Leave it to hollywood

...to make a movie about life in poverty and actually exploit the poor kid actors who do so.

Slumdog children to be rehoused

"Rubina Ali and Azharuddin Ismail, who played young versions of two main characters, were discovered by casting agents in Mumbai's Garib Nagar slum.

There was an outcry when it was found they were still living there after the success of the Oscar-winning film."

Since the producers of the movie wimped out on stepping up to make a difference in these two kids' lives, the Indian government is now paying for and giving decent housing to the families of the two child actors who brought pride to their country.

As for the western, Oscar-winning, millionaire movie-makers?

"The boy's father, Mohammed, who suffers from tuberculosis, told The Times of India: 'We have barely got any money from the film-makers. In fact, whatever came, has already been spent.'"

Crap Reduction

Okay, so this is a weird thought, but my brain enjoys tangents so this is what's going on in there:

Yesterday at Cornerstone Pastor Nate gave a sermon on John 15: Jesus is the vine and we are the branches. We have to be connected to Him or we'll whither.

His visual aide was a bit different. He had placed a large bowl of pure water on a pedestal above a smaller bowl filled with vegetable oil. He connected a siphon between the two, which allowed the larger bowl to fill the smaller one with water, pushing the oil out over the top. He likened God to the larger bowl, filled with goodness, and us to the smaller bowl, filled with icky stuff. We need to be connected to God so He can cleanse us of our gross stuff (our sins, our pain, all our dirt).

So that was a good idea. Then, he unveiled what was placed on a neighboring pedestal: a toddler-sized training toilet. You know, the plastic kind of tiny potty that comes in bright colours. He set the siphon between the toilet and the smaller bowl (representing individual people). He talked about how often we disconnect from God and suck our spiritual nutrition from something else - anything except God - which essentially means we're drinking from the toilet. Ick.

I loved the point P. Nate made and wrote notes and drew small diagrams of toilets and bowls of oil and then came the tangent...

Most people in America that are between ages 0 and 40 have parents who used disposable diapers on them. Now, the average baby soils about 6 diapers/nappies per day. That means one baby goes through 2190 diapers in one year. Multiply that by the time it takes for a kid to graduate from diapers to being potty trained, and that's between 4380 and 8760 diapers that each person in America has indirectly deposited into a landfill (how could plastic + crap be recycled?)

Let's say the average weight of a used diaper is one pound. That means each person has added between 2 and 4 tons of waste to any number of landfills in our country.

Are you as dumbfounded by this as I am??

I feel awful for the amount of waste my own body produced when I had no control of how it was disposed. Robin and I discussed this at breakfast (good timing, I know), and she could gladly say her parents used cloth diapers on her as an infant.

I usually try to be pretty cautious about wasting materials, but now I'm feeling the weight of this realization of my past as a babychild. How ridiculous!! I don't know what it will take to negate the effects of all that crap (+plastic) I put into the world, but I hope I can find a way to de-impact the environment, some how.