Fissures in Reality

Followup: Child Survival

2009-09-15T02:11:00.002-04:00

Perhaps some of you faithful readers remember my post on child mortality rates, where we discussed the main causes of child deaths globally.

This week I got some good news on my Facebook feed. (Are you Facebook-friends with UNICEF yet? It's a super-convenient way to keep up on headlines related to global children's issues.) Here's the good news: Recent reports indicate that global child mortality rates are continuing to drop.

Thanks to measures like immunizations, insecticide-treated bednets, and vitamin A supplements, the child mortality rate is declining steadily. From the article linked above: "UNICEF Executive Director Ann M. Veneman noted that compared to 1990, some 10,000 fewer children are dying every day."

This is good news--it really is--but of course there has to be an addendum. Although death rates are declining, 8.8 million children still die every year. Nearly 40 percent of these child deaths occur in just three countries: India, Nigeria, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Most of these children die of preventable causes, as discussed in my previous post, like malnutrition, malaria, and other preventable diseases.

Still, we are on the right track. Visit unicef.org for ideas on how you can get involved with the fight for child survival.

Issue: Women

2009-08-29T22:41:00.004-04:00

I will be amazed if anyone is still checking this blog, but here comes a post anyway! It has been a long hiatus, and I apologize. In the past couple of months, we bought a house, moved across the country, changed jobs, finished one thesis (my husband's) and started another (mine)--and of course, there's always that thing where we're chasing a toddler (or rather, waddling behind a toddler, since I'm third-trimester-pregnant). We are settled into our new home now, internet access and all, so I think that I will be returning you to your regularly scheduled blog-programming.

Today I mostly just have a recommendation. Last week a friend forwarded me an amazing article that was recently published in the New York Times. This article, "The Women's Crusade," was written by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. If Kristof's name sounds familiar to you, it might be because of his regular Times column that often addresses, among other social issues, global women's issues. Past columns have covered topics like sex trafficking, maternal health and obstetric fistula, and mass rape as an element of warfare. (You can access a full list of his columns here.)

Kristof and WuDunn (who are married to each other) have written a new book called Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Worldwide, which is scheduled to be released in early September. In preparation for the book release, the Times published an excerpt from the book under the title "The Women's Crusade." Please take some time to go read this article. If it is any indication of the quality of the book, you can bet I will be reviewing the rest of the book soon. "The Women's Crusade" is an excellent introduction to a number of issues that affect women around the world, such as domestic violence, poverty, bride burning, sex-selective abortion, sex slavery, maternal mortality, health, education, etc. etc. I hope to delve more deeply into some of these topics in future blog posts, but for now the excerpt from the book will provide you will a good overview, and a sense of why these issues are so urgent.

Book Review: Regarding the Pain of Others

2009-05-29T11:46:00.002-04:00

"To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time."
-Susan Sontag

OK, the cover picture is disturbing. Actually, it just gets increasingly disturbing as you look at it more, and as you think about its implications. Susan Sontag's book Regarding the Pain of Others is about violence, essentially. Every day we are exposed--in newspapers, on the internet--to photographs of violence that is occurring in some distant part of the world. What effect does the viewing of that violence have on us? What effect does it have on the person whose suffering is depicted? What is the relationship between the viewer and the viewed, and how can we make that photographic relationship more compassionate and less exploitative?

Regarding the Pain of Others is a really interesting look at issues connected to photography, the gaze, representation in times of war and suffering, and the complex relationship between those who look and those who are looked at. This book deals with the outer limits of human cruelty and brutality, and how people respond when exposed to visual images of these kinds of acts.

Try this. I've recommended James Nachtwey's photographs before on this blog, but I want to recommend them again. Take a look at his famine photographs, for instance. They are not easy to look at, nor should they be. But as you look--as you gaze at this other flesh-and-blood person whose day-to-day reality is so different than yours--think about what you feel for that person. Think about how you are affected by the presence of a lens or the presence of the ocean. Think about how you are connected, and also the ways you will never be connected. Think about these words: complicity, silence, helplessness, voice. Think about whether there is even an appropriate way to respond to photographs like these.

Regarding the Pain of Others ends like this:

"'We'--this 'we' is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through--don't understand. We don't get it. We truly can't imagine what it was like. We can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can't understand, can't imagine. That's what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right."

Issue: Consumption

2009-05-19T11:58:00.003-04:00

(Photo from the Wall Street Journal)

I don't know if this blog post is properly titled, or even if I have a concise and cogent topic for the post, but I just want to throw out a few things that I've been thinking about lately.

To get started, please click here and check out the Global Rich List. You put in how much money you earn, and see how much of the world's population is poorer than you.

Go ahead.

Do it.

I'll wait.

OK, now that you've done it, perhaps you're feeling richer than you did before you clicked on the link. Maybe you just found that you're in the richest 10 percent, or 4 percent, or 2 percent of the world. But your place there is not surprising, since half of the world (roughly 3 billion people) lives on less than $2.50 a day. And the richest 20 percent of the world accounts for three-quarters of the world's income.

Some people would like to think that this is changing--that as more wealth is created throughout the world, more people have access to wealth. But according to the UNDP, 80 percent of the world's population lives in countries where the income differentials are actually widening.

Whenever I start thinking about poverty, I invariably find myself considering my own place and role in the continuing existence of world poverty. After all, the world is rich in resources and wealth, but that wealth is unequally distributed. So the wealthy have more wealth, and as a result they (we) are able to consume more resources. This means that the richest people in the world consume far more resources than the poorest people in the world. In fact...

I got this image from a Global Issues blog:

If you break it down even further, the richest 10 percent of the world's population consumes nearly 60 percent of the world's resources. (By the way, in case you're interested, the breakdown in the United States is no less shocking--in the U.S., the richest 1 percent of the population holds 40 percent of the country's financial wealth.)

So what I keep thinking about is: How much of that consumption am I responsible for?
And the more I think/read about it, the more I feel like there is a crucial link between the widening gap between the rich and the poor, and the overconsumption by rich countries of the earth's (limited) resources.

My sister-in-law told me that when she was young, when her parents would say something like "Eat your dinner because there are starving children in China," she would respond with, "Then why don't you pack up this food and send it to them?!" It's funny, but it's also sort of a valid question. How does my eating everything on my plate change the lot of a hungry person in China (or Ethiopia, or Bolivia)? What is the connection between the amount of resources I consume and the amount of resources other people have access to? I definitely have a sense that this is a moral issue, and that it is immoral for me to consume extravagant amounts of resources when so many people don't even have enough to eat. So I believe that I should consume resources responsibly, AND I believe that we have to find ways to improve the distribution of goods and services so that the income gap doesn't continue to widen... but I want to hear people's ideas about how these two things are linked. Because I believe that they are, but I'm having a hard time explaining myself.

[This is where I'm really hoping that some of you (I know you're out there reading this, but most of you are COMMENT-SLACKERS) will step in, comment, and tell me what you think, because I feel like it's important and I also feel like there is something I'm missing.]

Of course, I can think of lots of things that each of us can do to reduce our ecological footprint and consume the earth's resources in a more responsible way, and it seems like this would be a good place to mention a few. A few suggestions, each with a link that will explain why it's relevant/important:

*Eat less (or no!) meat.

*Eat (real) food that is locally grown.

*Remember that famous maxim: Reduce, reuse and recycle.

*Assess your own ecological footprint and think about how to reduce it.

*Diagnose yourself: Do you have affluenza?

What else?

Film Review: The Soloist, and Issue: Homelessness in America

2009-05-12T10:48:00.007-04:00

Yesterday I saw "The Soloist" in a theater, and it inspired me to go domestic on the blog. "The Soloist" has a potent combination of themes; those of you who know me will not be surprised that I loved a movie that addresses homelessness and poverty in America, mental illness, race, the dynamics of helping/not helping people, group identity, the power of music, and the process of writing. It's in theaters right now, and I really recommend that you check it out if you have a chance. You can watch the trailer here.

For this blog entry, I'll review the film and also talk a bit about homelessness in the U.S. of A.

"The Soloist" is based on the true story of an encounter between Steve Lopez, a columnist for the L.A. Times, and Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, a gifted Julliard-trained musician who Lopez finds living on the streets of L.A. Lopez begins to write about Ayers' life, and the two of them become friends. He learns about the mental illness (schizophrenia) that derailed Ayers' plans to be a successful musician. He listens to Ayers play a two-stringed violin, and then a donated cello, in the street. He tries to help Ayers; he learns that helping is more complicated than we would like to think.

On a filmic level, I was impressed with "The Soloist." I thought Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr. (and the other cast members as well) were completely brilliant in their roles. The soundtrack (comprised mostly of classical music and variations, featuring a lot of Beethoven music) was gorgeous. I was also pleased because the cello happens to be my favorite instrument to listen to, besides the piano. But what really made me fall in love with this movie was what it's about.

When I was in high school I started volunteering weekly in the playroom at my local homeless shelter. I think it was this experience that really broke apart, for me, some of the myths about the face of homelessness. Throughout high school, college, and my post-college years, I continued to volunteer (and, for a time, work as a paid employee) with the homeless population. (I haven't managed to do much work in this area since I had a baby two years ago.) So you can imagine why this issue is so important to me. When I think of homelessness, I think of specific people--like a woman I knew, who had been married to an abusive husband and had no family to turn to. One day, after a particularly bad beating, she took her two daughters (ages 2 and 6 months) and all the cash she could find, got in the car, and drove until she ran out of money. She ended up in our city (three states away) and at our soup kitchen. She ate all her meals with us, and took public assistance for a few months until she could find a job and affordable+adequate childcare (not easy things to find). After a while she saved up enough money to put a deposit on an apartment... and then I lost touch with her. But when I think of homelessness, I think of people like her.

I've often said that poverty in America is a different thing than global poverty, and it is. (You're not very likely to die of starvation in America, or of diarrhea or measles or malaria--in other parts of the world, you're lucky if you don't. In some countries, the majority of people make less than a dollar a day, and live in conditions that would qualify them as homeless in America.) Poverty in America is is a bit different, and that's part of the reason I typically focus this blog on global issues. But don't assume I'm not equally concerned with domestic issues--I am. America has extreme economic inequality; there is a LOT of money up in here, and we still have children sleeping on the streets. And since most of my blog readers live in the U.S., that means some of the issues raised in this post are happening in your own backyard--and I don't know about you, but it makes me feel complicit.

It's difficult to find reliable statistics about homelessness, because homelessness is, by its very nature, a transient and difficult thing to measure. There are homeless people who live in shelters, or on the streets, or in cars, or who sleep on friends' couches. Some people may experience a lack of permanence that has them sleeping in hotels when they have some cash, or on the streets when they don't. An estimated 3.5 million Americans experience homelessness every year. For most of them, homelessness is a temporary condition, although an estimated 10 percent of them deal with chronic (or long-term) homelessness.

I know many people have a particular image that comes to mind when they think of people dealing with homelessness. When I think of homelessness, I think first of children--which is appropriate, since nearly 40 percent of America's homeless people are children (and nearly half of those children are under the age of five).

So who is homeless in America? Here are some things to consider, gleaned from the National Coalition for the Homeless:

* Approximately 40 percent of homeless men are veterans of the armed forces.

* Roughly 16 percent of homeless individuals suffer from "some form of severe and persistent mental illness."

* Studies have found that nearly half of all homeless women and children are fleeing domestic violence.

* Families with children comprise nearly one-quarter of homeless individuals.

* Up to 25 percent of homeless people work full-time.

