Hurrican Maria and Puerto Rico recovery - rebuilding in spite of cruel "paper towels"

"We are trying to help those who really need help — those who can’t get it from anyone else."

"We wanted to do something to make life better than it was before."

One can only hope that Donald Trump's cruel image of him throwing paper towels to the desperate Puerto Rican Americans  after Hurricane Maria, will be overcome by the humanitarian relief provided by Rotarians.

A cruel Trumponian image:

Trump was irritated by video footage of him throwing rolls of paper towels to a crowd of relief workers on the island, according to The Washington Post. The footage prompted accusations that Trump lacks empathy. (Image published in Business Insider)

Puerto Rico - After The Storm

Published in February 2019, The Rotarian magazine by Vanessa Glavinskas with photographs by Alyce Henson

A year after the Category 5, Hurricane Maria* tore through Puerto Rico, local Rotary members continue to rebuild homes and lives.

Eladio Montalvo faced a stark choice: risk drowning in his one-story home or climb through a window into the house next door. It was under construction but had a second floor where he could escape the rising floodwaters. He boosted his dog through and scrambled in after him. The two huddled inside an upstairs bathroom for 22 hours while Hurricane Maria raged over Puerto Rico. With 155 mph winds and torrential rains, Maria was the strongest hurricane to hit the island in more than 80 years.

After the storm, Montalvo went out to see what was left of the home he had lived in since 1958. The walls were standing, but the water inside had risen chest-high. Everything was destroyed. Without any family nearby, he had nowhere to go. He moved into his car.

"But after the storm came the calm," he says. "Good people came."

Faustino Rivera pats Montalvo affectionately on the shoulder. It’s September 2018, a year since Hurricane Maria, and Rivera and several other members of the Rotary Club of Mayagüez have stopped by to visit. Montalvo lives in a fishing town called El Maní outside the city of Mayagüez on the island’s west coast. He invites his guests inside to see the progress he has made adding a shower to his bathroom. There’s a pile of tiles that he plans to lay soon, and he has started painting the walls a light shade of blue. The home is neatly but sparsely furnished: a bed, a TV, and a few plastic bins, including one labeled camisas that has shirts and shorts tucked inside.

"He’s become my friend," says Rotarian Orlando Carlo, who checks in on Montalvo almost every week.

The Mayagüez club paid $4,200 for the materials Montalvo used to add a second story to his home. Made of concrete, outfitted with hurricane shutters, and built high enough off the ground to avoid flooding, the new addition contains a small kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom. Montalvo did much of the work himself, calling on friends and neighbors skilled in construction when he needed help.

To find people like Montalvo who needed help but didn’t qualify for reconstruction aid from the U.S. government’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Mayagüez club members worked with community leaders and screened each family. "We are trying to help those who really need help," Carlo explains. "Those who can’t get it from anyone else."

By the time Carlo met him, Montalvo had been living in his car for nearly six months. A local church leader introduced the two, hoping Rotarians could help Montalvo find permanent housing. "I could tell immediately that he was severely dehydrated from staying out in the sun and sleeping in his car," Carlo says. 

"He seemed stunned and needed guidance on how to start rebuilding. We assured him we were there to help him."

After the hurricane, Carlo was also living alone. His wife had gone to stay in Florida while he remained behind to run his construction business. But the lack of electricity and reliable communication meant his work projects were stalled, so he mostly spent his days volunteering. "It gave me a lot of time to help," he says. His home survived the storm, but the shortage of gasoline meant he had to plan his trips carefully. He rationed bottled water and food, eating what he calls a "hurricane diet" of canned pasta or sausage and rice.

"We didn’t have power back until the end of October," says Christa von Hillebrandt-Andrade, president of the Mayagüez club. "We could use one bucket of water per day. My teenage daughter learned that water is the No. 1 thing you need. She could live without electricity and even without her cellphone, but not without water."

Mayagüez is home to 75,000 people and to the island’s second-oldest Rotary club after San Juan. In the past, the club carried out smaller projects, but the massive devastation caused by Maria motivated members to do more to help their neighbors, especially the very poor.

