What a wild August. I spent a week with Mom and Mary Lu out in the redwoods of California. Absolutely gorgeous trees. I tried to put my arms around them and my 6-foot wingspan just barely reached a quarter of the way around some of the trees! It was really neat then to see a little tiny twig of the same species growing right beside it. We also saw elk but were making too much noise to see any bear or mountain lions (both rumored to roam the parks we were in, hence the reason we were making lots of noise). It was really good to get to see the gals, as it had been a year since I had been out there. I wish my family didn�t live so far away :( Hey everyone, I got an idea! You can all move here to Chicago, it is a great place! Then I wouldn�t have to travel so far to see you! :)
I got back from the trip west and worked three days. One of the days was the first partner meeting for our Faith in Prevention project. A lot of the meeting was information about how the grant would work, but there was still a lot of excitement and expectation. I�m in the process of sending a survey out to people who were interested but not funded through the current grant so that we can see how to keep them involved (especially if we can find more money).
From there I traveled to the south side where we had orientation for all the volunteers across the nation. There are 91 of us this year, 12 will serve in Chicago. Orientation was definitely different the 2nd time around. This time a lot of the theoretical stuff we talked about made more sense because I could relate it to actual experiences. The topics, however, were not any easier to take. It is hard to face the reality of so much injustice in the world. By the end of the week I was exhausted. My house lived with the Berkley, California house during orientation, and we are kinda hoping we can keep in touch with them somehow even though they are so far away.
I�m in a new house this year. I moved from a house named after feisty Episcopal priest Carter Heyward to the house of a peaceful but crusading Catholic bishop, Oscar Romero. Romero was appointed by the church to serve as Arch Bishop of San Salvador during a period of extreme violence and strife with poor Salvadorans fighting to maintain their lives, and the government fighting to maintain control. They thought he would be a good quiet choice that wouldn�t stir up trouble. They were wrong. Romero did not stand silent, but instead chose to speak out about the terrible bloodshed occurring in his country. He appealed to the fighters asking them to stop, and he appealed to the rest of the world not to ignore the pain. He was murdered while serving communion. "When the church hears the cry of the oppressed it cannot but denounce the social structures that give rise to and perpetuate the misery from which the cry arises." � Oscar Romero
I�ve been trying for the past week to find time to write an update but things have been REALLY busy lately. My ride into work also takes a slight bit longer, and I haven�t been willing to sacrifice sleep for Internet time. Oh well, I guess I�ll just have to go back to the beginning of the month to get you up to date.
We had another meeting of our Faith in Prevention partners. We went down to one of the city�s clinics on the southside to receive the Red Cross HIV Facts course training. It is the first of a four part training. I was surprised how much I knew about HIV/AIDS after just one year of working here at AFC. Our partners seemed to enjoy the training and get stuff out of it so that is also good.
Last Saturday was AFC�s AIDS Run and Walk. We exceeded our fundraising goal and had amazing numbers of participants, well above last year in both aspects. The weather was really gorgeous for us.
The past two days we held a Prevention Conference, which kept everyone around here really busy. Feedback from participants was really good. I enjoyed the two talks I sat in on, especially the one about harm reduction (a philosophy usually associated with care for substance using populations that believes you should help the person achieve safer life goals no matter whether they completely stop using drugs or not � common examples from HIV prevention include using a condom instead of abstaining from sex, or using clean needles and works instead of stopping all drug use). Some of our housing programs have been struggling with the issue since so often in the past staying housed in a program meant you had to stay clean and sober. One relapse and you were out. Now the system is starting to question that since it leads to constant instability for clients dealing with substance use.
A funny incident happened at the conference. We were meeting in a center for Jewish studies, and there were other conferences and classes going on in the building. At one point an older gentleman in a suit came over and asked us who we were since he had just gotten out of his conference. We told him �the AIDS Foundation of Chicago, we are having a conference on prevention, the current speaker is talking about how use of the drug crystal meth interacts with HIV prevention.� The man seemed interested and so strolled over into the room and was listening. He kept getting further into the room, until the speaker began to rather graphically describe a particular way that crystal meth was used. The man promptly turned around, almost at a run and said �I think that was a little more than I wanted to know�. I wanted to tell him �welcome to my year�. This past year I�ve heard a whole lot of stuff that made my ears burn!
I�ll have a new project to work on soon, although I�m not sure yet what my role will be. We just recently got a grant from Altria (the parent company of Phillip Morris and Kraft) to bring together a coalition of food providers and hunger advocates in the Chicago area. Some of our main goals will be to develop an advocacy agenda, to increase the usage of food stamps, and to begin bringing multiple providers together to eliminate duplication as funding gets tighter (for example there are agencies that provide food for those living with HIV, others that provide food for those who are elderly, and still others who provide food for those who are poor, if they work together they can be more efficient).
At home we are beginning to settle into Casa Romero. We made our long hallway into a "Hall of Justice" where we put information pamphlets, posters, etc. about different justice issues, especially the ones we are working on at our placements. Since it was Erica�s idea we are sort of heavy on Latin American issues right now, but I snuck in some AIDS issues, and I noticed a postcard from Amanda about jail issues.
