NorthWest Carrollton

Does this mean we, the citizens can rest now?

Sol Hernandez a blogger who lives in Fresno California has been blogging about the flood in the Mexican State of Tabasco.

You can see her interviewed here

Sol and her husband have a 14 month old baby and are unable to travel to Mexico but her mother and the rest of her family has been housing, feeding and clothing many people who are displaced. She has a paypal account as well as links to many many relief organizations.

Sol’s mother has also been giving massages at the shelters, so I guess Qualcomm is not the only place evacuees are treated with care and consideration.

In May of 2005 while searching for Health Insurance I discovered I had Breast Cancer. I joined the ranks 1 in 7. That is the number, one in seven women will get breast cancer. Now I was 1.

Surgery at University and Doctors appointments at Charity, if you can find it and you can afford it get some health insurance, it was too late for me my search was over, now I was a patient.

On August 27 I could hardly get out of bed, 2 surgical procedures and a bad ass dose of Chemo left me weak and sick. On Sunday we evacuated in the car, I was on the floor on the sofa cushions in my pj’s. The dogs, the kid, the husband..

All I could think of was the fact that I was scheduled for Chemo in 10 days, that one of the most important parts of treatment is consistancy, stick to the schedule,stay on track. By Tuesday my mission was to find a Hospital and a Doctor that would give me chemo, a dosage that was now under water in the bowels of Charity. One of the last phone calls I recieved before we left was from my Mother, she encouraged me to check into the Hospital afraid that the 12 hours in the car would be too much for me.

I was in Houston, and then Austin and finally in a Doctors office, ready for my next dose. I got there by being loud, by yelling and fighting, I got there cause I demanded to get there.

Now we are back in half our house, and all the fight that served to save me feeds me to fight this fight.

So tommorow is my last day of chemo. I had a new treatment which began AFTER I ended my first rounds of chemo. This course lasted a year, once a week. Every week, I never thought I could do it and I did.

Last week one of the women who sat with me was buried. June lost her house in Gentilly, first to the flood and then to a fire. She lost her life to Breast Cancer, and she always made me laugh.

I miss you June.

Donate

Gracias a la vida que me ha dado tanto,
Me ha dado la risa, me ha dado el llanto,
Así yo distingo dicha de quebranto,
Los dos materiales que forman mi canto,
Y el canto de ustedes que es mi propio canto.

Thanks to life which has given me so much,
It’s given me laughter, it’s given me tears,
Thereby I distinguish good fortune from ruin,
The two materials that make up my song,
And the song of all of you that is my own song.
Violetta Parra
“Gracias a la Vida”

UPDATE

Thanks to everyone who was so kind and generous, Greg Peters, Gambit cartoonist and all around talent is off to Cleveland Clinic, please support this effort to make sure his stay there is not offline

One of the projects I worked on while living in Mexico was Embroidered Retablos.

Most commonly retablos are hung in churches to give thanks for divine intervention.

“I dedicate the present retablo to the Holiest Virgin of San Juan de los Lagos for having saved me from a Texan who tried to carry me off. I hid under a tree by the side of the road with my little brother.”

The ExVoto is a public display of an answered prayer, and often the names retablo and ex votot are interchagable.

The women I worked with were mostly illiterate. They lived on outlying ranches and about 75% of the men in the community worked in the U.S. The project had started as a way to taking a traditionally male trade, retablo painting and using a female craft, textiles.

There were many bumps in the road. The issues of the narrative, since these women were for the most part, illiterate they had to tell their children the story, and the kids would write in pencil on the fabric. The issues of privacy, as soon as these women realized that they were creating a narrative record of their lives they became very bold and at times sordid.

Historically these paintings told a dramatic story, and that was that.

But with my ladies the stories were a source of income, I had a store and I sold them. I knew who sold faster, who had a better narrative sense and who was a master at needlework. The work was uneven but always entertaining.

Some of them even began to resemble the ubiquitous comic books that are read by adults all over Mexico.

When I first came to blogging Alan Gutierrez the Executive Director of Think New Orleans, a nonprofit that helps neighborhoods use the Internet to organize, seemed pretty determined to create a blog for my neighborhood and I went along with it. Whenever it would lay fallow he would call and demand that I publish.

And then like my Ranch ladies I began to understand that what I was doing was creating a historical time line, a chronicle of events as they happened. It sounds simple and obvious but for some reason I had never connected the two things.

What would those women do if they had a blog? What kinds of narrative voices are we missing for lack of, what? Not for lack of stories.

And here in New Orleans, the idea of a collective story of the city where multiple Neighbors and Neighborhood write the Recovery is a very exciting prospect. Where we could check on what other folks are doing across the City.

If anyone is interested let me know in the comments section.

I alwasys have to say thanks to the New Orleans Bloggers.

“People are beginning to feel more emboldened in their roles,” Gadbois said. “Everyone’s very
aware that we are living history and our fates are still undetermined in terms of the city and the community.
“Our city could be dying before our eyes. We’re not sure. So what we’re trying to do with these blogs is ask specific questions that only a specific audience would be interested in. And that’s going to help the whole city.”

Read the whole article online

If you are interested please post a comment here or go to the Wiki.

One of our fellow bloggers need some help with her House Gutting. This is a good chance to see what Geeks do with Tools.