Back after another hiatus.

I've been quiet for a month now. The last four weeks have mostly involved me struggling with my personal beliefs and then the beliefs that seem to be held by the larger public health community. One of the things I keep running into is this sense that we should outlaw things like bacon, soda, cigarettes: these things are not good for you, I know. And I confess! I am a habitual user of bacon, an occasional consumer of soda, and I have given up my occasional-cig-when-I'm-drinking habit. But to flat-out forbid their use ever?!

I'm told that I am not liberal enough for public health, in the sense of liberalism as expanding government control. In this, perhaps, I could nearly be considered libertarian!

The other thing I find myself running into is this attitude that poor people are ignorant and obese people are ignorant or lack willpower. Admittedly, it isn't quite explicitly expressed, but there is this general sense that IF ONLY people realized they were engaging in these harmful behaviors, they would stop. That is, obviously, not the case. Smokers continue to smoke, even when people they know die of lung cancer and even after they have been forced outside to smoke in lonely corners, at least fifty feet away from the door (as they should be!). The sense that we have to save people from themselves- this drives me crazy.

Anyway, I just don't feel like this is something I love enough. But I don't know where the hell to go now.

Under the shadow of the god of the forge...

I've been in Birmingham for about a month and a half now, and it's been quite a change from my time in Atlanta. I live close to UAB, so I bike or walk the two miles to class (except for that time that a policeman decided to give me a ride to school). Sometimes I cut through Five Points South because the walk is nicer; other times I stop off at Lucy's Coffee and Tea, a small café on University Boulevard. I like to stop by Forest Perk, another coffee shop that is open later than Lucy's, so I can do homework there.

I can see the sun set over Birmingham from my living room window.


I run a fair amount still; I also work out/play in the parks near my apartment. I go to a small local grocery for most of my produce needs and I can buy local and regional produce pretty easily. That Man came to visit me and we played house for a weekend. We ate well; we also went barhopping, so now I know some good places to go.

For me, Birmingham is full of unexpected moments. I've gone to a park to exercise and ended up fencing with rapiers with some gentlemen from the local SCA. As mentioned above, I've gotten a lift to school from a police officer, who didn't want to make me walk to school in the rain. I've mingled with some great local (and not so local) musicians at the Nick. On one of my lowest days, I ran into a friend from the con-scene while he was going into work and I was leaving class. I don't fit here, not yet, but I feel like maybe I could. Everyone plans around football games, though, which is a totally foreign concept to me.

I went to Dragon*Con (with That Man, of course!) to help promote PlayOnCon. I was all kinds of loopy by the end of the weekend. A friend got this snap of That Man tolerating my goofiness at the promo table.



I took one of the guinea pigs to the park, where she ate grass and didn't get eaten by dogs. These were taken today:





And yours truly in my new Real Deal Brazil hat. It's made of recycled truck tarps.

Respectfully submitted--

Tonight I met up with some folks at the J Clyde, a local pub, for my friend and realtor’s 25th birthday party. Her friend, A, who was already there, had met some football fans who were meeting up in Birmingham for the football game on Saturday. They were from all over the country: Las Vegas, Little Rock, San Diego, Philadelphia. These guys all work together remotely in banking and like to get together to drink and watch football and wreak havoc, like some kind of touring vikings. I had no idea who these people were (and neither did my friend!) but I think they gave her a great birthday. I know I had a good time, talking about art and music and grad school, and having my ego stroked.

“This is going to be the greatest two years of your life! You get to study anything that tickles your intellectual fancy!” one of the guys from Philadelphia told me. “Grad school is about studying, a little bit, but it is mostly about networking and meeting the right people.”

“You’re so positive! You haven’t said one negative word since you sat down. You’re so pretty, and you’re smart, and you’ve got your whole life ahead of you.”

“I’ve got my Ellen Page here,” another said, indicating A, who does look like a redheaded Ellen Page, “and my Ione Skye.”
“Who is that?”
“She’s the smart girl from Say Anything.”

After they had decided to catch a cab back to their hotel, I decided I would walk out with them, since my car was parked a few blocks away, and because they seemed like good guys. By the time we had gotten a block away from the pub, they had arranged themselves in formation, with me in the middle: one in front, two on either side of me, and one behind. One of them pointed out that he had a daughter- hell, they all had daughters- and that they all thought I was attractive, but they were way more interested in making sure I got to my car safely than in trying to have sex with me.
“Well, and you all have wives who will kill you and also me,” I teased, to a general chorus of agreement.

When we got near my car, I thanked them and hugged each of them and got into my car as they got into a cab.

Thank you, again, Matt, Barry, Mike, and Trevor.

I do have my whole life ahead of me, and so far, it’s pretty great.

Briefly, in bullet points, in the wee small hours of the morning.

Dragon*Con has come and gone, school is in full swing, and I am looking to the next event: Alchemy.

I'm craving surreality in my life, in a big way right now. Somehow I didn't get enough at Dragon*Con.

I just finished day one of the 30 days paleo challenge, except that I am going to commit fully to two or three weeks instead of 30 days.

It's very late, but I want to do something creative. Dad gifted me with a tripod, and I want to take a bunch of weird self-portraits.

Maybe I should clean up my apartment before I attempt that. Which means, naturally, I will go to bed instead.

I have a lot of thoughts, but nothing coherent or cohesive enough to share here.

“How to Be Alone” by Tanya Davis

If you are at first lonely, be patient.

If you’ve not been alone much, or if when you were, you weren’t okay with it, then just wait. You’ll find it’s fine to be alone once you’re embracing it.

We can start with the acceptable places, the bathroom, the coffee shop, the library, where you can stall and read the paper, where you can get your caffeine fix and sit and stay there. Where you can browse the stacks and smell the books; you’re not supposed to talk much anyway so it’s safe there.

There is also the gym, if you’re shy, you can hang out with yourself and mirrors, you can put headphones in.

Then there’s public transportation, because we all gotta go places.

And there’s prayer and mediation, no one will think less if your hanging with your breath seeking peace and salvation.

Start simple. Things you may have previously avoided based on your avoid being alone principles.

The lunch counter, where you will be surrounded by “chow downers”, employees who only have an hour and their spouses work across town, and they, like you, will be alone.

Resist the urge to hang out with your cell phone.

When you are comfortable with “eat lunch and run”, take yourself out for dinner; a restaurant with linen and Silverware. You’re no less an intriguing a person when you are eating solo desert and cleaning the whip cream from the dish with your finger. In fact, some people at full tables will wish they were where you were.

Go to the movies. Where it’s dark and soothing, alone in your seat amidst a fleeting community.

And then take yourself out dancing, to a club where no one knows you, stand on the outside of the floor until the lights convince you more and more and the music shows you. Dance like no one’s watching because they’re probably not. And if they are, assume it is with best human intentions. The way bodies move genuinely to beats, is after-all, gorgeous and affecting. Dance until you’re sweating. And beads of perspiration remind you of life’s best things. Down your back, like a book of blessings.

Go to the woods alone, and the trees and squirrels will watch for you. Go to an unfamiliar city, roam the streets, they are always statues to talk to, and benches made for sitting gives strangers a shared existence if only for a minute, and these moments can be so uplifting and the conversation you get in by sitting alone on benches, might of never happened had you not been there by yourself.

Society is afraid of alone though. Like lonely hearts are wasting away in basements. Like people must have problems if after awhile nobody is dating them.

But lonely is a freedom that breathes easy and weightless, and lonely is healing if you make it.

You can stand swathed by groups and mobs or hands with your partner, look both further and farther in the endless quest for company.

But no one is in your head. And by the time you translate your thoughts an essence of them maybe lost or perhaps it is just kept. Perhaps in the interest of loving oneself, perhaps all those “sappy slogans” from pre-school over to high school groaning, we’re tokens for holding the lonely at bay.

Cause if you’re happy in your head, then solitude is blessed, and alone is okay.

It’s okay if no one believes like you, all experiences unique, no one has the same synapses, can’t think like you, for this be relived, keeps things interesting, life’s magic things in reach, and it doesn’t mean you aren’t connected, and the community is not present, just take the perspective you get from being one person in one head and feel the effects of it.

Take silence and respect it.

