Bulletin

BULLETIN N°13 - August 2002

Relais des associations
12, rue Delille
06000 NICE

So that here and now cruelty to animals
is no longer tolerated

Tél et Fax. 04.93.85.59.50
Sur Internet.
www.stop-abus-animal.com

	*
	An eyewitness account by a student of veterinary medicine on a training course in an abattoir.
	*
	Lived and written by Christiane M. Haupt
	(Translated from the French version by Rosemary Matthews; original German at
	http://vegetarismus.ch/heft/98-2/schlacht.htm
	*
	'Only animals transported in accordance with the Law on Protection of Animals (LPA) and possessing an identification mark according to the rules are accepted.'
	*
	This is the inscription which appears above the concrete ramp. At the end of this ramp lies a dead pig, pale and stiff. 'Yes, certain amongst them die during transport. From cardiac collapse.'
	*
	I had brought an old jacket; it was a good thing I did. For the beginning of October, it was freezing cold. This, however, was not the only reason that I shivered.
	*
	I stuffed my hands into my pockets, trying to keep my expression pleasant while I listened to the director of the abattoir explain that for a long time there has been no complete examination performed on every beast, only an inspection. With over 700 pigs per day, how would a full examination of each one be possible?
	*
	“Here, there are no sick animals. If that is the case, we send them back immediately, with a stiff fine for the delivery man. If he does it one time, he won't do it a second.” I lower my head as if to apologise. “Hold on, just hold on,” (I told myself) “you've got to hold on these six weeks.”
	*
	What happens to the sick pigs?
	*
	“There is a special abattoir.” These words, pronounced in such a place, had a macabre ring to them. I possess some experience concerning the rules relating to their transport and I know at what level the protection of animals is presently acknowledged.
	*
	In the interval, a large wagon from which strident cries and lugubrious grunts escape, has arrived to park opposite the ramp. In the morning half-light, it is hard to make out the details; the whole scene has an unreal aspect to it and brings back some sinister television report from some war zone; rows of grey wagons with a mass of humiliated people, their faces pale and terrorised, as they are forced aboard the vehicles by armed men.
	*
	Suddenly, I seemed to come back to myself, and it was like awakening from a nightmare, covered in a cold sweat: surrounded by this mist, icy cold, in the dirty half-light of this squalid building, an anonymous concrete block of steel and white ceramic bricks. Behind us, is the edge of a wood, the trees covered with a light dusting of frost.
	*
	Here, unspeakable things happen; things that no one would want to know about.
	*
	The cries, that's the first thing that I heard each morning when I arrived to obtain my certificate of practical training. A refusal to participate on my part would have signified for me the loss of five years' worth of studies and the abandon of all my projects for the future. Nevertheless, my every fibre, my every thought was steeped in refusal; I was repulsed and frightened, and my conscience was assailed by a feeling of insurmountable impotence; to have to watch, without being able to do anything about it, and they were going to force me to cooperate and bloody myself.
	*
	From far away already, when I got off the bus, the cries of the pigs pierced through me like a dagger. For six weeks, for hours at a time, without respite, these cries assaulted my ears. “Hold on,” (I told myself again), “for you, all this will have an end. For the animals, never.”
	*
	A deserted square, a few refrigerated lorries, some halved-pig carcasses hanging from hooks, glimpsed through a door, in a blinding light. Everything meticulously clean. All this is a facade; a sham. I look for the way-in; it's situated around the side. Two cattle trucks pass in front of me, their yellow headlights cutting through the early morning gloom. The white light from lighted windows shows me the way to go. After mounting a few steps, I find myself inside, where everything is tiled white. No human souls in sight. Next, a corridor, also white, and the changing room for women. It will soon be 7 o'clock, and I get changed: white, white and white again! My borrowed helmet shakes in a grotesque fashion on my straight hair. My boots are too big. I return to the corridor and I go to join the veterinarians. Pleasant introductions. “I'm the new trainee.” Before continuing, the formalities. “Put on warm clothing, go and see the director and give him your health certificate. The Dr. XX will then tell you where you'll be starting.”
