Bitchin’ Table: Is the humiliation really necessary?!

Carly Quaglio (displayed as ‘carly’) and Katie Sensabaugh (displayed as ‘me’), bitch it out about guys who find someway or another to add an extra touch of humiliation on an already embarrassing moment. Why do they always have to do that?!

me: hey carly!

carly: Hey katie, what’s up?

me: just studying in the library..blah

carly: that’s finals week for you…except i’m at home

me: yeah..I wish I was..but the new puppy is SO distracting and there’s a cute guy who works here so it’s not too bad he’s your type

carly: oh yeah? i wonder what his name is.  SO listen to what happened to me the other day

me: k. I need a break from studying anyway

carly: I went for a run and i was waiting at one of the intersections near campus. near forest hills actually. you know, minding my business waiting for the pedestrian signal to change so i can safely cross right?

me: yeah, got it got it

carly: hahaha

me: (equivalent to head nods)

carly: okay so these two guys are in this big suv, they have their windows down and they’re being goofy and BLASTING this music and rapping and dancing to it and just generally being obnoxious. so they start looking at me at rapping to me and doing all these goofy dance moves towards me when their light turns green

me: that’s awkward

carly: everyone behind them is honking and yelling but they can’t hear anything because they have their music too loud and are harrassing me. so finally seeing the people behind them, I gesture to them that the light is green and they should go (usually a nice thing to do)

me: sounds nice

carly: as I do this we make eye contact, and they see they were holding everyone up. naturally, being the HUMAN that I am I see the guy move his hand up (assuming to wave or give a sign of thanks) so simultaneously I give him a thumbs up

me: hahahaha

carly: only to find that he gives me the middle finger, screams “BITCH!!!” and drives off with his friend

me: what?! that’s so obnoxious. seriously that pisses me off

carly: isn’t that so rude? I mean i was just trying to help him out

me: were they college students?

carly: yes, definitely. i don’t wanna say they had a frat vibe to them because that’s stereotyping…but they had a frat vibe to them

me: ugh. that’s disgusting. you should write a dart to them. or a letter to the editor. seriously, that’s ridiculous

carly: i know there was so much going on in my head. it’s like they felt they had to publicly humiliate me just because i corrected them. ”corrected.” all i was trying to do was help

African ‘Her’story: My sister

Okay, so my sister, Sarah, isn’t really African. She’s actually one of the palest people I’ve ever met.  In fact, depending on where she is in Africa, people call her different names indicating how white she is. In Ghana it’s obruni, in Congo it’s mundele. But she can pull off being pale pretty well — she’s also one of the most beautiful people I know.

I wanted to write about Sarah for my last official blog post because of her experience in Africa over the past decade. You don’t have to be African to be part of a unique history.

When I was in middle school, she was a student at U.Va. and chose to study abroad in Ghana for a semester. Even though I was really young then and didn’t know much about Africa, much less Ghana, I remember hearing her amazing stories. On one specific instance, she was travelling outside Ghana to either Togo, Mali, or Burkina Faso (for me, the details are quite fuzzy, so I’m sure there will be minor inaccuracies).

On her way back to Ghana, her visa expired, preventing her from entering back into the country. She was with one of her friends stranded in another country. In order to get back into Ghana, she needed to find an American consulate in the country she was in to renew her visa.

Unfortunately for her and her friend, it was approaching nighttime and the consulate was closed.

With little money and no place to stay, they somehow found a welcoming home with people who agreed to let them spend the night. As it turns out, members of the welcoming family were also members of Gaddafi’s bodyguard. At least she was well protected.

Crazy, right?

When I was in high school, Sarah got married to her longtime boyfriend, Adam. While Sarah was in Ghana, Adam was in the Middle East. The two of them together have an incredibly adventurous spirit.

Because of this spirit, two years after being married, they decided to move to Egypt.  Adam taught at an American school in Cairo and Sarah got her master’s at the American University of Cairo.

My family and I went to visit them while they were there. On the positive side, their town in Egypt seemed like the safest place on earth. I felt much safer walking at night there than in my own town. On the negative side, Egypt definitely has a patriarchal society. The strict Muslim influence is definitely one of the causes, but it is also embedded in the overall culture. Sure, the Egyptian men street vendors treated women customers like they were the most beautiful people in the world, but the young Egyptian boys, overall, had no concept of appropriate behavior because of lack of positive influences.

