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Romanian students make the number two by turning on a dozen lights in a 10-story dormitory in Cluj.
World Vision
World Vision
This means:
Petal says just one of Copp's recommendations is absolutely right: "Never go to the stairs."
Earthquake experts don't really like saying what you should do during a tremor, because most of the work you can do to keep safe should really be done beforehand. To be fair, it's hard to come up with good advice that's valid wherever you are in the world. For a lot of people in California, it's realistic to say you should get your house assessed for safety by an engineer. For most people in Central America, that isn't really an option. But there are some basic tips. The main thing is to try to have furniture -and anything with glass in it - fastened down so it's less likely to slide around. Petal says: "When you have mass casualties, what would usually be a normal injury - a cut or a broken bone -- can become life-threatening. So hanging a picture on the wall with a hook instead of a nail can save a life." I'd better write back to my Guatemalan friend. There are tremors in Central America all the time, and I don't want her to be crouched next to the refrigerator with her children thinking she's safe.***
Cholera is on the rampage in Angola, laying people low and stretching medical resources. Being a disease spread by faeces, it's usually worst during wet weather, when water supplies are more likely to be contaminated. Angola's rainy season has barely started - the wet weather lasts from March to October. Average life expectancy for Angolan men is 39, and for women it's not much better - 42. Fifty percent of the population doesn't have access to safe drinking water and 40 percent eats less than the minimum food requirement, according to the 2005 Human Development Report from the U.N. Development Programme. Cholera is easily treatable, but between 25 and 50 percent of people will die from the disease if they don't get treatment.***
Education is in the news this week, with UK finance minister Gordon Brown in Africa to announce a $15 billion education aid pledge. International aid agency ActionAid says countries like Mozambique were told they would get extra aid if they showed a clear commitment to education by spending 20 percent of their budgets on it, but still haven't been given all the cash they were promised. Mozambique's youth literacy has climbed at an astonishing rate, up to 62 percent from 49 percent in 1999, according to ActionAid. The country is building 6,000 primary schools a year but still has a million children not getting primary education. Classes have an average of 50 to 70 children, and the country would need 55,000 more teachers to meet the U.N.-recommended ratio of one teacher to 40 students. ActionAid says over 100 million children worldwide are not in school, and that at least 15 million more teachers would be needed by 2015 to provide schooling for them. *** Education can help children get over humanitarian emergencies, but it can also cause conflicts, according to researchers meeting at a two-day conference in Oxford, Britain. They say education should be an automatic part of humanitarian response, because it helps give children back a normal life, keeps them in a safe place, and provides comfort for young children after hard times. But it's not all good news. Obviously, if teachers exaggerate ethnic differences or tell their students one group is superior, or if schools are segregated, it can entrench prejudice and stoke conflict. Some commentators say Northern Ireland - torn apart for years by sectarian violence along Catholic-Protestant lines, with Catholics broadly allied to resistance to British rule - is testing new approaches to post-conflict education. Instead of glossing over differences, Northern Ireland is taking a path which strongly defines the two main religious groups, but seems to have led to a reduction in violence. Paul Nolan is the person to look up if you want to know more about this. He's the director of the Institute of Lifelong Learning at Queens University in Belfast. If you want to know more about education in Afghanistan through the turmoil of the last 50 years, it sounds as if Jeaniene Spink from Oxford University's Department of Educational Studies is your woman. And she'd probably be your first port of call if you wanted to find out more about this whole subject of education and conflicts, since she's the one who's been working on it with UNICEF, the U.N. Children's Fund. **** Did you know that Romanians can choose to put 2 percent of their income tax towards humanitarian work? Well, neither do most Romanians, even though the measure was introduced two years ago. Students have pulled off a series of clever visual stunts to publicise the law more widely, in efforts watched by international Christian aid agency World Vision. Students made the number two glow in lights 10 storeys high by turning off selected lights in a dormitory, trying to call attention to the option which was taken up by less than 3 percent of Romanian taxpayers last year. Aid workers quoted a man in a crowd watching students launch 1,000 candles floating on Chios Lake in Cluj: "Directing 2 percent of our taxes to send children to school should be a powerful motivation for everyone ... I would direct all 16 percent of my taxes to such a noble cause if I could." Leaving you with that nice humanitarian thought for the day, Ruth Gidley