November 13, 2010

Here’s a Woman Fighting Terrorism. With Microloans.

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF, LAHORE, Pakistan

An old friend of mine here fights terrorists, but not the way you’re thinking. She could barely defeat a truculent child in hand-to-hand combat, and if she ever picked up an AK-47 — well, you’d pray it was unloaded. Roshaneh Zafar is an American- educated banker who fights extremism with microfinance. She has dedicated her life to empowering some of Pakistan’s most impoverished women and giving them the tools to run businesses of their own. The United States should learn from warriors like her.

Bullets and drones may kill terrorists, but Roshaneh creates jobs and educational opportunities for hundreds of thousands of people — draining the swamps that breed terrorists. “Charity is limited, but capitalism isn’t,” Roshaneh said. “If you want to change the world, you need market-based solutions.” That’s the point of microfinance — typically, lending very poor people small amounts of money so that they can buy a rickshaw or raw materials and start a tiny business.

Roshaneh grew up in elite circles here in Lahore and studied business at the Wharton School and economics at Yale. After a stint at the World Bank, she returned to Pakistan in 1996 to start her microfinance organization. She called it the Kashf Foundation. Everybody thought Roshaneh was nuts. And at first nothing went right. The poor refused to borrow. Or if they borrowed, they didn’t repay their loans. But Roshaneh persisted, and today Kashf has 152 branches around the country. It has dispersed more than $200 million to more than 300,000 families. Now Roshaneh is moving into microsavings, to help the poor build assets, as well as programs to train the poor to run businesses more efficiently. She is even thinking of expanding into schools for the poor.

Microfinance is sometimes oversold as a silver bullet — which it’s not. Careful follow-up studies suggest that gains from microloans are often quite modest. Some borrowers squander money or start businesses that fail. Some micro-lenders tarnish the field because they’re incompetent, and others because they rake in profits with sky-high loan rates. Microfinance has also generally been less successful in Africa than in South Asia.

Yet done right, microfinance can make a significant difference. An outside evaluation found that after four years, Kashf borrowers are more likely than many others to enjoy improved economic conditions — and that’s what I’ve seen over the years as I’ve visited Kashf borrowers.

On this trip, I met a woman named Parveen Baji, who says she never attended a day of school and until recently was completely illiterate. She had 14 children, but five died. Ms. Parveen’s husband, who also never attended school, regularly beat her and spent the family savings on narcotics, she says. The family’s only possessions were four cots on which they slept, crammed three or four to a cot, in a rented apartment. “One night all my children were hungry,” she remembered. “I sent my daughter to ask for food from a neighbor. And the neighbor said, ‘you’ve become a beggar,’ and refused.”

Then Ms. Parveen got a $70 loan from Kashf and started a jewelry and cosmetics business, buying in bulk and selling to local shops. Ms. Parveen couldn’t read the labels, but she memorized which bottle was which. As her business thrived, she began to struggle to learn reading and arithmetic — and proved herself an ace student. I fired math problems at her, and she dazzled me with her quick responses. Ms. Parveen began to start new businesses, even building a laundry that she put her husband in charge of to keep him busy. He no longer beats her, she says, and when I interviewed him separately he seemed a little awed by her.

Eventually, Ms. Parveen started a restaurant and catering business that now has eight employees, including some of her daughters. She bought a home and has put some of her children through high school — and a son, the brightest student, through college. She has just paid $5,800 for a permit for him to move to London to take a health sector job. Ms. Parveen tried to look modest as she told me this, but she failed. She was beaming and shaking her head in wonder as she watched her son speak English with me, dazzled at the thought that she was dispatching her university-educated son to Europe. “Microfinance has changed my life,” she said simply.

That’s an unusual success story. But the larger message is universal: helping people start businesses, create jobs and support education is a potent way to undermine extremism. We Americans overinvest in firepower to defeat extremism and underinvest in development, and so we could learn something useful from Roshaneh. The toolkit to fight terrorism includes not only missiles but also microfinance and economic opportunity. The antonym of “militant” is often “job.”

