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Niños en todo partes del mundo encuentran situaciones de violencia y abuso. En muchos casos su propia familia o entre adultos en posiciones de responsabilidad, es donde los niños encuentran más violencia en sus vidas, ya sea física, emocional o sexual.

Según el Diagnóstico y Abordaje del Maltrato en Bolivia en el 2000, cada seis de diez niños sufren violencia física en sus hogares. También sufren violencia psicológica a través de las amenazas de botarles del hogar, riñas, insultos, gritos, prohibiciones de salir o la negación de darles de comer.

Además, según una investigación realizada en 1998 por DNI Bolivia sobre el maltrato en las escuelas y colegios, en las escuelas el 50 por ciento de los niños y niñas sufren maltrato físico alguna vez y el 6 por ciento lo sufren constantemente.

Esta presentacion junto con la Orientación Básica Sobre Niñez en El Contexto Boliviano, ambos hechos para un encuentro entre los cooperantes de Servicio Britanico, nos ayudan detectar y ojala prevenir el abuso de los niños.

Chuck Sturtevant and I did the interviews for this short video during the 2007 Cholita Fashion Show at the Hotel Presidente in La Paz, Boliva. This show happened at around the same time is the Miss Bolivia contest in Santa Cruz, which provided a cultural reference point for the event in La Paz.

An article by Daniel B. Smith in the New York Times Magazine.

About eight years ago, Glenn Albrecht began receiving frantic calls from residents of the Upper Hunter Valley, a 6,000-square-mile region in southeastern Australia. For generations the Upper Hunter was known as the “Tuscany of the South” — an oasis of alfalfa fields, dairy farms and lush English-style shires on a notoriously hot, parched continent. “The calls were like desperate pleas,” Albrecht, a philosopher and professor of sustainability at Murdoch University in Perth, recalled in June. “They said: ‘Can you help us? We’ve tried everyone else. Is there anything you can do about this?’ ”

Residents were distraught over the spread of coal mining in the Upper Hunter. Coal was discovered in eastern Australia more than 200 years ago, but only in the last two decades did the industry begin its exponential rise. Today, more than 100 million tons of black coal are extracted from the valley each year, primarily by open-pit mining, which uses chemical explosives to blast away soil, sediment and rock. The blasts occur several times a day, sending plumes of gray dust over ridges to settle thickly onto roofs, crops and the hides of livestock. Klieg lights provide a constant illumination. Trucks, draglines and idling coal trains emit a constant low-frequency rumble. Rivers and streams have been polluted.

Albrecht, a dark, ebullient man with a crooked aquiline nose, was known locally for his activism. He participated in blockades of ships entering Newcastle (near the Upper Hunter), the largest coal-exporting port in the world, and published opinion articles excoriating the Australian fossil-fuel industries. But Albrecht didn’t see what he could offer besides a sympathetic ear and some tactical advice. Then, in late 2002, he decided to see the transformation of the Upper Hunter firsthand.

“There’s a scholar who talks about ‘heart’s ease,’ ” Albrecht told me as we sat in his car on a cliff above the Newcastle shore, overlooking the Pacific. In the distance, just before the earth curved out of sight, 40 coal tankers were lined up single file. “People have heart’s ease when they’re on their own country. If you force them off that country, if you take them away from their land, they feel the loss of heart’s ease as a kind of vertigo, a disintegration of their whole life.” Australian aborigines, Navajos and any number of indigenous peoples have reported this sense of mournful disorientation after being displaced from their land. What Albrecht realized during his trip to the Upper Valley was that this “place pathology,” as one philosopher has called it, wasn’t limited to natives. Albrecht’s petitioners were anxious, unsettled, despairing, depressed — just as if they had been forcibly removed from the valley. Only they hadn’t; the valley changed around them.

In Albrecht’s view, the residents of the Upper Hunter were suffering not just from the strain of living in difficult conditions but also from something more fundamental: a hitherto unrecognized psychological condition. In a 2004 essay, he coined a term to describe it: “solastalgia,” a combination of the Latin word solacium (comfort) and the Greek root –algia (pain), which he defined as “the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault . . . a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at ‘home.’ ” A neologism wasn’t destined to stop the mines; they continued to spread. But so did Albrecht’s idea. In the past five years, the word “solastalgia” has appeared in media outlets as disparate as Wired, The Daily News in Sri Lanka and Andrew Sullivan’s popular political blog, The Daily Dish. In September, the British trip-hop duo Zero 7 released an instrumental track titled “Solastalgia,” and in 2008 Jukeen, a Slovenian recording artist, used the word as an album title. “Solastalgia” has been used to describe the experiences of Canadian Inuit communities coping with the effects of rising temperatures; Ghanaian subsistence farmers faced with changes in rainfall patterns; and refugees returning to New Orleans after Katrina.

The broad appeal of solastalgia pleases Albrecht; it has helped earn him hundreds of thousands of dollars in research grants as well as his position at Murdoch. But he is not particularly surprised that it has caught on. “Take a look out there,” he said, gesturing to the line of coal ships. “What you’re looking at is climate change queued up. You can’t get away from it. Not in the Upper Hunter, not in Newcastle, not anywhere. And that’s exactly the point of solastalgia.” Just as the loss of “heart’s ease” is not limited to displaced native populations, solastalgia is not limited to those living beside quarries — or oil spills or power plants or Superfund sites. Solastalgia, in Albrecht’s estimation, is a global condition, felt to a greater or lesser degree by different people in different locations but felt increasingly, given the ongoing degradation of the environment. As our environment continues to change around us, the question Albrecht would like answered is, how deeply are our minds suffering in return?

