So, friends, the next time I will be posting about my YAV year will be the next calendar one, 2014. This middle of December simply cannot be so. It must be something like June because today was over 80 and sunny. I'm soooo not ready for a White Christmas, but I am. I even put on Ma's snowflake earrings (for those of you who do not know, Ma was my maternal grandmother, and after she passed away, I now have a small collection of her classy-but-funky jewelry) and still walk to work in flip-flops even though it's 40-50 in the mornings because I want to get acclimated to feeling chilly. And to be tough and stubborn, really, so I do not get too soft or lose my Minnesotan heartiness towards blizzards and temperatures too cold for snow.
Since I've been lax about blogging regular life and all our YAV adventures until this point, I figured I'd do a review of my 2013 YAV life in photos! (And some captions so you get a sense of what's going on...). You may have seen some of these photos before either in this blog or on Facebook, but just in case, here are a bunch all at once - enjoy!
YAV orientation in Stony Point, NY, where we did yoga...
... sometimes canoed...
... sang, danced (I got to lead Zumba one night) ...
... did Bible study, and re-envisioned mission together.
I had an amazing small group! We reflected together, challenged each other in different ways, and sometimes, just watched silly Youtube videos.
Stony Point is where us four Tucson YAVs first met and bonded!
En route to Tucson, I gambled for the first time ever - $1 in the penny slots in the Las Vegas airport at the encouragement of YAV alum Luke.
And when we got to Tucson, there's that time we learned we inherited chickens from last year's Tucson YAVs.
Here's the first time got more food from the Tucson community food bank than we knew what to do with. We were initially stressed out about making do with a limited stipend to cover bills and food, the nature of which is supposed to help us understand some of the decision-making individual and families on limited salaries go through to put food on the table. But then we were able to register for the Agency Market at the food bank for being a community feeding program and thereby get a chunk of our calories for free. This eases the stipend stress a bit and hopefully will still make us think about what cheap foods are available to those who can only shop based on price alone. The Tucson food bank is one of the best in the country, but still, those who have to rely on it will find that lots of canned goods, packaged foods, and things you would never expect to contain corn syrup are readily available when fresh produce is quite hit or miss. But the "hit" days for produce really are fabulous, and we are grateful for that resource.
And that time we all made weird faces for the camera at the same time.
Our first house dinner! (Before Steph moved in). In house meetings we decided to have house dinners for everyone to commit to being there at least once or twice a week. There's just something special about sharing a meal in community. Our latest favorites are weekend brunches, sometimes breakfasts of big productions before church on Sundays!
We had to take a bike safety class which actually did help us feel slightly more comfortable with the concept of commuting by bike around the city, and Heather was the tire changing example!
I love biking, I really do, but I learned that going uphill for long periods of time on a bike is something I was not prepared for - somehow I struggled up "A Mountain" behind our pro housemate Tyler. Here's me posing with the "A" on the side of the mountain!
The ladies of the house went to "Slut Walk," a spoken word event for whoever wanted to share stories or poems and call for an end to violence against women, victim-blaming, and slut-shaming.
The new Tucson YAVs were received with a commissioning service at Southside Presbyterian Church, founding congregation of the Sanctuary Movement with a history of social activism. This has started to become my Tucson home church, and I look forward to seeing some St. Lukers here during the winter months!
St. Luke, my home congregation, did a blessing ceremony with a laying on of hands to send me off to my YAV year, and Southside received me in the same way.
Sometimes in Tucson, it gets toasty. Sometimes, people with a little less melanin in their skin have a rougher time than others. Here we are walking to a nearby bar to watch the Broncos game with Arial, Denver native.
And then, Arial told us being in Tucson for a year of service was not the right thing for her at this time. She was always meant to be a teacher, and this year, she was meant to be back in Colorado teaching. We still think of her often!
Tucson has some of the most beautiful skies I have ever seen. This is en route to the top of Mt. Lemmon for Southside Presbyterian's fall retreat, where you go through five different biomes on your way to the peak! We were so grateful to get a change of scenery from brown desert to green leaves and pine needles.
Worship around the fire pit. It was so great to be able to bond with some Southside members at worship, on walks, at mealtimes, and other fun times on the mountain.
YAVs getting cozy on a foggy day up on the mountain - so foreign to our bodies that had gotten acclimated to 80s and sunny every day.
YAV love on Mt. Lemmon!
