Imagine you are a woman in Pakistan, and you'd lost everything in a devastating earthquake that also claimed your husband’s life. Now, imagine you are fighting to get something, anything, back – say, for argument’s sake, your land. You don’t want the land for yourself – you want it for your two little boys, who were set to inherit it down the road. As a woman, you would have little ability to claim the land yourself.

Here are some of the obstacles you might face in trying to ensure your sons’ rightful inheritance:

1. Your former husband’s family has taken the land.

2. You need birth certificates for your sons to prove their claim, but unfortunately, the certificates were also lost in the earthquake.

3. To get new birth certificates, you will need to travel. This means you need a male from your family to travel with, permission from the eldest male in your husband’s family to make the trip, and money for the fare.

The money won’t be easy to come by. Right now, your former husband’s family is providing you with food, but no money. They won’t pay for your sons’ education. Obtaining permission from the eldest male is an uphill battle, as it is in his interest to keep his hold on the land. Ditto goes for the male who would travel with you.

This is just the beginning of the uphill battle for many of the women in Pakistan today, women who lost everything during 2005’s massive 7.6 magnitude earthquake.

If the woman above had daughters instead of sons, her fight would have been very different – it might have been to protect her daughters from underage marriage to much older men. If she had mourned for 40 days over the death of her husband, as many Muslim women do, she would not have gone out in public, making it impossible for her to receive relief aid that was distributed during that time. No matter her situation, she would face many obstacles to overcome.

That’s why UUSC partnered with an organization called Bedari after the earthquake. Bedari, which means awareness, is working hard to address some of the issues that are specific to women – issues like land rights, access to education, and access to sustainable livings. In the aftermath of a disaster, it’s often women and girls who are most affected, and Bedari, alongside UUSC, is working to address this disparity.

At a recent educational program for UUSC staff, Martha Thompson, the program manager for Rights in Humanitarian Crises at UUSC, talked about the situation facing women in Pakistan, and the work of Bedari. Watch the video below.

Written by Jack Stiefel, member of UU Fellowship of Vero Beach, Fla., and volunteer UUSC national co-chair for the Central Territory

My wife and I recently volunteered in New Orleans through the UUA/UUSC Gulf Coast Volunteer Program. We had two primary emotional reactions. One was a feeling of being overwhelmed by the immensity of the task that is still before the residents and former residents of New Orleans, especially for people of color and low-income individuals.

We also felt inspired by the leadership and commitment of local nongovernmental organizations. In the disturbing absence of anything close to an adequate response by local, state, and federal government, grassroots organizations -- some of which are UUSC program partners -- are at the forefront of recovery actions, working effectively and diligently to empower people.

Now that we are home, we tell others about our volunteer experience and our perceptions of New Orleans. Not uncommonly, someone will respond “I don’t know why they would ever want to go back to New Orleans and live in a neighborhood that is below sea level.”

I have to admit that before I went to New Orleans, I too questioned the wisdom of anyone returning to a living situation in which exposure to the dangers of another flood and devastation seems inherent. But in New Orleans I began to understand what “home” means. Home in New Orleans seems to involve a sense of community, of supportive extended family over many generations, of stability that is foreign to many of us who barely know our next door neighbor, who communicate with our extended family primarily by e-mail, and who move every few years.

“Home” in the devastated parts of New Orleans is profoundly important. It may not be “rational” to build below sea level in an area of questionable levees, but who can argue with the merits of knowing your neighbors, of being surrounded by family, of being part of a neighborhood for many generations as the community seeks to overcome the disadvantages our society ravages on low-income people?

I say let’s get “The Road Home” repaved and heavily traveled back to New Orleans by those who evacuated! Let’s remove all the roadblocks to getting affordable, adequate housing for those who want to return. And let’s make sure that the surrounding natural environment is restored and that there are secure levees in place to prevent the devastating effects of future storms.

Written by Lisa Hartman, member of First UU Church of San Diego and UUSC's volunteer regional coordinator for Pacific Southwest

I recently returned from New Orleans, La., where I participated in a service project to rebuild housing and office space for the Welfare Rights Organization (WRO), one of UUSC's partners in the Gulf Coast. Director Viola Washington and her small staff work to link disrupted and displaced survivors of hurricanes Katrina and Rita with services and resources to help them return home and/or improve their living situations. WRO’s membership seeks to monitor policy and advocate policy changes on issues that affect members’ lives relating to welfare.

I, along with five other volunteers, hung drywall, repaired exterior holes with siding to protect the structure from further weather damage, did carpentry, painted – anything required to reopen the office and transitional housing space so that Viola could return to her office. Her husband James, a radiology tech, took time away from his job at the VA Hospital to instruct us. He, through necessity because of Katrina, had become a self-taught carpenter.

