The World's Children,Our Children, or Why Failure to Make Peace is Not an Option

[Guest]

.

[Jill]

Here are what I think are some truly superlative images.  I think they offer much to learn, much to hope for, much to reflect about, and much to inspire (in terms of both commitment and further learning).  They’re only a sampling.  You should go to the links, themselves, for more of all the above.  

The first two pictures, below, are from this link: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/02/pakistan_daily_life.html

#1- Boys gather by a vendor selling tropical fish on his bicycle on the outskirts of Islamabad (Pakistan). (Muhammed Muheisen/Associated Press)
#2- An Afghan refugee girl stands with others in an alley of a slum on the outskirts of Islamabad. (Muhammed Muheisen/Associated Press)

The next are a few of my many many favorites from this link, http://www.jonkaplan.com/jonkaplan_gallery1.html#
Be sure to check out all 9 galleries when you go there.  As the members on one of my teams already know, I LOVE these pictures.

#3-Patchwork girls from Senegal,
#4-Shepherd girls from India
#5-Lijang kids from China
#6-Monica & Panini from Guatemala
#7-Laughing Boy from Peru
#8-Alicia from Ecuador

and finally,
though I already gave you the link to the website, peacestartshere.org, let me suggest for those of you who haven’t yet checked it out that, for the flavor of it, you start with this video called “Giving Back.”  It’s a video vignette of how a 16 year old Palestinian girl from Gaza who was given the opportunity to attend a Human Rights workshop in Holland was affected by the experience, very likely, for life.
http://www.peacestartshere.org/points.php?id=3

[Amy-in-PHX]

The first two pictures, below, are from this link: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/02/pakistan_daily_life.html

#1- Boys gather by a vendor selling tropical fish on his bicycle on the outskirts of Islamabad (Pakistan). (Muhammed Muheisen/Associated Press)
#2- An Afghan refugee girl stands with others in an alley of a slum on the outskirts of Islamabad. (Muhammed Muheisen/Associated Press)

My favorite from that link is #12, "Two Afghan refugee sisters and a Pakistani girl attend a daily class to learn how to read verses of the Koran, at a mosque in a slum area on the outskirts of Islamabad."
I am glad to see that the girls are being permitted to learn to read something, even if it is not in their native language but Arabic.  And I am glad because Afghan refugee girls and Pakistani girls are learning together.  And the girls' faces seem pensive to me, but their beauty makes me glad.

And, Jill, I just began posting on this forum (other than entrepreneur photos) a couple of weeks ago.  So I am not sure what it felt like at the previous time you remember, to be a part of KivaFriends.  But I look forward to reading your posts to find out.  Are you looking for responses only from the people who have been on the forum for years, or can anybody play?  If I may ask, what is it about the tropical fish vendor photo that attracts your eye?

[David2051]

I love the fish vendor photo.  Who would ever think of selling tropical fish in that way?

[Jan & John]

I discovered this one day...
downloaded it to my iTunes...
and now play it most days at least once...
-jan-

[Jill]

Jan, thank you for posting the video this thread made you think of.  There are so many connections we all can draw.

Amy, of course anybody can play.  That's the whole point.  For me, that's the whole goal and dream of it. But listen, when you see the following, it might teach you to be more careful about who you direct your questions to.....

This is my quick answer to the question about what was it that caught my eye, that struck my fancy (David's apparently, too) in the picture of the Pakistani goldfish seller, above.  My immediate response when I saw that question was something like, Wow. Let me count the ways!

I Loved that picture because:

1- It came as such a giant surprise to me that pet goldfish could be/were sold that way.

2- I loved the ingenuity of display and marketing- whether it was that of the young serious-looking
goldfish seller or someone else’s.

3- The older I get, the more Kiva-and-KivaFriend-relating and diversity-and-worldpeace-and-tolerance-craving I become.   I tend to notice more the commonalities among the peoples of the world.  It’s become kind of an automatic selective perception or enhanced noticing for me.  I take great pleasure in all the things I see in life that remind me of the universality of human experience, of how, sometimes almost uncannily alike, it seems we are.

I have a feeling there’s probably a direct correlation between how much pleasure I feel in those instances, and the hurt, anger, and sadness I experience every time I’m exposed to some group’s prejudice against the members of some other group.  Correlation between the pleasure and the growing frustration I feel every time I’m exposed to some group’s or religion’s vaunted, self-celebrating and for me, totally inane claim or suggestion of superiority over another.  Frustration, sadness and anger-- because I know that some people are actually buying it.  

Prejudice, fear, rejection and the ability to be heartachingly cruel seem usually to be enabled or facilitated by people’s inclination to view different people as “other,” as “strange,” as having absolutely nothing in common with (the pure-of-heart, caring, intelligent, apparently exclusively worthy) “us.”  I hate the hurt that prejudice, etc. cause, and so I love anything which makes them less likely.  Anything that refutes or belies the great chasm/gap/disparity that there’s supposed to be between near perfect Us and not even quite human Them.  