"I’ve been a Rotarian for 40 years, and I’ve never seen so much help come from other Rotary clubs," Carlo says. After Hurricane Maria, clubs across the United States wired the Rotary Club of Mayagüez about $50,000 directly; more than half of that money came from the Rotary Club of La Jolla Golden Triangle in California and a group of clubs in New York. As club treasurer, Rivera keeps track of every receipt and sends updates back to the donor clubs. A year after Maria, the club had helped 22 families repair their homes, mostly replacing roofs that were blown off by the hurricane.

Scanning the horizon from a hillside neighborhood nicknamed Felices Días — "Happy Days" — Carlo points out a less-than-happy sight: the many blue FEMA tarps that still stand in for permanent roofs. "There is still a lot of need here. This is not over," he says. "But we are willing to continue to help as long as it takes." And for Montalvo’s part, he has remained optimistic in spite of all he went through. 

"Hurricane Maria gave me more than she took," he says.

When Ken McGrath became president of the Rotary Club of San Juan in July 2017, he thought his most arduous task would be planning the celebration of the club’s centennial in 2018. Three months after he took office, Hurricane Maria hit.

"While Maria was a major disaster," McGrath says, "it had the beneficial effect of invigorating our club to show those in need the real meaning of Rotary."

By the time he was able to get an internet connection and check his email, McGrath had received 200 messages from clubs around the world offering to help. Rotarians in Puerto Rico started distributing food and water every Saturday. Working with other clubs, they coordinated the distribution of 300,000 pouches of baby food. They even put dog food out for animals that had been left behind.

Once the immediate needs were under control, they started to think about long-term relief.

"So much of the damage isn’t only to the infrastructure; it’s to the spirit," says John Richardson, a member of the San Juan club and a past district governor. To address mental health after the hurricane, fellow member Bob Bolte suggested the club do something unconventional: apply for a grant to support youth theater.

Bolte had met Antonio Morales in 1995 when the San Juan club installed a library in the housing project where Morales grew up. He was impressed to see that Morales, who was just 14 at the time, was running a theater group for other kids living in his tough neighborhood.

"Theater saved my life," says Morales, now a 37-year-old actor and director. "My father was a drug lord. My mother was a victim of domestic violence."

Even though his father had forbidden him to pursue acting, Morales persuaded his mother to secretly take him to an audition at the public performing arts school. "Everything I learned at school, I brought back to the projects," he says.

Eventually his theater group became an unlikely alternative to gangs in his neighborhood. "When boys reach a certain age, it’s very easy for them to join the drug gangs," Morales says. "We told them, ‘Come join our club, not them.’ Even the leaders of the gangs supported me. They didn’t want their little brothers to follow in their footsteps."

After the hurricane, Morales, who now runs the San Juan Drama Company and stars in a TV series called No Me Compares, started visiting housing projects with other actors to spread a message of hope and resilience to young people. "People were desperate. They were bored. They were depressed," he says. "We decided to go into these communities to give love. We didn’t have aid kits, food, or water to give — but we had our theater experience. So we said, ‘Let’s go and make these people happy.’" With schools closed and the power out, teens turned out in droves.

When Bolte learned what Morales was doing, he suggested Rotary could help. "These theater groups provide almost a second family to a lot of the kids," Bolte says. "I wanted to help him do this on a wider scale, across multiple neighborhoods." A $99,700 global grant has allowed Morales to expand the project to four theater groups so far and to pay a stipend to the facilitators of each group. Funding for the grant came from Bob Murray, a former San Juan club member who now lives in Arizona, where he’s a member of the Rotary Club of Scottsdale. In December 2017, Murray gave $1 million to The Rotary Foundation for the recovery effort.

Morales calls the project Teatro Por Amor, or Theater for Love.
Every Wednesday, the Santurce Teatro Por Amor group meets on the second floor of Federico Asenjo school. The sounds of laughter and cheering can be heard from down the hall as students, ranging in age from 11 to mid-20s, perform an improv exercise. Five members of the group squat down in the front of the room, and when the director yells "arriba," whoever stands up has to improvise a routine together. One boy stands up alone, so he takes off his shoe to pretend it’s a phone. He tells off the friend who "called," and the room erupts in laughter and applause.

"You come here and you’re not in the streets," says 18-year-old Nandyshaliz Alejandro, who lives in the same housing project where Morales grew up. This is her first theater experience. "This is one of the few things I actually look forward to."