Working together as a team in the heat and humidity and sharing peanut butter sandwiches on the porch were a spiritual practice for me. “Chop wood, carry water,” as the Zen Buddhists say. There is a connectedness amongst peoples of all backgrounds, and I felt knitted into that connectedness.

This five-day project was supported by the UUA-UUSC Gulf Coast Volunteer Program. For five nights, 11 volunteers were housed on the second floor of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans. We cooked together, slept in dorms together, traveled together, made decisions together, worked together, played cards together, and met in the evenings to discuss our experiences together. My life has been enriched by being with those other people, many of whom I had never met before. I look forward to other opportunities to contribute what I have to offer and share with others in service.

Two years after Katrina, I am alarmed and saddened to see that city, state, and federal governments have neglected rebuilding efforts in neighborhoods that were severely damaged by the storms. One late afternoon, while walking through the city, I approached a mother and her son – they were sitting on a dirty sidewalk, asking for money. After giving her what little I was carrying in my pocket, I had to remind myself that this is America, the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world. She and her son are citizens. I am a citizen. I have a son. I could be her – dependent on the generosity of others to feed my boy.

Our government systems have failed. Nearly 125,000 New Orleanean families remain without permanent housing – some living in toxic trailers, some sleeping under bridges, some camping on the streets and in gutted-out buildings. Other residents simply cannot be located. Half of the schools have not reopened, as they succumb to a rapid state of decline, are eaten by mold, and blanketed by tenacious ivies. The financial district is a ghost town. New Orleans, home to generations of families, has been all but forgotten by the government. This is a travesty.

The Senate is now considering S.B. 1668, The Gulf Coast Housing Recovery Act, co-sponsored by Senators Chris Dodd (D-CT) and Mary Landriue (D-LA). This bill helps low-income families by providing permanent affordable housing. It will also help people get back into public housing. We can encourage our senators to support this bill. It is time that we demand that our national government step to the plate.

Written by Sarah Karstaedt, UUSC volunteer National Co-chair for Eastern Territory

My recent visit to New Orleans, as part of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee's volunteer network leadership conference, has opened my eyes to the devastation that still persists there.

There is an urgent need for affordable housing for the city’s residents. The people who have returned to their damaged homes struggle against incredible odds. While their dedication and persistence are an inspiration to witness, they face rental costs that amount to as much as 86 percent of their salaries (for hotel workers and others in similar income brackets) to 37-49 percent of salaries for people in other professions. These hardworking residents deserve an affordable home for themselves and their families.

The good news is there is a way to help with this problem. My own senator, Chris Dodd (D-CT), is co-sponsoring the Gulf Coast Housing Recovery Act of 2007, which offers a way to address the housing problems in the Gulf Coast region.

This bill supports low-income families, by moving them out of FEMA assistance and into permanent, affordable homes, through the use of project-based housing vouchers. It provides help for families living in public housing by replacing housing units that were occupied before the storm and offering mobility counseling to assist residents in returning home. The bill also authorizes 5,500 permanent, supportive housing units for elderly, disabled, and homeless residents. It includes funding for fair housing and protects taxpayers and Gulf Coast residents through increased oversight and monitoring of federal recovery funds.

If you’ve been wondering how you can assist the beleaguered residents of the Gulf Coast region, contacting your senators and voicing your support for the Gulf Coast Recovery Act of 2007, is a great place to start.

Today's Times-Picayune story, "Road Home has money to pay grants expected to be issued this year," provides us with a mixed message fitting for its topic.

The title heralds good news, stability. Read down a bit and you'll find this nugget, "Counting on a bailout ... the Road Home is short anywhere from $5.6 billion to $6.6 billion..." Apparently the program has the money to pay as long as Congress bails out the program with somewhere between $3.5 and $4.5 billion in additional federal aid. I wonder how I could apply that sort of logic to my own finances.

As you'll see in the comments left for today's story, Louisiana residents are nothing short of outraged over the program many call No Road Home.

The Road Home program is meant to help mostly homeowners, leaving renters to fend for themselves. This is particularly unhelpful for a city like New Orleans, where more than half of residents rented before the storm.

The program's administration was outsourced to ICF, a private company in Virginia. They seem to have done their best to ensure that homeowners not be helped by the program they run, at least not in this decade.

And today's story tells of the challenges homeowners face in navigating ICF's processes, saying that "...applicants often complain about some part of the grant calculation and are never put into ICF's resolution process, and, if they are, the company may decide their dispute is resolved without ever informing them." The article also notes that "clients have been consistently denied access to their own files, making it impossible for them to figure out where the dispute lies."

