Tag: Liberia

Mobile books

I was waiting for my scooter ride outside Cho Ray Hospital when a peddler approached me. “Want to pick something to read?”. Turned out, she was selling used books, in a box: Cu Chi Tunnel, My Lai Massacre, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, Sorrows of War, Understanding Vietnam…

Those subjects are now as old as the war itself. All healed and pealed, just scars.

When I was in high school, I went up the gang-plank to tour the Logos ship.

This ship carried books and Bibles across the ocean to far-away lands (of heathen). Later, to reciprocate, I volunteered one summer aboard the Doulos (Logos 2.0) ship to W  Africa.  I saw the longing for a better life in those dark eyes. The instant bonding of men in different skin colors. And the no-way-out trajectory of Liberia in the mid-80’s.

Mobile books.

But not up-ward mobile lives.

Now, we have e-books and e-learning.

Open U and open source. I wonder how many of us are taking advantage of free access to advance ourselves.

I wonder how many sales the peddler made yesterday outside the hospital?

I wonder how many patients bought and read about Man’s Fate .

I read so I won’t be alone.

I am reading “Love and Garbage”.

And I appreciate your reading this, so you and I are not alone.

Love, death and garbage will always be with us. It’s an unmovable law. The consolation is, we are not alone in this. Want to pick something to read?

Women: mystery and macho

I wasn’t the one who opened up this Pendora box.

Stephen Hawking did. In a recent interview, he had mentioned that the biggest mystery in the universe was women.

You and I could have said that.

Girl with the Dragon Tatoo.

Girls gone wild.

Valley girls.

In 2011, we got an election in Liberia which gave us not one but three Nobel-prize winners, all women.

Germany, Argentina, Brazil, Australia, Byrma, Thailand…you name it.

From G.I. Joe to G.I. Jane.

In the Middle.East, not to be upstaged, some women stepped up to be suicide bombers.

Recently, a 911 caller asked if it was OK to shoot an intruder. The response, “go ahead, and take the shot”.

They could have gotten Bin Laden much earlier with similar order.

So intrigued with Larsson’s Tatoo Girl, Hollywood bought the rights to produce its own version.

Mystery indeed and macho in fact.

I grew up surrounded by strong women.

They lift, carry loads, feed babies, ride cycles, drive cars, cook, clean, teach, scream, and most of all, keep going in face of extreme hardships (even this long list doesn’t do justice).

I have come face to face with female victims of piracy, with doctor-turned-refugee, with singer-turned-shopper.

I have worked with team mates who turned VP, widow and writer.

Mystery!

Hawking has spent a lot of time on wheel chairs. He must have logged in a lot more research time than any of us about this “mystery”  that, to him, still eludes comprehension.

I remember that morning when the Challenger blow up (we were watching it live), taking away our dear (female) teacher in a smoke.

Or the congress woman from Tucson who is now recovering from an assassin’s bullet through the head.

The Big Three networks have all experimented with solo female anchors: CBS w/ Connie Chung, then later, Katie Couric. ABC with Diane Sawyer.

We trusted women to deliver the news (after all, they delivered us all in the first place).

Yet, we have problems accepting their strengths (when asserted to the extreme as in Larsson’s character).

I know one thing: the financial mess we are in must have caused more by men’s greed than women’s (more nurturing in nature).

And it will be a mystery to us all to get out of it unscathed, thanks to you-know-who.

(hint: German’s leader, IMF leader …..)