The Fighter Still Remains - BRENDEN FOSTER 1997-2008

<

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33ASQhDvfGs



The body of Brenden Foster has died. No longer is this bright, shining soul encased in a shell wracked with leukemia. No longer is he lying in a hospital bed with tubes coming out of his body and oxygen being pumped into his lungs.

I woke up yesterday morning to the news that he is no longer among us. He breathed his last while being held gently in his mother's loving arms. You may notice that I am avoiding saying that he is dead. This is on purpose. I am not in denial; I am not pretending that he is still among us. Sadly, he is gone.

So, for those who may not know, who is Brenden Foster. He is a boy of 11. Until a couple years ago, he was a little boy like many others, running around playing, just being a kid. Then he was diagnosed with leukemia. Since then he was been fighting and fighting, a true, small warrior, an inspiration to us. Is superimposing his face on a supernova a bit over-the-top? I think not.



It is always poignant when a child dies, whether little Zinna Linnick, kidnapped, raped, murdered or Ryan White, who died of AIDS some years ago after a very public battle or Sandeep Singh who achieved shaheedi in Delhi in 1984. Those have names. Equally touching is the death of the nameless child killed by American or Taliban bombs in Afghanistan or the little girl, unwanted, murdered preborn in Punjab (or British Columbia!) or the much-loved child that dies of starvation in his mother's arms or a lonely child crawling slowly toward food and shelter anywhere on earth.



What moves me most about Brenden Foster is the picture I saw of him on CNN. Tears streaming down his chubby cheeks, he was asked, "What makes you sad." He took a breath and responded gently, "When someone gives up." Brenden never gave up. His last wish was to feed homeless people.



He saw a story on TV about homeless people living in tents in Nickelsville, which I have already written about. Unlike me, however, Brenden did more than write and feel bad about it. He inspired others to get together sandwiches to feed these people. Not just peanut butter and jelly, he told workers, but ham and cheese as well, since some people are allergic to peanuts.



Last week, there was a huge local food drive to get people to donate food to the hungry. Brenden was awake and conscious and was able to see his last wish of feeding the homeless realised. Truck after truck was filled with food donated by people inspired by this extraordinary eleven year old child.

And this seemed to have caught on. I have heard about food drives around the country in his honour. This is wonderful. But I know Brenden would say that this is not enough. Feeding people once is good, but it's just not enough.

Here in Seattle recently, a very large, inclusive Food Bank had to shut down for lack of funding. This place not only fed the hungry but also aided immigrants, helped people find jobs and ran a free food bank. In addition, they sold refurbished computers with free Internet access at rock-bottom prices. Yes, this very computer that makes it possible for me to talk to you was bought there. I expect to hear about a Brenden Foster Memorial Fund to aid in such circumstances. If I hear, I'll let you know.

Seattle's professional football team, the Seattle Seahawks has offered to pay for his funeral, relieving his mother, Wendy Foster, of at least one worry.

I have found this website that should give the latest Brenden Foster news.

When I die, I suppose my friends and family will insist on having a funeral. There is a song I have requested be sung there, the last verse of Paul Simon's "The Boxer." It is how I want to be remembered.

It is how I will remember Brenden Foster.

In the clearing stands a boxer and a fighter by his trade,
And he carries the reminders of every glove that laid him down,
Or cut him till he cried out in his anger and his shame,
I am leaving, I am leaving.
But the fighter still remains.

Yes, indeed, the fighter still remains!

My Favourite Succinct Description of W

The person who is still in charge and who was chiefly responsible for taking the United States from an era of peace, prosperity and budget surpluses to the precipice of endless war, economic devastation and national bankruptcy.

 

Check it out:

 

Predictable Disaster of George W. Bush

--
WHY TRY TO FIT IN? YOU WERE BORN TO STAND OUT!

YOU KNOW YOU ARE LIVING IN 2008 when...

YOU KNOW YOU ARE LIVING IN 2008 when...

