News

Three-year-old German Shepherd Obi, a police dog based at West Drayton Police Station in Middlesex, was on frontline duties alongside handler PC Phil Wells in Tottenham in August when they came under heavy bombardment from bottles, bricks, street furniture and petrol bombs thrown by rioters.

Obi was hit by a missile, thought to be a brick, above his left eye. After passing an initial check, he continued to work for several hours, but it later became clear he was injured when blood was noticed trickling from his left nostril. He was then taken to a vet for assessment and transferred to the Queen’s Veterinary Hospital in Cambridge where a CT scan revealed a fracture to his skull above the left eye socket.

After being signed off work to allow for a full recovery, Obi took a well-deserved rest at home before returning to lighter duties. Earlier this week, after a final check, he was cleared to return to full duties.

Robbie Marsland, UK Director of IFAW, said: “We are delighted to be able to highlight the amazing service given by police dogs such as Obi. We were relieved to hear he has made a good recovery and he is a truly rewarding winner of our special Animal Bravery Award.”

Obi will receive his award at IFAW’s prestigious Animal Action Awards ceremony, hosted by Baroness Gale, at the House of Lords on October 18. PC Wells will accompany Obi to the ceremony.

PC Wells (30), said: “It was quite humbling to hear that Obi was to receive this award, in the same way that the public responded in the aftermath of the riots and came out to thank us. It’s really nice to have the work recognised and while Obi received a lot of attention, we are just one of many dog teams who go out on the streets every day. Obi has been keen to get back to work; he didn’t like being left at home when I set off on my own as he loves it.”

Commander Simon Pountain, in overall charge of the dog section, said: “I am really pleased that one of our dog handlers and his dog have been honoured in this way. This is a wonderful accolade for all the dog section, and I am extremely proud of all the tremendous work they do.”

Obi has lived with PC Wells, his wife Laura and two children in Surrey since he was a puppy and will stay with them as a pet when his working life ends.

All eight police dogs working in his unit on the same night in Tottenham High Road suffered some degree of injury, from cut paw pads from broken glass and debris, to cuts to the body and broken teeth.

Source : http://www.bnctv.co.uk/crime-obi-the-brave-police-dog-to-go-to-the-house-of-lords/

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Following the earthquake of March 11th in Japan, and the incident with the nuclear power plant of Fukyshima, 11,500 tons of radioactively polluted water were poured in the ocean on April 5th, 2011. In order to come to the rescue of the ocean and all its inhabitants, we propose the following use of the bottle "Environment" of our Kit Actions Espoir.

You can either directly vaporize a little from the bottle "Environment" directly in the sea, or mixed with some water in a bowl or a bottle, which you will then pour into the sea. If you do not live near the sea, you can pour the product or the mixture containing the product very well in a river or waterway, which will join the sea. If you live in Japan or in the other part end of the world does not have any importance, because all the seas and oceans are inter-connected.

The information of the product is thus transmitted to the sea as explained in the general presentation of the kit. In occurrence, the information held in the mixture is transmitted to the aquatic environment, in this precise case to the sea, to help it recover from the undergone trauma. By helping the sea, you will help all the creatures which live there... It is rather extra-ordinary it should be recognized, but they are avantgarde processes.

Like written previously in the general presentation of the kit, this kind of "encoding" energy information inside a phytotherapeutical product (floral elixirs and essential oils) is a matter of specialists and popularizes itself gradually such as for example, for the more known, the Bach Flower remedies, the FES products and other large companies in the world which launched out in this crenel of great innovation during the last years. Anyhow, it is an affordable means accessible for everybody to help concretely, in fact, the planet.

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Twenty-two years ago Heidemarie Schwermer, a middle-aged secondary school teacher just emerging from a difficult marriage, moved with her two children from the village of Lueneburg to the city of Dortmund, in the Ruhr area of Germany, whose homeless population, she immediately noticed, was above average and striking in its intransigent hopelessness.