I sit at my desk today trying to imagine how many people are sitting at their desks at ICF just not helping people. Not filing claims. Not communicating with clients. Refusing requests. Have they forgotten that these are real people? Real families, with real homes? That megacorporation is made up of individual workers, each with the power to do something.

So here's my challenge to each of them. Do something. Do something now. Ask yourself what's more important: your company's profit margin or the estimated six thousand homeowners depending on you to help them rebuild?

It takes many different ingredients to make a good gumbo. The same can be said about making good public policy -- especially when we want to create a just and equitable recovery for the Gulf Coast. Some of the key ingredients are coming together this week on Capitol Hill. Delegations of Hurricane Katrina and Rita survivors are in Washington, D.C. to share their experiences and insights with policymakers, the press, and the national organizations that want to help.

Earlier this year, Representatives Maxine Waters (D-CA) and Barney Frank (D-MA) held field hearings in the Gulf Coast region. They learned that one of the greatest unmet needs was affordable housing -- an essential first ingredient for recovery. Out of that testimony, they drafted and passed the Gulf Coast Hurricane Recovery Act (H.R. 1227). The Senate companion bill, the Gulf Coast Housing Recovery Act (S. 1668), introduced by Senators Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and Chris Dodd (D-CT), authorizes even more resources that would help renters and public housing residents to return home. But the bill is stuck in committee. A hearing was held earlier today thanks to the presence of the Gulf Coast delegation. They are helping to get things cooking again!

Nobody knows how to fix a good gumbo better than folks from the region. We need to follow their directions and help stir the pot. Let's make the phones ring off the hook while the Gulf Coast delegation is on Capitol Hill. Take action with UUSC today!

A couple of months ago, I wrote a blog about Blackwater, a private military company (PMC) that is operating in Iraq. I wrote it because PMCs like Blackwater are making millions upon millions of dollars in Iraq – yet are held to NONE of the same accountability standards that the U.S. Army is held to. For example, if Blackwater is involved in the shooting of say, 11 innocent Iraqi civilians, it's likely that nothing will happen. No one will be held accountable, no investigations will be conducted, and taxpayers’ dollars will continue to fund them. On the upside, the president of the United States will make statements like this one: “Obviously, to the extent innocent life was lost, you know, I’m saddened.” Well....

If the president’s remorse isn’t enough for you, then do something. Write your legislator. Actually, call them. Sign a petition. Get the PMCs out of Iraq. Or, if they are going to stay, let’s make them accountable for their actions.

Yesterday, it was hard to reach several of our partners in Louisiana involved with disaster response to Hurricane Katrina, because they were all on buses going to another kind of disaster response -- the rally against the racism and injustice in Jena. UU ministers and congregants from Baton Rouge and New Orleans were also on buses to Jena.

Jena is a small town in Louisiana that reminds those of us who need reminding that racism still runs deep in our country. A tree in one of Jena's schoolyards was known as a "whites-only tree." Some African American students asked the principal if they could sit under that tree. He said yes and they did. The next day, three white students hung nooses from that tree in the school colors. They got a three-day suspension and the school superintendent called it "a prank. " Some prank. The racial tension mounted quickly over the next several months.

According to the Color of Change website, as racial tensions mounted, threats of violence were made against African American students, some of which were carried out. A black student was beaten up by white students at a party. The next day, black students at a convenience store were threatened by a young white man with a shotgun, but the district attorney took no action.

Then a white student, who had been a vocal supporter of the students who hung the nooses, taunted the black student who was beaten up at the off-campus party, allegedly using the "n-word" to refer to several other African American students. He was beaten up by African American students. In this case, action was swift: six African American teens were arrested and initially charged with aggravated battery and intent to kill. Although the white youth had been bloodied and bruised, he did not sustain serious injuries. The bail posted for the six African American teenagers ranged from $90,000 to $138,000. (Bill Quigley relates the whole story in Truth Out.)

The mass demonstration in Jena yesterday was held to protest the double standards of justice for whites and blacks. Mychall Ball, the first student tried, was defended by a public defender to an all-white jury, and called by a white prosecutor. The trial was presided over by a white judge. The public defender presented no evidence and called no witnesses in defense of his client, who was summarily sentenced to 22 years in jail. The case was later thrown out of court by another judge because Ball was a minor and could not be tried as an adult. Nonetheless, he is still in jail, where he has been held since December 2006. The other young men involved in this matter also remain in jail -- none of them have yet to be tried, but their lives are being ruined as day after day goes by while their families struggle to raise the exorbitant bails.

My first response was: how can this be happening? But one of our partners said to me, "I am surprised that you are surprised, particularly after all you have seen down here after the hurricane." She was telling me that to be surprised is a luxury, while for her it is a bitter reality. She was right. This is not a time for surprise, only outrage.