If you have an art that needs a practice, stop neglecting it, if your family doesn’t get you or a religious sect is not meant for you, don’t obsess about it.

You could be in an instant surrounded if you need it.

If your heart is bleeding, make the best of it.

There is heat in freezing, be a testament.

Long time, no post!

I've been getting ready for POC, going through POC, recovering from POC, preparing for my move, driving up to DC, doing more preparation for the move, and I move TOMORROW to Birmingham!

In the meantime, here is a video shot in Jacmel, Haiti, with after my rotation left. It's a series being pitched to Discovery, and it best answers the question, "How was Haiti?" In it, you will see Rod, Grace, Philip, Frank, Mika, and Junior, all of whom I met during my time there.

Explore22 - Episode 1 (Haiti) from Explore22 on Vimeo.

Some Benefits of Hunting and Gathering

(image courtesy of Watersense.)

In a medical anthropology class at Emory, I read Jared Diamond's essay The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race, which I've been thinking about a lot ever since. Diamond argues that agriculture brought about an increase in the incidence of disease, as it encouraged crowding (which is obvious) and as it encouraged the consumption of diet that was sub-optimal from a nutritional standpoint, dependence on a few crops, which raised the risk of starvation (a rarity in modern hunter-gatherer societies), and paved the way for class- and sex-based discrimination.

The evidence is based on archaeological findings, as well as (less directly and admittedly with some conjecture) on anthropological studies of modern hunter-gathering societies, e.g. the Bushmen of the Kalahari.

'Until recently, archaeologists had to resort to indirect tests, whose results (surprisingly) failed to support the progressivist view. Here’s one example of an indirect test: Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn’t emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"

While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a bettter balance of other nutrients. In one study, the Bushmen’s average daily food intake (during a month when food was plentiful) was 2,140 calories and 93 grams of protein, considerably greater than the recommended daily allowance for people of their size. It’s almost inconceivable that Bushmen, who eat 75 or so wild plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers and their families did during the potato famine of the 1840s.'

The essay can be found here, and is short and quite well-written. I had forgotten that George Armelagos, the Anthropology department chair for most of my time at Emory, was quoted in the essay, so that was a bonus!

I'm not advocating a sudden worldwide return to hunting and gathering; our planet's population is huge and grossly dependent, both nutritionally and economically, on the growing, buying, and selling of staple crops, such as rice. It does, however, make me wonder what would happen if I stopped eating rice, wheat, and other foods I would only find in agricultural societies, as my body, like that of all humans, is adapted for eating stuff I find or kill. I started looking into this with greater interest after running across Mark's Daily Apple, where Mark and his minions write about their modern "primal" lifestyle (which is, of course, closely related to the paleo diet, for those who have seen mention of that in recent years). This has led to my beginning to experiment more with cooking greens and baking with almond flour (the cookies were good, the bread is stellar, the pie was a disappointment) and I'm looking forward to trying and learning more; and who knows? Maybe I will see results.

Reflections on Haiti: A month later.

I’ve been home from Haiti for about a month now, and I have had a lot of time to reflect on my time there. I still haven’t completed my intended project of transcribing all of my written journal entries to the computer so I can shared edited portions. I have, however, come to a couple of conclusions:

I’m tired of hearing, “Oh, I wish I could do something like that!” I’m also tired of hearing that I’m a good person for going. It was pretty much pure “voluntourism”: let’s go somewhere exotic and poor and help out on our time off! Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great, as it gets work done and educates people about places that are radically different worlds from their own. I went because I needed to feel like I was doing something, I had time, and I had some money available to me. I am glad that I went, but I went for me, to satisfy this urge I had to do something. And anyone can do it, given some time and some money. Many volunteers use their vacation days to do this kind of work; many people who are between jobs take that time to volunteer.

I can’t go back. I thought I would; I wanted to go back, desperately, after I got home. I still wish I could go back. But my responsibilities to commitments at home, to my friends and families, to myself, as I move to a new city and begin graduate school: those stand in my path, in an immediate way. On a deeper level, however, there remains this conviction that anything I can give or do can’t be enough, that it’s like trying to desalinize an ocean with an eyedropper of fresh water. And it isn’t because Haiti needs so much (although it does) or because I feel that my efforts are meaningless (although there are days when it felt and still feels that way).

I feel that Haiti is ill, and its symptoms of poverty and corruption are the effects of psychological scarring left over from the days of slavery: after the rebellion that transformed it from Saint-Domingue to Haiti, it was forced to pay reparations back to France and the United States and rest of Europe refused to trade with it, out of fear of war with France. Like so many struggling former colonies, when it gained its freedom, it was like a teenager, with an idea of how adulthood should look, but with not enough experience to self-govern and achieve that maturity. I think that Haiti’s development has been so stunted economically and its dependence on foreign aid become so strong, that it may not ever gain safe footing, particularly if it continues in the same pattern it has been for years now.

That sounds cold and callous, doesn’t it? I don’t mean to sound so hopeless, so negative, and perhaps part of this is me trying to distance myself from Haiti. It is, however, based on my observations and the observations I have compared with many others, not only volunteers in my group, but friends who have worked there with the military or visited at other times. There’s a sense among many Haitians that I met that one must work hard- but only hard enough to make it to tomorrow. And then one repeats it the next day, every day, until one dies. Not all people, of course, subscribe to that philosophy, and I am not saying it is unrealistic in the conditions in which many Haitians have grown to adulthood. It is simply the way to make it through the day without going insane: its own protective insanity. Jessica Leeder a writer for The Globe and Mail living in Jacmel wrote that she had hired a housekeeper, who quit after day one, believing that she wouldn’t make more money that the 38 dollars Canadian that she stole from Leeder the first day.

Why invest in the future, though, if you live without the certainty that there will be a future for you at all? In my last journal entry, as we left Jacmel, I wrote that Haiti constantly undergoes crises that seem to undo the work previously completed. It’s a recurring cycle of renewal, but it isn’t healing. It only returns Haiti to square one, or even square zero. The cause of the setback can be anything- whether man-made or natural disaster- but the average Haitian seems equally powerless in contrast, no matter the cause, as they are economically (and therefore politically) disenfranchised, to the point that creating something permanent looks, at least to my Westernized eyes, to be a pipe dream.

Best way to sum up how I felt upon returning home.

From Philip Ngiau's journal:

"I ‘m on my way to Kennedy Space center…and i just keep thinking about something i read. It was about one of the first lunar astronauts, and how the first night back from the moon there was a BBQ in his backyard. There he stood, beer in hand, looking up at the moon. Nothing had changed around him, everything and everyone was the same…the only difference was that this time he had “the opposite point of view” he was having right now…standing on the moon looking up at earth, and to him, it made all the bbq’s before all feel a little different than the bbq’s after…i didnt really get it, but its been running thru my mind after entering that supermarket. I cant help but remember standing in Pinochiot camp, or just haiti in general. The size, the rows of food and much much more i could use or need…it felt surreal…like one or the other must be fake, these two “places” cant exisit in the same “good” world we live in right…it makes me “crunch” up my brow in a bewildered and slightly lost feeling at the difference…but that is why i had to go to haiti…every time before, it was just a CNN report on TV, and no matter how much i watched it, it remained something i…well, watched on TV. Now its not…"

Close encounters of the slithery kind.

I went for a run this afternoon, on the back trails of Cochran Shoals. I like to go into the woods, instead of staying along the main path, which is wide and gravely and often full of people. It reminds me of playing in our woodsy backyard, growing up in Louisiana, but with even more space and less siblings. I get to run through mud and jump over logs and, in this case, go off the path and climb down into a creek that flows into the Hooch, and pretend that I look like a capable explorer. I was making my way down the creek, hopping from rock to rock, when I climbed onto a fallen tree. Suddenly a flash of movement caught my eye- it was a snake dropping from another branch into the water. I've never seen that before, but it startled me. I looked around to make sure there were no other snakes I was in immediate danger of stepping on and started to move toward the trail. I have heard so many stories about how cottonmouths get angry and will come after you if you surprise them, and since I didn't know what snake I had startled, I looked down into the water for it again. We made eye contact and it went gyrating downstream and I went crashing through leaves and branches to get back to the path. I just looked it up, and I think I found a brown water snake- not a water moccasin, not venemous, but still not something I want to get real cuddly with.

