Day 102: The Recreation Project

Africa is still on my mind.  A place where there is so much pain and suffering, through disease, poverty, and war.  But a place where good is happening as well.  Every day.  Africa is on the minds of many, working to bring clean water, jobs, and healing to war-torn regions.

The Recreation Project is working to transform the lives of youth who grew up in a time of war.  Exposed to, and participants in,  the tragedy that is war, their childhoods were snatched away.  Innocence lost.  But how does one go back to "normal" life when the war is done?  What is normal life, if all you've ever known is violence?

"At least 66,000 children and youth have been abducted in northern Uganda and thousands more have been raised on hostility and self-preservation rather than love and interdependence. The 20 years of brutality they witnessed, and were forced to take part in, fostered a culture of violence, and a psyche of despair and mistrust. While an agreement that would formally end the war has not yet been reached, the region has experienced relative peace and the work of long-term, holistic recovery is beginning.  Amidst a deteriorated social fabric, children lack the parental and institutional support needed to cope during this period of transition and increasingly adopt damaging behaviors such as joining gangs, abusing substances, and engaging in risky sexual behavior.

Our Response

Based on the belief that each of us has the ability to heal from within, The Recreation Project will create the space for young people to ignite their natural resilience. In an environment of pervasive mistrust and negative self-concept, The Recreation Project provides an alternative experience of cooperative and confidence building activities through a guided low ropes course and outdoor adventure excursions for nearly 3,000 youth.

Exhilarating experiences carry associations of war and fear. High impact experiential learning provides an opportunity to engage in stimulating activities in a safe and controlled environment, challenging bodies and minds to make new associations with those experiences. The rigorous activities of the project also provide a healthy release of energy that may otherwise be spent on damaging behaviors.

Through experiential learning techniques, The Recreation Project presents psychological, spiritual and behavioral change concepts in a way that is easily understood and internalized as compared to traditional classroom lectures or training sessions.

Building on the expertise of the Discovery Centre for building and training (based in southern Uganda), and partnering with the ongoing trauma-counseling program of the Caritas Counseling Center, The Recreation Project is an innovative project of the The Little Sisters of Mary Immaculate of Gulu that will bring healing and inspire young people to think in a transformational way about themselves and the future of northern Uganda."

The Recreation Project's Goals are divided into Phase One and Two.  Here is how they hope to accomplish their goals to provide hope and healing to the youth in Uganda.

Phase One: Challenge Course - Groups of 12-17 year olds and 18-25 year olds will participate in a one-day Challenge Course.  The Challenge Course and team-building activities will build onto and help integrate lessons taught in the group learning modules.  Topics presented may include emotional/psychological constructs such as: self-concept and identity, fear, shame, and mistrust.  The project also teaches creative problem solving and conflict mediation skills and provides information on gender-based violence, and substance abuse.  Additionally, each group will create an action plan for community service.  Groups are selected in collaboration with the Gulu District Education Officer and with child-protection agencies.

Phase Two: Outdoor Adventure Excursion - In addition to the Challenge Course activities, overnight outdoor adventure excursions will be offered to select youth leaders.  The excursions will foster group cohesion, teach concepts of leadership, as well as build personal confidence through challenging group tasks and symbolic activities that lead youth into adulthood.  Youth will challenge pre-conceptions of their own limitations through reflection (guided by a staff member) and affirmation of others in the group.

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Day 101: Planning Your Family

Africa is on my mind.  John has shared with me so many stories and beautiful pictures from his trip there, that I can't stop thinking of the people even though I have never met them.  They are a gorgeous people, and the children are impishly cute.  John said there were kids everywhere.  Some villages seemed to be filled with mobs of children, and hardly any adults could be found.  Perhaps this is because on average there are 8 children per adult.

It's a complex problem.  A large unemployment rate leaves a lot of spare time with not much to do.  The mortality rate is high, so having more children will ensure that at least some will live.  Culturally it's not uncommon to have a large family.  And education on contraception and family planning is only recently becoming available.

Day 100: Leaving Home

Leaving America can often be hugely eye-opening.  We've grown up here, and the access we have to water, food, education, and homes, seems so ordinary.  We don't think twice about where we will get food to fill our stomachs.  And the simple twist of the faucet unleashes gallons and gallons of cold clean water.  But to go away from this country, and enter another that is not as well off as our own, we then see how most of the world lives.  Unreliable electricity.  Unclean water that must be retrieved.  Many people without jobs, living in need.

