A Day in Her Shoes

Here is a Mother's Day fundraiser that we hosted at our house to raise some money and some support for the four first-year medical students heading to Tanzania this summer for COHI. The event was catered by the Ethiopian bar two blocks from our house. Delicious!

We played a "reality" game at the event where participants assume an identity of a woman in Tanzania, complete with an education, health history, and socio-economic status. As the evening progresses the players are dealt "chance" cards, after which they all have to make decisions in order to survive. It was fascinating to watch as humanitarian workers such as the night's guests would sell their kids to the local war lord in order to have food for the next round. Great time had by all!

Biogas, China, and the Bedouin

One of the projects I am currently trying to get some funding for at BUSTAN is to help Bedouin women safely and abundantly power their homes focusing on Biogas technology. Long story short: put human, animal, and other organic waste into a fiberglass dome buried into the ground with some kind of fancy machinery on top and you get usable, clean energy!

Last week I took a delegation from the Chinese Embassy on a tour of BUSTAN's projects in the Negev. The Chinese are currently the global masters of Biogas technology and are sending two local graduate students to China to learn the technology to bring it back to the Negev and help Bedouin women become environmental leaders in their communities using this new technology. Here is the group complete with two dudes from a local community called Dimona who worked on Biogas technology in Liberia, as well as my collegue and friend, Julie Cwikel, who runs the Center for Women's Reserach where I am currently a Public Health Scholar-In-Residence.




A very strange day, the weather was blustery picking up dust and spreading it all around. You can just barely see the electric plant in the background, yet the unrecongized village where these people are standing has no power.



I find myself questioning the relationship between the Bedouin, development workers like me, the powers that Be, and modernization. Its a quandary I find myself in a great deal if I am really questioning (and I hope that I am) what I am doing trying to help the women I am working with. I haven't found a confortable answer yet, but would love to have you all down to show you what I see and hear what you have to say about it. Perhaps you can be the one to provide the insight I crave...hurry! I feel I might be going a bit mad! You can tell by the look on my face in this picture, don't you think?



A very late Seder

While we were busy enjoying our generations of privilege, having not recently been enslaved in Egypt, Jews around the world celebrated Passover. We were truly reaping the joys of tourism, all things old and dusty, and lots of men named Mahomound in this land of the Pharaohs. Passover is the time of year when Jews and their friends come together for a long, relaxing dinner (called a Seder) when the elders retell the story of the Jews and the Pharaoh, the parting of the Red Sea, and the eventual walk through the desert leading Moses and the Jewish people to the land of Israel.

We joined some of our other Jewish kindred and a few not of The Clan who had also journeyed to Egypt over Pesach (the Hebrew work for Passover) to celebrate with a Seder last Shabbat (friday night dinner that is a weekly tradition for Jews around the world to mark the Sabbath). The dinner was complete with Matzaball soup, bitter herbs, a leg of lamb,and way too much wine.

The way these Seders usually look is that folks settle in around the table and each person has a reader to follow along with. The kind of Seders we especially enjoy are those where the retelling of the challenges of the Jews in Egypt are equated with those of all of the enslaved, struggling people of the world. This one was no different.

We sang spirituals, clapped our hangs, shouting, "Pharaoh, let my people go!", read from a Buddhist article about the spiritual symbolism of the parting of the Red Sea and the personal transformation of the Jewish people that was required before Israel and its milk and honey were able to appear. There was lots of wine drinking, way too much eating, and lots of honoring of those who toiled before us to clear our path as Jews, and as members of humanity.



Adam and I like to take time during this holiday to reflect on those still struggling each and every day against current day Pharaohs like the Janjaweed in Sudan, those living the daily terror of the on-going war in Iraq, those living in poverty, and the current discontent in my region of the world. We try to spend some time talking about what we can do in the coming year to support the liberation of people everywhere, and this year was no different. We look forward to honoring this tradition throughout our lives together. Seeing how people, civilizations, and governments deal with rebellious folks like Moses demanding that injustice, slavery, and oppression cease and that the current day Pharaohs, "Let my people go!"...Viva la revolucion!!!