The Delight is in the Details

More raw photos from my favorite photographer, 

age 4 years and 5 months at the time of these shots

Fresh out baby

Self-Portrait

Love Heals

Love Heals. Who can argue with that motto? Thistle Farms is a social enterprise and growing community of women in Tennessee who have come out of trafficking and prostitution and are learning that love does, indeed, heal. The women are given a safe home and taught job skills through the expansive undertaking of running Thistle Farms and creating their products literally from the ground up. (Best. Chapsticks. Ever.) It's an organization that is easy to get behind because:

1.) Their mission makes the world a better place. 
2.) Their products are all-natural and quality.
3.) My spouse actually admits* that he likes their chapsticks and candles better than the drugstore variety.

*To me. In private. Now indirectly on the internet.

I've been following them and buying their products for a few years now, and this year I have chosen Thistle Farms as the charity I am supporting in lieu of birthday presents. So...choose your own adventure.

If you were thinking of buying me a birthday present, go to Page 124.



If you were not thinking of buying me a birthday present, go to Page 27.





Page 124
You go to the Thistle Farms website. You're immediately taken with their clever lavender colored thistle motif. You become distracted by their products. If you decide to by a little something for yourself, go to page 34. If you decide to buy a little something for me, go to page 58. If you decide not to buy anything, go to page 72.

Page 27
You're kinda appalled that anyone would be so gauche as to practically beg for a birthday present, but this social enterprise concept intrigues you, so you decide to go to the Thistle Farms website anyway. You're immediately taken with their clever lavender colored thistle motif. You become distracted by their products. If you decide to by a little something for yourself, go to page 34. If you decide to buy a little something for me, go to page 58. If you decide not to buy anything, go to page 72.

Page 34
You buy a lemon verbena candle and a lip smoothie. Your package arrives in the mail. Soon, your lips grin and gleam. There is a gentle flicker in your living room and clean fragrance drifts around the corners. These scents were hand grown! you muse. Gratefully, you clean your kitchen and kiss your kid and drink an extra glass of water. It's been a good day.

Page 58
Whoo hoo! Score! Congratulations! You receive one hand-written thank you note and treasures in heaven.

Page 72
No curses are called upon your head. No dredged up debts are invoked. You live happily ever after until Christmas time when you are trying to figure out what the heck to get your Aunt Myrtle.

Twelve Textures

More amazing, unedited pictures from a four-year-old wandering around his backyard with a camera. Makes you question that overpriced stuff at Tate Modern.

Baking Cakes in Kigali

Our library is more than a bit unreal and feels like a Spanish country club. I am always subconsciously concerned that someone is going to ask me to prove membership.

If the library rented rooms, I think Ben and I would live here.

Seriously, how can this place be free?

Sometimes I use the private study rooms as meeting places for work. The other day, I drove away from a work meeting and nearly stomped on the brakes from the sudden realization that I had not checked out the library book I selected. I pawed through my laptop bag and indeed found the tome tucked away. Turns out that I had unthinkingly swept away all of the items from the work surface and unwittingly deflected the library scanners from detecting my theft by placing the book next to the electric signal of my laptop. The book that I successfully lifted from the library?

Yes. How to Buy a Love of Reading. Sigh. Three generations of library employees just shuddered.

I also like studying here and roaming the aisles looking for books that have NOTHING TO DO WITH TRAUMA. Between social work classes and human trafficking research, my brain is pretty full up on tragedy. Unfortunately, the only "fairy tale" element of the last book I picked up from the fantasy section ended up being a coping mechanism of the main character who lived in death row. He poetically narrated a story filled with horrifically cruel child abuse, sexual assault, murder, torture, and perversion of justice. It was like "Shawshank Redemption" meets Ted Bundy. The Dungeon turned out to be the solitary confinement wing, the Lady was a private investigator of death row cases, the guilty Priest was a prison chaplain with a sordid past and so on. Yikes. 

I say all of that to preface a pretty fun read I found that you can buy for only $4 (including shipping) on Amazon. (Or, you know, borrow from your local Spanish country club.) The main character is a middle-aged woman who runs a cake-making business in Rwanda. She had a soft heart and a practical mind and always ends up kindly fiddling in the lives of her clients. What I enjoyed about this book was that it managed to touch on some pretty tough themes (poverty, aids, sexual assault, genocide, orphans, prostitution, stigma, first world interference, etc.) while highlighting the strength and joy that are also a part of life. Instead of crying, I ended up laughing aloud so many times that I convinced my husband to read it too. We have both traveled and were amused by the author's ability to relay the humor of cross-cultural interactions. Unlike my other blog posts, I'm not urging you to change the world through this one, but you might change a little if you read it and enjoy yourself in the process.

Baking Cakes in Kigali by Gaile Parkin

Boston

B graduated from Lesley University

Massachusett's Avenue

Trader Joe's in Cambridge!

The library where I did NOT go to school. My condolence is that it is so cold in the winter that they have to use tunnels between buildings.

