Click on the links below, and get acquainted with these opportunities for fulfillment that are awaiting the power of your energy, passion and gifts.
An old saying we don't hear anymore, was that one should 'Use it, or loose it'. So if by chance, the daily grind of containing your genius and suppressing all that you know you can be, in order that you can fit in with the American scheme of things ....if the drain of succumbing to an existence designed and imposed, by people with a far smaller understanding and vision of the possibilities for Life has finally got you fed up.......it might mean, that it's time to broaden your horizons.
And by broaden your horizons, I mean expand your gaze. Look up, look out, and look within.
Look up and see that there are places in the world where what you know, and what you can do, would be very very welcome and appreciated. Even the smallest of your talents and skills, would make some in the world regard you as a magi, a wizard, shaman, healer, a great god or goddess bringing wholeness, harmony and light. The books that your children and grandchildren's schools throw out each year, would make hundreds, maybe thousands sing your praises, if you collected them and sent them to these organizations that I'm going to direct you to.
The clothes you no longer wear, the over the counter medicines, the 99 cents store cleaning, food, school supplies....my God, ....the bounty that drips from your hands, my People, can insure that prayers of thanks and love will be sung for you and yours long after you're gone. The chances of achieving immortality in America is slim, but there are places in the world, where the minds and hearts are not so cluttered with empty distractions. There, your impersonal kindness, would instantly add longevitiy to your legacy.
I'm talking about simple, direct, from your heart, and the sweat of your brow acts that create a circle for one's Soul. All intelligent people know that the Human Race, began in Africa. And for those of us fortunate to still wear the badge of first People thru our appearance, how particularly wonderful, to be a part of the curve, that directs the present evolution of humanity back to it's source.
You all know that I find Bush, and his infantile behaviour boring. But I have found my liberation. When I lift my eyes, and look out....I breathe in the power of the expanding Universe, and so I let my gaze expand, and I look beyond the shores of America. My name originated from the Nubian Kingdom of Meroe, which was centered in today's troubled Sudan, so even before Darfur and annual droughts brought our attention to Sudan, I've kept my eyes on that part of the world. Today, however, there was quite an inspiring story about one of the 'Lost Boys' of Sudan in the national news. The story follows below my thoughts.
I had a idea I wanted to share with Salva Dut, the Water For Sudan founder, so I went to my Wildlife Direct.org. site seeking some information. This is the site, where I follow the situation at Virunga National Park in the Congo. It's a great place to keep abreast of how the conflicts and fighting in the DRC is affecting the endangered Mountain Gorillas, the rangers and their families, and the villagers that live inthe region. (Scroll thru my earlier blogs for more information on this situation if you're interested.)
Any way, today, I found a new link on the site called the Virunga Youth Alliance, and boy did I find a new world. Please click on the link to read about this new grass roots group that is being developed by the concerned local people to educate the children on the importance of having a positive understanding about the endangered gorillas that they share habitat with. By the time I was finished reading down the page, I'd really been emotionally moved with all there is that I would love to be so much more involved with in our world.
So I'm sharing these links with you. Perhaps you might also feel excited and motivated to get involved.
One thing more.....I notice in the photos of both of these sites, there are plenty of our non-melaninated family members supporting, and even in the Congo, in the midst of a war, people come from Europe and volunteer, and get a chance to have extraordinary experiences both with the animals and the people that live there. Sadly I have not seen one black face from America in all the months I've been following the Congo situation, nor did I see any of us surrounding and supporting the brothers from Sudan with their project.
We've got to get out there in the world more. That's all I can say.......Don't believe the hype.
Click on these links, and find out what the Water for Sudan Organization and the Virunga Youth Alliance are all about, and as you're reading, pay attention to your inner feelings. Notice if there is anything that arises from within you, desiring to be a part of these worthy efforts.
I love you and appreciate all that you already do.....I just hold this big impression of how capable, intelligent and wonderful you are......and I want you to enjoy Being all of that.
......I also know just how needed You are, in the world.
