| LIFE-NET NEWS |
| by Ret Z. |
| Covering Poverty Widely in a Net of Many Voices |
| November 14, 2007 | No Profit; No Proceeds |
| Volume 11 Number 14 | All-Volunteer |
| "Give a family a fish, and they'll eat a meal; give them a Net, and they'll have fish for Life." |
| Economy in Africa Looking Up |
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The economic outlook for Africa is improving after a decade of 5.4% growth per annum, a rate that matches the world's, the World Bank (WB) has said. The trend indicates that a fundamental change is occurring in Africa, said a WB official. But the bank's latest report, Africa Development Indicators 2007, says ongoing investment is needed to sustain long-term development on the continent. Otherwise, a split may grow between affluent nations and stagnant ones.
The report looked at more than 1,000 indicators covering economic, human, and private-sector development, governance, the environment, and aid. It concludes that growth in many African countries appears to be fast and steady enough "to put a dent on the region's high poverty rate and attract global investment". The WB's chief economist for Africa, John Page, said he is "broadly optimistic" that there's a fundamental change going on in Africa. "For the first time in about almost 30 years we've seen a large number of African countries that have begun to show sustained economic growth at rates that are similar to those in the rest of the developing world and actually today exceed the rate of growth in most of the advanced economies." The key, said Page, was that "Africa has learnt to trade more effectively with the rest of the world, to rely more on the private sector, and to avoid the very serious collapses in economic growth that characterized the 1970s, 1980s and even the early 1990s." The report points to wide variations in Africa, however, highlighting three distinct groups of countries:
Poor infrastructure and the high cost of exporting from Africa compared to other regions of the world has been holding the continent back rather than any failures of African enterprise or workers. Volatility in sub-Saharan Africa has dampened investment. Corruption is also a factor that may limit needed investments in education and health. "Perhaps the easiest illustration of that," said Page, "is in the resource-rich economies where the resources often accrue to a small number of corporations and to government." Source: BBC |
| Mystery Donor Astounds Charities |
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Mike Batchelor of the Erie Community Foundation (ECF) invited the heads of 46 charities into his downtown office for one-on-one meetings. Nearby sat a box of tissues, which some of the heads used when they heard the news that a donor had given a staggering $100 million to the ECF, and the charities would share in the windfall.
The donor would be identified only as "Anonymous Friend." Batchelor and other ECF officials are sworn to secrecy, allowing only that the donor worked with the organization for years to identify deserving recipients before the announcement in late summer. Is the donor dead or alive? No comment, Batchelor said. What is the donor's connection to Erie? No comment. But as much as everyone would like to know the benefactor's identity, many are reluctant to pry, content to leave well enough alone. At the Achievement Center downtown, which provides physical therapy and other services to children, executive director Rebecca Brumagin puts a stop to discussions about who Anonymous Friend might be. "My feeling is that we're not honoring the donor if we spend time speculating about it." Her nonprofit, which serves 3,200 children a year in five counties, will get $2 million. "The needs are really great. So we will be able to help more children because of this." Kitty Cancilla cried when she learned Community Shelter Services Inc, where she is executive director, would get $2 million. The nonprofit's previous largest donation was $25,000. Even now, Cancilla clutches a balled-up tissue and fights back tears as she talks about the gift. With no money for marketing, the shelter gets donations and funding however it can. Over the years, it has scrimped to get by with food donations and has reduced overnight staffing. Cancilla said she was unable to even speculate who the donor could be, and she prefers not to even try. "It's disrespectful to the friend." Each nonprofit will get about $1 million to $2 million. Other money will go to the ECF and United Way of Erie County. The donor put no restrictions on the use of the money but encouraged the charities to use it to create endowments through the ECF. Nearly 500 charitable endowments operate under ECF administration. Most recipients are human-services agencies, including a food bank, a women's center, and a blindness resource group. Three local universities also will get money. And the entire county of 280,000 people will benefit, Batchelor said. "I really believe that it's really too big for Erie to even get their arms around." The only fear, said Cancilla and others, is that other people will see the large donation and decide their small contributions aren't needed. Source: Associated Press |
| Serbian Mental Institutions 'Horrifying' |
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A 21-year-old man with Down syndrome tied to a metal crib for years. Children, naked from the waist down, left to eat and defecate in their beds. A 7-year-old girl with fluid in her brain left untreated "because she will die anyway." These are some of the allegations of abuse at Serbian state mental institutions and orphanages described
in a report by Washington-based Mental Disability Rights International, which spent four years investigating the treatment of some of the 17,200 children and adults with disabilities in institutions in Serbia.
