[Some people seem to really like this article/ post. If you are reading this post, please leave me a comment! I would enjoy hearing from you!]

When I was born my family lived in a suburb in Anderson Township in Cincinnati Ohio. When I was one year old my family moved about 30 miles outside of Cincinnati to a place called Pt. Pleasant Ohio, on the Ohio River. We lived on a wooded lot of about 10 acres of forest, surrounded by about 180 acres of forest owned by various people. There was a meadow just over the hill and a little creek running next to our house. As a child this forest and creek were my playground, which led to a primal connection with nature which has survived until this day and inspired my drive to protect the environment, nature and animals. My family was in turmoil, mostly due to one of my parent’s inability to cope with stress, and the natural surroundings were one of only a few places of refuge. Since I was the youngest child in the family, I was the only one who could get away with standing up to this parent, which led me to develop a “rebel” personality which was to persist until my early thirties.

Although we lived in this rural place, my siblings and I still commuted into Cincinnati everyday to attend school. As a student I was always establishing some kind of club or enterprise, including a detective agency, a “paper bank”, a gold club (I thought that my brothers and I had discovered gold in a nearby gravel quarry), and a group of youngsters who broke the rules to visit caves on the school’s estate. Probably the first enterprise I created related to a social cause was the “Save the Seals” Club, for which my brother drew a nice picture of a seal to include on the leaflet. I’m not sure how I became aware of this issue, which involved the killing of seals for fur and meat, and was protested at the time by proto animal rights activists. I collected money in my class to send to the organizations working on the cause.

While in the sixth grade I was selected to participate in a special series of sessions for the most gifted students. As part of this we conducted a debate on “Star Wars”, or the Strategic Defense Initiative, Reagan’s plan to build a missile defense system in space. I was placed on the side of the debate against Star Wars, and took the initiative to contact the Union of Concerned Scientists, who provided our team with a range of information by mail.  My older brother returned home from college one time and told me that his professors taught him to “question everything”, words which for some reason stuck with me and informed much of my later thinking (and also became something for which I would be criticized).

My parents divorced around this time, but I still continued to excel academically and in extra-curriculars. I began to read the newspaper, and some sort of innate tendency led me to oppose and develop positions against racism and sexism, and desire to alleviate poverty. While in high school my idealism developed further, and I wrote two essays for a social studies class, one arguing against the death penalty, and another showing how Martin Luther King had derived much of his pacifist philosophy from Gandhi. Perhaps it was this influence of MLK that led me to become a pacifist myself, and I wrote articles for the student paper advocating trust in one’s fellow man, especially leaving one’s door unlocked. One of my fellow classmates, Dave Dietz, was a vegetarian and human rights activist, which led me to further questions and exposure to the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. At that time I thought I wanted to be a counseling psychologist and spent long hours on the phone talking to friends about personal subjects. I became convinced that watching TV was a waste of time and a negative influence, and so I stopped watching TV, a habit which lasted for about 15 years. In early 1991, I was one of only two students in my class who went to Washington DC to protest against the first Gulf War.

At the end of my time at St. Xavier High School I became a vegetarian as influenced by several other vegetarian students who were part of the theater group I was in. Around this time my older sister became a volunteer for the Peace Corps[1] in the Pacific island country of Kiribati, which was no doubt also an influence on me.

Since I had excelled in high school as well, I was fortunate to be accepted to several excellent universities, including Northwestern University, which is just north of Chicago. During these years I became much more sophisticated in my understanding and was influenced by my aunt, Joan Krueger, who had attended University of Chicago, been a civil rights activist during the civil rights movement, and remained involved in a wide range of political and social issues. In my Freshman year I was the coordinator of “charity activities” for my residential college, but looking back I realize that I was rather abrasive to my fellow classmates because I could not understand why they weren’t more inclined to get involved in these volunteer activities. One of the crazier things I did was to invite a homeless man to stay in my dorm room, who stole $20 from my pants pocket while he thought I was sleeping and then started to wander onto the other floors of the dorm. Needless to say this didn’t make me too popular with my dorm- mates and got me in a bit of trouble.