* The federal definition of "affordable housing" is housing that costs 30 percent of a person's income. This is calculated to guarantee that there is adequate money left to pay for insurance, health care costs, food, heating, and the many other expenses that people face (especially people who have to deal with the high costs of prescriptions and doctors' visits for treating chronic health conditions, including mental illnesses). But in most states, a minimum-wage worker would have to work 89 hours a week in order to earn enough to pay only 30 percent of their income to housing.

The problems faced by homeless individuals should be self-explanatory, but I'll mention a few anyway. Homeless people are extremely vulnerable to physical assault, rape and sexual assault, and theft. Homeless families generally don't have good access to health care, mental health care, and dental care, and mortality rates are three times as high as within the general population. Between the risk of physical danger, subpar health care, and being subject to dangerously cold weather, the average life expectancy for homeless individuals is age 51. Children in homelessness are much less likely to get a good education (which is part of the reason that homelessness is so self-perpetuating). One-third of homeless people do not get enough to eat. This section could go on for pages, but I think you get the idea.

How can this happen? Honestly, I ask myself that question every day. I mean, I can understand why it happens: A confluence of events that force people onto the streets. Poverty + expensive rental housing + increasing unemployment + the mortgage crisis + mental illness + inadequate health care/mental health care for many low-income Americans + domestic violence + inadequate veterans assistance + a low minimum wage + inadequate substance abuse programs + widespread misconceptions and intolerance toward homeless people that result in huge challenges for organizations that are trying to create more opportunities for housing and employment. Etc.

But the question I ask myself is not answered by any of these "explanations;" it is: How do we let this happen? President Obama recently said that it is "not acceptable for children and families to be without a roof over their heads in a country as wealthy as ours." I agree; I think it's unconscionable.

OK, so... what do we do? Often when I'm writing these posts I want to drop everything and move to Uganda. I want to do something. This post will be easy for you to act on in a very personal way, because homelessness exists in communities across the United States. Chances are, there is a homeless shelter or food pantry near you that is in need of volunteers or donations.

Click here to access a directory of service organizations across the country. You can search by state. The directory is not comprehensive, though, so you might also want to check in your phone book. The "blue pages" near the front should have a listing of local community service organizations. Or just get to work on Google. If your nearest organization has a website, it probably includes lists of what the organization is most in need of.

Also, the Take Part website for "The Soloist" has a directory of volunteer opportunities, as well as information and tips on how to get involve in your own community. While you're there, check out this video that debunks some of the popular myths about homelessness.

Once you've found an organization, call your nearest shelter/pantry and ask to talk to the volunteer coordinator. If possible, call with an idea of what you're hoping to do already in mind. This will depend on how much time you're willing to commit, but here are a few ideas:

*If you want to commit a couple of hours a week: Your organization may need people to serve meals, or to sort through donations, or to wash dishes, or to play with kids in the playroom, or to teach a computer class, or to teach a dance class for kids... Setting aside two or three hours a week will enable you to really get to know the people you're working with.

*If you want to do a big one-time only project: Donate some cash! Or organize a food or clothing drive in your neighborhood, or plan a party and ask everyone who attends to make a donation or bring a sack of food for the food bank. Be creative; big projects take planning, but they are a great way to pull together resources and simultaneously raise awareness about the issues connected with homelessness. (Some of your friends might not even realize that homelessness exists in your community.)

*If you want to do a little bit here and there: Perhaps you can take in periodic donations of food or clothing, or maybe the organization needs people to pick up food/donations from local businesses. Or maybe the organization has a big event coming up and they need help preparing or staffing. Some organizations will be able to accommodate you on this kind of an occasional basis.

*If you'd prefer to get involved in an activist kind of way, local organizations may or may not be your best bet. Sign up for the newsletter at the National Coalition for the Homeless website, or check out this list of advocacy groups.

All right, get to it! If you are able to watch "The Soloist" or get involved in a community project, I would love to hear about your experiences...

Film Review: War Dance

2009-05-06T09:54:00.003-04:00

This week I noticed a documentary on the shelf at my library, called War Dance, directed by Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine. I took it home and watched it; I'm glad I did. Maybe your local library has it, too.

War Dance is set in northern Uganda, a region that has been wracked by conflict for two decades. Ongoing fighting between government forces and the rebel group Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) has created instability in wide swaths of the countryside. (The LRA is also linked with the conflicts in neighboring Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, which we've previously discussed on this blog.)

Perhaps the dimension of the conflict that has received the most attention is the forcible "recruitment" (a.k.a. abduction) of children to serve as soldiers or slaves for the LRA. Although child soldiering is not the main focus of War Dance, one child featured in the documentary tells his story about being abducted, taken into the bush with the rebels, and forced to perform terrible acts. The other children interviewed in the documentary share their stories of how the war has affected their lives and the lives of their families. The film is a good introduction, on an educational level, to issues like child soldiers and orphan-headed households.

But the film doesn't stop with tales of atrocities. The main storyline of the film revolves around Uganda's National Music Competition, where 20,000 schools compete in dance, singing and instrumental music. The featured students in northern Uganda (from the Patongo school) have never made it to this competition before; after all, many of them are orphans, refugees, heavily impacted by the war. The film follows these students in their quest to compete in the Competition in Kampala. I won't give away the ending, but I will say that it was refreshing to see a film in which the children come away feeling empowered because of something they accomplished. So often, kids are portrayed strictly as victims, or they are shown being empowered by adults' lectures--but in this film, the kids work hard, accomplish something, and feel powerful as a result.

If you like music and dance, you will love the scenes of children performing traditional music and tribal dances. And if you like stylistically-beautiful films, this one's for you. Despite its sometimes-dark subject nature, it is gorgeous. The cinematography is breathtaking, the landscape is beautiful--and the color! the light!

I think the filmmakers made a stylistic choice to skimp a bit on historical analysis, so if you watch this film I would recommend that you read up on the LRA and the situation in northern Uganda, to help you contextualize what you're seeing. In fact, even if you don't watch the film, click on these links. Northern Uganda gets remarkably little international attention, and it is one of the world's most dangerous conflicts, especially for children.

You can watch a trailer for the film and look at (beautiful) still photographs at the War Dance website.

Issue and Action: Malaria

2009-04-24T17:34:00.005-04:00

Tomorrow (April 25) is World Malaria Day, so of course: Let's talk about it.

(This photo is from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation photo gallery.)

This is how it happens: Malaria is caused by a microscopic parasite that is carried by infected mosquitoes. When an infected mosquito bites a person, the parasite goes straight to the person's liver and begins to reproduce, then the infection is passed throughout the body through the blood stream. If the parasite arrives in the brain, cerebral malaria (which may lead to a coma and permanent neurological damage, and may be fatal) occurs.

Every 30 seconds, a child dies from malaria. Worldwide, malaria exists in 109 countries (which, combined, are home to half of the world's population) and kills a million people every year. In Africa specifically, malaria kills more children than any other disease. Overall, 90 percent of the people who die of malaria live in Africa. As is the case with so many public health issues, children are disproportionately affected by malaria.

Of course, even if a person doesn't die of malaria, there can be long-term effects just from contracting the disease. Globally, there are an estimated 350 to 500 million cases of malaria every year. Children who survive a case of cerebral malaria may suffer from long-term learning impairments or brain dysfunction. Also, malaria can cause anemia in children, which makes them more vulnerable to diarrhea, dehydration, and respiratory illnesses--which can, as we've seen in previous posts, be fatal in areas without ready access to health care, clean water, and adequate nutrition. Also, pregnant women (another high-risk population) who contract malaria have higher infant mortality rates, and their babies may be born with dangerously low birthweights.

You can imagine the toll that this disease takes on communities and nations; Africa loses an estimated $12 billion every year because of malarial infections.

One of the best-known (and simplest, and cheapest) ways to prevent malaria is to promote mosquito control initiatives. Distribution of insecticide-treated mosquito nets have been shown to have a remarkable effect on decreasing malaria. Technological innovation has made these nets more effective; old nets sometimes had to be re-sprayed with insecticide every six months, but the new nets are extremely effective. This, in combination with simple public health efforts such as removing standing water from the vicinity of homes (since mosquitoes breed near standing water), is crucial toward preventing malaria.

Other crucial initiatives involve improving access to drugs that treat malaria (which at present may be hard to come by, or too expensive). Other organizations are working to develop other prevention strategies (such as a malaria vaccine). The international community is working toward a goal of near-zero deaths from malaria by the year 2015. Obviously this will require concerted effort--and commentators seem divided on whether it is possible at this point--but many organizations are working toward this goal.

Recent data suggest that things are already changing, in some target countries, even faster than anyone expected. For instance, in Zambia, malaria deaths have been cut by two-thirds! And countries like like Rwanda and Ethopia are registering significant declines in their child mortality rates, attributable to the widespread distribution of bed nets.

I love these figures; I love to tell them to people who try to tell me that making donations to public health NGOs doesn't make a difference. Because if you choose your organizations wisely, your small donations really can contribute to difference-making.

If you're interested in learning more or donating to one of these organizations, here are some good ones to check out:
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria
Nothing But Nets
Malaria No More

Also, if you have ten seconds to spare, you can sign this proclamation indicating your support for President Obama's promise to make ending malaria a national priority in the USA.

And if you have ten dollars to spare, you can donate an insecticide-treated mosquito net to an African country (and receive a woven African bracelet as a gift).

Followup: Genocide Prevention Month

2009-04-21T15:41:00.004-04:00

All right, folks. This blog has gotten a lot of hits over the past couple of weeks, but I didn't get any comments on that last post! Did any of you watch a film or read a book about genocide? Do any of you have any recommendations for me or for other blog readers? I'm working on another post about Genocide Prevention Month, but before I get there I would love to hear some input on what you are learning and thinking about. (It's okay if you don't know me; I'd love it if you introduce yourself.)

So... anyone?

Action: Genocide Prevention Month

2009-04-09T08:43:00.003-04:00

April is Genocide Prevention Month. April 7 marked the 15th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, where nearly one million people were slaughtered in three months. Other genocides have begun in April, too--the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia. Genocide Prevention Month was established in the United States to be a period of remembrance, and also a period of activism directed toward fighting the forms of genocide that are happening today.

(By the way, if you're interested in the nitty-gritty definition of genocide, click here.)

Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be putting up several posts with suggestions on how you can commemorate Genocide Prevention Month, and turn it into an opportunity for activism. This post, though, is going to focus on what I view as the heart of everything: Education. The first thing I want you to do this month is to read a book and watch a movie. Learn more about genocides that have occurred; feel it.

1) Read a book. The Genocide Prevention Project and the American Booksellers' Association have created a list of "Books of Conscience" that will give you insight into past and current conflicts and genocides. I'm going to post the list in its entirety here, but please be aware I haven't read most of these books.

