Followup: Trick or Treat for UNICEF

Well, my one-year-old daughter and I just got back from our TOT for UNICEF extravaganza. I emptied out the box and counted out the money, and looks like we collected a grand total of $15.19. Not bad for a one-year-old! This will be a yearly tradition in our family; I think it's such a great way to teach kids about activism and giving and being a citizen of a world community. I don't think she really picked up on any of those messages today (she was too busy trying to understand why we couldn't go into the houses and play with people's pets), but someday she'll get more out of it. For what it's worth, she did figure out the process of folding the money and slipping it into the box!

People were very friendly. Every single person we visited tonight was familiar with UNICEF, and a number of them said they remembered doing TOT for UNICEF when they were kids.

While I was sitting on the floor counting the money, I had a flashback to my senior year of college when our UNICEF campus group had been coordinating TOT for UNICEF events at half a dozen (more?) elementary schools. I remember sitting on the floor for hours counting out well over $1,000 in pennies and dimes, rolling the change up so I could take it to the Coinstar machine. (Maybe some of you were there with me? Does anyone else have this memory too?)

Did anyone else do TOT? Any stories to tell? Or, while we're following up, did anyone take any action on Sudan?

Film Review: Pray the Devil Back to Hell

I think one of the most powerful vehicles for helping us to understand global issues is film. And one of the most powerful documentary films I have ever seen is Pray the Devil Back to Hell (recommended to me by my friend Laura, to whom I am indebted). Here's the trailer:



Pray the Devil Back to Hell is set in Liberia, a West African nation with a tumultuous history. After decades of civil war, Liberia had become a country that could hardly remember peaceful times. This documentary chronicles a group of "ordinary" women who, in the late 1990s, decided that they had had enough of war. They decided to stand up for peace. Groups of Christian and Muslim women came together to protest and lobby. At first they were hardly acknowledged, but with persistence and creativity these women managed to make their voices heard at the highest levels of government, and they changed their country in powerful ways.

My husband and I saw this film at a film festival in Boston, and we were absolutely blown away. It is a story of human brutality, but also the enduring power of hope. And about women, and sisterhood, and not giving up. (Incidentally, the current president of Liberia, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, is the first elected female head-of-state in Africa.)

This is from the website (which is worth visiting even just to hear Angelique Kidjo's gorgeous theme music): Tribeca Film Festivals' Best Documentary Award-Winning Pray the Devil Back to Hell is the gripping account of a group of brave and visionary women who demanded peace for Liberia, a nation torn to shreds by a decades-old civil war. This incredible, uplifting story has also earned awards at Silverdocs (Witness Award), Jackson Hole Film Festival (Audience Choice: Documentary), Traverse City Film Festival (Special Jury Prize: Non-fiction Filmmaking), and the Heartland Film Festival (Best Documentary). Desmond Tutu, Winner 1984 Nobel Peace Prize Winner, says that Pray the Devil Back to Hell"...eloquently captures the power each of us innately has within our souls to make this world a far better, safer, more peaceful place."

Depending on where you live, it may be difficult to get access to this film. You can click here for information on theaters and special events in cities across the country. Even if you don't see it coming to a theater near you, though, please keep your eyes open for this film in the future. It really is a must-see.

Issue: Child Labor

I'm posting a video called "No Es Un Joc" ("Not a Game"); you can visit the website for more information. This video takes you into the lives of child laborers in several Latin American countries. I probably won't normally post videos that are this long, but I was really impressed with this one. It has a minimum of commentary, it lets children speak for themselves, and it really gives the viewer some critical perspective.

Child labor is a very real problem around the world. It's difficult to accurately say how many children are involved in child labor, because it's a tricky thing to define. Many children work in agriculture or with their families, and the line that marks an appropriate amount of work can be fuzzy. Reliable estimates state that 250 million children between the ages of 5 and 14 are economically active, and half of those children work full-time (meaning they don't go to school). Child labor is much more common in rural areas than in urban areas, and boys are more likely to be engaged in economic activity. (Still, girls are more likely to have heavy unpaid household chores in their home OR someone else's, and primary and secondary school enrollment rates are almost universally lower for girls than for boys.) Child labor is closely linked to other topics that we'll tackle in coming weeks and months: Child trafficking, child soldiers, street children, the gender gap in education, etc.

An important term to know when you're reading about child labor is "worst forms of child labor." Descriptions of what constitutes the worst forms of child labor were briefly categorized in the International Labor Organization's Convention 182). Basically, these worst forms include any kind of slavery or forced labor, commercial sexual exploitation (like prostitution and pornography), illegal activities (like drug trafficking), or any kind of work that subjects children to hazardous conditions or physical/psychological danger. This means that on the spectrum of child labor activities, working on a family farm is typically much less harmful than, say, being forced to fight as a soldier in Uganda or being forced into prostitution in Thailand. An estimated 179 million children are engaged in one of the worst forms of child labor on a full- or part-time basis. This comes out to be one child out of every eight children in the world.

