View From The Basement

This day last year

This day last year I was sitting on a plane flying to New Orleans with a group of the young people I work with to get involved with the relief work that was (and I think still is) going on there.

You can read about what we did in my archives, here , here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

I often wonder how things have changed since we were there. I wonder how Bobby, Keneth and Dion are doing now? These guys from New Orleans were staying in the same camp as us so there were no pernanent addresses to get so we could keep in contact.

Carbon Neutral Mission

Last summer I lead a Youth Mission Trip to New Orleans to get involved in some relief work following Hurricane Katrina. We flew from Edinburgh to Atlanta and then on to New Orleans. I've calculated the CO2 for this trip  @ 1.6 t , and tried to work out how many tree's I'd have to plant to off-set this.

The amount of CO2 a tree will absorb depends on many variables, so any calculations are a bit of a guesstimate. I reckon 20 trees will over 4 - 5 years will off-set my CO2 for this trip.

So this month I'm going to give to Greenbelt. Not this Greenbelt, or that Greenbelt, but the Greenbelt Movement . This movement was set up by Wangari Maathai the 2004 Nobel Prize winner. What I like about it is that it's not just an environmental project planting trees in Kenya, but looks to provide employment for women, both in the planting of the trees and then in the management of the planted area.

On the brink of civil war?

A couple of years back I fulfilled a life ambition and visited the beautiful country of Lebanon. Since I was a young teen I'd wanted to go there and see the ancient cedars. So when the opportunity arose to take a youth mission trip there I jumped at it. As with most placed you visit to do some kind of mission you bring back something of that country in your heart so to speak, and also leave something of yourself there.

Over the past months my concern for the political situation in this small country has been growing. Ever since the assassination of Hariri Lebanon seems to have been lurching towards an ever growing period of instability, and one is left asking the question is this the portent of civil war?

The news coverage last week of the general strike in Beirut, organised by Hizbullah, seems to have added fuel to the tensions that were never far from the surface between the different ethnic groups who now peacefully try to coexist but when I was a kid were are war with each other.

BBC correspondent Jim Muir writes on the situation under the header "Lebanon clashes fuel fears of civil war". For a Lebanese perspective you can read the Daily Star an English medium Middle East Paper that's on the web.

One to watch?

Tonight on Channel 4 there's a programme called "The Trouble With Atheism". (sorry if your not in the UK). It's meant to be a response to the programme they put on earlier in the year by Richard Dawkins' called "The Root of all evil" (I think you can watch this on You Tube).

It should be worth a watch although I'm a little bemused at their choice of Rod Liddle as the agent provocateur. I'll miss is as I've a meal out with the others I do youth work with, but hopefully someone will tape it for me.

Pity the Nation

In the summer I visited Lebanon with some of my young folk to help run an English speaking youth camp in the south of the country. We met some amazing people whose lifestyle and passion for Jesus was very challenging.

It was interesting that the "kids" with me could remember nothing of the Civil War. They were too young to have watched like I did the news reports of hostage takings - Brian Keenan, John McCarthy, Terry Anderson and Terry Waite.

I found the Lebanese people wonderfully warm and friendly, which made it all the harder to understand why the different groups in Lebanon spent so long blowing each other up, and why now there is still a deep seated mistrust. (The situation in Lebanon reminded me of Northern Ireland - again a place full of warm friendly people that spent too long blowing each other up). Westerners I met there recommend Robert Fisk's book "Pity the Nation", so I've bought it as an early Christmas present for myself. I'll start reading it today.