Remembering Adeline

Today would have been my grandmother's 103rd birthday. I am grateful for her presence in my life. My grandmama had an enthusiasm and a zest for life. She always had a good story to tell and captivated people no matter how many times she told the same story. She taught me to face life's challenges with a sense of humor. This week I am dedicating the new Ananda website in honor of my grandmother, Adeline. Stay tuned for the official launch.

Ubuntu (ZAMBIA)

Ubuntu

“You never get used to death. Each time it comes, it comes so differently. With HIV you’re either affected or infected.” Victor, a volunteer said. Affected or infected. Death from the Virus comes often.

That summarizes the whole of the amazing continent of Africa where life and death hold hands. Where a funeral becomes a part of daily life, where coffin making is the most popular job and a baby suckles the breast of its infected mother because she can’t afford milk powder.

Victor is a volunteer with a group of five members known as Ubuntu. Ubuntu: the lyrical word translates as I am because we are. I am because you are. What I do affects you and what you do affects me. We are all in this world together. If the world could live by the principles of Ubuntu we’d probably be better off.

Ubuntu volunteers travel by bus and foot to isolated slum communities, hidden from the clean wide tree lined streets of Lusaka. They visit, spend time with, and work to identify ways to help families affected by HIV and disability. Victor, Harry, Christine, Lizzy, and Nicolas counsel persons living with disabilities. The disabled face physical, emotional and psychological challenges.

We join Ubuntu for home visits. The whitewashed mud houses consist of one small room, and are accessible by foot. We tread on dusty ground, litter, findings of synthetic hair, shreds of paper and plastic. A boy shyly greets us with muli bwanji (how are you?) . He is dragging a home made car he created from a plastic water bottle with wheels made from bottle caps. A girl dances by, running with an old tattered bra she is using as a kite.

It’s a luxury to own a bra or more than one set of clothes in Ngombe. Any money earned goes right to feeding one’s belly and the bellies of one's family. These are motion pictures of domesticity. These images that mom and I experience are both a priviledge and a responsibility; to share frames of daily life; to attempt to understand the larger framework of survival among impoverished communities and our place in helping them.

It seems an irony in places impacted with HIV, that “The Virus” carries a stigma. Often this is one of the factors for why people don’t get tested. One Ubuntu member comments: “My skill is in connecting, trying to remove the stigma from the affliction. It is like removing the bee stinger from the bee sting; how delicate this is.”

Disabled individuals are often exploited. Many are women and children. Ubuntu field worker Harry explains, “People don’t think that the disabled can get HIV; they believe that disability is a punishment from God. “Why would God punish them twice?” This is what they believe.

Ubuntu works at the grassroots level doing advocacy and case management. The goal is to help the disabled to access the same services afforded to nondisabled persons--to education, buying and trading in the community marketplace, getting a loan. They educate the general public to mainstream persons with disabilities, in the spirit of Ubuntu – “I am because You are!”

On this trip to the field, we are visiting different families who have received loans from Ubuntu (loans that range from $50-$200) to start their own businesses. Selling charcoal and grains made from corn millet are a business, as is frying dough and drying fish. The aim is with some initial capital provided in the form of a loan that business will produce some income (what we call in development terms --income generation activity (IGA)), for an individual in a household. The individual pays the loans back, the money goes into a revolving fund, and then another family is able to take out a loan.

A group of children stands under the shade of a tree. I ask a little girl in a pink shirt what her name is. Jennifer. She whispers. I know how to play along. Like Jennifer Lopez? I ask moving my hips in a salsa move. She begins to giggle and comes out from under the branches of the tree. Her faded pink shirt reveals faded glitter and curvy font, "Jennifer Lopez.” We have a good laugh, and shake our heads at the irony. There is still the glitz even on the back roads of Ngombe under the shade of trees rooted in parched earth, where children pump water from a borehole and carry pots home, carefully balanced on the tops of their heads.

