Stories of Change

Jaime Garcia, left, with volunteers Ximena and Carlos and the CWS School Kits that they will distribute. Photo courtesy Centro de Informacion.

During challenging times, a smile for students in Illinois

Centro de Informacion serves the Spanish-speaking residents of Elgin, IL and surrounding communities. Originally founded in 1972 to help the area’s small Spanish-speaking population, they have expanded over the decades as the number of Spanish speakers in the area has also grown.

Many of the organization’s clients are immigrants. “For the last 48 years, Centro has served as the place for immigrants to whom language and culture present barriers to ask questions, obtain bilingual help, and to build skills,” they say. “Bilingual staff provide interpretation help, assistance in filling out forms in English such as consumer protection, medical cards, food stamps, and claims for unemployment benefits among others, advocacy in resolving housing and employment disputes, and help in developing life skills, financial literacy, and parenting skills.” 

This year, the pandemic and its effects have led to extra challenge for many of Centro’s clients. “With the pandemic, many parents have lost their jobs. So that is a definite challenge. Some of our clients are undocumented, so they won’t receive government assistance like a stimulus check. However, we do have funding from grants for this like medical bills, utility bills, food. But when you don’t have a safety net like so many others do, it is very hard.”

Usually, Centro hosts back-to-school resource fairs for families. Among the other support and information they offer, they also hand out CWS School Kits. “The kids look forward to the resource fair every year! We have had families that come from years when they have several children and they love it,” says executive director Jaime Garcia.

We can all remember the thrill of having fresh new school supplies to face a new year. And with your help, more students are getting to experience that thrill through the CWS School Kits that Centro distributes. During the pandemic when so much is uncertain, this joy is extra special. “You are making a lot of children smile and laugh. Sometimes in times like this, the kids need to use an old, ripped backpack and reusing supplies for the school year,” says Jaime. “But just imagine their faces when they see they get a new school kit!”

“Just imagine their faces and know you did that. So, thank you!”

Centro de Informacion is also part of the Elgin CROP Hunger Walk, sponsored by CWS. They help organize the event and receive a grant for their ongoing work to fight hunger in Elgin each year. 

Stories of Change

Top: a woman stacks bags of BabyBRIGHT for distribution in Ban Mai Nai Soi. Bottom: bags of BabyBRIGHT.

An extra nutrition boost for young refugee children in Thailand

About 90,000 refugees from Myanmar live in nine camps in western Thailand, near the Thailand-Myanmar border. Our long-time partner, The Border Consortium, reaches these refugees with food, shelter and other support.

A few months ago, as the threat of COVID-19 emerged, The Border Consortium was in the process of introducing a nutritious food called BabyBRIGHT to the children in Ban Mai Nai Soi Refugee Camp. BabyBRIGHT is a fortified complementary food that is formulated to ensure that the refugee children who eat it will have the best possible health in their early years. 

BabyBRIGHT was created to fight chronic malnutrition, which is all too common in situations like this one. It has proven effective over the years, so it’s an important part of the Healthy Babies, Bright Futures campaign for families with children between six months and 2 years old. The program focuses on a variety of ways that parents can feed their young children better; BabyBRIGHT is one component of a larger program. CWS provided the funding to expand the use of BabyBRIGHT into Ban Mai Nai Soi. 

The inaugural BabyBRIGHT distribution in Ban Mai Nai Soi in April went smoothly. While following COVID-19 prevention measures, the TBC team reached nearly 200 children and their families over a three-day period. Each family received BabyBRIGHT as well as information about nutrition for the whole family. That’s 200 children who now have a significantly better opportunity for longer, healthier and more productive lives. 

As the COVID-19 pandemic spread worldwide, the Thai government put travel restrictions in place that affected the refugee camps. That could have made it difficult to continue to purchase and distribute BabyBRIGHT, but TBC continued to coordinate with the Thai authorities, and the supply of BabyBRIGHT flowed without interruption. The camp’s health care partner is also helping to distribute BabyBRIGHT within the camp in a way that ensures COVID-19 protection measures while reinforcing best nutrition practices. 

We’re so grateful for everyone who is working hard to ensure that these refugee children will have the chance to grow up healthy and strong. That includes TBC, Thai authorities and partners in the camps who are putting supplies in families’ hands. It includes The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, whose Light the World campaign provided the funds that CWS used to support this work. And, most importantly, it includes the parents and family members who are working day in and day out to feed children healthy food–including BabyBRIGHT!

Stories of Change

Arceia (right) and her siblings wash their hands at home.