About twenty minutes later, on my way back along the main path, I saw a gleaming black snake slithering toward the woods, away from one of the rectangular bench/planters that can be found along the path. I approached it, because I wanted to know what kind of snake it was. And because I am an idiot. It wasn't in a huge hurry, but it was making good time for the brush, and I gave it a lot of space. I figured it was a black rat snake (which with I've already had a close encounter) but I think now it was a black racer.

I've never seen snakes down there before; I knew they were there, but this was so surprising to actually see, particularly on the main path, since there is so much foot traffic there in late afternoon and early evening.

Running

I'm trying to get back into running since I didn't run much in Haiti, except at recreation, when it was chasing down frisbees or giving a million piggy back rides ("NON! I can only carry one of you at a time, you have no idea what I am saying, un! Un! Seulement! Pas deux! Pas trois! Okay?!"), and it's... well, it's going.

It was going pretty well, but yesterday my calves were sore before and after my morning run, so when I went to the Hooch for a walk, I planned to take it easy. Once I got off the main bike trail, though, and into the muddy, hillier areas, I suddenly found myself running. It probably wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't been wearing my light hikers, instead of my nikes or VFFs. So of course, I went back to the river this morning- this weekend, it's freeeeee!- and ran in my VFFs, so the run was easier at first and then my calves hurt so badly I had to keep stopping and stretching.

The only thing that got me through it was the Stuff You Should Know podcast, which is pretty magical AND available on iTunes.

Oh, and...

One of the volunteers from rotation 4 has been maintaining his blog much more faithfully than I have. I think he's a pretty cool guy, as long as you don't ask him for scary stories about his job! (He's a pilot!) Check out Philip's journal for current news and reflections about the compound (soon to be plural!!) in Jacmel.

Oh, and another blog, from Frank: This is Haiti. Very well written, very disturbing.

A video--

Dreamed I was driving along the coast and suddenly I was in Jacmel again, along the road to the beach. I woke up and one of the girls in my rotation, who was at Croix-de-Bouquet, just outside of Port au Prince, had posted this video of her time in CdB. Their compound was different as it was actively a school and there were several volunteers working in a medical clinic. Around 3:30 you meet a nurse who is talking about an 8 month old who came to them dehydrated and is now thriving. She doesn't mention this, but the mother was feeding the baby soup instead of breastfeeding because she believed that her milk was bad after the earthquake. The woman had carried five kids to term and they had all died except this one. The lack of education is just... unconscionable. ANYWAY, here is Hannah's awesome video.



Sorry for the lack of real update; life has been busy since I returned, as my boyfriend came back to Atlanta for a week!

Journal Transcript: Arrival in Haiti

11:00 a.m., having just left Kingston, Jamaica.
And we’re off! In a little Jetstream 18 seater, all 12 of us. We didn’t have to remove our shoes for security, which was just a metal detector and an xray machine. Jamaica is receding into the distance as we fly eastward to haiti. It’s a short flight, and so I guess won’t write mich. Still feeling quite nervous but looking foward to seeing Haiti and getting in Jacmel. The drive is supposed to be quite harrowing, more so than to Kingston from Tower Isle, which was stressful in some places because of other drivers’ insistence on passing on narrow mountain roads with no visibility around the curve. It was pretty though, so I am glad we went through the mountains, instead of the longer way around the island, which is how Richard, our driver, may return us “home”. I tried washing my hair with Dr. Bronner’s this mornng. It didn’t work at all; I don’t know why I keep trying that when it never works for me. Maybe I can find some shampoo in Haiti. Still not sleeping right, either, and woke up with giant bags under my eyes. Those dorms are miserably hot without fans- maybe I will just sleep in the walkway when we return there. It stormed last night and the sound of thunder and rain woke me. It cooled off a lot, thank goodness.
Oh, here’s a weird thing: before bed, the other girls’ dorm found a crab behind the door. He was about five inches long, maybe six, and his claw was wedged between wall and door. Who knows how long he’d been there. Lisa took him to the fence and dropped him over; Madge Saunders isn’t close to the water. He either found his way to water or made a meal for one of the many malnourished dogs roaming around Tower Isle.
8:20 p.m., Jacmel, Haiti
Holy shit, we’re here. Landed at Toussaint Louverture Airport in Port au Prince and were imediately mobbed by Haitians trying to sell us stuff and take our bags for us. Seven of us piled into a van with Larry, freaking out because there wasn’t enough space for all twelve of us. Drove through PaP, seeing all the devastation, all the trash, all the rubble, and all the tents. It was incomprehensible. But life goes on here: people go about their business, even when everything is in pieces, literally.

The ride through the mountains, though, was gorgeous- this is such a beautiful place, I had no idea. The compound is in an unfinished house. We have a basement and I climbed up on our roof too, which has a lovely view of the mountains and of an IDP camp, Tets Ansam (Creole for Heads Together). I’m sharing a tent with Ali but am pretty sure I will be in my mosquito net- it’s a lot cooler than a tent. Andrew, Joy, Jill, Grace, and Rod were already here, and I like them. Jill is from Newfoundland, Joy from Taiwan and living in NY, Andrew from NZ and living in LA, Rod from Devon, UK, and Grace who lives in Brussels. Let’s see... what else? We have a gorgeous compound with running water. We met our community liason, Mika, who speaks Kreyold and French. We learned that “bobo” is the word for vagina in Creole, and that Prestige is pretty good beer, which is good because it’s the only one here. Gill introduced Bobo to children as “Papa Bobo” and our Creole teacher Fanel told us it means, “you know... the pussy!” I laughed until I cried, my god. I feel so much better just being here! I am told by Larry I will meet the organization that does maternal-child health tomorrow, but that is sort of up in the air. We have a camp dog as well. She’s so sweet, but a bit skittish. The new electricity isn’t quite working right tonight, I guess, because our power keeps going off and on. We are probably going to church tomorrow morning.

Journal Transcript: May 4-7

May 4
St. Mary, Jamaica.
There are palaces next to shanties with exposed rebar here. I’m struck by how poor many Jamaicans are. Staying in dorms on bunkbeds, and it’s hot as hell. My soap leaked all over my toiletries, so I may be shampooless. I like the group and am excited but I miss home and my bed and everything. I feel like I’ll sleep for a week when I get home. It’s gorgeous here and I do catch the breeze, which is scented by Bobo’s cigar smoke (he claims it helps keep away mosquitos). It’s pleasant except for how hot the bed is. So, yeah. I’m here. Orientation starts at 9.

May 5
Ali let me borrow her macbook so I emailed Mom, Dad, Dustin, and Dan to let them know I’m here and safe. Orientation is about to start. It was almost impossible to sleep last night which makes me wonder if chloroquine can contribute to sleeplessness. I found myself reading outside on the cool concrete steps, trying to catch the breeze and forgetting how hot my mattress would be.
The parish hall, where we eat and are meeting, is large and has a stage and many sets of doors, kept open on both sides to allow air flow. There are fans but they drown out voices, so we have to speak loudly or be hot. I asked Mike, who is a construction veteran from DC, about the exposed rebar and he said it is a way to leave open the option of expansion, towards, since the lots are so small, at least around here.
This is a lively group, mostly young Canadians. We’re all so driven and so ready to be there and rather idealistic, I guess, but not in the way that many Emory students I knew would be. I am so impressed with every story I hear from everyone, even if I was really cranky with many of the volunteers last night, due to how sound echoes like crazy here and the heat. We talked about the compound today, how outsiders stay outside, how we’re on the edge of the tent cities in Jacmel, and all I could think of were zombies, of how David and I used to jokingly plan for a zombie apocalypse and what a compound for us would look like, and there’s a lot of overlap here, except obviously Haitians don’t want your brains; they want money, water, food, clothing, whatever you can give. They generally are friendly, Larry tells us. Larry is our operations and security training guy, and will be getting us through customs and to the compounds. He’s got a background as a psychologist, a martial artist, a jazz musician, a teacher, and in HIV/AIDS education procrams, and now he partners with Nadine. Nadine worked for the UN for many years in disaster and emergency logisitics, and ended her tenure there in Indonesia, where there was always a disaster to respond to. Her involvement in this began while she was in Indonesia, January 12th, and she flew over here to Jamaica, researching and juggling emails all the way from Jakarta to Kingston. She’s Jamaican by birth, but has lived all over. Oh, and she’s a yogini! Amazing! So those are our fearless leaders for orientation.
I don’t miss home as much in the daytime; there is always someone to talk to, even if there isn’t much to do. Larry tells me there is an organization specializing in safe and natural childbirth in Jacmel who I can interview for Dr. Foster. He says there’s no prenatal care to speak of, though, otherwise. I’m curious about maternal and infant mortality, birthweight, delivery methods.
Just found out- I’m going to Jacmel, on an 18 seater charter plane, on Saturday morning. Waiting to start a yoga class with Lisa.

