This is a test. This is only a test.

No, actually, this is where you'll find my blogs for a while. Until I get a little more technologically savvy.

I know, I've used it before. Then I gave up for a while. Now I'm back again. I guess I'm fickle.

I had a long post about Rwanda, but it never made it onto the main blog page. Here it is now:

March 15, 2005
I feel like I can talk about "Hotel Rwanda" now.

First of all, it was an excerpt from this Leadership Journal article that made me want to see it even more. I don't know that I agree with all that he wrote, but it did make me think about the movie in ways I might not have, analyzing it, running it through various filters.

I find that one response I want to have is to be better informed of what is going on in the world around me. It's a step. Not a very tangible step, but it's better than sitting blissfully ignorant in suburbia. A friend directed me to Oprah's website. If you have the stomach for it, this article has stories from Congo.

http://www.oprah.com/omagazine/200502/omag_200502_congo.jhtml

Someone told me she feels like there is really nothing at all that we can do about the pain and trouble of the world. And I tend to think, "It's true. What can we do about the complicated political and social issues of these countries that struggle so? We can't even seem to get aid to the people who need it, there is so much corruption."

I mentioned this to another friend, and she said she tended to agree with that first point of view, that the older she gets, the less she feels we can do. "I've fallen to the 'Nothing can be done' camp of social inaction," she wrote me in an e-mail, "Though I once saw a powerful cartoon. A vast crowd of people filled the frame, every one of them saying, ‘I can't do anything, I'm just one person.’"

I myself have never actually seen the cartoon she's describing, but the mere thought of it is haunting me. If all those people would do one thing, just one small thing...

One of my sisters-in-law pointed out that you just need to get critical mass to bring about change. She told stories of young girls who went around their town getting people to vote and those extra votes toppled the local administration and eventually, by some domino effect, changed the political history of a Central American country. I'll have to ask her for the details of that story, but she told it to illustrate that two young girls can be the catalyst for stirring up critical mass and suddenly you have significant change. She said there are many stories like this.

I don't want to be one more voice just shrugging, "I can't do anything, I'm just one person."