Family Values

My cousin Garrett is in Liberia, helping people cope with the Ebola epidemic. Here he is being interviewed via Skype by a reporter at New York’s WPIX:

If that doesn't work, here is the URL:

http://pix11.com/2014/10/03/ebola-relief-worker-describes-liberia-situation/

By Miss Manners’ reckoning, Garett is my first cousin once removed; by my family’s traditions, he is my second cousin, and by the calling customs of my nieces and nephews, he’s my baby cousin, being the son of one of my first cousins and the grandson of my dad’s younger sister. I’m not entirely sure I ever met Garrett, unless it was at a barbecue his uncle held while I was in NY visiting my sister this past July. He and I are Facebook friends, but he doesn’t post much. I knew about this interview because his uncle and aunt posted the link to this interview on Facebook. We are all quite proud of him.

AmeriCares, so their website tells me “is a non-profit emergency response and global health organization. In times of epic disaster or daily struggle, we deliver medical and humanitarian aid to people in need worldwide.” Garett is Vice President of Emergency Response, hence his trip to Liberia. His organization has been providing supplies that medical workers need in order to provide the care that they can without risking their own lives or infecting other patients.

AmeriCares has scaled up its response by providing eight emergency shipments of essential medicines and personal protective wear to both Liberia and Sierra Leone to help treat Ebola patients and to provide protective gear for health workers facing great risks in trying to control the outbreak. 

The shipments contained over 90,000 pairs of gloves, 88,000 face masks, and over 28,000 units of protective clothing including scrubs and disposable coveralls and gowns. Shipments of intravenous fluids to rehydrate Ebola patients have also been sent to Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Now they are working on large shipments of bleach to be used in infection control. People find Ebola scary, and rightly so, but it isn’t an airborne virus. Catching it requires coming in contact with blood or other bodily fluids from an infected person, all too easy to do if the proper protective wear and disinfectants are not available, but preventable if they are. Ebola is also not necessarily a death sentence. If patients get symptomatic care (such as rehydration) to keep them alive until their immune systems kick in, it is possible to survive Ebola. It’s not the same as getting over the common cold, but there is no reason to shrug and say, “Oh, well, what can we do?” either. 

So what can you do? Donate, obviously, if you possibly can. You can donate to AmeriCare here, but if any readers know of other reputable organizations working on Ebola relief efforts, go ahead and post about them in the comments.

If you are the sort to pray, or send good thoughts, or use other blessing rituals to signify your solidarity with people going through bad times, yes, please do! Garrett is not involved in direct patient care and does not anticipate being in any danger, but there are the many medical workers, the patients themselves, their family members, and anyone with the potential to be infected  to whom you can direct your efforts as well.

And go ahead and remember Garrett while you are at it, just in case. Because even if neither of us could pick the other one out of a police lineup, he’s family. Apparently, he’s one of the people who sees the rest of the world as family, too.

Update: More from Garrett here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/garrett-ingoglia/a-firsthand-account-of-li_b_5958884.html?utm_hp_ref=tw

Happy Birthday, Elyse

Today was Elyse’s birthday. I say “was” because Elyse is with us no more. She died on an April night at the age of 16 when a congenital aneurysm that no one knew she had ruptured. I knew her parents because I worked with her mother, and when I heard of Elyse’s death, I went to their house, where a large crowd had gathered to be of what comfort we could. Elyse was brain dead but being kept alive on life support so her organs could be donated. That was important to her parents, who were overcome when they learned Elyse’s heart was too damaged to be donated.

“She had a good heart,” I reminded her mom, one of those stupid, useless things you say when you want to be comforting but there are no words that can do that.

My friend told stories.  Elyse was a quiet elf of a child with an engaging grin. She had asthma, but like most teens, she wanted to fit in with her peers. So for months she did not tell her gym teacher about her condition. My friend told about how she learned that when the class had to run sprints, Elyse bravely puffed along, well behind everyone but willing to try. I could see her in my mind. It sounded like an Elyse thing to do.

