Pushed to the edge

Without a doubt, the worldwide financial downturn and accompanying recession are creating challenges for many of us here in the developed world.

For the poor, billions of souls who live in a state of permanent recession, these times are more than merely challenging, they are profoundly difficult, dreadful and even deadly.

Recent estimates from the World Bank state that upwards of 400,000 more children will die every year for the foreseeable future because of the worldwide financial downturn.

In the developed world, we are able to muster the courage to believe that the recession will eventually pass. The “good life”, a product primarily of where we live, and the opportunities afforded us, will eventually return.

Our brothers and sisters in the developing world share no such hope. Their courage, however, far exceeds ours when you consider what it takes to survive day to day in an environment that has none of the accoutrements we are accustomed to: clean water, universal health care, government stimulus packages, employment insurance and the kind of hope only opportunity can create.

For the poor, life continues along a trajectory that all but guarantees their lives will go from bad to worse in the coming months - if in fact worse is actually possible.

In times like these, we are more likely to speak about what we have lost, not what we have gained or for that matter retained, despite the recession.

By comparison, the conversation in the world’s poorest communities is more likely to focus on what has been gained, however modest by our standards: a meager meal for the day, a child surviving past the age of five, a modest crop harvested from a field tilled with the most rudimentary of tools, a glass of clean water.

Friend, we should, despite the challenges we may be experiencing right now, consider ourselves unbelievably blessed. We are mourning the loss of some of our worldly wealth. Not mourning the loss of family members as will most certainly be the case in the coming months as the poor find themselves pushed even further to the margins of existence as a result of the financial downturn.

Hunger and waste

Current economic conditions have made us hyper-aware of waste. The idea that we must be vigilant against carelessness and extravagance is suddenly de rigeur.

The flipside of extravagance is hunger, pure and simple. The truly hungry person is a model of efficiency: all of his efforts are channeled into preventing starvation. We know that approximately 1.2 billion people live this way most of the time.

Consider waste again:

In the United Kingdom, a shocking 30-40% of all food is never eaten;

In the last decade the amount of food British people threw into the bin went up by 15%;

Overall, £20 billion (approximately $38 billion US dollars) worth of food is thrown away, every year.

In the US 40-50% of all food ready for harvest never gets eaten;

The impacts of this waste is not just financial. Environmentally this leads to:

Wasteful use of chemicals such as fertilizers and pesticides;

More fuel used for transportation;

More rotting food, creating more methane — one of the most harmful greenhouse gases that contributes to climate change.

While we can and should all be more sensitive to waste in our lives—from our offices to the dinner table--- there is a way to address the situation that the truly hungry find themselves in. Invest in the ability of the poorest of the poor to feed themselves.

Information sourced from Globalissues.org

The Philippines: Students are ‘Last Best Hope’, not Cockroaches

 Photo Courtesy of Kevin Dunn

The Pamula’an Center for Indigenous Peoples’ Education is a school dedicated to the Indigenous Peoples in the Philippines. Through Pamula’an, HOPE International Development Agency is investing into the young IP college students that are, in the words of a local staff member, the ‘last best hope’ of their impoverished and abused communities.

The plight of IPs in the Philippines is under-reported and very serious. In a country where government is not in the habit of acting with democratic integrity, IPs are at the bottom of the barrel socially, with their land, culture, language, and history rapidly eroded by exploitative interests. In Mindanao, where the majority of IPs live, it is not uncommon to hear about poor, illiterate IP villagers simply thrown into jail when their land is coveted by private companies.

Pamula’an graduates have the knowledge, skills, and confidence to develop their poor villages, advocate for the rights of their people, and fight back against a system that threatens their survival. From time to time, the students share their personal stories.

