On a cold, dark February morning in the town of Bakoba, in the Diyala province in Iraq, Wisam Breegi found himself scrambling outside of a bombed-out hospital, searching for twigs to build a fire that would keep his newborn son from freezing.

It was 1991, two weeks before the First Gulf War ended. A ragtag hospital crew was trying its best to care for five women in labor — there were no other hospitals nearby — despite having no heat or electricity and few medical supplies. When Breegi was called in to see his wife, Sada, and their son, Danny, he could tell even in the candlelight that Danny was dark blue. The baby’s body temperature had dropped and the hospital’s incubators were useless without electricity. “It was paralyzing — I was completely helpless,” Breegi says.

A nurse shouted at him to gather kindling and, despite sporadic gunfire and bombing in the darkness outside, Breegi filled a steel container with enough sticks to douse with alcohol and light a small fire. They held it close to Danny, and his body temperature rose enough so they could take him to their car, where they cranked the heater.

The desperate move worked. Danny survived. And now, more than two decades later, Breegi is developing a medical device that would save the lives of babies like him: a disposable, highly affordable neonatal intensive care incubator (NICI), designed to be used in the most rural parts of the world.

If these NICI succeed, they will represent a novel approach to life-saving care for fragile infants. They are the first incubators designed for low-resource settings with the features of modern intensive care incubators, such as warming, phototherapy, respiratory support, humidity, protection from infections and even Wi-Fi. They can run on any source of electricity, including battery, solar, bicycle — even from a car battery.

“I went to Google Images and looked up ‘incubator in 1915’ — they haven’t changed in 100 years. It’s still a large, expensive, plastic box.”

And yes, Danny Breegi was inspiration for them — though not in the way you might think.

In 2013, Danny, by then in his 20s, was studying neonatal mortality in rural India while earning his Master’s in Global Public Health from Boston University. He shared troubling statistics with his father: Each year, millions of babies die around the world. And most pre-term babies could be saved with the kind of immediate care that incubators can provide.

Breegi was struck by the statistic, and it fueled his mission to create incubators for these millions of children.

“My dad didn’t connect the dots until I reminded him a few months ago about the whole story of my birth,” Danny laughs. “He thought about it and said, ‘Yes, we were in bad state, weren’t we!’ He’s so focused on other people that he didn’t even think of his own experience.”

Wisam Breegi is a deep thinker who seems equal parts pragmatic and emotional. He booms with enthusiasm, is partial to colorful metaphors, and goes off on richly detailed tangents about humanitarian crises around the world.

And he’s clear about the root of his passion: his identity as a Mandaean, an ancient non-Arab, pre-Christian ethnoreligion with origins in the Middle East, based on the teachings of John the Baptist.

Mandaean means “People of Knowledge” in old Aramaic, and its practitioners are known for their love of science and art. Throughout history, Mandaeans have been a persecuted minority, and their numbers have been shrinking; there are now only about 60,000 Mandaeans in the world. Yet they have actively maintained a love-thy-neighbor philosophy. A main pillar of the faith is to seek out injustice and fight it with knowledge, never violence.

“We learn from an early age how to be thinkers, and how to make something better, how to make people around you happier,” Breegi says. “If there is a problem, we need to understand it and get involved in solving it.”

Breegi and his family had been persecuted in Iraq because of their Mandaean heritage, at times more severely than others, depending on the political and social circumstances. Still, Breegi became a cerebral young entrepreneur and successful veterinarian who was a favorite of pet-owning Baghdad diplomats, one of whom had tipped him off about the possibility of airstrikes to the city. (Breegi had once gone out of his way, even interrupting his honeymoon, to save the diplomat’s dog when it had been poisoned.)

So during the Gulf War, he and Sada shuttered their Baghdad home and moved into a ramshackle building in the countryside to wait out the worst of the chaos — which is what they were doing when the baby came.

The hospital was a 45-minute drive from their temporary home. As a political refugee — he was a vocal critic of Saddam Hussein and pacifist despite the mandatory military draft — Breegi was just as afraid of being stopped by military police as by the bandits who roamed the byways. Because of a mandatory blackout, he wasn’t supposed to turn on his headlights, but the moonless night and twisting back roads made it necessary, and he knew this made them obvious targets.

