Saving the world one-on-one   http://www.odemagazine.com/article.php?aID=4228
 
by Jay Walljasper
This article appeared in Ode issue: 30 
 
By connecting people across the planet, mentoring programs can break down the barriers between rich and poor, North and South.

Once there was a kid who seemed to have everything going against him. He was poor, blind and black, living in the backwoods of the American South during the harsh days of racial segregation. But he did have one great advantage in life: a next-door neighbour who showed him how to play the piano.
The kid’s name was Ray Charles, and he changed the world as we now hear it by shaping the future of rock ’n’ roll, soul and country music.
“Wiley Pittman, he was a cat,” Charles recalled in an interview before his death in 2004 “If it hadn’t been for him, I don’t think I’d be a musician today.”

 Pittman owned a general store and café. Each afternoon after the lunch crowd left he’d sit down at a battered upright piano and play boogie-woogie—a rollicking bluesy style of music popular at the time. Charles remembered that from the earliest age he’d stop whatever he was doing when he heard the first notes fly off that piano and slip into the café to listen and learn.
 “I realize today,” Charles said, “that he could have said, ‘Kid, get away from me, can’t you see I’m practising?’ But he didn’t. He took the time.”
 Ray Charles was orphaned as a teenager but he was accomplished enough on the piano to make a living, and he journeyed across the country to Seattle where he played in nightclubs until the early hours of the morning. He’d stumble home at dawn, dog tired, only to be woken up at 9 a.m. by a neighbour kid eager to learn about music.

 “I’d get up out of bed—sleep just didn’t matter anymore because it was him,” Charles explained. “You could tell he wanted to learn, he wanted to know. And because I was able to show him some things, that made me happy, that’s what stirred my heart. I could help this kid.”

That kid’s name was Quincy Jones. He went on to become the world’s most legendary record producer, performer and composer, winning 26 Grammy Awards and receiving 77 nominations—more than any person in history. Like Ray Charles, Jones was also eager to give something back to other kids. He became a driving force behind We Are the World, a pioneering global-relief effort that produced a No. 1 hit and the album USA for Africa to raise money and awareness about hunger in the developing world.
 

“When we met I was 14, he was 16,” Jones remembered. “I just looked up to him because he knew how to do it all. He always used to say, ‘Quincy, play the music the way it was originally conceived because that’s the original soul of the music…’ And that stuck with me the rest of my life.”

The way Ray Charles learned from his neighbour is a classic example of how mentoring makes a huge difference in someone’s life. Throughout history, mentoring has been the primary way that wisdom and practical knowledge have been passed down—from parents, teachers, grandparents, spiritual leaders, godparents, village elders, master artisans, coaches, co-workers and friends of the family. The word itself goes back to Homer’s Odyssey, which recounts how before leaving on his long journey, Odysseus asked a close friend to watch over and guide his son. That friend’s name was Mentor.
Today, perhaps more than ever, mentoring stands as a valuable tool that can help young people make the most of their lives—especially those born into poverty or suffering under the weight of other social ills. This simple human act of helping someone else, multiplied by the millions, can change the world.
Kids today are often on their own in figuring out how the world works, especially if they come from a disadvantaged, single-parent or stressed-out family. But young people who do find a caring adult willing to spend a chunk of time with them have a distinct advantage, according to a study of 90,000 American adolescents published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in September of 1997.

