Comments (5) Empathy without judgement
This is my new mantra for 2013. Being a very process-oriented person I’ve never been much good at setting goals (don’t think I ever got that Young Women’s Personal Progress Medallion), so I thought I’d stick with a simple group of words to help me create transformation in my life.
I have been feeling a strange sense of paralysis lately. Every day I make a long list of To Dos. (Currently consisting of: 1) Find a job 2) Write an Op Ed about Marriage Equality 3) Find out when loans payments start 4) Submit claim form from my last day of health insurance 5) Go to the grocery store…. etc) Then I come home after work, with plenty of time to check off several things from my list, or at least make steps towards accomplishing them, and I settle in to a several hour binge of reality TV and general internet wanderings. Mind you, trashiness of content knows no bounds. My most recent obsession is ABC’s the Bachelor Pad. No, not the far more classy Bachelor. Bachelor Pad is a show where rejects from the Bachelor and Bachelorette fight each other in a twisted weeks-long game to win 250k. Classy.
But, something set in before law school graduation and really settled in during the dreary months of bar prep this summer. Really foreign feelings of lethargy and apathy began to leech into my brain.
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One time a friend of mine convinced me to do an aura test. Basically you answer a litany of questions in columns of Yes, No or Maybe. Adding up the columns tells you what color your aura is. This tells you what characteristics similarly-shaded people have. This particular friend likes to analyze responses to the test in real time, and has most of the questions memorized. When I answered the question, “You will someday be famous” with a No, she shook her head incredulously at me. “What?? You don’t think you are going to be famous??!?” I answered that I just couldn’t think of a reason that among billions of people on earth, I would make it into the handful that has fame and fortune written in their stars. Sure, I had thought about what it would be like to be famous, but couldn’t come up with the “how.”
In furtherance of my reality TV obsession, I was looking at the Twitter feed of one of the buxom babes on the Bachelor Pad. This particular contestant, Blakely, had worked for 15 years as a Hooters waitress, and is portrayed as one of the most unlikeable characters on the show. Mostly because she’s as pushy & manipulative as the men. When I read her Tweets I realized why I liked her. She posted a tweet from a woman trying to raise awareness of a rare disease that her son had died of. I realized that Blakely, aside from wanting to be rich and marry a hot guy, also wanted to be famous for the reason that I bet my Aura-loving friend would. Why so many people would. Because they want to be listened to. They want people, lots of people, to think what they say is legitimate, and value what they do.
In our fame-obsessed, reality-drenched world, we have stopped listening to real people. We listen to pundits shouting. Why to we listen to what they have to say? Because they are famous. Does it really matter why they are famous? No. If Angelina Jolie says that we should Free Burma Now!, then we probably should. If my friend Thelma says the same thing. Who listens? It all seems so arbitrary, but why so many causes try to lure celebrities to their side.
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Transitions are always difficult. You go from knowing what your day, your week and your years to come will look like to not knowing. For me this period of transition involves going from feeling overwhelmed with possibilities and ideas to totally underwhelmed with the banality of the choices I see before me, I hope for a short time. It comes from the excitement of knowing you’ll someday be a lawyer (or professor, or whatever) and the accompanying excitement, to suddenly being 32 and being a lawyer (or professor, or whatever) and having to figure out what that means, when you are supposed to already have spent so many years coming to know.
I am screening a rough-cut of my film on Monday!!!!
I am back in DC after a week in the Dominican Republic, and waiting to go pick Neil up at the airport!
I am feeling very grateful for family, friends and home.
It was amazing to work with Centro Bono and the amazing activists there. I asked them about how they do not tire of teaching people about rights that exist on paper but do not exist in practice. They responded that without knowledge of what your rights should be, you can never demand what should be yours to begin with. At one point in our meeting the group leader saw that we were lacking energy so he just sprung up and started singing and doing a dance. Then somehow, we all ended up dancing around the conference table. They really have amazing energy and vision.
What a wonderful experience working with this group!
The reason I am feeling so grateful for home and family is on the last day of our trip we visited the Casa Rosada, which is an orphanage for kids with HIV.
