100 Friends

2005-09-24T08:30:00.000-07:00

add photo MG/Sompop and other items from gmail

Here's my first report. I'm taking things slower than in the past, simply because I have more time. It's so much better to really have the time to explore projects more thoroughly than before. I haven't actually donated very much money as yet, but I have laid the groundwork with a number of projects for that very purpose.

1. August 12, 2005. Khao Lak, Thailand. I met an American man named Reid Ridgeway who is running a project in Khao Lak, two hours North of Phuket in Southern Thailand. Khao Lak is where the most people in Thailand died (approximately 5,000), or were injured and suffered from the tsunami. The worst damage also occured in Khao Lak.

The project is called: Ecotourism Training Center. It is part of a long term tsunami recovery effort that trains 24 young Thai men and women in three integrated areas of study: Computers, English and learning how to become diving instructors (as in scuba) so that these young people can get decent jobs in the tourist industry.—all part of a curriculum focused on environmental education and sustainable tourism. All of these students lost family members and their housing and employment. They don't want handouts — they want to work again and this program will allow them to do it.

I went there on to learn more, and investigate his project. They now have the facility decked out with an Apple computer lab, a professional video editing suite, a class room with a projection
screen, a dive gear maintenance lab, two long tail boats being specially equipped for diving and research operations, and the 24 are students funded and starting to learn. 100 Friends made a donation of 25,000 Baht ($610) to help them reach their goals. I'm more than satisfied that this project is really helping some young people to get back on their feet after suffering from the devastating tsunami.

Here's their website (Ecotourism Training Center):

www.etcth.org

I've also talked with many people who were here when the tsunami hit, learning a great deal about that whole tragedy. It's so frightening and tragic. Most people died or were injured by the debris in the water (tins roofs, cars, furniture, metal, etc.).

2. September 10th, 2005, Mae Sae, Thailand. I was lucky enough to be able to meet with Sompop Jantakra, the director of the Development Education Program for Daughters and Communities (DEPDC).A photo taken of me with Sompop is attached to this report.

DEPDC is a community-based organization offering education and full-time housing for children to prevent them from being trafficked into the sex industry or other exploitative child-labor situations. Most of these girls are hill-tribe children and they are truly stateless and often denied education and job opportunities. PBS did a program about Sompop Jantakra and DEPDC about 6 months ago. Sompop has saved hundreds of girls each year from being sold into Thailand's brothels.

With few resources, he and a network of volunteers identify children at risk. Then he persuades, pleads, begs or berates parents into allowing them to attend his school for free. Once there, the girls are taught vocational skills, then given help finding jobs or scholarships for higher education. If they are in danger, he will shelter them. The school, which depends on donations for survival, now also includes counseling services, a library and a legal aid center. "To see girls enslaved in brothels, it hurts," says Sompop. "If you can protect one child, you protect future generations."

Here's the link about that program:

http://www.pbs.org/opb/thenewheroes/meet/sompop.html

I visited DEPDC in a town near the Burmese border called Mae Sae (pron. may-sigh). They have numerous building for offices, a school, meeting rooms, dormitories (some kids stay there, others come from the outside, they stay at their homes). They also have a separate shelter for sex workers who have managed to escape or in some way get away from what is true sexual slavery in the brothels.

I did not make a donation during this visit because I am going to return there and by then I will have learned a great deal more about the human trafficking problem. One example of how 100 Friends might help DEPDC is by supporting some of the girls in the program. Every year several hundred girls are referred to them, many times more than can be offered places. It costs about US $500 per year for every girl they support. This amount covers the costs of school uniforms, full-time accommodation, equipment and activities, lunch and school transport, as well as life development and health care programs. Here is their web site:

www.depdc.org .

3.September 12, 2005. Bangkok, Thailand. I visited a program called Last Wishes. Chulalongkorn Hospital operates this program to help terminally ill children with cancer get their wishes fulfilled to give them some joyful moments during their last days. It is loosely modeled after the Make-A-Wish Foundation in the U.S.

I met with Dr. Issarang Nuchprayoon from the Department of Pediatrics, Faculty of Medicine at Chulalongkorn University and the project coordinator, Ms. Khun Ninbom. At Chulalongkorn University Hospital, they see around 80 new children with cancer a year. Fortunately most of them can be cured. Some of them are not so lucky, they suffer a cancer relapse and have a terminal disease.

One child requested to go the Chiang Mai Zoo (about 600 kilometers to the north) to see the pandas. They showed me many photos of the children and told me their stories. I will be meeting some of the kids and 100 Friends funds will be used to help them. They also asked me to teach counseling skills to Khun Ninbom, their coordinator, and I will do so. They are also telling other pediatric oncologists in Thailand about 100 Friends so I can help more young people in other hospitals in Thailand.

After Thailand I went to Cambodia and visited numerous projects. Here is a brief summary:

1. September 16, 2005. Phnom Penh, Cambodia. All Ears Cambodia is an organization that saves lives through curbing middle ear disease and its spread to the brain. There are about 1,300,000 people in Cambodia with ear problems and several hundred thousand Khmer (Cambodians) with disabling hearing loss. Half of these are children. The majority of them live within rural areas, and to date, this NGO is the only organization in all of Cambodia that provides diagnostic and rehabilitative services for all age ranges, from newborns to the elderly. I met with the staff in Phnom Penh.

They need two rather important items of equipment. The first is an instrument that is used to remove discharge from infected ears and this device is essential if the job is to be done properly (cost=$190). The second item is an electronic device used for measuring compounds to within units less than one gram when making up ceruminolytic agents, and those used to curb active outer and middle ear disease (cost=$300). 100 Friends will pay for both machines.

2. September 16, 2005. Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Steung Meanchey Municipal Waste Dump is located in southern Phnom Penh. It is one of the saddest sights I have ever seen. It is the closest thing to hell that anyone is ever likely to see on this earth. It is nicknamed "Smoky Mountain" because of the miasma of smoke that the dump constantly gives off. It is literally on fire; the waste creates methane as it rots and the methane burns. In monsoon season and throughout much of the rest of the year, the surrounding area is swamped and the children live and play in fetid water. Roughly 2,000 people, about 600 of which are children, live and work there. Cambodia is not alone in allowing children to work as scavengers at dump sites. There are thousands of child laborers at such sites in Vietnam, the Philippines, India, Nigeria, Brazil, Argentina and the Dominican Republic.

Most of the rubbish pickers at Stung Meanchey are either from Phnom Penh or came to Phnom Penh looking for work and ended up in the slums. Many of the approximately 600 children have parents or relatives who also work on the dump and look after them. Some of them go to school, but most do not - at least not on a regular basis -, and it is safe to say that virtually none of them ever completes a primary school education. Many of the children here were born into impoverished families that moved to the area from the countryside after the end of Pol Pot's murderous rule.
Instead of finding urban fortunes, many of them settled in a slum that was erected along the rim of Steung Meanchey, a dump infested with flies that gravitate to the leeching refuse, the dregs of a nation. About 10,000 people live in the slum that borders Steung Meanchey.

Very few children go to school because the school fees are too high and their families need them to collect rubbish to contribute to the family income. A whole family working together can actually earn more money than they could in the rural village from which they originally came. I visited the dump and two of the Children's centers. I saw the children who have been rescued from the dump and they are incredibly sweet. They live in a wonderful children's center, go to school, have nice dormitories, take field trips and received good medical care. They were hungry for affection and attention. For $600 you can rescue a child from this life of living hell. 100 Friends will donate a minimum of $3,000 to rescue at least six children so they can live at the children's center.You can see the children's centers, look at photos of the kids and learn their unbelievable stories here:

http://www.cchcambodia.org

This web site has more about their story and even more amazing photos:

http://www.pbase.com/maciekda/stungmeanchey2005

3. September 19, 2005. Siam Reap, Cambodia.

100 Friends First Report September, 2005

2005-09-24T08:28:00.000-07:00

Conversations with mass murderers

2005-07-19T22:45:00.000-07:00

http://www.salon.com/books/review/2005/07/20/hatzfeld/print.html

Conversations with mass murderers
In "Machete Season," 10 Hutu men recall how they enjoyed slaughtering their neighbors with machetes and clubs -- and six years after the Rwanda genocide, feel no guilt.

By Suzy Hansen

July 20, 2005 | The 1994 Rwandan genocide was ignored by most of the world as it raged on. But in years since, the horrific event that claimed 800,000 deaths has garnered worldwide attention, thanks to numerous books and documentaries, and even a Hollywood film. Philip Gourevitch's masterly "We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families," based on his dispatches from Rwanda for the New Yorker, became an award-winning bestseller. Romeo Dallaire, the United Nations commander stationed in Rwanda at the time, recently participated in a documentary based on his own memoir "Shake Hands With the Devil." And last year, the tragedy of the slaughter was brought to the big screen in the surprisingly good "Hotel Rwanda," a film starring Don Cheadle that managed to grab three Oscar nominations.

These renderings of the genocide include many unfathomable images of men furiously hacking at other men, of whole communities decimated while seeking refuge in church, of bloated, days-old bodies choking the country's rivers. As by now most people know, in Rwanda, the vast majority of the Hutu population participated in the mass killing of their fellow Tutsi countrymen (as well as Hutu moderates) in only 100 days, a little more than three months. The killing was done without the efficient aid of gas chambers or bombs or machine guns; instead, most of the murders were of the one-on-one sort -- a very personal, laborious killing in which many, many people willingly, almost enthusiastically, took part.

Although Western writers and artists have attempted, and will continue attempting, to translate the reality of a mass extermination, it's a nearly impossible task. They succeed in many ways, but what they can't quite get across is technical: What is it like for one entire population to kill another, day after day, for an entire season of the year? Did the men go to work too? Did they make love at night, and wake up and kill in the morning? Did they read books, get drunk, tell bedtime stories -- all after a day's kill? Did they cry?

"Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak," the second book on Rwanda by French journalist Jean Hatzfeld, attempts to answer some of these questions, and gives this madness a shocking sort of order. Hatzfeld interviewed 10 Hutus six years after the genocide, while the men served time in jail. These Hutus were from the rural Nyamata district (population 119,000), which includes a small town and 14 surrounding hills (Rwanda is lush and mountainous) split almost half between Hutus and Tutsis. Beginning in April 1994, within six weeks, five out of every six Tutsis in Nyamata were killed.

The 10 men, ranging from 20 to 62 years of age, hailed from these hills, where most of them were farmers. "None of them has ever quarreled with his Tutsi neighbors over land, crops, damage, and women," Hatzfeld writes. In fact, they lived next door to Tutsis, played soccer with them, went to church with them. "But these ten banded together," Hatzfeld explains, "because of the proximity of their fields, their patronage of a cabaret, and their natural affinities and shared concerns." Hatzfeld gives the reader a basic sense of who the men are -- the little detail already provided in this review -- but he wisely lets the men talk first before proffering their proper biographies. "That bunch was famous on the hill for carousing and tomfoolery," said Clementine, a local Hutu who is married to a Tutsi. "Those fellows did not seem so bad."

The Rwandan genocide officially began after the death of President Juvénal Habyarimana, a Hutu, whose plane was mysteriously shot down on April 6, 1994. The death of the president was the excuse the Hutu extremists needed to begin the killing that they had long planned. (Obviously, Rwandan history is ever more complicated: Hutu extremists had long been paranoid about Tutsi power; at various times Tutsis had suffered, and been slaughtered, at the hands of Hutus; a group of exiled Tutsis organized the Rwandan Patriotic Front, with whom Habyarimana had signed peace accords in 1993. Later, the RPF would enter Rwanda and stop the genocide.)

Hatzfeld's band of ordinary Hutus, incited by extremists broadcasting on the radio, gathered together, singing songs and screwing around, and then headed down to the marshes where they believed the Tutsis were hiding. The new killers indeed bonded immediately: "We gathered into teams on the soccer field and went out hunting as kindred spirits," said Ignace. "We had to work fast, and we got no time off, especially not Sundays -- we had to finish up," said Elie. "We canceled all ceremonies. Everyone was hired at the same level for a single job -- to crush all the cockroaches."

The most difficult part of all of this is to comprehend the moment when men become killers. The Hutus claimed not to have been forced to kill, though they did fear the consequences of not joining in at the beginning. By the time of the interviews, killing strikes them as quite normal. It's not as though their first kill is particularly memorable. Still, they attempt to recall it:

Fulgence: "First I cracked an old mama's head with a club."

Alphonse: "I was quite surprised by the speed of death, and also by the softness of the blow."

Adalbert didn't remember the "precise details" of his first kill: "Therefore the true first time worth telling from a lasting memory, for me, is when I killed two children, April 17."

They meditate on murder like this throughout the book. Elie: "The club is more crushing, but the machete is more natural. The Rwandan is accustomed to the machete from childhood. Grab a machete -- that is what we do every morning." Alphonse: "Saving the babies, that was not practical. They were whacked against walls and trees or they were cut right away."

Indeed, especially for farmers, slicing at things was routine. The men use the word "cut" to describe their murders, as if what they did was akin to dragging a paper edge across a thumb. Obviously it's a callous way of distancing themselves from their deeds, but it also signals the parallel they saw between hacking Tutsis and working in the fields.

Yet, there were differences. "Killing was a demanding but more gratifying activity," said Pio. "The proof: none ever asked permission to go clear brush on his field, not even for a half-day." Soon it became addictive, and there were rewards: "We could no longer stop ourselves from wielding the machete, it brought us so much profit." The looting that accompanied the killing was dazzling for the poor farmers, and it offered a way for the women to pitch in (though some women and children did kill). They stole everything -- some even grabbed the bloodstained clothing of the dead. "If you went home empty-handed, you might even be scolded by your wife or your children," one man said. And despite knowing that their husbands were out raping women and then killing them, most wives still made love to their husbands at night.

Many men insisted that this life -- the one where they woke up and killed people all day -- was a better one. "Man can get used to killing, if he kills on and on," said Alphonse. Fulgence went one step further: "The more we saw people die, the less we thought about their lives, the less we talked about their deaths. And the more we got used to enjoying it."

As the killing went on, the men became intoxicated by the idea of "finishing the job." The idea appears to have been that when it was all over, the Tutsis would be gone, and there would be no reminder of them. So the drive to kill every last Tutsi became more ferocious. In Nyamata not one bond of friendship spared a life, writes Hatzfeld; unlike in Nazi Germany, for example, Tutsis found "not a single escape network."

But there was another key component to the genocide's ferocity: No one was watching. There is nothing so damning in "Machete Season" as when the men speak of the "whites." One man suggests that the idea of genocide germinated in 1959, when Hutus massacred many Tutsis "without being punished." And in 1994, Hutu extremists gradually realized that the world was averting its eyes from the present atrocities as well. "All the important people turned their backs on our killings," said Elie. "The blue helmets, the Belgians, the white directors, the black presidents, the humanitarian people, and the international cameramen, the priests and the bishops and finally even God ... We were all abandoned by all words of rebuke." Pancrace agreed: "Killing is very discouraging if you yourself must decide to do it ... but if you must obey the orders of the authorities ... if you see that the killing will be total and without disastrous consequences for yourself, you feel soothed and reassured."

These were ordinary men, for sure. And ordinary men would have feared the punishment of others; as soon as the West pulled out of Rwanda they knew they were free to kill. It's clear that if some force had been monitoring them, at least some of the motivation to kill would have withered away. Fittingly, one of the chapters in the book is titled "A Sealed Chamber."

Perhaps not surprisingly, because of this long absence of condemnation, the men have no regrets. "I want to make clear that from the first gentleman I killed to the last, I was not sorry about a single one," said Leopord. Hatzfeld notes in amazement that the killers speak in monotone and "never allow themselves to be overwhelmed by anything." During the men's seven years in prison, they knew of not one Hutu suicide. If they were depressed, it was only because they were locked up. "Aside from the anguish of my years in prison," said Pancrace, "I do not see my life as harmed by all these regrettable events." The unfortunately candid Elie takes a stab at remorse: "In prison and on the hills, everyone is obviously sorry. But most of the killers are sorry they didn't finish the job."

"Machete Season" is realistic and, above all else, terrifying; Hatzfeld brilliantly organizes his subjects' stories for maximum effect. His method captures the rhythm of a genocide -- the cold, workmanlike, fierce nature of its repetition. The book goes on and on, the killers are still alive, they persist, they won't stop talking. Just when you think they won't mention their machete again, it's back.

When the men return home from jail, it's to a country in trauma. "The silence on the Rwandan hills is indescribable and cannot be compared with the usual mutism in the aftermath of war," writes Hatzfeld. What Hatzfeld suggests is the possibility of an Africa in turmoil because of many of its people's learned fatalism. Perhaps the most terrible line in "Machete Season" is spoken by Pio, who noted with astonishment the silence with which the Tutsis confronted their deaths, even as he came near to where they hid in the marsh, machete in hand. They did not fight back. They did not cry out. "They felt so abandoned they did not even open their mouths."

A miracle in the poorest part of India........I plan to find this boy and help him!

2005-07-06T11:39:00.000-07:00

June 25, 2005
A Vision of Stars, Grounded in the Dust of Rural India
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
PATNA, India
ANUPAM KUMAR, 17, is the eldest son of a scooter-rickshaw driver. He lives in a three-room house made of bricks and mortar and a hot tin roof, where water rarely comes out of the tap and the electricity is off more than on, along a narrow unpaved alley here in one of India's most destitute corners.
Anupam is good at math. He has taught himself practically everything he knows, and when he grows up he wants to investigate whether there is life in outer space. He wants to work at NASA.
"It's becoming very important to explore other planets because this planet is becoming too polluted," he said with deadly seriousness. Next door to his house, pigs rifled through a pile of garbage on an empty lot. His mother, Sudha Devi, a savvy woman with a 6th-grade education, cooled him with a palm-frond fan.
His father, Srikrishna Jaiswal, who made it through 10th grade, flashed a bemused smile. "He has high-level aims," he said.
"I'm not so concerned about reaching the peak," Anupam clarified. "I'm more interested in doing something good for the world."
For now, Anupam's sole obsession is to gain admission to the Indian Institutes of Technology, or I.I.T., a network of seven elite colleges established shortly after Indian independence in 1947 that produces an annual crop of tech wizards and corporate titans.
It is difficult to overstate the difficulty of getting in. Of 198,059 Indians who took the rigorous admissions tests in 2005, 3,890 got in, an acceptance rate of under 2 percent. (Harvard accepts 10 percent.)
Anupam does not know anyone who has attended the institutes, nor do his parents. But they all know this: If he makes it, it would change his family's fortunes forever.
"I feel a lot of pressure," he said. "It's from inside."
A VOICE in his head, he says, tells him he must do something to rescue his family from want, and that he must do it very soon. No wonder, then, that Anupam's mother forces him to wash his hair with henna, a traditional Indian hair-dying technique: At 17, Anupam is going gray.
In Anupam's story lies a glimpse of the aspirations of boys and girls in India today, a country that arguably offers greater opportunities than it did for their parents, but one that is also more competitive and a great deal more stressful.
More than half of India's one billion people are under 25, and for all but the most privileged, adolescence in this country can be a Darwinian juggernaut. To be average, or even slightly above average, is to be left behind. Nowhere is that more true than here in Bihar, India's iconic left-behind state, making the drive to get out all the more fierce.
"For average students, they have no scope," said Anand Kumar, 33, who runs a one-man I.I.T.-preparatory academy here. "The new generation feels more pressure than my generation."
At 7 on a recent morning, with the sun already blistering, Mr. Kumar, drenched in sweat, drilled a gaggle of nearly 600 students, almost all boys, in calculus. "Find the domain of the following function," he repeated into a scratchy microphone. His young charges, packed tightly under a tin-roofed compound, furiously scribbled in their notebooks. He resembled a revival tent preacher in a small American town.
Every week Mr. Kumar, who is not related to Anupam, tutors more than 2,000 youngsters, each paying just under $100 for a yearlong math session. Thirty others, the most gifted and neediest, he teaches free in an intensive seven-month course that includes room and board. He has received death threats - he suspects from competitors who resent his low fees - and on a recent day two policemen and two private guards stood sentry.
The intensity of competition can reveal itself in extreme ways. Mr. Kumar recalls how a neighbor, under enormous pressure from his family, failed the entrance exam and took his own life; he was 18. A former student, the son of a poor peasant, sank into a crippling depression after failing the exam last year.
Moni Kumari Gupta, 17, is one of the rare girls in Mr. Kumar's program. She, too, wants to do space research, also at NASA. The I.I.T. exam that Moni plans to take is still 10 months away, and yet she rises at 4:30 a.m. and studies 13 hours a day, seven days a week, with short breaks only for meals and a brisk morning walk. Her father, Sunil Kumar, gives her pep talks: "Face the competition," he tells her. "Don't be demoralized."
Disappointment stems from the depth of desire, piled on this generation by those with even fewer opportunities in the past. Before Anupam was born, his father had wanted to teach. His mother had wanted her husband to do anything other than ply a rickshaw, become a rickshaw-wallah. But Patna offered few options, and the children came quickly, two boys and a girl. Sudha Devi told her husband, " 'At least our children will do something big.' "
At home, the television could be blaring, the music could be on, the lights could have gone out, but Anupam would be studying, his father said. "How he concentrates, how he focuses his mind, I really don't know," Mr. Jaiswal mused.
At family parties, Anupam would be found in a quiet corner, his head in a book. Relatives warned Sudha Devi, "He will go mad."
Anupam's education has been spotty, as it is for many in a country where public education is often in disarray. He enrolled in a small neighborhood private school, then a government school in ninth grade. But most days, like many children, he skipped school and studied at home because he figured it would be more rigorous. Every now and then, a math tutor, impressed by his gumption, gave him tips.
Anupam says he was first drawn to the mysteries of space at 9 because of a television serial, "Captain Vyom," in which an astronaut ranges across outer space in pursuit of bad guys.
He recalls telling his mother about his interest in life in outer space, and he remembers her matter-of-fact encouragement: They haven't discovered it yet, he recalls her saying, but you can explore.
"He says there's something called research," is how his mother describes it today. "He wants to be a research-wallah."
IN the spring of 2004, studying by himself, Anupam failed the I.I.T. entrance exam; it is virtually unheard of for anyone to make it on his own. Then, under Mr. Kumar's tutelage, he devoted himself with the intensity of a monk.
On May 22, Anupam took the exam again, a grueling six hours of math, chemistry, and physics. He was not nervous either before or after, his mother said.
The week before results were published, Anupam bubbled with optimism. He was sure he would be among the top scorers, he said. His mother beamed at this. To a visitor, she referred to her son as Anupam-ji, an honorific usually reserved for elders.
Buoyed by his optimism, Anupam said that after graduation, he would install a proper roof, then dig a borehole so water could be drawn right at home. As soon as possible, he would like his father to stop driving a rickshaw.
[On June 16, sitting at his tutor's house, Anupam learned the results. He made it into the institutes, with a rank of 2,299. Classes start in mid-July.]
Hari Kumar contributed reporting from New Delhi for this article.

• Copyright 2005 The New York Times

Hmong Forced Out Of Homes In Thailand

2005-07-06T09:18:00.000-07:00

washingtonpost.com
Hmong Forced Out Of Homes In Thailand

By Rungrawee C. Pinyorat
Associated Press
Wednesday, July 6, 2005; A09

HUAY NAM KHAO, Thailand, July 5 -- Soaked by rain, thousands of poor ethnic Hmong refugees from Laos were living without shelter in northern Thailand on Tuesday, forced from their homes under a Thai campaign to pressure them to return to their native land.

Landlords in this village said the government set a Monday deadline for them to evict the estimated 6,500 refugees from their bamboo shelters, threatening locals with prison or fines of up to $1,200 for sheltering the Hmong, considered by Thailand to be illegal immigrants.

Thai officials also instructed vendors not to sell food to the refugees, including children, camped out since late Monday by the roadside in Huay Nam Khao, village leaders said.

"They have no place to stay, no place to cook. How can they stand the heat and rain?" asked Sawai Leeprecha, a Thai-Hmong village leader.

Some of the Hmong demonstrated Tuesday outside a government office near the village, located in Phetchabun province about 185 miles north of the Thai capital, Bangkok. But most clustered in groups along the road carrying reed mats and plastic sheeting.

"The Hmong would like to call for the United Nations to help us survive," said Jongli Saeloh, 43. "I would rather die here than be sent back to Laos."

A sign on a fence read: "Please help, we're very hungry."

During the Vietnam War era, the Hmong in Laos helped U.S. forces fight communist insurgents. After the communists took control of Laos in 1975, many Hmong fled, fearing persecution.

Although pressure on the Hmong has eased, military operations against small bands of Hmong insurgents in Laos continue and tensions persist.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Planting a Seed of Self-Sufficiency

2005-07-05T01:18:00.000-07:00

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-village5jul05,0,6604591.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Planting a Seed of Self-Sufficiency
The effort in Kenya is a test of how rich nations can help the poor, an issue on the G-8 agenda.
By Edmund Sanders
Times Staff Writer

July 5, 2005

SAURI, Kenya — Dwarfed by the lush, 12-foot cornstalks sprouting around her hut, Yunia Akinyi Adhola can scarcely believe her good fortune. Never has the maize grown so high here, she said, a guarantee that this year her family won't go hungry.

Her luck changed a year ago when strangers descended upon this poverty-stricken village, testing the rocky soil, interviewing neighbors and then, to everyone's delight, giving away fertilizer, high-quality seeds and mosquito nets. A new health clinic is opening on the main dirt road through town.

Like most of the 5,000 inhabitants of Sauri, a cluster of villages nestled in the green hills of western Kenya, Adhola hasn't a clue what motivated the newcomers to help. She doesn't know that a year ago the hamlet was plucked from obscurity by a United Nations team to serve as a testing ground for one of the most ambitious poverty-eradication campaigns ever conceived.

Now tiny Sauri stands at the epicenter of a growing international effort to end hunger and preventable disease in the world's poorest countries.

The bounty Adhola is about to harvest is a happy byproduct of the debate over how rich nations should help the poor, a dispute likely to come to a head at the annual Group of 8 economic summit in Scotland this week.

With much fanfare five years ago, world leaders vowed to achieve sweeping anti-poverty goals by 2015, including halving the number of people living on less than $1 a day, providing primary schooling for all children, halting the spread of AIDS and malaria and reducing child mortality rates by two-thirds.

By 2002, lack of progress toward meeting the goals led U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to launch the Millennium Development Project, led by Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University economics professor and poverty reformer. Sachs' team is part of a mounting campaign — including British Prime Minister Tony Blair's Commission for Africa — to persuade rich countries to double aid to Africa to $50 billion a year. The influx of money, which amounts to about $70 a year for each needy person, would be enough to substantially reduce needless suffering worldwide, proponents say.

"We can achieve this. It's possible," Sachs said in an interview. "But we're not even trying. That's the real tragedy."

Critics have dismissed Sachs' blueprint, outlined in his book "The End of Poverty," as utopian folly and called Sauri an international publicity stunt.

"It seems like a development Disneyland where planners go to enact their fantasies," said William Easterly, economics professor at New York University.

But Sachs said he intended to use the village to empirically demonstrate that the Millennium Project goals can be achieved on a smaller scale by 2009, and within a $70-per-person per-year budget.

Mindful that his theories were headed for a showdown at the upcoming G-8 summit, Sachs fast-tracked the Sauri pilot — the first of 10 planned "Millennium Villages" around the world — so the improved crops would be planted in time for the June rainy season.

"We wanted to get some results on the ground before the summit," said Glenn Denning, director of the Millennium Development Goals Center in Nairobi, which is overseeing the Sauri project. "We wanted to be able to say that this is not just theory, not just a bunch of academics sitting around in New York. We're actually doing it."

Smiling in her small green forest of cornstalks, Adhola, the mother of seven, said she expected to harvest as many as 10 bags of corn this season, up from the usual three or four.

Asked what she would do with the surplus, Adhola answered quickly that she planned to sell it. As for what she would do with the earnings, the 55-year-old grower appeared stumped. "I've never had extra money before," she said with a smile, adding later that she would probably use the money to pay school fees.

"What we're doing in this village could be replicated everywhere," Sachs said.

Remote Sauri is drawing international attention. Politicians, journalists, scientists and gawkers — from Ugandan members of parliament to Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie — have traipsed through the village. Residents have complained about the intrusion, and project leaders now ask visitors to arrange their trips at least a month in advance.

Critics question whether Sachs' vision in Sauri, while admirable, can be rolled out on a large scale.

According to Easterly, similar attempts to inject massive aid into Africa and other poor regions failed in the 1950s and 1960s. Despite receiving $2.3 trillion in international assistance over the last 50 years, underdeveloped nations have little to show for it and Africa has grown even poorer, he said. Billions of dollars disappeared into corrupt or inefficient African governments, never reaching the intended recipients.

"There's a lot of skepticism about the idea of the Big Plan or doing everything at once," Easterly said. "If you do everything at once, you can't tell what worked and what didn't."

The Bush administration last week promised to double U.S. aid to Africa over the next five years, but it has expressed skepticism about programs that would significantly increase the commitment.

Sachs rejects the naysayers and insists that his plan shouldn't be rejected simply because something similar failed more than a generation ago. Past aid campaigns, he said, focused too heavily on short-term relief and not enough on providing developing nations with the tools they need to pull themselves out of the "poverty trap."

Of the $3 billion spent annually by the United States in Africa, $1 billion is for short-term food aid, $1 billion for combating AIDS and about $400 million on salaries of aid workers and consultants, Sachs said. That leaves only pennies a year per needy person in Africa to provide practical long-term assistance, such as anti-malaria drugs, road and water repairs, or farming supplies.

When Sachs' team arrived in Sauri, 64% of the townspeople earned less than $1 a day and most endured bouts of hunger because of low crop yields, said Patrick Mutuo, the on-site coordinator for the village. Malaria rates approach 40%, and nearly one-quarter of the villagers have HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, Mutuo said.

Sachs' game plan for Sauri is simple. His team saturated the depleted soil with about $75,000 worth of fertilizer and gave away hybrid corn seeds that produce double cobs. Each person received a free $7 mosquito net to protect against malaria. Project leaders expanded a school lunch program and persuaded the Kenyan government to repair a broken water pipe and lay an electricity line to the town.

"There's no rocket science here," Denning said.

Sachs said the only surprising thing about Sauri was that such proven techniques had not been applied before in a comprehensive manner.

The town's bumper crop — expected to be five times last season's volume — should go a long way toward ending hunger in Sauri. Community elders predict 80% of the villagers will have enough to eat until the next crop.

Other results, such as reducing malaria and AIDS, will not be measurable for another year.

Though Sachs has committed to not spending more than the prescribed $70 per person over the life of the five-year program, he's busted his budget for the first year, spending about $100 per person because of start-up costs, such as the new clinic and mosquito nets, Mutuo said. The project will account for the difference by spending less in the final years of the pilot, he said.

Success will depend heavily on involvement of the community, which is expected to make a contribution equivalent to about $10 per person, and the government, which is expected to pony up about $30 per person, according to Sachs' plan.

In Sauri, for example, residents provided the labor to build the clinic and farmers will be required to donate 10% of their crop yields to the school-meal program. The Kenyan government is expected to equip the clinic and provide expensive antiviral drugs to combat AIDS.

The pilot is grappling with some unexpected challenges. The huge crop has left villagers unprepared to store the corn, and there is concern that the surplus will depress prices.

Because the project started at the tail end of the dry season, when hunger was most severe, some of the villagers sold their free fertilizer and mosquito nets to buy food.

But the reward for those who took the long-term view is vividly apparent along the muddy roads of Sauri. Those who sold their fertilizer or used it incorrectly will be harvesting stunted, wilting stalks of yellow or purple, while those who followed directions will have healthy, tall ones like Adhola's.

The true test will come after the U.N. leaves Sauri, and villagers must rely on their own knowledge and discipline to sustain the prosperity, Kenyan economist James Shikwati said. He worries that too much outside assistance could stifle homegrown creativity and local enterprise.

"Come back in 10 years, not at the end of five, and see how Sauri is doing," said Shikwati, executive director of a free-market public policy group called Inter Region Economic Network. "These kinds of approaches create a dependency syndrome. What Africa needs is to save itself, not to look outside for someone to save them."

In Sauri, leaders vow not to lose the momentum. They've formed a committee to ensure that their progress remains on track after the strangers leave and the assistance runs out. One of their first efforts is to build a storage facility for surplus crops.

"We are rising out of poverty," said Martin Onando, a farmer and Sauri elder. "We had nothing before. We will not go back. When someone escapes hunger, they will do anything to avoid it again."

We are not alone!!!!!!!!!!!

2005-07-02T14:16:00.000-07:00

July 3, 2005
200,000 Call for End to Poverty
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ

EDINBURGH, July 2 - Wearing white as a symbol of hope and justice, more than 225,000 demonstrators encircled the heart of this graceful medieval city on Saturday and demanded an end to abject poverty around the world.

The radical and the peaceful, the curious and the committed, all poured into the streets here to deliver their message to the powerful leaders who will arrive at Gleneagles Hotel in Perthshire, nearby, for the Group of 8 summit meeting that starts Wednesday.

