Stories of hope from around the world SUMMER 2011 FOOD FOR THE HUNGRY (FH) CANADA’S QUARTERLY PUBLICATION
SUMMER 2011
We talk a lot about Poverty Revolution being the movement of engaged Canadians who are partnering with FH Canada to end poverty one community at a time.
FH CANADA is a registered non-profit organization dedicated to providing long-term relief to those bound by poverty through sustainable community
But what does that actually mean?
development. As part of the global Food for the Hungry (FH) network, we currently work in ten countries around the world.
When you’re engaging with something specific, it becomes the focus of your thoughts and efforts. When it comes to poverty, it means advocating for the poor. In our first online-only issue of Hope Notes, you’ll meet a few advocates we’ve had the privilege of working with: a business-savvy child sponsor, a worldview-shattering teacher, an emotionally-invested human resources worker, a Masters student with an outside-in perspective on our organization and a surgically-skilled nun. These people come from all walks of life, all with different gifts and skills. But they’re united with a common purpose of speaking on behalf of the vulnerable. What’s most encouraging to me is seeing how each advocate has been impacted by their relationship with the poor – and how that relationship is inspiring them in their own lives.
Through project development, child sponsorship, emergency relief and medical equipment distribution, FH Canada strives to meet the physical, spiritual, social and educational needs of each man, woman and child living in poverty. POVERTY REVOLUTION is a movement of engaged Canadians who are partnering with FH Canada to end poverty one community at a time. As a Certified Member of the Canadian Council for Christian Charities, FH Canada meets the stringent standards set by the CCCC for accountability and organizational integrity. 6% Administration and running costs 6% Invested to generate future income 88% Building sustainable communities
Poverty Revolution is not a one-way street. We need you to help us complete this circle of end-to-end transformation. These stories are meant to be shared, so please pass them along to your friends and families. Post a link on your Facebook page or mention it in a tweet. As you read the following stories, ask yourself how you can advocate for the vulnerable. It may be challenging, but I can’t imagine anything more worthwhile.
Ben Hoogendoorn President
CHARITABLE REGISTRATION NUMBER:
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FH CANADA 1 - 31741 Peardonville Road, Abbotsford, BC V2T 1L2 T 604.853.4262 TF 1.800.667.0605 F 604.853.4332 info@fhcanada.org povertyrevolution.org facebook.com/poverty.revolution
In this issue
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Man with a mission
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Impoverished thinking gets the boot
Relie[ve] workers
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Relational marketing 101
This sister acts!
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10 Meet Jean
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Man with a mission A whirlwind trip to South Asia inspires an FH sponsor to do more for an entire community of Bangladeshi kids.
“If anyone doe kid, I’ll make
On March 15, 2011, Martin Jonker was the highest he’d ever been: 18,000 feet above sea level on Nepal’s Mount Everest. Two weeks later, the Abbotsford businessman was a mere three feet above sea level in low-laying Bangladesh, about to have another mountain-top experience: meeting Khairul, his sponsored child. “I didn’t know what to expect,” says Martin, who’s been writing back-and-forth with Khairul for five years now. Almost immediately after entering the
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community of Mymensingh, he walked around a corner and spotted Khairul, recognizing him from the pictures. “I knew it was him,” he says. “It was pretty emotional.” Martin was welcomed into Khairul’s small home where he met the ten-year-old’s parents, two of his eight siblings – all sisters – and most of the neighbours who didn’t want to miss the excitement.
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he ordered she explained how the Savings Groups were empowering women to support themselves and their families. Back at the FH office, Martin casually asked the Bangladeshi staff what they needed to best continue their work. Tops, they said, was to find sponsors for the many unsponsored kids. Whether or not that was meant as a direct request, Martin has taken it on as his personal mission. He now constantly tells people about Khairul and the community-wide impact of sponsorship. “If anyone doesn’t have a sponsored kid, I’ll make sure they have one,” he vows. “I want to do more for the kids.”
esn’t have a sponsored sure they have one.” “I guess they don’t see very many Westerners,” he says laughing.
