Misdiagnosing Poverty

Gillian Locascio, from Tacoma, WA, is an alum of AVODAH New Orleans. Currently, she works with local residents on a community health project in Western Panama.

This piece originally appeared on Jews4NewOrleans.org here.

‘Common indeed are the ethnographies in which poverty and inequality, the end result of a long process of impoverishment, are reduced to a form of cultural difference. We were sent to the field to look for different cultures. We saw oppression; it looked, well, different from our comfortable lives in the university; and so we called it ‘culture’. We came, we saw, we misdiagnosed.’ -Paul Farmer

Seeing oppression, or more often, the impacts of oppression and blaming it on culture — a phenomenon I have witnessed over and over in the last two years (and suffered from myself), working in New Orleans and in an indigenous area of Panama. I don’t think, however, we just call oppression “culture” because it makes us uncomfortable: I think it comes from a lack of historical awareness. Or at least, awareness of the right history. And the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond, an anti-racist organizing group founded in New Orleans, called Americans ahistorical.

Last year in New Orleans, with AVODAH, my housemates and I watched parts of the documentary film “Race: The Power of an Illusion,” we read excerpts from “A People’s History,” I worked daily and was mentored by people who had worked in the civil rights movement from the time of SNCC and Martin Luther King Jr.

And I got angry.

Ignition: Lifetime Goals and a Year of Service in Colombia

Leia Grossman is an AVODAH Alum who has worked at UNICEF in the Child Protection Section, earned a Master’s Degree at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, and helped build the Pursue community as a City Team member. She is currently spending a year in Cartagena, Colombia volunteering as a teacher through World Teach. She is blogging about her year at Cartes De Cartagena, but you can also follow along with her at Pursue. This is Leia’s first dispatch (cross-posted from PursueAction.org here)!

A little more than a year ago, I did an exercise as instructed by my brother Seth, wherein I listed my life’s goals. The instructions were:

“Get a stopwatch. Write ‘Lifetime Goals’ on the top of one page. List as many as you can in 2 minutes. Then take 2 minutes to refine, combine, and add any you forgot. Then do the same with 5-yr goals: What would you like to do in the next five years? Then 6 month goals: If you knew you had only 6 months to live, what would you want to do? 2 minutes to write, 2 minutes to revise.

Then go through, combine all lists and prioritize. Come up with your top 3 goals, these are your “A” goals. Then for each goal, take 2 minutes and list any actual activity you can think of that moves you closer to achieving that goal. What are the steps? Revise 2 minutes. Do that for all goals until you have a long list of activities. These are your “A” activities. Everyday you should do at least one “A” activity.”

I didn’t have a stopwatch, so my list of goals became rather long. At the top of my list:

• Quit my job and find one that I take satisfaction in (something creative and social justice-oriented)

The others became consolidated as follows:

• Be more physically fit and improve my yoga practice
• Get more focused in my writing
• Travel more frequently and write about experiences abroad – maybe do a volunteer project in another country
• Become fluent in Spanish
• Be more adventurous and take more risks
• Learn to dance

There were some others, but those aren’t applicable here and now.

So, with my goals in mind, I applied to teach English abroad through a program called World Teach (www.worldteach.org) and put Colombia as my first-choice country. Just submitting the application felt like a risk, and for Colombia no less.  Colombia: A country ravaged by years of drug violence and marred with a bad reputation for kidnapping and child prostitution. I managed to put Colombia’s negative image aside because my close friend Ana Maria Rodriguez is Colombian and is one of the sweetest and warmest people I know, and if she’s any indication of what the Colombian people are like, well, then, it was a country I wanted to go to. I’d also heard that the Spanish in Colombia is very pure, and therefore possibly easier to learn. With Ana Maria’s words of encouragement, I submitted my application in February 2010.

The View from Madison

By: Eli Wykell

This piece originally appeared at PursueAction.org here.

Let me give you a glimpse of my past few weeks: Last Saturday I joined 100,000 of my fellow Wisconsinites to express dismay at our governor’s plan to dismantle collective bargaining rights for public employees. The Saturday before that I joined 80,000 fellow Wisconsinites (1,000 of whom apparently were drinking tea). The Wednesday prior I joined about 30,000 in our state capitol and observed the most courageous political act I have ever seen as the “fab 14” Democratic state senators fled the state to avoid a vote on this atrocious bill. And, the day before that I woke up and walked past the capital as I do daily and saw something that was even more remarkable than 100,000 people collectively expressing outrage and demanding justice.

On that walk I saw a public genuine outrage that I had never seen before. There were probably less than a hundred people protesting, mainly union workers. It is difficult to articulate why this small protest was actually the most amazing. I could not have expressed it then but in retrospect I sensed both the conviction that this issue evoked, but perhaps also a sense that something historical was starting.

What Are You Reading?

Originally from Canada, Ora received her B.A. and M.A. from the University of Toronto. As a Corps member, Ora worked with the New Orleans non-profit Resurrection After Exoneration, helping wrongfully convicted men become advocates for change in the justice system following their release from prison.