“As crazy as it sounds, I thought that if things went badly, I’d hit the gas, not stop, and literally jump the border into Iran,” he says. “I thought that no matter what happened it would be better than being captured in Iraq. If you’re likely to be 100 percent dead or 90 percent dead, you go with the 90. I had a solution!”

They made it to the hospital, though, and found that it was in terrible shape: A missile had struck it just days before Danny’s birth. But the destruction isn’t what Breegi remembers most.

“For us, the hospital was heaven, even though it was pretty much abandoned,” he says. “There were a few people there. It’s like your bottle of water is gone and suddenly there is a little stream.”

The Breegis’ lives ricocheted in unexpected directions after the war. First, they arranged to leave Iraq discreetly for Jordan. But Jordan wasn’t much safer — it was the backyard of Mokhbarat, the Iraqi intelligence. “I was under constant threat that Jordanian Saddam loyalists and Arab nationalists would inform on me about my whereabouts,” Breegi says.

Then, when Danny was four months old, the family left for Spain, thanks again to the connections Breegi made with diplomats. After a year, they moved to the United States, where Breegi earned his post-doc in gastroenterology and started a medical research career.

Years later, in 2008, he took a hiatus from his lucrative job at a biotech firm to devote himself full-time to the plight of the Mandaeans, who had lost their protections in Iraq after the 2003 Gulf War. Breegi lobbied at the fourth human rights conference in Geneva and at the U.S. State Department to recognize the Mandean crisis. He worked to relocate thousands of Mandaeans to America, and built the foundation of a Mandaean community in his adopted hometown of Worcester, Massachusetts.

When Danny finished graduate school, Breegi decided that the time was right to turn his attention back to medical device innovation. He founded a company, Breegi Scientific, and launched a single project: the NICI.

“I went to Google Images and looked up ‘incubator in 1915’ — they haven’t changed in 100 years,” he says. “It’s still a large, expensive, plastic box.”

So he invested his own money and pulled together a group of businessmen and researchers — including Danny — to make the NICI a reality. For several years, the core team members have volunteered their time, buoyed by Breegi’s conviction that they can create an incubator as world-class as those in the United States — using his own patented devices and software and hardware built from scratch. 

“At first, lots of people thought I was insane, especially when it came to economic feasibility,” he says. “But that didn’t answer the question of, ‘Why are we leaving millions of babies to die?’ Because we might not be making money?”

In a sense, it was a callback to other times of his life: his history of taking risks and not worrying if they’d pan out.

“Life is like a cup — you don’t see how much water is in it while you’re pouring it in,” Breegi says. “It’s not a one-moment thing, when it’s suddenly full. The water, like a company or an idea, is cumulative. When your cup is full and it starts to spill over, you can see what you’ve accomplished.”

Now, after years of development, Breegi Scientific is on the verge of putting its incubators in the field. The company has raised more than half a million dollars and successfully built and tested the proof-of-concept technology. The team has engaged a professional engineering firm to validate the NICI prototype and will soon be building 60 units to test in city-based hospitals in Honduras. Each hospital sees about 420 births a month, and an average of 30 percent of these newborns need intensive care.

“None of the hospitals have a fully functioning incubator,” says Breegi. “We are expecting this trip to save over 100 babies.”

Breegi Scientific also plans to raise $3 million to support clinical trials in Africa, India, and Southeast Asia. At the U.S.-China Health Summit last September, the company was awarded a trip to Chengdu, China, where it is pursuing a collaboration with the Sichuan province government.

It’s all a step closer to Breegi’s vision of putting battery-powered incubators in every rural hospital on the planet. And his son Danny, who inherited his father’s optimism, says he isn’t surprised that his father’s idea has come this far.

“I think people gravitate toward people who do something honorable because it gives them hope,” says Danny. “It’s what he taught me growing up — if you do good, people will rally around you. Whatever good you put into the world grows into something better.”

Published on December 12, 2018

It was a crisp fall morning in Seattle, and in a small section of the Washington Park Arboretum, 24 three-to-five-year olds took their positions. Most were dressed in rain pants, puffy jackets, and waterproof boots. One of them waved goodbye to her mother, then begged a visitor to break a muddy pine cone so she could use the halves as roofs for her fairy homes. Another raced toward the mud kitchen to make rock soup. A third found a paintbrush, then started to paint rocks with a preternatural focus.

