Category: Best of The Human Rights Warrior

The Lessons of 22 July

On By Jennifer PrestholdtIn Best of The Human Rights Warrior, Global Events, Justice, Parenting2 Comments
My daughter in Norway in August 2010.
For many in Norway, the terrorist attacks on July 22, 2011 represent the loss of innocence.

On the morning of July 22 last year, I read the breaking news of a car bomb attack in Oslo, Norway.  I clicked on the link to the NRK live coverage, forgetting that my three children rise and swarm, like mosquitoes from tall grass at dusk, at the slightest potentiality of a video.

“WHAT IS HAPPENING?” yelled my then-9-year-old son.

“It looks like a car bomb exploded in downtown Oslo.”

Gasps all around. We had been in downtown Oslo less than a year before.   We had been in that part of town and I think we may even have walked down the street where the explosion damaged several government buildings.

Damage to government building on July 22, 2011

Image Source

“WAS ANYONE WE KNOW HURT?” screamed my then 6-year old daughter.

“I don’t know yet,” I replied.  “Let me listen to what they are saying about it.”

I was trying to remain calm; I was struggling with a decision. As a parent, you have to make a choice about what horrific events you introduce to your children.  And you have to decide – often on the spot – how to talk to them about tragedy and violence.  You have to find the words to explain the evil that exists in the world while you simultaneously reassure them that,  for the most part, they are safe.  Obviously, this is not easy and there is no manual.  But it is part of your job as a parent to help them make sense of life as a human on this planet.

“IT’S LIKE NORWAY’S 9/11!” blurted out my then-nearly-12-year-old son.

Presciently, in hindsight.  It was that statement that decided me, that hardened my resolve.  You see, like everyone else, I have a story to tell about 9/11.  That’s a story for another day, but, suffice it to say, it committed me to engaging my children in a year-long discussion about the tragic events of July 22, 2011.

The Norwegian media were cautiously talking about how preliminary evidence indicated a terrorist attack.   So we had a fruitful discussion (or at least what passes for a “fruitful discussion” when your kids are 6, 9 and 11) about 9/11 and the impact of those events on America. My children do not remember our country before 9/11.  It was good to talk to them about the need for security, as well as the need to balance security with the protection of individual rights, including discrimination based on race and religion.  They were engaged.  They asked questions.  Then, with the  request to be kept informed of the emerging news of the Oslo bombing, they went on their way to do whatever it is that 6, 9 and 11 year old boys and girls do on a bright summer day.

But as the day went on, the news from Norway got dramatically worse.  Eight people were killed and nearly two-thirds of the 300+ people in the government buildings were injured (and had it not been 3:30 pm on a Friday in the holiday month of July, there would certainly have been many more casualties).  But the car bomb in Oslo was merely a distraction.  Less than two hours later, right-wing extremist Anders Behring Brevik, dressed as a police officer in a fake uniform that he bought on the Internet, took the ferry to the island of Utøya in nearby Buskerud.  There he killed 69 people – mostly under the age of 18 – at an summer camp for politically active young people in the AUF (Arbeidernes Ungdomsfylking), which is affiliated with Norway’s Arbeiderparti (Labor Party).

AUF describes itself as “Norway’s largest political party youth organization and champion for a more just world (“AUF er Norges største partipolitiske ungdomsorganisasjon og kjemper for en mer rettferdig verden”).  Anders Behring Breivik carried out the massacre in cold blood, coming back to shoot again those who were lying injured, shooting kids in the water as they tried to swim to safety.  He later claimed that he was trying to save Norway from Muslims world by attacking Social Democrats, Norwegian immigration policies and the concept of multi-culturalism.

This photo of participants at the AUF summer camp on Utøya was taken July 21, 2011, the day before the massacre.

Image source: AUF

It was one thing to talk to my kids about car bombs and 9/11.  It was something else entirely to talk to them about Utøya. I  didn’t tell my kids right away about the massacre.  I waited a few hours, sifting through the emerging stories of horror until the basic narrative was clear.  When I did tell them, what they most wanted to know was:

“WHY?”

I said something about hatred, but there was really nothing I could say by way of explanation.  Far too many  lost their lives on July 22, 2011. And Anders Behring Breivik’s hateful, violent acts stole not just the future of scores of young people, but also the innocence of a peaceful nation.  Just as we demarcate contemporary US history as pre- and post-9/11, so for Norway is tjueandre juli (22 July).

Luckily for me as a parent, stories began quickly emerging about what happened on Utøya. Amazing stories of luck and bravery. Young people not much older than my own children who showed great presence of mind in an unthinkable situation.  Leadership and sacrifice.  These are stories – and there are many – that deserve more space than I have to give here.  But we followed these stories in the days and months following 22 July.  They gave us hope. They showed us that ordinary people – most of them still kids – could do extraordinary things.

There is much in our interactions with the world that we cannot control. We can control, however, how we act; how we REact to events and actions by others.  This is a lesson I strive to teach my children.  I don’t always provide a good role model, but Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg certainly did. I’ve been reading the speeches of Jens Stoltenberg this summer.  From the beginning, he encouraged Norwegians not to give way to fear and hate and prejudice. He urged Norwegians to react to the attacks of 22 July by being MORE welcoming to the outsider, to the foreigner. Invite him in for cake and coffee, the Prime Minister suggested.  Invite her to take a walk. Get to know one another.

When local elections were held in September 2011, fear was not used as a campaign tactic in Norway.  I showed my kids the AUF campaign materials which said, “This summer, our democracy was attacked.  The terrorist chose cowardice and ruthless violence over argument and political debate.  Our answer is not more violence, but more democracy.”

“Our answer is MORE democracy – Vote Now!”

Image Source

I’ve heard people say that Norway’s response to July 22 was simplistic.  Idealistic. Naive. Maybe it wouldn’t work in other countries.  But if you doubt that words matter, let me tell you what happened after the trial of Anders Behring Breivik began on April 16, 2012.  Breivik had testified that a particular song, Barn av regnbuen (Children of the Rainbow) by well-loved Norwegian folk singer  Lillebjørn Nilsen, with its concept of living together in a multicultural Norway, was brainwashing children into supporting immigrants.  This is a song that Mr. Breivik, apparently, detests.

So, shortly thereafter, in a chilly spring rain in a square near the courthouse in Oslo, a crowd of more than 40,000 people joined Mr. Nilsen in singing Barn av regnbuen.  Many more were singing the song at the same time in smaller communities around the country. Norwegians throughout the country sang it as a form of protest against hatred. They sang it so loud that it could be heard in the courtroom.

Once again, I clicked on a link to a video from Oslo.  Together, my children and I watched this video.

40,000 sang Barn av regnbuen

Folksinger Lillebjørn Nilsen and a crowd of 40,000 sing Barn av regnbuen (Children of the Rainbow) at the trial of Anders Behring Breivik in Oslo (Source: NRK)

This is a song that I learned many years ago.  It is actually a Pete Seeger song called My Rainbow Race, translated into Norwegian by Lillebjørn Nilsen.   I did a rough translation of the lyrics of Barn av regnbuen in a blog post in April. The song’s title comes from the verse:

Sammen skal vi leve
hver søster og hver bror.
Små barn av regnbuen
og en frodig jord.

Together we will live
every sister and every brother.
Small children of the rainbow
and a flourishing world.

