Woman Reading in the Rain

Micah Albert, USA, Redux Images, 1st Prize Contemporary Issues Single. Taken on 03 April 2012 in Nairobi, Kenya. Pausing in the rain, a woman working as a trash picker at the 30-acre dump, which literally spills into households of one million people living in nearby slums, wishes she had more time to look at the books she comes across. “It gives me something else to do in the day besides picking [trash],” she said.

Constance

The song: Constance, by Mr. J. Medeiros, can be a very good teaching resource not only to shine a light on child prostitution, human trafficking, sexual tourism and mafias, but also to talk about our responsibility when consuming porno, since millions of women and children are kidnapped and prostituted to fuel this market.

In my opinion, this song can be used together with other material to analyse facts and raise awareness among teenagers about these issues, but not as an activity of the fill-in-the-gap type, because this would trivialise the lyrics and the topic.

Sexual exploitation demeans, degrades and threatens the victim’s physical and psychosocial integrity. There are three primary and interrelated forms of sexual exploitation of children: prostitution, pornography and trafficking for sexual purposes. Other forms of exploitation of children include child sex tourism, child marriages and forced marriages.

An estimated one million children around the world are forced into prostitution every year, and the total number of prostituted children could be as high as 112 million. The buying and selling of human beings is a $32 billion global business, according to the U.S. State department’s 2009 Trafficking in Persons Report.

Lyrics to Constance by Mr. J. Medeiros

Teaching is to see the possible start where others stop

“If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Finding Meaning and Purpose in Life

Martin Luther King insisted that all forms of work are God-honoring callings.

Work is taking the raw material of creation and developing it for the sake of others. Musicians take the raw material of sound and bring the meaning of art into our lives. Farmers take the raw material of soil and seed and bring food into our lives.

All sorts of work are forms of serving the others: making their furniture, looking after their children, giving them treatment for their illnesses, teaching them, building their houses…  All work is service.

All of us have different talents, aptitudes, abilities. Through work we enrich one another and become more and more interwoven. Farming and business, childcare and law, medicine and music—all these forms of work cultivate, care for, and sustain the world.

But, how can we know what our vocation is? It is not appropriate to try to discern our vocation by starting with the knowledge of our abilities, because gifts often “pop out” and surprise us as we participate in different activities.

But, the more we discover who we are and the more we discover what desire lies deepest in our hearts, the more we will discover what direction we should take in life.

Some questions we can ask ourselves are: