Since blogs are an exercise in vainglory anyway, I will assume you all have been dying to know what I’ve been up to and why blogging has been sparse. Here’s why:
- My sister got married! I’ve never been a fan of weddings, but this one was awesome. I think maybe it’s because I got false eyelashes for the first time.
- My garden is KILLING IT. I have huge, infant-sized zucchini and hundreds of small tomatoes.
- I went to LA for work — we’re planning a new gardening initiative. We are also, as a foundation, investing in some super cool projects here in Austin that I can’t wait to share when it’s appropriate. Being a philanthropist is every bit as cool as you think it will be.
- I turned 29. 29 is, let’s say, sadder than 28, but wayyy better than 22.
- The Village Center is closing. I’ve been going there every week for over a year now and it’s really sad to see so many families moving and relationships changing, but it’s the nature of refugee life. I will miss the group of kids so so so much.
- I had the privilege of welcoming Dr. Salai’s wife to America. My 84 year-old Burmese friend is an eloquent champion of peace in Burma; I have never met anyone so hopeful and determined for their country. He hadn’t seen his wife in 4 years, and now they will live together in America.
- Freddie Mercury is still around. I almost released him into the wild when he ate my eye glasses, but we’ve worked things out.
- We’re moving. I’m sad to leave our first house and our garden, but we’re moving near my best friend and a Mexican bakery. It’s a lose-win situation.
- Phillip and I are both going to Thailand for a month this summer! I’m beyond thrilled to be going back to visit friends and students and to eat som tam and chili crabs and go to the beach and. Oh man. It’s going to be awesome.
I read one measly book in April. The subject matter of the book was so intense, I couldn’t read a lot at one time. I’d read half of it before and just now picked it back up. It’s rough, no need to make it more palatable.
War is Not Over When It’s Over is a collection of women’s stories from post-conflict zones. As you can expect, war demolishes more than just the physical landscape of a place. So many tales of rape, brutality and injustice go unreported after a war is supposedly over. Really hard to read but really worthwhile. It’s bad enough that sexual violence exists; we shouldn’t make it worse by ignoring the problem.
This is the best thing I’ve seen in a long time. Just this video spawned a scholarship fund and a foundation to support creativity and entrepreneurship in kids. Love.
Happy birthday to my boss and world-changer John Paul Dejoria.
Wednesday: Give a little.
Last week I kind of skipped Give a Little. I think the unspoken message was you know what, I’m a teeny bit sick of giving. It’s hard to pretend that giving gets me jazzed every day of the week. I’m going through a phase right now in which I’ve gotten so big picture I can’t even tell what I care about anymore or which organizations are effective. And what does effective even mean?! Within philanthropy, it’s called donor fatigue.
Sometimes it’s important to take stock of what you feel called to do and where your talents meet a need. Rethink. Regroup. I can’t stress enough that personal relationships with the poor or oppressed or truly the only thing that remain at the end of a time like this or at the end of, well, the end. Organizations will lose your trust. Nonprofit leaders will disappoint you. It’s not that relationships are a mean to the end, but they are the end. They’re the goal. So I know it’s not give a little — relationships aren’t easy or small — but the beginning of one is a small place to start.
Happy Easter!
Practicing Vulnerability
Today I’m guest blogging on my friend Jessica’s blog about the poor. Check it.
I have no concrete idea how Christianity will wrestle free of its current crisis, of its distractions and temptations, and above all its enmeshment with the things of this world. But I do know it won’t happen by even more furious denunciations of others, by focusing on politics rather than prayer, by concerning ourselves with the sex lives and heretical thoughts of others rather than with the constant struggle to liberate ourselves from what keeps us from God.
—Andrew Sullivan in his Newsweek piece on Christianity today
Without realizing it, all the books I read last month were very different approaches to the poor.
Friendship at the Margins- My friends in Bangkok were with Word Made Flesh, the organization that co-author Chris Heuertz created, and they restored my faith in missions organizations. Chris writes about the importance of relationships and hospitality and about living alongside the poor in a way that is subtly revolutionary.
Poor Economics- Economists Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee founded a poverty research lab (J-PAL) at MIT and they know a lot — like, a lot — about the poor. The thing is, so much of what they know and prescribe in the developing world is counter-intuitive and at times frustratingly so. For instance, they’ve found that one way to keep kids vaccinated is not educating parents, but essentially bribing them through food, to keep their kids vaccinated. Their methods might not be what are expected, but they work.
Behind the Beautiful Forevers- Author Katherine Boo spent 3 years researching and hanging out in a slum in Mumbai to write this beautiful non-fiction narrative. She’s interested in why people are poor and what keeps them poor. Her sentences are amazing.
What I love about these books is that they delve into the lives, choices and emotions the poor without reducing them to projects, prescriptions or caricature. They are complex people living in an even more complex, broken system that we all in some way are a part of. Through relationships, policy and story, we can invite them into our lives and perhaps even earn the right to be invited into theirs.
