Commercial for EasyIME

Posted on July 2, 2015 by annetbell

Here is the 30 second commercial that took all day to make back in March! It was made in India to save money to be shown in California, Texas, New York, and Florida. These are the states with the highest number of immigrants. It was a fun day to be a part of such energy and enthusiasm. I met and visited with the owner of the company who used his complicated and expensive experience getting a Green Card to simplify the process for others. Another example of Indian entrepreneurial spirit.

Dr. Anne Bell. . . . . who would have ever thought . . . but it was fun for a day!

Posted in India, Uncategorized | Tagged Amdavad, commerical, Easy IME, Green Card, India, Indian entrepreneur | 2 Comments

America’s First Wave of Women’s Rights Activists

Posted on July 1, 2015 by annetbell

Near life-size figures of the first wave of the women’s rights activists in the United States.

On Sunday, since it was raining in Central New York, we drove to Seneca Falls to visit the Women’s Rights National Historical Park. It was opened in 1993 and my daughter-in-law had worked on the project when she was employed by an Auburn architecture firm. The site is free, contains the sculpture above as you enter the main building, a reconstructed of the Methodist Church where the first convention was held in 1848 and a visit to the home and recitation of the life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who was the main organizer. She was deeply inspired and influenced by her Quaker neighbors. There is a small but interesting gift shop and all in all the visit was quite educational and entertaining for a group with a rather large range of age. The upstairs exhibit , though filled with great pictures and text, would have been understood easier if it was arranged in sequential order instead of the the rather confusing organization .

This first convention was attended by 300 women and men and began a 72 year work for women’s suffrage. One attendee, who was 19, lived to vote in 1920.

The convention presented the “Declaration of Sentiments” which declared that all men and women are created equal. It was quite radical and dangerous for the women to sign as they had no power or protection. Just as the brave men who declared their freedom from England in the Declaration of Independence and put themselves open to persecution and death, so did these early brave feminists.

This Is Women’s History in the United States!

Posted in Uncategorized, USA | Tagged 72 ;years of struggle to vote for women in the US, Convention 1848, custody lawas, demanded equal rights for women, educational opportunities, history, human rights, participation in church, professions and politcs, property rights, Quakers and Methodist Church, Seneca Falls New York, women's history in the US, Women's Rights | 2 Comments

“Annie”. . . . . the Film

Posted on June 30, 2015 by annetbell

The area grandchildren and I went to see” Annie,” this morning. On Tuesdays, throughout the summer kid friendly films are run with a $1 per person admission. I had wanted to see the new version of this classic. Jamie Foxx was a more modern Daddy War-bucks character. Instead of a house full of servants, his penthouse is filled with technology that any man who sees would love to have. But it is a believable , lovable, plucky , cheerful Annie, Quventshane Wallis who steals the show. She has lived an opposite life to the one she sang of in the hope and optimism of “Tomorrow.” In the film , she is met with disappointment and endures as the smart kid she is, though your heart will sink with her disappointment.

This film came out at Christmas at the end of a very hard year for our country, with many of those problems enduring into 2015. This “Annie” feels current with topics such as poverty, foster care, even alcoholism, multiculturalism musical arrangements. But life was met and understood through reinvention, striving, survival and the importance of dreams,

I cried!

This Is a Fun Summer Film for Both Children and Adults !

Posted in film, Uncategorized, USA | Tagged "Annie", alcoholism, foster care, Jamie Foxx, New York City, Quventshane Wallis, technology | Leave a comment

Virginia History. . . . . . . My History

Posted on June 25, 2015 by annetbell

I am a Virginian by birth and heart. My high school was Robert E. Lee High School named for the great Confederate general. My grandmother’s family members owned slaves and my ancestors fought in the Civil War for the Confederate States of America. My great-grand father lost his farm and couldn’t feed his family. My mama said she was twelve years old before she discovered that “damn Yankee” was not one word! The”carpetbaggers” came from the north and plundered. General Grant was magnanimous in his victory, allowing the Confederate soldiers to keep their horses because he knew they needed them to work their farms and provide for their families. President Lincoln was very gracious in victory, but he was killed shortly thereafter.

