Castaway’s 16 months adrift on Pacific

Daily Telegraph, February 1, 2014

Islanders on the remote Pacific atoll of Ebon do not see much passing sea traffic so when a battered fibreglass boat floated on to their reef, they were understandably curious.

To their amazement, an emaciated man, with long straggly beard and hair, dressed only in torn underpants, his skin weather-beaten from sun and salt, was inside the vessel, along with a turtle.

He had a remarkable story to tell, saying that he had survived 16 months adrift on the Pacific, eating turtles, birds and fish that he caught with his hands and drinking turtle blood and rainwater.

It is a story reminiscent of the Tom Hanks film Cast Away. And if details are confirmed, it is believed he will claim the record for surviving the longest time adrift after floating more than 8,000 miles from Mexico.

The details are still sketchy, not least as the man speaks only Spanish and there is only one telephone and no internet connection on the atoll, the southern-most outpost of the Marshall Islands.

He has communicated that his name is Jose Ivan and that he left Mexico for El Salvador in September 2012 with a companion who died at sea several months ago. His story was in turn relayed to the world by Ola Fjelstad, a Norwegian anthropology student conducting research on the atoll, who spoke by telephone to a news agency.

“His condition isn’t good, but he’s getting better,” Mr Fjeldstad said. “The boat is really scratched up and looks like it has been in the water for a long time.”

Mr Ivan indicated that he survived by eating turtles, birds and fish caught by hand as there was no fishing gear on board. He drank turtle blood when there was no rain.

The men who found him took him to the main island on the atoll to meet Ione de Brum, the mayor, who used the single phone to call foreign officials in Majuro, the Marshall’s capital.

The castaway’s voyage is not over yet. The government airline has only one plane that can land at Ebon but that aircraft is out of service for maintenance and not expected to be available before Tuesday. Officials may instead send a boat to pick him up and bring him to Majuro, from where there are international air connections.

“He’s staying at the local council house and a family is feeding him,” said Mr Fjeldstad. “We’ve been giving him a lot of water, and he’s gaining strength.”

Jose Ivan was given a basic health check and was found to have low blood pressure, but he is walking slowly with the assistance of islanders and does not appear to have any life-threatening illness.

Home to fewer than 1,000 people, Ebon is a coral atoll of 22 islands, with a land mass of just 2.2 square miles and a highest elevation of nine feet, strung around a deep lagoon. It is one of 24 atolls that make up the Marshall Islands, which have a population of about 60,000.

Mr Ivan’s boat is a 24ft fibreglass vessel with propeller-less engines. Such craft are capable of circumnavigating the globe, although he clearly had no such plans when he set off.

It is not the only epic story of survival on the Pacific. In 1992, two fishermen from Kiribati were at sea for 177 days before they landed in Samoa.

In 2006, three Mexicans were found in a vessel near the Marshalls, nine months after setting out to catch shark. They survived on rainwater, raw fish and seabirds, their hopes buoyed by reading the Bible.

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28 Minutos E 7 Segundos De Vida

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WHAT IS RITALIN?

Ritalin is the common name for methylphenidate, classified by the Drug Enforcement Administration as a Schedule II narcotic—the same classification as cocaine, morphine and amphetamines.1 It is abused by teens for its stimulant effects.

Even when Ritalin is used as a prescription drug, it may have severe effects including nervousness, insomnia, anorexia, loss of appetite, pulse changes, heart problems and weight loss. The manufacturer says it is a drug of dependency.

In June 2005, the US Food and Drug Administration issued a series of public health advisories warning that Ritalin and drugs like it may cause visual hallucinations, suicidal thoughts and psychotic behavior, as well as aggression or violent behavior.

One writer put it this way: “Parents are never told: ‘Oh, by the way, once in a while a child dies simply by taking their prescribed medication.’ Or ‘By the way, children on stimulant medications have twice the future rate of drug abuse.’ Or ‘By the way, one third of all children on these medications develop symptoms of obsessive-compulsive behavior within the first year.’”
1.amphetamine: a powerful central nervous system (brain and spinal cord) stimulant, often called “speed.”


STREET NAMES

RITALIN:


Diet Coke


Kiddie Cocaine


Kiddie Coke


Poor man’s cocaine


R-ball

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Finding Strength in Times of Trouble

by Dennis Edwards: 

About three years ago my twenty-seven year old son died in a swimming accident. After finishing his education in England he had been offered a job in Bermuda at $50,000 a year. He took it. Six months later at midnight, I received the phone call that every parent dreads. Your child has gone missing. His clothing has been found on the beach front near to his home. He has missed work for the first time in six months.

