Archive for August, 2008

Counting the hidden cost in Georgia

August 25, 2008

By Laura Sheahen, CRS for Caritas

Laura Sheahen/CRS

A boy sits in a shelter for Georgians who fled their homes amid bombs and shelling. Psychologists are worried about the long-term impact of the violence on children. Photo: Laura Sheahen/CRS

At the end of Week 2 of the Georgia crisis, tens of thousands of displaced people are getting food. Many no longer have to fear hunger, at least for the short term. But a new enemy is moving in: sickness.

I spoke with one of two nurses working at School #39, where 300 people who fled their homes are now staying. “The conditions aren’t hygienic,” she says. Sharing the school’s shower less bathrooms, sleeping on the floor, and unable to wash properly, the shelter residents are succumbing to diarrhoea and vomiting.”

Caritas is funding hygiene kits with basic, but crucial items like soap, laundry detergent, towels and toothpaste. At School #39, a small army of Caritas volunteers passes out diapers, toothbrushes, and more.

Local Georgians are aware of the health issue. A woman from the neighbourhood of #39 stops by to tell the nurses that her daughter is a gynaecologist, and is willing to visit the three pregnant women at the shelter.

Hygiene supplies and medicine will help improve people’s physical health. Healing emotional wounds, of course, isn’t as straightforward.

A woman in her 40s shows me her deep lower-abdominal scar, a sign of her battle with cancer. She weeps for her home and farm, nine miles outside of the disputed city of Tskhinvali. The house was burned, and because of the political situation, her family may never go back. “People need to work, but what work can we do now? Our place is gone,” she said.

So the nurses at #39 don’t just listen to people describe symptoms of illness; they also listen to their stories. “Their relatives have been killed, their houses burned or looted,” says one nurse. “We sit and cry with them.”

Nearby, at a psychological care centre in Tbilisi, a room of 15 people—Caritas volunteers and others—take notes as they’re trained in basic support to displaced people.
Janna Javakhishvili, a psychologist there, tells me some of the stories she’s been hearing. A 24-year-old woman was grabbed and nearly abducted by a group of different ethnicity in her hometown. She begged them to let her go, telling them she had a baby to care for. They didn’t kidnap her, but now she has flashbacks and nightmares about their attempt. Another man saw family members killed, and he buried their bodies before fleeing himself.

Dr. Jan Vorisek of the psych centre says it’s important to help severely traumatized people quickly because if they don’t get help, their symptoms can morph into full-fledged post-traumatic stress disorder.

“Most people are resilient,” he says. “But Post Traumatic Stress Disorder can become chronic—and can incapacitate people from functioning normally for a long time to come.”

After the training, the volunteers will go into 14 shelters and help traumatized people help themselves. The volunteers lead problem-solving groups that encourage displaced people to work together to improve shelter conditions. In one case, a group of residents figured out a way to wire their shelter for electricity.

“Before they had no sense of control. Now they have a sense of self-sufficiency,” Dr. Javakhishvili says.

The volunteers will also work with children, encouraging them to be physically active, and to draw and role-play with toys. “If you ask them what happened to them during the conflict, they won’t be able to say anything,” says Dr. Vorisek. “But they will tell you what happened to the toy.”
Sharing sorrow is also important. The mental health staff members say that simply showing support can be a great comfort to people who have lost everything. “When we talk to people in the shelters, we often hear the same thing,” says Dr. Javakhishvili. “They say, ‘If you cry with us, we feel better.’”

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Colombia: Fear and cold-blooded killing in the mountains

August 21, 2008

By Michelle Hough
Part 4
See below for parts 1,2 and 3
Caritas/Michelle Hough
Credit: Caritas/Michelle Hough

I don’t know if it was the altitude, but I was feeling dizzy, disorientated and exhausted. We’d travelled high up into the mountains and were sitting in a priest’s house in a grey and depressing little town. In front of us there was a man and a woman. They weren’t related; I’m not even sure they’d even met each other before that day. They were both in tears.

They were talking about wanting to retrieve bodies. The man wanted his daughter back. When he spoke of trying to get her back he broke down. The woman looked as though she’d spent days crying. As she sat with us, she still couldn’t stop the tears. All she wanted was to get her sister back.

A couple of weeks before I arrived in Colombia, four teachers were kidnapped from their schools in broad daylight. People said that the left-wing guerrilla group the FARC had taken them because they thought they were collaborating with the army. They reportedly held them hostage and later killed them. Some people say they were subjected to torture before they died. Everyone said that the teachers had never done anything wrong and had been just doing their jobs.

