As a longtime employee of the Institutional Advancement Department (read “fundraising”) at UUSC, I’ve been asked many times to clarify the nature of our work and how it’s funded, especially when it comes to our humanitarian relief work. In a time of humanitarian crisis, such as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami or the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan, people wonder why they should donate to UUSC over, say, the Red Cross or Oxfam or any one of a number of charities providing direct aid to people around the world.

I tell them that if they want their money to be used immediately, they should donate elsewhere. There are many fine organizations out there that are ready and willing to swoop into a disaster area on short notice to manage immediate relief efforts. However, if these donors want their money to be thoughtfully granted to grassroots UUSC partner programs located in areas of great need and administered by program officers sensitive to the needs and concerns of the local people in ways that promote longterm solutions to issues faced by marginalized populations, then they should give to UUSC.

Last month, while traveling in Indonesia and meeting some of the beneficiaries of the generosity of UUSC donors, I learned just how important this distinction is.

Indonesia is primarily a nation of Muslims -- in fact, it’s the largest Muslim nation in the world. The Aceh region, specifically, is under Islamic (sharia) law, making religion an important part of the everyday fabric of life there. The complexities of this environment make our partnerships with local grassroots organizations vital. Not only do they help us identify and support particularly vulnerable populations, they know the people they serve. They know the cultural issues that sometimes preclude some local populations from accessing – or even knowing about – options for aid and exercising their rights.

Over the course of a week spent with the Bedari delegation, meeting with representatives from such groups as Solidaritas Perempuan, LBH-APIK, Bungoeng Jeumpa, and the Center for Community Development and Education (CCDE), I learned that women in Indonesia and Pakistan face similar issues of: 1) not knowing their rights under either sharia or secular law, 2) not knowing how to access their rights, 3) encountering familial and/or cultural resistance to accessing their rights, and 4) widespread ignorance or misinformation on what rights sharia law actually grants to women.

I also learned that members of these partner organizations -- paid and volunteer, female and male -- spend a lot of time reaching out to communities and building trust so that people will feel able to share their problems and ask for help. Field representatives of both sexes are necessary. Women need to be active in their struggle for their rights, and women survivors often only feel comfortable confiding in other women. Men need to stand in solidarity with women, and many men in local communities are more receptive to the message of women’s rights, especially in a religious context, when it’s delivered by other men. In this way, slowly but surely, our partner groups in Indonesia and Pakistan are fertilizing the ground in which the seeds of women’s rights may grow.

What's more, I heard complaints from several people about Western tendencies to march in and start giving orders, pointing out the speck in the other's eye while ignoring the plank in their own and running roughshod over cultural and religious sensibilities different from theirs. This is not unique to Indonesia or Pakistan. Look at American gunpoint “diplomacy” around the world these days, especially in Muslim areas. Are we truly making anything better? Are we creating lasting, positive change? Or are we merely making millions of people feel disempowered, controlled, and resentful of us? Are we actually sowing resistance to the ideals we purport to uphold? We need to ask ourselves these questions at all levels, lest we inflict more wounds than we heal.

My experience in Indonesia has deepened my conviction that although we, Americans, have the power to tell people what they need, what to do, and how to run things, doing so will never produce meaningful, beneficial, lasting change. If you share this view, if you believe that giving people the tools to help themselves is ultimately a better strategy than simply trying to fix their problems for them, then consider donating to UUSC.

For some women, a scarf is a pretty piece of fabric, a fashion accessory. For others it's a symbol of religious devotion. However, for many women a scarf is a tool of oppression used against them in name of religious piety.

My colleague, Gretchen, and I spent a week in Aceh, Indonesia, with five Kashmiri representatives of Bedari, a volunteer organization working to further women's rights in Pakistan. Though the rights of Pakistani women are more severely curtailed in most cases than those of the Acehnese women, one notable difference is that the Acehnese Muslim women must cover their hair thoroughly or risk detention (and possibly caning) by sharia police, whereas women in Pakistani cities, at least, can often get away with minimal or no head covering.

I chose to dress modestly in Aceh, but, as a non-Muslim, I was not required to cover my hair (though as a redhead, I might have received significantly less attention if I had!). Two of our Pakistani women friends continued to wear their scarves, but one did not; as an obvious foreigner, she could also get away without covering her hair, and she preferred not to do so when given a choice. I didn't really think much about it until she and I were shopping for souvenirs at a shop in Banda Aceh, when I saw her examining a length of hot pink fabric embellished with metallic threads while searching for a gift for her mother. Thinking she was interested in scarves, I pointed out some pretty ones in a nearby display case.

"I don't give scarves as gifts," she said, explaining that she doesn't support the enforced wearing of headscarves and so refuses to give them to other women. And then I thought back to the evening of two days prior, when we had thrown Gretchen a surprise birthday party in the hotel and invited two of our friends from Solidaritas Perempuan. One of them had allowed me to try on her jilbab, hers a sort of tube of stretchy fabric rather than a folded square of fabric tied or pinned about the head. Laughing, we agreed that I resembled nothing so much as an eastern European peasant woman with it on. I wore it for five or ten minutes before deciding that it was way too hot and needed to come off.

