Links, Links, Links! 6th April 2013
Hello all! How are we this week? I’ve been flat chat at work doing the oil and gas thing, while also working on getting a few things moving on the Youth Without Borders side and writing a whole bunch of different articles… anyhow, enough about me! Let us look at interesting things on the net recently…
Daily Dishonest posters…I had to chuckle.
But that's the thing about racism: it goes way beyond bad intentions. The most insidious racism is just so ingrained it's involuntary.
Waleed Aly’s brilliant piece on ‘The Curse of Australia’s Silent Pervasive Racism’.
This one is pretty cool: Miracles of Engineering in Peru: Drinking Water Out of a Billboard!
“Each generator captures the air humidity and from there it goes to a reverse osmosis system. Each tank stores about 5.28 gallons of water. These 5 generators purify the vital liquid and its total is gathered in one tank,” said one of UTEC’s engineers involved in the project. The billboard has already produced about 2,496.42 gallons of drinking water in a 3 month period, an amount that equals the water consumption of hundreds of families per month.”
An interesting piece by the Australian Government’s ‘Resilient Communities’ initiative on ‘advice to young Muslim Australians’. I don’t enjoy motherhood advisory statements, but this was rather good.
And, don’t wait for someone to come and take you by the hand. Don’t wait for the leaders and Imams. They have their hands full. You must initiate the process.
You must lead the way.
There is a perception among many of us that it is fine to be an Indian Muslim, Pakistani Muslim, Algerian Muslim, and Palestinian Muslim. And so on. But, for some reason, there is a false perception that it is not fine to be an Australian Muslim. The ‘Australian’ part is seen by some as ‘kufr’ (unbelief). Don’t be fooled by this simplistic and false understanding.
Don’t be afraid to say you are a Muslim and an Australian. Don’t be afraid to say that you are an Australian Muslim.
An interesting and informative perspective: How to move beyond youth tokenism into real engagement.
My piece for Future Challenges on women in the workforce, and why there is more to it than just numbers.
Why volunteering in orphanages sometimes does more harm than good. This is part of the ‘well intentioned but misguided’ mindset my father and I share about a lot of aid work…
Again on the ‘well intentioned but misguided’ note, a piece on WhyDev that really resonated (and challenged me in equal parts) on Why making the world better does not make necessarily make YOU better’.
It sounds harsh, but it has to be said. It’s important to understand that doing good things does not make you good. It is important to understand that good people can and frequently do do bad things. Not all good doers (confession: I positively loathe the term “do gooder”) are nice. You need to enter the aid world understanding that you will have to work and deal and maybe even share quarters with some truly nasty individuals. You need to understand that you, too, may do things that are not nice, things that you’re not particularly proud of. And you need to understand that this is nothing at all about your competence as a humanitarian. Being deeply committed to reducing the amount of injustice in the world, and expending great amounts of energy and personal resource towards that end in no way precludes you from treating your staff unjustly. It’s the opposite of “but he/she/they mean(s) well…” argument, all too frequently used to justify everything from poor individual performance to ridiculously reasoned startup NGOs.
On a totally different note, looking for some crazy cool (modest) fashion inspiration? Oh, check this out. I couldn’t get past the first jacket…
Thank you, Mr Sartorialist.