8. Volunteering: "Listening to the City"

I wanted to share another aspect of myself: that I've volunteered in many types of situation, for different causes and in different locations, too. Each opportunity to volunteer has allowed me to grow a bit (or a lot, as the case may be) and I hope it has helped the organization or cause too.

One of the more renowned (although not necessarily any more worthy than other things I've volunteered for) opportunities I've had was volunteering as a facilitator for the "Listening to the City" town hall meeting, July 20, 2002 in New York City.

Let me backtrack a tad first, though. On Sept. 11, 2001 I was living in Seoul, South Korea, teaching English as a Foreign Language. Since I was teaching adults, some of my classes were very early in the morning so that people could come before work. I hadn't watched TV the night before, so I only learned of the attacks the next morning when I arrived for my 6 a.m. class. When I arrived everyone was very sullen and quiet and I think it was some Korean teachers who asked if I'd heard the news. Since I hadn't, they told me. My immediate knee jerk reaction was, "Oh, no, that means were going to war."

I mean, that's not what I wanted, but I knew my homeland well enough to know that that would be next. Even as I learned more in the following days I was convinced that what needed to be done is find the culprits of this criminal attack and bring them to justice. Well, I also knew that the USA doesn't support the International Criminal Court (which wasn't yet active at that time), so I knew that wouldn't happen.

Anyway, I'm getting off the track now. The Koreans were very sympathetic about what happened, and, of course, it was a terrible thing.

When I found out about the opportunity to participate in the Listening to the City event, I was back in Philadelphia (yes, I do get around, not always by desire though). I've uploaded here a copy of my handwritten notes at the facilitator training July 19, 2002 and also a copy of a card, part of a set we volunteer facilitators were all given, that was painted by an artist whose office was in One World Trade Center. The painting is right-side-up and the description is the back of the opened card.
July 20, 2002, the day of Listening to the City was undoubtedly one of the most emotional and draining days in my whole life. I was really wiped out by the end of the day, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one. Balancing being attentive to what was being said, how people seemed to be doing, trying to include everyone and follow what we were supposed to be doing was daunting, mainly because of the emotional nature of the situation.

The organizers of the event, as is their usual policy in such meetings, tried to really mix up the demographics at each table. That meant people from the city, people from outlying areas, people who lost someone in the attack, officials of various sorts, and ages, gender, ethnic and socioeconomic class were all mixed up. I don't know for sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if some of those people related up close to the 9/11 events found some catharsis in that meeting. And maybe I did too.

After that I volunteered once for a regular town hall meeting (i.e., a more routine one not related to 9/11 or other crisis) in Washington, D.C.. but otherwise the timing and place haven't meshed for me to act on other requests for facilitators at such meetings.

The last time I was in New York City I didn't go to the site where the attack was. Instead, I had lunch there with my aunt and uncle (once removed or something like that) and then went walking around Central Park that lovely Sept. Saturday. I'd read that Central Park had really been fixed up nicely so that it's a safer and more attractive place than it had been for a few decades. I was very impressed and I didn't even see the half of it!

On that note, I'll bid you adieu for now...

~ Meg

7. Families

I think many people will agree that families, in many ways, are strange things. If I remember correctly, sociologists consider the family the basic social unit of society, although exactly what a family exactly is may be slipperier to define and also varies from culture to culture.

Since I've been single most of my life, with the exception of about 2 years when I was married, I still consider my birth family my primary family unit. Currently that consists of mom, two brothers and one brother's 2 sons.

As far as families go, I think I had it relatively good growing up, although as an adult it's been a bit rockier. I'm the oldest child and the only girl, so I mainly remember from about 11 or 12 years of age through high school I didn't relate too much to my brothers except some afternoons when I had to babysit them until our parents came home at dinner time. Eventually, as we grew older, it was no longer necessary for me to babysit them, but I still felt like the effects of that former responsibility lingered on. I remember one of the brothers whiningly asking me to tell the other to stop doing something annoying, which I didn't think they would do (ask me to do that, I mean) if there weren't still some effect of the babysitting past still hanging on.

