Regional
Helpers
Sept. 17, 2010
Dear Brothers and Sisters in the California region,
Please take a few minutes of your time to read this newsletter from your California Regional Helpers. We would like to have the opportunity to share with you how our work as regional helpers is progressing. We feel that it is important for us to communicate with you regularly, so that you may know what our work is all about and, perhaps, can let us know how you would like us to serve you. Therefore we are planning to write to you on a fairly regular basis.
We had the opportunity to meet many of you at the regional Congress during the Memorial Day weekend, but we realize that most of you did not have a chance to attend that wonderful event. Therefore, FIRST, we need to give you an INTRODUCTION OF OUR DEWAN. We are:
- Deanna Foster from Subud Santa Barbara deannaifoster@gmail.com
- Irena Olender from Subud Palo Alto irenawrites@earthlink.net
- Ralph Davila from Subud Santa Cruz davila.ralph@gmail.com
- Suryadi Mai from Subud Los Angeles solar@tsm-architects.com
- Sanderson Morgan from Subud Arcata sandsage@gmail.com
To complete this introduction we each have added a short biography with a picture to this newsletter, so that you can have a sense of who we are. You will be able to find these at the end of this Newsletter.
NEXT, we want to SHARE some of OUR WORK with you. Our term started in the end of January 2010 after the World Congress and will continue until the next World Congress. During the past six months we prepared for our work at the Congress and supported the regional committee and the Congress committee in their work. Of course this work is continuing, since the new Congress chair, Andrew Morgan, is already working on developing your regional Congress for 2011. And, our hard-working regional committee is always busy taking care of the region’s finances and Subud houses, so that we all have a safe and stable place to practice the latihan. We so appreciate their hard work!
Aside from supporting the committees the main body of our work is concerned with supporting the latihan in the region and furthering its development. To that end we have started to make contact with regional members who have requested our assistance, and we are doing regular latihan with some of those. In the future we hope to make contact with every Subud member who for some reason does not belong to a local group. We have scheduled a regular regional latihan every third Thursday of the month so that there is a regular latihan for everyone. Each of these latihans will be announced on the Subud Cal Events e-mail.
We would like most of this work to be informed by our testing. We have felt a great spiritual need in the region, and therefore we want to do everything possible to help deepen the latihan, and to strengthen the personal and spiritual connections of all members with each other. We are making ourselves available for kejiwaan activities at different centers if so requested. In the immediate future we are planning a kejiwaan weekend for the Ojai/Santa Barbara group, for the Monterey group, for the San Joaquin Valley group and for the San Diego group. Some of these kejiwwaans might be open to the larger membership, and, if so, you will be notified. We also hope that fun, friendship and community will play an important role during those events. We also feel that supporting the local helpers is crucial for the deepening and growth of the latihan. Therefore we will work towards encouraging younger members to become helpers, and we hope to be available for helper development as well.
We hope this message has given you a sense of the work that we are doing. If you have any concerns, or would like to make a suggestion or request, please do not hesitate to contact us.
With love, blessings and peace,
For your Regional Helper dewan,
Irena Olender
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Deanna was born in Minnesota and has wonderful early childhood memories of times at her Norwegian grandparents farm there. When she was 7 years old, her family moved to Mountain View, California, where they stayed with her other grandmother in a new development one block off El Camino. Behind their home were orange and apricot orchards as far as the eye could see.
Deanna grew up mostly in Redwood City, California, with a brief sojourn in Cloverdale. She was opened in Palo Alto in 1971 and then moved to San Francisco. Moving back to Palo Alto after 5 years she was made a helper in that group. As single persons in Subud in the 70s, she and her Subud friends were all a little rebellious, but still loved the latihan very much and had wonderful, strong latihans.
In the mid-1980s she went to England were she lived and worked in Anugraha, first in marketing and then in the conference office. After 3 years her time with Anugraha was finished. After a stunning two months on Java, she ended up back in the United States where she met her husband Daniel. They were married in Woodstock, Vermont.
Deanna, Daniel and all Daniel’s children moved to Virginia after a year so that Deanna could take training from the “Association Montessori Internationale” located in Washington DC.Virginia is where they raised their youngest son and their daughter and spent most of their married life. Their oldest son ended up in Virginia as well. Virginia is also the place, where Deanna taught Montessori school for many years. True to a prediction from Lutfi O’Meagher at Anugraha, Deanna “retired to the relative obscurity of the Shropshire countryside”, except that the countryside turned out to be in Virginia, rather than in Shropshire. Part of the obscurity was also the fact, that she left Subud off and on over a 10-year period. She attributes this mostly to the pressures of raising children, being relatively far from a Subud group and her discouragement with Subud’s lack of success in the world.
