Manuella: A Haitian Success Story, One Year Later

If you’ve never had the chance to see what we’ve been able to accomplish in post-earthquake Haiti, take a moment to watch the film we premiered in 2011, ‘Hope in Haiti’. At about the 7 minute mark, you are introduced to Manuella, a woman who typifies the situation of young mothers in the developing world: fearful and depressed, constantly labouring to keep her many children alive and well.

Just a few weeks ago, we met with Manuella to see how life has changed for her since she received help through our 2011 campaign on behalf of Haitian families.

HOPE International Development Agency's Director of International Relations, Clifferd Dick, reports that...

‘Real positive change is beginning to happen in her life!  The new tarps that [we] were able to get her continue to provide her and her family significant temporary shelter.  Manuella is also now a member of the local Chinchiron cooperative!  She participates in all the training and education services that [we provide] to farm families…Manuella and her husband have been able to access improved seed and participate in agricultural training as they work to improve their farm yield.  Finally, the water situation is about to change for Manuella!  A part of the storage silo structure that is just beginning to be built is a large water cistern.  This will gather and hold for community use water that runs off from the roof of this building.  The cistern will hold tens of thousands of litres of water, reducing greatly the time and effort required by Manuella's family to collect water.’

It is gratifying to revisit the struggles depicted so candidly on film, and then to consider the changes that have taken place since. Now she is epitomizing the flip-side of the typical developing world mother’s situation: a success story who was just waiting for a small investment of tools and training.

Fear replaced with hope in Cambodia

To live in poverty is to live in fear.

Fear that your family will not have enough to eat. Chan, a mother from Pursat, Cambodia, knows this fear all to well. “Four of my family members would work all day long for just enough rice for one, maybe two meals that day,” says Chan. “We just kept getting weaker, and our situation continued to get worse. We had nothing left to hope for.”

Fear that your children will not survive. In the region of Cambodia that Chan lives in, one in eight children die before reaching their fifth birthday. Chan knows the heartache that comes from having to bury one of your children.

Chan’s life has changed significantly since receiving help from HOPE International Development Agency donors who gave her the hand up she needed. Today she is well on her way to being free from poverty and her family is healthy and happy. Fear has been replaced with hope!

The same, however, cannot be said of other families in Chan’s home province of Pursat, Cambodia. They too need help to lift themselves up out of poverty.

You can give that help today with and ensure that families receive the resources and training they need in order to transform their lives and free themselves from poverty – just like Chan and her family did.

Learn more about how you can help today.

Guatemala: Time Saved and Dream’s Realized for Juana San Amparas

Last year we met Juana San Amparas, a woman living in the village of Chinantón, Guatemala. Juana is a widow with several children. In addition to chores too numerous to list, she collected water each day so that her family could drink, cook, and bathe. This task became a tremendous burden during the dry season when the local spring dried up and she had to walk several hours to collect water of extremely poor quality. Juana is like so many women we’ve met - inestimable hours of their lives are lost to water-collection. It boggles the mind.

As of last November, with the help of HOPE International Development Agency, the people of Chinantón, including Juana, were volunteering their time and energy on a gravity-fed water system that would bring clean water from the nearby mountains right to the village, throughout the year.

We are happy to report that this work is now complete; Juana is now able to collect the clean water for her family from nearby her home. Our efforts to help the poorest of the poor in Guatemala to gain access to reliable clean water sources continue. We are now looking at providing water for another community called Los Llanos. You can rest assured that there are many more like Juana there.

African Stories and ‘Comment Culture’: Where Compassion and Callousness Meet

The Globe and Mail has published an excellent article about dealing with famine before it becomes a catastrophe, and about UNICEF’s efforts, in particular (although make no mistake — plenty of other organizations, HOPE International Development Agency included, try to take preemptive action against famine).

The editorial is thoughtful. It’s helpful to let people know how hard aid organizations work to address a crisis like that brewing in the Sahel region of Africa right now, before they become media spectacles. Unfortunately, it is the media spectacle that inevitably provokes the greatest response from concerned donors.

As eye-opening as the article is, the reader comments below are far more revelatory. Although one must always remember that the comments section of most online publications are the natural habitat of people who are spoiling for a fight, eager to express their polarizing views with convenient anonymity, they are still worth a read. That is, if you are someone who cares for the poorest of the poor and tries to create the conditions on this planet that would give them something that almost approaches a fair shake in life.