"Thirty thousand children die every day as a result of extreme poverty," said Richard Bennett, the chairman of the Make Poverty History campaign, the work of a coalition of 500 groups in Britain. "That is one every three seconds. It's totally avoidable, and the fact that it is avoidable makes it unacceptable."

Their list of particulars is not long, Mr. Bennett said at the protest, the first of several scheduled over the week. The activists and demonstrators want the wealthy of the world to do more for the wretched of the world, most notably in Africa. Specifically, they say, the world's richest countries should forgive the debts of the poorest countries, with no strings attached, equalize trade and put an end to harmful export subsidies and increase aid to poor countries while ensuring it gets funneled to the right people. The aid, activists say, should not come attached to cumbersome, unworkable requirements.

Buoyed by the sunny weather, the demonstrators spoke of their newfound hope that the British prime minister, Tony Blair, President Bush and the other leaders of the eight major industrialized countries were beginning to take note of the widening gap between rich and poor. The jubilant crowd blew whistles, banged drums, waved placards that read "Water Not War" and "Drop the Debt," donned kilts and flashed their white wrist bands, a symbol of the anti-poverty campaign.

At 3 p.m., the marchers - and many others in the city - halted for a two-minute silence. Shortly afterward, the marchers formed a white-clad human chain around the city center. In London, St. Paul's Cathedral was wrapped in white, and similar installations were planned in other cities around the world.

"Half the world is dying to eat and the other half is eating itself to death," said Elizabeth Hodgson, 49, a modern studies teacher at a high school in Livingston, not far from Edinburgh, who went to the march with her teenage daughter. "It won't be solved overnight, but there is no point in saying it will never be solved."

Cardinal Keith O'Brien, the head of Scotland's Catholics, read a message from the Vatican. He said that Pope Benedict XVI had called upon the summit meeting's leaders to do more for the poor of the world. The pope, he said, holds "ardent hope that the scourge of global poverty may one day be consigned to history."

Sitting on the grass at the rally on the Meadows, the city's largest park, Mike Dewar, a retired firefighter, said he had gone to the rally to help draw attention to the poverty that is ravaging the world but gets short shrift among the world's most pampered countries.

"They have to realize we're unhappy," he said, of the Group of 8 leaders. "They seem to be immune in their ivory towers. We don't all need money. Just a decent way to earn a living."

On the stage at the Meadows, Kathy Galloway, a human rights advocate from Glasgow, put it bluntly.

"This isn't about charity," she said, to the cheering crowd. "This is about justice."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times

The Illiterate Surgeon

2005-06-27T20:57:00.000-07:00

June 12, 2005
The Illiterate Surgeon
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia

Just about the worst thing that can happen to a teenage girl in this world is to develop an obstetric fistula that leaves her trickling bodily wastes, stinking and shunned by everyone around her. That happened four decades ago to Mamitu Gashe.

But the most amazing thing about Ms. Mamitu is not what she endured but what she has become.

Ms. Mamitu's story begins when she was an illiterate 15-year-old in a remote Ethiopian village unreachable by road and with no doctor nearby. She married a local man, became pregnant and after three days of labor, she lapsed into unconsciousness and the baby was stillborn.

"After I woke up, the bed was wet" with urine, she remembers. "I thought I would get better after two or three days, but I didn't."

That's typically how an obstetric fistula arises: a teenage girl, often malnourished and with an immature pelvis, tries to deliver her first baby. The fetus gets stuck, and after several days of labor it is stillborn - but some of the mother's internal tissues have been damaged in that time, and so to her horror she finds herself constantly trickling urine or sometimes feces from her vagina.

Soon she stinks. Her husband normally abandons her, the constant trickle of urine leaves her with terrible sores on her legs, and if she survives at all she is told to build a hut away from the rest of the village and to stay away from the village well. Some girls die of infections or suicide, but many linger for decades as pariahs and hermits - their lives effectively over at the age of about 15.

Fistulas were common in America in the 19th century. But improved medical care means that they are now almost unknown in the West, while the United Nations has estimated that at least two million girls and women live with fistulas in the developing world, mostly in Africa.

This should be an international scandal, because a $300 operation can normally repair the injury. A major effort to improve maternal health in the developing world should be a no-brainer, for it could prevent most fistulas and reduce deaths in childbirth by half within a decade, saving 300,000 lives a year.

But maternal health is woefully neglected, and those suffering fistulas are completely voiceless - young, female, poor, rural and ostracized. They are the 21st century's lepers.

Ms. Mamitu was exceptionally lucky in that she was brought to a hospital here in Addis Ababa that offered free surgery by a saintly husband and wife pair of gynecologists from Australia, Reginald and Catherine Hamlin. Reg is now dead, while Catherine is the Mother Teresa of our time and is long overdue for a Nobel Peace Prize.

After that operation, 42 years ago, Ms. Mamitu was given a job making beds in the hospital. Then she began helping out during surgeries, and after a couple of years of watching she was asked by Dr. Reg Hamlin to cut some stitches. Eventually, Ms. Mamitu was routinely performing the entire fistula repair herself.

Over the decades, Ms. Mamitu has gradually become one of the world's most experienced fistula surgeons. Gynecologists from around the world go to the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital to train in fistula repair, and typically their teacher is Ms. Mamitu.

Not bad for an illiterate Ethiopian peasant who as a child never went to a day of school.

A few years ago, Ms. Mamitu tired of being an illiterate master surgeon, and so she began night school. She's now in the third grade.

The Fistula Hospital where Ms. Mamitu works is nicknamed "puddle city" - because patients stroll around dripping urine - but it abounds with joy and hope.

President Bush has increased aid to the developing world generally and to Africa in particular, but a few days ago he rejected Tony Blair's appeal for a further dramatic increase in assistance for Africa. The real stakes in that rejection will be measured in lives like Ms. Mamitu's. I hope that Mr. Bush will reconsider - for the sake of people like those girls with fistula living in huts alone on the edges of hundreds of thousands of villages.

Ms. Mamitu shows us what a tragedy it would be to write them off. A couple of Australians once gave Ms. Mamitu a break, and so today Ms. Mamitu is not a victim at all, but an inspiration.

And, I hope, an inspiration to us to be more generous.

E-mail: nicholas@nytimes.com

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times

It's taking sooooo long!

2005-06-26T00:31:00.000-07:00

June 26, 2005
After the Tsunami, Rebuilding Homes and Social Fabric
By SETH MYDANS,
International Herald Tribune

LAMBADA LHOKE, Indonesia, June 23 - When the people of this fishing village rebuild their homes on their old foundations, they will live among a checkerboard of empty lots left by those who died in the tsunami six months ago Sunday.

"They will be blank," said Charul Amri, the village chief, describing the square patches of rubble or tile flooring that are all that remains of the fishermen's houses here on the coast of Aceh.

Eventually, he said, those plots will be claimed or bought, new neighbors will take the place of those who are gone, and Lambada Lhoke - where just 600 residents out of 1,700 survived - will come back to life.

"That's the law of nature," Mr. Amri said. "Where there's an empty space it will be filled."

But the blanks left behind are as much social as physical, and they may take even longer to fill. Entire families, neighborhoods, villages and social networks were torn apart by the tsunami. Most people here have lost relatives and co-workers, often in large numbers.

This Indonesian province at the northern tip of Sumatra suffered the greatest losses on Dec. 26, in the tsunami that followed the world's most powerful earthquake in 40 years.

The giant waves that scoured the coastline obliterated more than 600 villages and left a landscape of rubble and flotsam in Banda Aceh. Very little has been done to begin rebuilding them, prompting sharp criticism over the pace of reconstruction. Indonesia's death toll is still evolving, as more bodies are found and more survivors are reunited. In Aceh, by the latest count, at least 127,000 people are dead, 30,066 are still missing and half a million have been displaced from their homes, according to Michele Lipner, the coordinator of humanitarian affairs for the United Nations here. This makes up a large part of the regional toll for the tsunami, which now stands at 176,727 deaths, with another 49,616 missing.

About a quarter of Aceh's population of four million has been directly affected by the tsunami, she said. "We are looking at a loss of human resources - teachers, civil servants, doctors, nurses," she said. "We're not looking at just rebuilding buildings but rebuilding human capacity. It's unprecedented, absolutely unprecedented."

The swaths of death changed population patterns, she said. It is not enough now simply to replace schools, for example, on the sites of those that were destroyed. In Lambada Lhoke, the checkerboard of the dead and living matches the pattern of vacant lots along the seashore.

Mr. Amri, who lost 11 relatives, stepped into his job when the village headman died in the tsunami. He said three of the four neighborhood chiefs had died. The village harbormaster and the caretaker of the mosque are dead, along with many of the skilled workers who would be needed to help rebuild the village. About 30 villagers had college degrees; all but 6 are dead.

Lambada Lhoke - like many other communities - is now a village of widowers. Many men were out fishing or working elsewhere; the women were at home, in the path of the waves. The international aid group Oxfam estimated in March that as many as three times as many women as men died in Aceh. In Lambada Lhoke, just 125 of the 600 survivors are women.

The men have been left to take care of themselves, and they seem to be going it alone. Neither here nor in other villages have the men and the surviving women banded together for mutual help.

"They live alone, they cook alone, they wash alone, they sleep alone," said Bukari Wahab, 35, a fisherman who survived with his wife, who was left crippled.

Another fisherman, Sofyan, 45, said: "No women around here. No one to do laundry."

As a result, Aceh is bursting with weddings. Here in Lambada Lhoke, 35 men have already remarried, many of them to relatives of their wives, according to local custom.

Until their new homes are built, people here live in a cluster of tents that become drenched in monsoon downpours and sometimes blow away in the high winds that sweep across the now-barren coast. Only a few sparse palm trees remain after waves stripped away all other vegetation and almost every building.

It is here that the reconstruction blanks overlay the social blanks. It is difficult to build a new life when homes and public services have not begun to be put in place.

Shortly after being named to lead a new rehabilitation and reconstruction agency at the end of April - four months after the tsunami - Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, a former energy minister, said he was shocked at what he found here.

"There are no roads being built, there are no bridges being built, there are no harbors being built," he said. "When it comes to reconstruction - zero."

It was only last month that the Indonesian government produced its multivolume broad "blueprint" for reconstruction.

The billions of dollars it has received from governments, aid organizations and many thousands of individuals have now entered the bottleneck of the annual budget process and apparently will not be available until at least September.

In an interview, Ms. Lipner of the United Nations said that the pace of recovery here was in fact not slower than in most other postdisaster situations and that all the elements of reconstruction were now in place.

"You're not simply rebuilding," she said. "You're going back and recreating communities, recreating an infrastructure, and doing it in a fashion that minimizes risk for future disasters. So when people talk about the pace of reconstruction - do you want to build a house just to build it or do you want to make sure you do it right?"

But for the people who live here, it can be hard to understand that things are being done right.

"Housing, housing, housing, even a simple shelter!" said Azwar Hasan, who leads a private local agency that helps displaced people.

"I'm thinking, 'Oh my God, people are coming here for needs assessments again and again,' " he said. "They are getting lost in their blueprint. Everyone is talking about tomorrow. When are they going to do something?"

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times

Their hearts are in the right place but once you are on the ground it's difficult...........

2005-05-28T10:57:00.000-07:00

washingtonpost.com
In Sri Lanka, a Hard Lesson On Road of Good Intentions

By John Lancaster
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, May 28, 2005; A01

KOMARI, Sri Lanka -- She was fresh out of college, bright-eyed and ambitious, an earthy, well-read physician's daughter from Missoula, Mont., with an iPod, a loving family and lots of big ideas. The only thing Satya Byock said she lacked was "a freaking plan."

The tsunami gave her one.

Two months after the Dec. 26 calamity in South Asia, equipped with high hopes and $13,000 in donated funds, Byock made her way to this remote fishing and farming community on Sri Lanka's east coast. Here, she joined forces with several other volunteers -- including a firefighter from Washington state and a young Australian couple -- in an ad hoc recovery effort.

What followed was a harsh dose of reality.

With limited resources and no experience in relief work, the freelancers have struggled in the face of obstinate bureaucracies, profiteering local businessmen, tensions with mainstream aid groups and resistance from villagers, most of whom remain too fearful of another giant wave -- or too dependent on aid donations -- to leave their refugee camps and return home.

The first-time aid workers have watched in dismay as the school they helped to rebuild has lost students because many of its teachers have failed to show up for work. They have also endured the hardships of life without electricity or running water, and moments of agonizing self-doubt.

In many ways, their story echoes those of thousands of untrained foreigners -- known derisively in professional aid circles as "tsunami tourists" -- who flocked to the region to be a part of the largest humanitarian relief effort in history and have emerged both chastened and wiser for the experience.

"There was such a sense of disappointment, and an overwhelming sense of cynicism," recalled Byock, 21, who said she preferred the term "guerrilla aid workers." "I thought about leaving a number of times."

But their efforts have not been for naught.

Despite the setbacks, the Komari volunteers have drawn strength from small triumphs, such as pumping wells clean of seawater or rebuilding the home of an elderly tsunami refugee who wanted to return here to die. Nor are they giving up. Although Byock unexpectedly left the country this month after a dispute with a local police official, the Australians remain and another American has arrived to take her place; Byock plans to keep working on behalf of the village, through awareness events and fundraising, in the United States.

"Every now and again I have a day when I think, 'What am I doing here?' " said Genevieve Lean, 29, an intensive care nurse who came here from the Australian city of Darwin and is now the team's leader. But invariably, she added, "at the end of the day something happens that makes you think, 'Okay, I can do this.' "

Villagers seem to appreciate their efforts. T. Sundararajah, for example, is a farmer and shop owner who said he began drinking heavily after he lost most of his possessions to the tsunami. But the freelance group has given him hope. He recently quit drinking, he said, and now works with the team on an initiative to restore damaged croplands.

"They are doing good work," said Sundararajah, 54. "That's why I joined them."
Area of Devastation

Flanked by the ocean and a lagoon, shaded by graceful, curving coconut palms, Komari is a place of captivating beauty that occupies a narrow strip of sandy soil about 130 miles east of Colombo, the capital.

Even before the tsunami, it was also a place of considerable poverty. In contrast to the other side of this island nation, which in recent decades has experienced a boom in tourism and other industries, the east coast has borne the brunt of the suffering during the 20-year civil war between Sri Lankan government forces and rebels from the country's ethnic Tamil minority.

The death toll from the tsunami in Komari was far lower than it might have been. The catastrophe killed about 31,000 people nationwide. In this town, only an estimated 75 of 3,500 residents died, thanks in part to the quick thinking of paramilitary troops who evacuated the village before it was completely flooded. But the physical damage here was staggering, with most structures reduced to heaps of bricks or perhaps a single room or wall.

As elsewhere in Sri Lanka, international aid organizations rushed to provide food and other assistance to displaced families, most of whom still live in two large refugee camps that bracket Komari. But in what remains of the village, much of the recovery work has been carried out by the small team of freelancers that Byock recently left.

The team owes its existence to Darrin Coldiron, 35, a brash, stocky firefighter from Spokane, Wash., who flew to Sri Lanka with a colleague in early January. Other members included Lean, the nurse, and Andy Ashton, a primary school teacher, who were living together in Darwin. They initially tried to volunteer with established aid groups; finding no takers, they quit their jobs anyway, flew to Sri Lanka at their own expense and came to Komari.
Defining a Mission

Byock had experienced a similar awakening. After graduating from Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Ore., in 2004, she drifted from place to place. She was staying with her grandmother in San Diego, and "99 percent of the way through 'Anna Karenina,' " the classic Leo Tolstoy novel, when the tsunami struck.

She hooked up with a tsunami relief group in her home town of Missoula, helped raise money and learned about Komari from her local newspaper. An aunt bought her a plane ticket to Colombo, where she landed on Feb. 19.

The money Byock brought with her from Missoula, along with funds raised elsewhere, swelled the team's coffers to about $40,000. The group acquired a name, Northwest Firefighter Disaster Recovery, and a purpose. With larger organizations devoting most of their resources to semi-permanent housing and sanitation in the camps, the team decided to focus its energies on the village.

To that end, they tried to set an example by moving into a grubby, tile-roofed bungalow that is one of Komari's few intact dwellings. Thrown together like contestants on "Survivor," they shared the hardships of hauling water from a well and showering under a plastic container warmed by the sun.

As a first step toward making the village habitable, the volunteers began an effort to clean wells that had been flooded with seawater, acquiring pumps and a $450 salinity tester and consulting foreign experts by phone and e-mail. Hiring local workers for $5 a day, they also went to work on the school, knocking down classroom buildings that Coldiron deemed unsafe and fixing others.

The volunteers have encountered many unforeseen roadblocks. In particular, they have clashed with local officials over the interpretation of a new rule meant to discourage people from living within about 200 yards of the sea, a policy that has effectively placed much of Komari off-limits to rebuilding. They have also had problems with workers from professional aid agencies.

"The predominant line was, 'We're so-and-so, and we're the ones who are in charge, and if you want to do anything, you should do it through us,'" Coldiron recalled.

Against that backdrop, Byock said, the energy and enthusiasm she felt when she arrived in Komari soon dissipated.

During her first weeks here, she worked on an employment initiative that paid village women to weave roof panels out of palm fronds for temporary housing. But the initiative fizzled, Byock said, when the women decided they were better off collecting handouts while "sitting in camp."

Moreover, Byock said, whenever she tried to suggest alternatives, "Darrin's catchphrase was, 'We tried that and it didn't work.' It was a very scary situation."

To add to her troubles, she ran afoul of a local police official, who found her at home by herself one afternoon and made what she regarded as "inappropriate" overtures. Word of the episode got back to the man's superiors, who reprimanded him, Byock said. The official then turned hostile, demanding repeatedly to see her passport -- which she feared was a prelude to deportation -- and interfering with her work.
Signs of Progress

By late April, when a reporter visited, Komari still resembled a ghost town. Coldiron had returned to his firefighting job, and the three remaining volunteers were showing signs of strain. Unwinding after a long day's work, Lean, the nurse, wearily described how a 90-minute argument with a local lumber supplier over the terms of a delivery had reduced her to tears.

"At the moment I feel pretty burned out," said Lean, an intense woman with a warm smile that appears infrequently. "There are just too many barriers."

Lean expressed particular dismay at the tepid reaction of residents to the group's housing initiative. The team had offered to build simple wooden homes for refugees who wished to return to the village, provided they demonstrated their seriousness by contributing $50 -- in cash or labor -- of the $350 cost. Most preferred to remain in the crowded camps.

The missing teachers were another cause of frustration. Riding a borrowed motorcycle through the village, Ashton, the teacher, nodded in the direction of a temporary, open-air classroom, where children in white uniforms sat patiently. Their teacher was nowhere in sight.

"That just makes me sick seeing that," Ashton said.

But the freelancers could also point to signs of progress. After several months of effort, the team and its local laborers had pumped out most of the village's 450 wells. While contamination problems remained, the salinity in some wells had been reduced to the point where Ashton could mark them as "clean" in a color-coded computer spreadsheet.

Byock also was beginning to see the fruits of her efforts, which for most of April focused on helping landowners restore their gardens and croplands to productive use. Walking through Komari on her morning rounds, she watched approvingly as a villager and one of the team's paid workers strung barbed wire around a small plot that would soon be planted with donated mango and lime-tree seedlings.

"The way to start agriculture now is with trees, because they're much easier to watch, and water," Byock said before moving on to another part of the village, where she exhorted farmers to move quickly on a plan to form a new farmers' society.

Byock's troubles with the police official, however, were not over. During a meeting that week with the man's superior, she and her colleagues learned that the officer was due to be transferred as a consequence of her complaint about his behavior. Fearing retribution by the officer or one of his friends, all three decided it would be best if Byock left the country as soon as possible.

In a hotel lobby in Colombo shortly before her departure, Byock was philosophical as she reflected on her nine weeks in Komari. She expressed confidence that the work she started would continue, tempered with regret that she would not be around to see it. And far from being disillusioned by the experience, she said she would like to return to Sri Lanka, albeit as a paid development specialist.

"I don't feel like I failed," she said.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Grisly Choice

2005-05-20T13:38:00.000-07:00

I swear, next time I'm in Afghanistan (2006) I'm going to learn all about it so that I can make a report and convince some burn specialists to go there to help these women.

washingtonpost.com
In Search of Freedom, Afghan Wives Make a Grisly Choice

By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, October 28, 2004; Page A16

HERAT, Afghanistan -- Zahara Mohamedi decided she couldn't take it anymore.

Last year, when she was 18, her family sold her for the equivalent of about $1,200 into a forced marriage with a man she had never met. She moved from the city to a village, where her new husband never allowed her to leave the house. She was treated as little more than a servant, taking orders from her in-laws -- even from an 11-year-old girl.

Eight months ago, Mohamedi poured cooking oil over her head and chest and announced that she was going to set herself on fire. Her in-laws dared her to. They beat her and held her. She broke free and lit a match, immediately engulfing her face and upper body in flames.

"It was a kind of protest against the pressure," said Mohamedi, who survived the ordeal but carries its scars -- her left arm is badly burned and her chin is bound to her chest by her own skin.

"I didn't care about my life," she said, speaking quickly and softly, tugging at the beige shawl that covers her disfigured features. "If I was killed, I would be free of him. If I survived, I would be free of him, too."

Mohamedi's story is hardly unique here in westernmost Afghanistan, where, three years after the fall of the Taliban, women remain subject to many legal, religious and cultural restrictions and domestic violence is endemic. So far this year, at least 180 women and girls have been taken to the rudimentary burn ward in Herat's hospital. More than 100 have died.

All are believed to be victims of self-immolation, though many, in the presence of their husbands or relatives, later deny they were attempting suicide and blame their injuries on cooking accidents. The majority of them, like Mohamedi, were in their teens or mid-twenties, sold into forced marriages and victims of constant abuse.

Last year, the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, using records from the burn unit, recorded 300 suspected cases of women and girls setting themselves on fire; more than 80 percent of them died.

The commission says the actual number of women who have resorted to self-immolation is far higher than what is reflected in hospital records. In addition to those taken to the hospital, many more may be dying in isolated villages, rights workers say.

"Why does it happen? Because of poverty in society," said Qazy Ghulam Nabi Hakak, the Herat regional program manager for the human rights commission. "The families that can't survive engage their young daughters to older men. . . . Another problem is the tradition of the people. Conservative families don't allow their women to sit with men, to work with men in an office or to walk open-faced from their houses. Women feel like they are in prison, and under that pressure, they commit suicide."

Herat province, which borders Iran, is more religiously conservative than many parts of Afghanistan. In rural areas, men expect women to stay indoors or to cover themselves with burqas when they venture outside.

Conditions for women improved after the Taliban was toppled in 2001, but "advances were tempered by growing government repression of social and political life," according to a report issued by Human Rights Watch late the following year.

Ismail Khan, a powerful faction leader who governed Herat before and after Taliban rule, imposed many of his own restrictions on women. "Ismail Khan has created an atmosphere in which government officials and private individuals believe they have the right to police every aspect of women's and girls' lives: how they dress, how they get around town, what they say," said Human Rights Watch's Zama Coursen-Neff in the report she co-wrote. "Women and girls in Herat expected and deserved more when the Taliban were overthrown."

Last month, Afghan President Hamid Karzai dismissed Khan from the Herat governorship. But popular reaction to the move did not suggest widespread support for the lifting of social constraints. A mob stormed the human rights commission's office on women's affairs and set it on fire, destroying files and computers.

Last Sunday, there were 10 burn victims in the Herat hospital's burn ward, all women, the youngest a 14-year-old. Nosh Afreen, a physician, said 10 cases amounted to a slow day. Sometimes, she said, "we don't have one empty bed."

"Most of the women who want to commit suicide use this method," Afreen explained. "Actually, the women aren't aware of any other method to commit suicide. If they wanted to take pills, they don't know how many pills to take. So this is the only method they know."

As she spoke, a burn victim arrived, covered by a blue burqa, leaning on the arm of her husband and limping badly. When her husband saw a foreign journalist and his interpreter, he muttered, in an agitated voice: "These women ought to learn to be more careful when they're cooking!"

Later, the woman, 25, sat in a bed in the burn ward with most of her face swathed in gauze, only her eyes visible, and an intravenous drip in her arm. When questioned, her husband said that she had been preparing a meal in a pressure cooker when it exploded.

Afreen and members of the Human Rights Commission said husbands and other relatives of women who survive suicide attempts often try to cover up what happened out of shame and fear of criminal prosecution. In most self-immolation cases, police respond and file a report. Afreen said that, despite the investigations, "nothing happens."

In many ways, Mohamedi's story is typical.

She was born in Iran to parents who were refugees from western Afghanistan. They returned to Herat even before fall of the Taliban. The family was poor, with five girls and a boy. Her father tried to make ends meet by selling whatever he could find from a wheelbarrow. Mohamedi's education ended after the seventh grade.

Last year, a distant relative came with an offer: Two young men from a village an hour away would purchase her and her younger sister, then 15, to be their wives. When the money was paid, there was a lavish double wedding.

"Nobody asked me what I wanted to do, or did I like him or not," Mohamedi said. "When I found out they had engaged me to him, I said okay, if it's my family's wish, I'll do it for them."

From the beginning, she recalled, her life was hell. She was forbidden to go outside, even to see her younger sister, who lived 20 minutes away, or her mother in Herat. Her husband beat her regularly, sometimes for no reason, but most often for asking to leave the house.

Her in-laws, she said, were worse. She was treated like the family servant. At one point, her mother-in-law told her to take orders from her 11-year-old sister-in-law. "You should serve her like a servant," Mohamedi recalled the woman telling her. "Whatever she wants, you should do it."

Mohamedi constantly warned her husband that she was thinking of killing herself. But he only laughed, she said, and encouraged her.

"He thought I was just joking," she said. "I didn't know how to commit suicide. He was encouraging me, saying, 'Why not just burn yourself?' "

One night after dinner, she served tea to her father-in-law, returned to the kitchen, poured cooking oil over herself and set herself ablaze.

The family at first refused to take her to the hospital, instead placing her on a bed and fanning her scorched body. It was only when her sister found out what happened and came, and neighbors gathered outside, that the family took her to Herat's burn ward. At first, the in-laws said she had been in a cooking accident -- that her scarf caught fire. But her mother, Sharifa Ghulani, said she started screaming until she learned the truth.

Mohamedi spent 23 days in the burn ward. While there, she said, she saw 56 other women, all of whom had done the same thing. The youngest, she said, was 13.

She and her sister are now divorced from their abusive husbands. Mohamedi said she feels bad about her appearance but that her scars may serve as a lesson.

"It's not only a lesson for my younger sisters," she said. "It's also a lesson for all of our relatives and neighbors."

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

Makes me want to scream. How can this happen? What kind of world do we live in? Some people are truly evil.

2005-05-09T18:42:00.000-07:00

May 8, 2005
Sri Lankan Maids Pay Dearly for Perilous Jobs Overseas
By AMY WALDMAN

KEGALLA, Sri Lanka - The teacher held up an electric cake mixer and told the class of wide-eyed women before her to clean it properly. If it smells, "Mama," as the aspiring maids were instructed to call their female employers, "will be angry and she will hammer and beat you."

"This is where you go wrong," the teacher continued. "That is how Mama beats you and burns you - when you do anything wrong."

Eighteen female hands took down every word, as if inscription could ward off ill fortune. Among the women, Rangalle Lalitha Irangame was struggling to keep up, haggard after a sleepless night in the hospital. Her 4-year-old daughter was sick with fever, a worrisome turn for any mother, but a cause for panic for one about to leave for years abroad.

After a year of thinking, 35-year-old Lalitha - who prefers that name - decided to trade her life as a Sri Lankan housewife for one as a Middle Eastern housemaid. After completing their 12-day training, she and her classmates would join a mass migration of women to the Persian Gulf's petro-lubricated economies, trading the fecundity and community of Sri Lankan villages for the aridity and high-walled homes of the Arab world.

Behind those walls the women risk exploitation so extreme that it sometimes approaches "slaverylike" conditions, according to a recent Human Rights Watch report on foreign workers in Saudi Arabia. But while attention has focused on the failure of countries like Saudi Arabia to prevent or prosecute abuses, the de facto complicity of the countries that send their women abroad has largely escaped scrutiny.

For developing countries, migration has become a safety valve, easing the pressure to employ the poor and generating more than $100 billion in remittances in 2003, according to a study by Devesh Kapur, an associate professor of government at Harvard.

More than a million Sri Lankans - roughly 1 in every 19 citizens - now work abroad, and nearly 600,000 are housemaids, according to government estimates. Migrant workers have become Sri Lanka's largest and most consistent earner of foreign exchange, out-doing all major agricultural crops.

In Saudi Arabia, the most common destination, they call Sri Lanka "the country of housemaids." In Sri Lanka they call the maids heroines.

Sri Lanka's government has become an assiduous marketer of its own people. With training programs like Lalitha's, it is helping to prepare what is by now a second generation of housemaids. It even provides a safe haven to shelter, hide and rehabilitate those women who return with broken bodies, lost minds or incipient children.

But it does little to publicize those abuses, protest against them or protect the women for fear of jeopardizing the hundreds of millions of dollars they send home each year.

The women's remittances have built homes, provided capital for businesses, and given the women themselves an enduring confidence. But those gains have come with incalculable hardships.

The women often leave indebted, work virtually indentured and have almost no legal redress against the sexual harassment, confinement or physical abuse they often suffer in the countries they adopt. With no absentee voting rights, they also have no political voice back home.

By one estimate, 15 to 20 percent of the 100,000 Sri Lankan women who leave each year for the gulf return prematurely, face abuse or nonpayment of salary, or get drawn into illicit people trafficking schemes or prostitution.

Many housemaids who run away from their employers are kept in limbo at Sri Lanka's embassies because no one wants to pay their way home. Last year, after their plight was publicized, the government airlifted home 529 maids who had been living for months, packed as tightly as in a slavehold, in the basement of the embassy in Kuwait.

Hundreds of housemaids have become pregnant, often after rapes, producing children who, until Sri Lanka's Constitution was recently amended, were stateless because their fathers were foreigners. More than 100 women come home dead each year, with most deaths labeled "natural" by the host governments, although Sri Lankan officials concede they are powerless to investigate.

Back home, the exodus has reconfigured family life. Women dispense maternal love through letters, cash and cassettes sent home. Divorce, children leaving school, husbands turning to alcohol, and child sexual abuse have become routine byproducts of the women's absence.

There are less tangible tolls as well. "That time will never come back," Roshan Prageeth Kumarasinghe, an 18-year-old neighbor of Lalitha's, said, choking back tears, of his mother's decade-long absence.

Ready to Sacrifice All

In Lalitha's class, nine of the women were mothers, all 40 and under, all prepared to give up everything for their children's future, including, for 2, 4 or 10 years, the company of the children themselves.

By the end of their 12-day course, they would learn how to dismantle a vacuum cleaner and say "toilet cleaner" in Arabic. They would learn, too, not to take the gold chain their employers would leave out as temptation. They would even be taught that in the Muslim countries they were destined for, they should conceal that they were Buddhist or Hindu.

Technically, they were women, all above 18. But in their shy smiles and the innocence of having come of age in a conservative culture, they were girls. Almost all of them, like Lalitha, had at least a 10th grade education, reflective of Sri Lanka's high literacy rates, but that had done nothing to improve their employment prospects.

Two of the girls had failed marriages, and saw going abroad as their only hope for supporting themselves and their children on their own. Three were hoping to secure a better marital match by earning a dowry larger than destitute parents could provide.

Four were newly married, hoping to escape from relatives' homes into their own. Three were the second generation of housemaids in their families - one even planned to take over her aging mother's job.

All were poor. In this hill country district, the poverty rate is 32 percent. Most men find only irregular work tapping rubber, earning at best $50 a month. Their only hope for climbing up, or avoiding slipping further down, is their wives.

The husband of one of Lalitha's classmates drove a rented motorized rickshaw, earning just enough to feed the family. Their house was literally sliding away, with no money to build a retaining wall or repay a bank loan that was well overdue.

His wife, S. M. R. Deepa Ranjanie, a bright-eyed 25-year-old poet, was determined to solve the family's financial crisis, but in leaving she also saw an escape. She had married at 16, had two sons, 9 and 4, then had seen the marriage sour. She was desperate to flee an abusive home.

Lalitha's husband, K. Weeratunghe, 41, worked when he could tapping rubber or felling trees. On some days the family had no money for milk. Their house was so meager that, to improve it, Lalitha decided to leave him behind - along with her daughter, Hiroshika Mihirani, 4, and son, Manoj Sandervan, 8.

With no electricity, the home had a perpetual gloom. The walls were cracking, the windows glassless. In class, the women pored over pictures of the gulf's glossy kitchens, but at home Lalitha cooked on a wood stove in a room made of palm fronds.

The training she and the others attended had in fact been started in part because rustic village women's unfamiliarity with electric appliances and Arabic was exposing them to the wrath of frustrated employers.

The course was conducted by the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment, a public corporation established by an act of Parliament in 1985 to both promote migration and protect migrants, two sometimes contradictory missions. It runs 22 training centers, including the one in Kegalla.

