Michael Henderson did a thousand weekly radio talks on American radio stations when he and Erica lived in Oregon for 21 years. He is posting from time to time a selection of them on this website as they may still be of contemporary interest and some tell stories related to Initiatives of Change's history and people.

Thursday, 10 September, 1987

This summer I met Horacio, a young Argentinian conscript who fought in the Falklands/Malvinas war. He had an extraordinary brush with fate, being left for dead on the battlefield. A sergeant came by checking names and putting bodies in bags. As Horacio was being examined his eyes blinked – and the sergeant took him to a medical crew.

Thursday, 20 August, 1987

How many creative ideas are lost to the world because our minds are cluttered with unhelpful input or clouded with preoccupations which could be got rid of? I thought about this when I considered the story of a friend in Liverpool.

Thursday, 06 August, 1987

What could be more English than a nanny. When my wife was on the Isle of Wight last year she watched sailing boats taking rookies out for a lesson. Accompanying them was a little boat to watch over their progress and safety. It was called appropriately, the nanny boat.

Thursday, 23 July, 1987

Friendship is a great blessing in life. Some people have few friends, some many. And, as Aristotle wrote, ‘Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.’

Thursday, 16 July, 1987

I was in Atlanta last month with others from Portland. We were there along with 300 people from 29 countries to attend an international conference for Moral Re-Armament with the theme ‘Building for the future.’

Thursday, 19 March, 1987

A scant mile from the devastated ‘green line’, the road to Damascus which separates the Muslim and Christian communities in Beirut and where from time to time we see on TV young men shooting at each other from amidst the rubble, is where my friend Fuad lives. I call him Fuad for the sake of this talk; to reveal his real name would be dangerous.

Thursday, 12 February, 1987

When an Indian friend of mine came here as a young rather overawed immigrant many years ago, he was asked at his port of entry by the immigration office, ‘Do you know anybody in this country?’ Not knowing the difference between know and know of, he blurted out triumphantly, ‘I know two people, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.’

Wednesday, 07 January, 1987

I first met Alice Wedega 35 years ago when she was representing her country at a conference in Ceylon. Nearly twenty years later we were her guests in her beautiful country, Papua New Guinea. Alice was the first woman member of the Legislative Council and the first woman in her country to be decorated by the Queen of England.

Thursday, 06 November, 1986

A Buddhist couple from Laos who are alive today because of reaching out to others.

Thursday, 30 October, 1986

This International Year of Peace was marked in an unusual way last month by the Australian Foreign Ministry. It sponsored the showing in Canberra of a film about a great French woman, Irène Laure.

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