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Alternative Spring Break: College Students Giving Back in Flint
Masouna Kochaji is a Communications Coordinator at IRUSA. She recently attending Alternative Spring Break in Flint, MI and shares her experience with ReliefLab. In early March, I was sent to Flint, Michigan to accompany Howard University students on an alternative Spring Break. Having only heard stories of the conditions in Flint, I was anxious to see what the situation would be. The Howard students would be spending an entire week at various schools in Flint, and work with local students and staff in the classroom. While the students were going to support the community for a week, I’d only be on this trip for two days…and what I saw in those…
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East Africa: The Pain of Losing a Child
Tufail Hussain – Deputy Director, Islamic Relief UK – writes about meeting Fatouma during his recent visit to drought ravaged Somalia. Dotted around Mogadishu, the capital city of Somalia, are camps where countless desperate families arrive in search of food and water. It was at one of these camps, where teams from Islamic Relief regularly distribute food packs, that I first met Fatouma. Fatouma, from a village in the Burhakaba region, around 250km from Mogadishu, told me her harrowing story of survival through the catastrophic drought. “The drought has been with us for years, but in the last 12 months things became unbearable. My people are farmers, and our lives…
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Paving our Daughters’ Path towards a Suffer Free Future
When Khadijah Abdullah, Founder and Executive Director of RAHMA, first walked into the meeting room, I wasn’t sure what to expect. The meeting was titled: “Honoring our Daughters: The Effects of FGC in the DMV”. This struck me as odd. The Greater DC area? We keep hearing of practices of this nature in some countries, especially in Africa, but they always seemed very far away. Never in a thousand years would I have imagined that these practices could be performed here, at home. A few minutes before I joined the lecture, I did some research about FGC in America and found statistics I didn’t expect, especially that I knew that…
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A Global Thirst Trap: Breaking The Cycle of Poverty
One of the most used terms amongst me and my friends is the phrase “thirst trap”. It’s just a colloquial way of expressing a negative attribute that speaks to desperation, and it has nothing to do with water. Last week on World Water Day, I could not help but to think thirst trapping is a real subject matter in our world. Yet, thirst trapping is not a matter of desperation but it is a matter of cyclical poverty, a trap that continues to cycle without the ability to quench a thirst. From the moment, we are born, we are trapped by the element of water. As newborns, we are 75…
