At the beginning of my career, I visited a Sudanese refugee camp in Uganda and saw a two-year-old girl die before my eyes. The technical term for what this girl experienced, when you are too thin and malnourished for your size, is childhood wasting. And it was, indeed, a waste. A young life - with all its potential - gone forever.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the tragic loss of potential in children due to malnutrition and suffering.
In this poignant reflection, Linda Thomas-Greenfield recounts a deeply impactful moment in her life where she witnessed the heartbreaking reality of childhood malnutrition in a refugee camp. The term 'childhood wasting' underscores the severe consequences of poverty and conflict, illustrating how young lives filled with potential can be abruptly cut short. This moment serves as a stark reminder of the realities faced by many in vulnerable situations and the urgent need for compassion and action.
In practice
In a speech about humanitarian efforts, one might say, 'As Linda Thomas-Greenfield told us about witnessing a child die from malnutrition, we are reminded of the urgency in our mission.'
Throughout my career, from Jamaica to Nigeria, Pakistan to Switzerland, I've learned that effective diplomacy means more than shaking hands and staging photo ops. It means developing real, robust relationships. It means finding common ground and managing points of differentiation. It means doing genuine, old-fashioned, people-to-people diplomacy.
The fact that I made it to where I made it, when I look at where I came, I think is a message to the world and it's also a message to other young people who come from diverse and underprivileged backgrounds, that where they come from does not necessarily have to define where they are going.
Those of us who experience racism cannot, and should not, internalize it, despite the impact that it can have on our everyday lives. We must face it down, every time, no matter whom it's directed towards.
I think countries are now, leaders are now more conscious of the importance of having women engage in their country's development plan. Because again, and I say this over and over and over again, when we invest in women they invest back in their families, they invest in their communities, and they invest in their countries.
The more we elevate people's lives - the more we treat people with dignity and respect and honor their rights and freedoms - the more we discourageand even preventterrorism.
It is unconscionable for Russia to force Ukrainian citizens into Russia, and put them in what will basically be concentration and prisoner camps.
No honest man will argue on every side
If humans are not required to earn a living to be provided survival needs, many are going to want very much to be productive, but not at those tasks they did not choose to do but were forced to accept in order to earn money. Instead, humans will spontaneously take upon themselves those tasks that world society really needs to have done.
Any war or conflict you enter where you are likely to lose more Americans and expend more treasure is something worthy of very detailed debate. There ought to be a lot of skepticism. There ought to be a lot of discussion.
What we call generosity is for the most part only the vanity of giving; and we exercise it because we are more fond of that vanity than of the thing we give.
My long struggles as a soldier of the Chinese Revolution have forced me to realize the necessity of facing hard facts. There will be neither peace, nor hope, nor future for any of us unless we honestly aim at political, social and economic justice for all peoples of the world, great and small.
For pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of space ; the sense also of extreme fixity in passing objects ; and sounds very remote and then very close ; flesh being gashed and blood sparting, a joint suddenly twisted - beneath all of which appears something very important, yet remote, to be just held in solitude.” — Virginia Woolf, The Waves
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