LiveOneWorld

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.

Christine Ongson -SLU’s Filipino Student Assocation

Source: REUTERS-Erik de Castro

What had started as strong rainfall on the night of September 25, 2009 soon morphed into a greater force of nature. Typhoon Ondoy (or “Ketsana,” as it is known internationally) made landfall, leaving the Pacific island country devastated and revealing the government’s unpreparedness. Within 24 hours, Ondoy had deposited 17.9 inches of rain—the most rainfall recorded in a single day in 42 years, according to the Philippine Atmospheric Geophysical Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA)—incurring $100 million worth in damages and 360 people dead. Ondoy did not stop there. Soon after, the tropical storm crossed over to neighboring countries Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand, where it left similar trails of destruction.

In 2006, Blake Mycoskie, an entreprenuer and traveler living the American dream, saw an opportunity to help children in an unconventional way. While traveling around impovershed villages, he realized that children there had no shoes to protect their feet, their main mode of transportation. He returned to America determined to make a change.

Blake with the shoe that keeps on giving. Photocredit: Papermag.com

And so TOMS was born. Operating under the motto One for One, for every pair sold in the states, a pair would be delivered to a child without shoes in Argentina. Modeled after the Argentinian version of the Espadrille, but with rubber sole and fashionable patterns, Blake started selling shoes with expectations that he might sell a couple hundred pairs from his apartment. Soon, industry leaders like Fred Segal and American Ray became interested in the project. As soon as October of 2006 the shoe of tomorrow was the talk of the press making the pages of the likes of Vogue, GQ, and The Los Angeles Times all by the end of 2007.

As of February 1, 2009 TOMS has distributed more than 100,00 pairs to children in Argentina, Ethiopia and South Africa. If everything goes according to plan, they will deliver 300,000 more in 2009 alone. In less than five years, Blake and TOMS will have protected nearly a million little feet from cuts, sores, and infections as well as allowing them to access education in schools that require shoes.

With its astounding success in so little time, Blake has initiated other plans for the company. On April 16th he encouraged people to go barefoot for the day to increase awareness and is looking into building a factory in an impoverished nation to help people help those around them.

Photo by NASA

This year Americans  celebrate the 39th and most important Earth Day yet. Celebrations in St. Louis and throughout the world will focus on putting the environment in the political limelight as well as educating individuals on how to decrease their ecological imprint on our spectacular planet.

Notable events include:

• 20th Annual St. Louis Earth Day Festival-Includes demonstrations and hands-on activities as well as vendors selling environmentally friendly products and non-stop entertainment on two different stages. Attendees are encouraged to take alternative transportation. Those riding bikes will be provided with valet service on the grounds.
• Disney’s Earth- This Earth Day Disney launches it’s new independent film label Disneynature with the release of it’s new film Earth. With help from the creators of BBC’s Planet Earth, it tells the story of three animal families over a year in their daily tribulations dealing with the climate change. Compelling reasons to go: for every ticket sold this week Disney promises to plant a tree, narration by James Earl Jones, and most importantly polar bear, elephant, and whale babies.
• The Earth Day Network- This organization, promoting year long environmentalism is holding a celebration on the National Mall in Washington, DC hoping to attract 100,000 people where politicians and activists will encourage citizens to join “The Green Generation“.
• For more information on environmentalism and various other Earth Day celebrations in the St. Louis area please read this article and accompanying video from the St. Louis Beacon, a completely electronic and thereby environmentally friendly source of local news.

by Laura Bowman

Laura Bowman with Dr. Kimmel

I first heard about Dr. Michael Kimmel around the beginning of the fall semester last year. I had just moved back to my hometown to go to Illinois State University after going to SLU for a year, and as long as we are being honest, I was in a rather odd place. I was very glad to be back with my old friends, but at the same time there were (and still are) people that I wasn’t sure how I was going to navigate the rest of my collegiate years without seeing on a regular basis.

So in my state of dissatisfaction with college in general, I discovered Dr. Kimmel. I caught him on the Today Show doing publicity for his newest book, Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men, an exploration of the “guy” culture of American males ages 16 to 26. Dr. Kimmel, a sociologist at the University of New York Stony Brook, is one of the leading experts on men and masculinity today. He somehow managed to take everything I ever felt about the college dudes and bros surrounding me and explain it all in a delightfully intelligent manner (without the exasperated sighs and angry grunts that usually frequent my conversations on the subject).

OneWorld is proud to introduce you to its website, sluliveoneworld.org. The purpose of this website is to disseminate information and encourage dialogue about social justice issues, both local and global. This site is a medium for you to upload your thoughts, opinions, pictures, and overall experiences in order to compel others to create real and tangible change in the world. We believe that knowledge is the first step in the process of action, and by contributing to this site you will be a crucial part of that progression.

How to contribute: In order to ensure that we are receiving quality posts that are constructive and conducive to our mission, we ask that you send all of your submissions to oneworldblogging@gmail.com. New blogs and pictures will be posted by the website administrators every Sunday.

Guidelines: Blogs can address any number of issues, as long as they are within the context of social justice. Because we are a non-profit organization, we prefer not to endorse political parties or candidates. Any politically-themed contributions should present all sides of the issue, although the blogger’s opinion is welcome. Please no rants! Obviously, we ask that all submissions are sensitive to all cultures, religions, sexual orientations, etc. Blogs can be anywhere from a paragraph to a couple pages, depending on how extensive the topic.

With all of this in mind, we encourage you to submit your thoughts, research and passions for others to learn from. Whether it is a journal entry from a study abroad experience or an exposé on an unpublicized issue, every post has the potential to change minds and make others more cognizant of their global community. We are excited to see the kind of dialogue we can create on this website, and the way in which it will be used to change our school, city, country or world.
This website runs solely on your submissions and responses, so we hope to hear from you soon. And don’t forget to check the website every Sunday!

Thanks,
The OneWorld Staff