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First Annual Rogue Bud Writing Competition

First Annual Rogue Bud Writing Competition Sponsored by
Rose Audrey In Honor of Joel Muska

First Place Prize
I will Publish your Book!

Let me take your words and transform them into a work of art. I can help you to produce a quality product and it will be yours to do with as you like. I will design a cover for your creation and I will format your words into a book. Then I will set you up with your own account with Lulu.com and you will have a world wide web storefront featuring your very own book!
*ISBN purchase winner’s responsibility as well as copyright.

Do you have an unfulfilled vision of some day becoming a published author?
Do you have an outstanding work ethic? Do you have a great attitude?
Are you a team player? If so this contest is for you! I am now accepting submissions for novels to consider for publication. See contest guidelines.

Contest Guidelines:

Please email me an 800 word or less essay on why I should select your novel to be considered for publication. Include a one page synopsis of your novel with the entry essay. (One page synopsis will not be included in word count.) I will review the submissions and select ten people whom I will then request to see more of their work. I am a Christian and the work must reflect high moral values.

Joel Muska is my co-worker who is retiring and I wanted to do something to honor his persistence, reliability, great attitude and stellar work ethic.
If you feel that you have something substantial to offer please contact me!!!

Initial Submission Deadline:
September 15, 2010
No late entries will qualify

Email Contest Entries to:
Joyfulnoizministries@yahoo.com
Subject line must say: Rogue Bud Competition

2010 Poetry & Flash Fiction Contests Guidelines [06/27/2010] | Printable guidelines

 

Prize: $500 for the best poem & $500 for the best flash fiction plus publication in the journal. * Finalists in each genre will also be considered for publication.

Deadline: Dec. 30, 2010.

Eligibility:

* Open to all poets and writers whose work is in English.
* Entries may not be previously or simultaneously published.
* All MMM staff members and family of staff members are ineligible.

Anonymous judging:

* Do not put your name on your work(s). All entries will be read anonymously.

* Include in your cover letter: (i) your name, (ii) e-mail address and phone number(s), (iii) mailing address, & (iv) the title(s) and genre of your submission.

* If you enter in both categories, please send them in separate envelopes.

* Mark “poetry contest” or “fiction contest” on the envelope.

* Mss. cannot be returned; do not send your only copies.

* Include an SASE (self-addressed stamped envelope) to receive the announcement of the winners.

* Send paper entries in duplicate.

Entry Fees:
$15 for as many as 5 poems per entry (total submission cannot exceed 10 pages).

$15 for as many as 2 flash fictions (or short-short story under 1,500 words each, typed double-spaced).

Entrants get a free subscription!
Make checks payable to: Many Mountains Moving.

Final Poetry Judge: TBA

Final Flash Fiction Judge: Thaddeus Rutkowski

Send to:
Many Mountains Moving
(Poetry or Flash Fiction) Contest
1705 Lombard St.
Phila. PA 19146

Or via e-mail, send an attachment (RTF, Word, WordPerfect or PDF) to editors@mmminc.org without any identification in the ms. itself. Then send a paper cover letter along with a check for $15 exactly as you would with a regular paper submission. (See above). Ms. will be acknowledged as received as soon as the check arrives.

PHOTOGRAPH BYJOLKA IGOLKA

A Landscape of Women's Stories

 

Submissions Round Two

Thanks to everyone who submitted for round one. We will be in touch with each of you by July. We are now moving into round two of submissions.

Overview

 

Mapping Me: A Landscape of Women’s Stories is an anthology of fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, photography and artwork. Its objective is to explore the connections – the invisible threads – that exist between women across the globe. Our starting point is to place the most basic question of identity, “Who am I?” within the complexities of culture and ethnicity. How do women respond to motherhood, rage, loss, relationships and loneliness across cultures? Do we share the same concept of grief and sadness, joy and love? We ask the writers and artists to tell stories, which negotiate the demands placed upon everyday women by society. The goal of this project is the sharing of such stories that allow the readers to draw their own conclusions whether or not culture is a divisive state between women.

 

Content

 

 

Mapping Me: A Landscape of Women’s Stories is about transcending the physical geography of our contributors as they map the internal landscapes of their lives. Our themes are those ‘points which connect us.’ While the female reality varies across countries, still we laugh and we cry. We may not personally understand the experience of arranged marriages, bound feet, or restrictions across checkpoints but we can understand a mother’s love, a daughter’s pain and a young girl’s giggle. Some of our themes explore the bonds between women, shifts in consciousness and experiences in extreme situations but all our stories are by women and their choices. Our objective is to breakdown the different stereotypes in an entertaining - and sometimes comical – way. This anthology gives voices a chance to be heard and the reader an opportunity to listen to positive female stories outside of tabloid global gossip.

 

Some Questions To Think About

So what does this mean for you? Well really, it is up to you. Some questions we have we been asking artists and writers to think about are:

1. Who are you? Are you a 'Culture' first or a 'Woman' first? What is your voice?

2. How do you negotiate the cultural and/or societal authorities that tell you to be thin, pretty, get married, have children, worship, obey/disobey, have a career, stay at home etc.

3. Do you have a burning story about an event, a lost love, heartbreak, arranged marriages, unarranged marriages, infertility, fertility, or even a bathroom cluttered with make up.

4. Do you want to express conflict? Family dynamics? Frustrations over rivalries, children, demands of home and work, silences, arguments, tension with extended

families. Do you have a story of revenge? Manipulation? Women are complex creatures and we are capable of great loving as well as great evil too. We are, of course, human.

 

5. Who do you see in the mirror each morning? How does your culture affect your body image? Does it? Do you fight against it? Do you buy into any stereotypes? Do you have a funny story to share. We are looking for humour too. This is not a grim book.

 

Categories

 

 

Please select a category and create a story, poem, creative non-fiction or artwork.

 

· Category 1. Stories of movement and motivation, restriction and escape. 

· Category 2. Stories about food and nurturing. 

· Category 3. Stories about, touch, love, sexuality or virginity.  

· Category 4. Stories about self-image, judgments, perceptions and observation. 

· Category 5. Stories about motherhood, family, marriage, fertility, birth.  

· Category 6. Stories of laughter, fun, malice, viciousness.  

Additional Guidelines

 

 

Please make sure your work conforms to the following guidelines:

 

· For round two, contributors’ literary works must be original and unpublished.

· You may submit as many works as you wish.

 

· Writer’s Word Count Guidelines

 

1. Short stories: no more than 1000 words
2. Creative non-fiction: no more than 1000 words
3. Poetry: 4 to 6 pieces.

4. Flash fiction - anything less than 500 words.

· Your work must be submitted as either an attachment in a rich text format (RTF) or a word document (doc). No PDF files or docx files, please! We simply cannot work with these file formats. Alternatively, you may paste your work in the body of the email. If your writing has a specific format, attach it as a file to the email.

 

Works can be submitted in your mother tongue. Please provide an English translation with your submission.

 

· Artwork Guidelines

· You may submit as many paintings, photographs or a mix of art and prose as possible. We accept JPG files (no JPF)

· Submit your work to Orchid Tierney and Tamara Azizian at mappingme@gmail.com

· Please provide a cover letter and include a short biography (no more than 50 words).

· Let us know under what categories you are submitting your works.

· Deadline is the 1^st of September 2010

· Our reading period is 1 to 3 months

Please do not send links of your writing or artwork. We will not read them.

