| LIFE-NET NEWS |
| by Ret Z. |
| Covering Poverty Widely in a Net of Many Voices |
| September 13, 2006 | No Profit; No Proceeds |
| Volume 10 Number 9 | All-Volunteer |
| "Give a family a fish, and they'll eat a meal; give them a Net, and they'll have fish for Life." |
| A Century of Change in US Consumer Spending |
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A report from the US Labor Department, called "100 years of US Consumer Spending" reflects a century of economic and social change. Highlights:
America in 1901 was significantly smaller, younger and more male than today. The population was 76 million (compared with 281 million in 2003), and the median age was about 23 (today it's more than 35). There were 104.4 American men for every 100 women. Today there are about 96. Less surprisingly, men dominated the workplace, with only 20% of women holding formal jobs. Families were larger -- an average of 4.9 people, compared with 2.5 today. But mainly, folks were poorer. Family income averaged $750 in 1901 compared with slightly more than $50,000 in 2003. Even after factoring in a century of inflation, average household incomes have more than tripled. In more than a fifth of all households in 1901, some of the income was earned by children. Almost a fourth of all families took in boarders or lodgers for cash. And only 19% of American families owned their own homes. In 1901, people spent more than 42 cents of each dollar on food, an additional 14 cents on clothing, and 23 cents on housing. About 20 cents were left to spend on what were considered "nonnecessities." A century later, only 13 cents of a comparable family's dollar went for food, and less than a nickel was spent on clothing. Housing cost more -- about 33 cents -- but two-thirds of all families owned their own homes, 26% of them free and clear of any mortgage. Throw in transportation costs (which weren't tracked in 1901, but accounted for 19% of the average household budget in 2003) and health care (which took 5% of the budget in 1901 compared with 6% recently). You still have a quarter of the current household budget available for vacation trips, DVDs, laptop computers, health club memberships, and all the rest. In 1901, Americans spent 1.6% of their incomes on alcohol; by 2003 that had fallen below 1%. Tobacco spending dropped by half, from 1.4% to 0.7%. Spending on "reading and education," on the other hand, nearly doubled as a share of income, from 1.1% in 1901 to 2.1% in 2003. And contributions to charity went from 1.3% to 3.2%. Sources: Philadelphia Inquirer |
| Hundreds of Insolvent Hospital Patients Detained |
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Burundian state hospitals routinely detain patients who can't pay their hospital bills, Human Rights Watch and the Burundian Association for the Protection of Human Rights and Detained Persons said in a new report released last week. The patients can be detained for weeks or even months in abysmal conditions.
This practice highlights broader problems of the health system in Burundi, where patients have to pay for their own treatment, the two organizations said. Both organizations called on the Burundian government to end the detentions and to make access to health care for all Burundians a central part of its new Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper. "Detaining poor patients because they can’t pay a bill punishes the poor and violates international human rights law," said Juliane Kippenberg, NGO Liaison of the Africa division of Human Rights Watch. "It’s an abuse that the Burundian authorities must end." The 75-page report, "A High Price To Pay: The Detention of Poor Patients in Hospitals," documents how Burundian hospitals in 2005 detained hundreds of indigent patients, sometimes in inhumane conditions. Many of those detained were women giving birth who unexpectedly needed caesarian deliveries. In some cases, hospital authorities refused further medical care to those who could not pay their bills and forced them to vacate their beds for wealthier incoming patients. Patients who could not pay their bills were kept under guard and prohibited from leaving hospital grounds, often for weeks or months, but in one case for more than a year. Some detainees sold their farm animals or land to settle accounts in order to leave hospitals. Others escaped or were rescued by benefactors who paid their bills. Burundi’s government continues to detain indigent patients, and hundreds are currently in detention in the country’s state hospitals. In Burundi, one of the world’s poorest nations, patients commonly have little money to pay medical expenses. The most vulnerable are supposed to have part of their medical expenses paid by the government, but the system of assistance does not work in practice. Moreover, the Burundian health sector is plagued by massive funding shortfalls and by fraud and corruption. Source: Human Rights Watch |
| Hunger Chews Its Way Into Cleveland Suburbs |
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Hunger is eating away at families throughout Cuyahoga
County OH even in some of the most affluent suburbs.
