alumna? alumni?

I’ve been an official Baylor SSW alumna for about a few days now – days that have been filled with a lot of craziness, as I’m sure you believe. I’m just beginning to wrap my brain around the idea that I am through with social work education. The idea and its reality come with a lot of sighs of relief but some trepidation as well. For instance – it’s been two years since I took a Truett class. Will I still fit and feel at home when I start classes again in the fall?

However, I’ve got a long summer ahead of me to ruminate on all of that. Tonight – as I sit watching old Terminator movies with Sarah, Mike and Suz – I just want to comment that I’m an alumna. It’s pretty rad.

 

even though i’m scared of mary murphy

… SO EXCITED FOR THIS!

 

research schenangians abstract

To graduate from the Baylor School of Social Work, I had to conduct a fairly substancial research project. I’ve been crafting and conducting it since about August of last year and so to finally hit “send” on the email yesterday feels surreal.

Here’s the abstract for those interested:

UrbanPromise Ministries is a community based educational initiative started in Camden, NJ in 1988 and has current locations in multiple states and countries worldwide. A partnership exists between UrbanPromise and the African Bible College of Malawi in which graduates from Malawi spend one year in the US participating in and studying the UrbanPromise model in order to start their own non-profits back in Malawi. This article explores the possibility of cross-cultural communication and mutual learning between the indigenous participants of the UrbanPromise programs and those from Malawi. Through interpersonal interviews, it was discovered that mutual learning is possible within the organizational context, but that there are discrepancies of opportunity and implementation between the two locations studied – Camden, New Jersey and Wilmington, Delaware. Further research is recommended to fully ascertain the differences.

Interested? Send me an email, and I’ll gladly send the whole thing!

 

epic fail

Wow, epic fail on my part to actually post on this thing. Wow.

I’m in the process of completely finishing up at UrbanPromise and the MSW program in general. I fly back to Waco on April 18th and I’m ready to get back and get this next phase of life underway.

I’ll start blogging again more as I do things again that I can blog about. For instance – weddings, graduations and trips to LA.

Until then, I’m going to pop the next disc of “Freaks and Geeks” into the DVD player and continue to edit the research report.

 

overdue update

I heard on NPR that blogging makes people happier. Not sure if that’s true, but I figured I’d give it a go.

It’s been over a month since I posted on here, but not a whole lot has happened. I live in bit of a psychological Groundhog Day – I read, I write, I commute… Rinse, wash, repeat. So here’s the rundown of my life over the past month/semester.

Books Read: Not Buying, My Undoing, Heart and Soul, Bridget Jones’ Diary, The Soloist, Three Junes, Echoes, Girlbomb, Chronicles of Narnia (all 7 books), The Magician’s Book, The God of Intimacy and Action, Continent for the Taking, But Enough About Me, The Last Summer of You and Me, Daughter of the Ganges, Bitter is the New Black, They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky, Moose, Chasing the Flame, When Broken Glass Floats, Her Last Death, Dandy of the Underworld, Letters from Zaire, The Hour I First Believed, The White Masaai, Bachelor Girl, Piece of Cake, No Disrespect, Joining Hands, Everything Must Change, The Feminization of Poverty, The Good Life and its Discontents, Regulating the Poor, From Poor Law to Welfare State, The Men the Gods Made Mad, When Work Disappears

Books Reading Right Now: King Leopold’s Ghost, Teaching to Transgress, State of the Nation, Savage Inequalities

Movies Watched: Um… a lot.

Projects Worked On at Urban: Wrote three curriculums, taught four cycles of those currciulums, written an evaluation tool, helped an intern get ready for a board presentation, conduct and write a research project, and other duties as specified

And that’s been pretty much it. Throw in a fabulous Spring Break with Sarah, a few Broadway shows and a lot of time commuting and listening to podcasts and you’ve got a pretty good idea of the last few months of my life.

 

things this week

It’s Wednesday morning at 2am. So far this week, I have…

… read two books and watched three movies and ten episodes of television shows
… got angry at society approximately four times
… found out that my grandmother will probably be in the hospital for the rest of the week, if not longer
… rediscovered how much I love You’ve Got Mail
… realized that my body just isn’t quite ready for intense pilates
… started to map out my summer … which will definitely include trips to Malawi and Louisville and might also include trips to Ethiopia and Omaha
… sent emails about my research project and then nearly had a panic attack that those emails weren’t being returned fast enough and then realized that it was only a day and that I need to calm the heck down
… missed people so much that I literally ached. I haven’t missed people in that way since I lived in Waringstown.
… spent far too much time on Facebook
… wished that I could spend more time taking pictures again
… managed to go on week number three without really cleaning my room, but still managing to keep it more clean than Brian’s
… looked for jobs that I can’t possibly apply for and am hopelessly unqualified for and then became depressed. To remedy the depression, my mom and I went and got sundae’s at Friendly’s… which always fixes everything
… plotted how many pounds I need to loose before I can venture to the Cheesecake Factory in Cherry Hill that I discovered last week
… spent far too much time trying to be witty in this post. I’ll stop now.

 

evil of the earth

In Jonathan Kozol’s book “Amazing Grace”, he recounts a conversation with an elementary aged child named David who lives in the South Bronx. They were having a meandering conversation about church and God and what David thought about his mother – and eventually, Kozol asked him what he meant by a comment saying that God wasn’t powerful enough to fix the “evil of the earth”. David replied, “Evil exists. I believe that what the rich have done to the poor people in this city is something that a preacher would call evil. Somebody has power. Pretending that they don’t so they don’t need to use it to help people – that is my idea of evil.”

