What can/can’t you live without?

Posted on 26. Jan, 2010 by kchristieh in inspirational people, my life

In 1985, I was perfectly happy living in an 8′ x 12′ concrete-walled dorm room. I was thrilled to have a single in a dorm full of wonderful people. I didn’t care that the bathroom was down the hall, or that I didn’t own a car. I had a decent bike, a comfortable bed, adequate food, and was learning and having fun with terrific people.

Twenty-five years later, I enjoy living with my family in a nice house in a safe town with wonderful schools. I appreciate all the comforts life has brought me, but I also recognize how my material comforts have also brought an added level of stress, as my husband and I need to work hard to make mortgage payments, save for college for the kids, and meet expenses. I often tell my husband that I’d be happy living in a much smaller house, as long as I have my computer, a fast internet connection, and a secure yard for our dog. Clearly, the list would be longer if I thought about it…I’d also want great schools, a safe community, my printer, my purse, our couch, my gloves, my boots, my fleece jacket, my special pajamas, my pillows and a few more items and services. But as I sit here and scan the interior horizon, there truly aren’t very many items I’d consider to be that important to me.

In his recent column, “What Could You Live Without?“, Nicholas Kristof tells of an Atlanta family whose daughter challenged them to sell their house and buy a smaller one, and donate the net proceeds to charity. Even as it inspired some people, it evoked the wrath of others who complained that they shouldn’t donate to people overseas when there are Americans in need. I’m in the former category, and am impressed that a modern American family that has so much could sacrifice it and make a difference in the world.

The unexpected dividend in this case was that the family found that downsizing brought them closer together:

Mr. Salwen and his wife, Joan, had always assumed that their kids would be better off in a bigger house. But after they downsized, there was much less space to retreat to, so the family members spent more time around each other. A smaller house unexpectedly turned out to be a more family-friendly house.

“We essentially traded stuff for togetherness and connectedness,” Mr. Salwen told me, adding, “I can’t figure out why everybody wouldn’t want that deal.”

I look forward to reading the book they wrote about their experiences, The Power of Half. I don’t think my family wants to downsize, but if they did, I’d be all for it. I wouldn’t mind slowing down the treadmill and enjoying life and my relationships more. In the meantime, if I ever find the time, I am going to get rid of a lot of extra stuff we have around here. The Sport Chalet shoes were just a start…

Women are the solution, not the problem

Posted on 26. Oct, 2009 by kchristieh in economy, education, feminism, health, inspirational people, international, startling statistics

Tonight I met one of my heroes: NY Times journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Nicholas Kristof. I heard him address an alumni group about his work and his new book, Half the Sky. Other than my family and our president, there’s probably no one I’ve blogged about more. I have immense respect for how eloquently he tells the stories of people who are unfairly treated, and for how deeply he cares about what happens to them.

Here’s a quiz based on what I learned this evening:

1. Which do you think there are more of in the world: males or females?
2. If the 19th century was defined by slavery, and the 20th by totalitarianism, what is likely to define the 21st century?
3. True or false: As many American women died in childbirth during World War I as men died on the battlefield.
4. A female sex slave in Cambodia can be purchased for several hundred dollars. Approximately how much in today’s dollars would a 19th century American slave be worth?
5. Which of the following concerns Kristof the least when he visits an African warlord: car accident, banditry, or dying at the hand of the warlord?
6. In some developing countries, families spend 2% of their income on education. What do they often spend 20% on?

