Cold Spaghetti

A few Just Posts ago I posted a note from our dear friend Carmen, who recently began her job with the Peace Corps in South Africa.  Earlier this week I spoke to Carmen via chat — our first “live” conversation in 6 months. We talked through some ideas, challenges, and experiences. Not necessarily all connected to her current situation, but about the characteristics of “the work” in general. The realities of rural poverty. Being aware and at times surrounded by gross inequalities. The struggle of whether a problem is local or regional or national or global… and what it means to work at each level. Many of us involved in poverty work are called to it from a deep seated mission of social justice — yet are often asked or forced to work in ways that can codify or sustain the systems that create the inequalities we would like to address. There is a lot to struggle with, personally and professionally. There is always so much need and the desire to help, to give, to serve… it can get overwhelming. I want to find ways to help her and her new home; making the world a little smaller through our connections and friendships and trust in each other just feels like the right thing to do.

Here is some exciting news!  Carmen has started a blog. Right now it’s a place of photographs and brief descriptions.  Her emails reflect the richness of her experience and the tremendous need she encounters each day in her work. I’m hoping to write more about her work on THIS blog, and link to it in THIS space… and hopefully, maybe, possibly… get some ideas, suggestions, and contributions to her work from the wonderful readers and writers who participate in the Just Post social justice round table.

As for Ga Gona Mathata?  It means no worries*.

The Just Posts Roundtable for May 2009:

• Becky at I‘m Just Sayin with Racism? Really?
• Claudia at The Bottom of Heaven with Creative Freedoms and the Not Now Book
• Erika at Be Gay About It with Fingerprints make a family and day of decision
• Girlgriot at If you want kin, you must plant kin with Roundup and Please tell me
• Her Bad Mother with Humanity I Love You
• Holly at Cold Spaghetti with You don’t want to meet the new boy in town and Pondering Fate
• jen at One Plus Two with Everyday Piscasso and school daze and at Blogher with Bird by Bird
• Julie Pippert at Using My Words with Women with Big Dogs (and infertility)
• kittenpie at Life of ‘Pie with No Less
• Matt at Matt, Liz, and Madeline with yesterday…
• Mouse at The Mouse’s Nest with A pre-Blogging for LGBT Families Day rant
• Neil at Citizen of the Month with Proposition 8 and the California Supreme Court
• Paul Newnham at Give a damn about poverty? with Fairtrade fortnight begins and What is going on in Canberra?
• Skye at Heroine Content with On Anachronisms, Sexism, and Reality
• thordora at Spin Me I Pulsate with I’m sorry, is The Mother’s Act trying to help women? My bad…
• wrekehavoc with Guilty Pleasure Monday: Goodnight Saigon Billy Joel
• Zack Ford at Zack Ford Blogs with Why the Prop 8 Decision Inhibits Equality
• Zoom at Knitnut with Warts, wars, and the language of cancer

May Readers:

de
girlgriot
jen
painted maypole
alejna
holly

Please send love to Alejna, who has great music to go along with your JP reading.

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If you have a post above, or would just like to support the Just Posts, we invite you to display a button on your blog with a link back here, or to the Just Posts at Collecting Tokens. If you are unfamiliar with the Just Posts, please visit one of our information pages.

* Well, according to Carmen: “literally it means ‘there are no problems’, but it does also mean ‘no worries.’  Setswana – along with Sepedi and Swahili, among others – are in the Bantu language family, and they all share similar sayings, made famous by a certain Disney movie.”

Alejna and I are sending out the call for Just Posts for May! We’re hoping to get the round table up early(er) this month… so please send on your nominations!

