Sponsor Families in Need for Christmas

The Christmas season is here and everyone is cheerfully (but frantically!) running around preparing for parties, gift exchanges and dinners. But there are many clients here at the Partnership who aren't so cheerful. Many are not expecting a visit from Ole St. Nick this season because of crisis in their lives. That's why the Partnership does a large-scale gift drive every year to collect gifts for our clients who are not as fortunate. This gift drive is called the Holiday Cheer Campaign.

Elder men and women living at home alone, victims of domestic violence living in shelter with their children, and many others who are dealing with family or personal crisis need help to provide a little bit of Holiday Cheer this year.

Anyone can sponsor an individual or family simply by calling Partnership Volunteer Coordinator, Rosemary Miller, at (423) 697-3830 or emailing her at rmiller@partnershipfca.com. Rosemary will match you with a "Wishlist for Santa" and you shop for the client just as you would shop for your spouse, best friend, or child. Drop your items off at the Partnership's 1800 McCallie Avenue office by December 15 and our own little elves will deliver the presents. It's that easy!

Of course, if you do not like to shop you can still help out. Simply visit partnershipfca.com and make an online donation to be used to purchase the client's wishlist items. Same end result - no shopping required!

Many are in need this year, and sponsorships are lower at this point than they have been in previous years. We sure could use your help.

Merry Christmas!

Domestic Violence Kills

Many of you have heard about the tragic murder of a local woman at the hands of domestic violence. The Partnership's Crisis Services is still reeling from the news. We want to tell as many people as possible that help is available to them and their families. We want them to know about our 24/7 Crisis Hotline that provides confidential, often life-saving assistance, to victims of domestic violence. Victims do not have to suffer. Please call (423) 755-2700 if you are being abused. Someone is available at all times to help you and your family get to safety. You don't have to hurt anymore.

CRISIS HOTLINE 423-755-2700

Celebrate Recovery Today - National Alcohol and Drug Addiction Recovery Month

There are over 23 million Americans currently being treated for drug and alcohol addiction. They are on the road to recovery. This is the 20th year celebrating National Alcohol and Drug Addiction Recovery Month. Partnership Counseling Center joined the celebration today starting with a march across the Walnut Street Bridge and ending with a community presentation at Miller Plaza. Both city and county mayor offices recognized today's celebration with proclomations.

More important though, have been the stories recovering addicts have shared publicly today. As I sit here writing this now, a local artist is sharing his story of recovery and how CADAS helped him rebuild his life. A previous recovering addict, who was an attorney previously, shared his story of addiction to meth. A local nurse shared how she quite smoking after 35 years and reminded the audience that nicotine is also a drug. One consistent message of all the recovering addicts was that help is out there.

The Partnership Counseling Center is one of the many resources in Chattanooga. Cal 423-697-7130 to schedule a confidential appointment.

DWTSC Thank You to Supporters

Thanks to everyone who participated in some way in Dancing with the Stars Chattanooga! Saturday night was amazing! We had nearly 900 people in attendance, packing the Tivoli and Tivoi Centre for what had to be the best after party. Our own Lynda Hood raised over $7,000 to win the Fan Favorite Award - with all her proceeds benefiting the Partnership's Sexual Assault Center.

Alexis Bogo won the Dancing Champion Award, receiving high scores from the judges and a ton of votes from the audience. Her Fred Astaire instructor and partner was Kyle Barel. Way to go guys.

It was a close race for everyone. And everyone did such a great job. Josh McManus called on his Elvis alter ego, Ed Harrison was a Womanizer, Kelly Brexler nailed her finishing position (as seen in Sunday's Times Free Press!), and Dr. Marc Cromie pulled out all the stunts to Bring Sexy Back.

And if you haven't hears already, our guest star Maxsim Chrmerkovskiy auctioned off his pants for a whopping $2,100 -- and then sold another pair for the same price! He and Nicole Volynets were such professionals, and their dances were amazing!!

Can't wait to start planning for next year. Not sure how we'll top nearly 1,000 people in one of the city's best venues - with one of the best DWTS performers. But I bet you we'll do it!

Last week for tickets and voting!

Hi guys! This is the last week to buy your tickets to the much anticipated event, Dancing with the Stars Chattanooga. Tickets are selling fast so don't miss your chance to see Max from ABC's Dancing with the Stars as well as your local dancers. This is also the last week to send in your fan vote for your favorite dancer.

So, don't miss out and visit dancingwiththestarschattanooga.com now!

Check Out Our Moves

Our six local star dancers have been rehearsing for weeks in preparation for the June 26th DWTSC event and we have a little rehearsal footage for you to see! Each day this week, and each week leading up to June 26th, we'll have a little sneak peek for you. These are just little glimpses of our dancers' progress from beginning to end of their practices at the Fred Astaire Dance Studio. Music has been edited so the final performances will be surprise. Click on the video links to the right and ENJOY!

Dancing with the Stars Chattanooga - The Beginning of Fan Favorite Voting

Our dancing stars are practicing in back-to-back sessions now. Working through choreography with the instructors at Fred Astaire, trying on their dancing shoes for the first time, deciding on their music selection (which is going to be great, I have to tell you), and thinking about costuming. And let me remind you that each of our stars have full-time jobs. So it's not as if they have a lot of free time right now. Yet they still keep showing up to practice and take whatever is thrown at them, all to make sure DWTSC is a great event and a great fundraiser for the Partnership. And, I suppose, to make sure they don't trip up in front of 1,600 people at the Tivoli.

You would think that's enough to handle, right? But we're talking about our Chattanooga Stars. And these folks always go the extra mile. That's how they've become community leaders in their own fields. So it's no big deal for them to already be getting geared up for the DWTSC Fan Favorite Award contest.

The Fan Favorite Award will go to the dancer who receives the most pre-event votes for them. The contest puts the "fun" back in "fundraising" by allowing fans to make a donation that will directly support a specific program area of the Partnership, while also voting for their favorite dancer. The results are updated nightly on each dancer's bio at www.dancingwiththestarschattanooga.com . Fans can vote by text, by online donation, or by giving donations directly to the dancer if they so choose.

And each dancer seems to be developing their own campaign. Take Ed Harrison for example. He's set up a new Facebook page and has already received the first two online votes of the event! Ed is also donating his two free Green Room tickets (a.k.a. best seats in the house!) to one of his supporters who makes a donation over $20. We will randomly select a Fan before the event to receive the tickets. So make sure to check out his page and show your support.

Check back here regularly for event updates and comments from our dancers!

Day 6 Friday

Friday My Last Day Tennessee Here I come

The Mix Club for Kids

I think today was my favorite day. Samuel came and picked me up and took to me to the Mix Club that he works at some afternoons near Duha. It is like a Rec Center and right in the middle of the Pentagon. Great name huh? The Pentagon is a housing project that mostly Gypsies live in and there are a lot of drugs in the area. Samuel says people in the community are afraid of people who live in the Pentagon. Aren't we all, maybe for different reasons.

Anyway, I was quite alarmed to hear the first rule of the club. Children must smoke outside. .... Yes you heard it right. It is a reality here. It is illegal to sell to children under 15 but many children under 15 smoke. Wow. Again the walls were painted, you can see where they painted the outside. Samuel gave me a cd of songs that 2 boys, ages 14 and 16, made singing gypsy and slovak songs. It was amazing. They were so good. Very professional. If I were smart enough I would put some of it on the blog. I think it can be done... maybe.

Then we visited my young friends Rene and Kevin from my last visit 3 years ago. They are now in a children's home outside Bratislava. I did not know if they would remember me, but I was hoping. Of course I took them Tennessee Volunteer Football hats. What kind of person would I be if I didn't.... right? They were very pleased. Rene said he would come to Tennessee and play foot ball. Rene remembered me, he is the same age as my son Noah, but Kevin who is the age of my son Joel did not. Rene had used up most of my video tape during my visit to Duha and remembered using my camera. The other children at the home had many questions about America. They wanted to know if I knew Tu Pac and 50 Cents. Apparently rap is very big among teens. Samuel says among gypsy children rap and gangs are a very popular image of America. Not much to be said for that.

I gave the boys my card and told them to learn English and they can email or write to me. I hope they will finish school.

