I just returned from a Humanitarian Travel Abroad trip to India and, once again, besides being overwhelmed by the warm welcome we received from the children and teachers, I was humbled by the people I met who follow their hearts to make a difference in the lives of others.
As in previous years, our main activities in Kolkata were organized by the amazing Rosalie Giffionello of Empower the Children. Rosalie is a retired teacher from New Jersey who now applies her skills educating disadvantaged children in India. We also added a side trip to a village on the outskirts of Santiniketan to visit an innovative literacy program.
With Empower the Children we organized a photo shoot in the bustee where the children were given digital cameras and sent off to photograph their world!
Water buffalo shed in Dakshindat slum
We also completed paper mache masks with teenage students at one of Prayrona's vocational schools. One of our volunteers, Danny, brought toys made by his father, a Portuguese immigrant to America. These board and competition games can be made of everyday things found around the house - they were a big hit among the children at all of the schools we visited.
We left the hustle and bustle of Kolkata by train and spent the night in Santiniketan where we visited Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore's Visva Bharati University and spent the afternoon playing board games and cricket with village children at Suchana school.
Kira and Piusardo make a mask
Suchana was founded by Kirsty Milward and her husband Rahul Bose. Their center is dedicated to helping the children of Santal and Kora families - poor rural, tribal peoples who farm in the area - gain reading skills, enabling them to perform better in school. To get the children interested in reading, the tribal children told folktales to the teachers who then made books of the stories illustrated by the students themselves. The idea is to first get the children excited about reading in their native tongue before teaching them Bangla, the language used in public schools.
Finally, we met Mr. Tim Grandage at a birthday party for Mrs. Violet Smith of the Fairlawn Hotel where we were staying for the week. (Mrs. Smith celebrated her 91st year!) A former HSBC bank manager, Mr. Grandage started his charity, Future Hope, to help street children receive an education, medical care and, well, 'hope,' providing housing, clothing and healthy dose of rugby and cricket. Grandage now has hundreds of kids in his care with many graduates now working or in school abroad.
Makes me wonder, "What did I do today to make this world just a little bit better?"
To read about our activities on this trip in more detail, visit the January blog posts of David, one of our volunteers:
A new Thai airline, PC Air, has hired nine transgender flight attendants. In Thailand, men living as women, with or without sex reassignment surgery, appear to face less social and economic discrimination than in other countries. While Chaz Bono's appearance on Dancing With the Stars in the US was debated throughout the media, 'ladyboys' or 'kathoeys' as the estimated 500,000 transgendered male-to-female individuals are called in Thailand, have their own beauty pageants (see the Miss Tiffany Beauty Pageant). It's true that some transgendered individuals have found lucrative careers in fashion in the West, mainly in haute couture, but models in this niche industry do not deal day-to-day with a cross section of the public as do flights attendants. And while Pakistan and Nepal have legalized third gender roles, these individuals do not have the same visability as international airline employees - nor was the significance of legalizing these roles in Pakistan and Nepal launched with a publicity campaign! Do you think the name of this carrier - 'PC Air' - stands for 'politically correct'?
The school, founded in 2006, is a non-profit, non-governmental organizationregistered with the Palestinian Authority since February 2007. In the their own words:
We believe a future Palestine is possible, with people who dream of a better life and invest positive energies in their society.The occupation is devastating our lives, as individuals and as a nation. Trust, unity, dignity, respect and hope are under threat.With our circus school, we want to develop the creative potential of young people in Palestine to engage them, empowering them to strengthen their identity, and enter into a constructive and positive dialogue with each other, in order to become positive actors in their society. We offer a safe space where people meet in equality and by working together we achieve the most meaningful result.
Our goal is to overcome the divisions within our society by working with everybody, everywhere. By bringing people together in our trainings and traveling all over the country with our shows, we challenge the multiple boundaries that have been imposed on us for far too long: political, geographical, economical, religious and gender.
They have circus clubs for boys and girls in the West Bank, in Ramallah, Hebron and Jenin. In October 2011, the school started new circus clubs for beginners in Bethlehem, Al Faraa Camp and Birzeit. The Palestinian Circus school also has a summer camp and entertains people with their mobile circus and street parades. What could be more healing for a people whose ethnic identity most often conjures the word 'occupation' or worse, 'terrorist'? Check out their web site, read about their mission, look over their photos and I think you too will be inspired - smiling.
