ADRA

An initial emergency response is underway targeting areas affected by the deadly earthquake, which hit 57 miles from Chengdu, the capital city of the Sichuan province, destroying up to 3.5 million homes. ADRA volunteers are in Dou Jiang Yan, one of the most accessible areas in the affected region, to conduct emergency assessment. Based on initial findings, the most urgent needs of survivors are water, food, blankets, shelter, and first aid medical service.

The current situation on the ground continues to be tense and uncertain due to ongoing aftershocks and heavy rains.

The quake, considered the worst since 1976 when more than 240,000 people died, hit at 2:28 p.m. local time (6:28 a.m. GMT) and was felt as far as Beijing and Bangkok, Thailand. Updates will be released as response efforts expand.

To send your contribution to ADRA’s emergency response effort, please contact ADRA at 1.800.424.ADRA (2372) or give online.

ADRA is present in 125 countries, providing community development and emergency management without regard to political or religious association, age, gender, race, or ethnicity.

Paulo Lopes has a confession to make: "The more challenging the position, the more I like it." And he has had his share of challenges—blessings too—since accepting his first job with ADRA fifteen years ago.

Listen to an Audio Interview with Paulo Lopes

A challenging initiation

Paulo received a baptism of fire on his very first day on the job in 1992, when he joined ADRA Angola as its finance director. With a civil war churning and foreigners fleeing, the country was an extremely difficult place to live. "I remember my very first night in Luanda, the capital city, like it was yesterday," he says. "Seven kilometers away from where I was staying, a huge blast woke me up in the middle of the night. The blast was so strong that the house trembled as it would during an earthquake. Later on, I learned an ammunition storehouse had exploded."

Six months later, his wife, Edra, joined him in Angola, holding their infant son Lucas in her arms. They arrived in an almost empty plane; most everyone else, it seemed, was determined to avoid the country all together. At the airport, security was rigorous and brutal. Walking towards Edra tangled up with baby and suitcases, Paulo made a step past a location guarded by the Angolan army. "If you make one more step, I'll kill you!" warned a heavily armed soldier. Paulo knew by the soldier's tone that it was not an idle threat, and served as a reminder of the harsh reality into which his family had arrived.

Food was scarce. Electricity had been cut months before, and water from the tap was non-existent. The family had to buy muddy water from local vendors, then boil and filter it before use. Often, they had no milk for the baby.

With armed patrols at every street corner and frequent night bombings, life was stressful. Only one week after the family's arrival, the airport was shut down and the civil war erupted, making travel out of the country impossible. Six thousand people were killed in one single week.

After nine months of serious discussions, United Nations representatives allowed Paulo—representing ADRA— and UNICEF staff to fly to the town of Huambo, a civil war hotspot in the center of the country, to assess needs, evaluate logistic challenges, and meet with the rebel forces. As a result of weeklong negotiations, Paulo and the others established a trust with the rebels and organized the first food distributions. ADRA's food distributions, coordinated with the United Nations' World Food Programme, continued for a full year. Each week, seven planes brought desperately needed food to the region, feeding hungry Angolans.

"I knew God was using me to help in this crisis, despite the dangers and difficulties," remembers Paulo. "Those were my best years with ADRA."

From nursing to numbers

Growing up in Brazil, young Paulo's ambition was to be a nurse. However, he soon found out that he didn't much like sciences. Instead, he focused his studies on accounting and theology, and made plans to become a pastor. Though he liked theology, he realized that he preferred budgeting and analytic accounting. In college, the decision to study business came naturally, as did the decision to begin dating Edra, whom he had met in high school. The couple married immediately after graduation and Paulo was hired as the college's cashier. Later, he held high-level accounting positions in different areas of Brazil.

After those first two difficult years in Angola, the family moved to the ADRA office in the neighboring country of Mozambique, where ADRA managed large post-civil war projects that included food distribution operations funded by USAID. The program was complex and challenging and again, Paulo’s special gift for finances was put to good use as assistant finance director for ADRA Mozambique. It was during their six and a half years of service in Mozambique that baby Marcos joined the family.

From Mozambique Paulo moved to finance positions for the Adventist Church in Armenia and Irkutsk, Russia. What a challenge it was to adapt to the harsh climate with long freezing gloomy winters after nine years of work in Africa! Learning the Russian language presented another challenge. So far, the family had served in countries where Portuguese, their native language, was spoken. Now in Siberia, they had to learn Russian to communicate. As expected, the children learned it easily at school and adapted quickly to their new environment and culture. Paulo and Edra struggled a bit more.

After two years in Siberia, they moved to Zaoski near Moscow, where Paulo worked as finance manager for the Adventist Publishing House.

Pray and trust

By the time the Lopes family left Russia a few years later, they were fluent in Russian. Paulo, however, admits that during the years he worked at the publishing house, he truly missed working with ADRA. "I visited ADRA's Web site almost every day!" he says. Consequently, the family asked God to open up a position at ADRA.

As they waited for an answer, they planned to return to Brazil, their home country. Tickets were booked. Cardboard boxes multiplied. They grew anxious to see their families again, their thoughts already centered on Brazil.

However, just one short month before leaving, Paulo received an unexpected phone call from Heriberto Mueller, at the time director for the ADRA Asia Regional Office. The Indian Ocean tsunami had struck India and several other countries a few months before, in December 2004. With significant tsunami emergency and recovery programs developing, ADRA India was eagerly looking for a good finance director; Paulo's name was at the top of a list of potential candidates. When Heriberto asked if he would be interested, Paulo was speechless from shock. God's answer was so evident and so perfectly on time! But, the family still had to agree. . . .

The decision to accept the job in India took the family less than ten minutes. God's answer to their prayers was simply too clear to ignore.

A Passage to India

In July 2005, six months after the tsunami, Paulo started his new position as ADRA India's finance director. Though it demanded much time, energy, and travel, Paulo relished his work organizing and managing the finances of the tsunami-related projects. After a first phase of relief and rehabilitation projects (mainly housing reconstruction and water and sanitation projects), the programs naturally evolved into a post-tsunami recovery phase with more income-generating and agricultural projects.

In March 2007, Paulo was promoted to country director, a role that allows him to direct not only ADRA India's tsunami recovery program, but the office's projects throughout the country. He notes especially the recurring polio eradication projects in northern India. "India is a huge country with huge needs, especially in the health issues such as HIV and AIDS, tuberculosis, and maternal/child health," he shares. The office also responds to seasonal emergencies, such as the recent severe flooding in the eastern portion of India.

While Paulo keeps busy directing ADRA, Edra continues to be very much involved in the church and also enjoys her teaching job at a local kindergarten. She's finally had her chance to learn English, and the boys, Lucas and Marcos, are now perfectly fluent in both English and Hindi. Though they have spent their childhoods in far-flung countries, the boys maintain a thoroughly Brazilian love for soccer. However, this has not prevented them from also becoming expert players of cricket—the national sport in India.

Married to his work?

Edra is very supportive of Paulo's passion for and dedication to the work of ADRA: "In all the countries we lived in we were always able to find help when needed. Sometimes a neighbor, other times a church member or a local friend. We always had our angels taking care of us."

And then Edra smiles and winks as she says, "Paulo really has two wives, both with very similar names: Edra and ADRA!"

Out of central Tajkistan's rocky, war-hardened soil, ADRA is constructing greenhouses and helping families in the Rasht region grow hope in an area still recovering from Tajikistan's brutal five-year civil war.

Since the end of Tajikistan's civil war in 1997, the region has suffered a full collapse of its economy, leaving many people struggling financially. In a region already characterized as "less developed," the civil war destroyed the region's financial infrastructure. Many of the survivors lost their homes and livelihoods in a conflict that reportedly killed at least 50,000 people and forced another 1.2 million to flee from their homes. Thousands of families were left to mourn fathers and brothers who never returned home. And when the war ended, those who remained wondered how they would survive.

The greenhouses built by ADRA Tajikistan provide an answer to that question, allowing families to grow dill, tomatoes, cucumbers, radishes, and other vegetables during the cold mountain winters.

"The home-grown vegetables enrich the families' diets, provide an income, and increase their overall wellbeing," said Victor Muhanov, project assistant for ADRA Tajikistan. "Also, children can watch the process of carrying out greenhouse agriculture and learn valuable skills and abilities that will be passed down from generation to generation."

The greenhouse project, showcased in ADRA's 2007 edition of The Original Really Useful Gift Catalog, began in June of 2007. Each greenhouse costs $1,500 dollars to build, and can be constructed in two days. So far, ADRA has been able to provide greenhouses for six families.

Sanchagul, a rather shy woman with soft brown eyes and dark, kerchief-covered hair, is the wife and mother of one of those families. Fifteen years ago Sanchagul, her husband, Mirzo, and children were a typical Tajik family. Then war broke out, filling each day with insecurity, terror, and confusion. And when a missile fired by a military helicopter destroyed their home and belongings, they were forced to join other war-displaced families in a settlement known as Pitomnik. Mirzo was able to build them a small, four-room house, and Sanchagul has done her best to make the simple house a home, with traditional rugs to warm the floors and family portraits to line the walls.

The couple and their 25-year-old son, Mirzorahim, bear deep scars from the war. Mirzo struggles with crippling states of depression caused by the trauma and horrors of the war that make it hard for him to work and provide for his family. Before the war, Mirzo enjoyed a successful career as an accountant and business manager for the Rasht region government. Now he works as a laborer working to reconstruct the local roads. But with his depression, he often is unable to work, and the family often does not have enough to eat.

Mirzorahim was a normal, healthy, 10-year-old boy when the fighting began, exposing him to the hard realities and deadly violence of conflict. Since then, he periodically battles epileptic-like seizures doctors believe were triggered by war-caused trauma. His three younger sisters, Khangoma, and twins Fotima and Zuhro, attend school in a nearby settlement, though without proper shoes the walk is often difficult, especially in the snowy winter weather.

