Tribute to Meghan, Class of 1998

As a group of 38 young women, the Class of 1998 was one of the smallest classes to pass through the halls of Agnes Irwin. We not only knew each other by name, but even the least likely of friends realized some intimate detail about each others’ lives. So when cancer stole one of us away earlier this year, more than a decade after many of us had last seen her, we felt a palpable loss.

On February 5, 2011, at 30 years of age, our dear friend Meghan Murphy left this world.

While at Agnes Irwin, Meghan was a leader, always balancing academics with issues she felt passionately about. She not only sat on the student-faculty committee, she was active in advancing race relations among the study body and was a member of umoja—which in Swahili means unity. She was one of the few students who participated in a committee to recognize gender awareness, and she expressed her deep commitment to public service through her representation on Agnes Irwin’s community service board. She rowed on the crew team, but more importantly, she acted as a positive force between the different personalities in our small class. Her humor brought lightness to our classrooms, and her friendship was important to so many of us. Often inspired by Meghan, we selected her to speak at our graduation in Bryn Mawr. While sitting there together listening to her beautiful speech, it was difficult to discern between tears of laughter and tears of sadness. Her speech struck that perfect chord between nostalgia, anticipation for the future, and a sense of history.

Following her young career at Agnes Irwin, Meghan attended Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where her commitment to the environmental movement flourished. After graduating from Cornell in 2003, she stayed among the hills, gorges, and the one great, long finger lake that comprises Ithaca, to start a biodiesel company and to become the editor of the book, Biodiesel America, which later became a movie. She volunteered at a local hospice care facility and threw the rest of her energy into working for T. Colin Campbell, the author of The China Project, the most comprehensive study of health and nutrition ever conducted. Like Dr. Campbell, Meghan was a fierce advocate of sustainable living and the vegan diet. She was also a soul-searcher, and from Ithaca, traveled to India to partake in a spiritual retreat. For Meghan, no adventure was too big. No cause she felt passionately about was unworthy of her sacrifice.

When she found out she would have to battle cancer, she tackled it head on, staying positive and seemingly hopeful during her last year with us. Through an online journal, she reconnected with many of us, writing about her struggles, making us laugh, when all we wanted to do was cry. One of the most telling photographs of Meghan posted last year was of her hula hooping on the beach in Florida—where she sought treatment and care—with a grand smile on her face.

As Meghan’s spirit looked around at those of us attending her funeral service, she saw a reflection of herself. Songs sung by her friends filled the halls of the Ithaca church. Each friend and family member who spoke recalled her energy and enthusiasm for life. Collectively, we buried Meghan on top of a large Ithaca hill, in a nature conservancy, far from the sounds of the roads below. The wind whipped snow to our brows and we followed a large draft horse that pulled a sled carrying Meghan’s body, which was wrapped in a biodegradable cloth. She became part of the Earth, as it always was a part of her—to the singing voices of those who loved her.

…Swing low, sweet chariot
Coming for to carry me home,
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Coming for to carry me home.
I looked over Jordan, and what did I see
Coming for to carry me home?
A band of angels coming after me,
Coming for to carry me home.

Dear Meghan, may you rest in peace.

Traveling through Vagus

I almost traveled again today, to somewhere otherworldly, through my vagus nerve. I was reading about how a bump on my leg could be sarcoma, or cancer, and I almost passed out.

The Vagus Nerve. It slows the blood pumping from our hearts. But sometimes mine malfunctions. Hemorrhage, self-destruction, starvation have broken it. Things that I fear, things that disturb me, often attack my vagus nerve, and break it. My mind assists with the havoc. It produces images that just don’t want to leave—the protruding ribs of a sick child, the arm of a heroine user, me on a surgeon’s table having cancerous cells scraped away. At those times, the blood moves rapidly from my heart, and I churn out all my defenses: liters of water, raising my feet horizontally, hanging my head between my knees, pretty thoughts. But before long, my feet start to tingle, my body shivers, my armpits sweat. The room sits under a heavenly light. And I fall from reality. I enter another world, where time, as we know it, ceases to exist. The seconds or minutes spent by those around me scrambling to wake me up, to raise me back into consciousness are, to me, days, months, sometimes years. While there, I’ve been under a horse’s hooves, I’ve had children dancing around me, I’ve been lying in a field of grass watching the sun set. I see people I haven’t seen in years. It’s the closest I’ve ever been to a coma, or death.

