Category Global health and disparities

FMM 2 3 17 Fine Print

“The first step in the evolution of ethics is a sense of solidarity with other human beings.”~Albert Schweitzer.  My father-in-law was a simple man.  His wife died and left him with four young kids, and he raised them in the old-fashioned Jamaican way, sure that firm discipline and education were essential to a good upbringing.  […]

FMM 1 27 17 Selah

“Every time I hear the sound, the sound, the sound…” ~Mutabaruka.  I grew up surrounded by music, music of every description.  There were hymns and choir practice of course.  My father was a singer (the Welsh are famous for their Male Voice Choirs), and long road trips were often accompanied by family sing-a-longs.  Included in […]

FMM 1 20 17 Sense of Adventure

“The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?”~Dorothy Day.  I once got lost in the fog.  England used to be famous for its fog – ‘pea-soupers’ they used to call them.  Fog so thick you could […]

FMM 1 13 17 Return of the Prodigal

“Half the story has never been told…” ~ Robert Nesta Marley. Superstitions are funny things.  For whatever reason, human beings hold on to unreasonable beliefs, even after science refutes them.  Whenever my mother spilled salt, she would always pick up a pinch and throw it over her left shoulder.  I am not sure what that […]

FMM 12 16 16 From Fairy Princess to Feminist

“A woman is like a tea bag, you can’t tell how strong she is till you put her in hot water.”~Eleanor Roosevelt.  As a child, I hated the color pink.  I don’t know how early this started, but I detested it.  There was a saying: ‘Pink to make the boys wink’.  I detested that too, […]

FMM 11 18 16 Chant a Psalm

“Just living is not enough…one must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.”~Hans Christian Andersen.   My father was chaplain and teacher of Bible Knowledge at a high school in the heart of Jamaica.  Since the school was founded under the ‘auspices’ of a Christian School, the subject was not Religious Knowledge.  There was no […]

FMM 11 11 16 Remembrance

“In the end we will remember, not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”~ Martin Luther King, Jr. There was a card game we used to play when I was young; it was a simple game of pairing cards.  But the deck was spread out (face down) on a table, and […]

FMM 11 4 16 Evoking our Better Angels

“Peace is not unity in similarity but unity in diversity, in the comparison and conciliation of differences.”~Mikhail Gorbachev.  One of the problems with growing up as a preacher’s child (parson pickney, in Jamaican terms) is the unrealistic expectation that somehow you will behave better than the average child.  My mother discovered that I had ‘unfriended’ […]

FMM 10 28 16 Baked in your DNA

“We must make good use of this life for the time that we have left. This brief flash of light, like the sun appearing through the clouds.”~Kalu Rinpoche. When I was about 15 I had my first perm.  Like most females I was convinced that my own look was not good enough, I had to […]

FMM 10 21 16 Wake up and Live!

“If every day is an awakening, you will never grow old. You will just keep growing.”~Gail Sheehy. There is something special about watching a child develop.  The helpless baby that soon learns to roll over and explore, the toddler that figures out how to push buttons on a remote, the pre-schooler that begins to write […]