What’s Really Hood: A Collection of Tales from the Streets by Wahida Clark, et al
Sometimes do you pick up a book and you don’t really know why you did? I saw this book in Target, and picked it up on an impulse. I read the cover and thought “you know, this is way out of my culture and out of my comfort zone” but then I thought hey – it’s a sub-culture in my own country, and like isn’t it hypocritical to be so interested in other cultures and then to ignore this sub-culture in my own country? Plus, I had a friend called Wahida, . . . well, it doesn’t have to make sense. It’s just the way it was.
I read the whole book. Some of what I read was frankly repellant. Some of the sex was so implausible that I can’t tell if my ideas are just way out of step with the changing times (and there are clues that this may be the problem) or that this sub-culture just has constant, earth-shaking sex.
The book contains five very different stories, but there are threads of similarity that appear in all five. Drugs are rampant, and destructive to individuals, couples, families, children, friendships, marriages, and the social context. Parenting skills are often fragile or non-existent. The male-female relationships are mostly exploitive.
And they all dream of a better life.
I think that’s what kept me reading. The stories are raw. You might not even like them at all, you might wish you had never heard of this book, but there is an honesty in the rawness, and a yearning to escape. The goal of all the easy money in the drug trade is mostly to GET OUT, to run away to some place safe, to live in a place where gunshots aren’t heard, and where kids can safely go to school.
I learned a lot from reading this book, but it was not an easy read. It is gritty, and characters you find yourself liking get killed off. It’s also stuck with me; I find myself thinking about things it brought to my attention. I’d love for you to read it too, and tell me what you think.
“My Name is Legion”
To me, this is one amazing story, so many elements. A man is possessed – not by one unclean spirit, but by many, and in his misery, he is so strong that he cannot be safely chained. Jesus casts those demons into pigs, who run off a cliff and die.
The swineherds run to the city. I’ll bet they were not happy; they would have to tell the owners of all those pigs – two thousand pigs, that’s a lot of pigs – that the pigs were all dead. The people from the village could see the newly-healed man, and still they asked Jesus to leave. I am betting there were some mightily displeased merchants who were really mad about those pigs.
But the former demoniac asks to go with Jesus and Jesus tells him to stay, and tell the people how his life has changed since Jesus healed him. I imagine it took a lot of courage. I imagine he wanted to stay near to Jesus, fearful unclean spirits would re-enter him. I hope he was able to stay clean and to tell of this miracle in his life.
Mark 5:1-20
5 They came to the other side of the lake, to the country of the Gerasenes.* 2 And when he had stepped out of the boat, immediately a man out of the tombs with an unclean spirit met him. 3 He lived among the tombs; and no one could restrain him any more, even with a chain; 4 for he had often been restrained with shackles and chains, but the chains he wrenched apart, and the shackles he broke in pieces; and no one had the strength to subdue him. 5 Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always howling and bruising himself with stones.
6 When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and bowed down before him; 7 and he shouted at the top of his voice, ‘What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me.’ 8 For he had said to him, ‘Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!’ 9 Then Jesus* asked him, ‘What is your name?’ He replied, ‘My name is Legion; for we are many.’ 10 He begged him earnestly not to send them out of the country.
11 Now there on the hillside a great herd of swine was feeding; 12 and the unclean spirits* begged him, ‘Send us into the swine; let us enter them.’ 13 So he gave them permission. And the unclean spirits came out and entered the swine; and the herd, numbering about two thousand, rushed down the steep bank into the lake, and were drowned in the lake.
14 The swineherds ran off and told it in the city and in the country. Then people came to see what it was that had happened.
15 They came to Jesus and saw the demoniac sitting there, clothed and in his right mind, the very man who had had the legion; and they were afraid. 16 Those who had seen what had happened to the demoniac and to the swine reported it. 17 Then they began to beg Jesus* to leave their neighbourhood. 18 As he was getting into the boat, the man who had been possessed by demons begged him that he might be with him. 19 But Jesus* refused, and said to him, ‘Go home to your friends, and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and what mercy he has shown you.’
20 And he went away and began to proclaim in the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him; and everyone was amazed.
House Rules by Jodi Picoult
I got it all done – two days before Christmas. Wooo HOOOO, I get the reward, a new book! One I had been eager to read, House Rules by Jodi Picoult. (You can read reviews of other Picoult books by doing a blog search, enter Jodi Picoult in my blog’s search window.)
