Fashion model gives back to Congo

Noella Coursaris Musunka/Maerzinger Photography

Born to a Congolese mother and a Cypriot father in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Noella Coursaris Musunka is a super model whose image graces billboards and magazine pages (Vanity Fair, Cosmopolitan, GQ, Arena etc) all over the world and represents brands such as Agent Provocateur, Apple ipod, Virgin Mobile and Barclays.

But Noella is a model in other ways too. The 27-year-old, who started her modelling career through a competition for Agent Provocateur in London and lived there for several years (she now lives in New York), has founded a non-governmental organization to advance girls’ education in Lubumbashi,  where she was born.  She is also a human rights activist, advising the UN, politicians, celebrities and corporations on the situation in her country.

Noella is coming to London on October 2nd to host “Creatives Unite For Congo”, a fashion show in profit of a school her NGO is building in Lubumbashi.  The show will showcase work by Congolese fashion designers IJO and Modahnik, the London brand MF Couture, as well as clothes made by girls from an orphanage supported by her NGO.

Noella’s father died when she was five and her mother, who didn’t have the resources to raise her on her own, sent her to live with relatives in Belgium, then Switzerland where she studied business. The silver lining to this traumatic event was a good education and a modelling career, which allows her to travel all over the world.

When she returned to the Congo to visit her mother 13 yeas later, she felt in love with the country. “The moment I stepped off the plane, I felt at home.”  The visit changed her forever. “From that moment I said to myself that one day I will do something back for my country. Even if I didn’t have my parents, I had been fortunate to have an education. I thought the best thing to do is pass on to others the same opportunity.”

So in 2007, she set up the Georges Malaika Foundation in New York in memory of her father. “His name was George and  “Malaika” in Swahili means angel.”

Noella and her team of non-profit and private industry professionals are building a sustainable school for 300 girls outside Lubumbashi and have already sponsored 16 girls with tuition, uniforms, meals and school supplies. The design for the school was donated by Studio MDA, the architects for Madonna’s Raising Malawi school, and the first stone was laid down in February by Khaliah Ali, the daughter of Mohammed Ali.


Over the last few years, she has addressed the DRC Parliament on violence faced by women of Eastern Congo and spoken at the UN and universities across the US about the war, which as been waged there for the last 10 years and killed more than 5.5 million people, and about rape being used as a weapon of war. But she also wants to focus on the beauty of the DRC, its culture and its people.

Creatives Unite For Congo: October 2^nd at 8pm at The Penthouse, 39-43 Underwood St.  N1 7LG London, for tickets or more information:  rsvp@gmfafrica.og

The Neighborhood Mosque

Here is a beautiful poem my friend the Iranian poet Majid Naficy wrote to stress the need to separate state and religion in Iran. “I have come to this realization that for me as an Iranian it is not enough to request separation of religion and state, but I should also show how this tragic fusion had taken place,” he told me.

Majid was born in the ancient city of Isfahan and became a published poet at the young age of 13. He was politically active against the Shah's regime. After the 1979 Revolution, the new regime began to suppress the opposition, and many people, including his first wife and brother were executed. He fled Iran in 1983 and settled in Los Angeles where he lives with his son. He has since published eight collections of poems, including Muddy Shoes and Father & Son.  

Here is his poem:

The Neighborhood Mosque

                  by Majid Naficy

In our neighborhood

There was a tiny mosque

Which had a dome, but no minarets,

And as a child I thought

That Ali had been stabbed there. (1)



The man who called us to prayer

Was a chubby laughing janitor

Who dyed his hair, and beards

Hands and feet with henna,

And the big toe of his right foot

Stuck out from his torn shoe.



Every day early in the morning

I awoke to his harsh bellow

From the rooftop of the mosque

And thought of the shivering boys

Who with sleep around their eyes

And copper bowls in their hands

Passed by the empty mosque

To buy brains and tongues

Ears and cheeks

From the lamb cookery

At the entrance of the alley.



