i just found out that i will get to hang out with the pope when he is visiting the US in april. and by i will get to hang out, i mean myself and the entire rest of my office. this is cool and funny to me at the same time.

it is national migration week here at usccb. this means that there is a lot of focus on our migration and refugee services (mrs) department. a small write up was done about what i do, so i thought i would share it, because it explains my job better than i usually do probably. :)



"Did you know...

In many war torn countries children, whose parents were lost to them due to death or separation, often find themselves alone and without any source of comfort or support. Another population of unaccompanied children are those who try to find passage to the United States. As many as 100,000 unaccompanied, undocumented children enter the United States every year with the hope of reuniting with their family or finding work that will enable them to send money back home. Approximately 10,000 of these are detained by the federal government and may be released to family in the United States or returned to their country of origin. Alone in the United States or in a refugee situation overseas, undocumented children are in a very vulnerable situation; it is in this context that the problem of human trafficking can easily intersect broader refugee crises and immigration.

Through its Safe Passages program, MRS ensures that children traveling without adult relatives and without legal travel documents are provided a safe haven, and receive appropriate child-welfare standards of care while in the custody of the U.S. government. For children smuggled in and at risk from organized crime, MRS works with more than 30 diocesan offices to determine whether family reunification is a suitable option, and follows up with children to ensure their well-being."

so great:

http://www.freerice.com/

it shows how long it has been since i have posted that when i went to write this entry it took me a second to remember how to make a new post. goodness. anyways, i am headed for the capitol--washington d.c. I got a job with USCCB (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops) in their Refugee Department and will be starting Oct 9th. My official title will be "Family Reunification and Child Specialist". Basically, USCCB is one of two agencies that are referred refugee, migrant, and trafficked children from the federal government and are responsible for conducting assessments and making recommendations on placements of the children.
I'm excited, and the job has come together and worked out amazingly.
I will have a lot of Hispanic clients, and will need to be able to do interviews and translate for clients, and for this reason, I decided a trip to the Dominican Republic was necessary to brush up and get ready for that level of communication. :) So, on Thursday I will leave to go to the DR for five days.
Whirlwind.

my last day in south asia. it is full of people and packing. i am currently desperately trying to figure out how to get everything back to the U.S. and not pay $250 extra for it. it is quite challenging. i now have a scale in my room and am juggling between three different suitcases. the last few days have been great. the people that have been in my life here are fantastic, and i have been deeply blessed by them.

please continue to pray for me as i continue this process and travel back. i am pretty worn out physically and emotionally and it is just a long stinking trip. thanks so much, and i will see you when i get back in country! (monday night!) finally, a small depiction of the ridiculousness of monsoon season!

well hello. it has been a while...i may not even have readers at this point! (and i can't say that i would blame you!) amazingly enough, i am winding down my last days here in south asia. i myself am struggling to realize that i will be on a plane back to the US as of monday morning. for now i am trying to take everything in and store it away in my mind for the days when i won't be here. let's catch up on some things.

my mom and her friend, lisa caramagno, visited recently! it was incredibly fun and exciting to have them here and show them what my life has been like for the last ten months. we went to lots of restaurants, did some shopping, and headed down to a beach resort area for a day. all in all i think they were ready to return to the States, and may have even kissed the ground upon landing in NYC. South Asia is no easy place to visit or live in, but they were champs!
i have a few things on my "to do before i leave" list. i accomplished one of them last night. i had my hair chemically straightened, or "rebonded". 4.5 hours of treatment, 48 hours of no washing, and you can have lovely straight hair too. you may be thinking to yourself, "Marianne, your hair is straight already.." well, that is thanks to my dear friends blow dryer and straightener. there are a few challenging things in addition to sitting still for 4.5 hours:

• not getting your hair wet when it is monsoon season. i should probably receive a prize for my efforts.
• not washing your hair for 48 hours. in addition to not washing, i am not supposed to put it in a pony tail, clip, use bobby pins, or anything else that will disturb the now straight hair. this essentially means i cannot hide my un-washed hair, which i hate.

