Category Archives: International News

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

Guru Krupa Foundation Renews Anisha Kitchen Garden Project

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Susila Dharma USA is proud and happy to report that Project Anisha has received the second year of funding for its Kitchen Garden Project from the Guru Krupa Foundation based in New York state. The Foundation has given another grant of $10,000 to Anisha this year to continue its four-year educational project to teach over 1400 middle school students to grow organic kitchen gardens at their homes.

The Kitchen Garden Project at Anisha teaches families to grow small-scale kitchen gardens, producing organic vegetables from native seeds. This can make a significant difference in their health and standard of living.

These students live in the Martalli Region of Karnataka State in Southern India. Their families, often single-parent, struggle every day with extreme poverty and everything that results from it. They live in a drought-prone area that is also hard-hit by the effects of climate change. Learning to grow small-scale kitchen gardens producing organic vegetables grown from native seeds (initially supplied by Anisha’s native seed bank) can make a significant difference in improving the standard of living in this area. It can help to stem the flow of farming families that are forced to abandon their homes in India’s countryside and move into the dumping grounds of India’s big city slums.

We are so appreciative of the support provided by the Guru Krupa Foundation to help Anisha do its vitally important work! Please visit their website to learn about their impressive work in both the United States and India – www.guru-krupa.org.

You can read more about Anisha on our web site and see a slide presentation about the Kitchen Garden Project below.

Disaster Relief Agencies for Hurricane Harvey

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Many people have been contacting us to find out whether we are doing anything to send aid to those made homeless by Hurricane Harvey. SD USA is not a disaster relief organization,  but we are very happy to refer our members to organizations that do this work much more efficiently than we would be able to. Here are some links to disaster relief organizations now active in Texas and Louisiana.

You can see an updated list of organizations accepting monetary donations here.

Texas Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster website for a list of vetted disaster relief organizations.

American Red Cross – You can donate directly to the American Red Cross to assist hurricane victims. Minimum online donation is $10. To donate visit redcross.org, call 1- 800-RED CROSS or text the word HARVEY to 90999 to make a $10 donation.

Salvation Army – Call 1-800-SAL-ARMY, go to the donate online or send your contribution, earmarked “Disaster Relief,” to The Salvation Army, 10755 Burt St, Omaha, NE 68114.

Catholic Charities USA – Donated funds go to support recovery efforts, including direct assistance, rebuilding and health care services. You can donate here.

Here is an excellent article by Episcopal Relief & Development on how we can help and what kind contribution is most helpful.

How does a Baby’s Brain Work?

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The first year a baby’s brain needs love to develop. What happens in the first year is profound.

By Yudhijit Bhattacharjee Photographs by Lynn Johnson
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, January 2015

In the late 1980s, when the crack cocaine epidemic was ravaging America’s cities, Hallam Hurt, a neonatologist in Philadelphia, worried about the damage being done to children born to addicted mothers. She and her colleagues, studying children from low-income families, compared four-year-olds who’d been exposed to the drug with those who hadn’t. They couldn’t find any significant differences. Instead, what they discovered was that in both groups the children’s IQs were much lower than average.

“These little children were coming in cute as buttons, and yet their IQs were, like, 82 and 83,” Hurt says. “Average IQ is 100. It was shocking.”

The revelation prompted the researchers to turn their focus from what differentiated the two groups toward what they had in common: being raised in poverty.

How does a Baby’s Brain Work? video from The National Geographic, Jan. 2015

The researchers found that children who received more attention and nurturing at home tended to have higher IQs. Children who were more cognitively stimulated performed better on language tasks, and those nurtured more warmly did better on memory tasks. The results demonstrated just how critically important an emotionally supportive environment is at a very young age.

Read the National Geographic article here as a PDF file.

 

Continue reading →

SD in the Democratic Republic of Congo

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With an average income of less than $200 (USD) a year, the Democratic Republic of Congo is one of the poorest countries in the world. Corruption is rife and the government provides less than a minimum of public services. Transportation presents a terrible problem for any endeavor, with few roads maintained sufficiently for any but the most rugged vehicles. Public education is nonexistent and healthcare is unavailable for those without money.

25083370606_7d13083226_oFor many years Susila Dharma Projects in the DRC in education and healthcare have been struggling with this very difficult situation, trying to find ways to create schools and healthcare centers that can meet the needs of the people in an affordable way without going bankrupt. There have been failures, but the overall progress thas been astonishing. Continue reading →