One night last week, I heard my now-10-year-old son singing in his bed.  He was singing Barna av regnbuen.  He sang the whole song, the refrain and every last verse.  And then he sang it again.

There will be many tributes on July 22, 2012.  Remembrances and roses to honor the innocents who lost their lives one year ago, the survivors who will never be the same again.  Add to them this tribute,  from a kid in a bunkbed half a world away.  A kid who, hopefully, has learned something from the tragedy of 22 July.

A Beastie Boy’s Surprising Legacy

On By Jennifer PrestholdtIn Best of The Human Rights Warrior, Famous Activists, Human Rights, Memoir, Music, True Stories9 Comments

I had a bad feeling when Adam Yauch was a no-show for the Beastie Boys‘ induction into the Rock n’ Roll Hall o’ Fame in April. So, while I was not surprised, I was saddened to learn of his death from cancer at the age of 47.

The Beastie Boys were not my favorite band growing up. (That would be The Police.) They had an impact on my generation (X), however, that is worth acknowledging. Only a few years older than me, the Beasties burst onto the national scene when I was still in high school. As girl from the suburbs of a small Southern city, whose first album was REO Speedwagon’s Hi Infidelity  and first concert was the J. Geils Band (with Hall & Oates!), I found the Beastie Boys to be something of a breath of fresh air.  For me, they symbolized New York and the urban, East Coast, post-racial America that I had yet to experience.

I did see the Beastie Boys once, when they toured with Madonna in 1985 on the Virgin Tour, but that was purely by accident since I was going for Madonna and didn’t even know who was opening. Quite honestly, I couldn’t really tell Beastie Boys apart. They all had dark hair and, what with the VW gold chains and sunglasses and baseball caps and hats and all, they weren’t that distinguishable. They were named either “Mike” or “Adam”, so take your pick.  Sure, they had nicknames – “MCA” was Adam Yauch and “Ad-Rock” was Adam Horovitz – but unlike Sting and The Police, it didn’t really matter too much to me who was who in the Beastie Boys.

“Enough of this hip hop! Bring on the Material Girl!” That’s what I mostly remember thinking during their set.

License to Ill came out in 1986. I didn’t own it on cassette or LP but plenty of people at my college must have, because (You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party) was de rigueur for dorm room parties.  Along with UB40’s Red, Red Wine and Bon Jovi’s Livin’ on a Prayer, it was the soundtrack for my early college social life. I can still close my eyes and flashback through the entire MTV video, complete with the nerds saying, “We’ll invite all our friends and have soda and pie!” and “I hope no bad people come!” The Beasties’ exuberant “KICK IT!” still echoes in my head 25 years later.

Never what you would call a fan, I pretty much lost interest in the Beastie Boys after License to Ill.  Frankly, pulling stunts like having girls dancing around in cages at their concerts didn’t help much.

I came back to the Beasties in the mid-1990s. But not really because of their music.

Beastie Boy Adam Yauch (MCA a.k.a. Nathanial Hörnblowér) had become a human rights activist.  He started a non-profit called the Milarepa Fund in 1994 to support Tibetan independence from China.  Royalties from the Beastie Boys’ 1994 songs Shambala and Bodhisattva Vow (from the Ill Communication album) were dedicated to the Milarepa Fund and the fight for freedom for Tibet. They sponsored an information tent on Tibetan human rights at Lollapalooza and performed concerts to raise money for the cause.  In 1996, Yauch organized the Tibetan Freedom Concert.  The largest benefit concert in the US since 1985’s Live Aid, it attracted 100,000 people and raise more than $800,000.  Additional Tibetan Freedom Concerts were held on four continents in 1999.

It turns out that the Beastie Boys had principles and they were not afraid to use them.  Shortly after the bombings at US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Adam Yauch used his time at the microphone at the 1998 MTV Music Awards ceremony to talk about stereotyping Muslims as terrorists. “It’s kind of a rare opportunity that we get to speak to this many people at once,” he said. “So, if you guys will forgive me I just want to speak my mind for a while.”   He went on – prophetically, it seems now – to speak about the U.S. government’s military aggression in the Middle East and the growing climate of racism towards Muslims and Arabic people. “The United States has to start respecting people from the Middle East in order to find a solution to the problem that’s been building up over many years.

Another issue that the Beastie Boys took on directly was the rights of women.  They’ve been rapping against domestic violence (“Why you got to treat your girl like that?”) at least since Paul’s Boutique. When it was announced that Adam Yauch had died, my friends on Twitter lit up the night with lyrics like “I’m gonna say a little something that’s long overdue/The disrespect of women has got to be through/ To all our mothers and our sisters and our wives and friends/ I want to offer my love and respect to the end” (from Sure Shot).    Song For The Man was written after Adam Horovitz observed the overt sexism – and blatant harassment of a woman – by a couple of guys on a train. If more men spoke out like the Beasties, the world would be a better place.

At the 1999 MTV Video Music Awards, when the Beastie Boys won the award for Best Hip Hop Video for Intergalactic, Adam Horovitz spoke about the problem of sexual assaults and rapes at Woodstock 99.  He made the pitch for bands and concert venues to provide more security to better protect women.

The Beastie Boys have continued their political activism into the 2000s. After the September 11, 2001 attacks, for example, they organized and headlined the New Yorkers Against Violence Concert in October 2001. The concert proceeds went to the New York Women’s Foundation Disaster Relief Fund and the New York Association for New Americans.

Adam Yauch with his daughter at Amnesty International's 5th Annual Media Spotlight Awards in New York in 2002

Adam Yauch with his daughter at an Amnesty International Event

Image Source

I’ve been thinking about the life of Adam Yauch, which ended far too soon, and have come to realize that the Beastie Boys not only helped define the formative experiences of my generation but they are also representative of many of the traits of Generation X. Wikipedia has this to say about us: “When compared with previous generations, Generation X represents a more heterogeneous generation, exhibiting great variety of diversity in such aspects as race, class, religion, ethnicity, and sexual orientation.” The Beasties, in freely crossing music boundaries between punk and hip hop and alternative, certainly are illustrative of this heterogeneity and diversity.

But I think that another of our generational traits is the ability to change. (I love this quote from Wikipedia:  “Change is more the rule for the people of Generation X than the exception.[citation needed]”)    The Beastie Boys were no different from many of us who were, in our youth, racist, sexist, and/or homophobic dorks. America was just a less tolerant place when we were growing up in the 70s and 80s. Not that that is an excuse for the many of us who stayed silent and went along with the crowd rather than speaking up for what was right.

Like the Beasties, however, most of us have grown up and figured out that our actions – and our inactions -have consequences.  As Adam Yauch once pointed out, “Every one of us affects the world constantly through our actions.”  To not take advantage of second chances would be a mistake.  Like Adam Yauch and the Beasties, we should take advantage of every opportunity to take action for good.

Most of the Gen Xers I know will, like the Beastie Boys, freely acknowledge our past immaturity, our arrogance and stupidity, and accept it without embarassment.  Most of us embrace change as the only way forward, even though it sometimes means also accepting criticism.  Adam Horovitz has a great quote that pretty much sums up this point:

“… (Y)ou might say that the Beastie Boy ‘Fight For Your Right to Party’ guy is a hypocrite. Well, maybe; but in this f***ed up world all you can hope for is change, and I’d rather be a hypocrite to you than a zombie forever.”

That’s a pretty good lesson for anyone, regardless of what generation you come from.

