Girl who slapped the entire mankind on face

Severn Suzuki, at the age of nine, along with a group of children founded the Environmental Children's Organization (ECO), which was dedicated to learning and teaching other kids about environmental issues. In 1992, at the age of 12, Cullis-Suzuki raised money with members of ECO, to attend the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and gave this speech which is a Slap in the face for the entire mankind. Simply superb, it is not enough that we watch it, but we must think about it also.

The transcript of her speech is below,

Hello, I'm Severn Suzuki speaking for E.C.O. - The Environmental Children's Organisation.

We are a group of twelve and thirteen-year-olds from Canada trying to make a difference:
Vanessa Suttie, Morgan Geisler, Michelle Quigg and me. We raised all the money ourselves to come six thousand miles to tell you adults you must change your ways. Coming here today, I have no hidden agenda. I am fighting for my future.

Losing my future is not like losing an election or a few points on the stock market. I am here to speak for all generations to come.

I am here to speak on behalf of the starving children around the world whose cries go unheard.

I am here to speak for the countless animals dying across this planet because they have nowhere left to go. We cannot afford to be not heard.

I am afraid to go out in the sun now because of the holes in the ozone. I am afraid to breathe the air because I don't know what chemicals are in it.

I used to go fishing in Vancouver with my dad until just a few years ago we found the fish full of cancers. And now we hear about animals and plants going exinct every day -- vanishing forever.

In my life, I have dreamt of seeing the great herds of wild animals, jungles and rainforests full of birds and butterfilies, but now I wonder if they will even exist for my children to see.

Did you have to worry about these little things when you were my age?

All this is happening before our eyes and yet we act as if we have all the time we want and all the solutions. I'm only a child and I don't have all the solutions, but I want you to realise, neither do you!

• You don't know how to fix the holes in our ozone layer.
• You don't know how to bring salmon back up a dead stream.
• You don't know how to bring back an animal now extinct.
• And you can't bring back forests that once grew where there is now desert.

If you don't know how to fix it, please stop breaking it!

Here, you may be delegates of your governments, business people, organisers, reporters or poiticians - but really you are mothers and fathers, brothers and sister, aunts and uncles - and all of you are somebody's child.

I'm only a child yet I know we are all part of a family, five billion strong, in fact, 30 million species strong and we all share the same air, water and soil -- borders and governments will never change that.

I'm only a child yet I know we are all in this together and should act as one single world towards one single goal.

In my anger, I am not blind, and in my fear, I am not afraid to tell the world how I feel.

In my country, we make so much waste, we buy and throw away, buy and throw away, and yet northern countries will not share with the needy. Even when we have more than enough, we are afraid to lose some of our wealth, afraid to share.

In Canada, we live the privileged life, with plenty of food, water and shelter -- we have watches, bicycles, computers and television sets.

Two days ago here in Brazil, we were shocked when we spent some time with some children living on the streets. And this is what one child told us: "I wish I was rich and if I were, I would give all the street children food, clothes, medicine, shelter and love and affection."

If a child on the street who has nothing, is willing to share, why are we who have everyting still so greedy?

I can't stop thinking that these children are my age, that it makes a tremendous difference where you are born, that I could be one of those children living in the Favellas of Rio; I could be a child starving in Somalia; a victim of war in the Middle East or a beggar in India.

I'm only a child yet I know if all the money spent on war was spent on ending poverty and finding environmental answers, what a wonderful place this earth would be!

At school, even in kindergarten, you teach us to behave in the world. You teach us:

• not to fight with others,
• to work things out,
• to respect others,
• to clean up our mess,
• not to hurt other creatures
• to share - not be greedy.

Then why do you go out and do the things you tell us not to do?

Do not forget why you're attending these conferences, who you're doing this for -- we are your own children. You are deciding what kind of world we will grow up in. Parents should be able to comfort their children by saying "everyting's going to be alright" , "we're doing the best we can" and "it's not the end of the world".

But I don't think you can say that to us anymore. Are we even on your list of priorities? My father always says "You are what you do, not what you say."

Well, what you do makes me cry at night. You grown ups say you love us. I challenge you, please make your actions reflect your words. Thank you for listening

All work and no pay

IN India, one of the more depressing features of government policy in the social sectors is the extent to which it relies on the unpaid or underpaid labour of women.

This was evident in the functioning of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan in many States. This parallel system of “education centres” (rather than proper schools) was set up using local women with eight years of schooling to teach children for a paltry “remuneration” rather than employing trained teachers at regular wages. Similarly, the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) scheme operates on the basis of poorly paid Anganwadi workers and helpers.

While these women perform essential and demanding tasks that typically amount to full-time work, they are not given the status of regular government employees. And because their payment is so low that it would contravene minimum wage laws in many States, it is described as “honorarium”.

More recently, this tendency was taken to its logical conclusion. One of the flagship schemes of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government – the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) – relies almost entirely on unpaid female labour. Indeed, the lack of remuneration for the accredited social health activists (ASHAs), who form the backbone of the scheme, is part of its very design.