I’ve landed on carpets, bathroom floors, sidewalks, and stair wells. One time my head only slumped back while I remained seated in my chair. I’ve acquired large bumps on the back of my head, rug burn on my face, bruises on my knees, depending on how I fall. I’ve woken up with a smile on my face, crying, and in a hospital bed, always feeling as if my whole life has been drained from me. One time, when my vagus nerve was at its worst, I had a seizure.

My dysfunctional vagus nerve destroys my chance of ever entering medicine, being an injecting drug user, or maybe giving birth; for the better or for the worse.

I once thought the nerve would eventually become more insensitive, beating away slowly, lackadaisically, mechanically functioning as it should. As I grew older, I thought I would better be able to cope with the world’s demons, to better hide my fears, by inconspicuously remaining vertical despite a racing mind. But I’m fairly certain, at this point, that this condition is inherent; that the vagus nerve will continue to plague me. And as I age, I am almost certain that my vagus nerve will constantly remind me it’s there, not to be forgotten. Like most people, my health will worsen as my hair turns gray, which will require more trips to the doctor, more bad diagnoses, more surgeries, more blood work, more of the unpretty.

My mind, my affinity for all things of misery doesn’t help. I work in public health, a world of statistics about death and disease. I watch films about mothers giving birth and dying in a pool of blood because they couldn’t get to a hospital, infants whose diarrhea is so watery and persistent that it shrivels them up, eventually sucking the life right from them. I stood in a room and stared at a dead, gray, stillborn fetus. I write sad stories in an effort to produce a visceral reaction among my readers. I try to dissociate. Sometimes it’s easier, sometimes it’s not. If I’m doing my job well, it’s not.

So, occasionally the world will just be too much for my vagus nerve, and it will call it quits for seconds, or minutes. And maybe that is how I will be able to survive, by checking out for a while, traveling to somewhere more beautiful, when things become too ugly. Maybe, in reality, the vagus nerve is saving my life.

A New Sort of Wanderlust

I am not in wanderlust right now, at least not in the true sense of the word. I am not writing to the sound of Yemen’s call to prayer, from the Nigerien desert, or from Bali’s silent shores. I am sitting in my house, sipping wine, listening to Rachael Yamagata – but I feel so very far away.

It’s been a strange 24 hours. Yesterday, an old friend of mine passed away. At age 30, a cancer expanded and manifested, until it took her lungs, her heart, and her life. Meghan died only a day prior to the anniversary of my grandfather’s death – February 5 – such a strange day it will be always.

I can still hear her voice. She wasn’t my best friend. She wasn’t my sister. I hadn’t seen her in years, but she stayed with me. I remember listening to her give the closing speech at our high school graduation, with tears in my eyes. Because that is how Meghan rolled. She could make a sour soul laugh. She could reach inside us all with her smile. She could move us, but subliminally. I admired her. She lived organically. She lived to save the planet, but she couldn’t save herself.

She taught me things — about her lessons on dying. She stayed positive as she lost pound after pound, healthy cell after healthy cell. She kept making me laugh, when all I wanted to do was cry. She swung herself around, hula hooping on the beach. She walked in the sand. She tried hard to stay with the living. She got jealous of her friends with silver hair. Oh, if only she could age and grow old with her loved ones. She tricked us all, in her ascent to heaven. I thought she would always be among us — the living. She said that dying made her feel younger. She was smaller, more dependent, less herself as a woman. Her life froze and went in reverse. She couldn’t shift it the other way, although she tried her hardest.

And through it all, she wrote and shared her life with those around her. The online narrative that encapsulated her last months on Earth made me feel so very close to her. So, when I got the news that I wouldn’t be hearing from her anymore, I felt deeply saddened. I felt cheated.