our maid, whom the faithful readers may remember from her famous appearance on my blog around thanksgiving time, had a marked leave of unexplained absence for about 1.5 weeks. this behavior was unprecedented, and we were convinced that she may have randomly quit without explanation. however, much to my surprise on monday morning at 8:30 as the doorbell rang and i peered out the peep hole, her little 4'6 self was standing outside. i joyfully opened the door and in my best mime+english abilities attempted to ask her where she had been. to which she responded by making a face (tilting her head to the side and sticking out her tongue) and saying "husband". i took it to mean that her husband had died. i immediately felt awful, and attempted to convey how sorry i was. she however, did not seem phased by discussing this most recent death of her spouse. i was surprised, but chalked it up to being one of those things lost in translation. i came into work, and later on in the morning was talking to one of my co-workers about it, and before i could even finish, she said, "ugh..these workers are always kiling off so many family members!" she proceeded to tell me how it is common for domestic workers to claim death in the family instead of asking for vacation. goodness. this makes more sense now seeing as how our maid's uncle, mother, and husband had all "died" within a three month span, with no remarkable sadness or grief being displayed on her account. i'm still slightly unnerved by it though.

there is a strange dichotomy going on regarding the internal vs external reality of my leaving. externally, everything is the same. i take the same autos to work, drive on the roads, see my same co-workers, hang out with my same friends, etc. internally though, there is a storm that surges from time to time demanding to attempt to recognize and deal with the fact that life as i have come to know it for the last ten months will be ending on monday. it is very strange and makes me feel unsettled.

so, that is a jumbled bunch of snippets from life right now. my hair and i (it takes on an entity of its own when it requires this much care) are about to head to the gym (with my rain jacket on, of course). i would greatly appreciate prayers as i transition back home.... and i am incredibly excited to see everyone again!

joy.

my blog has been quiet as of late, which is reflective of just how busy life here has been. in the last two and a half weeks there have been two visitors to our corner of the world. my time here is seeming to wrap up quickly. today my roommate and i tried to figure out a weekend to do some sight seeing, and found that there are really only two weekends that we can actually get away before i leave.

things in general have been good. God is doing some very cool stuff, right, i know that's so vague...but i can't be descript, so, vague you get! ;)

a few pictures from things lately:

--scratch the few part--the internet is being snail-like and won't let me upload more than just this one. so, one picture of the outside of a beautiful old french villa i stayed at in a town a few hours south of here last weekend. more stories and pictures sometime when i have things i can write about and internet that is not molassess!

okay...so here they are in no order of any sort...(my battery is going to run out soon!)

camel riding in the desert!

indoor ski slope at the mall of the emirates

CARIBOU!!!! (does it get much better than that? no.)

rogue camels wandering around the desert.

nicolette at the beach with the burj al arab hotel (shaped like a sail in the background)
danielle and i at the beach.

okay. that is all for now! happy mother's day to all the moms, and happy birthday to my brother!

website is under construction! apologies for those of you who have been checking it. you don't really need a login to see it, i just had to do that for a few days until i could work on it a bit!
dubai was fantastic fabulous! i will throw up some pictures and stories when i get a few mins and a functioning computer..mine is currently dead.

my roommate and i's conversation a couple of minutes ago. (background: she threw up this morning after drinking one sip of her tea):


nicolettegrams@yahoo.com says:
at the risk of sounding like *****, is it possible that i have a worm and just don't know it
nicolettegrams@yahoo.com says:
i know i haven't really lost weight, but maybe i am eating enough to support us both
Marianne says: muahahaha
Marianne says: possibly.
Marianne says: we need you on cipro. STAT!
nicolettegrams@yahoo.com says: stat
nicolettegrams@yahoo.com says: yes stat
nicolettegrams@yahoo.com says: and with it all I am still hungry
nicolettegrams@yahoo.com says: which just annoys me
Marianne says: the worm needs to be fed!
Marianne says: and it does not like tea!!!!
nicolettegrams@yahoo.com says: feed it!
Marianne says: get it straight zicolette
Marianne says: when else in our lives will our conversations go like this.....?? lol + sigh.

on being famous...

