Newsletter Spring 2004

Capacitar: Evolving with the Times
—Patricia Mathes Cane, Ph.D. Capaticar Founder/Co-Director

As Capacitar celebrates 10 years as a nonprofit and 16 years as an international network, we are taking new steps using the tools of our times to better respond to the needs of our world. To reach out more effectively to diverse peoples and cultures, we are developing virtual capability with office and program and are envisioning the creation of a "virtual Capacitar Institute". Our website is being redesigned to better implement our mission, to facilitate communication between peoples in different regions, to offer resources for trainers in different languages, to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of programs electronically, and to provide for a global virtual network of empowerment and solidarity.

Some of this is already happening. Informal chatrooms and email networks have sprung up to connect Capacitar participants within Ireland/Northern Ireland, Indonesia and Southern Africa. Capacitar manuals and materials have been translated into Spanish, Haitian Creole, Swahili, Bahasa Indonesian, and Tetum (East Timor). The Capacitar for Kids program is virtually evaluated each month by children and teachers in Cincinnati connecting through our website with an evaluation company in the Carolinas.

To promote regional interchange and networking, our first U.S. conference will be held in July in San Diego with 55 women and men participating from around the country. Regional conferences have already been held in Central America. Teams in different world areas are reaching out to offer workshops to other groups in their regions. The El Salvador team has offered trauma trainings in Colombia; the Chile team works in Argentina, Peru and Brazil; the Indonesian team has brought together Christians and Muslims from conflict zones in the region; and current trainings are uniting participants from Ireland and Northern Ireland.

One of the essential factors in Capacitar's growth has been effective collaboration with diverse grassroots communities, as well as professional organizations and groups. Recent workshops in Argentina brought together marginalized barrio women and also reached out to psychologists, social workers and professionals working to heal trauma in the country.

An important new collaboration for Capacitar is with a web-based network founded by Sr. Jean Schafer, SDS, to address the issue of trafficking of women and children (reported on in this newsletter). Other collaborations involve our joint efforts with the Cancer Consortium in Texas and CANSA in South Africa, as well as partnerships with many AIDS organizations in Southern and Eastern Africa.

As we respond to the times, Capacitar's prayer, adapted from a UN prayer, summarizes the commitment we make for the next 10 years for ourselves and our world:

We join with the Earth and with each other,
With our ancestors and all beings of the future,
To bring new life to the land, to recreate the human community,
To provide justice and peace, to remember our children
To remember who we are. We join together as many
and diverse expressions of one loving Mystery,
For the healing of the Earth and the renewal of all Life.

Transitions

We lost three members of the Capacitar family in 2003.

• Eileen Gargan was a member of the Capacitar Advisory Board and a monthly supporter since Capacitar's founding. She also volunteered hundreds of hours of her time helping Capacitar staff set up and maintain the bookkeeping system, and she prepared our monthly, quarterly and yearly payroll tax returns. Despite a chronic illness, Eileen always brought laughter and joy with her.

• Carmen Garcia was a union leader and organizer in Guatemala. She was one of the earliest participants in Capacitar workshops and a woman of great courage. She had lost part of her hand in an industrial acident but, despite the ongoing pain, continued her work. She was also a member of the Capacitar team that ran the healing tent at the NGO Forum on Women in China in 1995.

• Tom Condon, husband of co-director Joan Condon, was affectionately dubbed by Pat Cane "the husband of Capacitar." Tom supported Capacitar with both his wisdom and his willingness to volunteer for any of the tasks that needed to get done that staff didn't have time to do. And he kept the home fires burning for Joan as she traveled to do Capacitar work.
  Eileen, Carmen and Tom all embodied the Capacitar philosophy of striving to live in wellness despite illness and pain. They are greatly missed.

Farewell and Welcome

Rita Jovick, PBVM, is moving on to other challenges. Rita has worked in development and administration since 1998. We want to thank her for all the work and her dedication to Capacitar and wish her luck in her new endeavors. We will miss her cheerful and willing presence.

Peggy Thompson is joining the Capacitar team on a consulting basis. Peggy has her own business, Winning Grants, and she will be advising the Capacitar staff on development and public relations strategies and implementation. We look forward to working with her as Capacitar continues to grow.

United Nations Womens' Conference

Co—Director Joan Condon made a Capacitar presentation arranged by IPA (International Presentation Association—Sisters of the Presentation) as part of the UN program for International Women's Day. About 45 people attented the side-bar program entitled, Healing Conflict through Embodying Peace. They learned some of the wellness practices that Capacitar teaches for creating peace within ourselves, so that we can live in peace with others.

• Ireland, Northern Ireland
  Two cycles of Multicultural Wellness training are being offered in Dublin, along with outreach workshops in different parts of the country. In Portadown, No. Ireland a workshop was offered to HURT—Homes United by Rampant Terror, to help heal people from all sides of the conflict.

• Indonesia/east Timor
  Capacitar in East Timor has begun a new series of trainings in Baucau. Teachers, firefighters, nurses, catechists, women's rights advocates have gathered to begin this new series. The youngest participant, attending with her mother, is seven years old. Her quick grasp and enthusiasm are keeeping us all on our toes! Participants in the Indonesians trainings came from different islands to Bali for the second in a training-for-trainers series. Many of the participants are from Ambon where Capacitar is becoming an integral part of the efforts in peacebuilding and reconciliation. They are reaching out now to other areas of conflict where trauma healing will help people to work toward peace.