I immediately got on my knees and cried out to God, as any parent would, beseeching Him for my son’s safety. No sooner had I begun to pray, than I saw, in my mind’s eye, a vision. My son was entering into the Heavenly City. A crowd had gathered to meet him. I saw my recently departed father and a close friend who had died from cancer a few months earlier. Everyone was hugging my son with warm embraces, like a great celebration or graduation. At that moment, I knew my son was with the Lord, and we would not find him alive. His body was found five days later.

I remember, there in Bermuda, while sorting through his things, a wave of emotions hit me like a tsunami. “Why, God? Why, God? Why did this happen? Why, my son, who was hard-working, friendly and had so many good qualities?” I had walked down to cliff where his clothes had been found above the churning waters of the Caribbean at a local diving spot. The tide was high and rough. If I dove in, could I make it through those troubled waters to the mouth of the little natural pool where bathers would swim peacefully some forty meters away? The voice of conscience told me it was too dangerous. Besides, I knew not where the hidden rocks stood beneath the waves that had injured many a young diver.

When I got back to his apartment, I was still in emotional turmoil. Desperately, with tears forming constantly in my eyes, I opened up my computer and logged in. I had a message on Facebook. My son’s former girlfriend had written me. While she had been taking time to listen to the Lord and receive from Him some encouraging words for me in prophecy, she heard my son’s voice in her voice of conscience. “Tell my father not to be discouraged. Tell him I’m okay. Now, I understand all that he had tried to teach me. Tell him I am thankful for all he did and not to worry about me. I am okay.” She thanked the Lord for the privilege of receiving this message and sent it on to me.

As I read those words, tears swelled in my eyes. But they were not tears of despair and anguish, but tears of joy and comfort knowing that my son was okay. He was safe in the arms of Jesus. You may say, “It was a figment of her imagination.” Maybe it was. All I know, I was encouraged and through those words found strength to continue on in the face of one of life’s most difficult tests, the death of one’s child.

How God does sends the message, is His business. Whether or not it was my son speaking to his former girlfriend or an angel disguising himself as my son or Jesus himself speaking as my son, or the girlfriend’s own wishful imaginative thinking, I do not know. I do know that I was encouraged, and strengthened in that difficult time. I was able to face that dark hour in faith and with the knowledge that my son was okay. He was with Jesus.

“All things truly do work together for good to them that love God.” She called upon the Lord and He answered and He gave her just the message I needed to be inspired and encouraged and to find the faith to continue on in life’s difficult journey. Her listening to the Lord in prophecy and accepting the message bore good fruit in my life. Like Jesus said, “and by their fruits you shall know them.” Therefore, I conclude it was good. It was from the Lord.

Are you calling upon the Lord and learning to hear His still, small voice in your heart? He may have a message for you or for you to pass on to someone else who’s passing through a time of trouble. He may give you a vision, or a dream, or you may have a sensation. Or you may hear his still, small voice in your heart telling you this is the way, walk in it.

“Ask and ye shall receive, seek and ye shall find. Knock and it shall be opened unto you”. Are you knocking on Heaven’s door for the answers that you need? Please do. You won’t be disappointed. Your message from the Lord may be just the comfort your loved one needs in their time of anguish!

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The Balsam of God's Love

by Dennis Edwards:

Six years ago my twenty-seven year old son died suddenly from a swimming accident. On midnight the 17th of March, Saint Patrick’s Day, I received a call from my son’s roommate. My son was missing and his clothing had been found on a nearby beach.

My first reaction was to get down on my knees and cry out to the Lord in prayer. As I did, I had a vision of my son entering into Heaven to the joy of my parents and other departed loved ones. I immediately knew he would not be found alive. Five days later his body washed ashore and was found by some tourists.

What helped through those difficult days? What was the healing balm? Of course, having a relationship with the Lord and being able to hear His voice in prophecy was a great help and stabilizing affect at that time. The prophecies I received from others were also very strengthening. Reading His word to receive comfort from the written word was important, too. Crying out to him with all my heart in prayer was another important aspect of the healing and helped me in ways I probably do not consciously understand.

But perhaps the most important key to my healing in a tangible, physical way, that I remember most clearly above all the rest was the love and encouragement I received from others. For that to happen, I had to confess and share my heartache. The Bible says, “Confess your faults one to another. Pray one for another that you may be healed.” (James 5:16) Confessing to others what I was going through enabled me to receive the encouragement that I needed and was perhaps the key to victory and healing.

