The Translator

I recently finished reading a book called The Translator by Daoud Hari that was fascinating so I thought that I would share.  It reads like a collection of short stories about Daoud's life growing up in Darfur and his role as a translator once the genocide/war broke out.  Daoud was lucky to gain an education, leaving his small village to go to one of the bigger cities in Western Sudan where he learned both English and Arabic.  Because he was destined to leave his family and not continue raising animals like his brothers, Daoud travelled to Libya and Egypt looking for work.  When the war broke out, Daoud travelled to Chad and worked for press reporters, translating for them at the camps and guiding them into Sudan to get images and testimonies of the atrocities.  I'm not going to give away the entire book, I encourage you to read it yourself!  It will provide you with a sense of how people live in Darfur, what happened, what it felt like and what the people went through, but it won't keep you up at night.  There are stories that are shocking that humans could do this to each other, but again, it's not like watching Black Hawk Down.  Go ahead and give it a read, I'm sure you'll enjoy it and learn something about our world.  I might even let you borrow my copy.

Summer Reading

A blog post highlighted 10 books to read before heading into the real world.  They are:

1. The World Is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman
2. Classic Rachael Ray 30 Minute Meals by Rachael Ray (really? i mean food is important, but really?)
3. Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin (love this book!)
4. Tiffany’s Table Manners for Teenagers by Walter Hoving
5. Getting From College to Career by Lindsay Pollack
6. How To Be A Hepburn in a Hilton World: The Art of Living with Style, Class, and Grace by Jordan Christy (want to read)
7. Women & Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny by Suze Orman (meh, i can skip this one)
8. Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, A Young Man, and Life’s Greatest Lesson by Mitch Albom (great book, should read it again!)
9. Oh! The Places You’ll Go by Dr. Seuss
and they asked for reader comments to get #10.
So my #10 would be a Malcolm Gladwell book, either Blink or the Tipping Point or What the Dog Saw, all good quality books.

My list of books to read keeps getting longer and longer, and the stack beside my bed keeps getting larger and larger.   And it probably doesn't help that I read 3-4 books at the same time.

But thinking about Three Cups of Tea made me think about how many philanthropies there are in the world that I want to support (and some which I do suppport) such as 1. Doctors Without Borders, 2. Partners in Health, 3. American Cancer Society, 4. St. Jude, 5. Theta Foundation, 6. JMU, 7. ODK, 8. KDP, 9. the local NPR station, 10. JMU ATEP, 11. Greg Mortensen's foundation, 12. Congo Leadership Initiative (run by my brother's little) and there are more!  Are there really a hundred foundations that all support similar things?  Would problems actually get solved if the multitude of foundations worked together better? Or would that make things worse?