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Blog Post Posted March 11, 2010, 4:11 pm by Paul Souders

We've tidied up the website

Before and after images of the newly refreshed website

It's been not quite a year since we redesigned MercyCorps.org using Drupal. I've been watching the new design in action for the last 11 months. I noticed a few places where the new design wasn't quite performing the way I had hoped. So I've spent the last month or so refactoring the design using two new design principles. (Well, they were new to me).

First, I developed a new geometry for the site structure based on the 960 grid system. (Thus, this little project came to be called "the 960 project" here in the Web Cave.) Simply put, I changed the width of the site from about 994 pixels to 960 pixels. 960 is one of those magic numbers that's easily divisible by lots of numbers — so it's easy to break the site up into two or three or four (or, theoretically, twelve or twenty-four) columns. This saves us a lot of trouble calculating the widths of columns and fudging the width of the last column by a pixel or two get everything nicely aligned.

Since I was already mucking around in the HTML and PHP, I decided to go full-tilt and clean up the stylesheets that govern the look and feel of the website. I did this more-or-less according to principles of object-oriented CSS. This concept is a little more abstract and harder to explain — and really new to me. To generalize, I use some style selectors (usually classes) to tell me what a thing looks like (its colour, font size, margins); other styles (generally IDs) that tell me how it behaves in the layout (its width, height, text wrap, etc). I reserve special style selectors (usually default HTML tags) to tell me what a thing is (its semantics: is it a paragraph, a subheading, a list item?). I try really hard not to mix too much appearance into layout or semantics, and I try not to make cosmetic selectors carry semantic water.

Refactoring the stylesheets had a curious side effect: it became very easy to enforce design discipline. My first step was to define the cosmetic and layout selectors, so when it came time to clean up the HTML, I could just mix and match those classes into the HTML to achieve a desired effect, usually without having to write a special custom selector. It was like: for a decade building websites had been a little bit like pottery, where each new effect or style required throwing a bunch of wet clay onto the wheel, and thinking it from the ground up. But now it's as if I'm working with a box full of several standard-size Legos that I can mix and match. This might seem like it's constraining, but it's turning out to be surprisingly liberating. I can easily experiment with an element's appearance in the Drupal template, just by adding or changing classes.

These two processes — transitioning to the new layout grid, and cleaning up the styles — has created kind of mini-redesign. The new(ish) Mercy Corps website features:

• A standard colour palette. We previously had almost 20 kinds of "brown" — where we only really needed six.
• A brighter palette and cleaner pages. Because pages are more efficiently organised, I didn't need a lot of lines and background colours (all brown, apparently) to divide up the content.
• Larger fonts and more whitespace.
• Larger photos.
• And yet, improbably, most pages aren't any longer, despiting being fit into a slightly narrower (by 34 pixels) frame.

Finally, I hope all these changes — subtle though they may be — improve the user experience. We have a lot of great content on our site, almost every piece of it connected to something else. I feared our website was underselling those connections by pushing them out to the margins of the page. I hope those connections bubble up, keeping you engaged with us.

I've also made public the small (and rough) Google presentation I used to sell the 960 project to my colleagues. It explains the deficiencies of the old design in greater detail, and includes some conceptual diagrams of the 960 layout.

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Blog Post Posted March 11, 2010, 9:57 am by Sayeed Farhad Zalmi

Celebrating International Women's Day in Afghanistan

Country: Afghanistan
Topics: Women's Empowerment

Several of Mercy Corps' female team members in Afghanistan smile with their gifts celebrating International Women's Day. Photo: Sayeed Farhad Zalmi

Mercy Corps Afghanistan celebrated International Women's Day in Kabul with bunches of flowers and gifts for female staff. Many of Mercy Corps' female staff here are working in high positions: country director, programme manager, deputy programme manager, head of departments and coordinators.

The party began around 2 p.m. and all staff from Mercy Corps' main offices gathered for this important event. At the opening speech, Mercy Corps' deputy country director — Dr. Sardar — congratulated Mercy Corps' female staff on International Women's Day.

Dr. Sardar emphasized the significant role of women in global development. He counted Mercy Corps' female staff as key players of our programme achievements. “If you see the biggest people in the world, he/she is born by a woman and raised by a woman,’’ he said. At the end of his speech, Dr. Sardar called Christian Mulligan — Mercy Corps Afghanistan's country director — and presented her a bunch of flowers and a scarf.

One by one, each female staff member received gifts.