The other thing that I think that Adam Yauch and the Beasties symbolize for my generation is the ability to age with nimble good humor and some small modicum of coolness.  To acknowledge we are aging, to joke about it, but to still be self-confident enough to hang with the young ‘uns – this I see as a generational shift.  (Nothing, by the way, in the definition of Generation X on Wikipedia mentions this particular trait.)  Maybe this is just another aspect of our ability to change, but the first minute or so of this video of the Beasties playing POW and Shambala live will give you an idea of what I’m talking about:

I’m sorry that Adam Yauch, a.k.a.MCA, a.k.a. Nathaniel Hornblower, won’t be continuing this Gen X journey with the rest of us. I hope he knows that he left a legacy here on Earth that is bigger than his music. Wherever his soul resides now, I hope that Adam Yauch is still kickin’ it.

Talking To My Kids About Death

On By Jennifer PrestholdtIn Best of The Human Rights Warrior, Education, Family, Human Rights, Memoir, Parenting, True Stories6 Comments

Pet Graveyard

The recent demise of Fat Stanley was met with far fewer tears than that of Kevin Bacon (the gerbil) and definitely far less anguish than that of Tub-Tub, our first dearly departed rodent pet.  It did however, necessitate a discussion about death with my three children.   The easiest answer to the question “Where is Stanley now?” would have been to describe a dwarf hamster heaven, where Stanley roams freely among a vast surfeit of yogurt treats and well-oiled wheels.  While it was somewhat tempting to give them an easy and soothing answer, I can not  in good conscience pitch that pablum to my kids.  You see, in my line of work, I talk to people about death all the time.

As a human rights lawyer, my job is to document human rights abuses.   So there have been many days over the course of my career when I have asked  people to describe to me in very precise detail how someone they loved died.  In one week alone in 2007, I took statements from more than 45 Liberian refugees at Buduburam Refugee Settlement in Ghana for Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.  The very first person I interviewed at Buduburam was a teacher.  The teacher was wearing a pink polo shirt that was remarkably clean and crisp, given the hot, dusty conditions on the camp.  He had come into the Refugee Welfare Office, where we were piloting the interview process, to watch a football match on the TV.  When I asked if he wanted to give a statement, he said, “Sure.  Why not?”

It was late May and the equatorial sun had beat down relentlessly all day long.  As we went into one of the private offices to do the interview, however, a pleasantly cool late afternoon breeze was coming through the barred window.  I discovered later that the location of the camp was very close to the Prime Meridian, as well as  the notional center of the world – 0°, 0°.  The sun sets early and fast near the equator.  As we talked, the shafts of light from the setting sun were low and long, glinting off the gold in his round, wire-framed glasses.

I had an interview protocol to follow and certain biographical data to collect.  We talked about what he did in Liberia, where he had lived.  It was going well.  We established a rapport, buzzing through the facts of his life.  I’ve done many similar interviews with the survivors of human rights abuses. You know immediately when a question is going to cause someone to break down.  But the trigger questions are not always the obvious ones and usually you can only tell as you ask the question.  As you see the pain  in their eyes, the anguish in the lines of their mouth.   The moment I asked the teacher if he had ever been married, I knew.  I knew we would both soon be crying.

People who have experienced trauma and loss often think it is behind them, that they have put it in the past.  But of course, that is never really possible.  The teacher and his fiance were not yet married when the fighting came to Monrovia in July 1990.  When Charles Taylor’s NPFL rebels came to their neighborhood, they separated the men from the women. She talked back.  He yelled for her to hold her tongue, to just cooperate!  He didn’t know if she heard him.  The teacher had been herded into the back of a pick-up truck with other young men.  It was from that vantage point – above and unable to help – that he saw the rebel hit her with the butt of his rifle.  He knocked her to the ground, turned the gun around and shot her.  The whole thing happened fast, so fast.  Then the truck pulled away.

There was much more to his story.  He escaped the rebels eventually, made his way onto a leaky tanker with thousands of other refugees, made it to safety in Ghana.  Got a teaching job and lived in a refugee camp for 17 years.  But those parts of his story came later, after he had wiped the tears from his glasses.  After we took the time to honor the memory of his fiance.  To dedicate his statement to her, so that her story would not be lost among all the others in the terrible Liberian civil war.

As a parent, I know there is a natural impulse to try to shield our children from the sad and terrible details of both life and death.  I believe each parent has to make his or her own decision about what is best for their children, so I am not presuming to give advice.  I do believe in God and the potential of an afterlife, but I have no idea what actually happens after you die.  But I know that bad things – terrible things – happen all the time and, as my kids grow into their tweens and teens, I think I would be doing a disservice to them not to be honest about that.  And I am absolutely certain that, like the teacher, you carry your loved ones in your heart long after they leave this life.  The best thing you can do when you lose someone you love is to keep their memory close and honor them in whatever way you feel is right.

Sometime shortly after my third child was born, I gave up trying to be the perfect parent.  I made peace with the fact that the best I can do is try – try as hard as possible – to do my best.  I stopped obsessively reading parenting books and desperately seeking “expert” advice on how to do things like talk to my kids about serious issues like death.   I started following my own parenting guidestar.  For lack of a better way to put it, I started listening to my gut instincts.

So when my 9 year old son asked me to tell him a story from my work, I looked at him silently for a while as I listened to that little voice inside my head. It was telling  me that he was ready to hear the story of Victoria.

Victoria was the last refugee I interviewed at Buduburam on that trip in 2007.  She was a poised and intelligent young woman who rushed back to the camp from her classes at nursing school in Accra in order to give her statement.  We sat outside, away from the buildings on the edge of the camp, face to face with each other on white plastic chairs set on the hard-packed red dirt.  Victoria’s mother had died when she was young, so as a child in Liberia she had lived alone with her father.  Her story began later than the teacher’s; two civil wars raged in Liberia between 1989 and 2003.  She was only 8 or 9 – the same age as my son – when the fighting reached her house.

Her father told her to hide in the bushes by the side of the house while he went out to talk to the rebels.  She lay on her belly in the bushes, saw the rebels argue with her father.  She watched as they shot him in the head and he fell to the ground, unmoving.  The rebels went into the house and took food and anything of value.  But they didn’t find Victoria in her hiding place and eventually they lit the house on fire and left.   “I didn’t know what to do,” Victoria told me.  “My father never moved so I knew he was dead.  I just didn’t know what to do next.   So I stayed in the bushes, crying, near my father’s body all night.”   The next day, as the sun rose, she kissed her father goodbye and went to a neighbor’s house.  The neighbor brought Victoria with her to Ghana.

After Victoria told me her story and left for her home, I sat for a long time on that white plastic chair, on the edge of a refugee camp near the latitudinal and longitudinal center of the world.  A cool breeze stirred the sweat-damp hair on the back of my neck as the sun sank rapidly. The sunset was brilliant with colors – the muted pink of an impossibly crisp polo shirt, the bright orange of my small son’s hair, the deep purple of a bruise left by a rifle butt.

My son had listened to the story quietly.  I hadn’t been sure how he would react, so it was a surprise when he said.  “That was interesting.  I feel sorry for Victoria.  It is sad that all of that happened to her.  But she found a way to survive without her dad.  The neighbor and other people took care of her.  It kind of makes me less afraid of what would happen if you died.”

The kid makes good point.  One which I hadn’t thought of before I told him about Victoria.   Talking to my kids about death is also talking to them about life and how to live it.