this morning as i was brushing my teeth, i got a text from an ex-pat friend saying that one of my roommates and i were pictured in the paper. we had been anticipating this as the paper photographer took our photo on saturday night when we were out with friends. when we got into the office, one of our co-workers started talking about how he had seen us. we proceeded to investigate online to see if we could dig it up. the great part (at least to us) was that in a joke on the press, who had caused some serious trouble for us last time we were in the news, we had told the reporter a fake name for my roommate, and that we were from mozambique. as we were perusing the world wide web, our landlord, of all people, texted me and said, "nice to see you guys in the paper this morning". we found the article which included a photo of the two of us-the three guys we were with had been mysteriously cropped out, and a small column on the reporter's take of the place we were at that night. some of the highlights included:
"A lot of ex-pats were seen tapping their feet to the music. Some of the people spotted include Anita, Nichola, Marianne, Peter, and Eric."
so funny...my life here is just funny sometimes.

i almost blend in, right? :)

I ventured to the airport this week to pick up my roommate as she returned from her two week trip to the states. Pick ups from the airport are a special process here, as are many things. We have to hire a car to take us, and the cheapest cars do not have air conditioning. So, around 11:00 pm I got picked up from my flat and made my way, windows down through the city to the airport. I had sprayed myself with bug spray in anticipation of the mosquitos, brought a bottle of water because the lows these days are in the 70’s, and my trusty iPod. After my driver tried to drop me off for departures (wrong, I do not have any luggage even!), and then circled around once before he understood that I meant park and wait, we finally slid into a parking spot sandwhiched between other people waiting.
I texted my roommate in hopes of her phone being charged enough to respond back to me, and waited in the back seat of the car until I knew she was close to coming out. She called me once she made it to baggage claim, and it was time for me to move.
I now needed to make my way up to the arrivals section of the airport. It is entirely outdoors, there is nowhere you can go inside the airport to meet arriving people. There is a long guard rail that lines about 100 feet of the arrivals area, so its kind of like a Hollywood Premiere type of walk from the exit door of the airport to the end of the section where you can finally greet your friends and family-except it is far from the glamour of Hollywood. A world away both literally and figuratively.
The rail to the airport walkway of fame was lined by about 300 people, and 98% of them were men as it was around midnight, and most women are in by about 9:00 here. I of course, was the only Westerner on that side of the rail. I managed to make my way up to the front so I could easily spot my roommate and we could find each other among the masses. People looked on in bewilderment at my lone white face in the sea of south asian skin tones.
My front row spot proved to be the highlight of the night, as I watched all of the bewildered Western businessmen clumsily making their way down the walkway in a jet lagged, culture and climate shocked condition, while the flight crew knowingly makes their way down the concrete carpet and into their travel van.
The business men meanwhile frantically searched for their names on all of the placards, and listened as men would call out, “Mr. Frieberg, Mr. Frieberg!”. I could not help but be amused by this process, as well as feel glad that after being here for about six months I am comfortable on the side of the rail that I was on. I have crossed over. I am no longer the Westerner walking around in a constant state of confusion and shock. Rather, I feel comfortable in my own skin here.

Matt: i was like..marianne is getting interviewed on the internet...it looked like you were on cnn

ha. if only.

this weekend, south asia is winning in our ongoing battle.
1. i got incredibly sick last night, and didn't go to bed until 7:00 am this morning.
2. my atm card would not work.
3. my atm card does not work because unbeknownest to me, it expired yesterday.
4. there were riots/protests yesterday. i had to stay inside my flat all day until it was over.

argh.

this is my roommate, nicolette, on the right. she left for the u.s. for two weeks tonight. this makes me sad, because i like her. you may be thinking to yourself, "marianne, two weeks is a short time". oh, but its a long time when you live in a fish bowl sized bubble.

Marriott asks:

would you like some...

.....sugar? or some brown?

south asia is full of tough decisions.

-exciting, but makes me laugh: http://www.noelheikkinen.com/ go to the march 21 post.

-i have killed three mosquitos in the last ten minutes


-the temperature in my room is 86 degrees. when i have two fans running on full speed.

ok. in entirely true and new news, it is watermelon season here, and the streets are glistening green and red.

to be fair, i had never seen a bug bat in the U.S.! i will work harder on my fact checking before i decide that things do or do not exist in entire countries. :)

As promised, I present to you the Bug Bat:

so, you hunt down some bugs around your room...preferably before bed time when they will wait around to bite you all night long. it looks a little like this.

then, when you catch one, their little bodies spark and sizzle until they dissapear. it is quite exciting. we tried to capture it in the picture, but it happens too fast.