a heavy rain

Okay so it is still raining.
I have my own flood story, I am thinking some people do ... have their own flood story.
Here is mine.
I was living alone, in my late forties, in the woods. I called it the woods.
I was in Appalachia and living on what we called river road. My house sat right in front of the river ... from every room in my house I could see the river and from every room in my house I could hear the river. Marvelous.
The water would coast over the rocks and the sound was a constant companion.
I lived there for years. And years.
And only one year did the river rise so high that it threatened my home and my life. It have been raining and raining. Sometimes the front end of the road, down
toward the four lane, would flood and you would just take the back way to town ... the beautiful back way .... climbing up the hills, by the waterfalls, twisting and turning you way to town. It took about a full half hour longer.
Anyway ... one morning I woke up in my second floor bedroom that faced the river, looked out the window expecting to see a large yard with meandering rock paths through the wisely planted rhododendron down to the road and then to the river. But there was no yard, no "rhodies" as I called them, there was no land. There was only water as far as I could see. I was Rapunzel without the hair.
And the odd thing about a river flooding is that it creates another fast track other than the one way out in the middle ... there were passages in my yard going like heck for Tennessee. Swirling hard and fast. Little rivers in the big river which wasn't that big in the beginning.
Well I was full panic when I got down to the front door. I moved the car and the truck up and in the barn with my dogs inside. I went down to check the basement and the water was more than 5 feet high. I could not in that second figure out what to do ... the yard was inching near the first step to the house and the basement still had some space ... I joked about pumping the river into the basement ... to myself ... and then I got the sump pump set up, and it began its work, adding the basement water to the yard, down the long driveway now mostly covered with river water.
In a short two hours, I could begin to see the water inching away from the house.
I felt blessed in that moment. Seriously blessed.
The slow movement back to the confines of a river bank. It took days.
The debris, the rotting things, the insects, it was devastating what was left behind.
Just devastating.
And for a long time and even now ... a heavy rain makes my heart beat faster.

rain

washes all things clean.
I certainly hope so.
It is going to rain for days and days.
I am looking forward to the cleanliness.
Seriously.

She Inspires

MEXICO: Indigenous Woman on the Offensive

FROM the Inter Press Service News Agency

Two years ago Eufrosina Cruz was
kept from running for mayor of her home village by the
traditions and customs of her indigenous community in
southern Mexico just because she is a woman.

But she refused to back down and challenged the tradition – a
decision that brought her death threats but also dreams and
achievements that she had never imagined.

On Tuesday the 29-year-old Zapoteca Indian woman presented in
the Mexican capital a new civil society association aimed at
highlighting the deep-rooted nature of native traditions and
customs in many communities especially in the impoverished
southern state of Oaxaca where a large proportion of the
population is indigenous.

If in November 2010 women can finally vote in my village
and one of them is elected mayor I will be more than happy; it
will be the best achievement of this association through which I
promise to become even more crazy which is what people in my
village say I am Cruz said in an interview with IPS.

Her group is called Quiego short for Queremos Unir Integrando
por Equidad y Género en Oaxaca (roughly we want to come
together for equity and gender in Oaxaca). The acronym was
inspired by Santa María Quiegaloni the name of her village of
800 Zapoteca Indians located in the mountains of Oaxaca one of
Mexico’s poorest states.

Quiego plans to hold workshops and organise women’s
groups first in my village and later throughout Oaxaca and
anywhere else that we can to raise awareness on women’s
political rights and help them understand that some traditions
are no good but that we are not alone and that we have to wake
up she said.

Cruz an accountant was the first woman to attempt to run for
mayor there. Although some of the men backed her up the heads
of the local assembly said tradition blocked her from
participating as a woman.

But that denial of women’s political rights had not been loudly
protested until Cruz brought the problem to the attention of
state and national authorities.

I always said things couldn’t stay this way that it was
unfair. But I didn’t imagine that all the rest of this would
happen she said.

By all the rest she was referring to anonymous
death threats that led to police protection for her as well as
the approval of a reform of the Oaxaca state constitution at her
initiative which clearly stipulates that no local tradition can
apply if it denies the political rights of indigenous women.

But she also meant the numerous invitations to take part in
conferences and in meetings with legislators and government
officials and the decision by the Mexican government of
conservative President Felipe Calderón to award her the national
youth prize consisting of 100000 dollars for her work on
behalf of women.

Last year I quit my job (as coordinator of academic
programmes in technical high schools in Oaxaca) to dedicate
myself completely to the cause of defending our women to coming
together to talk and to gradually finding a way out of this ugly
poverty and denial of our rights she said.

Mexico is the Latin American country with the largest
indigenous population in absolute numbers which is variously
estimated to make up between 12 and 30 percent of the country’s
104 million people (the smaller official estimate is based on
the number of people who actually speak an indigenous language).
The overwhelming majority of the Mexican population is of mixed
indigenous and Spanish ancestry.

More than 90 percent of the 12 million officially counted
indigenous people live in extreme poverty nearly 50 percent are
illiterate and 80 percent of the children under five are badly
malnourished according to the human development report on
Mexican indigenous people published in 2006 by the United Nations
Development Programme (UNDP).

A study focusing on gender issues by the government National
Commission for the Development of Indigenous Peoples also
released in 2006 states that among the poorest of the
poor among the most marginalised of the marginalised are
indigenous women.

On many occasions they are discriminated against because
they are indigenous because they are women and because they
are poor. The social systems of their own communities also
frequently exclude them says the report on
indicators with a gender perspective for indigenous
peoples.

Among the country’s indigenous people there are 636720 women
who only speak native languages compared to 371083 men. And 27
percent of native people over 15 are illiterate by contrast with
a national average of 9.5 percent. But illiteracy among
indigenous women is 34.5 percent against 19.6 percent of men.

In Oaxaca 39 percent of native women and 22.3 percent of
native men over 15 are illiterate.

Among my people many women still believe that that’s how
it should be that rights are only for men that only they
deserve to study said Cruz. But I tell them that
they have to open their eyes and change even if they are
threatened horribly like what happened to me.

Cruz left Quiegolani at the age of 11 because she did not want
to end up being married off at 13 like her sister and raising
a gaggle of children in absolute poverty.


A lot of people have helped us: journalists politicians
and women’s groups. Thanks to all of them this association has
emerged but we are still searching for more support in order to
complete our dream said Cruz. (