life with refugees: spoiled milk

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all week i've been feeling like the gross kid. you know, the one who tries to keep up appearances but just fails, and fails hard and publicly. well, my friends, i'm sharing this story with you today because it has an ending that is both humorous and absolves me of blame!

remember that shopping trip i wrote about back in early april where my refugee friends sat in my car and ate a whole bag of carrots? file that away for a moment and let me tell you another story from my week.

lately, every time i've gotten in my car i've noticed it has smelled a little funky. a little like spoiled milk, a little like maybe something crawled in my trunk and died. as i frequently have several passengers in my car at the same time, i pop the trunk and toss in there quite often things that would otherwise take the passenger seat: my yoga mat, a pair of sandals. my trunk was extra stinky, and thought maybe that it had sprung a leak in the recent rains and that's why my car smelled a little off.

well, my friends, on thursday after apologizing to my refugee friends after having driven them around all day in a stinky hotbox car, i arrived at my yoga class and popped the trunk to pull out my yoga mat. lo and behold, what else did i find in there but a nasty old coagulated carton of milk, of a brand i didn't recognize, dated from 6 weeks ago and leaking slowly slowly out of a bloated gallon jug!

as you might imagine, my immediate reaction was to try very hard not to retch everywhere- a prospect made more difficult by the heat in my yoga studio. my second reaction was to wonder how on earth this  nasty jug of milk (really, it's not fair to even term it milk at that point) ended up in my car.

scenario #1: at some point i shopped for groceries and put them in my trunk. i brought them in the house without seeing the jug of milk and never noticed that the milk i bought didn't make it to my refrigerator. weird, but not completely out of the realm of possibility.

scenario #2: did i marry an evil genius who knows of my love for pranks and just out of nowhere decided to prank me in a serious way? mad respect, but also i am rather pissed.

scenario #3: let me draw your attention back to the early april shopping trip with my refugee friends. you know, the one where we bought them a bunch of groceries, where i dropped them off at their individual houses and let them pull their groceries out of my trunk on their own while i helped their sweet babies get out of the back seat.

hint: it's scenario #3. that's right: i'm not the gross kid. nor am i the sort who will ever take anyone grocery shopping ever again without checking and rechecking my trunk to make sure they got everything out.

sewing + refugees

if i ever start a sewing blog, or this turns exclusively into one, it will be named "sew without pinning." or "look at the state of my living room." grad school rockstar hubs has taken to calling his piles of books + computer + mugs with remnants of hot beverages scattered around our small apartment his "sewing projects", probably in the hopes that i will be as gracious with his stack of school related things as he is with my sewing projects and the ungodly amount of space they seem to require.

on the actual topic of sewing projects though, my official "year of the quilt" is over but the time i spend quilting has certainly not lessened.

here's what's currently taking up my entire livingroom floor my current project. i mentioned a few months ago that i was sewing a quilt for work, but couldn't share much about it for the sake of client confidentiality. the same is true with this one, but it's so adorable that i'm going to be as vague as i need to be (and only share low res, low light iPhone photos!) to share. 

this is the second version of this quilt, with our second group of refugee friends. the first one is pretty similar, but in blues and greens. i wish i could share the photos of the faces i got when i asked them to pose for the camera with a hand painted blue, because that's my most favorite part!

we had each person in the group paint their hand, print it on a square of fabric and then write their name and the place they identify as home. some of them put the countries where they were born, some put the countries where they were living in refugee camps, some put the actual refugee camp names. i was surprised to see that not everyone put the country our agency identifies as their "country of origin"as their home. of course, if you've lived in a refugee camp for years and years in a country aside from the one where you were born, it really shouldn't be surprising that you identify with the one where you grew up, right? these dear friends of mine teach me things every time i interact with them, and for that i'm grateful. 

plus, a chance to combine two things i absolutely love: refugees AND sewing! 

life with refugees: orange juice

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the thing about working with refugees is that sometimes, it's really, unimaginably difficult. there's no single reason for this, really- there are the cultural and language barriers, the past experiences and incredible trauma so many refugees have lived through, the expectations refugees have for their resettlement, the expectations resettlement agencies have for their refugee clients, the moving to a new country with a new language, new set of expectations, new everything. not to mention the fact that you're trying so hard to control human beings, people with their own likes, dislikes, thoughts and feelings.

these little bits of life with refugees that i want to share in this space will, i hope, serve as reminders to me of why i love what i do, even when i don't love what i do.

that might have been a good thought to include on my first life with refugees post, no?

