Features
Silvia's Fight for Equality
Born and raised in Ixtahuacán, Huehuetenango, a town very close to the Guatemala-Mexico border, Silvia’s childhood was very hard. Beautiful green mountains, fresh air and a quiet small town were the landscapes that surrounded Silvia throughout her childhood and adolescence. But she had to make her best efforts to break the many barriers that tried to stop her from becoming a successful woman in a culture that often sees and treats women as feeble. Read more...
From Concrete to Custody
Bungee is a rough-cut gangster. By day, he sleeps and lays low; by night, he runs the streets of Mindanao, Philippines, ruling a gang known as the Black Scorpions. He protects his gang’s territory, steals to make ends meet and pretty soon he could become a local drug lord. But there is one thing that separates Bungee from most other hardened gangsters—he is 12 years old. Read more...
Keywords
A Hand Up, Not a Handout
Marcel, a 30-year-old friend from Rwanda, wrote an email stating: “I am not good because there has been a long time without a job. I am still looking for a job. My life is not going well for me.” Marcel was not making a veiled plea for a handout; he truly wanted an opportunity to use his skills and abilities to provide for his needs. Read more...
Keywords
The God of Chaos or Order
Sometimes, I get a little sick of the “Jesus fixed my life” testimonies. Don’t get me wrong—I love it when people come to Christ for the first time or are healed of lifelong addictions. But when everything is so resolved and wrapped up with a nice, pretty bow, I tend to question the story’s validity. Because, let’s be honest: life, sometimes, is just plain messy. Read more...
Keywords
Fishing for Recovery
I have been fishing and raising fish all of my life; I spent much of my summertime youth playing in and around my grandparent’s ponds, raising bass, sunfish and bluegills. I caught fish in nearby lakes, put them into buckets, and rushed home to dump them into our ponds. As I grew older, I read all the books I could find about raising fish and dreamed of someday going into the aquaculture business (farming fish or other crops that are grown in water). I didn’t wind up in the fish business, but as head of Operation Blessing International (OBI), I’m still moving fish from place to place…only now the hobby of my youth has turned into a mission to feed protein-starved children in Haiti and to teach Haitians how to raise their own fish. Soon after the Haiti Earthquake in 2010, OBI teamed up with Zanme Lasante, a Haitian charity founded by Dr. Paul Farmer that runs 12 hospitals and is focused on public health. We purchased land near Port-au-Prince to establish a home and training center for abandoned children with disabilities; special needs kids left homeless by the quake. We found an ideal site owned by a wealthy Haitian that had left Haiti ten years earlier. There were run-down but useful existing buildings and over 80 mature fruit trees heavy with mangos, papayas, and bananas. OBI repaired the buildings, fixed the well, built a new 30-bedroom dorm, dining hall and commercial-sized kitchen while Zanmi Lasante organized and managed an experienced team of around 100 caregivers, trainers and therapists. We named the facility Zanmi Beni, which roughly translated from Haitian Creole, means “Blessed Friend.” For special needs kids, Zanmi Beni has become like an oasis of hope in a desert of despair. Over a year ago, OBI bought a small turn-key tilapia-rearing facility in California. We dismantled it, moved it to Haiti and set it up at Zanmi Beni in order to raise fresh fish for our kids to eat. The tilapia thrived, the kids were fascinated watching them grow and loved the fresh fish suppers, but the facility wasn’t big enough. There were so many other hungry kids that we wanted to feed. It was like a modern day “Loaves and Fishes” story; a multitude of hungry kids but not enough fish to go around. We prayed about it and decided to make the tilapia operation bigger…much bigger. One of the historic problems with fish farming in Haiti is that well-meaning groups try