The beginning of the garden

It's getting warmer! It's one of the greatest things in the world. I've been recycling coke cans so that I can directly relate the money I get from them to the seeds I buy. In this picture is Babu, (actually 5 small Babus). The little onion in the foreground is called Oprah. The rest are pre-plants. That is, it's not clear if they will grow or not. In the Nutella jar are some tree seeds from Mt Auburn Cemetery. Basil seeds in a couple of the coffee jars, and lavender in the other coffee jars. Plants must be the most cool thing because you can actually see them grow before your eyes. I'll keep you updated.

Caro down from Paris

Caro came down from Paris, and we met the day after Eug's birthday. It was so good to see her! And also Gladys and Rhobhi, who are really nearby but we don't get to see eachother as often as we would like to. We hung out a little. Note that I'm wearing the same thing as the day before...

Birthday

We had dinner for Eug's birthday. Afterwards, we came and had cake at our place. Check it out :)! James got Eug this game that's really hard puzzle that I still haven't figured out, though Eugene has.

google reader

This is a little bit random but I also wanted to introduce google reader to those of you who are kindof into technology but may not know about it:

You just sign in using your regular gmail account at reader.google.com

You can add sites to the reader by typing the url into Add subscription. It's great because it'll tell you if there are new posts on those sites and keep you updated on all the blogs or news sites or Christian sites or group feeds you might want to keep track of, but don't have time to actually navigate to everyday.

It definitely cuts down on the amount of time I spend reading the news. Of course, since a lot of the time I'm just trying to procrastinate... anyway, it's a good organizer. So what it does is essentially downloads all the rss feeds into one site, and also lets you know how many unread posts are on each site. So for Mail and Guardian, for me its always hundreds, but for my cousin's or friends blogs, I can know and read every new post without looking at the actual site.

Waiting

Sorry for the long absence. In the meantime I managed to get through a few papers (in a rushed way). I feel like I can breath a little before the onslaught of the next set.

I've just started a book by Philip Yancy, Disappointment with God. I think I'm going to really enjoy it. Book 1's first page reads:

You do not have to sit outside in the dark.
If, however, you want to look at the stars,
you will find that darkness is required.
The stars neither require nor demand it.
-- Annie Dillard.

I felt like these were pretty profound and beautiful words. Tomorrow is my husband's birthday. I'll let you know more about Yancey's book. I'm also reading another one by him.

I saw the storm pictures from Durban?! Whoa.... what happened to the best weather in the world? And how come nothing so crazy happened my ENTIRE life there? Not that I'm a disaster tourist or anything...

What's next?

At the moment we are starting to think about what's next-- for me, after this degree is finished. I need to find something useful and helpful to do over the summer in preparation, and it's my hope that it could be paid. Could you please pray for me about this?

I'm not sure what to pray for sometimes, but we want to know concretely what I should do next, and it's implications for our marriage.

Did I tell you that my husband colour-coordinates our books? I think we must be quite unique in that our books do not have any inherent logic according to author, theme, title, whatever. It looks good! I post the picture of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf because I feel like she's a woman with purpose-- inspired right here in Boston by Harvard's JFK School of Gov.

Happy International Women's Day

Women's day in Afghanistan.

Happy Birthday Ghana, 1 day late

I've been one day behind since the 1st March. Happy Birthday, the second country to gain independence (after Sudan).

Revolutions are brought about by [wo]men, by [wo]men who think as [wo]men of action and act as [wo]men of thought

We face neither East nor West ; we face Forward

-- Kwame Nkrumah (first president of Ghana)

Preparing for Spring Break

If we are to go forward, we must go back and rediscover those precious values-- that all reality hinges on moral foundations and that all has spiritual control
-- Martin Luther King

I know this is painfully close to using a blog to say what I had for breakfast, but bear with me:
I'm getting ready for Spring Break! I have a lot of different papers to write. I'm going to tell you about them so that you can teach me anything you know.

1) I'm writing on The Health Impact of Mining in South Africa. I want to look particularly at the disintegration of the family and community structure.

2) One paper (the big one) on the difference between theory and practice in the ethics of resource allocation (that is, even if ethically it would make more sense to give someone who is more likely to survive a space in the bed, if a near dead person occupies the bed, they won't necessarily make that person move for the sake of what is right theoretically)

3) In nutrition, I have 3 projects: Food insecurity and Childhood HIV/AIDS were assigned to me as group projects; my final paper is about changes in diet after migration-- If refugees who move into an environment that has completely different foods and massive life changes, does this lead to bad health. In many parts of Boston is really difficult to get affordable vegetables, for example, and the vegetables may be very different from what many refugees/immigrants are accustomed to.

4) In SB, I am doing a critique on the "breast is best" campaign, which equates breastfeeding with being a good mother. This makes it very difficult for women who choose not to breastfeed.

Telling you what I'm thinking about makes it almost seem as though I'm ACTUALLY thinking about them! Next step, writing!