Search results for: indonesia
Indonesian floods and the class divide
Monsoon rains that began December 31 have brought catastrophic flooding and landslides to Jakarta, West Java, and Banten in Indonesia, with more rain expected in the coming weeks. Over 35,000 people have been displaced and more than 1,300 homes damaged. At the time of this writing at least 66 people have been confirmed dead. One…
Read MoreWhere witchcraft trials still happen
In the Northern Region of Ghana, Halloween isn’t so much not celebrated as not heard of. The closest I got to celebrating was giving some candy to my Humanist Action: Ghana teammates and watching a scary movie. As the next US holiday follows quickly, I am reminded that these holidays are intimately tied to violently…
Read MoreWorld Faith Counters Violence and Poverty Though Interfaith Engagement
World Faith, our Challenge the Gap beneficiary during July, August, and September 2015, endeavors to disincentive violence. How? By countering cultural narratives that explicitly or implicitly create divisions and animosity between diverse groups. By encouraging humanization through volunteering together to work on shared community concerns—rather than traditional interfaith dialogue—and addressing the underlying economic issues that…
Read MoreHumanist Community of Central Ohio: Two Years and Bleeding!
This month, members of the Humanist Community of Central Ohio (HCCO) will get together for our regular Bleed & Feed: a group blood donation service project followed by dinner. But this event is special – on September 15th, the group will be celebrating two years of regular blood donations. We anticipate reaching 80 units of blood donated over the last two years: that’s ten gallons of blood and dozens of lives saved!
The Bleed & Feed takes place every eight weeks – the minimum waiting period required between donations by the Red Cross. Participating members gather at the donor center for their appointments, cheer one another on, and then migrate to a nearby restaurant for a post-donation dinner.
The core Bleed & Feed group is about six HCCO members, with others joining in as their work and donation schedules allow. While we had around 3-5 units donated at our early events, the HCCO team now donates between 6-10 units each event between whole blood and apheresis donations. Part of the increase is from our members joining the cause; another reason is our informal competition between our group and the Seattle Atheists’ donor team.
The “Feed” is a critical part of the event. Everyone loves to have dinner with good company. We have members join us for the dinner who aren’t able to join us for the donation – and that’s great! We rotate our restaurant choices so that no one gets bored: we’ve had Mexican, Indonesian, Greek, tacos, steak, Italian and Chinese. Once we even went to a restaurant that specialized in bison! But we’re always careful to make sure there are vegetarian options wherever we go – we have more than a few vegetarians in our group, and we don’t want anyone to be left out.
Read More