The Casa Rosada, or Pink House, is an run by Nuns. They have about 50 children ranging in age from a few months old to early teens that the Nuns house, feed, clothe, teach, and provide medical care to. The work the nuns do is amazing, and the children are very well cared for, but it made me so so sad and lonely for them to look at a tiny 3 month old baby and think that he would be there his whole life without a family. Many families in the DR cannot afford medication or care for HIV positive children so they are abandoned in the hospital.
This experience left me feeling very sad, and very appreciative that I have a family. It also left me feeling so much awe and appreciation for both the activists and lawyers at Centro Bono fighting for the rights of migrants, and for the sisters at the Casa Rosada that spend their lives caring for children that parents and society have abandoned.
True examples of charity & life.
Tuesday morning we got off to an early start and hopped into our van-taxi headed out to interviews in Consuelo, a Dominicans in a community a few hours away from the capital, about their issues receiving and using official documents because of their Haitian parents or grandparents.
The Dominican Republic changed their Constitution in 2010 to end Jus Solis (getting citizenship by being born in a place) and they have been retroactively taking the documents back of people who were born long before that law passed, and denying these Dominican citizens (with Haitian names or of Haitian descent) birth certificates, national IDs, passports, opportunity to attend high school and university, and many other benefits that come with an official state identity… even if they have long had documentation and have been in the Dominican Republic their entire lives.
Here’s a good place to read and learn more about this issue. Here is a podcast by Georgetown law on Dominican Statelessness. Think about how many things you need an ID to do. You can’t drive, go to college, use your credit card, get government documents or benefits, rent anything, start a bank account, work or do any of the hundreds of every day tasks that require having an official ID.
This is a photo of a birth certificate on woman I talked with showed me. The Registrar wrote on the back that her parents are undocumented Haitians. Why? No clue. There is no official procedure in place to do this. The Registrar just took it upon her/himself to add this. It gives some insight to the discriminatory nature of the registration process in the Dominican Republic. People of Haitian descent (or Dominicans with darker skin who may not even be Haitian) are singled out for poor treatment.
The people we met with are Dominican, and were born in the Dominican Republic, so they are also not able to get Haitian citizenship. To get Haitian citizenship, they would have to travel back to Haiti within 2 years of being born and apply for a birth certificate there. Aside from being undesirable, since they are Dominicans, it is impossible for many of these families to travel and they risk leaving family members behind.
This situation illustrates the definition of the unfortunate term “stateless.” These Dominicans of Haitians descent have no nationality. Officially speaking, they are neither Dominican nor Haitian. We are cooperating with a local NGO, Reconoci.do, to document some cases and abuses these “stateless” people have experienced.
Unfortunately this scene repeated itself about 7 times on the way to do our interviews:
The “taxi” was overheating because there was some kind of terrible leak and fluid was basically gushing out of the car. At several points along the journey the driver would pour fluid in and breathe into the car as if he was giving it mouth-to-mouth. However, the vehicular CPR was to no avail, and we had to call another taxi to come pick us up.
When we finally arrived in the neighborhood and to the church where we conducted the interviews, we were almost 2 hours late.
Many people had been waiting several hours for us to come. I was a bit frazzled from the harrowing taxi journey. There were about 25 people waiting to be interviewed. We tried to make a quick game-plan as a group. In what seemed to be a series of unfortunate events I was somehow left alone with another student who does not speak Spanish to interview this group while the rest of the law students took off for another town.
So:
I busted out my laptop & gave a group interview the best shot I could. At certain points I was asking group questions like, “Raise your hand if you have one parent who is Dominican.” It was very loosely organized chaos, but they all wanted their stories to be heard and they had a lot of patience with me. I got the names and basic information of everyone and tried my best to get important data on them all. They were amazingly kind and forgiving of the slow process.
After we finished at the church, a few of the girls took me to their house for lunch. Their hospitality was so generous and I was grateful for the rest and a meal! Unfortunately I have the bladder of a two-year old child and have to pee about every 15 minutes. Their bathroom is a space in the back where squat and pee on the bare ground. Also quite unfortunate was my lack of cultural competency in this area. Despite my best efforts I ended up splashing my feet twice. They must have thought I was quite inept.
I was totally exhausted by the end of the day. This International Human Rights fieldwork is harder than you think! Or maybe you already think it’s hard. In which case you are right as (afternoon Dominican) rain.