The national More Light Presbyterian conference came to Tucson! My home church of St. Luke Presbyterian is a long-time More Light Church that welcomes and affirms full inclusion in the church of people who identify as LGBT, and my new Tucson home church, Southside, recently voted to officially become a More Light congregation! Freddie, a YAV in Hollywood, came down to Tucson to stay with us and go to the conference, so we went to some of the sessions together to hear updates about progress in the national church, re-envision traditional binaries of gender and sexuality as spectrums, and then to see an incredible gay men's choir rock some Lady Gaga!
Jason, Heather's boyfriend took us to a traditional celebration at the San Xavier Mission of the St. Francis Feast - he grew up for part of his life on the Tohono O'odham reservation, the largest Native American reservation here in southwestern Arizona. Because the Catholic mission was founded to Christianize native peoples in the region, the celebration of Catholic rituals to this day is contentious due to the opposing forces of a history of colonization and current culture of people who have converted and do want to take part. This night in early October, the plaza outside of the mission was surrounded with food vendors selling everything from Indian fry bread to tamales, observers filed into the church to cradle, lift, and kiss the head of the statue of St. Francis, and then crowds gathered in the darkness outside for fireworks and a dancing procession whose music seemed to create dissonance with the tolling of the chapel bells.
The Tucson community rallied around 3 of its members being detained for ridiculous reasons and called for an end to the discriminatory law SB 1070 and its execution by Tucson police.
Here are Arturo and his family at the City Council meeting where they allowed more time for the "call to the public" so all community members who wanted to raise their voice could. He and other Tucsonans spoke about the October 8th incident and continued to press for an end to SB 1070's poli-migra cooperation so the community could trust the police and families would not be needlessly separated.
Group photo of community members who turned out for the City Council meeting. Con el puño arriba - With a fist in the air! Ni una mas - Not one more!
The march for the one-year anniversary of the death of Jose Antonio, a 16-year-old who was murdered by Border Patrol across the border in Mexico. The communities in Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Sonora, Mexico turned out to mourn and celebrate his life, and to continue to call for justice and peace on the border.
Peace and light through the border wall at the march for Jose Antonio - two BorderLinks employees embodying our organization's name.
Tucson activists stopped Operation Streamline from criminalizing 70 migrants in less than two hours. They did it for one day and hope to end it forever: Operation Streamline: Part Two
The next day, I went with Amy Beth (my YAV housemate whose placement is Southside Presbyterian) and Southside's Pastor Alison (and her adorable toddler Naomi!) to Phoenix for the national Ni Una Mas conference. It was incredible to see activists from all over the country host a conference en español to share strategies for community organizing and immigration reform.
At the conference we also divided into regional groups and focused on making our voices loud to President Obama to stop deportations.
And that Sunday (wow, this was a full week) happened to be Migrant Sunday at Southside. Pastor Alison tied so many things together from this week's actions in Tucson as well as her own civil disobedience - while the Southside community stood up to defend three of its own, she was in Washington, D.C. getting arrested with about two hundred other faith community leaders and politicians for immigration reform. On the altar was one rock for each migrant who had died and been found in the Tucson sector in 2013. 183 bodies had been found, so Amy Beth went through the very emotional and spiritual process of finding rocks in the desert and labeling each one with the person's name, or "Desconocido"/"Desconocida" if the name was unknown. Following the incredible sermon and service, church members processed to take a rock or two from the altar to place at the migrant shrine outside the sanctuary.
Amy Beth and I were part of a group of Southsiders that wanted to start volunteering at Ochoa Elementary, a Reggio Emilia charter school with an incredible model of teaching respect, conflict resolution, value of different skills and learning styles, and collective learning. In the bottom left photo, she is playing with musical instruments made from recycled materials. I've been assigned to help a fifth grade classroom, mostly with reading support (but really whatever the teacher needs me to do) for an hour on Fridays, my day off!
Mauricio used his MEA break to come visit
me in Tucson for the second time! What a sweetheart. And, here's
another Northfield, MN connection - Elisabeth used to be the assistant
coach for Carleton Women's Tennis, and she happened to be playing a
national championship tournament in Tucson!
My first delegation as a BorderLinks staff member - I assistanted for Alex's crew from the Presbytery of Des Moines! I did not do the whole delegation with them, but I did chunks as part of my training. It was especially moving to do many of the visits and learn right along with them - especially going to Operation Streamline as I discussed here.
One of the ways us YAVs support each other is doing some type of volunteer work or involvement with each other's organizations. Our first adventure in this vein was to follow through with our commitment to Habitat for Humanity's Brush With Kindness even though Arial had left her placement there. We thought of her as we gave the entirety of a woman's ten-year-old Habitat home a fresh coat of paint in a few hours.