Tribal Sisters (KENYA)

Female circumcision. Cut with a jagged edge of a knife, stick or rock and sutured with thorns, ankles binded by rope. Gruesome it may seem, this is seen as a way of economic security and a path to womanhood. To be circumcised qualifies a girl for marriage. For families it means that their daughters will be taken care of. It is a way of life.

When I was a junior in college my sociology professor assigned me the research topic of female circumcision. In my library I sat with diagrams of female anatomy wondering how to present an intimate subject to a classroom of strangers. I brought one visual aid—a poster board in which I pasted nine sets of rectangle pieces of red construction paper, punched holes in it and sewed them up with yarn. Behind each set of red doors was the face of a woman—faces cut from issues of National Geographic. I took a pair of scissors, slowly cutting down the sewn doors. I turned to the class. “Each of these women has undergone circumcision,” I began.

Ten years later I found myself in Kenya on a medical mission seven hours from Nairobi in a desert past the great rift valley and far from Mount Kilamanjaro with the nomadic pastoralist Pokot tribe, among men and boys carrying bows and arrows, and women with dreadlock hair that glistened with goat fat and red earth. They wore beaded rings around their neck, each ring of beads marked a rite; circumcision, marriage, birth. Here, wealth is determined by herds of goats, cattle and camels.

I did not know how closely my life would touch female circumcision until I was in one of the villages and a young man decided that he liked the muzungu from Hawaii. His mother made an offer for my bride price. It was proposed that his family would pay 40 goats, 20 cows, and 5 camels for me to be his second wife.

“But you have to get circumcised,” his mother told me.

I told her that I was very honored but declined the offer to get circumcised.

Our stamina and tempers baked in the oven of the desert. We worked in 114 degrees, ran out of water, ran short of food, and slept in the equivalent of a chicken shed, a box of a room without windows and an aluminum roof that heated up during the day, with chickens and goats running and pecking at our door.

The medical mission coordinator, a self-proclaimed leader in humanitarian relief missions hid our provisions of canned tuna, granola bars, and crystal light lemonade in his backpack. He kept himself busy with photo opportunities and political negotiations for his personal fundraising efforts while the rest of us worked.

My job was to clean bloody instruments used by the dentist to perform tooth extractions. For thirteen hours a day, sitting on a rock and using a tree stump for my table, I soaked, disinfected, and wiped clean the shiny metal instruments brought from Spain. There was no clinic where we worked. Only grazing camels, dried up river beds, and snakes.

Several times I thought about dying in the bush among funnels of dust storms, thorny bushes, and wide-eyed vultures. Never being found, my life cut short at the mercy of a twisted ego.

Life was not ready to give up on me. The unpredictable, unforeseen duality of humanitarian work. It was in the desert on that trip that I met Kiyapyap in one of the villages where we were volunteering. A slender girl with eyes that radiated and skin the color of dark chocolate, I learned that she was eleven years old and was living at a local primary school having run away from getting circumcised and early marriage. Kiyapyap stood out from her crowd of classmates and told me “I want to be a teacher, when I grow up.” Potential and determination are not timid. They wear themselves like buttons on a coat. I saw a leader in Kiyapyap and realized at that moment, why I had come to Pokot. Not one to make promises in the field, I told Kiyapyap that I would inquire about how to help her.

One that same trip, I met an anthropologist who was doing fieldwork for his doctoral studies on conflict among nomadic pastoralists. He gave me a lift in a beat-up white truck at 7 a.m. on a bumpy dusty road forty miles from our chicken shed in an attempt to see if I could reception from a "high point" in the desert on my international mobile to let my family know that the medical mission was run by a fraud. Not one bar of signal showed on my phone and I resigned myself to the fact that we were in the middle of nowhere with a madman. It would be my silence and my prayers that would keep me alive.

The anthropologist began to explain to me the dynamics of wealth among the Pokot. “You see that pen over there?” He pointed to a family hut with a fence with more than forty goats. “They are fairly well off. If a family has five goats, they are struggling.” I learned that currency is measured in terms of livestock. Fights occur when someone takes your goats—it is a measure of the value of your property. I also learned that in an arid place like Pokot if there are no boreholes for water, it is common to drink goat milk and the blood of cattle.

