MADRE is supporting the US to Gaza Campaign. Check out the fundraising event listed below. For more information about the campaign, visit www.ustogaza.org.

A NYC FUNDRAISING EVENT NOT TO BE MISSED

JOIN A SUNSET CRUISE IN NY HARBOR

THURSDAY AUGUST 5, 2010

It was 90 degrees today. When I came home from the office, I took a quick shower, put a load of laundry in the washing machine and rinsed some vegetables for dinner.  I poured myself a glass of ice water and thought about Ghalia and her seven kids living in Gaza City.

Water is readily available to me; still I am mindful of what I consume. But as careful as I am, I waste more water in a day than Ghalia has access to in a month.

Ghalia is 48 years old and lives with her children in the Zeitoun district of Gaza City,  where most water is unfit for human consumption.

Ghalia, like so many mothers in Gaza, struggles every day to find clean water for herself and her children.  And she worries every day about her children becoming sick or even dying from the filthy water they are sometimes forced to drink.

You can make sure Ghalia's children have clean water to drink.

What's most maddening to me is that Ghalia's crisis is utterly avoidable. It's not the result of an earthquake or any other natural disaster, but of Israeli military policies. Early last year, Israel destroyed Gaza's water infrastructure in a protracted bombing campaign. Ghalia's husband and 39 other relatives were killed in the bombing. Since then, an economic blockade has prevented Gazans from importing the materials they need to rebuild the water system.

More than a year after the bombing, Gaza City's water infrastructure remains in ruins, barely functioning and filled with deadly bacteria, sewage, salt, toxic nitrates and other impurities. The biggest danger is to babies and young children. For them, waterborne diseases--even a simple case of diarrhea--can easily become life-threatening.  

I'm counting on your support today for a major initiative we've launched to bring clean water to Gaza.

Without immediate intervention, families like Ghalia's are at great risk for cholera, hepatitis and other deadly diseases.

For Ghalia, getting safe drinking water is an exhausting, endless struggle. From her small patch of land where she raises vegetables to sell in the market, she earns about $162 a month. With this, she must provide everything — rent, food, clothes, transportation, seeds and tools to grow food, medicine—and drinkable water — for herself and her children.

Clean water costs Ghalia $50 a month — that's four times as much as contaminated water costs from the municipality.  It's also about one third of her income.  If other expenses or emergencies eat up her budget, she can't buy clean water at all.

Sometimes a friend or neighbor will share their drinking water. "But we can't have a person help us and give us water all the time," she told me. "We have to use the water we can find and it's full of salt and disease.  I am filling my tanks with it because I have no choice."

Working with our sister organization, the Zakher Association for the Development of Palestinian Women's Capacity, MADRE is installing 25 large water filters in the five communities of Gaza City with the worst water and highest rates of contamination.  Each filter can serve about 350 families with children.

We are also installing smaller water filters in 10 kindergartens, each one serving an average of 150 girls and boys between four and five years old. It's so important to get clean, safe water to these little ones!

How much will all this good work cost?

MADRE needs to raise $18,750 to fund the 35 filters and bring fresh, clean, drinkable water to an estimated 54,000 people throughout Gaza City. That's an average of $2.88 a person -- about the cost of one premium bottle of water.

I hope you will be as generous as you can with the tax-deductible gift you send today.  

Ghalia told me that clean water would change her life and that of her kids.  She told me that if she could spend fewer hours collecting water and had more time to work in her fields, she knows she could earn more at the market and maybe afford to send her children to school. She knows they'd be sick less often.  

Like any mother, Ghalia wants to give her children the best she can. She knows that for young children who are already undernourished, waterborne illnesses can be life-threatening, but she needs our support to keep them safe.

Please help us help Ghalia and thousands more like her.

Thank you

Vivian Stromberg
Executive Director

P.S. — As a result of international pressure to ease the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, Israel has finally agreed to allow more materials through the blockade, making this a perfect time to deliver the water filters to our sister organization. Now is the time to act!

P.P.S. — There are so many other stories just like Ghalia's. To read about Maryam, another mother struggling to provide water for her family, follow this link.

Here is the letter:

    Comments on Office of Global Health Affairs;
    Regulation on the Organizational Integrity of Entities
    Implementing Leadership Act Programs and Activities,
    Notice of Proposed Rulemaking,
    74 Fed. Reg. 61,096
    December 23, 2009

    Dear Secretary Sebelius:

    The undersigned organizations and individuals submit these comments on the proposed regulation implementing the “anti-prostitution policy requirement,” 22 U.S.C. § 7631(f), contained in the United States Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria Act of 2003 (“Leadership Act”).

    HIV prevention goals – as well as the human rights of individuals – are undermined by the Leadership Act’s “pledge requirement,” which requires recipients of funding to have a “policy opposing prostitution and sex trafficking.” We oppose the requirement because it compromises much-needed health and social services and the right to those services, as well as free speech. The law is bad – and the proposed regulations do not made a bad situation any better. Moreover, the proposed regulations are unworkable for foreign NGOs.

