Palms For Life Fund

Alexa and Darcy in Kenya, Sanaa Project

2011-06-23T09:53:00.000-04:00

The mural begins!

Darcy

We have started the mural!!

The entire front surface of the New Dawn Education Center, about 80 x 20 feet had been cleaned and primed by a local Huruma painter by the time we arrived at the school Tuesday afternoon. We spent that afternoon talking to the students, form by form. Headmaster Ben brought us to each classroom, introducing Darcy by her new Swahili name, Tausi, which means peacock, is much easier to pronounce, and never fails to rouse giggles from the students. We explained why we were here to those students who did not already know, and told them we hoped they would feel free to approach us with any questions about art, or if any of them were particularly curious about or interested in our project. They applauded and cheered and called out “Sanaaaaa” for Darcy’s camera. Before leaving that day, we handed out 160 Sanaa Project t-shirts, one to each student, so that they could all – even those who had not chosen to participate in the art club or mural painting – be a part of our project.

The next day, Wednesday, we arrived around 3:30, an hour before the students are finished with classes, to start taping up the outline of our design. The students peered through the windows of their classrooms. Some were wearing their Sanaa t-shirts, prepared to start painting. Some held up recent drawings they had done for us to see, or came to discuss their ideas for the mural. We had decided to start with large blocks of bright colors — an abstract interpretation of a sunrise, with a lot of orange, New Dawn’s school color. This, we hoped, would be a simple way to start the process and would give the building a cheerful but clean look right from the start. From there we hope to incorporate the students’ individual ideas and skills: Harriet loves to paint flowers, so perhaps she will add vines and flowers to the columns. Isaak does good lettering, so he can be the one to write the words “New Dawn Education Center” along the second story. Daniel’s eagle was so impressive, maybe he would like to do a silhouette of a bird over the orange sun. But that afternoon, we started slow. The students painted with great care, up and down, up and down, making sure the colors reached into every corner, along every windowpane. The colors were so vibrant that, although we only had one hour to work and the front was only half-way colored in by 5:30, the building was transformed already.

Before heading home, we stood at the bottom of the stairs leading to the school building’s main entrance and visualized the final product. I had been nervous about starting, but excited, after all this time, to get the colors up and see the students involved. We have come to realize how they value the building and the time they are given there. They put on their mustard-yellow uniform sweaters every day and walk, some from miles away, taking care to look neat, keep their notes in order, perfect their handwriting. School is not a chore to them but a privilege, and we hope that the respect and love they show for the building can be expressed through their mural.

Pictures coming soon!!

Alexa

Alexa and Darcy in Kenya, Sanaa Project

2011-06-17T11:54:00.000-04:00

Last day of individual painting!

Today was a gratifying last day working on the small-scale art projects! We wanted to be sure that all of the students could finish their work on time and have art that they were proud of to bring home at the end of the day. We haven’t told them yet that we hope to leave an arts program in place after our departure, because that plan depends on so many factors yet to be worked out – finding someone responsible and interested enough to lead art club meetings long-term, funding, enthusiasm from the students, being able to continue using the church space, etc. The people of Huruma seem to be so accustomed to people coming and going that they probably don’t expect to see permanent changes from each group of young foreigners that come their way and we don’t want to get their hopes up just to disappoint. We want to let them know we are trying our best, but feel that we should wait until we are certain before we make any promises. However, there was plenty of paper, brushes and pencils left for us to leave with Headmaster Ben, so we are feeling optimistic!

We told the art crew we’d be gone until next Tuesday and they seemed disappointed – many had been expecting a class tomorrow – but as soon as Darcy announced our plans for the mural, which we had mentioned only briefly before, everyone was happy again!

We took more photos of the students and their art. They wanted pictures by themselves, with each other, with us, of their favorite Monet or of their palette where they had mixed the perfect skin tone. Our two New Dawn graduate students approached me, said goodbye, promised to be there early on Tuesday to help prepare for the mural, and gave me their paintings to keep. Both had been sketched out and delicately painted in great detail. Daniel had spent all that day painstakingly mixing oranges, browns, yellows, and reds to create the appropriate effect of feathers on an eagle’s back. Samuel had drawn, erased, re-drawn, erased, and re-drawn the front left leg of a horse copied from a small Cezanne watercolor. Irene had mentioned these two men to us before, saying they were two of Huruma’s most serious artists – serious in their practice and serious about pursuing art in their futures. Headmaster Ben had similarly discussed them with us and told us how much he hoped Daniel and Samuel would be able to learn from us. I’m not sure how much we taught them, but at the very least we gave them a peaceful hour and the necessary materials each day to do what they enjoy.

Now the weekend, and next week: The Mural!

Alexa

Alexa and Darcy in Kenya, Sanaa Project

2011-06-15T13:49:00.001-04:00

New Dawn Art Students

Photography by Darcy

Alexa and Darcy in Kenya, Sanaa Project

2011-06-15T11:52:00.001-04:00

Africa Redefined: United Balozi Group

Darcy

Having our Sanaa Project meetings with the New Dawn students every day at 4:30 means we have our mornings free. Our first week was so full of running errands, organizing plans and adjusting to Kenyan life, that it never occurred to us that there would come a single moment when we had no plans until today. The Tongoi household headed off to work – some people went to the preschool in Huruma, some to talk to the high school students at New Dawn, and Darcy and I were left to catch up on emails, buy new supplies, and figure out how we can best take advantage of our free time.

We had decided early on that we wanted to be as active as possible during our time here. Staying with Sammy Tongoi and his parents has been excellent motivation. Aside from Irene’s complete commitment to the Huruma community through the New Dawn Education Center, the New Dawn Clinic, and a church nearby, her son Sammy and friend Alex Choi have been hard at work on their project, Africa Redefined (check out their site! www.africaredefined.com). So far their work here has revolved around a group of young men from Huruma who, despite some having graduated from high school and others being trained in practical professions, have been unable to find sustainable work and worry about never making it out of Huruma Village. Sammy and Alex have been coordinating group meetings, helping the men organize themselves into a formal committee, and giving them the encouragement they need to keep working and hoping.

The other day, while we waited for 4:30 to arrive, we went with Sammy and Alex to photograph and film the election of the committee officials and the drafting of their constitution. The meeting started off quietly. A young graduate of New Dawn Education Center named Jimmy stood in the center of a circle of thirty-five men and told them why they were there – to come together and start taking action not just to change Huruma, but to be rid of it altogether. The village of Huruma is built on government land and can never become a permanent community. The residents see no reason to beautify it, to built more stable houses, or to create a job market there with work stalls and shops – they realize that they can be kicked out of their homes at any moment. The handful of Huruma residents who came out to this meeting to take initiative and change their lives and the lives of their loved ones have the shared dream of seeing Huruma disappear forever. Their constitution did not state this mission, or any other mission. It focused on the practical and the immediately necessary. It demanded that all members be represented and respected. It required that those in attendance be sober for each meeting and that the actions of elected official be monitored carefully to avoid corruption. Jimmy was elected chairman, two other New Dawn graduates were elected secretary and treasurer, and two friends volunteered to be joint disciplinarians. Membership fees were agreed upon – 100 Kenyan Shillings each, about $1.15 – and Darcy took photos of each member to be used for their identification cards. At the end of the meeting a group title was selected: “United Balozi Group”, ‘balozi’ being Swahili for ‘ambassadors’. Finally, Jimmy asked the group if they “unanimously endorsed this constitution”. When all agreed, we parted ways.

Over those two hours, Darcy and I had watched the men transform into vocal and enthusiastic participants in a project that we, Africa Redefined, and the members themselves believe can make a difference. We hope to spend as much of our free time as possible being actively involved in projects such as these. The people of Huruma are so full of hope that what they seem to need most is a push in the right direction and inspiring words to reinforce their optimism, which Darcy and I are more than happy to give.

Alexa

Alexa and Darcy in Kenya, Sanaa Project

2011-06-14T13:48:00.000-04:00

Sanaa 101

Today we were up early and on our way to Huruma by 8:30 for our first meeting with the New Dawn Education Center headmaster, Ben Khalonyere. We presented him with our plans to implement an “arts club” for interested students, teach them some color theory and technique, create individual works with them all during the first week, and paint a mural on the face of the school itself during our remaining time. Ben told us that their school had never started an official arts program as part of their curriculum, not due to lack of interest but because arts teachers were expensive and hard to come by. He seemed thrilled by our eagerness to help and excited to share our plans with the students. We scheduled our first art club meeting for 4:30 that afternoon in the church nearby and left him to go explore the village until then.

We met with Pastor Sammy at 4:00 to set up for the 25 students Ben had promised to recruit and send our way. The church is made of tin with wooden shuttered windows, rows of plastic chairs and three large wooden tables. We rearranged the furniture and set up paints, pencils, brushes and water on each table. We also had a series of images – a few books on various artists/movements and two-dozen postcards of MoMA masterpieces – to be laid out for inspiration. As soon as the students arrived they began studying the works by famous artists: Matisse, Gaugin, Van Gogh, de Chirico, Kirchner, and Mirò, among others. They passed them around and traded before beginning to directly copy the images they finally settled on. We tried to encourage them to create original paintings and suggested that they just use the postcards for inspiration but quickly began to see how they added their own spin and style to the famous paintings, making each work completely their own. A Rothko was given a floral boarder, a Modigliani woman was painted in a colorful patterned dress, and a de Chirico piazza painted in bright yellows, pinks and purples.

We taught them about mixing colors and Darcy circled the room with a palette of baby-blues and oranges to share. Not one of them was willing to settle and paint a dark swatch of a Mirò generic forest green, or leave a slightly tan square of a Rothko white. Some students finished faster and were eager to start a second painting. Others flipped through the books and asked questions about various artists or works. One of our students was a young man named Daniel, a recent graduate of the New Dawn Education Center who dreamt of becoming an artist and came to practice, sitting peacefully in the back row with a pencil, sketching Cezanne figures silently and with great precision. But for everyone it seemed, above all else, to be a fun, relaxing hour of peace and quiet.

At the end of the hour, the students reluctantly put down their brushes and pencils and handed over their unfinished works only after we promised we would return at the same time tomorrow to keep painting!

Check back soon for pictures!

- Alexa

Alexa and Darcy in Kenya, Sanaa Project

2011-06-10T13:48:00.000-04:00

Our Arrival

We arrived in Nairobi on June 9, and were at the New Dawn Education Center in Huruma by early-afternoon. We met some of the students and teachers all of whom were enthusiastic in their mustard- yellow uniforms when we informed them about our project. We are staying with the school’s Director, Irene Tongoi, with whom we have been discussing the Sanaa Project in further detail.

Since being here, we have been exposed to many of the large problems that exist in the village. In particular, many of the villagers told stories of volunteer groups who come to Huruma with hopes of making a difference but fail to consider their projects’ sustainability. The villagers expressed feelings of frustration with outsiders’ lack of awareness and consideration for long-term improvement. We are doing everything in our power to make sure our project will be different.

2011-05-27T13:46:00.000-04:00

Alexa and Darcy in Kenya, Sanaa Project

2xShin

We have been in touch with California-based street artist 2xShin (check out her work here: flickr.com/photos/shinshin2008/) about our mural project!

We reached out to 2xShin with the idea of incorporating her techniques into our project. She uses wheat paste to adhere her photographic images to surfaces around various cities.

She told us her process wouldn’t work on the steel structure of the New Dawn Education Center but offered a ton of other suggestions and advice about technique, materials, color schemes, theme options.

Thank you 2xShin!

Alexa and Darcy in Kenya, Sanaa Project

2011-05-27T13:44:00.002-04:00

The Mural Site

We recently received an email from Irene Tongoi, Director of the New Dawn Education Center in Huruma. She attached an image of the school on which we will be helping the students paint a large-scale mural:

Constructed from recycled steel sea containers, the surface measures approximately 80 ft long by 20 ft high. The material and the ribbing of the exterior walls pose an interesting challenge! We are in the process of researching what technique, paint types and designs will be ideal for such an unusual structure.

We’re excited to see what can be done with this unique site!

Alexa and Darcy in Kenya, Sanaa Project

2011-05-23T13:33:00.000-04:00

Welcome!

We’re very excited to share with you an important moment in our lives!

This June we will be traveling to Kenya as volunteers to develop a sustainable arts program for 160 high school students. The Sanaa Project (sanaa is art in Swahili) is directed at students who live in the poverty-stricken Huruma slum outside the city of Nairobi, the country’s capital.

We believe that artistic creation is not only crucial to education but also a right for students in all societies. Through the Sanaa Project, we hope to raise awareness about the importance of art as a means of expression and a source of hope.

We need your help to connect these 160 children to art in a sustainable way. Our goal is to raise $10,000 by June 10^th to buy the art and mural supplies, T-shirts for the children, and to cover our travel costs and local subsistence at $20/day. With your help we will then sell the students’ artwork here in the US and reinvest the funds to buy more art supplies.

We will be leaving with the Volunteer for Life program of Palms for Life Fund, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization based in the United States. We decided to work with Palms for Life because we believe in their mission—the idea that “we are all connected to the poor” and that investing in education is a key step to addressing the root causes of poverty.

During this first mission of the Sanaa Project, we will initiate a mural project, designed and executed by the students, to stand as a constant reminder to the local community of children’s potential for creativity.

More information regarding the Sanaa Project can be found under the Kenya heading in the “Projects” page in the Palms for Life site.

Thank you!

Darcy and Alexa

Hannah's Interview with Michael Conforti

2010-10-01T13:30:00.000-04:00

Michael Conforti: We are on today. Welcome everybody back to our show called “Notes from the Field,” I’m Dr. Michael Conforti, the Founder and Director of the Assisi Institute, which offers programs in Vermont and Assisi, Italy, which is our home in Italy, for almost 21 years now. And what we have been doing on this radio show is inviting people that have really made a difference in this world; people from the sciences, from the arts, and from the humanities. Today we have a really very special guest; our guest today is Hannah Laufer-Rottman, who grew up in Europe and for many years she worked with the UN with the World Food Programme and from there she’s gone on to be one of the major figures in the world trying to help eradicate world hunger and Hannah thank you so much for agreeing to do this today and welcome to the show.

Hannah Laufer-Rottman: Thank you so much, Michael.

Michael Conforti: Oh you're welcome. I’d like to say in opening, in introducing you to our audience, aside from all of your other talents, Hannah speaks nine languages. I can't imagine how a brain or a psyche could be wired to be that talented and I just spoke with you in Italian and your Italian is as fluent as your Flemish and everything else so that’s a gift. The other thing I want to say, and I remember one of the first times we talked, that really got me so drawn to you and your work; is you told a story where you were working in Africa, I believe you said it was Africa, with people that they literally did not know where their next meal was going to come from. We talk about that, I don’t know where my next meal is going to come from, my next dollar, but you meant that literally. And I wonder if you could talk about that as maybe also being what spearheaded some of your programs, that I know you developed your own nonprofit foundation which I’d love to hear about; but could you tell us a little bit about what that experience must have been like for you, when you literally saw people not knowing where meals are coming from?

Hannah Laufer-Rottman: Well yes, absolutely, thank you so much, Michael, it's a real pleasure for me to be here today. So let me answer a little bit to this first question, just to introduce us and to just bring the subject in the middle of our conversation at once. The hunger that people experience is an every day condition for poor people and very often I say that poverty is the art of survival, because indeed you know that people don’t have enough food on a daily basis; they go out every day without knowing if they will find the food and if they will have a meal on that day. But they somehow survive and today the number that we get of people dying from hunger is relatively low considering that so many people in this world, more than one billion people, suffer from hunger and malnutrition. So many live on less than one dollar a day which is dramatically below the poverty line; so we have a condition for people, for many people in this world who live indeed without knowing where their next meal is coming from, and somehow they survive, and that is the miracle.

Of course, how do they survive and what does it mean for young children to not know where their next meal is coming from? What does it mean for a pregnant woman to not be able to eat the food that she needs in order to ensure her health and the health of her baby? All of this has terrible consequences so talking about this should not be taken in lightly at all. It’s not just knowing where the food is coming from, it’s also realizing that people who live in this condition suffer, unfortunately, damages on their physical and emotional and psychological condition, many of which are totally irreversible. So, the problem of not knowing where the next meal is coming from is, as I said a condition of poor people, to people who completely identify with their condition of being poor, and they go out every morning with a big question mark, will they get the job that day? Will they find the food? Will they, when they go out to their field, will there have been enough rain for them to ensure that they will have something to harvest at the next season.

Many poor people live with all these question marks every day, but somehow they cope, which is absolutely amazing. Of course, when you go to Africa and you go to these very poor communities, you look around, you won't see anybody being obese; you see lots of very skinny people. I don’t say that you see them malnourished to the point where that you see on TV some times, those terrible images, you know, of children when you see just their bones. No, but you see lots of very skinny people, and you see mothers when they breast feed their babies they don’t look as healthy and as full and clean as mothers in other parts of the world where people have enough food so you see all these physical proofs of people being hungry and living with hunger. And as I said, there is also the invisible damage of hunger. And you know, one day, this was not in Africa, this was in Ecuador, I visited a school where we gave breakfast to the children, which they never had before; children would go to school without food, and they would sometimes walk a long way coming down from their communities to the school that is in the valley; sometimes they walk one to two hours just to go to the school, and leaving home where there is maybe no breakfast that day, because people, sometimes have breakfast and sometimes they don’t, and even if they have breakfast, it’s maybe a sweet potato and a tea with a little bit of local sugar. So these kids arrive at school, have nothing to eat in school, and after, of course, half an hour, they’re already starved, and they just live throughout the day with this feeling of hunger. One day as I told you when we were distributing school breakfasts to these children, we gave them just a very highly nutritive biscuit and a glass of a quarter of liter of milk, and I saw all these children during the break at school eating with such an appetite.

Michael Conforti: They were transformed, they had to be, right?

Hannah Laufer-Rottman: They were completely transformed. But then I went to one little kid who spoke perfect Spanish, and I say, in Spanish, “Entonces, estabas con hambre?” means, “So, were you hungry?” And she looked at me with an expression of, “What is this woman talking about?”

Michael Conforti: Oh God, of course.

Hannah Laufer-Rottman: And then I came to realize what it is, Michael. And do you know what it is? People who are hungry and live with hunger and know that since they were born, they have to live with hunger, they don’t experience it as, “I am hungry.” Because you see we, in our world where we have access to food anytime and we never imagine that we would not have access to food, we can say, “I’m hungry,” because we know that immediately after we will have food, so saying, “I’m hungry” is the introduction of, “Now I’m going to have something to eat.” Well, when people don’t know where their next meal is coming from, they don’t express the, “I’m hungry,” because they just live in this state of constant hunger and that’s part of their living condition.

