My poor blog has languished as my life has writhed through a year of turmoil. That tripe about how the Chinese character for crisis is the same as for opportunity may be smarmy, but I hope it's true.
In the past 12 months since I went to Washington, my marriage of 17 years ended (his call), I'm on the brink of becoming certified as a public school teacher (my call), my beloved oldest daughter started a PhD program in the Midwest, my novel was rejected by yet another agent (not to mention being poorly reviewed by members of my book club), and my darlng cat died. All of that stuff commenced last October and it's now coming to fruition, by dint of Superior Court and the Department of Higher Education. Also the Humane Society because I have two more lovely cats who needed a home in addition to my surviving dog who is around 14. I need him to live until the age of thirty as he is the only male companion I trust these days, aside from my dear 14-year-old son.
My goals for the summer are to find a teaching job for September (no small feat in this budgetary environment), to spend an inordinate amount of time in my kayak, to find some way to turn my entire backyard into a maintenance-free patio rather than a dustbowl, and to go camping for a long weekend with my friend Jan. Also to write another novel. It will either deal with the demise of my marriage or the Norman Conquest of England. Stay tuned, comrades.
I’m not quite sure how a long-time-albeit-small-potatoes CARE donor like me rated a scholarship to attend the organization’s annual conference in Washington, but an email arrived a couple weeks ago saying that CARE needed another person to lobby Connecticut’s congressional delegation and would I be interested? If it weren’t for the scholarship, I couldn’t have accepted the invitation, but because of it, before you could say, “inside the Beltway,” I was on a plane to DC. I was suddenly transformed from a CARE supporter into an amateur lobbyist on issues that affect families in the developing world.
CARE’s president and CEO is an inspiring leader. A physican, HIV researcher and—like my daughter, Esme—a Barnard College alum, Dr. Helene Gayle pointed out in her opening remarks that CARE’s annual conference proves to legislators that constituents are willing to lobby on behalf of voiceless, oppressed people around the globe. (Most attendees foot the bill for their conference fee, travel and lodging themselves.) Many lawmakers also realize that reducing global poverty isn’t just a moral imperative. Poverty destabilizes societies and directly impacts US national security.
This year’s conference was the biggest ever, drawing over 900 supporters from every state in the union. A day of workshops and panels, highlighted by an inspiring call-to-action by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, educated conference attendees on three key legislative initiatives that CARE would like to see passed in the House and Senate.
Conference attendees broke into groups based on our congressional districts and boned up on facts and figures. We each got to choose one of the three legislative issues to present to our elected leaders or their staff.
The first issue CARE policy experts presented dealt with global food security, seeking to reconfigure US food aid programs toward empowering farmers in developing countries—over 80% of whom are women—rather than using the current emphasis on shipping huge volumes of food grown in the US to countries experiencing food crises.
The second effort sought to exert pressure on countries to stop practices that force very young girls into marriage, often with men two and three times their age. Such marriages doom girls to lives of poverty by cutting off any chance for further education and putting them at grave risk of unsafe teen pregnancies, domestic abuse, and HIV infection.
The third focus was on providing support for cost-effective, simple programs that combat death and disability due to easily preventable complications of pregnancy and childbirth.
The Connecticut CARE delegation consisted of about a dozen people. We met with Senator Christopher Dodd, House Representatives Rosa DeLauro and Jim Himes, plus a legislative aide from Senator Joe Lieberman’s staff. We described how the bills we’d learned about attacked global poverty and asked each lawmaker to co-sponsor them, if he or she hadn’t done so already. If already sponsors, we asked each of them to push Senate and House leadership to get the bills passed.
I was surprised by the focus and intensity that our congressional leaders and their staff gave to us. While all of them see lobbyists of various types on a regular basis, we were well-prepared, committed citizen advocates who weren’t expecting anything for ourselves and didn’t represent interest groups with deep pockets. I think it might have made a refreshing change for them.
My conference experience was wonderful! I was especially moved by the presentation of CARE’s “I Am Powerful” award to a brave, entrepreneurial African woman named Goretti Nyabenda. I was energized by the performance of female drummers at the Tuesday night dinner and was heartened by the sharp, compassionate, and often amusing insights of three African first ladies who were interviewed afterward.
The conference held some interesting surprises for me. I hadn’t expected the gender diversity of the group; I thought mainly women would attend, but there were a good percentage of men, too. The racial diversity of the group was also impressive and the accents I heard suggested that countries of origin were also varied. Our Connecticut group leader was a Dutch World War II survivor who credited US aid for her very existence. Perhaps the nicest surprise was the presence of very young advocates who were daughters of adult attendees. One girl from a Connecticut town lobbied with our group. She provided a poignant reminder of the inherit horror of child marriage. “Look at me,” she said to a Senate legislative aide. “I’m just ten, but I could be one of those girls forced to marry when I should be in school.”
The motto for one of CARE’s signature campaigns is “I Am Powerful.” The women and girls helped by this program are among the most oppressed, disadvantaged people on the planet and yet, with the help of organizations like CARE, they are able to bring prosperity to their families and communities. In an odd parallel, I felt incredibly empowered by being asked to participate in the democratic process of this amazing and richly blessed country of ours. With all the educational and economic advantages I’ve experienced because I was lucky enough to be born in a developed country, I still never expected to feel so much new power at the CARE conference. I was given the privilege of advocating for those who have no way to engage with the powerful. I’m already starting to save so that I can be back at the 2011 CARE conference “on my own dime” and with my husband in tow!
A couple of weeks ago, I got a call from my brother-in-law. Calls from Dennis are usually not good news. They tend to happen because my sister is busy patching some new crack in the Greene-family piecrust and therefore cannot make the call herself.
Turns out that my mother had lost all her short-term memory in one fell swoop. Boom. Gone. Didn’t know who the president was, what year it was. Heck, she didn’t know what time it was even though she seemed to be desperately interested—she kept asking my sister about it every 30 seconds or so.
Over Mum’s strenuous protests, Bethie dragged her to the local hospital for testing. Until I could get there, Bethie, Den and my brother Randy took turns caring for my dad, who suffered a stroke a few years ago and needs help with things. After a few days in the hospital, Mum made a dramatic recovery and was itching to get home to boss her beloved prisoner around again. She normally doesn’t tolerate any help whatsoever, but she must have been grateful that her brainworks hadn’t collapsed entirely because she let me stay on for a few days. After her first day home from the hospital, it was all I could do to stop her from waiting on me instead of the other way around, so I decided to take a long walk.
I have a fairly tortured relationship with my hometown. On the one hand, I’m proud of my working-class roots, but on the other hand Southbridge’s economically-depressed, post-industrial dreariness does tax the poetic soul. As an artistic kid in a place that only had love for the football and cheerleading squads, I escaped by age 18 for college and then the far-more-fascinating Babylon that is New York City. However, Southbridge holds one piece of turf that is dearer to me than just about any outside of Scotland—my grandfather’s grave.
I selected a circuitous set of backroads to get to the cemetery and set out with my hands in my pockets, my head down, and my iPod cranking some tune for the disaffected. (My musical tastes tend to run toward mournful anyway.) As I walked, I was struck by how… well… how good the old town looked. I mean the tenement apartments (wooden triple-deckers), while of an eternally unattractive design, were mostly done up in newer clapboard-style vinyl siding. The roads had fewer potholes than here in much posher Milford. I walked by a playground that was awash with happy, brown-skinned kids. The little ones played tag while the older ones shot baskets through hoops with actual intact chains—another one-up on Milford. (By the way, the brown children belong to Southbridge’s Puerto Rican community, which was stranded there without job prospects sometime in the 70s after the factories shut down—the same factories that had attracted waves of French Canadians, Irish, Greeks, Poles, Romanians, Albanians and various others before them; catapulting those groups into the middle class, so they could look down their noses at the next wave of immigrants.) It appeared that the landlords of my hometown had invested in their properties during the boomtimes that immediately preceded the Great Recession of Aught-7, 8, 9 and 10. This gladdened my calloused little heart no end.
When I finally located my grandfather’s grave, I stood for a while and stared at it. I was surprised by the little pansy motif in the corners of the granite marker, just as I am every time I see it. They were selected no doubt by my grandparents for the infant they buried beneath it in 1923. I was named for that baby—Margaret Ellen Greene, a name I’ve since changed to Meg Eilidh; Meg because no one ever called me Margaret anyway, and Eilidh because it’s the Gaelic form of Ellen. My grandfather was a lone spot of attention in the maelstrom that was my homelife as a very young child. He read to me for hours and I listened. In my darkest times, it’s his spirit that I pray to for help, and in my happiest triumphs, it’s his heart that I credit for showing me I mattered all those years ago.
A text to my cellphone vibrated in my pocket, interrupting my little reverie. It was Bethie. “Where are you? I’m making you dinner!” I texted her back and she picked me up at the graveyard.
“You can cook for me, but I’m buying the wine,” I told her. “We’ll toast Grampy and the doctors who bullied Mummy into taking her meds.”
We clinked imaginary wineglasses and drove home.
