The political is personal

I cried at least once a day for the first ten days after November 8.

There are a lot of reasons, and there is no single reason I can explain. But it’s been a month now, and its time for me to start writing stories again. Because stories are how I process the world, and goodness knows we need to process, and because stories will be so important in these months as we try to remember how to love one another.

This story is imperfect and selfish and true and has nothing to do with policy, really. And it’s not at all the most pressing reason to mourn, but it’s one that has somehow cut me deep in these weeks.

Photo by Walter A. Aue

On November 8, 2016, no matter how you spin it, this country chose as its next president an (alleged) sexual predator over a qualified (if polarizing) woman.

I could not have predicted the blow that that feels like to me as a woman.

During the campaign, I was more anti-Trump than pro-Hillary. And my chief concerns with Trump were about the effect his presidency could have on undocumented immigrants, refugees, Muslims, people of color, LGBTQ people, international relations, the environment, free speech…I could go on…

The point is, I didn’t feel a personal threat or affront as a white woman. And I didn’t feel a particular attachment to Hillary. It took me several days of sobbing to realize that my grief after the election was not only for all the anger and fear and pain for people I care about (and probably also some kind of illusion/idolatry I’ll explore later), but was also deeply personal.

In one of the more poignant moments of the debates, Hillary said, “Donald thinks belittling women makes him bigger. He goes after their dignity, their self worth, and I don't think there is a woman anywhere who doesn't know what that feels like.”

I felt that. I know that. But I didn’t know, until 3 am on November 9, what it feels like to see that a person who treats women in this way, in word and deed, is judged fit to be our president.

I didn’t know what it feels like to hear in a concession speech a reminder to girls that they are valuable and powerful—and to sense that it was a word that needed to be said, a word that could no longer be assumed. “To all the little girls watching this, never doubt that you are valuable and powerful,” she said, and I sobbed.

When I was eleven years old I became the president of my elementary school’s student council. I was really into it—whether as a power trip or because I really cared about which Lisa Frank items we sold at the school store, I can’t say. My grandma bought me a gavel for Christmas with the words, “President Katie” engraved on it. I told everyone I was going to be the first woman president of the United States. “Hopefully,” my mom said, “that will happen before you’re old enough to be president.”

In mid-October, with Hillary’s double-digit lead in the polls, I recalled this moment and smiled. My mom was right! We would have a woman president before I turn thirty-five. But I’ll be thirty-five in 2021, and (barring the problematic and improbable #Michelle2020) now my mom looks so naïve. Now, it looks like we were not at all ready for a woman president, so not ready we chose him. (And oh, I know it’s more complicated than woman vs. man, but I do think sexism played more of a role than we realize in Hillary’s unpopularity).

When I think of the convention center Hillary chose on election night for its glass ceiling, I understand why she couldn’t bear to speak that night in that space. I would’ve wanted to smash it.

//

But it goes beyond this, too. It turns out that I developed a fondness for Hillary, a personal sympathy far beyond my initial skepticism of her candidacy. Because when I think of a qualified woman being rebuffed for a job, when I think of how hard it is to be a woman in her career field, I think also of my own journey.

My church taught me that women cannot be pastors, and I think I believed it, or at least I let it seep into me, enough that I was 24 before I realized I might have a calling in the church.

I still love the church that raised me. They are loving and radically welcoming of immigrants and dedicated to the arts and marvelously anti-Trumpian and all the things you might not expect of a church that taught me women can’t preach. (Things are never what we expect, are they?)

In July, I happened to visit on the day that a peer of mine had been invited back to preach. He was being ordained that afternoon in our very church. And as he began to speak, at the same moment I felt excited that he was stepping into the path of his calling—I was overcome by a dull sadness.

Because I will never be invited to preach in that church.

Perhaps some of those church members will one day come to a church where I preach, and perhaps they will pray for my ministry, and surely there will always be hugs and love and encouragement for me in that place. But the church that first gave me a space to use my gifts in God’s service—a sanctuary in which to sing my first solo, a microphone to share my testimony of faith, a pulpit to write my first sermon, which was okay because it was a skit for youth Sunday—will not invite me back into that space.

The truth is, the hurt I feel from all of this isn’t strong or permanent; it comes in waves. It happened to be magnified on that day. But I left the church at 23, before I wanted to be a pastor. I never butted my head up against their (rather opaque) glass ceiling. I never tried to change their minds. It would hurt more if I had.

//

When I visit this church, I’ve never quite been sure how to talk with people about my career. I mention the places where I have been interning or the classes I’m taking, and most people are deeply supportive and interested. But still every word I speak feels to me too political, confrontational. By being who I have been called to be, I am an affront their system. So sometimes I talk about the community service program I started, and don’t emphasize the controversial parts like preaching. And when asked if I’m hoping to work with youth or be a chaplain I try to shake my head gently and explain that no, I want to be a pastor.

That Sunday my friend was preaching, the district president (our version of a bishop) was in attendance, and someone introduced me to him. He seemed apologetic about the place of women in our church. “Our denomination has lost a lot of very talented women to other churches,” he said sympathetically. In usual form, I smiled and shifted the topic to keep things non-controversial.

In this post-election, time, though, I want to engage more honestly, vulnerably, and fully in places like this. I wish I’d said, directly and gently to him, “Yes, you have lost us.” I wish I’d said, “It’s painful to me to hear my friend preach here this morning and know I’ll never be able to do that.” It probably would have been good for him to hear.

There will be many times when it is important to speak in the days ahead. And I know myself enough to know I’ll need a lot of fierce prayer to stay patient and keep telling stories. But after Hillary, after the tenacity of that glass ceiling, after the startling toleration in this season for violence and words against women, I’m no longer going to be sheepish--anywhere--about the political overtones of my calling or my identity or my beliefs or my story or the Jesus I believe in. 

It’s more dangerous to be quiet.

For the girl in the brewery

Photo by Ken Douglas

I wanted to say that I am happy for you, and proud of you.

You must be fourteen or fifteen. There in the bar, surrounded by college kids and young adults and your parents, you were so clearly you. The weather had just turned warm, and your wore your spring cotton dress over leggings. You didn't look out of place in a bar. You walked back and forth across the room like the ground was familiar under your sandals. You didn't overdo it either. There was no attention-seeking, just a face full of laughter. You twirled and danced and leapt as the music changed. You moved with friends, or with the music, or on your own.

