I was fortunate enough to spend Thanksgiving in New York City, thanks to a wonderful friend who was out of town, and lent us her apartment in Brooklyn. We walked all over, saw the sights, and went to see Billy Elliot on Broadway. I saw the movie last year, and we really wanted to go and see a play – so this was our choice. It was really interesting – the stage play puts much more emphasis on the politics of  the Thatcher years in Britain, and her resounding defeat of the labour unions in the 1980′s. It brought back many memories for me – of a society that was angry, of frustration, economic hardship, aggression and pride fighting for space. thee were poignant moments, hilarious comments, dark struggles and the beauty of the ballet. It was a time of hardship, solidarity for the working class and deep rifts and divisions in the coal mining families that are still rife today.

Britain has changed so much since then – I’m not sure if it’s for the better – the whole nature  and composition of society has altered.  I’ve spent the last twenty years living outside of my country, and feel very much like a stranger looking in, with the right accent and passport.  Going to see Billy Elliot took me back to a very different country, and back to many forgotten memories of childhood. Who’d have thought a Broadway play could have such a powerful effect on my psyche – it’s even made me want to write an essay about it – how about that!

Dec 1st is the ‘celebration’ of World AIDS day – by celebration, I guess we rrecognize, remember and learn more about the disease that is afflicting so many, world-wide. From 1988 to 2008 – the last twenty years over 25 million people have died from AIDs. In South Africa there has been a major reversal of Government policy towards the acknowledgement of AIDs. Click here to read the article. One of the most significant changes there has been the President’s approach to being tested. Aids in Africa is surrounded by myth, secrecy and shame, and for one to be tested is considered shameful, it is shrouded in secrecy. For many years AIDs support groups have been asking for country leaders in Africa to be tested, to stand up and be counted, to lead by example. Certainly when I lived in Zambia the American Embassy tried, as persuasively as possible to encourage  President  Mwanawasa to be tested, to be a positive role model, to confront ‘the enemy’, but to no avail.  In South Africa we now see that the President is willing to be tested, a huge leap for mankind!

According to the Buncombe County website, “In WNC, there has been a steady increase in the number people who are testing positive for both HIV and syphilis over the past few months. Syphilis is a sexually transmitted disease that can sometimes be hard to recognize. Many people infected with syphilis do not have any symptoms for years, yet remain at risk for serious health problems if they aren’t treated.”

This is incredibly worrying – AIDs and STD’s on the rise in a country where the support, education and health facilities are abundant? What is happening to us – I remember a time, back in the late 80′s when we were so paranoid about AIDs, and subsequently SO well-educated about prevention that we went way over the top to avoid spreading the disease. Why then has the curve turned back up? Has sex ed in schools glossed over the tragedy and danger of AIDs and STD’s?

Reviewing the literature and the newspaper articles  from an adult perspective,  the messages that  are portrayed in the play are in contrast with some interpretations of Thatcher’s handling of the miner’s strike, and the social commentary that the play provides. I’m out to seek the truth!

I was horrified when I heard about the The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force’s recommendations, revising the recommendations for breast cancer mammogram screening. Although they say that these are guidelines only, not binding, we know for sure that our insurance companies will adopt them and begin to choose not to cover us. The Susan.G.Komen home page reports the following:

“Most breast cancer experts agree far more than they disagree. One thing that the evidence clearly shows is that mammography reduces the risk of dying from breast cancer. Susan G. Komen for the Cure® continues to recommend annual mammography beginning at age 40 for women of average risk and earlier for women with known risks for breast cancer.

Mammography is not perfect, but until we can develop more precise screening methods and can more accurately predict which women are at risk for breast cancer it is still our best tool for early detection.”

As I read more and more reports about this issue, I am encouraged to see that most specialists continue to recommend yearly mammograms, encourage monthly self exams and support the age of 40+ as the baseline. I do not wish to be hijacked by my insurance company for something that we took so long to decide initially, and has been successful – which is now ‘maybe, maybe not, sorta kinda being refuted.”

There are things that can be done. Click on the Susan.G.Komen web page and let your voice be heard.

Sign the petition, learn some more, be PRO – ACTIVE,  spread the word.

If there was ever a period in time that I could  travel back to (and then jet around the world in) it would be the early 1900′s. From the late 1880′s to around 1940 it was such a fantastic period in art where a lot of the experimentation, the breaking from tradition all took place. Alongside such fabulous artists such as Van Gogh and Picasso,  Art Nouveau was arising from the works of Gustav Klimt and Gaudi, and  Europe was changing shape and form.  Oh to be in Paris then!  In the US photographers Alfred Steiglitz and Ansel Adams were making huge inroads to the work of nature photography, Steiglitz also opening one of the few galleries in New York that initially showed the fascinating work of the Cubists and the Impressionists that was coming out of Europe. Georgia O’Keeffe was married to Steiglitz at this time, albeit a  tumultuous marriage as many of them seemed to be – creative genius seems to resonate with infidelity, and turmoil.