When I spoke to Msgr Hector Fabio Henao, the Secretary General of Caritas Colombia, he said teachers in the region were probably the only ones working along with the priests in local communities. They worked in no-go areas and for this reason they were under a lot of pressure.

He said that if more teachers were kidnapped, no one would want to teach and children would not receive an education. He said the Church had been trying to convince guerrillas to change their position and let all teachers go back to school.

Both Sister Maria* and a community leader who I spoke to, said that Colombia’s left-wing rebels used to be known for being on the side of the people.

Sister Maria told me that in the 1980s, a left-wing group in Bogota’ stole a milk van and distributed the milk to the city’s poor people.

How could they have made the leap to cold-blooded killers in such a short time?

The Sister told me that it was in part due to the fact that their structure had been weakened and they were afraid.

The founder of the guerrilla group the FARC, Manuel Marulanda, had died earlier in 2008 and two top commanders had deserted. New people were moving up the ranks.

“The rebels used to support social matters and they would never have kidnapped teachers. Now it’s only about drugs and personal issues,” said Samuele*, the community leader.

The day before we met the relatives of the murdered teachers, hundreds of children had taken to the streets of Los Rios* for a silent march calling for peace in the light of the teachers’ disappearances.

As we sat in the parish house, Sister Maria comforted the father and sister of the murdered teachers. She offered them moral support and advice about getting the bodies back and she told them God and the Church were with them. She tried to help them feel not so alone during what must have been one of the worst moments in their lives.

The father and the sister sounded fearful and looked exhausted.

After so many years of war, I imagined that tens of thousands of people in the surrounding mountains of southern Colombia were feeling the same way.

Forgiveness or an endless chain of hate?
Part 3
Read parts 1 and 2

Credit: Caritas/Michelle Hough

Juan* stepped on a landmine while out for a walk with his wife one day. He received gashes up and down his body and a torn stomach. His sight and hearing were damaged. He was still in pain seven months after the accident and could no longer work on his small patch of land or earn a living.

At the end of my interview with him at the Caritas Pastoral Centre in Los Rios*, he looked at me and said: “Life can be very unexpected.”

I thought he was referring to the fact he’d stepped on a landmine, but he went on to explain that because of his injuries, he was able to travel 200 miles to the city of Cali for treatment, and he’d never have dreamt before his accident that he would have had a chance to leave his hometown and visit such a place.

It seemed a slightly bizarre way of viewing his misfortune, but I couldn’t help admiring how he was dealing with his difficulties. No drama. No tears. He just managed to find something positive in a very bad situation.

It seemed to me that many of the people I spoke to in Los Rios were trying to under-play – or even deny – their desperate circumstances. After all, seeing as displacement, killings, landmine injuries and kidnappings were common, it was almost as though people had lost perspective and thought that living in a conflict zone was normal.

As a result, those affected by the conflict didn’t seem to expect very much to compensate for their damaged lives.

The Government was supposed to give financial help to people who had been made homeless. Some of the people I spoke to hadn’t applied for this.

Other people didn’t apply for financial help as they didn’t understand how the system worked. Caritas provided a lawyer to help people navigate their way through the bureaucratic complexities of applying for money for losing their homes and also to apply for compensation for landmine accidents.

Caritas also paid for a psychologist, Luis*, who specialised in helping people injured by landmines to overcome the trauma of their accidents. He also worked with those who had lost their homes.

Luis confirmed my suspicion about how people dealt with their circumstances. He said the people who’d lost their homes because of violence sometimes refused to accept their new reality. Often landmine victims were the same people who had fled the violence. A double blow. For them, reality was much tougher to accept as they had to face up to terrible injuries or even the loss of a limb, as well as the fact they had lost their home.

Luis explained that faith was an important factor in how people faced their new reality. Those who believed in God were more likely to accept their situation and forgive the perpetrators. He said it helped them carry on and gave them a will to live.

In fact, Juan had told me that his faith in God was an important factor in how he dealt with his situation. It helped him not dwell on what happened. He said he felt as though God was looking after him.

Luis said that basically, these people focused on their daily needs and asked for very little.

However, Luis said that even though people often seemed to be coping on the surface, there was a lot of internalised rage.

He said the damage of over forty years of conflict was seeping down the generations. Children who lost their parents in the fighting sometimes joined one of the armed groups to act out vendettas against those who had destroyed their families. Luis called this “an endless chain of hate”.

Caught in the crossfire
Part 2
Read part 1

Copyright: Caritas/Michelle Hough

What amazed me most was that someone had plumbed a toilet into a wooden shack with a tin roof. It seemed a strangely permanent thing to install in a place that should have been a temporary home for one of the many families in Colombia who had fled their homes because of violence.

