I've been a volunteer at the Whitman Walker Clinic for about two years now. When I first started, I was unemployed and begged them to give me paperwork to do. I came to work every day for months just to do data entry. Then, I started the counseling and testing training, and no matter how good I was, I was always a bit too nervous and they never felt that I had been observed enough; I was never quite smooth enough. What I was really good at was outreach. I was good at finding teachable moments, identifying what people didn't know and using my props for visual demonstrations of safe sex techniques. Actually, what else would you expect when I got my MA two years ago in Training and Education (really heavy on Adult Learning methods) with a concentration in Health Promotion (which had a heavy focus on Behavior Change theory and methodology). I think that safe sex outreach is becoming one of my things.
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About a year or so before he passed away in Fevruary 2001, my grandfather shared with me a very curious dream. We had been really close, much closer than my father and I had been. Granddaddy was getting very sick, and they talked about putting him in a special home. He only considered it when I convinced him that it might be a good idea.
One day, he asked me to drive him home to Burnt Corn in Alabama so that he could say goodbye to everyone there. He mentioned to me how he had once run across some Creek people who told him that he looked as if he were definitely one of their people. He didn't really tell me how he responded to them.
Later on, he got really sick. One night, he had a strange dream that he told me about. In this dream, there was a caravan of people in wagons who looked like gypsies. He said they came to him, in their brightly colored gypsy looking clothes, and said, "Come on with us! We are going traveling all over the world. If you're coming, you better decide now, because we're leaving tonight!" Granddaddy decided not to go with them. When he woke up, he was burning up with a fever. He stumbled into the bathroom, where he saw a little red light. It went up the wall, across the ceiling, and out the window. When he told his doctor this, the doctor was sure that if he had gone with them, he would not have woken up.

I think that he was visited by his Creek ancestors. People don't know it much now, but Creek dress was often compared to gypsy clothing; it was brightly colored and people wore lots of turbans and sashes with plumes in them. They rode in wagons on their way West, to the Land of the Dead.

At the end of the 2000 fall semester, things went really badly for me in graduate school. I was trying to finish my MA, but my dad called me and said that it was obvious to him that I really didn't want the degree, so I had better drop out and get a job immediately. My grandparents were both sick, and he and mom couldn't afford to help me finish school anymore. I was working on my final paper for an education class when my father tried to force me to drop out of school. I found a job as a telemarketer so that I could stay in Tallahassee, and I arranged with my professors to sit in on undergrad classes in preparation for my comp exams. At the end of the semester, they decided that I still wasn't ready, and they wanted me to spend yet another semester sitting in on classes before they let me take my MA exams. At Christmas, I recieved a letter that my incomplete comp registration and the education class that my father made me abandon had expired, and I was academically dismissed. I decided to be a flight attendant, because that was a really gay profession. Dad suspected this, got my resume, applied for jobs for me everwhere, including northern virginia, and then sent me away, to make sure that I did not "come out" by taking an openly gay profession.
I left Tallahassee in the middle of the night right before Valentine's Day, 2001. My parents weren't around, but I talked to Granddaddy on the phone during the whole two day journey to NoVa. It was really fun! I hung my medicine wheel and feathered medicine pouch from the rear view mirror, and I decided to make a detour to see Ocmulgee, the ancient capital of the Creeks in Georgia so that I could offer tobacco to the great pyramid mound there. Then, I continued on my way North. I kept talking to grandaddy at pay phones all along the way. When I finally arrived, I let him know. Then granddaddy called my dad, to make sure that everything was arranged for me, that I had a job and a home. Dad said yes. Granddaddy said okay, that he could finally stop worrying. So he went outside and dropped dead working the next day. The doctors don't know how he was alive at all; his body was completely bloated and his blood was poisoned from infections. Granddaddy stayed around just to make sure that I arrived here safely. And I'm still up here.....

I know this is a totally irrelevant subject, but I was thinking about this again recently. Someone at a pagan ritual on Sunday happened to mention Forrest Gump, and then I held forth on my theory. I am really shocked that no one seems to have written anything about this online.

So, what is my theory? Forrest Gump is an almost chapter for chapter adaptation of Chretien de Troye's 1180 medieval work, Le Conte du Graal!

