Recent News
Recent news and events from Micah Challenge International and national campaigns.
GCAP Meeting, Oxford, UK
Micah Challenge was in Oxford, England, last week with many other groups, working on ideas that can be used in all countries to campaign on global poverty.
Everyone came together as part of GCAP, the huge global coalition against poverty. Twenty passionate, strong-willed people in a room together is a recipe for creative sparks and there were plenty of ideas about Stand Up 09 and campaigns for 2010.
We discussed everything from the tech savvy to the truly local: avatars who “stand up” against poverty, the online poverty countdown clock, research on children in Mexico and women’s poverty forums.
Next year – 2010 – marks 10 years since the Millennium Development Goals were agreed. It is a chance for Christians to remind the world’s leaders of our promise to the poor and to promise anew to take action. It will be an opportunity we cannot miss – too much is at stake.
Micah Challenge is keen to be involved with GCAP campaigns like Make Poverty History and One and to lead Christians to take action.
A Christian organizations gathering at the G8 meetings
In Italy, under the auspices of the Micah Challenge, Italian Evangelical Alliance and Coevema will organize a meeting with all the Christian organizations presented at L’Aquila.
Read the Italian Evangelical Alliance press release here press release IEA-G8.doc
When the foundations are shaken: L'Aquila
My memory of the media coverage of L'Aquila was of a semi rural area
shaken by a major earthquake last Easter and which made thousands of
people homeless.
But when we arrived on site it didn't take long
for me to realise that I had made a serious miscalculation. L'Aquila -
a thriving city of over 150,000 people and an important heritage site -
had been reduced to a ghost town. Since November 2008 the city had
been subjected to over 2000 tremors; the last one happened three hours
before we arrived on the last day on which the public would be allowed
to visit.
So it's right that the G8 will be held in L'Aquila's
military fortress a few kilometres from the shattered city centre.
Putting power in the proximity of pain seemed the right thing to do.
For within a stone's throw from this year's G8, 100 camps will each be
occupied by a thousand people who huddle together in make-shift tents.
And people whose affluent and ancient homes now lie in ruins will share
space with strangers for an indefinite period no-one is daring to
predict.
But what impressed me was the fact that Christian
witness has been alive and well. In the months since the disaster
struck, local Christians have ben a fixture in the race to rehabilitate
and comfort these displaced people. They are in daily contact with
those who grieve the deaths of some 300 people, and share in the
numbness of others, as 500 people are not accounted for.
Giuseppe
Rizza, general director of the Italian Evangelical Alliance and
coordinator of Micah Challenge told me of the efforts of the Coevema a
local relief and development ministry which has been actively involved.
All
eyes will be on the G8 in a few days time when powerful leaders, the
press and NGOs will converge on L'Aquila to discuss global issues and
resurrect the recent nightmare. It's an opportunity to give new
meaning and depth to the G8. But it will also be an opportunity for
the many NGOs and Christian specialists to stop long enough to remember
and applause Coevema's commitment and the energy which local Christians
have poured in. Christian witness at the G8 will be important, but it
will be more authentic if it is able to pause long enough to pay
tribute to local efforts like that of Coevema which has simply 'been
there' all along.
Joel Edwards
Tribute to Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem
The Micah Challenge family was saddened to learn of the tragic passing of the UN Millennium Campaign's Deputy Director on 25 May 2009.
Tajudeen was very supportive of Micah Challenge, and had met with and encouraged a number of our Coordinators. We were in continuing dialogue with him about the issues of poverty that he was so passionately involved in tackling. He will be sadly missed.
Please click here for the UN statement: http://www.standagainstpoverty.org/en/node/8826
Joel with Dr Tajudeen in January this year.