Unlike in high school, I had somehow lost my overwhelming desire to succeed academically and was a rather disorganized, procrastinatory student. Again influenced by my aunt and the conditions of poverty in Chicago, I decided that counseling psychology was a profession which would primarily assist the middle classes. Although worthwhile, I decided to focus on what I considered to be more important issues like poverty and race, through the study of Sociology. I took two gender courses in Sociology which led me to do extensive independent study in gender, and particularly masculinity. At the end of my Sophomore year I traveled around Europe as a street performer (listen to music recordings here) and stayed in many European people’s houses as they met me while I was performing in the street (I was sleeping on the trains).

My junior year in college was a very unusual one, as I became immersed in a kind of permanent brainstorm in which I pursued my own studies (often at the expense of my official ones!) and started to write notebooks full of ideas. Most of my independent studies were related to intentional communities (usually known as utopian communities), gender, and theoretical or imaginative discourses on how the world’s problems could be resolved. My aunt continued to be an influence during this time, and during my visits to her house on the south side of Chicago she would share with me stories about the sixties or discuss some issue with me. She received a vast quantity of literature from various non- profits (NGOs) which I consumed during this time.

Through my aunt I received a position working for Upward Bound, a summertime educational program for African American students from some of the most poorly served schools in Chicago. This program was run by African Americans for an entirely African American group of students, and I was the only “caucasian”[2] person in the group. My first truly cross cultural experience, I found it very difficult as we were all living together in a kind of “campus” in southern Illinois. As the only white person I felt rather shy but somehow managed. It was also my first teaching experience, and I came to see first hand the unbelievable disparities in the US educational system, as some of my students (who were in high school) lacked even basic math skills that I had learned in the 3rd grade. I repeated this same program after my senior year at Northwestern.

Around the time of graduation all the other students were busy deciding what they would do next and making big career plans. I knew that I wanted to do something related to all of the social and environmental causes I had been learning and theorizing about, but didn’t really want to focus on one because I felt that they were all inter-related. During college I had started working at the YMCA childcare center, which fit with my gender studies, and I wanted to have experience with children for the time when I myself would have children. I decided that rather than embarking on a new job, I would stay and work at the Childcare Center part time while continuing my independent studies. I also wanted time to pursue my interest in meditation, which had developed in the last few years of university. Looking back it wasn’t a very ambitious decision, and is part of the reason why my career got off to a slow start.

By this time I had become relatively radical, had read widely in a wide range of social issues and extensively developed my own ideas about what was needed to resolve some of the problems in the US and the world. The main influences in my life at that time were Gandhi, Marxism, environmentalism, the intentional community and social justice movements, as well as my own critical and creative thought processes. In 1996 I hitchhiked across the US and had some very unusual experiences. After another year at the childcare center, during which I gained experience working with ever younger children, I left Evanston to return to Cincinnati. My experience at the childcare center was a positive one, as it made me aware of how unappreciated this profession is, and at the same time gained valuable experience with children.

Back in Cincinnati, I worked briefly as a recycling intern in Anderson Township , before moving to the inner city neighborhood of Over the Rhine to work for the housing cooperative ReSTOC. There I caught up with my friend and former classmate, the vegetarian and human rights activist Dave Dietz, and became involved with a group of activists working on social justice initiatives in the neighborhood. While my previous work had been mostly conceptual or theoretical, it was here that I gained valuable practical experience.

After working as an intern at ReSTOC for a few months, I was hired to be the House Manager of the Catholic Worker House, a homeless shelter for 15-18 men, a big responsibility for someone only 24 years old. My responsibilities ranged from managing the shelter and staff, to raising funds for the shelter, writing the newsletter, establishing policies and enforcing the relatively strict rules of the shelter with its residents. I was inspired by the Catholic Worker movement, founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, although I had long since ceased to consider myself a Catholic. Among the interesting tenets of the movement were its emphasis on voluntary poverty, aid to the poorest through direct action, and pacifism. Among my accomplishments during that time were to defend the House from a variety of threats, mostly internal, during a period immediately after which the House had almost been closed. After one and a half extremely stressful years, however, I decided to resign as the House Manager to work at the Drop Inn Center, Cincinnati’s largest shelter. Fortunately since then the house has been well managed and has continued to improve since I left.

