Below is from his personal blog which you can visit at: http://bryanmonzon.com/blog or follow him on twitter @bryanmonzon

After a long couple of days of travel, I’ve yet to arrive in Haiti but I’m one step away. I’ve flown across the United States to Tampa, Florida and drove in the rain through a tornado warning into Miami. We’re at the Marriot where, on Super Bowl weekend, we have 6 rooms for one night at $40.00 total! Jared Brown, Co-Founder of Project 81 and organizer of this trip, somehow managed to pull this feat off.

I’m rooming with Greg and James, two native Haitians making the journey along with the team. The team is quite a crew. There’s 18 total of us and team members skills vary from neurosurgeon to journalists. I am the team’s videographer.
We leave tomorrow on a US military aid plane at 1:30pm EST. The flight is less than 2 hours long and we will certainly be inserted into a world like we’ve never imagined. I was in the San Bernadino mountains during the ‘94 Northridge earthquakes and I remember the images of the 1989 San Francisco quake. It’s hard for an economic powerhouse like California and America to recover from such destruction, let alone a nation already impoverished before the catastrophe.

What to expect from this trip would be impossible. It’s such an awkward thing for people who want to wish us well and say “have fun” or “oooh that’ll be exciting”. While the adventure is an adventure, I would much rather visit on different terms. The quake happened, I have skills that could be used and the opportunity was available. I’m thankful for that and look forward to meeting more wonderful people.

With all of this I realize more and more that this is where I want to be. Traveling to meet people, hopefully meet their needs and gain a fantastic friendship that lasts a lifetime.

Today, December 7th, is the first ever choicemob, and you’re invited.  What’s a choicemob?  It is a coalition of proactive consumers joining together to support companies that uphold our common values: Fairness, Compassion, and Respect for the Earth.  Today we’re flexing our consumer, gift-buying muscle in support of Better World Books.

The choicemob community believes that business is changing our world, so we need to change business.  By ‘mobbing’ socially proactive companies with sales and attention, we can make them the envy of their competitors and draw more companies into the practice of social values.

The more we shift our buying to companies that uphold our common values, and the more noise we make about it, the more the business world will embrace Fairness, Compassion, and Respect for the Earth.

Join the choicemob.  Show the world that our values mean business.

This is a great opportunity to spread the word about Joseph Kony’s war, and gather some much-needed money to support Invisible Children’s many on-the-ground development programs and advocacy operations. Thirty seconds of your time can go a long way for many of the war-affected children in our Visible Child Scholarship Program or the women of our MEND Initiative.

Please click HERE! and vote. You can vote up to 20 times, and your 10 study group partners can vote 200 times. My 14 Facebook friends Your 600 Facebook friends can vote 12,000 times. You get the drift.

The film follows 5 African Leaders as they journey to restore hope and deal with realities through community and persistent prayer. After the film there will be a time of discussion with:

Director of Pray With Africa – Cary Graham
Narrator of film – Ciona Rouse
Filmmaker – Austin Flack
Please join us. If you have any questions or need more information please email Anna Azarjew at aazarjew@gmail.com

Learn more and join our prayer community at www.praywithafrica.com

The End (Jake’s Story) from Nuru International on Vimeo.

www.invisiblechildren.com

By KWANG-TAE KIM, The Associated Press
10:11 a.m. August 16, 2009

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korean leader Kim Jong Il held talks with the head of South Korea’s Hyundai Group, the North’s state media reported Sunday, in a rare meeting that could warm prospects for a resumption of stalled cross-border projects.

Meanwhile, North Korea warned the United States and South Korea of “merciless retaliation” over sanctions imposed on the communist country, and nuclear attacks in response to any atomic provocation.

Kim and Hyun Jeong-eun, Hyundai’s chairwoman, had a “cordial talk,” on Sunday, the Korean Central News Agency reported in a brief dispatch from Pyongyang, though it provided few details.

Just days earlier, the North freed a Hyundai worker whom it had detained for months. Pyongyang accused the worker of denouncing North Korea’s government.

For the rest of the article CLICK HERE

Before he becomes a forgotten footnote in Aung San Suu Kyi’s biography, it’s worth pausing to consider the price John Yettaw is about to pay for his unauthorized nighttime swim. On Aug. 11, Yettaw, 53, was sentenced to seven years in a Burmese prison for donning a pair of flippers and paddling across a lake to the Rangoon home of Suu Kyi, the pro-democracy dissident and Nobel laureate. (Suu Kyi received an additional 18 months of house arrest for violating the terms of her sentence by sheltering the Missouri native.) Seven years is a stiffer sentence than many had expected for Yettaw, who is said to suffer mental problems. Even worse: four of those years will consist of “hard labor” — a punishment whose severity shouldn’t go underrated.

Disciplining wrongdoers with arduous physical activity stretches as least as far back as the ancient Greeks — and it’s always really sucked. Homer’s Odyssey recalls the plight of Sisyphus, the Corinthian King consigned to nudging a boulder up a hill for all eternity; according to the gods’ twisted decree, when he neared the top of the hill, the rock would come tumbling down. Rehabilitation in 19th century England took a page from the Greeks’ prescription for soul-crushing drudgery: inmates would be forced to trek endlessly on treadmills, pass their days turning purposeless cranks for thousands of revolutions at a time, or shuttle cannonballs back and forth in an activity known as the “shot drill.” Among those subjected to forced labor in British prisons was scribe Oscar Wilde, who toiled for two years on charges of public indecency.

In the first half of the 20th century, both Hitler’s Nazis and Stalin’s Soviets used forced labor to build up their infrastructure. From 1918 to 1956, between 15 and 30 million people are estimated to have died toiling in the notorious Soviet gulag from exhaustion, illness and malnutrition brought on by 14-hour days felling trees, digging in the frigid Siberian tundra or mining coal. Often the labor was as fruitless as the punishments devised by the British. In the early 1930s, more than 100,000 prisoners toiled to construct a canal between the White and Baltic Seas — which turned out to be too narrow and shallow to service most vessels.

For the rest of the article CLICK HERE

Remba Beauty Initiative from Ricky Norris on Vimeo.