2nd October, 2006

DAVID ADAMS

Emily Price had never met someone who was HIV positive before she met Sopal, a Cambodian woman aged in her late 20s who was taking part in a program called Women of Hope in which HIV sufferers are helping to educate others about the disease.

“It was just an amazing experience and we sat down and had this amazing interview with these women and they told us everything about their lives and they us about the discrimination that they‘d suffered as HIV sufferers...” says the 21-year-old from New South Wales.

A NEW PERSPECTIVE: Emily Price meets some children working on the streets of Phnom Penh. "The trip was very much about trying to create the sorts of global partnerships outlined in the Millennium Development Goals that mean that these sorts of things are possible - it was about giving a group of young Australians the experiences to be able to come back and speak to Australia from firsthand experience of understanding what these issues are, what these issues mean,” says Oaktree's Simon Moss.

“All of the women were married and most of their husbands had died...but they were just so passionate and so empowering and so strong. I’ve never met such strong women.”

Price, who lives in Beecroft in Sydney, says that not only do they had to deal with living the disease, they also faced estrangement from their families and being shunned by those who lived around them. Even their children are left without friends in the playground because of the stigma attached to the disease.

“All these kinds of barriers they’d had to overcome and yet they were so strong.”

In July this year, Price was among seven young people, aged 18 to 23, who went on a three week trip with the organisation to Thailand and Cambodia as part of what Australian youth-run aid and development agency Oaktree are calling 'Our Generation’s Challenge'.

Simon Moss, one of the team's two leaders and the oldest in the group, says the idea of 'Our Generation's Challenge' was inspired by a book written by economist Jeffrey Sachs called The End of Poverty which examines how the Millennium Development Goals - a series of eight goals signed up to by world leaders in 2000 which include halving extreme poverty, halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education, all by a deadline of 2015 - are achievable.

“The last chapter of the book was called Our Generation’s Challenge and...it was very much saying that our generation is the very first to have the means at it’s disposal to end the sort of poverty that we see people are living in - the less than a dollar a day sort of poverty that means people don’t have access to education and health care...and safe drinking water.”

Moss, who has just finished an arts degree at the University of Melbourne and runs training workshops as well as working at Oaktree where he is the Victorian director, says the book asks the question of whether, given that the means is now possible, there is the political and social will to end global poverty.

“Where we came in...was a group of us at Oaktree having read that - and a couple of people having met up with Jeff Sachs (who is the also director of the UN Millennium Project, a body commissioned to develop a concrete action plan to tackle global poverty, hunger and disease) when he was out in Australia last year - saying ‘We think there’s actually something that we can do to show that that’s the sort of challenge that our generation is willing to take up; the sort of challenge that our generation - not everyone, of course - is interested in',” he says.

“And the trip was very much about trying to create the sorts of global partnerships outlined in the Millennium Development Goals that mean that these sorts of things are possible - it was about giving a group of young Australians the experiences to be able to come back and speak to Australia from firsthand experience of understanding what these issues are, what these issues mean.”

Moss says the trip was also about creating relationships so the trip was just about saying ‘You’re poor, we’re rich, isn’t that bad for you’ but about actively working with those living in poverty to achieve their goals.

The trip saw the the group, who came from across Australia, talking with representatives of the United Nations Development Program and other UN organisations, Cambodian Government ministers and non-government organisations as well as visiting people who were the recipients of the programs being implemented to achieve the Millennium Development Goals.

While Oaktree generally run between two and four study trips a year, Moss says this trip was different because the focus was not on the work of Oaktree itself but on the broader work the UN is doing to achieve the Millennium Development Goals.

LOOKING FOR A BRIGHT FUTURE: Simon Moss, seen here talking with students at the Royal University of Phnom Penh, says that one of the standout lessons it held for him was that people, regardless of where they live, usually have much the same desires and concerns.

“This is the only trip of this sort that we’re running this year and we’re hoping to be able to run it next year,” he says.

It’s also envisaged that in the future the trip will be expanded to include visits to countries like Bangladesh and Malawi.

Moss says that for him, one of the standout lessons from the trip, was that people, regardless of where they live in the world, usually have the same concerns and desires.

“They’re concerned for their friends, they’re concerned for their families, they’re concerned for their futures and that anything we do to try and support people to live out the sort of lives that they want - that they should have a right to - is something that we should pursue.”

He says this is particularly the case in places like Cambodia where 25 years of war has almost wiped out and entire generation, resulting in a severe lack of health care professionals and teachers and mid-level bureaucrats.

“It’s saying how can we actually support people in those circumstances down to just the simple things - like saying ‘Because this country is poor, the government doesn’t have enough money to run schools or hospitals so people are dying or people are going uneducated all just because they don’t have enough money and eventually they might be able to work towards that but how in the meantime can we support them in helping them to build the sort of country that allows them to do that themselves’.”

Another of those who went on this year’s trip, Gemma Arthurson, says that along with a visit to Africa last year, it has helped to shape the future direction of her life.

The 20-year-old who hails from Park Orchards in Melbourne says that while the two month trip to South Africa, Namibia , Botswana and Zambia - where she took part in volunteer projects including working in a hospital in Zambia and on a kibbutz in South Africa - helped her to decide to undertake a degree in international studies (which she is now doing at Melbourne’s RMIT University), the recent trip had given her a new perspective on tackling issues like global poverty.

“We were talking to people that could shape policies and things like that so it was kind of a totally different angle to eradicating poverty...” she says. “I’d always thought I’d want to do more volunteering and stuff like that - and volunteering is fantastic, don’t get me wrong - but after meeting with those people that shape those big decisions and stuff like that, I think I want to work on something that can impact more people across the world, if that makes sense.”

Price, meanwhile, says a common theme that kept coming up during the trip was the importance of education as a way out of poverty.

‘It’s something that Oaktree really advocates for but it’s something different being able to hear it personally from people who are rising out of poverty.”

She cited a visit to the Cambodian Children’s Fund as an example of what can be achieved.

“There’s a huge rubbish dump on the edge of Phnom Penh and the children fossick there with their families for plastic and tin and glass and things that they can sell to try and make a living,” she says. “So the children that live on the rubbish dump are living in extreme poverty. But CCF takes them from the rubbish dump and provides them with an education. So that was just one practical example I could see of just the transformation an education can bring to an individual’s life.”

A CHANGED LIFE: Gemma Arthurson, shown here meeting a student at the Cambodian Children’s Foundation, says trip helped to give her a new perspective on tackling issues like global poverty.

Price, who became involved with Oaktree at Macquarie University where she’s studying arts/law with a major in anthropology after hearing about the organisation at a church youth group, says it was on a mission trip to Bolivia in South America earlier this year that she really developed a passion for helping the poor.

“We were working in village communities with children all around the city of Cochabamba...” she says. “I was just working with the missionaries with a lot of different children’s groups - my favorite part was the baby washing ministry (which) we did at the rubbish dump which was amazing. So, yeah, that just all catapulted my passion for the poor which I think is something that God has given me.”

Now editing a resource for youth looking at the Millennium Development Goals, Price says her faith was an essential part of the way in which she responded to the trip.

“When I see someone who is in need, I instantly think of that verse from Matthew (25:40 -'“Whatever you did for the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me') and I can’t walk past them,” she says. “I’ve also been challenged by Micah 6:8 which is actually the verse of the Micah Challenge Campaign - ‘What does the Lord ask of you but to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God’. I think it’s a struggle when you’re doing all these great things to walk humbly with God but I think that’s what you have to do because He’s the source of that sense of a need for justice and I can’t sustain it on my own.”

~ www.theoaktree.org