Dear Readers,

We send you the November issue of the SD Network eNews which includes information about:

1. Newly published DR Congo Report
2. Member News
   • Relief News
     • Caribbean
     • M'Zab, Algeria
   • SD Vietnam Activities
   • Youth Team Building Retreat - SD Indonesia
   • ICDP Board meets in Portugal
   • SUN for LIFE growing Moringa
   • Q Fund Update
   • Munawaroh English remembered
3. Susila Dharma in the World: UN & Networking
4. From the Office
   • Get Involved! Blog
   • Volunteer working camp 2009 in Mexico or Colombia

Thanks, from the SDIA Team!

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1. Despite the Hardships...DR Congo Report

Virginia Thomas's comprehensive and interesting report of a joint visit by WSA and SDIA made to D.R. Congo in June is now available online. The report includes:

• Facts on the conditions of life in DRC, a country that ranks 167th out of 177 countries in the world in terms of poverty;
• An overview of the education, health and community development projects in DRC that are associated with SDIA;
• A glimpse of DRC enterprises with a social benefit;
• A report on training sessions on project management and financial reporting that were delivered to 35 local leaders as part of the SDIA Capacity Building initiative;
• Recommendations for working with members in DRC.

Read the full report and see photos here

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2. Member News

Follow-up on Caribbean relief

Members of the SD Network and SD Canada have sent approximately $8,110 [USD] for emergency hurricane relief to the Caribbean and individual Subud members. As we go to press, another $500 has just come in from SD Suriname. On behalf of Subud members affected by Hurricane Ike, the SD Network thanks you very much for all your generous contributions! In a recent visit to the area by the SD Chair, Emelina, we have learned that approximately 70% of these funds have been used for house repairs (roofs, ceilings, walls, furniture, floors, pipes and water containers, mattresses, shoes, clothing, sheets, kitchen utensils, etc.) and 30% for medicines and food. Some funds are also being used to help people in other parts affected by the two hurricanes.

Maria Isabel (Aneesha) Santana, one of the people helping to coordinate aid to families writes:

We want to give thanks for your preoccupation about the damage by Hurricane Ike in our city and your rapid reply to help to us. The immediately urgency was to re-establish phone communication so I could call Emelina. She sent the Emergency Funds and used clothes, shoes and many articles for more needy families. We want to give thanks too, to all the people in many countries who sent assistance to Susila Dharma. God Bless You!

More reports are still coming in on how the rest of the funds will be spent.

M'Zab, Algeria

During the Eid holiday in Algeria, several Subud members, and thousands of others were affected by torrential rains in the M'zab that caused flash floods; at least 33 people were killed and many more injured in this historic region of oases located in the south of the Sahara desert.

Hundreds of people had to be rescued by helicopter and up to 600 houses were destroyed in the rains of September 30 and October 1st in the seven oases where several Subud members have their family homes. Hamid Zergoun from Ghardaïa and another Subud member from Berriane have lost their homes and most of all their belongings to the flooding.

Cedic Hadjadj (SD France) visited the M'Zab a few days after the floods and wrote a report you can read in French or English. Assistance is being coordinated with SD France. For more information contact Arnaud Delune at mhdelune@club-internet.fr

If you feel moved to help, you can do so by visiting the SDIA website at: http://donations.susiladharma.org/donate_now/.

SD Vietnam does a lot of good with little!

With $2,100 [USD] donated from SD France and two individuals, plus $437 [USD] raised from its own membership, SD Vietnam has been able to achieve a lot this year. It has

• helped twenty destitute people to undergo eye surgery,
• purchased ten bicycles for ten poor students of the Dong Tam district,
• purchased a roof—a canvas cover for her hut—and one folding chair for a poor woman of the Bien Hoa village,
• purchased exercise books for a class of the Tinh Thuong School, Phung Hiep village,
• repaired the playground of the Tan An Hoi Primary School,
• drilled three pits for 3 families of the Tra On district, Vinh Long province,
• donated to the broom making class of the vocational school for blind people in
  Tam Ky.

Congratulations to SD Vietnam! You are an example to us all.

Youth Team Building hosted by SD Indonesia

In August, Susila Dharma Indonesia hosted a three-day Motivation and Team Building field training at the Children's Village, Cipanas, West Java. The training was held for potential youth candidates interested in joining the SD Indonesia team.

The first session was on Building Motivation. All participants were encouraged to change their way of thinking. Another morning was the Orphanage House Management session with the chairperson of the Children's Village management. Everybody was curious to know the history and the daily operation of the orphanage. Then each participant had the task of interviewing one child. They ran outside eagerly to begin their task and worked happily together with the children to clean the Children's Village.

