NEWSBYRUTH MESSINGER

Each year on International Women’s Day, I take time to reflect on the many inspiring and courageous women I’ve had the privilege to meet in my travels as president of American Jewish World Service (AJWS), an international development and human rights organization that supports grassroots projects in 36 countries in the Global South. The communities I visit are often ravaged by hunger, violence and disease, all of which are byproducts of gut wrenching poverty. And, from community to community, it always seems that the common thread I see is the marginalization of women, who are oftentimes barred from working or exploited by employers, forced to marry before reaching adulthood and have little if any access to education or information about reproductive health.

The referendum on independence for Southern Sudan has come off with minimal violence, and it seems that Sudan’s president Omar Hassan Al-Bashir will accept the inevitable outcome: Southern secession.

The Obama administration is rightfully pleased with how the referendum has been carried out, but this is not the time to let up. A peaceful resolution to the North-South conflict may be possible, but there are many issues that are not yet resolved, and the situation in Darfur remains unstable and threatening to those living there in camps for displaced persons. We must urge the White House to stay engaged.

For nearly two years, my fellow activists and I have been urging the White House that it must do more to prevent the outbreak of another war in Sudan. Now it seems the administration has listened.

President Obama was the first head of state to commit to attending last month’s special UN session concerning the referendum on independence for Southern Sudan. This vote - fewer than 90 days away - is prescribed in the Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005, which ended more than 20 years of civil war. If Sudan is serious about peace, it must not only permit the referendum in an atmosphere free of violence, but must accept the will of the people should they choose independence. A vote for secession will also require that Khartoum works cooperatively with the government of Southern Sudan to resolve all issues regarding borders and oil revenues.

Ruth Messinger is part of Change.org's Changemaker network, a network comprised of leading voices for social change.

Recently, at the United Nations Summit on Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), Secretary Gereral Ban Ki-moon acknowledged that "the world has failed to invest enough in the health of women, adolescent girls, newborns, infants, and children. As a result, millions of preventable deaths occur each year, and we have made less progress on MDG five, improving maternal health, than any other." In response, the international community pledged $40 billion to the effort.

Bravo! Now let's hope that perinatal mental health gets its share of the pie.

Perinatal mental illness, a known commodity in the United States, is also widespread in the developing world. For example, one-third of all South African women who give birth will experience some form of depression or anxiety during or shortly after pregnancy. Without treatment, a mental illness can have devastating consequences that include problems with fetal brain development, non-completion of immunizations, higher rates of infectious illness, poor nutrition, gastro-intestinal problems, growth retardation and infant mortality. It also makes the mother more vulnerable to HIV infection, substance abuse, loss of employment and suicide.

Experts believe that increased perinatal depression is often a function of a negative cycle in which poverty and mental illness feed off one another. The cycle is manifested in housing problems, social drift, exclusion, lack of access to a social safety net and violence/trauma. The Perinatal Mental Health Project of South Africa, which provides counseling for women at-risk and advocates for increased resources to combat perinatal mental illness, has found that 69 percent of all women seeking the organization's counseling have an unsupportive partner and 39 percent have an unsupportive family.

Ruth Messinger is part of Change.org's Changemakers network, comprised of leading voices for social change.

It appears that Haiti's "15 minutes of fame" are up. With few exceptions, the journalists who flooded the zone following the earthquake are nowhere to be seen. And the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee's harsh criticism of the rebuilding effort six months after the earthquake is a sign that patience is wearing thin. Meanwhile, the lives of Haitians on the ground are still appalling — over a million in tent cities and squatter villages, rain flooding their streets, rape on the rise, too many basic services not restored.

In its recent report, the Senate Committee specifically pointed to the Haitian government's failure to address immediate needs, such as clearing rubble and moving hundreds of thousands of people to durable shelters in time for hurricane season. But the report also recognized the need for a more robust vision for how this island nation will thrive 20 years from now, and it has identified 10 keys for a successful long-term rebuilding effort. These included creating a plan of action, building Haitian government leadership, coordinating international aid and integrating the voices and interests of Haitian people - Haitian civil society - into the rebuilding process. It's this final recommendation that has not received nearly enough attention, from anybody.

Ruth Messinger is part of Change.org's Changemakers network, comprised of leading voices for social change.

Five months after the earthquake, security in Haiti's refugee camps remains dire. In some camps, gangs and opportunists have hijacked the aid distribution system, charging high prices for food or demanding sex in exchange for access to aid.

As the New York Times recently reported, more than a million Haitians are homeless, without adequate food, shelter or health supplies. Gender-based violence and sexual abuse are widespread, and girls and women avoid using toilets for fear of being assaulted. Cite Soleil, one of Haiti's most infamous slums, is a breeding ground for many of these injustices. Less than 28 percent of Cite Soleil's inhabitants have received aid from relief organizations; over 50 percent of Cite Soleil inhabitants do not feel safe at night; and 20 percent of all violent incidents since the earthquake have been rapes.

