Refractions

In 2003-04,  after Israel began construction of its 425-mile security fence in the West Bank,  a Middle East Affairs listserv I belonged to at the time, started circulating news tips, alerts, and sources for those of us interested in developing stories.  One news alert  was a catalog of hardships faced by Palestinians as a consequence of the fence, culled from various news sources.  Farmers on the West Bank were angry that they could not lead their sheep to pasture or harvest their olive and guava trees because Israel's new fence separated them from their land. There was a quote from a Palestinian farmer that burrowed under my skin. "Can somebody intervene here? We cannot get through the Israeli fence to our land. All the sheep owned by the village are going to starve. Many of our ewes have miscarried. We cannot bear to watch. You know when birds get stuck in oil slicks or whales get beached, everybody rushes to help them. Maybe helping the Palestinians is complicated. But

 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gail-hamburg/one-mans-crusade-for-room_b_2657929.html "Perhaps, Sir, you will someday come back with books." The words were uttered in 1998 by the headmaster of a grade school in Bahundanda, Nepal -- that had a library, but no books -- to John Wood, a stressed out American senior executive at Microsoft, who was trekking the area's famed Annapurna Circuit. "...maybe if you went high enough into the Himalayas, you could not hear Steve Ballmer (CEO of Microsoft) screaming at you," Wood had told a friend before the trip. The headmaster's remark, less a Jedi mind trick than the formal vernacular of British English spoken in the East, would irrevocably change Wood's life and eventually the lives of impoverished children and girls in Nepal, Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Laos, Nepal, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Vietnam and Zambia. www.roomtoread.org Wood's just released book, "Creating Room to Read: A Story of Hope