Ernestine Krehbiel and Rose [No Name Given]

Rose (R) shares why she wanted to participate in a One Small Step interview. She says starting with her kid’s generation, they’ve lost the ability to communicate effectively. Ernestine (E) says she has been a teacher for over forty years and teaches her students that they can disagree without being disagreeable.

E says more about her experience of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. She says one of the first sit-ins in the United States happened in Wichita in 1958. E talks about a big public pool in Kansas that was segregated. She talks about moving to Minnesota and later Baltimore. E describes what it was like participating in sit-ins in Baltimore.

E recalls taking her mother to visit her sister, Aunt Marie, in Texas. E says her aunt asked her for forgiveness for when she did not stand up for Black people during the civil rights movements. E recalls when she was able to see Martin Luther King speak. She describes the moment as electric.

R talks about her faith. She says from her earliest memories, she always knew that God was real. R says her parents struggled financially when she was growing up and they experienced homelessness several times in her life. R recalls a time when her family was living in a trailer with no running water and her aunt suggested to her that she pray. R says a couple of days later neighbors from the church visited her family and moved them into a new home. She says she started to attend the church and found that God was not an ethereal being but that God was her father. R says she discovered love and hope. She describes learning that her sister, Stephanie, had a brain tumor and how she took care of her until death and coached her kids through the experience. R says later her own six-year-old son was diagnosed with a brain tumor. R says every step of the way her family has been blessed and she knows that God was walking with them.

E shares that both of her sons are adopted. She discloses that she had an ectopic pregnancy and was in a state where abortion of all kind was illegal. She says a doctor risked his career and operated on her late at night. E says at that time she got a real sense that there was something other out there and that God was there. E describes her journey to adopting her first son.

R says she grew up in a home where politics were never discussed. She says normally she followed her husband’s politics but in the last five years she has become more informed and is more comfortable being more involved because she wants to be. R says as a nurse she believes that life is sacred. She adds that she believes that more government issues should be solved on a local level. R says she would say that she is conservative and believes in a small government but a well run community and state.

E says that she is very liberal and part of that is because she believes that God would have been a liberal. She says she believes in universal healthcare. E adds that she is pro-choice and anti-abortion. E says theologically she tends to believe more in the Jewish way. She explains that she was president of the Kansas League of Women Voters so she sees herself as bipartisan who worked on educating everyone to get out and vote.