Today we went back to the same community, but I recruited several more people to help with the interviews there and things went much more smoothly and was slightly less chaotic.
After finishing in Consuelo, we went out to a Batey, which is a small community for plantation workers. Here is a photoblog about the Bateys and some of the people affected by discriminatory application of the laws here.
There we were able to interview more people. We were able to talk to some people with very compelling stories. Traditionally, people of Haitian descent work on the plantations (as the Dominican government encourages them to come work the fields with temporary work cards), and these are some of the areas most directly hit by “statelessness.”
After we finished the interviews all of the kids wanted to play games on my laptop. Unfortunately I am the most boring laptop of user of all time & I don’t even know if there are any games on my laptop. If there are I don’t know how to access them. LUCKILY I found this children’s book I had downloaded to my computer that a friend of a friend wrote and illustrated. AshMae saved the day! They read it over & over and loved screaming out the names of each animal as it came up on the screen.
After we had several go-rounds with “A Bunch of Friendly Animals” I busted out Photobooth. This was a genius move, if I do say so myself, and they were entertained for a good solid 45 minutes. The universal appeal of ridiculous pictures was made manifest.
This Bad Romance parody pay homage to Alice Paul who played a huge role in gaining women the vote & is, in my opinion, the most distinguished and amazing person ever to graduate from my law school! SO many reasons to love this video. God bless the internet and people with lots of creativity & time on their hands!
I am a student attorney in the International Human Rights Clinic. I represented a woman in an asylum hearing (like a trial, but before an immigration judge) in January and we won! Asylum is something that an immigrant can apply for if they have a well-founded fear or persecution if they return to their own country. If they are granted asylum, they can stay in the U.S. and live safely here.
I didn’t say anything about my case in January because I wasn’t sure what was confidential or not. However, I just noticed on my school’s website that my Clinic professor made a video and talks a lot about our case. So, I’ll let him explain it to you:
I have not posted yet about my secret life as an event planner. Yes, it’s true, I love event planning. And, I’m pretty good at it, if I do say so myself.
On Feb. 13 I planned an event called “Americans Who Tell the Truth: Ethics, Integrity and the Law.”
We had 10 portraits by the Artist Robert Shetterly and several of the portraitees came to speak, include my man Ralph! The portraits are amazing, and even more beautiful in person.
Ralph Nader, Jennifer Harbury, Tom Drake, Jesselyn Radack, Robert Shetterly, Jane Mayer.
The keynote speaker was Ralph Nader.
Luckily, the entire event is online here (including me giving an intro with lots of “ums”!) in case you missed it. Nader’s keynote was amazing. He talked about “staying in the truth-telling zone.” At 78 he’s still got it!
The best part was the ice-cream bar reception after the event. Apparently Nader is an ice cream enthusiast, so I got to eat three bowls of ice cream with Ralph Nader.
Here’s the awkward photo to prove it:
We had an amazing whistleblowers panel with Thomas Drake, Jesselyn Radack & Bunny Greenhouse.
Jesselyn Radack has a new book out, TRAITOR: The Whistleblower and the “American Taliban.”
Jesselyn is a courageous and inspirational lady. Tom Drake said something that struck me. He talked about following your own personal constitution.
Jennifer Harbury is an international human rights attorney and has an amazing story of trying to fight to find her Guatemalan husband after he was disappeared by CIA-backed paramilitaries. I love the juxtaposition of the art and the person in this shot.
It really was quite a thrill to meet all of these heros in person and to learn from them. It was also a thrill to see these portraits in person. We had them up in the library for a week after the event & it was so sad when I had to pack them up and ship them back.
Well, I made it most of the week without any TV. I was pretty good about not wasting time watching online videos or movies. My only downfall really, was when Kate and I watch the Walking Dead on Sunday night. I figure it was OK since it was a few hours from the end of the week anyway. Now the interesting thing about this experiment is that after about 2 days of not watching TV I started having vivid crazy dreams. One was about being chased around my university campus by giant spiders and then trying to kill them by throwing bricks at them from the top of the Johnson Center (the main student center at GMU).
