Making Gingerbread Cookies

Saturday at last and rest is coming many, many times a day. ^_^ The program of the day was simple: paying the tax we have to pay when we leave the country, then did some groceries and bought a fabulous book for children titled "Quién es Tomás?" (Who is Tomás?), which I bought from the author. The money made from the sale of the books is being used to help a foundation which helps children. It was really nice to meet the author, who was kind enough to to dedicate the book to my nephews.

From there we went home, where my boyfriend and my oldest nephew got on playing with the computer and I napped a little. Gash, I was needing that! ^_^ After that we got on the Christmas things with my boyfriend, Mom and my oldest nephew setting the Christmas tree and I preparing gingerbread cookies. :-) I can only hope that this recipe works, as I have misplaced my usual recipe and so had to fish another one from the Internet.

The Holidays are slowly coming, and we might be the last house of the block to catch on the Christmas feeling, but slowly here we are. :-) Now, I gara go and check on those cookies. See ya!

Arts, Crafts and Wonderful Nephews

Weekend at last! I already missed one of the programs I had planned - a yoga class held outdoors - and the second program of the day also seems to be falling through the cracks. I won't be taking my nephews to my favorite library for some children activities they had prepared. But no biggie as I've been relaxing, and getting the supplies I need for a little project of mine. Shhh! Those are still top secret. You will know when the time is right, and it they come through well.

It things come out right, I'm planning a crafty weekend for myself, with a good dose of fun. I've added a few crafty things to my list of 13 - things I've done in the past and weren't half bad at it - so I want to see how they go now. Maybe I've got bold and confident about my dormant skills after my "smashing success" with crocheting my cloche hat. (Yeah, I haven't added a picture of it finished, right?) As result, I've felt emboldened to try out my hand at some of my old hobbies. One of them is drawing. Yeah, I'm a complete disaster now, but I intend to keep giving it a try, see if I can get at least to the level I used to have, and then maybe try my hand at painting. You worry not. If my paintings are not good, then I won't make our apartment in Budapest ugly with hanging them on the wall. I'm consistent in that: the amateurish crap of others won't disgrace my walls, but neither will my own attempts unless they get to be good.

My inspiration for this renewal of the crafty hobbies comes basically from my eldest nephew. Sharing time with him playing with my scrapbooking supplies, trying to find new artistic uses for different things (he has a thing for corks, so he has been collecting them from the discarded wine bottles we keep in the shed), and then playing with things he normally don't have access to, such as stamps. My rubber stamps are all in Hungary, but there are some foam stamps I kept here, which he has discovered and he loves. I showed him once how to put different color inks on a stamp to get a colorful picture, and since then he has been enjoying trying out new ways to color his stamps.

Since my supplies are running low (and I still have much scrapbooking to do), I've decided to make him an arts&crafts box. There isn't much in it yet, just some plastic, gluey tubes of paint (the squeezing type), some inkpads and foam stamps on blocks, and then added also some painting brushes, water colors and a couple of supplies for water coloring. I want to see if I could take him a bit from the craft-side and towards the art-side. Perhaps I can interest him more in painting and drawing, and if so, I'll ask dad to make him an easel, so we can set him out in the backyard to paint to his heart content, and slowly get him more serious supplies, depending on what interests him more. If he rather leans towards the craft-side, then instead of an easel, we could fill the box with other materials, and maybe even try out other crafts.

The arts&crafts box is currently an old shoebox, but hopefully with time it will evolve to become a chest of wonders. I don't have my own box of wonders yet, but have a new drawing pad, pulled out my jewelry making supplies and readied my sewing box (don't have a basket for my knitting and crochetting supplies). I guess I am getting there too, and all thanks to one fabulous young guy in my life. Aren't nephews just a blessing?

Long Weekend with Kids

Taking advantage of the long weekend thanks to the moved Discovery of America (it's actually on October 12th), my eldest nephew asked his parents to let him stay with us from yesterday to today. He loves staying with his grandparents, and has been staying with us from time to time since he was little. His behavior has improved greatly since he was a child. He has become a very nice, very gentle little guy.