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I just started something new on Saturday. I'm doing corn fast. What does this mean? It means that I will not be eating anything made of corn or corn products for quite some time. The other details lead to even bigger questions.
I have posted quite often that I claim Native American ancestry. Specifically, I'm of Muscogee Creek descent. Lots of folks have gotten upset when I say this, because black Americans are not allowed to be multi-racial. It always hurts me when I am challenged this way, because no one challenges my mother. On the contrary, people are constantly approaching her to ask her what her race is because they can never figure it out, and they always seem to need to know. I know that I do have native american features, and people do occasionally identify me as native american before I say it myself, but most whites don't know that lots of southern blacks are of native descent as well. Most of the people who are enrolled members of the so-called "Five Civilized Tribes" look white because these southern tribes began mixing with Europeans early and extensively. Even though I will never find my ancestors on the Dawes rolls and can never officially enroll as a Muscogee, I'm still one anyway. I don't look as obviously native as my mother does because half of my genes are from my father, and he doesn't take after his native ancestors as much. I think in that respect, although I'm not actually bi-racial, when people saw my parents and me together, they often assumed that my father was black and my mother Asian. People in Thailand constantly asked me if I was half black and half Thai.
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http://www.culturecartel.com/review.php?aid=1000498
This article was written almost six years ago, and somehow I missed the media flap about it. I had no idea that Ice Cube was a rebellious suburban slacker, the son of two UCLA faculty members. Wow! He was the ultimate poser, pretending to come from the projects. And he handed the fate of Black America over to the record executives on a silver platter. Read the article I referenced above and see how it jibes with my previous post.

In the last two weeks, everyone has been awash in the tragedy that is the death of Whitney Houston. I have found myself mourning as well, even though I haven't been watching any coverage on TV. Various news and opinion sites have said that Whitney's death is Bobby Brown's fault, because he supposedly got her hooked on drugs when she had really been a "good girl". I've also read the exact opposite, that she hooked Bobby Brown on drugs! My response? Who cares!

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When I was in my early twenties, I was confused and angsty. The current overload of everything vampire has caused me to reflect on this time period in my life when I actually identified with the vampire phenomenon.

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So I just sent an email to the office manager of the consulting firm letting her know that it has been two weeks and the boss still hasn't said a word to me about the the job that is supposed to start next week. I said that he has not discussed the salary or anything else since lunch on Dec. 12th, and I asked when this discussion would take place. I really want to tell them flat out that I won't do it, but I felt that I at least needed to give them a final opportunity to say something concrete, offer me a low salary, so that I can refuse it and walk away. I think that if they don't respond by five, I'm just going to send another email before 5:30 saying that I have recieved so little information, I cannot accept the position.

I come from an old Southern family, actually a very, very, very old Southern family. In Southern families, scandal and secrecy is the name of the game. Respectable people are ashamed of airing their dirty laundry in public. Only low class people parade the undesirables in their families in full view of the public, because a person's worth is based on the reputation of their family. Things will be done for people based on their family honor. People look askance at drunks who don't control themselves in public, or at the cousin who has six children out of wedlock and doesn't hide them. The proof of a person's character is how churchified they appear in public, how conservative they can pretend to be. If people have things they can whisper about you, they don't respect you, and you lose power and prestige.

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So, I had keys, I had a car, I was on my way! I got home by 8, packed, and hit the road, so excited, listening to awesome music. I drove, and was happy, and was actually going to celebrate my birthday a little late by dancing to psytrance with hippies in the woods for a giant equinox ritual. This event was thrown by the same community who used to do Gaian Mind at 4QF.

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So, last week was rather hectic. On Monday, I got an email from my boss asking where the ginormous research paper was that I had promised to turn in the week before. It really wasn't done, and I was truthfully feeling completely overwhelmed by it. I had gone to Burundi to conduct qualitative research as well as gather quantitive data on our girls' education program in June, and since then, I still hadn't put the whole thing together. I had finally started trying to tackle the qualitative data from my notes again a few weeks ago, and had almost finished writing up all of that the preceeding friday. I decided to send my boss the draft outline I was using on Tuesday, and then she finally replied at the end of the day with a copy of a paper that an intern had written last year, saying that she wanted the quantitative data analyzed in charts and graphs. Crap! That data was a mess. This was worse than a grad school assignment; actually, it was exactly the same kind of exercises, which makes me realize how much school really was prep for real life.

