Donate Button Blues

Back in London with loads of admin jobs! But I thought I should keep up the blog - I've been a bit lax over the last year, changing from weekly to monthly posts and then none at all over the summer (but I had a good excuse).  So, partly because of the fallow summer, Children Unite is in a fundraising drive... damn it I knew I'd eventually have to do this!  This means I'm trawling through loads of foundations and trusts trying to figure out if Children Unite fits their criteria - as SO OFTEN we don't.  Nobody funds advocacy work - there my little moan over...going to have to put that DONATE button on the blog after all (see first ever post!).

Worshipping the God of Wealth

On Monday we'd had the last of our working days, finalised our schedules, budget etc. for the rest of the project and discussed what conclusions we could draw, at this stage, from the data. A very satisfactory way to end the workshop. I'm working with a great team here - there's been no politics of any sort, just a group of people who REALLY want this work to end up helping children.  And by the end of the workshop we could see that this research will go some way to empowering children who've been sexually abused - just by the fact that the research highlights how they OVERCAME the terrible situations they found themselves in (most research highlights how they got into these situations or how they suffered in them). So, a good, strong ending to the work.

But on my last day in Nepal it was the festival Divali and I was deeply honoured to be invited back to the family home of Milan (the lead researcher in Nepal). At his home I helped cook puri (puffed up little pancakes) as well as a 'mandala' - a drawing on the ground outside the front door that is made of coloured powder with marigold petals all around it - all the houses have a trail of marigolds and mandalas from their gate to their prayer room - to allow Laxmi, the God of Wealth, to enter the house. I felt so honoured to participate in Milan's family's celebrations, his grandmother, mother, father, sister-in-law and two nephews were all there.  The ceremony bit started at the gate of the house, went through the courtyard, stopping of at the family shrine, then in front of the door (where the mandala was), another shrine by the door and over the door (everyone wants to make sure Laxmi comes into the house!!) and then up the stairs to the prayer room.  Along the way Writu (Milan's wife) and her sister-in-law performed ceremonies with a little tray of bits and pieces (powders and seeds it looked like), and they lit candles and the dad rang a bell.  Milan gave me a running commentary explaining the story of Laxmi and the significance of different aspects of the ceremony - for example, on the tray of bits and pieces there was a coconut which he smashed open and then sprinkled the coconut milk along the path of marigolds. Milan explained that they use a coconut instead of an animal sacrifice as the coconut milk is considered 'pure' - similar to the purity of blood. Milan let off a few fireworks (didn't follow the firework code of course like us safety conscious Brits!).  Then upstairs to the prayer room with lots of singing led by great grandma.  Before we ate I was given a tika blessing (red dot on forehead and marigold petals on head) and drank some special spiced milk (with my right hand). The meal was delicious but by this time I was starting to get twitchy about making my flight on time so had to make some rather hurried goodbyes, screeched in to the airport just in time for check-in (I was the last one!).  It was an amazing ending to my visit to Nepal...not particularly looking forward to facing the reality of all the admin and fundraising tasks I have piling up on my desk...thank goodness I've already worshipped the God of wealth, should have her on my side at least!

Thinking positively despite rain

It's the last day of our analysis workshop and it rained for the first time since I've been in Kathmandu.  We've spent the whole week analysing the data from 47 'life-story' interviews with child domestic workers in Nepal.   We spent the first 2 days developing codes from the data in interviews - which is the first level of analysis, then comes categories, then themes; and we've all got so ensconsed in this process we are now talking in 'codes' to each other.  We say things like 'thinking positively gets researcher through to lunch' or 'going to the toilet enables researcher to escape workload'.  But on a more serious note, the discussions have been really exciting, I'm learning a lot about Nepali culture, once you start delving into what children are saying you realise that it is all influenced by and imbued with cultural values. Where it was most apparent was when analysis team would come up with a Nepali word and it would take a paragraph to explain it in English...one such word meant 'accepting and tolerating by keeping silent, but in a strengthening way'.  I will miss the comradery of the team once I'm back in my little office in Hackney...lots of photos on the Children Unite Facebook Profile if you're interested.  Tomorrow I fly home late so will have time to join in with celebrations for Nepali 'Divali'...which should be fun!

