Expanding Our Borders
Coming Home This past week I arrived from the US into the airport at Shannon, Ireland. I was excited to be coming home. I've only been to Ireland a few times but each time I connected strongly with my Irish roots. My mother is a Murphy and her family immigrated to the US during the Irish potato famine in the 1850s along with two million other Irish people who left their homeland to start new lives in the US, Canada and Great Britain. When I passed my passport through the hole in the glass to the customs agent at the airport, he thumbed through my passport at the pages and pages of stamps, including one from being in Ireland just a month ago. Then he glanced at my customs form. "You're a teacher?" "I teach a movement class for women," I responded, not going into the explanation of Qoya , the class I would be teaching in Ireland this week. He scanned my passport. "You travel for fun?" he asked. "Why are you going to all these