No way. They will not make Australia home

As part of their "No Way" asylum seeker campaign, the Abbott government has published a horrific graphic novel 'targeted' at Afghan asylum seekers. It has no words, "'because Afghans are not as educated as Australians". [Link to: The Guardian - Australian Government Targets Asylum Seekers]

Regardless of one's stance on the actual 'problem' of asylum seekers, surely we can agree that the methods of the Abbott government are becoming more and more extreme as our Prime Minister has unilaterally declared a 'war' at the cost of billions of dollars to the Australian taxpayer, in direct violation of international law, because we're being 'invaded' at the rate of around 3,000 genuine refugees a year, a rate that if continued for THIRTY years would STILL not fill the Melbourne Cricket Ground.

'And it's working', the PM says, 'no boats have arrived in Australian waters in 55 days'. What they don't tell us is how many boats have left Indonesia or Malaysia! If the aim is to stop the boats arriving in Australia apparently it's working - we turn them around! But if the aim is to stop people dying on boats in an attempt to get here (which is what both governments told us it was) then evidence suggests that it's not.

Why Sri Lankan Children in North Drop Out

Ramadhas, a father of two girls, returned home in mid-2010, but was forced to take his oldest daughter out of school when he was no longer able to provide for his family with the meager money he earned from his small vegetable garden.

“About a year after we returned, we had hardly any money, but there was a good market for scrap metal that could be collected. She skipped classes and came with me to collect metal,” he said. The father and daughter team earned just over $2 for every kilogram of scrap they collected, much of it left over from the war. But since then the scrap metal market has become less lucrative. His daughter, now 14, has started doing odd jobs instead and he doesn’t know whether she will ever return to school to complete her education.

Although he doesn’t want his other daughter to leave school, the prospects don’t look good. “I have given up farming. Now I also work as a labourer, and the family income depends on what she makes,” he said.

$ 1.25 a Day

Sri Lankan authorities have expressed concern over an increasing number of reports that children are dropping out of school in the conflict-affected north, where economic pressure and poor prospects are creating conditions that could have negative consequences for the future development of the region.

Most of the dropouts are from poor families who find it difficult to make ends meet as humanitarian assistance dries up almost five years after decades of civil war ended. This situation is being aggravated by an acute lack of job opportunities and a rising cost of living.

“It’s a vicious cycle,” said Sivalingam Sathyaseelan, Secretary to the provincial Ministry of Education. “The main reason is the lack of jobs. There is no money in these families, and they need everybody that can work, to work,” Sathyaseelan told IRIN. “They are able-bodied and can find odd jobs or agricultural work more easily,” so there is growing pressure on children in their early teens, mostly at secondary school level, to leave the classroom.

The top public official in Kilinochchi District, Rupavathi Keetheswaran, the government agent, agreed. She described the situation for the estimated 40,000 households in the north that are headed by women, or those families with disabled members, as particularly dire, saying, “Sometimes the children don’t have any option but to work. There is no one else to make money for the family.”

According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), these children generally find work doing temporary or manual jobs such as unskilled labourers in construction projects or on farms. “Sometimes the kids would just wander [around] ‘til they find odd jobs,” said Ramalingam Sivaparasgam, the ILO national project coordinator, who noted that some children work for as little as USD 1.25 per day.

Skewed Assertions & Lack of Data

A study released in January by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), analyzing out-of-school children in four countries - Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka - says the island nation has close to universal participation in primary and lower secondary schooling, with just 0.07 percent of all primary and lower-secondary school-aged children not in school.

However, the data did not cover the districts of Jaffna, Mannar, Kilinochchi, Mullaitivu and Vavuniya, which comprise the Northern Province, where the final days of conflict were fought out. “It is important to remember that the Sri Lankan data excludes five districts in the North where conflict took place, and rates of school exclusion are known to be higher than average,” the report points out.

Children living in the conflict-affected northern and eastern areas of the country have lower school participation than the national average, particularly in lower-secondary education, the report conceded, with child labour cited one reason for dropouts.

Older children and young adults were motivated to drop out because jobs commensurate with high school or university graduation levels were very hard to find. “They have to settle for manual labour jobs if they remain in the region, so why not take them [out of school] now?” said Sathyaseelan, the top provincial education official.

This is particularly true in the more remote, interior areas of the region, where facilities and job opportunities are often non-existent, and little investment is taking place. “There are no private enterprises, [and] very few government offices in the villages. The only thing that is there, is construction of houses or farm work,” government agent Keetheswaran confirmed.

According to ILO, the longer a child stays away from the classroom, the harder it is for them to catch up. “There are no night classes or extra classes for such dropouts right now. Without such assistance they find it extremely difficult to re-join their studies,” Sivaparasgam said.

But without targeted programmes to identify drop-outs and help them, there is also no effective way of persuading them to return to school. “More so when money is very hard to come by for families,” he said.

[Sourced & edited from: http://www.irinnews.org/report/99606/why-sri-lankan-children-in-north-drop-out]

We Seek to Understand the Situation of the Poor and Work Alongside them Towards Fullness of Life

I grew up surrounded by extreme poverty and unfairness with parents that have given their lives to doing all they can “to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ and meet human needs in his name without discrimination” (from The Salvation Army’s Mission Statement).

I remember Mum spending hours at a Singer treadle sewing machine making clothes for children in homes and orphanages in Sri Lanka. I remember watching the kids walking proudly in alligator file to church in their brand new matching outfits and huge ‘look at me’ smiles.

I remember Dad spending days organising feeding programs and medical distributions for the homeless and the poor. I remember spending hours in an old VW van packed to bursting with bags of rice and corrugated iron as we tried desperately to access a cyclone devastated the community.

I remember going to a very exclusive school and learning to live with the tension between the people I lived among, who had little or nothing, and the kids I went to school with who wanted for nothing. (20 years later I watched as my daughter learnt the same skill.)

Today I remind myself that I signed up with The Salvos and with World Vision because I believe that “from everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked”, (Luke 12:48). My privilege and opportunity - pure accidents of my birth - require that I make those that have little or nothing the priority of my life and passion.

I love the World Vision value statements. I have no problem aligning my life and work to these. The fact that they align well with my spiritual DNA and life script is a ‘happy coincidence’. I willingly sign up to be biased for the poor, I willingly commit to working to understand and work alongside the poor to transform lives and communities with the goal of achieving ‘life in all its fullness’ - for everyone. I will willingly engage with the affluent supporter for the sake of the marginalised and vulnerable—but it must always be for that purpose!

In the priority to align with a supporter centric model I find that I need to remind myself that I exist to “serve the neediest people of the earth; to relieve their suffering and to promote the transformation of their condition of life” (from World Vision Values Statement). I understand and am committed to the fact that to serve the neediest we need to engage with supporters and we need to appreciate the supporter’s perspective. But to offer that meaningful experience where the supporter feels connected and where there is potential to transform their life I have to start not with where they are at or with what they want, but from the perspective of suffering and need and with an understanding of the “neediest people of the earth”.

May we often be accused of having a bias for the poorest and neediest!