global food crisis

And what use is a blog if you cannot promote something important?

I was listening to ABC radio national – my favourite program Life Matters, the other day and an expert was talking about the Global Food Crisis. Here we are, the rich fat cats of the West, moaning about some losses on our share investments! Sure, perhaps the financial crisis is really affecting people in the West but to me it just looks like we are having to survive on a few less pairs of shoes. After all as someone said on the radio, our grandparents used to recycle string – we haven’t reached that level.

Anyway, the point of it is the REAL crisis in the world today is this – and it seems to me this is a greater problem right now than even climate change. The greatest impact of climate change is yet to come and will mainly affect less developed, vulnerable, already poor and starving nations.

So I am trying to inform myself about the global food crisis and thereby get the word out to others also. Herewith a few informative websites.

Compassion says 800 million people are now struggling to find their daily bread. 300 million children are now starving and the global food crisis threatens another 100 million people. Four children die from hunger every 30 seconds. In many developing countries the cost of rice and beans has doubled in the past year. So if you are already starving what does that mean if rice and beans double in price?

Mothers in many nations are facing impossible choices such as between feeding their children and buying medicine for a sick child.

People in the West are dying of excess, while the world starves. We face impossible choices, like what style of take away to buy for dinner. Obesity & cardiac disease, diabetes – the major killers today – are all related to lifestyle and dietary choices. I include myself here as someone who consumes far too much and is overweight.

And this is what the United Nations has to say:

“We consider that the recent dramatic escalation in food prices worldwide has evolved into an unprecedented challenge of global proportions that has become a crisis for the world’s most vulnerable, including the urban poor.”

UN World Food Program

And now I have copied in the explanation from Compassion’s website:

WHAT IS THE GLOBAL FOOD CRISIS

Like a ‘silent tsunami’ the global food crisis has caught the world off-guard and left millions of people struggling to survive.

Throughout almost every region of the developing world people are experiencing localised food insecurity, lack of access to food, or shortfalls in production or supplies. According to the World Bank, in the last three years global food prices have increased overall by 83 per cent. In many developing countries the cost of food staples like rice, wheat and corn has more than doubled in the last 12 months.

One sixth of the world’s population, nearly one billion people, already live on less than $1 day—the common measure of absolute poverty. Of those, 162 million struggle to survive on less than 50 cents a day. Rising food prices have the greatest effect on those people already struggling with food insecurity who spend 60 per cent or more of their income on food. According to the Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organisation Jacques Diouf, there are now over 862 million people in the world without adequate access to food.

UPDATE ON THE GLOBAL FOOD CRISIS

Partly due to the global economic downturn, food prices have started to drop slightly after record spikes during 2008. However, it is expected that prices will remain substantially higher than pre-2005 levels and will continue to cause families living in poverty to decrease both the quantity and quality of nutrition. As global economies begin to recover again, pricing pressures—particularly in developing nations—could even accelerate. Any decrease in food prices will most likely take longer to flow through and make a difference to the poor and will be less substantial than those seen in the markets of developed nations. The current macro-economic environment may be therefore be providing some broad temporary relief, but not a permanent reprieve from food price inflation, particularly for the poor.

WHAT CAN WE DO

If you are concerned about this I would recommend

a) Doing some research – become informed

b) Start by donating money to a recognised charity – the major ones would be World Vision, Compassion (Christian) or Oxfam (secular)

c) Talk to your friends, post on facebook, blogs etc – raise awareness

d) Get larger organisations such as churches, workplaces & business involved

e) Lobby the government for greater contribution from Australia

More links:

Here is a photo essay from Time magazine

Just search Google – there are many links available!

gardening theory of parenthood

As a regular and quite recent facebook user I soon discovered “Farmville”. You may know it, the game application where you get a little patch of virtual land. You can then plow the earth, buy seeds, plant them and wait for them to grow. Plants grow, you harvest them and get money, which can be used for exciting things like buildings, lemon trees, cows, pigs or chickens – great fun.

Well, this application had me interested for a few weeks. It was quite nice to plant the seeds then come back in 1-2 days and find fully grown plants. It gave me something to look forward to in the day. After I expanded the farm a bit, got a few animals and nearly towards generating some kind of balanced diet, well it did get a bit boring. I’m quite glad to say.

What happened next though, was quite amazing. I actually went out and bought some real seeds and a seed tray, shoved them in and did the same thing – waited. Surely enough after a few days, things did begin to grow out of the earth. It was incredible. I have to admit to never doing this before in my life. My previous experience of plants was to buy and kill them. Unlike children or animals, plants were just never loud enough or made enough demands for me to pay attention.

