At best we are all teachers, teaching the lessons we each have learned from life. Life throws us different challenges. Some of us learn through experiencing civil wars, riots, racial and gender discrimination and civil upheaval.
Others learn from growing up in impoverished environments, single parent households, drugs and alcohol addictions, domestic violence, parental negligence or going to prison. At some point a light bulb moment hits us and hopefully leads us to the point of our lives' success: deciphering the lessons learned from those challenges that life has thrown us.
These lessons are lessons we all reap a shared benefit from despite the fact that our human journey has been immensely different. Things such as resilience, humanity, patience, unbreakable sense of thrive and humility are all qualities we seek to learn and attain in our lives and it becomes our duty to teach these qualities to our fellow human beings once we learn them through the journeys of our lives.
There is a lesson to be learned from each experience, even if it feels extremely depressing and hard to get through. Success in my humble opinion is not becoming extraordinarily rich and famous and having a thriving career. Rather it is those moments that tremble your heart. The ones that plant an unshakable memory in your mind and take you to a happy place every time you recall them. Moments that make you feel grateful to be alive.
Those moments often derive from things one has done from the heart. At the end we're all connected emotionally as humans so when we help one another, we experience the same joys regardless of our differences and different backgrounds.
Therefore let life be a classroom that continuously teaches you valuable lessons. And then teach those that can benefit from your life's lessons because at best we're all teachers.
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Saturday, January 15, 2011
youngsters in prison
One of the aspects that makes being a journalist a rewarding job is the few chances one gets to make a social difference through the medium of creating awareness and bringing to the forefront a social issue that wasn't previously in the spotlight.
For a while I've been concerned with the increasing amount of Somali youth both here in the US as well as in Europe who keep getting into trouble and often end up in prison. Somali youth have been in the media for numerous other reasons including ongoing associations with gang violence and acts of terrorism but these often dim into the distance once the media interest has died. Meanwhile this growing problem of youth entering Western prisons by hundreds seems to be either unnoticed or less important than the previous issues.
In the mean time the parents, families and communities of these youngsters that are in prison continue to face harships that many a times go unnoticed.
The reports above focus on the youth in the US prisons and the social implications of their imprisonment.
For a while I've been concerned with the increasing amount of Somali youth both here in the US as well as in Europe who keep getting into trouble and often end up in prison. Somali youth have been in the media for numerous other reasons including ongoing associations with gang violence and acts of terrorism but these often dim into the distance once the media interest has died. Meanwhile this growing problem of youth entering Western prisons by hundreds seems to be either unnoticed or less important than the previous issues.
In the mean time the parents, families and communities of these youngsters that are in prison continue to face harships that many a times go unnoticed.
The reports above focus on the youth in the US prisons and the social implications of their imprisonment.
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
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