Focus Campaigns
Africa is a vast continent with many valuable resources, particularly arable land. Unfortunately, this fact is not a secret. Many nations outside of Africa recognize the potential that currently underutilized…
“International Firms Stand Accused of Fish Piracy”The East African quotes AFJN’s Beth Tuckey on Somali piracy
This article was originally published in Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF) on April 20th, 2009. In early February, The New York Times released information detailing the involvement of the U.S. military in the bungled…
ACTION ALERT! If you’ve been following the news recently, you’ve probably heard a lot about pirates. Not the swashbuckling, patch-over-the-eye, ruthless robber kind, but the disempowered, poverty-stricken, Somali kind. Although…
Now that Laurent Nkunda is out of the picture and some other rebel groups have been integrated into the Congolese national army, what is the Congolese government’s excuse for neglecting…
In Goma, the capital of the North Kivu province and surrounding towns, there are many signs of hope. Since the announcement of the capture of the National Congress for People’s…
by Beth Tuckey For many of us, the word “pirate” conjures up a whole host of images, most notably that of a swashbuckling, patch-over-the-eye, ruthless robber. In our history texts,…
Posted April 8th, 2009. Adapted from an article originally written for the US Catholic Missions Association. On March 19th, at the end of the Mass celebrated in the National Stadium…
This month, the Catholic Coalition on Climate Change is launching a unique and unprecedented initiative, A Catholic Climate Covenant and the St. Francis Pledge to Care for Creation and the…
As one of its principal missions, AFRICOM states (africom.mil/AboutAFRICOM.asp) that it will offer “the kind of support that will enable African governments and existing regional organizations… to have greater capacity to…
Last week, AFJN joined dozens of organizations in thanking Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) for his work in appropriating more money to the Least Developed Countries Fund (LDCF) of the United…
Nearly 700 participants will come together at Ecumenical Advocacy Days (EAD) this weekend in Alexandria, VA to discuss the relationship between climate change, migration, and poverty. AFJN has helped formulate…
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has become somewhat infamous as one of the most well-funded failures of Western attempts at development. On the continent of Africa, the rather unsuccessful IMF…
Despite anxieties around Rwanda’s military presence in Congo, troops have now begun to leave eastern DRC, five weeks after they crossed the border to attack FDLR Hutu rebels. A ceremony…
As one of its principal missions, AFRICOM states that it will offer “the kind of support that will enable African governments and existing regional organizations… to have greater capacity to provide security…
Last week, Caritas reported on the first-ever gathering of religious leaders from the numerous communities affected by the continued aggression of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a gathering focused on finding a…
Vulture funds, often called “Distressed Debt Funds” are predatory hedge funds that siphon off newly freed resources from poor-country debt cancellation efforts. They do this by buying up a poor…
Hearing Burundians greet each other and greet us in Kirundi got me curious about finding out the meaning of these daily greeting rituals. The finding is, astonishingly, a good ground on which Burundians can build bridges of reconciliation and recovery from the hurt caused by years of war.
In fact, greetings in Burundi are full of expressions of wishes for peace for individuals and for the whole community. In the morning, you say mwaramutse. It literally means ‘did you wake up?’ It can also mean ‘did you survive?’ This question is about surviving the unexpected challenges that can happen in the dark of the night.
This article was originally posted on January 29th, 2009 during AFJN’s trip to Burundi and Uganda. It appeared as a blog post on justicegreatlakes.blogspot.com. Reposted here April 14th, 2009. Although…
Through an accident of birth, most of us enjoy an extravagant lifestyle. We have the basics—food, clothing, housing, and health care—and then some—education, stable communities, good jobs, freedom to travel…