I had to leave the next day for a planned visit to family, but my husband went to the funeral. He said it was crowded, and he was on a long line to see the family and pay his respects when another coworker saw him and took him on a shortcut through a side door. “The Bishop was there,” my friend told me when she returned to work weeks later. Seeing that Elyse’s father was the principal of one of the city’s Catholic schools, I didn’t find the Bishop’s attendance excessive, but I was glad that my friend had that comfort.

Five months later, on Elyse’s birthday, two airplanes slammed into the twin towers in New York City. Today everyone is remembering, and mourning, the people who died in that attack. It is appropriate that they do so.

But I woke up this morning remembering a little blonde elf of a girl who will never be older than 16, and whose death was no less tragic.

Happy birthday, Elyse.

You've Got a Friend

Saturday the St. Anonymous UMW went to Oak Alley for a tour and lunch. My good friend D was able to come with me. As I mentioned the one other time it was relevant to whatever story I was telling, D is African American, whereas I am of European (mostly Italian, with a little Yugoslavian thrown in) descent.

We had a good time touring the old mansion. The tour guide was very well-versed in the home’s history and had an infectious personality. (At the end of the tour, she told us she had quit teaching to take on the job, because she enjoyed talking to people who actually listen.) The original owner of the home had selected the property, which had belonged to his sister, for the alley of oak trees leading to the river. The house was oriented to the trees to take advantage of the breezes coming off the river. Mr. Roman had built the home in order to entice his wife, a city girl from New Orleans, to live out in the country, but she rarely stayed there because she had family members she needed to take care of back in New Orleans. It wasn’t until her husband’s death from tuberculosis that she moved to Oak Alley for good to run the plantation.

After the tour, we had a buffet lunch in one of the restaurants. Then we had more time available for walking around until our car pool driver needed to leave. D wanted to see the reconstructed slave quarters and exhibit, and I wanted to see the gift shop. We did a quick turn around the gift shop and went off the the cabins, which were quite close. 

The first cabin had a list of first names of all the slaves that had worked on the plantation, plus one unknown. One of the slaves had figured out a way to grow pecans with shells thin enough to crack easily, an innovation initially credited to his owner. There were displays showing the clothing slaves wore, restraints used to capture runaway slaves, and other aspects of slave life you wouldn’t pick up watching Gone With the Wind. 

As we left and got ready to look for our ride, D turned to me and said, “Aren’t you glad we didn’t live back then?” Well, yeah, I have often said I am glad I didn’t live back in the good old days. But for me, the worst that could happen was that I would have grown up an illiterate Italian peasant, a life that could have had its good side. For D, the difference two hundred years would have made would be huge. She may, with her ancestory, have been a free woman of color, but more likely she would have been a slave, working back breaking labor, having the chance of her children being sold away from her, maybe being beaten. So yeah, I’m sure she was glad that she didn’t live -

“Because then we couldn’t even have been friends,” D went on.

It took a minute for this to sink in, and then I stopped in my tracks and reached to give her a hug. In the process I managed to bump into her and snag her sweater on my engagment ring. My spontaneous gestures have their downside.

“What,” she started, as I said, “Of all the awful things that could have happened if you had lived back then, the first one that comes to your mind is that we couldn’t have been friends? That means so much to me.”

We said a few other mushy things and then went to find B to get our ride back to church.

I know I have said before how privileged I am. I was born with an extra helping of smarts, I was born in the US because my ancestors were brave enough to come here, I was born at the right time to get practically a free ride to college and graduate school, and graduated at the beginning of the second wave of feminism, which benefitted women of my generation tremendously. As I have frequently told my husband, my life has been like an automatic door: it opens up in front of me and closes behind me and I hardly have to worry about it.

Now I see I have one more piece of privilege that I have never considered. I have a friend.

