It's not that I have been secretly cherishing a desire to write Ireland's earliest Christmas article, but I would like you to start thinking about buying Christmas cards, right now. No, it's not an about-face from my usual bemoaning of the commercialisation of Christmas, writes Breda O'Brien.
The cards I have in mind are handmade from renewable materials by Nature's Garden, a women's co-operative in the Philippines.
Last January, after the tsunami, I wrote an article pointing out that while the effects of the tsunami were devastating, there are places in the world that endure similar losses but do not receive the same publicity.
As an example, I chose a little village called Kiloloron in the Philippines, which had been destroyed by flash floods and landslides, made much worse by indiscriminate logging. Frankly, I was surprised by the level of response. People sent me cheques, and Irish people with connections in the Philippines even made direct contact with the co-operative.
Some readers rightly chided me for not providing contact details at the end of the article. I compounded the problem by giving some of you an email address, when the reality is that internet access has not been restored to the area even yet, some 10 months later.
The last time I wrote that there were parallels with the tsunami. Hurricane Katrina has since wreaked havoc in the Gulf Coast states of the US. While disasters affect everyone, what each of these horrific events demonstrates is that the poor suffer much, much more.
Hurricane Katrina showed that the problem is not just that the city of New Orleans lives below the normal water levels of the Mississippi river and Lake Pontchartrain, but that an alarming number of its inhabitants, nearly one in three, lives below the poverty level. The US has been forced to admit to the scandal of poverty in the midst of wealth, and it has led to an unprecedented degree of soul-searching.
We may shake our heads at the manifest injustice of so many Americans, particularly African-Americans, barely subsisting in a country of untold wealth, but we cannot afford to be complacent. On a global scale, there are millions of people eking out miserable existences, while we in the developed world profit from their labour. As the world grows smaller and we learn more and more about our neighbours, we cannot just point the finger at the US.
It is encouraging that the Irish government will meet the UN goal of donating 0.7 per cent of GNP in development assistance by 2012. It was deeply disappointing when it reneged on its original promise to meet it by 2007, but it is more likely this commitment will be honoured. However, the poor of the world cannot wait for the massive structural changes in trade and aid that would ensure them justice. They need help right now. That does not mean abandoning advocacy for change, because advocacy for justice and immediate help must happen simultaneously.
Sr Anne Brittain, an English Sister of Sion, is one of those responsible for originally setting up the Nature's Garden project in Kiloloron. The village where she has chosen to live desperately needed sustainable sources of income. The work that the women decided on as a source of income is highly labour intensive.
They share the tasks in rotation: chopping the banana trunks and cogon grass, cooking the fibre, washing, sieving and pressing the materials, drying them, and cutting the resulting handmade paper into sheets. Another group of women design and make the cards, again completely by hand. The tragedy is that the equipment slowly and painfully accrued by the women was destroyed by the floods, as were their homes.
Angie, one of the most talented designers, recently had the terrifying experience of seeing her toddler, Patricia, succumb to dengue fever. Just as in New Orleans, where they fear the floods will result in increased mosquito activity, Patricia probably contracted dengue from mosquitoes breeding in stagnant water. Dengue is very serious for the old and the vulnerable.
There is good and bad news from Kiloloron. The good news includes the fact that the co-operative, through a mixture of grants and wage advances, has helped almost 70 families to rebuild. Sr Anne also marvels at the resilience and courage of the people, who have managed to surmount the hammerblow that nature, in combination with human indifference to the environment, managed to inflict on them. The bad news is that the rainy season has not yet started, and there is huge fear among the people that the landslides and floods will happen again. There has been no replanting, nor any governmental attempts to shore up the damage done by the logging. Nor is anyone sure what course the local river will take once in full spate again.
In spite of living with that threat, the women's co-operative is back in full operation. They hope to buy a "jeepney", a kind of hybrid bus and jeep, to transport the cards to Manila because travelling by bus with boxes of cards is becoming unsustainable.
In an interesting reflection of the changing times we live in, one of the people who sells the cards here in Ireland is a Filipina, though not from anywhere near Kiloloron. She is a lay missionary to Ireland, and has worked in parishes in Kildare and Wicklow. Her name is Gracia Kibad, and one of the reasons she supports the work is because it demonstrates so well what people in adversity can produce, and the dignity which work can bring.
The cards are also sold by Gorta in their shops, at around €1.50 a card.
Given that they are miniature works of art, they are cheap. Anyone wishing to order Christmas cards, beautiful notebooks, bookmarks, or generic cards, can contact Mary Kenny.
Mary is a friend of the indefatigable Helen Mitchell, whom I mentioned in the last article. Helen, an Irish laywoman, finds time to support this project in addition to her own heavy workload with the poorest of the poor in a diocese in the Philippines, but far from Kiloloron. The least the rest of us could do is to buy a few Christmas cards, even if it is still September.
Orders for cards can now be placed with Mary Kenny on 01-8253205, or by email at marykenny10@eircom.net