As I Realize My Old Photo Of Street Children From Togo - Which I Edited Myself And Which I Had Authorization To Use - Got Removed Due To A Prank A User Played On Me?! Luckily I Had Enough Foresight To Save My Old Picture On My PC!

>“Domradio” says that this Wednesday in Togo there have been demonstrations against president Faure Gnassingbe who still refuses to step down. Reason is not only that he refuses to allow reforms, but also that his dynasty started about half a century ago. People accuse Gnassingbe of spending only 1/3 of the taxes he promised would be given to the health system actually to that system. At least that’s their explanation as to why so many citizens of Togo can’t afford even the most basic medical treatment. Also it seems to people that he doesn’t care about the 40% of all citizens who can’t even read or about the 58% of all citizens who have less than 1 $ per day to spend.
Last but not least police officers have been arresting, wounding and even killing participants of these demonstrations and it is widely believed they did so on orders from Faure Gnassingbe.
>“Agrarheute” says that to improve the situation of countries where starvation still is a big deal – for example Congo or Madagascar – and also to find a way to feed the increasing world population, the “Gregor Mendel Stiftung” in Bonn (North-Rhine Westphalia /Germany) now started a project to find a way that will make plant-growing more effective – be it by developing new sorts of food plants or by growing the plants we already have more effectively.
I guess you know who the monk and botanic Gregor Mendel was.

Okay! Seeing how this week Donald Trump won the Elections this definitely did not make headlines, but still: As she wants to become a doctor and work in a developing country according to the newspaper “Halterner Zeitung” a girl from a high school in Haltern am See (North-Rhine Westphalia /Germany) decided to get some hands-on training in a kindergarden in Lavenderia in Togo.
This week she returned and told the newspaper the following things about Togo:
>In Togo people generally are less-reserved than in average parts of Germany. For example most people she med immediately wanted to get to know her, start a conversation with her, didn’t mind that she neither spoke nor understood this area’s dialect and already after the first conversation said things like “I like you!” or “I like you very much!”
>Things don’t go as hygienic as in Germany. For example drinks were sold in some plastic bags and if you spilled some juice while getting the liquidity from the bag into a glass or bottle, that was just a common thing to happen. Also even public places like this kindergarden didn’t have running water taps.
>Even in the capital electric lights weren’t taken for granted. If she wanted to read at night, she was to use a torch light.
>Due to not many men being qualified enough for as well as interested into this job even in the capital city people just got away with breaking even heavy traffic regulations.
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Re-upload: Associations that help street children from this LDC are:
>UNICEF (www.unicef.org)
>Aid For Africa (www.aidforafrica.org)
>UNHCR (www.unhcr.org)

I recall that Togo and Cameroon are those two Least Developed Countries with the highest numbers of cocoa exports: The animal-aid organization “Tierschutz Euskirchen” now used some kind of trick to prevent those who still don’t believe in the scientific fact that chocolate could kill your horse or dog from feeding said treat to said pet-animal. Instead of appealing to their responsibility for the animal’s health they now decided to address the problems the production of chocolate brings to the countries cocoa comes from.
While it’s mostly industrial nations that consume chocolate – there are polls in which only one percent of those asked replied they never eat chocolate and other polls that say that most people like those sorts best that contain either a lot of milk or a lot of cocoa – most of the cocoa needed for our chocolate comes from tropical developing countries.
“Fairtrade Deutschland” says that in some of these countries cocoa even has become the main-source of income. So far so good, but since the 80’s the monetary value of cocoa has been decreasing rapidly. Except for those few who own huge cocoa-plantations none can live from that anymore leading to people abandoning those plantations owned by their families for perhaps centuries and to escape poverty and unemployment to hire as low-paid and poorly-treated laborers on the plantations of those who are wealthy enough to afford bigger plantations. Often the aforementioned laborers are paid so low that they need their children to work on these plantations, too. To do so these children of course need to quit school. The text heavily implies that these children are treated just as poor as their adult co-workers.