Michael Conforti: What a profound understanding of their life. That really shakes me when you say it that way.

Hannah Laufer-Rottman: Yes.

Michael Conforti: Let me ask you a tough question here: We see on TV these ads for people, starving children and say, “Please give a dollar we’ll feed this child for a week or whatever,” so we see all that on TV. I’m sure many people, a lot of us can grow immune to that, and say, “You know what, here’s another TV show, let me turn the channel, let me watch a baseball game or a comedy, I don’t want to see the face of hunger in front of me.” What do you say to us when we begin to turn sort of a, oh God, almost a cold glance to those images, and also why do we do it? Why do we want to turn away so quickly? Or say, oh yes, what a beautiful young little girl, beautiful little boy, but you know what? There’s nothing I can do. I see the ads all the time, but you know, you lived it. We’re seeing it from the comfort of a living room, eating popcorn, having to finish a nice dinner. How do you help us? I mean you've been in the trenches with these people, Hannah.

Hannah Laufer-Rottman: Absolutely. Michael, that’s a very, very tough question. You know in the international community there is something we call the “donor fatigue”, which is that donors become very quickly uninterested in helping the poor. Look at the Haiti phenomena. In the beginning Haiti was everywhere, Haiti was able to collect millions of dollars to help for the terrible dramatic situation, and now Haiti does not exist any more. And people knew this, people said in a few weeks, Haiti will need more help than ever, but the press, the media will not help us, so we need to find a different way of raising the consciousness and the awareness about what’s going on in the world, so what can I tell you about hunger? You know there is this expression like, if you talk about something impossible, you would say, “Are you talking about ending world hunger?” You know, this is a symbol of something that is impossible to reach. Well, my idea about hunger is that, firstly, food is everyone’s business; access to food, hunger, is everyone’s business. That’s one idea. The second very important statement is, food has to happen today; not yesterday or tomorrow. It has to happen today; it has to happen every day.

So that is just an introduction to the next idea which is yes, the dollar, the two dollars, the three dollars can make a difference today, because people need to eat today so if we need the money to feed the children and just communities altogether, today we need that money. There is of course, a sort of a fatigue among the public, which comes from, why isn't there an end to this problem? Why do we have to continuously give money to feed the poor? Why can't we just stop this hunger once and forever? Well, because it’s not easy, it’s not fast, it’s not going to happen tomorrow, but it should happen. We should also simultaneously, while we feed all these people, be it here in the US (people are hungry in the US), babies, poor people everywhere in the world, we need to realize that we need with one hand to feed those people, and with the other hand, we need to invest in a new way of dealing with access to food so that we can invest in the long term solution. It’s not just one solution, there are many solutions, they all depend on the different situations but there is a way to considerably diminish the risk that people face of being hungry.

Michael Conforti: Is there enough food around? Is it an issue of politics? So before I ask you the question of, you know, can we really end world hunger, why is there hunger?

Hannah Laufer-Rottman: Well you know, you have so many conditions. First of all, you have hunger because of a catastrophe; look what happened in Haiti. But the thing is that in the US if a catastrophe hits, the US has a very solid base, the US is a very developed nation; even if a situation, a terrible drama would occur there would still be a possibility to access food, because the system is solid. But in those very poor countries, a catastrophe like a huge hurricane or an earthquake or a volcano eruption, completely kills the little survival mode in which people use to live. They use all their possible livelihood in a second, so there you need food immediately. This is where we have to bring in food because this is an emergency, people are hungry and it is caused by an external factor.

But there are other conditions. There are some countries where people are hungry because simply they don’t produce enough food. Why don’t they produce enough food? Because sometimes of very, very political conditions. The government hasn’t done what it had to do; the money that was received from international organizations was not invested in buying huge amounts of pumps and drillings to get the water out there which is underneath the earth and with water people could start doing very productive agriculture. There is poverty and hunger, and this, by the way Michael; we talk about hunger as if it were an isolated phenomenon. It is not. It is just one manifestation of poverty, so we should always go back to what is the origin somehow of hunger and you know, poverty has lots of causes and one of the manifestations of poverty is hunger. So people are poor in poor countries, because the country altogether is poor. But sometimes people are poor in countries where it has been a history of inequalities, of unequal distribution of wealth. Some countries, like Brazil for instance, it’s a country that has historically been marked by an enormous exclusion of the poor; for instance, the whole northeastern region of Brazil is suffering from poverty and hunger like the worst places in Africa; and you go down in the region since going down to Rio, the Sao Paulo, and all the south of Brazil, what you see, plentiness; food all over; people are not starving at all; there is an enormous availability of food. Brazil has one of the largest gaps between the rich and the poor. This is historic. That has to change by political actions whereby government insures that poor people have a higher share of the nation’s wealth and once you have a higher income, they will be able to access the food as much as all the other population. So you see there is no just one answer to this, but there are different answers, but you always have to look at what is the cause, what are the underlying causes and then we have to address those underlying causes and that’s the way where we can bring an end to hunger, slowly.

Michael Conforti: And this is really what your own organization, Palms for Life is about, isn't it? It’s an organization, a nonprofit group set up to help either alleviate or address the issue of world hunger. Could you tell us a little bit about your own foundation?

Hannah Laufer-Rottman: Well yes you know that’s a very interesting question Michael, because after having worked for almost 30 years with the UN World Food Program, and having been involved a lot in emergency feeding, but also in what we call development feeding; when I established Palms for Life; when I founded Palms for life, I decided that I would leave to the UN and the humanitarian organizations to deal with distributing food, per se, because it is very expensive, these are big programs and I didn't want to get involved in these kind of programs, but what Palms for Life is doing and why I am so passionate about it, is because we work systematically in those areas where we can address the root causes of hunger and poverty. And we cannot do it all, it’s not that we are going to revolutionize the world, although I hope so, I really would like to have a much more influence on world decisions as I’m having and I will eventually get there; but by bringing our share, I’m sure that we make a difference for many thousands of people. I give you an example. In Burkina Faso in West Africa, one of our projects is to help poor women produce tomatoes and onions. With producing tomatoes and onions, these women can actually establish themselves as a cultural entrepreneurs, because they sell those tomatoes, get an income, and with that income they can buy clothes and food and pay for education of their children. Now there is one trick there; why has it been so difficult for these women?

Michael Conforti: You're saying that they're actually growing this themselves or they’re buying it for other people.

Hannah Laufer-Rottman: No, they grow tomatoes.

Michael Conforti: They grow them; that’s what I thought.

Hannah Laufer-Rottman: And the onions; that’s their profitable business. But you see that’s not enough, because once you analyze what’s going on, you see that these women don’t make as much money as they should make by selling tomatoes and onions. What happens is that they have one handicap; the handicap is that they are not sufficiently organized and industrialized. In other words, when they produce and harvest their tomatoes, they have only so many days where they can sell the tomatoes. Big trucks from neighboring countries come, buy all those tomatoes at a very low cost, and depleting the women from their product, but also giving them peanuts in payment. So the way to overcome this is by going one step further; help these women dehydrate the tomatoes; if they dehydrate the tomatoes, they can keep them, store them, and sell them a little bit further outside of the harvest season, thereby securing a better price and with this better price, their income would be even higher than what they get selling raw tomatoes to the truck drivers that pass by their communities. So that’s just an example of, with a little investment, and with a good understanding of what happens locally, we can make a huge difference.

Michael Conforti: Is that one of your projects; is that one of the projects of Palms for Life?

Hannah Laufer-Rottman: Absolutely. It’s one of the projects, and that’s not a very expensive project, but we impact, these kind of project is a real impact, it’s not just a benefit, it’s an impact. You know, impact means a more long lasting effect. These kinds of project have impact on these people for many many years and even further, once I got to work with these people, I sent a young consultant of ours, who is in Burkina Faso there, and I sent her to the communities, I said, “Go and take the temperature. Talk to these women, see what their needs are.” A few days later, she writes me and she says, “You know, these women work very hard. They don’t have enough agricultural tools. They have to bend over, work in very difficult conditions. If they could have more agricultural tools, their life would be much easier.” And she gave me the list of all the tools these people need. A few weeks later, I got a funding from a local foundation here, about $10,000 and I was able to send this money out there, and they buy now, locally they have bought with this money, all kind of agricultural tools that make the life of these women much easier, make them more productive, and these women at the same time feel empowered; they feel that they can work with dignity; that there is somebody out there that thinks of how to make their life better, treats them with respect. I mean these have enormous consequences.

Michael Conforti: It’s profound how you're changing people’s lives; both the outer world of their life and the inner world, like you say, with dignity and pride.

Hannah Laufer-Rottman: Absolutely.

Michael Conforti: What a contribution you make to the world. If people want to find out more about your organization, make a donation, or maybe even volunteer, how do they get in touch with you?

Hannah Laufer-Rottman: Well very simple, first of course people can go on our web site and there they can find a lot of information on our project, our web site is www.palmsforlifefund.org. People can also write to me, my address is Hannah.Laufer@palmsforlifefund.org and I normally reply very quickly and if people make donations, donations are tax deductible. Just for your information, we have also set up a special construction fund for Haiti. We are not doing anything in Haiti right now, but I am setting up the fund, and I am in touch with local organizations in Haiti and when the moment will come, we will be ready to work with local organization that is serious and that works in the areas that we are interested in. And you know, basically we are interested in education and food production, giving income to women, educating girls, keeping girls in schools. You know, those are all these important problems that will eventually overcome poverty. Because you see they say that when you educate a woman, a girl who has gone through her school, so primary school and secondary education, statistics show that these women, young women, marry later, have less children, send their children to school, and their children are healthier than other children of women who have not been educated.

Michael Conforti: You're changing multiple generations by making that one intervention on the group.

Hannah Laufer-Rottman: Exactly, Michael. Exactly. This is why I say impact; it’s not just effect, it’s an impact. It reaches very deep in these societies and so yes, this is what we do and that’s our passion and if people want to know more, we can talk about this and as I said, people can go on our web site; we have all kind of project. You know the Burkina Faso is just an example, but we have projects in Ecuador, in India, we are now producing a dairy development project, especially for local women in Ecuador. We support water and sanitation project in Swaziland where we help build latrines in schools for girls especially. You know there is so much one can do if you really go in trying to address those root causes of poverty.

Michael Conforti: So even the people that don’t want to dedicate their life to this as you have, they can still make a contribution either financial or otherwise.

Hannah Laufer-Rottman: Absolutely, and as I said, all these contributions are tax deductible and yes, that’s exactly how people can help.

Michael Conforti: Well you know if you want to put a link on our web site, call the office, we would love it; any way we can support it we would love to do it.

Hannah Laufer-Rottman: Thank you so much Michael. That’s really wonderful and I appreciate so much this opportunity and you know, once I get into the subject, it’s very hard to stop me, I’m really passionate about it so.

Michael Conforti: Clearly, you're very articulate and it’s an emotional theme that I’m sure hits so many of us when you're talking. Look it’s so foreign from our lives; I mean, you are living in a world that it’s totally foreign from whether you're European, whether you're American way of life. We’ve all grown up, no matter how difficult our lives are, you knew there was food. We always had in our family, we’d even have 40 people coming to dinner, 60 people, there’s always another box of macaroni, so 15 cents, 20 cents for a box of macaroni, you feed people, but you knew it was always there. I think you're addressing something that is part of the unimaginable in life.

Hannah Laufer-Rottman: That is so true.

Michael Conforti: You've walked in that terrain and you've learned the language of it. And I have you know, the utmost respect to really what you do, I don’t know if I could have done it. You know let me ask you something else, I know I only have a few minutes, because you have to run, you have a very busy schedule, but many years ago I took a trip and I took my son to an amusement park, a big chocolate amusement park, where they had rides and factories, making chocolate, and I don’t want to mention the name, but it’s pretty clear what I’m talking about; and anyway, there was a sight there that I’ll never forget that I don’t know, maybe it’s not polite to speak this way, but let’s try it anyway; I saw these people, I mean obese doesn’t capture what it was. I mean these people, they couldn't even walk any more they were so obese, and they were riding around in these carts; you know, these motorized carts, and you know a lot of them were riding up to the fast food places, for pizza or French fries, hamburgers, hot dogs, and as I think about that now in the context of our conversation today, here you are, you're saying if somebody gets a glass of milk and a couple of oats, or a little bit of fresh fruit, or these kids getting a breakfast for the first time in their life, how do you as a human being Hannah, look at some of these situations, look at the obesity at America and in the world, I don’t want to focus just on America, that’s in the world today, or other parts of the developing nations, and you see this obesity. I mean, America I know is one of the worst. I mean, if you could put yourself in my shoes looking at the theme of this amusement park, literally 400 or 500 pound people riding motorized cars. And I’m not trying to say bad things about obesity, that’s not what I’m saying, but it’s just as juxtaposition to what you've seen.

Hannah Laufer-Rottman: Mm-hm.

Michael Conforti: Could you say something about it?

Hannah Laufer-Rottman: Well Michael, you know that’s a very, very important subject. Just for your information last year, Palms for Life, the only project that we had in the US was a project to raise awareness about hunger in the US that affects 49 million people, of which-

Michael Conforti: How many people?

Hannah Laufer-Rottman: 49 million - 4-9 million people of which 17 million are children.

Michael Conforti: Oh God.

Hannah Laufer-Rottman: So let us not imagine that hunger is a subject that is completely away from America. It is in America as well. It affects, as I said, lots of Americans and we have seen them and we have organizations a contest [ph?] called Faces of Hunger in America because we want Americans to see what’s going on and if you go on the web site, on our web site, Palms for Life, you will see on the right hand, an icon that sends you to a page called “Faces of Hunger in America.” There you can see 14 short films showing hunger and this one woman, for instance, in one of the films the woman says, “There are evenings where I skip a meal in order to feed my children.”

Michael Conforti: Oh my God.

Hannah Laufer-Rottman: So that happens in America. Why do I tell you this? It’s because the subject of food, hunger and obesity, they are all part of one big problem in America, it has different manifestations, but it’s part of a big problem. There is something that does not work properly in the American society. And obesity and I’m not talking about the obesity that is clearly resulting from a medical condition and there is nothing we have to say about this, except that doctors should do their job and take care of these people and treat them for whatever imbalance they might have. But the other part of this uncontrollable way of using food to satisfy something that is deeply missing in the person’s psyche, in the person’s life, that is another aspect of obesity. And I see obesity as a little bit as a sociologist if you wish; as a manifestation of something going wrong in the American society. So I’m not in the blaming mode-

Michael Conforti: No, no, no, I understand.

Hannah Laufer-Rottman: -of saying, “Oh you know, people you are so obese, stop overeating!” That’s not it. I am rather going into what is causing this and when I look at what is going on in the American society and how food altogether is being treated and the relationship that people establish and the relationship the society, the government, everybody has weird relationship to food, and that has to change.

Michael Conforti: Well let me push you for one second again, and I know you have got to run, I’m sorry but I want to get as much as I can out of you, and I hope you come back, I hope you'll agree to come back, you have so much to offer.

Hannah Laufer-Rottman: Thank you.

Michael Conforti: So if you looked at obesity as an image, say a dream image, because you're saying you want to understand it from a sociological point of view, an archetypal point of view, look at the orients say or obesity, how would you frame it? What would you say the central issue is around obesity, when you're trying to get underneath it as you just said?

Hannah Laufer-Rottman: Yeah I think it has to do with it’s the relationship between your body and the outer world.

Michael Conforti: That’s very interesting.

Hannah Laufer-Rottman: And it’s what you put inside your body and what you store inside your body and how you use in a way the food as a symbol of something that you need to get, not to feed yourself, but to satisfy some kind of need, and I can't go too deep into it, because it’s maybe very very complex, but what I want to say is that people who are obese for the reasons that are not the medical reasons, have a relationship to food that has nothing to do with food per se. Because once you have the awareness of what you eat and why you eat, eating is a ritual, Michael, and you know this. Eating is a celebration; it’s a celebration of life, of food, it is seeing food as life, and it is a holy exercise of our every day survival activity.

Michael Conforti: It almost seems like information or the lack of information or faulty information is also a part of this.

Hannah Laufer-Rottman: There is a mixture but there is the other thing, which is many obese people buy a lot of food in the stores because that’s the cheapest consumer item that they can buy and that gives them a sense that they are consumers. The American society wants people to be consumers. And it’s very difficult. I mean those who cannot afford to buy a very expensive car that is advertised might go to the supermarket next door and buy a cart full of food because they need to have the sensation that they are not excluded from the consumer society. That’s one possible explanation and one has to look into all of this. And the whole way the food is being presented to people has to change also. And then the content of the food, when I say the food that is presented to people, do you know how much crap is in food? I mean, people buy food without knowing what they’re buying.

Michael Conforti: I know, I can't eat hot dogs any more. I can barely eat a hot dog anymore.

Hannah Laufer-Rottman: Exactly, so it is what is sick is the offer and the demand, so that the offer is completely distorted; food is not being respected in what is essential about it, what the orient of it, and people don’t see their body in a relationship to food that honors the food and honors the body simultaneously. It has gone away from that kind of dialog, very far away. You know, when you go to restaurants, when you're eating, people say, even it’s very very ironic, even Mexican waiters will tell you, “Are you still working on your food?”

Michael Conforti:

Hannah Laufer-Rottman: I know it’s a very simple expression for many people it wouldn't mean anything. For me, it is an offense. I feel it personally as an offense. I think, “What?” Because I am not working with my food, my food is, I have a different relationship with my food, it’s not working on it, you know? So that’s just an example, but it’s a very important subject, Michael, and there are lots of things behind it and I wish we could make a program and talk to people who are obese and follow them and understand why they, how they live. What happens?

Michael Conforti: With compassion and trying to understand.

Hannah Laufer-Rottman: With compassion and we’d understand and we will discover that there is something very sick in the entire society in the way food is being offered and food is being consumed.

