7.14.2009

Tourism on Their Own Terms

Posted by Monique Dubos on July 14th 2009 in Uncategorized Edit


Eco-Surf Volunteers. Photo Courtesy ESV

Sam Bailey was surfing his way up the western coast of Peru last year, taking advantage of the warm waters and hospitality. Crossing into Ecuador, he traveled through beach towns in various stages of development, and arrived in the small town of Canoa on the north coast.

Bailey noticed that in many of the villages, big companies had set up hotels and restaurants without concern for the natural environment or local customs. The fishing village of Canoa, which also catered to surfers, was fairly undeveloped, with most roads still unpaved and electricity that goes out every once in a while. It was obvious to Bailey that tourism was coming to Canoa, but he hoped he could help the villagers build their industry on their own terms.

His idea was to start a camp where college-aged students could learn to surf and take on environmental projects. “Surfing is a solitary sport. Surfers don’t see beyond themselves when they return to the beach,” Bailey says. To change that dynamic, he approached Daniel Velasco, a town leader and fellow surfer who runs a “posada,” or “small hotel,” in Canoa. According to Bailey, Velasco initially feared this was just another way to exploit the village. But Bailey convinced Velasco of his sincerity and assured him the groups would patronize locally-owned hotels and restaurants, spending money in the local economy. Also, each group member would donate money to the local grade school. Velasco agreed to introduce Bailey to the community and helped facilitate what became Eco-Surf Volunteers.


Eco-Surf Volunteers with local children. Photo Courtesy ESV

The local grade school, La Escuela los Algarrobos (named after a kind of native tree), includes English as a Second Language and environmental education in its curriculum. Eco-Surf Volunteer participants facilitate arts and crafts sessions to give the students a chance to practice their English. Moya Foley, the school administrative and financial director, a Canadian who has lived in Ecuador for 30 years, says that the financial donation helped complete some construction on two new classrooms, and the volunteers “worked their butts off moving dirt, sanding, painting and generally doing whatever we needed done.” The volunteers’ hard work — about four hours a day — is rewarded with daily surf lessons given by local.

In addition to helping out at the school, the volunteers lead the village children on beach clean-ups. “I think the most important thing the volunteers take back to their countries as an experience, is the cultural immersion they have and the contact with the community,” says Velasco. He was particularly satisfied with the impression the volunteers made on the children. “They are used to seeing tourists partying or laying on the beach reading,” but through Eco-Surf Volunteers, they “see the volunteers working on the school activities, [doing] beach cleanups and collecting garbage on the street.”

The programs have been a big hit with the children, involving both students from La Escuela los Algarrobos and others from Canoa. “The first day we had about 20 kids and on the last day we had 90!” says Foley. They are “looking forward to the volunteer’s return. They stop me on the street, the older ones, and ask me when they are coming back.”

Bailey is planning several more camps through 2010, but envisions the people of Canoa eventually taking over operation of the camps themselves: “The town is still discovering what is needed. They want progress, but want to do it in a careful way. The biggest concern is developing the tourist industry while maintaining cultural identity.”

Eco-Surf Volunteers

HELPING IN KOLKATA

Tamrah Schaller O’Neil is volunteering in Kolkata, India, through the organization Pathways to Children. She has agreed to send occasional reports about her experiences.



Kolkata streets are quiet at 5 a.m. but the air is thick with a distinctive scent of coal smoke, diesel and spices. Five of us are travelling with Pathways to Children, which facilitates extraordinary volunteer experiences. We drive to Mercy Hospital to see where they cook the rice and lentil mixture that feeds 25,000 people daily. Men load huge food-filled steel caldrons into a truck and we follow in a car. Women and children are lined up with steel bowls at established points on the road to receive their only meal of the day. Men unload the giant pots and one or two female village leaders step up to distribute the rice. Family representatives carry cards stating the number of their family members in order to get the appropriate amount of food.

Our leader today is Amitabh Singh, donor relations manager of Children Need Love, an affiliate of Mercy Hospital. Singh says that most residents of the city have no idea these people exist. We hand out food, mostly to children, and take their pictures as they eat. Their smiles nourish us as they enjoy the attention of our cameras and admire their own images in the digital viewfinder. As the sun rises, we reach the last stop where the remaining food is emptied into children’s bowls. Then we retrace our route to pick up the empty pots and return them to the hospital to be refilled for the following day, and the day after that.

Our next stop is the school for the blind. We take a tour and observe students learning their lessons. There are 135 children here aged two to 20 years, and all were rescued off the street. Mercy Hospital pays their tuition. We had planned to reorganize their Braille library, but because the windows have no glass, dust perpetually blows in. We discuss the library’s needs, which range from capital improvements to tapes to record books and lessons for the students to listen to.

