We Can Do Better - Can't We?

Homeless in Seattle
Photo by M Barrett Miller

What you're looking at is one persons sleeping loft. 

Well, maybe not a loft!

She has found a little space out of the rain. 

Her worldly goods are in those two shopping carts. They are parked there while she begs within sight of the carts and all her earthly pocessions.

Here are a few questions, suggested by a number of national agencies, for consideration and action if you think she could use a hand- 

Your voice will count if you let your elected officials know your thoughts and feelings.

• Would our/your community be better off if we made year-round shelter and day and hygiene services available to more of the people who need and want them?   
• Do you support addition shelter funds for homeless families?                  
• Should we maintain specialized child care services for the youngest children who are homeless?  
• Does it make sense to increase our city's investment in giving people safe, warm, dry places to be at night and during the day, or would you rather see people moved from place to place as the days get shorter and the nights get colder?   

If we have the will, there are solutions!!

"Times Winged Chariot Hurries Near..."

                   Eric photo by M Barrett Miller

“Times Winged Chariot Hurries Near…”

As Eric shuffles towards his eighty third birthday he recently shared with me his thoughts on what he’s learned from his run.
A theme he returns to often is that people today have lost sight of what’s most important. “They run this way and that way looking for more stuff to make them feel good about themselves.”
He shares that when he was a kid in Kansas, before the “big war”, no one had much of anything. “We made do with what we had. We never seemed to want what the fella down the road had. I mean, if he was doing fine we were happy about it. Not jealous.”

As the War ground on, Eric, barely a teenager, got a job selling farm equipment. He was good enough at it to squirrel away a little bit of money, after contributing to the family needs, towards his education.
He did well enough in high school to get accepted into college. Later, at the University of Kansas he earned his PhD.
He didn’t wander far off campus after graduation. He taught, on a part time basis, anatomy and physiology to pre-med students.
Money was very tight in those Kansas days!
In order to pay his bills, and help out his family, Eric agreed to work for his uncle who operated a successful mortuary in town.
Until 1980 he remained in Kansas working full time in the funeral home. The call of the west, and changing times in Kansas lured Eric to the Pacific Northwest.
“When I got into eastern Washington I was completely enveloped in a cloud of dust. It was so quiet, eerie quiet! I didn’t know the volcano had blown until I stopped at a diner off the hi-way. Boy, was I ever surprised!”

Eric made Bainbridge Island his home for years.
He ran a number of funeral homes until the doctors told him, after his fourth heart attack, that he needed to consider moving to the “mainland.”
On a good day Eric’s heart is operating at about 30%.
The doc’s have said they could try for a repair but the odds were long on his surviving the operation.
Eric is okay with that news.
He has chosen to live on knowing that he is in “right now” and able to enjoy, and be ready, for whatever comes his way.
When we are together we laugh a lot about the craziness around us. He likes to poke fun at some of the zanier politicians wondering why they are so mean. “Don’t they understand how quickly this will go by? In a snap your stay is over. Why not share your heart while you’re here rather than wasting time chasing things and broken ideas.”

Why indeed!

M. Barrett Miller

Let Kids Be Kids, Inc.

"Hey, is that an angel at the door?"

A friend of mine has entered what may be his final dance with AIDS. 
Whenever he has the opportunity to share his story, and the challenges of his diagnosis and how people have reacted to him, Trudy James’s name is always part of the story.

When he first arrived in Seattle he was as sick as a dog.
His family had walked away from when he was diagnosed.
He had no friends in the community.
He was in bad shape.
Long into his hospital stay he received a visitor that would change his life.
One lonely afternoon he was sitting in a chair looking out his hospital window towards the Olympic Mountain range, when he heard a soft knock on the door.
The lady who entered took one look at him, crossed the room and gave him a big hug. (These were the days when large warning signs hung on patient doors warning people of the patient’s medical status.)
My friend loves to share that she said, “Help is on the way.”
He further shares that she was the first non-medical person to touch him in months.
He often chokes up when he shares this moment.

I first met Trudy at a meeting at Multifaith Works, an organization dedicated to serving those challenged by HIV/AIDS and other debilitating diseases. I had joined a “CareTeam” made up of students who had volunteered to offer support to a “Care Partner” seeking camaraderie.

