by Lilla Hassan

Lilla is a Loretto Volunteer working as a Site Coordinator at For Love of Children, which provides tutoring and educational services to students in D.C.  

When you are young, everyone asks you, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” When I was younger, my answer was a doctor. The person who I look up to as one of the most virtuous beings in my life is my father, and he is a doctor. I was born in a place that for centuries has been the center of religion and politics: Rome, Italy. My family is originally from Somalia, but my parents moved to Italy in their 20’s to attend medical school. When I was six, my family made the decision to move to the States in search of a better education for me and my two brothers. Even as a young child, I operated under the assumption that if I worked hard, any goal was well within my reach. However, my perception shifted dramatically after a single day working at For Love of Children.  

For Love of Children (FLOC) is a non-profit organization that provides educational services beyond the classroom to help students succeed from first grade through college and career. Our goal is to see our students succeed in the classroom, successfully complete a post-secondary degree, and thrive in the working world. All of our tutors are volunteers who teach our students from the FLOC curriculum. During my time at FLOC, I have been deeply moved by watching students who attend failing schools go to great lengths to succeed despite having the odds stacked against them. During my time at FLOC, I have found a sense of satisfaction, to an extent that I could have never fathomed, in helping these students succeed in school.

I find it so intriguing to see that these children remain so unscathed by the limitation placed on them not due to a lack of abilities, but simply due to their zip codes. In their eyes, the world is so pure, everyone so loving and caring, and everyone is equal regardless of any differences. I have begun to see the world through a different lens due to their optimistic views on life.  Every day I am elated at their success as if they were my own. Each one of my kids has taught me something different with perseverance being a common theme amongst them all. At the beginning of my service term, FLOC enrolled a third grade girl. She came to us way below her grade level in mathematics. She still had not grasped the basic concept of numbers. I worked with her and the tutor to prepare her to pass her numbers exam so we could help her reach the learning level at which she should be. For months we were stuck and did not seem to be making any progress. One day, she came to me and said “Ms. Lilla I want to test today. I have been practicing saying my numbers, and I think I can do it”.  Thirty minutes later, she came running down the hall with a slip of paper in her hand. She had finally done it! She had passed her test. She ran into my arms, and we jumped around chanting her name, other staff joining in as we celebrated her success. 

 At FLOC, I have never seen a group of staff so personally invested in their students’ success. We celebrate each child’s success as another step toward closing the education disparities amongst the minority population in Washington, DC.  Each time one of my kids makes a stride closer to being at the appropriate academic grade level, each day we enroll another child into our program, and I see the smile of hope in their parents’ eyes, each day a parent calls and says that their child’s grades have dramatically improved, that’s when I know my job is worth it. I am committed to correcting injustice by using education to help poverty-stricken children rise above the limitations placed upon them by society. Just like an old African proverb my mother used to recite to me, “It takes a village to raise a child,” and I’m glad that, at FLOC, we are all so invested in our children. 

__by Kathleen Stephan

Kathleen Stephan is a Loretto Volunteer serving as a legal and social services case manager at Bread for the City.

As Loretto Volunteers we are called to live a life of simplicity.  I began thinking about this concept after I graduated from college in the spring of 2010.  I had committed to a year in El Paso, Texas with the Border Servant Corps- a community based program with a similar mission to Loretto.

Throughout my year in El Paso, I was amazed to realize that simplicity brings forth generosity.    My trust in community grew and  slowly I began to let go of my fears of not having enough.  Our kitchen was never empty and the table was always full.  I left the desert with an understanding that our society reveres convenience.  We, as people, have immediate access to anything.  It is a hard truth but my commitment to simplicity has required me to rescind my entitlement to convenience. 

_There is nothing quick about preparing beans from scratch, taking the bus to work, working with clients who are severely mentally ill, and hanging clothes to dry instead of using the dryer.  There is no fast conclusion for  constant accountability to four other women and a larger religious community.  It is rewarding, fruitful and encouraging - but it requires work, planning, consideration, sacrifice and time.

There is nothing simple about living simply, it is in fact one of the most complex undertakings I have ever tried.  Most of the time I am content to live the life I lead in the the way I have chosen.  However, sometimes thoughts of "Why am I trying to do this? I can't do it perfectly!" will send my peace of mind tailspinning out of the sky.  I am learning to not be overwhelmed by failure, to stop suffocating myself so I can breathe deeply, forgive myself, and try again.

I say that simplicity is a practice because I want it to become my mindset.  I have to be conscious of what I allow into my life and how it will affect me.  I hope to find satisfaction by investing myself to the best of my ability and not by controlling the outcome.  I want to enjoy the present and find pleasure, joy and peace in everyday tasks.  I want my relationships to be honest and uncluttered by insecurity.  I want to love because people deserve it, and receive love because I do too.  I want to be simple enough to be in awe of the complexities that surround me everyday.  

