Words of Rembrance by Clarence B. Jones on MLK Jr. Day

Andy

“Silence in the face of violence, is evil itself.” Just an example of one famous quote paraphrased by Clarence B. Jones, who spoke at the University of Michigan this past Monday. It was an honor to hear Jones speak on the day of remembrance for his friend and ally of the Civil Rights Movement, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. During that historic time period, Jones was considered one of the closest political and influential confidantes of Dr. King. Serving as adviser, lawyer, draft speech writer, and friend, few knew him better.

In a brilliant and authentic display of oration, Jones proclaimed, “Except for Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, Martin Luther King Jr. in 12 years and 4 months from 1956 to 1968, did more to achieve political, economic, and social justice in America than any other event or person in the previous 400 years.” It seems almost inconceivable, that during a time of racial oppression, lack of social media or internet, and limited popular support, that one man could amass such a following that would change the course of history in this great nation.

Listening to first-person testimonials about the week leading up to the famous “I Have A Dream” speech, opposition to the Vietnam War, and the “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, would have seemed to be enough. However, Jones also weaved a story of anti-violence together, calling to arms action against inaction. He implored the audience to realize the world of violence has many faces, and lies beneath society’s eyes like molten lava. It does not have to be fatal to affect communities. The need for a fierce urgency to make investments toward improving the quality of life, a non-violent future. In the words of Dr. King, “The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate.”

Lastly, Jones reflected on his feelings when President Barack Obama was first elected as President of the United States in 2008. After succumbing to a rush of emotion, tears filled his eyes. Not for the electoral results, but tears for all those people who made that election possible. Without the collective work of the Civil Rights Movement and sacrifices of millions, we would have never seen such history made. I cannot emphasize enough the goosebumps that appeared on the audience’s skin when listening to the methodical, yet emotional reaction delved so rich in the history of the Civil Rights Movement. To think he stood side by side with arguably the most influential person from American history regarding civil rights was awe inspiring.

When asked, “Who today is most like Martin Luther King Jr?” Jones answered with a rhetorical question, “Who today is most like Shakespeare, like Leonardo Da Vinci, like Michelangelo? No one.”

Andy Mychkovsky is a first year HMP student at the School of Public Health.

Toxic Inspiration

Desiree

You need to attend the Toxic Tour of Detroit, no matter what your discipline of study is. It occurs in the fall semester, and is meant to build awareness around environmental issues that are happening in Detroit.

Yes, I will admit that I am biased. As a native Detroiter, I feel that any issue that Detroit is facing, I am facing. But I promise that if you are completely and unapologetically disinterested in the City of Detroit, that going on the Toxic Tour of Detroit will get you engaged. The environmental issues affecting Detroit are more than likely happening in the area that you are from, or at least not too far from it.

Detroit Institute of Arts

The tour made me think of many things, such as what can be done with industrial structures that are no longer in use, and how communities can organize themselves and successfully get their demand for a healthier environment where they live realized.

Highlighted on the tour were landmarks that have toxic environmental implications such as the Detroit Incinerator, the site of the Old Uniroyal Plant, the Ambassador Bridge, and the Packard Plant in Hamtramck. U of M faculty as well as local environmental activists led the tour.  As a native Detroiter, I was proud to see such a great deal of efforts being organized around environmental issues, many of which were led by locals. The tour showed me the challenges that environmental activists in my city are facing.

In between going from one environmental hazardous area to the next, were attractions such as the DIA, but also some of the most beautiful, historic neighborhoods on the planet.

Detroit Incinerator

I felt a sense of personal obligation after going on the tour. Now that I am aware of the environmental issues that are facing Detroit, I can no longer ignore what I am no longer ignorant to. Although I do not know what my role in environmental activism in Detroit will be, I am certain that I will have one.

Driving? Turn the Phone Off!