And of course, there was the dark and evil shadow over the south of slavery. The southern farmers were certainly not the first slave owners in history or the last. Sadly we see slavery still practiced in the world today with sex slaves and indentured slaves working in horrible conditions, as well as historical stories of slavery in ancient Rome. There are horrible instances of injustice in the world today that many are working to eradicate.

That said, slavery is absolutely wrong and evil, in history and today. I wholeheartedly support removing the Confederate Battle Flag from any place of honor in today’s governments in the south or anywhere else. It should be placed in museums not destroyed and eliminated but there for people to see, remember , and learn from this dark history.

I have to say I was horrified at the thought of the talk of removing the statues of Confederate Generals in Richmond and other southern cities. Isn’t this what ISIL has been doing in the Middle East? They destroy temples and statues of other religions and historical sites with whom they disagree to try to wipe away the faith system and history from the earth.

While I was teaching, every January on Martin Luther King’s birthday, I told my students about growing up in the Jim Crowe south using examples found on the internet. I am a primary source. I remember one of the last classes of third graders I taught in Arizona saying, “Mrs. Bell, that can’t be true! You are making up some of your stories, right?” I told them that sadly it was true and must never happen again. We need to remember the inhumanity to man and NEVER let it happen again. People need to remember that evil existed and still exists so as not to be able to deny that period of our history. With the denial comes the risk and possibility of history repeating itself.

Genesis 50:20

The Message (MSG) (the story of Joseph from the Message translation)

^19-21Joseph replied, “Don’t be afraid. Do I act for God? Don’t you see, you planned evil against me but God used those same plans for my good, as you see all around you right now—life for many people. Easy now, you have nothing to fear; I’ll take care of you and your children.” He reassured them, speaking with them heart-to-heart.

Amen. . . . . .

2012, BOB BROWN

The statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee and his mount, Traveler, face the setting sun on Monument Ave. in Richmond, VA Tuesday, Nov. 13, 2012.

……

Posted: Tuesday, June 23, 2015 1:48 pm

By KATHERINE CALOS Richmond Times-Dispatch

The contentious nature of the Civil War won’t go away in Richmond when Confederate battle flags disappear from state license plates.

Smoldering remnants of the past flare up in unexpected ways in the former capital of the Confederacy. The blaze sometimes is literal, as when a banner of Robert E. Lee was torched on the Canal Walk in 2000, but more often it’s a blaze of words over monuments, names and, yes, flags.

“Any of us who’s been around the city for a long time knows that Confederate heritage issues crop up frequently,” said John Coski, historian at the American Civil War Museum and author of a 2006 book, “The Confederate Battle Flag: America’s Most Embattled Emblem.”

“Sometimes we handle it well and sometimes we don’t, and we end up on national and international news as the city that can’t get over the Civil War. What it’s really all about is trying to decide what does and does not belong on our symbolic landscape.”

After the Civil War ended in 1865, African-Americans moved toward equality during the Reconstruction era. From the end of Reconstruction in the late 1870s until the Civil Rights era in the 1950s and 1960s, former Confederates and their descendents regained power and used it to enshrine their vision of Confederate heritage.

Confederate heroes were memorialized on Monument Avenue. A statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee was placed in the state Capitol at the spot where he accepted command of the Army of Northern Virginia. The Confederate flag adorned the reverse side of Richmond’s city flag until 1992.

“Southerners who lost the war were completely free to put up monuments to their heroes, to teach history the way they wanted, to emblazon it on city banners. That’s what the status quo was for generations,” Coski said. “But it was an artificial status quo that had a lot to do with Jim Crow and segregation. A lot of people who opposed integration reached for the Confederate flag as their symbol of choice.”

African-Americans did not forget the flag’s association with slavery and terrorizing tactics of segregationists when they gained political power.

“They are part of the decision-making body (that) decides what belongs on the landscape, and increasingly the Confederate flag is being removed,” Coski said.

