Coincidences are Random.

Let's play a game. (As my friends said in the Saw parody they did for an English class: "Let's play a game. If you win, you get a puppy. If you lose, you have to take care of the puppy!") We'll call it "small world".

Let's start with this week's movie, Lord of War.
I've already seen this movie, multiple times (I remember my brother shot me with an airsoft gun until I said I'd go see it with him). While the movie isn't bad, in fact, it does have it merits, most strongly its presentation of the gun trade, it does have some structural problems with the plot, making it predictable to a certain extent. As much as I think that celebrity diplomacy can be contrived, and I do believe films like Blood Diamond, Lord of War are a type of celebrity diplomacy, the undeniable fact remains that big budget films like these with a wide audience base allow for topics that aren't usually known about, much less discussed, to be open for speculation by a much broader range of people. Whether on not that compels them towards action is another matter.

Part of the movie takes place in Sierra Leone, during it's civil war of roughly a decade. By a random coincidence, I had just finished reading a book about Sierra Leone before we watched the movie Wednesday. The book, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah is a very honest book. From the back of the book: "At the age of twelve, Ishmael Beah fled attacking rebels in Sierra Leone and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he'd been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts. At sixteen, he was removed from fighting by UNICEF..." Reading it, especially in relation to Beah's time spent in the army, which wasn't too much different from the RUF, in that violence was a way of life, is...disheartening. While Beah's story turns out well in the end, there are millions of others whose lives ended thanks to a stray bullet. Thankfully, the country is slowly, very slowyly, acheiving some semblance of stabilty.

By another random coincidence, I also read the book What is the What, a similar story, taking place in Sudan as Valentino Achak Deng treks across southern Sudan into Kenya, before Darfar happened, but still during the seemingly neverending civil wars that go on there. In Kenya, Valentino lives in a refugee camp - with horrible conditions, disease and rape rampant and resources never evenly distributed. Deng works his way through the system, and eventually his story ends well too.

By random coincidence, I happen to be writing a paper on Jeffrey Sachs, economist and head of the Earth Institute at Columbia. Sachs also heads the Millennium Villages Project, which is working to attain the MDGs, Millennium Development Goals, goals created by the U.N. (in part developed by Sachs as well) for improving human lives by reducing poverty, disease, famine by 2015. Sachs essentially gives $1.75 million to villages over a 5 year period in the form of fertilizer, wells, schools, supplies, seed, equipment, etc. Two of the 13 villages are located in Kenya.

By random coincidence, an opponent of Sachs, Paul Krugman, won the Nobel Prize for Economics this year. Sachs and Krugman disagree on how to help economies that facing economic slums. And at the moment, I'm too tired to go into that with specifics.

By random coincidence, most of the countries featured in Lord of War are in a constant state of slumminess... the "poverty trap".


And that kids, is the game.
(I won a puppy!)