Bronze Giant Spider by Louis Bourgeois (Photo by Nathan Strange/AP)
Also, I think I slept a little bit better mostly because I would end up going to be earlier instead of staying up to watch an episode of John Stewart or something. All-in-all, I think this was a great experiment and Kate and I are going to try and incorporate less TV watching into our weekly routine. In fact, we are going to try and save all the episodes we would normally watch during the week for the weekend.
One more thing I have discovered through this process. I do not have the willpower to tackle a new lifestyle each week. I need a break between the weeks to rethink what I am doing an prepare. So, I am going to amend my initial plan and give myself a free week between each experiment week.
Day to Day, Media
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media, no tv, TV
This week I brought death row exoneree Juan Melendez to speak at my school.
His performance was amazing. He was a skilled storyteller and was able to tell the story of his time on death row with beauty and humor. It was a mix of performance and truth-telling.
Below is further info on Juan I gathered from various places. The sad part of his story is that he is not alone in spending long years on death row for a crime he did not commit. There have been 139 people exonerated from death row since 1973. That number, obviously, only represents the people who are able to collect enough evidence to reverse the previous findings of the judicial system.
His innocence highlights the problems of the death penalty, but I tend to side with Virginia Snow Stephen, daughter of Lorenzo Snow, who said, “If it is evil to kill in the heat of passion, is it not a double evil to kill by a supine community consent called law?” Death is not a punishment or a penalty. Death is an end. As Melendez said in his speech on Thursday, “you can always release an innocent man from prison, but you cannot release an innocent man from the grave.”
Juan is an internationally renowned speaker and human rights activist who spent a total of 17 years, eight months and one day on Florida’s death row for a crime he did not commit.
Juan was born in Brooklyn, NY, but was raised in Puerto Rico. At the age of 17 he returned to the United States mainland. He worked as a migrant farm worker until FBI agents arrested him in Pennsylvania at the age of 33. Juan was charged for the Florida murder of a man he had never met.
The crime in Juan’s case was particularly brutal. On September 13, 1983, the victim, Delbert Baker (a white man), was shot three times and his throat was slashed, leaving the crime scene drenched in blood.
Juan’s conviction rested on the testimony of two questionable witnesses–a police informant with an unsavory criminal record who also held a personal grudge against Juan and a co-defendant who was threatened with the electric chair but who ultimately received a sentence of two years probation after he testified against Juan at trial. On September 21, 1984, the Court sentenced Juan to death. Juan, who could not afford an attorney, was convicted and sentenced to death within a week even though there was no physical evidence against him. He was not fluent in English at the time of his trial, was not provided an interpreter, and thus did not even understand the proceedings against him.
In spite of the fact that Juan’s case was riddled with doubt right from the start, the Florida Supreme Court upheld his case three times on appeal.
It turns out that a month before Juan’s trial began, another man, Vernon James, had confessed to the murder of Delbert Baker. A tape-recorded confession was made in the presence of the police investigator in Juan’s case. Had it not been for the fortuitous discovery of the transcript of the taped confession of the real killer sixteen years after Juan was sentenced to death, he almost certainly would have been executed. Ultimately, it came to light that the real killer had not only done a taped confession, but had confessed to over sixteen people, some of whom they were able to locate, and the prosecutor had systematically withheld this exculpatory evidence.
In light of the new evidence, Justice Barbara Fleischer determined that Melendez was entitled to a new trial. In turn, the state of Florida declined to prosecute a second time since the key witness at the original trial was now dead and another witness for the prosecution had since recanted his testimony.
Juan was released from prison on January 3, 2002, making him the 99th Death Row inmate in the United States to be exonerated and released from prison since 1973. Upon release he received a pair of pants, a shirt and $100 compensation from the state. He has not received any further compensation, nor an official apology from the state of Florida. He was 33 when he was convicted and sent to death row and almost 51 when he was set free.
Since his release Juan has testified before various legislative bodies in New Hampshire, New Jersey, Maryland, New York and New Mexico. He was intensively involved in the in the repeal campaign in New Mexico, where he now lives. He had two face-to-face meetings with Governor Bill Richardson who cited wrongful death penalty convictions as his primary reason for repealing the death penalty in New Mexico. Juan is a member of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty and the Journey of Hope . . . from violence to Healing.
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