When I returned from Kenya, I contacted the anthropologist and told him about Kiyapyap to see if there was a possibility of helping her with her schooling. The anthropologist connected me to a Catholic Father who worked at a mission in the bush about 200 km away from Kiyapyap’s family. The Catholic Father paid a visit to the headmistress of a boarding school in the nearest city about four hours away, explaining the unusual situation of the girls and gained admission for secondary school for Kiyapyap and another Pokot girl, Kadogo to enter secondary school. He sought the permission of both sets of parents. It was the first time the girls had ever traveled in a vehicle, the first time they had worn shoes on their feet, and their first glimpse of a more developed world outside their communities. When they arrived at the school, all the students stood outside to welcome them.

On Kenyatta Day--October 21st, my mother and I were reunited with Kiyapyap and Kadogo, nearly two years after they began boarding school. Dressed in white and blue checkered uniform dress with a regal blue sweater, Kiyapyap embraced me and did not let go. Kadogo shyly hugged mom. We sat staring and smiling at each other. There are no words. They are my younger sisters and I love them as my own.

We spent time teaching the girls Scrabble, a game that my grandmama played with me from the time I was a child. It gave the girls an opportunity to practice their English. It was astonishing because not only did they have to think a different language, they had to spell and strategize about where to put the tiles on the board.

We took the girls on an excursion to an animal orphanage. I’m sure the girls were used to seeing some of the animals in their lives in Pokot. We took Kiyapyap and Kadogo for the second ice-cream of their life. We shared pictures of my brother and sister and a few photos from back home in Hawaii. Taking Kiyapyap’s hand in mine, I asked.

“How many siblings do you have?”

“Five sisters and three brothers.”

“How many goats does your family have?”

“Fifteen,” she smiled.

Kiyapyap’s father died when she was a child. Her mother became inherited by her uncle and this formed a new family.

“You still want to be a teacher?” I asked.

“I want to be a headmistress!”

Kadogo, quiet and reserved said she had three sisters and two brothers. Her mother did not remarry. (She refused to be inherited). Her family had twenty goats and times were difficult. Kadogo wants to be a doctor.

I asked both girls what they did before they went to school in the village. They walked 15 km to gather firewood, 20 km to gather water, they helped build their family house from sticks and mud and they looked after their younger siblings at the age of ten.

I asked the Catholic Father how he addressed the sensitive issue of female circumcision with the parents. “I told them that if they circumcised their daughters, the education would stop.” Father then explained to us---that parents really care for their daughters. They don’t want to harm them but this is something that is cultural, the society expects it and the parents feel obliged. He also explained that parents realized the opportunity for an education. Most girls don’t have the chance to complete secondary and higher education because families can’t afford books and uniforms.

The Catholic Father showed us pictures on his laptop of the time that he brought the girls’ mothers to the school campus for a visit. In one of the photos Kiyapyap's mother cradled her baby brother in one hand and held a vessel made from the stomach of a goat in the other. “Her mother brought her fresh goat milk as a treat!” the Catholic Father announced.

I turned to the girls and made a request: “My little sisters, never forget where you come from. It is who you are. You will learn many things in the school and meet girls from different areas-- Mombassa, Kisumu, and Nairobi, but never forget who you are. You have a chance to be an example for other Pokot girls.”

Change begins with one life at a time. In a school of 500 girls Kiyapyap and Kadogo are the only two from the Pokot tribe. They are the first to represent their tribe in a school of higher education.

Abel's Journey (ETHIOPIA)

mom with abel

The gates of St. Mary’s Language School were slightly ajar. We pushed our way in treading lightly under the dim gray-white of the street light and holding the hand of my unsteady mother, setting foot on larger stones to avoid falling into the deep holes in the ground. We came to visit Abel Ayelew. The roots of trees slithered across the soil. Past the roots and around the corner were steps to climb with a drop off to several feet and no handrail. Finally we came to yellow wooden door with the number 12.

