Prologue
“Strange weather we’re having, eh?” Annie often wondered if everyone else had as many odd references pop into their heads as she did. This one reminded her of an old virtual movie she and Abby saw on their seventh birthday. Wanting to be the lead character in the movie, Annie watched it from the perspective of Simba. Abby, of course, wanted the full picture and watched it from “audience view.”
“Abby, do you remember when Rafiki came up to Simba after he talked to his dead father —” Annie started, but was interrupted by the production assistant opening the door.
“OK, Doctors, we’re ready for your interview now,” he said.
Abby looked over, “Let’s go.”
This wasn’t the first time the twins had been interviewed for broadcast. Five years back, when they were trying to expand the medical ministry, they arranged through a friend to get onto “This Week in Chicago” and talk up their medical trips to Guinea-Bissau. While the caster wasn’t that interested in the trips, or in Guinea-Bissau, the caster’s agency did think the entire story-line would pick up views simply due to the unique combination of it all. But Annie remembered how that didn’t go as expected as soon as the caster introduced the story, and could still recall the entire experience as if watching a recast of the interview.
“Welcome to ‘This Week in Chicago’. I’m your host, Tina Walters. Today we have a story that will warm your heart on this cold Chicago day. With me are two identical twin-sisters from Chicago that take two months every summer to travel abroad with their husbands and young children in tow, and set up a clinic offering free medical services to the poor inhabitants of a tiny African country on the verge of permanent disaster, distress and disease.”
Abby tried to correct the direction a few minutes into the interview, at one point saying “The focus should not really be on us, but instead on how all people are called to serve others and to be an active part of that service. For too many decades, Americans have been less interested in helping others, and more in helping themselves. Our medical mission in Catió is one example of giving to others from the blessings we all have in our lives.”
Annie jumped in when her sister paused, “All of us can feel overwhelmed at times by the pace of life each of us experiences. I’ve had numerous parents come to me and tell me every day is too full of events they feel they have to do, and they then wonder if it’s really needed.” She turned to face the camera, “I tell them it’s normal to feel this way, because of the expectations that modern society has placed on us. But it’s the constant consumerism that is unnatural. Activities that focus on others are a means by which this imbalance can be addressed. And introducing these service events into the family not only shares this lesson with children, but also provides ‘together-time’ for parents and kids, develops stronger family bonds, and actually reduces the level of stress for those who participate.” Annie knew she had a better bedside manner than her sister, and hoped that an approach people found less confrontational would be something the caster would gladly follow.
Instead, the interviewer went back to focusing on the sisters’ personal lives, and peppered the discussion with questions that tried to highlight the absurdity of what they were doing. “Aren’t you worried about the diseases you are exposing your infants and toddlers to?”, she wondered out loud, not really allowing either of the sisters to properly explain that limited medical facilities doesn’t automatically equate with communicable disease. “Do your husbands approve of how you take the family away from their home for such a long time?” she worried, as if the men needed to make all the decisions. “Do you feel your religious views will hold back the very region you are trying to help?” she questioned, implying that Christian faith was inconsistent with modern society. The interviewer focused on their beliefs as they were symptoms of a disease that medical professionals should recognize as a sign of a deeper problem needing to be fixed. “You are both opposed to gene therapy, correct?” she directed at them, “and both have, um, untreated genomes? What issues have you encountered with your children?”
They were actually able to handle those questions with a fair amount of calm that didn’t seem to get the reaction the interviewer had wanted. Annie and Abby had been similarly queried by classmates and neighbors reacting to the faith (and the genes) they inherited from their parents, and from colleagues and even parents of their children’s friends about the safety and common sense of the mission trips. But then came the final question… “So what happened that a pair of teen beauty queens such as yourselves went through such radical changes in the past decade?” They were initially confused by this question, since it didn’t seem to have any relationship to anything they were talking about up until this point in the discussion. The interviewer played a video from the 2073 “Chicago Bright” series, showcasing the twins singing a duet in fashionable (and shapely) clothing.
Five years back when that had happened, Annie looked at Abby, with color rising in her cheeks, and walked off the set. They were embarrassed to be reminded of the talent series their mother had entered them into so they could win cash to pay for the advanced tutoring they were receiving at the time. While they did earn some money for their studies, their Third Place finish wasn’t the $3,000,000 Grand Prize they had hoped would cover college and medical school costs. Now here they were in 2091, getting ready to go through another interview meant for public broadcast. But the conditions were much different this time. This caster remembered them from five years ago (or perhaps researched who might be a local connection to the weather event) and reached out to them. He said he had seen that interview and had no desire to capture them as had happened before. He promised them the right to review the final version of the interview before it was published, and gave them, in advance, the cyberlock code that would delete the broadcast if they didn’t like it after it was distributed. The doctors said they wanted to highlight their medical mission, to which he agreed, since it was a key part of what made them good candidates for the interview.
So, today, they found themselves in front of a camera again.
“Welcome to another episode of ‘The World in Your Town’. I’m your host, Jordan James, ready to bring home the events of the world to show how they affect us here in the Chicago and Western Great Lakes area. Tonight, the events of the world and their affect on Chicago are truly one and the same. As you all know, we’ve been experiencing a week of nearly the heaviest volume of rain ever recorded in Chicago-land, all as a result of one of the strangest and most costly hurricanes ever. That one hurricane to which I refer is not, my fellow wet Mid-Westerners, the one dumping rain on us now. But instead, it’s the massive tropical depression originally called Benito.”
