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Why care about the G8 Summit?

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Jennifer holds her baby, Gladys, after washing her with water from the gravity-fed water system installed by World Vision in her village. ©2011 Suzy Sainovski/World Vision
Every year since 1976, the heads of state of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Russia (which joined the group in 1997) have been meeting to discuss the global economy, security, and, increasingly, development issues. These leaders, known as the G8 (or Group of Eight), will hold their annual summit in Deauville, France, today and tomorrow. It can be difficult to understand why citizens of these countries should care about high-level policy meetings like this one. But these meetings set the course for critical priority decisions that affect what programs and issues are addressed, and which ones are set aside. These meetings result in financial commitments made by individual countries....
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Observations from Missouri’s tornado zone

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Outside Irving Elementary School in Joplin, Missouri, the devastation following the May 22 tornado is hard to comprehend. ©2011 Phyllis Freeman/World Vision
Editor’s note: Joplin, Missouri, is a small town in the U.S. Heartland. Its official population is 50,150. But now, it is tragically smaller in every sense, after the May 22 tornado that left 122 dead, 750 injured, and more than a quarter of the town destroyed. Phyllis Freeman, our domestic emergency response director, is on the ground in Joplin. I went looking for a school and found Irving Elementary School. It was mangled, the bricks blown apart. You can only think about the children who lived through this, seeing the skies turn black, hearing the roar of 200-mph winds, and watching the tornado chew things up, literally. Then they emerged to find their home gone, not knowing what’s happened to...
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South Sudan: Can independence bring a brighter future?

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Southern Sudan preliminary results announcement celebration in Juba, South Sudan on January 30, 2011. ©2011 Abraham Nhial/World Vision
Editor’s note: South Sudan, a region left devastated by decades of civil war, held a referendum last January in which voters decided to split from the northern part of the country and become an independent state. Preparations are in full swing for festivities to mark the upcoming independence of South Sudan. The mood is upbeat. On July 9, some 30 heads of state will travel to Juba, the acting capital city, to witness the birth of this new country. The history behind this event The region’s path to independence was preceded by 21 years of conflict between rebels in the South and the government based out of Khartoum, Sudan’s capital city in the North. This created a massive humanitarian crisis,...
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‘We refuse to be enemies’

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"Peace" graffiti in east Jerusalem. ©2011 Jon Warren/World Vision
It was one of the most memorable meals I’ve ever had. The location was a hilltop west of Bethlehem about a month ago, and my fellow dinner guests were 30 pastors and church leaders from the United States. That night, our bus parked at a cement-and-barbed-wire barricade, and we hiked about half a mile over two such barricades to have dinner at the top of the hill — in a cave! The prominent sign at the end of our hike proclaimed the slogan: “We refuse to be enemies.” The parcel of land west of Bethlehem is only about 100 acres. It is owned by the Nassar family, a Palestinian Christian family who have lived on and farmed the land since...
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