Fahima Rahimpur — Mercy Corps Afghanistan's Deputy Manager of Monitoring, Evaluation and Information Management — expressed her thoughts: "As a woman working in a male-dominated society, you can maintain your personal momentum by staying true to who you are, knowing your strengths and having the confidence to show them off. Take advantage of your uniqueness. If you are the only woman, consider it a positive, not a negative. Every time you attend a meeting or lead a presentation you have a tremendous opportunity to showcase your skills and talents.

"Mercy Corps Afghanistan is one of the few organisations here where women are busy working in many different positions," she continued. "Although most of the workers are men, the friendly, safe, professional and supportive environment given and provided to the ladies is beyond imagination. For me as a women working in such an organisation, I really feel privileged and honored."

"Celebration and recognition of International Women's Day gives you the feeling of being valuable and credible to male co-workers and the whole organisation. It paves the way for more growth and significant contribution towards achievements of goals. This is a great opportunity to thank all male colleagues for their support.’’

This day is celebrated in a time when the new government of Afghanistan has put some extra attention on appointing women in high positions. The first female provincial governor, the appointment of three female cabinet ministers and several deputy ministers are some positive evidence that women were making progress in male-dominated conservative Afghan society.

Although such progress has been made, discrimination against and abuse of women continues. Domestic violence and forced marriages are all too common, and many women in the country suffer from poor access to legal resources and exclusion from public life.

Afghanistan has a ways to go in its recognition and treatment of women — but here at Mercy Corps Afghanistan, we appreciate and celebrate their work every day.

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Blog Post Posted March 10, 2010, 4:04 pm by Karen Anderson

Spring of hope: EPES provides emergency water to earthquake survivors

Country: Chile
Topics: Water/Sanitation, Health, Emergencies, Displacement

EPES staff member Maria Stella Toro and a neighborhood woman help distribute water from the EPES well in earthquake-stricken Concepcion. Photo: Educacion Popular en Salud (EPES)

Within 24 hours of the quake — and still unable to locate several of its staff members— the centre of Educacion Popular en Salud (or EPES, Mercy Corps' local partner in Chile) in Concepción was in action, distributing water to its neighbors in the René Schneider section of Haulpén, a earthquake-shattered city located between Concepción and the Talcahuano port.

EPES Concepción director Dr. Lautauro Lopez was the first to recall that the EPES building, built in 2006, draws its water from a well and a water main that could be accessed with an electric pump. Through immediate coordination with the municipality of Hualpén (whose offices had just been looted), EPES was given temporary use of the municipality’s emergency portable generator.

As the water started to flow, the mounting tension and despair gave way to an improvised but efficient community-led distribution system to supply some 300 families (nearly 1,200 people) with water from the EPES well. The untreated water was not safe for drinking, but instructions from the EPES team helped guarantee that neighbors would use it safely until an emergency water purification system could be put into place.

With the first rays of daylight, at 6 a.m., neighbors began to line up to assure their place in the distribution line. Pumping began at 9 a.m. and lasted until dusk. While some neighbors organised the numbers for a fair and orderly wait, other pumped water and filled buckets, canisters and bottles.

Within days, a team from EPES Santiago had reached Concepción as part of a caravan with the newly-formed Inter-Church Emergency Committee, Chile 2010 — created to respond to the crisis — with medicines and its own generator, which kept the pump running until electricity was restored and throughout continual power outages.

Sign at EPES water distribution point : "DRINKING WATER: Elderly, ill, nursing infants, nursing mothers and pregnant women. ONLY CLEAN BOTTLES WITH CAPS. From 10 am to 12 pm." Photo: Educacion Popular en Salud (EPES)

“You’ve been an enormous help to us,” says Mario, a neighbour waiting in line for his family’s water ration. “We are four families living allegados (without a home of his own) in my mother-in-law’s house: me, my wife, my two sisters-in-law and all our children. We would have had to go as far as Laguna Redonda (a small lake on the outskirts of Haulpén) to bring water.”

On Friday, EPES received a visit from a emergency relief specialists bearing a portable water filter sent by GlobalMedic, a Canadian organisation that had reached Concepción right after the quake and had learned about the EPES makeshift water distribution through a member of the Inter-church Committee.

GlobalMedic staff members Dan Malka and Matt Capobianco trained the EPES team to use the water filter, which it donated to EPES, and instructed them on other, chemical alternatives for purifying water. The filter cleans up to four liters a minute, a much smaller amount than the 40 liters a minute being pumped untreated from the EPES well. A dual distribution system was devised to supply safe water for drinking.