Now I would spare you the details, but I want you to imagine walking to door #12 completely blind. Abel is 16 years old and came to Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia on a bus from his town of Gojjam 300 kilometers away. He came to the city, on his own, without anything determined to find a school that taught Braille.

How did we meet Abel? On our last visit to Ethiopia we were on our way home from a visit with an HIV affected family. (People here do not say HIV, they say “The Virus” in a whisper). As we were driving my mother saw a boy with a cane and his teenage friends swaggering down the street.

Mom said “WAIT! Stop the car.” She got out and embraced him in a big hug. I sat thinking, my mom is nuts. We had stopped the car in the middle of a dirt road in a community unknown to us surrounded by corrugated aluminum roofs and mud houses held together with hay. Dusk was arriving.

Abel had two white moons in his eyes, they were cloudy. He was completely blind. I got out of the car and took Abel’s hands. I took both of his hands and held them in mine. “Love is not something you have to see, you can feel it,” I said.

He squeezed my hands back and said, “I feel it.”

That was a year and a half ago and Abel spoke the local language of Amharic. His swagering teenage friends were our interpreters.

That love transcended the miles and oceans between Africa, Boston, and Hawaii. Over the months we sent emails to each other. Abel would go to an internet café and ask the waitress to help him type an email.

Abel’s dream was to learn English and become an advocate, a lawyer. With the help of the NGO Hope for Children Organization, Abel registered at St. Mary’s to study English five days a week. He attends high school classes during the day and English class at night, the youngest pupil in his class. How he walks everywhere and knows the distances between places, is beyond me.

When I met him earlier in the day he was carrying a few sheets of heavy white paper, our emails from over a year ago and a black folder that had holes in it. Then he put his hand in his pocket. “This is my pen!" he smirked as if he could see my reaction to the short, conical instrument, a fourth of a normal pen's size. It had a metal pin which he would stick through the holes of his folder to spell things out in Braille. Dot by dot.

Abel turned to me. “It is a difficult learning system for a disabled person. For example, there is a lack of Braille paper. It is very expensive. There are no Braille books…and I live alone.”

Abel saves his Braille paper for his exams. He has a professor who is blind at his local school. Abel listens to the exam questions and writes his answers in Braille. His teacher grades his examinations in Braille.

“How do you take notes?” I asked him.

“I listen.” He grinned.

“But how do you remember everything, if you can’t write it down?”

“I catch it on my brain.” His grin became two dimples.

Tonight we made a surprise visit to Abel’s English class to thank his teacher. There were 30 students sitting at old wooden benches about seven students squashed into a bench barely any space between them.

My mom who manages to find a flower to put in her hair no matter what country we’re in had tucked a fuschia bougainvillea behind her ear and was wearing a Hawaiian mu’umu’u dress. She opened with “Hello everyone. I am here to visit my son’s English class.”

The room was silent, but you could hear the joy. Then mom said, “My Abel, you are seated next to two beautiful women! How did you manage that? ” The classroom roared with laughter.

I introduced myself and said I was from Hawaii. “But you look Ethiopian,” someone in the back responded.

We laughed, asked and answered questions, and --I danced a short Hawaiian hula for everyone. I enjoy sharing Aloha.

Someone raised their hand and asked the question: “What is the difference between Ethiopia and America?”

“The Ethiopians have an open heart and wear their soul on the outside,” mother said.

Abel closed the class thanking the teacher and saying how happy he was to have this opportunity. Abel wears his soul and it is cloaked in the vision of his dreams. His courage as tall as the mountains.

The Wish (ETHIOPIA)

On the road to Addis University, before the roundabout circle, past the Yesus Drug Store, and a boy charging people to weigh themselves on an industrial food scale, we found our friend Eshetu; a 22 year old man who is disabled from the waist down. His name derived from the Amharic Eshet—the silk threads that protect an ear of corn. We met him as we were dropping off film at a roadside store.