Go With God

"God bless you on your journey," the young man at the airport said as we walked off to our gate.

We had been eating dinner with the young man (let's call him Chris) at the food court in the Atlanta airport because the other tables were all taken and he was the only person at his. Not only did he immediately reply yes when we asked if we could sit with him, he engaged us in conversation as well. It turned out that Chris was on his way home to Alabama from an orphanage in Honduras. "Mission trip", I immediately thought, and sure enough, his next words were, "I heard about it through my church." Chris had spent a month at the orphanage doing handyman jobs, while other volunteers came and went "playing with the kids".

As I told Chris, I worked for 36 years at a non-profit rehabilitation center for children, and what I know about volunteers is that they all want to play with the kids, not do the chores like cleaning mats and toys that aren't glamorous but are necessary. So, I added, I respected him for being willing to do the chores he did.

"That's nothing," he said. "The first week I was there, I cut the grass with this thing like a weed eater. The Lord was really working on me then."

Reading this dialog, I'm sure it sounds like Chris was the kind of believer who welcomed us to his table to ask us about our relationship with Jesus and urge us to pray the sinner's prayer with him, but not so. Most of our conversation from then on was about his studying at Auburn to become a civil engineer. Since John is a civil engineer, they had a lot to talk about: math and physics classes and how hard they are, when to take the FE Exam, what kinds of things civil engineers do. So I didn't tune back in until we were getting up to go catch our flight, and Chris wished us God's blessing on our trip. I thanked him sincerely. I don't know why it is that the kind of thing that usually makes my teeth grit coming from other people sounded different coming from Chris, but it did.

The reason we were in the Atlanta airport, and at dinner time at that, didn't suggest God's blessing on our trip, more like maybe he was working on us. We had arrived at the Baton Rouge airport at 6 that morning to catch a flight to Memphis, another one to Minneapolis, and a final flight to Grand Rapids Michigan. We were to arrive there at 5 PM and then drive another two hours or so to my sister's rented beach house in Elberta, Michigan, where my older nephew's wedding would take place two days later. Due to storms in the east, however, the crew that pre-flights the plane in Baton Rouge arrived late, we missed our connection to Minneapolis, and spent four hours waiting for a flight to Atlanta and then another two waiting for a flight to Grand Rapids that arrived a little after 10:30 PM. I spent the waiting hours frantically trying to contact my sister, who had no phone service at the lake house, but fortunately checked her voicemail, emails, and Facebook messages while running errands.

"I don't know how you are going to find us," she said. "It's dark here and we have no phone service." She emailed us directions anyway. We had our GPS device and her directions. How hard could it be?

When we finally found Hummingbird Lane at 2:15 AM, we realized what the problem was. There were about half a dozen cabins scattered throughout the site, and it was pitch black, making it difficult to match the description (a tan chalet) to the buildings. Finally we decided to go back to the main road, look for a motel, and look again in the morning. John turned the car around and drove back down the gravel road, our headlights catching a sign on a tree. "What was that address?" he asked. I checked the saved email. The address matched the one on the sign. I went to the door and as I tried to key the password into the lockbox that held the key, my other nephew, Anthony, opened the door. "I thought I heard someone out here."

In the morning my sister was surprised to see us. "Al had trouble finding it in the daylight." 

"We did too, at first." I didn't mention the young man at the airport and his prayers, even though that kind of story would have delighted my sister.

But when we left two days later, as Anthony got ready to catch his flight back home and then to Hawaii, where he is stationed in the military, I wished him Vaya con Dios*.

Go with God.

*A song with that title was popular in my youth, but the phrase itself is archaic among native speakers of Spanish, according to my internet research. 

Like a Light Has Gone Out of the World

Last week my husband called my attention to a local news item. “An old friend of yours has died. Not a friend, someone you used to work with.” 