As of yesterday, EPES was providing safe water between 10:00 a.m. and 12:00 p.m. to pregnant women, nursing mothers, the elderly, people with disabilities and special health conditions — all identified in advance by the neighborhood health promoters.

“Access to potable water is so important,” says Nadia Pardo, standing in line with her water jug to get water for her family, including her elderly father. “All the places to buy bottled water are closed, and if there was somewhere to buy it, it would be way too expensive.”

But mid-week, municipal water services should be restored and new challenges — including sewage treatment, clean-up and rebuilding lives and hopes — will begin.

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Blog Post Posted March 10, 2010, 10:38 am by Fabiola Coupet

Training to help children heal — a healing process in itself

Country: Haiti
Topics: Health, Emergencies, Displacement

I’m Fabiola, a part of Mercy Corps Haiti’s staff of nationals, hired as the communication officer about three weeks ago. Needless to say, keeping up with Mercy Corps’ energy and momentum has been challenging but mostly fun and almost always rewarding.

Today, I’m attending a Comfort for Kids training that is taking place in the heart of Port-au-Prince, near Champs de Mars where a large number of my displaced countrymen have been living since the earthquake struck on January 12. On this rather cold Tuesday morning, 19 participants — mostly pediatricians, a few nurses and even an anesthesiologist — have gathered to hear what Griff Samples’ (our psycho-social super-hero) team has prepared for them.

For the first time, I’m learning about the four pillars of human existence: people, places, routines and traditions. Clearly these are all concepts we are familiar with, factors we deal with daily.

Today, our Comfort for Kids trainers are using these factors in an interesting metaphor: imagine these pillars as four legs holding up the table of life. If this is the case, on January 12, the table of Haitian life collapsed and the four pillars of our existence were shaken to their core. The people, places, routines and rituals that made life-life have been thrown up in the air — and picking up the pieces among the debris has turned out to be a challenging process for many.

I was in Pétion Ville on January 12, and although my family and I are extremely blessed to be alive and well, somehow we are all still traumatized by the whole experience. My mum was under the rubble of her massive three-story office building in Delmas where she has worked for 35 years — PLACES. She finally found an exit point after digging through for two hours without the help of rescuers.

She’s since been evacuated outside the country for medical care and rehabilitation — PEOPLE. My dad is doing OK but is a little bit of a mess without her by his side. He is also physically exhausted as he hasn’t slept in a proper bed for more then one night at a time since the 12th — ROUTINES.

My brother has had to postpone his wedding until further notice — TRADITIONS. Our normal day-to-day lives have been rocked and changed forever…and that’s just my family’s story. Like I said, we are part of the fortunate ones.

I see the trauma everywhere I go, in my own friends who still can’t manage to sleep inside their homes, in their children, in my colleagues who ask about exit drills in case of aftershocks. Truly, anyone who was in Haiti on January 12 has been and still is affected by this catastrophe.

Psycho-social programmes such as Mercy Corps’ Comfort for Kids train parents, teachers, caregivers, doctors and other medical staff to understand normal reactions to crisis for adults and children of all ages. Participants also learn how to support children more effectively and how to answer their questions with age-appropriate honesty. Programmes like these are crucial to the rehabilitation of our nation, our people, and most importantly the innocent children who will inherit this land.

I came to this training to observe, photograph and document, but even I am walking away with something else: a bigger picture, an objective perspective of what happened to me and millions of my fellow Haitians on January 12th, 2010.

Let the healing begin.

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Blog Post Posted March 9, 2010, 7:01 pm by Karen Anderson

In Chile, hard work and messages of hope

Country: Chile
Topics: Water/Sanitation, Urban, Health, Emergencies

Hector Reyes —a staff member for Educacion Popular en Salud (EPES), Mercy Corps' local partner here in Chile — and I returned from the earthquake-shattered city of Concepción late last night. It took us almost 12 hours to make the six-hour trip because of the earthquake damage to roads and bridges. The destruction in Concepción and surrounding towns is devastating. The port city of Talcahuano where we have worked is destroyed beyond belief.

Soldiers stand watch over a devastated area of the Chilean port city Talcahuano. A swamped fishing boat lies in the street. Photo: Educacion Popular en Salud (EPES)

Concepción felt like a war zone. When we arrived last Thursday — five days after the earthquake struck — an 18-hour curfew was in place and the military was posted throughout the city. We had to have a government-issued safe conduct pass to drive into the city to get to EPES and move about during curfew. At 7 p.m., Concepción was like a ghost town studded with military checkpoints.