Because of Trudy’s insightful management, empathy and orchestration of teams supporting the sick, my respect and admiration for her has grown exponentially!

A few years ago Trudy left Multifaith Works to found Heartwork, a non-profit dedicated to working closer with people dealing with planning and decision-making in preparation for the final grand adventure.

To understand her path, and the incredible contributions she has given to everyone she has touched, I will share a bit of her journey.

Trudy is a trained hospital chaplain. She graduated from the University of Kansas and Union Theological Seminary in New York City.
She was the founder, then Executive Director, of the Regional AIDS Interfaith Network (RAIN) in Arkansas.
In seven years, 1500 faith-based RAIN volunteers served over 500 individuals with AIDS—20% of the AIDS population in Arkansas at that time.
Trudy was passionate about recruiting, training and supporting volunteer CareTeams and shared the AIDS CareTeam program model with ten other states. 


In 1997, she moved to Seattle and began a successful CareTeam program under the umbrella of Multifaith Works, a nonprofit dedicated to compassionate community-building.
She served as CareTeam Program Director and CareTeam Program Specialist for eleven years, retiring to focus on Heartwork.
Trudy also served as a per diem Chaplain at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance for five years and continues to give phone, hospital and home support to individuals with life-threatening diagnoses or on-going illness.
She is on the Advisory Board for Compassion and Choices of Washington and on the Outreach Board for Foss Home and Village.
She does ongoing “5 Wishes” and bereavement groups for Providence Point Community, Issaquah, and Northaven Senior Living, Seattle and other venues throughout the Northwest.

A couple of months ago a teaching colleague, and friend, got the diagnosis he never wanted to hear.
After talking long and hard with friends, doctors and family he decided to go for chemo treatment #1, and if needed, chemo treatment #2.
Each week I would drive him to the hospital for his treatments.
About mid way through chemo #2 he told me he was going to pass on the third level of treatment.
After way too long in silence I asked him if he wanted to talk to anyone outside of family and friends.
He did.
About a month after introducing him to Trudy we were headed up to his doctors one afternoon when I asked him what he thought about talking with her. He said, “It’s kinda like talking to an angel.”
Well said.

Check out Heartwork, you’ll find that my friend was right-

Oh, if you get a chance to meet Trudy ask her about breakfast in the White House with Bill Clinton and Al Gore. 

M Barrett Miller
Let Kids Be Kids, Inc.

Trusting Kids to Teach About HIV/AIDS

Students at the Annual AIDS Walk Photo by M Barrett Miller

Trusting Kids to Teach About HIV/AIDS to Their Peers!

I am not often blown away, but I was totally rocked back on my heels this week by a number of students at Newport High School, in Bellevue, Washington.

Every year Seattle hosts an “Annual AIDS Walk” in Volunteer Park. For the last dozen or so years I have shot lots of photos of the activities that generate donations towards ending the HIV/AIDS scourge in our local and global communities.
I like to concentrate on kids supporting the event, as their involvement will help educate and curtail the spread of the disease in the future.
Each year the most visible kids are wearing very cool ASPEN sweatshirts. This year I was able to talk with a couple of kids, and introduce myself to their teacher, Barbara Velatequi.
During our quick conversation we agreed to exchange emails. My hope was to visit with her, and her students, at the school so I could get a better idea of her program and why these kids are so enthusiastic and dedicated.
I also wanted to know why Ms. Velatequi had dedicated the last nineteen years to educating kids about HIV/AIDS, STI’s and behaviors that might put them at risk.

Unfortunately there are still too many “adults” that think kids are, to use Ms. Velatequi’s words, lazy, untrustworthy, sexually active, drug addicted, and permanently plugged into loud, obnoxious music.

Not so-

My experience, with many schools, is that they forbid any realistic sex education classes. A number of them have requested that the speakers I have brought in to visit with students, about living with HIV/AIDS, do not speak about sexuality, their particular life style, contraceptives or anything that might challenge their sole message of abstinence. When that happens we try to make the best of it and hope the kids see through the blockade.
I felt confidant that the kids I had talked with at the AIDS Walk were not treated in a similar fashion.

