Fight global poverty and Honor the DeadBy Sarah Morrison
Bay Area musicians, educators, and spiritual and secular leaders will come together next week at San Francisco’s UN Plaza for the first-ever public eulogy to honor the tens of thousands of people who die around the world each day from poverty-related causes.
The event, which will take place on Oct. 8 starting at 7.30 pm, is being hosted by Honor the Dead -- a non-partisan organisation that is dedicated to raising awareness of global poverty -- in the attempt to inspire individuals to take action on international issues of inequality.
Speakers will include Reverend Glenda Hope from Network Ministries, Rabbi Peretz Wolf-Prusan from Temple Emanu El, Imam Suleiman Ghali from the Islamic Society of San Francisco and Sister Chandru Desai from the Brahma Kumaris Meditation Center. There will also be ceremonial music from South African choir Vukani Mawethu, a nonprofit multiracial choir that has performed alongside Nelson Mandela as part of a lifelong struggle against racism and injustice.
According to Honor the Dead founder Alex Thompson, speakers will honor particular individuals who have died around the world from poverty-related causes like malnutrition, tuberculosis, AIDS and malaria, in an attempt to inspire people to become actively involved in the fight against extreme poverty.
Thompson said: “Many organization are already effective at channelling volunteer time or donations to help out in the fight to alleviate global poverty, but the point of this initiative is to raise awareness and to bring people into the movement.”
According to a 2008 UNICEF report into the state of the world’s children, every day there are over 26,000 children under the age of five who die around the world, usually from preventable causes. Yet, for Thompson, not enough people fully understand the severity of these figures.
“Part of the point of this effort is to bring these figures to light. UNICEF estimates that every three and a half seconds, someone dies from a poverty-related cause. I think if more people were aware of this in the mainstream, then they would act differently,” he said.
Reverend Glenda Hope of Network Ministries has written eulogies for the homeless in San Francisco for 20 years and is recognized as an Unsung Hero of Compassion by the Dalai Lama. She said this event will enable people to come together and get actively involved in the fight against poverty.
“I am hoping that we can make people more aware of and more concerned about global poverty -- a condition that is making so many people homeless and leading to deaths from poor medical care, starvation and polluted water,” she said. “We need to get people to identify some actions they can take instead of just wringing their hands or turning the page of a newspaper.”
Hope has worked alongside the poor and homeless in San Francisco for more than 37 years and believes that issues of extreme poverty are connected all across the world. “Of course extreme poverty affects many people in many areas across the world,” she said. “But it doesn’t do any good to sit around and feel bad about it. I think individual people need to come together and take action to change the structures and policies of society that create this kind of injustice.”
For Imam Suleiman Ghali, from the Islamic Society of San Francisco, the point of the event is simple and self-explanatory. He said: “As humans, we need to feel the pain of one another.”
He added: “We need to remember and feel with the rest of the world – especially with the poor that are dying senselessly from diseases that could be prevented, from a lack of medicine that is so cheap that it could and should be sent out to them.”
While the Honor the Dead event is essentially focused on raising public awareness about the extent of global poverty, Thompson said it will also direct attendees interested in volunteering for the movement to Results.org, a grassroots advocacy organization striving to engage ordinary citizens in their democracy.
Ken Patterson, a grassroots manager for Results.org, said that the organization’s volunteers are helping in the coordination of the event and hope to provide what he calls the “missing education” to citizens that are not sure how to become involved in the fight against poverty.
“This event is putting a face to the statistics, and honoring the lives of people that have been lost for mere pennies,” he said. “Diseases like TB – for which there has been a cure for 50 years – is still killing people and until we hear their stories, and understand that they have families, people who will miss them, and kids that will cry when they die, we don’t get a sense of the sort of suffering that they go through.”
He added: “People really can come alive in their democracy and make a difference – they can change policies, leverage money and get our decision-makers to take action on this important issue.”
Sister Chandru Desai from the Brahma Kumaris Meditation Center, has been involved in several interfaith eulogies for those that have died homeless on the San Francisco streets. She said this event was an extension - paying tribute to those who have lost their lives all around the world.
She said: “We need to respect those people that have been deprived and didn’t get a chance, but we also need to stop the future panning out in the exact same way.”
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Comments (1)
Excellent article. It is time to actualize the many practical solutions available to end global poverty.
This event is gonna be great. Get a preview of fantastic Oakland chorus Vukani Mawethu at HonorTheDeadTV: http://blip.tv/file/2676338
Posted by Hellen | October 3, 2009 09:07 AM