Last June, horrified by what they were reading in the news, bloggers across the UK came together to highlight the atrocities taking place in Syria. Last September, we united again; shocked that nothing had changed, appalled by the torture and terror being suffered by Syrian women and children.
Today, sadly, we have to do it once more. Continue reading
I don’t very often include videos on the blog. But sometimes I think it’s really important to let people speak their own words, in their own voices. This is only two minutes long. Please watch it.
No matter how long you have been a writer for, how skilled you are with words, or how passionate you are about a subject; there are times when you just cannot find the right way to adequately express how you feel. There are times when the world is so dark that you feel your own small actions cannot possibly help create even the smallest spark of light.
I have been completely numbed this week by what I’ve read about the situation in Syria. I was shocked, in particular, by the Times article on Wednesday that set out in truly horrifying detail what took place in Houla. 49 children were killed – not in some accidental explosion, but deliberately, violently, one by one.
Before I became DorkyMum, I worked full time as a climate change campaigner. It was a brilliant job – especially for a recent graduate – as it required me to develop so many different skills. I had to do a bit of fundraising, a bit of media work, some political lobbying, supporting volunteers, organising events and – of course – lots of pretty dull admin stuff too.
Towards the end of my three years there, I started to become a bit disheartened with the work. It felt like the results we were getting from our campaigns were in no way equal to the effort we were all putting in. It was so frustrating to be working full time on something and only ever celebrating the smallest of victories. With all the will in the world, we could organise a hundred postcard campaigns or lobbies of parliament, and we would never achieve our aim of halting human induced climate change.
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