Taken from The New York Times

A Gap Year

A gap year is a time out, a breather, a chance to recharge your batteries or to try out a different way of living and maybe a different way of learning. Students have many reasons for temporarily wishing to stop their studies.

Sometimes they just want to hit the pause button. After years of studying hard and feeling the stress of exams that seem never-ending, some students just want to have a year to relax, reflect and think about the future.

Others may not be certain that they are on the right track. They want time to look at other possibilities and decide what is the best future for them.

Other students may feel that their chosen path requires skills and experience that can be learned better through hands on training than in a classroom. A year spent living in a different culture, speaking a different language is always a plus on a cv.

If you are interested in taking a gap year, here is a link that may interest you: http://www.gapyear365.com/activity/art-drama-music

"When will my apprenticeship begin, Sir ? »

“It has begun,” said Ogion.

There was a silence, as if Ged was keeping back something he had to say. Then he said it, “But I haven’t learned anything yet!”

“Because you haven’t found out what I am teaching,” replied the mage.

A contest!

MAKEBELIEFSCOMIX.COM lets you make your own comic strip. They are sponsoring a contest. If you are one of the winners you will receive a free book.

What goes around, comes around

Very easy

A poor farmer heard a cry for help. He ran and there was a terrified boy in the bog*. The farmer saved the boy from death.
The next day a nobleman introduced himself as the father of the boy the farmer had saved.
"I want to repay you," said the father. "You saved my son's life."
"I can't accept payment," said the farmer.
The nobleman saw a boy.
"Is that your son?"
"Yes."
"Let me give him the same education as my son."
The farmer's son attended the best schools and graduated from medical school. He became Sir Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin.

Many years later, the nobleman's son had pneumonia. He was saved by .... penicillin.
The nobleman's son was Sir Winston Churchill.

**************

The same story

His name was Fleming, and he was a poor Scottish farmer. One day, while trying to make a living for his family, he heard a cry for help coming from a nearby bog. He dropped his tools
and ran to the bog.

There, mired to his waist in black muck, was a terrified boy, screaming and struggling to free himself. Farmer Fleming saved the lad from what could have been a slow and terrifying death.

The next day, a fancy carriage pulled up to the Scotsman's sparse surroundings. An elegantly dressed nobleman stepped out and introduced himself as the father
of the boy Farmer Fleming had saved.
'I want to repay you,' said the nobleman. 'You saved my son's life.'
'No, I can't accept payment for what I did,' the Scottish farmer replied waving off the offer. At that moment, the farmer's own son came to the door of the family hovel.'Is that your son?' the nobleman asked.
'Yes,' the farmer replied proudly.
'I'll make you a deal. Let me provide him with the level of education my own son will enjoy If the lad is anything like his father, he'll no doubt grow to be a man we both will be proud of.' And that he did.
Farmer Fleming's son attended the very best schools and in time, graduated from St. Mary's Hospital Medical School in London, and went on to become known throughout the world as the noted Sir Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of
Penicillin..

Years afterward, the same nobleman's son who was saved from the bog was stricken with pneumonia.

What saved his life this time? Penicillin. The name of the nobleman? Lord Randolph Churchill .. His son's name? Sir Winston Churchill.
Someone once said: What goes around comes around.

Work like you don't need the money.
Love like you've never been hurt.
Dance like nobody's watching.
Sing like nobody's listening.
Live like it's Heaven on Earth.
It's National Friendship Week.

*bog = marécage

The Strike

Yes, I am on strike. I am on strike because it seems to be the only way I can protest the government's action in education. Where other governments are attacking the economic crisis by investing in education with more and better paid teachers, France is reducing the number of teachers, policemen and hospital personnel. Five years ago in our lycée we arranged for all the English classes in "seconde" to be taught in small groups. Students got more attention from their teachers and more opprotunities to practice and progressed. But year after year the number of hours diminished and the program could not be continued. Is it honest to call reducing the numbers of teachers and increasing the numbers of students a "reform"?

Right brain or left brain?