it, but no matter how hard they try… they fail. The main reason for failure in the fish business is lack of experience and expertise. Even though we were already raising fish successfully, I knew that we lacked the expertise to do it in a big way, so we secured the services of Mike Picchietti. Mike, one of the world’s top experts on tilapia, owned a hatchery in Florida and had just sold his interest in a company he founded in the early 90s that harvested 2 million pounds of tilapia filets a week. Mike designed an expanded hatchery, nursery and fish farm for us. He spent lots of time in Haiti and supervised construction and training of our Haitian staff. The new OBI Aqua Center will yield over 50,000 pounds of fresh fish per year, plus provide large numbers of fingerlings to ensure sustainability and supply the needs of Haitians wanting to start their own aquaculture business. We will work in collaboration with the Haitian Department of Agriculture and local universities to train Haitian managers in the practice of aquaculture. In late January, I escorted 60,000 tiny tilapia fry from Florida to Haiti. The baby fish made the trip swimming inside heavy plastic bags filled with oxygenated water, each bag inside an insulated cardboard box. The tilapia fry were donated by Aquasafra, a hatchery owned by Mike Picchietti. Mike donated the fish as the “seed stock” to get our new Aqua Center started. Moving fish over long distances can end in disaster if anything goes wrong. Delays can result in oxygen depletion and dead fish. Our trip aboard a chartered 60-year-old DC-3 went smoothly. Mike and the OBI Haiti team were waiting at the airport along with the Haitian Minister of Aquaculture and our contacts from Zanme Lasante. The Minister worked with customs to expedite transfer of the fish from the airport to our trucks. Upon arrival at the Aqua Center, the plastic bags full of fish were removed from the boxes and placed in the ponds to float until the water temperature in the bags matched that in the ponds. Our team then opened each bag and poured in several quarts of pond water to acclimate the fish to the PH and chemistry of the local water and then the fish were released. All but a few were alive and acting perfectly normal. As I write this, the fish have been in Haiti for just over a month and the tilapia have grown from weighing a half gram each to over 10 grams each! In addition to tilapia we also imported over 2,400 adult ornamentals; Angelfish, Tiger Barbs, Gourami, Platys and Corys. We purchased the ornamentals from commercial fish farms in Florida, but kept them in quarantine at Aquasafra where they were certified as disease-free. The ornamental fish will eventually jump start a brand new aquarium fish industry that will create jobs and income for Haitians. We will train candidates and give them a starter kit including several pairs of brood fish, an aquarium, filter and some fish food. We already have orders from pet stores all over Haiti. If we can teach a young Haitian how to raise some Angelfish on the back porch, besides earning good money, he or she will gain business experience and confidence to raise fish in a bigger way. This, together with the tilapia operation at Zanmi Beni, is how we intend to “teach a nation to fish,” and in so doing, put a dent in the poverty that is strangling the people of Haiti. As a kid in Michigan, I dreamed of growing up and raising fish for a living. Today however, I am blessed to be helping make those dreams come true for others by raising fish and teaching others to earn a living so that they might have a better life. Bill Horan leads Operation Blessing International, a nonprofit organization that has helped millions of people in 105 countries and all 50 U.S. states, providing goods and services valued at more than $2.7 billion and earning the ranking of one of America’s top ten “Most Efficient Charities” by Forbes magazine.
Keywords
Paying It Forward
Laure has big dreams. One day she wants to build a school that teaches young women to sew. She wants to send her kids to university. And she wants to own a boutique. Read more...