The other day I started watching "The Sound of Mumbai," seen in a video clip here from Youtube. As I travel to Kolkata, India each year to volunteer with slum children I was drawn of course to this film. In my time with Indian children, I always feel I learn and gain in many ways much more from the experience than what I give, so I was intrigued by this effort to showcase Indian children singing the much-loved songs from "The Sound of Music." I will admit that it seemed rather ethnocentric that foreigners would find it useful to teach poor children English songs that have nothing to do with their background, ethnicity or environment. But I guess I was wrong.
In An "English goddess" for India's down-trodden, BBC News reported that the dalits of India are "building a temple in Banka village in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh to worship the Goddess of the English language, which they believe will help them climb up the social and economic ladder."
The dalits, known as untouchables, are so low and vile that they perform the most polluted, menial tasks in Indian society, working with animals skins, waste and tending pigs and buffaloes. Ghandhi called them harijan, or "children of God." While discrimination based on caste is illegal in India, and has been since independence in 1947, many of the country's 200 million dalits face injustices daily, living in slums and squalor, attending school but made to sit and eat separately and suffering violence perpetrated by higher caste Hindus whose actions often go unnoticed or are disregarded. Indeed, the Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) charity has stated that while some crimes are reported, much caste-based discrimination and violence in India goes unrecorded.
Just this week, an Indian dalit boy was killed because he had the same name as that of high caste man's son. The boys father, Ram Sumer, had been given several warnings by Jawahar Chaudhary to change the names of two sons whose names were the same as his own, Neeraj and Dheeraj. The body of Neeraj, 14, was found in a field by two friends: he had been strangled. Chaudhary denies involvement saying he was framed, but two acquaintances of his have been arrested.
But hope springs eternal, and for the dalits of Banka, action means change. About two-feet tall and made of bronze, the newly 'minted' Goddess of English is modeled after the Statue of Liberty. According to Chandra Bhan Prasad, a dalit writer who came up with the idea:
She is the symbol of Dalit renaissance. She holds a pen in her right hand which shows she is literate. She is dressed well and sports a huge hat - it's a symbol of defiance that she is rejecting the old traditional dress code. In her left hand, she holds a book which is the constitution of India which gave Dalits equal rights. She stands on top of a computer which means we will use English to rise up the ladder and become free for ever.
The goddess of English
While Hindi is the most widely spoken, there are dozens of languages regularly used in India with hundreds more in use in rural areas. To communicate, Indians often use English as their lingua franca. In Banka, Nalanda school principal Shiv Shankar Lal Nigam says that "It's not possible to get by in today's world without English. Even to communicate with people in other Indian states, you need to know either the local language or English. Since you cannot learn multiple Indian languages, English has to be used as the link language."
To succeed in medicine, education, engineering, IT, virtually any job of consequence, it is important to know English. Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar, a Dalit thinker and architect of the Indian constitution, is quoted by Chandra Bhan Prasad as stating that "English was the milk of a lioness, only those who drink it will roar."
To avoid discrimination, some dalits converted to Christianity, but some found even this unsatisfactory (read Indian Dalits find no refuge from Caste in Christianity) . The government of Indian passed legislation decades ago to remove and make punishable prejudice and wrongdoings aimed at dalits to no avail. Perhaps the Goddess of English will help dalits combat caste inequality: after all, the origins of caste discrimination are embedded in Hinduism, perhaps it necessary to fight centuries old religious beliefs with an equally imposing supernatural 'force.'
Kamlesh was pushed on to a pile of burning rubbish for walking on the "wrong" road
While in the US attitudes towards gays, lesbians and transgendered people are changing, there is still a stigma present that makes it difficult for many young people exploring their sexuality to do so freely and safely. While on the one hand there is the tragic story of Rutgers student Tyler Clementi, who committed suicide after his roommate used a webcam to spy on him in an intimate encounter with another man, on the other there are movements such as The Trevor Project and It Gets Better that speak
Anna Grodzka
against hate and intolerance aimed at gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered individuals.