I have no luck with grocery stores. Last year I had to deal with our grocery store closing and going without another one nearby. I heard that in Romero we could walk to the store and so was overjoyed. Then the store closest to us closed! It says it is just for remodeling, but we�ve heard rumor that it will really be closing for good. Fortunately there are other stores sortof nearby, so I�m not quite as bad off. Also my housemates this year tend to pick up some things whenever they pass a grocery store.
We went to a meeting of the School of Americas Watch (they work with Erica�s agency) for one of our community nights. It was a welcome home celebration for one of their members who had just been released from prison (she was being held for bringing illegal stuff � i.e. penicillin for a local orphanage- into Iraq). It was certainly an interesting cultural experience. I�ve never really been in a group where getting arrested was something to be admired and praised. I wish we had had more time to talk about it as a community, but as the meeting was on a week night and late, we had to get to bed for work in the morning.
I joined the Broadway UMC choir, which gave me the opportunity to write this finally. Practice is at 7:15, so it isn�t quite practical to go all the way home, but it leaves me lots of time to whittle away. I really love the songs we have sung so far, and I haven�t broken any windows yet. They also haven�t kicked me out! Now if we just had handbells!
Sunday was our commissioning service, so the four Romeroans hiked over to Light of Christ Lutheran church. It wasn�t my favorite service, and not the friendliest church, but we did get commissioned. Later that afternoon I went to Pedal for Peace, which is a fundraiser for my housemate Erica�s placement. The Chicago Metropolitan Sanctuary alliance works for peace in Central America. A lot of the violence in Columbia, El Salvador, and Guatemala is further inflamed by US monetary support for militaries there. The money they raised goes to help several villages and projects in Central America. I didn�t fundraise, but I did enjoy the bike ride and provided an extra body as a show of support.
I�m kind of in a lull at work right now. I had a TON of work a couple of days ago, but finished it all. The problem with my workload is that a lot of what I help with is for reporting stuff to our funders, or preparing for meetings. Those both have very specific due dates, and often can�t be done very far in advance. That means some days I have absolutely nothing to do, and then a day later I�ll have 8 things, all needing done tomorrow. I�m working on several cool projects, just not today :)
Well, I watched most of the Vice Presidential debate but I have to admit I gave up and went to bed part way through. I was up long enough to hear them completely dodge and avoid the the first few domestic questions and decided I was fed up. Given my work last year and this year I was most disappointed when the moderator very pointedly said "I want to talk to you about AIDS, and not about AIDS in China or Africa, but AIDS right here in this country, where black women between the ages of 25 and 44 are 13 times more likely to die of the disease than their counterparts. What should the government's role be in helping to end the growth of this epidemic?" Candidate Cheney dodged the question by focusing nearly his entire 2 minutes on the foreign AIDS crisis, admitting "I have not heard those numbers with respect to African- American women. I was not aware that it was -- that they're in epidemic there." Candidate Edwards did no better. He too focused on the foreign crisis, and then domestic healthcare in general. Neither one addressed the fact that in the United States HIV/AIDS is killing Americans. Neither one addressed the fact that it is our youth, and our already hard-hit minorities that are being infected. It is estimated that 40,000 Americans become infected with HIV each year. It is the leading cause of death for African-Americans 25-44. How many more will need to become infected and die before our political candidates end their ignorance?
On another soap box�
They are threatening to cut Chicago Transit Authority services. According to the last Census, 26% of Chicagoans rely on CTA to get to work. Yet, our traffic is still some of the most gridlocked in the country. How much worse will it get with service cuts? How many low-income, seniors, youth, not to mention volunteers will loose mobility because the CTA cuts service? The issue is the cost of running the transit system, but my question is how does it compare to the cost of the automobile system? GROWL
Ok, enough ranting for today. I�m heading to choir. Maybe I can sing my frustrations out to God. At least God listens even if the politicians don�t.
Be careful what you ask for! After a week of sitting around at work with nothing to do, I finally got a BUNCH of projects, and now hardly have time to take a breath. Of course, this means I�m MUCH happier :)
One of the projects I�m working on sounds kind of boring, but I actually enjoy (ok, sometimes I don�t, but most of the time). It involves a lot of puzzle solving and yelling at computers, which is why I like it. We have to report statistics on our clients to a bunch of different government agencies. Unfortunately, our data isn�t always in the best shape because it goes through several hands before it is finally compiled into a report. My job is to go through and fix things that we can fix here, and try to come up with guesses about where things are going wrong so that we can fix the source of the errors in the future. Sometimes it is frustrating, because there isn�t a whole lot we can do right now (for example we are missing the ethnicity of most of our clients because we weren�t asking it until recently so old clients don�t have it and because the difference between race and ethnicity is confusing, so we often get one but not the other. I can�t really do anything about that here, because I don�t have contact with the client to ask. We will soon have a new intake form (another part of the project is standardizing our forms used to gather the info) and all clients will need to answer it, so hopefully our data will be a little more complete after that.
