T H E   H U M A N I T Y   E S S A Y

Aung San Suu Kyi defines her conception of humanity called Bodhicitta, the mind of enlightenment.

Upon returning home to Burma in 1988, Aung San Suu Kyi became deeply involved in the democratic movement. Elected as the Secretary General, Aung San led the National League of Democracy until she was placed under house arrest by the military regime. In 1991, she became the eighth woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. She was released from house arrest in 1996 and continues to work in Rangoon for the restoration of democracy.

"The essential distinction between savages and civilized men lies not in differences of dress, dwelling, food, deportment or processions but in the way we treat our fellow humans. It is the degree of humanity in our relationship with others that decides how far we have learnt the art of peaceful coexistence...Each one of us has a duty to try to achieve a more human, civilized world. By joining the compassionate heart firmly to the wisdom of insight gained through prolonged and careful study of the problems that beset our globe, each one of us will find a way of making a unique contribution towards creating a better home for all of us."

page 8
Stone Pillars
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H E R O

In 1980, Bill Drayton founded a non-for-profit organization to promote social innovation across the world. He called it Ashoka. Through funding from the organization, 1,000 Ashoka Fellows have effectively contributed to their societies for the past eighteen years. On the contribution of Ashoka Fellows, Mr. Drayton elaborates:

"I deeply admire and respect each of you because you have had the courage to become social entrepreneurs, a critical but still unrecognized profession...You have stared down the solid front of stuffed shirts who told you that you couldn't. I know how extraordinarily blessed I am to have you as friends and teachers"

The following four excerpts detail Ashoka Fellows' personal experiences in pursuing social betterment for their countries:

The only government doctor assigned to an eastern Indonesian island of 96,000, Hyronimus Fernandez considers the place of medicine in the Solar Alor Archipelago.

"A doctor and his or her medication are just temporary and expensive aides. People can surmount most health problems themselves, using local resources. I do not see the need for health as identical to a need for medication, for hospitals, for doctors, or for an often exploitative medical system that relies more on treating the patient's symptoms than their ailment. A group of locally trained community leaders, educated in basic health care techniques, along with members of the community, can prevent and cure most illnesses together."

"One idiom I love from the Xhosa people," Gcina Mhlophe explains, is "Inyathi ibuzwa kwaba phambili". This means, "To learn something, one needs to ask those who have walked the road". With careful respect for her ancestors, Mhlophe explores the intricate web of South African wisdom that can be understood through storytelling.

"Life was hell in the eighties in South Africa; the Apartheid beast was still refusing to die. The state of emergency gave too many freedoms to the police for all their brutality. As I tried to understand what was happening, my writing was affected greatly, I had seen and experienced so much pain that there were times when I doubted the significance of what I was doing...Then the power of these ancient stories began to show me the way and give me strength.... I worked all day and night trying to understand them, sharing them with others. In May 1990, I started to go out to the schools, to youth centers in different townships, and to orphanages. I told the stories and we tried to reinterpret them to make sense of the situations and times we were living in. I began to understand, in a new way, stories I had know all my life."

After establishing an informal school in train station, Inderjit Khurana reflects upon his mission against poverty in his homeland of Bhubaneswar, India.

"Rather impulsively, one Sunday I went to the railway platform and set up an impromptu school under a tree. That was the skill I had, the thing I knew best: to teach. There was no looking back after that day. The poor neighborhoods around the platform became alive to the benefits that even non-formal schooling could bring, even if these were intangible benefits, such as dignity, self-respect and confidence. The school has retained its informal structure, its accessibility, its willingness to listen and respond, and, perhaps most importantly, the will to carry out a program in its true spirit rather than abiding by the laws."

The first woman in Nepal to obtain a doctorate in law, Dr. Shanta Thapalin accounts her struggle to reconcile the conflicting roles of wife, mother, lawyer and activist.

"Upon receiving my degree, I had to accompany my husband to a number of remote and backward areas. I saw things and heard stories that shocked me. The women of Nepal needed help. They needed emancipation. They certainly needed rights. My ambitions took a reshuffling and the fight for woman's rights became my new religion...For years, on account of my sex, I looked upon with mistrust and underestimated as a lawyer. The idea of a vocal and assertive woman leaping into the forefront to advocate and fight for woman's rights was not acceptable. I spelled trouble for many, who in turn tried to create obstacles every step of the way."

page 10
"Dear Yermolai..."
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D I A L O G U E

A nineteen year old Australian and a twenty-four year old Russian introduce themselves to each other in a trans-continental correspondence. Anouk Russell, a university student from Northbridge, New South Wales, Australia shares her impressions of Russia with Yermolai Solzhenitsyn, from Moscow, Russia.

