recommendations

I must have slept funny last night because I woke up this morning and my back just ached. Either that or I'm just getting old. But anyway...

I do have a couple of recommendations as this weekend draws to a close.

The first is the current photography exhibition at National Geographic, from the photo camp in a Ugandan refugee camp. I went to see it with some friends yesterday and I highly recommend. What I remember most from the captions of these pictures was one girl saying that she was 17 and didn't even know how to read or write her own name. Can you even begin to imagine? Another younger child said he wanted to go to school and become a doctor, but that would never happen. That statement saddened me. Here we're taught to imagine that we can be anything we want and there's a child that wants badly to become a doctor, but at such a young age he's already abandoning his dream.

Others wondered if their parents were still alive after the Rwandan genocide which, if you know your recent history, was 13 years ago. Imagine going for over a decade knowing this horrific event happened and you had no news of what happened to your family. There was a picture of a machete describing the importance of a machete for survival but also the horror because of the damage the weapons did in Rwanda.

After taking in the photos, we sat in for the film God Grew Tired of Us, which is something I've often wondered. Not of me, but of the world. Somehow I'm inclined to think that we we do to each other today is far worse than what happened thousands of years ago when we were first almost wiped off the face of the planet with a flood (if, of course, you happen to believe that story). The film was wonderful, and I somehow managed to hold back tears for most of it, until the end.

There were a few lighter moments in the film as well. Most of these were with the relationships between the Lost Boys. One refugee who was headed to the US was discussing electricity and how he's never used it. He thought it would be very hard for him since he never used it. Imagine going through life with these things we take for granted. I have joked with my parents wondering how they managed to grow up without computers or the internet. But imagine not growing up without electricity or running water, especially when those things are available.

I think it was John Dau in the film who talked about the End Days in the Bible and how when he traveled from one camp in Ethiopia back through Sudan to another camp in Kenya that he wondered if that was what was happening, if God had grown tired of the people on Earth to make them go through what they did.

If you get the chance, I very strongly recommend watching this. I'd like to read the book but right now I've got a few in my "to read" pile and several on my shelves that I would like to reread.

Since I've already gone on long enough, my final recommendation is A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini; I finished it yesterday. I'll admit there were a few moments when I didn't want to read anymore because it was just so depressing, but I kept reading because I kept thinking that it just had to get better. The lives of these women who didn't deserve their hardships had to get better. But the writing was poignant and the story heart-wrenching. I won't go further because, again, I've gone on long enough, but suggest if you're looking for something to read, check this book out.