• Tanzania/South Africa
  In April, Tanzanian women will meet for a third training of members of a national team. Two women from an AIDS orphan and advocacy network in the region of Mombasa, Kenya, will attend the training. The Capacitar work in South Africa with networks of advocates and caregivers working in response to the AIDS pandemic has encouraged her in her work to provide in-service training for the volunteers in the Mombasa region. Three cycles of trainings are being offered in South Africa, as well as trauma trainings for the SACBC AIDS Office (Bishops Conference).

Collaboration on Anti-Trafficking Advocacy—Sr. Jean Schafer, SDS

Human trafficking is the buying and selling of human beings, mostly women and children as young as four years of age, and recruiting, transporting, transferring and harboring them for exploitation in sweat shops, as cheap labor, or most often for sexual exploitation. Millions of people are coerced into this lucrative market annually. "There are more slaves alive today than all the people stolen from Africa." (Disposable People, Kevin Bales, Univ. of CA Press, 2000). The Netherlands, Germany and Australia have legalized prostitution, which NGOs state has only exacerbated human trafficking, rather than curtail it. Power, greed, profit and sexual desire drive the trafficking industry forward.

Lack of work makes people, especially women concerned for their families, feel desperate. This makes them vulnerable to the deceptions of traffickers. Southeast Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe and Central America are fertile fields from which to entice women and children with promises of good jobs abroad. Recruiters offer women work as maids, baby-sitters, secretaries, waitresses, or sales persons. They are lured to the United States and many other countries, primarily Germany, the Netherlands, Japan, and Italy. They may be taken legally or clandestinely, but upon arrival the women discover there is no job and no money. They are told they must pay back the high costs of transportation and their room and board. They are forced to earn this money by selling their bodies. If they refuse or resist, they are beaten, threatened, sequestered and drugged. They spend months or years in brothels, massage parlors, escort services, strip joints, or casinos without recourse to health care or advocacy. In many U.S. cities these clandestine activities go on without its local citizens realizing what is actually taking place in local massage parlors or via local newspaper ads for escort or dating services.

The Trafficking Victim's Protection Act (TVPA), promulgated into law in October 2000, gives organizations and law enforcement agencies the tools needed to go after human traffickers. Traffickers include not only pimps, but also the recruiters, buyers, sellers, harborers, guards and transporters, any of whom, if convicted, could serve up to 20 years in prison. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), because of the TVPA, can now do more than minimize harm to victims. USAID promotes rescuing victims and reporting traffickers. This is both dangerous and difficult, since money given to legitimate agencies abroad is sometimes sub-contracted out to illegitimate organizations that are harder to trace. This is especially true where governments or local law enforcement agencies are corrupt. Yet, through awareness raising, grass roots action, and with pressure on legislators and law enforcement agencies, perpetrators everywhere can be shut down and punished. Women victims, once naively hopeful, become psychologically scarred, physically ill and filled with despair. They are then often incapable of self-rescue. These voiceless, and too often faceless, people need the courageous help of those, for whom any form of violence and injustice against others is intolerable. Through creative programs in social service agencies, such as that offered by Capacitar trainers, victims become survivors and productive citizens.

This is one such story reported by Wendy Murray Zoba in, and here excerpted from, Christianity Today November 2003. She interviewed a woman rescued from a brothel:

"I was 17 years old when I got married in Cambodia. Three months later my husband, who was kind to me, had to move because of his business. Despite my family's disagreement, I went with him. At our destination we stayed at a guesthouse, which he knew of. In the evening of our arrival he went out to meet friends, leaving me alone. He never came back. I had no money. After a week a woman from the guesthouse told me that my husband had received a large amount of money from her and that I was to stay and work in order to pay her back. I then found out that the guesthouse was actually a brothel. I was forced to sleep with men. If I refused, I was beaten, tied up and threatened with electric shocks. I kept looking for a way to escape. I could only pray to God for help. After three years, because I was too sick to work, the woman sold me to a Buddhist monk, who took me to his family. I only wanted to die because I felt so dirty. I eventually set out to try and find my family. I learned that my sister had died only three months earlier. I was so sad. I sat by the edge of the road alone. A Christian couple found me and took me to a rehabilitation center, The White Lotus. There I found healing and love again."

Just as the white lotus grows in dirty, stagnant water, so sex trafficking survivors learn, with the help of caring supporters, to bloom again despite their backgrounds. The Anti-Human Trafficking Project, co-sponsored by the Salvatorian Sisters and Capacitar International, Inc., works to raise awareness through presentations, workshops, and the newsletter, Stop Trafficking! The Project also connects social service agencies with Capacitar trainers, who teach self-healing techniques to staff and survivor alike. Finally the Project works to organize grass roots citizens to speak out to local and national government agencies and legislators against human trafficking in all its forms.

If you are interested in supporting the Anti-Human Trafficking Project or receiving its newsletter write stoptraff03@yahoo.com or contact Capacitar at capacitar@capacitar.org.