My younger daughter living in far away Hawaii sent me a handmade birthday card that took 10 days to arrive, a little battered, but a welcome surprise, though my birthday had already passed. Here’s the outside of the card, which now graces my living room mantle.
My daughter was born right here in DC at GW Hospital, but has traveled
all over the world and now lives with her husband in Honolulu. I’ve visited her
there and once met her in Indonesia where she was doing biology research.
She visited me here in DC just last June. Although my daughter is a scientist, actually a biologist, she is also an amazingly creative artist. I’ve featured some of
her sewing projects before on this blog, each one unique and delightful. Because
of the time change and her heavy work schedule, we don’t get to talk very often.
Spring flowers are showing their colors now in our neighborhood.
Eighty-nine-year-old California Senator Diane Feinstein has neither resigned nor returned to the Senate.
We’d like to think that humankind has demonstrated progress as we all move together through this finite life, but obviously that is not always the case. Some things were actually done better in the past. One small but significant example was the hand crafting of illustrated devotional books, more beautiful and expressive than any books produced today. The illustrated book of hours was once a popular Christian devotional in the 15th century.
Wash. Post, Eight shot at two sites in Southeast Washington, police say
Wash. Post, Three
found dead after vehicle plunges into Anacostia River (How
and why is still unknown)
ABC News, Man allegedly guns down parents and their 2 friends
days after his release from prison
Days after his
release from prison in Maine after serving a sentence for aggravated assault, a
34-year-old man was still able to obtain a gun to kill his parents and another middle-aged
couple. He also shot 3 people just traveling along the highway, one now in critical condition. He has been re-arrested, but the damage has already been
done. How much of this random, lethal, and instantaneous violence do we, as Americans,
have to risk and continue to endure? The NRA just held its annual
meeting, as is reported below. Where is the NRA’s fabled “good guy with a
gun” said to protect us all against such unprovoked attacks?
Daily Beast, Black Teen Shot in the Head After Ringing the Wrong
Doorbell: Family A 16-year-old boy in
Kansas City was shot in the head by an 84-year old white home owner who responded
when he rang the bell. Fortunately, though gravely injured, the boy was not
killed. The shooter may have been radicalized by listening to Fox News according to his grandson.
Remember the woman who entered the wrong apartment and shot
a black man inside, killing him? Now she is being released after only 16
months. Well-armed trigger-happy white folks might try speaking first to black
people before wantonly shooting them. I’d like to protect members of my own
family.
NBC News, Boyfriend of N.Y. woman who was gunned down in the
wrong driveway recalls her final moments
They had pulled their car into a driveway while looking for
an address. That cost a 20-year-old woman her life. A gun almost never serves as
protection for the gun owner, much more often as a threat to others. Many trigger-happy
assailants turn out to be older white men, in this case, a 65-year-old man who
fired on the car in his driveway. Do these guys, living alone like this man,
feel the whole world is out to get them? What about just asking someone what address
they might be looking for and offering to help them?
NBC News, 2 Texas cheerleaders shot after seemingly getting into
wrong car after practice
Two cheerleaders were shot and one was critically injured,
in this case, by a younger Hispanic male (most shooters are male). As with some
older homeowners, just having a gun in his possession prompted this man to use
it when he was not even being threatened. A young woman had just
accidentally gotten into his car by mistake, then got right out, but before she could
apologize, both she and her friend were shot. Having a loaded gun always at the
ready means it can be fired in a nanosecond at the slightest provocation, even before
the shooter has time to think. Texas is an “open carry” state, meaning that guns don't require a permit.
Daily Beast, Little Girl, Parents Shot After Basketball Rolls Into
Neighbor’s Yard: Report A 6-year old girl and her
parents in North Carolina were all shot when they tried to retrieve their ball.
The shooter is a former felon not allowed to have a gun. The girl’s father is
still hospitalized.
Wash. Post, Police
arrest man who shot 6-year-old girl, father in North Carolina
AP, Alabama police arrest 2 teens for birthday party
shooting
This arrest was for last week’s deadly shooting, where 4 young people were killed and 4 others remain hospitalized. Even avid gun-lovers should join in seeking a remedy because what’s happening now is hardly good for their image.
