Day 260- SMART Grants, napkins and sea shores

Dear Mr. President,

Today has been a great day. First, I'd like to thank you for a bit of good news I received today. Instead of taking out the small subsidized loan I'd been offered this year, I've just been awarded a National SMART grant. This is incredibly reassuring. The loan I was planning to take out this year wasn't huge compared to my total debt, but I'm still happy to avoid borrowing at all. I know I am incredibly lucky to be given this grant, especially when so many other students in my situation are seeing their debt levels continue to rise dramatically. I'm so grateful for the help.

Also today, I received a letter from my friend serving in the Peace Corps. I miss hearing her voice and seeing her every day. I miss our pancake mondays, our walks around greenlake and our heated political discussions that usually devolved into a general discussion about how much we want to marry Jon Stewart. I love reading her letters and hearing the details of her life in Burkina Faso, but I think part of her letter to me was actually meant for you:




It says: "I stole you a napkin from the embassy =) There is a sweet picture of Obama hanging in the embassy. It makes me so happy to see it. I'm still proud he's our president."

I don't think I could say it any better.

The last thing that made today great was this story a friend sent me on facebook about Israeli women helping Palestinian women sneak across the border for illegal day trips to the beach. A quote from one of the brave Israeli women interviewed struck me as particularly moving. "We want more Israelis to realise that there is nothing to be scared of. We want more people to refuse to accept the ideology that keeps us apart – and to just refuse to be enemies."

There is nothing to be scared of. I refuse to accept divisive ideology. I refuse to be enemies.

These are powerful, wise words. And the simple act of taking these Palestinian women and their children to see the ocean shows how ordinary citizens can fight injustice through simple acts of kindness. I think maybe these women should replace Netanyahu and Abbas for the peace talks. Something tells me they'd make a lot more progress.

Respectfully yours,

Kelsey

Day 182- Control

Dear Mr. President,

I'm a control freak. I like to be in control of myself, my emotions, and the things that happen around me. Psychologically, this is probably due to the amount of time I spent feeling not in control of what what happening to me or what I was feeling as a child. I recognize that this is often problematic, as I can't control things like Al-Qaeda, or a person's access to a phone, or the time difference between here and Africa. My best friend, who has been in Burkina Faso for only a little more than a week, is being evacuated with the other Peace Corps volunteers. I'm assuming that this is related to the AP story I read earlier today, describing kidnapping threats from AQIM against westerners in Mali and northern Burkina Faso, though this is only speculation. Before she was evacuated, my friend was able to send me a text from a borrowed phone, and assure me that she is OK.

That was 9 hours ago. I have no reason to believe that she is not still safe, but, of course, my lack of control over the amount of information I'm receiving has me anxious and worried. Her friends and family have had sort of a phone circle going, making contact for the sake of our own comfort, as no one has any new information yet. It's funny the way that fear changes us. I've been angrier about this than I ever expected to be. Al-Qaeda's ability to disrupt and terrorize with just a threat is so frustrating. Also, while I believe that the wars we're fighting, the prisons we've built, and the murders we have sanctioned, ostensibly intended to keep us safe from these threats, are actually making the world more dangerous for Americans, I have no clear idea of what a solution would look like. I don't have any respect for the rhetoric, methods or goals of Al-Qaeda, but I do not believe that its members are wholly irrational beings, or that American foreign policy is not responsible for much of the antipathy that generates more Al-Qaeda members. What is most upsetting is that the people who will ultimately suffer in all of this are not the members of Al-Qaeda or the men making the decisions they find so objectionable, but those soldiers, civilians and volunteers like my friend who are caught in between.

I know that the US government will do everything in its power to make sure that my friend and the other volunteers are kept safe, or brought home, and I am grateful for this. I hope that it also finds a way to make more of the world safe for Americans who travel and work abroad- a goal that no amount of military might can achieve. We can't always help the way the Al-Qaedas of the world feels about us, but, speaking as a control freak, I think we'd win a great deal more good will if we accepted that there are some things we can't, and shouldn't, try to control.

Respectfully yours,

Kelsey