October 18, 2016
So, it’s been months since I updated the blog, since I wrote
anything at all other than emails. Long emails mostly but not writing for
myself. So much has happened and I forgot my ipad at work today so I thought it
was the perfect opportunity to write. It’s so cathartic and in the beginning, I
wrote every day to process. Eventually, it becomes normal life though and it’s
hard to find the joy in the everyday, even though it would be interesting to
other people. Plus, there’s just no time. There’s never enough time to finish
my to do lists and when I get home I’m just so exhausted I just want to veg
out.
This has been a crazy few months though, it warrants a blog
post or two. In September, I got to go to this amazing conference called Vital
Voices. Boom went two years ago and Mimi went last year. I loved it so much
more than I ever expected to. I met some of the coolest and smartest people on
the planet and had some of the deepest and most intellectually stimulating
conversations of the past 6 years. I also saw a Broadway show and met a famous
designer, so it wasn’t all cerebral. People keep asking me what I learned in
the States that I can use here, but really all the stuff that I learned that
was useful came from the other participants. I already know the laws of the US
and it’s not super helpful living in a country where they are years behind
those kinds of laws. However, most of the other countries represented were kind
of on the same level of governmental beaurocracy as Thailand, so it was interesting
to see how they are tackling some of the issues we have.
This team of ours had 22 women from 17 countries. For me the
best part was being with people who were close to my age and the same sort of
life situation as I am in. That is a huge void in my life in Thailand. Also
people who really intellectually challenge me. In ministry, people are so
wrapped up in their daily lives and their ministry, there’s just no head space
left for brainy conversations. It was so nice to be with people who had the
bandwidth to keep talking about all this stuff for hours. And also geek out
over books and tv shows. Nobody here cares about that stuff but Mimi. 555 Let
me see if I can remember all our countries and names off the top of my head.
Australia: Andrea who is crazy brill and is a lawyer and an
advocate and a refugee kid and getting her PhD and wrote laws for Australia and
is way smarter than me and has accomplished ten times as much, even though she
is younger than me. Yes. I know. I wasted my 20s being friends with movie stars
and traveling the world rather than changing it. Move along.
Turkey: Ezgi who is the sweetest and most hilarious! Best line “Eez booooring.”
(but you must roll the R). She works with ECPAT Turkey and has worked on a lot
of their great successful campaigns and is doing a lot of policy work to
improve the lives of children and refugees. She’s amazing (yeah, you’re gonna
hear – well, read – that word a lot)
Sri Lanka: Naduni, my little bus buddy. We ended up sitting together a lot and
geeking out over books and movies and working with little kids. She is only 22
and getting her law degree and she also works for ECPAT Sri Lanka and has the
cutest accent. We got really close during the trip and lots of tears were shed
during our goodbye. I was like “STOP CRYING! You’re going to make me cry!” and
she was like “I can’t! I have no one in my life at home to talk to like you.”
So of course then I was bawling too.
South Africa: Diane and Tirasai
Di is from Jo-burg and Tirasai is from Cape Town. Tirasai is hilarious. Her
best line of the whole trip was “Don’t fight the monkeys!” when talking about
stupid tourists who get their stuff stolen by monkeys and then try to fight the
monkeys to get it back. She works doing training for adults in how to treat
children and educating about children’s rights. She has two kids and her
daughter is also hilarious and such a badass at age 6. She knows her rights and
exercises them, to her mother’s distress. Tirasai turned 30 on this trip so we
celebrated her birthday in NYC! Well, we planned to, but she fell asleep first,
so some of the rest of us celebrated for her.
Diane and I clicked from day one and haven’t stopped talking
since. Modern technology is amazing, isn’t it? She works for the National
Freedom Network, connecting different people and organizations and fighting for
rights of trafficked people. She literally represents the people of South
Africa in all these super cool government meetings and gets to speak truth to
power on a daily basis. I would be so freaked out to do that. She’s such a rock
star. Also, her kid is named after Lara Croft (sort of.)