Since the time of that study, notes Jay A. Winsten, associate dean of the Harvard School of Public Health, the number of kids in mentoring programs throughout the United States has jumped from 500,000 to 2 million. That’s still a fraction of the estimated 17 million American kids who need a mentor because of family or socio-economic disadvantages—but it’s a promising start.
The surge of interest in mentoring in the U.S. can be traced in large part to the dramatic results of a 1993 study. Researchers divided 1,000 kids seeking mentors into two groups—half were paired with a mentor through the well-established Big Brothers Big Sisters program, and half were put on a waiting list. The kids, aged 10 to 16, were all from single-parent families and 80 percent of them lived in poverty. Compared to the kids without mentors, the study found that kids who had maintained contact with a mentor for at least a year were:
-- 46 percent less likely to experiment with drugs
-- 52 percent less likely to be truant from school
-- 33 percent less likely to exhibit violent behaviour
Marc Freedman, who conducted the study (and later co-founded the mentoring organization Experience Corps) , says he first thought something was wrong with the data. He had not expected results anything like these. Another big surprise came when he discovered that very few of the mentors in the Big Brothers Big Sisters program had any background in youth counselling, psychology or education.
“It was just the relationship itself,” he recalls. “They were ordinary people spending 10 to 12 hours a month with these kids, taking them to McDonald’s and ball games. It’s like that old Woody Allen line: ‘Ninety percent of life is simply showing up.’ They showed up for these kids and they listened to them.”
 Jean E. Rhodes, psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston who has studied mentorship programs for more than 20 years, cautions, “I don’t want you to think this is a panacea. It’s not that mentoring can solve all our social problems and that we don’t need government programs and don’t need private programs. But the effects of mentoring are dramatic when you look at relationships that last at least a year, and at quality programs.”
By “quality” she means programs in which mentors are carefully screened and prepared, rather than thrown in with a kid with little sense of what to expect. Rhodes’ research suggests failed mentoring experiences leave children in worse shape, reinforcing their experiences that no one can be trusted to care about them.
 
Mentoring programs are growing rapidly around the world. The idea is well-established in Europe, Australia and New Zealand. A program launched in Singapore’s schools has spawned the Asian Mentoring Partnership, which hopes to spread the idea throughout the region. Susan G. Weinberger, a former teacher and school administrator who helped launch the Singapore project, as well as programs in Canada and Bermuda, notes, “It’s the same issues with kids over much of the world: peer pressure, bullying, drugs, alcohol, gangs, shoplifting and self-esteem. I sent a list of the issues to officials in Singapore for them to adapt to local conditions, and they said they were exactly the same problems.”
 Many experiments are underway to expand the possibilities of mentoring. Some schools now invite volunteers into the classroom to tutor and mentor students. Businesses too are signing on to the mentoring movement. New York City’s Bloomingdale’s department store pairs employees—including the CEO—with kids at a nearby public school. Yellow school buses from New York’s largely African-American Harlem neighbourhood roll into midtown Manhattan regularly, stopping at the offices of the Goldman Sachs investment firm so students can meet with their mentors. A Dutch company is cultivating a connection with new African businesses (see sidebar “When two worlds cooperate”).
And mentors aren’t just for kids anymore. The National Retired Teachers’ Association is launching a campaign to link beginning teachers with seasoned classroom veterans to encourage and inspire the novices. A similar program in California sets up young doctors with long-experienced peers.

Up to this point in history, mentoring has been seen as an exclusively local solution to problems. That’s great as far as it goes, but it can’t fill the greatest social need of the 21st century: the widening gap between impoverished people—especially in the developing world, where half the population exists on $2 a day or less—and those who are more prosperous.
The recent emergence of e-mentoring, using e-mail as the primary bond between mentors and mentees, opens up a new world of possibilities for connecting people. The AOL Time Warner Foundation has recently teamed up with the advocacy organization Mentor to assemble a tool kit (see www.mentoring.org/mentorsonline) promoting this newest step in an age-old tradition of people inspiring one another.
That makes it easy to envision a new era in which people of all ages exchange ideas and share knowledge across borders. You no longer need to be a high-powered figure like Quincy Jones with all kinds of superstar friends to be able to make a difference for struggling people in the developing world.

