The Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) is partnering with the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (UUSC) on a joint volunteer trip to Haiti, January 21. In the post below, trip participant Kara Smith of UUSC shares her thoughts on the progress made so far and on the journey to help rebuild the community and lives of earthquake survivors in Haiti. The UUA-UUSC Haiti Volunteer Program is made possible through the contributions of UUA and UUSC donors and a generous grant from the Veatch Program of the UU Congregation at Shelter Rock, in Manhasset, N.Y.

I boarded the plane for Haiti this morning. As I packed and readied myself for the trip, questions ran through my head in a continuous loop, mostly about what it will be like two years after a massive earthquake struck.

Last Thursday our team was readying ourselves, going over logistics and schedules, and we paused for a moment of silence to reflect on the two-year commemoration. As I said a prayer for all those who perished and for those who survived, I said to myself, "This is why we do this work."

Since the earthquake, UUSC has worked with partners as they work for a just recovery. I am privileged to work for an organization that understands the meaning of the human struggle for human rights. It is about helping one person at a time, treating them with dignity and compassion as we build together for a better future.

Today I am on my way to meet some of the amazingly brave and powerful people whose blood, sweat, and tears are part of the mortar of rebuilding Haiti — and making it a Haiti in which all who struggle for voice, agency, and inclusion in the recovery process are respected. We will visit with partners in Port-au-Prince who are working to ensure sustainable access to food, providing skills trainings and income-generation projects, and helping protect women and girls from gender-based violence. Then we will head to the Central Plateau to work with the Papaye Peasant Movement for a UUSC-UUA JustWorks service-learning trip.

I feel truly privileged to be a part of this journey, through the work that I do at UUSC and the opportunity to stand shoulder to shoulder with our partners on the ground. I invite you to join our webinar From the Ground Up on January 26 at 7:00 p.m. (ET) to hear a bit more about our trip and UUSC's work in Haiti.

Two months ago, I traveled to Haiti assisting UUSC Haiti Emergency Response Manager Wendy Flick and also serving as a photographer, capturing photos and video of our partners and their work. I met most of UUSC's partners and visited many of our on-the-ground projects. In addition to the many kisses and warm hugs exchanged in greeting, it is the strength, pride, and resilience of the people I met that I cherish the most. It's amazing how motivated I became when surrounded by such great energy, work ethic, hope, and resilience. They are truly some of the most amazing people I have ever met, and I'm certain their hard work will benefit their communities and country beyond their lifetime.

My experience enabled me to see firsthand the importance of the way in which UUSC works — using the eye-to-eye partnership model — and what this means to our partners and their work. In addition, I was reminded of the significance of lifting Haitian voices, especially as we commemorate the two-year anniversary of the earthquake that devastated Haiti on January 12, 2010.

I learned about the need for increased education and awareness around issues such as gender-based violence and child slavery. Guerda Lexius of Limye Lavi (Light of Life) in Haiti shared, "Recently Limye Lavi has decided that gender-based violence and child slavery issues are so closely tied together that when you bring up one you must also address the other. The issues are very closely tied together, along with education."

I participated in brainstorming solutions for income generation, and we encouraged our partners to network with one another around finding solutions to common issues. On several occasions our partners spoke about the importance of the way UUSC is working in Haiti.

They expressed their appreciation and recognized UUSC's uniqueness in working in a way that supports them to become independent from aid. Coleen Hedglin of Beyond Borders told us, "Haiti needs this desperately! Bring hope to Haiti through solidarity and partnership, not oppression and dependency."

UUSC works through eye-to-eye partnerships, building relationships of empowerment rather than relationships of dependency. It was fascinating and powerful hearing from our partners that they joined hands with UUSC because they recognize and appreciate our intent to provide aid from a place of solidarity.

Our partners' experiences and testimony highlight the importance of UUSC continuing to work for a just recovery by providing aid with dignity to our partners on the ground. It is equally as important for those of us who are not on the ground to find ways to be in solidarity. Join UUSC for an on-the-ground report via a webinar from Haiti and learn more about what you can do to support the recovery effort at home in the United States.

The Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) is partnering with the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (UUSC) on a joint volunteer trip to Haiti, December 3–10. In the post below, trip leaders Nicole McConvery of the UUA and Evan Seitz of UUSC share their thoughts on the journey to help rebuild the community and lives of earthquake survivors in Haiti.

After months of planning, we can't wait for the volunteers to arrive for our next JustWorks experience! As trip leaders, we've arrived safely in Port-au-Prince, and it has been nonstop preparation for the arrival of participants ever since. Last night, all the trip leaders met at the hotel and went over last-minute logistics. It is great working with the team, including UUSC Haiti Emergency Response Manager Wendy Flick, who has over 10 years of experience in Haiti. We reviewed the flight itineraries of our volunteers and are ready to pick them up at the airport tomorrow.

We have a great and diverse group of volunteers on this trip, thanks to the generosity of UUA donors. Ten Unitarian Universalists from nine states will be working to construct a community building at the eco-village site, a project of UUSC's partner the Papaye Peasant Movement (MPP). Located several hours outside of Port-au-Prince in the Central Plateau, the eco-village is providing sustainable homes and livelihoods for 10 Haitian families displaced by the earthquake — and establishing a model for future villages that are already being planned.

On the UUA-UUSC joint JustWorks trip for youth in August 2011, we helped construct the final two homes in this village. Now all 10 homes have been constructed, the families have moved in, and the first crops have been harvested. It is an exciting time! The community building will be used for communal agricultural activities, trainings, and social gatherings.

We're happy to report that this is the first time in Haiti for trip leader Nicole, who is part of the UUA's International Office, as well as for fellow trip leader Erik Mohn, the UUA's young adult spirituality and service consultant as well as a consultant for UUSC's College of Social Justice. Evan remembers being quite nervous his first time in Haiti, which was also his first time leading a trip for UUSC. If Nicole and Erik are nervous, they certainly don't show it!

That's it for now; we need to go get some rest. Our first set of volunteers arrives at 9:00 a.m. tomorrow, and we want to be bright-eyed to greet them! We're so looking forward to another powerful experience working with Unitarian Universalists and MPP in the unforgettable countryside of Haiti's Central Plateau.

We all need networks to get vital information — whether it's our network of family, friends, and coworkers, or the various news sources we access.

But we can lose these networks instantly in the chaotic aftermath of disaster, like the March 2011 triple disaster in Japan. Over six months since the devastating earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear crisis, survivors consistently say that their recovery is hampered by the difficulty of getting reliable information about how and where to access assistance, services, and protection.

Now, imagine you're a survivor of the disaster, and you don't speak Japanese. Perhaps you're an immigrant worker from Latin America or a Filipina woman married to a rural Japanese man. Your networks are dispersed, and you don't know where to turn for information you can understand and trust.

Enter the FACIL Multi-Language Center. After the 2005 Kobe earthquake, FACIL formed to help non-Japanese-speaking survivors. Today, FACIL is producing multilingual radio programs that inform listeners how to access services, assistance, and potential employment. The radio programs also encourage listeners to call in and help educate Japanese people about the immigrant community.

With UUSC's support, FACIL is developing and broadcasting fun and helpful radio programs, forming self-help groups within the immigrant community, and distributing solar-powered radios. Ultimately, UUSC and FACIL are helping disaster-effected immigrants in Japan rebuild their networks, restore their hope, and recover their lives.

Help us continue to help: donate now to the UUA-UUSC Japan Relief Fund.

On the wall of my cubicle, I have the following quote posted:

"If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together."
—Aboriginal Activists Group, Queensland, Australia, 1970s

To me, this is what UUSC's eye-to-eye partnership model is all about — solidarity. And I was struck by this in May during visits from two of our partners: Agathe Jean Baptiste, our representative in Haiti, and Imam Mohamed Magid, who has trained imams in Sudan on women's rights. It's exciting to learn how those partnerships — and the thread of solidarity that ties them together — play out in the real, on-the-ground work that UUSC engages in and supports.