What I really like about Jodi Picoult is that she writes about really tough situations and exposes our ignorance and ambivalence to us. In this book, she writes about a single mother who is raising two sons, one of whom has Asperger’s Syndrome. He is extremely bright, but lives in a world where he is bombarded by too much sensation. He cannot block out sensory input that we learn to ignore, and some of it – noise, colors – in his case, the color orange – or any change in routine can cause him to spin out of control. Imagine a two year old having a tantrum in a grocery store . . . now imagine an eighteen year old young man having the same tantrum. It helps you see what the Mom is dealing with.
Dad left when the second son was born. “It’s too hard,” he said, and left her to cope with all of it.
She gets child support, while her husband is raising his new family a continent away. She free lances as an advice columnist, and edits from her home to supplement the bare bones family existence. She learns to cope with Jacob’s needs, and she advocates for him fiercely, to be mainstreamed in the school system AND to have some special supports to soothe him when he becomes over-stimulated.
Jacob isn’t a burden, although his need for routine – certain colors for different days of the week, including meals – can be burdensome. Jacob is also very very bright, and obsessed with crime scene forensics. He loves setting up “crime scenes” for his mom to solve and the one bright spot in his daily life is the Crime Busters show which comes on every day at 4:30.
And then, suddenly, a life which is already wobbling turns upside down. Jacob is implicated in the murder of his tutor, a young woman Jacob loved working with, who helped him develop an understanding of how people interact and behave. Those who know Jacob understand his quirks and eccentricities are due to his wiring, but Jacob looks very odd, very threatening and even violent to the outside observer – a nightmare client as a defendant.
It is a GREAT read. Picoult keeps her secrets up to the very end; the book is tightly wired and we are given clues all along the way. The edition I read had both a reader’s guide and an interview with the author at the end. It is NOT cheating to read those first! It gives you good guidance on what the author is trying to say, and what may be significant, while not appearing particularly so.
It gave me a great appreciation for parent’s of children outside the realm of ‘normal.’ It gave me an appreciation for the work and persistence and dedication it takes to try to get a more level playing field for their children.
It the book Jacob has some self-awareness, and compares Asperger’s Syndrome to seasonings, and he believes we all have a dose of Asperger’s Syndrome in our wiring, but that some children get a little extra.
‘Lost Boy’ Casts Vote for Independence
I found this today on NPR News and it delights me for a number of reasons. For one thing, I didn’t know David Eggars (you remember him from Zeitoun) had helped with the writing of ‘What Is The What?’. Second, who knew that any of these kids would survive? Survive, write a book, thrive, go back to the Sudan, give to the country – and vote. Every now and then in this sad world you hear a good story. This is one.
January 10, 2011
During Sudan’s civil war, in which some 2 million people died, Valentino Achak Deng fled to Ethiopia on foot. Separated from his family for 17 years, Deng is one of Sudan’s so-called Lost Boys, children who were orphaned or separated from their families during the brutal war.
Now, voting is under way in Southern Sudan in a referendum that is expected to split Africa’s largest country. Among those voting this week are the Lost Boys, including Deng, whose life became a best-selling novel in America and who has returned to his homeland to build a school.
After a peace agreement between north and south, Deng returned to Juba, the capital of Southern Sudan, in 2006. He says when he got there, the place was still a wreck.
“On some of these roads, you could see old war tanks. On some of these roads, in some neighborhoods you could see the bones and skulls of dead people,” he recalls now, driving around Juba.
Now, as Southern Sudan appears headed for independence, Deng is optimistic — and Juba looks a lot better. Paved roads, now lined with hotels and restaurants, arrived for the first time in 2007.
Juba is a booming city, one of incredible contrast: Barefoot women selling piles of gravel by the side of the road sit next to a Toyota dealership.
Peace is spurring investment and consumer demand. Juba’s growth is driven by Southern Sudan’s oil revenue as well aid from foreign governments and nongovernmental organizations.
Deng grew up in a tiny village called Marial Bai. In the 1980s, northern bombers and Arab militias came.
“They bombed Marial Bai, destroyed it, killed everything, burned crops and livestock,” he says.
Deng was there when the fighting came. He says he “ran away with the rest.” He was 9 years old.
Deng joined thousands of Lost Boys, who spent months trekking across Sudan to refugee camps in Ethiopia. His experience is captured in What Is the What, a novel by Dave Eggers, which reads like a modern-day story of Job.
The boys, some naked, march across an unforgiving landscape, facing Arab horsemen, bombing raids, lions and crocodiles.
