Africa news: the bad, the good, and the ugly

Zimbabwe is breaking my heart these days. Two weeks ago the news was so hopeful-- it looked like they had had a free and fair election, and Mugabe was finally going to step down and let the work of rebuilding the country begin. How naive. Here's today's Washington Post story. The news really is worse by the day.

Preparing for the Worst in Zimbabwe: Opposition Faces Violent Reprisals After Election Wins

Here's something considerably more hopeful (and much more fun), from Charity:Water, one of the coolest save-the-world campaigns I know: http://www.charitywater.org/mailings/psa.htm

And to return to maybe the saddest subject of all, I saw the Congolese doctor who is repairing rape victims in eastern DRC speak on Tues, so I'll add a link to the same article (about him) that I posted a few months ago. The article says it all. The amazing thing to me (at the Tues event) was that Harvard is setting up all these research projects and teams to "study" the question of why hundreds of thousands of women are being raped in violent, horrible ways as an act of war (but in a "war" with no real objective or sides)... but (of course) no one in that group had a clue why men were doing this or how to stop it. This is the kind of pure, chilling, pathological evil that seems to drive people away from believing in God-- but from my point of view it should be driving people towards God. What else but an infinitely loving, healing, powerful, and good God is ever going to change those men, or restore those women? The Congolese doctor had a very interesting comment-- I was sure he was a Christian (well, I think the article says so) but nothing spiritual was ever discussed, except this one little comment he slipped in at the end, basically that those women who keep asking God why this has happened to them do not heal, but the ones who come close to God and believe that He is with them do heal. Good luck, Harvard, ever figuring out how to heal these women, without the loving presence of God.

Here's the article: Women left for dead—and the man who’s saving them

(Oh, and on an entirely frivolous note, I was somewhat disappointed with Aujourd'hui. Some of the food was spectacular, but they were into these tiny fancy portions, so that my four large seared scallops that were supposed to come with pasta actually came with exactly four tiny bow-ties. And my tarte tatin for dessert, by far the most disappointing, was "deconstructed" to the point that it was actually four chunks of apple, a little cinnamon sauce, a little strip of pastry balanced like a teeter totter on the apples, and two thimble-sized scoops of ice cream. I wanted to say, "What is this?" Who could possibly want a dessert like that over a nice big caramelized slice of apple tart that you can really sink your fork into, especially when one is paying $12 for it? It seems I am not as much of a food snob as I thought, but it was really a bit haute haute haute for me.)