Get Paid for Your Spring Semester Stories from Abroad

October 28th, Turn $500 into $750, Turn Green Paper into Good Works

This Wednesday (the 28th) we have an online gift matching opportunity. Any amount between $50 and $2,500 you give to Amizade will be matched at 50%. This is a rare opportunity and one I hope you’ll take. This is the first time – ever – that we’ve had a matching gift opportunity like this, so I hope you’ll forgive me for taking more than a brief moment to tell you about what we’ve been up to. Instructions on how to give and have your gift matched are at the bottom of this post.

Sometimes when I talk about Amizade I focus excessively on how we’ve been able to make the numbers work over the past few years – we’ve balanced the budget, expanded, hired new staff, and kept administration costs below 20% - but of course what really matters is the effects we have in communities and in individual lives. We’ve also seen continuity and improvement in those areas during the past year.

• Through cooperative efforts with West Virginia University, Central Michigan University, and Road Scholar (previously Elderhostel), we offered several programs in Germany and Poland that promote Holocaust Remembrance, Anti-Genocide Efforts, and historical landscape preservation. The recent rise in holocaust denial and genocide elsewhere in the world illustrate the vital importance of this programming.  

• In the Navajo Nation, we worked with Duke University's Duke Engage initiative to develop and establish a college preparatory program. Only 36% of Navajo college students graduate college in six years compared to 56% of the US population. The program addresses this challenge directly and will be offered again in 2010.

• In Brazil, we helped develop community centers in Alvorada and Livramento, near Santarem. Community members use the sites to offer courses, have sports activities, and offer cultural activities. The centers serve more than 100 children and more than 75 families. A recent study by the University of British Columbia suggested more than 50% of youth in Santarem report violence as their primary concern, making these community centers especially important as places for safe activities.

• Through cooperation with Carlow University, we offered a national conference on global service-learning attended by more than 70 individuals representing several states and institutions of higher education. The conference helped staff and faculty at other universities improve their institutions’ capabilities to offer critical, reflective, community-driven academic service-learning programming that stimulates students’ thinking on global citizenship.

• In Montana, for the second consecutive year, we offered a volunteer program for Dartmouth University alumni, who contributed to the historic and environmental preservation of the OTO Dude Ranch, an icon of the American West and America’s first dude ranch.

• In Puerto Morelos, Mexico, Amizade cooperated with Regis Jesuit High School of Denver, Colorado on the beautification of a kindergarten classroom and facilities.

• Through cooperation with the University of Idaho’s Upward Bound Program, Penn State – Abington, and Academy of the Sacred Heart of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, Amizade supported Washington, D.C. programs to combat hunger and homelessness. Hunger and Homelessness have been on the rise in Washington DC since 2001, and have only gotten more acute in the current economic downturn.

• In Bolivia, Amizade built on more than twelve years of cooperation by completing classroom walls at Viloma Primary School, installing a bathroom at the Hogar de Ninos Orphanage, and supplying volunteers at The Ceoli Center for Children with Disabilities and at The Millennium Casa Cuna Orphanage. The Bolivian Government provides orphanages with only the equivalent of 47 US cents per day ($0.47) per child, so the volunteer support and material support that comes with it are sorely needed.

• In Ghana, Amizade cooperated with West Virginia University to continue efforts on the community library in Jukwa, Ghana. When completed, the library will be the first public library outside of the capital city of Accra.

• Through cooperation with Central Michigan University, Westfield University, Duke University, and West Virginia University, Amizade supported peace and reconciliation-related programming in Northern Ireland, both in Belfast and Ballycastle.

• In Tanzania, Amizade continued Women’s Rights and Water Harvesting efforts, ensuring women and children have improved access to water, empowerment, and education. Those efforts were recognized in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, WVU’sDaily Athenaeum, and Johnstown, Pennsylvania’s Advocate.

