To honor her action and activism, Activist Council member Timothy Wotring spoke with 2020 award recipient Linda Eastwood:
Linda was born and raised, with her older brother, in Southern England to parents who had migrated from Northern England. She explained to me the cultural differences of Northern England, which was communal and community-oriented compared to the individualistic flavor of Southern England. Her father was an electrical engineer and, at 95, continues to be proud of his profession. Her mother was a savvy homemaker. They instilled in Linda the habit of going to church and an ethic of service. Her parents were very involved in caring for others in the neighborhood, including her father helping fix talking book machines for the blind (complex machines in the days before audiobooks were ubiquitous.)
While attending high school, Linda was interested in science, history, and music. And she continues to be! She attended the University of Birmingham (England) and majored in Physics. She continued her education path and earned an M.Sc. in Medical Physics and a Ph.D in Medical Physics at the University of Aberdeen (Scotland). She calls herself a lifelong learner and her CV would agree. She was sought after by Picker International Inc. (later acquired by Philips Medical Systems) because of her work with MRI. She moved to Lyndhurst, OH, just east of Cleveland in January 1986 for the job. I learned that MRI was not something that was always taken for granted, nor accessible. Linda was part of the efforts to help get this powerful technology working well and out there to help others.
While Linda’s day job was working with MRI, she was an active member of Lyndhurst Community Presbyterian Church. She chaired the Social Justice Committee and was able to make relationships and partnerships with organizations that had connections to Latin and South American communities. Linda traveled to Cuba several times to meet her church’s partner congregation, and to Honduras with Heifer International. Through these experiences, Linda learned the value of developing relationships, rather than the one-off mission trips. During her time spent in Cuba, she had the realization that the Cuban people already have hands to work with, and what they really want is friendships.
Because Linda wanted to foster these relationships, even more, she began to learn Spanish in 2001 and trained for PPF’s Accompaniment program in 2006. When she retired officially from her career in science, she devoted herself to a second calling in ministry that is deeply intertwined with her connections to Latin America. She spent a month as accompanier in Colombia in 2010, as part of the final semester of her MDiv from McCormick Theological Seminary.
Linda stayed connected to the people she met in Colombia and, on graduating from McCormick, accepted the position as Coordinator of the Colombia Accompaniment Program. She was the first PPF staffer to be ordained to her position. As Accompaniment Coordinator, Linda trained and supported dozens of accompaniers, and led a delegation to Colombia. She worked closely with Germán Zárate and others in the Iglesia Presbiteriana de Colombia to foster as equitable and just relationships as possible in the Accompaniment Program, focusing on following the leadership of the Colombians and disrupting patterns of colonialism and US superiority in our relationships.
Linda served as the PPF Accompaniment Coordinator from 2010 through 2013, and she remains on the PPF Accompaniment Consejo, supporting the Accompaniment Program as a volunteer. She also maintained her Colombia links by teaching occasionally at the Reformed University (CUR) in Barranquilla, including leading a McCormick seminary student travel seminar to study alongside CUR students.
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