Annie was familiar with how these broadcasts played, and could almost guess, by the pause in Jordan’s delivery, a breakaway to an intense visual sequence would be next. Jordan continued, “It was nearly a month ago that Benito broke in two and spawned the twin-hurricanes, Benny and Bonnie. Benny traveled in a straight line from where it was birthed in the middle of the Atlantic, destroyed Bermuda, turned Ocean City, Maryland into a Ghost Town, whipped through Washington, DC., Baltimore, Pittsburgh and northern Ohio before slowing down and basically sitting over top of Lake Michigan for the past five days, dumping 30 inches of rain on the tri-state area since last Tuesday. And while we were watching Benny trash his way through the Eastern United States, let’s not forget about his twin-sister, Bonnie. She continued in her father’s (or should we say “mother’s”?) path and completed a circular arc back towards Africa, hitting the coast of the tiny country of Guinea-Bissau, where the waves and especially the winds tore apart whatever efforts that nation had succeeded in building towards a stable future.”
“With me today are some twins of our own – Abigail Freeman-Caruthers and Annabeth Freeman-Jones. Or, as they are more often referred to by their patients, Dr. Abby and Dr. Annie.”
The camera pulled back from Mr. James to reveal all three of them seated in front of a giant green screen. Annie knew the screen would be replaced by graphics in the edited version, but she still found it odd how it seemed to overwhelm them.
“Thanks for talking with me today, Doctors. Besides the twin-connection, can you share with our viewers how else you have a connection with the strange weather events of the past month?”
(Annie smiled and thought “Strange weather we’re having, eh?”)
Abby went first, using the conversation thread they had practiced with the production assistant back in the prep room. “Well, Jordan, besides having grown up and lived in Chicago our whole lives, we devote a portion of our summer each year to serve the people of Guinea-Bissau with a medical mission my sister and I organize near the coast.”
Abby paused, and Annie could see she was thinking about their location and the devastation she was sure had hit it. Annie jumped in. “The people of Guinea-Bissau have been hit twice as hard as we have,” she said rather sharply.
“I’m sure they have, … Dr. Annie, correct?”, Jordan asked politely. Annie nodded. Despite 33 years, people that didn’t know them well still had difficulty distinguishing between the two.
“So, you’ve got experience with both Chicago weather and what the area that Bonnie devastated is like. Have you ever seen rainfall like we’ve had here this past week?”, Jordan continued, taking the opportunity to steer the talk back to what the viewers wanted to hear about.
“No,” Abby replied, snapping out of her distant thoughts, “we’ve never experienced anything like this either here or in Guinea-Bissau, even during the rainy season. And our Chicago patients have been struggling with how it is affecting their health. As an Internal Medicine doctor, I see patients in the hospital with dozens of conditions the rain simply makes worse. Allergies, asthma, heart issues, arthritis – believe it or not, we had someone come in yesterday that exhibited signs of contaminated water consumption after he drank from a stream that may have been tainted by a nature-preserve latrine that overflowed.”
“So you’re saying we may be seeing cholera around Chicago?” James asked, trying to get a bit more excitement into the interview.
“No, I am absolutely not saying this person had cholera. We don’t need to pretend this is 1885, and spread false rumors that the Chicago River has been contaminated by the city sewer system,” Abby quickly corrected him. “I’m simply saying that people need to take extra precautions as a result of the exceptional rainfall. Make sure you are drinking water and eating food that has been safely delivered and safely prepared. Don’t walk through flooded areas, even if you think it’s only a puddle. The extra rain has caused flooding in many areas which is picking up chemicals and other contaminants in runoff from building basements, parking lots, and even ‘green spaces’ with animal feces or fertilizers and herbicides used to treat the land.”
Jordan turned towards Annie. “How about your own families, Dr. Annie? How have they coped with this once-in-a-century event?” he asked.
‘Too personal,’ Annie thought. She didn’t like attention focused on their kids, since she worried they sometimes felt dragged into their mothers’ lives. So she proceeded slowly while deciding how best to reply. ‘Start with facts,’ she told herself. And then to the camera, “Well, Abby and her husband have four children, and my husband and I have three. Hopefully the same things Annie has cautioned everyone about are things our children have learned from us. But just in case,” Annie turned to the camera, “stop splashing around in the yard, kids!”, she said with a smile.
“Of course it takes a bit out of a person,” Annie continued as she turned back to Jordan, “and children have a harder time understanding how it all fits together and how it may be impacting them. In my family practice office, I sometimes have to focus more on emotional health and evaluate whether a child’s symptoms may have a mental source as much as a physical one. And I know our kids are no different, as they are feeling upset the rain won’t stop, sad when they hear about people’s homes being flooded, and even a bit depressed that their lives are seemingly on-hold, not being able to go outside and play, not being able to have sports practice or games take place, and not even being able to make plans for the weekend, as people are unsure of exactly what is coming next. I encourage all parents to be vigilant in looking out for these impacts on their own children and talk to them about what is happening. An apple a day may keep the doctor away, but having a conversation with your child while she is eating the apple can improve the mental health for the whole family.” Annie smiled, partly to be reassuring but mostly because she thought that was a really good pivot away from personal matters and back to the general topic.
The interview continued for another 15 minutes, with more questions about health warnings, experiences in Africa with the rainy season there, a bit more about the medical mission – which both Annie and Abby were able to shamelessly plug for a couple of minutes – and finally some thoughts about what this meant for the future. Was this to be the ‘new normal’ from a weather pattern perspective, Mr. James asked the audience. Would Chicago take on a rainy season like West Central Africa? After it was all done, the twins just hoped that the condensed 5-minute broadcast would be helpful for those that viewed it.