Leah Bader E-Portfolio

This year I became a member of the club Global Brigades. Global Brigades has seven chapters at Penn State, including Medical/Dental, Micro-finance/Business, Water, Public Health, Human Rights, Architecture, and Environmental. These chapters each have separate goals and travel to Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Ghana to execute sustainable projects. Next year, I will have the honor of being the co-president of the Public Health Chapter here at Penn State and I couldn’t be more excited.

Recently, I’ve been helping Global Brigades put together awareness events to spread awareness about the lack of access to clean water, medical care, as well as bringing attention to the other environmental and preventable health problems in the countries we travel to. On Friday March 21st, (World Water Day)  I helped gather volunteers and make posters to stand outside the HUB for 5 hours. Today, April 9th, I help gather volunteers again and make poster to stand outside the HUB, this time for 3 hours and focusing on general issues of all chapters rather than just clean water. As well as spreading awareness, we also try to recruit people to join the club, attend a trip, or just get involved in some way.

It’s National Global Brigades Week!

Don’t take advantage of your toilet! Lots of people don’t have access to indoor plumbing!

Lots of people also have to walk far distances carrying heavy buckets just to have water!

For my policy paper, I want to address the issue of having a recognized, intersex “third gender” option on official US documents.

Starting with birth certificates, as many as one in 2,000 babies are born with identifying characteristics of both sexes and genders. Currently in the US, parents are forced to make a quick decision to label their child as one gender or the other, often having the infant undergo surgery to push them in one direction. A lot of times parents are forced to make this decision at their child’s birth to satisfy federal regulations that require gender identification, with surgery following in attempt to “normalize” the baby and conform it to the gender the parents have chosen. Sometimes, this can cause great trauma in a person’s life, as seen in the “John/Joan” case:

David Reimer was born a boy biologically, but after a botched circumcision where his genitalia was severely damaged, his parents were prompted to get the infant surgery to construct a rudimentary vulva and raise him as a girl, “Brenda”. Once Brenda got to be about 13, her parents revealed to her past, after many tumultuous years of struggle and she decided to become male once again. However, the damage was immense and after many years of emotional turmoil, David Reimer committed suicide at the age of 37.

Germany recently implemented a law that allows parents to claim their baby as “intersex” on the birth certificate until the child is old enough to decide gender on their own.

Going past just birth certificates though, Australia just granted citizens the ability to identify as “intersex” on passports and other official documents in 2013.  In 2009, Indian and Pakistani citizens gained the rights to identify their gender on documents beyond just male and female. The third gender option in the US would be useful on birth certificates to allow infants showing both sex characteristic to decide their gender on their own and for transgender adults to be identified as they wish to be.

The option would be very low cost, since the US could follow Germany’s example and, rather than reprinting all forms with a third gender option, instead have people indicate their choice by leaving the selection blank or by putting an “X” through the entire genera section.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/11/01/242366812/germany-offers-third-gender-option-on-birth-certificates

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Will-India-recognize-a-third-gender/articleshow/27050953.cms

I had always been the stoic one. Steadfast and strong. My brother, David, taught me that. Letting people see you raw and vulnerable was for the weak. For those who couldn’t control their feelings.

Yet here I was. Sitting in the middle of the dairy aisle of my local grocery store. Bawling my eyes out.

I’d been living alone for months. At 17, I had a large house all to myself.

David had been sick for a long time, but recently he’d had to stay down at the UPenn hospital in Philly to receive specialty care and multiple surgeries. My parents both worked. Splitting their time between their jobs and the city. Leaving me at home alone, over an hour and a half away from any of them.

He was only supposed to be there for a couple of weeks. But today marked the fourth month of him there and me alone.

No one knew. My family wasn’t open about it. My teachers only realized my living situation when both of my parents failed to show up for my yearly parent-teacher evaluation the day before and I’d finally run out of excuses. Their looks of pity, mirroring the faces of shoppers who passed me by for milk and eggs.

After another half hour of crying, I managed to drag myself home. When I got through the door, the answering machine blinked back at me.

