News

As many of you may already know, ACT's current project is fund raising for the Zambian Children's Fund, and several people have asked me questions about other ACT projects. ACT is a group that wishes to fund raise for many charities and causes, however, because we do not yet have enough members and staff, we have decided to work on one project at the time. And right now, our main focus is to fund raise for the Zambian Children's Fund. Thank you.

Ella

Why We Want To Help

African children eat because of Tucsonan

Then Kathe Padilla, others help school them

ANNE T. DENOGEAN
Tucson Citizen

Kathe Padilla's labor of love was inspired by a July 4, 1999, newspaper article about homeless orphans living in the streets of Lusaka, Zambia.

The scale of the country's desperation hit the Tucsonan when she read the caption accompanying a picture of children eating from bowls on their laps. It said the Fountain of Hope charity fed 100 children every day. But she knew from reading the article that the organization had 2,000 children registered.

"As a mother, I was so horrified by the thought of, 'How do you decide which 100 children out of the 2,000 you feed?' And if you tried to be fair and feed everybody once before anybody else got fed a second time, it would take a month. And no child could survive on eating once a month.

"That's when I said, 'I could feed 100 or 200 children in Zambia. I know I could make this happen,'" said Padilla, a social activist who had long worked with the food bank and other Tucson agencies that fight hunger and homelessness.

In the eight years since, Padilla, 55, created the Zambian Children's Fund and built an orphanage and school campus outside Lusaka that serves more than 100 children. She hopes to slowly build it up to shelter 500 children.

"I realized that I couldn't stop at just feeding children. I couldn't just put them back out on the street once I had fed them. I decided to try to raise them as if they were my own and do everything I could for them," she said.

Zambia, a nation of 11.7 million people in southern Africa, is one of the world's poorest countries. It has more than 1.2 million orphaned children, including about 710,000 who have lost their parents to AIDS. An estimated 17 percent of the adult population is infected with HIV.

In the face of the AIDS crisis, tuberculosis, malaria, starvation and poverty that limits access to the most basic health care, the average Zambian can expect to live no longer than 38 years.

That's the world Padilla entered when she flew to Zambia on her own in the fall of 1999 and started knocking on doors to recruit people to serve as the board of directors of what would become The Chishawasha Children's Home of Zambia.

Padilla recounts the history of the sister organizations on www.zambianchildrensfund.org.

By early 2001, the Tucson and Zambian organizations were able to open a home-based support program that helped orphaned children stay in school by paying their fees and providing them with shoes, uniforms and school supplies. Despite high unemployment rates, families have to pay to send children to public schools in Zambia, Padilla said. The children in the program were living with relatives or without an adult in the homes the parents had left them.

Padilla said it's not uncommon to come across grandmothers caring for 20 or more orphaned grandchildren.

"Basically, they are watching them starve because they have no pension or Social Security," she said.

By May 2001, the sister organizations were able to rent a three-bedroom house in a Lusaka neighborhood, hire a house mother and move in the first 16 children.

"The children arrived dressed in rags, malnourished and with little or no education. The two consistent things they brought with them were parasites and disease. Most of the children had intestinal worms or worse," Padilla wrote. "The most rewarding part of living with the children was watching them turn from listless children who neither wanted nor seemed to be able to do anything into bright, happy, healthy children in just a few months.

Once a month, (I) would line them up to check their height and weight. Children were growing one or two inches a month and gaining as much as 20 pounds. Because they arrived from all over the country, each of them immediately started learning all of the five different languages spoken in the house."

In September 2001, a teacher was hired, and classes for the young residents began in grass huts behind the house. Children from the surrounding areas as well started attending the school.

Thanks to a $50,000 gift from Tucson's New Spirit Lutheran Church, the orphanage bought 15 acres eight miles north of Lusaka in 2004 and started building the first of two five-bedroom houses. The children moved from Lusaka to the new campus in 2005.

The Colin B. Glassco Charitable Foundation for Children of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, contacted Padilla after a small article appeared in O, the Oprah Magazine, asking whether it could help. The foundation provided a well and complete water system and has since become a major contributor, helping to pay for the construction of four residences and the first wing of what will be a three-wing school.

Colin Glassco "fell in love with the whole project and what we were doing," Padilla said.

A retired Tucson couple, Dr. Robert Garrett, 65, and Mary Hotvedt, 62, have volunteered with the Zambian Children's Fund to establish a medical clinic and a skills center at the orphanage complex. They recently returned from Zambia and have committed to spend three months there each year for five years.

Hotvedt, a certified marriage and family therapist, said it was a chance "to do work that felt like it was meaningful in a different way."

"I feel very good about it. I feel it's a drop in the bucket in terms of the issues that AIDS, colonialism, poverty and bad government have left in their wake."

Early in this endeavor, Tucsonans provided about 99 percent of the financial support, said Padilla, who jokes that she's "a professional beggar." Though the list of contributors has expanded and the fund now has working groups in Nashville, Tenn., Toronto and Ithaca, N.Y., Tucsonans still account for nearly half of all donations, she said.

Every two years, the fund sends from Tucson to Zambia a 40-foot shipping container packed with donated goods, including shoes, clothes, computers, sewing machines and school supplies.