Her immediate reaction was shock. “This isn’t right, this can’t go on,” she said to herself. After careful reflection she set up what in Germany is called a Tauschring — a sort of swap shop — a place where people can exchange their skills or possessions for other skills and possessions, a money-free zone where a haircut could be rendered in return for car maintenance; a still-functioning but never-used toaster be exchanged for a couple of second-hand cardigans. She called it Gib und Nimm, Give and Take.

It was always Schwermer’s belief that the homeless didn’t need money to re-enter society: instead they should be able to empower themselves by making themselves useful, despite debts, destitution or joblessness. “I’ve always believed that even if you have nothing, you are worth a lot. Everyone has a place in this world.”

But the homeless of Dortmund seemed not to take to Schwermer’s plan, few ever turned up to the Tauschring. Some, they told her angrily to her face, felt that a middle-class woman with some education would never be able to relate to the circumstances of the dispossessed. Instead it was mainly the unemployed and the retired who began, in snowballing numbers, to flock to the Tauschring, their arms full of things that had been lying around their homes unused for years, or skills that they possessed but no longer exercised: retired hairdressers volunteered to cut the hair of out-of-work electricians, who would wire their kitchens in return; retired English teachers gave language lessons in return for the services of a dog-walker. The point was, not a single pfennig changed hands.

The Tauschring grew exponentially, was written up glowingly in a couple of local papers and turned into something of a Dortmund phenomenon. Its success also prompted Schwermer to ask serious questions of herself and her way of life. “I began to realise that I lived with so many things I didn’t need. So I decided that I wouldn’t buy anything without giving something away. That’s how it started. Then I began to really think about what I needed, clothes for example, and noticed that I could easily get by with what I could hang on ten coathangers. Everything else I gave away. I had so much stuff in the house that was superfluous. Getting rid of it was a relief.”

After a while even her vast collection of books began to assume an excessive presence in her home and one day Schwermer marched to a second-hand shop with her entire library. “The woman in the shop was upset. But I felt that giving them away was a good thing. I love books but I knew I had to get rid of them. I didn’t miss them, which surprised me. I just wanted to pare things down to their essentials.”

What had, in part, led Schwermer to her conclusions about “stuff” was a year of psychotherapy after the breakdown of her marriage in the mid-1980s. It was a difficult year, she remembers: “I was in floods of tears nearly every session, but at the end of it I felt so happy and decided that I wanted to live more simply. I also wanted to pass on what I learnt in therapy to other people, and that’s when I began to train as a psychotherapist.”

Other things changed. She took up meditation and began to realise how dissatisfied she was in her job. “I was always ill with flu or had backache and never realised the connection between my physical symptoms and my unhappiness at work.”

In the wake of setting up her Tauschring, she began to experiment with other sorts of jobs on the side. “I was working in a kitchen for ten deutschmarks an hour and people were saying to me, ‘You went to university, you studied to do this?’ But I thought, well, every person has an intrinsic value, why should I be valued more for being a teacher or a therapist than for working in a kitchen?”

The more ascetically she lived, the happier she became. By 1995 she was deeply involved in the Tauschring, house-sitting for short periods in exchange for cleaning or light maintenance work. She was buying virtually nothing: “When I needed something, I found that it would just come into my life. My glasses, for example. There was an optician who was a member of the Tauschring and he gave them to me in return for some therapy sessions.”

It was in 1996 she realised that “I had to go farther” and took what would be the most radical decision of her life: to live without money. She gave up her apartment and teaching job and resolved to live nomadically, an “extreme lifestyle”, she admits, moving from house to house, in return for menial work. Her new way of life was intended as a short-lived thing: she had given herself 12 months. But she found herself enjoying it so much that it never really ended.

Thirteen years on, she continues to live according to the principles of Gib und Nimm. “Life became much more exciting. More beautiful. I had everything I needed and I knew I couldn’t go back to my old life. I didn’t have to do what I didn’t like, I had a more profound sense of joy, and physically I feel better than ever. Living without money was just the first step. I realised that I wanted to change the world and I wasn’t going to do that by looking after someone’s cat while they were on holiday.”

