Listen to the August 22 broadcast of Sundays at Five by clicking the play button below.

The WIP’s film critic Jessica Mosby joins Kate and Ali in conversation with first-time filmmaker Kiran Deol. Her new documentary film Woman Rebel tells the story of Silu, an officer in Nepal’s rebel forces, which are made up of 40 percent women. Silu is a true female change agent: by the end of the film she is transformed from rebel leader to member of parliament. Listen to their conversation about Nepal, the People’s Liberation Army, and what leadership balance has meant for the revolution and for Nepalese politics.

About the Broadcast: The WIP’s Executive Editor, Kate Daniels teams up with identical twin sister Ali Daniels to present Sundays at Five, a weekly radio broadcast on KRXA, Monterey Bay's Progressive Talk Radio station. The twins share stories and discuss topics ranging from campaign finance reform to the phenomenon of Facebook. Tune in every Sunday from 5-6 pm PDT or listen online. Podcasts of previous broadcasts are available on The WIP Talk.

Make a cup of tea and join the conversation!

There is no denying that big cities have a special attraction to most people. And New York, being one of the biggest cities in the world, has many qualities that make it unique. Not so for me at the beginning.

I came to New York in 1971 with my wife and daughter to do research in microbial genetics, a new field of research for me. Despite my having lived previously in Buenos Aires, another big city, for five years, the culture shock was tremendous for me (my wife had been here before). And it didn’t help that when we arrived we were sent to the wrong place.

The hotel our hosts –lovely people- had reserved for us had two different wings that couldn’t have been more different: one new, the other old and unattractive, full of sour, strange characters. Out hosts were unaware of this disparity and we ended up in the old wing. Not only was our room old but it was foul-smelling to boot, inhabited by roaches and other insects that terrified my daughter and unnerved my wife and me.

My English was extremely poor. I could manage at reading and writing it but had almost no experience speaking it. My wife, on the other hand, was an English professor who had spoken the language since childhood. These difficulties with the language, together with an unwelcoming and strange environment made me want to take a plane back home soon after I arrived in the city.

Fortunately, my wife’s common sense prevailed and we stayed, felt more used to our new surroundings and soon some friends of friends lent us an apartment before we finally rented our own. From then on we felt totally at ease with the city. New York, so harsh for me at the beginning, has become our home for almost 40 years.

The possibility to meet unusual people is one of the great attractions of a cosmopolitan city like New York which I particularly treasure. I recently had brunch with a friend at an old, wood-paneled restaurant located in the basement of a Greenwich Village hotel. The place at one time had probably seen the likes of Mary McCarthy, Allen Ginsberg, and Edmund Wilson.

As we talked about what makes New York such an interesting place I told my companion an anecdote about the city. I was returning home from dinner at a friend’s house on a frigid winter evening. There were only two people in my subway car sitting close to each other and near an end of the car: an older woman and myself.

We were both silent. She was reading a magazine and I was lost in my own thoughts when we heard a loud, repetitive noise coming from the other end of the car. Suddenly, we saw a young man coming through the door. Despite the extremely cold weather he was only dressed in shorts, a T-shirt and a huge Mexican sombrero with small hanging trinkets in it playing with a basketball as he walked from car to car. My fellow passenger and I looked at each other. Then, she said quietly “Only in New York, only in New York.”

Not to be outdone, my friend told me his favorite subway incident. After shopping the whole afternoon, he and his wife took the subway home. In front of them sat a rather disheveled man, in itself not an unusual sight in New York.

What caught my friend’s attention, however, was that the man was reading a book intently and completely oblivious to his surroundings, without bothering to lift his gaze even for a second, so enthralled was he by his book. What also surprised my friend was this man’s hostile and angry expression, which caused unease in both his wife and himself.

What could that man be reading, my friend wondered, that made him fix his attention on the book in front of him? No matter how much he tried, he couldn’t read its title. Finally, my friend’s curiosity was rewarded. Just before getting off, he was able to look at the man’s source of attention. Disheveled and angry-looking as he was, the man was reading “How to Win Friends and Influence People”.

César Chelala is a writer on human rights and foreign policy issues.

While it should never be the case that a high percentage of the Haitian population remains living in refugee camps seven months after the earthquake, still camp residents have managed to create in a few of those camps a small-scale model of the type of future society that many would like to see. This includes democratic participation by community members; autonomy from foreign authority; a focus on meeting the needs of all; dignified living conditions; respect for rights; creativity; and a commitment to gender equity.

The Petite Rivière Shelter Center (CHHPR by its French acronym) camp, near the epicenter of the earthquake outside Léogâne, contains some of those elements. For one thing, it is run by a group of women whose full attention is on the well-being and dignity of the community.

• Elizabeth Senatus is coordinator of a community-run, women-led refugee camp that emphasizes creativity and cultural expression. Photo: Beverly Bell.  •

Another notable factor is that the camp was started and remains run by Haitians, both those directly impacted and grassroots allies. Most Haitian camps are managed with the heavy involvement, if not leadership, of foreigners, either non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or individuals. Certainly, outside help has proven crucial to these displaced people who frequently struggle on the edge of survival. But in Haiti’s thousand-plus camps, that help has all too often come in the form of management that represses Haitian decision-making and participation, as well as the potential for community advocacy for a systemic response to the crisis based on justice for homeless survivors.

Part of what makes the Petite Rivière Shelter Center camp work so well is that it is composed of members of a preexistent community which relocated en masse after the earthquake. Relations are based on knowledge, if not always full trust, among individuals. The relationships have made it possible for governing committees to quickly emerge and function well, and have allowed agreement on a set of rules to maintain calm and order. Strangers trying to enter the space are questioned and may not be allowed in, thus offering security from violence and theft.

Another advantage this camp has is its physical environment; it sits in fields under a grove of lush mango trees, in a clean, quiet, rural area. Elsewhere, more than a million people are forced to lodge in smog-choked median strips amidst whizzing traffic; in remote, broiling deserts; or in overcrowded urban spaces with no sanitation or utilities. Survivors remain in these inhumane locales because neither their government nor any agency has initiated better options for them, and they have no funds to make other plans on their own.

Elizabeth Senatus is an unemployed journalist who now serves as general coordinator of the Petite Rivière Shelter Center. Below is her description of how the camp functions.

This camp started on January 12, the day of the earthquake. In shock, everybody in the area went to sleep in a field without sheets or anything. They spent three days like that, affected emotionally and psychologically because of the strong aftershocks. Some people were scared because of the rumors that it was the end times, that God was coming. Some didn’t even bother to find out if their houses were collapsed or if they had people who died; they just went to the field. After four days, they came to this area under these mango trees; they made little houses out of sheets.

I heard that these people were abandoned and humiliated. I use my leadership and met two or three friends who were from Léogâne. We decided we couldn’t let this situation continue. I asked them to help form this committee, and that’s how we started.

One thing that makes this camp different from most others is that we formed the management committee - not an NGO but young volunteers who believe that Haiti is a country like any other. What’s also different here is the close collaboration between the members of the committee. It has 16 members; I’m the general coordinator and we also have a general secretary, plus coordinators of other committees like human rights and civil protection, public relations, communications, and evangelism. We didn’t wait for people to come give us orders; we organized it.

The camp management committee was formed by invitation quickly because we were in an emergency situation. It wasn’t a favorable time to have elections because it was a disaster.

We’ve used what resources we have. We don’t wait for millions to arrive, we just create. There’s lots of creativity. We’ve done extraordinary things with the means we have at hand. That’s how we established a children’s space, for example. There are Canadian military who were building an orphanage behind us, and another woman and I went and asked them for materials for the children. They gave materials, some tools, and a case of blue plastic tarps. CARE gave us tarps to create a children’s space, too, and a podium. We used cement blocks from the collapsed houses to build that space. We use that space for dancing and theater, too.

We borrowed a drum from a vodou priest. We had people dancing with the drum, like an old lady who lost her son. You know in Haiti, folklore is a big deal. The drum is the sign of music and the sign of happiness; it allows people to recreate. The drum makes everybody dance; even if you have problems, you dance. We started the folkloric group dancing like this in the ancient way, everybody dancing and singing like crazy with no control. We had kids who went down to dance for May Day by the sea; we even signed a contract with a team from Canada for one of the little girls to go to participate in a cultural event in Canada in August.

We had people living in misery under little sheets. You know the world was seeing Haiti’s image through little sheets. And it kept raining. People from elsewhere asked me, “Elizabeth, how can they survive like this?” I said, “It’s all because of the drum.”

At that time we had more than 150 people, and every time it rained all the people had to go like sardines under one big tarp that someone had borrowed to create a health center. So we used the tarps the Canadians gave us to create spaces for kids to sleep with their parents. Later MUDHA [the Movement of Dominican-Haitian Women] approached an international agency and helped us find tents.

Besides the drumming and dancing, we do theater to help people’s state of mind, popular theater that expresses what’s happening in the community. We help farmers organize, we have a women’s group, we have an education space for kids because a lot of schools were destroyed and some of the kids had never gone to school. We don’t follow the same pedagogy as a formal school because we lack the means. We do something like the club where the kids can learn and recreate. We have workshops [like jewelry-making] where people learn skills that can help them economically.

We made uniforms for May 18 [Flag Day], and with our sense of patriotism we went to the street. The kids wore red and blue uniforms [the colors of the Haitian flag] to give a lesson to hypocritical NGOs and an apathetic state who’s not responding to our needs. We showed them that what our ancestors left us as our heritage, we still have it. The kids marched in the street, singing the national anthem, and everyone – parents, people from the diaspora, students and teachers from other schools – accompanied us in the streets. People thought that the organizing had to have been done by a big school in Léogâne; they couldn’t believe that a camp of displaced people could do that.

Like I said, we use whatever resources we can find. For example, for the dance trainer and the two drummers, we pay their transportation fees to come here by motorcycle. We collect money between ourselves to do it because we don’t have money from NGOs or from the government. We’ve never even been visited by a government representative, not even once after January 12. We’ve told other camps with committees not to wait with a begging bowl but to create, to go out looking for what they need.

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The women’s organization Shining Star came about when I sat down with several women who were dancing together. They exchanged about their lives, about what they used to do when they went to the market together. Men were sitting around not participating, so one afternoon I said to the women, “Why don’t we form a women’s organization?” We did it. Our first activity was for Mother’s Day, with all the mothers of the camp. CARE helped us find 200 gifts for 200 mothers. We also got support from a German mobile clinic and MUDHA. We did theatre; the mothers were in it. The kids and adults danced, and we had a buffet where everyone ate. This was Shining Star’s first action as a women’s organization.

The women of Shining Star are shadow advisers to the camp committee. Most of the camp committee is women, too; the men are a little apathetic. You know that society is made up of men and women and we need the balance, but you also know that Haitian women are really put down. It has taken so much effort for women to become doctors and lawyers and such. We want to hold that balance. But we don’t exclude the men.

We know that in this camp, within the families under the tents, women are being abused by their husbands. This is the reality even though these same women stand up when we do women’s activities.

[Regarding rape] I would say this area is calm. The residents were living together before. They know each other, there are things they won’t do. If something like a rape of a woman or girl were to happen, it would be by someone from somewhere place.

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We have a mission here to prevent children and young girls from falling into danger. We don’t allow young girls to have their own tents here that would attract young men and facilitate rape. Here kids stay with their parents in their household. That’s how we try to limit sexual violence.

I think it’s true that the role women play in this camp make it different, but I don’t think that male chauvinists see it that way. Frankly, if we didn’t have a group of women in this committee we would have failed already. Holding together people who are living under a piece of sheet, homeless, is not easy. The men are crossing their arms and waiting. The women get dressed and go out to see what resources we can find, while the men are waiting to see what we bring back.

We’ve done so much with this site. When we look at the conditions in some of the camps in Port-au-Prince, we’d have to say that we’ve created a model for how things could be in camps. Others could look at our way of organizing the camp and use it to do something in a bigger scale. We think that our camp could form part of the dream for national reconstruction.

It’s about understanding, patience, educational, training. It’s also about wisdom, credibility and all that to succeed. Yes, you could say we’re a model.

Many thanks to Agathe Jean-Baptiste for translating this interview.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

The 1988 massacre in Iran and the repetition risk of another catastrophe is a serious international concern. We need global support to to save the life of present political prisoners in Iran among them many women who are the first victims of such atrocities. This is call upon all to awaken consciousness throughout the world to help to prevent another catastrophe.

In Iran’s history, the summer of 1988 represents a time of genocide and massacre of 30,000 political prisoners. Yet to this day, human rights violations and arbitrary executions are continuing in Iran. Due to the appeasement policy and concessions towards Tehran’s mullahs, however, the international community has kept silent regarding this genocide.

The Iranian regime carried out the most ruthless massacre of political prisoners in Iran’s modern history, genocide by the definition, under the direct order of Khomeini. The purpose of this horrendous crime was to confront the regime’s defeats in its 8 year war with Iraq. This plan was in preparation for many years and implemented by the ‘Death Committee’. Currently, Khomeini’s successors have begun a new crime to once again rebuff the existing crisis of the regime. The Iranian regime’s judiciary chief has issued 1120 death sentences and due to international revelations and human rights condemnations, this issue is on hold anticipating Khamenei’s personal admission. (Nedaye Sabz Website, 9 August 2010 – The Nedaye Sabz Azadi reporter has learned the judiciary chief has written a secret letter to Ali Khamenei asking for permission to execute 1120 prisoners.)

Tehran and prisons like Evin and Gohardasht were the epicenter of this killing spree in 1988. The regime’s ‘Death Committee’ was obligated to employ this crime against more than 30,000 political prisoners in Iran’s prisons. The members of this committee are currently sitting in high posts in Ahmadinejad’s government. No prison, city or village was exempted from this massacre. The ‘Death Committee’ visited each and every prison and determined the fate of every single political prisoner and PMOI supporter. After 22 years, the dimension and mysteries of these horrific killings, neither in magnitude nor in manner, have not been revealed.

Thousands of families in Iran are still unaware of their loved ones destiny. The Iranian regime has never to this day informed the families of the thousands of political prisoners that were executed and buried in mass graves across the country. The prisoners’ names and specifications were all registered, each of them having received jail sentences. Many of the executed prisoners had finished serving their jail sentenced yet the regime had refused to release them. According to witnesses (who are ready to testify in any international courts) from inside the prisons, in some nights 350 prisoners were sent to the gallows. For example, the head of Mashhad’s Vakil Abad Prison said during a telephone call, “Those in Mashhad’s prison have been finished off.”

This unprecedented and horrendous killing spree took place under the written fatwa, daily orders and direct supervision of Khomeini himself. During the weeks that this massacre was taking place, all the Revolutionary Guards and prison officials were on high alert and other than just one telephone line provided for the ‘Death Committee’, there was no other means of communication. The IRGC members and prison guards and officials were forced to take part in the killings to have a part in the genocide, not allowing the chance to disclose the secrets to the outside world.

Only a limited number of prisoners who witnessed various scenes are alive today. A number of witnesses lost their sanity after witnessing such horrifying scenes, not being able to speak about the atrocities for months. Among these witnesses, a few have been able to depart from Iran and are currently living in Camp Ashraf in Iraq. Many of those executed were under the age of 18 and 58% were under the age of 30. Many families that are living in Camp Ashraf today have lost 3 to 10 members of their family during this massacre. The Shojaii family lost 12 of its loved ones.

Of course, the information gathered about this massacre is very incomplete and limited. The dimensions of this atrocity were so enormous that Montazeri, Khomeini’s successor and Iran’s 2nd religious figure at the time, wrote a letter to Khomeini objecting to this massacre. Becoming furious, Khomeini relieved him of his post and sentenced him to house arrest for the rest of his natural life. Ayatollah Montazeri passed away last year just a few days before the Ashura uprising in Iran. Currently, a region in Tehran containing a number of mass graves of the massacred is named Khavaran and has become a place of worship for the Iranian people. Political prisoner Ali Saremi, whose death sentence for visiting his son in Ashraf has been recently approved was arrested and tortured after appearing in Khavaran in South Tehran. There he paid tribute to the massacred and spoke in commemoration of the martyred victims.

Today, after 22 years and following the Iranian nation’s uprising during the last year, the eyes of the world has opened to just a small portion of the crimes committed against the Iranian people. An international campaign led by the Iranian Resistance, with political, parliamentary and legal figures in Europe and the US taking part, has called for an investigation of this crime against humanity and the trial of those involved in this genocide that is continuing to this very day. The current government posting officials of the Iranian regime are the torturers and those responsible for this vast crime. Witnesses of these crimes, inside or outside Iran, and especially in Ashraf, have announced their readiness to take part and testify in this regard in any court. Keeping the public opinion around the world informed of what actually occurred is a humanitarian duty to prevent the reoccurrence of genocide in Iran. It will without a doubt place the international community alongside the Iranian people that are victims to horrific oppression every day. Coinciding with international sanctions against the Iranian regime and the Revolutionary Guards, human rights condemnations are required to fulfill the pressure needed to bring change in Iran.

Azam Haj Heidari is an Iranian female prisoner of conscience who has witnessed women’s torture and ill-treatments in the Iranian Mullahs’ prisons. She is the author of a book called "The Price of Remaining Human", that was recently published in Europe.

By Molly Theobold

As climate change worsens, and fresh water availability grows more erratic, the food security of small-scale farmers throughout Africa will increasingly depend on their water management abilities. Luckily, the tools for improving water management already exist. But, as a recent report from the Rockefeller Foundation notes, the key to getting these tools to the people who need them the most will be making sure that the funding, donor, and policy-making community understands what they are and why they need more support.

• As climate change worsens, and fresh water availability grows more erratic, the food security of small-scale farmers throughout Africa will increasingly depend on their water management abilities. Photo credit: Bernard Pollack •

On the ground, there are countless groups working to help farmers improve water management techniques and gain access to improved water management technologies. Many of these organizations will be highlighted in State of the World 2011: Innovations that Nourish the Planet as deserving of more resources and funding from the donor and policy making community in order to alleviate global hunger and poverty.

In Accra, Ghana the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), a non-profit organization working in Asia and Africa to improve water and land management for farmers and the environment, received funding from several groups, including the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) initiative, Challenge Program for Water and Food, to work with urban farmers in Ghana to develop improved farm wastewater management. Because of lack of alternate options, farmers often use wastewater to irrigate their crops and clean their vegetables. But IWMI is working to help these farmers clean the water they have, as well as conserve it, improving sanitation, crop yields and livelihoods.

In Zambia, International Development Enterprises (IDE), an organization working to improve the livelihoods of farmers in Asia and Africa through improved agricultural technology and market access, is helping families improve their livelihoods, eat balanced meals, and afford education for their children with a single technology: a treadle pump. The pump makes irrigating larger pieces of land easier and improves crop yields, allowing farmers to diversify and increase their harvest, and increasing a surplus that can be sold at local markets for a profit. (See also: Access to Water Improves Quality of Life for Women and Children)

And in Ethiopia, a farmer-priest named Kes Malede Abreha was able to develop a water management system on his farm with the help of funding from the global, NGO-initiated organization, Prolinnova. His system has allowed his family to move from a one room house to a larger home where he is now able to grow a diversity of crops, and raise chickens, cattle, goats, and bees. (See also: Persistently Innovative: One Farmer Teaches by Example)

He is also showing farmers in the community how small investments in technology, like those outlined in the Rockefeller report, can go a long way to improving a family’s quality of life.

To read more about innovations that improve small-scale farmer water management see: Getting Water to Crops, Water Harvesting, Slow and Steady Irrigation Wins the Race, and Weathering the Famine.

The goateed face of Fred Thompson, Law and Order actor, one time senator, and failed presidential candidate doing tax-hating video bites to preserve the deficit bloating Bush tax cuts is the latest in a series of right-wing maneuvers to promote factional greed and ignorance. Video bites like Fred’s are a principal source of public information and no counter-bites have appeared.

Where is the immediate response strategy of the ’08 Obama Campaign? It may be beneath presidential dignity for Obama to return to the campaign trenches. So send a stand-in with equivalent or greater visibility to Fred Thompson’s to educate the country about who is and who isn’t going to pay more taxes if the Bush tax cuts are not extended. The faction bearing the income tax increase is Americans earning more than $250,000. Why shouldn’t they? “With taxes” Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, “we buy civilization.”

It is delusional to forget that an unscrupulous right-wing enemy has been waging a media war against democrats and progressives since Obama took the oath of office. It’s time to bite back.

The recent statements by Gen James Jones, President Obama’s national security adviser that the door is open for President Obama to meet with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad if the Iranians agree to resume talks with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) regarding their nuclear program could break the impasse in the situation with that country. President Ahmadinejad should eagerly take this opportunity to present Iran’s position to President Obama and improve relations with the U.S.

“There is no point in a theatrical meeting,” stated Gen Jones in an interview with CNN. “One thing they must do is return our three hikers. That would be an important gesture. It could lead to better relations.” Improved relations are now more necessary ever, given the controversy created by the start-up of the Bushehr nuclear power plant. The conditions under which the plant will start providing energy to Iranian cities could become a model for other nuclear plants in the country devoted to peaceful purposes.

Russia has pledged to safeguard the site and prevent spent nuclear fuel to make nuclear weapons and the U.S. State Department released a statement indicating that it does not see the fueling of Iran’s first nuclear power plant in Bushehr as a “proliferation risk.” The Obama administration, hoping to lower the prospects for an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities, has assured Israel that it would probably take a year or even longer for Iran to develop a nuclear weapon.

That is not Israel’s position, however. “World powers must strengthen pressure against Iran to comply with international decisions, stop its activities in uranium enrichment and heavy water plants, and respond to the criticism against it,” said a statement issued by Israel’s foreign ministry. However, Israel itself has refused to sign the Non Proliferation Treaty and is widely assumed to have an arsenal of between 100 and 200 hundred nuclear weapons.

In September of 2009, the General Conference of the IAEA called on Israel to open its nuclear facilities to IAEA inspection and adhere to the non-proliferation treaty as part of a resolution on “Israeli nuclear capabilities.” “Israel will not co-operate in any matter with this resolution,” declared the chief Israeli delegate to the conference.

As a signatory of the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), Iran has a right to develop nuclear energy for peaceful use. Iran’s officials have stated that Iran will accept that monitors from the IAEA have access to the fuel shipments at Bushehr, located 745 miles south of Tehran. IAEA officials were at the site last Saturday as the first truckloads of fuel were moved from a storage site to a “pool” inside the reactor, part of the agreement with the Iranian authorities.

