Dry Bones Dance

Wisdom from my elders for the day

I now know what I want to be like when I'm 70. There's a guy who translates for various professors where I work. I forget how many languages he speaks, but I think it's 5 or 6. He started out translating during the Korean War because very few Koreans spoke English and he happened to be one of them. There are a number of things on which we don't agree, but it's impossible not to like the guy. He's turning 70 in a month or so, and when I told him he looked younger, he said, "I feel 25 or 26! I'm not old yet. When you wake up in the morning and lie around all day, take a bunch of pills and make appointments with lots of different doctors - that's when you're old."

He's done a whole mess of interesting stuff and has a PhD, but the thing he's most excited about is going to visit his grandchildren in France this summer. He says he always bugs his kids to send him more pictures of his grandkids because he's doesn't see them every day.

So here's his nugget of wisdom for the day: "When I became a grandfather - that's when I started to understand the world. I didn't before." I feel better now, because I'm fairly certain that I don't understand the world, and it's good to know I've got another thirty years or so to work on that.

Moment of happiness

I went to my women's group tonight, and it makes me all happy inside. It was most of the same women from the retreat this weekend, and I was just glad to be in the same room with such brave women and in a space where the Spirit actually does stuff. I feel like I'm at the beginning of a new kind of journey. I'm not sure where I'm going, but for the first time in a while, I feel like I'm going somewhere - and that's a good thing.

Girls start the revolution

I know I wasn't going to post this week, but I read this today, and I liked it so much I had to share. (You might have to register.) Apparently, some teenage girls, children of immigrant mothers who worked in garment factories, got tired of their mothers's being tired and in pain from poor working conditions. So, this is what they did:

Oakland's sewing machine operators are almost all from Hong Kong and the Chinese province of Kwang Tung. The nonprofit Asian Immigrant Women Advocates was founded two decades ago to help them improve their lives, but ergonomics was never on the agenda - until the workers and their daughters put it there.

By the late 1990's, the teens were walking picket lines on behalf of their mothers to compel large manufacturers to take responsibility for the conditions in small contracting shops. Their mothers came homes exhausted, complaining of headaches, backaches, and pain in their arms and hands...The job of spreading the word fell to the daughters, who prowled Oakland's garment factories with fliers encouraging the women to seek treatment for pain. "At first we were so scared," said Winter Xie, now 19. "The people just shut the door right in our face, or they'd yell at us. Or the workers wouldn't accept the fliers. They were scared of their bosses."

But they persevered, and now LA County is studying the changes this group of girls and women brought to the garment shops in Oakland. You know, if they'd put stories like this in Seventeen, young women in this country might discover that they have more to contribute to the world than their fashion statement. It's amazing how fighting for justice makes the size of your hips or your breasts seem a little less important.

Small blogging hiatus

I won't be doing much blogging this week - I'm working on an article, and I don't have time to do that and blog. Plus, I only have three more days of work until I'm off for two months - yee-ha!!!! The time off is fabulous, but I have a lot of loose ends to tie up between now and Friday. I'm headed to a conference in Colorado on Friday, and don't know what the internet situation will be. All that to say, I'll be back when I can. Try not to miss me too much.

Sacred Space

I got back this afternoon from the women's retreat, and I'm afraid to say too much. We were all entrusted with each other's stories which is a painful and healing gift which needs to stay within that circle of women. There was a different kind of holiness there - something big enough to cover that deep shrieking kind of pain that feels like it might blow the room apart and you along with it. I don't want to give details of anything but this: One of the women told me a story near the very end. It ended with her looking at God and having God tell her, "I love you. Do you know that?" She was looking right into my eyes when she said it. I sobbed for an hour, and the words have been echoing around inside the rest of the day. I can't quite feel that yet, but it feels like soon, maybe I might.

Unplugged weekend

I'm off to a retreat tomorrow and will be in a phone-free and internet-free zone until Sunday afternoon. Hope everybody has a good weekend as I try enjoy my unplugged status.

Guilt and Can I have a dollar?

