Dan Sadowsky's blog

As Yemen continues to grapple with political turmoil and multiple conflicts, Mercy Corps is hoping that engaging youth in their communities can help the country realize a brighter future.

Our biggest program there is called Engaging Youth for Stable Yemen. It's a conflict-mitigation program that brings youth together and builds their capacity to create positive change by teaching them life skills, job skills, and helping them participate in community service.

I recently spoke to Rafael Velasquez Garcia, who manages the program out of our office in Aden:

Our Engaging Youth for Stable Yemen program brings youth together and builds their capacity to create positive change by teaching them life skills, job skills, and helping them participate in community service. Photo: Mercy Corps

We hear a lot about the political turmoil in Yemen. What is life like there these days?

Rafael: The situation in Yemen has been deteriorating over a long period of time. Even before the recent political turmoil and demonstrations, Yemen was facing a number of difficulties: it's the poorest Arab country in the region and disproportionate number of young people. By some estimates, close to 60 percent of the population is under the age of 30.

Since the protests began earlier this year, more than 100,000 people have been displaced nationwide. We've also experienced fuel shortages, electricity blackouts, as well as exponential increases in the prices of daily household commodities.

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Our team in Bishkek sent these photos of loading a truckload of supplies headed for families in southern Kyrgyzstan. They include soap, dishware, bedding and 1,500 pounds of baby food.

Photo: Mercy Corps

Photo: Mercy Corps

Photo: Mercy Corps

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Five tons of food and medical aid from Mercy Corps' microfinance company, Kompanion, and three other organizations were distributed to a hospital and a beleaguered neighborhood in Osh yesterday.

The regional manager of Kompanion distributed baby food, cereals and essential commodities -- detergents, soap, matches and toothpaste -- to sequestered employees of Kompanion and Mercy Corps. The main children's hospital also received a small amount of food and commodities.

Our employees there say they didn't observe any masked or armed gangs reported driving around the city in recent days. "They noticed that people and cars on the streets getting more, so that situation getting better. The same is in Jalalabad -- even public transportation is available on the streets."

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Our microfinance company in Kyrgyzstan, Kompanion, has already organized and distributed $35,000 worth of food to hospitals in Osh. They're also collecting clothes to deliver.

More than 1700 people have been reported injured by inter-ethnic violence in Kyrgyzstan's second-largest city.

In Kyrgyzstan's hospitals, food is not generally provided to patients; families are expected to feed and augment the care of their hospitalized relatives. The Kompanion-led humanitarian aid to hospitals includes fortified foods (baby formula and cereal and adult instant hot cereal), sanitation products, basic medical supplies, and antiseptics.

The interim government's coordinator for aid in the south expressed the need for support of hospitals, as the financially strapped government is over-extended and unable to meet many public service needs, let alone a humanitarian crisis of this magnitude.

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Part of our assistance to newly displaced families in Colombia's Putumayo department includes skills training so they can earn a living.

Here, women learn how to make handbags that can fetch a good price locally.

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See how we're helping an Afro-Colombian fishing community along Colombia's northern coast conserve mangrove forests that protect their homes, secure their livelihoods and sustain the region's biodiversity.

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Start with a nationwide war fought largely to acquire land. Then add overlapping titles, valuable natural resources, a sparsely populated region and an inefficient government, and you've got all the ingredients for boundary disputes.

In Colombia's rugged Darién region, Mercy Corps is offering an alternative to the traditional forms of justice and the threat of violence. Our land-conflict resolution program is training communities how to solve their disputes over land peacefully. In most cases, we're giving marginalized indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities the training they need to defend their titled lands.

Our local partner, Fundación Darien, has assembled a team of a dozen mediators, lawyers, topographers and GPS specialists. We're also getting counsel and support from Mercy Corps staff in Guatemala, who've successfully mediated hundreds of land conflicts between indigenous communities and large landholders.

On Sunday we visited the indigenous Embera Katio Chidima, whose leaders believe our program can help them protect their sacred lands from encroachment by coca growers, cattle ranchers and timber interests.

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The youngest, 40-year-old Nancy, was first to arrive in 2007. She was squeezed out by intensifying fighting between guerrillas and paramilitaries and a death threat she couldn't ignore.

