Connecting Community Gardens and Food Pantries

The world is full of sad news, bad news, horrifying news.  Violence and evil dominate it seems.  Ugly, disheartening violence.  But there's some good news out there, too. Today, day 1 of 2015, is a good time to remember that.

Many brave people are fighting for peace and justice all over the world. The worldwide struggle for civil society continues, from the efforts of Nobel prize winners down to the grassroots dedication of ordinary people.  Most change for the better comes, I think, from the bottom up.

It's so here in Toledo, Ohio, and the NW Ohio area.  Lots of local organizations are doing good work housing, clothing and feeding the homeless, the wounded, the needy. Our Ukrainian friends visited many of them during their Open World international exchange program in November.  They were impressed. Our visitors are doing the same kind of work in the towns and villages where they live, even under the most trying of circumstances, and were able to take lots of new ideas home with them.

These voices from the bottom up are often muted, stories buried under thundering headlines of society's ills.  I look for them wherever I can find them, anecdotes to the news that fills us with gloom and doom.

I recently read of a great effort originating in a bountiful garden in New Jersey.   An enthusiastic gardener, Gary Oppenheimer, was growing more food than he needed and didn't want his produce to go to waste. He decided to connect with a local pantry that provides food to victims of domestic violence.  "If there's food you can't use...get it to someone who needs it."

So he created Ample Harvest.  Oppenheimer has signed up more than 7,000 food pantries across the country.  They are now providing fresh fruits and vegetables to those who need it. Healthy food, good for the body and soul, a nice addition to all those canned goods many of us donate!

Most of these exchanges are seasonal, but I have an idea more will come out of this, including freshly preserved fruits and vegetables that can be sold as well as given to food pantries.  In fact, the food pantries might be able to come up with some entrepreneurial ventures of their own.

A community garden,
Toledo Blade

Reading about this project made me think of the community gardens here in the Toledo area. Some of these gardens have honeybee hives, which produce yummy fresh honey that is gathered, packaged, and sold as well as shared.  The Franciscan Sisters' garden has a polyhouse, a plastic greenhouse, that allows them to grow food year round.  New gardens are starting up near Scott high school and other city locations. These gardens, now over 160 of them, are members of "Toledo Grows," an outreach program of the Toledo Botanical Gardens.

Marcy Kaptur, our U.S. Congressional Representative  (Ohio District 9), is a huge supporter of these community gardens, along with efforts to protect and preserve our Maumee river environment, the Lake Erie watershed, and yes, honeybees.

I think she would like the idea of Ample Harvest.  We can all give any surplus from our own gardens to agencies that feed the poor.  And we can easily connect our community gardens and our food pantries in lots of different and beneficial ways. Such a project won't take a lot of money, but for sure it will have lots of benefits, a "harvest of caring."

Article on Ample Harvest: https://news.yahoo.com/blogs/best-person-in-the-world/matching-gardeners-to-pantries-brings-a-harvest-of-caring-134446389.html

My Sylvania Christmases,2011, 2012, 2103, 2014, and a few special things

xmas card 2014

2014 Xmas Eve, Casa de Mama, & a few memories

2014 xmas letter
Dear loved ones,

     2014 was a good year at home, disappointing on the national scene with the gridlock of hateful politics, and heartbreaking abroad, in the Middle East and for me especially in Ukraine.  So many friends in harm’s way.  There were times when I became so upset that I needed those gentle reminders from some of you to stop watching the news!  It got me through the senseless wars and violence that dominate our world. 

   I don’t expect much better for the new year.  Low expectations for peace, or justice.   I’ve turned Niebuhrian, as in Reinhold Niebuhr’s  teaching that there is evil in the world; we have to  fight it; but it will always be with us.  My friends from Peace Corps days in Ukraine  confirmed that sentiment during their visit here for an Open World program. But how incredible to have them here, after 3years of persistent effort..okay, a royal pain in the neck!  “One individual can make a difference” a friend kindly put it.

      On the home front, it’s great having the whole clan in Sylvania. We are a few blocks from each other, a blessing on so many levels.  I’m where I’m supposed to be, surrounded by Elissa, Michelle and their loving children. Joy and Gratitude!

       The year brought a trip to San Miguel with Elissa (fantastic), to St. Pete, Tally (sister’s hip replacement), and Miami (South Beach), to Barcelona and the French & Italian Riviera (beautiful), the latter throughGo-Ahead Tours. Also had some nice visits from friends here, including Sandie Schwende  and Andy.   I blog for myself, mostly to keep writing and putting thoughts on a page;  do special projects  for my Rep. Marcy Kaptur, like the  honeybee book  (still going) and a memoir of a Polish survivor of World War II and the Russian gulags. I’ll continue with international exchange projects as I can, working with others to create people-to-people exchanges, the foundation for peace.  I’m working with SUN (www.SaveUkraineNow) to send humanitarian aid to eastern Ukraine, where the refugee crisis overwhelms.

Kyle, Philip, Chase 2014

       The year flew by almost at the speed of light.  It’s truly amazing.  The older I get, the faster time goes.  I wish you good health, safety (from gun violence as well as accidents), and happiness in 2015. Little things mean a lot! Keep in touch, with love, Fran

Getting and putting up Shel's tree, Dec. 2014

Jan 1, 2014 ,Winter storm, the first of many.  A long, hard winter in toledo.

Feb 2014, with Elissa in San Miguel Fantastic!

Thanksgiving 2014 at Michelle's!  I bought the turkey,
she cooked.  Yummy!

2013 Christmas at Casa de Mama

Cards made by Jud, watercolors

2013 Xmas letter. My holiday cards this year are original watercolors by my Peace Corps friend Jud Dolphin.  He started painting in Ukraine and has kept at it. I started writing a blog and have kept at it. Exploration. Persistence. Keeping young at heart. My themes for 2013.

It’s hard to believe another year has gone by, and faster than ever.  Add a year to your life, and time shrinks!  Last year at the end of December, grandson Josh and I were in San Miguel.  Josh is a great traveler and we had a fabulous time.  In 2014 Elissa and I are going to San Miguel, so she’ll get to experience one of my favorite places.  We’re excited.  Exploration! 

Christmas Cactus 2013 reminds me of my mom

Some threads in the fabric of my time in Sylvania will carry into 2014.  Italian lessons, practicing Spanish with Elissa, the Historical Society, support for urban missions for the homeless, travel, and a new research and writing project on honeybees & NW Ohio environment with our US Congressional  rep. Marcy Kaptur.  Marcy by the way, a loyal Obama Democrat, hates what’s happened to the House under this speaker also from Ohio.  I can’t imagine being a House member now; but  she hangs in there, doing her best for the 9^th congressional district of our state.  Persistence. 
I also continue to grow with my kids, Elissa and Michelle, and my grandkids:  Alli (at BG and doing great); Josh, Kyle and 2-year-old Chase; Tony and Julia, mom of Philip, who is now 6.  “Life takes you to different places.  Love brings you home.”  It brought me back to the Toledo area, and it’s been precious. It keeps me busy, and young at heart.  Wishing you the joy’s of exploration, persistence and a youthful spirit in 2014, and good health, with love. 

grandkids 2013. added Tony cause he couldn't be with us. 

Elissa's collage for me,dec 2013. Love it!

2013 Christmas Eve at Casa de Mama 

2013 decorations. On to a nice little fake tree!

2013 Grandkids: Alli, Kyle, Philip, baby Chase,
Julia and Tony,who couldn't be with us.

2012 Christmas, Sylvana 

E happy with Tony 

Xmas eve at my place; alli in her Senior year, HS,
heading to BGSU in 2013! 

Remembering Loren: Nov 12, 2012 My brother is 65 years old today, not here on this earth, but someplace else where his soul resides.  I am keeping his spirit alive, just remembering him and missing him so much, but frankly, I long for his presence more than anything in the world.  I’m also wondering about this other place.  A surgeon recently had a near-death experience and declared there is a heaven. He had lovely images of butterflies floating in an ethereal garden, a floating world.  I’m not there. I think the vision the good doctor had has more to do with neurones and synapses, and chemicals dancing around in the brain, than anything else.  Not that I don’t want to believe.  I do.  I really do.  Especially so if it might mean I would get to see Loren again, and my parents, and all those I loved and knew and lost.  I think we will never know, not while we are in this time and space.  Some friends think death is a kind of freedom from these restraints.  I don’t know.  Happy birthday dearest brother wherever you are.  I hope we meet again. Life is not the same since you’ve been gone.  And I have few people to rant with; just our sis, really! 

With Shel and kids in Nantucket, July 2012, first time back in years. It was lovely.  

2011 First Christmas in Sylvania, after Peace Corps, at Casa de Mama, on Main Street

2011 Wreath, my first christmas
in Sylvania Main St.

2011 xmas tree, a real one

2011 Xmas at Casa de Mama, Sylvania

Christmas 2010: Wishes for my grandkids 

Who knows what the future will bring for my grandchildren.  The world holds challenges and opportunities.  They have lots of choices.  

I hope they chose wisely.  I hope their wishes come true.  That they stay safe and healthy.  That the god/goddess who watches over children is always with them.  That angels like my brother Loren sit on their shoulders at all times and protect them, encourage them, give them confidence.  That they stay positive about life, choose a good path to their future, take life’s inevitable ups and downs with strength, remain resilient.  I hope they remember that the content of their character and strong values are more important than things, that their inner spirit is more important than their outer looks.  I  hope they remember they live in a global village, that some people are less fortunate than they are, that they can contribute to making the world and their environment a better place.  

These are some of my new year’s wishes for my grandchildren. I pray that they grow in wisdom, follow their dreams.  And who knows, but some of them might even become Peace Corps Volunteers one day! 

Christmas eve 2009,Taxim Square, Istanbul,
with PCVs Jason, and also Jud. Beautiful service at Pope John XXIII's
old church, down about a mile from the square.

How does it feel, Crimea?

Crimea then, a mixture of cultures and beauty, and the sea. 

Human Rights Watch investigation.

Crimea today, occupied, going downhill
under Russification campaign and Stalinist terror tactics.
NYT "Property grab in Crimea.".

The Russians stole Crimea from Ukraine in a stealth nationalistic and militaristic campaign orchestrated by Putin, which accompanied a covert and overt brutal intervention. Brutal.  The Russian invaders claimed that over 90% of Crimeans voted to join Russia in what is considered by most countries as a fraudulent illegal election.  Rigged to the teeth.   I've always doubted that "over 90%" hogwash. More Putin propaganda.  But if that's what the majority of Crimeans wanted, those Russian-speaking,revved-up hyper-hysterics, that's what they got.

The Russians have infiltrated and are destroying Crimea's economy, politics and culture.  It's a Russification campaign that is sickening to witness and worse to hear about from friends whose lives are in danger.  What used to be an autonomous republic under Ukraine, with relatively peaceful relations among its citizens, and freedom of speech and assembly, is now like a Soviet socialist republic ruled with an iron fist, a Stalinist regime installed and ruled by Russia.  It's illegal, and so far Putin is getting away with it. There is no justification for his invasion of another country's lawfully acknowledged territorial integrity and boundaries.  None.  

According to Human Rights Watch, human rights abuses in Crimea are now rampant, against Tatars, journalists, professionals, anyone who voices any criticism or anyone who is not becoming a Russian citizen.  "Under various pretexts, such as combating extremism, the authorities have been persecuting people who dare to openly voice criticism of Russia's actions on the pennisula."   Persecuting, kidnapping, murdering. The Russian puppets have set a deadline of January 2015 for people to become either Russian citizens or be designated "foreigners" with no rights at all.. Lines for passports run for days and days; frustration mounts. Nothing works. Hospitals, banks, shops. Even worse, heavily armed thugs, mercenaries, and extra-legal gangs rule with abandon.  No effort to restrain them. This is a civilized society in the 21st century?  The quality of life has become unbearable and will get worse as the Russian economy tanks.

The Russification campaign includes land grabs on a large scale.  An AP investigation found many instances of "legal owners strong-armed off their premises; buildings, farms and other prime real estate seized on dubious pretenses, or with no legal justification at all; non-payment of the compensation mandated by the Russian constitution; and targeting of assets belonging to or used by the Crimean Tatar ethnic minority and the pro-Kiev branch of the Orthodox Church."   What happened to the Yalta Film Studio, set in the mountains overlooking the Black Sea, has been replicated over and over: 
"One day in October, a dozen armed men in masks drove up to the gates of Yalta Film Studios.  They weren’t actors, and this was no make-believe. It was a hostile takeover....'They forced all  the employees onto the ground, sealed off the premises and halted the work of the studio,' said  owner Sergei Arshinov...." 

Ukraine's justice ministry has said that about 4,000 enterprises, organizations and agencies have had their property expropriated.  "Some holdings, from shipyards to health resorts, were publicly earmarked for repossession by Crimea's regional government, now part of the Russian Federation. Others were simply seized by armed men, sometimes carrying official decrees that were never published or no documentation at all." ( http://news.yahoo.com/change-leadership-crimea-means-property-grab-202020014.html).  

Welcome to the new Crimea.  This once-harmonious pennisula, homeland of Tatars, a tourist mecca for world travelers, a feast of historic sites like Bachysaray,Yalta and Yevpatoria, is now submerged into a Stalinist state and going into the abyss with the Russian economy.  My heart goes out to Crimeans who wonder, to those like the Tatars who are persecuted, again, to those once-Ukrainian loyalists who are now prisoners of a Stalinist state.  .   .  

But for those who joined the thugs' protests and "voted" to join mother Russia, for those hyper-hysterics, you are getting what you deserve. You let yourselves be sucked in by false propaganda, false promises, ramped up BS ad nauseum,  You supported the stealth violence and stealth takeovers, taking down Ukrainian flags, putting up Russian flags in public mass hysteria gatherings organized by Russian mercenaries, directed by Putin. You invited dear mother Russia to run rampant over your government, your people's halls, and public organizations. You allowed Russian mercenaries and thugs to destroyUkrainian armed forces, and in thousands of humiliating ways. Humiliating.  How could you do this? You allowed Russians to take over your education system and your economy. There are no NGOs.  The once-thriving tourism trade on which you depended?  It no longer exists.740 hotels? almst empty. You are Ukraine's traitors in what is now Putin's Jerusalem.   You are suffering the consequences of your "majority" vote to join the motherland. Hysterical nostalgia got you nowhere.

How does it feel, Crimea? 

Articles: 
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/22/world/europe/under-russia-life-in-crimea-grows-chaotic.html?

http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/11/17/crimea-human-rights-decline

http://www.theweek.co.uk/russia/60273/crimea-how-daily-life-has-changed-under-russian-rule

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/lithuanias-military-alert-russian-activities-190100709.html

http://therearenosunglasses.wordpress.com/2014/12/17/russia-we-have-the-right-to-put-nuclear-weapons-in-crimea/

My Rumi Circle

Rumi, wikimedia image

Rumi quotes:

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”

"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I'll meet you there."

"When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.” 

"The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”

My Rumi Circle, as I call it, is small.  No one knows about it.  Those few people who are in this circle don’t even know they are in it. It’s not like having facebook friends. It’s a little group of people I think of as soulmates, friends who float through the real world grounded, purposeful, and looking for the lightness of being.  Not in the Milan Kundera sense, but in the sense of seeking light while wandering through a forest.  A dark forest with many paths.

Probably they would like the Rumi quotes above, or we would talk about them with zeal.  I think of these friends as critical (in the broad sense of the word) and tolerant, wide-ranging in their interests, knowledgable, travelled, compassionate, open and searching. They are imperfect and know it but they stretch.   They are flawed, and they deal with it.  They reach out with open arms, sometimes not knowing who or what they might embrace.  They welcome the marginal and the lost.  

My brother Loren is in my Rumi circle, beloved, and Andy, Doris and people who understand some of my blogs, facebook comments and rants.  I feel safe ranting with them because they know I’ll get back to the center somehow, somewhere, and they know it as the process is unfolding.  We all go off like this.  But we know where we are heading ultimately, the general direction, often circuitous, which is to that field Rumi talks about. 

My Rumi circle just instinctively understands this.  We don't have to say anything.  It's not a matter of discussion. We just know in our gut that there's a reason for rising indignation and there will be a reason for adjusting it.  There's some compelling impetus behind the indignation and urge to rant, and the same compelling impetus in defusing it.  Things just settle where they are supposed to in time. 

The people in my Rumi Circle live far apart, some here on earth and others only the goddess knows where.  They do not know each other. Sometimes we don’t communicate for ages, years even, that is not in words or on facebook or skype even, but for me they are always there, always present. It's an unbreakable connection.

“The smallest coffin is the heaviest,” said a mourner today at a burial of the children killed by Taliban terrorists at a Peshawar, Pakistan school.  

It’s a sadness that led me to think about this Rumi circle in the first place. I believe these friends understand how the smallest is the heaviest. In lots of ways. On so many levels.  “Too horrific for words,” said reporter Nic Robinson of CNN. Yes, and through the disbelief and the outrage rises the compelling indignation, and the need to rant.  The souls in my Rumi Circle can walk in and through contradictions and foolishness, and even outrageousness, and find that we are still behind one another. This circle of unusual friends.  

We understand what others might consider “weird” things.  Like Rumi saying that “The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” 

We know these wounds. They are wounds we carry from childhood, from mistakes we have made, the shame we bear, the rejection we have experienced, the pain and loneliness brought on by ourselves or sometimes others.  We also know the inexpressible joy that emerges in time from these same wounds, self-inflicted or other-inflicted.  It’s like Mary Oliver says in her poem Wild Geese: 

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

In the Rumi circle, we share our wounds, and our imaginations; we help each other heal and expand, to take our part “in the family of things.”  Hard as it is, and as far as we fall from grace, we reach for the transcendent and universal, that spirit, that field, that light that Rumi and Mary Oliver talk about. 

Poem (The spirit likes to dress up...) by Mary Oliver

The spirit
likes to dress up like this:
ten fingers,
ten toes,

shoulders, and all the rest
at night
in the black branches,
in the morning

in the blue branches
of the world.
It could float, of course,
but would rather

plumb rough matter.
Airy and shapeless thing,
it needs
the metaphor of the body,

lime and appetite,
the oceanic fluids;
it needs the body's world,
instinct

and imagination
and the dark hug of time,
sweetness
and tangibility,

to be understood,
to be more than pure light
that burns
where no one is --

so it enters us --
in the morning
shines from brute comfort
like a stitch of lightning;

and at night
lights up the deep and wondrous
drownings of the body
like a star.

Next Nobel Prize Winner? Mustafa Dzhemilev,Crimean Tatar Human Rights Warrior

yahoo images, 2015

The Nobel Peace Prize is sometimes contested.  The 2015 winners, Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan, the brave young woman advocate for children's education, and Kailash Satyarthi of India, fighter against child slavery, seem notable and laudable.

But I have one great human rights warrior to add to the list for 2016: Mustafa Dzhemilev, the courageous and long-time nonviolent fighter for the rights of the Crimean Tatars. He has been imprisoned, tortured, spent years in gulags. He continues to fight. The Ghandi of his people.  His pain and struggle are etched on his face, but he remains unbowed.

I learned that he was nominated for the award in the past, which I hope won't exclude him from consideration in the future. The Tatars, an ethnic (Tatar) and religious (Muslim) minority on the Crimean peninsula, are forced once again to fight for their survival.  Literally.  Dzhemilev, at 73 years of age, continues to lead the struggle.

Exiled forcibly with his family (he was a young child) upon Stalin's deportation order in May 1944, along with some 250,000 other Tatars, he grew up in Uzbekistan to become a fighter for the rights of Tartars to return to their homeland.

I can't imagine being forced from home one dark night, suddenly, viciously, at the barrel of a gun, with nothing but the clothes on your back, and maybe a handicraft item grabbed while fleeing, hidden away to pass on to kids and grandkids.  A reminder of a homeland and a tortuous past.   One family told me this story when I visited them in Simferopol, and showed me a common but beloved household item that had been passed along in this way.

In 1989, Dzhemilev returned to Crimea, joined by thousands upon thousands of other Tatars. They began to rebuild homes, communities, and social and cultural institutions.  A fleeting moment of joy.  The Ismail Gasprinskiy Library, a UNESCO heritage site devoted to preserving Tatar culture, is one shining example.  The vibrant beauty of iconic Bachysaray, a main tourist attraction with the stunning palace and historic grounds of the Crimean Khan (15th to 18th centuries), surrounded by awesome cave dwellings, another.

I can't imagine returning to Crimea after living in exile somewhere in Central Asia for decades, your land confiscated, your heritage dimmed. I can't imagine trying to rebuild your life, step by step, stitch by stitch, brick by brick, and then being forced to live once again under a Russian occupation. What an unbearable shock.

That's what happened early this year, when Putin began his deadly stealth campaign on Ukrainian land, when he occupied, invaded and took over Crimea. He ramped up the propaganda, along with secret services operatives, mercenaries, and weapons, to a fever pitch.  A once peaceful and relatively prosperous part of Ukraine became a war zone.  Crimea "belonged" to Russia, Putin pronounced, again at the barrel of a gun and with brutal violence. I suppose like Alaska "belonged" to Russia at one time. But grounds for an invasion today? Grounds for breaking international treaties and humanitarian laws? Grounds for violating the territorial integrity of another country?

Today, the Crimean Tatar people are under an oppressive Russian rule on the land of their ancestors.  Putin has taken over part of modern Ukraine for his own delusional purposes. It's a heartbreaking tragedy, and an international crime.

Putin got away with it.  Crimea is now ruled with an iron fist by a totalitarian regime enforcing Russification on every level.  The Tatars are being victimized beyond endurance.  Killed, disappeared, threatened daily, their neighborhoods and institutions taken over by Russians, some destroyed.  It's happening in eastern Ukraine, too, in Lugansk and Donetsk oblasts, in other cities: stealth, invasion, violence, convoys of Russian heavy weapons and soldiers, special ops; bombs here and there, violent brawls in parliaments, on the streets, in government offices; explosions in Khargiv, in Odessa, Mariupol.  The sounds of Putin's war, with no end in sight.

Putin is a war criminal strutting on the terrain of freedom like a mad dog.

So Mustafa Dzhemilev, this elegant, brilliant and nonviolent fighter for justice, was recently denied entry into the homeland for which he has fought all his life. How devastating beyond words.

He had been in Poland, receiving the first Leah Walesea peace prize. He was stopped at a border check point by Russian soldiers, as five thousand Tatars, who had come to welcome him, watched--helpless, infuriated, defiant. Their hero. Treated like a common criminal.  Forbidden to return to Crimea. Putin's victory.

A surreal rerun of a terrible tragic history.  Crimea.  So beautiful.  So haunting. So violated.

The world needs to recognize what has been lost.  The dreams that have been shattered by Russia's invasion. The tragedy of ethnic Ukrainians who dare not speak out.  The tragedy of the Crimean Tatars, a peaceful people, whose homeland has been repeatedly wrested from them. The hopes dashed. The fabric of a unique cultural heritage destroyed.  The struggle that Mustafa Dzhemilev symbolizes.


SOME SOURCES (copied and pasted but have to type in):
http://journal.georgetown.edu/islamic-justice-through-nonviolence-mustafa-dzhemilev-and-the-national-movement-of-crimean-tatars/

http://www.rferl.org/content/ukraine-crimea-dzhemilev-interview/25387012.html

http://www.jamestown.org/single/?tx_ttnews

http://www.mfa.gov.pl/en/news/solidarity_prize_for_mustafa_dzhemilev_of_ukraine

http://crimeantatarlibrary.blogspot.com/2012/03/international-mother-language-day-at.html. A blog by Peace Corps friend Barbara Wieser who served in Crimea.  She also recommends the International Committee for Crimea (ICC).

http://www.rferl.org/content/crimea-tatars/26595092.html. Tatar scholar attacked; historic library forced to close by Russians. Not sure of the status of the Gasprinskiy library now.

http://unpo.org/article/17764

http://news.yahoo.com/crimea-annexation-upends-lives-tatar-minority

Modern Physical Exam: The Medical Equivalent of 20 Questions

I just had a complete physical.  I was prepared for it, checked-in, the reception desk confirmed "getting the full deal today." Medicare requirement. No co-pay.

