Humanyms

Who Represents Who?

I like to do media watch. What exactly is being skipped or said, or assumed. The juxtapositions of articles and photos that lead the mind into what the page didn’t actually say..the gaps the shadows fall into. Not that I’ll talk about that precisely, more the well-intentioned. For example as Big Noise points out, well-meaning disability simulations mislead throw one in without orientation of coping strategies, encourage pity and confusion rather than show people as capable, and thriving. Michael J Fox points out that pity is a dangerous mental place. It’s very close to dismissal and abuse and far from equality.

Big Noise also draws attention to a disability ad of actors without disability respresenting the blind, etc. Can someone who is not in a chair portray someone who is? Why not just cast an actor who is in a chair?

A new movie is in town. Canadian, and embracing subjects of adoption and fish-out-of-water when childless get a child foist on them by circumstance. Fairly classic scenario. To its advantage it represents the gay couple as tough sports guys. They are hapless when they inherit a boy who is in the effeminate fabulous range. I think it’s caricatured enough all around to annoy me personally were I not in the mood for fluff, but in the discussion forum of Breakfast with Scot people ask why not real gay actors instead of gayface?

Does it matter? Lesbian women men have played straight women. Is that any different?Shouldn’t everything be

• gender-blind
• color-blind
• sexuality-blind
• age-blind
• ability-blind
• accent-blind
• height-blind

for casting anyway? If you’re a good actor, you should be able to play whatever you could pass as, right? Charlie Chan was played by someone not Asian. (Yet we aren’t likely to do that again, are we?) How sensitive is reasonable? What is harmful representation and to whom? Tangentially, do dolls reflect or teach females roles?

Speaking of representation, Miss Ability. It is intended as beauty contest to portray that physically disabled people are beautiful too. The disabled also can also be classically beauty knock-outs obeying the requisite gendered getup, height, weight, proportions. Is this progressive? asks The Gimp Parade. Does it represent the disabled?

Quote: “Women, like any other minority, have learned to identify with heroes who don’t look like them or have the same genitalia. We’ve learned to look beyond the structure of a body and instead dive further into characteristics. I just want the same opportunity for straight, white men, that’s all….” – Thomai

New at the bookstore: Muslim Girl World, has positive images of females who, brace yourself, are in a magazine are permitted to keep their clothes on and talk about their goals and work. Its target audience is women and yet nothing on how to woo or wow or entrap a man, and isn’t brittle pride of a $ucce$$full woman who beat the odds, is a successful entrepreneur (and proud single mom). Muslim World Girl even addresses the obsolete idea of ethnicity as a monolithic definition of self. It showcases a diversity of the diaspora, so needed in a time when media is still at the cartoon-phase of portraying people who respect Islam. About time to see that.

Link: Qu’ran Miracles Encyclopedia has a lot of articles.

Progressameter: (Glad game under any other name would taste as chocolatey…) This day is going fairly well. I got the Christmas letter written and printed. (I wasn’t going to do one but it’s back by popular demand.) I think it’s amusing. Hopefully family will think so too. The assembly line of cards is started. I got my new eye prescription ordered. I found the (psst, no one tell mom) hard to find round tablecloth for parents. I managed not to spill any more water into my printer. I waited out a line at the post office to buy stamps. (Apparently doing that earlier in the month would have been a good idea. There are no off-hours this time of year.) I got a couple goodies in the mail. The re-shod shoes are picked up. Some email is caught up. I managed to eat balanced meals instead of giving into temptation to live on brownies. My desk is still a riotous mess but that’s why there’s tomorrow. That is why there is tomorrow, isn’t it?

Immigration, Factory Economies and Dispute Resolution

Stories to do with immigrants consistantly catch my eye. It’s a sandbox for national, personal and group identities, for the strategies we all need in negotiating distinctions. It’s also a sandpit because any news story relies on a chain of interpreting voices, the invariable misquotes, omissions and so on involved whenever information is related, more so when there is controversy and perceived sides.

In the U.S. there’s a chain of meat-packing plants called Swift in Iowa and Nebraska, among other states. It’s been in the news for the last quarter, for one thing after another. It must feel that interminable to some workers and to some management people as well. To others a piffle of peripheral discomfort. Ronald Huereca brought my attention to the stories.

In July conflict came to a head. Bottlenecks were happening as people stopped work to take prayer breaks. A person was taken as an example and grabbed while praying and fired. There’s obviously some communication breakdown.

