A collection of volunteers who are going to have been to Haiti

Lots of airplanes and helicopters are arriving in Haiti today carrying workers and supplies for the earthquake ravaged country. For this round-up of Haiti stories, we want to focus on people who are going or have been to Haiti before.

From the UK's Wigan Today, we read about this firefighter who has left for Haiti to look for survivors in the rubble.

Selfless rescue technician Simon Cording is one of a team of UK firefighters who volunteered to fly out to the disaster-hit Caribbean country from Gatwick overnight.

The 35-year-old, from Platt Bridge, was one of a 61-strong UK rescue team due to deploy to Haiti as soon as the airport reopened following heavy snow.

Simon, who has been a fireman for 12 years and is currently stationed at Sale Fire Station, will help with the massive rescue operation after a series of quakes hit the poverty-stricken country on Tuesday night.
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The promptly-arranged UK Fire Service International Search and Rescue Team, which includes eight members of the Greater Manchester Fire Rescue Service, will use two search dogs and 12 tonnes of equipment.

On their arrival at the quake-hit country, which together with the Dominican Republic occupies Hispaniola Island, the UK contingent is set to form two teams to search for survivors around the clock at separate sites.

They will be using heavy breaking equipment, specialist cameras and listening devices in a bid to clear rubble and identify survivors.

From South Dakota's Arugs Leader, writer Peter Harriman talked to people who have been on mission trips to Haiti.

Pam Plaiser of Tea founded Mission-Haiti with her husband, Mike. They have worked in the country about 15 years. She says Haitians have the strength to deal with disaster.

"The people are one of the neatest groups you will find. They have this super-strong will to survive. They live in survival mode every day, but they just don't give up."

Joe Rainboth's brother, Lee, has lived in Haiti three years in the mountain village of Mizak, about 50 miles southwest of the capital Port-au-Prince. Joe Rainboth of Spearfish says his brother sees the same thing in Haitians that Plaiser does.

"There is something in that population of Haiti that often gets overlooked. Haiti itself doesn't have much in the way of emergency response or organized communication. But as a people, they are the type to pitch in and help each other," Joe Rainboth says.

Emily Knutson of Sioux Falls accompanied Plasier on a mission trip last November.

"The country itself is absolutely incredible. It is beautiful, but it is heartbreaking to see so much poverty," she says. "Whether you are in the mountains or in the city, it is like one big slum you never leave."

Finally from Indiana's Star Press, Seth Slabaugh writes this story of a Nurse who hopes to head to Haiti this weekend.

For a year, Muncie nurse Connie Baldwin has been planning, packing and fund raising for her annual trip to Haiti, where she treats kids for worms and other infections.

Now, because of the earthquake, she might not get to go on the trip scheduled to leave this weekend.

"It would be a huge disappointment," she said. "With all the preparation we go through, the actual going to Haiti is like an anti-climax."

The U.S. Department of State has issued a travel alert urging U.S. citizens to avoid travel to Haiti because of the extensive damage, extremely difficult communication and lawlessness.

But this wouldn't be the first time a medical team from St. Francis of Assisi University Parish has gone to Haiti against the state department's advice. Besides being poverty stricken, Haiti also has been victimized in recent years by politically motivated violence and hurricanes.

Baldwin had to laugh Wednesday afternoon when an American broadcast journalist reporting from Haiti was asked by an anchorwoman back in the studio if Haitians were receiving enough food and bottled water after the earthquake.

"They didn't have bottled water and food before the earthquake hit, much less now," Baldwin said. "The only thing good I see coming from the earthquake is it might make the world aware of how great the needs in Haiti are. People don't realize how poor they are and how much help they need."

We wanted to focus on these individuals because their small voices need to be increased in volume. The small voices of the thousands of people who put up their own money, leave their comfortable lives for a time, and help to do good even during disasters.

There were a couple of very loud voices that said horrible things yesterday. We wonder if their tone would change if they went on a mission trip, or if the tragedy wasn't separated from them by a body of water. Those voices really depressed us yesterday, so we wanted to find some others.

UNICEF's efforts to combat child mortality in West Africa questioned

UNICEF's efforts to fight child mortality came into question in a recent study done by the health publication The Lancet. The study said that UNICEF's efforts did decrease child mortality in the nations it concentrated on, but it did decrease in other nations as well.

From this IRIN story we read more about the study and quotes of defense from UNICEF officials.

The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) “accelerated child survival programme” in 11 West African countries did not save significantly more lives than in areas that were not targeted, says an evaluation published in The Lancet this week - but analysts say this does not mean UNICEF was doing the wrong things.

“They did the right things,” Jennifer Bryce, evaluator and researcher at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told IRIN. “They did what is feasible to do quickly and outside of health systems… Where there was disappointment and missed opportunity was that they did not do more.”

Focusing on Benin, Ghana and Mali, the evaluation analysed the impact of UNICEF’s US$27 million child survival programme implemented between 2001 and 2005.

Findings showed mortality in under-fives decreased by 13 percent in Benin, 24 percent in Mali and 20 percent in Ghana, but that the decreases in the former two were no greater than in non-project areas, while no comparison data was available for Ghana.

One reason for this is that UNICEF pushed Health Ministries, donors and aid agencies in the countries involved to adopt similar approaches to child survival, which led mortality rates to drop elsewhere too, Mickey Chopra, UNICEF’s head of health, told IRIN.

“In most instances there was a dramatic decline in child mortality. These are very poor countries and this was not a time of economic prosperity or declining poverty, so the interventions were the things that really made the difference,” Chopra told IRIN.

UNICEF implemented the project in some of the hardest-to-reach and worst-off areas of targeted countries, Chopra pointed out.

Other criticisms of UNICEF’s approach include an insufficient emphasis on under-nutrition, and interventions to address neonatal deaths (mortality of babies aged 28 days and under).

UNICEF did not push Health Ministries hard enough to change their policy on allowing community volunteers to treat children suffering from pneumonia, diarrhoea and malaria - the three biggest child killers in West Africa. Changing this could drastically reduce child mortality rates, said evaluator Bryce.