Kate has been dealing with diarrhea for almost two weeks. It’s been a pain. She has an incident at school and is home for a day and nothing happens, then she goes back and the whole thing happens again… with an occasional blow out at home that results in floor, clothes, and bed washings. I’ve been able to take her to the doctor for tests, give her fluids, and not for a moment worry about any of it. The inconvenience of it all was in the back of my mind when I read Robin’s post for assistance. My friend, Robin (whom you may remember from her amazing Mama-multitasking) lives and works in Bangladesh. She works for ICDDR, B and recently posted a plea for support for her agency, which is struggling to get re-hydration salts to an impoverished population that will die without them. One of this month’s Just Posts is about poverty in Bangladesh and offers an interesting backdrop to the reality that Robin sees in her work — and what went on in my own head when I thought about how “inconvenient” diarrhea was for our family while others are facing it as a life and death situation.

Also? A package of oral rehydration salts costs about ten cents.

Just a thought. And on to Just Posts.

Thank you thank you thank you thank you to this month’s readers and writers and especially to the new folks who contributed to the April Roundtable… thank you. Be sure to stop by and say hi to my Just Posts Partner, Alejna, too!

April Just Posts:

• Amanda at Love Letters in Hell with I chose my choice!
• angielynne76 at Angielynne76’s Blog with Equality for All
• antiracist parent with Oprah and the secret lives of moms
• Ashley at The Dhaka Diaries with Faces of Poverty
• Emily at Wheels on the Bus with Bea and Eve
• erika at Be gay about it. with Marriage equality again — VERMONT!
  and Marriage equality — IN IOWA!!
• flutter with RAINN dance
• flyingtomato at flying tomato farms with the un-holiest marriage
  and Quit calling me a “Hobby Farmer…”
  
  GirlGriot at If you want kin… with Will This Make My Mom an Immigrant and Ceremonies in Dark Old Men
• Hispanic Fanatic with Prepare for Impact
• Holly at Cold Spaghetti with Where I Ponder Charity
• Julie at Using My Words  with Breastfeeding is like five whole minutes of your life, total…so to speak
• Julie Pippert at Momocrats with Senator Roland Burris supports National Equal Pay Day, co-sponsors Paycheck Fairness Act
• Knitnut with A few highlights from Rethinking Poverty
• Mad at Under the Mad Hat with Dear John
• Phoebe at Rectory Entrance with How’s that Gentrification Going?
• Planet Nomad with Do They Know It’s Christmastime
• Quadelle with A mini home makeover
• Rae at Journey Mama with Thirteen Follows a Long Time After Twelve
• Thailand Chani with Susan Boyle and Necessary Rant
• The Painted Maypole with Ten

THANK YOU to April Just Post Readers:

• Alejna
• Elizabeth (no blog… yet?)
• Holly
• Lucy
• Mad

The calendar tells me it’s the 30th, the last day of April.  (That’s the thing about calendars.  Their days are all numbered.)

So we’re gathering up Just Posts.  Please send on posts written in April that brightened your day, expanded your horizons, helped you learn new things.  (We don’t want someone’s photographic mind to be left undeveloped.)

Get ’em in as soon as you can… (Time flies like an arrow.  Fruit flies like bananas.)

A good friend of ours is a Peace Corps volunteer in South Africa.  She doesn’t have a blog (despite my ardent encouragement and hopes of it, the remoteness of her assignment make it easier to simply send an email when possible) but when she writes, she does so with beauty and thoughtfulness and reflection.

Which is why I am posting a passage in one of her last email’s here.

I know that the tone of my letters and email about my time in South
Africa have been mostly up-beat and generally full of the anecdotes
and general hilarity that come with learning and blending with a new
culture as well as my usual crazy adventures.  All of these are very
accurate and quite true, but I think it is important for me to convey
that this is also only half the story.  The cultures of South Africa
tend to downplay things undesirable or possibly unbecoming, and there
is a very vibrant tradition of singing-through-the-tears.  It is easy
therefore, coupled with my personal mental default-setting being humor
rather then melancholy, to simply write my letters to those far away
about the superficial ups and downs of daily life without delving into
the harder daily experiences which are a communal understanding yet an
elephant-in-the-corner with my fellow PCVs and community members.

Therefore, in an effort to share some of the other realities of life
in South Africa, this is a little more about the situation and
community of which I am now a part.

I live in a village without a clinic.  It has one tar road, one shop
to get bread and a few other sundries, one ‘bottle shop’ for the
procurement of alcohol, and one primary school.  It has three
burial-grounds.  In a country where one in five people are
HIV-positive and upward of 95% have latent tuberculosis, this ratio of
cemeteries to services is far from uncommon.  About half of the
patients at my organization are wheelchair bound, yet we are located
off of a dirt road on uneven and rocky terrain – just like their
houses (if they one of the fortunate amongst our clients and have a
house).  My community members have lived their whole lives in full
visibility of the platinum mines and limestone quarries which produce
a sizable wealth for the upper-echelons of the country, but they will
never see even enough of that money to pay a visit to the private
hospital in Rustenburg (35 km away) to get the medications they need
when they are sick.  My host brother came home mad as hell on Friday
night – Good Friday – after witnessing a car accident in which six
people were injured because someone in a sports car going to the
largest casino on the continent (20 km away) wasn’t paying attention
when making a turn.  Two of those people will get the care they need,
and afterward make it to the near-by resort, the place where, if they
were lucky (not to mention survive the accident), the other four could
potentially get a job, but never afford to visit.  South Africa is a
place where the “first-world” and “third-world” sit in uneasy
juxtaposition.  Unlike where infrastructures are non-existent or there
is more homogeneity in the human condition, poor South Africans see
every day the things they will never have (there is no judgment in
that statement of who is worse off, it is just a thought on the range
of hardships being undertaken by different populations).

If you have read this far, thank you for humoring me.  Again, I am
always more then happy to talk more deeply about any of these subjects
or to entertain questions.  I also hope that it is understood that
these truths aren’t the only side of the story, either.  I am always
and continually amazed at the resilience people have to all that is
thrown at them.  South Africans sing, they sing a lot, but there are
also many tears.

I love the contrasts within her discussion and how they serve as a way to understand the human condition within — one school to three graveyards, affluence to poverty, accident to luck.  Reasons why, she argues, for there to be many tears — but also (and this is where I start to pull her words a little further) reasons why unrest, uprising, and violence may be not only common but justified in this type of environment.

One of my passions in public health is ecological research — or, literally, studies that look to how a total environment (particularly social environment) impacts health.  This mode of research is still quite new, but exploratory studies suggest that when great divisions in wealth and poverty exist within a community, everyone within it experiences less optimal health.  In short, what we are starting to understand (at least, scientifically) is that common good benefits everyone.  It doesn’t take a lot of thought, then, to see why staying in Louisiana is important to me, at least, as a scientist.

This month’s Just Posts give fuel to the common good fire — and, as always, do so in varied and inspirational ways.  Giving props to corporations moving to fair trade products, discussing the importance of math and realities of education in poor regions of the world, illustrating the connection between cheap and available produce to labor exploitation, celebrating notable “Days” in March with personal stories and insight.

Thank you, readers and writers!  And please please — if you read something this month that inspires and informs and would be perfect for the next roundtable, send it on!

The March Just Posts

• Thailand Chani of Finding My Way Home with Would you like to be a hero?
• TeacherC at An (aspiring) Educator’s Blog with Investigating Social Inequity in the Mathematics Classroom
• Tash at Awful but Functioning with Whadaya Know Georgia.
• Rebecca at Flying Tomato Farms with The cost of a winter tomato
• prof susurro at like a whisper with Today is World Water Day and Women Aviators Make Herstory
• Paul Newnham of Give a damn about poverty? with Congrats Cadbury and Fairtrade this Easter
• Painted Maypole of Painted Maypole with An education in the jungle
• Mary at Them’s My Sentiments with A House Made of Asbestos
• Mad at Under the Mad Hat with More posts about buildings and food
• Kyla at The Journey with The Speech
• jen at One Plus Two with day 37: getting real
• girlgriot at If you want kin you must plant kin with Preach Responsibly and Missing the Point
• Erika of Be gay about it. with And so we wait.
• Em at Social Justice Soapbox with some random thoughts on giving
• Curtis at can’t see the forest with Beautiful Horizon, where hunger is on its way out
• Christopher at One Dollar Diet Project with (f)armed conflicts
• bon at cribchronicles with stuck in the freudian anal phase
• Ann Douglas at ParentCentral.ca with The Other Mothers
• almost idealist at One Year to Change the World with Equality for women: 2009 and we’re still not there and Time for a change
• alejna of collecting tokens with finding a way to volunteer with my hands full

This month’s readers:

alejna
Bon
Claudia
girlgriot
Holly
Kyla
Mad

Alejna, my JP accomplice, has words of wisdom with the list, as well as lyrics and performance of the very song whose lyrics graced the wall above my desk through college and at least three jobs (as if I needed more evidence of how much she rocks?!) — please stop over and say hello!

Here in New Orleans, February was Carnival month. It’s the best and worst of life each day here, but somehow the dichotomies are heightened during Carnival. The joy coupled with the danger, the opulence and the excess, the celebrations and the hangovers.

Just Posts follow suit this month with a wide range of issues, views, expressions, and topics. There are poems, lists, rants, and realizations. Every one represents a piece to a larger puzzle, a few stitches in the tapestry of our world.

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Before the list, though, I have a favor. I have submitted an entry to win my Dream Photography Assignment. In short, my dream is to have the funds to return to impoverished areas where I have worked in the past with the goal of providing portraiture photography to the families living there and then giving them copies of the photographs. It is a gift that I always try to give, but due to time constraints, logistics of travel, print availability, and cost — one that I am rarely able to do. In the few times when I’ve brought back a photo, I have been intimately moved by the response. So much so that doing this on a larger scale remains one of my fondest dreams. While there are opportunities for photographers to pitch assignments to document poverty, photograph landscapes, and capture everyday life — there are few (if any) funding opportunities for photographers to simply give back.

I am hoping you will help me. I’m hoping you will vote and spread the word for others to do the same. The ideas with the top 20 votes will be judged by a panel — and I need your help to get in that top 20.

Please consider visiting the site and putting in a vote for my dream.

And finally. Thank you thank you thank you for reading, nominating, and writing…

Our Readers:

Bon
Hel
Mad
Holly
Alejna

Our Writers:

Amy at Je Ne Regrette Rien with A Day With Fibromyalgia and This Angel Needs SOLE.

Jen at One Plus Two with En Route and Welcome to the Jungle.

Thordora at Spin Me I Pulsate with When a Man Wants to Murder a Tiger…

Bon at cribchronicles with More.

Angela at Letters from usedom with We are in the Middle of Something New, I was given a beautiful award, and Tapestry of Life.

Reya at The golden puppy with Money Changes Almost Everything, Past Present and Future, and Right or Wrong.

Julochka at Moments of Perfect Clarity with School is Cool.

Hummingbird at Hummingbird with Friend, stop a moment.

Deborah at What if with What a Wonderful World and My Dear Valentine.

Peter at The Buddha Diaries with Film Review: Wheel of Time, Another much bigger ethical conundrum, and Post-Racial.

Third story at Three Stories High with Kites on a Corner.

Elder woman at Elderwomanblog with Just One Shift.

Jarret at Creature of the shade with Stay or go.

Maggie Dammit at Violence Unsilenced with The Beginning.

Erika at Be Gay About It with Violence unsilenced.

Em at Social Justice Soapbox with Take Action: Responding to the Victorian bushfires.

Susie J with Grow and Garden and Share.

girlgriot at If you want kin, you must plan kin with How now, Juan? and To B(oycott) or not to B(oycott).

la loca at baggage carousel 4 with  wrong reason, right vote.

Thailand Chani at Finding My Way Home with Jiho.

One Year to Change the World with To bin or not to bin and The Age of Noisy Altruism.

Brigitte Knudson with Education Stimulus: What America Really Needs.

Neil of Citizen of the Month with My Once A Year Jewish Rant.

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Alejna’s conversation is up and singing, too!

If you’ve nominated or written for this month, please feel free to copy the button to your website. If you want more information about Just Posts, check out the Just Posts Page.

Welcome to Just Posts!

Just Posts monthly round table began two years ago by Jen at One Plus Two and Mad at Under the Mad Hat.  This month marks the first (the inaugural, perhaps?) round table hosted here and at Collecting Tokens, by my co-conspirator, Alejna.  She and I share the belief that reading, thinking, and writing are partners which lead to positive action.  I find inspiration, ideas, motivation, and reason within the Just Posts and give great thanks to the readers, writers, and contributors.

Please take a moment to read some of this month’s posts.  The topics include poverty in Bangladesh, U.S. politics, conflict in the Middle East, discussions and ideas for giving, racial stereotyping, gender roles in parenting, environmental change…  and more.  If you visit a post, please take a moment to comment; a small way of letting others know what you are reading, thinking, writing, and even doing?  We want to hear all about it…

The January Just Posts Roundup:

• Adrianne at The Bodhi Tree with Quote of the Day
• Angela at Letters from Usedom with Can We Change the World Just By Connecting?
• Ashley at Letters from Dhaka with The P-word
• BipolarLawyerCook with International Relations
• Brigitte Knudson at A Liberal Education with On Social Justice and Education
• De at An Indigo Virgo with Noughts and Crosses
• Emily at Wheels on the Bus with The Holy Land and There Must be More Money
• Erika at Be Gay About It with My Uterus Sent Me Flowers
• fire byrd with this madness needs to stop, before there is a war
• girlgriot at If You Want Kin… with Miss and Mrs. … who? and Samaritans in a Subaru
• Her Bad Mother with The Invisible Boy
• Holly at Cold Spaghetti with Chipped, Just Posts for a Just World and No Cheese with This Whine
• jen at One Plus Two with Behind the scenes of the Just Posts
• KC at Mothers in Medicine with Getting into the spirit and Getting into the spirit, part 2
• KC at DC Metro Moms Blog with A light in the dark
• Kevin at The Bartoy Blog with Stimulate The Economy — Forgive Student Loans!
• Leslie at Adventures in Randomness with I Have a Dream
• Little Pea with On Joining New Clubs
• Lucaites at No Caption Needed with We The People
• Mad at Under the Mad Hat with The Pragmatist and the Heart of Gold
• Mary at The Eleventh with To Her, This is Normal
• Melissa at MOMocrats with Blog for choice: Priorities for the new administration
• Paul Newnham at Give a Damn About Poverty? with Discipline and Training and Small Sacrifice
• Rachel at Kitchen Fire with The First Time I Voted
• Rebecca at Flying Tomato Farms with Farmer’s Market Nutrition Program and Change I believe In
• Sahar at Sahar’s Blog with Clean off your hearts, people of the world! and Roll up them sleeves, we’re getting down to business
• Shahrazaad with War Ends, Schools Begin
• SoulSnax at Rice Daddies with They’re homogeneous: Black Culture, Asian Culture, etc…
• Thailand Chani at Finding My Way Home with Laying Down Arms
• Thordora at Love Has No Need For Memory with Pensioneering

Some of the January Just Post readers:

Emily
jen
KC
Mad
Hel

Please send some love to Alejna, too!

What posts did you read during the month of January that made you more aware, more informed, or more moved about our world?

Alejna and I are kicking off our first Just Posts Roundtable… and actively requesting links to posts!  Here’s the jist: posts on personal blogs that make the world a little smaller, brighter, better.  They could have environmental insight, show passion for health, take a stand on inequality, tackle the global economy, address community violence, debate a solution to a pressing problem, or highlight a person or organization that deserves a little attention… you get the idea.

Just Posts for a Just World.

Have something in mind?  Submit it to the monthly roundtable: justpostsroundtable at gmail dot com.  Need more information?  There is a permanent page up with the 4-1-1.

Send in submissions by Saturday (February 7th) to be included in the Roundtable post on Tuesday, February 10th.  Nominators get a nod for reading and sending submissions and writers get a nod for writing.

Thanks to everyone and happy reading!

And extra thanks to Jen, Mad & Su!

Without a doubt, the best thing I have ever done for my career was have children.

Going completely against the words of my advisers (“no one will ever take you seriously if you have a baby while you do a PhD”) and in contrast to my departmental peers (almost all of whom are not only childless but single) — I got married and had babies.

And it was the best thing I have ever done, or could ever have done, for my career.

I work in Public Health, specifically in International Health, where I study things like poverty, development, gender, migration, and disparity.  In terms of methodology, I am a big believer in qualitative research in health; that we need people who actually unpack what all those health numbers mean so that we can be most effective in how we address health.  So when I walked into a rustic birthing facility with my visibly bulging 6 month pregnant belly to hold the hand of a young mother and help her labor — that woman gripped my hand and trusted me.  A year later, when Will crawled around the cement floor with other babies in the community meeting, women easily opened up to share stories of how they feed their children.  People approached me in buses and street corners, pushing Will in his stroller through the streets of Lima.  When I brought Kate into homes of newly arrived immigrants after Katrina, I compared nursing techniques with new Mothers struggling to figure out how to do it on their own.

What does it mean to be a Mother and work in International Health?  It means everything.  Being a Mother just breaks through all the differences that culture, faith, ideology, geography, wealth, and language build between us — although they may shape how we are Mothers, the visceral experience of pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and simply having a child is universal.

So there are no better people in the world to speak about issues like social justice, responsibility, activism, and the work of creating a better world.

You know what light bulb brought me to this conclusion?  Reading Jenny’s line about seeing Alejna and baby Theo for lunch, during which the baby “audibly soiled his diaper.”  The universality of the experience struck me — how that could have happened anywhere with any group of women and all the Mothers in the room would know the sound and share the response.  It reduces us all to the most fundamental of our qualities, that which makes us human: our ability and responsibility to care for each other.

To me, Jen and Mad‘s Just Posts are the internet representation of the important and relevant words of regular folks — and particularly of Mommy bloggers, who are routinely maligned and discounted as unimportant.  I know that writing about my family is important.  The personal is political — and the work I do living here, in this wounded city, is as important as any news about town, if not more.  Seeing similar experiences, thoughts, and challenges from others through Just Posts helps me see those same personal and political actions in so many other communities.  Finding them was a gift and has become something that I look forward to for inspiration.

So that is why Alejna and I, with the gracious blessings of Jen and Mad (and also Su), have teamed up to carry their legacy.  We sincerely hope that people will continue to send us recommended reading from bloggers throughout the world who have written something that makes us all more aware, more committed, more involved.

Jen, Mad and Su have Just Posts up for October — these are social justice and activism oriented posts nominated by readers — and I am flattered to be among the offerings. I learned of these through the talented and mellifluous Alejna, who is fun to read not only because of ThThTh, but because she is an endless source of pants-related humor. (Become the mother of a toddler and pants become very funny. Really.) The Just Posts have been a big source of inspiration for me over the last few months and this month’s posts were no different. I loved Jen’s writing about the impact of the tropical storm-related flooding in Belize, which has devastated the rural community she and her husband bought property within and are moving to in January of the coming year. Magpie’s charge inspired me to donate $25 to charity. My own sister-in-law made a strong argument about how the legacy of slavery is still a very real presence to school children attending schools named after slave owners. These are just a few examples.

I enjoy reading the Just Posts because it helps me to connect to others who are aware of the world around us and look for ways to make a difference. A little happy place in the internet.

The beach is my other happy place. So, here are a few pictures from the beautiful Gulf Coast, featuring my favorite kids. Because there is where I want to be right now…