Another day, another dollar

I started a new job three weeks ago. 

I decided to return to government. 

It was a massive decision, a scary one, but also one I am happy with. It is daunting - I have had to start at the very bottom of the totem pole, and in a position and environment that is surprisingly (or maybe unsurprisingly) oppressive. 

It is a place of cubicles, window-less (unless you're a supervisor, then you get a small window overlooking the parking lot), dirty and dusty. They never vacuum the "booths," as the cubicles are sometimes called. There are people who have been doing this same job for decades. People have sat in the same booth for possible decades also. 

The government here is fascinating. The union is massive, but at risk.

I will post more as I continue to find my way. 

No 'Poo, Day 7

Sometime last week, I stopped washing my hair with anything other than water. 

I want to say this is the 7th day without using shampoo. Every day I have showered and rubbed my scalp under the water, and a couple of nights I brushed corn starch through it. 

This is what it looks like at the moment, in the morning before I take a shower.

I have been putting it up with a hairclip every day and when I take it down in the evening, it feels a little bit damp and a little bit oily. It has felt oily consistently since probably the second or third day that I stopped washing it, but I don't think it's getting oilier, it's pretty much the same level of oily. I have also going back to watching my face with just water, and then rubbing a cotton pad with witch hazel over it afterwards. 

Why am I doing this? That is a good question, people have asked me and all I can really say is that I've been interested in doing it for a while and I'm very intrigued by this idea that I don't need to live so heavily reliant upon chemicals. I think what led me to try again was reading or hearing something the other day about a mother who never washed her children's hair with shampoo since they were born, and what beautiful hair they have. I thought, I've always wanted beautiful hair, if stopping the use of shampoo is going to give me that, and I can stop producing all this rubbish that's associated with using hair products, and move away from chemical dependence, well that's just great! 

The only regrettable thing about this experience thus far is that I believed summer was basically over, but in fact it is not and yesterday it was 90°F. And I had an event for work. And I felt concerned that maybe my hair looked disgusting and smelled bad. 

I did ask my husband to smell my head and he indicated it was not offensive, it smells like I haven't washed it but it doesn't smell bad. So there you go, I guess it smells a little, not horrendously as one might expect, and I don't expect that to last forever, I am pretty confident that eventually it will resolve itself. 

Yesterday, I was very tempted to wash my hair, but I didn't. So hopefully I can keep this up. It's really not as bad as I thought it might be. 

Books, books and more books!

One of my best friends from college is a doctor named Chris. Chris is an intellectual; he talks about incorporating literary factoids and other interesting tidbits into his classes teaching med students. Before I moved to Australia, Chris and I used to have the most fascinating intellectual conversations and debates in my car. 

I don't get to see Chris a lot these days, even though we now live in the same city again, so it was really nice that we touched base and he came over for dinner last night.

He started telling us about a fancy set of books that he is carrying around in the trunk of his car. They are all the classics of Western thought: the Britannica Great Books of the Western World series.

I have an interesting relationship with Western thought. My final paper when I studied community development was about the advantages and disadvantages of non-western world views. Non-Western world views, in my mind, are pretty important to the world for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that they form a pretty big part of it.  

There was something unsettling about this exclusive series of books of Western thought. I didn't say anything; the thoughts were not really clearly formed my mind, so much as I felt a general unease.  Maybe it was disturbing to think that this is the stuff that informs the way we think, and some university, the University of Chicago actually, has decided to publish this as some kind of complete set encapsulating the important thoughts of our times. 

The set unsettled Chris, too, albeit for different reasons; it was a gift from someone no longer in his life, a gift he did not wish to keep. He had tried to donate the set to a local library, but the collection was rejected. Apparently, Chicago Public Libraries (or at least, the one he tried) do not take book donations.

My first thought immediately went to the work with PIEs two weeks before, and I said, "I bet any public school in this city would love to have this set of books!"  I offered to take the books, thinking, surely I can find a home for these books. He doesn't need to keep them in the trunk of his car, I know there are kids who would relish these books. 