She still lives — a week at a time — in the spare rooms of members of the Tauschring, cleaning or working in return for accommodation. Only very occasionally has she had personality clashes with her hosts and she tries to resolve any tension within herself “by going for a walk”. She has emergency savings of €200 (£180) and any other money that comes to her she gives away. “I decided it was OK to collect my pension but I give most of it away, except for what I need to pay for train tickets.”

She has no health insurance because she didn’t want to be accused of scrounging off the state. Instead she relies on what she calls the “power of self-healing. When something hurts, I put my hand on it and say to myself I have the power to heal myself and the pain goes away.” What if she becomes really ill? “Cancer? Then I suppose I’ll die. I’ve already prepared myself for death several times — times when I thought, ‘This is it, it’s over’. But then I got up the next day and everything was fine.”

Her entire material world is now contained in a single black suitcase and a rucksack. No photographs because, she says, “I don’t need them”.

In the flesh Schwermer is charming and engaging as well as lively and youthful-looking with strong jutting teeth and eyesight that she says she has halfway managed to correct herself with exercises she has picked from the people she meets. She is well dressed, neat and tidy and, it may come as a surprise given her lifestyle, 67 years old. Her two children — now a music teacher and a therapist — support what their mother does although the family don’t spend Christmas together. Though single, she has relationships every now and again, but is adamant that any love affair will always come second to what she calls her ideological work with Gib und Nimm. “I can imagine having a serious relationship with someone who is spiritual and who believes in what I’m doing, but not one where I live in a nice big house. I can fall in love but I can’t imagine living with someone. ”

Given her constant roaming about the country, it is almost impossible pinning her down. We met in the Greenpeace offices in Münster, near Cologne, where she was to address a group of young people who had been inspired by her work to live without money for week (Schwermer spends much of her time giving lectures about her lifestyle). Accompanying her was an Italian/ Norwegian film crew and we watched as successive teenagers stumbled in and out of the office, having been given the task of bartering for food with the offer of work. “We already live in a barter economy. We go to work to get money. I want to go farther.”

What is farther and how far is far enough? Ideally, Schwermer would like to lead by example and give other people courage to change their attitudes towards money and how they live in and contribute to society. The pressure to buy and to own, she feels, has intensified in recent years. Consumerism is essentially about “an attempt to fill an empty space inside. And that emptiness, and the fear of loss, is manipulated by the media or big companies.” There is a fear, she says, that in not buying or owning an individual will fall out of society. The irony, she claims, is that material goods can never plug a spiritual hole and shopping and hoarding are more likely to isolate people than bring contentment. Does she intend to start a revolution?

“No, I think of myself as planting the seed,” she says. “Perhaps people come away from my lectures or seeing me being interviewed and decide to spend a little less. Others might start meditating. The point is that my living without money is to allow for the possibility of another kind of society. I want people to ask themselves, ‘What do I need? How do I really want to live?’ Every person needs to ask themselves who they really are and where they belong. That means getting to grips with oneself.”

Does she really think that she can convert other people to her life philosophy? “Yes, that’s our future. One day we will all live without money, because we don’t need it and because it is only a burden. We’re the way we are because it’s how the system allows us to be. We can buy everything we want but we need so much less than we realise. If you think that the capitalist system we live in now is the only system, well that’s just ridiculous.”

Though she no longer owns any of her own, she has written two books on her adventures (and has given away her royalties). The first, My Life without Money, turned her first into a minor hero in Germany in some quarters, the kind who, last week for example, was invited on to a late-night TV forum to discuss whether Money Can Make You Happy. Surrounded by dot-com millionaires and lottery winners, she spoke while the other guests peered at her, visibly disconcerted to meet a woman who had given up everything and who claimed to be happy. “I live completely normally, only without money,” she said. “There are people who do so in Siberia. And in Africa there are many people who survive only because they all help each other.”

