COLUMBUS, OHIO – Meaza Awoke, a native of Ethiopia who lives in Westerville, registered to vote yesterday and plans to cast a ballot for the first time in her life in November.
Awoke, 44, co-owner of the Blue Nile restaurant with her husband, Mequanent Berihun, said that in the 16 years she has lived in the United States she has seen the economy and employment decline and affect her business.
“Small businesses are dying because the economy is bad,” said Awoke, who hopes the next president will create jobs. “People aren’t eating out. Our customers have been laid off.”
Spanish teacher Carmen Ladman gleefully accepts a naturalization certificate from federal court deputy Fran Green to the cheers of her students from Columbus School for Girls. Ladman was the last of 300 new citizens to receive a certificate at yesterday’s ceremony at Veterans Memorial.
Doral Chenoweth III | dispatch
Spanish teacher Carmen Ladman gleefully accepts a naturalization certificate from federal court deputy Fran Green to the cheers of her students from Columbus School for Girls. Ladman was the last of 300 new citizens to receive a certificate at yesterday’s ceremony at Veterans Memorial.
Carmen Ladman used to plan her trips home to El Salvador around her country’s presidential elections so she could vote. After becoming a U.S. citizen yesterday, she won’t have to travel so far to cast her ballot this year. She will vote in America for the first time.
“How important this election is for this country made me apply (for citizenship) to vote,” said Ladman, 52, who has lived in the United States 12 years. “I’m a believer that we all have to do something.
“If I don’t participate in the process, I don’t have the right to say this is right or this is wrong.”
Ladman, of Worthington, was among 300 people who became citizens yesterday at a ceremony at Veterans Memorial. Many of the new Americans, ranging in age from 18 to 79 and hailing from 73 countries, completed voter-registration forms afterward.
Completing the long citizenship process and living in a politically important state will drive most of these new citizens to the polls, said Paul Beck, professor of political science at Ohio State University.
“New citizens really take their rights as citizens seriously,” Beck said. “You can expect these people to show up at the polls in November.”
More than 2,900 people have been naturalized in Columbus since January. U.S. District Judge Michael H. Watson, one of three judges at the ceremony, told the new citizens: “Exercise your right to vote and engage others. Many lives have been lost fighting to preserve this precious right of citizenship.”
Ladman, a Spanish-language instructor at the Columbus School for Girls for 11 years, discusses immigration issues in her classes. Yesterday, 46 of her students witnessed a civics lesson in action when they watched her take the citizenship oath.
Brothers Manuel and Rafael Rizo, who were born in Mexico and moved to this country in 1997, sat next to each other and took the citizenship oath together.
Rafael Rizo, 21, said he’s glad he is now officially an American so he can vote to improve conditions for immigrants. “I’m looking at the candidates and who is for freedom, jobs and who is doing more stuff for immigrants,” said Rizo of Delaware.
Becoming a citizen is important to Yelena Chaykovskaya, 61, a native of Uzbekistan, because she feels at home here. In her native country, poverty and violence made life difficult.
But now she is concerned about the challenges facing her new nation, especially war. Chaykovskaya, who lives in Alexandria in Licking County, plans to vote to address the country’s needs.
“Right now America has very big problems,” she said.
(Afrik.com) – Drought-affected communities in Ethiopia will receive an additional food aid package of nearly US$ 60 million from the US through the UN World Food Programme, it was officially announced Thursday.
The US Agency for International Development (USAID) said the relief contribution provided by America consisted of nearly 72,000 metric tonnes (MT) of food, including approximately 33,000 MT of sorghum, 33,000 MT of wheat, 5,000 MT of corn soya blend (CSB), and 1,000 MT of vegetable oil.
UN and non-governmental relief agencies operating in Ethiopia reported that increasing food insecurity and malnutrition in some areas of the country were posing a serious challenge to humanitarian response activities.
For instance, reports said the overall humanitarian situation in the south-eastern Somali Region had worsened due to progressive shortages of water and food.
The US is the largest donor of emergency food assistance to Ethiopia.