When I went to college I decided I wanted to try to relate otherwise with my brothers, so I made a conscious effort to build our relationships. That kept up until I went overseas for a long-term work position when I was about 25. Then my energies and focus sort of drifted elsewhere.

During childhood I never really knew what my brothers thought of me. Was I the illusive older sister who virtually ignored them? I never really intended to ignore them; it's just that I was always busy with a lot of other things, whether it be school, teaching Sunday school, working part-time, hanging out with friends, or any number of other such pursuits.

Now, decades later, however, I'm the fall-guy who's done everything wrong, made everyone mad and tried to destroy families... at least that's what I'm accused of. Of course, there's always more than one side of a story, and I'm sure their accusations have a grain of truth to them, but I never meant any evil and I still think I'm right in many ways. Some things are pretty complex though, and it's possible that no one really understand all the aspects. Now that we're all adults, there's no responsible parent to demand all sides of the story from their young complaining children. And young children aren't usually as clever as adults are at covering up the truth. (I doubt a child could pull off Watergate, although that was not leak-proof either, and there probably is some child somewhere who could prove me wrong).

So now our once fairly idyllic family is in shambles, with no responsible adult to patch things up. And the one parent left is completely dependent on my brothers, so the chance of her taking an objective view on things is pretty minute.

I don't think these things usually happen over night, although, as in my case, there can be an event that sort of unravels everything, not unlike the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back.

Well, I think that's enough serious thought for today, and I'm feeling it affect my fibromyalgia again, so I'd better leave off here. I will say, though, that I looked for a childhood family photo to post here, and I'm thinking of one in particular where we're all dressed up to go to church, but there must be a photo album somewhere that I haven't found yet among my unpacked boxes.

Enjoy your day...

Meg

6. CIA Freedom of Information Act Request

Recently I was at a July 4 birthday party and the celebrant was all decked out in an Uncle Sam hat and necklace with U.S. flags on it. I asked her if she considered herself patriotic, and she almost offendedly answered very assertively that she was and said she had an uncle who died in World War II so she had to be.

I didn't say anything else, but my response to that question would be quite different. Of course there are very many conceptions about what it means to be patriotic, but I don't generally think of myself as very patriotic. I mean, I vote when I can and have also been known to write to officials about my views on this or that position, even lobby in person, sign petitions or on occasion participate in demonstrations. But what I mean is that I don't particularly feel an obligation to the USA as a nation. I rather consider myself a member of the human race and other political divisions don't really mean much to me.In the same vein, I consider myself an "equal opportunity" critiquer... for example, both Russia/the USSR and the USA end out being the brunt of my criticism for one thing or another. And today I'm going to focus on criticizing something about the U.S.

But before I do that, I also want to mention, without going into a whole lot of detail at this point, that I believe in the separation of church and state (here's one place where a lot of people will undoubtedly get mad at me). Just briefly, though, I believe that the Church's mission is not political (here I'm speaking about Christian churches in particular), but spiritual. The Church is supposed to be changing the world by bringing people into a relationship with Jesus Christ, not by fixing Washington (the other Washington... D.C.). So the Church meddling in politics is detrimental to the soul of the Church.

From the other side of things, I also believe that as the USA is supposed to be a democracy, and as such it should involve all peoples, and not favor one religion (or no religion) over another. In the Old Testament (the Hebrew Scriptures) God - Yahweh - was supposed to be the head of the nation and that should happen when the Messiah returns (as a Christian, I believe Jesus Christ is their once-rejected Messiah who will return and set up His earthly kingdom). But the USA (or any other country for that matter) is NOT the new Israel, and at this time God is not even dealing with Israel that way.That said, since we do live in a democracy, I don't see anything wrong with individual Christians (or other types of believers or unbelievers) getting politically involved. I do think the Church needs to be very careful about any type of collective political activity though.