	*
	The director is a jovial man, who first of all speaks to me of the good old days when the slaughter house had not yet been privatised. Then, interrupting himself regretfully, he decides to personally show me around the place. It's in this way that I arrive on the ramp. On my right, some concrete holding-pens closed in with iron bars. Some of them are ready, filled with pigs. “We start here at 5 o'clock in the morning,” (the director tells me). We see the pigs pushing against each other here, trailing there; a few curious snouts manage to poke through the bars; a glimpse of small eyes, some simply wary, others clearly fearful, panicked. A large hog throws itself on another; the director grabs a stick and deals out several blows to the animal's head. “Otherwise, they'll give each other some nasty bites” (he explains).
	*
	At the bottom of the ramp, the transporter has lowered the bridge from the wagon, and the first pigs, frightened by the noise and the sharpness of the slope, push themselves towards the back; but in the meantime a driver has climbed into the back and deals out blows from a rubber cudgel. I will not be surprised later on, at the presence of red welts on the halved-pig carcasses.
	*
	“With pigs, it's forbidden to use the electric prod,” explains the director. Certain animals attempt a few hesitant steps, stumbling sometimes. Then the others follow. One of them slips and its trotter gets stuck between the ramp and the bridge: it gets up again and continues on, limping. They find themselves once again surrounded by iron bars which leads them inevitably into an empty holding-pen. When the pigs in front find themselves in a corner, they cram together in a mass and press against one another, clinging resolutely to their companions, which causes the man herding them to curse angrily and strike out at the pigs at the rear of the group. Filled with panic, they try to climb over the tops of their unfortunate companions.
	*
	The director shakes his head: “Brainless, simply brainless. How many times have I already told you that it's pointless hitting the ones which find themselves at the back!”
	*
	While I am looking on, petrified, by this scene ; “Nothing about all this is real,” (I couldn't help thinking), “you must be dreaming” ; the director turns and greets the transporter of another load which had arrived at the same time as the other and is about to unload. This takes considerably less time but with far more cries from the animals than the first wagon-load and I quickly see why: behind the stumbling pigs, a second man has appeared in the unloading area. To speed-up the operation, he is doling out electric shocks from some kind of instrument. I look at the man, then at the director.
	*
	“You know that's forbidden with the pigs,” the director says.
	*
	The man looks surprised, then puts the instrument away in his pocket.
	*
	From behind, something rubs against me at the level of my knees; I turn around and see two bright blue eyes. I know many animal lovers who enthuse about the deep sentiments one can read in the eyes of a cat, or the unfailingly loyal and faithful regard in the eyes of a dog. But who talks about the intelligence and curiosity that one can perceive in the eyes of a pig?
	*
	Soon, I would learn to know these eyes, but in another manner: struck dumb with fright, overcome with pain, then emptied; drained, broken, rolling on the blood-stained floor.
	*
	A thought crosses my spirit like a sharp knife, and it will come back to me again hundreds of times in the course of the following weeks: Eating meat is a crime; a crime....
	*
	After a rapid tour of the slaughter house, I find myself in the rest room. A window which opens onto the slaughter room allows me to see pigs, covered with blood, suspended, passing by in an endless procession. Indifferent, two employees are having their breakfast. Bread and sausage. Their white aprons are covered with blood. A scrap of flesh is stuck to one of their boots. Here, the inhuman racket which will deafen me when I go through the slaughter room is muted. I back-up hastily because half of a pig carcass has turned the corner too fast and bumped into another half swinging in front of it. It brushes against me, warm and limp. This is not true; it's absurd; impossible.
	*
	Everything falls on top of me at once. The piercing cries. The grating of machinery. The metallic sound of the instruments. The penetrating stench of burned hair and skin. The steamy exhalation of blood and hot water. The bursts of laughter, the casual calls of the workers. The flashing knives which cut through tendons as they hang the halved animals on the hooks. These halved animals have no eyes. Their muscles are still palpitating. The chunks of flesh and organs fall into a gutter where the blood flows in abundance, and this disgusting liquid spatters over me. You slip on the lumps of fat which are strewn on the floor. The men in white, blood dripping down their aprons, under their helmets or their kepis, their faces are just like any others that you might see on the metro or in the supermarket.
	*
	Involuntarily, I expected to see monsters, but it's the kindly neighbourhood grandfather, the casual young man who strolls along the road, the well-groomed man who comes out of a bank. They call out to me in a friendly manner. The director quickly shows me the room where they slaughter the cows, empty today. “The bovines are here on Tuesdays,” he advises me in the manner of telling an employee what he has to do. “You may visit the slaughter room on your own, at your leisure.” Three weeks would go by before I would find the courage to go.