 

Payment

 

 

We regret that are unable to provide payment to contributors as this is a self-funded enterprise.

 

 

Any questions please contact us at

 

mappingme (at) gmail (dot) com or visit us at www.mapping-me.blogspot.com

 

Cuba, an African Odyssey

  

<img style="visibility:hidden;width:0px;height:0px;" border=0 width=0 height=0 src="http://counters.gigya.com/wildfire/IMP/CXNID=2000002.0NXC/bT*xJmx*PTEyNzg*NzMwNjIyNzMmcHQ9MTI3ODQ3MzA2Nzg1NyZwPTEwNjExOTImZD1mLTMxMzUtY3ViYV9hbl9hZnJpJmc9MSZv/PTg5ZjdlYTU3M2I1ZjQ3ZDk5MTFhNWIzZDEwODBiZDliJm9mPTA=.gif" />Watch more free documentaries

Trailer for the documentary.

GO HERE TO SEE THE FULL DOCUMENTARY

(2008) 116 min

CUBA, AN AFRICAN ODYSSEY is the previously untold story of Cuba's support for African revolutions.

CUBA, AN AFRICAN ODYSSEY is the story of the Cold War told through the prism of its least known arena: Africa. It is the untold story of Cuba’s support for African revolutions.  It is the story of men like Patrice Lumumba, Amilcar Cabral, Agosthino Neto and of course Che Guevara who have become icons, mythical figures whose names are now synonymous with the word revolution. This is the story of how these men, caught between capitalism and communism, strove to create a third bloc that would assert the simple principle of national independence.  It is the story of a whole dimension of world politics during the last half of the 20th century, which has been hidden behind the facade of a simplistic understanding of superpower conflict.

CUBA, AN AFRICAN ODYSSEY will tell the inside story of only three of these Cuban escapades. We will start with the Congo where Che Guevara personally spent seven months fighting with the Pro-Lumumbist rebellion in the jungle of Eastern Congo. Then to Guinea Bissau where Amilcar Cabral used the technical support of Cuban advisors to bleed the Portuguese colonial war machine thus toppling the regime in Europe. Finally, Angola where in total 380,000 Cuban soldiers fought during the 27 years of civil war. The Cuban withdrawal from Angola was finally bartered against Namibia’s independence. With Namibia’s independence came the fall of Apartheid… the last vestige of colonialism on the African continent.

CUBA, AN AFRICAN ODYSSEY unravels episodes of the Cold War long believed to be nothing but proxy wars. From the tragicomic epic of Che Guevara in Congo to the triumph at the battle of Cuito Carnavale in Angola, this film attempts to understand the world today through the saga of these internationalists who won every battle but finally lost the war.

Credits

Written, directed and narrated by

Jihan El-Tahri

Edited by

Gilles Bovon

Photography by

Frank-Peter Lehmann

Sound Recordists

James Baker

Graciela Barrault

Produced by

Tancrède Ramonet

Benoît Juster

Jihan El-Tahri

 

 

10,000 Years Of History Run Through Mosley's Veins

July 5, 2010

Listen to the Story

July 5, 2010

Author Walter Mosley has taken the occasion of the country's birthday to reflect on what it means, to him, to be an American. In his own personal American mix, he identifies African, Jewish, and Asian ancestors; French-speakers, and Latinos.

 

Copyright © 2010 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

NEAL CONAN, host:

And now, the Opinion Page.

Most of us get the day off to observe Independence Day, which the calendar placed on Sunday this year. On this occasion, novelist Walter Mosley joins us. In an op-ed piece for CNN.com, he considered his identity and the 10,000 years of blood that runs in his veins. Among his observations: I am a new man almost every day. I and mine were once colored, Negro, black, Afro-American, African-American, brother, sister, Uncle Tom, revolutionary, good one, bad one, convict, malingerer, miracle and so much more. In the end, Mosley writes, I can say with conviction that I am America.

Are you America? In what ways? And when did you come to that conclusion? Our phone number is 800-989-8255. Email us: talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. That's at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. You'll also find a link there to his essay "10,000 Years of History Runs in my Veins."

Walter Mosley's latest is "Known to Evil." And the writer joins us on the phone from New York. And happy Independence Day.

Mr. WALTER MOSLEY (Author): Thank you. Happy Independence Day to you.

CONAN: And the fact that you are America might, upon rereading that paragraph, seem like one of those self-evident truths, I wonder whether that was easy conclusion for you to reach.

Mr. MOSLEY: Easy? I guess - you know, that's interesting, because I started out as a kid thinking out I was America and, you know, experienced a great deal of alienation growing up in the '60s and '70s, and maybe for a while thought I wasn't, and then came back to it again. So, whether it was easy or not, it was a long road.

CONAN: A long trip. Was there a moment of revelation that, oh, my God, I am?

Mr. MOSLEY: Well, you know, I wrote a book a while ago book called "What Next?" which is a - and - it came out just about the same time that we attacked Iraq for the second time. And it was a criticism of our war on terrorism. And I was on tour in England to talk about the book and, you know, I said, you know, we're doing this and we're doing that, talking about America.

CONAN: Mm-hmm.

Mr. MOSLEY: And the people are saying, well, why are you saying you? You're not doing this stuff. And I said, well, I am. I'm an American. And they said, well, you didn't vote for, you know, the president - Bush at the time. I said, no, but he's still my president.

And I think that that was the beginning of me saying, yeah, you know, I have to kind of face up to what I'm doing, you know, what I like and what I don't like and what my county is doing, what I like and what I don't like about it.

CONAN: The miracles and the crimes.

Mr. MOSLEY: Yeah.

CONAN: It is an odd set of contradictions that makes us all Americans.

Mr. MOSLEY: Well, you know, and it's - in a way, in spite of what we say about being a melting pot we are...

CONAN: Mm-hmm.

Mr. MOSLEY: ...and, you know, we start, you know, with those, you know, people coming over from Asia, you know, and becoming the Native Americans. And, you know, then the slaves - in my case, the Jews that came over at the beginning of the 20th century. The French and the Spanish and the - and every - all those other people all coming here at different times over many thousands of years to blend into a very unique kind of nation. When - and even though we call ourselves this great melting pot, we don't quite realize it, I think, how true it is.

CONAN: Well, we draw distinctions amongst ourselves, though, in many ways - you say you have Jewish blood?

Mr. MOSLEY: Yeah. My mother's Jewish.

CONAN: And therefore, have strong connections to that community and - or least that point of view.

Mr. MOSLEY: Mm-hmm.

CONAN: And also that you have memories of the Creole in New Orleans.

Mr. MOSLEY: Yes. The Creoles in New Orleans, and then, you know, even though I'm not directly related, you know, just being raised in L.A., you know, I mean, the thousands of Chicanos that help me out kind of govern, you know, what I became. This is - it's so amazing. And it's so true for all of us, you know? And, you know, the racial, you know, the racial definitions are so, I mean, they're kind of fallacious. You know, they don't really make much sense. And though, you know, we hold tightly to them, you know, this is black. This is white. This is, you know, so-called Hispanic.

CONAN: The - it's interesting that - I wonder, have you been watching some of those programs on PBS that Skip Gates has done, where he traces people's DNA and...

