Author and Sumter County native Sarah Bracey White discusses her book “Primary Lessons.”
Watch the full interview with Sarah Bracey White on WIS News 10.
Lives Brought to Life
Author and Sumter County native Sarah Bracey White discusses her book “Primary Lessons.”
Watch the full interview with Sarah Bracey White on WIS News 10.
On March 24th, 2017, Sarah Bracey White will be on a panel for the symposium “Aging in America” sponsored by the American Society on Aging at the Hyatt Regency in Chicago.
She will also be selling copies of her book, “Primary Lessons.”
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Sarah Bracey White, Scarsdale Women’s Club (Scarsdale, NY)
Thursday, September 22nd at 2 pm.
Sarah will be reading from Primary Lessons
Kevin Carey, Annie’s Book Stop of Worcester (65 James St, Worchester MA)
Friday, September 23rd at 7:00PM
Kevin is reading with Jennifer Martelli as part of Worchester Storytellers
Sandra Castillo, Books & Books (265 Aragon Ave, Coral Gables, FL)
Friday, September 23rd at 8pm
Sandra is reading from Eating Moors and Christians
Sarah Bracey White, Marian Woods Catholic Retirement Center (Hartsdale, NY)
Thursday, February 11th at 10:30 am
Sarah will be talking about Primary Lessons and there will be a staged reading of The Wanderlust: A South Carolina Folk Tale
Sarah Bracey White, Somers Library (Somers, NY)
Saturday, February 13th at 1:30 pm.
Sarah will be talking about Primary Lessons
When the Jim Crow South welcomed Sarah Bracey White with a hard slap, the plucky if bewildered young girl found her power in books and, later, in writing. Here’s an interview with the memoirist whose Primary Lessons (Cavan-Kerry Press, 2013), in its fourth printing, is helping heal the wounds of segregation in a small — and never to be forgotten — South Carolina town.
Read the full interview at Southern Literary Review
Sarah Bracey White, Mainwright House (260 Stuyvesant Ave, Rye, NY)
Tuesday, September 29 at 3pm
Sarah will be talking about Primary Lessons in Mainwright House’s author series
Shira Dentz, Amherst Poetry Festival (James Tate Memorial Stage, Emily Dickinson Museum Grounds, Amherst, MA)
Saturday, October 3rd, 2:55pm
Shira is reading with Dara Wier, Ravi Shankar
Donald Platt’s poem “The Main Event” listed one of the Boston Reviews’ “Ten Poems and One Contributor’s Note You Should Strongly Consider Reading from The Best American Poetry 2015″
Robin Silbergleid, MSU Main Library (East Lansing, MI)
Thursday, January 29th at 7:00 pm
Robin is reading as part of the Michigan Writers Series
Sarah Bracey White, South Carolina Council of Teachers of English Conference (Kiawah Island Resort, SC)
Friday, January 30th
Sarah will be exhibiting Primary Lessons at the conference
Sarah Bracey White, Sumter County Public Library (111 N. Harvin Street, Sumter, SC)
Saturday, January 31st, 3-5 pm
Sarah will present Primary Lessons at the Annual Local Authors’ Fair
Kevin Carey, Firehouse Theater (Newburyport, MA)
Saturday, January 31st at 7pm
Kevin’s ten minute play, By Accident, will perform in the New Works Festival
A skinny, brown-skinned girl sits on the porch of a weathered gray house in South Carolina. Pencil in hand, she writes a letter to another 12 year old in South Dakota — trying to make a pale-skinned version of herself understand what it’s like to live in a place where everyone who has power over you is white, and they all seem to hate you.
Fast forward 50 years. That little girl has grown up, but is still trying to make sense of her early years in a place where she was always considered “less than.” And trying to understand why her school teacher mother never chafed under second -class citizenship. Afraid to illuminate the truth of her early, painful memories, she first pens novels about southern families. “Her real life is what interests us,” publishers tell her agent. “Come back when she writes a memoir.” She thinks her life too simple and ordinary for a memoir; but occasionally, she creates small, but honest reflections for her writers’ group. They encourage her to dig deeper into the gold mine of her life. An essayist friend tells her that everything that happens in life is fodder for a writer. So, she begins to write essays about her life.