	*
	The first day for me is no more than a kind of fifteen minutes' grace. I go to sit myself down in a small room next to the rest room and hour after hour, I cut flesh into small pieces taken from a bucket of samples that a blood-stained hand refills regularly from the slaughter room. Each of these small pieces : an animal. It is all then chopped and divided into portions, to which are added chloric acid and then cooked to test for trichine. The employee who accompanies me shows me everything. Trichine is never found, but the test is obligatory.
	*
	The next day, I find myself alone in a part of the gigantic machine that cuts up the pieces. A rapid instruction : “Here, remove the rest of the bone from the collar of the back throat and separate the knots of the lymphatic glands. Sometimes, a pig's trotter still dangles, it must be removed.” So, I cut. You have to work fast, the production line moves on without respite. Above me, other pieces of carcass pass by. My colleague works with spirit, whilst the bloody liquid accumulates in the gutter and I am spattered right up to my face. I try to go around the other side, but there an enormous water-cooled blade cuts the pigs' carcasses in two: impossible to stay there without being soaked to the bone. Gritting my teeth, I cut again, but I must hurry up, I'm reflecting at all this horror, and at the same time, I have to be damned careful not to cut my fingers off. The next day, I would borrow a pair of metal gloves from a colleague who had finished his training course. I stop to count the pigs which pass-by before me, running with blood. I won't use the rubber gloves anymore. Its true that it's repugnant to plunge one's bare hands inside the warm carcasses, but if you find yourself in blood up to your shoulders, the sticky mixture of corporal fluids nonetheless penetrates inside the gloves and renders them superfluous.
	*
	Why bother to make horror films, when all this is right here?
	*
	The knife is soon blunted. “Give that to me, I'll sharpen it for you.” The brave grandfather, in reality a former meat inspector, tips me a wink. After having handed me back my sharpened knife, he starts to chat about this and that, and he tells me a joke before going back to work. From then on he takes me under his wing a little and shows me a few tricks which make the work on the production line a bit easier. “Listen! You don't like all this here. I can well see that. But it has to be done.” I cannot find him disagreeable. He goes to a lot of trouble to reassure me. Most of the others also make an effort to help me; it amuses them, no doubt, to observe the numerous trainees who come and go here, who are at first shocked, and then grit their teeth in order to complete the period of their course. In any case, they mean well. There are no petty squabbles.
	*
	I have come to think that, apart from a few exceptions, the people who work here do not react in an inhuman fashion; they have simply become indifferent, as I also did with time. It's auto-protection. No, the real inhuman ones are those who regularly order these mass-murders, and who, because of their voracity for meat, condemn the animals to a miserable life and an appalling end, and force other human beings to accomplish a job which is degrading and which transforms them into rough, coarse beings.
	*
	Myself, I am progressively becoming a small cog in this monstrous automatism of death. After a certain time, these monotonous manipulations begin to become automatic, but they also remain very unpleasant. In danger of being smothered under the deafening racket and the indescribable omnipresent horror, comprehension retakes the upper hand on the dazed senses and starts functioning again. Make the difference, puts things back into order, try to remain discerning. But this is impossible.
	*
	When for the first time, in fact, the second or third day, I realised that the bloody, burned and torn body of the animal was still palpitating and that its tiny tail was still moving, I was not able to restrain myself. “They're....they're still moving!” I said, even though, as a future veterinarian, I had learned that it was the animal's nerves. I heard a mutter: “Drat it, someone's made a mistake, it's not quite dead.”
	*
	A spectral trembling shakes the halved beasts everywhere. It's a place of horror. I am frozen to the very marrow of my bones.
	*
	Returning home, I lie down on my bed, my eyes turned up to the ceiling. Hours pass, one after another. Every day. My entourage react with irritation. “Don't look so miserable; give us a smile. After all, you wanted to become a veterinarian.” Veterinarian, yes, but not a killer of animals. I cannot hold myself back. These remarks. This indifference. This evidence of murder. I would like to, I must speak out, say what I have in my heart. I am suffocating. I would like to speak about when I saw the pig that couldn't walk anymore, progressing for better or worse on its backside, legs stuck-out sideways; about the pigs which receive kicks and blows from a cudgel until they finally enter into the killing box.
