energy surge

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  Well, I have had several days of real productivity in recreating my Golden Child website. It is a tedious task for me and I am having a lot of outside stressors.

Errands have to be done, things need to be bought, money has to be made, the dishwasher needs unloading/loading…it goes on and on and most times I am overwhelmed. But here I sit, working at this computer much of the day.

This new and improved site will be a Flash XML site and although the creators of the template assured me that there need be no coding and the site will be easy to modify I find that not to be the case.

When you are altering anything in an XML file you will quickly find that having a space or a quotation mark out of place will prevent the site from working.

Look at it this way. It’s like writing a book and forgetting a comma on one page in chapter 6, then finding that your table of contents has vanished. Imagine that you don’t know that a comma is missing. You have to find out why you TOC has vanished and fix the problem. That takes a lot of trial and error and a lot of time and frustration.

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Yet, I am the only one who can do this. Like all art forms, I am the only one who has this dream in my head. I know what I want it to look like and sound like and feel like. Even if I did have the hundreds of dollars it would take to pay someone, I would still have to find the photos, do the interviews, create the Power Point presentations, the quizzes the puzzles etc. The paid person could only put everything together and make sure it all worked.

Right now I am just trying to get the basic elements together for launching. Like all web sites it will be an ongoing project. But just as I take pride in having the first comprehensive informational site for pan-Africans with albinism, I also want it to be the best site for pan-Africans with albinism that I can make.

So, I will work on my albinism site and this Zebracorn site and my art and my writing each day until I am satisfied with my product.

As a Creative, I don’t think I have a choice.

Tags: computer, site update, web site

Yes I’m different, so what?

In one of the X men movies, I think it was the last one, the good doctors wanted to “cure” all of the X men. That spoke to people with differences and disabilities of every description.

Some in the movie wanted a cure and some rejected it. The “normal” people couldn’t understand why some didn’t want to be “helped”.

Of course I thought about us.

What people do is give those who are different a “disease”. They call it a disease or condition or illness or say you “suffer from” something. It’s their own mental illness and paranoia that makes them uncomfortable with anyone different.

There are pigmentoids out there who think we must want to be like them…poor things that we are. After all, they are sooo perfect we can’t help but envy them. One of my college mates even said that to me thinking I would agree with her. The look I gave her shut her up.

When people ask you wouldn’t you rather be “normal” they are asking if you wouldn’t rather be like them. People have even said the worst thing in the world would be to have a child that doesn’t look like everyone else. They would rather abort a child or put her through painful surgeries that have her be different.

I have read several books on eugenics. That’s the practice of breeding people. You would be surprised how many people believe in it. If you are thinking how evil Hitler was, understand that he got his ideas from America: from famous and beloved people like Darwin and his father and brother who thought the world would be a better place if the not-so-perfect people would just go away.

Well, it’s never going to happen. No person born, who has ever been born or who has yet to be born will have perfect genes. It’s not possible. It’s the way we’re built. It is necessary for evolution and maybe survival. It’s necessary for diversity. Whether you can see it or not, everyone has something different about them. It may be manifest in having a brown eye and a blue eye or being short or being allergic to strawberries or having albinism. Sometimes it has devastating effects, sometimes it’s minor.

So why sweat about it? You are who you are and your kids will be who they will be.

Finally, we are being heard

On Friday October 2nd ABC’s 20/20 aired a program about albinism. I first thought it was going to be a sensationalized account of the life of the poor thing albino. I was very pleased to find that in my opinion this was (for the most part) not the case.

There were some profiles of children and the trouble they had in school. There were some profiles of successful adults.

The most powerful part for me was the segment about how albinos are being killed in Africa. Poverty has created a violent and bloody outbreak of murders. Children are being hacked apart in front of their families. And sometimes the families are the culprits. I told LIB about this a year ago. Some did not want to believe I was telling the truth. Here is proof. Someone has heard.

Someone has heard and answered the call. There is an organization called Under the Same Sun that was formed to help what I consider my people: my family. They also help provide sunscreen, sunglasses and hats. The sun is poisonous to our skin, and we are extremely sensitive to light.

On Sunday, October 18 two more shows were aired. One was on The Learning Channel and was called Albino Island. It also spoke of the violence going on the Congo. It spoke about how albino children are being protected by housing them in camps. Adults are also being treated as if they (we) were an endangered species.

The other show was on animal planet and was a bit less flattering. I only mention this show because most people don’t now anything about albinism. I am as fascinated by albino animals as anyone else. This show featured a white dolphin, a nest of white alligators, and several other beautiful creatures.

What both TLC and 20/20 failed to say was that there is another myth going around about albinos. If you have sex with an albino she will remove your AIDS. Albino girls are being gang raped at a high rate.

For more information on the 20/20 show and to see some videos go to this website:

For information on TLC’s Albino Island go to this great post

To find out what you can do to help go to Under the Same Sun

Also go to Albinism Aid

Virginia
The Golden Child

Tags: Africa, Congo, killings, South Africa, Tanzania, TV shows

A big job

I am finally getting around to it after a very long time. I am revamping the Golden Child site.

There have been many revisions on my home computer but I kept abandoning them. They just weren’t to my liking. I made many CSS sites that didn’t work, or had so many problems that I got bored with them. I wound up just redoing the home page.

I even downloaded a Word Press site, and transferred most of the information. I didn’t like that one either.

I finally found a template to use. It’s xml and Flash and I really like it. I may have to provide a mirror site for those who cannot use Flash. Transferring all the historic information and adding new things is proving to be a daunting task. And I am not known for speed. Everything I do is slow, methodical and I hope, well thought out.

It would be so much easier to have an expert do it for me but I don’t have the money to pay anyone and I am a control freak. This site will have more than 30 pages so bear with me as I delete, include, tweak, revise and make sure all the graphics and text are just right.

Once the new site is up, this blog will go away. (Not that anyone is reading it.) It will be incorporated into the new site along with some nice surprises.

I will send out announcements when it is done. It will take me a while but you have waited this long, I hope you will enjoy the new site

Tags: CSS, Flash, update, web site, xml