This past weekend I ran off to Utah (via Orange County for the longest possible way to go, but also for free childcare) to attend the Salt Lake City Weekly party for the recipients of the 2011 Best of Utah award. Mine was as a board member of WAVE, the advocacy group I helped found, and the staff of the newspaper liked us so much they invented a category for us. Best Mormon Feminist.

I didn’t know what to expect, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t need an acceptance speech or anything, but it turned out to be a party at a club with free food and booze. I got no food, and was interested in no booze, so I missed out on that, but I brought my cousin friend Karen and we had a blast living it up like two single girls on the town. I even got hit on at the party, and since I’ve been developing a bit of a complex about my momma frump, that did the old girl some good.

We left the party and had a beautiful meal like you’d see on Top Chef, slept in late the next morning, went shopping, had another long lunch, and then Karen left and I got another day to sleep in, lay about the room, meet with some other friends, and get away from worrying about anybody else’s needs for a while. It was pretty dang luxurious.

I was so honored to represent the rest of us mouthy broads that make up the WAVE board, and I will now have a plaque on my wall declaring me the Best Mormon Feminist, if that ever comes up for debate. But I’m not really sure that my troublemaking needs to be encouraged.

I’m sad this picture came out blurry, but if winter light is hard, Boston winter light is the hardest, and I’m just grateful I have a record of meeting my new Sister, Lina.

Lina is Ugandan and a tireless, heroic, advocate for peace and security and opportunities for women. Her country has been tortured by dictators for longer than I’ve been alive, first with the notorious Idi Amin, and then by Joseph Kony, a rebel leader who calls his army the Lord’s Liberation Army and has led a civil war against the Ugandan government, first motivated by ethnic conflicts and now by just his madness and lust for power, for the last 20 years.

You have probably been hearing in the media about the atrocities happening in Darfur. Ethnic cleansing, child soldiers, women kidnapped and used as sex slaves. Darfur is in Sudan, a bordering country to Uganda, and Joseph Kony has had training and support by forces in Sudan. What is happening in Darfur is happening in Northern Uganda, but without as much attention.

Currently a tentative peace has been made, Kony is hiding in Congo, the country neighboring Uganda on the other side, and now aid groups can come to Uganda to support the victims he has left behind.

This is my other new sister, Judy. Judy is a well-known human rights advocate and professor working in the field of international development. She has traveled the world and seen that women are so often left behind in peace building.

She traveled to Uganda with her college students in an effort to rebuild homes destroyed in war, and what she found galvanized her to action.

Sexual assault is so common here in the US, that chances are good that if you haven’t been assaulted, someone close to you has, so think about what that person has been through. Think about the emotional toll assault has taken on them, the shame, the loss of self-worth, the physical healing, maybe eating disorders, suicide attempts or other evidence of psychological trauma.

Now imagine feeling all that in an area where you are lucky if you have a home. Where you suffer from the effects of poverty, your family has been killed, and you have been cast out by your community for fear that the man who assaulted you will punish them. You are alone, raising several children who were conceived by rape, and you are no more than 25 years old.

I watched the video interview of one woman who had been kidnapped at 10 years old and made one of Joseph Kony’s “wives,” her childhood literally stolen. During the years she should have been in school learning to read and write, she was in the African bush being tortured by a madman. She is now raising the children she bore as a child in the wilderness, and struggling to find peace and security. I saw other people, survivors and former child soldiers, overcoming the worst atrocities human beings can inflict on one another, their faces bearing witness to the horrors of what they had lived through.

I was so moved by what I saw, I couldn’t sit still. I could not look at that woman and explain to her that I was too busy to help because I hadn’t vacuumed that week. We don’t all have the opportunity to get deeply involved in this cause, but when the opportunity came to me, I could not walk away from it.

I’ve since come to believe that this is part of the work the Lord has for me to do. With less than a week’s notice I managed to arrange a nearly week-long cross country trip with just two phone calls. Everything fell into place miraculously. After my week in Boston meeting with the board, it became plain that the skills I have are what they needed. Not just my OCD organizing skills and web experience, but even my crafting as we come up with items these women can make that would sell here in the states.

I have a lot more work ahead of me, but I think this will also give me the perspective I need. I think I’ll be able to stop beating myself up for something like the state of my yard when I’m working towards something so very important.

By now you may have picked up on the occasional note of desperation in my blogging. A little exhaustion, feeling spread a wee bit thin. This year has been the most demanding and rewarding year in my life, and it left me feeling at a very low ebb in my emotional resources. This weekend was just the recharge that I needed.

I went to the Mormon Women’s Forum Counterpoint Conference. They invited me to speak on the work I’ve been doing for WAVE, and so I got to spend the weekend hanging out with my feminist heroes, my dear friends, and surround myself in this supportive community that extended me blessings and love and every good thing.

The writing and activism stuff I’ve been doing has been so rewarding to me, but it is emotionally costly. This weekend I felt all of that emotion I’ve been putting out given back to me in the most beautifully tender ways.

I’ve also learned about an exciting new charity that I feel compelled to get involved with. Judy Dushku, that beautiful silver fox in the photo, runs an African charity for survivors of war trauma. I’ll write up a better post in the future, but it was so personally meaningful to me, and so incredibly moving, that after her speech I had to just go up to her, hold her hands, and say, “I want in.”

Which seems to be leaving my mouth a lot these days. I’ve also been pitching in a little bit behind the scenes of a really wonderful magazine for Mormon women, Exponent II, and my friends there have tried to protect me from myself by volunteering to go easy on me. But I can’t help myself. There’s a lot in this world I care about and I want to be involved in all of it.

I had a former bishop who used to always say, “A change is as good as a rest.” When someone would get exhausted and frustrated by volunteering in one capacity, he’d ask them to volunteer somewhere else. He did this with his kids too. When they would whine about doing yard work, he’d send them inside to fold laundry. A change of environment, a use of different muscles, could be just as comforting as taking a break and twice as productive. This is a principle that works in my life. I get exhausted with fighting bureaucracy for Atti’s care, so I write something, and when I get sick of writing something, I make something. It’s a careful balancing act, but it is FAR more rewarding than taking a nap.

In order to pull it off, I just need to relish the weekends I get like this last one, surrounded by friends who cheer me on and prove to me where the true rewards in life are.