Andy

Driving is debatably the biggest public safety and public health issue of our nation. It is the leading cause of death among Americans ages 1 to 34, and the leading cause of long-term disability for all (McMillin, 2010). Statistically speaking, it is the single most dangerous activity most of us will do today. Skydiving or flying are insurmountably much safer activities, despite what our society believes. So why as a nation do we allow any mobile phone use in the car by the driver, something that drastically increases the probability of an automobile accident to persist?

As noted in the NYTimes article, “AT&T Chief Speaks Out on Texting at the Wheel”, research has shown that texting while driving increases ones risk of a crash beyond that of even an impaired driver with a 0.8 blood alcohol level (Richtel, 2012). A large majority of the population believes the BAC legal limit driving law to be a necessary piece of legislation. It only seems obvious to ban something more dangerous than something that is already banned.

Now some of you will say, texting is regulated in some states. This is obvious, however I’m wondering if we need a ban of total mobile phone use by the driver in the car. Plain and simple, mobile phones distract a driver in numerous ways. Manual manipulation of the phone such as texting or dialing significantly detracts from the time spent viewing the road. Unless you were blessed with the ability to use your two eyes independently, this presents a huge problem. In addition, there exist many distracting effects of the phone conversation through emotion or cognitive reasoning. Studies have shown that splitting cognition between two events greatly reduces the efficiency of any single activity. This is evidence to support the ban of total mobile phone use in the car, since the duration of a typical phone conversation can be up to two orders of magnitude greater than the time required to dial or answer the phone (Strayer, 2003).

Someone dies in a highway crash every 13 minutes (American Osteopathic Association). We must pass legislation that bans mobile phone and other electronic devices use while driving. Is even one life worth a text or phone call? What if that life was yours or your loved ones? The phone call can wait, especially if it’s your last.

Andy Mychkovsky is a first year HMP student at the School of Public Health.

Emotional Roller-coaster

 

Saurabh Vyas

 

Hi,

It has been a little more than a month since the second-year of school started, and it will be an understatement if I say… it has been hectic… very very hectic.

As I write my first blog post, I had a chance to reflect upon the most important things currently going on in my life. And if you are wondering where the title of this post comes from, then its from the sheer delight and happiness of being involved with the organizing of the biggest HMP alumni event – Reaching Excellence in HMP, and spearheading the Students Engaged in Global Health activities for the upcoming year; and the low-point of this roller-coaster has been a more personal experience which I would like to share.

University of Michigan is a place filled with people from different fields, interests, cultures… But, there is a common string as you find an infectious enthusiasm, passion to excel and achieve something worthwhile. I must say I have been impressed by many people whom I have met, but perhaps the person whose passion for global health really moved me was my late friend Sujal Parikh. An m4 medical school student, he was involved with Physicians for Human Rights, UAEM, UVP and the Center for Global Health, and was a natural leader in the field. With his immense passion, Suj was definitely going to be a leader in infectious diseases research and international health issues. Alas, the news of his unfortunate accident while on a Fogarty International research trip to Uganda, had us worrying for his well-being since past week. And finally the news all of us were dreading came in a couple of days back… The young and dynamic leader whom we all loved, met with an untimely and unfortunate demise. Memories, experiences and stories are all that remain… and over the next couple of weeks, we will be paying a tribute to him in the best way we can… I would like everyone who reads this post, to say a silent prayer blessing for the peace of his soul and well-being of his family.

More on Suj by Center for Global Health - http://www.globalhealth.umich.edu/sujalparikh.html

On the other hand, the HMP department is gearing up for the Reaching Excellence symposium. With more than 480 alumni already registered it is going to be an event to look forward to, not only for networking but for inspiration. The chief keynote speaker is Don Berwick (Presidential nominee as Chief of CMS).