Our society lies to us when it sells convenience.  It tells us that we'll only be happier, more productive, and better if we do things faster, quicker and with greater efficiency.  Those are not terrible qualities but they can't alone reflect my values or the beliefs I have about peace, justice and healing.  I never want to be so numbed by convenience that I stop recognizing the injustice around me.    

Simplicity has helped me to slow down and recognize that I have a choice in how I live.  Furthermore that I need to make choices that support everyone's right to choose how they live; it is a simple idea with radical connotations.   It says that I will not embrace convenience if it takes away your ability to work decent hours for a fair wage, to raise your children in a safe place, to have access to quality healthcare, education and dignity without fear, humiliation or disregard.  I will work to remove my reliance on a system that oppresses you even if it means I can't do everything I would like.  I'm in no way there yet - I don't think I ever will be - but I'm committed to it and I am proud to be doing so with the Loretto Community.

_
Molly is a Loretto Volunteer serving as Program Assistant/Activities Coordinator at Bethany Women's Center at N Street Village.

Hello, my name is Molly Chamberlain and I am a Loretto Volunteer living in Junia House in Washington, DC. For those of you who identify with the Enneagram, I am a 3. You may have already guessed that this brief reflection took weeks to compose because, as a three, I was preoccupied with the message it would send about me and the house (especially after Anne's brilliant piece).

This reflection comes to you several months into my volunteer year and I couldn't be a in a better place.

__
I recently graduated from Siena College in May with a bachelors in Social Work. I had spent several years in Albany, so coming to DC for a volunteer year was to be one thrilling experiment. I decided to take on the life of a "year-long" in order to explore my newly earned degree, my faith and what lay beyond upstate New York. Within the limited amount of time that I have been here, I have already learned a lot about all three.

My work in DC takes me to the Bethany Women's Center at N Street Village. I wake up every morning around 5:15 to shower and catch the bus; I get into work at 7:00 or 7:15 each day. My morning is filled with lots of things to do, preparing our day center for the communities' arrival. Once the door is unlocked there is a flurry of activity. Some days it seems that there will not be enough time in the day to meet everyone's needs. We begin our day with reflection and a meal. I enjoy meals in Bethany's because it is a time when a majority of our community is together. The tables often remind me of my high school cafeteria. There are certain groups of friends that have their usual seats together. It's a comforting reminder of the community we have amongst our clients, regardless of age, race, religion or creed.

My favorite time of day is not breakfast or even lunch. I patiently await the two o'clock lull that drifts in several times a week. These few silent minutes are few and far between in Bethany's and I treasure them for the opportunity they hold. After everyone has gotten detergent, shampoo or a pair of slacks in the morning, this lull provides a time to sit down and connect to people. I spend these few minutes each day playing Scrabble and discussing politics or talking to a group of women about their families while we play a game of Spades.  It’s in these moments that everyone, staff and clients, can let their guard down and make meaningful connections. I have already grown to love and appreciate so many of the ladies at Bethany's it is hard for me to imagine what my life will look like without them.

I am excited for every day I go to work. I can only hope that I will hold this passion throughout the year and throughout my life.

by Anne Lacher, Loretto Volunteer

Anne is currently serving as a Loretto Volunteer at WATER, the Women's Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual.

A 1, a 3, a 7, an 8, and a 9 walked into a house. No, this is not a joke.  The house is Junia, and we, the Loretto Volunteers, are as different as night and day and everything in between.  After an exhausting week spent baring our souls and sharing our pasts, we set off across the knobby hills of Kentucky and through the Appalachian Mountains, bound for our new home in Mount Rainier, Maryland.  The Motherhouse had armed us with our Enneagram numbers, nailing down our personality types, communication styles, and behavioral patterns.  No two women were the same; five volunteers, five personality types, one house. A recipe for disaster?

Hello. My name is Anne, and I am a 9.  A happy native of Minnesota, I discovered my true passions while attending an unexpectedly liberal, Catholic college. The College of St. Benedict | St. John’s University played a huge role in forming the person that I am now. It is a fantastical place where nuns smuggle poitín, Deacon Professors join the students for happy hour, and monks give communion to LGBTIQ advocates immediately after the Archbishop refuses to do so.  I had never experienced such liberal religion, and I certainly had never held any interest in scholarly theology or gender studies. After a curriculum overflowing with concepts of peace, environmental stewardship, and gender, race, and religious equality, I felt newly enlightened and a little at odds with my parents’ conservative Christian interests.  As graduation loomed ominously closer, I worried that I would never find another community like St. Ben’s/St. John’s, full of strong liberal activists who are one part crazy and two parts fun, who are concerned about underrepresented issues of justice, peace, and equality.  Enter Loretto: “extending the boundaries of learning and justice, of human dignity and peace.”