The last event of my day (before packing and flying home to my wonderful family) was to meet Eva and Igor her husband in the old city for a very important reception for the former Prime Minister (I think- anyway he was very important) who had written a book with the former PM from the Czeck Repbulic. It was a policical event and a book signing all in one. Igor works for him which is how I got a special invitation. It was very interesting. After the speeches, they christened the book. I can't think of any other way to say it. They took water and poured it over the book like a christening.

Here is a famous actor I don't know and the former Prime Minister getting ready to pour water on the book.

Last but not least, I saw the people watcher in his window again today. I have looked for him every day to no avail, but today he was there. A very nice ending to a great week. I am very thankful to the Partnership, Chattanooga Rotary Club, Bryan College and Dennis Miller who helped make this week happen. I hope some community change begins to occur and that maybe I have planted some seeds. Chow - See you in Chattanooga

Day 5 Bratislava On the Downside Now

Flowers in the park

Brana di Zivota "Gate to the Life" was a great visit today. I met with the Director Gabriella and her staff. Two of them spoke English which helped. They have a similar program to the Partnership shelter and serve 12 women with children. They also have a children without parents shelter and house young people aging out of shelter care.

As throughout my trip, the thing that I was interested in was how they collaborated with other programs in the community to lobby for funding and to create a coalition to speak for victims rights. That is a very new concept here, so maybe I planted some seeds. I hope so. Education and prevention of domestic violence; rape; homelessness and other social issues are not high on priority lists partially because there are few staff to do the work (which I totally understand). But I am also not sure there is full recognition of how prevention can be related to education efforts. They do not do psycho-educational groups on domestic violence with the women in their shelter with topics about the cycle of abuse; indicators of abuse; effects on children; safety planning etc. These issues are usually worked on one on one in meetings with the psychologist. I encouraged them to do the classes with all women they work with. Very important concept because domestic violence impact everyone.

They would like for me to send them our support group program on domestic violence. I am very excited about that.

Eva and a few of her class

In the afternoon I taught a class for my friend Eva Havelkova at the University Performing Arts. I talked about the Partnership and our project in Slovakia, but I focused my topic on the history of the oppression of women; domestic violence; rape and dating relationships. They were quite amazed at some of the things I said. They do not talk about those issues here and especially dating violence. I brought some cards I received from the Tennessee Coalition against Domestic and Sexual Violence created through the TNBLUE.org website. the students had never seen anything like it. We briefly talked about rights in a dating relationship... again a very foreign concept.

I focused on how important my understanding of my history was to how I create change in my community. Many of the students here do not even learn about being under communism and it was only 20 years ago. They do not know about oppression and it is not taught to them to my understanding. So.... I gave them a lesson in oppression and civic responsibility. I asked Eva later if I could be arrested for the things I may have said. Not since 1989.

Later in the day as I was walking back to the boat I saw some of the most beautiful flowers in bloom and then a saw some people rowing. Life here is not as fast paced as at home. Even though the week will soon be over, the hours are not frantic ,filled with due dates; PQI reports; grants due; too many meetings to attend; and never ending work with no time to complete it. It has been so nice to put that away for a week and focus on one thing at a time and enjoy each moment of time not worrying about the next one. However, I miss my family and can't wait to seem them Saturday. It seems like a month since I hugged and kissed my boys.

Day 4 Wednesday.

Bratislava Day 4

check out the artwork on these shelter walls.

A very busy day. I was up at 8 and it is not almost midnight. I have not slowed down today and tomorrow will be similar. Dasa took me to Majak today. Wow. I met the social worker, who explained their program and showed me around. Check out the walls. Its that way all over the shelter. They have 60 women currently being sheltered and 25 children. My staff won't believe this but the social worker is the only one who works with them like our case managers at the Partnership. So the ratio is 1 to 60 compared to 1 to maximum 5 or 6. Hmmm. We think we are overworked Ouch. The program is very similar in ways to ours.

One thing that struck me was the expressed need to control things. We also discussed the cycle of violence and in many cases alcohol and drugs are blamed on domestic violence here. I shared my first encounter with the Lenore Walker books on domestic violence and the cycle of violence. I shared that I believe that those things exacerbate the behavior but they do not cause it and if we let it be an excuse we are not holding abusers accountable.

We also discussed the importance of education as a key to prevention and changing the environment of complacency in Bratislava. No one seems to think domestic violence is a big deal, not my problem. Again the issue of funding came up. With no coalition of programs, there are no strong lobbying voices to help speak out for social issues, funding and services.

It seems that economic growth is more important than social issues. I think when the social issues are sleeping in the mall entrance or asking for handouts in the mall, maybe things will change. I think when women and children die at the hands of abusers because no one thinks is their problem; I think when someone important's family is impacted by domestic violence, things will change. I think when the daughter of an important person is raped, things will change. I ask myself, why does it have to be this way. And then I think...isn't that what happened here in America; Tennessee and yes Chattanooga and sometimes still happens.

It was great to see this very large shelter and know that women are being helped at least for now.

After my visit, I went to buy tennis shoes and chocolate. My feet will be eternally grateful. Then I met my great Friend Eva Havelkova and Dasa and we went to see the opera Faust. It was a tragedy. Very sad. I had forgotten my college literature. Even with the Italian song and Slovak translation it was still sad. Tomorrow I go to Brana de Zivota and visit another shelter and then will lecture at Eva's class at the University. Chow

Dancing with the Stars Chattanooga - Big Announcement Coming!

We have a big announcement coming this Saturday that we are just soooo excited about! If you came to the Partnership's Dancing with the Stars Chattanooga event last year, you know what a great time was had by all. This year's event is going to be even bigger and better in so many ways! We have six WONDERFUL dancers from the local talent pool known as Chattanooga. We have a sizzling special guest dancer from the actual ABC hit show, Dancing with the Stars. If you loved Tony Dovolani and Elena Grinenko last year, you will surely love our guest star this year!

We have a new venue which will maximize the performance, and will provide LOTS of seating to accomodate everyone who wants to see the show! We sold out last year, over two weeks before the event.

Make sure to check our website at www.partnershipfca.com this Saturday - May 1st - to see who our guest dancer is and who our local performers will be! Also - make sure to pick up a copy of Chatter Magazine and the Times Free Press for these special announcements.

Many thanks to our presenting sponsor, First Tennessee, for making this event possible. And to the Chattanooga Times Free Press for print sponsorship of DWTSC 2010!

Bratislava Day 3

See you Soon.Some things are the same no matter where you go in the world: families, adults relaxing in a park, children playing in a park or trying to feed the birds, dandelions (I saw some today), relationships beginning and ending, birth, death. Some social issues are the same too. We see domestic violence, sexual assault, child abuse, homelessness, hunger in every country.

I took a picture of St. Michael's Tower which is so beautiful to me but on closer look....

I saw this homeless man in the archway. Later when I was walking across the bridge to Petrazalka I saw two more homeless men sitting under the freeway on the sidewalk in what looked like they were preparing for the night. Erie Chapman, the author of Radical Loving Care, advances the idea of the Good Samaritan and the idea in the story is the golden thread that is found in every great faith through history as well as the humanitarian tradition. He says that "love not only sits at the center of humanity but that love can be present in all people and all things." He also says that charitable work is sacred and that "without the guidance of love humanity is degraded to lower forms of living... and human life itself lacks meaning". Pretty heavy stuff, huh.?

Homeless people are in every country, around the world.

I did do some relaxing stuff today. I walked forever and soaked up with my eyes so much architecture, beauty and sense of history and awe. There is this feeling in my brain like I get when I am traveling I24 from Nashville to Chattanooga just past Monteagle Mountain and I see the mountains to the right. It always takes my breath away in Spring and Fall.

On a practical note, I have figured out how to stay cool in the Botel. I have taken out the entire window. American ingenuity. Much cooler. I have also started my own little travel guide for Women Travelers (who are not the jet-setting type if you know what I mean on a social workers salary). A few of them are: 1) always bring tennis shoes; 2) always bring your own paper products and 3) always pack extra clothes in your carry on.

I am going to have to find chocolate for the 5th graders at Brainerd Baptist School and since they want chocolate, I bet the 2nd graders will too. I've been told to buy German Chocolate - not Polish. We shall see. I also must buy tennis shoes. My feet are killing me and I continue to trip. I tripped again today but did not completely fall down. Good catch.

I will be going to Majak Nadeje ( Lighthouse of Hope) tomorrow. I have gifts from the Partnership and look forward to our time together tomorrow. I finished my PowerPoint today for my lecture. It is a motivational piece on activism. Surprised? The rest of the week will be busy. It is late.