But I suppose when you’ve lost your home, job and security and you’ve been displaced for eight years, your precarious position in life starts to take on a sense of permanence.

The shack belonged to Diego* and he lived in it with his wife, two children and grandson. He was going to be the part of the focus of Caritas’ documentary on Colombia’s displaced.

On my second day in Los Rios*, I followed the film crew down a steep hill to Diego’s home.  Diego had been in the house for four years. A tube supplied running water and the family had hung up ornaments and religious pictures. There was even a sewing machine.  A fluffy white rabbit in a hutch out back completed the image of domesticity. I asked what his name was and someone pointed out that he didn’t have one as he was going to be eaten.

Diego used to be a bus driver about 100 miles away from Los Rios*. He was sometimes made to transport FARC guerrillas. Later, they asked him to take messages too. The paramilitaries in the area started to threaten Diego and his colleagues, accusing them of collaborating with the guerrillas. Diego’s wife persuaded him to take their family away to a safer place.

Now Diego lives a hand-to-mouth existence. He’s helped by the local Caritas in the area. The Church provides the land that he lives on, he is sometimes given work driving for Caritas and his wife works in the centre’s kitchen.

Paramilitaries in Colombia have a reputation for torture, “disappearances” and killings, while left-wing guerrilla groups are known to kidnap, plant landmines and kill people.

Diego’s story was similar to others that I heard while visiting a camp for those who had fled their homes outside Los Rios. Thirty families had been living there in wooden-framed constructions covered by green plastic sheeting for the previous eight months or so.

Juan* was building a house on the council-owned land after having to leave his own home in Putumayo because it was located on a crossroads where the army, the guerrillas and paramilitaries often clashed.

Another man I spoke to said that the army had asked him to leave his home as it was dangerous because there was lots of fighting; while another family said they too had left their home because of fighting.

Everyone had been scared. Scared enough to leave their homes and jobs and go to a new town where all they had was a flimsy tent for a home, not knowing if they’d ever be able to go back to the life they knew.

Slowly, a different face of Colombia was starting to emerge and I began to realise that beyond the smiles and friendliness lay the shadows of fear and broken lives.


Terrorism, landmines, volcanoes…and bad driving
Part 1

Maria Libertad Mejia

Photo: Maria Libertad Mejia

When I told a journalist friend I was going to Colombia for my first Caritas field trip, she looked thoughtful and said: “Colombia? It’s the most dangerous country in the world.”

As I travelled from Ipiales airport to our destination and the driver sped towards another blind curve on the wrong side of a holey mountain road, I thought she might be right.

Caritas in Rome wanted me to an accompany a film crew to the southern Colombian town of Los Rios*. They were making a film about a family that had lost their home and a landmine victim with the themes “Truth, justice and reparation”.

I hadn’t realised until a few weeks earlier that Colombia was the top country in the world for landmine accidents. It was also home to one of the largest displaced populations in the world with an estimated three million people uprooted by conflict.

It seemed strange that the only times we ever seemed to hear about Colombia in Europe was when it was something to do with cocaine.

The group I was travelling with - Maria, the director, Juan, the cameraman, Carolina, the sound recorder, Luis, my translator and Mallerly who was from Caritas Colombia and was overseeing the whole project - were all Colombian and I had seen no obvious foreigners since leaving Bogota’.

I felt like I was the only European in the whole of southern Colombia. I suppose it was only to be expected considering the UK Foreign Office website warned against travel to many of the departments there (including Nariño where I was going), with terrorism, landmines and volcanoes listed among the dangers to travellers.

It could also have been one of the reasons why Colombia’s 40 year-plus civil war barely received a mention in Western media. Also, the fact that Colombia was 126th in the 169 countries listed in the World Press Freedom index - it was stuck between Kazakhstan and Burundi - made you wonder about the news that actually managed to filter through.

However, Colombia became the top news story around the world the day after I arrived in the country.

I was in a security briefing at Caritas’ Bogota’ headquarters when someone announced that French-Colombian hostage Ingrid Betancourt had been rescued from the jungle where she had been held for over six years by left-wing FARC rebels.

I interviewed Caritas Colombia Secretary-General, Msgr Hector Fabio Henao, and while he seemed pleased about Betancourt’s new-found freedom, he cautioned against reading too much into the rescue so soon as the situation was very complicated.

Two left-wing rebel groups (FARC and ELN), one paramilitary group and the army were engaged in a conflict that seemed to be about land and resources and which was further complicated by masses of financially-lucrative coca fields which the US Government had invested billions of dollars in destroying.

Hector Fabio told me that the Church gave support to the victims of the violence, but that meant that the Church itself sometimes became a target. A week earlier, Felipe Landazury, a Caritas aid worker had been killed in Tumaco, near the Ecuador border – not far from Los Rios, where we were heading.

“Armed groups don’t understand the commitment of the Church,” said Hector Fabio. “They get confused and think that if you’re working for the victims of the conflict, you’re working against them.”

I wondered what these same groups would think about a film crew wandering about their territory, making a documentary about the victims of the violence for the European and North American Caritas aid network members. I didn’t really know what to expect during the trip.

For someone like me, who had never been to Latin America, arriving in Los Rios was like arriving in the Wild West: decrepit buildings; holey roads; people of all ages darting about helmetless on big, dusty Yamaha bikes; guinea pigs being slowly roasted on a spit by the roadside and lots of big black vultures flocking overhead.

However, after my first day in the town and after meeting some of the friendly locals and the nun who ran the local Caritas centre, I started to think that the only real danger in Colombia was the bad roads and the even worse driving…

*Names changed to protect identities

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Caritas volunteers at work in Georgia

August 20, 2008

By Laura Sheahen, CRS for Caritas

Caritas Georgia volunteers pack soap, toothpaste, toilet paper and other hygiene items. Caritas is helping thousands of Georgians who fled bombings earlier this month. Photo: Laura Sheahen/CRS

The young people–most of them around 18 years old–have worked from 10 am to 10 pm for six days straight. It’s tedious work–unloading trays of bread loaves, sorting them, roaming from floor to floor of a tall, run-down, abandoned hospital building to pass out food to 1800 frightened, hungry people–and then moving on to the next shelter.

Or the teenagers are registering families who fled their homes, or packing hundreds of bags full of soap, toothpaste, toilet paper, and other hygiene supplies.

It probably wasn’t the summer fun most teens anticipate.

But Caritas volunteers in the war-torn nation of Georgia keep going.
And the staff–bakers, cooks, drivers, psychologists, social workers, a doctor–are working round the clock to reach as many displaced people as possible.

Estimates now say that 150,000 people fled their homes; 128,000 of them are scattered throughout Georgia proper, many going to the capital city of Tbilisi.”

For the tens of thousands without relatives to stay with, government-appointed shelters in old buildings are the only option.

“The government left us here, and hasn’t brought us any food,” said one person at the Isani shelter, a former military hospital without electricity or running water; it’s now home to 1500 people who left their homes to escape bombings over a week ago. “But Caritas came.”

In Tbilisi and the western city of Kutaisi, Caritas is now feeding 2660 people a day, up from about 500 the day after the worst violence subsided.

The Apostolic Nuncio for the region, Monsignor Claudio Gugerotti, is at the Isani shelter too, meeting with the residents and asking them what they need. They’re grateful for the food, but eating bakery items (like bread rolls with bean or kielbasa paste) for a week can be hard on the stomach. Getting the displaced people a greater variety of food is key.

Wiring the large building for electricity is happening slowly, floor by floor, but the people still have no water. One man washes his legs with a hose available outside the building.

The nuncio describes how he managed to enter the bombed city of Gori on Monday. So did and Father Witold, Secretary General of Caritas Georgia, who brought bread to people unable to flee the shelling ten days ago. Many people who fled Gori are worried that their homes are being looted by roving gangs. “They tried to steal a local priest’s car when we were in Gori,” says the Nuncio.

Back in Tbilisi, Caritas volunteers stir enormous pots of macaroni and cheese, load mattresses into vans, and assemble hygiene packs. The teenagers put detergent, towels, sheets, soap and more into bags for each shelter resident. The sharp corners of the toothpaste tube cut the plastic bags, so they find an ingenious solution: put the toothpaste inside a toilet paper roll.

While they work, they talk about what they’ve seen in the shelters.
Many of the shelter residents are from the country and ran from farms when the bombs started: one woman was milking a cow, and ran with the milk still on her hands.

Many displaced people need shoes, underwear, and other clothes. “They’re in shock,” says a 23-year-old volunteer named Irma. “Some fled barefoot, in their pyjamas.”

The children are frightened, says another volunteer. “They’re afraid to go outside,” says 17-year-old volunteer Albina. “If they hear a loud sound, they’re scared.” Volunteers have gathered not just essential items, but also toys for the shelters.

And there is some happy news: a shelter resident just recently went into labour, and was brought to a Tbilisi hospital to give birth. Mother and baby are doing well.