During my time at the Catholic Worker, I remained closely involved in a network of non- profits and activists called the Over the Rhine People’s Movement, which included ReSTOC, the Drop Inn Center, and the Peaslee Neighborhood Center. The movement was founded in the early seventies, largely by an activist named Buddy Gray and Bonnie Neumeier, who transformed the Drop Inn Center from a social service agency into a volunteer run shelter with a more radical agenda. They established the Drop Inn Center at its current location when they occupied an old union building at 12th and Elm street. Buddy Gray and Bonnie Neumeier, among others, were among the most selfless activists I have ever met, working for decades as volunteers without a salary or even health insurance. The movement was mostly composed of a mixture of
neighborhood activists and idealistic graduates of Xavier University in Cincinnati. In the 90s, the city wanted to transform the Over the Rhine neighborhood from a “ghetto”, into a more middle class neighborhood, something which the activists referred to as “gentrification”. They were concerned that this process would aggravate the problem of homelessness by reducing the supply of low income housing and forcing poor people into peripheral neighborhoods where they would have less access to centrally located social services. As a result, a long drawn out conflict with City Council and private housing developers ensued, which continues to this day. Buddy Gray himself was murdered in 1996 by one of the homeless men that he had helped during a time when this man had stopped taking his medications for mental illness. Many in the neighborhood felt that the housing developers were behind this, as they had commenced a “hate campaign” against Buddy. Buddy was killed six months before I began working in Over the Rhine for ReSTOC.

During the time I was at the Catholic Worker House, Erich Kunzel, the well known director of the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra, developed a plan for a vastly enlarged campus for Cincinnati’s School for the Creative and Performing Arts (SCPA). It was a nice plan except that it involved the forced relocation of the Drop Inn Center to a marginal industrial district several miles away. The OTR People’s Movement was resisting this forced relocation with all its strength when I started to work at the Drop Inn Center. In addition to administrative duties, one of my main responsibilities was to assist the Drop Inn head Pat Clifford in the effort to resist the relocation. Very radical and outspoken at this time in my life, much of my work time was spent participating in high level meetings about the proposed new school, and I sometimes gave speeches before the City Council and Public School Board on this subject. I also organized Community Issue Forums for the neighborhood residents and shelter residents about issues that were going on in the neighborhood. It was very exciting working with all of the different activists in the neighborhood and getting used to movement politics. For some reason, after I left the Drop Inn in 2000, this threat receded and the Drop Inn Center is still at its original location.

On a personal level, this was probably my most radical period so far, and I continued my earlier independent study in the evenings and on the weekends, writing and participating in other civic groups. I was rather alienated from the system in the US at the time, as I could see clearly many of the flaws of the US, in particular its domination by corporate interests, which corrupted democracy and prevented positive changes in the system. My philosophy at the time was a mixture of socialism, belief in true democracy, pacifism, environmentalism, and egalitarianism. Most of my time during this period was spent in one form of activism or another, and looking back it was probably the time when I was most devoted and efficient in furthering the causes I believed in. I continued to devour information on a wide range of subjects, in particular about issues overseas and related to world trade, politics and the history of various countries, often from a socialist perspective. By this time the real focus of my attention had turned to the international level, as I had always tended to look at the big picture, and saw that almost all problems in the world, even domestic problems, were related to the international order and system. This knowledge continued to grow, until I decided to leave the US in 2000 in order to experience other countries firsthand.

Initially I only planned to travel for six months, to go overland from Morocco to Vietnam (rather ambitious for six months!). During my travels I was unable to maintain the same degree of activism before, but still tried to remain engaged and learn as much as possible about political and social issues in the countries I visited. However, I had been interested in India for a long time, and when in eastern Europe began to doubt whether I would be able visit India with the funds I had. So I stopped to teach English in Istanbul, where it was also quite difficult to continue to be active because of the language barrier. I did, however, attempt to form a union of the English teachers with one of my colleagues (we didn’t get too far), and immersed myself in studying economics and attempting to develop theories about it. During all this time I wrote the newsletters which are contained elsewhere in this blog.

After leaving Istanbul I continued traveling further east, eventually arriving in India. In India I finally managed to convert my travel into something more related to social justice, by meeting various NGO representatives and activists. First I visited the Sevagram ashram founded by Gandhi in Maharashtra state, which was then being revived to some of the original ashram practices, with organic agriculture added in. Then I went to Anandwan, an innovative leper colony founded by perhaps the most inspiring person I have ever met, Baba Amte, who also was one of the leading figures protesting the Narmada dam. This leper colony was founded on the idea that work (rather than charity) gives dignity, and had created a variety of cottage industries that the lepers participated in. Amte and his wife and two sons had expanded the mandate to include blind and deaf children, while his son worked in a remote area with the tribal people threatened by the Narmada dam.