About six years ago she returned to Subud after a wonderful trip to revisit Norway and England with her daughter, Madeleine, and her husband, Daniel. At first she felt a bit disoriented and didn’trecognize many old friends, but now she feels she has grown enormously over the past 6 years and is grateful for the incredible blessings and guidance she has received.
Deanna is the mother of one daughter and four step children who are all wonderful. She and Daniel returned to California in 2008 and now live in Santa Barbara, where Daniel works as a contractor and builder, and Deanna has embarked on her new career as a landscape designer. They have three grandchildren and one more on the way.
Deanna looks forward to getting acquainted or reacquainted with the members of Subud California and feels ready and happy to do whatever she can to be a useful regional helper.
top IRENA OLENDER
Irena was born in 1941 on the island of Java in Indonesia, Her parents named her Beatrijs. The start of World War II brought the Japanese occupation to Indonesia, and, together with her mother and two older brothers, she spent three years in several Japanese concentration camps in Java. At the same time her father was imprisoned as a slave laborer for the Japanese in a P.O.W. camp at the infamous Burma Railroad.
These experiences had a profound impact on her family and Irena’s life. Even though her immediate family all survived, her paternal grandmother and her father’s two brothers all died in the Japanese camps. For a while her family was in chaos and completely impoverished. Another brother was soon born, but her parents’ marriage did not survive. After the divorce her mother remarried, and Irena’s stepfather, also a camp survivor, took over the responsibility for bringing up the children. The arrival of her half-brother and half-sister rounded out the large family with a total of six children. Because of the chaotic political situation in Indonesia, the family bounced back and forth between Indonesia and The Netherlands, and lived in many different places in both countries.
Irena became a spiritual seeker at a young age, also because she needed to make sense out of the diverse religious backgrounds of her parents, her family and her environment. As a child and teenager she developed two rather contradictory notions of God. On the one hand she had been taught about the authoritarian God, ready to throw people into hell. On the other hand she knew and felt a Presence, whose Love and Grace revealed itself in the harmony and tenderness of music, and in the wild beauty of Kalimantan or the peace of a Dutch seascape. She was blessed enough to realize that the latter perspective was closer to the truth, but she searched for a way to resolve this dichotomy. This made her deeply curious about the variety of people’s religious experience and its effect on personality and she ended up studying philosophy and psychology when she attended Leiden university in The Netherlands, where she became committed to an interfaith perspective early on in her academic and social life. She finally found out about Subud many years later through a friend, and was opened in Palo Alto in 1992; however, she had been spontaneously opened about a year earlier, when she was exploring Jewish spirituality.
Irena came to the USA in 1966 as a participant in a Fulbright Exchange program at the University of Michigan. She met her husband Irving there, and remained in the USA to be with him. They chose to settle in Los Gatos, California, where Irving opened a Medical practice in OB-Gyn, and Irena had a part time psychotherapy practice. They have been married for 42 years, and have two adult married sons and two lovely grandchildren living in the same area. Irena feels very grateful for the gift of stability that God gave to her and her family in her adult life. It was also a great blessing for her, when her husband was also opened in Subud in 2005.
Irena is deeply grateful for the gift of the latihan, and the guidance, grace and healing it has brought to her life. The grace of feeling a direct connection with God validated her deep wish to embrace all religions as a path to God, in spite of the pernicious strife between their outer structures. She also received the gift of knowing her true nature as a Peacemaker, and learned to love and forgive even the Japanese. During this work she was given her Subud name “Irena”, which means “Peace”.
Irena has been a local helper in Subud Palo Alto for ten years. This is her first time as a regional helper and she is very happy to be allowed to serve in this way and give back to Subud. She looks forward to meeting her Subud brothers and sisters in the region and hopes that we all can work together to strengthen the latihan.
top RALPH DAVILA
Ralph is a native Californian opened in Los Angeles in 1968. He is married for almost 40 years to Luzita, who is also opened. They have four kids and one granddaughter.
Ralph has spent most of his Subud life in various committee positions with various groups in the U.S., not so much as a Helper. Ralph has worked in or owned various Subud Enterprises, and lived in a Subud Community, He is currently living in Santa Cruz, California.
