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Being on the OneWorld team is a lot of fun! We are still looking to fill a few positions, so please fill out this short application if you are interested. Even if you have not yet worked on a past issue, you are welcome to apply.

OneWorld Application 2010

Send your completed application to oneworldmagazine@gmail.com.

Starting this Saturday, SLU will put on its tenth annual ATLAS week. It is a SLU tradition that recognizes and celebrates the international dimension of the institution’s academic programs as well as celebrate the role SLU has had in world wide education. What that means for us as students is that the week will be full of awesome events that bring many global issues to light in a way not usually done in a classroom. Atlas hopes to inspire and inform students on taking actions to contribute to better lives for all global citizens.

As an organization that support awareness and global justice, OneWorld encourages the SLU community to attend as many events as you can. With so many events and topics, it is sure to be a difficult decision on which ones to attend. Women’s Rights? Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Fighting HIV? We can’t decide for you, but be sure to watch out for events run in conjunction with SLU’s Haiti Task Force. As one of the major supporters of the task force, OneWorld members would love to see you out to learn and support the rebuilding of Haiti. All of these events can be found under our Events page.

IDP Man by Tro Kilinochchi licensed by Creative Commons

As students we often take many things for granted. For instance, a mindless swipe of your ID at ABP or Salsie’s can get you more delicious Calories than some people have had in weeks. Often the concept of hunger is one that we fail to discuss or even recognize in a society of super-sizing and obesity, but for 1.02 billion people around the world, feeding oneself and one’s family is a day to day struggle. As part of the upcoming ATLAS week here at SLU, The Doerr Center for Social Justice and Campus Ministry are co-sponsoring an Oxfam Hunger Banquet. There you can learn more about the role food plays worldwide and how people around the world are affected by hunger. To RSVP for the banquet please email emcmill2@slu.edu.

Make sure to check back for more ATLAS week highlights and reflection!

By Lauren

Right now I am reading a book about President Truman (Truman by David McCullough) and I have just read the section about the bombing of Japan. I am left feeling very angry. Again. I have felt this way about the bombing of Japan since history lessons in 5th Grade. Every single teacher I have every had has taught us that “it was necessary” to end the war. That “the war would have gone on for years if America had not bombed Japan.” I don’t buy it. It was a display of power that looked at a massive loss of human life as necessary collateral damage. Japanese people, both foreign and American, were disposable, second class, solidly un-American people.  In Truman’s inaugural speech he talked about how the developed world should use its technology to help those in developing countries bring those living in poor out of poverty. But months later all he had to say about the human toll of the bombing was “I myself certainly regret the necessity of wiping out whole populations because of the pigheadedness of the leaders of a nation.” The necessity.  I suppose that is one way to look at killing 90,000 people in an instant. The political decisions he made had horrifying effects. But, he has not been the first men to view huge number of civilians as “enemies” rather than people. It is happening today in the Middle East. I react strongly to these particular incidents of  non arbitrary violence against human beings because I am a third generation, Japanese American. My family and hundreds of thousands of other people have dealt with the effects of America’s xenophobia. Internment, racist statements, vandalism, the list goes on.  We are only one of many groups of people throughout history who have been marginalized  by the policies of governments and the xenophobia of civilians; compared to most other victimized populations, people of Japanese decent have not suffered near the level of brutality that countless other groups have suffered because of hatred and ignorance. The frenzy of war, the inundation of news footage of suffering people, the relativity of numbers…all of these things allow us to view people as masses. Americans celebrated the destruction of Japan’s might. The bombs were used to, in Truman’s words, “shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans.” It is not wrong to want to preserve American lives, but 90,000 Japanese people died instantly, and 60,000 died in months to come from burns, shock and radioactive poisoning. Of those, only 10,000 were Japanese soldiers. Ultimately over 200,000 people died. Yes, the atomic bombs were a catalyst that ended WWII. But at what cost? To end a war, it was decided that it was justified to kill over 200,000 foreigners. Truman later said that “my object is to save as many American lives as possible but I also do have a human feeling for the woman and children of Japan.” But he also said, after learning that the bombs had great success, that it was “the greatest thing in history.” That is one way of looking at it. Our world leaders cannot  continue to look at their neighbors as the US did in 1945.  Iran threatens Israel with nuclear destruction while genocide and femocide occur around the world. To be a world leader imposes the burden of balancing the infinite value of the human person against the interests of national security and economic stability. They need to remember that  countries, buildings, cities, and the rest are inhabited with precious human life. These aren’t just numbers. It’s not that simple, and it unjust to deny it in order to further the needs of one nation.

Jesse Sullivan, OneWorld founder, camps out in the snow of DC to show solidarity with the people of Haiti.

Hundreds of miles away from Haiti, one of our own is attempting to understand some of the suffering of the Haitian people. Jesse Sullivan, founder of OneWorld and current aid to the ambassador of Haiti is spending an entire month in a tent on the streets of Washington, D.C. In doing so he intends to show his solidarity with the Haitian people and raise money to bring them emergency shelter. In the first half of the month he has pledged to stay outside he has faced record snowfalls, clothes and blankets soaked with ice cold water, as well as interviews from CNN and the like. Through his acts we are reminded that though the images of Haiti have faded from most of the front pages, the damage is still devastating and suffering of the people has not yet ceased.To follow Jesse’s experience follow his blog or subscribe to his YouTube channel.

