The Fun Continues (presenting at a Student Internship Fair)

One of the things I really like about the Friedman Fellowship is that it allows my to continue my involvement after my summer internship. Right now, I am eating an ice cream cone at Inside Scoop: a student internship fair where students talk to other students about their summer experiences. Two months on, I am just as excited about the work I did at Human Rights USA. I use my knowledge of non-profits several times a week, and am still grappling with the ethical issues which are their bread and butter. And now, I’m a nun! (at least until Saturday, when the show is done).

Inspirational Quote:

“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” –Benjamin Franklin

A Brief Hiatus (because I am without internet access)

More soon! In the meantime, some amazing letters from Israel, a haunting essay on counter-traffickers, and strong essay on slavery in the United States.

Inspiration Quote:

“I do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing handwriting nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality counterbalancing indecipherability, transcendentalizes intercommunications’ incomprehensibleness”?

Who We’ve Helped is Up! (last day at my internship, and some writing samples)

This whole summer, the section I have worked the longest and the hardest on is Who We’ve Helped. Today it includes 20 of our clients’ stories. With the help of the staff and attorneys at my internship, I wrote and re-wrote more than 25 stories (we did not use all of them). Writing about FGM and torture and spousal abuse hurts–but creating clear stories satisfies me. Below are some of my strongest prose.

Warning

(Some terrible things have happened to the clients of Human Rights USA. I wrote about those things. Abuse, children threatened, political violence, and torture):

Blerina:

Even after the family’s relocation, their house was arbitrarily searched by the police, they received death threats in the mail, and Blerina’s father was beaten in the street by members of another political party. One beating left him nearly dead. Local farmers found him bruised and bloodied and rushed him to the hospital. When ten-year-old Blerina saw him laying in the hospital bed, she feared for his life.

Imani:

Imani’s story is told on her body: a scar on her ear, where her husband nearly tore it off with a slamming door; jagged gouges in her back where her husband pushed her onto a heap of broken glass; a deep, gnawing bite-mark on her wrist—her husband’s response when she told him she was too ill to have sex. Her story is written most clearly on her face: lines of grief for 23 years of torture and sexual abuse, fear for her two children left in the house of her abuser and their father in Cameroon, worry about starting a new life in the United States.

Kinah:

Kinah made the brave and dangerous choice to oppose her society’s traditional practice of genital stretching and cutting, and when her opposition was ignored and her personal sanctity violated, she sought protection in the United States.

Thema:

On appeal, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals issued a groundbreaking decision that the threat of FGM provided a basis for protection under the Convention Against Torture, even for mothers whose deportation threatens their daughters with this practice:

“The [U.S.] government could never do to these girls in this country what the INS seems all too willing to allow to happen to them in Nigeria.” 314 F.3d 303, 310 (7th Cir. 2002). Since then, other courts have recognized FGM as torture.

Families of Shi Tao and Wang Xiaoning:

Rep. Lantos [...] told CEO Jerry Yang and General Counsel Michael Callahan to “beg forgiveness” from the families of the detainees. Both men turned and bowed to the women, and publicly apologized. One week later, Yahoo! and the families settled the lawsuit.

I am proud of these passages because they were difficult to write. I had to find an elegant way to represent horrific facts without revealing details which could identify our clients. I had to paint a picture of strength through torment, I had to show how each woman and man’s choices made sense, and I wanted to show how something good would come out of each story. Note that all of these names are pseudonyms.

Inspirational Quote:

“The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a courtroom, be he any color of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box. As you grow older, you’ll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don’t you forget it – whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash.”–Atticus Finch, Chapter 23

Sometimes Things Just Work (or, my trip to urgent care)

I had this bug bite. It was gross. I will not go into details, but it worried me a little. Thinking I saw the characteristic bulls-eye rash of a tick bite, I emailed a good family friend who knows a lot about ticks and Lyme. She told me to get it looked at *now*. I trust her advice, so I dropped my todo list for the evening (drop off a shirt at my old work, pick up my greyhound tickets, preemptively pack) and spent from 7-10:30pm door to door getting it checked out.

