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This is the number-one question I get about Haiti:

“So how’s it going? Are things getting better over there?”

Question number two?

“When’s it going to be back to normal?”

Back to normal in Haiti. That’s an interesting question.

It’s been two years since the earthquake that killed 250,000 people and devastated the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. This is Haiti. Haiti — a little more than an hour from Miami, but where half the children under age 5 are malnourished and the life expectancy is only 59 years.

Haiti, where half the population can’t read or write. And where more than half the population lives on less than $1.25 a day.

And that was before the earthquake.

What is back to normal?

If you’d witnessed the destruction right after the January 12, 2010 earthquake, you would see a noticeable difference today. Most of the rubble is cleared from the streets. There is even reconstruction going on.

At the same time, collapsed buildings are everywhere. You don’t have to look for them, they’re everywhere. Hundreds of thousands of people still live in tents or temporary shelters donated by a myriad of charitable organizations. Even the National Palace is still a collapsed ruin.

So are things getting better?

We can report that Compassion has completed its short-term and transitional strategies to bring immediate relief to the impacted children and their families. We provided food, safe water, shelter and medical assistance.

We worked with our church partners to get our programs back up and running, provide post-trauma counseling to the kids and the church staff, and provide shelter, desks and chairs for classes to resume. We are back to the business of caring for and developing the children of Haiti.

Is it like it was before? No. Nothing is. But we have worked hard to give the children a chance, to keep them from losing their opportunity despite the tragedy.

Now we are working on the long-term solutions. We have always been about long-term solutions. To help children in poverty develop physically, spiritually, economically and socially from their mothers’ womb until they become the adults God meant them to be is a long-term solution for Haiti.

The disaster response team is thinking of the long-term in post-earthquake Haiti as well. In our Pastor Encouragement and Vision Casting Strategy, we’re teaming with like-minded local leaders to engage the Haitian church and society to give sustained attention to the values of integrity, justice, responsible leadership and good governance.

We’ve started an income-generation program, offering entrepreneurial training and low-interest loans to help the parents of our children start businesses — businesses that will not only help them and their families, but will also bring additional jobs to their communities. And we’re rebuilding schools to meet or exceed international seismic standards.

Schools that will never fall down on children again.

Are things getting better? If you ask Orleys Ley, he would say yes. Orleys is a tailor.

When the earthquake struck, both his home and his business collapsed, killing his wife and oldest daughter. Without a way to make a living he was left alone to care for his two-year-old daughter, Orleus.

However, he was able to get a loan from the income-generation program, which allowed him to buy equipment and rent space across the street from his collapsed home.

He reopened his tailor shop, making clothes and school uniforms. He has been so successful that he has purchased additional equipment and opened a tailor school in his shop. He is teaching others the skills that enabled him to rise out of the despair.

For Orleys, and the hundreds of other small business owners taking advantage of the income-generation program, things are getting better.

And new, stronger schools are being built.

In Simonette, a rural village along the coast north of Port-au-Prince, the finishing touches are being given to a 16-classroom school that will accommodate more than 500 children. Even people without any knowledge of construction or engineering can see the difference in these buildings.

Ultimately we hope to work with our church partners to complete 30 schools and help them move into the future with better facilities than they had before. More importantly, we want to provide opportunities for thousands of children to have safe, clean places to learn and grow.

As I stood in front of the buildings in Simonette, watching the Haitian workers install the last window panes and dabbing on the last of the paint, I listened to one of the students, a girl of about 12, speaking with her friend. “There isn’t a better school in Haiti,” she said.

I can’t say there isn’t a better school, but I can say there isn’t a better-built school. Our engineers will be the first to remind us that no building is completely earthquake-proof.

But there is no building in Haiti that has been built with more care. These school buildings would stand up to any construction standards in the world, built by local workers trained by our engineers to withstand both earthquakes and hurricanes.

Are things getting better? For the children of Simonette, they are.

The girl smiled as she turned to her friend. “That’s my school,” she said.

Yes, it is. The children are too important to give them anything less.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Matthew Moore is the management support director for Haiti and oversees the implementation of our Complementary Interventions earthquake strategies there.

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

AIDS and poverty. Poverty and AIDS. One doesn’t cause the other, but for children and families living in extreme poverty, AIDS is especially devastating.

Several factors multiply the devastation caused by HIV/AIDS in developing countries.

One is the lack of prevention education.

Another is the high cost of treatment and the difficulty of getting the lifesaving medicinal tablets that travel 10,000 miles to travel that last mile, into the hands of the people who need them.

To travel beyond the clinic and into the slum. To travel down the dusty roads in the rural areas. And up the hills and down into the valleys to the out-of-the-way places.

