Day 3: Color

Day 3:  What color are you grateful for?

I am grateful for yellow.  When we first moved into our Reno house, the living room had black floral wallpaper with matching drapes (pictured above).  Now, the same room has yellow walls (pictured below), and it makes an enormous difference.  It brightens up the room, both by increasing the literal lightness and by making it feel cheerier.

Another yellow related thing that I'm grateful for is sunshine.  Reno gets 252 sunny days per year, and the only way this could get better is if that number was 365.  I love this feature of desert living.  It mellows out winter, it makes it easier and more pleasant to spend time outside year round (and it makes it easier to boot the dog outside when he's being a pest), and it feels good physically and emotionally to get so much sunshine.

Day 2: Technology

Day 2:  What technology are you grateful for?

I am grateful for texting.  It's more efficient and less awkward than a phone call.  It's less annoying than voicemail.  It doesn't require an Internet connection like e-mail.  You can put in cute emojis.  You can contact more than one person at a time, quickly.  You can regularly check in with parents and far away friends, you can send out prayer requests, and you can send hilarious thoughts to your sister.  It's an introvert's dream come true!

30 days: Smell

I've done a thankfulness post every November since I started this blog, and this year, I'm going to try something a little different.  I found this image on Pinterest, and I thought it would be fun to use it as a writing prompt for the next 30 days.  (I might miss days, but I will make every effort to do catch up days promptly.)  I'm not going to put these up on Facebook (other than this starter one) - just on my blog - but if you are interested, I would love to have you participate along with me in the comments, on your own blog, on Facebook - wherever!

To kick off, I will start today with Prompt #1:  What smell are you grateful for today?

I am grateful for the smell of food prepared by other people.  As most of you know, we brought a new baby home 3 weeks ago, and friends from church and MOPS have been bringing us dinner every few days to help ease the transition.  This smell brings gratitude for many reasons:

• The meals have been delicious!  And I love to eat delicious food!  
• It's work off my plate - in these weeks where I'm working pretty hard around the clock, I'm so grateful to everyone who finds ways to lighten the load.
• Friendship - It's not a small thing thing to plan, shop for, prepare, and transport a full meal for a family.  If you work full time or if you have small kids of your own, which describes almost everyone who brought us meals, the logistics of meal provision (and then figuring out dinner for your own family) get even trickier.  I'm so grateful that people care that much for us, or care in general about helping people out in their time of need.  

Extreme World Poverty: Hunger in the Age of the Plenty

This post is a book review of "Enough: Why the World's Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty" by Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman.  This is the first book review blog in a series exploring extreme world poverty.  My purpose in writing these book reviews is not to give a comprehensive synopsis or critique of the book, but to try to pass along the information that is most relevant to those wanting to help with these issues.  But if the issue of world hunger really grabs your heartt, then I would highly recommend reading this book.  

What's the book about?  

For several decades, the world has grown more than enough food to feed all of its people, even as the population continues to grow.  Yet 9 million people each year continue to die from hunger, most of them children in Africa.  This is a complicated issue with many causes, including those that many of us have heard of (drought / natural disaster, war zones, corrupt dictators), but also those that many of us have not heard of:  how the richest countries in the world have enacted policies, or failed to institute and support economic systems, and this has resulted in hungry people not being able to afford food that would otherwise be available.

There's a lot of dense content in this book, especially regarding agricultural practices and economic policy.  The book gives a history of different things that wealthier countries have tried in aiding hungry countries, explaining which policies have worked well and which policies have caused more harm than good.  

What are things that have historically helped?