With both her husband and her son ill, the responsibility of providing for the family has fallen squarely on Sangachul's shoulders. Like all mothers, Sanchagul wants to make sure that her family is provided for, that her children are safe and their lives easy, and that they grow healthy and happy. But without help, each day becomes a struggle to survive.

Sanchagul received a greenhouse from ADRA this past November, and is just about ready to harvest the first crop of vegetables. Mirzo and Mirzorahim enjoy working in the greenhouse, cultivating vegetables that will supplement the family's meals and be sold for much-needed supplies, such as new shoes for the girls.

Grateful for the assistance from ADRA, Sanchagul knows the hope she holds for her family's future in this rocky, war-torn land will now grow as strong and healthy as the vegetables in their new greenhouse.

ADRA's relationship with the people of the Rasht region began back in 2002, with a project that distributed wheat, sugar and oil among the people in need there. ADRA has continued working in the Rasht region, reconstructing schools, providing community development assistance, and distributing gifts to children from vulnerable families.

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 Stepping through the front doors, we get our first clue that something big happens here. Lining the walls, from floor to ceiling, are crude wooden shelves. Each shelf is heavily packed with the reason we are here … crackers, small cakes, cookies, and bread.

If you walk through a small door in the back of this room, your eyes won't believe what you see. Hidden by this small storefront is a huge bakery, where production is happening at a rapid pace. On the left, a man sticks a long paddle into a deep wooden oven and effortlessly picks up a pan of baked goods lying deep in the oven, twirls it on the end of the paddle, then lays it back down again to finish baking. On the right, someone else is mixing huge batches of dough, and another person presses the cookies into shape with ingenious makeshift equipment. Huge bags of flour and other ingredients are stacked along the wall. What once was a small, struggling business is now a thriving enterprise.

This is the home of Maritza Molina, a baker and mother of five, and a member of an ADRA-supported community bank, which was named "Together We Triumph" by its group members. She began working with ADRA 10 loan cycles ago. She started with a loan of 3,000 lempira ($180) and has worked her way up to receiving a loan of L15,000 ($800). Before the loan, she lived in a small wood house and rented the bakery property, which she staffed with four employees. With the loan, she's been able to build a larger brick home and hire six employees, and she now owns the bakery property. She also used to have to buy her baking materials on credit, but with her loan, she can now buy her ingredient inventory with cash and get a better price. Her clients have increased by five distributors, who take the product and sell it to clients. In production, she used to use six 100-pound bags of flour per day. Now she uses up to twice that amount. As for sales, she used to sell L1,500 ($80) per day; now she sells nearly L3,000 ($180) a day and is able to give a commission to her distributors. She still has goals to grow her business and get more equipment, such as a mixer, and replace her wooden oven with an electric one.

Her entire family is involved in the business. She works with her spouse, also a baker, and her son and daughter help after school. "I thank God for the opportunity to be in this bank, and I thank ADRA for investing in me, for the loan to improve my business, and for teaching me money management, how to run my business better, and the importance of good customer service," says Maritza. "The extra profits have also helped with our health and education expenses."

Maritza is part of ADRA Honduras' credit program for micro and small enterprises. The program promotes the socioeconomic development of mainly low-income women who do not have access to conventional forms of credit in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and who are presently involved in microenterprises. Loans are made available via more than 100 community banks of solidarity groups consisting of approximately 30 women each. The loans are used by women for such activities as wholesaling, retailing, small manufacturing, tailoring, auto mechanics, agricultural activities, and others. Amounts of approximately $100 to $600 are loaned in incremental steps for four months at a time. More than one loan will be allowed as long as the previous loan was successfully managed and the interest and capital duly returned. Repayments are made biweekly with a flat interest rate of three percent per month. The solidarity groups are expected to save 10 percent of their individual loan amount. ADRA-employed credit agents monitor the loans, each facilitating 10 to 12 groups of up to about 300 members total.

At the time of our visit, ADRA was targeting three neighborhoods of Tegucigalpa: Flor del Campo, San Francisco, and Nueva Suyapa. During a four-year period, the program directly benefited 2,830 women, 150 men, plus the owners of 20 existing small businesses.

The middle and lower income sector of Tegucigalpa numbers about 700,000 in 316 townships. Water for the townships is in short supply, and few have sewerage systems. Electricity is also rationed, and unpaved, eroded streets are standard. Other factors aggravating the problem are illiteracy, single motherhood, limited or nonexistent manual and professional skills, frequent illnesses, and exploitation by harsh merchants and clever entrepreneurs. All have combined to provoke a vicious cycle of destitution as well as food insecurity. At the time of our visit, 65 to 68 percent of the economically active population was underutilized or unemployed.

Poor entrepreneurs are unable to access formal forms of capital and must rely on local moneylenders, who charge very high interest rates. With low or no savings and no access to credit or formal lending institutions, entrepreneurs have no capital to invest in business activities.

To enhance the beneficiaries' entrepreneurial skills, ADRA trains them in organizing and managing solidarity groups, opening and managing bank accounts, operating pertinent machinery and equipment, bookkeeping, small business management, and production techniques.

Maritza is just one person who has benefited from this program. I also met Felicidad, who has a small grocery store, and Nora, who has a beauty salon. Lourdes enlarged her tortilla shop, Suyapa sells chickens and snacks, and Miriam is a diesel mechanic with a taxi business that grew from one taxi to 11! Maria sells spices and herbs, and Plasida has a produce stand. Each of these women was selected by ADRA because they have a favorable attitude toward change and organization of the community, as well as a desire to participate in the development process. They were already entrepreneurial women and eagerly joined hands with ADRA to grow and expand their businesses to become profitable enterprises that bring income support to their families, enabling them to purchase ample food, pay school fees and doctors bills, and become self-sufficient.

At each home and business we visited, we saw joy and pride on the faces of women empowered by ADRA. But also in each neighborhood, there remain more women in need of a hand of assistance to attain the dreams they have for their families or their businesses. Your continued support enables more women and their families to reach the business and personal goals they so long to attain. It's just as Maritza's community bank members believe: Together We Triumph!

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She wanted me to meet one of the students. I knew that this must be something special she wanted me to experience. I did not need a second invitation. At 3:30, I pointed the old Land Cruiser into the wall-to-wall traffic and fought my way to the district where the school was located.

Schools #29 and #116 are located next to each other and work with the deaf and the blind, respectively. The four-story gray building with cement-brick walls resembled a prison rather than a school. I walked up those uneven concrete steps to the third floor to the classroom that had been assigned to our project. As I stepped into the classroom, all 20 students touched their foreheads, then put their fists to their chests and pointed their open palms toward me in greeting from their silent worlds. A smile was evident on each face. Private conversations took place in sign language between the students as we waited for the teachers. Just a week ago, these children lived in isolated worlds; now they had been brought together and given a sign language to communicate with each other.

I made a little speech in English that was translated into Mongolian by Battsetseg and then into Mongolian sign language by one of the teachers. I challenged the students to make the best of the rest of their life’s journey now that they could communicate. We gave each one a certificate, and I shook each precious hand that is now being put to such valuable use in communicating. I took a photo of the group, each student holding their certificate with one hand and pointing their other hand with loose fingers to the ceiling and wobbling it back and forth, which is sign language for clapping and joy. They were so proud of those certificates.

Battsetseg then asked them who the best student had been. The students all pointed to a thin, pale, and emaciated man about 30 years of age. Was this the student she wanted me to meet? Tsendjav’s story unfolded as I spoke to his parents alone afterward. He was one of triplets that his parents were so proud of. While still a baby, he was given an antibiotic for an infection. His parents claimed that it made him deaf. For 30 years these respectable parents—the father is a Mongolian language professor at the University of Mongolia, and the mother is a teacher at an elite school—hid this child from every visitor to avoid the embarrassment of anyone knowing that they had a child with a disability. Every time anyone knocked at the door, they would hold their index finger across their lips, and he would go scampering to the bedroom and remain out of sight and quiet till the visitors had left. Not a single person ever knew that they had another son who was deaf. They loved him, but they did not know how to communicate with him. The only sign he knew was the index finger across the lips.

One week ago, the parents, who had heard about the ADRA sign language course, plucked up enough courage for the first time in 30 years to take Tsendjav out of their apartment. The first day in class, he would not lift his head and made no sign of taking anything in.

But I saw him this afternoon, just five days later. He was at the center of many conversations. This week he learned all 35 letters of the Mongolian alphabet for the first time in his life. He could not even count when he came on Monday. Oh, the joy of his parents as they clutched the precious 600-word sign language dictionary, their key to communication with their son. Soon we hope to have a new 3,000-word dictionary in their hands. Tsendjav came up and shook my hand, gave me a rose, and pulled my head toward his so he could press his cheek against mine as a sign of respect and thankfulness. I had a lump in my throat, and my eyes misted over. This was a child who had been brought out into the light for the first time in his lifetime. How many more are still hidden?

The parents thanked us over and over. The father is going to give us a list of 3,000 of the most actively used words in Mongolian so we can corroborate our list with his. I challenged him to become the first professor of sign language in Mongolia.

We are at SMP4 Junior High School, and 545 students are lined up in the school yard listening to speeches from ADRA, a representative of the district education department, and their headmaster, Mr. Zainun Zakaria.

The headmaster delivers a powerful motivational speech to his students, urging them to be strong. They are survivors and should not let the tsunami ruin their lives. They need to look forward and rebuild their future through education. He reminds them of the two bombs that destroyed Japan at the end of World War II. The students should look to the Japanese to see how successfully they rebuilt their country after their disaster. It was through education and determination that Japan rebuilt a strong economy.

He wants his students to get on with life. He believes that through school the children can return to some sort of normality in the midst of personal tragedy. They have this opportunity because of the work ADRA is doing in his school. He expresses his gratefulness for the many NGOs and in particular ADRA. He urges his students to learn from ADRA and the other NGOs that have come from the other side of the world. He tells them that they are important. The world cares about them and their future. In return, they must do well in school and rebuild their lives.