Michael Conforti: Well you know, as we talk, again, I really want to honor you with your time frame today, you got me thinking, I would love to do a public program through the Assisi Foundation and I think Broxtowe [ph?] Borough where we are here, you know, we do programs here and in Europe, but to do one here, because it’s a very active socially minded community, here in southern New England, and west of Massachusetts and I think your work would be received so well, and so I’ll give you a call about this, to try to set something up, you as the speaker for this. And I really want to thank you and I want to say you're truly a gifted woman, and I know it probably sounds funny to hear that; you don’t have to worry about it, I’m saying it to you. You're a gifted woman and you're making a tremendous contribution in the world and I want to thank you very much for taking the time here today and you know, you dedicated your life to this.

It's the little things

2008-07-28T05:59:00.002-04:00

On our way to Pambala, a beach 2 hours from Luanda (north bound) where we picked veggies from a huge vegetable garden and where a wave almost stripped me of my surfer’s bikini, there’s this church and its garden.

Picture this: red dirt roads, live chickens waiting to be bought and killed, mega semi-trucks in mini semi-highways, women in pano grilling some sort of meat by the street, myriad of disorganized taxi vans (that somehow ARE, in fact, organized), and then all of a sudden , a patch of green, ACTUAL green grass. I blinked. My synapses had obviously malfunctioned and I had started to see…green. I felt like asking the four “ws” and one “h”: where, what, why, when, HOW??

A church that had been constructed during colonial times with the perfect pink/peach coloring (you know what I’m talking about) stands erect as the maternal guardian of this dirty G-d forsaken town of Cacuaco. And its garden, has become for the community a symbol that is somehow respected. Did I mention there were FLOWERS in this garden?? It was truly a sight for pollutionized eyes. Angola just keeps surprising me. What a little lot of heaven.

Onto other news: I was offered a job at PubliVision, a media and advertising company here in Luanda, and I’ve accepted! The charge is “Executive Director” although it seems the work will most likely be manager of internal and external relations. The agency is young, craving dynamism, and working with the crème of the crème of Angolan brands. I start a week from today at which point, I will be killing myself working part-time for DW and part-time for PubliVision until my DW contract is over in September. Goody… So this means, dear friends, this little lady is staying in Angola for quite some more time. Visiting is now required.

PS. That’s me and a Mucua, a fruit. Yes, the mega rat-looking thing is a fruit. I made juice out of it.

Toy Soldiers

2008-07-10T06:52:00.006-04:00

...or trucks. It’s official, I have become an art collector, patron of the art Angola has to offer, if you will (and I will).

Two weekends ago, I went to Porto Amboim. A little south from Luanda, we left early in the morning to try catching the fishermen coming in from sea. We just made it. A friend’s “lady” lives in this fantastically dilapidated port town which once was Angola’s jewel. Now, all we saw were huge empty warehouses, a fish factory with more rust than smell, and a disco “Leite” (Milk) which we had all to ourselves until about 11pm. Think the locals were staying away.

The weekend was filled with fresh grilled fish (bought 10kg worth!), sleeping under a jango (in a tent…with a mattress!), and a short exploratory trip to the waterfalls. Strangely enough, when we left the waterfalls, we all realized we hadn’t actually trekked to see them, but rather made friends with a little Angolan boy and his trucks.

He came around shyly, dragging his pile of tin along a stick with a string loop at the end of it (which helped to drag the trucks). He was sweet, black as soot with a white smile that sucked you in. I fell in love…and after half an hour of talking about his trucks, I decided it was time for me to invest in something completely useless and permanently beautiful.

The negotiations began. The boy, Toní, had never sold anything he created before. He was shocked when I told him I wanted to purchase it, but I explained to him why. Everything was in the “why.” He had made an art piece. He was an artist. The truck had unfathomable details – rearview mirrors, seats for four, wheels on an axel. Did I mention it was made out of tin? Hot dog cans, rubber from shoes (for wheels), metal wire from used electronics, and wooden sticks to hold the wheels together.

He was reticent about giving me a number, so we plopped a 200 kwanza bill on the table ($3) and asked again. After five minutes of hesitating (not knowing whether he should say 200, since he knew that’s what we had, or less, or more) he looked up, and in an inaudible murmur, whispered “200.” We all agreed it was a fair price. What would he do with the money? What was his favorite food? Pasta! Ok, you can eat pasta for a week. Or, he said, I can buy material to make more trucks.

I’m an art collector. My first purchase sits on my night table.

Pictures! http://picasaweb.google.com/naama.laufer/PortoAmbuim

Ding! Round II

2008-06-23T11:57:00.006-04:00

You stare at your computer screen and think, “WHAT??” Yes, ladies and gents, I am back for another thrilling, exhilarating, gripping, rousing, breathtaking adventure in the beautiful Angola. I was gone for 6 weeks and feel that more roads have been built, more floors on buildings are going up, and more garbage trucks are roaming the city at the most random hours of the day. I call it improvement.

I’m back at Development Workshop for a consultancy that will end nicely right after the elections (September) with a focus on revamping Angonet (www.angonet.org). With that said, I just designed a new email signature, am organizing a workshop on PowerPoint presentations, and need to develop a national questionnaire to determine what development issues are the most in need of some exposure. Oh yeah, and on the side, I’ve started seeking out other fun consultancies. Lovin’ it.

As it happens in Angola, I’ve returned to find some old friends gone, new friends acquired, and the always-surprising white smiles against dark dark skin, red fiery earth, and a kitchen that for some reason is having some trouble staying put and “remodeled.” Think plaster falling from ceiling straight into delicious meat stew.

And so, I am back home with tons of delicious butterfly kisses. It’s winter season here which, gasp, means cooler nights and, tada, less mosquitoes (although the buggers still got me my first week here). I am loaded with a wok pan which I schlepped from NY, a couple lemon/pepper spice tins, a few African panos, my iPod dock, baby wipes, and 70lbs worth of clothes and toiletries (Ellin Lavar’s liquidmotion goes with me wherever I go).

I am so ready for round II.

Last Dip

2008-04-21T11:58:00.000-04:00

Drove back from the beach yesterday, Palmeirinhas. The sand was interminable, the water a perfect temperature with just the right amount of waves. My last dip.

I feel like one of those wartime reporters who spent three months deep in the bush, dropped off in a country they’ve never visited before (probably didn’t even know where they were), given a pad of paper and a box of pencils, and just spewed out page after page of ramblings. My ramblings are a website, and so I present to you www.dwangola.org.

Three months in Angola were intense, and I return to you with a new sense of wonder (enter Aladdin theme song) and an EU passport that gives me a three-month stay in the US. At the moment, my dear fans, the world is truly my oyster and I’m not quite sure what the next step will be. Might start a blog there as well…

Here is to me signing off from the land of baobabs and mustard sunsets.

Community Work

2008-04-11T04:50:00.002-04:00

Don’t go picturing Naomi Campbell in designer-wear strutting her 3-inch heels picking up trash in New York City. This was real community work as in 1980s Land Rover a la Indiana Jones (the one with seating for 8 – or 12 – in the back, two benches facing each other), jeans and Pumas, bag-full of bread and Cadbury for snacking, hole-ridden side roads, red dirt everywhere, and then out of nowhere a community jango sprouts.

The jango (see pic, a community’s meeting place) was where KixiCredito, DW’s microfinance offshoot, and PARCIL, DW’s program that promotes social infrastructure rehabilitation, were to meet with the village’s elders to discuss their livelihood.

Women on one side (nursing mothers outside), men on the other, me in one of the “privileged” seats (for a second I thought I had committed a horrible oops and should be sitting elsewhere – they assured me that no, I was to remain in the plastic chair) a group of about 30 villagers, most of whom didn’t speak Portuguese but one of the many local languages, gathered to set their community’s priorities. What was most important? Water? School reconstruction? Healthcare? These seem to be the plights of most everyone here in this wealthy country.

I was surprised that the session started with a prayer (in Portuguese). All stood, this rich, traditional group, to pray to a G-d that I’m not sure they even believed in. But when all were back in their seat, the women spoke. At first, it took Luis (PARCIL program manager) a couple of different approaches to get them engaged and trusting…and then the dam broke. There’s a school but no teachers, there’s land for a clinic, but no money to buy materials much less medicine, government promised water pumps, but none have been installed, and of course, there’s no electricity. So, what comes first?

What comes first??? What do you mean what comes first? Aren’t these all basic human needs? It’s incredible how these poor poor communities have to pick one among these, and yet, they do. Once they have water, they deal with education. Once they have teachers in their schools, they construct the clinic. Once the community is healthy, they get light…and so on. The great power that DW has been giving these communities for so many years is to depend on themselves to pull themselves out of poverty. No amount of international funding can match that.

Only quasi-white person in the group, this was one of my most fulfilling experiences here.

Hot off the press

My visa came through and my passport is back in its orange leather sleeve. I will be saying good bye to Angola on the 23rd of April…back in the US on time for my birthday. Bittersweet, I tell you.

Somehow, however, I (ahem, DW) will not have to pay ANY fine…shocking. I’ve been in the country for over the “allotted time” but the universe is working with me. Three months and a bit will be my total time (this time) here in Africa.

G-d's Kingdom

2008-03-31T04:15:00.003-04:00

I crossed the Luanda border last weekend. Somewhat illegal, as I do not have my first visa extension quite yet (also hoping passport is not lost in the “system” but that’s another story), I was officially visiting another province – Malange.

The supposed 6-hour, 6-car trip (which somehow extended into ten hours) led us to the Quedas de Kalandula. One of the most spectacular sites I have ever seen, the waterfalls exploded with such perfect precision that I sat stunned and simply admired G-d’s kingdom. It was unbelievable. I regretted not knowing how to do yoga, because it just felt right to sit in lotus position and meditate. I did it anyway.

So, after grilling, dancing and singing, we all passed out at 10pm (pathetic, I know), to wake up at 4am (couldn’t sleep), wait until the sun was out at 6am, and take a dip in the freezing waters of the river that led to the falls. Fantastic…and freaking cold.

Late morning took us down to the bottom via a narrow, muddy, insect-(maybe cobra) filled, swamp-like, almost-vertical bush/forest path. A group of 8, almost all of us fell at least once, scratched up some part of our body, and/or got bitten. We loved it and returned to take another dip in the freezing waters. You say masochism, I say…peer pressure, no, really.

So, to wrap up the story, it started pouring, weather plummeted a few hundred degrees, we cooped up in our tents (hoping they wouldn’t be washed away) and had another night of grilling, dancing and singing. The 10-hour car trip back home was a cinch. I could really write a guide book for this country.

Kitchen update: Think the remaining tiles are not going to go up and we will forever have a bucket to catch the water below the sink. At least we have a bucket…

A key got stuck in our front door lock. No idea how it happened, but we currently have to go in through our kitchen door (didn’t even know we had a kitchen door!) and make sure the lock of our gate, the lock on the chain, and the lock on our kitchen door gate are all…locked (couldn’t think of another word here). Just hoping the sandwich guy doesn’t show up at 4am again…

Also realized I didn’t share my fishing adventures with you all…nor the TWO tuna I caught. So proud…so proud…Some pictures uploaded for you to share in my spoils of the sea. Will upload more as soon as internet cooperates.
http://picasaweb.google.com/home?tab=mq

If you were holding your breath in high anticipation of my return, breathe out…no idea yet.

Coke @ the Roque

2008-03-18T04:58:00.000-04:00

You should never plan going to the Roque Santero too far in advance. The biggest open air market in Africa could potentially, maybe, perhaps, be a little intimidating, especially due to the raving reviews (read: “Don’t go to the Roque, it’s dangerous, you will find human heads on sticks”). So, with this in mind, the best was to just…go. I mean, I was here in Angola, how could I not?

Small glitch in my plans, however, was the absolutely-no-camera-allowed unwritten rule, which means, you only have my memory and these words to live through what I did…an absolute African anthropological experience. A few snapshots:

· Law of Attraction is in full effect. The energy you put out, is what you will receive. We were three (two guys and moi), all somewhat white in an ocean of beautiful black bodies, but we blended. We stopped to buy jinguba (peanuts), got some recipes from the vegetable ladies, tried negotiating for my panos, and danced among the piles of used clothes…ok, no one else was dancing, but we got some chuckles

· Picture of the day: an old lone “costurero” (tailor) at his sewing machine surrounded by nothing except burning trash and red dirt

· An entire section just for pots...piles and piles of them. One was big enough for me to sit in, comfortably.

· Women making steaming funge in huge pots among barefoot children, a stray dog or two, street vendors and a lot of dust

· Man frying jinguba with sand (“from our own beach down there”) for “a better taste”

· Meats…you could really see poverty in this section. Every table had just a few cuts (guts, stomach, liver), no hanging carcasses, flies galore

· Curious children everywhere, stuck to us like gum in hair

· I am now officially “gostosa,” “amorzinho”, “maezinha,” and “fofa.”

· Pano section: colors, colors, colors, colors…seemed like an oasis of vibrancy against a rather desolate and dry setting

· We were almost run over (often) by little carts that squeezed through the tight little aisles

· Almost stopped to watch a movie…in big army green tents that hosted wooden benches and a large TV from the 1980s. Just fantastic.

…and then, after almost three hours of walking among dirt, burnt trash, with arms loaded with panos and idiotic smiles on our faces, we drank the most incredible liquid I have ever tasted. Coca Cola. Straight from the can.

Quote of the week: “Quem não tem cão, caça com gatos.” (He who doesn’t have dogs, hunts with cats). Africa, the land of adaptation.

Angolan cholent of the week

2008-03-12T10:26:00.000-04:00

A Brit, an American, an Angolan, and a multi-national mutt walk into a bar…ok, this time it was a restaurant, during lunchtime in Luanda. All in our 20s and 30s, the topic of discussion swiftly turned from weekend campsites on the beach to Lunda Norte. On the border with Zaire, the province hosts some of the country’s poorest, least educated, and most AIDS-affected communities. Just starting a program there is a challenge due to often-absent local administrators, lack of community organization (or interest to organize), and poor infrastructure. There always seems to be enough space and a lot of time to speak about this country…its highs, its lows, and its in betweens.

After two weekends of little sun (this weekend was my first encounter with the evil little bugs that hide in Angolan cuisine so I ignored outdoors), I have started losing my I-just-stepped-out-of-a-JLO-video look, and so we’re off camping once again…the coast is our oyster aka, haven’t decided where to go yet, but pictures to come.

Visa update: I still have not received the necessary papers indicating that my first 30-day extension has gone through which means no travel. And PS, I have started filing for my second extension. A little bummed, so Fabrice recommended I explore FIRST next time I’m in Angola. Yes, it’s getting to that time where I have begun thinking about crossing the pond again. By thinking I mean, once in a while I get flashes of winter in New York and have a moment of panic. Also, realized I lost (left) my phone in the 17-hour New York-Jo’burg South African Airways flight, so will be emailing you all for numbers soon…ugh, I loved that phone.

Favorite names of the week are:
Valdney, Vangrico, Mandavela, Chitanda…I mean, really. These are fantastic.

Kitchen Update: Almost, almost, almost there…but still missing the pipe that drains water and prevents my kitchen floor from flooding. Hmm…any engineers out there looking for work?

I made a belt out of twine today. It’s fantastic. Think I started a trend.

Deep Thoughts by Naama (and a few random ones)

2008-03-03T11:02:00.001-05:00

When the light changes, Angola becomes a different watercolor all together.

- The soil is red in Angola. Rich in oxidized iron. Chemistry 101.

- Rainy season has started in Luanda…officially and tangibly. On Saturday, in one hour, the city flooded after a highly intimidating graying sky. Rain shoes - no matter what you wear, it’s not enough.

- Luanda carries my favorite sunscreen – Garnier’s Ambre Solaire, Clear SPF 20. Not yet FDA-approved in the US. I love this country.

- New Development Workshop homepage is almost up. Take one last look before I blow your minds http://dw.angonet.org/.

- My recent DW project obsession is ONDAKA – an adult literacy program that publishes a monthly bulletin compiled by local communities, primarily in the Huambo province, that acts as a platform for peaceful dialogue. There is a tremendous will in Angola to avoid conflict and educate younger generations on the importance of stability.

- I continue being a firm believer that women multitask better than men.
Angolan women: carry a bucket of water, or fish, or shoes, or mandioc, or bananas, or gasoline on their heads, a baby on their back, plastic bags on their arms, and rearrange their pano whenever necessary
Angolan men: just walk, with nothing…next to the women

- Went sailing this weekend for the first time in my life. My body looks like I fell down a flight of stairs…and then another. It was one of the most exhilarating things I’ve ever done (after climbing Masada at 4am)

Kitchen update: not done yet, but almost there…or so they say
Quote of the week: Mother to her son eating ice cream, “Is it ok? Not too cold?” Classic.

The office smells like the fresh bread I just bought at the bakery, and I have one month left in this beauty of a country.

Gastronomic Adventure

2008-02-26T03:41:00.001-05:00

No culture is complete without food, and so, I bring you an A-through-whatever-food-names-I-remember guide to Angolan cuisine.

Arroz – not your mother’s rice; cooked with corn, jimboa (see below), peppers and whatever else is found at the market that day

Batata Doce – sweet potato but not the orange/red ones we have in the States that Maayan bakes in the oven; these are white, almost flaky, but incredibly sweet

Churrasco – grilled chicken...yah, that’s it

Coffee – yes, we all know what this is, but here coffee flows through veins so I figure I would include it for added effect

Farofa – coarse corn meal; mixed with feijão (see below)...would be fantastic to thicken any dish

Feijão em olio de palma – yellow beans in this palm oil sauce...a lot of bean eating here

Feijoada – adopted from Brazil...brown beans and pork, which means Naama no eat

Fish Calulu – a blend of dry fish and fresh fish; one of the only dishes I can’t quite swallow...a very strong unique taste

Funge milho – the STAPLE food in Angolan cuisine...kind of like mashed potatoes made with corn (think I mentioned it in my first blog entry); half a serving and not only are you done eating for the day but an all-afternoon nap is a must

Funge bom bo – similar to above, but made with mandioc...stickier, gooeyer…the perfect kid’s meal; more typical of Luanda than the rest of the country

Galinha em molho – wild chicken (as in, those chickens that cross the street without a care in the world and then freak out when a car almost runs them over) in a jimboa-base broth; much tastier than the normal “frango” (store-bought chicken…although I’m sure you can find the wild chickens is some stores as well)

Gambas – shrimp (but HUGE ones); Angolans are big on all shellfish here (being on the coast and all) **Interesting note: Currently lobsters are illegal to eat because it’s their egg-laying season…surprise, surprise, not everyone respects that around here

Jimboa – green leaf similar to spinach but lighter in taste and mixed with everything

Jinguba – peanuts; think they’re fried or grilled…quite crispy…eaten with everything

Mandioca – mandioc; eaten as a carb to accompany fish, meats or chicken…can be completely tasteless

Meat Calulu – same as fish calulu but with meat…you know where I stand on that

Peixe Grilhado – yum yum yum…grilled fish…FRESH fish always…a little bit of pepper, salt and lemon is all I need. I’m going to go into serious withdrawal in NY

Selection of grilled meats – pick and choose…they kill and grill everything including monkey

Weird note of the week: sun sets in the middle of the sky here…not on the horizon. In the last month, I’ve seen the sun set only once on the water.