Imagine a company in Chicago extending a helping hand of expertise and encouragement to a struggling start-up firm in Thailand. Imagine a village in Belgium pooling its resources to offer assistance to a village in Zaire. Imagine students in Japan keeping contact with students in Brazil. Imagine musicians in Montreal, environmental groups in Australia, railway workers in Switzerland, church congregations in Poland, software engineers in Korea and families in Florida reaching out to their counterparts throughout the world. E-mail and phone conversations could be supplemented by regular shipments of tools and goods, as well as occasional visits.
 And the benefits won’t flow just in one direction. The Chicago company discovers that its growing familiarity with Asian culture opens up new lines of business. A sales manager visiting from Chicago becomes obsessed with Thailand’s temples and embarks on a successful architecture career. An elder from Zaire visiting his new friends in Belgium offers a suggestion for improving the local park to the great delight of the village children. A young Japanese woman meets her husband at a party in São Paulo.
Mentoring shows great promise for helping the world’s poor. The simple idea of fostering one-on-one relationships between people—in a community or around the world—also acts as an antidote to deep-seated distrust about aid programs. Many people resent their tax money going to foreign aid, since they don’t choose how and where to spend it And some suspect the lion’s share of donations to charitable organizations never makes it out of the front office. But because the contact in a mentoring relationship is personal, it melts resistance. It offers a direct, authentic experience—you are in constant conversation with the people you want to help, you come to understand what they need most, you offer something important on top of money and you get something back.
Mentoring offers us all opportunities to use our skills and knowledge to make the world a better place. We can, each in our own way, become Wiley Pittman—the boogie-woogie pianist next door whose heart and soul live on in the music of Ray Charles and Quincy Jones.

More information:
www.whomentoredyou.org (This Harvard School of Public Health Web site offers interviews, including Ray Charles, Quincy Jones, Oprah Winfrey, Deepak Chopra, Colin Powell and many others)
www.mentoring.org (The Web site of the U.S. advocacy organizaton Mentor)
www.BBBSA.org (The Web site of the U.S. Big Brothers Big Sisters organization)

An Entire Philosophical Revolution

http://www.thepeacealliance.org/main.htm

Participate in an historic citizen lobbying effort to create a U.S. Department of Peace. This legislation was introduced into the U.S. Senate and re-introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives in September of 2005.

The primary function of a Department of Peace will be to research, articulate and facilitate nonviolent solutions to domestic and international conflict.

The Department will focus on peaceful conflict resolutions, prevent violence and promote justice and democratic principles to expand human rights.

Peace, to have any lasting value, must be advanced, expanded and strengthened continuously. Doing so requires skill, dedication, persistence, resources, and, most importantly, people."
~Senator Mark Dayton

http://www.thepeacealliance.org/action/bill_reintro/senate.htm

"Each of the great social achievements of recent decades has come about not because of government proclamations, but because people organized, made demands, and made it good politics for governments to respond. It is the political will of the people that makes and sustains the political will of governments."
~ James Grant, former Executive Director of UNICEF