I get asked for money by people on the street anywhere from three to ten times a day. It’s not possible to give money to everyone, and not terribly helpful to the person on the receiving end anyway. I do find that I’m more likely to give money to homeless people when I’m feeling guilty or inadequate, so there’s several people buying lunch or booze or drugs on me this week. I don’t know which, but I’m not sure it matters since my little generosities were more about me trying to feel better about myself than their need anyway. One guy with a little boy thanked me – really thanked me – for being kind. What can I say? I’m a sucker for a kid.

It’s my standard guilt complex that somehow, I am not doing enough or being enough or working enough. It used to drive me to do things like work seven days a week for three months without a day off, or take five phone calls a day from an emotionally needy person, or to not ask someone to go with me when I was going to pay a visit in a dangerous neighborhood late at night. Wasn’t I supposed to do the will of God by meeting people’s needs with no thought for myself? Wasn’t I supposed to be able to handle it?

It turned out that it was more like doing the will of God so I wouldn’t have the time to think about myself. So to all the kids that I used to try and work out my feelings of self-hatred – I really am sorry about that. I hope I didn’t screw you up too much. I cared about you the best way I knew how, but sometimes the best we can do isn’t all that good.

I used to be constantly haunted by free-floating guilt. I moved into an apartment building with a drug dealer out front, gang members on the corner, and drunk guys passed out on my doorstep, and still felt guilty. I worked way too many hours, trying to be a good little youth worker and still felt guilty. I learned Spanish, drove a car that broke down every 3 weeks, made $14,000 a year and still felt guilty. I was rigidly disciplined about prayer and reading my Bible and still felt guilty. I was not committing any of the big evangelical sins involving being drunk or naked and still felt guilty.

I’ve gotten better at setting boundaries over the years, and worked out a few of my issues. (Seriously – I have. You should have seen me a couple of years ago.) I’ve started to believe that I may not be an irrevocably bad person, but some days, I still feel guilty. It’s not the “You know, Christy, you were pretty rude just then. You should really go apologize.” kind of guilt. It’s the “You’re not trying hard enough.” kind of guilt that only makes me crazy if I pay too much attention. Some days I feel guilty because my apartment building is too clean, my landlord usually fixes stuff, and there’s no one unstable sleeping on my couch.

Somewhere along the way I got the idea that the will of God is just a booty call, with God all big and strong, knocking on my door and saying, “Get up - we’ve got business.” I’m supposed to jump out of bed and say, “Sure thing, baby, let’s get busy.”, even if it is 3 am and I’ve got to get up early the next morning and I know he just wants what he wants, and I’ll wake up feeling used and stupid.

Now I know that’s not true. I can recite verses about God’s love and tell other people about it and believe it for them. It just doesn’t always feel very true, and trusting God feels like throwing myself into the arms of a real big guy who might not be very nice to me.

I don’t have that figured out yet, and I’m not sure how hard I want to think about it. Right now, all I want to do is write, hang out with people, and maybe wander around the city a bit looking for pockets of hope amid the chaos. I don’t want to be responsible for meeting anyone’s needs, although I hope that I’m kind and willing to walk through hard things with people that I care about. I’ve been reading this part in I Peter where it says that what makes us the people of God is not how good we are – although that is important – but the fact that we have received mercy. I think I’ll just go with that for a while and see what happens.

Today's good news

Just so I inject a little bit of hope into my posts today, I had a lovely tour of ArtShare LA today. They do some great and innovative work combining tutoring, academic skills, and art with students in Boyle Heights and Southgate. Many students are on probation, and it is not unusual for them to have high school students come in reading at a 2nd or 3rd grade level. Other students are doing well, and just need a chance for some creative expression and a place to figure out what they want to do next. They have a gallery with work by the students, a theater where they mount productions written by students, a dance space, creative writing workshops, and 30 intern artists studios. It's always good to balance all the tales of tragedy in the world with small stories of good people doing good things.

There's more than one war

I know that we're all focused Iraq at the moment, but there's another conflict that needs our attention. In the last year, more than 10,000 people have been killed in Sudan. Approximately one million people have been displaced. Many of them have headed for refugee camps in Chad, where there is not enough food, water or protection. It is a desperate situation for hundreds of thousands of Sudanese villagers who have watched their villages being burned, family members killed, and women and girls raped. Those who manage to escape are forced to flee into the desert without sufficient food or water, and many mothers have saved their children from attacks only to watch them starve.

Human Rights Watch is calling for more international attention to the Sudanese government's refusal to allow access for humanitarian agencies and the dire situation:

Despite international calls for investigations into allegations of gross human rights abuses, the government has responded by denying any abuses while attempting to manipulate and stem information leaks. It has limited reports from Darfur in the national press, restricted international media access, and has tried to obstruct the flow of refugees into Chad. Only after significant delays and international pressure, were two high-level UN assessment teams permitted to enter Darfur. The government has promised unhindered humanitarian access, but has failed to deliver. Instead, recent reports of government tampering with mass graves and other evidence suggest the government is fully aware of the immensity of its crimes and is now attempting to cover up any record.

With the rainy season starting in late May and the ensuing logistical difficulties exacerbated by Darfur’s poor roads and infrastructure, any international monitoring of the shaky April ceasefire and continuing human rights abuses, as well as access to humanitarian assistance, will become more difficult. The United States Agency for International Development has warned that unless the Sudanese government breaks with past practice and grants full and immediate humanitarian access, at least 100,000 war-affected civilians could die in Darfur from lack of food and from disease within the next twelve months.

For more background on the situation in Sudan, particularly Darfur, here is much useful information from the excellent Human Rights Watch and Doctors Without Borders, who have been working in the refugee camps in Chad. The situation is reminiscent of the genocide in Rwanda, and once again, the international community is doing little to stop it. There are a number of NGO's in Sudan, but they are limited if they do not have the support of the Sudanese government.

So, what can you do? First, you can call your senators and representatives (or MP or whatever you've got wherever you are) and ask them to make some noise to get the U.N. Security Council to put pressure on the Sudanese government to give international monitors, international media and humanitarian NGO's full and free access. Second, you could send some money to organizations that are trying to do something, such as the aformentioned Doctors Without Borders or Human Rights Watch or similar organization.

50 years of Brown v. Board of Education

I've been following most of the coverage of the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. Click here to read a transcript of an interview with Cornel West and Henry Lous Gate and here to read about some African-American parents who fought to reverse the mandatory integration of their local high school. Almost all of the articles I've read agree that most urban schools are almost as segregated now as they were in 1954. It was a necessary ruling for the time, but as a means of achieving true integration in our educational system, it has failed miserably.

Most people would be in favor of integrated schools - at least in theory - but I think our focus on schools is starting at the wrong place. The reason why schools in Compton or East L.A. are almost 100% African-
American or Latino is because those communities are almost 100% African-American or Latino. The only way for students in those communities to attend an integrated school is to get on a bus at a painfully early hour of the morning and spend a long time getting to a school on the Westside or in the San Fernando Valley. I can assure you that bussing white students in to those schools is not going to fly.

The truth is that if most of the schools in a district are bad, than the majority of people with financial resources to do so will either move to a better school district or send their kids to private schools. I'm finding myself on the side of parents who think that it should be possible to provide a quality education for a school full of black or brown kids, even if they're poor. That's a challenging task, but it would be easier if more of us believed that kids from even the most distressed neighborhoods are capable of academic excellence.

It would be far easier to have intergrated school if our cities were not so segregated by race and income. I don't know everything that we need to do to change that, but more affordable housing would help. I used to think that all Christians with some cash should take the path of downward mobility and live simply among the poor. I still think that's a good thing for some of us to do, but I'm a realist. So, if you want to live comfortably in middle-class and affluent suburbs, go right ahead. What we need more of are people of good will in those areas to battle NIMBY-ism and advocate for things like inclusionary zoning and decent affordable housing for the working poor. Affordable housing advocates can't usually win if they're going up against wealthy home-owners in Irvine or Mission Viejo, so they could use a little help.