The issues surrounding immigration, lawful and undocumented, are complicated – and I certainly don’t claim to be an expert in them. Issues of undocumented immigration, border control, amnesty, and rights for immigrants seem to divide people in startling ways, and not along the political lines we are so accustomed to.

However, one thing seems clear, at least to me – we shouldn’t allow people to die along our borders, people who are simply seeking out opportunities they might not have in their native countries.

That’s the issue Ray Ybarra, a 26-year-old law student, is working on right now. I met Ybarra while on a JustJourney in Chiapas, Mexico. And, while the issues surrounding immigration and immigration laws are complex, he made this one point very simple – the right to live, documented immigrant or not, should be fundamental.

Ybarra works in Douglas, Ariz., a tiny town along the Mexican border. In a time that is post-“Operation Gatekeeper” and “Operation Hold-the-Line,” two major anti-undocumented immigration movements that blocked up borders in both California and Texas, Arizona is the new hotspot for undocumented immigration.

But, that’s a major problem. Crossing into border towns in parts of California and Texas was difficult, but not necessarily life-threatening. Crossing into the Arizona desert, and being forced to walk for days on end, is a completely different story. It’s a story that is leading to the deaths of hundreds of undocumented immigrants a year. This is compounded by the fact that picking up an undocumented immigrant in the desert, or harboring one in any way, is a federal offense, one that can come with hefty jail time.

Ybarra is standing up against this fact. In a grand act of civil disobedience, he is attempting to bring thousands of people to the Arizona border next year, and, working with them, simply pick up those crossing the desert – or, for those who choose not to pick people up, to simply be there in numbers and solidarity with the concept. And, in a time of difficult questions around immigration policy, I admire Ybarra’s efforts to put peoples’ lives and safety first, and political motivations second.

Now, let me explain – Ybarra is not encouraging Americans to bring in undocumented immigrants, or to carry them across the border. He is encouraging people to scan the desert and pick up those who are making the difficult journey. In other words, he is encouraging people to render humanitarian aid. Essentially, Ybarra is trying to make a moral argument, backed with real people, that by having a federal law AGAINST picking people up in the desert, we are allowing them to die – that, being forced to pass by someone, because of the law, is morally wrong.

And, given the state of things, Ybarra's project is impressive. We are living in a time when the U.S government is actually building a fence, a big, hulking, hundreds-of-miles-long fence along the border. We are also living in a time when heavily armed individual citizens, with no legal authority and no training, are taking it upon themselves to act as border police, catching immigrants proudly and sending them back home. And, given these facts, and the difficult questions facing us around immigration policy, I believe that the movement Ybarra is leading is brave. It’s the kind of movement that, wherever we fall on the political spectrum, has a unifying message – we should not allow people to die along our borders, and we shouldn’t have laws that are complicit in those deaths. And, I for one, agree with him.

As UUSC Programs Director Atema Eclai and I jolted over muddy roads in Northern Uganda, I kept asking myself, “What makes the world decide to ignore a terrible war? How do we decide to close our collective eyes to thousands of young children kidnapped from their homes and brutalized into being soldiers against their own people on pain of death? How can we see Darfur but not Northern Uganda?"

Atema and I were in Northern Uganda to explore the possibility of UUSC program work there. The war in Northern Uganda has made it on to every list of “Forgotten humanitarian emergencies” since the early 1990s.

Since 1986, the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in Northern Uganda waged war against the central government by kidnapping Acholi children and youth and forcing them to fight. They have terrorized the Acholi population by brutal killings, torture, maiming, and rape. At the end of the 1990s, the Ugandan government rounded up the entire Acholi population, more than 1.5 million people, and forced them into large, poorly run camps around towns. Thousands of people died from disease due to lack of sufficient food and poor sanitation, others died when they were killed or kidnapped by the LRA. There are now peace negotiations between the LRA and the Ugandan government, and everyone is waiting and hoping for peace.

Every camp is a cluster of hundreds to thousands of neatly thatched, round, mud-walled houses. Between us, Atema and I have seen many refugee camps across four continents but neither of us had ever seen such neglected, underserved camps as these in Northern Uganda where the Acholi people are waiting for the current negotiations to lead to a deeply desired peace.

In a main camp of 20,000 people in Pader district, there are no clinic or schools. Camp residents are supposed to go to the town clinic and schools, which are totally overwhelmed by the numbers of displaced. There were children everywhere, some carrying other children, many acting as heads of households, struggling to look after their orphaned brothers and sisters.

And these children were comparatively lucky. They had not been kidnapped by the LRA, raped, beaten, and brutalized. We saw some of the girls that had escaped from the LRA, young girls whose eyes it was hard to even look into. How is it that we, in the rest of the world, just decided not to look?