These are strong words for children who have recently survived earthquakes and a tsunami. After the formalities, the children receive their new bags. I catch up with Mr. Zakaria. He shares that he has worked 34 years as the headmaster of this school. He pulls up his trousers to show me the marks, scars, and discoloration on his legs. “Tsunami—tsunami,” he proclaims. I quickly get a translator so I can understand what he wants to tell me.

On December 26, 2004, Mr. Zakaria had attended teacher training at the school and was on his way home. As he got to the bridge in town, the earth shook. He quickly jumped out of his car and lay on the ground, holding his arms around his head. When the large earthquake stopped, he hurried back to his house to make sure his wife and daughter were fine. Confirming that his family was all right, he went to the mosque to gather information and see if someone needed help. Not many people were in the mosque, so he returned home. On the way, he met people screaming about the rising water levels.

He ran to find his daughter and tell her to go to her grandmother, who lived farther down the coast. The daughter, like any teenager, wanted to change her clothes and pack a bag. Both Mr. Zakaria and his wife urged her to leave on her motorbike. Finally, she obeyed her parents and drove off. His wife ran over to the neighbor’s two-story house, bringing a small bag of documents. Mr. Zakaria watched his family leave. The water level was rising; by now it had reached the side of his house.

He got on a motorcycle and tried to drive off, but the bike stalled because the water level was too high. Everything happened so fast. Suddenly he found the water carrying him away. He tried to grab hold of something, anything. He grabbed on to a jeep. The car was tossed around, and he was back in the water. Struggling, he tried to grab hold of a building, but the current was too powerful and he was swept away. After an hour of struggling, he was finally able to grab the roots of a Beringin tree. As he pulled himself up onto the tree, he found that he was not alone. Also clinging to the Beringin tree were a civet with three of her kittens, two mice, and a chicken.

For hours, they clung to the tree, not seeing any other living being. The water was filled with dead people. It was pulling back to the sea at a stronger and faster pace than it had come in. All Mr. Zakaria could do was sit and wait. The sun was scorching hot and burning him, but he thought only of his wife and daughter. Where were they? What was happening to them?

After four hours, he decided to try to reach a patch of dry land that he saw in the distance. He removed his shirt and trousers. He tied his trousers around his waist and his shirt around his head. He knew that his clothes would slow him down. He estimated that it would take about 15 minutes to swim to land, but the current was strong and he was weak. He swam from branch to branch. He found a board and pushed it ahead a bit and then swam to it. While he was trying to swim, he was afraid that another wave would come.

 At some point, he realized that he had lost his clothes. He felt pain in his leg and saw that it was cut in many places. Finally, after an hour and a half, his feet touched dry land. Mr. Zakaria was tired and worn-out, but determined to find out what had happened to his family. He staggered to his relative’s house, which was situated in an area that was unaffected. There he was able to rest for some time and eat some food. His thoughts were with his daughter and his wife. He was particularly concerned for his daughter; had she done as he had told her? If so, he knew that there was little chance that she had survived, as her grandmother’s house was close to the waterfront.

Regaining some strength, he started his search. He walked around the city and saw destruction and dead people. He ended up at the mosque, and there he finally met his daughter and wife. It was around 4:00 p.m.; he had seen them last at 8:30 a.m. For once, he was glad that his daughter had done what she thought was best and had not followed his directions. Had she obeyed him, she would not be alive.

Mr. Zakaria still smiles; he knows that he is lucky and is grateful that his family is safe. All the material positions they have are the daughter’s motorbike and the small bag his wife took. However, this is not important; they have each other.

After hearing his story, I understand that his strong speech to his students was not out of insensitivity to the children’s experience, but out of care and to motivate them to continue life. Seeing the work ADRA is doing to rehabilitate the children’s school and give them back a future, I too smile with Mr. Zakaria and promise that ADRA will not forget him or his school.

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The cold tarmac at the Vladivostok airport was the end of the line for me. The air was about 17 degrees Fahrenheit, as warm as it was going to get for a mid-winter morning. Twenty dull hours of flying had set my wrist watch no less than fifteen hours ahead of Washington D.C. to a distant time zone in the Russian Far East. Here, if not for strict border crossings, a person might drive to North Korea for lunch or go to China for an all-afternoon shopping spree. I was, for the moment, in a different dimension.

The moment we stepped off the bus that ferried us from the plane, the main terminal door swung open and we entered reverently in a single file. Down the hall a crowd of eager Russians, shapkas on every head, searched our group of new arrivals for a glimpse of their husbands, girlfriends, and business guests. I, too, was looking deep into the crowd for a man who just two days before had promised in a short e-mail to meet me here. He had sent me his telephone number in case one of us failed to show up, but he didn’t see the likelihood of that happening since he had booked himself on a flight that would arrive several hours before mine from a distant city in Siberia. The only thing he noted with some level of concern was,  “I have problems with English language.” And that was it.

It was almost 11:00 a.m. by my watch, and I stood in the middle of the hall wrestling with my bag before I set it down on the shiny floor. For a moment it occurred to me that he would not arrive. After all, there are still many things that can keep two complete strangers 9,343 miles away from each other from converging at the same time on the same spot of earth in a place unfamiliar to both.

On the Trans-Siberian Railroad traveling to visit ADRA projects along the way.

That impossibility, however, came only as a passing thought.

I watched a family, anxious to see a relative arrive, stretch out their arms as he approached their side of the airport hall. As for me, I imagined the meeting with my local contact being something like this:

“Am I glad to be here! I wasn’t sure if we’d meet, but I’m certainly happy that you made it. So, good flight from Novosibirsk? Are you ready to get on with the trip? By the way, when do we catch the train tonight?”

Which is why, a minute or two later, when I found myself standing in front of a man wearing a suit and tie and an elegant black shapka who spoke to me only in Russian, but to whom my identity was fully known, I was only half convinced that this was Nikolay Grebenyuk, director of ADRA East Russia, the person with whom I had corresponded for a month and who had replied to all my inquiries in a series of messages in well-written English. How could this be? I was flummoxed. Then I said:

“Nikolay?”

A wide smile spread across his face, the kind that says unequivocally, yes, it’s me.

He had immediately recognized the stitched ADRA logo on my windbreaker jacket when I walked into the terminal. He pulled out a paper folder with the same logo printed on it, as a gesture to ensure mutual recognition.

“How did you manage to write in English?” I asked.

He fumbled with some words, and said, “Computer program.”

Pointing to the exit, he asked (I could only guess), how my flight from Moscow had been, and was I ready to get on with the trip? He patted me on the back. As we walked out into the brisk morning air, I sensed that perhaps he was also glad to know that neither of us had flown all this way just to be stood up by the other.

At two o’clock that same night we were seated comfortably in a spacious and mostly empty sleeper railroad car on our way to Irkutsk, a city three days away that lies near Lake Baikal’s southern extremity not far from the border with Mongolia. Although we had enjoyed the convenience of a local translator during the day, our communication was now restricted to loose Russian and English words, wild hand signals, and doodles on a small paper pad.

I crawled into my sleeping bag. Nikolay, who still seemed to be working out some words in his head, stood up and said, “Chai?” The word would have gone past me had I not visited northern Pakistan a year earlier where drinking tea is a part of every social event and is offered to any guest who enters a home, much like a calumet among American Indian tribes, to extend friendship and peace.  He quickly dashed through the narrow corridor and got two tall glasses from a train attendant, then filled them almost to the brim with hot water from a boiler at the end of the railroad car.

“Good chai,” I said. Nikolay responded in Russian and seemed pleased by my appreciation of the local tea.

“My country drink chai. All people,” I said.

A puzzled look settled on his face. The confusion, perhaps, had something to do with my assertion that everyone in my country, like Russia, was a tea drinker. Or that he wasn’t sure what country was my country.

“America?” he said pointing to me.

“No, no. No America,” I said putting my index finger to my chest. “Chile.”

I drew an imaginary map in the stale air of our compartment, and after a brief pause, he said: “I Ukraina.”

“Not Russki?” I said in the best bit of Russian I could summon.

Until now it had not occurred to me that Nikolay could be anything other than an authentic born and bred Russian. Perhaps, if I’d known the language well I could have detected a slight foreign twist in his voice, but then again, he had lived outside the Ukraine for so long that he surely had by now left out of his pronunciation any clues of having been born elsewhere.

In his work for ADRA, Nikolay Grebenyuk oversees all of Siberia, an area equivalent to nearly nine times the size of Alaska.

His mother and father, who raised him Russian Orthodox from birth (he would later become Seventh-day Adventist), still lived, he said, in his childhood home in Kumejki, a small rural village 110 miles southwest of Kiev, where they had a large field of bright sunflowers, which they tended to year after year. They loved the Ukraine and would not live anywhere else, even if that meant seeing their son, who had lived in Siberia for the better part of two decades, only from time to time. Fortunately, his older brother lived just down the road from them, and that gave Nikolay a measure of comfort.

Family was sacred to him; one doesn’t need words to sense the love of a man for his wife and children. Opening his notebook computer, he clicked on several photographs which popped onto the screen: holding a big fish with his 12-year-old son, Pavel; daughter Katya, 16, posing near the door of her grandparents’ home in Kumejki; and Lena, his wife of seventeen years, sitting on a beach during a recent summer trip. I was sure, then, that being on this train with me meant that Nikolay was losing time with them; it was the nature of the work. We’d all been there: far-removed, longing.

Presently, as we sped through the darkness across the vast Russian countryside, we were taking sips of hot tea. It was late in the night, but there seemed to be a sense of interest in each of us to know where the other had come from—and perhaps where he was going.

The train traveled the entire night along the Chinese border all the way to Khabarovsk, then turned west at the northern end of the city and crossed the Amur River. Nikolay was delighted to see the river flowing undisturbed under a hefty layer of ice possibly as much a three feet thick, he said. To sink a fishing line into the river a man would need to drill by hand for the better part of the morning, a sweaty task even in the deep freeze of winter. But no amount of ice, nothing really, was going to get between a man and his fish.

This was apparent the next day when it came time for lunch. Long before boarding the train (when exactly is anyone’s guess), Nikolay got his hands on a trout that only two or three day ago, I imagined, had been swimming up a river in Kamchatka, an extensive peninsula opposite to Alaska across the Bering Sea whose fresh fish products are considered the best in the region. Now, the trout lay smoked inside a plastic bag. Using a small kitchen knife, he cut the flesh into thick slices; the outside was clearly well smoked, but bringing a piece of the fish to my mouth, I tasted the raw gelatinous body.

“Good,” Nikolay said, “Very, very good.”

One bite was enough. In Russian he offered to give me half of the fish. Taking the knife, he pointed to the slices that were mine. I declined, offering my upbringing as a poor excuse for not being accustomed to eating fish. He said no problem, and having eaten his share of the trout, he put the rest back in the bag and placed it by the window where the deep cold from outside would keep the meat fresh until the following day, in case I changed my mind.

By now it was customary after every meal for us to read from a book or stare out the window or simply sit back and choose a conversation topic to pursue. We had somehow managed to discover words in Russian and English that we both vaguely recognized, and soon we were having lengthy exchanges.

One such discussion started hours after we left Khabarovsk as the train worked its way across a vast, uninhabited plain colonized by birch trees and little else. We were in the Siberian taiga proper, Nikolay said, a biome that extends all the way to Norway and, skipping the Bering Sea, into Alaska and much of inland Canada. A man takes a measure of pride in saying he has been in it—in winter especially. It is, after all, a place of infinite beauty, but which can test even the most rugged of men. In years past Nikolay had ventured into the open taiga for days at a time, not necessarily alone, but always in the spirit of adventure.

“My friend professional hunter,” he said.

It was with his buddy Sasha and two or three other friends from Irkutsk that he would walk into the wild on weekends to camp, rest, and sometimes hunt. He was showing me some photographs of one such trip when he said he owned three carbines. It was with one of these that he went into the forest one day and killed a bear. At present, however, he kept his carbines stored at home, because he hadn’t found much use for them in recent years since he moved west from Irkutsk to the bigger city of Novosibirsk.

Life in Irkutsk had been memorable: hunting trips to the Siberian taiga, visits to Lake Baikal, friends, romance. But Nikolay had not moved there postulating that he would achieve those things, but rather that those things would come to him in time, as one must often do upon arrival in a strange, foreign land. This was 1986 and he was enjoying the relative freedom of having finished four years of training at a military academy in Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod) at the confluence of the Volga and the Oka rivers 250 miles east of Moscow. The Soviet Army, naturally, would expect a return on its investment. Before the blanket of winter dropped on Siberia, Nikolay arrived in Irkutsk to report for duty and begin, he said, a career as an acquisitions and logistics officer. The job meant supplying the base—from the grunts to high commanders—with everything from socks to the lard used in the kitchen. He was organized and watchful of every detail and over the years he rose steadily, as did his love for Irkutsk and his new wife and later his two children, to become major—by now in the Russian Army. 

A few days later, in late afternoon, he would take me to the main entrance of the army base to show me his former home. A Sukhoi jet fighter was propped handsomely on the snow near the gate. A young guard was standing out of the cold inside a yellow building. Nikolay didn’t say a word. He just smiled. But I knew that he had thirteen years of memories tucked away behind those tall black metal gates.

Siberia, if you didn’t know it already, is enormous. It extends eastward from the Ural Mountains not far from Moscow and southward to neighboring Kazakhstan, and runs along the borders of Mongolia and China all the way to the other side of Asia where the land dead-ends at the Pacific Ocean eight time zones later. If you take a cutout of the map of Alaska and set it down over Siberia, it will easily fit no less than eight times and leave plenty of wiggle room to add California, Oregon, Washington, Florida, Indiana, Maryland, Connecticut, and two Districts of Columbia.

To approach the size of Siberia in a different manner, one comes to the conclusion, after some simple mathematics, that Nikolay must oversee—and try to crisscross—as many square miles as the vast majority of ADRA country offices in, say, Africa (twenty-six out of a total of thirty-four)—Mauritania, Mali, Cape Verde, Senegal, Guinea Bissau, Guinea Conakry, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Sao Tome, Angola, Namibia, Madagascar, Burundi, Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Mauritius, Ethiopia, Malawi, Lesotho, South Africa, and Zimbabwe—alone.

One man.

He tackles distances by plane and car and, as we were doing now, also by train. Getting around remains a very big undertaking.

Nikolay, however, had not let a single moment of frustration slip out of him since we’d met. If he ever felt overwhelmed by anything—by the size of the territory he was meant to bring relief to, by the needs of the people, by the time away from home—it was never apparent to me in any way. Perhaps, Siberia had had the opposite effect on him. Or he had dealt with it long ago. The reality, nevertheless, is that eight years after leaving the army to work for ADRA he remained driven, optimistic, confident, and, best of all, cheerful to the marrow. 

In the process, he had managed to stay deeply human, too.

“Every time I go to a project I dedicate myself to the people,” he said later through a translator. “I try to do my best to help them and make their lives a little better.”

I saw this side of him even more clearly in Irkutsk, where we arrived in the middle of the night after seemingly time traveling 2,569 miles over the frozen Siberian taiga sipping hot, sweet tea.

The next day at noon we gathered in Novolenino, a residential district of the city, inside a spacious, sunny room at the Regional State Organization Orphanage #2. Here, sometime ago, ADRA had brought food to supplement the pantry of the orphanage and improve the diet that the children needed to grow up healthy. Lunchtime was well underway and two dozen little children, one to four years of age, sat around tiny square tables eating hot soup and bread. A few, too little to master a spoon full of soup, got help from the staff. When lunch was over, the children ran inside the room chasing each other around until they slowly grew tired.

An ADRA volunteer helps a little boy eat lunch at a center for HIV-positive children in Irkutsk, Siberia, Russia.

Many of the children staying in this orphanage wing, called Aistenok (it means “stork-baby” in Russian), are living with HIV. Some arrived at the orphanage soon after birth, abandoned, in some instances, near a bus stop, in the snow, or in the alleys between houses, well before they would know the love of a mother or understand the cruelty of the world outside these walls. Fortunately, on this day none seemed aware of the latter yet.

The happiness in Nikolay’s face was palpable. He held a little girl in his arms and whispered a few short words to her. She was shy. Quiet. He said something else, tickled her chin and she broke out in a wide smile.

Many children who have been abandoned live in infant houses until they can be adopted or transferred to homes for older children.

“This is what drives me to do my best,” he said. “The children.”

We stood quietly watching the staff put every child in bed for a nap. Not every child was willing to go to sleep. Minutes later, however, the room grew peaceful. Silence.  We heard only the gentle, rhythmic breathing.

I was certain that the faces of these children, of so many others, too, would stay with him beyond this day. He had said to me, “Each time I return home after several weeks, I feel pain for the people. I am touched by the sorrow I see in many places in Siberia. But then I tell myself that I’m working for them.”

Nikolay standing on the ice of Lake Baikal.

We drove to Lake Baikal the next day over newly fallen snow. The icy surface of the lake was a clear window into the depths of the water. So clear, we could see the bubbles trapped inside the ice. Nikolay walked to an open market not far from the edge of the lake. When he returned, holding something wrapped in a newspaper under his arm, he said,

“Baikal fish.”

I sensed right away that Nikolay Grebenyuk wasn’t going to let my upbringing get in the way of a good fish.

We spent the next hour eating fish with our bare hands.

“You like?” he asked.

“Of course,” I said.

Eating omuel, a popular fish from Lake Baikal.

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Members of the Dhanawe women’s group tend to their kitchen garden

The small plane carrying me to Hudur town starts its descent into the once lush green cropland surrounding the capital of the Bakol region in south Somalia. Instead of thriving fields of millet and vegetables, though, I see scraggly, water-starved vegetation poking up through patches of sand. Scattered water wells and a few boreholes dot the ground below. The plane lands, and I step onto the Hudur airstrip. “Welcome to dry Bakol,” my colleague John Ndezwa says in welcome.

John, the project coordinator for ADRA’s Emergency Water and Livelihood Support Program (EWLSP), tells me that chronic drought conditions in southern Somalia have devastated the Bakol region and have greatly affected the ability of the agro-pastoralist communities to produce food. “Many wells are dry and those that are functioning yield water that is 50 percent below normal capacity. The locals’ dependence on water for their survival and livelihoods has threatened their ability to recover,” John explains. He adds that increased movement of livestock and people in the region has put existing water and food sources under persistent pressure, thus straining resources and creating competition and the potential for conflict at already crowded water points.

EWLSP is ADRA’s latest project in Somalia, promoting the establishment of ten kitchen gardens by women’s groups who are trained to manage the gardens. With 34,000 beneficiaries throughout Somalia to its credit, the EWLSP has brought hope to local women determined to increase their household income and diet diversity.

I set out with John and the rest of the ADRA team to explore the Bakol countryside and see how the EWLSP project is helping people in the dry, vast lands of south Somalia. We travel east from Hudur town and after a few kilometers we arrive in Dhanawe village.

A group of about 30 women—members of the Dhanawe Women’s Group—have braved the scorching sun to meet the ADRA team. With assistance from ADRA’s EWLSP project, the women have set up a kitchen garden and they are eager to tell us how the garden has changed their lives. Fifty-year-old Amino Muqtar Gudow, one of the most active members of Dhanawe women’s group, is especially anxious to share her story. “I am very grateful for this project because I now see hope of harvesting my vegetables, selling them in the market, and making enough money to fix my teeth,” says Amino, who though self-conscious about her imperfect smile, grins widely as the other women tease her good naturedly. “I have to look good to find a husband and this is a perfect opportunity for me to improve on my beauty,” she adds.

Amino Muqtar Gudow

From Dhanawe, the ADRA team travels to visit three other villages participating in the garden project: Farak, Garasweyne, and Tawakal. The gardens provide ample evidence that EWLSP is fulfilling its objective to strengthen and diversify livelihoods of households and communities in Bakol. More than 100 women have been trained on seed selection, soil fertility, and irrigation techniques, along with how to prepare land and plant seeds properly. Hundreds more will benefit once the additional six planned kitchen gardens are fully operational.

“ADRA has provided us with good training on how to manage this kitchen garden and has also given us farm tools and implements, including wheelbarrows, shovels, forks, rakes, irrigation drip kits and seeds for planting,” says an elated Habiibo Aden Mumin, the chair of the Garasweyne women’s group. “We are now prepared to turn our shambas [gardens] green.”

In each of the four kitchen gardens I visited, the vegetables planted and nurtured by the women are doing well. Mano Sheikh Hussen, one of ADRA’s EWLSP community trainers, ensures the women know how to make the best use of their homegrown bounty. “The women are trained on how to cook these vegetables and taught the importance of such a diet to the family,” notes Mano, adding that the women also learn some basic principles on how to market their produce.

In Bakol, where ADRA has implemented water projects for the last six years, it was easy to see the kitchen garden project has helped to bring about another “green” revolution. With the women inspired by their garden’s success and the increased diversity in their families’ diets, hope has replaced despair.

Vegetables in Dhanawe kitchen garden

“I am very optimistic that once I sell the vegetables and make money to fix my teeth, I will be able to get myself a husband. Men do not like me because of my teeth, but I am now optimistic that things will be better,” concludes a joyful Amino, as she reaches for a jembe [garden hoe] and begins tending her garden.

As I hop onto the plane bound for my home base of Nairobi, the words of Amino still linger in my mind, and I smile as I think how her life is changing because of ADRA’s kitchen garden project.

Jason Nyantino is the public relations officer for ADRA Somalia.

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Looking down from the relative comfort of my airplane seat as I pass over the vast, arid country of southern Somalia, I notice that the water holes are downright dry. Blame it on Gu and Deyr—the seasonal rains that have been largely avoiding the Horn of Africa for the better part of a decade.

In general, one would remark, the region is in trouble. Slowly keeling over. The two consecutive failed rainy seasons are giving the residents of the districts of Huddur, Elberde, Rabdure, Tieglow, and Wajid, in the Bakool region, a reason to consider the worst. The last dry spell arrived in 2005 between April and June, when the Gu rain was supposed to soak the grazing areas and give farmers enough moisture for their fi elds. But when the water didn’t come again in October, and the fodder and the water holes became critically low, livestock carcasses began turning up all over the place. That’s troubling news when your way of life depends on the health— and size—of the herd.

In the Bakool region alone, more than 1.4 million people are beginning to feel the effects of the drought. Water prices are already jumping. But the water itself is increasingly going to fewer people—that is, to people who can afford, and are ready to pay, 35 to 40 Somali shillings for each 52-gallon drum, nearly US $3. In a country where the yearly income for an average person is $600—when there are no droughts, of course— that kind of spending will cut a hole in your pocket. If the situation worsens, the United Nations fears that there will be more than just dead animals. The magnitude of the situation then would be like shutting the faucet off in, say, Colorado Springs, Minneapolis, Honolulu, and Tulsa at the same time—indefi nitely.

Elberde district is the most affected by the lack of rain, and the problem is stretched to an almost unbearable level by the ongoing clan confl icts. Only two hand-dug wells and one borehole—from a total of 18 wells—are functioning. The rest have simply dried up.

Many herders up and down the Somali-Ethiopian border are not waiting for the water to come to them. Instead, they are pushing their flocks, and their families, to the south across an area the size of New Jersey toward more fertile areas in Garas Weyne, Morogavi, Dhil Siji, Xuddur, El-Lahelay, and various Tieglow villages where they are likely to fi nd a river. The move, in humanitarian lingo, has turned them into IDPs— internally displaced persons. This means that thousands of people are now strangers in their own country. And that, most likely, means that someone else will decide whose bucket dips into the water fi rst.

Although ADRA rehabilitated several wells and boreholes in the area, the infl ux of 12,000 IDPs and their camel and goat herds has reduced water levels by half. That’s worrisome, if not alarming, when you consider that the next rain— the Gu seasonal rain—is not due for another two months. However, no one should have to wait around that long for water.

But some do. In Falanfay, a small village near the Bakool regional capital, Xuddur, people waited four years to see the water in their well. Nevertheless, after all that time, Ibrahim Golbow is thankful. He is 98 years old, a former shoemaker and a village elder. He has a good reason to be happy about the water. That’s because over the years he has become the father of 20 children— 14 boys and six girls. And he wants to see them live a long life, as he has. He says, “ADRA is the sun of our village. It has brought us water, which had been a problem for ages. I see hope on the way, and this is a good thing, you know.” Finding water when you need it most is in some ways an exercise in patience and stubbornness.

Take the plan of ADRA, for example. It’s a struggle against the harsh Somali landscape: picking a collapsed borehole, removing the silt from the inside, digging deeper into the earth, and restoring water yields to normal levels—all of this before moving on to the other 69 holes. One by one.

While other relief agencies are trucking in the water from the Juba River, a steady drink that meanders across the most droughtprone region in Africa, ADRA’s plan—funded by the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA)—is entirely set up to give towns and villages in the Bakool region—Garas Weyne, Elberde, El Dhun, Xuddur—a permanent way to get their water. Already, the UN Water, Environment and Sanitation (WES) committee is on the ground, so work can start immediately.

Soon, ADRA will carry out a geophysical survey and drill a borehole in Abal, a town east of Xuddur. Also, because that kind of assistance most likely won’t be enough, ADRA hopes to partner with Médecins Sans Frontières- Belgium to pump and pipe water from the El Dhun borehole to Xuddur, then build latrines in some of the most overcrowded villages, chlorinate water sources, and produce kitchen gardens at some of the rehabilitated wells to increase food production and give people better choices of food.

For now, however, the attention is on the holes. No one is celebrating yet.

Perhaps, if the people of Bakool fi nd the water before the water fi nds them, they will have time later, one hopes, for everything else.

After building enough trust and rapport, we initiate a conversation with her and encourage her to speak about her experience of the tragedy of December 26, 2004. The very word “tsunami” makes her sigh, and she is in tears, as she lost her daughter and granddaughter on that day.

Arjunadevi, in her late 50s, has been in Thazhznganda village ever since she married an inhabitant of that village. They had two sons and one girl. The girl was the last in line; hence, she was pampered by everyone, and in turn, she was affectionate and kind to everyone in the family. The eldest son is involved in fishing; the youngest is an engineering student.

Her daughter had been highly educated, and even had been working as a teacher. This was unusual, as girls of this village don’t go for higher studies, and no one at all goes for work outside the village. Arjunadevi had the pride that her daughter was the only female in the whole village who had been highly educated.

Arjunadevi adds, “My daughter, Arun Jelitha, aged 27, worked as a teacher; she always had the thirst to study more and more. We spent quite a sum of money for her education. She was a model to this village. On seeing her, many other girls too started going for higher studies. She was so kind toward everyone in the family, even close to her sister-in-law. She took care of her brother’s children so well and bought for them what they liked. She had brought two of her friends to her home during the holidays that December.”

Arjunadevi always gently insists on having a glimpse of her daughter’s photograph, now enlarged and decorated with flowers and lights. She takes us into the house and silently takes a deep look at it, even as we watch her and the image. Confirming that we have had a good look at the graceful person that her daughter was, she starts bringing out the gory story of her daughter’s demise.

“On that fateful day, before anyone could realize that a tidal wave was approaching us, all of us were caught in the tsunami wave,” she explains. “My daughter was just screaming to save her friends who had come for their holidays. She wanted to ensure that, because they were outsiders and guests, no harm should happen to them in the village.

“My daughter-in-law was holding my granddaughter and trying to escape, and I remember only that, because I was struggling in the water. After the wave retreated, we found that our daughter and granddaughter (the one who was in my daughter-in-law’s hands) were missing and later found to be dead. I just could not believe that my daughter was no more. She wanted to study, and we spent a lot for her studies, and now what do I see of it? Though she was 27, she wasn’t married yet; maybe if she had been married, she would have been somewhere else and she would not have died. Only because she was here she has died. As I sit alone at home, I just recall each and every movement of her and the moments she spent with us. I am not able to forget her even for a single second.”

Arjunadevi is a wreck now. Having lost her grown-up daughter in the killer tsunami waves, she has suddenly found her life emptied of all meaning. The world has become a meaningless place all of a sudden.

Her husband has hardly taken responsibility, even during the days before the tsunami consumed her daughter’s life. Now he is even more devastated.

Her house is located not far away from the shores and easily bore the brunt of the tsunami.

Arjunadevi still recalls the fond connection she had with her daughter, remembering her daughter by spelling out each and every activity in which she was engaged when alive.

They had an intense bond with each other, and Arun Jelitha grew up enjoying the intense love of her mother.

Now she is alone, as her truant husband hardly returns home and her sons spend few hours at home. She cooks for herself and for her sons—only one single meal a day. But her desolate and wrecked nature hardly excites her sons to come home. Her relatives come and spend some days with her, but they cannot help beyond that.

The panic level seems to go up every now and then these days, thanks to false warnings from people around her. After the news about the earthquake in Andaman, people were more scared, but such signs did not affect Arjunadevi, as she is no longer scared of death. Indeed, she says that if death would unite her with Arun Jelitha, she would embrace it willingly.

Nowaways, Arjunadevi sleeps little; she hangs around the seashore, wishing to meet her daughter in the form of her spirit. Her belief in the afterlife and ghosts has given her renewed strength as she hopes to meet her daughter one day on the shores of the sea that gobbled her up.

