Community is...

...sharing the shower.

One of the folk here visits Kenya and Uganda several times a year to encourage the church there - he ministers not only in preaching but also in practical areas and reported after his last visit some of the needs - like people not being able to even afford soap. And yet when I step into our shower I have to negotiate vast numbers of shower-gels, shampoos, conditioners, women's under arm razors, those horrible fluffy wash poofs. Personally, in the shower I use water and soap, period, and anyway I like the shower enclosure to be free of ancillary stuff, more room for Me. I would not dream of leaving my shaving stuff in a communal bathroom: I can only imagine the cries if I did!

This morning's news

Here's a couple of extracts I thought were interesting from the news this morning:

In April 2000, in a wave of new millennium optimism, world leaders promised to deliver something at the beginning of the 21st Century that in many developed countries had been taken for granted by the end of the 19th Century: Primary education for all children.

This basic gap was going to be fixed within 15 years, so that by April 2015, the unacceptable position of millions of children never even beginning school would be consigned to history. This was one of six Education for All pledges, which included targets such as girls having equal access to learning, and a halving of adult illiteracy...

It's perhaps worth thinking about what else has arrived since the education pledges were made in April 2000. YouTube, the iPhone, Facebook, hybrid cars, 3D printing, Twitter, the Mars rover, Wikipedia, China's and India's space programmes, mobile broadband, Skype and mapping the human genome. Unlike building primary schools, somehow these all proved possible.  BBC

and, somewhat unrelated...

The part of a bee's brain that allows it to see has been recreated by scientists in a computer simulation and connected to a drone - not of the bee variety, but an unmanned aerial vehicle...

"Bees and all other insects are miracles of engineering which we are nowhere near equalling," said Prof James Marshall.  BBC

Such are the amazing but paltry advances of our civilisation...