When my brother and his family came over for lunch yesterday, I used the chance to talk with my sister-in-law about our Halloween plans for the children. It's going to happen on the Sunday before Halloween actually, so we have enough time to enjoy the carving of the pumpkin, and the decorating of chocolate cupcakes with all sorts of Halloween motives. We talked in lenght about the matter, and my eldest nephew overheard us, which got his attention. Since he loves to do art - and has been asking me for several weekends now to do art with him - he was now interested in making Halloween arts, painting haunted houses and ghosts. ^_^ Indeed Halloween is more of a children's holiday than that of adults, but that doesn't mean that we can't enjoy it just as much.

Spending a weekend with children is quite demanding. My nephew is a real angel now, a joy to be with, and the older he gets the more and more I enjoy his company. I can honestly say that he is a fabulous person, smart, interesting and with cultural inclinations, which is lovely in a world as cybernetic, instant and shallow as the one we live in now. Still, though he's perfectly capable of looking after himself, he's not here to be alone, he's here to spend time with us, and that means that we are supposed to spend it with him. And so we do, and no matter how much we enjoy his staying here, spending time with him means that we take time from our other plans. It means also that we should try and match his energy, and people our age are definitivelly not up to match the energy of a healthy, happy, active 7-year old boy. ^_^ Good thing he can be patient with us.

We shall see next time.

(Sorry, I was supposed to write about the Discovery of America holiday, but not right now.)

Happy Children's Day!

Weeeeee! Candy and pizza, and enjoying a moment of silliness and absolute childlike behavior. Maybe even allow yoursewf to tawk wike a chiwd? A cousin of mine and I are prone to do that. But it's Children's Day so why not? More icecream and less lunch. more gushy beverages and less water or "healthy crap".

Then I start thinking about children for this post and several things come to mind. First, that it might sound ironic from a confessed Childfree person like me, to go on talking about children. Like the children I won't have or the child I still am? Neither. Granted, I don't really like children. I creep at the sight of children like others would creep at the sight of a dead body, but I love my nephews. They were here today, and it was a delight to have them around, running up and down the house, playing with the cats and talking, sharing their funny ideas. Dani, the oldest, is still the one with the biggest heart and the sharpest mind. He's rather creative, but puts himself easily down by any setback. Fer, the youngest, is a raging ball of confidence and bossy behavior. A little charmer with a hellish attitude. It's kind of interesting noticing that these two are people like any of us, with somewhat less experience, but all the parts of the ir personality already there.

Stores are now filled up with children stuff, with only a few books - because Costa Rica isn't a land for books, and whoever takes this passion more seriously belongs to an "undergroud" cult-like group much like the animé fans or the Trekkies. There are also toys, and these toys are rather interesting. Have you noticed the toys of children? They are all replicas of adult things, they are all stuff to train them to a given adult role. Dolls so they play Mom or practice on them their vanity and sensuality, play make up, small cars, guns, doctor kits, trains, planes... there's nothing "just children like", nothing - save maybe for the playgrownds -  that's not pushing children to be adults. It gets me thinking, what kind of "childhood" are we aiming to keep, what sort of inner child, when children themselves are constantly pushed into adult roles? Now even more, with whore-dresses for girls, and real, appliable play make up. Do you still remember the clothes we used to wear when we were little? Shorts and jumpers, colorful shoes and Hello Kitty skirts.

When we celebrate Children's Day, what are we really celebrating? Are we really keeping children to their childhood, or are we celebrating a lie, where children are being mistreated, pushed too early into the adult roles, suspended in a state where they are loaded up with things they haven't fully understood yet, and yet denied the knowledge? And when we talk about the inner child, what are we recalling to? Do we want to look at our real lives, our real car, real house, real children, real job and pretend they are all play things? Do we want to escape somehow the responsability for the life we have led?

Today, I'm thinking about the past, and I'm thinking about the rest of the world. Childhood isn't that perfect, dreamlike state we would like to pretend it is, so let's open up our eyes, and instead of yearning for the children we were or we pretend we were, lets smile at our inner children and tell them: "Hey look! Now my toys are real!" Let's connect, learn, remember what we wanted and be happy for what we have achieved. And for the rest? Well, we aren't dying in five minutes, right? We can still work on the rest, and thus still have something to do. And if we are dying in five minutes, then use that time to write your will and will each of your unfinished wishes, to other people. Sure they'd love to have something to do. ^_^

Our inner child isn't hidden, we are it. And it's not really a child, it's us, so if you feel like you've lost them, dude, you just lost yourself.