http://www.dopcampaign.org/action.htm

"What is quite clear - and would become clear as you go along with this campaign - is that you are trying, and I consider myself with you on this in every way... [To create] not only a massive but a basic change in our culture, in our entire approach to our relationships with other human beings... It's not a matter of simply getting another Department of government. You're speaking of an entire philosophical revolution."
~Walter Cronkite

~~~light opera~~~

 smiles @ everybody

Zen and the art of happiness Ode Magazine is one of my favorite publications. One of the nicest things about the online version is that readers are able to respond to articles. Click on the link and leave a comment on this or any Ode article you find once you are there. http://www.odemagazine.com/article.php?aID=4208

Stephan Herrera

This article appeared in Ode issue: 29

The tiny Himalayan nation of Bhutan pursues happiness as a political goal. Ode pays a visit to the place that may turn everything we know about economic development on its head. Every developing country works hard to cultivate an image, a distinct brand awareness, to attract tourists and trading partners. Few have been as successful as Bhutan. Actually, this tiny Himalayan country has somehow managed to create an ethos that defines the country’s state of mind. Imagine a peaceful kingdom with some of the world’s tallest mountains and most unspoiled forests, which is populated with Buddhists who preach kindness and goodwill toward humankind and nature. Imagine a poor country that has chosen to build its own unique path to modernization, one that does not rely upon conventional tourism and development. Some of the world’s rarest animals make Bhutan their home, including the snow leopard, Bengal tiger, takin and golden langur. Bhutan is home to 616 species of birds. In the spring, summer and fall, the lowlands are awash with colour: bright red, pink and white and blue poppies are everywhere. Unlike Bhutan’s neighbours in Nepal, Bangladesh, India or China, heavy industry has not scarred the landscape or fouled the air and water. It’s not that there is no industry, it’s just that the industries and production that exist are, for the most part, compatible with the environment and local communities. Unlike most other developing nations, Bhutan’s King Jigme Singye Wangchuk did not mortgage his country’s political and economic fate over to the World Trade Organization (WTO), the United States, the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in exchange for hard currency and soft promises of help. Instead, Bhutan stitched together a small coalition of bilateral partners like India, Thailand, Japan, Switzerland, Canada, Sweden and Denmark, who all agreed to step in as investors and donors of talent, bridges, telecom equipment, road-building plans and hydro-power technology. Today the vast majority of Bhutan’s hard currency comes from ecotourism and hydro power-generated electricity. Its economy is one of the fastest growing in Asia. And the political structure is peacefully making the transition from monarchy to a kind of Asian-style democracy—at the king’s behest. King Wangchuk created a novel development plan three decades ago, early on mandating that his country’s success be judged in part by the degree to which it makes the Bhutanese citizenry happy. Yes, happy. In Bhutan, happiness is a measuring stick by which all aspects of modernization are judged. The King believes that gross national happiness (GNH) is more important than the widely used measure of economic well-being, gross national product (GNP). I went to Bhutan to see how this grand idea plays out in reality. When I asked middle-school students in the poorer rural areas, where one might think money and jobs would be the only things that are important, I got an earful. Perhaps it should have come as no surprise to me that in a land where the king is widely revered, there would be great enthusiasm for the GNH philosophy. Then again, I did not hear preprogrammed dogma about GNH. Moreover, in most cases the teachers left their classrooms when I arrived so the students were free to speak their minds, at least as much as one can expect from students speaking to a total stranger. One 16-year-old boy in Bumthang, who like many Bhutanese goes by the name Karma, said he did not know of a single teenager in the countryside who did not feel encouraged by his government’s interest in developing the nation with the balanced sensibility fundamental to GNH. Throughout Bhutan, but especially in small towns like Bumthang, which are surrounded by striking snow-capped peaks, gentle waterfalls and verdant valleys filled with the sound of hawks and the occasional monkey chatter, an outsider can quickly forget that like most of the world, the rural interior is seriously impoverished. Stuart Campbell, the American manager of the Uma Paro spa hotel in Paro, which opened a year ago, told me that entrepreneurs in Bhutan, most of whom are Bhutanese, regard GNH with guarded optimism if for no other reason than the perception in the business community that GNH creates a sense of stability. “The government certainly doesn’t require [businesses] to buy into GNH,” Campbell told me one night over dinner. “But I can guarantee you that every business owner in Bhutan that is smart will continue to embrace and support it because so far, at least, it’s been good for business.” If the high ideal of Gross National Happiness succeeds over the long run, it will be in large part because the youth, entrepreneurs, and outside investors believe that it is good for them. It doesn’t seem