An interview with heidiminx

Thank You was all it took…
An interview with heidiminx
by Jason K. Walsh
“In fact, punk rock means exemplary manners to your fellow human being.” – Joe Strummer

What can one person do to make a difference? In the age of change, that is the mindset that Americans hopefully strive towards, as the economy plummets, jobs disappear, and hope seems to be evaporating before our eyes. We look to our leaders to make a difference, when the solutions lie within us all. We are the ones who can bring about change. We are the ones who can make a difference.
I had the opportunity to talk with heidiminx about her personal journey to bring change to the lives of people who have been suffering for decades. She has recently returned to Dharamasala, India for a second time as a volunteer at the Tibet Hope Center, a refugee community where many now call home after fleeing the political oppression that drove them from their own nation.
Growing up on the streets of Baltimore, heidiminx found punk, Oi, and hardcore at an early age. She relocated to New York City and found family amongst the New York Hardcore underground community and has become an important part of the success of Black N Blue Productions with partners in crime, Joe Cammarata and Madball’s Freddy Cricien. She started Built on Respect as her way of furthering her ability to bring change through education and good, old fashioned humanity.
JW: First question. How did you get into volunteering?
heidiminx: Several years ago when I had just moved up to New York and started doing some different corporate PR, I was actually working with a Playboy account and actually had a personal publicist that told me about a woman named Susan Scott Krabacher, who was a playmate who started her own non-profit called the Mercy and Sharing Foundation and she started orphanages and schools in Haiti. The Peace Corps would not take her because she did not have a college education and she just went and started on her own. I called her up and said, “Hey, I work with Playboy and it sounds like what you are doing is really cool. How can I be involved?” Then she said, “Well, we are doing a press tour later this year and we’re taking thirty journalists over to Haiti and if you could help me that would be wonderful.” I rolled up my sleeves and said, “Hell yeah.” In my early twenties, I was on a lot of different boards for different charities and things like that and it wasn’t really doing it for me. It was nice and we sat there and made some fundraisers and got a bunch of people together and everyone sat around and patted themselves on the back and it was so further removed from the actual cause that it bored me to tears. So after having gone over to Haiti, I’m not one to sit still so, you know, the idea of a vacation in Hawaii is fairly repugnant. My dad’s a travel writer and I’ve been traveling since I was a little kid, and I wanted to go to India, so I decided the best way to do it was doing a volunteer vacation and that’s what I did. I hooked up with one particular group called Cross Cultural Solutions and I went over and I decided specifically that Dharamasala, you know because of me being Buddhist and that’s where the Dalai Lama and the entire Tibetan government in exile is, that that’s where I wanted to go. I went over and I spent my mornings, you know about four hours each morning, working within the Indian community, helping, you know with their assessment of my skills, teaching English and computers to some rural students who lived in Dharamasala, and then I started to spend my afternoons up in Mcleod Ganj, which is the Tibetan enclave of Dharamasala and I tripped upon a little community organization called the Hope Center. It was run by two early twenties Tibetan refugees and they put together such a compelling community program. It takes a lot for someone to really truly inspire me and they truly inspired me. The last day that I was there I made the determination and promised that I’d be back and I don’t renig on my word. So, I came back home and figured out how to use my voice and to work with my friends and to inspire other people.
JW: So, you’re going to be over there for three months. What kind of things are you going to be doing over there?
heidiminx: There’s a lot of different things. Every day I like to participate in the conversation classes where different tourists come through town and the students and refugees of that community are there. It’s basically conversational English classes, where they can tell their stories and exciting them through conversational English. They have other programs. Once a month, they work with one of the old-age homes and they bring different volunteers and students in to interact with some of the older residents and do tea parties. They do a “Clean up the Town” project. One of the main things I am concentrating on is “Stories of Our Students,” they call it the S.O.S. project. Over the past two years, the Hope Center has been collecting stories of what it took for the different students to be able to leave different regions of Tibet and come in through Nepal and into Delhi, then in Dehli back into Dharamasala. Basically, it’s what their stories were that made them leave their country, to get an education or to get a spiritual leader. These have already been collected in a series of one-to-two pages and I want to use them as a basis for English lessons and then work with the Center’s director to set up some online stores and probably self-publish that book through the Center and make it something that could be a sustainable form of income. I’ve also been working with Michael Distelkamp, who owns Convoy Films and produced the Black N Blue Bowl DVD. He’s been very inspired by what I’ve been doing and he and I are actually pursuing a grant right now to see if he can come over to India and we can make a Built on Respect documentary.
JW: What was it about your first experience over there that inspired you to decide that you wanted to return? What was it about the people there?
heidiminx: My students said “thank you.” It was that simple. The last day I was there, you know I didn’t want to make a big deal out of leaving and I think in this world today, “please” and “thank you” are hardly overrated. They’re kind of rare gems and people forget to say it so often. There were students that day saw me taking pictures and all of a sudden I hear yelling in Tibetan and forty, fifty people are surrounding me, and Kusang goes and gets me a “khata,” which is a Tibetan scarf that you would give in thanks and respect to somebody. He puts it on my neck and we take this group picture and the next thing I know the students that I hadn’t even taught were just all filing past and saying just thank you so much for helping make a difference and we really appreciate what it is you’ve done for us in this small community center. It was so heartfelt that I knew that in barely the two weeks I spent there, if that was the impact and response that if I really dedicated and worked hard that that could be exponentially increased. So, I made the decision that day to go back over and do whatever I could. I’ve got a very, very, very good group of friends around me and wonderful people that I do business with. Many of them are in bands and they’re amazing people and they’ve inspired other people worldwide through their music. Everybody from Al Barr from the Dropkick Murphys to Randy from Pennywise to Jamey Jasta (Hatebreed, Jasta) to Pete and Lou Koller from Sick of it All and Freddy with Madball, and even Joe (Cammarata) with Black N Blue, and the Street Dogs. They’ve all banded together to help me get a message out there and tape PSA’s (Public Service Announcements) and rasie awareness for what I’m doing.
