Category: world

  • let it splash…

    When the ocean surges, don’t let me
    just hear it. Let it splash inside my chest!
    ~Rumi

    Kuroshio Sea – 2nd largest aquarium tank in the world – (song is Please don’t go by Barcelona) from Jon Rawlinson on Vimeo.

    via worldhum

    I can’t even express how deeply it thrills me to realize that these creatures are swimming below and around me when I paddle on the ocean–thus, I need poetry (and photography)! The ocean itself seems a kind of creature, its cycles and rhythms are at both completely regular and completely unpredictable. Added to that is the beauty of all that finds home within its depths…

    On Saturday, for the first time, I tested out a waterproof camera setup to take out with me on my outrigger canoe. I snapped pics of pelicans and shorebirds, and the various landmarks that are part of the Newport channel. And here’s me, on my boat*:

    me & my boat!!

    I wish the ocean was as clear and blue in the Newport area as it is in the Japanese aquarium captured above. I rarely ever actually “see” anything swimming in the water except for the trash floating on the surface. So that’s one reason I’m really thrilled to be headed to the South Pacific in a few months–to see some really clear blue water. Of course the other reason for my excitement is that I’ll be competing in my first international outrigger competition. And that, my friends, is as amazing and unbelievable as life can be…

    *We rigged up a sweet steering system for my canoe so I can maneuver with just one foot pedal.

  • You will survive

    When I was 13, I was struggling to survive, too, so the message of this video resonates with me even though I have no experience with human trafficking. And…I am so pleased to be part of it–you can see me, along with others from Orange County Friends Meeting at 2:12.

  • Catgirl goes to Washington


    the way she sees the world, originally uploaded by pilgrimgirl.

    Our teenage daughter is headed to D.C. in a few weeks to join in an FCNL delegation to lobby Congress for specific measures related to peace, the environment, immigration, etc. Catgirl is so excited about this opportunity and so are we!

    This will be a big adventure for her and she’s already committed to blogging daily about all that she experiences. And you can bet that I’ll be linking to her posts and adding my $.02, too!

    Members of our local Quaker Meeting are supporting her efforts and she’s also looking for anyone who might have an extra transferable JetBlue award to aid with her travel expenses. If you’d like to be part of her support team, please contact me (remyjATuciDOTedu).

    Catgirl has asked for this trip for her birthday–isn’t that wonderful?* I can’t help but think back to when I was her age and marked my birthday that year by having my first chemo treatment (ugh!). So I’m super-especially delighted to help her celebrate this year in such a memorable manner! What an amazing gift she is to me, to our family, and to our community.

    Pic above taken on our trip to the Capitol last winter, with the Jefferson monument in the background.

    *By way of full disclosure…the birthday girl also asked for a pair of Cons in addition to the trip–she is, after all, a teenager! :)

  • fireworks


    like fireworks, originally uploaded by pilgrimgirl.

    Twenty-five years ago I watched a display of fireworks from my hospital room window, knowing that in the morning I would be wheeled into surgery to remove the tumor in my knee via the amputation of my leg. My cancer diagnosis was in May and I’d had six weeks of subsequent chemotherapy. All the while, of course, praying for the miracle that would mean that God would cure my of the cancer before the amputation surgery. Dad stayed with me that night, July 4th 1984, pushing my wheelchair to the large window by the elevators that offered an even better view of the aerial display.

    Since then I find it difficult to get excited about fireworks. I mean, I can enjoy them and be overwhelmed in the sensation of sound and light. But…I rarely seek them out on my own, typically eschewing 4th of July activities that involve them, preferring to picnic or relax with friends.

    My friend Brecken recently gave me a new reason to feel ambivalent about fireworks. In her work with HandReach she learned that 90% of the world’s fireworks are manufactured in one Chinese village, and she’s met many of the victims of accidents that have occurred as a result of this incredibly dangerous industry. If you’d like to hear a story about the human impact of fireworks manufacturing, click on the link below.

