Tag Archives: Road Trips

Accidental VIPs

This is the sixth post in a series about a UK road trip that starts here.

We had arrived in Silverstone, England for the Mini United festival tired, hungry, crabby, and on a budget. “You can sleep when you’re dead,” is one of my mottos. Hungry could be fixed with overpriced, tasteless vendor food, but a budget was a budget, and incompatible with a long weekend of overpriced vendor food. I was doing okay financially—obviously—since I could afford the airfare to get there. But Rebecca worked as a carer, which is someone who cares for elderly and handicapped people in their homes. It’s a super important and supremely underpaid job.

We crawled out of the tent and surveyed our surroundings.

Yes, teepees—they’re big over there. I subtly strolled by one that was open to get a look at the interior but didn’t have the guts to take a picture. There’s a permanent platform, so you’re never going to get wet unless it’s flood-mageddon. You rent the teepee with all the gear, which can include cots and coolers and all the bulky heavy stuff that’s a drag to store and pack if you own it.

Is this cultural appropriation? I don’t know. Maybe they’re just triangle-shaped tents. It’s not like these campers were dressing in rawhide and eating dried strips of deer meat and doing war dances. At least, not that I saw.

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We used the porta loos, which weren’t bad as far as giant storage containers of feces and urine go. There were sinks with warm water but no showers.

I was having a hard time getting excited. But hey, it was just three days. How bad could it be? I didn’t want to ask Rebecca what she was thinking because it had been my fool idea to come here.

We slogged for what seemed like a mile, following the other ratty-looking campers, to get to the registration point. “Okay I’ll just say it,” I said. “We can walk back to the tent and cook over the stove every meal, which will take forever but save us money. Or we can buy the overpriced food at the concessions.” I was wondering how much a beer would be.

“Yep,” Rebecca replied, stonily. Then she turned to me with a forced but radiant smile, “Let’s just see how it goes!”

“Hmm … what a novel but healthy idea!” I was on board.

“We can always bitch and moan later.”

“Yes, it’s a beautiful day!” I replied, and it was. We were tromping through a farm field on a sunny, warm spring day.

We arrived at the registration point and there was a line a hundred people deep. An employee came by and scanned our confirmations. “Oh,” he said meaningfully, “You’re North Americans.” I didn’t correct him, that Rebecca was not a North American, in case that was a bad thing which would cause her to be ejected.

He waved us over to a different line where no one was waiting. This was good. I showed the confirmation. “Welcome!” our staff greeter said enthusiastically. “Here’s your swag bag.” He handed us each some nice-looking messenger-type bags emblazoned with the festival logo and stuffed with … stuff, to be revealed. “And these are your VIP badges.”

Rebecca and I exchanged glances that said, “do we keep our mouths shut, or not?”

“Thanks for thinking we are VIPs,” I said regretfully, “But we just paid the regular admission like everyone else.” I waved my arm toward the hoi polloi waiting in the very long line.

This guy had the best job in the world, because he got to say this to people: “You are VIPs, because you–you North Americans–are our best customers.” I didn’t feel like an uber customer, but I just smiled and nodded in order not to break the magic.

—

We made our way straight to the VIP lounge, where we sat speechless, smiling dumbly at one another, emitting the occasional giggle. “What if it’s a mistake?” I kept asking.

“Let’s just stay in here the whole time so we don’t have to risk not being re-admitted!” was Rebecca’s idea. And that’s pretty close to what we did.

On the Road Again

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This is the fifth post in a series about a UK road trip that begins here.

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Rebecca and I whiled away a week in Wales. We hiked along the cliffs; this was my favorite sign:

We spent a day at St. David’s Cathedral, which is a functioning place of worship. St. David is the patron saint of Wales. He punished himself for his sins by standing neck deep in the sea. The ice cold sea.

The cathedral was erected on top of a monastery circa 500 AD. The interior was fantastic, though cramped, with signs like this throughout:

It was impossible to get good photos inside because it was so dark and I couldn’t back up enough to get perspective. That’s okay; sometimes it’s good to just be and really see, and not be preoccupied with getting the best shot.

The little gem below is from the exterior. It’s important, in the UK, to look up or you’ll miss the gargoyles, murals, and curlicues.

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We wandered about the countryside. You know the expression, “take the high road?” Well there really is such a thing as a high road. They’re useful during floods, apparently:

Back in town, we stopped at the butchers—a real butcher shop—to buy lamb. This is Wales, after all, which has more sheep than people.

Rebecca is a great cook, and she managed to make lamb stew with spring potatoes and peas on a camp stove. Here she is doing her impression of a posh Oxfordshire camper, complete with pinky aloft.

There was one rainy day, so naturally we attempted to cook inside the tent. This is a Very Bad practice. As experienced campers, we should have known better. The stove toppled over, the meths ran along the floor, flame followed, and we screamed and scrambled to put them out. We succeeded, but there was a burn hole in the floor of Rebecca’s newish tent.

We often recall this story. She remembers it being her fault, and I remember it being mine. At least it’s not the other way around! All that matters is that neither of us got burned and we still had a tent over our heads, if it did have a hole in the floor.

We returned to the pub a couple times and learned a great deal about McGiver, Mr. T., Luke, Bo, and Daisy. The farmers just couldn’t get over that I, and American, was so ignorant about my own culture.

If our road trip had only been this much—this sojourn in Wales—it would have been enough. But we had only begun! We packed everything back into the Micra and bade farewell to our beautiful, peaceful, seaside outpost. Off we went to our next destination, Silverstone, England, for the Mini Cooper Festival.

The “Welcome to England” sign made me laugh. The drive was like going from Minnesota to Wisconsin, and yet here we were crossing country borders, sort of.

Rebecca wasn’t laughing. She was driving 200 miles on a week of sleep deprivation and encountering Bank Holiday weekend traffic jams and spring road construction projects every two miles. As we slowly progressed I watched her shoulders rise up to the level of her ears. This was my introduction to certain charming British terms such as “buttock clenching,” and “fuckwit.”

The drive took most of a day. By the time we neared Silverstone, Rebecca was laughing in a way that made me nervous. Once again, as we neared our destination, the skies darkened and the winds rose. We pulled into the campground adjacent to the racetrack and festival grounds at dusk and this time did a little better at pitching the tent. We looked around. We were surrounded by a sea of tents and teepees populated by rag-tag Mini owners from all over the world. We were famished, so we walked and walked and walked until we found the food stalls and bought some extremely overpriced and under spiced curry in a paper cup.

We trudged back to the campsite to use the porta loos before it started raining. Neither of us said anything, but we were both thinking we should have stayed in Wales.

Springtime of the Daleks

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Have you ever tried to pitch a tent in the dark in a gale force wind? That’s what Rebecca and I did on the second night of our UK road trip.

“Park the car between the cliff and the tent site to block the wind,” I yelled helpfully.

“But the tent is bigger than the car!” Rebbeca pointed out. There was a lot of flapping and flopping and “f—ing!” and hysterical laughing before it was done.

Here is Rebecca blowing up her “lilo,” which is what Brits call an air mattress. She is purposely not looking at me, or she would burst out laughing and end up sleeping on the hard ground.

We got things pretty well organized, then settled down to sleep. Our bodies were the only thing weighing the tent down. We lay there in the dimness watching the top billowing wildly.

In the morning, we crawled bleary eyed out of the tent to scenes like this:

That’s the wonderful thing about seaside weather; it can change within hours. Rebecca made some coffee and porridge on the cook stove with the meths. I still couldn’t get over that that’s what they called camping fuel.

Then it was off on a hike:

If you live in a place with four distinct seasons, like Minnesota with its harsh grey winters, you appreciate the pure bliss of a spring hike. I do believe that our bodies are attuned to the seasons and nature in general, although that connection is blunted by indoor lighting, artificial schedules, and screens, screens, screens. But if you get outside on a spring day and start paying attention to the colors of the sea and the tiny blossoms and the sounds of larks that you can’t even see because they fly so high, very quickly you feel alive—alive, and free, and joyous.

We hiked for hours and said barely a word to one another; it wasn’t necessary. Then we headed into St. David’s via narrow, hedgerow-bordered roads and farm fields.

We learned we would have to return the next day to tour the cathedral, so we wandered around and ended up in the pub, which fortuitously had a pub quiz that evening. We were enjoying our fish and chips with mushy peas and a pint of ale when a crusty farmer sidled up to us and began making marriage proposals. “I’m a millionaire farmer,” he declared. “Ye could do worse.” We laughed at first, until we started wondering if he was serious because he was so persistent. Thankfully the quiz started and he went back to join his crusty friends.

Now, Rebecca and I had been to many pub quizzes in Oxford, where the typical question was, “In which scene of Hamlet does Polonius offer Laertes a string of aphoristic clichés enumerating the shoulds and shouldn’ts of a young man’s life?”

This wasn’t Oxford. The first question was, “What common household items did McGiver use to escape from a drug lord in Season 3? Was it: a fork and spoon, a pen and paper, or chopsticks and a cigarette lighter?” The rest of the questions were based on other great American TV series like the Dukes of Hazzard and The A-Team.

Rebecca and I looked at each other and tee-heed. We weren’t going to win this quiz, but this was much more entertaining than playing cards in the tent. We had had a few pints when Rebecca raised her hand. I can’t recall what cheeky question she asked of the quiz master, because as soon as she opened her mouth the whole pub turned and stared.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

“Ahx-fohrd-shaw,” she replied (Oxfordshire), intentionally overdoing the posh Oxford accent. They all laughed, we laughed, and the questions about McGiver went on for hours.

—

If you ever go for a walk in the country, be sure to bring a flashlight in case you end up walking back to your tent much, much later, in the dark, on unlit country roads after having maybe one too many pints.

Fortunately, Rebecca and I had packed our headlamps, so we had loads of fun impersonating the daleks from Dr. Who:

“You shall be exterminated!”

Croeso i Gymru

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Before I resume my series on the UK road trip I have to mention a meeting I attended today. For those who are new to this blog, I work for an organization that provides psychological and physical rehabilitation to torture survivors. We had a lunchtime talk by an attorney who is representing one of the 70-some detainees at Guantanamo. I can’t repeat much of what he said because it is top secret. Seriously! I’ve always wanted to say that and now it’s true.

Let’s just say that he firmly believes his client is innocent, that his client was tortured severely and repeatedly, and that his client has horrendous, humiliating physical problems as a result. As the attorney described his client’s symptoms I watched as, one by one, we stopped eating our lunches.

Well, I kept eating. I felt like a schmuck but it was my only chance to wolf something down between meetings.

Again, for those of you who are new to the blog, it began when my son Vince went to prison. He was never tortured, unless you count being kept in solitary confinement for a week. However, this attorney described actions taken by Gitmo guards that were just like things done by guards in Minnesota. Mostly, it involved random acts of violation. For instance, out of nowhere they would go into his cell and rifle through his things and scatter them around. They weren’t expecting to find anything; it was about throwing him off balance, making it clear they could do whatever they wanted whenever they wanted, and intimidating him so he would never feel safe.

Now he is home free and doing well. But I found myself feeling upset during the meeting. It’s well understood in our organization that many former prisoners have PTSD from what they endured on the inside. I sometimes think I have what’s called secondary trauma, which is caused by hearing the stories of people who have suffered. So even though I’ve never been in prison I am affected by it. I just needed to get that off my chest. Thanks for reading.

—

Back to the road trip!

Rebecca packed all our gear into the Micra and we were off to Wales. We agreed at the start that I wouldn’t drive, since I had never driven in Britain and didn’t have an international driver’s license. But mainly it was because every time she took a turn I was inclined to yell, “head on collision!” because in my mind we were in the wrong lane.

It’s only about 200 miles from Oxford to St. David, Wales, but it was spring so road projects had sprung up everywhere, along with the famous bluebells.

We were headed for Abergavenny to spend a night at Rebecca’s brother’s house. The route was clear as a corn maze. I had never encountered round abouts and I asked Rebecca to explain the rules to me.

She tried, but I think it’s one of those things—if you grow up knowing it, you just know it—and you can’t explain it to someone else.

We stopped at an outdoor store to buy fuel for the camp stove, which they call meths. Even Rebecca, a native who had visited Wales many times, was stumped by this one.

Back on the road, I asked, “How is it that Wales is part of the UK but still separate country?” Again, she tried, but it seemed to be another case of “it’s clear and obvious if you were raised here, and it’s hopelessly bewildering if you weren’t.”

We had dinner with Rebecca’s brother and his wife. Rebecca referred to her sister-in-law’s “charming Welsh accent” but I couldn’t hear it. We left their house early the next morning; ominous dark clouds and high winds increased as we drove toward St. David’s.

We found the campground at dusk, and when we checked in, the woman in the office retracted her lips and sucked in her breath. She didn’t tell us we couldn’t camp, but she clucked and fussed with a worried frown on her face before she finally pointed out our site, on the edge of the cliff overlooking the sea.

How’s that for a cliff hanger? Ha ha ha.

The Original Woodstock

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This is the second post in a series about a road trip across England and Wales that starts here.

It was May. It was still wintery in Minnesota but spring was well underway in England when I arrived. Rebecca lived in Woodstock, a small, charming town outside of Oxford most famous for Blenheim Palace, where Winston Churchill was born. The palace is okay, if you like that kind of thing.

My favorite aspect of Blenheim is the grounds and “pleasure gardens” which surround it. You can literally walk for hours and never see another human, just sheep. And the old trees…it just doesn’t get much better.

I could step out of Rebecca’s door, walk one block past the public entrance to Blenheim, then slip into the “neighbor’s gate.” I don’t understand how it all works, but apparently the Duke of Marlborough, who is the current occupant, must allow the public access to hike and enjoy the grounds. But you have to know there’s a no-fee gate, otherwise you’ll pay £14.90 just to walk in the gardens. Here are the two gates:

Woodstock is an expensive place to live. It has quaint shops full of locally-sourced organic gluten-free wool jumpers and cozy old pubs like The King’s Head, the Bear, and the Black Prince. People come from Oxford and London for the weekend to shop and eat and see Blenheim.

Rebecca’s address was The Maisonette, 1 Brown’s Lane. Maisonette just means “little house” in French. The building was just like the church where we had met—everything crooked, cramped, and damp—except it was about a hundred years older and had enjoyed that much less maintenance and upkeep. The ground floor was an antiques shop called The Dickens House, and the building/shop owners, believe it or not, lived below it in the windowless basement.

Rebecca and her flat mate had a three-bedroom, two-story flat above the shop—thus the term maisonette. It’s very common for flats in the UK to come furnished, with everything from (of course) furniture to appliances like toasters and kettles, down to the silverware and dishracks. The maisonette was furnished with the leftover antiques from the Dickens House, which were dark and heavy and took up so much space there was barely room to walk. The chairs and sofa were upholstered with worn puce velvet and the carpet was some sort of dark teal astro turf. The living room walls were adorned with William Hogarth prints depicting the 18^th Century gin epidemic.

Charming!

The Maisonette was located next to the public pay urinal and across from the one party pub that had some sort of heavy metal karaoke night, so Rebecca had her own personal gin epidemic on the weekends.

Her flat mate was never there because she worked two jobs in two other towns—as a DJ in Oxford and as some sort of communications officer for a nature preserve way out in the boondocks. I stayed in the spare room, in which was stuffed a queen sized bed, more antiques, and the flat mate’s boxes and bags of stuff which I had to crawl over to get to the bed, which was perfectly comfortable.

—

So I flew to London, took the bus to Oxford, and Rebecca picked me up in front of the Ashmolean Museum, which was our usual pickup place, and we headed to Woodstock to pack everything into Rebecca’s Nissan Micra.

Yeah I had a Mini, but she had a Micra, into which we—well she, really—meticulously packed my suitcase, her hiking backpack, the tent, sleeping bags, cook stove, food, a cooler, and other camping gear for our two-week camping road trip.

My Name is Anne, and I’m a Travelholic

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I’m house sitting again, this time for a friend who has a huge apartment and two cats who need minding. My friend is Peruvian and collects art and artifacts every time she goes home. Here are some of my favorites:

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My last post about the road trip, and my anxieties around it, brought to mind the only other Big Road Trip of my life. I’ve driven to Chicago a half dozen times but that’s nothing compared to the trip where I never once got behind the wheel.

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My friend Rebecca and I met at an Alanon meeting in Oxford. AA and Alanon meetings vary greatly from one culture and location to another. In St. Paul meetings, people go around at the beginning, say their names, and the crowd responds, “Hi Anne!” The meetings are pretty squirrely. There’s lots of laughter and disorder.

Not so in Oxford. The meeting was in an 18^th Century church. The ceilings were low and building was cold, cramped, and crooked. The chairs were hardwood with no cushions and the backs were a 90 degree angle from the seat, making for maximum discomfort, especially since the tilted floors meant your chair teetered to one side. I regret I never brought a marble to set in the middle of the table so I could see which direction it would roll off.

At my first meeting, the introductions started and the first person said slowly and with perfect enunciation, “Hello, my name is Roger”—or “rwah-jah” as he pronounced it. I exclaimed, “Hi Roger!” Just me. No one else. Everyone stared at their hands, neatly folded in their laps. I’m sure they were thinking, “Bloody Americans, they’re so enthusiastic about everything!”

I heard a barely-stifled guffaw and a snort on the other end of the table just as a woman introduced herself, “Hello, my name is Rebecca.” She looked straight at me and laughed. The rest of the group carried on as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. It took a while, but Rebecca and I would become good friends.

—

A year later my work visa had expired and I was back in St. Paul. I job hunted for seven months, taking the bus everywhere because I had sold my car when I moved to England. It was a painful stretch. As soon as I landed a job I bought a Mini Cooper. Maybe it was a foolish thing to do, since I hadn’t even started the job yet, but I thought of my Mini as sort of like the greatest souvenir / consolation prize I could have from my time in England.

And did you know? There are Mini events going on all the time all over the world. I learned that there would be a “Mini Festival” in England the following spring. It was as good an excuse as any to go back and visit. So I Skyped with Rebecca and she was in.

“Let’s go to Wales though, too, okay?” she proposed. “We can visit my brother the sheep farmer and camp on the cliffs overlooking the sea.”

Was that okay with me? Was it! Oh boy! I bought my ticket and started looking at maps.

We would drive from Oxford to Wales, then slingshot back to Silverstone racetrack for the festival. It doesn’t look that far on a map but … I’ll get to that.

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If you’ve read this blog from the beginning, you know I started my adult life on welfare, in subsidized housing, with no car.

Here’s how I afford trips—my two indulgences—on a nonprofit salary: I live below my means. I make do with small living spaces. I have a dozen pairs of shoes—which is nothing for an American female. I shop at thrift stores and get my haircuts at Cost Cutters with coupons. I make my own coffee and cook from scratch instead of going to coffee shops and restaurants.

I hope I don’t sound smug. My intention is to encourage you—if you love travel but don’t have a lot of money—to consider offbeat adventures like the volunteering, language immersion, and medical missions I’ve described in the last few months. Or even just every day adventures like house sitting for a friend.

A Case of the What Ifs

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In three weeks I will be on my big road trip to New Orleans. My friend Lynn arrives on Saturday afternoon from Scotland and we’ll head out the next morning.

Here’s the itinerary I’ve mapped out:

Sunday, April 3: 8-hour drive from St. Paul to Chicago with a stop for lunch with cousins and a niece in Madison, Wisconsin. I am told we must see the protest singers at the state capital. I have no idea who or what they are.

Monday, April 4: A full day in Chicago—Millennium Park, architectural boat tour, another niece

Tuesday, April 5: 8-hour drive from Chicago to Memphis, check out Beale Street and Sun Studio or the Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum.

Wed, April 6: Visit the National Civil Rights Museum which is in the Memphis motel where Martin Luther King was assassinated, then hit the road for the 7-hour drive to New Orleans

Wed-Sun, April 6-10: In New Orleans for 5 days! French Quarter Festival will be on, and there are so many other things to do, like an alligator swamp boat ride, plantation tours, and fabulous architecture, gardens, and cemeteries.