to matter that neither the king, nor anybody else throughout history for that matter, has figured out how to quantify happiness. To the contrary, it is perhaps because happiness cannot be measured that the King created the concept and goals of GNH in the first place. The thinking in Bhutan is that unless change results not just in a higher standard of living, but happiness, what’s the point of changing? Most governments, at least in theory, would like to think their policies are designed to maximize the happiness of the masses. Few really are. The king and government of Bhutan aim to be the exception to the rule. And they might just succeed. Here are three reasons why: * First, the four “pillars” of GNH—environmental conservation, socio-economic development, culture and good governance—have just been enshrined in the country’s first constitution as the guiding principles of the government’s contract with its people. * Second, the Bhutanese do not merely have a right to happiness, they have a right to judge their government on the degree to which development and modernization plans are in keeping with GNH. Just as with their king, the Bhutanese may submit a grievance to the government if they feel their happiness is being neglected. * Thirdly, Bhutanese across a broad spectrum of class and standing have embraced GNH as a good thing. All of the Bhutanese I met along my travels—and I met schoolteachers, students from K-12, farmers, bankers, country doctors, civil servants, Internet entrepreneurs, even cynical intellectuals and journalists—have bought into the idea that GNH is not a gimmick, but a plan for enlightened and sustainable development. They see GNH as a defining feature of their culture and a logical extension of their Buddhist tradition. It is entirely possible that the good people of Bhutan are being hoodwinked into thinking their government really is weighing future development and modernization plans against the impact these plans will have upon their happiness. The Bhutanese and the rest of the world—which is beginning to pay attention to Bhutan’s happiness experiment—will know for certain soon enough. In a matter of months, the sole responsibility for governing Bhutan will officially pass from the partnership that has existed between the king and the government for the past six years to the government, entirely. The fate of GNH is now linked to the fate of the Bhutanese public, both of which are now under the control of an elected government. The government has its work cut out for it. As one government official who oversees Bhutan’s bilateral relations told me, “Perhaps the greatest challenge is making sure that our neighbours in the region and our bilateral partners around the world respect our desire to develop our nation and our economy using the principles of GNH. We are a small developing country that depends very much upon its neighbours (and donors). It would be very easy to let others tell us how we should be modernizing.” Today, no government official’s speech is complete without some mention of it. A national conference on the theory and pursuit of GNH has been spun out of a series of academic lectures on the topic. Last year’s first annual  GNH conference was so popular, in fact, that the second installment, held this past June in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, in an effort to make it more accessible to the global observers who have become intrigued by GNH, attracted some 400 academics and policy-makers from 35 countries. There is talk of inserting a panel discussion on GNH into the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Reporters who cover the developing nations of Asia on a regular basis say Bhutan is one of the bright spots on their beat. If Bhutan can prove that a healthy economy, democracy, social equality, sustainable development, environmental protection and energy independence are all within reach of even the poorest nations, this tiny Buddhist country will turn 100 years of economic and political theory on its head and possibly even inspire other nations to take a chance on this Bhutanese style of Zen economic development. Not surprisingly, there are skeptics who feel GNH and even Bhutan are not model operations. The Economist magazine essentially pronounced GNH a cheap parlour trick earlier this year. The Kathmandu Post, an English daily, had this to say about GNH: “The pseudo-reforms are an effort to create the appearance of political pluralism without autonomous social and economic power in Bhutan. Today, the supporters of the regime record success and talk about Gross National Happiness but they will not mention human-rights violations, the muzzled press, centralized government dominated by the elite, communal harmony and condition of exiles whose return is barred.” Still, if Bhutan’s king and his ruling elite are up to no good, they certainly have hoodwinked a lot of very smart, well-traveled souls. George Martin, a retired infectious-disease specialist who spent nearly 30 years at the U.S. National Institutes of Health, has seen his share of developing countries around the world. Martin says the issue is not whether Bhutan has problems. It does, not least in its health-care system. Rather, the point is that Bhutan has far fewer than any other developing nation he’s visited, save perhaps for Costa Rica. “Bhutan is a success story that has only just begun,” he says. To be sure, Bhutan is still very much a developing country. Close to 90 percent of the population still relies upon the family farm for food and income. More than one-third of Bhutan’s budget is plugged with development aid. The country has $598 