Krista Sumalisat tell us:
As Indigenous Peoples, we have been taught the importance of our culture, and realised that it is unique, and now is a source of pride. Before, I was ashamed to be an IP. I used to suffer a lot because of discrimination. Here, in the Philippines, there is a nickname for IP’s. It is “Eee Pees”, which in Filipino means ‘cockroach’. Imagine growing up and feeling this is the identity you have inherited. I would hide my IP identity and try to forget it and be like the rest of society. But in the process of so many other IPs doing the same thing, we risk losing our culture completely. When I am done my degree at the Pamula’an college I will return to my community to work with the community on documenting and understanding the importance of their culture. I will teach them to be proud of our tradition of relying on the earth to meet our needs and living in harmony with the environment.

Vanjie Rohas says:
Here, in Davao City, I am very far away from home. Once a year, I can take the bus across Mindanao to see my family – it takes 18 hours on very rough rural roads in this country. But, I know it is important to persevere, even when I miss my parents and my siblings. I want to be able to return to my community and to have the skills and means to serve them, and to help them to come out of poverty. The whole community is waiting for my return, I am their source of hope for a better future, for both them and their children. I will be a teacher for my tribe and community in adult literacy, so that they can have the knowledge of how to hold the government accountable for providing help and basic services. Otherwise, our community will continue to live in total poverty, without even such simple things as a clean source of water.

Many students like Vanjie and Krista are still hoping to receive HOPE scholarships, amounting to a thousand dollars per year. It is an incredibly effective investment to make. Education has far-reaching effects, not only for the students themselves, but for their families, whole communities, and, by extension, an entire people in peril.

Darfur: Bashir Called to Account

The International Criminal Court has just issued a warrant for the arrest of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir. Earlier in the week, U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton remarked that al-Bashir should ‘have his day in court’ if he wanted to dispute the charges of crimes against humanity that the ICC has levelled against him.

For many - not least of all the people of Darfur - Bashir’s charges of crimes against humanity could not have come soon enough. It is a relief to see that international scrutiny of the Khartoum government has not totally relented. One only fears that the Darfuri people, rather than al-Bashir, will end up paying the penalty for this serious development. Reportedly ten international aid agencies have been expelled from the region by Bashir’s government following the indictment.

Thankfully, HOPE International Development Agency's presence in Southern Sudan (an independent region within greater Sudan) is stable, and able to continue responding to the tremendous needs of Darfuri refugees.

Please support our wonderful staff in Southern Sudan with your thoughts, prayers, financial support, and advocacy. In addition to serving the considerable needs of Southern Sudanese villagers who are settling into new communities, they are helping to shoulder the burdens of their neighbours in Darfur. They have witnessed serious atrocities. Indeed, one staff member confirms every harrowing news report with this clear-eyed observation: ‘Once a civilian is seen by the government militia or Sudanese Liberation Army, he/she is gunned down, raped or seriously beaten.’ Darfuris are not victimized occasionally or even frequently--- but systematically and without exception.

Learn more about HOPE's work in Southern Sudan by watching "Long Road Home", a video filmed by HOPE volunteers.

Afghanistan: Aid is a Reflection of Need

This week a HOPE International Development Agency shipment of medical supplies arrived in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, after clearing the typical bureaucratic gauntlet. The reception of these supplies is always an extremely happy event. As one might expect in a country where deprivation is felt to achieve a unique standard in dreadfulness, to say that Afghani hospitals and clinics are under-supplied is a great understatement.

Because HOPE works in over twenty countries on three different continents, we encounter many different ‘versions’ of poverty, different gradations of lack or constraint or threat or oppression. The medical supplies programme is only one of the many anti-poverty strategies at HOPE’s disposal, but in its administration we learn about the head-spinning varieties of poverty playing out in villages and cities across an unequal planet. To put it another way, the kind of medicine we supply to any given community is a litmus of the kind of suffering you are going to encounter there.

For example, in the Dominican Republic, demand for medicine to treat diabetes is very high. Now, anybody who has managed to experience the Dominican Republic outside the tourist’s enclave knows that life, especially in the countryside, is a struggle. The high incidence of diabetes probably reflects the fact that the diet of poor Dominicans tends to be comprised of the kind of cheap, starchy food that cause sudden spikes and dips in blood sugar levels.

However, in Afghanistan, the demand isn’t for insulin, it’s for oral rehydration packets. Afghani doctors and nurses aren’t treating diseases that result from poor diet, they’re helping people to cope with the effects of having no food at all. The #1 health problem for Afghanis is malnutrition. Only Angola has worse child and mother mortality rates than Afghanistan. We see from the kind of support our Afghani health workers request that the level of poverty they are contending with is among the worst in the world.

So while it is a pleasure to see a medical donation arrive safely in any of the places where HOPE is at work, it is especially heartening in this place. Knowing the way Afghanis struggle, it is little successes like a well-stocked clinic that encourage our staff to work through any number of administrative or logistical challenges.

The Certainty of Uncertainty

For those of us who live in the developed world, the gnawing uncertainty perpetuated by the continuing worldwide financial melt down is simply that, uncertainty.

Ultimately, the crisis may call for a rethinking of our lifestyle, currently defined by our fixation with profiteering and our appetite for consuming far more than we truly need – a condition that brings the moral poverty of our affluence into sharp relief.

For those of us who live in the developing world, the uncertainty created by the melt down is far more sinister because it is, in a very real way and often deadly way, certainty.

If, for example, your family was malnourished and chronically hungry before the melt down, they are now certain of starving. If your opportunities, modest though they may be, were limited before the melt down, they are now all but nonexistent.

For your family, uncertain times guarantee, with absolute certainty, that you can count on life getting significantly worse – if indeed this is actually possible given your current proximity to suffering and loss.

While we in the developed world ponder just how far we’ll have to cut back on our discretionary spending in order to maintain some semblance of the lifestyle to which we’re become accustomed, the choices being made in the developing world are far more difficult and profound.

For example, in a run-down hut in one of the poorest places on earth, a widowed mother, at her wits end, contemplates becoming a prostitute in order to earn the meager amount of money she needs to buy food for her children. Things have gotten so untenable that she is willing to trade her body for the well-being and security of her children. She is, in fact, choosing to die a little bit each night so that her children can live a little bit each day.

So, while we cut back in an attempt to deal with and ameliorate the uncertainty that keeps us up at night, the poorest of the poor slide even further into obscurity and remain, as they so often do, the collateral damage of our lifestyle.

The Philippines: ‘Don’t Worry Because I Will Study Well’

In Mindanao, a part of the Philippines where up to 40% of the population is living on $317 dollars a year - yet a kilo of rice still costs about $0.70 - serious poverty is the norm.

Here, as in the rest of the optimistically labelled ‘developing’ world, poor families frequently cite education as their greatest dream, the element that could change everything for the generations to come. Yet, if you’ve got to find out how to keep 5-8 people from starving when a kilo of rice costs 70% of your daily income, school fees are not in the cards.

Finding creative ways for the poorest children in the world to attend school is something HOPE International Development Agency devotes itself to. If our mandate is to see families make a permanent break with poverty, then investment into education is an obvious stratagem.

A number of Canadians are currently helping young Filipino students at the primary, secondary, and university levels to fulfill the dreams of their families. It is an incredible arrangement. The letters we read from these young scholars always reconfirm our basic intentions. These are children who work hard, and will enrich their families and communities with the advantages an education affords them. One theme is constant in the letters: I will make good on your investment into me. One fourteen-year old girl writes:

‘Before anything else I would like to greet you a pleasant day. Thank you for the support that you give, I can now able to proceed my study. Sometimes I can absent in school because sometimes we lack of food in our home. My parents work hard for my study; don’t worry because I will study well for you and for my family.’

Because we know how serious and frequent the reality of ‘lack of food’ is for girls like her, the energy she pours into her studies commands our respect and support all the more.