I will share more about the symposium in my next post over the weekend. Till then, wishing you all good health…

-SV

 

 

SPH 2010 Symposium– Health and Human Rights: Reframing the Public Health Agenda

 

Katie Sloter

 

Yesterday was the Health and Human Rights: Reframing the Public Health Agenda symposium. If you are currently in the School of Public Health, there is a 97.84 percent chance you attended said conference. I am always simultaneously encouraged and discouraged when considering human rights. I am discouraged by the lack of enforcement mechanisms in peacekeeping activities, and the inherent despair in the atrocities that human beings continue to perpetrate against one another. One of my undergraduate majors was International Studies: Global Health and Human Rights. It can be frustrating to learn and recognize the depth of pain in the world, and not know how to respond to something so vast.

However, even in discussing torture, land-mines, devastating natural disasters—I see a glimpse of humanity in the fact that there are those who still respond, and strive to turn rhetoric into action. Every professional at the symposium has seen that something needs to be done to give voice to the most vulnerable people in our world. They have seen that sitting back and watching is unacceptable; and so they have devoted their lives and careers to removing what despair they can and adding what joy they can. This is, after all, the reason I decided to go into Public Health in the first place. Knowing that there are those striving to provide relief to sufferings gives me a sense of camaraderie and hope. As individuals we cannot win against the vastness that are human rights violations, but as a collection of professionals in medicine, law, education, economics, public health we can try. I would like to thank you who have chosen to strive for the ideals that should be reality. I am inspired by you, and I hope that we can encourage each other in this.

2010 Census

Tiffany Yang

The Census is coming! I mean, in our mail.

I was actually really excited to fill out a census form. It only comes every 10 years and provides data to determine the number of seats each state is allotted for the House of Representatives, helps determine funding for hospitals and schools, and is a great tool for researchers (as I’ve come to learn in some of my classes). I received mine in the mail today and, while I had my back turned making tea, my boyfriend filled out the form. I was crushed. I had waited years to make my contribution and was foiled. But, this goes to show you that it really is that easy to fill out the form. 10 short, easy questions. The most you have to do is spell your own name and check a few boxes. Then you stick it in the envelope they’ve provided (postage already paid for!) and tuck it in your mailbox.

There’s been some talk recently about making sure college kids to fill out the census forms. Most people in our age range aren’t sure about whether to fill them out because college/grad school is “transient” and, therefore, wouldn’t that make the census inaccurate? Well, no. The census is a snapshot in time of the composition and location of our population. And wherever you are right now is what you should put on the census form.

Something I really want to stress is that this doesn’t take long to answer (2 minutes, tops), you don’t need to be a U.S. citizen (only a resident), and provides information so that accurate decisions (that affect your life) at the governmental level can be made.

This is what I don’t want to happen: you get the form in the mail and think to yourself that you’ll fill it out later because you’re just too tired/stressed/can’t be bothered to fill them out at the moment. A day goes by. Two or three more. You think about it and how you should take the time to fill it out but something else keeps getting in the way. Before you know it, the deadline has passed.

The forms are due April 1. Get to it!

Bring it Back, Take it Forward

Carrie Rheingans

Last weekend (March 12-14), many units at the University of Michigan and the Ann Arbor District Library supported a conference titled “Bring it Back, Take it Forward”, about 50 years of activism in southeastern Michigan. I spoke on Friday on the Health Activism panel as an AIDS activist, along with two physicians who have been activists for healthcare reform and a man who is a former UAW union member working for healthcare reform.

Odile Hugonot Haber (moderator), Dr. James Mitchiner, me (taking notes about what everyone's saying!), Dr. Andrew Zweifler, and Al Gladyck

A video of my panel will be in the Ann Arbor District Library’s video collection if you’d like to see how it went. AnnArbor.com invited Dr. Mitchiner to write a guest column about health reform after the bill passed.

Members of the Latin@ Social Work Coalition with Arturo Rodriguez, U-M alumnus and President of United Farm Workers

Me with Dean Baker, PhD in Economics from U-M and supporter of the financial transaction tax

Me with Arturo Rodriguez and the United Farm Workers flag he signed for me!

Podcast from AADL featuring U-M SSW alumnus Jim Toy and U-M SSW student Elizabeth González.

The Agrarian Adventure!

Tiffany Yang

For one of my classes last semester we were required to do a community service-learning project and see how nutrition (teaching, implementation in school foodservice, etc.) works in the real world. I chose to work with The Agrarian Adventure because I thought that their goals and objectives were spot on with what I believed in.

The Agrarian Adventure seeks to educate kids about where their food comes from (i.e. not a shrink-wrapped or boxed package that itself comes from a box) and how their body is affected by the foods they eat. In order to reach these goals, the Agrarian Adventure has partnered up with Ann Arbor public schools (notably, Tappan Middle School) to set up an after school food and garden club, an organic schoolyard garden, and find ways to integrate ideas about food into the school curriculum.

We believe that it is best to teach the message about good, sustainable food early on to kids and not to adults. Why don’t we just sit the parents down? Well, it’d be hard to get all of them to commit to a time frame. Plus, as an adult, you’re pretty set in your ways. As a kid, even though you may not have control over everything your family buys, you may be able to persuade them to try a new vegetable or food preparation that you learned in school. In fact, at the annual Harvest Dinner that the food and garden club holds every year where the menu is designed and made with food harvested from the garden and prepared and served by the students, I had parents tell me how their kid (normally a picky eater/vegetable hater) would demand that they buy [insert random vegetable] because their kid grew it/ate it at club. How great is that? It just warms my heart to know that being active in the production of your own food can erase any (ok, most) preconceived hatred of said food.

This is true even for me. Two weeks ago we were slated to make a butternut squash, carrot, and ginger soup (both the squash and carrots were harvested from the garden in the fall and stored). That did not sound appetizing to me even though I consider myself to have a very open mind in trying foods. When the pots were on the stove and I stared into the sad murky abyss that was the soup, I wasn’t sure I could keep up my chipper face to the kids about how great the soup was going to be because, honestly, it did look kind of gross. But we ladled it out and I gingerly sipped a spoonful. It was good! That just shows you how much things can change when you get over your doubts. I ended up having 2 “bowls” (we had mugs for bowls) of the soup. It was that good.

As you could probably tell from above, my involvement was with the after school food and garden club. We would go outside when the weather was nice to harvest vegetables, do some planting, or just some garden clean up. Staying indoors meant learning kitchen skills (such as knife safety) or learning how to cook (or, rather, how to teach kids how to cook). I’ve heard past volunteers say that the hour spent at the after school club was the “fastest hour of the week” and they were definitely not joking. It was a whirr of activity from prepping for the arrival of kids to getting them settled, introducing the activities of the day and why they are important to actually carrying out the activities and cleaning up. It was so exciting to see these kids try new foods and gain a sense of pride in producing and cooking their own food. So exciting, in fact, that I’ve decided to keep volunteering this semester and, hopefully, will be able to continue volunteering.

I firmly believe in food and health education, especially taught in a way where kids have control over the activities (such as gardening and cooking). With the increasing rise in obesity throughout the United States, it is especially important that there are programs in place to teach kids about food and its effect on your body. Michelle Obama’s stance is a take in the right direction and I strongly applaud her for that. I can only hope that more programs like The Agrarian Adventure are implemented throughout the country and that we, the nation as a whole, can learn to cast off processed foods in favor of real foods like whole grains, fruits, and vegetables that actually have the capability of nourishing our bodies.

World AIDS Day 2009

Carrie Rheingans

Today is World AIDS Day: a day where 5,500 people will die of AIDS and 8,200 more will become infected with HIV – 152 of them in the United States of America. The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS just released a report that says that AIDS is the leading cause of death globally in women of reproductive age. We know that HIV is a worldwide crisis, already devastating countries across the globe and poised to ravage others… unless we continue to work to stop AIDS. If you’re a regular blog reader, you know I’m not a person who just spews statistics; you know I like action (see previous posts about work with youth in the USA, youth in Peru, outreach in the USA and Peru, and advocacy). So for this World AIDS Day, I want to share with you some things you can do to help stop AIDS.

