Our project officers must travel to incredibly remote places to reach some of the projects we support—but they’re well worth the effort. For instance, Claudio, who covers Latin American projects, describes his recent journey to a boarding school in the mountains of Arequipa, Peru. After a long flight, he rode a crowded bus for 12 hours until it literally reached the end of the road.
It can be humiliating to be treated as a charity case—the object of someone else’s pity and justification for their pride. Not being able to feed your family can be enough of a blow to your self esteem; but having food (or a house, or other basic need) provided in the wrong spirit can be almost as crushing.
Did you know that an estimated 1.1 billion people around the world rely on unsanitary water sources for drinking? Clean water is a basic necessity that no one should have to do without. That number got a lot of attention this week as the U.N. and other international groups observed World Water Day, a time for raising awareness about the plight of those who lack access to clean water.
Reports have been trickling in all day from our staff and mission partners in Haiti. The devastation from yesterday’s 7.2-scale earthquake has been profound. “It looks like Dante’s Inferno. There are dead bodies everywhere,” said Mike Henry, our Haiti projects officer who is on the ground in Port-au-Prince today, working with our partners to bring aid to the people.