We arrived at the EPES Concepción Centre to see the church next door with gaping holes and major damage. But our EPES Centre, built in 2006, is standing relatively unscathed. Dr. Lautauro Lopez, the EPES director in Concepción and the only local staff member who was able to reach the centre, was there to meet us. We hugged and hugged each other. He was so happy and relieved we were there and we were equally relieved to finally see him. We still hadn’t made personal contact with our other three local staff members.

Since the earthquake, Dr. Lopez has worked without rest — providing emergency medical care and organising the water distribution for the centre's immediate neighbors, who, like the rest of Concepción, were without electricity and water.

More than 300 families (about 1,200 people) are getting water every day from a pump that's connected to a water main underneath EPES's centre in Concepción. We had bought an emergency generator from Santiago, which we brought with us in our truck hastily borrowed from a friend. Fortunately, shortly after we got to the EPES centre, electricity was restored and we were able to run the pump with electricity from our building. But we continued to experience power outages, so our generator allowed us to keep working — Hector, as usual, had thought of every imaginable problem and brought extension cords and tools.

Meanwhile, Dr. Lopez had helped organise the neighborhood committee to distribute the water. Fear, uncertainty and desperation made the first days very tense but things are running smoothly now. People start lining up at 6 a.m. outside the EPES centre and the neighborhood committee gets there at 9 a.m. to start the distribution process. One person gives out numbers, while another coordinates the people receiving water and three others pump the water and put it in the containers that people bring with them. Water distribution continues all day.

Next to the makeshift water distribution point in the EPES centre's yard, children are playing on the playground and gazebo built two years ago by volunteers from long-term EPES supporters Prince of Peace Lutheran Church (Clifton Park, NY), Trinity Lutheran Church (Owatonna, MN) and students from Swarthmore College. The children’s laughter helps a very tense situation feel more normal.

The health promoters, our staff and their families are unhurt — but the trauma is enormous. As soon as we arrived, we started visiting the health teams, distributing educational fliers on water management and disease prevention, as well as providing emergency health kits. When they saw Dr. Lopez, many wept then hugged him and said, "We knew EPES would come, we knew EPES would come."

The port in Talcahuano is swamped with ruined cargo. The water is polluted with debris and sulfuric acid from the breakdown of wood and food. Local water supplies are not running, and those that do run are not drinkable. Photo: Educacion Popular en Salud (EPES)

The feeling of isolation and fear has been so great. After the earthquake, looting erupted in these neighborhoods, and people started protecting their streets with barricades and volunteer night patrols. Aftershocks of up to 6.8 magnitude caused waves of panic, as did false alarms of another tsunami.

There is still no running water in the communities EPES works in, the septic system is collapsing, public transportation is scarce and aid is only beginning to arrive. But there is also a strong sense of solidarity, of neighbors helping neighbors, and a spirit of coming together — every other car on our way back yesterday had messages of hope painted on the windows. Fuerza Chile! Vamos Chile!

Gracias for all your support!

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Blog Post Posted March 9, 2010, 9:59 am by Luke King

A palpable sense of accomplishment in Baghdad

Country: Iraq
Topics: Urban, Peaceful Change, Conflict & War

On Sunday morning, election day in Iraq, I was awakened by a text message from a colleague telling me to get to a safe spot. Turns out I had slept through the first of dozens of bombs that would occur on election day in Iraq.

From 6:45 a.m. until 10:00 a.m., more than 100 bombs exploded throughout Baghdad. That’s roughly one explosion every two minutes.

My colleague and I spent the morning huddled in a corridor away from any glass that could shatter during the blasts. We sipped coffee, worked on our computers and listened to the news as foul-smelling air drifted through the windows.

We had long anticipated that election day would be volatile, but we certainly didn’t expect such a volley of bombings. It was discouraging. We knew that our Iraqi colleagues were going to the polls, and we were worried about them. We were equally worried that no one would go to the polls, preferring to stay home and avoid the risk of being harmed or killed.

Indeed, 38 people died in Baghdad that day.

But around mid-day, something changed. The explosions tapered off, and newscasts began reporting an uptick at the polling stations. Our neighbour, an elderly woman with whom we share a house, walked out of the gate with her two daughters to go vote — even though she had told me earlier that she was too afraid to go.

