Raising Awareness: Ai Weiwei and the Refugee Crisis

Ai Weiwei, perhaps the most important artist alive, has found an interesting topic of study over the past couple of years: the global refugee crisis. Ai’s work has always had a social bend. He has shown his disdain and criticism of the Chinese government, particularly after the Sichuan earthquake, in many of his previous art pieces. In fact, his political activism even landing him in jail for 81 days.

Ai Weiwei: Inspiring with Art

In recent years, however, he has been working outside China in either a subterranean studio in Berlin or working in New York with the Public Art Fund. Ai Weiwei and the refugee crisis are hardly a surprising pair. Though he is veering away from the domestic politics that prompted many of his earlier works, tackling the global refugee crisis, nonetheless, inspires the same poignant and emotionally resonant works for which Ai has become internationally celebrated.

Ai’s art is certainly deserving of its reputation. “Remembering,” perhaps one of his most famous projects, was a massive art piece created in response to the Sichuan earthquake. Ai lined up thousands of backpacks along the Haus der Kunst in Munich. Each backpack represented a child who was lost in the earthquake. In addition, the backpacks spelled out a sentence written by one of the victim’s mother: “All I want is to let the world remember she had been living happily for seven years.”

The sensitivity Ai showed in focusing on the tragedy of a large number of people while highlighting the individual—in that case, the child’s mother—is how he has been able to approach the global refugee crisis. It is also that level of sensation, that which marked “Remembering” as an art piece, that should keep Ai Weiwei and the refugee crisis in the headlines.

Ai Weiwei and the Refugee Crisis

Ai Weiwei has responded to the crisis with several art projects and a documentary film, “Human Flow,” now available for streaming on Amazon. The documentary, as well as the project of combatting the refugee crisis, is ambitious. It is grand. It is wide in scope.

The film opens with an aerial shot of the sea. A refugee reception is soon underway as refugees come ashore from their boat on that sea. The image, the tiny heads adrift surrounded by impossibly small waves, conveys the immeasurability of the scene. Yet, as the film progresses, faces are visible, close-up. And, for a moment in this opening see, the audience sees the director.

The film isn’t just about the refugee crisis; it is about the international figure Ai Weiwei and the refugee crisis. He, the director, appears in many crucial scenes throughout the film. It is his documentary and his exploration of the crisis. Yet, his image is used sparingly. The audience sees him react to people organically; they see his emotional reactions, but the focus is always on the other people—the refugees.

The documentary spans several countries and jumps from location to location; not creating a story, but an especially moving tapestry of lives woven together by the different crises they experience. Close-ups highlight the individual while aerial shots from drone cameras create a sense of scale.

Ai Weiwei’s New York Art Project

As part of his work for New York’s Public Art Fund, with proceeds also going to the IRC and the UNHCR, Ai Weiwei used portraits of 300 of the refugees he encountered doing research and creating the documentary to create banners on display around the city. The banners are part of his “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors” exhibition, in which the artist also created several fence or cage installations around New York City as a commentary on the tendencies to not treat refugees with the respect and humanity they deserve.

Moreover, the images of individuals, used as part of a massive and publicly accessible art projects deal, are a testament to the massive scale of the crisis, and yet they imbue the subject, the refugee, with individuality and emotional resonance. These pieces are guaranteed to be seen when walking around New York.

The documentary and his other art projects serve to create and propagate awareness. It is not just an awareness of the refugee crisis, but of the otherwise unseen humans who are affected by the crisis. It is the emotion behind the art of Ai Weiwei and the refugee crisis itself that needs to be shared. And a readily streamable documentary along with a strong public art project serve as excellent ways of spreading awareness. His work can be seen as a call for action to address the needs of the global poor and the world’s refugees.

Ai Weiwei is far from finished making a statment on the refugee crisis. His next project, entitled “Laundromat,” will be in Qatar. The artist uses 2,046 articles of clothing left behind by refugees when fleeing the Greek island of Lesbos. In an email interview about this new project with the New York Times, Ai asserts this call for action, noting “We cannot reject the idea that humanity is one.”

– William Wilcox

Photo: Flickr

US Aid Benefits Refugees from Venezuela

Latin America is experiencing one of its worst ever migration crises. This region has experienced multiple population movements in its history. Venezuela has seen a mass exodus of people due to four years of economic downfall and the subsequent impoverishment of the citizens.