Stacy Burrs, who’s looking forward to Thursday’s topping off ceremony at the Black History Museum and Cultural Center, where he serves on the board, said “it’s remarkable what’s happening. It’s long overdue.” But it’s not done.

Too many statues and monuments remain for Confederate heroes, Burrs said. Too many schools are named for people who prevented blacks from getting an equal education rather than “people who worked toward a more fair and just community.”

Roice Luke, a former board member, complained about the Lee statue in the Virginia Capitol, comparing it to the display of the Confederate flag at the South Carolina capitol.

“For me, that’s the Confederate flag in many ways,” Luke said. “That really should be in the Museum of the Confederacy, in my judgment. It shouldn’t be just a few feet away from George Washington in Jefferson’s historic building.”

Southern heritage groups like the Sons of Confederate Veterans and United Daughters of the Confederacy still view the Confederate flag as a venerated memorial to their ancestors. But it’s also the kitschy emblem of the “Dukes of Hazzard” television show. It’s been adopted as a symbol by free-wheeling motorcycle gangs and appeared as a decoration on the guns of Ukrainian rebels.

“Those meanings all exist together,” Coski said.

Presenting the flag in an accurate historical context keeps it from being a divisive emblem, said David Ruth, superintendent of Richmond National Battlefield Park.

The second national Confederate flag and a yellow hospital flag fly at Chimborazo Visitors Center because those were the flags in use when it was a Confederate hospital, he said.

“It’s displayed as part of the story of Richmond Civil War history,” he said. “I personally have not had any confrontation from any perspective about the more present-day meaning of the battle flag.”

Paul Levengood, president and CEO of the Virginia Historical Society, said that when Confederate symbols and structures are presented in their historical context, not on a license plate, it’s an “opportunity to engage history and learn from it, to learn something more about the people and times that erected it.

“It always strikes me as a dangerous path to say we need to destroy the evidence of the past because it makes us uncomfortable today or less than celebratory about our past. It misses the point of history, which is to understand the human condition and the events of those who lived before we did.”

The continuing flare-ups around Confederate symbols “remind us of how central the Civil War is to who we are as a nation, how it looms 150 years later over what we do and who we are as a people,” Levengood said. “In that regard, it seems to me it’s a reinforcement that history does matter to people. The past is not isolated from people’s lives and consciousness.”

GENERAL LEE WEARS WHITE MANTLE When two inches of snow fell on Richmond last Wednesday, the statue of Robert E. Lee was framed by the snow-laden branches of trees along Monument ave. The snow was wet and melted quickly. This photograph actually is a bas

HIGHER THAN LEE?--Ewing Krainin is the only person in Richmond to look down on General Lee...and he's only doing it for business reasons. Here to do a series of pictures on Richmond for a national magazine, Krainin has had to enlist the aid of the Fire D

Posted in Uncategorized, USA | Tagged Civil War, Confederate Battle Flag, Confederate States of America, history, Lincoln, Richmond Virginia, USA | 2 Comments

Varanasi , City of Life and Death

Posted on June 23, 2015 by annetbell

Varanasi was a life changing experience for me. I have visited it twice, once on each trip to India. This morning, I was looking for pictures of the narrow alleyways that make up the ancient city, and I found this video on the Hindu death rituals in this holiest of ancient Hindu cities.

Hindus believe, from their mythology, that Varanasi ,( Beraris, Kashi) was created by Shiva from a time 3000-9000 years ago and is the oldest contentiously inhabited city on the earth. Archaeologists have found evidence that it is in the top 10 oldest , continuously inhabited cities on earth. I had planned to share our experience this last trip of visiting the ancient courtyard of the Shiva Temple, nestled in the center of the narrow alleyways that make-up the ancient city.

We were told by our local guide to respect the dead and not take pictures. Obviously, the filmmaker had permission to film as an educational film. Each time we pass this ghat of death on our boat floating in the Ganga, we just instinctively rose silently to our feet in respect for the dead and the the mourning family .

We were told that the Indians, who are able, go to Varanasi and rent a room when they are near death because dying and being cremated there t insures the immediate acceptance to heaven or Moksha. Two interesting traditions are that no women from the family are allowed near the crematorium because of the belief that women are more emotional and would be too distress by the sight of their loved one being cremating. Also the reverse baptism of the body in the sacred water of the Ganga as the first step of cremation. .

Cremation has become popular all through the world due to cost of burials, cemeteries being short on space, and religious or nonreligious beliefs. In fact, David and I have discussed that we both are considering cremation , when the time comes.

This Is Incredible India!

Posted in film, India, Uncategorized | Tagged death, Hinduism, oldest city on earth, religion of the world, Varanasi | Leave a comment

“Poverty is a Result of Lack of Access”. . . . Marta Vanduzer-Snow

Posted on June 22, 2015 by annetbell

The Times of India

Meet the Boston woman who builds toilets in UP

| Jun 20, 2015, 07.33 PM Times of India

Having grown up in both under-privileged and privileged classes in the States, Marta says her idea about the difference in the two classes shaped her view of the world.

NEW DELHI: India draws epithets mostly of two kinds from foreigners. Indophiles call it ‘exotic’ for its rich multi-culturalism, mysticism, spirituality and other cliched reasons. Yet, others scathingly dub it as a ‘dump’ for its egregious lack of sanitation, infrastructure and development. Some go as far as calling India a ‘shithole’ ‘drowning in its own excreta’.

But an American Ph.D student Marta Vanduzer-Snow (34) moved to rural India three years ago thinking that India needed a different approach altogether—”To be an invisible human who makes a difference on the ground.”

The result—Marta, a Rutgers University scholar who grew up in Boston, got 82 low-cost evapotranspiration toilets in homes and 1 in a primary school and 10 feet wide 122 meters permeable roads constructed, all at half or one-third the cost of similar governmental projects in the villages of Rai Bareli and Amethi in Uttar Pradesh.

Each government toilet, built under Swachh Bharat Abhiyan that aims to eliminate open defecation by Mahatma Gandhi’s 150th anniversary in October 2019, costs about Rs.17000, but the evapotranspiration toilet that Marta has brought to the villages costs only Rs. 9109. As against government’s Rs. 4 lakh per 100 meter of interlocking road, Marta’s 100 meter permeable road costs only Rs. 2 lakh.

A co-author of books and research papers with various academics, Marta has developed a theory for three-pronged strategy on development that integrates infrastructure, health and education. “I wanted a small scale model based on my theory that I could execute. So I did some research and found that Amethi and Rai Bareily had quite a few active self-help groups. I decided to learn, practice and contribute.”

An Amartya Sen development economics fan, Marta who spends her own personal resources on all these projects, has also set up 27 solar power plants, including two street lights and a mobile charger. One of the only villages in Rae Bareli boasts of being the beneficiary of night light set up by the do-gooder scholar. Marta also got French drains built, with rainwater harvesting techniques and has been working on myco-filtration systems for potable water.

Along with her programme coordinator Pawan Singh in some villages, she has also run literacy programs, written text books on English and organic farming, set up libraries and oversaw a pilot stage of four classrooms. The Rutgers scholar also run telehealth, ‘Mera Doctor’ a medical facility that offers 24×7 doctor-on-call service for free for a year to two villages.

Having grown up in both under-privileged and privileged classes in the States, Marta says her idea about the difference in the two classes shaped her view of the world. “The sharp difference was basically due to access or lack of access to opportunity,” she believes. The travels through Africa, Middle East, Asia and half a year she spent in Nepal running community service programs after high school confirmed her understanding of the difference in social classes. “But human life is about hope and how we look at future and what is possible for us. That is why I am doing what I am. ”

This Is Incredible India!

Thanks Judy!

Posted in India, Uncategorized | Tagged access or non-access, caring, classes, hope, India, Love in action, Marta Vandzer-Snow, poverty, sanitaion, Times of India, toilets, UP | Leave a comment

I Forgive You !