By Lauren Hashiguchi

Photo courtesy of Lauren Hashiguchi

This past summer, I spent time working in laboratories and communities around Haiti. I was on Twitter and noticed that Haiti had a spike in tweets so I clicked on a link. I found out that two hours ago Port-au-Prince had been hit by a 7.0 earthquake. I spent a lot of time in Port-au-Prince, and am now left in my apartment thousands of miles away, imagining the utter disaster that even a small earthquake could render in a country with such little infrastructure. In Port there are hardly any road or traffic signs, shacks line the ocean and scale up the mountains, and I am sure the large buildings have ever been evaluated for structural integrity. As I write this, there still aren’t pictures or a lot of information online because its too recent, but I heard the national palace collapsed, and if the government-funded palace didn’t withstand the shock, I hardly want to venture towards thinking about how the people living in the smaller, poor buildings fared.  A world away, I am trying to hope for the best, all while imagining the worst.

I remember spending hours sitting at a pick up point in Port, waiting for our ride to pick our team up to go to another work site. Of course, our communication was nonexistant, so our driver never came. We sat sweating in the sun, trying to talk with some of the Haitians who were lingering nearby, interested in why our group had chosen such a strange place to rest. Eventually, an American couple offered to take us to the orphanage they ran. They were already in the area picking up a women who was adopting three of their children, and it was no problem for six more people. So, we piled in the back of a dilapidated delivery truck among bushels of medical supplies and food.  Together we bounced around in the darkness, listening to the sounds and smelling the city, imaging what we were driving past. After a while the truck stopped and we ventured out of the back of the truck to find ourselves in an orphanage with hundreds of children, all living under the care of an American couple. Among those children were over twenty disabled children, who the couple rescued from around the city. (In Haiti people are wary of disability because of vodoo, so many disabled children are abandoned in pits shortly after birth.) We spent the entire day there playing with the children. I met a twelve year old who was going to be adopted to my hometown, Portland, so I spent most of my afternoon telling her about all the places she could go with her new family. The children there were so loving of one other and of us, foreigners who came to them lost and weary.

Thousands of miles from a country filled with a resilient people and international aid workers, all I can do is remember the people who came into my life while I was in Haiti and pray for them.

As someone planning to enter a career of international health aid, I suppose this feeling now is something I should learn to anticipate. As college students, many of us are entering developing nations to serve the poor and along the way, we make human connections around the world. Now we begin to understand how strongly our friendships bind us to the lives of those living in poverty thousands of miles away.

www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/01/12/haiti.earthquake/index.html

Lauren Hashiguchi

Photo by HDPT Central African Republic

She had begun to miscarry the day prior, but her family did not realize something was wrong until much later. She arrived to the clinic by motorcycle at dawn but could not get an appointment, so she waited five more hours until getting emergency care. By that time her garments were soaked in sweat and blood. She grasped my hand for over two hours as Dr. Jim performed an emergency curettage. Later I cleared the aftermath from the floor and table in a daze, horrified at the suffering this women had endured because she had not gotten care soon enough. While this young Haitian women survived, countless women around the world die each day from similar complications. Currently the majority of maternal deaths occur from direct causes relating to labor[i] with women in poor nations and rural areas suffering a disproportionate maternal burden.

Stephanie Kunz

Photo by John Rawlinson

People with AIDS live every day battling their disease. From getting the proper medication to facing the stigmas some associate with the disease, their daily lives are no walk in the park. On this day, the 21st Annual World AIDS Day, uninfected and infected citizens alike in this nation and others focus their attention to the progress that can made on scales of all sizes.

Tianyi Li

Photo by Ben Brown

This year, SLU’s Multicultural Competency Vision Team created a powerful initiative called “I OWN: Cultural Marketplace” for diversity month. This marketplace acted as an interactive exhibit to explore the dimensions of oppression and commodification of bodies by institutional, structural, and individual forces of our society. The dimensions consisted of bodies as entertainment, bodies as property, N/A bodies, disposable bodies, invisible bodies, dangerous bodies, and hardest-working bodies. For a week of November, the room in the BSC became a marketplace. The stations had different multi-media elements with information about how bodies have been oppressed and used as social commodities. The marketplace also featured life size visual displays of faculty, staff, and college students whose tangible and intangible body parts will be priced and tagged by the marketplace attendees according to their societal values.

Katie Langley

Painting by Zac Parsons

• We need your help to stop a gruesome cycle of murders, kidnappings and torture of SINALTRAINAL(National Union of  Food Industry Workers) union leaders and organizers involved in daily life-and-death struggles at Coca-Cola bottling plants in Colombia.
• Coca-Cola bottlers “contracted with or otherwise directed paramilitary security forces that utilize extreme violence and murdered, tortured, unlawfully detained or otherwise silenced trade union leaders,” the lawsuit states.