senseless flames

THE TROUBLE with scheduled blog posts is that they don't reflect what's currently happening.  After watching the flames in Hackney, Croydon and elsewhere yesterday, today has been a constant checking on news updates.  If you're an overseas reader (and I know there are many of you), and you've not picked up on what's going on here in the UK, Laura Anne has a summary of events over at her blog.  What started in London has spread to other cities.

Rumours fly everywhere, so it's important to establish the reliability of the sources. There have been claims of disorder where there are none. But some are indisputably true, and as ever I feel wordless.  Distressed, outraged, and utterly perplexed - but...but we don't do this sort of thing!  Well, apparently some do.  The rest of us twitch with helplessness and indignation.

Not all entirely helpless - many have been out cleaning up after the riots - what one Twitter user described as a 'riot of goodness'.  There seems to be a determination that we will not let ourselves be tarnished by the actions of the few, and we ourselves are prepared to clean up the mess in sheer defiance.  Get your broom and go.

General advice seems to be don't panic, and stay out of the way at scenes of disorder.  A sea of spectators will not help get things under control.

So we sit and wait from a distance, praying in our frustration and our disappointment that there will be an end to the senselessness, to the disregard, to the pain that is being inflicted in so many ways.

Woman leaps from burning building in Croydon last night 

Image: Wenn.com via yahoo

See BBC news here and live coverage here

Top image from the Independent

reflections on 1994

Today is the International Day of Reflection on the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda, when nearly 1 million people were brutally killed in a horrific civil war.

Tribalism ran painfully deep for those involved- I read in my prayer book this morning that on visiting Rwanda on behalf of the Pope, one Cardinal spoke to some Rwandan church leaders, asking them: "Are you saying that the blood of tribalism is deeper than the waters of baptism?"  One leader answered, "Yes, it is."  

Whenever I think of Rwanda, I think of a little boy.  My parents began sponsoring a Rwandan child while I was in my teens.  During this terrible time, they lost touch with him.

It was wonderful, later, that the sponsorship programme (then Tearfund, now joined with Compassion) found him.  I believe he had lost many of his family members, but he himself survived.  He's now a man in his twenties, thus the correspondence between them ended a couple of years ago (this is Compassion policy once a child reaches 21).

Strange for me to think of 1994 - it was a year when I was lost in the muddles and miseries of growing up, and the year I first began to struggle with CFS/ME.  I was coping with panic attacks and teenage crushes (probably not unrelated to each other!).The horror of the news reports felt oddly distant, another world.  A preoccupied teenage girl in the West was in completely different circumstances from that Rwandan boy suffering through unspeakable loss.

I probably grieve more now than I did then, which is why it is helpful to remember, to reflect - when perhaps at the time the horror of it barely slid through the chinks of my life. I registered but did not understand, so tied up in my own adolescent world.  I wish I could say otherwise.

16 days...

Tomorrow marks the beginning of '16 days of activisim against gender violence'. November 25th is International Day Against Violence Against Women, and December 10th is International Human Rights Day, which is, as the website says "in order to symbolically link violence against women and human rights and to emphasize that such violence is a violation of human rights."

This is an issue that has always stabbed at my heart, particularly in the area of sexual violence, which, long term reader will remember, initially spurred my production of 'Fragile World'. We cannot escape the horrors of atrocities committed against, for example, the women of the Congo, appalling stories of mass rape, horrors that we cannot imagine, and frankly, do not want to. And yet, they exist. Can we really be silent in such a world as this?

And gender violence is not just a problem in unstable countries under specific threat of war or terrorism. Domestic violence is everywhere.  According to Rest0red, two women a week in the UK die due to domestic violence incidents. Globally, one in three women will suffer violence at the hands of a male partner. In the UK, it's one in four.

The website for '16 days' can be found here, providing links and resources to help raise awareness of this issue. This is what they say about the campaign:

The 16 Days Campaign has been used as an organizing strategy by individuals and groups around the world to call for the elimination of all forms of violence against women by:

• raising awareness about gender-based violence as a human rights issue at the local, national, regional and international levels
• strengthening local work around violence against women
• establishing a clear link between local and international work to end violence against women
• providing a forum in which organizers can develop and share new and effective strategies
• demonstrating the solidarity of women around the world organizing against violence against women
• creating tools to pressure governments to implement promises made to eliminate violence against women

Let's use our voices; let's not be silent. Spread the word and get active. Change the world.