Other factors of poverty contributing to the incidence of HIV/AIDS include:

• poor health facilities
• communication and transportation difficulties
• unstable governments
• the prevalence of environmental diseases

Currently, less than 10 percent of HIV-positive children in need of treatment are being treated.

This year the World AIDS Day global focus is on zero new HIV infections, zero discrimination and zero AIDS-related deaths.

Which is a big deal when you consider that more than 6,800 new HIV infections occur daily, worldwide, and more than 5,700 people die of AIDS each day.

But beyond the death and physical illness, among the many challenges facing people living with HIV/AIDS are the stigma and discrimination that come with it.

People living with HIV/AIDS in extreme poverty are still feared, avoided and ostracized. People who overcome their fears and get tested for HIV are often still afraid to speak out and educate or advocate for others – which is why we have this blog post.

AIDS and poverty. Poverty and AIDS. If you care about releasing children from poverty in Jesus’ name, then that means you should care about fighting AIDS.

So get out there and fight.

Do one thing today (World AIDS Day), one thing with purpose, one thing to help the world get to zero and bring some glee to a child.

Sources: www.childinfo.org, www.unaids.org, www.unicef.org

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Even though you smell like sewage on the outside, you smell like Jesus on the inside.

You’re poor because you’re a sinner. You’re poor because God hates you.

These are the words I remember the most from my childhood.

I was convinced that these words were true.

I wanted to prove to God that I’m a good boy and that He can love me. – Anthony Njoroge

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

A carbon tax. Floods in Queensland; fires in Victoria. Oil spills off Western Australia and Mexico. Mining in the Kimberly; irrigation in the Murray Basin; logging in the Daintree. No matter where you stand along the great climate-change divide, the debate about our environment — and what should be done about it — is hard to avoid.

In Australia, the environmental considerations we face are often long-term and somewhat academic in their repercussions. How would a dam affect local animal populations? Is the disposal of solar power batteries just as bad as the emissions from coal power? What would be the economic impact of restricting uranium mining?

Despite being the world’s worst polluters per capita, Australians live in one of the world’s most pristinely clean environments — even in our cities. Our skies are rarely congested with smog; our national parks are rich and sprawling; our streets are largely litter-free; our sewage is treated and piped away.

By comparison, tension between people and the planet in the developing world is much more stark. The struggle for economic growth has left scars in streets and slums awash with untreated effluent when it rains, waterways choked with garbage, landscapes stripped of vegetation, and urban airways blanketed with thick haze.

With lower levels of resource use and a much shorter history of using them, the developing world’s impact on the environment is much less than its developed counterparts; yet it bears a much higher price for damage done.

The World Bank’s 2009 World Development Report estimates that carbon pollution will cost Africa about 4 percent of its GDP and India about 5 percent — while the cost to world GDP is just around 1 percent.

Inadequate sanitation and housing infrastructure, higher levels of malnutrition and poor health, increased propensity to flooding, greater reliance on the land, and extremely limited resources to prepare or respond make poor nations and their people more vulnerable to environmental crises such as natural disasters.

For instance, both the Netherlands and Bangladesh are highly susceptible to floods, but while the Netherlands spends more than $100 per person per year on flood defences, $100 is a quarter of the average person’s annual income in Bangladesh and far out of reach for the public purse.

The implications for development for nations grappling with poverty — and for their children — are clear.

Securing a safe, healthy environment is essential for ensuring the well-being of an individual. Without it, efforts to improve health, housing, economic security, agriculture and other contributors that raise a person’s, or a community’s, standard of living are undermined.

Protecting the environment is just as important as these other seemingly competing priorities — and as with so many development activities, children are key to the process.

This is one of the reasons our holistic child development programs, which work to impact nations and generations by releasing children from poverty, have included a focus on environmental responsibility, or creation care, since the very beginning.

The other reason creation care is integral to our programs is reflected in our mission: to release children from poverty in Jesus’ name.

We believe that God created the earth, including men and women. We are made in the image of God, given a privileged place within His creation and commanded to exercise stewardship over it (Genesis 1:26—28).

Care for God’s creation — the environment and everything in it — is a biblical obligation, and we are morally accountable for how we carry out the task (Genesis 2:15).

We believe that creation care is essential to truly working in Jesus’ name and an important biblical teaching to pass on to the children to whom we minister. Therefore, creation care is incorporated into each of our four core programs, reaching children from the womb to the workforce.

The training that mothers receive as part of our Child Survival Program is practical and relevant, designed to improve the well-being not only of the household but also of the community — making caring for the environment an underlying theme.