In these and other ways, Amizade connected more than 300 volunteers and service-learning students with community-driven initiatives around the world. The community outcomes I mentioned above are important, but also vital to all that Amizade does and stands for are the changes in each individual life that result from these experiences. Regardless of whether their careers are in public health, development, teaching, law, business, or something else, Amizade participants are strongly affected. They regularly report working in their own lives after programs to continue to support Amizade’s efforts to build a better world. They devote themselves to the ethical actions necessary – through work, life choices, and civil society – to build a more just, sustainable, and inclusive world.

Please support our efforts this year. This matching opportunity is nothing short of incredible and can substantially leverage your philanthropy for a strong and growing cause that creates positive social change at the community and individual levels.

To take advantage of this matching opportunity, please simply:

1. Go to the Pittsburgh Gives website and create a LogIn now.
2. Return to the Pittsburgh Gives website promptly at 10am on this coming Wednesday, October 28^th, LogIn, and make your gift. **Important** - The Pittsburgh Foundation has announced it will refresh its website at 9:59 am on the 28^th, so that no one can LogIn before 10am and simply wait for 10:00. It is important, therefore, to LogIn precisely at 10am.
3. Find “Amizade” using the search box in the top right quarter of the page.
4. Click “Amizade”
5. Click “Donate Now / Donate to Nonprofit” in the top right quarter of the page.
6. You will have just leveraged your philanthropy considerably! Thank you! 

Thank you for taking advantage of this opportunity while it’s available. I hope it came through in my post above, but if it didn’t: Please understand that giving to Amizade is giving to save lives, empower through education and opportunity, form friendships across cultures, and build a better world.

2009 Citizens for Global Solutions Multimedia Contest

$4,000 in prizes up for grabs. Get your creative juices flowing on representing Global Solutions - http://multimedia.globalsolutions.org/2009-multimedia-contest. Contest deadline = November 17. Good luck!

Why Amizade Supports Holocaust Remembrance and Historical Preservation Efforts

For fifteen years, Amizade has maintained a strong commitment to community-driven service. This has meant building schools, tutoring children, learning about specific cultural histories and practices, and restoring historic sites. When a community proposes a service initiative, we motivate volunteers and students to enact that initiative. In Germany and Poland, we work to honor the wishes of Holocaust Survivors, their families, the families of Holocaust Victims, and the global coalition of people organized in opposition to genocide, anywhere it occurs. We therefore support Holocaust Remembrance and related historic landscape preservation. Holocaust denials and contemporary genocide continue to clarify how absolutely vital Holocaust Remembrance and anti-genocide efforts are today.

During our programs in Germany and Poland (one of which we recently facilitated for Elderhostel volunteers), groups are led by Dr. Christopher Kopper, an expert in modern German History and Holocaust Studies. During the September Elderhostel program, Amizade Director of Operations Brandon Cohen visited with the group to share his grandfather’s story as a Holocaust Survivor. Brandon added to the program’s overarching emphasis on communicating the human reality of the Holocaust.

That six million Jews were killed in that genocide is often cited and repeated, but it is somehow even more unsettling and horrifying to begin to understand each of those six million people as individuals with husbands or wives, children, parents, jobs, homes, hopes, dreams and fears. And of course, these genuine individual lives and experiences were just as present for all of the Nazi regime's victims, including Roma, people with disabilities, Slavic peoples, homosexuals, and others.

Visiting the sites where the Holocaust took place and learning more about the fear, intimidation, and systematic murder enacted by the Nazi regime makes the reality and horror of the Holocaust uncomfortably clear. Though understanding the Holocaust in that way is uncomfortable and challenging, it must be understood, and the historical reality must be made clear.

Holocaust deniers do a disservice to humankind when they subvert history. This disservice comes in several forms. First, their denials are direct and clear affronts to Survivors, their families, and the families of Holocaust Victims. Their denials are – six million times over – telling the families of murder victims that there was no murder. Second, denials negate a clear reality about the modern world: a ‘civilized’ Germany at one relatively recent point in history saw fit to exterminate a vast part of Europe’s people. If we as a human community do not understand and accept this historical fact we run greater risk of allowing such horrors to occur again - and again. Third, by sowing seeds of doubt within the historical record deniers create room for disagreement between Jews and non-Jews. Thus deniers sow seeds of dissension within the broader human community and create conflict where none should exist.