Schwermer knows from experience that not everyone will take her seriously. When she began with her project, “I was attacked frequently by people telling me that I wasn’t living without money at all, that I was just being provocative or scrounging, which made me cry! But then I realised it isn’t just about giving and expecting something back, or about giving and allowing oneself to be taken advantage of, or becoming a victim. It is about the possibility of having another life, of letting go of the stuff around us and examining our deepest fears.”

She tells me about an episode three years ago when she became convinced that she was going to starve to death: “But I really asked myself what that was about and realised it was about my childhood, and it had no bearing on reality.” (Schwermer is the child of refugees who lost everything after the war). Her only real terror now is appearing in the media. “I hate being on TV because it makes me so nervous but I know I reach a lot of people that way.” The people she does get through to, judging by the demographics of the lecture halls she visits, tend to be women. Why? “Because women are more open to new ideas.”

Is Schwermer a lunatic? Certainly she has been called “naive” and “idealistic” by the author of an article in the right-wing Die Welt newspaper, who asked her whether she was pursuing a communist-lite agenda when communism has been proved to be a failure. “It’s true that communism didn’t work,” she says, “but human beings need to learn to be a little bit different before we can learn to share what we have. We are going to run out of oil in ten years. We don’t have infinite resources. That just isn’t sustainable.”

Is her own itinerant lifestyle sustainable? She thinks so. She feels young but, in the event of death, she has organised her own funeral. She’s “paid” for it by striking a deal with an enlightened clergyman, who agreed that she would cover the costs of the burial by offering counseling sessions for the bereaved. Such deals are a regular feature of her new existence: only the managers of the German rail network seem to be immune to her formidable powers of persuasion, hence the few euros she still needs at her disposable to travel long distances.

Schwermer often talks enthusiastically about “the new world” she is in the process of discovering. She is esoteric but not mad or prone to ranting. Most people find her to be engaging and likeable: there are now many members of her Tauschring. What about those who live without money but not through choice? What about the poor and the homeless? Has she ever converted a homeless person to her way of thinking?

“I haven’t managed to reach the homeless,” she says. “I did hold lectures for the homeless but only six or seven showed up. They didn’t want to hear it. One of the men there accused me of having ‘connections’, that I’d only been able to do what I have been able to do because I knew people. I do have contacts, that’s what this new world is all about, forging links and contacts. Otherwise it wouldn’t work.”

She never managed to convince her interlocutor and not long after their conversation he had resumed his place outside on the pavement begging for spare change.

Source :  The Sunday Times

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/article6928744.ece

 

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Elephants and Development
Cambodia has a long history of peaceful coexistence between people and elephants. Its most famous building, the spectacular Angkor Wat temple, was built out of stone and marble with the help of elephants in the 12th and 13th centuries. Elephants, then abundant in Southeast Asia, served as the critical heavy machinery, carrying building materials and providing the necessary force to hoist pulleys and move stone. Long revered in Hindu and Buddhist traditions, elephants continue to hold deep meaning for followers of those religions today. In Khmer history following the Angkor period, several kings believed that possessing rare white elephants could bring glory for the country. However, despite their cultural significance, after a period of unregulated development, Cambodia’s wild elephant population has dwindled significantly.

Cambodia is a country in transition, having emerged from a violent and isolated past under the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s and subsequent conflicts between the Khmer Rouge and Cambodian government in the 1980s. Now, growing as a constitutional monarchy, Cambodia has experienced a dramatic increase in population and an explosion of unregulated development. This has placed enormous strain on the country’s natural resources, particularly its now-fragmented rainforests.

Migration routes of endangered Asian elephants have been disturbed by this development, leading to conflicts between local communities and elephants. With their habitat decreasing, elephants are destroying farms as they look for food on the edges of the forests. Many rural farmers have been forced to relocate as a result of development in other parts of the country, tilling small tracts of land on the forests’ edges to feed their families. Desperate farmers have, in the past, killed elephants to protect their crops. These migrant farmers have no experience living in wildlife areas and no bond with the forests or the elephants. They are extremely poor, have little education and no political power to resolve land and livelihood conflicts.

