SUMMER TIME is a time for parties, and parties are for celebrations. I recently had the pleasure of going to a couple of parties which celebrated very special occasions.
The first marked the 25th anniversary of Quinta da Calma, the first and most established centre for all things complementary in the Algarve. From the very early days as a place for people to come for healthy holidays, it has blossomed into one of Europe’s leading centres for training teachers of yoga and a veritable oasis for those who need to unwind and recharge their batteries.
It was so nice to go there on a warm gentle evening, enjoy some delicious vegetarian food and catch up with so many people I had not seen for years. I was delighted to see so many people of all ages there, mingling with ease, even with people they had not met before: the common link was the place and its philosophy, and that was enough.
The second party was also a celebration of things complementary. This time, it was the presentation of certificates and badges to the healers who passed the official assessment to become fully registered healers, in accordance with the new regulations covering complementary therapists in the UK.
International healer and medium, Douglas Ballard, has been working with the two groups for just about a year. It was a great compliment to all involved that the groups achieved a 100 per cent pass rate. The assessors praised the high standards of both theory and practice, and I get the feeling they would not refuse an invitation to come back to the Algarve branch of Kent Healers, to share their knowledge and experience in the area of healing.
So the Algarve now has an active nucleus of 15 healers, qualified and registered to UK standards – another step towards offering natural healing for those in pain. I would personally like to congratulate each and every one of them for reaching the European standard for healing.
I don’t often buy English newspapers, I find them quite depressing, but I bought a copy of The Observer a couple of weeks ago. The headline read ‘$55bn Africa debt deal, a victory for millions’, and the article talked of ‘the historic deal to free more than 30 poor countries from the crippling shackles of debt to the West’. Bob Geldof hailed the deal, brokered largely by UK Chancellor Gordon Brown. He was quoted as saying: “Tomorrow, 280 million Africans will wake up for the first time in their lives without owing you or me a penny from the burden of debt that has crippled them and their countries for so long. Money we didn’t know we were owed and never wanted in the first place, and money they could never pay.”
On page two of this same paper, however, was another piece that totally burst the feel-good bubble. Under the headline ‘UK arms sales to Africa reach £1 billion mark’, the article explained that weapon sales to African countries quadrupled between 1999 and 2004. Many export licenses granted by the Department of Trade & Industry, involved the sale of arms to some of the most deprived states, and countries with the poorest human rights records. Among the exports listed are the following:
• over £30 million of military equipment sold to Angola
•licences for sale of £3.6 million of military equipment to Malawi, one of the least developed countries in the world
•licences for export for military equipment to countries such as Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia and Nabibia – the only time you normally hear of these countries is when images of starving children and homeless refugees reach the TV screens.
•licences to Uganda, hardly known as one of the nicest regimes in the world
•UK arms sales to Nigeria up tenfold since 2000, to £53 million, including armoured vehicles and large calibre artillery.
That is just obscene. How dare the British government pat itself on the back and take the glory for leading the way on wiping out debt, when its own arms sales to these same countries is playing a part in the misery of the people? Geldof is right – these 280 million people were probably unaware of the debt, but sure as hell they knew all about the tanks and guns and grenades that forced them from their homes, and killed their families and friends.
And, as if that was not enough, there was a letter in this same paper or another around the same time, from a man who had been involved in supervising the distribution of funds after one of the early major donations – from memory it was Band Aid or Live Aid. He asked that there should be a system for controlling how the £35 million for one particular country was to be spent. The request was refused internationally, saying it would be ‘churlish’ to tell a country how to spend aid funding. Two months later, the despotic leader of that same country spent £30 million on a new private jet.
I think it is wonderful that debt to these impoverished countries has been wiped out, and I congratulate all the countries who have agreed to this long overdue gesture. I wonder if it is a condition of any such agreement that the leaders promise to put into place programmes to rebuild the lives of their people, instead of killing them. And then, instead of selling weapons of war, these smug countries such as England could sell material, equipment and know-how, to provide long-term security to the people and the possibility of knowing that they can, finally, look after themselves in the peace they deserve.