News4, 9-Year-Old Shot in the Back by Stray Bullet in
Southeast DC This happened much too close to home when a young girl here was shot while just passing
by in a moving car.
AP, Tennessee moves to shield gun firms after school shooting Republican lawmakers in Tennessee awarded final passage Tuesday to a proposal that would further protect gun and ammunition dealers, manufacturers and sellers against lawsuits.
The gun lobby and gun lovers are far outnumbered by the rest of us, incentivizing us all to stand up together against their threats. Every effort must be made to reduce the sheer number of firearms in circulation, first by collecting guns surrendered voluntarily in buybacks and dropping them all into the ocean or otherwise destroying them. Fewer guns mean less gun violence and death whether by design, accident, or suicide. Already, there are far more firearms in the US than people, most in the hands of a relatively few avid gun lovers. The unlikely chance that a gun might prove protective is far outweighed by the much greater probability that it will actually prove harmful to the gun owner and his/her associates. My own family experienced this when my then 11-year-old son was injured by a dropped pistol discovered by curious boys in a neighboring home.
Not all murders are committed with guns. In cases where a young woman has been strangled, she often was killed not by some random stranger but by someone she knew. Rape/murder cold cases committed by a man the victim actually knew and trusted keep being solved due to present-day forensics. Such murderers, after keeping a low profile for years, are probably now feeling some anxiety. A perpetrator may have already died, but sometimes he is still alive and is taken into custody. The following arrest was just made on April 20. USA Today, Police make arrest in 20-year-old NY cold case after DNA links suspect to death of Megan McDonald
This happened in Middletown, NY. The surprised 42-year-old suspect, after being arrested and put in handcuffs, protested, “I didn’t do it.” What else might he be expected to say?
Benjamin Franklin once observed that nothing is certain except death and taxes. We’ve been discussing death here, so time now for taxes. Most of us have had to pay income taxes recently, all except perhaps Donald Trump who apparently sometimes pays little or no taxes. There are many ways to pay, but you cannot simply walk into an IRS office and plunk down a big wad of cash. Rather, cash payments for income taxes may be made only through an authorized cash processing partner. Federal taxes have gone up since last time. I was shocked by how much more I had to pay this time.
Yahoo News, Dominion, Fox News settle defamation suit for stunning
$787M, averting trial Judge Eric Davis informed jurors, who'd been sworn in hours earlier,
that “the parties have resolved their case.”
Fox settled to stop the release of any more publicity about this case, barely even mentioning it on the network itself. Fox finally agreed to pay up and acknowledged its knowingly false election claims, made deliberately to appease its rightwing listeners and feed into their conspiracy mindset. Network personalities wanted to avoid the airing of their private disparaging remarks about their audience. Dominion, whose very raison d’être is to guarantee election integrity, could not allow Fox’s blatant falsehoods to stand.
Reuters, Mexico feels the strain as Haitian migrants, caught in limbo, mark time
Amnesty International has issued an alert: Cuba UPR submission is now available online in Spanish, English, and French...[T]he Universal Periodic Review (UPR) is a mechanism of the United Nations Human Rights Council that evaluates the human rights situation of all UN Member States. The examination of Cuba is scheduled to happen on November 15, 2023.
China has raised its international profile by brokering a peace agreement between Iran and the Saudis.
Being disconnected from the internet, like my younger sister and her family, is a 2-edged sword. She, her husband, and their son are limited to neighborhood connections, phone calls, and news from a daily hard-copy newspaper, which is just fine most of the time. But on occasion, my sister calls to ask me to look up something or to send out a message for her on the internet.
With so much of life now taking place online, it’s sometimes hard to tell when you are interacting there with a genuine human being, not a bot. Despite the internet’s many mysteries, threats, aggravations, and distractions, it’s still hard these days to live without that worldwide connectivity. While staying out alone at my son’s place in W Va., without any radio, tv, or phone, I do feel the absence of the internet. Sometimes, back home in DC, when listening to the old-time radio program Dragnet, I’m transported to the pre-internet age of my younger years when purchases were made in cash, communication was often difficult, and everyone smoked, so cigarettes were routinely offered to crime suspects to get them to talk.