Unfortunately, deniers today are numerous and sometimes as powerful as President Ahmadinejad of Iran, who has made no effort to mask his fervent anti-Jewish stance. Also unfortunately, and as much as I have absolutely met some wonderful, reasonable and kind Iranians, the rest of Ahmadinehad's government appears to harbor similar hatreds, having voiced no objection to his recent appointment to Defense Secretary. This new Iranian Defense Secretary is wanted by Interpol for his suspected role in masterminding the bombing of a Jewish Center in Buenos Aires in 1994; a bombing that killed 85 people. Clearly, with such powerful and numerous deniers in the world today, all remembrance and preservation efforts are vital - and need even more support.

I want to take a quick aside to say that I once spent two wonderful weeks travelling around northern Ethiopia with an Israeli, a Swede, and a Swedish-Iranian. The Swedish-Iranian woman was kind, insightful, filled with love for all people, and harbored not one bit of ill-will toward our Israeli travelling companion. She, like other Iranians I've met, expressed her faith in her country, the beauty of its mountains, deserts, and date orchards, the kindness of so many of its people, and its proud legacy as having arguably authored the world's first known charter of human rights - some 2,000 years ago. All of which is to say denials must absolutely be contradicted and stopped, but let's be careful to remember that not all Iranians are as reckless and loathsome as their current President. What we're really seeking here, for Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, Arab Women and Asian Men, is a world where all people have basic human rights and respect one another's rights as well.    

And seeking that world, advocating for that world, and creating that world is the final component of why our work in Germany and Poland is so important. We are educating anti-genocide leaders of today and tomorrow. We are growing the global community who has witnessed the historical artifacts and reality of the Holocaust, and we are therefore growing the global community of people who understand the brutal reality of genocide and who will not sit idly by while tens and hundreds of thousands are killed today in Burma, Darfur, and The Democratic Republic of Congo. Through service organized around historical preservation at and near Auschwitz, we are preparing people of all ages for deep commitments to inspiring and unfortunately essential anti-genocide movements like this one:

I am proud to be part of these efforts and I'm proud that Amizade is part of these efforts. I want to thank Dr. Kopper, Michael Sandy, Dr. Daniel Weiss, Amy Scanlon, Brandon Cohen, Steve Zupcic, and especially Betty Lou Weiss and Dr. Elena Kamel for strengthening and advancing our role in this vital historical remembrance and anti-genocide work.

Today's Update: Those of you who are moved by courageous acts of individuals to save lives despite the genocidal acts of totalitarian regimes will appreciate this profile of 89-year-old New Yorker Dr. Tina Strobos published recently in the New York Times. 

Yes We STILL Can, Magic Money, Do Amizade, The Challenge of Development, Great Job!

In this post:

1. The Contest Has Become an Even Better Opportunity; Yes You can STILL Make a Difference with Just a Click! 
2. Leveraging your philanthropy – Opportunity for 50% matching on October 28^th
3. 2010 Service-Learning Courses are Online with Applications Available and 2010 Volunteer Program Opportunities are Coming this Week Too
4. The Challenge of Development and hints at site updates from Bolivia, Germany and Poland
5. Great Job Amizade Pittsburgh Staff and Carlow University Volunteers – Painting a World Map at Pittsburgh Public Schools’ International Magnet School!  

The Contest that has become an Even Better Opportunity: Yes You can Still Make a Difference

Many thanks to all the Amizade Friends and Followers who voted to support our water harvesting project in Karagwe District, Tanzania. The contest was a wild ride, and the conclusion looked momentarily like the melee surrounding the 2000 Presidential Election! But this one’s not going to the Supreme Court; in fact we’ve been handed a much better option. And those of you who emailed us in frustration right after noon today (asking if you could still vote) – we’ve got great news for you.

