Update Against Hunger - June 8, 2005
Field Notes:
Dear Action Against Hunger Team Member,
On the occasion of our 24th issue, Update Against Hunger has been redesigned. We hope you enjoy the new look and feel.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu to Accept ACF Award
Great news. Desmond Tutu will accept our Humanitarian Award at this year's annual Food Day Gala on Friday evening, November 11, at the Metropolitan Club in New York City.
As you probably know, retired Archbishop Tutu was the first black General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984. His Nobel was awarded because of his public crusade for "a democratic and just society without racial divisions," requiring equal civil rights for all; the abolition of South Africa's passport laws; a common system of education; and a stop to forced deportation from South Africa to the so-called homelands.
Later, as chairperson of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Tutu spent two years gathering reports of kidnappings, torture and killings. The Commission granted amnesty to those who admitted their crimes. "When people thought there was going to be an orgy of retribution, we walked the path of reconciliation, working for restorative rather than retributive justice," Archishop Tutu said.
In 2000, he established The Desmond Tutu Peace Foundation in Cape Town, South Africa, to promote "ethical, visionary, and values-based human development." Earlier this year, the Foundation announced plans to construct the Desmond Tutu Peace Centre in Cape Town as a place where warring parties will be able to meet and resolve their differences. The Peace Centre will also "help train people in how we work for peaceful resolutions to conflicts, how can we help people who were enemies before become friends," Archbishop Tutu said.
We are as honored that Desmond Tutu will join us for our accolades as we are pleased to extend them.
Cathy Skoula
ACF Executive Director
New from US Headquarter:
In its profit-making mode, Smashing Ideas designs digital images for websites, marketing materials, games and so forth for clients such as Casio, Eddie Bauer, Ford, Kraft, Microsoft, Warner Brothers, and NBC. The company was founded by animators Ben Yenter and Evan Clarrissimeaux, and Internet tech expert Glenn Thomas. The team that designed our new layout is the Consumer Products group, which includes Account Director Vanessa McCutcheon, Creative Director Tiffany Young, Senior Art Director Lisa Ng, Account Coordinator Jessica Siegel, and Junior Designer Elias Holtz.
Says Vanessa: "At Smashing Ideas, we spend most of our time having fun. We design interactive entertainment for kids and teens, as well as for adults now and then. When we heard of ACF's goal to improve the lives of children around the world, we felt it was a perfect opportunity for us to leverage our interactive skills to help make a difference for kids who aren't as fortunate as the ones we often create entertainment for. ACF is an organization we're proud to be affiliated with, and we look forward to contributing to their continued efforts to reduce world hunger."
We look forward with equal pride to Smashing Ideas' continued contributions, and we thank them profoundly for their dedicated pro-bono efforts on our behalf.
News from the field:
Peace Isn't Curing Hunger in South Sudan
On January 9, the Government of the Sudan (representing North Sudan) and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (representing South Sudan) signed a peace agreement designed to end a 49-year conflict that has left 1.5 million people dead. The North, dominated by Arabs, has tried to impose Islamic Sharia law across Sudan, even in the South where most of the population is Christian or animist. In addition, both sides have fought over control of Sudanese oil, located in the South and currently producing roughly 320,000 barrels a day. The agreement splits revenues from the oil evenly between North and South. Further, starting in July, the South will become autonomous and six years from now will vote on whether to remain part of Sudan or to become permanently independent.
The idea that peace alleviates hunger, however, is flat-out wrong. We've made three nutritional surveys in South Sudan recently that uncovered disturbing statistics. International standards declare that an emergency exists when instances of global acute malnutrition (whose victims weigh less than 80% of an equally tall healthy individual's weight) exceeds 15% of a population. Likewise, an emergency exists when instances of severe acute malnutrition (when victims weigh less than 70% of an equally tall healthy individual's weight) top 4% of a population.
In our surveys, global acute malnutrition was measured at 24.0% of the under-five population in one area, 28.1% in another, and 30.7% in a third. Similarly, severe acute malnutrition was 4.4%, 4.5%, and 4.9%. The causes include less than normal rainfall that diminished harvests for the past two years, little or no availability of measles prevention and care, poor feeding practices, and inadequate hygiene and sanitation.
Rainfall aside, these causes derive in large measure from Sudan's civil war. South Sudanese have been displaced to land that isn't their own, and no government effort has been made to maintain or create the infrastructure necessary to provide healthcare, education or access to assistance. Our current and proposed projects address these crises, and peace will of course help our efforts, which are showing progress. But peace itself solves nothing in war-torn communities, which are in urgent need of rehabilitation and improvement. The crisis in South Sudan continues.
Person Profile:
Profile - Dominique De Juriew
"I'm lucky," says Dominique De Juriew. "I'm doing things that I like." Intrigued by anthropology for as long as she can remember, Dominique has been surveying the kinds of communities that fascinate her in Congo and Myanmar, assessing our programs and proposing new projects based on her field research.
French-born but raised chiefly in Montreal, Dominique studied anthropology there and went to work for the Institut national de la recherche scientifique. While surveying food security among the Inuits in northern Canada, where winter temperatures drop to -50 F., Dominique knew at once that she'd prefer a hot climate-ideally, Africa. So she began a quest for job opportunities via the Internet, and a web contact at Doctors Without Borders referred her to ACF. As she hoped, we sent her to the Democratic Republic of Congo.
In DRC, we were curing malnutrition among children successfully at our Supplementary Feeding Centers in Kinshasa, the capital, but within a month, beneficiaries were undernourished again. We assigned Dominique to find out why. The answers proved to be numerous, but most involved diverse family and cultural pressures that forced mothers to revert to unhealthy feeding practices.
More recently, Dominique spent three months in Burma, helping us improve our success at reaching women who need help improving their families' nutrition and access to clean water.
Next, Dominique will be a food security coordinator for us in Indonesia. Having worked in the Arctic as well as in equatorial heat, Dominique says, "It is better to follow the sun."