That quote haunted me. The idea that pretending we don’t have power could actually be “evil” at first drove me to a defensive state of mind. Evil is murder or genocide or slavery. Evil is not just being ignorant or lazy. And I know lots of people who simply go about their lives – they’re good people! Just because they don’t constantly fight for the rights of the underprivileged doesn’t mean that they’re evil. But then I sat back and thought about it. Perhaps it is a certain kind of evil – an evil that exists when good men do nothing and simply accept their privilege without ever questioning who is sacrificing something to make their lives so comfortable. Who delude themselves into the idea that some people ‘deserve’ to starve and others ‘deserve’ to eat. CS Lewis talks about this kind of evil in “Screwtape Letters”, I remember. Wormword tells Screwtape that the only thing that he truly has to do is to seduce the Church into apathy – and then they had succeeded.

We talked a lot about power in Jon’s class last semester. We talked about what power looks like and how to give clients power and how true revolutions always seem to happen when we teach the underprivileged to seize and harness their own power as humans. And I never really knew what to practically do with that. What could that possibly look like? I know Guitterez has thoughts on that in Latin America and clearly Ghandi has some as well for India… Is that what it looks like here? Will it truly take a ginormous, history shifting revolution? Are there littler victories against the pervasive evil?

But what has really been keeping me up at night… how many times and in how many ways am I evil? When do I unknowingly contribute to a system of oppression? How many times have been evil because I’ve never questioned my privilege or how easily the system works to accommodate me?

 

spring 2009 reading list

For my internship at UrbanPromise, I am engaging in a fairly ridiculous reading list. Dr. Yancey has greatly contributed to this list – deciding that I didn’t know enough about welfare reform and started plucking book off of her shelf and thrusting them on to an ever growing pile.

Not counting the pleasure reading books that I’m sure I’ll accumulate, here’s the goal list…

Regulating the Poor – Piven & Cloward

Invisible People – Greg Behrman

The World Without Us – Alan Weisman

An Imperfect Offering: Humanitarian Action for the 21st Century – James Orbinski

Pedagogy of the Oppressed – Pablo Freire

Ending Global Poverty - Stephen Smith

From Outrage to Courage – Anne Murray and Paul Farmer

The Good Life and Its Discontents: The American Dream in the Age of Entitlement – Robert Samuelson

From Poor Law to Welfare State - Walter Tratner

A Piece of Cake - Cupcake Brown

AIDS & Accusation: Hati and the Geography of Blame – Paul Farmer

The Key to my Neighbor’s House: Seeking Justice in Bosnia and Rwanda – Elizabeth Neuffer

The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls – Joan Brumberg

Bachelor Girl: A Social History of Single Living – Betsy Israel

School Girls: Young Women, Self Esteem and the Confidence Gap – Peggy Orenstien

Divided by Faith: Evangelical Faith and the Problem of Race in America – Michael Emerson

Communion: The Female Search for Love – bell hooks

No Disrespect – Sister Souljah

The Working Poor: Invisible in America – David Shipler

When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor – William Julius Wilson

Teaching Community – bell hooks

Teaching to Transgress – bell hooks

Savage Inequalities – Jonathan Kozol

The War Against the Poor – Herbert Gans

The Feminization of Poverty: Only in America? – Gertrude Goldberg

Simply Christian – NT Wright

Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? – BD Tatum

Suprised by Hope – NT Wright

Everything Must Change – Brian McLaren

Amazing Grace – Jonathan Kozol

I’ll keep you posted on the ones that have been read and the other ones that I’ve accumulated along the way

 

progress

CFS Sign

Originally uploaded by genvessel

this sign is part of a display in the student center at UrbanPromise that the students of the Camden Forward School made for MLK/Inauguration Week. it’s also my new definition of progress.

 

colorblind?

The inauguration of President Obama has clearly gotten the whole country thinking about race. The conjunction with MLK day is amazingly poignant and appropriate – for it was his work and the work and sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of others like him who sacrificed so much to make Obama’s life possible. However, it’s also incredibly poignant to me – since I spend most of my academic life right now reading and researching about race and racial identity among adolescents.

The book that I’m reading at the moment – well, one of the books I’m reading at the moment – is called “Why Do All the Black Kids Sit Together in the Cafeteria” and it’s an exploration of racial identity in America. It’s an excellent book and one that I recommend heartily – and I’m only on page 47. In the current chapter, the author is discussing the formation of a child’s understanding about their own race. Most people’s earliest memories of race conversation already prove that in our culture, white skin the normal while other colors are an aberration. This is an understanding even among children of preschool age! I’m reminded of the study where the researchers had black little girls choose which dolls to play with and they always chose white dolls – because white was what was beautiful – even though there were ample dolls with varied colored skins to choose from.

Her point – and the source of my question – is why did we start to value children being “colorblind”? Why was this the right idea and solution? And yes, Michael W. Smith, writer of the song that’s running through my head right now, “Why Can’t We Be Colorblind?” – I’m including you in this question. I remember as an adolescent being proud to be colorblind – but all that meant was that I tried to treat everyone as though they were white and ignore the fact that they weren’t. While this is certainly a step up from Jim Crow – do not get me wrong – I still think that being “colorblind” isn’t the goal.

Being colorblind still means that we’re missing out on things. My brother, for instance, is physically colorblind. He has trouble telling the difference between blacks and browns and other dark shades and I’m pretty sure that reds are hard for him too. While I’m not saying that Brian is a deficient human being because of it, I am saying that there are beautiful nuances of life that he misses because of it. What beautiful nuances of other cultures and races and ethnicities are we missing because it’s easier to lump everyone into one category and be colorblind?