More reports came in of steady turnouts and photos started appearing of proud Iraqis leaving the polls with their stained index fingers, waving defiantly. It’s now being reported that the turnout rate reached 68 percent.

By that evening, there was a palpable sense of accomplishment throughout Baghdad. It was clear that despite the efforts of some to ruin these elections, the Iraqis had simply overcome. In my career, I’ve never seen such courage from so many.

That evening there were two more bombs close to the Mercy Corps office, but I hardly noticed them over the celebratory gunfire ringing throughout the city.

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Blog Post Posted March 9, 2010, 6:25 am by Jim Jarvie

Haiti, nine weeks after the earthquake — what happens next

Country: Haiti
Topics: Social Innovations, Livelihoods, Environment, Emergencies, Economic Development, Displacement, Agriculture

Week 9 post-earthquake: Mercy Corps, like our partners and peers, has been focused on emergency response. We’ve been busy with distributions, Comfort for Kids, water and sanitation provision, and more.

But what should we do now that contributes to long-term recovery? The context is challenging at best. Consider these statistics:

• Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere
• It is ranked 146th out of 177 countries in terms of human development
• 80 percent of Haiti's people live in abject poverty
• Unemployment here is somewhere between 70 and 80 percent
• Literacy is only 62 percent
• About 96 percent of the land is deforested and its soils and slopes eroding — which makes it more vulnerable to hurricanes and other storms

Then, of course, there's the impact of the earthquake. There’s a lot to do. And so the Mercy Corps Haiti team took a pause last Sunday to prioritize focus and direction, to consolidate thinking and strategy. Programme managers who'd helped direct emergency responses in places like Darfur, Indonesia's Aceh Province and Sri Lanka shared their experience in moving from disaster to long-term recovery.

The strategy that arose — which reflects what we've been planning since shortly after the earthquake — is that we’re going to roll out a recovery strategy based on job creation through urban regeneration and resilience, rural infrastructure development, and business development focused through small and medium enterprises. All of these things are interlinked and will integrate issues surrounding youth, education and vocational training, environmental responsibility and disaster risk reduction (DRR).

It's a complex but complementary strategy to address a wide range of challenges, many of which existed well before the earthquake struck.

In the short-term, we’ll still need to focus on emergency recovery, but we want to start targeting activities in ways that will blossom into long-term revitalisation. In rural areas — where we're focusing on places hosting displaced people from earthquake-shattered cities — this will likely include working on improving feeder roads to help deliver produce to markets; improving irrigation; and recovering degraded land for tree planting for cash crops and fuel wood.

In urban areas, we’re looking at DRR measures in anticipation of coming rains and the hurricane season; waste management measures — particularly those focusing on income generation such as organic waste composting; and critical upgrades to water and sanitation service delivery.

For the long-term — through approaches including small business development, community associations, microfinance and related services — we intend to build on current activities to create sustainable jobs in agricultural markets and urban recovery.

In a post-disaster environment clear goals are needed, but plans need to flexible to make sure we achieve them on a road that’s bound to be full of surprises. We have those goals now, and hope to be on the road to achieving them.

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Blog Post Posted March 8, 2010, 9:57 pm by Roger Burks

The choice between rice and death

Last Thursday, the tiny West African nation of Togo held a presidential election. In many ways, it was only news if you were looking for it — which, as someone who served as a Peace Corps Volunteer there in the mid-1990s, I was.

Compared to historic elections in two news-grabbing, turbulent countries — yesterday in Iraq and next month in Sudan – last week’s contest in Togo might seem inconsequential. Again, it might seem like an event that could only concern those with some connection to Togo and, of course, the Togolese people themselves.

But Togo’s latest presidential election — and its still-unfolding aftermath — is relevant to everyone who wishes for equality and fairness and for the voices of people to be heard.

Togo, like many African countries, has been plagued by decades of dictatorship and kleptocracy. When Gnassingbe Eyadema — the prototypical big man who had ruled the country for 38 years — died in 2005, there was a brief moment when a few million people thought things might change. But that moment quickly passed when Eyadema’s son, Faure Gnassingbe, seized power and then held onto it in a hastily called presidential election that was widely regarded as fraudulent.

Violence flared in Lomé, Togo’s capital, as supporters of the main opposition party protested the results. Nearly 800 people were killed, more than 4,300 injured and as many as 24,000 people fled for their lives into neighboring countries.