“Children cannot wait for child health days to be treated… They need a trained person right then and there, when they are sick.”

Proven interventions include giving children antibiotics for pneumonia, zinc and oral rehydration salts for diarrhoea, and artemisinin-based combination therapy and bed nets for malaria.

Learning lessons

UNICEF has listened and responded to these lessons, said Bryce. “They really responded to the results, even up to the highest level.”

The agency has changed tack, working with others to lobby ministries to shift their policy on community health worker responsibilities to administer treatment, said UNICEF’s Chopra, and policy change is under way in 46 African countries, including Mali, Malawi and Ethiopia.

Neo-natal mortality is now more central to child survival interventions, and UNICEF is among many donors to push nutrition up the agenda.

Computer models

The most exciting change to emerge out of child survival analysis in recent years, said Bryce, is the development of computer models that can accurately analyse causes of child mortality and the effects of different interventions. This allows experts to input different response scenarios - upping mosquito-net provision while scaling back on HIV intervention for instance - to ascertain which would save the most lives.

“With this technology, you don’t have to have donors driving the agenda… You can have the causes of death driving it,” said Bryce.

Exposure risk

The publication of the evaluation’s frank findings of the weaknesses of UNICEF’s programme have worried some that UNICEF and other aid agencies will refrain from publishing less-than-glowing evaluation results in the future. “After the past few days why would anyone ever want to publish an evaluation?” asked Bryce.

But that would be a mistake, said Chopra. Aid agencies and donors have promised to be more transparent about their aid efforts in a bid to make the often-murky sector more accountable.

“We commissioned this evaluation and we didn’t block publication… We have a responsibility to share these lessons… We’re committed to continue to learn how to improve the work we do… and are committed to putting our findings in the public domain.”

"Today, we are all Haitians." Part 3

Here is another roundup of stories that caught our interest in regards to the Haitian earthquake.

In this story from Canada's National Post, we learn about the death of a Canadian nurse that just arrived on the island.

An Ontario nurse killed while volunteering in Haiti when the deadly earthquake struck has been identified by her church as Yvonne Martin.

The Waterloo Mennonite Brethren Church identified Ms. Martin on its website, along with a written memorial to the nurse, who had arrived in Haiti just 90 minutes before the quake hit.

"It is with a heavy heart that I share with you the death of our dear sister, Yvonne Martin," said the statement on the Waterloo church's website. "Yvonne passed away as the result of the earthquake in Haiti, where she had just arrived to do medical mission work for the fourth time."

Ms. Martin, who would have been 68 this year, was part of a team of seven people from the Kitchener-based Evangelical Missionary Church in Canada who had arrived in Port-au-Prince Tuesday afternoon to provide humanitarian assistance to several northern Haitian communities. According to the church, Ms. Martin and her colleagues - all from southern Ontario - had just checked into a guesthouse when the earthquake started and the building collapsed. Ms. Martin was killed but her colleagues managed to escape. The church says it learned of her death Wednesday morning.

Ms. Martin was well-known in the Elmira area and worked at the Elmira Medical Clinic for more than 30 years.

Colleague Val Thomson told the National Post that Ms. Martin was "one of the most kind people I've ever met."

Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=2438230#ixzz0cXxqM3eL
The National Post is now on Facebook. Join our fan community today.

The Kentucky Post has this video of the charity Matthew 25 which is prepairing to ship goods to Haiti.



In our first roundup of stories we linked to a story of a Michigan charity that lost contact with it's orphanage in Haiti. This story from MSNBC brings us the story for a church in Pennsylvania going through a similar dilemma.

“We lost [contact with] our building,” Crespo said after a magnitude-7 earthquake Tuesday crumpled most structures in Port-au-Prince, the poverty-stricken capital of 8 million people. He and three other staff members from the nondenominational church were desperate to get to the site as quickly as possible, taking with them food, medicine and a tent to house the 11 children and five staff members.

They don’t know what they’ll find when they get to the orphanage, which the church operates along with with Hope Point Community Church of Spartanburg, S.C., and Rice Bowls, a nonprofit ministry that partners with orphanages in underdeveloped communities around the world.

“We’re expecting the worst,” said Crespo, whose mission is just the spearhead of an effort that will see his wife, Luz, and numerous other church members flooding the Santos neighborhood, where the orphanage once stood, in the coming weeks.

They’re not even sure how they’ll get there, because most flights to the country are canceled, and communications remain difficult.

Crespo planned to take the team on a flight Wednesday night to Santo Domingo, capital of the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti. From there, they hoped to find ground transportation and a route through the devastation.

"Today, we are all Haitians." Part 2

Here are a couple more reports from aid organizations that are already in Haiti.

One thing to remember when giving donations to charities or aid groups is to give money to those who already had people in Haiti. The first few 24 hours after a disaster are when the need is greatest, so you don't want to give money to a group who is sending people there after the fact.

OXFAM says it has 100 people in the country in their appeal for donations that we found at the UK's Ormskirk and Skelmersdale Advertiser.

The public is being asked to donate money to help provide clean water, shelter and medical help to people affected in one of the poorest countries on earth.

Many aid agencies expressed fears that there will be outbreaks of waterborne disease such as cholera in the wake of catastrophic damage to the densely populated capital, Port-au-Prince.

Oxfam, launching an appeal for millions of pounds, said it has a 100-strong team working across the country and would be responding with public health, water and sanitation services to prevent the spread of waterborne disease.

Penny Lawrence, Oxfam's international director, said: "More than 85% of people in Haiti already live in poverty. With major buildings destroyed it is likely that less well-constructed homes will be even more seriously affected.

"This earthquake is grim news for the poor people of Haiti. We are calling for the generous support of the UK public to help us save lives."

Medecins Sans Frontieres reports on the damages to their facilities in Haiti and their efforts to resume service.