The traffic at the center was incessant. Mothers brought their daughters. Husbands brought their wives. Brothers brought sisters who had been left by their husbands. One woman came in to register with an 18-month-old baby still sucking at her breast, although she was too thin to give milk.

Many women had been recruited by a network of private agents, not always reputable, who trolled rural villages and town bus stands looking for new prospects. The agents earned commissions for each woman from both the foreign employment bureau and partner agents in the Middle East.

Lalitha's course Lalitha aimed to create competent maids, but also docile ones, who would serve out two-year contracts promising about $120 a month even if the pay almost never came. A maid's greatest asset, teachers taught, was "tolerance."

The reason for that message, analysts and officials say, is the competition from other poor nations, notably the Philippines, which together send hundreds of thousands of women abroad each year. Too many demands for housemaids' rights, the government fears, will simply prompt the gulf countries to seek housemaids elsewhere.

When it came to the prospect of abuse or sexual harassment, the teacher gave almost no allowance for the possibility that even good housemaids might be victimized, no acknowledgment that even a smelly cake mixer did not justify a beating.

The teacher, Kaluarachchi Chandra Malini, a 38-year-old former housemaid with erect posture and a brisk manner, taught the women how to turn on hot and cold water taps, how to run electrical appliances, how to navigate household hazards - the cleanser that could poison a child or the Clorox that could blind a maid.

More than that, she tried to prepare the women for the risks leaving their families entailed. Given the high incidence of fathers raping daughters with wives away, the housemaids were told not to entrust older girls to their fathers. An older lady was better, or even a home for girls.

Because Sri Lanka's divorce rate has climbed with the migration, the women should take the addresses of trustworthy neighbors to whom they could write asking whether husbands had fallen into drugs, drink or other women's arms. The trainees were warned not to send money to their husbands, lest they drink it away.

These pitfalls were already known to some of the women. One student, Disna, had as a girl seen her father drink away the money her mother had sent from abroad.

And Deepa's neighbor had just returned from Kuwait to find that while she had faithfully been sending money to her husband, he had not been faithful to her. Deepa, however, had studiously avoided going down the hill to learn this fact at first hand.

Silence About the Abuse

There seemed to be a national pact under way: with rare exceptions, the returning women did not reveal the worst of their experience, and the departing women did not ask. Sexual harassment and especially abuse were considered too shameful to discuss with husbands, relatives or neighbors.

But while the class steered from the worst, it was often literally in the room next door. One day a girl of delicate beauty, 21-year-old Niroshamie, came into the office, black tendrils curling around her face, X-rays in her hand.

The young scion of the Kuwait house where she worked had repeatedly tried to molest her, finally pushing her to the ground and breaking her wrist. She had to pay for the cast, work with it on for two months, then finance her own way home. She had returned to Sri Lanka with a wrist needing surgery and not a cent more than when she had left.

But the most gruesome cases were kept out of sight, quickly ushered from the airport upon arrival to the Sahana Piyasa, literally the Place of Relief, a shelter run by the foreign employment bureau.

The shelter gets two to three severe abuse cases a week, according to the officials who run it, and often many more. Some women are so badly injured they are carried off the plane on stretchers, or swathed entirely in bandages. Most cases never make the news, and they stay at the shelter until they heal enough not to shock waiting families.

Karunasena Hettiarachchi, who until recently was the chairman of the foreign employment bureau, said the government did what it could to protect women, but the very nature of the job made it difficult. In a house, as opposed to a factory, "there are no rules," he said. Sri Lanka's embassies had no power to investigate what went on behind private walls.

Agents, too, looked the other way, in part because no one wanted to cover the costs of a maid who did not serve out her contract.

Thangarasa Jeyanthi, 20 and emaciated, had arrived at the shelter from Lebanon one morning. She had a face as purple and puffy as a plum, eyes swollen shut, burn marks on her body and dried blood still around her ears.

The husband and wife she worked for had assaulted her daily, she said, speaking in the high, anguished voice of a little girl who cannot understand what she has done wrong. They had cut her with a knife, kicked and stomped on her, tied her hands with rope and denied her food.

Her employer's mother had rescued her, taking her to the police. They secured five months back salary for her, and took her to the airport, where strangers moved by her appearance collected $232 for her.

"I never expected to be returned to Sri Lanka," she said. "I always thought only my dead body would come back."

The abused women struggled to reconcile the message of their training - that good behavior would make for a good experience - with the reality of their employment.

"I did all of my housework properly," said Sudarma Manilariatne, 27, who arrived at Sahana Piyasa in January with swollen, bandaged legs, a gash on her forehead and a fractured hand. "I do not understand why they did this."

She had been beaten by her female employer, and was helped to escape the house by the employer's 16-year-old son, after receiving not a cent of salary. She wore a head scarf, which the shelter staff urged her to remove. The young woman refused and began to cry. For Sri Lankan women, long hair is a source of pride, its absence, a source of shame. Ms. Manilariatne's employer - her "mama" - had cut boy-short the hair that the maid's own mother had helped her take care of as a girl.

Fearful and Already in Debt

The training course was coming to an end. Ms. Malini, the teacher, was worried about Lalitha. She struggled with leaving her children for 12 days, Ms. Malini said. How could she go abroad? Lalitha, visibly upset over her sick child, physically ill herself on some days, insisted that little by little she was mentally preparing.

In class, the girls stared intently at photographs of airplane interiors while Ms. Malini provided last-minute tips. Do not wear black when you meet your employer lest you look too dark. Do not be frightened when you see only the eyes of the Saudi Arabian woman who meets you at the airport. Wear long sleeves and a wedding ring, even if unmarried.

Deepa's 9-year-old was crying in the mornings, knowing she was leaving. "We have to build a beautiful house," she told him, although the family's debts meant a new house was years away.

With the foreign employment bureau's registration fees to pay and new clothes to buy, she and the other women were borrowing money from anyone they could. Deepa had given the family's only valuable possessions as collateral. Her children would be without both their mother and the television they so loved, she said ruefully.

Deepa had failed the strict medical exam Saudi Arabia required of housemaids, and would go to the United Arab Emirates. Her fallibility was a leaky heart valve. She had had surgery once, and needed it again, but she was afraid even to take her medicine with her, lest her employers discover she was unwell.

To both save and escape her home, she would gamble with her life. "I was happier in the class," she said.

Dukkha, or suffering, is a word that colors the women's conversations and shadows their lives. When Lalitha went for the medical test every housemaid must pass before departing, her illness during class was explained: she was pregnant.

She faced a choice between a child she wanted and debts she could not pay. She did not believe in abortion, she said, but hers was a life with no room for error. She paid $27 to terminate the pregnancy, adding to the family debt and her own sadness.

Now Lalitha's agent seemed to be swindling her. He had promised a ticket, then not delivered it, then brought a visa that turned out to be fake.

As wrenching as it was to leave her children, shame was prodding her toward Saudi Arabia. She and her husband borrowed $398 from fellow villagers. The first repayment date had come and gone, and the lenders wanted her gone, too, and earning money.

She wanted to earn money, too, not least to keep paying for private classes for her 8-year-old son. "He is clever," she said of the boy. "I want him to climb up."

Lalitha had already taught her 4-year-old the alphabet, she said proudly. Her husband, who had finished only the eighth grade, noted that his wife was more educated than he.

Only her 8-year-old seemed to recognize the implications of his mother's departure. "Who will teach me when you go?" he asked.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times

Condoms please, Mr. Pope!

2005-05-09T10:29:00.000-07:00

The Pope and AIDS
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
SÃO PAULO, Brazil

Let's hope that Pope Benedict XVI quickly realizes that the worst sex scandal in the Catholic Church doesn't involve predatory priests. Rather, it involves the Vatican's hostility to condoms, which is creating more AIDS orphans every day.

Nobody does nobler work throughout the developing world than the Catholic Church. You find priests and nuns in the most remote spots of Latin America and Africa, curing the sick and feeding the hungry, and Catholic Relief Services is a model of compassion.

But at the same time, the Vatican's ban on condoms has cost many hundreds of thousands of lives from AIDS. So when historians look back at the Catholic Church in this era, they'll give it credit for having fought Communism and helped millions of the poor around the world. But they'll also count its anti-condom campaign as among its most tragic mistakes in the first two millennia of its history.

"The Catholic Church helps increase AIDS in the world," said Roseli Tardelli, a Catholic who is editor of the AIDS News Agency in Brazil. She added: "That's wrong. God doesn't like it."

Now that more than 20 million people worldwide have died of AIDS - a toll greater than three Holocausts - there is growing pressure within the church to reconsider its position on condoms.

"If I were pope, I would start a condom factory right in the Vatican," one Brazilian priest told me. "What's the point of sending food and medicine when we let people get infected with AIDS and die?"

In his office, that priest keeps a small framed condom behind glass, with a sign: "In case of emergency, break the glass."

Rosana Soares Ribeiro, the coordinator of a Catholic-run AIDS orphanage in São Paulo, says she feels that it's more important to save lives than to obey church rules. So she tells the H.I.V.-positive teenagers in her care to use condoms when they have sexual relationships.

"My life belongs to God, and God would not want me to allow somebody to be infected with the virus," she said. "So God will forgive my violation of church rules."

The countries that have been most successful in controlling AIDS, such as Thailand, Brazil, Uganda and Cambodia, have all relied in part on condoms to reduce transmission.

The Vatican has horribly undercut the war against AIDS in two ways. First, it has tried to prevent Catholic clinics, charities and churches from giving out condoms or encouraging their use. Second, it argues loudly that condoms don't protect against H.I.V., thus discouraging their use.

In El Salvador, the church helped push through a law requiring condom packages to carry a warning label that they do not protect against AIDS. Since fewer than 4 percent of Salvadoran couples use condoms the first time they have sex, the result will be more funerals.

Fortunately, the Vatican's policies are routinely breached by those charged with carrying them out. In rural Guatemala, I've met Maryknoll sisters who counsel prostitutes to use condoms. In El Salvador, I talked to doctors in a Catholic clinic who explain to patients how condoms can protect against AIDS. In Zimbabwe, I visited a Catholic charity that gave out condoms - until the bishop found out.

"What would Jesus do?" said Didier Francisco Pelaez, a seminarian in São Paulo. "He would save lives. If condoms will save lives, then he would encourage their use."

Even some senior Vatican officials are catching up with reality. One step came when Cardinal Javier Lozano Barrágan, the Vatican's top health official, said last year that condoms might be permissible if a husband had H.I.V. and his wife did not.

I wish the cardinals could meet a 17-year-old Catholic girl in São Paulo named Thais Bispo dos Santos. She is H.I.V.-positive, goes to Mass each Sunday, wants to have an intimate relationship and marry, and feels betrayed by the leaders of the church she loves.

"Because of their age, they should be wiser," she said of the cardinals, adding: "I resent that they don't think of people like me, teenagers with AIDS or H.I.V."

So if Pope Benedict wants to ease human suffering, then there's one simple step he could take that would save vast numbers of lives. He could encourage the use of condoms, if not for contraception, then at least to fight AIDS. That choice between obeying tradition and saving lives is stark, and let's all pray he'll make the courageous choice.

E-mail: nicholas@nytimes.com

An unbelievable story....how can people do this to their own daughter?

2005-05-06T22:56:00.000-07:00

washingtonpost.com

A Killing Commanded by Tradition
Afghan Adultery Case Reflects Challenge of Extending Modern Law to Tribal Lands

By N.C. Aizenman
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, May 6, 2005; A01

GAZON, Afghanistan -- Begum Nessa recalled waking up with a start.

Someone was banging on the wooden door of the house.

She sat up in the darkness as her husband, Mohammed Aslam, rushed outside.

"Where's your oldest daughter?" she heard a voice demand. It was the senior elder of their village.

"She's inside, sleeping with the rest of my family," answered Aslam, a short man with gentle eyes and a bushy black beard. He owns livestock and several wheat fields and is a respected figure in this tiny, mud-brick hamlet at the bottom of a remote valley in northern Afghanistan.

But the elder's voice took on a mocking tone: "Oh, is that so? Go and fetch her then." Nessa recalled feeling suddenly dizzy. She reached for the propane lamp in the bedroom where all nine members of her family slept each night on the floor. She turned it on just as Aslam burst inside.

They gasped in unison at the sight of Amina's empty mattress.

Within an hour, the entire village would learn that the 25-year-old married woman had been discovered in a darkened nearby hut with her lover.

Within two days, Amina was dead -- killed by her fellow villagers April 20 after the men of the community ruled that she had violated Islamic law by having an affair with a neighbor.

Amina's fate highlights the magnitude of the challenge faced by Afghanistan's central government as it attempts to extend the rule of modern law and democratic processes beyond the nation's capital, more than three years after the defeat of the repressive and fundamentalist Islamic Taliban government.

But the attention that Amina's killing has attracted in a forgotten corner of Badakhshan province also tells the story of a region in flux -- caught between centuries of tradition and the hopes of a nascent modern state.

Discovery

The day began when a party of messengers hiked into Gazon on the long, rocky footpath from the provincial capital, Faizabad, bearing momentous news. Amina's husband, Sharafatullah, had finally returned from Iran after a four-year absence and would soon reach Gazon.

In this picturesque valley where tillable land is scarce and many families eat only rice for dinner, it is common for men to seek work abroad. But Sharafatullah had sent no word, let alone money, since leaving home.

"How long am I supposed to live like this?" Amina's father said she had often complained to him.

Still, Sharafatullah's departure two years after their arranged marriage had also allowed Amina unusual liberties. Instead of having to live with -- and wait on -- her in-laws in the next village, she had returned to her parents' two-room hut in Gazon. There, with plenty of siblings but no children of her own to care for, she had time to sew herself colorful dresses or to go for walks along the wild river that rushes past the village, her parents said.

That morning, when told of her husband's impending return, Amina betrayed no emotion, relatives recalled.

But after nightfall, she crept out of her parents' home and made her way to a nearby hut. The owner, Ashur Mohammad, discovered her there, padlocked the door behind him and rushed to sound the alarm.

Soon Amina's father, the elders and a crowd of villagers had gathered outside. Mohammad unlocked the chain and flung open his front door. At the back of the room sat his son, Karim, on a floor cushion.

Next to him sat Amina. Her expression was once again blank, Aslam said.

It threw Aslam into a rage.

"I shouted, 'What is she doing here? Give her to me! I will kill her!' " he recounted last week. "I was so shocked, and my Islamic dignity was so offended."

But the other villagers restrained him, Aslam and other witnesses said.

"We told him, 'No, no! This should be handled by sharia now,' " his brother Hashem recalled, referring to the Islamic legal code.

"Fine, I will give her over to sharia then," Aslam said he responded. "Whatever sharia says, I will do it."

Amina was crying softly when the village elder and several other men brought her to her great-uncle Mohammad Assan's house, just a few steps from her parents' hut.

" 'Keep a close watch on her,' " Assan recalled the village elder telling him.

Assan ushered Amina into a large, empty storeroom. Even by the standards of Gazon, it was grim -- no carpeting to cover the mud floor, no sheet tacked up to hide the mud ceiling, no window except a slit high up in one wall.

Assan said he brought in a carpet and unrolled it for Amina to sit on.

"Did you do this? Is it true?" he asked her.

Amina turned away from him without a word, Assan recalled.

"Well, try to get some sleep then," he remembered saying.

Judgment

Gazon's mosque is a rectangular, mud-brick building that sits on the river bank and is surrounded by a large, rock-strewn courtyard.

By mid-morning on the day after Amina was discovered with Karim, it was filled to bursting with hundreds of men, not only from Gazon but from five neighboring villages. Word of the suspected adultery had sped through the valley as though carried by the wind.

The men squatted in the courtyard or perched on the low stone wall around it, fingering worry beads and trying to chat over the roar of the river while they awaited the arrival of their community's most important member.

In mid-afternoon, Maulvi Yousaf arrived.

Yousaf, a stooped man in his mid-fifties, wears a blue-gray turban and has puffy cheeks and a snowy beard that give him the look of a kindly grandfather. But when he speaks about topics that anger him, such as the central government's neglect of Badakhshan, his voice becomes loud and harsh.

At such moments, it is possible to picture him as the militia leader he once was, commanding hundreds of soldiers first against Soviet troops and later against the Taliban forces, which never managed to take the valley.

After the Taliban's defeat in 2001, Yousaf said he disarmed his men, handed over their weapons and retired to his villa in Faizabad, devoting himself to the work of a maulvi, or Islamic scholar. Yet when a messenger arrived from Gazon to tell him of the scandal that had erupted in the village the previous night, Yousaf did not alert the provincial police chief, the district court or any other government authority. Instead, he made for Gazon as quickly as possible, as if still personally responsible for its governance.

"I was worried that Sharafatullah might go to the village and fight Amina's parents, causing a whole community dispute," Yousaf explained. "I was trying to prevent tribal warfare in which thousands of people could be killed."

As it happened, Sharafatullah went to his own village nearby and was "wise enough" to remain there as events unfolded, Yousaf said.

Shortly after reaching Gazon, Yousaf and several other village leaders went to Assan's house to interview Amina in private, he and other witnesses said.

Under sharia, the punishment for adultery is death by stoning. But the code requires that there be undeniable proof of the crime -- for instance, multiple witnesses to the sex act, a confession, or other signs such as an inexplicable pregnancy.

Yousaf said his hope was to exonerate Amina, not to extract a confession from her.

"When I went into the room I was smiling," he said. "I told her, 'Look, I know nothing happened. This is just an allegation. People won't hurt you if nothing happened.' "

Yousaf also said he only questioned Amina about the previous night.

But instead of taking the hint, he said, she volunteered that she had been having an affair with Karim for two years. She said she wanted to divorce her husband and marry Karim.

"She seemed relaxed," Yousaf said. "Like she thought her plan would work."

Karim, who was being held in another hut, told him a similar story, Yousaf said, except Karim said the affair had lasted only a year.

According to Yousaf and several other witnesses, Yousaf then returned to the mosque and advised the crowd not to take justice into their own hands.

"I told them, 'Yes, this is the case and it is wrong. But the time of jihad when we had field trials is over. We have a government and the rule of law now," he said.

People in the crowd countered that they had always handled their disputes through village councils, or shuras, and expressed concern that the provincial court was too inefficient or corrupt to punish Amina, Yousaf said. Some were even aware that Afghanistan's new constitution provides that no law should contradict sharia, and they suggested that by implementing it in this case, they would be operating within the system.

Yousaf said he did not press his point.

For the rest of the day, and much of the next morning, the villagers discussed the fate of Amina and Karim.

Accounts vary of what exactly the final decision was and how it was reached.

Some say a small group, including Yousaf and the few other literate members of the community, met inside the mosque, then came out with a written order for the crowd to approve and for Amina's father to sign with his thumbprint.

Others say all 400 or so members of the shura made the decision by consensus, but that their opinion was merely meant as a recommendation to give Aslam on handing Amina back to him. They said he was free to do as he wished with her.

But no one involved disputes that the villagers were unanimous in their view that according to the dictates of Islam, the proper resolution of the case would be for Karim, as an unmarried man, to be lashed and Amina, as a married woman, to be stoned to death.

Early that afternoon, one of the mullahs went to fetch a stick with which to whip Karim as Yousaf took his leave of the villagers.

Then they watched Yousaf's turban slowly vanish over a mountain path and, along with it, Amina's last hope.

Punishment

There are two, conflicting accounts of Amina's death.

According to her great-uncle Assan, after the shura reached its verdict, a group of villagers came to the dark storage room and took her away to be stoned.

"She knew what was going to happen to her," Assan said softly. "She was screaming and sobbing."

Amina's paternal uncle, Mohammad Azim, said he watched as the villagers forced Amina down a muddy path toward a patch of soft earth along a riverbank surrounded by stones, a few yards from the edge of the village.

It was a beautiful spot, shaded by an enormous tree and offering a charming view of the village clinging to the mountainside.

It was also an ideal place for a stoning.

"They dug a hole in the ground right here," Azim said, pointing to a spot in the clearing six days later. "Then they buried Amina up to her waist, with her arms pinned by her side."

Azim said Amina's hair was covered in a head scarf, and that she was crying in terror as nearly a hundred men gathered in a circle around her and began throwing small rocks at her head.

"I couldn't watch for more than a few minutes," Azim said. Instead, he said, he walked up to Amina's parents' house and waited with them in silence during the two hours it took to kill her.

Several villagers and Amina's mother said that they, too, believe she was stoned. And a few said they had seen the bloody hole after she was removed from it.

But no one else would admit to witnessing the actual stoning, much less participating in it. And the ground where Amina was allegedly buried to her waist showed little sign of disturbance six days after her death -- possibly because, as Azim and other villagers contend, they had refilled the hole and then the river had flooded over it, or possibly because the stoning never happened.

Several other villagers, including Amina's uncle, Hashem, tell a very different story.

Hashem said the villagers handed Amina over to her uncles, including himself and Azim. Their original intention was to hang her, Hashem said. But as they were leading her away, they became increasingly angry and started to beat her with their fists.

"It was dark," he said. "All of us were striking her, and then she fainted and we saw that she was on the ground and not breathing. Maybe she had a heart attack."

Whatever the means of her death, Amina's parents said her bruised corpse was returned to them sometime between afternoon and evening prayers that day.

Amina's mother, Nessa, said she did not grieve.

"My daughter was a criminal and a sinner who brought dishonor on my name," Nessa said hotly several days later. "And I should be blamed for her death, not anyone else, because I told my tribe they could kill her. I forgave them for spilling her blood."

At about 40, Nessa has weathered skin, but the same striking raven hair and high cheekbones as Amina.

If Amina had been allowed to live, Nessa added, the shame of it would have forced Nessa to leave the only home she had ever known and a valley in which her family had lived for generations.

"But now I can walk everywhere in the village with my head high. . . . I'm happy. Extremely, extremely happy," she shouted. The tone in her voice betrayed no joy.

Then Nessa covered her face with her hands.

Early on the morning after Amina's death, her family and fellow villagers buried her in Gazon's cemetery. But they could not bury what they had done to her.

Sorrow Replaces Rage

Anis Akhgar, the representative from the Afghan Ministry of Women's Affairs in Faizabad, rose from her desk to greet Badakhshan's provincial police chief.

"So," Akhgar said as the chief settled into an armchair. "From the media reports it sounds like this case out in [Gazon] is very serious. But it's been five days and we've heard nothing from the government. What are you doing about it?"

Gen. Shah Jahan Noori shifted slightly in his seat. A reporter was sitting in an adjacent chair.

"I have sent officers there today to bring back the family members for questioning," he answered quickly. "We will know more very soon."

Badakhshan is among the most unreachable corners of Afghanistan. Large swaths of it are routinely cut off by snow during the winter. In Gazon, villagers estimated that about eight women each year die in childbirth because they cannot make it over the footpath to the nearest doctor in Faizabad. And even Faizabad is connected to the rest of Afghanistan by only a narrow, unpaved road.

Yet the exchange between Akhgar and Noori offered a hint of how much is changing, even here.

In addition to Akhgar, there is a local representative of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission in Faizabad as well as various Afghan journalists -- all of whom quickly spread the word when the first rumors of Amina's killing surfaced. Within days, the London office of Amnesty International had issued a press release urging the Afghan government to investigate.

Badakhshan's police chief had been transferred to his post from a different province; with no local roots, he was more susceptible to outside pressure to intervene. Despite Noori's initially slow response to reports of Amina's killing, within a week after it happened he had arrested several of her relatives and sent officers to Gazon to detain several more.

Amina's father Aslam, however, was released from police custody in Faizabad after a night of questioning, on grounds that he was not directly responsible.

Just before embarking on the long walk back to Gazon, he sat on a metal chair in a room in the police station, reflecting on all that had happened in the last several days.

Unlike the feelings of his wife Nessa, Aslam's anger at Amina had by now given way to sorrow.

"I feel so sad for her. She was so young," he said, as his eyes grew glassy with tears. "I really miss her now. . . . I will miss her voice, and our conversations in the evenings."

There was much he wished he could go back and change. "If only she had told me that she did not want to go back to her husband," he said. "I would have done something about it. I would have counseled her."

But he said he harbored no doubt that she deserved to die after she admitted to committing adultery.

"There was no option. This is what Islam commands us."

His only regret was having given Amina over to the village rather than killing her himself.

"Then only I would be burned," he said. "But now all my relatives are suffering."

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Incredible story of sadness and courage in post-tsunami Sri Lanka...

2005-04-30T11:20:00.000-07:00

When I go to Sri Lanka I will try to find this man and help him....

washingtonpost.com
Battered by the Wave, but Not Beaten
Sri Lankan Left Destitute by Tsunami Begins to Recover

By John Lancaster
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, April 30, 2005; A01

ARUGAM BAY, Sri Lanka -- Four months after the tsunami, Ranga Krishnarajan is not entirely back on his feet. But at least he's back in the kitchen.

A gentle, soft-spoken man whose shy smile is partly hidden by an unruly beard, Krishnarajan barely escaped with his life when the ocean rolled inland last Dec. 26, smashing his thatch-roofed guest huts and restaurant and with them his primary means of supporting his wife and 9-year-old daughter.

But Krishnarajan, 41, is no longer the destitute and desperate man he was in the first weeks after the tsunami. With help from an aid group and friends -- including loyal foreign customers -- he has built and equipped a makeshift kitchen under the eaves of his damaged home. There, surrounded by salvaged cutting boards and utensils, he is once again finding satisfaction, income and therapeutic benefit in the preparation of seafood dishes such as grilled lobster and barracuda marinated in garlic and lemon.

While most of his customers these days are aid workers, he also caters to the surfers and backpackers who once sustained his business and have started to trickle back, albeit in small numbers. Although his life is far from settled -- his wife and daughter remain so traumatized that they have refused to return home -- Krishnarajan has finished work on three new cabanas and officially reopened for business last month.

"I like to be very busy," said Krishnarajan, who still bursts into tears at unexpected moments and is dogged by guilt over the drowning of a young girl who was staying at his home when the tsunami struck. "I don't like to think about anything."

Krishnarajan's prescription for putting the tsunami behind him -- hard work and lots of it -- has been adopted by many survivors in Arugam Bay, a once-picturesque fishing and tourist community of nearly 4,000 on the heavily damaged southeastern coast, about 135 miles east of Colombo, the capital.

Despite massive destruction and an overtaxed government bureaucracy, which has yet to deliver on many promises, the area is gradually recovering its economic pulse.

Local entrepreneurs are working with a U.S.-based aid group, Mercy Corps, which eschews costly construction projects in favor of more modest initiatives aimed at restoring incomes and morale.

Long Road to Recovery

A visitor returning to Arugam Bay after an absence of nearly two months found it significantly improved. The beach and adjacent areas have been largely cleared of rubble, the main street is lined with simple open-air restaurants, and businesses are festooned with colored lights distributed by Mercy Corps with the aim of lifting spirits. The aid group also has provided hotel and hostel owners with tents to serve as guestrooms until permanent ones can be rebuilt.

Because it attracts tourists, Arugam Bay has a leg up on many other ravaged communities, which lack its entrepreneurial spirit and relatively sophisticated business class. The area has been an especially attractive destination in the three years since the government signed a cease-fire with ethnic Tamil rebels who still maintain an active presence in the area.

But even here, a full recovery is a long way off. Like in other areas in Sri Lanka, many families are still camped out in scrub-land refugee camps because of bureaucratic inertia and confusion, especially concerning new land-use rules meant to discourage people from living near the sea. The delays have blocked construction of permanent housing.

A similar paralysis has afflicted the local fishing industry, which lost the use of 438 vessels out of a fleet of 450, according to an inventory by Mercy Corps. Only about 15 percent of the fleet has been restored. The government initially pledged to replace lost fishing boats but has since turned over the job to aid groups and private donors, who are struggling to coordinate the massive effort, aid workers say.

Still, there are bright spots, and Krishnarajan is surely one of them.

An Idyllic Home

Even before the tsunami, experience had bred a certain resilience in Krishnarajan, a schoolteacher's son and member of the Tamil minority who grew up in the Tamil-dominated north. Like many young men of his generation, Krishnarajan flirted with the Tamil separatist cause and got caught up in the fighting that erupted between rebels and the Sri Lankan government forces in 1983.

The same year, he was detained by two government soldiers, one of whom sat on his thigh while the other yanked his lower leg sharply to the side, breaking his knee "in a very technical way," said Krishnarajan, who still bears the scars from two operations to repair the damage.

By 1988, after two stints in India as a refugee, Krishnarajan had soured on the separatist movement and was determined to put the war behind him, he said. With the north still engulfed in fighting, he made his way south to Arugam Bay, an idyllic place with leaning coconut palms and sparkling waters whose mostly Muslim population had largely stayed out of the violence. (Krishnarajan, like most Sri Lankan Tamils, is a Hindu).

At the time, Arugam Bay's nascent tourist industry catered mainly to vagabond surfers in search of the perfect wave; Krishnarajan found work as the caretaker of a small guest house whose owner had fled the country because of the war. His surfer clientele taught him to speak English and also how to cook, skills he later put to use when he opened his own business, the Beach Hut, in 1995. Along the way, he met and married his wife, Jayanthini, a schoolteacher and Tamil Christian from up the coast.

The Beach Hut prospered, particularly after the cease-fire. It grew to include 16 rooms, a garden restaurant and an Internet cafe. Krishnarajan lived with his wife and daughter, Lakshanya, in a four-room house next door.

Ravaging Sea

On the morning of the tsunami, the Beach Hut was filled with Europeans, Israelis, Americans and a handful of Sri Lankans. The Krishnarajans also had a houseguest, Vinoo Jahanadan, 11, the daughter of close family friends, who came to stay with them every Christmas.

Krishnarajan was in the kitchen when he first heard the screams and shouted warnings. He thought little of the commotion, he said, until "my feet got wet." He ran into the street and was quickly overtaken by the surging water, which slammed him against a wall, stripped off his clothing and carried him inland for several hundred yards before he was finally able to grab a coconut palm.

His wife and daughter, who had been outside, were swept across the street and into the public library, which filled with water almost to the ceiling. They escaped through a window. Vinoo was not so lucky. She tried to cling to one of Krishnarajan's employees, but lost her grip and was carried away, never to be seen again. Several other guests also died, including an 8-year-old American boy.

Krishnarajan spent three days searching for Vinoo's body before traveling up the coast to inform her parents. Even though they hadn't said so directly, he said, they made it clear they held him responsible for her death, adding to his burden of guilt.

The next three weeks passed in a fog of confusion and despair. "I'm not doing anything," he recalled in his broken but serviceable English. "Just walk around. I don't have a shower. I don't change clothes."

But eventually the fog began to lift. A friend visiting from Colombo provided him with a mobile phone and a small loan. Other contributions trickled in from former guests: a Briton, a couple of Australian surfers, a young man from Brooklyn who had visited several years before with his father.

Meanwhile, Mercy Corps provided him with a wheelbarrow and a shovel so he could begin removing rubble, as well as a portable generator and a refrigerator. With the help of the loans and his modest savings, he hired laborers and completed the first of his cabanas in February. He plans to reopen his restaurant next month, although for now, he is happy to serve meals on makeshift wooden tables by the beach.

Beginning Again

Krishnarajan's emotional recovery has been somewhat slower. One night last month, at a celebration to mark the Beach Hut's reopening, someone asked him to give a speech. He was overcome with emotion and couldn't summon any words. Speaking of Vinoo the other day, his shoulders started to shake, and tears coursed down his cheeks. Being around people, he said, makes him "nervous." The only antidote is to stay busy.

Also unresolved is his future with his wife and daughter, who are living in a rented house across a bridge in neighboring Pottuvil, where the damage was less severe. They visit once a week. Last month, Krishnarajan had almost persuaded them to move back home. But they dropped the idea after another tsunami scare and a panicked evacuation triggered by an earthquake in Indonesia, where the first tsunami originated.

"When we pass the bridge and come to this side, there is fear," said Jayanthini, 37, a handsome woman with long dark hair and a flawless smile. "Even when you come you feel like leaving right away."

At the Beach Hut, though, things are moving ahead.

The other night, a bare-chested Krishnarajan, clad in his trademark plaid sarong, prepared a lavish fish barbecue for a handful of foreign guests. To the accompaniment of hand drums, the meal was hauled by oxcart to the beach, where Krishnarajan poured himself a glass of arrack -- a potent local liquor -- and circulated easily among his customers. It was a clear night and the moon lit a silvery path on the sea. There were sounds of laughter and gentle surf.

For a moment, it was almost as if the tsunami had never happened.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

A BOY'S DREAM OF FLYING

2005-04-30T11:15:00.000-07:00

What a metaphor for children all over the world who have dreams that are so hard to get off the ground.............

April 30, 2005
COMING OF AGE
A Would-Be Pilot, Hitting Turbulence on the Ground
By MICHAEL WINES

MASJAING, South Africa

IN a part of the world where so many young people never get off the ground, 17-year-old James Mokoena wants to be a pilot.

He will fly a fighter jet, but not just to wage aerial battles. Africa is full of hungry people and people sick with malaria, he said. Many of them need a James Mokoena to bring them food and medicine.

"I haven't been in a plane," he said, but dismissively. "I want to be in a plane for four, five years, and to know that I am in that plane - me. That I, James, am driving it."