    The Bush Administration originally found that the pledge requirement was unconstitutional as applied to US NGOs and, accordingly, prevented agencies from enforcing it against US NGOs. They reversed course in 2005 and a broad coalition of groups sued the US government on First Amendment grounds to stop enforcement. The draft regulation makes no mention of this litigation even though a federal court has twice found the pledge and its implementation unconstitutional. Instead, the draft proposes an extremely burdensome scheme for US groups to exercise their free speech rights. Moreover, the proposed regulation continues to be so vague that affected NGOs do not know how to operate under it. The draft regulation is therefore deeply disappointing.

    In order to cure the ongoing constitutional violation, HHS should refrain again from enforcing the policy requirement against U.S.-based non-governmental organizations, as it did from May 2003 through May 2005, and as it has been substantially ordered to do by the District Court.

    The proposed regulations do not clarify what it means to “oppose prostitution” and leave it unknown whether the following activities are allowable:

    1. A recipient uses private funds to support a “safe house” where meetings, counseling, and health services are provided for sex workers. The program supports efforts to negotiate with the police to assure that the sex workers will not be subjected to illegal harassment and exploitation. By ensuring a safe environment, health workers are able to engage and consistently reach vulnerable groups in need of services.

    2. A recipient provides private funds to a group of sex workers that has come together as a collective to help them obtain access to such rights as wearing shoes outside a brothel and a proper burial. That group of sex workers either has no policy on prostitution or, on its own accord, takes a public position promoting or advocating the legalization of prostitution.

    3. A recipient supports with private funds a range of health care providers, including some private entities that operate their own clinics. Such health care providers might advocate for the legalization of prostitution, conduct research, publish papers, or speak publicly on the topic of legalization of prostitution.

    4. A recipient uses private grants to conducts trials on microbicides. These trials require the enrollment of individuals at very high risk of contracting HIV, such as sex workers, in order to evaluate the effectiveness of new products in preventing HIV transmission. Such trials must be carefully constructed to ensure that such women are not exploited as human subjects. Previous trials involving sex worker populations have been unsuccessful due to protests by sex worker groups (among others) over the perceived ethics of such trials. The recipient wants to work with this community in order to build bridges and help sex workers and their allies understand the potential of microbicides and prevention research. It also wants to contract with members of the community to conduct research and engage in outreach with their peers. The coalitions, NGOs and unions representing sex workers all take different positions on the issue of prostitution and its legalization.

    5. Countries have experimented with a range of legal and health approaches with regard to prostitution. It is the responsibility of public health professionals to objectively examine these various approaches and to present evidence on their outcomes. A recipient uses private funds to engage in public health research and discourse related to the pros and cons of various legal regimes and health approaches to stemming the transmission of HIV/AIDS among this high risk group.

    6. A recipient supports a privately funded study to examine the reproductive health needs of HIV positive women, including commercial sex workers. The study occurs in several countries, including some where commercial sex work is legal. The research findings indicate possible benefits arising from the decriminalization and/or legalization of sex work in stemming the transmission of HIV/AIDS and the organization publishes such findings.

    7. A recipient provides privately funded technical HIV/AIDS support to a U.S. academic institution, in which faculty members take a wide range of positions on the legal status of prostitution and how it affects public health outcomes. The recipient would like to continue providing technical support.

    There are additional concerns about the requirements to maintain separate organizations, because they are unworkable in most practical situations. Additionally, the regulations do not provide a process for approval of affiliate organization proposals and given the penalties for being out of compliance, this lack of clarity may make it more likely that organizations simply cannot provide the needed services.

    In addition, the regulation calls for funding recipients to maintain “objective integrity and independence from any affiliated organization” that engages in undefined “restricted” activities. A recipient must be “to the extent practicable in the circumstances, legally, physically and financially separate from the affiliated organization.” Rather than listing clear standards, there are five non-exclusive factors, none of which is given any particular weight. The agency reserves the right to determine, “on a case-by-case basis and based on the totality of the facts, whether sufficient legal, physical and financial separation exists” and reserves the right to take other, as yet undisclosed, factors into account.

    The harsh separation requirement is unnecessary, and has been rejected by HHS in other arenas. In regulations for the faith-based initiative, HHS required that federally funded activities are conducted either at a different time or in a different place than any privately funded, religious activities such as worship and proselytization. HHS has recognized that this level of separation is sufficient to ensure that the government neither funds nor endorses a grantee’s message. Therefore, such separation would be sufficient to ensure that HHS does not endorse any privately funded speech related to prostitution by recipients.

    The unconstitutional limitation on free speech lead us to believe that the pledge should not be enforced against US-based NGOs. We also maintain that the proposed regulations are unworkable and stand in the way of providing essential services to human being, both because they fail to answer basic questions about what is required and they propose a budensome affiliation scheme.