You just looked yourself; you just looked free.

*

I was a tiny bit jealous.

I wish I would have been a little more like you when I was your age.

Don't get me wrong, I am mostly happy with who I was. I had a purpose--study hard and love people. I had good friends who are still my friends. I was bathed in love.

I'm glad my clothes weren't stylish by the standards of any clique. I'm glad some of them were hand-me-downs, because it gave me a heart trained on simplicity. I'm glad I was a little lonely, because it gave me eyes to look for the lonely ones. I'm glad I was always thinking, analyzing, considering, because it gave me patience and thoughtfulness and depth. I am even glad that it took me longer than most to grow into the rhythmic motions of my body (though that was not without cost) because I made friends while standing on various walls, because my mind and spirit were grounded in an firm identity by the time I learned to dance.

But looking at you, I see that I missed something, too. Something of joy, something of spontaneity and freedom.

In a world where so many girls your age are not comfortable in their own skin, you made me wistful, and glad.

So keep laughing freely, friend. Keep twirling.

Becoming Pastor Katie

This is (one angle on) the complicated, messy story of my journey to Duke Divinity School, where I will begin my studies next month.

Photo by Keith Kissel

We are yawning through our Sunday school or confirmation class and we are debating what societal roles are acceptable for women. I have no desire to join the military so I could care less when we debate the role of soldier, and I am fairly certain we are going to have a woman president within a few years, so that part of the discussion seems superfluous. But when we get to pastor, I pause. I have the sense that this question matters beyond our class today. Matters to us. To me.

My teacher shows us a Bible verse: Women should be silent in the churches. And another one: I do not permit women to teach or have authority over a man. My friend protests, but I am looking at the words right there, and I take the Bible so seriously, and I can’t see a way to wriggle around it.

That night, I ask my mom what she thinks. She tells me some of her best friends are lady pastors, and if they are sharing the gospel of God’s love in Christ, she can’t see why God wouldn’t approve.

*

I have volunteered to share my testimony—the story of my incredibly unexciting spiritual journey to age fourteen—in church. I walk to the front of the congregation, grab the microphone, and talk about learning to pray, learning to trust God rather than popularity or success at school. At the end, I tell them that I want my whole life to be about serving God.

The people in the congregation smile proudly at me as I look around the sanctuary. Afterwards, a few come and tell me they enjoyed my speech.

The official teaching of our church is that women can’t preach. But it doesn’t seep down far into our culture. This feels like a good thing. Women serve and lead in almost every ministry. They are elders, they read the scripture, they serve communion, they speak in church, they lead youth group, they teach Sunday school to adults and to children. I have always felt free. I have never felt limited.

It’s just that when I start to think about serving God with my life, and what that will look like, the idea of being a pastor never occurs to me.

*

At camp every summer, I live with a community of girls for two weeks, and my I get my yearly quota of deep, spiritual conversations. On Sunday mornings, women and men speak in front of the whole camp, sharing their life stories. In Bible studies, my lady counselors blow my mind with new ideas about living life for God. During rest periods, I creep over to counselors’ bunks and ask for wisdom, and these women encourage me to grow.

It is one of my deepest, loveliest summers—a summer of stars and brownies and skinny dipping and late-night whispers—and I am exploring in this place that is expansive, open. I have started to question some of the teachings of my church, especially the political ones. “What do you think,” I ask my counselor, “about women being pastors?”

“Well,” she says slowly, “I don’t know for sure. But I do wonder whether women have the necessary qualities to lead a whole church.” She stutters a little. “I mean, personally, I haven’t gotten as much from women pastors as I have from men.”

I breathe in thoughtfully, nodding. For the moment, it makes sense. I haven’t gotten as much from women pastors either, I think. It is a safe phrase to hide behind when the Bible is ambiguous—this pretense of personal experience. For several years, it becomes my line.

But the truth is, I have never had a woman as an official pastor to “get” things from.

And yet most of my spiritual development has been guided by women.

*

I am twenty-three and working in the nonprofit field, serving God with my life by loving the poor. I enjoy my clients, but something is missing in my relationship with them, something about sharing stories and doing life together and delving into the big questions.

John has been teasing me for a couple years now. He says I need a job where I can talk about faith; therefore I should become a pastor’s wife. He says this flippantly, to mock established roles and bring lightness to heavy conversations.

When he says it, I laugh. The idea that I could take the word wife off of the phrase and then claim pastor as my calling, still doesn’t register.

Until one night I am reading Bonhoeffer, and something in the words on the page leaps out at me, and echoes of the past months reverberate around me, and I realize that pastor is a word for the things I feel most called to.

After a few excited, sleepless nights, I tuck it away. I know my personality; I am an Enneagram Type One whose deepest fear is of being ethically wrong, whose deepest hope is to be so good that I am beyond condemnation by anyone. I am still a tiny bit afraid to make waves, to become something that could possibly be against God’s plan, something that could draw confused looks from my more conservative friends.

I keep working in nonprofit, and then a church job literally drops in my lap and I think, Okay God, point taken, I will try it and see what happens.

*

In June 2012, Rachel Held Evans hosts a “Week of Mutuality” on her blog, which is a glorious bombardment of posts designed to make the case that the Bible supports equality for women in the church. I eagerly tune in each night, learning about women apostles and Greco-roman household codes and an end to patriarchy. I devour everything, and the last strands “women should be silent” are removed, and the last whispers of “I’ve never met a good woman pastor” slip away.

At the end of the week, I feel utterly free.

A few days later, I have this transcendent moment in a glorious church. I confess to God all my fears of being wrong or controversial or inadequate. The organ is echoing in my heart, and the desire to follow this small voice is now greater than my fears, and I know it is time to take the next step.

Letting Awa in

Today I am delighted to share a heart-wrenching story written by a friend of mine who was a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa and has continued to live and work in West Africa since 2009. The names of both women have been changed to protect their privacy.

Possible trigger warning: mentions of rape and abuse.

She was supposed to be my (host) mother in the West African village, but she was only a few years older than me, so from the beginning I called her Awa.

