Towards a Joyful Soul

This year, I decided to share some of my Austrian Christmas celebrations, specifically a German Advent song and Sankt Nikolaus Tag traditions, with my fellow housemates and Dan, the site coordinator. Tradition has it that St. Nicholas comes around houses and puts goodies in the boots of good children. His counterpart, Krampus, purportedly steals the children who have been bad. But those who have been good get small goodies, often food and socks or mittens. Unlike Santa Claus, Sankt Nikolaus Tag is separate from Christmas Day. It's during the same season, but the Christ child is the gift brought on Christmas (in my mind, this is one reason that there is less of a conflation of capitalism and consumerism with Christmas in Austria). On December 5th, I told my housemates to put their shoes outside with essentially no other instructions. All I told them was that it is part of my cultural heritage. They were suspect and probably a little confused, but did it anyway. I went to th

As you may or may not already know, this year I am working as the Program Assistant at Eden House, a long-term residency program in New Orleans for survivors of human trafficking. Even though I have written many weekly blog posts, I have rarely included anything about my work because of confidentiality and because I struggle knowing how I ethically present the things that my day includes. One of my tasks at Eden House is to schedule Professional Development workshops for our interns. A couple of weeks ago, Leanne McCallum, who leads the Greater New Orleans Human Trafficking Task Force, was our scheduled speaker. After getting a general understanding of what the Task Force does, one of our topics of conversation included myths about human trafficking. Some of these myths include that only foreign nationals are trafficked, that trafficking always includes smuggling, and that trafficking always includes physical violence or abduction. (read more about  misconceptions  and  myths )