	*
	What I've seen comes back to me: how the animal is sliced in front of me and swings as it is hung up: pieces of muscle shared in two equal parts, starting from the inside of the thighs.
	*
	Number of slaughters by day: 530, I will never be able to forget this figure.
	*
	I would like to talk about the slaughter of the cows, their soft, brown eyes, filled with panic. Their attempts to escape, of all the blows and the curses, until the miserable beast is finally imprisoned behind the iron bars and double-locked door of the pen, with a panoramic view onto the hall where the cow's unfortunate companions are being skinned and cut into pieces. Then the approach of death; a chain is hooked around a hind leg and in the moment that follows, the animal tries vainly to free itself. Even as it lunges upwards, its head is severed. The stream of blood which spurts in profusion from the headless body even as the hooves draw themselves up.
	*
	I would like to tell about the atrocious noises from the machinery which tears the skin away from the body, the movement of a finger, circular and automatic, which removes the eyeball from its socket - artery severed, a bloody flow running down the outside, and the eyeball thrown into a hole at ground level, where it disappears amongst all the 'waste'. The noise of the loads sent down the worn aluminium waste chute, the internal organs removed from the headless corpse which are then, apart from the liver, the heart, the lungs and the tongue which are all destined for consumption, sucked into a kind of rubbish collector.
	*
	It's true that I would like to speak about the things that happen. In the middle of these sticky, bloody mountains is a gravid uterus. I saw tiny calves, already fully-formed, of all sizes, fragile and naked, their eyes closed inside the uterine envelope which can no longer protect them, the smallest as tiny as a new-born kitten, but nonetheless a miniature cow, the biggest with a silky coat of off-white hairs, with long eyelashes, which can only have been a few weeks away from birth. “Isn't it a miracle, what nature creates?” remarked the vet on duty that week, whilst throwing the uterus with the foetus inside it into the gaping throat of the rubbish mill.
	*
	I now have the certainty that no god can exist because no lightning came down from the sky to punish the crimes committed down here, crimes which will be perpetuated interminably. Nor to soothe the thin and pitiful cow which, when I arrived at 7 o'clock in the morning, was dragging herself along, at the limit of her strength, exhausted by her desperate efforts in the glacial corridor, full of draughts. Too exhausted to go on, she had collapsed just in front of the killing box. For her, there is no god, nor anyone else, to give her a small tap on the head to help her out of her suffering. Before that could be done, they had to deal with the rest of the animals destined for slaughter.
	*
	When I left at midday, she was still lying there, shivering. Despite repeated instructions, no one had come to deliver her. So I loosened the halter which was pitilessly strangling her flesh and I stroked her forehead. She looked at me with her huge eyes and I learned then, in that moment, that cows can cry.
	*
	My hands, my blouse, my apron and my boots are covered with blood and other substances: for hours, I worked on the production line, cutting-up hearts, lungs and livers. I had already been warned: “With cows we're always totally submerged!” It's this that I would like to communicate, so that I don't have to carry this burden alone, but there is no one who wants to listen to me.
	*
	Since I've been here, people have quite often asked me: “How's it going at the abattoir? Me, in any case, I couldn't do it.” With my nails digging into the palms of my hands I draw crescent-shaped wells of blood to stop myself striking out at their sympathetic faces, or to stop myself from throwing the telephone out of the window. Cry, there, that's what I want to do, but since I've seen this daily spectacle, each cry gets stuck in my throat. No one has asked me if I can hold out.
	*
	The reactions and responses, so parsimonious, betray the uneasiness towards this subject. “Yes, all that is absolutely terrible, but we only eat meat occasionally.” Often I tell myself: “Grit your teeth, you must hold on, soon all this will be behind you.”
	*
	For me, that the massacre continues day after day is one of the worst manifestations of indifference and ignorance. I think that no one understands that it is not getting through these six weeks which is important, it is this monstrous mass-murder, which renews itself millions of times, and all of those amongst us who eat meat are responsible. In particular, all those who pretend to be friends of animals and eat meat: they are not worthy to be trusted.
	*
	“Stop, you're making me lose my appetite!” It is also with this type of reaction that more than once I have been struck dumb. Sometimes, the tone rises: “But you are a terrorist, any normal person must laugh at you.” How to get through these moments? It has happened that at such times I go to look at the tiny foetus of the calf that I took home and which I put in some formalin. “Memento Mori.” Let the 'normal' people laugh.
