{"id":721,"date":"2008-06-29T21:45:55","date_gmt":"2008-06-29T21:45:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2008\/06\/notes-from-the-field.html"},"modified":"2008-06-29T21:45:55","modified_gmt":"2008-06-29T21:45:55","slug":"notes-from-the-field","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/06\/notes-from-the-field.html","title":{"rendered":"Notes from the field"},"content":{"rendered":"

*\u00a0 At the playground, I happen upon two little girls. Maybe four or five years old. Burmese. One had the other in a headlock and had a fistful of hair that she was pulling as hard as she could. “Uh…stop, ” I said, “Don’t pull her hair…” because I could tell it was not <\/em>a game. Or if it had been, it had gone terribly wrong.
\nI really was at a loss – should I physically pull them apart myself? Because the hair-puller wasn’t budging.\u00a0 Mercifully someone’s parent came along and separated them. Minutes later, one of them was kneeling on the ground, weeping.
\nAnd it wasn’t the victim.
\n\u00a0
\n* A group of girls (also Burmese), aged 4 to 12 or so, approached a man pushing his baby on a swing. “Excuse me,” they asked him, “Could you tell them – ” they pointed to two boys grinning nearby, “to stop throwing this – ” and the kicked the tree bark mulch on the ground, “-at us?”\u00a0
\n\u00a0The man obliged. He yelled at the boys and told them to stop. One of the boys moved his fingers like a talking mouth and \u00a0said, “Blah, blah, blah”\u00a0 – and some other things. Not in English.
\nOne of the girls informed him, “He’s cursing at you in Burmese.” The girls walked away. The boys ran in another direction. The man yelled something after them.\u00a0\u00a0
\nIn German.
\n\u00a0
\n\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. 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