So here’s to you, Fat Stanley.

And to you,  Kevin Bacon.


 

I honor your memory and the time you spent with us.

My Love Affair With Patrick Stewart

On By Jennifer PrestholdtIn Best of The Human Rights Warrior, Famous Activists, Human Rights, Memoir, Women's Rights6 Comments
“Our house was small, and when you grow up with domestic violence in a confined space you learn to gauge, very precisely, the temperature of situations. I knew exactly when the shouting was done and a hand was about to be raised – I also knew exactly when to insert a small body between the fist and her face, a skill no child should ever have to learn.”
-Patrick Stewart on The Legacy of Domestic Violence,
 The Guardian, 26 November, 2009
He had me at “Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.”  In my opinion, his Jean-Luc Picard is the only Star Trek captain worthy of helming the USS Enterprise;  Picard makes Kirk and the others look like a pack of braggarts, whiners, and wimps.  For more than 20 years, my love for Patrick Stewart has burned strong and bright, “the star to every wandering bark”.  A talented Shakespearean actor, Sir Patrick nails every role he plays, from Othello to Shylock to the Seattle Opera director with a crush on Frasier.  Then there’s his one-man version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.  I can’t think of another actor who I would want to see play 40+ characters.  And let’s not forget the lecherous caricature of himself that he played inExtras. Good gravy, that made my heart beat faster!
My love for Patrick Stewart is sexless, as chaste and pure as that of the heroine in a Victorian novel.  I feel for him what the young X-Men feel for Professor Charles Xavier – admiration, respect, passionate loyalty.   It’s a love, I know, not meant to be tested in real life.  Yet I can’t help myself.
I’ve never met Patrick Stewart.  I know almost nothing of his personal life beyond the fact that he choses to use his fame to support human rights. He’s been a long time supporter of Amnesty International in his native UK. I’ve written recommendation letters for students applying to the internship program he endowed at Amnesty.  (None of them ever got the Patrick Stewart Human Rights Scholarship, so I can’t even claim that two-degrees of separation.)
What really took me ’round the bend on Patrick Stewart was his decision five or six years ago to talk about his own experience with growing up with domestic violence.
“I experienced first-hand violence against my mother from an angry and unhappy man who was not able to control his emotions or his hands. Great harm was done by those events – and of course I mean the physical harm, the physical scars that were left, the blood that was spilled, the wounds that were exposed – but there were also other aspects of violence which have a lasting impact physiologically on family members.  It is so destructive and tainting. 
It’s taken me a long time to be able to speak about what happened.  Then, two years ago, around the time of the launch of the Amnesty International campaign to  Stop Violence Against Women all that changed. After consultation with my brothers, we all felt that it was time for me to speak out about what had happened in our childhood, and to show people that domestic violence is protected by other peoples’ silence.”
– Patrick Stewart, Turning the Tide,
Domestic violence is a worldwide epidemic.  It violates the fundamental human rights of women and often results in serious injury or death. Studies show that between one quarter and one half of all women in the world have been abused by intimate partners.  Certainly men experience domestic violence as well, but women are victims of violence in approximately 95% of cases of domestic violence. (For sources and more statistics, see StopVAW.org)
It took the human rights community far too long to recognize domestic violence and other gender-based rights as human rights abuses.  Because the violence is committed by private actors rather than the government in the context of family life, domestic violence was long considered to be a “private matter”.  Fortunately, the international human rights law has progressed and violence against women is now considered a  human rights abuse.  The government has a responsiblity to prevent violence against women from taking place and to prosecute or punish the perpetrators of the violence.  The UN Committee Against Torture has even clarified that violence against women, including domestic violence, can in certain circumstances be defined as torture under the Convention Against Torture.
Implementation of laws that protect women from domestic violence is, of course, the ongoing problem throughout the world.
It is never easy for survivors of human rights abuses to talk about the violence they experienced.  It comes at great personal expense and sometimes that expense is just too great for people to overcome.  There has been a lot of outrage recently about Rihanna and Chris Brown. I wish Rihanna would become an advocate against domestic violence  – photographed holding an Amnesty International placard – but I can’t judge her or the decisions she makes about her life. It does make me think, though, that it is doubly important for male celebrities like Patrick Stewart to use their fame as a platform to raise awareness about violence against women.
I defy you to watch this video and tell my love of Patrick Stewart is wrong.
What will it take to end domestic violence worldwide?  It will take more than Sir Patrick Stewart.  As he says in this Amnesty video, it will take sustained government action to ensure that domestic violence is treated as a public health issue rather than a private matter.  But Patrick Stewart’s decision to use his celebrity to speak out about the domestic violence experienced in his childhood home puts us one step farther along that road.
“Violence against women diminishes us all.  If you fail to raise your hand in protest, then you make yourself part of the problem.”   
– Patrick Stewart, Turning the Tide,
Amnesty Magazine, May/June 2006
Stop Violence Against Women.
Captain Picard says, “Make it so.”

Me and Rosa Parks on the Ellis Island Ferry

On By Jennifer PrestholdtIn Best of The Human Rights Warrior, Famous Activists, Human Rights, Memoir, True Stories3 Comments

My oldest son is studying the life of Rosa Parks in his 6th grade history class.  “I actually met Ms. Rosa Parks once,” I say.  He’s already halfway up the stairs, heading back to the sanctuary of his room. “Did I ever tell you about that?”  On the cusp of his teens, he has no interest in being trapped by a pontificating mother.  “Yes,” he replies.  He pauses, half-turned towards me, left leg on a higher step, poised for flight.  I see my opening and I take it.

***

In 1986, my grandfather Orville Prestholdt was recognized with an Ellis Island Medal of Honor for his contributions as a “Norwegian activist”.  I was a sophomore in college and I took a Metro North train down to New York to meet my grandparents the night before for the gala event.   The honorees were staying at a fancy hotel, one those midtown landmarks that is long on history but short on space in the guestrooms.  As I entered the lobby, I walked straight into the sonic boom of Lee Iaccoca (chair of the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, honorary medal recipient).  If I remember correctly, I next walked straight into the back of Donald Trump (Scottish-German).  Fortunately, “The Donald” was engaged in animated conversation with Mr. Iacocca and didn’t notice my faux pas.

Established in 1986 by the National Ethnic Coalition of Organizations, the Ellis Island Medals of Honor “pay tribute to the ancestry groups that comprise America’s unique cultural mosaic”.   Walter Cronkite (Dutch), Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (French-Irish), Joe DiMaggio (Italian) – the Ellis Island medalists were a veritable Who’s Who of American immigration.  Of course, this was back in the Reagan era when Americans still celebrated the fact that we are a nation of immigrants.   The 80 inaugural Ellis Island Award winners had been selected from more than 15,000 nominations following the controversy over the Medals of Liberty. Announced in the spring of 1986, the Medals of Liberty had honored 12 naturalized citizens, including  Bob Hope (English), I.M. Pei (Chinese), Irving Berlin (Russian) and Elie Wiesel (Romanian).   Numerous ethnic groups had objected that they were not represented among the winners of the Medals of Liberty, however, and had threatened protests during the “Liberty Weekend” (July 4, 1986) award festivities.  So the Ellis Island Medals were created more or less as a compromise.

That’s when they went looking for the lesser-knowns with more obscure national origins.  People  like my grandfather, who had changed his name from Olaf to Orville when he immigrated from Norway in order to “be more American”.  My grandfather had charted a successful political career in the Sons of Norway, from lodge president to International Board of Directors.  He got his Ellis Island Medal for his “contributions in preserving  Norwegian- American culture”.  Too late for “Liberty Weekend”, the Ellis Island awards were to be presented on the actual 100th anniversary of the dedication of the Statue of Liberty in late October of 1986.  That date fell on a Monday, but I figured it was worth skipping one day of classes to be a small part of history.

Having finally located my grandparents among the honorees at the reception, we headed to the elevator to go up to their room to drop off my bag and change for dinner.  Muhammad Ali (African-American) was in the elevator with some family members; they held the elevator door for us.  Mr. Ali tapped me on the shoulder and, when I turned, began performing a magic trick with a polka-dot silk scarf.  At the time, I didn’t know that he had Parkinson’s.  Or maybe I had heard he had Parkinson’s, but I didn’t really know what that meant.  In any event, I watched in horror as the man – who had been such an icon in the 70s when I was a kid – struggled, with trembling hands, to slowly stuff the scarf into a fake plastic thumb.  That’s how I found out how they do that disappearing scarf trick.  No kidding – Muhammad Ali!  The fake plastic thumb was several shades different from the color of his skin and looked dangerously close to falling off his real thumb, but he was focused like a laser on making that scarf disappear.  I remembered playing chase at recess on the playground at Magnolia Woods Elementary School.  The one who was  “it” would yell,  “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee! I am the mighty Muhammed Ali!”  As “The Greatest” slowly performed his magic trick for me, I watched the single, crystalline drop of drool that hung suspended from the corner of his mouth.   I thought for sure I was going to cry.

My grandfather handled the whole thing much better than I did.  Maybe he was just feeling pretty good after a couple of highballs and a chat with Victor Borge (Danish), but he clapped his hands when the scarf finally disappeared and chortled with glee. “Woo-hee-hoo-hoo!!!”  He may have danced a little jig in that elevator, too – he was that kind of guy. But I can’t be sure because I had gotten really good at ignoring him when he did that kind of thing in public.  At 19, I saw only the weaknesses, the frailties, the embarrassments of my elders in that elevator.  Now I see that I missed the courage, the determination, the encouragement, the shared joy in the accomplishment of a difficult task.

That night, as I lay in my narrow rollaway bed listening to my grandparents snore a few feet away from me, I thought about who I might meet the next day.  I hoped to see  John Denver (German) and Cesar Chavez (Mexican).  Maybe also Gregory Peck (English) and Andy Williams (Welsh).  Bob Hope was going to be there, too, as his wife Dolores (Irish-Italian) was receiving an award.  But the person I most wanted to meet was Ms. Rosa Parks (African-American).

Rosa Parks had been a larger than life figure for me growing up in the post-Jim Crow South.  The East Baton Rouge Parish school system underwent court-ordered desegregation when I was in high school, so I had some sense of the courage it must have taken her to do what she did.  I thought she was an American hero.

The awards ceremony was to take place on Ellis Island, so in the morning we were all bussed down to Battery Park and the chartered ferry.  Most people stayed up on deck for the short ferry ride, cameras at the ready to take photos of the Statue of Liberty.  About halfway through the ride, I went inside to look around.  And there she was!  A tiny, birdlike woman with large glasses sitting alone on a bench by the window.  In my mind’s eye, she is wearing a hat, coat and gloves but I can’t be sure I haven’t borrowed that memory from other images.  She sat prim and erect, her hands folded on her purse in her lap, looking straight ahead. It is exactly how I always pictured her on the bus. I walked over and asked, “Can I sit here?”  She looked up at me and nodded briefly and I sat down.  Then my courage failed me.  I couldn’t think of what to say next.  As we approached the Statue of Liberty, she turned for a better view out the window so, of course, I did, too.  “She’s smaller than she looks in pictures,” remarked Rosa Parks to me. Or maybe just to herself, but I smiled and nodded anyway.  Then we approached Ellis Island and her family came to collect her.  I went back up on deck to look for my grandparents.

***

“Maybe a famous person like Rosa Parks didn’t really want to talk to you.  You were a stranger,” my son speculates.

 “Maybe,” I say.  “But I wasn’t thinking about that. I was just sitting there, trying to think of what to say to her and how I was wasting my one chance to talk to her.  It was like I was frozen.  I never did say anything else to her, other than ‘Can I sit here’?”

“So what would you have wanted to ask her on the ferry?”  my son wonders.

“Well, I guess I would have asked what it was like to ride that bus.”

Twenty-five years later, I realize that Rosa Parks was probably asked some variation of that question nearly every day of her long and beautiful life.  She was probably asked it more times than she could count.  Asked and answered; you can google it.

“I don’t recall that I felt anything great about it,” Ms. Parks remembered in an interview with the Montgomery Advertiser. “It didn’t feel like a victory, actually. There still had to be a great deal to do.”

This conversation with my son made me realize that I didn’t need to ask her anything that one time I met her.  I didn’t waste my one chance to talk to Ms. Rosa Parks.  It was enough to be able  to sit quietly in her presence for a few minutes. An African-American and a Norwegian-American, sitting side by side on the ferry and gazing together at the Statue of Liberty.

The Importance of Educating Girls

On By Jennifer PrestholdtIn Best of The Human Rights Warrior, Education, Girls Rights, Human Rights4 Comments

 

Fifth grade class in Chuchoquesera, Peru

When I visited the classroom pictured above in the Peruvian highlands back in 2004, I noticed that slightly more than half of the students were girls. I remarked on this fact to the human rights activist who was giving us the tour of this Quechua-speaking indigenous community.  He smiled sadly and said,

“Yes, but this is fifth grade.  In sixth grade, children go to a lower secondary school that is farther away.  Most of the girls won’t go.  It takes too long to walk there and they are needed to help at home, so the parents won’t let them go.  Besides, most of them will be married soon.”

Unfortunately, this is a situation of gross inequality for girls that is repeated in communities throughout the world.

In the United States, where education is both compulsory and free, we often forget that the right to education is not meaningfully available in many parts of the world – especially for girls.  The UN estimates that there were more than 67 million primary school-age and 73 million lower secondary school-age children out of school worldwide in 2009.  In addition, an estimated 793 million adults lack basic literacy skills. The majority of them are women.

Since then, I have visited classrooms and asked questions about girls’ access to education in countries on several continents.  This is a photo I took at Buduburam Refugee Settlement in Ghana.

Kindergarten class, Buduburam Refugee Settlement, Ghana

Boys far outnumbered girls in this classroom, illustrating another of the problems for girls in accessing education.  When resources are scarce, parents will often choose to spend the money on school fees for their sons rather than their daughters.

There are many good reasons to ensure access to education for girls, however. Educating girls is one of the strongest ways to improve gender equality.  It is also one the best ways to promote economic growth and development.

“Investing in girls is smart,” says World Bank President, Robert Zoellick. “It is central to boosting development, breaking the cycle of intergenerational poverty, and allowing girls, and then women—50 percent of the world’s population—to lead better, fairer and more productive lives.”