The first reports are now emerging from Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) teams who were already working on medical projects Haiti. They are treating hundreds of people injured in the quake and have been setting up clinics in tents to replace their own damaged medical facilities.

The Martissant health center in a poor area of Port-au-Prince had to be evacuated after the earthquake because it was damaged and unstable. The patients are now in tents in the grounds and the medical staff have been dealing with a flow of casualties from the town. They have already treated between 300 and 350 people, mainly for trauma injuries and fractures. Among them are 50 people suffering from burns—some of them severe—many of them caused by domestic gas containers exploding in collapsing buidings. At the Pachot rehabilitation center another 300 to 400 people have been treated. In one of MSF's adminstrative offices in Petionville, another part of Port-au-Prince, a tent clinic there has seen at least 200 injured people. More are getting assistance at what was the Solidarite maternity hospital, which was seriously damaged.

One of MSF's senior staff, Stefano Zannini, was out for most of the night, trying to assess the needs in the city and looking at the state of the medical facilities. "The situation is chaotic," he said. "I visited five medical centers, including a major hospital, and most of them were not functioning. Many are damaged and I saw a distressing number of dead bodies. Some parts of the city are without electricity and people have gathered outside, lighting fires in the street and trying to help and comfort each other. When they saw that I was from MSF they were asking for help, particularly to treat their wounded. There was strong solidarity among people in the streets."

Another MSF coordinator there, Hans van Dillen, confirmed that Port-au-Prince was quite unable to cope with the scale of the disaster. "There are hunderds of thousands of people who are sleeping in the streets because they are homeless," said van Dillen. "We see open fractures, head injuries. The problem is that we can not forward people to proper surgery at this stage."

So many of the city's medical facilities have been damaged, healthcare is severely disrupted at precisely the moment when medical needs are high.

CARE is sending more workers to their staff already in Haiti, and has some quotes from their staff on experiencing the earthquake.

CARE is deploying additional emergency team members to the devastated city of Port-au-Prince in Haiti, where the worst earthquake in 200 years destroyed houses and left thousands homeless. While the exact death toll from the 7.0-magnitude quake is not yet known, it is expected to be catastrophic.

CARE has launched an international appeal for funds for Haiti that will support immediate emergency operations. CARE plans to start food distribution using stocks of high-protein biscuits from its warehouses in Haiti. CARE is coordinating with other U.N. agencies and aid organizations to assess damage and on-the-ground needs.

Initial reports are that homes and buildings across the city have been destroyed, including essential services like hospitals. Electricity is out and phone lines are down across the affected area, restricting available information about the extent of the disaster. Aftershocks continue to rock the area and have caused landslides outside the city.

Sophie Perez, CARE's country director in Haiti, was in the CARE office in Port-au-Prince when the earthquake hit. CARE's staff in the Port-au-Prince office escaped the office safely, but we are still trying to determine if all other staff in the area are safe.

''It was terrifying. It lasted for more than a minute,'' said Perez. ''The whole building was shaking. People were screaming, crying. Last night, people were sleeping outside because they were afraid to go back inside their homes. Many of the houses are destroyed anyway. There were eight aftershocks last night. Everyone was sleeping in the streets. The whole city is affected. It is just morning here now, and I can hear helicopters working on the search and rescue. The immediate need is to rescue people trapped in the rubble, then to get people food and water. We're particularly worried about the children, because so many schools seem to have collapsed. Children were still in school in the afternoon when the earthquake hit, so there are many children trapped. It's horrifying.''

Dr. Helene Gayle, CARE president and CEO, said, ''This is an extremely serious situation. We currently have 133 personnel on the ground in Haiti and are deploying additional staff immediately to distribute food, hygiene kits and water, as well as to deliver emergency health services.''

"Today, we are all Haitians."

Many stories are pouring in about local charities making pledges of aid to earthquake devastated Haiti. Tuesday, Haiti suffered a 7.0 Richter quake that destroyed the city of Port-au-Prince.

The International Red Cross has set up a relief fund for Haiti. In this Christian Science Monitor story that we found at KMIR, writer Sara Miller Llana records a quote from the Red Cross and provides one bright spot to the story.

International Red Cross spokesman Paul Conneally said an estimated 3 million people may have been affected by the quake and that it would take a day or two for a clear picture of scope of the destruction to emerge

Thousands of structures – from government and United Nations buildings to the millions of shacks that line the impoverished nation's capital, Port-au-Prince – have been reduced to rubble.
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Few countries are as vulnerable to natural disaster as Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere. Wracked by political instability and poverty, and hammered by a series of hurricanes in 2008, Haiti faces a tough recovery ahead. But as the nation digs itself out of the confusion and rubble, there is a bright spot: with the UN peacekeeping force already on the ground and an army of international aid organizations with a long presence in Haiti, recovery efforts might be more coordinated and well-oiled than in other disaster zones.

"The good news is that there are many, many organizations in Haiti," says Elizabeth Furst Frank, vice president of global program operations at AmeriCares, which is sending medical aid to Haiti, where the US-based group has had a presence for 25 years. "So you'll see a faster response faster than in Myanmar after the cyclone, because so many NGOs are well-established and will be responding in any number of ways."

A charity from our home state of Michigan that started a orphanage in Haiti says it is no longer standing. WWMT talked to the Haiti Foundation Against Poverty.

Grand Rapids native Mallery Thurlow started the Haiti Foundation Against Poverty in 2006, working to bring awareness and raise funds and supplies.

We spoke to her over the phone late Tuesday night as she was packing up to head to the country, hoping to get there this weekend to provide aid.

She told us she has spoken to multiple people there in Haiti and the destruction is devastating.

An orphanage her organization helped start has been leveled and some handicapped children are stuck in side.

She's unsure if the school they assist is still standing.

KY3 news in Springfield, Missouri reprinted this press release from a local charity that is on their way to Port-au-Prince.

Convoy of Hope is establishing an emergency command center just outside the city of Port-au-Prince where food, water and supplies will be distributed to victims of the earthquake that rocked Haiti on Tuesday.