People from Euclid to Bay Village are showing up at local
food pantries or getting food stamps.
A new report by the Center for Community Solutions found
that countywide, the number of food stamp recipients per
1,000 residents soared 43% between 2000 and 2005. In the
suburbs, that rate was up almost 89%. Data from the Hunger
Network of Greater Cleveland -- a web of emergency food
distribution centers -- shows that assistance at suburban
centers overall had jumped 40% since 2000.
"The big message here was the movement of hunger into the
suburbs. It's not just a Cleveland problem," said Terry
Lenahan, a policy and planning associate at the Center for
Community Solutions. "People should know that it's
happening all over, maybe right in their own neighborhood."
At the food pantry in Middleburg Heights, manager Carol
Ganofsky was handing out cans of vegetables, soup, boxes of
pasta, cereal, and other basics on August 31. Robert Smith
of Middleburg Heights came in with his 6-year-old son,
Hunter. "I look for work every day," said Smith. "It's
just not there. There are a lot of empty buildings.
"You hate to ask for help, but I'm glad it's here."
America's Second Harvest, a national network of food banks,
reported earlier this year that 47% of those helped by
emergency food pantries lived in rural or suburban areas.
"It's definitely a quiet phenomenon in the suburbs," said
Erin Deegan, communications coordinator for the
Akron-Canton Regional Foodbank. "The people standing in
line for food don't always look like they need emergency
help. But with all the job losses, they do."
Lenahan said some of the rising numbers in Cuyahoga County
suburbs may be due to people relocating from Cleveland.
She said it's also clear that longtime residents of the
suburbs are feeling the pinch.
In the mid- to late-1990s, about 8,000 of the households receiving food stamps from Cuyahoga County included people with jobs. That number has now doubled, meaning that despite having jobs, wage-earners still are falling short of meeting a basic need. "Think about the stereotypical steelworker who's no longer making steel," said Gauntner. "Now he cleans offices and works at McDonald's on the weekends." Source: Cleveland Plain Dealer |
| Modernization at the Expense of the Poor |
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New buildings sprout like mushrooms across the Kigali, Rwanda, skyline, but this splash of modernity in a once rundown capital city belies a grimmer reality: Thousands of poor have been pushed out to make way for these structures; they still await resettlement.
"Weeks have now rolled into months and into years, but the municipality has not kept its promise to provide us with a good place, homes and other facilities," said Ephraim Kabalisa, a 41-year-old shoemaker living near Nyabugogo, a Kigali market. Kabalisa now lives in a new rural settlement, called an agglomeration, the lowest level of local administration, in Rulindo District, 20 km north of Kigali. Each agglomeration comprises between 50 and 70 households. The government created the housing scheme in a bid to ease the chronic housing deficit. People living in shanties have been driven from Kigali to make way for the buildings, under a new urban planning program known as PIGU (Projet d'Infrastructure et de Gestion Urbaine). In a recent newspaper article, editor Bonaventure Bizumuremyi, wrote, "Mismanagement of funds and negligent follow-up in the construction of new infrastructures of dwellings, primarily in the rural areas, have created man-made disasters in many agglomerations especially for those peoples evicted from their land in the city." Agnes Nyirahuku, 65, a small businesswoman five years ago before the government expropriated her home, shares this opinion. Although she was given compensation, it was not enough for her to build another home outside the city. The Kigali municipal authorities have tried to resolve the problem by providing alternative housing for them in the new agglomerations. "There is no sanitation or other infrastructure for development that they promised us, like hospitals, schools, electricity, or water supplies," said Nyirahuku. "The misery related to joblessness is too frequent and the authorities have not helped us find a solution." Source: IRIN |
| 300 Camden Homes to See Improvement Aid |
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Camden Churches Organized for People recently won $7.5 million in state aid to upgrade about 300 city homes. The Camden Home Improvement Program will provide grants averaging $20,000 each to homeowners on a first-come, first-served basis.