Good night.

Bratislava Day 2

Dasa

Day 2 Bratislava

Last night I went to dinner with Dasa (Dagmar), Paulko (her husband) and Samuel (our friend who visited Partnership from Duha). Dasa is the Director of the shelter and started it in 2006. Anyway, I fell down the stairs coming from my room to go and meet my friends. Luckily it was just the last stair, I did no serious harm, and I did not feel too unembarrassed. It's not like I will ever see any of the 7 or 8 strangers in the room who clearly did not speak English ever again. C'est la Vie. We walked to a nice restaurant and then up to the Castle (Hrad) Bratislava. There is a great deal of history in Bratislava.

The Castle was partially destroyed at one time by Napoleon Bonaparte and there are also remnants of a Roman Encampment also on the grounds of the castle. It has been repaired many times over many centuries going as far as the 9th century. Makes America seem very young by comparison. Okay,enough of the meager history lesson.

I must also tell you how much I miss my children, husband, cold drinks and ice. Europeans are not much for cold beverages and certainly not ice. I also know why you don't see huge percentages of obese persons in this part of the world as well. They walk everywhere or bike. Samuel bikes 10 miles to work every day. That's crazy I say. Common practice here.

Today I went to Duha and saw some of my colleagues from my previous visit. It was a good visit. they have hanging in the stair way the T-shirts from the T-Shirt project we did when I stayed in 2007. The children in the shelter do many types of wonderfully creative art which I hope to duplicate back home.

Their shelter has many of the same problems our shelter faces every day. They face funding cuts. Dasa told me if the government currently in power continues to cut social services like the Crisis Center they will close after next year. My very passionate opinion that I shared with Dasa and Samuel is that young people are not social activists. They don't vote based on my conversation with Samuel. If there is to be a future for domestic violence victims; rape victims; children who are abused; the homeless and others in need, the community (i.e. the young people) must become motivated to change the current climate of politics and not accept the status quo.

I only wish someone had talked to me about these issues when I was 2o. I wonder what I might have done with that power at such an early age. I see women like Dagmar and Eva Havelkova who believe in the rights of women and children and stand up for victims. I only wish there were an army of Dasa's and Eva's in Bratislava, making life safer for victims of domestic violence, human trafficking; child abuse; rape and other crimes. (Sorry I got on my soap box.)

I hope that things change here so Duha and the other centers can continue to make a difference the lives of women and children affected by domestic violence and homelessness. Much education is needed and Dasa does not have enough staff to do the daily operations of the shelter and outreach also. I know that story only too well. We suffer the same fate. Education is the key to prevention.

I feel so privileged to work and live in a country where I truly believe one voice can make a difference. We have to make our voices heard about violence against women and children. Men must take a stand against violence. While most individuals who abuse are men; most men are not abusers. Men can make the difference and help us change the world.

Well it is past my bed time. I have been to McDonalds for supper tonight and tomorrow have a free day. I will let you know how that turns out. Chow.

Bratislava and Domestic Violence

[Posted by Regina McDevit, Director of Crisis Services at the Partnership]
My first blog post. Ever....and I am doing it from another country. I have already had to figure out how to change the language at the top back to English from Slovenske. As my husband would say....computer literacy is a challenge for me. Please remember I am a novice.

I am so excited be visiting for the 3rd time, thanks to Dennis Miller; Bryan College and the Chattanooga Rotary Club and of course the Partnership. I have had the privelege and honor to consult with programs working with victims of domestic violence in Bratislava for 4 years. Domestic violence and other forms of violence against women are very much a thriving activity across the world. Sadly, many countries are 20 to 30 years behind the United States.

The Bratislava programs and my good friend and human rights expert Eva Havelkova is interested in quality of services that the Partnership provides to victims and the multi service aspect. There are no agencies similar in Slovakia.

I have worked with the Duha Shelter since 2007 and can't wait to see all of my friends there this week.

I arrived yesterday and my luggage arrived today (for which I am very grateful). I can now dry my hair and use my curling iron and computer. I have had only one altercation with a taxi driver who was not happy when I did not believe he was giving me a good price to my hotel. Thankfully my friend Dagmar and her husband showed up right after that and I did not have to discuss the matter any longer. I am trying to figure out the Euro and think I may have been ripped off but since I can't count it I don't know. I shall ask Samuel, our friend from Duha that visited Partnership in February, about the currency.

I saw this dog looking out the window on my way to the old city center today. He was people watching.

Tomorrow I hope to visit one of the shelters. I will also visit 2 young brothers about the ages of my sons. They were at Duha shelter last visit and now they are in another shelter. I hope they remember me. They were abandoned by their parents and have no one to care for them. There are 2 new domestic violence shelters in Bratislava since my last visit. That is good news. I shall keep you posted on my adventures.

The Dogwood Shop

If there was ever a time for thriftiness, it’s now. Luckily, there are entire shops devoted to thrift where you can go to save money for more important things like food and rent. If you’ve lived in Chattanooga for any time at all, you know where to find the big thrift stores, but they’re not the only ones around. One of the smaller stores, the Dogwood Shop in Hixson, is actually run by the Partnership. I paid a visit to the Dogwood shop recently and spoke to Sue, the proprietor, and Betty, one of her many volunteer workers.

Dogwood has been around for sixteen years, and Sue has worked there for eleven of those. It was originally owned by The Cancer Society, then it changed to Lutheran Services, and last February marked the store’s fifth year with the Partnership. The transition from Lutheran Services to the Partnership was smooth according to Sue. She told me that the Partnership is a good organization that lets her do her own thing, which seems to be working for her.

Besides Sue, the Dogwood Shop is staffed by elderly volunteers. Many of her volunteers, including Betty, have been at the shop for close to ten years, almost as long as her, and a few have been there even longer. Some are in their 80’s and still working for the simple joy of it, but most of them are around 70. Betty takes clothes and other crafts home and mends them, and her husband pitches in as well by fixing watches and performing any technicall work he can get his hands on. “If he can fix it he will,” Sue said. He often mends jewelry, and he recently repaired a manger made out of olive wood by meticulously cutting new pieces to replace the ones that had broken away.

“They’re just wonderful ladies,” Sue said. “They do what they like to do.”

They must like what they do (after all, they’re still volunteering when they don’t have to work any more) but that doesn’t mean that their work is easy. “We work very hard to keep everything looking nice,” Sue said. Everyone pitches in with mending and cleaning – and make no mistake, everything needs to be mended or cleaned. If you buy something from the Dogwood Shop, you can rest assured that it has been thoroughly washed, disinfected, scrubbed, washed again, steamed, ironed, stitched, and patched.

They sell more than linens, clothes and decorations though – a whole wall and another shelf near the counter was full to bursting with every kind of book. The Grumpy’s that used to be next door to the shop has moved, and McKay’s recently moved farther away from most of the area’s customers as well, which has led to slightly increased book donations. This is good for us bibliophiles because Dogwood’s markup is noticeably less than the two big used bookstores.

There isn’t a lot of rhyme or reason to the donations that the shop gets and the business they do, but a few things can be counted on: inclement weather is bad for business, as is the Christmas season, oddly enough. They do the best business at the beginning of each season, when people are repurposing their wardrobes to the changing temperatures, but Spring and Summer, when people are having yard sales and donating anything left over, are the peak.

As with everything else, the Dogwood Shop has been hurt by the recession. This didn’t make sense at first (after all, what better time to shop at a thrift store than an economic climate that requires thriftiness) but Sue reminded me that most of a thrift store’s clientele shop there no matter what, and a recession means that that customer base often goes from having just enough money to shop at stores like Dogwood to having almost none.

On a lighter note, McCallie recently donated sixty-five prom dresses to the Dogwood Shop. There were fifty left when I spoke to Sue, but it’s been a few weeks since then. There should still be some left though – she told me that their sizes ran small, which was keeping them from flying off the shelves. Still, I had a look at them, and there isn’t a thing wrong with them. If prom isn’t already over and you or a girl you know doesn’t already have a dress, you can’t go wrong taking a look at Dogwood’s selection.

Homemaker Services

“A test of a people is how it behaves toward the old. It is easy to love children. Even tyrants and dictators make a point of being fond of children. But the affection and care for the old, the incurable, the helpless are the true gold mines of a culture.”
–Abraham J. Heschel

The first program I looked at when I started writing for the Partnership was the Elderly and Disabled Victims Program, and in my post on it I talked about how important it is to take care of the elderly – if not out of respect then at least through the selfish realization that we will all be in their shoes given enough time. There is more to caring for the elderly than saving them from abuse though, and the Partnership provides more long-term care through its Homemaker Services.