“Who?” I asked of course, then looked where he was pointing. It wasn’t really a friend or coworker, exactly, it was the former medical director of the children’s medical facility where I had worked for 36 years, the person after whom the place is now named. He was 91 years old, so his death wasn’t a surprise, but I was sad nonetheless.

Until his retirement 26 years ago, Dr. M had devoted half a day a week to what was then called “brace clinic” at our facility, monitoring the progress of children with cerebral palsy, fitting them with the long leg braces that were then the standard of care, recommending surgery if needed and often doing the surgery for free if the parents couldn’t afford to pay. As the then president of our board pointed out at the ceremony marking the renaming of the center in his honor, that half day a week, that could have been used to serve paying patients, represented a tithe of the doctor’s income. Before he retired, Dr. M lined up replacement orthopedists to volunteer their time, but it took two of them, each working one afternoon a month, to take his place. By then, the Center had applied to become a Medicaid provider and long leg braces were being phased out and replaced with more modern orthotics.

Despite the tithe of his working hours and the other donated services, Dr. M apparently did well for himself financially. His family has its own charitable foundation, which donated a good bit of the financing needed for expanding the center several years after Dr. M retired.

My husband accompanied me to the funeral home for the visitation. There was, as I expected, a long line of people waiting to sign the visitor’s book and speak to the family. While waiting, I whiled away the time chatting with E, one of my first clients there. “You need to start working with this child right away,” my boss told me after observing E at clinic, “He doesn’t talk at all, and he’s six.” E’s problem, it turned out, was that he was overwhelmed by Dr. M. As I learned once he started speech, the problem was not getting E to talk, it was getting him to shut up. We reminisced about Dr. M, E repeating an often made observation, “You never needed to ask if he was in the building. If he was there, you heard him.” 

“How old is your daughter now?” I asked. “Five” Almost as old as E when I first met him. “Are you still working as a DJ?”

“No, I’m building custom computers now.” Then he shared with me his desire to get on the board of directors of the center. I wish him well. I think it would be an excellent idea. 

I finally work my way up to where the family is and introduce myself. Dr. M had several sons and each one introduces himself to the guests and shakes hands. The oldest one, when he hears where he used to work, tells me that the Center is what his father had been proudest of. “He should be,” I replied, still not able to get used to using the past tense. 

All of us have an impact on the people around us. Most of us affect the world for the good, in some small way. Some people go above and beyond that. Their influence goes farther and wider, and when they pass, it’s like a light has gone out of the world.

Congratulations to Per Ahlberg

Belated congratulations to Dr. Per Ahlberg on his having been elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Per Ahlberg is a paleontologist and Professor of Evolutionary Organismal Biology (stop sniggering and read that s-l-o-w-l-y; it means as opposed to molecular biology) at Uppsala University, Sweden. He also has a wicked sense of humor.

Dr. Ahlberg is not a personal acquaintance of mine, but I know of his election because we both post on TalkRational. Dr. Ahlberg posts things like, 

Tiktaalik is correctly dated as far as I can judge. The best constraint on the human-zebrafish split is Guiyu oneiros, a lobe-finned fish from the Silurian of China described by Zhu and colleagues last year. Guiyu is a basal member of the coelacanth + lungfish + tetrapod lineage, and must thus postdate the human-zebrafish split. It is 419 million years old. The Polish trackways show that the tetrapod line had separated from the lungfishes and coelacanths by 395 million years ago. 

I post things like, “It’s a house band that had a small cult following in the mid-90’s" in answer to questions like, “What is evo-devo?”* 

So despite that nasty little incident in which Dr. Ahlberg called me a marriage wrecker, I decided to be the bigger person and offer him my congratulations anyway, here on my blog where he won’t read it, along with pretty much the rest of the population of the earth, including Sweden, wherever that is. Somewhere cold, is my understanding. Somewhere where having published a few (dozen, hundred, whatever) seminal papers on tetrapod evolution is considered reason enough to elect someone to a society that probably doesn’t even have fancy hats like the Swedish Chef Institute.

