I've been waiting for an article like this one to come out, finally noticing that not all nomadic Arabs in Darfur are bad or members of the janjaweed militias.
Now we need to live up to our humanitarian principles and provide needed assistance to the civilian nomads.
I have just made my first microloan through Kiva, an organization I read about a few weeks ago.
I chose to lend to two women, one who has a food stall business in Nigeria, and another who is setting up a hair salon in Kenya. I wanted to lend to women because studies show that assistance to women has a much greater effect on reducing poverty than assistance to men, and I wanted to lend in Africa because I will be going there soon and this way I feel a little more of a connection there (I wanted to lend to someone in Senegal, but Kiva doesn't seem to have anyone in Senegal who qualifies for a loan right now).
I'm pretty excited about this - it will be interesting to follow the growth of their businesses and repayment of their loans over the next year or so!
This has made me happier than anything else about the elections today.
I was expecting the Democrats to do well, so I didn't get excited this morning when I heard the results.
I wasn't expecting Harold Ford to win my home state, so the results didn't particularly depress me on that point. (Although I am once again left thinking, how is it possible that I come from that land?)
But now, finally, the news that is giving me a happy excited buzz: Donald Rumsfeld will no longer be the Secretary of Defense. That one I was not expecting, at least not this soon.
Now I've got to find out about this Robert Gates guy.
It's been a really rough week at work. Last week my immediate supervisor and I got screamed at for 20 minutes by people we work with, because they thought we hadn't shared information with them that we should have. So that made me feel really crappy. But my great boss said that regardless of whether we messed up or not, it's not in our job descriptions to be punching bags for anyone, and we should stick up for ourselves. So that was nice.
And then today I screwed up with him: I sent out an email that I wasn't supposed to send out. He emailed me to ask me what happened, why I sent it out when he said not to. So I explained and said I was sorry. And his response: Don't worry about it - have a good weekend.
How amazing is it to have a boss who doesn't yell at you even when he would be justified in doing it? After my last boss, who was bitchy and yelled at me even when I hadn't done anything wrong, I feel like I'm in heaven.
I seem to be on a roll lately with people in my life being especially wonderful to me. Who's next? Any takers? I really wouldn't mind getting used to this.
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