If you were following closely you know – last night we had 3^rd place, this morning we were in 5^th, through the day more than a hundred of you voted, we jumped to third, and at noon, we had fallen to 4^th by only 5 votes. The good news is that the organization that promoted this contest, Africa Rural Connect, has decided to offer one more round. The deadline for voting for this final round is November 15^th. The really good news is that we’re currently in first place for the final round. And the even better news is this gives us time to email friends and family; it gives us time to email people we know want to change the world for the better but don’t know how or feel like they don’t have time. We can let them know all they have to do is register and endorse the project here:  http://arc.peacecorpsconnect.org/view/965/rainwater-harvesting-in-rural-tanzania.

Above, a group of Amizade students interviewing a family that received a water tank this past summer (and here the same group is later getting briefed at the US Embassy in Dar Es Salaam). 

And finally, the best news of all, if we get the first place, $3,000 prize, in this final round instead of the $1,000 3^rd place prize we were chasing, we’ll be able to work with seven (instead of just 2) families to install water harvesting systems. We’ll therefore be able to help at least 70 (instead of 20) people get access to water. What that does for people in real terms is challenging to understand without the experience of watching young children and women wake every day to walk miles for water. It’s hard to understand without watching children, working hard at school all day, take their lunch breaks to walk in their school uniforms to distant water sources, instead of eating lunch. What I hope to communicate is that these water systems, which the families support by providing some of the locally available materials, are absolutely liberating.

This is the kind of water source many children and women are forced to utilize before having water harvesting systems. 

Water systems free women and children from daily water gathering duties and provide opportunities to go to school and to work. It is a simple solution, it is locally supported, it is empowering, and we have had clear successes with the systems we have installed over the past two years. When we visit families that have received systems, they are literally overcome with thankfulness. It is a priceless gift – and you can enable it. Here’s a little note one of my board members put together for his network. Feel free to cut and paste it to go to your friends and family:

Friends,

If you get a chance to go online tonight I have a quick way you can support a great cause at no cost to you.

1.     Click this link Rainwater Harvesting in Rural Tanzania | Africa Rural Connect

2.     sign up  

3.     click “Endorse it” for the Tanzania Water harvesting program. 

It will take 60 seconds. 

They are a few votes away from winning a grant to deliver a clean water harvesting system to some folks in rural Tanzania.  This is a non-profit I’ve been involved with for the past half-decade that does great work. 

Please forward this to any and everyone. 

Thanks!!

Please be sure every good and kind person you know – votes for this. Thank you.

Students, a Tanzanian Family and WOMEDA Director Juma Massisi in front of a new water tank 

Leveraging Your Philanthropy – We can Beat the Market

Yes, you’ve asked, and it’s true. On October 28^th, thanks to the Pittsburgh Foundation, we can make $50 turn into $75. We can make $2,500 turn into $3,750, and all of the parallel options in between. The Pittsburgh Foundation is matching gifts on the morning of October 28^th beginning promptly at 10 am. To have your gift matched at 50 cents to the dollar, simply create a Login at The Pittsburgh Foundation website and return to the website promptly at 10am on October 28^th. Matching funds are limited, so please be certain to return precisely at 10 am.    

2010 Service-Learning Courses and Volunteer Programs

Amizade makes a difference through a unique model of development: we promote community-driven service across cultures. All of our efforts are enacted by community leaders and volunteers working in cooperation with volunteers and students who are visiting the community to serve, to learn about local perspectives and experience, and to connect and form friendships across cultures. The 2010 Service-Learning Course opportunities are all online and the semester programs are featured in this volunteer-produced (Thanks, Brother Dave) video:

The 2010 volunteer programs will all be online here within a few days.

The Challenge of Development, Site Updates from Bolivia, Brazil, Germany and Poland

In supporting community-driven development, Amizade wants to support those initiatives that are empowering, enabling, and locally-supported. That is definitely what we have in the Tanzania Water Harvesting Initiative.

Sometimes, however unfortunately, our community partners have moments when they lack fundamental basic resources. Sometimes we are asked to step in to fill gaps. The orphanage we partner with in Bolivia, Millennium Cradle House, has been hit with some unequivocally hard times. I know several people are interested in helping Millennium in particular. If you want to help the children at Millennium Cradle House, you can also give on the matching day mentioned above and indicate that you’d like your donation to go to Millennium. I’ll write more about that soon.