Mr. MOSLEY: You know, I have - I haven't. Yeah, because, you know, even though I'm interested in the biology of it, you know, obviously. What's more interesting for me is the linguistic culture that, you know, we're formed by linguistic culture. And so, you know, I'm not particularly drawn to it, though - you know, I know Skip is doing that.

CONAN: Mm-hmm.

Mr. MOSLEY: It's a wonderful thing, yeah.

CONAN: We're talking with novelist Walter Mosley about being American. 800-989-8255. Email us: talk@npr.org. In what ways are you American and when did you come to that conclusion? We'll go to Shawn(ph), Shawn with us from Panama City.

SHAWN (Caller): Hello. Am I on air?

CONAN: You are.

SHAWN: I make my living as a jazz pianist/vocalist and every city that I go to worldwide, I mean, I can find a crowd, but - I mean, nationwide I'm speaking. I can find a crowd or a group of musicians who are married to the concept of jazz which is an explicitly American music. And there's this resilience like through Katrina where the music keeps coming back. And I know this is probably a little - a different branch of what's been talked about, but I hear all this talk about New Orleans and the melting pot like talking about New York City, and I'm from Kansas City, originally.

There's something magical about the way that Americans respond to music, and especially amongst the jazz community. Yesterday, for some reason I just reflected on that and felt entirely American.

CONAN: Hmm.

SHAWN: Thankfully I have the music too.

CONAN: As long as you can play.

SHAWN: Yeah.

CONAN: Shawn, thanks very much. We appreciate it.

SHAWN: Mm-hmm. Thank you.

CONAN: And you were talking about the languages of America, Walter Mosley, jazz is among them.

Mr. MOSLEY: Oh, yeah, jazz is definitely in. And you know - and it's so interesting because it is, as I said in that little article of mine, it's the kind of unconsecrated marriage between Europe and Africa, jazz.

CONAN: It's interesting, I grew up in and around New York and it was of great importance there to ask people, are you Polish, Ukrainian, Irish - who are you?

Mr. MOSLEY: Hmm.

CONAN: I was always told to understand that in Southern California, in California in general, that mattered a great deal less.

Mr. MOSLEY: Yeah. I think that that's probably true and that has to do with eras. That has to do with the history of - in New York being older or the east being older in some ways and reflecting the really ancient racial stereotypes of Europe where - you know, races were - if you were from - you know, if you came from Romania or you came from Spain or you came from Italy, you were different races.

You know, that's why everybody outside of Rome was a barbarian, you know, because there were different races. You know, and I think that - and but by the time you get to California, you know, that wave of, you know, America gets to California, the races have been changed into color.

CONAN: Yet both places are membranes. They're the places through which people pass into America.

Mr. MOSLEY: Yeah.

CONAN: Yeah. Let's see if we got another caller on the line. Lynn's(ph) with us calling from Rock Hill in South Carolina.

LYNN (Caller): Are you back to me now?

CONAN: Yes, we are.

LYNN: Okay. I like what you've been saying because, you know, in South Carolina, if you're not from here, you're a, like a come-here folk. You're either Yankee or you're just an outsider.

CONAN: Yeah.

Mr. MOSLEY: Yeah.

(Soundbite of laughter)

LYNN: It's like 20 years before you fit in. And I have lived here about 25 years.

CONAN: So, you're beginning to fit in?

LYNN: Yeah, just now. And I'm 62 years old and I'm just now beginning to fit in.

CONAN: So, being accepted as a local.

LYNN: Yes. Yeah. It's an interesting concept, isn't it? Because they just -they really are out of touch with the mainstream of America down here because they're so small. And I tend to want to speak up about that because, you know, women go so unrecognized sometimes in military, but on other occasions you do recognize them. I mean, if you have a degree or you have a specialty, like you're a cook on TV or you're - you know what, if you're a professional singer.

CONAN: Mm-hmm.

LYNN: I sing, you know, I went to college for that. And I play, because I have a keyboard but I'm not well known and I'm not in the business right now but it's just a different concept down here. I think because the weather is so muggy down here that I'm thinking about moving into New Mexico.

(Soundbite of laughter)

CONAN: It may take you another 20 years to be accepted there but I - you're right though it will be a little drier.

LYNN: Yeah.

CONAN: And today is just ferocious, as I understand it.

Mr. MOSLEY: Oh, yeah.

LYNN: It's in the hundreds coming up this week down here. And boy, it's terrible.

CONAN: It's terrible. Well -

LYNN: But, you know that TV show they had on the, you know, last night, "The Capitol Steps," that was the best one they've ever had.

CONAN: Hmm. I glad you enjoyed it, Lynn.

LYNN: Oh, boy. I knew everybody had enjoyed that. It was just plain good.

CONAN: Thanks very much for the call and hope you fit in.

LYNN: Thank you.

CONAN: Bye-bye.

Mr. MOSLEY: I mean, I used to live in Vermont, in a small town in Vermont. It was kind of wonderful there. People would say that you didn't - you weren't a member of the community unless your grandmother was buried in the graveyard.

(Soundbite of laughter)

CONAN: That leaves a lot of people out.

(Soundbite of laughter)

CONAN: Let's go to Richard(ph), Richard with us from Oakland.

RICHARD (Caller): I'm listening to your program as I'm doing my bookkeeping. And I was just - I was kind of touched (unintelligible) I just - last summer, I did a bicycle tour of Europe. And I started from Sicily and cycled through Sicily and then through Sardinia and Corsica and then the French Alps and the Swiss Alps.

And when you're seeing Europe at 10 miles an hour or even less when you going up these mountains, it's, you know, you're not going more than maybe 20 or 30 miles a day and so you're sleeping in a campground. It's a very - you know, pretty intimate. You get to see the population pretty intimately.

And I'm - you know, my grandparents where German (unintelligible) and we completely assimilate, but we always kind of hang on to our German heritage. And as I was traveling Europe, I - you know, and I'm not speaking bad of it, but it seems that lets say for instance you're talking to somebody from Spain, as an American, I can call that person a Spaniard, but a Spaniard, if they're -Spaniards talking other Spaniards, you'll say - you make sure that his region of Spain is very much so, he said, well, I'm from Catalonia or Seville.

And when I was traveling in France, it's even 20 miles later, people identify with their area or their drainage so intensely and consider themselves that first and a Frenchman second. Or maybe if I'm from Basel first and then I'm a Swiss second, or...

CONAN: Mm-hmm.

RICHARD: ...I'm from Sicily first and an Italian second. And their loyalty is to their region first and then to the country second. And when I saw that there, I always had these illusion about Europe being so strong, being, you know, (unintelligible) you know? We came out of the Second World War being a superpower unfortunately, but I would like to have seen Europe I was having so much faith in the European Union that they may help us or, you know, take a more active role in, you know, in war politics. And when I'm seeing how fractionalized the European is, it was pretty disheartening.

CONAN: It's interesting, Richard. Thanks very much. I hope you had a good time on your trip.

RICHARD: Yeah. You - can you speak to that, please?

CONAN: If you give me just a second.

RICHARD: Thank you.

CONAN: You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

And Walter Mosley, I wondered if you had a response to that.

Mr. MOSLEY: Well, I think it's interesting. I think that, you know, one of the things that strikes me about America that's good about us and also bad about us is how ahistorical we are, you know? And I've seen the other day when my father was telling me that when he was in World War II and they, you know, they got to France, the first thing they said is, Lafayette, I am here. And, you know...

