Hello 2022!
Happy New Year to our supporters, staff members, teachers, students and families! On my end, after some down time during the holidays, I’m looking forward to a new academic year in Zambia. While coronavirus cases continue to rise in Zambia, our team has been diligent in creating alternate plans since the school opening is delayed by a couple weeks. I’m so grateful for their partnership, their nimbleness, and their commitment to our students during this time.
2021 closed out with a number of losses that had me thinking about my own goals for this year: First, bell hooks passed away from a kidney failure on December 15th. Born Gloria Jean Watkins, bell hooks was an American scholar, social activist, feminist, and professor. In particular though, hooks played a pivotal role in including Black women and working-class women in the fight for women’s rights. She argued for the intersectionality of gender, race, and class, and had a flowing style of writing that cemented her in college courses across the country. I spent some time over this break re-reading some of her works and this quote stuck with me as we enter 2022: “Living simply makes loving simple.” May she rest in power, and may we learn how to live simply and love simply this year.
Next, the world mourned the loss of Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Tutu is known for his work in South Africa as an anti-apartheid and human rights activist. But his work extended far beyond just South Africa, stressing the need for non-violent protest and encouraging foreign economic pressure in order to further the fight against apartheid. After Nelson Mandela became President, he was selected to chair the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, advocating for restorative justice through three stages – confession, forgiveness, and restitution. One of his famous sayings was: “Do your little bit of good where you are; it's those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.” In a time where so many of us are exhausted by the world around us, I find solace in the notion that we can each do a little bit of good.
And last, in the final hours of the year, just three weeks shy of her 100th birthday, we lost Betty White – an actress and comedian who I grew up watching on The Golden Girls. She worked in television longer than anyone else, and received eight Emmy awards spanning 1951 to 2014. She shared a similar optimism with her character on The Golden Girls, Rose Nylund. And 2021 being the year I turned 40 myself, this quote particularly resonated with me: “Don't try to be young. Just open your mind. Stay interested in stuff. There are so many things I won't live long enough to find out about, but I'm still curious about them. You know people who are already saying, 'I'm going to be 30 - oh, what am I going to do?' Well, use that decade! Use them all!”
Wishing you all a happy and healthy 2022.
-Reshma