Category Archives: spark your spirit

satnam

inspiration for an 11 year old girl

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i’m breaking my tradition of just posting an inspirational quote with no title, no commentary because yesterday someone found their way to this blog by doing an internet search for “how can 11 yr.old girl accept being biracial.”  i’ve been mildly haunted by this.  i don’t have advice to offer from personal experience because when i was eleven, i didn’t think of myself as biracial exactly.  so, though i was dealing with it and certainly many of my issues stemmed from it, i wasn’t pondering my life through that lens.  i couldn’t have verbalized my angst in those terms.  and, even if i could have, who knows how vastly different my situation was from that of the child who prompted the search.  anyway, i just thought i’d post a few of these inspirational thingies i’m so very fond of in hopes that one or two of them might be just the perspective shifter or the advice needed to help in this situation….

4th grade

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wow… what a disparity… i find this project fascinating and heartbreaking.  i also can’t help but think that there is a direct correlation between the racist advertising of old and the wide gulf between the experience of the predominantly white private school fourth grader and that of the student in the predominantly black inner city public school.

Drastically Different 4th Grade Stories

Two years ago, Judy Gelles was volunteering at an inner city public school and was assigned to a fourth-grade class. The school was as diverse as they come with children from African American, Hispanic and Asian immigrants. After several months of helping the students with their reading skills, she felt the need to connect with them on a deeper level. Mostly, she wanted to find out their stories.

She asked each student the following three questions:
Whom do they live with?
What do they wish for?
What do they worry about?

Inner City School USA

African-American, Hispanic, and Asian immigrants make up the fabric of this school. The majority of the children are African American. Many students come from broken families and live in dangerous neighborhoods. This is a “lock down” school. The gray fortress main door of the school becomes a blank slate for the students’ words. Their stories capture the gamut of societal issues: violence, immigration, the demise of the nuclear family, and the impact of the media and popular culture.

The biggest takeaway? “Family is extremely important to all children,” Gelles said. “They all need parents and relatives who care for them and look out for their future.”

After Judy Gelles learned about the deeply troubling stories of inner city 4th graders, she became even more curious. What were 4th grade children experiencing in different schools not just in the US but around the world? Across cultures, which values remained the same and which were starkly different? She not only compared an inner city school with a private one in the United States, she traveled abroad to India and China.

PRIVATE QUAKER SCHOOL, USA

Caucasian, African-American, Latino, and Asian students make up the fabric of the school. The majority of the children are Caucasian. The white clapboard main door of the school becomes a blank slate for their words. Most of these students love their school, come from two-parent families, and feel protected by their parents. They have high expectations of themselves, and worry about the negative effects of war, hunger, and global warming. A silent worship service for students and teachers takes place once a week from 8:30am to 9:00am. Anyone is allowed to share a message during this service.

These were her findings:

Inner city schools in the US have many problems due to the children’s chaotic family structure.
Students in the private schools in the US are more fortunate.
Students in China value education, and are extremely close to their parents.
In India, kindness, moral values, family, and education are highly valued.

READ MORE

just thought we should know

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David M. French Dies at 86

Ever wonder who tended to the injuries of demonstrators brutalized during the civil rights protests of the 1960s? David M. French, a former Howard University professor of pediatric surgery and one of the first African-American board certified surgeons, coordinated many of those first aid efforts, as just one piece of a long career that merged medicine and public service. He died March 31 at the age of 86.

David M. French (Ellsworth Davis/Washington Post)

After witnessing firsthand the lack of quality health care available to blacks in the South at civil rights protests (he once converted his family van into an ambulance to lead a medical unit overseeing the care of Mississippi activists demonstrating against racism), French became committed to improving the health of underserved people and began to focus on preventative and community medicine.

French founded Boston University’s department of community health in 1969. He also established a network of community health centers in Boston before moving to Ivory Coast in the 1970s. There, he led an effort to train nurses and improve public health in 20 countries across the continent.

French returned to the United States in the mid-1980s and retired to Barboursville, Va. But his work didn’t end then. He went on to serve as medical director of Helen Keller International, a New York-based nonprofit organization that runs public health programs in developing countries. More recently, he served as medical officer for the nonprofit service and development African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Read more at The Washington Post.

the middle way

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photo by brooke golightly

The Big Squeeze

Excerpted from “True Happiness”

Sounds True, Inc.

This is the place where most of us hang out for a long time, in what I sometimes call the big squeeze, where you are sort of caught between your idealistic notions of how you want to be (and how you think everyone else should be as well), and your “human frailty” if you want to call it that – the realness of your cravings, or the strength of your habitual patterns. You are sort of caught and rubbed between these two things…

(the sound of Ani-la rubbing her hands together is heard in the recording over a brief period of silence)

And, it’s very interesting, because on the one hand there is your idealism, how one “should” be. And then you are up against how you actually are. And interestingly enough – if you actually allow yourself to be rubbed instead of being harsh on yourself, if you will allow yourself to be rubbed – this is a place were some sort of real balance comes in. You really learn what is the middle way between idealism and craving, some kind of middle way where you can hold your seat, you can keep your heart open and stay receptive to these difficult places. You can stay open and more and more you can not harm yourself by doing the same things over and over.

But it’s half way… you’re sort of right in the middle of something, and I really think this is the place where we learn compassion for ourselves. This is the place where we begin to have some appreciation for what other people are up against, some real empathy, instead of just criticizing them all the time.

When you see yourself, how strong your aspiration is and how you are not always able to measure up, you learn so much from this inbetween state of a really good-hearted strong wish to not block your buddha-nature, and yet still finding yourself in that very place.