PierToPeerCoaching

Coming together across the divide...

This morning I listened to an inspiring interview with Elena Cheah and Mariam Said about the West-Eastern Divan, the orchestra founded by the late Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim to bring together young musicians from both Arab nations and Israel to make music on neutral ground (their permanent home is now Seville in Spain) and to share ideas freely about the ongoing Middle East conflict.

Edward Said was born in Jerusalem and raised in Jerusalem and Cairo; Daniel Barenboim was born in Buenos Aires to parents of Jewish Russian descent.  A chance meeting in the lobby of a London hotel in the early 1990's led to an intensive friendship. "These two men, who should have been poles apart politically, discovered in that first meeting, which lasted for hours, that they had similar visions of Israeli/Palestinian possible future cooperation. They decided to continue their dialogue and to collaborate on musical events to further their shared vision of peaceful co-existence in the Middle East. This led to Mr. Barenboim's first concert on the West Bank, a piano recital at the Palestinian Birzeit University in February 1999, and to a workshop for young musicians from the Middle East that took place in Weimar, Germany, in August 1999." (http://west-eaterndivan.artists.warner.de)

'the streets of anywhere'

On the streets of anywhere lives a man.

The same man.

Homeless and alone in the world.

The tears that fill his eyes go by
silent, and unnoticed.

Tears that cry out for a simple glimpse of the
certainty that he's a brother to us all.

That he belongs.

But you & I dare not look.
Lest we catch such a glimpse.

A glimpse that might show us the
frailty of our own humanity.

A glimpse that might admit that we are, and
always have been, more than brothers.

Thanks to Nic Askew of Soul Biographies...

Can you really complain that your life is difficult...?

The last couple of days I've been profoundly reminded of how fortunate I am...

Yesterday I went to see "Sin Nombre" the Mexican/US production, and Sundance award winning debut feature by Japanese/Swedish American director, Cary Joji Fukunaga, about migration from Central America to the United States. Sayra, a teenager from Honduras is trying to reach New Jersey with a father she barely knows and a mass of other Hondurans attempting to make the same perilous journey on the rooftop of a freight train that crosses Mexico.

Willy/Casper runs into Sayra when, with Smiley, the 12 year old new recruit to the Mara Salvatrucha, and the gang's second in command, they board the train and terroize the occupant's into giving up their life's valuables - the few possession with which they are escaping. Saving Sayra from brutal attack, Casper ensures a price is put on his head by his fellow "brothers".

The film entertwines the two stories of the escaping Hondurans and the Mexican gang members, all of whom try to survive the harsh reality of their daily lives.

Joel Bleifuss writes: "The world, in all its harsh reality, of undocumented immigrants like the Honduran teenager Sayra in Sin Nombre, is not the chaotic creation of random fate.