by the numbers

katrina on my team took this one for our "missing children" campaign

1...the number of children in my family
2...the number of functioning hands (and feet) i have
3...total members in my family
4...months i'm in india
5...days a week i'm supposed to work out
9...number of sites help international has this year
13...individuals living in my house right now
14...oreo packets we demolished the other night
20(th)...the day batman comes out!!!

and 30......

every 30 seconds a child goes missing in india. by the time you're finished reading this, depending on how quickly you read this, there will be anywhere from 8-20 children that have gone missing here.

i tried googling the word "disappeared" and the first thing that came up is an article from wikipedia listing all of the individuals who have mysteriously disappeared. the sad thing is that in that list, there are hundreds of children who go unnoticed daily. many of these children don't know how to write or say their own names (often one can identify at least which region in india someone is from by their last name) so they can't find their way home.

you may be asking yourself, where do these children go? what happens to them?

-they run away
-their parents are killed or committed suicide
-they are sold to the circus, but usually kidnapped
-they are taken for sexual purposes
-they get lost
-they get put to work as child laborers in factories

...and many many more things. the sad thing is that there isn't a system in place to find these children. in fact, 80% of the police think looking for children is a waste of their time, and don't even bother.

something interesting to ponder: which people do we allow to go unnoticed? whom do we allow to disappear entirely? which individuals do we discredit completely as human or noteworthy?

monsoon season

with a renewed hope of freshness and life, the monsoon season hit southern india with abruptness and confidence. people looked forward to the monsoons that would temporarily save them from their drought. the monsoons were supposed to bring water to those who wait days for water. they were supposed to bring softer soil, and promise of a kitchen garden for those without income and subsequently without food.

yet, the monsoons hit with a week of vengeance, and since it has been smoldering hot again. it came like a thief in the night--here one day, and gone the next. the thing is, the days that the monsoon hits, the streets are deserted. trash, human and animal waste, and dirt float to the surface. not a single item remains even halfway dry. and i've learned one very important lesson:

try as you might, you can't clear your view or see a path clearly with a wet hand.


it is hard to wipe something completely clean with something dirty.

i feel as if here in india, we are constantly struggling to fight for a new path, but mostly just smudging things around. my previous post illustrates some of the daily juxtapositions that i encounter. today, i had to sit quietly as i heard about undesired daughters named "unwanted" (Nakusa) or "girl who was not wanted." i had to sit and listen about girls who are named "girl to be used as a social prostitute" (Mataram). girls whose families believe that these young girls (aged 7-13) can be married to hindu gods, and in turn be used by any man in their village at any time they desire. these girls are sacrificed and dedicated to the entire village for the men's pleasure.

today i witnessed as three laboring women with infants slung on their sides clamored to get onto a moving train with water buckets tied to a bamboo pole. subsequently, two of the women lost a few of their water buckets, something they have to purchase here with their own savings for laboring. i watched as i saw the forlorn look cross their faces when these women started calculating the real cost of what just happened: weeks of savings to purchase the buckets, the set back that means on their daily income of a few rupees a day (a few cents a day) without the buckets, and how much they will have to save to purchase some new ones. this whole time i watched them literally fighting for their own lives, a man was in the seat next to me pointing out microsoft's biggest headquarters outside of the US, and facebook's asia headquarters here in hyderabad.

the thing is, there are days where i can't make much sense of what is actually going on around me. there are other days where things are blatantly clear. like the hot sun here is being magnified and singed into my forearm for me to never forget. i can't help how clearly i understood today that the bottom line is this: we are all humans and should be treated as such. today, more than ever, i re-learned that suffering is universal, as can be compassion, empathy, and a smile. although sometimes it may seem impossible to see the path through the monsoons, and maybe sometimes you can't find that dry hand to wipe away the murk, that eventually the monsoons stop, and in the end they bring life back into a desolate place.

..that one time it was july 1st

before i knew it, it became july.
i'm laying in bed listening to the sounds outside--a man doing a low-pitched call for old newspapers, and crazy drumming and bells to get offerings for the monsoon gods.

i've been asked to update people on my life, but this place is too mystifying and magical to describe. everything hits you in the face so hard all at once. nothing is half-way.

the colors are overwhelming, even the white seems brighter and the blacks seem to have more depth. there are no pastels, or "muted" earth-tones.

the smells are either heavenly--from fresh jasmine flowers adorning people's hair and door-ways, to deadly--fresh fermenting human and cow waste.

the people here are either extremely loving and friendly, or extremely abrasive.

every article of clothing is adorned with some sort of sparkle, sequins, bedazzle, or accessory. the women daily put on toe rings, bindi, bangles to take you to the moon and back, and braid their long, thick hair.

the food is extremely sweet or extremely spicy.

the weather is either unbearably hot, with heat coming up from the ground, or monsooning so that one has to swim through the deserted streets and sleep with earplugs.

the women are constantly overlooked. the children are constantly reprimanded.