Her husband hatches a plan to get her true stories out into the world. He and his daughter buy her a domain name, “Onmymind.org” and tailor-make a web site for her. He encourages her to abandon the literary style of her novels and write in her own voice. It’s hard for her to abandon imitating the great writers she admired in college, but she does. Readers visit her website, read her stories and write laudatory messages about how much they enjoy her writing.
A friend, Linda Simone, suggests that she submit one of her oft-told stories to a contest that offers a $1,000 prize for the best story about a writer’s first experience of racism. She submits a piece about the summer of 1963 when, months after her mother’s unexpected death, she left South Carolina and worked in a girls’ camp on the shores of Lake Fairlee in Vermont. She does not win the $1,000 prize; but, she does get selected for inclusion in the anthology, “Children of the Dream.” Her essay is then selected for a reprint of the best essays from “Children of the Dream.” That reprint becomes a textbook, and she begins to receive reader’s comments about the power of her story. It makes her believe that perhaps her life has enough substance to interest readers. But there’s one last hurdle.
Southerners are taught upon exiting the womb that family business is not to be shared with the public. So, she believes that the life she shared with her mother, father and siblings doesn’t belong to her. However, she feels confident that her current life is hers. Essays about the state of her current life quickly make their way into local journals and commercial anthologies. Still, she can’t shake the need to reconcile the difficult years she spent in South Carolina and the need to understand her ambivalence toward her mother about her mother’s efforts to make a “proper” southern woman out of her. Without the intent of ever publishing her journey of self-discovery, she begins the search for what lay at the heart of the child who refused to accept the designation of “less than.”
She mines the depths of her past in three hour chunks. At night, after long work days when she’s too tired to make up anything, she sits at her computer and closes her eyes. In the voice of the five year old she remembers being, she begins her story. Along the way, sense memories rise and sweep her into a sea of recall where she relives the seasons of her childhood. On and off, for four years, she writes. By the end, she discovers the strength that sustained her. Then, she puts her memoir in a drawer — until this email message arrives from her friend Linda:
“This is your agent speaking. I think I’ve found a home for Primary Lessons. CavanKerry Press, a reputable poetry press has a memoir imprint and is accepting unagented, book-length memoirs during the month of February. Send them Primary Lessons.”
This email message makes her groan, but Linda is the same friend who prodded her to submit her piece to “Children of the Dream.” So, she prints out a hard copy, packages it along with a $20 reading fee and mails it to CavanKerry Press.
Six months later, a woman’s voice on the other end of a phone call asks for Sarah Bracey White. She answers affirmatively and the woman says, “This is Florenz Eiseman from CavanKerry Press. We’d like to publish your book.”
“What book did I send you,” she asks. Florenz laughs, then says, “That’s not usually the response I get when I call to say we’re going to publish an author’s work. We’d like to publish your memoir Primary Lessons. We thought it was the best of all the submissions we received during our open call.”
“Are you serious?” she asks Florenz. “Very serious,” Florenz answers. “I’m CavanKerry’s managing editor. You’ll soon get a call from Joan Cusak Handler , our publisher. And I’ll be sending you an email confirming everything I’ve said to you. Congratulations!”
She hangs up the phone, stares at it for a moment, then runs screaming into the living room to tell her husband the news: A publisher wants to publish her memoir!
From Primary Lessons
“Nah-nah-nah-nah-nah, Sa-rah-can’t-go-to-real-school.”
Sandra has found yet another weapon to use against me.
“Stop teasing your sister,” Mama says. “You’re too big for that kind of foolishness.”
“She started it,” Sandra answers. “Always acting like she’s better than us. I just said she can’t go to school ’cause she’s still a baby.”
“I’m not a baby. I went to school in Philadelphia and I can too go here. Can’t I, Mama? Can’t I?”
“The law says you can’t start school unless you’re already six or will be before the end of December,” Mama answers. “You won’t be six until February, so you can’t start this year. You’ll stay at Mother Primo’s. When I come home, we can have pretend school. I’ll teach you all the things I teach my class.”
“I don’t want pretend school. I want real school!” I hurl the words at Mama, then run out the back door and scurry to my favorite hiding place under the house behind the brick supports for the kitchen chimney. There, hidden in the cool darkness, I cry while muttering to myself. I hate it here. It’s not the law, it’s them. They won’t let me do anything. I have to go to school. Aunt Susie said that as soon as I learn to write, I can write her a letter and tell her how I’m doing. When I learn to write, I can tell her how much I hate it here. Once she knows, she’ll send for me to come home, to Philadelphia, where I belong.
