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Movie Afternoon

Public Achievement is holding a movie fundraiser on Sunday 31st January - we're showing 'Divorcing Jack' at the QFT at 2pm. The exciting news is that Colin Bateman, the author of the book on which the film is based, will be present to introduce the flick, how cool is that?! There will also be a raffle and the prizes are rather impressive including:
- 1 year subscription to QFT
- A ‘pamper evening’ for 10 at Space NK, Lisburn Rd
- Tickets to The Absence of Women, The Lyric
So if you want a ticket for the event then give us a bell on 9044 2813!

I finished an absolutely amazing and inspirational book this week – Three Cups of Tea tells the story of a mountaineer, Greg Mortenson, who as he came down K2 in Pakistan from a failed attempt on the summit in 1993, lost his way and then collapsed in a remote village, Korphe. The locals took him in and with hospitality beyond their means got him back on his feet. He discovered that the village had no school and the government didn’t provide a teacher, so they shared a teacher with a neighbouring village and on the days the teacher didn’t come to Korphe the children were left to get on with their lessons themselves out in the open, those without slates scratching sums in the dirt. So he promised the village chief that he would come back and build him a school. Fast forward 15 years and now the charity he founded, Central Asia Institute, has built 78 schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan focussing on education for girls and providing a balanced alternative to the Wahabi madrassas – religious schools which often foster extremist Islamic fundamentalism.

I was attracted to the book because I love reading anything involving mountains in far-off places, and stories of places like the Karakoram Highway have always conjured up awesome jagged peaks and vast, remote landscapes in my imagination. The summary on the back also held appeal with the line, “at once a riveting adventure and a testament to the power of the humanitarian spirit.” I love to read stories of people who actually make a difference on the ground, people who don’t just talk about it or think about it, they get out there and do it. Mortenson is one such person. I found it so inspirational that he just resolved to do something despite having nothing to start with and got stuck in. It’s not an ‘arm’s length’ charity where good is performed ‘to’ or ‘at’ people from a distance. The guy really knows his stuff and has gotten to know the people and customs of these remote areas from the inside out earning trust the hard way. The CAI approach is one where they seek to ensure that the local community is in the driving seat initiating, implementing and managing the projects and I like that focus on local empowerment. The book also has a lot to say about the war on terror and the failures of US foreign policy with its core belief that the enemy is ignorance. Moreover Mortenson says,

“I’ve learned that terror doesn’t happen because some group of people somewhere like Pakistan of Afghanistan simply decide to hate us [Americans]. It happens because children aren’t being offered a bright enough future that they have a reason to choose life over death.”

Incidentally, the name of the book comes from the words of Korphe’s village chief who became a close friend of Mortenson.

“Here we drink three cups of tea to do business: the first you are a stranger, the second you become a friend, and the third you join our family, and for our family we are prepared to do anything – even die.”

So get a hold of this book, I think it’s going to be one I will return to for inspiration again and again. There are also a couple of videos on CAI on the Outside magazine website.

Da daaa!
I’ve made it to the end of November & National Blog Posting Month having posted 21 days out of 30! I think it’s a fair achievement for someone who’s rather sporadic with their blogging! I have a feeling that somehow I’ll never decide to do it again, but certainly it’s forced me to be more consistent. To be honest I have a fair few ideas for posts every month but I just don’t always make the time to actually do it. We’ll see if this energises me to continue more regularly over the next few weeks. Mind you tomorrow I’m off to Donegal on leave (YAY!) for 5 days so there will be radio silence.

On to today’s post then…I’d mentioned having recently bought 2 CDs, the first of which was commented upon on Friday. The second CD I bought was We are Together. It’s actually the soundtrack to the film, Children of Agape – We are Together. The film tells the story of a children’s orphanage in S Africa where the children have lost their parents as a result of AIDS. Cameras follow the children’s choir in this orphanage over a period of 3 years as they use music to overcome their hardships and their loss. I managed to see it when it was shown on Channel 4 back in the summertime and it’s tremendously moving. It’s the kind of film that makes you laugh and makes you cry. And actually I just wanted to up and go to S Africa and just be there for those kids. Seriously if you ever get the chance, get the DVD and watch it, there are a few clips on the We Are Together website. The CD includes 20 tracks sung by the choir and they are brilliant, the really young children have amazing voices despite being so young. My favourite at the moment is a tie between Pigogo – the Peacock song which is kind of happy and bouncy and the title track We are Together (Thina Simunye) which is more reflective and embodies some of the spirit of the children to stick together and not forget who they are. It’s really awesome stuff, go buy, profits go to the orphanage.