This investment can start to even out Camden's redevelopment efforts so the neighborhoods aren't left to molder while upscale housing is built along the riverfronts. The $175 million in state redevelopment aid to Camden, which has helped revitalize the city's central waterfront and its medical and educational institutions, has not done much for the neighborhoods. Turning the focus on improving existing housing is overdue. The state ought to consider comitting even more of the recovery aid to neighborhoods. That's where state and local officials can turn the city around. Officials should also commit to cleaning up the neighborhoods as homes are renovated. Abandoned cars should be pulled off streets, vacant lots cleaned up, and hazardous empty houses bulldozed. State and local officials talk often about attracting investment to the city. But it will be tough to make the city rise without improving the neighborhoods where most residents live. Source: Courier-Post |
| Community Center Helps Darfurians Recover |
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On the outskirts of the town of Nyala, Sudan, Dereig Camp is a temporary home for more than 20,000 people who have been displaced by the ongoing violence in Darfur. They have been attacked, have lost family members, and had their homes destroyed. A Church World Service (CWS) partner-run community center inside the camp is enabling people to help each other overcome their traumatic experiences.
"People are suffering. The whole community is suffering; we are all internally displaced," Amina says. She and her extended family came to Dereig in 2004, after their village was attacked. A mother of four, Amina works as a volunteer at the camp's community center. She is responsible for opening the center, tidying up, arranging the equipment, registering participants, and supervising activities. "The most positive thing about the center is that it brings people together," she says. "People can talk to each other and forget their suffering and the difficulties they have gone through. Some have been attacked; some have seen their villages burned and lost loved ones." Elizabeth Cornelio, or "Mama Eliza," as everyone calls her, runs the center. She has been trained in trauma counseling by CWS coalition partner ACT-Caritas. To encourage people to come to the center, Cornelio makes personal visits around the camp. It isn't enough to just talk, she says. "You have to give people something to do, so that through the activity they can forget what happened." The community center offers activities such as weaving grass mats, sewing, making tablecloths, and making pasta. The men are involved in the heavier work -- building beds, for example. These livelihood activities allow people to earn money to buy essential items for themselves. The center also offers training in recognizing and dealing with trauma. "Most of the women have trauma, and yet they do not know how to recognize it in others or even in their children," Cornelio says. With this training, people learn how to help each other. Source: Church World Service |
| Anti-Casino Fervor Grows in South Philadelphia |
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Hundreds of Philadelphians demonstrated against the proposed South Philadelphia casino on Sunday as the December date for awarding casino licenses looms. Local residents picketed in front of the proposed Foxwoods site, airing fears of what the mammoth casino could mean for their neighborhood.
"This is the ultimate assault against a community," said Republican ward leader and Pennsport Civic Association member Suzanne Haney. "This is not only about property rights but rights for self-determination of the community." "Our property values are going to drop up to 25%. We are going to have more crime. More prostitution. More traffic. More risk to children." Riverfront Communities United, a coalition of half a dozen community groups and civic associations, organized the demonstration, which was larger than a similar action held at the same site in May. On Sunday, South Philly residents were joined by those fighting casinos in Northern Liberties/Port Richmond and East Falls/Nicetown. In July 2004, the PA legislature passed Act 71 which mandated licenses for 14 gambling facilities in PA, two of those in Philadelphia. The site known as "Foxwoods" at Columbus Blvd and Reed St is one of five proposed locations in the city. The site sits only blocks from residential streets and has over 16,000 homes within the surrounding one square mile. The civic associations and community groups along the riverfront are driving much of the anti-Foxwoods fervor. "It's uniting all of us. Petitions are going around in the neighborhoods," said Paul Boni of the Society Hill Civic Association. "From Society Hill down to Whitman Council groups are coming together." Much of the protest was directed at elected officials who did not show up at the rally, including Governor Ed Rendell and State Representative Vince Fumo who helped author Act 71, and Councilman Frank DiCicco who represents the riverfront district. Source: Philadelphia Independent Media Center |
| # LNN # Small # Hauls # |
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| NYC Children Struggle with Hunger, Obesity |
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One quarter of New York City's 1.9 million children live in poverty -- 50% higher than the US average -- and many of these children are overweight, according to a report by a food supply group. The Food Bank for New York City said more than 40% of children in the Head Start program, which fosters healthy development of children up to age 5 from low-income families, were overweight or obese.