I started my journey online, looking at CVS minute clinics. The only one open until 8pm was in Arlington, VA, so I took a cab. The cabbie and I had a great conversation about wireless access and the One-Laptop Per Child Project. The Minute Clinic had this neat, very accessible touch screen sign-in program. The nurse practitioner was professional, knowledgeable and precise. She referred me to Arlington Urgent Care for after hours care. Another, less chatty, cab-ride later, I walk into a dingy white hall. It looked (and worse, smelled) like those institutions in 1980s horrors movies. Cleaning agents, urine and scared, sweaty people. I have always been a fan of hospitals because I have always gone to good hospitals, with art and murals on the walls. Arlington Urgent Care is not like that.

The intake nurse was nice, and I filled out all of the forms. When I realized that I would be spending my Wednesday evening in hospitals, I ran across P street to buy a book at Second Story Books, my local used books store. The first title my eyes fell upon was Lyme: A Backgrounder or something to that effect. I chose a book of letters to the U.S. president on high education–it seemed more hopeful. At the CVS, before my second cab, I grabbed some snacks. So while I waited in the urgent care waiting room with a nervous teen-aged boy, two older, thugish blond men and a twitchy older woman, I snacked and read leading educators’ opinions on what we need to do to deal with higher education in the United States.

Eventually I went to an oddly large room, where a reserved but nice nurse got my stats. She left, and said the doctor would be in soon. After about 5 minutes, I got bored of my book and started practicing my new repertoire piece: “Losing my Mind”, by Stephen Sondheim. To make a long story short, the doctor was professional, kind, and prescribed me the exact kind of antibiotics my family friend had told me to get. One cab ride to a metro station later, and I was on my way home.

Total medical costs: $25 (though I haven’t filled the prescription yet)

Total transportation costs: $31

Total entertainment costs: $13

I know that some part of my good medical experience has to do with having great health-care coverage and the ability to take an evening off. But even the lowering halls of Arlington Urgent Care seemed brighter after I spoke with the doctor. Competent professionals can make any situation bearable, and I was beyond impressed at the professionalism of all of the nurses and doctors who I spoke with today. Go DC metro area for having such great care.

Inspirational Quote:

“Patience is the art of hoping.”–Luc de Clapier

Another Section is Up! (and, an internship in human rights for DC locals)

I am so excited. The second of the three sections I am redoing this summer went up today. The Get Involved section, which includes our Donate page, our Internships and Jobs page and our Our Partners page, is new and improved. With better linking, more photos and fully updated content, this section should help my organization reach our audience more effectively. Hooray!

I am currently writing the ad for my replacement. Odd feeling. The new position will be Social Media Intern. As soon as the description is approved, I will link here. It will be for DC locals only as it takes place during the year, and could be great fun for an undergrad who wants to know more about what it is like to defend human rights. Contact me if you are interested.

Inspirational Quote:

“The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.”-–John Steinbeck

ICANN’s Policies and Human Rights

Recently the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has gotten some press over its rule changes dealing with generic top-level domains (anything after the dot, e.g., “.com”, “.edu”, “.uk” or “.biz”).  I see 3 timely issues for human rights organizations:

1. ICANN’s contract with Department of Commerce ends in August and there is a lot of international pressure to make the body international rather than U.S.-based. For example, in 2005 Libya lost access to the .ly domain and had to ask ICANN for help, creating a minor political crisis. It turned our that ICANN had, as far as I can tell, purposefully removed access to all “.ly” websites (like their government websites and national banks) because of a disagreement over payment. Given that the fastest growing group of internet users will be from developing countries (many with repressive and censoring governments) this decentralization could lead to greater limits on the internet speech globally.
2. ICANN recently agreed to open up top level domain names to a wide variety of words, like .sports, .coke or .happyjoyjoy. There could be three problems with this:
   1. It may create a great deal of brand confusion if an organization does not control all domain names using their name (aclu.aclu, aclu.org, aclu.freedomofspeech),
   2. The cost to apply one of these top-level domains is currently $185,000. This will make it very difficult for non-commercial organizations to compete for .humanrights or .nonprofit. The application process is also a wee-bit byzantian (see flow-chart here).
   3. ICANN came out with 20-something recommendations for applications to keep in mind when applying for one of these generic top level domains (aka, gTLDs). Recommendation 6 reads in part:

      “Strings must not be contrary to generally accepted legal norms relating to morality and public order that are recognized under international principles of law.”