Through all of this, I’ve never been a great believer in heaven. But today, things changed. My mind kept traveling there, to somewhere otherworldly. And a deep sense of calm prevailed. Meghan’s spirit was so big that it has to be somewhere. Life wouldn’t make sense if she ceased to exist. So, yes, Meghan is out there, up there, around there, here, everywhere. There just can’t possibly be any other way. Meghan has been stirring in my mind, teaching me things all day long. I thought of her as I rode my horse, and I felt more at peace, more positive than I ever had atop the horse before. Thank you, Meghan. Because me and that horse, we are here, and well, and we have what seems like all the time in the world. I only wish Meghan had the same.

While she is traveling around out there, getting acclimated to her new surroundings, I am traveling too. And with this, I am changing the meaning of this blog – to not just be about travel around this globe, but the traveling we do every day. Although it was a story of the most tragic sort, I traveled to Meghan, with Meghan. I heard Meghan through her writings, and I felt close to her because of her will and spirit to keep us with her. I hope I can keep you with me.

Meghan, as so many others have said, we'll miss hearing from you, may you travel in peace.

Sana'a - Dubai - D.C.

Almost 360 degrees. I circled the globe, over Iran, Afghanistan, Russia and Greenland, landed on yet another planet, and am now sitting in my beloved Washington, D.C. apartment with my cat, wearing a red tank top. If it wasn't so cold, I could wear the tank top outside, and I wouldn't get stares. Later, I plan to run through the streets, listening to my iPod. I plan to hold Heather's hand.

Ah, to be a woman, and to be free.

Of course, all freedoms are relative. As a woman, I could still become trapped inside my head, and feel limited by the shape of my body, my capacity for professional growth, an economic downturn. But, let's face it, here in D.C., we live in relative freedom.

As my plane rose up over Sana'a, I have to say, I breathed a sigh of relief. I let my scarf drop loosely over my neck, and removed my blazer. In my short sleeves, I readied myself for a few hours in Dubai before returning home.

And even in Dubai, just three hours by plane from Yemen, what I sensed was progress, modernity, and a relative antithesis. Dubai, like Abu Dhabi, the two most famous cities in the United Arab Emirates, pride themselves on progress. Their country has used its oil wealth to offer free education, through the university level, and free health care to all of its citizens. Because of its wealth, the cities are pristine high-rises jetting through the sky, and Dubai is an international metropolis filled with a modernity and capitalist mentality that even many places in the United States might try to emulate.

A couple of hours spent people watching at one of Dubai's famous shopping malls was filled with Arab princesses, their faced bedecked in make-up, three-inch long eye lashes, diamond-laden abeyas, and head scarves sitting high on their heads to cover towering buttresses of hair. These princesses walked beside European women with bare middrifts, and women wearing loose pastel outfits, with what looked like bonnets as head scarves. A few women sported the full face veil, as in Yemen, others wore the Indian Sari, the colorful Somali headscarf, and some looked like me. It was truly an amalgamation, in every sense of the word.

When leaving the mall, we were startled by a display of fireworks outside the Sheraton Hotel. Red, green and gold sparkles lighted the night sky. We asked our driver what the occasion was, assuming this could go on every night in Dubai -- a city of money, gold souks and shopping malls -- and it would make sense.

"It is the shopping festival," he said.

Ah, yes, of course. Every year, five days are designated for the "shopping festival," which brings in large crowds from all over the world to help boost an already boosted economy. While there, for $115, visitors can visit the tallest building in the world, spend the day at the beach, or go on a desert Safari -- all in a one day.

But it's not all a Disney Land in Dubai. The place still allows public executions and one is due in the next couple days, to prosecute a man who raped a little boy in a Mosque. He'll be gunned down by a firing squad. Because of the diverse population -- and various codes of dress -- the country has a "zero-tolerance policy" for sexual harassment.

The editorial page of Dubai's English language newspaper was filled with letters from its readership condemning France for trying to outlaw the face veil.


