The “50 Days of Action for Women and Girls” campaign is underway with several organizations, including ChildFund, seeking to advance progress in U.S. foreign policy efforts on the following issues:

• Ending Early and Forced Marriage
• Ensuring Quality Education for Women and Girls
• Preventing Violence against Women and Girls
• Improving the Health of Women and Girls
• Promoting Economic Empowerment of Women and Girls
• Achieving Peace and Security for Women and Girls
• Protecting Human Rights & Promoting Leadership and Participation of Women and Girls
• Putting Women and Girls at the Center of the Post-2015 Global Development Agenda.

This week, the campaign is focusing on quality education for girls and women. So I wanted to share a link to a video about our work with two unique girls’ schools in Kenya.

One school “books” girls for an education instead of early marriage. Another features solar-powered lighting so courses can be held in the evenings after the days chores are done.

http://youtu.be/vdKLMUs9ntw

Happy National Peace Corps Week!

Remembering my days living in northeastern Kenya as a volunteer in the 1970s. It was an amazing experience that taught me so much about the developing world — and about myself.

This is a great week to learn more about the Peace Corps mission. It might change the course of your life.

We received a sweet note from children in our Kenya programs. Seeing their happy faces reminds me of the important work we are doing through the support of ChildFund sponsors and donors:

We say Thank You to our sponsors

For your kindness and support.

We learn, eat and play

Because of you.

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

Children from AIC ECCD, Archers post, Northern Kenya

With no family to spend Christmas with during my two years in Kenya as a Peace Corps volunteer, my fellow volunteers became my family. One year my Christmas holidays were spent in northwestern Kenya. There my fellow volunteers gathered to celebrate the holidays in the Pokot tribal area, home to a traditional tribe whose customs included wearing animal skins and eating a meat-based diet.

We didn’t exchange gifts – volunteers have no money to spend. Instead, our focus was on spending time together. We honestly didn’t mind sleeping on the floor or in tents and having too many people sharing one bathroom. We were having fun in the way young people can. But we never dreamed it would be so difficult to cook our Christmas dinner, the focal point of our celebration.

The volunteer who was our host had purchased a turkey for the occasion – a live turkey. She thought she was keeping it safe near her house but two young children practicing their hunting skills with bow and arrows killed the turkey a week before Christmas! With no refrigerators in sight, my friend and her neighbors ate the bird before we arrived.

Ever resourceful, our group pooled its cash and bought a few chickens for our Christmas feast and made a Robinson Crusoe-style oven (a large metal pot with a lid and charcoal on the top and bottom) to cook them. The chickens took forever to cook; yet, when we finally ate, what we lacked in style and cuisine, we made up for in spirit.

Perhaps feeling responsible for our missing a turkey feast, community members, dressed traditionally, gathered the next day and danced and sang for our group. Soon, they paraded in a cow and slaughtered it in our honor. One enterprising member of our group, experienced from working in a butcher’s shop while in high school, elbowed his way to the front and carved out the filet steaks. That night we ate the best meal that the tribe could offer us. We were grateful.

From my work with ChildFund, I know that 870 million people do not have enough to eat, and 98 percent of them live in developing countries. As you enjoy your Christmas dinner and count your blessings this year, I would ask you to also think about what you can do in 2013 to ease the hunger of others across the world.

I was up before dawn to meet the other visitors outside the district health center. The district medical officer (a German doctor) was taking a group of provincial governmental officials on a tour to see how the Ministry of Health system was working in this remote part of northeastern Kenya. As the newly arrived Peace Corps volunteer assigned to work on nutritional problems, I was invited along.

We left before everyone else was up. I had crept out of my temporary quarters without eating breakfast; I didn’t want to disturb anyone. I also didn’t carry any food and water with me, not yet experienced enough to know you should always be prepared when traveling in remote areas.

The day grew long and very, very hot as we traveled from health dispensary to health dispensary. We didn’t know it then, but this semi-desert part of Kenya was at the beginning of what became known as the Ethiopian drought of the 1980s. This sparsely populated area was home to the Boran tribe, nomadic herders who survived on their camels and goats.

We found the dispensaries to be staffed with one or two health assistants, who had a minimal supply of drugs to treat the local population for a variety of ailments, often malaria. The health dispensaries didn’t have electricity or a water source; so the assistants had to haul water for long distances. Needless to say, we didn’t drink any of their precious water and shared with those we met the few cookies and snacks others in our group had brought along.

At sunset, we arrived at a district town and drove up to the health center. I remember very clearly running to the large water tank in front of the health center and putting my head down under the faucet to drink my first drink of the day. I was parched and the water tasted sooo good.

As this town got few visitors, our group received a lot of attention. A big dinner was prepared in our honor, starting with the slaughtering of a goat – about 6 feet from where I was sitting. It was the first time I had ever seen an animal slaughtered. Needless to say, by the time the food was ready to eat at about 9 p.m., I had pretty much lost my appetite. I picked at a few pieces of meat from the communal plate. Someone commented that Americans didn’t eat too much.

That was my first Thanksgiving in Africa – with little food and no water all day.

Years later, I often thought it was good to experience a day of forced fasting as a point of comparison for my decades of over-consumption on Thanksgiving. Working with ChildFund helps me appreciate just how much I have and how truly difficult it is for the many millions of children and families who go without.

As with many things, life lessons are difficult to see or appreciate in the moment. But they are always good to remember.

The news spread like wildfire among the parents who had gathered to watch their kid’s soccer game. The parent responsible for snacks that day had brought Oreo cookies. It wasn’t that we were complaining that the snack wasn’t healthy enough or feeling superior because we would only bring homemade snacks.  It was because we were jealous - we wanted some!

Where were we living without easy access to Oreos?  It was Dhaka, Bangladesh. When I lived there, there was only two ways to get Oreos — bring them back in your luggage when you went on home leave or have a friend with U.S. commissary privileges share some with you.

If I was offered an Oreo, I would certainly take one. But living in a country plagued by child hunger had the same impact on me then as it does today — it made my desire for Oreos insignificant. It has been estimated that between 50,000 to 100,000 people have died in the recent Horn of Africa drought, most of them children. The cause was hunger. In Kenya and Ethiopia, ChildFund and many other organizations worked successfully to reduce the impact of the drought on children who are the most vulnerable. Somalia children were not so lucky. The humanitarian community’s slow response to the drought coupled with the government-less, chaotic Somalia made a potent mix that prevented help from reaching many children in time.  

Actually it’s a tossup for me as to my favorite cookie - Oreos or chocolate chip. My guess is that a Somalia child would have welcomed either.