Sudan Quotes

Can you cite one speck of hard evidence of the benefits of "diversity" that we have heard gushed about for years? Evidence of its harm can be seen — written in blood — from Iraq to India, from Serbia to Sudan, from Fiji to the Philippines. It is scary how easily so many people can be brainwashed by sheer repetition of a word.

Beni bir gün unutacaksan, bir gün bırakıp gideceksen, boşuna yorma derdi; boş yere mağaramdan çıkarma beni. Alışkanlıklarımı özellikle yalnızlığa alışkanlığımı kaybettirme boşuna. Tedirgin etme beni. Bu sefer geride bir şey bırakmadım. Tasımı tarağımı topladım geldim. Neyim var neyim yoksa ortaya döktüm. Beni bırakırsan sudan çıkmış balığa dönerim. Bir kere çavuş olduktan sonra bir daha amelelik yapamayan zavallı köylüye dönerim. Beni uyandır.

The Republic of South Sudan does not belong to a particular tribe—it belongs to all tribes of South Sudan; those who think so should think coherently. The truth is, tribalism kills and destroys.

It is morally appalling for the so called liberators of South Sudan to keep liberating their own people from a war that has already been won.

Joan of Arc came back as a little girl in Japan, and her father told her to stop listening to her imaginary friends. Elvis was born again in a small village in Sudan, he died hungry, age 9, never knowing what a guitar was. Michelangelo was drafted into the military at age 18 in Korea, he painted his face black with shoe polish and learned to kill. Jackson Pollock got told to stop making a mess, somewhere in Russia. Hemingway, to this day, writes DVD instruction manuals somewhere in China. He’s an old man on a factory line. You wouldn’t recognise him. Gandhi was born to a wealthy stockbroker in New York. He never forgave the world after his father threw himself from his office window, on the 21st floor. And everyone, somewhere, is someone, if we only give them a chance.

Since that day there is nothing anyone could ever say to convince me that one person cannot change a nation. One person can do unbelievable things. All it takes is that one person who's willing to risk everything to make it happen.

There are no longer natural famines in the world; there are only political famines. If people in Syria, Sudan or Somalia starve to death, it is because some politician wants them to. In

Will they stand sir?” “Stand? I’ll have trouble stopping them charging. These men are the 9th Sudanese battalion, all from the South Sudan and the Nuba Hills. Bloody fine soldiers with just a little discipline imposed by their officers. You’ll see and so will the Dervishes.

The West's post-Holocaust pledge that genocide would never again be tolerated proved to be hollow, and for all the fine sentiments inspired by the memory of Auschwitz, the problem remains that denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good.

Whatever I do, however I find a way to live, I will tell these stories. I have spoken to every person I have encountered these last difficult days...I speak to these people, and I speak to you because I cannot help it. It gives me strength, almost unbelievable strength, to know that you are there. I covet your eyes, your ears, the collapsible space between us. How blessed are we to have each other? I am alive and you are alive and so we must fill the air with our words. I will fill today, tomorrow, every day until I am taken back to God. I will tell stories to people who will listen and to people who don't want to listen, to people who seek me out and to those who run. All the while I will know that you are there. How can I pretend that you do not exist? It would be almost as impossible as you pretending that I do not exist.

I have realized that for those who live in the West, freedom is so often something they take for granted. It has always been there for them. It is their unnoticed, unrecognized, constant companion and friend. But for those of us who come from countries like Sudan, freedom is wonderful and precious.

The issue is complex, but like many matters in Sudan, it is not as complex as Khartoum would want the west to believe.

As much wrong as I did in life and as many people as I hurt, I can say that God never stopped talking to me. I just stopped listening.

Rich American men, who tend to live longer than the average citizens of any other country, now live fifteen years longer than poor American men, who endure only as long as men in Sudan and Pakistan.

I had forgotten that, and so many things. How could I put everything down on paper? It seemed impossible. No matter what, the majority of life would be left out of this story, this sliver of a version of the life I'd known. But I tried anyway.

Incompatible religious doctrines have balkanized our world into separate moral communities, and these divisions have become a continuous source of bloodshed. Indeed, religion is as much a living spring of violence today as it has been at any time in the past. The recent conflicts in Palestine (Jews vs. Muslims), the Balkans (Orthodox Serbians vs. Catholic Croatians; Orthodox Serbians vs. Bosnian and Albanian Muslims), Northern Ireland (Protestants vs. Catholics), Kashmir (Muslims vs. Hindus), Sudan (Muslims vs. Christians and animists), Nigeria (Muslims vs. Christians), Ethiopia and Eritrea (Muslims vs. Christians), Sri Lanka (Sinhalese Buddhists vs. Tamil Hindus), Indonesia (Muslims vs. Timorese Christians), Iran and Iraq (Shiite vs. Sunni Muslims), and the Caucasus (Orthodox Russians vs. Chechen Muslims; Muslim Azerbaijanis vs. Catholic and Orthodox Armenians) are merely a few cases in point. These are places where religion has been the explicit cause of literally millions of deaths in recent decades. Why is religion such a potent source of violence? There is no other sphere of discourse in which human beings so fully articulate their differences from one another, or cast these differences in terms of everlasting rewards and punishments. Religion is the one endeavor in which us–them thinking achieves a transcendent significance. If you really believe that calling God by the right name can spell the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering, then it becomes quite reasonable to treat heretics and unbelievers rather badly. The stakes of our religious differences are immeasurably higher than those born of mere tribalism, racism, or politics.

The thing about dreams, though, is they usually sound crazy to everyone but you. All it takes is one other person to buy into them to keep you going.

Did you hear about the recently discovered temple in the Sudan ?" I stared at him. "Yeah. I'm a regular reader of National Geographic." Ol' Frankie's brows quirked. "You wield sarcasm, madam, as well as a master swordsman does." "Gee, thanks." I smiled at him and batted my lashes. Quit flirting . Patrick flicked the command into my head. He sounded half-annoyed, half-amused. I'm not flirting. Quit being cute and likeable. An impossible request. I've always been too adorable for words.