Though rain seemed to be looming — as it often does in Seattle — these preschoolers would not be going inside today, or any other day of the year. That’s the calling card of the Fiddleheads Forest School, a half-day preschool program in Seattle’s Washington Park Arboretum that meets outside, rain or shine, five days per week, year round. The school’s two classrooms have portable bathrooms (covered in stickers and blocked off by gingham sheets), reading nooks (stocked with waterproof books), designated dry areas (covered by tarps), mud kitchens (with real pots and pans), gathering circles, obstacle courses (made of stumps), and of course, the aforementioned fairy village, where kids can play pretend.

To anyone who has parented a preschooler — or tried to wedge one into a winter coat — a fully-outdoor preschool experience might sound like a daily exercise in frustration, or at least a symphony of whining. But “nature preschools” have been steadily growing since the 1980s, when schools in frigid Denmark pioneered the concept, due at first to a shortage of indoor classroom space.

Then teachers started to notice that the kids who spent more time outdoors were developing better resiliency and social awareness than those in traditional classrooms. Thus forest schools took off across Scandinavia, spread to the UK, and have recently started to take hold in the United States. Today, there are more than 250 “nature preschools” and “nature kindergartens” in 43 states, meeting mostly in gardens and public parks, catering to a largely affluent clientele. (The Fiddleheads half-day program costs $8,060 per year, not counting gear and extra costs for special field trips, although some need-based scholarships are available.)   

At a time when climate change predictions are increasingly dire, immersive outdoor education can feel like a tiny way to make an impact on the future. Forest school proponents believe that by instilling a love for the outdoors early on, they can train the youngest citizens to become better stewards of our quickly warming planet.

But forest schools are also well-matched to a range of other modern parenting concerns: There’s the test-driven, early-reading ethos of modern preschools and kindergartens. (At Fiddleheads, the kids dictate their own learning plans and focus mostly on play.) There’s the gnawing feeling that screens are overtaking childhood —  leading to what author Richard Louv has termed “nature deficit disorder.”

And there’s the idea that western childhood has become too coddled. That’s where inclement weather comes in, says Fiddleheads co-founder Sarah Heller. Keeping kids outside year round, she contends, builds stamina, confidence, and resilience. It also translates to an obsession with quality outdoor gear: Fiddleheads has a gear rental library, and parents are instructed early on about the myriad coats, hats, pants, boots, and mittens their kids will need to survive a winter in the wild.

Fiddleheads teachers say their curriculum also helps kids adjust to bad weather. During the fall, the students focus on understanding the seasons. In the winter months, they do a lot of exploring and moving to keep themselves warm. In the spring, they focus on projects that integrate what they learned during the winter.

By instilling a love for the outdoors, they believe they can train kids to become better stewards of the planet.

“We talk a lot about listening to our bodies,” says Fiddleheads teacher Jenn Leibham. “This helps us prepare for winter. On cold days, when the kids are miserable, we acknowledge that being miserable is okay. We sit down and I ask: What do you need? Then we pause. We do those things. And we make it through.”

The teachers, meanwhile, figure it could always be worse. When Heller visited forest schools in Norway, teachers told her that their kids walk five miles per day during the winter, to stay warm.  

In sunny weather, at least, there is something about being out in the woods, surrounded by children in jewel-toned coats and colorful boots, that feels undeniably idyllic. Even standard lessons about sharing and caring somehow take on a mythical quality: When I visited the school this fall, I helped a tiny blonde named Reese build a home for her fairies, with instructions to pay special attention to creating a home that the green fairy would like. The green fairy had been excluded in the past, Reese said, so she wanted to make sure that the fairy would come this time.

Later, I joined a puffy-suit-clad 3-year-old who seemed pristinely calm as she brushed green paint methodically onto a muddy rock. I helped a blond boy build a hole in the ground, giggling as he dug up the computer mouse he’d buried in the dirt the day before. I watched the kids hold a dance party on a piece of thin wood, listened as they sang songs in “plant speak” (“Plaaaant planty plant plaaaaant”), and helped them investigate the mystery of a rogue sunflower seed that had somehow ended up in the fairy village.