CONAN: That was actually World War I, but that's all right.

Mr. MOSLEY: No, my father said it in World War II.

CONAN: Okay. Well...

Mr. MOSLEY: I know my father said it.

CONAN: The general said it World War I.

Mr. MOSLEY: And I know that wasn't in World War I. But, yeah, they said it's in World War I, too, but they were still saying it in World War II, that obviously...

CONAN: Yeah.

Mr. MOSLEY: ...my father was just a sergeant there. And I think that our knowledge of history has changed. But even when we knew our history, we didn't have that much of it.

CONAN: Mm-hmm.

Mr. MOSLEY: And Europe has so much more to - it's a wonder and a weight on them, you know? And I don't really know what to think about. I don't know if it's - I don't, you know - the caller said, you know, unhappily, we ended up a superpower. Yeah, it's true. I don't know if I want Europe to be a superpower, either, saying that they've, you know, fueled some of the bloodiest wars in history.

CONAN: On the other hand, the alternatives were not happy ones.

Mr. MOSLEY: What do you mean?

CONAN: If we weren't the superpower somebody else might have been, and the alternatives were not happy ones.

Mr. MOSLEY: Well, might not have been, yes.

CONAN: Yeah.

Mr. MOSLEY: Though I'm not sure - I think I agree with the caller, saying well, it would be nice if we weren't either, if we can actually kind of just share the planet and share, you know, the world, you know, between us without having to have superpowers, that will the best possible thing.

CONAN: Losing would have been unfortunate and...

Mr. MOSLEY: Losing to Germany would have been really awful, certainly.

CONAN: And you weren't going to beat Germany unless you were a superpower, so...

Mr. MOSLEY: Yeah. But we - I think he is right that we came out of it a superpower. We didn't go into it a superpower.

CONAN: Oh, that's true.

Mr. MOSLEY: Yeah. We came out of it like that.

CONAN: No question about that.

Mr. MOSLEY: And - but anyway.

CONAN: Anyway.

Mr. MOSLEY: That separation in Europe is wonderful and terrible.

CONAN: Richard, thanks very much for the call.

Here's an email from Nancy(ph) in Guadalajara. I never felt particularly American until I moved away. I now live in Mexico. And I am surprised how much I miss everything from the U.S.: the music, the writing, TV, movies. I realized the U.S. has a quest for excellence in invention, products and both public and private services, and distributing the results of that quest rather equitably.

Mr. MOSLEY: Hmm. Wow. I don't know what to say about that. I'd have to be very insulting to people like Japan and Switzerland, you know, Mali, I don't know. I think - it's interesting, I think that it speaks to us - we have an identity as an American. And I'd have that identity, and I love America, but I don't think that we're better than other countries really.

CONAN: I wanted to ask you about your conclusion to your piece...

Mr. MOSLEY: Yeah.

CONAN: ...that you said this history is not composed of the false accounts of the past. It is the blood and the beat and the light that passes through my mind and yours. I am your sibling, whether you know it or not, and whether you accept me or not.

Mr. MOSLEY: Yeah.

CONAN: Brother is an interesting word.

Mr. MOSLEY: Yeah. And sibling includes women.

CONAN: It does.

Mr. MOSLEY: But - yeah, no. The thing is I'm, you know, I think that there's a underlying relation that we have. I think it's in our blood, too, like Skip will say. But I think it's also in our language and our culture. We're connected in ways that - in which we cannot be separated. And whether we recognize it or not, that relationship is there. And, you know, it's kind of wonderful when you don't feel pressed and you don't feel put upon by people in your environment and by the government and by businesses. There's a real celebration about who we are.

I think that earlier caller talking about jazz is really - is true in our music and our stories. There's a deep identity that Americans have that I love, you know? And I'm so happy not to be able to enter into it, whereas, you know, I think we talked to a little bit about W.E.B not W.E.B. Du Bois but about the talk on yeah, Du Bois's talk about slavery.

That, you know, that on the Fourth of July, he talks about slavery. And on the Fourth of July, I can talk about how we're all related in a very important, a very deep way. And I think that shows a big change in this country, even more so maybe than our president.

CONAN: Walter Mosley, thank you very much for your time today.

Mr. MOSLEY: Thank you.

CONAN: You could find a link to his essay at npr.org, click on TALK OF THE NATION. He joined us today from New York. Tomorrow, we'll talk with NPR's Barbara Bradley Hagerty about neuro crime. Join us then. This is NPR News.

Copyright © 2010 National Public Radio®. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.

Mysterious illness plagues Gulf oil disaster workers

Reported by: Janet Kwak Email: JanetKwak@woaitv.com Last Update: 6/15 9:57 am

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Gulf oil disaster workers coming down with mysterious illness

Oil cleanup workers hired by BP clean oily deposits from the shore in Orange Beach, Ala., Saturday, June 12, 2010. Almost two months after an oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, shortages of government-required protective gear and cleaning equipment are slowing work to remove the sticky mess and keep beaches along the coast safe and oil-free. (Dave Martin, Associated Press) SAN ANTONIO -- For weeks now, local hospitals have tracked patients with suspicious symptoms coming in from the gulf coast. Doctors are having trouble distinguishing it from the flu. "What makes it challenging is that patients show up with non-specific symptoms. Headaches, fatigue, problems with memory and concentration, upset stomach," lists Dr. Claudia Miller at UT Health Science Center. The illness is called "TILT," or Toxicant-Induced Loss of Tolerance. Patients lose tolerance to household products, medication, or even food after being exposed to chemicals, like burning oil, toxic fumes, or dispersants from the spill. "Things like diesel fuel, exposure to fragrances, cleaning agents that never bothered them before suddenly bother them," adds Dr. Miller. TILT has been difficult to track because symptoms are similar to the flu. Currently, Dr. Miller is educating primary care doctors on how to spot and treat the illness before it gets worse. Though it's not contagious, the best cure right now is staying away from affected areas. "Be sure to wear protective equipment and stay out of areas with smell, if [you] feel sick," Dr. Miller says. "The smells are usually chemicals that can make them ill." Those who are most at risk are pregnant women and patients with prior medical problems, like asthma. To see how susceptible you may be to the disease, click here.

Mother Jones Online / By Mac McClelland

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"I'm a Nervous Wreck": Gulf Fishermen's Wives Face Trauma, Domestic Abuse, Economic Insecurity

The wives of the men whose livelihoods have likely been destroyed by the BP spill forever, grapple with an uncertain future and air their rage.

June 28, 2010  |  

 

Oil stains cover the gloves of a Greenpeace official after he dipped them in oil floating on the surface in the Gulf of Mexico off Lousiana. Despite thick globs of oil that have coated their sandy beach, scared away tourists and forced fisherman to hang up their nets, Grand Isle residents insist the spill is no reason to stop drilling.

Photo Credit: AFP - Saul Loeb

 

 

 

Inside a cool, shaded old plantation house in St. Bernard, Louisiana, we're all breathing in our favorite color and blowing out gray smoke.

This relaxation exercise is brought to a roomful of women by the St. Bernard Project, a nonprofit founded in 2006 to provide rebuilding services to Katrina-ravaged St. Bernard Parish as well as offer "psychological rebuilding" through its wellness and mental-health center. Since the oil spill started, the organization has been looking to vastly expand its services to meet the area's latest mental-health crisis: the unrelenting depression falling on families living and working on the Gulf Coast. Everyone here except the three clinic workers and me is a fisherman's wife.

