“Suppose that a community that was moderately equipped with a food market or a supermarket, a hospital, a school, a police station, and a church. Now you are asked to get rid of one of these institutions, which one would it be?”
Lorraine, one of our colleagues in China, posed this question to the participants during training programmes, and that one answer coincided among them was “the Church”.
(Starry sky in a Thai-Myanmar border town)
(CEDAR’s note: The writer, Dr Ho Shun Yee, joined CEDAR’s Exposure Trip to the Thai-Myanmar border towns and the northern regions in Thailand at the end of last year. In this article, Dr Ho shares her experience and thoughts about the tour. CEDAR will host another in-depth tour to Bangladesh to visit the poverty-stricken communities. For more information, please visit: http://cedarfund.org/trip/)
In mid-December 2018, more than ten of us from CEDAR arrived at the Thai-Myanmar border – a place that turned out to be quite different from the land of orchids, Thai silk, massages and water fights that most people would have in mind when the place is mentioned. There were cloud-shrouded mountains and singing streams, but what we heard was a song of a thousand sorrows from the border towns. Yet, in a way, it was also a song of hope.
Continue reading 2018 CEDAR’s Exposure Trip – A Tale of the Border Towns
[“SHARE” JAN – MAR 2019 ] JOIN HANDS JOIN HEARTS
Education is a very important part of eradicating poverty. Yet, many children living in low-income countries do not have the opportunity to receive proper education. Their parents are usually occupied by work to earn a living to put food on the table, thus they seldom think about the future of their children, who they thought would likely share similar fate like them. Because in their eyes, earning income to support their families is more important than getting an educational access for their children.
Continue reading Let the Community Be Responsible for Their Children’s Education
[“SHARE” OCT – DEC 2018 ] FOCUS ~ Christian Response to Poverty
Written by: Raymond Kwong (CEDAR’s Chief Executive) and Jady Sit
In recent years, the international development sector began to emphasise the importance of human inner transformation for uprooting poverty. For instance, Cornell University Professor Kaushik Basu, who serves as the chief economist of World Bank from 2012 to 2016, shared in a public lecture, that no matter what kind of models of poverty alleviation is, one of the key factors to its success is whether people are willing to let go of some of their own interests or economic benefits and seek higher purposes, with which human being in general are common, and so, he advocates strengthening values education in society. This is about changing hearts and minds.
Impoverishment is a consequence of mankind’s broken relationship with God, with each other, and with the rest of the Creation. This broken relationship does not limited to the poor, but also to the non-poor. That is to say, for the sake of ending poverty, inner change has to happen with both the haves and the have-nots.
Continue reading Uprooting Poverty: The Perspective of Christian Faith
[“SHARE” OCT – DEC 2018 ] JOIN HANDS JOIN HEARTS
Every individuals should be entitled to basic human rights, no matter adults or children. However, in reality, millions of children are far from having their rights secured. Children’s rights is not just an ideology, but are about children’s survival, children being free from any form of abuse and exploitation, children’s entitlement to education, children’s freedom of expression and their rights to enjoy social and cultural lives.
Continue reading Julie who Does Not Give In to Circumstances
CEDAR Fund’s partner EFICOR distributes emergency supplies to flood-affected families in Kerala (Photo credit: EFICOR)
“If we don’t address the needs of the poorest people in the community, then our projects will have no meaning,” said Ramesh Babu, programs director of EFICOR.
EFICOR, the Evangelical Fellowship of India Commission on Relief, is our Indian partner accumulated 51 years of experience in poverty alleviation and disaster relief. In India, climate change is closely linked to increased poverty. More than half of India’s working population is farmer, and around 30% of total population lives below the poverty line. While it is most affected by climate change, it frequently suffers from severe floods and droughts. Farmers’ annual harvests are also greatly reduced because of the impacts of global warming. Last year, several hundred peasants committed suicide because they could not bear the huge economic pressure brought by the drought in Tamil Nadu, South India.
When facing disasters, poor farmers are usually the most vulnerable as they lack knowledge, economic capacity and reliable social infrastructure to deal with natural hazards.
