Merry Christmas!

If i could,
i would visit each and everyone you to wish you the very best of this beautiful season.
i would wrap my arms around you and hug each and everyone of you real tight.
i would give you the perfect gift, say the words to mend your broken heart
i would sit with you,hold your hand and chill with you
i would bring you that special someone who's worthy of your time and you
i would grant you the love that sustains,
give you the peace you seek
give you joy that endures
give you the closure you desire
give you the healing that liberates
give you the rest you need
give you the new beginning you want...
give you the perfect gift

i could,
offer you the perfect gift! of the everlasting one, the prince of peace, the bright morning star. the one who is all the above and more. the reason for the season.
friends, i give you JESUS.


will you accept Him?

Merry Christmas everyone!

Congraduations to Zephi!!

Congrats to the newest Engineer in the house!
the one and only Zephi-Fareiheit!

I wish you enduring success and everlasting joy.
May you be blessed in ALL that you lay your hands to do (cough)
May the grace and goodness of God be with you always.
May you never forget how precious you are.

from:joke a day

It Happened Like This,...

The following are actual statements found on insurance forms where car drivers attempted to summarize the details of an accident in the fewest words.

I had been driving for 40 years when I feel asleep at the wheel and had an accident.

I was on my way to the doctor with rear end trouble when my universal joint gave way causing me to have an accident.

As I approached the intersection, a sign suddenly appeared in a place where no stop sign had ever appeared before. I was unable to stop in time to avoid the accident. To avoid hitting the bumper of the car in front, I struck the pedestrian.

My car was legally parked as it backed into the other vehicle.

An invisible car came out of nowhere, struck my car and vanished.

I told the police that I was not injured but on removing my hat, I found that I had a fractured skull.

I was sure the old fellow would never make it to the other side of the road when I struck him. The pedestrian had no idea which direction to run so I ran over him.

I saw a slow moving, sad faced old gentlemen as he bounced off the hood of my car.

The indirect cause of the accident was a little guy in a small car with a big mouth.

I was thrown from my car as it left the road. I was later found in a ditch by some stray cows.

The telephone pole was approaching. I was attempting to swerve out of its way when it struck my front end.

Happy Thanksgiving

I have a lot to be thankful for.
here's just a few:


I am very Thankful:
for knowing and loving God and to be known and loved by Him
for Life as i know it
for Love
good Health
simple abundance
joy i can't explain
another bday
my last year in my twenties
my amazing mom and dad
my gorgeous and wondeful sister(am getting paid for this one!)
my broda(beebee)
my Family (long and short)
my awesome friends (virtual and real)including u too madam gbegele!
the clearing Haze
my girl Abi, who's just completed her rounds of chemo. yeah!
the little things,the in-between, the big things, and the stupendous
the one who declared he was "the one"
my new life ahead

I wish you ALL a Wonderful Thanksgiving day

that's a star!

Nujood Ali and her lawyer Shada Nasser @ Glamour magazine's star studded awards ceremony held Monday night at Carnegie Hall.

the effervescent 10 year old clearly stole the night and everyone's hearts in a room filled to the brim with celebrities like Hillary Clinton, Condy Rice,Annie Lennox, Nicole Kidman, Fergie,Tyra Banks, Mel B and her new hubby.
Katie Couric presented her with the Woman of the year award which she shares with Hillary Clinton and Nicole Kidman amid loud cheers and tears.

read about her here

The little girl was waist-high, so small that the lawyers, clerks and judges hurrying through the courthouse in Sana’a, Yemen, almost missed her.

As lunchtime arrived and the crowds of noisy men and women cleared away, a curious judge asked her what she was doing sitting alone on a bench.

“I came to get a divorce,” 10-year-old Nujood Ali told the jurist.
Her impoverished parents had married her off to a man more than three times her age, who beat her and forced her to have sex, she explained.

When she told her father and mother that she wanted out of the marriage, they refused to help. So an aunt provided her with bus money to travel to court and seek a divorce.

Within days of that April 2 encounter, Nujood’s tale and the plight of child brides in Yemen made international headlines.

And thanks to the efforts of human rights lawyer Shada Nasser, who took up her cause, the girl at the centre of the story has begun to overcome her trauma and dream of a better life.

Yemeni law sets the age of consent at 15. But tribal customs and interpretations of Islam often trump the law in the country of 23 million.

A 2006 study conducted by Sanaa University reported that 52 per cent of girls were married by age 18.

Publicity surrounding Nujood’s case prompted calls to raise the legal age for marriage to 18 for both men and women.

Yemen’s conservative lawmakers refused to take up her case but it sparked public discussion and newspaper headlines.

Several more child brides came forward, including a girl who sought a divorce in the southern Yemeni city of Ibb recently.
“This case opened the door,” Nasser said.

Nujood says that at first she felt ashamed about what had happened to her. “But I passed through that,” she said, eyes narrowing in her black headscarf.

“All I want now is to finish my education,” she added, her mouth curling into a smile. “I want to be a lawyer.”

Nujood’s unemployed father, Ali Mohammad Ahdal, has two wives and 16 children. He is among the many tribal Yemenis who migrated to the capital over the last decades looking for work. Instead, he found misery.

In February, Ahdal arranged to have Nujood married to Faez Ali Thamer, motorcycle deliveryman in his thirties from his native province, Hajja.

Protector turns persecutor

Nujood’s parents said they were trying to do what was best for their daughter and didn’t even receive a dowry, a claim many Yemenis don’t believe.

The parents say the groom had promised he wouldn’t have sex with her until she reached puberty.

“We asked him to raise her,” said Shu’aieh, the girl’s mother.
The groom has disputed that claim.

Ahdal, in his mid-forties, said he wanted Nujood to avoid the fate of two of his older sisters. One was kidnapped by a rival clan and another ended up in jail for trying to protect her, an example of the murky inter-tribal disputes that bedevil Yemen.

“I was trying to protect her,” Ahdal said during an interview inside his family’s two-room flat on the outskirts of Sana’a.
Nujood looked forward to getting married, not understanding what it really meant.

Besides being a pre-adolescent bride, she is a fairly typical little girl. She likes playing hide-and-seek and tug-of-war with her friends and siblings.

Her favourite colours are red and yellow, she said, and her favourite flavours are chocolate and coconut. She loves dogs and cats and dreams of being a turtle so she could swim in the sea. “I’ve never seen the sea,” she says.

About 40 people attended the wedding in the village of Wadi La’a, where the groom lived. As a wedding gift, she received three new dresses and a $20 wedding ring. She was to live with him and his family.

The trouble started on the first night, when he demanded that they share a mattress. She resisted, walking out of the room, only to have him follow.

Sometimes he beat her into submission. For weeks, she cried all day and dreaded the nights, when he would enter the room, blow out the oil lamp and demand sex.

“I asked him not to sleep next to me,” she recalls. “He told me: ‘No, we sleep together in the same room. Your father agreed to accept me as a husband.’”

On a visit to her parents’ house back in the capital weeks later, she wept that her husband was doing unmentionable things to her. Her father claimed there was nothing he could do.

“My cousins would have killed me if I brought dishonour to the family by asking for a divorce,” he said.

But her mother’s sister discreetly advised her to go to court.
The bewildered judge who found Nujood on the bench decided to bring her to his house for the weekend.

His daughters had a swing and toys she had never seen before. They had satellite television, and for three days she feasted on cartoons.

Once the work week began, the judge dispatched soldiers to arrest Nujood’s father and husband. He placed Nujood in the care of an uncle, her mother’s brother.

Still the lawyers and judges had no idea how to handle her case. Nujood and her uncle languished in the courthouse for days until a middle-aged woman, the only one in the courthouse without a headdress covering her face, approached them.

“Are you Nujood?” asked lawyer Shada Nasser, among Yemen’s leading women’s rights activists. “Are you the one asking for divorce?"

Nujood replied she was.

“I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Nasser said. The girl reminded her of her own daughter, Lamia, 8 years old.

Nasser went to the cell where Thamer, the husband, was being held, and was shocked at the age difference between the two. “Why did you sleep with her?” she demanded. “She’s a little girl.”

He didn’t deny it, Nasser recalled. Instead, he complained that Nujood’s father had said she was much taller and better looking than she really was.

Nasser vowed to Nujood that she would take her case without pay and that she would take care of her. She took her to her upscale home and offered to let her stay there.

