March 1, 2005: Headlines: COS - Mali: AIDS: Jewish Issues: Jewish Women magazine: Carrie Lee Teicher, 25, spent two years with the Peace Corps working in West Africa, in Mali's only HIV/AIDS clinic
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March 1, 2005: Headlines: COS - Mali: AIDS: Jewish Issues: Jewish Women magazine: Carrie Lee Teicher, 25, spent two years with the Peace Corps working in West Africa, in Mali's only HIV/AIDS clinic
Carrie Lee Teicher, 25, spent two years with the Peace Corps working in West Africa, in Mali's only HIV/AIDS clinic
Carrie Lee Teicher, 25, spent two years with the Peace Corps working in West Africa, in Mali's only HIV/AIDS clinic
Extreme Tikkun Olam
Sometimes repairing the world calls on us to leave the familiar behind.
By Rahel Musleah
Jewish Women magazine
Spring 2005
Caption: Carrie Lee Teicher with some of the local people during her stint in Bhavnagar, India, one of the world's worst places to live.
[Excerpt]
Carrie Lee Teicher, 25, spent two years with the Peace Corps working in West Africa, in Mali's only HIV/AIDS clinic. Last summer, she volunteered in India with the American Jewish World Service. Teicher, who says that activism "runs in the family" and that tikkun olam is the core of her Jewish identity, describes her experiences as the "polar opposite" of her Westchester upbringing and her Barnard College education.
"It's one thing to read and study about poverty and another to go to barren millet fields and live with people with no access to food because there are no roads," says Teicher, who is completing her graduate studies in public health at Columbia University.
The lack of Jewish community or ritual in Mali led her to deepen her moral and ethical connection to Judaism. She even wrote her own Passover Haggadah reflecting her impressions. Being a Jewish American woman in Mali, a Muslim country, during 9/11 and the outbreak of war in Iraq was "on paper not the safest place, but I personally never felt danger," she says. "If I didn't go out at night, it was more because I was concerned the batteries on my flashlight would die." The urban educated in Mali supported the Palestinian cause, but, Teicher says, they treated her as an individual outside their anti-Semitic stereotypes. To the people of rural Mali, Jews were a biblical tribe from ancient times, "like Amalekites or Canaanites."
In Bhavnagar, India, Teicher confronted not only unmitigated poverty but also human exploitation. She worked at a blood bank, researched HIV rates and staffed a women's welfare center that provided the only health care in a nearby ship-breaking yard that has been cited by international organizations as the world's worst place to live and work. Thousands of migrant workers take battleships and cruise ships apart by hand. "I didn't realize how harsh it would be," she says. "Being able to live without electricity, running water or flush toilets is no great task, but I never got used to the poverty or the degradation."
Still, when asked what she has gained from her overseas experiences, she answers: "The world."
"You do not know what you are cheating yourself out of when you let your fears stop you from taking leaps into the unknown," says Alexandra Saperstein, 32, who volunteered with the Peace Corps in Bulgaria from 1998 to 2000. "There are parts of yourself you would never discover," she says. "The resources within and around you will show up."
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Story Source: Jewish Women magazine
This story has been posted in the following forums: : Headlines; COS - Mali; AIDS; Jewish Issues
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By Anonymous (host2.ossu-2-gw.cust.sover.net - 209.198.84.222) on Monday, February 13, 2006 - 9:02 am: Edit Post |
Interesting website. Keep it up. My students can really use this website to keep up with the issues in Mali.
