Poverty | Sleep is for the Weak

Writing Workshop in association with ActionAid: Giving

Posted by Josie on Jan 13, 2011 in Charity Organisations and Awareness Raising, Creative Writing, Save the Children, Writing, Writing Workshop | 7 comments

I can’t give you much money.
Not enough.
I wish I could.
While rich businesses sit on unpaid taxes,
while fat cats grow fatter on bonuses obscene
in their self-serving blind greed
I have to find another way.

But anger sits underneath my giving,
like a renewable, news-ignited fuel cell,
pushing me to act, moving limbs and heart and head.

It’s the eyes I remember. Dark eyes, staring under heavy, tired lids.
Tired by life, and by grief, and by that palpable confusion
of why me? Why not you?
It’s to you I speak, to you I give.

I give you my hands.
I give you all they can do.
I give you the pictures I take of you, the stories they tell,
the unsquashable joy that flares from your playing children
like a bright aluminium burn.
Their smiles. Your tears.

I give you my voice, grown louder lately,
not yet that sure of what to say, but finding ground
in which to plant seeds that might grow,
if only little ones, little sprouts,
the colour of rice paddies and blue skies.
The colour of rubbish piles and thick, dark mud.
The colour of justice, and solutions so simple you could scream,
and deep, hard graft.

I give you my dreams.
Nights of vivid, haunting recollection.
I give you my feet that wander again
the halls of crowded, filth-ridden hospitals
as I wonder which child here will die first.

And

And I give you my hope.
My heart swelling joy at watching
SOMETHING WORK!
Watching rebuilding, healing, awe-inspiring
CHANGE.
My pride, my excitement, my passion caught
like a killer-disease that turns out to be preventable
with just pennies,
pennies that make my pockets feel not quite that empty after all
or quite so ineffective.

I give you my eyes, my inspired, open eyes,
meeting yours as we stand face to face,
wet with shared grief and pain
but with new vision, new inspiration.

I give you it all.

I give you my words.

Photo is mine from my trip to Bangladesh with Save the Children last year, which you can watch a video about here and see lots more photos of here.

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This post was written for this week’s Writing Workshop. Our theme was GIVING, helping to promote and raise awareness for ActionAid‘s latest campaign and you can read more about the prompts and how to take part in the Workshop here.

And don’t forget that you’re all invited to ActionAid’s Happy Bubble event in London on Monday!

Now it’s your turn. Have you got a post to share about Giving and how it makes you feel?

Leave your name and the URL to your post in the MckLinky below (the URL should be to your post not just to your blog) If you have the time it would be great if you could try and show your support to other participants by reading and commenting on at least two other entries.

If you haven’t had chance to respond yet, then you’ve got another whole week to take part and enter your link so there’s plenty of time. Our next workshop will be in two week’s time, so I hope to see you back soon.

Many thanks, from me and from ActionAid, for taking part.

Photo is mine from my trip to Bangladesh with Save the Children last year, which you can watch a video about here and see lots more photos of here.

Writing Workshop Prompts in association with ActionAid: Giving

Posted by Josie on Jan 10, 2011 in Charity Organisations and Awareness Raising, Writing, Writing Prompts, Writing Workshop | 9 comments

A very good morning to you, and welcome back to the Writing Workshop!

To kick us off for the new year we have a special theme this week, all with the aim to help raise awareness of the work of anti-poverty charity ActionAid.

Next week ActionAid, will launch a new campaign focusing on the amazing feeling their supporters get by helping developing communities work their way out of poverty.

Me and the team from ActionAid wanted to help spread that feeling ahead of the campaign by making this week’s Writing Workshop prompt ‘Giving’

For any newcomers to our Workshop, here’s how it works: each workshop I’ll give you a bunch of writing/blogging prompts, something to get you thinking. How you respond to them is entirely up to – there are absolutely no rules and it is open to anyone who’d like to take part. The aim is to provide you with a touch of inspiration and an opportunity for expression, to help you make some connections you might otherwise not have discovered and create something unique and personal. You can write about real-life experiences or try your hand at some fiction, express yourself through stream-of-concious writing, or have a go at at writing in some form poetry. Be creative, be brave, be honest. Those are the only provisos.

And remember! We’re not looking for perfection here! Just have a go! The best way to get better at writing is PRACTISE. All the best writers aren’t afraid to write badly. So turn your inner-critic off for a while and just see what words come out.

For this week’s Giving theme, as always, we want to see what this idea means to you, but here are some suggestions to get you going:

- Have you ever made a random act of giving? How did it make you feel?

- Have you ever had a strong emotional response as a result of giving?

- What are you passionate about and what would inspire you to give?

As well as inspiring some great writing, hopefully this week’s workshop will also make people think and act too.

You can find out more about ActionAid’s campaign here: http://bit.ly/actionaidfeelings, and ActionAid would also like to open an opportunity for all of you to attend their launch event in London on Monday 17th January. You can find out all about The Happy Bubble here: http://bit.ly/happybubble. I know they’ve got lots of innovative surprises and freebies on hand so it should be lots of fun.

Now here’s what you have to do. Decide how you’d like to respond, write your post and publish it on your blog between now and THURSDAY. On Thursday come back and use the widget that will be up to paste in the URL of your post to share. Then take some time to read some of the other entries and leave some comment love! We’re not here to critique – just to have fun and support each other in our writing experiments. So be kind please. Anyone who would like to submit something via email, or even anonymously will be more than welcome to do so. I’ll post them on the site here and include the link in Thursday’s round-up.