Sierra Leone: Rhoda works at a shelter for trafficking victims and does a lot
of great work with them. She was constantly solving problems the whole time we were
in the states. She taught me a lot about the civil war and child soldiers in
Sierra Leone and about the Ebola crisis that recently happened. She’s lived
through so much more national tragedy than anyone from white bread suburban
America can even comprehend and her faith is still strong and she keeps
fighting for those too tired to fight for themselves.
Kenya: Phyllis works for this amazing organization called HAART and is on their
programming staff (I think that’s right). She brought some amazing resources to
share with us and we are going to be using the framework for the trainings
about trafficking we plan to do with Jojo’s Sanctuary in the next year.
Serbia: Jelena is awesome. She basically runs Atina, which is a series of
shelters for domestic abuse and trafficking victims. Also, she was one of the
brainiacs behind the creation of Serbia’s first bagel shop, which employs a lot
of the women from their shelters. She also taught me a lot about what it’s like
to grow up in the middle of a civil war. I think Americans have a lot to learn
from people who grew up in war about what is really important in life and what
is worth fighting for. She is so Balkan and straightforward and has the best
dry sense of humor. I swear, I have a quote a day from her. She is hopefully
coming to visit me in February!!!!! I cannot wait.
England: Baljeet. Dude. This woman. She is such a cool human being. She is a
lawyer and started the first NGO for refugees and migrant rights in England and
she GETS. THINGS. DONE. She’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met and
she’s so funny too. I think that is one thing we all have in common and
something everyone who works in this sort of intense situation needs is a good
sense of humor and the ability to laugh even in the face of insurmountable
obstacles.
Chile: Carolina: potentially the smartest person I’ve ever met. I wish I could
download her brain into mine. I never stopped learning from her. Every word
that came out of her mouth was genius. She started a theater troupe with her friends
after uni, then worked for the Ministry of interior and created a plan for
their country to fight trafficking, then went to study her master’s in England,
did a fellowship in DC, started Chile’s first Anti-Trafficking NGO and
currently works with the ministry of finance. Oh, did I mention she’s also a
lawyer? She’s a year older than me. Yeah, I know. I’m a failure and wasted my
20s. Get in line.
Brazil: Artha works with Rede Nami who do amazing work in the favelas of Rio
using graffiti to spread awareness about violence against women. They work in
neighborhoods, schools, etc. We got to do an awesome graffiti workshop and
spray paint the crap out a wall in a park on the lower east side. (maybe?)
Thailand: me and Pik You already know about me, Pik is our Victim Advocate and
represents the family of the victim when they go to court for trafficking or
abuse cases. She’s amazing, even if she did complain constantly about the 5
star restaurants and 3 course meals we were forced to eat daily. hahaha
Phillippines: Marie Grace is a Supreme Court Justice in the Philippines. She
specializes in child abuse cases so she was excited to learn a lot and we
learned a lot from her about the court system there. She went with Pik and I to
see Waitress on Broadway.
US: Alisa and Margeaux Alisa works with Organization of Prostituion Survivors
in Seattle and is changing the world, yo. She connects all the different
aspects of society to shift the focus from the sellers of sex to the buyers.
Because of her org, they arrested 250 johns in 2 days. Amazing. Last year was
the first year ever for a major metropolitan city to not try a single juvenile
for prostitution. Such a win. According to Human Trafficking law, the purchase
of sex from an underage person automatically constitutes trafficking, so why
should the kids who are being victimized be punished? She’s also been integral
in setting up a school for john’s that is so good, some of them choose to go
multiple times. It’s one of the first of its kind in the US and is changing lives.
Please give them money to keep improving Seattle!
Margeaux is a victim advocate and travels the country doing
speaking engagements and sharing her story and how people can get involved in
stopping trafficking in the US. She’s super cool and is from Kentucky. I didn’t
get to hang out with her as much as I would have liked.
