So... What's Uganda Like?

Written in June 2008 during my Amsterdam layover prior to my return to California.

I noticed this strange lizard. It was moving in the most awkward sort of way. It had a longer tail than any lizard I had ever seen before and its steps required great effort. We had just walked out of Invisible Children's microeconomic bracelet making site. As I was led to the dirt floor I would be sleeping on in the dangerous and impoverished IDP camp, the first thing I noticed was the lizard. As my head tilted to the side to observe its movements, my host, Santa, saw a friend of hers. She called over her friend to introduce me. Oblivious to the lizard, the newfound friend reached out her hand to shake mine and stepped directly on the creature. She didn't even flinch. I smiled, tried to make eye contact, but my gaze shifted to her feet. Did she know what was under her?

As we finished our brief greeting, the woman walked away, leaving the struggling lizard in her midst. Santa was leading me to her home, but I was concerned about the creature. It was then, upon closer observation, that I realized that the "lizard" was, in fact, a baby rat. As we walked away, the rat lay on its side... struggling to survive in an IDP camp. Rats and huts and thousands of people. All struggling to find a way to breathe in the camp.

While I sit peacfully on a vacation in Amsterdam, I consider the sacrifices Santa made for us that evening. Diligently, she crawled on the dirt floor to prepare dinner for our already plump bellies. At five months pregnant, Santa was one year and three children ahead of me in life. Then, as the men in her community came over to enjoy the dinner she had labored over, she politely sat in the dirt while they enjoyed the small hierarchy of resting on a wooden chair. Women cook. Then they sit on the dirt while the men eat their food in chairs. Then the women clean up the mess. And the men go to enjoy a Casava Liquor. Alcohol washing away the haunting holes that 22 years of war have created in their lives.

It's hard to fully understand the life that the Acholi lead. Santa drew me a warm bath and sent her 16 year old friend Palm out with me to the bathing section of the camp. Palm enegantly balanced the warm gallons of water on her head. Then, surrounded by huts, she asked me to begin to bathe. My nakedness in the crowded camp created a sensation of vulnerabiltiy that I had never known before. Of course, how naked can I be when the truth is that in a few short hours, I have the freedom and power to leave the camp? How can my spirit be broken by impoverty when I know that my wealth is always within my reach? How could I ever truly know how vulnerable, how tired these residents must be? They have no way out, and I will always have a way out. Nakedness can't be very shaming when you know you can cover up again soon.

The next morning, a man greeted us and began to speak to Santa in the Lwo language. She nodded, understandingly, and then handed the man a few thousand shillings. Enough to buy a few Cokes.

"Hello. Good morning," the man greeted us white guests in his Ugandan flavored English. "Last night a baby died. One week. We're holding the funeral today... Well... good bye."

For several minutes we sat silently in the room. I wished that I had brought my wallet to the camp instead of locking it "safely" in the intern house. But after a few minutes of silence, life had to return to the room. Babies die, but life in the camp must go on.

So, in that evening, when I saw life escape out of the baby rat, and as Santa crawled on the dirt ground, and as I sheltered my nakedness in the congested camp, a one week old baby lost its only chance. After nine months of carrying the child, a mother wept and a father found another hole in his life to try to fill again.

So, what's Uganda like? It's beautiful. But the injustices of the land will never leave my heart. How grateful I find myself today. Not only have my eyes seen this injustice, but I continue to be given the opportunities to help change these crimes.

JoJo for President

Johannes is on the highway
He’s most at home behind the wheel
He’s on a mission
Get to where he’s going
Fast
He tailgates
Enough to cause me to nervously
Cross
And uncross
And cross my legs again

He’s handsome
The boy a mom dreams of for her daughter
And while his youth shows
Always so playful
There’s something about him
His barrel-chested walk
Projecting voice
Halfway cocky smile
That tells you he should be trusted

“JoJo,” I revisit the frequent topic of conversation
“When you’re elected president you’ll still let me be your
Brains behind the whole operation, right?”