Giovorny, 52, followed after her family was robbed and threatened off their bountiful farm by guerrillas.

Last came 42-year-old Nubia, from Cauca, after her husband was kidnapped and killed.

Ever since, Nubia said, "We've relied on each other to survive."

It hasn't been easy. Each has two young ones in her care: daughters, nieces, grandkids. All 12 share the same space: a cramped rental house with no land.

Giovorny has to care for an epileptic niece and cope with being apart from her 64-year-old husband, who earns money farming land that's several hours away. "He's from the country, so he needs his liberty" Giovorny said with resignation. "He feels trapped in this small house."

Nancy's husband sells cell-phone minutes on the streets from 7 in the morning until 9 at night. He makes about $3 a day. The bulk of the sisters' income comes from the small-goods store they run out of the front of their home. It offers packaged food and sundries ranging from chips and bread to toilet paper and diapers. The income isn't sufficient: They're sometimes so low on food that they take from the store to fill their bellies.

Mercy Corps helped them open the tienda with a grant of nearly $200, and gave them pots and pans, bedsheets, hygiene kits and more than two months' worth of food.

We've also helped restore their sense of dignity. The trio faithfully attended weekly trainings to learn how to assess and respond to family violence. Giovorny, whose formal schooling didn't go beyond first grade, proudly showed me her graduation certificate. "As displaced people, we are sin honrado," or disrespected, she explained. "But this shows that we are learning and that we can go forward, that we are capable of more."

Miguel shot and edited this video of the sisters and their families as they went about their lives:

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Mercy Corps outfitted a rehabilitation center in southern Colombia with the latest technology as part of a holistic program to reintegrate land mine survivors back into their communities.

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Photo: Miguel Samper for Mercy Corps

At the end of our day in Putumayo's capital, we stopped by a graduation celebration of sorts. More than 30 people displaced by the armed conflict were marking the end of an 80-hour course in gastronomy with food, music and a dip in the river.

Photo: Miguel Samper for Mercy Corps

The course was sponsored by Mercy Corps' partner organization, Fundacion Diosésis, and Colombia's technical training institute. The teacher, Lia Caicedo (who's not pictured), explained to me that her students had learned the basics of everything from proper food hygiene to preparing all sorts of meats, salsas, snacks and desserts.

"The idea is to give them the skills so they can start their own microenterprise," she said, "even if it's just selling empanadas, tamales or other snacks. It's so they can earn an income."

The class also offered a chance at solidarity and friendship for people who, in most cases, had recently been forced to leave behind the only life they'd ever known.

Sandra, a 33-year-old single mom threatened from her home in January, hopes to put what she's learned in a Mercy Corps-sponsored cooking class selling homemade meals door-to-door. Photo: Miguel Samper for Mercy Corps

Skills trainings like these complement the income-generation component of the program we offer to displaced families. There, they learn the basics of running a business, from surveying the market to setting prices and coming up with a business plan. At the end of those trainings, they receive a small amount of seed capital — about $200 — followed by a grant for capital purchases.

The gastronomy students included men and women mostly in their 30s and 40s. They were eager to tell me what they'd learned — like how to correctly carve a chicken, cook three types of rice, or concoct a sweet milk-based dessert.

One 33-year-old woman named Sandra told me she learned how to make an "American salad," a dish which resembled a pasta salad and that she described as "muy rico."

Sandra was typical of most graduates in that she aspires to run her own food business. She'd like to team up with her mom and go door-to-door sellling suprema reina — a chicken breast filled with sausage and cheese with sides of sauteed vegetables and eggs.

Another graduate, Alexander, who we'd spent time with earlier in the day, had a more humble aim: "to surprise my wife with good food," he said, to which both he and his wife, Merly, had a good laugh.

Alexander demonstrates in his home kitchen how he learned to chop onions in a Mercy Corps-sponsored gastronomy class designed to give people who've been displaced the skills to make a living. Currently he and his wife make and sell a peanut-flavored caramel on a stick in the streets of Mocoa, Putumayo. "Life continues, and while we are living, we have to struggle." Photo: Miguel Samper for Mercy Corps

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