May 6
Unsurprisingly I slept so much better last night. The combination of sleep deprivation, rum, and now familiarity with my location really helped. Got a few more mosquito bites. It’s so odd to think that our group is splitting up on Saturday! It’s not like we’ve all known each other for long, but these are the only people I know here so I claim them as mine, to some extent, in my head. We’re told to hang out with our compound groups more, which did happen last night at Glenn’s. Cathryn, Julia, Bobo, oddle, Gill, and I were the last people at the bar and comprise six of the nine Jacmel crwe. The other three are Stephanie, Michael, and Ali. The group is a good one, I hope, and we’re building the dynamic.

Some notes from orientation:
“Y’all look like you slept way too well. That is NOT part of the training.”- Larry.
A taptap is a light truck with benches in the bed; garishly painted; hop on, hop off.
Don’t no-show for meals, or church. Preval is still head of gv’t, but there’s no infrastructure. Other NGOs we will see: UN, MSF, but we’ll wait and see. The disaster relief people have already left. UN is moving Pinchinat camp to a safer place for rainy season- about 7000 people. We’re in the pipeline to help with paperwork. Both camps have four people each from previous rotations.
Getting through cusoms and immigration. Do not move as an individual- stay together as a group.
“I’ll say, ‘Nous sommes un organization humanitaire. Il y a dix personnes.’ And then you’re all standing there with your ID badges around your necks and smiling so it looks legit.”
“What if they try to tax our luggage at customs?” “You tell them to go to hell!”

Obviously we had more orientation today, about the compounds, landing in Haiti, culture, and the current situation. Larry’s method of conveying information is story telling, which I prefer. We end up hearing a lot of anecdotes, including this one:
The first time we were in Haiti, there was a woman on the plane from Ireland, a sister, like a lot of volunteers back then. Sister Anna. She was going to Port-au-Prince, to a clinic, and I could tell she was feeling really nervous and trepidatious. I told her, “Sister, this private plane is your last privilege; all privileges end here, Sister.” When we landed, I tried to carry her suitcase, but she wouldn’t let me, so we walked to the first gate together, me with my backpack and her pulling her little rolling suitcase. Back then, you could just walk in, no immigration. I gave her my number, and said, “Sister, call me if you need anything.” Later, I got back here and she’d called twice- it was Nadine’s phone, actually- always with the same thing. “I’m alone, I am abandoned, this clinic is just some cots, there’s only one old woman here.” We tried and we tried to get ahold of her, but I never heard anything back.

After a brief silence, Ali cut in, “Wait, that’s it? That’s the whole story?!”
“Not every story in Haiti ends happily! We can make up an ending: And then she went back to Ireland and was safe and sound.”

Larry talks a lot about “back then”, which sounds like more time than it is- he means right after the earthquake in January. Completely insane how things have changed since then. The compound is pretty nice, all things considered: two bathrooms, a roof over our tents, power outlets. I’m kind of irritated with how GVN made the conditions sound. I bought these water treatment tablets I don’t need, I could have brought my laptop, more books, tank tops. I hate feeling like the situation was so misrepresented to me and being so damned overheated.

May 7
People started their malarone within the last few days. Chelsea woke us all up, hollering about a spider, nearly hyperventilating. A lot of people in this group are easily squicked by rats, spiders, roaches, all of which we have an abundance of here at Madge Saunders in Jamaica. This morning, I was putting in contacts while Ali and Chelsea were brushing their teeth, and Chelsea asked, “Is that rat poop in the sink?” Sure enough, it was. While I’m not afraid of rats, it’s still pretty gross. There was also a kerfluffle while I was in the shower. “Did the rat come back again?”
“No, it’s a roach the size of a rat!”
Not scary, but still pretty gross. Hopefully we as a group won’t have too many nightmares, malaria-drug-related or otherwise.
(later) Went to Dunn’s River Falls today, where we climbed the falls twice and were thoroughly soaked. I ended up removing my shirt and wore just my bra and shorts- I didn’t bring my bathing suit because I thought I’d be working all the time and not have time to do fun stuff. I had a lot of fun, took some pictures, fell on my ass a few times. I feel really good! Strong, capable, really “on”.
That said, right now I am feeling a bit cynical, maybe as a cover for my fear that we will accomplish nothing by being there, just babysitting or providing busywork. If we teach French or English, what happens when we leave? Will the next group pick up our lesson plans? Are we going to have access to rotations 1 and 2’s lessons? God, I hope so. I worry, too, that I cannot balance compassion and sense, that I will want to adopt every child and give out a bunch of handouts. The video we watched of one of the camps in late January had a phrase that rang true, rang hard, rang familiar: “the dignity of work”, instead of “the indignity of handouts”. Providing marketable skills and a niche in which to use them is, in my mind, radically important. I prayed- well, I guess it was more like meditation- a lot today- to have compassion and love for everyone I come into contact with, whether in or out of the compound; for safety; for my health; for an alert mind to see both dangers and opportunities. I hope I can have all these things and harness them to do as much as I can, as hard as I can, in my time in Haiti. The next time I write, I will be in transit. Here comes that cliff-jumping feeling again.

It is the strong who can afford to doubt themselves, the true who don't need to lie to themselves about their weakness, and the brave who go forth and get lost so that they can map the stars and write the charts that will guide starfarers for centuries to come.
-my friend, Sabrina Pandora


Two more days until I leave for Montego Bay! My volunteer journal can be found here!

Highlights of my trip to Maryland--

I drove up last Thursday, and it's normally a twelve hour drive or so, but on an impulse, I detoured off of the main highway somewhere in southern Virginia (Fancy Gap, it looks like), and took the Blue Ridge Parkway for a few hours. I had no phone service (curse you, T-Mobile!!) and no physical map so after a while I started to get antsy and worry where I was going to join the highway. I stopped to take a lot of pictures, as well as to admire the views.

Friday night, Dan and I took the metro down to Adams Morgan to meet up with one of our friends for a few drinks. Hex was late, so Dan and I wandered a bit, in search of a bathroom, and found ourselves in Dan's Cafe. Adams Morgan has a ton of bars but this one didn't quite fit- the facade lacks windows and looks kind of condemned. I ordered a beer and Dan asked for a bourbon neat. The bartender pointed out that he could have a flask bottle for thirteen dollars, instead of a little airplane liquor bottle for five bucks, so Dan took the bigger bottle. The bartender poured the bottle into two glasses, which he pushed over to us with a bucket of ice, before spiking the empty bottle into a trash bin. Dan used the bathroom while I continued to marvel over all of this and came out a shaken man. I have since looked up Dan's Cafe on yelp, and almost all of the reviews mention the bathroom and how terrifyingly gross it is. Hex was still not there, so I helped Dan out with the bourbon. I'm a good helper. And my beer was terrible.

The rest of the night included the biggest slices of pizza I have ever seen, karaoke with a bunch of drunken college kids, and live music at Madam's Organ.

Saturday night, we met up with Hex again, this time at a sports bar in Leesburg, which seemed odd, except that the band playing there was The Reflex, and they are tons of fun live! The bar was giving out jelly bracelets and while some folks were there in jeans and a tee (including yours truly), other people were all kinds of dressed up- I even saw a totally hideous and hilarious zebra print suit.