I recently met up with Sheryl Dungan, a caseworker with Homemaker Services, and shadowed her while she worked. She explained to me that homemakers visit clients once or twice a week to help with cleaning, groceries, laundry, meals, and access to community resources to help with things like bills, expenses and room and board. They also drive clients to doctor visits, pick up their medicine, help with essential shopping for items such as clothing, and write out checks. Clients don’t always need all of these services, but they are all available. Each of the program’s homemakers is attached to one of its two caseworkers, who in turn visit clients regularly to make sure that adequate service is being provided in addition to organizing and coordinating the work of the homemakers. “Our goal is to keep them at home,” she said, “to maintain self-sufficiency.”

On this day Sheryl was checking up on a very special client named Roberta. Roberta has devoted her whole life to caring for others – she has raised a whole generation of foster children and was herself a homemaker until she was 78 years old. I was too polite to ask how old she was, but she gave me her birthday and let me do the math*. She is so used to helping others that she has trouble sitting back and letting others do for her now, but when I met her she was so tired from a marathon church session the night before (she still sings in the choir) that her protests were more playful than anything.

Roberta’s homemaker is Brenda, an affable woman in scrubs who works harder in a day than I do in a week and complains much less, but that could be said about almost anyone at the Partnership. Brenda’s been with the program fifteen years, during which time she has only seen one man hired. She winked as she told me that she’s also seen one man quickly leave because he couldn’t handle the work (Eat your heart out Mike Rowe). She worked in a nursing home before coming to Homemaker Services, and while we all understand that nursing homes are sometimes necessary, her experience with them is part of what drives her to do everything she can to keep her elderly clients living in their own homes. She also explained to me what’s entailed in essential shopping; it’s not just food and medicine, it’s also things like books. Books might not seem necessary, but one of her clients is on dialysis, and without his books to read he would be stuck at the hospital staring at a wall for hours on end.

Brenda took a break when we arrived, and we all sat down around Roberta. The three of them spent a long time talking about their experiences as homemakers, remembering triumphs and failures (the latter are surprisingly few), as well as moments of laughter and sadness and the strange hybrids of the two that working with the elderly can often bring. So many of their stories ended with one of them asking, “Whatever happened to her?” and another softly saying, “They passed on,” that I had to ask how they deal with the constant loss that goes hand-in-hand with serving a population at the twilight of life. The recipe seems to be a potent mix of faith and a very stubborn sort of grace, but they’re still not immune to the effects of death. “That’s the most painful thing for all of us,” Brenda said about clients who pass on.

They also told me that the program’s funding is in danger – there is a very real possibility that at the end of this contract year Homemaker Services will no longer be able to pay two caseworkers, which will mean a loss of service for vulnerable elders as far away as Rhea County. That was something to be worried about another time however, because now was the time for work. I would like to say that I did a lot to help, but by the time I had changed Roberta’s linens the floors had been mopped and vacuumed and the garbage and laundry had been carried out - I felt a little useful all the same. As Sheryl and I prepared to leave, Roberta took our hands, smiled, and said, “Thank you, I love you, sweeties.”

We love you too, Roberta.

“Resolve to be tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant with the weak and the wrong. Sometime in your life you will have been all of these.” –Dr. Robert H. Goddard

*It’s 1918 if you want to play the home game.

Building Stable Lives

Unless you’re one of the richest 1% of Americans, you have probably been or felt poor at some point in your life. There is poor and then there is poor though, and while some of us might have had to suffer the embarrassment of reduced lunch and too-big hand-me-downs, or drafty one room apartments and a steady diet of ramen and rice, I hope that most of us will never wonder if, without help, without some intervention, we might starve, might lose our homes, might not be able to give our children the basics for living let alone a prosperous life.

But this is the reality of life for many people in America, far too many – as of 2008, nearly 15% of American Households were food insecure. There are programs in place to help people without access to food, such as United Way’s 211, but 211 and other programs like it are stopgaps, meant to get people through brief periods of urgent need. Serious poverty is a relentless monster, however, and many people find themselves calling for assistance over and over in a given year. Obviously the help they’re receiving isn’t doing anything for the core problem, that circumstances in their lives have brought them to a place where they can’t acquire the basics of human survival.

One of the areas with the greatest number of repeat callers in Chattanooga is East Lake, which has some of the highest poverty and unemployment rates and lowest high school graduation rates in the city. In other words, the area is a perfect storm of all the factors contributing to poverty and hunger, and it has the fewest resources available to aid in these problems. But how can that be helped, other than giving people food and monetary aid? For Raquel Hidalgo and the “Building Stable Lives” initiative, the solution is – as usual – not a handout so much as a hand up.


The biggest problem facing most of the families she deals with is a lack of work, which takes not only a financial but a psychological toll as well. This has gotten worse recently, as rising unemployment leaves people of all educational backgrounds scrambling to find any employment, leaving the poor of areas like East Lake, who often don’t even have a GED, to compete for work with high school and college graduates. Construction, labor and production have been good sources of work for those without high school diplomas in the past, but few construction projects are initiated in an economic climate like this one and those are temporary anyway – once the building is finished the job is done. Labor and production have been dwindling for years, giving way to a service based economy as the industrial and agricultural work of our parents and grandparents is moved out of the country. The logical solution is to go back to school or at the very least get a GED, but when food is scarce, children are crying, and the stresses of living in poverty pile up on every side, it can be difficult if not impossible to rally the time or the psychological energy, let alone the money, to do so. This is where Raquel comes in: she helps families in crisis take inventory of their lives and shows them ways to work within their circumstances to pull themselves out of their current chaos.

One of the most important services she provides for her clients is showing them how to get a GED and, beyond that, how to achieve even higher levels of education. Many have begun the process of getting their GED, many have already gotten it, and a few have even enrolled in classes at Chattanooga State. She also gives her clients access to computers and shows them how to use them to find work and handle their resources – something that many of us consider incidental but which have become almost necessary for full participation in society, since even the lowest paying jobs are moving to exclusively handling the application process online. Little things like computer illiteracy can add up to a severe handicap, and helping with these problems is a large part of Raquel’s work.

But working and thinking, jobs and education, those are the keys. Those are the foundation around which all the other work, all the other assistance, is done, and it really is staggering the dignity that meaningful labor can bring a person who thought they were useless, the hope that education can bring do a mind that has been for too long turned inward in despair and frustration. What Raquel and the rest of the Partnership provide for the people they help is not a crutch or charity, but – as I’ve said over and over – empowerment and the freedom to be productive. I will leave you with a quote from The Grapes of Wrath that, to me, sums up exactly what we mean when we use the E word:

The last clear definite function of man-muscles aching to work, minds aching to create beyond the single need-this is man. To build a wall, to build a house, a dam, and in the wall and house and dam to put something of Manself, and to Manself take back something of the wall, the house, the dam; to take hard muscles from the lifting, to take the clear lines and form from conceiving. For man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.

Deaf Services

Finding a job is hard. Keeping a job once you’ve found one can be just as hard. I know how difficult these things can be firsthand, but until recently I’d never considered just how much more difficult they could be. I have spent a lot of time mulling over all sorts of privilege, but it was shocking to realize just how complacent I’d been in my own abled privilege. What if a prospective employer wrote me off immediately because they assumed I was incompetent due to a disability? What if that same employer wrote me off just because my presence made them uncomfortable? These are only a couple of the difficulties faced by PWDs (People With a Disability), but each disability comes with its own difficulties as well. What if, for example, I was perfectly qualified for a job but lost it because I couldn’t communicate with an employer who would rather take someone less qualified than expend any effort on communication? The difficulty of working or even living in an environment where communication is difficult or impossible was brought to my attention when I spoke with the women in the La Amiga program, but it applies to another group as well – the deaf.

One reason my abled privilege took so long to dawn on me, at least where deaf people are concerned, is that none of the deaf people I have ever met – admittedly not many – seemed “disabled.” In fact when left to their own devices or among other deaf people they got by just as well as anyone else. Sure, they couldn’t hear, but they had access to a sophisticated visual language capable of conveying just as much specificity and meaning as any vocal one, and in a culture as literate and digital as ours what else would a person really need hearing for other than speaking with hearing people? The only time the deaf people I knew seemed frustrated or ill-equipped was when they had to do that very thing, and even then their difficulties more closely resembled those of a foreigner than a PWD*.