Michelle, the clinical coordinator running this early-morning support group, asks the five wives who have come what the St. Bernard Project can do to help them.

"I don't know, because I don't know what's gonna happen."

"We need work. For the wives."

"Whatever happens needs child care. If wives are gonna start workin', someone has to take care of the kids. A lot of fishermen have kids."

"The biggest issue is that our situation is unknown," a woman named Tammy says.* She is tough and broad and has a soothing husk in her voice like phone sex or five packs of cigarettes. Tammy is dressed in white and is eight months pregnant. I hope never to get in a bar fight with her. "They haven't stopped the oil, huh? This is like a time bomb. You can't prepare for what you don't know. But I can tell you right now that we need toilet paper."

The claims checks BP is supposed to be sending are eight days late, which means everyone's out of cash for necessities. The day before, cars lined up and down the nearby highway for a 38,000-pound food giveaway. This morning, like every morning, there was a line outside a church center in New Orleans East, in a part of town where stray dogs scavenge trashy lots and industry makes the air smell like burning toast. There, and at four other locations around Southern Louisiana once a week, Catholic Charities is giving out $100 grocery vouchers. Though they don't open until nine, sometimes it takes being at the doors by four in the morning, when it's somehow already hot, to get one, because they always run out. But you can't buy toilet paper with the vouchers—food only.

I remember that about the $75 grocery vouchers the Red Cross gave us as Katrina evacuees in 2005. The checkout clerk at a grocery store in Ohio wouldn't let me buy vitamins, and boy was I mad about that. Had I not already cried myself out at the Gap looking at a shirt that I already owned but might be underwater back home, I would have pitched a sobby fit in Giant Eagle.

"They won't even let you buy Dawn," Brenda complains. It's difficult to describe Brenda without employing the phrase "fiery redhead." In January, she moved out of the 10-by-16-foot FEMA trailer she'd been living in with four kids and a husband and cats and dogs. In the new house, she can't stop the kids from sleeping in her bed, because they got used to doing it, out of necessity, for so long. She thinks almost everything, including the following statement, is funny: "I mean, Dawn isrelated to food."

"So is toilet paper," Tammy says, and everyone thinks that's funny, too.

"You could get food with food stamps, but ain't no way to get toiletries."

 

"That's why we need them checks. We never got our second check."

"Us either."

"I heard on TV that BP spent $2 billion on the spill."

"Maybe in boom. It's not comin' in money."

Everyone laughs.

"The money goes through local authorities and they stuff it in their pockets. They gettin' the money and it's supposed to come to us and it just gets stuck there."

"We got our first check for the wrong amount and we went to tell them and they said we had to bring in all this paperwork, then we gotta wait two weeks for them to fix the check."

In the meantime, the women's husbands are working for BP, doing cleanup. Boat captains make $36 an hour, $25 for deckhands, but BP's capping their wages at $200 a day. All around, it's far less than the husbands usually make in June. And there's a lottery for work. Those people who get drawn seven days a week? It's rigged, the women say. There are cliques.

Young, fresh-faced Julie with the toddler on her lap doesn't want her husband doing cleanup anyhow. She tells him to stop doing it because it's dangerous. He says, "How do you want me to feed you?" She says, "How are we gonna eat when we're dead from chemical contamination you're bringing into the house?" He says, "We'll live on the check."

At this point in Julie's re-creation of this daily fight, everyone yells, "But we're not getting the check!"

"Okay," Michelle says calmly. Soon she will admit that she doesn't watch news about Louisiana anymore. She stopped watching it after Katrina. All it does is upset her. When she describes this to us, her body will give away how visceral her response is; she can't talk about the glimpses she's caught of the oil well gushing away, that live underwater feed in the corner of CNN's coverage, without cringing and wincing. But right now, she asks the fishermen's wives how they're feeling.

"Mad! I'm mad! At BP, at nobody has their shit together to take care of all this oil!"

"I'm not depressed; I'm angry."

And the men? How are they dealing with their own anger?

"My husband's talking about finding BP CEOs and hurting them, even if he has to go to prison forever. He's not thinking clearly. The oil spill has completely consumed him."

"They can't smoke pot anymore. It's just a part of the culture, all the fishermen do it, but now they have to take drug tests to get the cleanup work. So now they goin' drinkin'."

"My husband's goin' drinkin'. My husband comes home and screams at me. The food's not good enough, the floors aren't clean enough. That's why I'm here, for him to take it out on me."

In next-door Plaquemines Parish, 11 domestic violence came in on one recent weekend, compared with 3 on a typical weekend. Cathy Butler, the woman who takes the calls, isn't ready to attribute the spike entirely to the oil spill; it's a hundred degrees outside, after all, and calls always increase a bit in the summer. The mayor of Bayou La Batre, Alabama, says they've had 320 percent more incidents of domestic violence since the spill. Whatever the cause, Butler is sure it's gonna get worse soon. "The more people are out of work, the more trouble we're gonna have," she says. "Plaquemines Community CARE is offering help now, but we're gonna need some more counselors. In the coming months, I'm gonna see a definite increase." She says she is also seeing an increase in child abuse calls.

Michelle tries to offer some perspective to the women by explaining that their husbands' anger is just a reaction against helplessness. He can't fix this, but hecan fight. That's why we need to breathe to learn to be calm when we're awake. We need to accept surrender in the situation. If we can keep ourselves grounded, it helps the other person to ground themselves. That's one reason why the St. Bernard Project is reaching out to the fishermen's wives—to spread some of the grounding back to guys who aren't really therapy types. As Margaret Dubuisson of Catholic Charities Archdiocese of New Orleans, which has recently added 17 case managers and crisis counselors to its staff, says, "They're not the kind of people who think, when trouble comes along, 'Oh, I need a shrink.'"

Soon after this session, we'll hear about an Alabama charter boat captainshooting himself in the head on board his vessel, which hadn't seen much business lately aside from doing cleanup work for BP. "He had been quite despondent about the oil crisis," said a coroner. One of his deckhands told theWashington Post that many more fishermen share his boss' despair: "It's just setting in with 'em, you know; reality's kicking in. And there's a lot of people that aren't as happy as they used to be."

Everyone in the plantation house practices breathing in—one, two, three, four, five, six—holding for a second with abdomens, not just upper chests, full of oxygen, exhaling through the mouth for six counts more. Try to make it a game with kids, Michelle says. Have them visualize inhaling their favorite color, exhaling smoke with a hiss like a snake. The sound also lets you know they're really doing it, really practicing stress relief. Julie says her daughter can't go into the fish section in Wal-Mart anymore. When she sees it, she just starts crying.

"It's disappointing when you realize you're not as resilient as you thought you was," says a woman in a pink T-shirt. Her name is Donna, and she's ropy, a tight and wiry fortysomething with short dark hair. Once she starts talking, she can't stop spewing distress. "Everyone's saying this knocked us on our knees? We were already on our knees. I used to say I was a Katrina survivor until Gustav, and I realized I hadn't really survived, because I couldn't deal with Gustav. And now this."

The other women let her talk, nodding, though they've not been anywhere near so voluble about their own vulnerability. Tammy, for example, has simply announced several times, "I'm a nervous wreck."