After lunch we head to Mother Teresa’s. Except for the sign that says “Mother’s House” and the nuns wearing distinctive white and blue trim habits, you would never know that so many receive care within these shabby walls. The nuns have a very set registration protocol for volunteers. We are assigned the afternoon shift of the young handicapped and will be able to return tomorrow to help.

For dinner we have a special invitation. A friend in Minneapolis has notified her best friend Jyoti in Kolkata that the five of us from Pathways to Children are in town, and Jyoti invites us all to her home. What an honor to have a dinner in a private home. She is a board member of Society for Indian Children Welfare. Its founder, Dr. Z.P. Dadina, comes to pick us up. The organization does amazing volunteer work, much like Mother Teresa’s, with an orphanage for special needs children. The other members of the all-women board join us for dinner. In addition, we meet Monica and Maria, who work on adoptions for special needs children from India through Adoptions Centrum in Sweden. Most of the women dress in non-traditional Indian clothing, no saris, but the meal was traditionally spicy Indian. The amazing cuisine can’t compare with the company of so many inspiring, highly educated women dedicated to helping the children of India.

Pathways to Children
www.childrenshomeadopt.org/Pathways_to_Children.html
Children Need Love
www.childrenneedlove.org
Mother Theresa of Calcutta Center
www.motherteresa.org
Society for Indian Children Welfare, Dr. Z.P. Dadina
dr.dadina@vsnl.net


7.13.2009

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The Giving Trip

Posted by Jan Hanson

In early January 2007, I boarded an early morning flight from Minneapolis. While boarding the plane bound for Lima, a woman asked in broken English where I was going. I told her I was serving as an international volunteer in Ayacucho, Peru. She said, “It’s very poor there.” That is precisely why I chose to spend two weeks working with orphans in Ayacucho, and it was a trip of a lifetime.

My volunteer work with children in Peru was simple. It involved being taken by the hand of a small boy and sitting close on the dirt playground while we wrote our names and English words in his school notebook and read them out loud. I spent other days cutting out paper dolls for amazed eight year olds at a girls orphanage, reading Mi Papa es un Gigante to toddlers, teaching basic English to teenagers and even piling 20-30 pound blocks to build a fence around a school so children could have a safe place to play. True joy filled my heart as I thought about the joy these simple gestures would bring to children.

That experience galvanized a passion inside me. I realized that my professional career of marketing financial services for a nationwide banking company was no longer satisfying. Instead, spending my life and talents doing something to make the lives of orphans and poor children just a little bit brighter was what I was built to do.

Months after volunteering in Peru, I began to shape a plan for a nonprofit called 200 Orphanages Worldwide Inc. I built a web-based nonprofit that would serve as a forum for existing organizations worldwide to raise awareness and funds for building projects that serve orphans.

Today, there are more than 12 organizations featured on 200orphanagesworldwide.org with projects totaling about $2 million. Many of the featured organizations have representatives living in and around my home state of Minnesota. Meeting with them and learning about their projects in far-away countries provides a sense of urgency to the orphan crisis, bringing their needs closer to home.

Relindis Moffor is executive director of Angel of Mercy, one of the organizations featured on the website. She just returned from delivering clothing, medical supplies and other relief to the children in Cameroon who were orphaned when their parents died of HIV/AIDS. She dreams of building a home with specialty care for the orphans with AIDS at a cost of $100,000. In the meantime, she works two jobs, one to pay for the needs of the orphans and one to support her own family. Relindis and the others serve as our heart and hands on the ground. Our mission is to help her help them.

My work now involves building support and creating a solid donor base, getting the word out, and mobilizing volunteers around the world to host events that spread the word and raise funds. Once people hear about the children and their needs, they often want to do something to help. At a House To House Wine Tasting Informational meeting last November, about 26 friends and family gathered to learn about the mission. One attendee was so touched by the needs of the orphans at our first House to House event that she asked her manager if he’d consider hosting an event to raise funds for an orphanage on the site. He agreed, and the 1st Annual Charity 6K Walk/Run is scheduled for February 21.

The need is so great; someone said it’s like eating an elephant. Well, that begs the question, “How do you eat an elephant?” The answer is, “One bite at a time.”

Likewise, the needs of the orphans are so overwhelming they have to be broken down into bite sized pieces. The projects featured on 200orphanagesworldwide.org represent about 2,000 orphans. That means that if 2,000 people each gave $1,000, all the projects could be built. We’re working daily to make that happen. It’s one bite at a time.

7.11.2009

MENDING THE HEART OF A COBBLER'S DAUGHTER

Kadeeja’s family lives in the Kurdish area of northern Iraq. They are shoemakers, weavers of “klash,” a handmade shoe common in the region. They sell their shoes at the local market, and some are bought by Preemptive Love. This organization sells the klash on its website to consumers across the world, and uses the money generated to fund heart surgeries for Iraqi children. A relative of Kadeeja’s approached a Preemptive Love staff member in the market to say that there was child in his family who was in desperate need of heart surgery. Could they help Kadeeja?

