It's April 12, which means Sexual Assault Awareness Month is almost half way over. There are still plenty of opportunities, though, for you to celebrate the month throughout the Tucson community. 

Here's one. To commemorate Sexual Assault Awareness Month, raise awareness and advocate for survivors of sexual assault, the UA's Students Promoting Empowerment and Consent and the Women's Resource Center will put on their one of their largest annual activism endeavors, Take Back the Night, this evening.
The event kicks off with a survivor solidarity march at 5:30 p.m. in the Women's Plaza of Honor and continues after the march with guest speakers, special performances and a "speak out" where survivors will anonymously and publicly share their sexual assault experiences. 

SPEAC and the WRC invite anyone and everyone to march, speak and generally "reclaim the night." Check out Take Back the Night's Facebook page for more TBTN-specific info, and check out the interactive map below for information regarding the rest of SPEAC's Sexual Assault Awareness Month affairs. 

Could first impressions be worse?

There they were, the four of them talking so loudly to each other that they were almost yelling. Their Cajun accents were so strong that they would have better fit in a cartoon. Their voices drowned out the conversations in the seats next to them. Two of them had the lower lip and gum decay that only a lifetime of chewing tobacco can inflict on someone, and they all wore amazingly greasy hair. Despite the frigid December weather, they boarded the plane in sleeveless shirts and ripped jeans. Did I mention that they were loud?

My mind was set.

I fortunately sat far enough away that their voices faded out after 30 minutes and I slept deeply. I was awakened to an intercom announcement: “We are now making our final descent into Istanbul, please turn off all electronics and return your seat to the upright position.”

“Idunmind if they speak Turkush here, suhlonguz everone understanz English too!” cackled my Cajun friend. It had to have been a joke. Nobody who willingly leaves their own country really thinks like that. But nobody else was laughing. Not even the others in his group.

Finally.

I grew up in Death Valley and don’t do well with cold. Seeing 2016 on my calendar means that I’d been on the road for 18 months now, shifting between hemispheres every six months and staying in perpetual winter. 18 months of cold nights and stuffy clothes. But not now. The warm and humid air that stuck to me after I exited the airplane in Kenya was a long awaited hug.

After a quick wait in the immigration line, I made my way out of the airport and was quickly met by Eric and Vivian. Eric is the founder and leader of Mathare Foundation, the organization where I would be working for the next month. Vivian was an assistant who coaches the soccer team and counsels children in writing. We grabbed a cab that was too small for the three of us plus my backpack, so I went with my bag on my lap and Vivian offered to take Hobbes on hers. These were good people.

We were headed to Mathare Slum, a slum of 500,000 people with a 30 percent HIV infection rate and no free education past 8th grade. I would work at Mathare Foundation, a non-profit that offered children free classes in soccer, performing arts, and photography. The pragmatic hopes are that the photography program can be self sustaining and offer the children real work, while the soccer and performing arts programs were meant to assist children in getting scholarships to continue their studies. The immediate results are that the kids can display and take pride in their accomplishments, have positive role models outside of the home, and have productive work to do in the time when they are most vulnerable to drugs and crime.

The local chapter of Habitat for Humanity is looking for military veterans who need repairs done on their homes — at no cost to the homeowner.

The program is meant to improve the safety, condition, livability, and accessibility of homes owned by veterans. Projects also work to upgrade the energy efficiency of homes in order to reduce energy costs.

“We are promoting respect and dignity for our nation’s heroes,” said Habitat Tucson CEO, T. VanHook about the program. “We are committed to helping our veteran neighbors live in peace and safety. Habitat Tucson builds more than just homes.”

Know of a veteran who could benefit from free home repairs? Direct them to this website or to Shianna Searcy of Veteran Homeowner Services at 326-1217, extension 209. 

Habitat for Humanity also offers home ownership opportunities and other resources for veterans all over the Tucson metro area. For more information on those programs, visit habitattucson.org/veteran. All general inquiries can be directed to the Habitat for Humanity Tucson main office at 326-1217.

This is part seven of a journal I’m keeping during my time working at a refugee camp in Greece. Part six, covering my first week working as an interpreter at a medical clinic, can be found here.

I started this week with the same job as last week, working as a Farsi interpreter at the medical clinic at Lesvos island’s biggest refugee camp, Moria.



Jan. 11

Today brought two of the most memorable stories of this month.

First was a young man who came in with charred and peeling skin on one hand. “It got burned in a fire,” he told me, “in Turkey a few days ago.” A doctor looked at his hand and found that there was no permanent damage, then went to get the young man vaseline and bandages.

While the doctor was away, I asked the young man how he burned his hand. “I was throwing gasoline on a bonfire,” he told me.

