When I listened to Lauryn Hill in college on repeat for two years (seriously, ask Finny how silly obsessed I was with that album), I never thought 10 years later I’d be working with actual refugees. There is a lot of confusion about refugees in America and I am new to this field. Here’s what I’ve recently learned:

~ A refugee is someone living outside of his or her home country and is unwilling or unable to return due to a well-founded fear of persecution. This could be because of race, religion, nationality, membership of a social group, political opinion, etc.
A current example are the Sudanese lfrom Darfur who are fleeing to camps in Chad and Kenya to escape persecution. The Janjaweed Arabs of the north are committing active genocide against the African tribal folk of the south. (I am over-simplifying a mass migration of people, but you get the idea.)

~A evacuee is not a refugee. An evacuee is someone who has been evacuated. Simple enough, right? You can imagine the confusion when after Katrina political leaders started referring to evacuees as refugees. No dice. Evacuees who were born in the US could not be refugees. Make sense?

~An immigrant is a person who has moved to a second country by will or through refugee status. Refugees are therefore immigrants. Immigrants are rarely refugees. Only 1% of refugees living in refugee camps around the world make it to a third-country, such as the United States, for immigration.

~ An illegal immigrant is a person who has moved to a second country without the permission of authorities in the second country.

~ An asylee is a refugee who reaches another country through their own devices. For example, Cubans who reach the shores of the US are asylees. They are able to seek asylum in the United States. Another example is Martina Navratilova, who requested political asylum from her home country of Czechoslovakia. She later became a US citizen.

Refugees are brought to the United States from dozens of countries. In Arizona, there are refugees from more than 90 countries. How do these refugees get here? The United Nations High Commission for Refugees asked a dozen or so countries to help with the 12 million refugees worldwide; 80% of these are women and children. Most of the men die during the conflict that led their families to flee. Some 70% of these families live at least 10 years in refugee camps, outside of their native countries.

The Refugee Act of 1980 created specific US funding to help aid those fleeing persecution. Before then, refugees were handled on a case-by-case basis. Considering how many people from Eastern Europe immigrated as refugees after the World Wars, it is surprising it took until 1980 to pass formalized legislation and funding. The cap on refugees accepted into the US each year is 70,000. In 2007, 41,000 refugees were resettled.

The process is entirely political. There are countries we would gladly accept refugees from — think North Korea and Iran. There are countries were the trickle of folk come in, but it isn’t as politically glorifying — think Africa. In Arizona, our largest current refugee populations are coming from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Bhutan and Burma.

I’ll cover the life of a typical refugee family resettled in Arizona in the future. And yes, I am loving this job.

~K

It’s been quite a while since I’ve browsed my copy of “You Can Do It” — a book blogging project I’m doing with Aimee. Rather than do the badges in order, I’m skipping ahead to badge #41: Eat It.
Essentially the idea is to take a closer look at what you are eating, see how it makes you feel, eliminate junk and add more healthy stuff. This isn’t that big of a leap; I’m neurotic about what I eat. I grew up in an athletic home. My mom taught aerobics for ten years, my dad and brother were great swimmers, and I’ve recently dug in my heels to become a triathlete. You feed your body crap, you feel like crap, you swim/bike/run like crap. Einstein, I’m not.
So, knowing how to eat healthy is in my DNA. Doing so habitually, and eating an appropriate serving size, is not.

Fruit-free breakfast that screams: time to go to the grocery. 1 cup of fat free cottage cheese, one Western Alternative bagel, 2 tablespoons of fat free cream cheese: 272 calories, 1 gram of fat, 38 grams of protein.

Specifically the badge suggests you:
1. Food journal for a week to take a nutritional inventory. I like Sparkpeople. It’s free and comprehensive. Also, I like having a buddy. Colleen encouraged me to stop drinking soda and I feel worlds better having made this little change.
2. Follow the guidelines. Know how much you should be eating vs. how much you are eating. Here’s a great tool.
3. Learn serving sizes and how to read nutritional labels. (I am also on alert for high-fructose corn syrup in my food. It seems to be in everything these days and there is nothing about “corn” or “syrup” that is going to make me healthier. In simple terms: the feed corn and other grains to animals to fatten them before slaughter. Old McDonald, I’m not.)
4. Make a meal plan and shop with taste in mind. Fresh produce and spices are easy and healthy ways to make your meals much tastier. This is an area where I need to change; I go to the market about once a week and never have enough produce in the fridge. With my new job, I’ll walk past the market each way everyday and I hope this helps nudge me to be different. Also, I’m getting more involved with the Phoenix Farmers’ Market.

