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Chapter 17 — In a Tizzy to Hear From Benjamin

Andrew Gaertner
4 min readOct 17, 2021

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A serial novel in the form of correspondence among a family while the world as we know it collapses around us. I recommend you start at the Introduction:

https://medium.com/climate-for-change/climate-for-change-introduction-5331d5ab9313

But you can start anywhere you want.

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Website Chatbox (Translated from Bulgarian):

Dear Dad,

Great news! I’m crying right now! We got a letter from Benji! He and his friends are in a prison camp in northern Minnesota, and they were able to smuggle a letter out with a guard. She went to great personal peril to hand deliver the letter yesterday. We have 48 hours to get a letter ready to send back to Benji; we will meet the guard in the park tomorrow morning before she goes back up north. I hope you get this and can respond before we see her. I know Benji would love to hear from you and Mom.

He and his friends are alive, although they are cold and hungry much of the time. Here is his letter:

[the letter was transcribed here]

According to the letter, he is at a former environmental education camp. I looked up the camp location on my paper map, and Benji is right — it is not very far from the Canadian border. That is so far away!

It looks like it has been a week since he last wrote. I hope he knows by now that World War III hasn’t quite started yet. What does your English…

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Andrew Gaertner
Andrew Gaertner

Written by Andrew Gaertner

To live in a world of peace and justice we must imagine it first. For this, we need artists and writers. I write to reach for the edges of what is possible.

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