	*
	“Stop, you're making me lose my appetite!” It is also with this type of reaction that more than once I have been struck dumb. Sometimes, the tone rises: “But you are a terrorist, any normal person must laugh at you.” How to get through these moments? It has happened that at such times I go to look at the tiny foetus of the calf that I took home and which I put in some formalin. “Memento Mori.” Let the 'normal' people laugh.
	*
	In fact, the anatomy of the hind part of the animal, thick, dotted with pustules and red marks, reminds one strangely of what one can see on sunny holiday beaches: the rolls of fat overflowing from too tight swimsuits. Or, again, the cries which sound interminably in the slaughter halls when the animals sense approaching death could come from women and children. Being unable to distinguish the difference become inevitable. There are moments when I think: “Stop, this has to stop. Let's hope that they'll do it quickly with the electric pincers, so that this finally stops
	*
	“Lots of animals don't cry,” a vet said once, “whilst others freeze like statues and start crying for no reason at all.” For my part, I ask myself how they can stand without moving and cry “for no reason at all”.
	*
	More than half of the time of my course had passed before I finally ventured inside the slaughter hall to be able to say: “I've seen it.” Here, is the end of the way which started with the unloading ramp. The dismal corridor to which all the holding pens lead leads to a door which opens onto a waiting pen which has capacity for 4 or 5 pigs. If I had to portray in images the concept of “fear”, I would do so by drawing the pigs huddled up against one another in front of the closed door, and I would draw their eyes. I will never be able to forget their eyes. The eyes that each one of us who wants to eat meat should be made to look at.
	*
	The pigs are separated with the aid of a rubber cudgel. One of them is pushed in the direction of a space enclosed on all sides. It cries, and tries to back-up and escape from where it came, at which point the harried man responsible for penning it up gives it a shock from an electric prod and is finally able to close and lock the door of the pen behind it. At the press of a button, the floor of the pen is replaced by a kind of moving walk-way which the pig has no choice but to straddle, next a second corridor opens in front of the pig and the walkway, with the pig on board, slides towards the front of another box. There, a brute of a butcher responsible for the slaughter, to myself, I always called him Frankenstein, plugs in the electrodes. A three-pointed stun pincer, as the director explained to me. We see the pig in the box try to rear up, then the moving walkway is brusquely withdrawn and the animal, twitching, subsides into a pool of blood, its trotters shaking.
	*
	Here, another brute of a butcher is waiting for it. Sure of his target, the man plunges his knife under the right front right of the pig; a flow of dark blood spurts and the body slumps forwards. A few seconds later, an iron chain closes around one of the animal's rear legs and the animal is swung upwards; the brute of the butcher uses his knife. The floor is covered with a pool of blood at least a centimetre deep. There is a dirty, blood-spattered bottle of cola set down amongst it. The butcher grabs the bottle and takes a swig.
	*
	I then decide to follow the carcasses which, swinging from their hooks, and bleeding abundantly, are directed towards “hell”. That's how I denoted the next room. This one is high and black, full of sweat, stench, smoke. After several bends during which the blood continues to flow into pools, the row of pigs arrive at a kind of enormous oven. It's there that the pigs' bristles are eliminated. The animals' bodies plunge into a kind of crater in the interior of the machine. One can see inside. The flames turn yellow and, for a few seconds, the bodies are shaken from all sides as if in some kind of grotesque and quivering dance. They are next taken to the other side on a large table where they are immediately caught by two big brutes of butchers who start by removing the bits of bristle which were not eliminated, then scraping the eye-sockets and separating the trotters. All this happens very rapidly, the work effectuated in perfect harmony. Hanging from hooks by the tendons of their back legs, the dead beasts are then directed towards a metal flatbed containing a kind of flame-thrower. In the deafening noise, the body of the animal is subjected to a jet of flames which, in the course of a few seconds, envelope it entirely.
	*
	The conveyor belt then moves on again and transports the body into the next hall, the same one in which I found myself during the first three weeks. There, the organs are removed and placed onto another conveyor belt higher up. The tongue is removed, the tonsils and the oesophagus detached and thrown away, the lymphatic ganglions cut, the lungs put in the waste, the tracheal artery and the heart opened and the samples for the trichine analyses are taken, the gall bladder pulled out and the liver examined for any sign of the presence of worms. Many pigs have worms and if their liver is full of them, it must be thrown away. All the other organs, like the stomach, the intestines, the genitals, are scrapped.
