We hope you’ve had a wonderful Christmas!

And we are excited for the New Year. You are not ready for what we have planned.  Our next tour… major.  MAJOR.

One of our favorite writers to write Human Rights History

From DUKE TODAY:

DURHAM, NC — Adam Hochschild loves the history of the underdog, of social movements that apparently come of out nowhere to successfully challenge entrenched ideas and power. We like these stories, too, but often, Hochschild says, they come to us as heroic ventures led by heroic people, who often are members of the upper class elite. Hochschild, a co-founder of Mother Jones magazine who will speak Monday at Duke, writes these histories with a different touch and finds the forgotten characters who played important parts. In King Leopold’s Ghost, it was Roger Casement and George Washington Williams who brought the world’s attention to Belgium abuses in the Congo. In his latest book on the British anti-slavery movement, Bury the Chains, he looks beyond the better-known story of aristocrat and abolitionist leader William Wilberforce (told last year in the movie “Amazing Grace”) to shed light on lesser-known characters such as Thomas Clarkson and a brilliant ex-slave named Olaudah Equiano.

In an interview last week, Hochschild talked about why these kinds of figures play such an important role in his histories and the success and failures of social movements.

Q: Why are you attracted to people such as Casement and Clarkson?

Hochschild: I feel like the only way to get people to history is to tell it through a group of characters. When I find a patch of history I want to write about I go looking for characters through whom to tell the story.

They are a mixture of heroes and villains. Few people in real life are heroes in the conventional sense, always doing the right thing; none of us are like that, and none of us are like that in history. People are filled with doubts, they make wrong decisions, and sometimes they change sides.

In particular, I’m interested in people who have some transforming experience. In Bury the Chains, there’s the story of James Stevens who was something of a dandy who was completely transformed by watching the trial of slaves and became one of the abolitionist leaders.

Q: Is there a general theme to what you learn from these people?

Hochschild: One of the things that I hope to show is that at any given point in time people make moral choices, even if they don’t think they do. The fascinating thing about the British anti-slavery movement is that up to the point that it burst into public life, everyone took slavery for granted. Movements that make people suddenly see something in moral terms for a first time fascinate me.

I hope the readers raise the same questions. You wonder, what will people 200 years from now look back at what we take for granted and think of it as an outrage?

Q. You focus on the grass roots activism that helped power these social movements, but the elites were involved as well. Are both necessary for a movement to be successful?

Hochschild: It’s hard to come up with a formula true for all times and places, but for a society to go through a complete revolution, some combination of elite and mass movement is important. There have always been elite sympathizers in movements, but you don’t get anywhere unless there is strong pressure from large number of people. But it helps to move things along faster if you are able to appeal across class lines.

The issue is the history of these movements tends to focus on the elites. If you are writing about a long-ago period, the people who kept records for later historians tend to be better educated. For Bury the Chains, I’m lucky that so many of the activists left detailed records. There is the extraordinary Olaudah Equiano who wrote eloquently. But one of the frustrations in King Leopold’s Ghost was that there were so few voices of the people of the Congo.

Q. History can be upsetting, and there was a strong reaction in Belgium to King Leopold’s Ghost. How did Bury the Chains go over in England?

Hochschild: The book appeared in 2005, and the 200^th anniversary of abolition was in 2007. The reaction to the book was very friendly, but the interesting thing was the country’s reaction to the anniversary.

I had expected the anniversary to pass without much notice, because in 1907, the 100^th anniversary, there hadn’t been a single commemorative event. But last year was different. There were more than two dozen specials on abolition on BBC alone. And what pleasantly surprised me was not only did they celebrate the history, they celebrated in the terms I wrote about it, giving attention to the popular movement, rather than just focusing on Wilberforce and his friends.

What I think happened is now there is such a large population from the Caribbean in England, these people weren’t going to sit back and see the abolitionist story told in the traditional way. They wanted to see their voices in it as well.

Book Drive – One Month Left

There is one month left in this year’s book drive, and three trips to Uganda are one the line. We raised 2 million books last year, accomplishing our goal of holding the largest book drive in history, but we’ve got a new game plan this year – we’re going for the smartest book drive ever.  No need to clutter up your bedroom or school anymore, you can ship your books in as you go.  We’ll send you the boxes to put them in and you can print UPS labels off of your computer at no cost to you.  Books that will be counted for the Schools for Schools competition must be postmarked by January 29th, so watch the video, collect some books, send them in and give yourself a pat on the back.  You deserve it.