Ralph’s media career began as the Business Manger for a Country/Rock band. He later moved on to his own business of marketing, sales and distribution of magazines to all the major retailers in the U.S. During that same time he acquired a bookstore newsstand. Next he went to a non-profit media reform organization, whose purpose was to expand the power and influence of independent magazines. Ralph is now scheduling interviews for prominent Guests on internet radio shows, syndicated talk shows, and national radio programs that are on commercial and public stations.
Ralph is very grateful for the Latihan. Following the guidance has kept him out of a great deal of trouble and made it possible for him to know many Subud Brothers and Sisters both personally and professionally. The grace and gratitude that comes with doing the Latihan is not to be denied.
For fun and peace of mind Ralph listens to music, builds projects at Burning Man, camps out, and travels to faraway places.
top SURYADI MAI
Suryadi was born in 1948 in what is now North Vietnam. In 1954 Vietnam was divided in two parts. The North became communist, and The South became a republic.
Suryadi’s family evacuated from the North to the South in order to escape the communists in that same year. Suryadi was baptized after his birth, but soon after that, when he was 3 months old, his parents separated. He was raised by his grandmother, and became a Biddjost.
He had no idea of who or what God might be, but since a young age, he always prayed to a higher power for protection and guidance.
In 1969, he came to know Subud through his friend Hoan Toan, and Prio Hartono in Saigon opened him in the same year during Prio’s third visit to Vietnam.
In April 1975 Saigon fell to the communists, and Suryadi became one of the first boat people escaping the communists. A group of 29 Subud members, including Suryadi and seven Subud children, managed to pay a small boat owner to transport them all across the south sea to Thailand. On the way there, they were picked up by a Thai fishing boat and brought to Songkhla, a city in the south of Thailand. There they managed to make contact with Subud Thailand.
Subud Thailand informed Bapak about their situation. Bapak then asked the Subud brotherhood to help the group of Subud boat people.
In June 1975, Subud Austria was successful in helping them to be accepted by the Austrian government as refugees. They became members of the Viennese group, and became part of the Subud life of the group while adjusting to life in Austria. Suryadi felt fortunate to be able to see Bapak several times when Bapak came to visit Austria or came to a Subud world congress.
Suryadi graduated in 1974 with a Master’s Degree of architecture from the University in Saigon. In 1979 he earned another Master’s Degree of architecture in Austria and became a licensed architect. He then had an opportunity to design and manage projects in different European countries.
In 1991 he immigrated with his wife and three children to the USA. They settled down in California for two years, and then moved back to Austria in 1993.
In August 1997, after he was divorced, he retuned to the USA alone to attend the Subud world congress in Spokane. He then settled in California and has remained there up until the present time. In America he had to start all over again in his profession to earn California credentials and to become a licensed architect. He currently has a practice in Orange County. He is now living with his wife Minh-Tu, whom he quite unexpectedly met at the Subud world congress in Austria.
Suryadi became a helper in 1996 in Austria. He feels his life has been an interesting journey with much purification. He thanks God everyday for all the hardships that made him become the person he is today and help him grow into his true self.
He prays, that God may give him guidance in everything he does as regional helper, so that he may contribute and give back to Subud.
top SANDERSON MORGAN
Sanderson was born in 1945 in San Diego, California. His father was in the Air Force and his mother was an elementary school teacher. As a result of his fathers military career he grew up all over the United States. He has one brother, Sebastian, a member of the Subud California at Sonoma center.
Sanderson is very fortunate to have been a Subud member since 1999. Now in his first term as a Regional Helper, Sanderson has served as the Men’s Helper for Subud California at Arcata for six years. Prior to that he served two terms on the California Regional Council.
Since being opened he has found Subud to be a spiritual practice that is both immensely rewarding and uniquely challenging. The whole milieu of Subud history and culture interests him and he is especially fascinated by the phenomenon and influence of the latihan upon people’s lives. He is enormously thankful that Bapak felt to gift the latihan to humanity and that he devoted his life to our wellbeing.
Sanderson has recently “retired” and is an emeritus Professor of Art at Humboldt State University where he taught courses in Art Museum and Gallery Practices, and in Drawing, and, also served as the University Gallery Director for 30 years. Prior to that he worked at the University Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley now the Berkeley Art Museum. He was educated at the Academy of Art College and Lone Mountain College, San Francisco. Before that he served with the topographic engineers in the U.S. Army.
Currently he works occasionally as a consultant for museum related practices. However, a serious and concentrated studio practice is more interesting to him at this time, so that he can become the artist he almost became before choosing to immerse himself in a career of art museum work and teaching and raising a family.
He is the father of three wonderful adult children and grandfather of two grandchildren. He is now unmarried, exploring retirement and currently residing in Eureka, California.
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