This happens at the same time that international media and neoconservative figures in the U.S. continue beating the drums for a war against Iran. That is the case of former U.S. ambassador to the UN John Bolton. In what can only be described as an irresponsible statement, Bolton stated that Israel had a window of opportunity of eight days to attack Bushehr’s nuclear reactor. What Bolton and other neoconservatives in Washington refuse to acknowledge are the tremendous consequences that such a move by Israel would entail, including dragging the U.S. into the confrontation.

Ahmadinejad’s ranting against Israel cannot be a justification for a war against that country. At the same time, he cannot afford to lose this opportunity and take Gen James Jones offer by immediately releasing the three U.S. hikers it is keeping under detention and engaging in serious diplomatic talks with the U.S. At stake is not only Iran’s nuclear program, but a safer world as well.

Dr César Chelala, a co-winner of an Overseas Press Club of America award, writes extensively on human rights and foreign policy issues.

With the motto “Providing a preferential option for the poor in health care,” Partners in Health offers an unusual model of health care provision. Its mission is both medical and moral.

Partners in Health is widely recognized as changing the potential for health for low-income people and countries throughout the world. Partners in Health’s extraordinary success comes from its philosophies regarding health and justice, which include a belief in the power and dignity of the patient; a commitment to health care as a human right; and an understanding that true health for the poor can only come through challenging the poverty which causes so much illness. The success of the group also comes from the zeal with which it pursues its philosophies through hands-on medical and social care in several countries.

• Partners in Health provides free health care in eleven hospitals and four displaced people's camps  throughout Haiti. Photo courtesy of Partners in Health. •

In a rare interview, Loune Viaud tells about Partners in Health’s Haiti program, Zanmi Lasante, or Friends of Health. Loune serves as Director of Operations and part of the strategy and planning team in Haiti.

Beverly Bell: Tell us about Partners in Health, how it constitutes an alternative in health care and especially how its philosophy has contributed to bringing about another model of care in Haiti.

Loune Viaud: We started in Haiti more than 25 years ago. We realized right away that you can’t talk about health without talking about the social aspects of health: justice and rights. That’s why we try to embrace a lot of social elements underlying health. When a patient is sick, we don’t see the sick person only, we see the environment and community they came from. After they leave the hospital and go back home, will they have water to drink? Do they have a place to live? Do they have food to eat? Can they send their children to school? Do they have work? We try to touch on all of it: job, home, nutrition, malnutrition, agriculture. We try to touch on schooling and sanitation, meaning potable water.

That’s why we don’t just consider ourselves a health organization, although we have a big medical team: doctors, nurses, pharmacists, lab technicians, etc. We also have community health workers, outreach agents, and agricultural agents who live in the communities and strengthen those communities.

BB: We know that Partners in Health’s work is not only a social program, that it’s tied to the idea of transformation, to the idea that as long as people are living with injustice and inequality they won’t enjoy good health. I understand that people that in the village of Cange, where Partners in Health has been for so many years, really trust the group, and that this is one of the reasons you’ve have better success with people following HIV/AIDS treatment programs than even the National Institute for Health. How is power connected to the issues of treatment and the relationship to the patient?

LV: I don’t want to start rejoicing about what you call success because we still have a lot of work to do. It’s forward, forward, forward. Matter of fact, every time we see the numbers going down, we make more efforts to see if we can get them to zero.

I can’t say that we change the lives of the people completely, but we’ve seen improvement.
Let’s take for instance an HIV patient. We know that if that person can’t afford medicine, can’t eat, can’t send their kids to school, doesn’t feel that they’re heard as a person and seen only as a patient, that person’s not going to get well. But when people are sick and know that they can count on an organization to help them send their children to school, then they can concentrate on improving their lives, which means taking their medications. When people are sick and know they don’t have to keep on drinking the river water they used to drink but can drink potable water instead, when they don’t have to live in a straw hut in poor sanitary conditions and get bitten by mosquitoes anymore… even though physically they’re not totally well, morally they know that they’re recognized as a human being.

I think what makes us successful is our accompaniment program. Take tuberculosis, a disease of poverty. When a person comes in and tests positively for tuberculosis, what we do is send an accompanier to visit that person’s home to see the social conditions they’re living in. If that person sees they need a new house, we work with the community to get them a house that, as we say, can’t fool the rain. In terms of water, we set up filters or other catchment and treatment systems. The accompanier goes to visit the sick person each day, assures that the patient takes their medications, assures that if the patient has a problem that he or she listens. Even if the accompanier can’t solve the problem, the very fact that the person can talk about it and someone can listen without judging is really important.

Well, at that point, if the accompanier can’t solve the problems by him or herself, he or she will go talk to the supervisor in the hospital. The accompanier becomes an advocate for the sick.

Health also goes alongside education. Early on we realized that the best thing we can do in a community is to send children and the youth to school so that they don’t spend their time in the streets. What we did, starting in Cange, was to create a school with trained teachers, books, and at least one hot meal for the kids so they can concentrate and study. The parents don’t have to worry about where they’ll find money to pay. Now we have 15 schools throughout the Plateau Central. We have thousands of students, children who go to study, sometimes just primary school if that’s what the town has, though in Cange the school goes up to 12th grade.

We also send young people to study in universities in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, or we send them to study nursing in [the Haitian towns of] Léogane and Gonaives. We help them find scholarships to go to Europe for specialized studies.

BB: From the perspective of Partners in Health, what do Haitians need to be a people with good health?

LV: Access. One of the things that really frustrates me and makes me mad is to find someone who’s walked eight or ten hours to get to our hospital in Cange, sometimes in terrible pain. For that person to go through what it takes to get there, you can imagine how advanced the sickness must be. Sometimes it’s almost too late. If that person could stay where they lived, they could go to the clinic or the dispensary early on, without having to go far from the community.

That’s what people need: access to care. But I’m not just talking about access through proximity. It’s not just about building a hospital or a health clinic nearby and then asking people to pay. If the care or the medication is expensive, the people won’t get it.

It’s access, access, access. It’s the right of people to heath care when they need it, drinking water, sanitation. If you offer these things that are far away or that people can’t pay for, it doesn’t serve them. They have the right to have their needs met, quantitatively and qualitatively.

BB: So does that mean that everything that Partners in Health does is free of charge?

LV: I always avoid saying that our services are free. Health care is expensive. Someone pays. But not the poor, because they can’t afford it. We don’t want the poor to pay with the little that they have. We don’t want them to say, ‘’I don’t have money, so I’m not going to the doctor.’’ We don’t ever want that to happen.

People pay with what they have. Sometimes they carry on their heads bananas, fruits they grow, they bring a chicken, you understand. They bring what they can so that they can pay. But we always struggle that it’s not the poor who pays for the care.

BB: If we’re looking at structural change, we know that at the end of the day it can’t be done through NGOs, in Haiti or anywhere else. NGOs can’t replace the state. But all of us who know Haiti know that right now the state isn’t fulfilling or can’t fulfill its responsibility. Are you doing advocacy vis-à-vis the state to make it assume its responsibility to the citizens, now or in the future?

LV: The state is the one who’s in place, legally, to respond to the needs of the people. What Partners in Health tries to do is to collaborate with the state so that if there’s weakness in one aspect, we can reinforce its efforts, so that down the road it can better meet its responsibility.

We always say that the Ministry of Health is our most important partner. We realized a long time ago that it doesn’t make sense for us to do our own little efforts apart, to build our own hospital or clinic or even separate schools. We insure that everything we do supports and reinforces the Ministry of Public Health, the Ministry of Education, and the Ministry of Agriculture. If there were a Ministry of Housing or Water, we’d support them, too. We don’t invest in separate efforts.

Apart from [Partners in Health’s hospital in] Cange, we work with ten public hospitals. We started supporting the Ministry of Health in these hospitals in 2002. And then, we’ve started building what’s going to be one of Haiti’s best hospitals, in Mirebalais. It will have a training program for residents in a partnership with national medical school. That’s twelve hospitals where we’re working, in all.

For the most part, we’re strengthening the state-run hospitals. But when you take, for instance, the hospitals in [the towns of] St. Nicolas and St. Marc, really Partners in Health provides a lot of staff. We pay for salaries and equipment. We’re really part of managing the hospital with the Ministry.

BB: Please tell us about what’s happened since January 12th. Partners in Health has played an important role after the earthquake, assuring that at least some people have received the care that they need.

LV: January 12th came upon us without warning. We started clinics in four [internally displaced people’s] camps. We have almost 400 employees - doctors, nurses, lab technicians, pharmacy technicians – that we’ve hired since January 12th to provide medical services in these camps.

One of the first things we did after the earthquake was to start supporting the government in the largest hospital, the University Hospital [also known as the General Hospital]. We provided and coordinated volunteers; we came with medications and equipment that they needed. There are fewer and fewer volunteers coming now, but our work continues so people can get the care they need in a hospital, with dignity.

We haven’t signed anything officially with the Ministry of Public Health. It’s really an engagement with the directors of the University Hospital to support the place. We’re not managing it. It falls into our line of work to support what the Ministry is doing.

Also, with other partners we’re creating a foundation, Friends of the University Hospital, to really rebuild the hospital and make it into what it should be. We’re working with the national medical school, too, so students can get training there.

BB: If I understand correctly, Loune, you weren’t trained in health care or management. You came to help at Partners in Health and you got your “doctorate” on the job.

LV: I’ve been at Partners in Health for 22 years. When you start working here, you enter a vocation. You have to love it to do it because it doesn’t pay very much. You do it because you truly believe in the human being. We at Partners in Health treat every person as though it were our own sister, brother, mother, child.

BB: I’m guessing you have a great need of funding.

LV: Like I said, this work is expensive. We’re always looking for people to help pay so the poor don’t have to. We’re looking for partners, as our name implies - as long as they share the philosophy and understand what we’re trying to do. Alone we can’t do this work. It’s the work of many hands. If you look at our logo, it’s hands together.

To support Partners in Health’s work in Haiti, please click here.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

“Should government change for the people or people change for the government?” This question posed by a professor in Sierra Leone serves as a major source of friction in this post conflict society.

In developing a new governance system, Sierra Leone struggles to reconcile traditional, tribal ideologies with Western, democratic principles encouraged by the international community. During a recent visit, I experienced the struggle to reconcile these systems. This struggle hinders continued development, particularly for women and youth, whose disenfranchisement was a root cause of the Eleven Year War. If the two, opposing systems are not rectified, then lasting peace may not be a guarantee in Sierra Leone.

• A poster in an NGO office. Photograph by Meredith Sullivan Benton. •

Many Sierra Leoneans see this as a struggle between Western ideas infringing upon the domestic culture. One Sierra Leonean describes democratization as “using the white man’s forms to change our traditions, taking the white man’s money to change our culture.” The two judicial and election systems embody this conflict between Westerners and Sierra Leoneans.

In relation to the prior, regional and national courts adjudicate national law violations. These courts’ judges are monitored by the national government and international organizations. While the effectiveness of this monitoring is debatable, some semblance of a system exists. In contrast, chiefs mediate issues related to local and customary law. With little infrastructure to oversee these under systems, corruption abounds. Chiefs often require payments from the parties, ruling in favor of the party who pays more. The meetings are informal and lack national government or community oversight. Since women and youth likely do not make an independent income, they are less able to provide the needed fees to win favor. While many were already victims of injustice during the war, they now find that the new government for which many fought perpetuates their continued victimization.