Since October 2007, the American people have provided more than 804,000 MT of food assistance to the disaster-prone East African country.
Given through USAID’s Office of Food for Peace, the assistance was valued at nearly US$ 627 million and it included more than US$ 324 million in emergency food commodities and more than US$ 302 million in contributions to the Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP), a multi-donor effort led by the Ethiopian government to address chronic food insecurity.
Meanwhile, Assistant Administrator of the USAID’s Bureau of Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance, Michael Hess, and Jeff Borns, Director of the Office of Food for Peace, are currently visiting Ethiopia to meet with government officials and representatives from humanitarian organisations and analyze the effectiveness of the American humanitarian assistance in affected areas.
During their 15-19 September 2008 tour, Hess and Borns have travelled to Somali and Southern Nations Nationalities and Peoples regions of Ethiopia to observe USA ID-funded programmes and meet with regional officials and USAID partners.
According to the Somali Regional Disaster Prevention and Preparedness Bureau, food and water shortages have reached critical levels in many areas of the region leading to increased rural-urban migration.
Affected areas include Korahe, Warder, Degehabur, Gode, Fik and parts of Liben and Afder zones.
Also, WFP reported that the region remained of particular concern due to erratic dispatches of food assistance.
Constant increase in food prices has compounded food insecurity while livestock mortality is escalating due to extreme shortages of water and pasture and drought-related diseases.
With concern growing about the likely exacerbation of drought conditions as the July-September rains in Jijiga and Shinile zones are nearing a failure, regional officials said priority responses should be immediate interventions in food, in come and livelihood protection support, animal feeds and water supply.
According to WFP, increasing needs of food assistance in Ethiopia remained the leading factor challenging timely and adequate response activities.
The agency currently faces a resource shortfall totalling 145,690 MT of relief food valued at US$ 118.9 million.
Days after the Israeli government did an about-face and agreed to continue evaluating Ethiopia’s Falash Mura population for eligibility to make aliya, a new school opened in the northern Ethiopian city of Gondar to help prepare thousands of Falash Mura children for a future life in the Jewish homeland.
The school, which was established with the full support of the Ethiopian government, is being funded by a collection of American-Jewish organizations, headed by the North American Conference on Ethiopian Jewry (NACOEJ), which receives some of its funding from the United Jewish Communities (UJC).
The facility, which will teach Hebrew, religion and Jewish culture, will cater to an estimated 10,000 Falash Mura – Jews whose ancestors were forced to convert to Christianity a century ago – who are currently waiting in Gondar to find out if they are eligible to immigrate under a special clause in the Law of Entry.
In the meantime, the debate over whether Israel should let them in continues, as does the debate over whether the UJC, which is the chief fundraising arm of American Jewry, should continue providing financial support and other essential aid to the families, most of whom have no other form of income outside of the donations made by North American Jewry.
On Sunday, the Israeli government decided that Interior Ministry representatives in Ethiopia should continue checking the eligibility for aliya of some 3,000 Ethiopians, whose names originally appeared on 1999 census known as the Efrati list. However, many Ethiopian community leaders and their supporters insist that there are between 8,000 and 10,000 people who still need to be considered.
On Thursday top UJC officials met to discuss whether to continue funding projects for the Falash Mura in Ethiopia.
In January, UJC President and CEO Howard Rieger sent a memo to executives of the 19 largest federations saying that funds raised in a special campaign dubbed Operation Promise, which was intended in part to help Ethiopian Jewry, had run out and that the UJC was halting its funding of aid programs in northern Ethiopia.
MOGADISHU (AFP) — Somalia’s business community on Thursday expressed concern over the closure of Mogadishu airport by a radical Islamist group, arguing the move was tantamount to self-inflicted sanctions.
Somalia’s Al-Shebab movement earlier this week warned that all flights should cease as of September 16, arguing that the airport was an instrument of Ethiopia’s Woyanne’s military occupation of Somalia.