The Revolution gave the mosque two tall minarets

With loudspeakers on their balconies

Blasting days and nights.

The mosque was filled with bearded men carrying rifles

And veiled women standing in line

Collecting their monthly ration carts 

From the state head of prayer

Near his pulpit or prayer niche. (2)

But the laughing muezzin had gone

And instead of him,

The son of the local lamb chef

Sat on the balcony of one of the minarets

Keeping an eye on the neighborhood.



From then on, I would cover my ears

At the sound of the call to prayer,

And never pass by the mosque again

Fearful that the bearded young men

Would jump on top of me

And butcher me in the prayer hall,

Then wash their dirty hands

AT the ablution pool

Without asking themselves:

Is it lawful to shed the blood of a "warring infidel"

In the confines of the neighborhood mosque?
 

          September 16, 2010

1. In 661, Ali, the first Imam of Shi'a muslims was fatally stabbed in a mosque in Kufa, Iraq.

2. Prayer niche (Mihrab) is a niche in the mecca-facing wall that marks the direction of prayer in a mosque where the leader of congregational prayer stations himself.

    

Barefoot Peace Walk - UN International Peace Day

On UN International Day of Peace, this Tuesday, walk for children, for the dispossessed, for peace. 

To mark the UN International Day of Peace on 21^st September, the International Refugee Trust (IRT) is holding a Barefoot Peace Walk in London to draw attention to a major humanitarian crisis taking place in Central East Africa in which 20-60,000 children have been abducted by the rebel group known as the  Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).

 On that day, the charity is asking people to wear white and walk through central London to raise awareness of the grim reality affecting millions of people in Central East Africa in one of the world’s worst and most neglected humanitarian crises.

Millions of civilians have suffered over the past 24 years in the struggle between the LRA and the Ugandan government. The group originated in Northern Uganda but is now spread across the Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic and South Sudan. The LRA is notorious for abducting children and forcing them to become soldiers and sexual slaves. The rebels target civilians, mutilating and killing on a horrific scale.

Campaigners are urging David Cameron’s coalition to help stop Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony, who has been abducting children to fight in his rebel army and rescue the children still in captivity. 

In support of the walk, author and comedian Jane Bussmann will perform her award-winning show ‘Bussmann’s Holiday’ (directed by Emmy winner Sally Phillips) at a special free event to be held at the Africa Centre from 7.30pm. 

A 20-year old former LRA abductee, Juliet, visited London this July with the charity War Child to share her experiences with school students, politicians and the media. Juliet hand-delivered a personal letter to Downing Street, urging the Prime Minister “to find a way to release girls and children who are still in the bush… this is an international problem and I ask you to take international leadership to stop this injustice."  An estimated 3,000 children are still held captive.

Regional governments are struggling to protect civilians and apprehend Kony and his top commanders. Campaigners are calling for the UK, which has strong ties to commonwealth nation Uganda and which contributes substantial aid to the region (£130m committed to the DRC), to demand value for money and stop Kony from destabilising the region. They urge Cameron's coalition to take a leading role in regional and international efforts to pursue peace and secure stability.

Barefoot Peace Walk participants will meet at 6pm next to St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square, tomorrow and leave at 6.30pm for a 45-minute walk through London past landmarks including the Houses of Parliament. People are encouraged to dress in white and to walk barefoot, but this is not compulsory. The walk finishes at the Africa Centre, 38 King Street, near Covent Garden, where the special evening event starts at 7.30pm. All activities are free to attend. IRT’s partners in Uganda and Sudan will take part in local events on the same day.

"People are being killed for hunting a small impala" – when conservation and human rights clash.

 

                                                  John Antonelli

                                                                                                                               

I’ve always dreamt of seeing lions, elephants and giraffes in their own habitats in the wild. And I thought that wildlife reserves were saving the environment while at the same time injecting money into local communities and providing jobs – they were win-win enterprises.

But I’ve met a woman in London a few months ago who told me it is not always the case and often the survival of endangered species is pitted against the rights of some of the world’s poorest people.  Since more and more people visit wildlife parks, I thought I’d share here some of her concerns about the situation in her own country, Swaziland.

