The more time I’ve spent in the states, the more apparent it becomes to me that America is bought and sold. To be honest, I liked Obama. I worked hard to get him elected. I keep hoping that he will stand up one of these days. I really hoped that he would bring change but in my opinion, such change been marginal at best and at the hands of corporations. I mean really when the Wisconsin governor is trying to break up people’s ability to collectively bargain, which should be flat wrong as also echoed by the thousands marching in the streets of Wisconsin, where is Barak Obama?
It’s disheartening to get emails from safe food advocates whose writing is almost in disbelief at what President Obama has let pass in regards to GMO crops. We also have bills alive in Congress that would strip the EPA of all regulating abilities. The idea that corporations will self regulate has hurt us again and again. I certainly do not mean to put this on Obama, he has done a decent job. And you know what, its not Obama’s kingdom that I submit to. There is something bigger and greater here.
I/ we need to continue to do our part, to challenge the injustices hampering humanity. Right now foreign aid is on the chopping block. This is a fraction of what the government spends but is vital for the survival of millions. Please call and urge your representatives to not cut it.
I know this was sort of an incoherent ramble but it just hurts. It hurts to see where were going. We must stand and not get trampled corporations.
(Tom Morello of RATM in solidarity with Wisconsin Unions)
(Matt Taibbi and my hero Amy Goodman having a good chat about the realities of Wall Street)
I’m semi stealing this from Eugene Cho’s blog at God’s politics but great ideas should spread. It’s great that we have Martin Luther King Day and many people engage in service and helping others but especially as of lately, I think many people are trying to own him as their own. From Glenn Becks rally last year to just a few days ago, a Pentagon official declaring that he believes that MLK would have been in favor of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Dr. King is one of my heroes and I believe he was doing a tremendous job to articulate Jesus’ call bring heaven on earth and I think a lot of people are missing his whole message
When reading his words and hearing his speeches, Dr. King had many powerful things to say. Especially later in his career when he expanded from civil rights to economic justice, caring for the poor and protesting against the war in Vietnam, undoubtedly put his life more at risk.
MLK was a preacher and loved God. He spoke openly about his faith. It motivated him to act. That’s part of who he is.
Many folks know him for his push for equal right but he pushed for so much more. He also cared deeply for the poor, organizing the Poor People’s campaign. This care for the poor was confused with Communism and all of his calls were monitored by the FBI.
He was adamantly opposed to the war in Vietnam. So much so that he even suggested bringing wounded Vietnamese to America for medical treatment.
I will let him speak for himself
“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
“Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time: the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.”
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction ... The chain reaction of evil -- hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars -- must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.”
“This oft misunderstood, this oft misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate -- ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: "Let us love one another, for love is God. And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love." "If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us."4Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day.”
“When our days become dreary with low hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe, working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”
Gardens are great. As I have mentioned before, growing a garden is beneficial in many ways. You get to eat your own food with hopefully close to zero carbon footprint and it tastes better. You also get to be closer to nature and I think there is something magical about watching your own food grow. With my time in Rwanda, we had tons of cows around and using cow manure is a great fertilizer. This was an easy way to grow a great healthy garden. Many folks in America don’t have a bunch monster cows roaming around their house so other fertilizers have to be used.
This is where composting comes in. Instead of using either healthier peat fertilizer, which is harvested unsustainably or chemical fertilizers which will seep chemicals into your fresh fruits and veggies and runoff into streams, create compost!
Composting is easy and near free.
How you do it? (well vermicomposting)
Buy a Rubbermaid container, drill about 30-40 1/8 inch holes on the top, bottom and around the sides.
Fill with bedding, which can be shredded cardboard or paper. You will also want to dampen the bedding. Then you throw in all you throw in all your food waste, well not dairy or meat but most everything else, just put it in the bin.
Last and not least you got to get your worms. Red wigglers are apparently the best. They work fairly fast. If you throw 100-200 worms in there, you should be fine. That’s it, just keep feeding them organic waste.
Composting is a really easy, cheap and will create some of the best fertilizer. You will literally be taking what is straight waste that could go to a landfill thus creating more waste. So you are cutting down on creating more toxic leachates and producing more methane for a super healthy fertilizer for your garden.
Even if you live in an apartment, you can still vermicompost. It doesn’t smell and you can compost with whatever size box you want to.
So there are ups and downs about being home. One up is that I am now really connected to information. I guess people have the choice of what information they want. I was flipping through the channels the other day and found the gem Bridalplasty. Yes, it’s just as bad as it sounds. Women compete for plastic surgery before their wedding. There are redeeming things on TV though. If you have never watched it before, I would highly suggest PBS’s Frontline. It’s a great hour-long documentary series about all different topics. This week’s episode was about Todd Willingham who was executed by the state of Texas. Days before his execution new evidence came forth that proved his innocence. He was executed anyway. This caused quite a stir in Texas for a few days but eventually went away just like many other injustices.