Felix Juan Osorio lifts the corner of his mattress. The underside is rippled with brown water stains, and it smells of mold. One year after Hurricane Maria flooded the family’s home, the mattress is still wet, but they can’t afford a new one.

"I never thought mattresses would be the No. 1 request," says Armand Piqué, a member of the Rotary Club of San Juan.

Piqué has been working in Loíza, a town not far from San Juan where the Osorio family lives, since he learned people in the area weren’t getting the help they needed.

"There are certain areas where it is difficult to get in if you don’t know someone," Piqué explains, adding that drug trafficking can make it dangerous for strangers to enter certain parts of Loíza. The Villa Santo neighborhood is one of those areas. 

So, Piqué worked with a community leader, Ángel Coriano, to find out what families needed. Coriano, who grew up in the area and now works for the Puerto Rico Department of Health, is the type of person who knows everyone.

"I was listening to what all these people were asking," Piqué says. "And I thought, our club cannot provide everything that’s on this list. I need to find the thing that is most pressing, something that they really need." 

Again and again, people brought up mattresses. Unlike other furniture, mattresses, once wet, don’t dry out. So far, Rotarians have distributed hundreds of mattresses across the island.

Before receiving her new mattress, Felix Juan Osorio’s neighbor, Maritza Osorio, had been sleeping on a damaged mattress, the springs poking her ribs. She suffers from pulmonary hypertension, and the lack of rest took a toll on her already fragile health. "I could hardly sleep," she says. "Now I’m comfortable. I’m able to sleep, and I’m feeling better."

It’s a bright, sunny morning in Rubias, a picturesque farming village in the mountains about 35 miles east of Mayagüez. In a few hours, that sun will begin to power a new water filter, providing the 100 families who live here with access to clean drinking water for the first time.

Water Is Life - Alyce Henson photograph

Ken Surritte is guiding José Lucas Rodríguez Fontánez, a member of the Rotary Club of Yauco, through the installation of a SunSpring water filtration system. 

Surritte founded the organization Water Is Life with the goal of installing Sun-Spring filters wherever people lack clean water. The Yauco club teamed up with Water Is Life to bring the system to Rubias and two other towns, with most of the funding coming from Bob Murray’s donation to The Rotary Foundation.

"Now the whole community will have clean water," says Rodríguez. "Because this system runs on solar power, it will work even when the electricity is out."

Rodríguez was governor of District 7000, which covers the entire island of Puerto Rico, when Maria hit. He became a primary contact person as clubs across the island began to organize relief efforts. In the immediate aftermath of the storm, he coordinated the distribution of necessities such as food and water. Now he’s focused on helping Puerto Rico rebuild.

"We wanted to do something to make life better than it was before," Rodríguez explains. The club decided to help the people in Rubias because it’s one of more than 200 villages so remote that they are not served by Puerto Rico’s sewer and aqueduct authority. Instead, families here had constructed a rudimentary electric-powered system to pipe water from a nearby stream into people’s homes. They use that water to wash dishes and bathe, but must drive an hour to the nearest grocery store to buy bottled water to drink.

Hurricane Maria decimated the town. "Everything we were growing was gone," says Yolanda Pacheco. 

Mudslides washed coffee and banana trees — along with a giant chunk of the only road in town — down the mountainside. The electricity was out, and the town was completely cut off. "My husband couldn’t sleep," Pacheco says. "He was going out of his mind with worry." For four months, the family’s only source of light was a flashlight. They collected rainwater to bathe.

Now, after six hours of work in the 90-degree heat and oppressive humidity, Surritte has the SunSpring system up and running. He explains how it works to a small crowd gathered around the tall silver cylinder.

"The filter acts as a block for the bacteria and contaminants," he explains through an interpreter. "So only the safe water comes out through the tap." He invites everyone to join him in trying the water. The crowd is a little tentative, but one by one, they fill up cups, smiling.

"God knew what we needed," says Mariano Feliciano, a community leader who will maintain the filter. "We’re so grateful for this water."

Eladio Montalvo’s neighbors gather in front of his home and marvel at its transformation. With its fresh coat of white paint set off by dark red trim, the house, Montalvo says, "is my palace."

On a Saturday in late October 2018, a group of college students from the Rotaract club at the University of Puerto Rico in Mayagüez spent the day painting the exterior of the home.

"He was so touched that young people had come and taken an interest in him," says von Hillebrandt-Andrade, the Mayagüez Rotary club president, who organized the project with the Rotaract club. "The Rotaractors were also touched by Eladio’s story. Some of them never realized the hardships people went through during the hurricane, and his resilience is something I think they will carry with them forever."

A few weeks later, Mayagüez club members visited again, dropping off turkey, rice with peas, salad, and pie so Montalvo could have his neighbors over for Thanksgiving. "We’ve established a lasting relationship with him," von Hillebrandt-Andrade says. "Rotary is about touching other people’s lives, and in doing that, you’re transformed too."

*Maria......worst natural disaster on record to affect Dominica and Puerto Rico, and is also the deadliest

Desperate Hispanic migrants are America's "Syria"- riding the Beast

"Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto said the plan (to secure borders) would create new economic zones and safeguard migrants’ human rights by securing the country’s historically volatile southern border. Instead, the number of migrants beaten, kidnapped, and murdered has skyrocketed. Some have even been victims of the black-market trade in organs."- *Levi Vonk in the Rotarian.

Riding 'The Beast' Across Mexico To The U.S. Border

Whenever I read published stories about the desperate Mexicans and their migrant families, it brings to mind how many of them would benefit our American economy while helping them to save their people from suffering. 

(This Levi Vonk article is one of the published stories. Thousands of others are the personal histories of the victims of this refugee migration.)
This article (belos), published in the November, 2017, Rotarian magazine. is one of the few available for Americans to read, if they bother to do so. Indeed, that's the reason I'm re-blogging this feature by Levi Vonk- for people who dare to read about the suffering of Mexican migrant families. 

On the tracks of the beast- (railroad tracks):

In Mexico’s migrant shelters, a Rotary scholar puts his education into action by Levi Vonk

There are two inescapable elements of southern Mexico.

The first is dust – desert rock ground to a powder that finds its way into your every crevice: the backs of your knees, the folds of your eyelids. You cough it up as you drift to sleep and discover its brume  (i.e.- mist) settled across your bed sheets in the morning.

The second element is violence.

Levi Vonk found both on the gritty tracks of the Beast.

Over the past half-century, millions of Central Americans have crossed Mexico from south to north, fleeing poverty, decades-long civil wars, and, most recently, brutal gangs. 

To escape, migrants used to ride atop the cars of the train line known as the Beast.

In July 2014, Mexican immigration officials announced a plan called the Southern Border Program; part of it entailed closing the Beast to migrants. Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto said the plan would create new economic zones and safeguard migrants’ human rights by securing the country’s historically volatile southern border. Instead, the number of migrants beaten, kidnapped, and murdered has skyrocketed. Some have even been victims of the black-market trade in organs.

In early 2015 I had just completed my studies as a Rotary global grant scholar, earning a master’s degree in the anthropology of development. I had studied how trade and development initiatives in Mexico could make people’s lives more perilous, not less. To learn about what was going wrong, I went to southern Mexico to use the skills I had gained through my global grant studies.

Southern Mexico is poor and rural, made up of small pueblos and subsistence agriculture. In some ways, I felt at home. I grew up in rural Georgia, and I became interested in immigration after teaching English to farmworkers harvesting cabbage, berries, and Christmas trees in the foothills of North Carolina. Many of the men I worked with were from southern Mexico. Their descriptions of the violence brought by drug and human trafficking led to my interest in the region.

To understand how the Southern Border Program was affecting people’s lives, I stayed in migrant shelters, which are not unlike homeless shelters or temporary refugee camps. 

They are often without reliable running water or electricity, but they do provide migrants with a warm meal and a place to rest before they continue north.

At first, shelter life was a shock to me. Sick or injured people arrived nearly each day. Severe dehydration was a big problem, and some people had literally walked the skin off the bottoms of their feet. I was there when a gang member entered the shelter to kidnap someone, but shelter directors stopped him.

By the time I arrived, shelters along the tracks of the Beast had seen the number of migrants dwindle from 400 a night to fewer than 100. Shelter directors explained that the number of Central Americans fleeing into Mexico each year – around 400,000 – had not fallen, but because immigration agents were now apprehending anyone near the Beast, people were afraid to approach the shelters. These safe havens had been transformed into no-go zones. 