Lessons on composting and the safe disposal of rubbish help clean up neighbourhoods and provide a useful source of fertiliser.

Training on growing vegetables gives families a cost-effective — and environmentally friendly — supply of food.

Education on the importance of safe water for drinking and bathing not only reduces sickness, but also raises awareness of the consequences of polluting community water sources.

In several development centres, mothers have learned how to make purses to sell using recycled plastic, thus reducing waste while adding to the family’s income.

In Kenya, our staff encourage mothers to beat the drought by recycling water from their washing to water vegetable gardens.

In the same way that children in our Child Sponsorship Program are taught how to wash their hands to avoid sickness, they are also taught to clear rubbish, keep waterways clean, and understand the value of trees to protect and improve their surroundings and their standard of living.

Uganda’s Rakai district is one that has felt the impact of poor environmental management. Uganda lost half of its forests in the civil and political strife of the 1970s and 1980s and another quarter of its remaining forests between 1990 and 2005.

Today, Uganda’s forests are being cleared at a rate of 92,000 hectares every year — a pace that will leave it completely deforested by the year 2052.

The rapidly growing population’s demand for land to grow crops and build houses, and for trees for fuel like charcoal and firewood, is driving Uganda’s deforestation. This demand is exacerbated by the fact that 70 percent of the country’s forests are on private land.

The Rakai district, part of the grazing corridor which hosts 60 percent of Uganda’s cattle population, has been hit particularly hard by water depletion and increased frequency of droughts that have been linked to the deforestation.

Compassion’s Kakuuto Child Development Centre in the region responded by giving each child at the centre four trees — distributing a total of 900 mango, orange, avocado, tangerine and hard-wood trees throughout the community.

The children were taught how to plant and look after the trees, as well as how to use energy-saving stoves that reduced the amount of timber needed for fuel.

In addition to providing shade and helping to reduce flooding and soil erosion, the trees will provide a valuable source of food and income for the families.

As our Leadership Development Program works to develop Christian leaders and empower young people to bring change to their communities and nations, it is also one of the key ways we encourage creation care — simply by empowering the community’s own young people to make their voices heard.

Wanda Medina is one of our Leadership Development Program students and a passionate advocate for the forests and wildlife of her home in the Bahoruco Mountains of the Dominican Republic.

As well as studying education at university, Wanda volunteers at the Unit of Environment Management of the Municipality, working to convince local farmers to preserve the forests. It’s a battle with life-and-death consequences, seen clearly in neighbouring Haiti — where more than 98 percent of forests have been cut down at a rate of 10 million to 20 million trees each year with devastating consequences for the hurricane- and flood-prone country.

By comparison, the Dominican Republic’s 28 percent forest cover looks verdant. But not for long, if the slash-and-burn land clearing techniques that the Environment Ministry says have claimed nearly 310,000 hectares of forest in the last 50 years continue.

“In our meetings, farmers say that they have families to support and the only thing they know how to do is agriculture. They take what they have at hand, which is the land. So we teach them methods of how to reforest and cultivate their land at the same time, like planting tall trees like mahogany and avocado. We also run courses on tree grafting, beekeeping and honey production, and raising pigs, so the farmers have other employment opportunities and skills.

“I want my community to make progress and be developed, that it will go back to be what it was regarding its forest and vegetation. I hope that people will go back to feel for and take care of their environment, all that is around them and their natural resources.”

Compassion’s Complementary Interventions help tackle the barriers that stand between children and healthy development that can’t be overcome through our core programs alone. Environmental factors such as natural disasters, poor sanitation and health epidemics are often among those barriers. As a result, many Complementary Interventions involve improving the way home and community environments are managed.

For instance, thanks to a Complementary Intervention designed to help parents generate income, a group of 15 parents of children attending the Ebenezer Child Development Centre in southern India have been taught how to make paper bags to sell to local shops.

While improving the parents’ work skills, the training also supports a government effort to reduce the use of plastic bags that have caused wide-scale pollution of waterways and streets.

A Complementary Intervention in six child development centres in Kenya’s Machakos district is also supporting government environmental initiatives by establishing fruit-tree nurseries in each centre to propagate seedlings to distribute to children’s families. The nurseries will provide a food source as well as help combat desertification and soil erosion in the region.

Installing solar-powered stoves is another effective Complementary Intervention that has been implemented in several centres. The stoves use a clean and endlessly supplied fuel that doesn’t force people to choose between cutting down a tree for firewood today and keeping it for the fruit it will bear tomorrow.