So I took the next step and dug out a bit of the garden, mixed in a bit of compost from the neighbours and inserted seedlings in. Watered, even fertilised. Waited… and amazingly enough those little plants continued to grow.

My husband kindly cut logs to delineate a space and now we have it – a real vege garden. With live things, that actually grow. I’m pleased to say I’ve even been remembering to water it. Checking it for new leaves. Could it be that I’ve become a gardener after all.

We’ll see how long it lasts – after all I have had new projects before (joining the gym, mosaics, guitar, saxophone, novel writing) none of which are still happening.

This is all supposed to be leading to the main point, which is my gardening theory of parenthood. Like plants, children naturally grow and flourish and learn and develop when they are given the right conditions. We don’t always know in what direction they will grow, or even what kind of plant they are sometimes. But our job is to wait, watch – provide the earth and the water and the sunshine. Love, food, shelter, protection, nourishment. Allow them to grow. Don’t get in their way and they will bloom in amazing ways.

The gardening approach to parenting is in contrast to the baking / cookie cutter approach. Baker knows what kind of cookie she wants, prepares dough according to recipe, cuts dough to shape and puts in the oven. Gets exactly the cookie she prepared from the recipe.

But a cookie is not alive.

I want to be a gardener parent.

survival instinct and the new mother

Evolutionary psychology is a field of science that looks at human behaviour in terms of evolution. Some of our habitual or instinctive behaviours have developed that way and are encoded in our brains because these behaviours lead to the survival of the species.

These types of behaviours include attraction to the opposite sex  (for reproduction) protection of offspring, seeking food or shelter (nesting) and general response-to-threat behaviours.

I remember a particularly interesting trip with my 3 children to the “Crocodile Farm” in Cairns. On arrival I became nervy and irritable, I wanted to make our trip as short as possible and I got very prepared to fight irrationally and seriously with my husband when he tried to take the children somewhere. Basically I was quite prepared to do whatever it took to remove the threat. But it took a while for me to realise that what i was actually afraid of was the Crocodiles! Because a lot of the time, evolutionary behaviours occur on an unconscious level – they are instant reactions that occur in the “anxiety centre” or brainstem, and bypass the logical thought centres (cortex) of the brain.

So in mental health anxiety is often seen as an evolutionary behaviour. Our nervous systems have evolved a “fight or flight” response to any kind of perceived threat. This involves certain body sensations (increased heart rate, muscle tension etc) which prepare us to literally fight or run – and other responses here might include a “freeze” response which happens in some kinds of anxiety.

Looking at mothers with new babies, all our evolutionary responses are maxed out because we are programmed to protect this new little life. This leads to the “mother bear” syndrome when some of us will go for anyone’s jugular if they seem to be threatening our baby. This includes fathers, when they seem to be putting the baby in danger.

So how does this work for postnatal disorders. We all know about postnatal depression and how common it is. Anxiety symptoms are very common and is intimately connected to depression, so much that some even say they are the same thing.

We have all seen worrying mothers and anxious mothers and fiercely protective mothers. When does this cross the line and become a disorder? Maybe some of our behaviours and body responses were adaptive when we used to live in the savannah surrounded by possible predators. We had to find shelter and food, avoid threats and stay with the group to survive. These responses can work against us in the society in which we now live.

Some common anxiety disorders are:

- panic disorder and agoraphobia (fear of open spaces) people become anxious when out in the open – a primal fear of exposure to predators, and this is associated with panic attacks.

- social anxiety – people are afraid when around their friends or community and fear rejection by the group, sometimes worrying about their own appearance – this dates back to a time when rejection by the group could mean death, and perhaps those who looked different were rejected because it might mean disability and threaten the survival of the group. But the result of this kind of anxiety can be that people actually avoid the group and inadvertently create what they fear – isolation.

- obsessive-compulsive disorder – a classic feature is fear of germs and compulsive hand washing – related to fears of disease and death. Again this becomes worse with a small baby as a protective mechanism gone wrong and can sometimes cause harm to the baby through excessive cleaning or lack of affection. I have met women who fought bitterly with their husbands about hygiene, not realising they were literally fighting for their lives.

So that’s how anxiety disorders in pregnancy and postnatally are related to evolution. It kind of makes sense when viewed in the context.