He is standing outside his cement-stuccoed house, a four-room box on a dirt road in this township of about 30,000 on the Lesotho border. Inside is a single bed for him, three brothers and a sister. His mother is ill. His father never got past the sixth grade. Everything here fairly shouts that James's dream is folly.

Except James himself. Two years ago, having completed his elementary years at the township primary school, he walked the mile from Masjaing to Fouriesburg, the far wealthier town on the other side of the highway. There, he announced that he wanted a better education than he could get at Masjaing's uninspiring local high school, from which few students ever graduate, and that he wished to enroll in the eighth grade.

"I asked him whether he realized there were school fees to be paid, and he said his father would pay them," said Irina Grice, the principal at Fouriesburg Intermediate School. "His father came, but oh, his clothes were torn, and he was very, very poor.

"But the father said, 'The child chose, and he wants to be in this school.' "

One in three of South Africa's 37 million blacks live in townships like Masjaing, slums built to keep them away from white people when they were not mining whites' coal or cleaning whites' houses. Of those township dwellers over age 15, well over half are jobless. Of those with jobs, about 6 in 10 earn less than $250 a month. The townships are economic and social sinkholes, poverty traps in a nation where the rich-poor gap is among the widest on earth.

JEREMANE MOKOENA - he calls himself James, he said, because he dislikes his first name - wants out of Masjaing. He wants out of the underclass that apartheid created and into the world of opportunity that apartheid's demise has opened up for other, luckier youths.

Few of his friends here - boys idling on the dusty soccer pitch and clustered on gravel street corners, clueless about how impending manhood will shut off their escape route - have the pluck for the journey James so clearly craves. For those who do try, success is rare. Failure, and consignment to a life in society's cellar, is crushing.

Slim, with a shy, if broad smile and a tendency to look away when talking, James resembles anything but a pioneer. But nobody should underestimate his grit.

"My father, he works," James said. "He keeps on telling me that life is very strong, like a rock. You have to push it forward. You have to stand for yourself, not just wait to have somebody come and say, 'James, go forward.' "

His father, 44-year-old Petrus Mokoena, is James's unlikely inspiration. A gaunt man in threadbare blue coveralls and a fluorescent red jacket, he works a split shift for the Masjaing (pronounced mush-a-ENG) sanitation department, collecting trash in the predawn hours, catching some sleep, then collecting more trash in the afternoon.

For this, Mr. Mokoena earns under $300 a month. Fouriesburg Intermediate wanted $40 for tuition. Mr. Mokoena paid it. Apartheid, he said, kept him an indentured and ignorant laborer on a white-owned farm his entire youth.

"I want James to see that not to go to school is a bad thing," said Mr. Mokoena, speaking in Sotho, his only language. "I want him to speak English and to write English."

Forty dollars is no small sacrifice. Ms. Grice said she once asked James why he was doing poorly in one subject. "He said, 'I can't finish off the work before it's dark, and we don't have electricity,' " she said.

"So I said to him, 'It's possible to study by candlelight.' And he said, 'We don't have any candles.' "

It is James, the one with a shot at a future, who has become the family's center of gravity.

Petrus Mokoena passes many evenings drinking Lesotho beer. His wife MaDibeo, silent and vacant-eyed in her mysterious illness, has left a hole in the household and a gnawing fear in her children's bellies. Tiny 7-year-old Mampho and her 9-year-old brother Thabiso now demand James's attention instead of hers. So do the cleaning and cooking.

James's handsome older brother Dibeo, 19, spent four straight years in the ninth grade at Ypokaleng High, the school James escaped.

That leaves 13-year-old Joseph, as charismatic and quick-witted as James is quiet and deliberative, as perhaps his brother's closest companion.

There are girls, of course, and James said he was somewhat interested. But "if I had a girlfriend, I couldn't think as well," he said. "I don't have a girlfriend so that I can focus."

In truth, James has few close friends. Awkward and shy, he is in transit between worlds, and not really comfortable in either.

Some evenings, Mr. Mokoena frets over the cost of his son's schooling and how James, now the household's most educated member, is moving beyond his rough-hewn father.

"My father told me that since I was in this school, I was beginning to lose my culture," James said. "That I am becoming a white person. That I don't eat with my hand; I eat with a fork."

But each weekday night for the last two years, as Mr. Mokoena left to collect trash, he took a pen with him to mark his time sheet. And when he returned about 6 a.m., just as James began to stir in his crowded bed, he gave his son the pen to use that day at school.

Then James donned his Fouriesburg uniform and walked the mile to his other world.

RIGIDLY Afrikaner and all-white under apartheid a decade ago, the Fouriesburg school has since become almost all black. Most white students stampeded to prep schools when apartheid ended; the current student body consists mostly of better-off blacks and a few whites who cannot afford private schooling.

James was neither. "He has the worst situation, in that the children tend to look down on him and see him as really poor," said Mick Andrew, a 67-year-old English literature teacher and the closest thing James has to a mentor.

James made a show of sloughing off their ostracism. "Most of the time, at school, I don't do things for fun," he said. "I come, I do what I have to do, and I go home."

At home, he studied. When he first came to the school, in January 2003, his grades were abysmal, in part because of his poor English. In his first term, he failed five subjects. In his second, he failed only English.

Fouriesburg classes end at the ninth grade. As the December end of term loomed last year, James made elaborate plans to enroll in the 10th grade at a private school in Tweeling, 75 miles to the north. James said his father would pay tuition. He could help, he said, by selling candy and drinks.

"I chose this school because I wanted to be far away," he said. "This place is away, but it's not far. Tweeling is far away."

But his dream exceeded his grasp: what James really needed was a scholarship, and his grades did not merit one. When the new term began in January, James attended Breda High School some 10 miles from Fouriesburg. It was the only school James could afford that would take him in.

"Very often, the bright ones can get out in some way," Mr. Andrew said. "Someone will see they have a future. James hasn't progressed very well at school, and that makes it even more difficult for him."

Ismail, another Masjaing ninth grader who was James's best friend at the Fouriesburg school, agreed. "I told him," he said, " 'If you're going to be a pilot, you're going to have to study harder.' "

Copyright 2005 The New York Times

a great idea to prevent genocide...........

2005-04-24T00:57:00.000-07:00

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-annan8apr08,1,5936547.story?coll=la-headlines-world
THE WORLD
This seems like a great idea to me so we can prevent genocide in the future….

Annan Calls on Humanity to Be Ready to Fight Genocide
U.N. chief launches an international warning system that includes use of force to help prevent a massacre like that in Rwanda 10 years ago.
By Maggie Farley
Times Staff Writer

April 8, 2004

UNITED NATIONS — Ten years after the slaughter in Rwanda, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Wednesday that the world must be prepared to take decisive action — including the use of force — to prevent genocide from happening again.

Speaking to the U.N. Human Rights Commission to launch an international warning system, Annan said the world now must act in Congo and Sudan to avoid mass killing and "ethnic cleansing." He said that he would appoint a special advisor on genocide to monitor potentially explosive situations, and that an envoy would go to Sudan next week.

"Anybody who embarks on genocide commits a crime against humanity," he said. "Humanity must respond by taking action in its own defense."

President Bush echoed Annan's call for the Sudanese government to stop Arab militias from committing atrocities against its black communities and to allow access for aid agencies. Bush added that the U.S. would not normalize relations with Khartoum until there was peace in the country.

"I condemn these atrocities, which are displacing hundreds of thousands of civilians, and I have expressed my views directly to President [Omar Hassan Ahmed] Bashir of Sudan," he said in a statement from his ranch near Crawford, Texas. Bush did not suggest any military involvement to stop the violence.

The warnings represent an evolution in the decade since the Rwanda massacre, said Samantha Power, who chronicled the reasons behind the world's paralysis on Rwanda in her book "A Problem From Hell."

"President Bush called Bashir, which is one more phone call than Clinton made to Rwanda in 1994," said Power, a lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "At least he's not saying, 'We're not going to send troops, so let's stay mute,' which is what happened before. That's a version of progress."

Annan's action plan to prevent genocide is built around an early warning system to prevent the wars and ethnic conflicts that have the potential to escalate into genocide, and to sound the alarm when intervention is necessary to halt it.

"One of the reasons for our failure in Rwanda was that beforehand, we did not face the fact that genocide was a real possibility," he said in Geneva.

"And once it started, for too long we could not bring ourselves to recognize it, or call it by name."

Annan, who was head of the U.N.'s peacekeeping department during its failures in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina, said that he wanted to make the eradication of genocide part of his legacy as secretary-general.

In 1999, he made the case for "humanitarian intervention" to protect people subjected to wide-scale human rights abuses by their rulers. Last September, he cited the need for criteria for "coercive action" — an obligation to intervene with force if necessary.

But the concept of humanitarian intervention has become entangled with the Bush doctrine of preemptive action, making some concerned that a U.N.-authorized intervention could mask a pretext for aggression.

"That is not something the Security Council ever envisaged when it was established, and it makes many of its member states very nervous," said Anne-Marie Slaughter, the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. "But Rwanda is simply a stain on our collective conscience. The only possible response is to take preventive measures, even when it means using force."

Using coercion suggests the creation of a U.N.-authorized rapid reaction force, an idea that was included in the original charter, but never created because of fears about a "world army." Currently, U.N. peacekeepers are only authorized to maintain peace, not to stop a war, and it usually takes months to muster a force from nations willing to contribute troops.

"There's been progress in the thinking but no improvement in our tools, in that we're still dependent on states to supply the forces," Power said. "It's really hard to move states to act, and then you have to go with the begging bowl in hand."

But for survivors of the Rwandan genocide, like Jacqueline Murekatete, 19, who spoke at a U.N. ceremony Wednesday, such complexities mean nothing. She described how almost all of her extended family was hacked to death by machete-wielding Hutu neighbors. She said she had heard the explanations of how no one wanted to term what was happening in Rwanda "genocide" because it would mean they would have to do something, and about President Clinton saying he just didn't know how bad it was.

Murekatete told diplomats gathered at the General Assembly that if the world had heeded warnings and taken action a decade ago, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children would be alive today, "among them, my parents, my six siblings, my uncles, aunts, cousins and numerous relatives."

Her voice breaking after descriptions of growing up with many other orphans and how some survivors were condemned to a slower death by HIV/AIDS after repeated rapes, she said she had a wish: "As we leave here today, I want each of us to make a resolve and a vow to do all that we can that events such as that which occurred in Rwanda in 1994 will never again occur either in Rwanda or elsewhere in the world."

Leave your medicine and coins behind!

2005-04-21T14:20:00.000-07:00

SUNDAY POST
The Weekly Magazine Of The Kathmandu Post
Kathmandu, Sunday, January 14, 2001 Magh 01st 2057.

http://www.nepalnews.com.np/contents/englishweekly/sundaypost/2001/jan/jan14/2ndpage.htm

The Medicine

One morning, this winter, Janice Belson, so far an unknown entity in my life, and I decided to meet at my home in Lalitpur. However, it was "Karmic". A tete a tete soon followed, punctuated with a fair share of pleasant diversions provided by my daughter, thrilled at having "a blonde haired, blue eyed" company for lunch.

The first question that hit me hard, as I squatted through the chilly, wintry morning, squinting at letters that gaped at me from the various papers and paraphernalia was, why would an "all American girl," be interested in ill equipped health posts precariously perched on trails in the back woods of Nepal? Why? For during my short and colourful encounters with them I have invariably had frivolous discussions on the pollution, the dearth of political instability, street children and the sights and sounds of Thamel - a far cry from what faced me up front.

A story of intrigue, virtue and dedicated passion unfolded as I sat with this 56-year-old American mom, from Los Angeles. "It’s a simple idea really, isn’t it often true that the simplest things can make the most difference". These words began my six hour introduction to the history of "Medicines For Nepal(GB)", this lady happened to be its executive director

Every year thousands of travellers visit some of the world’s remote corners. The year 1999 saw approximately 100,000 adventure travellers visit Nepal. Trekkers pay thousands of dollars for these vacations, despite that Nepal remains among the poorest in the world. An estimated 9.2 million Nepalese are living in destitution according to the World Bank. If 20% of these travellers had taken 1/2 pound packages of medical supplies to major health posts along the trails, more than 1200 pounds of medicine could have been transported to major health posts along the trail. Medicines For Nepal(GB)are in the process of creating opportunities for adventure travellers to become aware of this simple concept of delivering first aid supplies that compliment the large shipment of supplies once or twice a year delivered to Kanti Children’s Hospital in Kathmandu and other established clinics through Medicines For Nepal(GB).

It all emerged out of a dream, a passionate ambition of one individual who wanted to one day transform the lives of little bare foot children running through the high valleys in the shadow of the Himalayas. It started with her passion for photography, an obsession with mountains and an ever-growing desire to trek and photograph the people of Nepal. Close associates and owners of the Chomolungmu Trekking and Expedition Agency, Ang Norbu Sherpa and his wife Lakpa, initiated a unique trekking plan. This was the first decisive step towards the creation of this benevolent global revolution, called Medicines For Nepal(GB), which would soon witness incredible support, endorsements and sponsorships from significant corporations.

In the year 1992 a small American group progressed into the rugged terrain of the Everest region for a 2 month long trail and exploration of the Himalayas. "The spirit of Everest", an awe-inspiring series followed. Janice had captured those priceless moments on film. However, an almost insatiable desire to retrace the tracks of the Himalayas persisted, for she had one of the most strange and vivid experiences along the dusty trails. She had seen children with severe nutritional deficiencies. The next few years saw Janice coming to terms with a painful knee injury during a photo film shoot. Nevertheless, sheer determination, a lust for life and her foremost mission to give back something to the people that so inspired her, brought her back to the hills and mountains that had by now become her life blood.

Janice met Dr. Usha Raj, chief division officer of Neanatology, UCLA, in 1998. It became quickly apparent to both that the expertise and competence of Dr Usha Raj and Janice’s readiness to help and return to Nepal could create extraordinary changes in the daily health problems of Nepal, particularly for the children.

An odyssey into the Everest region began for a team of eight high profile Americans and with them came the first 45 boxes of medical supplies. These boxes would save the lives of 3000 children and prevent early nutritional blindness. It was November 1st 1999. Medicines for Nepal (GB) had the corporate sponsorship of among others "Operation USA" (a joint winner of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize). Kanti Children’s Hospital, Kathmandu, spearheaded by the director, Dr.Govinda Raj Ojha, would be the centre of all its activities.

The November 2000 trek that took in pharmaceuticals such as vitamin A would cater to the needs of 45,000 children. This benevolent way to travel globally was a life changing event for Greg Wozer, general manager, Leki USA an incredible supporter who decided to join the team. The team had Johanna Belson a young audio visual specialist, Rama Nand Tiwari, owner and publisher of the Pilgrims Book House in Kathmandu, Chris Gubera, director of Adventure Medical Kits, Ang Norbu Sherpa, Sarah Luck Gossage, administrator of Operations USA, Ram the cook, and Krishna, the head sardar. These adventure travellers with a difference dropped off medical supplies along the trails at all the major health posts.

"What if every backpacker, every adventure traveller could deliver a tiny package of basic medical supplies such as aspirin or bandages to some of the worlds remote locations? Rural doctors and medical clinics that go without supplies would receive a steady trickling stream from passing travellers so that minor every day injuries don’t turn into medical emergencies for simple lack of antiseptics and ointment," these words convey the mission statement.

This group of visionaries is now in the process of developing an interactive educative based website that will allow travellers in the process of planning their adventure vacation, to learn more about their destination and to learn what they can do to make all the difference. They will be taught how to put together a small package of the most needed over the counter medical supplies and where to deliver them along the way and directions to health posts or hospitals.

The little dream that grew out of plain compassion and a deep seated feeling to help, finally emerged as a major mission with corporate heads of the I2 Foundation, Pat Rangel, director, Ed Viesters, Mountain Guide, Jim Meyers of Outdoor Research, Tom Meyers of Therm-A-Rest, Hotel Tibet, Kathmandu, Ron Nadeau, from Grabber Smith Glasses, Yolo Sport, Thai Airways, Los Angeles endorsing this marvelous and benevolent way of travelling. In Nepal, Dr Shyam Prasad Bhattarai, chief policy planning officer of the Foreign Aid and Monitoring Division at the Ministry of Health in a letter of appreciation thanked and applauded Medicines For Nepal (GB) for, "The medicines worth 55,000 US dollars distributed to the poor people and specially sick children of Nepal".

With the talent of Thangka Artist, Tenzing Norbu Lama, who catapulted into instant fame with his artistic rendition of Eric Vallis’ "Caravans Of The Himalayas", a brilliant logo was created, instantly reflecting the maxim and purpose of this organization. Simple yet powerful.

The other side of the coin

We hate them. We shrug them off like bugs. Yet we cannot dare ignore them completely. Even in this age of sophisticated spending tools, coins wield an invincible power over us. We may not always have a hold on them. But in unexpected situations, they do make a comeback with a big bang. Their grip on us may not appear to be too familiar, yet at times they catch us unawares.

Imprisoned somewhere inside a musty drawer or in a worn out purse or forcefully hidden in piggy banks (a convenient and popular dustbin), the venerable coins hibernate for an indefinite period, unable to prove themselves as a force to be reckoned with. But a brief introspection tells you that the case is not so. Strangely though, we are caught in a love-hate relationship with them.

Our love affair with coins starts the moment our eyes fall upon guzzling tempo metres. Suspected tampering with electronic metres aside, what really infuriates daily commuters, who tend to be penny wise, is the bold display of fares not in a round figure but in tattered numbers. The metre reads Rs 35 and 50 Paisa. Whether it’s Rs 35 or 20 Paisa or less than this, you will be the ultimate sufferer and end up paying Rs 36. Then why this sham? You get irritated with this number game on electronic metres. Ask a driver for change, and he will mechanically answer back that he has no coins. When he turns the tables on you, the same shortage will confront you. But who is to be blamed? At this critical juncture, you remember your dear old coins discarded in the unlikeliest of places. Your heart craves for them, now.

We may not always feel this love for our coins. Some of us, the working lot, must have discovered the importance of money, in whatever form, when we gathered our first ever salaries, no matter how trivial an amount it must have been. And that’s not. The challenge that comes with it (our first salary) might have taught us to spare a thought for unglamorous coins. When our wallets are fully loaded, we do actually hate them giving them all sorts of names. But when in dire straits, they suddenly turn out to be beautiful, glamorous and outrightly useful.

Talking of beauty, I remember the beauty of sacrifice in the Hindu culture. But even the so-called die-hard followers of Hinduism fail miserably to live up to its principles. And mind you, the principles are not that exacting. But since this sacrifice, like so much else, involves direct money sacrifice, the love for coins intensifies.

Picture a scene in front of a temple. A devout Hindu closes his eyes and gets lost in his prayers or mantras. But his religion demands that just mumbling words is not enough. This pious thought snaps him out of his trance. Quickly, he takes out his wallet. A closer inspection of his wallet gives him an unpalatable message. Forget coins, not a single rupee of the lowest denominations is in sight. Frustrated, he fumbles deep inside his pocket. Not a single coin can be fished out. If only wishes were horses... All he can do right now is to yearn for those discarded coins. No matter how hard we try to defend ourselves, the fact is that we simply cannot do away with coins, especially when it comes to religious rites and charity. And the rustier and uglier the coins, the better usage they make.

But it is amazing to know that coins are shunned by even the poorest of the poor. A few months back, as I was walking downtown, a beggar, fulfilling all the criteria of a genuine destitute, was pleading for alms "in the name of God". The word "God" was too sacred to be ignored. But the dearth of coins failed my otherwise generous hands. Luckily, another lady just a couple of steps ahead of me produced two coins and tossed them into his bowl. No sooner had the coins tinkled than the beggar threw them aside in utter disgust. He must have thought that the presence of coins would further deteriorate his beggarly status. If coins are a status symbol with them, then why not with us? This provides us an ample excuse to justify our hatred towards coins. And this is how coins are thwarted for the time being.

The more embarrassing encounter with precious and yet not so precious coins is yet to come. This time there is no imaginary figure to tell the story. Once when I was inside an ace Indian fast food centre, the person behind the counter, quite unexpectedly, gave back my change in coins. Inept at handling coins, some of the smaller ones fell to the floor, making vulgar noises (at least to me!). After dancing on the floor for quite sometime, they happened to land, unfortunately though, near the feet of a well-dressed gentleman. Embarrassed, I turned my head in the opposite direction. Perhaps, it was my childish gesture or his innate reverence for coins that prompted him to hand over the fallen coins to me. Red-faced for being so indifferent to lovable objects, I thanked him.

This incident led me into soul-searching as whether to break up my affair with coins once and for all or to embrace this bitter- sweet object forever. But reality tells a different story. I cannot afford the luxury of a coin-free life. Somewhere, sometime they may be waiting for me.

It is not only ME who is going through this love-hate affair with coins. I am not talking of affluent people with sleek credit cards. But I am sure every income group who have yet to reach the break even point identifies with at least one of the above episodes. If not, then the person may be either a beast or God. And another thing, the coming days are not so rosy for coins. If the vanishing rate of the lowest denomination coins and notes are anything to go by, then in a few years time Rs 10 coins will be the lowest denomination coins. And where will the 1,5, 25 paisa coins end up? In museums, more than likely.

AIDS Still Means Death

2005-04-20T15:14:00.000-07:00

washingtonpost.com
In Rural Zimbabwe, AIDS Still Means Death
Politics and Poverty Deprive Many of Relief as New Drugs Stem Disease Across Africa

By Craig Timberg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, April 20, 2005; Page A12

ZHULUBE, Zimbabwe

Little is easy these days for Gladys Mataruse. Walking tires her. Talking hurts. And in long, sleepless nights of coughing fits, she lacks even the comfort of her husband, who has declared her "useless" and moved away. But nothing, she explained in a hoarse whisper, is more painful than her fear that she will soon die of a mysterious disease, effectively orphaning her two school-age daughters.

Mataruse, 29, has the thin arms, slack-skinned face and glum stare of someone very ill. She said she had heard of AIDS. Yet all she knows about the disease is that it often causes the symptoms she's experiencing -- weight loss, diarrhea, coughing, fever -- and that here in rural Zimbabwe it is invariably fatal.

"I wish to be healthy again, but now I'm doubting it will happen," said Mataruse, her eyes fixed on the floor as her youngest daughter, 6-year-old Florence, sat unsmilingly beside her, wearing a white dress.

AIDS is no longer an unavoidable death sentence in most of the world. Even in much of Africa, billions of dollars in international aid has made it a chronic, controllable disease for a small but growing number of patients with access to antiretroviral medicine. But this relief is arriving in a profoundly uneven way, dividing the continent into areas where AIDS is survivable and areas where it is not.

By this measure, Mataruse could not live in a worse place. Zhulube is a remote region in southern Zimbabwe, a country whose public health system has been decimated by economic collapse and international isolation. In southern Africa, the epicenter of the global pandemic, no country is as far behind in treating AIDS, according to World Health Organization statistics.

An estimated 1.8 million Zimbabweans have HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Of that group, 295,000 need antiretroviral treatment immediately, but only 8,000 -- less than 3 percent -- are getting it, according to a December report from WHO. The need for treatment is growing far more quickly than the capacity to provide it, the report shows.

Mataruse's local clinic, an arduous three-mile walk from her home, lacks not only antiretroviral medicine but also the kits needed to test for HIV. Even the basics of modern health care -- syringes, intravenous fluid, antibiotics and elastic bandages -- are frequently out of stock, a nurse at the clinic said.

There are no doctors there. The nurses who have chronicled Mataruse's decline have never mentioned either HIV or AIDS, she said, and neither term appears in the battered paper folder of medical records she keeps.

The surge of international funding that is beginning to prolong the lives of Africans with AIDS has bypassed Zimbabwe almost entirely. The United Nations, the World Bank and President Bush's AIDS initiative are focusing on other countries, in large part because President Robert G. Mugabe's reputation as one of the most undemocratic and anti-Western African leaders has kept donors away from Zimbabwe.

"There is tension between the international community and the government of Zimbabwe," said James Elder, a UNICEF spokesman in Harare, the capital. But he added, "Don't take it out on children. Let's move the attention a little bit away from politics and put it on people."

The average amount of international funding each year in southern Africa is $74 per person infected with HIV, according to UNICEF. In Zimbabwe, that figure is $4.

The discrepancy is even more dramatic when compared with sums received over the border in Zambia, where international donors provide $187 per infected person. And though Zimbabwe is slated to get a grant of $14 million from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the same agency rejected a request in December for more than $250 million, citing technical flaws in the proposal.

The results can be seen in the relative availability of medicine. In Zambia, antiretroviral drugs are reaching 13 percent of those who need them, according to WHO statistics. Zimbabwe's southwestern neighbor, Botswana, which has a much higher per capita income and receives substantial health care funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is getting antiretrovirals to 50 percent of those who need it.

Even in South Africa, which has been widely criticized for its sluggish response to AIDS, antiretrovirals are reaching 7 percent of those who need the drugs. In major South African cities such as Johannesburg and Cape Town, the waiting list for government-subsidized AIDS medicines has virtually disappeared, doctors there said.

While the governments of most countries hit hardest by AIDS have cooperated with international donors, Mugabe's government has grown increasingly belligerent toward the West, especially the United States and Britain, which he regularly attacks with caustic rhetoric.

Mugabe has won some international praise for his willingness to discuss AIDS publicly, in contrast to South African President Thabo Mbeki. He revealed in a speech last year that members of his family had contracted the disease, and the government also instituted a tax supposedly intended to generate resources to fight AIDS.

But many Zimbabweans express doubt that the money raised by the levy has gone to treating or preventing AIDS. There are few public health messages about HIV anywhere in the country, aside from a handful of vaguely worded billboards promoting condom use.

The reputation of Mugabe and his ruling party for siphoning public funds for private gain, meanwhile, has made the major international donors even more reluctant to deal with him. And the parliament passed a law last year to bring independent aid groups, which might provide an alternative for delivering international health assistance, under government control.

The victims in this standoff between Mugabe and Western donors are Zimbabweans with AIDS, activists here said.

"You can't win this battle by fighting the government, because they control the resources," said Lynde Francis, an AIDS activist in nearby Bulawayo. "It doesn't matter how much you whine and moan about the government. It doesn't get you anywhere to withdraw help."

One of the few international donors to make a significant commitment to fighting AIDS in Zimbabwe is the studiously non-partisan French medical group Doctors Without Borders, which has managed to make Bulawayo the only city in Zimbabwe where antiretrovirals are widely available. A Zimbabwean company is also beginning to make a generic version of a popular combination of antiretroviral drugs, which might improve access.

But here in Zhulube, a dusty, destitute village in a gold-mining region, the public health system has trouble handling even comparatively simple maladies such as pneumonia or infected wounds.

Mataruse has walked to the clinic almost monthly in the past two years, complaining of coughs, headaches, fever, diarrhea and night sweats. Her health records show she was routinely given nothing more than painkillers.

The slide in Mataruse's health has been accompanied by other troubles. Weight loss is one symptom that even those with little education in southern Africa have learned to spot. As her weight fell from 136 pounds to 99, Mataruse said her husband decided to find another wife because she could no longer clean the house or carry water on her head.

Her husband's family, which reluctantly took over her care, has insisted she use her own dishes and blankets in the mistaken belief that sharing them could spread the virus. Last month, Mataruse was told that she must also prepare all her own meals, an increasingly difficult task as her strength wanes.

Once, several months back, she considered moving to her parents' home in a nearby city. But she relented, she said, after her husband objected.

"Why are you going?" she recalled him saying. "You are dead already."

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Plumpy'nut! Yeah, that's right. Read about an amazing lifesaver...so ingenious!

2005-04-13T10:07:00.000-07:00

Plumpy'nut Doesn't Use Water And Is Easily Distributed; Big Deployment in Darfur Balancing Profits With Aid

By ROGER THUROW
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
April 12, 2005; Page A1

EL GENEINA, Sudan -- Four-year-old Sadia Mohamed Yousif walked 25 miles with her family to the Krinding refugee camp here. Violence ravaging the surrounding Darfur province had driven them from their farm and Sadia was near starvation when aid workers began feeding her a new product made of sweet, enriched peanut-butter paste.

Its name is Plumpy'nut, and as its use becomes more widespread, this whimsical-sounding product is helping transform the treatment of malnutrition in children. Each packet, the size of a small juice pouch, weighs less than 100 grams but packs 500 calories. After several weeks on a diet of Plumpy'nut -- brought to the camp by Save the Children, a U.S. aid organization -- Sadia was able to stand and walk again. When she spied the silver-and-red packet in her mother's hand, she said "Plumpy," stepping forward on wobbly legs and reaching out her hands.
[A malnourished baby holds a silver-and-red packet of Plumpy'nut while sitting on her mother's lap in a refugee camp in Darfur, Sudan.]
A malnourished baby holds a silver-and-red packet of Plumpy'nut while sitting on her mother's lap in a refugee camp in Darfur, Sudan.

"Plumpy saved her," said her mother, Fatma, with a broad smile.

Plumpy'nut is the serendipitous result of one man's breakfast-time revelation, which came after years of research by nutritionists. Made by a French company in the Normandy countryside, Plumpy'nut has been fed to some 30,000 children in Sudan's Darfur region and aid officials there say it has helped cut malnutrition rates in half.

Unlike powdered-milk formulas, which have been the standard treatment for severe malnutrition, Plumpy'nut doesn't need to be mixed with clean water, a rare commodity in famine-stricken regions. Medical officers aren't needed to be on hand to mix ingredients. A mother simply snips a corner of the packet and squeezes the paste into her child's mouth. As a result, nutritionists for the first time can take treatment beyond crowded emergency feeding centers and hospital settings, where disease can spread rapidly, and into the communities where malnourished children live.

The shift from emergency treatment to more-routine community care, "has long been a Holy Grail of humanitarianism," says Steve Collins, a director of Valid International, a United Kingdom organization specializing in famine relief. "It's an amazing breakthrough when it comes to therapeutic feeding."

A delicate mix of capitalism and humanitarianism, Plumpy'nut is made by Nutriset SAS, a private company specializing in food for humanitarian relief. With 40 employees working from a small blue-and-white factory in Malaunay, France -- a country otherwise known for its haute cuisine -- Nutriset also makes milk-based formulas for treating severe malnourishment as well as other nutrition-boosting products.

While other food companies seek to sell their yogurt and breakfast cereal to the widest possible consumer market, Nutriset focuses only on the world's hunger zones. Its products are household names in places such as Ethiopia, Sudan, Congo and Malawi. Its main customers are aid agencies. In this niche, Nutriset has few rivals. Competing products such as enriched biscuits aren't as versatile as Plumpy'nut -- which costs relief agencies about 35 cents a packet before shipping -- many aid workers say.

Of course, neither Plumpy nor other similar products can help overcome the more intractable problems associated with famine, such as lack of clean water.

First Major Deployment

Darfur, a vast region in Western Sudan, has been Plumpy'nut's first major deployment. For two years, marauding militias, composed mostly of Arab nomads and cattle herders, have attacked Darfur's African farmers in a battle over arable land. United Nations agencies estimate nearly two million people have been driven from their homes and at least 70,000 killed, although other estimates place the death toll much higher. The survivors have sought refuge in squalid camps with minimal sanitation and health facilities in Sudan and neighboring Chad.
[Michel Lescanne]

The U.S. government has labeled the attacks against Darfur's farmers as "genocide" and a U.N. commission probing the violence concluded in February that government forces and militias committed atrocities on a "widespread and systematic basis." The Sudanese government, accused of supporting the militias, refuted the findings, saying it's waging a campaign against Darfur rebels.

As the turmoil threatens to wipe out a third farming season, Nutriset is anticipating another run of round-the-clock production mixing peanut paste with sugar, fats, minerals and vitamins. For Nutriset, the news of fresh orders always comes attached to reports of children on the edge of starvation. "When we got the first order for Darfur, our initial reaction was, 'It's a pity, it's happening again,' " says Isabelle Sauguet, Nutriset's sales and development manager.

The increasing use of Plumpy'nut -- more than 300 metric tons have been distributed in Darfur alone -- has boosted Nutriset's sales to about $15.5 million a year from about $6.5 million in 2001. Nutriset, however, is wary about being seen as profiting from the tragedies it serves. It doesn't offer its products for commercial sale, through creating high-energy athletic bars, for example.

Aid groups would object "if we make money from these products and invest it to make commercial products in order to make more money," says Michel Lescanne, Nutriset's chairman and managing director. He says the company plows back its profits into research and development. The company doesn't disclose salaries it pays.

Plumpy'nut's origin lies in the African hunger crises of the early 1980s, including Ethiopia's epic famine in which nearly one million people died. Back then, Mr. Lescanne was developing an enriched chocolate bar for malnourished children while working at a French dairy company. The product never caught on. "The taste wasn't good, and it was expensive to produce," he remembers, making a sour face. The company dropped Mr. Lescanne's project, he recalls, but he wanted to continue his research. In 1986, he bought some scales and blenders and founded Nutriset in his kitchen.

At the same time, nutritionists working for various aid agencies were also hunting for new malnutrition treatments. Earlier feeding regimens involving various levels of protein, fat and nutrients didn't work effectively and in some cases exacerbated problems by putting excessive demands on a malnourished person's already-weakened digestive organs.