Moreover, it is still in the fashion (see Designer's Choice: Transsexual Models) and entertainment segments of American society and elsewhere that people who see themselves as other than heterosexual seem to be most visible (think Chaz Bono on Dancing With the Stars). While worldwide countries such as Nepal and Pakistan are legalizing third gender roles, in the US gender diversity is still a contested topic. But, there are stories of professionally successful transgendered people who are clearly accepted in mainstream society here and in other Western nations.
Recently, Poland's first transsexual member of parliament, fifty-seven-year-old Anna Grodzka, was sworn in following the general election in October. Grodzka was previously a man, known as Krzysztof, before having surgery in Thailand. While Poland has been a traditionally socially conservative country, Grodzka's Palikot Movement has taken a strong anti-clerical stance, criticizing Roman Catholic priests involved in politics. This coupled with the waning influence of the church allowed Grozka to win 10% of the vote and make the Palikot Movement the third largest political party in Poland.
Of Maori heritage, Georgina grew up on a rural farm, an indigenous young man coming of age in a society dominated by white privilege. Georgina's story only begins here; she was 'educated' in the streets and clubs of urban New Zealand, spending time in prostitution and using drugs, working as a singer and dancer in the transvestite nightclubs of Wellington and Auckland. After a brutal rape, Georgina retreated to the "remote" town of Carterton for drug rehabilitation, became a community organizer, was elected mayor of the town in 1999, and eventually made her way to the national stage as a member of parliament. Her story is told in all of its elegance, humor and irony in the documentary, Georgie Girl. I saw the New York premier of this film at the Asia Society and was both entertained and inspired. Especially when the film showed a clip of Georgina's elderly, rural white constituents talking about "our Georgie."
Amanda Simpson
In the United States, in 2010, President Barack Obama appointed Amanda Simpson, 49, senior technical adviser at the commerce department in the bureau of industry of security. Simpson changed from a man to a woman in the late 1990s while working in Arizona at the missile firm Raytheon. A former test pilot for Raytheon, the Telegraph reported that Simpson persuaded the company "to adopt a policy protecting employees from discrimination and abuse based on gender identity." In her governmental position, Simpson is in charge of protecting national security through the management of international trade, enforcement of treaties as well as the promotion of homeland, economic and cyber security. In regards to her new employment status Simpson said:
I'm truly honored to have received this appointment and am eager and excited about this opportunity that is before me . . . But as one of the first transgender presidential appointees to the federal government, I hope that I will soon be one of hundreds, and that this appointment opens future opportunities for many others.
I find it interesting that while Chaz Bono's stint on DWTS was plastered on every major newspaper and celebrity magazine in the US, I found Simpson's announcement in the The Telegraph.
In November, 2010, Alameda County elected 49-year-old California patent lawyer Victoria Kolakowski as the United States first openly transgender trial judge. Kolakowski beat prosecutor John Creighton 51 to 48 percent, a margin of nearly 10,000 votes, to become a member of California's Superior Court. Previously, Kolakowski was an administrative law judge for three years working on energy contract and compliance disputes for the California Public Utilities Commission.
As I write this, I wonder if it is a coincidence that both Simpson and Kolakowski were both 49 years-old at the time of their appointments. At this age biological women would be going through menopause and entering obscurity in the American public eye as 'gendered women,' by which I mean they would no longer draw attention for their beauty or ugliness, their fertility or lack there of.
Indeed, historically and worldwide, postmenopausal women have often gained positions of importance normally reserved for men in politics. Remember Margaret Thatcher, Gold Meir and Indira Ghandi? Currently serving are Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany; Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, Prime Minister of Iceland;Pratibha Devisingh Patil, President of India; Julia Gillard, Prime Minister of Australia; Sheikh Hasina, Prime Minister of Bangladesh; Ellen Johnson Sirleaf,President of Liberia and many more in Brazil, Finland, Kyrgystan, Slovakia and Switzerland(for a little insight on this read Gender and the Company We Keep). Perhaps because middle-aged, menopausal women become invisible in the sexual/youth-centered American psyche, accomplished transgendered women can succeed minus the fanfare, both pro and con, as we seem to either applaud or bash a person's appearance according to prevalent norms. But I digress!
This article states that "gay rights activists hope that the visibility of the candidates will help normalize people’s relations with people who are transgender — a broad category that includes heterosexual cross-dressers, homosexual drag queens and kings, and those who believe that they were born in the wrong body."