Awa welcomed me warmly to the place I would live for two years. She introduced me to relatives; she patiently taught me the local language; she explained the village politics; she told me how to eat and what to wear and how much money to give during special ceremonies; and, making use of one of the few English phrases she knew, she often exclaimed, “You have a big butt!”

No matter how much time we spent together, though, there was a certain level of distance between us.  Most of the time I attributed it to language and cultural differences. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t put myself in her shoes. But I also – intentionally and unintentionally – maintained walls. I didn’t want to get too close, be too vulnerable, give too much.

After two years in the village, I got ready to move a few hours away to continue my work in the capital. The night before I was to leave, Awa lay distraught on my bed, crying her eyes out.  How could I be leaving her? I told her I’d visit and call.  I knew I would miss my village, but I was excited to have my own apartment, running water and a fridge, a 9-5 job, and an internet connection. I was ready to separate from her a little more, and especially from her abusive husband.

Over the next couple years, I called and visited and even sent money to cover school fees and supplies for her two boys, or to pay for medicine when someone was sick. Then Awa started calling regularly for money to see the doctor or buy medicine.  After a little probing, I found out she was having reproductive health problems. I did some research, then called Awa and invited her to come to the capital to see a recommended doctor here. I’ll cover all the expenses, I said.

She got approval from her husband and told me she’d call me when she arrived in the city to get directions to my house.

Directions to my house? Wait, you’re going to stay with me?

I was not prepared for this. This was crossing the line. I would go with her to see the doctor, give money, make phone calls – but not let her stay with me, not open my life completely to her.

But didn’t I just open up my house and bed to you a few weeks ago when you were here in the village, she reminded me. And so I gave in.

When she arrived late in the evening, I showed her how to flush my toilet, turn the hot water heater on, take a shower, and light the stove. I was worried more about her breaking something in my apartment then about her exhaustion and sickness.

We saw the doctor the next day, and he ordered several tests to check for STIs. He told us we would have to wait 3-5 days for the results and in the meantime she was not to have sex with her husband, who also happened to be in the city, or she might contract another STI.

Maybe you should just go to your relatives’ house for a few days? I suggested to Awa.

If I go to their house, my husband will go there and want to see me, to be with me, she said. 

But doesn’t he know why you’re here? That if he is with you, it could wreck your treatment? I said, appalled.

Yes, but you know him.

I did. I knew his temper and his ability to manipulate people and his tendency to beat Awa and force her to be with him even if she didn’t want it. So she stayed. A couple days turned into several days. Several days turned into two weeks.

I felt sick and confused and helpless. Every moment I spent with her was a reminder of this painful, disgusting, unsolvable situation.

Every night we had pillow talk. Only instead of silly gossip, she told me about all the pain she had experienced because of her husband. How she had been barely 13 years old when her father had arranged her marriage, how she had cried and begged her mom to not let her go. How her first night with her husband was like a semi-truck barging through the door to a hut. How she had been sick for weeks afterward, couldn’t even eat, had to go to the hospital. How, during the years that he was a senator and had money, he would sleep with prostitutes in nearby villages and then return home late, expecting her to sleep with him, too. 

Finally one night, she couldn’t hold it in anymore.  She sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.  My heart hurts, Ndeye, she cried to me. Ndeye, my heart hurts so badly.

All I could do was plead desperately with God. I prayed and I prayed as I rubbed her back, her shoulders shaking with sob after sob. Lord, do something for her!  Give her a way out.  I can’t handle this anymore.  LORD, do something!

A couple days later, I sat down with Awa and her husband and explained that Awa had an STI, so both of them needed to take medicine. I also brought up the issues of mistreatment, both with Awa and with their kids. I was cautious, but when he said that the problems always stem from Awa, I had to be firm. This was my opportunity to stand up for Awa, but I was also afraid for her. What would happen when they both returned to the village?

Later that evening, Awa left to return to the village. Her husband is still in the capital for political meetings. I’m hopeful that she’s healing physically. But I’m still unsure about her emotionally and psychologically.  She is suffering.

Somewhat reluctantly, I let her in close, and now I feel a portion of her pain.  I have never felt such pain before; I want it to stop. I want to pull back, to stop calling, to stop sending money, to forget all of it. But I can’t. I made a choice to let her in, and I’m not going back no matter how much it hurts. It’s a process, but I’m learning to open myself up, to love, and to be loved.

This post is a the final installment of my Women’s History Month project, “Honoring Women’s Stories.” You can read more about the project and see other women’s stories here.

Aiming at perfection

I am so proud today to share with you this lovely story written by my dear friend. She has chosen to remain anonymous, but I think you will agree with me that that the telling is brave, heartbreakingly beautiful, and ultimately redemptive. She is going to be an amazing doctor, a true healer.

Photo  by Amanda Munoz

Although encouraged in every way to succeed from infancy, I somehow initially escaped the illusion that one could “have it all.” When the neighborhood boys started teasing me about being fat, the choice was easy—I would give up on my body and would instead be really smart. I was already succeeding in school. What I liked most about math and science was that I was the best student at both subjects. While the “fat girl” taunting continued daily, it ended at the school bus stop. The school was sacred ground, and I was safe and confident when I was studying. 

I set my goals and I reached them.  I was first in my class, and I got the highest scholarship to college.  I continued to study math and science and decided to be a doctor.  At that point I think it was still the challenge that drew me to medicine. If I could perfect one domain of my life, I would work on my brain—partially because I despised my own body. 

Somewhere along the quest, I lost the security of the classroom as the challenges grew. I couldn’t rely on my confidence in my brain any longer and I turned my intense self-criticism on my appearance. That’s when I developed an eating disorder.

I was 20 years old when I started running. I began weighing myself daily. Initially, I thought I would be happy with a size 10, down from a size 14. With the same intensity I have always had for perfection, I passed that goal in 3 weeks, losing 20 pounds. And I was happier; I was healthier. 

With my small successes, I started needing to be perfect, not average. Once I set my eyes on perfection, I could no longer settle for less.  It was all-consuming. I embarked on a dieting routine that I still struggle with 8 years later. While I finished college and got into medical school, suddenly the dreams I was previously passionate about became less important—becoming a doctor, saving the world, being perfect.