Another Hectic Sunday

Something must be definitively out of order whrn you wake up on a Sunday at 6:45 am all by yourself. No alarm, no plans, no trip to the beach only a disjunctive: join my usual yoga class at 10:30 am or join my friends for breakfast at this awesome location some miles away driving, with the opportunity to meet new people, update on information and plunge into the most recent topics of conversation hot on the cyberuniverse - which I may or may not know of. This was a Twitter Breakfast, a uniquete kind of meeting where you can synch with the rest of the community, or at least be updated on the latest trends without having to sacrifice your own usual search. (For instance, I'm quite disconnected of the local gossip and national actuality, as I'm more stuck in telecommunications, Amazon.com, books and American Politics.)

As I was starting my Sunday as any other Sunday, I realized that I still had to wash Sookie. But not only that. Kari and I had decided to take my older nephew for shopping to get him scubba diving equipment (he's birthday is close and his aunt - me - thinks that a T-shirt and a Chinese Chess game ins't nearly enough). Then I realized that I had to get going with Lau's scrapbook project, so either I worked on it now or I would never be ready. As result Sookie got washed and waxed, but neither the yoga class not the Twitter Breakfast were doable under my current situation.

It's kinda sad that two things that are important to me, that could be among the last one I can attend in my life, are moved for something one could say I can do any other time. Well, no. Yes, say, but I had to cancel on both for the reason that though I could do scrapbooking any other time  - pictures are not going anywere - scrapbooking is a very time consuming thing and either you get doing it on schedule, or you end up with no margins of time left, holding into any available, free minute to work on them.

It reminded me of studying and even working. Sure, you can think you can study any time, you can work anytime, but exactly that sort of thinking is what pushes you later to be unable to do it anytime, because either you do it now or you'll never get done with it, and you'll fail or lose what you where aiming for with the project. I didn't plan my time well with this project and I ended up running out of time, and as result now I have to give up things I would love to do, in order to catch up on the project and get it by the last available time possible for me.

From this I leave you a question: Are you looking forward for Hectic Sundays? Is your schedule really as flexible as you pretend it is, or are you working yourself a whole lot of rushing and trouble? Pressure isn't fun and it can end up being really expensive.

Organize your time well. Plan your activities.

Child Noise and Joy

My boyfriend and I spent three nights at Panama. We are actually on our last night tonight, and well, in a way I'm happy we are getting the heck out of here. Don't get me wrong, I like Panama really much, and the city is adorable, but the hotel, well, It wasn't the best decision I've made. Now, let's not go over the fact that this site that I made the reservation on (a certain "Despegar.com", much advertized in Latin America, seems quite shady as a lot of things included in the description of the hotel proved not to be right - such as the safe included, or airport shuffle included, or the checking hours, not to mention the difficulty the hotel seems to have with finding our reservation...), now shall we go on the matter of the multiple inefficiencies of the hotel - that I'm reserving for the evaluation of the place - but the families lodged at the hotel.

I read a time ago - in one of those childfree, pro-child arguments - how some people talked about the sound of children as a "source of joy". If I recall correctly, it was a matter of having children at a wedding, and how they playing and laugher made the whole event much more enjoyable. Yep, sure. When I read the article I imagined that person lived in a Jane Austen world with melodic laugher, or a "Little House in the Praire", surrounded by Ingalls or something of the sort. Certainly, if you like children, the idea of children sounds and laugher may appear - theoretically - as something heartwarming. (If you've recently seen the movie "The Orphanage", it does not!), but still, for me it's like people saying that music from the 80's makes them happier: yes, it does the trick for them, but it doesn't do it for me.

