Oct. 27. 2015. Are You Gay?

“Are you female or male? Or… both?"

“Are you homo or not?”

[To man] “Do you have wife? Or… husband?”

“Are you man or woman? Or… third sex?”

You must be insulted if someone seriously (or either way, jokingly) ask about your sexuality. So then, how about you define yourself?

“I am a man… because I have a man’s genitalia, and I am attracted to women.”

Do you think it is enough explanation to define yourself as a MALE? Then, here are some questions for you:

1.    What if your general recognition towards biological sex has an exception, “intersex”?

2.    What if you, as a man, have a sexual attraction to women, but your gender identity wants to define yourself as a woman?

3.    What if you are not attracted to anyone, regardless of sex, and have never felt sexual arousal, which is identified as “asexual”?

4.    What if you were ostracized during your school days because your gender expression was so girly?

5.    What if you’ve had crush on man just for a few seconds because he was your ideal person who has everything and that was exactly what you have always wanted to be?

6.    What if you have fantasy about ladyboy, bisexuality or pansexuality?

So then, what are you? Are you sure that you are all-about-man? Who told you that you are a man with what kinds of criteria?

Let’s talk about my case. I used to like the color, pink. The reason? I don’t know, I just liked it, all colors from red channel, including purple, violet, and powder pink. I’d never thought my color preference would be a big issue to Americans. Of course, I have to admit the fact that it was already 3 years ago (probably, men have become more open to pink now?), and people in Utah were startled (perhaps, Utahns are more conservative than others?). Anyway, this story happened when I went to Kumasi, Ghana, for global health study abroad program with a big group of public health, nursing and medical students during summer, 2012. I brought my fancy white and pink striped slipper to wear indoors to Africa! But, some strange moments occurred. When I walked around, a male colleague saw my slipper with pop-eyed and cried out in surprise, “Pink…………..???”

“Yes, my friend, it is pink, so…?”

“Oh… You should be very careful for that.”

“…….?”

He must have some fixed boundary of choosing color to make himself to be a masculine? I took a little offense at his shock and came back to my room. Another colleague, who was my roommate, also saw my slipper and showed exactly same response, “Pink…………….???”

I shocked them again when I took out my purple laptop. A female colleague saw it and asked in surprise, “Charles! Why is your laptop pink?” Well, there was some choice that I could remonstrate with her. “My friend, this is not pink, but purple!” “Okay, Okay… You’re right.” She consented reluctantly. After that, whenever I talked with her, she asked me earnestly couple of more times, “By the way, Charles! Why is your laptop pink?”

They didn’t ask me directly, “Are you gay?” However, they seemed that they wanted to hear from me directly like this, “Yes, because I like pink, I am gay.” They were so nice Utahns who didn’t cast me out even if I looked somewhat suspicious. One more moment happened when our group came back to the U.S. from Ghana. I finally took out my U.S. cell phone to turn it on. Sadly, my cell phone case was also pink. Another female colleague said in a low voice, “Pink…?” ‘Okay okay… Your response doesn’t that surprise me anymore.’ Right after this Africa trip, I threw my purple laptop into the storage, gave my fancy white and pink striped slipper to my “female” friend, and bought the new cell phone with “pure white” cover. Also, I threw all pink shirts away with tears in my wounded hearts (half in joke). It was the moment that I had to abandon my color preference to survive (Yes, I was really serious at that time).

What is your sexual orientation?
Is it the exactly same as your gender identity?

And now, I am attending half-day Gender & Sexual Diversity (GSD) Training provided by Palladium, global health consulting firm. 13 attendees from USAID, CDC, and other implementing partner join today’s training session to discuss gender & sexual diversity. I have been working with Palladium and Johns Hopkins University to research the impact of GSD training funded by PEPFAR (The U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) in 38 developing countries, and today’s training was great time for me to talk about Gender & Sexual Minority (GSM) with staff who have been working so hard to change people’s awareness towards lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT), men who have sex with men (MSM), and sexism.

Wait, what is GSM? Why do we make the new terminology and make ourselves confused? GSM means “People whose gender, sexual orientation, or sexual characteristics differ from what is typically expected.” It is a broader concept than LGBT and MSM that you can be also considered as GSM. If I had stuck to my pink preference ignoring whatever people think about me, I would have been called, GSM. However, I just wanted to be normal and I didn’t want to argue with anybody by saying “Pink isn’t just for girls!” Wait again, what is normal? Since when people started thinking men cannot like pink to be masculine? How much we have been suffering from this kind of social convention, not expressing yourself to the full?

Clicker for the training! 