Without noticing it, I dropped down to 114 pounds; my nadir BMI was less than 17. At that point I would still have described myself as “pudgy,” and I still wanted my bones to be more defined.  I could no longer sleep at night—I awoke after only a few hours of sleep due to my depression and because my joints hurt with no soft tissue to cushion them. I lost hunger cues and was nauseated; I would go more than a week without a bowel movement. I went 4 years without a menstrual period. I was unaware that both my mind and my body were in so much pain. 

I struggled through the worst of the eating disorder because I had friends and family who saw the whole person in me—a whole person who continued to exist although at times broken. My dream to learn medicine continued, and they encouraged me. I redirected my efforts to studying medicine and the intricacies of the human body. I labored over books of images of the ideal human body with rippling muscles; I studied the perfect principles of physiology. 

Then I met patients—and I immediately realized that no individual comes close to the perfected images.  We are each plagued by rashes, fractures, obesity, mental health disorders, and infections. I have learned about the body, heart, and brain in medical school. The whole person is greater than the sum of its pieces; there is an element to the human that will never be found in my textbooks. My journey ultimately has made me accept that no amount of perfection in body or mind will ever make me happy. I finally realized that no matter what the number on the scale read, I would still feel blemished—because I am blemished. We all are blemished. 

Becoming a doctor is an odd choice for someone who spent the first 22 years of my life despising my body. I have spent the last 21 years studying to prepare for my graduation this May. I still think medicine is my vocation. I come alive when a patient brings me into her life and allows me to see how she ails. It still shocks me that patients allow me—as a student—to perform a physical exam. It is an honor to try to alleviate their pain and to carry their burden.

I don’t think people can fit a mold or are entitled to “have it all.”  But I do not have to choose between my mind and my body. In order to be happy and to fulfill my role as a physician, I have found that I have to love and honor both my mind and my body.

This post is a part of my Women’s History Month project, “Honoring Women’s Stories.” You can read more about the project and see other women’s stories here.

Pressed but not crushed, part 2

Read part 1 of Paulina's story here.

I went to see Paulina in the spring, at the family compound where she was staying with her mother. She still swung her hips and insisted on a feast of coconut fish for her guest. Edwiggy crawled around with a little doll. The Tanzanian pop radio and children’s shouts were a more pleasant background than the busy road where Moses lived in the city.

Here in Moshi is where she had first met Moses. He had grown up here, worked at a shop selling rice and sugar and soap. Her mother would send her to the shop for tea leaves. Sometimes Moses bought her a Coke and induced her to linger a few minutes at the store.

“He was charming,” she told me. “Different than he is now.”

“Has he tried to call you?”

“He calls, but I will not go back,” she said as though it was that easy, as though she could simply toss him aside, like the chaff she was sorting out from the rice. “Once he pulled his gun on me.”

*

She was working at a hotel in here Moshi when he asked her to come live with him. She weighed the options—a meager job cleaning at a tourist hotel, better than most of her schoolmates, but long hours for low pay—or keeping house for charming Moses-from-the-shop. As soon as she arrived in Dar es Salaam, she knew he was different—drinking, drugs, sleeping with other women. The police job and his co-workers were pushing him in a direction she didn’t know how to handle. He came home angry and didn’t have much to say other than to ask about dinner.

When she was pregnant with Edwiggy, that’s when he first started beating her. In her seventh month, scared for Edwiggy’s health, she went home to Moshi. Her mother trekked to different markets every day to buy and sell sweaters and coats, thrift-store throwaways from the U.S.  Paulina could only sell coconuts from home and help with the laundry and cooking. She didn’t know if her mother and siblings silently resented her as another giant belly to feed. After all, she’d gotten fat in the big city.

She delivered the baby in Moshi. Moses pursued her. She convinced herself he had beaten her because of the pregnancy. He’d be better now that the baby was born. She returned to Dar.

The beatings resumed after a few weeks. She started to get scared when she found messages from other lovers on his phone. She was terrified of AIDS; the Tanzanian public health campaign had been in successful in getting the word out about condoms and HIV testing. The marketers, the government, the newscasters could talk about it. You just couldn’t talk about it in real life, with your lover; no real man would consider wearing condoms. All Paulina could do was question him. “Why do you have messages from other women on the phone?”

Every question meant a beating.

One night, when Edwiggy was only a few months old, Moses came home wasted, complaining about the food she’d prepared. She snatched his phone in suspicion or retaliation. He pulled out his gun.

Paulina talked him down. She lived with him for several months after that. She slept with him, cooked for him, and raised their child. He never apologized.

*

After a day of coconut fish and storytelling, and watching Edwiggy try to stand, it was time for me to go. I stood to leave. That’s when she brought it up again. “Do you have the money to help me start a business?”

She had a vague plan about going to Nairobi to buy secondhand clothes, to sell them at markets like her mother did.

I had dangled money in front of her eagerly once, in hopes it would make her leave an abusive relationship. Now, after more thought and other experiences of being ill-used for cash, I balked a little. I feared she didn’t have a good business plan, might become dependent on me for help. She and Edwiggy were safe now. Did I need to help beyond that?

But she still needed to provide for her daughter. And I had offered her help. I gave her $100. “Use it for business,” I said. “Be careful with it.” Another woman I knew had begun raising goats, sheep, and chickens on the same initial amount.

When I came back to see Paulina one last time before my departure from Tanzania, she asked me again for money. “I haven’t started business yet, and I had to use $25 to take Edwiggy to get her shots,” she said.

I swallowed and told her I didn’t have any more to give.

In retrospect, I was wrong. She had used the money to provide needed health care for her daughter. I could have encouraged this. I could have helped more. I could have done research on micro-lending groups, tried to refer her to someone to help. I could have found more seed money, sat with her to make a business plan, stayed an extra day and gone with her to invest in inventory. But it was so complicated, and I needed boundaries, and I was tired of being asked to be a savior, tired of these murky situations, and I was going back to America, and I knew nothing of business, and what more could I do?

I gave her a big hug and promised I’d come back one day.