I don’t know if other people felt the same way but when you see or read about such injustice it makes you want to cry out. This man lost all 3 of his little girls to this fire and then is wrongfully accused and killed by the state. It’s really hard to take. A question still remains for me though. Why do we have the death penalty? Seriously? Why do we have the death penalty?When did we feel it was our right as human beings to take others lives? I’m not even going to go into the religious part of the death penalty but does it not just seem wrong to you? If you’re hardcore about eye for an eye justice, does it make you happy? Research has shown that by having the death penalty does nothing to deter someone from commiting a crime. Could you be a person who financially thinks the death penalty saves money? It doesn’t, it’s much more expensive to execute someone than to jail them for life. Reducing the number of people in jails (this is a really great article, I would suggest it)? We have over 2 million people in jails in America, execution is a drop in the bucket compared to number of people in jail. The victims? This is tough but we must be bigger than those who do wrong, there is a time to turn the other cheek.
"We no longer have a choice my friends, between violence and nonviolence. It's either nonviolence or nonexistence." MLK Jr.
I just don’t know why we still have the death penalty. It seems unnecessarily ruthless and wrong. If you feel this way, please do something about it.
Much is already being done. Over the last few years, the amount of executions nationwide has gone down. We went from 56 in 2009 to 48 in 2010, these are good trends. Let’s keep the momentum going.
I’m struggling to find a good website to get people started on ways to speak out about the death penalty but here is a start.
I saw it coming but didn’t. I’ve been ‘home’ (amurica) for over a week and have a million things to write about without the ability to do so. I can’t compute the vast differences from such rawness to processed life. I think it comes down to choices. It’s the choices that have really set things apart. For a year, the choices were slim, you go to a restaurant and have 2 choices, you ask for one and they don’t have it so you have to get the other. Your options on things to do are quite limited. This is quite a contrast to life in America. The choices have been overwhelming. From 20 different types of cheeses at the grocery store to restaurants having menus and actually serving the things on them. This is all quite a contrast for me. But I am only speaking for myself right now, not the 4+ million living on $0.50 a day in Rwanda.
It’s their choices or lack thereof that I can’t get out of my head. Yeah my choices might have been slim but for millions around the world their choices are impossible. Rwanda has done a decent job of trying to provide affordable healthcare and good education for many but for those in crippling poverty, choices still have to be made. Choices like buying clean water for the family one day OR paying for a child who is sick to go to the hospital. Saving up for 2-3 weeks to buy a bed net to try to reduce the chances of a kid getting malaria or spending a few extra francs at the market to try give the kids some fruit or vegetable to diversify their strictly cornmeal diet. Trying to reduce hospital visits is hard and expensive. When kids grow the added expense of school fees and the loss of a family member to help fetch water or help on the family plot is hard. Life can unimaginably tough.
There is a lot of hope though. Many of these families work very hard and care deeply about their families and children and if given the chance, they can greatly improve the situation their family is in. Non-profits and governments are trying to invest more and more in micro-finance and micro-savings programs to help people not have to make such hard decisions. Nobody should have to decide between clean water or a sick child, school fees or a squandered future. The inequity is large in our world of 20 different cheeses but a lot can be done and the potential is huge.
This could be really boring for 90% of people but if you’re interested in development or you donate money to any of the big hitter non-profits, micro-savings could be where a fair amount of money is headed. In the past 30 years, micro-finance has sky-rocketed bringing small loans and big opportunities for millions that were either unable to get credit or enslaved to loan sharks with unreachable interest rates. Everyone is getting involved in micro-finance, including governments. Some micro-finance is good, some bad and some ugly, depending on the country. Rwanda has its own micro-finance bank called Umarango Sako. Apparently they have given out a lot of loans and are pushing a majority of the population to join the formal economy and participate in business and get a bank account. According to other NGO folk, Rwanda is doing a decent job handling micro-finance but others aren’t handling it so well.
So to join the Umarango Sako micro-finance community you need 10,000 francs. That’s the equivalent of around $20. I know a Jackson seems like chump change but in a country where close to 60% of the population lives on less than $0.50 a day, 20 dollars seems impossible for most. This is where micro-savings comes in, to help the poorest of the poor. Similar to micro-finance, micro-savings joins a group of 12-15 very vulnerable folks, predominately women, and together, they create a savings club. Each week, each member brings what they can and buys shares of entire savings collected. The price of a share is determined by the group. This can range from 500-1500 francs ($1-$3). In joining the club they are also asked to donate a little bit to a social fund to help pay for an orphans school fees or widow’s funeral or a cause agreed upon by the group. After three months of growth the group chooses one person to give a loan to. They (the hard core people at Care and other non-profits who wrote the painstakingly detailed manual) have learned that most people in the group end up helping each other out to start a small business or pay for something much needed to improve their family life.
Most micro-savings projects are still in pilot stages but from what people are telling me, results have been overwhelmingly positive.
It now just depends on how it spreads. Each non-profit has to tailor similar micro-savings projects for each country. 3 years ago, Niger was the first test country for micro-savings and since then projects have been popping up all over Niger. Rwanda is in its second year where non-profits are wrapping up their pilot stages and starting to operate full scale.
I highly doubt that if you’re reading my blog that you believe that all poor people are lazy and they should help themselves but if you are, check it, people helping themselves. Besides education, people are lifting themselves out of poverty without any outside financial help.
Poor folks aren’t powerless or voiceless, many just aren’t given an opportunity to rise up. I don’t know about you but I love a good empowerment story and I think micro-savings is going to be full of them. So share the story of micro-savings and if you got a couple bucks, maybe give a few to a non-profit engaging in micro-savings.
