HEALTH AND WELLNESS

                              A newborn baby shrieks in a hospital in Madrid, Spain. A nurse frantically tries to pacify him but to no avail. The baby is suffering the agony of heroin withdrawal. Worse still, he is HIV positive. His mother was hooked on heroin. A Los Angeles mother inadvertently drives her car onto a street controlled by a gang of drug dealer. She is greeted by a barrage of bullets, which kill her infant daughter. Thousands of kilometers away, in Afghanistan, a peasant cultivates a field of poppies. It has been a good year; production is up 25 percent. Opium poppies pay well, and the peasant’s family is struggling to survive. But these pretty poppies will be converted into heroin, and heroin destroys lives. A shy teenage girl in Sydney, Australia, goes to a discotheque every Saturday night. She used to find it hard to mix with the crowd, but recently a pill called ECSTASY has given her new confidence. The pills she takes were smuggled into Austra

                           INFLATION, sickness, malnutrition, poverty –these problems are widespread in developing lands. And there is no immediate solution in sight, at least from human point of view. If you live in developed or developing land, is there anything you can do to improve the quality of your life? Yes, there is! Following are five suggestions that you may find helpful and practical.                                                 NUMBER ONE: PLANT A GARDEN “He that is cultivating his own ground will have his sufficiency of bread,” says the Bible at Proverbs. Indeed, it may surprise you to see how much can be produced on a fairly small plot of land. In his book LE JARDIN POTAGER SOUS LES TROPIQUES (The Vegetable Garden in the Tropics), author Henk Waayenberg claims that a plot of land measuring 50 to 100 square meters can produce enough vegetable to feed a family of six! Why spend your resources on things that you can grow yourself? Depending on the

                             “Around 290,000 Australians are problem gamblers and account for over $3 billion in losses annually. This is disastrous not only for these problem gamblers, but also for the estimated 1.5 million people they directly affect as a result of bankruptcy, divorce, suicide and lost time at work.”-J. Howard, prime minister of Australia, 1999. John, mentioned in the preceding article, became a problem gambler. He moved to Australia, where he got married to Linda, also a gambler. John’s addiction grew worse. He says: “I progressed from buying lottery tickets to betting on racehorses and gambling at casinos. I ended up gambling nearly every day. I sometimes gambled away my whole paycheck and had nothing left with which to pay the mortgage or feed the family. Even when I won a lot of money, I continued to gamble. It was the thrill of winning that hooked me.” Individuals like John are not uncommon. Whole societies seem to have caught gambling fe

                   John, who grew up in Scotland, dreamed of winning the lottery. “I bought a lottery ticket every week, “he says. “It cost me just a small amount of money, but that ticket gave me hope of gaining everything I ever wanted.” Kazushinge, who lives in Japan, loved horse racing. “Gambling at the racetrack with my friends was a great deal of fun, and I sometimes won large sums of money,” he recalls. “Bingo was my favorite game,” says Linda, who lives in Australia. “This habit cost me about $30 a week, but I loved the thrill of winning.” John, Kazushige, and Linda viewed gambling as a relatively harmless form of entertainment. Hundreds of millions of people around the world share that viewpoint. A 1999 Gallup poll showed that two thirds of Americans approved of gambling. In 1998, American gamblers spent about $50 billion on legalized gambling –more than they spent on movie tickets, recorded music, spectator sports, theme parks, and video games combi