It is very significant that she does not even refer to her daughter without attaching due respect to her. She says that she did that even when Arun Jelitha was alive. They were more like equals than mother and daughter. She remembers her good deeds in the finest detail: how she woke up, how she spoke, how she performed her household chores. She remembers her gait and vividly can reconstruct the details of her returning home as she would appear on the faraway road visible from Arjunadevi’s house.

From what Arjunadevi says, Arun Jelitha was a responsible and loving girl. The entire family and the life of Arjunadevi were anchored around the existence of Arun Jelitha, as she is the one who remarkably completed her Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Education degrees. She became a teacher in a school in the nearby town (Cuddalore) and worked from home after a short stint with hostel life, which her mother discouraged because she could not bear to live separately from her daughter. Life was fine till the tsunami struck the village.

Ever since losing Arun Jelitha, Arjunadevi contemplates suicide and needs to be counseled against it. She says that after her daughter’s demise, there is no point in living her life.

When she found life meaningless in the company of her irresponsible husband, who gets drunk often and returns home after two or three days of inexplicable absence, she found meaning only in raising her daughter and showering intense love on her. This made more sense to her than doing the same with her sons, who grew up working away from home and going fishing.

In this context of meaninglessness, it was her daughter who gave a tremendous sense of meaning and purpose to her life. That’s why she wants to live with Arun Jelitha in her imaginary life, conversing with her to fight her emptiness and relating to her as if she exists in flesh and blood now.

She has not demonstrated any sign of psychological abnormality as she carries out her everyday routine, such as bathing, eating (though very little), cooking, etc. But she needs a lot of support and encouragement.

ADRA’s psychosocial officer is working with her in regular intervals, but that is not enough. We could train or encourage some village volunteers to work with her to bring her back to a certain sense of normalcy, as such volunteers could make daily contact with her.

We spent 20 minutes looking around at the previous site of his small elementary school and his now nonexistent house. We chatted pleasantly, and he introduced me to his many friends, his previous students, and their parents.

He had been sitting on his back porch when the tsunami rolled in. The dirty water was as high as the palm trees, and he was caught up in it while running away. He tumbled around in the water for a long time.

It was time to leave, and I found a small gift for him in my bag. We shook hands as I said good-bye. He grabbed me and hugged me very tight and then pressed my cheek against his very hard cheek and then the other cheek. As I stood back, I could see that he was crying and could not speak very well. We parted, and afterward I realized that I had given him an opportunity to share his story and, in so doing, deal with some of his grief. I have spoken to many people here with a similar response. Often a deep friendship develops from simply listening to their story and caring for their needs.

First I see a baby, and then a beautiful young woman with haunting eyes. “Tsunami,” he whispers, his voice choking as he tries to avoid crying in front of me. I ask our translator if he will translate for me as Mahfoud shares his story with us.

Mahfoud explains that he had his own business and employed several people. He bought land and was moving into a big house next to his brothers. It was close to the beach in the north part of Meulaboh, Indonesia. It was an area busy with life, cafés, and restaurants lining the boardwalk. To have a house in the middle of this was a sign of success.

I ask if it’s possible for us to visit this place, and he agrees to take us there. We drive to the northern part of town and come to an area where it looks as if post-tsunami cleanup has already occurred. There is hardly any rubble or debris, or any sign that this was a thriving area close to the boardwalk. “There hasn’t been any cleanup here,” Mahfoud tells me.

I look around. Surely there can’t have been that many people living here; there is nothing except grazing water buffalo.

I look at Mahfoud, and he leads me to a concrete slab. “This is my house under here, but it’s the floor of my brother’s house,” he says. This sounds a bit cryptic, so I ask him to explain how this is his brother’s floor. He points to another concrete slab and says that his brother’s house was over there, and it was a three-story house. We are standing on the third floor. The first and second floors are lying side by side like dominos.

He takes me back to the 26th of December 2004. It was a cloudy morning, and Mahfoud was hesitant to leave. He needed to go to the Simpat market to sell clothes at one of his many shops. The market was an hour away from his home. He discussed with his wife, Nana Meilina, if he should go. They had been married for more than four years and had an almost two-year-old son, Fakrol Raji. Nana Meilina urged him to go. They had just invested a large sum in new clothes to sell. He looked at her and knew that she was right. They needed the money. He must go to the Simpat market.

He stopped by his shop in Meulaboh to check on things before leaving town. An hour later, he arrived at the Simpat market and felt the large earthquake. Mahfoud quickly got on a motorbike with his friend and headed back toward home. They were close to Meulaboh when the first tsunami wave swept them off their bike. They grabbed a piece of wood and managed to float around for what seemed like 30 minutes. He estimated that the water level was five to six feet deep. Just as suddenly as the wave hit him, it began to pull back. Despite the strong surge, he managed to stay on his feet. He kept walking toward his home until the second wave hit him. This time he could not keep his head above water. He could not breathe; he could not see anything in the black water. He could not swim in the strong current. He was up against forces that were much greater than he was. He thought that these were his last seconds. He was gasping for air when suddenly he felt his friend pulling him up by his hair; he grabbed his friend’s arm and pulled.

At this point, I interrupt and ask the translator if Mahfoud is sure that he was really pulled up by his hair. “Yes,” the translator confirms, “and no, his hair was not longer at that time.”

He must see my surprise, and we both look at Mahfoud. He is balding on top, and where there is hair, it is quite short.

Mahfoud continues his story. After his friend pulled him out of the water by his hair, they both managed to reach a four-story house on the side of the road. They waited—they could not do anything else. When the water went down to chest height, he jumped back in. He waded through the water and all it carried with it. He didn’t seem to sense what was around him; he waded toward his home and prayed that he would find his wife and son.

He got to his house and found several bodies stuck in buildings and trees. His house was gone. He found no sign of his wife or son.

Mahfoud pauses; he looks at us and then looks at the tall coconut trees. “The tsunami,” he says, “was above those coconut trees.”

I look back at him and know why the area is swept clean. Nothing could stand a chance in water levels and waves of such height.

He sighs and tells us that he kept looking around in disbelief. The people, along with the cafés and restaurants, were swept inland toward the city. He now knows that only about three percent of this area’s population survived.

As he looked around for his family, he saw the third wave coming, and he ran to a two-story house that was partly standing. When the third wave had withdrawn to the sea, he continued his search. Not much was left now. Then he recognized some clothes. Yes, this used to belong to his wife, and over there was a piece of his son’s shirt. He roamed around finding some of his own clothes, but no sign of his beloved Nana Meilina or Fakrol Raji.

As Mahfoud talks, tears are running down his face, and I in respect look at the ground. Hearing his pain and sorrow, I feel my eyes swell with tears as well. We silently stand where his house used to be. The place where he saw his wife and son for the last time.

Continuing, Mahfoud tells us that he kept hoping as he kept searching. He wandered through the entire city and helped many people he met on the road. He doesn’t remember how many. He kept walking and searching for days and nights.

He went to the internally displaced persons camp. After a couple of days, he was invited to stay with friends. Mahfoud accepted, but found that his kind friend had many people staying with him. Mahfoud located distant cousins and stayed with them for a time. Since he had lost everything, he could not contribute much to the household and did not want to be a burden. Mahfoud began to spend his nights on the floor in the mosque and looked for work by day.

He owed money from the clothes he had purchased to sell at his shops. His assets were gone. He sold his old car, which was parked where the tsunami didn’t reach, and this enabled him to pay off some debt. It would have been easy for him to claim that he had lost everything and was unable to pay. However, he was convinced that he wanted to pay some of his debt. He also desired to hold a Kenduri (a memorial service) for his wife and son. At this point, Mahfoud felt no need to plan for the future, for what future was there for someone who had lost everything?

Eventually, he found work as a driver in a pickup that belonged to a distant relative. Then Mahfoud became one of ADRA’s Meulaboh drivers. For weeks, he went quietly about his work, always ready to help and assist. One day, his heart spilled over, and he shared his loss with one of the Indonesian ADRA workers. When our ADRA staff heard that Mahfoud had been sleeping in the mosque for several weeks, they invited him to share their living quarters.

The always helpful and smiling Mahfoud. When you get to know him, you see that his smile, though genuine, has sadness to it. His eyes reflect pain and grief, yet he gets up every day and does a great job with ADRA. Friendship has sprung up with several of the ADRA workers from Jakarta, and those of us who are not fluent in Bahasa Indonesian wish we could say something of comfort. All I can do is smile and put my hand on my heart to shown my empathy, and ask the translator to express my sympathy and how his experience has brought tears in my eyes.

Mahfoud is grateful for the opportunity to work with ADRA and shows no bitterness that he now is an employee when he used to be the boss. Those of us who work with him pray that one day he will be able to plan for the future.

They won’t be seen even during the village festivals. They are not part of the village, yet they are in the village. In other words, they are in the village, though they are not of the village—they don’t even possess a ration card. Only when you make a special effort will you see them or meet them.

That is exactly what we did. As we waded through the casuarina trees that cluster thickly around the hinterlands of the village, we reached a ground beyond its borders that has been cleared of the trees that otherwise abound. There lay some thatched houses. They are so low that to enter into them, one has to virtually crawl. Some 10 people, the majority of them women and children, were milling around, with a few among them only visible as hazy shadows behind the line of tree trunks.

They are the Telugu-speaking, oppressed caste members whom the mainstream village used for providing services, such as guarding the villagers’ groves or cleaning the village temple premises when the festival approached. In return for the services they rendered, they were paid a paltry sum or in kind in the form of 66 pounds annually of rice and other grains. Other than that, they were not the recipients of any other rights and privileges from the mainstream village. They normally resided in the secluded confines of the groves, at peace with themselves. Their other source of income was fishing, though they normally did that with a hook in the shallow waters of the sea. The women would sell the fish in the Cuddalore town if the catch was good and would buy vegetables and groceries from the money earned by selling the fish.