Having a disability does not prevent Eshetu from working. Wearing a yellow fluorescent vest with orange reflector stripes, he works as a parking attendant dispensing tickets and collecting fees for parking, using two worn down wooden crutches for support and stability. We were taken with Eshetu because he wasn’t using his disability as an excuse to beg. When you witness someone who perseveres with life despite the social, physical, and psychological challenges—it is a tribute to the strength of the human spirit.

We made arrangements to take Eshetu to the NGO to learn about his life. As we were driving in a 1980 mustard yellow Fiat with a thin tan line that outlined the body of the car, I attempted to roll down the window when the handle fell off. Ooops. We started laughing. Eshetu showed me the calluses and blisters on his fingers from where he gripped the handles of his crutches. I do not speak Amharic, but suffering is a universal language, as is joy.

We arrived at the blue-gray gates of Hope For Children greeted by a dog name Lucy, little girls in school uniforms of denim colored pinafores with sky blue blouses. A young man was waiting sitting on the concrete wall. He wouldn’t recognize me until I got closer, but I recognized him right away. My Abel. You will learn his story soon.

“My sister…It has been one year and six months since I met you.” Abel said. His white walking cane was folded in his hand. I smiled.

We sat facing the yellow memory boxes. Eshetu spoke Amharic and Abel was fairly good in English. Abel became my translator. Eshetu believed that he became crippled when he was given an “injection in his back as a child and had a bad reaction.” He came from the district Walloo, eight hours by bus and hadn’t been home to visit his family because he didn’t have the money.

I had been caught up in my note-taking when Abel asked me: “Where is his problem, because I can’t see?” Abel is completely blind. I explained that Eshetu did not have the use of his legs and that he was walking with sticks that were larger than the walking cane that Abel used. It is hard for me to describe to you—the feeling that wrapped around me, it was touching.

I asked Eshetu what he wanted to do with his life, what was his future plan. He was quiet. One of the staff members who was standing over my shoulder said, “He has not had time think of his future, he has been busy trying to live day to day.”

“What do you wish for, Eshetu?” I ask.

“I am 22 years; I did not have the chance to finish high school. My wish is to finish my last two years of school.”

Mom and I nodded to each other. I grasped Eshetu’s hand. “Many people have seen me. They have written articles in the newspaper about me. But no one has tried to help me,” Eshetu responded.

I continue to hold Eshetu’s hand. This symbolized more than going back to school. It represented a young man facing society and staring stigma down. If he can be an example, others can follow. That’s what it’s about. Creating possibility and gradually affecting change.

The first priority was getting Eshetu’s school papers and certificates which were back home in Waloo. There was no way to contact his family because they did not have phone. Eshetu was excited to surprise them.

It was the first time he would be home in three years.

Unconditional Love (ETHIOPIA)

In the eyes of every child is the light of the future. If that light dims so does the hope of this world.

We were in Ethiopia less than 24 hours when we were sidelined by a suicide call for help and the preying eyes of HIV. We were in the office of an NGO waiting to meet our sponsored children when three women showed up. Their hands restless, eyes wide and unsettled. A staff member turned to me and said; “A woman is threatening to commit suicide and kill her son. He is two years old. She’s not from here, doesn’t know anyone and has no family. She is alone.”

The staff member searched my eyes for recognition. “She was just diagnosed with the Virus.”

People here do not call Human Immune Deficiency Virus by its name nor its acronym; HIV. They whisper “the Virus”. If you have the Virus, it is a death sentence. Grandparents have seen a generation die before their eyes. Children have seen fathers, mothers, aunties, and uncles die from the Virus. It is a never ending cycle.

The staff member made arrangements for an outreach worker to be with the mother. To hold her hand. And sit with her through the shock, to counsel her. Stop reading. Think about this mother. What would run through your mind? Yes. It probably is the same. Call it empathy, compassion but allow it time. The busy chaos of our lives can wait a moment.

Life is a series of moments. For my myself and my mother it is about creating moments of joy and laughter between the pangs of suffering. We hear stories of sorrow, and we listen. Not out of pity----out of the ability to draw connections to humanity. People no matter how poor or sick want respect as a fellow human being. We drove down crevices of a street lined with boxy mud houses pressed with strands of hay.

