I got back from Kentucky late on Tuesday night. It was a great trip with a lot to work through on issues of healthcare, economics, and religion. It was also hard for my partner and me to be away from each other for so long. I find that I function better when I have our relationship to connect me.
Here are a few other thoughts that come to mind as I work through what I learned:
- Surprisingly, the situation was not far from what I grew up with. I recognized how people understood community and family, and I related to the economics of the rural areas (despite the difference between agricultural/small industrial Kansas and coal-mining/tobacco-farming Kentucky). I also recognized the stereotypes from outside (and of outside). Last of all, I was reminded that I myself am part of the brain drain. I left Kansas to get away, got educated, and never returned. Some variation on a theme of exile, but not exactly. I recognize the need, and somewhere inside me, the desire, to return to where I came from - if nothing else, to represent a different point of view. It motivates me to find something more solid in my commitment to a community here in the Bay Area.
- I was struck by the fact that most healthcare access and poverty alleviation programs were run by women. The theory is that there is a strong matriarchy of grannies - older women who know a lot, organize, and get things done. We met some amazing women doing amazing work.
- Not only were these women organized and sharp, but often ventured on their own to address poverty - dragging their reluctant churches with them only later. It reminded me of my own convictions about the purpose of religion: to care for each other. Religion, in the end, is nothing if it doesn't connect people together. Sure personal spirituality is a component, but nurturing the person is a component of a bigger sense of caring for each other.
I guess that's it for the moment. I got reconnected with a friend from college who is studying rural sociology, who gave me a lot to think about in relation to stereotyping and "metrocentricity," the idea that perspectives, analysis, and values presume that the city is the standard by which everything is judged. Reminds me of feminist criticism of medical studies that hold men as the standard against which women are measured. Hm.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
I so hear you.
1) Being away from Cory...My sweetheart has been once again in Mississippi this week and I've felt like hibernating the whole week. It's bizarre, and I'm a little pissed off at myself for reacting like this, but what can you do?
2) The brain-drain...I feel generally guilty that I've done something like settled for the time being in the Bay Area and do not have plans to go back to Iowa, in fact I feel rather out of place and restless in Iowa. The county I come from had more people in 1900 than it did in 2000, and my leaving is a part of that.
Post a Comment