Even with his new focus on the many unsponsored children, Martin hasn’t forgotten the one child who brought him to Bangladesh in the first place. He recently sent another letter to Khairul and included some of the photos from the trip. But it seems it may be tough to transition back to the whole longdistance thing. “I would have taken him home if I could’ve,” says Martin, who chuckles and quickly explains his reasoning. “The poor guy – the only boy with all those sisters!”
After Khairul had shown him the folder where he kept all of Martin’s letters and photos, he climbed onto Martin’s knee as his older sister stood to give a speech. She thanked Martin for sponsoring Khairul, but informed him the sponsorship had actually impacted their entire family and community.
Help Martin fulfil his goal by sponsoring a child in Mymensingh today! Visit www.fhcanada.org/manwithamission
Martin was about to see exactly what she meant. He was taken on a tour of some of the FH initiatives in Mymensingh. At a leadership group he saw teenagers breaking into small groups to talk about their goals and dreams. At a mothers group he tried hard to keep up with his translator as the discussion moved between topics of justice, hygiene and family issues. Then he went to meet Rokia, a Community Savings Group member who runs a sewing business out of her home. As she measured him for the shirt
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Impoverished thinking gets the boot Former teacher and aid worker equips Canadians to better understand and engage with poverty at home and abroad.
“Can you just stop?” A man in his late fifties breaks the reflective silence of the small meeting room. “You’re going to totally wreck my life if you keep talking about this.” He doesn’t seem to be joking. Melissa Giles is getting used to strong reactions during her intensive Poverty Revolution Boot Camps. “People are coming up to me fairly regularly and saying, ‘You’ve completely changed the way I view poverty,’” she says. Boot Camp is a day-and-a-half workshop that cuts through a culture that defines poverty as primarily material. The sessions challenge life-long assumptions, foster deep reflection on the origin of poverty and explore poverty’s surprisingly relational nature. The weekend also introduces a holistic development model with as much potential for transforming Canadian communities as communities overseas.
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Melissa is still relatively new to her role as training manager at FH Canada, but already she’s trained 220 people across four provinces. She never expected that this would be her job.
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A teacher by trade, the thirty-five year-old spent
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three years teaching middle and high school but knew it wasn’t her niche. She decided to go overseas on a humanitarian internship in Western Uganda, but figured she’d soon return to the classroom. Instead, she moved to Liberia as a deputy country director with a well-known relief and development organization. The comparison between her overseas experiences could not have been starker. Uganda had been 100 percent community development: walking side-byside with local staff until they felt confident to run a water and sanitation program on their own. Liberia was just coming out of a brutal civil war, and things were too unstable for similar programming. People were returning as refugees and from internally displaced people camps; the homes they returned to were destroyed and cropland was completely overgrown with thick jungle vegetation. The need was basic relief provisions before being able to think about community development. “There’s no cookie-cutter response to every situation,” says Melissa. “I had good training as far as some cross-cultural knowledge and I started understanding the technology and skills we were going to use,” she says. “But I didn’t necessarily have a foundational teaching to understand the complexity of what I was witnessing.” Jump ahead three years and Melissa is immersed in worldview training. “It’s almost like a piece of the puzzle slipped into place,” she says about receiving FH Canada’s staff training, which takes a holistic view of poverty.