Ensuring equal access to education for all girls by 2015 is part of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals, making this issue a major focus of work by the United Nations (for more info, check out the UN Girls’ Education Initiative site), the World Bank and many international non-governmental organizations.   October 11  has been designated as the International Day of the Girl Child to draw attention to the topic.
Nepal
On a much smaller scale, the Sankhu-Palubari Community School in Nepal is doing its part to encourage gender parity in education and  increase literacy rates.  The school works in partnership with The Advocates for Human Rights (the non-profit where I work) to prevent child labor and improve the lives and well-being of the neediest children in this community in the Kathmandu Valley. I travel there regularly to monitor progress at the school.
 cropped-spcs-program1.jpg
 For several years, the school has successfully met goals for gender parity among students in both the primary and lower secondary grades. For the 2011-2012 school year, 147 of the 283 students in pre-school through eighth grade are girls. Additionally, and perhaps more significantly, 15 of the 31 students in ninth and tenth grade are young women.
Pre-K student at Sankhu-Palubari Community School, Nepal

Most of the students’ families work in agriculture.  They are farmers with little or no money to spare on school fees, uniforms and supplies.   Many of them are from disadvantaged groups such as the Tamang and Newari.  Indigenous group with their own cultures and languages, the indigenous students must learn Nepali as well as English when they come to school.  Frequently, the adults in the family are illiterate.
 

 9th Grade students at SPCS

How has the teaching staff managed this success at keeping girls in school?  Since the school’s founding in 1999, the teachers have conducted outreach to parents and worked hard to encourage female students to attend and stay in school in spite of societal pressure to get married or enter domestic work. It took more than 10 years, but their efforts have paid off.  While girls worldwide generally are less likely to access, remain in, or achieve in school, 52% of the students in K-8th grades at the Sankhu-Palubari Community School this year are girls. And a girl is at the top of the class in most of the grades at SPCS.

The impact of the school both on the individual students and on the community over the past 12 years has been profound.  When I was there in March of 2011, we interviewed approximately 60% of the parents of SPCS students.  It was clear to me that parents value the education that their children are receiving and, seeing the value, have ensured that the younger siblings are also enrolled in school rather than put to work.  Twelve years ago, there were many students in the area out of school but now most are attending school. I could also see the physical benefits that the students derived from attending school when they stood next to their parents.  Even the 5th grade girls towered over their parents, illustrating the simple cause-and-effect of adequate nutrition, wellness checkups, and not having to work in the fields from a very young age.

The Sankhu-Palubari Community School may be a small school in a remote valley, but it is a place where the human right to education is alive and well, providing a better future for these children.  In particular, the effect that these girls have on their community, their country and – hopefully, the world – will be thrilling to watch.

 

This post was originally written for World Moms Blog.
Photo credit for photo to Dulce Foster

Why American Moms are Cheering for Licia Ronzulli

On By Jennifer PrestholdtIn Best of The Human Rights Warrior, Family, Gender, Global Events, Parenting, Women's Rights8 Comments

Photos of European Parliament Member Licia Ronzulli with her daughter keep popping up on my Facebook news feed and Pintrest.  My friends are mostly moms, so I speculate that they had an emotional reaction when they first saw the photo of MEP Ronszulli with her baby.  I know that I did.  I cheered and teared up a little, almost simultaneously.   Then I stopped and asked myself, “Why?”

The photo of Ms. Ronzulli at work with her baby is not a new – it was taken in September 2010.   While this photo caused a splash in Europe in 2010, it took  a while for it to catch on here.  That’s about right – as a country, the US is generally well behind Europe in terms of policies that support mothers.

Although she doesn’t bring her daughter to the European Parliament regularly, there are other photos of Ms. Ronzulli and the  now-toddler  Vittoria.  During a vote on the Eurozone debt crisis on February 15, 2012, reporters snapped several photos of Vittoria with her mom at the European Parliament.

The media coverage I have seen has focused on the cutesy (“awwwwwww”) or “hilarious” aspects of the photos.  That’s too bad. I think the media missed the opportunity to talk about WHY American moms like me are cheering for Ms. Ronzulli.

Here are a few reasons:

1)  Ms. Ronzulli’s employer, the European Parliament, has rules that allow women to take their baby with them to work.  Most American women do not have that option.
2)  The photos perfectly symbolize the work-family balance that all of us working moms struggle with every day.   The fact that, according to media reports, the photo of Ms. Ronzulli with her infant was taken during a vote on proposals to improve women’s employment rights makes it all the more poignant.
3)  Ms. Ronzulli is showing the world that childbirth does not automatically flip the offswitch on our female brains.  Women continue to be productive  employees even after they become mothers.  The Daily Mail, which ran the February 2012 photo in an article titled “Does my vote count, mummy?”,  describes the 36-year old Ronzulli as seeming “in complete control in spite of having her baby on her lap throughout.”  Why is this such a surprise?  I know that I, for one, have become better at multitasking and more efficient at doing my work since I had my first child.
4) In the 2010 photo, it appears that Ms. Ronzulli is choosing to keep her 7 week old infant with her as much as possible.  In my experience, that’s important for babies who are still so little.  Yet 6 weeks is the typical maternity leave in the U.S.  That doesn’t mean that it is paid leave, however. The U.S. is also one of only a handful of countries with no national law mandating paid time off for new parents.
5) Ms. Ronzulli was entitled to a parenting leave, but chose to take only 1 month of it.  She makes the point that it is about personal choice.  In 2010, she told The Guardian “It’s a very personal choice. A woman should be free to choose to come back after 48 hours. But if she wants to stay at home for six months, or a year, we should create the conditions to make that possible,” she said.   Amen, sister!
6) She looks GOOD!  I know I never looked that good 7 weeks after labor and delivery, but many of my friends very quickly looked like their pre-baby selves again.   I certainly didn’t look my best when I was the sleep-deprived parent of a toddler, but the world didn’t end.  Moms like a little reminder now and then that a having a baby doesn’t slam the door on our ability to look and feel good.  Sometimes it sure feels like that, but really it’s just a temporary setback.
7) Ms. Ronzulli probably didn’t have to nurse baby Vittoria sitting on a toilet in the ladies room.  That’s something I had to do at some point or other with all three of my babies here in America.

So thank you, Licia Ronzulli, for giving us American moms something to cheer for today and a reminder of what we need to continue to work towards tomorrow!

The Sharing Table

On By Jennifer PrestholdtIn Best of The Human Rights Warrior, Food, Human Rights, Memoir, Parenting, Recipes2 Comments

I first heard about “The Sharing Table” when my son came home from kindergarten and exclaimed, “No snack for me today!  I had three hot dogs – plus my home lunch.” I pictured the Oscar Wienermobile pulling up at his school, tossing hot dogs like Mardi Gras beads.  “Where did you get three hot dogs?” “The Sharing Table, of course.”

The concept is simple.  If there is something in your school lunch that you don’t like, you leave it on the table.  If there is something in the school lunch that you want more of, or – if you are like my children –  you would like to supplement to your home lunch, well, you can just help yourself.  I couldn’t find any official Minneapolis Public Schools food policy, so I quizzed the kids.

Me:  “So, how did you find out about The Sharing Table?”

  • Oldest son (age 12):  “Duh!  It is right next to the Allergy Aware Table. You can’t miss it.” (This one has a peanut allergy.)
  • Youngest son (age 9):  “I didn’t really know about it, but then I think the Lunchroom Teacher told us at some point. The Lunchroom Teacher is kind of mean. If you forget your lunch, you go to The Sharing Table.”
  • Daughter (age 6 1/2):  “It’s right there! Kids put their grapes there.  I like it when I can get the ‘mandrigan’ oranges.  Sometimes I take something and put it in my lunchbox for a snack later.”