"I feel like if I could just get structure back in my life, I could do it," Donna continues. "I haven't had structure since Katrina. I have four kids and a full-time job and they had all their activities and us adults played baseball but I still found a way to do it because I had structure. We functioned like this just fine. I was 40 when Katrina hit. It took me 25 years to get my structure in place, and now I don't have it. I turn on the washing machine, and come back later, and I've run the washing machine without putting the clothes in it. I don't know what I'm doin'. Every time I start to get structure something else happens. I hope I figure it out before the next disaster. But now I feel like we'll never get there. We're not even goin' in that direction anymore." 

Plaquemines Community CARE hopes to expand its wellness services with satellite offices, but doesn't have the funding yet. Catholic Charities does its counseling in St. Bernard on the back porch of a rectory. The organization, which is also the only place many workers affected by the spill can go for some help toward rent and utilities, got $1 million from BP for this kind of emergency assistance. The money ran out in less than a month.

The scenery between New Orleans and the St. Bernard Project office is grim, the stuff they show you on disaster tours, neighborhoods that look like Katrina was five weeks ago, not five years ago. The project is still helping the hurricane's survivors, treating 300 low-income patients suffering post-storm trauma in the last year and a half. They saw a surge of mental-health care need just from local residents watching eerily familiar total devastation in Haiti on the news. They now need two satellite offices and to increase hours; Patron Tequila is currently sponsoring a five-city fundraising train tour. 

Joycelyn Heintz, coordinator of the St. Bernard Project's Mental Health and Wellness Center, is bracing herself for the psychological damage this disaster is going to inflict both on her companions and on her client base. "Once we see the full impact," she says, "it's gonna be worse than Katrina."

*The names of the wives have been changed.

>via: http://www.alternet.org/story/147355/%22i%27m_a_nervous_wreck%22%3A_gulf_fishermen%27s_wives_face_trauma%2C_domestic_abuse%2C_economic_insecurity?page=entire

Twenty-Four Hours in a Haitian Camp

Monday 05 July 2010

by: Katie Kane, t r u t h o u t | Report

(Photo courtesy of Katie Kane)

It is 2:00 PM in what used to be the neighborhood of Croix des Prez in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. After the "catastrophe" of January 12, 2010, it became Camp Croix des Prez, only one of the many camps in which over 600,000 still live. Four months after the earthquake, it looks as though the destruction took place yesterday. Concrete dust, rubble, trash, half-collapsed buildings, rusted tin and tents make up the geography of Croix des Prez. It is a landscape on tilt.

I am here to spend the next 24 hours living in the camp. I've just flown in from Missoula, Montana, where I am a professor of literature at the University of Montana. I landed in the country a few days ago and, now, I am about to spend 24 hours in Croix des Prez. I'm not undertaking this action lightly. This is not disaster tourism, nor is this a stunt that takes its direction from American reality television. The camps in Port-au-Prince are notoriously dangerous sites of contagion, rape, violence and death.

These are precisely the conditions many Haitians have had to live with every day since the earthquake happened, and I have been invited by KOFAVIV, a local women's organization, to learn first-hand and on the ground what life is like in the camps. I am as prepared as I think I can be, which, in hindsight, is to say not at all prepared. Despite all my research and planning, nothing could have made me truly ready for the reality of Croix des Prez.

My expectations will be challenged immediately. As I wait for my camp contact Blaise Laloune to arrive, I realize that I am standing on top of the roof of a collapsed house. Other people are standing there with me. It is a difficult reality to take in. Wilclair Jean, a man who waits with me, realizes what I am thinking and says to me, "68 people died here." He gestures around the camp while he tells me, "We are standing on their bodies; they are under us and we walk on them everyday." In a statement that somehow sums up the general situation of failure on the part of the international aid organizations in Haiti, Jean says, "No one has come to help us to get them out." It is a phrase I will hear many times over before I leave the camp: "No one has come to help."

One man I meet asks me, "Has the world forgotten Haiti?" From the looks of Croix des Prez and the other camps I have visited, the answer has to be "Yes." In the ways that most matter - providing for people's basic human needs - the world indeed seems to have forgotten Haiti.

The women of KOFAVIV are frustrated. They want the world to know that Haiti still struggles. The women can't understand why, four months after the earthquake, with all the money donated to them, they continue to live in conditions that are profoundly dangerous, unsanitary and unfit for human habitation. Now that I am here, I can't understand it either.

How could this situation, one that is quite frankly unimaginable for anyone who isn't here to see, smell, hear and breathe it, be allowed to continue? It as if, four months after the collapse of the World Trade Towers, no reconstruction work had been done and Americans were living in the ruins of the buildings, cooking meals, bathing their children, struggling with each other for scarce resources and living their lives without much hope for the future.

But this isn't America, where our disasters are most often addressed and ameliorated somehow; this is Haiti. At 3:00 PM, the temperature at Croix des Prez is close to 100°, but, as I've found out, inside people's "houses" the temperatures are at least 10° hotter. Made of corrugated tin, scraps of wood, plastic, tarps, even paper, the homes are more like ovens at this time of the day. There are approximately 50 of these dwellings in Croix de Prez and about 350 people live here. It is a small camp that covers an area of about one-eighth of a square mile. There isn't a lot of room at Croix des Prez, but there are so many people.

At 4:00 PM, David Schmidt and I enter Monsieur Raimond's house, a ten-foot by ten-foot shack with a tarp roof that sags a bit under what is left of last night's rain. The home contains two mattresses elevated off the packed dirt floor, one chair without a seat, a small charcoal grill and not much else. It is as neat and tidy as such a place can be, with cooking and serving vessels and utensils packed into homemade shelves propped along the walls. The adults sleep on the beds and the children sleep on the floor on carpet scraps that are currently seething with flies.

David speaks in Kreyol to Monsieur Raimond to ask him about life in the camp. I notice a glass gallon jug on the floor that contains about two cups of cloudy water. I try hard to listen to what the elderly man of the house is telling us. I don't want to think about water and how much I'd like to drink some. As we leave and I say goodbye in Kreyol ("orvwa"), Monsieur Raimond, who is blind, understands that I am a woman. He had not known that. He says my name with recognition, "Ah, Katie," and tells me in French, "Je suis enchanté." We all laugh. He reminds me of my grandfather, who was equally courtly and polite.

From 4:00 PM until 7:30 PM that evening, Monsieur Raimond's story will be repeated again and again in the houses we visit. Potable water is not available. It must be purchased and it is expensive in a country with an 80 percent unemployment rate. Many people drink and bathe in dirty water and get sick as a result. Food is also still hard to come by. One woman, who is alone and whose four children live with her in her home, says that she is not able to eat every day. Her children listen to her talk to us and then look at me. They look at me as if I can help them and, of course, I can't. I have nothing to give them to eat. I think about my five children and how much they have to eat and how safe they were when they were small.

The story is the same for almost every member of Croix des Prez: food, water, shelter, security, employment and education are basic needs that are still unmet. Aid is often promised, but does not come or is given only a few times. Dwelling places are open to the elements. Today, the floors in a number of the "houses" are still wet, muddy even. In many cases, the walls of the homes are full of holes where the sun shines through. Later, because it is the rainy season, water will pour in through those same openings. Water and garbage flow right now through the trenches dug into the dirt trails that pass between the houses of the camp. I am very careful where I walk. I worry about the children who wander around in their bare feet. I can't imagine what it would be like to raise children in this kind of place.