10 February, 1996

Dear Yermolai,

"... I also want to ask you about Russian authors. My mother loves the Russian novelists, notably your father, Doestoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev, and Pasternak: so I've had as easy opportunity to read their novels. Here the sense of genuine feeling that I noticed in Russian music is also apparent, but in the more clarified form of intense patriotism. Every writer is in love with the Russian peasant and his simple life, full of admiration for his willingness to work hard. The customs and heritage of the Russian people are catalogued with much pride, and the sense of community is held sacred. Russian authors have so much to say about humanity, and forceful illustrations with which to say it that penetrate through the clumsiest of English translations. Australian literature...was for a long time nothing more than the sentimental imaginings of settlers about life in Britain, or tales of draught or bush fire whilst trying to tame the land. Which endures the most? That which deals with human behavior, observed at extremes by your countrymen.

Please tell me if I am romanticizing the situation there, or if I'm grossly ignorant of some Russian literary movement.

Sincerely,

Anouk

March 4, 1996

Dear Anouk,

"We wiped out the class system. Now those entering power play by the "this is your big chance to get rich so do it while you can" rule. It's the robber-barons all over again, except the land of opportunity... is crisscrossed by corroding pipe lines, radio-active dens, slumped posts...And there is no counseling, much less compensation. History does not always deal the fairest of hands. Unfortunately, it seems that it is the same the world over: those who taste power and money grow easily addicted, and swiftly find the dominant logic of their existence to be a self-perpetuating pursuit of and service to those two masters. Nothing new here. It's just that in successfully structured societies, incentives, laws, enforcement and adherence to them aid to spread the benefits around; some countries have done so quite effectively. ....

Best of everything,

Yermolai

page 13
All in a Day's Work
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P H O T O  E S S A Y

With understanding eyes, John Isaac reveals the rural women of Africa and his native Asia. Photography from Isaac glimpses into women's lives in Egypt, Malaysia, Afghanistan, Mali, and many other countries.

Perhaps the most revealing images of Isaac's work are the photographs he does not take. Whenever there is the slightest question of trespassing upon an individual's dignity, he puts his camera away. Once, in Rwanda, he even resigned his career of fifteen years, devastated by the inhumanity he was witnessing. Only after months of self-examination did he return to photography.

John grew up in a small village near the town of Tiruchchurappalli, in southern India. "My mother raised me herself," he told us. "One of the most important lessons she taught me was never to take away a person's dignity." What prescient advice to a man who was to become the chief photographer of the United Nations, who now has been on assignment to over seventy countries.

page 19
Marker on the Shore
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C U L T U R E

A millennial observer in Malta champions the underdog.

"In this period of accelerating history and contradicting tendencies," Richard Falk told us, "it seems more important than ever to prepare human consciousness for the next millennium." During Falk's 1996 sabbatical in Malta, he addressed this concern in his book which dealt with the state's changing role in an increasingly globalized world order. Today, he continues to teach at Princeton University, where he is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of International Law and Practice.

"I feel that the main threat today comes from global market forces that are eroding the independence of sovereign states and are operating without community ties or accountability...In opposition to this current threat are those who are victimized and those, working in various transitional gropings towards a global civil society, who seek to sustain life prospects for the future. These underdogs...provide crucial resistance to the worst tendencies of globalization-from-above, whether it be placing an automotive population bomb in the midst of future generations, turning away from the torments of sub-Saharan Africa, or ignoring the homeless wandering through American city streets. Our most important challenge. therefore, is to encourage the process of globalization-from-the-ground-up in any way we can, to help make the impossible happen!"

page 22
"The party is so loud downstairs..."
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P O E T R Y

In her poem, "The Guardian Angel of the little Utopia", Jorie Graham muses at the fate of our human souls.

Raised by American parents in Italy and educated in French schools, Ms. Graham has published five books of poetry. As one critic explains, "Jorie Graham makes no attempt to seduce the reader through her cleverness, but only to challenge her own mind and see if we can hold on for the ride." Awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1996, Ms. Graham is currently on the faculty of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

"...The party is so loud downstairs, bristling with souvenirs.

It's a philosophy of life, or course,

drinks fluorescent, whips of syntax in the air

above the heads-- how small they seem from here,

the bobbing universal heads, stuffing the void with eloquence,

and also tiny merciless darts

of truth. It's pulled on tight, the air they breathe and rip.

It's like a prize the way it's stretched-on tight

over the voices, keeping them intermingling,

forcing the breaths to marry, marry,

cunning little hermeneutic cupola,

dome of occasion in which the thoughts re-

group, the footprints stall and gnaw in tiny ruts,

the napkins wave, are waved, the honeycombing

thoughts are felt to dialogue, a form of self-

congratulation, no?, or is it suffering? I'm a bit

dizzy up here rearranging things,

they will come up here soon, and need a settling for their fears, and loves, an architecture for their evolutionary

morphic needs-- what will they need if I don't make the place?--

what will they know to miss?, what cry out for, what feel the bitter restless irritations

for? A bit dizzy from the altitude of everlastingness,

the tireless altitudes of the created place,

in which to make a life-- a liberty-- the hollow, fetishized,

and starry place,

a bit gossamer with dream, a vortex of evaporations,

oh little dream, invisible city, invisible hill

I make here on the upper floors for you--..."

page 24
Exhaustion
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P H O T O  E S S A Y

Photography by Sebastiao Salgado celebrates the soul of working men and women.

In the words of Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano, the photographs of Sebastiao Salgado "... show us that concealed within the pain of living and tragedy of dying there is potent magic, a luminous mystery that redeems the human adventure in the world." Winner of many prestigious awards, Salgado has learned the lives of the planet's often ignored people for the past twenty years. He now lives in Paris with his wife and two children.

page 27
Rays of the Moon
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From Argentina to Vietnam, lullaby rhythms have a soothing effect on this uncertain world. Tom Wasinger comments on the fundamental nature these universal ballads.

An American multi-instrumentalist and composer, Tom Wasinger spans a variety of musical genres. He has produced Track To Bumbliwa, a journey through Aboriginal music; The World Sings Goodnight, a collection of lullabies; and Many Moons, a collaboration with his wife where Wasinger incorporates four languages into his musical compositions. They live in Colorado.

"At bedtime in every hut, hamlet and house across the globe, the lullaby is a shared human tradition, as fundamental to our species as laughter and tears. At dusk in India a man rocks his child in a cradle with a silk thread tied to one end, comparing her in a song to a ray of the moon, In the silence of the long night a Swede sings to her child that everything sleeps at this moment, even the roses and the hyacinth: 'so sleep now, still is winter.' In Algeria a Berber father compares his child to whey-milk in a gourd suspended from the roof like a cradle. He sings to the milk, asking it to become butter. A Vietnamese mother sings to her baby that life is like an unstable bamboo bridge. She promises to help the child across."

page 28
CAUSES: Lottery or Strategy?
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F O R E I G N  A F F A I R S

Here, Flora Lewis poses the question, "does our instinct for good works get the better of us?"

Long the author of twice weekly Foreign Affairs column for the New York Times, Ms. Lewis continues writes on world politics. She has been the recipient of numerous awards for her distinguished reporting and is the author of four books. She lives in Paris.

"It is self-defeating and unrealistic, and in my view rather childish, to rage and call for sanctions as some do against any foreign country whose behavior strikes us as offensive. Waiving a big stick at practically everyone, for anything, means not only losing all leverage when something grave does come along and depleting what arsenal of influence we do have, it means being the bully. I think a judicious choice of what is truly objectionable and a scale of response from mere disapproval to outright active indignation can have far more effect. I think just making yourself feel better is a self-indulgent reason for taking up a cause; it's making things better for others that counts."

page 31
A Kikuyu Story
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F A I T H

Laura Simms weaves a magical Kenyan tale by the Kikuyu which tells about "things of the spirit".

"I do not use stories," Laura Simms says. "The stories use me." An American living in New York City, Laura has performed the spoken word for the past thirty years. Recognized internationally, she has also been the resident storyteller at the American Museum of Natural History since 1979.

There was once a man who had black and white cows. He tended them as if they were his children. Every day he took the cows to green pastures to graze. One morning he found their udders empty. They gave no milk. He took them further to greener pastures. But, for two more mornings, the cows gave no more milk. Their udders were completely withered and empty and dry. He knew something was wrong.

On the third morning he decided to stay awake all night to watch the cows. And he did. In the middle of that night, he saw a rope come down form the sky. Climbing down from the rope were beautiful women, star people, carrying calabashes. They placed their gourds on the earth and milked his black and white cows.

He didn't care about their precious milk, because those women were so beautiful. He wanted to marry one. He caught her. She struggled. He held her tight while the other star women rushed back to the sky. She resisted. She fought him. Until, finally he said,

"Woman, I want to marry you."

She stopped struggling.

"I will marry you on one condition," she warned.

"I have a finely woven basket. If you promise never to look inside until I give you permission,

I will be your wife.

He happily agreed. She married him. She placed her basket by the door of their house. She was a good wife. The star women tended his black and white cows.

As time passed, however, he grew more and more curious about what she kept in the basket, until he began to think,

"She is my wife. Doesn't that mean it is my basket too? What harm will it be if I just look inside?"

He closed the basket, A few minutes later

she arrived home asking,

"What did you do today?"

"I looked into the basket," he answered boldly.

"What did you see in the basket?" she asked softly.

"What was there to see?" he boasted.

"There is nothing in the basket."

"Oh. You saw nothing. But everything is in the basket. All the beautiful things of the sky for you and me.

If you would have waited , I would have taught you to see. Now I must go." The woman who came from the sky took her basket and went back up to the sky.

The Kikuyu storyteller added,

"It is the same today, mankind still thinks the things of the spirit are empty."