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I am saddened by what I read and hear in the news. So much of it seems designed to trash Obama and all the things he's accomplished. I just hope that eventually the news will be fair and show that the Tea Party people and the hypocritical Christian Right are doing everything they can to hurt the poor and needy in our country. Their hypocrisy knows no bounds. It almost sounds as if they are trying to sabotage the world's economy on purpose in order to get a Republican into office who will declare war on the rest of the planet and bring about the Rapture. After what they did, I really don't know how the Republicans are even allowed to be a legitimate political party anymore. I have read that the entire country was punished by having its credit rating lowered because of our politics. But, I think all of it happened because of the right-wing wackos. They did this.

So, I'm still obsessed with Mississippian Moundbuilder civilization. At Christmas, my best friend gave me a novel by the Gears about a Native American couple who defend the culture from DeSoto. This was exactly what I had been looking for for a very long time, and didn't know it. I found the rest of the series and devoured it, and was so happy that I could live the culture through the pages of the novels; I had dreamed about what this culture must have been like for so long. I highly recommend the People series by Michael and Kathleen Gear. It truly is a shame that we had a culture here in North America that truly was on a par with MesoAmerica and no one except for archaeologists has any idea about it at all.

So, the last Mississippian city that I visited was at Moundville Alabama in 2004, after hurrican Ivan. It was the second largest Mississippian city after Cahokia, and it is near Tuscaloosa, so I thought that maybe it was close enough to my mother's ancestral home of Burnt Corn Alabama that maybe my ancestors were from there. Today, I discovered that there was an even closer temple mound city at Bottle Creek Alabama, not far from Mobile. It is considered one of the major missippian sites, and was the most important city for the Pensacola Indians. I grew up in Pensacola, and I can't find much info at all on the Pensacolas, except that they harrassed the Spanish. The online information says that there were still temples and palaces in use at Bottle Creek on into the 17th and 18th centuries. This is so exciting! Unfortunately, there were only tours for archaeology students and professionals, and these only happened in 2003. The city has not been opened up to the public. It's on an island somewhere not far from Mobile, apparently, and it's way out in the swamps along a river, making it easily accessible by canoe. Most of the Mississippian cities were next to rivers, and they used waterways as transport for their vast trade networks and war parties. I hope I get to visit the Bottle Creek city one day.

So far, the Mississippian cities I've visited are Ocmulgee, Moundville, and Lake Jackson. The information at the Lake Jackson site does it no justice at all, compared with how important a city it was.

I am learning that contrary to what some sources indicate, the Mississippian culture was not in complete decline when the Spanish showed up. There were still big cities around, although they were mostly in the South. The civilization had been going strong for a good five hundred years until the Spanish arrived. The Spanish did see the cities with their palisades, armies of archers and warriors, and pyramid mounds topped by palaces and temples. But the Spanish had just come from sacking Mexico and Peru, and they wanted gold. The Mississippians cared nothing for gold, they just venerated copper instead.
And so the Spaniards attacked as many cities as they could find between 1511 and 1565 at least. The Mississippians held out and wiped out every Spanish army, something that even the Aztecs, Mayas, and Incas couldn't do. But, they met their match with DeSoto. He was the most bloodthirsty conquistador ever, and was given North America as a prize for having wiped out the Incas. For four years, he conducted a bloody military campaign against the Mississippians, and destroyed many of the cities. He was finally killed, but the destruction and chaos that his army left behind was too much. The survivors were left in disarray after so much was destroyed, and then they caught diseases from the spaniards' pigs. The few people along the Gulf Coast who survived gave up and went to the missions that the Spanish priests soon set up, and then the British came in the 1600s and 1700's and wiped them out. The survivors who were further north regrouped into confederacies and formed the modern tribes that people know now, especially the Creeks, who are really called Muscogees (those are my people). But, things could never be the way they were. Hernando DeSoto destroyed the Mississippian civilization on purpose with his bloody war.

So two days ago I went to yoga, then came out of class. I called my girlfriend, who had my cellphone that I had accidentally left at the hairdresser on Saturday. I have been trying not to call her too much because she is busy, but essentially I could almost never call because she was always doing something. She would rarely call me. So, I called to ask if I could stop by to get my phone, because she hadn't called me the day before to tell me when she would be around as she had promised to. She was at home and just reading, and said ok.