My husband flipped through the list of books on his phone next to me, reading out titles, and talked about how depressing it would be to have these books in our home because it would be a constant reminder that we haven't read them. I looked at the list as well, noticing a book by Goethe. I've been interested in exploring Goethe ever since I read Alan Kaplan. I commented on how interesting it was that there was only one book by Goethe in there, while the entire Shakespeare and Freud collections are part of the set. 

And suddenly, before we knew it, we became interested in this set of books. 

We went down to Chris's car and each brought inside one box filled with books.  We set them down, commenting on their smell. I asked if they were used books, and Chris confirmed they had previously been owned by a priest. 

I pulled one out, and wouldn't you know it, it was Goethe. 

The Big Transition

I started this blog originally in 2011 to write about Papua New Guinea in the context of the policy struggles relative to the cross-border transmission of tuberculosis and the intergovernmental responsibility for the treatment of PNG nationals seeking health treatment in Queensland, Australia.

At the time, I had started to study community development and was exploring new ways of thinking about the world that clashed with deeply held assumptions and understandings from which I had been operating and from which generally, the Western world operates. I ultimately reverted my long, impassioned posts to draft.

Two years later, I moved back to America, commenced to transition my career to community development and took a position with a local non-profit in Chicago. I set out to use my blog to reflect on my work. However, it felt too personal and raw to share publicly and eventually, I reverted those posts to draft, as well.

I think I'm ready to start blogging about my real life, the people I meet, the thoughts I have about communities and development generally. So this is an introductory post, the third and it's many years. I'm trying again and hope to post again soon. 

What I Want

I wrote this on July 29, 2011. I just found it and I decided to post it because it really showcases what I went through as I was studying CD and one of the stories that really stood out for me. This course was taught by Dave Andrews, who has his own website and a Wikipedia entry! I love this guy SO MUCH and I wish he was here so that I could go to him for guidance. I believe he introduced me to the tradition of the radical hospitality of Jesus Christ and his life and work are just so inspiring.

July 29, 2011

Today was my first day in a course called Community Development in International Contexts.

I chose this course, which is only offered every other year, because I was hoping for more coursework that could involve researching PNG and ways to promote development.

The course seems to be more focused on South Asia and Africa, which is an entirely different scenario, I think, than PNG, but was insightful nonetheless.

The professor recounted his experience of choosing community development as a profession.  He spoke about travelling to India, at 20, with his new wife, to go to the very end of the line, the bottom, and experience the life of the poorest of the poor.

He found himself hours from boarding a plane in a slum in Delhi, where lived 1,000 people in abject poverty. They didn't even have a tap among them to share. There were 200 families, each with 4-5 family members, who couldn't afford to survive on the meagre incomes they received from the little wrk they could find.  Parents scavenged in garbage heaps for produce that was not completely rotten and waited outside of butchers to rescue intestines, heads and legs that were discarded.

The children would get sick, from diarrhoea and dehydration, and in desperation the families would go to the wealthier neighbourhoods to beg for water.  But people shunned them, because they were dirty and smelled bad from lack of water to bathe.  The water they could get was often polluted, and every night he would hear parents crying as their children slipped away.

He cried as he recounted these memories of hearing the anguish of his neighbours in their powerless cycle of poverty.

I know this is what life is like for at least a billion people in the world.  At least a billion people in the world live in poverty, dying from preventable diseases and lack of basic necessities like water.  Moving from rural areas to cities only to be stripped of their limited funds by crooks who they don't imagine not to trust because they have come from small villages where people were accountable to each other, to massive cities rampant with crime and its partner anonymity.

Hearing these stories didn't make me cry, in my privileged life I have the opportunity to take medication to help me survive despite being fully able to count on clean water to drink and food whenever I need it. I am privileged to have an education that enables me to use a credit card should I ever find myself out of work, until I can find a job that offers security and incredible benefits, where I have the ability to take leave if I'm sick or even just if I am not feeling up to work that day and still receive my full pay. I can take leave to study and still receive my full pay.  The government will pay my school fees and let me pay them back every week through my pay.

Not even in America did I have these luxuries.

And yet like many others I still find myself wishing I had more - so I could travel whenever I wanted, wherever I wanted, and not face any barrier to what I want.

What I WANT. I live in a world where I can actually feel that somehow I deserve what I want.

I digress.