Category Archives: International News

News about SDIA, projects in other countries, and other international news.

Help Deliver Health Services in the Congo!

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A new bridge connects the two parts of Kwilu Ngongo, providing a reliable access to the Mother and Child Hospital.

In many parts of the world thousands of people die from causes that would be preventable if they had basic services like clean water, sanitary toilets and access to simple healthcare procedures and medicines. In places that do not have these infants often die of diarrheal disease and mothers, often too young to safely carry a child, die from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth. Continue reading →

Healthcare for a Neglected Population: SD DRC Stage II

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Mother and Child at the hostpital

Mother and Child at the hostpital

Decades of conflict and a lack of government investment have made it hard for people in the DRC to access basic healthcare. The distances, cost of transport, lack of health infrastructure, bad roads, burden of disease, poverty and poor nutrition combine to create a toxic mix that results in one of the highest child and maternal mortality rates in the world. Continue reading →

What is the Susila Dharma Network?

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“What is the Susila Dharma Network?” This question came up in a recent flurry of emails—and it surprised me. It surprised me because I use this term frequently in my writing about Susila Dharma, and I had supposed that everybody knew what it meant. One of our board members thought it meant SDIA, the international Susila Dharma organization. But this is not right.

The Susila Dharma International Association (SDIA) is not the “boss” of Susila Dharma, nor is SD USA the “boss” of Susila Dharma in the United States. Actually, the opposite is true. The organizations are here to facilitate Susila Dharma work, but we are more like servants than masters. Our responsibility is to help create a structure through which Subud members, working in community, can carry out humanitarian work, and to express through action in the world what we receive in our latihan kedjiwaan.

So why do we use the term Network? Well, it is a network of projects and supporting organizations like SDIA and the SD National organizations, but most importantly, it is a network of people. Some of these people work on projects, some work on fundraising, some contribute their time and money, and some are not even in Subud. The people we are trying to assist are also part of the Susila Dharma Network, and their contribution, while less obvious, is perhaps the most important of all. Walt Whitman wrote: “The gift is to the giver and comes back most to him. It cannot fail.” By giving this work and this support, each of us receives. “It cannot fail.”

So, the Susila Dharma Network is all of us. Because we are a network, there is an opportunity for communication from the top down or from the bottom up, but communication can also move in unexpected sideways directions and this allows space for the inspiration of the divine, which is almost always unexpected, to enter.