1. Volunteer in your local community. The HIV/AIDS Resource Center is Ann Arbor’s local AIDS service organization and is always accepting volunteers. You can also contact the Washtenaw Interfaith HIV/AIDS Network (WIHAN) to volunteer. You can find non-governmental organizations around the world in the Global South through the International AIDS Alliance.
2. Educate yourself and spread your knowledge. Correct myths and discriminatory and stigmatizing language when  you hear it. Good resources: UNAIDS - Kaiser Family Foundation – CDC - MDCH - Avert – AIDS.gov – google.org
3. Get yourself tested for HIV. Free testing is offered all week in the local community (see complete listing here), or you can text your zip code to “KNOWIT” (566948) to find a local testing site.
   

   KNOW YOUR STATUS!

4. Support organizations serving people living with HIV by donating directly to them rather than buying some product that only contributes a minuscule portion of its profits. Your donation goes further when it goes directly to the organization.
5. Write a letter to the editor of your local media source, call into radio stations, and send emails to friends, family and colleagues with things people can do. Describe the epidemic in your local community and challenge people to act. Call on elected officials to fund important services that keep people alive.
6. Attend World AIDS Day and World AIDS Week educational  and action events near you. The Ann Arbor area has many events going on this week – see a complete listing on the World AIDS Week website.
7. Be creative and use your skills to make a difference in your community!

 

Carrie in front of the AIDS memorial in Durban, South Africa

Michigan Community Conversation for a National AIDS Strategy

Carrie Rheingans

Michigan got its chance to give feedback to the White House Office of National AIDS Policy on Wednesday, 18 November 2009. From across the state, providers, people living with HIV, and people affected by HIV came and gave their recommendations, suggestions, and demands on video tape and in writing.

I was the statewide organizer for this event as part of my social work internship at the HIV/AIDS Resource Center (HARC). This experience was the perfect combination of public health and social work that I hope to gain from my dual degree program (MPH/MSW). When the nationwide community conversations were announced, many people across Michigan wondered why we didn’t have one scheduled near us, especially considering the fact that some zip codes in Detroit have higher HIV prevalence than some countries that receive emergency money form the United States government. The Campaign to End AIDS contacted me after hearing from a few outspoken Michiganders and we did a lot of grassroots organizing in a few short weeks to pull off this successful event. See the Between the Lines article and the Michigan Messenger article for further coverage.

The conversation was only two hours long, and the majority of the time was occupied by community members speaking about what they wanted in a National AIDS Strategy. The night started with welcomes from Craig Covey, Ferndale mayor (Ferndale is the city where the event was held) and longtime staff member of the Michigan AIDS Coalition, Christine Campbell and Larry Bryant of the Campaign to End AIDS, and Charles Pugh, President-elect of the Detroit City Council. Charles also moderated the event.

Below are some of the things people told the White House:

“When is the last time we got together as a community of loving, living people when funders weren’t making us?”

“We need quality healthcare for LGBT people living with HIV and AIDS – we need to strengthen doctor-patient relationships because people are not comfortable coming out to their doctors”

“Viagra and Cialis have aided in the resurgence of sexually transmitted infections in senior housing complexes. We need more education and prevention in these locations”

“The church, rid of stigma, denial and fear, becomes a change agent”

“my barrier [to being an AIDS advocate] is childcare”

“I wanted post-exposure prophylaxis and the nurse didn’t even know what it was!”

“We need the same laws coast to coast – enough with a patchwork of different laws about HIV”

“I missed class tonight to be here on my birthday to tell you that we need rec centers for our kids to have something safe to do after school”

“Michigan prisons don’t hand out condoms or test for HIV when people are released – but we know that people are still having sex and they need to get tested because they might need to get right into care”

It was great to hear people from as far away as Kalamazoo, Flint and Lansing gathering to speak out about such an important issue.

Larry Bryant from the Campaign to End AIDS introduces the event as moderator and President-elect of the Detroit City Council Charles Pugh looks on