The forest does seem to provide ample opportunities for child-led learning. On one recent day, Leibham said, some kids noticed tunnels on the log where they sit for their morning circle. The tunnels formed a maze, and the kids thought an animal’s nails might have dug the lines. Leibham called in one of the arboretum’s horticulturists to confirm this, and it turned out the tunneling was made by a certain type of beetle. Later, the kids went on a hike and, to their delight, found more beetles.

Leibham says the kids also make their own classroom rules, to help them understand boundaries and rule-setting. “Healthy risks are important,” she says. “But we need a plan, and we need to check in with ourselves to understand what feels comfortable.”

“On cold days, when the kids are miserable, we acknowledge that being miserable is okay.”

Recently, some of the children announced that they felt unsafe on the teeter totter in the obstacle course — a board laid across a log, which seemed dangerously close to some other logs. So they held a classroom meeting, and the teachers helped the students move the teeter totter to a place that felt more comfortable. They even hung up a sign about the risk.

In another nod to modern sensibilities, the Fiddleheads students regularly practice mindfulness. Each kid has a designated “special spot” in the classroom, an individual place to take a break, invite a friend over, or simply sit in quiet.

Here in the woods, the sights and sounds of the city are less apparent and it feels easier to stop and — literally — smell the roses. At one point, as the breeze started to blow and pine needles rained down on our heads, all of the children around me gleefully shouted, “FALL!!” All of their lessons that month, it turned out, had been about the changing seasons. “Fall is my FAVORITE because LEAFS!” one little boy declared when I asked him which season he liked best.

For these kids, forest preschool seems like pure joy. That helps explains why the niche institutions have proven a big draw: In the Seattle area alone, there are a number of outdoor preschool programs, some of which pay special attention to financial assistance. Though Fiddleheads has only been open for six years, the waiting list for its 24 slots is more than 150 families long. The school recently opened an afternoon class to try to accommodate the extra interest.

Still, forest schools aren’t for everyone. Many parents worry about their kids getting hurt, dirty, sick and cold, and thus will never send their kids to these kinds of programs. Fiddleheads doesn’t have a special education program or a lot of racial diversity, though its demographics largely match those of greater Seattle.

And some education experts say the benefits of an outdoor education, among a cohort of kids from similar backgrounds, could be overstated.

“Getting children outside and engaging them in learning about the natural world is not inherently a bad thing, particularly when juxtaposed with the large amounts of time that children in traditional classrooms spend indoors doing seat work,” says Fikile Nxumalo, an assistant professor of early childhood education at the University of Texas at Austin. “But these [forest] schools remain in predominantly privileged spaces.”

Nxumalo says she’s not sure the United States needs more forest preschools. “I’m more interested in the kinds of shifts that are needed to educate young children within all kinds of educational institutions,” she says.

That extends, she says, to how schools should address growing concerns about the climate. The very qualities that make forest schools feel so enchanting, she says — the fairy playgrounds, the quiet spaces — might limit their effect as a training ground for future environmentalists.

“These schools perpetuate a romanticized version of nature,” she says, “and there is a lot of work showing why this construction of nature is inadequate.”

Forest school proponents, on the other hand, argue that you have to teach children to love the natural world before they can truly care about it; that’s precisely why the programs combine education with play and exploration outside. The children I saw at Fiddleheads did seem to appreciate and understand nature — perhaps even more than most other 4-year-olds I know. The teachers say that many of the children bring their families outdoors on the weekends, too.

But Nxumalo says ideally, schools should teach kids to understand the ecological challenges in their own communities, not just in a pristine corner of the woods.

That, she says, may be the real secret to keeping the planet healthy for generations to come.

Published on November 28, 2018

On a muggy Saturday afternoon last summer, Jackie Katz rang a doorbell on a suburban street west of Boston. A tall, grey-haired woman opened the door, her eyes shifting from Katz — who was pushing a stroller filled with bottles, diapers, wipes, and campaign flyers — to the 7-month-old baby in her arms. His name was Jorah, and he gnawed on a pen as Katz introduced herself as a candidate for Massachusetts state Senate, gently rocking and bobbing to help her son stay calm.

“You’re cheating,” said Greta Stone, 64. “I’m a sucker for babies.”

Kissing a baby on the campaign trail is the classic candidate’s photo op. But the picture is different when the baby belongs to the candidate. This is an implicit goal of the many groups supporting women in politics. If you want more women to achieve electoral success, more of them have to start younger — like their male counterparts. If they start younger, more of them are likely to have young children.

