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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Anna's LiveJournal:
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| Monday, November 2nd, 2009 | | 7:24 am |
Hour Children
Written Oct. 27. Posted now. Today was the second of two community service days for 11th graders at my school. I led a trip to Hour Children, a sort of transitional community for formerly incarcerated women with young children. The organization’s goal is to help women reunite with their children and help the women achieve stable, healthy lives for themselves and their children. It’s a pretty encompassing and apparently wonderful and successful organization. We spoke to two women who are both clients and employees of the organization. They described the basic structure of the program, and the range of the services it offers. They also told us their own stories. The first woman to talk, Kelly, had her first daughter (who is now 18) when she was 17. Kelly insisted that she was a good mother for the first ten years of her daughter’s life. Then she started getting more and more involved in drugs, addicted to a variety of things including heroin and crack, gave up custody of her daughter to her sister, did short stints in prison - basically, was a complete mess. When her daughter was 15 or so, she got pregnant again. She was still getting high, there was a warrant out for her arrest, and she was hiding from the law for five months. She eventually realized that if she didn’t turn herself in, she’d just get arrested when she went to the hospital to give birth, so she turned herself in when she was seven months pregnant and was given a 60 or 90 day stay in prison (can’t remember). She said she hadn’t been to a doctor for a prenatal checkup until she went to jail. There, workers from Hour Children reached out to her and convinced her to come live with them when she got out. Her daughter was born while she was in prison (she said that babies born to incarcerated women must stay in the hospital for a week - without the mother. The mother goes back to prison and returns to the hospital a week later to collect the baby. Which seems unbelievably cruel.) She was released when her daughter was two weeks old, and a woman who worked for Hour Children picked them up and drove them straight to the transitional, communal house. The initial house women live in when they join the program is called My Mother’s House. The women describe moving there as “coming home.” As in, when Kelly said, “When I first came home, I was just amazed… it was the first time I’d felt like I was in a place where I really belonged since my mother died when I was seven.” My Mother’s House is a communal house, where women and their young children live together, the mothers cook together, they share chores, etc. It sounds pretty strict - there’s a curfew, but a lot of women are on parole, so many of them have curfews anyway. There’s dinner every night at 6:30 or 7, and everyone has to be there to eat together every night - trying to instill in the women a habit of cooking real meals and eating with their families. Every woman cooks for the whole house twice a month. They offer a federally approved job training program, providing help with resumes, how to work in an office, basic computer literacy, etc. They help women set up email and checking accounts, which many women have never had before, and help them improve their credit. They offer women internships and then sometimes jobs at the organization - so many of the employees and interns are also the women the organization is helping. They have day care for young children of the mothers in the program, and they bring in teachers and psychologists to evaluate the kids for, among other things, developmental problems related to exposure to alcohol or drugs in utero, which is a common problem among these kids (the women estimated that about 70% of the women in the program were former addicts). They offer mentoring services to children outside the program who currently have a parent incarcerated, pairing kids up with mentors. And I’m not mentioning everything - they do so much, and it sounds like they’re so effective, at least some of the time. Kelly was absolutely clear that if it weren’t for Hour Children, she would not have her younger daughter (or at least not have custody of her or any relationship with her) today, and she would be back on Staten Island doing drugs and stints in jail. After going through their training programs, she’s a full-time employee of the organization, running the mentorship program, and she lives in their permanent housing with her two year old daughter (she pays rent, but the apartment is owned by Hour Children and everyone who lives in the building has gone through the program). She has dinner every night with her daughter and with several other women and children from the program. She was practically in tears, and she said “I’m never leaving here. This is home.” One of our students /was/ in tears by the time she was done. It was incredibly moving and inspiring. | | Monday, July 6th, 2009 | | 9:39 pm |