At 5:30 PM, Blaise arranges for David and me to meet with a group of women. They speak of their sense of profound vulnerability. For Haitian women, the threat of rape is a shadow that falls over them as the sun goes down. In some camps, members of KOFAVIV and FAVILEK (another women's organization) sleep in shifts at night to combat the post-earthquake epidemic of gender-based violence. One woman tells me, "How can I hope to be safe when I don't even have a door?" "Anyone can come in," she says pointing to her house and then to her daughter. She starts to cry. I force myself not to weep with her, and tell her thank you in Kreyol. I mean something much more than thank you, but I am completely inadequate in my response.

For men, the issue of jobs is particularly important. While we move from house to house in one of the narrow alleyways that make up a maze of tin, wood and plastic between the houses, we come across Mathieu Dalmacy who is sitting outside his house playing his guitar. His response to our questions about conditions in the camp is startling in its intense, sharp critique of the work of NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) and aid organizations in Haiti.

"A job comes first, that's how I see it," says Dalmacy. "They have to create jobs for people. These international organizations might have come to help us for real, but I know and see that the people do not get what they are supposed to get. Here in Haiti this is the way it is: the big men get their share first. Maybe if those international organizations would have worked with the grass roots they would have gotten better results. For example, in my neighborhood there are a lot of homes that were destroyed. Is one of those international organizations willing to give me a job?"

Dalmacy talks to us about a number of other issues - dislocation, loss of land and the "50K cars" that he sees NGO officials driving around in - but he leaves us with a song he has written about Haiti. It is beautiful and heart wrenching: "Haiti you are suffering. / Haiti I love you very much / and you mean everything to me. / Even though things are hard / I am waiting for the day / when things get better. / If our ancestors, Toussaint and Dessalines were to rise from the dead / they would weep for you, Haiti."

By the time we are done interviewing people our first day, it is almost 8:00 PM. Despite the protests of Blaise and Nadège Maître, another member of KOFAVIV, I cannot eat. It is too much to listen to people who are starving and malnourished and then to eat - at least it is too much for today. David and I imagine that we will just turn in early. We couldn't have been more wrong.

Blaise returns with three men, one is the guitarist, Dalmacy. He has brought his instrument and some clairin, a local moonshine made out of molasses. We will be up for hours singing songs about Haiti and about love and, courtesy of David, there will be a bit of Bob Marley, songs of the Mexican revolution, Chuck Berry and the Beatles thrown into the mix.

Children dance and play with the water bottle rattles that David has shown them how to make. Blaise's son asks if he can sleep with me and Nadège, and I talk about her desire to keep studying languages, an educational project that was interrupted by the destruction of her school in the quake.

We are up until 11:00 PM when Blaise decides that we have had enough, dismisses the group and assigns a man to spend the night in our tent with us for our security. It is hard to fall asleep. It is hot, the ground is hard and there is a man I don't know sleeping in the same tent. But, I tell myself, I am not sleeping in a small, confined space with eight other people. I am not lying on a muddy carpet scrap while flies buzz around my head. I am not hungry or thirsty and I will not dream of the men who came to my home last month to try to take my daughter from me.

Six o'clock AM the next day, I wake early to find David already up and ready to work. In addition to interviewing a few additional people and continuing to document conditions in the camp, our primary job for the day will be to buy the materials for an afternoon meal that we will make together, Americans and Haitians.

We leave for the market place at 8:00 AM. With our money, Blaise and Nadège are able to bargain for fish, rice, mushrooms, plantains, and other ingredients at a much larger market place than the one in Croix des Prez. We return home and begin processing and cooking the food on an outdoor charcoal grill. Everything has to be prepared outside. The conditions are difficult, although the women don't seem to mind. There are no chopping boards and no tables. There is no kitchen sink and no garbage can.

The women laugh at my inability to properly chop cooked beets, or for that matter to successfully execute any task I'm given. They are patient with me. The knives have no handles: they are only blades, and the vegetables are really hot. I'm a mess of beet and lime juice, fish scales, salt and charcoal smoke by the time all is said and done. But the food is wonderful.

Haitian cuisine is a marvelous mélange of French, African and Spanish influences. The menu the women planned for us included poisson rouge (red snapper), riz djon-djon (black mushroom rice), pickliz (a spicy coleslaw), salade russe (beets, carrots and potatoes) and ju sitwan (the best limeade I have ever had). Blaise makes sure that everyone eats. We've managed to buy for and to help make food for about 40 people.

After the meal, the women and I do the dishes in pots of water. I use a plastic bag to wash things since there are no dishrags. Everybody is happy, but tired. It has been a lot of work and it is now 3:00, officially past the 24-hour mark. We have been in the camp for over a day. All that remains is to take a few last photos and to say goodbye to the women, men and children and thank them for their patience and for their hospitality.

We will leave behind us the living conditions that the people of Croix des Prez will continue to struggle with on a daily basis, without hope for change in the near future. Soon, both David and I will go home to the United States. We will go home to a shower, a dry place to sleep, to potable water, dependable sanitation and to an abundance of food and security.

All of what I have told you about Croix des Prez and about the camps in Port-au-Prince is true, but what is also true and, perhaps, most troubling about this story, is the fact that approximately $37,000 per individual Haitian has been raised by various aid organizations for disaster relief in Haiti. According to a recent CBS news report, in some cases only 7 percent of funds donated by Americans and others around the globe have been spent by aid organization. The best of the groups polled, The Red Cross, has spent 25 percent of its donations for "emergency relief" in the form of tents, shelters, cooking implements and food. In the case of each organization, the rest of the money is being held in abeyance for "long term" development in Haiti's "future." Even 7 percent of $37,000, which is $2,600, should be enough to buy a tent with a floor.

As I finish writing this article about Croix des Prez in the late evening on Friday May 21, it is raining in Haiti. It is raining hard and, unusually, it has been raining for four hours. I am dry, but in the camp houses are coming apart and falling down. The people are awake and wet. They are suffering. Men and women, grandparents and children, all are awake, I am sure of that. As they told us, when it rains, they have to stand up ankle deep in mud and water inside their homes, trying desperately to keep themselves and whatever possessions they can hold from getting completely drenched.

These people who have cooked for us and taken care of us will stand up inside their homes in the rain for hours, keeping a wet, miserable and familiar vigil. When the rain stops, they will try to clean up and go back to sleep in mostly wet and muddy clothes and bedding. While they sleep - if they sleep - garbage and sewage will continue to flood into their living spaces under the wood, metal and plastic walls of their homes.

In the ways that matter most, then, you and I have, in fact, forgotten Haiti. As I have said, the answer to the question I was asked when I entered the camp must be yes: yes, the world has forgotten Haiti. But, this forgetting, this global turning away, is not final. We must find a way to truly see into Haiti's camps. We must truly try to understand the lives and suffering of the people who live there. We must insist that the money we helped raise and gather for our fellow human beings be spent wisely, but spent now and spent in consultation with Haitian people at the grassroots as well as governmental levels.

A truncated version of this article was published in the Missoulian.

 

The Ninja Parade

Why Educated Black Men Won’t Settle Down

“…they are extremely arrogant and definitely aware of their self-worth.“

Those are the words of a black woman who loves black men, commenting on educated black men. It was in no way a “man bash”, only an observation about trends amongst educated black men that she knows. Does she proclaim that ALL educated brothas are like this? Nope. But is that attitude (and others) prevalent among the accomplished masses? Damn right. [NOTE: I chose a picture of President Obama and First Lady Obama because they have become the new "gold standard" for progressive black romance...and also the very thing that many educated black men appear to be uninterested in.]

