The Cultunio Journal

People are the program.

Behind every supper, walk and storytelling night are people who said yes to sitting down with strangers. Here are six of them, interviewed at home, at work and in the community garden by our editor Priya Nair.

Amara Okonjo
Tomasz Wiśniewski
Rukhsana Begum
Desmond Clarke
Mei Lin
Callum Fraser

Amara Okonjo cooking jollof rice in her kitchen in Flatbush — Amara Okonjo, photographed for the Cultunio Journal.

Home cook · Flatbush

The jollof that started an argument, and a friendship.

Amara came to New York from Enugu in 1994 to study pharmacy at Long Island University and stayed for thirty years, a husband, three children and a sixth-floor apartment in Flatbush with a view of the Manhattan skyline that she pretends not to care about. She first came to a Cultunio supper as a guest in 2021, sat next to a retired Ghanaian schoolteacher and spent the whole evening disagreeing with him about rice.

"Jollof is an argument. Every family thinks theirs is right. At the supper club, everyone is right for one night."
Amara Okonjo

The following spring she cooked her first supper for twenty-four strangers. She made jollof, of course, but also the egusi soup her grandmother cooked for funerals and weddings, because "both are about everyone showing up". She now cooks four suppers a year and mentors new home cooks on how to scale a family recipe from six portions to thirty without losing its soul.

The retired teacher, Kofi, comes to every one of her suppers. He still says Ghanaian jollof is better. He also drove her to the emergency room when she broke her wrist on the ice last winter.

Cooking with us since 2022
11 suppers cooked
Signature dish: party jollof

Tomasz Wiśniewski shaping rye dough in his Greenpoint bakery before dawn — Tomasz Wiśniewski, photographed for the Cultunio Journal.

Baker · Greenpoint

Rye bread at four in the morning, English verbs at seven at night.

Tomasz opened his bakery on Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint in 2014. His sourdough rye sold out by ten every morning, but he described his English at the time as "good for prices, bad for jokes". He joined the Language Swap Cafe to fix that, offering Polish to anyone who would correct his phrasal verbs.

"I could talk to flour for twelve years. Talking to my customers took a little longer."
Tomasz Wiśniewski

His regular partner turned out to be Ruth, a retired attorney whose grandmother came from Kraków. She wanted to read her grandmother's letters. He wanted to understand the difference between "put up with" and "put up". Three years later they have translated forty-two letters together and Ruth has learned to braid challah in his back room on Fridays.

Tomasz now hosts the Polish table at our Wednesday cafe and bakes the bread for our Wigilia supper every December.

Language Swap member since 2022
Polish and English table host
Bakes for our December Wigilia

Rukhsana Begum feeding fabric through a black sewing machine in her Jackson Heights tailoring shop — Rukhsana Begum, photographed for the Cultunio Journal.

Tailor · Jackson Heights

Forty years of hems, and the first person to ask about her mother.

Rukhsana has hemmed pants, taken in wedding saris and rescued school uniforms from a narrow shop under the 7 train in Jackson Heights since 1986. She learned to sew from her mother in Sylhet, who stitched kantha quilts from worn-out saris, layering old cloth so that nothing in the house was ever wasted.

"The girls who come to Stitch & Story ask about my mother. Nobody has asked about my mother in forty years."
Rukhsana Begum

When we started Stitch & Story she agreed to teach one session "to see what young people are like now". She has taught every term since. Her current partner is Maya, a sixteen-year-old from Elmhurst who arrived not knowing how to thread a needle and is now finishing a quilt panel for her own grandmother.

The panels made in Rukhsana's sessions were shown at the Queens Public Library in spring 2026, each with a label written by the younger maker about what they learned from their partner.

Teaching since 2023
9 pairs mentored
Craft: kantha stitching

Desmond Clarke holding a bunch of callaloo in his community garden plot — Desmond Clarke, photographed for the Cultunio Journal.

Storyteller · Crown Heights

Twenty-six years on the B44, and every stop has a story.

Desmond arrived from Kingston in 1962 as a nine-year-old in a borrowed coat. He drove city buses from 1978 until he retired, most of it on the B44 up and down Nostrand Avenue. He knows which stops have the best beef patties, where the college kids get on, and which retirees would ride the whole route just for the company.

"I drove the B44 for twenty-six years. Now people pay fifteen dollars to hear me talk about it."
Desmond Clarke

His daughter signed him up for our storytelling workshop without telling him. He told his first story, about a woman who gave birth on his bus at the corner of Nostrand and Atlantic, in October 2023. The room gave him a standing ovation and he has told a story at almost every Tell Me Something True since.

These days Desmond grows callaloo, Scotch bonnets and pole beans in a community garden off Nostrand Avenue and brings bags of them to our suppers. He is also writing his stories down, with help from a volunteer who types while he talks.

17 stories told on stage
Garden plot since 1998
Favorite stop: Nostrand & Fulton

Mei Lin rewiring a vintage table lamp at a community repair cafe — Mei Lin, photographed for the Cultunio Journal.

Volunteer · Bushwick

Fixing lamps on Saturdays, fixing loneliness by accident.

Mei is an electrical engineer for a transit contractor and grew up above her parents' takeout restaurant in Chicago's Bridgeport neighborhood. She moved to Bushwick in 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, and by the end of that year realized she had not had a real conversation with anyone outside work for months.

"People bring in a broken toaster. Then they stay for two hours and tell you about their divorce."
Mei Lin

She started volunteering at the repair cafe we run with a church in Bushwick, fixing lamps, kettles and radios. She noticed that people lingered long after their item was fixed, and that many of them lived alone. With our team she set up a Conversation Circle that meets at the same table right after the repair session.

The circle now has a waiting list. Mei still fixes around fifteen items a month and says the most common fault is "a loose connection, which is also the most common problem in New York".

Volunteer since 2021
Circle host, Bushwick
About 600 items repaired

Callum Fraser playing the fiddle at a folk session in a wood-paneled bar — Callum Fraser, photographed for the Cultunio Journal.

Musician · Bay Ridge

A Glasgow fiddler who taught half of Bay Ridge to strip the willow.

Callum grew up in Partick, played in folk sessions across Glasgow for thirty years and moved to Bay Ridge in 2019 to be near his grandchildren. He found New York lonely in a way he had not expected: "Everyone is very friendly, and nobody knocks on your door."

"A ceilidh is the only party where it does not matter that you cannot dance. Nobody can, after the second reel."
Callum Fraser

He emailed us offering to play at a Burns Night supper. That one evening has become our biggest event of the winter: a supper of haggis, neeps and tatties, a reading of "To a Mouse" by whoever draws the short straw, and a ceilidh in which Callum calls every dance and forgives every wrong turn.

He has since started a monthly session in a Bay Ridge bar where anyone with an instrument is welcome. A Lebanese oud player and a Bangladeshi tabla player are among the regulars, and the tunes are, in Callum's words, "getting interesting".

Burns Night caller since 2020
Monthly session in Bay Ridge
Instrument: 1920s fiddle

Two copies of the printed Cultunio Journal on a linen tablecloth beside a cup of tea and a kraft envelope

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We are always looking for tellers, cooks, walkers and makers. You do not need to have done anything famous. You need to have lived somewhere, loved someone or made something.

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