Exercise and Stress

Indeed.

Well, friends, I have done you a favor. My social work research class (which is indeed about experimenting on people but not really how it sounds) required us to conduct a "single-study research design" with a literature review on our project. This means that I picked a person, asked what he wanted to change in his life, came up with something to hopefully affect the specific change, and then measured whether or not that something was effective. And I had to spend a bunch of time looking up the journal articles of other more scholarly folk who have done similar experiments. The study question ending up being whether or not exercise improves a person's perceived stress level.

Here in are the articles I read. I put them in exceptionally tiny print so that you can scroll through them faster.

References

Blomstrand, A., Bjorkelund, C., Ariai, N., Lissner, L., & Bengtsson, C. (2009). Effects of leisure-time physical activity on well-being among women: A 32-year perspective. Scandinavian Journal of Public Health, 37, 706-712.

Brown, J. (1991). Staying fit and staying well: Physical fitness as a moderator of life stress. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60(4), 555-561.

Brown, J., & Siegel, J. (1988). Exercise as a buffer of life stress: A prospective study of adolescent health. Health Psychology, 7(4), 341-353.

Cohen, S., Kamarck, T., & Mermelstein, R. (1983). A global measure of perceived stress. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 24(4), 385-385.

Gerber, M., & Puhse, U. (2009). Do exercise and fitness protect against stress-induced health complaints? A review of the literature. Scandinavian Journal of Public Health, 37, 801-819.

Kwag, K., Martin, P., Russell, D., Franke, W., & Kohut, M. (2011). The impact of perceived stress, social support, and home-based physical activity on mental health among older adults. The International Journal of Aging and Human Development, 72(2), 137-154.

Melinda, C., Denis, C., & Clare, M. (2010). Direct and buffering effects of physical activity on stress-related depression in mothers of infants. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 32, 23-38.

Roberti, J., Harrington, L., & Storch, E. (2006). Further psychometric support for the 10-item version of the Perceived Stress Scale. Journal of College Counseling, 9, 135-147.

Perales, F., Jesus, P., & Borja, P. (2014). Impact of physical activity on psychological distress: A prospective analysis of an Australian national sample. American Journal of Public Health, 104(12), 91-97.

Vasterling, J., Sementilli, M., & Burish, T. (1988). The role of aerobic exercise in reducing stress in diabetic patients. The Diabetes Educator, 197-201.

The conclusion of all of them is: exercise helps reduce your stress level. Turns out even a little bit every day or a moderate bit every few days helps. Drat. That's what the magazines in the check-out stand have been telling us for years! The trick is that when you are stressed, the thought of exercise makes you feel more stressed. I personally loathe exertion. Good news! If you exercise too much (i.e. "vigorously" at high intensity for prolonged periods of time) you actually lose some of the stress improving benefits. If you get too attached to exercising it becomes a project or an addiction and causes more stress. So, the take away is that something is better than nothing--even if it doesn't feel like it in the moment. 

And tying back in to our opening hook: Calvin wins again!

Human Trafficking in Ventura County

Here is a three part series put out by the Acorn. Wish they had mentioned our founder, Shannon Sergey!

Part 1
Part 2 (Featuring me!)
Part 3

Photography Project

I'm helping my friend promote a photography project. This unstaged, unedited series captures a lazy backyard BBQ.

Yep, that's me.

So, what do you think?

A word on the photographer: he is four-years-old and had not used a camera before this first series. Every picture was unposed and only had one "take." I always said he was a genius.

When did us adults start become afraid of trying new things?

Hope Rising Ministries

In addition to my anti-trafficking work through Forever Found, I am very proud to be on the board of Hope Rising Ministries, a faith-based nonprofit headquartered in Texas that is likewise dedicated to ending human trafficking. Hope Rising's main project at the moment is the establishment of a safe aftercare home on a ranch in Texas for American girls who have survived sex trafficking. The property has been purchased, and we are raising funds for the buildings and proper licensing. I've visited the ranch and felt my soul relax and expand watching the horses cavorting in the sunset. Our equine therapy program is already up and running serving survivors who are housed elsewhere, and we're seeing definite results in girls opening up and learning to trust and rising to the responsibility of proper horse care.

One of the main reasons I have confidence and commitment to Hope Rising Ministries is my friendship with Sherri Clement, our founder. I attended a Hope Rising fundraiser in Santa Paula several years ago and heard Sherri speak about her outreach to women in the sex industry. Over the next few months I was pretty busy with work but felt as though God was telling me to get in touch with Sherri. After (finally) contacting her, I found out that she had kept several business cards from the fundraiser and prayed over connecting with those people. Of course, one of the business cards was mine. I ended up volunteering for Hope Rising for about a year. Sherri and I both became certified as Hands that Heal trainers, a faith based training for aftercare providers. After putting on a four day training in Houston together, Sherri and I traveled to Thailand to train staff at two aftercare homes for child trafficking victims. 