ABOUT GENOCIDE

A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power

The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness by Simon Wiesenthal

ARMENIA

The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak

Forgotten Fire by Adam Bagdasarian

A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility by Taner Akcam

BOSNIA

The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway

The Hemingway Book Club of Kosovo by Paula Huntley

Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Wartime Sarajevo by Zlata Filipovic

CAMBODIA

Children of the River by Linda Crew

First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers by Loung Ung

DARFUR

Darfur: A Short History of a Long War by Julie Flint and Alex de Waal

Darfur Diaries: Stories of Survival by Jen Marlowe, Aisha Bain, and Adam Shapiro

The Devil Came on Horseback: Bearing Witness to the Genocide in Darfur by Brian Steidle, Gretchen Steidle Wallace

A Long Day's Dying: Critical Moments in the Darfur Genocide by Eric Reeves

Not on Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond by Don Cheadle, John Prendergast

The Translator: A Memoir by Daoud Hari

THE HOLOCAUST

The Diary of a Young Girl: Anne Frank by Anne Frank, Susan Massotty (translator)

The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi

Maus I: A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman

Night by Elie Wiesel, Marion Wiesel (translator)

Number the Stars by Lois Lowry

Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi

RWANDA

Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe by Gerard Prunier

Deogratias: A Tale of Rwanda by J.P. Stassen, Alexis Siegel (translator)

Say You're One of Them by Uwem Akpan

Shake Hands With the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda by Romeo Dallaire

A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali: A Novel by Gil Courtemanche

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families
Stories From Rwanda by Phillip Gourevitch

ALSO OF NOTE

What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng by Dave Eggers

Let me recommend a couple of others that aren't on this list: When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge by Chanrithy Him, and Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust by Immaculee Ilibagiza.

This is why I love to read: I believe that reading breaks down the barriers between groups and peoples. It gives us the chance to see from behind someone else's eyes, to get inside their skin. It humanizes everyone, including the reader. And I like to believe that this process--of humanization and the destruction of superficial barriers--is a crucial part of creating a world where genocide is unthinkable. So do a little something to get more human: read a book of conscience this month.

2) Watch a film. A good film does the same thing as a good book; it puts you into another place and time and makes you capable of feeling what someone else feels. I'm going to list some that I can vouch for personally, and others that I haven't seen but have heard recommended. Some of these films are feature/fiction films, and some are documentaries. Some are about the genocides listed above, and others just share similar themes.

FILMS I HAVE SEEN:
Schindler's List
Hotel Rwanda
War Photographer
Pray the Devil Back to Hell
Rabbit Proof Fence
Life is Beautiful

FILMS I HAVEN'T SEEN (but have heard recommended):
The Devil Came on Horseback
The Killing Fields
Sometimes in April
Darfur Now
Blessed is the Match
My Neighbor My Killer
Ghosts of Rwanda
The Diary of Anne Frank
Shake Hands With the Devil: The Journey of Romeo Dallaire

Feel free to list other recommendations of books and movies in the comments section! And if you'd like to write a book review or film review for this blog, just let me know!

Issue: Water

2009-03-23T10:11:00.004-04:00

"The human right to water is essential for living a life of human dignity. It is the pre-requisite for all other human rights."
(Kofi Annan)

Yesterday (March 22) was World Water Day, and this coming week (March 22-28) is World Water Week. It's perfect timing for this blog to address the world water crisis. Water is often discussed in conjunction with sanitation, but for today's post I am just going to focus on water.

Across the world, nearly 900 million people lack access to clean water. This lack of access to water poses a huge public health problem; every day, 4,200 children die of water-related diseases. (An estimated 125 million children under the age of five live in households that do not have regular access to clean water.) Most of these children dying of water-related diseases are die from diarrhea--an illness that kills an estimated two million children every year. Incredibly, the number of diarrhea-related deaths around the world is currently on the rise.

This is a big, big deal and it directly affects roughly 1/7 of the world's population.

There are really two linked issues when we're talking about the world water crisis: water scarcity, and water quality.

The water scarcity issue is particularly prevalent in Africa, where vast tracts of the land is dry and receives little rain. In some rural regions, women walk ten miles a day to fetch water for their families--carrying 40- or 50-pound water containers--and during the dry season, women may walk nearly twice that distance. (You'll notice I said women, not people--water-gathering is typically considered a female activity, linked to domestic reproductive tasks, and across the world women generally bear the brunt of water-collecting labor.) In fact, the World Health Organization has estimated that African women and children spend, collectively, 40 billion hours a year gathering water.

You can imagine that this takes its toll on women and families in various ways. Health problems can develop from carrying heavy loads long distances (even, in some cases, curved spines and pelvic deformities that cause problems during childbirth). Pregnant women who carry these heavy loads suffer increased health risks. Women and girls traveling alone can be vulnerable to violence and rape. And in some families, girls are required to gather the water--a task that can take so much time that it makes it impossible for the girls to attend school. This time-consuming activity also prevents women from working in other income-generating activities or vital domestic tasks (or caring for their own health).

In the West, we're always being exhorted to drink eight glasses of water a day. Certainly this would be good, healthy advice for anyone, but it isn't an option for much of the world. In fact, one flush of a Western toilet uses as much water as the average person in the developing world uses for a whole day's washing, drinking, cleaning and cooking.

So once a woman has spent half her day collecting and carrying water, the difficulty still hasn't ended. Because chances are, the water she found is not clean or safe for her family to drink. Issues of water quality affect people in urban and rural areas alike.

My own personal introduction to the water quality issue came when my husband and I were living in Mozambique. We were conducting a research project that took us out to a rural village with our research assistants to do some interviews. We noticed a hole in the ground toward the center of the village, and we went to take a look. This was the water supply for the entire village: A crumbling hole dug in the ground--not even a well--with dirt and dead insects floating on top. I remember feeling sick: Even though I'd read about water quality issues, I looked down at that dirty water and imagined scooping up a cup of it for a child to drink, and I felt the world's inequity sink down into my bones.

When a person drinks unclean water (any water from a non-purified source, which can include groundwater, contaminated rainfall, floodwater, or river water, to name a few), that person is vulnerable to various waterborne diseases. Diarrhea, cholera, and typhoid are the most common diseases that are transmitted through unclean water supply. There are dozens of other waterborne diseases--giardiasis, guinea worm, etc. (These are all diseases that occur from drinking unclean water; I am not even going to go into diseases that are connected to standing water, like malaria, dengue fever, or schistosomiasis and related parasitic infections--maybe in a future post.)

This interesting document is a reminder that water scarcity and quality are not necessarily issues of physical scarcity, but that the Africa water crisis is "structurally induced scarcity." In some cases, the world water crisis has been accentuated by politics, economic interests, and even unscrupulous marketing practices. I can't resist mentioning an issue that I find particularly telling:

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, people began to learn that Nestle and other baby formula companies had been aggressively marketing infant formula in less-developed countries. The suggestion implicit in the marketing campaigns was that babies would grow fatter and healthier with formula than they would with breastmilk. Many women (who grew up in communities where breastfeeding was previously the normal--and even only--way of feeding a baby) began to give their babies formula instead, in response to the marketing campaigns. And this is what happened: Families began to spend money they didn't have on infant formula they didn't need. They began to mix the formula with the only water sources they had, which were often unclean. And, since the formula labels were often in a foreign language like English (or because the mothers had not been to school or learned to read), the mothers often used very small amounts of the formula, to make the container last longer.

You can imagine what happened. In addition to losing the natural benefits of breastfeeding (like passing antibodies on to the babies, facilitating the release of bonding hormones, and having a natural method of fertility suppression and birth spacing), the families lost money and inadvertently exposed their babies to the dangers of unclean water and malnutrition. And babies got fatal diarrhea. And babies began to die. You can read more about this in Gabrielle Palmer's marvelous book, The Politics of Breastfeeding, which I highly recommend.

When I worked with UNICEF in the Philippines, I learned that UNICEF still will not accept monetary or in-kind donations from Nestle, because Nestle has continued to promote the use of baby formula in the Philippines, undermining the health of babies and accentuating the already-enormous issue of water impurity and children's health.

We already have technology for many solutions to the world water crisis. In some cases, solutions are free: Encouraging a cultural return to exclusive breastfeeding, helping urban communities negotiate with their local governments to extend clean water systems to the entire community. Other solutions are well-established and cost-effective: Creating rainwater collection systems, or digging pumps and wells in rural areas to create access to groundwater sources. There is very little mystery behind the world water crisis. It's an issue of distribution, and with increased resources this is something the world community should be able to make fast progress on. Despite this, the world water crisis is actually becoming worse over the past few years. As the world's climate changes, communities are being subjected to more drought and the drying-up of water tables. It's urgent.

There are many, many organizations that are working on clean water and sanitation issues around the world. I'd like to introduce you to one project that I particularly like: Tap Project.

There are a number of ways you can get involved with the Tap Project.

1) Are you planning to go out to eat anytime soon? Click here for an interactive map, which will show you restaurants in your community that participate in Tap Project. At these restaurants, you can donate $1 (or more, of course) to Tap Project.

2) Learn more about becoming a Tap Project volunteer in your community or workplace by clicking here.

3) Make a donation (or learn more about using eBay's Giving Works program) by clicking here.

4) Or (this is even quicker and easier), text the word "TAP" or "AGUA" to UNICEF (864233) to make a $5 donation!

5) Check out this cool article in the New York Times to see some of the great ad campaigns that have been created to help Tap Project.

Do something for World Water Week...

Followup: Sudan

2009-03-13T08:58:00.004-04:00

You can read my original post about the conflict in Sudan by clicking here.

Since the beginning of March, there have been some major developments in the crisis in Darfur. Last week, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the president of Sudan. He has been charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity; this arrest warrant is significant because it is the first time that the ICC has ever issued a warrant for a sitting head of state. (You can read more about the ICC here.)

In response to the issuing of the warrant, the al-Bashir government rejected the authority of the ICC, and promptly issued a statement saying they would be expelling 13 major non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that are distributing aid in the Darfur region, including Oxfam, Care International, Doctors Without Borders, and Save the Children. This is obviously a political ploy, an attempt by al-Bashir to "raise the stakes," and it's one that will have a devastating impact on the lives of millions of people.

The government began kicking these organizations out of the country a few days ago. NGOs like these have been providing ongoing aid to millions of displaced people across Darfur and Southern Sudan. The UN warned that "the loss of these non-governmental organizations means that more than one million people will be without food, 1.5 million without health care, and over one million without drinkable water" (read the full article here). You can listen to or read a March 10 NPR story about the situation in Darfur here.

Aid organizations predicted that the Sudanese population could begin to feel the effects of these expulsions within a few days--so, that means today. I read that some NGOs from Asian and Arab countries have applied to begin working in Sudan, in attempt to fill some of the gaps left behind by the departure of these major NGOs. This is a small glimmer of hope, but the information trickling in from Darfur is pretty dire. Save Darfur has up-to-the-minute information on their website.

A couple of things you can do:

1) Sign up, if you haven't already, to receive e-mail updates with action alerts from Save Darfur.

2) Click here to send a letter to Secretary of State Clinton, urging her to make Darfur an immediate priority.

3) Send a postcard to President Obama. He has issued some strong statements over the past few days, but we need to hear more. According to this interesting article, President Obama has "moral authority" in this area because of his African heritage, and we need to keep the pressure on him to be an unwavering voice about this conflict.

Followup: Democratic Republic of the Congo

2009-03-03T12:32:00.002-05:00

A few months ago, I posted about the conflict in Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Please click here to read my post, if you haven't already.

The conflict is still raging. In fact, it's the deadliest war our planet has seen since World War II. People are still dying and being displaced from their homes. Women are still being raped with impunity. Eastern DRC is the most dangerous place on earth for women.

I've been receiving frequently e-mails from the organization Raise Hope for Congo, and I've been able to write letters and sign petitions through their action alerts. This week, I got an e-mail describing the Congo Challenge. For the next three months, the organization is encouraging people to learn more about the crisis in the DRC and become involved in raising the profile of the conflict, and in generating awareness about the atrocities occurring in conjunction with the war. They will be sending e-mails with suggestions on how to get involved, "whether you have 5 minutes or 5 hours," they say.