• Provide money that goes back into the African economy
• Some examples of this are 1) western countries granting debt relief to African governments, and 2) sending money for Africans to purchase food from African farmers rather than sending over American food while African farmers can't sell the food they produce.
• "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a
  
  lifetime." (Lest this suggestion come off as too paternalistic -- African farmers are well aware of what they need, but the daily struggle to survive makes it too difficult for them to implement these things for themselves.  When they are given a little bit of breathing room (their family has enough food, they have regular access to water, etc.), they DO start implementing these things for themselves.  These are tips for us westerners as to how we can best help in a sustainable, rather than short-sighted, way.)
• Establish markets so that farmers have access to fair price discovery, uniform quality standards, and futures contracts.
• Infrastructure - roads, electricity, irrigation, farming tools.
• Extension offices that provide information to farmers on the newest and best farming techniques.
• Access to better seeds, fertilizer, etc.
• Private citizens, religious groups, and private corporations mobilizing to help raise money and awareness for these issues.  (It is especially helpful if you are a big name like Bono or Bill Gates :), but everyone's efforts help.)

What are the policy solutions that would most help with world hunger now?
(Note:  If you are wondering why these particular ideas, or what has been the harmful consequences of going a different direction on some of these suggestions - that's the bulk of the content of this book.)

• Wealthier countries should keep promises to expand development aid - $9 billion is currently given by all sources (public and private worldwide), and that amount needs to be doubled to reach everyone.
• Create a global fund to aid small farmers in Africa - help small farmers get the tools and information they need to grow enough food for their own families, and this will eventually lead to them making extra food and becoming self supporting.
• Invest in infrastructure - Support projects that provide roads, electricity, and irrigation.
• Africa takes responsibility - African governments need to keep their promise to dedicate 10% of spending to agriculture.  (Some are, some are not.)
• Plant new seed technology - (controversy alert!) - it would be helpful to the farmers of Africa to use genetically modified seed technology that is engineered to be most productive given the various agricultural conditions of their countries, but this seed is more difficult to obtain while there is controversy about GMOs in America and Europe.
• Find an alternative to turning food into fuel - Research other types of green energy that don't take away from the food supply (including making energy from the parts of food that we don't actually eat).  
• Create an international grain reserve - When emergency drought conditions arise anywhere in the world, it would be helpful to have a ready-to-go store of food available.  
• "Level the plowing fields" - (controversy alert) - provide subsidies to African farmers, and consider the effect of subsidies in western countries and think about whether there are ways to make them less harmful to African farmers (for example, by linking subsidies to better environmental practices rather than production).  (You could also just cut subsidies to western farmers, but i feel REALLY squeamish making this recommendation, both because I was raised in Nebraska and know some farmers, and also because fairness - if Americans should help with world hunger as a justice issue (and i think we should), this should be spread equally and not all heaped on the back of farmers.)
• Give U.S. food aid the flexibility for local purchases - Right now, the United States sends the vast majority of food aid in the form of actual bags of food.  It would be helpful to African farmers if the U.S. sent half of this in the form of money for Africans to purchase food from African farmers (or, if cutting the food amount sent would be too detrimental to American farmers, increase the aid budget and send the entire increase in the form of cash to purchase from African farmers).

Which Organizations Are Helping?
(Note - neither of these are formally endorsed by the authors of this book, but they both come up multiple times as organizations that are helping make positive change):

• Bread for the World - this is a group to check out if you want to learn more about policy changes and justice issues related to world hunger.  They have an email list, tips for how to contact your elected representatives, tips for how your church can get involved, etc.
• World Vision - this is a group to check out if you want to provide a financial donation to a group providing direct aid to hungry people.  

Home

Do you ever have a concept on your mind that seems to come up over and over?  That concept for me, this week, is the idea of "home".  I just read a book about people being evicted from their homes, then thought about some of my old jobs involving housing, then read a Tim Keller devotional about home.  That's really a lot of things *very loosely* tied together, so this stream of consciousness blog is probably going to be more of a demonstration of pregnancy brain than anything else, but each blurb is a subject that has been on my mind lately 

1.  Evicted Book Review

I just read "Evicted:  Poverty and Profit in the American City" by Matthew Desmond and would highly, highly recommend it.  It describes a problem that most of us have heard of, but few realize the scope of:  evictions.  Some of the main points of this book:

• Low-income tenants are often paying 80-100% of their monthly income on housing costs.  (This is where the private market prices are at, and public housing is unavailable even for most people who financially qualify.)  This makes it almost impossible not to get behind at some point.  And once you're behind, even just a little bit, landlords can evict you at anytime.  
• Evictions are not just the result of poverty but can also be a contributing cause of poverty.  Having an eviction on your record makes it harder to get into a new home, and it can cause depression, job loss, involvement in the child welfare system, loss of possessions, etc.
• Groups that are most highly affected by evictions are single women of color and single parent families with children.  (You'd think children in the home might cause landlords to treat a family more sympathetically, but nope, it's very much the opposite:  adults with children are WAY more likely to get evicted - statistically, having children has the same effect as being 4 additional months behind on your rent.)
•  When a family grows up with a stable home, rather than being forced to move from place to place, studies show that it can nurture the following things:  happiness and mental health, school success, steadier employment, savings, and safer / stronger / more thriving neighborhoods. 
• Two of the main solutions this book proposes are:  better access to justice for low-income tenants (who could often fight or at least delay evictions if they had the same kind of protections as their landlords), and a more robust public housing assistance program (so that everyone who qualified could actually receive help staying in their home).  

2.  My old jobs / legal passion

One of the things I hoped to do with my career was to help with some of the problems highlighted in the Evictions book.  This was primarily because of 3 jobs I worked during my college and law school years:

• In my "gap year" between college and law school, I worked as a homeless prevention outreach worker at La Puente in rural Colorado, where I talked to hundreds of people who were nearly homeless (facing an eviction or foreclosure notice, or utility shutoff) and tried to help figure out a plan that would help them stay in their homes for at least a little while longer.  
• For law school summer clerkship #1, I worked at Bread for the City in Washington DC - I assisted in the department that provided direct legal assistance to tenants.  I got to see the huge volume of people going through landlord-tenant court, and how most of the landlords had lawyers, while practically none of the tenants had legal assistance (and the people with lawyers virtually always won).  I saw the homes that some of our clients lived in, and the lack of bargaining power these tenants had if they needed improvements made (because they could always be evicted, and could not necessarily find a new home quickly).  I saw Section 8 tenants lose their homes as the owners of their buildings sold to luxury condo builders.  
• For law school summer clerkship #2, I worked at the National Housing Law Project in Oakland, CA - they focus on "systemic" problems - problems that affect a large group of people, and that can be fixed with a change to a particular rule or system.  My main summer project was helping with a manual on rural public housing, but I learned about all kinds of systemic issues in the public housing world (such as prisoner re-entry, domestic violence, etc.).  

I loved all 3 of these jobs and learned a TON from all of them, and had hoped to launch into a legal career that would somehow focus on housing justice.  But when I graduated law school, I couldn't find a job in this field.  I was lucky to work two other jobs that I really liked and found meaningful, and now I'm blessed to be able to stay home with our kids for awhile (not that there aren't some days i would give anything to be back in an office...).  But reading the Evictions book reminded me how much I care about housing issues, and how much I would someday, in some capacity, like to be able to work on them again.  

3.  Christianity and home

It never occurred to me before, but "home" is a major theme of Christianity - yearning for a home, the pain of being away from home, the promise of someday living in a perfect home.  Here is an excerpt from Tim Keller's excellent devotional "The Songs of Jesus" (which is another book I would highly recommend) on the topic of home:  "God's promise to give Abraham's descendants a homeland (Genesis 12:1-5) is central to understanding the plan of redemption.  We long for home, a place of security, comfort, and love.  We were made
for a world without death or parting from love, a world in which we walked with God and knew him face to face.  The world has been marred by sin and is no longer home, and we are restless exiles since our expulsion from Eden.  So when the Son of God came he had no place to lay his head (Luke 9:58) and was crucified outside the city.  He took the great exile we deserved so we could be brought into God's household (Ephesians 2:17-19).  And someday he will turn the world back into our home indeed (Revelation 21:1-8)."  - From the devotional for September 22

So those are the thoughts that have been floating around in my head this week related to home.  Would love to hear your thoughts on either of these books, or any other thoughts about the topic of "home".  