Yes, I look forward to the day when people can just be people, not referenced by race/ethnicity, gender/sexual preference, age or any other qualifier, seen simply as a person good at their job.
Pope Benedict XVI is touring Benin in West Africa. While in Europe Catholics are leaving the church in record numbers, West Africa's Catholic population is thriving and Benin boasts the world's fasted growing Catholic population. Indeed, the next Pope may be African as high ranking bishops and monsignors from this region move into important leadership positions in the Catholic Church.
However, Benin also recognizes Voudoo as its official religion and high ranking Voodoo priests were invited to meet the Pope on his current visit. While 22% of the people in Benin identify themselves as Muslims and 27% as Christians, 40% follow Voodoo. In Benin as well as in Ghana, Nigeria and Togo, people have no problem syncretizing Voodoo with Islam or Christianity, especially during times of stress. Voodoo is however, more than a religion. It comprises culture, philosophy, language, art, dance, music and medicine. Ordinary people ask Voodoo priests to intervene for them with the gods. These divinities are specialized, similar to Catholic saints, who intervene for people in times of need. For example, there are over 5,000 saints and some examples include: Saint Christopher, patron of travel; Saint Francis of Assisi, patron of animals; and Marie Bernadette, patron of the sick. In Voodoo, Gou is associated with war and blacksmiths, Sakpata with illness, healing and earth, Heviosso with storms, lightning and justice and Mama Wata-with water. Locals in Africa insist their religion has nothing to do with sorcery or black magic.
West Africans brought Voodoo to Haiti where it continues to blend alongside French colonial Catholicism. Some of the 100 Voodoo gods and goddesses have mirrors in particular saints who, while similar, are not exactly the same in their myths and abilities. For example, Mary is Ezili the Voodoo love spirit, Saint Patrick is Danbala the serpent spirit, the peasant farmer Azaka is Saint Isidore and Saint James is the warrior Ogou. On the altars in priestesses' homes one can see images of these Catholic saints side-by-side with candles, powders, herbs, oils, roots, perfume and a variety of liquors, all important elements of Voodoo ceremonies.
And in New York, you can also find a Voodoo priestess in Brooklyn - Mama Lola. For an in depth look at this contemporary Voodoo healer, read Karen McCarthy Brown's fascinating ethnography of Mama Lola.
As a Catholic by birth but not by practice, I find it interesting that the fastest growing populations of new Catholics reside in Africa, emerging from peoples whose own Voodoo beliefs involve the literal sacrifice of animals, theatrical ceremonies filled with pageantry, the consumption of alcohol and the worship of supreme beings. While I found the guilt and patriarchy of my own childhood Catholicism overbearing and frightful, I may be willing to sit with Mama Lola in her home and see if her approach to the gods feels more welcoming.
Africa has the Roman Catholic church's fastest growing congregation.
In this photo taken Thursday Oct. 6, 2011, a man holds up a gold ring he found as he was searching for scrap metal in contaminated water at the bottom of one of the biggest trash dumps in the city, known as "The Mine," in Guatemala City.
Last month in "Working at the Dump" I wrote about people around the world who work and sometimes live in their city's waste. Here, in the Huffington Post, "Guatemala Trash 'Miners'," everyday people descend 300 feet into a ravine below a landfill and amid "foul odors, the danger of unstable piles of garbage collapsing and the chance for heavy rain to suddenly raise the water level" dozens search for jewelry and other metal scraps that remain behind when the lighter garbage washes away. They can make the equivalent of $20 a day or more, as good as a regular job for the poor of this country. Though illegal and dangerous - some 'miners' have died while others have suffered broken bones in flash floods in the ravine - the work can be lucrative.
These 'miners' are modern day hunters and gatherers, finding opportunity and resources wherever they can. If you are !Kung, you can roam the Kalahari desert, hunting giraffe and other wild beasts and gathering wild fruits and high protein mongongo nuts. Urban dwellers however need cash to purchase their food and pay for housing. So, if you live in Guatemala City, you head to the landfill hoping to find jewelry or to "collect screws, faucets and other recyclable metal items that" you can sell for 85 cents a pound, eraning twice the minimum wage on average per 'scavenger trip.'