In Haiti, it means that we are working with several groups that put a premium on listening to what marginalized survivors of the devastating earthquake need, whether it's body-based trauma treatment or support for internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the countryside. As Jean Baptiste emphasized in her visit with us, "UUSC is working with local grassroots organizations that hear what people need and don't go with their own agenda."

And in Sudan, Imam Magid worked with 30 local imams in a groundbreaking training that covers the theological basis for women's rights. Using Islamic texts to empower women and support women's equality, the training taps into the religious community for solutions to violence against women. This strategy offers respect for local religious tradition and holds more weight in Sudan than working with, for example, government agencies. There, imams have prominent influence and intimate connection with the community — they're viewed as more neutral than politicians and government; they spend time in the Darfur IDP camps for births, deaths, marriages; and they have people's trust.

As Imam Magid puts it, "Humanity is one family. Protecting human rights is an obligation of every human being. Every woman that we save, every life that we protect, it is worth it."

We stand with the people of Haiti, with the people of Sudan, with all the people of our human family who are working to challenge oppression and to protect the rights of every individual. Who's with us?

When I first started working at UUSC in February, I was intrigued and inspired by the fact that the organization was formed during World War II to help refugees flee the Nazi regime. Rescue & Flight: American Relief Workers Who Defied the Nazis, a new book by Susan Elisabeth Subak, tells the stories of the people who first started UUSC's human-rights work, introducing us to Robert and Elisabeth Dexter, Charles Joy, Martha and Waitstill Sharp, and Noel and Herta Field. In her words, the stories of these key individuals and their work bring history alive.

As Subak lays out in the introduction, it was a friendship between two young people that helped give birth to the important work of the Unitarian Service Committee (which later became UUSC). In 1937, at an English holiday camp, 19-year-old Harriet Dexter befriended 18-year-old Hans Subak from Vienna. In 1938, as Hitler completed the German annexation of Austria, Hans felt with increasing urgency the need to emigrate. He wrote to Harriet, who convinced her parents, Robert and Elisabeth Dexter, to write the affidavit that enabled Hans, the father of Rescue & Flight's author, to leave Austria for the United States.

And so it began. Those first simple actions would grow into much more. Rescue & Flight details how the Unitarian Service Committee helped hundreds of refugees navigate the channels to safety — both official and underground when necessary — from their outposts in Czechoslovakia, France, and Portugal. It shows the horrifying unwillingness of the U.S. and other governments to help refugees during WWII — the bureaucracy involved in emigrating was nightmarishly byzantine — and to provide any notable support to the activities of the Unitarian Service Committee and related organizations (even while at the same time the U.S. government was enlisting members of those same organizations for espionage).

In the pages of Rescue & Flight, I could see the precursors to UUSC's contemporary approach of responding to the needs of marginalized populations — from setting up a medical and dental clinic in Marseille to organizing kindergarten classes in French internment camps. Noel Field wrote at the time, "'At Rivesaltes, thousands of children are being educated and occupied, physically and mentally, and the spirits of thousands of parents (almost all of these fighters for a better world) are being raised at the sight of it.'"

Subak offers fascinating details — the origins of the flaming chalice symbol (designed by Austrian Jewish refugee artist Hans Deutsch for the Unitarian Service Committee, and which was subsequently adopted by the denomination as the symbol of Unitarian Universalism), narrow escapes as Germany expanded occupation, illegal border crossings, clandestine messengers. The activities of the Unitarian Service Committee in aiding refugees even drew the attention of a Lisbon correspondent of Hitler's own newspaper who wrote an article warning about Charles Joy's work.