Sunday morning, we drove down to Old Town in Alexandria, where we visited the Torpedo Factory, which is an arts space, and actually has exactly nothing to do with torpedos anymore! I really liked the neighborhood- it reminds me a lot of Charleston, in some ways- I guess it was mostly the old buildings and being close to the water.

Driving home Monday, I spent a lot more time on the Blue Ridge Parkway, starting at mile 0 and ending at Meadows of Dan, where I got onto a rural road and spent a lot of time praying I'd get to a highway before I reached West Virginia. I stopped a lot and walked around and took even more pictures. I even had a picnic lunch in the mountains! I didn't get home till 1 a.m., and I was still too wired to sleep until 4.

Well, hello!

I got my journal login from GVN, so here's the link: http://www.volunteerjournals.org/author/kwork/

Cynthia Sewell is a volunteer who is probably home by now, having just completed her rotation in Haiti three days ago. I'm going to quote from her journal here, since this was... just unbelievable.

Hi All, sorry so late with an update. My last day in Haiti and I finally have access to a computer. I’ll attempt to be brief with my summary of events which have unfolded in the past 2 weeks. Week 1 we arrived in Port au Prince and proceeded to make our way through the city. The sites confirming all that we have seen in the news media. Extremely overcrowded city decaying before your eyes. Most buildings reduced to rubble, rubbage and sewage everywhere! We made our way to Jacmel, on the southeast coast of Haiti. Arrived in a torrential downpour. Quickly determined our compound was not safe for habitation and infeasible to set up camp. We stayed in a nearby questhouse for 4 days until we could get our compound up to “living” standards. I use that term loosely. As the development team with were dropped in country with little resources and connections with other ngo’s. We had many false starts, but finally prevailed by week 2. We have created a community center for the tent camps surrounding our compound. We offer adult english classes, childrens’ art and recreation classes. The appreciation of the Haitians is heartwarming. We also formed a partnership with OIM to help relocate the displaced people of Pichonat, the largest IDP camp in Jacmel. Our first visit to the camp was met by a group of angry demonstrators chanting they will not leave. We aborted our mission that day as we considered the situation might ascalate. Unfortantely, I will not be able to continue my work with the relocation process. I also spend time with children in a couple of orphanges as well as a few schools. In summary, the needs are enormous! I accomplished what little I could in such a short period of time.

So, yeah, they built the whole compound from scratch, and it now has two pit toilets and some tents. It looks like more people were being redirected to Port-au-Prince on the previous rotation, probably because of the aforementioned incident at Pichonat.

One week to go!

Some links.

Via Andrew Sullivan, in light of my recent body painting adventure, in which I did have help (at least getting my back), which was lovely and rather relaxing:
Donald Johanson, a paleoanthropologist, believes, based on his time with the Masai in Kenya, body art predates cave paintings: "They were probably decorating one another, and this was like, in a broad sense, like when you look at non-human primates that groom one another, it was a way of developing social contact and social connectedness and cohesiveness. So the earliest art really goes back to Southern Africa [...] Europe wasn't really the place where the creative explosion happened. It came along with us into Europe and developed over time to the point where you have the first impressionists, twenty-five thousand years ago," by which he means the cave paintings at Lascaux. (That link leads to a 3D virtual tour of the caves, if you are interested.)

Kathleen Parker reflects on the growing sense of political unrest in the face of the fifteenth anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, which is today. "Is the political environment becoming so toxic that we could see another Timothy McVeigh emerge?

No one knows the answer, but fears that anger could escalate into action beyond the ballot box are not misplaced. Ninety-nine percent of angry Americans might be perfectly satisfied to rail at their television sets -- or to show up at a Tea Party rally -- but it takes only one.
[...]
Add to the mixture of organic anger and grass-roots momentum the heckling language of Beck, Limbaugh & Co., and one fears that volatility could become explosive. What's next, militias?

Well, yes, now that you mention it. In Oklahoma, un-ironic legislators are sympathetic to a proposal to form local voluntary militias to thwart unwanted federal initiatives and to preserve state sovereignty."

Scary stuff. Here's hoping that the Second Amendment rallies today stay nonviolent, though, and that all those guns are in fact unloaded and holstered!

Also scary, but less because of my fellow man- a veritable hit parade of the biggest explosions in our history! Includes Krakatoa, the unexplained explosion at the Tunguska River in Siberia that leveled over 2000 square kilometers (that's over 1200 square miles!) in 1908, and Lake Toba, which was a supervolcano in Sumatra that cooled the earth 70,000 years ago and may have contributed to a decline in the human population at that time!

Lots of things.

My housemate Sean says there are way too many things going on with me at once right now, and I guess he is right.

I drove over to Birmingham to visit UAB on Friday, and took a tour, and I love the campus. I love what I saw of Birmingham, and I felt pretty safe and comfortable there. I also really liked the department and think I might fit in pretty well. My contact person there was really helpful in answering questions about potential financial aid, and there's a possibility I may qualify for the Academic Common Market, which would allow me to attend for in-state tuition prices. The woman who gave me my tour is a first-year in the program and was very helpful and enthusiastic and directed me to websites to look up housing.

So for now, I am up in the air. I have to decide by May 1st, so that I can tell GSU whether or not I have chosen them, and I have no idea. I'm going to try on this idea of moving to Birmingham this week and see how it fits me. I'll be looking at apartments and thinking about when I would move, and use that to help see how I really feel about the idea of moving.

In other news, pre-POC went off pretty well. The property is quite nice and reminded me of like a family summer vacation type place- not super nice, but definitely not a dump. I was in a suite, there was a refrigerator, a stove and it was like being in a little tiny apartment. On Friday night, I was there alone, and I didn't feel unsafe. I drove out to Homewood to look around and find dinner and then came home and had a beer and relaxed and read.

On Saturday, it was like summer camp, almost. I was a lot more familiar with the property and was running around from building to building and then once more of my friends arrived, we were running errands to WalMart and Sam's in search of party supplies. Sean and I made jello shots before I crashed out for half an hour- I was feeling really sick and tried to nap a few times, only to be awakened by someone texting or my con-roommate coming in to the room in search of me. After the nap, I felt much more human, had dinner, and then painted myself green. It worked pretty well- but I have NO pictures! All in all, the weekend was very fun, and I got to see a lot of friends I dearly love and make more new friends! I'm really looking forward to POC 3 now!

I have about four hundred things to do before I leave for Alabama tomorrow morning so I will keep this short, but:

I GOT INTO UAB!!!!

I'm meeting up with a tour guide tomorrow morning at 10:30, central time. Details to follow!

Change of plans?

I don't know for sure, but I may be going to Bham a day early to look at UAB, which would entail me dumping a bunch of party decorations in my car and staying in the hotel where POC will be an extra night. The room would be fairly cheap, since I am told I can have it booked at the con rate now.

Mom and Dad used to work at UAB so they know a ton of people and a ton of places and it is kind of awesome and kind of overwhelming. I don't know anything about Bham except that they have Dreamland Barbeque and I lived there for three years of my life. Oh, and I kind of remember going to a public library there as a toddler.

Anyway, I found a few more things I wanted to share. Be a nerd and get the painting of the First Cylon War that Adama has on his wall in Battlestar Galactica. I am still stuck on the third season, because I got distracted by Dexter and shiny things and probably Glee, but I still am vaguely disappointed that my biological mother isn't Laura Roslin. I continue to hang on to hope that my biological father who I haven't yet contacted is Bill Adama, though.

Also, the Library of Congress announced that they are archiving all the tweets publicly made since 2006, so that's exciting. The stupid stuff I text when I am drunk is definitely on the internet forever, and you would think that this would make me more likely to think before I tweet, but it probably won't; it will probably inflate my sense of self-importance, so that everything I write on twitter will be, to me, words of wisdom handed down to following generations. Here is some of my recent "wisdom" (and these are written sober!) in reverse chronological order:

My background check is gloriously boringly empty. Yay!
Made tuna salad at parents' but they only have wasabi mayo. Ow, my sinuses/Mmm wasabi. Just me, the dog, & the John Adams miniseries.
No, no, no, I do not want to be awake, no. Take this consciousness away, please, I will use it later, I swear.
Getting a background check on myself at the Sandy Springs police dept. For Haiti, not recreationally.
Ohmigah, you guys, I look like the Hulk. Ahahahaha.