Kitchen update: almost there…missing a few tiles and the tube that doesn’t drain the water straight to the floor.

More pix!
http://picasaweb.google.com/naama.laufer/Angola250208

Bread & Cheese

2008-02-20T04:43:00.000-05:00

Perspective. Overused word in the US, rather adequately perfect here. Let me explain.

Yesterday I went home to take my little afternoon nap (yes, peeps, I am LOVING my naps…not sure how that is going to fare back in NYC) and, to maximize my sleep, and minimize my hunger, I decided to make two cheese sandwiches. One, I gobbled up before my nap, the other I cautiously wrapped up in a napkin to eat on my way back to the office. The moment I was cautiously wrapping my second sanduitz (pronounced a la Greek), I just knew I wouldn’t be finishing it.

I took two bites as I pranced down my staircase and the moment I stepped out onto the street I saw them. Three street children who were on a search and eat mission. I have never seen the desperation of hunger so up close and personal. When one of them spied me and my little bundle, he didn’t even look into my eyes, his gaze was fixed on my sandwich. Not sure when he last ate. He got the sandwich. I should’ve made more for them...why are children starving in this world? There are enough resources for us all.

Wow, bread and cheese…that got me thinking of Thai food and how much I love the culinary diversity that is NY.

News of the week: Kitchen is being remodeled...as in, tiles are in, sink is almost working and cockroaches are no longer ruling the land.

per·spec·tive (pər spek′tiv). I love Angola.

Reality Check

2008-02-14T06:20:00.001-05:00

I’m in Africa. As in, I am REALLY in Africa. I have never lived in a country like Angola in my life. Yes, Ecuador and Brazil were a good prep course, but nothing compares to the realities of Africa.

A brief history of Angola in two sentences (ok, three).
Angola is an oil- and diamond-rich country in southern Africa that was colonized by the Portuguese. Fast forward a few decades, Portugal leaves the colony and so begins almost 3 decades of conflict. Fast forward a little more to 2002 and war ends. (for more detailed info, check out wikipedia.org)

So where are we now? Angola is about to explode in the international arena. Construction companies are vying for land (and there’s still a lot of it), there are opportunities for anyone who is in banking, engineering, finance, mining, marketing, entrepreneurship…you name it. So that’s the business side.

On the people front, NGOs and the government are diligently working together to decentralize the country, encourage participative planning in local communities, and continue building and rehabilitating schools, clinics, entire neighborhoods (a little bit of rain can destroy tens of houses…PS, rainy season here in Luanda has brought on exactly one hour of rain in the last month. Freakin’ global warming.)

And so, I’ve picked the perfect place to observe Angola from…Development Workshop works directly with both the government and the people (did I mention they are officially an Angolan NGO?) implementing projects across all 18 provinces…am hoping to travel to Huambo province soon to see the DW projects there…heard things are very different there…quiet nights, starry skies…

My new favorite thing about Angolans is every time I say good morning, good afternoon or good night, they respond with “obrigado” (thank you). I just love their warmth.

News of the week: Work has begun on remodeling my kitchen…and street children literally moved a car I was in out of a parking spot. Fantastic.

Prada Beauty in Angola

2008-02-07T10:50:00.000-05:00

For all of you out there wondering, my skin looks great. Prada Beauty lives strong in Africa. There has GOT to be a short comedy there somewhere…

News of the week: my shower head has been replaced so no more bucket “showers.” I had become quite attached to that blue bucket…it had become somewhat of a morning, noon and night ritual. Yes, it’s that hot here.

I am progressing wonderfully with the website redesign/edit for Development Workshop. I couldn’t have embarked on a better project to understand the plights of this country and the steps that this organization has taken in the last 25 years to make amends. There is an INCREDIBLE amount of work, thought, and care that has gone into the hundreds of projects that DW has undertaken…now it’s just a matter of finding every file, every image, and every video and plopping them into the world wide web (that’s “www” for those who just did a double take).

My New York killer instincts are being softened by the African culture, but am still a bit “particular” (ahem, obsessive) about scheduling meetings…many are shocked when I actually ask them a time that would be best for them…and then, to top it off, show up on time. It’s great.

Weekly highlights:
- Carnaval kept me up until 6:30am...I think I lost 12 kilos
- I did not get bitten by flesh-eating flies camping at the beach (although one of the girls in the group ended up in the hospital with a swollen leg. They told her it was tse tse and then that it wasn't. wonderful.)
- I have had enough Portuguese wine to last me a lifetime...I've officially banned it from my diet and have switched to the cheaper bottles of yummy French wine
- my half-black self is slowly coming out via a fantastic tan (i am no longer looking like a plump little tomato)
- I've made friends with every guard from home to work...there is one every 5 meters...I'm quite popular
- no crazy sandwich man this week

David told me the Giants won the Superbowl, the housing market is in shambles, and it hit 65F (18.33333C) yesterday (during WINTER…on the EAST COAST!). Unreal. The US is missing me…but at least my face is dewy and uber smooth.

The good and the quirky. Welcome to Angola!

2008-01-29T10:24:00.000-05:00

I have landed in Angola. After two days of travel (including the ultimate baby-crying-in-airplane-for-15-hours experience), a stint in Jo'burg (where I definitely overpaid the guy helping me with my suitcases) and a diet composed of challah and ginger tea, I landed in the tropics. The moment tiny droplets of sweat started forming on my nose, I was happy…and I haven't stopped being happy since.

As many of you know, I am volunteering/consulting/interning for Development Workshop, an incredibly dynamic non profit that has been in Angola since 1981…My initial charge has been to update the website ("actualizar o website") and develop informational pamphlets ("panfletos") for the world to see…all my photoshop and editing experience is coming into exquisite use…and yes, I am already working in Portuguese. Half the time I feel like I'm speaking some version of Spanish-French-Italian…it's awesome. More on work front soon.

And so, without further adieu, here are some highlights (trying to keep it short, so I can keep my fan base going strong for the next three months):

· I have a chain and lock on my door. Yes. And some random guy rang the doorbell at 4:30am the other day looking for a steak sandwich. I told him we don't start serving until 10am. Thank G-d for locks.

· Our family friend, Cara, lives here in Luanda which means: instant social life, fantastic beaches, incredible dinners with wine (Portuguese, alas, but still…), and tons of girl talk

· Luanda Day was on Friday, but the whole city did not find out whether it was going to be a holiday or not until Thursday night.

· People here have the most beautiful smiles, the capacity to carry A LOT of weight on their heads, and a booming grayish market money exchange operation

· Grapes cost $50 per kilo…kiwis are close

· I have tasted some of the most delicious food…"funge" (corn-based similar to mashed potatoes), "gallinha" (wild/local chicken), "jimboa" (green, spinach-like yumminess), and of course, a ridiculous amount of mango juice

· The long tunics and pants I wear day in day out are last season here…women look at me like I have no sense of style. Moi?? I am fast becoming the proud owner of many "panos" (pareos)…

Skype is becoming my closest friend…after gmail. Hint hint hint.

P.S. Look at my pictures by clicking on this link: http://picasaweb.google.com/naama.laufer/Angola102

How to tackle Poverty?

2007-10-30T22:29:00.000-04:00

I have just come across on the Reuters AlertNet of a blog titled : What's the best way to improve developing world health?

The writer Peter Apps mentions several ideas that are constantly being debated upon; in the end he quotes the Liberian health minister Walter Gwenigale who said that he knows what would make a real difference in his country -- and it is the one thing Western donors will not fund. He told Reuters that what he really wanted was outside funding so he could pay doctors enough not to quit and go overseas -- and hopefully to tempt back medical staff who fled during the war and are now earning better money in other countries.

It is a problem that some experts and aid groups feel will get worse if the European Union introduces its "blue card" scheme to encourage skilled migration, which could also drain trained medical staff and nurses from poor countries.

In a way, I was mislead by the title of the article as my hopes were high to read a miraculous recipe, some innovative idea. Nothing yet. It prompted me to the following reflection:

Perhaps the problem has to be stated differently: health can not be isolated from education, housing, food security, employment, micro-finance, literacy... Poverty has to be tackled as a whole - with its many components - and governments of poor countries have to be the main protagonists of their own development. They have to be the core signatories of their own Millennium Development Goals. Goals that are realistic and that they assume full ownership, responsibility and accountability for. With the strong support, participation and even monitoring by the rest of the world - the rich countries and international organizations - within the frame of a world alliance.

Centro del Muchacho Trabajador - Quito- Ecuador

2007-10-03T11:26:00.000-04:00

Images speak... Lunchtime at the Centro del Muchacho Trabajador where hundreds of mainly indigenous streetchildren and their families gather every day to receive a free lunch. Sometimes, this is the only meal they have for the day. The CMT also provides many other services to these communities: education, health, adult literacy, day care center, recreation and of course food and nutrition. Kids learn at convenient times, when they take a break from their street activities. Take a look at the pictures by clicking here.

Liz in Bukoba: "The Disabled Outing"

2007-07-25T14:26:00.000-04:00

Let me start this communiqué with the Walk of Shame. I was walking home from Mugeza (the Bukoba suburb that sits on a hill about 8km away from the city) last week, my cheeks burning partly from the 88 degree heat but mostly from the shame that I was feeling. I took the dalah-dalah (bus) up to the disabled school and was unable to accomplish any of the things that I had set out to do up there. Because of the language barrier it was impossible for me to organize the children, either individually or in groups! I hung out for about an hour, chatting (mostly just greeting everyone and laughing and smiling and giving high-fives) but to get anyone to listen to me proved impossible. Even the teachers who speak extremely limited English could be of no help. I was so embarrassed and upset that I was on the verge of tears for the first leg of my march back to the city. I had two hours to sort things through in my head all the way back to Bukoba and part of my calm was delivered to me by an amazing woman who spoke no English at all.

I met this woman about half way down to Bukoba town and we fell into step. I was happy to have a companion for the remainder of the walk as I was feeling very lonely and sad and once we had exchanged all of the pleasantries that I know in Swahili and I had told her my name (she never told me hers) we had a series of comfortable silences that I found as inviting and peaceful as a hug from my Momma. When she had arrived at her destination which was a few minutes from my own, I had the equivalent of 2 dollars for her in my palm as a shook her hand and thanked her for her company. She has no idea how much I appreciated her, but considering a well paid housekeeper makes around 20$ a month here, I think I gave her some indication.

When I arrived at Raza's home we agreed that one wonderful and rewarding project for next Sunday would be to take all of the disabled children on a picnic at the beach if they cleaned their dorms and bathrooms first on Saturday.

Upon arrival at the disabled school in Mugeza on Saturday we were greeted by a wonderful teacher who told us that the other teachers were in the city for the day renewing their teaching certifications and that they would be gone all day and the cleaning could not happen that day. I pretended to be disappointed and even a bit angry but thinking quickly I struck a deal: when the teachers return, they must recruit the students to help in the cleaning of the dormitories and the restrooms (concrete blocks with a squat hole) and I will return the following day and inspect their work and if I am satisfied I will take them all on a picnic at the beach. The teacher said it would be done so we left.

Sunday morning I was told that the transportation that had been arranged would be at Raza's petrol station at 9am. I asked if this meant 9am Bukoba time or New York time and Raza laughed and assured me that although the driver was African he would be sure to let him know that there was a mzungu (white person) waiting for him so that he should not be late.

At 11am we are finally in the truck en route to Mugeza. I am sitting in the front of a flat bed truck that is used for shipping cargo with the three orphans Hussein, Abdullah and Hamza (who like to go everywhere with people and are the most active people in Bukoba!) and I fear for my life. The roads are very bad but the driver is speeding out of control and I know there are no shocks or seat belts in the front and I cringe to think of what the disabled children are going to do in the back! We get to the school and none of the teachers or students seem very surprised that their transportation looks more appropriate for moving crates of soda than disabled children, so I pretend that I am okay with it as well. It seems that this is the way that they are hauled around when going anywhere together. Laughable when you think about 'short buses' with those elevators that go down to the sidewalk and the slowly come back up again. Have you ever felt like just picking up the wheelchair- or crutch-bound person and sitting them in the bus in order to speed things up? Well that is exactly what we did, and while some of them were not easy to lift, most of them are small children and I could just follow the lead of the others and hoist them up onto the flat bed and direct them to a relatively safe area, much less time consuming than those elevators! Most could get in with a small boost and climb up but several were just passed in like sacks of potatoes.

I inspected the dorms and the restrooms and they were very clean with all of the beds made and the mosquito nets tied nicely. Although the women's dorm still had a faint smell of urine the teacher said that that was permanent and she didn't know what it was from (it was worse the last time I was there, so at least there was improvement!) and I said that I was satisfied so we loaded the kids into the truck along with the Head Mother and Father who mentioned that some of the children were still on holiday.

I then came up with the brilliant suggestion that we count the children and there were fifty-six of them plus the Mother and Father and the teacher and I sat in the front with the three boys. I am not ashamed to admit that I was too chicken to ride that flatbed. Fortunately because of the weight of the load and the bad roads, the driver was forced to go very slowly (1st gear) all the way down to the beach (and on the way back our load was so heavy again that he had to go slowly or the truck would not have made it up), whew!

We got to Spice Beach at around 11:30 and stayed until 2pm. Most of the children were screaming happily for the entire duration of the outing. The boys got naked and jumped right into the waves while the girls took about an hour of edging far away from the boys and then slowly jumping in. It was so beautiful to see them smiling and laughing and splashing and I was very glad for my life guarding certificate because, lest we forget, most of these children are severely handicapped. That did not matter and they did not care and so, keeping a watchful eye, I did not intervene at all. One of the blind children (there are about a dozen) was sitting in a chair and I just grabbed his hand and made him walk with me at his own pace while I held his hand right into the water! He was so cute and laughing and happy, it was so much fun that I found myself laughing along with him. I did the same thing with the other blind children and it was a blast. No language skills are necessary to explain what they are walking towards and how it makes them feel.

I was so proud of these children and their bravery as well as their natural ability to take care of each other and themselves. They hung their own we clothes out to dry, loaning each other wet shirts and clothes for swimming to keep maximum clothing dry. Also it was so sweet to see who takes care of whom, for example there is one girl who is mentally handicapped and she is the guardian of these two girls who are blind. Another girl who has just had eye surgery and now can see is always giving a piggy-back ride to another girl who has extremely stunted growth and deformed legs and takes a long time to get around on her crutches because she is about 2 feet tall. Another thing that was so amazing was seeing the children who have club foot or other leg deformations running in the sand! They have a hard time getting around on land because if their toes are pointing to the sky and completely externally rotated they are walking on a very sharp point at the end of their leg that is like a heal. This is painful and typically they cannot put all of their weight down on that leg (in many cases it is both legs that are affected) but on sand this problem is much less severe and they were running around. It doesn't hurt to fall on sand like it does to fall on packed earth so all of the children seemed a little more carefree.

At 2:30pm the driver came back to the beach to get us (because I made sure that he knew he was supposed to be there at 2) and we loaded the kids onto the flat bed and headed over to IZAAS where some of the older orphan girls along with 2 of the women who work for Raza and Mama had cooked a lovely dish of pilau with meat and rice, veggies, potatoes, onions and tomatoes and spices as usual.

Interestingly the disabled children have very different eating habits from the orphans. Partly because they are used to being catered to due to their various disabilities and partly because they are fed regularly and are never worried where their next meal is coming from. Another thing that I noticed was a group of sulky girls who sat at the back and didn't eat, some of them eventually decided to start crying. It took a long time for it to be explained to me that these girls are vegetarians and would not touch the pilau. I was surprised but impressed and began to wonder what kind of gourmet food they are served up at their school that they can afford to be so picky. Mama cooked them some plain rice and gave them bread and fruits and the salad that was served to everyone and then I distributed the sodas and the children were happy (sort of). If you want to make a child happy, give them soda.

Around 6 we loaded back up to return, the children seemingly grateful that such a tiring, if not exciting, day was coming to an end. I caught a glimpse of us in a store front window and it was so comical looking that I was not surprised when the police man pulled us over at the permanent police check point at the outskirts of town. He asked where we were going and the driver said "Mugeza". "Carry on then." As though he saw nothing wrong with 58 people riding the back of a flat bed truck up a hill where there are basically no roads! To me we looked like a cross between someone shuttling Mexicans across the California boarder (only we kept the tarp on the truck open) and really bad accident waiting to happen.

It was such a positive experience for the children and for myself I was on cloud nine the entire way home. Much different from my walk on Friday! It turns out that the last time they had a group outing like that was a full year ago. I felt so badly for them when I heard that and it is such an easy thing to organize. It only took a little initiative and a very little bit of cash. The total cost for a day at the beach including truck and driver, lunch for 60, petrol for Ruta's vehicle and soap and cleaning supplies was less than 150 USD. Best money I have ever spent. Seriously, I feel like if they only get this type of opportunity once a year, they will remember it for a long time!

One of the projects that I would love to organize for the children is the purchase of a vehicle similar to the one that we used to bring them down to the beach. It would be between 10 and 15,000 USD and enable them to go on outings whenever the teachers (who loved the distraction and change of scenery as well!) decide to take them, they could go to town, or visit other disabled schools, go to the beach and the fisheries, I feel like it would be a very worthwhile project.

Liz in Bukoba: "The Disabled Immediate Needs"

2007-07-25T14:19:00.000-04:00

After spending quite a bit of time up in Mugeza at the disabled school and getting to know the staff and children quite well, I have narrowed my focus to some very worthwhile projects that are tangible and varying in size and difficulty to achieve. I think that this is the best way to go about it because I really have no idea what my capacity to raise funds will be (I have never tried it before the efforts for this trip) but I hope to succeed because these projects will be very impactful on the lives of many children who do not have it easy. There is one girl who I have gotten especially close with whose name is Antoinette. Her story is so sad and relates the difficulty that these children have been suffering since birth. Although some of them have better relationships with their parents than this particular girl, she is a very good example of what happens here when a child is seen to be handicapped in any way (mentally or physically).

Antoinette crawls. Her family has no interest in purchasing a wheelchair for her because they have decided that she is not fit to live. When she was a baby and her limbs began to grow crooked and she did not start walking her parents were confused but ignorant and so they did not seek medical attention (more common here than not). Once they figured out what was going on with her, they decided that she was not fit to live and so they stopped feeding her and caring for her. She was dirty to the point where she had to have some of her nails removed due to fungus as well as starving and had been eating grass when she was brought to Raza (it was unclear by whom, I will assume some sympathetic villager as is often the case). He decided to sponsor her entry into the disabled school and that is where she now lives. He mentioned to me that she never smiles and if I could get her to smile that would be an amazing accomplishment in itself. Well she is such a cutie, and while it was difficult to get her to smile at first, she warmed up to me eventually and now she smiles almost freely at me when I greet her. I think it may be my Swahili that she is smiling at because it is so bad and very crudely accented, but whatever works, right?!

There are 4 children at the school who need wheelchairs but do not have the funds to purchase any, and so they crawl. Even the ones who have wheelchairs have very old ones that have been abused over time and are breaking down, but at least they can move around upright. I would like to get wheelchairs for the children who have to crawl like Antoinette.

I was mistaken when I said that there were a handful of blind students. There are twenty-eight and more are expected next year. Not all of them live in the dorms at Mugeza and that is why I underestimated their numbers. The school is actually an integrated school with disabled and able bodied children who live locally. I now know that several of the blind children live at home but there are a fair number living in the dorms. For these 28 children there are 4 functioning Braille Writers. The teachers, Mussa and Tabu (the one who was at the beach outing with me) who live at the school can both read Braille and have been trained to teach the blind, among other specialties. I loved watching Mussa read the Braille with his eyes: that was so cool! The Braille writers that they currently have were made in Watertown, MA but he mentioned that they are now making some in South Africa as well. Each student goes through about 4 packs of Braille paper per school year. The government, which is supposed to be running this school, is also supposed to be supplying them with paper, writers, etc. But from my observations, there this school is very under funded and it is not adequate in supporting and furthering the lives of these most vulnerable of children.

In truth they are not miserable, and it is nice to see them enjoying themselves and hanging out with each other, taking on leadership rolls where they can and always lending a helping hand to one another. When I dropped them off after the picnic they were happy to be home and were singing to me as I walked down the road. It is just sad to see that less than a mile away there is the school for the Deaf and Dumb that is run by nuns (not the government) and is SO MUCH better. The children at Mugeza live in two dorms one for the boys and one for the girls. At lunch they eat ogali--wheat or maize paste that has the consistency of cream of wheat cereal cooked without enough water that is sticky and gummy (in fact that is what it is!). It is also perfect for food fights, but they never play with their food (I guess when you have to eat with your hands, the temptation is somewhat diminished) and they get red beans with that. At dinner they have rice with the same beans. Twice a week they have mtoke (the green cooking banana that I have described) with beans and then the same for dinner with rice. I was surprised with the quantity of pilau leftover after the outing but they are in a very different situation than the orphans, because they are fed on a very regular schedule and although it is not gourmet food, it counts.

The acquisition of a flat bed truck for the IZAAS program could really benefit the disabled school as well as the orphans. Raza has assured me that if something is purchased for the school itself and kept at Mugeza than thieves will come and if I return in a year to see what has become of the truck, all that will be left is a shell. He is realistic on most counts and, because I have no frame of reference, I would be inclined to trust his judgment on that. He employs a night watchman who sits in front of these apartment/shops and said that a truck would be safe there (he has two of his own SUV's in the same location) and that it would be used for the right purposes.

The need is so great that there are many more people who can be helped by operations and the purchase of crutches but for several reasons, for example the unreliable medical care here coupled with the complete lack of aftercare, I feel that these three projects would be a great start. These are what I see as the short term needs of the school for the disabled:

• 3 wheelchairs

• several more Braille writers (25 would be ideal but I have no idea how realistic)

• hundreds more packages of Braille paper because they never go out of style

• and a flat bed truck for outings to add fun into the lives of these children

Who's with me?

Liz in Bukoba: "The Home Visits"

2007-07-25T14:15:00.000-04:00

Last Friday, after the giant feast at the orphanage, I decided to visit some of the children's homes. It was very interesting and so this past week on Friday again, when they are well fed and energized and are excited because they have no school, I told them that I wanted to do the same. It was decided that I would go to a particular neighborhood Kashai, which is located behind the airport and where several of them are from.

When we finished our Friday feast, often the only full and nutritious meal that the kids know they can count on during the whole week, we began the home visits. As usual there were some hangers-on from other hoods who were just there for the trip and to hang out: I am having so much fun with these kids! I know that I came here to spend most of my time with the disabled children up in Mugeza, but it has been so difficult for me to organize and communicate with them because of the language barrier that it seems as though I am spending much more time than I had originally anticipated with the orphans. I have been planning a large outing with the disabled children on Sunday so if all goes well (or not, which always makes for better stories somehow!) my next article will be about them.

Raza chose Kashai because it is known as a rough sort of place in this small, peaceful town. I wonder how he would feel about my old 'hood in Brooklyn. My overall impression of Kashai is that it is not so bad: It seems that Raza chose the children with the worst living conditions for my first 4 visits (as I told him he should) leaving the more typical situations for my own discovery. I do not want to create the illusion that these children are living in the lap of luxury, this is not the case at all, they are all in desperate need of help and that is why they are a part of the orphan program at IZAAS. These hoses for the most part had 2-3 rooms and half were made of mud bricks sith tin roofs while the other half seemed to be more permanent structures. It was nice to figure out which children were siblings as I asked each to pose with their families in a room of the house. Since I have always seen them in large group situations, occasionally smaller groups with the girls, it was hard to tell who was related. In several situations the family was too large to fit everyone in the frame from the range allowed by the house so I had to stand on a piece of furniture or outside of the room while taking the picture.

Most families have more than four children with extra children around the house making it hard to decipher where they belonged, but one thing is for sure, there was very little adult supervision, if any. Seeing a group of three- and four-year-olds hanging out by themselves behind a building or under a tree with an older sibling, maybe two years older, but charged with watching them is a very common occurrence. This also clarifies another question that I brought up in an earlier article about the small, avoidable injuries becoming major disabilities, for example the hand burn victims. Siblings and peers just don't watch as closely as a parent would, although they make fine short term babysitters they do come up with some very typically childish games that are risky at best. The other day I was in a very large truck (more on that later) driving down a bumpy highway and there was a 4 year old child who had made a kind of wagon by cutting open one side of an old plastic oil can and attaching a rope to the handle. He was dragging his baby sister who was a few months away from walking age along the road, the 'highway.' When the children noticed the truck coming they ran and he forgot to pull the can/baby so she was sitting in the middle of the road as we were barring down on her and finally she was pulled away.

Back to the home visits. These children are living in such severe poverty that it was very sad to see. They are laughing and skipping and can't wait to get home to their families, but I can see why the IZAAS orphan program is such a positive experience for them. I saw several of their peers just hanging around with nothing to do or causing trouble, while these children that Raza has 'adopted' into the program are very well behaved and have a positive environment to hang out in after school and where they make friends who have similar interests. In one of the homes that I visited there was a front room that contained a desk and a chair, but besides that house none of the children have a place within their home to study. They will either be outside or not studying. None of them have electricity, so night reading and study is impossible.

At one of the homes there were two adorable sisters at home with their mother and older brother. They were sitting in a front room and I asked for the grand tour which included a back room separated by a very dirty curtain. In the back room there was a little boy sleeping (the brother said "baby is sleeping") on a mattress on the floor but then I noticed a tiny lump in the bed that was pushed up to the other wall. Tiny little baby who was 3 weeks old. So cute! Of course when your house contains two young girls, two boys, one teenager and one toddler as well as a mommy and a tiny baby, the sleeping arrangements become very interesting. It was hard to figure out but one thing is for sure, none of these children have the luxury of a bed to themselves. I know how I felt growing up about the impossibly of sharing a room but I could not imagine ever being forced to have my entire family share my room (although the room that I called my own from age 3- 19 is actually bigger than any of the entire houses that I have visited here in Bukoba!).

Of the houses I visited this week, all had at least one parent or guardian at home, except for one situation. Annette's house was the last house that I visited and I met her adorable younger brother who was sitting on the stoop. Their house is very dark and part of a single structure with multiple entries which presumably house other families. There is a rear exit to the area that they would call a bathroom and shower but as in all of the other situations it is just a muddy patch with a semi-private enclosure of hand-woven dried palm fronds and a gas can full of water next to an empty large plastic bowl. This house seemed very dark and the ceilings were extremely low. The two children were the only ones in the family and shared a private room while their parents had their own room. There were a total of three beds and three mosquito nets. I was impressed so I asked where her parents were. It turns out that her father was just admitted into the hospital in another city four days ago (most likely HIV/AIDS) and the mother went to accompany him. "When will they be back?" I asked stupidly and I was met with a blank stare. Clearly they are gone for an unknown period of time. What will you do in the mean time for food, money, etc? Well I was proudly escorted back outside the house where I had not noticed but the brother was selling things on a table, mini-piles of 4 tomatoes for 50 cents and they were beginning to wrinkle. I can only assume that the mother left them with some things to sell, quickly approaching worthlessness. How will these children fend for themselves? I bought a bunch of tomatoes and distributed them to the 3 children who were my escorts home. I also gave the little brother the extra pack of roasted nuts that I had bought for all of the children who were escorting me around (at one point when I saw that one of the orphans whose home we had just visited had later set up a low table where she sold these little roasted peanuts in newspaper rolls for five cents a bag). I went back later in the day with two huge avocados and some almonds (from Dubai duty free!) and the equivalent of five dollars specifically for food for them. Two days later I discretely gave her another two dollars and told her not to tell any of the other children. She may have because later that day I received requests for money from two more of them which I denied. It may just be that they know I am leaving soon and so this is the time that they make requests ("Leeza! Give me my bicycle!" "Give me my radio!" are both demands that I have heard in the past 48 hours but typically they are very understanding, they are used to being told "No").

It is amazing to see in action all of the good training that they orphan program has provided for the older children involved. They are extremely responsible for the younger ones and those who are natural leaders have plenty of opportunity to shine. For the girls, a group of six of them were recruited by Mama to help make the food (same style pilau) for the disabled outing that I sponsored on Sunday. They did a very good job and were rewarded by being able to eat as much as they could of the food once all of the work was done. They cooked, cleaned, boiled, chopped, stirred, distributed and cleaned every dish and the entire room after the outing. They have not only learned good manners and school smarts but cooking and cleaning as well. My final impressions about the IZAAS drop-in orphan program is that it caters to a huge need here in Bukoba and it is a very well run program. The children learn amazing life skills and create bonds with their peers who have similar interests. They are all attending the program out of their own free will and each have at least one sibling who does not attend, proving the fact that they could just as easily stay at home or hang out on the streets. Raza helps the families with money for these children's school fees and provides them with a positive, healthy learning environment and they love it. I feel so lucky that I have been invited with such open arms into each one of their homes, their families were very welcoming and happy to have had pictures taken of them and not one of them was at all unhappy to have me come into the house and look around. It was also a great bonding experience between myself and the children to have me come and see where they live, instead of just being some strange woman who plays Pictionary with them in the afternoons!

Liz in Bukoba: The Word Spreads

2007-07-20T00:55:00.000-04:00

A few years ago in the middle of Raza's campaign to help the disabled when he was most focused on the Jaipur limb project, he helped a man from a bush village (actually about 10, 000 people in said village but very spread out with universal language) about 200 miles away from Bukoba. This man had been crawling for his entire life due to an early amputation necessitated by a snake bite. Needless to say his fellow villagers were extremely surprised to see him walking upright into the village upon his return. They had a huge celebration and everyone was in awe of his new leg. None of them had ever seen anything like it, let alone heard the word prosthetic. On Tuesday the same man came with a big group of disabled people from the same village, and an able bodied man who was put in charge by the head of the village. Both the man in charge and the first man to receive the limb could speak fluent Swahili and were herding the group of people around for days.

Besides carrying a letter from the head of the village explaining that the man in charge was responsible on behalf of this village elder and extending warm greetings and thanks, these people carried nothing with them. Not a bag or a bite to eat. It is not a rich village and they could not afford to pay for their dalah-dalah ride to Bukoba but they somehow arranged with the driver (or waited until they found a driver who was satisfied with the arrangement), that Raza would pay for their fare upon arrival because he had been known to help the disabled. Keep in mind Raza had not heard of their coming or plans at all.

Upon their arrival, the leader paid and was happy to see the man that he had helped walking proudly into his shop after so many years. One woman had elephantitis of the legs with huge feet and calves. Another woman had a severe club foot and was using crutches that were for a child- they were so small! In fact when she heard that she could have an operation to fix her club foot she actually requested that the foot be amputated so that she could have a nice new limb like her friend! Raza and I strongly discouraged that, and we tried to explain that you are better off fixing and keeping your own body parts. A third woman had a very short leg and crawled in crab-like walk because she never was given crutches. Her smaller leg is perfectly formed, just miniature. It ends at about the knee of her regular sized leg. One man was holding a 6 month old baby who had swelling of the brain so severely that she could not hold her own head up. The final woman was an amputee due to gangrene at her mid-calf. She used a stick diagonally across her body wrapped around her involved leg in a hop-sort of walk. The final person to come in was a woman holding a club foot baby. Once her husband realized that the baby was handicapped he left her and now she is living with an old woman in the village.

Raza is sending them all to Kagondo Hospital to see what his friends there say about their conditions. Their accommodations and food will be paid for while they are here, along with whatever surgeries they end up needing be it in Kampala or Nairobi for the more severe cases. The word has spread even to the far away villages that there is a man named Raza who runs a program called IZAAS, that will help the disabled who are in need.

Liz in Bukoba: More Pictures

2007-07-11T14:14:00.001-04:00

Dear Reader: if you are interested in seeing more pictures of Liz in Bukoba then please go to: http://picasaweb.google.com/palmsforlife
Visit this site on a regular basis as we will be adding more and more pictures as they come in.

Liz in Bukoba: A Typical Day

2007-07-11T14:11:00.000-04:00

Well, as anyone who has ever lived in Africa can tell you, the days here are very varied and interesting. Matthew and I were discussing how when he lived in New York for 2 years he became bored very quickly and couldn't wait to get back to Africa for some more action! It is a different kind of excitement here: there is plenty of waiting around because little things take much longer to do, however the excitement happens all around you every day. I can see what he means by being bored in New York. There is plenty of action there but it is predictable. Here in Africa the days are never predictable and there is always something exciting happening. In response to an extremely popular question I will try and explain my environment here in Bukoba as well as daily life here to the best of my ability.

Each morning I jog from my apartment down the main street of Bukoba town down to the shore of Lake Victoria and around the lake. The climate here is ideal: each afternoon it reaches about 85 degrees (F) and has yet to dip below 75.

The locals eat Mtoke which is also know as a cooking banana. I know what you are all thinking, "plantains!" Well that is what I thought too, but could not have been more wrong. The skins of these bananas are bright green when they are ripe but they are not very sweet at all. Instead they have the consistency and flavor that is probably best compared to that of a potato. The Tanzanians cook them in water with spices and serve them with a few beans. Typically a huge bushel of them costs around 5 dollars and feeds a large family for a week. They eat their food off of one communal plate and with their hands. There is also an abundance of fruit and veggies for me to eat, but typically the locals stick to Mtoke because it is cheap, readily available, high in energy and quite filling!

Raza's wife Mama is an amazing cook and they have me over for lunch or dinner almost every day to ensure that I have at least one hot meal. They are both of Indian origin but both are Tazanian natives so the food is an amazingly delicious mix of Indian and local African. There are several types of bananas eaten here, a typically sweet one that is cooked like a sweet plantain similar to the Mexican and Cuban style as well as a medium size banana like in North America but a bit darker in color and finally the mini bananas that I love so much as well. There are also several types of oranges, mini and large all very sweet and yesterday when I went to Kagondu with some of the disabled children they were harvesting pineapples and they were sweeter than anything I have ever tasted: full of flavor with none of the sharp pineapple bitterness that I am used to. They were about 50 cents for 3 of them! I eat at least one passion fruit every morning, they are small and sweet and delicious and also come in several varieties, as well as the delicious tomatoes and gigantic avocados that I also eat daily. There are fish in the lake--tilapia to be exact--and chickens abound making eggs readily available. It is amazing to me the variety and quality of the food that they can prepare here considering that most people are cooking over charcoal and wood burning piles using one or two pots! As I mentioned every day here for me has been different and while I am not trying to achieve a regular schedule the rhythm of life is so much different here that it has taken some getting used to!

The mornings are usually spent taking care of personal matters, for example laundry (by hand and dried on a line), email (twice a week but over a connection as slow as molasses running uphill when it is working), going to the market to buy fruit or veggies (every two days because I have neither fridge nor Tupperware to preserve things in and my outdoor kitchen ensures that the bugs help themselves). During the daytime so far I have been doing different things based on Raza's suggestions and I will later write about the goings-ons at IZAAS during a typical week. Basically I spend that time observing what goes on around the IZAAS medical project which has a rhythm to it, although it is chaotic, and takes up most of my day. At around 5 on week days I will head over to the orphan center and play some games with them, typically the boys chase the tennis ball that Matthew was kind enough to leave with me, while the girls hold my hand and touch my hair and work up the courage to smile at me and laugh with me. They are very shy girls and the boys are for the most part, crazy. They are so cute and I have become very attached to them all, especially the one whose houses I have visited.

Their circumstances are all very unique but for the most party they live with relatives in tiny and not child-proofed homes without electricity or running water. In all cases there were other children at home during the times of my visit who were of school age but not attending school due to lack of money and the necessity of working to provide income to feed the family. The orphans are supported financially by Raza and the IZASS project for school purposes but not all of the children attend his program. The smart and dedicated ones do. Tin roofs and mud walls are the norm and there are absolutely no frills or personal space. Most sleep two to a bed but some have more, and there is not one situation that I have seen where the road that they travel on to get to these homes is not covered in garbage. Some good news is that they seem to all have mosquito nets over their beds due to a very successful educational campaign that occurred here a number of years ago. The other good news is that these children have Raza's program to go to every weekday afternoon in order to have a positive influence and a clean safe and positive environment to learn in and to play in. They have been so receptive to me and every day that I do not come by the drop in center I hear about it from them and their teacher. Amazing how far the game of Pictionary can go! Because my Swahili is not very good and their English is about as proficient, Pictionary has become our favorite game by default.