My late ex-husband, who died of lung cancer in 1999, was a life-long chain smoker of unfiltered Camels who had a standing ashtray in our living room and even smoked in bed. Our kids and I breathed in secondhand smoke for many years.
Wash. Post, Supreme Court preserves access to key abortion drug as appeal proceeds The Court essentially punted on a much anticipated abortion decision. Is pregnancy a health condition meriting medical intervention to eradicate it? It certainly may be a condition that the person experiencing it may want stop. Readers already know my feelings on this question.
With abortion now such a salient news topic, political correctness requires reporters never to refer to pregnant women but only to pregnant people, since those born female and now unhappily pregnant may be non-binary. I’m still trying to wrap my head around the idea popularized by abortion advocates, that ending a pregnancy is a “human right” and somehow does not involve killing an unborn human. It’s been very hard for prolife advocates to get others to backtrack on something that had long been considered a “right.” Two conflicting interests seem to actually be involved, with one party having no voice or agency.
NY Times, Could Peer Influence Be a Cause of the Global Baby Bust?
South Korea has the world’s lowest birthrate. Many women there simply are not interested in having children or even in getting married. Japan, also with a declining birthrate, now offers incentives for having children, but only up to 2. China’s population is actually shrinking. Europe is doing slightly better than the US, but still faces population decline. Latin America’s birthrate has just about reached sustainment. Africa is the continent with the highest birthrate. Population growth is uneven, unlikely to achieve the ideal average of steady 2.1 growth worldwide.
Multiple births make only a small dent in the population shortfall, but they do help. The Mississippi quints were born in late Feb. after fertility intervention.
Below, a 14-year old who gave birth to triplets was adopted by the ICU nurse tending her premature babies.
While today’s news on Sudan focuses mainly on
the north, the north and south were once united, reminding me of my mission to
the south in 2006. Here is an article I once wrote and a photo of me there.
Template for a
Post-Treaty Darfur?: Southern Sudan may show the way.
Barbara E. Joe October 01, 2007
South-central Sudan is the last place on earth I would
have envisioned spending an Easter Sunday. Skirting the equator, the region is
accessible only by cargo flight under U.N. or other auspices and is closed to
outsiders except as authorized by the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Movement and
Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Army (rebels who are also fighting in Darfur, to the
West). It lacks roads and is littered with landmines, sparsely populated, with
scorching winds, no water for vast stretches and daytime temperatures exceeding
110 degrees F. How could I have ever imagined celebrating Easter there?
Yet when asked by the
nonprofit Bishop Gassis Sudan Relief Fund in March 2006 to undertake a
fact-finding mission to southern Sudan, I barely hesitated. Only a year had
passed since a peace treaty was concluded between the southern Sudanese rebels
and the government in the north, and I was anxious to see what Darfur might
look like if it eventually makes a similar treaty. A longtime human rights
activist, I was also curious about the practice of Catholicism in a country
rarely associated with my faith.
My monthlong journey
began at the thatch-roofed airport in Lokichoggio at Kenya’s northern border,
where I stayed overnight in a fenced church. There, kerosene lamps provided
illumination, while a soccer match flickered on a generator-powered television
set. A Kenyan supper companion told me that he would never consider bringing
his family to join him in this primitive outpost. Still, this way-station was
luxurious compared with the bare landing strip in Kauda, Sudan, where the
wreckage of a crashed plane remained in mute testimony to a failed landing. I
traveled in a Soviet-era cargo plane with Bishop Macram Gassis himself, a
near-legendary Sudanese Catholic prelate with a long record of humanitarian
achievements, for whom the organization I represented was named.
Following local custom,
I wore ankle-length skirts despite the suffocating heat. Local people soon
crowded around me, eager to see their images on my digital camera. They always
asked my name, that much of the language I understood. At 68, the same age as
the bishop, I had been chosen for this mission largely because of my recent
Peace Corps experience in rural Honduras, which had inured me to physical
hardship. But southern Sudan offered an even more challenging environment: no
phones, no mail, no electricity, no clocks, few roads and no water in the dry
season except for a brackish liquid seeping up from holes hand-dug in dry
riverbeds.