In other words having anything other than the separation of church and state leads to corruption of both the church and the state, so it's a lose-lose proposition.

That was all to lead up to my real topic today, although the above was an important discussion in its own right.The path to my above convictions didn't happen overnight, but through many experiences and things that I learned along the way, trying to make sense of my life.

For some years I had involvement with several Protestant missions to Eastern Europe/USSR and at one point the V.P. for Finance of the Slavic Gospel Association told me that they took money from the CIA for their short-wave radio work into Communist countries. At the time I didn't really think about the significance of this too much, although it was enough of a revelation to me that it stuck with me. It didn't really sink in, though, until years later after I'd experienced more with some of these missions. At that time in my life I was really trying to put things together and I decided to do a bunch of Freedom of Information Act requests, one of these being to the CIA regarding whether they gave money to SGA. You can read their response below. [Click on the images to get a larger, more legible view.]

I won't say anything else about this right now except to say that about the same time I was told that SGA got money from the CIA a lady I knew from church single-handedly ran a Christian day-care center and she told me she wouldn't take any government money because that would limit her Christian focus at her school. So just imagine, then, what possible impact CIA money might have on a major mission organization to Communist countries...

And maybe you can also begin to imagine how my fatal flaw (see my first posting) could lead to an unhappy end.

Until next time...

Meg

5. Mt. St. Helens' Eruption

I haven't lived where I am long and some things are still in boxes, so I've been trying to find some things I want to use here. One of the things is my post card collection, which I found yesterday. This post card gives me the chance to bring in several things about me and my family.

I can't assume that everyone necessarily knows about / remembers the eruption of Mt. St. Helens (in southwestern Washington State, USA), but I hope you can read the print on this post card. Maybe your browser will let you either zoom in on it or click on it to get a larger image. At least that's what I'm hoping...


When Mt. St. Helens erupted Seattle got very little of the ash, despite our relative proximity to the mountain, because the winds were going easterly. But my youngest brother was on a trip with the school band in eastern Washington and they ended out being stranded there because the ash got into engines making driving virtually impossible. So I mainly remember that a school put them up in the school gym. So as far as excitement (if that's what you want to call it) goes, he was the main one in the family to be affected by the eruption.

One thing that the eruption did, though, was put Washington state on the map. This was before Starbucks and Microsoft, you understand, so a lot of people didn't know much about the state or about Seattle. So a couple weeks after the eruption when I went on a summer mission trip (this was after my sophomore year in college) back east to work with Russian emigrants, they knew something about Seattle, and wanted to know about the eruption from the standpoint of someone closer to it. So that's mainly how it affected me.

This post card is one that was actually sent to me, not one that I bought specifically for my collection. On the back mom writes to me in Russia suggesting that I could maybe use it (the post card) in my teaching. She knew that I sometimes used my post cards as "realia", real life teaching objects, in my English as a Foreign Language teaching. One thing I sometimes did was give students a few (2 to 4) cards and then ask them to write a short story based on something they imagine in the post cards. Or, for more beginning students, I might give each of them a card and have each one write a sentence about their new post card, then pass the card on to the next person so they each wrote something about each post card. Other times I might use them to teach vocabulary, such as building types, professions, animals, etc. I'm not sure whether I ever used this particular post card or not, but it was nice that mom thought of that.

Another thing, though, that I remember that is sort of distantly related to the eruption is that in 1981 I selected a glass ornament with Mt. St. Helens ash as one of the hostess gifts for the family that I stayed with during my trip to Nantes, France as a member of the inaugural Seattle-Nantes Sister City Association citizen exchange. I'm getting ahead of myself here though.

I guess that's enough for today, and you're gradually learning a little about who I am, and hopefully you might be learning some other interesting tidbits as well.

Mt. St. Helens didn't affect Seattle too much, and Tropical Storm Bonnie seems pretty tame from where I am today too. I hope things are okay where you are, as a bad storm or volcano eruption aren't things you even wish on your worst enemies.