I also figure a great way to have ready access to fresh produce is getting off my lazy duff and gardening. I’ve lamented countless times how my patio garden is tiny and gets the wrong sunlight and a dozen other reasons why it won’t work to grow a thing. However, the main reason nothing has grown is because I haven’t been here long enough to keep it watered and pay it enough attention. And frankly, I want a magic garden too! This resource for Phoenix gardeners and my new schedule are giving me hope this will change.

Peter Hoffman was recently interviewed in Bon Appetit. Hoffman is the owner of several restaurants in New York City and is a champion of buying local, supporting farmers’ markets and eating healthy food. A bit I enjoyed, while we’re on the topic:

Bon Appetit: Why should Americans support local farmers’ markets?

PH: Buying from local farmers is about getting off the grid — not the power grid, but the food-system grid. Money stays local, our outlying regions can remain agriculturally productive, and the landscape is preserved. The food tastes better because it hasn’t traveled as far and is fresher.

Bon Appetit: If someone says to you ‘I don’t shop at farmers’ markets because they’re too expensive,’ how do you respond?

PH: Get with it. That is the real cost of food. Vote with your fork and your belly, and support the opportunity to buy directly from farmers — and eat better food by buying from them.

Getting with it, Peter.

~K

So, let me be honest. I’m a bit of a hypochondriac drama queen. I’ve been through this before and didn’t have TB. And I’m 100% convinced I don’t have sleeping sickness. Shoo tse tse fly! Don’t bother me.
Why?
Because I resigned today. And my headache disappeared. May have something to do with the hard 9 hours of sleep I got last night (how is that for reassurance you are making the right choice?). Or it could have to do with the great breakfast I had this morning. But it certainly has to do with less stress.
I’ve loved this job and still love the organization, but I’m moving on to greener pastures — another non-profit within a few minutes of my house on foot, still working with African folk, still focused on public health. Plus, I got a great farewell Africa tour out of this job before I handed over my resignation.
Nope, the rodeo hasn’t arrived in town. That’s just me, headache-free, singing, “Giddy-up!”
~K

When I’m on the ground working at one of our project sites, I spend most of my day observing. I walk with our public health workers through the villages, watching how they interact with families, seeing what their communities look like, scrutinizing the children and trying to tell if they are getting enough to eat, if there are mosquito nets hung in their huts, if there are pit latrines and clean wells available in the area. I take a lot of photographs and notes and try to come up with a plan to make our health projects more effective. A bit of what I saw in Beira — and I’ll warn you, some of these are disturbing:

This is a typical home in a village near Beira.

This is an improved method of hygiene that has been introduced. If your dishes air dry off the ground, they’ll stay cleaner and animals and children won’t be able to touch them either. (Obviously these still need to be washed.)

A health promoter interviews a family in Msena — a local language.

This family cultivates rice in one of the many flood plains nearby. They dry the rice on plastic sacks and then grind it with a giant mortar and pestle. They then take this ground material and put it in a large flat basket and wait for a slight breeze. When the breese is just right, they bounce the ground rice in the basket and the husk — which they’ve separated from the rice with the mortar — blows away in the wind leaving the rice ready for cooking. This process takes days for very little in terms of calories or vitamins gained. In other words, this isn’t Uncle Ben’s.

Speaking of vitamins, there is a malnutrition issue in many of these communities with babies. Babies who can’t breastfeed — because the mother died in birth, her milk didn’t come in, she’s HIV-positive and doesn’t want to feed the baby her milk, or the baby is lactose intolerant and can’t keep the milk down — die quickly. There is Plumpynut available for those who bring their children to the malnutrition feeding centers. This is a healthy baby being weighed.

In constrast, this is the one-year-old I described earlier. She was later taken to the central hospital and put on a feeding tube. She weighed 5.5kg at 14 months.

Her brother, who I carried to the clinic that day, was also malnourished and was cared for at the hospital. A more urgent issues was matakenyas — a worm that had invested his sweet little feet.