Past learning about handwashing is keeping families safe in the face of COVID-19

Arceia is a student living in the Tana Toraja district of Indonesia. Her community is called Se’seng, and it’s in the mountains. It’s an area that is prone to landslides, so CWS has teamed up with families here for years. 

Back in 2015, we worked with students, teachers, parents and community leaders for a program called Safe Schools and Safe Communities. We shared information about emergency preparedness with students in 16 schools, including Arceia’s. Students learned about handling some of the risks they faced at school, including where to seek safety in the event of a landslide or how to avoid illness by washing their hands properly. It was a wide range of topics, but valuable information that is still helpful today.

Fortunately, students have not had to use what they learned about landslides. But the information about washing their hands has been helpful every day for the last five years. “Now, five years later, our teachers and students still wash their hands often with running water and soap,” the headmaster of Arceia’s school said recently. “Hand washing is a habit for students in our school. They learn the correct six steps for proper hand washing with soap from Grade One. We could not have done this without our CWS friends, who helped us install water tanks and sinks.”

Fast forward to March 2020, when Tana Toraja decided to close its schools to slow the spread of COVID-19. Because of our past work together, hundreds of students in the area–and their whole families–already knew the key prevention strategy: frequent hand washing with soap. 

Arceia recently told our team, “Our family feels grateful that CWS helped us learn how to properly wash our hands.” And one of her parents added, “This is so important now with the spread of COVID-19.” Their family, like millions of others worldwide, has heard about how important washing their hands in recent weeks. But just many of their neighbors, they were already prepared because of longstanding CWS programs. 

Stories of Change

The student-led awareness-raising event about preventing human trafficking.

Students are taking the lead on sharing information to prevent human trafficking in Vietnam

Human trafficking is a risk in rural Vietnam, just like it is in many parts of southeast Asia. Criminal networks are strong and pervasive, as are poverty and vulnerability.

With support from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, our team in Vietnam partners with ethnic minority communities in northern Vietnam. We focus on a myriad of challenges, especially ones that affect children. Human trafficking is one of these challenges. 

Our team has helped students learn to talk to one another about the risks and warning signs of human trafficking. “In the past, only teachers gave lectures and presentations. Since you, ‘Teacher Thang’ [as she called our CWS colleague], came and taught us, we learned how to share information among ourselves and our friends. This is a very important topic for us, so we want other students to know. When we first started to learn how to communicate with confidence, all of us were afraid or shy to stand and talk to our school mates,” says Ha Ngoc Linh, a 5th grader at Muong Kim commune Primary School. 

Linh is a member of a group called the Communications Interest Group, which focuses on leading conversations with other students. “When you came to teach us, we learned how to lead awareness-raising discussions with other students,” she says. 

Linh, who is the oldest of three sisters in an ethnic Thai family, worked with the other students in the after-school communications interest group to organize an information session about human trafficking risks and prevention. The students organized the session themselves, from the beginning to end. Their knowledge of the topic, and their confidence in sharing information with their peers, was impressive.

Because peer education is a new concept at her school, Linh says that some students “were laughing and trying to embarrass us.” But it was only the listeners who were uneasy. “Now that we are more confident, we look forward to leading more activities like this,” Linh says. 

Stories of Change

Abdulaziz (right) and Mumed in their home.

After years of hell, hope for a young refugee in Cairo

Abdulaziz Ibrahim has been through hell.

You wouldn’t know it by talking to this gentle 18-year-old. When members of our team visited him at his home in Cairo a few weeks ago, he was quick to offer a smile and to share his meal.

It was heartbreaking, then, when he told us about the horrors he has lived through to get to this point.

Abdulaziz fled his home country of Ethiopia during unrest in 2016. Like too many children and teenagers in violent areas around the world, he was alone—desperately seeking safety with limited resources and help.

It was four grueling months between when Abdulaziz left his home in Ethiopia and when he arrived in Cairo. The smuggler who was “helping” him extorted him near the Ethiopia-Sudan border, demanding huge amounts of money, taking some of his few possessions and locking him in a house even though Abdulaziz was hungry and dehydrated. Abdulaziz escaped, but he was found, sent back to that house and tortured.

When the smugglers finally let him go, Abdulaziz was on his own with no food or water. He walked until he found sympathetic people who gave him food and tea even though they didn’t speak his language. “There were some Oromo working in the area, so I approached them,” Abdulaziz says. They helped him get a haircut and new clothes. If he stayed in Sudan and was caught, they told him, he would be deported back to Ethiopia. So they helped him find a new smuggler to get out of Sudan. Abdulaziz made his way to Egypt and eventually found a community of people who spoke Oromo. They helped him register with the United Nations Refugee Agency.