Sudan daha yumuşak bir şey vardır: Sevginin dokunuşu!

And Professor Tongun, from Sudan, “Like a tree in the forest, America doesn’t hear foreign suffering.

There are no longer natural famines in the world; there are only political famines. If people in Syria, Sudan or Somalia starve to death, it is because some politician wants them

There is a whirlwind in southern Morocco, the aajej, against which the fellahin defend themselves with knives. There is the africo, which has at times reached into the city of Rome. The alm, a fall wind out of Yugoslavia. The arifi, also christened aref or rifi, which scorches with numerous tongues. These are permanent winds that live in the present tense. There are other, less constant winds that change direction, that can knock down horse and rider and realign themselves anticlockwise. The bist roz leaps into Afghanistan for 170 days--burying villages. There is the hot, dry ghibli from Tunis, which rolls and rolls and produces a nervous condition. The haboob--a Sudan dust storm that dresses in bright yellow walls a thousand metres high and is followed by rain. The harmattan, which blows and eventually drowns itself into the Atlantic. Imbat, a sea breeze in North Africa. Some winds that just sigh towards the sky. Night dust storms that come with the cold. The khamsin, a dust in Egypt from March to May, named after the Arabic word for 'fifty,' blooming for fifty days--the ninth plague of Egypt. The datoo out of Gibraltar, which carries fragrance. There is also the ------, the secret wind of the desert, whose name was erased by a king after his son died within it. And the nafhat--a blast out of Arabia. The mezzar-ifoullousen--a violent and cold southwesterly known to Berbers as 'that which plucks the fowls.' The beshabar, a black and dry northeasterly out of the Caucasus, 'black wind.' The Samiel from Turkey, 'poison and wind,' used often in battle. As well as the other 'poison winds,' the simoom, of North Africa, and the solano, whose dust plucks off rare petals, causing giddiness. Other, private winds. Travelling along the ground like a flood. Blasting off paint, throwing down telephone poles, transporting stones and statue heads. The harmattan blows across the Sahara filled with red dust, dust as fire, as flour, entering and coagulating in the locks of rifles. Mariners called this red wind the 'sea of darkness.' Red sand fogs out of the Sahara were deposited as far north as Cornwall and Devon, producing showers of mud so great this was also mistaken for blood. 'Blood rains were widely reported in Portugal and Spain in 1901.' There are always millions of tons of dust in the air, just as there are millions of cubes of air in the earth and more living flesh in the soil (worms, beetles, underground creatures) than there is grazing and existing on it. Herodotus records the death of various armies engulfed in the simoom who were never seen again. One nation was 'so enraged by this evil wind that they declared war on it and marched out in full battle array, only to be rapidly and completely interred.

George Bush made a mistake when he referred to the Saddam Hussein regime as 'evil.' Every liberal and leftist knows how to titter at such black-and-white moral absolutism. What the president should have done, in the unlikely event that he wanted the support of America's peace-mongers, was to describe a confrontation with Saddam as the 'lesser evil.' This is a term the Left can appreciate. Indeed, 'lesser evil' is part of the essential tactical rhetoric of today's Left, and has been deployed to excuse or overlook the sins of liberal Democrats, from President Clinton's bombing of Sudan to Madeleine Albright's veto of an international rescue for Rwanda when she was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Among those longing for nuance, moral relativism—the willingness to use the term evil, when combined with a willingness to make accommodations with it—is the smart thing: so much more sophisticated than 'cowboy' language.

But without William K, I would have forgotten that I had not been born on this journey. That I had lived before this.

He feels ennui depression adrift in his life. Purposeless, perhaps because —dig a well in the Sudan and thejanjaweed come in and shoot the people anyway —buy mosquito nets and the boys you save grow up to —rape women —set up cottage industries in Myanmar and the army —steals them and uses the women as slaves and Ben is starting to be afraid that he is starting to share Chon’s opinion of the human species that people are basically shit.

Others with names like myths, names like puzzles, names we had never heard before: Virgilio, Balamugunthan, Faheem, Abdulrahman, Aziz, Baako, Dae-Hyun, Ousmane, Kimatsu. When it was hard to say the many strange names, we called them by their countries. So how on earth do you do this, Sri Lanka? Mexico, are you coming or what? Is it really true you sold a kidney to come to America, India? Guys, just give Tshaka Zulu a break, the guy is old, I'm just saying. We know you despise this job, Sudan, but deal with it, man. Come, Ethiopia, move, move, move; Israel, Kazakhstn, Niger, brothers, let's go!

Any critique of realism must begin with a sober assessment of the horrors of peace.

So, your friends call you Bastian. Your enemies call you asshole. What do lovers call you?” “Why do you want to know?” She smiled up at the stars. “Future reference.

By the standards of the European industrial world we are poor peasants, but when I embrace my grandfather I experience a sense of richness as though I am a note in the heartbeats of the very universe. He is no towering oak tree with luxurious branches growing in a land on which Nature has bestowed water and fertility, rather he is like the sayal bushes in the deserts of the Sudan, thick of bark and sharp of thorn, defeating death because they ask so little of life.

Indeed, religion is as much a living spring of violence today as it was at any time in the past. The recent conflicts in Palestine (Jews v Muslims), the Balkans (Orthodox Serbians v Catholic Croatians; Orthodox Serbians v Bosnian and Albanian Muslims), Northern Ireland (Protestants v Catholics), Kashmir (Muslims v Hindus), Sudan (Muslims v Christians and animists), Nigeria (Muslims v Christians) and Iran and Iraq (Shia v Sunni) are merely a few cases in point. These are places where religion has been the explicit cause of millions of deaths in the past decade.

War is always far worse on the poor than the rich. Always.

Family became so important to me. Without it I was like a tree alone in a desert.

I knew God gave me these dreams. How could I give up on them?