Commercial activity at the airport has since been frozen but Somali traders in Mogadishu as well as among the diaspora in Nairobi are concerned that the measure will only further stifle an already agonising nation.
“It’s disastrous, a black era for the people of Somalia because the airport is a facility that serves everybody, not only the foreign forces as the Shebab say,” said Muktar Adan Sanka, a trader who sells medicines in Mogadishu.
The Shebab did not elaborate on the action they would take if flights continued but their decree came amid intelligence reports that the militia received a new delivery of surface-to-air missile.
“The airport is generating money that helps Ethiopian Woaynne troops get revenue, the premise is under the direct control of Ethiopian troops,” the Shebab said in a statement posted on the Internet on Saturday.
The airport is used for both commercial and military flights but is also the main base for the Ugandan contingent of the African Union peacekeepers, who were reinforced by Burundians earlier this year.
“How dare they close this airport, which everyone uses, including those who made that decision? We must not keep silent otherwise we will let them destroy our livelihood,” said Abas Mumin, another trader.
“They took this fateful decision at a time when traders were reviewing the maritime option because of the surge in piracy,” he explained.
Attacks by marauding pirates off the coast of Somalia and rogue checkpoints dotting the country’s ragged roads further complicate trade and the much-needed delivery of food aid.
A large Somali diaspora lives in Nairobi, where many of those who could afford to leave the war-torn country have settled and started businesses.
“Since Tuesday, we’ve been unable to fly or send commercials goods to Mogadishu. The airport is not operational despite the Somali government pledge it would remain open,” Nairobi-based trader Ahmed Aydarus complained.
“Direct flights to Mogadishu from Nairobi and Dubai were the most useful ones, people get food and medicine from there,” he said.
“If there was a nearby airport through which people could bring their shipment it would be okay, but the nearest airport we can safely use is in Berbera or Hargeisa” in Somaliland, said Amina Hassan Bilan, another trader.
Abdi Moalim Abdulahi, another Nairobi resident, said he resented the presence of foreign troops in his country as much as the Shebab do but argued that closing the airport was self-defeating.
“Unfortunately, the airport closure simultaneously punishes the occupying force and increases the Somali people’s suffering,” he said.
The government in Mogadishu has attempted to convince traders and commercial airlines that the airport could still be used.
“The Shebab have no powers to stop flights as they are not in control of the airport. They only used the media to terrify people,” presidential spokesman Hussein Mohamud Mohamed Hubsired told AFP.
But his reassurances fell on deaf ears in Nairobi, where the business community argued it would be foolish not to take the Shebab seriously.
“We know that three planes were shot down by Somali insurgents last year and they might do it again. Hubsired shouldn’t say such things,” said Sirad Haji Hassan, who is in the import-export business.
“People should not be used as target practice for the insurgents’ new missiles,” she added.
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia – A workshop to discuss and improve on a Draft Communication and Advocacy Strategy of the African Union, jointly elaborated by the Division of Communication and Information (DCI) of the African Union and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) Representation to the African Union in Addis Ababa, opened today Wednesday 17 September 2008 at the headquarters of the African Union in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
For two days, participants will brainstorm on a framework to improve communication and advocacy in the African Union.
Speaking while presiding at the opening ceremony, the Head of the DCI, Mrs. Habiba Mejri-Cheikh Habiba, said, the information, communications and advocacy strategy is intended to be a dynamic instrument, isolating key objectives, audiences and themes and associating them with appropriate channels. “It also ensures flexibility to respond to changing circumstances in a changing world”. She underscored the need to involve all the actors in the domain of communication from the African Union regional offices, the Regional Economic Communities (RECs), the AU organs, and the AU partners to share their experiences and good practices with a view to enriching the document that will project a balanced image of Africa worldwide.
The Director of the UNFPA Liaison Office, Ms. Etta Tadesse on her part lauded the Division of Communication and Information for organizing the workshop on communication, which she said is the key to development in Africa. She said, due to the many challenges Africa is facing, there is need to call on every African to contribute in his/her own way to the integration of the continent. “This has to be done by dissemination of information about the African Union by involving the media at all levels while monitoring feedback to be able to respond to the demands of the population including the stakeholders”, she said.
