A Journalist In Darfur

This is Awatif Ahmed Isshag.

She's been a journalist for the last ten years.

She lives in Darfur.

When events like the ongoing crisis in Darfur come to the attention of relatively secure people like me (resident of the USA, not starving, and not seeing death and destruction every day), we feel particularly helpless.

It's going to take more than the combined efforts of all the aid organizations there are to help people in that country [not to mention the horrible happenings in other countries].

It's going to take a massive change of heart--massive change for each individual who could help in any way and massive change for every government and political person who has any influence on secular happenings--a thorough spiritual transformation.

Can you hear it?

The world is crying, screaming for change...

The Dynamist Blog carried a short article about Awatif Ahmed Isshag. Here's just a taste:

"Nearly a decade ago, at 14, Isshag started publishing a handwritten community newsletter about local events, arts and religion. Once a month she'd paste decorated pages to a large piece of wood and hang it from a tree outside her family's home for passersby to read.

"Her grass-roots periodical has become the closest thing that El Fasher, capital of North Darfur state, has to a hometown newspaper. More than 100 people a day stop to check out her latest installments, some walking several miles from nearby displacement camps....

"Isshag complained that despite international attention, the suffering of Darfur remained vastly underreported inside Sudan. There are no television stations in the area, and most newspapers operate under government control or are based hundreds of miles away in Khartoum.

"'The local media don't cover the issue of Darfur,' she said. 'We hear about it when one child dies in Iraq, but we hear nothing when 50 children die' in Darfur."

She is, in a way, blogging without a computer.

If you need some background on the bigger picture, the BBC News has Q&A: Sudan's Darfur conflict and Wikipedia has Darfur Conflict.


A more complete story on Awatif Ahmed Isshag can be had at the Los Angeles Times. Here's a telling detail from that article:

"An advocate for women's education, Isshag credits her parents for allowing her to avoid being tied down by housework and pursue her interest in writing.

"But she occasionally uses her columns to lecture other women on pet peeves. A recent 'For Women Only' article lambasted those who took off their shoes on the bus. 'It's wrong,' she said with a laugh."

Breaking News !!!

I'd mentioned last week that I was encouraging a few individuals to become "E-Mail Reporters"--those who respond in special ways and offer material that becomes a Post.
Comments are extremely import in a blog because Comments are "FeedBack". A Post from a "Reporter" is more like "FeedForward"...
In my Post, Synchronicity & Conflict, I asked for folks to "submit some 'evidence' or give some 'testimony'" and, even before any Comments were posted, I got this response from our First E-Mail Reporter, Sandy:

"Yes, I think under or overlying spiritual forces have the ability to create similar and related events that become noticeable through their repetitiveness. This repetitiveness then becomes so noticeable that it gets to the point of being obviously spiritually motivated in nature and not just coincidence.

"When my father was delusional and dying from brain cancer , the synchronized theme was butterflies. Butterflies were to be seen everywhere I looked. For instance, on one particular day while my father lay in bed so sick, butterflies were on the ear rings of someone in the room, on the belt around someone else's waist, on the wrapping paper of the gift my aunt was opening, and in the yard fluttering and fighting their way in the wind and on that same day my father even mentioned butterflies in a few of his last words. Before he became bedridden, he had given me some tea cups that had belonged to his grandmother and they had a beautiful butterfly design on them. Butterflies represent change. I believe there are just some things, like synchronicity that can't be fully explained. I do think they are for us to take notice of, however, to see that something of great spiritual value is happening."
~ Sandy

Synchronicity & Conflict

Weird things happening of late...
My read is that they're spiritual in origin. But it can be difficult to decide if a string of events is mere coincidence or something more...

Synchronicity is up there in the the title of this post and, for those of you that don't use that word everyday, here's Wikipedia's link to it. And, here's a brief quote from that article:

"It differs from mere coincidence in that synchronicity implies not just a happenstance, but an underlying pattern or dynamic that is being expressed through meaningful relationships or events."

If you've read the last 4 or 5 posts here, you'll see what may be synchronicity in action. This post will focus on just one instance of this train of Related Events:

Yesterday I wrote about Conflict. Right after I posted, my friend walked in the room and asked me to go to an event with him. I was particularly exhausted but felt the event would be interesting so I said, "Yes!".

We arrived and others arrived and the group finally consisted of:
*Two white males in their 60's
*Two black males in their 70's
*Two black females, one in her 70's and one in her 20's
*Two white females, 90's and 60-70s

I was a visitor but all the others were there to talk about Unity--specifically, action to end racism and bigotry in the city.

After a lot of agenda checking and goal and vision talk, one of the men (black) started a rant about the police and fire department's totally lack of racial integration. Everyone else sat there in, what seemed to me, placid acceptance (found out after the event that he was prone to do this).

Suddenly, the other black man challenged him to put up or shut up (his words, however, were mild as milk) and dared him to go the next day to those civil services and do, at least, some investigation of the problem.

Everything calmed down and the man who'd been ranting praised the other guy for being extremely positive! [ Hey, I mean, these were people seeking unity, right? ]

So what happened? Was this mere coincidence--writing about conflict then experiencing it so Dramatically?

Has there been some deeper Spiritual Reason for my week of apparent synchronicity?

My jury's still out on this issue:
but...
please, submit some "evidence" or give some "testimony" in the Comments...
Or, take your concerns over to our BackYard...

So Who's Right ?

Here's my Supremely Obvious comment for the day:
"There sure is a lot of conflict in the world !"
From disagreements between friends to bloody sectarian war, it's all around us. Something else that may be obvious to you is that there are a lot of ways being touted to "manage" or "reduce" or "eliminate" conflict.

Image Credit

I'm reading a book now, The Anvil of the Spirit by Morris Taylor, and I came across a fascinating comment about understanding conflict (seems to make sense that we must understand where it's coming from before we can manage, reduce, or eliminate it...) This quote may seem as Supremely Obvious as that other one up there but if you slow down and think about it (try feeling your way into it, too...) I think you'll find it as helpful as I did:

"Every individual is following a sensible strategy for getting along in the kind of world he thinks he lives in."

This blog really isn't about offering solutions, though I will point to quite a few as time rolls on. It's a place to give spiritual perspective to what we all are living through. Still, I want to offer these results for "conflict" from the B.I.D.E. Custom Spiritual Search Tool.

Many folk will tell you that conflict is inevitable. What matters is how we "deal" with it.

Just to indicate how inevitable it is (and, indirectly, how important it is to learn how to deal with it...) here's a closing quote from a Supremely Spiritual man:

"The shining spark of truth cometh forth only after the clash of differing opinions."

What do You have to say about conflict?