JW: Was that flight back pretty tough for you? Did you not want to leave?
heidiminx: I knew that I was coming back. I’ve lived in so many different cities, so many different countries, New York is my home. But, New York is also what I call my home base. There’s always phone, there’s always internet as long as I’m surrounded by good people at home, I can be anywhere. So, I knew that I’d be coming back and I was looking forward to coming back and seeing my friends and in fact the hardest thing for me was the first week when I came back, just walking down the street and looking at the newsstands and seeing Lindsay Lohan’s lack of underwear on the front of US Weekly or hearing people complain about the most mundane things. “My text message didn’t go through.” Wow, you’re fortunate enough to have a cell phone? You know? It’s kind of the old adage, “mo’ money, mo’ problems,” if that’s even an adage. I came back home and just some of the things, it was really hard for me, some of the things I heard people crying and complaining about were so inconsequential in the grander scheme that I pretty much just spent my first month back telling all my friends what I saw and what I heard and what I learned. The more that I talked, the more of an understanding that they had. Some of my friends weren’t aware that it’s against the law to fly a Tibetan flag. That if you call Tibet from India, the Chinese government monitors your phone calls. Could you imagine the uproar if you knew all of your phone calls were being listened in on by the U.S. government, never mind the Patriot Act? If you were told you can’t fly the American flag, and oh, by the way, we don’t speak English anymore in this country. Here’s your new language. We’d be beside ourselves. So that was just some of the stuff that I spent the first couple of weeks, even still, just in parting, I’m trying to share the stories and make people understand.
JW: Obviously, you feel very connected to these people. What did you take away from the experience you did have with them? As far as for people who might read this, what kind of people are they compared to your everyday American, if there is such a thing?
heidiminx: I think one thing is while America might consider itself “one nation, under God,” be that Christianity, be that Judaic, the Tibetan people as a whole are Buddhists and I think one of the most important things is the practice of “ahimsa,” which means nonviolence. The Tibetans as a whole have met their oppression not with violence. They’ve not taken the “eye for an eye” stance. They’ve tried to understand and even people that I’ve met who have been through the worst and most horrible situations are very happy and very light of mind and they don’t hate the people who have oppressed them. They just try to gain understanding. I think as a whole that’s a lesson the rest of the world needs to learn. There’s no mother in this world that says I’m having a child because I hope to God one day he dies at war. No one, yet our world is still full of war and hate. As a whole, the Tibetans have been through so many horrible things and they can still be very likeminded and all they all they ask for is patience and justice and they do it with an open mind and a very honest heart. I really think the rest of the world could stand to learn from them.
JW: And that leads me into my next question…maybe you have learned a lot from these people?
heidiminx: I had already been studying Buddhism. My teacher is Tibetan and he fled Tibet in 1972. He changed my life through what he’s taught his students and what his students have imparted to me, which is part of the reason I’m so attracted to it. Studying Buddhism and being in America is drastically different than studying Buddhism and being amongst a Buddhist community. You know it just really helped give me a visual and cultural understanding that these practices can work and can make for a very happy group of people.
JW: Very cool. Now tell me about the $1 drive. How can people help out?
heidiminx: I mean honestly right now, we’re in a recession. So many of my friends work really hard for their money. Within three or four weeks of building the Built on Respect website, we had I think over 178,000 hits to the site. At first I thought, if I’m doing this maybe I can try and find some corporate sponsors that want to underwrite the charity work I’m doing. Maybe they’ll write checks and at the end of the day, corporate America is a wonderful scapegoat as a letdown. I realized that if individuals, just one on one, were shown, hey, if you can donate a dollar, I’m taking a computer over with me and I’m blogging every day and I’m taking video and I’m showing you what I’m doing with it and this is how far it goes. If people want to be a part of it, they can. I don’t know many people that can’t afford one dollar or a pound or a euro or a lira. Even one ruppee. I really decided to focus in on this as a DIY campaign because I’m doing it DIY style.
JW: Tell me a little about how people can log on and follow you along as you take this journey over there.
heidiminx: If people come to Bulitonrespect.com, I have my own blog on that website, that I’ll be doing text updates. I’ll be doing some video updates and picture updates on there. I’m going to be blogging pretty much every day to make it a very interactive process. On some days, it might be a recap of what was done. Another day, it might be a fun video with me and one of my students, with them teaching me to cook something traditional vegetarian Tibetan.
JW: What would you say to people who read this and become inspired as well by the example you’re setting doing some positive stuff like this, helping your fellow man? How would you encourage folks to take up the reigns and try and find something like this for themselves?
heidiminx: First of all, I’d be very flattered if I’m inspiring anybody. That’s really awesome. If somebody wants to do something, I’ve got a list of ways people can help what I’m doing. If they go to Dosomething.org and try to start a project or even if it’s just smiling at somebody walking down the street, you know, pay it forward. There’s a hundred things you can do a day and frankly, smiling or just saying “please” and “thank you” is the first and most important thing. The only limits that any person has are the ones that they’ve set for themselves and if you break those down, there’s absolutely nothing that can stop you and you can do whatever you want. If you have that option that’s the ultimate freedom, especially if you’re here in the States you have a lot more freedom than everybody else in the world. Don’t take it for granted, exercise it, and share it.