“If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” –Mother Teresa

I am a big fan of quotes and this is one that is particularly powerful to me. It is one that keeps me motivated to work for worldwide justice. It reminds me why it is important that I think about others when I make lifestyle choices each day. It is a quote that reminds me that I am connected to each and every human being on this planet.

First, I want to reflect on the word “peace”. In college I am pursuing a minor in Peace Studies, so I’ve thought a lot about what this word means. One aspect of peace that I have learned in my classes is that there are two different kinds of peace. One is negative peace, which sounds bad but it really just means an absence of war and violence. The other is positive peace which is a little more comprehensive. Positive peace includes anything related to justice: social, racial and economic, gender, environmental, etc. In a document from the University of Hawaii, Professor R.J. Rummel states, “This is not only peace from violence, but also peace of mind.” The quote serves as a reminder to me to work for justice, to work for creating a worldwide “peace of mind.”

 “We belong to each other” also resonates with me. Although we tend to divide humankind by race, religion, nation, geographic location, class and caste, I believe we are all neighbors, no matter how far away we are from each other. Simply because we are all human beings, we need to take care of each other. But more than that, we are all connected – even if it doesn’t feel like it sometimes. For example, I know that personally, on a day-to-day basis, I don’t notice the effects of climate change. However, this is not the case everywhere. While I was in India, I talked with a tribal village that truly relied on the land. Their water supply came from the local river, they relied on plants and animals around them for food, and much of their livelihood came from the surrounding forests. As we talked to them, they explained how in recent years, life has gotten more difficult. The river is drying up and the forest is disappearing. Performing their daily tasks is getting harder and harder. These people, who lived in a manner much more sustainable than I do, were suffering in part because of the actions of others around the world. They asked us if God was punishing them for something. My connection to strangers halfway across the world has never been clearer to me than at that moment. My actions and habits can affect others.

“If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” This is a quote I turn to again and again for inspiration and motivation. Are there anymore quote lovers out there? What quote helps you on your road to justice?

My mother loves to bake; from fruit pies to Swedish pastries her two ovens provide the best parts of Holiday meals. Ever since I can remember, one of my favorite recipes of hers has been Beech Bread. Until last week I always thought that this was another one of those recipes passed down from cookbook to cookbook, like the rye bread recipe my great grandfather brought over from the Åland Islands. It turns out, however, that this isn’t the case at all! After college one of my mom’s first jobs was at our local health department. One of her co-workers was a nutritionist who taught local women involved in the WIC (Women, Infants and Children) Program recipes for affordable nutritious foods, and this is where her recipe came from. So it turns out that my yummy, moist and rich childhood Beech Bread isn’t a family recipe at all!

As ELCA Advocacy urges support for a strong Child Nutrition and WIC Reauthorization Act in 2010 that increases access, expands participation and improves nutrition standards, I thought I would share a recipe that continues to be an important morsel of my life today. Admittedly, the recipe is nearly 30 years old, so I have no idea if it has recently been in use in health department classes or the WIC program, but I do know that it tastes just as good as ever…in fact, I just finished a slice!

BEECH BREAD (a “quick” bread)

3 cups buttermilk or sour milk*

3 cups whole wheat flour

3 cups enriched all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon salt

3 teaspoons baking soda

1 cup molasses

1 egg, beaten

*to make sour milk, add 1 Tablespoon vinegar or lemon juice per cup of regular milk. Let sit 5 minutes.

Directions – Combine flours, salt and soda. Mix well. Add buttermilk, molasses and beaten egg to the dry mixture. Blend together well. Let stand in bowl for 20 minutes. Pour batter into 2 greased and floured pans (about 9”x5”x3”). Bake at 375 degrees for 60 – 75 minutes.

Enjoy!

Lana

Last week one of the items of “Top Hunger News” featured on Bread for the World’s blog was this video, recently released by NPR, explaining the unintended impact that giving away free food has had on the local economy in Haiti.

In the aftermath of January’s devastating earthquake in Haiti, post-disaster relief is creating a new kind of problem for businesses there. The massive influx of food aid has altered the price of rice, throwing the delicate balance in Haiti’s food supply chain out of whack and threatening to collapse the country’s rice market. – Bread blog

I watched the video and with its implications on my mind, throughout the week had conversations with different people and read more on the topic of food aid, like this article about outside organizations overwhelming Haiti’s local aid economy.