The mentality of who is your uncle—an ethnocentric way of thinking, is one of the leading causes of South Sudan’s internal conflicts.

A man will perhaps tolerate an offensive word applied to himself, but will be infuriated if his nation, his rank, or his profession is insulted.

The thing about dreams, though, is they usually sound crazy to everyone but you.

This morning there s first a predictable story about Darfur; an expert on African affairs notes that seven thousand African Union troops patrolling a region the size of France have been ineffectual in preventing continued janjaweed terror. Funding for the troops is about to run out, and it seems that no one, including the United States, is ready to put forth more money or come up with new ideas to stop the killing and displacement. This is not surprising to those of us who lived through twenty years of oppression by the hands of Khartoum and its militias.

Hypocrisy, is when individuals become abnoxiously contradicting, unrealistically criticizing the government of South Sudan, but yet are part of the puzzle underneath the Salva Kiir's regime".

You would think bearing witness to something like this would make a difference, and yet this isn’t so. In the newspapers I have read about history repeating itself in Cambodia. Rwanda. Sudan.

These are universals, as is the fear women feel during times of political upheaval that occur in what could still be called the outside world of men--whether during the Taiping Rebellion so many years ago or today for women in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Sudan, or even right here in this country in the post-9/11 era. On the surface, we as American women are independent, free, and mobile, but at our cores we still long for love, friendship, happiness, tranquility, and to be heard.

There is a huge trapdoor waiting to open under anyone who is critical of so-called 'popular culture' or (to redefine this subject) anyone who is uneasy about the systematic, massified cretinization of the major media. If you denounce the excess coverage, you are yourself adding to the excess. If you show even a slight knowledge of the topic, you betray an interest in something that you wish to denounce as unimportant or irrelevant. Some writers try to have this both ways, by making their columns both 'relevant' and 'contemporary' while still manifesting their self-evident superiority. Thus—I paraphrase only slightly—'Even as we all obsess about Paris Hilton, the people of Darfur continue to die.' A pundit like (say) Bob Herbert would be utterly lost if he could not pull off such an apparently pleasing and brilliant 'irony.

Salva had been in Rochester for more than six years now. He was going to college and had decided to study business. He had a vague idea that he would like to return to Sudan someday, to help the people who lived there.

The rigid rifle drill of the British infantryman had been their most potent weapon since the wars against Napoleon. Now it was the turn of the Dervishes to feel the impact of those heavy lead Martini Henry bullets. By now any European army would have staggered and might even have stopped. The Dervishes never paused, but ran forward screaming their war cries and trying to get within killing distance of the steady lines of men before them.

In the early 20th century, one of the most popular visitor attractions in Paris was a human zoo, which millions of people visited every year to see ‘specimens’ from Madagascar, India, China, Sudan, Tunisia, Morocco and the Congo.

Turn and face the Light, and all you see is Brightness. Turn and face Shadow, and all of Life will appear before you.

And she found her voice. "Thank you," she said, and looked up at him bravely. "Thank you for bringing the water.

It was like taking a hammer to the home I had built in the Arabic language word by word, over many years in Sudan and Saudi Arabia. My increasing strength in English correlated negatively with my Arabic. The more I felt at home in English, the less Arabic felt like one. So much so that learning a new language was to acquire a new wound. Multilingualism meant multi-wounding.

As many as thirty or as few as ten years later, lying exhausted and still, eyes open in the dark long after the three suns of Rakhat had set, no longer bleeding, past the vomiting, enough beyond the shock to think again, it would occur to Emilio Sandoz to wonder if perhaps that day int he Sudan was really only part of the setup for a punchline a life-time in the making. It was an odd thought, under the circumstances. He understood that, even at the time. But thinking it, he realized with appalling clarity that on his journey of discovery as a Jesuit, he had not merely been the first human being to set foot on Rhakhat, had not simply explored parts of its largest continent and learned two of its languages and loved some of its people. He had also discovered the outermost limit of faith and, in doing so had located the exact boundary of despair. It was at that moment that he learned, truly, to fear God.

I heard Mansour say to Richard, ‘You transmitted to us the disease of your capitalist economy. What did you give us except for a handful of capitalist companies that drew off our blood — and still do?’ Richard said to him, ‘All this shows that you cannot manage to live without us. You used to complain about colonialism and when we left you created the legend of neo-colonialism. It seems that our presence, in an open or undercover form, is as indispensable to you as air and water.’ They were not angry: they said such things to each other as they laughed, a stone’s throw from the Equator, with a bottomless historical chasm separating the two of them.

When an angry mob demands the death of a female English schoolteacher alleged to have insulted the Prophet, as happened in Sudan in November 2007, the real objective was not the defence of Islam but of honour, which – it was felt – had been slighted for many long years by the Western powers. This ‘spontaneous’ use of religion was accompanied by its deliberate instrumentalization by those who are pursuing other objectives, but who prefer this disguise. Even the Crusades, as I have said, had several motives other than religious ones, but these motives were merely less easy to admit to; so they preferred to declare that Jerusalem needed to be liberated. Such a cause appears nobler; and, in addition, the appeal to cultural identity allows more powerful inner resources to be mobilized.

Bana gül göndermiş." Hattın diğer ucundan, hayalkırıklığını belirten bir hırlama geldi. "Hayatım, nadiren radevuya gittiğini biliyorum ama o şeyleri sokak köşelerinde beş papele satıyorlar." "Kristalden yapılmış." Elena konuşurken, kristal gülün ışıltılarından gözünü alamıyordu. "Ay, olamaz." "Ne olamaz?" Elena ağzı açık bir halde en yakın çekmeyece uzanıp fazla hafif olduğu için nadiren kullandığı ince keskiyi aldı ve güün sapındaki bir bölgeyi hafifçe kzımaya çalıştı. Bıçak işlemiyordu. Sonra bıçağı tersine sirttü ama bu kez gül "çizilmelere dayanıklı"bıçaı çizdi. "Ay olamaz." "Ellie, neler olup bittiğini hemen anlatmazsan yemin edeirm seni eşşek sudan gelene kadar döverim. Ne oluyor? Kan emen mutant bir gülmüymüş.? Elena kahkahasını tutup elindeki tarif edilmez güzellikteki şeye baktı. "Kristal değilmiş." "Kübik zirkon mu? diye sordu Sara kuru kuru. "Ay, dur bir dakika, yoksa plastik mi?" "Elmas." Ölüm sessizliği.

Answer me something. This life, where you get to meet people and know them, and become friends, and then in a few days or a few weeks, either they leave or you do...is it worth it? I am not sure. I think so. Maybe having your heart broken like that is what keeps it open.

It is America (or Israel) at war, not just any war, that disturbs the Left. That is why there have been few demonstrations, and none of any size, against the mass murder of Sudan’s blacks; the genocides in Rwanda, Cambodia, or Congo; China’s crushing of Tibet; or Saddam Hussein’s wars against Iran, Kuwait, and Iraq’s own Kurds. Though there are always admirable individual exceptions, the Left has not been nearly as vocal about these large scale atrocities as it is about America’s wars. One additional reason is that, in general, atrocities committed by non-whites rarely interest the Left—and therefore ‘world opinion,’ which is essentially the same thing as Leftist opinion.

We’d never handled guns so when we saw a person handle it and it went bang, we knew that thing killed. We called it the harmful stick. We learned quickly that if somebody points the stick at you, you die.

The average Bhutanese knows much more about the world than the average American...(for Americans)It is more comfortable to watch fake news about celebrities than to know what's happening in China or southern Sudan. But events happening in China or Sudan affect us so much more because they are real.

You will not find Jesus in heaven, reclining on a cloud. He isn’t in church on Sunday morning, sitting in the pews. He isn’t locked away in the Vatican or held hostage by a denominational seminary. Rather, Jesus is sitting in the Emergency Room, an uninsured, undocumented immigrant needing healing. He is behind bars, so far from his parole date he can’t think that far into the future. He is homeless, evicted from his apartment, waiting in line at the shelter for a bed and a cup of soup. He is the poor child living in government housing with lice in his hair, the stripes of abuse on his body and a growl in his stomach. He is an old forgotten woman in a roach infested apartment who no one thinks of anymore. He is a refugee in Sudan, living in squalor. He is the abused and molested child who falsely feels responsible for the evil that is perpetrated against her. He is the young woman who hates herself for the decisions she has made, decisions that have imperiled her life, but did the best she could, torn between impossible choices. Jesus is anyone without power, ability or the means to help themselves, and he beckons us to come to him; not on a do-gooding crusade, but in solidarity and embrace.

When Bill Clinton ordered a missile attack on the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, my sixth-grade teacher had us sit down and write a paragraph explaining why such an act was necessary. But I knew that on the other side of the television screen there was a mass of human beings who saw things differently.

Did you know that Darfur was a great country long ago, so great that it was both in Sudan and also in Chad? Did you know that the French who controlled Chad, and the British, who later controlled Sudan, drew a line putting half of Darfur in each new nation? Did you know that? What do you care about this line if you are darfur men? What business is it of yours if the British and the French drew lines on maps? What does it have to do with the fact that we are brothers?" The boys were moved by this...

ben seni sevdim seveli bak ne hal oldum uzanmış yatıyorum dinlen biraz Selim kalkardı ellerime sarılır beni bir gün unutacaksan bir gün bırakıp gideceksen boşuna yorma derdi boş yere mağaramdan çıkarma beni alışkanlıklarımı özellikle yalnızlığa alışkanlığımı kaybettirme boşuna tedirgin etme beni bu sefer geride bir şey bırakmadım tasımı tarağımı topladım geldim neyim var neyim yoksa ortaya döktüm beni bırakırsan sudan çıkmış başlığa dönerim bir kere çavuş olduktan sonra bir daha amelelik yapamayan zavallı köylüye dönerim

I do not know how we could run so far and so fast and so long. We did not run with our own strength but with strength from God. That is the only explanation. The

All great movements, every vigorous impulse that a community may feel, become perverted and distorted as time passes,

hour she’d

Kitap okuyucuları da diğerleri gibi arkadaşlığa havadan sudan söz ederek başlamaya razıdır. Ama genellikle bu konudan daha da ileri gidebilirler.

Chinese authorities demonstrated during the climate-related civil war that began in Sudan in 2003 that they would support mass murderers when doing so seemed to serve their investments. In

Some presence had a hold of me in that moment that would change my life from then on. I didn't know what that change would look like or how it would happen. All I know was that it was there.

Şimdi pencereye karşı dirseklerimi dayadım ve büyük bir üzüntü camları buğulandırmaktadır. Nedir bu? Neredeyim? Kıpırdamadan kaldığım bu sessiz evden deniz kokusunun büyük bir okyanus musluğundan çıkıyormuş gibi fışkırması gerekti. İşte, yalnızlığın canavarlarla dolmaya başladığı saat; gece sınırları içerisinde çökmüş, çölleşmiş renklerle parıldamakta ve şafak ağlayarak çekiyor gözlerini sudan.

Years later I was in the Sudan on a conservation project when I heard an incredible story on good authority that sounded similar to my own. During the twenty-year war between northern and southern Sudan elephants were being slaughtered both for ivory and meat and so large numbers migrated to Kenya for safety. Within days of the final ceasefire being signed, the elephants left their adopted residence en masse and trekked the hundreds of miles back home to Sudan. How they knew that their home range was now safe is just another indication of the incredible abilities of these amazing creatures.

THE TRUTH IS BORN IN STRANGE PLACES Joan of Arc came back as a little girl in Japan, and her father told her to stop listening to her imaginary friends. Elvis was born again in a small village in Sudan, he died hungry, age 9, never knowing what a guitar was. Michelangelo was drafted into the military at age 18 in Korea, he painted his face black with shoe polish and learned to kill. Jackson Pollock got told to stop making a mess, somewhere in Russia. Hemingway, to this day, writes DVD instruction manuals somewhere in China. He’s an old man on a factory line. You wouldn’t recognise him. Gandhi was born to a wealthy stockbroker in New York. He never forgave the world after his father threw himself from his office window, on the 21st floor. And everyone, somewhere, is someone, if we only give them a chance.