| | Monday, June 22nd, 2009 | | 12:14 am |
TMI, Randall Munroe. TMI. | | Sunday, February 22nd, 2009 | | 10:11 am |
I just read an NYT travel article about Cape Town. Two sentences in particular bothered me a lot. First, "Then there’s the urban poverty that most tourists, and most white Capetonians, seldom see, except when they pass by it on the way to and from Cape Town International Airport: the squatter camps of the Cape Flats, where tens of thousands of immigrants from impoverished rural areas dwell in shacks beside canals overflowing with raw sewage, and makeshift bars, or shabeens, fill with the alcoholic and the unemployed." This was the only mention of poverty I saw in the 3-page article. First of all, I have massive problems with the sentence, like describing the people who have been in Cape Town for South Africa for millennia as the immigrants - and why are they immigrants? Because they were forced off their land and had to migrate to the cities if they hoped to find work. And why are they unemployed? Because there isn't any work. That sentence had too much of a blame-the-victim feel for me. And "most white Capetonians" don't see the poverty? That's not possible. Most white Capetonians employ people who live in these areas, not to mention that you can't walk down a street without having a kid, or a mother with her small children, or a man with mangled feet, beg you for money or food. It's not that it's not around them. If they don't see it that's just a really special kind of blindness. While I understand that that's not what you want to think about on your exotic vacation, I think it deserves more than one sentence, partly because ignoring the poverty leads to thinking along these lines: " it was easy to feel guilty about such shameless self indulgence, but I was paying only the equivalent of $250 a night at a temporary discounted rate, so I didn’t dwell on it." $250 a night?! It's easy to feel guilty about BUYING A CUP OF COFFEE in Cape Town. I know this is the Travel section. But really, one sentence? | | Friday, February 13th, 2009 | | 1:02 pm |
| | Monday, December 8th, 2008 | | 9:24 am |
Dear Building Services
Our ancestors made a marvelous discovery at some point, or points, in prehistory: insulation. The idea that, whatever your heat source is, you can /confine/ the area it's heating, and not simply heat the entire outside world (directly, anyway). This is the idea behind modern buildings and radiators. Unfortunately, it doesn't work as well if there are gaping cracks around every single single-paned window. And guess what - if weatherstripping windows /prevents them from closing properly/, it sort of defeats the point. *shivers* Current Mood:  coldCurrent Music: multiple songs involving Jesus playing in my head. Not sure why. | | Saturday, November 8th, 2008 | | 5:16 pm |
Obama
Bob Herbert__________ I've come across a number of people, at least here, who seem to be getting a little sick of hearing how incredible this election is. There's the "it doesn't really mean anything; there are still a ton of race problems in America" camp, and the "it's not as big a deal as you think; he's not really black anyway" camp. It's worth remembering that forty years ago people were being beaten, jailed, fired, harassed, and killed for trying to /register/ to vote. At the 1964 Democratic Convention, Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party challenged the all-white Mississippi Democratic Party for their seats at the convention, and they were turned away. Our parents were kids then. This was not that long ago. So this is probably preaching to the choir, but I felt the need to counter the cynicism (thankfully, generally overwhelmed by jubilation) I've seen here. | | Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 | | 2:38 am |
O.M.F.G.
I can't really believe it. But WOW. *exhales that part of my breath I'd been holding for months, at least* | | Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 | | 11:37 am |
go vote!
this is my first presidential election. pretty sweet. Apparently this guy predicted 49 out of 50 states right in 2004. If he's even close this time, we have nothing to worry about, but I'm about to head to philly to gotv anyway. | | Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 | | 9:47 am |
| | Monday, October 27th, 2008 | | 10:50 am |
Anyone buy art?