I remember my first day in Bermuda where my son had died. While asking for directions at a shop, I mentioned to the shop girl that I was the father of the young man who had recently drowned. “You poor thing,” she sighed. “Can I come around and give you a big hug.” On numerous occasions I received encouragement from strangers that I met in this way.

God promises to comfort us in our times of tribulation. Jesus said He would send the comforter, the Holy Spirit, to us. He wants us to be comforted. But if we keep our troubles locked inside, if we keep the pain in, we won’t receive the love and encouragement we need and our healing process will be longer and perhaps never complete.

Therefore, don’t keep those emotions hidden. Let the tears flow. Share your pain. In doing so, others will respond with the balm of love you need. Don’t suffer in silence. Share your hurt and others around you will help heal it. God works this way to draw us closer to one another and be His arms and His hands and His lips and His ears to one another.

When we receive the love and encouragement that we need in our time of anguish, we are able later to return that love and encouragement to other needy or suffering souls that pass our way. “Blessed be God…who comforts us in all our tribulation, so that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God.” (2Corinthians 1:3-4)

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Jonathan & Charlotte perform 'The Prayer'

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Jonathan and Charlotte perform 'Perhaps Love' live

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Jonathan and Charlotte perform 'Angel' live

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Book Explores Ways Faith Is Kept, or Lost, Over Generations

By Mark Oppenheimer, NY Times, Jan. 31, 2014

Vern L. Bengtson came from a religious family—to put it mildly.

“My dad was a minister of the Evangelical Covenant Church,” Professor Bengtson, who teaches social work at the University of Southern California, said from his home in Santa Barbara this week. “He had nine brothers and sisters, and all were staunch Evangelical Covenant Church people. I had 33 cousins on my father’s side, all staunch Evangelical Covenant Church people.”

In 1963, after college at a school sponsored by his historically Swedish denomination, Professor Bengtson entered graduate school at the University of Chicago. There, he was an oddity in two ways. All of a sudden, most of his peers were irreligious. And while he happily took cues from his parents, his classmates didn’t trust anyone over 30.

To a graduate student, this state of being the odd man out suggested a research question: Why do some young people adopt their families’ views, while others strike out on their own?

In 1969, shortly after being hired at U.S.C., Professor Bengtson began a study of 350 families, whom he interviewed regularly until 2008. In some families, he interviewed four generations. In all, his respondents were born in years spanning 1878 to 1989.

Professor Bengtson’s project yielded more than 200 articles, many focused on aging and intergenerational conflict, topics on which he has become an expert. Now, at last, he is ready to draw some conclusions about religion, the issue that got him started.

In “Families and Faith: How Religion Is Passed Down Across Generations” (Oxford; $29.95), written with two colleagues, Professor Bengtson argues that families do a pretty good job of passing religious faith to their children. More interesting, for those who fret about children leaving the fold—that is, clergy members and parents everywhere—Professor Bengtson has theories about why some children keep the faith while others leave.

According to Professor Bengtson, parents have as much hold as ever on children’s souls. “Parent-youth similarity in religiosity has not declined over 35 years,” from 1970 to 2005, he writes. Denominational loyalty is down—kids feel free to ditch the Baptists for the Presbyterians—but younger generations are no less likely to inherit core beliefs, like biblical literalism, the importance of church attendance or, for that matter, atheism.

As to why some children follow their parents, spiritually speaking, Professor Bengtson’s research confirmed some common-sense assumptions. For example, it helps if parents model religiosity: if you talk about church but never go, children sense hypocrisy. And intermarriage doesn’t help. If you’re Jewish (or Mormon, Catholic, etc.), and want your child to share your religion, it helps to marry someone of the same faith.

But Professor Bengtson’s major conclusion is that family bonds matter. Displays of parental piety, like “teaching the right beliefs and practices” and “keeping strictly to the law,” can be for naught if the children don’t feel close to the parents. “Without emotional bonding,” these other factors are “not sufficient for transmission,” he writes.

Professor Bengtson also found that one parent matters more than the other—and it’s Dad. “But what is really interesting,” he writes, “is that, for religious transmission, having a close bond with one’s father matters even more than a close relationship with one’s mother.”

There are some exceptions. In general, however, “fervent faith cannot compensate for a distant dad.” Over and over in interviews, Professor Bengtson said, he found that “a father who is an exemplar, a pillar of the church, but doesn’t provide warmth and affirmation to his kid does not have kids who follow him in his faith.”

Professor Bengtson’s own family hewed to the rule of the nurturing dad.