“Our Haiti country director is on the ground and we are working closely with our partners to check on the children we feed and also to assist victims with immediate needs,” says Hal Donaldson, founder and president of Convoy of Hope. “We have a warehouse in Haiti and have food and supplies immediately available to those in need. In the next few days several more containers filled with relief supplies will be prepared and shipped immediately to Haiti.”

Initial reports indicate that many buildings, homes and walls toppled under the strain of the earthquake. Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Many of its nearly 10 million residents live in abject poverty.

For several years Convoy of Hope has worked in Haiti and currently feeds 7,000 children there each day.

Finally, columnist Nicholas Kristof invokes a slogan from 9/11 and updates it to the disaster in Haiti.

After 9/11, the French newspaper Le Monde declared: We Are All Americans. And after yesterday’s earthquake: Today, we are all Haitians. No country seems to have had worse luck with misrule, environmental mismanagement, natural disasters and poor governance than Haiti. And now the earthquake.

Kids Count Report for Nebraska focuses on immigrants

A Kids Count report was just released for the state of Nebraska, and this year it focuses on immigrant children. The report issued from Voices for Children says that there are many barriers that prevent immigrant children from becoming productive adults.

The Kids Count report blames the barriers for immigrant children on restrictive laws and policies. Many of the children are US citizens because they were born in the states, however their parents might not be US citizens. The parents of these children avoid seeking services for their kids out of fear of being deported away.

From the CT Post, Jean Ortiz of the Associated Press unpacks the report for us.

In 2007, some 52,000 children — nearly 12 percent of all Nebraska's kids — were born in another country or had at least one foreign-born parent. Some 85 percent of those children are U.S. citizens, the nonprofit group said in its report.

A year earlier, 61 percent belonged to low-income families. Advocates say children in low-income households face the greatest risk of receiving low-quality child care, having inadequate nutrition, being uninsured and growing up in an unsafe neighborhood. They are also the kids most likely to end up in the juvenile justice system.

Some 64 percent of immigrant children lived with parents who had difficulty speaking English in 2007, according to the report. Those parents often struggle to navigate the school system or access health care and other services for their children, meaning that their offspring could miss opportunities for improvement and better health.

It also means those children have to shoulder more responsibility, said Mark Mather with the Population Reference Bureau, who has studied the issue on a national scope.

"What we have here is a generation of translators," he said. "These kids are kind of between two worlds."

Children of illegal immigrants are even more vulnerable because their parents are too scared to access public services for their children for fear of being discovered and deported, the report found.

The effects of the Olympics on Vancouver's poor

With the Winter Olympics coming up in Vancouver, city activists are critical of the games taking much needed resources away from the poor. Activists will call attenetion to the problem by staging a competing "Poverty Olympics" just days before the winter games.

Vancouver promised to turn the Olympic Village into affordable housing, but construction of the housing has gone over budget. Activist now fear the city will change it's mind and turn the Village into Condominiums to help recoup some of the costs.

From the Seattle Times writer Kristi Heim writes this profile of the effects the games have on Vancouver's poor.

A few days before the official Games begin, advocates for the poor will stage a "Poverty Olympics," aiming to push the city's social problems into the global spotlight. The parody, which claims to "reflect the unique local flavor of the host city," has a cockroach, a bedbug and a rat as mascots.

"In the Downtown Eastside, the street scene isn't so pretty," said longtime community activist Jean Swanson, referring to the neighborhood that a U.N. official called one of the worst slums of a wealthy city. "We have the same HIV rate as Botswana, and we're a developed country."

An element of Vancouver's Olympic bid was a four-page statement of social goals pledging the Games would be used to benefit the inner city.

Organizers promised to employ neighborhood residents, build affordable housing, prevent existing residents from being displaced and protect civil liberties.

Those promises helped win passage in 2003 of a citywide vote for approval of Vancouver's Olympic bid. An Olympics-related housing committee later said eliminating homelessness was to be the lasting legacy of the Games.

Supporters argue that the Games have brought tangible improvements to the Downtown Eastside: building renovations, construction jobs, temporary shelters for the homeless and new low-income housing.

Yet, many critics say the neighborhood's problems have worsened and that the $6 billion Olympics-related spending spree has yielded scant social benefits for the poor.

Haiti earthquake

One of the countries we cover regularly here at the blog had a devastating disaster overnight. Haiti suffered a 7.0 magnitude earthquake which has destroyed the capital city of Port-au-Prince. The death toll is already in the hundreds of thousands but aftershocks keep increasing that total.

The International Red Cross has set up a relief fund for Haiti. They have already released $200,000 of emergency aid to the earthquake victims. Also this post from the ONE Organization did a good job in summarizing the response of aid charities.

From this AFP story that we found at Channel News Asia we read more about the disaster.

Bodies littered Haiti's capital Wednesday after an earthquake that may have killed thousands of people as it collapsed shantytowns, luxury hotels and even the presidential palace.

With victims pinned under debris and powerful aftershocks rattling the country, looting broke out soon after the 7.0-magnitude quake which spared no part of the capital Port-au-Prince, which was close to the epicentre.

Injured residents of the crowded city poured into the streets screaming in panic with each new tremor. Many bodies were just left in the streets or crushed under debris.

The quake toppled the cupola on the gleaming white presidential palace, a major hotel where 200 tourists were missing and the headquarters of the UN mission in Haiti where up to 250 personnel were unaccounted for.
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Estimates of the death toll ranged from hundreds to thousands but with every hour passing it was becoming clear that the destruction and loss of life was catastrophic.

A major international relief operation was set underway with the United States, France, Britain and other countries promising help.

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Aid group World Vision said it would begin distributing first aid kits, blankets and potable water to survivors on Wednesday.

This "is especially devastating in Haiti, where people are acutely vulnerable because of poor infrastructure and extreme poverty," Edward Brown, World Vision's US relief director, said in a statement.

Already the poorest nation in the Americas, Haiti has been hit by a series of recent disasters.

As a background on Haiti, the Toronto Star printed this history on the troubled state. For our snippet, we fast forward to the present day and some stats on the woeful state of the country.

Since then, violent crime and drug trafficking have weakened the country as poverty deepened. Haiti's GDP is less than $8 billion a year, making it one of the world's poorest countries. The average salary is $70 a month, unemployment is rampant and inflation tops 14 per cent a year.

Life expectancy is 52 years, 10 per cent of infants die before age 4, almost a third of the population are either ill or underweight, almost half are illiterate.

A series of natural disasters has destroyed subsistence livelihoods in many parts of Haiti, and the deforested land cannot withstand tropical storms.

Heavily dependent on foreign aid, Haiti has turned to the international community for help. Canada – whose governor-general, Michaëlle Jean, is Haitian – pledged $520 million over a five-year period.

There are a few positives: a more stable political situation and a UN-backed cleanup of gangs that terrorized the capital Port-au-Prince. But some fear this latest disaster, a 7.0 earthquake, could be the tipping point toward a failed state.

Changing state law wording to "at-hope"

This is a news story that George Carlin would have taken great interest in. A Washington state lawmaker wants to change state law wording in regards to poor children. Children used to be called "poor" but we decided that it was to harsh, then they lightened it up to "disadvantaged" but no, that is still to mean, so let change it to "at-risk." State Senator Rosa Franklin's idea it to further change the term to be "at-hope"

From KSTU in Utah, this Associated Press story introduces us to the bill and what our linguist friends at Lake Superior State University think of it.

Democratic State Sen. Rosa Franklin says negative labels are hurting kids' chances for success and she's not a bit concerned that people will be confused by her proposed rewrite of the 54 places in state law where words like "at risk" and "disadvantaged" are used.

The bill has gotten a warm welcome among fellow lawmakers, state officials and advocacy groups.

"We really put too many negatives on our kids," says Franklin, who is the state Senate's president pro tem. "We need to come up with positive terms."

Republican Rep. Glenn Anderson disagrees, saying the potential cost of getting the bill from idea to printing — an average of $3,500 — is too much. And besides, he says, he is insulted more by the idea of the bill than what he called the political correctness it represents.

"It's not the label, it's the people who show up to help (children) that make the difference," he says. "What helps is a smart, well structured program, that has funding and credibility."
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But there's one group that's glad about the possibility of getting rid of the phrase "children at-risk." The people who publish the annual humorous List of Banished Words banned "at-risk" in 2000, calling it an overused and misused phrase.

But the idea of changing state statutes to say "at hope" instead drew a giggle from Tom Pink, a spokesman for Lake Superior State University. Pink's office also banished "politically correct" in 1994 along with politically correct words and phrases.

"While I respect what the legislator wants to do, I think we can all agree that changing the words doesn't change the problem," Pink says, adding "it maybe even takes attention away from what perhaps should really be happening."

High unemployment and high suicides

One of the most remote and depressing Indian reservations is in South Dakota. Pine Ridge reservation is not one of those who has benefited from a fancy casino. Instead, Pine Ridge suffers from an 80 percent unemployment rate, and a high suicide rate.

From the UK's Guardian, reporter Chris McGreal visited the reservation.

Pine Ridge is among the US's largest Indian reservations – much smaller than the vast plains of the midwest that the Sioux once roamed but still bigger than England's largest county – and also among its poorest. No one is sure how many people live on its 2.2m acres, but the tribe estimates about 45,000.

Conditions on the reservation are tough. More than 80% unemployment. A desperate shortage of housing – on average, more than 15 people live in each home and others get by in cars and trailers. More than one-third of homes lacking running water or electricity. An infant mortality rate at three times the US national average. And a dependency on alcohol and a diet so poor that half the population over the age of 40 is diabetic.

The Oglala Sioux's per capita income is around $7,000 (£4,400) a year, less than one-sixth of the national average and on a par with Bulgaria. The residents of Wounded Knee, scene of the notorious 1890 massacre of Sioux women and children and of the 1973 standoff with the FBI, are typically living on less than half of that. Young people have almost no hope of work unless they sign up to fight in Afghanistan. The few with jobs are almost all employed by the tribal authorities or the federal government. It is not uncommon to hear people quietly speak of the guilt they feel for having a job. Those who don't survive on pitifully small welfare cheques. It all adds up to a life expectancy on Pine Ridge of about only 50 years.
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But the tribe's leaders today view the treaties as a trap – promising much but providing just enough to create a culture of dependency and despair. "The government wanted us to feel defeated and we played right in to their hands," says (Tribe President Theresa) Two Bulls. "We were taught to feel defeated. Look how they brought welfare and our people lived on welfare and some of our people don't even know how to work. They're used to just staying at home all day, watching TV and drinking and taking drugs. That's the state the government wanted us to be in and we're in it."

It is a state Adelle Brown Bull has spent her life resisting, not always with success. The 69-year-old great-grandmother is still in the same tribal-owned house she raised her eight children in, and some of them never moved out. Today the two-bedroomed home is stuffed with grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She sits at her kitchen table, the green wall behind her dotted with photographs of the generations of babies. Some of the pictures are so old they are in black and white.

Among those living with Brown Bull are a daughter and her three children who are all in their 20s. Two of the granddaughters have several children of their own, one of them a baby. There's another grandchild, nine-year-old Michael, who Brown Bull is raising after his mother in effect abandoned him when he was 10 months old. The numbers fluctuate but there is anywhere between eight and 15 people sleeping in the house at any one time.

None of the occupants has a job. Brown Bull gets a pension of $538 (£337) a month, plus $323 (£202) for caring for Michael. The other mothers in the house get welfare cheques of a few hundred dollars a month. "We just manage," Brown Bull says, laughing.