Last week I blogged about Enough: Why the World’s Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty. The questions and wonderings and conversations I had surrounding food aid were piqued in part by one of the chapters, “Who’s Aiding Whom?” focusing on Nazareth, Ethiopia in 2003. The authors write of Jerman Amente, an Ethiopian farmer and grain trader who “shook with anger” when he saw American food intended for starving Ethiopians pour into the country, while homegrown Ethiopian wheat, corn, beans, peas, and lentils “languished untouched” (86). Kedir Geleto, the manager of a grain-trading operation in Ethiopia, says in the chapter, “American farmers have a market in Ethiopia, but we don’t have a market in Ethiopia…We don’t oppose food aid. When there’s a deficit in the country, of course we need it. But when there’s plenty of food in the country, then it’s unbelievable” (87).

I’m relatively new to this conversation about food aid. While I certainly had a sense that not all aid is equal, and that very well-meaning people with good intentions can actually cause harm, the past few weeks have been the first time I truly gave these ideas more than a passing thought. With just a little digging I found a wealth of opinions and information that help me be better informed and more respectfully critical. Here’s my question: who else is new to the conversation about food aid and what have you been learning? How about veterans? What should we know?

Julie Reishus

As I was doing research for a paper I am writing on gender and development, I ran across an intriguing definition of the word poverty. Through my classes in college and my work at ELCA World Hunger I have done a lot of thinking about big issues related to poverty, but seldom do I sit down and think about what the word actually means. I decided to do some investigating on how others define poverty and here is what I came up with.

Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary defines poverty as “the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions,” “renunciation as a member of a religious order of the right as an individual to own property,” “debility due to malnutrition,” and even a “lack of fertility”! Besides the last part, this definition covers a basic view of what poverty is, not having money or property or enough food to eat.

Next, I looked up a more concrete way of defining poverty. According to the World Bank, the international poverty line, as of 2005 defines poverty as living on less than $1.25 a day. Domestically, the United States Department of Health and Human Services poverty guideline for a four person household in 2009 was an annual income of $22,050 or below. According to the CIA World Factbook, Israel views poverty as living on $7.30 a day or less, and Mexico bases their definition of poverty on the amount of food one has. 

The definition I ran across in my research comes from Charlotte Wrigley-Asante in the Norwegian Journal of Geography. She argues that poverty is more than lack of income, but also incorporates “lack of dignity and autonomy and vulnerability.” She states that poverty is “the uneven distribution of life changes and experiences” and that “poverty is equated with deprivation and lack of social power.” She also includes vulnerability to “risks, shocks and stress and the inability to deal with them without sustaining damaging loss” in her definition of poverty.

Now that I have shared what I found, I want to hear what you think! What is poverty? Lack of money? A specific number? Being deprived of human capabilities? How would you define poverty?

“He smote the bank!” cackles Jean Stapleton, after John Travolta, as the archangel Michael, casually unleashes a bolt of lightning in the movie “Michael.”

Earthquakes, oil spills, floods, droughts—there’s a lot of smiting going on, and a lot of preparing for it, not with sackcloth and ashes but catastrophe scenarios and emergency response plans and drills.

I discovered this last week at a talk on the Great Storm of 1861-1862—the one that turned California’s Central Valley into a 300-mile long puddle; the one that forced the California state government to move to San Francisco; the one that damaged 7/8^ths of all housing and destroyed one out of every eight homes and a third of all taxable property in California.

Sacramento in 1862

This fascinating, safely distant story of a smitten state was followed by an anxiety-generating winter storm scenario that the U.S. Geological Survey is creating. The hypothetical date of this “extreme precipitation event” is January 2011; May 2011 is when the agencies and emergency managers and responders will hold their practice drill. Based on the understanding that California has a “mega storm” every 300 years (and destructive as it was, 1861-62 wasn’t a mega storm), these experts are:

…examining the possibility, cost, and consequences of floods, landslides, coastal erosion and inundation; debris flows; biologic impacts; physical damage such as property loss from wind, flood, and landslide; and lifeline impacts such as bridge scour [when the sand and rocks around a bridge give way, leading to collapse], road closures, and levee failures. Consideration is given to the disruption of water supply and the impacts on ground-water pumping, seawater intrusion and water supply degradation. The scenario is depicting the economic consequences of these damages in terms of repair costs and business interruption, public-health implications, and emergency response.

The USGS guy painted the picture starkly and dramatically. When he finished, the room was silent. Finally the emcee stood to thank the speakers and said, a little shakily, “well, I guess it’s time we all move to the foothills.” We took home delightful reading: “The ShakeOut Earthquake Scenario,” which modeled the aftereffects of a hypothetical 7.8 earthquake on the southern San Andreas Fault as the morning rush hour was ending. That Southern California earthquake drill, involving 5000 emergency responders and 5 million citizens, has already taken place. (Watch this USGS video on the earthquake scenario and  the ARkStorm winter storm project, and check out the Old Testament imagery.)