The next week, when Mama sends me to buy a half pound of bologna from the store around the corner, I see something that makes me forget my errand. A nun, dressed in full black habit and white wimple, leads a line of children from a brick building into a small church next door. After the last child enters the church, the nun closes the big wooden doors. I climb the steps and peer into the church through a wide crack between the doors. Most Sundays, Aunt Susie and I used to go to the church around the corner from her house, but our church was nothing like this one.
A sweet, smoky smell makes its way through the crack and tickles my nose. A man in a long black robe with a red sash around his middle stands in the pulpit reciting in a language I can’t understand. Every now and then, the children answer in unison. Sunlight pours through a stained glass window and bathes a statue above the pulpit with a rose colored light. I watch, mesmerized. When the priest marches out of the pulpit and down the aisle toward the door where I stand, I run home.
“Mama, Mama, I saw a nun – just like the one that gave Loretta to Aunt Susie. She was leading some children into a church. There’s a school next door to the church. Can I go there? Can I please?”
“Hold your horses. You can’t go barging in there. It’s a school alright, but it’s a Catholic school. It costs money to go there. I can’t afford it. Wait until next year. Then you can go to Liberty Street with your sister.”
I stamp my foot. “But I want to go to school now!”
“Don’t you talk back to me! I said you’ll go to school next year when you’re old enough. Now go and get that bologna for lunch – and come straight back home.”
I do as I’m told, but several times during the next few days, I manage to sneak off from Mother Primo’s to watch the children. One little girl waves at me and I go over to her. “Hi. My name’s Sarah,” I say. “What’s yours?”
Women Around Town has included Primary Lessons on their “Best Books For Celebrating Black History Month” list.
Congrats Sarah Bracey White!
Women Around Town has included Primary Lessons on their “Best Books For Celebrating Black History Month” list.
Congrats Sarah Bracey White!
The story presents well how young children learn to interact with their world based upon those decisions they make when small about how their world works and how to protect themselves from hurt. There is a great deal of hurt in Primary Lessons. The harsh impact racism had and continues to have in this country is ever-present.
Visit vikihudson.com for the full review
The story presents well how young children learn to interact with their world based upon those decisions they make when small about how their world works and how to protect themselves from hurt. There is a great deal of hurt in Primary Lessons. The harsh impact racism had and continues to have in this country is ever-present.
Visit vikihudson.com for the full review
And while Primary Lessons is about a young black girl during a time of racial inequality, its themes speak to the child in all of us, and to mothers and daughters of all backgrounds – everywhere.
For the full review visit Southern Literary Review
And while Primary Lessons is about a young black girl during a time of racial inequality, its themes speak to the child in all of us, and to mothers and daughters of all backgrounds – everywhere.
For the full review visit Southern Literary Review
The book is a charming read, cover to cover.
–This and THat by JL
Always, it’s good to remember that it’s never too late to make your peace with a parent who has disappointed you but did their best. In Sarah’s case, she only lived with her mother for 12 tumultuous years. In that time, despite their different views, despite Sarah never feeling the affection and joy that she needed, her mother taught her some valuable lessons she would need to survive in a harsh world.
-The Fork in the Road
From users on Amazon:
Sarah Bracey White has written a memoir that is a page-turner, heart-wrencher and stunning witness to a sad period in American history.
It is compelling, and is read so quickly that the reader is left hungry for more.
The book is a charming read, cover to cover.
–This and THat by JL
Always, it’s good to remember that it’s never too late to make your peace with a parent who has disappointed you but did their best. In Sarah’s case, she only lived with her mother for 12 tumultuous years. In that time, despite their different views, despite Sarah never feeling the affection and joy that she needed, her mother taught her some valuable lessons she would need to survive in a harsh world.
-The Fork in the Road
From users on Amazon:
Sarah Bracey White has written a memoir that is a page-turner, heart-wrencher and stunning witness to a sad period in American history.
It is compelling, and is read so quickly that the reader is left hungry for more.
