My problem lies here though. I did my timetable and it worked,  but why oh why can’t I keep to it? I have noticed that should I follow the timetable religiously for a few days I’m doing well, but the minute I stray from it,  I’m back in la la land!

I think the problem is we must be having too much time and too many things to do. We want to read the news, catch up with friends, see that movie we’ve wanted to see for over a month and ofcourse spend hours on Facebook.

When will we realise that everything does not need to happen all at once. In fact, if we don’t spend that time watching that TV show we never really liked, we would actually accumulate a great deal of ‘leisure” hours. Time is precious, it is a gift, we just need to slow down and recognize we have a lot of it. The old saying “Life is too short” can be true in many instances, we find we recall this quote at times of death or sickness or some other misfortune. Life is not too short, life is what we make of it and how we use it.

Maybe you haven’t been or will never go to Paris or Egypt, but maybe you have made a  big difference in someones life. Maybe you are the best cook your parents, kids or grandkids have ever been lucky enough to have. Maybe you are the best person, the greatest friend in a mates life.

Loosen up, and enjoy life. We should stop focusing on the time we have left, and focus on what we want to achieve right now. At this hour, at this minute, today.

She was free to do as she pleased, sure she didn’t have the latest iphone and new technology updates every two days however she wasn’t confused by everything available to her. In her day, you picked a career out of the 5 or 10 open to you and that was it. You didn’t need to finish school, you needed to make money and support your family.

This may seem completely ridiculous to some of you who believe that we have it a lot easier now with information at our finger tips. But what if this isn’t always a good thing. We are constantly being updated, reinvented, renovated… when do we have time to just stop and enjoy life. Are we simply to preoccupied with existing and surviving day to day or are we truly living life?

If we could live on the bare minimum, the absolute core necessities, what would life be like? Would it be easier? Simpler? Happier? I love life contrary to the pessimism in this post, I just wonder are we living it to its full potential? The choices we are offered today often make us second guess, which one is better…are we choosing the best option, is this the safest option. Why are we so worried that there is something else better out there?

My conclusion is that too many choices are unhelpful. I don’t want to have to choose one apple out of the 30 available to me, I just want to know which is the best, juiciest one that at the end of the day I am going to enjoy. I believe we need to slow down, take a moment and enjoy the present.

Let me begin my stating that I do not support either side. I do not believe in war in such circumstances, I do not believe that one sides casualties are greater or worse than the other. It is a war and therefore their are brothers, fathers, sisters, mothers, grandparents lost on both sides.

Firstly, with the little media coverage given they have not accurately informed the public of who the LTTE are. The reason for their uprising was solid oppression of the Tamils under the Singhalese government.

The Tamils of Ceylon (now known as Sri Lanka) are of two categories either Eelam Tamils of the coastal north-east province and the up-country tamils of the central highlands of the Central, Uva and Sabaragamuwa Provinces. The Upcountry Tamils were brought by the British at the beginning of the 19th century from South India to work on the British plantations. Thus the tamils were treated as sub-human, inferior peoples by the majority Singhalese.

Tamils from Tamil Nadu were brought to Ceylon as indentured labourers meaning an agreement binding servant to master (as was the policy in America of the African people).These Tamils were condemned to virtual slavery under the British, and, after independence, to the Sinhalese masters.

After numerous uprisings and civil war, the Sri Lankan state carried out forced strerilisation of Plantation Tamils to reduce their numbers. Many were killed in the series of anti-Tamil pogroms and many fled to the Tamil homeland in the North East.

When Sri Lanka gained its independence from Britain in 1948, one of the new government’s first acts was to remove Tamil plantation workers’ citizenship rights. Sinhalese was declared the country’s sole official language, making speakers of the Tamil language second-class citizens. Knowledge of Sinhalese was made a prerequisite for employment in the public service, excluding most Tamils from government jobs. Discrimination against Tamils was also applied in education.

For many years Tamils opposed this discrimination by peaceful means, including demonstrations, sit-ins and participation in elections. But peaceful protests were met with violent repression, carried out by the police and army, as well as racist Sinhalese mobs incited by politicians and Buddhist monks. Repression of peaceful protests led many Tamil youth to turn to violent methods. The LTTE was formed in 1972 and carried out its first major armed action in 1978.

The armed conflict has since escalated and is not at its absolute peak. The LTTE attacks have grown more and more brutal:

- Feb 21, 2009
Eastern Province, Amapara.
10 civilians including 2 children were killed while 5 others including 2 children reportedly sustained serious injuries when a group of LTTE terrorists opened indiscriminate small arms fire at civilians in Kirimetiya at Rathmalgaha Ella, in Iginiyagala today (Feb 21) at around 5p.m.

- June 6, 2008: Colombo
Two Bomb attacks on buses by LTTE in Sri Lanka have left 22 people dead and about 100 injured, the first of them hitting a vehicle in a suburb of Colombo.
Twenty people died and more than 80 were hurt in the blast in the capital while a later attack in the town of Kandy killed two and injured 20.

- Aug 8, 2006
Colombo
Three civilians including a three year old girl were murdered by the LTTE terrorists exploding a car bomb. The bomb went off near a girls’ school in a residential area of the city.

- June 15, 2006
Anuradapura
LTTE terrorists murdered 64 passengers and injured at least 80 travelling exploding a claymore mine on a bus to the town of Kebitigollewa in Sri Lanka’s north central province. Most of the killed were children.

Yet, the government has done little better with many artillery attacks by the Sri Lankan Army on tamil villages, killing hundreds if not thousands of civillians.  At present, the LTTE have trapped thousands of Sri Lankans in a small area of the conflict zone along the northeastern Sri Lankan coast. Their purpose is to secure an independant state in Sri Lanka’s northeast which they have been fighting for since 1983. Over 70,000 people have been killed as a result and the group has been declared a terrorist organization by 32 countries, including the United States and the European Union.