    As for me, from now on I think I’ll stick to displays like the one pictured above–it offers enough ‘fireworks’ for me.

  • thank you from Huang Meihua


    Huang Meihua, the 12 year-old girl who was the recipient of my birthday wish donations, sent this thank you note to me and to all of those who contributed. Our money was wired to her family this week, for her ongoing medical care (and specifically for those prosthetic legs that she needs).

    Friends, you are WONDERFUL.

    A note for you:

    I’m Brecken, the director of HandReach — the one who got to actually collect the money that Jana raised for her birthday wish to Meihua, the 12-year-old in China whose legs had been amputated in the Sichuan earthquake. We wired the money Jana raised to Meihua’s family about a week ago, and our coordinator in China told Meihua how “Auntie Jana” had raised this money in honor of her own birthday. Meihua said she was very touched and inspired by Jana’s big heart, thinking of others instead of just thinking about her own life. She said she hopes to grow up to be a woman like Jana someday and help children who need it. I’ll be meeting Meihua personally in a couple of weeks, and will look forward to sharing the photos of Meihua’s new prosthetic legs with Jana and all of her wonderful friends!

  • My BIG Birthday Wish!

    I’ve decided that this year what I really want most for my birthday is for each of you who are able, to make a donation to my favorite charity, HandReach. One reason I care so much about HandReach is that they provide medical services, most specifically prosthetic limbs, to children in China. I want to give the gift of mobility to these young amputees–because I know all-too-personally just how much easier life can be with a good-fitting prosthesis!

    My friend Brecken of HandReach sent me the following message after learning of my plan to solicit donations:

    Jana, you rock!!! I was offline all day today, only to log in and find a bunch of lovely donations from your friends. Now I feel like it’s HandReach’s birthday, too! :)

    I’d like to designate this money to a special cause. We’re going to be providing prostheses this summer for a 12-year-old girl who lost both legs in the Sichuan earthquake last year. We just learned this morning that there was a fire in her temporary camp overnight, and her house and first set of prostheses burned. We’re planning to get her a set of even better prostheses, and plenty of excellent rehab. Her name is Huang Meihua (pronounced “Hwahng May-hwa”), and you can see her photos here [note: link fixed!]

    Happy, happy, happy birthday, Jana! I can’t thank you enough for thinking of HandReach! You are giving the gift that will truly keep on giving….

    For those of you who would like to join in my birthday wish, you can donate directly via this page. And do feel free to pass the link forward to anyone outside of this blog’s sphere who might also want to contribute to this worthy cause.

    And for those of you who have already donated…your generosity amazes me. Thank you so much for making my birthday the best one ever!

  • Twexperiments in on-the-ground reportage

    This afternoon UCI sent out a campus-wide alert (called a ZOTalert) about a possible gunman on campus by sending text messages to student and employee cellphones. Almost immediately the UCI homepage crashed, so to find more information I logged in to Twitter.

    Using hashtags (which are search terms designated by #sign) I searched Twitter for any happenings. I found that most people tweeting the alert were using the “#UCI” or “#gunman” tags so I kept a browser window open with those search terms and started filtering through the noise to see which messages seemed to give corroborating information about what was actually happening on campus. (Note: I was on campus at the time, but not near the central areas where the action was happening).

    I learned that a few buildings seemed to be on “lockdown” (such as Aldrich Hall and the Student Center), that students were warned to sit away from windows, and that there seemed to be a large police force amassed on campus (and a SWAT team, perhaps?). Then I started “re-tweeting” or reposting the messages that seemed to have the most new information, designating them as such by the “RT @username” prefacing each of my tweets.

    Because my twitter feed sends my status updates directly to my FB page, a conversation started there among various staff and students to confirm the twitter info. Simultaneously I kept my twitter search windows refreshing and my cellphone nearby.

