Angelina (not in the tabloids!)

I have a list of things I have yet to discuss on my blog, but when I saw this clip on the MSNBC Africa page, I HAD to write about it. As much as I hate the amount of attention most American's give to movie stars these days, I feel Angelina Jolie deserves it. Well in this instance anyway. If I see another tabloid magazine cover with her, Jennifer Anniston, Brad Pitt and some outlandish claim on it, I swear.

Anyway, as easy as it is to dislike someone so beautiful and famous, I am envious of Jolie. Not only is she an independent woman who doesn't like to follow the rules, (I wish I could posses more of these two qualities sometime) but also she does something I dream to do. She travels to Darfur and tries to help and most importantly listen to speak on Dafurians behalf. Not that I could ever compare to Angelina Jolie, but I hope that one day I can be as courageous as her and write something that makes a difference. Hopefully the conflict in Darfur will be long over by the time I reach that point in my career.

This particular story is about her travels to Chad, which I felt appropriate and relative to this past weeks post. She was visiting refugees from the Darfur region.

While Jolie is limited in what she can do, I give her credit for going there and trying to get involved as much as possible.

Here are some of the quotes from the article:

"“It’s always hard to see decent people, families, living in such difficult conditions,” said Jolie, who reached the 26,000-person Oure-Cassoni camp after crossing a Saharan sandstorm.

“What is most upsetting is how long it is taking the international community to answer this crisis,” she said in a statement released Wednesday by the Geneva-based U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees."

I think that voicing an opinion like this from such a well known movie star can do more than a, for example, UNICEF person stating this in a press conference. First of all, a UNICEF person probably would never have a press conference. Unfortunately this is the way or society works. Teachers and aid workers tend to get paid the least amount of money and attention when they are doing some of the most marvelous things in the world.

There was also a video with this clip, which I found to be, well horrible; there was no voice over, it was all natural sound. I did not get a story from the video, except that Jolie was in Africa. I also didn't like how they had a link to her career. I would have like the story to have focused a little more on what she actually did there. In general the story lacked some real news. The photos below are from the video. I realize they aren't of great quality, but the video wasn't exceptional either.