Tag Archives: International

12 Communicationist Contributions of 2012

Posted on December 12, 2012 | Leave a comment

Today on 12/12/12, I continue my annual tradition at looking back at my year of giving. I do this not to brag, but give some attention to the causes I care about and to hold myself accountable to make sure I always walk the walk and give back. You can read 11 Communicationist Contributions of 2011 to catch up.

I didn’t make a donation or volunteer my time to the Washington Animal Rescue League (WARL), but I helped them in their mission to rehome homeless animals. I adopted two cats (and paid their adoption fees) and am so happy to be giving them a home. I’m especially touched by Nemo’s story — WARL had a choice of either performing an expensive surgery to amputate his leg or give up on him and they chose to save him. When we visited the shelter for the first time he was recovering from his week-ago amputation and they were caring for him so well and we wanted to help. After a rough first month at home with many vet visits, he’s doing great with his little brother, Moo.

I attended Heartly House’s annual Walk A Mile in Her Shoes event. (Heartly House is a domestic violence and sexual assault center in Frederick, MD.) Men walk a mile in high heels to raise awareness and funds for violence against women issues. It was really one of the best events I’ve ever been to! I love seeing allies who don’t need to stick up for an underserved population doing it anyway. My pictures are here. They had a fun way to donate – Vote with your dollars for the best dressed man. I voted for a mustached man in red pumps.

I wrote about my January 29 speaking engagement in this blog post. I am so proud to have volunteered in this way and recommend it to anyone with a story to tell.

I had the opportunity to attend the National Sexual Assault Conference in Chicago during August. While I was there, I bought a T-shirt to support A Long Walk Home, an organization empowering girls who have survived violence.

 

I made a donation to support the Poplar Spring Animal Sanctuary when I attended their vegan potluck Thanksgiving event in Poolesville, MD. There was a feast for the turkeys! Cute pictures of rescued farm animals are here.

 

I had somehow never heard of Movember before this year. My friend Matt kept posting about it on his Facebook wall til I clicked and was convinced to donate. It was actually my very first time giving to a men’s cause. (The idea is that you grow a mustache for the month of November to raise awareness and funds for prostate cancer.) When I went home for Thanksgiving I found out that my dad was participating and I ended up posting it to my own Facebook and sparking several more donations from Facebook friends.

 

This was my Kickstarter sponsorship of the year — An interactive theatre piece by my amazing writer friend Danielle Staubitz. She got funded!

 

This year I saw many individuals fundraising for their medical bills. I’m happy to see this trend of crowdfunding expanding in this way and wish I could have given to everyone. I made one small donation via GiveForward to the relative of a colleague undergoing cancer treatment.

 

A highlight of 2012 was my friend from Germany coming to visit the Americas. We toured Maryland, DC, Virginia, and West Virginia together, and then also a few days in Mexico! It was such a treat. We spent one night at Hotel Istirincha, which preserves land and wildlife. The state of Veracruz works with the hotel to help wild green sea turtles survive. My friend and I got to take part in releasing 100 baby turtles into the sea, an experience I will never forget.

I continued to re-loan my Kiva funds to individuals and groups on the site. I made a loan in January to the San Blas group from an organization I spent the summer of 2005 with, Fundacion Paraguaya. I also loaned to a women’s collaborative in Tanzania in September.

 

The organization I gave the most to this year was Marylanders for Marriage Equality, a coalition working to pass Question 6  in Maryland. I volunteered several hours during early voting days and Election Day in Bowie, MD and created a fundraising page that raised $270 from seven of my friends and family members. The emotional hours on the line and phone-banking were absolutely worth it.

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Vintage Vignette: Spanish in Spain

Posted on March 7, 2011 | Leave a comment

Vintage Vignettes glimpse into the Communicationist’s past, one to ten years ago from this day.

This time of year in 2007, I was nine months in to my year in Europe. I was living in Spain and completely in love with being able to speak Spanish every day. I was also writing my first blog, and I’d like to share an excerpt from it with you in today’s Vintage Vignette:

For me, learning another language is like building a new life. Every time I speak Spanish or listen to Spanish, each word has so much more meaning than most in my native language. It’s because each time you learn a word, you make a memory. I learned the word for terrorist attack when I was in Spain and the terrorist bombing on the Madrid train happened. I learned the word for popcorn the first time I went to the movies in a Spanish-speaking country. I learned the word for red-head trying to describe my family to the interns in Paraguay. I learned the words for clubs and spades playing poker in Asunción. I learned the word for “done up” in my reading for my Social Movements class describing a drag queen at the 1993 March of Washington for gay rights. I learned the word for execution yesterday collecting signatures with Amnesty International against the death penalty. I learned the word for understand in Ecuador the summer before I started studying Spanish when a shop-keeper kept asking me if I understood (I didn’t). I learned the word for stamps sending postcards home from Puerto Rico. I learned the word for canopy in the rainforest in Costa Rica. My friends and I learned the word for license plate in Bilbao trying to figure out the system to pay for parking the other day (you have to punch your plate number into a machine and we were running up to people on the street asking them when the heck the directions said because the Guggenheim was only open another hour and we had to get there). Every time I use or hear one of those words, I think of when I learned it.

