Anukatariinan päästöt: Opening the Fall 2019

Happy with the boletus

The late summer was so dry especially in my “territory” so I didn’t even try to pick blueberries. Instead of that I contacted a semi professional person whom I knew to an immigrant. When I called her her husband answered and told the berries would be ready in six p.m. When I arrived there he told there is two hours delay. I told him I’ll go to a mall nearby and asked him to call when the berries are ready. After an hour he called to tell me the berries were ready. The reason I told the story was this: During the procedure he thought he had been spoken to a man and met a lady and I had to explain the situation before he got it.

The mentioned blueberries

I’ve been as Anukatariina at work almost every day. Till this semester I still didn’t do it when I had education to professionals. This time I also broke that rule. As a consequence a former student of mine came to tell me how I’ve looked good and got ten years younger! She was my student ten years ago and I just wonder how old I must have looked then...

Starting the semester with colleagues

The political and social activities have been the main reason for my busy fall. We have updated the home page of Dreamwear Club which have taken some effort: Both the content and the technique of the page have been out of date and we had to build a brand new version. It is still under minor modifications but I’m happy to its main characteristics.

The other big effort has been TransHelsinki happening in November which has quite a lot of preparatory work, because the “staff” has not been too big. I also have attended some meetings around the Against Hate program been, at the Seta desk at the Early Childhood Education Fair, done some experience teaching and been interviewed as a Seta activist at my home.

At the Victim Support Organization with Samuel and Julian from Trasek ry

At the early childhood education fair with Tuija

The fall meeting of the Dreamwear Club had Oktoberfest as its theme. This kind of themed meetings seems to be a good idea and we decided to continue this tradition.

The official part of the meeting as the chair

The inofficial part of the meeting in dirndl

The next day after the fall meeting I travelled to Brussels. Finland holds the Presidency of the EU and organized an event with the Commission, which set out guidelines for the EU equality policy, especially with regard to the LQBTI people. The situation in different EU countries is strikingly different and in the Eastern countries it is alarming, mostly because of the skilful and well planned international hate campaign against us. Finland had quite a big delegation and I and my friend Tanja were part of it, also representing our associations Dreamwear Club and Regnbågsankan. It seemed I was the only transvestite in the congress among 600 people. We had possibilities to our initiatives to promote equality and resist hate politics in Europe and some of our points were present in the final statement of the congress.