    Thank you for consideration of our comments.

    Sincerely,

    [INSERT NAME]

We may not all agree about whether boycotts are the right tactic to use at this time in our efforts to end the occupation. But we should all agree to oppose repression against activists who use non-violent tactics to press their government to comply with international law. That’s what Israeli supporters of BDS are doing and they deserve our support.

By Yifat Susskind, MADRE Policy and Communications Director

MADRE, our partners and progressive organizations around the world have long recognized the right to water as a human right. Not only does it underpin the most basic of human rights—people’s right to life—access to safe water is also essential to the enjoyment of all other human rights.

Because international standards did not reflect that reality, MADRE has worked as part of an international effort for a United Nations water covenant that would commit governments to treat water as an entitlement, guaranteeing that every person has a secure, accessible and affordable supply of healthy water. We've also continued working with our partners on the ground to make this right a reality in Gaza, Kenya and Nicaragua.

Right now, you can help us provide clean water for women and families in Gaza.

Read more about water as a human right.

Other MADRE news on Haiti »

MADRE to Present Findings on Rapes in Camps to Officials in Haiti

Read more about the Colombia shadow report »

All of the photos displayed at the exhibition were sold in a silent auction. Proceeds from the evening will go to benefit MADRE’s work on behalf of child soldiers.
 
MADRE would like to extend many thanks to all who attended and to those whose support was vital in making the event successful, including:

See photos from the event »

Colombia:

Colombia’s decades-long conflict has devastated countless communities and created entire generations of people who have never known peace. Thousands of children have been recruited by armed groups on all sides of the conflict. These children are virtual slaves; many are sexually abused for years. To ensure that conscripted children can never return home, armed groups sometimes force them to kill their former neighbors or even family members.
 
Those who have been able to escape are lucky. Through MADRE’s partner organization, Taller de Vida, many former child soldiers have found healing, compassion and a community of caring adults who mobilize art to defend human rights and help children envision and build a life of peace.  The photos featured in the exhibit brought that principle to life.
 

Uganda:

For over two decades, Uganda’s children have faced the threat of being abducted from their homes by soldiers of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a rebel group operating in Northern Uganda.  It is estimated that 90 percent of LRA rebels were abducted as children, and as many as 66,000 children have been kidnapped over the course of the conflict. As in other conflicts, the children are often forced to commit horrific crimes against their families and communities in order to make them lose hope of ever having a life outside of the rebel group.
 
The UN Office of Drugs & Crimes (UNODC), in partnership with the International Criminal Court (ICC) Trust Fund for Victims, organized a workshop in Gulu, Uganda to assist in the rehabilitation of former child soldiers and abducted girls through art therapy. Artist Ross Bleckner traveled with the UNODC to Gulu to teach painting to young girls and boys. The children created art that represented their past sufferings and future hopes with brilliant colors and vivid shapes. After the workshop ended, UNODC brought the paintings back to New York, and Mr. Bleckner curated an art exhibition at UN Headquarters entitled “Welcome to Gulu.” The Born Into War exhibit featured paintings from this workshop.
 

Helping Hands Coordinator / Administrative Assistant

MADRE is seeking a highly organized, motivated professional with a commitment to women’s human rights and international social justice.

Responsibilities

Helping Hands Coordinator

• Manage MADRE’s humanitarian aid campaigns
• Maintain communication with existing or potential donors, research new donors, and solicit humanitarian aid donations
• Design promotional materials and marketing strategies for each humanitarian aid campaign
• Maintain donation inventories and donor contact databases
• Organize donations in office warehouse and prepare items for overseas shipments
• Solicit student groups and help them organize events for MADRE
• Recruit and manage volunteers

Administrative Assistant

• Assist the Executive Director with research, scheduling meetings, planning events, travel arrangements and various other logistical tasks
• Maintain office equipment, order and stock office supplies, manage mailing needs, organize filing systems, and address constantly adapting responsibilities
• Act as front desk receptionists by courteously answering phones, transferring calls, taking messages, and greeting all visitors

Qualifications

• Commitment to women’s human rights and progressive social change, knowledge of the focus areas and regions in which MADRE works
• Strong research, writing, and data management skills
• Keen attention to detail
• Professional knowledge of MS Office suite, Google Docs and Adobe Photoshop
• Strong organizational skills; ability to manage many distinct areas of work at once
• Ability to work under pressure with competing priorities and deadlines that often change
• Some experience in soliciting donations preferred
• Spanish proficiency preferred but not required
• 2-year commitment to MADRE

This position requires the ability to lift and move boxes of various weights.

How to Apply:

Please send resume with cover letter addressed to Vivian Stromberg at madresearch@live.com.

No phone calls, please.

Due Date: August 1st
Start date: August 9
Salary: TBD

MADRE, Inc. is an equal opportunity employer.