Kadeeja was sixteen years old when her relative spoke with Preemptive Love, and the defects in her heart were taking a toll on her life. She was exhausted by any exertion and limited in what she could do. Furthermore, pulmonary hypertension, the over-working of her heart, threatened to bring her life to an early end.

Preemptive Love agreed to take on Kadeeja’s case. This meant finding funding to pay for the surgery and related care, as well as for travel to a country where the surgery could be performed. It also meant arranging the surgery, aftercare, visas, transport and accommodation. She was a high-risk patient who had in fact been previously turned down for surgery. Nonetheless, Preemptive Love managed to arrange for Kadeeja’s treatment with a hospital in Turkey. And so, with all the excitement of a 16 year-old leaving her home country for the first time, Kadeeja set off in mid January, 2009. The surgery was a complete success, and on February 2, 2009, she returned home healthy and ready to begin a new life unrestrained by illness.

A major source of funding for Preemptive Love is the shoes made by Kadeeja’s family and other families like hers in northern Iraq. The organization buys shoes at the local markets, paying fair market price, then sells them on its website to buyers overseas through Buy Shoes. Save Lives . One hundred percent of the profits from the shoe sales go toward Preemptive Love’s heart program. This system has the additional benefit of opening markets to the shoemakers that would otherwise be unavailable, resulting in higher incomes for them and their families.

Saving lives by repairing hearts is the core of Preemptive Love’s mission. There are, however, other advantages to the organization’s work. Successfully transporting a child to another country for major surgery requires a great deal of cooperation from a great number of people. With Preemptive Love’s work, this cooperation often occurs across divisions that are commonly regarded as insuperable barriers. The Kurdish people have been at odds with Turkey for years, yet Kadeeja, a Kurdish child, was saved by Turkish doctors. Preemptive Love has funded surgeries for Iraqi children in Israeli hospitals, allowing Jewish doctors to save Muslim children. Americans, Iraqis, Israelis, and Turks end up being simply people, not adversaries, working together to save lives. Given the long history of conflict in the region and the recent wars, anything that encourages cooperation and minimizes divisions is a blessing. When these actions save children’s lives it is a true gift indeed.

Preemptive Love
preemptivelove.org


7.10.2009

MERCY IN KOLKATA

Tamrah Schaller O’Neil is volunteering in Kolkata, India, through Pathways to Children.



Try to imagine you are the mother of a child who has a cleft palate. Your child is a social outcast, has no future and brings shame to the family. The good news is your child has been offered a free corrective operation. However, you can’t afford to travel to the hospital, much less a place to stay or even a meal. What do you do? Calcutta Mercy Hospital helps solve all these problems. The hospital provides a place to stay for mothers of children having free surgery, plus bus fare and meals, and nightly launders the only sari they own.

Dr. Harlan Muntz from the United States has performed over 50 cleft palate surgeries and travels to India at his own expense. He works at Primary Children Hospital in Salt Lake City but volunteers at Calcutta Mercy Hospital about twice a year. His ultimate goal to train a local doctor and team to do cleft palate surgeries without him is now being realized. Because of their success, the hospital has the financial support of Smile Train.

The other Pathways to Children volunteers and I have the privilege to meet these doctors and the families they serve. We hand out 125 outfits made by a generous Minneapolis woman to the children who have cleft palates. Their families are grateful to receive clothes to replace their children’s tattered outfits. Although we don’t speak the same language as the recipients, we are able to assist them in finding the correct sizes for their children.

After lunch we flash our pre-registration cards at Mother Teresa’s and don aprons. We head up to the handicapped room for younger children where there are about 25 children whose handicaps range from autism to retardation. Each child has a book which lists what staff knows about the child and how they can best be helped with exercises. I work with Bobette, who has severe cerebral palsy. No birth date is listed in her book, which means she was probably left on the street. Mother Teresa’s ministries only take in children who have no one to take care of them. Bobette is dressed in an old sweater — it is almost 80 degrees today — a cotton diaper, pants and socks. She has very short hair which I suppose is easier to keep clean and to avoid lice. She doesn’t smell very good and I wonder when she was last bathed. I place Bobette on her stomach so we can work on exercising her neck muscles. She tires easily. She seems to like when I give her a backrub — always a favorite of my kids at home. An orphanage women worker clips each child’s fingernails and toenails. Then she comes back with Q-tips and cleans each child’s ears.

The bell rings to indicate that it’s time for the volunteers to leave. We say our reluctant farewells to these precious children. Before we go, I climb the stairs to the roof where women do laundry all day by hand. Rows and rows of the colored cotton squares that are used as diapers blow clean in the setting sun. It is almost peaceful looking over the rooftops and far away from the constant honking, bustle and begging of Kolkata streets.

7.09.2009

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