India is among the worst-performing countries when it comes to government expenditure on health. In 2004, such spending amounted to only 0.9 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP). Only four or five countries in the world had ratios lower than this. The UPA government had promised to increase this ratio to 3 per cent of GDP within five years, but four years on, it is still only around 1 per cent.

However, the government at least recognised the pressing need to improve health conditions when it launched the NRHM. Its stated goal is ambitious: to provide effective health care to the entire rural population, with special focus on the 18 States that have weak public health indicators. Commentators have pointed out that despite being presented as an entirely new flagship programme, the NRHM is essentially an amalgam of existing schemes and programmes. Most of its key components, including the reliance on ASHAs, have been tried before with varying degrees of success.

These elements include the provision of an ASHA in each village; a village health plan prepared by involving a local team headed by the panchayat representative; strengthening of the rural hospital for effective curative care and making it measurable through the Indian Public Health Standards (IPHS), and accountable to the community; and local integration of the programmes and funds of the Health and Family Welfare Department.

The most significant element of the NRHM is, therefore, an ASHA, who acts as the link between the community and the government health system and becomes the first port of call for any health-related matter, especially for less-privileged groups.

The mission statement makes that clear: “The ASHA will be a health activist in the community who will create awareness on health and its social determinants and mobilise the community towards local health planning and increased utilisation and accountability of the existing health services. She would be a promoter of good health practices. She will also provide a minimum package of curative care as appropriate and feasible for that level and make timely referrals.”

Does this already sound like a lot of work? But there is more, for the NRHM explicitly requires an ASHA to do many more things. Here is a brief list of the activities that she is required to undertake:

■ Create awareness and provide information to the community on determinants of health such as nutrition, basic sanitation and hygiene, healthy living and working conditions, information on existing health services and the need for timely utilisation of health and family welfare services;

■ Counsel women on birth preparedness, the importance of safe delivery, breastfeeding and complementary feeding, immunisation, contraception and prevention of common infections (including reproductive tract infections and sexually transmitted diseases) and on the care of young children;

■ Mobilise the community and facilitate access to the health and related services provided by the government at the local level, including immunisation, antenatal and post-natal check-ups, ICDS, sanitation, and so on;

■ Arrange to escort pregnant women and children requiring treatment and/or admission to the nearest pre-identified health facility, which could be the primary health centre or the first referral unit;

■ Provide primary medical care for minor ailments such as diarrhoea and fevers and first aid for minor injuries;

■ Be a provider of the Directly Observed Treatment Short-course (DOTS) under the Revised National Tuberculosis Control Programme;

■ Act as a depot holder for essential health provisions such as oral rehydration therapy fluids, folic acid tablets, chloroquine for treating malaria, disposable delivery kits, oral contraceptive pills and condoms;

■ Manage and allocate to members of the community the contents of the drug kit supposedly provided to each ASHA;

■ Inform the health authorities at the primary health centre or sub-centre about births and deaths in the village and any unusual health problems or outbreak of disease in the community;

■ Promote the construction of household toilets under the Total Sanitation Campaign; and

■ Work with the Village Health and Sanitation Committee of the gram panchayat to develop a comprehensive village health plan.

Just in case these tasks are not enough to keep the ASHA occupied, the NRHM website helpfully suggests that “States can explore the possibility of graded training to her for providing newborn care and management of a range of common ailments, particularly childhood illnesses”!

All these tasks are to be performed by a woman who is to serve one village or a population of 1,000. The minimum qualification of an ASHA has been set at eight years of completed schooling. This rigid requirement has been placed even though several parts of the country, especially the tribal and underdeveloped areas, which need such intervention the most, do not have literate women, much less those who have completed elementary school.

Once chosen, an ASHA receives a total of 23 days of training in separate modules before she returns to fulfil her responsibilities. It is hard to imagine how a few weeks of “training” in a typical government format can help create all these capacities, especially when an ASHA is also expected to diagnose and treat minor ailments and recognise serious illnesses. Once she has been chosen and trained and made to perform all these complex and demanding tasks, what is her remuneration? Amazingly, nothing! The NRHM envisages that an “ASHA would be an honorary volunteer and would not receive any salary or honorarium. Her work would be so tailored that it does not interfere with her normal livelihood.”

There is some grudging acceptance that ASHAs can be compensated for the period they spend in training but only at the training venue and by day of attendance. Any other remuneration can only come in the form of the monetary incentives that are given as part of specific programmes such as immunisation. Some State governments have instituted payments to ASHAs but in no case do they exceed Rs.1,000 a month. And, usually, ASHAs get much less, only around Rs.500 a month at the most. Yet, in most cases, fulfilling all their responsibilities would require ASHAs to work for more than eight hours a day as well as at odd times, given the unexpected nature of sickness, deliveries, and so on. All this is supposed to be done out of a sense of idealism and community feeling, trading on the time-worn stereotype of caring women who serve their families and communities selflessly.

It is appalling to think that such a major and massive programme could be designed and launched by explicitly relying on the unpaid labour of so many women – nearly 500,000 ASHAs have been recruited – and now there is talk of launching an Urban Health Mission with USHAs. The bureaucrats who administer this programme are only too happy to be the beneficiaries of periodic pay commission awards that allow their salaries to rise faster than the inflation rate.

