Entries from November 2008 ↓

I took much pleasure in reading more about Barack OBAMA. It is believe that the formative years of a child mould the adult. Moncef Guitoni, an imminent scholar specialist of Parenthood and emotional intelligence taught me that much can be learned from the early childhood (0-6 years)of a person. I note from the documents available from the net, that Barack went through several break ups: first divorce of his parents, when he was only two years; then the challenge of living in a new environment in Indonesia, break up in culture, language and environment; and later yet another uprooting to continue the schooling in Hawaii, away from her mother in the lap of her grandmother. Does he carry the traumas of these breakdowns or have these dramatic changes honed his ability to sustain external environmental ruptures and overcome them? Does he speak Indonesian or does he understand the language?

Seeing the achievements of the later years, he surely has benefited from the wide variety of different experiences and culture. He has definitely a view of the world more enrich that most Americans possess. He himself wrote: Reflecting later on his formative years in Honolulu, Obama wrote: “The opportunity that Hawaii offered — to experience a variety of cultures in a climate of mutual respect — became an integral part of my world view, and a basis for the values that I hold most dear.”

I always have great respect to persons who have taken the task of putting to ink their life history. He did it. This demonstrates amongst other qualities, the ability to think orderly and in a structure and to write and communicate excellently.

Childhood through high school

Born in 1961. Throughout his early years, Obama was known at home and at school as “Barry.” Obama’s parents met while both were attending the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where his father was enrolled as a foreign student. They separated when he was two years old and later divorced. His father received a Masters degree in Economics from Harvard University, then returned to Kenya, where he became a finance minister before dying in an automobile accident in 1982. His mother married another foreign student, Lolo Soetoro, and the family moved to Soetoro’s home country of Indonesia in 1967. Obama attended local schools in Jakarta, from ages 6 to 10, where classes were taught in the Indonesian language.

Before his time in Indonesia, he first attended St. Francis Assisi Catholic school for almost three years. When his family moved to a new neighbourhood, Menteng, he attended the secular, government-run SDN Menteng 1 school for his fourth year. Obama’s stepfather was “not religious”, and “never went to prayer services except for big communal events”, according to Obama’s sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng. When Obama was in third grade he wrote an essay saying that he wanted to become president. His teacher later told the Chicago Tribune that she was not sure what country he wanted to become president of but that he said that his reason for becoming president was that he wanted to make everybody happy.

Obama returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents while attending Punahou School, a private college preparatory school, from the fifth grade until his graduation in 1979. Obama’s mother, Ann, died of ovarian cancer and uterine cancer a few months after the publication of his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father.

In the memoir, Obama describes his experiences growing up in his mother’s middle class family. His knowledge about his African father, who returned once for a brief visit in 1971, came mainly through family stories and photographs. Of his early childhood, Obama writes: “That my father looked nothing like the people around me — that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk — barely registered in my mind.” The book describes his struggles as a young adult to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage. He wrote that he used alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine during his teenage years to “push questions of who I was out of my mind”.^[ Obama has said that it was a seriously misguided mistake. At the Saddleback Civil Presidential Forum Barack Obama identified his high-school drug use as his greatest moral failure. Obama has stated he has not used any illegal drugs since he was a teenager.

Some of his fellow students at Punahou School later told the Honolulu Star-Bulletin that Obama was mature for his age as a high school student and that he sometimes attended parties and other events in order to associate with African American college students and military service people.

The effect of the results of the election of OBAMA on the stock exchange in the US has deceived me. I was expecting a regain in the confidence of the investors and an improvement in the indices. It would appear that this is not the case. Else, the impact of the results of the elections is not great enough to move positively the indices and to cure the situation we are experiencing. Or shall we have a wait longer?

New York Times reported:

Stocks Slump After Election Rally

The post-election bounce never materialized Wednesday.

Investors took profits and dealt with another round of bleak economic news as shares on Wall Street eclipsed their gains from Election Day.

The selling began early after a report showed that the nation’s service sector contracted in October, falling at the fastest pace since records began in 1997 and accelerated in the final minutes.

At the close, the Dow Jones industrial average was down 5 percent, or 486.01 points. The broader Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index declined 5.2 percent.

Kreole as an option to improve the effectiveness of our education system in Mauritius?

Have you read the article of Jimmy Harmon on L’Express of the 4^th November. Do you think the proposal is feasible?

Not being an expert in education, I support the idea of using the mother tongue, the easiest communication vehicle to access further learning. The underlying principle would be: to learn from ‘known to unknown’. Indeed, I rather watch and enjoy Louis de Funes or Benny Hill in the original version. True! Reading R. Tagore in Bengali must have an enhanced flavour as much as hearing ‘zistoire ti jean in Creole’. I for one can express my sentiments better and easier in Creole despite the practice and use of English all through his education years.

The political issues and the unspoken battle of ‘protecting one’s turf’ , be it for the teachers and the education establishment who have to adjust their deliverables, be it for the politicians -whose main outcome is more towards gaining mileage to be re-elected-, be it the parents of the various social-strata who fear changes, have to be trashed out.

What is your opinion?

Amazing! Yesterday I received a mail from Jacki Marshall , a sweet lady, who I met 10 years ago on a Nile cruise. I recalled that we had a wonderful cruise in the company of Jacki and her friends. She sent a mass mail to show her support to Barack Obama for today’s poll.

When I inquired that she was doing, she replied that she was involved in micro finance in Kenya. That immediately aroused my curiosity. How could she living in the US, North Carolina, possibly be dealing in micro credit in Kenya? She thus opened a new avenue to me thru H3O. Wow! this is a living example of the Grameen Bank principle you could participate.

How it works:

Lenders choose an individual business, group, or village project in a developing country to support using the h3o web site and paypal. The loan can be as little as $25. Our Micro Finance Institute partners (MFI’s) upload entrepreneur businesses and village projects to our web site that need funding. They are real clients who need help.

Most loans are funded between 6-9 months (agricultural loans 9-12 months).

Throughout the loan period the loan officer sends a short e-mail journal update to the web site every 3-4 months. As the loan gets paid back EACH lender has the choice to take back the funds or “recycle” the money back to another individual, group or village project. Micro credit success repayment rates are high. (e.g. Grameen 95%)

What is different about this philanthropic model is that your original loan money can be continually impacting a working poor family of your choice. For example: A single $100 loan amount can be recycled 10 times in five years, which means 10 families have been lifted out of poverty with a single, initial $100 loan amount.

h3o partners with credible, registered, accountable MFI’s with transparent financial records whose mission is empowerment of the working poor.

Our MFI’s and NGO’s (Non Government Organizations) in developing countries choose which CBO’s (Community Based Organizations) to lend to. The CBO’s are mature women’s groups with strong self governance and a proven track record of debt repayment and have been meeting for a minimum of one year.

Each CBO that has access to h3o funding receives ongoing business and life skills training from our partner MFI in developing countries, to better ensure success and debt repayment.

Our MFI partner distributes and collects the loan and manages, and in some cases manages savings accounts for clients.

h3o loans are given without collateral. They are based on dignity and trust. The CBO group itself acts as guarantors to one another securing loan repayment and future loans. If one defaults, the group is responsible for any defaults. Failure to pay the loan limits any further loans to the individual and the group. This “in house” peer pressure is one of the main reasons micro credit has such a successful loan repayment rate of 95 %.(Grameen Bank) All are stakeholders in each other’s success.

On the 31^st October  2008 Berlin Templehof airport has ceased to function as an airport. It touched me to learn about this event. In my university studies, I had started off my end of study dissertation by quoting the event that happened in 1948 in that very airport which has been called the Berlin Airlift.

On 20 June 1948 Soviet authorities, claiming technical difficulties, halted all traffic by land and by water into or out of the western-controlled section of Berlin. The only remaining access routes into the city were three 25-mile-wide air corridors across the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany. Faced with the choice of abandoning the city or attempting to supply its inhabitants with the necessities of life by air, the Western Powers chose the latter course, and for the next eleven months sustained the city’s two-and-a-half million residents in one of the greatest feats in aviation history.

Operation Vittles, as the airlift was unofficially named, began on 26 June when USAF Douglas C-47 “Skytrains” carried 80 tons of food into Tempelhof, far less than the estimated 4,500 tons of food, coal and other essential supplies needed daily to maintain a minimum level of existence. But this force was soon augmented by United States Navy and Royal Air Force cargo aircraft, as well as British European Airways (BEA) and some of Britain‘s fledgling wholly privately owned, independent airlines.^[ The latter included the late Sir Freddie Laker‘s Air Charter, Eagle Aviation and Skyways. On 15 October 1948, to promote increased safety and cooperation between the separate US and British airlift efforts, the Allies created a unified command – the Combined Airlift Task Force under Maj. Gen. William H. Tunner, USAF, was established at Tempelhof. To facilitate the command and control, as well as the unloading of aircraft, the USAF 53rd Troop Carrier Squadron was temporarily assigned to Tempelhof.

In addition to the airlift operations, American engineers constructed a new 6,000-ft runway at Tempelhof between July and September 1948 and another between September and October 1948 to accommodate the expanding requirements of the airlift. The last airlift transport touched down at Tempelhof on 30 September 1949.

Historians, who write on the advent of modern Air Cargo, attribute this Berlin Airlift as the start of the industry. Prior to this operation, the hold of aircraft was mainly used commercially to carry postal mail. Aircraft were not conceived to cart goods in such quantity.

As a large part of my life career (25 years) was in the field of Air Cargo, I feel very sensitive and attached to the subject. In Mauritius, I lived and worked through the era of Boeing 707 all cargo aircraft with 30-35 tonnes lift capacity, DC 8 aircraft 41 tonnes lift capacity to Boeing 747 with 110 tonnes lift capacity. Today, all cargo aircraft are no more in operation to Mauritius on a regular basis.

Luke 12, 35-40

You Must Be Ready

^35(BJ) “Stay dressed for action^[f] and^(BK) keep your lamps burning, ³⁶and be like men who are^(BL) waiting for their master to come home from the wedding feast, so that they may open the door to him at once when he comes and^(BM) knocks. ^37(BN) Blessed are those servants^[g] whom the master finds^(BO) awake when he comes. Truly, I say to you,^(BP) he will dress himself for service and have them recline at table, and he will come and serve them. ³⁸If he comes in the second watch, or in the third, and finds them awake, blessed are those servants! ^39(BQ) But know this, that if the master of the house had known at what hour^(BR) the thief was coming, he^[h] would not have left his house to be broken into. ⁴⁰You also must be^(BS) ready, for^(BT) the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.”

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Our Lord asks us to ‘stay dressed and keep our lamps burning’ and be in ‘waiting.

To be in waiting of someone is to happily looking forward to the coming of the person, indeed it is in this very spirit that our Lord expects us to live. Whilst I live in this expectation, I have the awareness of His presence and am in permanent  communion and adoration of my Creator. I am thus able to cherish His love. To live for and by Him and in total trust of Him is what is expected from Him. No doubt this way of living requires efforts from my part. It does consume me to keep my lamps burning, on other hand to live off the light of my Lord is so blissful that the effort does not commensurate with the benefits.

Today, the church celebrates the commemoration of the defunct, I feel very much in communion with my parents and those who have loved me and are today, ahead in the kingdom of God. I believe that for the love they shared, thanks to our merciful Lord, they are all dressed up at the table of our Lord in bliss.

O Lord I pray you to give me the gift to be ever mindful of Your presence in me, to make me ever ready for Your coming, to hold me dress up , and to keep burning my lamps in waiting for You.

La Toussaint est une fête chrétienne, dont l’Église catholique a fixé la date au premier novembre en 835. Depuis, chaque année, la Toussaint célèbre Dieu et tous ses saints martyrs. Le choix de la date n’est pas innocent, l’Eglise Catholique encore jeune cherchait ainsi à évincer la fête païenne célébrée ce jour-là. Le premier novembre était en effet l’une des quatre grandes fêtes des nations païennes du nord de l’Europe, la Saint-Sylvestre celtique, le dernier jour de l’année, suivi du jour de l’an : Samhain. Les Irlandais émigrés en masse aux États-Unis lors de la grande famine du milieu du XIXème siècle, ont apporté avec eux leurs légendes, et en Amérique, Samhain est devenu Halloween. Selon les Celtes, cette nuit du premier novembre qui enterrait l’année voyait revenir les esprits et autres fantômes pour hanter les maisons des vivants. Ceux-ci plaçaient une petite lumière à l’abri dans un navet devant leur porte, ainsi que des aliments, pour chasser les revenants. Le navet est devenu citrouille en Amérique du Nord où Halloween est fêté par petits et grands depuis longtemps.

La mode est arrivée en Europe où la Toussaint, devenue Halloween pour les plus jeunes malgré qu’Halloween se déroule en fait la veille, s’écarte de plus en plus de la religion. Désormais, les citrouilles rivalisent chaque année avec les chrysanthèmes dans les grands magasins la dernière semaine d’octobre. Il faut préciser que la Toussaint est une fête catholique, en l’honneur de tous les saints du panthéon catholique, et n’est pas reconnue par l’ensemble du christianisme.

Les protestants ne fêtent pas la Toussaint car ils ne reconnaissent pas l’autorité de la croix, du saint suaire ainsi que la Vierge Marie ou du Saint Père. La Toussaint, célébrée dès les origines de l’Église Catholique, est donc une fête qui rend hommage avant tout à ses martyrs. Cette fête religieuse fut créée au début du VIIème siècle par le pape Boniface IV, qui dédia le Panthéon de Rome à la Vierge Marie et à tous les saints martyrs. Rome était devenue chrétienne et il était temps d’effacer les traces des anciens dieux. Le pape Boniface, quatrième souverain pontife, débarrassa le temple de toutes ses idoles, et, le 3 mai de l’année 605, le consacra à la Vierge Marie et à tous les martyrs, le rebaptisant du nom de Sainte-Marie aux Martyrs. La Toussaint fut alors fixée au 13 mai, jusqu’en 835, date à laquelle le pape Grégoire IV instaura la date du premier novembre pour sa célébration afin d’appliquer la politique ecclésiastique de l’époque. Plus prosaïquement, la date correspondait également à la fin des vendanges et les moissons. Les fidèles, libérés de leurs travaux, pouvaient venir en foule pour célébrer les saints martyrs et trouvaient plus facilement à se nourrir.

Au XIème siècle, on fit suivre la Toussaint du jour des morts, jour de commémoration de tous les fidèles défunts. L’origine de la Toussaint vient également d’un archevêque de Gênes, Jacques de Voragine, à qui l’on doit la « Légende dorée » au XIIIème siècle. L’ouvrage relate la vie des saints illustres avec quantité de miracles et de faits surnaturels dont le Moyen Âge était friand. Il a connu un grand succès car il permettait aux croyants de s’attacher aux saints martyrs fêtés lors de la Toussaint. Notons enfin que la Toussaint en France reste l’une des quatre fêtes chômées depuis le Concordat de 1801.

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Chez nous à Maurice, les chrétiens ont conservé la fête de la Toussaint le 1^er novembre et le 2 novembre le jour de la commémoration des morts. Les cimetières seront visités et la mémoire de nos défunts sera rappelée.