Answers:

1. Males. Even though statistically there should be more females, so many females are aborted and such a low priority is placed on the health of women that in many parts of the world, boys outnumber girls by an outsize margin.
2. Gender inequity. It’s a huge problem in much of the world, and holds many societies back. Also, see question 1.
3. True. American maternal mortality improved when women got the right to vote, and politicians thought the electorate demanded adequate medical care.
4. $40,000. As poorly as American slaves were treated, their masters had more of a financial interest in keeping them healthy and productive. A female sex slave is worth so little that if she causes problems, she’s expendable. In some instances, her fellow slaves are made to beat her to death if she’s a troublemaker.
5. Dying at the hand of the warlord. Caveat: that holds true when he’s in the territory of the warlord. The warlord doesn’t want to be known for being responsible for killing an American journalist. I agree about the car accidents; one of my fellow writers from The Stanford Daily recently died in a car accident in Africa.  :(
6. Tobacco, alcohol, prostitution and elaborate celebrations. Kristof argued that this is why women should be empowered to make more financial decisions. He said he’s seen families whose children have died of malaria for lack of a $5 net, and yet the father spends $1.50 on alcohol 3x a week.

Kristof doesn’t want to just make people feel sorry for the people he writes about: he wants to spur them to action. Here were some areas where he said improvement would make a drastic different not only in the lives of the women they affect, but would have a ripple effect in helping the societies in which they live:

• End sexual slavery. Nearly 1 million women and girls a year are trafficked as sex slaves, and at least one reputable group estimates that there are 27 million people in bondage worldwide at this time.
• Improve female education. He said that when he’s talking to leaders of poor nations, he makes more headway on this issue by explaining that females are their country’s biggest untapped resource than by appealing to moral arguments.
• Improve maternal health. Today, a woman in Niger has a 1 in 7 lifetime chance of dying in childbirth. Women in many other countries don’t fare much better. A poor woman in a rural setting has two strikes against her, but there are techniques and practices which could be used to serve even these women better.
• Empower women financially. Micro-loans have been particularly successful in allowing women to not only provide for their family’s livelihood and education, but it’s allowed them to have more of a say in how the family money is spent.

If I were a journalist, I’d want to be like Kristof. But I’ve chosen a path where I can be around my family more, so I try to do my part by volunteering, creating websites for non-profits, and blogging.

Kristof was correct when he said that what makes us happiest is when we help others. It’s immensely satisfying to have a positive impact on the world. And Kristof definitely does.

If you’re interested in hearing Nicholas Kristof speak, he’ll be in Southern California for a bit longer. Here’s his schedule of events.

I’m adding Anderson Cooper to my Favorite People list

Posted on 17. Feb, 2009 by kchristieh in inspirational people, tv

OK, I don’t really have such a list. But if I did, Anderson Cooper would definitely be on it!

I had the pleasure of hearing Anderson Cooper speak this evening at the Distinguished Speaker Series of Southern California at the Pasadena Convention Center. (Thanks, JB!) I was impressed by the dedication, humility and heart he brings to his job. He could have easily sailed through life living off his trust fund, but instead he’s chosen to go to the world’s most dangerous and heartbreaking locations and report on the real stories behind events. He makes a big effort not to take sides, and isn’t impressed by celebrity or power. He said his favorite interviews are when he finds an everyday person whose story illuminates a given situation.

Here are a few of his main tips, all of which I agree with:

• Never underestimate the power of working harder than everyone around you. Now to teach that to my kids…
• Follow your bliss. Amen to that, too. There’s no job more rewarding than doing what you love. Not everyone is blessed to be able to do what they love like he does, but it’s worth a shot!
• Always keep your heart in what you do. I think that whether you’re reporting or doing any other job, you should always remember your humanity and respect those around you. You’ll do a better job and live a fuller life.

I wonder if he’s friends with Nicholas Kristof? I bet they’d hit it off quite well.

How much of this presidential race is about race?