~ Meg

4. Russian Apricot Torte

On the light side, I'd like to share with you a recipe translated from the cookbook "Vsyo Iz Muki" (Everything from Flour), Irkutsk University Press, 1990, p. 63.

Apricot Torte
1 1/4 cup flour
1 cup sugar
10 eggs

Filling
400 grams [14 oz.] apricots
1 cup sugar

Pour the mixed pastry batter in a round cake pan (or large fry pan). which has been prepared with butter and paper in the bottom, so that the batter comes about 3/4 up the sides of the pan.

Bake the cake at a temperature of 200 to 220 degrees [C. or 392 to 428 F.]. Check the doneness of the cake with a toothpick. Cut the cake in two horizontally, and pour [some of'] the prepared apricot puree over the bottom layer. Then put weights of 1 to 1.5 kg. [2.2 to 3.3 lbs.] on the cake [like for pressed sandwiches] and leave it like that for 2 to 3 hours.

After this time has passed pour the rest of the puree, now heated, carefully over the top of the cake, spreading it with a knife so that it will be smooth.

***

I made this cake in Russia and enjoyed it. The ingredients are simple and this is the time of year when fresh apricots should be available (at least in the northern hemisphere!). The parts in brackets are mine. I suppose this recipe might work with other fruits too, but I haven't tried that. The recipe doesn't specify how long to cook the cake, and I didn't write a notation about that, but I would suspect something less then or around half an hour at that temperature.

One memory I have of apricots in Russia is the wonderful, plump dried apricots I got at the market and often used to make apricot compote (a beverage, rather than dessert eaten with a spoon). Tree fruits didn't grow where I lived, though, because the growing season was too short. But there were lots and lots of berries... but that's another story.

~ Meg

3. Fibromyalgia

I really can't blame anyone for not totally understanding fibromyalgia. First of all, no one totally understands it, including doctors. And unless you know someone with fibromyalgia, probably you only know what the commercials on TV tell you about it... which means you probably just know that it's a condition involving pain. And humans, probably everywhere I suspect, tend to create mental stereotypes of people they don't really know much about. So if you're not around seasoned (read: old) people very much, you probably have some kind of vague stereotype about them ("oh, she's over 30, she's OLD"... we all know what that means... or do we?) Same thing with people in different socio-economic conditions or from different ethnic backgrounds. It's just easier to form stereotypes, and we don't have the time nor energy, let alone desire, to really learn about every single group of people. And even if we did, the more we learned about them the more we'd learn that each group is really diverse, so that there are infinite layers of groups within groups. And, unless you're a sociologist (or marketer or politician), the costs and benefits of making the effort to learn about even just some of the groups (and how do you decide which groups, anyway?), makes it seem very expedient to not even try but rather to form little stereotypes of groups, and then sort of forget about the whole thing until you find you need to pull up that little stereotype you consciously or sub-consciously developed at some point in the past.

So I'm just saying that it's quite understandable that you might not know much or anything at all about fibromyalgia. I'm not saying that's necessarily a good thing, but rather that it's understandable (and on a certain level it might not be a terribly bad thing either). And I won't exactly say that I'm here to rectify that lack in your understanding of fibromyalgia, or that I'm very pleased, on a personal level, that you don't know much about it. But I do understand that you can't really be expected to know about all such things.

But you should understand too that stereotypes and lack of knowledge can be frustrating (along with other such emotions) to people who are the brunt of the stereotype or lack of understanding. I know it can be frustrating to me.

There are several things about fibromyalgia that make it particularly frustrating (although people with other conditions might counter with their own issues). One is that fibromyalgia is considered an "invisible disability" (cp. http://www.invisibledisabilities.org/). According to that web site...

"The term Invisible Disabilities refers a person's symptoms such as extreme fatigue, dizziness, pain, weakness, cognitive impairments, etc. that are sometimes or always debilitating. These symptoms can occur due to chronic illness, chronic pain, injury, birth disorders, etc. and are not always obvious to the onlooker."

