The World Bank, anxious that the last vestiges of Zimbabwe's former inclination toward socialism be abandoned, successfully urged the imposition of a token tuition charge for all grade levels. Equivalent to one U. S. dollar per year per child, this f...
A woman desires to be a man's last romance, her baby's first love and a person who can live with dignity all her life. As a girl matures to be a woman, her fairy tale imagination gets superseded by her struggle to be a good wife, a good mother and mo...
For a moment, I wondered how different my life would have been had they been my parents, but I shook the thought away. I knew my father had done the best he could, and I had no regrets about the way I'd turned out. Regrets about the journey, maybe, b...
Either I protect my friends and lie low until the fight for Radiasure is over, or I put everyone in harm's way and make sure that horrible drug never gets made again. Maybe if I was only putting myself at risk, I could be okay with it. But I can't ma...
...Bhutan all but bases its identity upon its loneliness, and its refusal to b assimilated into India, or Tibet, or Nepal. Vietnam, at present, is a pretty girl with her face pressed up against the window of the dance hall, waiting to be invited in; ...
One of the paradoxical and transformative aspects of implicit traumatic memory is that once it is accessed in a resourced way (through the felt sense), it, by its very nature, changes. Out of the shattered fragments of her deeply injured psyche, Jody...
Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope. It is a tool for daily life in modern society. It is a bulwark against poverty, and a building block of development, an essential complement to investments in roads, dams, clinics and factories. Literacy is a...
She had thought, instinctively, that Victoria had a remarkably beautiful face. The face showed an alert awareness of life: her lips- full, overblown like clown-lips liable to laugh at the slightest provocation. She thought that her features were not ...
Society has put up so many boundaries, so many limitations on what’s right and wrong that it’s almost impossible to get a pure thought out. It’s like a little kid, a little boy, looking at colors, and no one told him what colors are good, befor...
Skye said when she looked at Lise, she saw a black mark, an aura. Just like the mark on Lise’s thigh, it was a warming. Deenie thought of it now, of Lise and the stretch mark on her thigh. And how the fevered mind of her fevered friend might believ...
My teacher's mind and my interest in youth has brought me to some renewed conclusions, and I pass them on earnestly to mature persons who are given to assisting young people off the trail. The dictionary has a word for them: iconoclast. It is defined...
This was the first time I thought of S— that day. Her music was beautiful, her voice was beautiful, her body was beautiful. Even the dirty little pads of her feet were beautiful. I cursed myself then. For once, heaven had sent me Beauty in its most...
The sky is blue today, Max, and there is a big long cloud, and it's stretched out, like a rope. At the end of it, the sun is like a yellow hole..." Max, at that moment, knew that only a child could have given him a weather report like that. On the wa...
I have learned that I will not change the world, Jesus will do that. I can however, change the world for one person. I can change the world for fourteen little girls and for four hundred schoolchildren and for a sick and dying grandmother and for a m...
Tessa had lain down beside him and slid her arm beneath his head, and put her head on his chest,listening to the ever-weakening beat of his heart. And in the shadows they'd whispered, reminding each other of the stories only they knew. Of the girl wh...
The dominant myth of the day seemed to be that anybody could do anything, even go to the moon. You could do whatever you wanted -in the ads and in the articles, ignore your limitations, defy them. If you were an indecisive person, you could become a ...
This is George, my beloved George. D'you think I want to go to my grave knowing that at the moment of his trial he looked around and saw no one lift a finger for him? If it is the death of me, I shall go to him." "Go then," he said. "Kiss our baby go...
Life's an act of magic, too. Claire Hamill sings a line in one of her songs that really sums it up for me: 'If there's no magic, there's no meaning.' Without magic- or call it wonder, mystery, natural wisdom- nothing has any depth. It's all just surf...
Everything has a spirit and it's all connected. If you think about that, if you live your life by it, then you're less likely to cause any hurt. It's like how our bodies go back into the ground when we die, so that connects us to the earth. If you du...
Staying requires being curious about who you actually are when you don't take yourself to be a collection of memories.When you don't infer your existence form replaying what happened to you, when you don't take yourself to be the girl your mother/fat...
In every single scenario that you step into, in life, it is like stepping into a body of water and you need to stop and really stand there to feel what's going on in that water— the temperature, the direction of the current, the particles in the wa...