Beverley Scott

For those of you who may be wondering what’s happened to me, I am still alive and kicking. I am in the second semester of my third year of medicine at the University of Guyana and have just begun my first set of rotations in medicine and surgery at the Georgetown Public Hospital.

How I ended up here is a very long story for another time. What I will say though is that being in Guyana is teaching me how to be humble and how to appreciate many of the things I took for granted in Trinidad and while I was studying in Saint Lucia.

Guyana is a beautiful country. Like the mystery of our beings, you have to experience Guyana to appreciate its beauty – but that too is another story for another time.

I write to you at this time – when everyone is getting ready for Carnival and I am homesick as hell, missing all the music and the Panorama finals and the Calypso Monarch – because I recently met a Guyanese woman of outstanding calibre who touched a social justice nerve in me and motivated me, as swamped as I am (and I really am swamped) with work, to write an article about the work she is doing.

Her name is Desiree Howells and she recently received the MBE for her voluntary work with CAFOD. MBE stands for Member of the British Empire and CAFOD stands for Catholic Agency for Overseas Development.

However, the reason I was so fascinated by her had nothing to do with the fact that she received a medal from the Queen. At a Christmas dinner we were chatting and she said to me, “Do you know that 1.3 billion people in the world live on less than US$1 a day?”

I honestly hadn’t known this and even though the dinner progressed and we went on to speak of other pleasanter matters, that little piece of information nagged at me when I came home for the Christmas season to get my full of pastelles and black cake, ham and bake and shark.

So when I returned to Guyana and she invited me over for tea, I took the opportunity to speak with the vibrant 72-year-old, whose youthful appearance and sprightly features belie her age.
Desiree Howells is a Guyanese national who has lived in England for most of her life and has spent the last ten years radically working for social justice changes in England and the world. She is a widow and retired teacher with a passion for human rights.

Growing up in Guyana, she witnessed the economic imbalance that existed within her country. As she grew older, and while working in England, she realised that there were gross economic inequalities between First and Third World countries. So, after retiring from teaching, she became a CAFOD volunteer and devoted herself more fully to working for social justice.

“The good thing about CAFOD is that the money goes to the grassroots people - not to the people up there,” Des said, gesticulating above her head. “CAFOD says, ‘tell us what we can do to meet the needs of the people in a community’.

So you can imagine that in one place they are building a well so that people can get water in a community, in another area they are helping to build a clinic and train somebody to run the clinic, and in yet another area they are helping with books, or helping people to build latrines. So nobody sits and says ‘oh these people are poor, let’s send them something’.”

There are more than 1,084 projects currently run by CAFOD in over 70 countries and most of them deal with children. “We don’t only stop there,” she ADDED. “We ask why are these people poor, why are they suffering, why are they getting ill.”

CAFOD seeks to find the answers to these questions and addresses the deeper issues associated with poverty. One of these issues, which Des is very passionate about, involves free trade and international debt. In 2005, CAFOD’s main project was entitled “Make Poverty History”.

All over the world, she recalled, people joined in to help with the project. “Nearly all the trade rules in the world are in favour of rich countries. CAFOD was asking governments for more cancellation of debt for poor countries, for fair trade justice and more and better aid.”

Des speaks to children at schools about the work of CAFOD and encourages them to raise money for CAFOD projects. “When I speak to infants about free trade I tell them, it is like if you have a tiger in a cage and that tiger is the big strong countries of the world and then you put a baby kitten or a rabbit in there with the tiger and the rabbit is the poor country.”

Sometimes she uses the analogy of Snakes and Ladders where the big countries make the rules so that if they land on the snakes they are not swallowed by them but the poor country is.

Des informed me that Guyana was among those countries which benefited from the “Make Poverty History” project.

“In 1992, 94% of what Guyana was making in revenue was going to service debt, leaving only six per cent to run the country,” she said.

Last year, however, this figure was down to 20%.

“In the end, it is the poor people of countries who are the ones that suffer,” she lamented. Many countries, she noted, have repaid what they initially borrowed from the IMF and developed countries but the exorbitant interest payments keep them in debt for years and years.

Desiree Howells

"Live Simply" symbol

“For every English pound that goes from richer countries to poorer countries in need of aid, CAFOD worked out that the aid-receiving countries pay back £13 in debt and interest,” said Des, who is a member of the advisory group that plans the CAFOD campaigns.

Because only ten per cent of every dollar given to CAFOD is spent on administration – with the remaining 90% going to its projects, CAFOD does not have administrative offices in every country; however, anyone can become involved in CAFOD campaigns, projects and advocacy.