It is beyond the scope of this blog to address the extremely complicated feelings that Westerners habour towards Africans. But it’s fair to say that there is a tenor of extreme disgust and impatience towards the perceived ‘failures’ of this continent, economically, politically, and otherwise. This impatience makes rallying support for intelligent investments into the abilities of poor African families to become self-reliant (something we try to do) quite the uphill battle.

If you are like many of the commentators of this article and you believe that sending aid to famine-afflicted starving people directly causes problems like overpopulation, you have a perfect excuse not to care very much at all whether the next batch of miserable African victims die off or not. Not caring is being part of the solution, rather than the problem! One wonders at the thought process which leads the very intelligent-sounding ‘Dieter HH’ to state that aid organizations “may in fact have made the situation much worse by encouraging irresponsible and unsustainable population increases ( y factors of 3X to 4X ) in what is/was under the best of circumstances a marginal and unforgiving eco system.”

What does he picture in his mind’s eye? That presumably once she’s watched her child with toonie-sized biceps ingest a rehydration packet, the typical African mother immediately makes plans to give birth to many more children, seeing as the experience of depending on emergency aid has relieved her of much of the stress of figuring out how to keep body and soul together? Maybe African mothers and fathers are sort of like entitled teenagers and they have children just to test the patience of Western donors?

We say this: beware of the type of logic that encourages hardness of heart. Beware of the thoughts that conveniently allow you to forgo even the most modest shows of generosity. Consider carefully what commentator ‘KateCanadian’ has to say:

“The responses to this article so far are not responses to human beings in trouble. They sound like the callous English landlords who sneered at the Irish in the midst of the potato famine. The 8-year-old child whose brain is being clouded and body twisted by lack of protein and vitamins -- the child does not know that thirty years ago relief funds were stolen by strongmen who died before they were born. The child is living now, today, and needs help in a situation created by adults.”

UBUNTU

Today, many families are preparing to celebrate Easter, a holiday that is rich with symbols that celebrate life and the thing that makes life truly good — love.

We have often considered it our mission at HOPE International Development Agency to get people who have been given a lot to understand how full life can be when they give generously — when they give more than they thought they would be comfortable giving. But it is difficult to convey the joy of sharing in a culture where lonely self-protection rules the day.

As you mark Easter this year, and you think about how to be on the side of life, on the side of love and generosity, perhaps think about this story:

An anthropologist proposed a game to a group of African tribal children. He put a basket full of fruit near a tree and told them that whoever got there first would win the sweet fruits. When he told them to run they all took each other’s hands and ran together, then sat together enjoying their treats. When he asked them why they had run like that, as one could have had all the fruits for himself, they said: “UBUNTU, how can one of us be happy if all the other ones are sad?”

UBUNTU in the Xhosa culture means: "I am because we are."

Happy Easter and remember — you are because we are.

UNION: Beyond the Consumer’s ‘Voluntourism’

For those interested in traveling for a purpose beyond merely taking in the sights, consider volunteering with HOPE International Development Agency's UNION program. If you have a few minutes, watch this short film about UNION.

In recent years, we’ve become aware of the term ‘voluntourism’, which refers to overseas tourism that incorporates some sort of volunteering. The term is fairly glib and in many respects, it should be. The idea of rich westerners taking excursions to the poorest, most desolate places on earth for their own sense of personal enrichment should make us all a little squeamish. The idea that one can buy the experience of feeling like a good person — because, let’s face it, it is costly to fly, costly to travel to far flung places — should give one pause.

We have been sending volunteers to the communities where we are at work since the early 80s, long before there was a market for this kind of travel experience. Since that time, we have been telling people that, in fact, they are really not that useful to us as school-builders, nurses, teachers, or any of the myriad roles that people take on as overseas volunteers. Even if those are exactly the sort of jobs our volunteers do, the purpose has never been to replace indigenous school-builders, nurses, and teachers with Western travelers — the purpose has been to allow our volunteers to simply experience life in these villages.

The most useful work our volunteers do takes place when they return home — our volunteers have raised untold sums of money for the communities that they grew to love, they have become formidable advocates, they have found ways to support and strengthen the work of HOPE. We could hand out a million pamphlets on poverty and their impact would be inconsequential compared to the experience of a handful of people who had actually traveled to a poor village and befriended the people there. Information breeds opinions, but experience stokes the fire of activism.

So while the term ‘voluntourism’ summons images of the perfect consumer package — a travel experience designed to provide moral satisfaction in a few convenient weeks — please understand that the UNION experience is a little different. We want your time overseas to be the beginning of something a lot less convenient, tidy, and short-term, but ultimately much, much more satisfying

Saving Lives In Comfort and Style: Irony or Opportunity?

