Turn on the Lights: Electrify Africa

Laurie White July 2, 2015

I have spent my life in and around places where seemingly limitless electricity and bright lights are the norm.

I have spent a good bit of my photographic life looking for places where the sun's light shines down just so, striking people, places, and things in the way that makes them more beautiful than they may already be--to my eye, anyway. Everything is subjective. I didn't connect with studio lighting instruction in photo classes. I admire people who can do great indoor work with no natural light, but I wasn't up for the challenge of metering, calibrating, shooting, and then changing it all again for the next shot, over and over again. The results of this work are often stunning. It just doesn't work for me. I love telling stories and framing scenes. The technical details are often lost on me.

It has never been difficult for me to find light when I want it, though--inside or out. I am so absolutely dependent upon electricity flowing freely through my house and all of the places I go outside of it that just how dependent doesn't even occur to me to until it is gone. When my town loses power, it's a newsworthy event. When the power source falters in my house I keep using up electricity on my phone so I can share the tragedy that is me having no electricity with my social networks. Insanity. I run around looking for candles and flashlights. I wonder how I'm going to occupy myself with real things like books and conversations with actual humans until I can plug back in. I deal with practical matters of food storage and perhaps the loss of a heat or cooling source. Overall it's an entirely manageable situation.

But mostly I wonder how long it's going to take until it comes back on. How long is it going to take these people whose job it is at the power company to keep the lights on to make this happen, already?

Taking electricity so deeply for granted is why my gratitude lists lately include things like "I turn on a faucet and water comes out. Awesome." "I flip a switch and a light comes on." Because the truth is that 19 percent of the world's population -- or 1.3 billion people -- has no access to electricity at all. One.org informs me about so many critical needs around the world, and one of those is the need for safe, affordable electricity in sub-Saharan Africa. I didn't even know what "energy poverty" meant before I read One's significant material. Now I know that it's a frightening situation that affects millions of African people.

Health care is hugely affected. More than 30 percent of clinics in sub-Saharan Africa--serving approximately 235 million people--are without electricity. I try to imagine life in my city if doctors could only provide services before sundown; if surgeries weren't guaranteed a consistent light source, or if communications between health care providers weren't guaranteed. This is the norm in Africa, and it affects the health--and let's get real, the survival--of millions of people.

Because power is in limited supply, people must cook inside over open fires or from kerosene sources. This is dangerous and unhealthy.

Energy poverty is a critical issue for women.

This is the problem. I like to think quickly about solutions. So I'm thrilled to be a part of One's Light for Light Campaign this month. Throughout July some of your favorite photobloggers will share their favorite light-filled photographs. In exchange, we'll be asking you to sign the petition to encourage lawmakers to pass the Electrify Africa bill. My friend Karen kicked us off yesterday with gorgeous shots of her trip to Malawi.

Last year, the House and the Senate both introduced bills that would help bring electricity to 50 million people in Africa for the very first time. Unfortunately, they didn’t pass, but there is another chance this year. The House just introduced The Electrify Africa Act. It's important to tell Congress just how important this bill is, how important it is to #ElectrifyAfrica. So please sign the petition to support the Electrify Africa Act.

I shot my very favorite light-filled pictures on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, just outside of San Diego. They are a matched set taken minutes apart during the very same sunset. The top image hangs where I can see it first thing every morning, because it makes me think especially of powerful forces and beautiful things.

Speaking up for people who --literally-- do not have the power to advocate for themselves is a powerful force, and a beautiful thing. And for those of us who have a continent's worth of electrical and media outlets at our disposal, it's really, really easy. So I encourage you to sign the #ElectrifyAfrica petition. Follow the #ElectrifyAfrica hashtag on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Use it yourself. Share this post, and share your own favorite light-filled image on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter, and tag it #ElectrifyAfrica and #LightforLight. Visit Heather Barmore's site tomorrow for her images and thoughts about this crucial initiative.

It's the most light-filled time of the year in North America. I'm looking forward to seeing yours.

