Make Poverty History

2005 has been designated the year to make lots of noise and make a difference and to make poverty history. There is a global campaign launched to end poverty as we finally have the resources, knowledge and opportunity to do so. Click here to check out the campaign in NZ.

We are the first generation that can look extreme and stupid poverty in the eye, look across the water to Africa and elsewhere and say this and mean it: we have the cash, we have the drugs, we have the science, butdo we have the will? Do we have the will to make poverty history? Some say we can't afford to. I say we can't afford not to.
- Bono, 29 September, 2004

An excerpt...

An excerpt for Life of Pi which I am currently reading (and enjoying).

There are always those who take it upon themselves to defend God, as if Ultimate Reality, as if the sustaining frame of existence, were something weak and helpless. These people walk by a widow deformed with leprosy, begging for a few paise, walk by children dressed in rags living in the street, and they think, "Business as usual". But if they perceive a slight against God, it is a different story. Their faces go red, their chests heave mightily, they sputter angry words. The degree of their indignation is astonishing. Their resolve is frightening.

These people fail to realise that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside. They should direct their anger at themselves. For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out. The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing from each heart. Meanwhile, the lot of widows and homeless children is very hard, and it is to their defense, not God's, that the self-righteous should rush.