But studies show that mothers running for office have long been viewed differently than men by potential voters. Women candidates report anecdotally that they are more likely to be asked who’s home minding the kids and how they will juggle the responsibility of parenting with legislating. And while going through the electoral motions with a young child might be a sweet campaign-trail icebreaker, it definitely isn’t easy. To truly change the gender balance in politics, it might make sense to start with the challenge of campaigning itself.

Before this past election cycle, Katz, 35, a public school history teacher, had never considered a political career. She decided to run for office after participating in the Women’s March in Washington, D.C. the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration — joining a “pink wave” of women nationwide who have explored candidacies, at every level of government, after the 2016 election. In July, Emily’s List, a political action committee geared toward pro-choice women Democrats, reported that since the 2016 election, some 40,000 women had contacted them to say they were considering running for office. In the 2016 election cycle, only 920 women had done the same.

Katz settled on a Democratic primary for a Massachusetts state Senate seat held by a Republican incumbent. In 2017, she attended the Massachusetts Teachers Association’s “MTA Campaign School,” a program geared toward educators who are considering a first-time run. There, she learned the ins and outs of raising funds, addressing voters, and using databases. Katz figured that, as a public school teacher, she was used to multitasking and talking to groups. And while she lacked the resources of someone with deep pockets, she was frustrated with the lack of educators, social workers, and nurses elected to office: “Our legislature is made up of lawyers, realtors, and small business owners.”

 The fact that she became pregnant with her first child soon after she announced her candidacy didn’t slow her down — until eight months into her pregnancy, when she found that she no longer had the energy to attend events or canvass voters.

Then she gave birth to Jorah in late January and the equilibrium changed. Suddenly, she had to figure out how to take advantage of a newborn’s naps and hold him while she put together mailings, posted on social media, and made phone calls. “I did not anticipate the lack of sleep a new mother has,” she said last summer, during the height of her primary battle. “Before I had my son, it didn’t matter that I was not home at 6 p.m.”

By the time election season geared up, Katz’s husband, an electrician, started staying home with the baby in the evenings so Katz could continue a grueling campaign schedule that had her working seven nights a week. In addition to canvassing two hours during the day and two hours in the evening, she attended events, spent hours on the phone looking for volunteers and fundraising, assembled mailings, responded to email, and handled her social media.

 “It’s as hard as I thought it would be,” she said at the time. “I just wish I had more time.”

“Serious campaigning is a full-time job, and then some.”

Becca Rausch, Massachusetts state Senate candidate

Until recently, women politicians have tended to wait until their children were older before they tossed their hats in the ring, says Kira Sanbonmatsu, a senior scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. In a 2008 nationwide survey of state legislators conducted by the center, researchers found that 3 percent of women legislators had children under age six, compared to 8 percent of men. Twenty-two percent of men and 14 percent of women had children under age 18.

At the time, only 24 percent of state legislators were women — perhaps because, as one woman surveyed noted, fewer women have a “stay-at-home wife.” According to the Barbara Lee Family Foundation, which studies and supports women’s political involvement, the percentage of women in state legislatures since then has only risen by 1 percent.

It’s unclear whether this year’s election results will ultimately change that balance. But in the current cycle, “women have been more open to using motherhood as a credential on the campaign trail,” Sanbonmatsu says. “I think that’s partly an evolution of voter acceptance.”

Indeed, in some notable cases this season, bulging bellies and tiny children became full-fledged campaign accessories. In September, Zephyr Teachout, a New York State attorney general hopeful, released a campaign ad that showed her undergoing a prenatal ultrasound. In Wisconsin, gubernatorial candidate Kelda Roys breastfed a child in her own campaign ad — the film crew captured the scene by accident, but Roys decided to leave it in the spot. “What the heck, this is real life,” she told HuffPost.

The presence of small children with their politician-mothers has forced some institutions to change. When Illinois Democrat Tammy Duckworth became the first U.S. Senator to give birth during her term, the Senate passed a rule allowing women to bring and breastfeed infants on the Senate floor during votes.

“It symbolizes the greater integration of women into Congress,” Sanbonmatsu says.  “It’s taken so long.”