Georgi, 17, loves fishing. Ordinarily in the summer he might be in Georgia’s picturesque mountains, standing near a stream. Instead, he is moving heavy supplies in the hot sun from a cargo container. A few days ago it was mattresses and pillows. Today it’s boxes of shampoo bottles and soap. Caritas has worked here for years, so it knows all the warehouses, how to work out shipping details, and how to get the best discounts on large supplies of humanitarian aid.

The aid workers are weary but aren’t stopping. Rapidly sorting bread loaves, a 21-year-old volunteer named Timuri says the reason is simple. “These are our people.”

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The Forgotten Georgians

August 19, 2008

By Laura Sheahen, CRS for Caritas

“Don’t let me die without you,” 87-year-old Zina Kvanchiani pleaded to her family when violence broke out in the Kodori Valley, a region of northwest Georgia. Paper-thin from illness and unable to walk, Zina was in no condition to flee the area unassisted.

Her two daughters and a friend had no other choice: they sat her in a bag and carried her on foot–for miles–to safety.

Now Zina and four other people from her family live in a tiny room on the third floor of a crumbling school that was unused for years. The building has water only every other day–and it’s not drinkable. There is no bathroom on her floor, and she is far too frail to move.

Zina is in a makeshift shelter in Georgia’s second-largest city, Kutaisi. As of Sunday, over 14,000 people had fled to the city and its surrounding towns.

As international attention has centred around Russian-Georgian politics and the capital city of Tbilisi, thousands of displaced people in the west of Georgia are at risk of being cut off from aid or forgotten. Kutaisi is only about three hours west of Tbilisi–on a good road. Kutaisi is closer to the Black Sea than Tbilisi, which helps in terms of port shipments. But with the railroad bombed and the main road between east and west Georgia shut down by the military, few resources from the east–where the airport is–are able to get through.

A Caritas team from CRS (a Caritas member in the USA) arrived in Kutaisi on Saturday taking a winding, unpaved back road that few 4×4s can handle, much less trucks carrying humanitarian aid. Going from shelter to shelter, the team met with people who had lost everything and whose most basic needs–for water, bathrooms, and a way to cook donated food like rice and potatoes–were not yet met.

One mother displayed a prescription for her three-year-old son, wondering how to contact a doctor. Another needed adult diapers. An elderly lady had fled her house so quickly that she was without her false teeth, and could not chew.

“We know we can’t ask for what we had at home,” says a woman whose family lives with five other families in a 20×20 foot schoolroom. “But we need soap, medicine…”

A longstanding partner of CRS in the area, AbkhazInterCont (AIC), is run by formerly displaced people who fled similar violence in the early 1990s. Their current programs provide vocational training and small loans to displaced people who had to start new careers.

Having rebuilt their lives over the course of many years, the staff of AIC is now gearing up to help the new victims of the conflict. “We understand exactly what they’re going through, because we went through it ourselves,” says Archil Elbakidze, who heads AIC’s board.

Another partner is also working to help Kutaisi’s displaced: local authorities have asked Caritas Georgia to provide bread from its bakery. There is enough food available to last a few weeks until aid shipments arrive, say city officials, and the hot summer temperatures mean that heating is not an issue.

But winter comes quickly in the region, and authorities are worried about what will happen then. Tens of thousands of people may need heaters for the winter, blankets, and kerosene. And if they are not allowed to return to their homes, they will need financial help to get housing and perhaps to learn new livelihoods. CRS and partners like Caritas are focusing on immediate needs like food and hygiene, but are also planning for the long road ahead.

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Caritas takes help to Georgians

August 16, 2008

By Laura Sheahen, CRS for Caritas

No Way Back Home: Displaced Georgians Fear for the Future

“I bought that new house last October, borrowing money from friends to do it. It could be destroyed when I go back, or everything in it could be gone,” says Georgy, a man from the bombed Georgian city of Gori. “What will happen now? I can’t be a refugee twice.”

Sitting in a church rectory in the capital city of Tbilisi, Georgy has tears in his eyes as he talks about getting his wife and two young children out of his town during last week’s bombing. His plight reflects that of many people who escaped Gori; several had already been pushed out of parts of Ossetia, farther to the north, years ago–and had started life over. Now, twice-displaced people are wondering if they can ever go back to Gori–and what will be left of their homes and possessions after a week of turmoil.

Georgy and his family stayed one night at a Catholic retreat house, and are now with his wife’s relatives near Tbilisi. He is more fortunate that the thousands of abruptly-homeless people from bombed areas who now are in makeshift shelters in the capital, often sleeping on the floor in crumbling old buildings.