Then there are other memories that go with other words. Like the first time a student of Spanish asked me a word they didn’t know and I did know it (a Swiss girl asked me how to say wheat). Then there are words that don’t have translations to English like the word for the time sitting around the table talking after you’ve eaten that I learned living with the family in Sevilla. Or the word for a big tango hall that I learned in Buenos Aires. When I’m trying to figure out which grammatical tense to use, I think of the teacher who taught it to me. For me, Spanish is a collection of the last 5 years of my life. That’s what makes it so alive for me…Each word is an experience. Learning a language is just like life…You get frustrated, you learn, you grow. There are little triumphs (the first time I was able to talk politics in Spanish) and hang-ups (for some reason I could never remember the word for broom until I finally mastered it a few months ago). Spanish is a whole other life within a life for me.

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Beyond Raising Awareness

Posted on January 14, 2011 | Leave a comment

Frank Mugisha (see my past posts about consulting with him here and here) presented his new PowerPoint presentation last night at Arlington Street Church. He was part of a panel succinctly titled “Crisis in Uganda: Trans-Atlantic Parallels of Homophobia and Racism: the Export of a US Conservative Agenda to Uganda.”

Frank’s mission is to save lives of persecuted GLBTI Ugandans. When your PowerPoint is trying to aid a cause like that, you have to make sure that the presentation of your message does justice to your content. Frank’s original PowerPoint was already solid, but we can all benefit from an outside perspective.

What we really noticed was the importance of adding a clear call to action in a new final slide. Frank’s presentation is extremely moving with many personal stories painfully illustrating the dangers of being out in Uganda. Every audience member wants to help in some way by the end, but didn’t know how. I can’t stress enough how important the close is — Get that ask in! Many of us in the field of do-gooding don’t feel comfortable making a hard sell. It can feel like it cheapens the difficult and sensitive work that we do with the community to turn that community into a marketing point to ask for money, but think of it as another part of advocacy. You want to advance your mission and expand its work and getting the word out there is just the first part. Turning that awareness into action whatever your goal may be (Donate! Contact your representative! Sign the petition!) doesn’t make you corporate, it makes you a champion of your cause.

 

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Meeting Frank Mugisha

Posted on January 10, 2011 | Leave a comment

Following up on our phone call, my supervisor and I were able to meet with Frank Mugisha, Executive Director of Sexual Minorities Uganda, at our offices in Boston. He is here for a week and we are helping him with his PowerPoint presentation that he will be delivering twice while he’s here.

My supervisor and I have been working hard on our edits to his original presentation, even over the weekend. The meeting went really well and he likes all of our suggestions. We were able to really solidify what the call to action at the end is and turn it into a strong last slide. I’ll be attending his presentation later this week to see how it goes.

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Vintage Vignette: Falafel and a Film

Posted on November 10, 2010 | Leave a comment

Vintage Vignettes glimpse into the Communicationist’s past, one to ten years ago from this day.

On this day in 2005, the Palestianian-Israeli Peace Alliance (PIPA) held its first event. PIPA is a group I started at Boston University with my freshman year roommate. I, a young woman with Israeli family, and she, a young woman with Palestinian family, were randomly placed together. We saw an opportunity to create a forum where people from both sides could have a dialogue. Over the two years I served as President of the club, I saw people from the region have a conversation with their peers from “the other side” for the first time in their lives, on the other side of the world from their homes. We had events that ranged from discussions to cultural parties to outing off-campus to see speakers or movies. PIPA still exists at BU to this day and has expanded its work off-campus.

We had no idea if the club would get off the ground or not, and were thrilled when dozens of students turned out to Falafel and a Film. We screened Promises (trailer below), an Oscar-nominated documentary that allows the children of the region to speak about their opinions on the conflict and eventually meet each other. They speak wisely: “In war, both sides suffer. Maybe there’s a ‘winner’ but what’s a winner? People on both sides die. Both sides lose.”

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Consulting with Frank Mugisha

Posted on September 10, 2010 | Leave a comment

Frank Mugisha is one of those people that is changing the world. We all are in our own ways, but Frank is having a global impact. A gay Ugandan, he has dedicated his life to working for LGBT rights and has literally risked his life for the cause.

It is an honor to have been brought in on a project involving him at the office. We are providing pro-bono consulting to him and today was our first phone call with him. My supervisor and I spoke with him for an hour about his needs, which are mostly related to his PowerPoint presentation that he uses to illustrate his mission around the world. We are going to help organize it, beautify it, and consolidate it. From what I can see, the order needs some thought and we will need to add a slide at the end that states what the audience can do to help. There is currently no call to action in the presentation and when we meet with him in person we will have to solidify what that call is (or calls are).

It is humbling just to speak on the phone with him and I am so excited for this opportunity!

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Vintage Vignette: Pink Point in Sofia

Posted on August 11, 2010 | Leave a comment

Vintage Vignettes glimpse into the Communicationist’s past, one to ten years ago from this day.

On this day in 2007, I was doing street outreach in Sofia, Bulgaria. It was my last weekend of a 2-month internship with the country’s only LGBT organization and the whole team (all three employees, a few board members, two summer interns, and a couple of volunteers) pulled together to raise awareness in a park with a lot of foot traffic in the downtown area of the capital city.

We set up a tent called the Pink Point. Outside of this tent we handed out brochures and engaged people in conversation. Inside the tent we had displays and activities. Number one challenge for me in this outreach event: Not speaking Bulgarian.

So how did I and the other international intern get around this? First of all, we had print materials in Bulgarian to hand out. We learned how to say “Want to learn about equality for all Bulgarians?” (or something like that) and if they said “Da” we would just point to the tent where they could talk to the Bulgarian staff. Ahead of time we were able to contribute in other ways by brainstorming the activities and discussing logistics at the office in English. It worked out pretty well and it just goes to show that communication is more than language — Smiling, open body language, and lots of nodding can go a long way.

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