In the report, which is expected to be read closely by European Union officials who are assessing Serbia’s readiness to join the 27-member bloc, researchers concluded that "filthy conditions, contagious diseases, lack of medical care and rehabilitation and a failure to provide oversight renders placement in a Serbian institution life-threatening." European Union officials said that such reports would be a basis for their assessments of a country’s record in upholding human rights, and of its readiness to enter the union. Eric Rosenthal, executive director of the rights group, said the use of physical restraints on children for years at a time was the most extreme he had seen during 14 years as a disability rights advocate. He said there were no enforceable laws in Serbia regulating the use of such restraints. "This is the most horrifying abuse I have seen on powerless children, who are tied to beds and unable to move," he said. "This constitutes a clear case of torture." Vladimir Pesic, a Serbian government official dealing with disability issues, declined to comment, saying he had not seen the report. Rosenthal said the extent of the abuse at mental institutions in Serbia was particularly egregious given that countries had spent tens of millions of euros to help rebuild institutions in Serbia after the 1999 NATO-led war. "The mental institutions have been newly rebuilt with the help of the West," he said, "so the abuse is happening in clean, new buildings built with foreign money." Laurie Ahern, an investigator who toured the Serbian mental institutions with a registered nurse, said she was most alarmed by the case of a man with Down syndrome, who was tied to his bed at Stamnica, an institution southeast of Belgrade. When Ahern asked a nurse how long it had been since the patient had left the bed, the nurse replied, "Eleven years". "There were rows upon rows of young people with Down syndrome," Ahern said. "These children are mobile and can move around. But they are being left in metal coffins to lie there until the day they die." Source: New York Times |
| Camden School Shows Excellence Through the Arts |
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Creative Arts High School is housed in an old three-story building of washed-out bricks. It stands in an isolated and dreary part of South Camden. Inside, though, there is happiness, dynamism, illumination. Teachers, principals, and students work tirelessly in a beehivelike atmosphere of artists swarming their academic tasks.
They all manage to function despite the facility's discomforts: steep and narrow stairs, crammed learning areas, water flowing from questionable sources, and offensive odors from nearby factories. These elements are not surprising, given that the old building had been abandoned for a long time. In 1999, when Creative Arts High School was founded, its administrators were promised this was a temporary arrangement until a new school was built. Nobody remembers that promise. Still, under the direction of Davida Coe-Brockington, this is an educational oasis in Camden. The school's motto is "The Art of Learning is Learning through the Arts." Students in grades nine through 12 are taught the standard curriculum, but they also study art specialties, according to the interests and skills of each. The school has departments of music, dance, drama, painting, and fashion design. It has won international contests in Italy, Puerto Rico, and Ghana. Music teachers Suzzette Ortiz and Jamal Dickerson work within the school's small and uncomfortable premises. Ortiz is director of the choir and won a Wal-Mart Teacher of the Year Award for 2006-2007. Dickerson, as director of the school's band, was the winner this year of the Milken Family Foundation Educator Award. The school has obtained such high achievements on the basis of three fundamentals: mutual respect, discipline, and always striving to excel. Teachers not only are artists in their fields, they also master the art of teaching; this is a mission for them. Ortiz, for example, gave up a bright piano career: "It was worth it because my music is multiplied in that of my students and it prolongs in time what I love most." Source: Courier-Post |
| Displaced in Somalia: A Refugee's View |
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Mother-of-two Faduma, 22, has lived in a camp for displaced people in central Mogadishu since she fled south from Baidoa seven years ago. Her story:
I actually returned to Baidoa in April this year when there was heavy fighting here in Mogadishu but I came back recently because my husband was hit in his face by a stray bullet and so I had to look after him. We have a lot problems -- no food, no medicine and we can't just walk to go and find these things. We don't feel safe. There are children sick in our houses. When the children get sick we have no medical facility to go to so we just recite the Koran -- or we use a traditional burning method where you give a small burn on a different part of the body depending on what sort of sickness the baby has. Or we try herbal medicine. There are a few hospitals near our camp but they don't accept us because we don't have money. They only take the most serious cases, like the wounded or gunshots. My own child died of diarrhea. In the last year though it has been a little better and fewer children have died from diarrhea but it will get worse when the rains start. There is a lot of rape. One woman in our camp was gang raped. Some men came in from outside, took her baby from her and gave the baby to the father, and then three men raped her. I even heard of a 70-year-old woman who was bound and raped by a man with a knife when she was walking to the tailor. It is terrible. We don't know of any treatment; we can't go anywhere for help. During the fighting, six months ago, there was an increase in the number of rapes. But since the transitional federal government said no-one could walk around at night the number of cases has decreased. This is because it is not so easy anymore to enter our camp after dark. We don't go out because of security. We don't even go to the toilet at night. We now take bedpans into our shelters because if you walk to the latrines at night you will surely be raped after midnight. The main problem with the camp though is that it doesn't have gates and so anyone can just come in and out. In our camp none of the husbands have divorced their wives after being raped because everyone knows it is not the woman's fault. She will be OK, people don't look badly on her. There are not those sorts of problems here because sometimes women are even raped in front of her father, husband, family and baby and they cannot stop it. The biggest problem is that she doesn't wake up the next day. She just lies down and doesn't wake up. We live in a small area -- roughly a space of four meters by four meters and in this space there are three to four families. When a woman is raped everyone is aware because you can hear the woman screaming. So we go to her afterwards but there is little we can do. We don't have guns, you can just be kind. Source: BBC |
| How Immigration Raids Affect Children |
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For every two people detained in immigration enforcement operations, one child is left behind, according to a recent report, "Paying the Price: The Impact of Immigration Raids on America’s Children," released by the National Council of La Raza and the Urban Institute. The report finds that two-thirds of these children are US citizens, most under
age 10.