Every few days I go up to Mugeza, where the disabled children's' school is and I also head over to the "deaf and dumb" school. With the exception of a handful, the disabled children were with their families until yesterday when they returned to the school, there was some kind of holiday, but that worked out quite well because I was able to establish a rapport with some of the girls making me seem like an old friend returning to hang out with them as opposed to a stranger coming to tell them what to do. For the remainder of my stay in Bukoba I will be heading up there daily in order to do physical activity with them based on their individual needs. Mostly it will be basic exercises for those who can and just playing and having fun rolling around in the grass. Although I have not helped the disabled children with their physical needs as much as I hoped that I could by working with them for a month, I have seen what goes on behind the scenes of IZAAS and have been working with Raza on a plan that hopefully will improve their lives for the future.

My evenings are very quiet, on the nights when I am not eating with Raza and Mama (they tend to eat quite late so I opt out of dinner more often than not) I am in my apartment by 8 or so in order to beat the malaria mosquitoes to the punch (I hear they love you more when you eat bananas so I think I would be in trouble if I didn't!), then I write in my travel journal and plan out my blog articles and I spend some time reading under my mosquito net before I nod off. My apartment is part of the building that Raza grew up in and was left to him by his father. Also a great philanthropist, Mr. Fazal was a family man and built 4 large apartments in addition to the one that his family lived in growing up, all on top of the storefronts that he owned. At one point there were 22 people living in the apt. that Raza and Mama now occupy alone.

My personal pad is above the drop in center (medical and orphan, they are adjacent) and is quite huge. There are 4 large rooms all bigger than my current room on Eldridge Street and as wall a toilet room, outdoor kitchen, and a balcony. I am giving the impression of luxury and although it is spacious I promise I am not living like a typical Tanzanian but it is really more like the shell of an apartment. My first two weeks here I had serious difficulty sleeping, although I would read to try and get my mind off of the activities of the day, there was never enough distance from the activities of the day and the journaling for me to get my mind off things before sleep. I try to journal and plan my articles early in the evening now so that I can read and get into my books. It makes it easier to sleep: I find the need here so overwhelming that if I try to sleep thinking about the activities of the day and what is to come tomorrow, and try to work on my grand plan for my return, I cannot sleep there is too much going on in my head. I have read 3 books in my two weeks on the road, it is the only way. For those of you who are concerned, for the past few nights I have finally gotten some sleep, so I think my body has adjusted to the time zone and I have finally figured out a way to control my mind. It was hard to take in everything at first, but now that I have started to work on a plan for the future with Raza and narrowed my focus to what I can personally achieve to something tangible which is easier.

So that, in long, is what I have been doing on a daily basis here in Bukoba. There is alot of 'hurry up and wait' that goes on and makes the days frustrating because I am so goal oriented and I am only able to achieve half of my daily objectives in each 24-hour period, but I have been very active with no leisure time thus far. Although I don't mind working 7 days a week for a short while it will be a hard pace to maintain so I intend on making up for it at the end of my trip. With Raza's blessing and guidance I have begun planning for a safari (the Swahili word for "journey") where I plan on seeing much more of beautiful Tanzania! I hope I have painted a vivid picture of my daily life here in Bukoba, surely a hard task as everyday seems completely different from the last.

Liz in Bukoba: A week at IZAAS

2007-07-11T13:53:00.001-04:00

What goes on at IZAAS in a typical week? This program, founded by a businessman named Raza Fazal, is very multidimensional, but essentially there are two major divisions: the orphans program and the disabled project. Every week so many things happen here that it has taken a while to step back understand the flow of the whole place. I will do my best to describe what happens and how the aid is distributed on a weekly basis citing examples from my own personal observations over the past two weeks.

Raza owns the building that he lives in (I live there as well in an apartment in the back) and it is above several store fronts. He owns a hardware shop, a travel agency, and a cellular phone distributors on this premises. He also has other very successful businesses in other locations around town. The mornings, he says, are dedicated to these ventures: take care of your businesses first and in the afternoons see the needy people who drop by for various types of assistance.

In the back of the building next to the orphan drop-in center there is the IZAAS Medical Project Center. Having heard of Raza's program, many villagers from the surrounding Kagera region come to see the doctor here every morning. Because the IZAAS program has helped so many disabled people it has gained a sort of notoriety with the locals. Consequently, people who could easily be treated elsewhere end up here simply because they don't know what to do or cannot afford to go to the government hospital.

Last week, for example, I saw a mother and child at the medical drop in center from about 10am to around 2 in the afternoon. The child had a very large and severe burn on her leg from a cooking incident (very common here because stoves and fires are on the ground) and should have been taken to the government hospital for immediate care but they sat and waited at the drop in center until someone saw them and directed them to the right place. I can't imagine sitting around patiently waiting for help while one's daughter had a huge open wound on her leg covered by a dirty wrap, slowly becoming infected. This is one of the reasons that there are so many disabled people in this part of the world, often a simple injury becomes much more severe, in many cases permanently crippling due to delayed, absent or insufficient care. Even when the villagers do know where to go to receive a certain medical treatment, lack of transportation, and thus time, into town often prevents them from doing so.

In the afternoons people drop by the hardware shop and request financial aid from Raza and his helpers. His right hand man, Ruta, listens to the requests of the various applicants and then makes his recommendation to Raza who reviews each situation and most of the time follows Ruta's suggestions as far as how much to give each applicant. Their methods are precise and well thought out.

On Monday of last week, for example, as I was standing in the shop a woman came in requesting about 95 USD in aid. She has five children aged 13 to 22 her husband has died of HIV/AIDS and she wants money to send the children to school. After reviewing her case Ruta decides that they can give her about 25 USD and Raza makes this the offer. Everything is recorded. In several of these cases that I observed that the applicant was turned away to go back home and get proof that the aid that was given previously (some are first time visitors but it seems that most have a history with them) went to the proper place in the form of a receipt or report card.

The next woman to drop by the shop was disabled. She walks with crutches and has a prosthetic limb. This limb was paid for by the IZAAS program in 2002 and is now broken. Raza will pay for her transportation (by bus known as the "dalah-dalah") as well as for the new limb: a total cost of around 200 USD. She receives full payment for her claims because she is helpless and lives alone. Several more people dropped by the shop with similar claims as the first woman, the most common scenario being that they need help paying school fees for their children. Although they cannot all be compensated for the total ammount that they have requested, if some type of proof is provided regarding their needs and their responsibility in using previous funds properly, they are never turned away empty handed.

I was very impressed with the formality of the process and clearly there is a reason why Raza is such a successful business man. He runs his charitable organization with the same honesty and diligence that he runs the other ventures. Some of it is by instinct, but most of the flow of money is based on factual information. Ruta keeps every record in a giant book so that it is a known fact and recorded how much of the of the businesses' and how much of Raza's personal money is going to help these needy people. It turns out that a very significant amount, somewhere around 100, 000 USD every year!

Along with the typical day to day drop ins to the shop and the medical center, there are also 'special events' that occur regularly. Every Tuesday for example, you will find about 30 to 40 people hanging around outside of the shop starting at 11am ranging in ages from a few months old (babes in arms) to around 80 years old. They are all HIV positive and they come for in-kind food donations that is distributed by Ruta at around 3pm. They prefer to give them food as opposed to money because they know that at least one good meal a week can make a huge difference in their health, regardless of their age.

Fridays are a very special day at the orphanage: Mama, Raza's wife and some other women, both paid and volunteer, work all morning and into the afternoon to prepare a meal for all of the children It is uncertain what, and if, they have been eating during the rest of the week, but at least once a week they are very well fed. Cooking for 65 children seems like no great task, especially when these 65 eat like they are 150. They are literally starving for nutritious food and it is obvious by the way they dig in! The way here is off of communal plates and I have never seen 5 children sit around a giant heap of steaming pilau (rice, meat and veggies stewed all together with spices: delicious!) and eat and eat and eat until they send the youngest back with a bare plate for more. Most of the children have about two platefuls polished off with the rare treat of a glass full of soda. I ate less than 1/5 of what they were each consuming and was very full.

Saturday the drop in center is open early and Sunday the children are mostly on their own, occasionally another orphanage invites them to join in a communal meal. Up at the disabled center the weeks are much less varied, the children have class and they are fed but they get no exercise or serious stimulation except for the rare times when there is the occasional visitor or when I come up to play with them as I have been everyday now. They sing songs and hang out and are happy but there is not too much going on in their lives. It is fun for me to see them as I always get an extremely warm reception as do all visitors. This week I will be bringing up some friends that I have met here: my neighbour and an

Irish girl just to get the children excited and make them feel like they have more playmates than just me!

A marketplace of shops, an orphanage, walk-in clinic, center for the disabled and home -- these are the many different things all going on in Raza's humble building with its dedicated helpers. As you can no doubt see, there is so much work over the course of a single week that goes into assisting the many people who are helped by IZAAS.

Liz in Bukoba: Initial Impressions

2007-07-06T15:03:00.000-04:00

So here I am in amazing Bukoba, Tanzania! It is beautiful- the earth is bright red and everything around it is green and lush. Huge banana trees, flowers, and plants dot the landscape. The fruit is amazing, passion fruit is the big thing here, you can just bite into the skin (or cut the top off if you are me!) and then drink out the seed/juice mixture. The pineapple, mango and oranges are also delicious.

The people are extremely genuine and friendly; they love to greet one another as they pass. When I jog in the morning on the shore of Lake Victoria I have to say the Swahili greetings about 100 times! It is so funny. They love watching me run- I think they are mostly looking at my sneakers. Here the typical footwear is flip-flops or any type of sandal.

I have had the opportunity to meet Raza, the man who started IZAAS. He is a true visionary. He started the project 10 years ago working with the disabled. Originally he was mainly focused on getting artificial limbs for amputees. He expanded to helping people with many types of disabilities but has since narrowed his scope to children on the advice of a Dutch physical therapist who came to Bukoba for a 2 year stage as a volunteer to help IZAAS (she left in 2003). The work he does is amazing- he is truly committed to the children he helps

That is all for now but there will be plenty more to come. . . . .

Liz in Bukoba: Nameema

2007-07-06T14:53:00.000-04:00

I am walking with a well dressed woman, Jonio, from where the dalah-dalah (taxi-bus type thing) has dropped us off, in a very close suburb of Bukoba. I follow her and her daughter, also well put together, clean looking and well fed down an unpaved rocky path towards their home. Earlier today they had come into Raza's shop requesting financial aid from IZAAS and I asked if I could do a home visit. From my experience here it seems to me that they are what I would call middle class Bukobans, by appearance only, and I want to see how they live. We walk for about 15 minutes downhill. Jonio is pointing out the various highlights of this neighborhood, the school, her friends' houses etc and we arrive at a small house. Her son Dedas is sitting on a rock listening to a disc-man, so I conclude that I was right, middle class. Nameema greets me warmly and comes over to shake my hand. I ask to see the house and she graciously invites me in. Through a cloth curtain outside door we enter a room about 6x6, with a straw lined floor and they spread out a cloth for me to sit on. We all sit and start chatting in broken English and very broken Swahili about life in general. After a time, I ask to see the rest of the house, there is another cloth door behind them and I am curious. I stick my head in (there is not enough room to walk in) and it is another room, about 6x4 with one large bed and one smaller bed, some plastic containers and some wooden shelves. Nameema explains to me that her sister and her sleep on the small bed, her mother and other sister on the big bed and her brother on the straw of the adjacent room. I ask about the father and they laughingly mime and explain that he is a drinker and he is abusive and they are happy when he is not around, like now. Where does he sleep?

I follow Nameema into an adjacent structure, also with low brick walls and a tin roof, this part of the house consists of two rooms, one has a bed, with standing room all around, and the other is what she laughingly calls the sitting room, there is a wooden futon frame, but no mattress. Now she is laughing hysterically and so is her sister, Beth. She decides to continue the tour in a very MTV 'Cribs' fashion. She takes me to the bathroom, the shower, a woven straw corner with what looks like and old gas can full of water (this suburb is quite far from water supply and I see several people trekking around with these gas cans) and then I get to see her garden which has newly planted pineapple and cassava sprouts along with some other beautiful plants. This is not a temporary home, the garden tells me that she plans to live here until they give fruit. (pictures to follow)

My tour is finished and I have to ask what they are laughing about because I don't see anything funny about this situation, but they do so I stop asking and laugh with them, so that they don't think I am mean, but I feel more like crying. This is a very typical situation and they are not poorly off. All 4 children have finished primary school and at least started secondary school, so they are making it work. Nameema is the most articulate, happy and beautiful youth that I have met she is also disabled. Nine years ago she was hit by a car and she had to stay in the hospital in Kampala, Uganda for 6 months. In the past 9 years she has had 5 surgeries and she still uses those silver crutches with the handles (not sure what they are called). She broke her femur in 4 places and did something very severe to her lower leg that I could not figure out but there are two huge parallel metal rods sticking out from her leg that each contain a series of pins, so I assume that they are holding her leg together.

Jonio, her mother, came to IZAAS because Nameema has to go back to Kampala for (at least) 2 more surgeries and she needs money for the trip, doctors and a visa. What happens when you are living at the poverty line, making just enough money to house, school and feed your children and suddenly one of your children needs expensive operations and trips to another country? How can they manage the expense? There is no way, this is where IZAAS came into play. For the past 9 years Raza and IZAAS have been paying for every trip, doctor's visit, visa and surgery for Nameema, otherwise, without the proper care, her leg would have had to have been amputated.

Smiling and requesting that I come back for another visit tomorrow, Nameema walks with me as far up the path back to the road as she can. The going is tough, it is uphill, rocky and winding, so she turns back after a few minutes. I wave farewell and turn to watch her make her way, slowly and carefully down the steep path. I am so glad that she will get her funds for her trip to Kampala but I wonder after 9 years, what is the best expected outcome for her? Is it possible for her to ever walk again unassisted? Without the proper aftercare I really have no idea, so I can only hope that with the money that she will get from IZAAS this next operation will be the one that cures her...I am doubtful, but hopeful at the same time.

Liz in Bukoba: The Disabled

2007-07-05T00:01:00.000-04:00

The disabled children live about 7 km from Bukoba in an area called Mugeza. There they have very basic facilities, no frills. There is also a 'Deaf and Dumb' school very close by, operated by IZAAS. Unfortunately, the children do not have access to organized exercise or physical therapy. There are a few doctors who volunteer for Raza and his IZAAS program: Tanzanians, Americans and Europeans alike. They do everything from screening and registration with the medical system to actual operations.

Amazingly, there have been several cases where the child has been disabled for years, deaf for example, and due to lack of medical attention and money the families have no idea, or the ability to find out, that a simple operation can cure them! The doctors have screened over 200 of the deaf children alone and there are several dozen who are on the waiting list for an operation which is expected to cure them! It is very difficult to find the funding and Raza puts up his own personal money, along with whatever he receives from the occasional donation that comes in to help these children. Raza's system is very well organized and he has budgeted that he can pay for 3-4 of these children's operations per month. This is in addition to the immense amounts of money that he allots to various other needy cases each DAY! He is truly an inspiration and lives a simple life according to my standards but EXTREMELY well for the standard of living for locals here. He has been a successful business man and has continued his late father's way of living to help the needy.

It is difficult to imagine being disabled for your entire life and finding out that there was a simple operation that could cure you, or at least improve your life dramatically, and not being able to afford it. A few hundred dollars couldn't even get you IN to most of the doctors' offices in NYC and here it would cover the transportation cost to Dar es Salaam or Nairobi where there are major hospitals, along with the entire operation and prescribed medications! Sadly though, even after the operations have been a success, there is little to no after care available. However, they manage to get along better than before (walking with a limp is much better than being wheelchair bound due to a severe case of club foot- VERY VERY common here for some reason).

There are about 75 children living at the disabled center at present. They are SO sweet and friendly and love talking to visitors. Their spirit is amazing and inspirational! I love going up there and playing with them, it is really heart warming.

Liz in Bukoba: The Orphans

2007-07-04T23:44:00.000-04:00

Between the recent history of the Rwandan genocide and the war in Uganda there were many displaced children that Raza, the founder of Izaas, encountered coming to his program for the disabled. Some of them were orphans and all of them were very needy, but not always in the same capacity that he was used to helping. However, if a child came and the need was great, he began to assist in whatever way possible.

Tanzania is famous in East Africa for its peaceful history. Other regional countries look to it as an example; this is one of the reasons that there are many refugees here. There were many displaced and vulnerable children in Bukoba due to the wars in neighboring countries and the city’s proximity to the Ugandan and Rwandan boarder. Raza was like a father figure for these children and he helped them either locate their families or funded transportation to a city where they had relatives. Sometimes he even housed them himself.

Raza now has a very basic house with bunk beds and a room for cooking where only children in extreme need are housed. Even children who are not orphans come to him for help. They may need assistance with school fees, may have been abused (not very common here in TZ), or may have parents infected with HIV/AIDS (VERY common here in TZ).

The orphan program is now what can best be described as a drop in center for vulnerable children. There is a large classroom-type setting with desks and a chalkboard and there is a teacher who comes every afternoon (Raza pays the salary) that helps them catch up on their lessons, gives them some moral coaching, and gives them a safe and reliable environment to meet at every day. Some of them have parents who have died from HIV and AIDS, some of them have one parent alive, some of their parents have left or been killed by accidents or infections or any number of reasons.

It is therefore difficult for the families to send all of the children to school. Most of these children are years behind because they had to drop out due to lack of funding. It costs about 200-300 dollars to send one of these children to school for the entire year, depending on if it is primary or secondary education. This includes school fees and the cost of the uniform, as well as books. (I remember spending that on a pair of high heeled shoes that I have only worn twice!) Often if there is a child who seems very promising and is dedicated to their studies Raza will try to find a way to fund their schooling so that they can continue after primary school. Sadly the opposite is true for those who do not show the same promise. Can you imagine how many people you know who would have had their education taken away from them if they had not shown much promise by grade one?