The trip becomes a clarifying lens.  We suddenly are able to see clearly the blessings that we have.  Gifts.  Skills.  Resources.  Money.  When we learn and begin to understand the needs in these other places, we also can see how we are called to help.

John just returned from Africa, where he experienced this firsthand.  We've been processing his trip, and there are exciting prospects on the horizon.  Ways that we may be able to bridge our lives with theirs.  We hope to make a difference.  I'm excited to perhaps share this dream with you in the next 260 days.  

HALO, Helping Art Liberate Orphans, is an organization founded by Rebecca Neuenswander Welsh.  Another dream that was born from a trip outside of the USA, and is now flourishing. 

"In 2002, Rebecca went on a mission trip to Honduras. It was there her life took an unexpected turn.

"I encountered a girl named Daisy, she was living on the streets, she's six years old, she was begging on the streets for water," Rebecca said. "And I'm thinking how do I live a six-hour flight from here my whole life and I have no idea this is going on?"

Back home, Rebecca shared Daisy's story with kids in America. They were so moved they started fundraising - $5,000 went to orphans in Mexico. Soon, Rebecca began to receive artwork from them as a thank you.

"We had all this artwork and we decided to do an art auction," she said. "It just went over so well, because you sell a piece with a child's story and it's so powerful for people to be able to connect to that.

In 2005, Rebecca formed the charity - helping art liberate orphans - or HALO. 

"We would do art therapy with the kids and it just helped them communicate better and raise their self esteem," Rebecca said. The organization currently supports 11 orphanages around the world.

HALO also serves more than 1,000 underprivileged kids at educational centers in Kansas City and Denver. Last year, Rebecca's charity raised more than $300,000 to support the kids.

"It's about reaching out and really wanting to make a difference," she said. "Everybody wants to do something they just have to figure out how to do it."

Rebecca found that by using her own strength she was able to help build a strong life for others." CBS News


Helping Art Liberate Orphans from Ambitious Pixels on Vimeo.

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Day 92: A City of Healing

Here is a story of a woman with a strong spirit, amazing courage, who has impacted hundreds of thousands of lives in her country of Somalia.  Found at New York Times.

Image found at Vital Voices Global Partnership

On May 5, just after sunup, 750 militants surrounded Dr. Hawa Abdi’s hospital. Mama Hawa, as she is known, heard gunshots, looked out the window and saw she was vastly outnumbered.

“Why are you running this hospital?” the gunmen demanded. “You are old.  And you are a woman!”

They did not seem to care that Mama Hawa, 63, was one of the only trained doctors for miles around, and that the clinic, school and feeding program she built on her land supported nearly 100,000 people, most of them desperate refugees from the fighting and poverty that has afflicted this nation.

For hours, militia commanders held Dr. Abdi at gunpoint while their underlings — mostly 15- to 16-year-old boys — ransacked the hospital, shooting anesthesia machines, smashing windows and tearing up records.

The gunmen, who belonged to one of Somalia’s most fearsome militant Islamist groups, notorious for chopping off hands and stoning adulterers, put Dr. Abdi under house arrest for the next five days and shut down the hospital, causing two dozen malnourished children to die in the bush after their families fled.

But something extraordinary happened. Hundreds of women from the sprawling refugee camp on Dr. Abdi’s property dared to protest, adding to a flood of condemnation from Somalis abroad that forced the militants to back down. Dr. Abdi even insisted that the gunmen apologize — in writing — which they grudgingly agreed to do.

“I told the gunmen, ‘I’m not leaving my hospital,’ ” Dr. Abdi said. “I told them, ‘If I die, I will die with my people and my dignity.’ I yelled at them, ‘You are young and you are a man, but what have you done for your society?’ ”

Somalia has been at war with itself for 20 years. The health care system, like much of the country, has been demolished. There are very few functioning hospitals left. But for decades — as the government imploded, warlords took over, more warlords came and an Islamist insurgency swept across Somalia — Dr. Abdi has persevered, offering a refuge for thousands of families driven from their homes by relentless street battles.

In a nation where the government controls only a few blocks in this war-torn capital, Dr. Abdi and her daughters, who are also doctors, are essentially running a small, desperate city on their own. But that is not enough, in her estimation. So, on separate patches of land she owns, she is organizing families to run farms and has bought a small fleet of fishing boats to help feed the camp.

Her stubborn commitment has earned her recognition worldwide. After nearly 30 years of Caesarean sections and emergency feedings, Dr. Abdi and her daughters were included in Glamour’s Women of the Year 2010, putting them in the same elite company as Julia Roberts and Queen Rania of Jordan. The magazine described Dr. Abdi as “equal parts Mother Teresa and Rambo.”