TRIBE
I got a couple of interesting CDs this week and I'm just getting my first listen to one of them. Actually there are 2 discs on the album, it's Bruce Parry Presents Amazon Tribe: Songs for Survival. Disc 1 includes songs inspired by issues affecting tribal people and by the recent TV programme, Amazon, and is written and performed by a number of famous names. It was the first track that really attracted me to buy the album as it provided the theme music to the TV show and I just love it, there's something very uplifting yet slightly melancholy to it, it's a feel-good track, makes you feel like you could take on the world in an ambient, mellow kind of way. There's a fair bit of musical variety on the first disc, some tracks I instantly liked on the first listen, others I think will be growers. Interestingly one of the songs on this disk is an Irish folk song, Carrickfergus, sung by Razorlight's Jonny Borrell. Pretty good too, his gravelly voice suits it quite well. The second disc takes recordings of tribal samples collected by Bruce Parry on his travels and creates some pretty funky dance/experimental tracks (one is called Don't Touch the Dusty Fruit - now there's something you didn't think you should take into consideration!) Again I think some will be growers whilst others grab you immediately but it's really cool to hear how they've blended some of the tribes' voices etc into the tracks.

Bruce Parry's TV show was absolutely brilliant. He's such a great presenter, he's just a people-person through and through and a real grafter so no wonder he endears himself to people of all the tribes he visits - he just gets stuck in and is up for anything. There's no way you could be prejudiced towards the people he encountered on his journey, the way that he spent time getting to know loggers and cocaine producers meant that you saw them as human beings trying to survive like anyone else. The only thing I struggled with was how Bruce made himself so vulnerable to pretty scary stuff by seeking out experiences of shamanic rituals. However I think the success of the programme is how it really highlighted some of the big issues affecting not just the survival of tribal peoples along the Amazon but the survival of the planet.

So I'm well pleased with my purchase and what's more all the profits from the album sales go directly to Survival International, a human rights organisation for tribal peoples around the world.

(I'll post on my other CD aquisition another time!)

My Global Impact
I finally got round to catching up on some magazine reading at the weekend and came across an article in the Autumn ’08 Tearfund TearTimes magazine highlighting their ‘My Global Impact’ scheme. They have an online calculator which figures out your carbon shoe size and then suggests an amount for a donation based on the size of your carbon footprint so that you can help protect the world’s poor from the worst effects of climate change.

The cynic in me wonders if that can be used as a cop-out to forget trying to reduce your carbon impact and just pay money to make yourself feel better. But at the end of the day that’s just the cynical viewpoint and making a contribution specifically to support those in poverty who suffer the most from the effects of climate change can only be a good thing. The calculator takes into consideration your gas and electricity consumption (don’t know what you do if you use oil for heating and not gas!) and stuff like annual car mileage, flights etc.

I was appalled to find that my carbon footprint for this year was an astronomical 20.8 tonnes of CO2 per year including:
Household emissions: 0.1
Transport: 16.5
Consumption & waste: 4.2

I think I’d thought that seeing as I cycle to work most of the time I could afford a little smugness. Not so! Mind you I guesstimated my annual car mileage to be 12,000 and I don’t actually think since I’ve moved to Belfast my annual mileage is as high as that anymore, it might be more like 10,000 but that’s still a considerable amount. The fact that I had 2 trips to Wales this year plus 3 trips to the USA does not help either. What’s worse is that the global ‘fair share’ of carbon output is 4.3 tonnes based on every inhabitant of planet earth emitting an equal allowance of carbon dioxide per year. The figure suggested for donation based on my results was £313.50 which seems like a lot and I can’t do that in one whack before Christmas. So I guess I need to get to work on reducing my carbon impact - cut down my car usage and get more energy efficient lightbulbs etc (Tearfund list some helpful tips to help reduce emissions here).

I've found this a really interesting exercise to do. It’s easy to rant and rave about climate change and about how we need to change but this calculator really brings it home and makes it personal! Check it out, the Tearfund website is full of good info!

Recycle ink cartridges for Christian Aid!

Free T-shirt!
Check out the cool edun LIVE link on the left menu bar. If 200 unique visitors visit the site as a result of my link, then I get a free T-shirt! What’s even better is that “edun LIVE is a new line of blank t-shirts created for merchandising purposes. Headquartered in Ireland, it is the sub-brand of EDUN – the socially conscious clothing company launched in the Spring of 2005 by Ali Hewson and Bono. edun LIVE’s mission is to drive sustainable employment in sub-Saharan Africa through high-volume sales of blank t-shirts and organic t-shirts.” So if your youth group or knitting club or Mothers Union is looking for ethical club T-shirts then this could be worth checking out!

Clothing fasting
Came across some great stuff through the 24-7 Prayer site – they had a news piece on a group of students at Cambridge University who are doing a clothing fast wearing the same T-shirt for the whole month of May (I think they have 2 of the same T-shirt so they can wash them regularly!). Anyway they have a great website called More Than Clothes and their fast is really well grounded; the website includes some great meditation and practical challenges – lots to learn from here & put into practice! They also have some great links so I started surfing around and realised how poor I am at knowing what’s going on in the world, and what’s more at doing sod all about it. So I have a bit of reading to do at SPEAK’s website and also at Oxfam’s Make Trade Fair website where there are opportunities to go and DO SOMETHING!