April and May Pics

This year we went to the Tulip Festival again, but we were only able to make it on the last day, and we weren't able to take any friends with us. We had fun anyway. The weather was beautiful and so were the tulips. Next year when we go we will have the baby with us too!

New Life, New Struggles, New Growth

It is definitely still Springtime, and I am thrilled that some little bit of sunshine has finally returned to Portland. If you don't live in the Pacific Northwest or perhaps a tropical rainforest then you may not know what it is like to feel like your feet are starting to mold, and that perhaps that myth about Oregonians growing duck feet is not that far off. I am not really designed for that, and my husband, being a native of Kenya in East Africa is definitely not designed for all that rain. To top that off the little that we managed to preserve from our first year garden last year has all been depleted. I am so tired of grocery store food, I am aching for sun and food directly from our backyard. The recession has also hit our house, neighborhood church, just life in general. We have a friend, another Kenyan immigrant staying with us because he has not been able to find a job for months, our neighbors next door have an in-law staying with them for the same reason and another part of community village has lost her job as well. So I have been thinking more and more about the adage that "real revolutionaries grow their own food."

It seems like despite our best efforts at nonviolent communication, or general togetherness this house has been full of very loud processing while all of the struggles that we face come up. Honestly, it is all here we are very diverse household. Two of us are immigrants, one of us is a child, one of us is queer, most of us are Black, and let just say that income is enough at the moment, but you never know, it can still be tenuous. So Easter fell in the midst of all this, and brought with it the message of new life and I started processing that. Then I had an issue with my tooth that brought unbearable pain, but one of my coworkers at school put me on to squirting Echinacea directly on the area. The earth is miraculous! This was amazing, and then this same week we got our baby chicks.

Here are some pictures of our garden starting to come alive, and the new baby chicks. I still have at least three posts worth of topics to cover today, but I will try to break them into sections so that you can all read the parts that are most interesting to you.

Signs of Spring

Spring has finally begun to spring in Portland. There is talk of chickens everywhere! We went to a tuplip festival, and our garden has been completely transformed into an urban homestead. I will post pictures of that soon, but am still plagued with a few technical difficulties. There do still seem to be a lot of uncertainities in the air, the recession is definitely impacting Portland, but when the sun comes out after all those months of "liquid sunshine" and we all get our much needed doses of vitamin D, everyone's mood changes.

I am also uplifted by other things. I am taking a class with Geoffrey and Nathaniel in Nonviolent Communication with Children. I love this class! I can not really get enough of it. I can't say that I have perfected it, epsecially in some of those more heated moments, but it does give me another perspective and way of looking at things, and a different way of approaching other family members in the house. In fact, it has given me a whole new set of tools for communicating with many people at Mountain Valley as well as at home. It is continuing to shift my thinking in terms of how I want to raise Malcolm, and educate him.

I am really open to a lot of possible futures for Mountain Valley, but it would be great if it became a charter school and then it would really be a special place for kidsof multiple ages where we could really venture out into the city and other parts of the wide wide world to learn about all sorts of things.

I am also learning a lot more about permaculture, simple living, and many other things. I am just dying to dive into all of these inter-connected areas and recreate myself and create the world with Malcolm and my family. I have been saying lately that what I really want to do is to make stuff, grow stuff, and create stuff. Malcolm is done baking pumpkin bread with his Uncle. I got to go-bathtime.

Catching UP

This spring has been so full of commotion and activity that I have had no time at all to keep up with the blog. I have really missed it, and kept thinking I would find time overall Memorial Day weekend or 4th of July, and now we are in the middle of summer and I have not even posted the Easter pictures,missed pics of the beach because I did not have the right batteries and are just sitting down to talk about how my family has completed fallen for Obama.

We had fun at Easter, and colored Easter eggs. That was a messy process, but fun but not like last year's Easter. I missed our friend's ritual of thinking about what we wanted to accomplish in the next year. In Easter of 2007, I said I wanted to go back to Kenya with our family in 08 without using a credit card. We didn't make it. Instead, Boo has had to have surgery on his teeth, and I am still trying to figure out how to pay for my root canal. Between the two of that is $6,000 in medical bills if I get mine-so much for Kenya.

The presidential primary season in Portland really heated up this year, and we all caught the Obama bug. We all had it already, we have since long before he announced but the Hillary/Obama stuff had us worked into a fervor. We were surprised to see Oregon playing such a key role in the election.

We took Bugaboo to the Obama rally in May that drew 75,000 people. It was pretty unbelievable and my pictures don't do it justice (refer back to previous battery issues), but it was really amazing to see people just keep coming. Baba Malcolm, Malcolm and I arrived downtown at around 10:15. The rally was supposed to start at 12:30, and people were already wrapped around the block. All over the place there were people selling all kinds of things with Obama's picture or name on it. It reminded me of the little kiosks in Nairobi where you could buy everything Nikes to 1 cent candies and cigarettes to fish for tonight's dinner.

What was really shocking to me was that it was not a predominately African-American crowd. It was very mixed ( well for Oregon anyway), and people stood patiently in 90+ degree weather waiting to see Obama. While he spoke,well-organized Campaign activist sprayed the crowd down and offered us cook drinking water. Malcolm sat on our shoulders and learned the expression "Yes, we can." He still says it whenever he sees a picture of Obama on TV or something. We put an Obama sign in our yard, and somehow he learned to read it on his own, wherever he sees the word Obama in whatever context he reads it. That's my baby boy. Yes, we can Malcolm.We can.

After the May Primary then June arrived and so did my mother and my birthday. This year, I actually wanted to do something and we had people over for a party in our garden.

I have gotten addicted to garden. We have chickens now, and hopefully soon we will have a beautiful coop as well so they can get out of our basement! Malcolm loves the plants, and eats anything green he finds growing.

He is really enjoying a few weeks off of school hanging out with our church community. You know before he was born I really thought my activist community would step up and be a family for my little one. It did not happen that way, instead I got an entirely new family, and I am totally grateful that God sent them to me every single day. I do not know what anyone does without a faith community, and feel that ours is striving very hard to become the Beloved Community that Dr. King dreamed of. Malcolm knows more peace and love and community in a rainbow of people than I ever have. I hope that we continue to keep the balance of his experiences on the safety and community side and not the pain and hurt that so many of us have felt under the stings of racism here.