In the early 1990s, these nutritionists, in conjunction with agencies such as the World Health Organization, developed a set of formulas for therapeutic milks that they dubbed F-75 and F-100. Nutriset then developed a way to turn these recipes into a powdered mix for use in the field.

"Just open the package and add some water," says Mr. Lescanne, waving his hands with the flourish of a French chef. The product became the accepted way to treat malnutrition and helped to establish Nutriset's niche.

Some Limitations

But Nutriset and nutritionists working in famine zones knew that powdered milk mix had its limitations. Because it needed to be mixed with clean water, it could only be used in clinical settings, either in established hospitals or in feeding tents set up at the onset of a famine. This meant malnourished children were crowded together, aiding the spread of illnesses such as diarrhea and measles. It also required mothers stay with their sick children during treatment. Nutritionists wondered: Would the health of children left behind deteriorate? What about those who never reached the treatment centers?

"It became a fixation for me to come up with another way," says Andre Briend, a former specialist in pediatric nutrition at the French government's Institute of Development Research and now an official with WHO in Geneva. After many years working in the developing world, he returned to France in the early 1990s and began consulting with Nutriset. He sought an alternative to the powdered mix. He tried pancakes and doughnuts. He tried a chocolate bar, but it melted at high temperatures, making it unsuitable for use in desert famine zones. Adding the necessary minerals also ruined the taste.

One morning in 1997, while eating breakfast, he noticed a jar of Nutella, the chocolate-hazelnut spread popular in Europe. He had seen it on breakfast tables, including his own, for years, but this time he recalls thinking, "Of course!" He called Mr. Lescanne. "Why not a spread?" he said, both men recall.

Since the previous experiment with chocolate didn't work, Mr. Briend tried a peanut paste. When the ingredients from the F-100 milk formula were added, it still tasted like peanut butter, only sweeter.

Picking a Name

Nutriset executives pored through a dictionary trying to come up with a name that would suggest a personality rather than a scientific label. Coming across the "P" section, they combined "plumpy" and "peanut." On its packaging, the apostrophe is represented by a picture of a peanut.

In many African countries, the peanut is a staple food and Nutriset found no cases of peanut allergy. Nutritionists began deploying Plumpy'nut in hunger hot-spots. Children, delighted at the taste, gobbled it up. "The children cried when we took the Plumpy'nut away in order to weigh them," recalls Mr. Briend.

Armed with Plumpy'nut, aid agencies are developing a new treatment method. During Ethiopia's latest famine, in 2003, which afflicted more than 12 million people, relief organizations erected a network of feeding centers to administer milk-based treatment. Countless lives were saved, but medical workers were overwhelmed by the crush of children filling the centers. Aid workers using Plumpy'nut were able to relieve the pressure by returning children to their homes and treating them there.

In Darfur, aid workers have stepped up their use of these community-based treatments. Nutritionists say a milk-based treatment is vital for severely malnourished children with medical complications, which may comprise up to 20% of the total. But milk-based products can be breeding grounds for bacteria, either when mixed with contaminated water or when left out in the open. For most malnourished children, nutritionists have found that a steady diet of Plumpy'nut at home -- three or four sachets a day for several weeks -- will usually bring recovery.

Some groups want to take the production of Plumpy'nut beyond Nutriset's factory and into the field. Mark Manary, a pediatrician at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis established Project Peanut Butter in Malawi, in southern Africa. To reduce costs, it uses local ingredients as well as a mix of vitamins and minerals supplied by Nutriset. Dr. Manary hopes to crank out 150 metric tons a year to treat Malawi's estimated 15,000 severely malnourished children.

Dr. Manary initially used Plumpy'nut he'd received as a donation in 2001. Recovery rates soared to 95% from 25%. "We didn't need a statistician to tell us this was better," he says. "We figured if we wanted to continue, we needed to make it locally."

Valid International's Dr. Collins, is also hoping to spur local production of Plumpy'nut-style products using other commodities, such as corn or wheat, as well as peanuts. "It's such an important technique, it can't be beholden to just one company," he says. "We need the lowest price with high quality to match."

Despite the competition, Nutriset says it is open to local production. The company is hoping to establish a franchise network of local producers; it would supply its nutritional mix for a fee and offer advice on production and quality.

In January, Fatma Adam Hassin emerged from her thatched hut in the Krinding camp cradling a packet of Plumpy'nut. She filled a plastic bottle with water and washed her hands before sprinkling some drops over the face and hands of her 2-year-old daughter, Hasania, who was severely malnourished. The mother sat on the ground outside her hut and fed Plumpy'nut to Hasania, who typically eats three packets a day in nine sittings.

Plumpy'nut allows Ms. Hassin and other mothers to stay with their children rather than move to a feeding center located elsewhere in the camp. "How would I take care of all my children if I'm not at home?" asks Ms. Hassin, who has eight children in total.

Plumpy'nut also puts the mother in charge of feeding and caring for her child. "It's the most beautiful thing with Plumpy'nut," says Hedwig Deconinck, a senior emergency nutrition specialist for Save the Children working in Darfur. "The mother tells us, 'My child is healthy and I have done it.' "

Write to Roger Thurow at roger.thurow@wsj.com1
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Sad story of old sex workers

2005-04-10T00:13:00.000-07:00

washingtonpost.com
Aging Prostitutes Find Champion in Mexico City Mayor
Critics Say Populist Trying to Curry Favor

By Mary Jordan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, April 10, 2005; Page A20

MEXICO CITY -- Cataracts cloud her eyes and arthritis stiffens her spine, but Maria Luisa Torres, 70, still walks the streets of the Merced selling her body, as do many elderly women in the downtown neighborhood, where just about everything is available for a price.

"Would I like a change in life? Yes," said Torres, with a lipstick-stained cigarette stub in her wrinkled hand and her beige stockings held up with rubber bands. But after working as a prostitute for four decades -- or maybe five, she can't quite recall -- it is not so easy to stop now.

Among the thousands of prostitutes in North America's largest city are hundreds of women in their sixties, seventies and eighties who continue to sell themselves to earn cash to buy food or medicine, according to women's groups. Now, an unusual project to house some of them in a public shelter is drawing attention not only to their numbers but also to the social policies of embattled Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who recently turned over a building to the prostitutes.

Lopez Obrador has built a huge base of support among the disenfranchised since he took office in 2000. In addition to building houses for the poor, he has established monthly cash payments and public transportation discounts for the elderly, medical assistance for the disabled and economic support for single mothers. He has fixed streets and parks, spent lavishly on public works projects aimed at alleviating traffic congestion and even turned over the spacious city-owned building to aging prostitutes.

So when Congress voted Thursday to strip him of his immunity from criminal prosecution in a relatively minor land dispute, several hundred thousand people -- many of them the city's poorest residents -- turned out in Mexico's central square to support him. They decried the action as a political lynching of their mayor, the front-runner in early polling for next year's presidential election.

Lopez Obrador's opponents say his free spending on social programs represents not a big heart, but a big ego. Even though critics say some of his social programs such as the shelter are laudable, they argue that the mayor is using city money to buy votes at the expense of the city's long-term economic health. They say his economic policies scare off investors who could improve the city's economy and create jobs that would help lift people out of poverty.

On Saturday, Lopez Obrador told reporters outside his modest apartment building "there is no way to silence me." As supporters chanted, "You are not alone," he said he would remain in his home, with the ranking member of his staff running the capital's day-to-day business, as he awaited word of his expected arrest.

Authorities have indicated that they would seek Lopez Obrador's arrest in about 10 days. Mexican law states that anyone facing formal criminal charges may not run for elective office.

Speaking from Rome, where he was attending the funeral of Pope John Paul II, President Vicente Fox defended the action against the mayor, saying it gave the world an example of Mexico's "legality and adherence to the law."

Many of the aging sex workers who will soon trade grungy brothels and door stoops for an ornate, colonial-era building worth more than half a million dollars want Lopez Obrador on the ballot next year.

"This is the first government to open its door to us and listen to sex workers," said Carmen Muñoz, 51, an organizer of the women. She said she has worked as a prostitute for 30 years but never found a mayor so willing to help people like herself. "We are very grateful," she added.

The women in La Merced, a market area and red-light zone near the city center, said Lopez Obrador is giving long-overdue attention to the underprivileged and forgotten. After holding several meetings with the Merced prostitutes -- something they said had never happened before -- Lopez Obrador gave the building to them and directed his cabinet to help them obtain health care and other benefits.

Semillas, a women's group, is leading a fundraising drive to outfit the donated building with beds, a kitchen and a medical clinic. The plan is to open it later this year. Well-known female personalities, including writer Elena Poniatowska, singer Eugenia Leon and actress Jesusa Rodriguez, also support the project. Poniatowska is helping organize a huge march in support of the mayor on April 24.

Those who will live at the shelter are the "independent" prostitutes 60 to 85 years old who are not connected to pimps and groups that take a percentage of the women's earnings.

Torres, the 70-year-old sex worker, said the new shelter means she will no longer have to worry about finding a customer in order to pay for a place to sleep. Her curly gray hair is tinged blonde with dye and she wears a cardigan over a floral dress that falls past her knees. Nothing fancier or skimpier is needed, she said.

Men know she is not young, but she chooses to think that "an antique can be more valuable than something new," she explained. She strolled through Jardin Loreto, a nearby park, saying to passing men: "Amor, vamos?" or "My love, shall we go?" After agreeing on a price -- often $5 or less -- she leads her customer to one of the many run-down hotel rooms nearby. She has been doing this for decades, since she left the coconut fields in western Mexico. At first she had higher hopes and opened a little sandwich kiosk. But "not even a fly would stop" at her stand, and she turned to the only sure money she could find.

Muñoz, the women's leader, said aging prostitutes typically receive less money for their services than the younger ones. Some men, young and old, seek out older women they view as "maternal figures," she said, and some also pay the older sex workers to "talk about their problems."

Hermelinda Bermudez, a sex worker in her seventies, said she started in the trade to earn money for her children and now does it to make money for her grandchildren. But as she ages, it gets harder to attract customers, she said as she started to cry.

Muñoz said many poor women turn to sex work to pay for tuition and food for their children; that way, a grateful family takes care of them later in life. But other times, families shun these women and they wind up alone on the streets. It is those women that Lopez Obrador is helping, Muñoz said.

Marta Lamas, a founder of Semillas and a prominent feminist, said some poor women from the countryside ride three or four hours a day on a bus into Mexico City to work in brothels that are nothing more than large rooms with curtains separating little spaces. Then at dusk they board a bus back home to their families, who have no idea how they spend their days.

After a long interview on a recent afternoon, Torres -- an avowed supporter of Lopez Obrador -- got up from a bench in the donated building and put her arm on her lower back.

"I'm so stiff," she said, arching her aching back before she headed outside to her park again. She held up a floral embroidery she had been working on. She said she looked forward to the shelter being completed and sitting in its grand inner courtyard, finally having a comfortable place for her only hobby.

"What I really like to do is knit," she said.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Dreaming your life is soaring....

2005-04-09T02:21:00.000-07:00

pril 9, 2005
COMING OF AGE
At 15, Dreaming Big Dreams: Oh, to Be a Scholar
By TIM WEINER

MEXICALI, Mexico

ALICIA ÁLVAREZ lives two miles from the American border and light-years from the American dream.

Growing up in Mexicali has made her a realist at 15. She has no taste for romances and soap operas. Harry Potter stories and a horror movie at the mall are as far away as fictions take her from her city's heat and dust.

Alicia has a fierce intelligence, and it fires her only soaring ambition: to get a decent education, schooling that could lift her up and out of her surroundings into a better life. It looks to her as likely as a trip to Mars.

"It seems impossible," Alicia said with a shy, distant gaze. She has started high school, having proved herself one of the brightest girls in her city, a straight-A student with an exceptional aptitude for math.

"My family has no money for college," she said. "I probably will never get to a university, though I would love to.

"My education has been hard. My teachers are trained in teaching, not in math and science. It's a struggle for them to teach me what I need to be taught. To learn what I want to know. And I want to know so much."

She finds herself, like her country, poised with one foot in the door of opportunity and one stuck in the poverty and powerlessness of the past. But with her fine mind, the idea of having a better life than one's parents, while distant, is still a shimmering possibility.

Her father, David Osuna, 46, works part time selling used cars. He has good weeks and bad weeks. Her mother, Alicia Álvarez, 48, keeps house. They have provided their children with the basics of life: food, clothes, shelter. Their slender, dutiful, deep-thinking daughter is a bit of a mystery to them.

Alicia's brothers, David, 21, and Luis, 16, are in awe of her intelligence, respectful, sometimes distant. David is the one in whom she sometimes confides her dreams.

ALICIA'S uncle and godfather, Abel Álvarez, 56, knows her aspirations. He grew up behind a plow, and then crossed over the border when he was her age to work the fields of the Imperial Valley in California. He now earns a good living in construction, a self-made man who builds malls in El Centro, Calif., 15 minutes north of Mexicali.

He has watched Alicia grow up with a mixture of pride and worry.

"It's not a lot easier growing up in Mexicali now than it was 40 years ago," he said. "The pie's a little bigger, but a lot more people want a slice. Growing up here, you go up against all that, and with the United States and all its riches just over the line."

Mexico's economy has been flat for almost five years. Poverty is ever-present. The middle class is small; it has been shrinking for a generation. Stealing into the United States is often the only way out.

Alicia has seen what is over the line, having traveled with her uncle and cousins on short trips to Los Angeles, San Diego and Riverside, halfway between Los Angeles and Palm Springs. "I love Riverside best of all, it's so pretty," she said. "So much greenery, so many trees. It's the cleanest, greenest place I've ever seen."

But Alicia says the idea of sneaking across the border to live and work holds no attraction for her. "I don't want to migrate," she said flatly. There is no legal path for her, and she does not want to be an outlaw.

She is a bit better off than many other young Mexicans, especially the millions living in the countryside whose families struggle for enough to eat, and she would not risk what little she has for a gamble in a strange land.

Still, Alicia sometimes feels the walls of her cinder-block house closing in on her. The heat rises above 100 degrees in Mexicali for almost half the year. The house is crowded, and the closeness sometimes chafes at family life and familial love.

"We quarrel sometimes," she says. "We don't always get along. My parents don't always think the way I do." When the little house gets too hot, too close, she finds refuge in books, or when there is a little money to spare, alone at the movies, at a mall a mile from home on the edge of the city, near where the desert begins.

She has become, of late, more of a loner, though she has a best friend, Karen Aguilar. "She is my one close friend, Karen, and no one else," Alicia said. "We grew up together. We shared secrets and all that. We used to spend all our free time together. But now she works, and I have to study, and time seems so short."

Karen, 16, used to visit Alicia almost every day. "We'd go hide in her room, play music, dance together, talk about boys and things," Karen said. "If we went out, it would be to walk to the mall, look at clothes. She is often a shy girl, but with me, she'll open up."

But things are changing. Karen's father forbade her to go to Alicia's 15th birthday celebration last year, a day that serves as the formal presentation of a girl as a woman in Mexican society. It traditionally is marked first with a formal Catholic Mass, then with the best party a girl's family can afford.

Karen's parents are Jehovah's Witnesses, and they objected to her going to a Catholic church. The schism almost broke Alicia's heart. While not a deeply devout Catholic, Alicia took the ritual seriously - the Mass is the last of its kind that a Mexican girl receives before her marriage.

Karen's absence was marked by an empty chair at the party afterward, held in an electricians' union hall. A D.J. played Eminem. Many of the girls danced with one another in a tight circle, dressed in tube tops, hot pants and tiny minidresses, making sexy hip-shaking moves stolen from music videos.

Alicia danced chastely, outside the edge of the circle, moving slowly in her creamy beige gown.

The priest and her elders had said this was to be the most beautiful day of her life. On the first night of summer, under a new moon, she was turning from a girl into a woman. The party made her parents happy, and that made Alicia happy.

But the ritual was a little empty, like her friend's place at the table, and the romance of it all felt rented, like the hall. She was dancing alone, a world apart.

SHE has once or twice held hands with boys. There have been "little kisses," but nothing else, she says. She is not ready for the intensity and confusion of sex. Her mind is growing fast. But her body is starting to catch up. Sometimes she feels that when she looks in the mirror, she sees a different person every day.

"I know I'm changing," she said. "I'm not the same as I was when I was a child. But I'm not grown up either.

"There have been guys who say they want to be my boyfriend," she said. "I tell them no. I tell them I don't want that. I tell them I'm special. I'm different. I haven't been attracted to them. I tell them that, and sometimes it makes me feel ugly. But no one whom I've been attracted to has asked me.

"Boys are not what I think about, not that much," she said. "What I think about when I'm alone is growing up. Because I have to grow up, I have to think about high school, and then how I am going to find a way to go to a university despite having no money? If I get there, what I am going to study."

Mexico has made strides in public education over the past 25 years, particularly in primary schools, but not nearly enough. Only one of seven children entering first grade finishes high school.

"Maybe half the students who finish eighth grade don't have access to a good high school," said Rafael Rangel, chancellor of Tec de Monterrey, Mexico's most prestigious university. "We haven't built enough high schools or trained enough teachers. It's a terrible situation. Many of the kids who do make it through high school have no access to a university."

"There's no bigger problem in Mexico," he said.

If Alicia is struggling for answers, so is her country. Her life is a long list of questions, including the biggest of all: what she will be when she grows up.

"Maybe the best I can hope for is to find a teacher in high school who can teach me accounting, and then a job keeping the books at some business," she said. "Still, I would love to be a real scholar, to go to a university and make my life better than that."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times

Jeffrey Sachs’s plan to eradicate world poverty

2005-04-06T23:56:00.000-07:00

ALWAYS WITH US
by JOHN CASSIDY
Jeffrey Sachs’s plan to eradicate world poverty.
Issue of 2005-04-11
Posted 2005-04-04

On July 9, 1985, a thirty-year-old American economist named Jeffrey Sachs stepped off a plane in La Paz, Bolivia, high in the Andes, where the inflation rate was three thousand per cent. Prices were rising so fast that on the streets of the capital people were frantically trading bags of depreciating pesos for dollars. Sachs, one of the youngest tenured professors in the history of the Harvard economics department, had established himself as an authority on inflation and international finance, and was someone who, in his own words, “thought that I knew just about everything that needed to be known” about his subject.

It was Sachs’s self-confidence that had earned him an invitation to Latin America. A few months earlier, during a seminar at Harvard on the Bolivian crisis organized by some Latin-American students, he had interrupted the speaker, strode to the blackboard, and announced, “Here’s how it works.” When he finished scribbling equations, a voice at the back of the room said, “Well, if you’re so smart, why don’t you come down to La Paz to help us?” Sachs laughed, but the speaker, Carlos Iturralde, a Bolivian businessman who later became his country’s foreign minister, wasn’t joking. Seven weeks after Sachs arrived in La Paz, some of his recommendations were implemented, and three years of hyperinflation came to an immediate end.

Thus began the twenty-year journey through the developing world which Sachs recounts in “The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time” (Penguin Press; $27.95). From Bolivia, where he acted as an economic adviser for several years, Sachs moved on to Poland and Russia, where he played a controversial role in the transformation from Communism to capitalism, and, most recently, to sub-Saharan Africa. For the past three years, Sachs has been leading the Earth Institute at Columbia University and directing the United Nations Millennium Project, a multinational task force of economists, scientists, and development experts. The Millennium Project recently published a plan to halve global poverty and hunger by 2015—a target that the world community adopted in September, 2000, at the U.N. Millennium Summit. The plan calls on rich countries to double their financial assistance to poor nations, something that Sachs insists is workable, affordable, and in the long-term interest of the developed world. “Ending poverty is the great opportunity of our time,” he writes.

As Sachs points out, more than a billion people currently subsist on less than a dollar a day—the standard threshold for “extreme poverty.” Every year, hundreds of thousands die of starvation, malnutrition, or diseases like aids andmalaria; tens of millions of children perish in infancy. In the face of this ongoing catastrophe, this year the American government will extend to poor countries approximately fifteen billion dollars in aid, which is roughly a thirtieth of the Pentagon budget and about an eighth of one per cent of the gross domestic product. (American private giving to the Third World typically comes to another six billion.) Although President Bush agreed to quadruple aid, to an internationally agreed-upon target of 0.7 per cent of the G.D.P., he hasn’t matched his rhetoric with extra cash. In 2002, he did set up a Millennium Challenge Account, which was supposed to direct money to developing nations. So far it has approved just a hundred and ten million dollars in grants, or about what it cost to make the movie “The Aviator.”

In the absence of a natural disaster, such as the Asian tsunami, or a bloody civil conflict, such as the one in Sudan, the fate of the world’s poor rarely attracts attention in this country. So it’s greatly to Sachs’s credit that he has been a gifted and tireless advocate; indeed, he may be the only economist to have published a book with a foreword by a rock star. (“His voice is louder than any electric guitar, heavier than heavy metal,” writes Bono, the lead singer of U2.) But Sachs is also making some grand claims: “We can realistically envision a world without extreme poverty by 2025.”

Can we? Poor countries have been receiving at least some foreign aid for thirty or forty years—a total of more than a trillion dollars, in one estimate—and, for the most part, it hasn’t done much good. Generations of development experts have seen their plans stymied by the impediments of the real world. Has Jeffrey Sachs, a man who rose to prominence as a proponent of unfettered American-style capitalism in former Communist countries, really figured out a solution?

In the summer of 1989, Sachs was in Warsaw advising the Polish reformers who had won a historic victory in parliamentary elections. At a late-night meeting, he and a colleague, David Lipton, sketched out some ideas for decontrolling prices immediately, stabilizing the currency, cancelling foreign debts, and, eventually, privatizing state-owned enterprises. Jacek Kuron, one of the leaders of the Solidarity movement, told them to write up a plan. Sachs said they would go back to America and fax over some material within a week or two. “What do you mean?” Kuron demanded. “I need this tomorrow morning.”

Sachs and Lipton worked through the night, and by dawn had completed a fifteen-page brief with a specific chronology of policy reforms. “It was the first time, I believe, that anyone had written down a comprehensive plan for the transformation of a socialist economy to a market economy,” Sachs recounts. “Our proposal was for a dramatic, quick transformation.” Some Polish economists advocated less radical changes, arguing that their country had neither the institutions nor the expertise necessary to handle unbridled capitalism, but on January 1, 1990, the government enacted the main elements of the Sachs-Lipton all-nighter as part of a new policy that was widely referred to as “shock therapy,” a phrase Sachs now dismisses as a misleading “journalistic concoction.” Freed from government control, prices soared, and many people saw their savings wiped out. Unemployment rose sharply, too, especially in the heavy industries that had provided most of Solidarity’s support. Although Sachs’s Polish critics claimed that their warnings had been vindicated, he argues that his strategy worked out well over time: “By 2002 Poland was 50 per cent richer in per capita terms than it had been in 1990, and it had logged the most successful growth record of any post-communist country in Eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union.”

If Sachs’s account of his time in Poland sounds a little self-serving, his account of his time in Russia, where he advised the economic reformers who surrounded Boris Yeltsin when he came to power in the fall of 1991, is downright contentious. “Many critics later accused me of peddling a ruthless form of free-market ideology in Russia,” he writes. “That was not the case. My main activity for two years was an unsuccessful attempt to mobilize international assistance to help cushion the inevitable hardships that would accompany Russia’s attempt to overcome the Soviet legacy.”

Perhaps Sachs remembers things differently than others. According to other accounts, he brushed aside warnings that Russia wasn’t ready for an immediate shift to capitalism and pushed for an overnight deregulation of prices, a drastic reduction in government borrowing, a sharp cut in subsidies to consumers and firms, and the selling off of state-owned enterprises, in addition to trying to secure financial assistance from the West. After the reform program was enacted, Russia experienced rampant inflation, a precipitous decline in industrial production, a surge in crime, an unprecedented fall in life expectancy, and the looting of the country’s mineral wealth by well-connected businessmen, some of whom were gangsters. Sachs denies that these calamities had anything to do with the policies he espoused. “Most of the bad things that happened—such as the massive theft of state assets under the rubric of privatization—were directly contrary to the advice that I gave and to the principles of honesty and equity that I hold dear,” he maintains. The responsible parties, in his view, included Viktor Gerashchenko, “whom I tagged at the time as ‘the world’s worst Central Bank governor’ ”; the International Monetary Fund, which failed to provide adequate support for the ruble; and the United States government, which spurned Sachs’s call for a Marshall Plan for Russia.

The fact is that in both Poland and Russia Sachs favored large-scale social engineering over gradual change and institution-building. The disastrous privatization policy is one example. Although most of the privatization took place after Sachs left Russia, at the end of 1994, the original policy framework was put in place in 1992 and 1993, when he was still there. Each Russian was given a voucher worth ten thousand rubles to bid for stocks in newly private companies. Many people didn’t understand what was happening, and they sold their vouchers cheaply to better-informed insiders, who ended up controlling many of the privatized companies. Sachs, though, denies that he made any mistakes, or that the transition to capitalism could have been better managed. “Looking back, would I have advised Russia differently knowing what I know today?” he writes. “To a large extent, the answer is no.”

Sachs returned to Harvard full time in 1994, but he also continued to travel widely as a consultant. For several years, he worked with the World Economic Forum, a pro-globalization group that organizes an annual conference in Davos, Switzerland. He wrote for an annual publication called the Global Competitiveness Report, in which he criticized big government and expounded the virtues of open markets. On the latter point, Sachs has been consistent. Although he now tips his hat to anti-globalization protesters who detest everything Davos stands for, commending them for “ending years of self-congratulation by the rich and powerful,” he also regards them as fundamentally misguided. “By now the anti-globalization movement should see that globalization, more than anything else, has reduced the numbers of extreme poor in India by two hundred million and in China by three hundred million since 1990,” he writes. “Far from being exploited by multinational companies, these countries and many others like them have achieved unprecedented rates of economic growth on the basis of foreign direct investment (FDI) and the export-led growth that followed.”

The facts support Sachs: between 1990 and 2001, G.D.P. per capita rose by 5.5 per cent a year in East Asia and by 3.2 per cent a year in South Asia, and poverty fell sharply in both regions. Despite the claims of some analysts on the left, economic growth really is the best antipoverty strategy. If the rest of the developing world had matched the growth rates of China and India, victory over poverty would be in sight. Unfortunately, in sub-Saharan Africa, between 1990 and 2002, per-capita income didn’t rise at all, and the number of people living on less than a dollar a day increased by a third, to more than three hundred and thirty million.

The failure of globalization to enrich the world’s poorest continent presents a dilemma for its champions, such as Thomas Friedman, the Times Op-Ed columnist. His new book, “The World Is Flat” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $27.50), explains how factors like technology and outsourcing have made the planet even smaller and more competitive than it was in 1999, when he published his first book on globalization, “The Lexus and the Olive Tree.” Still, he recognizes that the three billion people who remain in or near poverty have yet to see the benefits. “If it was just a matter of time, you know, give it twenty or thirty years and the others will be there, then it would be great to declare that the whole world is flat,” Friedman quotes Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, as saying. “But the fact is there is a trap that these 3 billion people are caught in, and they may never get into the virtuous circle of more education, more health, more capitalism, more rule of law, more wealth. . . . I am worried that it could be just half the world that is flat and it stays that way.”

Well, nobody can accuse Friedman of leaving out evidence that contradicts his argument, and he does provide an engaging journalistic guide to the competitive challenges facing the United States. Africa’s failure to prosper in an era of globalization represents a more serious challenge to economists. Back in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, many economists were confident that newly independent African countries, such as Ghana, Kenya, and Uganda, would be able to escape poverty if only Western donors filled the “financing gap” between what they could afford and the resources they needed to invest in factories, roads, railways, and other forms of infrastructure. Once these nations developed modern industrial sectors, the thinking went, the rest of their economies would be pulled along. In a 1960 book, “The Stages of Economic Growth,” W. W. Rostow, an economic historian at M.I.T., popularized a version of this argument, saying that if underdeveloped nations doubled investment rates, they would soon “take off” into self-sustained growth. During the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, in which Rostow served, America’s foreign-aid budget reached an all-time high of 0.6 per cent of G.D.P., and during the seventies and eighties significant amounts of aid continued to flow to poor countries.

Much of that money was invested in grand projects, such as factories, highways, and dams. Kwame Nkrumah, the nationalist leader of Ghana, built the Akosombo Dam and thus created Lake Volta, one of the world’s biggest man-made bodies of water. The dam generated electricity for one major aluminum plant, but it didn’t lead to much other development, and it had unanticipated side effects: many of the people living next to the lake suffered from waterborne diseases like river blindness. Meanwhile, the Ghanaian government imposed heavy taxes on the country’s one internationally competitive industry, cocoa production. After decades of aid and investment, most Ghanaians were no better off than they had been at independence.

Ghana has proved all too representative. As William Easterly, an economist formerly with the World Bank, has observed, many countries that received a significant amount of aid, such as Ghana, Zambia, Chad, and Zimbabwe, had economies that either failed to grow much or actually shrank. Meanwhile, a number of places that received very little foreign assistance, such as Singapore, Hong Kong, and Malaysia, expanded rapidly. Looking at the over-all record, there appears to be no statistical correlation between aid and growth.

Sachs acknowledges past failures only briefly. “I reject the plaintive cries of the doomsayers who say that ending poverty is impossible,” he writes. “I have identified the specific investments that are needed; found ways to plan and implement them; shown that they can be affordable; and addressed the counsels of despair who claim that the poor are condemned by their cultures, values, and personal behaviors.” Setting aside the solipsism of Sachs’s “I”—ten specialist task forces and a sizable secretariat worked on the U.N. anti-poverty plan—his argument deserves to be taken seriously. He points to a recent body of research, originating at the World Bank, which suggests that aid can stimulate economic growth if it is given to countries with decent governments. Perhaps wisely, though, Sachs doesn’t rely too heavily on statistical findings, which are almost always ambiguous. (Easterly has recently challenged the World Bank’s results; other economists claim to have substantiated them.) Instead of defending past practices, Sachs advocates a new approach—“clinical economics,” he calls it—which pays attention to the history, ethnography, and politics of individual countries, rather than imposing uniform policies.

To explain how Africa might prosper, he knows, requires an account of why it hasn’t. Many development experts have been inclined to blame political pathologies. “Poor performers have corrupt, predatory or brutal governments, or sometimes, even worse, no government at all, but rather civil war among competing warlords,” Martin Wolf, a British economics commentator, noted in his recent book, “Why Globalization Works.” “The failure of the state to provide almost any of the services desperately needed for development is at the root of the African disaster.” Sachs begs to differ. The quality of governance is low in Africa, he concedes, but that’s the case in nearly all impoverished regions. And the causation runs from economics to politics, rather than vice versa: “Africa’s governance is poor because Africa is poor.”

Why is Africa poor? Sachs argues that economists have generally paid too little attention to geographic factors. In Bolivia, three years into his career as an economic adviser, he met a World Bank consultant named David Morawetz, who pointed out that Bolivia was a landlocked country with high transport costs. As a result, it had succeeded only in exporting goods with a high value-to-weight ratio, such as silver, tin, and cocaine. Lower-value goods, such as foodstuffs, were not worth exporting once the cost of getting them to the market was taken into account. “Morawetz’s point about Bolivia’s geographical distress was truly (and incredibly) something new to me,” Sachs recounts. “In all of my training, the ideas of physical geography and the spatial distribution of economic activity had not even been mentioned.” Alerted to the importance of geography, Sachs decided that Africa’s failure to develop was probably connected to the fact that much of the continent is hot, isolated, and ridden with tropical diseases. Starved of fertile soil, transport links, power, and adequate health care, much of the continent is stuck in “the worst poverty trap in the world.”

He describes visiting a group of villages in the Sauri region of western Kenya, where aids has stricken thirty per cent of the populace and the survivors don’t have enough money for fertilizer or mosquito nets. “There are no cars or trucks owned or used within Sauri and only a handful of villagers said they had ridden in any kind of motorized transport during the last year,” he writes. “Around half of the individuals at the meeting said that they had never made a phone call in their lives.” With some relatively modest resources, Sachs says, a “clinical economist” could provide many of the things that Sauri desperately needs: a power line to a nearby town, a health clinic with a doctor and nurse, fertilizer, water-storage facilities, mosquito nets, a cell phone, a truck.

How much would all this cost? Sachs and his colleagues at Columbia’s Earth Institute estimate the bill for getting the Sauri region up on its feet at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars annually, or about seventy dollars per inhabitant per year. “The benefits would be astounding,” Sachs writes. “Decisive malaria control, a doubling or tripling of food yields with a drastic reduction of chronic hunger and malnutrition, improved school attendance, a reduction of waterborne disease, a rise in incomes through the sale of surplus grains and cash crops.”

The U.N. anti-poverty plan would take that Sauri rescue program and scale it up. Each low-income country would devise a detailed multi-year poverty-reduction strategy, identifying its specific needs, which it would then submit to the donor countries. After reviewing the plan, demanding modifications where necessary, the donors would agree to provide enough money to carry out the strategy. Until the poor countries submit their requests, it is impossible to know exactly how much the U.N. plan would cost, but Sachs suggests a figure of a hundred and thirty-five billion dollars in 2006, rising to a hundred and ninety-five billion dollars in 2015.