Ah, but there's my Western, non-Muslim privilege: I can don or doff the scarf at will. I can laugh and joke about how silly I look with it on. Increasingly, the women of Aceh and Pakistan cannot. In fact, during our stay, sharia police rounded up 10 to 20 young women in Banda Aceh for insufficiently Islamic dress (judging from the Jakarta Post photo, they wore no jilbab, or wore short sleeves or tight jeans) and threatened them with caning. Even worse, it is becoming increasingly common for self-styled sharia enforcers in the more rural areas of Aceh to take it upon themselves to punish women for what they deem immodest dress, such as in one incident this July when, "In the name of sharia, and after saying a greeting, several youths claiming to be students of an Islamic boarding school in North Aceh tried to spray paint on the tight pants of several women," then returned the next day to attack the cafe owner who had resisted their raid. North Aceh has also seen incidents of sharia enforcers bursting into homes or hotel rooms to check whether women are covering their heads even in their own private spaces.

Personally, I think that the wearing of scarves or other modest dress is so much more spiritually significant when women have the right to choose it freely, without fear of coercion or punishment for refusing. Regardless, public space for Muslim women is shrinking in both Aceh and Pakistan, and the forced wearing of the headscarf is only one of the more visible manifestations of this restriction.

Our friends from Bedari warned the Acehnese groups we met that if they are not vigilant, Indonesia could go from being one of the most liberal of the Muslim nations to being one of the most restrictive, like Pakistan has become since the 1970s. I hope they take heed and are able to increase the voices and participation of women in both the public and private spheres.

May we all work to unravel the fabric of women's oppression instead of continuing to weave it.

At this writing, it's looking like the Democrats have taken not just the House, but the Senate as well, and I am so happy that I could almost cry. This is the first time in six years that I've felt any hope or optimism about the state of our nation, the first time in six years that I've seen more than a glimmer of understanding by the majority of my fellow Americans of just what a disaster Bush & Co., have visited upon us and the rest of the world. Today, I am no longer just another weeping, hand-wringing Cassandra, but witness to a nationwide repudiation of what the Republican party has represented since at least 1994.

All that said, while I want the Democrats to enjoy their resurgence . . . well, as Han Solo said in Star Wars: "Great, kid, don't get cocky!" They need to clean House (and Senate), but more than that, they need to not screw this up.

People are arguing about whether this is a mandate, and I am of two minds about that. The Democratic majorities are slim in some places, and they will certainly be subject to scrutiny. However, it is also true that the Republicans not only lost seats, but that, as of today, they have also failed to take a single seat from an incumbent Democrat. This has never happened before in U.S. history. Even Bush had to admit publicly that the Republicans took a "thumping."

Whatever you want to call it, though, I think it's pretty clear that right now the main message to the Democrats is that this is their chance to demonstrate how they differ substantially from the Republicans. We expect that the next two years will be neither an illustration of "same stuff, different party," nor merely a chance to exact revenge for the past twelve years. We gave the Democrats back their power, and now we expect them to use it responsibly, to repair our tattered republic and polish its tarnished image.

Don't screw this up, guys. We're counting on you.

It's a clear blue day, bright and pretty. It's just about the kind of weather it was exactly five years ago. There are a lot of people and organizations trying to tell us how we should remember the events of that day. President Bush, standing on the American flag on a carpet, of all things (fitting symbolism, his trampling on the symbol of our nation), ABC/Disney with their made-up -- excuse me, "dramatized" -- version of the history leading up to the tragedy, CNN.com with its real-time streaming of five-year-old video, recreating the timeline.

At this time on 9/11/01, I was standing around with coworkers at a previous job and listening to the radio, trying desperately to figure out what was going on, as we hadn't seen any television that morning and there wasn't one in the office, and the web had been brought to its knees by an overload of activity. I still remember the radio news announcer repeating, "Extraordinary . . . extraordinary . . ." as if he had run out of all other words.

I remember us all walking to a coworker's nearby apartment to watch three televisions stacked on top of each other, all tuned to different channels, trying to make sense of it all. I remember wondering if my dad, who worked in Washington, D.C., and my various friends and family in both D.C. and New York City were safe.

I remember feeling all day as if I were about to vomit, riding home on a nearly empty train with tears running silently down my face, friends coming to hang out because no one wanted to be alone, barely eating for three or four days. I remember the skies, ominous and silent except for the occasional chilling scream of scrambling military jets. I remember the suspicious looks shot my way because I dared to wear a winter scarf designed to wrap around my head as well as my neck -- "Is she one of them?"

Yes, I remember quite well. I don't need anyone to tell me how, least of all the president or any media network. In fact, I don't think I could forget if I tried. What I want them to tell me is this: Will there ever be any evidence that this administration has learned a single constructive lesson? Will we ever regain the liberties we gave away out of fear? Will the rest of the world ever trust this nation again? In the end, will there be justice for all? If we can't answer "yes" to those questions, then maybe the terrorists will have won after all.

It's not too late. Demand justice. Demand your liberties, and exercise them without apology. Live and love freely and joyfully. Vote the lying warmongers out. We can do it as long as we don't let the powerful convince us to live in a constant state of fear.