SI MONTHLY NEWS November 2007 Editorial
From SI Exco News
Problem solving
"One nation's problems can no longer be solved by itself completely. Universal responsibility is: feeling for other people's suffering as we feel for our own. It is the realisation that even our enemy is entirely motivated by the quest for happiness."
The Dalai Lama
Problem solving was in my mind as I investigated my overheating car engine to find water squirting out of a pipe. This generated the next problem of not getting to work so phoning in the lessons for my students. Thinking of the projects they were doing I asked them to write about the problems they had encountered and how they solved them.
What do we mean by problem?
What do we mean by solving?
A problem is something that disrupts our routine. Something that needs to be changed in some way to allow us to continue.
Solving is that changing of the circumstances to remove the problem and allowing us to continue.
However what is a problem to one person may not have equal importance to another. The car was a big problem to me whereas the mechanic had it solved quite quickly. Setting the lessons was a minor problem to me but rather larger for the person having to administer them.
These are minor problems relative to the world.
Servas was created to try and help solve the global problem of fighting and help replace it with peace. Servas is working on the Dalai Lama's statement in that we are looking at the global context as part of our universal responsibility. We need to look at methods of solving the problems. We are doing this by getting people to work together and learn about each other. This issue shows the meetings people have had and are planning as a way of bringing people together in a peaceful way. We review how Gandhi tops the popularity charts. Our president Gary Sealey muses over some of the global problems and how we can get involved in solving them.
As Servas members we have an obligation to consider other people's needs, work together peacefully and help solve the problems.
Country email addresses, concern
The standard email address for a Servas country is ...........@servas.org eg: britain[at]servas.org for Britain.
This is the way that many people learning about Servas will try to contact a country. As the main contact for Britain I get many emails coming through britain[at]servas.org.
During this month I have been trying to make contact with every Servas country to find out their requests for SI News 2008. Over 1/3 of the countries have the ......@servas.org bouncing back to me. Many of these are emails that have been forwarded from the country address to an individual address, which has then failed. It would seem that people have given their email address for forwarding but have not changed it when they have changed their email addresses. Please sort this out.
We look for more Servas members but from the figures above it is possible that at least 1/3 of the enquiries will not bother as the addresses do not seem to exist. Each country, please check that your forwarding address is still valid. If not then contact keylist[at]servas.org or ict[at]servas.org for help.
I am aware the there is a problem with an old Servas Britain website and address we are trying to sort this.
Contact
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