And The Schools for Schools Winners Are…

The 2009 Schools for Schools fundraising competition is officially over.  Over $740,000 was raised by 1600 schools in just 100 days.  The money you raised will be used to rebuild our 11 partner schools.  The winning schools will each send one representative to Northern Uganda next summer to meet the students at their partner school and see their money in action.  And this year’s winners are…

Anaka Secondary School – San Ramon Valley High School: $10,538.00

Atanga Secondary School – Sanford H. Calhoun High School: $14,001.02

Awere Secondary School  – Pace Academy: $16,255.00

Gulu High School – Desert Mountain High School: $8,015.86

Gulu Senior Secondary School – West Aurora High School : $11,510.00

Keyo Secondary School – Chino Hills High School: $6,777.77

Lacor Secondary School – Sewanee University of the South: $14,348.12

Layibi Secondary School – University High School of Indiana: $12,874.60

Pabbo Secondary School – Cypress Woods High School: $15,672.17

Sacred Heart Secondary School – Chapman University: $12,669.00

Sir Samuel Baker Secondary School – Downingtown West High School: $7,500

The 11 student representatives from these schools will be joined by students from the following schools:

Sanford H. Calhoun High School – November Challenge Winner

Glenbrook North High School – Creative Idea Winner

Thanks to everyone who participated in this year’s competition.  Classrooms, laboratories and latrines are being built, hundreds of students are in school, libraries are stocked and teachers are better trained at our 11 partner schools thanks to your combined efforts.  We’d love to take you all to northern Uganda with us next summer, but it just isn’t possible.  There are still three open spots for Book Drive winners on next summer’s Schools for Schools trip though, so make sure all of your books are postmarked by January 29th to be eligible for the competition.

Nicholas Kristof’s advice for saving the world

From Outside Magazine, by New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof:

In 2004, I visited the Darfur area three times, trying to bear witness to the slaughter of children and the burning of villages. I stepped over the desiccated carcasses of camels and goats to interview survivors still in hiding. I interviewed people who had seen men pulled off buses and killed because of their tribe and skin color, and I spoke to teenage girls who had been taunted with racial epithets against blacks while being gang-raped by the Sudanese-sponsored Arab militia, the janjaweed.

I was enraged by what I found and, as a New York Times columnist, wrote time and again about these atrocities on the op-ed page. Yet at first the public reaction seemed to be a collective shrug: Too bad, but isn’t that what Africa is always like? People slaughtering each other? Anyway, we have our own problems.

My frustration was multiplied when Manhattan erupted in a controversy showing that even cynical New Yorkers can brim with empathy—for a hawk. A red-tailed hawk dubbed Pale Male, one of the best-known residents of the Central Park area, had become embroiled in a housing dispute with the Upper East Side co-op on which he had a nest. The co-op removed Pale Male’s nest, outraging New Yorkers and generating considerable news coverage. Now, don’t get me wrong: I was on Pale Male’s side, but I also dreamed that the plight of people driven from their villages in Darfur or Congo could get the same sympathy as a homeless bird. Clearly, something was wrong with the way I and other humanitarians were approaching Darfur.

So I turned to the field of social psychology, trying to understand how I could craft my writing so that it would generate a response rather than a turned page. Over the past 20 years, there have been many studies that shed light on this question, and, increasingly, I’ve come to believe that those of us who care about human rights and global poverty can do a far better job in our messaging. Like Pepsi, humanitarian causes need savvy marketing. Indeed, they need it far more than a soft-drink company.

Good people engaging in good causes sometimes feel too pure and sanctified to sink to something as manipulative as marketing, but the result has been that women have been raped when it could have been avoided and children have died of pneumonia unnecessarily—because those stories haven’t resonated with the public. So for God’s sake, let’s learn how we can connect people to important causes and galvanize a robust public reaction.

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the ABC’s of branding

learn to read write and spell

with what they buy show and tell

and jump when they ring that bell.

Melting Polar Bear statue

The art piece was presented last week by artist Mark Coreth in Copenhagen and is sponsored by WWF.

UN urges countries to bring LRA leaders to ICC

(AFP)

GENEVA — The UN’s rights chief said the Lord’s Resistance Army should face charges of crimes against humanity, after her office catalogued atrocities against civilians in two new reports Monday.