Posted on 05. Oct, 2008 by kchristieh in politics

What if the background and qualifications of our current presidential and vice presidential candidates were reversed? Tim Wise’s insightful essay, “This is Your Nation on White Privilege,” takes a stab at how much race may be affecting peoples’ view of the race. Here are a few of the points it makes:

• White privilege is when you can claim that being mayor of a town smaller than most medium-sized colleges, and then Governor of a state with about the same number of people as the lower fifth of the island of Manhattan, makes you ready to potentially be president, and people don’t all piss on themselves with laughter,  while being a black U.S. Senator, two-term state Senator, and constitutional law scholar, means you’re “untested.”
• White privilege is not knowing what the Bush Doctrine is when asked by a reporter, and then people get angry at the reporter for asking you such a “trick question,”  – while being black and merely refusing to give one-word answers to the queries of Bill O’Reilly means you’re dodging the question, or trying to seem overly intellectual and nuanced.
• White privilege is being able to be a gun enthusiast and not make people immediately scared of you.
• White privilege is being able to dump your first wife after she’s disfigured in a car crash so you can take up with a multi-millionaire beauty queen (who you then go on to call the c-word in public) and still be thought of as a man of strong family values, while if you’re black and married for nearly 20 years to the same woman, your family is viewed as un-American and your gestures of affection for each other are called “terrorist fist bumps.”

Nicholas Kristof examines America’s racial attitudes in his column, “Racism Without Racists.” He notes that avowed racists aren’t likely to consider ever voting for a Democratic candidate, but it’s the aversive racists who may be swayed to vote a different way by someone’s race.

“In the U.S., there’s a small percentage of people who in nationwide surveys say they won’t vote for a qualified black presidential candidate,” Professor Dovidio said. “But a bigger factor is the aversive racists, those who don’t think that they’re racist.”

Faced with a complex decision, he said, aversive racists feel doubts about a black person that they don’t feel about an identical white. “These doubts tend to be attributed not to the person’s race” because that would be racism — but deflected to other areas that can be talked about, such as lack of experience,” he added.

Some people believe that everyone’s racist at some level. Perhaps that’s true. Also, racism can work both ways: for example, some people assume that Asian students are naturally smarter than Whites. I think it’s good when we’re aware of how our opinion of someone may be affected by their race. Recognition is the first step to recovery, and I hope that most people would at least believe that they should try not to be racist.

Why Barack Obama should read “Three Cups of Tea”

Posted on 15. Jul, 2008 by kchristieh in books, inspirational people, international, politics, religion

For all the money we’ve spent fighting terrorism in Pakistan, it seems to me the situation is far worse off now than it was several years ago. Too bad our government doesn’t adopt Greg Mortenson’s tactics. Nicholas Kristof agrees:

Mr. Bush has focused on military force and provided more than $10 billion — an extraordinary sum in the foreign-aid world — to the highly unpopular government of President Pervez Musharraf. This approach has failed: the backlash has radicalized Pakistan’s tribal areas so that they now nurture terrorists in ways that they never did before 9/11.

Mr. Mortenson, a frumpy, genial man from Montana, takes a diametrically opposite approach, and he has spent less than one-ten-thousandth as much as the Bush administration. He builds schools in isolated parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan, working closely with Muslim clerics and even praying with them at times.

You can read all about Greg Mortenson in the book, Three Cups of Tea. (Wow. It’s as of this time.) I finished reading it recently, and was totally inspired by this humble American mountain climber who sacrifices his time with his family and a potentially higher standard of living to help people halfway around the world. His willingness to adapt to local customs and the love he has for the people he is trying to help have earned him immense respect among people who are usually suspicious of Westerners.

Today I had lunch with a friend who’s involved in a ministry in Ethiopia that builds schools and especially tries to educate girls. Hopefully I’ll be able to help them by creating a website in the next few months so that they can convince more people to support them. Here’s an impressive ministry our church supports that I think someone should write a book about: The Free Burma Rangers. They brave incredible dangers to bring emergency assistance to the indigenous Karen people of Burma, as well as document human rights abuses.

We’re so blessed in this country, and it’s incumbent that we share our blessings. Hopefully our next President will understand this and we’ll make REAL progress towards peace and understanding.