A Food Bank report titled "Growing up hungry in New York City: An analysis of hunger among children" also showed nearly one-fifth of New York City's children rely on free food to survive, and 40% of families with children experienced difficulty affording food in 2005. "They don't have very much money available to pay for their groceries and so they must buy the cheapest food available in order to keep their children fed," Aine Duggan, the group's vice president of government relations, told Reuters. "Unfortunately what that means is they're buying the food that's highest in fat content and calorie content because the cheapest food available tends to be fatty food." Duggan said fresh fruit and vegetables were not as widely available in low-income areas as they were in middle-class neighborhoods. Overall, nearly half the city's primary school children were overweight or obese, the report said. It also showed that of the 1.2 million New Yorkers using emergency food programs, such as soup kitchens or food pantries, more than 80% survive on annual incomes of less than $15,000. "The federal poverty level is just over $16,000 for a family of three. There's just no way that a family living on $14,000 or $16,000 in New York City can make ends meet, it's asking the impossible," Duggan said. Less than half of New York City families who used emergency food programs took advantage of the School Breakfast Program, she said, while less than two-thirds used the lunch program. Breakfast should be made available during school hours, she said, because many families cannot get their children to school earlier to use the program. The Food Bank for New York City said one of the key ways of addressing the problems of hungry, yet obese and overweight, children in New York was to streamline access to these healthy programs, food stamps and other government nutrition plans. "Children who go to school hungry often cannot reach their full potential," the Food Bank said in a statement. "As adults they have difficulty finding jobs. The jobs they do find pay poorly, which prevents them from making ends meet for their own families. And without enough money the cycle will continue to repeat." Source: Reuters |
| Children Produce Radio in Mallorca |
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Adapted from a piece by Eva Carolin Ulmer:
Early in 2005 I had the chance to work on a radio program by and for kids on the Spanish island of Mallorca. The idea behind the program was to give children the opportunity to:
I was volunteer coordinator with Mundo Joven, together with a Colombian colleague, Mario Bolaños. The Tuesday-to-Thursday programs were largely music and talk shows with invited guests on such diverse topics as the environment, religion, sports, fashion, or values. The children’s program was different. Because this was a time-consuming after-school activity, we had two teams of six child reporters each between 8 and 12 years old. The teams alternated, one group coming in one week, the other group the next week. In addition to hosting the show, the children had to prepare for it. The show consisted of news, announcements, jokes, riddles, tongue twisters, stories and radio plays. News and announcements were chosen by the children themselves on whatever they considered news or worthwhile weekend or holiday activities to announce. Thus a child might speak enthusiastically of a new pet he got, or another might go into detail on a planned trip with her parents. The coordinators always prepared some back-up news and announcements but otherwise intervened as little as possible. Through feedback from friends, parents, and ourselves, the children got a feeling for what kind of news interested not only themselves but their listeners, too. Jokes, tongue twisters and riddles were very popular and lots of fun. Some children also brought short stories with them to the studio because they very much liked to read. However they were usually keener on reading than on discussing the story afterwards. The radio plays were based on the UNESCO series "Cuentos para la Paz" (Stories for Peace). I wrote scripts from the stories, and we rehearsed them once before producing them live in the studio. The children chose the characters they wanted to play and the sounds they wanted to produce. We also produced the sounds of the plays live -- footsteps, rivers, rain, birds, thunder, wind, a heartbeat, etc. For example, if you gently roll a balloon filled with grains of rice on a table, it sounds like raindrops. At first the children admired me because I knew "how to make rain and thunder," but soon they came up with their own ideas how to imitate sounds. Making sounds was definitely the favorite part of the program, but they took the reading very seriously as well and prepared their parts at home. Once in a while a child would get nervous after making a mistake and stop reading. Then we had to improvise and invent something to bridge the gap. The stories always