Still, calling interaction with the hearing a deaf person’s “only” difficulty is a bit of a mischaracterization – they live every day of their lives in a culture built by and for hearing people who communicate through sound. If they’re lucky enough to live in a town of any size they will have access to a community of other deaf people to communicate with, but otherwise virtually everyone they meet, from cashiers to judges to mothers to friends, will not understand them or be understood by them. Also, because most of the social and emotional aspects of human communication are non-verbal and visual, they will be able to pick up on the annoyance, confusion, impatience, or pity in hearing people they try to communicate with.


This is unfortunate because no matter how competent a person is otherwise, a stumbling block this size can have drastic effects on their self-esteem and confidence, and once those are taken away self determination becomes almost impossible. Almost impossible and completely impossible aren’t the same however, and the Partnership is one of many groups across the country that offers services to help deaf people find employment, live independently, and regain and maintain confidence in their own abilities.

One such case is Olga Olegovna Sidlinskiy, a 17-year old daughter of a family of Russian immigrants, and one of nine children. She is the only member of her family who is deaf but even so, when her father became unemployed and her working-age siblings got jobs to support the family, Olga – who had never worked before - decided that it was only right to pitch in. However, she wasn’t sure what to do or how to do it until a staff member at the Harvest Christian Academy for the Deaf in Ringgold directed her to Sharon Bryant and the Partnership’s deaf services program.

It’s important to remember that deaf services, just like all of the Partnership’s other programs, works first and foremost to make it so that people won’t "need" help – empowering people to build better lives again. It would probably be easier (and cheaper) to hand people like Olga a proverbial fish and send them on their way, but they need to be fed for the rest of their lives. So Sharon opened her tackle box and got to work.

She helped Olga put together a resume, explained how the interview process works, and helped facilitate communication between Olga and her potential employers. Olga then went on, despite the abysmal state of the job market, to find work at an Olive Garden where her manager has nothing but praise for her and she is actually teaching her coworkers some signing. Like the other 36+ clients Sharon has helped in her two and a half years with the Partnership, Olga now has more than a job. She has something that most of the rest of us take advantage of every day: self determination.

*Speaking slower and louder works about as well on a deaf person as it does on, say, a Parisian, and it generally elicits the same reaction.

The Family Financial Counselor

Last February, almost exactly a year ago, U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said that there was, “a reasonable prospect that the current recession will end in 2009 and that 2010 will be a year of recovery.”

Whoops.

He was right, after a fashion: industrial production, manufacturing, trade and sales have all recovered from their recession nadirs. The problem is that most of us aren’t sharp-featured Randian captains of industry and as such aren’t in charge of industrial production, manufacturing, trade and sales – the only way we normies get a benefit from these recoveries is if they create jobs. And they haven’t. Unemployment is, in fact still on the rise. Even for those Americans who are secure in their jobs, pay cuts are a distinct possibility and any hope of a raise will likely need to be deferred for almost a decade.

Still, things could be worse – and they have been. This might be the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, but it’s still not actually the Great Depression. And anyway, isn’t part of the American character our ability to buckle down, slam our noses into the grindstone, grit our teeth, and shoulder through any adversity that rears its ugly head? Isn’t that what our parents, grandparents or great-grandparents (as the case may be) did during the 30’s? Surely we can do the same under somewhat easier circumstances, right?

Not without help, it turns out. Apparently most of us aren’t the same hard-nosed, leather-skinned, nail chewing paragons of the working class our forebears were, but that’s alright, because help is available in the form of Linda Rath, the Partnership’s Family Financial Counselor. I sat down with Linda recently and asked her a little about what she does with the Partnership.

My primary function is to work with families who are seeking services for the
first time ever in their adult lives. People who have always worked, always
managed to pay the bills, but now some crisis has hit. Because of the recession
they have been downsized or they’re still working at the same company but they
had to take a huge pay cut, or they’ve been living based on overtime and there
is no more overtime. So lots of situations are occurring out there where people
who are still employed are really underemployed and can no longer pay the bills.

It is Linda’s job to fix that last part, because it turns out that a lot of what people do while they’re working and in the weeks and months after they lose their job or take a hit in pay has a huge effect on how hard unemployment hits them. According to Linda, when most people find themselves suddenly unemployed or working for less money than before, they try as hard as they can to maintain the lifestyle they had before – which was just as unhealthy, as you will see below – through credit and high interest loans, assuming that something will come along to get them back where they were within a few weeks or months. I think you can guess how that usually turns out. Add to that, even when working decent paying jobs, financial responsibility is still pretty rare.

Half of all people in the United States actually spend more than they earn each
month – but they don’t really feel like they are in debt or stressed because
there’s always another paycheck coming, which is going to catch it up and
they’re going to be fine.

In addition to living paycheck to paycheck, around half of Americans also have very little to no savings, according to Linda. She says that it is absolutely vital to keep three to six months’ worth of reserve funds set aside at all times in case of an emergency or a bout of unemployment – something I should probably start doing. “It’s virtually impossible to go through your entire life without some period of unemployment,” Linda said.

This stuff should all be expected when it comes to financial troubles though, really. We hear about it in the news all the time. What you don’t hear about as much, and what surprised me, was when Linda told me that:

A number of the clients I’m dealing with have got children between the ages of
eighteen and twenty-two living at home with them contributing nothing to the
household, and they can’t afford to continue to support their children and
that’s part of what is an issue to them. They’re not going to school and they’re
not working.

I mentioned earlier that the reason we cope with economic downturn differently from our forebears is because we are essentially a different sort of people, but that’s not exactly true. We might have been raised with television and fast food, but deep down most of us are still just as proud and stubborn as the Americans of the 30’s – and that’s a problem in this case. One of the biggest obstacles for people seeking help with their money, even when homelessness is imminent, is shame. Once that first call is made, however, many of her clients set their teeth and get to work. “Half of the people I see need just one appointment. They need a wake-up call.”

I mentioned in my first post that part of what the Partnership does is to make sure that people don’t fall through the cracks in the first place, and I think this is an example. Just remember, if you lose your job or find yourself making much less than you did before, there are resources available. Linda told me that she loves her current work and that she wants even more people to call so she can help them. Why not give her a call if you think you could use some help or just your own wake-up call? It is free. The number is 423.421.1367.





MONEY LINKS



annualcreditreport.com - A credit reporting service that is actually free. This website provides, as mandated by the federal government, one free credit report per year.



fdic.gov - A good source for economic and financial news, but this site can also lead to a number of useful resources and tools.



moneychimp.com - A resource for people like me who honestly don't understand a lot about finances on the macro OR the micro scale. It also has a very handy debt calculator that can show you how to make the sorts of payments necessary to actually get out of debt.

The Vagina Monologues

WARNING: There are going to be words in this article that you might consider “bad.” These words mostly concern the female anatomy. You have been warned.

Editor's note: This performance of The Vagina Monologues benefited the UTC Women's Center Transformation Project and the Partnership's Sexual Assault Center. The intent of this post is to raise awareness of V-Day and the work of the Women's Center and the Partnership. Some content from the original post has been edited. For the full version, please contact hashley@partnershipfca.com.

I wasn’t looking forward to last weekend. Classes had been intense, the weather had blanketed the whole city in slate gray clouds with no sign of relief, and my legion of neuroses were piling up all at once – but that was par for the course, really. What finally tipped the scales was when I realized Valentine’s Day was coming.

(Is there a person on Earth who actually looks forward to Valentine’s Day? Don’t answer if you do - the rest of us might have to come deal with you.)

What was going to be a weekend spent entirely in my pajamas, curled up with a good video-game while I felt sorry for myself was changed at the last minute when I was asked to go check out the UTC Women’s Center and their production of the Vagina Monologues. Ordinarily I would have been excited to see the show. I consider myself a feminist, or a pro-feminist man, or whatever you want to call it, and I’d heard about Eve Ensler’s opus and missed two of the school’s previous annual performances. Remember that it was Valentine’s weekend however – unlike the rest of the year, I was more interested in moping and sighing than I was in social justice.