    A few observations from this experience:
    1) Twitter is an unreliable news source, but its invaluable for ‘of-the-moment’ reportage. Being able to communicate with tweeps in the Student Center who could see the police activities (including the detention of an innocent student in camo pants) helped me to know how serious the situation really was. I knew that there hadn’t been any actual shootings, just a concern over a possible gunman.
    2) ZOTalerts, while a good system, really failed when it sent the UCI homepage down. This, IMO, aggravated the hysteria among various campus affiliates because no one could get current information.
    3) I am personally concerned that the surrounding schools (there’s a high school 2 blks away and an elementary school abt .5mi away) weren’t alerted to possible danger. K-12 students were sent home as usual and those who ride buses were being dropped off at points all around the campus during the height of the scare. Apparently, the kids on the buses knew about the gunman through text-messenging or cellphone calls, but their bus drivers did not.
    4) I learned a bit more about twitter functionality from this “twexperiment.” Next time there’s a scare like this on campus (whether real or faux), I’ll be even better-prepared to find and disseminate the pertinent information quickly.

    UPDATE: Readers from the OCRegister, thanks for dropping by!

  • Pilgrim classic: Mother’s Day Proclamation for Peace

    Originally posted May 13, 2007:

    The celebration of Mother’s Day originated with poet Julia Ward Howe, as a movement for women to fight the devastation of war and to show the way towards peace. Today’s sentimental-flowers-&-Hallmark-card bedecked event hardly measures up to the fiery rhetoric of the day’s founding mother…

    Julia Ward Howe’s Mother’s Day Proclamation – 1870

    Arise then…women of this day!
    Arise, all women who have hearts!
    Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
    Say firmly:
    “We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
    Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
    For caresses and applause.
    Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
    All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
    We, the women of one country,
    Will be too tender of those of another country
    To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

    From the bosom of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
    Our own. It says: “Disarm! Disarm!
    The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”
    Blood does not wipe out dishonor,
    Nor violence indicate possession.
    As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
    At the summons of war,
    Let women now leave all that may be left of home
    For a great and earnest day of counsel.
    Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
    Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
    Whereby the great human family can live in peace…
    Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
    But of God –
    In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
    That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
    May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
    And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
    To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
    The amicable settlement of international questions,
    The great and general interests of peace.

  • Special Election

    For my California friends…Here are the recommendations for the May 19 Special Election from the Friends Committee on Legislation:

    Proposition 1A: No. State Budget.
    Proposition 1B: Neutral. Education Funding
    Proposition 1C: No. Lottery Modernization.
    Proposition 1D: No. Protects Children’s Services.
    Proposition 1E: No. Mental Health Services.
    Proposition 1F: No. Elected Officials’ Salaries.

    To learn more about why they made these recommendations, click here.

  • historic


    reflecting themselves, originally uploaded by pilgrimgirl.

    All the time I was watching yesterday’s events I kept thinking “we were just there!” I think it made the inauguration feel so much more close and personal to our kids. :)

  • cowgirl


    Year of the Cow!, originally uploaded by mind on fire.

    When I was in NYC I picked out all kinds of interesting strangers to start conversations with. In this case, it was a quirky youngish Japanese girl in a cow costume. Others were french fry afficianados, bookstore proprietors, bakery customers, or fellow subway riders. Nearly every random conversation turned into a memorable encounter. John wrote about one particularly serendipitous exchange here.

    I’m not usually the type of person who’ll strike up a conversation with whoever happens to be nearby. But I think I might just have to change that from here on out…..

    What about you? Have you ever had a particularly memorable encounter when chatting with a stranger?

  • cemetery


    marble cemetery, NYC, originally uploaded by pilgrimgirl.

    John knows that I find cemeteries fascinating, and along with the requisite train ride, I think a cemetery visit is a must when I/we travel. This one was rather forlorn and I couldn’t get any close-ups because the gates were locked (as was the case with all the NYC cemeteries that we happened upon). It had the most vigorous squirrel population I’ve ever seen–the ground was crawling with them.