People have complex identities. It must be impossible to express every single emotion and define themselves who they are. Even if you are confident to say who you are and what you really want to do in the future, it can always change once you sleep and get up in the next morning. If you really like to dissect the color as black and white, sex as man and woman, and weather as summer and winder, where is true diversity? How do we ensure highest attainable standard of health for LGBT and MSM? I know, God created us, either man or woman, but we are still, imperfect creatures who always need love and sincere affection from somebody else. GSM is not the existence who we blame, but we embrace. We may be locked in the cage that is defined by our society.

I was really impressed by one attendee’s self-introduction.

“I am cis-gender. I am gay. And I am from Chicago.”

I haven’t heard of “cis-gender,” but it was actually great way to explain ourselves if you are not “trans-gender.” (It reminded me cis- trans- complex molecular structures in organic chemistry class). It was also good to see that he declared himself as a gay and said he had his husband. The time is already past when coming out man dies out. To be honest, I don’t want to argue whether same-sex marriages should be banned or not. But at least, I eagerly want to see that every single person regardless of their gender identity, gender expression, biological sex, and sexual orientation has the same human right to be respected. Also, I hope to see that people can become ally, who openly support the equal treatment and human rights of gender and sexual minorities.

Oct. 9. 2015. CORE Group Global Health Practitioner Conference [Day 2]

By sunrise Day 2, I was bright and breezy this morning. I thought it was so lucky for me to attend the conferences in DC because I would just drive and easily get there. For the next year in Spring, Core Group Conference will be held in Portland, Oregon, so far way from here. From CCIH in June to CORE Group in October, I might have not been grateful enough to attend conferences just because the places were located too close. Okay, so I have only one day left for the conference, and I will absorb all kinds of information! Day 2 was for “Behavior Change in the Age of Complexity: Implications for Monitoring and Evaluation” all day long.

It was interesting topic for me to understand how to approach to monitoring and evaluating (M&E) Social and behavior change (SBC) in an alternative way. You know, it must be very hard to measure subtle and indefinable changes in people’s emotions, so SBC M&E needs to be more adjusted for effective measurement of impact and generation of learning. The new way of approaching SBC M&E would be strengthened mixed methods coming from various disciplines, anthropology, sociology, history, psychology to embrace complex interactions and transformative change. For example, social/gender norm has been shifted, and the human right of underserved population, such as LGBT and MSM has been improved, so adapting and optimizing behavior change interventions would be fundamentally necessary to integrate community member’s engagement and feedback.

Through the conference, people’s efforts to share the new approaches to SBC M&E and applying the best local systems framework will improve the quality of life on the opposite side of the earth sooner or later. I met a few people from Johns Hopkins; they are from Center for Communication Programs (CCP) and Jhpiego. Though we did not talk much with each other, it was good to see people from the place that I am well aware of attend the conference to share their experience with global health practitioners from other organizations.

See you all in Portland!

Oct. 8. 2015. CORE Group Global Health Practitioner Conference [Day 1]

Without a full motivation, public health is not possible to emit the shiny light. To tell the truth, I was almost suffocated by the normal life these days, so I have always tried to find something fresh moment that suddenly motivates me again. I had never imagined that CORE Group Global Health Practitioner Conference would have a rich source of inspiration for me. All of us might have heard of this, how to get a job, how to start a new career, and how to successfully undertake the task at least one time: the answer was always networking, networking, and networking… So then, how do we start the vague, intangible, and difficult networking? It is not hard! You might also have heard the answer for that: Close the laptop right now, and go out to see the people.

It was true! Just as most people, I was in the middle of bunch of things to do, but I just drove to the conference place, Washington DC. Actually, I have been waiting for this conference for a long time. I was a bit sad that my oral presentation application was not accepted for “New Information Circuit,” but I still wanted to attend this conference. I thought my research work, quantitative analysis by using Lives Saved Tool, was pretty new for the New Information Circuit session, but I realized that this CORE Group Conference, which is held twice per year, have already dealt with this analysis several times. Wow… I have to keep up with all new information from now. Global health practitioners should be sensitive to embrace up-to-date framework and concepts with keen eyes!

