Breast Cancer, 1 year here, pluss more on Burma

Ok, so this is going to be a bit of a long one.

1. The first topic I want to address today is breast cancer. In the United States, October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The idea is to dedicate the entire month to making Americans aware and knowledgeable about breast cancer, as well as raise money for breast cancer research.

They do a good job raising awareness and money. Dozens of companies mark their products with a pink ribbon (the symbol for the disease, just as a red ribbon is for Aids) for the month, donating money whenever someone buys their pink-ribbon product. It's rather like the Product Red campaign, only Product RED(wiki) goes on year-round.

The problem sited by some is the knowledge part. Accourding to a survey by the National Breast Cancer Coalition many women don't rally know as much as they think about breast cancer. For an article by the Chicago Tribune about the survey, click here.

2. The next this I felt like mentioning was something I sort of missed a few weaks ago. I mean, I knew it happened, but I didn't say anything about it here, nor did I selebrate it. On September 21st one year ago, I arrived in Oslo, Norway origionating from Vineyard Haven, Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, U.S.A. with the intention of moving in with my wife, Lisa. With the exeption of a 3 week visit back home(google maps) around Christmas and a couple day trip to Germany a bit after that for a church event, I've been in Norway for a year now.

We've got a letter from UDI recently, and we also called them, and both the contents of the letter and the phone call suggest that they probably won't make a decision untill the end of October or even possibly until some time in November.

3. Finally wqe come to Burma. Things are looking crappy for the Burmese people as a millitary officer who defected from the Junta claims that thousands of Burmese are being killed and either left in the jungle or burned. He himself defected when he was given orders to load a bunch of monks onto a truck, take them out to the jungle, and kill them and leave their bodies there.

It's good to hear that not all Junta will agree to participate in the massacre, but I would have rather had the massacre not be happening at all. many are calling for a boycott of Chinese goods and the Olympics being held in china as long as their government continues to support the Junta and refuses to denounce their actions. I think it may be a good idea.

Here are a few new articles on the subject.

The long road to freedom by David Cook of The Age.

Burma: UN envoy meets top general as regime blames foreigners for violence

I'll finish later...


Oct. 11th, 07 My goodness, this is quite annoying. I can't seem to get the text size right for this post. In addition, it's been so long since I started it that I don't remember what I was going to continue with. Oh well, maybe it was pictures of our Burma rallies in Bergen. I'll do a seperate post for that, along with pictures of John's visitng us this past weekend.