Appalled and intrigued, I went to the Internet, and discovered I could learn how a New Madrid mega-earthquake would affect the Midwest, where almost no anti-seismic measures are in place. Briefly, five to eight states would be affected; local mutual aid would not work; bridges over the Mississippi could be uncrossable for several hundred miles, for years; transmission of natural gas, oil, and electricity to much of the east coast would be affected for many months, along with the supply of wheat and grains to other parts of the world; there would be significant out-migration. (Question for discussion in this FEMA exercise: what could or would emergency managers in one local jurisdiction like Memphis do when faced with such a catastrophe?)

Or I could choose a scenario for a slow-developing catastrophe like Lake Mead going dry, leaving 22 million people in three states without water. (Discussion question: How can emergency managers in Las Vegas prepare to respond?)

Or I could browse peak gas scenarios, 2012 Armageddon scenarios, global warming scenarios, armchair quarterback analyses of the Black Plague, the Irish Potato Famine, the 1917 Influenza Pandemic, Hurricane Katrina, or Limits to Growth, the 1972 scenario published by the Club of Rome that projected nine different outcomes based on the variables of world population, industrialization, pollution, food production and resource depletion. Only one of those nine is hopeful; the others are so dire, a catastrophe response plan would be pointless.  Recent studies confirm (says Wikipedia) that current “changes in industrial production, food production and pollution are all in line with the book’s predictions of economic and societal collapse in the 21^st century.”

Things are not looking good.

It’s tempting to call my efforts to live a sustainable life foolish. To quit trying to support alternative systems and behavior. To chuck  my bicycle for a really big car. But I think I’ll stay the course.

Why? For starters, imagining catastrophe is the first step in trying to mitigate it. The literature of catastrophe helps us grasp the scope of what we face, and discern what part of it is in our control. The silver lining to spending a sunny  afternoon imagining my hometown underwater was learning just how many people are collaborating on the response.

Second, letting go of the idea that everything is in our control is just plain healthy. No amount of clean living and recycling can prevent an earthquake!

Third, there is power in individual and collective action. Martin Luther thought so, too. Asked what he would do if the world were to end tomorrow, he said, “Plant an apple tree today.”

Smiting happens. But faith kicks in where reason ends. I’m voting for faith, for the apple tree, for the bicycle helmet. And I’m  spending tomorrow curled up with “A Guide to Emergency Preparedness for Sacramento County.”

Anne Basye,  Sustaining Simplicity

“The hardest thing in the world is to simplify your life, it’s so easy to make it complex. The solution may be for a lot of the world’s problems is to turn around and take a forward step, you can’t just keep trying to make a flawed system work .” – Yvon Chouinard

On Tuesday evening I was invited to watch the film 180 Degrees South. The film is a modern day reenactment of the epic 1968 journey of Yvon Chouinard (founder of Patagonia) and Doug Tompkins (founder of The North Face and Conservacion Patagonica) from Ventura, California to the mountaintop of Patagonia, Chile. Although I expected and hoped for the surf movie feel of the film, I did not expect how it made me think further about the interconnections of the environment, hunger, poverty and advocacy.

The film follows writer and photographer Jeff Johnson as he reenacts his hero’s journey, but well, on his own terms. His epic adventure lands him on a sail boat headed south and takes him for a ride to beautiful Easter Island. Through his journey to Patagonia viewers are introduced to issues facing local industries in Chile who are suffering from the effects of urban sprawl, water privatization and industrial pollution. My heart went out to the fisherman who recalled how schools of fish used to practically swim to their shore and their emphasis on respecting the ocean. 180 Degrees South paints a passionate picture of the need for advocacy, the power of a few people and the deep cry of our environment.

It’s 85 minutes well worth your time.

Watch the trailer here.

~Lana

I am a book lover. I am always reading, and usually that means I’m working my way through five or six books at the same time. My dad laughed at me the other day as I explained to him which category each of the eight books sitting on my bedside table falls into: currently reading, haven’t started but up next on the list, or must reread. I have an ever-growing list of books I want to read, and my work at ELCA World Hunger so far has inspired the addition of many new titles.

While my list is long, there’s one book I’m happy I gave priority to and proud to say I recently finished: Enough: Why the World’s Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty, by Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman.