On Sunday I couldn’t go to church in my home village as I had a hands-on training in a church in Reutlingen. On Sundays like these I just prefer going to church in Reutlingen and its surroundings, like Sondelfingen, Betzingen or Metzingen – as I did on Sunday, October 4th.
Fact is that Sunday, October 4th is also the day of the German-Roman-Catholic equivalent of Thanksgiving, called “Erntedankfest”. In fact protestants have an “Erntedankfest”, too, but they just don’t want to celebrate on the same day as Roman-Catholics.
Anyway the thing is that we not only use this day to thank God for having enough to eat to survive, but on that day German clerics usually also criticize the fact that we have too much, while so many have too little; that we destroy parts of nature and kill animals only to produce more food than we would need. This year for example the priest criticized the fact that each year the average German buys two shopping carts of food that he’s going to throw away anyway.
Some buy more than they can eat as the food they buy – for example meat, soy, eggs, dairy products – is comparably cheap and thus not too much of a loss for them if it goes to waste. Others want to try something new, realize they don’t like the taste of it and as they don’t want to give it to somebody else they simply throw it away. Thoughtless people simply don’t even pay too much attention to what they buy. This may sound ridiculous at first, but when they for example want to buy fish and enjoy let’s say salmon the most, they go to the multideck cabinet, pick out any random packaging that contains fish and don’t realize until they have to pay at the cash box that firstly the fish they bought isn’t exactly the fish they really like to eat and secondly it is only one day away from its expiration date.
The priest called this disrespectful not only towards nature that provides us with all this delicious food and that we exploit for our overproduction of food, not only disrespectful towards animals and human workers alike who do hard physical work that goes with bad treatment to provide us with nutrients, but it’s also disrespectful towards millions of people who right now are starving in the least developed countries of this world including Togo.

Most German newspapers when talking about the persecution of “witches” in South Africa depict the police as either helpless while facing all these crimes against alleged witches and wizards or as corrupt people who can easily be bribed into ignoring the murder of someone who was accused of being a witch. Also many German newspapers blame this situation on Christianity. I mean, it’s okay to say it out loud if you interpret things this way, but when I saw the English newspaper “African Times” in a kiosk on Tuesday I just wanted to know what someone who grew up in another country may think about this issue…and in fact this journalist saw things a bit differently:
>He argues that these murders don’t happen due to Christianity, but in spite of Christian faith. Colonialists used brute force to make African natives believe in Christianity. This resulted in natives forcefully abandoning some of the things they used to believe in while sticking to other ancient things they couldn’t just stop believing in – like their ideas about spirits, shape shifting and witchcraft. Besides the Old Testament /the Torah says that witches shall be killed, while in many cases the one accused of witchcraft wasn’t killed directly, but cast out of the village which resulted in him or her dying as a homeless on the street.
>People who deep inside the heart may know better, forcefully keep up this belief in witchcraft and evil magic people. For example the police of South Africa already had cases that seemed to be staged by people who just wanted the one they now accused of witchcraft dead.
>A suspiciously high number of victims was either wealthy or came from a family that for different reasons one could easily be jealous of which brings up the question if some of these “witches” just fell victim to a plot caused by either jealous people or by people who hoped that after the execution they could inherit some wealth from those they just sentenced to death.
>Especially in urban areas of South Africa people can be easily confused. That’s why newspapers that may have a provocative and exciting headline like “Witch Stoned To Death”, may be understood by us, but may lead to misinterpretation by people who read this in an urban area in South Africa. Some – but not all – may not be able to understand this stylistic device and take this as another reason to believe in this nonsense. Thus you may also blame newspapers for not taking into account what their readers are able to understand.
>The village of Helena, Limpopo (South Africa) proves that in fact there are officials who put great effort into saving people who otherwise would be sentenced to death for witchcraft. This village was built to have some place to bring alleged witches and wizards to and the idea worked. Nobody – not even those who want every habitant of this village dead – would dare to attack a village full of thought-to-be witches.
>South Africa has a law that makes it illegal to accuse somebody of witchcraft.
As I don’t have a photo that deals with South Africa I just decided to put this message either under my photo of Congo, Angola, Benin, Tanzania, Togo, Malawi, East Timor or the Central African Republic as these countries all have one thing in common: recent cases of people who were accused of witchcraft.
Inspired by this article I did some research on my own only to find out that:
>Save The Children UK (www.savethechildren.org.uk)
and
>UNICEF (www.unicef.org)
actually have their own programs to help children and adolescents accused of witchcraft in countries like these. They just rely on more donors and volunteers which is why I mentioned these two websites now where you may inform yourself about ways to get involved.