*

When I think of Paulina, I think how it isn’t fair. It isn’t fair that she had such a heavy load, that there was nowhere to turn for sustainable income or assistance, no way for a woman with a primary-school education and an infant to make it in her country, no legal recourse for the wrongs that were done her. It isn’t fair that I couldn’t, or didn’t, help her more.

But I also think of her grin, the gap in teeth when she giggles, her sing-songy voice, her hospitality, her caring father and mother, her great love for her daughter, and how she doesn’t give up.

I have a feeling, or maybe it is a hope, or only a desperate prayer—that she and Edwiggy are doing okay.

This post is a part of my Women’s History Month project, “Honoring Women’s Stories.” You can read more about the project and see other women’s stories here.

Pressed but not crushed, part 1

I visited Paulina my first week back to Tanzania. I hadn’t seen her for a year. She carried her six-month-old daughter on her back as she bent over her kerosene stove to fry potatoes and plantains. She swung her new-mother hips as she walked proudly to the refrigerator to retrieve the orange-papaya juice she had squeezed and blended for me that morning.

Juice in hand, I sat on the red plush sofa in a bare concrete room and stared at badly-translated, hokey photos on the wall (“house is where the heart is”) while I dutifully ate the plantains and meat she brought me. Paulina insisted I relax while she cooked porridge for her daughter Edwiggy, fed her, fretted about her lack of appetite, bathed her, dressed her. “I’ve been so busy rushing around, I ran into the door,” she giggled, touching a bruise on her head.

After a quick afternoon trip to meet her old grandmother and run by the market, we returned with baskets full of onions, tomatoes, papaya and watermelon. Paulina’s boyfriend was watching TV, irked that we’d returned late and dinner wasn’t ready. Paulina cooked dinner, fed Edwiggy again, put her to bed, made more juice. She brought out the food for me and Moses, and served his plate. She turned up the American hip-hop louder and heated bathwater for Moses as we ate. She washed the dishes.

By ten I was exhausted from merely watching her. Paulina flashed me her smile again.

“Katherine, sit,” she commanded in Swahili. “Let’s tell stories.”

She moved her shoulders to the music and sang along in English as I explained the meaning of songs to her. She asked me six times what I thought of her baby daughter.

Beyoncé danced across the screen. “In America, do people walk down the street naked like they do in the music videos?” Paulina asked. She helped me review Swahili words for all the body parts, including the ones seen in the music videos. She giggled. She asked me when I was going to make enough money to buy her a plane ticket to America.

As I was leaving the next morning for Arusha—eight hours away by bus, where I’d be living for the next year—she touched her forehead. “I didn’t really run into a door,” she told me as we arrived at the bus stop. “Moses beats me.”

I shook my head and tried to listen, but the ranting Swahili was too fast for me. My bus pulled up. I hugged her goodbye.

*

Three months later on a Christmastime visit to the city, I sat in her neighbor’s extra bedroom, sweating from the heat, as Paulina made the bed for me. She pulled her khanga up to her hips, exposing her legs. Baseball-sized bruises, blue and green and purple, adorned her thighs. “Moses got drunk,” she said. “He is a horrible person.”

“Leave him!” I exclaimed.

Her reasoning was practical. Moses, in his job with the national police, brought home money for food. He brought home money for Edwiggy. Paulina didn’t love him anymore, but where would she go without income? What kind of work could she do with a nine-month-old baby? Who would take her in? She figured she would endure it until Edwiggy was old enough to walk. Then at least, she wouldn’t be burdening her family too much.

I hesitated, knowing I should think this through, but the words burst from my mouth: “What if I give you some money?”

How many times had she begged me for money for a plane ticket, for a trip to America? She was always asking for help.

Now I tried to meet her deep brown eyes. “If you had a little money, could you leave?”

She refused. Maybe she didn’t want the charity, or maybe she thought I needed the money, or maybe her no was a cultural way of being polite. “You are a student. You are a volunteer. Keep your money.” She turned on the fan, tucked me into my mosquito net, and told me to sleep well. I ached for her. But I was twenty-two and she was twenty-one, and we saw no solutions.

*

Three weeks later, when I had returned to Arusha, Moses came home drunk with another woman.

Paulina walked out with her baby daughter and took with her enough of his money to buy the bus ticket back home to her mother, in a small town close to Arusha.

I read her text message while I lay on the lavish bed in the Kudu Lodge after the second day of safari with my parents, who were visiting from the U.S. It had been a day of elephants, cheetahs, soup and salad and steak. The dissonance made me uncomfortable.

A few minutes later, another text appeared. Will you help me with some money to start a business here?

-- 

The second half of Paulina's story is up here.

This post is a part of my Women’s History Month project, “Honoring Women’s Stories.” You can read more about the project and see other women’s stories here.

Life her own way

The first tears I shed after John proposed to me came about an hour later, as we started to dream of our wedding day, at the thought that Grandma wouldn’t be there. I had so wanted her to be there for that shining moment, to hold my hand for a photo, to give me a kiss as I waited to walk down the aisle, to make a wisecrack about our awkward first dance, to enjoy the company.

Better than her being there, though, were all the jokes and glances and secrets and dessert we shared over the years.

Better still was the impact of her life on mine, and that in the end we both knew how very much we loved each other.

*

Grandma’s life story is one of quietly defying conventions, and succeeding at almost everything by her wit and grace. She grew up in the Midwest during the twenties and the Great Depression. She was a precocious child and her mother was ready to get her out of the house, so she was sent to school a year early. She skipped another grade later and graduated from high school before her sixteenth birthday.

Apparently her only options in college (as a woman) were to study Home Economics or Sciences. Like my mother and me, she was really more of an arts-and-humanities kind of gal, but there was no way she was going to college for Home Ec, so bacteriology it was.

I will say that if she had majored in Home Ec, she would have completely dominated it, as she had the magic touch in home décor and in the kitchen. Her homemade spaghetti sauce was our Christmas Eve staple, and her Easter dinners of roast beef and twice-baked potatoes and jello were always flavorful and served in china and crystal. When I was a child, I admit that an overnight at Grandma’s excited me as much for the twenty-one types of cereal I would get to pick from as for the perfectly-timed dinners, but gradually I began to see the virtues of her more refined recipes. Now, I wish I had spent more time as an apprentice in her kitchen.

After college, Grandma moved to Washington and worked at NIH for several years before starting a family.  She met my grandpa through his sister, who was a friend in the local alumni sorority group, but the story goes that she continued dating other men until the day he asked her to marry him. When he asked, she said yes, and then added, “But I’m still planning to go on this date I have planned for Saturday.”

They must have worked through that, because they were happily and lovingly married for 49 years until he died in 1997.

Later on, when her kids were grown, she got a real estate license and worked thirty years as an agent, helping each person she worked with find a good home, insisting that all people, regardless of race or background, should be able to buy a home in a decent neighborhood, treating all her clients with thoughtfulness and care. She never retired. She sold her last house at age 86, two years before she died.

*

These are the outlines of her life, the facts that make it in an overview, a humorous summary. But there is so much more nuance inside the lines. Some of the details, the depths, the fullness of her person, I discovered in her dying, and in her death.

Grandma carried her sharp wit, intelligence and competence with her even into her final weeks, when her body was beginning to go, racked with pneumonia and too weak to walk without assistance. Even then, when she wasn’t loopy on meds or low on oxygen from the pneumonia, her mind was with us 100%, and for that I will be forever grateful.

For ten months, she was in and out of hospitals and rehab and then home with my mom or my uncle until she fell or caught pneumonia again. I knew it was a gift when I went to visit her every week, when I lay next to her in a hospital bed watching Jeopardy or took her outside for a walk, when she asked me to share my latest thoughts on career and life plans and then listened intently and thoughtfully as I spit out confused thoughts on jobs and relationships. I knew it was a gift that last Saturday we spent in the bright living room at my mother’s house, plunking out favorites from the Presbyterian hymnal and flipping through a book of Chopin preludes.

Grandma was a devout Presbyterian, one of the founding members of her church. After she died, my mother found a document she had written for church, describing her faith. In lovely prose, she wrote of her almost constant conversation with God throughout every day, and of the peace her faith had given her when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in her fifties.

The perpetual spiritual awareness was a part of her life she hadn’t talked about much. And yet I had always known by the way she lived.

We gathered for her funeral and the sympathy cards poured in, and one cousin wrote, The summer I spent at Aunt Ariel’s house is the summer I learned about acceptance. Others remembered her frequently opening her home for dinner parties or bridge games. My mom recalled her love of hosting foreign exchange students.

I thought of the way she was always reaching out to people—her interest in the life story of her Latina cleaning lady or the new Ethiopian woman at church; her insistence that we walk around the nursing home with the apple pie I had just brought, giving pieces to her new friends; her mission to get me to play the piano in the nursing home dining room—though she could barely hear by then—because she knew it would please old Mr. Baer, who never smiled.

I know that she made me feel adored, with her valentines and attendance at all my concerts and chats over coffee. She didn’t always have to say it—like her faith it was bubbling up under the surface in the way she looked at me and pried about my love interests and begrudged me to spoon feed her at the end when she wasn’t eating. I always knew that I was one of her most special people.

And she will always be one of mine.

This post is a part of my Women’s History Month project, “Honoring Women’s Stories.” You can read more about the project and see other women’s stories here.

Seeing her beautiful

On this day, I have been given an invitation. Today I open a box in my memory, dig through the clutter, and find her somewhere in the corner. I find the girl I once was, bring her out into the light. She is like a precious stone, and in the light I turn her and turn her, noting the shimmer and sparkle on each side, the light reflected in different hues, complex and deep and lovely.

I am not accustomed to seeing her this way. I rather think of her as scuffed up, gaudy, trying too hard, awkward, showy. But this month I honor myself too, and I try to see her beautiful.

Photo by TVZ Design

*

At age five, she came home from school and pronounced, “There is a writing contest and I am going to win.” She shoveled in her spaghetti at the dinner table and assured her parents, “I am the best on my soccer team.” She sang solos at church and at school without a waver in her voice.

She became student council president in sixth grade. By this time she was beginning to notice other girls getting big-chested, getting boyfriends, shaving their legs. Hers legs were still hairy and her clothes were still hand-me-downs. Her social confidence was beginning to fade. But she didn’t let it stop her. She ran for president, and she won.

That Christmas, she received from her grandmother a small wooden gavel, which was inscribed, “President Katie.” It was reason enough to declare, for the rest of that year, that she was going to be the first woman president of the United States.

I cannot deny that she has a bit of ego, a love for power. But today I look beyond it and see more in her. I see the confidence and joy and courage that comes from being loved, and being unafraid. I see independence and creativity and unselfconsciousness about sharing her gifts.

*

She lay on the floor next to a stack of Sweet Valley Twins books, with her ear pressed to the small clock radio and the volume way down. It was past her bedtime, but she had to catch the “Hot 9 at 9” which she recorded in her book almost every night, to stay up with the latest music.

Lately, though, she liked country music, the sad twangy love songs about loneliness. They were great for belting in the shower. To cover this embarrassing musical interest, she made up white lies about the CDs she was receiving for Christmas, insisting there was some Backstreet Boys and Will Smith among them.

On her school notebooks she had scribbled, “I <3 Lance Bass” in unnaturally floofy letters. When she wrote notes to stick into the vents in her friends’ lockers, she wrote her “e’s” like backwards threes because she’d noticed other girls doing it that way.

I usually see that girl and wince at how hard she tried, for how very long, to fit into a crowd. Today I notice also her longing to be relevant, her ability to observe and adapt to a culture, the real connections that she forged. I notice that some of the floofy-lettered notes were about God, some were attempts to reconcile friends, and some were written to the unpopular, overweight girl in her homeroom.

*

It was lunchtime at the high school, and she was sitting at the table, slowly picking each item out of her lunchbox, as the usual dialogue played out in her head.

- Fold your hands and pray, you can do it.

- No, it will only make them uncomfortable.

- Don’t be ashamed of your faith.

- They are going to think I’m so weird. They don’t understand.

She was in the school library at seven-thirty, showered and changed after morning swim practice. She sat with her friends at the table, studying. The Bible was in her backpack, and she willed herself to take it out—a bold witness, a display of unashamed faith. If only it was easier to be a Christian in this world. One day she drummed up her courage, and took it out of the backpack, and opened it, there on the table in full view. But of course she didn’t read it, only glanced around for ten minutes at all the other students in the library, sure they must be watching, waiting to pounce.

I know better now, that it’s not a war, that we are all really on the same side, trying to figure life out, trying to find grace in this world. The girl I was then thought this was a battle, and she wasn’t prepared to fight it. I am glad she wasn’t prepared, because maybe then she’d still be fighting, fighting when it is better to sing, and hold hands. Looking at her now, I see that despite her fears, she was singing and holding hands, and she must have done something right, because girls from that time are still some of her closest friends.

*

Today I turn her and turn her in the light. I see her and love her.

And I see also this: gratitude for the processes that formed her. For the love and opportunities that made her fearless and confident; for the family that encouraged her to notice the unpopular girl in homeroom and the hungry people in the world; for the loneliness that gave her compassion and cultivated her spirit. There are many girls who never get that love, who are never told they could be president, or who never believe it.

She is one lucky girl.

--

This post was written with inspiration from the Story Sessions prompt for international women’s day. This was a fun one to write about. You can find more stories like this or write your own over at the link-up by clicking here.

Visit my “Honoring Women’s stories” project for more stories of different women.

Learning to read at 60

I first met Shirley in 2009, while working with an adult literacy program in DC. Shirley was sixty, a mother and grandmother, a heart attack survivor, a lifelong DC resident. She was friendly, spirited, close with the other students. And she couldn't read.

I started tutoring her that fall, and over the next three years, we met most weeks in the library or at the building where she took her classes.

At first, we read lists of simple words, and short stories about school or work or family. After a story, sometimes she would pause and tell me about her experiences.

Shirley told me she’d had trouble in school from the time she started. All her brothers and sisters did okay, but she struggled to read. Likely, she had learning disability that was never diagnosed. The teachers passed her along each year. She dropped out in the seventh grade.

As I worked with Shirley, she made small steps forward, and we progressed to reading her mail and managing her bank account and bills. She told me that this was important to her, because ever since her mother died, Shirley’s siblings had been taking advantage of her. They charged her twenty or thirty bucks anytime she needed a favor, like writing out a money order, withdrawing money from the bank, reading a piece of mail. She wanted to learn to do it herself.

Photo by Dvortygirl

She told me that she had loved and cared for her mother dearly as she aged. She had moved in with her mother as a caretaker because in Shirley’s own words, “That’s what I do. I take care of people.” Some of Shirley’s siblings seemed to busy with their own lives to trouble with their mother, but Shirley loved every moment she spent with this woman, who was her role model, guide, and best friend. Her death changed everything.

Together, Shirley and I tackled the frightening task of writing, too: handwriting, signatures, filling out forms. But it was recipes she really wanted to record. When we finally completed a selection of recipes, she named it “Shirley’s Dream Cookbook.”

She told me her favorite thing to do as a child was to go into the kitchen, sit on the countertop, and watch her mother cook. She loved the smells and colors and found that she had a penchant for cooking herself. At class potlucks, Shirley made a mean crab salad and was renowned for her pork chops. On the other hand, she didn’t bake too much. Baking requires reading recipes and making precise measurements.

*

After a couple years, Shirley asked me if we could start reading the Bible.

It was slow going, because the words were difficult. But she also knew them, from years of churchgoing, and it was empowering for her to learn to read phrases like my enemies have disgraced me, O Lord do not forsake me so that she could read them before bed as a prayer.

Tutoring session became almost like a Bible study, and I’m not sure which one of us was the teacher.

One day we read about the day when God will wipe away every tear from our eyes, and she told me about the twin girls she had lost only a few days after she gave birth to them.

Another day, we read a psalm of lament, and she told me how she regretted her son’s slow descent into the wrong crowd. She had seen it happening and hadn’t known how to stop it, and it was that path and that crowd that had landed him in prison a few short months after his son was born. She’s convinced he was set up. Shirley’s son is still in jail, and Shirley misses him every day.

We read about God as a refuge and protector, and she told me her husband had survived after getting mugged one night as he walked from the bus to their apartment. He’d had eye surgery, and he couldn’t work for several months after that, but he was okay now.

We read about God’s great love for us, and she shook her head with that kind of wisdom and joy that only comes from trekking through the storm. She said, “Hallelujah.” She said, “Katie, I don’t even know where I would be without God’s faithfulness.”

*

Over the three years we worked together, Shirley improved her reading skills and increased her vocabulary. She opened a bank account, became comfortable with an ATM, and learned to write her own checks and money orders to pay bills. She learned to text. She learned several Psalms. She got a new apartment through DC public housing, one that has an elevator, which is better for her with her heart condition.

Every step in Shirley’s learning process was small. She still needs a lot of help with everyday tasks that require reading. She hasn’t gotten a GED or found a lawyer who can get her son out of jail or learned to read a novel. But in every small step she opened up a little more, found new independence, confidence, and determination.

Last year, Shirley was ready to share her story. She found her fifteen minutes of fame on the local NPR station, where she spoke about her experience battling illiteracy. A couple weeks later, she went with some fellow students to lobby the DC City Council for adult education funding. From memory, she testified in a packed public hearing about the difference adult literacy programs had made in her life. She absolutely nailed it.

This post is a part of my Women’s History Month project, “Honoring Women’s Stories.” You can read more about the project and see other women’s stories here.

It’s not too late if you’d like to contribute a story--your own or someone else’s. Just email me by March 12 at katiemurchisonross at gmail dot com.

Too young to marry

Neema, at 14

Neema (pronounced NAY-ma) means grace in Swahili. Neema’s first language was not Swahili; it was Maasai, the mother language of her tribe. She was her mother’s seventh and last-born. Her father had four wives and several herds of goats and cows. Neema’s mother was the second wife.

Neema’s oldest brother never went to school. Her father didn’t believe in education. But by the time Neema was six, her mother had become an advocate for education and sent her off to primary school, a few miles walk each day.

Neema sat in a classroom with forty or fifty other students and listened to the teacher. She learned to read and write, and tried to memorize the notes the teacher wrote on the board for them to copy each day.