One of the campaigns Des spoke animatedly about involved speaking out against manufacturers who labelled their products “Made in the USA” when, in fact, most of the product parts had been made in poor countries where workers did not receive fair wages. She gave me the example of a woman in Bangladesh who had made a coat and was paid the equivalent of 20 pence, while the coat was on sale in London in a well-known store for £100.

“Poor countries in Africa have to sell coffee beans to richer countries. However, if they were to decide to turn the beans into coffee and export it themselves to North America and the UK, they would have to pay a huge tax on it.” Des cited this as one example of how free trade agreements favoured First World countries.

“In many of the Latin American countries, the banana plantations are owned by American conglomerates.

The workers on these plantations get no protection at all. The men become infertile from the fertilisers they use, the women have deformed babies. So we campaign against things like that and encourage people to purchase fairly traded bananas and products,” she said.

CAFOD does not only campaign against injustice but also responds to emergencies. The agency always keeps money in the bank to allow it to respond immediately to an emergency. Des recalled when there was flooding in Mozambique some years ago: “CAFOD was there, providing clean water, food, tents, medicine, blankets and food. When the flood went away CAFOD brought in bamboo canes so that the people could build stronger houses and gave each family seeds to plant, baby chickens….”

CAFOD’s partners give it an idea of what is needed in the community. “It is never a patronising thing. We don’t say we know what is best. The community tells us what is needed. CAFOD partners know, through dialogue, what is needed by families in the community at any given time and so they help CAFOD to meet the community’s needs,” she explained.

CAFOD and other Catholic organisations have recently launched the “Live Simply” project. “We want people to live simply, to live sustainably and to live in solidarity with people.”
The symbol for this project is the sign of the loaves and fish, which is a reminder of the miracle Jesus performed in order to feed the multitude.

Des believes that it is important to make children aware of these issues since they are “the future of the world” and can also make a difference. “I say to the children when I go to the schools, ‘Don’t think you are too small. Human beings are co-creators with God. You do your bit and God will multiply it’.”

Another example she uses when she visits schools in England is the story of the Israelites receiving manna in the desert. She notes that in that biblical story, when God provided manna for the Israelites, he told Moses that they were only to take what they needed.

If they gathered too much and tried to store some it turned bad and this, DES believes, is a lesson for us. She laments that in today’s society we have all become slaves to the television and to consumerism.

“Everybody is so busy with their own affairs that people tend to lack that empathy which is so needed in our world today. We are all getting too much when we really only need enough. If we tried to live simply and have enough, then there would be more for the starving people in the world.”

Des is also the Chair of another organisation called Myrrh Education and Training, a Government-supported group based in England that teaches crafts, literacy and numeracy skills. Most of the persons who come for training have no employable skills.

Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, Des also decided to become involved with the group Peace and Justice in East London. This group sought to build bridges between people of all faiths and took part in the monitoring of trials of persons arrested for terrorism after 9/11.

“People have been locked up in the UK and have never been questioned, never been told what they’ve done, their lawyers have never been told what they’ve done and they are just being called terrorist suspects. So they are guilty and have had no chance to prove their innocence.”
Des visits these men in prison and their families and provides support, advice and counselling for them.

On the difference between need and greed, she added: “There are 110 million children who will never go to school at all. Somehow we have to be aware of these facts and start living simply. Mahatma Gandhi said there is enough food in the world to satisfy everyone’s need but not enough food to satisfy everyone’s greed.”

CAFOD has calculated that 25% of all the food bought in the UK goes straight into the dustbin. Des believes that in the US the percentage is even greater.

“People who generally go to church think that their faith is practised in church. Your faith is practised by your living in the world. You go to church to get nourishment to go out into the world and give service.

There are very rich people in Guyana. If they could just wake up and see what could be done to help it would make so much of a difference,” she said.

Des believes firmly that religion is not simply about being at Mass every Sunday but about practising one’s faith in the world. She mentioned that the motto for the Justice and Peace group was “Think Globally. Act Locally”. This, she said, meant that each individual must start in his or her own community.

“You don’t need to be part of a big organisation either. It might just mean helping an elderly person to do their shopping without much fanfare. That is helping others in need in our community. This is how we are called to live out our Christian vocation.”

Persons interested in learning more about CAFOD can visit its website at www.cafod.org.uk
If this article motivates one person to help someone in need in his/her community, it would have been worth the study time I sacrificed to write it.