I want to encourage you to sign up for the Congo Challenge, to read the e-mails, and to become activists, whether that means writing letters to politicians or publications, signing petitions, or using social networking to spread awareness. You can sign up by clicking here. This isn't asking much... but at least it's something.

Followup: Maternal and Newborn Health

2009-02-10T09:39:00.003-05:00

I just want to send out a few more items that may be helpful to those of you interested in learning about maternal and newborn health. Let's start in the U.S. In my last post I gave you the link to UNICEF's State of the World's Children address, but the publication offers little information about maternal mortality in the U.S. We need information about domestic maternity care, because the maternal mortality rate in the U.S. is currently the worst it has been in decades. One resource that offers great information (from mothers' perspectives) about maternity and postpartum care is Childbirth Connection's New Mothers Speak Out Report. Click on the link to read more about childbirth in America.

Moving back to international issues of maternal and newborn health: This video made me smile. You can read more about this awareness-raising campaign at Oxfam UK's website.

Also, might I recommend this photo gallery?

Issue: Maternal and Newborn Health

2009-02-06T13:27:00.006-05:00

The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) recently released their annual report, The State of the World's Children, for 2009. Every year this report offers an in-depth look at one particular issue affecting children around the world. This year the report is entitled "Maternal and Newborn Health," and it assesses the health and well-being of pregnant women and new mothers and their babies around the world.

Doesn't the picture on the front sort of make your heart grow a few sizes?

I'm going to try to offer an overview of some of the issues presented in SOWC 2009, but obviously my efforts will be limited; the report is 158 pages long, packed with information. I really encourage you, if you're interested in this subject, to click here to read the report. You can view it as a pdf file or request a paper copy. The blocks of italics in this post are direct quotes from SOWC.

"In the developing world as a whole, a woman has a 1 in 76 lifetime risk of maternal death, compared with a probability of just 1 in 8,000 for women in industrialized countries. By way of comparison, the lifetime risk of maternal mortality ranges from just 1 in 47,600 for a mother in Ireland, to 1 in every 7 in Niger, the country with the highest lifetime risk of maternal death."

When we're talking about maternal deaths (the term used to describe deaths that occur during labor or as a result of labor), there are two types of causes. "Direct causes" are obstetric complications (like post-partum hemorrhage, infections, eclampsia, or obstructed labor), or complications from abortions. These causes may be labeled as actually causing the mother's death. But there are numerous other "indirect causes," as well, which contribute to the emergence of these direct causes. Common indirect causes of maternal death include:

*Anemia
*Poor nutrition
*Lack of birth spacing (e.g., having too many babies one after another, without giving the body time to recuperate)
*Malaria
*Iodine deficiency
*HIV/AIDS
*Undeveloped anatomy (e.g., young girls whose bodies are not developed enough to bear children)
*Inadequate hygiene (which can cause maternal-neonatal tetanus)
*Poverty

In other words, if a woman is sick and weak and undernourished, her chances of having a normal, uncomplicated labor are greatly diminished. This list is partial; there are many other factors--both biological and socio-cultural--that make labor more dangerous than it needs to be.

Obviously, the health of the laboring woman/new mother is inextricably linked with the health of her baby. These factors that contribute to unusually dangerous labors and serious health problems also contribute to health problems and deaths for newborn babies.

"The latest estimates from the World Health Organization, which date from 2004, indicate that around 3.7 million children died within the first 28 days of life in that year. Within the neonatal period, however, there is wide variation in mortality risk. The greatest risk is during the first day after birth, when it is estimated that between 25 and 45 percent of neonatal deaths occur. Around three quarters of newborn deaths, or 2.8 million in 2004, occur within the first week – the early neonatal period."

The ten countries with the highest death rate for children under the age of 5 are:
1. Sierra Leone
2. Afghanistan
3. Chad
4. Equatorial Guinea
5. Guinea-Bissau
6. Mali
7. Burkina Faso
8. Nigeria
9. Rwanda
10. Burundi

"Some 86 per cent of newborn deaths globally are the direct result of three main causes: severe infections – including sepsis/pneumonia, tetanus and diarrhoea – asphyxia and preterm births. Severe infections are estimated to account for 36 per cent of all newborn deaths. They can occur at any point during the first month of life but are the main cause of neonatal death after the first week."

There are so many ways to promote maternal and newborn health. One of the crucial keys is prenatal care and adequate nutrition. When women are well-nourished and healthy, most labors proceed well without complications. However, this is not as simple as it sounds; the current and ongoing World Food Crisis that is driving food prices up around the world is making it difficult for women to meet their basic nutritional needs, let alone consume the extra calories that pregnant women need. And lack of access to basic health care for infections and illnesses (such as malaria) makes women even more vulnerable to complications.

One crucial element to decreasing maternal and newborn mortality is to provide training and resources to traditional birthing assistants, or midwives. Training programs (like this one, in Afghanistan) can integrate traditional and modern knowledge about childbirth, and provide midwives with much-needed supplies (like soap, clean towels, razor blades, receiving blankets, etc.) and training on techniques they may not be familiar with (such as infant resuscitation). Increasing pregnant women's access (before, during, and after labor) to trained labor assistants can ultimately result in the following crucial elements:

*Better management of infectious diseases (Prevention of malaria has been shown to decrease premature births!)
*Ongoing promotion of breastfeeding
*Prenatal and antenatal visits and assistance
*Improved hygiene practices
*Treated mosquito nets to prevent malaria infections in mothers and newborns
*Kangaroo mother care (e.g., skin-to-skin contact and on-demand breastfeeding) for low-birthweight babies

And of course, it's important to improve access to emergency obstetric care for babies and women with life-threatening conditions. Then, some of the best ways to promote child survival are to ensure that the child is exclusively breastfed, provide access to basic health care and immunizations, and prevent the child from contracting diseases like malaria.

Let me just give one example of how adequate prenatal care and effective care-provider training can work together. In Africa and Asia, over 30 percent of maternal deaths result from postpartum hemorrhage. The risk of hemorrhage is greatly decreased when a woman is healthy and nourished, and a few basic techniques can prevent hemorrhage. For example, the World Health Organization recommends delaying the clamping and cutting of the umbilical cord until it stops pulsing; this alone significantly decreases the risk of hemorrhage.

In addition to all these logistical factors, there are many socio-cultural factors that need to be dealt with to improve women's and babies outcomes. Here are a few things that have been proven to have a positive effect on maternal and newborn health, according to SOWC:

*Increasing educational opportunities for girls
*Decreasing gender discrimination (and letting women make choices about their health care, rather than having those choices dictated by husbands or communities)
*Preventing child marriage and early child-bearing by undeveloped girls
*Abandoning female genital mutilation (which causes many extra complications for child-bearing, e.g., accelerating the risk of post-partum hemmorhage and obstetric obstruction)
*Involving men and adolescent boys in maternal and newborn health and care (and focusing on family units)
*Creating supportive environments for women and babies
*Stopping violence against women (One example here: A study of 400 villages in rural India revealed that 16% of all deaths among pregnant women were due to partner violence. Cross-culturally, rates of violence against pregnant women are high)

One thing that this particular report didn't mention, though, was the risks that can also come along with the overmedicalization of birth. For instance, in the United States, over 30 percent of women give birth via Cesarean section. Best estimates suggest that perhaps five to ten percent of births require Cesarean intervention (and, in fact, SOWC presents similar figures). Unnecessary C-sections result in a host of risks to mothers (permanent injury to the bladder or uterus, infection, blood loss, damaged bowel functioning, future pregnancy complications, death, etc.) and babies (premature birth, breathing/lung problems, cuts and injuries, side-effects of anesthesia, difficulty breastfeeding, etc.) The United States tends to have extreme cases: On one end of the extreme are women who can't afford access to basic prenatal health care; on the other end, the trend toward non-medically-indicated elective (and expensive) C-sections that pose considerably more risk than a normal vaginal delivery.

On the child mortality list that I mentioned earlier (where the highest child death rates are closest to the top of the list), the United States comes in at number 151 out of 189; this means that there are 37 countries with lower infant-mortality rates than the United States. The countries with the best statistics (meaning the most babies who survive infancy) tend to be countries that provide a "best of both worlds" approach, where women have adequate access to prenatal care, good nutrition, supportive cultures and systems, and care providers trained in supporting natural childbirth processes, as well as emergency care. In other words, the technology exists to save mothers and babies in obstetric emergencies (and people have access to it), but low-intervention births are still considered the ideal situation for women and babies.

In case you're interested, here's the list from 151 to 189, so you can see all the countries that have better child survival rates than the U.S. The best in the world? Sweden.

United States 8 151
Cuba 7 156
Hungary 7 156
Poland 7 156
Thailand 7 156
Australia 6 160
Canada 6 160
Croatia 6 160
Estonia 6 160
New Zealand 6 160
United Kingdom 6 160
Belgium 5 166
Cyprus 5 166
Israel 5 166
Republic of Korea 5 166
Malta 5 166
Netherlands 5 166
Switzerland 5 166
Austria 4 173
Czech Republic 4 173
Denmark 4 173
Finland 4 173
France 4 173
Germany 4 173
Greece 4 173
Ireland 4 173
Italy 4 173
Japan 4 173
Monaco 4 173
Norway 4 173
Portugal 4 173
San Marino 4 173
Slovenia 4 173
Spain 4 173
Andorra 3 189
Iceland 3 189
Liechtenstein 3 189
Luxembourg 3 189
Singapore 3 189
Sweden 3 189

Issue and Action: Child Survival

2009-01-26T11:32:00.008-05:00

Today I received a link to the 2009 letter from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. I have been consistently impressed with the types of projects the Foundation takes on--and I love their motto, "All Lives Have Equal Value"--so I enjoyed reading Bill Gates's open letter describing the Foundation's successes and failures over the past year. You can read the full text of the letter here.

I was especially interested in the segment on preventing childhood deaths. This is a big deal to me. Some days I wake up and look at my one-year-old daughter and feel overcome with gratitude that she is still here with me; I often feel hyper-conscious of the nearly 11 million children who die before reaching the age of five every year. That's 29,000 children a day (21 children every second) who die, mainly of preventable causes. Every one of those children is as real and warm and tangible to their parents as my daughter is to me. This graph (from the letter) gives a breakdown of the causes of these childhood deaths:

As you can see in the graph, more than half of the child deaths are caused by diarrheal diseases and dehydration, pneumonia and malaria. All these illnesses are preventable and treatable. Sometimes Westerners are surprised to hear about the gravity of diarrhea, in particular, in less-developed regions of the world, but for children who are undernourished and continually exposed to risk factors (like unclean water supplies) these diseases can be death sentences.

Here's some good news: Child mortality rates is one area where great progress has been made over the past 50 years. Here's another graph from Bill Gates' letter:

Amazing, right? The rate of childhood deaths has been cut in half, thanks to fifty years of hard work by many individuals, communities, organizations and entities. What this statistic says to me is that we have the technology and experience to completely eliminate preventable childhood deaths. Diarrheal dehydration can be eliminated when communities have access to clean water supplies, when breastfeeding is encouraged, and when simple rehydration strategies are employed for children who have diarrhea. Pneumonia can be prevented through adequate nutrition and improved sanitation, and the treatment for pneumonia is well-established, which makes it a question of making that treatment easily accessible for all the world's families. And malaria can be prevented with the use of treated mosquito nets and antimalarial medications, as well as vector control. Treatment for malaria exists but needs to be made more widely available in order to save more people's lives.