There was almost no
transportation. Scarce vehicles and fuel all had to be airlifted in; the few
camels or donkeys were already heavily laden and not available for hire.
Siliri, a de-mining organization, had designated safe areas with white stones;
but such efforts had only just begun. I saw the skeleton of a car that had been
blown up after hitting a mine.
A Bishop’s Good Works
Bishop Gassis had
stepped into this waterless breach and arranged for a Thai-manufactured rig to
drill 150 boreholes up to 80 meters deep through layers of sand and rock, holes
named for such distant benefactors as Senator Sam Brownback and Congressman
Frank Wolf.
As the bishop approached
one well, children took turns pumping furiously, filling gourds and jugs while
goats and feral-looking pigs drank the overflow and women washed clothes
nearby. Crowds usually followed the bishop, but here the women scrambled shyly
away. Stop, don’t run away, the bishop called out in colloquial Arabic. Who do
you think provided you with all this good water? I, your bishop, did. The
bishop was the final arbiter on the location of wells and structures.
Mass was usually
celebrated under the trees as worshippers knelt on the bare ground. The image
of Sister Bakhita, a 19th-century Sudanese saint and former slave, was often
propped up nearby. Women wearing colorful headscarves and long flowered
dresses, with plastic rosaries around their necks, chanted the Kyrie Eleison
while beating drums and shaking homemade rattles. They also sang native songs
punctuated by high-pitched ululations; men sitting apart provided low-note
harmony. Boy and girl Mass servers deposited corn, papayas and pomegranates
into an altar basket; a boy even handed the bishop a live chicken.
At one Mass, the bishop,
preaching in both Arabic and English, appealed for dedicated catechists to
assist his few priests and nuns. If you are a single woman, very good, if
married, even better; if a single man, good, married, better still, but please,
only one wife, he said. He asked the congregation to bring in an animal to
sacrifice at Easter, a calf or goat, but no mere chicken. At another Mass, he
confirmed more than 100 people of all ages, including two blind men.
The bishop’s sermons
warned of returning refugees bearing the scourge of AIDS, from which Sudan
until then had largely been exempt. A nurse nun confided that girls who had
escaped from Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army were arriving pregnant or infected
with H.I.V. after being raped.
Since the peace accords
were signed in 2005 between Khartoum and southern rebels, the bishop had been
working relentlessly to bring the area, he said, if not into the 21st century,
at least into the 20th. While still unable to serve the Darfur portion of his
diocese, in the rest of his territory he had begun building, rebuilding, and
operating schools, orphanages, chapels and hospitals. Water was key.
Muslim pupils as well as Catholics and other Christians attended the bishop’s schools. The U.N. World Food Program provided daily meals. A special effort was made to enroll girls, though boys predominated. Some teachers were nuns, others English-speaking locals or Kenyans and Ugandans hired on yearly contracts. During the civil war, schools were targeted by government bombers reportedly trying to wipe out rebel spawn. One of the bishop’s schools was destroyed by shelling; another was bombed, killing 18 children and maiming several others. Unlike the situation in the north, Sharia law does not prevail in the south. When Muslim-Christian intermarriage occurs, the children become Muslims.
A sewing workshop, run
by a Portuguese nun who has spent 20 years in Sudan and is fluent in Arabic,
began with a lesson on the equality of husband and wife in a marriage. All the
women had arrived promptly, using the sun as their only timepiece, eager to
take turns using three treadle sewing machines. Women also worked alongside men
at the bishop’s construction sites while their small daughters cared for
younger siblings, carrying around babies almost as big as themselves.
Safety a Relative Term
Lured by the
availability of water and promise of peace, semi-nomadic Nuba and Dinka herders
were moving back, often settling in the hills for safety should government
bombers ever return. There I saw them constructing new huts and livestock
fences from dry bramble bushes and preparing the terraced hillsides for
planting. Several teenage boys told me they had returned on foot all the way
from exile in Uganda, considering southern Sudan now to be safe. Yet fighting
could still break out anew if the south eventually decides to secede from the
north, as permitted by the north-south peace agreement. Oil reserves are
located in the south, a serious complicating factor.
Southern rebel forces
manned frequent checkpoints, giving us the feeling that we were under siege.
Our party breezed past, though, thanks to the bishop’s armed rebel bodyguards.
Most men carried AK-47 rifles, knives or machetes; shootings and stabbings were
not uncommon. Nongovernmental organizations, as well as the bishop himself,
operated from within walled compounds where all staff members slept at night
and where vehicles and diesel fuel were kept under guard. One evening I
accompanied a deacon as he drove a woman with a bullet wound to a clinic run by
Save the Children. We never found out who had shot her or why. Another woman
told us her teenage son had disappeared en route to relatives in Khartoum. She
feared that the boy, if still alive, might have been kidnapped into slavery, a
practice not yet eliminated in Sudan.
Some of the tall,
slender southern Sudanese bore horizontal scars on their foreheads or were
missing two lower front teeth, pulled out in a rite of passage. Both men and
women made a point of vigorously shaking my hand; one man had only finger nubs,
probably from leprosy.
Because I sometimes
stayed overnight at a nuns’ compound, locals called me Sister Barbara. My
special friend was Soraya, a widow with two children who tended the nuns’
garden. Though I had to strain to decipher Arabic and suppress my urge to speak
Spanish, language differences proved relatively unimportant. Women often walked
alongside me, holding my hand or fingering my gold earrings. My belongings,
left unguarded in an open hut, were never touched. When I dropped a paper clip
in the sand, a woman hastened to return it.
I was once startled to
see several Dinkas emerging from the woods bearing spears, but was assured that
spears are now used only for hunting. On another occasion, I was briefly caught
outdoors alone in a blinding sandstorm that stung my skin and left me
temporarily disoriented. In the evenings I saw miniature deer and flocks of
wild guinea hens. Poisonous snakes sliding down from trees at night left
telltale trails in the sand.
I often drank well water
or drank from the common cup passed around to guests in a spirit of
hospitality. I was offered strong sweetened tea in a tiny glass and once a goat
was slaughtered in our party’s honor, the chunks of meat served on spongy
pancakes.
I learned almost nothing
about the practice by Muslims and Christians alike of a severe form of
clitorectomy. The practice is associated with a doubling of maternal and infant
mortality, yet outsiders working in Sudan told me it was not considered a
priority issue, given other urgent needs.
Outdoors at Easter Sunday Mass, amid pink desert flowers and stately baobab trees, congregants joined the bishop in expressing thanksgiving and hopes for a permanent end to the hostilities that had killed, starved, and injured so many among them. A goat was duly sacrificed. They also prayed aloud that their brothers and sisters in Darfur would join them on the path to peace, a peace that despite international pressure still remains elusive. From their own experience, they knew well that any peace treaty in Darfur would be only the first step on a long road to recovery.
Barbara E. Joe Barbara E. Joe, a freelance writer and
Spanish interpreter, lives in Washington, D.C. More information about the
Bishop Gassis Sudan Relief Fund is available at www.petersvoice.com.
A photo posted on our neighborhood website features a proud member of the Georgetown Hoyas women’s (yes, dare we say it? “women’s”) basketball team.
Robots will deliver food for Uber in parts of DC and Va., presumably not requiring a tip.
Online, I keep being invited to buy a “potent tonic” to reverse ED, a condition that does not trouble me greatly.
Neighborhood dogs and cats keep getting
lost and found.
A Spanish-language ad popping up on my computer feed seeks licensed
drivers to deliver items to local households. ¿Buscas ganar más dinero?
Entrega mandado y artículos para la casa. Maneja a
tus propias horas. Lo único que necesitas es un auto, un teléfono y una
licencia de manejo válida.
Instálalo cuando tú quieras. [ Verizon ad] Spanish-language ads invariably refer to “you” in the familiar form, as if addressing a close friend.
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