If I'm Good the Police Will Leave Me Alone

Laurie White June 16, 2015

I'm pretty sure I did everything wrong about teaching English this semester except listening to my students and helping them learn how to formulate their ideas more clearly and with more depth. I really love these conversations with young people who are learning to write better. Critical thinking isn't something you're necessarily born knowing how to do, especially in an immediate gratification salad bar of a society. Someone has to care enough to engage you in discussions that involve options beyond the kind you find on a multiple choice test. Okay, so you think that, but why? What would you do if someone asked you to defend your idea with facts and solid rationale? How will you respond when someone disagrees with you? You might not be able to immediately form responses to these questions . You might need some practice. You have to go a little deeper here.

When they're lost in formulating a good argument I tell them to go to the ultimate: asking for a raise. Money is a motivator and as close to a universal concern as I can get in this environment besides "we're all going to die", and this is not a philosophy course. How do you effectively justify not just your need for more cash from an employer, but how much you deserve it? This tends to wake them up a little.

I pulled a particular really smart but scattered student aside one day so we could talk more about his paper topic. He had the look that many of mine do--scattered not just from a state of being, but from life, which is to say he's managing too much of it and trying to go to school at the same time. He told me, after some talk about a safe topic that he didn't care about, that he really wanted to argue his belief that as an African-American teenager he was ultimately responsible for the outcomes of any interactions he had with police. His job was to be respectful, calm, and obedient if approached by law enforcement, and things would turn out in his favor. He wouldn't be arrested, especially wrongfully, or, God forbid, injured or killed like so many of his peers he has seen lately in the media. He would keep his head down. He would not act up. He would survive.

He shared a time he and some friends had been walking around in a nearby college town in the early morning hours. They were doing nothing and had nothing with them, he said, that would cause any trouble. Police had approached them anyway, asking why they were there and where they were headed. His friend who mouthed off made it worse for all of them. It made B nervous. He wished that his friend would shut his mouth. B kept quiet through the whole thing, and eventually they were allowed to move along. He liked to think that his behavior had made things better, that if his friend had been alone it would have turned bad. Using his head had worked so far, and he had to believe that this would continue.

I told him that if he could find some data to back it up, he had a valid argument for this particular assignment, and at the very least he could try. He needed to talk to people, and read commentary about this big, big issue carefully. He needed statistics about law enforcement interactions and crime rates, race and violent encounters incarceration percentages and cause and effect. We talked about qualitative research and how it's tough to argue a point that is based solely in feelings and anecdotal evidence, at least in an academic setting. This wasn't friends sitting around hashing over a belief; this was an argumentative research assignment.

I told him that I very much wanted his argument to be true, but our wishes weren't the point in this context. His job was to scan facts that might make it difficult to prove in addition to an easy case, because that is what you have to do when you're formulating a solid argument. It's almost more important to prepare for the counter-argument, to have a response prepared when someone comes for your idea and tells you you're wrong, as they almost certainly will, especially on a charged topic.

As I listened to him my heart broke while my womp-womp teacher mouth talked arguments and claims, counter-arguments and rebuttals. I thought I knew already what he'd find out, but it wasn't my job to decide that or influence him or discourage him from seeking answers. Sometimes my job is to hate a truth and witness it anyway, to balance intellect and emotion. Critical thinking, I guess.

But the not-so-secret is that the classroom ultimately teaches me hardest, and this was a tough one. I had walked the streets he talked about in that town he referenced, and the people I was told to fear were people who looked like my student, not the police, unless I was told to fear them catching me driving my car from a bar if I'd been drinking. I was supposed to fear the police doing their jobs, if I were legitimately breaking the law. This is an entirely opposite situation from B's. This is a different kind of life. This is the privilege people often claim isn't real, because it's uncomfortable. Because it is real.

A week or so passed before we talked about B's paper again, a week I spent watching the news and reading hashtag threads from a different perspective. I took a picture of a covertly racist billboard about prison, of all things, on a weekend trip to Tennessee. I walked by a #policelivesmatter bumper sticker and sighed. I favorited tweets that supported his claim. I spent a day in Baltimore and watched protests from a distance on the news. I did not feel optimistic for his research. I told myself it was important for him to process through this.