India: Vandana and Priyanka Vandana is a doctor working to change the way
doctors treat victims of abuse and trafficking and she runs all these amazing
programs across their whole part of Northern India. She’s so awesome and shared
so much of her knowledge. She also took care of me when I was sick. J Priyanka was the
youngest, at 19, and she founded an all girls magic troupe with the help of
Magic Without Borders. They go into school and hospitals and she even did a fun
little magic show for us, using more English than we thought she knew! She’s a
sweet kid.
Nepal: Neelam works with Free the Slaves in Nepal and had lots of stuff to
share about the way they work with people there and different trends they see
there. I didn’t get a chance to talk to her at length til one of the last
nights, but I learned a lot from what she shared throughout the trip.
Singapore: Peck used to work with an organization that works with migrants and
fights for migrant rights and trafficking victims. She was so funny and to the
point about everything.
Burma: Ying co-founded SWAN the Shan Women’s Action Network that does a lot of
work with Burmese refugees, both in Chiang Mai and along the border of Thailand
and Burma.
Cambodia: Sola was the sweetest! She grew up in the wake of the genocide in
Cambodia and knew she wanted to devote her life to improving the lives of her
fellow countrypeople. She’s only 27 but she has done so much work already with
her organization Hope for Justice to start to change the direction of her
country.
Our first stop was DC, where we landed on Sept 11, 15 years
after the towers fell and 3000 miles from where I was on that day. It was so
surreal coming in and seeing the Pentagon and where they had repaired it. It
blows my mind that kids are learning to drive who did not exist when that
happened. We were in the same van to the
hotel as Sola (Cambodia), Ezgi (Turkey) and Ying (Burma). We chatted a bunch
and I was pointing out all these different monuments like a cheesy tour guide.
When we got to the hotel, Pik full on passed out, but I went
to meet Alia, who used to work for Vital Voices but got another job and
abandoned us before we arrived. Traitor. ;) We walked over to this art festival
thing happening and ate some comfort food (grilled cheese!) and then took the
metro to the American National Portrait Gallery, which was really cool to see.
They have rotating exhibits so even if I had been there before (which I suppose
I may have) it would be new stuff now. Since Alia’s family is from Jordan,
which has AMAZING food, and she offered to make dinner for me, I demanded
Jordanian food and she did not disappoint. By the time we ate it was like 9pm
and I was passing out in my food. Hahaha. It was really great to catch up with
her and see her cool new house.
The next morning was day one and most people were still jet
lagged from their trips, but not me! I laugh in the face of jet lag. Ha Ha Ha.
It was nice to see Cindy again, who is the director of Vital Voices and
basically the reason I got to come, and also meet some new people. First off, I
met Margeaux from Kentucky and her super sweet guide dog, Junebug, and Alisa
from Seattle (what’s up, Washington?!) and Jelena from Serbia. Honestly, there
were probably a couple other people too, but I’ve forgotten who else, and let’s
be honest, they probably don’t remember meeting me at that exact point either.
Nobody really cares about the minutae of what we learned, so
I’ll hit the highlights. We went to the National Center for Missing and
Exploited Children which I have always been interested in, so that was super
cool to see it and hear from their team. Sadly, we were so late because the
crazy ass bus driver kept doing these insane U-Turns in the middle of the road
in areas where you CANNOT do U-turns! The best of this day was Jelena sitting
by me on the bus saying “What is he doing? This is forbidden!” I was like ‘YEP
it certainly is.”
Other highlights include visiting Google DC for a panel discussion
and dinner (and wine. They had Malbec!), visting the State Department where we
had to have special badges and an escort to the room, and a tour I organized
for 12 of us who had never been to DC. It was perfect actually, I asked the guy
at the concierge about night tours, since were getting a night off after our
last meeting ended at 4:30. He said the tour bus goes at night but it’s $42 a
person, but the hotel used a van service with a 15 pass van and the guy would
do a personal tour for us for only $75 an hour, with a 3 hour minimum. It ended
up being $22 a person including tip. It was fun running around the city and
making up stories about these monuments like I was a real tour guide. That was
a real bonding experience for us. My favorite parts of it were the Martin
Luther King Jr. memorial and the Roosevelt memorial because I had never visited
those before. People were really impressed with the quotes carved in stone
everywhere. They were like “wow, you guys have really good speakers in this
country.” Hahaha I was like, “sure, but they all have their flaws. They all
cheated on their wives, Jefferson had slaves, etc etc. A good speech doesn’t
mean they were perfect.” But, then none of us are, I suppose.
