Giving to Angels

This post is a departure from my usual photo-heavy storytelling. It's about donating to causes near and dear. I've at long last, after many years, sorted my priorities, both for financial donations and for volunteer work.

I am not congratulating myself for giving money to charity, but only dipping into my guilt in public. You know, the guilt about being white and comfortable in a developed country with clean water flowing from hoses and taps in car washes and kitchen sinks. And toilets.  And retirement funds flowing into bank accounts. Do you know how rare that is in the wide wide world?

And supermarkets. Let's not even go there. We have so much food. So much water. So much, so much. Even our poor, even our homeless, don't worry about water, and if they want food, they can get it. I'm not saying homeless and poor people in the USA aren't miserable. I'm saying that they aren't skeletal, they aren't dying from starvation, and their children can get medical care.

We have myriad problems: hunger, homelessness, inadequate care for mentally ill, dread diseases, ignored veterans, abused animals, environmental causes, I could go on and on. I've chosen to focus my charitable attention on families—women, mostly, and their children—who are terrorized by a domestic partner and who have endured rape.

TERRORIZE is the correct word.

I interviewed a woman (I live in rural southern Oregon) referred to me by the local Women's Crisis Support Team, for an online newsletter I write for "friends" of this organization. We're talking grassroots here, no big budget, struggling to meet payroll, no PR firm, nothing but passionate people, men included, employees and volunteers, who work their asses off to prevent domestic violence and sexual assault. Many of the advocates who work directly with victims suffer post traumatic stress syndrome by association. And in truth, many of them have been victims, leading to firsthand knowledge they'd rather not possess.

In this case, a woman who had been rescued from almost-certain death by this organization 14 years ago, happened to run into one of the advocates who delivered her from evil. She told me her story. I wrote it and asked her to review. She added volumes, then told me there are still things she can't bring herself to say. My guess is she's talking about endless rape and sexual degradation in addition to the terrors she describes. Read it and believe, then please support WCST or your local women's shelter. They save women and kids every single day.

The following is a lightly edited account of one woman's domestic abuse and how WCST came to her rescue. WCST's executive director assures me that as bad as the situation is, it is not unusual. "This happens more than we will ever know," says Krisanna. If you've not experienced domestic violence, or had personal contact with someone who has, you will not believe situations similar to this are happening in your neighborhood. One difference between now and the 1980s and 90s, when most of this occurred, is that law enforcement response is better now.

Sharon, in her own words...

What's so bad about November?

For starters, the sunflowers, once lords and ladies of the garden, are fallen, picked clean of seeds and crumbling to dust. A lone gold finch alighted for a final meal a few days ago as I prepared toppled giants for the "melt-down" pile, but alas, nary a seed remained. The bewildered bird flew off, probably looking for a finch soup kitchen. It was only a couple months ago that the sunflowers  were in their glory. How quickly glory fades, and light too, another of November's sorry lessons, within which one must search for hope.

For example, I started this post at 4:57 p.m. and it was almost dark.
But hello, that's a perfect rationale to start happy hour earlier! And also dinner. Ominous clouds fill part of the sky most days, whether it rains or not.
But that makes for dramatic lighting, which sends me scampering for even more photos, most of which are losers. But taking them (or making them, as current vernacular goes) satisfies my growing itch to capture moments before they go the way of sunflowers. Also on the cheery side of November, diminishing light primes deciduous tress to transform into sweeps of brilliant color, including those planted by PK in 1984 when we built our house, trees that now embrace with glowing arms our little Southern Oregon nest.

Some bad news this November: one friend was diagnosed with  cancer, and another is scheduled for throat surgery, relegating the  rhino virus currently mashing around in my head to its appropriate category: trifling. Then there's the same old, same old, having naught to do with November, but coincidentally, it came to my attention this month that:

1. Too many old people are sad, lonely, and bored.
2. Soldiers and civilians continue to suffer and die in wars that beggar justification.
3. Muslim fundamentalists hate you and me more deeply everyday just because of where we were born. 
4. Politicians dick around with national health care, and how does anybody believe that things will get better if insurance companies continue to rule?
5. Young girls still want to look like Barbie.
   

And then drilling down to the more serious muck:  I know that right now, not far away, some out-of-control parent is whaling—physically or emotionally—on his or her kid, or closing a  door and a heart on a screaming baby, or sexually abusing a child. Or a woman is being brutalized by her husband, boyfriend, or father. Or a miserable pet is chained outside in the rain. Or a homeless teen is selling sex for food. And the ugly images go on and on and on. If I let them.

That's why I, and most more-or-less healthy people, cultivate art, music, dance, gardening, nature, and sport too. To create a balance of beauty and vitality with evil and decay, to construct a reality separate from the gut-dragging underside of humanity. Even though I live in rural USA, the snarling sad face of the loveless is as prevalent in Southern Oregon as it is anywhere in the world. Rural America is not at all spared from home-based hometown brutality. It's all here, same as it ever was, although not exactly as the Talking Heads sang. It's more like a scene out of a David Lynch film or a Stephen King novel. Our pastoral landscapes and safe-looking streets and neat little homes (and a fair number of McMansions) can and do hide brutality, ignorance, and pain. Somebody has to do something, and somebody does.

But for now, it's not me. I've resigned, after nearly seven years, my position as a board member for the Womens Crisis Support Team, a still-passionate grassroots organization addressing local domestic violence. But I will soon follow my heart into  an organization such as CASA, which advocates in the legal system for child victims. I'm fortunate to do paid work for an affordable health care organization, La Clinica, in Jackson County, Oregon. One of its program is Healthy Start, Oregon's most effective child-abuse prevention program. Tragically its funding has been reduced, and more cuts are threatened, putting at least 50 local kids, mostly babies and toddlers of first-time ill-equipped and isolated young moms, at risk for abuse and neglect. This drives me crazy.
So I create my own reality with plants, food, flowers, friends and family making November not such a bad time, after all. Some images to back up my claim.