What Rescue & Flight really drove home to me, as our current Interim President and CEO Bill Schulz notes in the book's afterword, is the vital importance of telling the personal stories of the work that we do. These stories connect us on a more visceral level to situations that can be hard to process and comprehend; they bring alive the truth and gravity of history and of the present. Stories inspire us to act. We must keep telling them and reading them and sharing them.

On March 18, President Barack Obama announced his appointment of a Special Envoy to Sudan, retired Air Force Major General Scott Gration. He did so saying, "Sudan is a priority for this administration, particularly at a time when it cries out for peace and for justice. The worsening humanitarian crisis there makes our task all the more urgent."

It is true that the people of Darfur are in crisis. But those who have so far survived the genocide and displacement from their homes now face another challenge, after 13 aid organizations were expelled by the Sudanese government in March. To date, 14,000 aid workers who were providing basic provisions to 4 million people, including 2.7 million in camps for internally displaced people, have been forced to leave the country. These aid workers were responsible for providing the infrastructure for water systems, health clinics, schools, housing for the displaced, and massive food-and-supply distribution. Without that lifeline, many more lives will be lost.

From the statements by both Gration and Obama, it is clear that they are well aware of this crisis and are working to ensure that aid agencies and other lifesaving infrastructures are put back in place.

While I am heartened by their words and while I believe that they are truly committed to finding a peaceful end to the crisis, I would ask them to ensure that their approach and their plans take into consideration the most vulnerable of those living in Darfur — namely women and girls.

We know that 2.7 million people live in camps for internally displaced people. What is not as well known is that there are some camps where women and children make up 80 percent of the population. And it is women who are threatened with rape and other forms of violence each time they leave their camps to find food, water, firewood, and other materials to nourish and support their families.

Although the first step, a step that Gration and Obama should be applauded for already taking, is to ask that aid workers be allowed to return, we need to think about the future of those living in Darfur and address all of their levels of vulnerability.

Aid organizations do provide food, shelter, water, and medical care, but they do not provide protection. We, at UUSC, believe it is imperative to find new and creative ways to protect civilians in Darfur — especially women and girls — from the violence that they face as they go about their daily lives.

As Gration works with Sudanese Ambassador Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem for a solution to the crisis, unobstructed deployment of UNAMID peacekeeping forces, and a peaceful and just end to the crisis, I would ask him to remember:

Peace is essential to ending the genocide in Darfur. But there are realistic, simple measures we can take right now that can make a genuine difference in the safety of women and girls, who are most at risk. They cannot, and should not, wait until the end of the war. They need our help today. Please make their safety and security one of your top priorities.

As a humanitarian aid worker, I've traveled around the world to countries that
have suffered natural disasters. And time and time again, what I see are communities of faith responding to survivors' critical needs.

In Sri Lanka after the tsunami, people flocked to monasteries, mosques, and temples to find food, water, and shelter and reunite with their families. Right now in Myanmar, following a devastating cyclone and a distressing shortage of aid, survivors are finding refuge, relief, and protection in monasteries across the disaster zone. As the flooding continues in the U.S. Midwest, churches are centers of care and communication.

And after hurricanes Katrina and Rita on the Gulf Coast, courageous congregations, including Unitarian Universalist congregations, were there to gather people, respond to their spiritual needs, and match material needs with resources. Three years out, these communities of faith continue with this essential work.

Indeed, "church" and "ministry" can manifest themselves in many ways in times of crisis and disaster. In such times, we are presented with the possibility of grace.

How faith communities are able to respond — and whether or not they choose to respond — to a disaster depends greatly on their resources: structural, financial, technical, human, and spiritual. Disasters can allow us to channel grace, but first and foremost they deliver us tragedy and trauma. Ministering to the needs of the church is the initial step. Once the church has evaluated its capacity to do so, then there are a number of ways to reach out to the larger community.