Far from being difficult and weighty, my decision to spend a year of service half-way across the country was ridiculously easy to make. By the time I reached the end of the Loretto Volunteer Program’s blurb in one volunteer catalogue or another, I knew it was the program for which I’d been searching.  In the entire catalogue, Loretto was one of the only programs to list LGBT and women’s issues as main concerns in their mission statement and to declare their acceptance into the program of people of all “races, classes, abilities, sexual orientations, gender identities, and faiths.” I applied and was accepted, simple as that.  I had no qualms about living in close, shared space with strangers or about moving to an unfamiliar big city.  Having recently spent four months living in a tiny London flat with 10 strangers—who became first my friends and then my family—I felt well prepared for new people and new places.

Although it seemed intense, our time at the Motherhouse was merely an introduction to the program and to each other.  Our arrival at Junia House gave us so much more. Suddenly, we were living together, playing together, cooking and cleaning and sharing meals together, dancing, exploring, and venting together.  Far from a disaster, a 1, 3, 7, 8, and 9 sharing quarters was a recipe for fun! We were very lucky; our community life practically created itself.  Sometimes it’s messy and chaotic, but things have had a way of working themselves out.  Maybe it won’t always be this easy, but we have each shown ourselves to be open-minded and open-hearted individuals.  We’re quite the array of personalities, but, more importantly, we are five passionate, determined, and unified women working for justice and acting for peace.

by Ellen Nieman, Loretto Volunteer

Ellen is currently serving as a Loretto Volunteer at Bethany Women’s Center in N Street Village, a day shelter for women experiencing homelessness in Washington, DC.  

We are N Street Village. 
We are a community of respect, recovery and hope. 
We create a safe and welcoming place with our words and our actions. 
We expect kindness and we value honesty and diversity. 

-N Street Village Statement of Culture and Community

We say this statement every morning at N Street, squeezed in between a blessing offered by someone in the community and the Serenity Prayer.  It is just a brief moment of calm after the chaos which the lock removed from the door brings and before the rush of breakfast, but it is a powerful moment of unity.  These words, led by the most powerful voices and filled in by the rest with a musical lilt, ring through the small space of Bethany Women's Center and I wonder what they mean to the women sitting, waiting, and repeating these words for yet another day.

Some of the ladies enter slightly wrinkled from a night riding buses to stay warm and off their feet, some come straight from the street or emergency shelters.  Others from our night shelter across the street and our recovery housing come preparing for a day of check-ins, AA/NA meetings, case management, activities, chores, the list continues.  But no matter the crisis of the moment or the preoccupations of the mind, every morning it is the same shuffle to move tables and chairs to their usual positions, requests for soap and towels to wash and get warm, inquiries into the breakfast menu, and a multitude of other movements, conversations, greetings, hugs, plans, laughter, and hurts.  But once breakfast is ready and most have found a seat, everything pauses for a moment and through a blessing and this statement we go back to remember why we are there, what we are doing and how we are doing it.  That pause is brief but full. 

Once this morning ritual is complete, we return to the buzz of a new day.  Working together to build something new, each woman for herself and in support of the other women in the room.     

My days at Bethany Women’s Center are very full.  I spend my time preparing for meals, helping women get acquainted with the services at N Street Village, helping to meet clients’ basic needs, keeping the day center running efficiently, and socializing with the women who enter the center.  Facing a population which deals with the difficulty of homelessness, addiction, and mental illness is overwhelming at times, but also enriching and rewarding.  I am grateful for the learning, creativity and growth which this community has allowed me to express and experience.  My days are blessed with the routines of running the center and the unique gifts and spirit of each woman who passes through. 

People have been gathering outside the gates of Ft. Benning for decades now, demanding an end to war, occupation, imperialism, and impunity in the Western Hemisphere and elsewhere. I myself have only stood at the gates of the School of the Americas (now the Western Hemisphere Insitute for Security Cooperation) four times, and already I feel the gnawing twinge of exhaustion that comes with being “prophets of a future not our own.” Each year, we chant the same chants, sing the same songs, write the same letters, hold the same signs, make the same pleas, and cover the fence with our crosses. For each burst of renewed energy, there is also the pang of pessimism, a frustrating sense of repetition, and blaring reminders of limited progress.