Other sessions included Cultural Act: Exploration Through Body Movement And Voice, and Work Ethics with Ruslan Harnadi. SD Indonesia's chair, Ariana Susanti, came to meet with participants and facilitators.

Ruslan is joining the SD Indonesia team as Head of Program Development. The team has been invited by Subud Central Java to discuss how to empower Subud organization in the region by setting up a cooperative.

Read the full team building report here

Download Teambuilding report as a PDF file from SD Indonesia.

ICDP International Board Meeting

The ICDP AGM took place October 9th–12th in Lisbon. It focused on formulating ICDP development and fundraising strategies, as well as considering organizational restructuring and the creation of new didactic tools to enable the future growth of our work, whose main targets will continue to be vulnerable, neglected children and families at psychosocial risk.

The ICDP board members are Karsten Rukman Hundeide (chair), Santana Momade, Nicoletta Lailah Armstrong, Virginia Thomas, Stephan Solat and Penélope Villar. The current scope of ICDP activities, achievements, needs and difficulties was shared through board members’ reports, all of which revealed a considerable expansion of our work in the world as well as an increasing demand for further development in Africa, Latin America and Europe.

The board drew a distinction between two types of development: the first, in which ICDP initiates activities as the project holder and, the second, more typical development in which ICDP responds to requests for competence-building consultancy service. ICDP has a particularly strong presence in several countries: Norway (spread over a large part of the country through the Ministry of Children and Equality), Sweden (through health care, family centres, preschools, social care services), Mozambique (four year large training project sponsored by the Norwegian government through NORAD), Colombia (projects covering six provinces cooperating with UNICEF, local governments and the ministries of Education, Health and Social Services) and El Salvador (a national programme in cooperation with UNICEF).

Three committees were created: the professional committee will examine ICDP policies and procedures, the training programme, ICDP manuals and other materials, and criteria for use and protection of the ICDP programme; the evaluation committee will produce standards for monitoring and evaluation; the fundraising committee will take on the task of approaching new donors and developmental agencies. In addition to its main task of securing funding for new projects, there is an urgent need to establish sustainable funding for our core organization and head office.

ICDP needs your support. To donate now or to read the October ICDP Newsletter online, go to http://www.icdp.info.

Sun for Life Field Report

SUN for LIFE (SFL), teaches about the benefits and cultivation of the Moringa Oleifera tree. Zoy writes from Madagascar that the current priorities for his project are transportation and communication:

SFL's project is going well, too slow for me but, according to local standards (political troubles, corruption, administrative incompetence and fear of taking any kind of initiative so as not to be fired), pretty well.

Moringa Oleifera (M.O.) is known by absolutely everyone on the island but the Malagasy people only eat the fresh leaves in the national meat soup 'romazava' or in fish dishes. As most of the nutritional values are in the dried leaves, we are showing people how to cook the M.O. and are slowly building up a moringa recipe book. M.O. has more than 30% fat content and is very easy to digest.

The M.O. fresh leaf collecting is doing unexpectedly well also. I have invented a simple dryer to dry the leaves before they are transformed to a fine powder with very high nutrition values that is given to underfed people (prisoners, orphans, school kids, sick people, and breast-feeding mothers). Here is a comparison on nutritional value between fresh and dried MO compared to other common foods:

Protein source	dried leaves	fresh leaves
milk/calcium	17 x more	4 x more
bananas/potassium	15 x more	3 x more
carrots/vit A	10 x more	4 x more
oranges/vit C	0.75 x more	7 x more
eggs/proteins	4 x more	same
spinach/iron	25 x more	3 x more

You can read more about SUN for LIFE's work in French here

Congratulations to the Q-Fund!

Chellie Kew founder of the Q Fund writes from Zambia about their achievements this year:

Plan for the new school in Chimoza.

Greetings from Chimoza! As the school year draws to a close in mid-December, we look back on a year of great achievements. We will soon graduate our fourth class of seventh graders. New classroom blocks have been completed for grades 5–7, and the 8th and 9th grade blocks should be finished early next year. By then, Chimoza will have both underground electricity and running water. We have added more restroom facilities, and our partner, Seeds of Hope International—which specializes in hygiene, sanitation and community health education—frequently brings international visitors to Chimoza to demonstrate the success of our model. In July, we completed construction on a new clinic that offers non-emergency services and initial blood tests for malaria. The local governing council of Bwana Mkuba has given us more land, effectively quadrupling the size of our campus. The recent addition of a groundskeeper, gardener and night watchman will enable us to maintain our beautiful campus.

