Don’t Pressure Expectant Moms

/ Katrin Park / Leave a comment

When I first moved to London from New York, I was blown away that I didn’t need medical insurance to see a doctor.  All I had to do was look up National Health Service clinics in my area and go to the nearest one.  Prescriptions cost me mere £7, and birth control didn’t even require that £7-prescription fee (in New York, I had to pay $50 every month out of my pocket because they were not covered by my insurance).  Whatever NHS’s troubles, it seemed to me that they were doing a fine job.

Two years and a pregnant friend later, I changed my mind.

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Choose both the arms and the legs

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Emotional resilience is a key to surviving the challenges of today. It helps us adapt more easily to constantly changing circumstances.

So why do we continue to over-zealously support our children’s intellectual development over their emotional growth? In doing so, we are overlooking more than a decade of brain research that has confirmed children engage in learning at all levels.

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Supporting Local Farmers in Laos

/ Katrin Park

2 June, Saravane, Laos — Oudone Vongkham, 60, lives in Naxay Noi Village, about 22 kilometres from the district of Saravane, on the southern tip of Laos. He spends his days working on his farm. When a new market was built in his village — with a newly paved road, linking his farm to the market — transporting and selling produce became possible for him. Now his family has a small shop in the market where his wife and their nine children take turns to sell produce all day.

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Rwanda’s Reforms Boost Progress on School Enrolment

/ Katrin Park

7 May 2010, Kigali, Rwanda — When the Rwandan Government drafted the first status report on the Millennium Development Goals in 2003, the main focus was economic stabilisation. Poverty and maternal mortality targets were completely off track.

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In Northern Ghana, 10 Horsepower Helps to Fight Poverty

/ Katrin Park

14 April 2010, Tamale, Ghana — Amadu Mahama has spent the last 20 years trying to make accessible modern energy services to his people in his native Tamale of northern Ghana. He has never doubted that access to modern energy services is a key to reducing poverty, especially in rural areas where only 17 percent of the population is estimated to be connected to the national electricity grid.

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A Fish Net and a Boat

/ Katrin Park

Cyclone Nargis ravaged Myanmar in May of 2008, wiping out the Southeast Asian country’s western coast.  The opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi was still under house arrest, and the military Myanmar government, apprehensive about the waves of incoming foreign aid workers, allowed only Asian passport-holders to enter the country for post-disaster reconstruction work.

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UNDP Doctor Treats One Village at a Time

/ Katrin Park

Bogale, Myanmar, 10 June 2008 — Every morning since Cyclone Nargis made landfall, Doctor Ye Lwin has been getting up at five o’clock. After morning prayers, he starts seeing patients who have travelled a long way to come to the makeshift clinic UNDP has set up at its Bogale township office.

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Knight of Faith

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February 18, 2006
Banda Aceh, Indonesia

Dear Friends:

Leroy S. Rouner, my philosophy professor from Boston University, passed away on Saturday morning, February 11, 2006. He was 76 years old. He had bone marrow cancer.

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UN Takes Lead to Give Roof And Walls to Tsunami Survivors in Tents

/ Katrin Park

Aceh, Indonesia — When the Tsunami struck last December, Ibu Aja Cut of Teunom Village in the Aceh Jaya District on Aceh’s West Coast lost all her family members, save two grandchildren. Her house vanished off the face of the earth. The 70-year-old spent the next nine months in a six square meter emergency tent with her two surviving grandchildren. Two weeks ago, they moved into a newly erected temporary shelter. In the 36 square meter room with wooden walls, a metal roof, an open kitchen and two makeshift beds, Ibu Aja Cut, for the first time since the disaster, sees ray of hope.

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Demining Afghanistan

/ Katrin Park

Kabul — After 15 years of intensive demining work, Afghanistan still remains the most mined country in the world. It is estimated that some 4.5 million Afghans living in 2,400 communities, over an area of 715 square kilometers, are affected. An average of 100 people are killed or injured by landmines monthly. USAID, recognizing the critical importance of clearing lands for reconstruction and long-term development, continues the endeavor for mine action, which it first began in 1989 with the establishment of the War Victims Fund.

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