Catching Up

It's been over a month since I've posted anything on the blog. And over two months since I posted any of my own original content. Yeesh. That's embarrassing. I thought I would get my act together over the holidays when I wasn't so stressed about final exams and projects, but clearly that hasn't happened.

I have been quite busy over the past few months with school and work. The daycare kiddos have been hilarious, endearing, challenging, and everywhere in-between in that time (and always a cesspool of germs, as my good friend Meredith likes to say). Thursday of this week will by my last day at the YMCA Child Development Center and next week I will start at a faith-based daycare that I hope is a little more matched to my life's philosophies.

Last semester my big school projects focused on HPV vaccination attitudes and why young people do/don't get the vaccines series and about pre-/interconception care and its benefits (reproductive life plans people...everyone needs 'em!....Do you want kids? How many? How far spaced apart? If you don't want kids now/ever what are you doing to prevent conceiving? How is your general health? What is your current weight? Etc). This semester my big projects are mostly focused around rural hunger (we know quite a bit about what hunger/food insecurity "looks" like in urban areas, but much less about hunger/food insecurity in rural areas...such as most of Nebraska!). I have also been doing LOTS of learning and preparing for my trip to the UN's Commission on the Status of Women in two weeks!! Plenty more on that later. It's coming up so quickly and is so exciting and overwhelming. I really should journal or something because I'm an emotional roller coaster all day, e'reday about it right now.

Okay, now to things that I wanted to devote a whole blog to, but just don't have the time to anymore. These things were all the way back in...November. Nothing like a 3 months lag on blogpost writing (yikes). I was involved with both the First Lutheran's Hunger Conference and the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality (SSSS) conference...on the same weekend...in Omaha. Talk about switching gears! I legitimately would finish with one conference drive a few blocks and walk into the next one. Although tiring, they were so much fun!

Starting with SSSS. I, along with several others, presented a poster about challenges we experienced when moving our STI education/testing program from the adult jail to the youth detention facility. It was well-received by the other attendees at the conference (not to brag...but totally bragging! We are a very special organization that does this sort of work with an incarcerated population...they are often underserved in many areas of healthcare and I'm proud to be working with an organization trying to lift up that need). I went to several oral presentations about different topics having to do with sexuality education and research. Some of the more interesting ones had to do with social media and how that is affecting the mental health of LGTBQIA persons (the Grindr effect: 1) "rejection protection" because the photo of the person you are scrolling past seems to be further/more disconnected from you...the rejection is never in person, 2) "kid in the candy store" phenomenon where there is a perception of an unlimited number of potential partners, 3) "shopping effect"..what's next? who will be better?, 4) "X-ing out/social blocking" where younger persons are having difficulty entering and leaving conversations in real-life because on the internet you can just "X" out of a conversation window without needing to know how to end a conversation formally, 5) "social scrolling" where people have low accountability and inauthenticity due to anonymity). Those were some very interesting considerations I would have never taken into account about how social media affects us. I also went to a very interesting discussion about gender creative children and the process of getting them into medical treatment if desired for transition. It was an extremely informative conference and lots of fun!

At the First Lutheran hunger conference, the conversation centered quite a bit about "helping, not hurting" with our efforts to reduce food insecurity and hunger in the US specifically. Dan Rift, the Director of ELCA's World Hunger and Disaster Response, rightly said that "Jesus was a foodie." While that got several chuckles (from those of us young enough to identify with what a "foodie" is), it hits the nail on the head. Jesus did directly confront bankers, churches, and politicians about why they were keeping the poor and hungry, poor and hungry. The conversation continued to some of the work that the ELCA does globally. And in some ways we do a heck of a lot better of a job internationally with hunger than we do here. Do you know why? Because globally we actually ask those that we are trying to "help" what it is they need. In the US we have this tendency to assume what people that are hungry need...it's food, right? (Not always...sometimes food, shelter, health insurance, etc can come first too). The following morning our keynote speaker was Robert Lupton, author of Toxic Charity. Although I'm not sure I can agree 100% with all of his conclusions, it's a good, quick read for anyone interested. Lupton's thesis basically works around looking at our unexamined practices of giving to charity in this nation. Instead of evaluating the charity outcomes by how many people were fed/clothed this month by this charity, look at the downstream effects, "Are the poor becoming less poor because of what we are doing?" His most impressive solution to the question he's asking is the FCS Urban Ministries in Atlanta. Basically they revitalize neglected neighborhoods by doing a community needs assessment and finding areas of health to restore. They do this by using the core values of dignity, empowering and neighboring. He has found that mixed income housing areas really work and provide natural avenues for leadership and lifting poverty-stricken areas out of poverty. It's an interesting theory for sure. There was lots of push-back of his ideas so the conversations continued there. The thoughts still run through my head very frequently...I try to be a responsible giver when I can instead of just throwing money at an issue without knowing if what I'm throwing money at is even something that can be effected by money being thrown.

Well that's probably enough for one post. I have a few more posts planned, but for now I've at least caught up from the happenings of 2014. No promises about when I will finally get back with the next post though :)