My housemate Tyler and I went to the feed store to buy more chicken scratch and feed, and since we had trailers hitched up to the backs of our bikes, they opened the sliding doors to the storeroom for us to park there, and we found animals for sale! Baby chicks, hamsters, and my favorite (that I'm clearly really excited about), miniature rabbits! Even though we probably cannot have a fuzzy pet in our house, now we know where we can go to play with one if we want to.
That night I got to work a concert -
what?! - Katia Cardenal, one of Nicaragua's most famous singers, chose
to give a benefit concert for border justice organizations including
BorderLinks at Southside in Tucson, the city where she built her career
as part of a duo with her brother - Duo Guardabarranco. Since her
brother's passing, she became a solo artist and this concert performed
with her daughter! Katia wove stories about life and politics (and
spending five years in Norway where she produced seven albums and
translated Norwegian songs to Spanish) in between incredible melodies
about her homeland, love, and environmentalism. Check her out on YouTube
if you like! YouTube: Katia Cardenal
Southside had a Halloween party in the fellowship hall, so Amy Beth and I made up some costumes and biked to church to play games and spend time with Southside families. AB is a "college to-do list," I'm a tennis player (for those of you who have known me prior to my YAV year, this is not super original, but people in Tucson don't know tennis as part of my identity!), and the adorable Ellie May I think dressed up with her family as a tiger. We just borrowed her for the photo because she's so stinkin' cute.
Over the actual holiday of Halloween, YAVs from Austin and Denver joined us Tucsonans for our own border delegation to Agua Prieta, Sonora, Mexico, across from Douglas, AZ. We found out the day before that we were taking the Suburban (with a few years on it and about 18 different ailments) without
our coordinator Brandon, so Heather, Amy Beth and I did the driving to,
in, and from Mexico. Here it is in the daylight, with AB trying to work
her magic on the trunk door. This is after surviving our 2.5-hour drive in the dark to A.P. in the first place. We were pulled over in the outskirts of Tucson, not for speeding (I don't think it could speed on the highway if it tried...), but because our taillights were not working. After calling Brandon, we fiddled with the switch a few times and lo, it was just a fuse issue that resolved itself. But by that time we had pulled off the highway to the safety of a mechanics' lot and the muffler decided to stop muffling! Don't worry, Brandon was always a phone call away. And the Suburban did serve us well, albeit noisily. Our delegation leader Hugo from Frontera de Cristo Presbyterian Church was with us the entire time once we got to A.P., and he gave us excellent directions!
Because it would be part of my BorderLinks role, Brandon uhh, encouraged, that I do all the driving in Mexico, which included following the Water for Life team of CRREDA, a drug/alcohol rehab center and community partner, to fill up water tanks in the desert for people migrating on the Mexican side of the border.
We eventually parked the vehicles and walked typical paths of migration in the desert, all the while imagining what it would be like for people to walk and crawl this in the dark, trying to avoid detection by authorities, poisonous and scared/scary creatures, and every spiny plant imaginable.
The whole team outside of CRREDA. We met some amazing people that day (and the whole delegation!), but especially all of these leaders who fought their battles to sobriety here and now help others through theirs. Two 14-year-old girls especially astounded us with their maturity and all they have been through to have struggled with drugs and what they had to do to obtain them, accept rehab and decided to stay, and then become our English interpreters.
Dougla-Prieta Works holds various community classes including organic
gardening methods, and if individuals or families are interested in
taking home what they learned, they are given some starter seeds as well
for a healthier community!At Dougla-Prieta Works, we got to help out by
creating the adobe wall around one of the plant beds in their organic
garden. Apparently placing the last stone is a huge deal - as Raul from
CRREDA explained, in Mexico there is always a big to-do to celebrate the
first stone of an infrastructure project, but because of corruption or
running out of funds or motivation, projects that are seen through to
completion with the final stone are a rarity to be celebrated! Here we are applauding Estela placing the final stone.
Here I am surrounded by bags of better-than-fair-trade coffee, Café Justo (Fair Coffee)! In the mid-1990's, coffee prices dropped especially following NAFTA, so farmers of traditional coffee growing regions in Southern Mexico could no longer afford to keep cultivating coffee. Many migrated northward within Mexico and some to the U.S. until a couple men in Agua Prieta thought about forming a cooperative and doing the entire coffee production process themselves, including the roasting, which is where the bulk of profits come from. Instead of farmers shipping the green coffee beans elsewhere to be roasted and thereby only being paid for cultivation, they wanted to keep the entire process in-house to benefit farmers and their communities. It started small of course, but now there are 45 families on board in Chiapas, and people who had migrated have started to come back because it is economically sustainable! Fair trade standards are great, but this is even greater because farmers are working in just conditions and are able to keep more funds in their communities so they have solid economic opportunities at home, rather than having to migrate to survive. After a few years of Café Justo's growth and expansion from Chiapas to two other states in Mexico Here's their website to learn more and order to support these communities: http://www.justcoffee.org/
We had an incredible experience in Agua Prieta, clinched by a moving and humanizing visit with a Border Patrol agent in his home. The day after our return to Tucson, we got up early once again to help harvest leftover pumpkins for Heather's placement organization, Iskashitaa Refugee Network's gleaning program. They connect refugees to services they need in Tucson, and their main work is working with refugees to harvest produce around the city that would otherwise go to waste, and turn it into preserved goods or exchange culturally traditional dishes. Here's Heather looking adorable with her pumpkin and her sun protection. Who knew people grew pumpkins in the desert?
We came away with a few!
Here's our group of YAVs and a brother and sister from Kenya!
Tucson has taken All Souls/Day of the Dead, Dia de los Muertos, traditions from Mexico and Central America and made them their own. The parade in Tucson has grown exponentially the last few years, and traditions include face painting like skeletons and other rituals to connect with and celebrate dead loved ones. The YAV program got us a professional face painter, so here are my before and after pictures!
And then it ended with this pretty bizarre acrobatic dance fusion imagined by an artistic group in Tucson. Throughout the parade, people had written prayers on slips of paper and put them in a giant metal ball now flaming off in the distance of this picture for the prayers to go up to the heavens.
Meet my first BorderLinks delegation! What a great crew to start my delegation leading career with - six young souls from Carpe Diem Education in the middle of an experiential learning semester. Here we are on a desert walk with Dan Millis of Sierra Club Borderlands (and also a rocking BorderLinks board member). MaryCruz was also amazing to co-lead with, and I look forward to working with her more!
Here we are in front of our sister organization in Nogales - HEPAC!
YAV girls' weekend: Heather had connected with the representative
from San Francisco Theological Seminary back at YAV orientation who
invited all of us to their Inquirers' Weekend! They flew us out and put
us up in a beautiful guest house, and it ended up being just the three
of us plus a man named Craig as Inquirers. We were a little excited to see real greenery and fall leaves.
They treated us so well, really investing in getting to know us, giving us tours of the SFTS campus, the Graduate Theological Union of which SFTS is a part (a collective of seminaries where you can take classes from and get resources), and then even down into UC Berkeley - and we came across a protest about... immigration issues! We of course had to check it out, and we learned this group wanted California to be more immigrant-friendly, especially in light of an upcoming visit by Janet Napolitano, who became the president of the University of California system after a controversial post as Secretary of Homeland Security.
Our last full day visiting the seminary, they took us sightseeing in the city of San Francisco itself, and after official activities, I got to meet two dear Carleton friends, Jessie and Min Yao at the ferry building for dinner before taking the last ferry back to Marin. So good to catch up with them!
Sometimes, I get to play in the dirt at work! Breaking up rock-hard soil in the BorderLinks garden is a great stress reliever.
Another community turnout to a City Council meeting to push for changes in practices around SB 1070 - this time in "¡Alto a la poli-migra!" (stop the police-immigration cooperation) tshirts. Community members and organizations such as the Southside Worker Center, Corazon de Tucson, and the ACLU worked together to put forth recommendations to the City Council, and many of them will be taken under advisement and implemented in coming months!
At BorderLinks' staff retreat, we retreated to the church of our board president, and in the community garden, this cholla I think got snagged off the ground by my long skirt, and then it proceeded to enter my foot! Thankfully I could pull it out before it lodged itself more permanently, but it was hard to know where exactly to grab so I didn't get stabbed more...
Maria, in the middle, one of our new BorderLinks staff, is also a flamenco dancer! My co-worker Alex and I brought friends along to see her perform at Casa Vicente, and we hope she teaches our staff a couple things sometime.
Thanksgiving plans changed a couple of times, and instead of me traveling somewhere, people came to me! Mauricio came to visit me, and we had a lovely few days of vacation, exploring Tucson, playing a little tennis (and guitar), and catching up.