Thurow and Kilman are Wall Street Journal reporters who’ve been writing on Africa, development, and agriculture for decades. Enough is a result of their extensive reporting about global hunger and the forces behind famine. Each chapter is a compelling story and an illuminating piece of the history or current reality of hunger. The book’s coverage is expansive; rather than try to sum it up I’ll include this passage from the preface:

This book tells the story of the squandered promise of the Green Revolution and the neglect that brought hunger and famine into the twenty-first century. It is the story of Africa and the missed opportunities, the wars and megalomania, the folly and the good intentions gone bad that have left its agricultural potential largely unrealized, its people hungrier that ever before, and the entire world aching for more and cheaper food. It is a tale of self-interest and hypocrisy in the United States and Europe, how subsidies and food aid have gone awry, how geopolitics influenced by remnants of colonial-era policies and practices of the old European powers determine that some countries should bloom and others should starve, how markets failed, how warnings went unheeded, how the present crisis is engulfing us.

This is also, in Part II, the story of the new movement to reclaim the revolution’s lost promise and restore its momentum. It follows the trail from Borlaug to Bono, the Irish rock musician haunted by the chorus of the hungry he first heard in Ethiopia in 1984. From Bill Gates and his foundation colleagues, who realized that the medicine they were bringing to Africa was useless in a malnourished body, to Joe Mamlin, an Indiana doctor who became a farmer in Kenya so his AIDS patients would have something to eat. From Eleni Gabre-Madhim, who kept tilting at windmills until she brought a commodities exchange to her native Ethiopia, to Francis Pelekamoyo, whose Bible led his conversion from Malawi’s central banker to humble microlender. From a small town in Ohio to a tiny village in Kenya. From European CEOs to a couple of American sitcom-watching moms to a son of billionaire investor Warren Buffett. From British church activists to former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair to statesmen in Ireland working to ensure that their country’s dark history of famine isn’t repeated elsewhere in the future.

The authors’ hope is to “outrage and inspire.” With this reader they certainly achieved both. I would add that they also inform. The writing is extremely accessible and engaging, and the treatment of the issues is both broad and in-depth. The authors don’t prescribe one political view over another, but do take a critical stance on some powerful groups. I gained a helpful current and historical understanding of complicated issues that was not impossible to digest and not overly simplified. Enough was a hard book to read in the sense that I felt sorrow and anger at many points, but it’s also a hopeful book. I absolutely recommend it to anyone troubled by the 1 billion undernourished people in the world.

Check out this video about one of the stories in the book, and Roger Thurow’s blog.

“At the end of the day, when in doubt, I’ll feed the hungry.” — Dr. Mamlin, page 163

Julie Reishus

The Book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide is written by a husband and wife team who are former journalists for the New York Times, and through their travels found an issue that had been missing from the headlines- the ongoing struggle for gender equality around the world, and what this inequality means for women in the global South.

Half the Sky focuses on four issues in which gender discrimination is hurting and killing women around the world. Here is a snapshot of the issues they discuss in detail, along with some statistics from the book about the scope of these issues around the globe.

Human Trafficking: 600,000-800,000 people are trafficked across international borders each year and 80% of them are women and girls. They are trafficked mainly for sexual exploitation. Millions more are trafficked within countries each year.

Rape and violence: In most countries between 30-60% of women have experienced sexual or physical violence from a partner. Many women don’t report rape for fear of being stigmatized.

Maternal Mortality: In the global South there is one maternal death per minute. The lifetime risk of maternal death is 1,000 times higher in a poorer country than in a more prosperous country.

Routine discrimination: Between 60 and 101 million women are missing from around the world today. They have died due to unequal care or feticide, and at least another 2 million die from discrimination each year.

In addition to discussing these horrific problems that come along with gender inequality, the authors also provide ways to, as their title states, turn “oppression into opportunity.” The two solutions they focus on the most are educating girls and women and providing them with microloans. By educating girls and women, the authors argue that they can receive the necessary tools to stand against injustice, and are given the opportunity to participate in the economy. By receiving microloans, the book suggests that it gives women more power in society while giving them the chance to get out of poverty.

One helpful tool that Half the Sky provides is ways in which you can get involved in the struggle for global gender equality. The book provides many inspiring success stories of how individuals have overcome oppression, and also provides specific actions anyone can take to make a difference in the lives of women worldwide.

If you are interested in obtaining a study guide for this book, check out The Table!

-Allie Stehlin

Life + Debt, 2001 (86 minutes)

Life and Debt explores the impact of globalization on Jamaica.  The film provides an important perspective for groups who want to engage in fairly deep discussion around the topics of globalization, trade policy, and economic development.  The piece is certainly provocative, as it portrays an important but rather condemning view of the West and the United States and may cause discomfort among some viewers.  I was disturbed by the film (at several levels), and I was also left wondering about the current state of affairs, especially given the recent economic climate.

A discussion guide of the film is available here.  More info on Jamaica and the the work of the ELCA there is available at www.elca.org/jamaica.