NIN ANDREWS
First of all, I just wanted to say how much I loved this book, Primary Lessons. I was completely hypnotized by this little girl-you, and especially by her insights into her color-coded world.
SARAH BRACEY WHITE
Thank you, Nin. I call that little girl my Sarah-child.
NA: Was it hard to get into the mind of yourself as a child? Or is she still very much with you?
SBW: I’ve nurtured my “five year old self” all my life. I liked who I was then — the love I felt and the freedom I experienced. I’ll always cherish that memory. I felt as if I were “channeling” my younger self while I was writing this book. A lot of my memories after returning to South Carolina in 1951 were frozen in the iceberg of my “separation trauma.” To write this memoir, I had to crack that ice for access. When trauma occurs, sometimes we develop amnesia as a way to move ahead without going mad. We don’t go back to explore that hidden pain and its cause until we’re strong enough to deal with it. In my sixties, I was finally able to go back to my early life and seek a resolution for things that were still affecting me. Cracking that ice was extremely painful.
NA: What year did you arrive in Sumter?
SBW: 1951
NA: So you would have been ten in 1957. Did integration have any effect on Sumter schools?
SBW: No, integration had no effect on me and my school after the Brown vs Board of Education ruling. Sumter’s schools were finally integrated in 1971 when integration laws were “complied with” by sending all girls to one school and all boys to another school. This protected the “flowers of southern womanhood” from African American boys.
NA: You bring back a southern childhood in that era so clearly with your details: the Olde English Furniture polish, Household Finance Company, your aunt and your mother’s arguments about which is better or more racist, the North or the South. Did you go back to South Carolina when you were writing this book?
SBW: My editor Baron Wormser made me add all those details. I thought they were too much. But he was right.
I stayed away from Sumter, SC from 1964 – after my father’s funeral – until 1986. Then, at age 40, I was overcome with the need to know more about my father’s family. I spent my vacation in Sumter visiting friends and researching my family tree. This book, however, is not about my family tree. That book is in the wings.
I now return to Sumter at least every two years to attend family reunions or my high school’s annual Legacykeeper’s Banquet.
NA: Do you have a southern accent?
SBW: I tried very hard to erase my southern accent. However, traces of it linger — evident mostly when I’m tired. . . when I talk to other southerners. . . or when I’m excited.
NA: You had such a fiery spirit, even at five years old when you arrived in Sumter. Do you credit your aunt for that inner strength? Or your father?
SBW: We’re each the product of the intersection of nature and nurture. I think my father must have had a fiery spirit because my mother certainly didn’t. And then, during my early years with Aunt Susie, I watched her speak up for herself and do the things that she thought were right. Children absorb what they “see,” rather than what adults “tell” them.
NA: Did you feel like you were your mother’s mother?
SBW: Yes, I always felt like I mothered my mother. Her mother died when she was seventeen and yes, she needed mothering. That was why I had such mixed emotions about her. She always told me to do as she said, not as she did. Because she had made so many irreparable mistakes. That’s why I wrote this book – to explore my mixed feelings about a woman who evidently loved me, though she did not display her affection. I discovered through writing this book that I loved her and was angry at her when she died — leaving me alone, after taking me away from Aunt Susie.
NA: In Sumter you start out as an outsider: an outsider to your sisters, your mother, the town, and the southern way of life. Did you retain this sense of being an outsider?
SBW: I’ve always been an observer – even as a child living in Philadelphia. Human beings fascinate me! I’m mesmerized by watching them and analyzing their behavior. I’ll always be the outsider. After I entered an interracial marriage, I became “the outsider” in another world.
NA: Your mother claimed that she took you back to Sumter so that you would “learn to protect yourself from mean-spirited white folks.” And your aunt thought Philadelphia was a much better environment for you. Who do you think was right?
SBW: I think my mother was right to take me back to Sumter, but for the wrong reasons. I needed the knowledge that I was not given away, that she too loved me. Had she not re-claimed me, as I grew up, I would have questioned why I was the one she gave away and I would have felt some sense of inadequacy. My education in South Carolina was a better, more rounded one than I could ever have received in Philadelphia. My mother’s friends were my first teachers and that personal tie made them push me to be my best. We become what people around us expect of us. It’s why my mother felt that “Colored” children were best educated in “Colored” schools.
NA: Your sisters missed a few days of school to pick cotton? Did you ever do that?
