The Bulldozer

Wrote this a year and a half ago, but didn't hit "publish" until today....


I went to my first yoga class since being back today. The place I like had an 8:15am class and their was no way I was dragging my sorry butt out of bed to make it to that class so I went to a new place. When I walked in the bubbly instructor introduced herself and asked me if I had any injuries she should be aware of. I rattled off something about a torn stomach muscle that didn't heal well and went about preparing for class.

About half way through the class I remembered just how torn that stomach muscle really was. In fact two years ago I rushed myself to Monrovia in a taxi cause I thought I was having a heart attack or something crazy like that. One EKG at the embassy and ultrasound in some dark back office at the Sikh clinic later, we realized it was a hematoma in my abdomen...awesome. You know, because I had a job that required me to be on roads that look like something you wouldn't even recognize as a road on a weekly basis. Bouncing up and down in the back of a beat up land cruiser is REALLY good for the old stomach muscle hematoma. Then there was that ankle injury from high school that started hurting during the side angle pose. That one was pretty crazy...ankle the size of a softball at summer camp. Did I take it easy? Nope keep playing and working. Then during plank pose I felt the twinges in my back that have been some of my nearest and dearest friends for the past 12 years.

I don't mean to write all this to garner sympathy. Lord knows we all have our aches and pains. I'm no different. But the thing I realized in the midst of yoga class today is that I'm a bulldozer. A bulldozer when it comes to myself, my injuries, my heart, my life. I think that I am pretty understanding when it comes to hardship in life with other people. My encouragement to friends and family usually isn't, "Just keep pushing, you'll make it" or "Keep entering into this really difficult situation and it will miraculously get better." My responses to the hardship or difficulties in other peoples' lives usually extends much more grace. But for myself, it is all push, push, push. Hurt, injured, sad but get up and keep going Amy, keep going. Push down those difficulties in front of you and keep plowing through, for years...I can do that for years.

The thing is though, physical injuries don't heal well when you keep pushing yourself and neither does your head or your heart. I think that sometimes I don't have a choice, but when I do, I should work on resting my body, heart, mind when I need to and I shouldn't feel bad about that, like I'm not achieving the things I need to achieve. I should just rest and know that I'll run that 5k with friends next month, but this month it is time to put the bulldozer in the garage. 

The Anchor

A few months ago I had some meetings in Monrovia. Now that is exciting for many reasons, namely: good (or at least better) food, friday night salsa, awesome friends that I didn't see very often and the beach (!!!!). In addition to all that, it means endless hours of free, wireless internet at the office. During one of those marathon internet sessions, which may or may not have been during a very important meeting, I found pinterest.

Now the rest of the world found it months or years before but I didn't live in the rest of the world so I was a little late to it. My favorite tabs are the home decor (dreaming of my own, permanent place someday), women's clothes (looking at all the sweaters that I wish we had weather for in hot, smoldering Liberia), quotes, and tattoos. I've been secretly, and not so secretly, wanting a tattoo for years. I've thought of a few things that I'd like but I keep finding myself being drawn to the anchors. Which makes sense, because for the past few months I've been feeling a bit lost.

Fast forward a few months and I'm now traveling in the Southeast. Visiting friends who I haven't seen in far to long. Meeting babies. Venturing out to all the old haunts. I drove through Asheville, remembering the sweet taste of all the creative exploits of Salsas, an all time favorite restaurant that has hosted me and all my nearest and dearest on many occasions (ok well, mostly all). A bit farther down the road, jumping with joy as the "Welcome to Tennessee" sign appeared around the curve. Walking to Market Square and remembering when it was just a bunch of rundown buildings and a Subway. Watching things bloom on a warm spring morning as I have since I was 4. You know, I was home. The familiar place. The place where everyone looks familiar because they are probably an old friend's sister or cousin. The place where you run into people you were in high school art class with in the grocery store or at yoga class.

Anyway, I think I've been thinking about anchors because I was longing for the people and places that anchor me. No matter how far I go, at home the grass still turns the same color green before all the trees start to sprout leaves in spring. My girls and I will always reminisce about the places we went and the things we did when we were 17. I'll still drive down the old back roads at very high speeds because I remember each turn and bend. All these things are who I am, part of me just like my arms and legs, no matter where I happen to end up. It all reminds me of who I wanted to be before I went off and before adulthood made everything complicated. 

Songs That Are Home

I made it home...after perfect flying in Africa and Europe and disasters at Dullus. I've come home to so many things new and all the old things that I love, but mostly I've just been in bed, hanging with parents, and eating...oh and downloading music. Here are some songs that remind me of home, old and new.


Yes, Yes, and Yes...Will be purchasing everything they have ever done as soon as I get home!

Ok, a bit cheesy, but cheesy is good every now and then...plus beautiful, white Tennessee.

Just for me...I'm sure!

Beautiful to look at and beautiful to hear...