Where there could be dialogue there seems to have been two solitudes of walls that don’t cave towards each other far enough to create a new stable form.

The factory has constraints. The workers have constraints. It’s not a random time. Prayer schedules are readily available and can be shared with management as a predictable break time. There’s a range of time for prayer. Breaks have to be coordinated whether accommodating this or not.

True, people generally take shifts to not leave a skeleton crew but this is 120 people out of 1700. If there’s a will…? Practice may have to adapt somewhat for all these people to work together.

Sense started to prevail again in August, when they got a proposed labour agreement so the 120 Somali Muslims can get off the plant line to pray when conscience calls. At least some times of the year. It’s still being worked out.

The vegan-biased-apocalyptic-pessimist part of my mind wonders if any other outcomes could be good in the environment. To me it would be intolerable place to work — a work environment dedicated to killing and sorting meat. The smell of blood must permeate the way a perfume factory or sweet shop sinks into all fibres. Just a month at Tim Horton’s and the constant saccharine smell put me off donuts for more than a decade and counting.

Factories at $12 and $13 an hour of repetitive action has its challenges. Things get complex when unions get involved. It reminds me of my mother’s admonitions to treat my cousins equally, which she equated with fairly and the same. Different needs can require different responses.

On the other hand, it has been a stable slaughterhouse economy, with large scale meat industry, a way of life for over 50 years, and a people that make up a market that has no qualms. (On farm slaughter tends to be illegal in a lot of areas.) It hasn’t imploded physically or socially. One adapts.

There was a lull in the industry. There was an rural diaspora and aging population that meant workers were hard to come by. Since then the employment and community has grown 20%, that article says, due to latinos, buoying up an aging farming community, adding an hispanic festival. Most of the people are legally resettling.

So is it to the better or worse that feds came in for illegal migrant sweeps, and coordinating raids across 6 Swift meatpacking plants, seizing 1300 people?

[C]ritics of the raids–workers, union reps, clergy, community leaders, policy analysts and lawyers–wonder what the high-profile sweep accomplished other than to traumatize a few hundred Latino families and to cost Swift an estimated $30 million in lost production. If anything, it starkly reveals, once again, a federal immigration policy completely detached from economic and social realities.

Mark Grey, director of the Iowa Center for Immigrant Leadership and Integration says, “The game until now has been an elaborate choreography among the employers who need the immigrant workers, the immigrants who want these jobs, the communities who need them, the cattlemen who depend on them and the government whose basic motto has been: Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

There’s more than one underlying problem here. Territoriality, sense of self or country. Some way to assuage the sense of being swamped, at threat or some kind of turned tide of melting intolerance with understanding what underlies that.

At some point do you have to say enough? To meet this zero tolerance with another zero tolerance makes more walls when we need bridges and people crossing them to negotiate new equilibriums for people who persistently feel thrown off balance, agitated and uncomfortable.

Force has a subtext of intimidation and under that is anger and fear. That is what needs to be addressed to address the external shapes of raids or firings. Most people are ambling along. There isn’t overt virulently violent arm-to-arm xenophobia but there could be without dialogue as people withdraw to isolated ignorances.

When there is popular consensus, it is always local, not global. I don’t believe there is any universal. All philosophies at their base have the message of love. That’s a wonderful idea but it skips over and flattens a lot of data. We need all the messy non-jibing data.

I’m rather uncomfortable thinking along these lines of this story and the loaded speech that totters around as if it would force tires falt, not because of the misuse and misunderstanding and polarizations because that I can dismiss as people is funny monkeys but because the bias reinforces what is already my bias. Reading what you agree with is not informing yourself. It is means by which I can harden further into my own way of thinking.

That hardening is precisely the heart of most any problem that underlies conflict. To move beyond where I am I would have to enter what I expect is fear and anger and threat, the default attitudes of NIMBY, of assuming people are lost or wrong or unethical or a them. To do that I need only talk to a few people I knew who are agitated against immigration and enter their volatile inflammatory speech. Except I don’t want to go there since I’ve been there and don’t plan a return visit. But by not reaching I condemn myself to like-minded thinkers and that is always a vulnerable place.

There is a tipping point which can become more of a mass tripping point and people stop seeing things in the round because emotion and details displaces the wider lens of logic. All kinds of things which sound good can coordinate a denial of other frames of reference. All the frames of reference can’t fit into the head at once, but filling one’s mind’s ear with only one perspective displaces many things, including humbleness, the ability to listen and actual, on the ground, hard-peace.