      My concern is that ICANN will be making content-based decisions about domain names outside of the bounds of protecting intellectual property. This rule exists so that ICANN can refuse to grant someone rights to .jihad or .nazis. But what if the applicant for .jihad is a moderate Muslim group hoping to chill out young radicals, or the applicant for .nazis is the Smithsonian’s Holocaust museum? In my opinion, uninformed as it is, ICANN has better things to do than make content-based decisions about gTLDs (especially since China is now reengaging with ICANN).

3. ICANN is in the process of approving or recently approved a wide range of languages for inclusion in urls. This is good for people who
   do not read English. Some–in the West–have made the point that urls aren’t in English, they are symbols to accessing information, in the same way that Java is not in English, it is in Java. This new cornucopia of languages may cause brand confusion (google in farsi, cyrillic, and arabic). I am not sure what, if any, negative free speech issues arise from this.

I see two categories of long-term ICANN free speech issues:

1. Abuse from ICANN of poor or badly organized (see Libya) constituents, and
2. The larger (and more amorphous) issue of under-representation of noncommerical entities in ICANN’s decision process. ICANN does have a noncommercial constituency, but it appears that they do not have much lobbying power.

Whether gTLDs end up being a big deal is unknowable. Recent gTLD newcommers have been far from popular–who uses .biz or .museum or even .info anyway? Maybe the added confusion of variable text on both sides of the dot will outway potentially simplified urls (e.g., apes.sfzoo.org could become apes.sfzoo). Maybe only companies which can come up with half a million to a million dollars will bother, and we will end up with a two tiered internet.

In any case, human rights organizations may have stakes in the outcomes and should follow developments carefully.

Inspirational Quote:

The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably.” –Judge Aaron Satie (a character quoted by a Jean Luc Picard, a character in Star Trek: Next Generation).

PS: the above quote can be heard in the following video, whose first 30 seconds are one of the best arguments for the 5th Amendment I have heard recently:

Am I, uh, Normal? (Where Americans’ paychecks go, and how much we spend on groceries)

This summer I have tried to learn more about personal finance, and specifically budgeting. Whether reading the Living Below You Means boards on Motley Fool or the various budgeting groups on Wesabe, I have gotten some of my best budgeting advice from regular people people (see great quote below on  budgeting). But sometimes, empirical data helps me internalize all of this great advice, and it validates my impressions about average spending.

I found these charts because I was looking for ammunition in a debate with a future housemate: what is a frugal amount to spend on groceries each month? She thought my summer monthly budget was ridiculously high, and I did not think so given that PB&J is my staple food. After some research, focusing on  the first chart below and this Wesabe group discussion, I concluded that food costs vary so much between regions that comparing my spending in Washington DC to her family’s spending in semi-rural Pennsylvania produced no meaningful data for how much we should spend in Pittsburgh.

However in this journey for evidence I found two great resources I wanted to share:

1. This great chart from Choosing Voluntary Simplicity, a neat and practical blog about simple living. This chart breaks down grocery costs by age, gender, and then into four plans: the Thrifty plan, the Low-cost plan, the Moderate cost plan and the Liberal plan. It goes on to show how each variable affects monthly grocery costs. It is a little out of date, but provides solid comparative data.
2. This graph of where an average U.S. consumer spends her annual paycheck. While there are costs which I do not have (who ever spent more on clothes than books? Not me…) it does help me answer the basic question everyone’s been asking since that first gym class in middle school: “Am I, uh, Normal?”