Monday, April 11: 6-hour drive from New Orleans to Oxford, Mississippi. The University of Mississippi at Oxford is where America’s university system was forcefully integrated. I also wanted to stay in at least one sort-of-small city. Oxford’s population is 20,000, although I don’t know if that accounts for university students.

Tuesday, April 12: 6-hour drive from Oxford to St. Louis. Dinner with a friend from grad school, preferably in The Hill neighborhood renowned for its Italian food. At least eight people have told me we must—must! visit the City Museum. They say it’s lots of fun, that you can play around on the art like a kid, but it’s really for adults. I’m not that good at fun, but it is something I’m working on. I wonder if Lynn, being English, will find it fun. I’m not at all clear on what it is, but we’re going to find out.

Wednesday, April 13: 8.5-hour drive from St. Louis to St. Paul to get Lynn to the airport in time for her late evening flight.

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Whew. I admit I am anxious about how it will all play out. What if the route times on Google maps don’t allow time for bathroom breaks or lunches? That would mean all my times are off. What if the routes aren’t scenic? What if Lynn thinks all Americans are racist yahoos? What if every city is just a mass of Walmarts, Star Bucks, and strip malls? What if my GPS breaks and we get lost? What if one of us is mugged? What if the museums aren’t open on the day we’re there? What if my back hurts from so much driving? What if we get into a fight over what to do in New Orleans? What if we arrive after dark in one of these big cities and the hotel has no record of our registration? What if a meteorite hits the car? What if the car breaks down in a bayou and we hear banjo music?

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My anxiety is nothing like it used to be, but it’s interesting to notice it. I’ve learned a lot of tricks for dealing with anxiety over the years. Some of the ones that work best for me are to:

– bring myself out of my head to focus on my surroundings. Notice that I am not currently in my car surrounded by alligator-filled swamps or muggers, but in a chair in my dining room writing this post. This usually helps bring me back to reality.

– remember that nothing lasts. I may feel anxious right now, but it will pass if I don’t latch on to it. It’ll probably come back, but then it will pass again. So it’s not permanent. If it did get to be constant and lasted for a week, I would call a professional.

– know that, if I do end up surrounded by hillbillies, I will deal with it then. For now, I only need to do the next indicated thing—finish this post and post it. And so I will.

Go West, Ye Seekers!

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This is the third in a series of posts about a road trip to South Dakota that starts here.

The trip was a good start in helping my organization figure out how it can reach many more torture survivors using technology. But first, you’re probably all wondering about the four-hour drive—was it scenic? Here is a photo of the view out my window:

And another one; notice how I included a post in this one, just to spice it up:

But wait! There was more to see as we got closer to Sioux Falls, like these billboards:

Yes, Sioux Falls has jobs. Their unemployment rate is the 4^th lowest in the country—an eye-popping 2.3%, which is actually a problem.

It’s a nice small city, with about 165,000 people and growing. There appears to be more diversity than you would expect, with immigrants attracted to jobs in the Morrell meat packing plant and other industries. There’s no corporate income tax in South Dakota, so a lot of banks and credit cards companies are based there. And as in St. Paul and Minneapolis, where there are corporate headquarters, there is an orchestra, an airport, good restaurants and high-end shops, public art, and nice parks with bike paths.

There’s also no individual income tax in South Dakota, so if you’re looking for a job, you can find one in Sioux Falls and live like a monarch.

—

Our first visit was to Avera, which is a health system. It was founded by nuns which has become the largest provider of telemedicine in the U.S. What does that look like? I had no idea what to expect. But then we were led onto a sort of viewing deck from which we could see hives of doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and technicians tending to patients and lending back up to doctors in dozens of hospitals and clinics in 10 states. There was an e-ER, and e-Urgent Care, e-pharmacy, and so on.

There is a monitor, camera, and microphone installed at the foot of each patient’s bed in the hospital in, say…Thermopolis, Wyoming (an actual place). The doctor there can’t figure out what’s going on with a patient—in such a small place he just doesn’t see enough variety to recognize sepsis, or some other serious but not very common condition. The Avera e-docs can actually see and talk to the patient, diagnose him, recommend treatment, then monitor his vitals to make sure he’s responding—all from 677 miles away.

They also demonstrated an app that patients can use like urgent care, without having to leave the house. All their medical records are available to the clinician, who the patient can see and talk with via a secure Skype-like application that is compliant with all our complex medical privacy laws in the U.S.

Then, just for me, one of our hosts discussed their eCorrectional Health program. “Usually when a prisoner is seriously ill, they have to transfer him to a hospital, which can cost thousands of dollars. With eCorrectional Health, the facility physician can get a diagnosis and treatment recommendations without having to take the prisoner out of the prison. It saves a lot of resources.

“Everyone is happy…well, except for the prisoner, who doesn’t get a change of scenery.”

Knowing the medical, dental, optometry, and pharmacy “care” Vince received inside three different prisons, I think this eCorrectional thing may be a vast improvement. Prisoners may not get to leave prison, but they probably receive better care, from people whose humanity hasn’t been tainted and warped from working in the prison system.

—

We left Avera with our mouths hanging open, we were so impressed. The potential to expand the number of clients we reach is mind boggling. We’ve got a long way to go, but we’ll talk with Avera next week about potentially partnering to pilot something.

The Fox and the Hen House

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This is the second in a series of posts about a road trip to South Dakota that starts here.

When you think about it, South Dakota makes sense. It’s a very rural state where people have a hard time getting to an ER or clinic. Therefore the largest provider of telemedicine in the world is in South Dakota. We’ll also visit a guy who is the CEO of the country’s largest ethanol producer, and his wife, who have an interest in east Africa.

Then we’ll visit the Helmsley Trust, which is named for the late Leona Helmsley. One of Leona Helmsley’s grandsons lives in South Dakota, and I imagine that’s why the trust is in Sioux Falls. Leona, originally named Lena Rosenthal, was the daughter of Polish Jewish immigrants and became a hotel tycoon in New York City. Sadly she spent time in prison for income tax evasion and was controversial for being demanding. I’m sure she was demanding. You don’t get to be a billionaire by being meek. But when Donald Trump is demanding, no one thinks twice about it.

Leona Helmsley left $12 million to her dog in her will, and the Helmsley Trust, which has around $5.4 billion in assets, was originally mandated to only benefit dogs.

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By the time you read this I’ll be back from this exciting trip and will let you know how it went. I don’t expect anyone to write us a big check. Fund raising—or development as it’s called in the US, is a long-term process of relationship building.

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Here are a few prison-related updates.

Close to home, Vince got the final word on his punishment for not answering the phone when a probation agent called. He’ll be on lockdown for a total of a month and have an extra month added to his probation. I told a friend about it; she works for the St. Paul City Council and was an admin at the St. Paul Police Department before that so she is no stranger to bureaucracies and the sometimes difficult people who work in them.

“I always figure the guy had a fight with his wife,” was her assessment. “If he hadn’t, or if Vince had a different agent that day,” Vince’d still be on track to finish his probation on time.”

“Are they trying to goad him into doing something that’ll send him back to prison?” I wondered. “He also got two parking tickets that day—one was for parking more than 12 inches from the curb. Do you think they could be in cahoots with the police?”

“No,” she laughed. “They’re not that organized. It’s just random.”

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On the prison reform front, the New York Times ran an editorial, “Holding Sentence Reform Hostage.” The pending legislation would “reduce absurdly long mandatory minimum sentences for many nonviolent drug crimes, give judges more control over the terms of punishment and provide inmates with more opportunities to get out early by participating in rehabilitation programs.”

Some Republicans are scaremongering, Willy Horton style. At least that sort of makes sense.

But some Republicans say they won’t approve the bill unless it includes a change in federal law that would make corporations and their executives harder to prosecute for environmental or financial crimes. This has nothing to do with prison reform but is a standard tactic used by politicians to get what they want without having to work hard for it. I know, it’s hard to believe they could be much lazier.

In my opinion, this is evil. I don’t like to call people evil, I really don’t. But making it easier for companies like BP or Goldman Sachs to get off the hook?

In related but also absurd-news category, there’s this item: Former Tyco CEO, Who Served Time in Prison, Appointed Chair of Prisoner-Assistance Nonprofit.

Dennis Kozlowski, who did six years for stealing millions of dollars from his own company, is now in charge of the Fortune Society, a nonprofit that helps former prisoners find jobs, housing, health care, and education. What a great idea: putting an old, white, rich man–a former thief–in charge of a nonprofit with $10.8 million in assets. How nice for him. What could possibly go wrong?

Dakota Bound

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I’m on a road trip! No, not to New Orleans. Believe it or not, I am going to meet with three potential donors in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Yee haw!

Here’s the deal. The Center for Victims of Torture, where I work, does psychotherapy, physical therapy, and social work for survivors of torture and war trauma. We do it in groups in Jordan, for instance, because all the clients speak the same language. We do it on an individual basis in Minnesota, because clients come from 36 different countries and speak myriad languages which must often be translated, which doubles the time everything takes.

This is all good as far as it goes, except that there are an estimated 1.3 million torture survivors in the US alone. We do a lot of training to try to equip professionals outside of CVT to recognize and help torture survivors. But there’s also no way we can train every doctor, social worker, cop, or immigration officer that might come into contact with a survivor.

People have been talking about doing something with technology at CVT for years, but without funding that’s just dreaming. Part of my job is to find new sources of funding, and that’s what I hope I’ve done. I won’t bore you with the details, but there are three HUGE international development innovation funds that we hope to tap. To do this, we need to find partners who know how to reach patients in remote or difficult to access situations. That’s why we’re going to South Dakota.

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It’s so important, when you’re trying to get people fired up about complicated ideas, that you have the right people on your team. My co-pilots on this trip are a colleague who is from Sioux Falls and whose father has opened some doors for us, and CVT’s clinical advisor for our international programs, who is Kenyan and a PhD psycholgist. He describes the needs this way:

In Nairobi, there are thousands of Somali torture survivors living in the slums who are not there legally, under the protection of the United Nations. They literally cannot leave their dwellings during the day, because the Kenyan police will round them up and shake them down for bribes. Which would you choose: Pay a bribe, or be sent back to Somalia where you may face certain death? They may not have iphones, but could we develop a text-based therapy intervention?

Among the survivors who are in Nairobi legally, there are many Congolese and people of other non-English speaking nationalities. Kenya is an English-speaking country. The refugee kids may have already missed years of schooling due to being forced to serve as child soldiers and living on the run or hiding. Now they spend 12 hours a day in school—regular school, plus an extra block of time added on to learn English. They have survived unimaginable horrors. Many of them need psychotherapy or physical therapy, but they don’t have time for it. Could we develop a game-like therapy intervention that would appeal to youth?

CVT also works in Dadaab, the largest refugee camp on earth, in northern Kenya near the Somali border. Its population is about the same as Minneapolis—about 350,000 people. Could we do tele-therapy with them—either mental health or physical? If so we could reach so many more people. We could also use videoconferencing to train our own and other organizations’ staff.

“Do they all have smart phones in Dadaab?” I asked. I have been to Nairobi but not Dadaab.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “We would have to do a survey to determine who has the old Nokias, how many have smart phones. The Chinese are making big inroads into the African market with cheap smart phones. Most Kenyans use their mobiles for everything. They don’t have tablets or desk tops or TVs or land lines. They’ve basically skipped over those generations of devices and they do everything on mobiles.”

I love projects like this. They’re big, messy, uncertain, and complicated. They require me to work with people with whom I don’t normally interact. They may have big payoffs. And in this case they require a road trip.

Breaking Free

Living Well, Despite what Life Throws at You

Tag Archives: Road Trips

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On the Road Again

Springtime of the Daleks

Croeso i Gymru

The Original Woodstock

My Name is Anne, and I’m a Travelholic

A Case of the What Ifs

Go West, Ye Seekers!

The Fox and the Hen House

Dakota Bound