Deng eventually resettled in the U.S., where he attended college and was mentored and sponsored by ordinary Americans.
In 2007, he returned to start a high school in Marial Bai, where there was none.
“We have 250 students. Our annual budget now stands at about $200,000 because the school is free,” he says.
The school is funded by Deng’s private foundation. He says most donations come from Americans touched by his story and the plight of Southern Sudan.
Deng, now 32, has just cast his vote for independence. He says that for a Sudanese child of war, his life’s journey is almost inconceivable.
“I never imagined I would be the person I am right now,” he says.
The Gift
AdventureMan and I used to have lavish Christmases, trying to delight one another, and we did. One year, I bought his some crystal goblets he had been admiring, and some years I was able to add to his collection. One year, he bought me a Mont Blanc pen, which I adored, and another year two beautiful salad serving bowls with irises in them. (I still have them and delight to use them.)
This year, he gave me the best gift of all. I was working on a committee in our church, helping to make sure children we had volunteered to sponsor in the Salvation Army angel program received gifts of clothing and a toy or bike or age-appropriate gift. There were a few children at the end who had not found sponsors, but other people had chosen to donate cash or checks in lieu of sponsoring a child.
As we were getting ready for church, AdventureMan told me he had an idea for my Christmas gift, but he wanted to run it by me.
“How about if I make a donation to the Angel Tree, to help sponsor the kids who don’t have sponsors?”
He took my breath away. He can still do that.
We are not rich, we are modestly comfortable. We have always lived within our means, and placed a high value on saving. We have a comfortable home, enough to eat, and we keep our spending under control so that we even continue to grow our savings a little while we are now ‘retired.’ There is nothing I need for Christmas.
I’m still grinning from the grandness of his gift; the delight it continues to give me every time I think about it.
The Salvation Army has one of the lowest rates of administration funds to charitable funds of all the charities in America. They make every dollar you donate squeak, they work it so hard. They feed the poor, they give hope to children, they comfort the homeless and veterans, and they counter pornography and human trafficking (Yes. It happens in America, too.)
To find out how you can help this organization which helps so many, so generously, just click on the blue type Salvation Army and it will take you to their home page. There are many options for giving, including donations, giving of your time and energies as a bell ringer, or working with them in a variety of human services.
Star Wars Paradise
One of my bible study friends and I were talking about our study, and she asked me “What is it they are saying when all the people drop everything and go pray in those countries?”
The expat dilemma – most people don’t want too much explanation. And you never know who is a rabid anti-Islamist, and I don’t want to argue. But this time I took a chance.
“They are saying different things depending on the time of day, like first thing in the early morning they say ‘come pray! come pray! It is better to pray than to sleep!’ and then they say ‘God is Great! God is Great! I testify that there is only one God, and Mohammed is his prophet.'”
I sort of held my breath, as she thought about this, and then she said “Well, I guess that’s all right.”
Then she asked me if I ever thought about heaven. I told her about our churches in Qatar and Kuwait. I especially miss them at this time of the year. I told her I thought Paradise would look like our churches there, all peoples from all parts of the globe. I told her how on Christmas, all the Indian women wore their most beautiful saris, and the African women wore their dresses and fancy headpieces, and we westerners wore our nicest winter clothes, and we all worshipped together in peace, and to me, that was just a tiny slice of what I think paradise will look like.
My friend is fourth generation Pensacolian, and has never travelled. She proceeded to blow me away.
“Did you ever see Star Wars?” she asked me. I nodded. “Do you remember the bar scene?” I nodded again. Who could forget? But where is this discussion going?
“When we think of heaven, we think of what we know, but there is so much out there we don’t know, and God is creator of all the universe.” she said. “We can’t limit God to what we know; he is so much more! I think it’s going to be like that bar in Star Wars, that we will be with creatures we cannot even imagine, and that we can have celestial homes wherever we want, like a cabin in Alaska, or a hut beside the Ganges or maybe we can be here for a few thousand years and then on another planet, whatever we want.”
Her vision is huge. It took my breath away. The more she talked, the more blown away I became. I was shocked at my own smallness, my lack of imagination, and thrilled with her vision and the possibilities. She’s right, you know. We can’t begin to imagine what our heavenly home will look like, but her idea gave me food for speculation for months – maybe years – to come.
Underwear Rules
“I can’t believe the things you talk about in the locker room!” AdventureMan exclaimed, “we (meaning the men in the men’s locker room) never have those conversations.”