the other day i was taking some congolese refugee friends to the department of human services to get their food stamp card issues fixed. it's an unnecessarily, convoluted and lengthy process for something that takes approximately sixty seconds to fix. it requires a handful of basic documents without which my clients won't be seen.

on this particular day one client forgot to bring her documents to our office, so we had to stop by her apartment before heading to DHS. she grabbed what she needed and, curiously, also a gallon jug of orange juice and a glass. i didn't think much of it beyond the fact that it might be difficult to drink from a glass while in a moving vehicle. we arrived, parked and got out of the car and, to my bemusement, my friends took their giant jug of orange juice inside the building with them.

don't mind me, drinking my juice while waiting for my number to be called. i'll have my food stamps with a daily serving of vitamin c, thank you.

even now, a few weeks later, the nonchalance of my new friends and their orange juice brings a smile to my face. 

denver love: part 2

i've written about my love for denver before, but guys, i can't help it. i love where i live.

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when hubs and i first moved to our neighborhood (i moved here from an even more white bread suburb), we thought everyone in denver was white. then, i started work with a local refugee agency and learned that i was wrong- there is definitely diversity here, it's just that most of denver's culture is actually in neighboring aurora, or in lakewood.

i'm checking in again to report: I FOUND DIVERSITY IN DENVER PROPER!

earlier this week i went for a run around the fantastically large, beautiful park just south of our apartment, and ended up around the south side of the park right about the time the final bell rang at the high school across the street. i was shocked to see girls in hijab and galabeya, nepali-bhutanese, latinos, burmese, sub-saharan africans, all streaming out from the school's doors, running to catch the public bus.

i ran (slash walked, let's be honest) on my side of the street with a grin on my face, grateful for this little happy moment. i love the diversity of my community and the people and institutions working to welcome people into it.

life with refugees: american food

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today i made a new friend. i'll call him mahmoud. mahmoud recently had surgery and is on crutches. he has only been in the US since around Christmas, and has had quite the range of experiences these past four months. i headed out the door from the agency where i work with a few warnings about him and how he has been a little difficult for my coworkers to deal with, and i braced myself for a long car ride where neither of us talked much, save for what would likely be a laundry list of ways mahmoud as been wronged since coming to the states.

boy, was i wrong. from the onset, i tried to engage him in conversation unrelated to his experience at our resettlement agency. instead of having to try and remain sympathetic both to someone who has witnessed and endured unimaginable tragedies and the understaffed, overworked agency that helps me pay my bills, we spent the entire ride to the bank to cash his check chatting about the netherlands and how awesome the dutch are. always happy to brag on my homeland, we talked about soccer, canals, bicycles and the color orange, as well as the quirks of my hometown, which mahmoud couldn't believe is really called holland.

we kept chatting while at the bank, much to the amusement of the bank teller. on the way home, our conversation turned to american food. it went much like this:

me: what about american food? do you like anything?
mahmoud: no. nothing i like.
me: i figured. our food is quite different from somalia (where he's from) and ethiopia (where he lived for a number of years.)
mahmoud: yes. except, there is one thing i like. hot dogs. :: pause :: and also, burritos. anyone who knows me knows i like burritos.

mahmoud then goes into a local 7/11 to get a money order to pay his rent and offers to buy me a hot dog. i politely decline, and grin like an idiot to myself after he walks inside. our conversation continued after he got back in my car:

me: mahmoud, where do you buy your groceries? do you know you can buy hot dogs at king soopers?
mahmoud: REALLY??
me: yes! and you can cook them in like 6 different ways.
mahmoud: i need a wife who can cook hot dogs. who can cook ONLY HOT DOGS!

this, dear friends, is why my life and my heart are so much more full these days.

year of the quilt: round-up

i made 6 quilts from april 2012- april 2013. (plus one more that i can't share here).

i'm kind of impressed with myself. i figured i'd make 2, maybe 3 quilts but i just couldn't stop. 

they are, clockwise from top left: 

1:the postal service. 2: the 4600. 

3: tea with jore-ma, or my sari quilt.

4: i don't have a good name for this one. i just call it #6.

5: leila's quilt.

6: the shmick.

i think it's safe to call myself a quilter now, especially because i have three more in the works!

year of the quilt: number 4 is (almost!) finished

quick update: quilt number four is just about finished. i underestimated the amount of fabric i'd need for the back so i have a little more sewing to do, but let me introduce the latest in a string of triangle quilts. this one is the first that's (almost) entirely patterned. i'm pretty happy with it! 

i'll share more details when it's finished. promise.

and then, as it's been just about a year since i started sewing my first quilt, maybe a year of the quilt roundup!