I signed up for a dance class. The Old Town School of Folk music is this neat place that offers music classes focusing on ethnic music (instrumental, dance, vocal, theory, etc). The classes are usually pretty expensive, but they have a very gracious scholarship program that makes them affordable for anyone�s budget. Our entire house quickly jumped on that! We pay a little over $6 for an 8-week class. I�m taking West African dance, Erica is taking ballet, Amanda is taking HipHop and I think Lacey is taking modern. Should be a load of fun to watch each other practice :) My first class isn�t until October 26, so I have a while.
I think I�m going to get wet on the ride home tonight. I have been really lucky that Chicago has had a dry fall, but all the weather info sources are saying that rain is coming, and it looks pretty dark out there. I lucked out yesterday it rained while I was at work but stopped before I had to leave. Oh well, I guess I need to shake the dust off the rain gear anyway. I just hope we don�t get lightening.
Last Saturday Lacey and I biked down to the Pilsen neighborhood for the National Latino AIDS Awareness Day march. It was freezing cold and all in Spanish but still a lot of fun. We were a big crowd and we marched through the neighborhood chanting and handing out pamphlets. A lot of people came out of their houses, and rolled down their car windows to see what was going on.
This morning was the first meeting of our new �Altria Food and Nutrition Advocacy Partnership� since we received the grant. Altria is the parent company of Kraft and Phillip Morris, they are the ones that gave us the money. It brings together food providers to work on increasing food stamp usage and also develop an advocacy agenda for better food service provision. It�s another case where AFC is beginning to make partnerships outside of the HIV/AIDS service community to solve problems that cut across boundaries. I�m not sure what my role in the project will be yet, but it was a cool meeting all the same.
Yesterday was our Faith in Prevention meeting, and once again I came out of the meeting energized. One of the things we did was place ourselves along a timeline of major events in the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Some of our partners have been involved since the early 1980s! Others of us were pretty new to the fight. It was really moving to hear all the stories of how and why people got involved. The quarterly reports are do soon, so I can wait to see what everyone has been doing!
Last Friday I got to take the train out to Midway Airport and meet up with Dad who had a layover! We got to have dinner and catch up, which was really great. He was runner-up for Cokesbury Seminary store manager of the year! That�s MY dad :)
I talked Amanda�s ear off last night, so I�m sure she�ll be glad when my other housemates come home! Lacey has been on a work retreat all week (no where exciting, they were just staying in downtown Chicago � tee hee pretty amazing that THE Chicago is �just home� now :) ) Erica stayed over at a friend�s last night so the house would have been quiet if I wasn�t in such a talkative mood � can you tell I�m still in one? How do you switch this extrovert switch off again?
Hey readers! It has been a fun week here in Keriland. Last Friday I got to meet up with my ex-housemate Mel and have lunch. It was really good to hear about what she is doing in her eight part-time jobs (slight exaggeration, but I do mean slight).
Saturday Lacey and I biked up to a fabric store and spent WAY too much of our stipend on fleece and patterns that were on sale. I can�t wait to make it all into stuff! I got a pattern that has gloves and hats, and another one that has shawls (the ones that are like jackets). It was really great to have someone to go do fun shopping with.
Monday the Faith in Prevention group went for the second part of the Red Cross HIV instructor training. In the first part we learned basic facts about HIV. In this part we had to practice giving oral answers to questions as people might ask in the community. I feel much better answering questions now, and it was fun to watch how much the other partners learned. We are also getting their monthly reports in (they are due tomorrow), which is very exciting. I can�t wait to see what all the churches have done. Some of them have turned them in already so I�ve been avidly reading them. One of the churches described the reaction they got when they handed out information and condoms at a health fair. People couldn�t believe a church would do it, but expressed thanks. It sounded like the partner church that did it was really excited by the response they got.
Tuesday I went to my first West African Dance class, and was surprised to find that one of the Sojo House (another LVC house) volunteers was also in the class! It will be neat to check in and see how they are doing. The class itself was amazing. Great exercise, which of course means I�m still sore today. The dance we are learning is fun to do, and I can almost keep up with it (for someone with three left feet, that�s pretty amazing).
While I was dancing the housies went out shopping and got two huge pumpkins. When I got home we carved them up. One now has a scary face, and the other a happy face. I got to scoop all the goop out of one of them, my favorite part! I think we are going to try to roast the seeds so we can eat them too � yum!
Yesterday I had my fall evaluation with Joann (our city coordinator) and Shelly (my supervisor). Shelly said today that it was the best part of her day! The questions Joann asks really make you think about what you are doing so far, and how things can change to make it even better, so it ends up being a really great time to reflect. I sometimes don�t realize all I am doing until I have to describe it to someone.
It is starting to get dark really early now. It is usually nearly dark by the time I make it home. With the time change this weekend, I won�t be getting any light on the way home next week. Fortunately I like to bike in the dark once I get out of downtown. It is just making it through all the maniac cab drivers to get to the path that I don�t like and really don�t look forward to doing in the dark. At least I will still have light in the morning.
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