I heard the little girl in this photo crying before I saw her. Her mother is resting on the reed mat under the blankets in the far right side of the yard. She was 18 and had been sick since February.

Her little girl sat in the dirt, listening to her mother moan. I can’t imagine she was older than a year. She cried when we appeared, but seemed to otherwise be entertaining herself.

One week later when we returned to the community, the mother had died. I am not certain what will happen to this adorable little girl. With any luck, she’ll be taken to an orphanage where she’ll be fed and eventually sent to school. There was an HIV clinic offering free testing and treatment within a 15-minute walk of this village. I would guess stigma kept this woman initially from seeking care and handcuffed her family from doing anything after she was unable to do so for herself. If we can change one thing in southern Africa, may it be HIV-testing and treatment stigma. With treatment, people can live 20-25 years longer. It isn’t a cure, but it would have been a chance for this mother to see her little girl through childhood.

These beautiful women are some of the Mozambican saints who work and care for such children at orphanages. The work is thankless, tiring and never-ending. Yet, they do so with a smile that I have to believe only comes from a spirit fueled by God. They give me hope for the future of Mozambique.

That and the exceedingly obvious prevention messages that are becoming part of the culture. This condom machine provides customers at a cafe in central Beira more than just decaf or full-jolt.

~K

Today I played Ultimate frisbee with one group of orphans, and taught a different group how to do basic sewing. These experiences perfectly summarize my feelings about my career in Mozambique. I have been educated to do so much, but I feel helpless. Instead, I’ve fallen back on what comes naturally — being goofy, running around, and being domestic.
I remember once watching Jamie Foxx on “Inside the Actor’s Studio.” He was telling James Lipton how his grandmother had always made him go to church to sing, take piano lessons and play on the football team. Each of these skills came to be vitally important in the development of his acting career. He didn’t understand his grandmother’s insistence then, but when she died just a few days before he received the Oscar for “Ray,” it dawned on him: sometimes we have tools sharpened for when the opportunity arises. They don’t make sense until the project comes along and we have what it takes to get the job done.
I never thought playing a year of Ultimate frisbee in Tempe would come in handy in Manga, Mozambique — but boy did it. The orphanage is run by a middle-aged American man (saint, really) who cares for 35 orphaned boys. The boys are not only expected to do well in school, but they are also taught how to do construction, plumbing and other vocational skills that will make them highly employable once they are done with high school. When we arrived, a group of boys were working on a concrete fence. They were all too pleased to pull out their frisbees and challenge us to a match. I was the only girl to take the bait and by the end of an hour, I was wheezing but thankful that I run. I think they were a little surprised to see a girl hang with them and to be honest, I was a little surprised myself. PE used to be fun; now running around for an hour leaves me sweaty and pooped.
The sewing has been a delight too. We are working with a separate group of girls, teaching them basic sewing with the idea that they’ll be able to secure work when they are done with schooling too. Between entertaining the little kids outside of the machesa (a grass structure we use for community education) with a game of Raton! Raton! Gato! (like duck, duck, goose — but with animals they know), we taught a bunch of girls how to sew basic puppets. They learned to sew buttons for eyes and how to sew right sides together. It was fun and I couldn’t help but laugh that the last two tools I thought I’d be using in Mozambique would be frisbee and sewing.
Go figure. And yes, it makes that last little bit of school debt that much more annoying.
I will be home this time next week and I am excited and sad. I miss my bed, eating healthy food, my gym friends, the bagel boys, and of course my family and the Ya Yas. I don’t miss the heat, the commute, being way too attached to my Blackberry and NPR, and feeling like a cultural abnormality in a sea of MTV girls living in Tempe. It should be an interesting transition to American life. In the meantime, I’m savoring these last few days of African life.

