Page 73 of Radar

From a Difficult Past to a Hopeful Future

Doctor Kalinsky's great-grandfather, Heinrich Kalinsky, escaped the Nazi-occupied Slovak Republic in 1942. As German troops moved into the village of Kalin. Sadly, the family became separated in the chaos. Heinrich’s father and brother were left behind as resistance fighters smuggled Heinrich and his mother out of the area. Mother and son eventually found their way onto a boat headed to the United States, where they had distant family members living in Pennsylvania. They arrived malnourished andunable to speak the English language. In high school, Heinrich worked on the family farm. Later, he opened his own grocery store, which he ran alongside his wife, Ruth.

Growing food everywhere for everyone.

Dr. Kalinsky’s Spoons of Hope pods are built on the idea of sturdy minimalism and are shipped to the sites where they are needed, snapping together like a children’s toy without the need for tools. The design is intuitive, allowing the pods to be assembled without concern for language or literacy barriers.

“What Dr. Kalinsky has achieved is revolutionary,” Dr. Carmen Brandywine, spokeswoman for WorldCares International, said. “In a world facing increasing dangers that lead to food insecurity, such as climate change and regional conflict, her work offers the possibility of a scalable solution, providing local populations with fruits and vegetables to help provide for the nutritional needs of people in crisis.

From Lab to Lives

In a refugee camp on the Syrian-Turkey border, Mohammed shows off his handful of tomatoes and cucumbers that he obtained from the movable farm. He said, “While we still wait for rice and lentils from the WorldCares trucks, we now grow our own herbs and vegetables to make the meals better for our health and happier for our minds. Happier for our hearts.” Dr. Kalinsky visited a similar site in drought-impacted Ethiopia earlier this year. “I'll admit that seeing my concept in the field helping people made me cry. While this award is exciting because it will bring my design to the notice of more people, more organizations who may want to implement a Spoons of Hope module, but the biggest thrill for me was seeing children eating the food that they grew through my system.”

Back in Kalinsky’s lab, her great-grandfather’s tin spoon sits on her bookcase where she can see it and remember the human impact of something as simple and necessary as healthful food. The little girl who remembered hearing her great-grandfather’sstories of starvation and trauma has now dedicated her life to reducing the number of children who might someday tell the same kindsof stories around their future kitchen tables.

Xander read the article three times, and it made absolutely no sense to him that this woman, who was part of the Zoric family through the Kalinsky bloodline, was on board with the Zoric plot.

No sense at all. None.

In this article, Elyssa was a world-class science hero.

Start with the name — Dr. Elyssa Kalinsky. The name on her driver’s license was Elyssa Kalinsky Landers. Xander opened his photo file and looked at the picture he’d taken in his room in Lumberjack.

Kalinsky-Landers, hyphenated, he hadn’t seen that in the dark.

Kalinsky was not her middle name, but a maiden name. Married.

Did Elyssa seem like the kind of woman who would have an affair?

There were no rings. The friends didn’t make any references to her husband—or her wife—she could be bi—. But Eddie had frequently referred to his fiancé, Benny. Claude had mentioned his wife and children. And Elyssa had said nothing at all about her relationship status.

Married. Huh.

Not only had he slept with the enemy, he’d screwed somebody’s wife.

He was going to Hell.

Before he realized that Elyssa was a Kalinsky, working with one of the architects who helped make the doomsday machine a reality, he would have read the article and recognized Elyssa inthe journalist's words. He would have imagined all of that was true.

The hope that was sprinkled like pixie dust throughout the entirety of the article was the way that Xander had sensed her. Sunny, warm, self-sufficient, brainy, kind-hearted—Xander cut himself off before he added enthusiastic and flexible in bed. Under the circumstances, he wanted to distance himself from those memories.

Was all that a well-designed persona? Something that she showed the reporter and the men that she met when traveling far from home?

That was certainly a skill set that the Zoric family possessed: a smile on your face, a knife in your back.

She had given him the correct phone number. Would she have done that if she’d just violated her marriage?

There were all kinds of marriages, not everyone believed in monogamy the way that Xander did. He had never slept with a married woman—never slept with a woman that was in any kind of relationship before, and he didn’t like the way that sat in his chest. “Tricked into immorality by the Zoric vixen,” he muttered, and it felt like a false narrative.

Tradecraft 101: Never assume.

One could gather data and develop a theory, but to create a narrative from the name on her driver’s license was fallacious thinking.

Until he knew something definitively, he’d let that go.

Married or not, it didn’t change the fact that Elyssa had used her doctoral studies to feed the world.

Xander:Is Elyssa working for WorldCares now?

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