“This is a humanitarian crisis on the scale of Syria,” one director said to me, “but no one is talking about it.”

In the shelters, I chopped firewood, cooked dinners, and scrubbed kitchen floors. I changed bandages and helped people file for asylum. And I lived and traveled with migrants headed north, recording their stories – about why they left, where they hoped to go, and what they had faced on their journeys.

Mildred, a single mother of three, was fleeing gang members who threatened to kill her family if she didn’t pay them a protection fee. Ivan, the oldest brother of six, singlehandedly resettled his entire family in Mexico – including his elderly mother and his two toddler nephews – after hit men tried to kill them in their home in Honduras. Milton had lived in New York City for years – and had sheltered ash-covered pedestrians in his apartment during the 11 September 2001 terror attacks – before being deported.

The things I learned were terrifying. Instead of shoring up Mexico’s borders, the plan had splintered traditional migrant routes. Those routes had been dangerous, but they were also ordered and visible. Migrants knew approximately which areas of the train passage were plagued by gangs. They were prepared to pay protection fees – generally between $5 and $20. They traveled in groups for safety. And they were often close to aid – a shelter, a Red Cross clinic, even a police station.

The Southern Border Program changed that. Hunted by immigration officers, migrants traveled deep into the jungle, walking for days. Gangs, which had previously extorted money from migrants, now followed them into these isolated areas to rob, kidnap, or simply kill them.

The Southern Border Program has failed as a development initiative. Not only has cracking down on immigration made southern Mexico less safe, but the increased violence has deterred business investment that the region so desperately needs.

During my time as a Rotary scholar, I learned to look at development differently. We often think of international aid in terms of poverty reduction, and we often see poverty reduction in terms of dollars spent and earned. The anthropology of development aims to analyze global aid in another way. We pay particular attention to how initiatives play out on the ground to determine just what local communities’ needs are and how those needs might be met sustainably and, eventually, autonomously. 

When I was living in migrant shelters, we often received huge, unsolicited shipments of clothing from well-intentioned organizations. Had they asked us, we would have told them that their efforts, and money, were wasted.

In fact, directors had to pay for hundreds of pounds of clothing to be taken to the dump when space ran out at the shelter.

Among the things shelters actually needed, I learned, were clean water, better plumbing, and medical care. But shelter directors did not just want these items shipped over in bulk; they needed infrastructure – water purification, functioning toilets, and access to a hospital, along with the skills and knowledge to maintain these systems themselves.

Of course, as one shelter director told me, “Our ultimate goal is to not be needed at all – to solve this migration crisis and violence and go home.”

Rotary’s six areas of focus mesh neatly with these goals. Such measures require money, but more than that, they require in-tense cultural collaboration to make them sustainable. Who better than Rotary, with its worldwide network of business and community leaders, to understand the challenges and respond effectively?

One way Rotary is responding is by funding graduate-level studies in one of the six areas of focus. After his global grant studies in anthropology of development at the University of Sussex, my friend Justin Hendrix spent several years working in a Romanian orphanage, helping to provide the children there with the best education possible. Another friend, Emily Williams, received a global grant to get her master’s degree at the Bartolome de las Casas Institute of Human Rights at Madrid’s Universidad Carlos III and now works with unaccompanied Central American minors and victims of trafficking in the United States. My partner, Atlee Webber, received a global grant to study migration and development at SOAS University of London (School of Oriental and African Studies); she now works as a program officer with the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants.

Rotarians understand that to have the most impact, we need to learn from other cultures. As global grant scholars, that’s what we aim to do – during our studies, and afterward.

Levi Vonk

*Levi Vonk- anthropologist and writer researching migration in Central America, Mexico, and the US. He is currently a doctoral student in the joint UC Berkeley-UC San Francisco medical anthropology program. His writing and photography have appeared in Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, and National Public Radio, research has been supported by the Fulbright Program and the Rotary Foundation.