The Reasons Behind Venezuela Crisis

The problem has been further exacerbated by the re-election of the dictatorial President Nicolas Maduro. The economic policies of President Maduro and former President Hugo Chavez have mismanaged the country’s vast oil reserves and sent the country spiraling into depression. The government has cut imports by over 75 percent, choosing to use its own currency to balance the $140 billion debt. This is an extremely bad decision in a country that produces almost exclusively oil.

The result has been an enormous lack of services within the country and the decrease in GDP. These policies have remained unchanged or challenged because of Maduro’s stranglehold on the country’s media and legal system, in addition to his brutal responses to protests. Accusations of corruption and conspiracies surrounding drug trafficking have plagued Maduro’s career but haven’t challenged his rule in any meaningful way. The United States has responded to these allegations by sanctioning Maduro but this had relatively no effect on Maduro’s behavior. Realizing this fact, the U.S. turned their attention towards aid that benefits Venezuela refugees.

Refugee Crisis in Venezuela

Hopes for change internally seem bleak and have pushed over two million refugees into surrounding countries. At first, refugees are going to neighboring Ecuador, Peru and Columbia, countries that have been very welcoming in the past. Recently, however, the sheer number of migrants leaving Venezuela has forced its neighbors to take more aggressive policies.

Ecuador began blocking entry to refugees fleeing Venezuela with no passports. This policy came after the country declared a state of emergency due to the crisis. Peru and Columbia also announced their plan to adopt a similar policy and to deport migrants that are already within the country but without proper documentation. The policies of both the Government of Venezuela and its neighbors have trapped Venezuelan migrants in makeshift towns along the border, with limited resources. Most Venezuelan migrants sold their possessions in order to leave their country and have little to nothing in these towns.

The Aid of United States to Venezuela

Fortunately, the United States has played an instrumental role in providing aid that benefits refugees from Venezuela. The U.S had already provided $16 million in aid for the refugees through the United Nations Refugee Agency and another $6 million to help Columbia deal with their influx of refugees.

This money helped establish the infrastructure that is maintaining abovementioned makeshift towns and providing necessary health care for millions of people. Recently, the United States sent a life-saving resource to the shores of Columbia. Secretary of Defence, Jim Mattis, is sending a U.S. Navy Hospital Ship to help treat refugees in Colombia and surrounding Latin American countries. Hospital ships provide surgical care from some of the top military physicians in the world. They are protected by international law and help ease the burden on domestic medical institutions, which could influence many of these Latin American countries to take more beneficial positions towards refugees.

U.S. aid for refugees has a ripple effect on the countries that are hosting them because they have more resources at their disposal. This could change their policies in a meaningful way and end this migration process in the most positive way positive.

– Anand Tayal

Photo: Flickr

Changing the Treatment of Global Mental Illness

Mental illness receives far less attention than it should. Even though the data collected on global mental illness is minimal, it proves that mental diseases impose a functional hindrance on a stark percentage of the population. When not at full mental health, an individual cannot cope with the stresses of life nor make a productive contribution to their community. Therefore, providing effective and accessible treatment for mental illness is essential around the world.

Each organization listed here offers unique strategies to combat global mental illness. They range from small organizations with a specific focus to large organizations that devote only a part of their resources to mental health. Despite the varying sizes and contribution of each one, the continued efforts and successes of all of them still give an often ignored problem some much-needed attention and alleviation.

Strong Minds

The Strong Minds organization has had a promising impact on mental health despite being such a new and small program. Unlike organizations that tackle global mental illness by placing their incumbents throughout the world to cover multiple issues, Strong Minds has reserved its programs to African women with depression.

While this seems like a narrow focus, Strong Minds insists that their program can still have a major impact. Their website points to the statistics that 100 million people in Africa suffer from depression and women suffer at twice the rate of men. Suffering from depression makes women less productive and can cause further issues with physical health over time, which can, in turn, have an impact on the children of the person suffering.

Strong Minds uses a cost-effective method known as Group Interpersonal Psychotherapy (IPT-G), which it can easily teach to local professionals. It consists of an initial 12-week talk therapy session. The women who complete these therapy groups also have the option to create their own Peer Therapy Groups to help other members of their community.

Using the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) to evaluate their patients’ depression after the program, the organization found the results to be better than initially expected. Of the women who graduated from the program “between 94-97 percent” reported reduced symptoms of depression, and a third remained depression-free after six to eight months. With this success, Strong Minds hopes to continue to expand its program through additional connections with other programs in order to reach more women overall.