Despite these enduring hardships, I am reminded that there are, in fact, stories of positive change-stories that often go unreported by mainstream media.

Here's one: With support from American Jewish World Service (AJWS), an organization called EarthSpark has been supplying thousands of solar lamps to Cite Soleil, which has been virtually ignored by international aid efforts. EarthSpark is working to increase public safety in the camps, prioritizing lamp distribution to women who are most vulnerable at night. Using its local knowledge and networks, including AJWS's grantees Fonkoze, Konbit Pou Ayiti and Partners in Health, EarthSpark has distributed over 3,000 lamps to the most marginalized Haitian refugee camp communities.

One of the unforeseen and inspiring benefits of EarthSpark's lamp distribution has been a grassroots organizing effort by and for women. Women are now forming safety patrols at night with their lamps, acting as escorts for other women and creating lit pathways to public latrines and washing areas.

Ruth Messinger is part of Change.org's Changemaker network, a network comprised of leading voices for social change.

"America, Thank You So Much" sings the Stigmaless Band, a group composed of HIV-positive Ugandan teenagers taking drugs to treat AIDS.

Thanks to PEPFAR, the U.S. enables these teenagers and about 200,000 other Ugandans to receive the AIDS drugs they need to stay alive and sing. But that might not be the case for long.

In his New York Times piece "At Front Lines, AIDS War is Falling Apart," Donald McNeil paints a stark picture for the future of Uganda and the global fight against AIDS. Despite the incredible achievements of U.S. foreign aid in combating the AIDS epidemic, advocates and health providers are worried that the U.S. is turning away from this fight. Recent reports indicate that due to cutbacks in U.S. aid, major clinics in Uganda are no longer providing AIDS drugs to those who need them most. Of the 500,000 people who need treatment in Uganda, only 200,000 are receiving it...and 110,000 Ugandans are newly infected each year.

Ruth Messinger is part of Change.org's Changemaker network, a network comprised of leading voices for social change.

According to the latest UN figures, 1.3 million Haitians have been left homeless by the quake. Some of these Haitians are no longer sleeping in abandoned cars but in flimsy structures fashioned from plastic sheeting and salvaged wood — a minuscule improvement, to say the least. Over 218,000 survivors are living in makeshift camps in Port-au-Prince at immediate grave risk of flooding and landslides.

In the minds of too many of the privileged and the powerful, post-earthquake Haitian society has become little more than a faded photograph. Survivors' shelter and medical needs are no longer in focus or in vogue and too many relief efforts are being shortchanged. Virtually nothing is being done by either the Haitian government or international actors for those who will be flooded out of their squatter camps. Large-scale food aid — often distributed inequitably — has nearly run dry.

Ruth Messinger is part of Change.org's Changemaker network, a network comprised of leading voices for social change.

When I was growing up in the 1940s and 50s, Earth Day didn't exist. Blue recycling bins didn't flank trash cans and the words "climate change" held no meaning.

Times have certainly changed. For the past forty years, Earth Day has pushed environmental concerns onto the national agenda. Students grow up planting trees behind their elementary schools, holding recycling drives, cleaning up rivers and talking about ways to protect their communities.

But what happens when the fight gets bigger than cleaning up a river and planting a tree? What happens when the waters a community depends on for its livelihood are taken over by a development corporation?

Our communities are growing and globalization has made our world far more interconnected than we ever imagined. Our responsibilities as global citizens are growing, and we must constantly consider how our choices at both the macro and micro level affect people around the world. At American Jewish World Service (AJWS), we are working with many communities in the developing world that are struggling to protect their land and natural resources from exploitation. Part of AJWS's work includes telling the stories that don't get told — the stories of human attacks on natural resources that never make it to the headlines.

One of the best examples of the struggle to protect land is in Thailand. A major corporation, the Naracha Company, has been developing a huge marina near Phuket, a city in southern Thailand with a growing tourist industry. The plans for the marina also include building hotels and yacht harbors, casinos and bars. The corporation has illegally taken this land from the local, indigenous community, whose economy depends on fishing in the waters. In addition, the Thai Marine Resource Department has determined that the planned development would be highly detrimental to the local environment and ecosystems.

As many of us have been paying close attention to the long-awaited passage of health care reform last week, it was easy to miss something else that was absolutely extraordinary. Former President Bill Clinton said at a recent Senate hearing that he regrets the impact in Haiti of the free trade policies that became a hallmark of his presidency.

"It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake," Clinton said this month. "I had to live everyday with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did; nobody else."

Sadly, he's right. The rapid lowering of agricultural trade barriers in Haiti combined with misguided U.S. food aid policy allowed American agribusinesses to flood the country with cheap surplus rice and force tens of thousands of local farmers out of business. According to the Associated Press, six pounds of imported rice now costs at least a dollar less than a similar quantity of locally-grown rice. So how can a Haitian farmer compete? The past 15 years have shown they simply can't.