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Helping the Homeless in Moscow

Veronica Khokhlova · 17:27 · Eastern & Central Europe

LJ user beth4ever accidentally discovered (online) a group of volunteers feeding the homeless in the Moscow subway and at train stations, and decided to join them. Here's her account (RUS), also posted in the ru_homeless LJ community:

On the homeless.

I found this link and took part in an event last Tuesday. How did it go? I came to Chistye Prudy, found the building and the apartment. There were ten people or so there. Some of the food was ready: bananas, milk in small cartons (with straws), bags with cookies. Then Vika arrived and brought with her bread, cucumbers, dill and sausage. We quickly sliced everything and made sandwiches. We packed each sandwich into a separate little bag. Then we split into groups. Three people per group. The group that went to feed people at the train stations there were two young men and one young woman, in the other two (that went into the subway) there were only young women. I understand that it's not as safe at the train stations.

It took us about an hour. There are not enough people to walk around the neighborhoods [in addition to the subway]. Our route was this: Chistye Prudy, Lubyanka, Taganka, Chistye Prudy (I guess). As Vika explained to me, usually they meet 9-10 people at these stations in an hour. Most of them aren't strangers, but sometimes there are new faces and people from other routes. The names of all those we encountered are entered into a special notebook, for further reference.

We didn't come up to those who, despite looking like beggars, were selling something. Here's why. If a person is trying to earn money, he may get offended if you treat him as a beggar. And [we didn't come up] to those [beggars] who move from car to car. Are we supposed to run after them with our sandwiches? Also makes sense.

But on that Tuesday there weren't many people for some reason: we met only five.

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Southern Africa Blogosphere

Rethabile · 15:31 · Sub-Saharan Africa

"Commentary South Africa" report on the opportunity Jacob Zuma failed to take to clear up, "once and for all, the ridiculous notion that showering can ‘purify' someone of recently-transmitted HIV” [commentary.co.za]. The view is that Zuma is trying to revive his political clout, and must therefore appear unbending. "Commentary" links to a Guardian article that talks about the gap between what should have been, a rape trial, and what it turned out to be, a political meeting, and points out that "the government is not living up to its end of the basic Hobbesian bargain between ruler and ruled: freedom for security. There is far, far too much tolerance of public violence in South Africa " [commentary.co.za].
"
Fodder" offers another observation on the Zuma trial. It's Almost Supernatural; points to a letter that appeared in South Africa's the Eastern Cape Herald. The letter reportedly shows a hitherto unknown African anti-semitism, coupled with a dislike of America. Symptoms of a new strain of African Anti-Semitism have been spotted amongst Black Left-wing intellectuals in South Africa. The letter published in the Eastern Cape Herald this week encapsulates many of its features;

Rethabile on Mzansi Afrika; discusses racism, discrimination, and what could be done.

“As long as we're physically different, racism and discrimination will never leave our world. Unless something enormous happens. Something more threatening than an ominous cold war or a murderous hot one, something bigger than a natural catastrophe, something deadlier than any killer virus or monstrous organisms

"This is Zimbabwe" writes about the shortage of sanitary products in Zimbabwe, and how it is affecting women:

Shortages of sanitary ware go to the heart of women’s rights: it’s an issue which raises questions of whether a woman is forced to stay away from work or school; whether she is putting her health at risk by picking up infections or, if she is HIV positive, whether those infections will literally shorten her life span

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Images from Haiti: Hinche's New Cathedral

Alice Backer · 15:17 · Americas

Hinche - New Cathedral
Hinche's new cathedral, Haiti. By Martin Baran.

Martin Baran blogs photos of Hinche, capital of Centre department, Haiti.

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Egypt: Blogging Behind Bars

Elijah Zarwan · 14:50 · Middle East & North Africa

On May 10, Alaa Ahmed Seif al-Islam, the award-winning blogger detained three days earlier for participating in peaceful protests in Cairo, became one of the first people to blog from prison.

“Today it hit me,” Alaa began his post, “I am really in prison. I'm not sure how I feel…The way fellow prisoners look at me tells me I do not feel well but I can't really feel it.”

Thanks in part to an energetic campaign in the Egyptian, Arab, and international blogosphere, his detention has already helped call attention to the Egyptian government's recent crackdown on dissent. Soon after Alaa's detention, a handful of bloggers from around the world began a group blog dedicated to campaigning for his release. Andy Carvin, a Massachussets-based blogger created a video urging bloggers to participate in a “Google-bombing” campaign to associate Alaa's name with “Egypt” in Google's databases. Others began work on a Wikipedia page on Alaa. Shohdy Naguib Sorour—in exile in Russia since 2002, when he became the first Egyptian to face prosecution for his online activities—urged Russian bloggers to get involved. Sandmonkey started a successful online petition (and found he was getting a lot of online visits from the Egyptian government thereafter).

The international press penned stories. International rights groups Reporters Without Borders and Human Rights Watch issued statements. People gathered for protests in front of Egyptian consulates in big American cities. Meanwhile, the comments on Manalaa.net, the blog Alaa and his wife Manal maintain, continue to show an outpouring of support from within Egypt and around the world.

Sandmonkey, referring to a few of the international posts seemed astounded by the response from the “one blogging world:”

Do you understand what this means?

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China: Mumblings from Marxists and mortgage owners

John Kennedy · 03:16 · East Asia

After more than twenty years of Socialism with Chinese characteristics, education and health care remain prohibitively expensive for the majority of the population, privatisation in many sectors has left millions unemployed, independent labor unions are outlawed and capitalist hyperdrive has pushed the gap between rich and poor close to the breaking point.

While Marxism remains a relevant ideology for the hundreds of millions of Chinese still classified as peasants, for the Chinese government it's become a target for censorship on the internet—evidenced by the forced closure earlier this year of several of China's largest labor websites.

Individual blogs, however, are helping to keep the discussion flowing. On Wu Zuolai's Sina blog we see some of that sentiment expressed:

我曾编过民间故事方面全集，发现民间故事中穷人普遍仇恨富人，穷人致富人于死地似乎是天经地义的事情，可以没有法律也不顾人性。

I once edited a collection of amateur stories and I noticed that a lot of the poor folk in these stories tended to hate the rich, as if it were perfectly justified for poor folk to have a death wish out for rich folk, regardless of the law or humanity.

马克思主义为什么在中国或在穷苦的国家极具市场与生命力？因为马克思将富人划分为一个阶级，一个被穷人名正言顺地仇视的阶级，一个可以推翻的阶级，一个剥削人民压迫人民的阶级，一个吃人肉不吐骨头的阶级，一个为自己制造掘墓人的阶级，一个腐朽的必将灭亡的阶级。

Why is there such a vital market for Marxism in China and other poverty-stricken countries? Because Marxism puts the rich into a class towards which it is perfectly justifiable for the poor to be hostile, to overthrow; a class that exploits and oppresses the people, that eats people but doesn't spit out any bones, that makes one one's own gravedigger, a decaying class sure to perish.

-snip-
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