CORE Group Conference, established in 1997, is for exchanging new ideas and knowledge among more than 75 organizations in 180 countries. CORE Group members and associates are mostly NGOs, academics, and for-profit organizations, and they gather at the conference to make unified and centralized synergy to have a positive influence on community health. I think it is a great movement to cooperate with each other for creating “Trending topics in community health.” I joined the conference as a World Vision Global Health Fellow, the position that I am officially done quite a long time ago. Nonetheless, I was happy to become one of CORE Group members to meet Alfonso and Lianna from World Vision. We were in Sierra Leone together when there was an Ebola outbreak over there last year. There were some students and early career professionals among attendees, so I also enjoyed interacting with them during social networking time. The session about supervising community health workers and monitoring & evaluation gave me a better sense of finding thesis topic as a prospective doctoral student. It is interesting moment that everyone in the conference mentioned one person’s name “Henry Perry,” whenever they talked about community health worker and health systems. He is my lovely teacher at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health! I am glad to know he has made a great contribution to develop the guidance for managing community-based primary health care.

I am already excited to attend Conference Day 2 tomorrow. The conference reminded me again public health would be strengthened unlimitedly if people put their heads together to better other’s lives.

Oct. 3. 2015. Eritrea Cuisine I

I was just happy to see African food in the U.S. You know, basic ingredients are the same, no matter where people live, but depending on how to cook, it can be called Korean, Chinese, American, or African food. The bread was made of flour, the soup made of lamb, and the left side of the picture… what is it? Is it cheese? Bread crumbs? Weldegergis said, “It is HALVA!” “How do you spell?” “H.A.L.V.A. Halva~!”

I could not tolerate my curiosity, so I did quick web search with my phone. Halva is a type of dense, sweet confections. According to Wikipedia, there were two styles, flour-based and nut-butter-based, but I was not sure what kinds of halva I had. Anyway, I had a nibble on halva, and the taste was really sweet! I felt like it was a chunk of sugar, so I was a bit afraid of cramming them in my mouth. However, having carelessly torn bread saturated in lamb soup with a small amount of halva reminded me of my Africa life last year. Of course, there was no need to use spoon or fork!

Oct. 1. 2015. Refugee

Wars, conflict and persecution never end in the earth. UNHCR’s annual Global Trends Report points out that worldwide displacement was at the highest level in 2014, 59.5 million people forced to flee their home. To me, who has never been to a battlefield, the war-torn Middle East seems to be a far away land. Of course, there was a Baltimore riot last May, and it is not that quiet area, but still, I think I am in the place that misery displacement never happens. I am so apathetic. While Syria has become the world’s biggest producer of refugees and internally displaced people, what have I done...?

UNHCR- Worldwide displacement his all-time high as war and persecution increase 

I looked around. I was still in Baltimore, and I believed there was something that I could do for the community in Baltimore. When I realized that International Rescue Committee (IRC) helps refugees settle down in the U.S., I was reluctant to become an IRC Family Mentor for the first time. ‘I am a student, and I have a visa that expires soon. How do I work for refugees?’

In the end, I could not ignore the opportunity to become a Family Mentor. Though I did not know how much I could be helpful for refugee family who just came to the U.S., at least I thought I would be a good listener and sincere friend for them. I could not quite understand the difference between asylee and refugee even after IRC volunteer orientation, but I was full of both pleasure and duty that ‘I want to do this!’ When an IRC staff asked me over the phone interview what kinds of refugee family I would like to meet, I said without a moment’s hesitation, “I’d like to meet big family who’s from Africa!”

Why Africa again? There were quite a number of people who are skeptical about my work in Africa. They did not understand why I went to Africa, so to speak, unfamiliar place located too far away from the U.S. They said they would have done similar things what I did in Africa, right here in Baltimore. At that time, I could not answer for that. They may be right because I have had little concern what’s going on the communities that were so near to me. After a long trip in Africa, I was determined that I would do invaluable volunteer work for underserved population in Maryland and Virginia, the place where I can reach so quick.

That’s how I met Weldegergis’ family. He is from Eritrea, small country that gained independence from Ethiopia in 1993. After a long period of years of living in exile in Eastern Sudan, at last, his family finally set foot on the U.S. soil in 2015. He met his wife in Sudan and now has six kids, big family! I visit the family once a week to help them adjust to the new life in the U.S. by going to bookstore together, teaching English and math, or share each other’s daily life. I originally had a lot of pressure about how to become a great mentor, but now I feel like I am more healed whenever I see them. They moved in new, sweet home in Baltimore, go to school, go to work, and go to Catholic Church on Sundays.

Now I finally have the answer for those who are not sure why I like on the ground work. I would never imagine how hard living in the asylum and refugee camp. Weldegergis talks about his refugee life in the past with a smile, but I never know how much he had to go through. Likewise, I cannot feel the same way of pain and sorrow that Syrians have, simply because I am not physically there, and I am not in the same situation of forced displacement. So I need to go again, to feel their life fully in the same environment where gives suffering to them. I believe public health is for everyone. Wherever I am, I hope I can do outreach, go and visit people who need helping hands.