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“It makes sense now why things work the way they do.” Things are starting to fall into place for participants as well. One man attended Boot Camp because he wanted to go overseas and was researching development models. But half-way through the weekend he realized the lessons were hitting a lot closer to home. “I work with individuals who are
unemployed,” he told Melissa over a break, “and what you’re talking about here is what the Canadian Social Services programs need to hear as well!” The principles covered in Boot Camp also seem to fill a gap among international aid workers. Melissa has had coffee with past colleagues who are asking, “How come I’ve never had that training?” “I don’t think a lot of organizations are engaging with Canadians like this,” she says. Especially with the growing trend of short-term mission trips and a culture that encourages throwing money at problems to make them go away, Melissa maintains that good intentions are not enough if we’re to see real, sustainable, long-term change for everyone involved. “Sometimes groups go into development work and they aren’t thinking about how to step back before they begin,” she says. “They get caught in a vicious cycle of continuing to support programming instead of progressing towards an exit strategy.” There’s a big difference between feeling helpful and being helpful, she explains, especially when outsiders begin performing or supporting tasks that locals can carry forward on their own. “We can do harm,” she says, “even in our giving.” That’s one of the big revelations for many participants. For others, the weekend’s not so much about new ideas as it is acquiring the language and framework to communicate and contextualize what they already know. Whether the change is big or small, Melissa says she almost always sees a shift. When following up with participants, they’ll often report that the weekend moved them past a one- or two-dimensional view of poverty and its solution. Melissa still can’t believe this is her job. “Watching that happen in people’s lives,” she begins with a smile, “how would you not want to be part of that?” The next scheduled Boot Camps are October 14-15 in Edmonton, AB and October 21-22 in Abbotsford, BC. For more information, or to host a Boot Camp, contact training@fhcanada.org. 7
Relie[ve] workers A Regent College staff member draws from personal experience to prevent burnout among Japan’s relief workers.
A phone call can change everything. For Soohwan Park, it was the call that never came. It was the day after Christmas and Soohwan – originally from Korea but living in Thailand – returned from a walk and switched on the TV, anticipating an exciting end to the year. In just a few days she’d be welcoming her friend Carole to Bangkok for a mutual friend’s wedding. But for now Carole was vacationing in Phuket, making the most of her time in the country. What Soohwan saw on the news changed all that. It was December 26, 2004, and Soohwan watched in horror as a tsunami swept across the television set and the south of the country. She tried desperately to contact Carole but never heard from her again. “My life changed forever,” she painfully recalls. As much as she may have wanted to put the lifetaking tsunami out of her mind, her job and location made that impossible. Working in a Thailand office of FH, everyone around her was intimately involved in the relief and rehabilitation efforts. In 2006, after 10 years with FH, she needed to step back and reevaluate how organizations could better support their relief workers.
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Her transition led her to Vancouver’s Regent College, where she’s currently the head of People and Organizational Development in the Marketplace Institute. Settled in Vancouver, she also became involved in the Listening Post, a ministry in the city’s Downtown Eastside, an area known for drug abuse and homelessness. There, she simply listens and loves whoever walks in and wants to talk. So by this March when she heard about the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, she knew how she could assist in the response. Aid workers often face “compassion fatigue,” she says, referring to the physical, mental and emotional exhaustion she witnessed first-hand in the 2004 tsunami response. If symptoms are not properly addressed, the fatigue can lead to burnout and depression. “You run a marathon, get tired and then you rest,” she explains. “But people don’t think that’s important when helping people.” As part of FH Canada’s response in Japan, Soohwan traveled to the scene of the disaster to work with Friends with the Voiceless International (FVI), one
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of FH Canada’s local Japanese partners. FVI is working with a network of 26 churches within a 20-60 km radius of the Fukushima nuclear plant. The organization is empowering the churches to meet the physical and emotional needs of their communities, especially in an area where larger relief efforts aren’t willing to send their responders. “Some church pastors were ready to die,” says Soohwan, speaking of their willingness to remain in the nuclear area to help the vulnerable.
Relational marketing 101 For seven months, FH Canada staff watched curiously as Regent College student Iain MacPherson took notes on their every interaction. “You pick up a lot from the atmosphere of a workplace,” says the young Scotsman. “It reflects the ethos of the organization.”
This April, Soohwan facilitated a retreat for FVI leaders where she offered them a listening ear and helped design a holistic disaster-response strategy with an emphasis on sustaining overrun responders. Since returning to Vancouver, she continues to advise FVI’s church-training strategy.
Iain’s passion for holistic community planning led him to FH to do thesis research for his Masters of Christian Studies in Marketplace Theology. He wanted to find out how FH’s mission statement intersects with its actual field work. He found the connection in overheard conversations between FH staff and supporters.
Soohwan recognizes that it was her own loss and tsunami experience that gave her empathy for the pastors – some who had lost everything.