Another site update is coming soon from our Holocaust Remembrance, Historical Landscape Preservation, and Anti-Genocide Awareness efforts in Germany and Poland. And a lot is happening (medical volunteering, environmental initiatives, more!) at the site where we were originally founded in Santarem, Brazil.

Great Job Pittsburgh Staff and Carlow University Volunteers, Painting a World Map at Pittsburgh Public Schools' International Magnet School!

Yes! As reported by the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Amizade Pittsburgh Regional Outreach Coordinator Kat Stackel and other Amizade staff members (thanks too to Laura Hoch) recently worked with Carlow University students as part of Carlow University Service-Learning and Outreach Center's big 5^th Annual Mercy Service Day. Great work to all involved!

And of course, great work to all who supported us in the Africa Rural Connect Contest and to all who continue to support us. We're building a better world together! 


Stay up to date and be part of continuing to make a difference by following this blog or by joining our facebook group!

How YOU can make a difference RIGHT NOW for families in Tanzania

Amizade makes an important difference everywhere it works, but the possibility to make a difference and the outcomes of that effort are perhaps among their most extreme at our partnership site in Karagwe District, Tanzania. In Karagwe Amizade works with local organizations FADECO and WOMEDA to ensure women and families have access to water. Before working with Amizade to develop sustainable water harvesting systems on their houses, the families must walk as many as four miles every day for water – in each direction – and often the water sources are contaminated.

Gaining access to water is deeply liberating, and the manner in which Amizade works to support access to water is based on locally appropriate technologies and community investment in the effort. Our water harvesting initiative, which is kindly and generously supported by the All People Be Happy Foundation, involves installing aluminum gutter systems on homes to capture rainwater in plastic or cement tanks. This simple solution, managed properly to account for dry seasons, helps ensure continuous access to water. When families have access to water they are empowered; women have chances to work or attend school, children have more time for school and for homework.  

All of the families that received tanks this year contributed something to the effort. Often their contribution was the stone and sand for the cement base for the tank. In a region with annual per capita incomes hovering near $300, their labor to collect the stone and sand served as clear testimony to their real commitment to having and maintaining a harvesting system. An entire home water harvesting system costs approximately $400, which is a great deal of money in the local economy but a small price to pay to unleash potential for a whole family. It’s a small price to help individuals have their own opportunities to attend school and to work.

I’ve commented before on the continuously impressive and inspiring work completed by some of my friends in Karagwe District. Ensuring water access simply liberates people and gives them the time and most basic of resources to allow them to develop and innovate for their own communities. If you’d like to help us in these life-saving and empowering efforts, there are three ways you can do so right now:

1. You can vote for the water harvesting project on Africa Rural Connect. Vote for us because our solution is simple and elegant, it is locally supported, and it is sustainable. This could help us receive more funding in the future, so please vote now, and have your friends do so too. It will take you about 30 seconds, because you need to register, and it will make a huge, empowering and liberating difference for Tanzanian families if we win. Please make the commitment. And of course, please share the page with others and ask them to endorse!!!        
2. You can give to support the initiative, and if you give on October 28^th, your donation will be matched at 50 cents to every dollar. Matching funds are limited, so go to the Pittsburgh Foundation website right now, create a LogIn, and mark your calendar to return to the site on October 28 promptly at 10 am. Any donation between $50 and $2,500 that you make at that time will be matched at 50% and you can, in the notes section, designate that you want your donation to go toward the Tanzania Water Harvesting Initiative.   
3. You can become a fan of Amizade on Facebook or otherwise spread the word by sharing Amizade volunteering and giving opportunities with your family, at your religious institution, at your school, college, or university, or with your community group. Every group that volunteers in Tanzania plays some role in supporting this initiative, so the more people who know about the opportunities, the better. During 2010, we'll have semester programs, a summer service-learning course, and open volunteer programs (link coming soon) for volunteers of all ages in Tanzania. Please spread the word and/or share this video: 

Thank you for doing what you can to ensure others have basic access to water.