After a number of emails with Ms. Velatequi I was scheduled to spend a morning in two classes at the high school.
A few days before the visit I received a number of answers to my questions to Ms. Velatequi on why she had taken the risk, 19 years ago, to introduce a mature curriculum in the face of traditional administrative and parental objections. She had accepted the state mandate to teach about HIV/AIDS though little did anyone realize how well she was going to rock the status quo with her kids-

“…Changing human behavior is a daunting task; as a rule people do not like to change! Add to this barrier the young adults’ sense of invulnerability, and HIV prevention work becomes a greater challenge. For every barrier there is a solution, and the power of a dedicated, well-trained and passionate group of teens was my solution. I knew I could harness positive peer pressure, personalize the HIV/STI risks, help my students develop empathy for people living with HIV, and model acceptance of every human being. The ASPEN Educators could break through barriers and reduce the spread of HIV and other STI’s…”

With that, added to some other remarks of hers in mind, I arrived at the school ready to see what was what-

The first class I observed was made up of juniors and seniors. They were practicing a demonstration they would later use when they conducted a class for freshman and sophomores. The three girls orchestrating the demonstration had each student in the room share their cup of water with three other students. They were told to keep a record of whom they shared the fluid with.
Almost immediately a number of students noticed that the fluid in their cups took on a light pink color. (A chemical had been added to a statistically accurate amount of cups)
They were the infected ones!
The “healthy” students sat down with a sigh of relief.
The girls walked their fellow students through the process of determining who was the source of the infection.
As you can imagine there was some lighthearted banter as reality focused in on one student who started the infectious ball rolling.
A great demonstration!

Ms. Velatequi gave me the high sign to join her in the hall. She told me, as we walked downstairs, that two of her students were about to conduct a ninety-minute class with sophomores in a Health Class. The students we were going to visit only had the very basics on HIV/AIDS, STI’s etc.
This is what I wanted to see!

For ninety minutes two young ladies walked their fellow students through the most comprehensive training I have ever seen outside of medical school.
They did a better delivery of information than I have done in 23 years of presentations.
Better than I ever did in my college classroom!
Their use of posters, slides, poignant questions directed to students, humor, demonstrations, acceptance of choices, abstinence as a valid choice, compare and contrast, definitions, on board pre-written statements of challenges & solutions, walking around the room, recognizing unstated questions, statistics, sources, resources is a model for all of us given the opportunity to share knowledge with students.
I have seen embarrassment in student’s eyes when adults present touchy information to a class. I didn’t see one kid react that way during this presentation.

While watching these two girls I so wished they had been in my suitcase when I shared information in the third world to people so at risk.
I wished they had been conducting the “lesson” in every classroom I’ve ever walked into-
At the end of the presentation I shared with Ms. Velatequi, and the two girls, exactly what I have written above about their presentation.
I told them they should take their presentation on the road!
They seemed pleased.
Ms. Velatequi told me the girls had practiced for hours and hours and hours.
Under her tutelage these kids knocked it out of the park!

While talking with the students they shared their understanding of ASPEN and its reach beyond the sharing of information about HIV/AIDS.

“…The ASPEN program is to promote acceptance of all people, engage in service work to support those living with HIV, teach prevention strategies to reduce the transmission of HIV/STI’s, and create a diverse group of peer educators who will serve as role models and as a resource for all students at Newport High School. One of the five lessons that that ASPEN educators teach is the Diversity Lesson. This lesson is the celebration of diverse populations to whom we deliver our lesson. Christian, Muslim, Atheist, Gay, Straight, Transgendered, American, Middle Eastern, Chinese, young and old, everyone is deserving of respect, equal treatment, and physical and emotional safety. Acceptance of all people, a realization that we are all citizens in a global community, is the foundation of the ASPEN program…”

These kids are not just talking blue sky; they’ve been accepted in the greater community.