You can read more about the work of the Q Fund here.

Munawaroh Remembered

For many years the Sinecera project, an alternative health retreat center in Queensland, Australia, was an active member of SDIA. We were saddened to hear that Munawaroh English, who founded the project along with her husband Labasir English, passed away at her home in Couagl on September 30th.

Prior to starting Sinecera, Munawarah and Labasir founded Morningside Care, an old age home in Brisbane. Their work over the years was well supported by many people in Australia. SDIA has offered to assist Subud Australia in any way it can with establishing a new management team for Sinecera, which we hope will remain in Subud hands.

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3. Susila Dharma in the World: UN and Networking with Others

SDIA is privileged to be among international non-governmental organisations with special Consultative Status at the United Nations If you have any thoughts about how SDIA could be making a bigger difference for our projects and the communities they serve through our access to the UN's ECOSOC, UNICEF and DPI, please send us your thoughts at: un@susiladharma.org.

Katherine Carré reports on the 9th Session of the Human Rights Council which she attended in September 2008.

There is a new High Commissioner for Human Rights appointed for four years, Ms. Navanetham Pillay who succeeds Louise Arbour. Ms. Pillay is a South African Indian and has been an anti-apartheid and anti-female discrimination activist, later a judge at an International Criminal Court. A new President of the Council has been elected for the next year, Martin Uhomoibhi of Nigeria, an Ambassador.

The highlight of the session was when Archbishop Desmond Tutu was introduced by the President as a “moral voice worldwide.” Tutu presented the report of the Fact Finding Mission to Beit Hanoun in the Gaza Strip. He stated that what they saw "shocked us" and that the picture for victims remains grim, including ongoing violations of the right to physical and mental health.

There were three thematic presentations and reports concerning children: children and warfare, contemporary forms of slavery and the sale of children.

Read Katherine's full report here.

Solen Lees Gratiet, SDIA UN coordinator, sent us this useful link:

The United Nations NGO Informal Regional Networks (UN-NGOIRENE), which was established seven years ago in order to improve the exchange of information between NGOs in consultative status with ECOSOC, now has a web portal: "UN-NGO-IRENE Best Practices Network" which can be accessed at http://www.un.org/esa/coordination/ngo/irene. Its aim is to allow organisations to share and discuss Best Practices and success stories.

SD Projects Recognised for their Successes!

International Child Development Programme (ICDP) has received awards in Norway (The Teaching Prize 2007 to the Health and Welfare Agency in Oslo for their use of the ICDP programme) and Colombia (the National Award for Human rights for ICDP work by the department of Boyaca).

(See article above for more information on ICDP)

Rasjid Cesar, leader of Tierraviva Project in Argentina, was invited by UNICEF and the Argentine Ministry of Defence to participate in a conference on the "Rights of Pregnant Women or Women with Young Children in Detention" in Buenos Aires on the 14th of October. He was the first speaker of the day and gave a presentation entitled "The situation of children living with their mothers in penitentiary establishments". His contribution was well-received by judges, lawyers and the new head of the penitentiary service who attended. The invitation to participate in this important event is a sign of the recognition the project has achieved on a national level.

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4. From the Office

The Get Involved! blog is online at the SDIA website! As its name suggests, this is a space for you to get involved. Whether you are actively involved in a project, you are a would-be or past volunteer, a fundraiser, a donor, a parent wanting to engage children in development issues, or just someone interested in Susila Dharma work in general, the blog is for you. Here you will find fundraising ideas, tools for children, inspirational stories, links to volunteering positions and jobss links and lots more. Share with us your ideas and interests and your own experiences with your own SD work and interests. The content of this space depends on you! Please visit at http://blog.susiladharma.org/ and participate (Yes! Get Involved!) by sending us your ideas, links and stories.

Get involved in summer 2009 with the first annual SDIA-SYA volunteer working camp! For the first time ever, the Volunteers Without Tears team is proud to offer you the opportunity to assist a Susila Dharma project in Mexico or Colombia, while connecting with peers, our inners, and our surroundings. Work will include some combination of construction projects, mentoring, and short workshops—according to the needs of the host project. Although still in the project selection phase, the camp will be 2 to 4 weeks in length and will have a strong spiritual component. Application forms will be available soon. If you are interested in finding out more information or in participating, please contact the coordinators at alexandra.woodward@gmail.com and solen.gratiet@club-internet.fr.

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The SDIA Network eNews is published once a month from information sent in to the office. We welcome news items. Deadline for submissions is the middle of each month. Contact us at info@susiladharma.org

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