Compassion, tolerance & respect for others...

I love this story on so many levels.

Whenever I've been to Sicily or the south of Italy in the last few years, the refugee and migrant crisis is a very visible thing. But I'm always struck by the generosity of the local community.

Left alone, without the toxic influence of fear mongering, self serving politicians they do what human beings do the world over.

They show compassion, tolerance and respect for others. And they make room in their communities for other human beings.

The Good Postman

I decided recently that I was going to deliberately change the tone of this blog.

I'm still going to do what I've always done. But I also want to share things that move me, that aren't 100% linked to my day job.

I want to share things that inspire me, move me or make me angry and want to act.

In these strange strange times we all need a kick towards action. So I hope to highlight things that you'll find as interesting and inspiring as I do. And I hope it inspires us all to further action outside of the day job.

The video above is the trailer for an incredible film I saw today as part of the Human Rights Watch film festival. Details here and here.

It was an incredible film that shows even the poorest in Europe have compassion for those less well of than themselves. And that gives me a glimmer of hope.

Will you stand #WithRefugees?

In a fairly shitty year so far this gives me faith. In what I'm not sure. But I'm so so glad it's happening.

Please sign the petition & cheer on #TeamRefugees.

If you had to flee, what’s the one thing you'd take with you?

Watch this on a mobile phone.

Still The Most Shocking Second A Day

I'm a bit late to this as I've been away. Berlin then Warsaw if you're interested.

At some point on that trip I saw this via a tweet and it blew me away.

Very emotional and very believable.

And later I saw this from MSF. It shows yet again what a classy organisation they are. How many other organisations would share another's campaign. Not many, that's how many. It's a small act, but stuff like this gives me hope.

DISTRICT ZERO: What's hidden inside the smartphone of a refugee?

This film looks amazing. Watch the trailer, read the words.

Maamun opens the door to his shop, like he does every other morning. It is a tiny white container. Next to it is an identical container, and then another, and another. Thousands of containers stretch as far as the eye can see, all of them exactly the same. We are in one of the biggest refugee camps in the world: Zaatari, in Jordan. His shop repairs mobile phones. Maamun starts to serve his customers. Their memory cards contain their past in Syria: happiness, routine, family life. And then the war came, followed by destruction, fear and flight. Maamun rebuilds photos and sound, recovers lost content, recharges batteries, and restores the only link his neighbours still have with Syria. He and his friend Karim have decided to provide a new service: printing off the photos which have filled up the mobile phones of the people who live in Zaatari.

Through his routine, the conversations with his friends and neighbours, the daily life in his tiny shop, we discover that no-one wants to print off photos of the war; there is much more to the refugees’ sense of identity than that. They want to remember, they want to emphasise their Syrian identity, their identity as individual people. The photographs printed off in Maamun’s shop every day not only make us ask questions about the identity of the refugees, but also about our own identity: who are we? Why are we here? Where were we born? Where will we die?

All the info here.