As one of my heros, the late Reginald Lewis entitled his book, " Why Should white guys have all the fun?"
Kenkte
Ex-'Lost Boy' Brings Wells to Sudan
Apr 13, 1:09 PM (ET)By BEN DOBBIN
ABILNYANG, Sudan (AP) -
Every day, Manut Ngor Koot leads his family's cow for miles across the southern Sudan plains to a murky swamp that serves as his village's chief source of water. The cow is balky and has a limp. Looking after her is time-consuming, often frustrating.
The little boy's routine is about to change.
In a few weeks, he'll be taking a shorter walk in the opposite direction to attend school for the first time. There, in a stand of trees, a 260-foot-deep bore-hole is being drilled, endowing isolated Abilnyang and its more than 1,600 inhabitants with a perpetual supply of safe drinking water.
For most everyone here, the hand-pump well is an unimagined bounty, a magnet of vitality in a semiarid nook of Africa. Already, a two-room primary school is being built a hundred yards away, and a market hawking maize and sorghum, fish, salt and honey is sure to follow within a year.
Resting under a fig tree in 123-degree heat, drilling crew chief Salva Dut spies a sparkle in Manut's eyes. Considering his own passage from war-frayed youth to American immigrant as one of the rescued "Lost Boys of Sudan," Dut understands a thing or two about wondrous possibilities.
"You never know what person will change the world someday, maybe in a corner of this bush," he says. "It's very important for us to do this hardship work ... to show them the path where they could go."
Veiled in dust and wearing a shredded black polyester shirt with roughly scissored sleeves, Manut answers brightly when asked why he's eager to go to school.
"I want to learn to be a bicyclist!" he says in his tonal Dinka dialect.
"He sees that the people who own bicycles are educated," Dut explains with a laugh, reaching out to pat Manut's shoulder as a dozen youngsters gather around.
None can read nor even tell their age, but they sense a profound shift in their lives.
Arac Deng is 11 or 12, perhaps three years older than Manut, and suddenly able to cast aside the typical girl's all-day grind of collecting water from distant ponds that teem with parasites and are quickly becoming shallow and stagnant midway through the dry season.
Arac is determined to speak English, which replaced Arabic as the preferred language of instruction in schools when southern separatists negotiated a treaty ending Africa's longest-running civil war in 2005.
"When you speak well, people choose you to be a leader," says Arac, who wants to be a doctor.
Contaminated water is a major contributor to illness and shortened lives in southern Sudan, where an estimated 2.2 million died during the 21-year war, many from hunger and disease. Another 4 million were displaced, including 17,000 or more children who trudged to refugee camps in neighboring countries.
In 1995, Dut was among the first of 3,800 mostly orphaned Lost Boys resettled in the United States. He learned English, went to college and worked part-time as a church clerk in Rochester, N.Y.
When Dut discovered in 2001 that his father, Mawien, had survived not only the war but stomach surgery to remove Guinea worms and schistosomes contracted from infected water, he knew right away how to help. Among just a handful of now-grown Lost Boys to return with a humanitarian project, he spends half his year in Africa, half raising funds in America for his Rochester-based Water for Sudan charity.
Vast swaths of Dut's homeland, not least his native Warap state in the central hinterland, were bombed, burned and looted, the bodies scavenged by hyenas and vultures and left to rot.
Although the war ended in stalemate - Sudan's government in the Muslim north shifted its sights to the rebellious province of Darfur in the west - an uneasy peace prevails in this Texas-size region of 8 million mainly Christian and animist people.
Autonomy has produced piecemeal progress. The subtropical south has a predominantly rural, subsistence economy. But it also has oil fields that deliver billions of dollars in revenue to Khartoum, the capital, each year, raising fears that its independence referendum set for 2011 could renew hostilities.
Outside dilapidated, mud-road cities like Juba, bulging with tens of thousands of returning refugees, clean well water is a rarity. A United Nations report in 2001 found that 36 percent of hospital patients in Sudan were infected with parasites.
Dut's destinations are invariably settlements so remote they don't appear on maps, where mud-hut tukels with conical straw roofs are scattered far and wide across the tree-dotted savanna.
