IRNA
Iran intends to increase its aluminum producing capacity from the current 140,000 to more than 1 Mt/y within 10 years and to this end is seeking the help of Venezuela's state-owned heavy industry giant CVG.
<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela's Electronic News Posted: Sunday, May 25, 2003 By: The Very Reverend Roger Dawson May 25, Easter 6, 2003 sermon by The Very Reverend Roger Dawson Dean of St. Mary's Anglican Cathedral, Caracas
Coming here to Venezuela was a real culture shock for me. I had traveled about a bit but mostly within Europe. I have been to Africa twice, but only for a short time, and I lived abroad for a few months, but that was in Europe. I visited the USA on a couple of occasions, but nothing really prepared me for Venezuela.
Yet I believe that Venezuela is like many other countries in Latin and South America. It isn't that Venezuela is completely different to anywhere else, but it is very different to anywhere else that I have ever lived for any length of time. People think differently, have different expectations, and have different priorities and most importantly, have different ways of achieving those priorities.
I don't think that I am alone in my first reaction, which was to believe that I was right in my way and they were wrong in theirs. In time we make adaptations and, more than that, we adopt the new ways as being our new norm.
If that were not true, we would not have to experience a reverse culture shock when we return to the place from where we first ventured forth to come and live here. Rick and Ros Reycraft, who lived here in Caracas for six years, and with whom we spent a few days after Easter in Cincinnati, are assisting in a course of encounters for Proctor and Gamble, for whom Rick works, to deal with this special problem of reverse culture shock for people returning to the United States.
What happens is that what we regard as a sacred tradition is suddenly looks as though it is obsolete. I don't mean something found in church. I am talking about a way of doing things that has become so much part of us, we take it for granted that this is the way it is done, and to do it any other way must be wrong, no matter what.
This may actually be true of course ... we may do things in a particular way or come from a country that behaves in a particular fashion, and it could be that this is the very best way to do whatever it is that we do ... but what use is that if suddenly we find ourselves in a place that behaves quite differently.
It is a shock, and our initial response is to say "do it my way" ... but all calls for this fall on deaf ears because the people we would like to address have no idea what our way is. It drives us newcomers to the culture to the point of distraction and after living in a South American country for a year or two years many cannot cope with the culture difference and want to leave in order to get back to the safety of being where there are no great shocks.
Trying to understand the bible is another culture shock. Here we have documents not only written in cultures different to our own, but in times that we hardly can appreciate, because they are so very different.
The New Covenant documents are a whole series of culture shocks as the new faith of the Nazarenes, who were the followers of Jesus, was forged out of the worship of YHWH and pushed into a world beyond its original scope.
Much has been made of Jesus preaching a universal faith, but there is scant evidence for this and his brother James, who took over the running of the new faith after the crucifixion, could not see the possibilities of the faith going beyond the boundaries of Israel. He had a furious argument about circumcision with Paul, who wanted to dispense with this requirement for those who were born into a Roman or Greek culture and who had not been members of the YHWH worshipping community.
In other words, James and the rest of Jesus' brothers and sisters who ruled the Jerusalem church, believed that new converts would either be devout YHWH worshippers already like Philip and Stephen and other converts from the Essenes or like Paul who had been a Pharisee. These people were already circumcised and born what we now call "Jews" ... that is, they followed the religion that came out of Judah. If Gentiles wanted to join the disciples and family of Jesus, then they first had to become "Jews" before becoming Nazarenes, which was just one of the many ways of worshipping the God YHWH.
Last week, I described how the writer of Acts set forth the three point plan by which the world became evangelized. First they went to the Samaritans who were regarded as almost Jews. Second they went to foreigners who had Jewish connections like the Ethiopians and then thirdly they tackled the Gentiles who previously had no Jewish connections. The writer of Acts is an admirer of Paul, and supports his call for the inclusion of Gentiles without circumcision. The result of the dispute between Paul and James is settled by allowing Gentiles to be admitted to the faith without circumcision, but Paul has to make a large financial payment to the church in Jerusalem; something that takes him some years to accomplish. The settlement is based on the theological argument that we are all children of Abraham who came to an agreement with God before the circumcision requirement was introduced.
In today's reading from Acts we discover that the "circumcised believers were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles." My belief is that the circumcised would more than likely have been horrified rather than just plain astounded. Of course the writer is not going to say "horrified" because he is a Pauline argument supporter, but here we have a classic case of culture shock. People who have earnestly believed all their lives that their bodies should be marked out as belonging to God's Covenant by circumcision, now find that, in this outside alien culture, the new converts don't need this mark. The mark has become obsolete.
What does this say about them? We have many modern similarities such as when the liturgists brought the language of the Prayer Book and the Bible into modern times. It made some think that what they had treasured all their lives had been made obsolete and they have clung to the old in the belief that if it were good for them and their fathers it is good for all time. They could not make the break with the past. Yet here in Acts, and in the Letters of Paul, we find that the culture barriers are being broken all the time in order to bring the message of Christ to a wider audience.
Of all the people in the world who should know about culture shock, it is the members of the Christian Church. They broke the barriers to take the gospel into the Gentile world, they split along culture lines of Eastern and Western Christendom, and they broke again to form the Protesting Churches in the 16th Century.