I went anyway, of course, because it’s kind of my job and honestly what else was I going to do? It would be a good excuse to get out of the house and be sad instead of being sad at home. It turned out that sitting at home was exactly what I would be doing on Friday night anyway thanks to another of this Winter’s sudden, city paralyzing bursts of snow. The next night, however, I arrived at UTC’s Fine Arts Center two hours early, met up with a group of women decked out in awesome pink shirts that read “Vagina!” and got to work.

Work, as it turned out, made use of the “skills” I picked up at terrible retail jobs that I thought I would never need again. We put out t-shirts from three different years of The Vagina Monologues where everyone could see them, as well as sign-up sheets for the Partnership’s "Walk a Mile in Her Shoes" event, and…nobody took the bait.

“Nobody’s buying any shirts,” Sara Peters, head of UTC’s Women’s Center, lamented.

Well of course they weren’t buying any shirts, we weren’t pushing the product*. It was time to see if I still had that retail magic, so I set to work! No-one who passed by that table was free from my aggressive tactics, not even classmates; the money from these shirts went to the Partnership and the Women’s Action Council after all, so decorum could take a back-seat as far as I was concerned.

“Would you like to take a look at our ‘This is what a feminist looks like’ shirts?” I said to a group of men, holding one up for display. “Use them to demonstrate fifteen dollars’ worth of devotion to gender equality, use them get points with a girlfriend, use them to keep relatives you don’t like from talking to you at reunions, use them to cover your abdomen if you’d like, they’re good for all that and more!”

“If you’re as excited about vaginas as I am after that show,” I said to a crowd of people I’d already tried once before the performance, “why not take another look at these fine shirts?” I waved my hand over our whole selection like Vanna White lighting up vowels and smiled. “All the profits go to causes that support vaginas and the people attached to them!”

I don’t remember exactly how many shirts we sold by the end of the night, but it was an integer greater than zero and we got some direct donations besides from particularly charitable theatre goers. So that was nice.

The main event was the show, though, and that’s where my weekend went from, “horrible mope-fest,” to “galvanizing reminder of the work left to do.” However, before I talk about UTC’s performance, some history is in order:

Eve Ensler didn’t intend to write a play at all when she took her first step down the road that would lead to the Vagina Monologues – she just wanted to have a dialogue with her friends. As the conversations with friends went on, she realized that these were things women desperately wanted and needed to discuss but felt too ashamed to or were simply prohibited from it in their daily lives. Then the friends started relating anecdotes from their friends, and friends of their own friends. And then the referrals began. By the time all was said and done, Eve had interviewed over 200 women about their vaginas, and so in 1996 the Monologues were born.

At first Eve performed all of the monologues herself, but within two years the show had become such a phenomenon that others wanted to get in on the action. This is how the V-Day event got started; Miss Ensler, who was approached after nearly every performance by women desperate to share their own anxieties and experiences of sexual violence, began working with Willa Shalit to organize a weekend centered around performances of the Monologues and other, similar works nationwide to raise money to benefit female victims of abuse and rape and to pursue an end to those phenomena. Twelve years later the Vagina Monologues and V-Day are still going strong, and have actually grown since their birth – the Monologues have added new sections over the years to reflect the developing concerns of women, and V-Day has spread out of New York to encompass not only the United States but the whole world.

While I knew about the Vagina Monologues before last weekend, I didn’t know about V-Day, which was tragic because it was exactly what I needed. I think it was what even more women needed, too. Valentine’s Day might be something that everybody cringes and mopes over, but a movement that seeks to co-opt the date in pursuit of social justice and freedom of women from violence? If you can’t get a little excited about that then I don’t really know what to say. Some people apparently criticize V-Day for being misandrist, or for trying to remind people of gender and sex-based injustice at a time when the sexes are supposed to be coming together in love, but I don’t think they get the point. Or maybe they’re the people who’ve never had trouble getting dates in February.

Anyway, back to the show! It started with three of the performers coming out to tell us a little about vaginas; namely, what they’re called all over this great nation of ours. This checklist got everyone laughing, and I think that might be part of the purpose of the show, to take us all back to that simple, childish state where people’s bodies simply existed, some were different from others, and we all had a good-natured giggle over how funny some of the words were before getting back to the important business of torturing our parents.

One of the monologues was a newer addition written by Eve Ensler about her witnessing the birth of her grandchild. It was remarkable to me for the same reason I imagine the experience it was based on was remarkable to her: I forgot that women can do that, and even when I think about it now the logistical and mechanical concerns are so great that I get dizzy. The whole process really is miraculous.

The monologues reflected the experiences of real women with their sexuality and their bodies, so while many of them tempered their grievances with humor, wit and whimsy some of them showed, just like the lives of many women in the world today, a history of the most gut-wrenching sorts of tragedy or oppression without much relief to speak of. There was the story of the Bosnian girl who fell victim to the systematic rape of the women in her country as a tactic of war, whose words still make my hands shake with grief. There was the Congolese girl who told the audience, through the frame of her two years as a sex slave, the eight rules necessary to survive such an ordeal. There was the story of the woman in the burqa, which is of course at the center a very complicated debate, but which reminded us that however we might feel about Islam and the dress and behaviors that sometimes follow from it, it is a religious choice and we are a nation that prides itself on religious tolerance. The problem, we were told, is that for a great many women the burqa and things like it are not a choice, and if the monologue was any indication of reality under those circumstances then my heart goes out to those women.

Look, the piece is controversial. It’s not politically correct. And I assume
people are going to have responses to it. I interviewed women, and I told
their stories. I didn’t make them up. People are going to have problems with
people’s stories.

For the record, I agree with Eve. Really you should see the show anyway, but that’s neither here nor there.

I still didn’t have a date for Valentine’s Day, but you know what? Who cares! I got to take part, even if it was a tiny little inconsequential part, in an even better V-letter event that made me happier than I’ve ever been on Valentine’s Day, even with a date. I think I’ve found my February holiday of choice from now on!

*I feel like every boss I ever hated just typing those words out.

THE VAGINA LINKS

Random House's Vagina Monologues Page
VDay.org

La Amiga

The program I am going to tell you about has recently been nominated to receive a "People's Choice Award" by WTCI's Be More Awards. To vote for Partnership please go to this link and vote for them for the People’s Choice Award! Read on to learn more.

Imagine for a moment that you are an immigrant in another country, a stranger in a strange land. You arrive, perhaps in the company of the man you married back home or perhaps to live with your new native husband. You’re probably poor, but your husband might have money. You don’t know anyone in this new place except your husband and possibly his family, and you don’t speak or understand a word of the language. For all intents and purposes, you are deaf and mute and invisible to everyone but your husband in this new place, utterly dependent on him with nowhere else to go, no-one else to turn to, and no way to communicate even if you did.

You might have married a good man, in which case you will be encouraged to learn the language of your new home, to make friends, to drive or find work if that is what you choose. He will make sure that your immigration is certified as soon as possible so that you are both citizens by law. Your children will go to school and grow up happy in your new life. Things don’t always work out this way though, and you didn’t marry a good man. Perhaps you come from a culture that arranges marriages or you simply had to cling to this man out of poverty or fear of trying to survive on your own, but he is anything but good. He hits you. He screams. He threatens, terrorizes, and demeans. He rapes you. If he is a legal citizen of your new home himself, he tells you that he could have you put in prison or deported if you make him angry or deny him anything he wants. If you have a child he might repeat all of these abuses on the child on top of promising that if you cross him or defy him at all he will make sure you and your child are separated forever. You are utterly alone, because he has done everything he could to keep your immigration status in limbo, he has isolated you so that you can’t learn the language of your new home, he has instilled a fear of everyone who could help you in your heart and, worst of all, depending on the culture you come from you might not even recognize that, at least in your new home, the things this man is doing to you are illegal and reprehensible.

There are resources and shelters out there for women in this situation, but they’re much more difficult to access; the already crippling obstacles that keep native women from reaching out for aid in abusive situations are compounded by language, cultural, and perceived legal barriers. But there is hope, in the form of La Amiga and the FVSS. La Amiga is an initiative within the Partnership to provide better, more thorough services for immigrant and non-English speaking women suffering from abuse, and since it began two years ago it has improved the lives of over 100 women who otherwise would have fallen through the cracks. The program received funding from the Community Foundation of Greater Chattanooga, and for that we thank them.