Human-Elephant Conflicts Resolved
Tuy Sereivathana (Vathana) was born in 1970, the same year that Cambodia entered into a period of extreme political upheaval. In 1975 his family fled from the city and the brutal Pol Pot regime to the rural village where Tuy’s father’s family lived. Tuy’s parents, both well-educated, taught school in the mornings to the local children and farmed in the afternoon to make ends meet. During his childhood years in the countryside, Tuy developed a deep respect for nature and was particularly fascinated with elephants. Later, when he was awarded a scholarship to attend university in Belarus, he focused on forestry studies and returned to Cambodia committed to working to conserve his country’s natural resources.

As a ranger with Cambodia’s national parks, Tuy worked throughout the country, connecting with rural communities and learning more about elephant migration and ecosystems. In Prey Proseth and Trang Troyeng, two communities not far from Tuy’s ancestral home where 30,000 people live on the forest’s edge, he became aware of the lack of capacity within these communities to manage the human-elephant conflict they faced. In response, Tuy began developing his community-based model, spending time with the farmers in their fields and building their trust. He taught villagers how to use hot chilies, native plants, fences, fireworks and fog horns to ward off elephants. He demonstrated the benefits of crop rotation and diversification. Tuy encouraged farmers to alternate rapidly-growing crops such as cucumbers, which can be harvested several times a year before the elephants discover they are ripe. With this type of system, only one of many annual harvests would be damaged in the event of an elephant raid into a farmer’s field. More importantly, he fostered cooperation among the farmers to work together as a community, encouraging them to organize overnight guard groups to protect the fields. Tuy was also able to revive in the communities the national and religious pride attached to the Asian elephant, as many Cambodians revere elephants as sacred Buddhist symbols. Because Tuy understood the dynamics of this environmental problem, he was able to develop simple, effective strategies and practical solutions at the grassroots level.

During this time, Tuy, affectionately known as “Uncle Elephant” in the communities he works with, left his position as a National Parks officer under the Cambodian Ministry of Environment in 2003 to assume the role of Human Elephant Conflict Team Leader for the Cambodian Elephant Conservation Group, a project co-sponsored by Fauna & Flora International, the Cambodian government and community organizations. Tuy later became full-time manager of the project in 2006.

In 2008, Tuy helped set up schools and brought teachers to the isolated communities dealing with human-elephant conflict. He saw this as another opportunity to embed the elephant and wildlife conservation message into the community. With support from Steve Irwin’s Australia Zoo, the US Fish & Wildlife Service, the Los Angeles Zoo and International Elephant Foundation (IEF), Tuy was able to set up four schools. One day per week, these schools teach 250 children about the natural environment, elephants and other wildlife, and how to live in harmony with nature.

Since his work began, Tuy has seen significant success. At the start of the decade, elephant killings due to crop raids were not uncommon. As a result of Tuy’s involvement with the project, there has not been a single confirmed elephant death due to human-elephant conflict since 2005.

As elephant populations throughout Asia continue to decline, Tuy’s program has brought hope to local communities and bettered the prospects of endangered Asian elephants in Cambodia. Tuy’s model is now being used in neighboring communities and is being considered in other countries with human-elephant conflicts such as Vietnam and Indonesia.

Source :   http://www.goldmanprize.org/2010/asiaElephants

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Khan Yunis Journal
Finding a Steadier Path in Gaza
Wissam Nassar for The New York Times

Dr. James S. Gordon, an American psychiatrist, led Gaza children in a coping technique recently in Khan Yunis.
By ETHAN BRONNER
Published: September 7, 2010


KHAN
YUNIS, Gaza — Tough-looking ambulance drivers in this central Gazan
city are drawing images of their fears with crayons. In the
northwestern village of El Atatra, in an overheated hall without
electricity, 10-year-olds are closing their eyes and imagining a
reassuring place. In Gaza City, women who have lost children to
political violence are dancing away their tensions, their black abayas
shaking and flowing.

