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RELATED LINKS
Read about the 2009 Summer Fellows and their projects. "In Ecuador, Resentment of an Oil Company Oozes," New York Times (May 14, 2009). Learn more about Daniel's climate change/mobile technology project Face the Change.
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IN THIS SECTION
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Notes from the Field
Follow our researchers and fellows as they conduct research in the field. Patrick Vinck with HRC colleagues, Phuong Pham, and Neil Hendrick There are many countries around the world trapped in a cycle of poverty, conflicts and destruction, but few have received as little attention as the Central African Republic (CAR). Its northern neighbors, Chad and Sudan have made the headlines because of the crisis in Darfur. Its southern neighbor, the Democratic Republic of Congo, has been made (in)famous for its series of deadly wars since the 90s. Further to the East, the plight of civilians abducted and enslaved by the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda has been heard. The CAR has been affected by those events. Most recently, the Lords’ Resistance Army has abducted, killed and mutilated civilians in the South-East of the CAR. At the same time, the country has also experienced its own conflicts and violence, generally fueled by poverty and thirst for power. Figure 1: Regional Conflicts (source: HDPT-CAR) [We thank our donors Humanity United and the MacArthur Foundation for their flexibility and their financial support, without which we would not be able to carry out the work here.] At the end of the program, I was observing the seniors, and they were talking to Filipino people. And I said, they don’t know English, so how are they talking? But still, they are talking…She was talking in English, and they were answering in Hindi, but still they were happy. And that’s what I told them during the program: today, I have brought our new friends. So we don’t want to be a frog of one small pond. We will expand our knowledge, our culture, to other people, and in the same way, we will accept their culture. -CAPS Ambassador from the India Community Center My last entry presented the case of a man in his seventies, from Pakistan, who had been granted asylum in the U.S., but had not been able to complete his green card application correctly. He endured two years of intermittent homelessness in the East Bay before a CAPS program “community ambassador” was able to connect him with the International Rescue Committee, translate the necessary applications to obtain affordable housing and food stamps for him, and guide him through health care enrollment. He finally completed his asylum case and his access to these services just a few weeks ago. The dimensions of this case are not unique. A CAPS client from El Salvador had her asylum petition denied when officials confused her file with that of another woman with the same name. Because of her jeopardized immigration status, this woman sought health care only when a chronic problem had become life-threatening, leaving her with insurmountable medical debt. Again, a CAPS ambassador worked with this client for months, eventually obtaining the asylum she had initially sought, annulling her medical debt, and enrolling her in Medi-Cal. In such cases, the ambassador applies her 40-hour training to a wide array of personal and bureaucratic needs: she makes referrals, interprets, and translates, but also functions as a lay therapist, and perhaps even as temporary “family.” If all CAPS did were to provide community-based outreach and advocacy to people in such circumstances, it would be a world-changing program. But another aspect of its work is arguably just as important: its unification of communities that otherwise might never intermingle, let alone organize together for social change. Because CAPS trains volunteers from seven different ethnic and faith communities, the Program naturally brings disparate minorities together in pursuit of common interests. As one ambassador put it: “it’s a ‘we’ situation, not just an individual situation.” Some of the Program’s most meaningful work, in other words, is incidental to helping seniors meet their basic needs through community support; rather, it consists of ambassadors networking with each other. Ambassadors who are Muslims from Pakistan have gone to the Diwali celebration at Fremont’s Hindu temple for the first time, through CAPS connections; Sikhs and Hindus who grew up with Muslim neighbors in India have been to Eid celebrations for the first time, not in India, but in Fremont, also because of CAPS. Through program planning, members of different communities have discovered common challenges, such as changes in family structure over the course of immigration, or seniors being cut off from basic services by linguistic and cultural barriers. Through this recognition of shared obstacles, the seven communities participating in the CAPS program have bonded in ways they otherwise never would have. As an HRC fellow, I have helped with CAPS’s sustainability plan and future funding opportunities, in addition to the Program evaluations. As we look to the factors that have made CAPS worthy of continuation, this sort of community-building takes a center role alongside the more obvious goals of increasing knowledge of services and connecting clients to the resources they need. CAPS has therefore suggested, to the rest of the world, that given a strong human services department and a motivated volunteer base, any municipality could pull disparate groups together for community-driven promotion of access to basic services. As a means to realize the dream of “freedom from want” inscribed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Program has come to exemplify, for me, the revolutionary power of peaceful, local, community-driven action.