Hillary, please step aside

Posted on 27. Mar, 2008 by kchristieh in politics, social networking

After detailing how utterly improbable it is that Hillary Clinton will wind up with more popular votes than Barack Obama, Nicholas Kristof says the following in today’s NY Times:

Meanwhile, the big winner of the Democratic fist-fighting is Senator McCain. A Gallup poll released Wednesday found that 19 percent of Mr. Obama’s supporters said they would vote for Mr. McCain in the general election if Mrs. Clinton were the nominee. More startling, 28 percent of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters said they would defect to Mr. McCain if Mr. Obama were the nominee.

Exit polls show the same trend. In South Carolina in January, about 70 percent of each candidate’s supporters said they would be happy if the other person ended up winning the nomination. By the Ohio and Texas primaries in March, fewer than half of each candidate’s supporters said they would be content with the other person as nominee.

Granted, tempers may cool by November. But dragging out the contest only deepens wounds and reduces time for healing: In 9 of the last 10 presidential elections, the nominee chosen first ended up winning in November. And if the Democratic nominee has been crippled, that would hurt Democrats running for other offices as well.

What’s up with Clinton’s supporters? Obama’s platform is much closer to Clinton’s than McCain’s is. I prefer Obama, but if Clinton is the nominee, I’ll support her. But Kristof is right: the more time goes by, the less confident I am in the other candidate.

So, PLEASE step aside, Hillary! Do it for the good of the country, so that the Democrats can unite and win this race!!!

Click if you’re interested in joining the “Hillary, for the good of our country it’s time to step aside” group on Facebook. I have the feeling this group will get quite big! Also, click to join Nicholas Kristof’s fan club on Facebook.

How can we presume to decry human rights abuses in China?

Posted on 07. Jun, 2007 by kchristieh in articles, international, politics

It’s hard to take the high road on human rights abuses when our country has treated its own prisoners so poorly. According to Nicholas Kristof in today’s NYTimes editorial, Repression by China, and by Us,

The moment we did feel a threat, after 9/11, we held people without trial, and beatings were widespread enough that more than 110 of our prisoners died in custody in places like Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Guantánamo.

Our extrajudicial detentions and mistreatment of prisoners are wrong in and of themselves. But they also undercut our own ability to speak against oppression and torture around the world.

He’s right. As a country, we’ve lost our credibility. But, as individuals, we need to protect human rights around the world. And that means not only trying to get China to treat people fairly, but trying to get our government to do so also.

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The Darfur Puppy vs. 21 Million Starving Africans

Posted on 10. May, 2007 by kchristieh in articles, international, my life, religion, things that bug me

Why are even caring, generous people more moved by the plight of one needy child than the despair of millions? Nicholas Kristof examines this question in today’s NYTimes column, “Save the Darfur Puppy.”

In one experiment, psychologists asked ordinary citizens to contribute $5 to alleviate hunger abroad. In one version, the money would go to a particular girl, Rokia, a 7-year-old in Mali; in another, to 21 million hungry Africans; in a third, to Rokia — but she was presented as a victim of a larger tapestry of global hunger.

Not surprisingly, people were less likely to give to anonymous millions than to Rokia. But they were also less willing to give in the third scenario, in which Rokia’s suffering was presented as part of a broader pattern.

This isn’t surprising to me. I admit that I’m more likely to respond to a personal funding request than to a global one. Clearly, I’m not alone:

“Our capacity to feel is limited,” Paul Slovic of the University of Oregon writes in a new journal article, “Psychic Numbing and Genocide,” which discusses these experiments. Professor Slovic argues that we cannot depend on the innate morality even of good people. Instead, he believes, we need to develop legal or political mechanisms to force our hands to confront genocide.

It’s wrong, but when I know who’s receiving my aid, perhaps I’m more trusting that my money will definitely make a difference. I know it’s irrational, and it bugs me. A corrollary would be when I buy a new skirt or something else I don’t really “need,” even though that money could make a much bigger difference in someone else’s life. Kristof continues,

Even the right animal evokes a similar sympathy. A dog stranded on a ship aroused so much pity that $48,000 in private money was spent trying to rescue it — and that was before the Coast Guard stepped in. And after I began visiting Darfur in 2004, I was flummoxed by the public’s passion to save a red-tailed hawk, Pale Male, that had been evicted from his nest on Fifth Avenue in New York City. A single homeless hawk aroused more indignation than two million homeless Sudanese.