Albrecht’s philosophical attempt to trace a direct line between the health of the natural world and the health of the mind has a growing partner in a subfield of psychology. Last August, the American Psychological Association released a 230-page report titled “Interface Between Psychology and Global Climate Change.” News-media coverage of the report concentrated on the habits of human behavior and the habits of thought that contribute to global warming. This emphasis reflected the intellectual dispositions of the task-force members who wrote the document — seven out of eight were scientists who specialize in decision research and environmental-risk management — as well as the document’s stated purpose. “We must look at the reasons people are not acting,” Janet Swim, a Penn State psychologist and the chairwoman of the task force, said, “in order to understand how to get people to act.”

Yet all the attention paid to the behavioral and cognitive barriers to safeguarding the environment — topics of acute interest to policy makers and activists — disguised the fact that a significant portion of the document addressed the supposed emotional costs of ecological decline: anxiety, despair, numbness, “a sense of being overwhelmed or powerless,” grief. It also disguised the unusual background of the eighth member of the task force, Thomas Doherty, a clinical psychologist in Portland, Ore. Doherty runs a private therapeutic practice called Sustainable Self and is the most prominent American advocate of a growing discipline known as “ecopsychology.”

Continue reading Is There an Ecological Unconscious? here.

I recently did a 10 day silent Vipassana meditation retreat in Cochabamba Bolivia, in the tradition of S.N. Goenka. The best way that I can think to describe it is like a long trek with several difficult climbs that are endless, frustrating, and painful as well as other moments that are peaceful, breathtaking and provide new viewpoints for life. When the retreat was over I immediately forgot all about the hardships and began dreaming about doing a longer one, perhaps for 30 or 45 days.

Unlike some other types of meditation, the Vipassana taught by Goenka is a highly practical body scan technique that makes use of mindful breathing to focus the mind but not as the object of the meditation. Nor does the technique use mantras or visualizations; instead the main object of meditation is the body sensations that arise. The first three days of the retreat focus on practicing the technique of anapana meditation which involves concentrating on the sensation of breathing around the nose. The following 7 days provide instruction and practice in observing body sensations. Each meditation session is framed by Goenka’s chanting in a style that is strange to unaccustomed ears but becomes an important source of nourishment on the retreat.

The course was given by tape in Goenka’s Indian accent along with an excellent Spanish translation. The evening dharma talks were lucid and witty, full of illustrative anecdotal stories from India. My favorite one was about his teacher Sayagyi U Ba Khin who served as Auditor General of Burma and instituted a successfully strict plan to reduce corruption including Vipassana meditation courses for all public employees. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if more governments tried this approach!

The talks were based on the unstoppable repetition of three main points:

1. Morality- adhering to the 5 basic precepts including not killing, not lying, not stealing, etc.
2. Taming the mind- through a single-minded focus on observing the breath
3. Equanimity- training the mind to remain balanced by not reacting to any thought or bodily sensation, which little by little over time will teach the mind not to react with craving or aversion to any experience

The meal bell conditioned us all like Pavlov’s dogs and mealtimes were a great litmus test of our progress in equanimity. Watching the bowls empty from the back of the line was a very concrete lesson in anicca.

I calculate that during the ten days, we spent over 100 hours meditating, 60 hours sleeping, 30 hours resting after meals, 20 hours eating, and 10 hours listening to dharma talks. This schedule was daunting at first but I found that I quickly became accustomed to low-level tiredness and hunger. They became the least of my worries as the mind careened around, thinking about various topics including:

• When will that woman next door stop yelling at every member of her household including the dogs? And can I specifically request that my dana donation be used to invite that woman to participate in the course next year?
• At least this Shakira remix will drown out her yelling for a moment (although isn’t Shakira going through a bad moment professionally, she had so much more integrity during Pies Descalzos). Oh no not Kylie Minogue, I won’t be able to concentrate for the rest of the day!
• What if I design a year-long program for kids who are at risk of dropping out of school, I could base it on Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences. Each month would be based on recognizing and fostering a different type of intelligence so that every child could identify and build on their strengths…

And some of the techniques that I tried to get my mind to focus included:

• Friendliness- hey dude, let’s just sit down here together and meditate for a while, it will be fun, yeah?
• Bargaining-  if you concentrate now, I’ll let you think about multiple intelligences for 5 minutes at the end of the hour. Ok, I’ll let you sing Can’t Get You Out of My Mind for 2 minutes now if you promise to concentrate afterwards
• Sternness and threats- you get back here right now or I’ll make you sit in the lotus position for the next hour. Here, now, pay attention!
• Begging- please, please, please just concentrate until the bell rings, we’ve got to get through the next 15 minutes anyway we can

If you’re in Bolivia or anywhere else in the world for that matter, find out when the next retreat is, you won’t regret the steps you take on this journey of a thousand miles.

Recommendations for before you go:

1. Read the main S.N. Goenka Vipassana meditation website carefully
2. Walk a lot, preferably plan to go on a multi-day trek in the week beforehand so that your body will find it easier to sit for 10 days with very little exercise. I did the 3 day Choro trek and found that it really helped
3. Familiarize yourself with some essential concepts including:
   • the three trainings: sila, samadhi, pañña
   • the three jewels: Buddha, dhamma, sangha
   • the three characteristics of phenomena: anicca, anatta, dukkha
   • the five aggregates: ripa, viññana, sañña, vedana, sankhara
4. If you want you could also look up these additional concepts:
   • the noble eight fold path
   • the ten parami
   • metta
5. Pack according to the given list and make sure to take flip-flops for wearing after showers and to and from the dharma hall; hand sanitizer, echinacea or other things to help you avoid getting sick when sharing tight space with many other people; hair bands for people with long hair to keep it off your face during meditation (you won’t need any additional itchy sensations); warm socks and polar fleece blanket to keep warm during 4am sittings; large shawl or wrap to use while resting in the grass between sessions; and mosquito repellent and after bite lotion.