A One Woman Campaign Against Hunger

I took this picture years ago while visiting Haiti. It shows a typical urban scene: women and girls, wearing probably the only outfit they own, going for drinking water at a public tap, if they're lucky, or from a polluted, garbage strewn stream, if they're less fortunate. The situation in Haiti today isn't any better. In fact,  it's worse. Food prices globally are soaring, and Haiti has been hit hard. Add to that the devastation caused by recent hurricanes, and there are people in Haiti literally starving for lack of something to eat.

Bernadette Francois is one of our nurses at the hospital who emigrated from Haiti. Because of women like Bernadette, American hospitals are staffed by kind, devoted and hard-working women from a variety of cultures who have made their lives here and care for our sick, elderly and poor. And, because of women like Bernadette, the poor in places like Haiti have hope. In good times, Bernadette works tirelessly to send funds back to Haiti, supporting a disabled elderly woman who is of no relation to her, and funding several children through school. Recently, Bernadette is sending food, clothing, anything she can get her hands on, to Haiti. We told her to go into the emergency clothing closet at work and take anything there that's not of immediate need to our homeless patients (yes, we've got LOTS of homeless patients, who usually need a new set of clothing after they leave us).  Friends and associates are handing Bernadette $5, $10, $20 here and there for her to buy staples like bags of beans, rice and pasta. Yet the majority of what she's sending to Haiti are being purchased with Bernadette's personal contributions.

It never ceases to amaze me how many women there are out there like Bernadette; tireless, one woman campaigns against hunger, homelessness and poverty. They work quietly and without any fanfare, believing that even the very little bit that they do is helping someone and is worthwhile. Of course, if all of us did just one thing for one person, or devoted ourselves to just one cause, we would see a tremendous change for good in the world. If women like Bernadette ceased doing even small acts of kindness and compassion, our world would be so much the worse for it. 

"Hmmm, maybe I want THAT doll..."

I just had to publish this photo, which I received this morning from my friend, Carol Mitchell. Carol and her husband are currently in South Africa for two weeks on business, and Carol had graciously volunteered to do a "doll drop" while in Cape Town. The dolls were to go to disadvantaged children in Khayelitsha, a township outside of Cape Town, as part of the mission of the not-for-profit "Art Aids Art" to get ethnically sensitive dolls into the hands of these poor children. The dolls came from a variety of individuals--many of them were made by our team members at St. Anthony's Hospital. Many more came from doll making groups affiliated with "Dollies without Borders" in Gainesville, Florida, and several, including two of the dolls in the adorable picture, were made by my sister-in-law, Mary Mulrooney, and friends up in St. John's, Newfoundland. (Scroll down to my August 18th post and you'll recognize the dolls in their little box, ready to go to South Africa!) As you can see, one little girl looks thrilled with her doll, while her little friend may well be reconsidering her initial choice of dollie. It was a nice surprise to get this photo because we weren't expecting that the dolls would be given out to the children while Carol was in Cape Town; we thought she was just dropping them off to be distributed through Art Aids Art at a later date. I will post more about the Cape Town doll drop after Carol gets back to the States and I get a chance to sit down, hear her stories and see more of her photos. 

Crafting with the Crones

Last week was my first session at a local retirement home, where I will be facilitating a crafts circle twice a month. Twelve women with varying degrees of ability and mobility showed up in the home's activities room, eager to participate. Most of them want to make dolls to send to impoverished children overseas, but I quickly found that the templates I had been using for our own craft group at the hospital are way too small for arthritic hands to manage. Several more women want to knit and crochet warm clothing to send overseas, and several more want to LEARN to knit and crochet--a problem because I don't do either! 

So, after only one session, I had to re-think this whole craft circle thing. First, I had to come up with a prototype for a very simple doll with very large pieces that could be easily manipulated by people with minimal dexterity. Soooo, introducing "Dollie" and "Dollie Junior", my new designs for little dolls to go to Africa. OK, so I'm not much of a doll designer let alone much of a sewer, but the body and head are sewn together to make one large piece for easy sewing--and stuffing!--and the arms and "baby" are large enough to turn inside out, sew and stuff with little effort. If anyone out there has a simpler pattern they'd like to send my way, by all means do so.

 Second, I have to go out and recruit a knitter to accompany me, and I might have found a willing accomplice in a friend who is a knitting fanatic and is actually starting to infect me with "knitting envy". Her own women's craft group are making these luscious shawls out of big, chunky synthetic yarn that are to die for! 

The women at the retirement center are a delight. A couple of them actually have their old sewing machines in their rooms, and just the idea of sewing for somebody again got them talking about "back in the day" when several of them made their family's clothing. They have a strong desire to "give back", having lived good lives, and they expressed wanting to do something with their time that will be useful to someone else.  I think this is going to be a challenging situation for me, but I also have a feeling I'm really going to enjoy it, and learn a lot from these women. Maybe my girlfriend will actually get ME knitting something, too!

Minerva's Circle

Marcela Andrades Alfaro has a remarkable vision to assist foreign-born women--students and the wives of students at the University of Florida in Gainesville--to build and belong to a supportive and creative community where the women could learn and practice a variety of arts and crafts. She facilitates the blog for Minerva's Circle, a crafting group taking its names from Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, arts and crafts. The women have created everything from handbags, aprons and "monster quilts", to their own collection of dollies heading to Africa with Madeline Austin's "Dollies without Borders" project. Watch for a future article on Marcela and Minerva's Circle on this blog, and in the meantime, check out all the group's inspiring projects at minervascircle.blogspot.com . 