He laughs a little to himself
We have this exact same exchange
At least once a week
“T, what makes you think I’ll be president?”
He always fishes
For my same answer

“JoJo, you’re the cockiest
Most handsome guy I know
Who wouldn’t want you up front on their stage?
But man, we could be the power team
You’re the face everyone loves
And I’ll work my ass off behind the scenes
I’ll be the Hilary to your Bill Clinton
Together we’ll rule the world”

Red Light

This red light
The corner of my little phone
And its flashes mean that someone
Wants to hear from me

Check for the red light
Peer into my purse
Check again, just to be sure

I used to know that he was missing me
Private chats all day long
Forgetting my phone on purpose
Just to return to his red light

Return from a meeting
His message was there to greet me
Climb out of the shower
His red light to see how my day was going?
Exit the gym
Sweaty
Tired
He was dwelling on how nice I looked
Red light reminding me that he cared

My little phone
Up to my ear for hours late one night
And there we agreed
That we needed more from each other than just
A red light
Weaping
And tears
And too far away to make anything right

These days there is still a red light
An overdrawn account notice from the bank
Or a jumbled message from my father
Wat do U want 2 do 4 dinner 2nite?????
A carpool cancellation
They’re too busy to make it to dinner

Never a blush
Cheeks rushing with blood and warmth
Just a red light
And now the roll of my eyes

Easiest $1 Million We've Ever Made

Or, was it the hardest? Well, it was certainly the FASTEST $1 million Invisible Children has ever made.

As you probably noticed if you are a facebook friend of mine, Invisible Children was doing everything we could this past week to get your vote in an online competition to win $1 million. And was it EVER dramatic.

This past week, we pulled together a group of volunteers (sometimes numbering over 100) in our office to reach out and ask the general public to vote for us to win. We worked 18 hour days, even on Saturday and Martin Luther King day. We called, we emailed, we texted, we snail mailed, we faxed out press releases, we did interviews on the news and radio, and then we did it all over again. All across the country, our most committed volunteers started calling us asking how they could set up call centers in their homes to get more votes too. It was incredible.



This week-long competition was not without its moments of drama. Initially, Invisible Children and TWLOHA (To Write Love on Her Arms) were battling back and forth to hold onto the first place spot. We expected this. TWLOHA and IC both have a strong presence in youth culture and this was obviously the age group that would be voting the most on Facebook. However, the difference between the two groups was that Invisible Children had club chapters at thousands of schools across America. We discovered that as soon as we activated all these clubs asking them to find votes, that we gained an increasing pace in getting votes. Hmmm, maybe the press coverage didn't hurt too.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/laren-poole/help-invisible-children-g_b_428792.html


(Additional press included The Washington Post, CNN Tech, Fox 5 News San Diego, The San Diego Union Tribune, and 91X radio)

So, amid the fury of phone calls, helping loved ones create facebook accounts for the very first time, and the press, we missed the fact that another group, Isha, was climbing in the rankings for votes. All of a sudden, we saw that they were collecting votes three times faster than we could. "Who is Isha?" we all started googling. The answers we found were interesting.
-They provided inner transformation and personal growth? http://www.ishafoundation.org/
-They were mystic? http://www.midnightswiththemystic.com/isha-foundation.html
-They were a cult? http://guruphiliac.lefora.com/2009/03/17/sadhguru-and-the-isha-foundation/
-They were a yoga foundation that charges $1,800 to hear their speaker at conferences? http://www.ishafoundation.org/component/option,com_program/program_id,3119/task,details/

And who was voting for them? Well according to Facebook, people with names like Sdfj Dfsjlfkddjf or Gdfg Kcjbvkljvb. And they had never had any previous activity. Or facebook friends. Or any other info about them on their account. They were gaining votes at an almost, umm... mechanical rate. And we were starting to feel a lot like Avatars, defending ourselves against the machines.


