The Diocesan Dialogue
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April 2007

Millennium Development Goals: What ONE Can Do

High School Youth Retreat at St. John's Church, Logan

After an afternoon of cleaning windows at the Global Villages store, part of the group poses in front of their handiwork.

by Karen Cramer Van Winkle

What are the Millennium Development Goals? Why should we care as Christians and what can we do about them? Twelve youth and eight adults came together from Price, Salt Lake City, Tooele, and Logan to tackle these questions.

The Millennium Development Goals (or MDG's) were created in 2000 by the United Nations. They consist of 8 inter-related goals which strive to cut global poverty in half by the year 2015.

When we looked at the statistics on global poverty around the world, we agreed that things look pretty bleak.

For instance: about 30,000 children die every day from hunger and preventable diseases, more than 1 billion people in the world live on less than $1 a day, 800 million people lack basic literacy skills, and women account for two-thirds of that number.

Looking at the big picture, these problems seemed overwhelming. I mean, what could any of us really do about it?

Then we started learning about some very special people and how they were responding to the call to serve others. We watched a video called "Green Eyes in Africa" which tells the story of Ryan Hansen, a young adult and member of St. Mark's Cathedral in Salt Lake City, who has spent the last year and a half in Cameroon.

He went to Africa to work in an orphanage and once he got there, he found that the children were being abused and neglected. Facing against political corruption and even death threats, he worked for months to rescue the children from these deplorable conditions and created the New Hope Orphanage to offer a safe haven for the children to live and thrive.

We learned about the work of Global Villages, a store across the street from St. John's church, which sells fairly traded goods from around the world. The owner, Sally Keller, came to talk with us about the importance of fair trade.

She told us that fair trade can often increase the amount that artisans receive for their goods from a paltry 1% of their value to closer to 30 percent, helping artisans all over the world to rise above poverty and have hope for the future. We were more than happy to support Sally and Global Villages by spending the afternoon washing all the windows in the store, and even got to do a little fair trade shopping of our own!

We also realized that many of us had already been involved in numerous projects with our churches and schools which contributed toward the work of the MDG's. Even in our small group of 20, here are just a few of the things that we had been involved in: 30 Hour Famines, mission trips, serving at food pantries, raising money for the Road Home, building a well in Africa, buying fair trade products, sponsoring children in other countries, and holding bake sales for outreach projects.

When we realized that we were already doing a lot of wonderful things for the MDG's, it didn't seem quite so overwhelming and actually made us want to do more. One of the activities that participants said impacted them the most was our Hunger Banquet on Saturday night. Each person was assigned randomly to one of the three groups. The "high income group" represented the 15 percent of the world's population with a per capita income of $9000 or more.

The "middle income group" represented the 25 percent of the population earning between $900 and $9000 a year. The "lowincome group" represented nearly 60 percent of the world's population who earn less that $900 a year. As the banquet progressed, we learned more about the people in each of these groups and the struggles they face.

At Saturday's hunger banquet, only members of the high income group (Max Painter from St. John's, and Kristen Lilja) received a full meal.

When it came time to eat, the food was not distributed evenly. Those in the high income group sat at a beautiful table and were served a full meal, while those in the low income group sat on the floor and received only a half-cup of rice and a common bowl of water to share.

The interactions between the groups were very interesting and led to a lot of great discussion afterward.

Saturday night, we watched a presentation from the website for Episcopalians for Global Reconciliation (www.e4gr.org).

It talked about how much money it would actually take to accomplish the MDG's and how much we as Americans spend on everyday items, many of which really aren't that important. For example, $4 billion a year would save 500,000 women from dying in childbirth, and Americans spend $9.8 billion a year on bottled water. The cost for universal primary education is $10 billion a year and we spend twice that each year on ice cream. A grande latte can cost $3.65 - have one every morning and that's about $1000 a year. That would provide 200 bed nets that would save children from dying of malaria.

On Sunday morning, each participant received a white ONE campaign bracelet as part of a commissioning service sending them forth to spread the word to others about the MDG's and what they can do about them. Each person made a personal pledge of something that they individually were going to do.

Some of these pledges included giving up something for a month and using the money they would have spent to support MDG work, making a pledge of 0.7% of their income from allowances and after school jobs, and going back to their parishes and talking with others about the MDG's. Many of the youth chose to donate their pledge money to support Green Eyes in Africa. The presentation we watched on Saturday night ended with words that have stuck with me for days and I think summed up much of what we talked about all weekend. It said: "Giving is important... because Christ tells us that we meet him and serve him in the poorest of the poor. It's important because Christ tells us that where our treasure is, our heart will be also. It's important not because we should but because we can. Because our greatness comes from seeking and serving Christ. Because when we give our lives away... WE ARE RICH." Amen.

Karen Cramer Van Winkle is Diocesan Youth Coordinator.

If you would like to make a donation to be part of the Diocesan Youth MDG Project to benefit Green Eyes in Africa, please make a check payable to: The Episcopal Diocese of Utah, and mail by April 16 to: Episcopal Diocese of Utah, ATTN: Youth Ministry, PO Box 3090, SLC, UT 84110.

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