So I came over, and she wanted to talk, and then broke up with me. She was very nice and sweet about it, and hated to do this to me because I had offered her so much affection, but she isn't in a place to return it right now because she is both a professional aerialist and getting a PhD in biophysics, and doesn't have enough time to spend on me.

It was driving me crazy that I almost never heard from her; when I'm in a a relationship, I want more emotional closeness and sharing, not just needing to be squeezed into a schedule. I feel awful, but maybe I can find someone else who does have time for me. I was beginning to develop really strong feelings for my ex over the last month and half. I should probably take a break from dating, but this was my first real attempt at dating since my transition over the last four years, and during this time, I had been in an ambiguous non-dating relationship that apparently doesn't count. I now have more questions to ask on the next first date: Do you have time to be in a relationship with me? What does being in a relationship mean to you?

Previously, my questions, spoken and unspoken, were: Do you like me? Do you seem to want to be with me? Do you mind that I'm trans? Do we have things in common? (i.e.: geeky, queer, pagan, physically active, outdoors-y, festival camping, etc.) Are you attracted to me? Are we on an actual date? That last one was important, because previously I could never be sure if I was on an actual date.

So, I now that I don't have a girlfriend anymore, I get to go to my 20 year reunion and be around all my married high school classmates. Great! (not!)

So, as if I didn't have enough on my plate already, I had to go and add more. For the last few weeks, it's been one thing after another. First, I got into a bike accident and nearly broke my arm, which is still trying to heal. Then, about two weeks later my girlfriend and I were harrassed for kissing in public, and she was actually beaten and kicked by kids after I got on the escalator. This was traumatic for her and stressful for both of us. On top of that, I have been having trouble writing a paper for work; this has been a nightmare because sometimes when I have huge complicated papers to write, my anxiety disorder kicks in and I become mentally paralyzed when it comes to getting it all together. These panic attacks are physically painful.

Now, as if all that weren't enough, I'm going to put myself through the ringer this weekend. I decided to post to Facebook how sad I was that I was missing my 20 year High School reunion, and that I hoped everyone would have fun. My classmates responded almost immediately that the reunion was not this past weekend, but THIS COMING weekend, and that I now had no excuse. A local pagan here in DC then chimed in about how an MTF classmate had come to her 20th and gotten an award for most changed, with her prior permission of course. My classmates then responded to her and said, "That's exactly why we called her last night!" I had to really stop and think at this point.

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So I have been through a lot of changes lately. I think the biggest changes are that I finally have a really challenging job in my career field, and now I am finally in an actual relationship. This is huge! I have been struggling emotionally for the last few years because I wasn't working or advancing in my career, and I couldn't manage to be in a romantic relationship. I won't go into all the details, but suffice it to say, I went through a very tearful non-breakup with a woman whom I wasn't actually dating in the first place; we had been 'not-dating' for about three years. So, about a month and a week ago we decided we needed to take a break. I said we shouldn't talk for a whole month, which surprised her because she thought I would just say two weeks. I knew that two weeks later I was going to Africa, and decided that we would talk again as soon as I got back near the end of June.

So I cried for several days, and then tried to pick myself back up again, and cried some more, and the world generally felt dull and gray and empty and cold. After about a week, a friend sent me an invitation to a queer women's retro game night, and I decided to go. It was on a Sunday. So, I put on my really cute top that looks sort of like a tankini, threw on some flare-bottomed stretch pants, and went to game night. My friend who had invited me couldn't go because she had just been banned from the big pagan organization whose events we both attend, and she was in a really soggy emotional state. So I went alone, and was very nervous; I had not had a lot of luck going to queer-women's singles events so far. In fact, the last time I had been to one, I ran away in tears. (Okay, yes, so I cry all the time; what else do you expect from a pubescent teenaged 38 year old girl?)

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I have decided that I need to start recording my dreams. I came to this decision after chatting with my girlfriend last night, who is a skilled lucid dreamer. I’ve only ever known one other person who was a lucid dreamer, and he used to post his dreams here in LiveJournal every day. I used to have lots of dreams where I flew, but that was mostly back in the mid 1990’s when I used to journal every day. Back then, when I was in Peace Corps, my dreams were also very vivid due to Mefloquine, but I think I was better at moving around in my dreams because I recorded them regularly. I am going to start doing this now so that maybe one day I can be a lucid dreamer like my girlfriend, who is absolutely awesome in every way.