If you use your left brain more than your right brain, you are good at mathematics and very verbal. You act with logic and are well-organized. You understand grammar rules and enjoy doing excercises.

If you use your right brain more, you are visual and creative. You hate grammar exercises because they seem pointless to you, but when you are in a foreign country, you quickly pick up the language. You are often guided by your emotions.

Of course these are generalizations and very few people are extreme cases of right or left brain dominance. Most people switch sides depending on the situation. Knowing which side of your brain is dominant can help you find the most efficient way to study a foreign language.

If you google "Right Brain Left Brain" you'll find questionnaires to help you discover which side of your brain you use the most.

The Right Brain vs Left Brain test

illustration pour vos t-shirts

Bonjour,

j'ai été chargé par Madame Judith Dubois de faire une illustration pour les t-shirts réservé à la vente afin de récolter des fonds pour accueillir les américains.
Étant donné la masse de travail que j'ai à effectuer dans mon école, je n'ai pas pu fournir un travail convenable dans les temps, j'ai donc demandé à Nicolas Werbrouck, un ami illustrateur, de vous prêter une illustration qu'il a déjà réalisé pour le magazine Esprit Métis dédié au USA.

Je vous laisse apprécier son travail. Pouvez vous en mettre un t-shirt de coté pour Nicolas?
Merci! bon courage pour la suite!

Kellie
(je vous invite à venir voir le court métrage que j'ai réalisé en équipe sur mon blog)

What an amazing view!

Not content with having the tallest building in America , the owners of Sears Tower in Chicago have installed four glass box viewing platforms which stick out of the building 103 floors up. The balconies are suspended 1,353 feet in the air and just out four feet from the building's Skydeck.

Floating on air: Visitors get their first view from The Ledge, four glass balconies suspended from the 103rd floor of Chicago 'S Sears Tower .

Designers say the platforms - collectively dubbed The Ledge - have been purposely designed to make visitors feel as they are floating above the city. The reward is unobstructed views of Chicago from the building's west side and a heart-stopping vista of the street and Chicago River below - for those brave enough to look straight down. 'It's like walking on ice,' visitor Margaret Kemp from Bishop, California said. 'The first step you take you think "Am I going down?"'

Long way up: Even the floor of the platforms are glass - few were
Brave enough to look straight down.

Fearless: Anna Kane, five, spreads out on the floor of the 10ft square box which is 1,353ft up.

Spectacular: She also enjoyed amazing views out across the city

Unfazed: Although some adults felt dizzy after experiencing the Ledge,
Children seemed to take it in their stride.

'At first I was kind of afraid but I got used to it,' 10-year-old Adam Kane from Alton , Illinois , said as clouds drifted by below. 'Look at all those tiny things that are usually huge.' John Huston, one of the owners of the Sears Tower, even admitted to
Getting 'a little queasy' the first time he ventured out on to the balcony. However, after 30 or 40 trips, he seems to have gotten used to it.

Thrill seekers: The boxes jut out four feet from the building and were specifically designed to make visitors feel as if they are floating 'The Sears Tower has always been about superlatives - tallest, larges t, most iconic,' he said.
'The Ledge is the world's most awesome view, the world's most precipitous view, the view with the most wow in the world.' The balconies are 10ft high and 10ft wide, can hold five tons, and have glass which is 1.5 inch thick.

Inspiration came from the hundreds of forehead prints visitors left behind on Skydeck windows every week. Now, staff will have a new glass surface to clean: floors.

Architect Ross Wimer said: 'We did studies that showed a four-foot-deep (1.2 metres) enclosure makes you feel like you're floating since there's only room for one row of people, not two.'

The Skydeck attracts 25,000 visitors on clear days. They each pay $15 to take an elevator ride up to the 103rd floor of the 110-story office building that opened in 1973

My name is Jeff, Jeff Bond.