“In the past two years kids in the ASPEN program have had the opportunity, through the World Affairs Council, to meet with world leaders who are working on HIV prevention in their countries.
Last March, ASPEN hosted 10 teens from Serbia to share education curricula, strategies, and pizza. Face book, email, and skyping have allowed this collaboration to continue.
ASPEN is now needed, respected, and cherished by Lifelong AIDS Alliance and Dunschee House, both highly respected organizations in Seattle.
ASPEN students have served as keynote speakers and entertainers at the Seattle AIDS Walk as well as being phenomenal fundraisers.
Last year twenty-six ASPEN students raised over $45,000 for Lifelong AIDS Alliance, more money than any other team in the walk, including Microsoft, Starbucks, and every other corporate sponsor.
The team has also been entrusted with a food delivery route for Chicken Soup Brigade; each week two of the students pick up meals for clients of Lifelong AIDS Alliance. These deliveries ensure that their clients will be well fed for the week.”

When you Trust Kids amazing things will happen.

Can you see why I was blown away?

M Barrett Miller

Let Kids Be Kids

Enough!!!

SNAP fights for victims

To all those concerned about all our kids,

With yet another sexual misconduct charge levied against a local cleric, O’Dea High School Principal, we need to ask some serious questions of those who are ultimately responsible.

If only it were that simple!

It’s difficult to ask questions when the first lines of defense presented by the Catholic Archdiocese is to claim ignorance of the activity, claim the “victim” is mistaken, blame the “victim”, dodge and weave behind every legal machination richly paid attorneys’ can think of, discount the damage by the passage of time, attack those who stand up for the victims.

The latest news stories about O’Dea High School included all the above ingredients. 

If nothing else the church is predictable on how they wrap their arms around themselves.
They hope there are still enough people, press included, that will give them the benefit of the doubt, each and every time, in spite of the avalanche of historic evidence.
They continually seek the forgiveness they seem unable to offer their victims for exposing them.

1.     Why doesn’t the Bishop step forward and speak to these charges?
He’s the Shepherd of his flock and responsible for everything that happens to kids under his authority.

2.     Why does he have a “spokes-person?”
Is he so busy with other important functions? Functions so vital that he delegates dealing with child abuse to a paid shill who looks for cover, any cover.
Wait!
The Bishop’s little man didn’t stand up for kids when he spun a tale to the press. He blamed the bankruptcy court, which is overseeing the Christian Brothers bankruptcy, due to excessive abuse settlements and charges, for forbidding the Bishop to do his job.

3.     Yes! It’s the courts fault that no parents, students, neighbors, faculty, clerics knew of the pending actions against the school principal.
If it’s the courts fault for putting kids at risk is the Holy Apostolic Catholic Church going to raise heaven and hell condemning the court for its tunnel vision and dedication to money above all other values?
Not on your life!

4.     Why does the church insist on “confidentiality agreements etc.” whenever they settle a case?
If there were an institution that should be transparent you’d think it would be them!
Nope! Those agreements keep parents in the dark to the lurking dangers their kids may face at their school, club and in the very church itself.  
At this moment such an agreement allows a priest to oversee a school after a “settled” case of sexual harassment brought to court by fellow clerics. What is the actual story? Who knows? It’s wrapped in a secret settlement agreement.
Would you want your kids to go to that school?

5.     Maybe a bigger question is, “Why are parents still putting their faith in an institution that has shown no faith in them?”

This latest case at O’Dea will not be the end of this ongoing series of revelations, as much as the Archdiocese hopes and “prays” everyone will just move on…

N.B. The following email from an associate who once worked for the Seattle Archdiocese touches on the anger out there.

"...        1) The O’Dea guy had previous charges against him yet the Christian Brothers made him principal  - with the approval of the Archbishop

2)      the other priest, you mention, had a history of accusations of child endangerment (at the LEAST) which the Chancery ignored.

These things make the hierarchy COMPLICIT. We should be calling for an indictment against the Archbishop.

I mean, cut to the chase. The Archbishop was in charge. Charges were made which were ignored. The clergymen were permitted to stay on the job. No laws would have been broken by the Chancery had the accused been IMMEDIATELY removed and put on leave until the issues were resolved. Instead they hid it and the accused were allowed to remain in place, thereby continuing to endanger children. The hierarchy was complicit and should be indicted! (Precedent has now been established!) ..."