All three agreed that the only real rules were that the items on the Sharing Table had to be from the school lunch, i.e. pre-packaged. Sometimes the pre-packaged school lunches bum me out.  When I was growing up in Louisiana, the lunches were not pre-packaged.  They were made in the cafeteria kitchen by large African-American women who always seemed to be stirring giant stainless steel pots and having a grand old time.  The East Baton Rouge Parish schools offered up jambalaya, shrimp creole, crawfish etouffee, cornbread, buttery rolls, yams, succotash, John Marzetti casserole, iced spice cake – for only 90 cents a lunch. My high school cafeteria had both a “hot lunch” side and a gumbo/salad bar/milkshake side.

Those East Baton Rouge Parish school lunches were some of the best in the world.  The melamine compartment lunch trays (which I recall as being pastel green, orange, yellow, and blue) came back to the kitchen clean as a whistle – except when greens were served.  Nobody  EVER touched the greens.  The greens remained on the trays in the perfect ice cream scooper-formed mounds in which they were served.   The rumor was that the greens were actually grass and, in fact, there was some circumstantial evidence to support the hypothesis.   Not only did they look exactly like grass, but I myself observed over years – at Magnolia Woods Elementary, at Wildwood Elementary, at Glasgow Middle Magnet – that greens were always on the menu THE DAY AFTER the janitors mowed.  At Baton Rouge Magnet High, where students came from all over the parish, we did an informal survey and discovered that this was happening in all the school cafeterias.  Harbinger of the locovore movement? Or just coincidence?  You be the judge.  All I know is that nobody EVER touched the greens.

One greens day when I was a sophomore in high school, I brought my lunch tray back to the kitchen.  My tray was clean, except for the greens.  On the conveyor belt, there was a long line of trays with ice cream scoop mounds of greens waiting to be dumped.  The cafeteria lady who was spraying down the trays looked me in the eye and said,

“Y’all is wasting perfectly good greens. Y’all must not know what it’s like not having enough to eat.”

Y’all, in case you don’t know, can be used both in the singular as well as the plural.  I understood exactly what she was saying that day – she meant both.  The only possible response to this was, “Yes, ma’am.”

By which I meant, “I’m sorry.”

Last year 65% of kids in grades K-8 qualified for free and reduced lunch.  I think The Sharing Table is a fine way to make sure that all of these kids get enough to eat.  At my kids’ schools they also have R.O.T., where the kids have to sort the remains of their lunches into recycling, organics, and trash.  I think that’s a good idea, too.

This Thanksgiving I am thankful for the many blessings in my life: for my family, my health, the opportunity to do good work.  I rediscovered my love of writing this year and I’m grateful for that, too.  I’m thankful to that long-ago Baton Rouge High School lunchlady.  And I’m also thankful for The Sharing Table.  My children are learning lessons at school that are not in any curriculum.  They are learning a lifestyle of avoiding waste and paying attention to what happens to their garbage.  They are learning, by giving and taking equally, that if you have more than you need, you should share it.  If you need more than you have, you can take it without questions or shame.  It’s not political, it’s just about being together in a community.  Today I am thankful that I am not alone in raising these children to be good citizens of their community.

Throwdown* Crawfish Etouffe

1 lb. crawfish tail meat (can also use shrimp or catfish)

2-3 teaspoons Tony Cacherie’s Creole seasoning (if you don’t have that, use 2 tsp. salt, 2 tsp. garlic powder and 1/2 tsp. cayenne)

1/2 stick of butter

1 medium yellow onion, chopped

2 bunches scallions (green onions), chopped

2 stalks celery, chopped

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 can Rotel Tomatoes (diced tomatoes with green chiles)

1 can Campell’s Cream of Mushroom soup (the TRUE secret of Cajun cooking!)

Mix seasoning with crawfish and put in refrigerator for 30 minutes.

Over medium-high heat, melt the butter in a heavy pot.  Add the chopped onions, celery and garlic and saute until the yellow onion is translucent.  Add the seasoned crawfish and mix real good.  After about a minue, add the can of soup (no water) and stir.  Then add the Rotel tomatoes and mix.  Lower the heat, cover the pot, and cook the rice.  Stir the etoufee often and simmer over low heat for 20 minutes.  Season to taste with more Tony’s.

*The lazy version

JOHN MARZETTI CASSEROLE

Not my recipe, but I ate a whole lot of it and make it for my family now.  I do wonder how a dish from Ohio became such a mainstay on the EBRP public school lunch menu. Here is the source for this version of the recipe.

3 tbsp. olive oil

1 large onion, chopped

¾ lb. mushrooms, cleaned and sliced

2 lbs. lean ground beef

3 ½ cups tomato sauce

1 ½ lbs. cheddar cheese, shredded

1 lb. elbow macaroni, cooked and drained

In skillet, saute onion in oil until limp, about 3 minutes. Add mushrooms and fry until juices are released, about 5 minutes. Add beef and cook, stirring, breaking up clumps, until no longer red. Remove from heat and mix in tomato sauce and all but 1 cup of cheese. Transfer to greased 9- by 13-inch baking dish and add macaroni. Toss gently to mix. Scatter remaining cheese on top. Bake, uncovered, in 350-degree oven until browned and bubbling (35 to 40 minutes). Serves 10 to 12.

How To Live To 101

On By Jennifer PrestholdtIn Best of The Human Rights Warrior, Human Rights, Memoir, True Stories2 Comments
My Grandpa Olaf at 99

When people asked him his secret to living past 100, my Grandpa Olaf  had a standard response:  “Don’t die!”  But truth be told, he had more going for him than just his sense of humor and hardy Norwegian genes.  My grandpa actually DID have a secrets, rules he lived by that help explain his long and good life.

My Grandpa Olaf – who would have turned 104 this week – was born in 1907 and died in his sleep right before Christmas 2008.    My middle son cried even more than I did when we got the news.  I’m so thankful that my children knew him well, the man with the Winnie-the-Pooh voice. The man full of joie de vivre who taught me to ride a bike and twirled me on the dance floor at my wedding.  The loving man who made the doll bed that my daughter’s Americal Girls “sleep” in today.

The amazing thing is that, not only did my Grandpa Olaf live to be 101, but he was still going so strong.  When he was 99, my mom had to ask him to (please!) stop travelling .  He did –  internationally, at least – but he still got a huge kick out of showing people his ID with the 1907 birthdate.  He did not get much of a kick, however, out of the fact that after he turned 100,  the box marked “1907”  disappeared as a birthdate choice on most online forms.  That made him mad.

Some secrets are just not meant to be kept and I’m sure my Grandpa Olaf wouldn’t mind me sharing a few of his.  So here goes:

Two almonds a day keep cancer away.  From the time of my earliest memories, he had a big jar of raw almonds in the kitchen.  When I stayed with my grandparents, he made me eat them, too.  Turns out tat there is ongoing research on the phytochemicals in almonds which may have potential health benefits, including preventing cancer.  In any event, almonds are cholesterol-free, a good source of dietary fiber, and high in monounsaturated fat (which lowers LDL cholesterol).