contained a message about values such as tolerance, courage, or honesty, which we would discuss together at the end. I remember that it took some time to establish friendly relations with the station manager because naturally the children were active, funny, and noisy. It was a challenge too to convince the person in the control room to let me come into the studio with all the sound materials, like a bucket filled with water for the water sounds. It is a bit of work and requires a lot of flexibility to coordinate a program with children if you don’t want to stifle their spontaneity and creativity with set production plans. But the four months I was with Mundo Joven were extremely rewarding for me. It was amazing how the children turned into little journalists confidently speaking in front of the mike. Their ideas and energy brought fresh wind into the station making both young and adult listeners wonder, think and laugh out loud. Source: Radio For Peace International |
| NASA Satellites Find Balance in South America's Water Cycle |
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For the first time, NASA scientists using space-based measurements have directly monitored and measured the complete cycle of water movement for an entire continent. Using satellite data from three Earth-orbiting NASA missions -- Quick Scatterometer (QuikScat), Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (Grace), and Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) -- a science team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena CA, directly observed the seasonal cycling of water into and out of South America. Their research confirmed that the amount of water as rain or snow flowing into the continent from the marine atmosphere is in balance with the estimated amount of water returned to the ocean by the continent's rivers.
The findings are significant because until now there had been no direct way to monitor continental water balance. Scientists had been estimating the balance through regional ground-based measurements and computer models. The findings are published in Geophysical Research Letters. "Having a better understanding of the processes in which water is transported from Earth's oceans to continental land masses is important to a variety of climate and ecology studies," said Dr Timothy Liu, science team leader at JPL. "We'll have greater understanding of floods and drought, surface and ground water quality, and the availability of freshwater resources for agriculture and ecosystems." To calculate the continent's overall water balance equation, Liu's team compared the amount of water coming into the continent with that going out. A statistical method was developed to estimate water transport using QuikScat's surface wind data and atmospheric water vapor data from microwave radiometers. Rainfall data from NASA's TRMM were used to measure the rainfall over the continent. Water going out from the continent was measured by combining data from river flow gauges with projections from models that predict the amount of water discharged at the rivers' mouths. The river discharge rates were collected over periods ranging from a few years to a century, depending on the river basin and locality, and were averaged to determine an annual cycle. Scientists compared that estimate with the monthly changes in South America's mass over two annual cycles, from August 2002 to July 2004, as measured by Grace. They determined that the seasonal mass change is dominated by changes in the amount of surface and underground water. Liu said the large-scale geographic patterns of rainfall and mass change rates follow an apparent counterclockwise annual march over the northern half of South America. With relatively small amounts of evaporation, and small or slow surface water outflow, the mass change over a certain region is primarily driven by rainfall. The team found the annual variation of rainfall in the Amazon and La Plata basins -- the two largest drainage basins in South America -- correlates closely with the Grace measurements of their mass change. In addition, measurements of the flow of moisture across relevant segments of the continent's Pacific and Atlantic coasts were found to correspond with measurements of the annual cycle of rainfall in the two basins and the Andes Mountains. Liu said the study strongly validates the credibility of space-based measurements to study continental water balance, but is only a beginning. "Planned reprocessing of QuikScat, Grace and TRMM data to improve the data quality and resolution, when combined with data from planned future missions, promises to further enhance our understanding of water balance on a global basis," he said. Those planned future missions include NASA's Global Precipitation Measurement Mission, the European Space Agency's Soil Moisture and Salinity Sensor and NASA's Aquarius satellite. Source: Jet Propulsion Laboratory |
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