Yet there are bursts of energy, hope in our vigilance, remembrance in our songs. In Spanish, the word for remember is recordar, its Latin roots being re- (again) and cor- (heart). Therefore, to remember essentially means to put into our hearts again.
When I recall this deeper meaning, the repetition I encounter at the School of the Americas protest and vigil grounds me in purpose and place. I know where I stand, and why, and for whom. Furthermore, though it may not seem as evident amidst the multiplying fences, hovering helicopters, and armed police, there has indeed been progress in the struggle against militarization, and the movement still draws from deep wells of creativity.
This year, although a significant setback and a great deal of confusion resulted from the indiscriminate arrests of 26 people (most of whom did not intend to risk arrest), many others willingly participated in creative acts of nonviolent resistance throughout the weekend. About 10 to 12 people were arrested after briefly blocking a road into Ft. Benning with a large sign that read, “Stop: This is the End of the Road for the SOA.” Father Louis Vitale and Nancy Smith entered the base from the highway ramp, and David Omandi of the LA Catholic Worker and Christopher Spicer of the White Rose Catholic Worker jumped over the first set of barbed wire fencing at the entrance to the base.
And so I look to the resisters for energy, those who come year after year and those who engage for the first time. I seek solace in community and remembrance. I rejoice in news of Latin American countries refusing to send more students to the SOA, and members of Congress struggling every year to withdraw funding from the school.
And each year, I grow as an activist and as a resister. Philip Berrigan’s words grow louder in my heart. Don’t get tired, he says.
And my feet start to move.

 
"Yesterday I took part in the first forum for communities affected by climate change, hosted by GCAP and Feminist Task Force. Indigenous women from Oaxaca talked about how the changing environment is affecting their villages. The women have been dealing with a rapidly rising river, some thing no one has experienced  in over a hundred years. As result of the river rising there has been severe landslides, ruined crops and disruptions to basic community life and  family structures."

Read the whole thing here. 

Andrea, you're doing us proud!

Kelly Stewart, a native of Birmingham, Alabama, graduated from Middlebury College in May with a B.A. in Psychology and a double minor in Religion and Russian Literature & Culture. Kelly believes she became a feminist on the day her counselors at John Carroll Summer Day Camp told her and the rest of the eight-year-old girl campers that, while the boys would spend the afternoon playing sports outside, the girls would remain indoors to braid hair, at which point Kelly burst forth with, “That’s ridiculous!” and had to spend the afternoon silently in the cafeteria with the other delinquents. These early signs of deviancy foreshadowed her later interest in women’s issues, which developed into a broader interest in justice issues related to gender and sexuality. New Ways Ministry, where she has worked since the end of August, has been a great place to explore these issues from a faith perspective.

A recent graduate from Seattle University, Emily is enjoying the adventure of a new landscape and the opportunity to share her time with both the Women’s Ordination Conference (WOC) and the Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics, and Ritual (WATER). While at SU, Emily frequently found herself at the academic and personal confluence of religion and gender. She completed a double major in Theology & Religious Studies and Liberal Studies with a particular focus in feminist theology, gender studies, and Buddhism. Her involvement with justice and ministry work at SU makes the transition into Loretto life a natural and exciting one. Sharing time at WOC and WATER has been a good adventure thus far. It feels right for her to be surrounded by feminist values, courageous academics, and committed women working for justice.
 
Earlier this month, Kelly and Emily traveled to the Call to Action conference in Milwaukee with New Ways Ministry and WOC, respectively. Kelly attended the Catholic Organizations for Renewal meeting during the two days preceding the conference, where she sat behind a nametag which Emily had printed. Kelly and Emily staffed their respective booths in the exhibition hall, where they met no small number of eccentric conference-goers, friendly colleagues, and familiar members of numerous partner organizations.

The conference was also a great time for some Loretto connections! Kelly, a Southerner unfamiliar with Midwestern beer rivalries, had the poor taste to ask for a Budweiser at the Miller Lite Pub where she and fellow Loretto Volunteer Ellen Nieman reunited with a crew of Loretto sisters and co-members.  Unfortunately, Emily was absent as she had WOC obligations that evening. Shane Claiborne, Asra Nomani, and Joan Chittister delivered engaging key note addresses which provided Emily and Kelly with a lot of conversation material, questions, and insights. CTA's 20/30 initiative provided opportunities for those in their 20s and 30s to gather for conversation and connection. A highlight for Emily was the dialogue following Shane Claiborne's address because it complicated some important topics raised around inclusion, simplicity, and the ways in which communities can choose to interpret and/or practice the gospel message of Jesus. A highlight for Kelly was the Mass concelebrated by a diverse group of five people, including a Roman Catholic WomanPriest, which offered a glimpse of what a more inclusive, less hierarchical Catholic Church could look like.