The Philippines: From Edmonton to Kauswaga, With Love

This week our absolutely wonderful friends Elizabeth Duffield, Katie Duffield Somerville, Gregg Oldringg and Margaret McPhedran pulled off an extraordinary feat.

These Edmontonians annually hold a fundraiser that is attended by only a modest number of committed friends and family members. They routinely raise enough to transform an overseas community completely.

This year was no exception: they achieved their goal of raising enough to provide the district of Kauswaga, the Philippines, with two clean water systems that will serve 600 people altogether.

Kauswaga is a district that epitomizes the struggle of Philippine Indigenous Peoples. Its inhabitants are mainly farmers and fisher-folk, and 70% of them are extremely poor. This district lacks all major services. The people are desperate for help.

Clean water is an excellent starting point for the kind of development that will allow Kauswaga’s people to be healthy and self-sufficient. These families will emerge with self-confidence and organizational capacities they did not realize they had, as our work in developing water sources always entails training the families to plan, implement, and manage their own water systems.

So kudos to our friends in Edmonton, who once again made something wonderful happen for a lot of people they will likely never meet.

Let’s give Beth the final word, as she describes the value of their hard work better than we could:

"We are amazed by two things, that our little community of friends and family continues to band together to support a community overseas. When it comes to clean water, it is within our capability to something and so in the end, we are just thrilled to be able to partner with amazing people in the Philippines for such incredible, long-term change. And second, that all this is happening, simply because we asked."

Somalia: Water an Emblem of Restored Confidence in the Camps

Late last year we shared the story of Somalia refugees of the Horn of Africa famine crisis who had begun living in a place called Taagwey camp in Mogadishu, Somalia. These incredibly poor families had managed to fundraise $15,000 for a water system from the camp itself. It was a shocking accomplishment.

We’re happy to report that Taagwey Camp’s deep water well (or ‘borehole’) and reservoir have been completed, thanks to the efforts of the community. Families in the camp organized themselves to contribute voluntary labour and set up a management committee responsible for the maintenance of the water system.

This was a coup for the people of Taagwey camp. It allowed them to regain a sense of control over their lives, something the famine had taken away from them. We are now talking with families who are ready to return home and rebuild more resilient lives. We’ll keep walking with these families as they make their way from disaster to stability. There will definitely be more stories to come.

South Sudan - Hands Trained to Heal Have Become Hands That Harm

You know the situation has taken a significant turn for the worse in South Sudan's hospitals and clinics when the hands of doctors and nurses become as deadly as the diseases and illnesses they are trying to treat.

Chronic shortages of medical supplies are putting otherwise healthy people, including doctors and nurses, on the critical list.

Without basic medical supplies, such as surgical gloves, the unprotected hands of doctors and nurses become carriers of the disease, infection, and illness they are working so hard to prevent and treat.

One hospital, where doctors and nurses treat nearly 100,000 people annually, and conduct nearly 100 surgeries every month, was down to just one Kleenex-sized box of surgical gloves when we were first made aware of the problem.

HOPE International Development Agency has procured two huge containers of urgently needed medical supplies that will put the healing back in the hands of doctors and nurses in South Sudan. But we need your help to ship the containers as soon as possible.

Learn more about how you can help doctors and nurses as they struggle to save lives in very difficult circumstances.

Please visit www.hope-international.com today.

The Dominican Republic: Over Thirty Years of Friendship

This year, we’re going to do our best to shine a light on a place where we have worked with people to turn the tide of chronic poverty for over thirty years: the Dominican Republic. This beautiful country is known as a tourist hotspot, but outside the boundaries of these hermetically sealed resort-style communities, Dominicans struggle hard for a meager standard of living.

It’s a place that inspires and excites us. It’s a place where we’ve collaborated with local people to reforest miles and miles of desertified hillsides, where together we’ve built roads and schools and aqueducts and greenhouses and much more. We’ve seen fantastic progress in the Dominican Republic and it continues to be a place where we simply enjoy seeing our friends.

Rainbow Choi, who coordinates overseas volunteers for HOPE International Development Agency, recently led a team to the Dominican Republic, and she’s recorded her experiences in a blog. It’s well worth visiting, especially if you are someone who has wanted to experience a different way of life, in a less materialistic, more vibrant kind of community. If you’re someone who is interested in deeper friendships, you’re probably a great fit for our volunteer programme, UNION.

Canada: Looking Back at World Food Day

Back in October, HOPE International Development Agency’s International President David S. McKenzie, was invited to be a keynote speaker at World Food Day 2012.

Here is a short video that includes a few clips of David speaking.

World Food Day is a fantastic event, so if you are a Fraser Valley native, you should consider checking it out next year. Learn more about what the day is about.

Pakistan: $3 Brought Muhammad Out of Hell

When you place yourself in Muhammad Zaman’s shoes, even just for a moment, the idea of donations of medical supplies for clinics serving the poorest of the poor becomes incredibly exciting.

Muhammad is 14 years old and suffers from rickets. Many in the west will not be familiar with this ailment, since it is linked to chronically deficient diets, and this is not something your typical Westerner has to deal with. Rickets is a disorder in which the bones become soft and weak. The symptoms include dental deformities, muscle cramps, and ferocious bone pain. Frankly speaking, this is a disorder that makes a hell out of life.

The District Headquarter Hospital in Karak, Pakistan, has been operating for the past six months thanks to shipments of medicine and medical supplies that HOPE International Development Agency’s donors have funded. This hospital serves the poorest people in a very indigent region, and it is chronically under-supplied, although the doctors and nurses  who work there are incredibly devoted to their patients.

Muhammed’s pain became so severe that his father, a daily wage labourer, took him to the Hospital in Karak. The doctor there discovered that one leg was fractured. Elastic bandages costing a little more than $3 were required for the treatment. This was far more than Muhammed’s father could afford to pay. Luckily, the doctor consulted our colleagues in Pakistan and the shipment they had received included the bandages. So instead of sending Muhammed out into the world in unimaginable pain, with no hope of relief - which is what happens over and over again in developing world villages with under-supplied clinics - the doctor was able to treat this young boy.

Muhammed’s experiences are very real. There are so many people like him. We don’t know about their pain, for the most part. But there is so much that we can do to help. $3 brought one boy relief beyond words. Thanks to our donors, this kind of thing is happening all of the time.

Pakistan: Gardens for the ‘Landless’

In the West, where the living we earn typically has no direct relationship with the ground we stand upon, we could never really understand the pain of being landless.

Across the developing world, where most families keep body and soul together by growing food, those without enough land to produce most crops are in a special category of poverty. The instability, insecurity, and vulnerability they experience doesn’t ever let up, not for a day. Creative solutions are needed to make their situation more viable, so that the children of landless families can at least have enough stability and health to possibly make a better life for themselves when they grow up.

HOPE International Development Agency has been working with 70 landless women in Muzaffargarh and Jhang, Pakistan, over the past four months to promote kitchen gardening. These women and their families learned how to make a small kitchen garden work on the property that they have, typically an extremely small plot only large enough for a small hut. These are gardens that can produce a lot of food in minimal space, vegetables like bitter gourd, beans, ash gourd, spinach, coriander, and lady finger. The women are being taught to prepare the land they have for best results, cultivate it intensively, and reduce losses by pests.

This is about making the best of a difficult situation. We’ve found the women can improve their lives substantially through using what they do possess more efficiently. It’s making a difference.

Cambodia: The Health Fund for a Healing Society

Poverty doesn’t end when you merely enrich or enable the individual. An organized and interdependent community is the best hope against chronic need.

Cambodians had their strong sense of community perverted and destroyed by the Khmer Rouge era. People in this country want for many things, but trust in one another is the lack that possibly cuts deepest. When we see our work in Cambodia begin to repair these social bonds, we are truly encouraged.

The Health Fund our partnering families have created is a wonderful testament to the power of interdependence. Pech Van, a 57-year old widow from the village of Prey Omal, knows its power first-hand. Pech is not an abjectly poor woman; she has a good home garden and a chicken-raising business. But in the past when her family members fell sick, she felt the brunt of a different kind of poverty, a more pervasive kind: she lived in a village without a ‘safety net’. If her family members became sick at a time when she couldn’t sell chickens or harvest her garden, she had no means for paying doctors. In other words, she had no health insurance and no place to get any.

In May 2008, Pech joined one of HOPE International Development Agency’s new village health funds. Every month, Pech started paying 25 cents into the fund, along with almost 100 other families in her village; HOPE added money to this fund as well. From these pooled funds, the village health fund gives no-interest loans to fund contributors to pay for healthcare expenses. This has been a lifesaver for Pech’s family. In January 2009, Pech borrowed $40 to treat her mother for typhoid. She was able to pay this back in April, as soon as she harvested her vegetable crop. In August 2009, Pech again borrowed money from the fund - this time, she borrowed $50 to bring her young grandson, who had dengue, to the hospital. And again, Pech was able to pay back the loan within a few months with money from her home garden and chicken raising business. Since then, Pech has again borrowed and repaid money, and plans to do so in the future.

The Health Fund is an indication of a village that is confidently organizing itself. This is beyond good news for a place where in former decades neighbors were killing each other. There is trust in these communities, and a growing sense that they can move forward together.

Chinchiron: a Party That Started In Edmonton and Ended in A Haitian Village

Roughly a year ago, a group of very fine people in Edmonton threw a party. Their aim was to raise enough funds for a village in Haiti. The village, Chinchiron, was a place where 500 families were suffering water-borne diseases and fatalities constantly - one of the many crushing burdens chronic poverty had conferred to them.

We’re happy to report that our Edmontonian friends—who included Margaret McPhedran, Gregg Oldring, Kate Duffield Somerville, and Beth Duffield—were resoundingly successful, and as a result, the people of Chinchiron are getting their first taste of success.

Chinchiron’s water reservoir and rainwater catchment system has been completed. Construction was hampered at many points by poor weather, including typhoons, but thanks to the hard work of community members who contributed voluntary labour, the system was made in time to be filled with water when heavy seasonal rain falls in the next few weeks. This system captures rainwater off of the community grain storage silo, feeds it via gutters to a sloped reservoir, and directs it to gravity-fed taps. In total, the reservoir will hold 150,000 liters of water.

The families are anticipating the filling of the reservoir with great excitement and gratitude. All 3,000 of them will have access to enough water for irrigating gardens, bathing, washing clothing, and drinking/cooking (after it is boiled or treated). Families in Chinchiron have formed a committee to manage the new water resource and ensure that everyone has fair access to the water.

We have nothing but gratitude and respect for the friends who initiated this. Their idea was simple: let’s have a party and let’s celebrate our capacity to give at the same time. The notion that so many people have had their lives saved and transformed by an act of simply having fun is inspiring. Thank you.

Cambodia: The Link Between Confidence and Innovation

Farming families in Cambodia are taking great strides towards self-reliance. We’re excited by how well the dry-rice farming initiative is going among the families who wanted to try raising a new, hardy varietal of rice using sustainable methodology. They have taken to the new style of farming with enthusiasm and the success they’ve experienced has made them increasingly more confident.

One shouldn’t underestimate the significance of confidence among these families. Fearfulness is the hallmark of poverty: people who have been poor for generations are typically unwilling to take risks and endanger whatever resources they do have. But confidence is the secret ingredient that allows for innovations, and innovations can usher in great transformations and unexpected windfalls.

Mok Tal is a 37 year-old farmer. He and his family have been through every conceivable hardship in trying to cobble together a barely-secure life. They have worked as laborers on other farmers’ fields. Mok Tal had to travel to the Thai border to find jobs that often endangered his life.

Since 2009, Mok Tal and his family have been working with us to grow Dry Season rice. Little by little, life has improved. They had enough to eat and began saving money and purchasing more land.

In 2011, Mok Tal acquired a ploughing machine. Dissatisfied with the design of the machine, he replaced various parts with salvaged parts from a motor shop and made a new model that allowed him to plough comfortably for longer periods of time.  Other farmers asked him to make them their own. Last December the Ministry of Agriculture invited Mok Tal to present his tractor at a gathering for farmers in the region.

This is what we mean by confidence. This is the element that takes hold in the poor once they experience a little success. This is the factor that makes real, sustained changes possible. We only need to help the poor to get over that initial hump, and then they proceed to go the distance. The ‘help’ we offer to families like Mok Tal’s is really such a very minor part of their journey if it’s the right kind of help. Our assistance must instill confidence, not dependence. Mok Tal is a wonderful example of the former.

Ethiopia: A Milestone in Generosity

This week, Lyle Hatton visited the village of Toniya for the first time and saw the clean water system that was recently installed there. Although he had never before had the chance to see them, shake their hands, and hear their voices, he and his family back in Alberta had thought about Toniya’s people many times over the past few years.

David S. McKenzie, HOPE International Development Agency’s International President, received this email from Sherri, Lyle’s wife, in November 2009:

“Hi Mr. McKenzie ~

Thank you for taking my telephone call this morning.  My five-year old son, having been adopted from Ethiopia, was touched deeply by the gentleman’s comment at the Calgary [fundraising] dinner that 2 out of 5 children die from the water in Ethiopia.  It sunk in very deep for him.  He even remembers carrying very heavy water a long ways when he was 2 years old.

The day after the dinner, my son sat down with the pastor at our church and told him some of the things he’s learned.  He ended up doing a video interview, which was then played to the congregation the following week.  Many people were in tears listening to this five year old talking about children dying and how we all need to be doing something to help them.

My husband and I both dream of being heavily involved in projects happening in either one, or many, countries of Africa.  We want to be part of a ministry, or doing something on our own, like starting a clinic or orphanage.  With my son’s hope of helping the children already, we thought it would be a great opportunity to see what we could begin to campaign for now, and possibly see some of the effects of that when we return to Ethiopia next year to pick up our daughter.

I understand the huge cost associated with the springs in Ethiopia. I also understand that these goings-on are outside of Addis and we are prepared to cover our cost of visiting anything that we may be involved in, whether contributions towards a spring, or a different type of project.  […]

I look forward to discussing further plans with you in the future.
God bless,
Sheri Hatton”

The Hattons worked hard as a family to raise the tens of thousands of dollars required for Toniya’s water system. Their passionate advocacy attracted the attention of their community, the media, and many generous donors over the years. Lyle’s trip to Ethiopia this month, with David and a few other friends of HOPE, marks a tremendous milestone for the Hattons.

We salute the Hattons for all they have done. They have our respect and gratitude.  We can’t even adequately convey how the people of Toniya feel about them.

If you want to know more about the Hatton’s experiences, please take a look at their wonderful blog, The Family Expansion.

The Philippines & Coffee: Cashing In Without Selling Out

Last year many people came out to screenings of our documentary about Indigenous Peoples in the Philippines. If you never got a chance to see it, you can watch the documentary here.

Knowing exactly how difficult their circumstances are makes the strides they take forward into health and self-reliance all the more impressive. Lately we have been excited about the new venture that many of our friends in the Philippines are becoming involved with. We’re helping Indigenous farming families to enter the organic coffee market, and the prospects for success look very good.

It’s not uncommon for farmers in Mindanao, the Philippines, to grow coffee. What’s less common is for farmers to process the coffee they have produced. Because they have to sell the raw, green beans to a middleman, they miss out on the lion’s share of the profits. We’re helping these families to roast their own coffee according to the high standard of quality that the international market demands.

It’s going to make a big difference at the end of the day. What’s also wonderful is that they are learning how best to grow large yields of coffee using sustainable practices that will replenish their land and ensure its viability over the long-term. They do not want to make a profit today and lose everything tomorrow.

Congratulations to our intrepid friends in the Philippines. They are always willing to work hard for the sake of preserving their environment, their culture, and their children’s welfare. Organic coffee is going to help them to do all of this.