Then we were off to NYC! As we crossed from Jersey to
Manhattan, the driver cranked up “Welcome to New York” by Taylor Swift and then
“Empire State of Mind” and the whole bus was dancing. It was pretty funny to
witness. We raced to check in and change before going to Diane Von Furstenberg
studios (to which Baljeet hilariously asked “uh….who is Diane Von Furstenberg?”
She’s a clothing designer and model, for those who don’t know). I thought her
office and the meeting was pretty cool. Some of us, I won’t name names
(coughSAcough) were less than impressed. She swept into the room and
immediately asked “Water? Where’s the wine for our guests?” And suddently there
was really expensive wine in addition to the Evian and Pellegrino. Now, that’s
power! We had a really interesting discussion about what can be done to help in
our various parts of the world. It was the first (and I think, only) time that
the person we were visiting asked for our input rather than just telling us
what they did at their org. Plus, we got gift bags and signed copies of her
book! Yay books! She had some really lovely words to say to Alisa and Margeaux
and wrote them each a whole page letter in their books. She personalized all
the other copies for us too, and took photos with each of us, which was pretty
cool, I think.
Other highlights of NYC. DUDE. We stayed at the Midtown
Manhattan Hilton. In my entire life I never dreamed that I would be able to
stay in the heart of the theater district, across the street from the Radio
City Music Hall and 3 blocks from Central Park. It was incredible! Thank you
Hilton for sponsoring this program and giving us all the best nights’ sleep we
had in forever. The city is so vibrant and thrumming with life. I could have
walked all over it, and did.
On Saturday, we saw AHNA!!! And Aaron and baby Egan too, who
was learning to walk, but I REALLY missed Ahna. I have not seen her in person
since she moved away to get married, and monthly skype calls are just not the
same. It was so awesome to spend the whole day with them, and Di came along too
because she had nothing else to do, so I forced her. We went to the Strand
bookstore, which is the coolest on the East Coast, and then walked all the way
to the Staten Island Ferry, stopping off at a random fountain in a park and
also at the 9/11 Memorial area on the way. It was so crazy to be there just a
few days after the anniversary. It was very sobering. Aaron took lots of
pictures and Egan practiced a lot of walking. We took the ferry to Staten
Island and back because it’s free! Also it passes the Statue of Liberty with no
waiting in lines. Win win. We ended up at Central Park and walked around the
park a bit and finally had to say goodbye at 6. Then I went back to my room and
showered to go to BROADWAY! I had gotten Pik and I tickets to see Waitress and
it was magical. We had center orchestra seats and they were worth every penny.
Even though I was sad that I missed Jessie Mueller (Tony Winner) in the
starring role, it was made up for by seeing Jenna Ushkowitz (Tina, my favorite
character from Glee) in it as Dawn. I loved the show, the songs, the dialogue,
how they kept so many of the perfect lines from the movie and turned some of
the perfect lines into songs. It was amazing. I never feel more alive than when
I go see live theater. It’s like a drug for me. I could mainline it. Even the
two bombs that went off 2 miles from our hotel while we were at the theater
could not dampen my high. They caught the guy the next day, it was fine.
The next morning, we had off as well, so Diane and I rented
Citibikes and rode around Central Park. Both of us were so much more out of
shape than we realized. I thought she was gonna pass out. We took the bus back.
