Digs Picks |
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Erik Wiehenmeyer, the first blind person to climb Mt. Everest, recruited six blind Tibetan kids to climb Mt. Everest and asked filmmaker Lucy walker to join them. The resulting film, Blindsight, intersperses their amazing trek with backstories of these wonderful children - Dachung “Little Moon," Sonam “100000 Beautiful Lakes” and 4 others who had suffered greatly from being told they had sinned in a previous life, that they are possessed by a demon, or from other forms of bigotry against the blind in their native Tibet. A story that begins as children learning self-reliance through achieving a difficult feat evolves into one much more powerful and enduring - how human beings cannot fail to flourish when they are valued, encouraged, and loved. |
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Preparing for Peace
In its second year, Davis Projects for Peace, is an invitation to undergraduates at the American colleges and universities in the Davis United World College Scholars Program to design grassroots projects that they will implement during the summer of 2008. The projects judged to be the most promising and do-able will be funded at $10,000 each. The objective is to encourage and support today’s motivated youth to create and tryout their own ideas for building peace. Download their 2007 Projects for Peace View Book to see their amazing projects. |
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Several years ago Debbie Tenzer began looking for ways to counter the “Monday Blues” by doing nice things for people. This idea spread like wildfire among her friends and colleagues, prompting her to create Do One Nice Thing, a website filled with Nice Ideas for Mondays, Happy News and more. Since 2005, “nice-oholics” from more than 70 countries have joined in, performing services such as giving their lunch to a stranger, sending school supplies to Afghanistan, providing blankets for people with no heat, and signing up as organ donors. |
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Photographer Jerry Friedman has spent the last five years on a groundbreaking project to document people over the age of 110. He shares the teachings of 60 supercentenarians around the world through the Earth's Elders Foundation, dedicated to raising awareness of the value of elders and improving their quality of life. A collection of photographs will be shown from March 31 - April 4 at the rotunda of the Russell Senate Office Bldg in Washington DC. You can view photos and read biographies of these remarkable elders by visiting Earth's Elders Foundation. |
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In Sickness and In Wealth Airing at 10 PM ET Thursdays on PBS, Unnatural Causes is an illuminating series that examines how one's position in society has a direct influence on their health. In the first segment, researchers compare four people in Louisville, KY - a CEO, lab supervisor, janitor and unemployed mother - to discover how social class shapes access to power, resources and opportunity. The results show a persistent health-wealth gradient, with people on top living healthier lives, and up to 10 years longer. Watch the series or go to PBS for transcripts and a host of resources about health and social policy. |
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Everyone Has a Right The 27-year-long Angola civil war has been over for six years but the number of civilian victims continues to rise. Tens of thousands have been injured or maimed by landmine explosions, leaving the population shattered and ravaged by war. In an effort to restore dignity and confidence to its civilian population, the de-mining commission of Angola is hosting a Miss Landmine Survivor Pageant, with eight women, one from each province, each maimed by a landmine, competing and simultaneously becoming the public faces for their own cause. The pageant will be held on April 2nd in Luanda, Angola. Learn more about the contestants, place your vote, and support a worldwide ban on landmines Miss Landmine Angola 2008. |
Operation Smile For 25 years Operation Smile has been creating new smiles for children suffering the pain and humiliation of facial deformities. Dr. William P. Magee Jr., a plastic surgeon, and his wife Kathleen S. Magee, a nurse and clinical social worker, have received a host of humanitarian awards for their work taking medical teams to more than 25 countries annually to repair cleft lips and other facial deformities. What's remarkable is that this 45 minute surgery can restore dignity to a child's life, and at a cost of just $240. Operation Smile |
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Clean Water LifeStraw, a revolutionary, personal water-purification tool designed for use in the developing world, has won the fifth Saatchi & Saatchi Award for World Changing Ideas. Highly portable and made to last for about a year, LifeStraw reduces the need to travel long distances to find clean water sources - a journey that robs millions of young women of their energy, their time and their dignity. About half of the world's poor, mostly children, suffer from water-born diseases, with 6,000 people dying each day from drinking dirty water. |
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OnBeing is an amazing project by Jennifer Crandall based on the notion that getting to know people better is what we need to bring us closer to unity and peace. On her website you can view short videos of people (and other living beings) from all walks of life - individuals you may have thought you had nothing in common with, but are surprised when you do. Viewing this diverse video gallery is great practice in switching the notion of “other” into “similar to us” and carrying that viewpoint out into our everyday lives. Watch a new video each Wednesday or check out the archives at OnBeing. |
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Resisto Dancing: Songs of Compassionate Revolution Raffi Cavoukian, the Canadian folk troubadour who introduced Generation Y kids to "Baby Beluga" and other earth honoring tunes is calling all Beluga graduates to sing a new paradigm into being - a world that honors its young. Resisto Dancing: Songs of Compassionate Revolution is a heartfelt, hopeful collection of music for children, parents, educators, and decisionmakers. With spoken voiceovers by Jane Goodall, Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama, one lovely track, "The Covenant," sets these inspiring words to a blend of world rhythms: “We find these joys to be self evident: that all children are created whole, endowed with innate intelligence, with dignity and wonder, and worthy of respect.” |
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We'll Never Meet Childhood Again is an extraordinary film documenting some of the 10,000 children with HIV who were left to die in Romanian orphanages during the late 1980s. The courage of these children who want most to live normal, not tragic, lives is matched only by that of their dedicated caregivers who stand up to Romania's widespread prejudice against those with HIV. Responding to the pervasive assumption that they are just going to die anyway, one 15-year old says, “ It's like, if a kid had HIV from birth, that he's going to die twenty minutes after. No. If you know how to treat the kid, he'll live for years - years and years. 180 years he'll live. Or… maybe a hundred. Or at least 101 - because there are people who live to 101!” This inspiring film by Sam Lawlor and Lindsay Pollock was screened at the 2007 Human Rights Watch Film Festival in NYC. |
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The Kite Runner, a film directed by Marc Forster and based on Khaled Hosseini’s acclaimed novel, is the powerful saga of two Afghan boys, following them from their childhood in the vibrant city of Kabul before the Soviet invasion, through the dark days of the Taliban, and concluding in San Francisco after one of the boys builds a new life there with his father. This is a beautiful story of survival and redemption which, according to Roger Ebert, “helps us to understand that the newcomers among us come from somewhere and are somebody.” |
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Harvesting Elderpower We are moving to a global village and yet we don't have our global elders. The Elders can be a group who have the trust of the world, who can speak freely, be fiercely independent and respond fast and flexibly in conflict situations. Several years ago entrepreneur Richard Branson and musician Peter Gabriel discussed with Nelson Mandela the obstacles to solving difficult conflicts facing the world. Their idea of a small, dedicated assembly of leaders, working objectively and without any vested personal interest in the outcome, grew into the present day group called The Elders, 10 respected individuals with a commitment to solving global problems. In addition to Mandela, The Elders include Desmond Tutu, Jimmy Carter, Mary Robinson and six others. Announcing the formation of the group, Tutu remarked, “The ones who ought to be held in high regard are not the ones who are militarily powerful, nor even economically prosperous. They are the ones who have a commitment to try and make the world a better place. We – The Elders – will endeavor to support those people and do our best for humanity.” |
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Persepolis The animated film Persepolis is lovingly based on Marjane Satrapi’s two graphic memoirs about her coming of age as a precocious and outspoken female in Iran before and during the current repressive regime, and her ultimate heartbreaking decision to leave her beloved homeland. Her title derives from the Persian capital founded in the 6th Century BC, and later destroyed by Alexander the Great. Believing that Iran should not be judged entirely by the wrongdoing of a few extremists, Satrapi wants her film to be “a reminder that Iran is an old and grand civilization, deeper and more complex than the view of Iran as a monoculture of fundamentalism, fanaticism and terrorism.” |
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Toni Blackman Toni Blackman is an explosive rap lyricist, vocalist and writer who uses her music to foster communication across cultural, religious and racial divides. As she explains it, hip hop is an art form that gives voice to the voiceless, a genre where youth can speak to the issues that impact them daily. Toni founded the Freestyle Union to work directly with school and community groups to teach teens how to use hip hop to express their own authenticity. She frequently travels to Africa for the State Department as Cultural Specialist and Hip Hop Ambassador. Catch one of Toni's remarkable performances when she comes to your town, and listen to tracks from her songs Beyond the Bling, Hollywood Dreams and many others at ToniBlackman.com. |
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The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears |
In The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, Sepha Stephanous flees a military coup in Ethiopia to settle in Washington DC where he opens a grocery store in an African American neighborhood. As his community begins a period of gentrification, he faces the threat of yet another displacement. Dinaw Mengestu's tender and compelling first novel tells the story of people caught between the worlds of rich/poor, black/white and citizen/foreigner, as they struggle to navigate the rocky terrain of the American Dream. |
Breaking Ranks Is dedicated to raising awareness about rankism, the practice of treating some people disrespectfully because of the misperception that they are of lower rank, and therefore less deserving, than others. Inspired by Robert Fuller's groundbreaking books, Somebodies and Nobodies and All Rise, this website offers an array of tools for defending dignity in every aspect of life. Read articles and interviews and learn rank-busting tips, by visiting Breaking Ranks. |
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A Walk to Beautiful Every year, thousands of women in more than 40 developing countries suffer traumatic injuries called “fistulas” in childbirth, causing incontinence that leads to shunning by villages, husbands, siblings, and even parents. A Walk to Beautiful, an unflinching documentary directed by Mary Olive Smith and Amy Bucher, follows a group of these women in Ethiopia, as they journey from their marginalized existences in backyard shacks to The Fistula Hospital in Addis Ababa. Here, under the dedicated care of pioneering physician (and Nobel Prize nominee) Catherine Hamlin, their injuries are healed and their dignity restored. This illuminating film has opened at numerous festivals, winning documentary and human rights awards in Denver, St. Louis, San Francisco and Barcelona. |
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