I'm honestly happier with peace and quiet, or certain selected noises, such as a techno party, a sports bar in the middle of a Superbowl game, or the noise of trains. Some noisy movies also get to me, such as Fast and Furious, but kids are not my favored flavor in noises. A party is far more enjoyable with soothing jazz music and good conversation, than with children running around while you are looking out to make sure one of them are not distroying your property (car, coat, purse, home), or with your interlocutor paying you only half attention because they are looking our for the kids. Now, of course, it's always better a parent that keeps an eye on the kids, that one that detaches from it and leave the mess to the rest of the crew, but still, when kids are around adults are always somewhat in the edge. It's even worse than having an uncomfortable veggan friend in the party for whom you gara get out of the way to keep pleased and not "hurt sensitivities" - like not serving a big, juicy BBQ baby ribs because the scent of meat offends them.

Anyway, theoretically might be nice and romantic, but in the real life, in the practice, it's UNBEARABLE! Sure, I guess people who really want children find it lovely, just like hard metal rock lovers awe at the regurgitating and vomiting sounds of their singers, but for the regular folk, the sond of children may not be so pleasant. At the hotel a family was lodged, and whenever they were in the diner, you couldn't wait to bust the joint. The children weren't even running around and annoying directly the rest of the customers, but their shrieking voices, their demanding, their dumb playing were everywhere. It was so harsh, so high pitched, it worked like a poisoned needle piercing into your brain and interrupting your thoughts. Holding a conversation over their whining was just as hard.

The kids played even in the pool - a shallow, small, unsuitable pool - and the sight was disgusting. Maybe it was only those children, but there was a boy around 7 or 8 constantly trying to hump a 2-3 year old girl's butt, while the parents watched unfazed, and a 1-2 year old tried to mount the 8 year old. Their playing sounds weren't any more pleasing, with lots of "now me" and "lets do this" all over the place. No volume control. As I watched them rather disgusted (my boyfriend noticed I was looking at them as if I were staring at crap in a box), I wondered who would want those noises or maybe similar scenes anywhere else? Nowadays you can't count on parents to control their kids, because they don't, but rather expect all others to endure their trespassing. For instance, how many times have you actually heard of parents paying for the damage their kids do on someone else's property? Mostly they expect to be let off the hook because "they are kids". At a mass, if kids are allowed in, you are expected to endure their loud shrieking and crying, even at movies (I have been at movies where the irresponsable parents wouldn't leave the theatre when their children cried because "they payed the movie and have the right to be there"). 

An acquintance of mine, who has a child - a real monster - once told us about the time the kid made a scene at a public place, and they were so out of it, so fed up with the kid's temper tantrum, that they decided not to do a thing as the kid rolled on the floor and kicked and bothered other people, even when requested by others to control the child. That's modern parenting to you. Often parents also decide to let the kid throw temper tantrums and not attend them, since "paying attention and reacting to them will only make things worse", but then the rest of the people suffer from the teaching. Do those of us who haven't had a say on the birth of that particular child should suffer it? I'd say no. So joyful? Ummm... not.

Yes, children are the future and we've all been children, but please, don't come up with shit like "children bring joy" and that their sounds make everything "happier". No, it doesn't. It might work for you, but not for all of us, and yes, some of us actually like to hear what we have to think. Some of us do like to relax and have people around us who are relaxed, doing what they like, and not getting in the way with us.

Live and let live, or rather "live and let enjoy".

Achievement

Like in the life of every childfree person, recently I had a "run into" with an acquintance - friends, for some - who questioned again my decision about not to have children from two fronts, which amazed me by their irrationality. One was, the questioning about whether my boyfriend knows and what does he think about it. The other was the argument, that I was a child too.

For the first, whether my boyfriend knows or doesn't and what his thoughts are on the matter, are something that pertain strictly to him and me. Besides, I am not the property of my boyfriend, nor am I the property of nobody, therefore it is in my rights to decide what happens or not with my body. Giving birth, having children is MY RIGHT, not my obligation. It is my right also to decide not to have children. Topics about my boyfriend's rights to have children have already been addressed in prior posts.

For the second matter, yes, I was a child, because people can't be born in adult form, but that doesn't mean that, because I was a child, I must make children. Or is it that, because we were poor and I "had want" of many things in my childhood, if I were to have children, they must suffer the same needs and shortnings? Because I was raised atheist, even if I've found God later and believe in Him, I must raise children atheists? Or maybe because I was born  a girl I must have only girls? However this irrational, laughable argument is the kickstart of this post.