                                                             John Antonelli

The woman, Thuli Brilliance Makama, is Swaziland's only public interest environmental lawyer. She won the 2010 Goldman Environmental Prize in April for defending the rights of local communities and trying to give them a stake in protecting the environment. The $900,000 award, the world's largest prize for environmental activism, is shared between winners from six continental regions of the world.   Thuli was in London briefly, on her way to collect her award in San Francisco.

Here is what is happening in Swaziland:

Swaziland is a small landlocked country in the middle of South Africa and Mozambique, plagued by food and water shortages, overwhelming health problems and acute poverty. Yet white rhinos, elephants, lions, zebras, hippos and mamba snakes all thrive in its diverse ecosystems, and the kingdom has become a popular international destination for big game hunters and wildlife tourists.

But, in the name of conservation, local people have increasingly been forced off of their traditional lands and persecuted for continuing the hunting and gathering practices necessary for their survival. “It is near the edges of protected areas that you find the poorest of the poor. There is so much animal life there, but so little for the people,” Thuli said. Near the lush parks, local populations eke out a meagre existence through a combination of foraging and food aid (more than 600,000 of the country's one million people depend of food aid).

 With her local NGO, Yonge Nawe, she has documented the forced evictions, violence and killings of locals living in areas around conservation parks. She is calling on the Swazi government to bring the perpetrators to trial and offer compensation to local communities for lost land.

Villagers next to a big game park.                        Hosea Jemba

In Swaziland, important game protection laws are controlled by the monarch - not the government - and the king has given the administration of these laws to a private company, Big Game Parks, which operates three parks in the country and is owned by the Reilly family. In 1997, an amendment to the Game Act (not debated in Parliament) gave BGP rangers immunity from prosecution as long as they acted while "protecting game".  Yonge Nawe claims that as many as 50 local people have been killed since then.

Ted Reilly, who turned his farm into the country's first wildlife sanctuary in the 1960s and whose conservation efforts are recognized internationally, insists that without his company, Swaziland's parks would not exist and says his rangers act within the law.  In the early 1990s, there were barely any rhinos left.  It's only because he fought back and became tough with poachers that wildlife flourished back, he told Associated Press.

But Thuli maintains that many of BGP rangers' targets are just ordinary people, struggling to survive on the fringes of the parks. "These are just hunters and gatherers who need this to survive. People are being killed for hunting a small impala.”   She says she is not condoning poaching, but wants to see the poachers prosecuted instead.

 She believes that Swazi's remaining wildlife will not survive unless local people are given a stake in preserving it and can share some of its benefits.  “It can been done. Look at Kenya and Zimbabwe.”

She has recently won a landmark case to include environmental NGO representation in conservation decisions, and is now able to call on the Swazi government to repeal Section 23 of the Game Act, which gives free reins to park rangers.

I am hoping to go to Swaziland and look at the conservation vs. human rights issue from both sides.

Out of Prison and Trying to go Straight – an ex-inmate records his attempts to put his criminal past behind him

Paul outside Wandsworth prison/photo by Caroline Irby

Can you really change after a life of crime? How easy is it to escape an addiction? And if you are trying to go straight, what help is available? These were the questions that prompted photographer Caroline Irby and I to follow Paul Johnston’s progress after his release from prison, where he had served eight years of a ten-year sentence for aggravated burglary. 

We first met Paul in September 2008 inside London’s Wandsworth prison, then at the prison's gates on his release and continued to track his journey as the weeks, months and finally years passed: in a greasy-spoon in Clapham Junction, at St Pancras, the Tate Modern - in cafes, on buses and on the street - then back in prison, in Hull, where he was in secondary rehab after his re-release, and finally now back in London. 