We even made our first-ever Thanksgiving meal - pot roast with tips from his grandma, and a few hours later, it turned out beautifully! Hallelujah.
Our original thoughts were to try to meet my cousin Angie and her family where they live outside of Phoenix, but they instead came to Tucson too! And even brought my cousins Carrie and Dan who were visiting as well, so we had lunch at my house, and then went for a nice hike on A Mountain. It was so nice they could all come spend some time in Tucson with me!
After Thanksgiving break, we really needed to do a deep clean of our house. We hung out for a few hours with some music blasting and the incentive of treating ourselves to a dinner out in a restaurant for the first time in a very long time. Once we could breathe easy, we could get semi-dressy and eat Thai food.
We were invited to the Tucson YAV program steering committee meeting at one of the member's homes out in the middle of nowhere. It was great to meet our board to learn some of the business side of things, and we look forward to spending more time with them as they have all offered to do a different activity to bond with us throughout the year.
Winter apparently happens here too. Nothing like Minnesota, but 40 degrees at night with no central heating does get a little chilly. Thank goodness for fireplaces.
My second delegation: Harvard Divinity! The name was intimidating, but the group was so sweet, thoughtful, and already accustomed to critical thinking and reflection. Here Shura Wallin, a warm and spritely woman, takes the crew on a desert walk as a part of the Green Valley Samaritans - a group who sends vehicles out into the desert every day to place lifesaving water along migrant trails and provide food, medical assistance, and other humanitarian aid to anyone who needs it.
Shura and MaryCruz are longtime friends!
Here we are outside of HEPAC.
And back at BorderLinks after my final reflection with them. I had to transition them over to Alex for their last day and a half because...
... We had a YAV weekend in Cascabel! Here are AB and Heather looking cozy on the way to the rural hermitage community for their annual Christmas Fair where lots of local artists, artisans, and farms have a grand time selling their wares. It was semi-retreat, semi-work as it is now tradition for YAVs to come help at the fair every year.
Good way to support local economies! I picked up a few Christmas gifts for family throughout the weekend.
Here's our main post - the bake sale.
Oh yea, and we stayed outside in a tent.
The first night we hardly slept because we were so cold, and felt
validated the next day when we learned it was not some balmy 35 degrees
and we were wimps, but rather 18 degrees overnight. We built some
survival skills, that's for sure.
We also even did a little folk singing, jumping up on stage to sing some harmonies with one of Brandon's family friends. It really was a lovely weekend.
I love that BorderLinks staff also holds involvement in the community in high priority, trying to get to events with HEPAC in Nogales and Frontera de Cristo in Agua Prieta when we can, and we got to take a day of work to meet with some of our A.P. community partners and then take part in a border-themed posada. If you're not familiar (as I wasn't), a posada is a tradition in many Mexican communities where people process to different houses and knock on doors to remember the journey of Mary and Joseph to find a place to stay in Jerusalem. The first few doors they are rejected as they sing a traditional song begging to be welcomed in, and finally a house accepts them for the night, and there is much rejoicing.
In this border posada, the lyrics were re-written to act out people on
the Mexican side asking for passage and the U.S. rejecting them at the
first two stations. At each station, different leaders read a bible
verse and shared a prayer of reflection through the immigration justice
theme, connecting the struggles of the holy family to the struggles of today's migrants. Josias, our new friend from Frontera de Cristo, is on the left with the singers on the U.S. side.
At this station, we remembered the children and families affected by border separation. Joca of Frontera de Cristo says the prayer for this one.
And for the third and final station, we from the U.S. side asked for permission to come to the Mexico side, and both sides asked for forgiveness. We recognized a young Mexican couple with their young baby as parallel to Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus, as well as the migration of Jesus from the divine to the human. We then "passed the peace" in Presbyterian tradition (greeting many individuals with phrases such as "Peace of Christ be with you" or "Paz de Dios," etc.) and shared hot cocoa outside of the Migrant Resource Center.
The last event I'd like to highlight: BorderLinks' staff holiday party at our Executive Director Fernanda's house. Staff and board members mixed and mingled, and Nancy, Alex, and I even brought out the guitars for the traditional version of the posada song.
And of course there was also a piñata. What better way to recycle the piñata after it has been cracked and raided than turn it into cute hats? Here are three of my awesome co-workers: Indira, Margi, and Nancy.
I'm sure I've accidentally left out some people, adventures, and experiences - my apologies. Thank you, dearest family and friends, for your support of my YAV year and making these experiences possible! Happy holidays, peace and love to you!
