Today, I received a magnificent message from an excellent friend in Iran :

“My very dear friend,

A happy New Year and a lot of courage !  I wish you heaps of energy and satisfaction in all your enterprises.  I am sure that you will succeed in everything, because you do it with your heart and spirit.

Click on the picture to enlarge it

I send you this nice and significant picture, taken in the villages of the Iranian desert (South Khorasan - South Iran).

Warm regards,  Khadija.

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Dearest Khadija,

With a number of friends, we have worked together for so many years within the UNCCD, trying to contribute to the improvement of the NGO-position within the Convention and trying to show to all delegates the intrinsic value of the best practices and successes booked with our small-scale projects for rural people, farmers and pastoralists.  Silently, we hoped that our message about the necessity to combine traditional methods and modern technologies would be understood by some decision-makers, as they are in the steering seat for duplication of our success stories in many desertification affected countries.  Today, we are still very hopeful and will remain it, probably until the end of our days.  However, the day will come …

Your splendid picture above of this child in the Khorasan desert is fully breathing that silent hope.  It seems to me that this child is praying : “May the day come soon that people are not killing each other anymore, but cooperate to bring a better life to the poorest in all drylands of this world.  Please, don’t offer us loads of weapons anymore, but enough water and food to bring peace everywhere.  For without peace, our life is not decent, and with your weapons it will never be !“

Dear Khadija, here is my most sincere New Year’s wish : let us not kill that silent hope of hungry children for a brighter future anymore … certainly not in the name of “peace”.  That is one of the most important reasons I am now working with UNICEF in the refugee camps in S.W. Algeria, where we create family gardens and school gardens.  Those children deserve our support.  They all do in the drylands !

Warm regards,  Willem.