A Recap of Christmas in Pictures

I haven’t blogged in about a week. It wasn't intentional, but we had been staying at my parents' house and they are temporarily without internet. Here is a recap of my Christmas season:

Matt and I at an ugly Christmas sweater party:
My best friend and now roommate Charlotte and I at the ugly sweater party:
Our beautiful and creative neighbor/property-mate Paige, asked our church community to dress up as different characters in the Christmas nativity scene for our meeting before Christmas. I wasn't really too keen on the idea, but it ended up being fun, and how do you say no to this seven year old who asks you to dress up as one of the three wise men? You don't. Paige was Mary:
Me as a king bringing dark chocolate wrapped in gold foil to the baby Jesus:
Acting it out as the Bible story was being read:
The three sheep Charlotte, Emily, and Maria:
Here is the angel Galilea and shepherd Dan. This is one of the kids that makes me want to have babies one day:
Anyone who knows me well, knows that my craft skills are extremely limited. However, I am a fan of homemade gifts, so I tried my best to be as creative as I could. Here is an herb garden we planted for Matt's parents consisting of rosemary, basil, oregano, and cilantro:
Here are keychains I made for my parents:
Here is a necklace I made for my sister-in-law:
Lastly, we had some fun and enriching family time. Here is my brother Travis, Grammy, and me:
Here are some of my little cousins that are incredibly cute. They also make me think I should have babies one day:

I hope you had a wonderful Christmas as well. Now we are in Mammoth with Matt's family!

An Old Post that Never Made the Blog (but has a lot of good information to offer on human rights)

On September 24, the former UN High Commissioner on Human Rights, Louise Arbour, came to the Institute for Peace and Justice. She gave a lecture in the evening, and during the day the School of Peace Studies students got a chance to meet with her. The following are some highlights of things she said.

Spoken from the mouth of one who knows a lot about these things:
• Human rights protection is “best achieved closest to home.”
• In December, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights will be 60 years old.
It is broken into two covenants:
1) The Covenant for Political and Civil Rights
2) The Covenant for Economic, Cultural, and Social Rights
(The United States has signed the first one but not the second.)
• The problem is that Western democracies favor political rights but not economic rights. This serves as a “pretext for developing countries to denounce human rights as a Western idea.”
• For example, when she traveled to Sri Lanka, she saw a sign that said, “Arbour, keep your neo-colonial hands off Sri Lanka.”
• The most significant deficiency in the area of human rights has been the United States violation of them in its actions like with the use of torture.
• Guantanamo Bay is an example of the U.S. creating double standards in the area of human rights, which other countries view as a lack of moral standards in the U.S.
• The current economic crisis in the United States may change America’s hostility toward recognizing economic rights as human rights. This would be good because this hostility is costly politically.
• The United States has a bad record when it comes to signing human rights treaties. For example, they have not signed the Convention on the Rights of a Child.
• No Western countries have signed the Convention on the Rights of Migrant Workers, which other countries view as a lack of emphasis on economic rights.
• How can the U.S. expect developing countries to sign and obey human rights treaties if they are unwilling to do so themselves?
• The United States needs to rejoin the international community.
• If one of the United States’ goals is security, they need to embrace rights as a way to achieve and maintain this security. This is the way to a more secure world, because without doing this, other countries develop negative views of the United States, and that leads to insecurity.

This lecture was a part of the Women PeaceMakers Conference, which was one of my favorite events I got to be a part of this semester. Here is a picture of me with women from all over the world working for peace (I am second from the right in a white shirt).

Figuring Out What I am going to do for the Rest of my Life

Note to reader: This post is disjointed, which I guess it should be, because who really has coherent thoughts about what the rest of life will hold?

As previously posted, I have my three-week break from school to figure out what I am going to do with my life post-master’s degree. This is a big goal for a time span of three weeks, but it is the only time I will have off until the end of August, so I have to at least begin thinking about something.

I figured that a good starting place would be to review my life goals list. Yes, I do have one (this blog is getting nerdier by the day). One of my great personal flaws is that I often live in the future. I am a very goal-oriented person who enjoys setting goals and accomplishing them. However, while I am often thinking about the future, I do still greatly enjoy the present, which is actually one of the problems I am encountering. I don’t want to finish my master’s degree. I really do like it so much that I just want to keep going to school.

Regarding the future, lately I have felt this pulling in two directions. One direction is the path of a career, which may require me to move, leaving friends, family, and a better church community than I could have ever hoped for. The other is the path of being a mom (don’t get your hopes up, because that still will not be happening for some time unless through an act of God). I am a firm believer that women can have thriving careers and be wonderful mothers, but I just don’t know if I have the energy to be both at the same time. I remember when I was teaching high school, thinking, how can any woman who has children do a good job at teaching and at being a mom?

In summary, I feel at a crossroad:
Do I want to pursue a career in peacebuilding (which could mean looking for jobs all over the country or living abroad for a year or looking into Ph.D. programs)?
OR
Do I want to pursue settling down in San Diego with the eventual goal of being a mom?

I do believe that a person can accomplish all of her life goals in one life. I am sure that I can somehow have a career and children. But what type of career will that be? Do I want to stay put or follow the wanderlust that is always present within me?

Today I Took Myself on a Date for Christmas

Matt and I don’t ever really exchange Christmas presents. I guess one year we each bought a bike for Christmas, but we got them in November. It’s not that we don’t love each other, it’s just that we don’t really need anything new. Instead, we usually spend some money to go on a nice date together, which ends up being more fun for us than shopping, so it works out well. Plus, Matt and I try to live on as small of a budget as possible and save whatever money we can to travel. So if you are wondering why we both look ugly most of the time, it is because we don’t often spend money to get our hair done, or on new clothes, or nice makeup. We would rather travel to Third World countries and get strange diseases there. Weird, huh.