I was privy to a discussion about 3 of the boys who are extreme cases and housed in the orphanage, Hussein, Abdullah and Hamza. I spent the entire day with them and Matthew, another Izaas volunteer and employee of the World Food Program posted in Uganda. Like Matthew I fell in love with the boys. Over dinner, Matthew was talking to Raza and Mama (Raza’s wife) about these boys and they seemed to have decided that Hussein is not very smart and they will not be able to continue to send him to school. He looks to be about 10 years old and the others are around 8. Matthew, who has taken special interest in these boys, insisted and then offered to personally pay for their schooling if it would be possible to organize the enrollment. He has about 8 children enrolled in school currently! He agreed to transport them to wherever they could be enrolled. Martin, his driver for our trip from Kampala to Bukoba, a silent observer to all of our activities up until that point, said that he would help the boys by finding somewhere for them to live in Kampala so that they could attend a good school there. That gesture touched me so deeply that I almost cried, right there at the dinner table. This is how people are here. They will put themselves out to help someone in need. If they can do anything at all they will do it. It is beautiful.

There were about 60 orphans at the drop in center today. I can only imagine what is in store for them, hundreds have been helped and hundreds have not. I asked them to sing a song for me and taped it. They LOVE being in pictures and on camera and are so used to digital photography that they ask to see the photo right away!

THE MDG AND POVERTY IN BURKINA FASO

2007-07-03T15:32:00.000-04:00

We have approached the mid-point for the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) and progress to date varies according to the 2007 MDG report. Although some nations in Sub-Saharan Africa have witnessed positive improvements in specific areas, "the lack of any significant increase in official development assistance since 2004 makes it impossible, even for well-governed countries, to meet the Millennium Development Goals," U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said last Monday. The report further states that “donors should reduce the present unpredictability of aid by providing multi-year schedules of aid flows to each recipient country.” This report also urges the developed countries particularly the Group of the Eight most industrialized nations to meet their pledge to double aid to Africa by 2010.

One African nation desperately in need of this additional aid is Burkina Faso, one of the poorest countries in the world where the majority of the 13 million people live on less than $1 a day.

In an article entitled “A Century Behind” appearing in the January 16, 2006 issue of The National Catholic Weekly, Peter Donaldson, President of the Population Council, states, “Mortality rates in Burkina Faso are higher than they were in the United States in 1900. A baby born in Burkina can expect to live about 30 years less than a child born in the United States- 45 versus 77 years.” Donaldson goes on to discuss the pervasive poverty in Burkina Faso. There are many factors contributing to and stemming from the rampant poverty. These include an uneducated workforce, American and European cotton subsidies, food insecurity, deficient investment, poor infrastructure, scarce resources, illiteracy, and widespread disease.

Palms for Life Fund has selected Burkina Faso as one of our target countries. We are working to secure funding for the many wonderful projects and programs that cannot operate or expand without the necessary financial support.

Please help us make a difference. Donate to Palms for Life Fund. For every donation of $100.00 or more, we will gladly send you a FREE Palms for Life T-shirt.

Liz has arrived in Tanzania

2007-06-29T12:22:00.000-04:00

Well here I am in Kampala, Uganda and it is amazing! The weather is perfect and beautiful, not too hot (not like Dubai, YIKES!) and a nice tropical breeze. I had a wonderful flight down on Emirates Airlines into Entebbe airport and was picked up at the airport by Matthew Mcilvenna's driver and then headed into the heart of the city of Kampala. It is a tropical paradise here. The city is built on 7 hills, just like Roma, but that is pretty much where the comparaison can start and end. The earth is red, just like in Niger, but it GROWS! Palm trees, large bushes and tropical trees, grasses, mango, pinapple, lettuce, yams, maize, you name it, they grow it! Matthew works for the UN's WFP (World Food Program) and has been living in East Africa, on and off, for more than a decade. Although he works full time, his side project is IZAAS, the community service program in Bukoba, Tanzania. I will be spending the next month over there working with the children and the orphans trying to help them in several different capacites. Apparently there is email there (whew!) so the next update will be live from Bukoba and I will be able to give a better picture of my daily life and the needs of the children. For now all is well with me, I am happy, healthy and well adjusted.

xox Love to all

Liz Ross

HELPING ECUADORIAN CHILDREN JOIN THE WORLD WIDE WEB

2007-06-27T07:05:00.000-04:00

Palms for Life Fund is pleased to announce a new partnership to provide computer access and environmental upgrades to 37 elementary schools in marginal regions of Ecuador. Palms for Life and Mercy Corps will ship 200 computers and roughly 800 gallons of paint to education centers run by Fe y Alegría, an organization that operates throughout Central and South America in educating children in impoverished areas.

By the end of the year the computers, donated by Mercy Corps and featuring Pentium 3 processors and 500 MHz, will have high-speed broadband access. Fe y Alegría will be implementing IT educational programs for the school's teachers, and give the school children an electronic portal to the wider world. While the technology will be used to emphasize networking opportunities between the schools themselves, it will also serve the purpose "to adapt them to become the technical foundation of the struggle against the negative impacts of globalization and for social justice." The program's end goals are very much in keeping with Palm for Life's emphasis on the idea that "we are all connected to the poor:" This technology will allow the school children to enter the global digital family and share their experiences and culture with those around the world.

This new partnership will also provide the school children with the materials with which to enhance their classrooms and engage in creative teamwork. The paint will be used to commission murals emphasizing peace, non-violence and children's rights. These murals will encourage children through the creative process to work together, overcome their differences, and create a peaceful environment in their schools.

This is an exciting opportunity to combat poverty by empowering individuals to engage and overcome the challenges of their immediate environments as well as those of the wider world. In order for Palms for Life to continue to fund and explore opportunities like this one, please consider a contribution to the Fund via www.palmsforlifefund.org. For every gift of $50.00 or more, a FREE T-shirt will be donated.

Convert Another Salad Bowl into a Life-Saving Opportunity

2007-06-11T13:28:00.000-04:00

On the 31st of December 2006, our friends Elaine and Steve D. organized a wonderful end-of-the-year party at their home. They told their guests that they did not wish to receive any gifts. Instead, they were welcome to make a charitable donation to the Palms for Life Fund. As a result, a number of their guests visited the website and made very large contributions towards Palms’ efforts at ending poverty. Elaine and Steve offered their friends and family a unique opportunity to feel and do good and by doing so aided our efforts at helping those in need. Palms for Life Fund would not be possible without selfless and generous people like Elaine and Steve and all of their guests.

We hope that you may offer your guests a similar option!

Helping Orphans in Tanzania

2007-06-09T23:43:00.001-04:00

We have a very exciting special project that needs your urgent attention!

Palms for Life volunteer Liz Ross will be traveling to Tanzania in East Africa this summer to work with disabled orphans in the city of Bukoba. Her work will only be possible with your contribution to cover the expenses of her trip.

These children desperately need help in learning how to live with missing limbs and other disabling conditions. Liz will bring her extensive experience in fitness and physical rehabilitation to help the children strengthen and condition their bodies. In her prior work in Niger, West Africa, Liz created strength and conditioning programs for many athletes in several different sports and also helped found a national women’s basketball team which is still in existence today.

Liz will leave at the end of June and spend six weeks in Tanzania. Her trip will have a lasting impact beyond her six-week stay in Tanzania, as she will also spend time training local staff and establishing a regular sports activity schedule to utilize existing local athletic resources. “My focus will be on enhancing the strength and mobility of these disabled orphans with the aim of increasing their independence and quality of life,” Liz said.

For the children, Liz’ expertise will be life-changing. In many cases, Liz will be the only professional who will work with these children during their entire lives.

You can help her make that difference.

In order for Liz to fulfill this important mission, Palms for Life needs your contribution to help towards her minimal expenses of $3,000. Please click HERE and on Donate Now next to Volunteers for Life to give to this important cause and enable Liz' efforts to go forward.

All contributions of $50.00 or more will receive a FREE Palms for Life T-shirt.

If you would like to help Liz and further our efforts to alleviate poverty, please send a link to this blog to others.

We have many new partnerships with great NGOs and exciting projects that need the help of wonderful and generous people like you. These programs include feeding and educating impoverished children in Africa and Latin America, donating computers to indigenous children in Ecuador, providing micro-credit to poor women-headed households in Angola, improving maternal and child health in Burkina Faso, and many others. You will find more information about these projects on our website.

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we · are · all · connected · to · the · poor

A Hunger-Free World

2007-04-09T23:19:00.000-04:00

Palms for Life is above all interested in innovative and effective means of helping the poor. This morning I read a story that is inspiring for all of us who work in this field, whether we are working for a non profit or contributing to the cause. Andrew Youn, a young graduate from Yale and Northwestern University who founded a nonprofit "One Acre Fund" in Africa has one main goal: prevent generations of children from starving during the "hunger season" and instead having surplus food and money enough to go to school.

Youn started in Kenya, where hunger kills more children than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined, by applying an innovative micro-loan project (see ClarionLedger.com)

The business model is relatively simple, namely: provide poor farmers with micro-loans so that they can procure good seeds and fertilizers; educate them in managing their assets and production and help them develop their markets.

I have no doubts that the model can work. Throughout my career in the field, I have seen the magic effect of small loans. Without such loans, farmers would sell their grain even before the harvest just to get the cash to buy the seeds and the fertilizers. This simple cash input makes all the difference and can truly advance poor farmers and help them increase their food production. It is also worth mentioning that poor people have a very high repayment rate.

However, my experience also tells me that out of the four elements of that business model market development is the most difficult one. I think of the underdeveloped local and regional markets, the fragile and unstable national market and then well beyond, the voracious global market. The implications are enormous and can not be ignored.

I have witnessed in Ecuador for instance how farmers see their potatoes or onions or corn getting rotten in their farms because a bridge has fallen, a landslide blocked the road and the truck did not make it to their remote village; I have seen how farmers were obliged to sell their milk at pathetically low costs and had no infrastructure to handle perishable products. There are much more complex issues related to cooperatives, price policy, food imports…

Fair trade is what will ultimately make a long-lasting difference in the fight against hunger and poverty.

This is why Palms for Life is so worthwhile, because we see our projects as an integral part of the entire journey of fighting hunger and poverty. We look at the root causes of poverty and work with executing partners who embrace this approach and tackle poverty from all its angles. We ensure that education, training and capacity building are integral parts of every project.

This is how we are actively engaged in helping the world realize that we are all elements of one single system; a system, like the replica of our own body, where all parts are interconnected and must be beautifully aligned in workable harmony. The same way where it takes each of us to work hard to care for our health and integrity, to nurture the wonderful gift of life, this is the way each of us is responsible for making this world a better place for all.

UN Protecting Human Beings

2007-01-28T16:20:00.000-05:00

It has often happened in my life that I have come up with an idea about which I had strong feelings, that I found original and even daring to being exposed, and for which I was ready to take a strong stand, and that almost by coincidence, around the same time, someone else was expressing a similar idea. It usually provokes in me a mix of reactions: a first one, more spontaneous is: how interesting, this reinforces so perfectly well what I just said. A second one, more thought through is rather: there is consensus, this is not just a matter of coincidence; the time is ripe for this idea to make its way to the top, to gain the force of a hurricane and to reach the minds of the decision makers. Perhaps more than one other voice will make itself hear in addition to mine and more and more voices and finally, things will change. A renewed hope, every single day.

Throughout my career, it has often been difficult, at some crucial times, to remain silent. There were moments when events around me were so intense that I found it unbearable to just be there and watch, and remain silent. I thus took the risk and spoke out.

The other day, as I read a short note by the UN Spokesperson, on behalf of Mr. Ban Ki-moon, exhorting the parties in Lebanon to moderation and dialogue, the thought hit me like a lightning: what about the people of Lebanon? I could see the terror on people’s faces and had this clear image of human beings being caught in the midst of an unwanted, unnecessary fight. A new civil war.

And where is the UN? My dear UN which I had served for 30 years, in which I believe and which flag gives me the chills and the hopes, every single time. The UN with its ultimate goal to protect human beings? Yes, TO PROTECT. And the word just came in my mind as a revelation.

Again, what about the people?

I immediately went to my computer and sent a note to the UN Spokesperson. The Un Secretary General is the maximum authority in the world, the only one who has the right, the mandate, the obligation to look after the well being of all people, independently of their race, religion, age, gender, nationality. The SG has such a tremendous power, and can be such a wonderful world leader; he is the voice of ALL human beings and has the mandate to provide them an unconditional protection.

What does it entail?

It is true that the UN is but the reflection of all its constituency – the countries, i.e. their leaders – and is bound to seeking consensus. However, the SG is empowered by all the UN member states and as such, he should stand firm in front of the world politicians, and remind them over and over again about their responsibility. The SG is the spokesperson of the world’s human beings. This is what has been delegated to him. Human beings should be the center of the UN language and actions. The SG has to talk to the people of the world, remind them of their basic human rights while at the same time empowering them to demand accountability from their leaders. In public statements, the SG should for instance say:” I exhort you leaders to show moderation… The people of your country deserve to live in peace and harmony, we therefore urge you to….in order to ensure the well-being of the people for which you are fully responsible.”

Such language, followed by clear actions, will transform the UN and bring it closer to being able to fulfill its mandate, its ultimate goal, to protect human beings.

And last, but not least, a few days ago Lee Feinstein of the Council on Foreign Relations wrote in the Washington Post on the UN Reform: “The most important "reform" Ban Ki-moon can undertake is to convert these three inspiring words, "responsibility to protect," into a programme of action… The long-term goal is to avoid the stark options of "Doing Nothing" and "Sending in the Marines." That requires establishing a pattern of early and effective international response at the first signs of concern. The place to start is with concrete steps to build capacity -- diplomatic, economic, legal, and military -- in support of the principle of humanitarian protection. Universal adoption of the responsibility to protect has begun to remove the classical excuses for doing nothing in the face of mass atrocities. What is needed now is the capacity and political will to back it up”.

Now please, go back to my introduction….

Bono and Poverty

2006-11-08T15:00:00.000-05:00

This speech I listened to and found to be most inspiring, simple, beautiful, and true. Taken from Penn's Almanac website, http://www.upenn.edu/almanac/between/2004/commence-b.html

Commencement Address by Bono, co-founder of DATA (Debt AIDS Trade Africa), and lead singer of U2, May 17, 2004.

Because We Can, We Must

My name is Bono and I am a rock star. Don't get me too excited because I use four letter words when I get excited. I'd just like to say to the parents, your children are safe, your country is safe, the FCC has taught me a lesson and the only four letter word I'm going to use today is P-E-N-N. Come to think of it 'Bono' is a four-letter word. The whole business of obscenity--I don't think there's anything certainly more unseemly than the sight of a rock star in academic robes. It's a bit like when people put their King Charles spaniels in little tartan sweats and hats. It's not natural, and it doesn't make the dog any smarter.

It's true we were here before with U2 and I would like to thank them for giving me a great life, as well as you. I've got a great rock and roll band that normally stand in the back when I'm talking to thousands of people in a football stadium and they were here with me, I think it was seven years ago. Actually then I was with some other sartorial problems. I was wearing a mirror-ball suit at the time and I emerged from a forty-foot high revolving lemon. It was sort of a cross between a space ship, a disco and a plastic fruit.

I guess it was at that point when your Trustees decided to give me their highest honor. Doctor of Laws, wow! I know it's an honor, and it really is an honor, but are you sure? Doctor of Law, all I can think about is the laws I've broken. Laws of nature, laws of physics, laws of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and on a memorable night in the late seventies, I think it was Newton's law of motion...sickness. No, it's true, my resume reads like a rap sheet. I have to come clean; I've broken a lot of laws, and the ones I haven't I've certainly thought about. I have sinned in thought, word, and deed. God forgive me. Actually God forgave me, but why would you? I'm here getting a doctorate, getting respectable, getting in the good graces of the powers that be, I hope it sends you students a powerful message: Crime does pay.

So I humbly accept the honor, keeping in mind the words of a British playwright, John Mortimer it was, "No brilliance is needed in the law. Nothing but common sense and relatively clean fingernails." Well at best I've got one of the two of those.

But no, I never went to college, I've slept in some strange places, but the library wasn't one of them. I studied rock and roll and I grew up in Dublin in the '70s, music was an alarm bell for me, it woke me up to the world. I was 17 when I first saw The Clash, and it just sounded like revolution. The Clash were like, "This is a public service announcement--with guitars." I was the kid in the crowd who took it at face value. Later I learned that a lot of the rebels were in it for the T-shirt. They'd wear the boots but they wouldn't march. They'd smash bottles on their heads but they wouldn't go to something more painful like a town hall meeting. By the way I felt like that myself until recently.

I didn't expect change to come so slow, so agonizingly slow. I didn't realize that the biggest obstacle to political and social progress wasn't the Free Masons, or the Establishment, or the boot heal of whatever you consider 'the Man' to be, it was something much more subtle. As the Provost just referred to, a combination of our own indifference and the Kafkaesque labyrinth of 'no's you encounter as people vanish down the corridors of bureaucracy.

So for better or worse that was my education. I came away with a clear sense of the difference music could make in my own life, in other peoples' lives if I did my job right. Which if you're a singer in a rock band means avoiding the obvious pitfalls like, say, a mullet hairdo. If anyone here doesn't know what a mullet is by the way your education's certainly not complete, I'd ask for your money back. For a lead singer like me, a mullet is, I would suggest, arguably more dangerous than a drug problem. Yes, I had a mullet in the '80s.

Now this is the point where the members of the faculty start smiling uncomfortably and thinking maybe they should have offered me the honorary bachelors degree instead of the full blown doctorate, (he should have been the bachelor's one, he's talking about mullets and stuff). If they're asking what on earth I'm doing here, I think it's a fair question. What am I doing here? More to the point: what are you doing here? Because if you don't mind me saying so this is a strange ending to an Ivy League education. Four years in these historic halls thinking great thoughts and now you're sitting in a stadium better suited for football listening to an Irish rock star give a speech that is so far mostly about himself. What are you doing here?

Actually I saw something in the paper last week about Kermit the Frog giving a commencement address somewhere. One of the students was complaining, "I worked my ass off for four years to be addressed by a sock?" You have worked your ass off for this. For four years you've been buying, trading, and selling, everything you've got in this marketplace of ideas. The intellectual hustle. Your pockets are full, even if your parents' are empty, and now you've got to figure out what to spend it on.

Well, the going rate for change is not cheap. Big ideas are expensive. The University has had its share of big ideas. Benjamin Franklin had a few, so did Justice Brennen and in my opinion so does Judith Rodin. What a gorgeous girl. They all knew that if you're gonna be good at your word if you're gonna live up to your ideals and your education, its' gonna cost you.

