Going to Zambia!

So...at the end of April I'm jetting off AGAIN to embark on a 3 month volunteering project in Zambia with Restless Development, the leading global Youth-Led Development Agency! The project is funded by DFID, through the International Citizenship Service (ICS) which they started last year.

I will be working alongside Zambian volunteers to deliver Financial Literacy and Sexual & Reproductive Health workshops to student teachers in a college in Kabwe, Zambia (a town north of the capital city Lusaka).

Financial literacy is a really important way of enabling young people (especially young women, a particular interest of mine!) to have the freedom to make choices of their own. The aim of the SRH workshops is to reduce the rate of HIV related deaths (currently 2% amongst teachers) and build the capacity of student teachers to pass this information on to their classes once they start teaching.

I'm also a RD team leader, so I will also be supporting the other volunteers from the UK & Zambia! Meeting them at the pre-departure training, the other UK volunteers seem like a really diverse and interesting bunch, and I'm sure the Zambian volunteers will be equally fab, so I'm sure supporting them will be both fun and challenging!

It's going to be an amazing experience, as I've never been to Africa, and I know I am going to learn so much and hopefully have a positive impact on the community in Zambia and on the other volunteers. I can't wait to learn more about International Development, and the education system in Zambia, as well developing my skills of working with young people. YAY!

I'm really looking forward to it but I am a tad apprehensive too, as I will be away for so long (though I'm sure it will fly by!) and will really miss people. But...YOLO! ("you only live once" - apparently this a new phrase that all the cool kids are using...)

Also I'm fundraising for Restless, so if you want to donate some cash monies, please do it here (and GiftAid it!) and I will bring you back a Zambian animal...http://www.justgiving.com/Grace-Louise-Wood

<3 x :-)

Paradise?

While living and working with Sinhalese and Tamil Sri Lankans in the East of Sri Lanka for 3 months, I learnt a lot about the devastation caused by the civil war - death, displacement, injury, shelling, destruction of buildings, economic stagnation, corruption, rape...the list goes on. I even experienced being stopped at police checkpoints, which, although there are fewer now, are still in place between districts, and where Tamils may still be stopped and interrogated about where they are going and why.
However, the majority of what I heard about the civil war which raged in the North and East of the country for over 30 years was unreal for me; stories which touched me and made me cry, but which were still almost fiction to me, having no personal experience of it.
I once sat and listened to a Tamil woman talk about how she and her family had to escape from attacks by both government forces and the LTTE (Tamil Tigers), wading through rivers in the pitch black and hiding in forests. Tears ran down her face when she described how she had to lie ontop of her 3 year-old son so that he wouldn't be shot in the head. The fear a mother must feel at that moment of utter powerlessness, trying to keep her children safe, but not knowing how or for how long. Although her family survived and relocated after their displacement, many thousands did not, as Channel 4's harrowing 'Sri Lanka's Killing Fields' documentary shows.
The real-life footage of atrocities committed by both sides held me speechless in disgust. One woman tells how the Red Cross came to provide both sides with the GPS co-ordinates of local hospitals, so they wouldn't hit them, but the government forces used this information to target 65 hospitals directly. A beautiful TV presenter on the LTTE channel is reading news in a saree one minute, and lying naked and dead the next, having been brutalized, raped and killed by government troops. Somehow, previously seeing her in such a public role makes her horrific fate so much more real and representative of the hundreds of other women sexually assaulted, then tossed aside for being Tamil.
The distance between the decision-makers at the top, like President Rajapaksa, and the victims of the fallout of their decisions is so great it is sickening. While he sends his children to international private schools and buys cars and bodyguards for his wife in Colombo, poor, vulnerable people were losing their lives on the opposite side of his small island. His corruption is so entrenched now, as he has appointed family members into the most senior positions of government, that the country seems to be moving towards a dictatorship.
The video raises the question of how much the UN can do to intervene in crimes against humanity. When the UN workers in the North of Sri Lanka were told to leave by the government, they had to, and could do nothing to prevent the killings being carried out. However, I do believe the 'international community' must expose and denounce such atrocities, and show that we do care about people being killed on the other side of the world.
I will certainly be lobbying my MP to let him know that I care about people like the Sri Lankan volunteers I lived and worked with for 6 months, and that something must be done to defend the rights of the Tamil minority, and the Sinhalese civilians affected by the violence, which have been violated for so long.

Poor Kids

"I don't want to grow up" said 8-year-old Courtney as she lay on her hole-ridden bed, scratching her eczema-scarred ankle. Because for her and 3.5 million other children in the UK living in poverty, growing up only means the stress of struggling to feed a family on less that £70 a week and getting into debt. Courtney's mum can't even afford a bus fare, a sobering fact that has resigned Courtney to believe that she will “always be poor”, unlike her friend whose parents both have jobs and can afford holidays to Greece.
In another scene, Sam, an eloquent 11-year-old, reveals many of the compounding effects of being poor. He is bullied at school for wearing his sister’s second-hand uniform and called “mop-head” because his dad can’t afford to take him to a barber’s. He eventually does get his hair cut for £9 as a 12th birthday present, as well as a card. He knows the value of money; for him £1 means 6 hours of TV, paid on a meter. He doesn't want to have a wife, because "she might leave me", as his mum did on his second birthday.
Paige, who lives with her parents in a high-rise flat in Glasgow, points out the damaging effect of damp on the health of children living below the poverty line as she covers her mouth in disgust, looking up at the blackened ceiling of her friend’s bathroom.
It seems unbelievable that so many children and their families must live in such unsuitable accommodation while thousands of houses lie boarded up and empty across Britain, which should surely be renovated and given to families in need.
The responsibility for increasing the opportunities of poorer children lies with many people; local authorities, parents, schools and the government all have their role to play. Admittedly, the provision of free swimming, free family planning clinics, and free bus rides in deprived areas has increased, and libraries have always been places to access books and computers for free.
However, these services are rendered redundant if parents do not know how to access them, or schools do not take advantage of publicizing them.
And as for the government…well, the protests against the cuts only touched the surface of their irresponsibility. When in East Lancashire recently, I attended a community debate in a community centre that was going to be shut down owing to the cuts. The children there were extremely vocal about the damaging effect the closure would have. Not only would it would remove a place they could relax and play in, but they also believed it would reinforce stereotypes of hooded, criminal-minded teenagers hanging out on street corners, and thereby increase tensions and mistrust within the community, further impeding people's abilities to work together tho improve their community.
Poverty is not just lacking money. It pervades and cripples so many other areas of life; health, education, social inclusion, and in particular one's sense of one’s own prospects and future.
Organizations like Kid's Company are doing great work to tackle the traumatic effects of poverty and support children to grow into independent, secure adults. But we should also think about how we can do our bit, whether through lobbying MPs, supporting charities, setting up free after-school clubs at the local library or contacting schools to inform them about free facilities in the area.
It's documentaries like this that really make me want to get onto Teach First...fingers crossed.