View slide show: The Wedding Gift

Kirsten Walter ’00 and Ben Ayers ’99 didn’t register for traditional wedding gifts — eschewing the deep-sided pie dish, $17.99 at Macy’s — but instead asked friends and family to contribute to a barn-raising at their ca. 1800 farmhouse in Leeds, Maine.

The photo below and slide show at left show the gift being given. For two days prior to their Sept. 15 wedding — held in the completed barn — scores of family and friends, including some three dozen Bates alums, gathered to raise the frame and enclose the new building.

The raising culminated weeks of framework that commenced in earnest when barn designer Brad Morse ’99 arrived in August. He, along with Ayers and father-son neighbors Bruce and Nat Bell, formed a core team that cut the hemlock, milled the timbers at Bell’s farm, and cut the frame behind the brick farmhouse.

Ben Ayers '99 hammers pegs on Day One of the barn-raising as neighbor Kevin Hudner, an experienced timber-framer, steadies the beam.

As the gift of time, expertise, and funds grew large, the couple got uneasy about not being able to give back, “other than some homemade jams,” says Walter with a smile. Guidance came from two mentors, Gloria and Gregg Varney of nearby Nezinscot Farm, who said this: “Asking for help is the biggest way to build trust.”

The truism resonated with the couple, whose careers involve building communities by building trust — she as founder of the urban-agriculture nonprofit Lots To Gardens, he as project director for the dZi Foundation, serving Himalayan communities. “We decided to accept everything that was happening,” says Walter, “and to feel incredibly honored by the trust, community, and friendships it helped us build.”

By H. Jay Burns

Ayers is the force behind Porters’ Progress, a non-profit organization that provides empowering education and apparel suitable to harsh Himalyan conditions to mountain porters in Nepal. Bates is one stop on a U.S.-Canadian tour that Ayers is making with his 90-minute presentation, which includes a slide show and the award-winning BBC documentary Carrying the Burden, a 2001 Banff Mountain Film Festival selection.

A creative writing major at Bates, Ayers spent a junior semester in Nepal. In that country known for stunning natural beauty and harsh poverty, he started working with the porters who accompany tourist treks in the Himalayas. Moved by the hardships that these hardy and hardworking people endure, he founded Porters’ Progress after graduation.

Not to be confused with the Sherpas famed for their role in newsmaking mountain climbs, the porters that Ayers supports are typically lowland farmers who augment a subsistence living by carrying luggage for tourist treks. In thin clothes and flimsy shoes, they spend weeks at high altitudes carrying up to 250 pounds. Their cargo baskets are strapped to their foreheads with a cord that distributes weight to the spine.

“There’s a certain brilliance to them,” Ayers says, “that I was amazed at in the face of such hardship.”

Ayers’ presentation is sponsored by the New World Coalition, the Anti-Sweatshop Coalition and Amnesty International.