BENCHWARMER

Ramon Dacawi
Doing it

By the United Nations initial count, 38.8 million in 110 countries stood up against poverty. Most of those who stood – or tried to – were in the so-called Third World, the so-called South: Asia – 28 million; Africa – 7.5 million; Arab region – 2.5 million; Latin America – 734,000.

By the final count, the figure rose to 43.7 million. Understandably so. After all, it’s in the Third World where the extremes of deprivation are most common. It’s here where poverty is not a temporary condition but a constant, a given rather than an extreme, a rule rather than an
exception.

It’s here where poverty comes with birth – as if it were a birthright. It dictates the inequality of life that it shortens, and even the manner of death. Or even how one literally returns to dust, the indignity made less painful by the acceptance of one’s lot, or the lack of it in this Third World.

After all, it’s in some Third World countries where the poor don’t’ have a voice, except when told to speak up for dictators. After all, it’s the seventh year since leaders of 192 nations ushered in this millennium with a collective pledge to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. After all, we’re at the half-way mark to 2015, the target year the leaders set to finally eradicate the extreme.

After all, it’s time for nameless, ordinary millions to speak up to their leaders. Not only about poverty but seven other goals that world leaders vowed on paper to pursue under the United Nations Millennium Declaration they inked in September, 2000.

“What Stand Up did was to give them the opportunity to find voice on issues that matter to them,” noted Mandy Kibel, deputy director of communications for the UN Millennium Campaign. “They want to find their own voice, and they want to address not us at the UN, but their own governments and say we have expectations that you deliver on the promises you made.”

Three years before Stand Up, a world leader of form and substance gave voice to the millions gripped by poverty.

“Enough is enough,” former Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev said in his keynote at the World Urban Forum in September, 2004 in Barcelona. Before him were the world’s leaders, urban executives, development planners, non-government organization heads and even so-called development tourists

Gorbachev was referring to numerous agreements and declarations that world leaders signed since 1992, when the term “sustainable development” emerged out of the World Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

Gorbachev stood up against the disunity between theory and practice, the wide gap between the flourish of signature or speech and feeble ground work thereafter, between slogan and action.

Gorbachev knows of where he spoke. He served the Soviet Union and knew when it was time to step down, for its member-nations to chart their own development courses. Step down from political leadership he did. Towards making another difference he did not. Not forgetting Rio, he established Green Cross, now one of the world’s most respected environmental groups.

Enough is enough. It’s more than a slogan. So is the Stand Up pledge: “We cannot stay seated when a child born in a poor country today will die 30 years earlier than a child born in a wealthy one, when tens of thousands of people die unnecessarily every day.

“And we stand up because we are asking not for charity, but justice. We now that in our names, world leaders have made mighty promises to bring an end to extreme poverty by achieving the Millennium Development Goals. What is needed is the political will to achieve and exceed these goals. So we are on our feet to say:

“To the leaders of the wealthy countries: Be great. Fight to keep your promises – debt cancellation, more and better aid, and trade rules that help fight poverty. You know what needs to be done. Do it. “We also stand before the leaders of poorer countries to say: Be great. Make it your first responsibility to save the lives of your poorest citizens. We ask you to achieve real transparency and accountability in how money is spent, to tackle inequality, to root out
corruption. You know what needs to be done. Do it.”

On Stand Up Day next year, perhaps the pledge can incorporate a paragraph or two for the corporate and civil society, the non-government organizations, development workers and consultants outside of government.

After all, responsibility, transparency and accountability need to encompass all, not limited to the bureaucracy. In the same token that mediocrity and
corruption are not confined to formal governance.

Do it. It sounds familiar. A Baguio boy of substance and vision said that about a
decade ago, but with an h: “Let’s DOH it!” It worked in stamping out polio and other crippling illnesses of children of this Third World..It worked because Dr. Juan Flavier did not dictate it. It worked because he worked with thousands of volunteers, to whom he later paid tribute, to whom he attributed the success of “Oplan Alis Disease”.

Earlier, Baguio girl Natividad Relucio-Clavano, also did it. Against a world going heads-over-heels for milk substitutes, Dr. Clavano stood up, almost by her lonesome, to restore sanity in nutrition with a lifetime pitch for breast-feeding and mother-and-child
bonding the moment a baby was, is and will be born.

What these two Baguio doctors did are now world models that saved thousands and will continue to save millions of God’s greatest gift from the medical plagues of the Third World. Otherwise, they would not have been there standing up against poverty. Otherwise, the count would not have reached the 43 million mark.

As the late Baguio newsman Peppot Ilagan observed: “Children are a constant reminder from God that the world must go on” His is the most fitting definition of “sustainable development”. Like Stand Up, it’s more than a slogan. (e-mail:rdacawi@yahoo.com).