, influencing our career paths, our economic choices, and our daily lives for many years to come. Read more testimonies