Cheers,
Kelli

There are distinct scents to this part of southern Africa. It’s smoky — most of the trash is burned. It’s sweet — the tropical trees are heavy with papaya, banana and oranges this time of year. It’s savory — dried fish is a staple to the diet. It’s earthy. The people smell like they live — a life of hard work, sweating in the sun, living near a wide sandy beach in the salty air, bathing occasionally when the bucket from the well is full and nearby.
Last night a child stayed with us at our guest house. Among the dozen American volunteers, this 14-year-old girl has found a team of friends. One of the organizers of our group took to this girl — Amelia– several years ago and ever since she has been a staple of the volunteer house. This morning when I woke up in my bunk bed, I forgot that she was sleeping on the couch nearby. I clicked on my headlamp and rolled over to read for an hour. (Silence is precious here. Living with a dozen people leaves me craving for alone time.) I was five minutes into my book when I felt the mosquito netting being lifted and suddenly Amelia was climbing into bed with me.
I scooted over and greeted her in my basic Portuguese. She gave me a big hug and tried to read the words on my page, occasionally finding one she recognized.
“Good bye!”
“With!”
“Sit down!”
I nodded and smiled. She kept trying to hug me. I laid there with her, our arms entangled and thought about how nice it was to have this child with me. She talked quietly and from what I could gather, she babbled about perfume, new underwear and school. I thought about who I was at 14. I probably wanted perfume, new underwear and to be popular at school too. But would I have been able to care for my little brother at that age? Do we know what we are capable of? At 14 I was very naive. I still loved playing with toys and remember taking troll dolls and gummy worms with me to Mexico when I was this age.
Amelia doesn’t have dolls — she has actual children she is caring for.
When we crawled out of bed, I realized there was still at least an hour before anyone else would get up. I went through my backpack and found red nail polish. Amelia and I sat at the kitchen table. She smiled wildly as I painted her fingernails.
I suppose there are certain universal truths to being a teenage girl. You want security. You want to feel pretty. You want to be smart and well-taken care of. You want to be loved. This teenage girl wants to be able to take care of her siblings. And I even managed to find her some new underwear and a half-full bottle of Dove body spray that made her jump up and down in delight. If only all of her wishes were so easily granted.
I wish for her to stay in school, be able to keep the boys away, go to church and be the recipient of a fabulous stroke of luck that keeps her from sickness and further sorrow as an orphan raising a family. If good fortune had a scent in Mozambique, I’d say it would be clean and smart — a combination of bleach and that musty smell that rises from old library books when you crack one open. For today, body spray will have to do.

~K

Three orphanages and two days and I am spiritually spent. Thank you for your kind comments on the last post. My Internet time is fairly limited while I am here but I can’t tell you how much your comments cheer me on. Thank you.
Today we traveled to Dondo to work at an orphanage. We painted the exterior and spent several hours playing with the kids. Although there were activities planned for the kids, it was quickly apparent they’d rather just crawl on our laps and be held. So, I spent three hours under a tree holding a couple kids. They were 4-10 years old and simply wanted to have their heads against my chest. It was hard to hold back my tears for the trip home. I sat there, in the shade of a mango tree, playing with their ears, telling them stories in English they couldn’t understand, singing them songs from my childhood and trying my best to remember that just being there, playing with them, was enough.
Tonight we went to the baby orphanage in town to help feed the little ones. I recognize many of the children from last year, which doesn’t make working with them any easier. They are the sweetest kids and I wish more for them. There is no international adoption and adoption isn’t really part of the culture here either. Again, there are lots of cultural mazes that can leave you lost when trying to find an answer for some of these social issues. Instead, I found myself in the infant room, playing with a dozen babies less than a year old and singing “Jesus Loves You” to them. I don’t know why that song, but it seemed right. I sang, they smiled, and eventually I got them to sleep in their cribs.
There are few experiences in life that leave you feeling like you have nothing and everything in the same breath. I don’t have the solutions for the problems that keep Mozambique’s orphanages teaming with the sweetest, kindest souls you can imagine. And yet, seeing them and imagining their futures, I can’t help but feel like I have it all. I am incredibly blessed and am so thankful for my family. I only wish they were here to experience this with me.