Those symbolic gestures don’t help much with the logistics or expense of entering the arena in the first place. But some candidates have found that campaign law is on their side. Last April, Liuba Grechen Shirley, a Democratic candidate for New York’s 2nd Congressional district — who worked from home as a consultant while caring for her children — asked the Federal Election Commission to rule whether using campaign funds to pay for child care was considered “personal use” under its regulations. A month later, the FEC ruled unanimously in Grechen Shirley’s favor.

Jackie Katz, for her part, found ways to adapt her campaign to Jorah’s presence. On weekends, she took the infant on the trail, bringing him along to walkable neighborhoods as she canvassed. She developed a system for holding Jorah in one arm, popping the rear hatch of her SUV open with her free hand, lifting a stroller out of the trunk, and unfolding it in one swift motion. She would load her stroller with baby and campaign gear, strap on a baby carrier, and set off down a street, her long dark ponytail swinging.

Using a campaign app that provided each resident’s name and voting history — all public record — she would stop at houses likely to vote in Democratic primaries and ring doorbells with Jorah nestled in her arms. If no one answered, she would leave a postcard, scribbling a handwritten note that said she was sorry she had missed the resident, adding: “If my writing is messy, it’s because I’m carrying a baby.”

At one house, Jorah attempted to wriggle out of his carriage. Without pausing from her pitch, Katz hoisted him in her arms. “You’re doing so good. I’m so proud of you,” she murmured in his ear a few minutes later. She liked having him with her, she said afterward — though she knew she could double the number of homes she visited if she didn’t have him in tow.

Katz wound up coming in second in the September 4 primary. The winner, 39-year-old Becca Rausch, also has young children: Her sons are 2 and 4 years old. As they prepared for the general election, Rausch and her husband also found themselves juggling campaign and child care, enlisting volunteers to babysit and organizing family-friendly campaign events. Because of her candidacy, Rausch had to take a leave from her state government job. To make up for lost pay, the couple dipped into savings, while she took a part-time job as a lawyer to pay for day care.

“It was a big leap,” she says.

But Rausch says those challenges were part of the reason she ran for office in the first place — because she felt that the voices for young families like hers were missing in her district and in the legislature.  “I don’t see a whole heck of a lot of people who look like me,” she says. Because parenting takes up a lot of time and money, she notes, many young families can’t become fully engaged in local or state government.

But political institutions have the power to make things easier for their aspiring members. Liuba Grechen Shirley’s campaign-finance request is a case in point. “I think it would be helpful to women candidates with children — as well as men candidates with children — if child care expenses associated with campaign events could be treated as a campaign expense in state and local elections,” Sanbonmatsu says. Across the country, state ethics boards are starting to agree: When candidates recently petitioned state ethics boards in Alabama, Arkansas, Texas, and Wisconsin, they were given a thumbs up.

In other states, including Massachusetts, bills have been introduced to allow the use of campaign funds for child care. “It is crucial that child care qualify as a campaign expense,” Rausch said in a recent email. “This is an equity issue at its most basic level, disproportionately affecting women. Serious campaigning is a full-time job, and then some.” If she makes it to the Massachusetts state Senate, she may get a chance to vote “yay” for it.

Published on October 31, 2018

On March 24, 2018, thousands of high school and college students descended on Washington, D.C. for the March for Our Lives rally against gun violence. Six of them left from my home in Chevy Chase, Maryland and made the 20-minute trek to the National Mall, carrying homemade signs, brown bag lunches, water bottles, and loaded Metro fare cards.

These were not my daughters. All but two were strangers: college students from Temple University, Mount Holyoke, and Smith. The night prior, they had settled down in beds and sofas I’d freshly made up. After the march, I gave them lotion for their sunburn and sent each off for a well-earned nap. This was my own form of protest, deployed five weeks after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida — an event that launched a wave of student activism and created a group of proxy parents.

As a parent, a school shooting makes you feel helpless — not just because you imagine your child in that horrific situation, but because you don’t know what to do to fix the problem. Tweeting your frustration doesn’t do much. Neither does calling Congress to lobby for change. This is how a group of mothers in the D.C. area, whose children range from toddlers to college-aged kids, felt as we watched the Parkland students in the days following the tragedy.

We were looking for a way to help that felt both meaningful and personal. Making lunches and beds, it turned out, worked surprisingly well.

I had filled the bathrooms with towels and amenities and ordered ample pizza, but I wasn’t sure how to insert myself into the conversation.