Or know anybody who does? A Zimbabwean friend I met in South Africa is an engineering student but paints as well. Her website is http://www.sketchbooktrails.com/gallery-current.html . If you've read anything in this journal (or any news about Africa in the last year), you know that Zimbabwe is a mess. Taf, my friend, is having major problems making ends meet, and really needs to sell some of her paintings. As in, she's facing eviction and is running out of money to buy nice things like food. She asked me to try to find buyers here, so I'm trying to spread the word. If you can think of anyone who would possibly be interested, please pass along the information. Thanks~ | | Monday, October 6th, 2008 | | 7:55 am |
Good rundown of the state of South Africa today. *shakes head.* Might offer some clue about why I tend to stammer and trip over my words and launch into half-hour discussions when people ask me how my semester went. NYT. | | Wednesday, September 10th, 2008 | | 8:23 am |
guns, again
The NYT has an edtorial about a bill in Congress to drastically decrease gun control in DC, even though DC is passing its own legislation to respond to the Supreme Court decision. See especially: "This extreme bill goes way beyond what the high court required. Among other things, it would repeal a ban on semiautomatic assault weapons and eliminate firearm registration requirements, even for such things as sniper rifles and small, easily concealed semiautomatic handguns. Under the lunatic logic of this bill, made to order for the gun lobby, such rifles could be toted around on the street fully loaded. The bill is a gross trampling on the right of the district to govern itself, but it is far more than that. At a hearing on Monday, Representative Henry Waxman, chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said the bill would make it harder to protect government officials and the thousands of foreign dignitaries who spend time in Washington each year." I'm sorry... has /everyone/ forgotten the sniper thing? When everyone who lived near or around DC spent days (weeks? I forget) spending as little time on the streets as possible, completely paranoid when waiting at bus stops or doing anything that causes you to stand still, as a target? When DCPS shut down all out of school field trips and we were only ever allowed to leave the building to go to or from school? I know that was an unusual case, but still! argh. | | Thursday, June 26th, 2008 | | 9:53 pm |
Guns
In 10th grade or so, a kid in my high school class published a piece in the Washington Post about his 25 year old cousin who had just been shot to death because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time on the streets of DC. Six months ago, a kid who graduated high school with me was shot to death in his car. This makes me extremely angry. | | Wednesday, June 25th, 2008 | | 10:18 am |
| | Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 | | 4:26 pm |
| | Saturday, May 24th, 2008 | | 12:49 pm |
xenophobia
Things are getting worse here. The attacks on African immigrants that started in Johannesburg townships have spread, and a couple days ago began in townships in Cape Town. I overheard someone in a local fast food store in Rondebosch (the pretty upscale area where I live, far from the townships) two days ago on his cell phone. He was saying that his father had called him and told him to leave where he lived, and told whomever he was calling that he was just checking to see if they were okay. I think that night was when the first attacks in Cape Town began. I've gotten about three emails from different places and people asking for donations of food, clothes, blankets, and mattresses for people who were displaced from their homes, most of whom I think are sleeping in police stations or churches. We're talking thousands of people here. The Mozambique government is sending buses to collect its citizens who want to return home rather than risk the violence here. People are fleeing back to Zimbabwe. Can you imagine fleeing back to a country you fled because the violence is worse in the place that was supposed to be your haven, or the place where you could earn money to feed your family back home? And the US government's sending a nice strong message that we don't like immigrants in the US, either. I don't even really know what to say. I'm at something of a loss for words. | | Saturday, May 17th, 2008 | | 9:40 am |
And in other horrible news...
Remember the brave South African dock workers who refused to unload the shipment of Chinese weapons destined for Zimbabwe? Well, their government apparently doesn't share their silly qualms about providing more weapons to a dictatorial government that is already doing a perfectly fine job massacring its own people. The m&g yesterday had some horrible pictures of Zimbabweans who had been tortured recently for voting for the MDC. And to make things even better, townships around South Africa have been exploding with xenophobic violence this week, attacking, expelling, and sometimes killing foreigners, including many Zimbabweans. The basic response is "Don't they know we helped them end apartheid?" Apparently not. And I guess Mbeki doesn't feel like reminding anyone. Sorry for the doom and gloom - it just doesn't look like this is getting much press in the States, and I guess the world has had bigger problems this week, but things don't look good. (In case I'm scaring anyone, the violence has all been in townships near Johannesburg, waaay north of here. So far away from me.) | | Monday, April 21st, 2008 | | 7:20 am |
| | Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 | | 2:03 pm |
Zimbabwe election
Looks like there might actually be a runoff. This from official ZANU-PF sources, so maybe things won't be completely rigged. People here are watching the Zim election so carefully (it drives me nuts that the nytimes has had practically nothing on it, though I guess that's understandable). I overheard a girl yesterday saying she hadn't slept at all the night before because she'd been watching the news - her entire family is in Zimbabwe. And I know there are a lot of people in her position here. And I was actually in Zimbabwe for a day, two days before the election. I was at Victoria Falls, probably the most touristy part of the country, but it was still very interesting. There were actually some signs of the election, and of opposition - a few people wearing MDC (the opposition party) pins and things, which apparently in previous elections was basically asking to be assassinated. More later. Possibly. |
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