This article seems to agree that votes were looking funky: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/22/fraud-in-facebookchase-co_n_433928.html

I was crying. I was praying. I was barely sleeping. I asked God to please send the money to those who needed it most. And mostly, I was just working my phone and facebook to hunt down more votes for us. No matter WHAT type of votes we had to overcome, I was going to give it my all. In the last hours of competion, our 10,000 vote lead was slimming down to 6,000, then 4,500, then 2,000. Could we hold onto first place? And then the miracle tweets started pouring in. Katy Perry tweeted us. Then Rick Warren. Then, most surprising of all, TWLOHA publicly tweeted their support for us and asked their supporters to use their remaining votes to support us. And no matter what, we just kept calling. And calling. And calling. And then when it couldn't come fast enough, 9:00 pm hit. And we won! Barely. we had 123,990, Isha had 122,742 votes (a margin of just over 1,200 votes. If Isha had kept their pace for 30 more minutes, we would have lost).

So, we screamed. And danced to "A Milli" by Lil Wayne. And cried. And hugged. And Jason reminded us that this money was not OURS. It was God's and we need to invest and multiply it in a way that would make Him proud. And then we drank pink champaign on ice (an incredible gift from someone who wanted us to RELAX)... because if ever there was a time that we deserved to celebrate, this was the night.

The quote that will live forever in our history: "If they was using robots, and we still beat them, what does that make US????" -Zach Barrows

Legalize Marijuana?

I used to favor the legalization of marijuana in America. I've never been any sort of pot smoker myself and neither are most of my friends. I wasn't advocating for this legalization so that me and my friends could have "more fun" legally. I just felt that science indicates that marijuana really is on a similar level as alcohol and America had a double standard to be comfortable with the use of alcohol but not marijuana.

I wanted taxation on pot. I wanted to know that marijuana is free of being laced with any harder drugs. I wanted age restrictions and driving under the influence restrictions like we have to ensure responsible intoxication with alcohol. I thought that maybe legalizing marijuana would actually benefit American society.

I wasn't alone. Obviously. Here is a popular sandwich shop (designed to help you with your munchies) that you can find in college towns across the Rocky Mountain Range dedicated to the "glories" of marijuana:




What's funny is that I believed that marijuana should be legalized UNTIL I actually encountered legalized marijuana in action a year and a half ago in Amsterdam.

"Hey... I can sell you this... uh... magazine? All day, when I was your age, I used to sit in the coffee shops [marijuana shops] and smoke. It made me stupid. Now, this is the only job I can get. Selling these magazines. But... hey... on page 14 you will see a list of the top coffee shops in the district.... you know, if that's what you're here for."

A middle-aged homeless man made his living downtown Amsterdam selling these Amsterdam magazines to tourists. He obviously was who he was because he had such easy access to marijuana growing up in Holland. However, he knew that Amsterdam is the Las Vegas of Europe. People are there to party in a way that is completely illegal everywhere else in the modern world.

Being a good Christian girl, I was actually naive enough to not recognize the smell of burning pot, but when there's a coffee shop on every corner, the "smell of Amsterdam" is one that I now find drifting across certain dark corners of America on a regular basis.

My friends I met in Amsterdam told me about what the legalization of pot REALLY meant for the community.
-Yes. It increased tourism to the city. But not the type of tourists that Dutch citizens really wanted infecting their charming town. People LIVE and RAISE FAMILIES in these places where tourists were behaving at their absolute worst.
-Yes. Drugs are regulated by the government to prevent abuse. One example was that a business was prohibited from selling both marijuana and alcohol because the Dutch government knew that could be a deadly combination.
-Mushrooms and other "light" drugs were also available for purchase at these coffee shops, but not for long. Too many hallucinating tourists were jumping out of top story windows under the influence. It appeared at though the government was saying "oops, let's cut back on our liberal ways a bit here" due to all the deaths associated with these incidents.
-Regular pot smokers were frying their brain cells at a young age becoming unable to contribute positively to society in their later years. They became just a leech on society.
-The Dutch government was proactively adding many new regulations on the usage of marijuana in the country. It appeared as though they were attempting to undo the original extreme tolerance approach. It looked like they also regretted their approach to legalizing coffee shops. But how can you ever be taken seriously as an enforcer if you were too passive in the first place?