Show up!!!  This was the guy who never missed a graduation – or any other important event in our lives, for that matter.  He even bore witness to my brief stage career, which ended after a single performance of Alice in Wonderland in 5th grade at Wildwood Elementary School in Baton Rouge, La. (Guess who played Alice? Guess who memorized everyone else’s lines and said them for them – sotto voce –  if they missed their cue? Afterwards, Grandpa Olaf said to me, “Well, Jen, you really gave it your all!”)  As I grow older, I realize more and more how important it is to show up for the important events.  My regrets definitely center more on things that I have not done and weddings I have missed than things that I have done.

Appreciate your spouse.  Husband, wife, life partner, whatever. “The best thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.” My grandpa made this sign for my dad, who later gave it to my husband.

Never stop learning.    He had a tough childhood in a poor,  immigrant family.  The kind where your Norwegian mama makes you take castor oil but you have to line your holey shoes with cardboard.  He had to drop out of school to work and never made it past about sixth grade.   But he valued education above all else, and sent his daughters to the best schools he could.  He was so proud of my mother, the first in her family to get a PhD.  As an adult, he chose to learn through experience.  Between the ages of 65 and 99 – and particularly after age 80 – he traveled the world.  (If you have a bucket list – Grandpa Olaf says to prioritize the Galapagos Islands.)

Make the effort to connect with people.  My grandpa was a pretty social guy, one who believed strongly in getting out there and talking with people. He also liked to help and volunteered his skills with a number of nonprofits, fixing things for seniors and building community theater sets.   He lived for the last decade or so of his life at the Holladay Park Plaza in Portland, Oregon; people there called him “The Mayor”.

Fight for what’s right.  A union member for nearly 70 years, my grandpa used to tell me stories about having to wear flannel pjs under his wafer-thin airplane mechanic uniform in the Minnesota sub-zero winter cold.  He was part of the fight for every benefit and workplace protection, from insulated uniforms and hearing protection to paid vacation to safety regulations.  He was really, really proud of that.

My daughter chatting with my Grandpa Olaf

Spend time with children.  I fondly remember my grandfather  reading the Brer Rabbit stories to me and my brother, but he also spun us wild yarns about a character of his own invention –  Redpants Cookie.  From what I remember of this young, maroon-chaps-wearing cowboy, he always returned safely home from his adventures to find a glass of milk and a plate of cookies.  (If I ever write a children’s book, this is it, so don’t go stealing my Redpants Cookie!)  What I didn’t realize until his memorial service was that, in addition to me, my brother, and our cousins, he had been Grandpa to his second wife’s grandchildren as well.

Talk about things, don’t bottle them up inside.  My grandfather was an airplane mechanic in the Pacific during World War II.  He saw a lot of stuff, but what really troubled him was taking the returning POWs  off the planes.  Like most of his generation, he didn’t talk about it for years.  In his 90s, however, he would recount in vivid detail the helpless and  emaciated bodies of these human rights victims. “I should have talked about this years ago,” he told me. ” I shouldn’t have kept it inside for so long.”

Don’t postpone joy.  After my grandmother died, he went on an Elderhostel trip to Russia; my step-grandmother was on the same trip.  When they returned, they decided to get married.  They had only known each other for about a month, but at their age (he was 80, she was 70) – they figured, why wait?  They were married for 21 years.

"Father of Waters" statue, complete with the toe to rub for good luck and the stairs my grandpa used to run up when delivering papers

Seek your luck.   As a boy in the late 1910s, he delivered papers in City Hall in Minneapolis.  His job required that he run, carrying a heavy bag of newspapers, up many flights of stairs to the offices.  There is a large marble sculpture, called “Father of Waters” after the nearby Mississippi River. According to legend, rubbing his big toe brings good luck.  My Grandpa Olaf paused every day on his paper route to rub the big toe of the “Father of Waters”.  Later in life, we visited the statue together.  This week, on the 104th anniversary of his birth, I went by myself to City Hall and I rubbed that marble toe.  I thought of my grandpa and all that he taught and me.  And all he continues to teach me.

Celebrating Grandpa Olaf's 100th birthday!

Raising Boys Not To Be Total Jerks

On By Jennifer PrestholdtIn Best of The Human Rights Warrior, Gender, Human Rights, Memoir, Parenting, Women's Rights8 Comments

At some level, I’ve known since before my oldest son was born that this moment would come.  But when it did, it took me utterly and completely off guard.  I was driving a car full of boys home from a soccer tournament last week when my 9-year-old son piped up from the back,

“Hey mom! I’ve got a funny joke.  I’ll ask you a question and you say, ‘Ketchup and rubber buns'”.  “I’ve heard this one,” chuckled my 12-year-old son.  Snickers all around from the soccer players.  

Apparently, I was the only one who didn’t know what was coming next.

“What did you have for breakfast?”  “Oatmeal and ketchup and rubber buns.”

“No! Mom!  Just say ketchup and rubber buns.”

“What did  you have for breakfast?” “Ketchup and rubber buns.”

“What did you have for lunch?”  “What did you have for dinner?”  Etc. etc.  And then we get to the punchline:

“What do you do when you see a hot chick? You catch up and rub her buns!”     Peals of laughter from the boys.

To my very great credit, I did not run the station wagon off the road and into the ditch.  I kept driving – silent, hands gripping the wheel, looking straight ahead.  It was a perfect autumn day.  The sky was brilliant blue and the afternoon sun was catching the full color of the orange and yellow leaves on the trees along the highway.   It was a beautiful, perfect day but inside I was angry. I was mortified. I was disappointed.  I was desperately struggling to think of what I should say.

Every once in a while, though, it is helpful to have gone to law school.  “I don’t think that joke is funny.  You know, if you actually ran after a woman and touched her in an offensive way like that, it would be called “assault and battery”. It is a crime.  You could be arrested.”

“You could be arrested for THAT?”  “Yes.  Plus, the woman could also sue you.”

Silence descends.

“Also, I’ve actually had that happen to me. How do you think it feels to have a stranger grab your butt?”

“WHAT? That actually happened to YOU?”

“Sure. More than once. Usually at parties.”

“That’s kind of  making me feel sick,” said the 12-year-old.

More silence.

From the 9-year-old:  “I remember you saying that you didn’t like running past construction sites because the construction workers whistled and yelled things at you.”

I didn’t remember telling them that, but it’s true.  When I was a teenager, I used to go way off my normal running routes just to avoid running past a construction site.  Good, they were listening.

“So what are you going to say the next time you hear someone tell a joke like that?”        “Stop, Mom! We get it, ok?”

Teachable moment: ended.  I decided just to leave it there  – for now.  These are intelligent boys, good kids who love and respect their mom and their sister, their grandmothers, their female friends and teachers.   But they, like other young Americans, are deeply impacted by the culture that they live in. Children are exposed to an estimated 16,000 images every day.  They are powerfully influenced by their peers (I know they didn’t hear THAT joke at home).   How can that not impact the way that they view girls and women?  And isn’t it only going to get worse as they move through middle and high school?

The Ketchup Joke was a call to action for me.  I need to do more to raise these boys to recognize the problem and, hopefully one day, to speak up when they hear someone tell a sexist joke.    Thankfully, there are a lot of resources out there – research, organizations, websites.   The Advocates for Human Rights has developed a Challenge the Media workshop and resource list.   And I know that other parents have successfully managed to raise their sons not to be total jerks, but to be men who respect and treat women as equals.

I’ll report back periodically on what I have found.  In the meantime, I would welcome hearing about what others have learned.    But first, I’ve got a date with my sons.  We are going to see Miss Representation.

We've still got a long way to go, but we've taken the first step.