Speaking of looking like the Hulk- I picked up new green paint at Eddie's, which is a costume and puppet and magic shop near my house. I thought they had sold me the wrong kind, since I thought I wanted water-based instead of a cream, but this kind is amazing. It stays pretty well, even without liquiset or whatever, and it makes me nice and green without looking like I got overexcited about smearing fingerpaint on myself. I really hated having my face painted when I was a little kid, and the Magicolor reminds me of that gross greasy feeling, while the new stuff feels lighter and more natural, except for the fact that it turns me green.

Link dump.

First of all, a column from Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post, who recently won a Pulitzer: America is neither left nor right but centrist.

Another movement percolating right in front of our noses seems to be equally invisible to establishment eyes. Independents -- neither right nor left but smack dab in the broad middle -- today constitute 42 percent of the electorate, according to a recent CBS/New York Times poll.

Approximately 70 million strong, these are America's new homeless class, people who are equally disgusted with both traditional parties and the special interests that control them. They're all ages, sexes, races, ethnicities, though younger Americans are crowding the front rows. Of those born after 1977, 44 percent identify as independent.

I'm still slogging through The Conservative Soul by Andrew Sullivan, which is pretty eye-opening. I just discovered Parker through Sullivan's blog, and I'm trying to add to my political radar more opinions that don't match mine. More and more of my friends identify as centrists, who Parker broadly defines as "fiscally conservative, socially libertarian-ish", and less and less of them feel represented in the media, much less in politics, where politicians continue to try to pander to the fringier voters among us.

On a sillier note, meet the Alot, from Hyperbole and a Half!


"The Alot is an imaginary creature that I made up to help me deal with my compulsive need to correct other people's grammar. It kind of looks like a cross between a bear, a yak and a pug, and it has provided hours of entertainment for me in a situation where I'd normally be left feeling angry and disillusioned with the world."
Allie is a funny lady, and you should go read her work, or at least look at the pictures!

Finally!

An acceptance letter! Georgia State University sent me an email to say congratulations and welcome to the program.

"Dear Admitted Student:

Congratulations! I am happy to report that you have been admitted to the MPH program in the Institute of Public Health for the Fall 2010 semester. Your official admission letter will be mailed shortly, but I wanted to take this moment to contact you about this decision so that you may plan accordingly."


I squealed, "Eeee, someone loves meeeeee!" and bounced on the bed and startled my parents' dog. Sorry, Tia!

Pockets.

I have long been in the habit, when I go out, of eschewing a purse entirely, and instead relying on a Man With Pockets to carry my ID, money, and car keys. (It’s always a man, and it’s not always someone I am dating. The only woman who has ever offered is Z, and that is because she is a gentlewoman and usually a Gentlewoman With Pockets, at that.) If a Man With Pockets is unavailable or is flighty and not to be trusted and will probably leave me somewhere, like many women I'd rather just stick said ID and debit card into my bra. This has led to some interesting contortions, bulges, and pinching sensations, as well as far too many conversations with strangers that begin, “Oh! I’m sorry, I was grabbing my breasts. Hi, I’m Katie!” as I try to alleviate the awkwardness by introducing myself.

I even forgot once while I was in Baltimore overnight that I had stuck everything in my bra, because I had pockets, but I wanted to keep my ID safe from, well, me, since I had lost it earlier that day in the DC area, leaving it in a chain restaurant in a mall in Virginia, where I had only stopped in for an appetizer and to mooch off their free wifi. Fortunately they had found it and gave it back to me, after my host and I took a long detour into Virginia on our way to Baltimore. I panicked completely, thinking I had lost everything AGAIN or at least left it in the hotel room, and in the process of frisking myself, I finally found it all tucked into my bra, on the same side where I always put my ID, etc, and laughed hysterically and then drove off in search of a drink.

I share this here because I was just getting up from the couch, ready to go to bed, when I found that the bracelet I was wearing earlier was no longer on my wrist. I thought I’d probably absentmindedly dropped it into my purse, or stuck it in my jeans pocket. When I went to change into pajamas, I found it! In my bra, same side as where I would have stored my ID. I’m not sure how long it was there, or why I put it there, but from now on when I lose stuff, I am going to check my boobs first.

Green.

Some friends of mine run a convention in Birmingham, Alabama called PlayOnCon, which is having a free preview this coming weekend (April 17-18). The theme for the party on Saturday night is just... Green. Because my friend wanted to have a St. Patrick's Day redux, I suppose, a month after St. Pat's itself.

He and I were chatting, and he said he'd thought of a future costume idea for me: "You should be an Orion!"
I didn't watch Star Trek as a kid- I was more into Star Wars, because there were muppets and less talking, more shooting. So, I googled, and found a wealth of pictures.



For those of you who also don't watch Star Trek (or live with a buncha nerds), Orions are an alien race, whose females were trafficked as slaves because of their sexuality. In the most recent Star Trek movie, Kirk hooks up with an Orion at the Academy, whose sexuality is framed as in her own control, instead of being commoditized outright- she's Uhura's promiscuous roommate. (There's a lot of stuff I could address there, and perhaps I will at a later date.)


I was more than a little taken aback, but I wasn't asked to be a slave, just an Orion, which is easy- a bathing suit and some green paint, right?

Have you ever tried to paint yourself green? I painted a friend gold last weekend, but only his hands, feet, and face, but that was easy. I bought a bottle of Ben Nye MagiColor and some make up sponges and went to town, doing half of my face and part of my neck. It's all smeary. It leaves streaks, unless I saturate that particular point, which seems wasteful. I wish I had an airbrush, but there's no reason to get my own, unless I am going to use it over and over. I will be looking for another brand this week, before my roommate and leave for Birmingham on Saturday morning. Anyway, it will take some time to actually get myself fully green, and I will share the experience here, but in the meantime...

Convention--

I've been negligent, I'm sorry! I attended a science fiction convention in Atlanta this past weekend, and the preparations for it ate my life.

I didn't make it to anything con-related, which was a shame, but I was always incredibly busy or recovering from the busy-ness, helping out with Play On Con/Infirmary's party and also my housemate Dustin's Secret Agent party to some extent.

I picked up my landlord on Wednesday night from the airport, so that Thursday afternoon, he, my housemates, and I could all load up the vehicles and transport everything down to the hotel. We also had transport help from a few other friends, because there was a TON of stuff. This is my room full of random CRAP.

That night, I hung out with some old friends and some new friends and then got dressed to go to the Coffee, Tea, Or Me? party in the Presidential Suite. I bounced around in my white wig, dancing and seeing more people I hadn't seen in a while, and then I ran into my friends Sabrina and Wendie, who invited me to wander with them for a bit. We hit a private invite-only lounge, which was a great break from the hectic pace of the other party. My wig was driving me insane, so I headed to my room and took it off and returned to Jonestown's party to find my date who had been roped into tending bar, where I ended up pretending to help (but really just pouring punch and making conversation with people who ended up hanging around the bar). We ended up running out of booze! I don't know when I went to sleep, but I think it was around 3 or 4, and my twitter account says I woke up at 8, which is terrifying.

Friday was epic. It was all about acquiring cardboard and mixers and prepping for my group's party. Because there was a mix-up at the hotel with the party room, Dan and I didn't get to leave as early as we wanted to pick up some lights from IKEA and the cardboard from freakin' Duluth. We had to get ten nine-foot-tall pieces of cardboard and a big spool of corrugated cardboard, which was all used to line the walls of the party's "back room", and to build Fort Spreadeagle around the bed. Here is my car loaded up with cardboard!

The pieces on top were tied on and Dan tried to hold them on, but they tried to fly off once we hit 30 mph, which was unacceptable. There was no way we could drive 40 miles at that speed with him trying to hold the pieces down, so we pulled over and folded the nine-foot-pieces in half to put them in the car. That was fine, except that we had tied the doors shut and were climbing in and out of the windows until we could cut the twine with my car keys.