Five years later — and now more than four decades into rule over Togo by a single family — came another presidential election. Primarily because of the violence that followed the last election, as well as the fraudulence that fueled it, hundreds of peacekeepers and election monitors were deployed to the tiny nation. The European Union set up two-way satellite communications to transmit voting results from local precincts to the electoral headquarters in Lomé. It seemed like there might be some chance at legitimacy this time around.

But, when election day rolled around, the head of Togo’s electoral commission announced that the satellite communications network wasn’t working — so ballots would have to be physically carried from polling stations across the country down to Lomé. The possibility for a fair election dwindled.

There were reports that Gnassingbe’s ruling party was handing out bags of rice to families in particularly poor precincts as they came to cast their votes. (The average Togolese citizen makes less than £1 a day.) European Union observers noted this evidence of trying to buy off voters.

And, of course — according to preliminary results — it worked. Over the weekend, the electoral commission announced that Faure Gnassingbe had won 61 percent of the votes to the leading opposition candidate’s 34 percent.

Today, The New York Times reported that a “special election commando unit” had sealed off opposition headquarters and used tear gas on hundreds of people — including the main opposition candidate — who were trying to protest. A “special election commando unit,” really? What do you do when you’re faced with something like that?

Generations have waited for change in Togo, as well as in numerous countries where dictators and their descendants — whether blood relatives or not —hold sway. These citizens are farmers and teachers, doctors and businesswomen. And, in millions of cases, their voices simply aren’t allowed to count.

One of my friends noted that perhaps the Togolese people just voted “for the devil they know.” But why do they have to vote for a devil at all? Couldn’t there be a better choice?

In Togo, for years now, there has only been one choice: a vote for the status quo or nothing at all. A choice between rice and death.

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Blog Post Posted March 8, 2010, 11:03 am by Sahar Alnouri

Happy International Women's Day

Country: Iraq
Topics: Women's Empowerment, Peaceful Change, Civil Society, Citizen Involvement

Iraqi women represent 25 percent of members of parliament — they vote, they work and they have found ways to survive and maintain their families during the very difficult last seven years. Photo: Cassandra Nelson/Mercy Corps

I’m blogging again today to wish you all a Happy International Women’s Day.

The first International Women’s Day was celebrated 35 years ago, in 1975. The political and social landscape of the world we inhabit has changed dramatically in the last 35 years — old countries have disappeared and new ones have been created; the Internet and other technologies have transformed the way we work and live; and the role of women has grown and changed all over the world.

This year, the United Nations selected “Equal Rights, Equal Opportunities” for the International Women’s Day theme. In Iraq, this is a theme we can celebrate proudly.

Article 14 of the Iraqi constitution declares that “Iraqis are equal before the law without discrimination based on gender, race, ethnicity, origin, colour, religion, creed, belief or opinion, or economic and social status.” Iraqi women represent 25 percent of members of parliament. They vote, they work and they have found ways to survive and maintain their families during the very difficult last seven years.

Iraqi women have not made these strides alone — each of these achievements was accomplished with the support of Iraqi men.

Mercy Corps’ Women’s Awareness and Inclusion programme in the south and our Protecting Women through Education programmes in north and central Iraq are examples of how we are supporting equal rights and equal opportunities. Access to basic education is a constitutional right for both Iraqi men and women. It is also one of the first steps towards helping women to recognize and access other opportunities.

In my opinion, celebrating International Women’s Day is not about separating women from men. It’s about taking a moment to recognize that women all over the world frequently struggle to survive, to care for their families and to achieve equal rights and equal opportunities in environments that don’t provide them access to their basic needs and rights. It is about recognizing that the barriers women struggle against to achieve those basic needs and rights are often different from the barriers that men face.

To me, it is about understanding that it will take the efforts of both men and women to level the playing field for our daughters, sisters, wives and mothers.

Please, take a moment today to recognize the women you work with, the women in your families and in your communities. Also acknowledge the men who support the women in your workplace, in your families and in your communities. It is only by working together than men and women throughout the world will achieve equal opportunities and rights for all people.

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Blog Post Posted March 8, 2010, 8:33 am by Sahar Alnouri

Iraqi staff with purple fingers

Country: Iraq
Topics: Peaceful Change, Citizen Involvement

Here are some our Baghdad staff who participated in yesterday's elections. They are proudly displaying their purple index fingers, which signifies that they voted.

Photo: David Evans/Mercy Corps

Photo: David Evans/Mercy Corps

Photo: David Evans/Mercy Corps

Photo: David Evans/Mercy Corps

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