Eliza Griswold, who wrote about the compound in her book “The Tenth Parallel,” said, “Mostly out of sheer moxie, Dr. Hawa and her daughters have built a city of healing within the war’s brutal chaos.”

Dr. Abdi’s daughter Amina, who first learned to practice medicine trudging behind her mother during visits to the bush, said her mother needed to rest.

“But she has never rested in 20 years,” Amina laughed.

In fact, Dr. Abdi recently had a benign tumor removed from her brain. She is better, she said, but she is tired. Still the work continues, and Dr. Abdi plans to return in a few months.

“I can’t run away to save myself,” she said.

Dr. Abdi comes from a different generation of Somalis, one with opportunity. At 17, she won a scholarship to study gynecological medicine in Kiev, in what is now Ukraine; she was the only woman among 91 Somali students. Her dream to become a doctor began when she was 12, she said, watching her mother die in childbirth.

“I used to think and dream that one day I, myself, could save lives so no other mother would die helpless,” she said, her eyes bright behind thick glasses.

After Kiev, she returned to Somalia and worked for government hospitals. She married and had three children, two daughters and a boy, though her son was killed in a car accident in 2005. He was 23. Both daughters, Amina and Deqa, became doctors.

In 1983, she opened a one-room private women’s clinic on land her family owned and began persuading nomadic women to deliver their babies with her. Dr. Abdi said Somalia’s president at the time, Mohammed Siad Barre (the last president of a permanent central government in Somalia) personally gave her the permission.

That one-room clinic has steadily grown, almost unrecognizably. Today, Hawa Abdi Hospital has 400 beds, 3 operating theaters (still badly damaged from the attack), 6 doctors, 43 nurses, an 800-student school and an adult-education center that teaches women how to cook nutritious meals and make clothes.

Dr. Abdi has long performed surgical procedures herself, everything from Caesarean sections to tweezing out bullet fragments, though operations have been on hold because of the damage from the assault. Measles, malaria, diarrhea, epilepsy, tuberculosis and especially life-threatening malnutrition in a country constantly teetering on the edge of a full-blown famine are what she confronts on a daily basis, with some international assistance but far from enough equipment or medicine.

Around the two-story hospital, 15 miles down a shelled-out road from Mogadishu, a veritable city has sprung up over the years, 90,000 refugees living in bubble-shaped huts made out of plastic sheeting and sticks, people who have flocked here because it is considered one of the few safe zones in southern Somalia. The medical treatment is free, supported by donations.

The haven comes with some security guards and a few important rules. Among them: no man may beat his wife. The property even has a storeroom that doubles as a jail for offenders.

Hakima Mohamoud, a 50-year-old mother who had just given birth, recently arrived here with a tiny, listless, malnourished baby, who was immediately put on a feeding tube. It seemed to be working, and Mrs. Hakima marveled that her daughter’s life could be saved — for free.

“I’ve never, in my life, seen a free-of-charge hospital serving free medicines,” she said. “I don’t know how I will pay Hawa Abdi Hospital back.”

Many Somalis have essentially given up on their government helping them. So, too, it seems, has Dr. Abdi. When asked if she thought of calling the government forces that day in May, when she was surrounded by hundreds of militants, Dr. Abdi simply laughed.

“Oh no,” she said, “they can’t do nothing. They are only in the state house and they can’t go out.”

She gets excited every time the story comes up and described how the militants, during their brief seizure of her compound, even raised one of their signature black flags.

“As soon as they left, we pulled it down and put up a white one,” Dr. Abdi said.

It was made out of a hospital sheet.

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Day 88: We all need hope

Mercy Ships is an organization that I have been interested in for a long time.  I love their philosophy of bringing medical care, free of charge, to under-served people.  A floating hospital, fully equipped with the latest of technology, docking in cities and countries that may never have had access to a doctor, dentist, or surgeon.  The images of faces distorted by large tumors, or congenital deformities, is shocking to most of us here in the United States.  These are things we may never have seen, because with the access to medical care that we have here, these problems would have been addressed long before.

The interventions may be simple or complex, but for many the impact on their life goes way beyond just the medical repair.  A lot of these individuals have led lonely lives, being ostracized from their communities because of their physical differences.  They look scary.  Perhaps they are possessed by a demon.  Avoid them at all costs in case you become afflicted as well.   The surgery not only improves their health, in some cases saving lives, but restores hope and the promise of a future.  Marriage.  A family.  A part in the community.  Mercy Ships is in the business of restoring lives.  Such good news!


Video found at Mercy Ships's website.

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