I'm forty-two years old. I live in London. My unique childhood memory is when one morning when I went to my high school, I saw nobody. Finding this strange, I went to look in the classrooms to see if there was somebody. In the room, I saw students held hostage by a man wearing a cowl and carrying a gun. It was in this way I discovered that the high school had been taken hostage by gangsters. I learnt that the leader of the band was in the staff room because one gangster who called him told him that he controlled the first floor. By learning it, I skipped into the air duct which goes to the staff room. The exit of the air duct was above the leader of the band. I opened the ventilation cover and I jumped on him from above, knocking him out. With his talky-walky I told all the gangsters to come to the staff room. When all the band was in the staff room, I locked the door and I called the police. This is how I saved my high school from the gangsters.

Neville Brothers - Sister Rosa: Relaid Audio

watch the video on youtube

Rosa Parks

Photograph of Rosa Parks with Dr. Martin Luther King jr. (ca. 1955)

Source: Ebony Magazine

Mrs. Rosa Parks altered the negro progress in Montgomery,
Alabama, 1955, by the bus boycott she unwillingly began.

Wind Power Animation

The Pink Recovery

Men are paying a higher price in this recession than women. Perhaps that's fair.

by Christopher Caldwell

A week ago, President Obama touted a newly published report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) that showed the country had lost 247,000 jobs in July. It seemed an odd thing to boast about, but you have to consider the context. The economy was losing jobs at three times that clip when Obama took office in January. So it is possible that the U.S. is emerging from the most frightening economic downturn since the Depression. It won't be the same country when it does.

One thing that seems bound to change is the relationship between the sexes. Since the recession began in December 2007, the vast majority of the lost jobs have belonged to men. About half are in the heavily male domains of construction and manufacturing. At one point last winter, there were four men being laid off for every woman. The male unemployment rate is 9.8%, the female rate 7.5%. What constitutes "women's work" today? Well, health care, for one; 81% of the workers are female. According to the report Obama cited, 20,000 health care jobs were gained in July, while 76,000 construction jobs and 52,000 manufacturing positions were lost.

A job is a claim on a certain amount of society's resources and esteem. As men lose that claim, they lose the instruments by which they have traditionally controlled society. A lot of people see that as fitting punishment. There weren't any women among the high-profile malefactors in last fall's financial meltdown. Maleness has become a synonym for insufficient attentiveness to risk. Journalists have lately been having a field day with a study by two Cambridge University professors, J.M. Coates and J. Herbert, who sampled the testosterone levels of London traders and found they positively correlated with high profit trading days. Of course, nobody harped on this research back when housing prices were doubling and people were using their home-equity credit lines to buy third cars. But to paraphrase Richard Nixon's comment about Keynesians, we are all feminists now.

In Foreign Policy this summer, journalist Reihan Salam predicted that the "macho men's club called finance capitalism" would not survive the present economic ordeal. Provocatively -- but correctly -- he claimed that this male order rests on foundations considerably older than Ronald Reagan's supply-side revolution. The economic system that FDR shored up was a male one. The New Deal focused on infrastructure at a time when there were not a lot of lady dam builders around. (Salam might also have mentioned the GI Bill, the most effective instrument ever devised for giving a leg up to males in universities and workplaces.) Salam sees Obama's $787 billion stimulus package as a break with the New Deal. It spends relatively little on infrastructure and relatively much on female-friendly sectors like health care and education. Not to mention aid to state and local governments, where 3 in 5 employees are women.

Although clichés about the "vulnerability" of women in the economy have been disproved by hard BLS data, we want to believe them. When women lose jobs, the victims are women. when men lose jobs, the victims are, um, women, because they have to make up for that lost male income. The scale of male job losses was evident even when the stimulus bill was passed. That did not stop incoming Congressman Jared Polis, a Colorado Democrat, from warning Obama that "gender imbalance in occupations related to physical infrastructure development means that the direct job creation will benefit mostly men."

Men still make up 53% of the workforce, and the percentage of society's work they do is considerably higher, owing to women's shorter hours and more frequent sabbaticals for child-rearing. In prosperous times, women may yearn for more time at home. But economic realities have a way of washing away these yearnings. One such reality is the recession.

Another is that women receive 58% of the bachelor's degrees in the U.S., along with half the professional degrees.

