Update Against Hunger - June 7, 2006
Field Notes:
We Deserve a Break Today
Dear Action Against Hunger Team Member,
I've just returned from Yellowstone National Park, where I saw bears, wolves, coyotes, bighorn sheep, mountain goats, bison, elk, bald eagles, many of them mothers with newborns. The experience was exhilarating and refreshing, and it reminded me once again of the importance of regular breaks from the rewarding but intense, demanding, and exhausting efforts we make at Action Against Hunger.
When you first come to work for us, you tend to think that the idea of a break every three months is laughingly soft, that Americans take a vacation once a year, and that's enough. But when you consider the stresses of working in a different culture, with people who are facing tremendous problems, working 12 hours a day and more, forgetting to take Sundays off, working in teams whose ever-changing members need constant training.. Rest-and-recuperation is essential for our field workers every three to four months so they can recharge mentally, physically, and emotionally.
Having taken my own advice, I'm now pumped to be back at workthough I do miss those bear cubs.
Cathy Skoula
Executive Director,
Action Against Hunger (ACF)
New from US Headquarter:
Darfur Advocacy in High Gear
A few years ago, Action Against Hunger acknowledged that our effective programs for alleviating hunger were occasionally subverted by social and governmental policies. So we decided to launch advocacy efforts that attempt to alter those policies. In early June, we went to Washington, D.C. to discuss the recent peace agreement in Darfur, Sudan, and to present ACF International's perspective that land-tenure issues need sustained focus if the peace agreement is to hold.
Action Against Hunger has prepared a report on Darfur that says a crucial catalyst in the conflict is land rights. Traditional pastoralists, who lead livestock in search of grazing land and water, have livelihoods that sometimes put them in conflict with farmers. And land-tenure traditions as customarily accepted by each group can sometimes differ. Moreover, these traditions themselves are sometimes at odds with government-regulated land claims. Our report doesn't propose solutions, but it warns that if these opposing claims aren't addressed and resolved within the framework of the peace agreement signed two weeks ago, residents of Darfur are likely to continue fighting.
So last week, Roger Persichino, Emergency Response in New York, and Pierre Gallien, Desk Officer in Paris, spent a day in New York presenting our findings to representatives of both the French Delegation to the United Nations and the International Crisis Group. The next day, the two advocates traveled to Washington and spent the day in back-to-back meetings with a variety of power-players attempting to settle the conflict. These included advisors to Senators Sam Brownback, a member of the appropriations committee, and Barack Obama, who serves on the committee on foreign affairs.
Did we enlighten any of the VIPs we spoke to? Hard to tell. But pay attention to news reports about Darfur. If the conflict resolution meaningfully addresses land rights, that could be a sign of our growing influence.
News from the field:
Our Response to the Indonesian Earthquake
An Action Against Hunger staffer was on the ground in the Yogyakarta province of Java, Indonesia, on May 26 when the 6.3-magnitude earthquake struck. So we were fully informed about the damage from the get-go.
In fact, many humanitarian organizations were in the neighborhood, so at first, we let everyone else jockey for position aiding local victims. But we soon sensed that some of the organizations were working at cross purposes and discovered a clear need for our expertise in rural areas. So we've begun providing relief and rehabilitation in devastated villages, supervised by our Paris headquarters, which has been overseeing our tsunami relief team elsewhere in Indonesia.
Official estimates say that 80% of homes near the earthquake's epicenter were damaged or destroyed, leaving half a million Indonesians without shelter during monsoon season. Most dispossessed homeowners are refusing to leave what's left of their homes to forestall looting, but the shelters they've provided for themselves are seldom adequate against the torrents of rain. Most homeowners had private wells and indoor plumbing that flushed into septic tanks, but many of the tanks are cracked, and our water-and-sanitation experts worry that as a result groundwater will become contaminated.
Our immediate plans are to help the government distribute food and clean water as well as jerricans for carrying the water and purification chemicals to avoid disease caused by contamination. We also plan to set up new latrines and rehabilitate existing ones and to distribute tents that will protect families more adequately than current makeshift lean-tos.
We haven't yet fully assessed what the local long-term needs will be, but we intend to stick around for as long as we're needed.
Person Profile:
Profile Monica Ramos
Back from Darfurand Ready for More
Monica Ramos's parents are Mexican, but her father is a Mexican citizen, her mother is American, and Monica has dual citizenship. She was born in Baja California but grew up in the U.S. near San Francisco. She went to California Polytechnic University at San Luis Obispo where she studied mechanical engineering specifically so she'd be useful to the Peace Corps.
The Peace Corps, in fact, took her on and sent Monica to Bolivia. She stayed two years working as a water-and-sanitation volunteer, then continued another three years working for an American humanitarian organization, Water for People. When her stint was over, she backpacked all the way north to Mexico.
Her Peace Corps supervisor first brought Action Against Hunger to Monica's attention, and when she finally returned the U.S. last December, Monica approached our New York office. By the end of January, we had sent her to our mission in Pakistan, where she oversaw our water-and-sanitation program in Bala Kot, a town with a population of 80,000 located at the epicenter of last October's calamitous earthquake.
Monica arrived in the field just as Pakistan's focus began evolving from emergency response to rehabilitation. Her work encompassed trucking clean water for 16,000 beneficiaries, installing tanks and purification systems, rehabilitating water cachements, building more than 1,000 latrines, and constructing bathhouses. She also supervised hygiene education in 120 communities, which explained the virtues of handwashing, latrine maintenance, bathing, the use of chlorinating tablets, and the functions of hygiene kits that we distributed (containing such basics as toothbrushes, which were new to several rural communities). To educate local children, her team created a puppet show that was popular and effective. In deference to the local sex-segregated culture, Monica kept herself veiled during her work, but as a female, she says, she could address Pakistani women directly. As a result, Monica believes, she was more effective than a man could have been in her position.
Having now completed her four-month stint, Monica is R&Ring in southern France, but "I definitely want to continue humanitarian work," she says. She'd prefer working in long-term development rather than in emergency relief so that she could use her technical training to design permanent installations. But more importantly, Monica says: "Next, I want to try Africa." She expects, however, that in the long run she'll return to Latin America where, because of her family, she feels the strongest cultural pull.