Several years ago the beloved crossing guard at my kids’ elementary school lost his adult son. Thousands of dollars poured in to help him pay for funeral expenses, even though he never said he needed financial help. Yet, when high school kids try to get people motivated to donate money to help kids in Uganda, very little is raised. Kristof says that perhaps the best way to get President Bush to pay the proper attention to Darfur would be to represent its problems with a sad little puppy.

So maybe what we need isn’t better laws but more troubled consciences — pricked, perhaps, by a Darfur puppy with big eyes and floppy ears. Once we find such a soulful dog in peril, we should call ABC News. ABC’s news judgment can be assessed by the 11 minutes of evening news coverage it gave to Darfur’s genocide during all of last year — compared with 23 minutes for the false confession in the JonBenet Ramsey case.

If President Bush and the global public alike are unmoved by the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of fellow humans, maybe our last, best hope is that we can be galvanized by a puppy in distress.

He’s probably right. And I’m probably no better than anyone else in this regard. I think we all need to work on putting our compassion into action.

Seven in a row

Posted on 07. May, 2007 by kchristieh in articles, international, politics

Did you realize that if Hilary Clinton wins and serves two terms, there will be seven presidential terms in a row from just two families? I hadn’t really though about this until I read it in Nicholas Kristof’s NYTimes article today, “All in the Families.”

If Mrs. Clinton were elected and served two terms, then for seven consecutive presidential terms the White House would have been in the hands of just two families. That’s just not the kind of equal-opportunity democracy we aspire to. Maybe we can’t make America as egalitarian and fluid as we would like, but we can at least push back against the concentration of power. We can do that in our tax policy, in our education policy — and in our voting decisions.

Of course, that’s not a reason to vote against Hilary Clinton. But, if all things are equal, it sure would be nice to have representation from another family in the White House! Here’s what Kristof says:

It would be unhealthy to vote for or against a person solely because of his or her family. But where there is a pool of similar candidates, it seems reasonable to count inherited (and wedded) advantage as one factor — and to put a thumb on the scales of those who rose on their own.

And of course, if Clinton won, we’d inevitably be compared to less democratic third-world nations:

In South Asia — Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka — it has been common for a spouse or child to inherit a political office. But that always has the feel of a politically immature democracy. It would feel very Sri Lankan if we had a father-son series and a husband-wife series of presidents.

And if Jeb Bush succeeds Hillary Clinton in the White House, I’ll flee to Sri Lanka.

Hmm. It’d take a lot to convince me to move to Sri Lanka. But it would be unnerving…

Win a Trip, and See a Different World

Posted on 11. Mar, 2007 by kchristieh in articles, international, politics

Nicholas Kristof is no mere reporter: he’s a man on a mission to improve the world. He crisscrosses the globe rooting out injustice and poverty, and effectively communicates what he sees so that those of us who have the means can escape our indifference and do something about it.

Today he announced that he’s once again running a contest to see who should accompany him to Africa this summer. This time, however, he’s going to take two people, and one will be a middle school or high school teacher.

Of course, I forwarded the article to my daughter’s social studies teacher, Mr. Cartnal. He’s teaching the kids about African history and culture right now, and is inspiring kids to discuss the differences between nationalism and racism, and to think outside their cozy Southern Californian lives. I hope he enters and wins, because I know he’ll come back and change even more lives.

Note: Here’s what Kristof says about the picture I’ve included. For perspective, I remember that my daughter weighed 18 pounds at 1 year of age, and that her doctor was concerned that she was too light.

Cast your eyes above and meet Hidaya Abatemam, whom I met last month in a remote area of southern Ethiopia. She is 6 years old and weighs 17 pounds.

Hidaya was starved nearly to death and may well have suffered permanent mental impairment, helping to trap her — and her own children, if she lives that long — in another generation of poverty.

Yet maybe the more interesting question is not why Hidaya is starving but why the world continues to allow 30,000 children like her to die each day of poverty.

Ultimately what is killing girls like her isn’t precisely malnutrition or malaria, but indifference. And that, in turn, arises from our insularity, our inexperience in traveling and living in poor countries, so that we have difficulty empathizing with people like Hidaya.

I spoke to a friend today who returned from a mission trip to Ethiopia last Sunday. She said that people there were thrilled that someone had remembered them, and that their biggest fear was that they’d be forgotten. What she said was totally consistent with what Kristof says.  

 

Iraq war costs U.S. over $6,600 per U.S. citizen

Posted on 24. Oct, 2006 by kchristieh in articles, international, politics, things that bug me

This would be a great math problem for kids: take the total cost of the war (now estimated to be $2 trillion, aka $2,000,000,000,000) and divide it by the U.S. population (300,000,000) and you get an apocalyptic $6,666.67 per person. Not per family – per person.

Nicholas Kristof’s editorial in today’s NY Times, Iraq and Your Wallet, points out that:

For every additional second we stay in Iraq, we taxpayers will end up paying an additional $6,300.

So aside from the rising body counts and all the other good reasons to adopt a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, here’s another: We are spending vast sums there that would be better spent rescuing the American health care system, developing alternative forms of energy and making a serious effort to reduce global poverty.

(I would also add education to the list.)

In the run-up to the Iraq war, Donald Rumsfeld estimated that the overall cost would be under $50 billion. Paul Wolfowitz argued that Iraq could use its oil to “finance its own reconstruction.”

But now several careful studies have attempted to tote up various costs, and they suggest that the tab will be more than $1 trillion — perhaps more than $2 trillion.

That’s 40 times more than the original estimate. Why isn’t there more outcry over this? If I was off by that much on anything in my life, I’d be in HUGE trouble!

The bottom line is that not only have we squandered 2,800 American lives and considerable American prestige in Iraq, but we’re also paying $18,000 per household to do so.

The median US household income was $46,326 in 2005. That means we’re paying about 39% of a year’s worth of household income to be at war in Iraq.

I love having the freedom as an American to complain about this and not get arrested, but I don’t think those freedoms are being preserved by this ridiculous war.

Chinese Medicine for American Schools

Posted on 28. Jun, 2006 by kchristieh in articles, education, parenting

If American kids are two years behind Chinese kids in 3rd grade, imagine how far behind they are by high school! Nicholas Kristof visited China recently, and his NY Times editorial yesterday, “Chinese Medicine for American Schools“, recounts what he learned about Chinese schools.

On this trip I brought with me a specialist on American third-grade education — my third-grade daughter. Together we sat in on third-grade classes in urban Shanghai and in a rural village near the Great Wall. In math, science and foreign languages, the Chinese students were far ahead.

My daughter was mortified when I showed a group of Shanghai teachers some of the homework she had brought along. Their verdict: first-grade level at a Shanghai school.

It sounds like not only are the schools teaching at a higher level, but the kids are expected to put more hours into their schoolwork:

Yet, there isn’t any magic to it. One reason Chinese students learn more math and science than Americans is that they work harder at it. They spend twice as many hours studying, in school and out, as Americans.

Chinese students, for example, must do several hours of homework each day during their summer vacation, which lasts just two months. In contrast, American students have to spend each September relearning what they forgot over the summer.

My kids are working hard this summer, but at sports. When they have free time, they read or have friends over to swim.

Here’s my favorite quote:

Li Yafeng, a tenth-grade girl at the same school, giggled at my question. “I never planned to have a boyfriend in high school,” she said, “because it’s a waste of time.”

Ha! Try implementing that in America! Anyway, I agree with Kristof when he says,

Now, I don’t want such a pressured childhood for my children. But if Chinese go overboard in one direction, we Americans go overboard in the other. U.S. children average 900 hours a year in class and 1,023 hours in front of a television.

