Auteur/autrice : Heidi Barathieu-Brun

Linked with the presentation ashoka.

Linked also with our presentation of the Baby Academy she works also for.

Linked also with her text Working Mothers – The Balancing Act.

Dina Abdel-Wahab is pioneering the integration of special needs children with « normal » children in schools, a first important step toward achieving society-wide integration in Egypt. She recognizes that the early preschool years offer an especially promising opportunity to change attitudes, pave the way for broader societal reform, and set a different expectation of normalcy early in life.

Dina Abdel Wahab – Egypt

At least two million Egyptians are disabled or have special needs as a result of genetic or neurological problems, and half of these are children. Only about one percent of children and adults with special needs receive services from the government and citizen sector organizations.

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Linked with our presentation Oxfam.

Meet Kafil Ahmed is an Oxfam project officer in Bangladesh. « My job is to find organisations and groups who need support to combat poverty in their region. I check that everything is going well, and help them solve their problems. Today I am going to Manub Mukti Sangstha (MMS), an organisation working with some of the very poorest people in the country. These are people living on chors, low islands of silt built up in the rivers, which are easily flooded and washed away. »

Kafil Ahmed – Bangladesh

A day in the life of Kafil Ahmed: 9am: « I leave Dhaka and travel by car and boat to MMS, an organisation working with poor people. »  » At MMS I will talk to the staff, and will visit a village to see if the work done after last year’s floods helped to save lives and belongings in this year’s floods. »

2pm: « I arrive at MMS’ headquarters. They’re helping people to be better prepared for the floods, so that they have some protection. » 2.15pm: « A meeting with all the staff. They tell me how things have been going since my last visit. They are involved in a lot of projects:

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Linked with our two Humanitarian Texts Statement of US Rep. Nancy Pelosi, and Making Rehabilitation Into a Serious Business.

Not many people choose to spend their lives working with convicted felons and drug addicts. But Mimi Silbert, founder of San Francisco’s Delancey Street rehabilitation project, has committed her every waking hour to helping ex-cons become productive, welcome members of society. (Read more on Giraffe Heroes).

Mimi Silbert – USA

In 1971 Mimi Silbert founded Delancey Street with four residents, a thousand dollar loan and a dream. She envisioned a place where substance abusers, former felons and others who had hit bottom would, through their own efforts, be able to turn their lives around.

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His full name is Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy, but to more than 2 million surgical patients and 16,000,000 outpatients, he’s known affectionately as « Dr. V. » The 83 year-old chairman of Aravind Eye Hospitals, Dr. Venkataswamy is my hero.

Govindappa Venkataswamy – India

Dr. V. was born in 1918 to a farming family in a small village in South India. He received his medical degree from the Stanley Medical College in Chennai and joined the Indian Army Medical Corps to practice obstetrics. It was about this time that tragedy visited Dr. V. in the form of rheumatoid arthritis, a degenerative disease that attacked his hands. Although unable to practice obstetrics, Dr. V. did not give up. He began studying ophthalmology and had instruments specially designed for his arthritic hands – each one custom-made to fill a specific need. These instruments enabled him to perform as many as 100 cataract surgeries a day. He quickly became the most admired cataract surgeon in India. (Read the rest on MY HERO).

In 1956, Dr. Venkataswamy was appointed head of the Department of Ophthalmology at the Government Madurai Medical College, and eye surgeon at the Government Erskine Hospital in Madurai. He held these posts for 20 years and made remarkable contributions to research, clinical service and community programs, as noted below in biographical data. (Read more on One World Sight Project).

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The Professor Thorolf Rafto Memorial Prize for 2005 is awarded to the Chechnyan lawyer and human rights advocate Ms Lida Yusupova, in recognition of her brave and unrelenting efforts to document human rights violations and act as a spokeswoman for the forgotten victims of the war in Chechnya. Ms Yusupova struggles to defend human dignity in a chaotic war situation and in a context where the working conditions and security of human rights advocates and journalists are increasingly compromised.

Lida Yusupova – Russia / Chechnya

Lida Yusupova is the coordinator of the Grozny office of the Moscow-based human rights organisation Memorial. This small group is one of the few human rights organisations still operating in Chechnya, providing the world with crucial information on violations of human rights in this Russian republic.

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Linked with Sufia Khatun – Bangladesh, with Rebuilding Through Social Entrepreneurship.

Muhammad Yunus is the founder of the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh, which serves 5 million families with microfinancial services, a founding director of Grameen Foundation USA and a founding member of Ashoka’s Global Academy for Social Entrepreneurship (www.ashoka.org). He has transformed the lives of thousands of impoverished people through the grameen bank — a scheme that threw established banking norms to the wind by lending money only to the poorest of the poor. see on The Tribune.

Mohammad Yunus – Bangladesh

Loans of a few dollars for tools to husk rice, to buy a cow or a sewing machine – all small things have made a big difference to people’s lives. Many of the 1.2 million grameen borrowers, 90 percent of them women, had been reduced to begging for a living. Now most of them have a roof over their heads and can support themselves. Yet Yunus does not find his achievements extraordinary, he explains that the problem with traditional approaches to poverty alleviation and development is that they fail to seek things at a grass-roots level.

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Put on this site on June 30, 2006: See also our presentation in french of … encore Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Linked with our following presentations: ‘Muslim protests for pictures‘,

‘Rethinking Islam‘,

‘Talisma Nasreen – Bangladesh & France‘,

‘Safia Hussaini – Nigeria‘,

‘le coran et le prophète – in french‘.

and ‘again Muslim Protests for Pictures‘;

She says: If I were to say the things that I say now in the Dutch Parliament in Somalia, I would be killed.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali – Somalia & Netherlands

First my comment: as many Europeans, I like to know me tolerant, multicultural … as a nice, open, progressive individual, good for this humanity. And suddenly I say stop … no more tolerance with people crying at every moment ‘death to … ‘ … to whatever they do not like, to whomever saying anything wrong in their eyes.

Stop tolerance to this integrisme, say NO to this few crowds, able only to cry ‘death to … ‘…

… and we must help the normal, peaceful muslims how to handle this fanatic crowd. To do that, we must first become able ourselves to know what is our reaction. We cannot longer tolerate the continuous abuse of the human rights of women, of individuals having their own ideas … of people no more wanting follow religious rules but wanting follow modern, rational, logical thinking.

If we want the Human Rights followed, we have to defend them. For everybody.

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