One of my favorite initiatives to decrease child mortality rates is UNICEF's "I Believe in Zero" campaign. The idea is that with adequate resources and political will, we can improve distribution of existing technologies to ensure that ZERO children die of preventable diseases. Visit the website to sign a petition to President Obama, donate to the cause, and recruit your friends and associates (by putting a collection canister on your desk at work, or putting a banner or widget on your website or Facebook page, or getting the word out to your local media).

Please click here to sign a petition indicating your support for a Presidential Initiative to Accelerate Child Survival.

Then click here to access information about the Global Child Survival Act (introduced in the House and the Senate, H.R. 2266 and S. 1418). From the website you can send letters to your Senator and Representative.

And while you're at it, why not click here to access information about a host of other children's issues that you can become involved in? The U.S. Fund for UNICEF website makes it easy to lobby your officials and speak our on issues that are important to you because they are important to children.

I believe in zero. I hope you do, too.

Book Review: Hungry Planet

2009-01-22T13:46:00.005-05:00

I have a new obsession: the book Hungry Planet: What the World Eats by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Alusio. I had seen these photographs before: families from countries around the world photographed with a week's worth of food. They include photos like this one, from India:

This one, from the United States (Texas):

And this one, from Mali:

You can see more of the photos here and here.

But I really recommend getting your hands on the book; check your local library. In addition to the photographs and captions--which break down the total amount of money spent on food weekly, by food groups--the book also includes essays about each family included in the book and statistics about each country. There are also essays by such luminaries as Michael Pollan, plus recipes from each of the countries.

On one level, this book is a visual feast, a foray through countries and cultures. (In addition to the photographs of individual families, there are tons of gorgeous photos from each featured country.) But on a deeper level, this book is also a dip into some big and crucial global issues: global inequity in the distribution of resources, the very real existence of hunger in people's daily lives, the global coexistence of malnutrition and overnutrition, and the way changing eating patterns and food-marketing patterns are contributing to an increase in diseases like diabetes and cancer. It's eye-opening to think about where each of us would fit into this global portrait, and what that really means.

Book Review: Mountains Beyond Mountains

2009-01-11T01:41:00.000-05:00

I have a new hero; his name is Paul Farmer. After reading this book by Tracy Kidder (the full title is Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World, I have a sense of Paul Farmer as being a kind of edgy, smart-alecky Mother Teresa. With his medical degree from Harvard and a lifelong interest in liberation theology and social justice issues, Farmer established Partners in Health, a non-profit dedicated to providing a preferential option for health care for the poor. Farmer also founded Zanmi Lasante, a health clinic in a poor rural area in Haiti. He is this incredibly intense, focused, and passionate character who has literally given all he has to improving health in less-developed countries. Plus--and I love this--the book describes his efforts to merge medicine and anthropology, in the quest to provide improved health outcomes while still respecting cultures and identities and beliefs. Farmer has done more in his lifetime than I can even comprehend, and Mountains Beyond Mountains takes you around the world with him, from Peru to Russia.

After reading Mountains Beyond Mountains, I am definitely planning on reading some of the books that Farmer has authored (like this one and this one), but I recommend Mountains Beyond Mountains. It's a good introduction to public health issues (particularly tuberculosis and AIDS), and provides a really compelling picture of the way economic inequality translates into increased risk of illness and death for the poor.

By the way, if you live in the Boston area, Dr. Farmer will be speaking at Boston University on January 19 for Martin Luther King Jr Day. Click here for more details about the event. Maybe I'll see you there...

Book Review: A Long Way Gone

2009-01-05T00:42:00.003-05:00

This week I read Ishmael Beah's book A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. I really recommend it; it is hard to read, but I think the international community owes it to Beah to read this book, get sensitized, and then get passionate and angry about the fact that children are being used as soldiers in numerous conflicts around the world.

This book provides an up-close look at the plight of child soldiers in the civil war in Sierra Leone (which ended in 2002). The conditions described can probably be generalized to many other child soldiers as well. In the 1990s, Sierra Leone was embroiled in a brutal civil war that resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of people, and displaced more than one-third of the country's population. Both government forces and armed rebel groups recruited and forcibly conscripted children into their armed forces. (This practice continues in a number of ongoing conflicts today--see here, here and here for examples.)

When Beah was thirteen years old, he was conscripted into the national army, and went through "training" to become a soldier. Aside from the training in weapons, the children received a steady diet of drugs and Rambo movies (something that makes me feel really ashamed of Hollywood), and then they were thrust into combat and instructed to kill "anything that moved." Symptoms of post-traumatic stress were treated with cocaine and marijuana. For several years, Beah traveled with the army, attacking villages and rebel camps, and killing people in brutal ways. I can't imagine how painful it must have been for Beah to revisit these events in order to write the book. He doesn't flinch. He tells the truth.

At age 16, Beah was removed from the army by UNICEF and placed in a rehabilitation center. After a challenging rehabilitative period, Beah's path took him to testify before the United Nations, meet with international conferences of youth, and ultimately live in the U.S. and attend college here. It's clear, reading the book, that Beah is a naturally gentle and forgiving spirit, and one of the messages of the book is that under certain circumstances, all people are capable of great acts of brutality. Also, under certain circumstances, we are all capable of reclaiming our humanity.

In the end, A Long Way Gone is a harrowing look at the horrific treatment of children involved in conflict situations --and a graphic and heartbreaking look at war in general-- but it is also a story about hope and the power of rehabilitation. In Beah's words, from an occasion when he spoke before the UN Economic and Social Council: "I have been rehabilitated now, so don't be afraid of me. I am not a soldier anymore; I am a child. We are all brothers and sisters. What I have learned from my experiences is that revenge is not good... If I am going to take revenge, in that process I will kill another person whose family will want revenge; then revenge and revenge and revenge will never come to an end."

You can read more about Beah and the book on his website. I was also interested to read the perspective of the New York Times book review.

Issue: Universal Declaration of Human Rights

2008-12-28T09:49:00.000-05:00

In 1948, when the atrocities from the time of World War II became known and named, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Declaration contains a preamble and 30 articles that enumerate basic human rights that every human being is entitled to enjoy. Here's just a sampling of the rights that are set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

* The right to life, liberty, and security of person.

* The right to a nationality.

* The right to be equal before the law and not experience discrimination in the protections afforded by the law.

* The right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion.

* The right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.

* The right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of him/herself and of his/her family.

* The right to education.

You can read the full text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights here, or watch a really cool video with an animation sequence for each article here. (The film is totally worth the 20 minutes it takes to watch it.)

The year 2008 is the 60th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration, so there have been a number of movements to spread the word about the Declaration and encourage people to get involved (personally and politically) in ensuring that their own life incorporates these principles of human dignity and human rights. Here are two websites that I recommend for learning more about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

1) Every Human Has Rights. This campaign is sponsored by The Elders, an organization I've only recently learned about but that really gets my heart palpitating. (The video at the beginning of this blog post is from The Elders.) The Elders is a council of--well, of some of my greatest heroes, actually. Nelson Mandela, Graca Machel, Desmond Tutu, Kofi Annan, Muhammad Yunus, Aung San Suu Kyi, and others. The council has come together with the idea that if our world is a village, we need people with experience and commitment and compassion (a council of Elders) to share with us the value of their experience. So you can click here to get messages from The Elders, and here to get involved with the Every Human Has Rights campaign.

2) Protect the Human with Amnesty International. Seriously, take some time to check out this website. The Film, Music and More section is really great, with some fascinating films and book resources--too many for me to link all of them here, but go take a look. If you go to the Take a Stand section, you can quickly send letters and sign petitions on issues like Darfur, violence against women, political prisoners, and more.

"Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home -- so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any map of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person: the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm or office where he works."
--Eleanor Roosevelt

Happy Holidays!

2008-12-20T12:49:00.000-05:00

(Here is a gift this holiday season: Maya Angelou's beautiful Christmas poem, addressed to believers and unbelievers and Christians and Muslims and Jews and Buddhists and more. I wish you --sincerely-- a holiday season filled with joy and peace.)

Amazing Peace: A Christmas Poem
By Maya Angelou

Thunder rumbles in the mountain passes
And lightning rattles the eaves of our houses.
Flood waters await us in our avenues.

Snow falls upon snow, falls upon snow to avalanche
Over unprotected villages.
The sky slips low and grey and threatening.

We question ourselves.
What have we done to so affront nature?
We worry God.
Are you there? Are you there really?
Does the covenant you made with us still hold?

Into this climate of fear and apprehension, Christmas enters,
Streaming lights of joy, ringing bells of hope
And singing carols of forgiveness high up in the bright air.
The world is encouraged to come away from rancor,
Come the way of friendship.

It is the Glad Season.
Thunder ebbs to silence and lightning sleeps quietly in the corner.
Flood waters recede into memory.
Snow becomes a yielding cushion to aid us
As we make our way to higher ground.

Hope is born again in the faces of children
It rides on the shoulders of our aged as they walk into their sunsets.
Hope spreads around the earth. Brightening all things,
Even hate which crouches breeding in dark corridors.

In our joy, we think we hear a whisper.
At first it is too soft. Then only half heard.
We listen carefully as it gathers strength.
We hear a sweetness.
The word is Peace.
It is loud now. It is louder.
Louder than the explosion of bombs.

We tremble at the sound. We are thrilled by its presence.
It is what we have hungered for.
Not just the absence of war. But, true Peace.
A harmony of spirit, a comfort of courtesies.
Security for our beloveds and their beloveds.

We clap hands and welcome the Peace of Christmas.
We beckon this good season to wait a while with us.
We, Baptist and Buddhist, Methodist and Muslim, say come.
Peace.

Come and fill us and our world with your majesty.
We, the Jew and the Jainist, the Catholic and the Confucian,
implore you to stay awhile with us
so we may learn by your shimmering light
how to look beyond complexion and see community.

It is Christmas time, a halting of hate time.
On this platform of peace, we can create a language
to translate ourselves to ourselves and to each other.
At this Holy Instant, we celebrate the Birth of Jesus Christ

Into the great religions of the world.
We jubilate the precious advent of trust.
We shout with glorious tongues the coming of hope.
All the earth’s tribes loosen their voices to celebrate the promise of
Peace.

We, Angels and Mortals, Believers and Nonbelievers,
Look heavenward and speak the word aloud.
Peace.

We look at our world and speak the word aloud.
Peace.

We look at each other, then into ourselves,
And we say without shyness or apology or hesitation:

Peace, My Brother.
Peace, My Sister.
Peace, My Soul.

Book Review: Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles

2008-12-15T08:00:00.004-05:00

"Every time you say 'Africa is…' the words crumble and break. From every generalisation you must exclude at least five countries… Africa is full of surprises." (Richard Dowden)

This book is phenomenal, and I recommend it to anyone who is trying to deepen their understanding of the African continent. Richard Dowden is a journalistic veteran; he's spent over 30 years writing about Africa for several prominent British publications. From the outset of this book, Dowden acknowledges the impossibility of providing a comprehensive survey of Africa, but in my opinion this 554-page tome is a good attempt. Most of his chapters deal with specific countries: Uganda, Somalia, Senegal, Nigeria, South Africa, Sierra Leone, Burundi and Rwanda, etc. He also deals with continent-wide issues like AIDS, colonialism, and neocolonialism. Colonialism is an ongoing theme in the book. I've long had the sense that many of the current problems in various regions of Africa can be traced back to the abuses and travesties of colonial history, and this book definitely reinforced that idea for me.

My dad sent me this book after reading that Chinua Achebe (whose work I adore) wrote the Foreward. In Achebe's words, "The triumph of the written word is often attained when the writer achieves union and trust with the reader who then becomes ready to be drawn deep into unfamiliar territory, walking in borrowed literary shoes so to speak, towards a deeper understanding of foreign peoples, cultures and situations. Richard Dowden's [book] succeeds marvelously." High praise indeed.

One of my favorite chapters of the book is the chapter on Zimbabwe. Dowden first met Robert Mugabe back in 1976, when he was still a revolutionary freedom fighter, and Dowden's explanation of Zimbabwe's history really helped me understand recent events there. Likewise with the chapters on Sudan and the Congo; in fact, I drew heavily on the information from this book when I wrote my blog posts on those two countries. And of course, anyone who knows me is aware of my affinity for former-colonies of Portugal, so I enjoyed the section on Angola and wished he'd included Mozambique as well.

According to The Economist's book review, Dowden's book focuses on "two questions: why is development so slow in Africa? And how, in the midst of so much savagery, does the humanity of Africans survive as one of the continent’s defining characteristics?" I can think of other wonderful books that have attempted to answer the first question (like Guns, Germs and Steel, and The End of Poverty). But Africa approaches it from a slightly different angle, with an eye bent toward history and toward the agency of individual people. I loved Dowden's prose for its honesty. He is unflinching in describing the horrors of wars and famines that he has witnessed in Africa, and not afraid to indict specific people for the role they've played in the collapse of communities, but at the same time there is no doubt how much he admires individual people and whole cultures that he has met and lived with in Africa. In his words:

"Westerners arriving in Africa for the first time are always struck by its beauty and size--even the sky seems higher. And they often find themselves suddenly cracked open. They lose inhibitions, feel more alive, more themselves, and they begin to understand why, until then, they have only half lived. In Africa the essentials of existence--light, earth, water, food, birth, family, love, sickness, death--are more immediate, more intense. Visitors suddenly realize what life is for. To risk a huge generalization: [In the West], amid our wasteful wealth and time-pressed lives we have lost human values that still abound in Africa."

That passage sounds a little like he might fall into the trap of romanticizing and exoticizing Africa... but for the most part he doesn't. (This particular passage describes something that I felt frequently, though certainly not always, when I lived in Mozambique.) He gives a clear-eyed look at a complicated continent, and it is one fantastic read.

(And I can't finish this review without mentioning one thing. See the boy holding the soccer ball on the cover of the book? My one-year-old daughter is obsessed with him. She carries this book --heavy as it is-- around the house with her, pointing to him and saying her version of the word "friend" over and over, and sometimes she kisses him. Maybe it's the way he looks straight out at you, nothing in his eyes but self-ness. This photo has a strong effect on me as well; I think it's a great picture. But whatever the reason, my daughter loves him.)

You can read other reviews of Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles here and here.

Film Review: Rabbit Proof Fence

2008-12-08T13:48:00.000-05:00

Rabbit Proof Fence is a rare kind of film. Based on a true story, the film is set in Western Australia in the 1930s. At that time, the government had a policy of rounding up half-caste Aboriginal children and placing them in camps to become "civilized." The children were "trained" to become domestic works and become integrated into white society. Incredibly, and disturbingly, these kinds of government policies persisted (in various forms) into the 1970s in Australia. The term Stolen Generations is used to refer to the children who were separated from their families with the intention of removing all vestiges of Aboriginal culture from them.

In Rabbit Proof Fence, we meet three young girls who are kidnapped from their mother and placed into one of these camps. The three girls escape and begin a 1,000-mile journey home to their families, through the desolate Australian backland. The story is based on the life of Molly Craig whose daughter Doris Pilkington wrote the book Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence to document her mother's life. Molly Craig passed away in 2004, after a remarkable (and remarkably sad) life.

You can see a trailer for the film here. Rabbit Proof Fence is easy to find. Check Netflix, Blockbuster, your local library... You'll be glad you did.

One reason this film is particularly applicable to the subject matter of this blog is because of the interlink between a people's history and a people's present tense. In order to understand the kinds of systematic inequalities that persist throughout the world, it is essential to understand the roots, which are sometimes based in a more recent past than we'd like to acknowledge, of those inequalities.

Rabbit Proof Fence is moving to me on a number of levels. I first saw it years ago at the Tower in Salt Lake City. I remember I went with my friends Julie and John (who are now married to each other). I loved it because it taught me something meaningful about opening my eyes to the tragedies of racism, and also the beauty of other people and the world around me. Since then, I've seen the movie two more times. My own motherhood has created an even more intense connection to the film, and a greater empathy for the suffering of the mothers. It’s such a horrible concept: that a racist government could have the power to rip apart loving families. Side- by-side with this tragedy, though, is a very real sense of hope and defiance of racist systems. It’s interesting that re-watching the movie, I was surprised once again at the depth of its tragedy, and I realized that I had completely forgotten some of the more horrendous scenes over time. For whatever reason, after the movie ends the feeling that stays with me is a sense of the movie’s beauty and expansiveness, and over time the sense of outrage fades. Perhaps that’s another theme of the movie: forgiveness, and moving on.

Issue: World AIDS Day

2008-12-01T15:01:00.000-05:00

Today, December 1, is World AIDS Day. In fact, it's the 20th anniversary of World AIDS Day. So I thought it fitting to do a post about the global HIV/AIDS pandemic. (A pandemic is an epidemic that affects various geographical areas at the same time.)

If you take a look at this map, you'll see that AIDS truly is a global issue. Nearly 40 million people are infected, including over 2 million children. The countries with the highest rates of AIDS are the southernmost countries in Africa; in some areas, 35 percent of all people are infected with AIDS. Listen to this: 25 million people have died of AIDS since 1981. These mind-boggling death rate has left an estimated 15 million children orphaned in Africa alone.

In the United States, the AIDS issue sometimes gets marginalized and treated as a "gay issue," since about 50 percent of Americans with AIDS are gay men. But Americans tend to drastically underestimate the global impact of the disease, as well as the fact that AIDS really isn't an issue that we can bundle up and put on the doorstep of any particular group. For example, the demography of AIDS is significantly different in Africa. There, AIDS is typically transmitted through heterosexual sex (in some cases from unfaithful husbands to their wives). In fact, in sub-Saharan Africa, nearly 60 percent of the people infected with AIDS are women. This is partially due to the fact that women's anatomy renders them more vulnerable to contracting AIDS. There are other reasons, too, like the fact that women typically have less control over their sexual choices than men, and the rampant rates of sexual violence in many parts of the world. (Sadly, forced sex is even more likely to result in HIV infection for a woman because of the increased risk of tissue tearing and blood-to-blood contact.)

HIV/AIDS is also transmitted from mothers to their babies (either in utero or sometimes through breastfeeding), through blood transfusions, and through contaminated needles. (In the U.S., "dirty needles" typically refers to needles used for intravenous drug injections, but in less-developed countries where health care facilities have considerably fewer resources at their disposal, it often refers to unsanitized needles used in hospitals and health clinics.) There is evidence that the role of contaminated needles has been underplayed in the AIDS discussion. There is plenty of controversy around questions of prevalent transmission in Africa, and also plenty of controversy around the best way to stop the spread of the disease (or at least which kinds of programs are most effective).

I personally saw evidence of the needle issue at a focus group in Mozambique. At the orphanage where we volunteered, I attended a meeting with orphan heads of household. Most of the attendees were teenagers whose parents were dead, and they came to discuss the realities of their lives. It was sobering; perhaps another day I'll write more about this experience. For today, I'll just mention that their economic situations were as grave as you might expect in a country where the average yearly income is $250. (Total. Per year. And don't buy the "cost of living is so small" argument either; Joe and I found it more expensive to buy groceries there than in Utah.) The children at this meeting talked about the economic challenges of trying to keep their siblings in school, trying to keep food on the table. But one thing that really stood out to me was their accounting of their experiences with health care. The teenagers reported that at local health clinics, if they needed a vaccination or injection, they were required to bring their own needles. None of them could afford to buy new, sterile needles--they could hardly afford food--and so they borrowed used needles from their neighbors and took them to the clinics.

This focus group helped me understand why an estimated 16 percent of Mozambicans are infected with AIDS. It also helped me understand the staggering implications of the AIDS orphan situation for these 15 million African AIDS orphans. (The number might be much higher; it's hard to get good numbers.) The situation of AIDS orphans deserves a post in and of itself, so I will come back to it later, but for now please check out this website and this article for a good overview. Also, a few years ago I wrote an essay about my experiences at the orphanage in Mozambique that you can read here.

A couple of other good websites for learning more about the global AIDS pandemic are The Global Fund and (RED).

Followup: Pray the Devil Back to Hell

2008-11-29T12:25:00.000-05:00

You can read my review of the documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell here. The film is the story of modern-day Liberia, a country with a volatile and fascinating history. Yesterday I was listening to NPR and I heard an interview with Helene Cooper, who was describing her childhood growing up as part of the wealthy "ruling class" of Liberia. If you are interested in learning more about the history of Liberia (a country that was colonized by freed black American former-slaves, some of whom went on to enslave Africans, in the early 1800s), you can listen to Cooper's interview here. Her book, The House at Sugar Beach, is now on my to-read list. When I get around to it, I'll let you know how I like it--but based off this interview, I have a feeling I'll like it a lot.

Country Profile and Action: Sudan

2008-11-29T12:00:00.000-05:00

In my last country profile on Democratic Republic of the Congo, I mentioned the crisis in Sudan. I thought I'd already published this post, but as it turns out I forgot to post it to the blog. So reading this post on Sudan will hopefully give you more context on what I said about DRC!

Most Americans have heard a thing or two about the situation in Sudan. Back in 2004, the U.S. Department of State called the situation in Sudan "the worst humanitarian and human rights crisis in the world today." And things have not gotten better since then.

Over the past four years, an estimated 400,000 people have been killed in the Darfur region of Sudan. Another 2.5 million people have been displaced from their homes and are living in refugee camps. The people in refugee camps face all the hardships that refugees always face: Malnutrition, lack of education for children, lack of employment for adults, disease, rape, and violence. For those individuals still in their homes, they are at risk of being killed, tortured, systematically raped, and displaced. The situation in Sudan is being termed a genocide because of ethnicity-based killings (compared by some to what occurred in Rwanda), and there are no signs that things are improving. The stories of violence coming out of Darfur are atrocious. In one 2004 study, 61 percent of Sudanese respondents said they had witnessed the killing of a family member.

Sudan has been in a state of war for decades. In reality, modern conflicts between northern peoples and southern peoples can be traced back to the British colonial period. In the 1800s, European powers (mostly the French, British, Portuguese, and Belgians) basically divided the African continent between them, arbitrarily drawing country borderlines with no regard for tribal boundaries or land use issues. The Sudan was formed to include a huge geographical area (one-fourth the size of the United States), with Arabs living in the north and black Africans living in the south. (These ethnic labels are a little oversimplified, but they will do.) The British then forbade the Muslim Arabs to proselyte the southern people, and sent Christian missionaries instead. (To this day, Sudan is ethnically and religiously divided, Muslims in the north and Christians in the south, and this divide is at the root of many ensuing conflicts.)

When Sudan gained independence in 1956, virtually all of the government posts were held by northern Arabs (who are the minority population-wise). Southern people often felt (accurately) that their interests were not represented by the government. A series of conflicts arose over land use issues (like when the government planned to build a dam that would divert the flow of a river that southern farmers needed). In 1983, fundamentalist Islamic law was declared as the general policy of the country, exacerbating the already-notable ethnic differences between the two populations. A civil war ensued and lasted for 2 decades, killing 2 million people.