Ok, you may be thinking, Talitha, people all around the world have access to these drugs and behave in the same sort of way that you witnessed in Amsterdam. At least in Holland they're not having to hide.

Obviously, certain people are going to smoke pot no matter how legal/illegal it is. However, I know that for ME, if it's illegal, I won't touch it. But, a legalized substance, I'll at least give it a try. And there are a lot of people like me out there who respect the law enough to avoid begin using marijuana as long as it remains illegal.

I walked away from Amsterdam sad. I felt that this society was suffering from it's radical tolerance. I desired for people to be attracted to Amsterdam for its charm and beauty, not its decadence and depravity. I felt like Amsterdam had the completely wrong reputation. In your mind, you may think of this when you hear the word "Amsterdam"



But, I walked away from Amsterdam with images of this beautiful place




Maybe we can't just trust everyone in our society to maturely handle themselves in the presence of marijuana. Maybe extreme tolerance results in extreme irresponsibility. Maybe we all need a reminder of what's good for us... with the threat of punishment if we ignore that suggestion.

Thoughts?

Atlanta Olympics

The blinds were permanently bent. Lying in bed, eight years old, I would cry myself to sleep silently. Bending the blinds looking at the street lights. New house. New school. New life. All I wanted to do was run down that street back to Hannah and Ashley and catching ladybugs on recess in our empty milk cartons. I would never find friends like I had in my old neighborhood. Hannah and I would go swimming without sunscreen. Her mom stocking up towels in the old VW Beatle. No air conditioning, so we would eat ice cream on the drive home complaining about our sunburns. And now, I was alone.

The tears only lasted for about a month. I quickly adjusted to this new school and couldn’t even remember what I had liked so much about that old school in the first place. Katie and I would jump rope under the ramada. Heather and I would hang upside down on the monkey bars to see who could hold that position the longest. Megan would sit next to me in class and we would work together on practicing for the spelling tests. But in my room our new kitten had found her entry into the window. She continued to climb through that little blind section that I had bent back to peacefully look out on our neighborhood every night.

It was the year of the Atlanta Olympics. Americans were winning gold medals left and right. And every good gymnast that year seems to be named Dominique for some reason. Hair pulled tight into ponytails, glitter on their cheeks, leotards paying honor to the American flag. They pranced out across the floor to begin their performance. This was the floor routine night.

Look at how pretty they are. If you want to be a pretty teenager, make sure you’re skinny like them. My mind wandered while they chalked their hands and swallowed down their nerves.

Outside, our desert sky was turning red with monsoon fury. Lightening flashing. Dust consuming the entire street. Branches rapping against the windows and walls.

Lightening would flash and then I would count. one, two, three, four… Thunder cracked. I jumped. That meant that the lightening was four miles away. And if it got much closer, it might strike our roof and then my kitten and I would burn up. I hope mom gets home soon. I prayed as I ran down the hall to peak out my bent blinds. Nope, not yet. Just a dusty brown window with a few of God’s tears beginning to hit the pane.

I ran back to the TV just as Dominique began her floor routine. Leaping into the air she flipped and flew. She would stick the landing, throw her hands into the air. Dance. Squeeze into a corner. Take a deep breath and then do it all over again. The crowd cheered her on. Music that I’d hear on KZZP radio serenaded her performance. She never left the white box. She never fell. She threw her hands up triumphantly up in the air and the commentators couldn’t stop singing her praise. She walked off the floor and the crowd went wild.

I hopped up and stood in our corner. Thunder cracked. I lifted my arms into the air. Branches applauded me against our wall. I lifted my leg and flung myself into a cartwheel. Then another. Lightning. Then another cartwheel. Then a round-off. Landed and threw my hands into the air. Thunder. Rain. The crowd on the television went wild and flung their American flags into the air. And a small smile crept across my face.

All of a sudden, our latched front door whipped open and blowing dust flooded into our house. I screamed and coughed. The door opened up to its full width slamming into our wall and I lifted my head to see if anyone was there. Just the storm. I scurried to the door, my hands shaking. Shut it, and locked it. Lightening. Thunder.

