Our Meal of Resistance

I first met Debra at our Arizona senator’s office. Our paths crossed again at an ACLU Resistance Training.

This time Debra came with her partner, Candy, and shared that for decades, they’ve been organizing to secure their rights and were willing to join with us to continue the work on behalf of others. Truth be told, they offered not only solidarity but a rich education borne out of their experience.

After the training session Debra invited me to her resistance group of women who met every other Sunday. They’ve been doing this since the Women’s March in January and their numbers were growing as more women like me hungered for a sustainable way forward.

I couldn’t resist her invitation.

She followed up with an email describing the agenda. There would be time to discuss current actions, write postcards to government leaders and then an optional dinner. If I wanted to stay for dinner, I only needed to bring something to share and the hostess would provide salad.

The Sunday I attended felt bittersweet, like it was both my first and last opportunity to gather with these women since I’d be leaving to join my family in Burundi in a few days. I would be there for four months—away from the demands of citizenship at this critical time, away from resistance groups like this one. I could not resist Debra and Candy’s hospitality, so I brought my sugar snap pea salad to add to the buffet.

Read the rest over at SheLoves Magazine!

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All content on this site is copyrighted by Kelley Nikondeha. Please do not copy work without permission. You are welcome to quote or reference my blog in your article, but please make sure you link back to the original post. Please do not post an article in full without permission, because that is a violation of intellectual property. (My African friends have a different sense of this, but being American, I can tell you it does matter to me!)

All writing on this site represents my own journey, my own wrestling, my own epiphanies. While I work with Communities of Hope, ideas shared here do not necessarily represent this organization.