A makeshift stall supported on three sides with a wooden frame covered with remnants of bags displaying a pile of tomatoes waiting to be sold. Children waving. Women with tightly braided hair walking, white viscose shawls draped about them, from underneath peeked a child clinging to a breast. Everything has a rhythm. Every face a possibility.

Ethiopia was the first stop on our journey. This trip to Africa was to visit children; who have been affected by HIV and poverty. We carry parcels of encouragement and hope. Out suitcases overweight with pencils, notebooks, soap and shampoo, toothpaste and toothbrushes and Tootsie Roll lollipops. It is a luxury to buy these things when you can barely afford food to feed a family of five.

One hour before the suicide plea, we were in the main office of Hope For Children (HFC) an NGO in Addis Ababa that maintains eight group homes for children orphaned by HIV and helps 500+ children through outreach. The director, Woinshet was showing us photos; the first was of a child looking at a candle flame. The text under the photo read: In the eyes of every child is the light of the future. If that light dims so does the hope of this world. The next set of photos were before and after shots of children nursed back to health, a baby whose mother had died in childbirth, whom doctors thought would not live to see the next day, had been brought to Hope For Children and had surprised everyone.

Woinshet had returned recently from a conference about social change in which the Dalai Lama had also attended. “You know what he said to me? He said that I must continue to give unconditional love,” she smiled. Love that gives without pause to a four year old whom had lost his mother, father and sister to the Virus. When grief counselors took the child to the tomb of his family and to his home which was empty---he began to understand that his family would not return.

Binders of black files lined the bookshelves of the office. The files contained pages of profiles of children who were orphaned and living with family relatives who need support. Hope for Children runs a sponsorship program where $250/year provides for school fees, books, clothing, medical care, and food for a child. More importantly, it allows a child who has endured suffering a chance at a life of new beginnings. Hope for Children realizes the need to help children and families to cope when their lives have been cut short with the diagnosis of HIV.

The focus is on the now--providing basic needs; shelter, clothing, medical care, and education. Aware that most children will stop being children before age 10 and will have to fend for themselves and their siblings, Woinshet emphasizes the need for a continuum of care, long term solutions for children affected by HIV. “Most NGOs think that a child’s life ends after 18, but it is just another two to three more steps to their future.” If families want to receive assistance from the NGO, children must attend school.

To facilitate their chances of youth pursuing higher education, HFC has introduced English classes, an asset that families who live below the poverty line can’t normally afford. To reduce social stigma and increase awareness, children and teens participate in a Saturday program of singing, dancing and sports.

Outreach workers visit homes and conduct traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremonies with women’s groups to discuss how to protect themselves and how to prevent getting infected with the Virus. They talk about causes of HIV; that it is not a punishment, it is not a curse. That HIV is non-discriminating and can affect anyone; no one is immune to the virus. The ultimate goal is to decrease incidence, the appearance of new cases of HIV and to educate communities to reduce the blow of social stigma. Home based care volunteers teach families how to care for someone dying from AIDS; where to go to get Anti-retroviral medications, how to wash a mother who has sores, how to hold an aunty who is weak. Care and support continues into the aftermath of the Virus.

Yellow wooden memory boxes with small padlocks stood about eight feet and lined the back wall of one of the rooms in the office. The memory boxes contain family genealogies, christening certificates, property deeds, hopes and dreams of parents to their surviving relatives.

Imagine opening a memory box as a child fumbling through papers that were touched by your mother’s hand, reading her wishes for your future. I saw Woinshet the next morning and asked her about the suicide mother. “She is ok. I called throughout the night to check on her. It will take time, but she will be all right.”

Unconditional love.

KHARTOUM, Sudan

The last time I arrived in a desert I saw the landing strip three minutes before the plane touched down. We arrived in a cloud of dust in the United Arab Emirates. The winds of the desert showed no mercy. Anxiety. The currency I pay every time I embark on another journey not knowing what will, happen. My destination -- villages where communities live in poverty challenged by high disease burdens, lack of medical care, limited educational opportunities and 1-2 meals a day...This is the reality and the basis for intervention. The thing you have to remember is that every situation no matter how difficult provides an opportunity to do something about it.

