A March for Autonomy

What a busy start to our October! 

This time last week, I was really stressing the fact that we had 3 upcoming deployments and not many people on the schedules. Leading into Friday, the empty schedule stress was palpable in my house.

I’m going to get a little personal, SMD, but fuck, Saturday was important to me. Abortion as healthcare is the first “political” stand I ever took, and I put that in quotes because it shouldn’t be political. It is fact.

Abortion is healthcare, and bodily autonomy in medicine saves lives. I personally have witnessed this while delivering babies in midwifery school. Marching with the front line, as part of Street Medics Dallas, as a trans person with a functional uterus, as someone who can not physically afford to ever be pregnant again, working with you, SMD, on Saturday was one of the most proud moments of my life. 

Thank you for showing up. 

Thank you to the Afiya Center for coordinating, and to the SRA for helping to keep us safe. 

We handed out over 20 cases of water! We also treated some heat injuries and minor joint injuries. We collected donations of period products to share with our unhoused neighbors. 

The Reproductive Liberation March in Dallas is the biggest event that SMD has participated in!

At the same time, Chairman Meow was leading the Denton team for SMD at the Reproductive Liberation March. Chairman reports that it was “a good sized crowd,” and there were no incidents reported, other than thrown Gatorade. 😂😂😂

On Sunday, SMD teamed up with some of our burner friends and returned to Camp Rhonda. While our burner friends fed our unhoused neighbors homemade BBQ, Fox, Gear, Chairman, Beans, and myself provided health checks to the people of the neighborhood. We also gave out some wound care kits, hand sanitizer, masks, and period supplies.

This last week of street medic work fulfilled me. Gave me a little more hope. I hope it gave you the same. 

Geo is back home safely with us! Thank everything.

Upcoming events that we have: 

• October 15: The DFW Rainbow Coalition invites you to the Picnic for the General Strike. We will be hosting a picnic for those participating in the general strike that is occuring October 15th. The event is scheduled from 12pm-4pm at Tenison Park in Dallas ( address: 6600 E Grand Ave Dallas, TX 75223 ). The purpose of this event is to welcome those striking from work on that day. We want to provide them food and refreshments and also educate people about getting organized and unionized in order to demand better working conditions. We will also teach about mutual aid. If your group is interested in participating in this event  please respond and let us know what food you plan on bringing. This will be a potluck event as such we really need all groups to bring as much food as they can.
• October 19: Health Checks for the Unhoused at Camp Rhonda, 12 PM.

Fundraiser updates: Gear has been able to register for instructor classes! Thanks to a generous donation from Sex Workers Outreach Project, we will be able to buy the supplies needed in order to hold classes and teach our community BLS and First Aid! We are so excited to be able to do this, and we are already looking into our budget so that we can make Stop The Bleed a priority.

I love you, Street Medics Dallas.

Thank you for showing up.

Innuendo 

Photo courtesy of The Naked Lens.