Because it already had a soup kitchen and bakery, Caritas Georgia was able to swing into action early this week and now is feeding 300 people three meals a day at one shelter alone. Caritas is also bringing bread, tomatoes, large pots of stew, and more to other shelters in the city. In several shelters, residents desperate for clothes pick through donated clothing dropped off by Caritas.

Father Witold Szulczynski, the director of Caritas Georgia, has become a hero to some shelter residents. “Padre Witold” and other Caritas workers have kept their ears to the ground, following leads to find pockets of displaced people living in non-official shelters. “He came and found us,” says a woman named Lena. One such shelter now receives a Caritas dropoff of hot food.

At this shelter, a man from a village near the disputed city of Tskhinvali mourns his home and farm.  “I lived in that house my whole life–50 years. I had nine cows, an apple orchard…it was so good,” he says. With continuing tensions between Russia and Georgia, he fears he will never go back. “What can I do now?”

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Humanitarian cost rises in Georgia

August 14, 2008

By Laura Sheahen, CRS for Caritas

“We heard some sounds like shelling. We thought, ‘This is strange.’ But no one told us, ‘Leave!’” Lena, a blond woman from a breakaway region in Georgia, gestures frantically as she recalls the events of a few days ago. “Then the tanks came–that was stranger–but still we didn’t understand what was going on.”

“Then the bombs started falling from the planes, and we ran.”

It was the middle of the night, and many people from villages surrounding the city of Tskhinvali had no time to gather their possessions. As fast as they could run out the door or cram their
families into cars, their homes were destroyed.

As fighting raged between Russian and Georgian forces in and around South Ossetia, thousands of innocent civilians who escaped death found themselves instantly homeless. Estimates are that over 100,000 people have fled their homes. Those from the city of Gori, where the fighting has been heavy, have poured into Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia.

Now, they wait in temporary shelters set up in schools and similar places–often with little food and no extra clothes, not to mention mattresses, sheets, or hygiene supplies like toothpaste.

A construction worker whose large extended family lives in one room of a hastily-converted hostel tugs on his worn white shirt. “This is what I was able to bring with me. Nothing else.” Nearby, his relative holds her 6-week-old baby, who needs diapers. Some report that the refugees are washing and reusing disposable Pampers because they have no other options.

Many people are sleeping on the schools’ floors or putting wooden desks together to sleep on them. In one case, refugees sleeping in a kindergarten weren’t receiving enough food. “We sat hungry for two days,” says Lena. “Then Caritas came and found us.”

Caritas Georgia is already ministering to hundreds of internally displaced people in Tbilisi by providing hot meals at a soup kitchen, bringing bread and rolls to temporary shelters, and coordinating additional aid through worldwide Caritas partners. The Caritas network is working rapidly to meet immediate needs; staffers from Catholic Relief Services are on the ground assessing the most urgent priorities.

The longer-term needs will be harder to meet. “We just want to go home,” says the construction worker. “But there is no place to go home to anymore.”

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XVII International AIDS Conference

August 13, 2008

By Francesca Merico
International Delegate, Caritas Internationalis

Access to Medicines’ March, Mexico City, 2 August 2008

Access to Medicines’ March, Mexico City, 2 August 2008
Credit: Caritas

Walking around the Global Village, with its colorful booths, slogans, and presentations; passing from a session on the Joint Learning Initiative on children and AIDS to one on the Church response to AIDS; playing the Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance’s travel restrictions game at the Interfaith Exhibit, I felt the Conference’s hope as well as the challenges and struggles to bring together the many diverse faces of and responses to HIV and AIDS.

However, more than this array of groups and issues discussed, what nourished my enthusiasm were the many extraordinary individuals whom I met. They showed themselves as people whose passion, commitment and leadership is improving the living conditions of many people and children living with HIV.

At “AIDS 2008”, I was honored to meet and work with Mr. Juan Bosco Valle Delgado from the program “Esperanza de VIHda” of the Comision Episcopal para la Pastoral Social and Caritas Mexico; Ms. Beatriz Rebeca Jarero Ramirez from la Méson de la Misericordia Divina in Guadalajara (Mexico); Mr. Hernan Quezada, SJ, a dynamic Jesuit theology student and physician who is coordinating several initiatives on HIV and AIDS in Mexico and who founded a Guadalajara-based program called VIHas de Vida; Bishop Gustavo Rodriguez, President of the National Social Commission of the Catholic Church in Mexico; Bishop Gabriel Penate Rodriguez from la Comision de Salud de Guatemala; and “Laura” who spoke about her life as child born with HIV, who experienced discrimination and, for this reason, prefers to keep her real name secret, who lost her parents due to AIDS related-illnesses, and who found her new “home” and “family” at la Méson. Their contribution often goes unrecognized in international conferences, but they are putting their faith in action as a way to demonstrate their love to God in a tangible and concrete way, and they are making great progress in the response to AIDS.