SBW: No, I never picked cotton. I’m still fascinated by cotton fields and their history for people of color. I have a romanticized feeling about cotton, without the memories of the backbreaking drudgery of having to pick it under the blazing sun.
NA: Your father is such a tragic story. An educated man, he dies working alongside migrant workers. It’s as if he dies a slave’s death, but I believe he inspired you. Do you think of him when you are writing or speaking in public?
SBW: Fathers influence their children by their presence in, or absence from, their lives. While I never knew my father, my mother never spoke harshly about him and I longed for his return — when I was a young child. After I researched his family tree, I grew to understand more about the circumstances of his life and the many tragedies he endured. People who knew him said my father was smart, very socially conscious, and a moving public speaker. He loved to teach, as did my mother. Jim Crow laws restrained him from expressing himself, or teaching. I vowed I’d never become a teacher, and yet I have. It’s in my genes. I’ve never been afraid to speak in public. I always think of my father when I am on stage. I stand on his shoulders and speak with the power of his memory.
NA: You decided as a young woman to choose a career over love and motherhood when you turned down Butch’s wedding proposal and when you decided that you would never have a child. You never deluded yourself with the idea that a woman could have it all?
SBW: When I was growing up, I never knew a woman who had it all. I learned early that life requires sacrifices. I was clear-eyed from childhood about what I wanted and that was to be master of my own life. Children and husbands always seemed to restrain women. I was 44 before I married and when I did, it was because I met a man who believed it was his purpose in life to make me happy. He pushed me to attain my dreams. He urged me to write “Primary Lessons” and is now urging me to get to work on completing the next book. I never had children, which has allowed me to nurture other people’s children — as did both my parents.
NA: I think your pen-pal is the only nice white person in the book. She is this disembodied voice who offers some thread of hope for better race relations. Did you ever meet her?
SBW: No, but I’ve tried to find her. In 2010, while I was an inaugural fellow at the Writing Center at SUNY Purchase, I worked on a YA novel about my relationship with my pen-pal Sharon Yarian. I searched the internet, wrote letters to newspapers in South Dakota, had several genealogists in SD search for her, but to no avail.
NA: What is a writing day like for you? Do you have a schedule? A ritual? A favorite reader or a writing group?
SBW: I’m most creative early in the morning. When I started writing fiction, I’d work from 7 – 11 am each day. My answering machine message used to say, “I’m sorry I can’t take your call, but the muses have me hard at work.” Then, when I began to explore my relationship with my mother (see next question), I realized that the morning hours didn’t work for that. I had a full time job, so I began to write from 8 – 11 pm when I was too tired to lie. Now, I garden in the mornings.
My husband Bob listened to the pieces about my mother and father as I wrote them. I shared them as revelations about my past – like diamonds plucked from a coal mine. I’ve also belonged to a writing group (the Westchester SIG) for more than 25 years (longer than I’ve been married). We meet monthly and share whatever we’re writing. When I began to share the stories about my life, they urged me to keep writing. You’ve struck gold, they told me.
NA: What inspired you to write your memoir? Was there a particular event or triggering thought or moment?
SBW: One June, in a casual phone conversation with my sister Williette, she mentioned that the day was Daddy’s birthday. That fact surprised me. I didn’t know my own father’s birthday! It suddenly dawned on me that I knew very little about my father. After the call ended, I began to write down all the things I remembered about my father. My first memory was of seeing him when I was 10 years old. I tucked away the few pages I scribbled. Then, decades later, my husband said to me one day, apropos of nothing — I thought, “You know your mother loved you.” He countered my argument that she didn’t with “tell me something nice your mother did for you.” For weeks after that, he repeated the question. I recalled many things. And began to think that maybe she did love me. The five-year-old inside me had been clinging to her pledge never to love her mean mother. After a while, I started writing about my relationship with my mother as a way to understand my long-held anger toward her. I’d been writing about her in fictional pieces for years. In every piece, my ambivalence toward her for taking me away from Aunt Susie showed up. I also couldn’t acknowledge my anger at her for dying and leaving me alone. The completion of Primary Lessons allowed me to sit back and say, my mother loved me and I loved her. Both of our lives were filled with circumstances beyond our control. She tried — as best she knew how — to love me, protect me and teach me to survive.