Posted on June 20, 2015 by annetbell

Forgiveness is the heart of Christianity. During these dark, tragic days since the Charleston massacre, yesterday this murderer was faced by the victim’s families during the bond hearing. They followed Christ’s example from the cross to give forgiveness to the shooter for the murders of their loved ones. Followers of Christ are to forgive the sin of others and ask God to forgive them as they forgive others. ( Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.) ( From the Lord’s prayer.)

From the depths of their pain and grief, these dear people found the strength to forgive as their loved ones would have wanted them to do. What a powerful image and example for the world to witness, a call for God’s mercy and grace, lived out in our evil world.

This Is Forgiveness and Love in Action!

Posted in Uncategorized, USA | Tagged Charleston SC, Christianity, forgiveness, God's grace forgiveness and mercy, grace, Heart of Christianity, massacre, mercy | 4 Comments

Three Life Changing Minutes. . . . .

Posted on June 19, 2015 by annetbell

Gary Haugen, founder of International Justice Mission speaking at TED.

I hope you will take the three minutes to hear these highlights. I was at the simulcast of the conference but due to a previous commitment , I didn’t hear it all. How encouraging with the horrid news the last few days, that there are people who are working for justice and reconciliation. I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

https://vimeo.com/thejusticeconference

This Is Hope for Our World

Posted in Uncategorized, USA | Tagged citizens' rights, IJM, impunity, International Justice Mission, orphans, police brutality, property grabbing, rescue, reunite familes, ring criminals to justice, sex slaves, sexual violence, slavery, strengthen justice systems, vulnerable among us, widows, working for justice | Leave a comment

International Justice Mission’s Work in the World

Posted on June 18, 2015 by annetbell

This is the work of IJM in the world. They work with governments the police, legal community , and social workers to over come the injustice in the world and end the impunity of evil which promotes slavery, sex trade, and property stealing from widows.

OUR SOLUTION

In nearly 20 communities throughout the developing world,
IJM protects the poor from violence
by partnering with local authorities to

RESCUE VICTIMS

We partner with local law enforcement to go into brothels, slave facilities and other dark places to rescue victims.

BRING CRIMINALS TO JUSTICE

We relentlessly pursue justice in court.

We ensure that traffickers, slave owners, rapists and other criminals are brought to justice.

RESTORE SURVIVORS

We help survivors of violence rebuild their lives.

We create individual plans to help meet each survivor’s specific needs, including trauma counseling, job skills training or education.

STRENGTHEN JUSTICE SYSTEMS

We provide training and support to police, judges, prosecutors and justice system authorities.

We advocate for reforms that will keep the poor safe from being victimized.

OUR FIGHT

SEX TRAFFICKING

SLAVERY

SEXUAL VIOLENCE

PROPERTY GRABBING

POLICE ABUSE OF POWER

CITIZENSHIP RIGHTS
ABUSE

OUR MODEL WHERE WE WORK

FAQS

HOW WE WORK

Unique model.

We pursue both individual cases and systemic change through an innovative model called Justice System Transformation. Learn more >

Local teams.

95% of IJM’s global team of lawyers, social workers, investigators and other professionals are at work in their own countries—leveraging their deep understanding of the local laws, language and culture in their communities.

Global reach.

The largest organization of its kind, IJM has ongoing operations in nearly 20 communities throughout Africa, Latin America, South and Southeast Asia.

A commitment to partnership.

We work directly with local governments in the developing world. We also partner with churches, NGOs and universities to mobilize a global justice movement.

Recognized leadership.

Highlighted as one of 10 non-profits “making a difference” by U.S. News and World Report, IJM’s innovative work has been featured by Foreign Affairs, Forbes, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Times of India, The Hindu, the Guardian, The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Today Show, National Public Radio, CNN and many other outlets.

Strong foundation.

Inspired by God’s call to love all people and to seek justice for the oppressed, IJM protects the poor from violence, without regard to race, religion or any other factor, and seeks to work alongside all people of good will.

OUR SOLUTION

In nearly 20 communities throughout the developing world,
IJM protects the poor from violence
by partnering with local authorities to