Ophelia Dahl, along with
Paul Farmer and a few other wonderfully committed and other-centered individuals, was one of the co-founders of
Partners in Health. Her mom, whom she just lost a few days ago, was Academy Award-winning actress and apparently ardent PIH supporter,
Patricia Neal. Her dad, whom she lost years before that, was the English author,
Roald Dahl, among whose numerous works was
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the basis for the wildly popular kids’ movie, Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
I just now came across what, for me, was
a really fascinating and poignant article, actually, an excerpt from a new biography about Ophelia’s dad, Roald Dahl. I’ve decided to post it in a shameless effort to bring up the nearly already forgotten, “old news” Haiti, and
to remind you that a lot of us had said that we wanted to be, that we and our respective countries all needed to be with Haiti for the long haul.
And then there’s also Pakistan and the fifteen plus million people displaced by the flooding along with way too many other places and peoples in desperate need of help. Just as a kind of an aside, I found myself, the other day, having to really force myself to make a donation to the International Rescue Committee toward Pakistani aid. And this, from your Kiva Friend who promoted so wholeheartedly here the work of Three Cups’ Greg Mortenson in his work of building schools and other social service-related facilities in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The forcing myself aspect of it came from my realizing that in spite of my really strongly held belief system about us all being a whole whole whole lot more alike than we are different, I nonetheless had been frighteningly, if somewhat unconsciously affected by the media and other bombardment of messages calculated or, at least having the effect of instilling fear about those Muslim, supposedly westerners-hating “others.”
I found myself thinking something along the lines of, “Well, but there are so many other countries, other people who need help, etc. etc.” I really had to go through some pretty crazy internal wrestling and mental gyrations to overcome what I’ve come to realize has been the really insidious impact of all those news stories and speeches that tend to foster a really sad and artificial demarcation between good guy “Us” and scary, horrible, so obviously less than human, “Them.” It’s really really scary to understand that if I, with the value system that I, for just about my entire life, have held can be so nearly swayed, so nearly influenced, imagine the impact of those selective and skewed and fear-mongering stories on others who wouldn’t be anywhere nearly so (supposedly) protected, at least, somewhat insulated from that impact as I/ as we should be.
EDIT: On the subject of Haiti, about two and a half months ago I came upon
this story about an organization,
Teach the World Online, who found a wonderful way of reaching out to Haitian youth who lost their schools but who didn’t come anywhere close to losing their terrific hunger to learn.
And, on a regrettably less upbeat note, while searching for those links, I came across this article from less than a week ago, entitled:
Bill Clinton: Donors Still Holding Out on Billion In Pledges for Haiti Reconstruction.I guess talk really is pretty cheap. So much for a man’s/woman’s/a government’s word being his
(her/its) bond. Damn.