In his father's village of Lou-ariik, a bumpy two-hour drive north of here, his first well in 2005 had a transforming effect: A bustling market emerged, and a German charity recently opened a clinic.
In Aliek, 40 miles to the south, a brick-making quarry business immediately sprouted next to a well installed last year, and a large schoolhouse - absent windows and doors - was erected. In a town that typically enrolled 60 students, the new school this year has 566 pupils age 7 and up.
Headmaster Augustino Agoth credits the well: "The water is clean. It protects them from sickness. When they are healthy, they are good students."
Backed by $1 million in donations, Dut has slashed his costs to $8,500 per well by importing drilling equipment from Alabama and Japan. His wells sustain 60,000 people. Abilnyang is 18th on his list, and his 12-man crew hopes to sink 10 to 20 new wells before the rains come in May, leaving roads impassable.
Dut, 33, belongs to southern Sudan's predominant ethnic group, the Dinka. Next year, he'll expand 300 miles eastward to Upper Nile villages inhabited by the rival Nuer tribe. Taking charge of that operation will be fellow refugee Dep Tuany, a hospital aide who runs a Sudanese community center in San Diego.
Abilnyang was promised a well three years ago, and the crew's arrival releases ripples of joy. Dozens of people come by to help daily, some clearing tall grass where scorpions and snakes nestle, others gathering basketfuls of rocks that are pounded into gravel to make a concrete well platform.
"We need the well desperately. With it, everything will start. There will be no more hunger," exults former soldier Ayok Thiep, the village's police chief. His "jail" is a nest of thorn bushes and brambles where cattle thieves, adulterers and other troublemakers are forced to sit for hours in the baking heat.
For many, the prospect of a school - built by villagers repaid with cows - is even more exhilarating.
"I will teach the word of God and Oxford English and math," says Charles Wantok, 42, who expects 60 children to attend classes six mornings a week beginning in May.
Like Manut's father, Tong Gang Reec is a policeman in the town of Gogrial, a three-day walk away. Home on leave for three days, dressed in a blue uniform and carrying a Kalashnikov rifle, he says he'll happily pay to have his daughter and two sons go to school.
"The way I look at education, it's just beautiful," he says.
Dut's first well of the season meets the usual setbacks - blown tires and gaskets, a well-wall cave-in. In the meantime, Abilnyang hums to its wild-country rhythms: Boys drive goats and cattle to graze, girls gather firewood and water, mothers pound grains they've planted and harvested.
Despite the bucolic setting, natural perils abound. One moonlit night, while the horizon glows orange from a bonfire dance, a possibly rabid leopard mauls five goats. And while immunity to bacteria-laden water seems high, villagers tell of periodic bouts of severe stomach aches and diarrhea.
When the drill finally hits its mark after three days, villagers fill gourds and plastic jerrycans for their first taste of cool aquifer water that has flowed far beneath their feet all their lives.
"When are we going to see the fish come out?" jokes Mathuk Matong, the village chief.
Even an ashen-faced boy with suspected tuberculosis who's been coughing up blood for three days cracks a smile as he sits wrapped in a blanket next to his praying mother. He wears a bright green shirt, a gift sent with Dut from a soccer club in suburban Rochester.
"I feel happy when the people are happy," the chief declares as a group of men sit on their haunches sipping a celebratory sorghum brew. Now, he ventures, the well might attract an extra teacher or even a Western aid group.
For years, "nobody came here, not even government officials," one of his deputies grumbles.
While the future conjures an abundance of needs - from somehow acquiring books and chalkboards to someday funneling the brightest students to more advanced town schools - Dut thinks a barrier is broken.
"They're catching up with the world," he says. "They need someone to open the door for them, it's the only thing they need. And from there, they will do the rest."
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Water for Sudan http://www.waterforsudan.org/index.html
Virunga Youth Alliance http://rumangaboyouth.wildlifedirect.org/
Wildlifedirect.org http://gorilla.wildlifedirect.org/