Hunger: World’s #1 Killer Finally Earns Title of ‘Crisis’

Even in a time of economic decline, the threat of simply not having enough to eat is a remote one for the great majority of westerners. So it comes as a surprise to many North Americans that hunger and malnutrition are the number one risk to health worldwide, greater than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined.

This problem has worsened in poor countries to such an extent that the media is finally using the kind of language that is accorded to ‘real’ issues, those worthy of global attention - namely, the label of ‘crisis’. Google ‘Food Crisis’ and you will get tens of thousands of hits, all referencing the same phenomenon: namely, many more people are starving today than they were before.

The following are statistics on world hunger from the World Food Program and the Office of the U.N. Secretary-General:

- In 2008, the number of undernourished people in the world rose to 963 million (more than the combined populations of the United States, Canada and the European Union), up 40 million from 2007.

- Hunger does not affect just the individual. Economists estimate that every child whose physical and mental development is stunted by hunger and malnutrition stands to lose 5 percent to 10 percent in lifetime earnings.

- The total food surplus of the United States alone could satisfy every empty stomach in Africa; France's leftovers could feed the hungry in Democratic Republic of Congo and Italy's could feed Ethiopia's undernourished.

- Today 25,000 people will die from hunger. A child dies every six seconds of malnutrition or starvation.

- There is enough food in the world today for everyone to have the nourishment necessary for a healthy and productive life.

HOPE International Development Agency has invested into the ability of the most-poor to feed themselves for over thirty years. If hunger is not something you have experienced, count yourself blessed - and then act to bless somebody who has.

Sri Lanka: In Peace or War, People Make Progress

It looks as though the interminable conflict between Sri Lanka’s government forces and the insurgent Tamil Tigers may be coming to a head. In recent weeks, the army has vanquished the Tigers in a series of engagements that have substantially shrunk the territory under the control of the latter.

Political history aside, any development that secures an end to the fighting that has claimed more than 70,000 lives in Sri Lanka is to be welcomed. It is safe to say that both sides have seriously abused the civilian population caught in their decades-long crossfire.

HOPE International Development Agency has worked in Sri Lanka steadily for decades, prior to 2004’s horrific tsunami and throughout these vacillations of war and peace. While at one level, Sri Lanka is a troubling national character, a bastion of bad news and gloomy outcomes, there is another Sri Lanka in which ordinary people live and work, and in this place, there is always reason to hope. No matter how chaotic their national condition seems to be, the poor continue to make the best of difficult situations whenever they are given the opportunity.

For example, stories like Gnanasiri Lokugallappatthi’s are not preempted by civil war. Before the tsumani destroyed the village market, 56 year-old Gnanasiri had the extremely strenuous and low-paying occupation of carrying bags of consumer goods on his head and shoulders to local vendors.

One year ago, HOPE loaned a little less than $100 to Gnanasiri to start his own business. He rented a stall at the rebuilt Devinuwara Public Market Complex and began selling rice. Before long, he earned a good name and reputation as a rice dealer. Nowadays, he makes a little over $100 profit each month, and has just about paid off his loan.

As with most families, the crown of success is education. Gnanasiri’s son is graduating from high school, and his daughter is being trained as a nurse. In very little time, this family has emerged from a situation of drudgery and tenuous survival, to one of prosperity and new choices.

Ordinary Sri Lankans keep striving to make their children’s lives happier and freer. Their efforts are fruitful regardless of what developments happen to be grabbing headlines. Let us just hope that many, many more stories like this can proceed unimpeded in a climate of greater peace.

Democratic Republic of Congo: ‘Our Hospital Is Back!’

Last week, a large donation of medical supplies that HOPE International Development Agency procured for people in the Democratic Republic of Congo arrived after an arduous journey over land, sea, and (most obstructive of all) national boundaries. This process of delivering critical supplies to deserving communities illustrated two things. First, it demonstrated just how intense the challenges are for Congolese men and women working for the good of their people. Secondly, it evidenced just how severe the need for this work is.

A list of the bureaucratic hurdles that must be overcome in order to get live-saving supplies to villages in dire need does not make for entertaining prose. Suffice it to say, it is long, complex, and occasionally quite discouraging. But the outcome, once these hurdles are cleared, is pure joy.

HOPE’s representative Mossai Sanguma was present when the shipment arrived in the city of Karawa. He said that it was an amazing moment – people lined the streets as the cargo arrived. The whole city was energized. Many were exclaiming, “Our hospital is back!”

Their excitement was a reflection of their lack. For about a year there have been little or no medical resources available to medical staff in the hospitals and clinics of the northwestern Congo. In these conditions, people do not bother taking the time to visit their doctor. The care they might receive is not worth the walk. A medical system that might be serving people is rendered totally ineffectual—hospitals become little more than buildings. This donation is seen and felt as a bit of a revival, a blood transfusion for a weak and depleted system.

Some of the supplies will be used in the hospital at Karawa, where there is adequate storage and a pharmacy. Karawa is also a processing point, as the bulk of the HOPE donation is intended to be distributed to four health zones through out the northwestern district – to Loko, Watsolo, Dumba, and Bukada, and the approximate 100 rural clinics located in these zones.

The donation, in the end, filled two forty foot containers. This is a large gift, but in the grand scheme of things, it is touchingly finite, truly small-scale. The DRC, after all, has a population of 65 million. But even this humble modicum of assistance is linked to serious obstacles—and a spirit of gratitude that is even more sobering.

Bangladesh: Nasty, Brutish, and Short - But Still a Child’s Life

Given the way homelessness affects people in North America, it’s difficult to imagine what the experience of street children in developing world countries could be like. In a place like Dhaka, Bangladesh, Hobbes’s vision of life as nasty, brutish, and short is still accurate.







These are pictures of children being sheltered, educated, doctored, and fed in a HOPE International Development Agency-supported center in the city. They are being taught reading, writing, and specific skills that will earn them a stable income and allow them to become self-reliant adults. As evidenced by the photographs, they are shockingly young. Despite this, the biggest challenge that Bengali HOPE workers encountered was in convincing the children to attend the center at all. They had, in their short lives, only encountered exploitation and abuse at the hands of any number of adults. The pimps, politicians, drug dealers have already reached these children before they come to HOPE.

Fortunately, the children have been making measurable gains since the programme was launched in December 2007. In this short time period, 60% of the formerly illiterate children have become capable of reading and 50% have learned basic accounting skills. All of the children are healthier. Many had never used toothpaste before coming to the center, and now all of them are regularly seeing dentists and doctors.

When asked, the children say that the greatest thing about the help they have been given is the opportunity to play games. In the recreation room and in the yard outside, they feel totally at home, safe and happy and at rest. A board game in a clean, warm room is a little bit of heaven on earth, a paradise they never thought would open up to them. Children are still children—even when they’ve seen things we wouldn’t want to imagine.

Myanmar: bridging past and future with HOPE

2008 was a challenging year for Westerners and the global poor alike. The rich have seen their stocks crash, and people in places like Myanmar have seen their homes, families, and entire environments wiped away by disaster. However, each New Year brings a promise of renewal, and we have recently been told many stories that validate that promise.

A HOPE International Development Agency worker in Myanmar shares this photograph and story:

This bridge was jointly built by the Christian and Buddhist communities which live on the respective sides of the stream at Kathabaung Village. The previous bridge was destroyed by the cyclone and they have been using a somewhat narrow single log since the cyclone. The bridge is both a symbolic and very practical way of keeping their community connected, in spite of their identity differences. With HOPE International Development Agency’s help, they decided to build a memorial bridge with substantial concrete posts so that it would be more resilient than the previous bridge. They dedicated it with a community-wide ceremony upon completion.

Let’s do as these Myanmarese villagers are doing and pour our energy and resources into building bridges. From one year to another, from setbacks to progress, from despair to hope.

Happy New Year!