Shaken not stirred in Kathmandu

What do you do on a Saturday night when you’re in Kathmandu for 10 days? Watch a Bond movie of course!  We’ve been ensconced in this mountain resort for seven days, working from 8.30 in the morning to 8.30 at night and as our advisor and teacher (a professor in psycho-social research), left this morning – lovely as she is – we decided to see a bit of Nepali life.  So, four of us went to a mall, ate frozen yoghurt and hot dogs and watched Bond drinking his martini and cry (what is the world coming to!).  I didn’t get all patriotic watching the film as it has only been a week since I was home but I’ve been raving about Scotland (my favourite country!) as I’d flown from Glasgow to Kathmandu (I’d been on holiday in the highlands) and during the film, Bond drives through Glen Coe which I’d driven through on the way to the airport – have to admit to going a bit apoplectic at that point!  

Today was better, phew! I was determined that we'd start off well and we did...at breakfast I got all touchy-feely and made everyone laugh by getting out my little heart cushion thingy and passed it around the group, asking everyone to say what they'd be contributing to the group today (I said I'd be the 'mum' and look after everyone, make sure they're getting enough breaks, tea, vegetables etc.) Then we got cracking on the research codes. We all made a concerted effort to make it all as comfortable as we can so moved out of the cold, dark room we were in and spread ourselves outside in the sunshine.  At one point Faye (the trainer on this research method we are using) and I were using the incredibly low-tech method of catagorising the data on hundreds of little bits of paper that were literally taped down to the table to stop them blowing away in the wind.

Good day for an exclamation mark!

Today was tough, is tough I should say...still working, but I'm at that point where you just think you will NEVER get what needs to be done...done! We are laboriously going through each 75 page interview transcript and coding it....we have 45 interviews to go! So, today I have been mostly re-vising and re-calculating. The research team is in the situation (I seem to be in quite often) where we calculate how long this whole process is going to take, start the activity then, after a bit,  realise we've underestimated the time so revise the activities, re-calculate and start all over again.  We've been doing this all flipping day!  I do hope tomorrow is better!  All of us were starting to speak (shout!) to our transcripts as if they were a person who was purposefully withholding information from us!  Actually I think it was just me who was doing that. And it's never a good sign when you re-read a paragraph you've just written (as I just have with this blog post) and nearly all sentences end with an exclamation mark.  No, not a good sign at all.  I'll cheer myself up by watching Obama's victory again on CNN.

Kathmandu Code Breaking Quake

It was an earthquake that finally made me stop working tonight….I’m in a rather beautiful mountain top resort 5 miles outside Kathmandu undertaking data analysis for a research project Children Unite is running.  The project has been running for ten months, 47 life story interviews and four focus group discussions have been held with child domestic workers here.  It is an exciting moment for me, as I didn’t take part in the actual interviews, this is the first time I’m hearing what the children said but it is also laborious as we’re having to scan through all 47 interviews (some of which are 6 hours long) looking for similarities in the stories and turning these into ‘codes’.  So, when the building started to shake we decided it was a ‘sign’ from the spirits that we should stop for tonight!  More tomorrow…and I will report regularly while I'm here if I have much of a brain left to write….

SEND your gLOVE campaign update

Children Unite’s campaign ‘SEND your gLOVE’ was launched in March and is demanding that the UK Government protect child domestic workers around the world from exploitation and abuse.

On 16 June 2011, after years of discussion, the International Labour Organization (ILO) took a momentous step forward in the worldwide protection of adult and child domestic workers from exploitation and abuse. They adopted a new convention meaning up to 100 million domestic workers will finally receive the same rights as other workers, with special attention given to protecting children.

The Philippines on Wednesday became the second country to ratify the treaty, which was passed in June 2011, after Uruguay ratified it on June 14 this year, according to the ILO, which requires two countries to ratify a treaty before it can go into effect.

"Today's ratification by the Philippines sends a powerful signal to the millions of domestic workers who will be protected when the Convention comes into force," ILO chief Juan Somavia said in a statement.

"I hope it will also send a signal to other member states and that we will soon see more and more countries committing to protect the rights of domestic workers," he added.