Outraged, Nasser also called her contacts at the Yemen Times, the country’s English-language newspaper. The story of the brave little girl who went to court on her own to stand up for her rights captivated the country.

News agencies picked up the story and sent it around the world. By the time a sympathetic judge agreed to hear her case several weeks later, media packed into the courtroom. Verbally, the judge, Mohammad Ghadi, was merciless to the husband.

“You could not find another woman to marry in all of Yemen?” he demanded of Thamer. But legally, there was little he could do. No provision in Yemeni law provides for enforcement of sexual abuse charges within a marriage.

Not only did the husband and father go free but Thamer demanded $250, the equivalent of four months’ salary for a poor Yemeni, to agree to a divorce. A sympathetic lawyer donated the cash.

Nujood was elated. “She was smiling,” Nasser recalled. “She said, ‘I want chocolate. I want pears, cake and toys.’”

Nurturing hope

Nasser bought her some new clothes. Donations began pouring in, with several wealthy Europeans offering to pay for her education. One newspaper held a big party for her in its office. A Yemeni journalist gave her a mobile phone.

When the controversy died down, Nujood insisted on going back to live with her parents again, most likely because she is very close to her sister Haifa, 8. Her father promised her that he would not marry off her or any of her sisters.

The girl has refused to see a psychologist or a gynaecologist. She says she doesn’t like doctors. And besides, she says, the experience has made her stronger and wiser.

She says that she looks forward to beginning the third grade and pursuing dreams she never knew she had.

“I want to defend oppressed people,” she says. “I want to be like Shada. I want to be an example to the other girls.”

Free Jonathan Elendu

A call to the Nigerian government to apply the rule of law. to renew our faith in our motherland, prove your commitment to actually working towards real progress not just lip service.

The brick

A young and successful
executive was traveling down a neighborhood street,
going a bit too fast in his new Jaguar. He was
watching for kids darting out from between parked
cars and slowed down when he thought he saw
something. As his car passed, no children appeared.
Instead, a brick smashed into the Jag's side door!
He slammed on the brakes and backed the Jag back to
the spot where the brick had been thrown. The angry
driver then jumped out of the
car, grabbed the nearest kid and pushed him up
against a parked car shouting,
'What was that all about and who are you? Just what
the heck are you doing? That's a new car and that
brick you threw is going to cost a lot of money.
Why did you do it?' The young boy was apologetic.
'Please, mister...please, I'm sorry but I didn't
know what else to do,' He pleaded. 'I threw the
brick because no one else would stop...' With tears
dripping down his face and off his chin, the youth
pointed to a spot just around a parked car. 'It's my
brother, 'he said 'He rolled off the curb and fell
out of his wheelchair and I can't lift him
up.'
Now sobbing, the boy
asked the stunned executive, 'Would you please help
me get him back into his wheelchair? He's hurt and
he's too heavy for me.'
Moved beyond words,
the driver tried to swallow the rapidly swelling
lump in his throat.. He hurriedly lifted the
handicapped boy back into the wheelchair, then took
out a linen handkerchief and dabbed at the fresh
scrapes and cuts. A quick look told him everything
was going to be okay. 'Thank you and may God bless
you,' the grateful child told the stranger. Too
shook up for words, the man simply watched the boy!
push his wheelchair-bound brother down the sidewalk
toward their home.

It was a long, slow
walk back to the Jaguar. The damage was very
noticeable, but the driver never bothered to repair
the dented side door. He kept the dent there to
remind him of this message: 'Don't go through life
so fast that someone has to throw a brick at you to
get your attention!' God whispers in our souls and
speaks to our hearts. Sometimes when we don't have
time to listen, He has to throw a brick at us. It's
our choice to listen or not.

Thought for the Day:

God didn't promise
days without pain, laughter without sorrow,sun
without rain, but He did promise strength for the
day, comfort for the tears, and light for the
way.

Read this line very
slowly and let it sink
in...

If God brings you to
it, He will bring you through
it.


Thanks Peze for this.
i may not send it back every time or pass it on to 7 people to avoid bad luck or to prove i am not ashamed to proclaim the name of God, but i read them all before deleting and sending u a hiss or a R.E. where applicable.

and yes i do pass the jokes, maxines (my favorite) and yabis on...

but this was timely and GOT MY ATTENTION.