Russia Chronicles: A Traffic Jam

So we get there amidst the chaos that is an arrivals terminal in most places outside the US and Europe. The heat, the breaking down conveyer belt slugging along with our bags piled high, pushing, shoving, a rainbow of passports in hand, yelling taxi drivers, "taxi, taxi miss." All of the stuff that as an adult, I've come to accept as part of doing my job and living my life, but as a child was a little scary and a little exciting. On the other side of the immigration area my father grabbed us, literally, and we made our attempts to clear the madness. After that is just a blur of cars, streets, people, and a 2 room "suite" in a student dorm that we would call home of the next few weeks.

The evening comes and sleep...finally after many hours in airports and planes. But wait, it is sunny outside. A few hours later it is still sunny outside. Welcome to St. Petersburg in the summer. Dusk begins at 11pm and it is sort of dark for the rest of the night until it is daylight again by 6am. First thing on the to do list suddenly becomes finding heavy curtains.

So the next morning we ventured out and things began to get really interesting from there. We rounded the corner outside of our house and came to an intersection. The road curved on our left and we planned on heading down a side road cutting off to the right to grab what would become almost a daily stop for hotdogs...the Russian version. Right as our little family comes to the intersection we all look up to see the skirmish. There were a line of cars stopped in traffic on the road curving left and other cars coming from the side street desperately trying to either get in line or make holes in the line big enough to get their cars turning in the opposite direction. One such car making a desperate attempt to take a right turn to get in the line of cars was a little to forceful and more than a bit disgruntled by the time we got there. So disgruntled in fact that he was outside his car yelling, causing the driver that had blocked his right turn to also get out of his car, hands waving, to begin his own Russian tirade.

It was a serious, hands waving, furious pointing, people staring sort of argument until it took a turn for the worst. The man in the flow of traffic decided he was done with yelling and went to his trunk to pull out what looked a baseball bat. He proceeded to go over to the other guy's car and smash in the hood of the car....Ok, well that is one way to deal with a traffic disagreement. Eventually the sufficient damage was done for the offense. The guy pulling in to the traffic had lost the battle and everyone went on about their business as if nothing happened. Another new experience, I guess. 

Positive Psychology ??

I had no idea what Positive Psychology was until a few days ago when I watched Shawn Achor’s Ted talk on “The happy secret to better work.” His basic premise is that positive people do better work, not to mention, they are happier. He said that work performance is based on something like 35% intelligence and the rest is about attitude and how you perceive the world. If you think of stress as a negative as opposed to a challenge then you get tired and discouraged quicker. If you see the positive in situations instead of all the problems, you actually solve the problems more effectively. 

Pretty cool stuff I thought. He does consulting (of course!) and says that he tells his clients to do the following every day for 21 days in a row: think about 3 different things daily to be grateful for, and those things can’t be repeated again. Keep a journal and every day write down a positive experience at work. Meditate, it calms the chaos. Practice random acts of kindness (can be really simple things). After 21 days I guess these things become more of a habit in life and began to really shift people’s thinking to more of a positive outlook. I’m going to try it. 

Things I’m thankful for: 

For the first time in a long time, I feel like I have energy to get things done

I am thankful that I have a class to teach from the beginning of the semester this time

I am thankful that there have been great improvements in my work environment

...feeling better already!

Russia Chronicles: Before We Even Got There

The first time I traveled abroad, I was 11, I think...or maybe 12. Anyway, I was young and in that weird just entered middle school phase of maturation. My dad had been working in Russia for several months at a time and had enough frequent flyer miles to fly my mom, my sister and I over to St. Petersburg for a visit one summer. It was 1991, so a lot in Russia was changing. Communism had just fallen and capitalism was quickly spreading it’s influence over the entire country. Fascinating time really, but I just thought it was cool to get a passport and fly across the world. AND, my sister and I got a new gameboy for in-flight entertainment. Honestly, I think we spent a grand total of 4 hours playing with that thing. Lets just say we don’t have gamers in the family.

We left Knoxville and flew to some major city to catch a flight to Frankfurt. Germany, cool! I remember thinking about how the Frankfurt airport looked and felt time a tunnel. People were yelling over the loud speakers in a language I didn’t understand and I was really tired. We got on a plane for St. Petersburg and were told it would take a few hours to get there. Sooner than it should the plane started to land...strange, right? Even at age 11 or 12, I knew something was amiss. At some point during the descent a lady came on the intercom and said that a passenger had lost something and we needed to land in Warsaw to find it. Lost something? Things have really changed in the past 20 years of air travel, haven’t they? What in the world could some have “lost” that would require them to land the plane in Poland not Russia? We’ll never know, although the rumor was that it was expensive jewelry. 

