Nancy Fyffe's blog

Watching the HBO/Sundance documentary “Reporter”, about the work of NY Times reporter Nicholas Kristoff, I came back to old questions I have had about how compassion works in the human heart and how difficult it is to gather enough resistance to stop war a

Charity begins at home. How often I heard that statement growing up. I was raised in a church going home where the Bible was prominent on our bookshelves. The common understanding of the definition of charity back then was an ethical consideration, the intention to judge people in a tolerant way, to forgive transgressions, to see others possessing the frailties we, too, had. Today the word charity is usually invoked to refer to an organization that collects money to help needy people. One gives to a charity, or founds a charity.

Listening to many people around me expressing pessimism, or fear, about the current economic conditions in our country, I think of things my father said to me as I was growing up about dealing with difficulty. He used to say problems brought opportunities, that in the midst of things going wrong there was usually something that was going well. That is a generational attitude, shared by many people the age of my father. Perhaps it is now an attitude that can be cultivated in our times.

Dan Barry's poignant story of a leprosy colony in Hawaii sat above the fold on the National page of the New York Times yesterday. It's title, "A Story of Exile and Union Few Are Left to Tell", grabbed me. The first line of the essay is this: "The peace of morning comes to the small village of famous isolation called Kalaupapa". With the newspaper in my hands, the dark of early morning outside my window, and the quiet and stillness of a yet busy world far away from me, I was struck with the power of Barry's storytelling.