A Blackened Jungle
The initial disgust of the pit (shown below), unlined and filled with pure and poisonous crude, was soon met with disbelief as Donald led us to the “gooseneck.” Like most pits in the area, Texaco had attached a pipe at ground level that diverts overflow from the pit when it rains (and it rains almost everyday in the jungle) into the nearest stream or tributary leading to the river. As you probably remember from 5th grade science class, oil rises to the top; and that’s exactly what floods through the gooseneck pipe and gets siphoned into the stream. The bluntness of the company’s system of pollution was striking.
To understand the recent devastation caused by the contamination, you first need to get a sense of the initial optimism brought to the indigenous communities by the arrival of Texaco in the early 70s. Kevin Koenig, who works for the non-profit conservation organization AmazonWatch and joined me on the trip, wrote on the blog Chevron in Ecuador, When Texaco found oil, it was a Beverly Hillbillies moment ("oil that is...black gold...Texas tea"). Touted as a new era, oil was supposed to be the silver bullet that would bring Ecuador out of poverty and permanently put Ecuador on the road to prosperity and international importance. So said Texaco.
One family we visited built their house 30 yards from an oil well over 20 years ago. The mother (pictured below, right) had 7 children, the youngest of which was born and raised next to the operating well. As a little boy he would play in the pits, covered in oil. His mom always told him not to splash around in the pits because the oil stained his clothes, not because it was dangerous. No one ever told them about the poisons in hydrocarbons. He died at 14 of leukemia. Now the mother suffers from a debilitating skin ailment that the doctors cannot diagnose and anemia. The river they bathe in is connected to a “goosenecked” waste pit that releases petrol waste overflow into the tributary. The water they drink comes from a well drilled only 100 meters from an unlined waste pit. They have six hectares of land that barely produce enough bananas, cocoa, and corn from the contaminated soil to survive. Why then, do they stay? The answer was devastating. They simply have nowhere else to go. The mother begged, “We would run from this house if we could.”
In Ecuador, for example, Chevron still plans to drag the case out for another decade at the least, knowing that the those delays will unquestionably lead to suffering and death in the Amazon. The company has shown in the handling of this case that it will spare no cost for legal fees and public relations expenses. This, for me, is the real dagger. If Chevron had used the estimated $100 million worth of legal fees spent so far in this case for repairing the damage caused to the environment instead of to the company’s reputation, lives would have been saved. Just last week, Chevron attorney James Craig said the case will undoubtedly go on past the end of this decade, perhaps past the end of the next decade. That means that 30 years might pass after the indigenous people originally filed the lawsuit informing Chevron of the suffering caused by the company’s contamination. How many illnesses and deaths could have been avoided in that time? How many can still be prevented? Unfortunately, these aren’t the type of calculations discussed in Chevron’s boardroom meetings. As of right now, we are in the final phase of the trial in Lago Agrio. The court appointed expert estimated the total damages at $27 billion. Now, the final decision is in the judge’s hands. While we expect a judgment before the end of the year, no matter the outcome the fight will continue for years to come. Chevron has maintained that they will file an immediate appeal in Ecuador if the judge rules against them. In the meantime, the company continues to slander the Ecuadorian judiciary (even though they were the ones who pleaded with the court to move the case from the U.S. to the “fair and impartial courts of Ecuador” in the first place) and run smear campaigns against the people and organizations fighting for justice in the Amazon. Notes from the Field It’s hot and I’m sweaty. The monsoon rains are pounding outside my window here in the urban jungle that is Manila, in the Philippines, where my wife and I have spent the past month working to get our project - Face the Change – off the ground. It’s not so much the hot weather that brought us here – though that would be appropriate because our project focuses on climate change – but cheaper childcare. We’re at my in-laws and it’s only in Manila that we can afford to hire a nanny fulltime to look after our 18-month-old daughter. I spent many years as a foreign correspondent and worked with a couple of international organizations as a communications specialist. Then I decided to do a Masters of Public Policy at UC-Berkeley. While it’s extremely challenging, it is also my creative escape where I get to focus and expand my mind on things that truly matter to me. Now as I explore the nexus between human rights and climate change, I can feel how it pulls on every experience I’ve ever had. Face the Change is a web-based advocacy campaign that will use journalism-style stories to show how climate change is already impacting people around the world and how it will lead to massive and unprecedented social and human rights challenges in the coming years. So yes, whether you believe it’s man-made or not, climate