The Affero Blog
Intangible Thirst
By Steven McLaughlin in Articles
I feel as if I have used this space to write ad nauseum about the grave ills in the world that not only discomfort our fellow human beings, but lead also to their demise. I hope this post is less of that and more helping to lead to a better understanding of why what you do on a monthly basis through your gift is important.
For example, of course you know that people are hungry, children need schooling and people need houses to live in. These are not grandiose theorems that are hotly debated amongst the nation’s leading scholars; rather, they are realities that you know to exist via your own experiences in life. Maybe you have an inkling of what it feels like when your stomach grumbles or you have a headache and find it difficult to think straight because you missed lunch. There’s a probability that you have felt the wind’s sting on a blustery day when a bus was missed or a car broke down. At some point you may even have experienced what it’s like to feel as if you could not advance further beyond in your career field due to a lack of education. These things seem like common sense because the experiences are just that; common.
When it comes to the importance of clean water, I think that we tend to brush it off as “someone else’s problem.” A struggle that is neither relevant to your current state in life, nor small enough that you can personally give clean water to someone in need.
Sure we can spend our time tutoring a student at a local school, or buy a sandwich for the person standing by the side of the highway with a beat up cardboard sign that’s been scrawled upon with a sharpie impeding you to help out any way you can. These are tangible things you can do in order to alleviate someone else’s pain.
You can’t exactly fly to Sub-Sahara Africa with a few gallons of water to help ensure that people are drinking from a water source that is separate from the water source that hundreds of others are using as a source to clean themselves.
Even helping get clean water to areas that are nearby doesn’t always lead to a solution as to why there isn’t access to clean water in the first place. Rare is the opportunity that one has to build a new waterworks system in a city that’s been devastated by a hurricane, tsunami, or just plain lack of maintenance.
I think these are the reasons that clean water tends to be pushed to the back of our minds when it comes to issues to tackle, we can’t fix it easily and therefore it lacks a tangible solution.
However starting in the 1960s, the William Ashe and his family took outings into Baja, Mexico, to help orphanages, camps, and churches install new water systems. These outings, the relationships that were build and the need that was discovered became the foundations of what we know today as Lifewater International.
Lifewater International is an organization which seeks to provide tangible solutions to an issue that is beyond the grasp of many of us. That is why Affero has proudly partnered with them to support their vision of reducing and eventually eliminating the desperate need for clean water to the parts and people of the world that lack the resources to provide clean water for themselves.
Check them out and consider what you can do for to help provide clean water for those in need.
-Steve
A trip to Mexico and beyond
By Steven McLaughlin in News
A few years ago I had the opportunity to work alongside a friend on a farm in southern Mexico. I never imagined myself as a farmer but my friend had been living in Mexico for almost a year and I really wanted to visit him. It was spring break and I had the means to go, so I went.
While I was there I learned an overwhelming amount of information about agriculture, ecology, Mexican culture, and the Spanish language. Turns out the language of a culture is something that is incredibly beneficial to have a firm grasp on before diving into said culture
Looking back now I can see how my whole experience would have been much smoother if I had known the language. For instance we had the opportunity on one of the days I was there to drive to a city up north to partake in a celebration and feast. Eventually we needed to stop for gas, my friend got out to pump as the others we were travelling with stayed in the van while I volunteered to go inside and purchase some water. It wasn’t until I got to the counter that I realized “oh yeah, I don’t speak any Spanish” I offered several forms of payment, none of which seemed to satisfy the increasingly irritated woman behind the counter. Eventually I gave up and left on the counter a guess at what I thought would equal the amount of money I owed, hoping that it would satisfy the attendant and hoping I could put this embarrassing experience behind me. When we got on the road again the guys asked for change from the money they had given me, of which I had none. Turned out I had put the equivalent of around 18 bucks on the counter for 2 bottles of water. I was not allowed to go into gas stations for the duration of the trip.
Another thing I learned about while I was there was the story of Dr. Paul Farmer. By the time I had gotten there I think my friend had read and re-read Tracy Kidder’s book “Mountains Beyond Mountains” a few dozen times. If you haven’t had the chance to read this book I highly suggest going to the library or dropping the deserved 12 dollars on it on Amazon. If you have read it you know just how much the ideas in the book get under your skin.
Paul Farmer is an inspiration to many in his research and innovations in getting medicine to the sick. The book itself traces how Paul Farmer became the infamous Dr. Paul Farmer, but the overlying story of how difficult it is to get medicine to the sick in many areas of the world is what really shocked me.
In Haiti, for example (where Farmer’s work is anchored) behind HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis is the country’s greatest infectious cause of mortality in both youth and adults. While we’ve managed to control TB and to some extent AIDS/HIV in the States through rigorous hospital standards, testing, media campaigns encouraging proactive solutions and advances in medications, these diseases still rip through a nation that is about 1600 miles away. That’s just less than 1000 more miles away from where I currently am to Los Angeles. So the big question is why can we not help rid this nation (as well as assist other nations) of these diseases if we have managed to control them in some manner here.
Of course there are a hundred different reasons why, most of them involving governments and bureaucratic red tape, but I think another reason is that many have either become jaded to the idea of illnesses ravishing whole nations or we have become so secluded and naïve that we have forgotten that we have the ability to help our neighbors around the world out.
When I think back to the van ride we took in Mexico, the one where we all spoke English which lead to me forgetting where I was in the world and forgetting the thick language barrier that stood between myself and a couple bottles of water, I can’t help but be embarrassed at how naïve I was. My hope is that I don’t look back years from now with the same degree of guilt and embarrassment when it comes to knowing more about HIV/AIDS, TB and other illnesses in this world. I hope we can all look back and remember when we got together, were bold and empowered, and decided to do something about it.
Peace,
Steve
Unaccompanied Minors pt 2
By Steven McLaughlin in News
For the last two weeks I have struggled to put pen to paper (or to tap out my thoughts on a keyboard) regarding how I would wrap up my two-part piece on child soldiers. There seems to be so much information on this subject alone that I felt there was no way I am going to do it any justice.
On top of this I recently started a new job at work that has been eating up my free time like the Dilophosaurus chewed up Wayne Knight in Jurassic Park. That isn’t to say I don’t love my new job, on the contrary I do, however my writing has suffered in the past two weeks and been pushed to the back burner, and for that I apologize.
The third reason that I have struggled to finish this piece is that as a writer I tend to lean heavily towards being a comedy writer, and the fact of the matter is, the more I read and researched the dilemma of child soldiers, the less and less I found ways to make any sort of light hearted remarks regarding the issue. Face it; even the Dilophosaurus joke in the last paragraph was a bit of a stretch.
For these reasons among others I decided that I could not finish this piece on my own. Fortunately my friend (and co-affangelist) Mr. Rob Harvey pointed me in the direction of one Mr. Marcus Young. Marcus Young not only came to my rescue in helping me finish this piece, but he taught me more about the experiences of a child soldier than any book or article possibly could. Marcus and I had a great at length conversation regarding a group he has worked with for several years called Project AK-47.
Before I spout off about what Project Ak-47 is doing I have to precede it by saying that at the center of Marcus’ story of how he came to be involved with rescuing children from places such as Mexico, Burma and the Philippines is a man who very much so leans on Jesus in his life.
In short Project AK47 reaches into the depths of poverty and pulls out kids who weren’t given a fair first shot at having a childhood. Sure we could go back and forth and debate what it means to have a childhood, we could discuss how my Western idea of childhood differs from a world view of childhood, or even argue that there’s no such thing as a world view of child hood. We could do all that until we’re blue in the face, but the fact will still remain that kids as young as 3 and 4 are conscripted by their governments into militias. They start out as “go fers” running menial errands here and there, during this time they sometimes have food, clothing and shelter provided for them. Around the ages of 9 and 10 they start training the children in basic combat, and then at about 12 years old they join the ranks of other soldiers. At 12 they are physically large enough to carry the light, deadly and relatively cheap weapon that is an AK-47. The average time these children spend in some sort of paramilitary role on average is 7 years.
So yes, we could argue about what it means to “have” a childhood, but I’m willing to bet there are very few people that would wish the above paragraph on any child. What project Ak-47 does is to step in when given the chance and provide these kids with the food, clothing and shelter they need, but with the relationships they as children yearn for as well. The over arching idea behind Project AK-47 is that the children in these situations have two chances in life; to be a kid for 7 years or to be a killer for 7 years. A(a) kid (k)for (4) 7 or a(a) killer(k) for (4) 7. AK-47.
I think that if I were a sensationalistic writer I would reprint the parts of mine and Marcus’ conversation that shocked me the most, the parts that broke my heart and the parts that spurred me on. But that’s not my writing style and I don’t want to scare anyone into finding out more about this mission of Project AK-47. So here are my suggestions if you want to find out more or get involved with alleviating this darkness from our world.
1) Sign up for Affero (yeah, I went there.) Seriously though, sign up and vote for child soldiers to get your gift for the month. It can be that easy.
2) Go to Project AK 47′s website and get involved there. Read about their dog tag campaign. Their goal is to get 100,000 dog tags of child soldiers out to people to raise awareness of just how many children are in the bondage of armies, militias and other various groups. While you’re there look around and learn more about Project AK-47
3) Go to a library and type child soldiers into a search bar on the computer. The vast array of books and articles on the subject can lead to some great conversations and breakthroughs on this subject if you take the time to read them.
That’s it for me for the week. Thanks for your recent patience and I promise more regularity in the future when it comes to this column.
Peace,
Steve
Unaccompanied Minors part 1
By Steven McLaughlin in News
My challenge at the Affero project is to be able to help educate some of our readers on the different causes we want to help out with. My general knowledge on the subjects is/was just that, general. Since I began writing on this blog I have been blown away by how deep and dark some of these problems are that we want to help with. While we tend to be a light hearted group of people, these causes can leave one heavy hearted after enough time is spent learning and researching them. I believe for myself no other subject has moved me, changed me and disturbed me quite as much as the subject of child soldiers. Some numbers estimate that currently over 300,00 children under the age of 17 are forced into armed conflicts and UNICEF estimates that in the past decade 2 million such children have died in these conflicts, millions more have been left as refugees, disabled or orphaned.
Charles London’s “One Day the Soldiers Came” is an in depth view into the world of refugee children that I have thoroughly enjoyed. There have been times where I felt I just could not read any further, didn’t want to read any further, or was embarrassed at my own ignorance to the subject as a whole. Overall it’s been a great resource to finding out more about how refugee children end up as mass murdering soldiers.
One quote in particular from the beginning of the book has stood out to me, London says, “They’ve fought in different armies and come from different parts of the country. Fate has thrown them into this center together, turned them into a group, labeled child soldiers or ex-combatants or in some documents “youth who participate in conflict.” The labels tell you little. In the language of humanitarian aid, there are many categories for children; Street children, Internally Displaced children, Child Soldiers, Child Heads of Household, Unaccompanied Minors, Children in Conflict with the Law, Children Affected by HIV, Children Accused of Sorcery. Categorization is a way of processing children for targeted assistance in crisis situations.” I think this stuck in my head for so long because it communicates how wide and varied the experiences of child soldiers are and how different societies view them in different contexts.
One of the most difficult aspects for me to understand as I was researching this is that the idea of childhood is significantly relative to different cultures. It seems the more a culture values education, the more that society develops a set of rules to protect children. While the correlation of childhood and education may seem to be obvious to some, I think it only feels that way because of an ingrained western cultural standard. When I think collectively about every child I’ve ever known personally, from my own childhood on, I met almost all of them through an education system of some sort, whether it was through my own school or school’s I volunteered at or taught at. In our society education and childhood go hand in hand like facebook and birthday wishes.
My guess is that many of you reading this know a child. I know it’s a stretch to make that assumption, but I’m going to go ahead and exercise my creative judgment here and go with that assumption. Being a teacher I have gotten to know quite a few kids in the short time I have been in the education system, and I have to say that I can’t imagine any of them are ready to face war. I don’t know that anyone ever really is adequately prepared to give their life for some idea of patriotism or what is right versus what is wrong in some political argument that largely doesn’t concern their best interests. But this is what happens every day throughout the world in countries and territories that may take more than one attempt for you to pronounce the name of the land correctly. Our hope at Affero is that we can help out in some way by giving our combined efforts and resources to some people who are already on the front lines of this subject. I hate to end this with a cheesy quote, but Helen Keller once said “the highest result of education is tolerance.” And I couldn’t agree with that more than I do right now.
That about wraps it up for me for this week, next week I’ll be back with more on this subject.
Steve
Discovering homelessness
By Steven McLaughlin in News
It was a whirlwind weekend back in Ohio a couple of weeks ago. My wife and I now live in New England and had flown into Ohio for a couple of days in order to attend the weddings of some friends. We bounced around the whole state putting roughly 700 miles on our borrowed cars wheels trying to get to and from airports, weddings, friend’s houses, houseboats, church, lunches and back again in roughly 72 hours.
Being home is usually an overwhelming experience for us since we live so far away now. We’re usually trying to fill every free minute catching up with people we haven’t seen in months. Sure there’s Skype, email, cell phones, face book and twitter to keep us connected with our friends and family, but what we crave is the ability to sit down and share a meal, or coffee, or conversation face to face with people and reconnect with them personally. Thus being home is usually exhausting in the best of ways.
This is all to say that it surprised me as we were speeding down a dirt road from one lunch gathering to the next we came to an unexpected stop. We had both noticed that in the left lane of this road in the middle of nowhere a large turtle was struggling to cross the street. For the life of us we couldn’t figure where this turtle was coming from or heading to, it looked lost, far away from any semblance of home and it looked like it needed our help. I pulled off to the side of the road, jogged over to where my new found friend was stranded and gently nudged him along off of the road.
Feeling like a champion of all things in nature big and small I got back into my car and continued to drive to see our friends.
And then out of nowhere, like a hot knife through butter, this thought just strikes through my heart.
Why was I so quick to get out and help that turtle, but when I see people on the side of the road with signs that say they are homeless, why do I even question whether or not I should stop?
Of course the glaringly obvious answer that hit me over and over again as I continued to drive was this; it’s incredibly easy to help a turtle cross the road, and it takes much more effort to help out someone who has lost their home.
Homelessness is more than just men and women on the sides of roads with signs. One definition I read of homelessness stated that it is people “without a permanent, safe, decent, affordable place to live.” Statistics on who, how many and why people are homeless range into the upper hundreds of thousands to the lower millions depending on who you might be asking.
Beyond that there are millions on the verge of homelessness, just hoping that they don’t have to pay to fix a broken down car or have an unexpected visit to the hospital that would eat their pay check and have them miss that month’s rent.
All of these things rattled around in my head throughout the weekend as we continued on our way and eventually got back to our home here on the East coast. I realized that homelessness isn’t just this little problem that is sometimes annoying and is going to go away if I ignore it long enough. So I’m going to keep researching and writing as much as I can, finding out where I fit into this puzzle. I’m looking forward to getting back here and sharing what I find out with all of you.
Summer Hunger
By Steven McLaughlin in Articles,News
I’m writing this as the temperature is getting well into the lower 80’s and droves of people are filing through our town with their towels and coolers on their way to the beach. The ice cream truck has become more of a mobile hangout than occasional treat in recent months. The smell of burgers and dogs cooking on the grill intertwines with the odors of sunscreen and sweat as they waft in through our rarely cracked windows. All of this can mean only one thing; summer is close at hand.
For some, summer is more about tradition and ritual than it is an actual calendar event, I know for myself it is. The cookouts, the fireworks, the small town festivals celebrating some random claim to fame (The town next to mine growing up had an Onion Festival every year, many of us still have yet to figure out what the correlation between the onion and that town ever was.)
As I’m winding down my first year teaching I have numerous friends asking me what I’m planning on doing with my time off over the summer. My response is usually an icy glare that is cold enough to commit to not needing the A/C for the next several days. This is due to the fact that my school is year round, and while we do get several vacations throughout the year, for the most part we teach through the summer.
While I am envious of my friends that get a couple months off in a row for summer vacation, there is a student population that I find myself not envying throughout the summer. I recently came upon this article which explains in depth the food shortage that a group of students in America face throughout the summer. To briefly summarize the article, it basically points out that throughout the school year; many families in lower income neighborhoods come to depend on federally subsidized lunches that the children get at school to give their children a substantial meal.
In 2010 alone 20.5 million students depended on these lunches throughout the day, up from 19.4 million in 2009. Estimates suggest that over the summer months when school is out, around 16 million of these kids aren’t going to be able to receive lunches. Reasons for this seem to extend beyond my comprehension; everything from shortages at food pantries throughout the country due to the sour economy to bureaucratic red tape mandating when and where food can be given to children seems to be mucking up kids chances at a decent meal.
I don’t think I have ever in my life thought about school lunches being a significant source of nutrition. From all the time I have spent working in, volunteering at or attending public schools, all I have ever heard is how awful the food is. How messed up is it that I’ve spent years only hearing about how terrible food is, and there are kids that have stomachs that are aching for this food?
I heard a friend teach one time on how hunger is not an issue that stems from a downturned economy, but that stems from people not willing to reach out and help their neighbors in need.
I hope that this summer we can figure out how to feed more students than ever before, whether it’s donating food to a local pantry or finding out what it takes to volunteer at a lunch program in a nearby city, I know that I don’t want this to just be another few warm months that I drift through carefree and unaware of my hungry neighbors’ struggles.
Education For Life
By Steven McLaughlin in News
I have to say that when I started picking topics to write I spent a considerable amount of time steering away from writing about education, sometimes a guy just needs a break. My day job sees me working as a Physical Education and Health teacher, aka a gym teacher. If it were up to me I would be teaching English, or History, or even Science. Sometimes though you don’t get to pick a job, it picks you, and when I arrived at our school they were one Phys Ed teacher short, so I jumped in.
Our school is a therapeutic boarding school which is a fancy way of saying that the teachers here live alongside the special needs students we teach. It can be rather time consuming and exhausting but it’s absolutely the best job in the world for me. I end up spending almost every waking moment with students, around students, planning for students and talking about students, hence my resistance to writing about education at first.
Our very first winner at The Affero Project from April was Doulos Discovery School. If you haven’t heard of it yet, you need to check it out. It takes the idea of working and living among students to a whole new level. I’ve had the opportunity to know some of the people who work at Doulos personally throughout the years and I can say they are without a doubt some of the most passionate people I have ever met. Their zeal for life is uncanny, and that’s just what I know of them on a personal level As educators they are incredibly driven and creative people, hearing stories of how much they do with the little they have humbles me as a teacher.
At this point you may be wondering why Doulos Discovery School is our education cause. Well have I mentioned that it’s located in the Dominican Republic? A number of the people I mentioned above that have such a burning passion for education have given up comfy lifestyles in the United States in order to move to a place in the world that many have given up on. They not only live with the students they teach, but many times also get to know and come alongside the families of their students. They have made this move because they believe that everyone should have an equal chance at receiving a great education. Sometimes at work I get stressed out because my wife and I moved to New England from the Midwest and now we are constantly surrounded by kids that need our assistance, it can be slightly overwhelming. To move to a whole different country in order to follow the dream of helping kids, to give up part of their lives so that others can have better lives is astounding to me, but it is definitely something I want to help support.
To find out more about the Doulos Discovery school and the awesome people who live and work there go to http://www.doulosdiscovery.org/ .
Clean Water
By Steven McLaughlin in News
I want to write about clean water, I really do, but I have a problem. I have no idea what life is like without it. My average day starts like this.
I wake up, start a pot of coffee and use the bathroom. I take a shower, I shave and I enjoy my coffee. The day moves on and I have yet to even think about water.
Most days my teaching team gets to teach outside. This season in particular we get to teach baseball. We have the opportunity to teach kids what running the bases looks like. We get to teach them what catching a pop fly looks like, as well as teaching them how to throw to the cut off to get an out at third and hopefully back to second to teach what a triple play is, if we’re lucky.
These kids stay pretty healthy throughout all of this. They have the ability to change into clean clothes if they need and take medicine if they need. I alone get the chance to take a break in an air-conditioned room and have a solid quart of water and get ready to do it all over again for the next class, never thinking about the fact that clean water gets us through all of this.
I have a friend who is a carpenter by trade. For some ignorant reason when I think of carpenters I think of old guys sitting in rocking chairs whittling away at fallen tree limbs, hoping to make picnic benches and rocking chairs in their free time. Unbeknownst to me, carpenters are a lot more than that and I have done them a lot of injustice in my predisposed thoughts of them.
I want to be the first to say that my ideas of clean water are warped, just misplaced and wrong. After looking into it I want to throw my hands up and say I am unable to be changed in my knowledge of clean water because I am so twisted in my non-knowledge of it.
My carpenter friend reminded me though that he LOVES to work with pieces that are warped. That it brings out this creativity in him that he cannot explain where it comes from. Warped wood is this adventure, out of seemingly nowhere, that keeps him going during the most tedious of jobs.
My idea on what clean water is may be intrinsically warped due to my life as a person coming from the Midwest of the States, and it is something I’ve never been without, but my point is this. There is hope in that I don’t think I’m too warped to not be malleable enough to understand, to be bent into a new thing, to get it, really comprehend what it’s like to be without clean water.
We have links on the site, go ahead, check them out, it only takes minutes to understand the problem of clean water. It takes hours and days and weeks to figure out how to help, but it only takes minutes to understand how warped you might be when it comes to clean water. It’s ok though if you’re warped, a lot of us are.