"Five million children living in the US have at least one undocumented parent," said report co-author and Urban Institute researcher Rosa Maria Castañeda. "It was important to look at ... how they are affected." Urban Institute researchers studied three communities that experienced large-scale worksite raids by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents within the past year. The study points out that immigration raids directly affect children’s psychological, educational, economic, and social well-being. Such raids greatly impact immigrant communities, school systems, social service providers, and religious institutions, which have acted as first responders for many families during immigration arrests. Immigration raids, says the study, create economic distress and emotional trauma for children. The report criticized ICE’s processing and detention procedures, which routinely deny detainees telephone access, and the holding of many detainees outside their home states, making it difficult for those arrested to contact their families or other caregivers to arrange for child care. On the day of the raids in all three areas, school districts made sure that children were not dropped off to empty homes or left at school overnight. The majority of children, after ICE arrests, remained with a second parent. However, in Grand Island, 17% of children affected underwent the arrest of both parents. Resources of extended families and friends were depleted quickly, and support from nonprofit groups generally lasted only three or four months, falling short of the detention terms of some of the parents, up to six months, the report noted. Many children experienced emotional trauma from their parents’ sudden absence, often personalizing the cause of separation and feeling abandoned. Many remained fearful that their other, non-detained parent could be abruptly taken away from them. In her research, Castañeda spoke with 30 immigrant families. One parent told Castañeda that her 10-year-old son was fearful and showed signs of anxiety, especially when police sirens were heard outside their home. He ran to his room and hid, the parent said. In another case, a child was extremely confused, not understanding why his father had to go away, because they had come to the US to have a better life and not to be separated. In all three cities, immigrant families hid in their houses and were reluctant to open the door to visitors offering assistance for weeks after the raids. Mental health experts noted that the parents’ fears and the events surrounding the raids led to the children having depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, separation anxiety, and suicidal thoughts. Source: People's Weekly World |
| New Genetic Map Shows How AIDS Got to US |
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A genetic analysis of 25-year-old blood samples has outlined a new map of the AIDS virus' journey out of Africa. It shows that today's most widespread subtype
first emerged in Haiti in the 1960s and arrived in the US a few years later. The analysis fills a gap in the history of the virus, whose migration has been known in only a sketchy form from its origin in Africa in the 1930s to its first detection in Los Angeles in 1981.
Michael Gottlieb, an assistant clinical professor of medicine at UCLA and one of the original discoverers of AIDS, said the analysis placed the virus in the US nearly a decade earlier than previously believed. "It's pretty clear evidence for Haiti as a stepping-stone," he said. "The suggestion that the infection was further below our radar than I'd previously suspected is kind of unnerving." The analysis, published October 30 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, focused on a variety of HIV known as subtype B, which is the most prevalent form in most countries outside of Africa. Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona and senior author of the study, analyzed five blood samples collected in 1982 and 1983 from Haitian AIDS patients in Miami. The samples had been stored in a freezer by the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Worobey and colleagues looked at two viral genes and compared their sequences with virus samples from around the world. As a baseline, they used virus samples from Central Africa that are considered some of the earliest forms of HIV. Because viruses are constantly mutating, the researchers could construct a rough timeline of development by measuring how much the genes in later samples had drifted away from their ancestral forms. The team found that the Haitian samples were genetically the most closely related to the African virus, indicating that they were the earliest to branch off. Statistically, the researchers found a 99.7% certainty that HIV subtype B originated in Haiti as opposed to elsewhere, Worobey said. He surmised that the virus was brought to Haiti by workers who had gone to Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly known as Zaire, after the country became independent in 1960. The virus appears to have been carried to the US by Haitian immigrants sometime between 1966 and 1972, according to the mutation timeline. Source: Los Angeles Times |
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| South Jersey Students Experience Katrina Recovery |
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From the Gloucester (NJ) Catholic High School newspaper:
Two years after one of the greatest natural disasters in American history, the standards of living in some areas of Louisiana are still completely unacceptable. Deb is a 51-year-old woman who lives alone, but is very close to her family. She lost her mother in the devastation that was Katrina and was sent to live alone in Houston, Texas, for the next eight months. After our government stopped paying for her apartment in Houston, Deb returned home to what little was left. Three months after Deb applied for a trailer, FEMA finally delivered what would become her home for the next year and a half. When we entered her original home, we were shocked. Our plan was to go to New Orleans to hang Sheetrock. We even took a class. That was all we knew. We were very wrong. While her garage needed to be insulated and Sheetrocked, that was the least of Deb's problems. She had no doors, no floors, rusted gutters, termite damage and a water-damaged garage door, just to name a few. Some work had been done, which we assumed was the result of other volunteers. Imagine our surprise and disgust when Deb informed us that we were the first group of volunteers to come to her aid in more than two years. Within three short days, we insulated and Sheetrocked her garage, hung all the doors in her house, attached all of the doorknobs, fixed and painted her garage, tiled her kitchen floor, took down all of her gutters and painted in their place and made a lasting bond with a truly amazing woman. The extra money we had from all of our fundraising went to buy Deb a Jacuzzi tub, French doors, insulation, doorknobs, shower heads, bathroom faucets, a welcome mat and so much more. Deb told us that every night for two years she prayed for help in vain. She told us her patience was rewarded because "God sent me the best help possible." We were not professional construction workers. We were not even amateurs. We were a group of clueless kids from New Jersey pretending to know what we were doing. Yet we were able to give this one woman more than we ever dreamed possible. Likewise, she gave us more than she will know. Every one of us is a better person because of the four short days we spent in New Orleans. We learned things school can never teach. Source: Rampage |
| 'Extreme Makeover' Episode Draws Instant Acclaim in Camden |
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The crowd at Urban Promise exploded into cheers as soon as Extreme Makeover: Home Edition flashed on the TV screens Sunday evening. People at the screening party were applauding Victor Marrero's new home, but they also were saluting the work that transformed part of Urban Promise's dilapidated, century-old building into a new conference room and lounge.
Urban Promise donated the property for the Marrero family's 3,000-square-foot home in Pennsauken. As a reward, the TV show decided to enlist volunteers to renovate Urban Promise's East Side building. "It's overwhelming," Renee Pepsin of Evesham said. "A project like this can make a difference for Camden." Pepsin works at Space Design, a Philadelphia-based architectural planning and design firm. Space Design drew up plans for the two rooms and then provided 12 volunteers, led by Pepsin, to rip up the carpets, paint the walls, and buy furniture. Bruce Main, Urban Promise's executive director, said the renovation occurred in the same week the Marrero's new home was being built. The new conference room and lounge will provide a home for weekly meetings of Marrero's Single Fathers of Camden support group. It will also be used for two of Urban Promise's after-school programs. "The space has a 'wow' factor for the kids," explained Main, who lives in Cinnaminson. "But it's also inspired people to continue the renovations." Comcast stepped forward to install a new computer center. Campbell Soup is renovating the downstairs cafeteria. Sedexho is installing a kitchen. Sunday evening's party was thronged with professionals who volunteered their time to renovate the building. James B. Kehoe, president of the Southern New Jersey Building Trades Council, said 70 union members donated time worth $30,000 for the project. Gabriel and Deborah Feliciano, who grew up in East Camden, and now live in Cherry Hill on the income from their stone installation business, donated and installed new granite counter tops in the lounge. Source: Courier-Post |
| Anti-Gay Job Discrimination Affects Men More Than Women |
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Employers discriminate more against gay men in many jobs than against gay women, according to University of New Hampshire researchers who found that gay men who live together earn 23% less than married men and 9% less than unmarried heterosexual men who live with a woman. Discrimination is most pronounced in management and blue-collar, male-dominated occupations such as building, grounds cleaning, and maintenance, construction, and production, according to the study by UNH’s Whittemore School of Business and Economics.
Lesbians, however, do not experience similar discrimination in the labor market, according to Bruce Elmslie, professor of economics, and Edinaldo Tebaldi, a former assistant professor of economics now at Bryant University. Their research appears in the Journal of Labor Research in the article "Sexual Orientation and Labor Market Discrimination." The authors also found that lesbians are not discriminated against when compared with heterosexual women. They conclude that while negative attitudes toward lesbians could affect them, lesbians may benefit from the perception that they are more career-focused and less likely to leave the labor market to raise children. According to the study, 18.1% of lesbians have children, compared with 49.4% of straight women. The authors said, "Employers could reasonably infer that a lesbian applicant or current employee will have a stronger attachment to the labor force than will a heterosexual woman." The authors note that previous studies of attitudes of heterosexual men toward gay men and lesbians shows that the bias against gay men is much stronger:
Source: Associated Press |
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