It’s easy when exposing yourself to what you dislike to enter into reserve energy, self-heroism or self-pity or just grind yourself down into a masochistic self-flagellation. I suppose it’s easy enough to do any of that when pushing yourself forward in what you know you like. Perhaps that’s a null factor. What I want to do is see all sides. Sometimes I more pull my hair out than cultivate a head-full of snake eyes that can see in 360 degree panorama. What underlies my desire to stay out of frays but be informed about them, do devils advocacy from arm’s length?

It’s a sort of whetting the mind to see critically, to train myself not to get caught up in the transitory emotions of others or myself, and lose sight of everything but hearsay, to press myself to synthesize for myself.

It’s something I love to do, grapple with dissonance, but I have to remember to not toy with it too much. I can get in cognitive tail spins. When I get a bee in my bonnet like this, from track record I know it can be a displacement indicator — meaning somewhere in my life, something has cropped up that I should address, but will do verbal something more concrete and contained instead, a sort of mental workout. Which is fine is I do get to the thing that’s really bothering me, when that is the case. It gives the subconscious time to work on something else, like doing woodwork allows the brain to solve a math problem by not looking at it for a while. The desire to sort or save the world can come out of a deeper desire to sort of save oneself that gets overextended.

Of course on one level, it is about this explicit level, and exploration of what’s happening out there and what could.

Quotes: “We do not talk — we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests.” — Henry Miller (perish the thought Henry.)

“What is the good of drawing conclusions from experience? I don’t deny we sometimes draw the right conclusions, but don’t we just as often draw the wrong ones?” – Georg C. Lichtenberg, (let that not prevent our tongues from working it out.)

“A man needs self-acceptance or he can’t live with himself; he needs self-criticism or others can’t live with him. – James A. Pike

Attitude Poll of Macleans Magazine

If there is one thing I can say I hate, it’s taboos. And if there’s one thing I love, it’s census data.

Sometimes the two meet. That is “happystance”.

A July 1, 2006 Macleans article is called “How Canadian Are You? The 2006 Canada Day Poll”. It comes from a book called The Boomer factor: What Canada’s Most Famous Generation is Leaving Behind, to be published in the fall of 2006 by sociology professor Reginald Bibby.

In short: Reams and reams of delicious fodder to crunch, even in the summary version.

Numbers don’t give all the motivation and factors that feed in but they give something of an idea. Big national surveys on a regular basis are good thermometers for judging the general picture.

The good news I see is old taboos and scandalous things can become normalized. The downside is that we think we are working hard to form ourselves bright and new, and end up matching the group consensus of millions. (Is independent thought more illusionary than I thought?)

Featured Quote: “A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.” ~ Franz Kafka

more »

Mullings over Privacy and Openness, Local and Global

FYI: This post is going to be cast broad through online privacy, the Hijab and women’s concepts of how they should dress as well as personal boundaries and the concept of purpose of blog for online confessor and how that relates to self-acceptance.

Connections are tangental and explorations are not being corralled to any particular chute. Had ya guessed as much?

Diana Higgins was talking about public vs. private distinctions. Everyone’s cutoff point is different. Do you find it appropriate or neutral, comfortable or scandulous to wear PJs in front of strangers. It is just cloth but yet it’s not in a way.

Some, for want of privacy among other reasons, strip back their blogs of any identifying features, using only an avatar, never using anyone’s real first or last names, present no photos of themselves, no identifying localization details.

Soundtrack: Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire

It is rather like living a life reassigned by the secret service, but without the training, briefings and technical support. It constrains onerously. I want my blog to be as my life is. Which is to say: Everything interconnects. Openness and play and above board are all good. There are many sides to everything.

Cool Chair: by Hannu Kahonen

Industrial designer Hannu Kahonen of Finland designed this chair which folds open 2 ways. One way it is black, the other white. The reversable chair is 25mm thick so 100 chairs can be stored in one cubic meter of space. (found via a pamphlet called “Cool Dozen” of Design Forum Finland)

Soundtrack: Men in Hat’s Pop Goes the World

Privacy and Public Forum
I accommodated the comfort of family who requested I take my mailing address off line but I live under the principle that there is no “private” or “safe” or “hidden”. These are illusions that I am comfortable knowing are illusions.