But the British government won’t ratify the ILO convention, their objections to ratification are weak and do not reflect the long history Britain has of defending the rights of those most vulnerable to abuse and condemning slavery in all its forms.

Children Unite believes the UK government needs to take a stand and give a strong message to other countries that it will not tolerate the abuse or violation of children, wherever they may be, in situations of domestic work.

The SEND your gLOVE campaign targets Vince Cable’s department for Business, Innovation and Skills through postcards, an e-petition on Children Unite’s website and, innovatively, through messages of solidarity on rubber gloves.

The rubber glove is a symbol of the protection the legislation can give to domestic workers – in the same way that a rubber glove protects our hands when we are doing domestic chores.  Hundreds of gloves have already been signed by the good British public and are being collated by Children Unite.  A rally will be organized in July next year when the gloves will be presented to Vince Cable.  Here are some examples:

Children Unite is working with a coalition of NGOs and Trades Unions and have written to the Business, Innovation and Skills Department to demand why the UK Government objects to the ILO Convention.

Action you can take:

• Sign our postcard and send it to Vince Cable
• Write a message of support on rubber gloves and send them to us
• Sign our e-petition on our website
• Follow us on Twitter @ChildrenUnite
• Subscribe to us on Facebook 

IN PERU

Children Unite is working in partnership with La Casa de Panchita to lobby the Peruvian Government to ratify the ILO Convention and has produced a postcard that we are asking people to send to Peru.

Between March and July this year, 200 postcards have been sent from people in the UK to La Casa de Panchita to support the ratification of ILO Convention in Peru.

A big thank you to all the 200 people who sent postcards to Peru – please keep them coming, it is very exciting for the children of La Casa de Panchita to receive a message of support all the way from the UK.

La Casa de Panchita are sending these postcards to key people that they want to support the campaign. Sixteen postcards have also been delivered people who have then committed themselves to support the campaign and had their photograph taken to show their support.

These photographs are being displayed on a special page of the La Casa de Panchita Facebook Profile….click here to see the Facebook Page!

Additionally La Casa de Panchita is also part of a working group of advisors that includes Congressman Javier Diez Canseco and Eduardo Rodriguez of the ILO tasked with discussing the role and commitment of the Congress in ratifying the ILO Convention.

Caring for your assets

I’ve been putting off writing this as it’s a bit personal but I can’t justifiably write about anything else this month (May).  Children Unite was founded by myself and my partner Jonathan so it’s just the two of us really.  Jonathan doesn’t get paid for his work with Children Unite so he takes on other bits of consultancy work in the children’s rights field.  We have two daughters and cycle from our home in hackney to our office in hackney – it’s quite an insular existence I suppose except that we travel quite a bit with our work and are in communication with all sorts of people from all around the world (from street children I worked with 20 years a go to Jonathan’s sister in Ireland).  But Jonathan has been unwell for the past five months…particularly unwell for the last month and has not been able to work.  And, I’ve not been able to work much either so have been based at home; and between looking after Jonathan and running around after our girls it hasn’t left much room for anything but the priorities of Children Unite.  And while it’s been an exciting journey for us to set up Children Unite together, this kind of partnership has an obvious downside.  The good thing is that Jonathan’s illness will all be solved with an operation to remove his kidney (and his other kidney is fabulously strong) so it’s not a life-threatening or long-term situation we’re having to deal with.  But his operation has been cancelled three times so far and I’ve found that I’ve had to put all my energy into being Jonathan’s personal advocate – trying to get information out of the urology team at our local hospital has unfortunately required an unbelievable (and exasperating) amount of ingenuity and determination.

As a consequence I’m feeling unmotivated about Children Unite and can’t think more than a week in advance but I took this week off (to paint our lounge shocking pink in an effort to cheer us all up!) and had a meeting in the middle of the week with someone who came to our launch event who I didn’t previously know – Victor Riega Garcia, who works in corporate responsibility at Aviva.  Although I turned up a day early for the meeting (oops!), Victor was charming about it all and gave me some very useful advice – and I found myself becoming re-motivated about the future of our fledgling organisation. 

