Inspiring :: Young People Who Rock

This girl is amazing. She is only 16 and is already trying to make this world a better place. I pray that there are more young people out there like her, that is what this generation needs, young people who are willing to live for others and make this world a smaller, better, more loving place. Check out the article.

Tara Suri, 16, hopes to help to young children around the world achieve their
full potential.

Bake sales and recycling are common fundraising tactics in middle school. But Tara Suri wasn’t baking cupcakes for just any common cause. Her cause was hope, literally.
When Tara was 13, she was more than saddened by her trip to India with her family. From her sadness sprung the idea of trying to help the orphans in India and Sudan whom she saw abandoned by their parents, sometimes found in garbage dumps. Tara started H.O.P.E., or Helping Orphans Pursue Education. It aims to give kids the opportunity to achieve their full potential with the basics, like a sturdy roof over their heads, that Tara and her friends sometimes took for granted back in Scarsdale, New York.
Now, at 16, she has expanded her cause with an umbrella organization called Aandolan, which means “a movement for change” in Hindi. Through that fundraising group, Tara now runs Turn Your World Around and Connect a Kid along with H.O.P.E., and a lot of it for kids growing up continents away who are in sad situations.

The Current Kenyan Crisis

Here, where I live, if somone's preferred candidate loses a political race of somekind, no matter how/why they lost, we get upset, we show dissapointment; but never this. Kenya recently had national elections for a new President. Nearly 300 people have been killed in a clash of ethnic violence in the country in only a week since the elections, which are claimed to be rigged. msnbc.com described the events as "violence that has killed 300 people and displaced 100,000 in what was once lauded as among the most stable democracies in Africa." That is sad, not only that it is such violence and so many people are being hurt, killed, and negatively effected, but also that Kenya, once considered to be a stable democracy in Africa (which in itself are few and far between) is now expierenceing the atraucities similar to it's fellow African counrties, the Sudan and Rwanda, for example. BBC is claiming that over 180,000 people have been displaced due to this violence and over 350 have been killed. The UN's World Food Programe is despertaly trying to provide food for the 100,000 displaced people in the Valley Rift Area alone.

The church needs to step in.

These people desperatly need to be shown some love.

I don't know what I can do.




Here is a video of the violence. It is devestating.

Here is a article I read about the subject that got it on my mind, again. And here is another.

Making a Difference

Paul told Timothy to not allow his age to hold him back to make a difference in the world around him. I just read this blog of a few kids who don't let their age stop them either...

Santa Monica, California, is far from Tanzania. But a group of high schools there makes the distance seem closer. The Crossroads Teen AIDS Ambassadors are the youngest certified educator-activists in the country working toward the eradication of the disease.

The California students bring their mountainous mission to Africa. They travel to Tanzania and other countries to help tell their young counterparts about the history of the pandemic, the virology of HIV, and the importance of safe sex. But they also bring the "mountain" to them: Kids from Tanzania have come to California to go through the program to experience and see inspiration of a life minus the disease.

The hours are long, the information is daunting, and the trek is substantial. But from the AIDS Ambassadors' perspectives, even their small hands can help start move the mountain.

Melinda gets it.

I came upon a CNN Blog called Young People Who Rock...and this is the latest post...

Using her new found stardom to impact the Kingdom is the most noble thing anyone can do with something that can be so self-focused and self-centering. Melinda Doolittle gets it. She gets that she can impact the world. She was put in a place, with her rise on American Idol, that she knew she could use as a platform. She traveled to the Malaria-belt of Africa with First Lady Laura Bush supporting Malaria No More, to raise awareness of the disease. She believes, as do I, and many others, that Malaria can be eradicated, wiped off the face of the earth, completely prevented, that people dying of Malaria is a tragedy because it can be prevented -- with medicines to treat it and insecticides and nets to prevent it in the first place. People of Africa just need to be aware of it and have the oppertunity and knowledge to seek the help they need to live, because there is life after Malaria, and it can be prevented. Doolittle's goal is to see malaria eliminated in her lifetime, and I think that is possible. Melinda does rock. God bless Melinda and the many people like her. They are the ones who are going to shape our generation, they will leave the legacies for us, they are the ones we will tell our children about. They are bringing the good to this world, the way Jesus intended it. Melinda rocks. Melinda gets it.

If we all just got it, if we all just did our little part to bring the Kingdom...O what a wonderful world that would be.