~K

I am back in Mozambique, working at our health project and adjusting from the life of a spoiled expat to a quickly overwhelmed NGO worker. Today I started out in Mbatwe, a small village of mud huts built near the airport in Beira. We have had an on-going health project in this community for three years. We have more than 1,000 families participating in our HIV, cholera and malaria programs. They are wrapped into other social development projects too. The idea is after four years, participants will have improved health, housing, job training, education and well-being. The theory is that you use these public health models in communities that are hungry for change. It takes a village, so the story goes. In this village, we see progress in some areas (less standing water, better wells, more kids in school, more people being tested and treated for HIV) and then we have days like today.
I walked with two of our health leaders to do house visits with some of our families who have been struggling with health issues. I made it to three huts before I thought I was either going to quit and immediately go back home, or just sit down and sob. In each of the first three homes there was a child at the edge of death from malnutrition. In each of these homes, the child also had other complications — TB, HIV, orphan status, etc. And in each of these homes, the child’s caretaker knew how to reach out for help, where the feeding centers are located, how to get the dying baby into the hands of a health official and yet did nothing. If anything, they were angry (and perhaps shamed) that we showed up today to ask a few questions about the status of their family’s health. They are voluntarily participating in our project. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be stopping by. Each of these women presented a lengthy list of daily challenges that kept the baby’s health from being a higher priority. By the end of the third conversation, I felt my neck turning red in a flush of anger. Enough. I couldn’t hear another excuse.
I couldn’t be culturally competent or kind or compassionate or understanding that life is seemingly values life differently, and one more child dying isn’t that big of a deal. It is a big deal. They are a big deal to me — this bleeding heart liberal still thinks perhaps I’ll do something to make this country’s health a touch better.
And so I grabbed the third woman (the grandmother) and peppered her with a slew of questions before I put her two-year-old on my hip (suffering from malnutrition and a worm disease) and asked her to take her one-year-old (malnourished, HIV-positive) and said we were going to the clinic this very moment. These kids weren’t dying on my watch. I can’t be there everyday to guide decisions but I was not — absolutely not — walking away from this family. With a child bouncing from hip to hip, I walked behind this grannie (who managed to walk much faster than I could with a cloth wrapped around her waist, plastic flip flops on her feet and the sick baby on her back) for several miles before we reached the clinic. I sat with her at the malnutrition clinic, kept the kids entertained and soothed with hard-boiled eggs, oranges and bananas I bought from a roadside stand, and tried my hardest to keep my cool. The grannie spoke very little Portuguese, a language I have very little understanding of myself. Needless to say, my Msena isn’t so great either. But with my insistence and a bit of money, we got those kids into see a doctor. I don’t know what will happen tomorrow. I know I didn’t solve any problem long-term by putting my cultural competency aside and demanding we care for these kids today, but I can’t help but home for some change. Maybe another woman in the village saw us marching out toward the clinic. Maybe the two-year-old will fight on and survive and become a great leader for Mozambique. Maybe.

~K

Griselda, my godson’s mother, invited our her home for lunch on our last day in Jinotega. She made an amazing pot of chicken soup with countless vegetables. Here she stokes the fire to get the soup boiling.

Back in the kitchen, she and one of her girlfriends make chicken meatballs to add to the pot.

Truly the best soup I’d ever eaten. I was hungry and it was so filling.

She also served boiled taro root, which I hadn’t eaten since Africa. It is chalky but good.

And these boiled plantains were sweet and perfect naturally — like a yam.

In a non-traditional moment, we hit a great pizzeria in Granada for lunch yesterday. After a week of rice, beans, chicken and more rice and beans (called pinto gallo in Nicaragua), thin-crust pizza, bruschetta and fruity cocktails were heaven.

Yum.

~K

The cathedral in Jinotega.

One of many statues inside the churches we visited. These buildings are remnants of Spanish colonization and are silent sanctuaries in the otherwise noisy cities across the country.

The cathedral from the view of the wildly colorful cemetery.

A typical Nicaraguan rural kitchen. The wood burning stove reminds me that nothing is easy or simple for Nicaraguan women.

Amazing how orderly and clean this kitchen is considering the animals roaming just outside and the dirt floor. And yet, everything had its place.

Sewing in rural Nicaragua.

Laundry in rural Nicaragua.

A farming cooperative in rural Nic that is supported in part by USAID.

Cabbage, anyone?

The national cathedral in Managua — this was destroyed in an earthquake in the 1970s and now serves as a totally inappropriate place for President Ortega’s advertising.

Man begging outside of the central cathedral in Granada. (Yes, I did feel like I was on a church tour, but really — they are the most impressive buildings in each city. Thank you, conquistadores.)

Air conditioning in church. I’m thinking the heat of hell is a pretty appropriate theme.

Scene from the central square in Granada.

Nothing says humid fun like a carriage ride, right? Or — you could just sit on the steps, sip a cool Coke from an icy bottle and take photos of the suckers who agree to such rides.

~K