Just arrived in the Bangkok airport via Korea - legit Thai ice tea!

Getting a fish pedicure in Chiang Mai

A lifelong dream!

Being unexpectedly hatted + hugged by an elephant
(As you can see, I am ecstatic!)


We had a lot of fun adventures but also saw some heartbreak in Thailand and on an unexpected jaunt across the border to Burma. We tried not to take too many pictures of the kids in the aftercare homes to respect their privacy.

Burmese immigrants living in a dump in Mae Sot, Thailand

Home in the dump

Literally walking over the border into Burma

Burmese gas station

Unless you're CIA trained, it's pretty hard to hide who you really are after 27-hour transcontinental trips, strange diets, shifting schedules, and dramatic stories of healing and heartbreak. Sherri has one of the kindest and most generous hearts I have ever had the pleasure to encounter. She asks Jesus to change and grow her and she leans into heartache to offer healing. Plus, she was brave enough to venture into Burma! It's pretty neat to be able to see someone's character in such an unusual setting, and I'm glad that she is the leader of Hope Rising.

You can find out more about Hope Rising Ministries through our website and also through their Facebook page, which I help to propagate. If your heart is to support equine therapy or an aftercare home for American children, this is definitely a good investment for your donation.

Who's crazy?

As part of my master's degree in social work, I recently finished a class on assessing and diagnosing mental health disorders. I had some familiarity with mental health disorders from a year spent working with families who were homeless, learning about the effects of trauma on human trafficking victims, and a 496 hour practicum at a school for children with emotional disturbances. Yet, I was still a bit confused about schizophrenia and mostly thought of it as multiple personality disorder, aka "A Beautiful Mind." I learned that schizophrenia is a mental illness centering around psychosis, which means that you don't understand or acknowledge reality. Sometimes the psychosis is ongoing and other times psychotic episodes come and go between more lucid stretches. People with schizophrenia have delusions (false beliefs such as thinking that they are secretly Russian royalty) and hallucinations (false sensory experiences that are like hearing voices or seeing people who are not really there). It turns out that having "multiple personalities" is a different disorder entirely.

My teacher shared about a sensitivity exercise she experienced in which she put on headphones playing recordings which mimicked the negative and condemning voices often heard by people with schizophrenia. The voices told her what a terrible person she was, cursed her, and threatened her harm. While listening to the voices, she was instructed to fill out some forms and do a couple of other simple tasks while a staff person stood by and expressed frustration that she was "taking so long" to complete what she had been requested to do. It was terrible.

Most of us focus on the "mental" part of mental illness and not the "illness" part. There is an undeserved stigma attached to any impairment of mental processing. How foolish to think that we are "better" than someone simply because they are unhealthy. I don't think I am better than someone with cancer or Lyme disease or a broken femur--though the contrast makes me grateful for my health.

In class we learned about an incredible woman who lives with schizophrenia and helps break the stereotypes associated with it. She attended Yale and is a legal scholar and law professor at USC. Her story is told best in her own words. Here is a 15 minute TED Talk. You can read the interactive transcript here. 

Connect 2 Ministries

I have blogged about my 2012 and 2013 trips to Haiti in the past: learning about identity and contentment through Peter, picture updates of Peter, and depending on God's strength instead of self. 

About a third of the kids who attended

My life circumstances changed so dramatically over the past two years that I did not keep up with the ministry in Haiti that hosted my trips, although I continue to reflect on the people I met and the lessons I learned. As part of merging our lives, Ben and I began attending a new church together in April of last year. I was surprised and gratified to find out Conejo Church sent members to the same host ministry in Haiti. Similarly to my experiences, God used the heartbreak and hardship of Haiti to change and grow these people from our church. One of the men decided to host a fundraising lunch for Connect 2 Ministries. It just so turns out that the founder of the Haiti ministry lives 20 minutes away from our church and was able to come and share between his frequent trips. We were able to attend and support through money and prayer. (Let's get real: good wishes don't buy food or diapers.)

This kid used the googly craft eyes to become "four eyes"

Usually when you give money to an organization working internationally you are putting your trust in that organization's leadership and reputation without having the chance to see the projects on the ground. I think it's really cool that 1.) I was actually able to be onsite and meet the orphans and churches supported by this ministry and 2.) Even though resigning from my former job meant no more trips to Haiti, God actually brought the head of the ministry to my church for the very first fundraising lunch he's ever attended!

The kids got pretty comfortable after three days. 

Here are some pictures from my second trip. Most of them are from a VBS in a newly built church that is essentially the host of social services in the town just outside Port au Prince. I have also attached the flyer I made for our church's fundraiser. After visiting orphans and people in tent cities, I can share that a little really does go a long way, and I challenge you to forgo a luxury this week (dinner, movies, Starbucks, new dress) and give that money to Connect 2 Ministries or another organization that is helping people living on the margins.

Our team visiting a tent city

Another four eyes

Three friends