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Leading NGOs Warn Financial crisis Threatens Human Rights |
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Last week the US government provided another bail-out of $37.8 billion to the giant insurance company, AIG, bringing the total of rescue loans to that one company in the last two weeks to nearly $123 billion. This is $18 billion more than the annual amount of aid to poor countries and twice that needed to achieve the internationally-agreed Millennium Development Goals. In Europe the bail-outs have continued. The UK government has thrown in a further £50 billion to recapitalise the UK banking sector – which is roughly what’s needed for poor countries to adapt to climate change each year.
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CARE Gardens Relieve Food Crisis in Lesotho
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BBC News
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Lesotho Keyhole Garden
By CARE Staff
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CARE "revolutionary" gardens dramatically increase food production among subsistence farmers in Lesotho.
They are round gardens of about two metres in diameter and raised to
waist-height to make them easy for the sick and elderly to work. And farmers can harvest all year round.
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Aid Workers Targeted in Somalia Violence |
Newsweek Magazine |
Last month Somali pirates hijacked a ship bound for Kenya, snatching both $30 million in military equipment and prolonged international attention. The true crisis, however, is on the mainland, where escalating civil strife is exacting a dramatic humanitarian toll. In the past nine months, more than 870,000 civilians have fled their homes. Over 50 humanitarian aid organizations have helicoptered into Mogadishu and elsewhere to provide emergency relief for those who remain in the failed state.
David Gilmour
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| CARE Helps Build Peace in Darfur from the Bottom Up |
| By CARE Staff |
CARE’s extensive training and support of so-called Peace Committees in rural Darfur has increased community support for the peace building process. In particular, a peace conference held in Jemeza Lagaro among 13 tribes from surrounding areas helped build a very active community committed to promote peace.
These days, peace committee members from Jemeza Lagaro travel year-round from location to location working with communities to solve traditional conflicts among tribes. This work is so time consuming that during this past rainy season, a community member in Jemeza Lagaro found work cultivating the land of the peace committee chairman because he was not around to cultivate it himself! And yet this time is donated willingly by the committee members, who are convinced of the importance of the peace building process.
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CARE Helps Kenyan Women Seek Justice for Post Election Violence |
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Every morning she wakes up to his frightening face, a look she wants to erase from her memory but one she cannot escape. “He assaulted me with a machete and slashed my ribs before raping me,” she says as she recounts the nightmare she lived through during the Kenya post election violence earlier this year.
On December 30th, three days after Kenyans went to the polls, Joyce and her husband were drinking tea in their home when two men hacked down their door and attacked them with machetes. Thirty-two year-old Joyce recognized her neighbors, the same men who raped her in broad daylight a few days earlier. This time, they grabbed her husband and took him away.
After wandering the streets searching for her partner, she found him beaten up but still alive hiding on the banks on one of Nairobi’s filthiest rivers. As a result of the injuries sustained, he spent two months at Kenyatta National Hospital. When he found out that his wife had contracted HIV as a result of the assault and rape, he abandoned her together with their four children.
With her hair salon burnt down and her home destroyed, Joyce moved to a camp for the internally displaced along with hundreds of other men, women and children on the outskirts of Nairobi. “I am a refugee in my own country,” she says, bewildered by the brutality caused by her own people.
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