NA: When you were writing Primary Lessons, did you have an imaginary audience?
SBW: No. I never expected to have this book published. Writing it was a personal journey toward understanding myself.
On our family tree
my line ends abruptly.
Unable to seed the future,
I mine the past
dig deeply,
into veins of familial misfortune
bear witness to stories,
long suppressed
behind sugar-starched, lace curtains.
My revelations inspire fear
in those who hide the truth
behind forced smiles.
Or seal their lips
with fermented libations.
They would have me write fiction,
cloak history in gossamer,
present images that
bear no resemblance
to those whose genes we share.
They whisper that I,
childless, unfettered
free of impressionable children,
have abandoned self-control
in favor of self-indulgence.
Perhaps they are right,
for I disdain high pedestals
that require vigilant balance.
Instead, I tread the fallow fields
and spread the stories
of lives lived when life
had to be raked from barren soil.
My written words
shall carry forward our history,
that it may be known
by the young who follow me.
Unlike those before us
who discovered truths
and tried to express them
in a time and place
where their voices could not rise
above a whisper,
this next generation will be armed
with knowledge of the past
And able to build a life
On the pedestals of truth.
I send this gift into the future
It will be my offering
from beyond the grave.
By Sarah Bracey White
As an African-American child growing up in the segregated pre-Civil Rights South, Sarah Bracey White pushed against the social conventions that warned her not to rock the boat, even before she was old enough to fully understand her urge to defy the status quo. In her candid and poignant memoir, Primary Lessons, White recalls a childhood marked by equal measures of poverty and pride—formative years spent sorting through the “lessons” learned from a complicated relationship with her beloved, careworn mother and from a father’s absence engendered by racial injustice and compromised manhood.
Although born in Sumter, South Carolina, Sarah spends much of her first five years in Philadelphia in the care of her bighearted Aunt Susie and her husband, Uncle Whitey. As her parent’s fourth daughter, she has been sent north to ease her family’s financial burden, freeing her mother to work as a schoolteacher. Young Sarah loves her life in Philadelphia, and is devastated when her mother comes to retrieve her and take her back to a “home” she has never known. There, she is shocked and confused to encounter strange signs that read “colored only” and to be told for the first time that black people must behave a certain way around white people and accept their lot as second class citizens.
Still too young to attend the public school, Sarah convinces her mother to enroll her in the Catholic school, where the nuns arrange a scholarship. Sarah’s embrace of Catholicism rankles her mother, who finally transfers her to the public school—yet another disruption in the young girl’s life. Life at home is tough, the family living hand to mouth, especially during the summer when her schoolteacher mother does not get paid. Sarah’s father, once the principal of the local school, took the fall for his co-workers when the NAACP tried to challenge unequal pay for black teachers. His dismissal was a monumental blow to his self-esteemed that deeply affected the trajectory of his life. He has been absent from the family, seeking manual labor, and Sarah does not lay eyes on him until she is ten—and then only for a very brief period.
As Sarah’s mother struggles to support her five children on her own, she clings to her pride. But her acceptance of her fate infuriates Sarah, who believes her mother should seek some pleasure in life and not shrink from the nascent rumblings for civil rights that are beginning to sound in the South. Sarah comes into her own as she enters high school, discovering a talent for journalism. But life at home continues to be a challenge as her mother’s health worsens. With her older sisters out of the house and her brother still young, Sarah becomes her mother’s keeper. Deep tragedy will prove oddly liberating, however, opening up a world beyond Sumter for a young woman ready to take on the world.
Narrated in the present tense, White’s singular childhood story unfolds with the expectancy of life as it happens. “The point of any successful memoir is to discover what the speaker learns on their journey,” writes Kevin Pilkington, author of Ready to Eat the Sky and The Unemployed Man Who Became a Tree in his foreword to Primary Lessons. “[I]t is a trip worth taking when it teaches and enlightens and encourages me to revisit and solidify profound truths I already know to be true. Sarah Bracey White’s journey is a continuous struggle to find her way, a struggle I found both difficult and inspirational. Martin Luther King, Jr. said that ‘injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’ Young Sarah becomes aware of this at an early age, realizing being born poor and black is not the measure of a person’s value.”
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CavanKerry is grateful for additional support received from the following organizations: