Gulf Coast Gringa

Christmas Presence

2008-11-16T10:41:00.000-08:00

The summer before I left the country for a year of studying abroad, I had a combination birthday party/going away shindig. On the super-classy computer print-out invitations, I asked my friends to come celebrate with ice cream sundaes and told them "No presents; just your presence!"

In that spirit, I give you the 2008 edition of my dear friend Rachael's Christmas letter (for last year's, see here). I think it's a truly stellar idea because it puts Christmas outside the box (literally and figuratively). It's the birthday of a boy who would grow up to tell tax collectors to sell their possessions and give the money to the poor, so why do we celebrate the occasion by buying more stuff for people who already have enough material things?

Sure, the Magi brought gifts--but do you really think Baby Jesus ever used that myrrh or frankincense to spruce up his guest bathroom? I'm thinking those luxurious gifts were more a symbolic representation of the worth beyond measure of this sacred and special new baby, rather than examples of what to ask for (or give out) on your Christmas list this year. Think about it--the shepherds honored Jesus simply by showing up and spending some quality time manger-side, then going out into the world to pass on the good news. Given all the parables involving shepherds, and the fact that God has a habit of choosing them for important jobs (uh, Joseph, anyone? Or David, little shepherd boy-turned-king?), it's not a bad example to follow.

(If you're really and truly a frankincense-and-myrrh kinda person, or you just like showing people you care through getting them something they'll thoroughly enjoy, I have a post in the works for non-traditional/non-consumerist gifts coming up.)

So Merry Early Christmas (it feels weird breaking out Christmas carols and decorations down here when it's still warm enough to get a sunburn, so all y'all up north sing a round of Jingle Bell Rock for me while you're making sugar cookies, aight? And save me some cookies!!!), and enjoy this missive from the lovely Raquel who has so graciously allowed me to post it here!

My ideal "Christmas Presence" gift would be playing Christmas carols on my accordion with my Grandma--alas, due to geographical constraints, we'll have to wait until next year (inch'Allah).

"Season’s greetings!

As you may remember from last year I have started to change my approach in the celebration of Christmas! In order to do so, I must compete with all the holiday marketers who will begin to fill our television sets and radio stations with reminders of the coming Advent as soon as we put away our Halloween costumes!

This year I watched a hilarious and moving documentary called What Would Jesus Buy? about an activist group called “The Church of Stop Shopping!” that toured the country during the Christmas season and spread the message about the “Shopacalypse”: the mass commercialization of Christmas. The movie challenged me and other viewers to examine: why we buy so much, where we buy, and how we buy in an effort to identify what we can do to transform our habits and communities…not just during Christmas, but year round.

The movie also asked a fascinating question. What would Jesus buy? A Nintendo DS for the disciples? A spa day for Mary Magdalene? A new GPS system for Joseph and Mary? Economists predict that the average American will spend $801 this season, which ends up at a national total of about $241 billion. Something tells me that our friend Jesus Christ (the birthday boy) wouldn’t choose to spend that $241 billion at Amazon.com. So for as much as I love waking up to a tree bearing beautifully wrapped surprises with my name on them I had to ask myself: Is there a way to celebrate the birth and life of Jesus Christ without also celebrating material excess? Can I still retain the tradition of gift giving without also endorsing sweatshops, wasted packaging, and holiday debt? Yes!

Christmas Presence 2008

I approached the pastor at my church and told her that I was interested in creating a service project on Christmas Day to fill a need in the community and provide an alternative way to honor Jesus Christ’s life on the holiday. We discussed the large number of members of our congregation who end up spending the day alone because they are far away from family or simply do not have loved ones with which to celebrate. For them, Christmas is a dreaded and lonely holiday, not full of the joy and excitement I have been lucky to experience throughout my life.

So I devised my response: Christmas Presence, a community celebration to take place in the church basement that focuses on the gifts of fellowship and sharing and provides a place for people to gather and celebrate the joyous day with their extended church family. The benefit of Christmas Presence is twofold: it provides a celebration on Christmas Day for those who otherwise would be alone and also allows for an alternative to the usual fare of wrapping paper and batteries not included.

But Christmas Presence cannot happen without you! On this Christmas, I respectfully request that you not give me a traditional gift. I am a lucky girl and nothing I need can be bought at a store! (Unless you know of somewhere selling The Perfect Man. Because I’ve been looking for him everywhere and he seems sold out.)

If you planned on giving me a gift this year, the best present you could give me is a donation of $20 to Lake View Presbyterian Church designated for the Christmas Presence program. With your donation, I will be able to fund my Christmas Day service project and help to bring joy to the community and honor the life of Jesus Christ in a unique way. Money raised in excess of the program costs will be donated to Unitus, a non-profit that works to reduce global poverty through microfinance services, empowering millions of people throughout the working world. You are also warmly invited to participate in Christmas Presence. Turn this over for details about the festivities and your special invitation!

Send checks to Lake View Presbyterian Church at 716 West Addison Street, Chicago, IL, 60613

Please designate: Christian Nurture Committee “Christmas Presence” Program

Printed on Recycled Paper

* * *

You are invited to Christmas Presence

“No presents, just your presence!”

A holiday celebration for our extended Lake View Presbyterian Church family (and anyone else in the Chicagoland area!)

Christmas Day 2008

4 pm to 7 pm

The purpose of the “Christmas Presence” event is to provide an alternative celebration for the Lake View Presbyterian Church community that focuses on the gifts of fellowship and sharing.

The idea behind this event is to approach giving presents in new and alternative ways. People attending the event can choose to give of their time or talents or provide the present of their presence; because the greatest gift one can give is companionship and love. The event provides a place for those otherwise alone or away from family on Christmas to engage in celebration with their “extended” family. It also provides people with a different way to honor the birth of Jesus Christ, with friendship and love instead of wrapping paper and shopping lists! Members can choose how they enjoy the event, but not pressured to do anything but show up and celebrate!

The church basement will be set up with different stations, where people can choose how they want to celebrate and spend time together. The stations will provide different opportunities for people to give “presents” in alternative ways. Stations include:

1. “Joy To The World” Music Station

Live holiday music provided by church members giving the gift of their artistic talent

2. “Deck the Halls” Christmas Card Station

People are encouraged to make cards for an unexpected recipient, the mailman, their favorite pizza delivery guy, or the new neighbor, to give some surprise holiday cheer. Paper, stamps, art supplies and markers will be provided

3. “Visions of Sugarplums” Cookie Decorating Station

Kids of all ages can decorate holiday sugar cookies. Cookies, sprinkles, frosting, and fun will be provided

4. “Prince of Peace” Letter Writing Station

In the spirit of peace, people are encouraged to write a letter to a soldier away from home, a political prisoner, or a lawmaker influencing foreign policy. Sample letters, addresses, stamps, and envelopes will be provided

5. “The Little Matchstick Girl” Community Art Project Station

Church members will donate t-shirts before the event and during the evening participants can decorate t-shirt patches that will be sewn together after the event to make a t-shirt quilt. The quilt will be a collective gift that will be donated to a local shelter.

Christmas dinner will be served.

The event will include holiday refreshments, games, carols, fellowship, and more!

Give the greatest gift of all: your Christmas presence!"

Thanks, Rach!

It's A New Day

2008-11-15T09:01:00.000-08:00

We did something good the other week.

As a country, we did something good.

Together.

Not often you can say that these days...

Check out the video I stole from my friend Kate's blog--the link's in the title of this post.

I tear up when I watch all the American flags waving in Grant Park--that's my home city. Those are my people. That is our flag. It's okay to be patriotic again. We have something to believe in.

I don't have any illusions that our president-elect will change things overnight--*poof!* Quite the opposite, in fact--since the beginning, I've had my share of reservations about just how progressive the man for change would be. I'd done my homework back in 2004 when I was organizing a social justice issues forum for the Illinois senatorial candidates, and I knew his voting record, his habit of waiting for others to go out on a limb before stretching his neck out there himself.

So throughout election season, I watched, I waited--but I didn't get my hopes up. I didn't get swept up in the fever; I didn't fall in love (with everyone's favorite candidate, at least, ahem). But watching election returns with a house-full of Americorps volunteers giving a year of their lives to serve their country and their community--including 30-something 20-somethings who actually cared about politics, three middle-aged black women community activists, and a Vietnamese-American friend of mine wearing an "Asians for Obama" sticker

--watching Jesse Jackson tear up because after a brutal, corrosive history of slavery, racism, and oppression, we had elected our first black president--talking to my friend Rachael as she cheered and reveled in the instant community that sprang up in our home city's beautiful common space--I felt some of that cynicism die.

I know--Leah, a cynic, you say?? Impossible! But it's true. In this most-hopeful-of-all election seasons, I, the eternal optimist, played devil's advocate to my liberal friends' overflowing O-thusiasm, listened thoughtfully to what my conservative friends had to say, and put any and all thoughts about a bright and shiny new future for our country on the back-burner.

But the day after the election, when I asked my coworker and friend Mary, a solid Republican, what she thought about the previous day's events, she said she was alright with our new president-to-be. She felt like he would listen to the country, like he would build some bridges, even if she didn't agree with everything he did. He said as much in his acceptance speech: "As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, 'We are not enemies, but friends ... though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.' And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn — I may not have won your vote, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your President too."

And so for the first time in a long time--because, as my friend Kate points out, my generation has come of age amidst 8 years of misleadership, political opacity, and war--I feel hopeful about politics. I feel hopeful about the ability of our country's leader to lead. To challenge this very capable country, this innovative, hard-working, creative people, capable of sacrifice, with a new vision, and to marshal us toward it. For as Proverbs 29:18 says, "Without a vision, the people perish."

I've been reading Jim Wallis' God's Politics, from which I borrowed the above verse, and it has confirmed my belief that we as a country need that challenge--the kind that Lincoln, FDR, and Kennedy called us toward--and that when we crawl out of partisan trenches and come into that scary, barren, possibility-filled no-man's-land in between party lines, we are much more likely to accomplish good; we are much more likely to align ourselves with God's vision, as opposed to claiming, as Lincoln prayed we might not, that God endorses our side over our enemy's.

This doesn't mean that I will let go of my strongly-held values or that I will stop struggling for justice or praying for the guidance and courage to change the world we live in--I'm not going to be happy, for example, that Obama is for civil unions but does not consider it politically expedient to voice support for our gay brothers and sisters to unite in holy matrimony in the same way as our straight fellow citizens--but it does mean that I have come to see the value of unity over division--of post-partisan politics, if you will. That might sound a bit naïve--but then, I always was an optimist at heart.

(Sidenote: when I googled "text of Obama's acceptance speech" in order to find the words for the quotation used above, the first two websites to pop up were The Zimbabwe Independent and The Hindustan Times (India), a fact which highlights how riveting, how truly life-or-death, this election has been for people all over the world. Foreign Policy is one area in which I have experienced an unabashed renewal of hope since this election--our new president will have a concrete, profound, renewing effect on our global relationships, in a way that a simple change of head-of-state would not have accomplished. I am excited, really EXCITED, about the possibilities for rectification, restoration, and--dare I hope it, pray it--peace.)

photo credit--my buddy Vince

Election Day Warm Fuzzies

2008-11-07T20:41:00.001-08:00

Reposted from a Nov. 4 email:

Yay voting! Did mine this morning, first time ever actually going to the polls (instead of voting absentee). Got a sticker! Honestly, even if it weren't my "civic duty" to vote, and I weren't jaded-but-still-ultimately-a-believer in this whole democracy thing, I would do it just for the sticker (I was one of those kids who went to the dentist for the stickers and the cheap plastic trinkets you got to pick out of the "wishing well" at the end of your visit).

Pulled up into the Latimer Community Center (my local polling place) parking lot, which has never had more than 2 cars in it when I've driven by, to find it full to the brim. Short line inside (I waited until after 9am, thank you to bosses who are flexible about performing your civic duty!), got the above-mentioned sticker, thanked the poll workers, and voted in person for the first time in my young life--used a wide-out-there-in-the-open computer touch screen, somehow that seems anti-climactic, where are the little curtained polling booths with actual paper ballots of my youth when my mom worked election polls and brought me along to observe? (I spent most of the that day reading my new issue of Cricket magazine, but I think she knew that as an elementary-schooler I would soak up the whole thing like a sponge and it would become part of my civic make-up. Thanks, Mom, for the electoral osmosis--it worked!)

Walked around on a high all day, smiling at fellow sticker-sporters in a conspiratorial kind of way (Who cares how they voted! It doesn't matter, we shared in this mystical good-cheer-mongering communal act! It's like Christmas!).

From an fMh commenter:
"I always love voting in major elections. The whole process feels almost holy to me. It’s like a secular sacrament."

Ditto. Like I said, for better or worse, I'm a believer at heart.

El Colegio Electoral

2008-11-07T19:28:00.000-08:00

If you think the Electoral College system is complicated, try explaining it to a group of foreigners. In Spanish.

Yeah.

You know, though, I learned an awful lot about why we have the electoral college (to equalize voter turnout discrepancies, give smaller states more power, and preserve the federal character of our nation, to name a few reasons), why maybe we shouldn't have the electoral system (it gives inordinate power to a small handful of "swing" states; it occasionally nullifies the popular vote; it discourages voter turnout in solidly "red" or "blue" states, etc.) and the history of the whole bizarre system (the Founding Fathers didn't want the President being able to claim that he had a direct mandate from the people, making him more powerful than the then-indirectly-elected Senate, or the still indirectly-elected Supreme Court, and they didn't want the uneducated masses to be choosing the leader of the entire nation because we are too, well, uneducated; disturbingly, Constitutional Convention delegates from the South favored the system because it allowed southern states to count slaves in the population census that determined their allotted number of electoral votes, but of course denied them the right to choose electors (aka vote). The latter = bogus; the first made sense at the time; and the second maybe still holds water?? okay, okay, sarcasm. Sort of). Thank you to Miss Mary and Wikipedia for the civics lesson.

It was gratifying to see how interested the our Mujeres Unidas were in the whole process, given that none of them could vote in this past election (still waiting on visas, permanent residency, and/or citizenship. Sigh). They wanted to know what the new president's views on immigration would be (hard to say, as he wasn't very forthcoming on policy specifics during the campaign--I'm hoping he'll be pro-immigration reform, like John McCain was before campaign strategy made his rhetoric migrate more towards the reactionary immigration policy of his base). They wanted to know why the Republican symbol is an elephant when Republican starts with an "R," not an "E" (good question; here's the answer). They had questions about what happens if electors vote against the state's popular vote (it's happened before, but most states have a slate of electors for both parties, and the slate belonging to whichever party's candidate wins in that state is the one that then casts all that state's electoral votes on December 15th. Nebraska and Maine, however, split their votes proportionally instead of using a winner-take-all system). They wanted to know if voting is obligatory--which might seem like an odd question, but it is in other countries such as Peru, where you are fined for not voting. I had an interesting conversation with my Peruvian friend/coworker Rosa about how, for three years, she toiled as an activist working to restore democracy during the Fujimori dictatorship, but she now no longer votes because she doesn't believe in being forced to make a choice, one way or the other (her family in Peru pays her fines for her). Another reason she disagrees with mandatory voting: it is a huge burden for poor, rural citizens who sometimes live up to five or six hours distant from their polling places and must lose a day's or more wages just to obey the law. Oh, and if you thought early voting lines were bad here, just imagine the traffic jams when EVERYONE has to get to the polls instead of just 30 or 40 percent of the population. Gives new meaning to the term "civic duty," no?

But seriously--what would it look like if voting was mandatory here? I believe that voting is a vital part of ensuring that our democratic republic functions as it's supposed to--really, it's the whole basis of our system. And of course, the more people vote, the more our government will serve as an accurate reflection of the people's will (at least in theory; I'm not allowing for shady political maneuvers, Congressional corruption, failed promises, wild misuse of expense accounts, etc.), and that's a good thing. So, again in theory (disregarding traffic jams), it would be great if everyone voted. And that will never happen if we are left to our own devices--apathy, ignorance, logistics, and those pesky other priorities called "work," "family," "health," etc. see to that. But it's a little Orwellian--taking away your free will about whether to exercise your free will--to make it the law of the land that one must vote.

Then I think of my South African friend Craig, who is weeks away from obtaining his citizenship, and how much he wanted to be able to vote in this election. And I think of our SafeSpace homies who, even though they have paid their "debt to society," they are, as ex-felons, ineligible to vote. And then there are folks like my buddy Scottie, who, simple soul that he is, wanted to vote for McCain/Palin because "That Sarah Palin sure is a nice-looking lady," but come Election Day, his registration hadn't come through and he had to cast a provisional vote, which most likely will not count--a vote lost to bureaucratic error.

So no, voting shouldn't be mandatory--but even though it's sometimes a pain to stand in line, and we have a seemingly counterintuitive, Rube Goldberg-ian system of electing our President, every single one of us with the right to register should be out there exercising our civic privilege (since, thanks to the freedoms outlined in our Constitution and Bill of Rights, we have no obligatory "duty" to do so. Sorry, Peru).

¡Sabor de las Américas!

2008-10-18T19:42:00.000-07:00

On Sunday, September 28th, over 500 people attended our second annual Sabor de las Américas (Flavor of the Americas) heritage festival, enjoying authentically prepared food, a live Latin band and folkloric dance troupes representing the diverse cultures of Latin America. El Pueblo held a press conference about the need for just immigration reform, while our women’s group, Mujeres Unidas (Women United), sold t-shirts they had designed themselves, and our health fair offered free screenings geared toward the underserved Spanish-speaking community.

It was a beautiful day of celebration, education, and bridge-building in the unique melting pot that is the Mississippi Gulf Coast. A big thank you to our sponsors and to all of our volunteers for making this wonderful event possible!

Enjoy the photos.

She loves the dancing, she does!

Panamanian dancers recreate the mating dance of a native bird.

Bridget, Rosa y Ana watching the dancers. Check out Ana's fake PUMA shirt: PERU (with a llama).

Is this an Old Navy ad? Or simply the 2007 mullet-toss queen and her groupies? Or maybe just Anne and her homies dancing to the Cupid Shuffle. You pick.

Julio y David, our favorite serenaders, singing Mexican love songs. Ay, ¡que romántico!

Ingrid works her mad face-painting skillz on one of the kids.

Elizabeth, la reina del festival--she made the whole thing possible.

One of the Panamanian dancers, reminding me excessively of one of Gaugin's statuesqueTahitian women.

Kimberly, Carmen y Tere--some of our lovely Mujeres Unidas.

The dancing Colombiana. Her dress looks like an exuberant orchid, no?

Nothing better than a guitar piñata and a stick to smack it with.

Tour of the Faithful--statements from various denominations about the need for just immigration reform are read aloud.

Tour of the Faithful groupies!! They were on TV, too!: http://www.wlox.com/global/story.asp?s=9088370

Mexican folkore dance troupe, courtesy of Mujeres Unidas--even more charming in person!

Available for special events and quinceñearas. No, seriously, we are.

Dance No. 2, à la cowgirl.

the evening ends with a serenade of the lovely Katherine.

* * *

¡Que gran éxito!

Who Would Jesus Deport? Response

2008-10-18T19:35:00.000-07:00

I responded to Doug's comments/questions concerning my last post a while ago in person, but I figured I'd do it here as well in case anyone is still reading this and/or cares. Heh.

My response was two-fold: first and foremost, the goal of the post was to humanize the story of immigrants who are here with good intentions, who contribute to society, who do not merit (no one does) the term "illegal alien." I believe very strongly that one of the primary ways one gets beyond the "us vs. them" mentality that is such an obstacle to real dialogue and community-building is by getting to know the "them"--and then realizing that "they" are not very different from "us." It then becomes difficult to stereotype, ostracize, or hate on the "them"--because "they" have become real people. Case in point: I just went out for coffee with the farm manager I mentioned in the beginning of the post in question, and we spent half the time talking about our love for Manny Ramirez, and how both of us had coached U12 girls' soccer teams. We marveled at how similar our experiences had been--apparently soccer parents in Mississippi are just as high-strung as soccer parents in Massachusetts. And 11-yr-olds across the country hate running laps. Who knew?

Secondly, I think Doug's right--to a great extent, you can't legislate morality (outside of laws against things like murder, stealing, etc.). You can't make it a law to allow parents who just want their kids to have a better life to come to this country, and to keep out those who just want to milk the system. And even if you could, who would judge which immigrants have come here with "good intentions" and who are hard workers versus those who come here and abuse social services or commit violent crimes (I haven't met many such immigrants, but of course they exist)? So yes, the answer (at least in part) is to legislate economically--create more H2B temporary worker visas so that more immigrants who are already here doing dirty, dangerous, low-paying jobs that many Americans don't want to do can do so legally. Make it easier to extend or renew them. And (vitally important) create and enforce stronger oversight for employers, in order to prevent the immigrants holding the visas from being traded from company to company like so much cattle, housed 6 to an apartment, at the mercy of company dictates for everything from transportation to second jobs to cafeteria meals.

The short version, but there you have it. Legalize more temporary immigration, and oh, create more paths to residency and citizenship for those who have been paying into the system (taxes, social security) for years. Those SS $s especially are just sitting there in a separate SSA fund, never to be paid out to those who contributed them out of their hard-earned, low-wage paychecks.

Whatever happened to "Liberty and justice for all"?

Ask Yourself: Who Would Jesus Deport?

2008-08-17T15:46:00.000-07:00

WWJD--A New Twist on a (Very) Old Bracelet Acronym.***

One of my friends here is the manager of a fruit farm. He's been in the US for five or six years; he left his family farm in northern Mexico to work here as a migrant laborer when prices for Mexican corn couldn't compete with the low, low cost of subsidized grain imported from the US through NAFTA. He is part of a generation known as "NAFTA kids" who have sought a way to make a living in the US after their small family holdings fell apart in the wake of the trade agreement. The owner of one of the farms he worked on here in Mississippi recognized his experience and talent in agricultural management, taught him English, and hired him on as her foreman. Since then he has become her right-hand man, running the farm and getting involved in the organic food movement. He is a well-respected leader in the local Catholic Spanish-speaking parish, and he has spear-headed several projects aimed at bridging the gap between the immigrant community and the local Mississippian community. Mississippi is his home--his work, his spiritual life, his friends are all here, as is his goddaughter, of whom I am the godmother. If he is deported, to what "home" would he be sent?

Another friend of mine, Mercedes*, belongs to our Mujeres Unidas (Women United) empowerment and support group, as does her mother, Elisbeta*. At 19, Mercedes is the youngest of our participants, and truly represents the "next generation" of Latina immigrant women living in this country. Her mother, in search of a job that paid enough to support her family, brought her and her siblings into the country when Mercedes was about 6 years old. In a recent Mujeres Unidas gathering, Elisbeta told us how she used to send her daughter, who spoke no English at the time, to first grade with classmates who would relentlessly tease her during recess and rub her face in the dirt, yelling epithets she couldn't understand. Each day Mercedes would come home from school in tears, begging her mother to let her move back to Mexico and live with her grandparents, where everyone would speak the same language and no one would taunt her. Elisbeta told us that she wanted her daughter to learn English and to have a better life than she herself could ever hope for, and she couldn't imagine separating her family; but 13 years later, tearing up, she says "me sentí un monstro, un monstro horrible"--"I felt like a monster, a terrible monster"--for continuing to send her precious daughter through this awful gauntlet day after day.
Mercedes grew a thick skin, however, and her language skills developed until they matched the natural aptitude for mathematics, a subject without language, which her elementary teachers had noted in her. By the time she was in high school, she spoke English with no accent; she had proven herself to be a dedicated, intelligent student, graduating with her class and hoping one day to become a doctor. Upon graduating, however, she was not able to apply to any four-year colleges or universities, because she has no Social Security number. She is currently enrolled in community college, unsure whether she will ever be allowed to pursue a higher education in the land of her adolescence and young womanhood.

One more story: my friend Lauren* has been dating her boyfriend, Armando*, for over 2 years. Armando left his family and crossed the border in search of better job prospects--in his home city in Mexico a decent job, one that makes more than the 49 Mexican pesos (or $4.81 USD) daily minimum wage, is extremely hard to come by. He was stopped for a traffic violation--a broken headlight--by local law enforcement and thereafter detained by Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) in an overcrowded jail, where he slept on the hallway floor for several weeks before being sent back to Mexico with a permanent bar on his passport (meaning that he cannot legally return to the US, for any length of time, even on vacation. Ever).
After long, frustrating months of trying to find a stable job making enough money to contribute to his upkeep at his parents' home, he crossed back over the border at the risk of being incarcerated for multiple years. He has been able to find a more reliable stream of work here in the construction industry; but one traffic stop for something as minor as a faulty taillight would mean that he and Lauren will never be able to live together in this, her home country, even if they decide to marry. They would have to live separately, seeing each other only when she could take extended vacation; or she would have to move away from her family, friends, and home to Mexico and hope that they find work, and he would never be able to travel back to the United States with their children to see their American grandparents.
We are used to the question of the government's right to interfere in the bedroom of gay couples; what about mixed-legal status couples? Should a government be able to legislate your right to live with your spouse? As Lauren says: "The current law negates my ability to seek life liberty and the pursuit of happiness in my own country. Something I am supposed to be guaranteed."

So which one would Jesus deport?

I don't pretend to advocate for unequivocal opening of our borders to whomever wishes to come here (although I do believe that state and national borders are human creations which have no bearing on a person's God-given human rights, or his or her status as a human being, not an "illegal" or an "alien")--and I understand the sentiment of those who where born here or who immigrated legally and who wish to see others go through the process legally, to "get in line." But the truth is that our immigration system is severely broken, and for the vast majority of those wishing to come to our country, there is no "line"--no legal way to come to this country in order to put food in their children's bellies, or to work as the seasonal agricultural laborers, meat packing factory workers, or construction workers on which our economy relies**.

Until we achieve comprehensive immigration reform--and even afterwards--it is worth considering the question:

Who would Jesus deport?

*Not her real name.

**For Mexicans and many other Latin Americans, you must have a clean immigration record and you must have a clean immigration record and be the spouse, parent, child, or sibling of an adult U.S. citizen, or the spouse or unmarried child of a lawful permanent resident, who is willing to sponsor you. Even then, the process is long and arduous, and legal technicalities often close the door to those who would otherwise qualify. (Thanks to our immigration specialist Mary for that concise explanation of a complex policy!)

***I borrowed the title of this post from an article my boss wrote for the local paper--she, in turn, borrowed it from someone else In my opinion, it's too good not to pass on.

Boulevard Beer

2008-08-12T23:23:00.000-07:00

Apparently this beer out of Kansas City is only available in 13 Midwestern states...and guess what, Mississippi doesn't count as part of the Midwest (although I've had some East Coasters & Californians ask me if Tennessee does. Or Oklahoma. Ahh, geocentrism...).

But I still like it (the beer, that is).

We tried the IPA & the Bully Porter in a nifty little vegan-friendly joint called Prairie Blue in downtown Jefferson, Iowa, where we spent our overnight during RAGBRAI.

Long time coming

2008-08-12T20:11:00.000-07:00

I checked the date of my last post this evening and realized it corresponded roughly to the start of the Big P's Project SafeSpace, a homeless day center providing shower, laundry facilities, and most of all, a community of welcome and respite for the "residentially challenged" in our city. As the main staff person for this program, a role which often requires me to pull 12-hour days, I should not, therefore, be surprised that it is now August and I haven't found the time to create one single post on this blog. Yet I am--so many issues lately weigh on me and inspire in me just such depths of reflection as would fit perfectly into a nice, meaty blog post, and it's frustrating that I haven't been able to use this outlet to process the challenges of working with marginalized communities. I've missed my little blog, and I missed hearing from those of you who read it!

So the nose goes back to the creative grindstone, and I'll catch you up on some of the happenings of the last few months.

--

April: I traveled to Washington, D.C. for a spate of congressional lobbying with the tri-state Equity & Inclusion campaign, which fights for a just & equitable use of Gulf Coast recovery funds with the ultimate aim of eradicating poverty in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. What can I say--we like a challenge. (See longer post, with many more photos, here.) The Economic Development/Workers' Rights team in front of the Cannon Office Building.

Getting to sit down with Congressional staffers and elicit some interest from a few of them in regards to the Gulf Coast Civic Works Act (a WPA-style pilot program designed to create 100,000 high-quality, non-exportable jobs focused on rebuilding existing and developing new public infrastructure & civic works projects in hurricane-affected states) was an empowering experience. The glimpses we stole into the inner workings of the legislative branch of our government were fascinating, as was the development of strategy to push our legislation to the forefront--who do you target based on membership in relevant committees and subcommittees? Who owes whom favors in terms of sponsoring legislation? What important tidbits can you cull that will help you tailor your pitch to appeal to a representative's home district or personal history? It was easy to see how people get caught up in the game, the powerplays and tactical moves and the win/lose/compromise calculations. And the suits.
But that was also what disturbed me most about our visit--the fact that there is a game to play, when you're talking about real people's lives, the fate of real communities. The fact that in a supposed democracy (although really we live in a republic, a fact that is often conveniently glossed over in social studies class) the people have to travel a thousand+ miles to a 4 acre block of office buildings where the dress code is Ann Taylor and Brooks Brothers in order to have any kind of a chance to get a law passed that is vitally important to their survival...well, let's just say that isn't exactly an accessible option for the vast majority of our nation's residents. Which was the great thing about E&I--it gave us ordinary folk a chance to do just that. But it bothers me that I am listened to and taken much more seriously when I am part of a well-funded, large campaign that can fly me into D.C. to corner a staffer in the Senate cafeteria* instead of simply showing up at my representative's local office and trying to get on his/her appointment calendar. The tip of the iceberg...
*(where Senators pay $3 or $4 for a buffet meal for which everyone else has to fork over $12!! What about a discount for Americorps VISTA serving their country on a shoestring volunteer stipend (not me but close)?? Or for that matter, a discount for ordinary, tax-paying citizens who don't make the Senate's yearly salary of almost $170,000??)

Okay, let's not be entirely cynical--let's take a moment for paparazzi celebrity highlights! We saw Sen. Barbara Boxer dress down a security officer who didn't recognize her and tried to make her stand in the metal detector line. Nuh-uh, Mr. Security Man, you don't mess with the Senator! We also watched Dennis Kucinich's wife flit through his office looking dressed to kill and trilling along in her lilting British accent...yeah, so I'm reaching.

Also, a real joy, truly, to spend time with my family's good friend and my advocacy mentor/heroine Cat Cloud, Vice President of Important Things at the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA), and her lovely stepdaughter at the brand spankin' new Nationals park, where she helped me score my first ever complete baseball game!

Also in April: Jazzfest. It rawked.
Feathers + SoCo + Babies = Jazzfest.

Like Woodstock, but with more clothing & fewer mind-altering drugs.

Hot 8 Brass Band--one of my fave-o-rites--with Mardi Gras Indians. Sweet.

We saw also Alain Toussaint, Elvis Costello, Al Green, Calle 13 (my new favorite Puerto Rican hip hop/reggaeton/salsa/funk/rap/brass group), and a bunch of swing stuff. And Mamadou Diabate!

May: Our first Open House/Block Party as The Big P! We finally caught our breath from moving into our new offices (in January) and getting SafeSpace and ESL and a bunch of other programs up and running, so we threw a party to celebrate/show off our digs/welcome the neighborhood.

First food & libations: Then dancing ensued:

June: Visit to Hotlanta to see The Fam/The Sister. Botanical gardens, they were beautiful!
Weird poofy trees.

Lovely waterlilies.

Frog and Toad. I mean Leah.

Also in June: Our prayer vigil for immigration reform on the steps of the Capitol in Jackson--read the article about it in the Mississippi United Methodist Advocate.

July: Wow, July was insane. I was out of town every single weekend; came back the last weekend late Saturday night to help build a fence Sunday for our move from the old house to my roomies' brand new house a few miles away. No wonder I'm still recovering.

First weekend: 4th of July in NYC with friends from Habitat, mainly to see the Red Sox school the Yankees on their home turf. Mwahaha. Scored my second ever baseball game--thanks, Doug! (Clarification: I've been to several pro baseball games, but these were the first two for which I've kept score.)
Also trekked to the top of the Brooklyn Bridge (a fascinating feat of engineering!), reveled in the glory of deciduous trees in Central Park--I didn't realize how much I'd missed deciduous forest here in the Land of the Pines. Hit up the Met (my first time there--this
painting of haunted Russian pacifist/activist/writer Garshin, plagued by mental illness, stopped me in my tracks), including a visit to my old friend Cézanne, some QT with the toothpaste thick texture of Van Gogh's sunflowers & Degas' bathing women, and an ogle or two at my favorite French photographers, Cartier-Bresson & Doisneau. A modern photography exhibit introduced me to this gem of ironic composition, "headless" authorities photographing the body-less human head remains of the infamous Cake Box Murder.

Also enjoyed: Afghani & Moroccan cuisine in the Village; REAL bagels with tofu cream cheese (ahhh, heaven--I went there so often the bagel shop men wished me bon voyage and wanted to know when I was planning on returning); and saw the Tony-award winning out of Chicago's Steppenwolf Theater. Read reviews here and here. It was excellent--brooding and dark and hysterical and masterfully acted, especially by Estelle Parsons as the strung out matriarch, Violet Weston, and Steppenwolf veteran Amy Morton as Barbara, the eldest of three daughters trying to salvage the family vessel from the rocky shoals upon which her mother has steered it; she ultimately, however, ends up taking her mother's place as the vice-gripped captain of a sinking ship. Highly recommend it.

Second weekend: Our first ever Mujeres Unidas (Women United) leadership retreat! A smashing success involving visioning/mission statement development, communal art project, charades, beach time, good food, great women, and maybe just a smidge of merry-making. :)

Third & Fourth weekends: a 2,000-mile roundtrip drive to RAGBRAI (The Register's Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa) and a visit to my grandma's house in the land where the tall corn grows. Excellent use of Spandex.

I break my sunglasses before we even get on the road. Classy.

"RAGBRAI: Just you, the open road, and 10,000 of your closest friends."

The Cuzins, Day 2 (did I mention we biked about 115 miles in two days?)

Flossie & Leah prepare to take their two-woman show on the road.

Jobby, our little monster thingamabob, shows off the corn we picked from my uncle's sweet corn patch. I ate a lot of that, helped freeze some of it with my sister & mom, and brought a bunch back for lunch for folks at Project SafeSpace. The homeless community of the Gulf Coast concurs: Iowa Sweet Corn surpasses any and all Mississippi corn impostors. Mmmmm.

Alright, now that we're all caught up--look for more focused, subject-specific musings in the near future.

Happy August!

Our Nation's Capital/Capitol

2008-04-24T23:24:00.000-07:00

Time for the promised report on my visit to DC: "Ms. Leah Goes to Washington." (PS I actually get called "Ms. Leah" by my boss' kids and other small children around here. Weird.)

I've been to DC twice before, but for sightseeing purposes. This time, I went as part of the Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation's Equity & Inclusion (E&I) campaign, a multi-state advocacy effort to bring about legislative change favorable to a just and inclusive hurricane recovery in Louisiana, Mississippi, & Alabama. The campaign focuses on bringing together non-profits interested in a wide range of recovery-related issues to work on wider initiatives designed to create not only a bandaid solution to the Gulf Coast but a foundation for future prosperity--especially pertinent given that LA, MS, & AL are consistently at the bottom of the barrel in education, health, and poverty rankings.

The bill I spent most of my time working on is HR 4048, The Gulf Coast Civic Works Act, a WPA-style program that would bring 100,000 high-quality jobs & the necessary training to the Gulf Coast, along with infrastructure & public works rebuilding, and would provide for the preservation of Gulf Coast culture by organizing and centralizing all of the hurricane refugee stories that were gathered post-Katrina & Rita in the Library of Congress, a la the collections of slave & Depression-era narratives. Public works rebuilding is critical for our region--many communities still look like Pass Christian, where almost all essential public services, from the police to City Hall to the library to the local bank branch, continue to operate out of trailers. Many schools remain still shut down, including Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, the location of this famous Norman Rockwell painting:

Roads, harbors, bridges, levees--across the region infrastructure is in sore need of replacement, rebuilding, or shoring up. The work is there; the irony is that we don't have enough local, qualified workers to do the job. I should note that I'm not, in principle, against workers coming in from elsewhere to accomplish the work (I'm an imported "worker" myself and I work with immigrants), but it only strengthens the local economy to grow the existent workforce, giving them the training to secure living-wage jobs and establishing a solid base of high-skilled workers to maintain the newly rebuilt infrastructure & public works facilities for years to come. The Gulf Coast Civil Works Act addresses this with a 3-tiered system: the first round of jobs would go to local residents and displaced storm refugees; the second, to state residents; the third would be open to workers from everywhere. All rounds would prioritize women and minorities as potential job candidates; my friends K & J, who work in a women-in-construction program, point out that often, (minority) women are the sole breadwinners and it is in everyone's best interest to provide them with training & quality jobs.
Another good thing about this bill is that it will leverage successful existing programs, like Job Corps and NCCC (National Civilian Community Corps), not reinvent the wheel. One of my roles during our talks with Congressional staffers was to share a story that would "bring to life" the reason we need the Gulf Coast Civil Works Act. Here's the story I told:

I'm a caseworker at an organization that works with the immigrant community on the Coast. One of my client's sons, Jaime, is 17 and has dropped out of high school to support his family by working a construction job. We're getting him enrolled in Job Corps, a federal program which will help him get his GED, improve his English, and learn HVAC [heating and air conditioning] skills so that he could earn more money, better support his family, and contribute more to society. But the local Job Corps center, in the town where Jaime and his family live, has been closed since the storm, and the next nearest site is three hours away. Jaime will only be able to come home twice a year, and we're worried that without the support of his friends and family, he won't make it through the 2-year program. But with the Gulf Coast Civic Works Act, the center could be re-opened and the highly successful program--it has upwards of 90% job placement--could be incorporated into the Act as a solution to both the deficit of high-skilled jobs in the area and as a public works project in and of itself.

Then I deferred to my colleagues as to the numbers, the "ask" (what we're looking for the Congressman/woman to commit to), etc. Each of us had a part to play, coming from different issues, states, and organizations; we tag-teamed it beautifully and almost had Dennis Kucinich's top legislative adviser crying. No really, she teared up talking about how her family wouldn't have survived without the New Deal. Granted, Kucinich's office was an easy win; but we tailored our presentation to each office, pulling in the fact that Congressman Wu (D-OR 1st) is an immigrant himself (from Taiwan), or flooding Rep. Danny Davis' (D-IL 7th) with all our Chicagoland ties, or chattin' up Rep. Hinojosa's (D-TX 15th) front desk man whose grandfather died in the same Houston hospital where I was born (no connection too tenuous!). We hit up all the members on the Education & Labor committee, where our bill will have to go if it is to reach the House floor (see the School House Rocks video I used in my ESL the other day to help one of our students study for his citizenship test: "I'm Just a Bill" ). On Friday, our last day there, we reconfigured into state delegations and went to see Reps. Bennie Thompson (D-MS

Did someone say chic, overpriced boutique hotel? (paid for by non-profit $$, eek):
The robes really are a hoot, though:
Our nation's Capitol, with (spring!!) flowers:
The Nationals game at their new park (sadly, they lost, but I scored my first-ever entire baseball game!):
Meems, Turtle Girl (Go Sox!), & the lovely Cat:

The traditional 4th inning stretch Big Head Presidents Race--best 4th inning entertainment ever. Special points for powdered wigs and top hats.

Teddy never gets any love:Dogwoods!More dogwoods:
Metro peeps unaware that I'm photographing them (you fall for public transportation hard when you've gone without for over a year): La Corte Suprema:

Doesn't she look fab?

Word.

From our walk around the Capitol Hill neighborhood--spring!
Steve & Kieulin, lobbying homies:

???

Lovely flowers:

Rhubarb, where have you been all my life??

Enjoying a cold (nonalcoholic) one in Capitol Hill. Note Kieulin cracking up and the wig shop in the background.

Care for a bite of vegan-friendly sandwich, Leah? Why yes, Steve, thanks!
My team, super-sharp in front of the Cannon House Office Building.
We get ready to kick (or kiss?) some Congressional behind!

A half-demo'd building which looks like its face melted off. Public art, anyone?

Dentist Oversight Committee

2008-04-21T16:55:00.000-07:00

This is kind of a cheat post, since I basically copied and pasted it, but it makes a lot of sense to me and I think it gives a really memorable, understandable illustration of a controversial subject. It was sent to me by one of my bosom friends, a junior high science teacher in the Chicago Public Schools (and an everyday hero to me!). And given that the Hospitality State is at the bottom of the heap for education, it's definitely relevant to life here in the Mississip'.

"My dentist is great! He sends me reminders so I don't forget
checkups. He uses the latest techniques based on research. He
never hurts me, and I've got all my teeth.

When I ran into him the other day, I was eager to see if he'd
heard about the new state program. I knew he'd think it was great.

"Did you hear about the new state program to measure effectiveness
of dentists with their young patients?" I said.

"No," he said. He didn't seem too thrilled. "How will they do that?"

"It's quite simple," I said. "They will just count the number of
cavities each patient has at age 10, 14, and 18 and average that
to determine a dentist's rating. Dentists will be rated as
excellent, good, average, below average, and unsatisfactory. That
way parents will know
which are the best dentists. The plan will also encourage the less
effective dentists to get better," I said. "Poor dentists who
don't improve could lose their licenses to practice."

"That's terrible," he said.

"What? That's not a good attitude," I said. "Don't you think we
should try to improve children's dental health in this state?"

"Sure I do," he said, "but that's not a fair way to determine who
is practicing good dentistry."

"Why not?" I said. "It makes
perfect sense to me."

"Well, it's so obvious," he said. "Don't you see that dentists
don't all work with the same clientele, and that much depends on
things we can't control? For example, I work in a rural area with
a high percentage of patients from deprived homes, while some of
my colleagues work in upper middle-class neighborhoods. Many of
the parents I work with don't bring their children to see me until
there is some kind of problem, and I don't get to do much
preventive work. Also, many of the parents I serve let their
kids eat way too much candy from an early age,unlike more educated
parents who understand the relationship between sugar
and decay. To top it all off, so many of my
clients have well
water which is untreated and has no fluoride in it. Do you have
any idea how much difference early use of fluoride can make?"

"It sounds like you're making excuses," I said. "I can't believe
that you, my dentist, would be so defensive. After all, you do a
great job, and you needn't fear a little accountability."

"I am not being defensive!" he said. "My best patients are as good
as anyone's, my work is as good as anyone's, but my average cavity
count is going to be higher than a lot of other dentists because I
chose to work where I am
needed most."

"Don't' get touchy," I said.

"Touchy?" he said. His face had turned red, and from the way he
was clenching and unclenching his jaws, I was afraid he was going
to damage his teeth. "Try furious! In a system like this, I will
end up being rated average, below average, or worse. The few
educated patients I have who see these ratings may believe this
so-called rating is an actual measure of my ability and
proficiency as a dentist.

They may leave me, and I'll be left with only the most needy
patients. And my cavity average score will get even worse. On top
of that,how will I attract good dental hygienists and other
excellent dentists to my practice if it is labeled below average?"

"I think you are overreacting," I said. "'Complaining,
excuse-making and stonewalling won't improve dental health'... I
am quoting from a leading member of the DOC ," I noted.

"What's the DOC ?" he
asked.

"It's the Dental Oversight Committee," I said,"a group made up of
mostly lay persons to make sure dentistry in this state gets
improved"

"Spare me," he said, "I can't believe this. Reasonable people
won't buy it," he said hopefully.

The program sounded reasonable to me, so I asked, "How else would
you measure good dentistry?"

"Come watch me work," he said. "Observe my processes."

"That's too complicated, expensive and time- consuming," I said.
"Cavities are the bottom line, and you can't argue with the bottom
line. It's an absolute measure."

"That's what I'm afraid my parents and prospective patients will
think . This can't be happening," he said despairingly.

"Now, now," I said, "don't despair. The state will help you some."

"How?" he asked.

"If you receive a poor rating, they'll send a dentist who is rated
excellent to help straighten you out," I said brightly.

"You mean," he said, "they'll send a dentist with a
wealthy
clientele to show me how to work on severe juvenile dental
problems with which I have probably had much more experience? BIG
HELP!"

"There you go again," I said. "You aren't acting professionally at
all."

"You don't get it," he said. "Doing this would be like grading
schools and teachers on an average score made on a test of
children's progress with no regard to influences outside the
school, the home, the community served and stuff like that. Why
would they do something so unfair to dentists? No one would ever
think of doing that to schools."

I just shook my head sadly, but he had brightened. "I'm going to
write my representatives and senators," he said. "I'll use the
school analogy. Surely they will see the point."

He walked off with that look of hope mixed with fear and
suppressed anger that I, a teacher, see in the mirror so often
lately.

If you don't understand why educators resent the recent federal NO
CHILD LEFT BEHIND ACT, this may help. If
you do understand, you'll
enjoy this analogy, which was forwarded by John S. Taylor,
Superintendent of Schools for the Lancaster County , PA, School
District.
Be a friend to a teacher and pass this on."

Garden Update!

2008-04-19T11:36:00.001-07:00

3 new posts, check 'em out! Plus (to the left) a list of blogs I read (4 so far).

Garden update, after the high drama involving the city Parks & Recreation dept. uprooting people's community garden plots, sporadically planting them with pansies, and spraying chemical pesticides all over the place, all because (supposedly) the local councilman "wants to see color when he drives by the park." This is the same councilman who wanted to get rid of the basketball courts because the drug dealers hang out there. I got news for ya, Mr. Councilman: getting rid of the basketball courts where local kids play--local kids who eagerly agreed to watch over my garden plot in exchange for some of the produce--is not going to fix your ward's drug dealing problems. And if it would--you'd also have to get rid of half the street corners and most of the convenience store parking lots. Just sayin'.

A few pansies in the formerly fertile community garden plots:

My garden--Hurrah!!
The herb corner:
Peppers & okra:

"Take what you need, & nothing more/So that all may eat, & be restored."
(zukes on top)

Random beautiful flowers:

Fido the Guard Cat, at the boys' house:

Pure intimidation:

That's all the time we have for today, join us next weekend for a recap of Equity & Inclusion's Spring Legislative Days in DC: Leah Attempts to be a Lobbyist for the Gulf Coast Civic Works Act! (This should be interesting, as I brought with me not one conservative skirt, suit jacket, or pair of sensible pumps to wear in our nation's Capitol.) Also stay tuned for segments on the long-awaited Friday morning Illinois Constituent Coffee & Donuts Session with Senators Durbin & Obama, and Crashing the DC Area W Young Alumnae Get-Together!

Project SafeSpace

2008-04-19T09:17:00.000-07:00

Like the flier I made??
Thursday was the 'grand opening' of Project SpafeSpace, a new initiative of The Big P, which serves as "a place of welcome for anyone looking for a community of acceptance, a ministry of spiritual wellness & human dignity, or a chance to be in transformational relationship with others." Project SafeSpace offers "case management, laundry facilities and a shower, and communal Bible study with food (Wednesdays at 5pm)."

It is the culmination of months of envisioning, planning, and faithful response to the call felt by the social justice warriors at this non-profit to "care for the least of these." In a timely selection of scripture, Sally, my boss, preached last Sunday on Matthew 25 and the imperative on each of us to show compassion for the sick, visit the imprisoned, give food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, and clothing to the "nekkid" (yes, "nekkid"--she's a Mississippian). The Scripture says the ill, the felons, the starving, the parched, and the people wearing the same rancid clothes for weeks because they have nothing else to put on are all Jesus Christ. (This poses an interesting theological question--are "the least of these" metaphorically Christ-like because they are suffering as Christ did on earth? Or are they literally Jesus? Separately, I feel uncomfortable thinking we should feel obligated to serve them only because they are Jesus-on-earth, and not simply because they are our brothers and sisters in need.) Sally talked about how it may be easy to volunteer once a month stocking shelves at the local food pantry, or to visit your neighbor who's in the hospital following surgery; but we are equally called to see Christ in the drunk, toothless man accosting us for change; in the child rapist serving 25 years at Parchman; in the hospice patient who got AIDS from unsafe sex or drug use; and in the "crazy" missionary Sandra Kay who came testifying of the miracles she'd seen and asking an already poor non-profit--us--for money. We're called to see Christ in the truly least of the "least," and to serve accordingly. Jesus hung out with the dregs of society, those who were a world away from living righteously--not just those "deserving" of help. (This is where part of the "cost" of "the cost and joy of discipleship," one of my favorite lines in the UCC statement of faith, kicks in.) More on this in another post.

Our non-profit's commitment to living out this challenge is how I found myself kneeling at the feet of Miss Roxanne, unwinding the bandages that covered the oozing, greenish hole where the screws in her ankle protruded from the still unhealed skin. An alcoholic with a history of dope usage, Miss Roxanne had fallen through the floor of an abandoned Katrina house where she'd been staying; the plates and screws in her foot are the only thing holding the ankle joint together. To accomplish the major feat of walking, she requires the support of a cumbersome plastic brace and a collapsible walker; even with these aids, her steps are slow and difficult. As you might imagine, she's jobless, but she can't begin to receive disability payments until she weans herself off of her drug & alcohol addictions, a near-impossible feat without the help of expensive detox pills. Likewise, the drug rehab program we have her signed up for will not even enroll her until her system is clean of narcotics (oh, the irony), a process which takes about 3 weeks and the effects of which she can't face without the constant presence of a $2.90 bottle of vodka or a 40 of cheap beer. As for how she came to this point in life, as to why her face bears the battle scars of seven or eight decades' worth of life at the robust age of 43--well, even if you only believed half the stories she tells you, she's still seen and done and been through much more than the average person's share of misfortune, bad decisions, and horrific abuse.

Miss Roxanne was our very first community member at Project SafeSpace (they're not "guests" because this is their community, their place to feel at home). This is a status she wants memorialized with an employee of the month-style bulletin board display. Bitter tears squeeze from her eyes when she describes how the director of the local soup kitchen called the rehab place to warn them not to admit her; her hoarse, gap-toothed laugh rings out with cheery calls of "Hey sugarbunch!" to staff members she recognizes. As I brush through her matted shoulder-length hair so she won't "scare nobody lookin' like a crazy person" when she goes outside for a smoke, she tells me how it used to hang down the middle of her back, silky-smooth. It lost its supple sheen when she let her daughter, who's just about my age and who lives across the bay, convince her to dye it peroxide blonde. I don't know what their relationship is like, although Roxanne claims to have cut off ties with most of her family so they won't "see me like this." She's so far removed from regular society, so invisible, that an old friend she ran into a few months ago told her he'd just seen her obituary run in the paper.

After she's done washing, Roxanne hollers at the top of her lungs for me to come help her out of the shower and put clean gauze on her foot. The screw bits stick out of her flesh, the metal plate distorting the regular shape of her ankle into a boxy, unnaturally wide deformity. As I roll her kelly green athletic socks back onto her damaged legs, the stench of unwashed clothing fills my nostrils, and I think about Jesus washing the disciples' feet. The next day I help her pick through the few dry belongings left in the collapsed tent she used to live in, swatting at the mosquitoes and sweating in my office clothes as she instructs me from the car as to what should be salvaged from the shambles of her life. The owner of the neglected lot where she was squatting pulled up the stakes and crumpled up the tent so she couldn't sleep there anymore, so I'm driving her over to a burnt-out shell of a house where she'll bunk in a 2-man tent with a few homeless men she knows. In an absurd parallel of dinner-party etiquette, she's got her heart set on buying them a 40 of Steel Reserve as a sort of hostess gift for letting her crash their makeshift digs, but she's misplaced her last two dollars and can't afford to buy the beer--"Honey, you better frisk me for 'em, they've gotta be here somewhere," she tells me. The funny thing is, I'd do the same thing--I've been brought up to show gratitude for others' hospitality, and under the circumstances, beer is really the only thing her friends would want; but as an employee of a faith-based organization, I have to tell her I don't feel comfortable spotting her the $2 for the alcohol. Water or soda won't do, so I drive her back, empty-handed, to the blackened house and help her get settled on the concrete slab next to her friends' tent.

Now here's a question that's both metaphorical and literal: What do you give Jesus to drink when he's a homeless alcoholic trying to maintain a little dignity and show some gratitude for life's blessings, however meager?

Just tryin' to figure out how best to make good on our own invitation: "Come lay your burdens down and share the journey with us at Project SafeSpace!"

SB 2988

2008-04-14T18:34:00.000-07:00

SB 2988, a bill imposing felony consequences on employers hiring undocumented* workers and on the workers themselves, recently passed the Mississippi State Legislature. The bill takes effect on July 1st, at which time all entities employing over a certain number of workers will be subject to complaint-based checks on the legal status of their workers. If found to be in violation of the law, employers and employees alike could serve jail time, in addition to the current federal penalties imposing fines and deportation. The bill was written by freshman state representative Brandon Jones, Democrat of neighboring Pascagoula, a town which was significantly damaged by Hurricane Katrina and which has benefited enormously from immigrant workers' (both documented and undocumented) rebuilding efforts. The state manufacturers' association and Governor Haley Barbour both expressed strong reservations about the bill; however, Rep. Jones was able to push the legislation through on a wave of virulent anti-immigrant sentiment. Below, my co-worker's letter to the editor published in the Jackson, MS Clarion-Ledger in response to the new law.

Anti-immigrant bill may hurt our state's economy

The Mississippi Legislature has passed the Mississippi Employment Protection Act, a very costly and ill-advised anti-immigrant bill that makes it a felony to work undocumented, punishable by one to five years imprisonment.
There was a worker shortage after Katrina because of a severe lack of housing and other services. Immigrant workers slept in pup tents, in their cars and on the open ground. Conditions were harsh but the immigrant work force endured them and played a vital role in cleanup and recovery.
Today, in spite of the influx of foreign workers, Mississippi's unemployment rate (5.9 percent) is the lowest it has been in seven years. Whose employment needs protection?
Imprisoning violators will cost the state about $17,000 per inmate per year. If only 100 workers are convicted, that will cost $1.7 million a year. Add the cost of law enforcement and prosecution, and the cost goes higher.
Many immigrants send money home, but they still spend a large part of their earnings on rent, clothes, food, tools, cars, gasoline and utilities. That creates jobs and pours a lot of money into the Coast's economy.
Other cities and states have found that driving out the immigrant community damaged their local economy. A Sept. 25, 2007, article in the New York Times ("Town rethinks laws against illegal immigrants") details how the town of Riverside, NJ., suffered economically from its anti-immigrant ordinance, leading to its repeal two years later.
A May 6, 2007, Associated Press report in the Washington Post ("Attempts to curb illegal immigration prove costly") shows that many cities now face the mounting legal costs of defending anti-immigrant laws against constitutional and other legal challenges.
Finally, there is the damage to Mississippi's reputation, once again showing ourselves to be anything but "The Hospitality State." Perhaps that will be the highest cost of all.
MARY TOWNSEND
Hispanic/Latino Ministries of the United Methodist Church, Gulf Coast Mississippi

*As human beings can neither be "illegal" or "alien," "undocumented" is the most accurate term to describe immigrants who do not have permission to live or work in the United States.

Commercial-Free Music

2008-04-10T12:27:00.000-07:00

I hate listening to commercials while I'm enjoying music, hence my affinity for NPR/Mississippi Public Broadcasting (www.npr.org), and these two websites:

www.seeqpod.com trawls the internet for playable forms of your favorite songs & videos. It's free because it doesn't violate copyright laws by downloading music illegally--you get to listen to songs as many times as you want, but you can't keep 'em permanently on your computer, iPod, CD, etc. You can, however, create playlists accessible by internet--for example, I have one full of obscure songs by The Eagles to supplement my iPod Eagles stock, and one of songs by Yelle, a French electropop chick with a naughty sense of humor whose CD I can't buy here but whose catchy chansons caffeinate my mornings. I've also used this tool like a mix CD to create themed playlists, like "Mary," which features songs about ladies by that name--so far I have "Ah Mary" by Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, Proud Mary by CCR (maybe I should add the Tina Turner version but I'm old school), and "Let It Be" by the Fab Four. A very short "mix CD"--other good Mary-themed song suggestions please??

http://somafm.com is a collection of genre-based streaming internet radio "stations" which play through Windows Media Player or iTunes. It's continuous music, with a voice announcing about every half hour that "You're listening to SomaFM, we're free, tell your friends." The artist, song, and album information updates in real time, and on any given "station" there's good variety. It's very low-maintenance; I've never had problems with the music interrupting to sync on me like I do with traditional internet radio stations.
There are 13 stations, or flavors, if you will--many of them are electronically oriented, but they also have Sinatra-y stuff, "bachelor pad," indie rock, industrial, etc. The one I listen to most is called Boot Liquor (ha ha, get it?): "Americana Roots music for Cowhands, Cowpokes, and Cowtippers," which includes the likes of Allison Kraus, Willie Nelson, Kasey Chambers, Emmylou Harris, Johnny Hickman, Dam Combo, Blind Boys of Alabama...basically anything kinda twangy and bluesy and old-school country rock, with some bluegrass & roadhouse thrown in. Right now they're playing "Set My Chickens Free" by Merle Haggard.

So cheers! Enjoy a healthy dose of freedom from the avalanche of auditory advertising.

The Point

2008-04-09T23:38:00.000-07:00

Three new posts for your blog-reading enjoyment--check 'em out!

One of the neighborhoods in our city is called The Point. Located on the tip of a peninsula, The Point is the epicenter of the fishing, oyster & shrimping industries, which since the early part of last century have been dominated by immigrant communities. From the 1880s through the 1970s, it was European immigrants, particularly French and Croatian; although large portions of these communities lived in such poverty that in the 1920s they inspired the creation of the outreach mission I worked for last year, names like Desportes, Reynoir, Gollott, & Gillich now grace street signs, seafood warehouses, and mayoral campaigns all over the city.

The next wave of immigrants arrived in the early 1980s. Vietnamese refugees, "boat people" resettled after the Vietnam war, settled on The Point, taking to the shrimp boats like fish in water (sorry, couldn't resist). Two decades later, these once-feared and ostracized "aliens" have become an integral part of our city's diverse community, running grocery & convenience stores, operating restaurants, and managing whole shrimping fleets. Hurricane relief and solidarity organizations geared towards the Vietnamese community have sprung up since Katrina, and many, though not all, businesses have reopened (among them my very favorite sandwich shop down here, Le Bakery, which makes scrumptious tofu-carrot-cuke-daikon po boys from French bread truly worthy of the name). These days it's not uncommon to drive through The Point and spot a Vietnamese lady unconcernedly hard at work in an expansive garden, sheltered from the sun by a conical rice paddy hat.

The Vietnamese Buddhist temple...

...cheek to jowl with the Vietnamese Catholic church:

Where I get my spring roll paper and my soy bean pudding:

Mmmmmmmmmmmm:

The resilience of these communities and the way they have been gradually, but in the end wholly, embraced by those who've come before give me hope for the current influx of Latin American immigrants who are working hard to take care of their families and contribute to society, just like my ancestors, and yours, did. Latin restaurants, tiendas, and worship services are already thriving; maybe one day some of the clients with whom I work or the friends with whom I attend mass will feel comfortable working their own gardens in broad daylight, free of fear and welcome members in the community.

A Little Southern Charm

2008-04-09T23:21:00.000-07:00

Our new digs!

'The Big P," the non-profit I work for, went before the city zoning & planning commissions a few weeks ago to ask for approval to change our zoning from "offices" to "neighborhood center" so that we can open our doors to the general public, officially hold ESL classes, give people access to a safe space where they can take a shower, wash their clothes, organize themselves, hold community meetings, etc. instead of just being open for appointments only.

The first part of the process involved submitting a proposal to the zoning board, which was a bit of a bumpy process. The zoning board had a hard time understanding that although we are under the umbrella organization of a church denomination, and we will be starting a new church plant somewhere in the neighborhood, we are NOT a church. Church offices and a church worship space are two completely different things and can be located in two completely different spaces. Also against our favor is the fact that we share the same denomination as a local pre-storm homeless mission which was "notorious" for allowing its clients to get a breath of fresh air in the parking lot (aka "loitering") or to find temporary respite from sleeping on the streets by spending the occasional night at the mission (aka "zoning violation"). This association made the city nervous about what kind of operation we'd be running. In response, we downplayed the part of our mission which does outreach to the homeless community and reiterated 17 times that we were NOT going to hold church services in our offices (an activity which would fall outside the zoning we were requesting). And, we dressed up.

One of my coworkers tells the story of a friend of hers from up north who got a speeding ticket here in Mississippi. She went to court to contest the ticket, and watched as the woman in front of her, all done up, pleaded her case with the judge: "Oh, I'm so sorry your honor, I didn't realize I was over the limit, I promise it won't happen again. I'm just so sorry!" (Bats eyelashes, simpers, maybe squeezes out a little tear.) She got her ticket reduced or waived, I forget which, as the judge smiled indulgently and sent her on her way. Next up, my coworker's Yankee friend, who had shown up wearing a not particularly feminine outfit, and who immediately and vociferously began protesting her ticket as unfair and unmerited. She couldn't, for the life of her, understand why the judge, with a stern glare, doubled her fine after the lady in front of her had gotten off scot free.

This story illustrated for me and my good friend & coworker E, the two green Midwesterners, the tenacious power that the Southern Belle archetype continues to exercise over Dixie culture. The woman who flaunts her sex appeal, subverting the patriarchy through use of her so-called feminine wiles, wins the day; every Southern woman has a little Scarlett O'Hara in her, and when necessary, she knows how to turn on the charm.

How does this relate to the zoning commission? The moral of my coworker's story was that, when dealing with Southern males in positions of authority, you play into the archetype and you get what you want. Every member of the commission is male--the only woman in the room (besides us) was the secretary taking notes. So the morning of our appointment, we all got dolled up (seeing that I can get away with wearing a t-shirt and jeans at work, this is a big deal), dressed to the nines (heels! trouser pants! blouses! oh my!), and practiced our most simpering smiles, which the Fire Chief and his cohorts just ate right up.

Did it feel a bit off? Yes--I'm used to being treated as a person first, a woman second; France is the only other place I've felt so keenly a woman first, a person second. The whole thing tasted like a farce, a lovely little bit of play-acting designed to get us what we wanted. (You decide where you fall on the question of whether this is a degrading blow to women's dignity or a feminist co-opting of the patriarchy.)

Did it work? Yes--after several back-and-forths, we were recommended for approval by the zoning commission, and the city council (also all male, also a meeting for which we arrived all done up) unanimously passed our zoning change. Which allows us to open Project SafeSpace next week, which means showers, laundry, and a community of acceptance and transformation for our displaced and homeless brothers and sisters on the street.

A curious culture, a worthy end.

More Azaleas! etc.

2008-04-09T20:20:00.000-07:00

Sorry, couldn't resist.

Azalea Time

2008-03-22T11:45:00.000-07:00

I've been on the Coast a year this past Tuesday, and once again, it's Azalea time, thank heaven!

Feast your eyes:

More to come in white, lavender, and other shades of pink/magenta. They are simply profuse, my friends, and it is only because my digital camera has notoriously short battery life that I have not yet posted more snapshots of these gorgeous things.

A pair of houses I saw driving from church to the beach for my post-service run last weekend:

This house, right next door to the first, and only a few blocks from the beach, still bears the grafitti tattoos of post-Katrina FEMA numbers & insurance claim inspectors.

Perhaps because they sit devoid of the normal furnishings that signify a house taken over by inhabitants, these buildings seem to stand as entities unto themselves--not bare-bones shells waiting to be filled with possessions, but strong, sinewy edifices on the verge of stretching out their pillars and striding solidly off down the road, with purpose, freed of material trappings, never to look back.

This might also be because the one jacked up on stilts has a sign saying "Kosciusko House Movers" hanging out front.

Garden plot update:

My friend E & I turned over two bags of organic compost & two bags of dried live oak leaves into the plot, getting it ready to plant after I get back from our trip to Florida next weekend. I'm chomping at the bit already, can't wait to garrrrrrden! (ooh, piratey.)

A joyous Easter to all, and to all, a good night!

Time Began in a Garden

2008-03-02T20:04:00.000-08:00

So I've been reading this book, Serve God Save the Planet, given to me by a very good friend of mine who is my environmental role model. Its premise is that environmental stewardship is a Christian mandate--if we love God, we love God's creation, and we love God's children living in that creation; and we show our love through transforming our over-consuming, waste-producing lifestyle into one focused on simplicity, creation care, and valuing the spiritual over the material. It's great, you should read it--check it out at your local library, the author is Dr. Matthew Sleeth.

Anyway, I read a passage* in it the other day that jumpstarted my dormant (no pun intended) project to adopt a community garden plot and grow a vegetable garden. My friend KC and I had enthusiastically hatched this plan in January; I had even emailed Felder Rushing, the host of Mississippi Public Broadcasting's The Gestalte Gardener radio show, to ask for advice for a novice gardener--check out the link in the title above; he featured my questions on his show! (I should note that I had a very small garden in our side yard for a few years in junior high, which I grotesquely de-slugged using a salt shaker; but that's about the extent of my gardening expertise, though my love for garden veggies and flowers is abundant).

I had lamented to Mr. Rushing that I knew next to nothing about what to plant, or when to plant it, in this climate; I also confessed that I was itching to start gardening NOW, since we've had several high 60s-mid70s days last month & this month. He replied with a long list of delicious veggies suitable for South Mississippi (though he unfortunately had to ix-nay my rhubarb dreams) and a garden prep checklist to keep me occupied until Good Friday, the traditional "last freeze" date for Gulf Coast planting. (1. Good Friday's calendar date varies widely each year, as does the date of the last frost [thanks, Dad, for that one], so I'm not quite sure how this rule of thumb works; and 2., how amazing is it to be able to plant in March??? Instead of mid-May like up North!!)

So a few Sundays ago, I bought a sack of gardening lime, borrowed a shovel, and went to stake my claim on a plot at the local park. Turns out on Sundays no one is gardening, but lots of people are playing basketball, smoking weed, and cruising lime-green hydraulic-jacked Skittles cars with chromey wheel rims past the park/local drug dealer hangout. Ahhh, I love my community.

I spent about an hour turning over the soil and adding lime to it to change the pH (technically I should've measured the pH first but I didn't have any litmus tape on me, so I just sort of....guesstimated. My high school biology teacher is rolling over in his pocket-protected lab coat).
Digging into the flat gray soil, turning it to expose its dark, rich, iron-streaked underbelly; singing a few snatches of Bernstein's "Sing God a Simple Song" against the backbeat of bass-thumping rap music; feeling the breeze lick across my warm muscles, a reminder of the exquisite grace of a cool wind during marathon training last year...I sweat and bled, bright ruby drops consecrating the soil I will till for the next several months. Pragmatic, concrete hard work mingling with the minor miracles of seed germination and growth to produce a divine synergy, bestowing a blessing on the hands that labor for it, the bodies that are nourished by it, and the community it beautifies...Creation balanced in perfect miniature.

Mine is the top plot:

I can't wait for this Sunday, when I'll mix in some organic compost and get a chance to spend a little time makin' magic with the angels of Eden. After all, time began in a garden. :)

*"It was a perfect day, a day that defies the rules of grammar--it was 'more perfect' than all the days before it. We were putting some parts of the garden to rest, while in another section we harvested carrots and potatoes. Late in the day we sat together to weed the strawberry patch. A feeling of joy and peace overcame me. I felt close to God. I experienced 'the peace that passes all understanding.' ...We were doing what our Maker created us to do." SGSTP, p. 134

Sunday Morning Coming Down

2008-02-10T16:26:00.000-08:00

Monster trucks jacked up so high they need an extension ladder to enter cruise the downtown; signs saying "Catfish Fry Christ the King Tonight, 6pm" (ha) have sprouted up all over the neighborhood; military men and high school girls lay out on the beach on the first seasonable Sunday of the year, getting an early start on their tans.

Ahh, I love Mississippi.

Lent(ils)

2008-02-07T13:29:00.000-08:00

Given my penchant for spiritual musings, there will of course be more posts about Lent appearing in the very near future--it's such a rich, reflective kind of season, lots to dig into there (just like the lentil stew below!). But for now, I'll tide you over with a timely link where you can subscribe to a daily Lenten devotional, for those of you who are so inclined--just click on the word "Lent(ils)" above.
I really like the idea of a daily devotional--the regular time set aside to be with God, the sense of spiritual discipline, and the opportunity for spiritual rumination all appeal to me--but I'm lazy, so I'm really excited about how easy this idea is. The scripture for the day* as well as a reflection written by clergy and lay people of the UCC (United Church of Christ), my home denomination, are delivered straight to your inbox, so there's no need to spend hours surfing the internet or trying to create your own program. And this is a great way to "offer something up"--your time and prayerful reflection--instead of "giving something up" for Lent.
The first one, sent out yesterday, was written by a mentor of mine, the pastor of the church I attended in college. Hope you enjoy!

*When my Bible's not handy (okay even when it is), I use Oremus Bible Browser (http://bible.oremus.org/) to look up scripture lickety-split. You can choose the version of the Bible you want to browse, and select anything from a few verses to a chapter to a whole book. So handy!

And now for a Lent(il) treat--sorry, couldn't resist! I love lentils with a somewhat irrational passion, and this recipe is perfect for Lent: it's an easy no-meat meal, hearty enough to fill you up with or without a nice hunk of whole grain bread on the side. Even keeps you warm during cold winter weather!

Hearty Lentil Stew

-1 cup lentils (any color, I like green)
-4 large carrots sliced
-1 to 2 large onions
-2 to 3 bunch parsley or dried parsley
-large can tomatoes or 8 to 10 fresh ones chopped (these are optional; the stew works just fine without them. You can also try substituting a big bunch of collard greens or a couple big handfuls of spinach if you want more iron & calcium)
-extra virgin olive oil (gives it a little fat to help you feel satisfied--no need to use it if you're trying to stay non-fat)
-balsamic vinegar or freshly-squeezed lemon juice (optional)

(These are really just guidelines, feel free to play around with the proportions and add things along the way--stews never suffer from being cooked longer, so if you decide, halfway through the cooking time, that your stew needs celery or an extra handful of carrots, just add 'em in and simmer 'til the veggies are cooked.)

Heat just enough oil to cover bottom of stew pot or use a non-stick one. Add carrots, and onions. Cook until onions are translucent. Add lentils and tomatoes. Simmer until lentils are tender. Add water as needed. Keep in mind that this is a stew, it should be very thick!
Add parsley about 30 minutes in (total cooking time is about 45 minutes, but you can let it simmer all day if you want).
Serve warm the first time around, with the afore-mentioned hearty bread on the side if you like. Makes great leftovers and keeps for EVER. I like to eat a bowl at room temperature with some balsamic vinegar or lemon juice splashed on top to contrast the richness of the lentils. I'm getting hungry just thinking about it....

Serves: 4 Preparation time: 1 hour

Mardi Gras

2008-02-07T12:14:00.001-08:00

Mardi Gras came to town, we partook.
Need I say more?

Photos of the phestivities:

Scouting out the next float, plotting the best location for bead-catching

Mardi Gras 101: Note the traditional three-colored shirt: Purple for royalty, Gold for power, Green for faith. And that tri-colored lei in the upper right-hand corner is a good example of a "throw," or anything that gets launched off a float to the parade-goers, often at high velocity. Going after the good throws (big necklaces with charms on them, t-shirts, cups, stuffed animals) takes cunning, speed, and fine motor skills. Height doesn't hurt, either--but some of the most vicious throw-catchers are small, innocent-looking children who use their size and agility to outfox older, more sedentary parade watchers.

"Throw me something, Mister!"

Captain Jack Sparrow, I presume!

Shriners in mini go-karts always seem to show up at these things....

That's "krewe" with a K. The float-riders have been drinking and carousing since around 8 in the morning--so, oh, about 5 and a half hours at this point? And yet Mardi Gras turns out to be a surprisingly family-oriented event...

Local airmen driving big scary military vehicles all decked out in pretty little Mardi Gras beads.

Tanks on Highway 90--I never thought it would come to this!

I kiss a stranger in the hopes of getting a fake silk flower--and it worked. (Must be those mad skillz I honed kissing sweaty marathoners in Boston.)

Check out the ponytail on that member of the Walking Brigade (aka excuse for old men to smooch hot young things).

We make out like bandits!

On Tuesday, I learned several important things.

I have really good first-time Mardi Gras luck--and the amazing throws to prove it.

There really is no time too early to start drinking on Mardi Gras day.

I am a part of this community, and no matter how strong the pull of a glitzy, glamourous Mardi Gras celebration (and Kevin Kostner as parade marshal for Endymion!) is, I couldn't see myself celebrating anywhere but here, with my people.

Other parts of the country questioned the reinstatement of seemingly pointless drunken debauchery for Mardi Gras 2006, just 5 or 6 months after Katrina, when folks were still living in shelters, tents, or in trailers (well, not that that has changed much...); they couldn't see justifying the tens of thousands of dollars spent on celebrations, tv coverage, parade security and clean-up, floats and costumes and throws. They didn't understand why someone who had been exiled to Washington or Missouri or Pennsylvania would spend a chunk of their insurance money to come back home "just" for Mardi Gras.

Well, now, I get it.

Mardi Gras isn't about getting drunk or exposing yourself or streaking through the streets (although that all happens in good measure during the weeks leading up to Fat Tuesday). Mardi Gras is about family, it's about who you are and where you come from. It's about celebrating your heritage and your community, and giving yourself up with total abandon to the upheaval of status and propriety and rules that happens on Carnival. It's about one last free-for-all before digging into the self-reflection and self-denial of the Lenten season. It's about getting down with your people, eating and drinking and playing and laughing and savoring the time you have together.

And maybe, just maybe, it's a little bit about beer. Just a little. :)

MLK Day 2008

2008-02-07T07:48:00.000-08:00

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." -Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Every year on the day that celebrates the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I read his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," both as a reminder of the struggle for justice by those who came before us which we must carry on today, and because it is so powerfully written. Whatever else you might say about Dr. King, one thing is sure: he penned with words of fire and proclaimed with the voice of a prophet a message of undeniable Truth--the kingdom of God will be long in coming for those of us who cannot reach beyond the divides we have created between ourselves and our neighbors. We talked in ESL class that week about Dr. King's work, and it was frustrating (though not surprising) to see how well my hispanic/latino students could relate to living under the oppressive cloud of blatant racial discrimination and abuse. A fresh reminder of how much work we have to do, how much work I have yet to do, in order to accomplish that kingdom.

This year on MLK Jr. Day, I started a new tradition: I went to our city's MLK Jr. Day parade. MLK Jr. Day here is a big deal--the festivities aren't quite as grandiose as Mardi Gras, and the crowd is mostly African-American as opposed to everybody gettin' down together (if that's not irony, I don't know what is)--but judging by the fact that you have to get there 2 hours early if you want a decent vantage point, it's pretty important in the community. I did feel somewhat ambivalent about the whole celebration because it seemed to be much more about hanging out, watching pretty young thangs shake it in spandex (see below), and getting into the occasional street skirmish than about honoring Dr. King's memory, although the city's prominent NAACP and faith-based groups did pay him homage with floats, artistic & civic represenations, and broadcasted versions of his speeches. (More on the parade below.)

As much as MLK Jr. Day is a fitting and necessary celebration for our country (evidenced by the monochrome character of the parade-goers--King's message wasn't just for his own community, y'all!), and as much as it functions as a sorely needed catalyst for remembering and honoring the entirety of the Civil Rights movement, it can sometimes feel like a personality cult--King had his faults (as do we all), and he would be the first to admit, I believe, that the movement wasn't about glorifying him, but rather about creating widespread and lasting change, seeking restoration, and advancing the cause of justice.

So I was gratified as well as fascinated to learn more about the city's role in the Civil Rights movement--not a story that often emerges from the shadow of its more well-known sisters (the lunch counter sit-ins, the Montgomery bus boycott, etc.), but one which exemplifies creative, grassroots civil disobedience.

I'm talking about the integration of Gulf Coast beaches through the ingenious concept of "wade-in"s, or the simple act by blacks and non-black allies of laying down a towel, putting up a sun umbrella, and going for a swim on sections of public beach considered strictly "white only." The picture above (borrowed from a website about the book Beaches, Blood, & Ballots: A Black Doctor's Civil Rights Struggle by the estimable Dr. Gilbert R. Mason, founder of the Biloxi, MS chapter of the NAACP: http://www.upress.state.ms.us/books/55) shows law enforcement authorities forcibly escorting wade-in integrationists off of the beach, where, as members of the public, they had every right to be. Except, of course, that at the time, "public" didn't include black people.

I haven't read Dr. Mason's book yet, but it's high on my list of books to check out from the local library (after I finish Mississippi Mud, the true story about the Dixie Mafia's most notorious murder, a hit organized by a close relative of the man we rent office space from...I really had no idea what I was getting into down here!). I could hardly believe I'd never heard about this vital piece of history before--and we all know the old maxim about being doomed to repeat ourselves if we can't learn from our past. Thoughts & comments on Dr. King/Civil Rights Movement welcomed!!

As for our own MLK Jr. Day participation, check out the nifty, social justice-themed float HandsOn Gulf Coast put together:

Yes those are giant blue hands with MLK Jr. quotations painted on them. And yes we were the only all-white parade float. Or even mostly-white parade float. Just like later we were the only white/latino people eating soul food at the AME church in the background (whose fellowship hall walls are covered in gigantic murals of black Jesus and black Moses. I dig it).

This guy is HAPPY to be in the marching band. I mean, who wouldn't be--it's band!!

Check out the fringe, and the pantyhose! There was no shortage of psychedelic, skin-hugging, besequined outfits in this year's parade.

Drumline, anyone? This band kept jumping in and playing their own pieces over the sounds of other bands performing. And that's why it's called a Battle of the Bands!

Happy belated MLK Jr. Day, y'all--now go think about race relations and how you can break down some of those prejudices to which we all cling so very tightly.

Confessions of a Church-Hopper

2008-01-21T14:29:00.000-08:00

As I've mentioned before (see the post entitled "Wait for the Rain" in the April archives), there are no UCC churches in the state of Mississippi. So I have become a bit of a spiritual wanderer seeking sustenance and fellowship where I may, whether that's in the high-liturgy Episcopal church I attend on Sundays, or with the black Missionary Baptist congregations where I go for Wednesday night prayer services, or in the occasional Methodist or otherwise Protestant locale. This adds to my spiritual smorgasboarding a year and a half ago in New Orleans, where there were enough UCC churches that I could pick a new location each Sunday without visiting the same congregation twice; my denominational schizophrenia in southern France, where I was both a member of the local Catholic cathedral choir and a regular attendee at a Madagascar-influenced Reformed Protestant Church; and my exploration of Hindu temples & guru wisdom in India.

All this exposure to the myriad ways in which we worship God has given me a rather potluck taste for liturgical practices--for example, I have a fondness for the familiarity and symbolic weight of centuries-old ritual in the pre-Reformation church, but I also crave the dynamism and creativity of the ever-changing participatory prayers in Protestant churches. I find taking communion each Sunday at the Episcopal church to be very fulfilling and I take strange delight in using kneelers--somehow I feel more devout & focused if I'm kneeling when I pray--but boy could they use some more melodious hymns. We never take communion at Wednesday night prayer services, but the verbal theatrics and pure passion of the evening message will set your soul on fire. I'm not even ALLOWED to take communion in Catholic services (let's not go there...it's a sore spot) and I can't understand the finer points of the homily at Spanish-language mass, but the sudden three-dimensionality of one of the mariachi players singing harmony during a folk hymn is pure bliss. (Plus I love seeing little old Mexican ladies in habits responding to every statement with "Gracias a Dios"--as in, "Isn't it a beautiful day out, Sister?" "Yes, thanks be to God." "The choir was in tune most of the service!" "Yes, thanks be to God." "Are you teaching catechism next week, Sister?" "No, thanks be to God!")

The contrasts amongst this great variety of worship styles and credos have helped me to refine what it is, exactly, that I believe; conversely, the commonalities which tie them together have served to affirm the validity of my core beliefs. It's certainly an enriching process, one which stirs up the proverbial religious pot and makes me put on my theological thinking cap.

P.S. Check out my earlier post for today's flavor on the church-hopping front: Latin(o) Mass!

Monday Night Misa

2008-01-16T07:17:00.000-08:00

Monday nights my co-worker Elly attends Spanish-language mass at the Catholic church across the way from our office, and the first Monday after I got back she invited me to go. I'm rather game for new adventures, especially the religious kind, and I knew it would be a good opportunity to meet community members as well as work on my Spanish skills. So I put on yet another spiritual hat (to add to the UCC, Episcopal, Missionary Baptist and others I wear down here on the Coast) and headed off to la Misa.

The first challenge was trying to participate in the call-and-response service in a foreign language. I've been to enough Catholic masses in French to have memorized all the correct formulae and when to say what--"Pour des siecles et des siecles, Amen." "Que l'Esprit Saint soit avec vous..." "et avec votre esprit." Bada-bing. (The only trouble I've ever had is with the Lord's prayer, because I am so used to the words and the rhythm of the English version I grew up reciting every Sunday. But then, I get thrown off just by being in a different English-speaking congregation where they pause in different places or emphasize different words--although I have interchanging "trespasses" and "debts," as appropriate, down to an art.)

Now, I don't even know the Catholic service in English, so my participation in la Misa is entirely dependent on how fast I can a.) figure out what the priest (Father Paddy, who speaks Castilian Spanish with an Irish accent, I kid you not) is saying, b.) translate that to the corresponding section of a French mass, c.) remember the correct response in French, d.) translate the French response into Spanish, hoping I get somewhere close to what I'm actually supposed to be saying while still managing to fire off a reasonably sincere prayer. This is why I'm continually behind the rest of the congregation (thank God for the older lady who is also always behind because she can't hear anything); sometimes I have to resort to simply lip-synching and hope it looks like I know what's going on. And NEVER can I find in the missal what I'm actually supposed to be saying in time to join the congregation--it's torture!!

Other than that, however, la Misa is fantastic. The contrast between French and English masses (dare I say white/European masses in general??) and Latino mass, or even African-American mass (I once attended a fabulous second-line service at a black Catholic church in New Orleans), is like night and day. The first is solemn, slow, and can even be a bit dreary at times, although I do love the classical music & Gregorian chants that typically accompanied mass at La Cathedrale Saint-Sauveur. The second is more up-tempo and full of life--the homily is just as devout and the prayers are just as prayerful, but somehow listening to a group of mariachis (un-costumed; let's not get carried away) on guitars accompanying el coro as they harmonize Mexican folk songs while little kids zip up and down the aisles to be blessed, arms beatifically crossed and trying not to giggle--it just fills me with a little extra joy. Then there's all the cheek-kissing during the Passing of the Peace...okay, that happens in France, too, but somehow it's a little warmer here, a little less removed.

I never fail to walk out of la Misa with a smile on my face, my heart uplifted and my toes tapping for some ranchero music. It reminds me of the time a group of Unitarian-Universalist high school youth came down from northern Minnesota to attend prayer service at the local Missionary Baptist church--UUs can be pretty open to different forms of worship, but apparently these kids' home congregation wasn't too lively, because they all came out of service clapping their hands and singing gospel music, shouting "That was awesome, we're converting!!" much to the chagrin of their self-professed humanist youth group leader.

El Senor obra de maneras misteriosas...

AmeriWhat!

2008-01-13T21:48:00.000-08:00

Welcome to 2008, and to my newest incarnation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast: Gulf Coast GringAmericorps! Nyuk nyuk nyuk.

The funny part is, I really will be the gringa this year, as I will be working as an Americorps member at a start-up (read: 4 staff people including me) non-profit that seeks to bridge the gap in social services to the local Latino population as well as to change the hearts & minds of the wider community about immigration issues. The organization where I'll be working, alias The Big P, will have an immigration clinic, a homeless day center with showers & laundry facilities, a day labor-contractor meet-up program, a computer lab, and a space for Bible study & church services in Spanish. We will also continue to conduct our ESL classes, but in our new roomy quarters on the East side of town. We move in tomorrow--yessss!!!

This all sounds ambitious, and it is--that's part of the reason I'm so psyched to work here, that and the fabulous justice warrior ladies who are my coworkers, and the amazing people we serve, and the beautiful Spanish language we'll be speaking, etc. We don't yet have all our funding secured, we need office furniture, we're scrounging for grants, computers, curriculum materials, and appliances, and we have salary gaps. But we are all driven by a passion to do as much as we can with and for the Latino community on the Coast, a community facing both a severe shortage of resources and intense local resistance, both due to the explosion in the Latino population since Katrina.

Before the storm, there were virtually no Latinos on the Coast, and thus no social services or communal centers geared towards Spanish speakers or folks of Latin cultural descent. Now, as a result of a boom in the construction and service industries coinciding with a decrease in the indigenous workforce, 25-35,000 Latino immigrants, some documented, some undocumented*, have come to the area, and the tension with the pre-storm community--white, black, and otherwise--is a big problem. Abuse & exploitation abound in the form of unsafe working conditions, paycheck withholding, police harassment, and racially-motivated beatings; those lucky enough to escape such injustices often encounter seemingly insurmountable barriers in their efforts to lead normal, dignified lives--the inability to find healthcare professionals or social workers with whom they are able to communicate, the lack of opportunity to learn English, the loss of familiar support systems upon their arrival in the United States.

This is where The Big P steps in--we accompany individuals on doctor's visits and court appointments, provide casework consultations, represent immigrants during the visa and citizenship application processes, host dinner dances, festivals, and health fairs which build solidarity within the community, teach English, and provide spiritual counseling and fellowship. Amazing, no?

I am so very excited and graced to be on the cutting edge of justice work here on the Coast--and even more excited about becoming part of a new community.

*"Undocumented immigrant" is the correct term for an immigrant who is in the United States without proper documentation. "Illegal alien," "Illegals," "aliens," etc. are offensive terms for human beings who are our brothers and sisters; no human being is "illegal."

Here are a few fun photos from Americorps orientation, which was my life this past week. From now on I'm gonna be run ragged, folks, but that's the way I like it--I'm rarin' to go!!!

Orientation, Day 3 (or 4 maybe?? It all runs together...) Check out the cool t-shirts from past volunteers festooning the walls.

That's my back (in the white shirt and tan pants)--we're installing subflooring to keep the moisture-prone OSB from coming into contact with the new tile flooring. I definitely have the blisters to prove it.

Photo scavenger hunt (we were the first team finished and the only team to find all the clues, plus the bonuses!!)

More Americorps/The Big P fun to follow.

Update!

2007-12-19T14:46:00.000-08:00

Check out the photos added to "House Party"--they increase the post's cuteness 100-fold.

Also, take a look at the marathon post--nothin' like a sweaty marathoner!

Finally, as a year-end treat, here is a photo montage of the past nine months on the Coast. Enjoy!

I single-handedly hold up the state welcome sign on my first trip to Alabama.

Dormant Mardi Gras float in Ocean Springs awaiting 2008's festivities (in which I will FINALLY get to participate!!)

Leah & Dal in The FEMA Hilton (aka my house before it was finished)

The Hair Cut!!! SOOO short!!

Can you say line-dancing? With awful posture no less...

Leah accompanies Kate's interpretation of "Old Latin ballroom dancer woos unsuspecting young thing whilst kneeling in a Mash t-shirt" (performance art on our front porch)

Horseshoe crab on the Carolina shore during Thanksgiving--thanks Dad!

My Sistah et Moi tickling the ivories at our Grandma's over Christmas

A Merry 2008 to all and to all a GOOD NIGHT.

Last but not Least

2007-12-16T07:21:00.001-08:00

Although this weekend was my last here at the Mish, it many ways it was similar to all the others I’ve spent here. I woke up at 7 this morning to see off the volunteers who have toiled all week to bring Gulf Coast families that much closer to reclaiming their homes. This week’s group, from Pennsylvania Dutch country, had left behind bags of gently used work clothes and sleeping bags, which I hauled over to the food pantry at the office. Then at 7:45 a friend picked me up and we drove to a nearby Habitat for Humanity site, where we spent the morning installing windows and nailing down tar paper alongside the soon-to-be homeowner Miss Laverna and her granddaughters. Picture all of us humming along to Christmas carols on the radio as we sweat in the 75 degree, 90% humidity air—utterly disorienting for a native Midwesterner!

At noon I headed back home for leftovers from last night’s staff Christmas dinner, then spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning the house for the long-term volunteers who will replace me in January. As I write this, I am dog-sitting for some Floridians stationed at the local Air Force base; tonight we’ll all get together for some more good food and a few games of bean-bag toss, an Ohio favorite imported to the Coast by volunteers from Cincinnati. Tomorrow morning will find me worshipping at an Episcopal church, since there are no UCC congregations down here, and after church I’ll head back to the office to help put together Christmas baskets for our clients. Then I’ll try to catch a few hours of the Bears game and work on some lesson prep for the ESL class I teach to local Spanish-speakers—part of my new job helping to open a Latino community center next year—before welcoming this coming week’s group of volunteers from Texas.

Looking back on these past 9 months, I realize how often I’ve been swept away by the enthusiasm and grace volunteers bring to their work; how much I’ve learned about client casework and the realities of low-income and homeless living; how surprised I’ve been by the peculiarities of, and my own preconceptions about, the South—and most of all, how much I’ve learned about faith. Thinking about the moments of transformation I’ve witnessed—when a client’s needs are met beyond all their expectations, or when tears well up in a volunteer’s eyes as he or she reflects on a week of service—I can’t help but know that God is here laboring through the hands and hearts of our staff and volunteers, and working in the hearts and minds of our clients, homeowners, and local community members as well. It has been an absolute joy and privilege for me to be a part of this, and I will miss it deeply.
Your prayers and good wishes for the people of the Gulf Coast over the holiday season and into a new year filled with uncertainty—and hope—are truly appreciated.

Wishing you a Christmas of joy and a year of rebirth and rebuilding in the new Christ Child (after all, Jesus was a carpenter!),
Leah

She Did It, Folks!

2007-12-16T07:20:00.000-08:00

As some of you may know, I have been training for a marathon for the last, oh, eternity...I mean, 6 months. Last Saturday, in Huntsville, AL, I ran it.

Before: After:

My roommate and my mom don't think I look any worse for wear... but let me tell you, it took 3 days of recovery just to be able to walk without bowing my legs out like a pregnant lady (thanks to The Sister for that image). It became a very serious game to avoid the slightest unnecessary use of any and all affected muscles--like Hot Lava, but painful. Ouch.

It was, of course, totally worth it--and although around mile 18 I was yelling "This SUCKS!!" to innocent bystanders and grouching at my sister* to meet me with SOME kind of sustenance at the next aid station, 30 minutes after the race was over I began planning when I would be able to do another marathon and strategizing about how to trim down my time. Given the lamentable state of my joints post-race, however, I think I'll stick to half-marathons and 10Ks from now on.

Interesting Marathon Factoids:

-The guy who ran the first marathon back in ancient Greece ran only 24 miles, and then dropped dead. When they held the first modern marathon in the 19th century, the sadistic Brits added the last 2.2 miles we now know and love (aka THE worst part of the race, where you want nothing more than to STOP. RUNNING. NOW. NOW!!!!). The reason? They wanted to end at a nice little castle in the area, which happened to be 26.2 miles from the start instead of the original 24. Stupid Brits.

-Best running outfit: Mr. Incredible (a runner dressed as the movie character in spandex and mask and gloves--really!)

-Best marathon t-shirt slogan: "18 weeks ago I thought this was a good idea."

-Best bystander: blonde woman in a dirndl playing "You Are My Sunshine" and 80s rock anthems on an accordion, on roller skates. I kid you not.

Training for the race helped me realize that I have a stubborn (masochistic?) streak that pushes me to finish my given mileage no matter how hard it is or how much I think I can't do it--this is empowering, but not if it makes you almost collapse during mile 7 of a training run when it's 85 degrees out and 90% humidity and you're scouring the sidewalk for change so you can buy an orange at the grocery store on your route because you forgot to eat something halfway through your run.

Therefore, I also learned how to take care of my body during training and how to establish a training rhythm, which is a very satisfying process. Conditioning your body to do something insane shows you just how incredible these fleshly vessels are. And the calf muscle defintion--good heavens!!!

After the race I was on a constant emotional high for the next week. (Omnipresent Christmas chocolate may also have contributed to this state of euphoria.) What a cool unexpected perk of nearly running yourself to death!

*Special thanks, ETERNAL sisterly thanks, go to my Wonderful Sister, without whose diligent and enthusiastic presence at every other aid station with food, drinks, encouragement, and concern, I .simply. would not have made it. She is an incredible person and I cannot imagine anyone else with whom I would rather have shared this experience. It was a team effort!!

House Party

2007-10-29T14:46:00.000-07:00

Q: What do you do with an antsy 7-year-old who's just spilled glitter all over your desk in an attempt to glamourize your marathon training plan?

A: Take him on a field trip.

OPERATION "KEEP A 7-YR-OLD OCCUPIED":

Agents:
-Leah (aka Volunteer Coordinator)
and
-Number Five, Leah's sidekick (aka 7-year-old son of our Community Empowerment Advocate)
Mission:
Document "after" photos of Ms. Pat's house (90+ year old client with a heart of gold and some rad sunglasses)

Equipment:
-2 digital cameras (for documentation)
-Oreo crisp snack pack (for nourishment)

Mission Background:
Ms. Pat's house, when we began working on it in July, was covered in moldery old siding and graced by grimy, fungus-infested awnings. A crew of teenagers from my hometown (Chitown holla!) came in and destroyed the old siding. Folks from Michigan scoured down the awnings with pressure hoses, bleach, and scrapers, then painted them. Another group reattached the awnings and installed new flooring and cabinets, and a final group painted the whole house and trimmed out the windows and floors. Contractors installed appliances, hooked up the electricity, and connected the plumbing to the refurbished kitchen and bath.

Mission Report:
Number Five and I entered the target by means of a lock box on the front door, taking care to keep the new floors clean. We snapped several photos of the inside and outside of the house, attracting the attention of Ms. Pat (who is currently living across the street) in the process. We spoke with Ms. Pat about her new house. Analysis: homeowner is on Cloud 9 and should be moving in next week.
We exited the premises and Number Five, a budding combination lock prodigy, locked up the house and replaced the keys in the lockbox with no help from the person 3 and 2/7 times his age. Did I mention he made videos of our excursion? And figured out that people have to
As LisafMh of feministmormonhousewives.org would say, "Color me impressed."

Post-Mission Status Report:
Contractor has been called in to address remaining minor electrical inspection details; 7-year-old has new career prospects in locksmithing, or perhaps AV tech support. And we spent ample time inspecting bayou critters and playing at the park on the way home. Client gets her house back, I get my "after" photos, Number Five spins himself sick on the merry-go-round--everyone's happy.

The End.

A Little Piece of Heaven

2007-10-29T14:42:00.000-07:00

Last Thursday was a little piece of heaven. I told a work crew, whom I was dropping off at their site in the AM, that I would pick them up around twelve to bring them back to their trailers for lunch. "Oh, hey,” they said, “Steve [a homeowner client on another site] invited us all over for gumbo, why don't you just take us over there and join us!"

“Well, okay.” Big grin.

It was a perfect fall day (the first, really, we'd had at that point--crisp in the morning and warm and sunny by noon), and the whole crew of drywall-dust-smudged volunteers, plus some hangers-on (me) sat around on plastic chairs underneath the house* eating homemade gumbo, Steve's hospitality spread out before us like an expansive picnic blanket.

Steve is what I like to think of as the best-possible-scenario client--unlike many of our clients who are elderly, disabled, working multiple jobs or unable to face the strain of 2+ years of hurricane aftermath, he is physical & emotionally able to work on his house with our volunteers as they replace siding, put in new flooring, trim out windows, etc. One night he stayed up past dark with a spotlight trained on the floor of a tiny closet as he pieced together leftover bits of laminate flooring, determined not to waste any usable material. Our volunteers, who are (understandably) disappointed when homeowners can't, or don't, come to visit their work-in-progress homes on a regular basis, are thrilled with people like Steve. When a homeowner makes an appearance, checking in once or twice a day--or, even better, works side-by-side with the volunteers--it becomes an infinitely more personal and meaningful experience. Suddenly it's not just a house they're working on, but a home. Big difference.

As his 90-something-year-old mother, Miss Sarah, made sure everyone had enough to eat (and more), and his dogs, Stinky and Belle, begged for Halloween-themed cookie crumbs, I chatted with a family friend who works at a local casino. She told me how she's living with Steve and his mother right now because she can't find affordable rent, and how the ladies who come into the spa where she works routinely marvel at the "cheap," $3,000-a-month rent for condos down here. “If I were paying that much for rent, I wouldn’t be able to eat!” she exclaimed. Good thing she has friends like Steve.

I don't know if it was the weather, the food, or the fellowship that made me the happiest--but it just felt like a taste of kingdom come. Houseless and kitchen-less, a regular guy lays out a simple feast on his front lawn for a group of strangers who have come, in the face of so much injustice, to help him recapture a little “just”-ness in his life.

Tell me this place ain't somethin' to behold.

*Steve's house is raised up on stilts in compliance with FEMA flood regulations.

Christmas in October

2007-10-26T08:45:00.000-07:00

My good friend Rachael has come down to the Coast to volunteer for 2 months--she sold her car, broke her lease on her apartment, and rode a bus over 900 miles to get here! She has one of the toughest jobs at our non-profit--she works directly with clients giving out food, clothing, bus passes, hygiene kits, sack lunches, and other necessities, which means that she deals on a daily basis with desperate situations, hopelessness, heartache, substance abuse & mental health issues, and abrasive attitudes. She's really been a godsend--we'd be tearing out our hair if it weren't for all she does as the "gatekeeper" of our organization!

Rachael is also my role model for green-ness--environmental stewardship--and this year she's crafted a beautiful Christmas letter to send out to her family and friends in preparation for the holiday season. Read on, and check out the Green Xmas tips on the post below! --Leah

"Let me be one of the first to wish you “Merry Christmas 2007!” Yes, I know that you’re probably sifting through Halloween candy as you read this and, at best, envisioning the turkey and mashed potatoes that await you in several weeks. Christmas probably isn’t the first thing on your mind. But as you head into the upcoming holiday season, I wanted to share a few thoughts with you that might help to enlighten and enrich your Christmas experience this year.

The amazing book I read earlier this year Serve God, Save the Planet by Matthew Sleeth really challenged me to evaluate my habits and lifestyle in relationship to my faith. I came to fully understand why eco-stewardship is such a crucial part of following Jesus’ call to love our neighbors. Furthermore, Sleeth’s book helped to open my eyes to my multitudes of blessings and reminded me of the Bible’s position on giving to those in need and fighting for justice for the weak and oppressed. Being on the Gulf Coast has humbled me immensely and allowed me to understand the importance of the little things I take for granted on a daily basis.

As Christians we are oftentimes inundated with portraits of the poor and told how lucky we are to have things as simple as food, clothing, and shelter. Yet, though Jesus reminds us that the poor are among us, we are insulated enough not to really have to confront that fact, at least on a regular basis. In the hustle and bustle of our daily lives we are not often conscious of the suffering our brothers and sisters are enduring all around us. When we are hungry, we head to the fridge. When we are cold, we grab a sweater. When we are tired, we climb into bed. Too often it is easy to forget how all around us people struggle to secure even one of these basic needs every single day.

So where do my Christmas tidings fit into all of this? Well, as I began to understand the breadth of my many gifts, I started to assess the nature of holiday gift giving in general. I began to ask myself, “What do I really need for Christmas this year?” And while visions of proverbial “sugar plums” danced through my head, I quickly recognized that while I certainly would love a new camera or cute winter sweater, there was nothing I could say I truly needed. The images of the people I served daily here in Mississippi began to fill my mind, and before I knew it I was rid of those silly dancing sugar plums.

Christmas is a holiday commemorating the greatest gift we could ever receive: the love and grace of Jesus Christ. We give gifts each year to symbolize this gift and those that the Magi joyfully brought to the baby Jesus. Giving gifts to one another as a sign of love, joy, and peace is a wonderful part of our contemporary Christmas tradition. Yet, I had to ask myself, “Do I really need a new bath set or gift card to commemorate the birth of my savior?” Furthermore, when there are those who hope to fill the bellies of their crying babies, soothe their aching feet, or find a respite from the cold on Christmas Day, isn’t there a better way to honor and celebrate His life and teachings?

So, this year, in honor of Jesus’ birthday, I have a different kind of Christmas list for all of you. I would like food, clothing, and shelter for those who need it. How can you do that? Well, each week we turn away hundreds of people who need help with the basic necessities of life because there simply aren’t enough resources for them. Instead of buying me a present this Christmas, you have a wonderful opportunity to honor Jesus and his call to love your brothers and sisters in the Gulf Coast region by making a gift to the organizations where I work*. The joy and relief you can provide for them is far better than any present you could ever buy for me!

Furthermore, I lovingly challenge you to evaluate your own holiday gift giving. I know I certainly have drawers full of gifts I have barely touched. Are there people in your life that are so difficult to buy for you always end up just resorting to something impersonal or unnecessary? Think instead of donating to a charity that means something to them! Do you have items you could give to a mission in your area? Do you have a free Saturday to volunteer your time? The best gift we could ever receive was Jesus’ unfailing love. In turn, the best gift we can ever give is to love our neighbors, each and every one: especially the ones it is easy to forget about it amidst the chaos of our contemporary commercial Christmas.

…with tidings of comfort and joy… --Rachael"

Christmas in October--Go Green!

2007-10-26T08:35:00.000-07:00

Tips for a Green and Socially-Responsible Holiday Season
Festive & easy ideas by my good friend Rachael, my green heroine!!

1. Recycle your tree
Did you know that you actually can purchase a live Christmas tree that can be replanted post-holiday season? If you’re not into living trees then you can still purchase a cut tree, but make sure to take the extra step of recycling it instead of sticking it out with the trash! Go to Earth911.org to research recycling programs near you! (It’s also a great resource for recycling needs of all kinds…)

2. Minimize wrapping and packaging
Think of all the paper, bags, boxes, and ribbons you throw away every year! If nothing else, look for recycled wrapping paper. Think about cutting back on tissue paper and trimmings. Get creative with packaging; try layering a gift bag with several gifts instead of splitting presents into individual parts. And do your environment and your pocketbook a favor and unwrap carefully so you can reuse it next year!

3. Give non-tangibles
The best way to reduce wasted packaging is to reduce what is being packaged! Instead of bulky gifts think about treating a friend or loved one to dinner, a night at the theater, a car wash, or an evening of free babysitting!

4. Buy local
Make Christmas merrier for families and small businesses in your area by patronizing local stores and restaurants. Keep this in mind when you’re stocking the fridge for holiday parties, too! Food and travel are actually bigger waste contributors during the holidays than paper waste. Remember that the average meal travels 1500 miles to get to your plate. Be a good neighbor in more than one way and shop locally!

5. Upgrade to LED lighting
LED lights use only about 10% of the energy of incandescent bulbs and last so much longer. They also emit much less heat which makes them safer to hang on the tree next to your ornaments. And once you hang your LEDs, remember to turn them off when you’re out of the house or in bed for the night.

6. BYOSB (Bring Your Own Shopping Bag!)
Have you "sprung" yet for those inexpensive, reusable grocery shopping bags? If not, this is a perfect time to do it! Keep them in your car and bring them along when you run out to get ingredients for a party snack or head to the mall for your next round of gifts. Some stores even give you a discount for bringing your own bag! (And if you forget, save disposable bags too and reuse them to tote gifts to a party!)

7. Shop online
If you know what you want, cut out the middle man and buy direct from the warehouse. This cuts back on unnecessary packaging and delivery to wholesalers and retail stores as well as your excess time and gas going to the mall.

8. Be fair and buy fair
When you’re shopping, look for fair trade certified products. Fair trade certification means that producers and laborers are ensured a fair price and labor conditions. Remember this: money is power. Every time you give a company money you empower them to continue the practices they have in place. How about empowering companies committed to justice and equity this Christmas season? Check out http://transfairusa.org/

9. Do your research
Co-op America has a “Responsible Shopper” webpage where you can learn about the social and environmental impact of major corporations. Go to http://www.coopamerica.org/programs/rs/ and decide for yourself which companies deserve your support this holiday season.

10. Remember to reduce, reuse, recycle…and relish in green holiday cheer!

(Life After) Death & Taxes

2007-10-25T19:55:00.000-07:00

An interesting post about the messed-up tax structure in Mississippi, our current gubernatorial race (bizaaaarre--see the NYTimes article entitled "In Mississippi, Democrat Runs in G.O.P. Lane," : http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/us/10governor.html?_r=1&ei=5018&en=25841aa8d8ef109a&ex=1192680000&partner=BRITANNICA&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin ),
and the reasons behind our dubious distinction as #1 in the country for poverty levels. See also my comment in response--the poster brings up some interesting info, I think, but is way off-base on a couple of points.

"Only in Mississippi...."

Thanks for the link go to The Sister. :)

Where Have You Been All My Life, Fall???

2007-10-13T12:41:00.001-07:00

The great state of Mississippi finally got a touch of fall weather in the middle of this past week. This statement requires some qualification, of course--we're talking mid-80s as the high every day, with mornings brisk enough for a long-sleeved shirt if you're so inclined (which I'm not). People here wear t-shirts and shorts on Halloween, not long-johns under their costumes like where I grew up (this fact considerably improves the look of the midriff-baring Princess Jasmine combo).
Nevertheless, there's a breeze in the air and the humidity has taken a vacation to the tropics; later-blooming goldenrod is flowering all over the wild spots in the highway medians and ditches; the butterflies that folks up north have said goodbye to are flitting in between the wall frames going up on new houses being built on the beach, and hummingbirds are attacking my car when I pull up to a stop sign too close to their feeding ground (those buggers are territorial!). I've come to feel a surprising affection for the scruffy sycamore, the only tree that shows signs (albeit brown and yellow signs, not the festive red-orange-gold kind) of jumping on the fall bandwagon. It seems to have filled out all at once in a drunken foliate spree, then woken up the next morning to regret its profligate ways and promptly shed its leaves like half-eaten canapes that have been left out all night. Sycamore, you rascal!

The other way I know fall has arrived? The construction supers at the Habitat for Humanity house I worked on this morning had labeled all the interior walls and their future locations on the subfloor according to the Patriots and Colts football teams: "Hey, where's Randy Moss? Let's get him up here right next to Tom Brady and pound a few nails into him. Then we'll work on Peyton."

Ah, Fall.

Hungry for Debt Cancellation

2007-10-10T08:58:00.000-07:00

I signed up for a fast 6 weeks ago in solidarity with Rev. David Duncombe of the UCC, who is undertaking a 21-day fast for debt relief for countries whose debt was not forgiven at the G8 conference. Rev. Duncombe is using this time to meet with lawmakers in Washington, D.C. to garner support for HR 2634, the Jubilee 2007 Act. This act would alleviate the debt of countries not covered in the 2005 G8 debt cancellation agreement but which are still in desperate need of debt forgiveness. The stranglehold of interest and debt payments that industrialized countries and international financial institutions (like IMF and World Bank) hold over the heads of developing countries effectivley stifles any chance they have of combating poverty and injustice in a meaningful way. Many other factors (some internal, like corruption and poor environmental stewardship; some external, like international trade and ag policies) need to change for extreme poverty to be halved by 2015, as stated in the G8's Millenium Development Goals; but continuing to exact interest and principle payments on meaningless, crippling loans which prevent developing countries from even beginning to address extreme poverty and its root causes does not help. So I've been fasting for 6 consecutive Thursdays, starting on Sept. 6 and ending tomorrow; and I've committed to repeatedly contact my Congressional representatives in an effort to pass HR 2634. The money I save from not consuming meals was sent to Heifer Project International ( http://www.heifer.org/) to help a poverty-stricken family become agriculturally sustainable, financially independent, and healthier with a gift of bees whose honey they will harvest and sell.

If you want to know why I'm doing it, here's a short explanation: http://www.jubileeusa.org/home/front-page-news/cdffeatures.html You can also link to more info about debt relief on the Jubilee website.

Fasting is--well, an interesting experience. For those of you interested in the specifics, I am not eating any solid food on the days that I fast--just liquids (water, juice, sports drinks, hot chocolate, soy milk, tea, etc.), from the time I wake up until the time I fall asleep. At first it gives you a sort of light, floaty feeling--you're zipping about and getting things done efficiently--and there's a sense that you're cleansing your body (until you drink three cups of fake powder chai tea....). But by the afternoon, around 5pm or so, I start to crash and feel a complete lack of energy and concentration. If I can keep myself busy, like teaching ESL class or hanging out drinking some juice at a friends' house while they eat a homecooked crab cakes dinner (sigh...)--then I'm fine. But if there's nothing external to do, I lay on the couch watching DVDs and barely moving, and I head for bed at 7:30 or 8. So obviously the key is staying buzzzzzy.

I find what I miss the most is not actually the taste of food or the sensation of having a full stomach, but the texture of food, the solidness of it as I chew. After your first dozen cups of microwaved apple juice, you just want to bite into a waffle or a granola bar or pudding or.... anything substantial.

Other than that--it's not bad. Friends feel guilty for eating in front of me, but it's a choice I've made. I went to visit a friend in the hospital a few weeks ago and was jokingly commiserating about how we were both on liquid diets--but she pointed out how completely different it was because hers was doctor-enforced and mine was voluntarily. It's true, and her comment was a reminder of just how disparate real hunger is compared to one day of fasting. But just a taste of that (no pun intended)--just a short time of self-imposed deprivation, is good to remind you what millions of your fellow humans go through daily. Just a taste.

Je jure mon allégeance...

2007-09-03T11:07:00.000-07:00

I was driving back from dropping off a friend at the New Orleans airport the other day around 5:30 am, listening to the Ragin' Cajun, 100.3 FM. It was still dark out as I cut through the city on the 610, and suddenly the station changed from your typical Zydeco-Cajun mix of accordion-laced down-homey tunes, sung in accented French, to a recording of several voices intoning cyclic chants about God, Jesus, and "le Saint Esprit." It took me a few listens to realize (being the non-Catholic that I am) that it was a congregation praying the Rosary.... in Cajun French. Weird.

Folks who have learned "Parisian" French in a sterile academic setting often find Cajun French understandable, but barely. I like to think of it as the difference between a Boston Brahmin's clean, starched-collar elocution and the bouncing, rollicking twang of a native Texan. There is something sort of buoyant about the way Cajun words drop into the mouth and tumble around, in the process smoothing away some of the sharper, more precise corners that indicate that certain "raffinement" particular to textbook French. (Montrealites (Montréalais??) sound like this to me as well--probably just my American ears' inability to hear the nuances between the two.)

The repetitive nature of the Rosary was oddly calming as I powered through narrow lanes and sharp curves, zoomed up off of an energy drink (since I'd been awake from 3am on...). I spent so many miles listening to Cajun Catholics pray that I can now say the Hail Mary in French. I have no idea how to say it in English, but since I only go to Mass when I'm in France, I guess it doesn't really matter.

The strangest part about this was crossing the I-10 Twinspan going east as the sun was rising. As the clock ticked over to 6am, an instrumental version of the national anthem struck up. Then, in a moment of bizarre cognitive dissonance, my ears filled with the sound of the Pledge of Allegiance being transmitted over the airwaves in French. I wondered if this expression of patriotism was an intentional embrace of what the United States did for the foremothers and forefathers of today's Cajuns--it was, after all, this country which welcomed the Acadian refugees when the British kicked them out of Canada. Given the long-term, deliberate persecution of French-speaking Louisianans, however, and the systematic repression of pretty much any other minority group wanting to preserve their language and cultural heritage in this country (Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, some dialect speakers, indigenous Spanish communities...), it's quite ironic that the local Cajun radio station broadcasts a Pledge of Allegiance to the government in a language which they were forbidden to speak by that very same government.

Oh, the complexities of United States history.

PS: A belated happy Indigenous People's Day (known to most of us as Columbus Day), by the way. I refer to it as the former because I'd rather celebrate the immense diversity of this land's native cultures than the man who massacred thousands of Arawak Indians in the interest of expanding Spain's imperial grasp.

2 Years and Counting...

2007-08-27T08:40:00.000-07:00

Two years after Hurricane Katrina, life on the Gulf Coast has become a strange mix of the outwardly normal interspliced with the inwardly fragile. Storms forming in the Gulf loom over every casual conversation about the weather; a mundane review of a staff hurricane preparedness plan causes faces to cloud and shoulders to slump as coworkers relive the pain of Katrina’s chaotic aftermath. Though they faithfully show up for work, poor sleep and depression plague everyone from the cashier at the food mart down the street to Miss Gina, the woman holding together the local soup kitchen with her two hands. School-aged children cower in closets when afternoon thunder rolls on the Gulf; Miss Clara, an elderly client, blows out another year’s candles with a fervent wish not to spend her next birthday in a trailer seeping formaldehyde. There’s a sense that we are all teetering on the edge of a delicate balance between the routine and the heart-stopping.

Thankfully, physical progress continues to scramble determinedly along, thanks largely to volunteer groups like the ones that have come to serve at the organization where I work. One by one, damaged houses come back to life, as signs of recovery crop up like the morning glories in the vacant lots now dotting the city. Traffic lights have been restored on the main drag, and the bridge at the west end of Highway 90 reopened in June. Thanks to the labors of our volunteers, Miss Clara will be back in her house by Christmas instead of sometime next year. But the deepest damage wreaked by the storm—perhaps less immediately evident, but no less insidious—is that inflicted upon the spirits of those who bore the wrath of Katrina and who fight, every day, the battle of reconstructing entire lives from next to nothing. As much effort and energy as it takes to re-shingle tattered roofs, install new cabinets, repair rotten siding and replace buckled flooring, these tasks are all readily tackled with the abundance of volunteer sweat and enthusiasm which we are so blessed to have. A far more elusive commission for our community remains that of our organization's post-Katrina slogan: Rebuilding Lives, Rebuilding Hope.

As the two-year anniversary approaches, we are all called to reflect on how far we’ve come and how far we have yet to go, and what role each of us—you and I—might play in the continued effort to accomplish our mission. As welcome as physical labor and material and financial donations continue to be, taking the time to establish an exchange with local school kids*, or to write a letter of solidarity to the local paper (www.sunherald.com); calling your senators, then representatives, to ask them to push hurricane recovery funding through Congress; saying a simple prayer for the physical and spiritual recovery of the Gulf Coast—these are gifts just as valuable as a nail pounded in a two-by-four. Let the Coast know you have not forgotten them—or us, I should say, because in a way I have become a part of the community here, and I feel called to remain in Mississippi past the end of my volunteer term and to keep working for a just recovery. So I, along with the rest of the Coast, ask for your ongoing prayers and support, as we continue to Rebuild Lives and Rebuild Hope.

*http://www.greatschools.net/cgi-bin/ms/district_profile/9/ ; http://www.lbsd.k12.ms.us/ ; http://www.gulfportschools.org/index2.html ; www.biloxischools.net ; http://www.harrison.k12.ms.us/Default.aspx?tabid=135 ; http://www.ossd.k12.ms.us/

And..... We're Back!

2007-07-18T15:11:00.000-07:00

As I have been reminded/chastised by more than one person in the last few weeks (and I am surprised and grateful that this many people care!), I have not been posting regularly as of late. This is due to a combination of extreme busyness at work, being out of town on several weekends, having guests/friends come to visit, and being in a general funk about writing. As faithful readers out there may remember, my first post was called "Waiting for the Rain"--and I am here to say that the drought is over!

What kicked me back into gear today was a small thing, despite the pre-existing weight of some very rich experiences bearing down on me and just crying out to be dissected and processed. In fact, it was a very ordinary, everyday object that most of us probably don't even consciously notice. My zeal for blogging was reignited by a mailbox.

For the past few weeks, our agency has been supplying volunteers to the local coordination center, which orchestrates the relief efforts of the dozen+ organizations doing rebuilding work in our immediate community. The coordination center has been utilizing our volunteers (amongst others) to conduct site-by-site surveys of the area's neighborhoods in order to determine the condition of the buildings on each lot, who owns them, and where the owners are in the recovery process. This information helps to direct the center's outreach efforts and rehab initiatives, and generally allows everyone to gauge the community's progress on the monumental path to recovery. It's hot, long work, but it can be very rewarding because it gives volunteers the opportunity to interact with local residents in a meaningful way--in responding to the survey questions, residents will often spend 15 or 20 minutes, or longer, reliving the hurricane and its aftermath and simply sharing their incredible, emotional stories with the volunteers. Those administering the survey encounter gratefulness, anger, hope, despair, friendliness, slamming doors, the peculiar love/hate relationship with FEMA, and the inevitable Chatty Cathy (or Carl).

On our post-lunch surveying run, however, we encountered none of the above. We were driving north of the tracks, attempting to find a bit of a street that had suddenly stopped on the south side of the tracks and was supposed to pick up several blocks down on the other side. We finally found the street, but all it took was a once-over to realize that it was nothing but a string of empty lots, each one so overgrown that they ran together into one long, unruly field. Apparently they hadn't been touched in years, or maybe decades; there was little hope of finding any of the addresses we'd been given to check off our list, 342-360 Saratoga. As I was executing a 3-point turn to head over to the next grid square on our survey maps, a volunteer in the back seat said, "Yep, there's 342--we're in the right place. No houses, though." I turned to ask how he knew which lot we were on, and saw a black metal mailbox almost buried in vegetation, stubbornly bent at a gravity-defying angle. The metallic stickers on its side announced that it was, in fact, #342. The fact that this used to be a house, a home--an entire life--suddenly hit me in the gut, going deeper than the constant, wearying deluge of statistics and stories, zeroing in on the place where you finally get it. Oof. This entire street used to be populated, lively; there was a lone, defiant mailbox with a clearly printed address to prove it right in front of us. Across the street, I could suddenly make out an empty dog kennel with the door hanging open. Traces of whole lives. Where are these people now? Down the block awaiting the funds to rebuild? Moved away to a fresh start? Dead?

Destroyer of records and pillager of essential papers, Katrina hit hard in this data-obsessed country, where you don't really exist unless you have an address. Those powerful little numbers give you someplace to receive mail and bills; they enable you to get a library card or a driver's license, file for taxes or apply for a new social security card; they mean you can vote as a citizen of the United States and indicate where you can do so; they tell the power company which transformer to repair when the lights go out and the customer service lady at the waste management company where your garbage gets picked up; they even allow the pizza delivery people to find you. My housemate and I just recently got an official address for our longterm volunteer house and spent a quarter of an hour screwing plastic numbers onto our gable end, thus declaring our newfound legitimacy to the world; I suddenly felt safer because an ambulance or a fire truck would now know how to get to us in an emergency.

An address puts you on the map, literally and figuratively--if there had been no mailbox, no address on that lot today, we would not have been able to officially mark off Lot #432 as "vacant/abandoned" on our survey grid. That was what was so depressing about it, I suppose--today, instead of being the emblem that facilitates so many daily tasks and validates an entire existence, those numerals were a death knell, proof positive that what once existed so definitively, no longer does. Today, those numbers were the embodiment of all that has been lost here on the Coast.

Learning to Receive

2007-06-12T09:10:00.000-07:00

I've learned in the course of my travels that you often have to set aside your own preconceptions of "the way things are" in order to pay respect to, and gain appreciation for, your host's cultural traditions. You know, "When in Rome..." Usually this is a no-brainer for me--my openness to other ways of doing things has led me to many adventures and unfamiliar undertakings, everything from eating eel at a French-Japanese wedding to wearing the South Asian equivalent of Hammer pants to conform to conservative Indian mores. But one area of custom and cultural obeisance never fails to put my knickers in a twist: Hospitality. I was raised to offer to pay for a dinner or some other excursion or event when you are a guest in someone else's home, as a way of saying thank you; but in a lot of other cultures, this is the opposite of the norm. I once stayed with a Turkish college student in Istanbul (who had probably as much spending money as I did--zip) who paid for all my meals, all my museum visits, all my transportation, all the tea I drank and all the backgammon games I played, and even bought me a souvenir trinket I'd been admiring. When I asked, for the second or third time, to pay for a meal as my way of saying thanks, she looked me directly in the eyes and said, with a pained expression on her face, "STOP! You are shaming me." What I thought of as courteous offers were, in fact, insinuations that she and her family didn't have enough of a sense of honor to show the proper care and respect due to guests.

This same principle--the inverse of what I know--applies whether you're talking Turkish peasants or Istanbul urbanites, Varanasi schoolteachers or Delhi socialites, Lousiana ranchers or Gulf Coast dockworkers. And it means that I as an outsider have to swallow my own ingrained cultural patterns, rethink my definitions of "generosity" and "hospitality," and give up the power I'm used to having as an equal contributor. I hate that indebted feeling--it takes some serious reconditioning for me to accept, in its totality, being a guest.

In fact, it seems to me that the whole guest-host relationship is about power--my inclination as a white American woman is to assert my independence by showing that I can take care of myself (financially and otherwise) and that I won't be sugar-daddied, especially by men my own age. I'm used to being in power, or at least sharing power, and when I can't I chafe against what I see as being constrained to a very limited, passive, female role. This is, in part, why I find myself wanting to rebel so hard against the "Southern gentleman" type down here, the man who tries to pay for everything, all the time, no exceptions--and who looks at you like you're cross-eyed if you even think of trying to pick up the tab. It's like you're insulting his mother--come to think of it, you are, because you're implying that she didn't raise him right. Now, I'm not sure I could ever be that unequal of a partner, in terms of finances or power, in a longterm relationship--but as a short-term resident of the South, I am having to learn to accept the intensity of the "chivalry" here. (As an aside, let us note that chivalry as a way of life went out either with the Crusades or the pistol duels of the 19th century, depending on whom you ask, but either way it is long gone.)
Really it's a matter of becoming vulnerable enough, trusting enough, to let someone else make the decisions for you; but I tend to see the "imbalance" in this dynamic in terms of what I can't give or repay, not in terms of what I am allowing others to give to me. Something to work on.

The other aspect of this hospitality conundrum is something I often witness workcampers butting up against--accepting gifts from those you have come to help. One pastor from Connecticut who volunteered here told me how frustrated he had been when, as a young man leading a work group at our organization, he and his crew had stocked the empty pantry of the homeowner whose kitchen they'd been rehabbing as a house-warming present, only to find on their last day of work that she had used every last pickle slice and potato chip to make them a huge farewell lunch. "That food was supposed go to her," he had lamented at the time; "it wasn't supposed to be used on us!" As he later put it, he learned some grace-filled lessons about hospitality and generosity that week. I'm reminded of the parable of the Widow's Mite: the fact that the homeowner gave all she had, even though she had so little, amplified the magnitude of her gesture so that it was able to embody the sense of gratitude she felt for the work that had transformed her daily existence. In response, the workers had to learn to give up the control they'd had of the situation all week and, in a Christ-inspired role reversal, let the receiver become the giver, and vice-versa.

Another example from earlier this year: each week for 1o weeks straight my good friend Lucious cooked a massive feast for the volunteers who had come to work on his house. Each week he bought 30 or 40 steaks; he slow-cooked 3 racks of ribs; he boiled, fried, and grilled several pounds of huge Gulf shrimp; he fried up tons of flaky catfish; he roasted heaps of chicken wings and legs; he boiled snappy blue crabs; he whipped up endless batches of onion rings, waffle fries, tater tots, potato salad, etc. etc. Even though he claimed to have an "in" at local butcher and seafood shops (which he probably does, since he's been in the restaurant business for years), it still cost him a small fortune to prepare all that deliciousness; not to mention to do it ten times. And not only was each such undertaking financially burdensome, but it was time-consuming as well: he would start the day before by smoldering an entire section of tree trunk in a burn barrel to make the coals for his grill. Come the morning of the day of, he would spend hours slicing and chopping and roasting and boiling in the hot sun in order to feed his crew (and half the neighborhood). And he consistently met with a withering look of disdain all offers of reimbursement.

Often volunteers expressed consternation about this: "Why does Lucious spend all this time and money on us, when it would be better spent buying supplies or paying for labor to rehab his house?" It's for the same reason he doesn't think twice about buying workcampers a radio or renting a Port-O-Potty for their convenience: it's his way of saying "thank you."

Once again, it's about power--or rather, the lack of power you feel when you have been forced to cram yourself and your wife and your granddaughters into an unsanitary FEMA trailer for over 20 months, the helplessness you feel when even though you are the family provider, you can't get together enough resources or time to restore your family's home to a condition that's fit for living. I can't imagine the humility it takes to allow someone to help you rebuild your life and do for you what you cannot do for yourself, day after day after day. How vulnerable and indebted you would feel... and how badly you would want to restore the balance between you and your helpers, even in a symbolic way. Lucious responded to our doing for him what he couldn't do for himself by doing for us what we couldn't do for ourselves--preparing a soul food-seafood feast and treating us to a good dose of Southern Hospitality. Which means put your billfolds away, shut your mouths and "eat you some shrimp, Boo!" A delicious lesson to learn.

The 3 Stooges

2007-06-11T16:11:00.000-07:00

I must have a sign on my forehead, invisible to me but blatantly obvious to everyone around me, that says: "Please, give me animals to care for!! Preferably difficult cases!! And give them over to me for several days in a row, since clearly I have nothing else to do!!"
Because after the Infamous Kitten Incident (see Attack of the Kitties, May 6 post), I have once again ended up with multiple, domesticated (arguably) creatures under my wings--and this time it's dogs. A Whole Lotta Dog, to be precise.
It happened like this. My friend's father passed away unexpectedly, and she called me up from work and asked if I would be willing to dog- and house-sit while she and her husband went home to Florida to be with her family. We had only known each other for a period of several weeks, and the sum total of our interactions amounted to:

1.5 softball games and
.5 cornhole/grillout parties.

But she asked me because, as she put it, "I trust you." (This is one of those blessed moments in your life when you realize you must be doing something right.) I said yes, of course, even though I had never met her dogs--I am, by definition, a dog person, and I figured it couldn't be too taxing.

This is how I ended up dogsitting Merlin, Maverick, and Samson, otherwise known as The Three Stooges. (Points if you get the name reference for the first two--my friend's husband is in the Air Force, if that helps.)

Merlin and Maverick are black German shepherds, and Samson is, appropriately, a giant black and white Newfoundland. As mentioned above, this amounts to A Whole Lotta Dog. Although they are full grown, they are still in the teenage stage developmentally, and, as their owners put it, they are "really stupid" (they haven't trashed the house yet, so as far as I'm concerned, they're not all that dumb). Merlin and Maverick, who are brothers, were produced through some importunate breeding and thus are not considered high-quality dogs in a lineage sense, but in my opinion they're still some good-looking animals. Samson was an orphaned puppy being fostered by my friend's former boss when he decided he could no longer keep a steadily growing giant; my friend, having grown up with Newfs, took him on as a charity case and fell in love. He is the slowest of the three, but quite affectionate. All of them are nuts about tennis balls, shoes, and licking me in the face to wake me up in the morning. A more effective alarm clock I have yet to find.
I've been dogsitting since Thursday night (this will be night 5), and I have to say, despite the thick black and white hairs showing up in everything I own (including some I discovered between the keys of my laptop when I opened it this morning at work), it has its merits. First of all, as I said before, I am a dog person, and my family dog (a cute if somewhat aloof beagle named Belle) died in March. So it was high time I got some doggy TLC! Secondly, as I noted, these are some surprisingly beautiful animals, and once they warm up to you, they are all fun and games and let's-jump-on-Leah-because-we've-forgotten-we're-not-puppy-sized-anymore! (We just played a round of that and now the couch is vibrating because they are all panting in synch.) It's a fascinating process to discover the dynamics among the three of them and to learn their personalities. And you know, it's nice to have someone, or someones, to come home to. Even if they slobber. (In your armpit.) It gives your life a little more sense of purpose to be caring for other creatures, whether human or animal.
I'll try to take some pictures over the next few days to post here--particularly if I can capture that quizzical "What is it? WHAT IS IT??!!" look that they pull off so well anytime a doorbell rings on TV or I move more than a quarter of an inch from my seat.

Here's to lazy summer days sitting in a hammock with a beer and a saliva-covered tennis ball and the blue sky and three canine companions to keep you busy.

Opening Day

2007-06-01T08:02:00.000-07:00

Today is opening day of the 2007 Atlantic Hurricane Season. How I wish we were talking about a sports team here...

Right now I'm not feeling too anxious about the season, but that's because I've never lived through the terror that is a Katrina or a Camille. They're predicting a ragin' season this year, but they predicted that last year as well and we had a vewwy vewwy qwiii-et season. *knocks on wood*

The better part of this week has been devoted to making hurricane evacuation plans, buying hurricane clips and plywood to cover our windows, and holding discussions about stockpiling our food pantry. Wasn't too freaked out until I thought about getting the interns I'm supervising in New Orleans out of there in case of a storm, and the fact that I won't be there in the city to help them.

Your prayers/good vibes for a quiet season are appreciated.

Here's hopin' that the only hurricanes we encounter this year are the kind that come in a glass with a little paper umbrella!

Summer is...

2007-05-29T09:03:00.000-07:00

the wall of heat inside my ovenlike car
overcome
by the sharp wave of cold that drenches my insides
when I bite into a pink sour lemon sno-ball.

With the doors flung ajar
I sit with my legs hanging out like a clumsy colt's
and let the breeze blow through, straight from the brassy blue sky.

crunch suck melt slurp ahhhhh.

Trivia

2007-05-27T15:52:00.000-07:00

My sister (who visited last weekend--see "The Fecund Gulf") "tagged" me, which means she wants to know seven things about me that most blog readers don’t. So you get to hear them too. (ps I knew all of her 7 posted things on her blog, CrashOctopus.com--somewhere I am getting major sibling points!!)

1. I'm a nomad--I was born in Texas, grew up in Illinois, went to school in Boston and France, and have been to a good dozen other countries and 40-some states (Alabama being the latest--see the post titled Stars Fell On... on April 17). I also lived in New Orleans for a summer and now have ended up in Mississippi. It's sort of like that roulette rhyme: 'Round and 'round she goes, where she stops, nobody knows!
2. I was super-picky about the food I would eat when I was little; I ate nothing green except peas. The veggies I would eat consisted of corn, potatoes (okay, those are both starches), peas, and cooked carrots (never raw, horrors!!) with ketchup on them. Now I eat everything from alligator to rattlesnake to liver to rutabaga to spinach to borscht... my, how times have changed.
3. I used to play the piano. Key words, "used to." As in, no longer.
4. I am allergic to kitties. But not the ones I fostered, mysteriously enough...
5. I saw the movie The Notebook last night for the first time and I cried. I am a sucker for a good love story--not the sappy kind, but the kind that is a testament to the kind of love "that plants the fire in our hearts and brings peace to our minds."
6. Eating whole pints of Blue Bell Ice Cream & watching YouTube videos of West Wing montages, Avril Lavigne music videos, and the guy who can play all of the original Mario Brothers soundtrack on the piano are my guilty pleasures. Okay, maybe not so guilty... I thoroughly enjoy them.
7. I like bats. There goes one now! (I think a colony lives in the live oaks in my front yard.)

Now I'm supposed to go "tag" 7 other bloggers... yeah, I know, hmm, 2 other bloggers, one of which already tagged me. But here's the link to the other blogger, my godsister Alison, who is now *it*! http://www.bluishorange.com/

The Fecund Gulf

2007-05-22T11:15:00.000-07:00

"O God, how manifold are your works! In wisdom you have made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures.

Yonder is the sea, great and wide,
it is teeming with countless creatures,
living things both small and great.

There go the ships, and Leviathan that you formed to sport in it."
--Psalm 104:24-25

Last weekend my sister came to visit (hurrah for lovely sisters who sacrifice their time and their money to come and see you--and as a birthday present, no less!) and it was fantastically refreshing. We ate too much, we slept in (a little), we got sunburned and bug-bitten. And we got to have those great long conversations where you find you don't have to explain yourself because all the ground work is already laid--you've known each other for so long, learned each other's habits, passions, mannerisms and endearing and/or annoying idiosyncrasies, and so the person you're talking to already gets it, gets you. It's like jumping right back into the middle of a book you haven't picked up in five months, and not having to go back and reread to catch yourself up because you know the story so well. And to think we used to fight about who crossed the invisible line in the back seat of the car...

The other thing we did last weekend was Nature. We saw and experienced so much wildlife that I told The Sis we should be getting our own Discovery Channel show. Here's a little taste:

Saturday we went to the beach armed with cameras and sunscreen and wandered out onto a dock with some kind of shorebirds perched on the end, hoping to get a shot or two (The Sister is a photographer, amongst other things).

While she was on her belly stalking these two smidgeons of birds--who, seemingly incapable of flying far enough to get safely back to shore, just kept edging closer and closer to the end of the dock until they had nowhere else to go--I was experimenting with the effect of my shadow on a school of tiny fish swimming against the current like iridescent grains of rice. Suddenly a great, beautiful heron flew almost directly over our heads. The Sister was trying to follow it with her camera as it passed us, when, lo and behold, a second heron as magnificent as the first came in to land about twenty feet away from us on our dock. Yes, we were laying low, and yes, we weren't really moving, but I was awed that such a normally skittish bird (the same species that takes off from the pond I run by in the mornings if I so much as breathe wrong) would choose to stay this close to humans. The heron (a great blue) just stood there for 10 or 15 minutes, unperturbedly grooming itself, inspecting us, and scanning the horizon for... what? Its partner? Food? Do herons just sit and veg out sometimes with no purpose other than to stand there lookin' good?

The highlight of the visit in terms of comedy was definitely the "heron pretends to be dog by scratching itself with long clawed feet" routine.

I'm a romantic, I freely admit it--but in the tradition of Native spirituality, it felt like the Heron Spirit had deigned to pay us a visit. It felt pretty special.

Next The Sister tried wading out into the water to snap a few photos of a bosomy pelican napping on a pier piling. It didn't seem to feel too enthusiastic about posing; but I got some good shots of my sister realizing she was knee-deep in saltwater holding a battery-operated device!

As she waded back out of the water, we were approached by another form of wildlife: a 2-year-old gabbling incoherently about the little crabs in the reeds--or something. Lest you think he is a little behind developmentally in terms of learning to speak intelligibly, we learned from his grandparents that he is learning to speak English and Portuguese--we just felt dumb compared to a little kid who could tell whole stories about marauding airplanes and spies in two different languages (albeit at the same time).

Later that afternoon we took it into our heads to go crabbing, an adventure which started out at the marina bait shop with a lesson from an elderly black lady who taught us how to tie a lead string onto a crabbing net like she'd been doing it her whole life--which, come to think of it, she probably has; another lady we met later that afternoon was crabbing for "groceries," as she put it. This is one way people put food on their tables down here.

Then off to the grocery store for a pack of chicken necks, one of which we tied to the sweet spot in the middle of the crab net and lowered off of the public pier (see The Pier). When lowered to the bottom, the upper ring of the net collapses flat onto the lower ring, leaving the bait innocently lying on the ocean floor, free to tantalize passing crustaceans. Every 20 minutes or so (we were told), you pull the net up and see what you've captured. Easy enough, we figured--we'll have caught enough in a few hours to give us both a few boiled crabs for dinner, no problem. Heck, let's invite the neighbors!

Four hours later, grand total of caught creatures (drumroll, please):

-1 one-clawed, midget crab too small to keep.
-1 shrimp. Which fell through the net.

Dinner was a DiGiorno's frozen pizza from Winn Dixie.

* * *

I should mention some more, well, impressive denizens of the Gulf we encountered at the Pier. A whole family was fishing and crabbing at the very end of the pier, and amidst the shrieks and laughter and the sound of aluminum can tabs snapping open, we heard a pre-teen voice squeal "It's a dolphin! Look, a DOLphin!!!!" It was, in fact, 3 dolphins (species unclear)--a mother and a baby swimming cheek-to-cheek, so to speak, and a third animal (Dad? Mom's BFF? Godparent?) swimming a distance away. They came within, what, a quarter of a mile of the pier? and then moved back out again, staying in the area for quite a while. We saw them from the bay bridge the next day, as well; because they stayed in the same place for two days running, and because the mother and baby were swimming so close together, we hypothesized that Momma had just had the baby and was sticking in a sheltered spot to help it get used to swimming on its own. I'd never seen a dolphin in the bay before--I'm sure it happens all the time, but all the same, the cetacean sighting along with the heron visit conspired to make me feel we were having an enchanted day, despite the crab fiasco! (I've since been informed, by the way, that crabbing at the public pier probably did it--it's overcrabbed. Next time, The Sis and I will be heading out to the Gulf to a less popular spot to get us some crawly critters for dinnah.)

The next day we borrowed a friend's kayak and hit the wetlands. I am proud to say that it took us almost no time at all before we were smoothly gliding through the water, paddles synchronized in a glowing example of sibling solidarity... well, minus the numerous times I though The Sister needed some help turning and I added my own back-paddling or braking, thus throwing off her careful calculations about how much reverse thrust would be needed to bank a turn. I couldn't resist--I was just trying to help!

But seriously, we executed some sweet maneuvers, including reverse paddling and three-point turns, and we only got stuck once--in someone's front yard! I was unaware that private individuals have docks leading from their houses out into the wetlands, and that, even if you are inadvertently intruding into their "lawn," they will wave enthusiastically and walk all the way to the end of their dock laden with Cokes and cups of ice to cool you down from the hot hot sun. Now THAT is Southern Hospitality!

Aside from mastering the art of the kayak--which can be really euphoric when you get a good, coordinated pace going and find yourself slicing cleanly through the water--the rest of the experience was rather Alice-in-Wonderland. Kayaks sit so low in the water that you end up at eye-level with the reeds and the mud, and the red-winged blackbirds squawking at you that you're invading their territory are actually perched menacingly close above your head, so that you feel they may indeed have the upper hand and it would be best not to incur their wrath. This circumstance also allows you to drift in close enough to observe the minuscule crabs burrowing into the mud anchored by the waving grasses of this water-prairie. At times, the blackbirds and the great blue heron which buzzed our watery foxhole (the same which starred in yesterday's dockside drama??) actually made me feel I was traveling through a rolling Illinois grassland.

The labyrinthine* channels leading off of the main waterway are so precise that you wonder if they weren't laid out by humans hands. Every twist and turn as you navigate their meandering corridors is a surprise; once we turned a corner a bit too quickly and surprised an alligator out of its nest, right into the water beside us. Alligators move fast, so fast that my sister missed the whole thing because my head was in her way (I was sitting in the front). This capacity for speed, coupled with the fact that we were now sitting in a very low-slung plastic shell (which no longer seemed very sturdy) in opaque brown water concealing the whereabouts of a creature whose bite PSI** can be comparable to that of having a small pick-up truck dropped on you evoked a response that can be best summarized by the word:

PADDLE!!!!

We saw neither hide nor claw of this superb predator after it slipped into the water, fortunately--just a whole lot of fish jumping and flopping out of the water (trying to escape alligators?? Trying to grab an insectual snack?), a small <--- green heron (they're about 18 inches in body length), and a whole lot of boaters destroying the wetlands by going so fast through the main channel that their wake violently slammed the fragile reed-laced mud, thus carelessly washing away vital habitat. I felt like painting a gigantic NO WAKE sign in red letters on white plywood and installing it in a prominent location in the marina, perhaps under cover of nightfall in some sort of eco-guerilla action--hmmm, it's dark out now...where do we keep the spray paint?

This intimate tour of an unfamiliar ecosystem was like getting to peer at a Caravaggio up close; maybe beforehand you had a vague notion that the painting was a masterpiece, but you had never really looked at it that carefully. I'd heard how magnificent and ecologically vital the wetlands are; but now, I've stood nose-to-nose with the brushstrokes and discovered for myself this magical world teeming with incredible life, an entire network of organisms that, from afar, only looks like a lot of grass and water--pretty, but unanimated. Ah, how very artful is Mother Nature!

*awesome word, no?

**http://amos.indiana.edu/library/scripts/alligator.html

1 dead in attic

2007-05-14T20:05:00.000-07:00

Some days, it hits you harder than others. Like the days when you just happen to glance up as you drive to the post office to buy 2 cent stamps because you neglected to mail something important before the rate increase, and a two-story metal skeleton sprouting through the tree tops claws across your vision with its twisted, naked steel beams. Or the days when you're driving a couple of volunteers to work sites along the Gulf Coast highway, and for no apparent reason you start to count the number of barren lots marked only by empty metal signs and weeds and you lose count after 50. You get good at guessing what used to be in a particular spot, places where formerly lively establishments have been rendered bleakly anonymous but for a telltale row of gas pumps, a half-legible Olive Garden sign, or a set of front porch steps leading nowhere.

A few nights ago a volunteer group asked me to lead them on a "tour" of the town--it was already pitch black, so the only place I could think to go that was well-lit (besides the casinos, of course) was the local Katrina memorial, where a stark granite wall marks the height of the storm surge, and a collage made from artifacts locals found in the wreckage of their homes sits under floodlights. It's continuously illuminated in a way that reminds me of a war monument or the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. In a way it's both, I guess--350 some people died in the storm, and almost 20 months after she hit they still haven't identified all the bodies.

We walked around the memorial, peering at Little League trophies and battered silverware and rosaries and a silver "Most Likely To Be Missed" plaque from a high school class circa 1970; we then crossed the street over to our van, which was parked in the shadow of a multi-storied apartment complex that looks perfectly normal until you realize that the entire first floor has been erased.

Once back in our vehicle, we drove a few blocks east to an Episcopal church just off the water; like a cow carcass set upon by piranhas, the structure was picked completely clean by the immense wall of water that swept the coast that day. The surrounding property is one big mess of debris and brush, fallen trees and stubborn stumps and prickly, crackly vegetation, and out of it rise the rusted, dully red legs of a giant spidery sculpture, obscenely splayed like a tragicomic parody of the fiery orange Calder Flamingo in downtown Chicago. These metal beams are all that's left of a once graceful sanctuary built in 1969 after Hurricane Camille destroyed the original church building in 1969--talk about bad luck. Its congregation had chosen to rebuild in the same spot that first time because they were inspired, I suppose, by its proximity to water, that holiest of elements. This time, not without heavy hearts, they're relocating north of the interstate, a good 3 or 4 miles away.

It's in those moments--when you find yourself scrambling over the implacable rubble of a church, or when you notice that that piece of plastic ground into the dirt next to you as you cut across someone's lawn is an orphaned hairbrush, barely recognizable; when you feel the sky go grey and the wind pick up and the lightning dance a little jig across the tree tops and you're reminded in no uncertain terms that you now live in Hurricane Country; when you read a heart-wrenching Chris Rose* column about New Orleans struggling to revive itself after the storm and it socks you in the solar plexus because it is so real and because you know that so many houses sit empty, still--that's when you know, in your bones, why you're down here.

PS. A huge THANK YOU to all who participated in last Saturday's nation-wide Stamp Out Hunger US Postal Service food drive! Our food pantry was the recipient of over two mail trucks full of cans and dry goods, and although our caseworker was a little overwhelmed by the sheer volume of food--I don't think any of us had ever seen so many cans of potted meat--we were all thrilled to have so much food to distribute to our clients. Well done postal customers!!

*Chris Rose is a stellar Times-Picayune columnist who returned to the city literally hours after the storm to report on the devastation and whose writings acted as a lifeline for many exiled New Orleanians longing for news of home in Katrina's aftermath. A book of his collected post-Katrina columns, 1 dead in attic, is phenomenal; it is a must-read for anybody who wants to understand (as much as it is possible for someone who didn't live through it) what the city and the people that love her went through. http://www.chrisrosebooks.com/

Attack of the Kitties!

2007-05-06T18:44:00.000-07:00

Yesterday a delegation of workcampers talking in baby voices knocked on my door at 7am. I couldn't figure out why they were leading a troupe of small children over to my trailer on a Saturday morning (a belated Easter egg hunt?), but I rolled out of my bed/shelf (watch your head!), threw on some clothes and peeked out from behind my door into the blinding sunlight. They offered profuse apologies for waking me up early on my day off (let's face it, I don't have days off; pretending otherwise is just setting myself up for disappointment), then handed me a basket of cats. 4 mewling kittens, to be exact, black as coal dust, and outrageously eager to escape their yellow plastic laundry container-turned-conveyance.

The workcampers were late to catch their flight in New Orleans--what a parting gift!--, so into the trailer came the kittens, out came all my books from the cardboard box they'd been inhabiting for the last 2 months, into the box went the kittens, off of the rack came my towel, onto the towel went the kitties, and, kittens contained, over to the workcamper trailers I went to find their mama, whom the workcampers informed me was not doing well.

Indeed, she was sprawled, unable to move, next to a tupperware container full of milk; her mouth was dribbling reddish fluid into the milk, creating little pink coagulations that drifted aimlessly across the milk's white surface. Using rubber gloves from the volunteer trailer kitchen, I put her in the yellow laundry basket with a handtowel for comfort and trucked her over to my RV so I could keep an eye on her.

Next I thought it would be smart to pile all the cats involved into my car and drive three blocks to the animal shelter billboard advertising free spaying and neutering that I pass on my daily run (it pays to be observant--this is also how I know where the thrift store is, how much gas prices change overnight [a lot], and where to find SkiDoos for rent--in the abandoned parking lot next to the cemetery). I called the posted number, called another number, and got a nice lady on the phone who told me how to concoct a little number I like to call Kitten Ambrosia: 4 oz. evaporated milk + 4 oz. Karo syrup + 4 oz. water + an egg yolk (sorry vegans) = kitty bliss. I made a quick run to the grocery store (thank God the Food Tiger is open at 7:30am) for the ingredients, a baby bottle--which the store clerk, bless her heart, thought was for a "bouncing baby girl", which I most emphatically informed here it was NOT; but in a spirit of goodwill she wished me an early Happy Mothers Day anyway--some flea ointment, a litter box, litter, and scooper; and then I went home and got down to business.

Sad to say, Mama Cat expired while I was doctoring her babies. I'm not overly sentimental about animals, but I like to think that once she saw someone caring for her kittens--once they stopped screeching with every millimeter of their tiny feline larynxes at the indignity of not being fed every hour, on the hour, and started eating--she felt like she could depart this world for the great pet cemetery in the sky. Ignominiously, I had to put her in a plastic bag and dispose of her in the trash bin, because animal control doesn't work on the weekends (since rabid raccoons decide to invade your garage only on weekdays?? Right). I said a little blessing over her strangely limp, heavy body, and then went back to ministering to her offspring. Which, it turns out, is a full-time job.

Let's just say that--after flea meds; flea spray; slow-motion warm-water tail-to-nose dips designed to make fleas head upwards yelling "Abandon ship!" so that when they reach the nose-up end you can pick them off with a pair of tweezers, which is insanely frustrating and doesn't work; whipping up Chef Leah's new feline specialty a couple dozen (okay, two, but it feels like twenty) times a day; bottle feeding four messy drinkers who can only lap insanely small amounts of liquid, IN SLOW MOTION; spilling most of the Kitty Ambrosia on my favorite gym shorts; doing three loads of hot-water, bleach-added laundry to get kitty diarrhea off of my shirts, towels, you name it; waking up for early morning feedings; being treated to Kitty Concertos of Lament every time I want to take a shower, eat, or do anything not involving my new best friends; and acquiring a disturbing paranoia which produces phantom sensations of fleas crawling all over my body even when there is manifestly nothing there--I understand why people drown motherless kittens. I would never be able to bring myself to do it, but I see the point. Kittens were made to be raised by cats, not by people (least of all by people allergic to cats. Achoo).

But as my sister says, there is no better feeling than having 4 little feline motors curled up on your lap, purring in sync. And it's pretty cute when, crying like banshees, they frantically claw the front of your shirt and make skyward supplications with their little paws in an effort to nuzzle under your chin. Turns out that sometimes, that neurotic meowing isn't just about getting you to prepare another bottle of Liquid Kitty Crack, stat--sometimes, they just want a little lovin'. Awwww.

PS. Kitten cuteness notwithstanding, tomorrow morning they go to the nearest no-kill shelter. I'd love to adopt them, but a 7am-7pm job and the brand new carpet in the modular house I'm moving into say, emphatically, "NO."

MSNBC article

2007-05-02T14:56:00.000-07:00

One of today's front page MSNBC.com stories is about the complete and utter lack of affordable, workforce, and/or subsidized housing on the Gulf Coast. http://risingfromruin.msnbc.com/2007/05/rentals.html

" 'Rental Katrina victims are essentially the most powerless group of all in
trying to fashion a recovery,' says Reilly Morse, an attorney with Mississippi
Center for Justice, which advocates for racial and economic justice along the
coast. 'They have to depend entirely on landowners and land developers to make
something happen.'
The loss was staggering. In a state where nearly 30 percent of the residents are renters, 72,116 renter-occupied units were damaged or destroyed by Katrina, according to Gov. Haley Barbour’s office."

The rebuilding I'm involved with is all homeowner properties, but the direct service and emergency assistance that our organization provides serves hundreds of non-homeowners who, though they may have secured a local job, are struggling to find a place to live. The massive destruction of rental properties has caused rents on the housing that is still available to shoot through the roof, and the demolition or neglect of public housing (*ahem*, HUD!!) and other low-income housing options leaves people with little choice but to live on the streets or move away to an prohibitively expensive commute or a new locale where they have no job and know no one. The icing on the cake is the epidemic of NIMBYism--Not In My Backyard attitudes--that has hit the Gulf Coast. One local city council even went so far as to pass a resolution barring all projects funded by income tax credits (shelters, affordable or public housing, prisons, etc.), because, as one city official put it, they don't want "those kind of people" moving in. Please just come right out and call it what it is--ethnic and socioeconomic cleansing.

How do you support a service-industry workforce, like the one we have here at the Coast's many casinos, without some kind of accessible, affordable housing??

A SnoBall in... May.

2007-05-01T13:37:00.000-07:00

May 1st here on the Gulf Coast and it feels like mid-summer at home. I drove a workcamper over to the next town to meet up with her crew on their worksite, and walking into the bedroom they were working on was like walking into a completely new house. Last Friday the room was so crammed with stuff--dark furniture, a water bed, piles and piles of papers and mementos and knicknacks, the result of the hoarding that comes from nearly losing all your possessions and never wanting to get rid of the things that made it through the storm with you--that you couldn't tell what color the walls were. Now everything is cleared out, the walls shine with a bright white coat of primer, and trimming, door moulding, and light fixtures are going up. I swear, seeing something so unexpectedly transformed like that is like Christmas in... May. Not the perfect analogy if you are from up North, but remember, this is a hot, July-like May we're talking about!

And then I took the back roads--bursting with lilac, jasmine, and a zillion other flowers--over to my friend Lucious' house to drop off a cooler of his we'd used last week to transport some frozen Gulf shrimp (mmmm). On the way back to the office I decided it was so hot and I was so parched that nothing but a snoball could quench my thirst and cool me off. For those of you who haven't ventured this far south during hot months, a snoball is like a snocone, but better--the ice is crushed finer and the choice of flavors is nearly infinite. My snocone purveyor of choice in these parts is Cospo's Snoballs--and boy do they do it right. A dollar gets you an overflowing mound of finely crushed ice (the key to a good snoball is crushing the ice on site), saturated but not drowned by a syrup of your choice, including, I kid you not, Ninja Turtle. For a child of the 80s, it does not get any better than this.

Roll down the windows, turn up the country, put your pedal to the metal on the highway along the Gulf and you got yourself a little slice of heaven.

The Pier

2007-04-30T19:44:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite spots around these parts so far is the public pier on the bay near my trailer. I biked down there after work today to watch the fish jump and the sun set and the near-full moon rise. Sea gulls were squawking and fighting over the morsels tossed to them by a man shrimping closer in to shore; a family was fishing down at the end of the dock. I looked up at one point, idly pausing from writing my thoughts in my journal (thanks, Duck!), and happened to spot the king of birds--a great blue heron wading in the reeds. He waded, stood; waded, stood; then flew up to alight on the pier where the shrimper had been a few moments ago. His progress from pier to pier was contemplative, unhurried; eventually he made his way over towards the backwater pond where I usually see him during my morning jogs. He'd been absent this morning, and it was comforting to spy him out on the bay, a missing part of my landscape familiarly restored.

I know you're wishing I'd taken a picture, but some things are infinitely better in person.

Gratitude

2007-04-24T15:56:00.001-07:00

is a tricky thing. A letter to the editor from one of our out-of-state volunteers expressed her initial consternation that not all of the residents she had met on the Gulf Coast had made an effort to let her know they appreciated the hard work she and her group had been doing to help rebuild their community.
But by the end of her stay, she had realized that it's pretty difficult to bend over backwards day after day for 19 months to show how grateful you are; and to strangers, no less, who have come to help you because you can't help yourself. Emotional and physical fatigue, an optimistic or pessimistic outlook, pride, frustration, the attempt to preserve a modicum of dignity, the colossal amount of patience and fortitude it takes to negotiate the abyss of recovery red tape here--all figure into a given person's response on a given day, and unfortunately the author of the letter had hit some folks on their off day. But her observation points back to a mantra we like to repeat to our volunteers: It's not about you. No matter how long or how hard or how irritating your work day is, or how little you feel acknowledged by those you are serving, you have still come to serve, to put others before yourself.

(Actually, it really is about the volunteers in the sense that their time here is often a transformative experience--it changes their perspective, reveals their privilege, humbles them, and ignites (or rekindles) their zest for service.
Our aim here is two-fold: to improve the lives and lift the spirits of "the least of these," those hit hard by systemic poverty and by the inegalitarian effects of a catastrophic storm; and to provide an opportunity for members and friends of our denominational community, who are usually more privileged than those they serve, to come down and work side-by-side with their brothers and sisters as they attempt to recover and rebuild. It's definitely a two-way street; but as much as our volunteers give to the homeowners they work with, I hear over and over again how much more the volunteers receive from their hosts. It's a tremendous thing to see someone wake up each morning to a situation you would never want to experience and to witness them face it with grace, dignity, and optimism--and, most times, to be profusely thanked for the one week you are giving up to help move them past that situation.)

Ain't That America?

2007-04-24T09:35:00.000-07:00

My sister's S.O. doesn't particularly appreciate John Mellencamp--in fact, he has a rather creative epithet for the rock'n'roller which is not terribly flattering. But I dig this song of his--Pink Houses--because it gives you vivid snapshots of American life, each one tinged with underlying social commentary (read for yourself at the above link--each verse hits on something that really rings true about our paradoxical, mixed-up society). I think my favorite verse is the first one, because it speaks to what folks here are living through and how they react to their situations with humor and grace and gratitude:

Theres a black man with a black cat
Living in a black neighborhood
Hes got an interstate runnin through his front yard
You know, he think, that hes got it so good
And theres a woman in the kitchen
cleanin up the evening slop
And he looks at her and says:
Hey darling, I can remember when you could stop a clock

Folks here are up against forces outside their control; they are living in desperate, undignified, seemingly hopeless conditions; and they still thank God every day for waking them up in the morning, for the blessings of family and friends and good food and blue skies and soul-stirring music.

This is not to say that we shouldn't fight the systemic injustices in our world--that we shouldn't protest freeways being built through disenfranchised neighborhoods, or hurricane relief funding getting held up in state and local bureaucracies which deprive storm victims of the funds they urgently need to rebuild their lives***--but it does speak to the fortitude and resiliency of our neighbors. The ability to look at what you have around you, no matter how little it is, and appreciate it--that in itself is a gift, a small miracle.

***Help get HR 1227 passed! HR 1227, already passed in the House with an overwhelming, bipartisan majority, provides funding for hurricane survivors to secure temporary and long-term housing, including public and affordable housing, housing vouchers for elderly, homeless, and disabled people; it also extends the FEMA trailer deadline to December (instead of this summer). In addition, HR 1227 provides increased oversight of the funds the federal government has already earmarked for hurricane rebuilding. Send a letter to the Louisiana senators who are waffling over this bill:
http://www.colorofchange.org/hr1227/?id=2084-124616
or call your Senators to urge them to vote for HR 1227:
http://www.congress.org/congressorg/directory/congdir.tt?command=congdir

There Is a Balm in Biloxi

2007-04-19T09:36:00.000-07:00

A slam poem written by a colleague of some of our workcampers from Sojourners, a social justice advocacy group addressing the intersection of politics and religion.
I think it is an exemplary use of art, and in particular, slam poetry, to address social justice issues--racism, privilege, corruption, reparations, structural violence, housing inequalities, etc. It also raises what for me is a fundamental question of faith: What, as a Christian, am I called to do in response to injustice and inequality? What are all of us called to do? Christians tend to forget, I think, that Jesus had a radical vision of social equality, what amounted to a paradigmatic shift in relation to the societal structures of the day. We also tend to turn a deaf ear to the call of the prophets, who bid us work for the realization of God's Kingdom here on earth. But there's at least one among us who hasn't forgotten... read on. (It's long, but worth it. Read it aloud for maximum effect.)

THERE IS A BALM IN BILOXI
By Ryan Rodrick Beiler (Sojourners)

sleeping on floors feels hard core but
for those keeping score we still float on inflated pads of privilege on
our own terms taken for granted ignoring our
needles in need of breaching by camels can
one coming this far fail to feel something sacred
seeking to serve in solidarity in spite of
spaces made by races made by men who made our faces favored or flogged
bogged down by bigotry backed by bottom lines
lingering long through our history hysterically hateful or
hidden in habits held harmless but hurting us all
already fallen still calling us names we think we’ve forgotten but
we’ve gotten good at acting our parts enjoying the extras even
at the expense of sisters and brothers unseen for a season often
ignored but regularly revealed by verdicts disasters and everyday encounters with
inequality easily seen by sensitive souls insisting on solving impossible impasses
imposing ideals inferred from faithful philosophy’s philos so we foist
friendship on unsuspecting strangers seek
an end to Sunday morning segregation love
without which we are merely clanging cymbals symbolic
pet projects objects of over-compensation self-deprecation or
projected complexes patronizing paternalizing internalizing superiority passed
through pedagogy parents and presidents dead white men well-meaning or
malicious matters less than persistent conditions of
housing projects profiling police prosecutions prisons and lethal injections or
bad personal decision magnified by malignant manifestations of
massive indefensible disparity damned indefinitely by the assumptions made by
insulated insured unsullied suburban soccer moms of Bashan (Amos 4:1)
bovine buffers bearing the burdens of bad choices bleating
boys will be boys unless they’re black or brown in the wrong part of town
then call Sheriff Brown to take them down and keep them down keep
society safely steeped in silent sins of
systems
made of institutions
made of individuals all
influenced by Evil at each level a legacy seen at sea level in
lessons of levees and lack of planning for people impoverished by
inherited inequality unable to evacuate evaluating inadequate options given by
government given to gaps in attention
inattentive to tensions dissentions of disaffected defectors from
40-acre American myths can’t get no
satisfaction reconstruction reparations missing in action
affirmative action losing traction to so-called color blind code words wielded by
angry factions tactlessly asking for tax cuts in times of
domestic disasters and trillion-dollar pre-emptive unending wars on terror
tacitly seeking cancellation of the debt incurred for incalculable costs when our country made a
killing on middle crossings cotton fields and Jim Crow’s crimes
coffers culled from wages withheld
held hostage by America’s mortgage milked from
African
Asian
Mexican and
First Nations
banks bilked by Manifest Destiny’s dealings and stealings
railroaded ripped-off and ransacked of rights these
wrongs written off without so much as an I.O.U. or interest paid apart from
persnickety PC lip-service spackle over status quo cracks yet
cracker and honky don’t hurt half as much as n-word epithets
evidence that personal prejudice produces pain but
power pulls strings that make minorities
hang on every word
while enlightened whites worry and wonder which terms are fair game
gambling on guesses blessed by banter with buddies of color calling themselves
black or African American
Hispanic or Latino
should I be Anglo Caucasian or European American maybe
mzungu or gringo pick your lingo the
bingo of my birth blessed me with booster boot straps while
other brothers were born with bare feet on flood plains so
I can’t complain or claim total credit for
accomplishments built on benefits from the cream of cursed capital
generated by generals and generations of venerated investments
iterations of inverted perverted priorities placing profit over people
invisible hand over fist a flawed foundation for a nation built by
slaves making bricks without straw success fro some is no excuse for abuse to
call theft a blessing is blasphemous so God bless America as
soon as it admits its errors repents and accepts amazing grace shed on
thee a collective wretch like me I
once was blind but now I’m trying to see still
blurry from crying to God of our weary years and silent tears
shed for the martyrs of
Mississippi
Memphis
the Audubon Ballroom and
Sixteenth Street Baptist Church of Birmingham Alabama
where American terrorists blew up black babies we’re still
treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered this
stony road now watered by floods whose
damage we daily dare to audaciously undo
tenaciously graciously grabbing the hem of our Healer who
stops and names us “daughter”
don’t forget getting your Father’s forgiveness means
following Jesus
seeking justice
on the road to Jericho know who is our neighbor love
the least of these as sisters and brothers bearing God’s image in
spite of society’s assumptions or apathy about the broken Body
barriers built by blissful or willful ignorance expressed in
excuses for absence from the banquet of opportunities to build community
begging off to build bigger barns buy land livestock and lovers all
legitimate interests or idols of adulteration of the germination of
the seeds of the Kingdom seen in Revelation all nations offering adoration wonder
what worship style will win out in eternity’s harmonies of liberty hymns
happy clappy contemporary choruses or gospel glory glory glory hallelujah Lord
I want to be in that number when the saints go marching in a multitude from
every tribe and tongue and nation singing salvation belongs to our God and to the
lamb armed only with the sword of his mouth a
messianic message made plain in the Sermon on the Mount count as blessed all
poor pure peacemakers persecuted meek merciful thirsty and hungry for righteousness better
translated justice is at the bending end of the universe’s long arc according to Martin Luther King
so lift every voice and sing
till earth and heaven ring like
on the Sunday when we were all family at
First Missionary Baptist Church of Biloxi Mississippi warm fuzzies
backed by blood sweat and soul food feasts fixed in FEMA trailers
served by seventy-something saints we’re not worthy we’re not worthy given
our history but hospitality helps heal when we place ourselves in the peril of proximity
will we practice this prescription in our parochial priorities or
avoid going places where we’re the minorities much less the authorities
outside our areas of expertise align ourselves with ambitious agendas to
integrate ideal and real risk a mission impossible
resist the impulse to presidentially limit compassion to
faith-based initiative lip-service lacking bottom-line line-item actions and
truth be told I’m often paralyzed by precedent preventing connection
conventional wisdom weakens the will and the flesh follows familiar formulas
conformed to the pattern of this world forming comfortable communities of
mutual affirmation seeking confirmation through
constant commentaries on common controversies unconvicted by
verses advocating unity over and against separated equality degraded identity a
litany of lament Lord let us lay down our burdens and study war no more emancipate us
from stagnant stasis status quo quorums quote us First and Second Corinthians to
convince us that God’s weakness is wiser than worldly wisdom though
we’re well-versed in avoiding implications of the
ministry of reconciliation i.e. redistribution rich made poor for Christ’s sake and imitation and
Mary’s Magnificat vision of the mighty made low lifting the least of these like
Thy Kingdom come
Thy will be done on earth as it is
in heaven the revolution will not be spiritualized or rationalized away
Revelation’s real vision is the vindication of justice just as described in Psalm 37
Babylon’s bullets and bullies left behind
the end of evil empires’ industrial complexes we shall overcome
win without weapons waging war not as the world but with the Word of
the sharp-tongued Savior a Lion in a Lamb’s attitude
attacking our Adversary with atoning agape
Lord have mercy when you separate the sheep from goats
gauging love for the least of these of ill-health ill-fed ill-clad or incarcerated
clothed with compassion capable of destroying strongholds disarming arguments against
amazing grace how sweet the sound the
song of a saved slave trader truth stranger than
scripture’s impossible prescriptions no fictions
faith moves mountains or moves us to the mountain top so we can see the promised land
the integrated gospel of personal reconciliation and political liberation free at last lest
our hearts drunk with the wine of the world we forget Thee
facing the rising sun
of our new day begun
let us march on
till victory is won

Wednesday Night Revival

2007-04-18T13:08:00.000-07:00

A Baptist revival, for those who have never been to one, is like a rock concert with the preacher as lead singer, the chancel choir as the back-up singers, the organ, piano, and drum set as the band, the chancel as the stage, and the sermon as the star's best-known rock anthem.
The "set" starts out with some of that pre-song patter, introducing the sermon's theme and reading the pertinent Bible verses; as the sermon progresses, the piano and organ start providing a little background to the preacher's spoken words; then things heat up fast, with the preacher beginning to not just hum in between important phrases, but outright sing the message. The band picks up the tempo, the musicians get louder, and the Amens and My, my s from the choir and the front rows add to the buzz. Then the whole congregation gets into it, swaying and clapping and hollering, following the preacher's ascent until things are at a fever pitch, and the preacher is sweating, and the people are swooning, and the organist is bouncing on his bench and the deacons are running up and down the aisles... you almost expect a moshpit to break out up near the altar. Things keep getting hotter and hotter until the preacher blows himself out on the last electric riff of his sermon--"Wake Uticus UUUUUUUUP!!!!"--and turns and walks straight off the chancel/stage and out the vestry door, like the explosive finale of a sold-out show. And at the very end, after the altar call and the prayer circle and the choir benediction, he briefly re-enters, making an encore appearance for his loyal fans. The last blessing is said, and the faithful concertgoers file out of their pews, hugging and greeting each other, all a-tingle from the fiery performance. The host deacon shakes hands at the door, but The Preacher himself is nowhere to be seen--you can almost picture little Sunday school students lining up at the back entrance to the church for a chance to get his autograph.

Not bad, for a profession often seen as stuffily unglamourous and uptight.

Strawberry Fest

2007-04-18T11:32:00.001-07:00

This past weekend I again crossed state lines in search of good friends and a good drink. Most of my weekend time is spent doing things like learning how to use a nail gun, digging through large amounts of rotting organic material and composting earthworms, rescuing turtles stranded mid-highway, cleaning trailers and RVs, and church-hopping (another effect of having no UCC congregations in Mississippi--I am forever bouncing from Missionary Baptist to Methodist to Episcopal and beyond). But somehow, it is more fun to tell stories involving line-dancing and 3am truck stop diner buffets than it is to recount the wonders of emptying the toilet holding tank on my RV.

I motored over to Louisiana in the driving rain on Saturday afternoon, stopping in Ponchatoula once the weather had cleared for that town's famous Strawberry Fest. Strawberry Fest is your typical town festival deal, only it revolves around all things Strawberry--strawberry shortcake, fresh strawberries, strawberry daiquiris and margaritas, chocolate-dipped strawberries, strawberry wine (and endless playing of that venerable country tune), strawberry pendant necklaces and earrings, strawberry plants... I sampled a strawberry margarita and a strawberry dipped in what tasted like nutty-fudgy brownie batter. Dee-vine. I also visited the Turquoise Coyote, a gem of a bead and jewelry store with a Southwestern theme. If you are at all a fan of jewelry-making, or of antiques, and you are driving through southeast Louisiana, you should visit Ponchatoula, America's Antique City.*

This was all on my way to visit a friend from school who lives on her family's farm in Tangipahoa [Tanj-ih-pa-hoe] Parish. They raise cattle and timber, and it's sort of a gathering place for all W alums in the Louisiana-Mississippi area under the age of 30--A's mother has an open-door policy and showers true Southern hospitality and cooking on all her daughters' vagabond friends.**
The reason for this weekend's gathering was a David Allan Coe concert at The Stampede, a local honkytonk. (Definition of 'honkytonk': any establishment south of the Mason-Dixon line combining a bar and a dance floor, showcasing line-dancing or the two-step; particularly, such an establishment frequented by cowboy wannabes and rednecks, hence honkytonk.)
The beautiful thing about the kind of social dancing found at such places is that it's actually social--there is a set of commonly known dance steps which allows strangers to interact with each other in a way that mercifully avoids grinding, humping, etc. This means that folks dance with all sorts of partners, and pairing up with a given individual for a song or two doesn't mean that you are confined to that person for the rest of the night or that you are going home with him/her. So we had a great time kickin' up our heels with our friends and with friends of friends, and with friends of friends of friends--even though we were 20 miles from A's house, it seemed like she knew everyone, and if she didn't know someone, she knew their uncle's cousin's grade school teacher's daughter's boyfriend. Or his dog.
There's just something satisfyingly carefree about a night of good dancing with your friends. I can't think of a better way to spend a Saturday evening, even if it does involve witnessing folks falling-off-their-chairs drunk or wearing Confederate fishing hats (you thought I made that up, didn't you??).

The next day involved sleeping in, touring the farm, and trying to get one of A's heifers back up on her feet--she'd been sick and unresponsive for the last few days, and they may end up having to shoot her. We also planted lilies at A's grandfather's grave, and took a run distributing what I like to call "cow crack"--high-protein supplemental pellets that look like gigantic guinea pig food. If you ever want to see a herd of stoic, stand-offish cows get real excited and trot after your pickup truck like you're Santa Claus with a sleigh loaded with pre-chewed cud, get a bag of these pellets and pour a trail of them out behind you. You will see those slow-footed sourpusses perk up like comatose teenagers awoken by the end-of-school bell--running as fast as they can from one pile to the next, nudging each other out of the way and gobbling up little gray cylinders like kids in a candy shop. Mm mm, good!

Despite the fact that I got a flat tire outside of town on the way back, it was a great weekend--time to relax, make new friends, eat some real home cookin', and consume a whole stack of pickles straight out of the jar. Nothing like beer munchies!

This weekend it's time for the Crawfish Festival... even though it takes me half an hour to eat half a dozen crawfish, I can't wait!

*More fun facts about Ponchatoula: Home of the Strawberry Farmers' Wall of Honor; recognized in 1936, by the federal government as the greatest shipping point of strawberries in the world. Ponchatoula derives its name from the Choctaw Indian language meaning "hair to hang" because of the abundance of Spanish moss on the trees surrounding the area. http://ci.ponchatoula.la.us/ and http://www.ponchatoula.com/
**More on Southern Hospitality, the code of which is politely but firmly etched in stone, iron-bound by honor, and festooned with food and drink:
Once I tried to pay for lunch at the local Oyster Fest (a lot of the social scene in these parts revolves around _insert regional food specialty here_ Fests)--fried oyster po boys all around, and for me, my very first slippery, uncooked bivalve. I followed our waiter over to the cash register nook, handed him cash, and explicitly instructed him not to let A and her mother pay for me, because this was my way of showing gratitude for their hosting me. He played along and my fiendishly smooth plan went swimmingly... until he asked if they needed anything more, A. and her mom asked for the check, and I said I'd taken care of it. Out came the credit card, onto the table came the "We're locals" trump card, and back came my cash (except the tip, which they actually let me get!!).

"Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man"

2007-04-17T21:19:00.000-07:00

My current theme song, as performed by Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty. Because we have both kinds of music down here: Country and Western.

With a Louisiana woman waitin' on the other side
The Mississippi River don't look so wide.
Well, I thought I'd been loved but I never had
Till I was wrapped in the arms of a Mississippi man.
When he holds me close it feels almost
Like another hurricane just ripped the coast.
...The Mississippi River can't keep us apart
There's too much love in this Mississippi heart.
Too much love in this Louisiana heart...

Stars Fell On...

2007-04-17T19:21:00.000-07:00

Alabama!

One night the week before last, a friend asked me if I had ever been to Alabama. Much to my dismay, I hadn't yet had the occasion to make it to the Yellowhammer State (http://www.50states.com/bio/nickname1.htm), and so I told him. "Me neither," he said, "let's go!"
Alabama is a good 40 miles down the coast--but gas prices nearing $3.00 weren't about to stop us on our eastbound escapade! Besides, it was 10 o'clock on a Friday night, and it's not like either of us had to be up at the crack of dawn for a Saturday morning airport run... of course not. Ever notice how the attractiveness of a potential adventure (at least for the foolhardy) is directly related to its ridiculousness?
So we headed for the state line in Emerald, my sweet little electric-green, second-hand Prius. At the first Alabaman (Alabamite? Alabamian??) rest stop--the one with the Welcome to Alabama sign--we cheered triumphantly, then took pictures of ourselves in front of the sign (they didn't turn out so well, because highway signs are extremely reflective and human beings are not). This antic earned us some honks from passing cars, whose drivers, I'm sure, could only wish they were as classy as we were, taking self-portraits. Ah, the virgin ground of a brand-new state! It's almost as intoxicating as inhaling that new-car smell.
Just knowing I can cross another one of the 50 Nifty United States off my official "Been There, Done That" list gets me high. But we decided it couldn't be an official Visit to a New State without the inclusion of some sort of concrete activity involving at least an hour or so on Alabaman (Alabamish? Alabaster??) soil. What are two twenty-somethings going to find to do at 10:45 on a Friday night, when all the libraries and tea parlors are closed?

...and this is how we ended up at the Blue Bayou Lounge in Grand Bay, Alabama, of which I am now a card-carrying member. (Literally, they required me to fill out a membership form and sign a card before they would let us order, and I now carry that card in my wallet, for want of a better place to keep it.) But my induction into Blue Bayou Barhood was not the most hair-raising part of our visit--for that adjective, it's a toss-up between the Blue Bayou wall décor (a gigantic Confederate flag across the back wall, complemented by several blown-up photographs and table découpages of JFK, a smattering of Elvis paraphernalia, and a portrait of Princess Di) and the locals at the bar, one of whom was so inebriated that he threw quarters at us while we were playing pool. We couldn't make out if he wanted to join our game, or if he wanted us to feed the jukebox for him, or if he thought he was at a different sort of establishment... I've never had quarters thrown at me before, and their meaning is a little difficult to interpret.
Then again, when we pushed open the heavy metal door to the Blue Bayou Lounge and walked in, one of us wearing a crunchy knit-hat and cargo jacket ensemble and the other decked out in a headband color-coordinated to match her racer hoodie, the poor bartender must have asked herself what in the hootenanny we were doing in her establishment.

Mutual culture shock, anyone?

Blue Bayou--Part Deux

2007-04-17T19:15:00.000-07:00

Taking a moment to consider the Lounge's wall decorations--in particular the Confederate flag plastered across the whole of the back wall: it is a funny feeling to drive around town or be out on a jog and suddenly see the Stars and Bars snapping proudly in front of a seafood store, a baseball field, a school, a police station... The Confederate Hex, as it's also known, is the canton on the upper left-hand of the Mississippi state flag. There are very strong feelings on both sides of this issue, most notably the "Heritage, Not Hate" folks who maintain that the flag is a symbol of state and regional history honoring those who gave their lives for the Confederate cause, not a reminder of the inhumanity of slavery or a banner for modern-day racism. Others feel that Hurricane Katrina was God's punishment for keeping the Southern Cross on the state flag--according to my boss, after the storm you could see houses and buildings spray-painted with the words "Remove the Hex."
My view on this, though I am obviously not an involved party other than that I am temporarily living under the flag, is that "Heritage" is appropriate for Confederate cemeteries and war memorials, not for state capitols and school assemblies. Private usage of the flag is another issue (although just as callous and distasteful, says the progressive Yankee in me). But as far as state and local governmental institutions are concerned, the state of Mississippi has long since resumed its membership in the Union; and although the Confederacy looms large in both the local psyche and the annals of state history, I think it should remain just that: history.
I also don't think Hurricane Katrina was God's punishment for anything (including the parades and practices of the notoriously flamboyant gay population in the French Quarter, as some fundamentalist preachers claimed--http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/content/news_syndication/article_050831.shtml), so I find it a bit preposterous, and not a little offensive, to suggest that for whatever reason the victims of the storm deserved to lose their lives, their homes, their friends, and their communities, not to mention any form of normalcy or stability. My God isn't a vengeful one.
Finally, none of my ancestors were slaves (see the title of this blog), so I can't say how I feel about the flag as a symbol of hate--some descendants of slaves see it as a heinous throwback meant to revive racial injustice and hatred, while others don't feel especially threatened or affected by it, asserting that there are larger issues at stake for the black community (http://www.issues-views.com/comment.php/article/22094).

In any case, the "Heritage, Not Hate" argument doesn't hold water for me--so take it off the state flag, for Pete's sake! There are enough hexes adorning license plates, bar rooms, and fishing hats around these parts to more than compensate for removing it from the state standard.

Who would have thought that a spontaneous cross-state beer run would have inspired such reflection?

Disclaimer: I should point out that there is a general trend of eastward discrimination amongst Gulf Coast states. Texans feel that Louisiana is a hick state; Louisianans feel that Mississippians are at least one rung down on the social ladder; Mississippians thumb their magnolia-smelling noses at Alabama residents; Alabamans console themselves by saying At least we aren't Florida Panhandlers!, etc. Also, I wouldn't wish the whole of Alabama to be judged by my impressions of one visit to a bordertown watering hole--first of all, the ladies at the Quickie Mart who directed us to the Blue Bayou were just lovely, very helpful; and secondly, I obviously have very limited exposure to the state. For instance, I haven't even been to the giant flea market in Mobile--from what I hear, that alone will boost my opinion of the state off the charts!

Wait for the Rain

2007-04-12T15:18:00.000-07:00

Not that it's been dry here the past week or so... we did indeed have snow-like sleet accumulation on the rooftops last weekend for Easter--cold and wet just like every other Easter of my (mostly) Northern life, when I have come to the South for some HEAT, dammit!--and the rain on Monday meant that the crushed concrete one of our volunteer workcrews was layering into a pit for a client's driveway turned into a quicksand soup.

No, "Wait for the Rain" ain't a weather report down here--it was the theme of Rev. Don's sermon yesterday evening at the Wednesday night prayer and Bible study service at First Missionary Baptist. Don is my co-worker and a UCC pastor, but his was a traditionally religious African-American upbringing in the Carolinas, so when he's in town he attends and sometimes preaches at 1st Missionary.* And every Monday and Tuesday, he spends an hour or so rehearsing with the week's workcrew, teaching them a few African-American spirituals so that they can sing at the Wednesday night service. Watching all these white folks, who are used to a more staid, reserved worship style, stand up in front of the church and attempt singing, swaying, and clapping all at the same time, it never fails to strike me as a strange combination of earnestness and entertainment--a heartfelt offering by the workcampers to the community they are serving, and a source of well-concealed mirth for their black brothers and sisters sitting in the pews and politely nodding their heads and clapping along--I'm sure they must wonder what in the Good Lord's name these white people are doing trying to sing songs of a style wrought in the fiery furnaces of slavery, an institution of complicity for the forefathers and mothers of their race.
Some weeks go better than others, musically speaking; but because it is well-meant, the whole production is always well-received. Oh, and I forgot the kicker--Rev. Don always accompanies this crack choir on an electronic keyboard, playing in whatever key it is that is made up of all black notes. No matter what the song is or what key it was originally intended to be sung in. It's a trip.

Now that the stage is set:
Don is a rather quiet, reserved sort of man in large group settings--he is the one who will sit back and wait until directly called upon to make a contribution. But get him into a pulpit, and he lets go. I've literally seen him shimmy-shake across the chancel and run laps around the aisles, and if there's a sermon going, his own personal Amen chorus of Yeahs, Wells, MmHmms and Halleluuuu-jahs! can be heard all over the sanctuary. Last night he was filling in for Rev. Dickie, who was preaching at a revival down the street (more about that later), and when he took the microphone to preach about Elijah's prophecy that the drought he had called down upon wicked King Ahab's land was about to end, proving God's supremacy to the deity Baal, he called to mind one of those Hollywood-movies-in-30-seconds skits: back and forth, back and forth he pantomimed EACH ONE of Elijah's servant's seven trips to the mountaintop to see if rain was coming. There is something of a storyteller in Don, methinks.
Anyway, Elijah has heard the sound of an "abundance of rain," and Elijah's servant finally spots a cloud the size of a man's hand--and that sent Don off into a Spiritual Weather Report about outlasting your soul's dry spells, faithfully waiting for God's blessings to water your soul. His message resonated particularly for me, as I've just been through my own spiritual drought and I feel like coming to serve on the Gulf Coast was exactly what my parched soul needed. I could feel the individual water droplets plunking down onto the cracked earth--the story a workcamper shared about the astonishment of seeing a little boy who had been living in a crowded, unsanitary FEMA trailer run into a freshly dry-walled room and exclaim "I have a room!"; witnessing the transformations volunteers undergo in their short time working here; the humbling, overpowering ability to pick up my phone when someone calls on behalf of a family stranded, destitute, in a campground, and put them through to our caseworker, our SuperWoman, who can help them even though I can't; the profound peace of a simple beachside Maundy Thursday service with new, compassionate friends; the sight of a pelican or a great blue heron taking off, startled by my morning jogs.
I had to wait a while for those raindrops, and I didn't always know if I was capable of receiving them in the same carefree way I had before, if I could return to the same way of believing that I had grown up with. But as Elijah promised it would, it came--first as a cloud on the horizon, no bigger than a man's fist, then as a spring drizzle, then as a downpour of blessings that hasn't yet let up.

As they say at 1st Missionary Baptist: "God is good... Allll the time."

*There are no United Church of Christ congregations in the state of Mississippi. There used to be a handful, but they chose to integrate during the Civil Rights movement and, in addition to losing membership, their remaining congregants faced so much aggression and harassment at work and on the streets for their association with such a "radical" denomination that they felt they had to close those wide-open doors, or face even worse--bricks through windows, firebombings, etc. So much for "Thy Kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven."

Welcome to the Coast

2007-04-11T15:12:00.000-07:00

I've been on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi for just over three weeks now, working as a volunteer coordinator for a faith-based community justice ministry. It's not my first time down here, or my first time working on the Gulf Coast since Hurricane Katrina hit, but my term of service--9 months--will definitely be the longest, most intense, and, I hope, most rewarding experience yet. It's my aim while here to try to answer the call of the prophet Micah: "What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" while I serve those around me.
My role is to coordinate volunteers who come in from all over the country to spend a week rehabilitating the houses and the lives of those hit hard by Katrina. I do logistics, provide hospitality, and basically try to make their stay here meaningful and profitable both to them and to the under-resourced, underprivileged clients we serve (we typically work with community members whose income falls below 40-60% of the AMI [Area Median Income] or who are homeless). In theory, I facilitate direct service rather than hammering the nails myself; but it often happens that I'm in work clothes, loading tile or carrying sheet rock, or up on a roof getting my dose of nail-guns and shingles.
I also try to build relationships with our clients and participate in community events because I believe that solidarity, not charity, is the best way to work with others toward a more socially and economically just world.

I'm looking to make this blog a mix of sober, reflective posts concerning the lamentable state of recovery and the outrageously unjust circumstances that the storm revealed, and more entertaining, anecdotal stories about life as a white Illinois native transplanted to the Deep South. Questions, comments, and constructive criticism are welcome--enjoy!

-Leah