The Carter Center

While former president Jimmy Carter’s organization allocates a significant section of its healthcare resources towards physical diseases, it also has a commitment to mental health. Jimmy Carter’s wife and the center’s co-founder, Rosalynn Carter, manages The Mental Health Care Task Force and The National Advisory Council as well as The Fellowships for Mental Health Journalism. She also holds an annual symposium on mental health policies that gathers innovative thinkers in order to discuss and learn about a different topic each year.

Unlike an organization that creates mental health care programs or sends in doctors, The Carter Center focuses instead on spreading awareness and education about global mental illness. The task force partners itself with global health leaders in order to advocate for the need of such programs and to create policies that will alleviate mental illness. The fellowship has the task of reducing the stigma of mental illness by teaching journalists how to “more accurately and sensitively report information and influence peers and stakeholders to do the same”.

The Carter Center’s programs working in Liberia have had the most telling impact with the center and its partners training more than 240 mental health clinicians, some of whom have gone on to create programs of their own. It has also assisted Liberia’s Ministry of Health in the creation of a “five-year strategy and policy plan” to protect and promote the rights of mentally ill individuals.

The journalism fellowship has produced “more than 1,500 stories, documentaries and books”, which have garnered an Emmy, nominations for the Pulitzer Prize, and other awards. Many alumni have also reported a progress in the mental health policies at the local and state levels.

Doctors Without Borders

Founded in 1971, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) works to provide global healthcare in more than 70 countries to individuals who need it most in times of crisis. Natural disasters, epidemics, refugee migrations and conflicts all fall within the typical events that doctors in the MSF work to alleviate. Along with the typical injuries and illnesses following a crisis, MSF acknowledged the need to also treat mental illness as part of their emergency work in 1998.

This work remains a challenge for the organization due to the complexity of both managing psychiatric medications and providing long-term care in areas of conflict and disaster. Nevertheless, the organization held “229,000 individual and 53,300 group counseling sessions” in 2016, which were often performed by local counselors trained by MSF. These sessions treat a variety of symptoms from depression and anxiety to coping with the trauma that victims of disasters have endured.

Increased awareness efforts about the truth and the impact of global mental illness should influence more governments and non-profits to redirect their aims. However, more innovations will be needed in the coming years to make it cheaper and easier to provide mental health resources around the world. In the meantime, these organizations, as well as others, can only hope for and work towards the continued success of their programs.

– Elizabeth A. Frerking

Photo: Flickr

Ending Modern Slavery One App at a Time

Slavery is not a widely accepted or legal practice nowadays, but it is far from extinct. In 2016, there were an estimated 40.3 million people trapped in modern slavery. This slavery can take the form of forced labor, domestic slavery and sexual exploitation among others with many of these slaves being young children. Although, sexual slavery is often what many people think of when they first hear the term “modern slavery,” nearly 25 million people have been exploited as slaves for forced labor.

This is an epidemic that can seem quite daunting at times but has gained more recognition in recent years. Now, nonprofits, businesses and governments around the world are working to end modern slavery. One nonprofit in particular has used technology to their advantage and, on July 30, launched an anti-slavery application for smartphones in The United Kingdom in the hopes of ending modern slavery.

Smartphones and Ending Modern Slavery

In 2016, The U.K. nonprofit, Unseen, started a nationwide Modern Slavery Helpline that individuals could call to report incidents that looked like slavery. This hotline saw a large increase in usage at the beginning of 2018 with an 80 percent increase in reports. In order to make reporting easier and raise awareness for this problem, Unseen developed a new smartphone app.

The app has easy-to-read guides on identifying the signs of modern slavery and is an easier version of their confidential hotline. It features graphics showing what slavery can look like in different contexts, such as in manufacturing, construction, agriculture or domestic work. The guides are even detailed enough to show users different physical signs or movements that may indicate slavery.

The nonprofit recognized that traffickers and pimps are using technology and all the resources available to them to recruit, exploit and control their slaves. In order to fight traffickers and slavery, this organization created its own app to be innovative in its solutions to fighting this problem, believing it is an important step in ending modern slavery.

As of right now, arrests solely based on the hotline have been low, but different agencies in The U.K. are embracing the app and will hopefully begin to rely on it more. Currently, the app is only available in The U.K., but slavery is a widespread problem that has a deep tie to global poverty.