I know it’s probably a stretch, but I can’t help but feel that if people have the chance of realizing, “Oh, you mean that their kids like goldfish, too ?!?,” maybe it will be more difficult to regard people in the Middle East, specifically Muslims, as alien, as frightening, as someone we should bomb, bomb, bomb lest they bomb us first, etc. etc. etc.

4- It reminded me of my younger pet goldfish-wanting self when life felt so very very much simpler.  In this crazy way-materialistic society, it seems almost incredible now that kids could be entertained and made happy, really satisfied with a (poor) little 25 cent goldfish.

5- I loved the photograph itself.  Whether in Kiva entrepreneur pictures, in news photos, in books or on the Internet, I love pictures that give me a glimpse into the way that other people, other cultures live.

6- It reminded me of a joke I once heard.

[David2051]

Thanks for sharing that, Jan!  And Jill, come on now, what was the joke??   

[Amy-in-PHX]

Maybe the one from the 70's:  A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.   

[Jill]

To see some really exquisite photographs of some of the kids for whom all of us might want to try just a little bit harder, check out the 91 pretty priceless pics here:
http://www.fotopedia.com/wiki/Childhood    
(And since you’re going to be at fotopedia for awhile, anyway,  try some other search terms while you’re there.  For example, try punching in “Maasai people” and  “old age”, etc. where you’ll see some other real treasures).
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I don’t know about you, but there have been possibly a handful of times in my life when I’ve met some young person or another who caused this almost-wave of a really protective and kind of wistful feeling to come over me.   There was something about how they seemed just so infectiously fresh and open to life, so sweetly, almost impossibly innocent (not so much naïve-innocent  as just untouched, unjaded, unhurt-innocent), whose entire being(s) seemed to exude certainty that life was good, that it “always” would be good and the people in it kind and decent and everworthy of trust. ******* 


All this to the point that you (of course I mean that I) just so very very much wished that they’d be able to hold onto all of that, that life really could be that way --- at least, for someone.  Anyway, early this morning I saw a clip of some fifth graders from a glee club on New York’s Staten Island who evoked that same feeling in me.  (If you're only going to take the time to watch one short video, then watch the one at this first link, just following).
http://amfix.blogs.cnn.com/2011/02/18/staten-islands-p-s-22-chorus-to-perform-at-oscars/

This second clip doesn’t come close, even, to some of their best singing.  I just happen to love this song.


And our legislatures are saying that Arts Education is expendable?   I wonder, then, do they think that joy is expendable, too?

How my entire being wishes that all kids, kids everywhere in the world, could have this kind of opportunity, this kind of sweetness in their lives.

http://ps22chorus.blogspot.com/2011/02/ps22-chorus-press-conference.html
http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2010/04/12/2010-04-12_hes_teaching_to_a_gleeful_choir.html
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/feb/14/entertainment/la-et-oscar-choir-20110214

EDIT: *******  It just occurred to me that those of you who were blessed in life enough to have been able to have had your own children probably know, from very personal experience, countless intimations of those very same feelings that I described, above.

and David, I'll try to remember to tell you the joke when I come back, sometime next week.  It wasn't tha-ttttt funny, but sort of.

[brooke]

Thanks so much, Jill.  Spent 20 wonderfully full minutes browsing some of those photo sites.  I see sweetness and hopefulness in each face. Let us not disappoint such blessed children.

[iampaul]

I don’t know about you, but there have been possibly a handful of times in my life when I’ve met some young person or another who caused this almost-wave of a really protective and kind of wistful feeling to come over me.

Parenting instinct. A cry of fear will cause the heads of most adults in the vicinity to turn to find the source. A child bobbling unsteadily near the top of a flight of stairs or a curb or other brink of possible injury will draw a flurry of hands from those nearby reaching out to steady. And so on.

And our legislatures are saying that Arts Education is expendable?   I wonder, then, do they think that joy is expendable, too?

The arts, particularly the performing arts, have always been important to me. No, I don't think you will find a single legislator who will say that they don't bemoan reducing support of the arts. It is a difficult thing, sometimes, to prioritize spending when so many claim so many things are necessary. But, in the end, all things may have to come down to a model similar to Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs.

For a brief time around the time of my birth, my parents opted to live in voluntary poverty in protest of certain aspects of our government and denying that government their tax income. I wasn't aware of it until much later in my life from a short conversation with my father about it. One comment he made about a lesson that he took away from the experience was that he found it very hard to find the energy for creative pursuits when so much of his energy was consumed in the pursuit of basic survival.

It just occurred to me that those of you who were blessed in life enough to have been able to have had your own children probably know, from very personal experience, countless intimations of those very same feelings that I described, above.

I am a birth parent and an adoptive parent and a foster parent. A child does not have to be of your own blood to be "your own" as far as experiencing such feelings. There are many opportunities to "borrow" the attention and care of children for a while and experience all the same feelings.

Paul