As the plane taxed towards the airport, we were met by several branches of Polish security officials. The airport security opened the baggage compartment and started throwing out bags. Then all of a sudden, what looked like Polish police officers grabbed airport security, threw them against their cars and start padding them down...cue James Bond style secret agent swooping down with a helicopter, manhandling the security officials and snagging the bag with the missing jewels...Ok, ok, so the truth of the story stopped with James Bond, but several forms of Polish official looking security folks did proceed to pad each other down for awhile. After this display of utter confusion, the officials made up and put the bags back on the airplane. We taxied towards the runway and were off again. Random, but for a 11 or 12 year old, her mother, and her younger sister it was all a little too strange and probably a bit exciting too. Mind you all we really knew about Russia and Russians was the Cold War and all those movies portraying them as our arch-rivals, threatening us with nuclear war. Oh, and that our dad had been a few times and survived, so we decided to cling to that thought and in the end just looked at each other with “that was really crazy” looks on our faces....nuclear war averted! Little did we know the madness had only just begun. 

The Women in Yellow

Another Reposting from Burnside:

My day started at the women’s maximum security state prison. In the area that I live there is a men’s and women’s maximum security prison. I just so happened to have moved in across the street from the men’s maximum security prison, as you may have read, and sure enough a few weeks later someone signed me up to go on a tour of the women’s maximum security prison. Coincidence in my life? Act of God in my life? I guess we’ll have to wait and see. Anyway, my friend studies prison reform and so I brought her along with me. We got up early, stopped by the gas station for a little more coffee, and made the twenty-minute trek up the road. 

It was a tough morning for me, but the women in the yellow jumpsuits had a much tougher morning. I only got a glimpse of them. They were just delivered to the prison, having been sentenced for whatever they were convicted of. As the door swung open to the intake room I saw dozens of stone cold-faced women sitting shoulder to shoulder on wooden benches. They looked at me almost as a collective stare. There was no emotion behind their eyes or in their face. You know when you are on a subway or at the grocery store and you happen to look at someone you don’t know, there is this moment (before you realize that some creepy person is staring at you) when your face and their face softens just a bit and you acknowledge that someone else is there too? There was no of that. Their faces were the definition of a blank stare. It was as if someone had wiped their insides clean of emotion. I had no idea how to look back at them so I just lowered my eyes. 

They saw a variety of doctors today, some for their bodies, some for their minds and hearts. After their exams they were placed in small cells were many of them will spend the next few months going through detox. We were told that not only is the imprisonment rate increasing for women but the number of women coming in with major drug addictions is rising too.  Instead of the plush accommodations movie stars get, these women would have to be sick in a small cell laying in a bunk bed over a roommate they just met. As the door slammed and echoed through the halls I had questions:

How many do you think are pregnant?

Many of them are, I would say at least 12.

Do they deliver their babies here or at the hospital?

We take them to the hospital.

What happens with the babies after they are born?

The mother has 24 hours with them and then someone takes them.

The state?

Or a relative, but if there isn’t anyone then they go into the system.

My heart broke for them. My heart broke for the little ones too, the babies that only know their mothers for 24 hours. I thought about the women in yellow jumpsuits and how statistics say that many of them were born to women in prison or women who spent time in prison. A friend of mine recently told me that statistic is one in seven. So at least one, if not two, of their children would be back in that room several years down the road. My heart was heavy as we walked back through the metal doors and into the breezy spring morning.

There were some bright spots in the whole experience. Some of the women make all the uniforms for the other prisons in the state. They are paid and get to spend the money at the prison commissary or send it to someone on the outside. Several other women work with dogs to train them how to take care of elderly folks and others with disabilities. It was pretty cool to listen to the women talk about how they train the dogs to take care of their future owners. The dogs were pretty amazing too. They could turn on lights, pull the covers up, and grab toilet paper which they then delivered to their owner slobber free, well mostly slobber free. 

These women, the dog trainers, had a light in their eye that was in stark contrast to the women in the yellow jumpsuits. The dog training ladies expressed the feeling that they were helping people as they worked with their dogs. The dogs would move on into the lives of people who really needed them to meet physical and emotional needs. I think that says a lot about our need to be productive and help other people. The dog trainers have found a way to contribute to the larger community despite their circumstances. I hope and pray that some of those women in the yellow jumpsuits will find their way to that place, the place of work, contribution, functioning well in the collective. 

The last place we went was the dog training area. I wonder if they planned that. I wonder if they wanted us to leave on a hopeful note. Or maybe it was just closest to the front gate. In any case, I did leave a bit more hopeful than I would have if we had ended the tour with the women in the yellow jumpsuits. I left hopeful that people can find a productive place in prison. They can work for the collective good and that light in their eyes and warmth in their face could return when they were given something productive to work towards. Maybe that is a lesson for me when I loose a bit of the light in my eyes, think about someone else and how I can contribute. Maybe I can think about those babies that only have 24 hours with their moms and find a place to help there. Who knows…but there is hope.