Now 48, Paul grew up in Fulham, London. His mother was a school dinner lady, his father a truck driver. Many members of his family and friends are involved in crime and drugs. Two of his brothers are currently in prison, one for life. Paul has been addicted to alcohol and drugs since he was 17, and has spent most of his life in prison. He is separated from his wife and has three children: a son, 27, who was in prison with him and now lives in Spain, a daughter, 18, and another son, 16.

Towards the end of his sentence, Paul decided to turn his life around and enter a rehabilitation programme run by Rapt (the Rehabilitation for Addicted Prisoners Trust). "I’ve been in jail all over the country for all these years, dealing and using drugs. At some point, I decided I had enough. I got desperate. I wanted my life to be more than this. It sounds flowery, but I want to be a better person."  In prison, Paul worked with St Giles Trust, a charity training prisoners and gained professional qualifications. He now wants to do a counseling degree, and then open a boxing/counseling centre for at risk youths with a friend, a former professional boxer.

But as with many of the 95,000 inmates released every year, Paul’s journey was not going to be easy.   Our piece (selected extracts from copious notebooks) chronicling his attempts to put his criminal past behind him over the past two years was published in the Guardian (G2) on August 5.  The piece is constructed as a diary in which Paul talks openly about his regrets, his fear of leaving behind the only life he has ever known, his worries about his lack of money and a place to stay, and his anger and frustration at all the administrative hurdles he has to jump over. Looking back at his life, he talks about his childhood, what makes him trip, what gives him hope and strength.

The piece ends on a depressing note: Paul is pretty desperate – he has no job, no money and no idea how to live a normal life. But the article shows how important RAPt and other drug rehabilitation and reinsertion programmes are, and how without sustained help to find a job and housing, ex-offenders have little hope to succeed outside. Considering that keeping an inmate behind bars costs  about £44,000 a year, investing in good, consistent rehabilitation/resettlement programmes would be money well spent.

Read our article here.

Haiti - Bigotry and the fight for survival six months after the quake

Three years ago, photographer Caroline Irby and I went to Haiti to follow a group of poor, uneducated, but feisty and courageous HIV-positive women who were leading the fight against AIDS and its stigma in Cite Soleil and some of the other poor and volatile slums of Port-au-Prince.  (Read our piece in the Telegraph Magazine.)

Calling themselves the Delegate Mothers, the women brought medical care, material assistance, psychological support and education to some 250 families affected by HIV/AIDS – including 500 children.  They stepped in when foreign aid workers were forced to flee the country in 2004 and Haitians from outside the slums wouldn’t venture there. They volunteered for Rainbow House, a local support centre for people with HIV or AIDS, backed by Plan International, a children humanitarian charity.

Most people in Haiti, especially in the countryside, believe AIDS is caused by a curse, so they shun HIV-positive people for fear of attracting the evil eye on to themselves. If infected, they believe that only a voodoo priest can help them.

The general situation in Haiti was already pretty desperate when we were there, but now six months after the January 12 earthquake that killed more than 210,000 people and injured up to 300,000, it is a living hell. Over 1.5 million people are still surviving in tents. The infrastructure, already very poor, is still heavily damaged (including water, electricity, health services and roads), the risk of crime - looting, kidnapping and gun violence - is high and the security situation is extremely volatile.

Insecurity, overcrowding, sexual violence and lack of sanitary facilities are making life in the camps a misery, especially for women and girls. But for the Delegate Mothers and people with HIV, there is an extra challenge.  Bigotry and fear of HIV have forced the Delegate Mothers and their families and other people with HIV/AIDS out of camps and some are now sleeping in front of the rubble that was once were their homes.

                                    Delegate Mother helping with cleaning

“I avoid the camps because there is a lot of discrimination”, says Marie-Lucienne Milotes, a 40-year-old Delegate Mother whom I interviewed in 2007. “People refuse to sleep next to us.”

“Neighbours point their fingers at the children and say, they are from the AIDS family”, says Rosala Persona, a 67-year-old grandmother who looks after eight grandchildren after two of her own children died of AIDS-related causes.

Despite their circumstances, Rosala, Marie-Lucienne and the other Delegate Mothers have been working every day since the earthquake to help other families affected by AIDS in their communities.  