Gazan women imagined a safe place during a mind-over-body session.

Gaza,
the Palestinian coastal strip filled with refugees and hardship, is not
generally thought of as a center of New Age sensibilities. But through
the intervention of a classically trained but alternative-seeking
American psychiatrist, nearly 10,000 people here have been taught
techniques to reduce anger, ease family tensions and give them a sense
of control in an environment known for helplessness.

“My husband
is ill, I lost a dear friend a few days ago and the Israelis shelled
near our house last night,” Hadba Abu Daha, who lives near the Israeli
border crossing of Kissufim in east-central Gaza, said during a recent
session. “Being in this group makes us feel safe, like we are on Ali
Baba’s carpet. Here we can express our feelings and know that someone
cares about us.”

Ms. Abu Daha and others said that the
techniques, designed for people in stress and offered here free of
charge, were useful not only for them, but for their children and
husbands, to whom they teach the techniques.

The force behind
the training is Dr. James S. Gordon, a clinical professor at Georgetown
Medical School, a graduate of Harvard Medical School and a onetime
chairman of the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative
Medicine Policy. He is the rare American, and Jew, who has been
regularly visiting Gaza since 2002.

“We don’t have the power to
change the tragedy they are mired in,” Dr. Gordon, 68, said recently on
one of his trips here. “But we can help them gain a sense of control so
they can look at the world differently.”

Looking at the world
differently has been his quest for 40 years. Long before acupuncture or
mind-over-body techniques were considered anything but quackery by
American medicine, he was studying and promoting them.

Since
1991 he has run the Washington-based Center for Mind-Body Medicine,
which he founded, and he has taken his techniques to Bosnia, Kosovo,
post-Katrina Louisiana, Gaza and Israel. The program, he reported in a
peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, has
produced significant reductions in stress, depression and hopelessness
among participants, both immediately after participation and some
months later.

He currently has a grant from the Department of
Defense to test his techniques on soldiers returning from Iraq and
Afghanistan with post-traumatic stress disorder and major depression.

The
system, which blends elements of psychotherapy with classic self-help
techniques, may sound a bit hokey. Participants, divided into groups of
10, meet weekly for 10 weeks and are led through a series of exercises
involving closing their eyes, relaxing their bellies, “talking” to
their pain, imagining a safe place, drawing and dancing.

But the
program’s graduates here are enthusiastic and Mind-Body is now
everywhere in Gaza, with scores of instructors, many of them working
without pay, and waiting lists of people seeking to get in.

“Counseling
is new in Arab culture,” noted Shaher Yaghi, a Mind-Body counselor who
works with children with special needs. “People don’t want to be seen
as crazy, so they avoid therapy. But in a group there is less of a
stigma. A woman can’t easily go out alone in our culture, but here she
brings a friend. We show them how to cope and change their mood and
gain equilibrium.”

Another advantage to such group work is that
Gaza is not exactly teeming with advanced mental health professionals,
and this is a program that does not need them.

According to
Mohammad al-Sebah, director of mental health services at the Hamas
Ministry of Health here, Gaza, with a population of 1.5 million, has a
total of 6 psychiatrists and 22 clinical psychologists.

Some counselors are trained psychologists, but most are not.

Dr.
Gordon, who has spent $3 million on the Gaza program, all raised from
private donors, has trained 200 group leaders here in weeklong
sessions. The training is essentially an intensive version of the
sessions that the counselors will later teach, along with some of the
theoretical backing. The counselors continue their training in
bimonthly meetings with one another.

The Health Ministry, Mr.
Sebah said, had high praise for Mind-Body, and he is an instructor in
its program. Dr. Gordon said the minister of health, Bassem Naim, was
welcoming of his program and seemed unfazed by his being Jewish.