Seriously, though, Talk Rational is a fascinating place, especially the Life Sciences (formerly Evolution and Origins) board and the Physical Sciences message boards. Per is not the only working scientist to post there, although as most of them post under screen names, I tend to get the physicists confused with the geologists and the biologists. Since the whole point of Talk Rat is spirited discussion on a number of topics (science, politics, religion and secularism, mathematics, philosophy, history) plus more community oriented boards for discussing games, sports, media, pets, family and whatever, and since the moderating policy is fairly loose, the science boards tend to draw a number of cranks who are certain they can upend all of modern science by referring the resident scientists to badly mangled versions of the second law of thermodynamics, quantum physics or outlier statistics from poorly done experiments, or to the work of other cranks. The discussions that ensue tend to be highly educational for those of us who are really there to learn. As for the cranks themselves, they follow a derived set of laws that have been described as follows:

Laws of [Crank] Discourse on Internet Discussion Forums 

First Law: All evidences for [standard science theory] are speculative. All speculations for [crank preferred theory] are evidential. 

Second Law: One may escape intellectual responsibility on any issue merely by stating an intent to pursue it. 

Third Law: If you have an objection to any point I’ve raised, I’ve already addressed it. No, I won’t tell you where. 

Fourth Law: Unanswerable questions are invisible. 

Fifth Law: The truth of all previously established facts and conclusions are subject to their being convenient to the argument I am presently making. 

Sixth Law: Any claim  . . . post[ed] on a new discussion board invalidates the refutations of the same claim . . . already seen and acknowledged on previous discussion boards. 

Seventh Law: No matter how transparently pathetic . . . any [such] claims may be they can always be followed by something even more pathetic . . .  

Eighth Law: Any thread where I'm getting my ass handed to me on the original topic can be prolonged indefinitely by the introduction of tangential diversions or an abnormal focus on meaningless minutiae.  

These laws in their original have a particular poster’s name attached to them, i.e, “Poster Name’s Seventh Law”, but my experience is they apply to a number of people.

It is fascinating to me to see how often the credentialed scientists will post for pages on end patiently dismantling farfetched claims that they have seen numerous times before, even after it becomes obvious that they are talking to persons who are not arguing in good faith and operating on most, if not all, of the above laws. They do it for the lurkers, they say, and I am glad they do. I’ve learned a lot. 

So again, congratulations to Per and a thank you to all of the scientists who see public education as one of their tasks in the face of the perverse determination of some folks to remain, blissfully or not, ignorant.

*In case, you are wondering, it’s not.

I Have a Homework Assignment

Hubby and I went to a music festival today but left early because it was about to storm.  We did hear two bands and got to see the arts and crafts booths.  One of the booths belonged to a photographer from New Orleans named Joshua Lee.  He had a booth in the same spot last year and we had begun talking about photography.  He gave me a lot of encouragement despite the fact I didn't buy anything.

This year I looked to see him again and this time I bought a DVD called Katrina Revealed:Rebuilding Lives in the Big Uneasy.  We talked a little about my recent trip and how I took over 1200 pictures, and he gave me a homework assignment: take 100 pictures, but none of them can be between my knees and my eyes.  I need to be either down low or up on something when I take the pictures.  When I'm done, Josh wants me to email him and tell him what I learned.

When I left the booth I marveled that there are people like this in the world.  He's seen me twice in his life, he's never even looked at a photograph I've taken, and yet he was willing to offer help and encouragement not just to me, but to other people who stopped by his booth. Whenever I think about all the bad in the world I also try to remember all the Joshua Lees - the people who help other people just because that's what they do.  It's more than just their actions, it's the way they see the world.

And now I have to learn to see the world from a different perspective, as in the picture above, which I took while down on one creaky, arthritic knee.  Wish me luck, and learning.