The services La Amiga provides seem like common sense when you think about them. At the core, all La Amiga really does is act as a combination of translator and caseworker for non-English speaking and especially Latina victims, but there is really more to it than that. She is familiar with the culture of the women she speaks with as much as she is with their language, and this does wonders when it comes to helping them. In addition, she has done things like put out Partnership fliers in Spanish so that Latinas can actually understand what is written on the ads and know how to get help*, created a video in Spanish that carefully walks women through the process of arriving at a shelter if they come at night or during another time when La Amiga or a translator isn’t present, and she makes sure that immigrant women trying to escape from abusive relationships understand that their husbands’ threats of deportation and separation from their children are not true as well as providing them with the resources to achieve full citizenship.

All of this appears to have worked. Before La Amiga nine out of every ten English speaking women who came to a shelter remained and made the transition to independence, whereas fewer than five in ten Spanish-speaking women did the same. Only seventeen Latinas sought any help at all in Shelters in 2007-2008. In 2008-2009 however, more than one hundred Latinas and other non-English speaking women (and don’t be fooled, she is as much a Chingu or a Mitr as she is una Amiga) sought assistance and nearly eighty-six percent of those women didn’t return to their abusers.

La Amiga’s name is Lydia Salva, and I sat down to speak with her recently about her work with the Partnership. Ms. Salva is an amazing, vivacious woman who has seen more of the world than most of us ever will. She is also remarkably humble for someone who has done so much to help so many people, but she explained to me that she doesn’t really do as much of the work as you might think. All she does for the women she helps is provide support and resources for them to use.

“The mission of the Partnership is, ‘Empowering people to build better lives,’ and I like that,” she said. “I think that’s good. The Partnership is an amazing team. They’re always training you, and they empower you to empower others.”

She told me a lot about the special concerns and threats facing immigrant women and especially Latinas that make them so vulnerable. “Statistically, the Latin American woman is the most abused woman in the United States, whether she’s married to an American or she’s married to a Latino,” she said. “Those three countries that have the highest rates of domestic violence are right here in Hamilton County.” The statistics back this up: the World Health Organization reports that nearly one in two women in Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras is a victim of domestic violence and that the most abused of all foreigners living in the U.S. are Latinas born abroad. Lydia was adamant, however, that domestic violence and abuse can’t be laid at the feet of race or culture or nationality and used as a scapegoat. “Domestic violence is not limited to a culture to a language or to a social status. It’s the same, and the pain is just as bad.” She mused that all sorts of things could contribute to the higher rates of violence in Latin America, from Catholic veneration of Mary encouraging women to suffer silently with dignity as part and parcel to motherhood to the pretty much constant oppression and abuse of native peoples and those descended from natives by Spanish colonists and their white descendants. She did mention that a lot of abuse is tied to unemployment and joblessness and that as we see unemployment rise in the U.S. we are seeing a rise in domestic abuse as well. “It’s not an excuse. None of this excuses it, but they are explanations,” she said.

I asked her about the men who do the abusing, about what she thinks feeds into it and what, if anything, can be done to help teach them to break the cycle of violence themselves. “A lot of these guys that are abusing, they were probably victims themselves. They saw their mom, their grandmother get beaten and they never got help. So, I’m not excusing it but I’m also looking at that. Hopefully we can help them. You have to somehow educate the woman but also educate men,” she said. “One day, when I was doing a presentation, there was a group of about fifty and there were only like ten women and most of these were Guatemalans. So, when I was talking about domestic violence some of these guys, their eyes just got bigger and bigger when I explained it to them. And I remember I asked these guys, ‘Imagine you are a kid, and your daddy is beating your mom. What do you feel? What did you feel if that did happen to you? Did you feel pain? What was going through your heart?’ And I said to open your eyes, and in a lot of these guys I saw some tears. And I said, ‘Imagine what your children are feeling’ and a lot of them bowed their heads. I said, ‘If there was a program that could offer to show you how to handle your anger would you go?’, and so many of their heads nodded. A lot of these guys, they know something’s wrong, but they don’t know how to handle it. No one has told them how to, or what to do.”


After we had talked for a few minutes about her work and her experiences, Lydia introduced me to three of the women she has helped. Their names have been changed for their safety and privacy, but they were more than happy to speak with me about their experiences with La Amiga and the Partnership.

The first person I sat down with, who we’ll call Emerald, was a quiet Asian woman who apologized for her English frequently as we spoke. All three of the women apologized for their English this way, but I assured each of them as best I could that there was no need. I’ve been led to believe that English is one of the more difficult of the commonly studied languages to learn, and none of these women had even been studying it for more than three years yet were conversational. Emerald’s story from before she began her work with the Partnership can be found

here as well as a little bit on her life afterward, but the focus of my talks with each of these women was their lives now, what they are doing to reach independence and wholeness, and I think that falls more in line with the goals of the Partnership and its shelters than a preoccupation with the way they were victimized - these are survivors, not victims.

So what has Emerald been up to? She has learned enough English to get by in day to day life. She has recently gotten her Nurse’s Assistant Certification, which was a very big deal for her since she was told by her teacher not to take the test at all because of her English. She, like the other two women, had come too far and done too much to be held back by something so trivial however, and she not only took the test but was one of only seven out of a group of fourteen to pass it. She has a fourteen year old daughter who is not only enrolled in my old high school, but who makes better grades there than I ever did. She is also Sylvia’s longest-running case – her citizenship is going to come through soon, she is working as a nurse’s assistant, and what she wants more than ever now is to go back to school to be a nurse so that she can do even more to help others.

The next person I spoke with was an Indian woman we’ll call Shelly. Shelly has only been in America for a year and has only been with the Partnership for 85 days out of that, but from what I saw her life is in the process of pulling a complete 180. Her English wasn’t fantastic but it was enough to understand one another most of the time if we spoke carefully, and it’s important to remember that she has reached this level of mastery after only three months! Shelly reminded me, more than anything else, of Virginia Woolf. I don’t think she’s a writer, but a lot of what she said centered on how amazing it was to have a place of her own, where she can make her own decisions about her life and that of her son, and that this is something she has never had before. She also told me that she is learning to drive, which is another amazing experience for her because before she came to the Partnership she didn’t know how to use buses or even how to read signs to get from place to place on foot and, since Hindi isn’t nearly as common a language in America as Spanish, she didn’t even have the resources of translators or an immigrant community to help her – she was mute and paralyzed without her husband, but now she is learning to speak and to move. “I stay in home, you know? And I don’t know anything – how I go, how I speak, how I go on the bus, but in 3 months I learn too much about this,” she said.

She also echoed what Lydia told me about how many women, whether it’s because they’ve never known a life that wasn’t abusive or because they come from a more strictly patriarchal culture, simply aren’t cognizant that their situations are abusive or wrong. “In our culture, I’m talking about only Indian people, they didn’t respect women this much. I learned here that women deserve respect, because she is everything, you know? She can do everything as a mother, wife, sister, and what men can do also.”

The thing that struck me most about my talk with her, and what has informed my thoughts on all the other women, was when I asked her about her experience as a Hindi speaker alone in America. She said the quote above about being alone in the home, and when I asked her what it was like to now know English she thought for a moment.

“I can speak now,” she said finally.

The final person I spoke with was a woman from El Salvador who we’ll call Emily. The first thing you notice about Emily is her ready smile and her sense of humor, two things Sylvia tells me she has only recently reclaimed. Like many of the Hispanic women the Partnership has helped since La Amiga began, what Emily told me about her experience had less to do with shelter and material assistance, and much more to do with advice and education. What the Partnership taught her, she told me, was how to spot a person who would be abusive to her, what to look out for. They taught her that she deserves better than a man who will beat her and her daughter does as well, and she has learned to make better choices in who she wants to be and in the people she chooses to be with.

Since Lydia had been so humble for most of the hour I tried to get some praise from Emily. “She doesn’t really want to brag, Emily, so brag for her if you could,” I said. They both laughed and exchanged a few words in Spanish, and then Emily took a moment to find the correct words before settling finally on something simple.

“She helps,” Emily said.

Honestly, I couldn’t think of a better way to describe or to compliment Lydia and the rest of the Partnership. They help.

*Without being able to understand the writing, a lot of fliers and ads for women’s shelters honestly look like ads for depression medication.

To show your appreciation for the Partnership and the work of La Amiga, please go to this link and vote for them for the People’s Choice Award!