So my question I suppose is: What's the big idea? What's your big idea? What are you willing to spend your moral capital, your intellectual capital, your cash, your sweat equity in pursuing outside of the walls of the University of Pennsylvania?

There's a truly great Irish poet his name is Brendan Kennelly, and he has this epic poem called the Book of Judas, and there's a line in that poem that never leaves my mind, it says: "If you want to serve the age, betray it." What does that mean to betray the age?

Well to me betraying the age means exposing its conceits, it's foibles; it's phony moral certitudes. It means telling the secrets of the age and facing harsher truths.

Every age has its massive moral blind spots. We might not see them, but our children will. Slavery was one of them and the people who best served that age were the ones who called it as it was--which was ungodly and inhuman. Ben Franklin called it what it was when he became president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society.

Segregation. There was another one. America sees this now but it took a civil rights movement to betray their age. And 50 years ago the U.S. Supreme Court betrayed the age May 17, 1954, Brown vs. Board of Education came down and put the lie to the idea that separate can ever really be equal. Amen to that.

Fast forward 50 years. May 17, 2004. What are the ideas right now worth betraying? What are the lies we tell ourselves now? What are the blind spots of our age? What's worth spending your post-Penn lives trying to do or undo? It might be something simple.

It might be something as simple as our deep down refusal to believe that every human life has equal worth. Could that be it? Could that be it? Each of you will probably have your own answer, but for me that is it. And for me the proving ground has been Africa.

Africa makes a mockery of what we say, at least what I say, about equality and questions our pieties and our commitments because there's no way to look at what's happening over there and it's effect on all of us and conclude that we actually consider Africans as our equals before God. There is no chance.

An amazing event happened here in Philadelphia in 1985--Live Aid--that whole We Are The World phenomenon the concert that happened here. Well after that concert I went to Ethiopia with my wife, Ali. We were there for a month and an extraordinary thing happened to me. We used to wake up in the morning and the mist would be lifting we'd see thousands and thousands of people who'd been walking all night to our food station were we were working. One man--I was standing outside talking to the translator--had this beautiful boy and he was saying to me in Amharic, I think it was, I said I can't understand what he's saying, and this nurse who spoke English and Amharic said to me, he's saying will you take his son. He's saying please take his son, he would be a great son for you. I was looking puzzled and he said, "You must take my son because if you don't take my son, my son will surely die. If you take him he will go back to Ireland and get an education." Probably like the ones we're talking about today. I had to say no, that was the rules there and I walked away from that man, I've never really walked away from it. But I think about that boy and that man and that's when I started this journey that's brought me here into this stadium.

Because at that moment I became the worst scourge on God's green earth, a rock star with a cause. Christ! Except it isn't the cause. Seven thousand Africans dying every day of preventable, treatable disease like AIDS? That's not a cause, that's an emergency. And when the disease gets out of control because most of the population live on less than one dollar a day? That's not a cause, that's an emergency. And when resentment builds because of unfair trade rules and the burden of unfair debt, that are debts by the way that keep Africans poor? That's not a cause, that's an emergency. So--We Are The World, Live Aid, start me off it was an extraordinary thing and really that event was about charity. But 20 years on I'm not that interested in charity. I'm interested in justice. There's a difference. Africa needs justice as much as it needs charity.

Equality for Africa is a big idea. It's a big expensive idea. I see the Wharton graduates now getting out the math on the back of their programs, numbers are intimidating aren't they, but not to you! But the scale of the suffering and the scope of the commitment they often numb us into a kind of indifference. Wishing for the end to AIDS and extreme poverty in Africa is like wishing that gravity didn't make things so damn heavy. We can wish it, but what the hell can we do about it?

Well, more than we think. We can't fix every problem--corruption, natural calamities are part of the picture here--but the ones we can we must. The debt burden, as I say, unfair trade, as I say, sharing our knowledge, the intellectual copyright for lifesaving drugs in a crisis, we can do that. And because we can, we must. Because we can, we must. Amen.

This is the straight truth, the righteous truth. It's not a theory, it's a fact. The fact is that this generation--yours, my generation--that can look at the poverty, we're the first generation that can look at poverty and disease, look across the ocean to Africa and say with a straight face, we can be the first to end this sort of stupid extreme poverty, where in the world of plenty, a child can die for lack of food in it's belly. We can be the first generation. It might take a while, but we can be that generation that says no to stupid poverty. It's a fact, the economists confirm it. It's an expensive fact but, cheaper than say the Marshall Plan that saved Europe from communism and fascism. And cheaper I would argue than fighting wave after wave of terrorism's new recruits. That's the economics department over there, very good.

It's a fact. So why aren't we pumping our fists in the air and cheering about it? Well probably because when we admit we can do something about it, we've got to do something about it. For the first time in history we have the know how, we have the cash, we have the lifesaving drugs, but do we have the will?

Yesterday, here in Philadelphia, at the Liberty Bell, I met a lot of Americans who do have the will. From arch-religious conservatives to young secular radicals, I just felt an incredible overpowering sense that this was possible. We're calling it the ONE campaign, to put an end to AIDS and extreme poverty in Africa. They believe we can do it, so do I.

I really, really do believe it. I just want you to know, I think this is obvious, but I'm not really going in for the warm fuzzy feeling thing, I'm not a hippy, I do not have flowers in my hair, I come from punk rock, The Clash wore army boots not Birkenstocks. I believe America can do this! I believe that this generation can do this. In fact I want to hear an argument about why we shouldn't.

I know idealism is not playing on the radio right now, you don't see it on TV, irony is on heavy rotation, the knowingness, the smirk, the tired joke. I've tried them all out but I'll tell you this, outside this campus--and even inside it--idealism is under siege beset by materialism, narcissism and all the other isms of indifference. Baggism, Shaggism. Raggism. Notism, graduationism, chismism, I don't know. Where's John Lennon when you need him.

But I don't want to make you cop to idealism, not in front of your parents, or your younger siblings. But what about Americanism? Will you cop to that at least? It's not everywhere in fashion these days, Americanism. Not very big in Europe, truth be told. No less on Ivy League college campuses. But it all depends on your definition of Americanism.

Me, I'm in love with this country called America. I'm a huge fan of America, I'm one of those annoying fans, you know the ones that read the CD notes and follow you into bathrooms and ask you all kinds of annoying questions about why you didn't live up to thatŠ.

I'm that kind of fan. I read the Declaration of Independence and I've read the Constitution of the United States, and they are some liner notes, dude. As I said yesterday I made my pilgrimage to Independence Hall, and I love America because America is not just a country, it's an idea. You see my country, Ireland, is a great country, but it's not an idea. America is an idea, but it's an idea that brings with it some baggage, like power brings responsibility. It's an idea that brings with it equality, but equality even though it's the highest calling, is the hardest to reach. The idea that anything is possible, that's one of the reasons why I'm a fan of America. It's like hey, look there's the moon up there, lets take a walk on it, bring back a piece of it. That's the kind of America that I'm a fan of.

In 1771 your founder Mr. Franklin spent three months in Ireland and Scotland to look at the relationship they had with England to see if this could be a model for America, whether America should follow their example and remain a part of the British Empire.

Franklin was deeply, deeply distressed by what he saw. In Ireland he saw how England had put a stranglehold on Irish trade, how absentee English landlords exploited Irish tenant farmers and how those farmers in Franklin's words "lived in retched hovels of mud and straw, were clothed in rags and subsisted chiefly on potatoes." Not exactly the American dream...

So instead of Ireland becoming a model for America, America became a model for Ireland in our own struggle for independence.

When the potatoes ran out, millions of Irish men, women and children packed their bags got on a boat and showed up right here. And we're still doing it. We're not even starving anymore, loads of potatoes. In fact if there's any Irish out there, I've breaking news from Dublin, the potato famine is over you can come home now. But why are we still showing up? Because we love the idea of America.

We love the crackle and the hustle, we love the spirit that gives the finger to fate, the spirit that says there's no hurdle we can't clear and no problem we can't fix. (sound of helicopter) Oh, here comes the Brits, only joking. No problem we can't fix. So what's the problem that we want to apply all this energy and intellect to?

Every era has its defining struggle and the fate of Africa is one of ours. It's not the only one, but in the history books it's easily going to make the top five, what we did or what we did not do. It's a proving ground, as I said earlier, for the idea of equality. But whether it's this or something else, I hope you'll pick a fight and get in it. Get your boots dirty, get rough, steel your courage with a final drink there at Smoky Joe's, one last primal scream and go.

Sing the melody line you hear in your own head, remember, you don't owe anybody any explanations, you don't owe your parents any explanations, you don't owe your professors any explanations. You know I used to think the future was solid or fixed, something you inherited like an old building that you move into when the previous generation moves out or gets chased out.

But it's not. The future is not fixed, it's fluid. You can build your own building, or hut or condo, whatever; this is the metaphor part of the speech by the way.

But my point is that the world is more malleable than you think and it's waiting for you to hammer it into shape. Now if I were a folksinger I'd immediately launch into "If I Had a Hammer" right now get you all singing and swaying. But as I say I come from punk rock, so I'd rather have the bloody hammer right here in my fist.

That's what this degree of yours is, a blunt instrument. So go forth and build something with it. Remember what John Adams said about Ben Franklin, "He does not hesitate at our boldest Measures but rather seems to think us too irresolute."

Well this is the time for bold measures. This is the country, and you are the generation. Thank you.

Posted 5/19/04

Nicaraguan Rundown from Corn Island

2006-10-11T13:17:00.000-04:00

What is rundown? Originally from the Caribbean, this process takes coconut and produces coconut custard and oil by boiling the milk down. A full recipe is found:

http://eatjamaican.com/recipes/traditional-Jamaican-coconut-rundown-recipe.html

on the EatJamaican.com website (accessed 11 Oct 2006).

Interestingly enough, this recipe is also used in many Nicaraguan dishes from the Atlantic Coast and can be mixed with breadfruit, meat, fish, and vegetables. Immigrants from African origin came to the country from the Caribbean when they were working on plantations and brought many tropical foods along with them.

Something I was not aware of is that many people from the Atlantic Coast may speak English and Creole and not a word of Spanish!...or very poor Spanish. Such is the cultural separation between the coast and the city. This separation is followed in politics and economics of the country.

Should the building of the interoceanic canal take place, I can imagine the coast receiving a much needed economic boost.

Palms Food: Nicaragua

2006-10-11T13:08:00.000-04:00

Cajeta De Coco

2 cups condensed milk

1 cup fresh shredded coconut

1 cup butter or margarine

1/2 teaspoon vanilla

Directions:

Combine all ingredients in a saucepan and bring to a boil. Keep mixing with a wooden spoon until you see the bottom of the pan while you mix. Form them into small balls and store them in a refrigerator--if you don't eat them all.

Nicaragua: A Second Panama Canal?

2006-10-03T10:41:00.000-04:00

The President of Nicaragua, Bolanos, proposed on Monday the international support to construct a second canal, wider than Panama, in response to "the world's booming shipping business." (1)

This project would cost no less than US$18 billion and would take approximately 12 yrs to build. If you've ever visited Panama and Nicaragua, the stark contrast between the two countries cannot escape one's eyes. Panama is a small Europe with adorable crepe restaurants and the possibility of frolicking about in the city. This prosperity is largely if not entirely due to the building of the canal, originally plannd to be constructed in Nicaragua.

People in Nicaragua are living in the third poorest country in Latin America and it shows. The economic benefits for such a country from the building of the canal would be tremendous. Nicaragua, however, a country of beautiful people, is torn by a political corruption that has surpassed the acceptable levels we all tolerate, regardless of the country we live in or the form in which the corruption is perceived. How will this corruption encourage the level of investment required to build the canal? This will have to be addressed and, frankly, I am uncertain as to what a solution would be.

Panamians are pitching to expand their canal to reduce the traffic it currently experiences and in order to be able to compete internationally in the case a Nicaraguan canal is built. The public believes this move will pass quite easily.

It makes me sad to see Nicaragua struggling to move forward and the country is, to be blunt, so much in the shits that only a tremendous and prosperous undertaking like the building of a canal could push its economy forward in a reasonable amount of time.

1. "Nicaraguan Presidnet proposes second canal to complement Panama's." International Herald Tribune 2 Oct. 2006: IHT.com 3 Oct 2006 http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2006/10/03/america/LA_GEN_Nicaragua_Canal.php

Coconut: A Perplexing Nut

2006-10-03T08:31:00.000-04:00

It seems in India, according to The Hindu in its article on coconut oil (1) , the coconut oil industry has "lost glory." Coconut oil producers are not sufficiently protected by the market.
There has been generally a drop in products that contain fatty acids, thus affecting this product's rate of import. Import tariff's on palm oil and polyolefin has decreased, which means that the import of these competing oils take business away from coconut oil producers. Prices of the oil fluctuate on a daily basis. In response, coconut oil has been mixed with lower quality ingredients when coconut oil prices are high and falsely sold to consumers.

In Vietnam, the coconut industry also does not sufficiently protect the producers (2). The article about Vietnam, however, does not focus on the problems associated with the production of coconut oil but of those associated with any processing of the coconut. Producers experience competition from two sides because of tremendous demand. The growers sell the fruit at high prices because of the high demand to ship it to China, Thailand, and Cambodia.

What can we say about all this? Firstly, I adore coconut milk. My Brazilian friend the other day took coconut milk, condensed milk, and...I added some water to this sinful drink...and it was one of the best things I'd ever had. The point: Coconut is so damn good I see why it causes so many problems.

A tad more seriously, from the reading it seems that the coconut market in India has affected it internally (as Indians struggle with the rising price of coconut oil) and with the exportation of coconut oil (as the demand for coconut oil has fallen). The Vietnan coconut industry, on the other hand, is flourishing on an international front as the demand to import its coconuts is on the rise but is suffering internally as producers find themselves competing with international buyers for raw coconut product.

Does this mean that perhaps India should stop processing coconuts in order to extract coconut oil because it seems the demand is higher for copra, the raw coconut meat, in the international market? Does this mean that Vietnam should allow the national coconut prices to be solely regulated by the international market's demand? Neither solution takes into consideration the producers, who are suffering, for different reasons but in similar ways, by the demands for coconut and its products in the international market.

I wonder if the demands by the international market, increasingly a more healthy market, will continue to favor the raw, unprocessed coconut rather than its less healthy byproducts such as coconut oil--unfavorable for India.

Ideas, suggestions,...would be highly appreciated. The problem with the coconut in India and Vietnam can be compared to many crops whose prices become high in the local market.

References:
1. "Better deal for coconut oil sector demanded." The Hindu 22 Sept 2006: Hindu.com 3 Oct 2006 http://www.hindu.com/2006/09/22/stories/2006092209012100.htm

2. "Coconut price soar, growers get rich, producers starve." VietNamNet 28 Sept 2006: Vietnamnet.vn 3 Oct 2006 http://english.vietnamnet.vn/biz/2006/09/616734/

Coconut News

2006-09-25T10:04:00.000-04:00

Indian elephants suffer

"Entrepreneurs hire elephants to split open a coconut at the inauguration of a new store."

This sounds entertaining, and no doubt it is, but elephants are mistreated and abused in India. It is not only people that suffer but these beautiful animals as well. Apparently, elephants are in large Indian cities for religious reasons as they are sacred animals and are used for blessings at festivals.

This fascinating article draws a parrallel line between the life path of elephants and many poor Indian people in cities. They are migrants who will do much for a few rupees. The city too does not provide sufficient nutrition and water for its inhabitants, including elephants. What is sadly highlighted in this tale is how a society where its people have a low standard of living will consequently have animals that suffer as well.

There is some comfort to having a pet in a poor person's life. I remember in Ecuador there were many poor families that kept dogs or cats even though they didn't have enough food to nourish themselves. This I found odd and sad in many ways but empathized with the warmth a pet can bring to a home.

In Nicaragua, I witnessed the same but learned that dogs are kept in order to warn of and frighten away burglars. Crime has become a reality for most Nicaraguans and they feel the cost of keeping a dog, which is relatively low as they are often underfed, is a safe investment. The common occurence of dog poisoning only hightlights this fact. Dogs have to be better protected, I thought.

Closing thoughts: as entertaining as an elephant with coconuts might be, as cozy as we might feel with a pet at home, or as necessary as a pet might be for the safety of a family, the importance of respecting an animal's life goes hand in hand with respecting that of a human being.

Palms Foods: Ecuador

2006-09-06T08:28:00.000-04:00

Tomato Soup with Plantains

Ingredients

-8 medium tomatoes
-2 cups chicken stock
-1/2 tsp of salt
-2 tbsp vegetable oil
-2 onions--finely chopped
-2 plantains
-1tbsp cornstarch
-1/4 cup coconut milk
-dash white pepper

Directions:

In large saucepan, combine tomatoes, stock and salt. Bring to a boil - cover and simmer over low heat until tomatoes are soft.
Heat oil in saucepan. Add onions - saute until transparent. Peel and slice plantains. Add plantain slices to sauteed onions. Saute - crushing slightly.

Strain tomato pulp through strainer - or puree in a blender or food processor. Stir puree into onion mixture.

In bowl, combine cornstarch and coconut milk. Stir in about 1/4 cup hot tomato soup. Stir cornstarch mixture into remaining soup.

Stir constantly over low heat until soups thickens slightly. Season with white pepper. Pour into a tureen or serve in individual bowls.

Palms is Up and Running

2006-07-30T11:35:00.000-04:00

Hello,

I am the Executive Director of Palms for Life Fund, a new not-for-profit organization in the United States (with a 501(c)(3) status) that helps poor people overcome poverty by addressing some of its root causes. Our main focus is on educating and feeding schoolchildren, ensuring the health of mothers and infants, developing adult literacy and work skills and empowering local organizations.

Please visit our website at www.palmsforlifefund.org , give us your feedback, and consider making a donation. You can also write to me (hannah.laufer@palmsforlifefund.org) with information about local executing partners in the selected countries or to volunteer for working in those countries.

What is special about Palms is our team of experts who currently reside or have lived in poor countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America and know what poor and hungry people experience every day of their lives. Our only motivation is to make a difference, by advocating for the poor and raising funds to support projects that will make a long-lasting difference.

Now we are small, but we will grow in numbers of Friends that help Palms and numbers of people that get help from Palms. Please support our mission so that we can provide poor people with opportunities to get out of poverty.

Awaiting your visit to Palms for Life Fund.

Hannah