Showing Concern

“Concern, in Biafra, was not a one-hit wonder. It is now working in 30 different regions in Africa, Asia and Haiti. There are 4,000 people working for it in local communities”

SECOND READING

Fr Kevin Hegarty

Beatrice, a young Ugandan woman, is set to begin her studies at an American university next autumn. She is already familiar with the US. Last summer she was an intern in Senator Hillary Clinton’s campaign office. What a change for her, going from the mire of poverty to the privilege of American campus life.

There is an Irish angle to her success story. We, in local newspapers, are always looking for that kind of angle, a syndrome famously expressed in 1914 in an editorial in the ‘Skibbereen Eagle’ claiming it was keeping its eye on Russia. Maybe it is more than an Irish thing. Part of being human is a desire to make connections. There was a popular song in the 1920s which has the line ‘I danced with a man who danced with a girl who danced with the Prince of Wales’.

Anyway, the Irish input into Beatrice’s story is a Munster goat. Her family received the goat some years ago. This little improvement resulted in Beatrice being able to attend primary school.

In the last 17 years ‘Bóthar’, the Limerick-based livestock aid charity, has sent almost 4,000 cows and thousands of sheep, goats and pigs, usually to destinations in Africa. The animals go to families who have been selected by a committee of people from their community and who have attained qualifications in animal husbandry. The families promise to take care of the animal and to pass along the first female offspring to a neighbour. In the words of Peter Ireton, Chief Executive of Bóthar: “When it all works out it creates an economic cycle that has to be seen to be believed.”

So great things can come from small beginnings. One March day, almost 40 years ago, John O’Loughlin-Kennedy and his wife, Kay, hosted a meeting in their Dublin home, at the instigation of John’s brother, Fr Raymond, who was working as a Holy Ghost missionary in Biafra.

In 1967, political leaders in Biafra declared independence from Nigeria. This led to a civil war, society collapsed, famine followed. By the summer of 1968, 6,000 people were dying every week of malnutrition.

For Irish people, Biafra was the first television famine. Images of suffering dominated our screens. These images struck a chord here. They reminded us of our historical experience of famine in the 19th century. The Biafran strike for independence resonated with our similar struggle with England. The many Irish missionaries working in Biafran parishes, schools and hospitals made a further connection.

Forty people attended the meeting in the O’Loughlin-Kennedy home. The reality of the tragic situation in Biafra was graphically brought home to them by the eyewitness accounts of Chief Jerome Udoji and Chief Robert Obisa, who had arrived in Dublin on that day.

By the end of the meeting there was a fervent desire to respond to the critical needs of Biafra. Africa Concern was established. Its aim was modest – to send one ship to Biafra with emergency supplies. The public response was an Irish miniature of the global response to Bob Geldof’s ‘Live Aid’ initiative in the 1980s. By the end of 1968, £3.5 million was donated, equivalent to €64 million today.

The response encouraged the committee to buy, rather than hire, a ship. In September 1968, the SS Colmcille sailed for Sao Tome, a small island off the coast of West Africa. From this island supplies were flown directly into Biafra to avoid detection by the Nigerian government. Between 1968 and 1970 over 5,000 flights were made into that bereft and broken land.

Concern, in Biafra, was not a one-hit wonder. It is now working in 30 different regions in Africa, Asia and Haiti. There are 4,000 people working for it in local communities. It has a staff of 250 in its fund-raising headquarters in Ireland, the UK and the US.

The direction of the work has changed somewhat from what might be called fire brigade operations of emergency relief to creating programmes that effect sustainable development in third world countries. Though the organisation continues to respond positively to outbreaks of famine or the occurrence of natural disasters, the emphasis has changed to the rooting out of the causes of poverty. It now mobilises global expertise, local resources and its own experience in the field to find better ways of delivering aid. It contributes to international policy on development issues. Last May the UN adapted a new community-based approach on acute malnutrition, pioneered by Concern and its partners.

Much remains to be done. Between one billion and two billion of the world’s 6.5 million people remain in a poverty trap.

Concern’s main aim is to show how poverty can be defeated within a realistic timeframe. We can help. A Saw Doctors’ song shows us the way. The narrator of ‘I Used to Love Her’ is so smitten with a young woman he sees on a Concern Fast on Christmas Eve that he makes ‘an ostentatious contribution’. Let’s do it.