No. They talk about what they did in the military, they talk about aches and pains.
We women talk about everything.
I had just told AdventureMan about my new revelation. The woman next to me in the locker room told me about her system. She hangs her underwear on a rack in her laundry room, which is next to her garage. When she is heading out the door to go to water aerobics, she just grabs her underwear off the rack and heads out the door.
“You can do that?” I thought to myself. I might have even said it out loud. It was a whole new way of thinking for me.
What about underwear rules? What about the rule that says you are supposed to take things out of the dryer or off the rack and fold them up and put them away? Isn’t that like a law or something? I think – I used to think – it was like one of God’s laws, but now I am thinking maybe it was one of my Mom’s laws.
I feel so free! My laundry room is also next to my garage. LLOOLL! I can grab underwear on my way out, too! Wooo HOOOOOOO!
The Happiness Project
AdventureMan and I have subscribed to Bottom Line for many years and we often learn from the Bottom Line Secrets newsletter they send us. This was in today’s Bottom Line Secrets e-mail: The Secrets to Happiness!
The Happiness Project
Gretchen Rubin
Philosophers, psychologists and self-help gurus all have advice on how we can be happier — but what really works? Journalist Gretchen Rubin decided to find out. She devoted a year to “test-driving” happiness strategies and gathered feedback from visitors to her popular Web site. She called her research “The Happiness Project.” Different happiness strategies work for different people, but a few strategies stand out…
Seek novelty and challenge even if you value consistency and comfort. I didn’t expect exploring new challenges to make me happier — familiarity and comfort are very important to me — but I was wrong. Trying new things is one of the most effective paths to happiness that I have encountered.
The human brain is stimulated by surprise and discovery. Successfully coping with the unfamiliar can provide a high level of happiness. Repeating what we’ve done many times before can be comfortable, but comfortable is not the same as happy.
Example: Launching and updating a daily blog have brought me great happiness, though initially I feared that I lacked the necessary technical skills.
Challenge yourself to do something that sounds interesting — even if it’s different from anything you’ve done before or it requires skills that you’re not sure you have. Take a class… try a new hobby… learn a language… or visit a different town or museum every weekend.
Try doing whatever you enjoyed doing at age 10. The person we are in adulthood has more in common with the person we were at age 10 than we realize. Renowned psychiatrist Carl Jung started playing with building blocks as an adult to recapture the enthusiasm he had felt in his youth. If fishing made us happy when we were 10, odds are it will make us happy today… if playing the drums made us happy then, it probably still will.
Example: I was given a blank book when I was a child and really enjoyed filling it with clippings, notes, cartoons, anything that interested me. So as part of my happiness project, I bought myself a scrapbook and started clipping items from magazines and newspapers to paste into it. I was amazed by how much happiness I still could derive from this.
Read memoirs of death and suffering. Paradoxically, sad books can increase our happiness. These books put our own problems in perspective and remind us how fortunate we are.
Examples: I became happier with my own life when I read Gene O’Kelly’sChasing Daylight, the former CEO’s memoir about learning that he had three months to live… Stan Mack’s Janet & Me, about the death of the author’s partner… and Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, about the death of her husband.
It’s not that I’m happy that other people have been unhappy. It’s just a way of appreciating everything that I do have.
Declutter your home. A few minutes of cleaning can substantially improve one’s mood by giving us the sense that we have accomplished something positive. Cleaning also creates an impression of order that can contribute to serenity. And it helps remove a source of stress — conspicuous clutter is a visual reminder of a responsibility that we have neglected.
Try a brief burst of cleaning the next time you feel overwhelmed or anxious even if you don’t think it will work for you. Even people who are not particularly fastidious discover that this boosts their mood.
Examples: For me, cleaning out a drawer… organizing my medicine cabinet… or just making my bed in the morning provides a real boost to my happiness.
Be appreciative of people’s good traits rather than critical of their bad ones… be thankful for what they do for you, and stop blaming them for what they don’t.
Example: I stopped getting angry at my husband for forgetting to withdraw cash before we went out. Instead, I started taking it upon myself to make sure that we had the necessary cash. I also made a point to be more appreciative of all the things that my husband does do, such as dealing with the car.
Enjoy today even if there’s still work to do. Many of us assume it’s normal to live with limited happiness until some major milestone is reached — we earn that big promotion, have a family or retire. We tell ourselves, I’ll be happy when I achieve my goals.
Example: As a writer, I imagined how happy I would be when the book I was working on was finally published.
