Recent Posts by Peter Warski

The 5 W’s on drought and hunger in East Africa

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The 5 W's on drought and hunger in East Africa
The number of people affected by devastating drought and hunger in East Africa, also known as the Horn of Africa, has catapulted from 7 million in March to nearly 13 million now. Vulnerable children and families are subject to extreme and potentially deadly malnutrition as livestock perish, vital crops are destroyed, and diseases increase. Informed by these disturbing statistics — as well as reports from our field offices, international media, partner agencies, and the World Vision international partnership emergency response team — we’ve compiled the following information, which answers the who, what, when, where, and why of the drought and food crisis in East Africa. Expect more posts to come concerning this crisis. WHO is affected? An estimated 13 million...
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World Refugee Day: Highlighting a global crisis

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Scenes from a camp for internally displaced peoples in Corail, Haiti. ©2010 Jon Warren/World Vision
Earlier this month, Collins Kaumba, a World Vision communicator in Zambia, shared his experience visiting a camp for internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Sudan. His words were jarring: “Indelible memories of the suffering I saw in Darfur have followed me since the day I left Sudan…I have seen suffering and poverty in Zambia and other places in Africa — but not of the magnitude I saw when I visited Darfur’s camps…” A reader in Israel commented on the post and made note of the thousands of Sudanese refugees there who are watching the situation in their homeland as the South prepares for its independence in just a few weeks. Years of conflict in this African country have caused millions to...
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Hard facts about labor trafficking

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Workers cleaning old shoes so that they can resell them in the markets in Thailand and Cambodia. ©2007 Haidy Ear-Dupuy/World Vision
When I was 15 years old, I got my first job as a lifeguard. Before I started, I had to obtain a work permit with my parents’ consent and the consultation of my school. There were strict rules governing the hours between which I was allowed to work, as well as how many hours I was allowed to work per week while school was in session. All of these regulations were in place because I was a minor. I resented them at the time. As an adolescent who longed to be treated as an adult — and who wanted to earn my own money — I thought the state had no business telling me when, where, or for how long...
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A long road ahead for Japan

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WV Japan staff en eoute to Sendai (WV/2011)
Some humanitarian disasters occupy a few days worth of headlines — if that — and then quickly become a distant memory, if they’re remembered at all. The Japan quake and tsunami, in my opinion, has been the opposite. On March 11, we were instantly exposed to a flood of media coverage on the devastation in northeast Japan and the gravity of the nuclear crisis created by the crippled power plant. That coverage didn’t subside much in the weeks to follow. On some level, the headlines and news clips about this historic natural disaster seem to have rendered the crisis more of an ongoing suspense film than a real-life story about human suffering. One month after the disaster, I must remember...
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