Anyway, since I am not really getting a Christmas present from Matt or my parents or my parents-in-law, I thought I would take myself out on a date to celebrate the holidays and the end of the semester. Today seemed like a perfect day for it, because it is pouring, and I LOVE the rain. So I put on a warm sweater and a scarf (a must for a great date with yourself), and headed out. First stop, coffee shop. I splurged to get my favorite beverage and spent time writing and reflecting. (I have my three week break from school to figure out what I am going to do with the rest of my life, so that means a lot of introspective writing and thinking.) Then I headed over to my favorite, cheap sushi place to eat my favorite food. Yes, I was “Brooke, party of one.” But when you are on a date with yourself, what choice do you have? Then, it was off to home where I watched one of my favorite Christmas movies, Love Actually. And I did all of that with a smile on my face and without an umbrella (mine is somewhere in New Zealand). All in all, a successful date… except for I didn’t get lucky at the end.

If you are still reading this post, I commend you. And if you still want to be my friend after you read it, I commend you even more.

My Brain is Mush…

Which is okay, because I just finished my first semester of grad school!

I just emailed my last paper to my professor, and to be honest, I have mixed emotions about being finished with semester one. I have really enjoyed my professors and my classes, and am a little sad they are done. And I will miss my classmates for the next three weeks. I am just the type of person who loves school and gets a little nostalgic about it.

But, I also have a deep sense of accomplishment with the completion of the semester that is very fulfilling, and you will soon see why:

The count is in for semester one:
The number of pages I wrote: 129
The number of pages I read for classes: 2,443 (There was more than this assigned.)
The number of pages I read to write research papers: Way too many to keep track of
The number of times I was sick: 2
The number of emotional breakdowns I had: 1 (I don’t think I had any emotions left by the end of the semester; hence, the small number here.)

More on Gay Marriage

Just when you thought I was finally done writing about homosexuality, I am back with more! It's not my fault, it just keeps coming up. These are both good, and I highly recommend you take a little time to partake.

The cover story of Newsweek currently is on gay marriage. I think it is a fabulously written piece that sums up much of what I believe about the topic. It is a bit lengthy, but well worth it:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/172653/page/1

In addition, last night on the Daily Show, Jon Stewart's guest was Mike Huckabee, and they discussed gay marriage at length, which is the topic of this clip. Huckabee opposes gay marriage, and Stewart is trying to understand his position. Another piece that is interesting and well worth your time.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Mike Huckabee Pt. 2

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

I look forward to hearing your thoughts and comments about these!

Casa del Migrante Field Trip

Our cohort at University of San Diego

Earlier in the semester, our cohort went on a field trip with our religions professor to Tijuana, Mexico to visit Casa del Migrante. It is a home, founded by the Catholic Church, where migrant men can stay after being deported from the United States. They are allowed to stay at the house for a maximum of twelve days where they are provided with shelter, meals, and temporary work opportunities. We were able to eat dinner with the approximately 180 men staying there and hear some of their stories.

Casa del Migrante

I ate dinner across from two men named Fernando and Jorge. Fernando had been living in the United States for twenty-eight years working as an auto mechanic. He lived with his wife and two children, both of whom are in high school, in the Los Angeles area. Both of his children were born in the United States, and are therefore, U.S. citizens. Fernando was drinking alcohol in public, got caught by the police, and was then deported. He had never done anything wrong before that. Earlier in the decade, he was in the process of filing paperwork to become a legal resident, but then 9/11 happened, and the process was halted. Fernando missed his wife and children very much, and with no family in Mexico, he knew that his only option was to cross the border to get back to his family. He wasn’t sure how he would cross, because he didn’t have the money to pay a coyote, but he knew in his heart that somehow he had to get back to his family, even though he was very scared about the journey back to them.

Jorge had been living in the United States for sixteen years and worked in construction. One day, ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) came to his work place, gathered up anyone who was undocumented, and deported them. He had no family in Mexico or the United States, but had some friends in the U.S. He said there was nothing for him in Mexico and he was planning on crossing the border the night after we ate with him. He didn’t have any money to pay a coyote to help him cross, but he said he had nothing to fear but God.

I don’t know the fate of these two men, because I was only able to have a momentary encounter with them. Almost all of the people my classmates and I spoke with that night were planning on crossing the border again, either because they had family on the other side or knew there were jobs to be filled. Because of this, they were willing to risk their lives to get back.

Sunset in Tijuana

Economic Recession: Human Capital vs. Financial Capital

Robert Reich, UC Berkeley Professor of Policy and former Secretary of Labor, read a great piece he authored yesterday on NPR. Read it on his blog under December 3.

In summary, he said that while the government is working to back up our country’s financial capital, our human capital is being neglected. The federal government is ensuring that financial institutions, banks, and car companies are being funded, but where is the bailout for schools, which as a whole are losing money? Teachers are being laid off, after school programs cancelled, class sizes increased, “non-essential” classes cut, and college tuition fees raised.

I whole-heartedly agree with Reich. Currently, I am on my lunch break from substitute teaching at Escondido High School. In the first class I taught, out of 33 students, 11 turned in their homework, and out of those 11, only 4 had it completed. It caused me to wonder, based on Reich’s words: Are our youth failing in school or is our school system failing our youth? Should a group of 16 year olds be expected to care about education when the government time and time again has failed to see it as a high priority?

The government speaks of these financial bailouts as if time is of the essence. So too should it be with our schools. The negative ramifications of a poor education are not easily reversed. Money isn’t everything, but as a former teacher, I can say that it does help a lot. In these increasingly challenging times, there is hope for our world, but it lies within our children, not within the banks.