November 2017 | DUNA BLOG

The world looks very different to one who started with the UN in the summer of 1969 as a summer substitute for the on-vacation librarian with the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation.

There reports were coming in on what was happening to people who had worn plaid clothing on that day.  The plaids were forever carved on their bodies, with the different colors taking in different levels of radiation.  Of course, that was many years after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and thousands had died from intense radiation in the very beginning while others had lingered on weeks, months or years with lesser doses.  There were the plants who had grown profusely and those that had perished, some coming with new forms as their basic genes had been altered.

The devastation and changes of any future nuclear war are real not just a science fiction film.

The world looks different to someone who in the nineteen seventies interpreted scientists from all over the world as they saw that wells in the Sahel (North Africa) had to be dug deeper and deeper to bring up any water. Desertification was already present then.

The world looks different to someone who in 1974 sat with the people heading the newly created United Nations Population Fun as the debate went on with what type of life would be possible if the world population would continue to grow as it was growing at that point.  At that time the world population stood at four billion. Now we are heading toward eight billion and displacement and migration, due to wars and poverty have surpassed the levels of the aftermath of a horrible World War II.

The world looks different to someone whose closest friends during the seventies, the eighties and the nineties were people of colors ranging from light beige to deep browns, of cultures from East, the West, the North and South of a small planet, of nation states under one person rule to those based on elections, of faiths going back thousands of years to those formed  in the last century, from those whose diets included animals to those who diets even restricted what could be included from the plant kingdom, from those whose music was based on drums to those with hundreds of instruments, to those whose movements were carefully moderated to those who were finding ways to extend the use of every limb.

The community of those working with the UN is also limited, as it is overwhelmingly based on those with some education and a willingness to be with others who are not quite like them. It is a community which sees as its boundary the planet we all share.

It is a community which has a hard time understanding how those in other communities throughout the earth cannot see what is happening at a global scale and are not yet ready to accept the adaptations and sacrifices we must all – homo sapiens, that is knowledgeable humans -  make in order to survive and thrive.

Tatiana Androsov
Advocacy  Chair
Dallas United Nations Association