Locking things away is a game of keep away that says there is something worth stealing. Like wearing a Hijab. Some ladies who wear a hijab do it purely for social convention. Others are modest before men to not distract men, or presumably lesbian women, from the work at hand. Sometimes there is great stunning distracting beauty beneath. Some of this women who conceal do a service to help their message be heard instead of people getting lost in their skin or hair. Some women cover up and in their own judgement, the beauty wouldn’t be so much of an issue. Value is personal and relative.

It still gives a sense of security to know that one can’t be interpreted as flaunting everything you’ve got and therefore inviting someone to take. Of course that dialogues with the feminist edict that everything except the explicit word yes in mind, body,, heart and word means no.

Boundaries and Safety
What are the personal boundaries can be negotiated on a case by case basis. To lock something away, whether it is hair under a scarf, or identity under an online alias, or valuables in a safe, it comes down to the person with the asset and the ethics of who would choose to take or respect boundaries and leave them alone unless they are given.

One may creep about being clever spying on a covered woman from a window or hack a computer to get “private” information. Some things are easier to access but there is no way on earth I could lock away anything physically or digitally.

Soundtrack: Roxanne Potvin’s Your Love Keeps Working on Me

Trust
All I can do is only live in trust that people are in majority trustworthy and occasionally misguided, misintentioned or malevolent but that needn’t concern me because I can handle whatever comes. I’m in life to grow and learn.

There are days when I feel quite topped up enough on the learning front. Thank you very much but get served more. That’s ok too. How many times have I had “more than I could take” and yet, lookie here. I’m still alive and thriving.

My belief is that I do more harm to myself and others with self-protectionism than I could ever fear doing by accepting my limits and imperfections and that I will cry doom sometimes but I get over that too.

The mobius strip of woe-be-gone quaking fear gets old. I am tired of being earnest. I am done with being fearful and attempting to accommodate ad infinitum. It’s dreary and tiresome to be engaged all the time.

I’ve drawn my boundaries in closer. I’m getting older. I can’t bend over backwards like I used to and shouldn’t because there is no end to the amount of acrobatics some will ask of me. It has to be my call. My choice. It doesn’t matter what is asked of me. The answer of me comes from my choice of how to use my energy.

Soundtrack: Sarah Harmer’s Lodestar

Featured Events: Coming every Friday and Saturday in July and August the Centretown Outdoor Movies begins again with Sideways with Sandra Oh, who I am a fan of so that’s a thing to look forward to. Outdoors, under the stars, blanket and pay as you can for movies is a great summer’s evening.

Before then it is Italian Week Ottawa with lots of events. Kids performed a variety show concert tonight. June 16-18 Preston Street is closed. Everything from music including Opera on the 16th, to Ferraris and other Italian cars on the 17th to foot races on the 18th. I’ve been meaning to go for years.

Some people want an anonymous space divorced from their lives. Some want to expand their immediate “tactile lives” (I dislike the concept framing of offline as “real life”. Every moment I’ve breathed has been “real”.)

I could see how confessional-type secret blogs created for the point of un-tabooing, or blasting someone one is best not to blast might want an anonymity shield. The point of expressing freely is lost if one is still afraid of being discovered. There is still a level of veiled taboo and disconnect that means one is not living openly. Which is fine and perhaps necessary as a stage of getting less tender about some precious obsessional pain. Then the sharing in private can become another layer of self-oppression.

Living out loud is the ideal place. It is a skill, cognitive structures as much as social dexterity. It can’t come overnight. It can’t come at all without pressing oneself to accept oneself as imperfect, unsatisfied and asserting acknowledgment that things exist. It is not heaven nor hell. It is multifaceted.

Reading: The Anapanasatu Sutta: A Practical Guide to Mindfulness and Breathing and Tranquil Wisdom Meditation.

Glad Game: Some nice bits of closure. Back story: I have a notebook. The front half is for work notes. Starting from the back are notes from personal and poetry lives. As a contract ends, the two converged with nothing in between.

Mindfulness comes and goes but forgetfulness, that’s funny.

Glad I caught myself before I added to much milk to my cereal, which was in a drinking glass.

Glad I noticed why the mouse wasn’t moving my cursor. Which would be because what I was moving was my cell phone across my desk. lol.

Using a hammer drill takes about 5 seconds to do what took (with a normal drill) about 15 minutes. Growlll. Powerrrr. MmmMm.

The radio song I enjoyed was who? Mel Torme?! I never would have guessed I was listening to that name’s voice.