So people with these kinds of conditions are often thought of as lazy ("why aren't you working?") or get comments about how good they look ("you don't look sick!"). Of course, they're treated accordingly then. Among people with invisible disabilities these comments and attitudes are famous and you'll find lots on the Internet (for example) about how people with these conditions respond to such beliefs, comments and related actions.

There is rather a broad spectrum of experiences of fibromyalgia, but if you meet someone who has it, it would be nice if you could at least cut him/her some slack and try to be understanding and not too judgmental, especially based on just what you observe (i.e., he/she looks fine, so what's wrong?). Of course, this could be said regarding other invisible disabilities, too, such as lupus, chronic fatigue syndrome, diabetes, Crohn's disease, or depression, to name a few.

So what I am asking is for you to try to recognize if you have a pre-conceived idea about fibromyalgia or other such conditions and when you meet a person with such a health disorder, try to set aside your ideas and get past visual appearances.

I could say a lot more about this, but I can feel the stress of writing about this increasing my pain right now. Lately I've been focusing more on rather unemotional (or feel-good even) work on my recipe database, cooking and learning some gardening in my small kitchen garden. I had to give up my political interests because I got too stressed about it, and I have to also limit my stress from this blog too, which means I'd better leave off here until next time.

Thanks for taking the time to read this...

~Meg

2. Chernobyl Comes to Seattle

It's no secret that it's generally a good idea to start a story (this is, after all, the story of my life) with something that will catch the reader's attention. So I hope this post will do that. Don't expect that every post will be like this though...


Now, I just bet you're wondering what the significance of this artifact might be. And I'm here to explain it to you.

I was in Seattle the spring and summer of 1990 and I had a Russian friend that I visited and spoke with sometimes. I called her one day in the spring of 1990 and she was all agitated and tried to explain to me that there was a woman who's husband had been in the news in Seattle who'd lost her suitcase on the flight to Seattle from Moscow. That was somewhat of a fateful conversation, because she asked me to help Galina and told me how to contact her.

Before I continue, however, I should explain who Galina and her husband Anatolii were ... well, you can read about it in the July 1991 Reader's Digest (The Man Who Flew into Hell", p. 176ff). Mr. Grischenko was a test pilot who had been part of the mission to contain the Chernobyl disaster. He flew over Chernobyl dropping materials to contain the spread of radiation. The Communist government never admitted that he contracted cancer from that effort, but Mr. Grischenko ended out at the Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. I saw him once there; he was in a tent to keep him from contamination. But I spent some time with Galina both in Seattle and later in the USSR also.

The Grischenkos had come with a doctor from the USSR and I got the impression from their doctor that she didn't really trust them... you have to understand the political issues going on there. I mean, I don't claim to completely understand them myself, but I have some general ideas.

But I really had some nice time with Galina, although my encounters with her in Russia had puzzling aspects to them. But in Seattle I did try to help her get her lost suitcase, but I don't know that she ever got it back. I took her out on little trips to give her a break from the stress of seeing her husband so ill. Before she left we exchanged some small gifts. She gave me a necklace and earrings, of which I still have the earrings and wear them from time to time.

Her husband died in Seattle. They had trouble finding bone marrow to match his, and when they finally did they saw he was developing a small infection in his lung, but they didn't have much time, so they had to either do the transplant or not, and they did but he ended out dying of pneumonia.

I attended the funeral, but came in at the back. There was media everywhere and it was packed. Then I saw her off at the airport. There were just a few of us there, and the man, who I recognized from the TV showings of the funeral as being the consulate general from San Francisco came up and thanked me in Russian. That was all he said, so then I wondered what exactly he was thanking me for, but ostensibly it was for being a support to Galina during this difficult time.

One other thing I'd like to share about this time is that my workplace was very supportive of me during all of this, including letting me go to the funeral and see Galina off at the airport. They were a very special bunch and I wish all workplaces had such nice people.

So I will leave you with that to chew on for now. I don't know what I'll share next time, so we'll just have to wait and see now, won't we?