Continuing to southern India, I visited several organizations working with indigenous people (or adivasis, as they are known in India), including Samata in Andra Pradesh. I spent a few days at Auroville, one of the world’s largest intentional communities, near Pondicherry. I also participated in a two week traveling course created by Vandana Shiva’s NGO, which took us through Uttaranchal and New Delhi. This course introduced us to a wide range of issues and, of course, Vandana herself.

After India, I went to Burma-Myanmar thinking I would somehow be able to impact the situation there. Yet despite learning a great deal about the country and its main problem of dictatorship, it would take a truly sustained effort to have any real impact. From India I went to Thailand, where among other things I visited a community founded by Sulak Sivaraksa north of Bangkok, who combined Buddhist spirituality with an emphasis on sustainability and challenging consumerism. By this time I had almost run out of money again, and began to look for work in Laos.

Originally thinking I would teach English again, I soon realized that I was more interested in NGO work, which matched both my idealism and my previous work with the homeless in the US. However, NGO work for foreigners is relatively rare in Laos, and I had no international experience. So I briefly looked for work in Thailand before going to Cambodia.

After a few very difficult months looking for work, and a brief stint as a volunteer at Ockenden International, I finally found work writing grants at LICADHO, a renowned local human rights NGO, and helped them to set up their website (which can be seen at www.licadho.org). Under the kind patronage of Dr. Kek Galabru, I also worked at CARAM, an NGO working to help prevent HIV among Cambodian and Vietnamese migrants, and at NICFEC, during the monitoring of the 2003 national elections. I also joined with others who protested the 2003 invasion of Iraq through a local chapter of the Not In Our Name organization. In 2003 I began to work at the Cambodia office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on a human rights case database. While I was not a full scale UN staff, it was an incredible experience working in that office, which led to my work with Plan International in Kampong Cham province in 2004. This position involved field work in rural areas of the province to promote birth registration among the populace.

After that I went to Liberia as a UN Volunteer as part of the UN peacekeeping mission’s Electoral Department. Perhaps my most difficult assignment ever, along with the other UNV’s we were to assist the Liberian electoral authorities in implementing the national elections mandated by the Accra Peace Accords. It was difficult to be active in this environment, hindered by logistical and organizational problems, but I still feel like this is one of the places where I was able to have the most impact, since Liberia was really struggling at the time and needed good people to help them get back on their feet. After what I feel was a very successful election resulting in the election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, I was one of the electoral UNV’s chosen to continue on in Liberia, now moving to the UNMIL Humanitarian Coordination Section. In this position, my colleagues and I were to try to assist NGOs and UN agencies to coordinate their humanitarian activities. I enjoyed this position as a chance to learn about a wide array of humanitarian sectors such as Food, Protection and Water and Sanitation.

While I was in Liberia I began to apply to graduate schools and in August 2006 left Liberia to study Human Rights, Development, and Social Justice, at the Institute of Social Studies in the Netherlands. It was a very valuable time spent there, in an enriching intellectual environment, learning about and discussing the issues that I had long been thinking about, as well as many new ones. It was also an extremely difficult year due to a series of personal tragedies. Overall, though, I am deeply indebted to my professors and fellow students for the knowledge and perspectives I gained. With my Master’s Degree I will now be able to follow the course of work I choose, knowing that I have the educational qualifications if I need them.

Of course, I am really giving myself a lot of good press here, which is only part of the story. I continue to be constrained by my own weaknesses, selfishness as well as a overdeveloped ambition and perhaps a lack of realism. Many people who have known me would probably tell a slightly different story. So far it has been a long, winding road, with many interesting developments, and the great thing is that there are still many more years to go, for even more interesting plot twists. I continue to hope that as the years go on I will become more refined and successful in my work.

At this point I face a challenging juncture in which I must decide which direction to pursue next. Having finished my Master’s Degree, a certain chapter in my life has finished. I have the freedom now to choose many different courses of action- I only hope that I will find a good one!

[1] The Peace Corps is a US government program founded during the Kennedy Administration which sends US citizens to work overseas in foreign countries for a small stipend. Volunteers usually serve for two years.
[2] Caucasian is a nice, PC word for a white person!

: : : : : : : : : : :