One of the usual arguments pro-child campaign is that children and parenthood is a vital stage of life, and not living it equals to miss a step of life that ensures the only real maturity. In their philosophy, no real maturity can be attained if not through parenthood. I'll step away here from counter-arguing that no rational maturity can be assigned through parenthood when it comes to the parents that kill their babies or torture them, put their children to work or prostitute themselves, or down right neglect them or raise them in unhealthy environments. These are beyond proving and the shelves of Children Protection are filled with plenty of sad cases that can, alone, rest this case.

The point here comes from the line of "attaining maturity". The question here is "What do we understand under 'maturity'?". Maturity is often related to adulthood, wisedom, the capability to reason and be able to make decisions of its own and shoulder the upcoming consequences of it. It can be said in simpler terms, that maturity means being fully responsible of one's actions. Though indeed parenthood demands - ideally - capability to be fully responsible of one's actions, since with parenthood you must assume responsible over someone else, it doesn't mean that parenthood indeed gives you such responsability, or that - lacking of it before parenthood - you will grow into it by the force of being a parent. Furthermore, the idea of waiting until parenthood to become responsible and therefore mature (as no maturity can attained without parenthood, as pro-child preechers say) nulifies any other source of learning, maturing, stripping any sense or need to be responsible of one's actions and one's life and its conditions and circumstances. Let's not talk here about the shock it means for parents-to-be to not only become suddenly responsible for themselves - something they've never done so far - and also responsible for someone who is not in the capability to be responsible for itself.

Something these pro-family groups don't seem to want others to know is that you can learn to be responsible much before you become a parent, and therefore, you can attain maturity not only before parenthood, but also without it. This is particularly applied to women, where even today no woman can seem to be considered fulfilled, mature, achieved or even normal, if she doesn't go through motherhood. No matter how good she is in her other activities - be it work or not - if she's not a mother at a given age, she's a freak, bitter, aberration. In this same line, women close to the age of having children or slightly under are not taken seriously because they are "up to be taken", and therefore considered unreliable. It's not strange though that in a world that pushed the family-centric model over us, that force us to choose to be a mother over everything else, even being a woman or being a person, laborally women are in such a terrible position. No women is seen as a person, therefore able to prove her reliability through her daily actions, but seen as a womb that some man will eventually fill with seen and have poping children, breastfeeding them, converted to domestic life and puting her family before everything. We are socially and laborally preceived as unreliable, temporal work that will never be able to step in the place of men.

As women, family-centric  societies preech that the only kind of real achievement we can ever aspire for is in motherhood. If motherhood doesn't make you feel fulfilled, you are unnatural. If you are fulfilled by something else, then "you don't know what's good", "you are immature", "you'll grow out of it eventually". Family-centric groups, of course, excersize this sort of pressure over men as well, making them see family as the last link of a long chain of conquests that prove his virility, his manliness, and add to it, they are socially pressed to take responsability not only for the children, but also the woman or women sexually linked to him. So back off ladies, men are in in this with us.

So basically we are bullied into family, rather than let to choose it by our own free will. It's almost as if childfree-ness were the only real, freely taken decision. By selling us this preposterous idea that parenthood is the only acceptable mean towards maturity or achievement, be it or not, attained or not, children become a tool, a mean towards that end. It's not only unfair to use someone to get ahead in life, but then proven that no maturity can be attained, what kind of achievement do you get from having a baby? You've achieved to get laid? You've achieved to get knocked up? That you've got past the splitting pain of childbirth - or made someone go through it? Talking about the achievement got through "watching him grow" and "his achievements are mine" sound to me like crap or stealing. First of all, either you simply achieve to keep it alive, which is hardly and achievement, but your responsability for giving birth to him or her, or taking credit for something that's entirely the child's achievement. You can't learn for others, you can't evolve for others, you can't progress for others, just like noone can do any of those for you. So where's your achievement? In making your teachings stick? Okay, and what are you teaching?