After a quick break, I headed back down the hall to the party room, where there was MUCH more setup to be done. This is the stuff we had out front:


A buddy and I headed out to Walmart at around 9:30 to get orange juice and stuff for the bar, as well as duct tape, and a few things for me, like tylenol and metatarsal pads and lipstick. We got back around 10:15, and the party had been set to start at 10, so we were all feeling slightly stressed. I ran to get ready, and kicked my friends out of the room- they said I was fairly nice about it, fortunately. My roommate kept making quiet unobtrusive trip to retrieve stuff from the pile o' crap there, and friend came back with hairspray and helped me out with costuming.
I think it turned out pretty well, considering I came straight from Wal-Mart and didn't have the time I wanted to work with my hot rollers!


I had the best time at the party, dancing and doing photo ops. Someone walked by in big boots and crushed my big toe, cracking part of the toenail, so I had to go track down the only person I knew who had bandaids and swear and bleed in my bathtub for a bit. Ow! I decided to ignore the blisters I'd acquired a few days earlier and put my shoes back on to keep the rest of my nails. I felt responsible later when con security came by to ask us to keep the folks in the hallway quieter and then to shut the door. I like to feel responsible, especially since the security guy was a face I remembered from the Whose Line events at my very first Dragon*Con and I got to finally talk to him. It ended up being a very late night; A few of us stuck around cleaning up the room until the sun came up.

It was also a relatively early morning- I think I was awake a little before ten. I lay in bed for a bit, went swimming and hung out in the hot tub, and then ended up having a late lunch/early dinner and taking a nap. That evening, I went to WalMart AGAIN, to buy stuff for my housemate Dustin's party.

We got a lot of weird looks.


Dustin's party was lots of fun. I got there late, because I was painting my date's hands and feet and face gold- he wore a gold bodysuit and went as the Goldfinger victim from the movie of the same name and won Best Bond Girl. I broke out my black catsuit as a nod to Emma Peel. Another friend I hadn't seen in a while showed up as well, and we accidentally made a modern Peel/Steed team!


I was also presented with a Party Judge badge, which was freakin' awesome. You guys, I had an excuse to run around to everyone's parties and drink their liquor and eat their food. Aw, yeah!

On Sunday morning and early afternoon, I babysat the Presidential Suite while all of Dustin's party detritus was cleared out. The decision was made to keep the hotel room an extra night, and a bunch of us went out for the traditional post-con Mexican meal. Back at the hotel, the pool and hot tub were FULL of people blowing off steam. Someone brought water guns and we had pool noodles, and water fights ensued, with my date pointing one end of the noodle at people's faces while I blew air as hard as I could into my end. And people kept letting us get close to them! You'd think they would learn! A pool noodle is not exactly a ranged weapon. Finally the pool closed, we all changed into real clothes or pajamas and headed to some friends' room for drinks and games. I was definitely feeling the love, and I had a very VERY good time.

To sum up- I had a great time this year. It was much better than last year for me. Unlike last year, there was no drama. I missed seeing a lot of people and I want to do more con-related stuff next year, but I think I struck the perfect balance for me this time. Plus, I avoided the con crud! Win!

I was really reminded why I loved conventions in the first place and have thrown so much money and time at them over the last seven years. I love my friends in the scene and meeting new people and seeing people package themselves as the people they either wish they could be or that they are on the inside, when the real world doesn't interfere. I love being part of people's support teams, I liked tending bar, and I love the building and costuming and planning that goes along with party throwing. Even at my lowest moments this past weekend, such as when I was trying to get ready for the party and was hurting so very badly, I was having a blast, and that is priceless.

So I keep thinking I have an idea of what to expect before I go to Haiti, and then something new comes out and my perspective shifts again. Here is the latest thing to really freak me out.
In the absence of any official tracking of women and girls raped, except for a United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM)-led effort just initiated in 10 displaced persons camps in Port-au-Prince, KOFAVIV keeps its own tally. As of March 21, KOFAVIV outreach workers had tracked 230 cases of rapes in 15 camps, or 15.3 incidents per camp. Hundreds of such camps dot the city, their size varying from hundreds to more than 20,000. The ages of those raped in this sample range from 10 to 60, the majority of them teenagers.

Post-earthquake Haiti is plagued by high levels of anxiety and frustration among the population; hundreds of thousands of newly homeless females sleeping on the streets and in tent settlements, many of them alone; disorganized and inadequate policing; and a nonfunctioning justice system. For women and girls, this is a deadly combination.

The danger is compounded by the fact that thousands of prisoners, including convicted rapists, are now at large after escaping from the National Penitentiary. And the majority of police who were trained in gender-based violence were reportedly killed in the quake.

The full story can be found here, at the Huffington Post.

The article then continues with more anecdotes of rapes committed (they are all triggering, and I mean REALLY triggering, more so than I expected) and with accounts of KOFAVIV's (The Commission of Women Victim-to-Victim) attempts to mitigate and intervene in the violence against women and children in the IDP camps.

GVN hasn't talked about this at all, and I don't know what the situation is in the camps in Jacmel, but I imagine it is much the same. Of course, people are now "moving on" from Haiti as a cause, since the earthquake was months ago, which is an eternity in the fast-paced world of media coverage, so I am not sure how much we will hear about the conditions in the camps, aside from in the Huffington Post, which I generally don't care for.

Bonswa!

Today I made some English/French/Haitian notecards, using phrases from this website, recommended by the GVN. When I was in French classes in middle school, I hated making notecards. We had to throw out the cards if we had made errors; crossing things out was not permitted. Writing them took forever and I felt so wasteful if I made an error! We also had to submit them to the teacher, and, with my poor time management skills, this was a weekly nightmare. The tactic works, though, and I used it all through high school and college for Italian, Japanese, and Spanish (though I have forgotten all but the Spanish).

Haitian Creole (or Kreyol) is the most widely spoken creole language on the planet, with roots in French, Taino, and several African languages, as well as Arabic and English. It's written phonetically, which means that some words have the same pronunciation in French and Creole, but are written radically differently. For instance, one says "Bon soir" in French to say "good evening." But in Creole, one says instead, "Bonswa!" To warn of impending danger, a Haitian might say "Atansyon!" while a Frenchman would exclaim, "Attention!" My favorite example of this is the word for yesterday. I looked at the Haitian word for a long time, trying to divine its root: "ye". Then I considered the French word for yesterday, which is spelled "hier". I said it aloud, and then the gears in my mind clicked: ye is very close to a phonetic prononciation for hier!

That's all for today. Orevwa! (Goodbye!)

Questions about Haiti--

I'll be going to Haiti with Global Volunteer Network in May. I will be gone for three weeks, but now that I have received my preparation guide, I see that I will actually be in Jamaica for almost a week total. For my first few days, I will be attending orientation in Montego, and on Day 5, I will fly to Port Au Prince and then travel "overland" to our base camp at Jacmel. It looks like I will have weekends off, and then on the nineteenth day, I will fly back to Montego, debrief and be home on the twenty-first day.

Conditions will be very basic- I'm told that I will be bathing out of a bucket for my two weeks and that I will have to purify my drinking water. I am also going to be buying a mosquito net soon, which is sort of... startling. It's not something I ever thought I would need! Global Health Action posted some photos of the recovery process on their facebook page. This was one of the most interesting to me:


It's a tent, made out of whatever the Haitians could find. Most of the tents are like this, from what I am reading, and the Red Cross says that "more than half of Haiti's 1.3 million earthquake survivors have now been provided with shelter. The Red Cross says it expects most of the victims will have some form of shelter by May 1 to protect them during the upcoming rainy season."

More news as I hear it and more progress is made.

Trip Recap.

Now that I am home and settled again, I can recap my trip and answer a few questions.

I left South Carolina to stay overnight with some friends just outside of Raleigh. Lesley is a colleague of my father's and I met her and her husband Steve while Dad and I were in Hong Kong. They graciously opened their home to me after not having seen me for three years. I arrived after dark and was greeted by Steve and their enthusiastic Australian shepherd, Clancy. Steve and I grabbed dinner and hung out for a bit, chatting and watching hockey, until Lesley's flight came in. Once Lesley was settled, she and I walked Clancy, while she explained the finer points of cricket to me. The next morning, Steve left before I woke up, but Lesley made me coffee and oatmeal, which she referred to as porridge; I found this charming, which I think is compulsory for Americans, to find Australian and British accents and terms endearing.

I headed up to Maryland, trying to take as much time as possible to give my host time to get home from work before I arrived. I assumed I would be early, but I ended up caught in traffic on 270, which ate up an hour. Maryland would be lovely if I could visit there when it wasn't freezing or raining, I think. While I was there, I sat in on the tail end of my host's band practice, visited some friends I know through the convention scene, went bar-hopping in Baltimore, and got far too little sleep. It was a great visit! Some of my friends and I went to the Wharf Rat in Baltimore, which has been a pub in some capacity since the 1700s, and which serves beer from Oliver Breweries- delicious beer!

I also got to visit my friend Huck, who maintains her blog at Sweet Huckleberry. She invited me to have dinner with her neighbors, her partner Banjo Boy, and her, and we shared a delicious meal of black bean burgers with homemade bread and sauteed mushrooms. One of her neighbors is a sex therapist, Dr. Ruthie, and she is hilarious as well as knowledgeable. Huck sent me home with a bag of dried mushrooms and tomato seedlings, which warmed my heart. I am hoping the seedlings will do okay after their semi-traumatic ride home, though. I also got to meet Huck's hens and see the progress she and Banjo Boy have done on their house; it is a cute little Cape Cod that needed a lot of help, but it has come a long way under their dedicated efforts.

The trip home was long, but uneventful, which was a blessing. I listened to podcasts and a long music mix that a friend made up for me. So, overall, quite an excellent trip.

Short teaser from McKenney, VA:

My dad poked at me to update, but I haven't had steady access via my laptop since South Carolina. I will provide a full update once I am returned home, but for now, I will leave this little teaser while I am sipping iced coffee in a truck stop in central Virginia. Soon, yes, I will write about Raleigh, beer in Baltimore, driving all over Maryland, losing and finding my ID in Virginia, and some of the lovely people I had the pleasure of visiting on this trip!

For now, though, I will head back out onto the road. Maybe I will meet up with one of my Atlanta friends in Greenville, SC.

Today I leave for Cary, NC! It's been an awesome couple of days spent paddling around the marsh every day, taking long walks, and avoiding getting completely covered in ticks! Although I haven't gotten sunburned, I did get some sun. I have slightly more tanned calves; the line to which my jeans were rolled up to my knees is clearly visible now. I also tanned slightly around my vaccination bandaids! Those things do NOT come off as early as regular bandaids. I now have two slightly paler circles on my left arm. My inner Star Wars nerd thinks they look like the twin suns of Tatooine. (And if you don't know what that means, please don't worry about it!)

And now I have to leave and wear real clothes that aren't covered in mud again. I'm a little sad, but a little excited to get on the road!

In North Myrtle Beach--

I was just at my family's place in North Myrtle Beach a year ago, but I cannot tell you how happy I am to be here right now. My mother and sister are already here (little sis is on spring break) and one of my aunts lives here these days, so I knew I was going to get some lovely family time.

I pulled up around 5 (the drive took me six hours and some change, which unnerved my mother) and my sister and I immediately decided to drive over to Waites Island after we tossed my suitcase and stuff into the house. We got 100 feet away from the house and ran into some horses who we assumed had escaped. We ended up taking them back to the barn- but I'm pretty sure they were actually let out on purpose. Whoops! Anyway, we went to the island after that. There are more shots after the jump.

"Caring for Your Introvert" from The Atlantic

A friend sent me this and it is too well-written for me not to share it here.
Do you know someone who needs hours alone every day? Who loves quiet conversations about feelings or ideas, and can give a dynamite presentation to a big audience, but seems awkward in groups and maladroit at small talk? Who has to be dragged to parties and then needs the rest of the day to recuperate? Who growls or scowls or grunts or winces when accosted with pleasantries by people who are just trying to be nice?

I've recently realized that is why I am exhausted all the time these past two weeks: I am rarely alone and sometimes I just need breathing room. This upcoming roadtrip will be glorious from that standpoint! And this need to be alone is a quality about myself that I am rediscovering now that I do have more leisure time and am more social than before. I write more in my journal for myself, and I think that earning my own approval has become much more important to me than earning that of others.

How can I let the introvert in my life know that I support him and respect his choice? First, recognize that it's not a choice. It's not a lifestyle. It's an orientation.

Second, when you see an introvert lost in thought, don't say "What's the matter?" or "Are you all right?"

Third, don't say anything else, either.

For the full article, click here.

Vaccinations; or I am full of dying viruses.

Today I began round one of vaccinations I will need before I go to Haiti. I went to the Emory Travelwell clinic, where I received a huge packet of information and spoke with one of the doctors there. Another patient who is affiliated with Emory is flying down to Haiti on Monday with the University of Miami to work as a nurse, so she sat in on my appointment so that the doctor could be more efficient. She told us about malaria in Haiti: that it's the most dangerous kind and that if we have flu-like symptoms for up to a year after our return, we must immediately go to the doctor and tell them that we were in a high-malaria-risk environment recently. On the CDC's malaria website, there is a section with people's accounts of their experience with malaria. One of the stories in there is about a relief worker who went to Haiti and decided not to take his anti-malarial drugs because of the side effects. He came home, exhibited flu-like symptoms, and ended up being misdiagnosed by his doctor as having the flu. Then he got MUCH worse and spent ten days in the ICU to the tune of $23,000.

This is the point where I realized how incredibly real the situation was. I know it isn't a game, and I know that I have committed myself to something incredibly serious and possibly dangerous, but it didn't seem real until then. I am excited to have this opportunity and to do something that could be important, but I am scared. I am scared of mudslides and malaria and riots. I can only prepare myself so much for these things over the next two months, though, and I refuse to paralyze myself with fear.

I walked out of the clinic with a big yellow folder with information on typhoid fever, rabies, malaria, food preparation, traveler's diarrhea, preventative methods, and prescriptions for cipro and chloroquine (my anti-malarial). I also have three new holes in my arms: I got the seasonal flu and hepatitis A vaccines in my left arm and typhoid fever vaccine in my right. I could actually feel the hep A going through my arm and into my shoulder; the nurse did her best to alleviate the pain and even rubbed my arm and shoulder a bit to keep them from getting too stiff. (I told her that she is a treasure and should teach a class, to which she emphatically replied, "NO.") The flu and typhoid shots were nothing, but now my typhoid arm hurts!

When I return from my road trip, I will be getting round one of my rabies vaccination, a diptheria/tetanus booster, and an H1N1 vaccine!

Oh, also, this was in my packet, and it amused me.

Haiti.

Unless you've been living under a rock, you will have heard that in January, there was a massive earthquake in Haiti. Haiti, which was already the poorest country in the western hemisphere, is utterly devastated and relief workers have been dispatched from all over the world to begin trying to piece the country together again.

I'm a 23-year-old woman who comes from a privileged background and is looking to get her master's in public health, specifically in community health. I felt like I should do something and what I wanted to do was to go to Haiti as a volunteer. However, I was worried about cost and being useless, and in early February, I elected not to go. Except that I couldn't stop thinking about Haiti: I kept reading as much as I could about recovery efforts, about future planning, and about Haiti's history. I speak some French and started to look into learning a bit of Kreyol.

And then I saw pictures of Haiti, taken by employees of Global Health Action, which is based here in Atlanta, and I couldn't stand it anymore. I signed up with Global Volunteer Network, and I leave for Haiti on May 4th. I will be there for three weeks, working either in an orphanage or in an IDP camp in Jacmel. Details to follow, but in the meantime, I am gathering gear and preparing myself as much as possible.

"So... what are you doing?"

I graduated from Emory University this past December, with a bachelor's in anthropology. Since then, someone has asked me what I am doing with my life at least once a week. "Where are you working? Where are you going to grad school?" The answers are, "I'm not. And I don't know yet, I'm waiting to hear back." That said, I'm actually not bumming around; I'm busy all the time. I've taken on this role of surrogate girlfriend/housewife/mother and am ferrying people around, running errands, and generally trying to be helpful. Honestly, I've never been happier, and I realize how lucky I am that I get to live in a house with friends and have my parents support me before I join the real world.

This blog is chronicling what I am doing while I wait and take life as it comes.