One day, my sister and I were walking to the market, and a group of adolescent boys were coming from the other direction walking past us. As we met in our paths, one of the boys just kind of reached out and tried to touch my sister. Without losing stride, my sister just turned around and yelled and clapped at him, as if she were reprimanding a dog that just did something inappropriate. I recall her saying, “they just have no influence for appropriate behavior toward women, so you just have to embarrass them in front of their friends when they do stuff like that.” I knew if it had happened to me, I would’ve just been completely silent and continued walking. I think most women in Cairo Egypt would have done the same thing because of the cultural norm not to speak out against men. I remember being completely impressed with her courage in standing up and teaching a lesson.

When I was starting my freshman year in college, Sarah and Adam moved to the Democratic Republic of Congo, where they currently live. My sister got a job in the embassy, while my brother-in-law got a job at The American School of Kinshasa teaching primary school. They live on campus. It’s enclosed by a 10-foot wall with layers of barbed wire on top.

African ‘Her’story: Dreaming the impossible

I know I already wrote about this amazing African woman, but after seeing her lecture, her story justifies another post.

To remind those of you about my previous post, Dr. Elavie Ndura, a Burundian Hutu genocide survivor and scholar, came to JMU to speak about her experiences. As the president of the Justice Studies Student Organization, I thought this event would be able to bring insight to all concentrations in the justice studies major: criminal, international, and social.

As it turns out, students in other majors were just as interested in hearing her lecture.

About 200 people came to listen to her story representing not only justice studies but education, social work, sociology, international relations, political science and communication fields, among others.

After explaining a little bit about the background of the Burundian conflict, Dr. Ndura told about her personal struggle in during the 1970s. She said that her ethnicity and the breakdown of other ethnicities in Burundi really shaped her life, as well as the lives of other citizens. They were taught a distinct divide between the Hutu and the Tutsi’s, a divide which was made much more public during the Rwandan Genocide roughly two decades later. In fact, she said that a well-known ideology about the relationship between Rwanda and Burundi is that when “Rwanda catches a cold, Burundi sneezes, and vice versa.” The Burundi Genocide had much relation to the Rwandan Genocide.

Since she was a Hutu, this meant she had to struggle through education starting with the first grade because of the psychological put-downs from the teachers who were Tutsi in majority.” To add to that struggle, she said that being a woman made it even harder.

“Africa in general and Burundi in particular, being a women sometimes brings some rather interesting experiences in cultures that believe the man is in charge all the time and if you’re a woman you should just sit with the children somewhere and let the men talk and do business.”

Because of her struggle in education, she had to work extra hard to prove that she was worth something.

“I had dreams, I had dreams to be something better than I saw anywhere around.”

She had to work hard to achieve her educational dreams, dreams that seemed impossible. After her elementary school, she was sent to a city 150 north of where she grew up.

“Everyone one of the 100 plus miles, I walked”

That wasn’t the last time she traveled across country for her education.  She later went to an elite high school that was about 150 miles away from her junior high school and again reached that destination by foot. She showed up to the school covered in dirt from the multiple day-long travel. When she got to the school, her name wasn’t on the roster, contrary to her acceptance forms. Her father had to beg to let her stay in school and the teachers made her prove that she was worthy to receive an education there. She did.

She says this is where she first learned about inequality. She saw people being dropped off right at the door from Mercedes cars. She thought, “I had to walk miles to get here. I’m going to compete with these children that can’t even be dropped off 2 yards away from the door?”

She wanted to try as hard as she could to beat everyone in the class and then sometime buy her own Mercedes.

After she achieved the necessary education, she went to study in England. While she was there, she found out that her husband was captured during the genocide and poisoned in prison. She considered herself lucky because since her husband was poisoned, he was given a couple months to live, as opposed to being killed immediately. She came back to spend some time with her husband before his death.

During this time, high school boys were being killed, older men were being killed. They were burying mass graves for the dead bodies. All of Dr. Ndura’s uncles were killed.

Despite those tragedies, she was able to tell humorous stories about her life. She said

“when you lead a difficult life, you have to find ways to insert happy moments because one happy moment can make you live for a long time.”

African ‘Her’story: Overcoming obstacles

My majors have done a lot for me. As a political science and justice studies double major, I may not have job security immediately after college as opposed to my business major counterparts, but I can guarantee you that I will get a job I love…eventually. But even if I don’t, I’m satisfied knowing that for the past four years, I’ve been happy. I’ve been studying things I love—unlike by business major counterparts.

All business majors strive to look like him.