1. You accidentally enter your password on the microwave.

2. You haven't played solitaire with real cards in years.

3. You have a list of 15 phone numbers to reach your family of   3.

4. You e-mail the person who works at the desk next to you.

5. Your reason for not staying in touch with friends and family is that they don't have e-mail addresses.

6. You pull up in your own driveway and use your cell phone to see if anyone is home to help you carry in the groceries.

7. Every commercial on television has a web site at the bottom of the screen.

8. Leaving the house without your cell phone, which you didn't have the first 20or 30 (or 60) years of your life, is now a cause for panic and you turn around to go and get it.

10. You get up in the morning and go on line before getting your coffee.

11. You start tilting your head sideways to smile.  : )

12. You're reading this and nodding and laughing.

13. Even worse, you know exactly to whom you are going to forward this message.

14. You are too busy to notice there was no #9 on this list.

15. You actually scrolled back up to check that there wasn't a #9 on this list.

AND NOW YOU ARE LAUGHING at yourself.

NOW, KEEP LAUGHING!!  And remember, no matter who you are or what you're going through, someone has it worse than you do.

 

So get up off your duff and go do something to help someone somewhere.

 

NOW!

 

Atrocity In Somalia

ADULT ALERT!

WARNING! THERE IS CONTENT IN THIS POST THAT MAY BE INAPPROPRIATE FOR CHILDREN. THE OBJECTIONAL CONTENT IS NOT SEXUAL, JUST UGLY, VIOLENTLY BRUTAL AND HARD FOR ANY CIVILISED PERSON TO TAKE.

Once in a while, something comes to my attention that seriously threatens my habitually cheerful, optimistic mood. This in one such story. It is brutal. It is ugly. I warn you, I shall not spare your feelings. I shall be as merciless to you, my readers, as these "men" were to this young girl.

Let me start with a picture. Her name is - was - Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow. In this picture, she is being buried up to her shoulders in the ground, to be executed by stoning. Her crime? She was raped!

I know this girl's face will haunt me for a long, long time.

The English story here is from Al Jazeera. I am following it be a Babel Fish translation from Spanish of the same story. The Spanish version contains many more details, more emotionally written. It is worth wading through the bad translation to read its meaning.

Take a long, hard look at the terror on her face.

Amnesty: Rape girl, 13, killed for adultery

Somali fighters stone 'rape victim'


In recent months the Islamic Courts' al-Shebab group appears to have gained strength [EPA]

A Somali girl who said she had been raped has been stoned to death in Somalia after being accused of adultery, a human rights group has said.

Amnesty International said in a press release on Friday that the victim, Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow, had been 13 years old - not 23 as earlier reports had suggested.

Duhulow was stoned to death on October 27 by dozens of men in a stadium packed with 1,000 spectators in the southern port city of Kismayo, Amnesty International and Somali media reported, citing witnesses.

The armed group in charge of Kismayo had accused her of adultery after she reported that three men had raped her, Amnesty said.

"This child suffered a horrendous death at the behest of the armed opposition groups who currently control Kismayo," David Copeman, Amnesty International's Somalia campaigner, said in a statement.

Initial local media reports said Duhulow was 23, but her father told Amnesty International she was 13.

The Islamic Courts took control of much of Somalia in 2006, triggering an intervention by neighbouring Ethiopia, which propped up the UN-backed transitional government and ousted the Islamic Courts fighters.

While the group's political leadership largely fled the country, the movement's military and youth wing, the al-Shebab, switched to guerrilla warfare.

In recent months the group appears to have gained strength, taking over the port city of Kismayo, and dismantling pro-government roadblocks.

And now, the translation of the Spanish version:

They violate the girl they judge, it in an Islamic court they stone and it by… adulterous!


(PS). - It is the horror. And those that promote smiling the “Alliance of Civilizations” would have to be asked, in silence, if a society as ours it can be allied with those who they perpetrate - endorsed by his law and its governments crimes like the one of Asha.