With 2.5 to 5% of its population infected,  Haiti has the highest number of people living with HIV and AIDS outside sub-Saharan Africa.

Coping with the aftermath of the earthquake is a huge challenge for almost everyone in Port-au-Prince.  But for those living with HIV/AIDS, every day is a struggle to survive.

Rosala and Marie Lucienne never doubt for a second that they would continue with their work after the earthquake.

“God has allowed us to survive the earthquake,” says Rosala. “To show our gratitude we will continue to visit the families in our communities.”

I am hoping to return to Haiti in the autumn to meet the Delegate Mothers again for a one-year after the earthquake story.

Save the ancient cork forests- put a cork in it

I am just back from a reporting trip looking at the beautiful Montados, the cork forests in Portugal, which produce more than 50% of all the cork consumed worldwide. These forests, which spread over 2.7 million hectares along the Mediterranean Basin in Portugal, Spain, North Africa, France and Italy, are listed amongst the world’s major biodiversity hotspots and support an economy and culture that have grown up around cork farming over thousands of years.

The recent trend of replacing cork wine stoppers with plastic and screw caps, however, is threatening these forests and the animal and people who depend on them to survive.  Synthetic tops now account for close to 30 per cent of the some 17 billion stoppers used every year. If this trend continues, up to three quarters of the Mediterranean's cork forests could be lost within 10 years, estimates the World Wildlife Fund. 

It is harvest time in the Montado forest of Coruche in the Alentejo. Groups of men from nearby villages are skilfully stripping the thick bark off the cork oak trees with a special axe, performing the same precise, measured gestures as their fathers and grandfathers have done before them.  Women gather the bark strips into large piles, which men load onto tractors. They paint the year of the harvest on the light chocolate tree trunks, so they won’t be touched again for another nine years. The cork oak (Quercus Suber L.) lives up to 250 years and can on average be stripped 16 times during its lifetime, producing enough cork in each harvest to cover 4,000 wine bottles.

The cork forest I visited is a mosaic of cork and other oaks species, pine trees (producing pine nuts), wild olive trees, many different brackens and grassland.  Each one thousand square meter of forest contains about 135 species of plants, many with aromatic, culinary, or medicinal properties. 



The longevity of the cork forests and the diversity of the flora they harbor provide a myriad of niches for many different animals, says Nuno Oliveira, an independent conservation biologist, who guided our visit.  The forests’ open areas, shrubs and tree crowns offer escape, cover, nidification and foraging grounds to 24 species of reptiles and amphibians, 37 mammal species and 100 birds species, some of which are endangered, like the Imperial Eagle and Iberian Lynx.  The forests also host large colonies of insects of all kinds, which provide abundant food for birds nesting in the area and stopping here during migration.

These ancient forests absorb 10 million tones of CO2 every year and act as the last barrier against advancing desertification in North Africa.

Then there are the people: The Mediterranean cork forests not only support some 100,000 cork workers  (harvesting, general forestry and industrial processing), but also sustain a traditional way of life. There, farmers have practiced a low-intensity mix of agriculture and forestry for millennia - on even a small patch of cork land, they can raise a herd of goats, a few cows, goats and some pigs, which forage for acorns and graze beneath the trees. Villagers gather mushrooms, use rockrose bushes for firewood and tap local beehives for honey.

 “The Montado is not about top species like lions or elephants, but it is its communities of plants and animals – so rich, so diverse and living in perfect harmony – that make it so unique,” says Rainforest Alliance local representative Rui Simoes. In fact, he adds, the cork forests are one of the best examples of balanced conservation and development anywhere in the world. 

To help protect their endangered cork forests, cork producers in Portugal, Spain and Morocco are working with Rainforest Alliance through its Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification, which shows they comply with the highest social and environmental standards of the market.  Cork manufacturers in Portugal have also significantly improved the quality of their corks and launched publicity campaigns to urge consumers and retailers to value the cork in their wine bottles.