International Student Video Contest, $3,500 Prize

http://www.internationalstudent.com/contest/ - Check out the contest for students who are studying abroad or who WANT TO study abroad. A great potential opportunity to raise funds toward study abroad!

Global Service-Learning: Academically Rigorous and Personally Challenging

Photo: Hannah Caughman, Winthrop University, Current Bolivia Semester Student with Amizade and West Virginia University, pictured above at right connecting with a child at an orphanage supported through Amizade volunteers and students

Service-learning is a pedagogy - a teaching method. It is a delivery vehicle for clear course content. But it has the unpopular academic position of having unequivocal rootednesss in reality. At times, this leads to the suspicion that students receive credit simply for volunteering. This should never be the case with academic service-learning, and through the Amizade-West Virginia University partnership and course approval process*, it never is the case.

I'll write more on service-learning in the coming weeks and months, but for the moment, I've just posted below a set of student reflections that characterize one important characteristic of service-learning. That is, service-learning removes the common illusion that ideas studied in courses, personal values, and individual actions - are fundamentally separable. The quotes below are small excerpts from the students' larger reflections on the history and present reality of international development and their own personal roles and commitments in relation to global social challenges.


*All Amizade-WVU Courses are approved by the proposing faculty member, me (as Amizade's Executive Director), and at WVU: The Director of The Center for Civic Engagement, the appropriate Department Chairperson, the Appropriate Dean, the Associate Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, and the Associate Provost for International Academic Affairs.

Student Voices: Justice Rather than Charity

When you treat ending poverty as an act of justice rather than an act of charity, it places an individual responsibility on each of us to act in ways that are more just, rather than just nice.

- Alanna Markle, Political Science Student, West Virginia University, Current Bolivia Semester Participant through the Amizade-WVU Partnership (Pictured at right waiting to enter Cochabamba's soccer stadium)

Student Voices: The Courage to Make a Difference

Drop worry, hold hope, forget about your fears
Spread your love every moment, every day
Do your part, hold your hope, and remember
Things are never quite as they appear

- Margaret Roche, University of Massachusetts - Amherst, Current Bolivia Semester Student with Amizade and West Virginia University (Pictured at right with Amizade Bolivia Site Director Jean Carla Costas in Plaza Colon, Cochabamba)

Student Voices: Emerging Identity and Desire to Make a Difference

Always it has been the assumption that my parents work more so that I could work less, but in a way, they work more as a mechanic and a waitress, so that I could work just as much as a doctor or a lawyer, and herein lies the contradiction: I want to work more so that I can make less, and somehow, make more of a difference, and actually, I’m not so sure I can say at this point where that value came from. Maybe it’s neither my mother nor my father speaking. Maybe that is my voice beginning to emerge.

- Weenta Girmay, University of Pittsburgh, Current Bolivia Semester Student with Amizade and West Virginia University (Pictured above learning how to stucco and then assisting with an orphanage construction project that Amizade supports)

Student Voices: Children Begging in Cochabamba

It's absolutely heartbreaking to be approached in a restaurant by a four or five year old child begging for change. To be honest, it makes me angry for a number of reasons. First, because these children are denied by their circumstances the opportunities afforded to so many; to scratch out a living, they must learn to beg before they learn to read. It also upsets me that I haven't done anything to help or even realized the weight of the issue of global poverty until recently. Finally, it bothers me that more people aren't willing to help and are content to live their comfortable, isolated lives and ignore the condition of a great majority of the world. Who could blame them though? Everything we experience, everything we are force-fed by the media and by society tries to make us focus our attention inward.

- Sean Buuck, Indiana University - Bloomington, Current Bolivia Semester Student with Amizade and West Virginia University (Pictured above right at a Cochabamba Soccer Match)

$500 Travel Voucher Prize in Student Travel Photo Contest

Glimpse Magazine and STA Travel are teaming up to offer a $500 Travel Voucher for first prize in their "Best Shot" student travel contest. Good luck Amizade Students!