According to the Commissioner for Rural Economy and Agriculture of the African Union,
Mrs. Rhoda Peace TUMUSIIME, the workshop to validate a strategy for Communication and Information for the African Union is timely as the Union needs more visibility and advocacy to showcase its present and future activities given that the global community needs to know more about Africa. ” It is important for the different Departments of the AU to interact and galvanise their various communication activities to ensure fruitful management of the AU”, she explained.
Participants at the workshop listened to a presentation on the « Framework for Information, Communication and Advocacy » by Dr. George Ngwa, Communication Expert, UNFPA; the presentation of the the DCI Work Plan 2008-2011, outlining in a pragmatic and operational manner the implementation of the communication and sensitisation process adopted by the African Union for the next four years, was done by Mrs. Habiba MEJRI-CHEIKH, DCI Head; a presentation of the Current AU communication and Advocacy practices in the DCI by Mrs. Wynne MUSABAYANA, Communication Expert and a presentation of the AU website by Mrs. Christiane Yanrou, Senior Web-Administrator at the African Union Commission.
Representatives from the following AU Organs presented the state of communication in their respective structures. They are: the Pan-African Parliament (PAP), the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD), the Department of Peace and Security of the AU, the AU Mission in New York, USA, the African Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), Nairobi branch, and the Semi-Arid Food Grain Research and Development the (SAFGRAD).
Other participants at the workshop include: Communication Officials from the Southern African Development Community (SADC), “Communauté économique des Etats de l’Afrique centrale” (CEEAC), East African Community (EAC), African Development Bank (ADB), Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF),
African Child Policy Forum, AU Mission in Geneva, AU Mission in Brussels, AU Office Lilongwe, and Departments of the African Union Commission.
The Workshop for the validation of the African Union Framework for Information, Communication and Advocacy ends tomorrow Thursday 18 September 2008.
By UN Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN)
“The knowledge [that FGM is harmful] is increasing,” said Abate Gudunfa, head of the Ethiopian National Committee on Traditional Practices (commonly referred to as EGLDAM – its name in Amharic]. “Children born more recently are safer.”
Still, FGM is carried out on girls as young as 80 days old, particularly in the predominately Christian highlands, and up to 14 years of age in the lowland Muslim regions. A network of 40 NGOs, including EGLDAM, the government and international organisations, are involved in anti-FGM campaigns in Ethiopia. Policies have also been reviewed to ensure participants are punished.
“Prevalence, especially among newly born children is decreasing – meaning that more families have sufficient awareness and do not support this practice anymore,” Abate added.
A 2007 survey conducted by EGLDAM found that prevalence across the country had dropped from 61 percent in 1997 to 46 percent.
Nine regions including Tigray, the Southern and Oromiya as well as two city administrations namely the capital Addis Ababa and Dire Dawa, showed the highest improvement. Other regions recorded minimal change. “There is almost no decrease in Afar and Somali [regions] – the strongholds of infibulation,” the survey noted.
EGLDAM found a decrease in almost all ethnic groups. Some 29 groups reflected a 20 percent decline, of which 18 were located in the Southern Region.
“Those ethnic groups …should be considered real success areas and given due attention as possible learning sites,” EGLDAM said. “Six ethnic groups show about or less than 10 percent decrease and should be considered as groups of probable major resistance to change.”
These included the Harari, Shinasha, Alaba and Hadia ethnic groups.
Globally, an estimated two million girls are still at risk of undergoing FGM each year. Activists say FGM is deeply entrenched in society despite various efforts to stop it.
According to the Inter-African Committee, the practice is a serious health issue affecting women, helping to spread HIV/AIDS and responsible for high female mortality rates in Africa.
“The knowledge [that FGM is harmful] is increasing,” said Abate Gudunfa, head of the Ethiopian National Committee on Traditional Practices (commonly referred to as EGLDAM – its name in Amharic]. “Children born more recently are safer.”