Burqa provides a sort of protection for women. It is not a punishment.
-Muzammil, Dubai


If France calls for the veil ban for Muslim women, the Arabs should implement compulsory 'full Islamic veil' for all other religions.
SAK Jeelani, Dubai


This is just exploiting the innocent people and religion! Truly an act of discrimination from a 'so-called' human rights leader!
Asghar Ali, Sharjah


It shows the dark face of the West.
Tariq Bangash, Al Ain

And, alas, I return to the face veil again. I didn't mean to do it, and I am not sure how I feel about a legal ban. All I know is that even sitting here 9,000 miles away in Washington, D.C., the face veil still tightens my chest, and compromises my heart.

Ladies Night Out in Old Sana'a

I am already smiling. It was the perfect way to spend my last night in Yemen. The night leaves me with a sweet taste and a memory I will surely cherish forever.

The six of us packed into the landrover and headed to the shopping district in Old City. We were a colorful group. Black with red dots, black with mauve flowers, bright, glittery blue and a garden of something more mild decorated the heads of my companions. They were the ladies from the YMA -- the Yemen Midwives Association, and on this Wednesday night, which is comparable to a Friday night back home, they were ready to show Salwa and I the city.

We walked as a pack, pushing through the black cloaks and the men pushing their fruits and breads in wheelbarrows around the Old Souk. As we watched cheeks fill with quat, I was, at many times, lost in their Arabic laughter. I noticed stares, sure. We were all bare faced and smiling, window shopping. I couldn't have felt more at home. They haggled with the young man selling cactus fruit, and Layla reached over and insisted I try some too. As I bought a few gifts for people back home, they moved their arms through the air, as if they were dancing, and bargained with the shopkeepers. I was lost in a rush of their beauty and their energy, their power.

After shopping, we packed back in to the car, on a truncated roadtrip to the Arabia hotel, a comfortable place where you can eat mezze, drink local tea or smoke shisha. As health professionals, of course, they discussed with me all the downfalls of Shisha and quat, and we steered clear of the Houkhas.

India, the UK, Abu Dhabi, Bulgaria -- these Yemeni women had all been educated outside of their home country, their soul, and returned to make something better of the place they love. The Yemen Midwives Association trains women to serve the communities they came from. Through a new program, they are also helping some women to set up private practices in the most rural communities. There are only 12 private midwives in the whole country of Yemen, but talking to these women, with their infectuous enthusiasm, it made me believe there will be many more.

It made me hopeful, optimistic. The six of us, together, were that powerful.

They asked me about Oprah, journalism, living in an apartment in Washington, D.C. And I asked them about their weekends. Layla, who appeared to be about my age, likes to rest on the weekends, surf the Internet, watch movies. An Oprah fan, she just discovered The Color Purple. Bless her. Sometimes, she goes to the park and hangs out with her veiled sisters, but sometimes she doesn't. She wants to avoid the chaos of downtown Sana'a, something she battles every morning to be at the office by 9 am, and every evening around 6:30 pm, when she leaves. Layla, unlike the other ladies, is not married, but she might be interested. She has criteria. He must not be Yemeni. He must let her have an equal say.

The way her eyes light up, and the way her upper body fluctuates into motion when she has something assertive to say, I know that she will wait for this person. Layla wouldn't settle for anything less.

As the city moved around us tonight, I felt protected, everything else -- the honking horns, the yelling, the small children in need of money -- became more peripheral. It was easier to survive. I think if I ever have to live in a place like Yemen, it is women, like these, that would keep me alive. I would latch on to them, and never leave.

Thank you, ladies.

One Step Forward, Ten Steps Back

It was my last full day of work in Yemen today, and I'm puzzled. I'm confused about what I am supposed to take away from Yemen. I came here half-filled with fear, mostly for my own safety, and I am leaving only with the fear of what the future holds for the local Yemenis, for people like Leena.

I learned a few new things about Islam -- so central to Yemen -- today. In Islam, apparently, if you kill someone you have to pay the family of the victim a sum. But -- if the person you kill is a woman, say many conservative religious leaders in Yemen, you only pay the family half the cost of a real, human life.

This interpretation of Islam is what is ruining Yemen, said a well-to-do Yemeni who works for a political think tank here, and has children in San Francisco and a niece who he has encouraged to study engineering in Canada. He insists that the extremists have only burgeoned since the end of the Gulf War when many were repatriated from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, carrying with them these extreme beliefs.