In 2015, shortly after finishing his studies as a Rotary Foundation global grant scholar, Levi Vonk went to Mexico to work with migrants. For Rotary Foundation Month, he described what he has done and learned. Vonk studied at the University of Sussex, England, sponsored by the Rotary clubs of Shoreham & Southwick, England, and Charleston Breakfast, S.C. His master’s degree in the anthropology of development and social transformation led to his becoming a 2014-15 Fulbright fellow to Mexico. He is now a doctoral candidate in medical anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley.

Bullies and public health- Justice for All with Gary Haugen

"...no matter where you are in the world, no matter which country you’re in, people with power – whether political or police – tend to abuse it if they are not held accountable..."- Gary Haugen, leader of the International Justice Mission (IJM)
As a nurse, I found this article to be interesting on several public health topics: poverty, security, health and safety!

An excellent positive correlation between protecting public health and providing people with safety in the article "Justice for All", published in the February 2017, The Rotarian Magazine- 

by By Sallyann Price for The Rotarian
Link to a human trafficking website with more data

In 1994 Rwanda was reeling from the genocide of as many as 1 million people over 100 days, the apex of decades of civil conflict in the East African nation.

Gary Haugen: The hidden reason for poverty the world needs to address now

Gary Haugen, then a young human rights attorney working for the U.S. Department of Justice, landed in Kigali to head a United Nations unit investigating the genocide and gathering evidence needed to prosecute the perpetrators for war crimes.

“There was basically no functioning government, Haugen recalls. “So much chaos is unleashed when there isn’t a civil authority exercising control. A lot of people tried to help, sending food and medicine and providing housing and education, but when it came to the problem of violence, very few people stepped up to that challenge.

Haugen established the International Justice Mission (IJM) in 1997 to address violence in developing countries. The organization has 17 field offices and works with local investigators to rescue victims of violence, support survivors, strengthen law enforcement, and bring violent criminals to justice. In his 2014 book, The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence, Haugen argues that the progress made in the global fight against poverty means little when citizens’ basic safety is threatened.

At the 2016 Rotary International Convention in Korea, Haugen talked to Rotarians about one of the most harmful forms of what he calls the “everyday violence affecting the world’s poorest people – forced labor, or slavery. “Slavery is not a relic of history," he said, noting that an estimated 35 million enslaved people are hidden in plain sight, all over the world, generating $150 billion in profits for traffickers who seldom face prosecution. “It’s vaster and more brutal than ever. And it’s more stoppable than ever.

Haugen sat down with contributor Sallyann Price in Seoul to talk about the importance of addressing violence and safety in development work.

The Rotarian: How are poverty and violence related?

Haugen: When people think about the world’s poorest people, they don’t usually think about violence. They think of hunger, disease, and a lack of education and job opportunities. But just as important is daily vulnerability to violence, and not necessarily the violence that makes headlines: war, genocide, mass atrocities.

The form of violence that is far more destructive is what we call everyday violence – that’s sexual violence, police abuse, land theft, and forced labor. On a daily basis, these types of violence make it very difficult for the common poor person to improve his or her situation. You can give all kinds of goods and services to alleviate poverty, but if you’re not able to restrain the hands of the bullies that have the power to take it all away, you won’t see the kind of progress you want.

Abuse of power is a very simple human dynamic. It’s what a kid will understand in the schoolyard: There’s the kid who’s stronger and bigger than everybody else, and he’s abusing that power to take something from the victim, whether it’s lunch money or possessions or just their dignity. You see the same dynamic in the adult world; it just manifests itself in more adult, violent ways over time and on a bigger scale.

TR: Your address to the Rotary Convention focused specifically on the issue of slavery. Why this message for this audience?

Haugen: We are in a moment in history when forces are coming together to make it possible to end slavery in our lifetime. For the first time, enslavement is completely against the law everywhere. It’s an ancient evil that still exists, but it’s no longer the center of the global economy.

Rotary has demonstrated a unique capacity to focus effort on a global problem that simply shouldn’t exist anymore. Look at the example of polio: We have a vaccine that works perfectly well and we agree that everyone should be safe from this disease, but there’s an access gap. Similarly, everyone should be safe from slavery, and no parent should have to worry about a child being enslaved. We know that a combination of effective law enforcement and excellent survivor support can measurably reduce slavery, and violence overall. Rotarians, in their work to end polio, have shown the kind of focus and determination we need to succeed in that struggle.

TR: How do you respond to scientist Steven Pinker? In his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, he argues that this is actually the least violent time in history.

Haugen: If you look at the broad scope of history, there is, on average, much less violence in our world today. That’s good news because it shows progress is possible. But think of the comparison with polio – fewer people are vulnerable to the disease, but does that mean we don’t finish the job? Like polio, the violence that remains in our world is more concentrated in the lives of the world’s poorest people.

Wealthier countries provide a measure of security and law enforcement on a public basis, but in the developing world, personal safety often means hiring private security. The world is now divided between those who can afford to pay for their own protection and the billions who are left in lawless chaos, experiencing extreme levels of violence.

TR: What role can more powerful members of society, like Rotarians, play in improving the situation?
Haugen: In much of the developing world, the public systems of justice are so broken that those with wealth and resources do not depend on them. Every culture debates the role of government and the range of services it should provide, but there should be no doubt that the most basic of those services is seeing to the security of its citizens. Those with the opportunity to lead must invest in public security so all citizens can enjoy that same safety.

It’s fascinating that the most common forms of violence in the developing world are almost always against the law already. The problem is not the absence of law, but the absence of law enforcement that protects everyone. That’s our focus at IJM.

TR: When did you first see this pattern?

Haugen: After I graduated from college, I lived in South Africa. The big issue at the time was the apartheid crisis. That’s where I started to see what it was like to live in a society of violent oppression and abuse. After law school, I went to work for the U.S. Department of Justice, where I worked specifically on the problem of police abuse in the United States. I started to see that no matter where you are in the world, no matter which country you’re in, people with power – whether political or police – tend to abuse it if they are not held accountable. I saw the particular problem of violence against the poor when I was sent to Rwanda in 1994 to direct the UN’s investigation into the genocide there. A lot of people tried to help, sending food and medicine and providing housing and education, but when it came to the problem of violence, very few people stepped up to that challenge. Slavery in this era strikes me as a similar issue: We are aware of it, we can stop it, and it is up to us to take that responsibility.

TR: How does IJM help a community plagued by violence?

Haugen: In many parts of the developing world, people have given up hope that law enforcement will ever protect the poor from violence. Our work demonstrates that it’s possible to change. The recovery of that hope is a game-changer.

We begin with what we call collaborative casework with the local authorities. We recruit a local team of lawyers, investigators, and social workers and start working on individual cases. As we try to bring the criminals to justice, we start to see the broken points in the criminal justice system.

When we begin working on a case, we pursue a baseline study to measure the prevalence of different types of violence and the performance of the police and the courts. Working from those two baselines, we can measure when the criminal justice system starts working better and violence decreases. Over hundreds of cases over many years, we’ve documented that it is possible to transform a broken law enforcement system into one that protects poor people effectively.

TR: How is that progress measured?

Haugen: One measure of success is the relative ease or difficulty of committing a particular crime. Cambodia is a great example. When we started working there 15 years ago, you could arrive in Phnom Penh and within an hour you could easily purchase a child for sex. That’s much harder to do now. Our project there focused on enhancing the criminal justice system’s capacity to send sex traffickers to jail, and we’ve seen hundreds of convictions since then. Our baseline study found that as many as 30 percent of commercial sex workers there were children. That figure is closer to 1 percent now. Also, because the Cambodian authorities are effectively enforcing the law, IJM is no longer needed. That’s our ultimate objective.

TR: How does IJM determine where to intervene?

HAUGEN: IJM uses a variety of criteria for assessing the location of a future project, including prevalence of crime and the political will of the government and local law enforcement to address crime. Because our model of justice system transformation centers on building capacity in the public justice systems of the countries and communities we’re working in, it is imperative that there be at least some desire to address the problem from within law enforcement.

TR: How can Rotary members help keep communities safe as they plan humanitarian aid projects in the developing world?

Haugen: Ask people what they need and connect with local groups addressing those needs. Since people are less likely to talk about violence, Rotary members should be very intentional about facilitating conversations to explore specific problems. Once you start the conversation and sharpen your focus on this issue, you start to see it over and over again.

Rotary is already raising the bar of excellence in terms of sustainability and accountability in its projects. But violence fights back in a way that is different from hunger or homelessness. If you take on violence, you may end up putting yourself on the line in some manner. The willingness to take on this challenge is a powerful message. 

Check the website: Polaris- freedom happens now

Book Review: Anti-Vaxxers "those who forget history are doomed to repeat"

The Fever of 1721, by Stephen Coss, should be a lesson for the 21st Century, if modern civilization is willing to learn from the past to protect our future generations from preventable infectious diseases.

People who have evolved to become "anti-vaxxers" or those who have fallen victims to the unfounded beliefs about how preventative vaccines somehow cause deliberate harm to mankind, are obviously ignoring the medical science to prove them wrong.

George Santayana- Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. George Santayana (16 December 1863 in Madrid, Spain – 26 September 1952 in Rome, Italy) was a philosopher, essayist, poet and novelist.

Stephen Cross examines a time in history when people were desperately seeking inoculations, rather than avoiding them, a retrospective history about past epidemics.  

From The Pittsburgh-Post Gazette reprinted in the June 2016 "The Rotarian" magazine.  Book reviews by Harry Kloman (PPG) and Frank Bures (Rotarian)

We live in a time when people doubt science and fear that inoculation will debilitate them rather than help them.

A time when working people struggle and the rich tell them to wait until wealth trickles down. A time when a crime committed by a person of color leads us to assume that everyone else who looks like that must be a criminal as well.

But in this particular time, “we” are the people of 18th-century Colonial America, and the focus of “The Fever of 1721: The Epidemic That Revolutionized Medicine and American Politics” by Stephen Coss, a book about a turning point in medical science and the yet-to-be-born First Amendment.

“The Fever of 1721” is informative and solidly told, although I can’t quite tell if Mr. Coss wants us to recognize the ways in which the nascent 21st century reflects 1721. It’s hard to imagine he doesn’t, and perhaps his choice to not bludgeon us with comparisons is a prudent one.

The book’s central story begins when a smallpox epidemic hits Boston, and Dr. Zabdiel Boylston — who, Mr. Coss tells us, performed history’s first recorded mastectomy — decides to experiment with a controversial prophylactic: Expose healthy people to a drop of the disease to let their bodies destroy it, thus making them immune if they’re exposed to a bigger dose as the virus infiltrates the population.

His experiment saved the lives of hundreds of people, but not without exposing him to accusations, led by the government and the press, that he was doing Satan’s work. When at last, late in 1721, more people began to embrace the technique, those who could afford it rushed to him and paid his fee. Those who couldn’t pay continued to die.

It didn’t help Boylston’s experiment that Cotton Mather had urged him to attempt it in the first place. Mather, the notorious and troubled Puritan evangelist who presided over the Salem witch hunts 30 years earlier, had since seen a new light in medical science, but many still believed he was an exploitative menace.

Nor did James Franklin, Ben’s older brother, help the daring doctor. James invented modern journalism by launching a bold newspaper that reported relentlessly on the smallpox epidemic, something his cowardly rivals largely refused to do. But he also seized on the fear and frenzy to further malign Boylston. His New-England Courant was witty, scandalous, snickering, aggressive and sensational in its anti-inoculation jeremiads (a favorite word of Mr. Coss’). So the birth of modern medicine left us with the afterbirth of tabloid journalism.

Mr. Coss admires what James Franklin did, and in the long run, so should we: His newspaper crossed a long-honored Rubicon with its merciless critique of government, something no paper had ever done with such impunity (that is, until it landed James in jail for a month). Still, the newspaper’s fanciful fabrications and clamorous crusades often weren’t the proudest moments in the history of the American media, something that Mr. Coss acknowledges grudgingly and only in passing.

And James’ paper did allow its frustrated and abused apprentice — his 16-year-old brother Ben, a self-taught polymath — to find his voice as a writer and his passionate disdain for religious hypocrisy (copious back then) and government tyranny.

Set half a century before American independence, Mr. Coss’ book lays out the themes and conflicts that would soon consume an emerging nation. That some of these issues still consume us offers no comfort about our future at a time when knowledge increases by magnitudes every day. In 1721, politicians and the people refused to see how science could help. If Coss’ tale teaches us one thing, it’s that the fever pitch of ignorance and denial is not so lovely a way to burn.

Harry Kloman is a freelance writer and journalism teacher at the University of Pittsburgh.