	*
	On the lower conveyor belt, the rest of the body is prepared: divided into pieces; the articulations cut, the anus, the kidneys and the fatty parts surrounding the kidneys removed; the brain and the spinal chord removed, etc., and finally a mark is imprinted on the shoulder.
	*
	The next, the lower back, the abdomen and the thighs are prepared for weighing, then sent towards the cold room. The animals judged unfit for consumption are “provisionally isolated”. The marking is an operation effectuated in the sweat of the warm, sticky carcasses which hang very high up at the end of the line. The process must be done quickly and when one is not used to doing it, you risk being knocked-out by the halved beasts which arrive at the scales under such force that they bang into each other violently.
	*
	I won't say how many times my gaze strays to the wall clock in the rest room. But it's certain that there is no other place on earth where the time passes more slowly than it does here. A break is granted in the middle of the morning, and it is breathlessly that I rush to the toilets and do my best to clean myself of the blood and chunks of flesh; it's as if these stains and this smell will cling to me for ever. Get out, just get out of here.
	*
	I can never swallow any kind of food in this building. Either I spend my break-time, as cold as it may be outside, running around the perimeter fence, where I regard from afar the fields and the beginning of the woods and I watch the crows. Or else, I cross the street and go to the shopping centre where I can warm myself up by drinking a coffee in a small baker's shop.
	*
	Twenty minutes later, we are once again back on the production line. Eating meat is a crime. Never again will I be able to accept those people who eat meat as my friends. Never, never again. I think that all those who eat meat should be sent here, and be made to see what happens, from the beginning to the end.
	*
	I did not stay here because I want to become a vet, but because the people want to eat meat. And not only that, but because most of them are cowards. Their escalope, whitened, sterile, purchased at the supermarket, no longer has the eyes which pour tears of fright before death, it no longer screams when the knife is plunged into it.
	*
	All of you who nourish yourselves with these corpses of shame, you are spared from all that, you who say: “No, me, I could never do that.”
	*
	One day, a countryman came, accompanied by his son, aged 10 or 11, to have a sample of meat analysed for trichine. Seeing the child flatten his nose against the window, I thought that perhaps if the children could see all this horror, all these animals being killed, then perhaps we could hope that things might change. But I can still hear the child call out to his father: “Daddy, look over there! What an enormous saw!?”
	*
	That evening, on television, they announced on the news: “Mystery still unresolved of the young girl who was murdered and chopped into pieces.” I remember the general outcry and the disgust of the population in the face of this atrocity. I say: “The same atrocities, I've seen 3,700 of them in just one week.”
	*
	Now, I am not only a terrorist, but I am also sick, up there, in my head. Because I feel not only terror and revulsion towards a murder committed upon a human being, but also towards those committed thousands of times upon animals, in one single week and in one single abattoir.
	*
	Being human, doesn't that signify saying no and refusing to be a silent partner in murder on a grand scale, for a piece of meat? Strange new world. It is possible that the tiny calves inside their mothers' torn uteruses, dead even before they were born, had the best deal of all.
	*
	In one way or another, the last of these interminable days has finally arrived and I have received my training certificate, a scrap of paper, for which the price paid was so high, I have never paid so much for anything. The door closes behind me; a timorous November sun accompanies me from the heart of the abattoir as far as the bus stop. The cries of the animals and the sound of the machines fade. I cross the road as a large wagon transporting livestock rounds the bend to enter the abattoir. It is filled on two levels with pigs, crammed one against the other.
	*
	I leave without a backwards glance because I have borne witness and, at present, I want to try to forget and to continue to live. It is to others to fight now; myself, it is my strength, my will, and my joy of living that have been taken away from me and replaced by a sentiment of guilt and paralysing sadness. Hell is amongst us, thousands and thousands of times, day after day.
	*
	There is one thing left however, and for ever, for each one of us to do. Say, “No! No! No and no again!”
	*
		Ladies! Gentlemen! Let Us Wake Up ! We Have Been Sleeping Too Long ! "Never believe that a few caring people can't change the world. For indeed, that's all who ever have." Margaret Mead
	*