More than anything this summer, I have learned not to think about numbers, but lifestyle choices and needs. If I want an expensive haircut, I need to ride Greyhound to make up for it. If I eat PB&J for most lunches, I do not stress about spending $8 on some great curry once a week. I have the general impression that my budget is frugal. Charts like these allow me to compare this general impression with some empirical data–which helps me define and stick to my limits. And prove my friends wrong.

Inspirational Quote:

“The key is to have a budget that minimizes your “non-essential” spending and maximizes your “essential” spending. Frugal does not mean cheap – it means cheap where you can do with spending less.”–retire65 on Wesabe board

Coping After a Friend Quits

Last year, I watched a friend quit. I never saw the actual moment of quitting–it happened while I was gone. But quitting is more of a process than an event. Like coming out, or breaking up, or emptying a jar of jam. It was difficult to watch my friend slowly detach herself from my organization because I was not sure what my role was. Cheerleader to keep her in? Comforter to help her get out? Neutral sounding board? Professional conduct does not cover that niggling feeling of betrayal when a friend abdicates her responsibilities. There is the urge to protect, to guard her legacy. But there is also a small hurt feeling: if our work meant so little, why I am covering?

This friend was kind when she did not have to be, and helped me find my feet in a new situation. I wish that I had had a chance to say goodbye before she left. Mixing friends and colleagues begs this kind of trouble. She may have quit for economic reasons, or because the job was no longer fun, or because she had trouble at home. All of these are valid reasons, but she never told me why, so I cannot guess. It is not comfortable watching a friend quit.

Inspirational Quote:

Thomas Fuller – “Every horse thinks its own pack heaviest.”

The Master’s Tools (or, How to Stop Facebook Ads from Using Your Friends’ Faces)

A few minutes ago a friend posted instructions on how to stop Facebook Ads from using my friends’ faces to catch my attention. Here they are:

FACEBOOK has agreed to let a third party advertisers use your posted pictures WITHOUT your permission. Click on SETTINGS up at the top where you see the Log out link. Select Privacy. Then select NEWSFEEDS and WALL. Next select the tab that reads FACEBOOK ADS. There is a drop down box, select NO ONE. Then SAVE your changes. (REPOST to let your friends know!)

I did repost, and thought: I am using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house (see Audre Lorde quote below). Facebook provides an incredible market for advertisers, and competition for users’ attention is fierce. But, with all of the benefits and drawbacks of private information existing publicly, Facebook users do have boundaries. Third party ads using the faces of our friends crossed one of those boundaries. The feeling of violation when a man saw his wife’s face on a singles ad lets us know that our connected culture still has strong boundaries.

It was not Facebook that took the wife’s face, but a third-party advertiser who did so. But they did so only because Facebook provided them access (though this particular case might have been a violation of the Terms of Service). And how did Facebook users react? We used viral marketing to spread our dissatisfaction, and the cure for Facebook’s indiscretion, posting to our walls, blogging about it, complaining in person. Using Facebook to keep Facebook in line. It’s a little like democracy out there on the web.

Inspirational Quote:

“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”–Audre Lorde…except in the case of social media

Video Pick Me Ups for Slow Days

There is a block of time in every day where my work efficiency slows to molasses. There are many ways I deal with this crash–coffee/tea breaks, cookie runs, or motivational music videos (ok, maybe I am the only one who uses the last one, and only when I am working from hom). I think a mix of these remedies is the healthiest approach.

One of the great failings of the Internet is that I cannot deliver you cookies, or tea. You will just have to go to your local bakery/coffee machine However, I can deliver you motivational music videos.

These are the best pick me up videos I have found in two years of slow days at college. I also used these to get through my 6-hour video editing sessions last semester.

1. “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” from Disney’s Mulan
   
2. “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey, from Glee! (a TV show about the glee club in a high school)
   
3. “Major Tom (Coming Home)” by Peter Schilling
   

This last one is an AMV, which (except for the music) is fair use in my opinion.

Inspirational Quote:

“I am more concerned about the return OF my money than the return ON my money.”–Mark Twain