I first heard about the Feb. 14 Parkland shooting as I was waiting to board a flight overseas. My phone blew up: Post after post after message after news alert. An old friend who had moved to Parkland checked in. Her daughter had been at the school, and she was safe.

I was distraught, far away, and about to get farther. So I leapt to attention a few days later, when the March for Our Lives was announced and a D.C.-area attorney named Elizabeth Andrews, the mother of a high school senior, tweeted that she was willing to help find housing for the marchers.

A flurry of messages followed and the March for Our Lives Lodging Network was born.

In the end, nine women led the organizing, identifying more than 1,600 families willing to host guests, working to match marchers with homes, and managing the media attention that quickly arrived.

Not all of the homes offered were used, so people shifted to other tasks: assembling 1,300 brown bag lunches, handing out lunches at Metro stops, purchasing Metro cards. One woman who lived too far from the city to host still sent in brown bag lunches, each decorated with an inspirational message from a child or young adult.

The day before the march, my houseguests arrived in two groups. The first to show up was a pair of fashionable girls who had taken the train to Washington, visited with friends on the way, and arrived full of energy and hyper-focus for sign-making. The next four girls arrived in a car that had gotten stuck, at one point, on the side of the road. They were more reserved and took in their surroundings quietly.

At first, I was concerned, like any mother would be; they seemed worlds apart.

But before long, they were gathered around my kitchen table, eating pizza and working on signs. They played a full-on game of social geography, finding friends and interests in common. They talked about their mutual passion for gun control. One of the girls was the daughter of a friend, so we FaceTimed with her mother and laughed.

As with my own teenage and twenty-something daughters, it seemed my role was limited. I had filled the bathrooms with towels and amenities and ordered ample pizza, but I wasn’t sure how to insert myself into the conversation.

But by the next morning, the visitors were peppering me with questions. What was my experience with marches? Where had I gone to school? How old were my kids? Why was I hosting? They asked what I did for a living and about my sweet dog, Addie.

The day after the march, they drove away — still strangers, in a sense, but also partners in a compact, shared experience. I filled their cars with road snacks. I shared my email and photos from the weekend. It was a warm goodbye, made even sweeter when I discovered that they had stripped the beds and sofas and put the sheets in the laundry room.

As they left, some of the students gave me flowers. Weeks later I received a thank-you card in the mail. Inside was a handwritten note signed by four of the girls. “Dear Julia,” it began, and went on to thank me for my hospitality and generosity. “We’ll always remember the march,” they wrote, “and we’ll always remember your kindness.”

The feeling was mutual.

Published on October 24, 2018

A ranch hand in a Western shirt and cowboy hat kept a wary eye on us as she showed us to our cabin. 

“What’s your wifi password?” my 11-year-old wanted to know.

“We don’t have wifi,” she told him.

“No wifi?” he replied in horror. “That’s it. I am not staying here.”

“Sorry, pal, but you don’t have a choice,” I said. “Next boat back isn’t until tomorrow.”

I could not begin to remember why I’d thought a day off the grid, deep in the Cascade Mountains, would be good for him. But I put on a brave face.

“Oh, you’ll do great,” I reassured him. “We don’t need the Internet to have fun.”

The ranch hand looked at me skeptically. Clearly she didn’t think I could survive the next 24 hours, either. I was briefly indignant … until the cabin door swung open and I caught a glimpse of our family, framed in the bathroom mirror: two adults and two kids, all clad in uniforms you might recognize from Star Trek: The Next Generation.

That one glance reminded me why our family long resisted the social pressure to unplug on vacation. As a tech researcher and writer, I’ve spent years railing against the notion of “digital fasts,” which I consider a simplistic and counterproductive response to tech overload. Far better to use technology to enhance your holiday (by discovering great restaurants, for example), and use your holiday to remember what you loved about that mobile phone in the first place. My husband is a fellow techie, no more likely than I am to see an offline vacation as any kind of fun. We had voyaged into the wilderness despite its lack of Internet access, not because of it.

My first instinct was to tweet ‘OMG offline for 24 entire hours!! #NatureSucks.’