But things didn’t get much easier in Cairo; he didn’t have enough money to get by. When he was approached in a café and offered a job in an area far from Cairo, he took it even though it meant going with another smuggler in a group with more than 100 people. They left in the middle of the night. He was told not to talk, not to breathe, not to make a sound. Then security forces found them. The smugglers fled, leaving Abdulaziz and the others to be captured. The group was rounded up and asked for identification. Abdulaziz was sent to prison. “It was a difficult situation,” he says. “They only fed us once a day, and there was nothing to sleep on.” When the officials realized that Abdulaziz was still 17, they released him. He begged one of the first people he saw for money and got enough to get a ticket back to Cairo.

Back in Cairo, Abdulaziz learned about CWS’s local partner, St. Andrew’s Refugee Services (known as StARS). “I came to StARS and asked for an education,” he says. “I got it, and they helped me. I started to study, and then they helped me with a distribution [of supplies]. Then they told me they could help me find someone to live with. They gave me a caseworker, and I can ask her for help if I have a problem. I started to live my life, and to take an English course.”

There aren’t formal foster programs for unaccompanied refugee children in Cairo, and the number of refugee children living on their own in the city is growing. That’s why StARS has set up a community hosting program that matches unaccompanied refugee children with adult refugees who are willing to give them a safe and welcoming place to live. Hosts are screened and vetted. They do not get paid, but StARS helps them make improvements in their homes to make them more comfortable for both the host family and the refugee child moving in.

Abdulaziz was matched with Mumed Yusuf Ali, who is also an Oromo refugee from Ethiopia. They have been living together, along with Mumed’s wife, since July 2018. Finally, Abdulaziz had a constant support in his life. “I told him that I’m his brother, and we can stay together forever. I will share with you whatever I have,” Mumed says. “We have become family.”

Once Mumed had signed up to be a host, a team from StARS came and checked out his home. They bought a fridge, washing machine and fan to make it more comfortable, and they even paid for the maintenance when the fridge broke. They conduct a monthly follow up to make sure everyone is happy with the arrangement, and Mumed and Abdulaziz each have caseworkers at StARS who they can talk to if they are uncomfortable.

After the trauma that he suffered, it wasn’t always easy for Abdulaziz to get used to having a stable home environment again. “I always remember what happened on the journey and how I faced a lot of problems in my country and on the journey. Since I was 14, things have been hard and I haven’t had anyone to support me. I haven’t been given a good life,” he says. “I had psychological problems. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat because I would remember. I left home for three days and sat in cafés. Mumed called StARS and then found me and brought me home. He supported me and gave me emotional support.”

Today, Abdulaziz is doing much better. He is happily living with Mumed, and they continue to be a family even now that Abdulaziz is now 18. He also has a psychological caseworker through StARS to help him to continue to make progress. “StARS supported me in a lot of ways. Without StARS, I’m sure that I would be homeless and would have lost my mind,” he says. “They have supported me more than my family could, and they took me away from my problems.”

Young people like Abdulaziz arrive in Cairo every day, scared and far from home. Many do not speak Arabic and have a hard time making a life in Cairo. Most have had difficult or traumatizing journeys. That’s why StARS has a new center that specializes in support for these young people, with counseling, classes, support groups and more loving care. We’re proud to support them as they ease some of the burdens that are weighing heavily on thousands of young shoulders.

Stories of Change

Students reading at an outdoor library in Vietnam.

A new library makes reading more fun in Vietnam

With just under 300 students, Muong Kim #1 is one of the larger primary schools in its commune in Vietnam. So when I visited the school about 18 months ago, I was interested in seeing the library. To my disappointment, I was taken to a tiny room stuffed with books and supplies. It was more of a storage closet than a library. Plus, I found out that no reading activities were being organized for the students.

After that visit, my colleagues and I suggested that the faculty of Muong Kim #1 consider an outdoor library. Lots of people asked, “An outdoor library? What does that look like?”

Well, if you were to visit Muong Kim #1 today, you would see storybooks placed neatly on small, colorful shelves under the canopy of the school yard trees. Students are sitting here and there around the yard. They’re reading.