I don’t think we could replicate the Chinese students’ drive even if we wanted to. But there are lessons we can learn — like the need to shorten summer vacations and to put far more emphasis on math and science.

We’ll do what we can in our family, but it’s tough without changing our cultural norms and school structure!

A single blog can start a prairie fire

Posted on 21. Jun, 2006 by kchristieh in articles, politics

I was wondering how in the world the Chinese could censor all the corners of the internet. Thanks to Nicholas Kristof’s editorial in yesterday’s NY Times, “In China It’s ******* vs. Netizens“, I now know they can’t possibly censor everything. And, when they do find something objectionable, it’s like Whack-A-Mole – they can shut it down, but it pops up somewhere else.

Kristof set up a blog in Chinese and populated it with increasingly anti-Chinese government remarks about such topics as the imprisonment of his Times colleague, Zhao Yan, 1989’s Tiananmen Square protests and even Falun Gong. It was here yesterday, but it’s no longer there. Never fear! Here’s a pdf of a screen shot I made of it.

He says,

“All this underscores, I think, that China is not the police state that its leaders sometimes would like it to be; the Communist Party’s monopoly on information is crumbling, and its monopoly on power will follow. The Internet is chipping away relentlessly at the Party, for even 30,000 censors can’t keep up with 120 million Chinese Netizens. With the Internet, China is developing for the first time in 4,000 years of history a powerful independent institution that offers checks and balances on the emperors.

It’s not that President Hu Jintao grants these freedoms, for he has arrested dozens of cyberdissidents as well as journalists. But the Internet is just too big and complex for State Security to control, and so the Web is beginning to assume the watchdog role filled by the news media in freer countries.”

I think this is a great thing for the Chinese people, as they will be better able to hold their government accountable with more accurate and timely information they can find over the internet.

Does Nicholas Kristof really speak Chinese? Nothing would surprise me about this man!!

NYTimes slams Sudan, yet profits from them

Posted on 23. Mar, 2006 by kchristieh in international

I just received an email from the Save Darfur Coalition (www.savedarfur.org) about how the New York Times received almost $1 million from the Sudanese government for an 8-page advertising supplement even as they ran an editorial slamming the Sudanese government. I couldn’t believe they’d actually do this, but I found Nicholas Kristof’s blog (http://kristof.page.nytimes.com/) and he confirms it. He has mixed feelings – after all, money Sudan spends on advertising isn’t being spent on violence.

Still, they wouldn’t spend on advertising if they didn’t think it would reap benefits further down the road. So, if this bugs you as much as it bugs me, write the New York Times by clicking here or sending an email to 

Doctors Without Borders Speaker in Pasadena

Posted on 13. Mar, 2006 by kchristieh in articles, international

Here are some more heroes you should know about: the brave and talented women and men of Doctors Without Borders (aka MSF, Médecins Sans Frontières). They risk life and limb to provide medical care to the world’s sickest and neediest people, and support themselves primarily through private donations.

I just returned from hearing the group’s Executive Director, Nicolas de Torrente, speak in Pasadena. His talk reiterated what Nicholas Kristof’s article says in my previous posting, that Africa is in the midst of a huge humanitarian crisis, and much of the world is ignoring it. Here’s a snippet of what the Doctors Without Borders website says about Chad:

So what can we do? Lobby politicians, write blogs and get the word out, pray and donate money are the best options I can think of right now.

Many thanks to Julie for inviting me to this talk!! This was part of the Distinguished Speaker Series at the Pasadena Civic Center.

A Village Waiting for Rape and Murder

Posted on 12. Mar, 2006 by kchristieh in articles, inspirational people, international

Nicholas Kristof is my hero. This intrepid NY Times reporter doesn’t flinch from going to some of the most wretched, dangerous parts of the world and reporting the truth. (Stephen Colbert would like his “truthiness,” I’m sure!) Anyway, today’s story was particularly shocking.

Something must be done!