Randy Glasergen cartoon.

It turns out this complete physical had nothing to do with a physical exam as people my age define it and understand it.  It amounted to a game of 20 Questions, maybe a few more or less.  First the nurse, at her computer, not even looking at me, asks her 20 or so questions.  Then the doctor comes in, sits at her computer, and asks her 20-something questions. The questions (some of which overlap) have to do with diet (how many vegetables per day, do you eat fried foods,etc.), excercise, preventive shots, home safety, balance issues, and "mood" (have you felt sad the last few weeks, do you feel stressed, etc.).

The doctor nicely explained this was a Medicare Wellness Exam, which focuses on prevention.  Blood pressure, pulse, listening to heart and lungs, and 20-something questions. Wow. That's it.  I think my stress grew during this exam, because I couldn't believe it was the "full deal."

I left wondering how my health really was. Who knows?   Worsening arthritis? Stomach issues? Any other organs going?  Ears, nose and throat?  I didn't feel like asking. It was a done deal.  I had the medical equivalent of "20 questions." I had my "preventive" physical exam.

A last question: "Would you say you are in excellent, good...."  

"I'm in excellent health," I replied, as the doctor closed her computer and walked out the door, wishing me happy holidays.

Thanksgiving Thoughts

image, healthcoachzach.com

I just made my annual contribution to Cherry Street Mission. They shelter and feed the homeless, and I am grateful for their work. "Giving people a shot at a healthy life."  I also support Toledo Streets newspaper and Veterans Matter(1matters.org), which serve homeless vets.

The needs are so great, I wish I could give more.  I remind myself there are many ways to give.  I give money to a few charities, time to others, and prayers for most, in hopes other people will give thanks by supporting them. At this time of year I'm grateful for America's "can do" and philanthropic spirit.

I filled in a survey from my old high school in Rochester, NY.   It's a fantastic school that deserves lots of support.  But it's far away, like my college and my graduate school, also great educational institutions. It made me think, I am choosing to give closer to home, and also to smaller groups.  The bigger the non-profit, even crisis and environmental organizations whose missions I support, the less I'm likely to give, probably because I figure my little gift won't mean as much as giving closer to home. I think we feel best about giving when we can see the impact our gifts make on people and on our community.

It's that way with online appeals, too.  I have signed many a petition online, for gun control, against fracking, to support this political action or that, and then I am immediately asked for a donation.  Now I am on lots of lists and the appeals never stop.  As much as I care about certain issues and certain political action groups, I no longer sign online petitions. It just makes me feel bad that I can't support every cause I believe in, at least not with money.

I'm not sure about political appeals either.   Think of all we could give to those in need with the money poured into political campaigns!  I think most Americans feel the same way. Is it okay that people like the Koch brothers and other super wealthy donors dominate the landscape?  Our measley gifts mean nothing in the face of such political contributions. Maybe I'll make one exception: a small contribution to a woman presidential candidate in 2015, more to make a statement than to fund what will be another obscenely costly campaign.  I taught women's history for many years, focusing on women's struggle for the vote and greater participation in American political life. I'd be happy to see a woman president in my lifetime!

I do support a few international groups, like Doctors without Borders, but not many.  I believe Peace Corps Partnership projects, individual PCV projects that are tax-deductible, are a good bet, because I know they really do get down to the local level (http://donate.peacecorps.gov).  With a Partnership Grant, and some book donations from friends in Toledo, Ohio, a little public library in Starobelsk, Ukraine, was able to start its first English-language book collection and make a first step in applying for a Gates foundation grant to computerize the library.

In these cases, every little bit helps.  I believe individuals can make a difference, and that we can give in many ways.  America's philanthropic spirit is an anecdote to the nastiness of politics and a blessing for those less fortunate than we are.  Giving and gratitude: The spirit of Thanksgiving.