One student, Hoang Mai Chi, told us, “I was one of the 10 students who joined the student group to help our teacher, who is also the librarian. My duty is to take books from library room in the building each school day and place them on the shelves for my friends to read. Then, I return the books to the library store room at the end of the day. I see that my schoolmates like reading in the yard because it has nice breezes and is more comfortable than being in a stuffy room.”

Thanks to the success of the open-air library and our team’s other work to promote child-friendly libraries, the district’s Department of Education has decided to create a new indoor library at the school! It is much larger than the store room that I saw 18 months ago. It has lots of books, and games, too!

“I like playing a traditional game, Ô ăn quan [Mandarin Square Capturing] and reading comic books,” the student on duty as a library aid told me. Hoang Mai Chi told me that she likes guiding young students to find books, reading the books aloud to younger students who aren’t at the needed reading level yet for that story, and helping the library teacher continue to make the library more beautiful. “I also hope our library will have more games and new books,” she adds.

Our team is so proud of all the ways we’ve been able to promote reading both for learning and for fun in Vietnam!

Story told by Nguyen Thi Hai Yen, CWS Vietnam Program Officer.

Stories of Change

Haserat Beriša. Photo courtesy Center for Youth Integration.

Love overcame fear for Haserat’s family

During a recent visit to an informal Roma settlement in Belgrade, we stopped in to see the Beriša family. They’ve invited us to their modest home and want to show us how they’ve cleaned and decorated it to welcome home their son Haserat, who is coming out of the hospital. Everybody’s in a great mood and very excited about his return home.

For the Berišas and their neighbors, going to the hospital was unacceptable and scary only a couple of months ago. Now it had become a regular activity. Here’s what happened:

After many years of trying to organize a full medical exam and scheduling a heart surgery for the boy, we’re finally only one step away from our goal. There were many obstacles during this process, like incomplete medical documentation and ups and downs in his parent’s motivation to accept this surgery.

Now it is all behind us. The willpower for living and recovery was stronger than the fear of a fatal outcome from the surgery.

CWS supports two Drop-In Shelters for Roma children like Hasaret. The shelters are a safe place where children can play, study, eat, bathe and get clean clothes. The shelter teams also help the children’s families access social services like schools and healthcare. A professional team of shelter staff did all that they could to make this surgery possible and to create a better tomorrow.

In cooperation with the nurse and medical team, the outreach team has organized all the necessary exams before Hasaret’s surgery. They scheduled his admission to the hospital. A teacher and a psychologist have talked to Hasaret’s parents about further plans and needed appointments for a successful surgery and healing. His parents’ motivation was falling as they learned more about the risks and details of the surgery. However, the medical staff were so supportive from the beginning to the end. They kept in close contact with Haserat’s parents every day to keep them informed and comfort them about the process.

Haserat’s surgery was a success. He had to stay in the hospital for awhile to recover. During his hospital stay, the shelter team provided hygiene products and clean clothing for Haserat and arranging visits from his family. Over time, his parents were able to arrange their own visits. They became motivated to help Haserat realize how important his recovery in the hospital was.

Love and care overcame the fear of the unknown that had loomed large. It wouldn’t have happened without the team’s thorough and urgent work.

After all of that, the best moment was when Haserat’s mom sad, “I can find peace now knowing he is healthy.”

Stories of Change

Laila works on her sketches for the 16 Days of Activism campaign.

A young asylum-seeker is raising her voice for her sisters through art and poetry

“This issue gets worse day by day, and I hope my story will not just raise awareness but will give strength and hope to victims.”

Laila* is talking about gender-based violence, which she experienced in its most horrific form a few years ago.

The oldest of seven children, Laila grew up in the isolated and conservative central highlands of Afghanistan. In her community, girls are discouraged from going to school. Traditional thinking and local leaders still insist that women should not have the same rights as men.

Luckily, Laila’s own family was more open minded. Her father is a teacher and an advocate for women’s and girls’ education. Because he spoke up about this, his family received threats. One afternoon a few years ago, those threats turned to action. Laila was kidnapped when she was walking home from school. For three months, she suffered unimaginable abuse. Finally, one evening, she was able to escape. The men who were supposed to be watching her got into a fight, so she seized the opportunity to sneak out of the house. She recognized the neighborhood as one about two hours from her home, so she ran back to her house. Her family was amazed and relieved to see her, but they knew that it wasn’t safe for her to stay with them. As countless fathers of children in danger have done before him, Laila’s father arranged for a smuggler to get her out of Afghanistan to India and then on to Malaysia and eventually Indonesia.

When she arrived in Indonesia, Laila made her way to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to register as an asylum seeker. After she registered, she was directed to a CWS-hosted group home in Jakarta, which is operated with generous support from the Australian government.

