the Way of the Turtle

I've Got It Pretty Darn Good...
Friday, March 9, 2007

I was all set to come on today and gripe about how I woke up yesterday with a cold, and it's playing havoc with my last long runs before the Eastern States 20 Mile, blah, blah, blah. Poor me.

Today during our weekly leadership program block at school we had a group called Invisible Children visiting. They showed a documentary made in 2003 by three college students who went to Africa and ended up in northern Uganda, where they discovered that every night thousands of children flee their homes in the countryside and walk into the larger to escape being abducted by the Lords Resistance Army, a rebel group that has been trying to overthrow the Ugandan government. Apparently after 16 years of fighting the LRA finds it difficult to recruit so instead it relies on child abduction for both labor and soldiers. A survey in 2006 estimated that approximately 66,000 children have been abducted since 1987. In addition, hundreds of thousands of civilians have had to leave their homes to live in horrible conditions in government sponsored "protective camps." Basically it's an awful situation all around, made even more so by the fact that at the time very little was known about it in other parts of the world. That's improved somewhat in the last few years, as a variety of organizations have been formed to bring attention to the problems in Uganda and aid to the people affected.

After the Invisible Children documentry we saw a second short film that provided some updated information of conditions in Uganda but mostly focused on fundraising efforts by Invisible Children Inc. I honestly found a lot of the fundraising info a bit crass, but I guess they have to beat people over the head for them to get off their backsides and help out, what with all the worthy causes out there to support.

If you'd like to see the documentary, it can be found on Google video here. I wouldn't recommend it for young children - there are some pretty graphic images.

One of the things I took from watching the documentary is that I am very fortunate - I live in a country where life is relatively peaceful and I have an enormous number of luxuries available to me that folks in other parts of the world can only dream about. I don't have to worry about being shot at as I drive around (well... at least if I don't go to certain parts of Albany!) and I don't have to wonder which of my students will be at school the next day and which ones will have been taken from their homes by armed rebels. A cold and a disrupted training schedule is pretty insignificant in the grand scheme of it all. In short, the title of this post says it all - regardless of what minor inconveniences I may be facing at any given moment, I've got it pretty darn good, and I need to remind myself of that periodically and appreciate all that I have.

JMH