I Spent All Morning Surrounded by Police Officers

It’s sometimes difficult for me to think of police officers as heroes. Perhaps this is due to the media I’ve grown up with, where there is a Wire or Shield for every Law & Order or Castle on television and a story of corruption and brutality for every report of valor and courage in the news. Perhaps the feeling just goes hand-in-hand with being young, liberal and idealistic, and some of you are sagely clucking your tongues right now as you remember your own youthful misconceptions. Whatever the cause for this outlook, it was put to the test last Monday morning when I sat in on a domestic violence training course sponsored by the Partnership in cooperation with the Chattanooga Police Department.

I’m not sure what I expected, my only previous real life experience with the police amounting to traffic tickets and stern looks discouraging shoplifting* when I was a teenager. Whatever I actually expected, the reality of police officers turned out to be much more pedestrian. Officers from every department in the region filtered in as 9:00 rolled around, some in uniform and some in street clothes, some carrying a weapon and some unarmed, some old and some young, male and female, black white and Hispanic, some in fighting trim and some…well, still in much better shape than me. Before class started they sat around talking about, well, exactly the sorts of things everyone talks about with their coworkers: how much sleep newborns were costing them, what movies they’d seen, how a weekend trip had gone. It was almost as if – and I know this is shocking - they were regular people doing a job and trying to get by, just like you and me.

I was still dubious of course, but the seed of doubt had been planted. Then the class started and the first order of business was for everyone to introduce themselves and say a little bit about why they were there and what their experience with domestic abuse was. There were one or two answers that made me cringe and a handful of admissions that an officer was only there because they had to be, but they were outweighed by the heartfelt responses that – and here’s what finally started to turn me – many of these officers felt frustrated that there was nothing they could do to help the women and the small handful of men they encountered in domestic violence cases, often over and over, besides arresting an abusive spouse or intimate partner who would only later be let go and allowed to redouble his abuse once he got back home. I had always imagined the police the same way a teenager thinks of his parents – here were people whose only goal in life was to punish people every chance they got, for no reason other than that it was fun. The realization that none of them were rabid authoritarian fascists and that many if not most of them were just as concerned with protecting the innocent as punishing the guilty was about as shocking as finally realizing that my parents no more enjoyed grounding me than I enjoyed being grounded. It humanized them and gave me a sense of respect that had been missing before.

Sadly though, a desire to help and an understanding of how to do so, especially without also causing harm, are not the same thing, which is why Jack Parks and the Partnership were involved. There was actually a dedicated domestic violence task force in Tennessee between 1996 and 2000 that took the annual domestic violence related murder rate down from the twenties to the low single digits for its entire run before sadly running out of funding and the Partnership, the Police Department and the state of Tennessee want to try and repeat that success. In fact Chris Chambers, one of the veteran officers of the original task force, was the one teaching the class. The Partnership’s role in all this is providing the officers with a framework for learning and access to the sort of resources and services they can use to help victims and survivors of abuse, as well as writing and overseeing the grant to make sure that a lack of funding doesn’t stop lives from being saved later on this time.

But what did they actually cover in the class? I was only there for one morning out of the whole week of speeches from survivors of domestic abuse, role-playing and tests, mind you, but in the span of just a few hours I was exposed to a lot. First of all, it turns out that I’m not the only person who’s had trouble trusting the police, and that for all their good intentions some of this mistrust on the part of domestic violence victims is justified. Apparently it’s not uncommon for an officer to arrest the victim of domestic abuse as well as the abuser, usually because the victim is hysterical and uncooperative when they arrive compared to the abuser, who – as you can read about in the links below – is often such a consummate manipulator or bully that he is calm and composed by that time, granting him an air of legitimacy that throws the victim in a bad light. The officers in class defended this behavior at first, mostly on the grounds that the victims often seemed to pose a danger to themselves or got in the way of arresting the abuser. When Officer Chambers told them that arresting the victim, who will then be reluctant to contact the police again, increases that person’s odds of being murdered by their abuser by something like 75%, more than a few eyes went wide and no-one else spoke up.

Another issue of police mistrust, and one I was genuinely surprised was brought up, had to do with domestic abuse in same-sex relationships. Officer Chambers made a point to mention that not only does this abuse happen and make sure it was treated with the respect it deserved, he also drove home that when it does happen, whether it’s in a lesbian or gay couple, the rates of serious injury and murder are much higher. He didn’t have an answer when one officer asked why, but I think this quote from aardvark.org sheds some light on the issue:

Facing a system which is often oppressive and hostile towards those who identify as anything other than "straight", those involved in same-gender battering frequently report being afraid of revealing their sexual orientation or the nature of their relationship. Additionally, even those who attempt to report violence in their alterative relationship run into obstacles. Police officers, prosecutors, judges and others to whom a GLBT victim may turn to for help may have difficulty in providing the same level of service as to a heterosexual victim. Not only might personal attitudes towards the GLBT community come into play, but these providers may have inadequate levels of experience and training to work with GLBT victims and flimsy or non-existant laws to enforce on behalf of the victim.

It’s sad but true that we have a long way to go when it comes to protecting every member of our society equally, but the effort is still being made by good people of all political stripes, and I think that’s really all we can ask for now. The officers seemed to take the information seriously, which I hope speaks to their interactions with GLBT individuals in our community.

Racial and economic demographics were also brought up, and the information was startling – it turns out that one of the most underreported groups victimized by domestic abuse, and by extension one of the most vulnerable, is upper-middle class and professional women, since they often feel they have more to lose in leaving their abusers and those same abusers have more resources, social and economic, to bring to bear in keeping their victims silent, helpless and compliant. This came as a potent reminder that abuse and victimization of women pays only lip service to race, creed, nationality and class.

One of the important topics that tied back specifically into the Partnership was making sure that the officers know about and know how to utilize the resources and programs the Partnership provides. The most frequently mentioned frustrations in the classroom were that the officers had no real power besides arrest over the fates of victims in their cases and that even when they did get someone help they felt cut off from them, even though the victim is often still in danger if their abuser is released from custody; Sadly, one of the more common ways for an abuser to stay out of prison is for their victim to refuse to testify in court, either from embarrassment or a very understandable sense of fear. For the first complaint, it was made clear to the officers that not only is their assistance encouraged, but that a referral from a law enforcement officer to the Partnership is always taken seriously and dealt with immediately. As to the second complaint, they were assured that not only will the Partnership help keep them in touch with the people they’re trying to protect, but that the digital cameras they were provided as part of the class would prove to be potent tools for gathering evidence at the scene of the crime while it was still fresh, which would prove vital to keeping a dangerous abuser away from his victim even if the victim doesn’t testify in court.

Finally, Officer Chambers covered more about domestic abuse than just violence. He reminded everyone that it's only in the last few years that forced sex within marriage has been classified as rape, and that sexual assault and forced pregnancy are still often used as a means of controlling a victim. He also discussed psychological, emotional, and financial abuse, none of which are things I imagine the officers could help with directly, but knowledge of which will help them know what to look for when they're called as well as what evidence to gather for when a case comes to court.

So how has my opinion of the police changed after sitting in on this class? I still don’t think of them as heroes, really, but it’s probably better just to know that they’re regular people with a desire to do good and protect people who can’t protect themselves. All other things aside though, if I had to choose anyone to protect the women (and some of the men) in my life if, God forbid, they’re ever in an abusive relationship, I can’t think of anyone I would welcome more than the police and the Partnership.

*I never shoplifted, I just looked like I would have so I guess I don’t blame them.

Note: If you are currently in a relationship which you feel is unsafe or abusive, please be aware that there is no way to safely browse a computer if someone is dedicated to invading your privacy or monitoring your actions. This includes text messaging, e-mail, and instant messaging. If you feel you are in imminent danger or would be if your spouse or significant other discovered you researching this topic or reaching out for help, please go to the police, one of the Partnership's shelters, a computer at the library or a school, or even just a friend or relative’s house before you do anything else. You have options, you don’t have to deal with it alone, you DO NOT have to tolerate any kind of abuse one moment longer than you already have. Please be safe.

Important Domestic Abuse Links:
The Partnership's Sexual Assault Crisis and Resource Center
The Partnership's Family Violence Center
The Partnership's Emergency Shelter for Families
Aardvarc.org: A collection of important information and resources provided by survivors of relationship and domestic abuse and violance.
Nnedv.org: A guide on how to safely use the internet and computers if you are currently in an abusive relationship.
Helpguide.org: An article on the signs that you are in an abusive relationship or that someone you know is trapped in an abusive situation.