Human trafficking in Northern Alabama

In this video from WAFF, we find out more about one woman's effort to shed light on human trafficking going on in Northern Alabama. Trafficking for sexual exploitation in the area gained national headlines last year with the rape and murder of a trafficked five year old girl. This helped to prompt activist Pat McKay to help inform the area about the problem. The meeting mentioned took place last night.

Kids Count report for Michigan

Poverty and unemployment continue to rise in the state of Michigan. The effects of the job losses and lack of cash is severely felt by the state's children.

Kids Count in Michigan have produced a survey of children in poverty in the state, and despite the growing poverty they did find some positives. One of the positives was the amount of childhood deaths has decreased. According to the report, there were 18.9 deaths per 100,000 children, that is down from 23.1 in 2000.

From the Detroit News, writer Catherine Jun gleaned more data from the report.

More than 40 percent of Michigan students were eligible and received free or reduced federal lunches in 2008, according to Kids Count in Michigan, a report released by the Michigan League of Human Services. That's up from 30.7 percent in 2001.

Even in Oakland County, the state's wealthiest county, more children (age 17 and younger) are falling into poverty: 11 percent compared with 8.6 percent in 2005.
Statewide, one in five children lives in poverty.

At the same time, many of the programs that serve as a safety net to families are being cut, said Jane Zehnder-Merrell, senior research associate at the League.
"The erosion of economic security has a huge impact on kids," she said.

Poverty is tied to a 16 percent increase in confirmed cases of abuse and neglect since 2000, said Denise Glover, project director at the Child Care Coordinating Council of Detroit/Wayne County.

Glover said impoverished parents often cannot provide heat in their homes, often viewed as a measure of child neglect. Or they may take out their financial stress on their children.

"Tempers flair and the frustration levels increase," she said. "Children become the victims."

Two conflicting stories for Nigeria

Two different stories on All Africa today pose two very different assumptions on the economy in Nigeria. Dr. Magnus Kpakol head of the poverty reduction program for the government of Nigeria says that the poverty rate is falling. However, the head economist at Ahmadu Bello University Zaria, Dr. Mike Duru says that the poverty rate is rising.

First from this Daily Trust article that we found at All Africa, we find Dr. Kpakol's comments.

Daily Trust had reported that in 1980, 28% of Nigerians were poor; in 1985 the poverty ratio grew to 46% and dropped to 42% in 19992. In 1996, the ratio was 65.6%, in 1990 it was 70% and in 2004 it fell to 54.4%. He said the current poverty rate is less than 50 per cent and that Nigerians are richer.

He said though the actual data is collated by the National Bureau of Statistics which is expected to come up this year.

He said: "The poverty rate has drop because for example if you look at the economy, and look at what happens in say agriculture, you will realise that there is growth in the sector last year and that growth in output means something happened there. If you look across board, you will see that the overall GDP growth rate in the economy grew by about 6%.All of that growth took place in the non-oil sector where you have people getting jobs."

Daily Trust writer Jibrin Abubakar received quotes from Dr Duru.

Head of Economics Department of the Ahmadu Bello University Zaria Dr. Mike Duru has said that poverty rate is rising in Nigeria.Dr. Duru who spoke to Daily Trust on phone said the quality of lives of Nigerians is falling. He described as misleading equating rise in Nigeria's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to fall in poverty.

Provisional data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) indicated that real GDP grew by 8.23 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2009, up from 4.50, 7.22 and 7.07 per cent in the first, second and third quarters.

But the overall GDP growth for 2009 was projected at 6.90, up from 5.98 in 2008; hence the non-oil sectors remain the major driver of the economy.

Stitching high fashion from a shantytown

A social entrepreneur has helped bring women from a shantytown in Rio De Janeiro into worldwide fashion recognition. Maria Teresa Leal has helped women work out of poverty by sewing and stitching clothing for famous brands such as Carlos Miele, and Lacoste.

From the Christian Science Monitor, writer Andrew Downie profiles Leal and her work.

Coopa-Roca is the Rocinha Seamstress and Craftwork Cooperative Ltd. Leal started it in 1987 after noticing how women in the favela loved fashion. Leal had gone to Rocinha to help with a program that recycled trash, like tin or paper, into children’s toys. But when the women were given scraps of cloth, they used it to make clothes and accessories. Leal decided to organize these gifted women.

The seamstresses’ work has focused on customizing garments. They adorn clothing with their trademark embroidery, crochet, sequins, and beads. Sometimes they add their crochet or patchwork to products or packaging.

Their handiwork has contradicted outdated notions that work from favelas – Brazil’s impoverished shantytowns – is of poor quality, and Coopa-Roca now has a worldwide reputation for craftsmanship. Its client list includes lingeriemaker Agent Provocateur; Carlos Miele, the first Brazilian designer to hire supermodel Gisele Bündchen; and Lacoste, the French label that recently hired Coopa-Roca to sew hundreds of limited-edition polo shirts.

Such coups have cemented Leal’s reputation and won her numerous awards, both at home and abroad. She was named a fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1996, and she was honored by the Ashoka Foundation, which invests in social entrepreneurs, in 2000, and the Avina Foundation, which promotes sustainable development in Latin America, in 2004.
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Coopa-Roca has taught its members awareness of issues such as women’s health and has just signed an agreement with the Avon Institute to give workshops designed to raise self-esteem, teach proper makeup techniques, and show ways to check for breast cancer.

The work has given the women independence, financial stability, and faith in themselves, they say. They love Leal, but they have learned that this is not a normal master and servant operation, no small feat in such a hierarchical nation.

When asked what she thought of her boss, Marta Pinto almost bristled. “She isn’t our boss,” says Ms. Pinto, one of Coopa-Roca’s veterans. “We work together. But in every situation you need someone to lead, to bring business, to show us what to do. Everything has to be done as a team. Tete [Leal] would be nothing without us, and we’d be nothing without Tete.”

International aid flowing into Yemen

A lot has been said about Yemen since the attempted bombing of an airplane by an Yemeni national on Christmas Day. Yemen has a similar poverty situation as most of Africa, yet receives less aid per person than other African countries. Many policy advisers warn the US that they must address the issue of poverty in Yemen instead of simply fighting al-Qaeda.

