The World Is Our Community
This Is Our Charge
An inportant event in the Christian calendar is Christian Aid Week, May 14th-19th. Christian Aid is the relief and development agency of the British Council of Churches. It works in over 70 countries worldwide, wherever there is need. Of the money raised, 2.7% goes towards administration, 9.3% to fundraising, but 88% goes to the actual projects. Christian Aid doesn’t actually have any overseas staff, but works through local churches and organisations which are directly involved with the poorest and neediest people.
Most of its projects are based on giving people the means to help themselves; often with the minimum amount of outside influence they are able to participate actively in contructing development projects for their own communities. Christian Aid is about giving people the chance to help themselves.
For instance, since 1979 Christian Aid has been working in Cambodia attempting, with local people, to rebuild the shattered economy after years of warfare. This has involved, for example, agricultural reconstruction; under the Pol Pot regime irrigation channels were dug by forced labour in defiance of gravity and countours which meant that the flow of rivers was changed. The result of this is that many irrigation channels are now unusable and severe soil erosion has resulted.
Christian Aid has also funded health projests in the region, for instance a dispensary in Phnom Penh for factory workers and their families. It has also helped rebuild the devastated education system — now 90% of children are back at school but there is still a great lack of basic materials such as chalk, exercise books and pencils. There is still much to be done in this troubled nation and Christian Aid is committed to the long-term development of the country.
The slogan for Christian Aid Week this year is “The World is our Community: This is our Charge.” It reflects the recognition that the whole Earth and all its inhabitants are our responsibility. All of us are mutually dependent on each other and on the Earth to provide the means for our sustenance. A recognition of this means speaking out for justice and equality when so many people live in poverty in this world and our livlihood, the Earth, is degraded and destroyed due to the greed of the Western world and the pursuit of profit.
The Earth can sustain everyone, we have a responsibility to take care of it:
“Have many children, so that your descendants will live all over the Earth and bring it under their control. I am putting you in charge of the fish, the birds, and all the wild animals. I have provided all kinds of fruit for you to eat.”
Genesis 1:25–30
BUT — every two seconds a child dies of hunger, 800 million people (one in six of the human race) suffer from malnutrition. The Earth is not allowed to sustain the entire population, and who is responsible for this situation? WE ARE.
An important aspect of Christian Aid Week, as well as raising money, is increasing awareness of the plight of the world’s poor. But what exactly does awareness mean? Once you’ve examined the situation in so-called “underdeveloped” or “Third World” countries a shocking realisation hits you. We actually support the economic, social and political system which makes people poor, starves children and destroys the Earth. A few examples will suffice to illustrate this.
In Ghana, over half the children are malnourished and over half the country’s foreign exchange is spent repaying loans to rich nations. This has led to cuts in education and health care which is bad enough, but the ludicrous situation is that half the farming land there is used to produce cocoa for Western chocolate bars.
Similar situations exist in most of Latin America and the Carribean, where many countries are dependent on a few crops such as sugar, tobacco, tea and coffee for foreign exchange to pay off debts. The workers on these plantations are paid appallingly low wages and work in poor conditions. The plantations are owned by multi-national corporations whose prime aim is profit; they have no regard for the people or the land. Thousands of trees are cut down to increase the area of land devoted to the production of these crops, leading to soil erosion; trees retain water and prevent topsoil being swept away.
As well as exploiting agricultural workers, multi-national corporations exploit workers in their factories. In the tobacco, clothing and electrical component industries, the workforce, which is predominantly female, has to work in cramped, ill-lit, poor conditions for low wages. The companies avoid safety and pollution regulations. They tend to be encouraged to countries by tax exemption incentives offered by governments for a certain period of time. When this incentive period expires they often close down and move to another country.
We play a role in supporting the exploitation of people in countries such as these. We buy the products from the multi-national corporations; the tea, coffee, sugar, chocolate, clothing, tobacco … the list is endless. Our banks, despite making massive profits each year insist on loans they have made to poorer countries being paid off when they can’t even realistically afford to pay the interest rates. Our tourist companies support hotels in “paradises” such as the Carribean, which are again a waste of land and resources. It costs local governments billions of pounds to build and furnish hotels and vast quantities of food have to be imported to feed the tourists.
What this boils down to is that our own lifestyles must change; we must stop supporting this exploitation. There are so many practical things we can do. We can buy “Traidcraft” produce which gives workers a decent wage, we can watch closely the activities of our banks and write to them opposing their policies on Third World loans, we can write to MPs.
But surely the most important thing we must do is to stop living materialistic, greedy lives. We are manipulated by this consumer society in which we live, we see so many luxuries such as necessities essential to our well being. We waste so many resources producing, and spend so much money on, things we don’t need. It is time to change our priorities to being people-centered rather than profit-centered. And we must all play a part in this, no matter how small.
So, during Christian Aid Week it would be good if we devoted some time to considering these issues. Lastly, I urge you to get involved during the week in any way you can. The target for the University of York is £1000 and all the Christian societies are joining together to try and achieve this figure. It is a chance to put Christian values into action, and stand up for what we believe is fundamentally right — justice, equality for all, peace and righteousness.