To
ease concerns here over the music and dancing, which are part of the
technique, but are frowned upon by the strict form of Islam that holds
sway here, the genders are segregated and the music tends to have an
Islamic or folkloric quality to it. The Dabke, a popular Palestinian
folk dance, is often used.

Dr. Gordon is now talking with the
Palestinian authorities in the West Bank, run by the Fatah-dominated
Palestinian Authority, about bringing his technique there, probably by
having the Gazans train people.

He has also spent time training
Israelis who endured rocket attacks by Hamas. With the big reduction in
rocket attacks over the past year, his work in Israel has diminished,
but for a while a couple of years ago, there were closed eyes and soft
bellies going simultaneously in Israel and Gaza, a few miles apart.

He brought Kosovar counselors here to train the Gazans, and has brought counselors from Israel and Gaza together for training.

He
plans to take them all, along with counselors from the United States,
to Haiti this fall to train Haitians devastated by the earthquake.
Cross-national teamwork is part of his vision for healing the world’s
trauma.

The Mind-Body counselors in Gaza meet every two weeks,
exchanging impressions and offering one another advice. They call the
meetings their own safe place.

“We try to look to the light, to
the hope,” said Jamil Abdel Atti, who heads Mind-Body in Gaza. “We say,
‘Take off those dark glasses.’ ”

For some participants, optimism
emerges quickly. In El Atatra, a small group of 8- to 10-year-olds were
in their fourth Mind-Body lesson, and had been asked to draw three
images: themselves, their biggest worry and what it looks like after
their problem is solved.

Hazem, 10, drew his problem, as did
many of the others, as an Israeli tank aiming its barrel at a house,
something that happened in the war 19 months ago. His solution drawing,
however, was unusual. It showed the soldier in the tank and the
inhabitant of the house emerging and shaking hands.

A version of this article appeared in print on September 8, 2010, on page A6 of the New York edition.


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In a world where the bad news, the negative, the suffering and despair become a standard, www;fondation-bazile.org presents articles of reflection, suggestions and practical advices to all those who need to become stronger in adversity, mainly in case of natural cataclysm.

Through texts and articles, share a vision on humans, animals and environsment, is an action to make evolve the conscience of each and everyone.

The Kit "Actions Espoir", born from an original reflection, provides at low costs a most innovative product, for those who must overcome sometimes unimaginable tests...

The reception of people but also of animals in distress, supports those who need to find again hope.

www.fondation-bazile.org is the site of the Fondation Luc Bazile - Actions Espoir, a non profit making organization, which aim is, through conferences, writings, workshops, interventions on local, regional, national and international level, to help make evolve mentalities and thus take part in :

- Help, assistance and protection of human and animal life in priority related to natural disasters ;

- The protection of the planet in all its life forms.

She wants to provide, with simple means and to the greatest number, a support, beyond the tests of life, to find back hope.

For more information : please look at www.fondation-bazile.org

Contact : info(at)fondation-bazile.org

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"Fondation Luc Bazile - Actions Espoir" acts for those in distress : Humans, Animals, Environment.

We propose to those in need of it, informations taken from exchanges with animals about any subject their veterinary, or those who take care of them, or want to help them, might be worrying about.

Our communication methods are confidential. We need to be alone near or close to the animal in a quiet situation. We establish a written report in French and can give in English or Dutch, oral explanations. If we have time, we can also write in both of these languages. Generally, this "Animal communication Report" is extremely precise. It might contain confidential informations that might not have been communicated to us before. That is how we can demonstrate the level of precision that we reach in collecting informations that might concern an individual animal or a group.

This report might contain psychological or psychosomatic elements, personal history, but also the extremely accurate description of physical symptoms the animal experiences and that we express.

In principle, we don't advise about any treatment and we never know before writing our report, if it is appropriate to recommand any. The specialists decide, thanks to our informations, what is necessary and if usefull, we only can sometimes share our experience and methods, which are natural-based.