Sleeping children

This might be the most gratuitous blog I've ever posted, but one of the fun things about having a blog is that you can post whatever the heck you want.  So today's post is pictures of my sleeping children!  I can't imagine that this will be interesting to anyone besides me - that's what I mean by gratuitous - so if you somehow managed to stumble upon this post
in cyberspace, my apologies - maybe you will enjoy the sleep quotes.

"I love sleep.  My life has a tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?"  --Ernest Hemingway

"We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep."  --William Shakespeare

"It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it."  -- John Steinbeck

"The serpent, the king, the tiger, the stinging wasp, the small child, the dog owned by other people, and the fool:  these seven ought not to be awakened from sleep."  --Chanakya

“That sound of settling into the sheets and the covers has to be one of the best things in the world. Sleep is a mercy. You can feel it coming on, like being swept up in something.” -- Marilynne Robinson

“There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep.” - Homer, The Odyssey

Learning about extreme global poverty: the intro post

Recently, one of my pastors gave a sermon about his trip to Kenya.  My church, The Bridge, partners with an organization called When I Grow Up, and specifically, their project of supporting a school called Furaha in the Huruma slum of Nairobi, Kenya.  Pastor Tim told us about the extreme poverty he saw in the Huruma slum, and how this school offers hope of breaking the cycle of poverty to the families of kids who attend the school.  (This school is doing amazing work!  Check out the website to learn more.)

There are all kinds of startling statistics that can be ticked off about people living in extreme poverty, and if I'm being honest, so many of them fly over my head - but occasionally you hear a statistic, story, or description that shakes you to the core and that you know will stick with you.  The statistic that applies to the Huruma slum is:  40% of children don't live to see their 5th birthday.

How can that be??  This means that many, many kids are born healthy and then don't survive due to things that we totally take for granted in the United States - lack of clean water, food, sanitation, clothing, access to medicine and vaccines, safe housing standards, enforced child welfare laws, and i'm sure hundreds of other things.  What does that do, psychologically, to parents and kids, knowing that the odds of survival are so low and that they and their kids will be fighting to survive for their entire life?

While none of us as individuals can be the complete fixer of all the problems in the world - there is so much that can be done by individuals in wealthy countries for other individuals living in extreme poverty.  This starts with learning more about the systemic roots of the problem, and then using that knowledge to try to help in the best possible ways.  My personal knowledge about "what are the best ways to help break the cycle of extreme global poverty" is very limited, and I would like to know more.  If I had to guess at the most effective programs to support, I would list: clean water, public heath initiatives, education, and business micro-loans -- but I would like to do more reading to know if this list is on point, and if so, what is the best way to support these type of endeavors?

This isn't meant to be a guilt inducing blog post, but an explanation of the inspiration for a blog mini-series that I plan to do in the next year (or couple years - we'll see how things work out once new baby arrives!).  In this stage of my life, it's hard to do much "helping" work, even locally, because i generally need to bring the kids and spend 90% of my energy supervising the kids, and then we're no help to anyone.  But I do have some time to read and write, so this is an excellent time of life to learn and blog about issues, and then see where it goes from there.  So to start, I'm going to read and blog through the four books suggested by Pastor Tim, listed below -- and then we will see where the series goes from there.  If any of you are interested in this same topic, I would love to have you read along!

Suggested books (edited as I go with links to my book review blogs):
1.  The Hole in Our Gospel by Richard Stearns
2.  Enough:  Why World's Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty by Roger Thurow
3.  When Helping Hurts by Steve Corbett
4.  The Locust Effect by Gary Haugen