change is happening here and now. Together with a fellow grad student working out of his home in Berkeley, we’ve spent the past few weeks researching the human effects of climate change. The research is relatively new but the messages are clear. Climate change will likely cause forced displacement of massive groups of people, instigate the spread of new diseases, lead to the threat of new conflicts and increase poverty as people lose their sources of livelihood. We’re writing journalism-style stories based on the science about how climate change will impact people in different regions of the world. The information will be compiled in an interactive map we’re designing – sort of a one-stop shop that brings together reports and research, categorized by country and themes. As the site grows, we’ll also be telling stories about real people being affected by climate change, using video, podcasts, and photo essays. Another part of our project is a feature-length documentary that will be produced in partnership with a film company based in San Francisco. It will tell the story of how the Maldives president is trying to save his country from drowning as a result of rising seas. There are days when I wonder if I’m being too ambitious with what I want to achieve with Face the Change. I look at my little girl and wonder if anything we do now could truly make a difference for the world that she will inherit. But doing nothing is worse so I keep going. Notes from the Field I am working this summer with a program that is local to the Bay Area, but serves people from all over the world: Fremont’s Community Ambassador Program for Seniors (CAPS). Fremont, a city of about 200,000 people, is unusual both for its ethnic diversity and for being home to many people who have immigrated to the U.S. in their old age, often following their adult children. In 2005, a community-based needs assessment revealed that many seniors in Fremont could not access such basic social services as health care and transportation, often for linguistic or cultural reasons. In human rights terms, these seniors lacked many of the basic resources described by Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which affirms the right to “medical care and necessary social services,” particularly for elders and other inherently vulnerable groups. The CAPS program, initiated in 2007, responds to this gap by training bicultural, multi-lingual volunteer “ambassadors” from within seniors’ own communities to perform information and referral services. Ambassadors also offer translation/interpretation assistance and emotional support, particularly as seniors face such grave issues as deportation and medical bankruptcy in cultural and linguistic contexts they cannot navigate alone. My primary roles with CAPS this summer are to assist in the program evaluation; help to facilitate each community’s transition from the initial funding period into the next stages of the program; and help with fundraising and other publicity needs of the program. In practice, I am interviewing ambassadors to collect their reflections on the program, attending community meetings focused on provision of services to the most vulnerable community members, and collaborating on several reports and grant applications. As a student of medicine and public health, I am particularly interested in CAPS as a community-driven means to health care access. I have been particularly struck, though, by the inseparability of basic social needs: hardly anyone seems to need one basic resource, such as housing, health care, or legal aid, without also needing others. A case that resolved recently illustrates this point. A 71-year-old man who had come to the U.S. from Pakistan under political asylum approached an ambassador at the mosque they both attend. Estranged from his wife, this man had been sleeping in an abandoned garage, and eating only the community center’s free meals. His difficulties with English had led him to complete a green card application incorrectly, so he lacked the documentation needed to access the services to which he was entitled under asylum, and was afraid to bring attention to himself by appealing his case. Because the ambassador was accessible at the mosque, however, this man was able to connect with the help he needed, including translation and interpretation, within his own community. Working with her contacts in the Human Services Department, the ambassador connected this client with the International Rescue Committee, which helped him to obtain his green card; she also helped him to access food stamps and to find affordable housing. This critical situation illustrates the clusters of needs with which many clients present: immigration crises, perhaps involving trauma and persecution in home countries; housing that is crowded or otherwise dangerous; and linguistic (or even legal) barriers to self-advocacy. But ambassadors do not only build bridges between such isolated people and the resources they need; they also network with each other through regular meetings, sharing advice and simultaneously building solidarity between different ethnic and faith communities. Having seen how this model empowers communities to make public services accessible to the people who need them most, we are now focused on sustainability, and propagation to other communities that might benefit from a similar program – two themes I plan to address in my next entry.
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