The solution is to encourage people to see their thoughts more rationally and logically, and evaluate the reality of the situation. Is there any threat and what is the outcome of their conditioned behaviour. Is the anxiety harming or helping, and how to come up with more logical thinking or helpful behaviour. We need to activate our higher thought centres (cortex) and integrate it with the anxiety centre (brainstem) to calm it down. The good news is those pathways do exist and can be developed, as neuroscience research shows.

 

 

 

 

BloPoMo

This month is BloPoMo for me! At this stage I have dropped the Na (for National) because I’m in Australia and I assume the Na originates in a different country to mine! So it could be In(ternational)BloPoMo. I’m not sure if November is NaBloPoMo any more, I seem to remember it used to be once.

I’ve just decided to kick start writing and try to channel my random stream of ideas to some form of organisation I am going to try to write a post every day. I did try this once before and petered out half way through.

I also tried NaNoWriMo once (while pregnant with twins) and it was a complete disaster. Should have been great because I did have a lot of time on my butt.

Today I am getting away with this fairly non-eventful post to announce the month and yesterday has a post – so I am 2/2 so far. And as someone says, if no one reads it -who cares and if it’s bad, who cares!

Hasta la vista – fellow bloggers.

 

 

 

the spirit of karaoke

Why is it, when I blog I always end up writing about cheesy singing-related topics like Australian Idol and karaoke? Self-confessed karaoke tragic here. Yes, I am one of those people who, if you give me a glass of wine and a karaoke machine it’s hard to get me to stop. In fact I don’t really even need the glass of wine as an excuse (but often several are consumed along the way!)

Unashamed, I feel like writing a post about the spirit of karaoke, the philosophy of karaoke which I love so much. Basically it’s about anyone having a go, it’s about music for the sheer joy of it, never mind about talent, marketing, fashion or any of those unnecessary evils.

I feel that music has become such a commodity, in our materialistic world it’s just another product to be sold and make money. This results in our forgetting what it is to come together with other human beings and make music, imperfectly, for fun. This results in a kind of music fascism, that only certain styles which are in current fashion can be displayed in public. People develop a football team mentality.

Sure, I have no problem with talented musicians, I’m all for them. There’s nothing like a truly inspired singer, writer or group (Katie Noonan for example) who can remind us what heaven is supposed to be like. But I guess I’m a fan of community music, voices coming together and people all joining in. I’m sure in many cultures pre-TV, pre-internet, pre-commercialisation of everything it was the norm for people to sit around and sing together. Music was just part of the rhythm of life, the way people expressed their sadness and romance and grief and love and transcendence of the everyday. The way people formed community and came together. Try suggesting a singalong at your next dinner party and you are likely to be greeted by an embarrassed silence and hasty departure.

Why have people become so uptight? The majority of people I know, when asked to come to a karaoke night either a) think I’m joking b) are very, very busy c) sit uncomfortably on the sidelines or d) drink large amounts before even considering entering a stage.

Then there are the odd few crazies like me whose eyes light up. Who say “OK I’ll be there” and mark their diaries, and turn up, and keep singing, and stay late! We band together and form odd alliances and have wonderful outings. We spend time on ebay browsing karaoke machines and build up secret CD collections.

We experience judgment from the tight-lipped majority but inside our hearts are too busy rejoicing to care.

one more sand art

incredible artist

the white elephant is back

Greetings all – the white elephant is back!

It has been over 2 years and the white elephant has been heavily occupied with other pressing matters (the youngest of whom is now 18 months and the older 2 are nearly 4!)

However, while I’ve been away there has been a constant incoming stream of comments about one particular post I wrote back in 2006. I now have 163 collected stories from readers about “tsunami dreams” – obviously an issue that many of us share! There have also been a lot of comments about “thanatophobia” go figure! This steady reminder from blog readers has inspired me to resurrect the white elephant.

So I’ve decided to promote the tsunami dreams topic to its own pages (see menu) to hopefully make navigation easier. I have put all the comments up on their own page, and will try to find more information about this topic!

Generally speaking I’ve also been on facebook which has taken away some of my need to blog (I hate to admit!) but the writing bug never dies, it just goes underground for long periods…

I’ve noticed that many people I used to read are still blogging! So I look forward to coming to visit.

the big switch

A new and useful website on sustainable living

the big switch

how about this one then?

mentally ill man posing as doctor

It’s quite believable if you have worked in an Emergency Department. It’s just general chaos and no one knows who anyone else is, least of all the staff. It would be as easy as pie to just come in with a stethoscope around your neck, pull out the patient files and start seeing patients. All you’d need is a little experience of how the ED runs, which if you are a mentallly ill person, chances are you might have spent quite a bit of time waiting around Ed’s to learn how they work!