In spite of all this ... in spite of all that, the New Covenant documents scream out about change, people resist the change because they believe that what they first believed must be better.
Here is the evidence before you ... if the church is to grow then sometimes the culture barrier has to be breached.
What we have to learn is that it actually doesn't make the old obsolete; it just shows us that it is different.
According to Acts ... if we resist the change we resist the work of the Holy Spirit.
Is that what we want?
Isabel Allende on feminism: "We are 51 percent of the population; we can do it. So get on your high heels and fight, ladies."
By Christy Karras The Salt Lake Tribune
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Allende grew up in Chile but left after half her family was forced out of the country by a CIA-backed coup against its elected socialist president, her father's cousin Salvador Allende, in 1973 (Allende points out that the date was a Tuesday, Sept. 11). During Allende's term, "I have never felt so alive, nor have I ever again participated so closely in a community or the life of a nation," she wrote in the book. The government was removed by a Cold War America fearing socialism in any form and replaced with Augusto Pinochet's military government, and "democracy was replaced by a regimen of terror that was to last sixteen years and leave its consequences for a quarter of a century." She calls her take on life "half and half, good and bad," a description that also fits her depiction of Chile itself. In the 1960s and '70s, the country was mired in economic depression, but she remembers it filled with pristine nature and resilient, hospitable people. "I have traveled a lot, and I have never seen any place as beautiful as the south of Chile -- lakes, volcanoes, wonderful rushing rivers -- it's like Switzerland but rougher," she said. The text ranges from fuzzy sentimentalism to clear-eyed realism to sharp sarcasm. Allende looks on her childhood, for example, and writes, "In those days there was no such term as 'abused children,' it was accepted that the best way to bring up little ones was with a strap in one hand and a cross in the other." Allende also describes going through most of her life believing she didn't fit in anywhere -- a feeling that ultimately led her to write. "It gives me a sort of perspective which is the perspective of the outsider, which is good for a writer," she said. As a child, she loved to read, but "there were no role models for women to be creative in any way," she said. She worked as a teacher and a journalist, but it was a long time before she dared think of herself as a fiction writer. In 1981, she started writing a letter for her grandfather, who was dying in Chile. The result was The House of the Spirits, arguably the most beloved of her 10 books. "From the first page, I knew it was going to be something different," she said. "By the end of the year, I had 500 pages of something, but I still didn't know what it was." After her mother and engineer husband read it and picked out all the mistakes, she had a coherent story. At a time when women writers were largely frowned upon in South America, the only publisher willing to take on the manuscript was in Spain. Her book quickly took off in Europe, then elsewhere after being translated out of Spanish, the language she still uses to write. She wrote even while holding other jobs and raising children. "It's nice to have a room of your own and some time, but if you don't, you do it anyway. This is like making love when you're in love: You do it behind a door, if you have to." Allende calls America home now, and she loves many things about her adopted country. Here, she is surrounded by children, related by blood or not, and friends she invites over on weekends. She is still deeply affected by memories of the fear, suspicion and violence that overtook Chile while she became an exile, roaming first to Venezuela and then to the United States. Now, she is wary of attempts to bring democracy to Iraq. "How can you impose democracy and the American way of life anywhere?" she asks. "That's what the Nazis tried to do, impose their way of life on the rest of the world. I have seen a lot of violence in my life, and I know it never has a good effect. Never. Everything comes back to you, if you live long enough. And if it doesn't come back to you, it comes back to your children." Allende has long been outspoken about social and environmental issues. In Chile, Allende's relatives and acquaintances discouraged her views on women's rights, but she was and remains an outspoken feminist, willing to criticize women who comfortably sit back and enjoy the fruits of their predecessors' labors while women around the world go without. "The women who think that feminism is personal are those privileged women who have access to education and health care in industrialized nations, in urban areas," she says with fervor. "The rest of the world -- Africa, Asia, poor America -- those women have not heard the news yet. Take a look at your sisters." Her message to other women: "Make fun of all this stupidity, and change the world. We are 51 percent of the population; we can do it. So get on your high heels and fight, ladies."
Article Published: Sunday, May 25, 2003 - 12:00:00 AM MST By Diane Carman, Special to The Denver Post
Yolando Vallejo didn't care. The Rifle High School student said she never felt like she belonged in school. School seemed irrelevant.
"I had family problems," she said. "I always learned a lot when things happened to me." School was not happening.
So she decided she was going to quit, get a job, do something real.
Then the unexpected happened.
School got real.
Rifle High School Spanish teacher Maria Carrion-Kozak saw some information about a program at the University of Denver Center for Teaching International Relations. She was the adviser for the International Affairs Club. This looked interesting.
Carrion-Kozak is from Venezuela, and, as it turned out, the 20 students who joined the club were all Latinos - some first-generation immigrants from Mexico and El Salvador.
In many ways, the club was a refuge for them. Many were struggling with English, and some were barely passing their courses.
Most knew what it was like to feel isolated and foreign even in their own hometown. In the club, they translated for each other. In the club, they stuck up for each other.
Elizabeth Beindorff, project director for the DU World Affairs Challenge, invited them to participate in a statewide competition for a student project on world hunger.
But International Affairs was just a little club at a rural school with no money. It seemed impossible.
No problem, Beindorff said. She offered to waive the registration fee. She sent the materials and urged them to try.
Carrion-Kozak admits she was freaked.
"I was not prepared for this at all," she said. "I'm a Spanish teacher. I have no background in this."
But the students were eager, so she enlisted Kim Goossens, a school board member, to help with the project, and they went to work.
The kids began doing research after school. None of them had a personal computer at home, so most of the work was done at the homes of Carrion-Kozak and Goossens.
The students identified the 25 hungriest countries in the world and the causes of hunger in each of them. They learned that 1 billion people don't have enough to eat, that nearly half of them are children.
Once the students began to realize the scope of the problem, they mobilized quickly.
They organized a hunger strike at school, asking students to forgo lunch to experience what it's like to be hungry. They urged them to contribute their lunch money for hunger relief. They raised nearly $400.
They volunteered in a soup kitchen. They researched the hunger relief organization Heifer International, and used their money to buy a water buffalo to help starving villagers in the developing world. And they wrote and performed a skit, complete with a video presentation and music produced by a student rock band and the school choir.
Then they held more fundraisers, this time to pay for transportation to Denver for the competition in March at DU.
Despite all their work, they were prepared to get creamed.
Many of their competitors were from tony suburban schools. Some of them were from gifted-and-talented programs. They were just poor Latino kids from Rifle.
They smoked them.
On Thursday, they brought their winning project, "Giving a Face to Hunger," to the World Trade Day business conference in Denver.
In front of a painted cardboard set, wearing handmade costumes and few signs of nerves, the students delivered their poignant, powerful dramatization of the plight of the hungry to a roomful of buttondown business types.
When the students finished, the place erupted. The businessmen and women wiped tears from their eyes and gave them a standing ovation.
It wasn't just the skit.
At a time when a third of Latino students don't finish high school and teachers struggle to make school more compelling than a $6- an-hour job in a fast-food joint, a bunch of brown-faced kids with mediocre grades and limited English skills discovered their own remarkable ability.
"A lot of people didn't believe in us because the club is 100 percent Latino. Then we won," Leidy Ruiz said.
"We proved to ourselves and others that we don't all drop out and that we're smarter than we look," said Vallejo, who admits she's decided to stay in school - and not just because of the sudden acclaim.
Winning the competition was great, she said, but to her something else was more important. She discovered that even a bunch of poor kids from Rifle could make a difference.
"To be able to change even one person's life, that was the best thing."
As she spoke, Carrion-Kozak passed a tissue to Beindorff. The tears were welling up again.
They knew just what she meant.
Diane Carman's column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. E-mail: dcarman@denverpost.com .
chronicle-tribune.com By KRISTEN HARTY, Minority affairs reporter. kharty@marion.gannett.com
I discovered last week that the world is divided into two sorts of people -- people who can roll their 'r's and people who can't.
I fall into the latter category.
Ray Vasquez was trying not to laugh at me on the first night of Spanish class at the YWCA of Marion. We were going around the table, pronouncing the Spanish vowel sounds and consonant sounds, most of which are very similar to English.
Eventually -- inevitably -- we got to the 'r.'
"Say "errrre," Vasquez said, rolling the sound effortlessly off his tongue.
I already knew I couldn't do it. I know a little French and a little German and used to speak Hebrew pretty fluently. Never could roll a darn 'r.'
So I hesitated, of course. Tried to will my 'r' to roll. Everyone was looking at me and waiting in anticipation.
"ARE," I said. The sound stuck in my throat like an engine that wouldn't start.
Vasquez, who seems to be a very nice man -- pleasant and patient like a good teacher should be -- actually giggled a little bit. I know he couldn't help it.
And truthfully, the class was about evenly split between those who could roll and those who couldn't.
"It's not in your language, so you don't learn how to do it," said Vasquez, a native of Venezuela, who translates and teaches Spanish in a number of Grant County settings. "Don't be afraid to say it wrong because nobody's going to joke about it. This is a learning place."
And anyway, the point of taking the eight-week beginning Spanish class at the YWCA isn't to perfect the language or its pronunciation. The class is designed to give people a little exposure to the Spanish language and culture.
I'm taking it because I always feel ignorant that I don't know the most rudimentary rules of Spanish, and because in Marion there is a pretty good-sized Hispanic population that is growing. It's hard to make friends with people or understand who they are if you don't know anything about their language or culture.
So this is a start, a small effort to expand my horizons just a bit.
And the YWCA class is supposed to be fun, Vasquez said.
"This is the thing I can tell you, Spanish is not difficult to learn," he said. "It's just about patience, perseverance, time and having someone who can help you out."
Sounds like a worthwhile challenge.
As far as learning to roll an 'r,' however, it may be hopeless.
"Say 'carrrrrra,'" Vasquez said.
"CaR-ah," said I. "CaR-ah."
Er....Er...Ugh.
Originally published Sunday, May 25, 2003