Navi Pillay, urged countries to bring LRA leaders to the International Criminal Court, after she catalogued civilian massacres and the abduction of women and children for use as sex slaves or porters.

About 1,300 civilians have been killed in dozens of attacks in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo since June, said reports, from the office of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

They documented harrowing accounts of often “carefully synchronised” attacks on villages where civilians were slaughtered with a variety of bladed weapons or guns, mutilated, tortured and raped.

At least 1,400 people, including 600 women and children were also abducted in DR Congo alone, to serve as sex slaves or porters.

“These attacks and systematic and widespread human rights violations carried out by the LRA… may constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity,” Pillay’s report on DR Congo said.

Her comments echoed a similar statement on crimes against humanity in the report on Sudan.

“The international community, including governments in the region, should cooperate with the International Criminal Court to search for, arrest and surrender the LRA leaders accused of crimes against humanity,” the report said.

The LRA guerilla group first appeared in northern Uganda in 1988.

LRA chief Joseph Kony and two other leaders are wanted by the International Criminal Court since 2005 on 33 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, according to the UN rights office.

The future of Magazines: the Tablet

From the NYTimes Media Blog:

On Wednesday, Stephanie Clifford wrote extensively about American publishers who are tilting forward into a time when a lot of work by the media, including magazines, will be consumed on tablet devices. Sports Illustrated and Wired have both jumped in with prototypes, and magazine companies that have historically competed are joining forces to come up with an electronic newsstand. By developing content and interfaces that readers might actually pay for, the article suggested, “magazine publishers are taking a mulligan.”

And it’s important to remember that American publishers don’t have a monopoly on challenges, or ideas for confronting them. Sara Öhrvall runs the research and development at Bonnier Corporation in Sweden, a company that publishes a number of magazines in the United States, including Saveur and Ski Magazine. She sent along a video of a virtual prototype of a re-imagined magazine. It’s all theoretical: A device capable of displaying the magazine as conceived does not exist, so the demonstration is achieved with some dark-room magic.

The so-called Jesus Tablet, the One We Have All Been Waiting for from Apple, will reportedly be out some time early next year. Will it be the game-changer the iPhone was? Hard to say, but you can bet it will go nowhere unless publishers have some content ready that will jump up big and pretty when it is launched. The Bonnier approach shows real promise. Simple, easy interface with a minimum of buttons. Of particular interest, at least to nerds like Decoder, is the ability to “rub” content, which then “heats up” and offers options for deeper investigation. Let us know if you think they are on to something. (jump to minute 3 to see the tablet in action)

Ms. Öhrvall said in an email that all the gorgeous devices in the world won’t help renew the readers love affair with magazines unless the experience is a remarkable one:

“We started this project because the take-up of a digital magazine will primarily be dependent on whether we as a media publishing company could create a product with a really good reading experience.” she said. “There has been too much focus on technology and the stores, but you need something to sell too! We wanted to take the essence of what’s so great with magazines (the relaxed “on your own” time, immersive reading). We spent most of our time trying to understand how people really read, how they use their magazine in different situations and then tried to use the advantages of digital media to fulfill these needs in a better way.”

Africa News: South Sudan stuck between two armies

from BBC News:

More than 2,000 people have died in tribal clashes in Sudan in the past year, prompting fears the country is heading towards another civil war five years after its last conflict ended. Will Ross travelled to southern Sudan to assess tensions in a town caught between two armies.

Luckily it is the dry season. Yes it is baking hot, but at least the town of Malakal is not a quagmire and the mosquitoes are thankfully off duty.

“I’d be very happy to give you an interview, but not until I’ve had my two cups of tea,” the head of Malakal hospital told me.

Like many southern Sudanese, Dr Gabriel Gatwech is extremely tall and has in the past had to run for his life because of war.

Post-tea, the doctor told me that since the outbreak of peace five years ago, the hospital was now better staffed.

“I worked here as a doctor during the 1990s but I had to leave when the security forces falsely accused us of treating the rebels.

“Many doctors could not work,” he told me, as a nurse used an ear trumpet to check on the health of an expectant mother’s unborn child.

Malakal is in the south of Sudan but during the civil war it was a garrison town under the control of the Islamic north. The mix of mosques and churches points to a place which straddles the two sides.

Even today it remains extremely tense.

“To be frank,” Dr Gatwech tells me, “Northern and Southern Sudanese cannot live peacefully together. There is a total lack of trust.”

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