The reflection which brings a change has to come from outside ourselves, from some source of light.

'No one comes here except the army-, it's too dangerous,' the driver told his passenger, a tiny but determined woman agricultural student. The area, in the mountains of Northern Thailand, had been devastated and depopulated by guerrilla warfare.

The train was stopped by angry villagers who came looking for Sikh passengers. I confronted the mob and tried to reason with them. They got angry and assaulted me.

Looking deeper one could see the destructive potential of forces that have broken many another country. The most obvious tension is between Fiji's Indians, who comprise 49 per cent of the population of 715,000, and the ethnic Fijians (46 per cent).

A document changes hands. The scroll, signed by the executive President of the country, grants an amnesty to all those who surrender their arms.

Themes considered at the Moral Re-Armament conference complex, perched above the Montreux end of Lake Geneva, varied as widely as the delegations which came from all corners of the world.

`If the Japanese win, it is because they have a society that functions,' said one European executive.

They had taken to the streets in reaction to the latest stringent conditions imposed on Brazil by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). While wages have been pegged, prices in the shops continue to rise and the cruzado has been devalued by 27 per cent. There are, says Dr Jones Santos Neves, one of Brazil's leading employers, some 500,000 children without adequate food.

South Africa is in a state of deep unrest. Recently there has been a hardening polarization of the extremes of both right and left.