In the early twenty-first century the train of progress is again pulling out of the station – and this will probably be the last train ever to leave the station called Homo sapiens. Those who miss this train will never get a second chance. In order to get a seat on it you need to understand twenty-first-century technology, and in particular the powers of biotechnology and computer algorithms. These powers are far more potent than steam and the telegraph, and they will not be used merely for the production of food, textiles, vehicles and weapons. The main products of the twenty-first century will be bodies, brains and minds, and the gap between those who know how to engineer bodies and brains and those who do not will be far bigger than the gap between Dickens’s Britain and the Mahdi’s Sudan. Indeed, it will be bigger than the gap between Sapiens and Neanderthals. In the twenty-first century, those who ride the train of progress will acquire divine abilities of creation and destruction, while those left behind will face extinction.

People who do this type of work talk about the rupture we feel on our return, an irreconcilable invisible difference between us and others. We talk about how difficult it is to assimilate, to assume routine, to sample familiar pleasures. The rift, of course, is not in the world: it is within us....The world is a hard place -- a beautiful place, but so too an urgent one. ... Once that urgency takes hold, it never completely lets go.

When Africans were kidnapped, trafficked en masse and brutally dragged in chains to work camps in the “New World,” called plantations, we hid our deities and rituals in stories of saints, angels, and legendary characters. Our deities included a powerful cadre of orishas, abosom, lwas, álúsí, spirits, and god/desses. From South Africa to Sudan, Brazil to Cuba to even Indigenous Australia, we chant their names: Yemaya, Mami Wata, Atete, Iset, and Ala.

Incompatible religious doctrines have Balkanised our world and these divisions have become a continuous source of bloodshed. Indeed, religion is as much a living spring of violence today as it was at any time in the past. The recent conflicts in Palestine (Jews v Muslims), the Balkans (Orthodox Serbians v Catholic Croatians; Orthodox Serbians v Bosnian and Albanian Muslims), Northern Ireland (Protestants v Catholics), Kashmir (Muslims v Hindus), Sudan (Muslims v Christians and animists), Nigeria (Muslims v Christians) and Iran and Iraq (Shia v Sunni) are merely a few cases in point. These are places where religion has been the explicit cause of millions of deaths in the past decade.

The Sudanese intellectual Mahmoud Mohammed Taha argued that Muslims should embrace the spiritual Islam of Mecca and let go of the Islam of Muhammad’s more warlike and political Medina period, which, Taha argued, applied only to that specific moment in time and not to subsequent generations. Taha also campaigned against introducing sharia in Sudan. Though he still believed there was no god but Allah, and that Muhammad was his messenger, Taha was nonetheless hanged for apostasy in 1985.

A wide humanitarian sympathy in a nation easily degenerates into hysteria. A military spirit tends towards brutality. Liberty leads to licence, restraint to tyranny. The pride of race is distended to blustering arrogance. The fear of God produces bigotry and superstition. There appears no exception to the mournful rule, and the best efforts of men, however glorious their early results, have dismal endings, like plants which shoot and bud and put forth beautiful flowers, and then grow rank and coarse and are withered by the winter.

What the [Clinton/Lewinsky scandal] showed was that a matter of personal behavior could crowd out of the public's attention far more serious matters, indeed matters of life and death. The House of Representatives would impeach the president on matters of sexual behavior, but it would not impeach him for endangering the lives of children by welfare reform, or for violating international law in bombing other countries (Iran, Afghanistan, Sudan), or for allowing hundreds of thousands of children to die as a result of economic sanctions (Iraq).

In some cases, the materials at stake will be viewed as so essential to national survival or economic well-being that compromise is unthinkable. It is difficult, for example, to imagine that the United States will ever allow the Persian Gulf to fall under the control of a hostile power, or that Egypt will allow Sudan or Ethiopia to gain control over the flow of the Nile River. In such situations, national security considerations will always prevail over negotiated settlements that could be perceived as entailing the surrender of vital national interests.

And there’s one other matter I must raise. The epidemic of domestic sexual violence that lacerates the soul of South Africa is mirrored in the pattern of grotesque raping in areas of outright conflict from Darfur to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and in areas of contested electoral turbulence from Kenya to Zimbabwe. Inevitably, a certain percentage of the rapes transmits the AIDS virus. We don’t know how high that percentage is. We know only that women are subjected to the most dreadful double jeopardy. The point must also be made that there’s no such thing as the enjoyment of good health for women who live in constant fear of rape. Countless strong women survive the sexual assaults that occur in the millions every year, but every rape leaves a scar; no one ever fully heals. This business of discrimination against and oppression of women is the world’s most poisonous curse. Nowhere is it felt with greater catastrophic force than in the AIDS pandemic. This audience knows the statistics full well: you’ve chronicled them, you’ve measured them, the epidemiologists amongst you have disaggregated them. What has to happen, with one unified voice, is that the scientific community tells the political community that it must understand one incontrovertible fact of health: bringing an end to sexual violence is a vital component in bringing an end to AIDS. The brave groups of women who dare to speak up on the ground, in country after country, should not have to wage this fight in despairing and lonely isolation. They should hear the voices of scientific thunder. You understand the connections between violence against women and vulnerability to the virus. No one can challenge your understanding. Use it, I beg you, use it.

Bana gül göndermiş." Hattın diğer ucundan, hayal kırıklığını belirten bir hırlama geldi. "Hayatım, nadiren randevuya gittiğini biliyorum ama o şeyleri sokak köşelerinde beş papele satıyorlar." "Kristalden yapılmış." Elena konuşurken, kristal gülün ışıltılarından gözünü alamıyordu. "Ay, olamaz." "Ne olamaz?" Elena ağzı açık bir halde en yakın çekmeceye uzanıp fazla hafif olduğu için nadiren kullandığı ince keskiyi aldı ve gülün sapındaki bir bölgeyi hafifçe kazımaya çalıştı. Bıçak işlemiyordu. Sonra bıçağı tersine sürttü ama bu kez gül "Çizilmelere dayanıklı"bıçkı çizdi. "Ay olamaz." "Ellie, neler olup bittiğini hemen anlatmazsan yemin ederim seni eşek sudan gelene kadar döverim. Ne oluyor? Kan emen mutant bir gülmüymüş.? Elena kahkahasını tutup elindeki tarif edilmez güzellikteki şeye baktı. "Kristal değilmiş." "Kübik zirkon mu? diye sordu Sara kuru kuru. "Ay, dur bir dakika, yoksa plastik mi?" "Elmas." Ölüm sessizliği.” sy 111

Mass famines still strike some areas from time to time, but they are exceptional, and they are almost always caused by human politics rather than by natural catastrophes. There are no longer natural famines in the world; there are only political famines. If people in Syria, Sudan or Somalia starve to death, it is because some politician wants them to.

All journeys that really matter start deep inside of us.

You can tell if a person has come from the war: they are haunted from all the killing they have seen. It

The IGAD-Plus's compromise peace agreement is probably pregnant with a noisy, perhaps thunderous baby.

The body is like an engine. When the engine is shut down, there is no way you can even think of taking care of yourself. When you have food, the mind can take care of all those things.

From thwarting reconstruction efforts and economic development in war-ravaged Afghanistan to offering lifelines to embattled anti-Western governments in Sudan and North Korea, China has opposed the actions and goals of the U.S. government. Indeed, China is building its own relationships with America’s allies and enemies that contradict any peaceful or productive intentions of Beijing.

Life may have been hard, but we were happy. Yes, boys died and food was difficult to come by, but at least no one was shooting at us. We only ate one meal a day, but for me, coming into the camp at the age of six, I accepted this as normal. I never thought that life was unfair because I had to eat garbage. Instead, I looked at the scraps of food from the dump as a blessing. Not all the boys in the camp could do this. I knew some who chose to feel sorry for themselves, who complained constantly about their lot in life. What is the point of such complaining? After all the whining and complaining is over, you still live in a refugee camp. All the complaining in the world will not make your life any better. Instead, you must choose to make the best of whatever the situation in which you find yourself, even in a place like Kakuma.

Now right here, where the borders of South Sudan, Ethiopia, and Kenya all come together, there’s a patch of land, perhaps 14 or 15 thousand square kilometers—about the size of Montenegro—that is contested. This is just some unpopulated marginal cattle grazing country that is a hot soggy sponge in the rainy season and then a scorching hot griddle in the dry season. There are just a few villages, and most of those are just seasonally occupied.

Let's say that the God the Christians pray to is real. He actually exists. But this God is the same as the one that the Jews pray to and the same as the one that the Muslims pray to and whatever other religions are praying to a God, He is the one. One God with many faces. Most of these religions contain the myth of the Anti-Christ, a being who will come one day and lead the world astray, lead the world to a place of sin and evil. Who could this Anti-Christ be...Consider the God with many faces. How many wars have been fought in His Name? How many people have been beaten, jailed, and maimed to prove His points. Think of the Inquisition, the Holocaust, Salem, and the Sudan. All of these tragedies carried out in His name. Why is it accepted that He is a force for good? If we were to look for the Anti-Christ just by his accomplishments, wouldn't we clearly suspect the being who is the cause of so much woe?

Today I share about my addiction and recovery journey as often as possible because I don't want to die all alone in a dark closet, shrouded in shame beside the decomposing skeletons I tried so desperately to hide. I want to live.

DÖRDÜNCÜ ŞARKI Baharın son günleri; kömürlükler arasında Çamaşır ipleriyle kesilen Üç ağaçlı bahçemizin yanındaki papatyalı arsaya bitişik 400 Sert kaldırımlı ve yokuşu dik Yolda, ayakkabılarımın burnunu Çarpmamaya çalışarak sekiyorum. (Becermek mümkün değil bunu.) Bir satıcı eşeğinin küfeleriyle sığmadığı dar Boğazı aşıyorum 405 Ve servi ağaçlarıyla kasvet Ve daha birtakım ağır duygular veren Küçük meydana ulaşıyorum. Burada duvarları yıkık Bir mezarlık ve içinde bir türbe, 410 (Yıllar sonra gördüğüm Karacaahmet Mezarlık Bankasının -tövbe de- Yanında “bir küçük hesap sahibi” sayılırdı.) Türbenin parmaklıklarına düğümlenmiş çaputları. Sudan çıkarılmış bir ölünün parmaklarına takılı Yosunlar gibi görürdüm. Ve duvarın önündeki kara çalı, 415 Bana ölümün taştanlığını anlatan bir hocaydı kara sakallı. Çarpık mezar taşları arasında, Ölülerin beslediği çimenlerin ortasında Türbedeki taş tabutlar kadar Kayıtsızca uzanmış çocuklar.