On Saturday night, over 1,700 people will congregate at the Vancouver Convention Centre to celebrate the power of their generosity. Our flagship HOPE International Development Agency Film Premiere and Dinner is the occasion, but it’s more to the point to say that Filipino families will be bringing them there.

The Convention Centre is a milestone in Vancouver’s architectural and cultural development as a premiere city. Guests who attend the Premiere will be served a fine meal. They will be surrounded by beauty and grandeur—the pinnacle of what our economically rich society can achieve. The experience of our guests will be a world away — literally and figuratively — from what the beneficiaries of the occasion experience, day after day.

The families in the Philippines upon whom this year’s Premiere and Dinner series focuses on are the poorest of the poor. Of course they are. Why else would we be traveling across the country, exposing people who can help to their plight? They live with unimaginable choices. Leave your family to find dangerous, far-off work or watch them all starve. Give your children diseased water to drink or watch them dehydrate. Pull your children from school so they can help you scrape together the means to survive or watch the weakest members of the family die off.

There is a certain amount of irony in the fact that, in the course of helping these families, we will see the most beautiful hotels, eat the most delicious meals, and experience genuinely diverting entertainment. In a way it doesn’t seem right.

But if you choose to attend one of the Film Premieres and Dinners, perhaps you should treat it as an occasion to fully realize all that you have — and to go the next step and accept the fact that, for you, it is truly possible to help. We don’t see a contradiction in enjoying yourselves while you save lives. In fact, the choice to give is one that we want to celebrate with you and we hope we get the chance to do that this year.

Ethiopia: Villagers Vote Unanimously For Better Sanitation

People who know us tend to think ‘clean water’. It’s true that clean water is foundational in much of our work with the poorest families in the world. In our experience, clean water is the thing that neglected communities most often identify as the lack that hurts the most. Anybody spending three to five hours a day collecting dirty water, anybody with chronic diarrhea, anybody who is too dehydrated to breast-feed will tell you: help us with clean water, if you want to help us at all.

But wherever we are working to bring clean water, we are also working to establish good health and sanitation practice. These two things — a clean water system right in the village, and villagers with habits like hand washing and latrine-use — together constitute the engine of real transformation. These two things mean radically healthier communities and families who really understand what it takes to remain strong and in control of their own well-being.

Villagers who work with us really do get it. A recent survey of the Ethiopian villages in Bonke district working with us on clean water initiatives encouraged us: every single family has dug a latrine following their health and sanitation training. Our goal for 90% of them to do so was handily exceeded. Once our immensely beloved community nurses teach them how to preserve their health, families are evidently passionate about putting their newfound knowledge into practice.

Clean water and good sanitation — it makes nothing but sense to pair these two things. Fortunately, wherever we are working with villagers to establish radically better health, they are signaling their agreement by the way they live their lives.

We listened and we hope you will too

Recently, David McKenzie, International President of HOPE International Development Agency, met with Chief Tochi, leader of a small village of people in Koshale in the lowlands of southern Ethiopia.

Chief Tochi has never stopped trying to save his people. The problem is, no one ever stopped long enough to listen. We have and we hoping that you will too...

"We are living in a desert. We are living in the borderlands. Water is not in our country. When our women have babies, they do not have enough milk. Because the babies do not get enough milk, they get sick. Our primary problem is water.

Water is life. Our blood is water.

To preserve that life we walk to great distances, women, children, and animals. We have written letters about this to the government many times. I myself have written letters asking why they ignore pastoralist areas. Those living in the highlands, where water is easier to access, get help. But those who live far from the water are not helped.

So when we see you we are happy because at last you are paying attention. If you get us water, we will be really joyful. If you do this, the babies will grow up to be men and women.

In 1990, there were people who came in helicopters and they told us that they would bring water and irrigation and nothing happened. We were extremely unhappy about that and we thought, are we not human beings?”

Chief Tochi shares more about the need...

David: Chief Tochi, how far do you and your people travel for water?

Chief Tochi: We walk 5 hours to get the water and come back.

David: With all the villages that need clean water, why choose yours?

Chief Tochi: I recognize that others have needs, but our own needs are huge. We would hope to be helped as others are helped.

David: How would our big truck get here (a 10-ton truck is used during the clean water system construction and installation)?