When I lived in the New Orleans bayit in 2008-2009, I never felt the urge to visit the local library because our common rooms were always overflowing with books. These books, both much-loved and new, passed from hand to hand, sparking wonderful conversations and debates.

As the year winds down and we sink into the winter months, it’s great to keep our intellectual fires burning with books that motivate and educate, as well as give pleasure. Below are some of the books that have nourished me in the past year. What have you read lately that needs to be passed on? Share your thoughts and favorites in the comments below!

Igniting Chanukah

It’s not hard to find symbols of social justice in Chanukah.  There’s the triumph of individual freedom over censorship and oppression; the reminder, as we light candles, that we can act as a shamash in our own communities; and there’s the appreciation of having a safe haven – a home, with a window – from which to share and acknowledge miracles.

Sometimes, though, coming as it does in the holiday season, Chanukah is easy to embrace as a more superficial celebration.  And as Chanukah progresses, the cheerful activities of candle-lighting, latka-making and dreidel-playing can begin to seem a little routine; the prospect of eight successive nights can leave us wanting a little more substance. With this in mind, here are some resources that offer the chance to bring in – and spread – a little more light:

Traversing the Gender Gap

From AVODAH: Many thanks to Rachel Lee for raising issues of sexism and gender oppression. These are critical issues in the broader society and ones we are committed to grappling with in AVODAH.

Points of information:

• AVODAH has a policy of only accepting into the year-long program candidates who meet our acceptance criteria–none of which is linked to gender.
• We have an explicit policy not privileging male-identified candidates over female-identified candidates, or candidates with any other gender identity.
• Our recruitment practices reflect a determined effort to reach out to populations and individuals from a range of race, class, gender, and other identities and backgrounds.

We welcome continued discussion on issues of gender, power and privilege on the AVODAH blog.

Last week’s post explored how AVODAH’s male participants experienced their year of service as a minority in a majority female-identified milieu. Hoping to broaden the discussion, Rachel Lee (New Orleans 08-09) shared a letter she wrote to AVODAH staff last year that questions the implications of a ‘gender gap’. Rachel’s astute observations were well-received by AVODAH, particularly as the organization began this past year’s recruitment period. A portion of Rachel’s letter is posted below:

Being Male and Being Present: Part I

This month, Moving Traditions published an interesting report that attempted to address the following concern: “The Jewish community is losing boys…in unacceptably large numbers, leaving a generation of boys ignorant of the wisdom, core values, community, and spiritual nourishment Judaism provides.” Struggling to find a stop-gap, Moving Traditions put together a resource guide, available for downloading here, to provide educators with the means to “reverse the exodus of teenage boys from Jewish life through a connected set of actions”.

Looking Forward and Back

Originally from Toronto, Ontario, Ora participated in AVODAH New Orleans in 2008-2009. As a Corps member, Ora worked with the New Orleans non-profit Resurrection After Exoneration, helping wrongfully convicted and incarcerated men become advocates for change in the justice system following their release from prison.

Last week, on November 9, AVODAH began its yearly call, asking young people across the country whether we want to make a difference – whether we want to spend a year of our lives combining work for justice, Jewish learning, and community building. The opening of this latest recruitment season made me reflect on what AVODAH represented to me before I came into the program, how AVODAH challenged me as a Corps member, and how AVODAH continues to inform and transform my life as an alumna.

When I began thinking of applying to AVODAH in winter 2008, I had only a vague sense of what AVODAH offered. 

Questioning Community, Part II

In searching for answers to yesterday’s question – that is, how to foster plurality and minimize alienation in a community that boasts an AVODAH majority – I was offered meaningful insights from former Corps members.  One New Orleans alum wrote about the intensity of the AVODAH experience, and the difficulty of branching out into new circles, even when that expansion is necessary and desired:

“In the young, Jewish, social justice world in New Orleans, there are now about 20 of us who went through or are currently experiencing the wonderful, intense, year-of-service that AVODAH offers.  I think that as a non-AVODAHnik, it would be incredibly intimidating to enter a room filled with a majority of AVODAH alum or current members.

Questioning Community, Part I

Last Thursday, I blogged about the sensation of walking through life as a visible and invisible privileged minority. I also wrote about how, within North American Judaism, Ashkenazi culture is often taken to be the Jewish culture; we ‘white’ Jews identify and define ourselves as religious ‘others’ within a Christian majority while often forgetting about those minorities within our own religion.

Yesterday night, I was asked to grapple with these same concepts from a slightly different perspective. I attended an event geared towards young social activist Jews. The evening contained all the hallmarks of such a gathering; a convivial and earnest atmosphere; delicious vegetarian potluck; and talking and thinking about justice, Jewishness, and privilege. Beyond my awareness of my privilege as a white, young, middle-class, straight, able-bodied North American, I also felt privileged to be a part of this meeting group of inspired and inspiring young people.

The 20-something Jewish community in New Orleans is small, and consists chiefly of transplants from elsewhere in the United States. For the most part, gatherings and get-togethers are dominated (numerically, at least) by current and past AVODAH Corps members. This means that any time I walk into a gathering of Jews, I feel at home, surrounded by people who – for the most part – share my values and my struggles.