Because of the toxic smoke they produce, traditional wood, coal and animal-dung stoves are blamed for killing 1.6 million people every year, more than 85 percent of them women and children under 5. Thus, solar-powered stoves help save lives.

Similarly, at least one Complementary Intervention to provide adequate water and sanitation (such as a well or toilets) is put into action in every country we work in every year, for both health and environmental gains.

In the developing world, roughly 90 percent of sewage is discharged untreated into rivers, polluting the water and killing plants and fish.

In Southeast Asia alone, 13 million tons of faeces are released into inland water sources each year along with 122 million cubic metres of urine. This poses a major health threat to people who depend on open streams and wells for their drinking water as well as an economic blow to people whose livelihoods depend upon fisheries.

Water pollution from poor sanitation costs Southeast Asia more than $2 billion a year, primarily from the loss of productive land. In India, it is estimated that water pollution causes 80 percent of diseases. Providing safe water and hygienic toilets is essential to our development efforts.

This post originally appeared on compassion.com.au as The Great Debate.

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It’s been nearly two years since the devastating earthquake struck Haiti on Jan. 12, 2010.

In the months following the disaster, we received lots of donations to help rebuild and support the families and children affected. In all, we received over $30 million.

After receiving the donations, we began work on 21 strategies to address Haiti’s needs. Some of these needs were more immediate, while others are longer-term strategies.

Needs varied from food, temporary shelters, trauma counseling and medical care, to rebuilding Implementing Church Partner (ICP) buildings and income generation projects.

We still have four strategies in process or ongoing to maintain the support and needs of our ICPs, children, and their families.

1. Pastor Encouragement and Vision Casting: Post trauma counseling training for pastors of church partners and non-church partners, as well as hosting a conference on integrity, justice, and stewardship for Haitian leaders as they rebuild.
2. Child Protection: Provide school fee assistance, prosthesis and physical therapy, as well as monthly support for more highly vulnerable children.
3. Income Generation: Provide training and opportunities for parents and caregivers of our beneficiaries to begin or expand a business, which improves their economic position and provides jobs within the community.
4. ICP Facilities Reconstruction: We have faced some challenges that have delayed reconstruction but have identified solutions allowing us to build, safe, seismically sound facilities for our church partners.
• Quality Building Blocks: All blocks to rebuild the ICPs failed quality testing. We identifed a vendor to produce blocks that met the strength test needed for construction that is seismically acceptable.



• Qualified Engineers: We could not find engineers in Haiti who knew and understood how to build according to seismic codes, so we had to recruit trainers from El Salvador to oversee the building of each ICP and closely monitor each step of the building process.
• Design and Budget:The original design the team of engineers produced exceeded the allowable budget for the rebuild project. This set the project back three months.
• Pace of Building: We can only build one ICP at a time due to the close supervision and training needed for the Haitian construction team by the El Salvadorian trainers. Our plan is to increase building to two to three ICP facilities at the same time once an expanded number of construction teams have been trained and can demonstrate skill and adherence to acceptable building standards.

As we receive information on the progress of these efforts we will publish more updates.

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

The House of Diamonds Student Center in El Guanabano, Honduras, serves people whose livelihood is found in garbage. But that doesn’t mean they’re garbage themselves.

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

As a 5-year-old sponsored child growing up in Haiti, Beguens Theus dreamed of what life could be. Now, as a member of Haiti’s parliament Beguens is determined to see the dreams of every child in Haiti realized.

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

As a new school year begins across the nation, students will once again take up their books to learn about the shameful history of the slave trade around the world.

The problem is that the slave trade is far from history. In fact, it is very much the shame of our world today.

Currently, more slaves exist than during the time of slave trade abolitionist William Wilberforce. But unlike in Wilberforce’s day, 80 percent of today’s slaves are women and girls; 50 percent are children.

Earlier this summer, the U.S. State Department came out with its Trafficking in Persons Report for 2011. The report created global concern as nations reacted to their “tier placements.” Most third world countries fell under “Tier 2,” a dubious designation reserved for nations whose governments don’t “fully comply with the Trafficking Victims Protection Act’s (TVPA’s) minimum standards, but are making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance with those standards.”

The report is no surprise to those of us who work to rid the world of extreme poverty. For instance, in the 26 developing nations where Compassion International serves, 19 were placed in the “Tier 2” category. An additional five nations where Compassion serves were on the “Tier 2 Watch List,” a group of “countries whose governments do not fully comply with the TVPA’s minimum standards, but are making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance with those standards,” according to the report. Only one of the 26 countries found itself in “Tier 1”—meaning it was fully compliant with the TVPA’s minimum standards.

Read the entire post at FoxNews.com

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates