It is a truth that we meet every year, but never get used to: that unexpected disaster which caught a population off guard. And there is a matching truth just as painful. While disasters strike rich and poor alike, it is the poor communities who are hardest hit, by a very wide margin. Both realities grieve us. We can never get used to either.
That is why we resonate with those who say that, surely, we can keep our human race safer. We can increase early warning alerts, be better educated on what to do, construct safer buildings, locate populations more wisely. The list is massive. We can’t stop hazards threatening our planet but we can reduce the risk that they will turn into such damaging disasters.
After the tragic tsunamis that shocked the world on Boxing Day, in 2004, the United Nations gathered world leaders in Japan to lay out a framework that could help keep nations people safer and more resilient. That was in 2005. In 2015, that framework was reviewed, again in Japan, with the wisdom of ten years’ experience. Crossroads was invited to attend and to speak about the new Disaster X-perience we are developing, at the UN’s request.
It delights us to support any measure we can in order to make the world safer and its people less vulnerable.
Below: Malcolm and Sally Begbie, Crossroads’ directors, attending the World Conference for Disaster Risk Reduction in Sendai, Japan, March 2015.
us to see that investment into homes like these, over a couple of decades, can help thousands start life over.
She found an option other than prostitution through Freeset, a fair trade textiles enterprise. Debi had a job she could do with dignity and an appropriate salary. She was slowly able to save money and, in time, get married and move out of home. She even had enough to help support her mother.
When we buy products from Gogo Olive (and many others), we not only pay the ‘fair trade’ minimum. We pay an additional sum which the women use to invest back into their community and families. The Gogo Olive ‘grannies’ were able to buy eyeglasses for some of their workers with this ‘premium’ payment. It was a joy to see photos of the proud faces of these middle-aged craftswomen wearing their new glasses, for some the first glasses they had owned.
At just 16, she was desperate to contribute to the family income. She turned to a trusted ‘aunty’ of the family. Her aunty said she could find Beauty a job as a housemaid. Beauty took it but soon found that the job was in fact in a brothel. She was trapped. One of our partners met her just a month after Beauty began the work. She runs a papercraft business in Kolkata’s red light district that takes women from the sex industry and gives them new jobs, new training and a new dignity. Named Love Calcutta Arts, it was this group that created