the thing is, here in india we experience the highest of highs, and the lowest of lows. i'm pretty sure i laugh from the depths of my stomach at least once a day. i probably cry at least once a day too. i hear stories of individuals who have become my latest hero. people who have overcome impossible odds and stigmas. people who have used their whole life savings to create some sort of latrine for themselves and their families so they don't have to walk 3 km just to defecate. women who have moved beyond prejudices of HIV and their husbands leaving them in a society where that means everything.

someday, i'll have the chance to sit and write it all down. until then, i'll continue to share little "snaps" as they call them here--pictures or snippets of my life here in india. maybe a little will cause you to think as it has with me.

much love from india,
brookie

indelible footprints

a few months back, i heard someone say,

"you'll find as you're changing the world, you're changing yourself."

i did not come to india to change the world, nor do i pretend to think that i have any impact on the entire world. i realize that i am small and a mere simple girl with little to no reach. as a matter of fact, the more i travel, the smaller i feel. the more i realize how much there is that exists on this earth, and how many individual lives with individual heartbeats and breaths surround us.

the first few days the volunteers are here (they finally got here on thursday!!), my co-director and i have some great "exposure visits" planned with each organization we've worked with in the past. this includes seeing HIV/AIDS clinics, slums, leprosy colonies, "bridge schools," gardening projects, and meeting indigenous people of india who may be displaced due to a dam(n) dam being built. needless to say, i have had and will have some incredible experiences in the next/last 10 days.

the first of these which took place on thursday. it was the day our volunteers got into town (at 3am nonetheless), so we wanted to start off with something simple. turns out, i can't stop thinking about it, and probably never will. one of the organizations we work with, MV Foundation, runs what is called a "bridge camp." there are millions of child laborers here in india--both those born into it, sold into it, and taken into it. the child laborers cover everything from the stuff you buy at walmart, to sex slavery, to precious pearls and gold. sometimes, if a child has the opportunity, they can escape the life in which they are enslaved because of different reasons. however positive this is, it is also a bad thing because once they leave, they are often left with no family, no means for food or housing, and certainly no opportunity to marry with no dowry or family to present them. without these things, the public schools wont accept them (even though the government "regulates" that everyone is to be accepted), and these children not only fall behind the people their age, but have no chance of catching up and eventually go back to their old livelihoods and lifestyles.

what a bridge school does, then, is bridge the gap between what they missed through not being in school, and create opportunities for education for boys and girls. on top of that, they give them somewhere to live, family, job skills, social skills, and an address so they can apply for school.

we had the opportunity to visit one such school here in the outskirts of Hyderabad, and i will never forget it. we only got to go into one classroom, but these girls gave me so much strength and have left indelible footprints on my heart. i will never forget their faces, the hope, and the enthusiasm in which they spoke, listened, learned, and sang. these girls were so proud of the body parts they learned in english. they were so proud of the pronouns, the math, their little chalk boards in which they wrote all of their assignments, and they had every right to be proud. they had every right to be beaming, because they had an opportunity, actually a human right, all of a sudden granted: education, and freedom.

before we left, they wanted to sing a song for us. i will leave you with that. to see pictures from the experience, you can see my fb pictures here. the song they sang is in telugu, the national language in AP (the state). they talk about how no one will ever take their freedom from them. they proclaim and shout that they have the right to learn and to become whatever they desire to become (most want to be educators, doctors, and engineers). they talk about how they are the future generation. i was very emotional as i heard them sing with vigor, with nothing but pure determination on their smiling faces.

enjoy.
ps. read our team country blog here

what is lost...

for one of my courses, i had to read from "pathologies of power" by paul farmer. he is a brilliant man with excellent ideas on human rights, global health, poverty, etc.


here is an excerpt from his afterword:

...is it really useless to complain? ...writing about human suffering runs many risks, and most of these risks have been the subject of too much commentary. but there is also the artifice of packaging something so it offends the senses, but not too much. surely this too is a marker of lost innocence.

...i contemplate my own loss of innocence with resentful, sometimes even tearful, silence. from whom can i demand it back? as garcía lorca said, "things that go away never return--everybody knows that."

everybody knows that things that go away never return.

-paul farmer

i have had many conversations with survivors of sexual violence, and the one thing i hear more than any other is, "it will never come back." collectively, they say their: virginity, innocence, dignity, and a whole number of other things that were taken from them during the act will never return. i've often thought about this, and wondered the same thing that paul farmer did: from whom can they demand it back? is it really useless to complain?

one of the cutest little munchkins from
the orphanage in ecuador

these are all answers, or rather questions, i am currently grappling with in striving for justice in such a place we live in. yet, after countless hours discussing what we can do to change this world, to make it a little more beautiful, i find solace i knowing that there are so many people out there striving to do just that. people who give strangers smiles, compliments, and even hugs. people leaving concerts that let that one car that's been waiting forever sneak in in front of them. that person at the grocery store that goes above and beyond telling you their favorite way to cook the chicken when all you asked was if it was on sale.

and then i smile to myself, knowing one thing for certain: even if we can not regain our innocence, or those things we have lost that do not come back, we can always replace the space with something beautiful.

scars

to be alive at all is to have scars.