But that’s the kind of compromise you make when you plan a family vacation at the last minute. The highlight of our road trip through Washington State’s Cascade mountain range would be a town called Stehekin, which we would reach via a boat that travels the 50-mile length of Lake Chelan. I booked a cabin at the Stehekin Valley Ranch, which looked remote and rustic enough to feel genuinely outdoorsy, but not too outdoorsy — by which I mean our cabin had a private shower and flush toilet.

There was only one truly radical element in this game plan: the ranch, like the rest of Stehekin, prided itself on being TV-free, wifi-free, and “off the grid.” After years of evangelizing a more-is-more approach to technology, I was curious to see how our kids would cope with the widely exalted experience known as unplugging.

And I’ll admit I wondered how my husband and I would cope without wifi, too. My palms get sweaty if I have to go more than three hours without looking at Facebook, and my husband is literally incapable of letting a ringing phone go unanswered. We’ve intertwined our love for tech with our family life, collaborating on a family Minecraft server and talking our son into taking a bath by creating a Twitter account for the invented “National Bath Society.”

Tech is also fundamental to how I archive our family memories. I’m terrible about making photo albums and scrapbooks, but diligent about logging our holidays on Facebook and Yelp. This time, I thought it would be fun to have some kind of narrative for our vacation posts — which is how we’d landed on the idea of logging our trip as if we were a Starfleet crew, assigned to decide whether Earth was ready for admission to Star Trek’s United Federation of Planets.

 “We were moderately interested in seeing the region’s many waterfalls,” I wrote on Yelp at one point. “But we were extremely interested in observing the human reaction to this rather repetitive (not to say urine-inducing) spectacle.”

As an inside joke, our Star Trek travelogue kept us all amused. And I had one more surprise in store: The night before we were scheduled to board our boat to Stehekin, an Amazon package arrived at our hotel. I handed the box to the kids, who tore it open.

“Starfleet uniforms!” my son exclaimed with delight. OK, they were just T-shirts, printed to look like uniforms. But they’d do the job. Plus, I’d ordered novelty sunglasses that transformed our eldest into a Klingon and our youngest into a Vulcan.

 The four-hour boat journey to Stehekin gave us plenty of time to take photos of our family in our new regalia, framed by the spectacular scenery of the Cascades. Finally, we disembarked, boarded a bus, and arrived at our destination. As we looked into hiking options, our son tried to find a phone signal.

“We’re off the grid,” the ranch hand informed him. 

 “But isn’t there 3G?” I asked.

The expression I got from the ranch hand did not reflect the level of respect due a Starfleet officer. Apparently “off the grid” not only meant off the power grid and wifi-free: the whole park was beyond the reach of cell phone towers.

It was such an astonishing realization that my first instinct was to tweet OMG offline for 24 entire hours!! #NatureSucks. The rest of the family wasn’t faring much better. My husband tried to take our eldest for a nature hike, but it turned out that there were actual bees on the hiking trail. My son decided it was too hot to be outside, and opted to lie down in the cabin with an audiobook we’d downloaded before leaving the modern world. Normally I’d catch up on the news online while keeping him company, but that wasn’t an option either. I had to fall back on playing solitaire, like some kind of animal.

Finally the Internet came to our rescue, through a bit of advanced planning and the wonders of Amazon. While shopping for our Starfleet uniforms, I’d purchased a set of well-reviewed boomerangs, a bug magnifier, and a couple of multi-function compasses. This afforded us a couple of hours of Genuine Outdoor Fun, tracking down lost boomerangs via compass (don’t ask) and discovering a fetal squirrel that we examined with the magnifier.

That got us through to dinner, when we gratefully made our way to a dining room full of outdoorsy-looking white people. Was it my imagination, or did the room let out a collective gasp at the sight of our Starfleet uniforms? Perhaps it was directed at our kids, who clutched their iPhones — loaded with ebooks — like tiny, comforting teddy bears.

By the time we finished dinner, darkness was descending. Our youngest fell asleep, but our 14-year-old insisted on heading out into the pitch black to look up at the stars. We lay side-by-side on a blanket, my kid and my husband taking turns to point out different constellations.

“What’s that one?” our kid asked, pointing up at one cluster.

 “I downloaded a constellation app,” I crowed: another victory for my advance planning. “Let me look it up!”

“No!” they both replied.

      “The light will interfere with our vision,” my husband explained gently. “Let’s just enjoy the stars.”

Published on August 15, 2018