The dichotomy is further evidenced in the election systems. For national elections, all citizens over the age of 18 can vote. In contrast, only citizens who pay a certain amount of taxes participate in the local chieftain elections. As many youth and women do not have an income source to pay taxes, they are frequently excluded from the local elections. One source stated that “youth sing songs of praise to communicate their preference” to those who can vote. This problem is further exacerbated by the encouragement of the international community to decentralize the government, giving more power to local officials. Thus, women and youth have little say in electing those making the most decisions about their daily lives. As NGO’s push for decentralization and democratization, they need to be aware and cautioned that the two are conflicts under the current system.

The disenfranchisement not only exists for youth and women as voters, but also as candidates. The constitution requires elections be held according to “tradition”. While tradition is not defined in the constitution, many interpret it to mean that women cannot participate in elections because they are not members of the political secret society. Secret societies are popular social institutions in which most citizens participate. One secret society teaches boys how to hunt and be a husband. Another teaches women their role as wives, in which the initiation ceremony includes female genital mutilation. Another secret society prepares tribal and political leaders. Membership in the latter requires having a blood relation to former leaders. Oftentimes, this society excludes women. Without being a member, one cannot run for election. The enforcement of this provision does vary geographically, with some areas electing women to positions and others preventing women from being elected.

During the last election cycle, Elizabeth Kumba Simbiwa Sorgboh Torto challenged this custom, pursuing election as paramount chief. Her lineage was not challenged as her father was a paramount chief. However, because she was not a member of the toro, the political secret society, her candidacy was challenged. While the toro won and she was deemed ineligible, the issue garnered international attention. Many in Sierra Leone are now pushing for stripping “traditional” from the constitution and requiring that 30% of all elected positions be filled by women. Accomplishing these goals will be difficult. As one Sierra Leonean stated, “The chieftancy is very close to the hearts of people in this part of the world.” So close that one democratization and good governance advocate who will be a candidate in a future paramount chief election stated that he would not support all voters over the age of 18 voting in his chieftancy election. “I would continue the traditional election model even if I was elected paramount chief.”

In the case of Sierra Leone, it appears that both the government and the people need to change. The government needs to embrace equality and maintain basic human rights while still paying homage to the culture’s past. The government should also ensure that judicial and election systems are transparent, provide universal rights, protect all citizens, and have appropriate oversight. In contrast, the people need to acknowledge the conflicts between the dueling judicial and electoral systems. They should seek new solutions, creating a government truly of, by and for the people of Sierra Leone. I hope that the international community will support efforts from both the people and the government. I fear that if both systems continue under the status quo, then lasting peace may not be in Sierra Leone’s future.

Meredith Sullivan Benton was in Sierra Leone for a two-week course led by Dr. Pushpa Iyer of the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Meredith's blog is part of a series of reflections by Dr. Iyer and her students on the challenges to building peace in this war-ravaged country. -Ed.

Meredith Sullivan Benton is pursuing a Masters in Public Administration and International Management at the Monterey Institute of International Studies and is currently an intern in the Democracy Program at the Carter Center. Her career includes working as an Assistant Commissioner, Legislative Liaison and Policy Chief in the administration of Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen, serving as an aide to U.S. Senator Fred Thompson, and being a founding partner in the Tennessee Office of Southern Strategy Group. Benton graduated Magna Cum Laude from Pepperdine University with a Bachelor of Arts in International Studies and Intercultural Communication.

By Molly Theobald

Before Kenya’s independence, the Migori District’s economy was driven by the Macalder Mining Company, the area’s largest employer. When the company shut down in 1966, it left behind a lot of abandoned land—and a lot of unemployed miners. These miners, some of whom bought up land from the closed-mining company, continued, for the most part, to mine for gold. But the work became increasingly dangerous as gold deposits shrunk over time and miners were forced to go deep into abandoned mines to look for what little gold was left.

Many of the miners were poor in gold but rich in land. Yet, without proper training and an appreciation for the business potential of farming, they continued to return to the empty mines despite dwindling profits.

• CNFA provides farmers with the training and tools to turn their farms into businesses. Photo credit: Bernard Pollack •

In 2007, CNFA, a non-profit organization that emphasizes access to the private sector as a means of improving livelihoods and creating economic growth, and its Kenya affiliate, Agriculture Market Development Trust (AGMARK), set out to help miners develop new skills and improve their livelihoods.

CNFA provided improved seeds and fertilizers, as well as training in new methods of farming. CNFA also connected farmers with input suppliers and markets for their produce. The organization connected one former-miner-turned-farmer, James Adiang, with the Ministry of Agriculture which advised him to start growing tomatoes, watermelon, kale, butternuts, beans, soya beans, green grains, banana and potatoes. In just over two years’ time, James was able to purchase more land and livestock, as well as take up bee keeping.

“I became a gold miner on a full-time basis for over 10 years, and frankly speaking, it was like chasing after the wind because there was nothing I could show off,” James said in a CNFA case study. “Occasionally I used to get some unrefined gold particles which I sold to gold agents or brokers at a price of between Ksh. 150 to 500. The hope of some day digging big pieces of gold and instantaneously become rich is what kept me coming back and digging for all those years.

Now James sees the promise of financial security in agriculture. And he is sharing his new knowledge with the community. He has hosted CNFA-facilitated field days and demonstrations on his farm and hopes to use the business training he’s received to become an agrodealer, providing farm inputs and information for the local area.

James hopes that he can help his “community through education and demonstration to embrace agriculture as a better and sustainable alternative [to gold mining to improve] livelihood, food security and household income.”

To read more about how access to farmer training, tools and a market can improve livelihoods, see: Bringing Inputs to Farmers, ECOVA MALI: Building Home Grown Knowledge, New Frontier Farmers and Processor Group: Reviving Farmland and Improving Livelihoods, The Abooman Women’s Group: Working together to Improve Livelihoods, It’s All About the Process and Turning the Catch of the Day into Improved Livelihoods.

Listen to the August 15th broadcast of Sundays at Five by clicking the play button below.

In this week’s broadcast of Sundays at Five, Kate and Ali interview Mary Mangwiza Manyusa from Malawi and Mary Burns of Mountain View, California. Mary Manyusa was formerly Malawi’s chief of police and has used her pension to fund the organization, Mother Mary’s Children Centre, which feeds 1200 orphans every day. Mary Burns is the founder of Kasimu Grammar School in Manyesa, where 1300 students attend elementary school. Both women provide the only nutritious meal these receive each day.

For more information about Kasimu Grammar School visit: www.kefmalawi.com
For more information about Mother Mary’s Children Centre visit: www.mmcc.mw

About the Broadcast: The WIP’s Executive Editor, Kate Daniels teams up with identical twin sister Ali Daniels to present Sundays at Five, a weekly radio broadcast on KRXA, Monterey Bay's Progressive Talk Radio station. The twins share stories and discuss topics ranging from campaign finance reform to the phenomenon of Facebook. Tune in every Sunday from 5-6 pm PDT or listen online. Podcasts of previous broadcasts are available on The WIP Talk.

Make a cup of tea and join the conversation!

Coated in red dust, we traipsed across the scorching hot sand dunes, quickly making our way towards the barely clothed, emaciated men who were sieving through endless piles of sand. The agitated workers shouted incomprehensible phrases to us, but the one that I clearly understood was, “You here to buy diamonds!”

I was frightened, and for the first time after a week of being in Sierra Leone I sensed the hostility and aggression that only eight years ago fueled a horrific civil war. I had already lost hope that we would be able to conduct an interview with the workers. The men were aggravated by our presence; surely it would be futile and dangerous to converse with them. Suddenly, a local radio journalist spoke into a cell phone and announced that we were on the air. As soon as he said this, there was a quick hush amongst the workers and the atmosphere changed from one of complete chaos to a situation where communication was possible. Giving these workers, who are ignored by society, the opportunity to talk about their circumstances was more powerful than I could have imagined. In less than a few minutes, an angry, irate and hostile environment subsided, and our different languages, cultures and backgrounds met to create a successful and respectful dialogue.

Media has become a strong tool for peacebuilding in Sierra Leone, largely as a result of the 11-year civil war. At one of our interviews, Ramatu, the Chairwoman of Women’s Action for Dignity (WAD), said, “Thank God for the war, it allowed us to say ‘yes’…. After [the war] we were empowered.” Ramatu implied that women gained increased power as a result of the devastating war, and one way that they did this was through the use of media. “Media is our focus,” says Ramatu, “we had one hour per week of free radio airing to speak on issues regarding women and children.”

According to James Ambrose of Search for Common Ground (SFCG), between 80-90% of Sierra Leoneans own a radio. Those who did not have a radio during the war quickly acquired one in order to know where the rebels were moving. During the war, media played an integral role in reaching out to otherwise unreachable groups. Civilians and NGOs began to use radio and music to create open dialogue between political enemies and put an end to violence by communicating with combatants in the bush.

• In the Search for Common Ground office in Freetown watching a radio broadcast being made. Photograph by Mary Magellan. •

Search for Common Ground (SFCG), an organization that uses radio to create national and community discourse, successfully crossed the frontlines of the rebel armies and engaged in direct communication with the combatants. SFCG convinced rebel commanders to disarm and release child soldiers. Reporters went into the bush, talked with commanders, established credibility and then gradually took truckloads of children back into civilian life. Additionally, SFCG strategically used music, an ingrained aspect of Sierra Leonean culture, as a common connector to rebuild relationships between fighting forces and in broken communities. SFCG organized Peace Festivals in which musicians crossed the fighting lines to play concerts for the rebels and local villages. “We used music to cross borders,” said James Ambrose, the director of SFCG. All of the festivals were broadcast live throughout the country and featured discussions with local representatives on issues of reintegration, gender and empowerment.

We asked SFCG, “What do you believe the causes of the civil war to be?” Director James Ambrose responded, “alienating the youth from making decisions and participating in politics, and [not] giving them opportunities to work.” SFCG has addressed these root causes by using media to reintegrate and empower youth. They established Talking Drums Studios, a multi-media production studio, to create radio and audio programs that encourage the youth to take an active role in building peace and transforming conflict. Adolescents write and sing songs, recite poems, and tell stories about the challenges they face in the aftermath of the war. Talking Drums promotes the progression of sustainable peace by encouraging citizens to apologize, forgive and heal in a safe space.

As our course title suggests, there are many challenges to peacebuilding and media is no exception. The government is trying to take over many radio stations, reduce political criticism, promote pro-government public relations broadcasting, and according to Ambrose, “manipulate populations through music.” SFCG has been resisting the government by financially supporting independent stations and encouraging the development of issue-based programming. In addition, western rap music, which was highly criticized as a cause of the civil war, remains a negative influence on youth because it spreads messages of gaining power through violence and forming gangs to resolve conflicts.

Like many tools for building sustainable peace in conflict-ridden societies, media can bring about gradual change. Radio has created a necessary space for victims and perpetrators of the war to grieve and heal; one that is not readily accessible or accepted in Sierra Leonean society. Radio programs give many people, particularly women, children and the illiterate, a voice that they never had. Radio discussions may not immediately remove the underlying causes of conflict that still remain in Sierra Leone, but slowly, over generations, it can change the nature of discourse and stimulate an open society.

Mary Magellan was in Sierra Leone for a two-week course led by Dr. Pushpa Iyer of the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Mary's blog is part of a series of reflections by Dr. Iyer and her students on the challenges to building peace in this war-ravaged country. -Ed.

Mary Magellan is a master's student in International Policy Studies with a concentration in Conflict Resolution at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Her regional focus is Western Africa. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Global and Political Studies from Bard College in New York, worked in international development in Washington, DC and lived in France for two years to work abroad and improve her French language skills. Mary hopes to work on gender and youth development in the field of conflict resolution upon graduation in May 2011.

Last month I Fortunately got the chance to confront with the unfortunate situations. May be because of my passion of travelling and observing the situation I came across the harsh reality. Which is invisible for all of us or we deliberately try to make it invisible.

At that time temperature in Rajasthan was around 480c. And I was reached at another tribal area located at Kasbanonea Gram panchayat of Shahabad block in Baran district.

"Tribal area in Rajasthan where Bheel community residing"Photograph By:Netya Sharma

Prolegomenon

This tribal area is with the population of around 600 people and here the ratio of female is more than male. It is a tribal area where Bheel communities are resided. Specialty of this tribe is that they all live in a some distance where their land is situated and where their do cropping and cultivation. This Bheel community is a migrating community from Madhya Pradesh and here they residing since from last 40 years and spending their life in this village of Purampur. They totally dependent on the agriculture and as usual on the monsoon for doing agriculture. In the off season they migrate to the cities and do the labors work over there on daily wage pay.
From many, one of the specialties of this tribal community is that they all have a great sense of satiety from what they get for their livelihood.

Infrastructure

Four hand pump and one tube well for drinking water, the color of which I already mentioned which signify that at what extent it is potable. No provision of electricity, well they themselves do not consider it as a basic necessity.

Arrangement for education

There is one primary school where 49 students enrolled. But the teacher hardly visited one or two time in a month, where children also lack interest in this irregular system of study. And it enhances the absenteeism.

Bhanu is a courageous boy of Bheel community and now reputed also. Because he is the single person from his community who recently completed his Bachelors degree. And on that time I was able to see that happiness in the eye of her mother. Who was unable to conceal her pride which I saw on her face and which was really appreciable. When I asked her mother that how are you feeling now? Than on that time tears twinkled in her eye which was the sign of happiness. And then the mother of eight children spoke enthusiastically, “I am really happy for my son, what he did something “league se hatke” in their term (something peculiar from their existing community). And then my another question from her was that what she expect now from her son? She replied, “I would like to be him in a government job. But madam; there is a cut throat competition in government jobs, degree is not enough for the government job recommendation is also one of the addendum to get this”. Well as usual I have had no answer of this question of her. (Would it have been different she was a poor illiterate (but profoundly intelligent) indigenous tribal women. Than afterwards I comprehend the situation and use to cease the matter over there.

For me it was the time to quit, but some of the questions accompanied with me that why there is a difference in color of water and why electricity was not their basic necessity?

Bhanu had to struggle hard to get education but all the tribal students are not in a condition to face out such stiff struggle nor do they have the any god mother or father or any supporter to prop and persuade them.

Then who will come to cover them?

Netya Sharma is a freelance journalist. serving as a volunteer.She recently has done one of her study in Rajasthan on "Watershed Development in tribal area with their social participation". At this peroid she travelled across various places and observed the things. Through which she pitched on the many realities and facts which she share here in this talk.

On one of my visits to Cuba on UN-sponsored health-related missions I received one of my most useful foreign policy lessons from a young Cuban. On learning that my group came from the U.S., he told us, “Americans don’t understand Cuban reality. They can get more changes in Cuba with Levi jeans than with an armed invasion.”

His commonsensical reflection is in stark contrast with the U.S. government Cuban policy. The election of president Obama raised hopes that there would be a dramatic change of policy towards Cuba. After all, in April of 2009 he had said that it was time to end “old ideologies and stale debates.”

The recent release by Havana of 20 political prisoners and its promise that it would release 32 more hasn’t elicited a commensurate reaction from the U.S. At the same time, Ricardo Alarcón, the president of the Cuban Parliament, declared that Cuba would later release all political prisoners not guilty of criminal acts. This had been one of the most critical demands of the U.S. government.

However, with the same passion that an old person still feels for a youthful love affair, the U.S. government has persisted in a policy that has brought it only derision, particularly in Latin America. The lack of benefits has been of no concern to several U.S. administrations.

Except for the U.S., the whole world perceives that Cuban policies have remained unchanged in the face of the 50 year-old embargo; nor has the embargo improved the quality of Cuban lives. Instead, it has brought enormous hardships to the Cuban people and allowed the Castro brothers to exert tighter control on the population.

Much can certainly be blamed on the Cuban government, such as repression and imprisonment of political dissenters and economic policies that have only exacerbated the Cubans’ difficult situation, many living from remittances of relatives overseas. But these policies are not worse than similar or even more punishing policies on countries such as China, with which the U.S. has normal trade relations.

Miguel Angel Moratinos, Spain’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, recently declared in Madrid that the release of Cuban prisoners may very well lead to a significant change of the European Union’s policies towards Havana. He also stated, “We will change the European Union shared position on Cuba and we expect that this will lead to a lifting of the U.S. blockade of that country.”

The Cuban government has already participated in more than 200 joint ventures with foreign corporations, although none of them is American. At the same time, there are also offices and representatives in Havana of over 500 companies from around the world. U.S. agricultural exports to Cuba reached a peak of $710 million in 2008 a small amount compared to potential sales under regular conditions. Representative Collin Peterson, chairman of the House Agricultural Committee is supporting a bill, now making the rounds in Congress, which would normalize trade with Cuba and end the embargo.

Arguably, Florida anti-Castro community would be incensed by such a change and the president would lose support of some important legislators. However, the younger Cuban Americans don’t share the older generation opinion of the conflict with Havana. Should the administration take decisive action to end the embargo it may gain the President some significant support, once its advantages become clear.

Cubans would not be the only ones to benefit. At a time of scarce and expensive energy resources, a new estimate by Cubapetróleo (CUPET) raises the oil off its shores to 20 billion bbl. in Cuba’s northwest coast. Even a smaller amount could contribute to alleviate U.S. energy needs.

To persist on the wrong course of action, one that hasn’t produced any significant results in 50 years is like following a sophomoric policy regardless of the suffering it has caused the Cuban people. It is an inexcusable policy for a superpower.

César Chelala is a co-winner of an Overseas Press Club of America award.

Listen to the August 8th broadcast of Sundays at Five by clicking the play button below.

In this week’s broadcast of Sundays at Five, Kate and Ali interview Judge Rose Mbah Acha of Cameroon’s court of appeals. In Cameroon, approximately 50,000 children are not registered at birth. This is significant because without a birth certificate children are not able to attend school. Rose envisions that every child born in Cameroon starting in the year 2011 will be registered at birth.

About the Broadcast: The WIP’s Executive Editor, Kate Daniels teams up with identical twin sister Ali Daniels to present Sundays at Five, a weekly radio broadcast on KRXA, Monterey Bay's Progressive Talk Radio station. The twins share stories and discuss topics ranging from campaign finance reform to the phenomenon of Facebook. Tune in every Sunday from 5-6 pm PDT or listen online. Podcasts of previous broadcasts are available on The WIP Talk.

Make a cup of tea and join the conversation!

By Molly Theobald

Between the years of 1975 – 1976, the Cambodian farmer, Name Name, like most farmers in the country during that time, grew vegetables and rice to feed the soldiers of the Lon Nol regime.

Using his bare hands, Name mixed the chemicals DDT, Folidol, Phostrin and Kontrin in order to keep the pests away from his crops. As a result, he suffered from strange and uncomfortable physical symptoms. Sometimes he was unable to move or feel his hands and lower arms, and he experienced pain in his lungs and heart. His short term memory was also affected. All of these symptoms often persisted for up to six months after exposure to the chemicals.

• IPM combines various strategies and practices to grow healthy crops, reduce damage from pests and minimize the use of artificial inputs. Photo credit: Bernard Pollack •

When the regime ended, Name went back to farming for himself and his family, and decided that he would do so without the use of any of the harmful chemical fertilizers that he realized are so dangerous to his health.

With training from organizations supported by the Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO) and its Regional Vegetable IPM Program in Asia—in addition to some of his own research— Name learned how to prepare botanical insecticides and organic composts from animal wastes and other materials already available on his farm. Now he is now able to avoid expensive and dangerous insecticides almost completely.

This alternative approach is called Integrated Pest Management (IPM) and it combines various strategies and practices to grow healthy crops, reduce damage from pests and minimize the use of artificial inputs. The FAO Regional IPM Program uses informal farmer training schools, facilitated by extension staff or other local farmers, to help train and implement field experiments. Local farmers learn new techniques from each other— as well as develop their own methods through facilitated field experiments—to minimize the use of chemical inputs on their farm.

In addition to raising animals and growing vegetables and rice, Name also produces several varieties of mushrooms organically which he sells at local markets. Though he does not yet receive a higher price for his organic produce, his crops are marketed to an increasingly conscious consumer base as being chemical free. And Name hopes that as awareness about the dangers of many chemical fertilizers increases, so will the value of his crops.

For now, he is happy to be producing enough food to feed his family and earn a significant portion of their income, without endangering his own health, or the health of those that enjoy his crops.

To read more about how farmers can reduce the financial –as well as environmental and health—costs of chemical inputs, see: For Pest Control, Following Nature’s Lead, Tiny Bugs to Solve Big Pest Problem, In Botswana, Cultivating an Interest in Agriculture and Wildlife Conservation, Malawi’s Real Miracle, Emphasizing Malawi’s Indigenous Vegetables as Crops, and Finding ‘Abundance’ in What is Local.

“The rebels receive more from the government than we do,” a man told a small group of us. He leaned on his crutches, one of his legs having been forcibly amputated during the war. “If we had some opportunity here, in this place, life would be better…. We don’t feel the sympathy from the government in Sierra Leone.” He trailed off and stared a thousand miles into the distance.

At the rural campus of Njala University I chatted casually with a student, answering his inquiries as to what I was doing in Sierra Leone.

“Yes, but you know we are very poor here. You have seen this,” he said leaning in close to me. “And what is it you will do for us? We need help. The government does nothing for us. We need something.”

These sentiments were hardly unique. Indeed, from nearly every community - amputee camps, rural villages, war widow groups, and children - I heard frustrations about government neglect and appeals for aid from the outside. I heard embedded in the pleas and accusations that someone or some group was being favored. Someone was getting more attention, as people saw themselves as being quite blatantly ignored and left in destitution.

• Grafton War Wounded Resettlement Camp. Photograph by Ben Mitchell. •

But where is the individual agency in Sierra Leone? How is it that after a deep legacy of exploitation - from slave traders, colonizers, diamond merchants, and neighboring dictators - there is not revulsion to outsiders and a looking inward for strength? My answer is that this is an unfair indictment. That it is precisely the legacy of exploitation that fostered a sense of dependency in Sierra Leone.

The exploitation in Sierra Leone continues. Though I should be careful not to suggest that the well-intentioned work of development actors is of the same exploitative nature as colonizers and slave traders, I see it as not unfair to consider Sierra Leone as having been exploited through aid, development, and peacebuilding initiatives. These are very much theatres of politics and donor accountability, and Sierra Leone offers a stage for the demonstration of results and impact. The country recovering from war presents a context for the implementation of development and peacebuilding strategies, and the opportunity to display the efficacy of international standards of justice.