Iain explains a cycle he’s observed called “relational marketing” which is anything but a one-way, top-down process. People often donate in response to hopeful stories in FH’s marketing, Iain explains, “and when people donate, it creates more stories of hope.”
“[FH] can say to supporters, ‘Hey, check up on us. You gave $38 and it meant that this girl could go to school and her village could start a community savings group – look at the hope it has created!’”
“The questions I asked from my own experience of being a victim – not simply a relief worker – opened up many doors to understand their suffering.”
Thank you to everyone who supported our partners in Japan.
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FVI and Japan International Food for the Hungry (JIFH) worked with local leaders, churches and families to distribute relief items, provide child-friendly spaces and shelters, offer counselling support, rebuild homes and begin community rehabilitation. Both remain committed to equipping and strengthening the local church to respond to the needs of their community as they continue to recover.
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This sister acts! One full month. That’s how long Sister Margaret Ajiko had to wait to find out if the baby survived. The two-week-old was crying and vomiting when her mother brought her to Soroti Hospital. Suffering from pyloric stenosis, the baby’s stomach was separated from the small intestine. Sister Margaret carefully split the overdeveloped muscles and connected the girl’s two organs, allowing her to properly digest food for the first time.
A Ugandan surgeon campaigns to bring life-saving medical supplies to her rural hospital and preventative health practices to her local communities.
But recovery is almost impossible with the grim conditions of the North-eastern Uganda hospital and the high risk of bleeding and infection at home. “When you do that operation, you have to trust that the family has very good hygiene,” she explains. So all she could do was wait. The former missionary performs up to eight surgeries a day. She’s one of only 184 general surgeons in a country of 33.5 million people. Health care is
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covered by the government but the hospitals in the region reflect Uganda’s under-funded medical infrastructure. Families often have to bring their own rubber gloves and medicine to the hospital; patients on oxygen machines pray against the power outages that could cost them their lives; and mothers hold their newborns under their dresses for days in the absence of incubators, though the temperature can’t be regulated and many children die on their mother’s stomach. Sister Margaret has recruited FH Canada’s International Medical Equipment Distribution (IMED) program which sends donated and refurbished medical equipment to hospitals around the world. A 40-foot container of life-saving medical equipment – including sterilizers, beds, gloves, incubators and surgical tools – will be shipped to the hospital once the $15,000 shipping cost is raised. In the meantime, the hospital staff continue to improvise as best they can. “You get so overwhelmed,” says Sister Margaret, recalling a boy lying on sacks of rice after a hernia operation. With the lack of beds, the doctor will sometimes even take patients back to her convent. Sister Margaret’s no stranger to going beyond her job description. On the side she teaches medical students and health workers how to bring preventative health education into the surrounding communities. “When I see a case for the first time,” she says, “it’s usually quite advanced.” She hopes that preventative health practices at a grassroots level will change that and save lives.
hope for more visits like a recent one from a young mother in a black and white scarf. She approached holding a baby with a small scar on her abdomen from the previous month’s surgery. The baby was happy. Healthy. Alive. In the midst of unthinkable conditions, surprises like this keep Sister Margaret going. “When you hear that someone has survived,” she says, “that is the greatest joy.” Donate to the shipping costs for the Soroti Hospital container at www.fhcanada.org/medical.
“Families often have to bring their own rubber gloves to the hospital.”
But until the need for acute care subsides, Sister Margaret performs fearlessly as she waits for the muchneeded container of medical equipment. She can only
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Meet Jean. She and other Leader Mothers in Cachiman, Haiti stopped a cholera epidemic in its tracks. After being trained to prevent and treat the disease, each Leader Mother taught ten others – who each taught ten others. Women around the world are revolutionizing the health of their communities. Visit www.fhcanada.org/leadermother to learn more or even sponsor the training of one Leader Mother.
WATCH HOW IT WORKS!
1 - 31741 Peardonville Road Abbotsford, BC V2T 1L2 1.800.667.0605 info@fhcanada.org fhcanada.org povertyrevolution.org