Justice Studies in particular has given me the ability to engage in great conversations, analyze amazing stories and cherish awesome opportunities. This past week, for example, I was able to have lunch with Nate Fields, someone who was exonerated from death row.  His memories and stories were unbelievable. Closer to the beginning of this semester, I had lunch with the head of the Southern Poverty Law Center—a center that researches hate groups and works to minimize their effects.

This week, I’m especially excited about my upcoming lunch date. I get to have a dinner conversation with Elavie Ndura, a Burundian Hutu genocide survivor and peace scholar. As a victim of exploitation and violence in the 20^th century, Dr. Ndura’s life has been filled with challenges.

I initially heard her on a radio interview on With Good Reason, a Virginia Foundation for Humanities program on National Public Radio. I caught the very end of her interview as I was driving to work and I heard her say something truly inspiring. To paraphrase, she said that doors aren’t always going to be open for you; sometimes you have to push them.

To hear someone say something so encouraging and uplifting after having gone through a lifetime of struggle is remarkable.

As president of the Justice Studies Student Organization, I knew she would be an awesome speaker. I looked her up to get more information and found out that she currently teaches peace education at George Mason University. In particular, she stresses the importance of positive dialogue and the critical nature of acceptance of cultural diversities. I emailed her to see if she would be interested in speaking to our organization and anyone else we could get to hear her story.

She agreed to come speak. She is doing so this Wednesday (November 16) at 7:00 p.m. in Transitions.

Abortion is not genocide; women are not Nazis

My entries on this blog normally describe the struggles and achievements of African women. While I will continue to advocate for the recognition of African women in future blog posts, I’m going to have to diverge from my usual topic this week.

I’m sure you either saw or heard about the latest campus controversy. JMU students were blessed with an opportunity to encounter the Genocide Awareness Project on the commons yesterday. The title of the movement sounds great, right? Who wouldn’t want to learn more about the Genocide Awareness Project? As a justice studies major, I’ll admit I was inclined to learn more about this seemingly-inspiring movement.

I was completely wrong. As it turns out, the Genocide Awareness Project, or GAP, is a right-wing conservative movement that travels across university campuses in the United States and Canada with a movable display of pro-life propaganda.

While I have some, although admittedly limited, tolerance for pro-life movements, this movement without a doubt contains the most distasteful means of expressing their views I have ever seen. Not only did they have a myriad of horrific and bloody images of aborted fetuses, but they had those pictures juxtaposed with human beings victimized by genocide.

I would post the pictures here, but I don’t want to force people to see the pictures if they choose to avoid images and the commons altogether. To view the pictures, check out their anti-abortion website or read the coverage of the event in The Breeze. They’ll also be on the commons until the end of the day today for your up-close viewing pleasure.

GAP has a few things wrong with their argument and their methods. First and foremost, choosing to have an abortion is NOT equivalent to genocide. Second, the bloody fetuses depicted on the commons were results from abortions completed in the third trimester—something that is illegal and rarely practiced. Third, this isn’t the way to voice their beliefs; it is totally unacceptable . Period. The First Amendment obviously gives them the right to do whatever they want. Decency, however, shouldn’t be left to the wayside.

African ‘Her’story: Gone but not forgotten

One of my best friends is Kenyan. He just graduated from Eastern Mennonite University with a degree in justice and peacebuilding; I figured he would be a good source for information about African women achievements. I was right. “Google Dekha Ibrahim Abdi,” he said.

It was an easy inspiration. After reading just a few sentences about her and her achievements, it was clear just how remarkable she was. She is another example of a strong African woman that only makes international news coverage after her death.

She passed away this summer because of injuries during a car accident. She had just gotten back to her home country, Kenya. She was returning home from classes at EMU during the Summer Peacebuilding Institute learning how to further use her innate peace skills.

During the 1990s a small scale war broke out over water and livestock in Dekha’s hometown of Wajir. She initiated a peace movement that united Christian and Muslim women to work toward peaceful negotiations. Her process was centered upon rules of mediation; she made sure to listen intently without interrupting to everyone who wanted to use mediation as a resource. According to her obituary in The Guardian,

“she knew that humiliation is one of the main drivers of violence, and that they best antidote to humiliation is respect. When everyone felt their point of view was understood, she would work to restore relations between victim and offender.”

She was part of several non-governmental organizations and non-profits including Wajir Peace and Development, Responding to Conflict, Co-existence International, ACTION for Conflict Transformation, Peace Direct, and the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies in Cambodia. She was a founder and/or on the board of many of the organizations.

African ‘Her’story: The powers of women

To celebrate Eastern Mennonite University’s homecoming, Leymah Gbowee a 2007 Master’s degree graduate from Liberia, came to speak about her work and receive EMU’s alumnus of the year award. It seems fitting for her to win the recognition from EMU, considering she was just announced as one of the Nobel Peace Prize winners. She won the Nobel Peace Prize along with two other women–Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Yemeni activist Tawakul Karman.

Leymah received the Nobel Peace Prize because of her leadership in bringing peace to Liberia following years of violence and oppression in the 1990s and 2000s.

Charles Taylor, one of the most oppressive and corrupt war lords in Africa, was president of Liberia at the time and was using his oppressive regime to rape and kill Liberians across the country. In addition to the violence, the country was short on food and extremely impoverished thanks to Taylor’s apathy for taking care of his citizens.

According to the award-winning documentary “Pray the Devil Back to Hell,” at the height of the violence, one woman remembers watching Taylor’s followers slowly murder her husband to her left while witnessing the rape of her 12-year-old daughter to her right.

Leymah remembers having to tell her son he couldn’t have a bite of food because they didn’t have any left and praying every night that a better world would exist the next day.

Because of the uncontrolled violence and oppression in the country, she decided to do something about it.

“If we allow evil, what do we tell our children in the future?”

African ‘Her’story: Women entrepreneurs

Women all over the world deserve a lot of credit.  But I would argue that women in the developing world, especially Africa, deserve the most recognition.  To conceptualize the struggles and the hardships African women have to face on a daily basis is unimaginable. You’ve got to hand it to them—they’re strong women.

In my African studies classes, I’ve learned about African women entrepreneurs who manage to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, so to speak, and have started amazing organizations and have been the breadwinners of their families—something considered to be almost impossible in African society.

Forty women entrepreneurs representing 36 African nations were honored for their entrepreneurial dedication by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Monday.  The participants are part of a two-year-old program called the African Women’s Entrepreneurship Exchange Program (AWEP).  Sponsored by the State Department, the program is three weeks long and includes lectures and workshops that help women start their own businesses—and it guarantees that the U.S. will be a stable trade partner with their organizations.

According to allAfrica, last year, a

“participant from Liberia raised seed money to establish a business incubator that is helping more than 300 Liberian women start businesses. A women from Senegal brought agribusiness leaders to Washington to learn about public-private partnerships. A business leader from Tanzania set up a network of 1,000 Tanzanian women business owners and negotiated with Macy’s department stores to sell her textile designs and fabrics.”

This was the product from just one year of this program.

African ‘Her’story: A Noble Woman

If you happen to be one of the few people who set your CNN homepage to the international version, listen to NPR or read news on the BBC, you probably found out that Wangari Maathai passed away from cancer on Sunday at the age of 71.  Unfortunately not many people on this side of the world got a chance to know about this incredible woman while she was alive; I will reluctantly admit I was one of those people.

Maathai was the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.  She received this honor in 2004 for her work advocating for environmental protection policies.  She focused on the link that sustainable development had with the promotion of democracy and peace.  Maathai argued that environmental degradation and un-monitored development were factors that contributed to a growing amount of poverty in Africa.

As part of her advocacy work, she founded the Green Belt Movement.  According the non-profit organization’s website, it

“is one of the most prominent women’s civil society organizations, based in Kenya, advocating for human rights and supporting good governance and peaceful democratic change through the protection of the environment. Its mission is to empower communities worldwide to protect the environment and to promote good governance and cultures of peace.”

One of the most important projects within the Green Belt Movement that Maathai started was a tree-planting initiative.  This project has resulted in 40 million trees freshly-planted across the African continent slowing down the speed of soil erosion and protecting biodiversity.

African ‘Her’story

Africa is a seriously misunderstood continent. Our knowledge of that region comes from Hollywood, melodramatic news stories and themeparks (re: when Florida’s Busch Gardens used to be subtitled “The Dark Continent”). I will be the first to admit to have fallen into the sad Africa trap: disease, conflict, poverty and despair.  In my defense, however, I have been to a few countries in Africa, and it’s hard to deny the omnipresent hardships.

Despite the hardships that African people face, something about who they are as a people, what they stand for, and how they live in communities is truly admirable.  For those of you who have had the privilege of exploring the continent, you will be able to understand the addicting feelings you get while there.  I haven’t met a single person that has gone to Africa and doesn’t have plans to return.