The past few days

The news from Egypt is unbearably inhumane for folks who are rooting for security and justice over there as much as for in the U.S. How many more peaceful protesters will die because of social injustice and cultural misunderstanding? How many more innocent bystanders to peaceful demonstrations will be killed, like Andrew Pochter? He is not much younger than my son and grew up near us. He mentored kids in the U.S. His reprinted letter to one of them (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/07/12/how-to-live-your-life-advice-from-an-american-student-who-was-killed-in-egypt/) brought me to tears as I processed the jury's verdict in the Zimmerman-Martin trial. 

Arabs and Jews want peace. They want inclusiveness, in the governing of Egypt, their most populous state, and through a Palestinian state. I was reminded of this by young people yesterday at an event held by Middle East peace advocacy organization New Story Leadership (http://www.newstoryleadership.org/), again, in our neighborhood. 

David Ignatius wrote for the July 12th Washington Post: "the Arab Muslim world must recapture the inclusive spirit [of its first centuries]....Otherwise, the broken political culture will not mend" (http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/david-ignatius-recapturing-the-arab-muslim-worlds-golden-age/2013/07/12/e21d4bc8-ea68-11e2-aa9f-c03a72e2d342_story.html). 

Secularists, co-religionists, all citizens, need to share our stories and yearnings for peace, and figure out how to bring enough Egyptians, Gazans, West Bankers, other Arabs around the region, Israelis, and Americans together to tip the balance of the U.S. House and Senate and demand a Palestinian-Israeli peace treaty for two secure states. We -- in the U.S. and across the globe -- cannot bear the loss of life.

With apologies to Clint Eastwood, I have gone ahead and made my day

It's the little things that make life interesting, especially when you spend many of your days job-hunting. Today I was doing background research for a job application and I came upon a lovely passage in an article about experiential pedagogy, taken from a book of conversations between two radical educators, Myles Horton and Paolo Freire. One of Horton's reflections is retold, 

"Recalling an incident when someone criticized [Horton's] workshops at the Highlander Folk School [in Tennessee, which he co-founded], he recalls: 'All you do is sit there and tell stories.' Well, if he'd seen me in the spring planting my garden, he would've said: That guy doesn't know how to garden. I didn't see any vegetables. All I saw was him putting a little seed in the ground. He's a faker as a gardener because he doesn't grow anything...' Well he was doing the same thing about observing the workshop. It was the seeds getting ready to start, and he thought that was the whole process."

The conversations are in the book edited by Brenda Bell, John Gaventa, and John Peters, We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1990. 

Here's a blurry copy of the book cover, courtesy of amazon.com:

The quote is on p. 99. I found the quote in: "Critical Experiential Pedagogy: Sociology and the Crisis in Higher Education," on pp. 146-147, by Brian P. Kapitulik, Hilton Kelly and Dan Clawson, The American Sociologist , Vol. 38, No. 2 (Jun., 2007), pp. 135-158, accessed July 12, 2013, at <http://www.jstor.org.proxygwa.wrlc.org/stable/27700496>.

Reading this story makes me feel inspired and grateful for people who are patient and willing to spend time planting seeds, faithful that they will grow, or having conversation, believing that dialogue makes a difference.

Diasporic sentimentality and a real public-private partnership

In today's Washington Post an article http://www.washingtonpost.com/realestate/where-to-find-affordable-homes/2013/07/02/0226d3ec-df62-11e2-b94a-452948b95ca8_story.html about affordable housing in the D.C. region listed several projects. One is called "House of Lebanon." The name reflects the initial sponsor http://www.columbuspm.org/Connect_Portfolio_Lebanon.asp, Mount Lebanon Community Development Corporation http://nccsdataweb.urban.org/orgs/profile/421717077,  The D.C. government and private firms, and community-based organizations organized the financing for the senior housing project  http://mayor.dc.gov/release/mayor-gray-breaks-ground-house-lebanon-mixed-use-project-former-m-m-washington-career-high. One of the CBOs, Washington Interfaith Network, had a major role in advocating for the public funds and is a sister to the organization I volunteer with in Montgomery County, Maryland, just outside D.C.. The country of Lebanon has possibly nothing to do with the motivation for and naming of this project, but in my inner transnational village, I make a connection, and it's great to read about all these different forces for good created affordable housing for seniors in DC.