Because, if you've denied yourself the chance to mature outside of parenthood, if you denied yourself to accept responsability if not until after parenthood, if you bought the line that parenthood is the only real achievement you've got - which is using others, your own children, to accept worth in yourself, and steal their achievements, congratulate yourself for what's your responsability in the begining, or even for what's not yours to decide or control - then on which grounds can you expect your kids to be responsible, to mature, or on what ground you dare to tell them that they can be whatever they dream to be? Are you going to honestly tell your little girl that she can be all she wants as long as she'll drop it when the time comes to have children? Or are you gonna lie and spend your life spinning tales, because once you were a child and that's what your parents did with you?

Nice.

Yes, I break off the path designed by society to me. I've chosen to achieve fulfillment through other means, towards builiding myself by myself. I chose to make no one my achievement, but myself. No use of children, but develop myself, try out the path without dragging in innocent bystanders in my quest for completition. Funny thing, I do feel achieved, fulfilled and happy, and this is more than what I can say for many of those with kids. Childfree need not to blame their frustration or inability to enjoy themselves in "have kids and you must sacrifice things for them", but the childfree takes the responsability, when that excuse is often heard from parents, or told to parents by others, when they try to do things they could do when they didn't have them.

Thing is, to summarize, that parents or not, childfree or not, as people we should seek honestly our personal fulfilling - whatever it is - and attain maturity through life as a constant process since birth, and instead of making the choice of becoming a parent a social obligation, make it into a personal choice where whatever the outcome, whatever the decision, it will be respected by all of those around us.

As a childfree, I respect your decision to become a parent, even though I don't share it nor I can comprehend it. Please show me and my piers the same kindness.

Children Question

In a glop of inspiration, I found myself yesterday thinking about a couple if really awesome topics for posts for today or whenever. Didn't pick up my laptop, though, slamming my ideas quickly on the digital plane, but instead played them around in my head, letting them grow, swell and find a path of their own.

One of the topics I was concerned with, was the child-question. A comment issued to me recently again, about how can I be so mean as to refuse my boyfriend the joy of having a kid with the one he loves, and how I'm going to be to become a lonely, bitter old lady with no one to take care of me.  Well, I wasn't personally aware of the fact that my body isn't mine but my boyfriend's and thus my womb must be put at the service of his desire to have children, rather than respecting my decision to not have any. Besides, he can perfectly well have all the kids he wants with any other woman he wants, and I don't even require him to break up with me. Then again, I'm this open minded deviant who honestly believe that love is unique to each person, that jealousy has nothing to do with love, but understanding that no person is God, therefore no person can be everything for someone else, which lead us to conclude that real love is the capability to be happy your other half is happy and actively seeks the way for him or herself to be happy, while he or she is happy you also seek your happiness actively.

The end thought, the final destilation of this thought this time around, leaked down another branch of the thought. Children are not pets, company, an insurance for your elderly days, your servants or future caretakers, or a token, a milestone in your life without which you can't evolve to the next level. Sadly I realize that parents often don't get children, don't understand them, perhaps because they forget they are someone else's children too. Fact is that children are the one people with whom you must develop your most serious relationship. That's really a lifelong relationship where the parent figure must be mature, adult enough to understand that the child person will be first entirely dependant on him or her. The child person will require the parent person to show him or her the ropes. Teach the child person the language, social skills, ensure education, food and shelter, teach him or her through the years about values, principles, ethics, morals, good and bad, generosity, kindness, trust. Teach him or her to be alert, to avoid danger, to stand up for his or her believes. And then, the parent person must also be mature enough and prepared enough to let go of the child person, when the child person is adult.

The parent person do not own the child person, and the parent person has given to the child person according to his or her responsability, for bringing the child person to life. The child person owns the parent person nothing, more than what his or her soul dictates, because after all you can't be in debt for something you have not asked for.

Are those parents out there, those you throw stones at the childfree, aware of this? Or for them breeding new people into this word is their way to prove their worth, absolutely regardless of the imprints they leave in the children-people?

The other topic was about women, fashion and how at every fashion show the gay designer - someone with evidently no interest in women, other than friend and model - always tells us that he made the collection thinking of the "modern woman who knows what she wants". But this topic, perhaps, I'll reserve for tomorrow.