But when it comes to ensuring essential health services for the people, the women who bear almost the entire responsibility for delivery are to be deprived of minimally adequate remuneration. This combination of cynicism and miserliness does not augur well for the success of the programme. •

A letter from Iran to members of US Congress

Honorable Ladies & Gentleman!

It was with great dismay that I, and many of my fellow Iranians in Iran and abroad, learnt of the regrettably widespread support by you in the U.S Congress, for the Resolution HR 362. This resolution which imposes a naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf to stop all shipment of refined petroleum products from reaching Iran and to inspect all vessels approaching or leaving Iran, is an act of war waged on our country and the Iranian nation.

If passed, this resolution, would be yet another instance in a chain of flagrant violations of international law committed by the US and a war crime under the United Nations Convention on Genocide, executed against one of the most peaceful nations on earth who has not attacked any other nation, at least, for the past two and half centuries, a nation that has suffered a most brutal eight- year-long war of aggression by the ruthless dictator, Saddam Hussein, with the full political, financial, intelligence and military support of the United States, including the provision of the WMD.

Whereas the surviving victims of Saddam’s chemical attack on Halabja in the Iraqi Kurdistan and on Iran (in which thousands of innocent civilians were massacred) are still dying in agony, and the US hireling, Saddam, was conveniently disposed of as the witness and the executor of such crimes after the US “Mission” was “Accomplished” in 2003, the main perpetrators are still at large to move on from the bloodbath in Iraq to a genocide in Iran.

From a teenage admirer of the US and its culture in the early 60s who was deeply saddened by the assassination of JFK, I, and many people of my generation, have grown disillusioned and disgusted with the iron-fisted policies of your country unleashing wars of aggression, waging coups and toppling democratically-elected governments all over the world, installing ruthless regimes in developing countries and giving your full blessing to the massacres of their peaceful political opponents (1953: Iran, Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh; This US-engineered coup became the blueprint for many of the future black operations. 1954: Guatemala, president Jacobo Arbenz. 1965: Indonesia, president Dr. Sukarno, with more than a million people massacred, many on the basis of execution lists supplied by the US embassy in Jakarta. 1960s: Congo, Dr. Patrice Lumumba. 1960s: Greece. 1973: Chile, Dr. Salvadore Allende. 1976: Argentina; then Panama, Haiti … just to name a few. You well know that the terror list goes on).

The recent revelations by Seymour Hersh, in the New Yorker magazine, of the US Congress secretly funding of Bush’s request for 400 million dollars to escalate major covert operations in Iran involving assassinations, abductions, fomenting and supporting ethnic unrest and terror campaigns by such despised terrorist groups as MKO, to force a regime change, is a full circle since the 1953 US overthrow of the popular and democratically -elected government of Dr. Mossadegh in Iran. Under the circumstances, it is fully understandable why the US has exempted itself from prosecution under the International Criminal Court.

Honorable ladies and Gentlemen! The United States’ deeds towards Iran and the larger Middle East, rather than “promoting democracy”, have earned it the reputation of the “The Assassin of Democracy".

We, the recipients of your terror, tie our hopes only on the conscientious efforts of the peace-loving and humane American individuals and organizations in the anti-war movement to open your eyes to the catastrophic consequences of signing on to resolutions which usher incalculable human suffering and war. The pending Resolution HR362 is a war resolution which would potentially conflagrate your manufactured conflicts in the Middle East and the chain of its uncontrollable reactions and reprisals would spread and burn the globe. Violence breeds violence, ladies and gentlemen! Learn from the history! Learn from your recent mistakes. Do not flare up an unending chain of hostilities, to then naively and cynically question: "Why do they hate us?".

Perhaps a second go at Joseph Heller's brilliant Catch 22 is a timely read. Remember Yossarion's wonder at people on the ground raising their fists and shouting when he was flying up there only to do his job of bombing!! Let us not doubt for a moment that only acting wisely and humanely on the part of US statespersons would bring back respect and admiration for what US once stood for.

If your belief and love for "Democracy" and a “Free World” is sincere and genuine, then please respect the spirit of of democracy and the rights of other nations to live with dignity, to decide their destiny free of foreign interference, and to prosper as you do. A genuine celebration of your "Independence Day" would require celebrating the spirit of independence and respecting the independence of other nations too. Only God knows how, in the 21st Century, the US would have treated the poor Tom Paine whose "Common Sense" we have translated into Farsi and is just about to reach Iranian readers. If the American public and the US Congress do not reign in this ruthless hostility towards our nation, we wonder whether those who might escape becoming your “collateral damage”, would still be interested in reading on American ideals of liberty or whether they would rather spit us (the translators) in the face for propagating American “values” and “ideals”.

I sincerely hope that your wisdom, common sense and sound judgment would prevail over the elaborate false propaganda and agitations aimed at manufacturing a most vicious consent. This consent, if given, could not only devastate our lives, but would also, ultimately, be to the great detriment of the US itself.

Yours, with hope and in anticipation,