Just last week, a female that I hold in very high regard echoed the same idea. She has grown tired of all of the articles on “why can’t black women find a man” articles on the internet and tv. She pointed out that all this negative press about black women reflects an attitude on the streets (amongst many men) that sistas are clueless, and therefor hopeless when it comes to men and dating. And, most importantly, that it’s always the black woman’s shortcomings that appear to be put on blast. She’s either: not submissive, too opinionated, self-entitled, domineering, selfish, hypocritical, too much baggage, too many kids, unsupportive, opportunistic…or just a flat out mean-spirited b1tch, etc. I’ve heard it all before.

I‘m not here to confirm or deny any of those claims, in fact, this post isn’t even really about black women. It’s about us…the “educated” black men of a neighborhood near you. For the sake of conversation we’ll define “educated” as:
- at least a Bachelors degree
- gainfully employed
- above average earning [NOTE: not earning potential...but actually earning]
- under the age of 35
- heterosexual
- single (not “separated” or “we’re about to get a divorce” but for real single and not legally tied to any woman)

Admittedly, this represents a pretty small group…when you look at the entire picture, but there are literally hundreds of thousands of these men walking the streets. For all practical intents and purposes this group is the male version of the “typical” female who is depicted in the “why can’t she find a man” articles. I did a rather un-scientific survey of about 110 females that I know; simply asking what are some stereotypes of educated single black men and why they’re still single. The response was swift and surprisingly pretty limited. The same 4-5 things KEPT coming up. And upon follow-up, women weren’t really sharing stereotypes, they were sharing their own struggles trying to find/date a “good” guy.

Here’s what I found:

1- Numbers. Let’s get the obvious shit out the way first, there are waaaaaay more sistas that have themselves together than men. There may be a lot of reasons for this: raising our daughters to not trust/depend on black men, cats getting caught up on the criminal justice system early, ignorance, poverty, the list goes on. All I know is, I went to a Historically Black University and there were WAAAAY more women than men. Parlay that into corporate America and we see brothas who know full well that if they weren’t a doctor/engineer/lawyer/manager/preacher/educator/Indian chief/whatever, that they wouldn’t have NO HEAUX…none! The numbers are in our favor and we know it. Crazy thing is, it’s still kinda only the Top 25% of educated brothas that get all the women anyway…which further frustrates the situation if women want a guy to be educated AND attractive. So educated brothas have minimal motivation to settle down because the pool of women is so large.

2- Arrogance. This is very closely related to, if not rooted in, point 1. It’s so easy to start smelling yo own piss with a couple degrees in hand and some money in your pocket [NOTE: especially if you *juvenile voice* ain't nevvvaa haaadd shit]. Not to mention, we’re often riding the wave of sexual conquest from college and our early 20′s…so a guy can have the affirmation of being successful, having plenty of heaux, and KNOWING that he can continue at this pace until he dies. Knowing those things, makes a man arrogant. And arrogance, by itself, isn’t why men don’t settle down or what to settle down…quite the contrary, arrogance is what’ll make a good woman stop fucking wit a nigga all-together. As thirsty and aggressive as some sistas are to get married, there are some things that even THEY won’t put up with. And arrogance is a violation that get’s tired real quick. Shiiiiiit, a cheater will get a pass before an arrogant nigga…at least you don’t have to see/hear the cheating everyday, but you are always confronted with a man reminding you of who he is, what he has, where he’s been, and what he’s done.

3- Sexual Prowess. Smart people are freaky. Sex is a stress reliever. Add those two statements together and you potentially have a sexual hurricane on your hands. I’ve noticed in my own dating of women from all backgrounds that those who are less educated, tend to have had fewer sexual partners and fewer “erotic” sexual tendencies than those who are extra-educated (they just some freaks). When I listen to my male friends talk, the ones who aren’t as educated have had fewer partners and experiences than the ones with education. And for men, sexual conquest sets the tone for his sexual appetite. A lot of educated brothas I know travel a lot, work out a lot, read a lot, and have a LOT of sex. That can be intimidating for some women to even be with a man who has miles like that. And he may think that one woman couldn’t possibly satisfy him because he’s so used to sexual conquest in different social circles, cities, states, and even countries. Some niggas really are dogs.

4- Schedule. Being successful, in just about anything, is time consuming. The more money is at stake the more the investment of time will have to be. Add to that a lot of brothas who are out pursuing their dreams believe that we have to be twice as good as our white counterparts to succeed. That takes time. I know guys that have devoted their whole 20′s in pursuit of their dreams, taking very little time to do things like date or be in love. Ironically, our drive and focus is a turn on to most women…but they soon realize that’s just a detached fantasy and that he’ll probably be more in love with his dreams/goals than he is with his woman. Not every sista is down to take a backseat to a man’s career aspirations. The second part to this scenario is when he “arrives”, or reaches the first set of big goals that he had for himself. The natural reaction is to “live it up”…enjoy the money, status, prestige, and women/sex that come with all of his hard work. I mean, what’s the point of devoting 7+ years of post-high school education and/or climbing the ladder if you can’t enjoy all the new pu$$y and money that comes with it? A LOT of brothas feel this way. Quiet is kept, this is why half of them grind so hard and put in so many long hours.

5- Keepin’ it Real. To be honest, I was actually surprised at how many times this came up in the feedback I got from women. I’m not going to go into how there’s no concrete “black experience” and that black people are complex, with many varied experiences, classes, and values…but I will concede that there is a dominant “experience” and THAT is very much located in “the hood”. The hood isn’t entirely ghetto, but does carry many of the themes and midsets of poverty and “the struggle”. A lot of guys, as they progress in their careers, do loose touch with where they came from (which is presumably, but not always, the hood). Loosing touch is a babystep away from frontin’, and frontin’ is time consuming and expensive. Especially if you frontin’ for some new muthafukas. With that level of frontin’ going on, dude may not have time to date or authentically get to know someone because he’s too busy keeping up with his new surroundings and he damn sure doesn’t wanna be seen with no “around the way” girl.

*6- White Women. Yeah I said it. I had to put an asterisk next to it because: although marrying/dating a white woman isn’t really a reason “why educated black men won’t settle down”…it is seen as problematic in the eyes of many as to why so many black on black unions never happen. There is a perception that the more educated black men tend to date outside of their race (or are more likely to date outside) than less educated black men, and for that matter black woman period. This is probably true, or at least has some truth to it. Although I’m not sure there’s that huge of a spike of “educated” vs. non-educated brothas, in terms of dating outside their race…it just seems like it kills morale when a super-successful black dude marries a white woman, given that there are so relatively few super-successful black dudes. [NOTE: nobody really cares if a broke nigga ends up with a white woman] And the media, especially media geared towards black women, doesn’t help this at all. The successful black man leaves the faithful black woman who’s supporting him since he was broke as hell for…a white woman, is a all too common theme in movies and music. The reality is, the closer a man get’s to the top, the more exposure to white people he’ll probably have. Long hours at the office can lead to romance…I’m just sayin.

So there, that’s just a mini-summary of the feedback I got.  I’m sure there’s more to discuss.