Indifference or Other Priorities?

Today I learned for the first time what's "L'Arche of Zoé". I had read the headlines of many articles about this organization, and so far I assumed it was just another whacky terrorist group. Well, all we hear about are either terrorists, Democrats and Republicans or Stock markets. With that name, well, where would you put it? For the first time, today I decided to google it and find more about it. I didn't have much time to research since I have a job to do for myself, but what I found was that this organization is out to help orphans across the world. As you enter their site, you read about the situation in Darfour, where genocide is taking the lives of many innocent people. Of course, among those innocent people there are kids too. The site offers statistics about the number of children dying there.

The reality is terrible, but truth is that it kinda upset me. It made me remember this annoying advertisement that pops up constantly at CNN, where two black children are used to make people feel bad and "adopt" children from foreign countries by just sending them money and make them feel they are doing something for the "poor of the world", and giving some of their "abundance".

First, the accusations L'Arche de Zoé makes against ONG's such as the UN, can be on spot. It mentions economical support that goes to the wrong hands and peace negociations that only ensures more masacres. I do agree that there's a lot of crap going on there, such as this "Goodwill Ambassadors". I mean, celebrities who really, are not prepared (as in back uped with the proper career background), or just some people here and there, politically correct, who are given this lable, this position so that they can travel the world with a UN passport and "raise awareness"? Which are their real contribution? How much have their acting helped diminish poverty, hunger, injustice or war? So, when the site of L'Arche de Zoé says their efforts are proving painfully futile, I believe them.

However, when an organization seeks to help people far awayraising charity and appealing to the feelings of others, it upsets me. Okay, it might not be the case of L'Arche de Zoé, but people so quick and desperate to donate and do charity should think first. Why do you help the orphans of war in some far country, through some big enterprise, and maybe you are not even 100% sure that the money ACTUALLY goes to the orphans, and then you leave the orphans, the paupers of your own country. You help kids somewhere out there and complain about the crime in your city and the beggers in the corners. You just give the money, and that's as far as you wish to be involved. You feel good because you "helped" but then, how is that money spent? You think that giving them food and clothes and a house is enough to help them? Oh yeah, you build schools for them. Uhum, and the teachers? Will you provide the teachers? And what would you teach them? How great life is in the US, so that they allienate in their own country?

Question: Why Darfour? Kids enslaved in India are not needing help as well? Baby girls in China do not need help as well? Poor kids in the US with no health care and growing up in neighbourhoods where the death and gunshots are so common the only difference with warstroke cities is the lack of soldiers. Helping people in other countries is a way to evade what happens home, a way to close your eyes at the misery growing at home because "we are not as bad as others and we are not in such a bad situation as others". But is it true? Aren't we?

L'Arche de Zoé has gotten headlines because six of its members tried to get around 103 Darfour orphans or so to France. The kids were retourned to their legal parents, though it seems they were sent to orphanages. The six members were condemned to eight years of forced labor, and are pleading to be sentences according to the French Laws. I know people think they were righteous and now they are regarded as heroes and martyrs of a humanitarian cause, but I think they did things wrong. Sure, you have to help them, but you can't send every kid in peril to France! These kids will grow up and engross the number of immigrants and just breed more trouble. Today they are kids and people want to help them becaus they are "lost puppies", but what will happen when they grow up and add pressure to the labor market in France? Will you send them back to Darfour?

Inspite to the goodwill ambassadors and the corruption and bad choices, I still believe in the UN and the principles that gave birth to it. I do not believe in charity, and I belive countries should help themselves before helping others, but International Organizations such as the UN should tackle these matters, and not only "Darfour", but the trouble going around the world and instead of sending "goodwill ambassadors" to "raise awareness", they should propose a global development plan aimed to tackle conflict zones and poverty zones and help countries in need to solve their problems and find the way to grow and ensure welfare to their citizens.

It is not an opium dream, nor I expect this to happen overnight, but I must believe that you can solve things by actively addressing them insteand of jst talking, or otherwise I would have wasted my efforts at choosing my career.