 If we can prove the quality, the relevance and the value of our contribution, as regards the importance of the problem and the financial implication that might represent the health of an animal under given circumstances, we let you decide the amount of our donation. First of all, we are in service of the animals, as long as our expenses (travelling and lodging) are taken in charge.

 

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Noetic Sciences Review
Spring 1996
In the Service of Life
In
recent years the question how can I help? has become meaningful to many
people. But perhaps there is a deeper question we might consider.
Perhaps the real question is not how can I help? but how can I serve?

Serving
is different from helping. Helping is based on inequality; it is not a
relationship between equals. When you help you use your own strength to
help those of lesser strength. If I'm attentive to what's going on
inside of me when I'm helping, I find that I'm always helping someone
who's not as strong as I am, who is needier than I am. People feel this
inequality. When we help we may inadvertently take away from people
more than we could ever give them; we may diminish their self-esteem,
their sense of worth, integrity and wholeness. When I help I am very
aware of my own strength. But we don't serve with our strength, we
serve with ourselves. We draw from all of our experiences. Our
limitations serve, our wounds serve, even our darkness can serve. The
wholeness in us serves the wholeness in others and the wholeness in
life. The wholeness in you is the same as the wholeness in me. Service
is a relationship between equals.

Helping incurs debt. When you
help someone they owe you one. But serving, like healing, is mutual.
There is no debt. I am as served as the person I am serving. When I
help I have a feeling of satisfaction. When I serve I have a feeling of
gratitude. These are very different things.

Serving is also
different from fixing. When I fix a person I perceive them as broken,
and their brokenness requires me to act. When I fix I do not see the
wholeness in the other person or trust the integrity of the life in
them. When I serve I see and trust that wholeness. It is what I am
responding to and collaborating with.

There is distance between
ourselves and whatever or whomever we are fixing. Fixing is a form of
judgment. All judgment creates distance, a disconnection, an experience
of difference. In fixing there is an inequality of expertise that can
easily become a moral distance. We cannot serve at a distance. We can
only serve that to which we are profoundly connected, that which we are
willing to touch. This is Mother Teresa's basic message. We serve life
not because it is broken but because it is holy.

If helping is
an experience of strength, fixing is an experience of mastery and
expertise. Service, on the other hand, is an experience of mystery,
surrender and awe. A fixer has the illusion of being causal. A server
knows that he or she is being used and has a willingness to be used in
the service of something greater, something essentially unknown. Fixing
and helping are very personal; they are very particular, concrete and
specific. We fix and help many different things in our lifetimes, but
when we serve we are always serving the same thing. Everyone who has
ever served through the history of time serves the same thing. We are
servers of the wholeness and mystery in life.

The bottom line,
of course, is that we can fix without serving. And we can help without
serving. And we can serve without fixing or helping. I think I would go
so far as to say that fixing and helping may often be the work of the
ego, and service the work of the soul. They may look similar if you're
watching from the outside, but the inner experience is different. The
outcome is often different, too.

Our service serves us as well
as others. That which uses us strengthens us. Over time, fixing and
helping are draining, depleting. Over time we burn out. Service is
renewing. When we serve, our work itself will sustain us.

Service
rests on the basic premise that the nature of life is sacred, that life
is a holy mystery which has an unknown purpose. When we serve, we know
that we belong to life and to that purpose. Fundamentally, helping,
fixing and service are ways of seeing life. When you help you see life
as weak, when you fix, you see life as broken. When you serve, you see
life as whole. From the perspective of service, we are all connected:
All suffering is like my suffering and all joy is like my joy. The
impulse to serve emerges naturally and inevitably from this way of
seeing.

Lastly, fixing and helping are the basis of curing, but
not of healing. In 40 years of chronic illness I have been helped by
many people and fixed by a great many others who did not recognize my
wholeness. All that fixing and helping left me wounded in some
important and fundamental ways. Only service heals.


Reprinted from Noetic Sciences Review, Spring 1996
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