My Story Part 26 – “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

People erect walls all the time around things that we don’t understand or fear and we have to break sown those walls one brick at a time.

This is a story of one of those bricks being taken down.

It was the day I wrote about last week, “A Busy Day Today” and it was the last event of the day that tore down some bricks. I went to the workshop not knowing what to expect, the description of the workshop was how the location of where you live can make you sick. We had discussed the topic in one of my classes where we compared two Indian reservations, one had water and the other did not. The one with water could grow their own vegetables and the other was depend in food stamp. The one that had fresh vegetables had a very low rate of diabetes and obesity, while the other tribe the rates were epidemic. Depending upon the food stamps forced the tribe to eat high fat, high calorie food, low fiber foods.

So anyhow, after the movie, we were broken up into random groups and we discussed how health care inequities affected our organization. Most of our group members were with health care agencies and the were either in the medical field or social workers. I started to discuss how discrimination, poverty and lack of health care causes health care problems in the trans-community. They began asking question and they were amazed that they never thought about the problems we faced and the extent of the health care inequities. By the end of the night, I think that a few more bricks were torn down from the wall.