Interesting....

I've blogged about how much I enjoy reading memoirs so I thought I'd tell you about my newest obcession... documentaries. Kind of the same genre. Last Friday night Paul was working late at the office so I went to my local Blockbusters and found these 3 DVDs that looked interesting. They all turned out to be very well made with very interesting stories.

The first one I watched was the Paper Clips DVD. It is about a school in the rural South (I can't remember the name of the town right now) that began studying the Holocast and when the teacher told her students that 6 million Jews were murdered, a student wanted to know how many was 6 million. So they decided to come up with something visual to illustrate 6 million and they came up with collecting paper clips. And then as these kinds of projects sometimes do, it took on a life of it's own. I highly recommend it to you. It was informative and emotionally moving at the same time. Very worthwhile.

Next I was intrigued by the Shanghai Ghetto movie because of our upcoming trip to China. Shanghai is one of the cities that we are hoping to visit. Now, there is one little fact that I might need to mention here and that is that I must have slept through World History classes in high school and college because I am always so amazed with how much I don't know about world events like WWII or WWI or lots of other important, well known world-involving situations. Now with that said, I didn't know that Japan occupied a portion of China during WWII and Shanghai was in that occupied area. This documentary was about German refugees who escaped from Germany and entered China and lived in occupied Shanghai and how they lived and survived those years. It was very enlightening and emotionally moving. I learned a lot and it has further broaded my knowledge and understanding of those times and situations. When I go to Shanghai now I will have a different perspective than if I hadn't seen this show.

The final movie I watched is called Emmanuel's Gift. It is a very recently produced and released. It is the story of a boy who was born disabled, crippled basically, in Ghana. I forget the exact statistic of the number of terribly diabled people in that country but it is very high and these people are considered the very absolute lowest people of society -- basically worthless. This young man Emmanuel decided to ride a bicycle across the whole country of Ghana - using his ONE good leg - to increase the awareness of what disabled people can really do when given the chance and the respect. Ghana is one of the very first African countries to gain their independence a number of years ago and so they are actually considered quite a progressive country. Once again, I learned so much about Ghana, poverty, struggles of the disabled and then was totally inspired by this young man and his determination and drive and committment to making his life better but mostly trying to make all disabled peoples' lives better.

If you find yourself at the DVD store and you can't find a decent movie, I encourage you to check out any of those three movie... I feel confident you will consider watching them as time well spent -- I know I did!