When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my childrens lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Afew months ago I met this young man called Paul in a small one shop village called Gortahork in the Gaeltacht, the South of Ireland. Little did I know that his film was having such an impact throughout the world. I believe he was still at college when he volunteered to help at the Agape orphanage South Africa. ... this movie is the butterfly effect of what he saw there & filmed.
And as for Slindile ~ well.... one only has too look at her smile to see the beauty that transcends and will continue to affect peoples lives for many years to come....
Orphaned by AIDS ~ her story & that of her family, told here very simply but beautifully through the songs of the children of the Agape Orphanage, in KwaZulu Natal, reached the streets of New York and all around the world.
“Kae Goh Ogura was just a little girl playing in the streets of Hiroshima, when she heard an ominous sound coming from the sky. She looked up to see a tiny airplane, an American B-29. She watched as a small black spot dropped out of the airplane. All of a sudden, the black spot exploded in the air.
I also was also moved this week by watching this video "Lantern's of Memory", taken in Hiroshima by my friend Velcrow Ripper, a filmmaker from Toronto.
“People need to tell their stories. They need to be heard. It’s a critical phase of the healing process. For the Hibakusha, like so many survivors I have met, their greatest hope is that what has happened to them, not happen to anyone else. They told me, “We know the pain we have been through, and we would not even want our enemies to suffer that way.” The act of speaking out is a way to transform tragedy, into a force of change. Today, Kae Goh Ogura travels constantly, telling her story around the world. She has made an inspiring leap, allowing the pain she has experienced to open her heart” ~ Velcrow Ripper
Why should we love our enemies? ~ Martin Luther King
This week was the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. I visited the place with my friend from there some 11 years ago. I saw the palm of a child embedded into stone. Silently we hung origami cranes on the shrines.
A Japanese legend teaches that anyone folding 1,000 paper cranes (a bird believed to live 1,000 years) is granted a wish.
In 1955 a 12-year-old Japanese girl named Sadako Sasaki developed leukemia 10 years after the bombing of Hiroshima. She began folding 1,000 cranes so she could make a wish to get well. She also wrote the Haiku – “I shall write peace on your wings and you shall fly around the world.” ~ Sadako died October 25, 1955.
But, Sadako’s story did “fly around the world”. Her friends came together and raised funds to build a memorial to her and to all the children who died from the effects of the atomic bomb. In 1958, her statue was unveiled in the Hiroshima Peace Park with this plaque:
“This is our cry. This is our prayer. Peace in the world.”
Cranes adorning the peace memorial Hirsohima Peace Park, Japan
"My dreams are like torment, My every moment. Voices of my brain Of friends that were slain, Friends who died by my side of starvation In the burning jungle and the desert plain. But Jesus heard my cry I was tempted to eat the rotten flesh of my comrade."
Jal was bornin Sudan, "1980" he thinks. His father a rebel. His Mum killed by rebels. Soldiers raped his sister three times. He watched his aunt raped before his eyes and his entire village burned to the ground. At the age of seven he slept with an Ak47. One of the "lost boys of Sudan"~ a child soldier. Anger was white rage. Everything lost~ only thing to gain was revenge.
"I wanted revenge because I've witnessed my mom beaten in my face. I've witnessed my auntie getting raped. I've seen my village burned down. And that's so much bitterness, wanting to know who's this person doing all these things."
Very few people let go of this anger to turn it around. Most become so embittered and recycle the rage back into ruining more and more lives. Instead Jal has been restored. He was found in a refugee camp, adopted by aid worker Emma McCune and sent to England. ~ he now works to raise funds through his story and music for children in Africa.
"Jal's narrative flows between darkness and light, the terror that befell his family and kinsmen, the horrors he went on to inflict upon others, and a deep-seated desire to set things right." ~ Washington Post