From Bloomberg News, writer Henry Meyer presents an article full of facts and figures about international aid going into Yemen.

A Western failure to address Yemen’s economic and social weaknesses will exacerbate the threat from al-Qaeda in the poorest Arab nation, said Gregory Johnsen, a Yemen scholar at Princeton University in New Jersey. Yemen gets about one-third the foreign aid accorded to equally poor parts of Asia and Africa on a per capita basis.

“You can’t focus only on killing people and not on what turns them into al-Qaeda supporters,” said Mustafa Alani, a security expert at the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center.

About 40 percent of Yemen’s population, which is expected to almost double by 2030 to 40 million, lives on less than $2 a day, says the U.K. Department for International Development. Foreign aid comes to $12 a year for each Yemeni, compared with an average of $33 in African and Asian nations suffering similar levels of poverty, the department says.
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Yemen is in need of development help as the conflict with Muslim Shiite rebels on the border with Saudi Arabia exacerbates its economic troubles. Christopher Boucek, a Yemen expert at the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, estimates that the government is spending $200 million a month on the war.

In the province of Amran, refugees have crowded into six schools in one mountain valley near the conflict zone. The 1,200 children have been unable to go to class since September, said Lucienne Maas, country program director for U.K.-based charity Save the Children. More than 175,000 refugees have fled the fighting, according to the United Nations.

In rural areas, in which 70 percent of Yemen’s population lives, only 20 percent of houses get electricity, according to the U.S. Trade Development Agency. Less than half of the rural population has access to clean drinking water.

Drumming for peace in Sudan

Music stars from around the world took part in a film to promote peace in Sudan. This week a statement from aid groups said that Sudan was close to resuming it's civil war. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch organized the drumming to kick off a campaign to call world leaders to action. From Sudan 365, comes this cool drumming music featuring Nick Mason, Phil Selway, and Stewart Copeland.



From Yahoo News, this AFP story explains the campaign.

Drummers from Pink Floyd, Radiohead and The Police are joining other musicians to drum for peace in Sudan as part of an international campaign to press world leaders to prevent more bloodshed in Africa's largest nation.
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Celebrity drummers are taking part in a "beat for peace" film that features a drumroll starting in the war-wracked nation "and being picked up and passed like a baton between drummers in over 15 countries" -- including Brazil, Egypt, France, Japan, South Africa and the United States.

Drummers will include Radiohead's Phil Selway, Stewart Copeland of The Police, Nick Mason of Pink Floyd, as well as Egyptian musicians Yehia Khalil and Mohammed Munir and Ghana's Mustapha Tettey Addy.

Nine organisations including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the US group Save Darfur have joined efforts to organise the campaign along with the drummers.

Gatherings are due to take place in a dozen cities across the world on Saturday when the film will be launched on www.sudan365.org and the front page of YouTube, organisers said in a statement.

"I wanted to be involved in this project because I think music is such a powerful way of bringing people together," Selway was quoted as saying.

Sudan government denies aid group claims

Sudan government leaders on both sides rebuffed the claims made by aid groups during the week. A coalition of aid groups says that Sudan is very close to resuming it's civil war. A new incident of violence was discovered during the week where over 140 people died.

From Reuters, writer Andrew Heavens received from quotes of denial from government officials

Sudan ended more than two decades of north-south civil war with the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, but relations between the two sides have remained tense.

Aid groups and campaigners issued a series of reports in recent days warning there was a risk of fresh conflict as Sudan counted down the days to national elections in April and a referendum on whether the south should split off as an independent country, due in January 2011.

"The situation in southern Sudan is very far from what has been depicted...It is not all doom and gloom," Anne Itto, a senior member of the south's dominant Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) told reporters.

Itto, speaking in the southern capital Juba, said the campaigners had failed to take into account significant improvements and development in the five years since the accord.

Sudan's Foreign Ministry said in a statement a report "from some foreign organisations...that the north and the south are doomed to go back to war, was not correct and was not backed by facts on the ground".

There was a need to tighten security in the south, ministry spokesman Moawia Osman Khalid told the state Suna news agency.

But "war is no longer an option for the remedy of the situation between the north and the south, given the fact that the country has tasted the woes of the war and its repercussions," he added.

Poverty projections for California

A new study gives projections on children poverty levels for Northern California. The study says that an eighth of the area's children will live in poverty at some time during the year 2010. Also, a quarter of California children statewide will fall below the poverty line.

From KTUV, we read this further breakdown of the projections.

The study projects that as many as 2.7 million children in the state, or 27 percent of California's children, could be living in households below the poverty level at some point in 2010, according to officials with the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children's Health.

The federal poverty level is $22,000 in earnings per year for a family of four. Officials believe families in California need to earn at least twice that amount to cover basic living expenses.

In six Bay Area counties - Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo, and Santa Clara - the number of children in poverty could rise as high as 15 or 16 percent this year, compared to 8 to 13 percent in those counties in 2008.

The study, done by Duke University sociologist Kenneth Land, followed trends from 1995 to 2006 and projects poverty rates through 2012.

Japan's new realization

We remember back in the 1980's when many Americans feared that Japan was going to buy up all of America's property. Nowadays instead, many Americans fear that China will ask for immediate payment on all of our government's debt.

We bring this up because since the 1980's Japan affluence has shrunk a little bit. Japan is now realizing that some in their population are in relative poverty. For many years the affluence of the Japanese kept this problem hidden. Now with stats saying to contrary and a rash of suicides amongst breadwinners, Japan is beginning to see the need for a social safety net.

From the IPS, writer Mutsuko Murakami details Japan's new realization.

Japan’s rude awakening to the reality of poverty amid seeming affluence in some sectors of its society came about when, for the first time in 45 years, the government released in October 2009 data showing the extent of poverty gripping the country. Health, labour and welfare minister Akira Nagatsuma announced then that 15.7 percent of the Japanese people and 14.2 percent of Japanese children and teenagers under 17 were in relative poverty, citing a 2007 survey.