Keywords
Fighting Hunger from the Bottom Up
Since 1975, WhyHunger has been a leader in building the movement to end hunger and poverty by connecting people to nutritious, affordable food and supporting grassroots solutions that inspire self-reliance and community empowerment. WhyHunger also partners with musicians—like Bruce Springsteen, Carlos Santana and Marc Broussard—who collect donations and volunteer at WhyHunger partner organizations while on tour. Here, co-founder and Executive Director Bill Ayres discusses taking a long-term view on fighting poverty, his faith and the main lessons he’s learned in the past three decades. How did WhyHunger come to be? The late Harry Chapin was my friend and partner. We started what was then called World Hunger Year in 1975. The initial idea was to work on hunger around the world. We were particularly interested in famine that was taking place in Africa, and we were working with the U.N. to do a concert similar to the [Concert for Bangladesh, a fundraiser organized by George Harrison in 1971]. I said to Harry: "You know, this is never going to be solved by an event. We need to make a commitment to spend the rest of our lives doing this." So we started the organization in 1975, and one of the first things that we did was to talk to a whole bunch of congressmen, and we got President Carter to do the first presidential commission on world hunger. What we had learned in the meantime—and this is something that's very important for us, right at the root of who we are—was two things: one is that the root cause of hunger is poverty; the root cause of poverty is powerlessness. We believe that the solutions come largely from the bottom up, not from the top down. We work with about 8,500 community-based organizations around the country, and many dozens all over the world. Our focus is really being a grassroots support organization. We try to help these organizations that are right on the cutting edge of some of the folks who are not just giving people a sandwich or a bag of food, but are helping people to become self-reliant. That's a big thing for us—self-reliance. We started the first hunger hotline in American right here in New York City. It's now been taken over by the city, but for many years it was something that we'd started and supported—one number to call if you're hungry. That sort of morphed into the National Hunger Hotline, and we now run the only national hunger hotline in America, and we answer calls not only from New York but from all over the country. … We connect [people] to emergency food in their neighborhood, because we have these 8,500 organizations that we work with. How do you find the organizations that you partner with? In the United States it's pretty easy. We had a guy years ago who went out—he was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and he actually wanted to come work for me for less money because he had a real feeling in his heart for this. He visited every state in the country and we created a database, and from there we reached out and branched out to other people through conferences. Internationally we have a small program here called The Global Movements Program. There's only three people in it, but they work very hard to make connections through it. We know through our partners around the world some of these fabulous organizations who are not only giving the handout, but investing in community-based agriculture. Has faith played a role in WhyHunger’s mission? Absolutely. My motivation as a believing person—I think this is a moral issue. About two-thirds of the organizations we work with are faith-based organizations. We had a guy in just a little while ago who works with a Muslim group here in the United States. He's doing a whole walk for us this summer, it's the first time we've ever done that. It's national group of Muslim youth, which we're very excited about. A lot of our partners are also faith-based organizations. One of WhyHunger's focuses is on the environment’s connection to hunger. What is the link between climate change and the food system? One of the things you'll hear a lot of the big agribusiness companies say is that because of climate change and increasing population, we need to have more food. And they're right about that—but they say they're the only ones who can do that, and that's not true. The best way to deal with climate change is agriculture that is respectful of the limitations and the resources of the land and the water. In the Saharan region of Africa, as trees have disappeared over the years, the land obviously gets worse. One of the things you need to do is plant the right kind of trees, and then you give the trees away to the people on the land so that they will take care of it, so that they understand the tree has several features to it. One of them is that it has leaves that provide shade in very hot climates. Leaves often provide fertilization when they mix in with the soil; when you plant them properly, it helps the soil to get regenerated. Climate change is definitely happening, but it's how you deal with it. There's also other methods of agriculture where you're not planting fields and just spraying water over them—a lot of the water evaporates. The Israeli method of drip irrigation is a much wiser way to go. You need to have these farms that are not mono-culture, because when they're mono-culture that can destroy the land much more quickly. Companies take the land from the people, usually with some kind of shady deal with the government. They throw other people off the land and then turn it into grazing land for cattle for some company. Climate change has had a big effect on agriculture, so therefore on hunger, but there's way of dealing with it that can maximize the resources that are there and actually replenish the land. What are some of the biggest lessons you've learned over your time with WhyHunger? The first one is that you've got to do things from the community up. You cannot come up with some great idea and think that everybody is going to jump on it and think it's wonderful and be able to do it. We've seen all kinds of wonderful, innovative ideas that go no place because they then get sort of infused into a place that either doesn't want them or doesn't know how to do them. You really need to get the support of the community before any real change can happen. The other thing is something that I feel strongly about: There's no silver bullet, there's no one thing you can do to end hunger. It's a multi-level approach.
Resettling in Their Brave New World
In 2010, up to 80,000 refugees—victims of war and persecution in their homelands—will be invited by the United States government to come to the U.S. to replant their lives. Read more...
Most Commented