I’m a global nomad and on my way to Africa. The people who come into my life are my caravan. I carry their stories with me and each journey becomes a chapter in my book of life. My suitcase is packed with hope and determination. Six months after the desert landing in the U.A.E., the clammy palms, clenched jaws, and extra tug on my seatbelt returned in the skies above Sudan. "We will be experiencing turbulence as we fly through heavy cumulus clouds. It's best to stay in your seats and fasten your seatbelt for the duration of the flight," our pilot announced. I always take a deep breath when I hear that word-- TURBULENCE. The power of nature to thrash about a piece of metal in the sky.

We descend a thousand feet at a time through billowing clouds thick, a tunnel of eternal white. I hold my breath waiting to see the ground beneath; earth speckled with shrubbery. Buildings and houses like pieces on a monopoly game. Street lamps on a brite-lite board of the earth. The Nile, wide and curvy emerges.

The desert, peeled back by urban sprawl is dotted by brown mud houses and fringed by buildings and black tar roadways. A dancing Ferris wheel; rainbow sherbet lights of carnival rides. From each set of community houses stretch the Minarets of mosques. Tendrils of the tangerine sun dance about the cabin landing on a woman dressed in green, a cloth draped over her head. She recited scriptures of her Koran the entire flight from Frankfurt. Not once did she let her eyes shift.

The wheels hit the ground, skid and taxi to open runway. We speed past UN planes, white with elongated black letters. A helicopter waits for repair. It is not at every airport that you see UN planes. United Nations—a governing body meant to unite the world to declare what constitutes torture, to set standards for education, nutrition, health to represent the global voice under certain conventions, Human Rights, Child Rights, Rights of Women, Food Security. And yet serves another purpose, peacekeeping in times of war and disasters; complex humanitarian emergencies—a fancy term for the multifaceted causes that rip communities apart where governance is fractured or nonexistent and the lives of united people shatter.

I wonder what the eyes of those planes have seen; what kind of mission they flew--peacekeeping, food distribution, conflict resolution, refugee rescues? Have they seen the blood spattered canvas of the desert? Have they seen child soldiers and raped women fleeing for their lives? The door is thrust open and a bus awaits passengers; members of the Red Cross, a woman backpacker, two men in fatigues. A mother clutching the hand of her child. We are asked to remain onboard, as we are continuing to Ethiopia. The sky fades to melon and dissolves into the bluish-gray that begins the darkness of the night.

A Personal Welcome

Global grassroots from a local girl from Hawaii.

Hi and welcome to my blog. Finally I've found the courage to post my thoughts in cyberspace. The posts that you will read represent my opinions and perspectives based on my international experiences. I don't claim to have all the answers nor be an expert on the issue of global poverty. I'm a human being with a big heart. And I care.

Almost as a daily occurance I find affirmations that each of us is connected in the world we live in. This is the reality that I live in. These are the stories that I'll share with you. We each have a place and a purpose in this world. Life is short. So I live it up and try to make every moment count. Well, almost.

Be The Change highlights stories of real people; the challenges and inequities, the hope and the courage of humanity. I hope you will come away inspired. It is my personal quest, my journey to help make a difference. You'll also find links that offer interesting perspectives on global development as well as a link to my personal website Discovering Humanity. It is a work in progress---for 5+ years and it still being built. Please check in and visit for the latest updates.

Feel free to suggest links to articles, references, and events that focus on humanitarian issues. If you want to share a personal story that has affected you or if you would like to ask a question, please do. Ideas and suggestions are welcome. I'm also looking for contributing authors who specialize in topics related to the field of poverty. Join me as a fellow global citizen. And tell your friends, family, and colleagues too!

Please come back often. Stay tuned because I'm just getting started.

P.S. Photos on the site are my personal photos taken during my trips to the field. Please do not take these images.