March 16 - 18th, Friends General Conference's Committee for Ministry on Racism had their annual winter meeting in Washington, DC. Since my energy level was so low I decided to travel to DC the day before the meeting. I took the train down to DC Thursday afternoon. It gave me an opportunity to rest from my travel and be ready for the tour and meetings. Neil Froemming and Sara Satterswaite’s generously hosted me instead of staying at the William Penn House with the rest of the Committee. They live only a few blocks away. 
National Museum of the American Indian
We had a guided tour of the National Museum of the American Indian on Friday afternoon. Later that evening we had dinner at Neil and Sara's house. We ate take out food from a nearby Indian Restaurant. After our delicious dinner we sat around Neil and Sara's television and watched the very powerful documentary, “In the Light of Reverence: Protecting America’s Sacred Land." This documentary tells the struggle of The Lakota, Hopi and Wintu people, the traditional caretakers for three sacred areas who fight to co-exist with non-Indians whose concepts about land use, culture and what is sacred are different from theirs.
Committee Meeting at William Penn House
Our Committee met all day Saturday at the William Penn House. The Committee decided to sponsor a consultation for Friends of Color in the Midwest in May 2008. The joint conference with CMR and Youth Ministries has been pushed back to March 2009. Fit for Freedom, Not for Friendship is expected to be ready the fall of 2008.
Paul Ricketts was at William Penn House that weekend. He was there with a group from primarily peace churches in Fort Wayne. They scheduled a meeting with Keri Maloney, Sen. Lugar's legislative assistant for military affairs. Their meeting went well. I was glad to see him just sad that we were not able to spend any time together.
Dinner at an Ethiopian Restaurant
Saturday night we went to a local Ethiopian restaurant for dinner. I was excited because on the menu they said that they had two types of bread ( injera), one made with wheat and another made with Teff (a gluten free ancient Ethiopian flour used to make unleavened bread.) However, when we questioned them it turned out that even the Teff injera has wheat in it which meant that I had to get a separate meal because the
joint meal we ordered was served on the injera.
We finished our meeting Sunday morning at Friends Meeting of Washington and worshiped with Friends there afterwards. I was surprised to find a member from Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting who has relocated there. I was happy to see several Friends of Color that I knew. We had a few moments to greet each other and talked for a few moments, but they were on their way to a committee meeting.
Angelina Conti and I returned to Neil and Sara's to wait for our late afternoon train after eating lunch and driving around Howard's campus looking for African shops which might be open on Sunday.
1 comment:
Hey Vanessa: I once spent a few months trying to perfect an injera recipe. It was a lot of work, took exotic ingredients and needed to rise overnight. All that and it never came out looking or tasting like anything in the Ethiopian restaurants I frequented. After some inquiry I found out that the restaurants all use something exotic called Angimima flour--it took me a minute to unscramble the syllables to realize they were simply referring to plain ol' Aunt Jemima flour--doh!
Martin
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