When we sat back at the same table, we brought up nearly simultaneously that the news was making his point more difficult to prove. We talked about Freddie Gray, who had just died in Baltimore after an attack by police. We discussed Walter Scott, who had been shot in the back earlier in the month in South Carolina while running from police. I told him to consider the concept of kairos that we'd discussed in class, that timing--in a day, a relationship, a culture--has an impact on how your argument is received. What a time and place we were living in for this discussion, and also just for living. B said he was a little discouraged and I told him I was too, honestly.

"I'm starting to think that my ideas about this might not be so true, Professor."

I wasn't told in graduate school that sometimes, sitting across from a student, I would want to tear the world I barely understood myself apart with my bare hands. I never foresaw wishing for the ability to reach back with an eraser through hundreds of years of institutionalized hatred and violence, and now through a mass of rhetoric and acquittals, wiping away garbage in search of some basic decency and promise for the many--many, many--kids who cross my path, so many of them just trying to get an education they're told will help them on to better things, who are going to the movies, who are working to pay their cell phone bill and probably part of the rent and for their tuition and books too while they're taking too many credits at a community college for the load they carry outside.

I wasn't taught but have gained from experience a wish to want to be more to them than a representative of a group of people who will never let them up for air, while knowing I can only do my part to be better than they have experienced from others. I want to be the opposite of patronizing or contrived do-gooding, and obviously in stark contrast to any shaming and erasing they have experienced. I want to be a person who listens and guides, who hears their experiences and doesn't respond until they are finished speaking. I want to be a person who doesn't babble out words when none will do.

I told B that I was inclined to believe that he was correct, that he was learning an important, difficult truth, that our research often proves us wrong more than it confirms what we go in believing. I asked him if he felt okay about going back to his plan b, discussing the positive impact he believed that body cameras and other information-gathering equipment could and did have on the treatment of people of all colors by law enforcement officers. He said he felt like that would be more useful at this point, and he'd move on with it. We were both sorry he had to.

Topics aside, B is a talented writer who knows a little bit more than he did in January about how to get a point across, even if--hopefully especially if--he doesn't like what he sees or learns. He dropped his folder off right on time on the last day, a camera around his neck, fresh from shooting a friend's high school graduation. He is a resolute guy with some solid plans for the summer, who knows what to take in the fall. He has my e-mail address and a phone number if he needs a letter of recommendation, because I told him I left college with exactly zero of them and that's a terrible idea. I told him I'd write him one for anything, and that it would all be true.

He said that he'd been thinking, and he still considers himself responsible for his own behavior, but he is more aware now that it might not make the difference he'd like. He still likes to think that doing what he knows is right will up his chances of a positive outcome if he has to deal with police, which he does not want to do at all, you know? Who does? He thanked me for listening to him, and for being cool, and I did not cry until he left.

I admire this guy so much. I feel so fortunate that he crossed my path. I want him, down to my core, to be successful, and to be safe.

I get to do this job. Kairos in this case, in my life as a teacher and a person who absorbs a lot of news and has been feeling quite helpless about it all, means I got to sit in a classroom with a young black man before and after he critically scanned the environment, coming to grips with the realization that the outcomes of a scary situation may be out of his control simply because of who he is and not what he does. I thought that I understood that before, but I really didn't. B's plans for the summer are more solid than mine. I'm still, quite honestly, thinking about what to do next.

It's Okay If You Can't Even Do Half 30. Or Any 30. Or Anything, Today.

Laurie White January 16, 2015

The new year can be a different circle of hell on the internet for an addict. The holiday season is bad enough, what with the world drinking all over the place like we do on April Tuesday afternoons or whenever, and all of those ads for parties and presents with bottles as phallic symbols or vaginas or boobs wrapped in tinsel and ribbon. Everyone pretending to be alcoholics and calling it a-wassailing, basically. Drink drink drink whooo!

But normal people can do this. Complain about hangovers as temporary states of affairs, and alcohol calories as a time-limited indulgence, not a dietary staple. Because then it's January, and they--we're--supposed to give it up. Just stop. Don't do that drinking thing anymore. What are you thinking, with all of that eggnog and whatever else your lush ass has been pouring down its throat since Thanksgiving like you're allowed to just pour such things down your throat without a calendar-driven expiration date?

And it's not just drinking. People are giving up sugar now, too. Pouring the gluten, if there is any left anywhere, down the trash chute with the turkey and figgy pudding remnants. No more dirty food, either. Everyone is clean eating. Plus definitely no more shopping, I don't even care about those e-mail subject lines from all of your favorite retailers in January, about killing winter blues with fire and your debit card.

Stop it. Stop doing all of the things that you did with reckless abandon in December, when you were allowed. Except do the things you're supposed to start now. Because you're supposed to start working out like a lunatic. The worldwide warning went out that it's January, and that means yoga and spinning and treadmilling as if your very life depends upon it. (There is no space in yoga, all of everyone's dirty mats are touching because happy new year!)

It's insanity, is what it is. It could drive a regular person to drink, and for sure an alcoholic like me, who never needed any excuse anyway.

All of the years I lived in active alcoholism on the internet (oh, to erase caches and delete whole years of digital babble, if only) I tried to play along, mostly because I felt like I had to, and if I did, maybe that meant I didn't have a problem. Because a big part of being a slave to addiction, for me, was pretending -- that things were okay when they weren't, that I was just like you, my friend who could drink one glass of wine and "be done" or "not be in the mood" for more, who could actually be motivated enough by the promise of weight loss to cut down, or, more unthinkable, even stop.

What in the actual hell? What does that even mean? I can't even buy one green pepper, as an old roommate noted who pointed out that I needed two of everything, it didn't matter what. Two, like my vegetables or butter pats or what have you needed a buddy. Certainly my drinks did. They needed a whole tribe, a murder of glasses of wine. When people have one drink, I look on in awe, like how did you happen?

I haven't had any drink of any kind for 18 months, which is a long time for a person like me. And this holiday season was almost weirder than last year's, which was my first one sober in my adult life. This one was, if this were a Friends episode, The One Where We're Really Not Drinking This Was Not a Drill. And after it was over, when January 1 rolled around, and the people who'd been posting themselves with goblets and steins full of pure, unadulterated alcohol for two months, and also cookies and slabs of various barks and the like, started going full-on Whole 30 clean eating CrossFit sign up that I realized the difference between (probably almost all of) them and me. (Although I'm not equating alcohol addiction with food or exercise issues, which is another post.) I also remembered how upset I used to get when I realized that even if I wanted to? I couldn't stop what I was doing on January 1 any more than I could have stopped it on any other day until I was ready. I used to negotiate mentally with the South Beach diet induction phase -- like, how could this work for me except for the no wine part? The answer for me, unfortunately, was not more treadmill time. Tried that. Wine is a sugar-saturated weight loss impeding asshole, basically, one that I could absolutely not give up.

Because I needed it. It wasn't a choice. And I believe (although I am not a sugar or addiction or anything scientist, just a person with an experience) that if you are a true addict, you won't necessarily be able to stop doing it, whatever it is, either, because the internet says. It doesn't mean you are a worse person than your Facebook friend who is down to gnawing at the fairy dust in the air in front of her because she's cut out that devil gluten AND wine (oh, how blithely they're all "no wine for 30 days," hahaha) and emojis and joy. Until alcohol had kicked my ass the exact amount it needed to to kick down the door of my "I can't" to some version of "I can, I think, maybe", or at the very least "I have to because I'm going to die soon if I don't and somehow I don't think I really want to all of a sudden, wow, crazy", I couldn't have done it. Maybe some people can. I'm sure there are stories somewhere of someone's sobriety kicking off with a dare, but mine sure didn't. The stories I read just made me angry, and sad, and looking at a failure in the mirror who'd go to 90 minutes of hot yoga and then home to an empty apartment and a thwarted plan not to pour two bottles of wine down my throat.

I didn't really want to do that dance anymore, not after it started hurting so badly, and I suspect that no one else does either. I believe that to my core. And I believe that now from a place where I read these yearly January marches to dietary minimalism and vice reduction and know that not even the best intentions and solid gold wishes could have made me successful at them. I want to hug anyone who is reading along and feeling like she should be able to be better, that her insides should look more like other people's outsides, that a hashtag and an Instagram challenge should save her from herself. I'd go back and hug me, if I could, although that sounds weird so maybe not. All I have today is the knowledge that my recovery didn't turn on a calendar page, which is good to know because it means I get it, that I'm strong now, that I always was, really, I was just walking the road until a miracle dropped down into a hellish day in July and said I was done.