I also was pleased to meet representatives from Caritas Latin America and the Caribbean. I became more familiar with their activities with and for people living with HIV, and the challenges they are facing in the region. We discussed together ways in which to strengthen the working relationships between Caritas workers on the national, diocesan, and local levels and those of us who try to represent, at the level of the United Nations and other global fora, the engagement and priorities of the global Caritas Confederation. We agreed on the need to share information and to integrate the needs experienced at grassroots level with the programs and guidelines elaborated by UN agencies.

The one-day conference, held on 30 July 2008, for some 35 Caritas delegates from Nicaragua, Guatemala, Mexico, Brazil, Honduras, Peru, El Salvador, and Panama, and the gathering of representatives of Catholic Organizations attending the International AIDS Conference, hosted, on 5 August 2008, by Caritas Internationalis, Caritas Mexico, CHAN (the Catholic HIV and AIDS Network) and the Jesuit Community in Mexico, as well as the meeting organized by CAFOD and Trocaire, on 3 August, offered productive moments to build knowledge and better coordination among Caritas and Catholic organizations as they strive to improve their response to HIV.

A great achievement of the networking among Catholic organizations that took place during the 2008 International Conference on AIDS was the proposal to establish a global Catholic AIDS Network to boost the Catholic Church’s profile in responding to the HIV pandemic, and to improve contact and information-sharing among Catholic organizations working on HIV and AIDS and with people living with HIV. Representatives of these same Catholic groups also expressed the need for further theological and pastoral reflection on AIDS.

Pediatric AIDS was another major focus of Caritas Internationalis’ advocacy activities undertaken during the Conference. Caritas Internationals has designed an advocacy campaign to raise awareness and to accelerate action on the lack of diagnostics and treatment adapted to children and babies living with HIV in low-income settings. This Children’s Advocacy Campaign on Pediatric AIDS will be launched in autumn by Caritas Internationalis in collaboration with the Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance, and it will actively involve children to write letter to governments, pharmaceutical companies and media.

The Conference provided an occasion to inform participants about the challenges in achieving access to child-friendly diagnostics and formulations to treat HIV and to encourage action in order to resolve such problems. During the Conference, Caritas Internationalis staff, together with other participant organizations of the Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance, met with officials of several pharmaceutical companies to discuss actions being planned or undertaken by such companies to develop pediatric diagnostic equipments as well as “child-friendly” formulations and fixed-dose-combinations of anti-retroviral medications (ARVs) adapted for use with children living with HIV.

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XVII International AIDS Conference in Mexico City

August 5, 2008

Entry 1
By: Michelle Hough
Caritas Communications Officer

Ricardo Neco, a Mexico City member of Hairdressers Against AIDS, styles the hair of Maria de Socorro Lopez in a booth at the XVII International AIDS Conference in Mexico City.

Credits:EcumenicalAdvocacyAlliance

Hot dogs, pizza, Chinese, European deli…

I’d just got off a nine-hour flight from Rome, and despite the vast selection of things to eat at JFK airport, the choice paralysed me. I couldn’t face any of it.

Three days later on the first day of the International AIDS conference in Mexico City, I had the same problem. The programme guide looked like a phone book and was over 400 pages long. With an estimated 25,000 people coming from across the world to discuss HIV and AIDS, I suppose they needed something to cater to everyone’s tastes. Although I couldn’t help wondering if all these events just ended up being too many.

I‘m at the conference as part of the media team for Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance (EEA) – a network of 90 faith-based organisations to which Caritas belongs - that narrows down the phone book of events to faith-based ones. A bit more manageable. I’m here to write stories for the EEA newsletter and website – without forgetting to do some for Caritas Internationalis (CI).

Before the AIDS conference started on 3rd August, faith-based groups gathered for a “pre-conference” entitled “Faith in Action. Now!” Basically, this helped them to get their plan of action together and share ideas and experiences before being sucked into the whirlpool of the main conference.

It is the first time that I’m dealing with AIDS issues in my job as communications officer for CI, but I’m with Monsignor Robert Vitillo, who is CI’s Special Advisor on HIV and AIDS. He has worked in the field of HIV and AIDS for over 20 years.

