HAPPY BIRTHDAY BENJAMIN JACK TINDALL

Ben, Happy 20th
You are truly wonderful, talented and fun
Love you

Kenya scandal splits political elite

As a bitter power struggle rumbles on among Kenya's elite after the suspension of two ministers amid corruption scandals, the BBC's Will Ross in Nairobi assesses the impact of the graft on the country's young.

Donors are worried funds are being looted from Kenyan schools
In a primary school in a Nairobi slum more than 80 students are squeezed into one classroom.
As the teacher tests their science knowledge, the wide-eyed children raise their hands in unison. There is a real hunger to learn here.
But these students and others across the country are the victims of just one of the high-level corruption scams eating away at the public coffers.
"In Kenya of course corruption is pervasive and has been for a long, long time ever since independence but it doesn't get much worse than taking money from a child I think," US ambassador Michael Ranneberger told the BBC.
In solidarity with other donors the US withheld $7 million intended for a programme in the Ministry of Education.
Britain held back £10 million ($15 million).
This action was taken after an audit showed that roughly $1m had disappeared from the Education Ministry in just one month.

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THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES FRIDAY 19 FEB, LONDON

The Vagina Monoglogues is performed around the world in February and March each year to raise awareness and funds for local Women's organisations, which all work to end violence against women. If you can go to a Vagina Monologues near you, you should.



THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES, 7PM £6
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL UK
The Human Rights Action Centre
17-25 New Inn Yard
London EC2A 3EA

Stephen Malkmus - It Kills

Refuge.org.uk Valentines

www.refuge.org.uk

V-Day's Five City 'Turning Pain to Power' Brings International Attention to the Women and Girls of the DRC

V-Day's 'Turning Pain To Power Tour' took place during the month of February, 2009 making stops in NYC, LA, the San Francisco Bay Area, Atlanta and Washington, DC.

The tour featured Dr. Denis Mukwege, winner of the 2008 UN Human Rights Prize and Founder of the ground breaking Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, in conversation with Eve Ensler, reaching thousands of women and men throughout North America and bringing attention to the violence against women in the Congo, and V-Day's joint campaign with UNICEF.

Interview with Dr. Denis Mukwege

FROM CONGO WITH LOVE





Rankin's photographs, in collaboration with Oxfam will feature in a huge exhibition 'From Congo with Love' at the National Theatre, London for a month: 12 February - 11 April. The images focus on the love and solidarity found in the midst of the DRC, one of the world’s worst conflict zones. There are images and stories exploring romantic love, love lost, mother's love and the kindness of strangers, as well as photos taken by Congolese villagers with Rankin's guidance, providing an extraordinary insight into their everyday life.

New View Campaign

New View Campaign

The New View Campaign was formed in 2000 as a grassroots network to challenge the distorted and oversimplified messages about sexuality that the pharmaceutical industry relies on to sell its new drugs.

The pharmaceutical industry wants people to think that sexual problems are simple medical matters, and it offers drugs as expensive magic fixes. But sexual problems are complicated, sexuality is diverse, and no drug is without side effects.

The goal of the New View Campaign is to expose biased research and promotional methods that serve corporate profit rather than people's pleasure and satisfaction. The Campaign challenges all views that reduce sexual experience to genital biology and thereby ignore the many dimensions of real life.

E V E E N S L E R

Eve Ensler: writer, activist, founder of the V Day movement to end Violence against Women. This woman is inspiring, a kind of most extraordinarily excellent human and role model.

piece from The Vagina Monologues
Eve Ensler Interview

Are we listening to each other?

Tonight, while waiting outside to meet two friends I heard people talking as they passed by.
It seemed the listeners weren't listening to the other, the speakers not noticing the listeners not listening,
while they kept gabbing.
Perplexing.

C l e m e n t i n e

Lovely Clementine,

You are a precious, exotic creature.
Happy Birthday from the depths of my heart.

I love you,

Kate

Many Lost Everything

Special report: The rise of 'the African Taliban'

More than 500,000 displaced people live along the 20-mile Afgoye Corridor, west of Mogadishu. Many have lost everything, including their families, in their flight from the Shabaab – Somalia's terrifying Islamist militia

Rabbit and the Mad Hatter, Alice in Wonderland Party; Mick and Clementine in Paris, pixelated

A Serious Man, Coen Brothers

I like this film. I like the way that it looks. I like the characters, and the sense I felt of what it might have been like to be within the Jewish community in 1967 in Minnesota, suburb of St. Louis. I did not feel uneasy, but amused whist watching. I particularly liked Larry, the protagonist. He does everything right yet unexpected and troublesome things happen upon him, and it seems there is no reason.

Good Grief

Interesting article on grief
Clementine showed me this article written for "The New Yorker" by Meghan O’Rourke on grief. Part of it talks about the work of this lady, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a Swiss-born psychiatrist. She wrote "On Death and Dying" and then "On Grief and Grieving" ..anyway she stated that there were five stages of the dying: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance... and the same for the grieving. At the end of her life, she knew that grief can't really be boxed into categorical stages..'Other research suggests that grief and mourning don’t follow a checklist; they’re complicated and untidy processes, less like a progression of stages and more like an ongoing process'.

The article also discusses resilience of the bereaved, the way in which non-grieving others may retract from the bereaved, or think that after a certain amount of time they should be finished with grieving, and how death is dealt with in different cultures and points in history.

The Unheard Truth | Poverty and Human Right | Irene Khan

The Unheard Truth | Poverty and Human Right | Irene Khan

It's nice to get out of the city

I think about it sometimes but mostly do not

I've been thinking about obsession, what the word means, but mostly what it is like to be obsessed, fixated.
It's recognisable in all of us, but embarrassing to admit.

I found, for me fixation did not elucidate anything, but seemed a pleasant escape at the time.

Bear

TUB OF ICECREAM AS A HAT

"Went surfing in Wales last weekend - painful. I'd liken the feeling to....
wearing a tub of ice cream as a hat."

Mr Dave Casey

this
this panda

HOT AIR BALLOONS THANK YOU VERY MUCH

Eve Ensler: "If your Vagina got dressed, what would it wear?"

Six-year-old girl: "Red high-tops and a Mets cap worn backward."

'The Vagina Monologues'

Banana loaf cake

2 ripe medium bananas, mashed
2 medium eggs, separated
150g low fat plain yoghurt
80g soft light brown sugar
250g self raising flour
salt

*Preheat oven to 160, fan bake
*Mix mashed bananas with egg yolks, yoghurt
and sugar
*Sift in the flour and a pinch of salt
then stir together till mixed
*In a separate bowl, whisk egg whites to soft peaks
*Stir a spoonful in to slacken the mixture then fold
in the remainder
*Bake on centre shelf for 50-60 mins

CONGO NOW

People have looked at the Congo for over one hundred years and they’ve seen a great big pile of riches with some black people inconveniently sitting on top of them.

http://www.warchild.org/

I found this on 'Women's Asylum Charter' and once again was reminded that some of the dramas in my life are so trivial, pathetic. At the moment I am embarrassed because I made a reasonably substantial mistake at work. I just have to remember that it does not matter. Please watch this short clip about women's experiences with seeking asylum in the UK, possibly to put your own anxieties into perspective.

Every single woman from Asylum Aid on Vimeo.

I'm pretty sure that little piece of glass is still stuck in my finger.
It's concealed way down below layers of cells now though, so the pain minor and infrequent.

Time for some colour

Love Holly Golightly

There's an End
On The Fire

From kitchen window.

I wonder why we don't talk much about violence and abuse

Once we start to converse about the dark realities of human behavior, they are difficult to ignore.
When we agree that violence exists, we feel removed, blameless.

Yet hopefully the mare acknowledgment of these daily brutalities, would make us feel like we, in some way were expressing our grave disappointment, and in doing so, slightly eroding that feeling of complete hopelessness.

We could get used to voicing how we feel about these truths with people, whom we know.

Stop Raping our Greatest Resource, Power to Women and Girls of DRC

vday
I held and eight-year-old girl on my lap
Who had been raped by so many men
She had an extra hole inside her
When she accidently peed on me
I was baptized

- Eve Ensler

Somewhere in Leeds.

In Manchester.

apathetic
pathetic
apprehensive
uncertain
paranoid
anxious
joyous
optimistic

Old paintings from university.