Oh my! the cat-sitter seems to have wiped the counters and microwave too. And spent 3-4 hours a day with the cat. Cat-sitter must be a pro. I myself can’t stay awake while being catted for over an hour. Big shoes to fill I tell ya. That’s a lot of brushing to live up to. :-O

And the cat wants it now. She has a new word for brush (a sound she’s never made before) and she’s using it liberally since our return. Still I can’t think of a better way to ease down from a day than spend a half hour or so.

Featured Quote “Too much fact can lead people away from the truth.” ~ (scribbled in note margin but I’m pretty sure I am correctly attributing it to James Harbeck at the Ethics Plenary at the Editor’s Conference of Canada on June 11.)

Menu: The outer shell is pretty.

Passion fruit is a realllly good marketing name.

Inside, it jiggles. It’s like a de-saturated, low-flavor, pomegranate. You know how a Montreal-style bagel makes your jaw ache with all that chewing of the dense bread? Same idea but shift the sensation to the tongue as you try to work the pulp off the seeds. Methinks I have a clue where it’s name comes from now. (blush) Could be false etymology of course.

Aga Khan Award for Architecture

The last speaker of the Carleton University Lecture Forum series for the season was Susa OzKan speaking on Contemporary Architecture in the Muslim World on behalf of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture

The Aga Khan Award for Architecture, established in 1977 by His Highness the Aga Khan, recognises examples of architectural excellence that encompass

• contemporary design,
• social housing,
• community improvement and development,
• restoration,
• re-use,
• and area conservation, as well as
• landscaping and
• environmental issues.

He focused on a few sites that represented traditionalism, contextualism, social aid, and modernism
Traditionalism in Islamic architecture has a wide scope since the environments where Islam is practiced are spread world wide in more than 4 dozen nations are officially Islamic and over 1/5 of the world’s people are Muslim. It’s a broad field to pick out the best.

Suza Ozkan pointed to Hassan Fathy (1900-1989) as someone who was exceptional in using traditional mud materials to an expressive plasticity. He perpetuated the living tradition and kept the form that was simple and elegant not drawing attention to itself by ornamentation. He used the solutions of thick walls for insulation, local materials natural, shapes and small high windows for heat circulation and ventilation but brought the form forward with an understated elegance.

Appreciating the social Contextualism of a building is a significant part of architecture as well. In Mopti, Mali, Andre Ravereau built a medical clinic in the local style and materials but how he furthered that contextualization makes it outstanding. Rather than making it a building to the side of a town that people would go to, he made the building into a street, a sort of pedestrian mall integrated into people’s lives. Doctors and being around the clinic would allow going to a clinic being a natural part of routine, not intimidating.

Another way of contextualizing one’s building is how Canadian Ramesh Khosla built the Mughai hotel in Agra, India. His use of successive courtyards, spaces and proportions respect the Islamic tradition of inner courtyards when hotels are often generic worldwide not acknowledging local climate or culture and thoughtlessly subdividing vistas.

Khosla, like the Tanjong Jara Beach Hotel in Kuala Trengganu, Malaysia recognized the site-potential, responding to local heritage of buildings and space, and arranged the hotel so people can use a roof space to look at the Taj Mahal and appreciate their context.

The speaker pointed out that this award however, is not designed to give further accolates to already established prominent architects such as Khosla. It is centred on solutions. The half a million dollar prize is often a talent-finder, specifically the talent for solving social problems through buildings.

For example, a winner of the award came up with an elegant solution for a Primary School in Burkina Faso.

Diébédo Francis Kéré [...] took upon himself the cause of ensuring that his village would not be deprived of a school, and with a group of friends in Germany, Kéré set up a fund-raising association, Schulbausteine für Gando (Bricks for the Gando School). The idea met with a positive response and, having secured finance through the association, Kéré also obtained the support of LOCOMAT (a government agency in Burkina Faso) to train brickmakers in the technique of working with compressed stabilized earth. Construction of the school began in October 2000, carried out largely by the village’s men, women and children.

There is apparently a film made of the making of the school which is structured like this, . One corrugated iron steel roof is suspended above the compressed earth bricks rooms. Heat from the sun hits the roof and the space between it and the inner roofs keep the classrooms shaded and cool. The whole community has ownership of the school.

A similar project in some ways is the Kaedi hospital in Mauritania. Inside it looks like your standard hospital room. It’s unique in some ways. For example. the walls are made from sandbag tubes, filled with sand and coiled, something like making a clay pot.

. The tubes are tied together with jute rope and then the hive of a house is covered with a wire mesh and stuccoed. The otehr unique aspect of the project is that the hospital is distributed over a field where each room can have quiet. Corridors are out of doors under columns of semi baked bricks to direct and sun-shade. Patients come to the visitors who camp outside the hospital so there isn’t a noisy crowd in a room as someone tries to heal. The hospital is laid out in pods on a plant with stem structure. A poor sketch from memory may give you an idea of what I mean.

Using appropriate technology, such as room shapes that faciliate air flow, cooling rather than air conditioning equipment is supported. Using local materials that are cost effective to give more use for function that people want is key. But as importantly, the community is supported, the building is accepted as part of the social fabric.

I must admit, I was more taken with this modern hospital angle, deconstructing it into pods, than by the examples of Modernism such as Biblioteca Alexandria. While amazing that a library on the edge of the water so large can be so meek on the shoreline, not dominating by going down 16 floors, large spaces aren’t my favorite thing really, as much as I love libraries.

Another example of modernism is L’Institut du Monde Arabe where we visited last year. The latter is by architect Jean Nouvel is a hallmark of both contemporary architecture and of public acceptance of a building into identity. 70% of those surveyed in Paris felt proud of the building, that is represented something good as a reflection of themselves. It took icons of Islamic historical architecture, such as the pierced screen look, but made it a mechanical wall that opened and shut as apertures adapting to the amount of sunlight. It is impressive building. Nouvel said of it that he felt inspired by Alfred Hitchcock. By making the space, “They have to feel what I want them to feel.”

Contemporary Islamic architecture takes what is familiar and synthesizes it into something new, such as the emblematic water towers of Kuwait. They reflect an abraction of an oasis and palm trees.

Some of their choices for awards had been controversial since they stretched some people’s notion of what “counts” as architecture. For example the Kumpung Improvement Projects that had as its objective not Architecture, but social housing in impoverished areas. Some clucking went up about this and many other choices because the end results were not rich stylistic masterpieces, showpieces. His answer to that was a quote from Moore, “Instead of complaining they should learn what they are doing wrong”.

To be exceptional architecture it should be economically viable and symbolically satisfying. It must make a difference, not in theology and theory of the art but in lives, such as Grameen Bank.

At the time it was recognized by the Aga Khan Foundation it had enabled tens of thousands to build their own home by microcredit loans of $300 each. To date, that number is up to 300,000 homes. A man’s home is his castle. It may be large or small but that sense of ownership, rightness, makes it grand.

Their site is archiving hundreds of thousands of images and monographs of impressive examples of architecture that is sensitive to history, environment, form, use and users.

Further Featured Links: The Grameen Bank sets up programs where people get micro credit for start up loans. Say, to market weaving, one could market better with a bicycle to transport products. One joins a group of local people who also want a loan. No one needs collateral but everyone supports each other to repay the tiny loan biweekly at very low interest. It is similar to where people set up a group of 5 or 6 people who pool their savings and any can borrow from it in need and repay. Social pressure and trust allows it to work.

The Aga Khan is the 49th person to hold the hereditary title of the leader of Ismaili branch of the Shi’a branch of Islam. He is not only a religious and moral leader but head of an enormous number of organizations for development and humanitarian relief, such as sponsoring people to leave refugee camps in Afganistan, training in seismic-resistant construction in Pakistan, make sustainable health training programs in Tanzania.

The foundation invests in tourism such as supporting groups headed in the right direction such as the Serena Hotel in Mombasa which maintains a sanctuary for indigenous butterflies and also works actively with local residents on a programme to protect sea turtle nesting sites. In Tanzania it is micro-financing insurance against catastrophic loss of crop, or health or bread-winner.

All the economic and educational development goes hands in hand with peace and diversity work.

Movie: OT: Our Town is a documentary about marginalized high school kids being changed by the putting on Thornton Wilder’s play, Our Town, in the process taking ownership of their own town. It was worth the time and a case in point for the advantages of diverse curriculum and extracurricular options in schools.

Lit Link: Diana Higgins has writing prompts

Menu: Tomato mozzarella sandwich on sesame sourdough-rye bread

Word Chain: recind recent, recant recall, calm calamity at nightfall caught by the elbow of fog, gratefulness, gracefulness, fullness, groggy shaken free of nausea, fever soak sheets speak your name, or do they only mouth the shape?