As an aside, I’ve been having a bit of a think about how best to keep the workshop going into 2011, and after lots of thought, I’ve decided that it will be moving to every fortnight, which is a bit more realistic for me to keep up with. You’ll have more time to write – the McLinky will be open a full week from Thursday to Thursday, and I’ll have more time to read and support your entries. With a bit more time I’m hoping to be able to be a bit more inventive with our prompts too. If you’ve got any ideas I’d love to hear from you!

Right then. Time to get writing folks! See you on Thursday!

Workshop Badge Code:

Meeting Nick Clegg and a time for action – #blogladesh

Posted by Josie on Sep 21, 2010 in Save the Children | 6 comments

Can people really make a difference? When we’re talking about such global, evasive, complex problems such as poverty, disease, hunger, and on such large scales, can small groups of people speaking out really have any impact?

I guess that’s why we’ve been trying to find out over the last few weeks. We’ve blogged and tweeted and made videos and travelled half way round the world. We’ve pushed YOU to add your voice to ours and to the voice of Save the Children and you have – nearly 60,00 of you in this country alone. 10 million of you have heard about #Blogladesh. You’ve read about watched the stories of the people we met, and you’ve cried tears and you’ve been moved to talk about what you’ve seen.

This week, the little voices, our voices, are being given over to the hands of 150 of the World Leaders as they meet in New York to discuss what action will be taken globally towards meeting the Millennium Development Goals, targets set to finally ACT on the poverty and inequality affecting such a huge proportion of the world’s population and which are currently way of track. If any one can affect change, pushed by the global community’s passion and outrage and strong will, it’s these guys.

Last Thursday I got the chance to meet Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg before he left for the UN Summit in New York. I had five minutes. Five minutes to try and get across everything I had felt and experienced in Bangladesh and what he needs to DO, what he needs to be fighting for. I was nervous but felt so proud that we had been able to get our message this far. I just hoped I could do the team and the project justice in such a short space of time. I took photographs I had taken, blown up big on card, photos of the faces of two of the people we had me in Bangladesh, a mother and a child called Bibi Nurtaj and her son Shanto, who’s story you can watch here. I wanted him to see their faces, I wanted him to remember them, as I told him briefly of Bibi Nurtaj’s story, of the conditions she was bringing her child up in, of how Shanto had barely survived severe acute malnutrition and was now facing life blind in one eye as the result of prolonged diarrhoea, and still vulnerable to barrage of infections and illness. I told how Bibi Nurtaj had asked Sian to take Shanto away with us, of her desperation, how as I mother I could only begin to imagine the kind of life that would make you want to give up your own child.

And to his credit, Nick listened. I spoke emotionally, finding myself getting upset remembering, and he did listen. And I told him, as he must have been told so many times but I was glad to be able to tell him again, that he had the power to help change situations like this and that he should. I encouraged him to go out and meet some of these families himself, that I thought it would change the way he saw things, like it had me, and he responded that it was something he wished to do very much and he was committed to fighting for the reduction in maternal and newborn mortality and that those were the targets he was focusing on next week. I challenged him that the problems don’t stop when these children have survived babyhood, that we had seen with our own eyes the ongoing challenge to keep children alive in the face of poverty and hunger, and he agreed but said this would be a good start.

It is a good start. And I was glad to hear some fire and some passion in his voice as he spoke. These ARE issues he cares about.

And that was that. I left him with the photographs and my five minutes was up.

I guess the question now is will he keep his promises? Will the World Leaders find a way to unite and aggressively tackle the travesty that is 9 million children under the age of five still dying easily preventable deaths? Will they give it the will and the priority that it demands? Will they see that we CAN’T let this keep happening, that we have a moral responsibility, irrespective of the economic or political climate, to give these children a fair chance at life?

The money needed to fix this is small. But the resolve needed to make it happen is big. It needs a united and committed plan of action.

Our Blogladesh team mate Sian is out on New York following the events of the UN and reporting back. The UN Summit has revolving around it a whole week’s worth of campaign and awareness raising events which Sian is attending, interviewing important political figures and experts on issues of International Development. You can follow her reports on her blog and through the great videos being posted on the Save the Children YouTube Channel. And don’t forget to keep following @SaveChildrenPR for news and coverage of the Summit as it unfolds.

Back here at home the enormity of what’s happening keeps hitting me, the POTENTIAL for change has never been so great. All my thoughts are with the people in New York and the decisions being made. The realist in me expects that what comes out of it won’t be enough, that our voices will still need to find a way to keep shouting, and God only knows I will, because I can’t stop now, but let’s hope it’s a start, a good start.

Now’s your chance Nick, and all the rest of the people in power meeting in New York right now.

Don’t let the world down.

I’ll leave you with a video made to celebrate our trip and the people we met there, showing you what we’ve been fighting for and what we will continue to fight for.

(Almost) Wordless Wednesday: Not Fair

Posted by Josie on Sep 8, 2010 in Save the Children | 4 comments

I filmed this exactly one week ago. It feels the right day to post it.

The babe is more than swaddling bands;
Every farmer understands.
Every tear from every eye
Becomes a babe in eternity;

This is caught by females bright,
And return’d to its own delight.
The bleat, the bark, bellow, and roar,
Are waves that beat on heaven’s shore.

The babe that weeps the rod beneath
Writes revenge in realms of death.
The beggar’s rags, fluttering in air,
Does to rags the heavens tear

…

Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born,
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.

Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.

- Excerpts from William Blake’s ‘Auguries of Innocence’

Inequality like this is not fair. It doesn’t need to be like this. In one week me, Sian and Eva are meeting with the Deputy Prime Minister, in person. Add your voices to our voices by signing our petition. Help us press for change.

Please.