Should we expect men to cede some control over an economy that they have so thoroughly messed up? No. We have no examples of that ever having happened. What we have plenty of examples of -- you can see variants of it all over the developing world -- is economies in which women do all the arduous work while men sit around smoking and pontificating in coffeehouses and barbershops. For decades, policymakers have been attentive to the flaws of a patriarchal, middle-class, single-earner, nuclear-family-oriented model of family economics -- and their attention remains fixed on it. Whether or not that model dominated American society as much as its critics claimed, it is now being left behind. Maybe there is a humane model that can replace it. It hasn't been found yet.

Caldwell is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard

A Stove that Runs on Straw instead of Coal

The problem: poor mountain families in China have to haul huge loads of firewood for their cooking stoves. The solution: a new type of stove that runs on straw and other crop waste -- first by heating them, then burning the resulting gas. And since Beijing Shenzhou Daxu Bio-energy Technology's $50 stove emits eight fewer tons a year of carbon dioxide than a coal stove does, the device is easing deforestation while helping China, the world's largest greenhouse gas producer, reduce its heavy carbon load. by Austin Ramzy, Time magazine, Sept. 21st, 2009

Beach Soccer's World Champion

A Crazy Vacation

This summer Léa went to Biscarosse on vacation, because she enjoys swimming. She went there on a pink scooter. Every day she ate crab sandwiches and she drank pink Orangina. In the morning she went swimming and in the afternoon she played beach soccer.

One day Eric Cantona saw Léa playing beach soccer. She was playing like a champion. He asked her to join his team. Léa said no because she doesn't like men with beards.

Another day Raymond Domenech saw Léa playing beach soccer. He asked her to help his team qualify for the European Cup. Léa said no because she doesn't like Raymond Domenech.

Then one day Zac Efron saw Léa playing beach soccer and he invited her to a Japanese restaurant. They ate thirty-seven sushi and drank green tea. Zac asked Léa to join his team. Of course Léa said yes. Now Zac's team has won the Beach Soccer World Cup.

In the Ghetto

You can listen to the song :

Audrey's Vacation in Spain

Audrey went to Spain in a red helicopter with her boyfriend, Zac Efron. In Madrid they had afternoon tea with King Juan Carlos. Then they went to Barcelona to see the beautiful monuments. They climbed to the top of the Sacra Familia and they could see the sea and the mountains. Zac wanted to buy the Sacra Familia for 5,086,021,070 dollars and 60 cents. But he only had $5,086,021,060.60. So he sold his Rolex to Thierry Henry for ten dollars. Thierry Henry was very happy. But Zac changed his mind. He didn't buy the cathedral because it isn't finished. He is going to buy it in 2030, when it's finished.

Something to think about ...

Washington, DC Metro Station on a cold January morning in 2007. The man with a violin played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time, approx. 2 thousand people went through the station, most of them on their way to work. After 3 minutes, a middle- aged man noticed there was a musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds and then hurried to meet his schedule. 4 minutes later: The violinist received his first dollar: a woman threw the money in the hat and, without stopping, continued to walk. 6 minutes: A young man leaned against the wall to listen to him, then looked at his watch and started to walk again.

10 minutes: A 3-year old boy stopped, but his mother tugged him along hurriedly. The kid stopped to look at the violinist again, but the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk, turning his head all the time. This action was repeated by several other children. Every parent, without exception, forced their children to move on quickly.

45 minutes: The musician played continuously. Only 6 people stopped and listened for a short while. About 20 gave money but continued to walk at their normal pace. The man collected a total of $32.

1 hour: He finished playing and silence took over. No one noticed. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.

No one knew this, but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the greatest musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written, with a violin worth $3.5 million dollars. Two days before Joshua Bell had sold out a theater in Boston where the seats averaged $100 each.

This is a true story. Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste and people's priorities. The questions raised: in a common place environment at an inappropriate hour, do we perceive beauty? Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize talent in an unexpected context?

One possible conclusion reached from this experiment could be this: if we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world, playing some of the finest music ever written, with one of the most beautiful instruments ever made.... how many other things are we missing?