Since the abatement of the violence of the 1990s, Sierra Leone has seen impressive investments by the international community in the form of high profile reconciliation commissions, the construction of court facilities, and most striking to me, the establishment of new communities to house the war wounded and amputees. One of these settlements had at its center a sign containing the words “Welcome to Norway,” reminding residents of their benefactor. The interventions seemed disconnected from society, too much of a handout, and too obviously foreign. I think exploitive is not too strong a word. Problems of ownership and agency are in part due to exploitation in Sierra Leone. Institutions are distant and imposed from the outside. Expectations are shaped by these patterns. Critiques of a lack of agency in Sierra Leone may be fair, but also must be sensitive to the legacy of exploitation.

“When Kono finally became accessible in 2002 I visited and got the shock of my life,” recounted David, another University student from the Freetown campus of Njala Univeristy. “The once number two center of human activity in the country had been reduced to rubble…. Koidu town and other large settlements received the brunt of the destructions having not only been burnt, but almost dug out for diamonds…. There was no light, no pipe borne water, no recognizable roads in the capital town. When I told folks in the UK I'd decided to return and work in Sierra Leone they asked if I was nuts. When I added I'd be settling in Kono, they said you're definitely nuts!”

David continued, recounting his current struggles in Sierra Leone: “It's very difficult to do charity work in the current economic climate and in such a poor country. Every day life is a struggle to raise funds for school buildings, electrification, bore holes for water, teaching aids and other equipment, salaries for staff - the list goes on and on. But one should not give up. Yet the fact remains, no one in this world can do everything by themselves; you may not be able to assist us directly, but you may know someone who knows someone who knows someone that can. If you do, kindly inform them about us.”

Just as common as the appeals for help from outside and the testimonies of government neglect were statements such as David’s - hardly indicative of a lack of agency, and all the more remarkable when considering the exploitation that Sierra Leone has known.

Ben Mitchell was in Sierra Leone for a two-week course led by Dr. Pushpa Iyer of the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Ben's blog is part of a series of reflections by Dr. Iyer and her students on the challenges to building peace in this war-ravaged country. -Ed.

About the Author: Ben Mitchell served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Albania, and has worked extensively in the domestic non-profit sector. He has studied at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa, and holds a Masters degree from MIIS, where he specialized in conflict resolution.

Children constitute principle assets of any country. Children’s Development is as important as the development of material resources and the best way to develop national human resources is to take care of children. India has the largest child population in the world. All out efforts are being made by India for the development and welfare of children. Significant progress has been made in many fields in assuring children their basic rights. However, much remains to be done. The country renews its commitment and determination to give the highest priority to the basic needs and rights of all children. Children are most vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. A lot more has to be done for the health, nutrition and education of children. It is unfortunate that girls in particular face debilitating discrimination at all stages. Therefore, specific concentration is being given to the efforts to improve the life and opportunities of the Girl Child.

Children love to grow and play under the wings of their parents and loved ones. They need our loving touch, care and guidance to nurture, just like a plant that needs soil, water and sunlight to grow. But there are some unfortunate ones who are left destitute or orphaned. Their loved ones are taken away from them by the cruel hands of nature. And sometimes, due to lack of proper supervision and guidance, these unfortunate juveniles sometimes become delinquents.

Every child has the right to live, to survive. Children are also members of our society. And it is their birth right to enjoy the basic rights, that is-
1) Right to Survival
2) Right to Protection
3) Right to Development
4) Right to Participation
Besides providing them food, clothing and shelter, we as their parents and guardians should help them to develop to their fullest- by providing proper education, vocational trainings, medical facilities and other such amenities And we should safeguard their rights and see to it that their rights are not being violated.

Legislations
There are several Legislations pertaining to children. These include the following.

1.The Child Marriage Restraint Act, 1929.

2.The Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, 1986.

3.The Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2000.

4.The Infant Milk Substitutes, Feeding Bottles and Infant Foods (Regulation of Production, Supply and Distribution) Act, 1992.

5.The Pre-Conception and Pre-natal Diagnostic Technique (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act, 1994.

6.The Persons with Disabilities (Equal Opportunities, Protection of Rights and Full Participation) Act, 1995.

7.The Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, 1956.

8.The Guardian and Wards Act, 1890.

9.The Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act, 1956.

10.The Commissions for Protection of Child Rights Act, 2005

Several policies

The National Policy for Children was adopted on 22nd Aug., 1974. This Policy lays down that the State shall provide adequate services towards children, both before and after birth and during the growing stages for their full physical, mental and social development. The measures suggested include amongst others, a comprehensive health program, supplementary nutrition for mothers and children, free and compulsory education for all children up to the age of 14 years, promotion of physical education and recreational activities, special consideration for children of weaker sections like SCs and STs, prevention of exploitation of children, etc.

The Government of India adopted the National Charter for Children which has been prepared after obtaining the views/comments and suggestions of the State Governments/UT Administrations, concerned Ministries and Departments and experts in the field.

Several schemes

Several Ministries and Departments of the Government of India are implementing various schemes and program for the benefit of children. Some of the Schemes and Program being implemented by the Ministry of Women and Child Development are as under:
Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) Scheme

Rajiv Gandhi National Crèche Scheme for the children of working mothers

There is an integrated program for juvenile justice

The program is being implemented by the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment with a view to providing care to children in difficult circumstances and children in conflict with the law through Government institutions and through NGOs. Some special features of the scheme areas:
Establishment of a National Advisory Board on Juvenile Justice
Creation of a Juvenile Justice Fund.
Training, orientation and sensitization of Judicial, administrative police and NGOs responsible for implementation of JJ Act.
Institutional care shall be used but only as a last measure by enlarging the range of suitable alternatives.

Unaddressed issue
After having all these plans and policies for savior of children there is a lacuna in the system or we can say implementation part of the plans of these schemes fails or unsuccessful only at its commencement stage.
On this situation question occurs that who will do the advocacy for these children?
The provision of the children’s court has not covered the lacunae in the Juvenile Justice Act 2000 for children in conflict with the law.
Whether the date of arrest is to be taken into account or the date of offence for the determination of age of a juvenile delinquent.
Bail for children is mandatory however serious the offence is according to the act (except some cases).
But most of the children remain in the observation homes because they are mostly migrants, orphans or are too poor and have no money to pay for their bail. Since bail is mandatory a child should be completed within a four month period. The observation home is no better than a jail and it is not a place for a child in conflict with law. The child should be kept in special home only till he attains majority. The only positive section for children in this provision is that special needs of child victims/ witnesses are to be catered for and should include familiarization of court surroundings, informing children of different role of the key person in court and permission of leading questions to children below the age of eight years by a social worker.

Writer is a freelance journalist.

This has been in New York, as in many other cities around the world, a punishing summer. On one of the first nights the weather gave us a respite, I went to a new place for dinner, a Turkish restaurant a friend had enthusiastically recommended to me. I had intended to go for several weeks but the weather didn’t help me to make a decision about it.

An Adana Kebab plate looked particularly enticing, among other things because my maternal grandmother had been borne in that city. The dish was as delightful as I hoped it would be, a real treat. I mentioned my connection to Adana to the restaurant’s owner. “Oh, Adana,” he said, “what wonderful food they have there!”

After a short walk, I was in Washington Square Park, perhaps the most famous and active park in the city, visited every day by thousands of people. Here come tourists, neighborhood folks, misfits, artists of every kind and (including con artists), and a modern curse, drug dealers and buyers. It is a truly strange but wonderfully attractive mixture of people.

I had started walking towards the center of the park when I heard some wonderful jazz music coming from an alley. As I approached, I saw a trio of a drummer, a double bass player and a saxophonist performing. There was a relatively small, but appreciative audience.

A cool breeze coming through the tall trees, a full moon and an old-fashion looking street lantern made it all look like a Magritte painting, an additional bonus to a beautiful night.

As I was listening enraptured to the music, I saw in the scant evening light a beautiful black woman slowly passing by, dancing with incredible grace to the music being played. She was followed by her companion, who was offering one dollar cold water bottles in a hush voice. She interrupted her dancing to handle the water bottles to the customers and to receive payment.

The person sitting next to me bought a bottle and paid her with a $20 bill. She took the money and handed it to her companion who continued walking without giving her back the change. “Hey,” she said to him, “it is a $20 bill!” In what seemed like a well-rehearsed act he answered laughing, “Well, everybody has to make a living, isn’t that so!”

He handed her the change, took her by her waist and now the two of them were dancing to the jazz tunes, this time to music by the legendary Brazilian musician Antonio Carlos Jobim. They danced and laughed, danced and laughed, their erotic vibes filling the atmosphere. In the meantime, the cold water bottles were waiting on the side. Beautiful music, beautiful dance, good humor. It was a moment to treasure. It was another summer evening in New York.

César Chelala is a writer on human rights and foreign policy issues.

Carine Exantus is a 22-year-old university student majoring in social communications. She lost her home, aunt, and cousin in the earthquake of January 12. In “You Need to Hear from the People: Communicating from Haiti’s Refugee Camps” (August 5, 2010),” Carine explains why she has been blogging from the internally displaced people’s camp where she now lives. Here she tells more about daily life in the camps, and why creating permanent housing for the displaced populations is essential.

• The Haitian government response to the mass displacement has been occasionally to move refugees to another set of tents, like the acres of sweltering shelters in the desert pictured here. Photo: Beverly Bell. •

I used to participate in a religious group in a church right near the National Cathedral. The group was having choir practice inside the church at the time of the earthquake. Luckily I hadn’t gone, because about fifteen young people died. We tried to regroup, and we had a priest with us who gave us psycho-social help because at that moment the group was very hard hit. And then I went back to my university to find out what had happened to other young students, asking “Is so-and-so alive? Is so-and-so dead?” We found that a lot of our friends were still alive, though there were also those who died or disappeared.

Even though we lost everything we had, we had relatives and friends who helped us however they could. Those relationships with family and friends helped us; we supported each other. And little by little we got the urgent things we needed.

We weren’t used to sleeping outside under the stars, getting soaked by the rain so that when you get up you and your clothes are drenched. That makes us feel undignified. But we realize that we who survived are privileged, so we can’t just fall into sadness and depression.

You see all these people who lost their houses who don’t have the means to build other houses. In the camp, someone who has a tent is someone who’s found someone to give them a gift; the majority of people are living in tonèl, a little shelter made of a tarp over [four sticks of] wood. They’ve taken a little wood and some nails and they’ve built a little place to live. I can’t say that this is bad because people need a place to stay and no one is doing it for them, so they’re making do the only way they can. But the authorities should have foreseen this.

Especially now that we’re in hurricane season until November… For people who don’t have a good tonèl or tent, when the rains come, they spend the entire night standing up on their two feet. After seven months, people are tired.

Everyone’s primary needs are sanitation, health, bodily needs. Water is hard to get; you have to stand in a line in the sun to get water. They put in port-o-potties, but they don’t come and clean the toilets on time, so people don’t want to use them. You have to watch and see when they’ve just finished cleaning them to use them. In my camp, there are 12 toilets in the front, 12 toilets in the back – 24 total for 4,200 people. Me, when I wake up early, I go to a friend’s house and she lets me use the shower. But in the camp, it’s people themselves who have installed showers with their scarce means, and you can’t use them: you wash just to get dirty again. People hardly use these facilities anymore. Everyone at their tent has a little plastic basin where they throw water over themselves, or they just shower in public from the basin. In my journal I wrote about this: young women suffer sexual aggression because they have to bathe in public.

For food, everybody is getting by the best they can. As far as health goes, two months later, mobile clinics started coming. But now they’re gone. If you have a problem, you have to wake up at 4:00 in the morning to go get in one of the lines in the clinic they’ve set up in the CIMO camp. Then you wait til they open at 8:00. If you’re not there by the time they open, they won’t take you. If you have an emergency problem you have to go to the general hospital, but it’s hard to get care.

The question of security? Ha! They never did anything about that and they still haven’t. Because – I was just talking about the sexual aggression that exists in the camps – there’s all kind of rape happening in the camp. There’s rape, but people don’t want to talk about it publicly because here in Haiti, someone who has been raped is traumatized, and they don’t want people to know.

There’s a lot of theft, you have to watch what you have very carefully. I remember someone gave us a gift of a little chair to sit on, just a little chair. My mother was sitting in it, and she got up to drink some water in the tent, and when she came back, the chair was gone.

Look how Champs de Mars [the giant camp in the central park] is. You can just go in and out because these were public spaces, there are no walls or gates or anything. Anyone can just frequent the camp, whether they live there or not.

Before, we used to have a very big problem. There were escapees from the national prison who put their tents [in Champs de Mars]. When the people in the camp noticed all the trouble these people were causing, they went to the police. The police paid strict attention to the camp for about fifteen days. Every night they would come and arrest some people, which diminished our problem a little.

But the biggest problem we have now from a security perspective is that people come while you’re asleep, slit the tents open, take what they need, and disappear. That hasn’t happened to us, but we’ve talked to people around us who it’s happened to.

People aren’t adapted to live in environments like this. You have to work hard not to get sick. You see children who were normal before January 12, and now you see their color has changed, they’re skinnier, they have bumps all over their skin.

The most urgent need is to move people to a more comfortable place where they won’t be under tonèl or tents anymore. The most important thing is to move them to a different place - not under a tonèl or a tent again [the current government plan involves relocation to new tents], but a better, permanent structure. Put them in little houses so each family can have a place, more or less comfortable, to sleep, to leave their things, because to live you need stability, you can’t be walking around all day with all your belongings under your arms. You have to be able to say, “That is my place, that’s where my possessions are, that’s where I sleep, that’s where my home is.”

For people to evolve, they need to live better. If people can’t sleep well, how can you expect them to think or make any effort or work? People need a normal, stable life. Can they spend the rest of their lives under a tent?

It shouldn’t be this way. When you’ve been hit like this, when you’ve lost everything, there have to be authorities who can help. But people have been left to deal with it all on their own.

I thought that this was a chance for us to think about and change all of the problems we had. It touched us in all ways, and gave us a way to think about doing things differently. But we haven’t seen anyone taking action to really help us, to put together a reconstruction plan or help us with any of our other problems.

Talking about the future is complicated. I wonder if our future isn’t in jeopardy. Because sure, you see a big international presence in Haiti, but the Haitian authorities have disappeared. Sometimes they inform you of projects they’re doing, but you never have concrete proof that they’re doing anything.

If the government were to take responsibility, I won’t say that Haiti would develop, but it would have a radical change. Every day we wake up and think “Haiti has so many problems, Haiti has so many problems.” You don’t hear about any solution, you just see the problems growing.

For [Haitians] with willingness to help… when they don’t see their personal interests supported, they let go of the common interests because they’re so preoccupied with taking care of their own lives. The people who have the means to do so leave, and go somewhere else where they can live better.

We have a lot of work to do. We need to have dialogue so we can tell the international organizations what we need, what problems we have. I’d hope that the Haitian authorities and the international community can collaborate, can have good relations to develop really useful solutions for those who have problems.

UPDATE: In an interview in last week’s article, Carine Exantus told about why she feels it’s important to blog from the refugee camp where she lives. She is not alone. A recently established mobile Telecenter currently moves between six camps, offering computers and blogging potential to as many as 60 youth. The Groupe Medialternatif, which organized the initiative, hopes to make it possible for every camp to have its own blog. You can read more about the project (in French) here.

Thanks to Laura Wagner for translating this interview.

This was my first trip to Africa. I was traveling with a group researching the challenges Sierra Leone faces in building peace since the end of its 11-year war that lasted from 1991 to 2002. I had realistic expectations for the two-week visit, and I also had high hopes for falling in love with a new place. What I was not prepared for turned out to be their expectations for my visit. It turned out those expectations were quite high.

In hindsight I am not surprised that the people in Sierra Leone expected to receive money and other aid from a white person visiting their country from the West. After all, most of the people on our flight were going to Sierra Leone to build health clinics or for other aid-related work. I was another Westerner visiting Sierra Leone, but I had a very different mission there - to understand how my research in Sierra Leone fits into the larger picture of international aid and peacebuilding.

• Children greeted us everywhere we went. Photograph by Heidi Zirtzlaff. •

In the village I was relieved to learn that the villagers had a plan for themselves. They envision building a new community center with a tin roof to replace the current grass roof, which does not last through the rainy season. The villagers also plan improvements to their mosque. I was impressed with the work that the villagers had already done to clear a “road” through the bush so that visitors like us might come. The village was the exception, though. Most of the people we met seemed used to receiving money and donations from foreigners. It felt like they had come to expect help from the outside at the expense of their own sense of responsibility and empowerment.

I am still struggling to reconcile the role of the international community with the need for true grassroots, ground up, local visioning and action. I was surprised that the expectations for a group like ours were so high, and I was disappointed that some locals are not already doing more on their own. At the same time, I witnessed that the reality in Sierra Leone is one of desperate need. How much can locals be expected to envision a peaceful and prosperous future when they cannot feed their families today? Sierra Leone’s unemployment is higher than 50%. Many children are not able to attend school. Many young adults are struggling to make their way because they came of age during the war, and had no opportunity to do more than barely survive.

There is no question that the international community has some responsibility to help the people of Sierra Leone who may not be able to help themselves. I am concerned that the current efforts are not enough. Sierra Leone is in much the same situation now as it was before the war broke out. The efforts at peacebuilding to date, while noble, have not been enough by themselves. Unfortunately, Western aid has had the negative effect of creating unsustainable expectations that have led to a perpetuation of the status quo in Sierra Leone. Well-intentioned foreign aid has led people to wait for more and more aid to come.

The reality is that aid is not enough. Real and lasting change needs to come from within the people of Sierra Leone themselves. I know the desire for change is there; I saw it in their eyes and heard it in their voices. I know the international community is ready and willing to help. If the desire for a better future could be strategically coordinated with available resources, Sierra Leone would have a bright future indeed. Conflict brings the opportunity for change, unfortunately sometimes in the most violent way. Sierra Leone has an opportunity for change now. This is the opportunity that must be taken advantage of before it slips away. It would heartbreaking for Sierra Leone to have experienced all of the conflict and not to benefit from the change it so desperately wants and needs.

Heidi Zirtzlaff was in Sierra Leone for a two-week course led by Dr. Pushpa Iyer of the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Heidi's blog is part of a series of reflections by Dr. Iyer and her students on the challenges to building peace in this war-ravaged country. -Ed.

Heidi Zirtzlaff studies international policy and conflict resolution at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, California, USA. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Wellesley College, Massachusetts, USA. Heidi has studied abroad in Moscow, Tbilisi, Reykjavik, Haiti, Sierra Leone, Strasbourg, Amsterdam and Geneva. Through her travels, Heidi has come to believe that we all have more in common than we have in conflict. It is this belief that sustains Heidi’s hope for peace and understanding, even in today’s world.

Listen to the August 1st broadcast of Sundays at Five by clicking the play button below.

In this week’s broadcast of Sundays at Five, Kate interviews WIP Contributor Alice Speri who is working in Haiti as a journalist for the Haitian Times. Alice recently wrote an article for The WIP about Haiti’s incarcerated minors – children who are imprisoned in deplorable conditions and often without trial. Many of these children are innocent. All are pre-trial. Even prison officials condemn the conditions in the prisons, but feel helpless to change the situation.

About the Broadcast: The WIP’s Executive Editor, Kate Daniels teams up with identical twin sister Ali Daniels to present Sundays at Five, a weekly radio broadcast on KRXA, Monterey Bay's Progressive Talk Radio station. The twins share stories and discuss topics ranging from campaign finance reform to the phenomenon of Facebook. Tune in every Sunday from 5-6 pm PDT or listen online. Podcasts of previous broadcasts are available on The WIP Talk.

Make a cup of tea and join the conversation!

Over the last few years, Google has been a company that understood Net Neutrality, and they staunchly supported the fight to protect the open Internet. After all, their own company was hatched and then exploded into a phenomenal success thanks to the open platform of the Internet.

With their success has come power, and along the way the start-up-turned-corporation has pledged a “don’t be evil” ethic. But now the company has trampled that pledge and turned its back on Net Neutrality. The New York Times and dozens of other news outlets have reported that Google has been negotiating with Verizon to unilaterally craft ways to tweak the underlying principle of the Internet for their own gain. Read: Erode Net Neutrality without explicitly saying it. Meanwhile, the Internet for us, the public, would change forever.

According to press reports, Google has agreed to allow ISPs to construct a new pay-for-play private Internet. But since this news broke, Google has been doing damage control by saying that they haven't "had any conversations with Verizon about paying for carriage of Google traffic." But this is sleight-of-hand. They’ve apparently come to an agreement on what is known as "managed services," or "specialized services." This scheme will ensure new online innovators will never be able to compete effectively with Google, because they will have to make due with the bandwidth scraps left over for the public Internet. Also in a stunning reversal for Google, they have agreed that no Net Neutrality rules -- not even a ban on the outright blocking of content and application -- should apply to wireless Internet access.

As Google prepares its rhetoric and smoothes out a landing pad for its plan, the company has been painting those who support true Net Neutrality as radicals who are on the fringe of public opinion, yet this is the same position Google fiercely defended and advocated for in years past. The hypocrisy here is grandiose.

Just four years ago, Google was urging Internet-users to call their lawmakers to support the bourgeoning fight for Net Neutrality. Google CEO Eric Schmidt wrote in a letter:

Today the Internet is an information highway where anybody – no matter how large or small, how traditional or unconventional – has equal access. But the phone and cable monopolies, who control almost all Internet access, want the power to choose who gets access to high-speed lanes and whose content gets seen first and fastest. They want to build a two-tiered system and block the on-ramps for those who can't pay.

And Google’s Vint Cerf said:

Allowing broadband carriers to control what people see and do online would fundamentally undermine the principles that have made the Internet such a success…number of justifications have been created to support carrier control over consumer choices online; none stand up to scrutiny.

Oh how the tables have turned in just a few short years. “They” now includes Google, and the “justifications” are being hatched by the company itself. Here’s Schmidt this week defending Google/Verizon’s proposal:

People get confused about Net neutrality. I want to make sure that everybody understands what we mean about it. What we mean is that if you have one data type, like video, you don't discriminate against one person's video in favor of another. It's OK to discriminate across different types...There is general agreement with Verizon and Google on this issue.

Hey Google, remember when you wrote to the Federal Communications Commission in 2007 urging them to protect Net Neutrality and the innovation and healthy competition it created on the Internet? No? Well you did, and here’s what you said word-for-word:

Unfortunately incumbents operating in today’s concentrated broadband market have the incentives and ability to discriminate against third party applications and content providers.

And:

Traffic prioritization allows the broadband provider to become an unwanted gatekeeper in the middle of the Internet. Because of the market power they currently employ, broadband providers have the technical ability and economic incentives to determine which packets of Internet traffic get delivered to which consumers under what conditions. The end result is that the Internet becomes shaped in ways that serve the interests of the broadband providers, and not consumers or innovative Web entrepreneurs.

Wow, and:

Moreover, as will be seen, neutrality actually is an indispensable component to accelerating broadband deployment. Broadband providers actually can make considerable money from putting improvements into the network itself, rather than merely profiting from traffic congestion. Further, countries that enjoy an open environment, such as the United Kingdom and Japan, tend to provide more bandwidth at lower prices.

What about recently? As recently as April, 2010, Google was telling the FCC that rules to protect “nondiscrimination” on the Net were neither “new” nor “radical.” And they warned of the possible outcomes if the FCC fails to protect Net Neutrality:

Broadband providers’ statements about their intended (and current) practices demonstrate why oversight is vital. This situation makes immediate FCC action imperative to prevent broadband access practices, terms, conditions, and arrangements that are antithetical to the evolution of the open Internet from taking root and spreading. Experience teaches that lack of action by the FCC will be considered a “green light” for broadband providers to become much more aggressive in restricting usage of broadband networks and services to maximize profits.

Given the company’s history on Net Neutrality, the fact that Google is now in cahoots with Verizon in crafting ways to dismantle the open Internet is both stunning and outrageous. And the company’s mission, “don't be evil”, is now buried under a mountain of corporate greed that has Google becoming “the incumbents” they once warned against. It’s a shameful day.

But blaming Google for finding ways to deepen their own pockets is like blaming a tiger for eating a goat. We can hold them to some modicum of social responsibility, but at the end of the day, they're a corporation - it's what they do.

It's ultimately up to the FCC to protect Net Neutrality, and we need to hold them and our lawmakers accountable to us. We need to fight back and speak up to tell the FCC that we want a completely open Internet.

Megan Tady is a blogger, video producer and communications coordinator for Free Press. This blog was originally posted on her blog at SavetheInternet.com.

“There is a culture of silence around gender inequality in Sierra Leone.” As a conflict resolution student, I only began to understand the significance of this statement several days after I arrived in Freetown, Sierra Leone’s jam-packed, edgy capital.

For months I had studied Sierra Leonean women’s lack of access to healthcare, employment and political participation. Once on the ground I fully expected to see obvious examples of gender-based injustices. I envisioned women with sad eyes, empty hands, and seven small children each lying prostrate in the street while men in business suits stepped over them on the way to work. Upon arrival, I noticed no such blatant gender divide.

• Woman selling water on the road in Freetown. Photo courtesy of the author. •

“Women and Men have the Same Rights.”
“Blame the Rapist, not the Child!”
“Stop beating your wife. The police will send you to JAIL.”
“Anyone who takes a child below 18 years old for Female Genital Mutilation will be arrested.”

The capital seemed to know no privacy given the wide-open nature of the dwellings. I was truly beginning to wonder where these billboard horrors happened. It was only when we traveled to the provinces and met with Women’s Action for Human Dignity (WAHD), an organization devoted to rectifying women’s societal status, that the painful reality of the gender divide sunk into my soul.

The director of WAHD painted a bleak picture. Discrimination against women in Sierra Leone’s Northern provinces is a lifelong cycle of physical and emotional violence. It begins when a young girl is taken into the bush for initiation into womanhood, a ceremony often including mutilation of the clitoris. Throughout her life the girl will carry a heavier workload than her male counterparts. As our host put it, “Mothers and daughters are the only ones who work while the sons play and the fathers eat.”

A member of WAHD chuckled bitterly about premarital relationships, explaining, “A relationship between a man and a woman before marriage is sweet. In marriage they become enemies. At midnight you hear the women crying bitterly, but this is not reported, and in the morning, no one talks about it.” Marital rape comes with marriage, and marriage comes with being a woman. “Women are not respected if they are not married.” Paramount chiefs, the local village leaders, ignore women’s requests for divorce, and, since women have long been considered property, customary inheritance laws dictate, “Wives of husbands who die are married off to other members of his family.”

Perhaps I had not noticed women’s suffering because, despite sensitization campaigns, gender-based violence has been normalized and women suffer silently. As our host said, “Sierra Leonean women are to be seen, not heard.” Suffering is only audible when pain is too much to bare - in the bush where girls become women, in the dead of the night when women perform their wifely duty. This is to say nothing of the constant housekeeping, water fetching, and child bearing that take a disproportionate toll on women’s health. With no control over their domestic conditions, much less any voice in politics, gender-based violence is woven into the very fabric of society.

Were I born into such powerlessness, I might accept an inherently unequal status, particularly when the consequences from straying from my role would be severe stigmatization at best. Yet our host was not so fatalistic.

During the ten-year civil war, she explained, women experienced a sort of shift. Brutal rape, mutilation, and total disregard for humanity pushed women to their limits and they began denouncing violence. Many women took control over themselves and their families as their husbands left to fight. Collectively, they lobbied for peace and formed groups such as the one we were visiting. Now was the time, our host said, to articulate that power and weave it into society.

WAHD transforms gender relations by ushering women into society. First, our host said, since meeting basic needs is an urgent concern for most families, WAHD helps women acquire and tend a small plot of land within their property. Ownership and control of production, more than cleaning, carrying, or keeping house, are key elements of empowerment. Next on the agenda is educating citizens about recent national legislation banning customary inheritance laws and gender-based violence. To this end, WAHD forms single-sex focus groups of local men and women to brainstorm the fears, hopes, and benefits regarding women’s formal rights and their participation in society. After each group is questioned by a member of WAHD, the responses are shared between the groups, which then come together to find common ground and work toward increased gender equality.

Three months after my sojourn, I have many more questions about Sierra Leone’s gender inequality as well as the mechanisms in place to change it. How can Sierra Leonean women embrace ‘gender equality’ when powerlessness remains a norm despite ‘sensitization.’ What sacrifices will women make to continue to renounce their position in a patriarchal society and advocate for a different position or a different society altogether?

Christine Williams was in Sierra Leone for a two-week course led by Dr. Pushpa Iyer of the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Christine's blog is part of a series of reflections by Dr. Iyer and her students on the challenges to building peace in this war-ravaged country. -Ed.

Christine Williams earned her bachelor's degree in Language Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 2007. In 2010 she received her Master's Degree in International Policy Studies with a focus in Conflict Resolution at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Her academic interests include conflict in African countries and women's role in the peacebuilding process.

The slogan during the run up to the 1996 elections, which occurred in the middle of Sierra Leone’s bloody, eleven-year civil war, was “Power is in your hands.” The Revolutionary United Front responded by amputating the hands of anyone who went to the polls, resulting in an estimated 20,000 amputations.

The civil war of Sierra Leone, which lasted from 1991 to 2002, tore the country apart. Fighting occurred in every corner of the country, causing between 20,000 and 75,000 deaths and two million displaced persons in a country of only 4.5 million. Villages were burned to the ground, children were forcibly conscripted by all sides, families were divided, sons were forced to watch while their mothers and sisters were raped, friends were made to beat or even kill the family members of their best friends. The consequence is a fundamentally broken society. Even the most basic levels of social organization, the family and the village, were destroyed. As one amputee survivor put it, “Love was lost is the mists of war; now all we have is hate.”

What Sierra Leoneans need is to feel that justice has been done on both a community and a national level. The international community attempted to provide justice though the creation of the Special Court of Sierra Leone (SC-SL), whose mandate is to try those “most responsible” for the atrocities of the war, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). However, the Western-style SC-SL and the TRC are not enough to heal the interpersonal, inter-village and familial relations shattered by the war.

• The Special Courts of Sierra Leone. Photograph
taken by Ben Mitchell. •

A visiting German professor of psycho-social counseling at Fourah Bay College, gave us his perspective on transitional justice in Sierra Leone. He told us, “Africans just want peace.” It is the Westerners who insist on “justice.” While this simple analysis does not tell the whole story, it gives some important insights into the complex nature of transitional justice in Sierra Leone. Most importantly, it hints at the need for a multifaceted approach to justice.

This need can be felt during discussions with survivors of Sierra Leone’s war. The average Sierra Leonean continues to be pulled in contradictory directions, wanting those responsible for their suffering to be punished while also wishing to put their bloody civil war behind them. In order to begin to address these complex notions of justice, a more traditional, community based form of reconciliation as well as a reparations program are needed to fill in the gaps left by the SC-SL and the TRC.

An organization called Fambul Tok (Krio for “family talk”) International (FTI), has attempted to fill the need for a more localized form of transitional justice. The staff of FTI aids communities in leading their own reconciliation processes. Communities are asked if they are ready to reconcile, what reconciliation means to them, and what they would like the reconciliation process to look like. Most communities engage in truth-telling bonfires and traditional cleansing ceremonies. FTI and other organizations like it, work at the community level to heal specific injustices between individuals.

Reparations are also an important aspect of the transitional justice system in post-war Sierra Leone. Many Sierra Leoneans who suffered during the war feel a continued sense of injustice because those who caused their suffering, ex-combatants, benefit from the government-sponsored and internationally-backed disarmament, demobilization and reintegration program, while they continue to suffer. While many survivors receive benefits and attention from international non-government and aid organizations, the sense of injustice will continue until their own government is able to provide adequate opportunities and support for them. The reparations program is an attempt to fill this need, and while it is fundamentally flawed in several ways, it is a good start.

These localized, individually-oriented justice measures have begun to address the inadequacies of the national programs, but that is not to say that the efforts of the SC-SL and the TRC have done nothing. While these lacked the focus necessary to work at a community level, many believe the SC-SL had positive effects on the Mano River Region as a whole. One of the members of the prosecution team at the SC-SL who met with our group insinuated that one reason Guinea had not yet erupted into violence was that the prosecution and punishment of leaders of Sierra Leone’s warring factions had brought an end to impunity in West Africa. Sierra Leone’s civil war is largely blamed on the violence in neighboring Liberia, and while many other factors come into play, a peaceful region will help to ensure peace in Sierra Leone.

Everyone you ask in Sierra Leone will give you a different definition of “justice.” What they all have in common is a sense that justice has yet to be done for them. While it may be tempting to look at the successes of the SC-SL and the TRC, these top-down, Western mechanisms of justice alone are not enough to heal the interpersonal, inter-village and familial relations that were shattered by the war. In addition to these, FTI is setting an example for a more traditional, community based form of justice, and the government has begun to implement a reparations program for survivors. It is only through the continuation and expansion of all these different types of justice that Sierra Leone will begin to heal.

Deanna Tamborelli was in Sierra Leone for a two-week course led by Dr. Pushpa Iyer of the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Deanna’s blog is part of a series of reflections by Dr. Iyer and her students on the challenges to building peace in this war-ravaged country. -Ed.

Deanna Tamborelli is a Senior “Feb” (graduating in January of 2011) at Middlebury College where she is working towards her undergraduate degree in International Studies with focuses in Latin America and Political Science. She was born and raised in Rhode Island but has since lived in Italy, Peru and Vermont. Future aspirations include: returning to Africa, attaining a Master’s Degree in International Relations, volunteering with the Peace Corps and much more.