So here is last night's dream:

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For the next two weeks, I worked very closely with a small team of implementing partners. Every day we went out to a school, interviewed parents, teachers, school directors, and kids, stopped just before noon, and came back for lunch at the Center, then took a two hour sieste, went back to schools again, and returned by 7 for a family style dinner. It began to feel more and more like a real family to me; I really loved staying in the Center, hearing Pere Claudio's stories, listening to the Burundians and Italian volunteers teasing and flirting with each other. And non of them had any inkling that I was trans. After dinner I usually went back to the office to work a little and hang out with the other young people. It was really great. The best thing about the whole trip was that I had plenty of space in the afternoon to go to my room and dilate peacefully. Yes, I still have to do this, even a year and half after surgery. I think I was in better shape during those two weeks than I have been during most of my post op time.

The youth center is a fantastic oasis of peace in the middle of the grinding poverty of the northern sector of Bujumbura. To symbolize peace, Pere Claudio has hung the Italian Pace flags everywhere. I mean EVERYWHERE. So when I was welcomed home for dinner every night, I entered the gates that were hung with rainbow flags. Yes, that's right. Rainbow flags hanging on every wall. I spoke with Silvia, one of the Italian volunteers, about this, and she said that in Italy the peace movement had been warned that someone else was already using the rainbow flag, but they decided to use it anyway, and change the dark blue to a light blue and write PACE in white letters. Still looks queer to me!

Every day that I went out with my two colleagues, I heard more heartbreaking stories. I interviewed at least 50 people, and heard over and over how the girls don't have enough food to eat, get treated like Cinderella by the people they live with because they are orphaned by AIDS or war, they have to walk an hour to school every day and are late because they have to do all the household work and take care of the younger kids in the morning, and the stories just went on and on. On top of that, at the high school level the schools dock them points for being late, really just an excuse to pick on the poor kids. In all of the schools, children are chased away if they don't have school supplies because they are too poor. Then they take a test at the end of sixth grade to determine if they will continue in school, and most people don't pass it because the classrooms are 100 kids to one teacher, 4 students share 1 book, and no one can take books home. Even worse, the curriculum is completely messed up. They have split it between English, Kirundi, Swahili, French, Etude du Milieu, and Math, with instruction in Kirundi for the first 4 years. Then, for 5th and 6th grade, instruction is suddenly in French, and so the children then have to struggle in essentially a foreign language school where even the teachers don't master the language. At the end of these two years, their future is determined by a test in French. This year's test was actually fixed so that so many points were given to French questions that almost no one passed it. What was the point? To make sure that only the rich kids who hear french spoken around them have a chance?

So now I am writing my report. It feels like so much happened during these two weeks, but it was mostly work.

On the flight from Brussels to Bujumbura, I was seated next to an American Missionary who was flying with a Burundian man who had apparently been featured in a book. She told me that she had to be very careful, because he did not want other people to know who he was. Apparently, he had played some role in helping keep people from being killed during the war, but there were still threats to his life. We chatted a little bit about the different genocidal crises we had known in various countries, and then hours later it was time to land.

I walked down the steps and found myself directly on the tarmac, as is often the case after African flights. It was late evening in Bujumbura, and I knew that the Centre Jeunes Kamenge staff would be outside waiting for me.

Passing rapidly through customs, I emerged into the large domed terminal, and saw signs for other passengers. Nope, don't see Kamenge Youth Center, I thought. I waited, walked around, went inside and outside, and still no one there for me. I was a little bit scared at this point. Had something gone wrong? Couldn't anyone tell that I was a disoriented Westerner and not an African?