Chief Tochi: If you would promise to come, we would make sure the road is fixed. We made these paths a long time ago but we did not see any benefit from them, so we didn’t keep them up. But we would for clean water. I assure you that we will do whatever it takes.

“Whatever it takes”. That is how far Chief Tochi is willing to go to ensure that his people do not continue to suffer and die from drinking dirty water.

I can assure you that we at HOPE International Development Agency will do whatever it takes to ensure that Chief Tochi and his people gain access to the clean water they so desperately need.

If you can help, visit www.hope-international.com today.

Michael Paull: Addis Ababa and Beyond

Michael Paull, intrepid friend of HOPE and cyclist, has already made it to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on his epic bike ride from Cairo to Capetown. He is braving exhaustion, saddle sores, and children who seem to think throwing rocks at bicycle wheels is a reasonable sport, all in the name of raising money for clean water.

You have to salute somebody who chooses to ride for 12,000 kilometers through a terrain and a culture that is completely foreign and never fails to demonstrate a great sense of humor throughout the experience.

Michael's blog http://www.h2opia.ca/ makes for very entertaining reading. Check it out for a laugh and the opportunity to marvel at just how little you exercise compared to Michael right now.

Somalia: The Face of ‘Displacement’

We have not forgotten the families who fled their homes during last year’s drought in the Horn of Africa. Many of them are now living as refugees in camps outside of Mogadishu, Somalia. Staying home meant starving, so they are congregating in areas where organizations like ours can provide emergency supplies of food.

They are living a kind of bizarre half-life — they are merely about surviving. Home means having people in your life and the means at your disposal to be healthy, make plans, execute them, and feel you have a modicum of control over your fate. It means having a hoe to work your garden with; it also means having a caring neighbour who will tend your garden if you need to nurse your child all day long.

These refugees have none of that — they are utterly dependent on aid. The term ‘internally displaced persons’ is used for these families and although it’s dry and technical, the image of being ‘displaced’ is wholly accurate. These families are floating in a fearful reality; in these circumstances, they can’t get a foothold into a secure and self-sufficient place. Our long-term plan is to equip the refugees we are aiding with the means to reestablish their homes and livelihoods — to give them, again, a sense of place and belonging.

For now, easing their fear and ensuring their physical survival is top of mind. When we talk to people in the camp, their relief and also their stress is palpable.

Faay Salaad Ambuure is a mother of seven who came from Wanlaweyn district of Lower Shabelle. She told us, “My family lost all of our livestock and farming tools. This is the first time we’ve been given good food. It is enough for the whole month.” She thanked us many times.

A woman named Baabilo Dhakalow said, “These rations…make our life brighter.” But then she talked about how difficult it is to get enough water in the camp. “When we want to get water,” she said, “we go two to three miles away as we don’t have wells around.”

Mohamed Shidane from Dondhere, Afgoi district, is a farmer and father of eight. Shidane said that he lost everything that brought in income: faming tools, twenty caws, and a donkey. Fortunately all his children were safely brought to the camp. He told us, “It is the first time I have received…food”, and assured us that “the food provided is greatly needed and is enough to last my family for a month.”

Soon enough, we will be helping these families to find their place again. For now, keep them in your thoughts and prayers.

Afghanistan: Ensuring Equality—Patiently, If Need Be

Giving women a voice is an important part of what we do. The reality is, in many poor communities there are long held traditions and beliefs that make putting women in positions of leadership challenging, to say the least. But from a results-based perspective, helping women to achieve makes nothing but sense. It makes the job of eliminating chronic poverty that much easier. Women work exceptionally hard for their families and villages.

In Afghanistan, the road to gender equality is steep. But we are in it for the long haul. Our typical practice, when we help villages to form the groups that serve the community in special ways (like governing how a clean water system is used) is to require female as well as male members.

However, in Afghanistan’s poorest villages, it is not common practice for men and women to sit together in meetings. It is the poor themselves who must organize to improve their lives, and we cannot impose upon them to do what is not within their will to do. But our staff in Afghanistan are committed to ensuring that women still have an opportunity to act as leaders, so they have formed a separate group for women called the Village Development Committee. They are charged with getting women in their village to become more involved with anti-poverty work.

The ideal, from our perspective, is to have total equality and cooperation, but we are working with the poor, not against them. When we find a method that achieves an important aim—like giving women leadership opportunities—and also feels comfortable, culturally, for the people involved, we go for it.

Change is slow, but it is worthwhile. We know the women in the Village Development Committee would agree.