Celebrating Jennifer La Civita's Creative Legacy

It's Saturday, and in the basement of a former church in northwest Chicago, the knitting group has gathered on comfy counches, while around the corner in another room, Czech youth nibbles on Eastern European goodies and learn about art and culture in their parent's homeland, the Czech Republic. Upstairs, singing toddlers are developing an appreciation for rhythm and music in their Kindermusik class. Down the hall, a group of adults learns yoga, tai chi and meditation techniques, in a room where the walls are adorned with the work of local school children from one of the afer school arts programs. Welcome to the Portage Park Center for the Arts, the brain--and heart!--child of Jennifer La Civita.

For the past ten years, the Portage Park Center for the Arts has been the epicenter of art and culture in this ethnically diverse neighborhood in northwest Chicago. When I was living in Chicago, I was fortunate enough to experience the energy and magic of the Portage Park Center for the Arts firsthand. Jennifer didn't just found and run an art program; she has maintained, despite tenuous funding and long hours of work, a community arts and wellness center offering over sixty programs, including affordable arts classes for financially challenged children and the elderly, yoga--in Polish!--and a "home" for groups as diverse as a monthly folk dance gathering, a hand spinning group, and a "salon" for aspiring artists to share their work for critique. Jennifer helped home schoolers network and have access to arts education opportunities, hosted programs for immigrants to share and maintain their culture through the arts, and brought people of diverse ages, interests and backgrounds together to create and celebrate their lives. The center was a place where creative people could live their dreams, either by developing, or partaking in, innovative arts programming.

Typical of the center's offerings was a recent concert featuring Snatum Kaur and the "Celebrate Peace Band" that brought together people from a variety of ethnic communities and backgrounds that don't normally interact with one another. "The arts provide a venue to expand people's worlds," Jennifer explains, "and people meet and begin conversations here that wouldn't have happened in any other manner."

Jennifer has enjoyed providing Chicago with a supportive resource site that has promoted and celebrated the arts these past ten years. Knowing the huge impact the center has made on the lives of so many has given Jennifer a real sense of pride and accomplishment. A mother of two teenagers, Jennifer has a master's degree in counseling psychology and art therapy, and will be obtaining her doctorate in clincal psychology fromt he Adler School of Professional Psychology in the spring of 2009. She has decided to head in a new direction and start her own psychotherapy practice, incorporating the arts into her practice. We wish her well, and will be checking in on her from time to time.

Living--Just Barely--on $2 a Day

I spent some time over Labor Day weekend sorting through our cash donations and fair trade craft item purchases from two events in August: our doll making marathon retreat, and the dinner and a movie night to support the Fistula Foundation of Addis Ababa. I had to box up the remaining crafts to be mailed back to ArtAidsArt and Bead for Life, as well as tally our cash contributions and mail them off. In the end, we raised close to $650 for BOTH organizations, with our total purchases reaching nearly $1,300.

Many women throughout the world try to support themselves and their families on $2 a day or less. Raising $1,300 in fair trade crafts sales is nearly equivalent to providing income for a woman and her family for over a year and a half. 

Of course, that's not to say that anyone can really live on $2 a day, even in poor countries where the cost of most basics is far less than in the developed world. Traveling overseas in many third world countries, I was surprised to see that many products--toilet paper, processed foods, over the counter medications, etc.--are being sold for nearly the same price as in America. Living on $2 a day often means living on one meal a day, forgoing an education or medical care, and living without adequate heat or clean running water (not to mention toilet paper, processed foods and over the counter drugs!).

What's great about groups like Bead for Life and ArtAidsArt is that they don't just provide a decent living wage for women artisans in the form of a just wage for a nicely crafted product. These organizations take portions of the proceeds from crafts sales and plow them back into the community in the form of educational scholarships, subsidized healthcare and HIV awareness training, drilling projects for clean water, and building projects that will benefit the entire village. They listen to and work with the craftswomen so that projects that are important to the women and the entire community, and that will ultimately lead to independence, are funded. Please check out their websites and consider hosting a crafts sale at your next women's gathering: www.beadforlife.org and www.artaidsart.org . 

Crafting a Better World One Woman at a Time

Last night we hosted a "dinner and a movie" night at the home of Audrey Steele.

 We shared an African meal and showed the documentary "A Walk to Beautiful". Here's a picture of all the women who attended--Eirene Ng'anga Hackett's husband Keith, the only guy at our "hen session", took the photo. Thanks in large part to Eirene and Keith, we had enough African food to feed a small village! Everything was so delicious, and it gave us all a little taste of Africa.

 

After dinner we all watched the film, which highlights the good work of the Fistula Hospital of Addis Ababa, which offers free fistula repair surgery to Ethiopia's poorest women who are suffering from obstetric fistulas. Then we "passed the hat" to raise funds for one fistula operation for one Ethiopian woman--$450, to be exact. Now I was getting ready to pull out my checkbook at the end of it all and pay off whatever remained to be donated so that we would have the $450 needed for an operation, but can you believe that these generous women--and let's not forget Keith!--donated $588!? 

Many of us spent a good two hours after the film ended, talking about our favorite projects and the ways we hope to put good into the world. Audrey and Carmen travel overseas on medical missions with "Faith in Action". Holly and Debra M. raise food and funds through their crafting efforts. Cathy N. has supported five female victims of war struggling to rebuild their lives through "Women for Women International", and Eirene and Keith talk about the possibility of opening an orphanage in Eirene's home county, Kenya. I left the gathering, truly inspired that, in continuing to come together as women supporting women,  we are nurturing an ever widening circle of care, concern and giving.

If you want to see a great film that will deeply inspire you, order "A Walk to Beautiful", which was presented by Nova and can be found for purchase at PBS's web site. If you want to support a great cause and give a desperately poor woman a real opportunity for a new life, consider donating to the Fistula Foundation at their website: www.fistulafoundation.org .