The kitten and I hid under my blanket looking through the hole in the blinds until I saw the white Corolla roll into the drive way. My mom stepped out. McDonalds Happy Meal in hand.

I jumped up and ran to the front door before she could unlock it.

“Mom, mom! Dominique is going to win the gold medal. Can I go to gymnastics? The door flew open. And the lightening and thunder are only four miles away. What’s my toy? Did you get ketchup?”

She bent down, hugged me. “That’s great honey. So who’s next for the floor routine? You know that’s my favorite part of the gymnastics night.”

We watched the next Dominique, and Kerri, and all the rest of the 1996 Magnificent Seven fly though the air that night. Rain pattered against the window. The thunder grew duller and duller.

The next day at recess Katie, Megan, Heather and I cartwheeled across our soccer field agreeing that we should all start taking gymnastics classes so that we could be that pretty American Magnificent Seven team when we’re older. The boys yelled at us telling up to get out of the way of their soccer game. We stuck our tongues out at them and giggled. I launched into another cartwheel, threw my hands up in the air and smiled at my girls. “I’m Dominique. You can be Dominique too.”

Break Up

Memoirists dive into a million nitty gritty topics. Anne Lamott talks about her abortion to a Christian audience. Then she dedicates a chapter to her insecurities about cellulite and the way that she feels inferior to a 16 year old in a bikini. Marla Hornbacher dives into her near death experiences cutting herself under the influence of her bi-polar disorder. Martha Beck shares the way her Mormon leader father molested her as a child, while the church turned a blind eye. Lauren Winner talks about the grief-stricken process of converting from one faith to the next. Augusten Burroughs laughs at himself while sharing how his mom handed him over to her psychiatrist to be his new parent figure. The list could go on and on. These days, authors have no reservations in sharing it all with the stranger reading in the comfy chair at Borders.

But for some reason, they won’t talk about the experience of a break-up. All topics are a free-for-all, but the break up still seems to be too raw to expose.

When I was 17 I had my wisdom teeth removed. Sometimes that’s an easy process, but sometimes it’s messier. In my case, it was messy. It was full-fledged surgery including the dentist drilling through my jaw to retrieve the teeth.

When I came to, I lied in bed crying. I couldn’t tell you exactly where it was hurting, but I could tell you that the tears were involuntary. I leaned over and vomited up blood. I swallowed a Vicodin pill. Then I leaned over and vomited that up as well.

I wanted this to end. When would it end? Vomit. Sleep. Wake up to a loved one rubbing my back. Cry. Sleep. Vomit. Cry.

In a few days, I was done crying. My yellow-bruised cheeks still left me looking like a chipmunk storing up for winter. I couldn’t eat most food, but I could get out of bed. It was a little bit better. But then I’d bite my cheek on accident and the tears would well up again. The pain would come and go, but I could at least forge my way back into society.

Within two weeks, my stitches were removed, I was eating like normal, and the bruising was gone. All I could feel were holes in the back of my mouth.

And then eventually they were gone too.

To me, breaking up is a surgery of the soul. It is determined that your soul contains something within it that no longer should belong there. So, you close your eyes and rip that person out. Lie in bed crying. Not sure exactly where it hurts, but you feel it for sure. Vomit. Self-medicate. Sleep. Cry. Refuse to eat. Sleep. Cry. Wonder where the heck the Vicodin is now?

And in a few days, you might start to be done crying. But there’s a limp to you that still makes you look different if society bothers to check hard enough. You’re not laughing when everyone else does. You only hear half of what is said to you. You still don’t like to eat, but you’re out of bed. Then that one song comes on, or someone innocently mentions something about how great your relationship is, or you glance at a certain picture, and the tears well up again.

Time makes it all less raw. And in theory, your soul is healthier for having had that person removed. Maybe. Regardless, they’re gone.

Eventually, you’re back to the world as you knew it. All that’s left is the memory of the good days. And the memory of the bad days too.

Vicodin. Save me.