Hey scumbag. I just wanted to call you. I know you get pretty lonely there all by yourself. I made Mom & Dad promise they’d be there tomorrow for your game…… Uhhh… Look Leah… it doesn’t seem like I’m gonna be able to come home next week… Turns out, I’m gonna be here for awhile longer… Hey, uh, you turned out pretty great, ya know?  I mean for you at least. I’m, I’m actually pretty proud of you. You’ll always be my little sister, Lu. I love you.

At first I was curious as to what the choking sounds in the background were before I realized he had been crying. David was crying? Had Hell frozen over last night and no one informed me?

A month after my meltdown, the hospital let him out for a day trip. He cried again when he saw me. And again few hours later, when he reached back to hold my hand while I pushed his wheelchair down the aisle at our sister’s wedding. Tears streaming down both of our faces. No longer caring who saw what. Finally understanding that sometimes tears meant strength, not weakness.  So I do believe in tears. And in the occasional mental breakdowns in the grocery store. But most of all, I believe in big brothers.

I didn’t realize we were supposed to post our upcoming ideas for this semester, so sorry for the late post!

This I Believe:

I’ve been playing around with this a little bit and I’m still not 100% certain, but I’ve been considering doing something like “I believe in being a hermit” and talking about how it’s okay to be an introvert that likes to stay away from the general population for a couple of days. As a college kid that prefers to stay in with my books and movies on a Friday night, instead of attending a frat party, I know what it’s like to get judged for your social anxiety and how much pressure the few friends you can actually tolerate can put on you.

The other idea I’ve been thinking about is something like “I believe in secret love for your siblings”. While that might sound weird, if you have an older brother or maybe even a little sister, you know that more often than not, you don’t get along with your siblings. You might even over exaggerate and say you hate them. This is how my brother and I am. Even though we’ve grown up a little and are maybe at each other’s throats a little bit less, we’re still mortal enemies, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love him more than anything else in the world. After all, he might be a pompous jerk, but he’s MY pompous jerk.

Passion Blog:

I’d really like to stay with my current passion blog of movie reviews. Like I said earlier, I prefer staying in with movies than a college frat party any day. That being said, I know we have to come up with alternatives. Also like I said before, I love books along with my movies, so I wouldn’t mind talking about those for my passion blog either.

Honestly, I don’t have any other ideas for my passion blog. I really don’t love anything THAT much that I could keep talking about it week after week, except for movies and books. Movies were the theme of my Bat Mitzvah after all…

Civic Issues:

So I kind of want to do something with sex and gender because this semester I have a Sex Anthropology class that explores the evolutionary theory and how it applies to human sexuality, gender roles, etc. I know it’s only sylly week, but so far I love the class, my TA, and my professor (he’s kinda socially awkward – I love it. Reminds me of myself). That being said I know I need to specify and narrow the topic down a little bit, but again, I really like the class so maybe my specific topic should be something to do with the evolution of human sexuality, not just sex and gender.

I actually enjoyed some of the blogs from last semester. Okay, so in the beginning few weeks, I was really dragging my feet to write them and even to come up with topics to write about… but soon enough, I settled into a rhythm and began to look forward to typing out my weekly movie reviews. After all, I like to think it takes a special person to truly appreciate the campy special effects of movies of Sharknado while questioning the caliber of Christian Bale’s performance in a classic like American Psycho. So my taste might be eclectic and weird, but from the feedback I got last semester, I brought a lot of less-known movies into the light for my classmates to take interest in.

Honestly, I hate watching these videos. I find them corny and overdone with the visuals, so I usually opt to just read the script below. With that being said, I also found the Step 2: Shooting Basics to be almost just as unhelpful. This is probably due to the fact that I highly doubt my group will be shooting our own video for the public controversy video, making this information irrelevant to us. I find that downloading and cutting pre-existing video clips from news programs, TV shows, etc. that were shot by professional cameramen usually give your project a much more clean, professional look. If we’re being perfectly honest, this is because I know that I couldn’t possibly keep my hand steady enough to shoot a clip that looks stable and most likely the shaking video would result in half the class vomiting from severe motion sickness.

The next step that we were assigned, Step 3: Editing Basics, was MUCH more helpful for this particular project. While some of the information was pretty basic and mostly common sense, (I think we all know we have to connect a camera to our computer with a USB cord, how else would you do it? We also know to back up your files, as if anyone these days doesn’t…) the overview of editing was still very effective in teaching us the best way to go about things like trimming, transitions, sounds, and exporting the video.

Personally, my group is not yet at the point where we can start to use this information and begin editing, but I’m sure we will revisit the page for some simple pointers once we have compiled all of the media we want to feature in our video.

As I’m sure most of us have noticed, for most of the month of November there have been blood drives going on throughout campus at different central locations. This along with the charts showing the number of students from both Penn State and Michigan State have been the main and pretty much only informative methods to get the Penn State student body to participate in the yearly “PSU vs. MSU Blood Donor Challenge”. Basically, this is a “friendly competition” between schools that has been occurring yearly for the past 20 years to see which school can get more kids to donate blood to the American Red Cross.

Considering we’ve won the competitions pretty consistently with a record of 13-6, it’s been pretty surprising that this year we have continually been lagging behind Michigan by an average of a whopping 300 students. So what’s different about this year than the past 3 years where Penn State has emerged triumphantly in the battle of blood? Well for one thing, “poor” would be a compliment when describing the advertisement and rhetoric presented to get students to participate. Sure, there are posters showing we’re losing the fight all over campus, but I, like many other students, just glance at these on my way to class before completely forgetting the blood drive is occurring. Besides these tiny posters, there are tables set up in the commons to ask donors to sign up, and I don’t know about South, West, or North, but in East the volunteers working these tables often look like bored sorority girls that were made to volunteer by their Greek organization and talk to maybe 1/10 people who walk by and then get snippy when a person provides an excuse not to donate. It’s just a guess, but maybe that would explain for the lag in willing donors this year.

With all this aside, donating blood is still a wonderful thing to do and can help you become civically engaged in your community, so if you missed this blood drive, be prepared to make an appointment for the next one. Starting December there will be THON blood drives up until the big day as well as another “friendly competition” with Ohio State in March, giving you plenty of opportunities and time to donate!

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BzB8YEIRrfcTaWlac2Z1WS03NW8/edit

I’ll be the first to admit. I probably could’ve prepared myself a little bit more for this TED Talk. While I did an outline on notecards of my major points and I practiced numerous times, no one ever died from too much rehearsal. Also, my major points were outlined and I knew them, but I found myself stumbling over small words that were a lot less significant, but would’ve been easily called to mind if I had scripted my talk a little bit more. The powerpoint was the one aspect I was actually confident about — after many business classes (including Presentation Technology), I at least felt comfortable about that facet of my presentation. I thought my media choices were effective and helpful, ESPECIALLY the moving arrows to show the migration of populations of people over time (I was really proud of that slide if you couldn’t tell).

To make my talk better, I could’ve done two things: practiced more (it couldn’t have exactly hurt me) and scripted my talk a little bit more, which of course, in turn, would’ve forced me to practice more since I would’ve had to memorize more.  One thing I did, that I think helped me a lot, was I watched a bunch of TED Talks before scripting my own. I think this helped me come up with organizational ideas for my talk and taught me how to tell a story, while providing pertinent information the audience needs to understand. With this, I was able to connect my separate topics more easily and make my presentation seem like it flowed from one subject matter to another.

After I gave my TED talk, I thought I did pretty bad. I don’t know why, but I was really preoccupied and worried that my slides behind me and what I was talking about would somehow get messed up and wouldn’t correlate at all, so a lot of my concentration went on focusing that my timing was correct and that my visuals made sense with what I was talking about. That being said, since I was so focused on that, I could feel myself get a little flustered in the beginning and stumble over simple words or have the inability to decide what words I wanted to use to express myself resulting in what I thought was a lot of stuttering and long pauses. I didn’t really want to watch my TED Talk because I absolutely hate the sound of my voice when it’s recorded, but I sucked it up and tried. To my surprise, it wasn’t as completely AWFUL as I expected it to be. Yes, I did stutter a bit in the beginning and there was maybe one noticeable pause at the start when I completely forgot what the heck I supposed to be talking about, but overall you could see me become more comfortable and less flustered as I went on presenting. The more comfortable I got, the easier it looked like it was to present for me.  The only thing I really scolded myself for is that you can see my eyes shift to look at the computer to screen and see what slide I’m on, if it matches up with my speech, etc. multiple times. I guess I was really self conscious about that, but eye contact is definitely something that can be practiced, worked on, and fixed for later presentations.

Among my research about interracial marriages/families and in my Biological Anthropology course, I found that the question has been raised, is it better to be mixed race? What this question is asking is that are there genetic advantages to being multiracial? It turns out that usually, there are.

Being mixed race allows a person to have more genetic variation or diversity which can protect you from various parasites and infectious diseases, make your face more symmetrical translating into a more conventionally attractive appearance, and can even lead to physical advantages (athleticism) or advantages in coping with stress. When populations “pure breed” the offspring they produce express consistent and predictable characteristics. But, in order to achieve this “racial purity”, populations have to inbreed, a method of mating that has been proven to be detrimental to a species, creating increased cases of genetic conditions in offspring.

Even in Brazil, which was colonized based on a mixed race population, there is a sense of inequality between the lighter-skinned mixed race people and the darker skinned mixed race people, with the latter group typically living in the cities’ slums and under the poverty line. In Brazil, people no longer distinguish race by their ancestry, but by naming their skin color which varies from person to person, and can be perceived as different from one on-looker to the next.

You can find all these skin pigmentations naturally in the descendants of Brazil:

Besides the science though, mixed-race children are very controversial in a world where up until a few decades ago, interracial relationships were forbidden and illegal. Even in contemporary times, right-wing, conservative groups believe that mixing races is against the “natural order” and advocates “racial purity” (something that sounds a bit like extreme WWII beliefs, at least to me).

For those of you who don’t know yet, this weeks football game between our very own Penn State Nittany Lions and the Illinois Fighting Illini has been dubbed the “THON game”. On Facebook, Sunday night, THON announced that it will attempt a “Gold Out” this Saturday at Beaver Stadium. Now before you freak out and go buy a $50 gold sweatshirt, relax. The organization realizes most students don’t own gold clothing (I mean we go t0 Penn State, not stupid Notre Dame), so a small gold ribbon pinned to your clothing or tied around your wrist will suffice.

The reason for this sudden “Gold Out” is because Four Diamonds families will be in attendance, being featured at half-time, and even forming the tunnel from which the football team will emerge. THON just wants to showcase the overwhelming support the Four Diamonds Fund, THON, and pediatric cancer awareness has from the Penn State community to the families it affects. Also taking advantage of the Four Diamonds families’ presence this week, there will be canning for THON before the game, allowing you to donate that pesky spare change, the traditional TailGreat will be focused and centered on THON, and a “Ribbon Zone” will be located next to the traditional “S Zone”, outlining a ribbon for pediatric cancer awareness.

I, for one, am excited by this idea. After being bombard with pink everywhere you look in October for breast cancer awareness, I think the change to gold and pediatric cancer awareness will be utterly refreshing. Nothing against breast cancer awareness, but THON and the Four Diamonds Fund is such a big part of the Penn State campus, community, and experience that I feel as if this “Gold Out” will be ten times more effective than anything pink you wore throughout October. Not to mention it’s a nice way to show support and love for those suffering from the ailment and useful as a way to cheer on, not only the kids, but also their parents and siblings.

While wearing a gold ribbon this Saturday might not seem like much of an effort and may even have you wondering, “what the heck is this gonna do to help anyone?”, just remember that 100,000 people were thinking the same thing that morning, but when all of them come together and don the ribbon for the kids, it’ll be a wonderful sight to behold and a great support to the families, THON, the Four Diamonds Fund, and pediatric cancer awareness.

So when you wake up this Saturday, put on your Penn State blue and white as usual, but don’t forget your gold. Even small things can mean a lot.