How can the continent that produces the least amount of the green house gases that cause climate change be feeling the effects of this change already?

An article from the Christian Science Monitor written on last week helps make an interesting link between my life and work in Africa and my upcoming time in South America. Thanks to my aunt Sarah for alerting me to this article. I have only written briefly about climate change before and encouraged you to see Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” and maybe with the recent changes in Washington, D.C. the US can actually begin being part of the solution and not just the driving force behind the problem. I hope that my work in Brasil will allow me to see the effects of global warming up close in another context and allow me to see some tangible means being used to convince people of the realities of climate change and the ways in which we can work together to combat the reasons it is happening. We must all choose to help or hurt each other.

Here is a brief section of the article which I recommend reading in its entirety.

Africans are already facing climate change

Is Darfur the first climate-change conflict? In Kenya, a UN meeting begins Monday to set new fossil-fuel emissions targets.

By Scott Baldauf | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA – As delegates gather Monday in Kenya for a United Nations conference to set new targets to reduce fossil-fuel emissions after 2012, climate change is a present reality for many Africans.

In Kenya, Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Chad, people are already seeing the repercussions - including war. The conflict between herders and farmers in Sudan's Darfur region, where farm and grazing lands are being lost to desert, may be a harbinger of the future conflicts.

"You have climate change and reduced rainfall and shrinking areas of arable land; and then you add population growth and you have the elements of an explosion," says Francis Kornegay, a senior analyst at the Center for Policy Studies in Johannesburg.

Click ro read: http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1106/p04s01-woaf.html

The inside story on being held hostage in Iraq.

Many of you know that I am a Christian Scientist and I am sure many of you have heard of the Christian Science Monitor, a weekly international newspaper which has been in circulation since 1908 and was started through the initiative of Mary Baker Eddy who was the “discover and founder” of Christian Science.

This entry is just to alert you to an interesting 11 part series starting today the 14^th of August on Jill Carroll’s kidnapping while reporting for the Christian Science Monitor in Iraq. I will leave the details to this in-depth series but just wanted to bring it to your attention. If you have not heard of Jill a simple search of Google will bring up over seven million hits.

An excerpt from an email/letter sent on August 9th by Nate Talbot who is the Clerk of the Mother Church said “the series will run for 11 days (from Aug. 14 – Aug. 28) and will weave together Jill's own story with the "outside" story written by Peter Grier of what her family, the Monitor, and others were doing to free her.”

One final thing to leave you with which will undoubtedly be covered in the series is that the Monitor went out of its way during the time that Jill was kidnapped and since to work for her release and comfort her family. They went as far as promoting her to a full time reporter’s salary, etc. even though she had been in Iraq doing part time or freelance work and kept in close touch with her family. I think this is an amazing story with a happy ending despite the people who died such as her interpreter. Also just last week four people involved in her kidnapping were captured by US Marines in Iraq. See this article at the NY Times or search for others on the net.

You can find more information about the Monitor’s history, mission and work at CSMonitor.com in the About us/Help section.