-john steinbeck

as I am studying in my program and contemplating the suffering of many types of people around the world, i am realizing more and more the reality of this quote. we are often asked to contemplate the question: what is universal? what has no bounds? what is absolutely inalienable?

is love universal?

is suffering universal?

the more critically i think about these things that are intrinsically ours, the more i realize my heart is being opened to understand and love those around me. they say the more we work in this field, the less full our proverbial glass is....

and yet, that has led me to ask: who is drinking out of that glass? where is that second straw coming from? (as my professor so eloquently put it) maybe if our glass is less full, maybe if we have a different view on things that aren't all glitter and rainbows, we are more easily able to appreciate life, and fill our glass with those things that mean the most?

just a little stream of consciousness....

world changers

a few people have wondered what exactly my program is. they've all asked what do you study in your courses? what will you be when you grow up? what can you even do with a degree like that?

this is the reason i am in the program.
the kids in the dominican republic changed me forever.
puerto plata, DR, 2006

well, i had a great post talking about how i felt about everyone in my class, how awesome they all are, and how i felt entirely inadequate. however, one of the girls in my cohort took the words right out of my mouth, so i'll just link to her post. seriously, these people are incredible, and i feel like i've hit the ground running. if i can only lift where i stand, i feel like i might make a small difference in the world. click here to see her thoughts.


...and to leave you with a little snippet of our passion, enthusiasm, and desire to change the world, we watched this in class on monday. let me tell ya, i was fighting holding back tears, and i know all of us in my program would do this, given the chance. i can't wait until some video of me SCHOOLING the UN is posted on youtube! 

love you all,

brookie

what am i DOING

so if you're on facebook, and you're my friend, you know that i decided to take a life turn and go to graduate school. to some people, it may have seem out of the blue, but here's the story of why and how it all happened. reader's digest version, of course.

well, about a year and a half ago, i: took the GRE, got a fantastic score, decided not to apply to graduate school because i was happy with my job, then decided to apply because things were changing quickly, got accepted to a few schools, decided not to go to school because of a "promotion" at work, didn't get the promotion and lost my job, got a new job (remember THIS overly-dramatic post?? (how do you guys handle all of my drama?)), learned a lot from the new job, started getting antsy again and thinking about graduate school, decided no on graduate school*, then all of a sudden decided yes**, and left a week later.

*i had decided no for a few reasons: 
1. i wasn't sure i wanted to be in debt.
2. i wanted to make one thousand percent sure (yes, i realize this is impossible) that i wasn't running away. i didn't want to run away from unhappiness in my job, dating, social scene, weather, or anything. i wanted to be sure that the decision i was making was objective and logical, not irrational and reactional (not a word, i know). 
3. someday way down the line in my life i wanted to be married, and what i didn't want was to go into a marriage with debt, and an inability to fully live out the dream and career that graduate school would fuel and provide.


**it was the perfect timing:
1. i realized debt was so worth it. i was getting to a point where i was no longer progressing, and this was the next step to make me uncomfortable once again.
2. life was perfect. i had the perfect friends and maybe some of the best girl friends i've had in a long time, job was tolerable (although we were going to lose funding soon and work dynamics changed quickly), dating picking up speed, i loved where i lived, who i lived with, my grocery store, my pool, my apartment complex, my church, the sky, the sights and views, the things i did on the weekends, i was loving life in every single sense of the phrase.
3. i realized that somebody someday would love me for my crazy ideas and dreams and ambition. some crazy man would someday want to stick it out through my fickle dramatic stints, and that they would support me in the fuel that graduate school would provide me with to go out and change the world.

i would be lying to you if i said it was easy to just pack up and leave, especially with such little notice. it was anything but that. i had to tell my work the same day that it was my last day working there. i had to tell all of my friends and people i loved so deeply that i was leaving. i cried a lot. i also laughed at myself because once upon a time i really despised utah, and i had realized that i had made it my home for the last seven years. perhaps i learned to love it, own it, and sometimes defend it.

nonetheless, here i am in arizona. 22 days, and i am loving it here. my sweet dad (i would have been a lost wreck without him) drove my uhaul, stayed with me in a hotel until we found me a place to live, and even picked out a few husbands for me at church, haha. the place i live is charming. the city i live in is just my style. my roommate is adorbs. the people i have met and friends i have made are hilarious, amazing, and fun. the weather is perfect, but the main reason that i came for was school, and that has exceeded my expectations already. i am in my second week of classes, and already i am feeling myself expand, question, grow, and seek for more. i am realizing the things i can do to change the world around me, and the things that are happening around me to change me.

i've asked myself a few times, "what in the world am i DOING??!" i've woken up a few times in my new place wondering where in the world i am. i even sometimes think that i'm just on vacation, and i'll be back "home" before i know it. then, i realize how everything has worked out perfectly, and this is exactly where i'm supposed to be right now. this is going to be a beautiful experience for me, and i hope you are all ready for some really serious blog posts, and probably some ridiculous ones too. i kind of feel like some sort of pathogen growing in a lab. i am mutating and growing at unnatural rates, and have become immune to anything and anyone stopping me.

xoxo,
your favorite masters candidate in social justice and human rights
your favorite sun devil
brookie*