Reasonable people, he said, would never fall for such nonsense. Only extremism doesn't attract reasonable people, it baits uneducated and isolated people. People with an inability to think outside of a dangerous box.

Reasonable people would follow religious leaders like Sheik Yahia, who we also interviewed today. The Sheik pronounced the merits of family planning, which he says is inherit to Islam, a religion which helps its followers to plan for healthy lives. He even said vasectomy and tubal ligation -- permanent contraceptive methods -- are allowed as long they protect the health of the people. Sheik Yahia is working to make the age of marriage 18, and to outlaw female genital mutilation. But Sheik Yahia is reasonable, educated and he is of the minority. The people of Yemen can't rely on Sheik Yahia to be their savior.

More people need to be educated and more money needs to be allocated to social programs that make women's health and education a priority. But I don't see that happening anytime soon for Yemen. Dr. Jamila, a leader from the ministry of health, fights, every day, just to keep reproductive health as a national priority. She drives around Yemen with her face boasting its beauty, and I fear for her. A liberated feminist, dedicated to women's empowerment, Dr. Jamila has to use all her energy and will just to be able to sit at the same table with the conservative leaders who have an incredible sway over most of Yemen. She has to plead with them just to hear her, and not to leave the table.

Once she gets to the table, she then has to ensure that what she wants gets translated to each and every puzzle piece that comprises Yemen. Because in Yemen, each segment, or "governorate," is run by a different personality. Powerful national leaders like Dr. Jamila have little leverage over what is happening in each segmented part. Many parts are immersed in tribal warfare, most are running out of water, and some have become havens for planting seeds of hate, and training the next generation of Al Quaida warriors. There are only small glimmers of hope.

Dr. Zaeen, for instance, is the district ministry of health official, for Lahj. It is because Dr. Zaeen re-allocated the budget to put the health of mothers and babies at the top of his agenda, that the hospital in his district has become so welcoming to its women patients. It is a safe place women can come to deliver their babies, to breastfeed, to learn about kangaroo mother care and to immunize their newborns. Women hear from their neighbors about the friendly midwives who tell them how to space their pregnancies by using a contraceptive method of their choice, and they want to visit Lahj hospital too. That way, they can preserve just a small part of their youth, like their neighbors. They don't have to have newborns every year from the time they turn 16, and exchange dead babies for live ones as if that is a normal way of life. Maybe they can take some time to learn to read, if their husbands let them.

So there are the glimmers of hope in Yemen, and the educated few trying to change things a little a bit. Educated people know that by keeping half of the population down, they are keeping their country down too. They know how important it is to educate their people, so they don't fall prey to hatred. But they don't know exactly -- if they have the power to make a significant change.

Because according to mr. political think tank, things in Yemen aren't getting better, they are getting worse.

So I am unsure how far this glimmer of hope -- improvements in reproductive health and family planning at public health facilities -- will go.

One step forward, ten steps back.

Every educated woman I've met here, I have to add, has been against wearing the face veil. But they all do it at one time or another, when they are sick of being stared at, when a scar on their face became too much for the public to handle, when they feel they are defaming their fathers. So what will it take for these women to come out from under their veils and to see the detriment of hiding Yemen's most powerful commodity? If the educated women can't quite do it, when is the rest of the country going to follow? When are women in Yemen going to count for more than half a person?

And the face veil, of course, is only a start. But, in my very humble opinion, it's a healthy one.

Leena and Lahj

In some ways, I'm lucky to be a woman in Yemen, because I am getting a glimpse of the women, the beautiful Yemeni women, that most of you will never get to see.

"I am 54," joked Leena, a midwife from Lahj hospital, when I asked her how old she was.

Come on, I said, you are not!

I could tell by the very slight lines around her eyes that Leena might be 30, or maybe 31, just my age. She was joking.

Her dark eyebrows were laced with blond hairs that helped me to decipher her from the rest. Leena showed me around Lahj hospital as she introduced our team to the newborns and the mothers who had just given birth. I followed the abeya that was decorated with a gold trail of crystals pouring down one small side of her black dress, and knew that was Leena.

