"Courage isn't the absence of fear but rather the judgement that something's more important than fear. The brave may not live forever but the cautious don't live at all."

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us.

We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant,
gorgeous, talented and fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.

There's nothing enlightened about shrinking
so that other people won't feel insecure around you.
We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us;
it is not just in some of us- it's in everyone!

And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously
give other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear,
our presence automatically liberates others!"

-Nelson Mandela, 1994

Thanx Nyoni...you don't know how much it helped. Love you!

I'm afraid I'm not in the best of moods, I'm appalled at the tragedy that just happened in Korea earlier today. It seems like a living nightmare....120 assumed dead and another 160 missing because of a fire in a subway station. That makes me wonder if death will come suddenly to all of us without any warning at all, any moment. It also makes me think of what the innocent men, women, and children of Iraq....do they know that if there is a war they too might die? The global dream for peace is growing bigger but at the same time it seems like the list of tragedies is growing longer. What exactly are we doing to ourselves and the world that we live in? From environmental issues to political battles, from prejudice to discrimination, and now the whole issue with Iraq and North Korea. I feel like I will never hear an end to it...We all dream of some sort of utopia, but then our actions seem to contradict our ideas. We don't learn from history and our mistakes, we only seem to make them over and over again. How sad...

"We should stop thinking so much about the love of power, but think about the power of love."

I just wanted to tell you guys about TYN, a new global youth network that has just been launched in January 2003. The purpose of the TYN is to empower youth to participate in global issues and to promote their participation in world conferences. The future effects the youth, not the elderly, but youth, so therefore TYN believes that youth should have a voice in making world decisions. It is evident that the world in which adults are making right now is the world that the youth of today will have to inherit. TYN believes that the voice of youth should have an influence at an international, national, and local levels.

The THIMUN youth network is an idea inspired by the Hague International Model United Nations conference. TYN is an accredited NGO to the United Nations Department of Public Information (UNDPI).

I urge all of you to join TYN and to help youth create a bigger voice. For more info go to the link below and sign up! Feel free to email me anytime!

http://www.thimunyouth.net

Cheers,
Hye Jin

We, as members of youth are always told that we have the power, that youth are the future. But regardless of how many times a day that is preached to us, we don't truly understand it completely. I think instead of being told, we need to experience it ourselves. Over the past year, I have realized that even someone as unimportant as me could make a difference. We sometimes only concentrate on the big picture, when really the little picture is what matters. As someone once told me, "alone I can do nothing, together we can do anything."