This was part of a larger discussion on disaster preparedness held by Unitarian Universalist ministers, lay leaders, and congregants this past week at the denomination's yearly General Assembly. During this discussion, participants considered some of the ways that churches can match needs and resources among their communities. Possibilities include: becoming centers of collection and distribution of aid; providing direct services, such as hot meals or child care; offering safe meeting spaces where people can talk, listen, pray, and plan; providing shelter; joining interfaith responses; and protecting the most vulnerable among us from being overlooked and underserved.

During crisis and disaster, faith communities can be, and very frequently are, centers of relief, refuge, and hope for all — honoring humanity's interdependence and demonstrating that, even in dark times, the best of humanity can shine through.

As a longtime employee of the Institutional Advancement Department (read “fundraising”) at UUSC, I’ve been asked many times to clarify the nature of our work and how it’s funded, especially when it comes to our humanitarian relief work. In a time of humanitarian crisis, such as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami or the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan, people wonder why they should donate to UUSC over, say, the Red Cross or Oxfam or any one of a number of charities providing direct aid to people around the world.

I tell them that if they want their money to be used immediately, they should donate elsewhere. There are many fine organizations out there that are ready and willing to swoop into a disaster area on short notice to manage immediate relief efforts. However, if these donors want their money to be thoughtfully granted to grassroots UUSC partner programs located in areas of great need and administered by program officers sensitive to the needs and concerns of the local people in ways that promote longterm solutions to issues faced by marginalized populations, then they should give to UUSC.

Last month, while traveling in Indonesia and meeting some of the beneficiaries of the generosity of UUSC donors, I learned just how important this distinction is.

Indonesia is primarily a nation of Muslims -- in fact, it’s the largest Muslim nation in the world. The Aceh region, specifically, is under Islamic (sharia) law, making religion an important part of the everyday fabric of life there. The complexities of this environment make our partnerships with local grassroots organizations vital. Not only do they help us identify and support particularly vulnerable populations, they know the people they serve. They know the cultural issues that sometimes preclude some local populations from accessing – or even knowing about – options for aid and exercising their rights.

Over the course of a week spent with the Bedari delegation, meeting with representatives from such groups as Solidaritas Perempuan, LBH-APIK, Bungoeng Jeumpa, and the Center for Community Development and Education (CCDE), I learned that women in Indonesia and Pakistan face similar issues of: 1) not knowing their rights under either sharia or secular law, 2) not knowing how to access their rights, 3) encountering familial and/or cultural resistance to accessing their rights, and 4) widespread ignorance or misinformation on what rights sharia law actually grants to women.

I also learned that members of these partner organizations -- paid and volunteer, female and male -- spend a lot of time reaching out to communities and building trust so that people will feel able to share their problems and ask for help. Field representatives of both sexes are necessary. Women need to be active in their struggle for their rights, and women survivors often only feel comfortable confiding in other women.

Men need to stand in solidarity with women, and many men in local communities are more receptive to the message of women’s rights, especially in a religious context, when it’s delivered by other men. In this way, slowly but surely, our partner groups in Indonesia and Pakistan are fertilizing the ground in which the seeds of women’s rights may grow.

What's more, I heard complaints from several people about Western tendencies to march in and start giving orders, pointing out the speck in the other's eye while ignoring the plank in their own and running roughshod over cultural and religious sensibilities different from theirs. This is not unique to Indonesia or Pakistan. Look at American gunpoint “diplomacy” around the world these days, especially in Muslim areas. Are we truly making anything better? Are we creating lasting, positive change? Or are we merely making millions of people feel disempowered, controlled, and resentful of us? Are we actually sowing resistance to the ideals we purport to uphold? We need to ask ourselves these questions at all levels, lest we inflict more wounds than we heal.

My experience in Indonesia has deepened my conviction that although we, Americans, have the power to tell people what they need, what to do, and how to run things, doing so will never produce meaningful, beneficial, lasting change. If you share this view, if you believe that giving people the tools to help themselves is ultimately a better strategy than simply trying to fix their problems for them, then consider donating to UUSC.