We got to the postpartum room. She showed me impressive statistics of the amount of women who are receiving Vitamin A, family planning counseling, and are learning about the merits of breast feeding. And naturally the conversation turned to families.

"Are you married?" asked Leena, holding up my finger affixed with the small Balinese ring, representing the union I have with Heather.

"No," I said, absorbing the culture, and acting half ashamed, "no I'm not."

"Are you?" I asked, already predicting the answer.

"No," said Leena, looking down.

We then raised our eyes to each other, and smiled. At least I think she smiled. Her eyes acquired another crease, and glimmered under the fluorescent lights and bright green walls of the hospital.

The other midwives joined us, and listened. They didn't know much English, but they knew our conversation.

"No married!" said one midwife after another. There were now five of us standing in the circle, 8 eyes that looked like the age of my own. Our smiles got bigger as we shared our commonality, until the pronouncement turned into half a shout, a 'cheers,' -- "no married!," we chanted.

Hallelujah.

Unlike these providers, the patients at Lajh's maternity ward are all married, and, despite their knowledge of family planning, have at least 6 children in their lifetime. One woman today, with the veil removed from her face, had just given birth to her ninth child, and her fifth that is still living. When asked her age, she said she was between 30 and 35, but, unlike Leena's eyes, she looked 54. She was haggard. Another woman had just lost her baby during childbirth, but laying on her bed, she seemed completely at peace. This death had worked out for her. I can use the breastmilk from this pregnancy for my one-year-old at home, she said in Arabic.

Life can be hard in Lahj. That is why Leena is here to help out. She studied medicine in Sana'a and dreams of going to London to study English, but she always wants to return to Lahj. She wants to continue to help out the only worthy hospital serving Lahj city and the rest of the sweeping district, which, according to my tour book, shouldn't have been visited at all. In fact, the book says Lahj is off limits to tourists.

But we were different. Our project and our video about these hospitals, and about improving health care for women, is about good public relations for Yemen, not tourism. Equipped with two men, one from the Ministry of Health and one from the Ministry of Information, as well as two well-armed military guards with guns almost the size of my body, we entered Lahj. We were a convoy of goodwill, venturing into the unknown. I imagined that it must be what working in Iraq feels like, driving through a dry, desolate landscape in a convoy of SUVs, knowing only the unknown.

We were getting stares, and I believe they were different from the stares we got in downtown Sana'a. I was imagining things I shouldn't have. I imagined what I could represent to the stares -- Amerika, not miles from where the USS Cole was bombed , and within what looked like the news report I saw the night before about the Al Quaida training camps in Marib. But I kept opening my mind toward the mission.

Leena. We are helping people like Leena to help themselves and all the other women that come to her for services.

Leena's heart-shaped face. I saw it briefly in the postpartum room when she uncomfortably lifted her face veil to get a breath of stale air. And then again in the director's office. She took it off, and I realized that to talk to Leena, I had been picturing her. I had someone with a long, thin face in mind, someone with straight black hair, and a gaunt figure. This was not Leena.

Leena has a heart-shaped face, and a glamorous smile.

I didn't want to get into it. The Western woman asking disapprovingly about the face veil, but I had to...

"So, Leena, have you always worn that?"

She smiled her glamorous smile.

"Well, no, I never used to cover my face."

She said she does it because if she doesn't, she is afraid she will sully the reputation of her family, her father's good name.

"The face of a woman is an embarrassment," said Leena.

No, Leena, your heart-shaped face is not an embarrassment, I wanted to cry, not at all. You aren't hidden anymore, my dear Leena, I have you photographed in my memory, my friend.

"If you were in London," I asked "would you cover up?"

"No," she said defiantly. She was that decisive. She might cover her hair, but never her face, never.

But Leena won't be getting to London anytime soon. All direct flights from Yemen to London have been cancelled, as an effort by the British government to ward off terrorist threats. She will work, as she now does every day, helping women have a little bit more of life: with contraceptives, with healthy babies and a respectable place to deliver them.

She may do this for the rest of her life, as her heart-shaped face ages under her veil.