Uncategorized | Normal Is Over.

The search for significance. Looking all the wrong places.

October 20, 2014 · by stevegumaer

Basically, if you don’t read this you are a sad and normal person and will likely slip on ice and break your nose. Seriously: Read this!

oddnygumaer.com

Today I lost it. The world is for sure joining its forces against me. I was denied the grant to help fund my new book. And get this, this happened a day after I got a crappy grade on my exam in human rights and advocacy. As if this is not enough to ruin my day I can add a list of strikes against me:

A good friend nominated me for a women’s prize, but my name must have gotten lost in the pile of other names because I never even made the list of the people the committee recommended. (Or perhaps the nominating committee just held their stomachs, pointed to my name and laughed through the whole meeting).

I called, emailed, texted and wrote to a dozen people about Partners, and they never even bothered replying to me.

I wrote articles that I personally thought were masterpieces and got…

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#dieandseeificare

October 16, 2014 · by stevegumaer

Great invitation to engage. Now lets change history.

oddnygumaer.com

It’s that time of the year. It’s time for much of nature to die. Seeds were planted, grew, bore fruit, and now their mission is done. They die. My sugar snap peas gave me a lot of enjoyment. Now they are gone.

It’s also time for people to die. Children. Babies. Teens. Mothers. Fathers. Aunts. Uncles. Best friends. Grandparents. Colleagues. Neighbors. This is the time of the year when they shall die.

You may think I have smoked something strange and that I am just babbling nonsense. But this is not the case. I don’t smoke anything. Ever. I also don’t lie. And I hear a lot of stories I wish I didn’t have to hear.

Some days ago I was sitting in a small room with people whom I love and admire. There were nine of us. We were from four different countries and three different continents. You could almost…

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Free, Full Lives for Children

September 28, 2014 · by stevegumaer

She blazes some fresh thoughts on the mission of Partners with her keyboard.

Sacraparental

The last fortnight has been a mix of hope and horror as I’ve been learning more about the work of the friends we’re visiting in Thailand.

They are part of Partners Relief & Development, a small international charity that does strategic work in health, education, poverty uplift and human rights advocacy for the (very many) oppressed people of Burma. Partners is based in Thailand, where huge numbers of refugees and migrants come, but it works in both countries.

Like many of you, I’ve had Burma (or Myanmar – what do we even call it?) on the radar for a while, in a hazy way. It’s been in the same category as Taliban-ruled Afghanistan was for me – a hopeless situation of horrific oppression and hardship that I felt entirely powerless to do a single thing about.

It’s a country run for decades by a military dictatorship, famous for…

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