News in brief

An Afghan Parable ...

How do we rebuild a world torn to pieces? This is the parable of the day as told by an Afghan. A teacher takes a map of the world, tears it up and tells his students that they have one hour to fit all the pieces together. Five minutes later, one of the students hands in his map. Astonished, the teacher approaches him. The map is perfect. "How did you do it?" asks the teacher. The student turns over the map: on the other side of the page there is the portrait of a woman. "I put the woman back together and then I turned over the map. The Afghan teacher concludes: "If we reconstruct a woman, we can reconstruct the world." Nice parable, isn't it?

... and an African one

Here's another story to thoroughly understand the world. It was an African participant at a workshop on tolerance and dialogue among cultures who launched the idea: "When I look around me in the street, I see plenty of cars: Fiats, Peugeots, Mercedes, Cadillacs …Well. And all these different makes are driving down the same street. Who would like all these cars to be replaced by a single world make, the same car for everybody? No one. It's the same with God. Let's imagine that He exists: powerful as He is, if He had wanted a single religion on Earth, He could have made that happen." In other words: "Variety is the spice of life."