Sri Lanka ordered an end to combat operations against Tamil Tiger rebels in the country’s north to avoid further civillian deaths. The military will now concentrate on saving and rescuing civilians, who have been caught in the fighting between government forces and rebel fighters according to the Presidential statement.

UNICEF has called the situation in the north a “catastrophe for children,” with the lack food, water and basic medical supplies. It is a certainty that no matter the results of the war, Sri Lanka will be repairing itself for many years to come.

Whilst for most of us this is a shocking figure, how many people reading this will actually try to do something about it?

Poverty in the world is tremendous, if you look at any statistics you will see it. Every day, nearly 7,500 people become infected with HIV and 5,500 die from AIDS, mostly due to a lack of HIV prevention and treatment services. (The Millennium Development Goals Report – 2008).  I am not going to go through all the figures and stats because I know that you understand the severity of poverty in the world.

The reason for this blog was to inform and hopefully encourage people to get active. You need not head down to the soup kitchens or donate hundreds to charity (although these would obviously be great), instead I want to suggest a site called Kiva. Some of you may of heard of it before, it is basically a non-profit organization which aims to give entrepreneurs aid in achieving their goals in developing nations. 100% of loans made (which start at only US $25) are given to borrowers in areas such as Asia, Africa, South America etc. Over time, the entrepreneur repays their loan; the concept of  “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”. You then can choose to reinvest your money with another entrepreneur or simply put it back in your bank.

The recent bushfires in Victoria really made me think about alms giving. I thought if millions of money was raised in the span of a few weeks, what else could we do? I understand that money is tight in times like these for most of us, however if each person could donate even $10 to a worthy charity such as Kiva, WorldVision, Amnesty International etc. we could help millions of people stricken by poverty.

In fact I thought about big corporations such as Woolworths and McDonalds as well, what if these companies donated a percentage of their daily earnings to third world countries. How much better could the world potentially become?

I do not underestimate the sadness in the number of job losses around the world, family members of mine have lost jobs and are completely stumped as to what to do next. I simply believe that although the world may seem to be a bad place for many of us with a roof over our heads, access to clean water and a nice warm plate of food each day, their are people in much worse situations than us.

Please let me know if you are aware of any organisations like Kiva, as I am extremly impressed with their work.

It is set amidst Afghanistan’s last thirty years—from the Soviet invasion to the reign of the Taliban to the post-Taliban rebuilding. It attempts to show the fallout that Afghanistan’s violent history has had on a handful of individuals. I don’t want to give too much away because I believe it is one of those few books you will read from cover to cover.

Let me reassure you, it is no long lament,  it is a story of bravery and triumph of human spirit over adversity. Hosseini is a master of story-telling, of capturing and writing realisticly. Being a reader of most of Hosseini’s novels, one learns quite a lot about Afghan society and culture, and perhaps about Afghan personality and ethics. This I say, considering his stories are well informed and based on what well and truly could be real life stories simply written as a fiction novel.

I wish that it did not represent what I believe could easily be true of the horrors of Afghan society and culture.  It is not a book of happy endings for the faint hearted but a story of a beautiful country in terrible circumstances.

“She thought of her entry into this world, the harami child of a lowly villager, an unintended thing, a pitiable, regrettable accident. A weed. And yet she was leaving the world as a woman who had loved and been loved back. She was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. A mother. “

On March 8th as we celebrate women’s rights and independance it is crucial to remember that everything is not perfect, we cannot close the chapter on improving gender equality. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon stated

“violence against women cannot be tolerated, in any form, in any context, in any circumstances, by any political leader or by any government”

Let me put to you the following facts based on the reports of Amnesty International:

• In Saudi Arabia, women cannot vote, travel, drive, or work in most government offices without the explicit approval of husband or a male guardian.
• One in four women in Mexico has suffered physical, and sometimes sexual, violence at the hands of their partner. Thousands are put at risk of repeated abuse because weak or ineffective protection measures fail to ensure their safety.
• Over a quarter of women in Armenia have been hit or beaten by a family member and about two thirds have experienced psychological abuse yet the government says “domestic violence is not an issue for this country”.
• A 13 year old girl was stoned to death in Somalia on the 27th October 2008, by a group of 50 men who stoned her to death in a stadium in the southern port of Kismayu, in front of approx. 1,000 spectators.
• A 2006 study of schoolgirls in Malawi found that 50 percent of girls said they had been touched in a sexual manner without permission by either their teachers or a fellow student.
• Women are at greatest risk of violence from men they know. In Australia, Canada, Israel, South Africa and the United States, 40-70 per cent of female murder victims were killed by their partners (World Report on Violence and Health. Geneva: WHO 2002)

It is clear that action must be taken not only by governments and international bodies but by individuals. Violence against women and girls is a major human rights and public health concern.The Social Watch 2008 Gender Equity Index (GEI) for the first time, shows recent evolution and trends in bridging the gap between men and women in education, the economy and empowerment.

How can you help? Donate to Human Rights.

This is a worldwide issue which needs to be eradicated from society in order to move forward.

Happy Women’s Day!

How on Earth do the men at the Vatican fail to see that:

1. The girl is 9 years old, if she were to have the baby her physical health could prove fatal and her emotional health severely interrupted.

2. She was raped, if she were to have the baby how would the baby feel upon finding out she/he was brought into the world in such a way

I am disgusted at some of the Catholic Church’s decisions, it is living in the past instead of keeping pace with the times. I do not believe abortion should be a common medical practice for women who have put themselves in sticky situations however in the case of rape, bringing a baby into the world on such grounds is insane!