The presumption to rule the entire world for the benefit of all its inhabitants was startling. Evolution has made Homo sapiens, like other social mammals, a xenophobic creature. Sapiens instinctively divide humanity into two parts, ‘we’ and ‘they’. We are people like you and me, who share our language, religion and customs. We are all responsible for each other, but not responsible for them. We were always distinct from them, and owe them nothing. We don’t want to see any of them in our territory, and we don’t care an iota what happens in their territory. They are barely even human. In the language of the Dinka people of the Sudan, ‘Dinka’ simply means ‘people’. People who are not Dinka are not people. The Dinka’s bitter enemies are the Nuer. What does the word Nuer mean in Nuer language? It means ‘original people’. Thousands of miles from the Sudan deserts, in the frozen ice-lands of Alaska and north-eastern Siberia, live the Yupiks. What does Yupik mean in Yupik language? It means ‘real people’.3

Analysis of your social network and its members can also be highly revealing of your life, politics, and even sexual orientation, as demonstrated in a study carried out at MIT. In an analysis known as Gaydar, researchers studied the Facebook profiles of fifteen hundred students at the university, including those whose profile sexual orientation was either blank or listed as heterosexual. Based on prior research that showed gay men have more friends who are also gay (not surprising), the MIT investigators had a valuable data point to review the friend associations of their fifteen hundred students. As a result, researchers were able to predict with 78 percent accuracy whether or not a student was gay. At least ten individuals who had not previously identified as gay were flagged by the researchers’ algorithm and confirmed via in-person interviews with the students. While these findings might not be troubling in liberal Cambridge, Massachusetts, they could prove problematic in the seventy-six countries where homosexuality remains illegal, such as Sudan, Iran, Yemen, Nigeria, and Saudi Arabia, where such an “offense” is punished by death.

A clinic in Bolivia 140 kilometers from the nearest city prints out splints and prostheses when supplies are low. The cost per piece runs about 2 cents for the plastic. This might allow developing nations to circumvent having to import large numbers of supplies. Already, 3D printing is occurring in underdeveloped areas. “Not Impossible Labs” based in Venice, California took 3D printers to Sudan where the chaos of war has left many people with amputated limbs. The organization’s founder, Mick Ebeling, trained locals how to operate the machinery, create patient–specific limbs, and fit these new, very inexpensive prosthetics.

Our ancestors, alas, knew it only too well. When they cried to God, ‘Deliver us from famine!’, this is what they had in mind. During the last hundred years, technological, economic and political developments have created an increasingly robust safety net separating humankind from the biological poverty line. Mass famines still strike some areas from time to time, but they are exceptional, and they are almost always caused by human politics rather than by natural catastrophes. There are no longer natural famines in the world; there are only political famines. If people in Syria, Sudan or Somalia starve to death, it is because

I haunted and interrogated the past even as it interrogated me. London, Skinner's Lane, Brook Street, the Sudan - how had we passed all that time? Why did we not burn up every moment of it, as we would if we could have it all again? The journey back to England surfaced in dreams and occupied my days, the train to Wadi Halfa panting across the desert, reading old newspapers in the white, shuttered carriages while Taha, alas, was obliged to travel with the guard; and the stops, which had no names, but only a number, painted on a little shelter beside the track; and the steamer to the first Cateract and the visionary beauty of Aswan.

Years ago, I happened upon a television program of a “prosperity gospel” preacher, with perfectly coiffed mauve hair, perched on a rhinestone-spackled golden throne, talking about how wonderful it is to be a Christian. Even if Christianity proved to be untrue, she said, she would still want to be a Christian, because it’s the best way to live. It occurred to me that that is an easy perspective to have, on television, from a golden throne. It’s a much more difficult perspective to have if one is being crucified by one’s neighbors in Sudan for refusing to repudiate the name of Christ. Then, if it turns out not to be true, it seems to be a crazy way to live. In reality, this woman’s gospel—and those like it—are more akin to a Canaanite fertility religion than to the gospel of Jesus Christ. And the kingdom she announces is more like that of Pharaoh than like that of Christ. David’s throne needs no rhinestone. But the prosperity gospel proclaimed in full gaudiness in the example above is on full display in more tasteful and culturally appropriate forms. The idea of the respectability of Christian witness in a Christian America that is defined by morality and success, not by the gospel of crucifixion and resurrection, is just another example of importing Jesus to maintain one’s best life now. Jesus could have remained beloved in Nazareth, by healing some people and levitating some chairs, and keeping quiet about how different his kingdom is. But Jesus persistently has to wreck everything, and the illusions of Christian America are no more immune than the illusions of Israelite Galilee. If we see the universe as the Bible sees it, we will not try to “reclaim” some lost golden age. We will see an invisible conflict of the kingdoms, a satanic horror show being invaded by the reign of Christ. This will drive us to see who our real enemies are, and they are not the cultural and sexual prisoners-of-war all around us. If we seek the kingdom, we will see the devil. And this makes us much less sophisticated, much less at home in modern America.

The good performed by some of United Nations institutions, such as the World Health Organization and UNICEF, has been outweighed by the amount of bad the UN has either abetted or allowed. It has enabled genocide in Rwanda, done little or nothing to stop genocide in the Congo and Sudan, given a respectable forum to tyrannies, convened conferences (the Durban Conferences on racism) that simply became forums for anti-Semitism, and been preoccupied with vilifying one of its relatively few humane states, Israel. Its moral failings were further exemplified by its placing Qaddafi’s Libya on its Human Rights Commission, Iran on its Commission on the Status of Women, and North Korea on the Nuclear Disarmament Commission. It is not that the people who run the United Nations are bad people; it is that the United Nations is run by a majority of the world’s governments, and they are run by bad people. Without America in the Security Council, the bad would nearly always prevail.

CIA analysis began by late 1994 to run in a different direction. The insights Black and his case officers could obtain into bin Laden’s inner circle were limited, but they knew that bin Laden was working closely with the Sudanese intelligence services. They knew that Sudanese intelligence, in turn, was running paramilitary and terrorist operations in Egypt and elsewhere. Bin Laden had access to Sudanese military radios, weapons, and about two hundred Sudanese passports. These passports supplemented the false documents that bin Laden acquired for his aides from the travel papers of Arab volunteers who had been killed in the Afghan jihad. Working with liaison intelligence services across North Africa, Black and his Khartoum case officers tracked bin Laden to three training camps in northern Sudan. They learned that bin Laden funded the camps and used them to house violent Egyptian, Algerian, Tunisian, and Palestinian jihadists. Increasingly the Khartoum station cabled evidence to Langley that bin Laden had developed the beginnings of a multinational private army. He was a threat.