For the first time in her teenage life, Laila felt the tension leave her body.

“I felt free, which is such a great feeling. Everyone is respectful towards one another. I’m feeling so relieved because I’m in a respectful society where men and women are seen as equal.” In her new home, Laila, 17, is with other Afghan girls as well as women and girls from other countries, too. “It is nice to live in a multicultural home, learning about and respecting other cultures. I am missing my family a lot, and I cry many nights. On these nights, even the non-Afghan girls from Somalia, Ethiopia and Iraq all comfort me, and this shows me one thing: that we are in this together regardless of our background,” she says.

Laila is on a path to healing in the CWS home. As soon as our team heard her story, we worked with counselors to find a way to support her. “The first thing that CWS did after I shared my story was to send me to a psychologist,” she says. “And it helped me so much. The psychological counselling, and the daily comfort and assurance from my Social Workers helped me get my mental state better every day. I talked a lot to my Social Workers, too! They are both so kind and understanding. Coming from my area, it was hard to trust anyone, but I trust all of them absolutely and will do whatever they said is necessary, because I know their intention is good, and that is to help me recover. I am grateful.”

The 16 Days of Activism worldwide campaign runs from November 25 through December 10 each year – from the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women to International Human Rights Day. CWS encouraged all of the children and women living in the group homes that we host to participate in the campaign. Laila created three pieces of art and wrote a poem for everyone who face, survive and overcome violence against women and girls.

This was her poem:

For all women, do not keep quiet.
Raise your voice, because your Rights are equal.
It is time to find yourself, because you are not someone that just does whatever a man says.
Women too are powerful.
Raise your hand and make your future better.
Do not keep quiet, even when they have handcuffed your hand.
Being a woman is not a crime.

Laila started writing poetry when she was eight years old. She saw too many tough moments around her, such as girls being forced to marry at young ages and girls who weren’t able to go to school. For Laila, her poetry was a way to escape. She writes poems to express “the pain of others, and things that she saw and experienced.” She says, “I want to be the voice of all women who can never speak up, those who keep their pain inside, and for those whom will get punished and excluded for speaking up.”

Laila wants to share two of her poems and the stories behind them:

—-

Afghan Women’s Pain

Thousands of words are captive in their throat
I am a woman, the piece of Farkhunda’s body I am

I am a woman, the generation of aggrieved Farkhunda I am
I have been under violence for years

I am a woman, from the poor, pity generation I am
I am a woman on the awestricken road I am

I am a woman, the generation of Aisha and burnt Farkhunda I am

I have been under perverted eyes for years
I am screaming but nobody hears me, I am a woman

Yeah! The generation of poor Farkhunda I am

Laila explained to our team that this poem is about two real Afghan women, Farkhunda and Aisha. A Mullah falsely accused Farkhunda of burning the Qur’an. The gathering crowd, not understanding what was happening, sided with the Mullah after the Mullah yelled to the crowd that Farkhunda had just burnt a Qur’an and thus must be killed. The angry crowd savagely killed her. Later investigation revealed that Farkhunda did not burn the Qur’an. Bibi Aisha case is slightly more well-known, as she appeared in the cover of TIME magazine. Aisha’s face was mutilated by a Taliban, after her father ‘traded’ her for marriage to a Taliban fighter in compensation for a killing that her family did. Aisha managed to run away and returned to her family, but her father returned her to her husband’s family. As a punishment for running away, they brought her to mountain side, cut off her nose and left her to die. Luckily, she was found by aid workers, managed to heal and is currently living in the US.

—-

Afghan Women

Gloom of a woman has stories
Being a woman in my country is harrowing
Pains of tears after tears, being a woman is harrowing in my country

Afghan women have silent and bitter songs
Their life has thousands of journeys
In my country, how else can women suffer?

Laila interprets her poem like this:

– Being a woman in Afghanistan means that you likely won’t be able to access education or participate in society.
– Being a woman in Afghanistan is like being a bird, which can sing and make music. But in Afghanistan that song is sorrowful.
– Being a woman in Afghanistan means your voice is always silenced and you can’t sing your songs.
– Being a woman in Afghanistan means a thousand rough “adventures” but not being able to speak about it. On the inside, they are burning.
– Violence towards women in Afghanistan is widespread, even today.

“I want to be the voice of all women who can never speak up, those who keep their pain on the inside and those for whom if they speak up will be stigmatized,” Laila says.

*Name changed to protect identity.