Curiously, Sachs scarcely acknowledges that his views have evolved over the years. In a 1996 article for the World Economic Forum, he argued that big government and social-welfare spending impede growth. Now he is calling for the West to finance big-government programs in Africa. Still, readers will be more concerned with the practicality of his proposals than with the consistency of his opinions. And the plan his book lays out is impressive not only in its ambition but in some of its details.

He argues, persuasively, that aid ought to be extended in the form of grants, instead of loans, which have to be repaid, and that it shouldn’t be tied to specific expenditures. (Some donors have insisted that the money they give be spent on goods and services they export.) Ideally, aid should also be guaranteed for long periods. “In the past, donors often helped countries to build clinics, but then rejected the plea to help cover the salaries of doctors and nurses to help staff the clinics,” Sachs notes. “The predictable result has been the construction of empty shells rather than operating health facilities.”

Under the U.N. plan, financial assistance would be extended until 2015, as long as the recipients met certain performance targets. Health care, primary schooling, and other services for the poor would be provided free of charge, reversing the recent trend toward user fees, which the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have encouraged in a misguided effort to improve efficiency. “The extreme poor don’t have enough to eat, much less to pay for electricity or water or bed nets or contraceptives,” Sachs observes.

He’s surely right to emphasize spending on health care, direct poverty relief, and education. For one thing, rates of infection, malnutrition, and enrollment in schools are a lot easier to monitor than over-all economic progress. In Tanzania in 2001, for example, the government more than doubled the education budget and abolished user fees, using aid money to help meet the cost. Since then, the enrollment rate in primary schools has risen from sixty per cent to ninety per cent.

Yet, as the history of development policy suggests, there can be political dangers to overpromising, and Sachs, by placing so much emphasis on geography, underplays other reasons for Africa’s stalled development. Most African countries, bequeathed arbitrary borders by their colonial heritages, are ethnically heterogeneous, and that has led to political problems, as groups compete for the spoils of government. Kenya, which contains about forty different ethnic communities, has been plagued by corruption and ethnic conflict, as have many African nations. Congo, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, and several other countries have been riven by what the development economist Paul Collier refers to as resource wars, in which rival ethnic groups compete for control of valuable natural resources.

Sachs, as he did in Poland and Russia, refuses to acknowledge that institutional failures could hobble his ambitious plans. “Africa shows absolutely no tendency to be more or less corrupt than any other countries at the same income level,” he writes. Then he presents the results of a study that he and some colleagues carried out recently, using various indicators of quality of governance. Countries they judge to have “average” standards of governance include Chad, Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone—all places that have recently experienced devastating civil conflicts.

Many African scholars, such as the Ghanaian economist George B. N. Ayittey, are far more willing to criticize their kleptocratic governments than Sachs is. Ayittey points out that aid money sometimes helps corrupt and incompetent regimes to remain in power. The World Bank and the I.M.F. extended nine loans to the tyrannical administration of Mobutu Sese Seko, who looted Zaire for decades, at one point taking personal control of an entire gold-mining region. Sweden and other Scandinavian countries supported Julius Nyerere’s socialist regime in Tanzania, which almost destroyed the agricultural sector by dragooning scattered bushmen into collective farms.

Sachs also downplays the problem of misappropriated aid. Many African nations are so poor that under the U.N. plan they would probably receive annual aid payments equivalent to fifteen to twenty per cent of their gross domestic product. Without adequate safeguards, one has to wonder how much of this money would end up helping the people it was supposed to reach. Sachs’s plan calls for recipient governments to commit to good governance, it’s true, but, once the money started flowing, these assurances would need to be supplemented with stringent external supervision.

Still, Sachs is right to challenge the pessimism that blankets the issue of foreign aid. Americans tend to view the entire sub-Sahara as a disaster area. In fact, during the past decade many African countries have edged toward democracy. A number of dictatorial leaders have retired, died, or been overthrown, including Kenya’s Daniel Arap Moi, Nigeria’s Sani Abacha, and Zaire’s Mobutu. In 2003, Freedom House, the nonpartisan advocacy group, rated eleven African countries as free and twenty as partly free. That’s a big improvement over the state of affairs twenty years ago.

On the economic front, too, there have been glimmers of progress. The rapid development of Mauritius, an island off the coast of East Africa that has a thriving textiles industry, shows that under the right conditions Africans can compete in the world economy. The sharp rise in the price of oil, coffee, and other commodities has buoyed African commodity producers, such as Botswana, Equatorial Guinea, and Mozambique. Even some big countries that previously appeared to have stagnated, such as Ethiopia, Ghana, and Uganda, have recently managed to maintain modest gains in per-capita income.

What Africa needs is one or two unequivocal success stories that would serve as models to reformers in other places and attract global investors. Among the strongest arguments for the U.N. anti-poverty plan is that it would offer help and encouragement to countries that have embarked on reform programs but are still struggling to break out of poverty traps. “The biggest problem today is not that poorly-governed countries get too much aid,” Sachs notes, “but that well-governed countries get too little.” Ghana, Kenya, and Ethiopia are good examples. Each of these countries has worked with the World Bank and the I.M.F. to introduce reforms but is also facing enormous challenges, such as aids and malaria and heavy debts.

Although a little humility would help his cause, Sachs, youthful still at fifty, must be commended for trying to hold rich nations to their promises, and for reminding his countrymen that military action is not the only way to export American values. It will be fascinating to see how he gets on with Paul Wolfowitz, President Bush’s nominee to head the World Bank. Some commentators have speculated that Wolfowitz will seek to revolutionize the Bank’s lending policies. It is more likely that the Bank, which is full of well-meaning and knowledgeable people, will influence Wolfowitz’s thinking, as happened to Wolfowitz’s predecessors, including the Bank’s current president, James Wolfensohn, and, going back thirty-seven years, Robert McNamara, who also moved to the Bank from the Pentagon. Once you immerse yourself in the realities of global poverty, you’re likely to rethink even your most cherished orthodoxies. Just look at Jeffrey Sachs.

In a few months, Wolfowitz may well be pressing politicians in rich countries to increase their aid budgets, including his former colleagues in the Bush Administration. In order to pay its share of the U.N. poverty plan, the United States would have to find another forty billion dollars a year by 2015. Sachs reminds us that merely reversing the President’s first-term tax cuts for those earning more than half a million dollars a year would generate enough to meet this target. Here’s another way to look at it: to pay for the extra spending, each American would have to contribute less than the cost of buying a cappuccino from Starbucks once a week. Aid is not a panacea, and, even if the funding Sachs wants were to materialize, his grandest objectives may well remain unfulfilled. But, targeted carefully, aid can reward responsible governments, encourage individual initiative, and alleviate suffering. Surely that’s worth a cup of coffee.

The Pope and Hypocrisy

2005-04-05T23:37:00.000-07:00

April 6, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Pope and Hypocrisy
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

President Bush and other world leaders are honoring John Paul II in a way that completely misunderstands his message. We pay him no tribute if we lower our flags to half-staff and send a grand presidential delegation to his funeral, when at the same time we avert our eyes as villagers are slaughtered and mutilated in the genocide unfolding in Darfur.

The message of the pope's ministry was about standing up to evil, not about holding grand funerals.

"Throughout the West, John Paul's witness reminded us of our obligation to build a culture of life in which the strong protect the weak," Mr. Bush said. Well, what about that reminder? What kind of a "culture of life" is it that allows us to shrug as Sudanese soldiers heave children onto bonfires?

The latest estimates, from the British government and others, are that 300,000 or more have perished so far in Darfur. Mr. Bush has forthrightly called this slaughter "genocide," but he has used that label not to spur action, but to substitute for it.

These days the Sudanese authorities are adding a new twist to their crimes against humanity: they are arresting girls and women who have become pregnant because of the mass rapes by Sudanese soldiers and militia members. If the victims are not yet married, or if their husbands have been killed, then they are imprisoned for adultery.

Doctors Without Borders issued a report last month about Darfur that quoted one 16-year-old girl as saying:

"I was collecting firewood for my family when three armed men on camels came and surrounded me. They held me down, tied my hands and raped me, one after the other. When I arrived home, I told my family what had happened.

"They threw me out of home, and I had to build my own hut away from them. I was engaged to a man, and I was so much looking forward to getting married. After I got raped, he did not want to marry me and broke off the engagement because he said I was now disgraced and spoilt. ...

"When I was eight months pregnant from the rape, the police came to my hut and forced me with their guns to go to the police station. They asked me questions, so I told them that I had been raped. They told me that as I was not married, I will deliver this baby illegally.

"They beat me with a whip on the chest and back and put me in jail."

The report quoted another girl, 17, who was gang-raped and then locked inside her hut, which was set on fire. She escaped through the wall of the hut but suffered extensive burns.

John Paul wanted world leaders to show compassion for suffering people like these girls, not for dead popes. Mr. Bush and other world leaders flocking to Rome could truly honor the pope by meeting there to establish a protection force in Darfur.

In the meantime, these attacks are continuing daily. And what are we doing about it? When girls are mutilated after their rapes, we provide free Band-Aids.

Mr. Bush has supported a humanitarian relief effort. But even the aid agencies emphasize that what is needed most is a security force to stop the slaughter.

"We're proud of what we do," said Kenny Gluck, the operations director based in the Netherlands for Doctors Without Borders. "But people's villages have been burned, their crops have been destroyed, their wells spiked, their family members raped, tortured and killed - and they come to us, and we give them 2,100 kilocalories a day." In effect, Mr. Gluck said, the aid effort is sustaining victims so they can be killed with a full belly.

I'm not proposing that we send American ground troops. But an expanded United Nations and African force, with logistical support from the U.S., is urgently needed. And Condoleezza Rice should immediately visit Darfur to show that it is a U.S. priority.

Mr. Bush should promptly back the Darfur Accountability Act, a bipartisan bill that would pressure Sudan to stop the killing (so far, the White House hasn't even taken a position on the act). Ordinary citizens can also urge their members of Congress to pass the act.

If there is a lesson from the papacy of John Paul II, it is the power of moral force. The pope didn't command troops, but he deployed principles. And it's hypocritical of us to pretend to honor him by lowering our flags while simultaneously displaying an amoral indifference to genocide.

E-mail: nicholas@nytimes.com

Copyright 2005 The New York Times

Relief Is Very Slow in Coming

2005-04-05T20:19:00.000-07:00

April 6, 2005
In Tsunami Area, Relief Is Very Slow in Coming
By SETH MYDANS

International Herald Tribune

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia, April 3 - Three months after a tsunami
devastated this city, vast areas remain a flatland of rubble, mud and
stagnant water where only palm trees and the stumps of broken
buildings break the low horizon.

Tens of thousands of bodies from among more than 126,000 reported dead
in Aceh Province have been cleared away and nearly half a million
homeless people have found other places to live.

But among the ruins here, and for many miles along the coastline of
barren fishing villages, almost nothing seems to have been done to
begin repairs and rebuilding.

There is little sign in Aceh of the billions of dollars in donations
from governments, aid organizations, civic groups and individual
people who reached out to help from around the world.

"The only thing we've gotten is small packets of food and supplies,"
said Samsur Bahri, 54, a shopkeeper who lost his home and now lives
with nine people in a small room. "Where the money is, we don't know.
It's just meetings, meetings, meetings."

The government and the United Nations defend the pace of the
reconstruction, saying the scope and complexity of the challenge
requires a careful and well-planned response.

"Governments need to take time, and this in-between period is a
difficult time," said Margareta Wahlstrom, the deputy emergency relief
coordinator at the United Nations. "It's a time of managing
expectation, when progress is not so visible as the expectation is."

Aid officials say the international relief effort is a test case, an
unprecedented response to one of the greatest natural disasters in
history.

"There is so much at stake," said Lilianne Fan, the advocacy
coordinator for Oxfam Aceh. "The international community has invested
so much, not just governments but on an individual level. People need
to know what is happening and where their money is going."

Indonesia's state auditing agency said it was having difficulty
accounting for portions of more than $4 billion it says has been
received so far in donations, mostly from abroad, as it was being put
in the hand of various government agencies.

Vice President Jusuf Kalla, who has been at the center of the response
effort, said any shortcomings in the handling of aid money came from
the pressures of what he called an emergency situation that had
strained government resources.

Rufiradi, who heads a local lawyers' group called the Legal Aid
Foundation, said: "We have seen no reports from the government. We
only read in the media that there are large amounts of money coming
in. But it is not clear how much exactly that is, or how it is being
used or where it is going. Did it come to Aceh at all?"

There are no bulldozers or heavy equipment to be seen here; no one is
clearing away rubble or repairing roads or bridges; wells are not
being decontaminated; power lines are not being put up; there are no
sounds of hammers or saws.

The only people who seem to be hard at work are the looters, who have
chewed their way through the ruins like carpenter ants and are now
ripping at the guts of buildings for scrap metal to sell.

"In our area there are 15 families that want to go back home," said
Isna Nusulul, 21, a university student. "We can fix our houses but we
cannot clean the wells and we cannot live without sanitation. I do
expect that from the government."

As the months have passed, the government has been taking a long
run-up before it jumps into action. On March 26, well past the
original deadline, it issued a draft of what it calls its blueprint
for rehabilitation and reconstruction, subject to discussion, local
input and revision.

"It's still an overview," said Imogen Wall, the spokeswoman for the
United Nations Development Program in Aceh. "The details of course
will take several months to work out." Until the blueprint is ready,
international aid groups are also constrained in committing money.

The draft itself is a daunting thing; it comes in 12 volumes. Even
lawyers and aid officials say it is a challenge to read. For the
people here who simply want to start rebuilding their homes, it is
baffling.

"They say they have a blueprint," said Andi Ryanidi, 23, a street
vendor, as he stood in the drizzle near the ruins of his home. "What's
a blueprint? Blueprint - we don't even know what that means. And
meanwhile, nothing happens."

The devastation in Aceh was so total, said Ms. Wahlstrom, the United
Nations official, who recently spent six weeks in the region, that
advances were sometimes hard to appreciate.

"I met some people in Banda Aceh who had started in that terrible
barrenness to rebuild their house," she recalled. "It was a sad little
house, and then we talked to them and they told us that out of their
community of 1,300 people, only 11 had survived."

Indeed the government faces a huge and complex task. It cannot simply
throw up a few new dwellings; it must rebuild entire neighborhoods and
towns, entire economic and social environments.

"It is very difficult to rebuild, especially permanent structures, if
you don't have a clear idea who the land belongs to and how many
people are going to be living there," Ms. Wall said.

To begin with, a clear tally of the dead and living must be made, and
with more than 100,000 people still listed as missing, the final death
toll in Aceh alone is likely to be well above 200,000.

The complications of rebuilding come in many forms.

For one thing, this disaster may not yet be over. Seismologists
predict more earthquakes, perhaps even stronger than the aftershock
that devastated several small islands last week. Aid groups are
already stockpiling more relief materials. "This is going to happen
again," Ms. Wall said.

For another, there is a war going on: For more than a decade, Aceh has
been the scene of a Muslim separatist rebellion and brutal military
repression. There are reports that violence from both sides has
continued since the tsunami.

The greatest problem is a circular one. To a large extent, the tsunami
swept away the basic elements of recovery, destroying personal and
government records and taking the lives of many of the city's
officials and skilled people. Thousands of civil servants, teachers,
medical workers, engineers and technicians were killed.

With recovery plans being formulated in the capital, Jakarta, civic
groups here fear that local needs and conditions are not being heard.

As recovery inches forward, these groups say, it will encounter
conflicts over inheritance and land ownership, bureaucratic
inefficiency, competition among aid groups and among government
departments and, with so much money flooding in, the possibility of
vast corruption.

Several aid officials said they were concerned that the blueprint for
reconstruction was being drawn up in the context of the martial law
restrictions already in place in Aceh.

Among other things, martial law could provide a reason for expelling
most foreign aid groups from Aceh, said Mr. Rufiradi, the lawyer,
meaning there would be few outsiders to monitor the use of recovery
funds. Torn by unending war and repression, battered by a natural
disaster that may not yet be over, paralyzed by a reconstruction
effort that just cannot seem to get started, Aceh today is not a place
of hope.

Warren Hoge contributed reporting from the United Nations for this article.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times

The hardest place in the world to be an optimist is Africa.

2005-04-02T01:09:00.000-08:00

April 2, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Another Kind of Racism
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

LUBIMBI, Zimbabwe

The hardest place in the world to be an optimist is Africa.

Much of Africa is a mess, and no country more so than Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe. The continent has been held back by everything from malaria to its nonsensical colonial boundaries, but the two biggest problems have been lousy leaders and lousy economic policies - and Zimbabwe epitomizes both.

What makes Robert Mugabe a worse oppressor of ordinary Zimbabweans than the white racist rulers who preceded him is not just the way he turned a breadbasket of Africa into a basket case in which half the population is undernourished. It's also the fact that he's refusing to let aid organizations provide food to most of his people. He prefers to let them starve.

In one western Zimbabwean village, I found a woman, Thandiwe Sibanda, who is trying desperately to keep her family alive. "I'm the only one left to care for the children," she said. "My husband died, along with his other wife."

So now she is trying to provide for her own four rail-thin children as well as the two children of the other wife (who presumably died of AIDS along with the husband - so Mrs. Sibanda will very likely die of it as well). "All we can eat is corn porridge," she said, "and there isn't nearly enough even of that."

Mrs. Sibanda is adopting the same survival strategies as nearly every other peasant family I spoke to - they are down to one or two meals a day. She pulled her children out of school last fall to save the $2.25 in annual school fees, as are many other families. Her daughter just had a baby a few days ago but has no milk to feed it. The infant may be the first to die.

Jealous Sansole, a member of Parliament who opposes Mr. Mugabe, told me that in his district, people are already beginning to die of hunger. I didn't see that, but malnutrition is probably speeding up deaths from malaria, diarrhea and certainly AIDS.

The only reason more haven't died is food aid. Mrs. Sibanda's village, for example, until recently received regular food distributions from the World Food Program and the Save the Children Federation.

But last year, President Mugabe declared that Zimbabwe did not need food assistance. This was a lie, but Mr. Mugabe ordered the World Food Program and the aid groups it works with to stop handing out food to the general population.

Some groups continued to distribute food that was in the pipeline, and I visited some villages that received food until January. But now the food aid has all ended. At an elementary school I visited, the principal said that three-quarters of the pupils could not afford breakfast and came to school hungry. Along the border with Mozambique, poor families are marrying off their daughters at very young ages so they will no longer have to feed them.

If the old white regime here was deliberately starving its people, the world would be in an uproar. And while President Bush should be more forceful in opposing Mr. Mugabe's tyranny, it's the neighboring countries that are most shameful in looking the other way.

There's a liberal tendency in America to blame ourselves for Africa's problems, and surely there's far more that we should do to help. We should encourage trade, forgive debts, do research on tropical diseases and distribute mosquito nets that protect against malaria. But some problems, such as Mr. Mugabe, are homegrown and need local solutions, like an effort by South Africa to nudge him into retirement.

One of Africa's biggest problems is the perception that the entire continent is a hopeless cesspool of corruption and decline. Africa's leaders need to lead the way in pushing aside the clowns and thugs so their continent can be defined by its many successes - in Ghana, Mali, Cape Verde, Mauritius, Uganda and Botswana - rather than by the likes of Idi Amin, Emperor Bokassa and Robert Mugabe.

There's a twinkle of hope, for Nigeria and other West African countries have shown the gumption to denounce seizures of power in Togo and São Tomé. But South Africa is still allowing Mr. Mugabe to cast a pall over the entire continent out of deference for his past fight against white oppression.

Frankly, Zimbabweans have already suffered so much from racism over the last century that the last thing they need is excuses for Mr. Mugabe's misrule because of the color of his skin.

E-mail: nicholas@nytimes.com

Copyright 2005 The New York Times

10 Problems

2005-03-26T17:07:00.000-08:00

Ten Problems that concern me as director of 100 Friends Project:

1. Child soldiers:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=Child+soldiers&btnG=Search
2. Trafficking in women:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=Trafficking+in+women&btnG=Search
3. Afghanistan, Pakistan, India women burned “kitchen accidents” dowry deaths
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=kitchen+accident+south+asia+burns&btnG=Google+Search
4. Pedophilia children third world
http://www.childhopeusa.com/kids/geography.html
http://www.ecpat.net/eng/index.asp
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=pedophile+children+%22third+world%22+poverty&btnG=Search
5. Children scavenge garbage dump "third world"
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=children+scavenge+garbage+dump+%22third+world%22&btnG=Google+Search
http://www.motherandchildhealth.org/news/august03page2.html
http://www.courses.psu.edu/hd_fs/hd_fs597_rxj9/survival.htm
http://www.homelessworld.org/mylife/01-thelocation/text2.htm
http://www.time.com/time/asia/photoessays/mongolia_kids.020901/frame6.html
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=+garbage+dump+children+scavenge&btnG=Search
6. AIDS orphans
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=aids+orphans&btnG=Search
7. landmine victims
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=landmines+victims+&spell=1
8. UNESCO: Education for All: http://www.laborrights.org/press/school_africa1203.htm
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/nation/10274694.htm
http://www.unicef.org/newsline/00pr72.htm
http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/develop/africa/2004/1024freeschool.htmhttp://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002071305_africaed24.html
http://www.unesco.org/education/efa/
9. Children and their families who work in garbage dumps in the Third World.
http://www.thestar.com.my/lifestyle/story.asp?file=/2004/2/9/features/7017595&sec=features
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/827466.stm
http://www.elandar.com/back/winter98/stories/oaxaca.html
http://www.deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,595082518,00.html
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/mexico/20020630-9999_1n30dump.html
http://www.pbase.com/maciekda/stungmeanchey
http://www.forum.org.kh/~pio/html/index1.html
http://www.preda.org/photo%20gallery/jail.html
10. The plight of the elderly in the Third World
http://www.globalaging.org/pension/world/gray.htm
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~bsj/issues/00S08.html
http://www.globalaging.org/ruralaging/world/responding.htm
http://www.globalaging.org/ruralaging/world/aginganddevelopment.pdf
http://www.globalaging.org/ruralaging/world/tides.htm
http://www.globalaging.org/ruralaging/world/alone.htm
http://www.globalaging.org/elderrights/world/asiaaging.htm

2005-03-25T22:03:00.000-08:00

This is me (Marc Gold) with a little girl who is a refugee in Afghanistan (July, 2004).

Better Than Charity

2005-03-25T19:46:00.000-08:00

This is an utterly amazing project!

When a small group of Vermonters decided they could help Mexico's poor, no one imagined how many lives they would change.
by Lane Fisher
IN 1987, three neighbors in tiny Weston, Vermont, gathered over coffee to compare notes on their recent trips to Mexico. Years later one of them, Ike Patch, would say it was the best cup of coffee they ever had.
They were lamenting the economic disparities they'd witnessed. Mexico has more billionaires than any other third-world country, yet 40 percent of its people live in extreme poverty--compared with 25 percent in India--and are not helped by their government. Patch, a retired diplomat, worried about the implications of such economic and social imbalances in a country bordering the United States. Bill and Patty Coleman, self-employed writers and publishers, were troubled by conditions they'd seen in poor colonias during an awareness retreat sponsored by Weston Priory, a Benedictine monastery that takes several groups of Americans each year to Cuernavaca. Says Patty, "The three of us just sat down and said, 'We'd better quit moaning about what we saw in Mexico. Why don't we do something, even if it's small?'"
Sixteen years later, their "small" initiative, called VAMOS!, has blossomed into eighty-two projects that aid about forty communities in the Mexican state of Morelos and serve 370,000 meals per year to impoverished people, including 2,200 children. It has trained ninety-one poor Mexicans to become leaders in their communities so that they, in turn, teach and help empower others. It has inspired active support from a Weston-based board of fourteen--still headed by Ike Patch, now ninety-one--and financial contributions from more than 500 individuals, churches, and foundations in the United States. And it carried the Colemans into early "retirement" in Cuernavaca. "There's an amazing group of people who support us year in and year out," says Patty. "Bill and I just happen to be down here having all the fun."
"All the fun" means that the Colemans have worked without pay since moving to south central Mexico in 1989, covering their living expenses with their own funds. The board pays for fund-raising and administrative expenses, so that every dollar given to VAMOS! directly supports the poor. But help from the group means more than charity. "We decided that we would not enter as helpers until we really became part of a community," says Bill, who met Patty in 1960s while working for civil rights in Georgia, which they did for twenty years before moving to Vermont. They have taken their time getting to know communities and helping members of each to articulate what they most need. "Then we talk about what investment they can make in this and what investment VAMOS! can make, so we can be partners," he says.
One example is how VAMOS! works with street sellers who migrate between Cuernavaca, where they sell wares, and the mountains of Guerrero, a neighboring state. "We spent about six months talking to the street sellers, becoming friends with them, teaching a few of the women to read, playing games with the children," says Bill. "Then I asked them, 'What is it that you want for your children?' One woman very timidly responded: 'What we really need is a bathroom, because it costs a peso every time a child wishes to go to the bathroom, and we don't have that kind of money. So they go behind a tree, and people say, Look at those dirty Indians.'" The street sellers also asked if their children could be taught to read and write Spanish, the official language of Mexico but a second language for indigenous people, because they could not stay in one place for their children to attend school. Finally, they asked, "'Could you help us once in a while, at least, by giving them some food, because when we don't sell, we don't eat.'" The result was Casa Tatic, an indigenous cultural center occupying several buildings in downtown Cuernavaca, where mentored members of this community teach children and adults reading, writing, sewing, and computer skills and which functions as a base for street sellers.
Nutrition, literacy, potable water, and skills that lead to income are among the issues with which VAMOS! helps, when asked. But isolation is another: many poor women stay at home all day with their children, afraid that their few possessions will be stolen if they leave. Eight hundred mothers have been drawn into VAMOS! women's groups, where they can teach one another and discuss collective approaches to solving their problems. "This is a powerful force in a poor community," says Patty. "The men work long hours or go to the United States, so that this becomes a women's struggle."
The community of Cerro de la Corona lost its land in a takeover, a common situation in Mexico, and moved onto less desirable land, living in small, cardboard shacks. "They had nothing, absolutely nothing," says Bill. "We began a program for the children, and many [adults] participated. Out of that came a feeling that they really could do something. They weren't shy. So they began to work together, and they now have gotten electricity for their community," the first such colonia to do so. It took years of sit-ins at the state house in Cuernavaca, and the Colemans estimate that 90 percent of the demonstrators were women. "You've got to get from [being] completely isolated, living in that shack with your little kids and wondering where your next meal's coming from, to the point that in community you feel there's something you can do," says Patty.
"Bill and Patty are very strategic," says David Ray, minister at the First Congregational Church of San Rafael, California. "In starting projects they meet [an immediate] need, but they also build something more important--an ability to live and deal with a pretty unjust situation." For the past ten years, Ray has taken a group of Bay Area residents to Cuernavaca through Weston Priory and so has watched VAMOS! develop.
For four years, Ray's congregation has supported VAMOS! through its Every Dollar Feeds Kids project. Joined two years ago by congregations in Southington, Connecticut, and Chagrin Falls, Ohio, the project has funneled $100,000 to the group. Although churches "from Mormans to Episcopalians" support VAMOS! and the Colemans themselves were "born Catholic," they stand back from teaching religion. "That's divisive," says Patty. "VAMOS! is ecumenical."
Individuals in Cuernavaca have recently funded some dramatic developments. In 2001, one donated a three-story mansion overlooking the city, which VAMOS!--incorporated as a nonprofit in Mexico as well as the United States--is running as a guest lodge and retreat center. Proceeds from Casa VAMOS! support the organization's programs.
And an "anonymous angel," as Patty Coleman calls her, is paying an executive director's salary so that Bill, now seventy-one, and Patty, sixty-six, can begin turning over day-to-day supervision of VAMOS! projects. They're gradually handing the reins to Alejandro Lopez, a Mexican who speaks Spanish and English and has worked in education as well as managing U.N. programs, and they plan to stay in Mexico doing what they love most--talking with children and parents in the colonias.

What They Learned
Aid and social change programs need sustained support and supervision. Those that throw money and then leave tend not to foster significant change.
Really get to know the people you're trying to help and learn from them. After you've developed a relationship of trust, ask them what would be most helpful.
Stay focused on your primary goals, and don't spread your resources too thinly.
Providing charity to individual families can be divisive. VAMOS! decided early on that the best use of its money was "to fortify the strength of the total community."
Find people in the community with leadership potential and develop it.
Ask others to share what they have. The people of the third world cannot improve their circumstances without resources from the first world.
The work has been their privilege, says Patty. "Bill and I had always thought that when our nest was empty, we really wanted to learn more about how the other four-fifths of the world lived," she says. Working with the poor of Morelos has strengthened her sense of membership in the human community. "When you're working with the poor every day, you can almost feel the planet breathing with all these people. I realized when I was looking at the people in Iraq or Afghanistan or Africa, I was looking at basically the same thing. We realize all that has to be done in the world economic order to make the planet sustainable for all of us and that war doesn't solve it. It really is our problem if we want to call ourselves real human beings. [Working here] has enhanced my desire to do what we can.
"This was something worth giving our lives to," Patty says. "I think it's great to be my age and be able to say, I really enjoyed this. We're only here because we want to be."
Back in Vermont, VAMOS! Treasurer Richard Dougherty works about twenty hours per week for the board and speaks of "the satisfaction of knowing you're doing something so basic for people who have so little. We're fortunate that we can do something so meaningful," he says. Patty Coleman says the long-term effect of VAMOS! on their Weston group has been very positive: "Communities thrive when they have a reason for existing."
And Bill Coleman says that VAMOS! has given him understanding of "the dignity of the human spirit. Underneath the poverty, if you scratch it a little bit, you find such strong people, people who really care about others who are poor like themselves, who are real leaders, and they're just forgotten by the world. There is this tremendous force, if people could be given the opportunity to use all the talents and determination they have."
Lane Fisher is an associate editor of Hope.
WANT TO LEARN MORE?
VAMOS!
P.O. Box 212, Weston, VT 05161
802-875-3844
doughvt@sover.net
coleman@laneta.apc.org
www.vamos.org.mx/
www.casavamos.org
www.vamos.org [in Spanish]
WESTON PRIORY
802-824-5409
www.westonpriory.org

If there is hell on earth, this is it...

2005-03-20T07:52:00.000-08:00

March 20, 2005
Beyond the Bullets and Blades
By MARC LACEY

BUNIA, Congo — There were two ailing boys, both appropriately named Innocent, at a makeshift hospital here. They didn't know it but they represented the two different ways of dying in Africa's wars.

The older of the two Innocents, at 14, was a victim of the most obvious killer - violence. He had machete wounds to his neck, suffered as he tried to escape the tribal militiamen who swooped down on his village recently. Innocent's mother was killed. The men with machetes tried to sever Innocent's head, as well, but for some reason never finished the job. Innocent's neck had a series of deep hack marks when he arrived at the hospital in the arms of his father.

Doctors at the hospital, which is run by Doctors Without Borders, rushed him to surgery and managed to bind the wounds. They are not yet sure if he will survive.

The younger Innocent, just 12, was from another village overrun by tribal fighters, albeit several years ago. He got out in time to avoid injury. But ever since, this Innocent has lived in a camp, huddled together with other displaced people. Still, his survival is in doubt. His arms are covered with mosquito bites and his blood is full of plasmodium parasites. Malaria kills if left untreated, which it often is in war zones like eastern Congo.

This Innocent will likely survive for now because he made it to a hospital. But he will get malaria again, and the wars that surround him will continue, and who knows if he will have access to a doctor then? And if it is not malaria that kills him, maybe it will be meningitis or measles or AIDS. Those scourges already kill far too many Africans, even in tranquil areas where a fragile social order holds together. Add war to that picture, and the death toll rises calamitously.

That is the second way of death in Africa's wars.

Horrible though the genocidal spasms in Rwanda and the aerial bombings in Sudan have been, the vast majority of those who die in African war zones are not done in directly by warriors. Rather, it is the disruption that a few thousand armed men in ragtag militias can create in the lives of millions of civilians that send so many innocents to their graves.

In recent months, aid workers have begun providing a clearer picture of exactly why so many Africans die when conflict flares. Studies of two different war zones, by Physicians for Human Rights and by the International Rescue Committee, concluded separately that the major blame lies with the conditions created by wars in extremely fragile societies.

The first killer is flight. Desperately poor people are driven from their subsistence existence into even more hostile environments as they seek safety - deep into the forest in the case of eastern Congo, across the desert into Chad to escape the unfolding violence in Darfur. Typically, the few hospitals that may exist are emptied, their supplies are looted and members of their staffs are forced to run, alongside everyone else. Fields that once fed families lie fallow. Livestock die. Relatives and neighbors who depend on each other become separated.

Dependency and depression can come to many who find their way to the relative safety of camps, and when these uprooted souls return to razed villages, there is little time to rest from the trauma. Life begins again, and now their social network of neighbors and health workers and people to trade with - the thin fibers that knit lives together for survival - may have been torn beyond repair. The numbers who die in Africa's wars are almost too high to contemplate. The fighting in Congo - an amalgam of rebel insurgencies, tribal rivalries, competition for resources and just plain butchery without a cause - has taken an estimated 3.8 million lives since 1998, making it the most deadly conflict since World War II, the International Rescue Committee estimated. Another two million lives have been lost in southern Sudan, where a war between the government and rebels ground on 21 years before a peace deal was signed in January. And Sudan's Darfur region, in the west, has lost more than 200,000 additional lives over two years of tribal pillaging. Fighting in northern Uganda, where rebels who purport to fight for the Ten Commandments abduct children to reinforce their ranks and chop off the lips and ears of those who dare resist, has taken an estimated 100,000 lives.

Gathering health data in war zones is obviously a risky enterprise. But the I.R.C. was able to conduct four mortality surveys in Congo over the last five years, each a little more extensive than the last. In the most recent one, covering January 2003 to April 2004, investigators surveyed 19,500 homes spread over every Congolese province (although they skipped some especially insecure parts of the country). They estimated that 31,000 people die every month from causes connected to conflict, most of them in the unstable east and most of them from disease. They found a mortality rate in eastern Congo that was 80 percent higher than the average rate for sub-Saharan Africa, where it is high in the best of times.

Most deaths, the survey found, were due to maladies that are easily preventable and treatable in other parts of the world, such as malaria, diarrhea, respiratory infections and malnutrition. Less than 2 percent of the deaths were caused by violence.

"Life is a nightmare for these people," said Patrick Barbier, the chief of mission in Congo for Doctors Without Borders, which sees the same statistics borne out in its clinics. "Militias prey on the girls. Militias take the people's food. On top of that, they demand weekly taxes. In most areas there is little or no access to health and even if there is a clinic, people have to pay but have nothing to pay with."

That is not to say there is no remedy. In Darfur, aid agencies are pushing for a compensation commission to help restore some of what the displaced people there have lost. More health workers familiar with disease are badly needed in most war zones. But the only way to finally stop the loss of life is to stop the fighting.

In Kanyabayonga, near Congo's border with Rwanda, an entire town of 30,000 people was emptied of its population last December. Soldiers, who were fighting other soldiers from the same army, looted each and every hut. They emptied the pharmacies and carried away any food they could find. This is the way soldiers who are rarely paid make ends meet.

It is also the way civilians die. They run into the forest and live amidst the trees. In the case of Kanyabayonga's population, they stayed away for weeks. They ate what little they could scrape together. Some of the most vulnerable, particularly the children and the elderly, succumbed to diseases. They are now buried in the bush. The town has been reinhabited, but the desperately poor are now poorer than before. The question is whether they can rebuild their lives somewhat before the next attack.

Farther north, outside Bunia, where militias of the Lendu tribe are rampaging through villages inhabited by rival Hemas, a similar scene is unfolding. Civilians run for their lives. The slowest are killed on the spot. Most make it to safety and huddle together in camps. Last month, United Nations peacekeeping troops were protecting one of those camps, about 20 miles north of Bunia, when nine Bangladeshi soldiers were killed and mutilated by tribal fighters. The United Nations launched a counterattack. And in all the fighting, aid workers were blocked from reaching the camps.

Doctors Without Borders made it to one camp in Tche recently and found that 25 people died during the eight days when no relief supplies could get in. At another camp, Kakwa, near Lake Albert, aid workers said, two or three people were dying each day in a camp of 5,000 people, a dangerously high rate of mortality. There were many cases of severe diarrhea with dehydration, which is a leading killer in places without proper medical care. A woman who delivered a baby and then bled for several days eventually just stopped breathing.

The weather and landscape are different in Darfur, the site of a continuing rebellion, but the dying is the same. Because there is no forest to hide in, local Sudanese Muslims fleeing militiamen linked to the Arab-led government in Khartoum head out into the harsh desert-like terrain. They, too, huddle together in camps, where they, too, continue to be harassed. (The camp population is now estimated to be approaching two million. Their deaths, too, come partly from violence and more often from what violence begets.)

Jan Egeland, the United Nations' top emergency relief official, estimated last week that 180,000 people may have died in Darfur of illness and malnutrition, far more than the estimated 50,000 who may have been shot, stabbed, bombed or burned. He now ranks Darfur as the second worst humanitarian crisis in the world, after Congo.

In Darfur, Physicians for Human Rights has studied the plight of one village near the border with Chad, a place called Furawiya that in mid-2003 and early 2004 was a stronghold for one rebel group and the site of repeated attacks by government troops and allied militias. Nobody knows for sure how many of the 13,000 people who once lived in and around Furawiya, and who now are displaced in camps, will outlive the fighting and eventually find their way home. But the study showed that the deaths would likely continue for years.

The village and everything in it that once kept people breathing are destroyed. The livestock, a form of wealth in East Africa, were killed, stolen or butchered on the spot. Crops were eaten or destroyed. Huts were burned. Wells were polluted. For now, most of the people are too scared to go back home. Even if they do, their social structures will be gone, food will be hard to come by, medical care will be absent and their bodies will be sapped of strength.

No bullet may pierce them, but they will be war victims just the same.

Copyright 2005 The New York Time

Sent to me by Captain Joel Fogel

2005-03-18T22:03:00.000-08:00

Everyone is offered a chance to do something good in their lives. Sometimes it comes in a dream or sometimes it jumps out at you and you need to respond.

This was my epiphany. I responded and it changed my life. It was my gift.

The story was published this winter in the Christmas edition of NJ LIFESTYLE Magazine, of which I am a contributing editor.

Joel

PS with your permission, I would like to propose you as a subject for an interview and story with this magazine. There really are no accidents in life.

*******************************************************************************

THE GIFT : A Christmas Story

A Story Inspired by True Events

By Captain Joel S. Fogel

They called it the "rickety bridge". It was a span of wood and pilings, built in the 1920's, which stretched a quarter-mile across a piece of water known as Broad Thorofare. I must have driven over that bridge thousands of times, traveling from my home on the bay in Somers Point to the beach in Longport by the time I was 42 years old.

Everytime I crossed it, it gave me the chills. There was this combination of the clacking sounds made by the cars as they rattled over the wooden planks and the appearance of the rotting timbers which lined the bridge, looking like they were about to fall into the water.

People had died on that bridge. There was the old woman from Margate whose car stalled on the bridge which caught fire and she was burned to death, trapped inside. There was the young widow whose grief over the loss of her husband, drove her through the railings, committing suicide. And then there was the beloved Dr. Timberlake, who rushing to the side of a patient one cold rainy night, lost control of his car and plunged into eternity.

It was nearly 20 years ago, Christmas Eve 1986, the night that I had my incident on the old bridge. Hemingway once said that life was like a trip through the mountains: with time it was like standing from a distance, a person could see the peaks and know all the truly great moments of his or her life.

Time fades the details...they blend. I remember having just returned from an expedition in the Amazon for the Explorers Club that Fall which had gone badly. My 17-year-old marriage was rocky from too much time away from home. My daughters were becoming young women and my son, William, had just received his driver's license. He was anxious to drive.

My Father (my son's namesake) had been a widower for some time and he was lonely. So, we were on our way to pick him up from his home in Margate on the Parkway. We were taking him to a friend's house for a Christmas Eve Party. It was about 8:45 PM.

The rain was falling hard out of the northeast and beginning to freeze. A frigid wind was raking the bridge with strong gusts. The headlights of my sportscar revealed whitecaps foaming across the cold surface of the bay. The black ice, without our knowing, was beginning to form on the wooden surface of the bridge.

I have a nightmare about being trapped in a car which has gone off a bridge. In my dream, I see the car skid out of control, hydroplaining across the surface of the bridge before crashing through the guard rail and falling into forty feet of ice water. I am trapped in the car and the water is rising rapidly around my neck as I force my head into an air pocket...then I wake up.

That night, before my eyes, the horror unfolded. But it wasn't me who was going out of control. It was a brown Chevette that was careening towards me, spinning helplessly on the wet, frozen wood before hitting a rail on one side of the bridge and crashing through the rail on the opposite side, plunging into the ice water.

There was the sound of splintering wood, then silence as I brought my car to a halt next to the gaping hole in the side of the bridge. The wind and snow had muffled the sounds of the crash but in the distance you could faintly hear a person's voice...crying.

My son, William, had been listening to music on a headset and ironically, glancing out the window towards Ocean City when the accident occurred. He saw nothing and was shocked to see me jump out of our car and pop open the trunk.

"Dad," he shouted, as I pulled a piece of mountain climbing rope out of the car. "What are you doing ?"

"Someone has crashed into the bay," I yelled over the roaring wind gusts. " Drive to the bridge tender's shack and tell him to call the police...hurry !"

From my years of experience as a lifeguard on the beach patrol, I knew that we had only moments to effect a rescue in water this cold. I later learned from a police officer that the water temperature that night was 44 degrees farenheit.

In the distance, above the icy wind that whipped across the frozen bridge surface, I could barely hear a voice faintly crying:

"Help me ! Don't let me die....please, don't let me die."

A car was approaching in the opposite lane, from the East, heading towards Somers Point. I yelled at the driver to stop. He must have seen that something was wrong because he stopped immediately and jumped from the car.

"I saw them go over," he said, pointing in the direction of the car that was beginning to sink. "Quick," he said. " Timmy," he hollered to a smaller man who got out of the other side of the car. "Let's get down to the barge which is next to the bridge."

The new Dolores Cooper Bridge (named after the assembly woman who sponsored it's constuction) was being built to replace the rickety bridge. A barge floated beside the old bridge.
We all clamored down a makeshift ladder onto the barge.

The team could not have been better, as I later learned. The big guy first out of the car was none other than the Captain of the Longport Beach Patrol, Lefty Devers. He was followed by Timothy Kunik, a veteran lifeguard of many years (who turned out to be a distant cousin on my Mother's side), my son who was young and strong and myself, a former lifeguard with the Margate City Beach Patrol.

We had all been trained for this kind of task with the help of the "lucky" rope.

Lefty spotted the head of the person in the water. They had managed to get out of the car and swim towards the barge as the car sank. But the cold water was taking it's toll and the person was finding it harder and harder to swim against the current as their muscles tightened.

The person was wearing a think woolen coat which was pulling them underwater.

"I'm gonna die...please don't let me die !"

I remember spewing obsenities and saying something like..."no one's dying here tonight." Thinking back now, I was probably trying to convince myself more than reassure the other person. Whatever it was, it worked.

Lefty looked at me. "Someone has to go in," he said. "Here, wrap that rope around my waist. You, Tim and Bill hold on to it. Pull me back after I grab the person. He's gonna go under if we don't get out to em."

Lefty slipped into the ice water. While Tim stood on a tire tied to the barge, Bill and I secured the rope and prepared to haul it in. Lefty swam out to the person who was now exhausted and barely moving in the water.

"OK," he shouted. "Pull us in...I can't move."

We all yanked on the rope and after a few tense minutes, we managed to get Lefty and the victim near the barge where Tim, Bill and I helped to pull them aboard.And then all hell broke loose: police sirens, Coast Guard cutters, and an ambulance appeared. Within seconds we were pulled onto the bridge and rushed to the Shore Memorial Hospital.

The rest was a blur.

Around midnight, a young woman was crying softly in a bed inside the hospital room. My wife, Coty, my seven-year-old daughter, Anna and her older sister, Ellen, stood beside me as we watched her shake, recovering from hypothermia.

The young woman in the bed beside me was Kathy Steel, the person we had saved. With the blood from her broken nose and her short hair, I couldn't tell that she was a woman at the time of the rescue.

"I'm sorry I cursed at you," I said, apologetically. She continued to cry.

"Why are you crying ?" I asked. " We've been saved !"

" You don't understand, " she replied, sniffling. "When I hit that railing and whiplashed, breaking my nose on the steering wheel, I was wearing thick bifocal glasses."

"No, no Kathy," I said, chuckling. "You're not gonna get me to go down into that water again, looking for your glasses !"

With tears streaming down her cheeks, she replied, " When I was being pulled into the barge....I knew that we would be O.K."

"Well, hell girl, why didn't you tell us that," I joked.

"No, you still don't understand.... I knew we would be O.K. because I saw a light around the top of your heads...a halo."

Suddenly, I heard my daughter, Anna, whisper to her mother, poking her in the ribs:

"Hey Mom...did you hear that ? Dad's a saint !"

"Oh no, my dear," my wife replied with a large smile on her face. " He may be a lifeguard and a rescuer...but a saint he is not."

I looked into my wife's big beautiful brown eyes and I knew at that moment that things were going to get better.

I also knew that what I did that night was not done alone. Of course, there were the "Three Wise Men" as I came to call Lefty, Tim and Bill. But there was another force there that night as well that gave us the wisdom, strength and will to survive.

You can call it whatever you want...God is the word I like to use to describe the force that brought us all together that cold Christmas eve.

The Chinese say that if you save someone, you are responsible for them for the rest of your life. I can understand that. What completely blows me away is the rest of what happened after the rescue. For following the first gift of life, each of us recieved spiritual, material and psychic gifts that changed our lives forever.

I think I can best sum up what happened with the letter that Kathy sent me some years after the rescue, describing some of the things that had happened to her. She said:

"Dear Joel,

How can I ever thank you and the others for coming to my rescue that cold Christmas eve ? I suppose that the best one can do is to live the life that we truly want after nearly losing the life that we had been given.

And in that regard, I have left my work as a cook at Harry's Inn (now known as the Somers Point Inn), for work as a writer of children's books. I am also working as a singer and a stage actress...something I always wanted to do.

I don't know where it will lead but when I think that it all could have ended that frigid night many years ago...it is all a gift. Thank you.

Kathy"

She was right. It was all a gift. And once you're learned to understand that and be thankful for everything you have, you are on the right track.

Within the year, commendations from the White House arrived for all the rescuers from President Reagan.

Lefty retired as Captain for LPBP and coach for the local elementary school. Timmy got married and settled down with his family. My son, Bill, went on to college, work and adventures around the world.

As for me...well, God has been good. My wife survived bone cancer. I survived the dangers of an exploration down the Yangtze River where three other men drowned. Kathy's acting career inspired my own dreams of Hollywood and I went on to become a Screen Actors Guild actor with roles in more than 15 major films and national TV commercials.

Todate, my adventurous life is reminisant of the main character in the film, "BIG FISH"...you know the movie about the man whose life was so fantastic his own friends and family wouldn't believe his stories until the day he died and that delicate line between truth and fiction came together.

A few weeks ago, I saw Kathy again in a production of "Agnes of God". She was so professional and powerful as the psychiatrist who interviewed the unfortunate Nun Agnes. In a way, I felt like a proud Father watching his daughter achieve her dreams.

But, you know it's funny, ironically, saving Kathy Steel gave me a second chance.

Her gift to me was remembering the need to live a passionate life. Thanks, Kathy.

Capt. Joel S. Fogel
October 20, 2004
Somers Point, NJ

Education for All

2005-03-12T10:18:00.000-08:00

This is about an incredible educational program sponsored by UNESCO called: Educational for All. It provides opportunities for the kids who most need school to improve their lives. My goal is to raise the funds to sponsor one school in Africa. You can support about 300 children for one year for about $1,000. This pays for the teacher’s salary, eliminates school tuition and fees, and provides a hot nutritious meal and other benefits that have a far-reaching impact. Here are other articles on the same subject:

http://www.laborrights.org/press/school_africa1203.htm
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/nation/10274694.htm
http://www.unicef.org/newsline/00pr72.htm
http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/develop/africa/2004/1024freeschool.htmhttp://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002071305_africaed24.html
http://www.unesco.org/education/efa/

AFRICAN GIRLS' ROUTE TO SCHOOL IS STILL LITTERED WITH OBSTACLES
by Somini Sengupta
December 14, 2003 – (NYT) For as long as anyone could remember, the girls of this village had been forbidden to go to school. They were to be educated instead by the local voodoo priest, in a secret rite of passage not to be spoken about to anyone. When they finished, they were to be married. They and their children were to forever enjoy the protection of the voodoo priest.

That was until six years ago, when, with prodding from local government and United Nations officials, an extraordinary deal was struck. Every family in Koutagba could send one girl to school, the priest agreed, so long as it also sent another to him.

The mothers of the village fell on their knees, laid bottles of home-brew at his feet and prayed. Two years ago, two Koutagba girls finished primary
school. Today, 8 of the 27 pupils in fifth grade are girls. So is nearly half of the first grade.

The story of this tiny, remote hamlet in the heart of West Africa offers a metaphor for the challenges facing girls' education on the continent.

In spite of the steady progress in increasing school enrollment in sub-Saharan Africa, only 59 percent of all children attended primary school from 1996 to 2002, the lowest percentage of any region in the world, according to a report released Thursday by the United Nations Children's Fund, or Unicef.

For girls, because of a mix of traditional mores, crippling poverty and a lack of international aid for education, the numbers are even lower. Only 57 percent of girls were enrolled during the same period — again, by far the lowest rate worldwide, according to the Unicef report. (In South Asia, by comparison, girls' enrollment reached 71 percent during the same period, and in the Middle East and North Africa 75 percent.)

Perhaps most alarming of all, the number of girls out of school in sub-Saharan Africa rose over the last decade, to 24 million in 2002 from 20 million in 1990, according to the Unicef report. The costs of leaving girls out of school have already proved to be high, researchers say.

Uneducated girls are more prone to live in poverty as adults, die in childbirth, contract H.I.V. and raise children who, in turn, are likely to be poor and in ill health.

A report released by UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, in November painted an equally bleak picture, shining a light on the gender gap in countries like this one. While girls' enrollment in Benin increased by 9 percent over five years, the gap between boys and girls remains among the highest anywhere.

The latest reports stand in the face of recent pledges made by world leaders. Reaching gender parity by 2005 was among the principal development goals at the United Nations Millennium Summit meeting three years ago, along with reducing infant mortality and hunger. Reaching the education target in sub-Saharan Africa now appears unlikely, if not impossible.

"It would be criminal to fail on that goal," Carol Bellamy, executive director of Unicef, said in a telephone interview. "We believe that girls' education may be the single most important investment you can make to propel not only education for all, but several of the millennium development goals."

Ms. Bellamy singled out school fees, which were a fixture of World Bank-led economic reform packages for the last decade, as the largest obstacle to girls' education. In societies where girls are considered unworthy of the investment, many poor parents pay for their sons, not their daughters, to go to school. Girls are put to work, helping their mothers fetch water and firewood, caring for younger siblings, sweeping and cooking.

Persuading mothers to send daughters to school is often a formidable practical challenge. In some places, nurseries have been set up to relieve young girls of baby-sitting chores; in others, wells have been installed close to schools to save the girls from long walks.

Education specialists also point a finger at donor countries. Overall development aid has shrunk, and financing for education has fallen. Even a much-lauded education program begun by the World Bank two years ago, the Fast Track Initiative remains woefully underfinanced.

That, advocates argue, has hurt ostensibly well-meaning nations. Niger, for instance, locked in the Sahara and among the world's poorest countries, drafted an ambitious $96 million proposal to establish free primary education. But the country has received barely half the aid it needs, according to a recent study by the Global Campaign for Education, a coalition of development groups. Only 24 percent of girls and 36 percent of boys now attend school.

Many other factors conspire against girls' education as well, most notably the practice of marrying off girls as soon as they reach adolescence. In West and Central Africa, war has shuttered many schools. Across the continent, AIDS has robbed communities of breadwinners, leaving untold numbers of children to care for their families.

In the latest Unicef report, countries in West and Central Africa scored lowest in the gender parity index, a ratio of girls to boys enrolled in school. In Benin and Niger, for instance, the ratio was just under 0.70, compared to nearly full parity, or 1.00 on the index, in Iran and Bangladesh.
Beyond sub-Saharan Africa, only Pakistan hovered close to the bottom, with a gender parity index below 0.70.

The turnaround for Koutagba in Benin came in April 1997, with the arrival of a strange apparition. Riding up the narrow dirt road on a scooter came Regina Guedou, a woman with a college degree. She came to tell villagers about how they could profit from sending their daughters to school. At first, Ms. Guedou recalled, the women of the village did not even speak to her.

Ms. Guedou was a liaison between the local government, the villagers and Unicef. Slowly, she got the villagers' attention. The girls would learn to read a thermometer and be able to figure out if a baby had a fever, she told them. They could help their mothers compute the costs of buying and selling their peanuts at the market. She told them their girls could one day ride a scooter all the way to the nearest small town.

She finally won their trust by offering a Unicef-underwritten loan for $700, a huge amount in this country.

The women were to use the money to buy food from the nearest small town, and to bring it back to sell. In exchange, the mothers agreed to send a daughter to school.

The voodoo priest, Mamassa Babalakoun, was apparently convinced of the merits as well. His youngest daughter is now in the fifth grade.

The priest was not available to speak to a visiting journalist on a recent day. But his representatives spoke on his behalf, making it plain that while they believed that girls' education could one day profit their community, they were worried that tradition — and in turn, their own influence over the affairs of the village — would be overwhelmed.

"The fetish existed before the school," said one, who called himself the priest's spokesman. "Each one has to respect the other."

Ms. Guedou was there, speaking to the representatives with shoes off, hands behind her back, bowing ever so slightly between sentences. Tact is of the essence in such communications.

The priest's representatives added that girls who were educated could become government ministers and doctors. They could help care for their parents.

A group of village men sat on a log in the shade and listened intently. One's T-shirt bore the image of Tupac Shakur; another's Osama bin Laden; a third, an American slogan against drug abuse.

Behind the priest's compound lived an illiterate woman named Egbin Setati, quietly smashing tradition. Neither of her two daughters, ages 9 and 7, were going to go to the priest. They were both in school.
From:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/14/international/africa/14STUD.html

UN Millennium Projec

2005-03-10T18:48:00.000-08:00

This is a concise summary of the results of poverty worldwide. It’s from The UN Millennium Project which is an independent advisory body commissioned by the UN Secretary-General to advise the UN on strategies for achieving the Millennium Development Goals, the set of internationally agreed upon targets for reducing poverty, hunger, disease, illiteracy, environmental degradation and discrimination against women by 2015.

Headed by Professor Jeffrey Sachs, the UN Millennium Project is an independent advisory body and has recently presented its report, Investing in Development: A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals, to the Secretary-General. The research of the Millennium Project is performed by more than 265 development experts through 10 Task Forces. If you have any interest in the problems related to poverty you should read more:

http://www.unmillenniumproject.org/reports/index.htm

Fast Facts: The Faces of Poverty

More than one billion people in the world live on less than one dollar a day. Another 2.7 billion struggle to survive on less than two dollars per day. Poverty in the developing world, however, goes far beyond income poverty. It means having to walk more than one mile everyday simply to collect water and firewood; it means suffering diseases that were eradicated from rich countries decades ago. Every year eleven million children die-most under the age of five and more than six million from completely preventable causes like malaria, diarrhea and pneumonia.
In some deeply impoverished nations less than half of the children are in primary school and under 20 percent go to secondary school. Around the world, a total of 114 million children do not get even a basic education and 584 million women are illiterate.
Following are basic facts outlining the roots and manifestations of the poverty affecting more than one third of our world.

Health

• Every year six million children die from malnutrition before their fifth birthday.
• More than 50 percent of Africans suffer from water-related diseases such as cholera and infant diarrhea.
• Everyday HIV/AIDS kills 6,000 people and another 8,200 people are infected with this deadly virus.
• Every year, 300 to 500 million cases of illness worldwide are due to malaria.
• TB is the leading AIDS-related killer and in some parts of Africa, 75 percent of people with HIV also have TB.
Hunger
• More than 800 million people go to bed hungry every day...300 million are children.
• Of these 300 million children, only eight percent are victims of famine or other emergency situations. More than 90 percent are suffering long-term malnourishment and micronutrient deficiency.
• Every 3.6 seconds another person dies of starvation and the large majority are children under the age of 5.
Water and Sanitation
• More than 2.6 billion people-over 40 per cent of the world's population-do not have basic sanitation, and more than one billion people still use unsafe sources of drinking water.
• Four out of every ten people in the world don't have access even to a simple latrine.
• Five million people, mostly children, die each year from water-borne diseases.
Agriculture
• In 1960, Africa was a net exporter of food; today the continent imports one-third of its grain.
• More than 40 percent of Africans do not even have the ability to obtain sufficient food on a day-today basis.
• Declining soil fertility, land degradation, and the AIDS pandemic have led to a 23 percent decrease in food production per capita in the last 25 years even though population has increased dramatically.
• For the African farmer, conventional fertilizers cost two to six times more than the world market price.
The devastating effect of poverty on women
• Above 80 percent of farmers in Africa are women.
• More than 40 percent of women in Africa do not have access to basic education.
• If a girl is educated for six years or more, as an adult her prenatal care, postnatal care and childbirth survival rates, will dramatically and consistently improve.
• Educated mothers immunize their children 50 percent more often than mothers who are not educated.
• AIDS spreads twice as quickly among uneducated girls than among girls that have even some schooling.
• The children of a woman with five years of primary school education have a survival rate 40 percent higher than children of women with no education.
• A woman living in sub-Saharan Africa has a 1 in 16 chance of dying in pregnancy. This compares with a 1 in 3,700 risk for a woman from North America.
• Every minute, a woman somewhere dies in pregnancy or childbirth. This adds up to 1,400 women dying each day-an estimated 529,000 each year-from pregnancy-related causes.
• Almost half of births in developing countries take place without the help of a skilled birth attendant.

Another good-hearted traveler

2005-03-08T10:15:00.000-08:00

Another amazing world traveler doing more than her share of good works in the same vein as 100 Friends………..I intend to contact her……..

Posted on Sun, Feb. 20, 2005

R&R not on Howe's global travel itinerary

By Anne Chalfant

TIMES TRAVEL EDITOR

Cheryl Howe is standing in a dump in Nicaragua when a man hands her a baby girl.

He wants Howe to take his baby Wendy to live in the United States.

The man persists, and it's an awkward situation. Howe can only resolve it by handing the baby to another resident of La Chureca, the dump in Barrio of Managua, where many live and sort trash for salable goods.

Howe's travels in Third World nations have not left her completely resistant to the allure of children. Daughters Elyce, 21 and Elsa, 22, both now at Cal State Hayward, were street orphans in Indonesia, completely unanticipated results of a trip to visit a friend there. They completed her flock of eight, all of whom she calls her "accidental children," ranging in age from 10 to 25.

But an accidental traveler Howe is not. By age 9 she had made a list of 100 destinations. The Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal, the great pyramids of Egypt -- she has crossed some of those things off, and she does play the occasional tourist, taking cooking classes in Paris, and traveling on a World War II educational trip with husband Larry Howe to Dover.

But more often than not, the 48-year-old Livermore woman's travels to 20 countries have been aimed to make a difference in people's lives. "I have found the trips where I bonded the most are not the ones I went on as a tourist," Howe says.

And off she goes again March 4 with a team of 12 volunteers from the Tri-Valley area to Phang Nga, Thailand, where the group will rebuild homes destroyed by the tsunami and construct platforms to protect tents during the upcoming rainy season.

Howe's husband, Larry, is staying behind with the two children still at home. And Howe says, "I have tremendous help ... this time a nanny will bring the kids home, cook dinner. ... She's volunteering her services."

She goes where called

Howe was paid for her travels for years until recently as a mission director for Global Challenge; prior to that it was a friend abroad or serendipity that beckoned.

She has had her share of adventure. A trip to Belize took on a nightmarish quality when one of their groups' boats disappeared in the dark of night -- eventually capsizing. Her group built bonfires on the beach and ran up and down searching for survivors, and everyone did survive. The adventure with nature on Belize continued with scorpion bites, a prowling jaguar in their camp and mosquito bites so vicious they required medical attention. Still, it was one of her most memorable trips, one on which they had set up a literacy center for the locals.

Some tips

Globetrotter Howe has a few suggestions for other travelers.

• BE SURE TO PACK: What not to pack counts more these days. Don't take jewelry or anything you care about losing. Howe packs only enough clothes for five days so there's room for gifts -- toothbrushes, crayons and vitamins are valued. "We put the vitamins in zip-locking plastic bags so they don't sell them," she said. She also takes lots of lollipops.

For the upcoming Thailand trip, she is buying thrift store clothes that she can leave behind.

Write us a brief note on why you'd like to be profiled as a Globetrotter. Send contact information to Anne Chalfant, Travel Editor, Contra Costa Times, P.O. Box 8099, Walnut Creek, CA 94596 or e-mail achalfant@cctimes.com with "Globetrotter" in the subject line. We'd also like a trip photo with you in it.

Can you believe the courage of this woman and the injustice being perpetuated here?

2005-03-05T10:20:00.000-08:00

After you read the article, go to her website to learn more about this courageous woman and her work:

http://www.mukhtarmai.com/index.html

March 5, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
When Rapists Walk Free
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

One of the gutsiest people on earth is Mukhtaran Bibi. And after this week, she'll need that courage just to survive.
Mukhtaran, a tall, slim young woman who never attended school as a child, lives in a poor and remote village in the Punjab area of Pakistan. As part of a village dispute in 2002, a tribal council decided to punish her family by sentencing her to be gang-raped. She begged and cried, but four of her neighbors immediately stripped her and carried out the sentence. Then her tormenters made her walk home naked while her father tried to shield her from the eyes of 300 villagers.
Mukhtaran was meant to be so shamed that she would commit suicide. But in a society where women are supposed to be soft and helpless, she proved indescribably tough, and she found the courage to live. She demanded the prosecution of her attackers, and six were sent to death row.
She received $8,300 in compensation and used it to start two schools in the village, one for boys and one for girls, because she feels that education is the best way to change attitudes like those that led to the attack on her. Illiterate herself, she then enrolled in her own elementary school.
I visited Mukhtaran in her village in September and wrote a column about her. Readers responded with an avalanche of mail, including 1,300 donations for Mukhtaran totaling $133,000.
The money arrived just in time, for Mukhtaran's schools had run out of funds. She had sold her family's cow to keep them open because she believes so passionately in the redemptive power of education.
Now that cash from readers has put the schools on a sound financial footing again. And Mercy Corps, a first-rate American aid group already active in Pakistan, has agreed to assist Mukhtaran in spending the money wisely. The next step will be to start an ambulance service for the area so sick or injured villagers can get to a hospital.
Down the road, Mukhtaran says, she will try to start her own aid group to battle honor killings. And even though she lives in a remote village without electricity, she has galvanized her supporters to launch a Web site: www.mukhtarmai.com. (Although her legal name is Mukhtaran Bibi, she is known in the Pakistani press by a variant, Mukhtar Mai).
Until two days ago, she was thriving. Then - disaster.
A Pakistani court overturned the death sentences of all six men convicted in the attack on her and ordered five of them freed. They are her neighbors and will be living alongside her. Mukhtaran was in the courthouse and collapsed in tears, fearful of the risk this brings to her family.
"Yes, there is danger," she said by telephone afterward. "We are afraid for our lives, but we will face whatever fate brings for us."
Mukhtaran, not the kind of woman to squander money on herself by flying, even when she has access to $133,000, took an exhausting 12-hour bus ride to Islamabad yesterday to appeal to the Supreme Court. Mercy Corps will help keep her in a safe location, and those donations from readers may keep her alive for the time being. But for the long term, Mukhtaran has always said she wants to stay in her village, whatever the risk, because that's where she can make the most difference.
I had planned to be in Pakistan this week to write a follow-up column about Mukhtaran. But after a month's wait, the Pakistani government has refused to give me a visa, presumably out of fear that I would write more about Pakistani nuclear peddling. (Hmm, a good idea. ...)
Mukhtaran's life illuminates what will be the central moral challenge of this century, the brutality that is the lot of so many women and girls in poor countries. For starters, because of inattention to maternal health, a woman dies in childbirth in the developing world every minute.
In Pakistan, if a woman reports a rape, four Muslim men must generally act as witnesses before she can prove her case. Otherwise, she risks being charged with fornication or adultery - and suffering a public whipping and long imprisonment.
Mukhtaran is a hero. She suffered what in her society was the most extreme shame imaginable - and emerged as a symbol of virtue. She has taken a sordid story of perennial poverty, gang rape and judicial brutality and inspired us with her faith in the power of education - and her hope.
E-mail: nicholas@nytimes.com

Copyright 2005 The New York Times

Worldview

2005-03-04T14:29:00.000-08:00

This is a completely amazing radio program out of WBEZ Chicago. Here is a description of the project. It completely relates to the idea of the 100 Friends Project. Check it out:

WORLDVIEW

Global Activism Stories

When we talk about globalization, we usually talk about bodies that are massive in scale, such as multinational corporations, international governing bodies, states, or transnational organizations. Globalization, however, works on another important level. Before we even used the word, individuals were driving the exchange of ideas and commodities between cultures and states.

Worldview’s Global Activism Stories showcase the individuals trying to make the world better through small-scale efforts.

http://www.wbez.org/programs/worldview/series/globalactivism.asp

Pressure to Give Birth Often Brings Death in War-Torn Sudan

2005-03-03T22:47:00.000-08:00

In places like this, birth is quickly followed by death..and it is so preventable....

Pressure to Give Birth Often Brings Death in War-Torn Sudan

By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, March 4, 2005; Page A01

RUMBEK, Sudan -- The slender, exhausted woman in bed No. 6 was struggling for her life. A nurse had warned Bang Akok last year, and the year before that, to stop getting pregnant. But the pressure to have another child was just too great.

Even at age 23, even after eight other pregnancies, even after she almost died from hemorrhaging during her latest delivery, Akok could not resist the overwhelming demands from her family and her society -- trying to rebuild after 21 years of civil war -- to help replace those lost during fighting.

Now, hours after giving birth again, Akok was dehydrated and suffering from internal bleeding. This time, she had been pregnant with twins. One of her babies -- a boy -- died before he could be delivered and had to be cut from her womb. His sister survived and was napping by her mother's side, head full of brown hair.

"Her body was too tired," said Akok's soft-spoken aunt, Agoen Matheu, 50, as she held the young woman's hand in a hospital ward in this town in southern Sudan. "We knew she shouldn't make another baby. But she did."

In a continent with some of the world's highest rates of infant and maternal mortality, southern Sudan is a pocket of especially harsh suffering and poor survival odds for pregnant women and their newborns. Here at Rumbek Hospital's maternity ward -- the only one for hundreds of miles -- less than half of the pregnancies and births result in both a living mother and baby.

Across sub-Saharan Africa, women face a 1 in 16 chance of dying from pregnancy and childbirth, which have outpaced AIDS-related diseases as the leading causes of death for women, according to the World Health Organization. In the developed world, less than 1 in 2,800pregnant women face the same fate. Babies also die at extremely high rates in this part of the world, with more than 100 deaths per 1,000 live births, compared with 34 in East Asia, 30 in Latin America and 6 in industrialized countries.

In Sudan, 590 women die in childbirth for every 100,000 live births. It is a brighter picture than in countries such as Sierra Leone and Afghanistan, where the number is more than three times as high, according to WHO. But the ravages of civil war, the lack of skilled health workers and the remoteness of many settlements have made Sudan an especially precarious place to give birth.

"To come up with a live baby and a live mother at the end of a pregnancy is a huge, huge challenge," said Terry Sisa, a Kenyan nurse who works at Rumbek Hospital, where a small team of midwives toils without electricity, running water, blood supplies or pain medication. Each month, they assist with 35 healthy births. But each month, 50 infants or mothers die before, during or after delivery.

When it comes to maternal health, Sisa said tiredly, Sudan is "a century behind the rest of the world."

In Sudanese society, having many children is considered a wife's principal function and measure of worth. After years of war, women face added pressure to replenish the populace. In the rural south, girls often marry as young as 14 and are expected to produce nine or 10 children; as a result, fertility rates are among the highest in the world.

Yet, conditions surrounding most births remain primitive. Half of all babies in Sudan are delivered without the help of a skilled attendant, according to a 2004 study by the U.N. Population Fund. Poverty and underdevelopment compound the problem, with patients enduring long treks in the pounding sun to reach the nearest clinic. Akok walked for a week before reaching Rumbek Hospital in January.

A peace deal signed Jan. 9 between the Islamic, Arab government and the Sudan People's Liberation Army, a largely Christian and animist African rebel group, has eased tensions in southern Sudan and allowed health professionals to survey the extent of problems facing women and children.

But in the western region of Darfur, a separate ongoing conflict between the government and rebel groups is an additional obstacle to normal pregnancies, births and child care. Tens of thousands of families have been displaced by fighting, and their health deteriorating because of instability and poor nutrition.

"Giving birth is hard enough," Taban Paramena, a health officer with UNICEF, said during a recent visit to Rumbek. "Pregnancy is not easy even under the best circumstances. But try it in Sudan."

Fleeing the Fighting

A year ago, Ahmed Abdallah, 21, married Fadna Abdulla Rhaman, a pretty woman of 25. They lived in a compound of huts about 37 miles east of Nyala, the capital of South Darfur.

Rhaman quickly learned she was with child. Her new husband and their families celebrated. They slaughtered a cow and held the customary feast of celebration for a first pregnancy. But when Rhaman was eight months pregnant, her belly swelling with life, their village was attacked -- either by African rebels or Arab militiamen, allegedly armed by the government to stop the uprising.

"People came on horses at 4 in the morning, rebels or government, we aren't sure," said Khadija Ishak Hamad, Rhaman's mother, who sat in a dank shelter patched together from leaves, rags and sticks in a sweltering camp for those who fled. "My daughter was not well enough to run. I knew she was in pain."

In the late stages of her pregnancy, Rhaman spent her days resting, as most pregnant women do around the world. So when the family had to flee, Rhaman found it almost impossible to keep up. They had little water and had to walk for two days in the sun, with sand whipping up behind them.

"The biggest problem was that we were in the bush and lacked food," Hamad said. "At one point, we had to run to the mountains when we heard more gunfire. I carried her for a while."

During the journey, the family was worried Rhaman might give birth, because she was bleeding and kept passing out. But after several days, they made it to a crowded camp in Nyala where more than 80,000 people were living after being displaced by fighting. Rhaman gave birth soon after, helped along by women without formal training.

Afterward, she held her baby girl, wrapped in a torn pink blanket and named Abdallia, or Servant of God in Arabic.

"My wife was so happy," her husband recalled. "We thought everything would be fine. We thought she might need a better meal of meat. But we had nothing."

Rhaman knew she was weak because she couldn't breast-feed and felt dizzy. But her sister, who gave birth last year, fed the baby and the entire family squeezed into one hut, cuddling her. The men came by to praise the miracle. Her husband held the child. Another neighbor came over to offer a small bowl of dates and porridge.

But during the night, Rhaman began bleeding heavily. The next morning, her husband took her to a clinic in the camp. The lines were long. They waited all day. They were told to come back the next day. By then, she had died.

Attempts at Education

"You only see tiny babies here," said Sisa, the Kenyan nurse, looking over the hospital ward crowded with women and newborns. "So many are in their 10th or 11th pregnancies. No wonder so many women and their babies are dying."

Lately, the nurses in Rumbek have been feeling frustrated by the high number of deaths. Last year, 3,000 village midwives were trained and 1,100 students were recruited for training across the country, with the support of the government and the rebel group that controls southern Sudan.

"We desperately need help," Sisa said. "During the war, you knew why there were so many maternal and infant deaths. But now, we can't have this many people dying."

Recently, she started making lists of health tips to hand out to pregnant women who visit. But she has had to read them aloud in most cases, because few of the mothers can read.

Sisa also wants the hospital to create mobile clinics to educate the population in remote villages about family planning and hygiene. In Africa, large families are seen as prestigious. But Sisa noted that in Kenya, birthrates have slowed among educated women. In Sudan, she insisted, the numbers have to come down.

"I know you are suffering after the war and want large families," Sisa told a group of nurses in training at the hospital. "But you can't build a big nation if the women are dead. You can't have women bearing this many children. It's not healthy."

"Maybe try and stop at six," she said with a laugh, trying to gauge the reaction. Some women seemed to take her seriously, while others appeared to shrug her off.

Sisa has taken a particular interest in Akok's case. She warned Akok last year not to keep getting pregnant, but now she said she wishes she had visited Akok's village to speak with her husband and the other men.

But there was another problem with Akok's delivery. Near the end of the long walk to the hospital, she thought she was about to give birth, so her aunt started washing her with dirty water and using sticks to try to prod the babies out. She got an infection, which caused her boy's death before delivery.

"Never use unhygienic tools," Sisa reminded the group of apprentice nurses. "It's like shooting the mother and baby."

Back in the ward with Akok, Sisa clapped with happiness when she saw Akok's heart was still beating. She was still losing blood, but there was more color in her face, and she stayed awake a few minutes before passing back into sleep.

During one of Akok's waking moments, Sisa learned toward her and said: "No more babies. Really."

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Incredibly difficult times for Afghans

2005-03-03T22:33:00.000-08:00

One cannot comprehend how it this must be for the Afghans, especially the children. I deeply desire to be there now with helicopters, tons of food and doctors and medicine. Where are the Saudis, the Indian, the Brazilians...what kind of world it is where hardly anyone ever notices...

A Bitter Winter for Afghans
Extreme Cold Leaves At Least 300 Dead; Children Vulnerable
By N.C. Aizenman
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, March 3, 2005

ALTAMUR, Afghanistan -- Eight-month-old Gulmina was the first to die. Her tiny chest heaved with every breath for more than a week in November, until her uncle Nasrullah Niazai realized she needed medicine and bundled her into a battered car for the two-hour drive to the nearest doctor. But relief came too late, and the baby died soon after they returned home.

Next, in late January, Nasrullah's 18-month-old daughter, Shirina, fell ill. This time he quickly recognized the signs of pneumonia and wanted to fetch help right away. But by then, snowdrifts as high as 14 feet had completely sealed off this alpine village in Logar province, just 50 miles south of the capital, Kabul. A second child was lost.

By last week, when the men managed to dig a path out of Altamur, Nasrullah had buried another relative: his uncle, Nawab Khan, a former anti-Soviet fighter in his late nineties who died of untreated respiratory illness.

"I walked eight hours through the snow to find a doctor for him," Nasrullah said. "But no one would come back with me."

As Afghanistan struggles to cope with its harshest winter in years, more than 300 people have been reported dead from cold-related causes, while hundreds of thousands of people in villages across the mountainous central region remain cut off from help after weeks of freezing temperatures and steady snowfall. Once the villagers are reached, Afghan and relief officials said, the death toll could rise substantially.

According to the Health Ministry, 226 children under the age of 5 have died of infectious diseases such as whooping cough and pneumonia this winter, and 29 people either froze to death or were killed by avalanches. In some provinces, governors are reporting higher numbers of deaths, but they have not been confirmed.

According to the United Nations, even in warm weather, more than 700 children under 5 die from disease in Afghanistan every day. But the unusually severe winter has brought a new level of hardship to a country where most people live in mud houses with no central heating or plumbing, and many live miles from the nearest clinic.

In Logar, most of the 60 villages surrounding Altamur are still snowbound. Late last month, a Red Crescent Society representative, Mohammed Zaman Asir, hiked to about 20 of those villages and gathered news about 20 more.

In that tiny corner of the country, Asir said he learned of 25 children who had perished from cold and disease, 19 pregnant women who had died during unassisted deliveries, six people who had disappeared, and two teenage boys who were attacked by wolves as they trekked toward a neighboring village in search of food.

"Everyone was coming up to me and saying, 'Help us,' " Asir said. "It was very shocking."

In remote Ghowr province, one of the worst affected of Afghanistan's 32 provinces, a survey team from Catholic Relief Services recently visited 50 villages that had been cut off intermittently and learned of 173 children under age 5 who had died.

Afghan and international officials say they have responded aggressively to the potential humanitarian crisis. The World Food Program, which had already stored 21,000 tons of food in remote areas in anticipation of winter, is working with the Afghan government and aid groups to clear roads and distribute food to tens of thousands of people. U.S. and NATO forces have sent truck convoys and helicopters to deliver supplies.

The U.S. Embassy has freed up $100,000 in disaster relief funds on top of $600,000 that the U.S. government had already spent to provide blankets and cooking oil. The United States has also contributed $126 million to the World Food Program's operations. Much of the relief effort, however, has been organized by the Afghan government, earning praise from international officials.

"This is really significant," said Manoel de Almeida e Silva, the U.N. spokesman here. "Three years ago, the government of Afghanistan would have had zero capacity to bring all its ministries, as well as the international side, together under such close coordination. I'm not saying the effort is perfect, or that they don't need a lot of assistance. But they are clearly taking the lead."

While it has not reached crisis proportions, the suffering caused by this winter's weather underscores how vulnerable Afghanistan remains, three years after U.S.-led forces toppled the extremist Taliban government and launched a multibillion-dollar international effort to rebuild the war-ravaged nation.

According to a report released by the U.N. Development Program last week, Afghanistan ranked a dismal 173rd out of 178 countries in human development during 2004. The report said 29 percent of Afghans have access to health services, less than 40 percent of children receive vaccinations and 29 percent of adults can read and write.

That combination has made the harsh winter a particular challenge for families such as Logar's Niazai clan, which includes three brothers, their five wives and fifteen children. The relatives share a three-room, mud-walled compound with a breathtaking view of jagged mountain peaks.

The beauty of the surroundings masks the difficulty of life here. The land, never especially fertile, has been rendered virtually useless by a seven-year drought.

"Just soil and rocks, that's all there is here," said Sher Ahmad Khan Niazai, 43, the eldest brother.

To support the family, Nasrullah, 40, and the youngest brother have spent the last 20 years working in Saudi Arabia -- first as construction laborers, and more recently as owners of an auto mechanic shop. The two take turns visiting Altamur, staying for six-month stretches every two years.

When 8-month-old Gulmina, whose father is currently in Saudi Arabia, began coughing and breathing with difficulty, Nasrullah felt responsible but not especially worried. Unschooled and unfamiliar with respiratory diseases, he knew only that some of the children had suffered the same sickness last winter and come through it fine.

In retrospect, Nasrullah said last week, he should not have waited so long before taking Gulmina to the doctor. He also said he wondered whether the medicine he ultimately obtained without charge at a provincial clinic was what she needed. "I don't know what it was -- some syrup and an injection," he said. "But you get what you pay for."

Not long after Gulmina died, a three-day storm blanketed Altamur with snow. Like Afghans across the country, Nasrullah was overjoyed at first. "I thought, 'Finally we will have water in the well,' " he said.

But then little Shirina began to develop the same symptoms as Gulmina. It took six days before the snow had melted enough to allow Nasrullah to drive Shirina to the same clinic that had treated Gulmina. By then, Shirina was gravely ill.

Soon, the family's car broke down and it began to snow again. Twice, Nasrullah said, he and Shirina's mother carried her on foot to the doctor, walking eight hours through the snow each way. Their efforts proved futile -- as did Nasrullah's attempt a week later to bring a doctor to his ailing uncle, Nawab Khan.

Nasrullah and his brother, Sher Ahmad Khan, recounted those events in the casual tone of men who have become accustomed to seeing loved ones die. In 1983, their father and one of Sher Ahmad Khan's sons were killed during a Soviet bombing raid. After the family fled to Pakistan, three of Sher Ahmad Khan's children died of polio in a refugee camp. In 2003, polio claimed three more of the clan's children.

"We accept that this is the order of God," Sher Ahmad Khan said. Nevertheless, the Niazai men have taken pains to keep Gulmina's death from her father in Saudi Arabia. When he calls the family's mobile phone and asks to speak to her, they put one of the other children on the line.

"It's better for him to find out when he comes here. He will be very sad, but at least his wives and family will be around to comfort him," Nasrullah said.

As for his daughter Shirina, Nasrullah said: "She already knew so many words. She could ask for tea and for candies and for her uncles. And she had such a smiling face. I will never forget it."

It was not possible to speak to Shirina's mother. In keeping with conservative tradition, she spends most days in the inner rooms of the compound, shielding her face from even her brothers-in-law. Nasrullah would not allow her to be photographed or interviewed in the presence of a male interpreter. Instead, he spoke for her.

"Yes, of course she is very sad. Every mother is sad to lose a child," he said. "But I tell her, 'Don't worry. We will have more children. Then, in two years, I will come back and visit them.' "

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

100 Friends

2005-03-03T14:55:00.000-08:00

My friend Thierry Darnaudet works on projects like this and 100 Friends provides some support.

The Cambodia daily
Saturday and Sunday, November 8-9, 2003

Activists Blasts Release of Suspected Pedophile

By Phann Anna and Kevin Doyle

A child rights organization expressed outrage on Friday after court officials released a 73-yeear-old Austrian man whom police discovered Thursday with a naked 13-year-old Cambodian girl in his Phnom Penh hotel room.
Ernst Ivankowitsch, 73, was videotaped during the raid by police and child rights activists. In the footage, Ivankowitsch is questioned by police as he hastily pulls on his trousers and confesses that he had a sexual relationship with the young girl.
The suspect also said that he wished to marry the diminutive 13-year-old, who was wrapped only in a bathroom towel.
Ly Rasy, bureau chief of the municipal minor crime department, said Friday the suspect was arrested in his hotel on Kampuchea Krom Boulevard with the 13-year-old.
“We made an arrest based on the NGO report. Without the NGO, we could not make the arrest because the parents of the victim did not complain. [The parents] requested to release the suspect,” Ly Rasy said.
Municipal Court Officials confirmed on Friday that the suspected was released.
Prosecutor Sok Roeun said Ivankowitsch was charged with debauchery. However, the girl had volunteered to be his “girlfriend” and a letter from commune officials stated the girl was 16 years old.
“I did not detain him because he is 73,” said Investigating Judge Kim Sophorn. The victim’s family also demanded his released,” said Kim Sophorn, adding the girl’s parents say she is 16.
Hang Vibol, the director of Action Pour Les Enfants who mounted the investigation, alleged on Friday the suspect has had sexual relations with the girl since 1998.
“The release means our Cambodian laws do not protect the underage [children],” Hang Vibol said.

Hang Vibol said the girl’s parents informed him in February that the Austrian spent about $10,000 on land and a house for them., the parents of the girl have declined to make a complain because the suspect has promised to marry their daughter, he said.

100 Friends

2005-03-03T14:52:00.000-08:00

This little girl took matters into her own hands!
A Zoo in Trouble Finds an Angel, Age 9
By Mark Arax
Times Staff Writer

December 25, 2003

FRESNO — The lion died of cancer and the female hippo gave in to old age. The gorilla's living quarters were no longer up to snuff and he had to be shipped off, just like the polar bear.

Hard times have hit Fresno's Chaffee Zoo, once considered among the finest mid-sized municipal zoos in the country.

Raising money from wealthy farmers and developers isn't easy here. Organizations such as United Way say the San Joaquin Valley, beyond a handful of patrons, has never developed a culture of giving.

That's where little Angel Arellano comes in.

On Thanksgiving Day, the 9-year-old girl with a weak spot for animals — she cares for an iguana and seven stray cats — was sitting in the kitchen listening to three generations of elders bemoan the zoo's decline.

She grabbed her aunt's stationery, the one bordered in animals, and scrawled a letter to the Fresno Bee that has changed the way this community sees its frayed treasure.

"My name is Angel and I am 9. I heard that the Chaffee Zoo is having money problems. I am very worried for the animals. I think if everybody in Fresno gave $1 to the Chaffee Zoo it would help a lot. Here's my dollar," she wrote.

Jim Boren, the Bee's editorial page editor, had tried many times to awaken the city to the needs of the zoo on the poor south side.

His editorials couldn't keep Fresno from defeating a tenth-of-a-cent sales tax hike last March that would have raised millions of dollars for new exhibits and overdue capital projects.

Boren decided to publish Angel's letter — in her own crooked handwriting — next to an editorial headlined "Zoo's Guardian Angel."

Below a picture of the gap-toothed, smiling fourth-grader, the Bee invited readers to follow her example by donating to the "Dollars From Angels" fund.

The response was immediate. More than $37,000 — in dollar bills and $1,000 checks — have landed in the zoo's mailbox in the last month.

These days, it's hard to find Angel without a knot of reporters and cameras in tow.

"Do you know what it means to be a celebrity?" a reporter asks.

"It means I'm famous," Angel shoots back.

Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante and the superintendent of county schools have commended her "compassion and spirit."

The Roosevelt High School football team held a carwash to raise funds. Sunnyside High School, which draws its students mostly from poorer neighborhoods, managed to hand over $1,000 to the zoo's curator. Other school districts are planning their own drives after the holidays.

"It takes a lot to rally Fresno, and you're doing it," zookeeper Jodie Wright told Angel on a tour of the grounds this week.

The 18-acre zoo in Roeding Park remains a lovely spot in a city with too few greenbelts and no shortage of strip malls.

But Raymond Navarro, the zoo's supervisor, says he can no longer hide the years of neglect.

From the thatched-roof entrance — the thatching is gone — to the tiny pen for the two camels, the zoo needs millions of dollars to become what it once was: a respected facility that bigger zoos didn't hesitate to use as temporary home for animals on loan.

"Attendance keeps falling and we're in danger of losing our accreditation," Navarro said. "A zoo needs to keep adding new exhibits to draw people. Instead, we can't even afford to fix the suspension bridge in the Rain Forest exhibit. I'm all out of Band-Aids."

Angel's mother, Stacey Caha-Arellano, had been a volunteer zookeeper at Chaffee before landing a job with the Madera Police Department's animal control unit.

She wonders why it took the eyes and pen of a child to rouse Fresno.

"We have a lot of wealth in this valley, and it would be nothing for these rich builders to come forward and donate equipment and supplies. But everyone has become so self-absorbed," she said.

Navarro said some local firms, such as Tolladay Construction, Granite Construction and Morris Levin & Sons, have been quick to donate equipment and materials to patch up worn spots.

Last year, 1,200 volunteers spent a day sprucing up the grounds.

"We thought the bond measure would rescue us, but it didn't pass," Navarro said. "Now we're hoping Angel can lead the way."

Dollars From Angels

Chaffee Zoo Maintenance Fund

894 W. Belmont Ave.

Fresno, CA 93728

FresnoBee.com

A child shall lead them

Published 12/16/03 09:24:00

When 9-year-old Angel Arellano wrote a letter to The Bee on Thanksgiving Day about saving the Chaffee Zoo, she didn't realize the chord that she would strike among people in this region.
The overwhelming response to Angel's letter shows there's a genuine affection for the zoo, and the public wants it fixed.
Beginning with Angel's dollar, the zoo's maintenance fund had an additional $14,700 as of Tuesday afternoon, and zoo officials say a stack of letters has been arriving daily with contributions to the Angel fund.
Angel's effort has not only started a campaign to raise money for the zoo, she has innocently invigorated a political constituency for a facility that's fallen into disrepair. The money will help make improvements at the zoo, but Angel's biggest accomplishment may be showing Mayor Alan Autry and the Fresno City Council that they must deal with this issue.
Zoo lovers across the Valley have been awakened by Angel's poignant letter to The Bee about the need to fix the zoo. She has been challenging schoolchildren and their parents to send contributions. On Sunday at the opening of Huntington Boulevard's Candlelight Christmas, she challenged every police officer in Fresno to give a dollar to the Dollars from Angels effort.
The zoo's problems have developed over a long period, worsening because the mayor and the council have ducked the tough decisions that would put it back on firm financial footing. The zoo barely retained its accreditation with the American Zoos and Aquariums Association nearly five years ago because of maintenance issues that now will take more than $2 million to fix.
The zoo must go through the accreditation process again next year, and it cannot house large animals without being accredited. Losing accreditation would reduce it to not much more than a petting zoo.
Angel's enthusiasm for the zoo has been contagious, and her work is complementing other zoo fund-raising efforts. Now it's time for the mayor and City Council to devise a strategy that ensures the Chaffee Zoo has a strong future.
The Valley has thousands of angels who love the zoo. The adults shouldn't disappoint them.
© 2002 , The Fresno Bee

100 Friends

2005-03-01T00:16:00.000-08:00

100 Friends

This guy makes incredible films about the poor. I had a nice chat with him.

December 25, 2004
A Pilgrim's Progress: Using Film to Aid the Poor
By NICK MADIGAN

BURBANK, Calif., Dec. 21 - It's a very long way from Hollywood to the slums of Calcutta. They might as well be on different planets.
Gerard Thomas Straub knows the journey.
At one time a successful soap opera producer who turned out overwrought dramas like "General Hospital" and "Capitol," and more recently an author, Mr. Straub now makes documentaries about the crushing reality of the world's poor. He has finally found his calling.
In the last few years, Mr. Straub, raised as a Catholic in Queens, said he has traveled to 29 cities in nine countries, including Kenya, the Philippines, Jamaica, Mexico, Brazil and India. He wanted, he said, to "put the power of film at the service of the poor" by photographing and filming what he sees as the suffocating, deeply unjust conditions of countless millions. He has documented, too, the misery in his own backyard, Los Angeles's skid row, where as many as 10,000 people live on the streets and in shelters.
"I'm not an evangelist; they give a whole bad name to Christianity," Mr. Straub said in an interview in his office here. "I'm not interested in converting anyone. My message is for Christians who show an utter lack of concern or compassion for people who have nothing."
Mr. Straub had struggled with doubts about his faith since his teens, when he dropped out of a seminary in New Jersey after just a semester. Christianity, he thought, was "full of contradictions and absurdities."
Later, after working in soaps and as a producer for Pat Robertson's television show "The 700 Club," he became even more disillusioned. He wrote a scathing book, "Salvation for Sale" (Prometheus Books, 1986), about his experiences with televangelists, whom he described as "purveyors of falsehoods." His novel "Dear Kate" (Prometheus, 1992) was "a diatribe against the Church and any form of religion," he said, in which the main character was "so exhausted by his search for God that he wanted to kill himself."
Almost 10 years ago, broke and forlorn, Mr. Straub sat down in an empty church in Rome, where he was working on another novel, to rest his feet. He had not gone there to pray: far from it, he insisted. But something extraordinary happened.
"God broke through the silence," Mr. Straub said. It was a moment of revelation, he said, in which he felt "enveloped in love" for the first time, and it transformed him "from an atheist to a pilgrim."
He discarded the dark novel he had been working on for more than three years and, inspired by St. Francis and another saint from Assisi, Clare, began writing another tale. The memoir that resulted, "The Sun and Moon Over Assisi" (St. Anthony Messenger Press, 2000), sought to explain how the lives of the two medieval saints helped transform a self-described cynic who had spent two decades immersed in the world of television in New York and Los Angeles.
"Television was all about beauty and superficiality and creating fantasy, to divert us from reality," Mr. Straub said. He remembered sitting at an editing console in 1981, watching a fresh episode of the soap opera he was producing, "The Doctors," with Alec Baldwin in his first starring role, and asking himself, "Who would watch this?"
What he is doing now, he said sardonically, is truly "reality television."
"I'd really like to do 'Survivor Skid Row,' " he said. "I'd put some people down there with the rats and the gunfire and the mental illness and the drug addicts and see how long they last."
Mr. Straub almost didn't.
In 1999, when he ventured overseas to document what he called "global poverty and the Christian response to it," he was horrified. On his first night in Calcutta, staying in a church in the heart of a slum, he said he was so overwhelmed by the pervasive squalor - the thousands living in the streets, the filth, the wailing - that he could not close his eyes.
"I had stepped into a nightmare," he said. "I had more in my bag than these people had in their whole lives. The next morning I couldn't put the camera up to my eye. I had no way to take it in. I was too uncomfortable and upset."
But he rallied, traveling on to Bangalore, Chennai and Guwahati, and took hundreds of photographs of the people he encountered, trying his best, he said, to show compassion without exploiting them.
"I never just point and click," he wrote in a note to a reporter. "I first enter into some kind of exchange. Often we share a laugh, or an expression of sympathy or understanding. A portrait then becomes more than a depiction of a face, it becomes a record of a personal encounter."
Many of the pictures were used in his book "When Did I See You Hungry?" (St. Anthony Messenger Press, 2002), which included images from subsequent trips to other countries, among them Kenya and the Philippines. A 37-minute video version, with the same title, was narrated by the actor Martin Sheen. The film, and others he has made, has been widely shown at schools and universities; Mr. Straub sometimes appears to answer questions.
At the Bishop Hendricken High School in Warwick, R.I., for instance, a screening of "When Did I See You Hungry?" prompted a citywide response, school officials said, that raised more than $17,000 for various charities.
In the video's narration, Mr. Sheen recites a stunning array of facts. "Globally," he says, "about 800 million people do not have access to adequate food and nutrition. Of those, 200 million are children.
"More than 40 million people a year die of preventable disease or malnutrition: shockingly, 12 million of them are children under the age of 5," Mr. Sheen continues. "Every minute of every day, 20 children die of hunger or diseases related to hunger."
In January 2002, concerned about raising money for filming and for post-production and for his frequent trips abroad, Mr. Straub established the San Damiano Foundation, named after the church in Italy where, in 1206, a former soldier and bon vivant experienced an epiphany of his own: much later, he became St. Francis of Assisi.
Turning his sights on South America, Mr. Straub traveled to Manaus, in the Amazon region of Brazil, in April 2002, to film the lives of slum dwellers and lepers. The film that resulted, "Embracing the Leper," was made at the behest of James B. Flickinger, a retired business and tax attorney from Grand Rapids, Mich., who had founded a nonprofit organization, Amazon Relief, in 1995.
"Gerry came alone with his video camera, his still camera and his notebook," said Mr. Flickinger, who flew with him from Miami to Brazil. In the film, residents of a lepers' colony are shown stoically and even graciously enduring the withering of their bodies. It is a disease, Mr. Straub said, that he thought had been eradicated in the Middle Ages.
The film also shows life in a mazelike slum in Manaus where shacks are perched on stilts above festering pools of waste.
Mr. Flickinger said screenings of the film had helped to raise as much as $50,000 from donors in the United States to contribute to five schools, with about 1,000 students, that Amazon Relief administers in Manaus.
"I was kind of amazed how the word-of-mouth spread about the film," he said. "People were very touched by it. It got the message out to people who I couldn't physically go to meet. With such a little effort at this end, we can do so much good down there."
Closer to home, Mr. Straub, made two other films that have been used extensively as fund-raising tools: "We Have a Table for Four Ready," about a Franciscan soup kitchen in the blighted Kensington section of Philadelphia, and "Rescue Me," a feature-length documentary about skid row in Los Angeles and the work of the Union Rescue Mission there.
"The poor have taught me about my own vulnerability," said Mr. Straub, 57, who lives with his wife, Kathleen, in North Hollywood. "I went from riches to rags."
Emboldened by the reception to his films, Mr. Straub tackled an even more ambitious project in the summer of 2003. The film, "Endless Exodus," traces the path of migrants from wretchedly poor villages in El Salvador and Mexico into the United States, illegally and often at the risk of their lives, to find work.
"Families are torn apart in the name of survival," Mr. Straub says in the narration. Since 1995, he notes, more than 3,000 immigrants have died trying to cross the nearly 2,000-mile border between the United States and Mexico, many of them after collapsing in the sweltering Arizona desert, others shot by paramilitary vigilantes. The migrants face rattlesnakes, robberies, bandits and the border patrol.
One of the film's most poignant scenes shows a hardscrabble cemetery in the border town of Calexico, Calif., where migrants who die in the desert are buried. There are row upon row of small headstones, most with the barest of inscriptions, either "Jane Doe" or "John Doe" - or "Jhon," as it is misspelled on one grave. The adjacent property is a garbage dump.
Mr. Straub is planning another trip next month to Peru, where he intends to document the work of a Florida doctor who "gave up everything" to help the indigent.
"Not knowing what to do," Mr. Straub said, "is not an excuse to do nothing."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times

The Project made a $1,000 donation last summer.........here's the excellent result!

2005-02-28T17:41:00.000-08:00

100 Friends

The donation came from Brad Newsham of Backpack Nation: http://www.backpacknation.org/

The donation was made to the Afghan Women's Educational Center (AWEC): http://www.awec.info/

Many of these donations went for women in prison.

AWEC CASES REQUESTING URGENT SUPPORT/DONATIONS
PRISON WOMEN
Zainab
Zainab is imprisoned for running away from house because of her husband’s cruelty. Zainab has 2 children, who are currently living with their father. Father is very poor and is not able to provide for the children and is beating them. Zainab’s children need clothes and food.
Amount provided: 100 USD For clothes and food for children

Zardona
Zardona is imprisoned for carrying drugs. One four year old daughter is with her in prison, the child needs eye treatment and medicines. Zardona herself is lame; one of her legs is crippled.
Amount provided: 150 USD for clothes for child and woman, medicines

Lailuma
Lailuma and her husband were accused in kidnapping. Her husband is also in prison. Lailuma has 6 children, and family is very poor.Lailuma was released after 6 months, proven unguilty. She and children need food items, clothes, wood for heating.
Amount provided: 150 USD for food, clothes, wood

Other AWEC beneficiaries
Marzia
Marzia is 15 year old girl, who have no father and is living with her mother. Marzia is student of AWEC Accelerated Learning class in Kabul outskirts.
Five months ago they have returned from Iran, where they were living as refugees. Her mother is not able to provide clothes and enough food for the girl. They are living in rented room, but as her mother is not able to pay rent, the house owner has asked for them to move out. Marzia is thinking how to help her mother. “May be I can sell something”, she says. There are not many things to sell in their household, and this girl is under big risk of starting involved into illegal income generation activities.

Amount provided: 200USD for food, clothes, rent.

Gulwaro
Gulwaro is 13 year old girl, who is student of Accelerated Learning class in Kabul. She is an orphan and is living with her married brother. She cannot walk properly and her small nephews are helping for her to attend classes. The family is very poor and Gulwaro is usually in need for clothes and food items.

Amount provided: 100 USD for food and clothes

Naseer
Naseer is 13 year old boy, student of AL class in Kabul. His legs are crippled and he cannot walk, this was a reason why his mother had not introduced him to school before. His family needs any kind of material support.

Amount provided: 100 USD

Hafiza d/of Sayed Ahmad CWSC
Hafiza is 35 years old widow with 5 daughters, who is suffering from cyst in her abdomen. She needs an operation.

Amount provided: 200 USD