To read more about child labor, click here or here.

Action: Trick or Treat for UNICEF

The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) is one of the most far-reaching and respected humanitarian organizations in the world. I love UNICEF--I'll just come right out and say it. I did an internship at the UNICEF-Philippines country office (and I've seen their work in many other countries), and I am always amazed at how UNICEF really can get into places that other organizations can't. UNICEF focuses their efforts on children. Funds donated to UNICEF go to six key areas: Education, emergency relief, water and sanitation, health and immunization, HIV/AIDS, and nutrition. We'll be talking about all these issues in future blog posts, but for now you can click the links to get more information about the specific kinds of projects that UNICEF sponsors.

Every year, the U.S. Fund for UNICEF sponsors Trick or Treat for UNICEF. This is where kids take little orange boxes with them while trick-or-treating, collecting coins and donations for UNICEF. I'm sure many of you will be trick-or-treating this weekend, so it's a great opportunity for you to do a little fundraising while you're at it! To get an orange box, go to the Trick or Treat for UNICEF website. You can search by zip code for UNICEF's retail partners that have boxes available at their locations. Or, alternatively, the website also has a downloadable orange label that you can print out and paste on a canister to take with you.

The website is also full of other kid-oriented resources and fact sheets, including ideas on what to say as you're encouraging people to donate. After you've collected the money, you can send it through a Coinstar machine, or you can donate online, by mail or over the phone.

In college, I worked with schools who were doing Trick or Treat for UNICEF, and it was fantastic. It's a really powerful teaching tool for kids: an opportunity to say, "Let's be grateful that we have access to clean water and enough food, because not all kids do," then watch your kids kick into do-something mode. Kids have an amazing natural impulse to get involved, and Trick or Treat for UNICEF gives them the chance to participate meaningfully in their global community. So get yourself a little orange box and hit the streets! If you do it, please post a comment telling us how it went.

Introduction

For the past month and a half, I've been working on a contract project that has involved researching issues connected to child labor in various countries. Most of the information I came across wasn't new to me. Those of you who know me well are aware that I have been involved with humanitarian causes, that I've tried to be as globally aware as possible. So I am not surprised by child labor and human trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation of children; I know it's out there, I know what it looks like, and I've seen its face firsthand all over the world. Still, as I worked on this project, I had moments of desperation. I had moments (late at night, reading about child sex slaves in Macedonia, and children who spend their days cutting sugar cane in El Salvador, and the widespread rape of women and girls in the Congo) where I felt overwhelmed by it. I learned about the history of a few countries I didn't know much about before, like East Timor and Mauritania. I had a few nights where I couldn't sleep because of the stories that were spinning in circles in my head. I had a lot of moments where I thought, "If more people knew about this, we couldn't possibly let it go on."

But it goes on. I firmly believe part of the reason for this is that not enough people know about it.

When you open a newspaper or click onto the internet, world news tends to be smushed into a corner. If you want to read about U.S. politics or spoiled celebrities or how to lose weight, the American news media will be happy to oblige. But it can be harder to come across reliable, compassionate information about the rest of the world. When we do get access to world news, it often centers around international politics and the global economy --important information, to be sure-- but the lives of families, real people, remain unfamiliar to us. It is especially hard to hear the voices of children.

This blog is designed to give you access to that kind of information. I'll discuss issues (like child labor, human trafficking, and poverty--all issues that also exist in the United States). I'll give geography and history lessons. I'll review books and films that help us grasp the state of the world we're living in. I'll recommend websites and news sources. I'll tell you about amazing people who live all over the world and are actively engaged in making their communities better places. I'll host guest bloggers with expertise in these areas. And although I am not naive to the difficulties of "making a difference," I'll provide ideas for ways you can take action on some of these issues.

I have been accused, in the past, of being depressing. And honestly? I know there's truth to it. I can't apologize for it. There is a lot that goes on in the world that we should feel sad about. There are things that should keep us awake at night. I've thought a lot about what kind of tone I want this blog to take. I don't want you to come away every time feeling utterly debilitated, bereft, anguished--but I also don't want you to turn away from the computer and forget about what you read or saw. On a spectrum --where one end is total depression and the other end is ignorant unawareness-- I try to live most of my life somewhere in the middle: Perpetually uncomfortable with injustice and inhumanity, but still filled with hope.

I just don't believe in flinching, I suppose. I believe that empathy and compassion are traits born of mutual suffering. And power --action, movement-- is an inevitable result of empathy. Helping is exceedingly tricky. But the first step, which must be taken long before we make any attempt at helping a person, is learning. Knowledge has the ability to slide us, ever so gradually, along the path of understanding another person. And when we get there? Well, I just keep hoping that at that moment, we'll know what to do.