"Bookmans gives us tens of thousands of books," Padilla said. "TUSD (Tucson Unified School District) gives old desks, chairs, tables, blackboards, etc. All of our classrooms are from TUSD. Our library is from Bookmans and individual donations. People give us packages of underwear, new shoes. . . . We love to get soccer shoes."

The First Congregational United Church of Christ provides free office and storage spaces for the Zambian Children's Fund.

The fund has two paid American employees - Padilla and a part-time assistant. That allows it to spend the bulk of its $300,000 operational budget this calendar year to feed, clothe and care for the children and pay Zambian teachers and house mothers.

Padilla can save only a tiny fraction of the 1.2 million Zambian orphans. But she doesn't let the overwhelming need discourage her.

"The children I take in I know would not survive without what we are doing. We are handing them a real life," she said.

Anne T. Denogean can be reached at 573-4582 and adenogean@tucsoncitizen.com. Address letters to P.O. Box 26767, Tucson, AZ 85726-6767. Her column runs Tuesdays and Fridays.

Ella

Zambia Facts

We have discovered that one of the most impoverished nations in Africa is Zambia.

In 2002 around thirteen million people in Southern Africa faced severe food shortages. Countries particularly affected were Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe. In 2003 it was estimated that around six hundred and fifty thousand people in Zambia had died from AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) since the 1980s.-worldinfozone.com

Hunger
Traditional farming methods in Southern Africa are highly vulnerable to natural disasters, and have given poor harvests after years of cyclical droughts. Combined with chronic poverty and poor health care, these droughts have caused widespread hunger.
In Zambia:
Half of the population is undernourished
64 percent of all children are underweight for their age
The HIV/AIDS pandemic has increased hunger. Chronically ill people often cannot work,

reducing farming production as well as income to buy food.
Sources: World Food Programme, UNDP

Ella & Manda

Common Wealth

"... ...
We also face a momentous choice. Continue on our current course, and the world is likely to experience growing conflicts between haves and have-nots, intensifying environmental catastrophes and downturns in living standards caused by interlocking crises of energy, water, food and violent conflict. Yet for a small annual investment of world income, undertaken cooperatively across the world, our generation can harness new technologies for clean energy, reliable food supplies, disease control and the end of extreme poverty.
... ...
That's why the idea that has the greatest potential to change the world is simply this: by overcoming cynicism, ending our misguided view of the world as an enduring struggle of "us" vs. "them" and instead seeking global solutions, we actually have the power to save the world for all, today and in the future. Whether we end up fighting one another or whether we work together to confront common threats—our fate, our common wealth, is in our hands.
... ....
Fourth, while many of the poor are making progress, many of the very poorest are stuck at the bottom. Nearly 10 million children die each year because their families, communities and nations are too poor to sustain them. The instability of impoverished and water-stressed countries has ignited a swath of violence across the Horn of Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. What we call violent fundamentalism should be seen for what it really is: poverty, hunger, water scarcity and despair.
... ...
The Power of One
Great social transformations—the end of slavery, the women's and civil rights movements, the end of colonial rule, the birth of environmentalism—all began with public awareness and engagement. Our political leaders followed rather than led. It was scientists, engineers, church-goers and young people who truly led the way. If as citizens we vote for war, then war it will be. If instead we support a global commitment to sustainable development, then our leaders will follow, and we will find a way to peace."
... ....
Ours is the generation that can end extreme poverty, turn the tide against climate change and head off a massive, thoughtless and irreversible extinction of other species. Ours is the generation that can, and must, solve the unresolved conundrum of combining economic well-being with environmental sustainability. We will need science, technology and professionalism, but most of all we will need to subdue our fears and cynicism. John F.Kennedy reminded us that peace will come by recognizing our common wealth. "If we can not end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."

Sachs, author of The End of Poverty, directs the Earth Institute at Columbia University

--- Times

Ella

World Hunger & Poverty

World Hunger and Poverty: How They Fit Together

• 854 million people across the world are hungry, up from 852 million a year ago.
  

• Every day, almost 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes--one child every five seconds.

• In essence, hunger is the most extreme form of poverty, where individuals or families cannot afford to meet their most basic need for food.
  
  
• Hunger manifests itself in many ways other than starvation and famine. Most poor people who battle hunger deal with chronic undernourishment and vitamin or mineral deficiencies, which result in stunted growth, weakness and heightened susceptibility to illness.

• Countries in which a large portion of the population battles hunger daily are usually poor and often lack the social safety nets we enjoy, such as soup kitchens, food stamps, and job training programs. When a family that lives in a poor country cannot grow enough food or earn enough money to buy food, there is nowhere to turn for help.

Facts and Figures on Hunger and Poverty

• In 2004, almost 1 billion people lived below the international poverty line, earning less than $1 per day.
  

• Among this group of poor people, many have problems obtaining adequate, nutritious food for themselves and their families. As a result, 820 million people in the developing world are undernourished. They consume less than the minimum amount of calories essential for sound health and growth.
  

• Undernourishment negatively affects people’s health, productivity, sense of hope and overall well-being. A lack of food can stunt growth, slow thinking, sap energy, hinder fetal development and contribute to mental retardation.
  

• Economically, the constant securing of food consumes valuable time and energy of poor people, allowing less time for work and earning income.
  

• Socially, the lack of food erodes relationships and feeds shame so that those most in need of support are often least able to call on it.
  

----http://www.bread.org/