But just as peace agreements were negotiated and the civil war was coming to a close, a new conflict broke out in the Darfur region. The current conflict has its roots in rebel groups who have accused the government of neglecting the Darfur region. There are reports of atrocities committed by government troops and by rebel militia groups (and this is complicated, because as time goes on the rebel groups are increasingly splintered). The group accused of committing genocide, though, is the Janjaweed (which means "devil on horseback"), an armed rebel group that has torn through Darfur raping women and children, stealing, bombing villages, and killing people based on their ethnicity.

I found this YouTube video that provides a pretty good overview of the factors contributing to the situation in Sudan. I am not, though, an expert in Sudanese history, so if any of you notice an inaccuracy or would like to add to anything to what this video says, please post a comment.

There are so many ways you can get involved in the grassroots movement to promote the end of ethnic cleansing in Sudan. This is a cause that has great popular support in the U.S. and is getting a relatively-large amount of publicity here (especially in comparison with other human rights crises of recent years). Here are just a few action suggestions (and you can find a very long list of additional ideas from Human Rights Watch at this website). Follow the links for more information about each suggestion:

* McCain and Obama, during the campaign, issued a joint statement promising resolve and action for Sudan; send President-Elect Obama a message asking him to make good on that promise.

* Watch "Darfur Destroyed." (I'm not tech-savvy enough to get it onto this blog.) Pass it on to friends. Encourage your friends to get involved.

* Sign up for periodic e-mail updates from Save Darfur. These e-mail updates contain information about developments in the Darfur region and calls to action that will help you be involved on an ongoing basis.

* Join a local grassroots group dedicated to the Darfur cause. Click here to search by zip code.

* Sign petitions and write letters. Click here to access a quick form letter, or, if you're feeling more ambitious, click here to get addresses for leaders in the Sudanese government, the UN Security Council, and the American government.

* Learn more. Again, there is tons of information available on the internet. One feature that I find to be particularly reliable and powerful is Voices from Darfur, on the Save Darfur website, that features a few Sudanese people telling their own stories.

If you have any other ideas on what our blog readers can do (or anything we should know about Sudan), please leave a comment!

Issue and Action: The Global Food Crisis

2008-11-20T20:22:00.003-05:00

Earlier this year, we were hearing from major news outlets about the world food crisis. Between the months of January and April of this year, rice prices increased globally by 141 percent. This was big news here in the United States; I remember hearing that in my home state of Utah, people were buying up all the rice and wheat in sight because of fears over the crisis. But the reports sometimes underplayed the extent to how keenly this price difference was felt in other parts of the world. Keep in mind that there are one billion people in the world who live in less than $1 a day. For many of these people, 75 percent of their income may go to providing food for their families. You can imagine that on a budget like that, any amount of food-price inflation can be catastrophic. We read about riots in West Africa, civil unrest in Haiti, panic and despair all over the world.

When the first reports of the crisis were released, governments from around the world pledged $12 billion in food aid to the hardest-hit countries. Now, five months later, right around $1 billion of that promised amount has been delivered. It's interesting to consider how quickly our government managed to act when the financial markets crashed last month--but how lethargically our government (and others) is moving to respond to the food crisis.

At this point, many countries are still suffering from inflated food prices. Partially as a result of the global community's delayed reaction to the food crisis, the situation is still serious. According to United Nations estimates, the number of malnourished people around the world has grown, over the course of the past year, from 850 million to 925 million people. This means that after decades of progress in reducing world hunger, we are seeing the progress rolled backward, and for the first time in years, there are more hungry people around the world than there were last year.

I just finished an online conference call with Oxfam America, a humanitarian organization that does respected work nationally and internationally. One country highlighted in the conference call was Bangladesh. In the past 9 months, rice prices have risen 90 percent, and as a result the national poverty level has risen from 40 percent to 48 percent. (Keep in mind people fit into this definition of poverty if they are making less than $1.25 per day.) In Haiti, where riots earlier this year ended up in five people dying, people are resorting to eating "mud cakes" out of salt, vegetable shortening, and mud. Hunger and malnutrition already contribute to the deaths of 3.5 million children per year globally, and the numbers are bound to increase with this crisis. As grains like wheat and rice become more expensive, families are often obliged to cut out fruit, vegetables, and protein sources from their diets, and the myriad effects of poor nutrition ensue.

There are many different reasons for this ongoing problem. I'll briefly mention a few. Fundamentally, there have been a number of droughts this year in less-developed countries. (As the world's climate changes and the weather becomes more unpredictable, this is expected to be an ongoing challenge.) As emerging economies develop more capital (e.g. China) and begin to eat more like Americans, the world's grains are increasingly used for beef production rather than human consumption (and it takes 700 calories worth of animals' feed to produce 100 calories of beef). The instability of oil prices doesn't help, either--as oil prices go up, agricultural expenses follow suit. Additionally, as the U.S. has increasingly subsidized biofuel production (something many other developed countries to, too), the price of grain has risen; in other words, rich countries' energy policies have contributed to the rising cost of food around the world.

Oxfam's approach to this crisis has three different levels of intervention. The short term interventions are simple: emergency food aid. Particularly now, as winter is approaching in countries like Afghanistan (where humanitarian conditions are, according to what I learned today, currently the worst they've been in 20 years), emergency food aid is crucial. Middle-term interventions include improving access to food and supporting farmers in less-developed countries in their production efforts and stepping up our support of local reserves around the world. Long-term intervention is also key, though, and it revolves around reforming some of the underlying policies. The conference call a number of examples of policy changes that would be beneficial:

* Rethink the way the U.S. distributes food aid. Currently, the U.S. donates a lot of food aid--which is great--but typically the food is purchased here in the States then shipped overseas. This doubles the cost and slows deliveries. In countries where resources are available (but still unaffordable), it is quicker and more cost-efficient to a) purchase the food there, or b) distribute cash instead, assuming there is enough food on the market that people can purchase it themselves.

* Reinvest in agriculture. In the past, 30 percent of the U.S.'s international aid went to agriculture programs; now it is down to only 5 percent. Agricultural support programs would increase poor farmers' ability to increase production. (Since agriculture is an industry that relies heavily on credit at the beginning of the planting season, increasing credit options for poor farmers would enable them to produce more.) As it is right now, the lack of agricultural support is turning poor countries into importers and taking away their ability to feed themselves.

* Rethink biofuels. Currently in the U.S., one-quarter of the corn produced is converted to ethanol. This would make sense if there was a global food surplus, but currently there is a shortage, so that corn could be better-used.

So this week I've got two action suggestions for you from Oxfam.

Action #1
Participate in the Fast for a World Harvest. Fast for a World Harvest is an ongoing event; in 1974, a group of 250,000 people fasted the Thursday before Thanksgiving and donated the money to Oxfam. Since then, people and groups have conducted fasts, organized hunger banquets, and sponsored community events to raise awareness about global hunger issues and raise money for the cause. Since this month is Thanksgiving, it's perfect timing for you to express your personal gratitude and simultaneously offer a token to those who are suffering from hunger.

There a number of ways you can participate in Oxfam's ongoing Fast for a World Harvest. One way is to make it personal: Set a goal to fast for a meal or a day, in solidarity with people suffering from hunger, then donate the money you would have spent on this meal (to Oxfam or another humanitarian organization of your choice). If you are involved with a community or campus group, think about sponsoring an event; the above link will provide you with organizational information and free materials. Also, communities and campuses around the country are sponsoring Fast for a World Harvest events (like Hunger Banquets): click here to search for events in your community.

This really is the ideal time to participate in the Fast. Next week is Thanksgiving, when we celebrate our abundance with food. What better time to remind ourselves of the fact that this abundance is not a global fact?

Action #2
Take a seat at Oxfam's World Table. Remember those choose-your-own adventure books we used to read as kids? In this interactive application, you can follow the life of one of six people living in a less-developed country, "make choices" and see some of the common dilemmas faced by people. I really recommend sitting down and trying this out when you have a few free minutes. It's good food for thought.

Also, check out the Africa Peace and Justice Network; they have a section of their website dedicated to international agricultural issues. On the green sidebar, you'll find information about two related legislative bills (one on farm aid and one on food aid) that you can research and write your legislators about.

Country Profile and Action: Democratic Republic of the Congo

2008-11-14T16:38:00.005-05:00

"Violence against women in conflict is one of history's great silences."
--Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, President of Liberia

When my husband and I were living in Mozambique in the early months of our marriage, we read Barbara Kingsolver's novel The Poisonwood Bible together. (Actually, for the sake of accuracy: He read the entire novel, all 600 pages of it, out loud while I listened. It took four days of nonstop reading. I thought I had malaria --though it turned out to just be some tropical fever that never was diagnosed-- so I laid on a mattress on the floor burning and freezing by turns for those few days while Joe read and read and read. He only stopped reading to get up a couple of times a day and boil potatoes for us to eat. So I have more than one kind of attachment to this book.) The Poisonwood Bible was our first introduction to the history of the Congo, through fiction, and I highly recommend it to anyone. In addition to being a beautifully-written novel, it's an invitation to learn about the history of the region smack-dab in Africa's heart and grapple with sticky issues like colonialism and cultural imperialism.

The country of Democratic Republic of Congo (also referred to as DRC, RDC, or DR Congo) covers a huge area; it is the third-largest country in Africa and is home to roughly 66 million people from at least 250 different ethnic groups. DRC is often confused with its next-door neighbor, The Republic of Congo (which is also sometimes referred to as the Congo or Congo-Brazzaville; I know, it's confusing). The two countries have a shared history in some respects, but when you hear people referring to the current "crisis in the Congo," they are referring to events in DRC.

So I will condense the long and complicated history of the Congo area for you like this. Originally populated by Bantu peoples, the land area was claimed by King Leopold of Belgium in 1885 and named the Congo Free State (the setting for Joseph Conrad's famous novella The Heart of Darkness). As is so often the case under colonial rule, the local population was brutally exploited; it is estimated that in the first 20 years of colonial rule, 10 million people Africans were killed as a result of exploitative labor practice and disease. King Leopold, on the other hand, made a fortune in rubber. In 1908, when reports about the horrendous conditions in the Free State became internationally known, the Belgian parliament took over the Free State from Leopold and renamed it the Belgian Congo.

In 1960, the Congo was given independence, and a period of political turmoil followed. (This period of political instability is covered eloquently in The Poisonwood Bible.) Nationalist Patrice Lumumba was head of state for a few years, then he was overthrown and Mobutu Sese Soko, one of the truly corrupt dictators of our time, came to power and ruled for three decades. During his rule, the country changed its name frequently (four times in 11 years), and eventually settled on Zaire. At first Mobutu had the support of the U.S. (who viewed him as an ally in the fight against communism). The U.S. supplied $300 million worth of weapons ands $100 million worth of military training to Mobutu's military, but when the Soviet Union collapsed, American support for Mobutu cooled.

In 1997, Laurent Kabila (also backed by the U.S.) toppled Mobutu's regime and became president. There was hope for increasing stability now that Mobutu was gone, but the situation rapidly deteriorated. Neighboring countries (Rwanda, Angola, Uganda, Eritrea, Burundi, Zimbabwe, Namibia) all became involved in the conflict in varying capacities. This part of the history is very confusing, but it seems clear that a battle for natural resources is at the very heart of the conflict. All involved parties have some kind of economic stake in DRC. The conflict has been termed "Africa's First World War" because many countries are involved, but the villages of civilians in DRC make up the real battlegrounds. In 2001, Kabila was assassinated and his son, Joseph Kabila, took over as head of state. A number of peace agreements have been signed, but to no avail. At this point, various government forces and rebel groups (and splinter groups) are involved in a brutal fight over resources.

One key to this conflict is coltan; Roughly 65 percent of the world's coltan reserves are located in DRC. Coltan is a component in cell phones, laptop computers, and other electronic equipment. You've heard of conflict diamonds? While conflict diamonds continue to cause huge problems in DRC, we can add to the list conflict cell phones. This fight over DRC's rich natural resources forms the roots of what TIME magazine termed "the deadliest war in the world."

As I've read about the situation in DRC, I've found myself wondering: Why do we hear so much about Sudan and so little about DRC? I don't want to minimize the atrocities in Sudan; it's horrendous. 400,000 people have died; it's been termed a genocide. But in DRC, an estimated 5 million people have died in the past ten years. Yet most Americans are at least tangentially aware that something bad is happening in Sudan, and fewer people have a sense of what's happening in DRC. I've been reading a book by Richard Dowden called Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles (book review coming; it's fantastic). It helped me formulate my understanding of the Congo's history, and it's also helped me understand why the Congo gets less attention. Essentially, the cause of the Sudanese people was first brought to public attention in the U.S. by two concerned groups: Some Christian groups, who were concerned that African Christians were being targets of violence, and African-American groups who were concerned about reports of Arab northerners enslaving black African southerners in Sudan. The U.S., as we know, typically responds to international atrocities in proportion with its own self-interest. In this case, a relevant fact in U.S. interference was this: Sudan has lots of oil--700 million barrels of it. Other articles, like this one from the Guardian, have reinforced my sense that the U.S.'s initial condemnation of Sudan was linked to Sudan's role as an oil-producing country. Some authors have also mentioned the role of anti-Arab prejudice in U.S. foreign policy. Or maybe it's because in Sudan, the Janjaweed is targeting and killing civilians based on their ethnicity (hence the conflict being labeled as genocide), but the conflict in the Congo has followed a path that is common in modern African warfare. There is little direct combat between armies, and the majority of the people are dying from factors related to the displacement and poverty that are consequences of warfare. Starvation, disease, and frequently, side effects of rape--and of course, the violence perpetrated on civilians by fighters on all sides of the conflict.

Regardless of the reasons we have heard less about DRC, these facts remain: 5 million dead. (That's roughly equivalent to the total population of Utah, Idaho and Montana combined.) 1,000 people dying every day. Half of these deaths are children. An estimated 1.5 million people displaced. In recent days and weeks, I've been reading an increasing number of reports about problems in DRC: In the past few weeks, tens of thousands more people have been driven from their homes. A new wave of fighting erupted in recent weeks. Cholera and measles epidemics in refugee camps. Difficulties in getting emergency aid to people because of the widespread insecurity. Increasing attacks by the Lord's Resistance Army from Uganda.

As is often the case, civilians, especially children, are suffering the most in DRC. The statistics are grim. An estimated 33,000 Congolese children work as child soldiers, having been forcibly recruited. Fully one-third of all Congolese children are malnourished, and one-quarter of children are engaged in child labor. There are 4 million orphans in the country. (Many of these kids have been orphaned by violence, but nearly a million have also lost parents to AIDS.) Less than half the population has access to clean drinking water. Over 2 million people has been displaced. There is extremely limited access to healthcare, which compounds the fact that diseases are more likely to spread when people are living in close quarters without access to clean water or adequate nutrition. Infant mortality rates have reached 41 percent in the eastern part of the country; that means that nearly half of the babies born, die.

One of the truly horrendous components of this conflict is the systematic use of rape and sexual violence as a weapon of war. This is not new or unique to the conflict in DRC; All over the world and throughout history, rape has been used to destroy communities, dehumanize and injure women and children, and psychologically wreck families. But in DRC, the presence of rape has reached a particularly terrifying level. The DRC has been ranked as one of the worst places in the world to be a woman or a child. It's virtually impossible to get accurate statistics, but it's believed that hundreds of thousands of women and children have been victims of rape over the past decade.

I read an article by Eve Ensler about a year ago that brought the issue of sexual violence in DRC to the forefront for me. It's in an unlikely publication (Glamour), but I encourage you to read it here. I'm not going to address this issue in much more detail. Read Ensler's article or visit peacewomen.org for links to stories about the atrocities and sexual violence being levied against women and children in DRC.

A film, called "The Greatest Silence," was made to give Congolese women the chance to tell their stories about rape and sexual assault. I haven't had the opportunity to see the film in its entirety, but I'm posting the trailer here. Film can be, in my opinion, such a powerful conveyor of personhood that even just this trailer can bring the atrocities to life and make us care more deeply about exploited people:

So what can you do? I was hoping you'd ask...

* Write a Letter to the Editor of your local newspaper(s). It is unbelievable to me how little press DRC is getting considering the magnitude of the crisis. Many people are totally unaware of the situation of Congolese women and children, and this feels unacceptable to me. I'm going to be condensing this blog posting and creating a letter to the editor; I'll let you know if it gets published anywhere. (And make sure you let me know if yours does!)

* Send the link to this blog to your friends and family. Sometimes people hesitate to talk to their friends and family about issues like these because they don't want to get political, but this issue does not belong to any particular point on the political spectrum: It belongs to all of us.

* Sign a petition urging Congress to pass the International Violence Against Women Act (I-VAWA) (S.2279, HR.5927). From the website: "Drafted in consultation with more than 150 groups around the world, the IVAWA is a groundbreaking piece of legislation that incorporates proven solution for reducing violence into U.S. international assistance programs. It would impact millions of women, empowering them with tools to escape abuse and poverty."

* Write your representative in the Senate asking them to support Bill S. 3058 (Conflict Coltan and Cassiterite Act of 2008), which asks our government to document a list of groups that are benefiting from inhumane mining practices in DRC, and prohibit the importation of coltan and casseriterite that benefits these groups. To help you in drafting your letter, you can read more about conflict coltan and cassiterite here and here.

* Sign a petition to the president calling for the U.S. to promote peace, protect people, and prosecute perpetrators in DRC.

* Send letters. Amnesty International has two form letters available that you can send directly from their website to American and Congolese officials, indicating your concern about the situation in DRC.

* Be an informed consumer. I've been trying to find a list of tech companies that boycott coltan mined in DRC, but I'm not having much luck finding this kind of information. Does anyone know where it can be accessed? For information on conflict-free diamonds (if you're in the market for jewelry), click here. And for information on being a responsible global consumer of several products (including tech products), click here.

* Learn more. Click here to access a list of films, books and articles that will help you learn more about the history and current situation in DRC. The more you know, the more persuasively you will be able to talk to your family and friends, and encourage them to take action too.

You can find a detailed list of organizations and grassroots movements working to fight violence against women in DRC here.

Followup: Violence Against Women

2008-11-13T15:37:00.003-05:00

Just got this e-mail from the Family Violence Prevention Fund:

Everytime you visit www.GiveRespect.org, Geoffrey Beene Gives Back will donate $5 to the RESPECT! Campaign on your behalf.

That's right. With just one click of your mouse, you can help generate a $5 donation to the Family Violence Prevention Fund (FVPF), up to $500,000. It’s that easy. It costs you nothing. And, it raises critical funds for the FVPF’s programs to end and prevent violence against women and children.

Once you get to GiveRespect.org you can also show your support for the cause and express your respect for others by creating "Acts of Respect." Each time you do, Geoffrey Beene Gives Back will donate another $5.

Issue: Volence Against Women

2008-11-09T09:58:00.004-05:00

This post is just a primer. I'm working on a lengthy post about Democratic Republic of the Congo, and it occurs to me I should probably offer some kind of brief primer on "gender-based violence" before I launch into the situation in the Congo. I don't really like the term "gender-based violence" because it sounds slightly sterile, but the term can be construed to include such diverse atrocities as spousal abuse, rape, sexual assault, female genital mutilation, sex-selective abortion and infanticide, honor killings, bride-burning, and the systematic use of rape as a weapon of war, among other practices. We'll get into more detail on some of these issues later.

In essence, though, women and girls are routinely targeted with violence simply because of their gender. There is no country or culture around the world that is immune to the selective abuses of girls and women. Here in the United States, in fact, one in three women report being raped or physically abused by a spouse, date or intimate partner at some time in their life.

Click here to watch a film and add your name to the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), indicating your commitment to fighting violence against women.

One other reason that I don't like the term "gender-based violence" is that it turns violence into a women's issue, when it clearly isn't. It's a human rights issue that affects men, women and children. The Family Violence Prevention Fund has a Men's Network Against Domestic Violence, that operates on the core fact that although most domestic violence and rape is committed by men, most men are not abusers. And in fact, men have power in stopping domestic violence that women don't have--not just in their own lives, but in their example and their words to other men. At this site, men can sign a pledge indicating their commitment to fighting rape and violence, and can access more suggestions on how to get involved in the movement.

Film Review: War Photographer

2008-11-06T14:14:00.001-05:00

There may be a lot of film reviews in these early days of the blog. I'm currently taking, for graduate school, a class about film, representation, and identity. We are studying both documentary and fiction films, and talking about how those films portray cultures and people. We've watched a number of films that are relevant to this blog--hence the propensity of film reviews!

Today I'm recommending to you the film War Photographer. This film follows one of the most famous war photographers of our time, James Nachtwey, who is an impressive human being with an almost-unbelievable commitment to making people aware of what war looks like. Here's the trailer:

This is not an easy film to watch. Through the use of a video camera attached to the top of Nachtwey's camera, we see what he sees. We hear his breath, and the clicking of the camera. Interspersed with this, the film features still shots of Nachtwey's photographs, which are often breathtaking and sometimes so horrendous it's hard to look. After all, Nachtwey has photographed some of the great atrocities of our time: The Rwandan genocide, the war in Bosnia, famine in Somalia. He has taken pictures in the West Bank, South Africa, Chechnya, Sudan, Nicaragua. You can see some of his photographs on his website.

Nachtwey's photos have put the global horrors of war onto the glossy pages of magazines, and have forced people to deal with the reality of atrocities. Despite the fact that I cried through half the film and could hardly look at the screen sometimes, I'm grateful I watched it. Without that camera and that photograph, I would never have seen, for example, that one particular mourning Bosnian woman. I would not have had the opportunity to participate, even if it is vicariously, in her grief and her agony. And I do believe that it is possible to participate, to engage, through a photograph. When I look at James Nachtwey’s photographs, I feel closer to a reality that I haven’t experienced personally; I’m forced to confront humanity in a way I don’t typically have to in my everyday life. And I believe that it’s important to confront humanity like that. I really believe that films and photographs give us a shot at developing compassion, which is a kind of stepping stone to empathy. And I think I've made this clear before on this blog: I personally believe that the development of an abiding empathy is one of the central purposes of life.

Action: Vote!

2008-11-03T17:27:00.000-05:00

It's tomorrow: Election Day! The ONE Campaign has provided a handy chart comparing McCain's and Obama's positions on various issues related to international development and foreign aid. (Both candidates have some good things to say, but I think it's important that we know what they're saying.) The page also provides links to videos of both candidates speaking about global poverty, and more comprehensive information. Click here to check it out. (Sorry there's no info here about third-party candidates.) Have fun with your ballot box!

By the way...you guys are killing me with the lack of comments. Come on! Say something!

Followup: Trick or Treat for UNICEF

2008-10-31T21:43:00.005-04:00

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

2008-10-28T13:10:00.004-04:00

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

2008-10-25T14:45:00.000-04:00

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

2008-10-25T14:35:00.002-04:00

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

2008-10-25T13:26:00.007-04:00

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.