The news that it had been stoned until the death, untied a lukewarm wave of world-wide rejection one week ago, but the details that arise now cause the vomit.

Asha Ibrahim Dhuhulow neither was a woman, nor was 24 years old, nor was an adulteress. Its crime was to be born and to suffer in a country dominated by the Islamic fanaticism, the piracy and the violence as it is Somalia.

Asha only was 14 years old. It had not committed adultery. It had been violated by three men of the most powerful clan of the city. Helped by the Islamic court imposed by the integrist militias of The Shabab, the death to pedradas of the minor has served the twigs to erase all sign of the crime.

Ash, like many children of countries like his, was born victim already. It came to the world in the field of refugees of Hagardeer, in the south of Kenya, in 1995, where her family had to take refuge three years before, fleeing from Mogadishu from the attacks against his clan, the one of the Galgale, a minority in Somalia.

She was the last one in being born, thirteenth of six brothers and six brothers.

The young, that went to the school in the field of refugees, suffered epilepsy, reason why the family decided to send it with her grandmother in Mogadishu, where she could receive better medical attention. Kismayo was in its way.

From the past August, the integrist militias of The contral Shebab that coastal city.

Asha, “a very sweet girl, very humble”, remained catched in Kismayo, and sobrevió thanks to the charity of some neighbors and people that knew in its winding way towards the north.

where it could survive these two months thanks to the known ones that had done in the way. The money to arrive at Mogadishu finished, according to said to him to its father by telephone. The night of Saturday, three men approached to him they forced and it to accompany them to the beach, they violated where it.

Under paternal advice, it went to the courts and denounced her rapists. And there the suplicio begins that would end the girl tied and buried until the neck, list to be burst to pedradas.

Amnesty International (AI) reveals that the girl was stoned by a group of 50 men in a stage of the harbor locality, before near 1,000 spectators.

The islamists had taken a truck filled with stones - “greater than an egg and smaller than the fist of an adult man” - to the stage, so that people added themselves in the execution.

No of the facinerosos that participated in the violation and torture of Asha has been accused nor arrested.

Young agony d ela was frightful. After being stoned and when already they took it - supposedly dead a nurse discovered that still he breathed and returned to place it in the hole, buried until pechp, so that he continued the lapidación.

AI mentions a subject, call Sheij Hayakalah, that declares proud that “the tests were presented/displayed on the other hand and she confirmed her fault officially”:

“In addition it said to us that he was happy with his punishment by virtue of the Islamic law”.

Several witnesses mentioned by Amnesty count another thing: that the girl tried to fight against her detectors and had to be taken by the force to the stage.

Once there, the militiamen - partners of the three rapists shot against several people who tried to save the girl and killed a boy who was in the neighborhoods.

A spokesman of The Shabab apologized later by the death of the boy and assured that the one that shot to him would be punished.

“This is not justice, nor was an execution, this girl underwent a horrible death ordered by the armed groups competing that at the moment control Kismayo”, it affirms to butcher the person in charge for Somalia de Amnistía, David Copeman.

“Its murder is even another one of the abuses of the Human rights committed by the combatants in the conflict of Somalia, and again demonstrates the importance of the international action to investigate and to document those abuses, through an international commission of investigation”.

THE WINNER

This story did not originate with me.  I just like it and believe it can bear repeating.  Contained herein is one of the secrets of how to always be a winner.  A useful bit of information, I think.

 

A long time ago, your father and mother had sex. Your father distributed millions of sperm into your mother.



 

On and on they swam, their goal: your mother's egg. As they swam, more and more fell behind, until, reaching the egg, the weaker ones had all dropped out of the race. Only a few very strong ones reached the egg.




Now, the bravest and strongest of all those millions of sperm reached the egg first and penetrated the membrane and fertilised the egg.





That winning sperm and that winning egg...became [enter your name here]



YOU! You are already not only A winner, you are THE WINNER.


You have nothing to prove. Now, go out there and win. (Whatever winning means to you)