Genital Mutilation
By Joyce Yip
“When I was a child, I said I did not want to be a woman.”
Waris Dirie’s character was on stage, addressing an audience so still that you could hear the occasional hisses from reporters’ cameras and the quiet cracks from when a few in the group would take out their tissue wrappers.
“Why is it so painful? Let us try to change what that means to be a woman.” The audience rose up in standing ovation.
Though Waris Dirie is now years older than the character portrayed in her movie, Desert Flower—an autobiographical story that depicts her journey from an oppressed girl in the Somali desert to a world-famous supermodel in London—her memory of her genital mutilation from when she was merely five years old will stay with her forever.
“These are girls who are being tortured, …

HOMOPHOBIA
By Lew Golding and Amanda DeGoeas – Centre for Addiction & Mental Hospital (09/09)
“If we are honest with ourselves, we’ll acknowledge that our own community has not always been true to King’s vision of a beloved community,” This was a statement delivered by Barack Obama as he takes a principled stand on gay rights and intolerance within the Black community. Obama addressed 2,000 worshippers January 2008, at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King once preached. He stated “We have scorned our gay brothers and sisters instead of embracing them.”
It The City of Toronto, we would benefit if we changed our view of “community” from bricks and mortar to the view of community as an emotional, psychological and physical phenomenon. When Black communities alienate homosexuals, we are disrupting our collective sense of community – in essence we are disrupting …

Maternal and Child Health Care in the Developing World: Challenges and Prospects

by Nicole L Mensah
If one were to ask individuals living in North America to list the major health issues affecting Africa and other developing regions of the world, HIV/AIDS and Malaria would undoubtedly top such list. The media has bombarded us with the alarming statistics; and celebrities have long campaigned and raised funds for AIDS research. As a corollary, the general North American public often overlooks another critical health issue in the developing world—i.e., the maternal and child health predicaments. However, this subject has attracted the attention of many international organizations, particularly the UN, which now sees maternal, newborn, and child mortality rates as somewhat of a ‘Silent Epidemic.’ Not surprisingly, two of the eight UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs #4 and #5), introduced in 2000 to improve …

by Gil Zohar
KIBBUTZ TZUBA, Israel –
When a group of eight journalist tree huggers from China, Germany, the U.S., Canada and Israel attempt to encircle an uncommonly large, centuries-old Common Oak here recently – and run out of hands and arms only some half way around the mammoth tree’s circumference, I appreciate that forestation, ecology and conservation have been major issues in Israel decades before they became buzzwords in the West.
The eight of us are on a tour sponsored by the Keren Kayemet l’Israel (the Jewish National Fund) of ancient trees in the vicinity of Jerusalem in honor of Tu b’Shvat – Judaism’s arbor day on the 15th of the month of Shvat in the Hebraic lunar calendar, which this year falls on January 30. Led by tour guide Yaacov Shkolnik, author of the 2008 Hebrew book 101 Special and Amazing …