The Tie Between Poverty and Slavery

There are many factors contributing to modern slavery, but one of the most prominent is poverty. The International Labour Organization (ILO) argues that poverty and income shocks are key to understanding forced labor and slavery.

The ILO articulates that people living in poverty are more likely to borrow money, which can make them vulnerable to exploitation.  When a family experiences extreme poverty they are more likely to rely on a third party for emergency funds. Oftentimes, due to a lack of financial resources, this dependence ends up being on a recruiter or trafficker and leads to manipulation, slavery and exploitation. Slavery traps its victims in a tragic cycle where they end up impoverished with little escape.

Other factors that The ILO highlights are education and illiteracy, which are often more common in impoverished societies. Often people who are less educated end up working in manual labor where forced labor and slavery is more common. It is also more challenging for these people to gain an understanding of their rights and protections against slavery or how to exercise these rights to defend themselves.

Although there is much progress to be made in ending modern slavery, innovative nonprofits like Unseen are creatively helping solve this problem and will hopefully inspire others to do the same. Being able to safely report incidents of slavery is the first step to ending this horrible exploitation.

– Alexandra Eppenauer
Photo: Flickr

The Bidi Bidi Refugee Settlement: The World’s Largest

 The Bidi Bidi refugee settlement is one of several located in Northern Uganda and covers an area mass of 250 square kilometers. It is the biggest refugee camp in the world and houses over 270,000 refugees. Most of the refugees come from South Sudan, a country that gained independence in 2013 but witnessed a new wave of instability and famine in 2016, forcing over 1.6 million South Sudanese to flee their homes. Out of the 1.6 million, 800,000 fled to Uganda. Uganda has one of the most compassionate refugee policies, allowing people to set up their own homes, and refugees are given the right to work and travel, which is uncommon. Uganda has, therefore, become a hot spot for refugees, which has brought an economic strain on the nation, forcing it to rely on humanitarian assistance to sustain millions of refugees.

Who Are the Bidi Bidi

The Bidi Bidi refugee settlement is home to a mostly South Sudanese population. Many of the inhabitants of Bidi Bidi fled because of the threat of murder or imprisonment from rebels or government soldiers. Having left their homes, often walking for days at a time, they arrive at the settlement center with nothing more than the clothes on their back. The process of becoming a refugee is often slow and hectic, but basic needs are met in a timely manner thanks to the NGOs and volunteers’ tremendous effort and funds that have been dedicated to making this refugee camp more livable.

Insecurities

Many of the inhabitants are affected by disease, predominantly malaria and HIV/AIDS. Malaria-carrying mosquitoes breed in wet environments, and due to the rains in Uganda, no one is safe from malaria. Therefore, it is imperative that these settlements have proper access to medical aid and resources to ensure the well-being of refugees. In addition to a lack of medical resources, malnutrition affects most of the population of Bidi Bidi and the rest of Uganda. The Ugandan government has been under pressure to provide food for those malnourished, but it is almost impossible without humanitarian aid and support.

Opportunities in Bidi Bidi

Each organization working within the Ugandan settlement camps and Bidi Bidi offers different and varied opportunities for refugees to support themselves and regain a sense of normalcy. Caritas is an organization aimed at promoting justice and helping the poor, and they have mobilized efforts to give aid to the people of Bidi Bidi. Depending on which zone of the camp refugees live in, some receive a plot of land, agricultural tools and seeds to begin to sustain themselves and create opportunities for businesses.

Many women in Bidi Bidi have access to psycho-social support and empowerment resources that have been set up within the camp. The U.N. has created a system of revolving funds, meaning that funds are replenished when used, which allows women to learn vocational skills such as hairdressing and helping women build their own businesses. This leads to empowerment and creates a sense of stability in an unstable world.

The Future of the Bidi Bidi Refugee Settlement

The Bidi Bidi refugee settlement is the largest of its kind in the world, it uses what it can to create and offer opportunities and resources to refugees, so they may live more independently. It focuses on rehabilitation and independence and creates a sense of hope for the future of the inhabitants of Bidi Bidi. The unrest and violence in South Sudan still create thousands of refugees on a daily basis. The long-term solution is to achieve peace in South Sudan, so people can return home. However, in the short-term, it is imperative that Uganda receives humanitarian aid to ensure the safety and wellbeing of its inhabitants.

– Trelawny Robinson 
Photo: Flickr