Spirits

Laurie White November 19, 2014

Picture by me.

365 days ago I was hung over for the last time since then. (I hope so, can't say ever because I'm not a clairvoyant wizard.) It wasn't a remarkable hangover. That one happened on a scary day earlier in the week, the day I decided that this was the end, one way or the other, and as pointless as it felt at the time, I decided to give the better, less sad option a crack.

Today I woke up and read some stuff and went to see some people about some things, and I felt pretty good about it. I didn't feel good about much most Sunday mornings for a long time. Or Saturday mornings. Or your random Wednesday mornings. That's different today. That's good.

Yesterday I went back to the place I was on the last day I ever drank, in some kind of pilgrimage to a self I remember, very carefully and intentionally without dwelling on her, because it's important not to forget how wrecked this life was should I ever get any brilliant revisionist ideas about that. The whole past month and some change (because things really started to get bad from May on, after a years-long slide downward into terrible) has been a constant, evolving flashback, varying between fuzzy old-time newsreel and the kind of shift to relentless, vivid colors like Dorothy saw in Munchkinland post-Kansas. The dates, the holidays, the birthdays, the landscape melting from spring into summer has been really hard. Even as I'm focused on how much better things are today, there's a natural grieving process in my practiced, naturally negative (and also sentimental) mind for the simplest of things, like, say, lunch being over, so big life changes get them big time. This is getting better, but it's slow.

I'm amazed that I've been able to be productive at all, considering the time I've spent involuntarily remembering things I've forgotten about where I was last year, how I felt (that's the worst, yuck, feelings), how I spent every day in a place of self-loathing and terror, no longer able to physically tolerate the consumption of a substance that I thought I needed to live.

I am grateful for those feelings now, for that terrifying physical experience, because it was so bad that the memory of it and the knowledge of how quickly I'd crash back into it if I brought alcohol back into my life again as anything other than a respected adversary and a cautionary tale is the solitary thing that has kept a drink out of my hands for a day shy of a year. (I am not celebrating until it's actually the 14th. A year is a year.)

It's the fundamental conundrum of the addict. That which kills you also seems to sustain you, has in fact done that in some way for so long that the thought of living without it (even while you're dying, while it's kicking your ass into oblivion, yes, even the wine on the top shelf and the better IPAs) is unthinkable. If I hadn't been numbed out somehow for all of those years how would I have survived these feelings, right? How? I'm really not sure. This is the part that seems the hardest, in my experience, for normal people to understand. I've read some unfortunate internet comment sections and heard some sketchy comments in real life about the deaths of Cory Monteith and Philip Seymour Hoffman that show me just how much people don't get it, either can't or won't, depending. Drugs aren't part of my story, but I relate to those guys anyway. They got lucky for periods of time, too. They found some grace along the way, and then it went away, and that was that. I want longer. I want my full allotment. I'm only almost a year old.

So yesterday I went back to Annapolis and I went to the same teeny park on a corner that I sat in front of last year. I felt like a fool, but I did it anyway, and it turned out okay. I sat in a corner spot at the restaurant where I ate with a friend on Saturday last year, and I had a club soda (three, actually.) and a dozen oysters and some crab dip. And when I had satisfied whatever I needed to by being in that place on this particular day, I left. I walked by a wine store and I looked up and I realized that it was actually the last place I'd ever bought wine, ever, and I marveled that even as a woman came out of the shop saying "Guys! It's a free tasting!" that I felt only the oddest ancient twinge, that my feet had zero urge to follow her, because they know, as connected as they are to my brain and my heart at this point in the service of taking me to the places where I need to be to get me where I need to go, that there is nothing but destruction in there for me behind some beautifully-designed labels.

I went instead to see some friends who help to keep me on the path I'm on and then I went home and went to sleep. It was a really good day.

(I wrote this post on July 13, 2013 and just found it in my drafts. I guess it wasn't time to hit publish yet.)