Month: December 2019

This is the power of gathering: it inspires us,
delightfully, to be more hopeful,
more joyful, more thoughtful: in a word, more alive.
– Alice Waters

The table is a meeting place, a gathering ground, the source
of sustenance and nourishment, festivity, safety, and satisfaction.
A person cooking is a person giving.
Even the simplest food is a gift.
– Laurie Colwin

Community – meaning for me ‘nurturing human connection’ — is our survival.
We humans wither outside of community. It isn’t a luxury, a nice thing;
community is essential to our well being.
– Frances Moore Lappe

Our hands often reveal what we really think but do not say.
They can show a range of feelings and emotions
from confusion and frustration
to joy, understanding, love, and compassion. 

Behold the hands
how they promise, conjure, appeal, menace, pray, supplicate,
refuse, beckon, interrogate, admire, confess, cringe, instruct, command,
mock and what not besides, with a variation and multiplication of
variation which makes the tongue envious.
– Michel de Montaigne

The hands which beckon,
embrace, soothe, and comfort us
Bid us farewell.
– Kaye Earle

Hands calm us, feed us, and scratch our backs.
They intimidate, bless, encourage, and stop us.  They soothe and caress.
They draw our attention to the good and the bad,
often suggesting exuberance or fear.
– Charles Flowers introduction to Elliott Erwitt’s Handbook

Let us touch the dying, the poor, the lonely and the unwanted
according to the graces we have received and
let us not be ashamed or slow to do the humble work.
– Mother Teresa

When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us,
we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions,or cures,
have chosen rather to share our pain
and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand.
– Henri Nouwen

Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes.
Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as
beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds’ wings.
– Rumi ( 1207 – 1273)

Hands have saved lives and taken them just as easily.
They create the saviors of life as well as the purveyors of death.
Creating and destroying with a single move
a finger can move mountains or search the unknown heavens.
Hands live to caress and love.
Hands live to fight and die.
Forever living hands, forever exploring hands.
– Bruce Alan Humphrey

There is no trust more sacred than the one the world holds with children.
There is no duty more important than ensuring that their rights are respected,
that their welfare is protected, that their lives are free from fear and want
and that they can grow up in peace.
– Kofi Annan

For the past three decades as I traveled the world on assignment I
 have witnessed children working in fields, factories, ditches, tunnels,
mines, and ship-breaking yards.

The scope of the problem is vast.
Hundreds of millions of children spend their 
childhood working and do not have an opportunity to
play, go to school, or live in a healthy environment.

Amid attempts to protect elephants from ivory poachers and dolphins
from tuna nets, the rights of children go remarkably unremarked.
– Anna Quindlen

Child labor and poverty are inevitably bound together,
and if you continue to use the labor of children as the treatment for the
social disease of poverty, you will have both poverty and child labor
to the end of time.
–  Grace Abbott

The object of employing children is not to train them,
but to get high profits from their work.
– Lewis Hine, 1908

Child labor perpetuates poverty, unemployment, illiteracy,
population growth, and other social problems.
– Kailash Satyarthi

 

 

The International Labour Organization (ILO) defines child labor as work that is
mentally, physically, socially or morally dangerous and harmful to children;
and interferes with their schooling by: depriving them of the opportunity to attend school;
obliging them to leave school prematurely; or requiring them to attempt to combine
school attendance with excessively long and heavy work.