I’m finding it hard to separate home and work at the moment but in many ways this is a false dichotomy anyway – as a woman, and I think I can afford to generalize a bit on this point, home and work are not so dissimilar. They aren’t ‘different worlds’ as they are for some people (men generally) in more traditional jobs.  Since setting up Children Unite with Jonathan I’ve become less troubled or embarrassed that we are a ‘couple’ and we’ve met a number of other couples in the same boat. But this is, perhaps also because I’m not trying to prove myself to anyone.  In my 20s when I was trying to prove myself to everyone Jonathan and I both worked in the offices of Anti-Slavery International and we were fiercely independent of each other, never referred to each other as a couple and, in fact, hardly spoke to one-another – to the point where a volunteer once asked me if I had a problem with Jonathan as I was so short and sharp with him!!).  But now, although it’s not the first thing I want people to know when I introduce Children Unite, I’m not embarrassed by our relationship, it has always been such a strong partnership that it feels quite natural to work together as professionals.

So, I guess when I write up the annual report for 2012-13 I could say that these past three months I’ve been focusing on caring for the key asset that Children Unite possess: (the wonderful!) Jonathan Blagbrough!

Street Children Special

I was lucky enough to have an experience in my early 20s that 'changed my life' and brought me to the world of children's rights.  It was when, as a backpacker travelling across Asia, I hooked up with a group of street boys in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.  So, as it is International Day for Street Children today I am writing a special post on street children - an issue that is close to my heart!  In fact it is also close to Jonathan's heart - he worked with street children in Mexico (JUCONI), I worked with street children in Indonesia (GIRLI) and that's what we talked about when we first met!

There is, of course, a connection between street children and child domestic workers. It's rather a sad and shocking connection.  Many child domestic workers are sexually abused by their employers and are kicked out of their jobs/homes onto the street.  They are destitute.  They often have a baby to care for and the stigma of being an unmarried mother and they turn to selling sex as a survival mechanism.  So, child domestic workers make up a large number of children who are 'at risk' of becoming street children and Children Unite is trying to persuade organisations working with street children to look at working with child domestic workers as a prevention strategy.

When Jonathan and I worked with street children in our respective countries we very rarely came across girls...I certainly didn't meet any girls on the street.  Actually, I didn't 'work' with street children I 'hung out' with them, listened to their busking band (explaining what the lyrics were to various Rolling Stones or Beatles songs!), drew their portraits, drank iced tea with them - I did attempt to teach the boys English at one point but lessons were quickly abandoned (no paper and pens, different boys turning up to each lesson). One of the reasons why my experience 'hanging out' with street children changed my life was that I so desperately wanted their respect that the whole idea of 'them' (the poor victims who need our help) and 'us' the rich foreigner who offers help and 'saves' the children) was turned on it's head for me.  And I'd like to share my favourite story of my time with the boys (there are many!).

I was at the end of my voluntary 'work' and had spent my last day buying lots of handicrafts from the boys (friendship bands etc that they made that I wanted to sell in the UK) and as I was about to leave I couldn't find my wallet, so I searched around a bit.  Then a few boys helped me search around a bit more, then all the boys in the 'house' searched for my wallet. I could see them looking a bit embarrassed, there was a slight urgency to their searching but after a while I abandoned the search, and, trying not to show my dejection that an unspoken 'theft' symbolised my departure (I was already getting emotional about leaving), I left the 'house'.  I arrived at my home and the leader of the street boys was sitting waiting for me with a slightly damp wallet.  He told me the following story.  After I had gone the boys had a big discussion which turned into a fight when no-one would own up to stealing my wallet.  To calm the boys down, one of the leaders, Harso, said he would consult the resident ghosts of the house (previously two of the street boys had been murdered and their ghosts appeared regularly to staff).  The ghosts told him who had taken the wallet and where it was.  Harso didn't reveal who the thief was but he went straight to a pile of leather scraps (that the boys were making into bags to sell to tourists) and found my leather wallet, slightly damp, with no money in it!  As the fighting and accusations about who had stolen the money continued between the boys, Harso told the boys it was the 'magpie ghost' (who likes shiny things and was responsible for rather a lot of thefts in the house!) who stole my money and that settled it for the boys.  And, I was happy, in fact I felt honoured, that they'd cared so much about my feelings that the boys had searched searched and eventually thought it worthwhile to consult the famous 'ghosts'.