Eventually, a skinny young man in shorts came walking up to me. "Rolande?" he asked. "Oui, Oui! C'est moi!" "Je m'excuse, Guillaume avait dit d'aller chercher une blanche!" Of course that had happened. I had spoken with Guillaume on the phone, and he had of course assumed that I was white. So when they sent René to get me, of course he was looking for a white woman, and totally ignored me. Welcome back to Africa! Yes, this is what I went through for two years previously. I may not be white, but I am still mixed-race enough to stand out as not quite local, so that is probably why he realized eventually that this was the American.
It's always a problem for black Americans in Africa; we don't have the same class privileges that white people do that allow them to do their work easily. Their skin gives them authority; ours just makes people stare in confusion.
We chatted in the car with the other people from the center, and then went directly to Centre Jeunes.
When I arrived, I was greeted by a bizarre sight: a long table was laden with food in the dining room, and on the other side of the table sat Santa Claus in a tropical shirt and no red cap. To either side of him sat local young men. It looked like the Last Supper with Santa and his black elves. "Mangia, Mangia!" Of course. This was Pere Claudio, the Italian priest who had saved hundreds of Burundians by standing in the way of the death squads who had come to kill the young Hutus or Tutsis during the civil war, whichever group was the target that week. He was famous for running Peace and Reconciliation workshops. So, I sat down and ate, explaining that I was vegetarian but that I would try to eat fish if it were necessary. Afterwards,I went to the office, and the italian volunteer, Silvia suggested that I call my family to let them know I had arrived. I didn't really want to, but I finally decided to call and leave a message. This was the first time I had called the house phone at my parents' house in four years. And then I went to bed.

to be continued.

As I sat on the plane, faintly terrified, I continued to listen to Lady Gaga, steeling my spine and remembering that I am brave, strong, born to survive, and all around just so audacious and daring that of course I would dare to do what I was doing. I went over in my head all those times I had been told that I was too gay, too flaming, too airheaded to succeed, and guess what? I would show them all! My transgender behind was on its way into a country that had outlawed LGBT people last year, and by golly, I would help them and make them glad to see me, all without their even knowing that a tranny had waltzed in in broad daylight. Snap!

This was my first trip back to Africa in 13 years. My eyes teared up as I watched the ocean roll by underneath. I remembered my last trip from Peace Corps, when I had left Cote d'Ivoire forever; I had cried on the plane as that adventure had ended, and feared that I would never be able to return. That is when I had decided to do everything in my power to get back in the development game. Now, here I was, much stronger, fully female. But did I know how to be a woman in Africa? I had never done that before. The last time, I had been a flaming queen. The day before my departure, I had asked one of my female colleagues about high heeled shoes and other things like that. What should I bring? How formal should I be dressed for certain settings? "You have your experience from Peace Corps, don't you? You should already know these things," She replied. "You should just go with that." She is an RPCV herself, but like the rest of my office, has no idea that I am transgender. If they had known, I am sure they would not have been as nonchalante about sending me to Africa.

Eventually,I found that I was sitting with a family from Cote d'Ivoire, of all places. There was a mother and her two sons, aged 2 and 4. As darling as they all were, I did not get much sleep because the active boys just wanted to play. But this was absolutely perfect. I chatted with the mother about life in Abidjan, figured out where they lived in relation to our old house in II Plateaux, reminisced about attieke, alloco, and great dance music, and began to feel like my old self again. I was now speaking Ivoirian french like any Abidjanaise, and we even began to speak Dioula together. The woman told me her husband was from Aboisso, the province I had lived in, but I think he was a Dioula too and didn't speak Agni. This non-coincidence was a sign to me that I was indeed on the right track, that in some ways I was going back to complete my Peace Corps work in a certain sense, and that I was now much stronger in my identity.

The plane arrived in Brussels, and I threw my blue pashmina across my shoulders, adjusted the shoulder strap on my laptop case, put on lip gloss, and proceeded to walk through the Belgian airport in sophisticated, world-traveling NGO-girl fashion. Now that I was in Europe, I slipped into French, put on my Parisian persona from 1994, and promptly found myself in a crowd of young American girls apparently on either a study abroad trip or some service activity. They were loudly American. I came behind them in line and ordered my breakfast in French, then slipped back to English again to chat about the outrageous exchange rate. Shortly afterward, we got in line to board the plane. The Americans were continuing on to Nairobi, but I and many of the others were going to Bujumbura. I looked around at the faces, very different from the ones I was used to seeing in West Africa. Was that man a Hutu? Was that woman a Tutsi? I had read our files before my departure and was very aware that Burundi was no picnic. The country had been convulsed by the same crisis that had struck Rwanda, but they didn't get the attention for it. The same genocides and mass killings, uprisings by Hutus against Tutsi ruling classes had happened in Bujumbura. What was I going to encounter when I landed?

To be continued.