“I had this great big jovial grandfather, who just exuded warmth,” Professor Bengtson said. “All of his 10 kids followed him in the faith. And it was true of his father, going back to Sweden, and it was true of my father. There’s this pattern of paternal warmth that seems to characterize the Bengtson family. And that may be why there are so many evangelical Bengtsons.”

Professor Bengtson also found that grandparents have a strong influence on children’s religious development, and that freedom to leave can encourage children to stay. “Allowing children religious choice can encourage religious continuity,” he writes.

Then there is the conclusion that the professor now exemplifies himself: “Don’t give up on the Prodigals”—those who drift away—“because many do return.”

In graduate school and after, Professor Bengtson abandoned his faith. His despairing mother once wrote to him, “Vern, if I have to choose between you and my Jesus, I will choose Jesus.” Recently, however, too late for his mother to know, Professor Bengtson has found his way back to church.

“By golly, I had this religious experience when I was about 67 years old,” said Professor Bengtson, now 72. Easter morning of 2009, he woke up and decided to check out “this Gothic-looking church down on State Street” in Santa Barbara. He entered church a bit late, after the service had started.

“The organ was roaring,” he recalled, “the congregation was singing, the pillars were going up to heaven, the light was sifting down through the stained-glass windows. I was just overwhelmed. I found my way to a pew and started crying. … I haven’t been the same since.”

Professor Bengtson now sings in the church choir. His return—albeit to a progressive Episcopal church—has, he says, made him a better scholar. He now believes that some of his survey data are, while necessary, also “trivial—questionnaires asking, ‘Do you agree or disagree that the Bible is the divinely inspired word of God?’ “

Parents aren’t just trying to pass on to their children a checklist of beliefs, he said. Better than ever, he grasps “the kind of passion these parents had for wanting their children to achieve the peace and the joy and the hope and the inspiration they had found for themselves.”

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We Are Giving Ourselves Cancer

By Rita F. Redberg and Rebecca Smith-Bindman, NY Times, Jan. 30, 2014

DESPITE great strides in prevention and treatment, cancer rates remain stubbornly high and may soon surpass heart disease as the leading cause of death in the United States. Increasingly, we and many other experts believe that an important culprit may be our own medical practices: We are silently irradiating ourselves to death.

The use of medical imaging with high-dose radiation—CT scans in particular—has soared in the last 20 years. Our resulting exposure to medical radiation has increased more than sixfold between the 1980s and 2006, according to the National Council on Radiation Protection & Measurements. The radiation doses of CT scans (a series of X-ray images from multiple angles) are 100 to 1,000 times higher than conventional X-rays.

Of course, early diagnosis thanks to medical imaging can be lifesaving. But there is distressingly little evidence of better health outcomes associated with the current high rate of scans. There is, however, evidence of its harms.

The relationship between radiation and the development of cancer is well understood: A single CT scan exposes a patient to the amount of radiation that epidemiologic evidence shows can be cancer-causing. The risks have been demonstrated directly in two large clinical studies in Britain and Australia. In the British study, children exposed to multiple CT scans were found to be three times more likely to develop leukemia and brain cancer. In a 2011 report sponsored by Susan G. Komen, the Institute of Medicine concluded that radiation from medical imaging, and hormone therapy, the use of which has substantially declined in the last decade, were the leading environmental causes of breast cancer, and advised that women reduce their exposure to unnecessary CT scans.

CTs, once rare, are now routine. One in 10 Americans undergo a CT scan every year, and many of them get more than one. This growth is a result of multiple factors, including a desire for early diagnoses, higher quality imaging technology, direct-to-consumer advertising and the financial interests of doctors and imaging centers. CT scanners cost millions of dollars; having made that investment, purchasers are strongly incentivized to use them.

While it is difficult to know how many cancers will result from medical imaging, a 2009 study from the National Cancer Institute estimates that CT scans conducted in 2007 will cause a projected 29,000 excess cancer cases and 14,500 excess deaths over the lifetime of those exposed. Given the many scans performed over the last several years, a reasonable estimate of excess lifetime cancers would be in the hundreds of thousands. According to our calculations, unless we change our current practices, 3 percent to 5 percent of all future cancers may result from exposure to medical imaging.

Before agreeing to a CT scan, patients should ask: Will it lead to a better treatment and outcome? Would they get that therapy without the test? Are there alternatives that don’t involve radiation, like ultrasound or M.R.I.? When a CT scan is necessary, how can radiation exposure be minimized?

Neither doctors nor patients want to return to the days before CT scans. But we need to find ways to use them without killing people in the process.

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