Part of my post TEAS exam recuperation this weekend was to watch a movie about the life of Georgia O’Keeffe, her relationship with Steiglitz  and friendship with Ansel Adams.  My husband bought me a book about O’Keeffe and Adams for Christmas, and I was inspired enough to reread it this weekend. I am (when I get the time) a happy and relatively talented photographer myself, and an artist as well, although the creative space needed for me to really unwind and paint doesn’t happen all that often. Watching Georgia O’Keeffe, out in Taos, New Mexico, standing in the wide open desert spaces, looking at the light, the colours and the contrasts, and melding those with her brush on canvas made me yearn for the wide open spaces of Ecuador where I found my creative outlets. Being creative is  vital for me, for my personal space and growth. I find too long a period without letting my inner world come out can have all sorts of physical repercussions – I often get sick or very pent-up, very stressed if my world is not in balance. I need to be able to design, create or make something – drawing, painting, making jewellery or writing to keep myself in harmony with the world outside. Georgia O’Keeffe and many of the other artists of that time were exactly the same way. She left New York for the peace and serenity that the Taos desert gave her, offering her a creative outlet. I am post – TEAS and looking forward to doing the same. Maybe just for a day or two – but I will head up to New York this week, giving myself the opportunity to see the ‘Big Apple’ through the lens of my camera.  Life has to be more than just work and study – right?

OK, you have to read and watch this. http://www.insideedition.com/news.aspx?storyId=3628 This is not what is happening to me – I am stress eating, actually am training for the next Olympics on that one!  This poor woman however – what psychological issues does she have, that she has to get up every night and raid the fridge, scramble through the cupboards for food, and wake up to the littered remains of the candy bars all over the floor the next morning. The following questions arose from watching this:-

• Is this what the TEAS exam is  doing to me?
• Can she be trained to do the housework and the laundry at  the same time?
• What would be the repercussions if we could program our midnight activities….could I fit in a workout in my pj’s and wake up a few inches slimmer?
• Why the hell doesn’t her husband wake up?
• How much are her grocery bills?

Click on the picture, learn more about this stunning book – from Daoud Hari. I have been reading a lot lately it seems (I can’t get to sleep without a good book, and then sometimes I can’t sleep at all when I’ve got a really good one!) This is one that kept me up at night – trying to comprehend a world where everything you knew was betrayed – your village killed by crazed, vengeful killers without clear reason. Imagine if that happened where you lived…..the powers that be in Downtown Asheville declaring war on Fairview, Marshall or Old Fort. If hoards of weapon wielding jeeps and armed horsemen came stampeding through your street, shooting up everything in sight, setting fire to houses and throwing grenades in windows. What would you do? How would you react if you were a survivor? Would you fight back? Or would you give in and go to the camps, beaten and subdued, starving, weak and homeless?

Hari fought back the only way he could – with his ability to speak many local languages in Darfur and Chad, albeit at high school level, he worked as a translator to the foreign press, crossing the highly dangerous border into Darfur time and time again, risking his life to help get the message of the atrocities out to the wider world. His work has helped thousands of displaced people find hope, help and their displaced family members, and, most importantly, has played a significant role in bringing the plight of Darfur to world leaders.

I pray and hope that if the time ever came, my courage would stand strong and I could be as brave and focused as this man. We are SO incredibly lucky to live in this great country, but sometimes, I think it is necessary to step outside of our comfort zones and see the darker parts of the world.

I have just finished reading this book, and in our recession problematic times, it really is an insightful consideration about foreign aid to Africa and how it has been so ineffective. I lived in Zambia for two years, and experienced first hand how aid can have both a positive and negative effect on the population. I was fortunate to work in the American Embassy in Lusaka, Zambia, employed as the administrator for the Ambassador’s Special Self Help Fund, and Democracy and Human Rights Fund. It sounds fancy, but it was an office that only funded grass-roots projects (max funding was $10,000) which had a rigorous application process to narrow down the 1000+ project applications per year to approx 40.

We saw how much simple things like putting in wells in villages could turn the life in the village around. Small mills to grind maize, enabling the women in a 50 mile radius to be able to  grow, harvest and profit from a crop that would otherwise not be there. Building orphanages in villages for AID’s orphans, where the elders of the village would love and care for the children, if there was support in place – was paramount. Helping finance a the building of a huge fish pond, which would provide valuable nutrition, and future income for an entire village, keeping family units intact. Furnishing and building small schools where there were no government schools gave the children an opportunity to study at school all year long, the long rainy season, or the blazing sun no longer affected their ability to learn.

Dambisa Moyo is a Harvard and Oxford educated economist, who has worked at Goldman Sachs and the World Bank. She was born in Zambia, and has had the opportunity to see aid from both sides – the western need to throw money with little regard to the consequences, as long as it looks good; and also how her own country and continent’s corruption and abuses of power have reduced the effect of aid to pouring money into  a bottomless pit. She challenges the altruistic view that more and more money can be the only possible solution, pointing out that the billions of dollars that have been poured into Africa since the ’70′s have all but disappeared. There is little evidence of improvement, AID’s and malaria are still the number one killers, poverty appears to have grown, rather than diminished, and well-intentioned large-scale projects designed to help sit as redundant  dinosaurs on  the sidelines of African Cities.

I applaud Moyo’s writing – her fearless analysis of such an impassioned subject has challenged many of the ‘experts’ and from what I saw from my short time in Africa, corruption, bureaucracy and red tape are but some of the obstacles and bottomless pits where aid money seems to disappear. Maybe in this time of major recession, it’s time to redress our aid policies.

The following article  www.medpagetoday.com/MeetingCoverage/ACR/16572

discusses how household  insecticides has been linked to rheumatoid arthritis. It is very disconcerting to see how, after so much time, and household use, that insecticides are now linked closely to autoimmune diseases such as RA and lupus. The article reports on  how women, over a period of years have used bug killing sprays to keep their homes insect free, and are now suffering consequences. It is also studying how insecticides in gardens and lawns are also affecting our health.

Every day I read more and more about autism – especially how it is reaching epidemic proportions. Some say that it has always been around, but that we didn’t recognise it back then as a disease. Well if that was 40-50 years ago – where are all these elderly autistic people that supposedly were really there all the time? I am seeing that it is ‘possibly’ linked to vaccines, to pollutants in our homes, and now, possibly to insecticides.

Please – can somebody out there test these chemicals before we get them out on the market – as a parent who had very little option but to vaccinate my son  – he can’t attend state school without vaccinations, and now has an autism spectrum disorder -(I don;t know if that’s what caused it, I will never know) but I would love to know that the ‘big’ people out there are looking out for us ‘little’ people down here, as much as we are doing our best to be green, be clean and help ourselves.

Karan has practiced yoga, and alternative medicine throughout most of her life, and sees, quite clearly how this can be incorporated into the world of traditional western medicine, hence – integrative medicine. She sees the possibilities and is moving forward, in her own indomitable way, to help create a more holistic approach to medicine, right in the heart of Manhattan, at Beth Israel Hospital, on the east side. The loss of her husband to cancer, and a good friend who developed breast cancer, gave her the hands on experience to realize that western medicine was missing some fundamental pieces of the healing puzzle.

This is where it gets interesting, and where I love it when rich people with influence move away from just making money and hit the philanthropic trail.  (Move over Bill Gates!) She invited to dinner, Rodney Yee ( a huge yoga guru), Dr. Woodson Merrell, her personal physician who is also the chairman of Integrative Medicine at Beth Israel she began to formulate a plan. Using her wonderful name and influence (I don’t own a piece of her clothing!) she contacted the country’s foremost health care experts and hosted a 10 day retreat to debate and develop ideas of how integrative medicine could be mainstreamed into general hospital practices. She donated $850,000 of her own money to the project, creating an educational program that will train 100 practitioners in the arts of yoga, meditation, acupuncture and aromatherapy to help cancer patients be able to relax and heal.

The initial programs have been hugely successful, with patients feeling significantly better. Karan’s long-term goal is to persuade the National Cancer Institute to fund more trials and develop her ideas into full-on practice.  I love the idea that we, as individuals, albeit famous and rich, can make a difference. It is a huge part of who I am,  and no matter on what scale, the ability to be able to bring something positive into other people’s lives – even if it’s a smile or laughter, makes me feel that I have done something right. To be in a position where I can actively develop and create a positive change in peoples lives as Karan is doing is a goal. I feel that the more people take the initiative for change upon themselves, the less dependent we are on Government to bring about huge costly changes. Taking  more responsibility for the greater good can only be beneficial – thanks to you, Ms Karan! (P.S. Can I have a job when I graduate?!)