A gang child in the street in Río de Janeiro
A child armed with AK-47 in Kivu
A miner child in Potosí
A child in a brothel in Phnom Penh
An abandouned child in an lost orphanage in China
A sick of malaria child in Kisangani
An organ-bank child in East Europe
An amputated child in Freetown
It’s Xmas for them too. It’s up to us if they realise.
On Tuesday we have the Christmas party in Portiño. Last year we couldn’t celebrate this because the lack of volunteers, but this quarter two new volunteers, Tamara and Carolina, joined to Iria, who began with me in the group, and Alberto, who began last year. Moreover, Ana, the former coordinator came to help us in this time, and, of course, to meet again with children. It was a pleasant afternoon in wich we played, danced and eat sandwitches and candies. Of course, we all ended sticky 
These first months of the course were nice, but we have a lot of work to improve. We need more help. New volunteers, please!
Today was the end of a great era in the little free software movement in my University. GPUL has been for all moved from the 0.05 office of the Faculty of Computer Science. In that office GPUL born and grew. Eight years along, some great free software developers, and lots of speech series, even a reliable Conference were released from our Headquarters.
And, of course, we freaks became friends and passed much funny, intense time 
Now, we’ll go on into the Faculty… near the WC 
Some days ago I watched in TV the BBC documentary “The ghost of your genes” directed by Nigel Paterson. Of course, it was a very interesting program so the public TV passed it around 2:00 AM .
The beginning point of the documentary was “The Human Genoma Project isn’t the end, just the beginning of understanding the heredity and behaviour of our genes”. The investigation began with Dr. Marcus Pembrey’s observations at the Institute of Child Health in London. He discovered that a same genetic failure caused two different syndromes if the failure was gotten from father or mother. Over the genetic information, there must be some epigenetic information. It made sense: with the former theories, humans were built only with the combination of 30,000 genes. The epigenetic proves there are switches in each gene to activate or deactivate it.
The inmediate results seems to guide to a new theory in which our experience in the life (happyness or depression, shocks, hungry, environmental pollution…) cause some switches on/off in the genes to help to our descendants to be ready to their new life. Prof. Marcus Pembrey and a Swedish investigator Lars Olov Bygren proved the theory studying the population of some villages in Överkalix (northern Sweden) that beared famine in the beginning of the XX Century. They observed the important effects in life expectancy in grandchildren (and another symptoms like the women hips were more strait because hungry and it caused some modifications in their children’s developement to make easier the childbirth).
Another interesting observation that appeared in the documentary was provided by another scientific that analysed rat embrios and realized that the only procedure of putting the embrio on a object holder to the microscope caused changes in the switching of the genes. This fact was proved in humans when Dr. Pembrey took the statistics of Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome and discovered that in vitro children were 3-4 times more prone to to suffer that illness than natural conceived children.
Some interesting links about epigenetics:
“You say you’ll give me
A highway with no one on it
Treasure just to look upon it
All the riches in the night
You say you’ll give me
Eyes in a moon of blindness
A river in a time of dryness
A harbour in the tempest
But all the promises we make
From the cradle to the grave
When all I want is you”
“All I want is you” , U2, “Rattle and Hum” (1988)
The Dec, 3th of 1552 in a lost island in front of Chinese coast, St. Francisco Javier died after 120.000 Km. of faith voyage.
This 2006 we have celebrated the 500 years of his birth. It was a year to remember a great adventurous, man of God. His intense life was a reference to all us Christians in these difficult days.
Nobody reminds, but some decades ago, Carlos Pumares, an Spanish movie reviewer, was scriptwriter.
He wrote the script for a movie “El extraño amor de los vampiros” (Strange love of vampires). That movie ended with a suicidal (for love) vampire. His latest words were: “I had forgotten how beautiful was the dawn”.
Sometimes we don’t appreciate these simple things. Today I became aware of it.