The first disturbing warning sign of Japanese children living in poverty came in 2006 following the release of the report, ‘Economic Survey of Japan 2006’, by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which undertakes such studies every five years.

Of the 30 OECD member countries, it said Japan ranked second to the United States in terms of children living in relative poverty, with 13.7 percent, up two percent from the l990s. Until then the Japanese public had long distanced itself from the notion of poverty, especially where it involved children.

The Japanese, along with the government, used to view poverty in absolute terms, that is, as a critical state of hunger or survival. It was only in 2006 when the East Asian country began to recognise the idea of "relative poverty."

"For a long time the Japanese had maintained a firm belief that everyone was more or less in middle class, with no one having anything to do with poverty," says Dr Abe. Children in poverty were often viewed as isolated cases, notes the author of a widely acclaimed book, ‘Poverty of Children’.

The seeming affluence of Japanese society belies images of children starving on the streets or children unable to go to school. After all, the law provides for compulsory education for children aged six to 15, and more than 90 percent of junior high school graduates belonging to the middle class are able to move on to senior high school. The nation’s medical insurance system covers everyone – in theory, at least – and millions of Japanese tourists are known to go each year on shopping sprees abroad with children in tow.

Yet, there are subtle yet very real indications of poverty, which afflicts children in particular. These are based on findings that have pointed to increasing poverty and widening economic disparity in Japan, based on the latest available data generated in 2008. Thousands of contract workers and part-time workers lost jobs, as the manufacturing industry cut production and the service industry shrank.

The local media, for instance, reported that 33,000 children across the nation did not have health insurance. There have also been reports that many parents could not pay for school lunches, bringing the total unpaid bills nationwide to two billion yen (23 million U.S. dollars).

More on Sudan: new violence reported

Here are some more details on the statement by aid groups on the precarious peace in Sudan. The peace is even more fragile as it came to light today that over 140 lives were claimed in recent violence. The incident was just discovered today, but may have happened a couple of days ago. IRIN gives us full details on both stories.

Violence in Southern Sudan continues to escalate, with the latest incident claiming 140 lives, even as 10 aid agencies called for urgent international intervention to prevent a return to war between the north and south.

A senior UN official said on 7 January that at least 140 people had been killed and 90 wounded during an attack on the Wunchai region of Warrap state.

The fight occurred some time at the beginning of the year but reports emerged only after a UN security team visited the remote area by airplane two days ago.

"Local sources on the ground said at least 140 had been killed and 90 wounded," said Lise Grande, the UN Deputy Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator in Southern Sudan.

Grande, who also said several thousand cattle had been stolen, added that a military team of UN peacekeepers had left on 7 January by road to ascertain the exact situation on the ground in the wider region.

“We are deeply concerned at these reports,” Grande said.

“Lethal cocktail”

Details of the attack coincided with the launch of a report by 10 aid agencies who cautioned that the successful holding of elections and a referendum, civilian protection, as well as increased development funding for Southern Sudan, were crucial in preventing a return to war five years after the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA).

The agencies said the CPA was on the brink of collapse because of a "lethal cocktail" of rising violence, chronic poverty and political tensions.

"A great deal hangs on what can be achieved in the next 365 days," Richard Poole, director of humanitarian aid programmes for the International Rescue Committee (IRC) in Southern Sudan, told a news conference in Nairobi. "When the peace deal expires in a year, we must ensure that the chance for long-term peace and development in the region does not die with it."

Reacting to the NGOs’ report, people on the streets of Juba, the Southern Sudan capital, said they feared for the future.

"War is a possibility - we do not trust the north," said Simon Akol, a small trader.

However, senior officials of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), the ruling party in the south, said the risks were being exaggerated.

"Of course, we have problems with security that require a lot of attention, but we should not simply always look at the negative side of things,” said Anne Itto, the SPLM deputy secretary-general for the south.

“Of course we can do more, but we have come a long, long way since the peace deal was signed in 2005,” Itto added. "We have a government in place, as well as roads, institutions and roads being built, as well as a political space that has been created.

"Much needs to be done but we are hopeful for the future."

Not too late

Maya Mailer, a policy adviser for Oxfam and co-author of the NGOs' report, said in a statement: "It is not yet too late to avert disaster, but the next 12 months are a crossroads for Africa's largest country. Last year saw a surge in violence in Southern Sudan. This could escalate even further and become one of the biggest emergencies in Africa in 2010."

According to the agencies, at least 2,500 people were killed in 2009 and 350,000 fled their homes, "a human toll greater than occurred last year in Darfur". They said the rest of the world had largely overlooked this suffering.

The report warned of several possible flashpoints over the next 12 months including presidential, legislative and local elections in April – the first in 24 years – and a referendum in early 2011 on whether Southern Sudan becomes independent.

Warning that growing frustration over the lack of development in Southern Sudan was harming the chance for peace, the agencies noted that less than half the population had access to clean water and maternal mortality rates were among the worst in the world.

"There are fewer than 50km of tarmac road in the entire region, an area the size of France, and during heavy rains many areas are cut off for months at a time, making the delivery of humanitarian aid almost impossible," the report stated. "Some 80 percent of adults cannot read or write and one in seven children dies before their fifth birthday."

Francisco Roque, the country director of Save the Children in Southern Sudan, said: "After five years of peace, Southern Sudan remains one of the poorest regions on earth. People hoped the peace would bring economic benefits and development, but this has happened far too slowly and in some areas not at all. We are very worried about children who seem to be increasingly targeted in attacks on villages. International donors and the government must urgently improve aid to these areas.”

A return to conflict would have devastating consequences that extend far beyond Southern Sudan, the agencies said. This crisis was escalating at a time when the situation in Darfur, in western Sudan, remains one of the world's biggest humanitarian emergencies. They warned that there could not be sustainable peace in Darfur if the peace between north and south was allowed to fail.