There is surely no reason for Western civilization to have guilt trips laid on it by champions of cultures based on despotism, superstition, tribalism, and fanaticism. In this regard the Afrocentrists are especially absurd. The West needs no lectures on the superior virtue of those "sun people" who sustained slavery until Western imperialism abolished it (and sustain it to this day in Mauritania and the Sudan), who keep women in subjection, marry several at once, and mutilate their genitals, who carry out racial persecutions not only against Indians and other Asians but against fellow Africans from the wrong tribes, who show themselves either incapable of operating a democracy or ideologically hostile to the democratic idea, and who in their tyrannies and massacres, their Idi Amins and Boukassas, have stamped with utmost brutality on human rights. Keith B. Richburg, a black newspaperman who served for three years as the Washington Post's bureau chief in Africa, saw bloated bodies floating down a river in Tanzania from the insanity that was Rwanda and thought: "There but for the grace of God go I . . . Thank God my nameless ancestor, brought across the ocean in chains and leg irons, made it out alive . . . Thank God I am an American".

renkli balıkların şımarıklığından geçip, küçük balıkların doğuştan şaşkınlığından, yosunların yılışıklığından; kurbağa yavrularının gayretine hayranlıkla ve su yılanlarının kaçısına minnettarlıkla, vardım suyun kuytu sığınağına. akıntının mahmurlaştığı yuvasına. yarı uykulu, dalgın bu tabakada rastladım suyun başlangıcından beri orada olan bir balığa. dokunmadım hiç bu balığa. dokunulamaz balıklara. çünkü tutabilmek için bir balığı, gövdesini sıkıştırmalı. gövdesi tutulan balıkların çabucak kesilir soluğu. körpe ve iyi niyetli olsa da, çırpınarak kovar balık, kendi için açılmış her avucu. balık, ancak bakarak bilenlerin, görmekle yetinenlerin dostu. durduk balıkla yan yana. ancak yan yana durulabilir bir balıkla. karşısına geçip telaşını durdurmaya çalışacağına... arkasına geçip kuyruğunun dalgasında hırpalanacağına.. üstünde altında dolaşıp balığı şaşırtacağına.. sadece yan yana durulabilir bir balıkla. böylece bakabilirsin balığın neye baktığına. .... ben de baktım balığın baktıklarına. durdurup zihnimin işleyişini iyice, çalıştım aklımı saydam kılmaya. söyleyecek sözüm kalmayacaktı az daha. biraz daha dursam böyle kalakacaktım balıksı bir zamanda. yumuşaktı doğrusu, akıl dönüşüyordu suya. kendini diyemeyecek kadar duraksız bir akışta. derken bir kaplumbağa böldü duruşumuzu. ... balık baktı bana. sonra kaplumbağaya. şaşarak bir aklın bu kadar etten olmasına ve bir gövdenin zamanın bütün yaralarını taşımasına. balık unuttu anladığını, suyla birlikte aktı. daha biraz önce burada, bir şey anlamaktaydı. anlamın kendi gelmeden anladığından uzaklaştı. yeterince sudan biri olamadığımdan belki, su için fazla dilli, kaplumbağa beni suyun ötesine doğru çekti. aklım yeniden ete döndü. nihayetinde ben insandım, balık olup akamadım. tastamam kendimden ibaret olamadım. giderek hızlanarak ve suyun boğuk gürültüsüne kapılarak...

Sharon passed around a handout: "Triangle of Self-Actualization" by Abraham Maslow. The levels of human motivation. It resembled the nutrition triangle put out by the FDA, with five horizontal levels of multiple colors. I vaguely remembered it from my one college psychology course in the 1970's. "Very applicable with refugees," Sharon said. "Maslow theorized that one could not move to a higher level until the prior level was satisfied. The first level, the triangle base, is physiological needs. Like food and water. Until a person has enough to eat and drink, that's all one would be concerned with." I'd never experienced not being able to satisfy my thirst or hunger, but it sounded logical that that would be my only concern in such a situation. For the Lost Boys, just getting enough food and water had been a daily struggle. I wondered what kind of impact being stuck at the bottom level for the last fourteen years would have on a person, especially a child and teen. "The second level is safety and security. Home. A sanctuary. A safe place." Like not being shot at or having lions attack you. They hadn't had much of level two, either. Even Kakuma hadn't been safe. A refugee camp couldn't feel like home. "The third level is social. A sense of belonging." Since they'd been together, they must have felt like they belonged, but perhaps not on a larger scale, having been displaced from home and living in someone else's country. "Once a person has food, shelter, family and friends, they can advance to the fourth level, which is ego. Self-esteem." I'd never thought of those things occurring sequentially, but rather simultaneously, as they did in my life. If I understood correctly, working on their self-esteem had not been a large concern to them, if one at all. That was bound to affect them eventually. In what way remained to be seen. They'd been so preoccupied with survival that issues of self-worth might overwhelm them at first. A sure risk for insecurity and depression. The information was fascinating and insightful, although worrisome in terms of Benson, Lino, and Alepho. It also made me wonder about us middle-and upper-class Americans. We seldom worried about food, except for eating too much, and that was not what Maslow had been referring to. Most of us had homes and safety and friends and family. That could mean we were entirely focused on that fourth level: ego. Our efforts to make ourselves seem strong, smart, rich, and beautiful, or young were our own kind of survival skill. Perhaps advancing directly to the fourth level, when the mind was originally engineered for the challenges of basic survival, was why Prozac and Zoloft, both antidepressants, were two of the biggest-selling drugs in America. "The pinnacle of the triangle," Sharon said, "is the fifth level. Self-actualization. A strong and deeply felt belief that as a person one has value in the world. Contentment with who one is rather than what one has. Secure in ones beliefs. Not needing ego boosts from external factors. Having that sense of well-being that does not depend on the approval of others is commonly called happiness." Happiness, hard to define, yet obvious when present. Most of us struggled our entire lives to achieve it, perhaps what had brought some of us to a mentoring class that night.