In the evening, Neema walked home with her friends and returned to her mother’s boma. She took the goats out to feed at night, walked to the well half a mile away to draw water, and collected firewood for cooking. She sat in the smoky hut tending a bowl of ugali with greens for dinner. As she got in the bed she shared with her sister each night, she took a candle and stole a glance at her school notebooks. She loved to learn.

Neema always did well in school and the family said she had brains. She finished seventh grade. She, with all her classmates around the country, sat for the national examinations. She was neither confident nor scared; it was a test they all had to take to determine whether they could continue on to secondary school.

Neema failed the test. She would not be allowed to continue in government school. And she did not have the money to pay for private school.

She continued day in and day out with her work around the boma, never complaining. She had more time now so she made the tea in the morning and grazed the goats earlier so she could get back to help with cooking, too. Sometimes her mother was sick.

At night she called her sister and brother in the city, sobbing. “I want to go to school,” she cried. “I am afraid Father is going to find a man for me to marry.”

A few weeks after the notice of her failure on the national exam, Neema came home to find her father speaking with another village man. “You are going to marry his son,” her father said.

The man Neema was to marry was sixteen and had no education beyond the seventh grade. His family brought goats and sheep as a bride price for her father. There were parties at the boma, and all feasted on meat. There was going to be a wedding.

Neema continued to cry, and she called her brother every night pleading for help. She didn’t want to marry a man with no education and no future. A man who wasn’t a man. She didn’t want to marry at all. She was fourteen. She wanted to find a way to go back to school.

The family of the groom brought local alcohol as a gift. The wedding day was getting closer and all the plans were set. Neema’s father had gotten all his bridal gifts. He took his two younger wives and moved to the coastal region, hours away. He returned to finalize the matter.

Neema’s brother Meshak came in the middle of the day. He walked up the hill in his shuka while Neema was out hauling water. The family of the groom saw him and ran to the boma on the top of the hill to greet him, to see if there was any trouble.

While they were speaking, Neema returned with water and bowed her head respectfully to her older brother. She greeted him and quickly went to bring chai for her brother and the other guests.

They talked for a few minutes over chai, but then Meshak called Neema aside. “Pack your bag,” he told her.

Happily, she put a few khangas and her old school books in a small knapsack.

The groom’s father saw what was happening. He began to argue with Meshak. “She is bound to my son already. We have eaten meat together.”

Meshak had grown up in the same boma, the second born of their mother. He had passed the National Exam and could have gone on to high school, but his father sent him instead to tend cattle in the Serengeti with his uncle. He had been able to escape to the city finally, to become a car mechanic, and he had joined a Pentecostal church there, which taught that women had dignity. He was not going back to the city today without Neema. “No. She will not marry your son.”

The groom’s father was furious, yelling, calling others in the village to be his witness at the promise that had been made. Neema stayed quietly inside the boma, heart pounding, as the argument grew.

“Come now,” Meshak said to Neema, as a crowd began to gather around the boma. The father of the groom tried to block them, but Meshak pushed him aside and dragged Neema quickly down the hill back to the main road.

They were able to escape, not without giving the father of the groom some money. They boarded the bus for the city and returned to Meshak’s home.

Neema humbly took her place in his house, helping his wife with the cooking and cleaning, and waiting for a chance to go back to school. She shared a bed with Meshak’s young children and went about her daily tasks diligently, faithfully. She was happy to be away from the village and her father’s influence. Happy the next-door neighbors had a TV she was sometimes allowed to watch. But she still wanted to go back to school.

By the miracle of friendship and generous hospitality, I moved into Meshak’s home a few weeks after she arrived. I had met Neema and Meshak’s sister through a friend, and was looking for new housing in the city while I volunteered as an English teacher. The family welcomed me in with open arms.

I slept in the same room with Neema and ate from the same plate of ugali with her for three months.  She laughed at my foreignness and taught me how to properly tend the charcoal stove. We walked together to get fresh milk in the morning. Whenever I left for school, she demanded I give her my dirty clothes so she could wash them. Occasionally in the evening, she asked for help studying her old school books. She never asked me for money, but as I came to know her story more fully, it became clear that I could help her.

In the spring, I drummed up support from some friends to pay for the private school fees Neema needed. Neema returned to school, and we have continued to support her financially, in hopes that her success will eventually enable her to support herself and her family. Four years have gone by, and Neema has been in a boarding school where she is at the top of her class. She is able to focus much better than in primary school, when she was commuting by foot and had no electricity in the village. She took her high school final exams last November. The last I talked with her, she was waiting at Meshak’s house for results to come back. A lot is at stake—the chance to go on to a vocational college, or even university.

Meanwhile, she has learned how to live in the city. Her voice is deeper and her English is better. She is eighteen now, older and wiser, more ready for whatever comes next.

This post is a part of my Women’s History Month project, “Honoring Women’s Stories.” You can read more about the project and see other women’s stories here.

Honoring women's stories

Photo by Erik Soderstrom

In high school I used to long for summer, which was the time when I would get my fill of deep conversation to last me the year. At camp, late at night we would lie in a starry field or huddle onto a couple bunk beds or poke at the embers of a campfire, and girls would share their stories.

I have never stopped cherishing the vulnerable, real-life, honest, messy-beautiful stories of women and their journeys.

March is women’s history month, and it is a good time to tell stories. I have begun to write about a few women whose lives have been compelling, whose stories have stayed with me.

My intentions and hopes for this project are twofold:

First, I just want to honor the stories and the lives of these women—their strength, resilience, inner beauty. Some have faced great challenges. Some have been pillars for their families or communities. All of their stories are important, worth telling.

Second, in some of the stories, I want to draw attention to different issues that women face all over the world. I said in January that I wanted to write more about others, and that I wanted to take this year to revisit the global justice issues that I once actively cared so much about.

But here’s the exciting part: I would love your help. Maybe you know someone who deserves to have her story told. Maybe you can help us share in the wisdom that comes from hearing people’s stories. Maybe you are a woman with your own story to tell. It is more than just catastrophe and dramatic recovery that make our stories matter, so feel free to think outside the box. What story has captured your heart?

If you have something you’d like to share as a part of the project, please send me an email at katiemurchisonross at gmail dot com. I’d like to have your written story by Wed, March 12, but if you think you might want to contribute, send me a message as soon as possible, letting me know you are working on something.