When I watched the Actors' Studio interview with Angelina Jolie earlier this year, I couldn't count the number of times I was shaking my head. This was someone who, whilst having sex, experiemented with cutting herself and her partner. During a film-shoot, she decorated one of her trailers with porn. Jolie openly espouses bi-sexuality. All in the name of openness and honesty (I also lost count of the number times she used the word 'honest' in explaining her erratic behaviour cum preferences).

Jennifer Aniston had it coming, I guess.

Whilst I'm not going to encourage anyone to emulate Jolie's lifestyle, I think there are times we are called to focus on - just look at, acknowledge and think about - the good things that people do, independently of the strange darkness in their lives. We don't need to do a background check on someone before appreciating and thanking God for the good they do.

And in Jolie's case, I think this MTV Diary says it all (I couldn't register this blog on youtube but if you click on the link it'll still happen and I guarantee it'll be a good experience - there are three parts, make sure you watch all of 'em). It seems that this 'sex siren' is also a close friend of Jeffrey Sachs, whose book The End of Poverty, is the ultimate eye-opener for global-poverty-insulated people like me. I'm moved that Jolie could take the time and trouble to travel with Sachs and give the world an opportunity to witness first-hand some of the problems the world-famous economist wrote about.

Jolie's video-diary breathes greater vividness into an already spirited book. And for that I thank her. I think she can lead a whole generation towards taking action against poverty of the kind described in many pages of Sach's book. Here're some excerpts from the first chapter:

"(As) we arrive in the village, we see no able-bodied young men at all...Where, we ask, are the workers? Out in the fields? The aid worker who has led us to the village shakes his head sadly and says no. They are nearly all dead. The village has been devastated by AIDS.

"The presence of death in Nthandire has been overwhelming in recent years. The grandmothers whom we meet are guardians for their orphaned grandchildren. Each woman has her own story of how her sons and daughters have died, leaving her to bear the burden of raising and providing for five or ten, sometimes fifteen, orphaned grandchildren.

"(A woman) points to a child of about four and says that the small girl contracted malaria the week before. The woman had carried her grandchild on her back for the ten kilometers or so to the local hospital. When they got there, there was no quinine, the antimalarial medicine, available that day. With the child in high fever, the grandmother and grandchild were sent home and told to return the next day. In a small miracle, when they returned the next day after another ten-kilometer trek, the quinine had come in, and the child responded to treatment and survived.

"More than one million African children, and perhaps as many as three million, succumb to malaria each year.

"(At Malawi's Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital), there is no medicine in the medical ward. The room has a posted occupancy rate of 150 beds. There are 450 people in the ward...In most cases, two people are lying head to toe, toe to head - strangers sharing a death bed.

"The room is filled with moans. This is a dying chamber where three quarters or more of the people this day are in late-stage AIDS without medicines. Family members sit by the bed, swabbing dried lips and watching their loved ones die...each one of these patients could rise from the deathbed but for the want of a dollar a day.

"(UNICEF) has rightly described Malawi's plight as the perfect storm, a storm that brings together climatic disaster, improverishment, the AIDS pandemic, and the long-standing burdens of malaria, schistosomiasis, and other diseases. In the face of this horrific maelstrom, the world community has so far displayed a fair bit of hand-wringing and even some high-minded rhetoric, but precious little action."

(The End of Poverty, p.5-10)