When the tsunami hit the villages, they survived thanks to their folk wisdom—they always settled on the elevated terrain since that was the safest place given the fact they lived just 66 feet away from the backwaters. While the main village suffered a huge loss, this community lost just a few belongings—or lost all of it, depending on how you look at it; the truth is that they did not have many belongings. The fact that they were utterly poor has victimized them by not inviting the attention of relief providers and rehabilitation workers since they have not ”lost” anything—their ”normalcy” need not be restored, as poverty was their normalcy.

Yet they were seriously affected by the tsunami, for their lives depend on the payment from the mainstream villagers. When the latter lost their principal livelihood, namely fishing, due to the tsunami, the village economy came to a standstill. With fish catching  having dwindled alarmingly and villagers unable to patronize them, the Telugu-speaking community members have been suddenly reduced to the status of beggars, as they themselves state tremblingly. Now they survive on the leftover food given away by the villagers.

Sadly, they were never the beneficiaries of the relief and rehabilitation measures by any of those who cared to come to the villages. They said that even on normal days, they never received any of the development efforts or schemes, and during the post-disaster days, it could only get worse. Hence, health, education, electricity, or any other development good has never touched them.

Infant mortality and maternal morbidity are very high, partly thanks to the superstitious practices. That is what is confirmed by the life of Valli, who has been living in the soukku groves for the past decade or so with her in-laws’ family.

Valli’s first marriage was a disaster, as her mother died young and her father was never a responsible person. Indeed, it was her father who poisoned her mother to death, and even Valli could have died. At the young age of 13 1/2, she was married by her mother’s sister to a man from her village. But he left her after giving her a child. The child too died due to poor health. It was then that she met Selvaraj, whose family migrates to other villages in search of work (guarding work); they decided to live together. Since then, she and Selvaraj have married and have returned to Sothikuppam. Valli has two children—one daughter named Vasantha and a son named Chinnathampi. In fact, these two are the only surviving children of six in the past 12 years. The rest have died of one illness or the other, mostly from diarrhea.

Valli does not even recall that well the reasons they died. All that she can guess is that they died because of the curse of a goddess. However, as an afterthought, she would correct this by saying that they died because of poor health and health care. She says that the health care was so costly and so distant that she could not afford to access it frequently, even when her children were suffering from runny bowels. Indeed, even today, the pregnant women in her habitation area deliver their children in their respective homes supervised by their mother-in-law and assisted by their husband. Valli’s delivery too was attended to by her husband, Selvaraj, and mother-in-law, Laxmi. Angalai, Valli’s neighbor, told her that an institutional delivery was not advisable. If she and her baby were in the hospital, she wondered who would take care of them and who would feed them good food. At least at home they could get good food and receive care from her husband and in-laws, who could afford to attend to their needs. In fact, their idea of a hospital is a place where the staff members give some colorful tablets and are grossly indifferent to them. It is far away from their reach, as they do not have reserve money, leisure, and time to go to the hospital. Over a period of time, they have learned to live without institutional health care. They have evolved their own defense mechanisms and belief systems and also alternative medical practices that are hardly effective.

As a result, Valli’s surviving children, Vasantha and Chinnathampi, look visibly malnourished. When ADRA was organizing its medical camp, it made a special effort to bring Valli and Selvaraj to the camp with their children. The ADRA staff put them across from the village health nurse. The small exposure Valli received that day and the gentle admonition she got from the visiting nurse are reasons that she now underplays the curse of a goddess as the cause of her children’s death and attributes it to poor health care or to an unhygienic water source. Their only source of water is the small fount they dig; though the water is tasty, it could get easily polluted.
 
Ask her now why her children died, and she would say that they died of “loose motion” and she tried her best to save them, which meant taking them to the government hospital. But diarrhea continued despite that, and gradually she gave up on them and left it to her Kula (traditional) goddess to decide their fate.

Now, with some awareness being built in her, she vows to protect her surviving children by ensuring adequate health care. But Valli is not to be blamed for that. Only when there is a comprehensive social change that ensures that there is an overall development in their lives will they access these services. But as it stands now, their future generation too risks repeating the same social and economic disasters that their parents and forefathers were victims of.

Apart from that, ADRA had since 2002 also granted the blind farmers small scheme loans up to the tune of 27.6 million cedis to expand their agricultural activities.
 
Mr. Anthony Manooh, Technical Co-ordinator of Agriculture and Natural Resource Management of ADRA who presented the items expressed satisfaction at the performance of the farmers in soya bean cultivation, cashew planting and dry season gardening.
 
He challenged other physically challenged persons in society to take a leaf from the activities of the Karni blind farmers to engage themselves in productive ventures that would render them independent in society.
 
Mr. Manooh promised to offer them all the assistance they needed to harness their potentials to live comfortable and respectable lives in society.
 
Mr. Sampson Bediako Fordjour, Field Project Officer at Wa promised to supply them with grafted mango seedlings to add to other farming activities they were engaged in.
 
He called for regular meetings among them so as to come out with suggestions that could be useful for their development. ADRA also organised a three-day capacity building workshop for the farmers to equip them with technical skills and enhance modern ways of agriculture to improve on production.
 
The ADRA officials also educated them on the need to use improved seeds and prepare the land in line with modern trends that would increase field.
 
The participants were also taken through savings, record-keeping and the use of organic manure to improve yield and reduce cost of production.
 
© 2005 Copyright Ghana News Agency (GNA)

This article does not necessarily reflect the views of ADRA International

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Heavy, humid air enveloped me as I walked onto the tarmac at Vientienne airport, in Lao People’s Democratic Republic (PDR). En route to Luang Nam Tha province, tucked into the northernmost corner of Lao, and landlocked against China, I climbed the stairs and scrunched down into my seat on a tiny, 12-seater plane.

The aerial view showed terraced rice paddy fields dotted with men, women, and children—knee deep in muddy water, and backs bent in the heavy labor demanded of planting rice. The rainy season had arrived early, leaving the land muddy, but the vegetation green and lush. It is here that generations in Luang Nam Tha have labored valiantly for their survival.

ADRA is present in this “land of friendship” because 40 percent of its nearly six million population live below the poverty line—73 percent receive less than $2 per day in income. Only 37 percent have access to safe drinking water and less than half the population have access to sanitation facilities. Many are hanging on, to economic and physical survival by a thread. Literally.

Ironically, it’s with a thread that ADRA is reversing those statistics. The villagers of Luang Nam Tha are widely known for their production and weaving of natural silk. Through moriculture (mulberry cultivation) and sericulture (the commercial breeding of silkworms) projects, ADRA aims to increase household income, reduce poverty, protect the environment, and provide employment for women while maintaining and reviving local tradition, identity, and pride.

As we slowly edged our truck up a steep, muddy road, I found Onkeo, a 33-yearold mother of four, weeding her mulberry plantation. She courageously tried a new hybrid of mulberry saplings that ADRA introduced. Feeding her worms the new mulberry leaves and using a new “out of pot” technique for pulling thread and a spinning wheel, has helped to make her thread stronger, thicker, and less sticky.

ADRA trained her in new silkworm rearing techniques and mulberry planting, fertilizing, and pruning techniques then gave her a loan for fencing around her plantation and the saplings. ADRA also provided loans for silkworm cabinets that keep insects out of the silkworm rearing baskets. Onkeo’s family income has increased due to the higher quality of thread, enabling her to meet her family’s needs and save money for a paddy-tiller.

Just before leaving, I stopped at the ADRA Training Center where women gather to learn the new silkworm rearing and weaving techniques. A woman was hunched over a loom, busily stamping out an intricate silk scarf. The loom ADRA is training her on is more efficient and offers greater pattern variety than the traditional loom. On hand is an ADRA weaving trainer to ensure that materials produced are high quality, and an ADRA marketing manager who cultivates markets for the women’s silk products.

ADRA is also targeting vital health needs in this province. Through the Luang Nam Tha Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Project (LWP), ADRA is constructing latrines and gravity flow water systems, including maintenance training and a maintenance fund.

Targeting the same communities as the LWP, ADRA’s Responsive Education and Action for Community Health (REACH) project is reaching 12 villages with health education and a mobile clinic. Village health volunteers are trained to offer basic medical treatment and conduct health education activities in their villages. An ADRA-supplied medical kit enables villagers to purchase medical supplies quickly from the village health volunteer, creating a revolving drug fund.

These health projects are benefiting more than 3,000 people like Boua Kham, an ADRA village health volunteer. She has a deep passion for her work. Boua’s given birth to seven children, but she lost four to preventable causes. “My children would probably be alive today if I had known what ADRA has taught me,” she said sadly. She is an avid promoter of ADRA’s “3 Cleans!” campaign: eat clean, drink clean, and live clean. Every day, her work is dedicated to preventing other mothers from the loss she has borne.

In Lao, lives once knotted in poverty and illness now weave dreams of a healthy, prosperous and educated future because of ADRA. But more remains to be done. Many others wish to participate in the silkworm rearing and mulberry plantation project and many villages desperately need health assistance. “For many communities ADRA is their only hope,” the ADRA health staff stated. “When we have knowledge that can save a life, and the power to share it, we have a responsibility to share it.”

It’s a responsibility that ADRA and its staff carry courageously. It’s a responsibility we see demonstrated in the compassion and generosity of the faithful donors who make all of this possible.

And with your help today, ADRA will be able to do more to make Boua’s words come true for other mothers. “My children would probably be alive today if I had known what ADRA has taught me…”

Thank you for donating today!

There was one sheikh and Mosque speaker in Baqim, who was against the midwife training ADRA, was conducting. He told the people the training was dangerous for the girls and that it was against their habits, customs and the Islamic religion. He refused to let his family receive services from the trainers and trainees.

After months of midwife training, the trainers were called for a home delivery. They went to the house and delivered the baby, providing all the services the mother needed. The new mother happened to be the sheikh’s niece. Sometime afterwards, the Sheikh attended a meeting in the training center with the government health director.