As I wandered around the “global forum” – a big tent full of stands representing hundreds of AIDS bodies – and looked at the multitude of AIDS organisations present such as “Hairdressers Against AIDS”, “Puppeteers without Borders” , “Sex Workers Outreach” and the Jerusalem AIDS Project, I realised that there was a place for everyone’s point of view in the AIDS debate.

Entry 2
By: Rev. Msgr. Robert J. Vitillo
Special Advisor on HIV and AIDS, Caritas Internationalis

The three-day Ecumenical pre-conference, convened in Mexico City, prior to the opening of the XVII International AIDS Conference attracted the participation of 480 people coming from 77 countries. The Catholic participation in this pre-conference was significantly greater that that in previous conferences, especially due to the fact that CAFOD and Trocaire (respectively, the Caritas organizations of England/Wales and of Ireland) invited many programme partners, including those coming from national and diocesan Caritas organizations, from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. CORDAID, the national Caritas organization from the Netherlands also invited several of its programme partners.

With the overall theme of “Faith in Action … Now”, the pre-conference emphasized the need to engage religious leaders in a more intensive response to the HIV pandemic. During the plenary sessions, as at previous pre-conferences, much emphasis was placed on the need to challenge stigma and discrimination among religious leaders and communities of faith. In this regard, Bishop Mark Hanson, President of the Lutheran World Federation, made a ritual act of seeking pardon for such discrimination caused by church leaders by washing the feet of two HIV-positive women. Many participants were deeply moved by this gesture; others were made uncomfortable by such an action and expressed the need to focus more on the positive work of the churches in response to AIDS rather than to launch into a constant litany of the negative actions on the part of some churches and religious leaders.

One new feature of this pre-conference was a focus, during one of the plenary sessions and in some workshops, on the situation of children living with and affected by HIV.

Entry 3
By: Michelle Hough
Caritas Communications Officer

In the 1980s, there was a doom-laden advert on British television warning that the number of people who had died from AIDS up until then was “just the tip of the iceberg”.

 

Reading some UNAIDS statistics while I was at the International AIDS Conference in Mexico City, I found out that an estimated 33 million people were living with AIDS in 2007, while 2 million people had died from AIDS-related illnesses.

 

So it had been the tip of the iceberg… however, I met people with HIV and AIDS – people from Mexico and the United States - at the conference and, with the help of good healthcare and a nutritious diet, their lives were manageable.

 

I visited the Global Village at the conference, where hundreds of stands promoted various organisations’ ideas and efforts to help people with HIV and AIDS, and I felt that there was almost a sense of celebration. AIDS was no longer an iceberg that was going to crash into us and sink us all, but was something that could be brought under control by various means.

 

Closing comments at the end of the International AIDS Conference confirmed this idea: AIDS was preventable, but if you got it, it was treatable.

 

Then I remember a photo someone once showed me of an African family, asking me if I noticed anything strange.

 

I did. There were children and there were grandparents, but there were no parents.

 

The UNAIDS Epidemic Update says that three-quarters of all AIDS-related deaths in 2007 occurred in sub-saharan Africa.

 

From what I’ve read, the reality of HIV and AIDS is very different for these people. Often, they don’t have access to healthcare and the right medicines; when they do, they might not have enough or the right foods to boost their nutrition levels so their bodies can absorb antiretroviral treatments.

 

Francesca Merico, a colleague from Caritas Internationalis’ (CI) Geneva office, told me that children in poor families around the world, often die unnecessarily because they don’t receive a quick enough diagnosis, or they don’t receive enough nutritious food - or their families don’t have a refrigerator to keep medicines cool. Sometimes these children die simply because they are given the wrong doses of adult medicines as child doses aren’t available to them.

 

An estimated 290,000 children under 15 died of AIDS-related illnesses in 2007.

 

While wealthy countries are managing to navigate their way around the iceberg, these children and a whole generation of parents in the developing world are taking its full force.

 

The Catholic Church – with its vast network of dedicated people on the ground - focuses a lot of its AIDS work on people like these.

 

Francesca told me that CI is launching a new campaign to ensure the quick diagnosis and adequate treatment of children with AIDS.

 

I heard other stories too, such as the one by the General Secretary of the YWCA, Nyaradzai Gumbonzvanda, who said when she was growing up in Zimbabwe and her family was affected by AIDS and illness, it was the Church that was there in the absence of any other help.

 

The conference is now over and people have gone home. The rallying cry at the conference, “Universal Action Now!”, urged the world to ensure prevention, care and treatment for everyone by 2010.

 

Looking at the UNAIDS figures, for many people in the developing world, who haven’t yet even gained access to clean water and regular, nutritious food, this goal still looks a long way off.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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