An Outward Look...

I'm a person of many, many interests.  From art in all its various forms, to sports in all of its various forms, business, international relations, history, literature, movies, TV shows - basically anything that captures my attention and holds it for more than 10 seconds I count as an interest of mine.  One of my top interests though is international relations/foreign affairs (which is intimately tied to the subject of history - to me, you cannot know much or care about foreign affairs if you don't know the history behind the stories that appear in the newspapers).  In the past 24 hours I've come upon two great international relations related content that I think people should know about.

First is a link, courtesy of my favorite reporter, Kevin Sites.  Back in 2005, Kevin did a project for Yahoo!News called "The Hot Zone" - spend a year reporting solo on the human stories behind some of the world's "hottest" conflicts.  If you ever have an afternoon free and you want to learn about some of the more under-reported conflicts going on in the world, go to the Hot Zone archives and read a few of his stories and watch some of the videos that he shot. Kevin is also the author of the book, "The Hot Zone", which I also highly recommend. 

Anyway, any link that Kevin posts on his Facebook page is worth a read, and this one, courtesy of Foreign Policy magazine about the Top 10 under-reported stories of 2009, is no exception.  It highlights foreign policy issues that need to be watched carefully as they could have a great impact on the direction of foreign policy in 2010.

The second thing that I came across was a documentary on PBS, called "The Power of the Poor", which has brought to light a name in international relations that I had never heard of: Hernando de Soto.  And I am so grateful that I have learned who this man is, because his work brought down one of the most brutal terrorist regimes that has existed - The Shining Path in Peru.  I have briefly heard about the Shining Path before and was only vaguely aware of their importance in Peruvian history, but this documentary shed light on the entire situation.  What a story!  What a history!  The Shining Path, so brutal in its terrorist tactics that it was compared to the Khmer Rouge, was a Maoist organization that counted close to 80,000 members.  Fed up with their impoverished situation and frustrated with the government they turned to violence to bring about "revolution" in Peru.  And the sad thing was that the poor were just as much victims during their reign as they were before the Shining Path existed.  In comes Hernando de Soto - a man who "discovered" how to help the poor achieve prosperity through legal reform, making economic progress possible.  His legal reforms undermined the purpose of the Shining Path, and as such, Hernando and his Institute for Liberty and Democracy were targeted by the Shining Path with car bombing attacks and assassination attempts.  But in the end, de Soto and the IDL got their reforms through the corrupted government.  More than 50% of Peru's poor have been given economic opportunity to start their own businesses and enjoy the economic freedom and prosperity that owning their land and access to credit gives to all who are able to do the same.  

Basically, de Soto defeated the terrorism of the Shining Path through legal reform that allowed capitalism to flourish among the Peruvian poor and give them opportunity that they never had before in their entire history.  There are definitely still impoverished people in Peru - the documentary definitely addresses this - but the opportunity that never existed before to not be poor now exists for the Peruvian people.

This gave me hope, which is not something that I often have when it comes to world conflicts and systemic problems like poverty.  But perhaps if we approached the Middle East, Africa, and former Soviet republics with legal reform that made economic prosperity through capitalism possible, we would disable the power of Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and other "big-name" terrorist organizations.  It is a solution that is rife with hardships, difficulties, and complexities - but isn't that also true of trying to "solve" this problem militarily? 

Anyway, it is a topic that has piqued my interest and once I read de Soto's book, "The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else" I'll be sure to share my thoughts :).

A Hard Lesson

I have been reflecting lately on a topic that I believe affects all of us at one time or another - loneliness. One of the things that I have learned, and seem to continually learn, is how hard it is to live in loneliness. I think that one of the hardest lessons in life is how to learn to live in our loneliness.

I think about some of the people that I have encountered in my life that have a hard time being alone. From the guy who goes from relationship to relationship because he doesn't want to be lonely, to the girl who will put up with the guy who treats her horribly because she doesn't want to be lonely. I understand their battle, because I think one of the scariest things to experience is that time when you are home all by yourself, with nothing but an empty night staring ahead at you, until the hour comes when you should go to bed and all you have to look forward to is the repeat of the cycle again the next day. There is an emptiness there that reverberates in it's own silence. And even if you fill it with the noise of the television or music, the loneliness is still there, knocking on your heart.

Now, theoretically, community is supposed to alleviate this emptiness, this loneliness. And it does to a certain extent. The love and support of a real community surrounds people and provides them encouragement and support in times of pain and hardship.

And there is a lot of pain in this world and a lot of hardship. The book that I posted about previous to this posting, The Hot Zone, is chock full of stories of hardships that people have experienced that I cannot even begin to imagine what it must be like to be in their shoes. I cannot imagine being an Afghani child-bride beaten close to death, or a Palestinian girl blinded by a tear-gas container shot by Israeli soldiers, or the Israeli coffee shop worker who's body was burned by a suicide bomber, or what it is like to have my limbs torn apart from my body by land-mines placed near my home by militant groups in Colombia. But the thing that connects all these people is that in spite of the horrendous things that they have endured in their life, they are supported by their communities in a real way. There are people that live and walk with these people through this pain. But.

But, I still know that in spite of the communities that surround them, I am certain these people still experience a level of loneliness that connects them to me. Our basic humanity connects us and helps me to understand at a very small level what that pain must feel like.

I also think that one of the lessons that has been hard for me to learn lately is that though I love God and I know that He loves me and He blesses me with His unfailing and enduring love, loneliness still remains. And while I wonder if it will ever truly go away, I don't think that it will. We can surround ourselves with things, people, get married, have families, have friends, live in community, go to church, have our quiet times, and in the midst of all that, loneliness can still rear up it's head. I can run and keep myself incredibly busy and stressed out with life and work and friends, but I think it is all an effort to hide from loneliness. Because when I have a weekend to myself, like this past weekend, I find myself going crazy and slipping into despair.

And maybe that is where God wants me to go. Maybe He wants me to experience despair and loneliness so that He can dispel the falsehoods that surround it and remind me of the Truth of who He is. Perhaps the reason that loneliness never goes away is because I need it to remind me of where I should be looking and where I should be bringing my pain.

I don't want the people who read this to pity me or feel bad that I feel lonely, because that is not the point. The point is to recognize the pain of loneliness that lives in every person's heart is one of the things that helps make us all human and allows us to identify with any person that we meet - be it that donor in the front of the church, to the homeless person on the street who stands in the back, to the friend dealing with an unimaginable life situation, to the people half a world away experiencing a life and hardships so different from anything that we can even imagine.

May God give me the grace and self-confidence to continue to live in my loneliness and embrace it, instead of denying and masking it, so that it allows me to minister to every person that I meet. Because in the end, I know that the depth of what I feel lies also in their heart.

In the Hot Zone: One Man, One Year, Twenty-one Wars by Kevin Sites

My review

I cannot wait to read this book. This book is the result of Kevin Sites' journey over the course of a year to 20 different "Hot Zones" - areas in the world that are torn apart by conflict. I followed Sites and all of his stories on Yahoo and the stories that he brought to the world are so amazing. I love him, his writing, and the way he reminds us that the stories we read in the newspapers about "ethnic conflicts", or "Palestinian rebels", etc, etc, have real human faces and lives behind them.



*Update* I just started reading this book tonight and am already flying through it. This is a must read for anyone who cares about goes on in the world outside of the United States.


View all my reviews.