When the meeting was over, he asked the trainers if he could see the training material. He was given the training posters and curriculum and all other information he requested. The sheikh apologized and agreed that the girls should participate in the ADRA training program.

The sheikh started speaking in the mosque about the advantages of the ADRA Midwife Training Center and how ADRA is helping the district by teaching the girls and helping the people in the areas of reproductive health services.

One of the Community Midwife trainees shared with me how taking the ADRA Midwife Training had impacted and changed her life for the better, she said: Before I attended this training I was very shy, I could not talk to other people. I started the training, but my family and some of my neighbors were against me. After a while I was able to share some health education with a family member who was a very heavy smoker and had had a small baby, which was malnourished. I asked her to breast-feed the baby and stop smoking. I told her about the risks to her baby and herself if she continued smoking. She listened to me and told her sisters and others, they too stopped smoking and started asking me for advice. They also started taking better care of their children. Now my neighbors come to me for medications or counseling, they trust me and encourage me.

I could not believe myself after the training, I felt like I was dreaming. I can’t believe that I can talk with others, and give counseling to them for family planning. The difference between how I was then and how I am now and the confidence I have gained, is because of the training I received.

The ADRA canoe glided through the mangrove forest carrying me to one of many destinations on this journeyNggatokae Island. Intense, natural beauty grows rampant with lush tropical forest and wild orchids blooming everywhere. Walking towards Somboro village, the wind increased, bringing some respite from the hot and humid weather. But also the first drops of rain. I was glad to step inside the home of Illene Kenneth and listen as she spilled out her story. Outside her simple home, the rain poured heavily.

“Name blong me hem Illene Kenneth. Me likem for talem you how ADRA hem chagem life blong me. My name is Illene Kenneth. I want to tell you how ADRA changed my life.

“I live in the village of Somboro on Nggatokae Island in the Solomon Islands. My island is in the largest lagoon in the world, Marovo Lagoon. It is very beautiful here, but we have many hardships.

“Although I live a routine life nowpreparing meals for my four boys, washing clothes, gardening, collecting food, having worship, preparing dinner for the family, and putting the kids to bed it hasn’t always been like this. Not so long ago, I spent two hours each day getting water.

“The only water supply was more than a mile away. And I made four trips every day just to get the basic water we needed. In our culture, drawing water is considered women’s work, so my boys couldn’t help me carry water. I have no girls to help, so the burden was mine alone.

“Those four daily trips were just for the water we needed to drink and cook. With the water so far away, I often didn’t have the energy to get enough water to wash clothes as often as I should. Some days we ran out of water at night. Not wanting to make a trip in the dark, we didn’t clean up after dinner. This drew flies and insects to our home. We weren’t able to bathe every day, even the children.

“My children were often sick with many types of diseases. My boys had diarrhea and all types of boils, rashes, and skin infections. So did most of the children and people in my village. Those things affected us greatly, especially for the mothers because the nearest health clinic is so far away. We tried our best to survive, but it was so difficult.”

Will you help women and children like these whose endless search for water is the difference between life and death?

Illene’s eyes lit up as she continued her story, “When ADRA came, things changed for the better. Not just for me, but for my whole village. Our village impressed ADRA because we have a high school here that is a community initiative. It is not a government high school or a private high school. The community started it and keeps it running. ADRA could see that we are a very motivated village, but needed help. They talked with us about our needs and everyone agreed a new water source was a priority. Together, we decided to install a new water system for our village and high school.

“We all wanted to help, but couldn’t afford the equipment for a water system. ADRA paid for those, but we gave what we could — our labor. We worked together to carry equipment and parts along the five-mile route the water would run and dug trenches for the pipes.

“There are now many water pumps in my village. Now that we have a water supply and are able to wash more frequently, we are much healthier. It is a natural remedy for us just being able to wash and bathe our children. Not long after the water supply came, our boils, rashes, skin diseases, diarrhea, and sickness disappeared. That makes things easier. I am a great believer in clean water.”

Illene’s life had changed because she now has access to water that provides life, literally. ADRA’s development programs in the villages in the remote Solomon Islands are helping villagers create new futures for themselves and their children. Generations to come will remember ADRA’s name as the agency that gave them the promise of a brighter tomorrow.

Will you help ADRA change lives for more women and children?

“Now that I don’t have to spend two hours getting water every day, I have more time to spend working for my family and on other things like garden activities and keeping my home clean,” Illene continues.

“My children have more food because I now have time to plant my garden properly. This means that they also get better nutrition. I am also able to be more involved in the community. Each Tuesday, the women in our village meet together to learn new skills like sewing, traditional weaving, or other practical skills. Previously, we never had time to do this.

“ADRA is my partner and helps develop and improve my community. They worked together with us to improve our lives. It is like a burden has been lifted.” Leaving Somboro, our boat skimmed across Marovo Lagoon past countless other islands. I wondered how many more people lived in these places that also need clean water and improved health. Even though ADRA is changing hundreds of lives in the Solomon Islands through the 10 gravity-fed water systems that have already been installed, much more needs to be done.

Many more children are suffering from lack of clean water. Together, we can change that. With your help, ADRA can continue improving the lives of women like Illene and her family.

How many lives will you change today?

The hard-packed dirt floor, mud walls and dark shadows bore no resemblance to the way I’d imagined a room like this to be. Steady moans came from the young woman lying in the corner and only the traditional supplies of a cloth, razor blade, and wood shavings lay on the shelf nearby. It was hard to imagine that here a new life would be welcomed ... hopefully.

Will you help mothers like these?

Compared with the sterile, doctorand nurse-fi lled delivery rooms in my world, the two scenes couldn’t be more different. With the exception of one significant similarity. It’s embedded in the hearts of new mothers everywhere: the hope that their child will be healthy. The dream that their child’s life will be better than theirs. The desire to see their every aspiration met, their every dream come true and the wish that opportunity will meet their every ambition.

Stepping into that mud-walled world, life’s unfairness became painfully clear when I realized that for these woman—and for you and me—where we’re born heavily determines how or if we will live. The same is true of our children. And although it shouldn’t be, in Malawi and other developing countries, a healthy, opportunity-filled future remains unattainable for most.

You can help change that by partnering with ADRA!

More than 500,000 women die each year of pregnancy-related causes, Every Mother’s Wish 99 percent of them in the developing world. Malawi has one of the highest maternal mortality ratios in the world—1,100 per 100,000 births. In the United States, that number is eight per 100,000. The infant mortality rate in Malawi is 120 deaths per 1,000 live births versus seven deaths per 1,000 live births here in the United States.

And even if an infant survives the birth, more than 10 percent of children born in Malawi will die before their first birthday, and about 19 percent will die before their fifth birthday-many from preventable causes, such as malnutrition and HIV and AIDS, including mother-to-child transmission.

Also severely encumbering a mother’s potential is the HIV and AIDS epidemic in Malawi. Of the 800,000 people living with HIV and AIDS in Malawi, more than half are women, and 40,000 of them are their children. Mothers have also had to leave behind an estimated cumulative number of 390,000 AIDS orphans.

I couldn’t help but see the conditions of their world juxtaposed against mine and felt their undoubted frustration as most of their dreams, and the opportunities every human being deserves, remained out of reach. Fortunately, they don’t stand alone.

Change this by partnering with ADRA’s ministry.

Will you?

Part of ADRA’s mission statement acknowledges the mutual dreams it shares with mothers by asserting that it will, "Facilitate the right and ability of all children to attain their full potential, and assist in assuring the child’s survival to achieve that potential." With that mission, ADRA could not stand idly by in Malawi.

Since 1991, ADRA’s comprehensive programs for men, women, and children in Malawi, funded by the Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA), have targeted family planning, birth spacing, home-based care, HIV and AIDS and sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in 22 of the 29 districts in Malawi. They provide training to community health workers and traditional birth attendants to promote healthy children and safe pregnancies.

For the scene I described earlier to happen to fewer women, ADRA trains health workers to refer high-risk pregnancies to clinics, to use gloves during delivery, and for each woman to provide their own razor blade to prevent the spread of AIDS during the delivery process. The most recent phase of this project, from 2001-2003, benefited 1.2 million people.

In Malawi, the HIV and AIDS epidemic can be overwhelming, but hope lies in that country’s children. ADRA’s Anti-AIDS clubs provide recreational activities, focus-group discussions, and materials about AIDS. ADRA also targets youth out-of-school with brochures, drama, small business skills training, and small loans for entrepreneurs who complete the training.

ADRA’s daily 15-minute radio program and weekly TV show, both titled, Why Are We Dying? address the cultural practices that spread the disease, reaching more people than our projects or staff could personally touch.

Malawians, like the 19 community health volunteers I met at the Chilipa Health Center, are working hard for their own future and their communities. Since 1996, ADRA has been here in the Zomba district where ADRA community health volunteers teach their neighbors about family planning, HIV and AIDS and sexually transmitted infections. They’re proud to announce that their infant mortality rate is dropping.

They also think of women differently now as they’ve learned that a healthy mother means a healthy child and a healthy community. “Our community can develop only if we are healthy,” recognized one health volunteer.

ADRA, in partnership with each community, is fighting valiantly to enable and preserve the health of children and youth as well as strengthen the rights and health of mothers in Malawi. But the task ahead remains heavy.

That’s where your donation makes the most impact.

Will you donate a generous gift today for mothers in Malawi and other developing countries where the promise of life is tenuous, at best?

Your gift will help provide the medical help and training needed to empower women to deliver healthy babies, and to make appropriate lifestyle choices to help prevent the spread of HIV and AIDS.

At this time of year as we celebrate “Mother’s Day” worldwide, remember the mothers of kindred spirits in Malawi. As you watch each step of your child’s or grandchild’s journey through life, and your dreams fulfilled as your children grow, eat bountifully, head off to school or walk down the aisle in marriage, remember that those dreams are dreams of the women in Malawi, too.

With your help, ADRA can continue fighting for every mother’s wish. How many mothers and children will you help today?