million U.S. in debt. Nearly two-thirds of Bhutan is still without electricity and one-quarter of the citizens live without sanitary drinking water. The leading causes of death and disease haven’t changed all that much over the past 20 years. Most households use poorly ventilated wood-burning stoves in their kitchens. As a result, many Bhutanese still experience chronic and acute respiratory illness. They continue to suffer from malaria, diarrhea, dysentery, worms and infections. And health officials have had their hands full with a host of new diseases of modernity that have emerged in recent years, like hypertension, diabetes, and depression. One gets the feeling that even if it is unintentional, GNH is masking greater problems in Bhutan. Nobody in the government will admit, for example, that although the economy is growing rapidly and the standard of living has improved markedly, the country still has a long way to go before it can lay any claim to a complete reversal from misfortune to fortune. But the Bhutanese I spoke with were not naive enough to think  nothing could go wrong from here onward. Prime Minister Lyonpo Yeshey Zimba told me he feels the risk of a backlash against GNH is low and will remain that way as long as the government itself does not forget the main objective of GNH: to move forward as a nation with eyes wide open. “We must modernize to survive,” he said. “But we must do it wisely and with a dose of humility.” There are many conundrums. Bhutan’s ecotourism industry, for example, limits what villagers and farmers can do to electrify their homes. In Gangte, a vast and beautiful savannah in central Bhutan, power lines aren’t allowed out of fear they would disrupt the migratory patterns of the legendary black-necked crane. Local villagers naturally feel put upon because unlike tour operators, they do not profit from tourists. But there is talk of bringing electricity to such regions through alternative power sources like solar power, fuel cells and biomass. There is also talk of bringing electricity to the countryside through buried cables once the hydro-power infrastructure has expanded more broadly across the country. In his book Happiness (Penguin, 2005), the British economist Richard Layard reminds us that societies need goals aimed at improving lives even if sometimes their purposes and payoffs are a matter of debate. “Society cannot flourish without some sense of shared purpose,” he writes. Bhutan is gaining a sense of shared purpose, and that purpose is to prove to itself and the rest of the world that happiness can be merged with economic development. This has not necessarily made Bhutan a richer nation—although it probably has—but it has certainly captured the world’s imagination. As King Wangchuk stated at last year’s GNH conference, “I believe that while Gross National Happiness is inherently Bhutanese, its ideas may have a positive relevance to any nation, peoples or communities. … I also believe that there must be some convergence among nations on the idea of what the end objective of development and progress should be. There cannot be enduring peace, prosperity, equality and brotherhood in this world if our aims are so separate and divergent—if we do not accept that in the end we are people, all alike, sharing the earth among ourselves.” Bhutan is certainly in the best position today to put this philosophy to the test. Let us hope that GNH proves the cynics wrong or at least remains part of the solution, rather than becoming part of the problem in Bhutan. The real test lies ahead. The world is watching. If GNH proves over time to be little more than empty words, it will be our loss  too. Stephan Herrera is an American journalist, specialized in politics, economy and technology. He is Nature’s news editor and writes for The Economist. He wrote this article at the request of Ode.

Merry Christmas ( War is Over )

http://www.just-oldies.com/1975/merry_christmas.htm

Recorded By: John Lennon  
Written By: John Lennon

So this is Christmas 
And what have you done 
Another year over 
And a new one just begun 
And so this is Christmas 
I hope you have fun 
The near and the dear ones 
The old and the young 

A very merry Christmas 
And a happy New Year 
Let's hope it's a good one 
Without any fear 

And so this is Christmas (War is over) 
For weak and for strong (If you want it) 
For rich and the poor ones (War is over) 
The world is so wrong (Now)
And so Happy Christmas (War is over) 
For black and for white (If you want it) 
For yellow and red ones (War is over) 
Let's stop all the fight (Now)

A very merry Christmas 
And a happy New Year 
Let's hope it's a good one 
Without any fear 

So this is Christmas (War is over)
And what have we done (If you want it) 
Another year over (War is over)
And a new one just begun (Now)
And so Happy Christmas (War is over) 
We hope you have fun (If you want it)
The near and the dear one (War is over) 
The old and the young (Now) 

A very merry Christmas 
And a happy New Year 
Let's hope it's a good one 
Without any fear 

War is over if you want it 
War is over now

"Eight-year-old Virginia O'Hanlon wrote a letter to the editor of New York's Sun, and the quick response was printed as an unsigned editorial Sept. 21, 1897. The work of veteran newsman Francis Pharcellus Church has since become history's most reprinted newspaper editorial, appearing in part or whole in dozens of languages in books, movies, and other editorials, and on posters and stamps. "  http://www.newseum.org/yesvirginia/  For a rockin' good sound click on the Santa Claus is Coming to Town link @  http://higgstm.tripod.com/christmas.htm   Get JAZZED!