Repairing The Breach

Personal Reflection For the past 16 years I have worked for Tearfund, a Christian organisation that supports community development and humanitarian relief work overseas and within Australia. In that time, my work has taken me to many places that most people don’t get to travel to. I’ve met many people who struggle with poverty and hardships that most Australians would find hard to imagine, let alone understand or empathise with. If I’m honest, I have to admit that even after so many years of working with people who live in difficult and challenging circumstances I still really struggle, imaginatively and emotionally, to put myself in their shoes. Sometimes it’s just too confronting. People like the 3 children I met in Uganda, all under the age of 12, who lost their parents to AIDS and were living alone in a small wattle-and-daub house and working their family farm as a child-headed household. People like the families I met under a newly built-cyclone shelter on the low-lying mud islands of the Ayeyarwady River delta in Myanmar - families who had left a life of poverty and struggle in other parts of Myanmar to build a new life farming and fishing in the river delta, only to lose children, husbands, wives and everything they owned when 2008’s deadly Cyclone Nargis struck, killing 70% of the people in the village. People like the Cambodian families who welcomed me into their small, crowded homes built from scrap wood, tin and tarp over a black, filthy swamp where the rubbish and waste of Phnom Penh accumulates in the wet season - and even there they were vulnerable to forced eviction with no compensation as the wealthy and powerful did deals with the government to develop the city. Old boat - Carol Aust 47