Unfortunately, people who pin their happiness on a distant goal usually spend most or all of their lives less happy than they could be. Often they set ever more distant goals as the original targets approach… or they discover that the goal that they thought would bring happiness actually brings added stress. Some never reach their goals at all.
I’m much happier now that I remind myself to be happy about making gradual progress toward my goals, even if the goals themselves remain far in the distance
Bottom Line/Personal interviewed Gretchen Rubin, an attorney and former Supreme Court clerk. Based in New York City, Rubin is founder of The Happiness Project, a blog and newsletter, and author of the best-selling book The Happiness Project (Harper), for which she personally tested happiness strategies. www.Happiness-Project.com
Jonah and the Bush in the Quran
The readings in our Lectionary or daily readings, have been from Jonah. Johan has always been very real to me, growing up in Alaska, where great whales would swim in front of my house and occasionally a whale would beach, to the sorrow of all. Then one day, in far away Doha, a world away from Alaska, my Arabic instructor started telling us this story of Younis, and it sounded remarkably similar. I’d lived in the MIddle East for years, and I had no idea how many of our prophets also appear in the Quran.
So this morning, as the chapter of Jonas was finishing, I came to this one part, which has never made a lot of sense to me, Jonah mad at God because when Nineveh repents, God relents and does not destroy Nineveh (Jonah 3:10 – 4:11):
10 When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it.
4 But this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry. 2 He prayed to the Lord and said, ‘O Lord! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing. 3 And now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.’ 4 And the Lord said, ‘Is it right for you to be angry?’ 5 Then Jonah went out of the city and sat down east of the city, and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade, waiting to see what would become of the city.
6 The Lord God appointed a bush,* and made it come up over Jonah, to give shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort; so Jonah was very happy about the bush. 7 But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the bush, so that it withered. 8 When the sun rose, God prepared a sultry east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint and asked that he might die. He said, ‘It is better for me to die than to live.’
9 But God said to Jonah, ‘Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?’ And he said, ‘Yes, angry enough to die.’ 10 Then the Lord said, ‘You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labour and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. 11 And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?’
Jonah is sulking? Jonah is angry that Nineveh listened, and turned from their evil ways?
(This time, too, as I read, I saw that last line where God is talking and he asks Jonah should he not be concerned about more than a hundred and twenty thousand people AND also many animals. 🙂 I love having a verse to quote from a book about a prophet common to both Christianity and Islam which clearly shows God has a concern for how animals are treated. )
So I Googled “Jonah in Quran” and found a Wikipedia article describing Jonah’s story from the Quran, which
Jonah’s Qur’anic narrative is extremely similar to the Hebrew Bible story. The Qur’an describes Jonah as a righteous preacher of the message of Islam but a messenger who, one day, fled from his mission because it’s overwhelming difficulty. The Qur’an says that Jonah made it onto a ship but, because of the powerfully stormy weather, the men aboard the ship suggested casting lots to throw off the individual responsible for this ‘bad luck’. When the lots were cast, Jonah’s name came out, and he was thrown into the open ocean that night. A gigantic fish came and swallowed him, and Jonah remained in the belly of the fish repenting and glorifying God to the maximum.
As God says: So also was Jonah among those sent (by Us). When he ran away (like a slave from captivity) to the ship (fully) laden, He (agreed to) cast lots, and he was condemned: Then the big Fish did swallow him, and he had done acts worthy of blame. Had it not been that he (repented and) glorified God, He would certainly have remained inside the Fish till the Day of Resurrection. (37:139-144).
God forgave Jonah out of His mercy and kindness for the man, and because he knew that Jonah was, at heart, one of the best of men. Therefore, the fish cast Jonah out onto dry land, with Jonah in a state of sickness. Thus, God caused a plant to grow where Jonah was lying to provide shade and comfort for the man. After Jonah got up, fresh and well, God told him to go back and preach at his land. As the Qur’an says:
But We cast him forth on the naked shore in a state of sickness, And We caused to grow, over him, a spreading plant of the gourd kind. And We sent him (on a mission) to a hundred thousand (men) or more. And they believed; so We permitted them to enjoy (their life) for a while. (37:145-148).
Aha! Jonah was sick. If I were in the belly of a fish for three days, I might be sick, too. And when I am sick, I can be irrational, and cranky, and like a sick cat I just want to crawl away and hide under a bush. In another commentary, the author suggests that as a Hebrew, Jonah might wish for the demolition of an Assyrian stronghold, which also makes sense.
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