We were planning to get some more sleep before we were going to meet the bus
later but just as I crawled into bed I got a text from Gigi, who works for
Vital Voices (well, until she left to work for Hillary Clinton!) I had
basically ordered her to come see us in the city since she had a layover on her
way back from India. She was like “Well, I’m in Newark but I can’t manage these
bags on my own, so I’m just gonna fly home.” I was like “NOPE. Unacceptable. I
am literally getting on a subway to come meet you this very instant.” So, I
did. It was stressful, I will admit because I did the wrong thing and got a
ticket for the wrong train that left too late, so basically I got there and
then we had to run with her bags back to the train back to the city. Even with
all that, and running up to change into nicer clothes to wear for the photos we
were getting taken, I was STILL not the last person to get on the bus. HA! All
those years of musical theater quick changes still coming in handy!
We did the graffiti party that day and had a blast painting
this wall with a women’s empowerment slogan. It was pretty cool, even though
I’m not very good at it. Then, a bunch of us skipped dinner and went to
Hillsong church in Times Square! It’s in the theater above The Lion King. Di
and I were going to go to Lion King after the service, but on Sundays they play
at 6:30 and not 8 so we were just getting out of service when the show was
starting. Sad times. But, it all worked out cause we all went to have dinner at
Bubba Gump’s Shrimp Shack and it was delicious, even though I ate ribs and not
shrimp cause I live in a country with an ocean around it. There were 7 of us
that went: Jelena, Andrea, Diane, Phyllis, Rhoda, Vandana, and I. We all split
up and did some shopping later and Di and I went to the M&M store which was
delicious.
Next morning, we were off to Dallas! Never been before, but
it was pretty cool. We had a lot of good barbecue, but not enough mac and
cheese, in my opinion. The food at the hotel was amazing. Chicken tortilla
soup! My absolute favorite! We visited a couple domestic violence shelters and
learned some fundraising strategies and also the Dallas Children’s Advocacy
Center, which is what our center is modeled after. It was also amazing, and so
interesting to talk to the people who work with Multi Disciplinary Teams there
and find out that my procedures that I just made up after talking to a couple
of psychologists was actually exactly what they do. That was reassuring. We
also did some shopping at the thrift store that is the social enterprise of
Genesis Shelter. We all made out like bandits. It was good for us but not our
wallets!
Our last night was full of laughter and wine. There was
always lots of wine. Except that night we had margaritas as big as my head. We
dipped our feet in the rooftop pool and talked until the wee hours of night.
Then Naduni and I still got up at 7 am to send people off and say some final
goodbyes. There were lots of tears. LOTS. Of tears.
Finally, Pik and I got an Uber and went to Jenny and Trey’s
house. Jenny is one of my oldest friends (as in I have known her for a long
time, not as in she is older than me) and she moved to Dallas a few years ago
so I haven’t seen her in a while. It was perfect that we ended in Dallas so I
could hang out with her and meet her husband and his family. We also did a lot
of shopping to get all the stuff I had to bring back for camp! We even squeezed
in a movie: Snowden with Joseph Gordon-Levitt. One day, we did a road trip to
Austin and saw the Capitol Building and visited Sydney and Kevin Ling, some of
my friends from Africa/Australia who now live in Texas. Crazy world travelers!
We spent the night with Allison and her family and it was so
awesome to hang out with Sully and Lucky and Hudson and catch up with Allison
and Chad. The only one missing was Sophie, who was in LA. Sully now plays both
guitar and saxophone and Lucky is learning bass guitar and trombone. Hudson
does clarinet, but he didn’t want to play for me. The other two showed off
their mad skills and it was awesome. Sully has this fantastic singing voice
too. It’s so cool to see them have developed from little people with cute baby
personalities into full grown humans. I also love that I seem to have instilled
the love of reading in them during their formative years.
As we were leaving Austin, I stopped to see Jill and Steve,
who have tripled their offspring count since I saw them last. It was great to
catch up with them and hear about their lives and church and kids and catch
them up on all I’ve been doing.
Well, that’s the extremely truncated version of my trip to
the US. Hopefully you are still awake by the end of it. Stay tuned later this
month for entries about camp, Joy’s unwanted surprise party and more about
Jojo’s Sanctuary, which already has a website and ways to donate. (You can find
us here: cordmin.com/jojos-sanctuary)