“Shouldn’t you pour the gasoline before starting the fire?” I asked him.

“Yes, but I wanted to throw the whole can on the top of the fire.”

I couldn’t help it. I turned my head to the side and pretended to cough while I quietly laughed, but he caught me. Learning to keep my mouth closed while swallowing a yawn has been the best employment skill I’ve learned, but I imagine that making an unavoidable laugh look like a cough would be equally useful. When I turned back around, the patient and I made eye contact and he tried to hide a smile. The secret was out. We both dropped the serious tone and laughed at what happened. His laughter grew as I explained to him that “The Spanish firefighters on the beach poured gasoline on a fire last week too. They lost control for a moment and scared everybody at the beach, and they were firefighters! At least you can pretend you didn’t know better!”

We quieted our laughter when the doctor came back. I resumed my role as a medical interpreter. A professional, stoic, interpreter. Definitely not someone that laughs at/with patients. “There is no permanent damage and your hand will get better every day. Apply plenty of vaseline, and change bandages whenever you do. Keep your hand clean. Come back here if the burning gets worse.” I shook the young man’s good hand and led him out of the clinic. I looked for him around camp later when I went for food but couldn’t find him. Something tells me we could have shared more cool stories.




The other story involved zero laughter.

This is part six of a journal I’m keeping during my month working at a refugee camp in Greece. Part five, covering working at a distribution tent and finding a full-time translation job, is here.



Jan. 4

Today was my first full day as a Farsi interpreter at a medical clinic at Camp Moria, Lesbos Island’s biggest refugee camp. Afghans or Iranians who speak clear English are a rarity on the island, so I’ve handled a handful of different translation jobs. They all left me feeling meh. The medical clinic was different though. Working with needy people, avoiding egos, and having a uniquely needed skill set were all improvements over my previous jobs. Working in a warm building with the majority of the cute volunteers on the island was a nice bonus as well.

Working at the medical clinic finally felt like my calling.


Most of the cases today were fevers and colds. It was a good way to ease into a language that I studied 10 years ago and haven’t used again until a week ago. Hot, cold, fever, cough, and vomit were the most common words. I had prepared a long list of medical terms over the weekend and was very grateful that I didn’t have to consult it often today.

One of the rafts had hit a rock near the shore and popped that morning, leading to everyone on the raft walking the last 20 feet to the shore. While there were no drownings or hypothermia from it, one particular injury kept popping up.

"Please stop making me laugh about people getting sea urchins stuck in their feet," I giggled to S, a doctor from a medical team from Vermont. He wasn’t trying to make me laugh. He wasn’t trying not to either. I was fortunately able to hold it in while around patients.

Sobriety came quickly as a visibly pregnant woman came into the clinic. She wore tears on her cheek and her hands on her stomach. She had fallen out of the raft and crashed into a rock, stomach first. She was panicked that her baby was hurt and told us repeatedly that she was 8.5 months pregnant. It was a big relief for everybody when we found that she had “only” broken a rib. The baby would be fine.

This is part five of a journal I’m keeping during my month working at a refugee camp in Greece. Part four, covering a week of shore rescues and work as an interpreter, is here.


Dec. 28

The day has finally come to spend the rest of my donated money. I met with two friends and drove around the city of Mytilene, looking for box stores to buy gloves and shoes in bulk. We settled for a Chinese store downtown, making three different trips to spend every dollar we had raised.

We didn’t count everything, but we got roughly 25 pairs of shoes, 100 pairs of socks, 50 pairs of gloves, 50 pairs of underwear, 20 jackets, plus assorted clothes for children and women.


We then went to Moria, the largest refugee camp on the island, in the afternoon to link up with the two Spanish women I would share rides with for the week. They had returned to Camp Pikpa, a camp for refugees with special health considerations that I previously worked at, for the afternoon. I instead used a very expensive taxi and soon realized how far out the new hotel is. 15 euros a night for a quality hotel near the camp was too good to be true!

I considered returning to the tent at Camp Pikpa that night. My new room was very cold, didn’t have hot water, and was 40 minutes from work at Camp Moria. I missed my friends at Pikpa and spent the cold night feeling like I was on the moon. I wanted to be in my old tent at Pikpa.

I promised to take 24 hours before making a decision.

This is part four of a journal I’m keeping during my month working at a refugee camp in Greece. Part three, covering working at Camp Pikpa and branching out to find my role on the island, is here.


Dec. 21

A couple more volunteers left over the weekend, leaving nobody to conduct the coordination meetings in the morning. My impatience got the best of me as I clanged a rock against a metal pole until everyone gathered, then quickly briefed everyone on the ongoing projects.

I spent the rest of the day building shelves for the Medicins san Frontieres tent at Pikpa. A team of Germans came in, all of whom had previous experience in construction, which dramatically lessened my workload and made life easier for C, the woman who designs the shelves. C stays stays in the same tent as me at Camp Pikpa and is another Bay Area native. Roughly half of San Francisco is currently volunteering on Lesbos Island in some capacity.

We spent the early evening preparing and packaging meals for Moria, the main refugee camp on the island. Moria seems to be perpetually cold, understaffed, and undersupplied, so the Pikpa volunteers spend a lot of time there and bring clothes and food up when we can. Packing meals for them is a nightly ritual that signals the end of the work day at Pikpa.

Myself, two tentmates, and Dutch volunteer R went into town and spent the rest of the evening at a Syrian restaurant. It was R's last night and we wanted something better than refugee camp soup for our final meal together. Being waited on in a warm restaurant after two weeks in a tent seemed to be a delicious dose of civilization for all of us, though we were sad to see R go.

This is part three of a journal I’m keeping during my month working at a refugee camp in Greece. Part two, covering settling in at Camp Pikpa and starting work, is here.


Dec. 14: Reality sank in this morning. A very overqualified volunteer had gone back to her 9-5 job in the U.S., meaning the rest of us had to pick up the slack.

It was a lot of slack.

Several of us teamed up in the morning for around 45 minutes to take out and sort all of the trash and recycling, something she had done by herself. Another volunteer took on the nearly full-time job of washing dishes.

I spent the rest of the morning cutting out letters with an American volunteer. The letters were of the Latin alphabet and I drew their corresponding Arabic letter on each side of the letter. As we hoped, some of the children began playing with the letters and spelling their names! We can’t have much in the way of classes since we have such a fluctuating roster of children, but having kids leave Pikpa with a basic grasp of phonetics will be a big win if we can pull it off.

I spent the afternoon at Moria with two friends, although we didn’t do a whole lot. Situated in the hills above Mytilini, it offers an amazing view of the surrounding olive groves, with the Aegean Sea serving as a backdrop. Moria is run by the United Nations and has roughly 20 Non-Government Organizations floating around. There is often more need for help there than at Pikpa, but it is more difficult to be registered and approved. I headed over to the Olive Grove (where the non-Syrian and non-Iraqi refugees are sent) and did a bit of translating, but an Iranian-British woman was more enthusiastic and clearly more capable at this than myself, yelling orders and commanding respect as she marched through several lines of refugees.


That evening at Pikpa was fun, with a traditional Irish band coming to play for the children. The parents joined in and even let their guard down as they clapped enthusiastically to the beat. As I started dancing, a young Afghani man grabbed my hand and began dancing with me. I didn’t really think anything of it at the time as holding hands with other men is seen as a sign of friendship in many Arab countries (save your angry comment, I’m fully aware that few Afghanis are ethnically Arab). We danced nonsensically for a couple of songs before I left for the nightly job of preparing meals to be sent to Moria. Unfortunately, he flirted uncomfortably with me over the next week and generally begged for my attention. This (and similar incidents that tend to find me) is clearly karma for the times I've been friend-zoned and still went for the girl.

This is part two of a journal I’m keeping during my month working at a refugee camp in Greece. Part one, covering my last night in the US and two days in Athens, is here.


Dec. 9: It’s go time. After a series of subways and flights, I’m on the island of Lesvoz, the epicenter of refugee arrivals.

Now what?

I’d previously arranged to work in Molyvos, a town in the north of the island that desperately needed help a month ago. Since that time, thing have calmed down in Molyvos. Several senior members of the Greek government visited the camp in Molyvos before I came, leading to a pause in boats coming from Turkey. The Turkish coast guard is now patrolling the area near Molyvos at night, causing the smugglers to take boats further south. The city of Mytilene has now become the new major landing point. I decided to hold off on Molyvos for the time being and give Mytilene a shot.

Still unsure of where I will sleep or work, I decide to spend the day sorting clothes at a warehouse. This is a huge need on the island, as everybody dreams of coming and heroically helping refugees off of boats, but nobody dreams of heroically sorting shoes. I hailed a taxi in front of the airport and asked him to take me to the warehouse in town.

“Refugees?” he asks me.

“Yes, I’m going to the warehouse for refugees, where there are clothes,” I replied.

“You go to work for refugees, I will take you there?”

I tried to explain using the most basic English I could think of… “Yes, at the building with boxes, food, and clothing. The warehouse.”

“OK, we go to warehouse.”

Five minutes later, we were at Pikpa, which is definitely not a warehouse. Pikpa was formerly a summer camp for children with special needs, though it was abandoned and later became a refugee camp. It is now populated by at-risk families or refugees with special health conditions (i.e. pregnancy) that made them a poor fit for the general population at other refugee camps.