Tag: Livelihood Development

From Desolation to Community

Written and edited by: Jady Sit, Jojo Poon At noon on 25 April 2015, Nepal was hit by the strongest earthquake in 80 years. Countless families lost their loved ones, homes, and properties. Approximately one third of Nepal’s population, 8 million, was affected by the quake. In the midst of ruthless disaster, people responded with love. Shortly after the earthquake, the world quickly pooled their resources to help. Yet, when global news coverage died down and emergency relief phased out, this was when we began to walk with the affected communities, helping them to rebuild and recover their communities sustainably for the long run. In the last decade, CEDAR has been supporting partners’ community development work in mountainous

This is Community Development

Written and edited by: Jojo Poon I enjoy hearing stories and sharing of different development workers very much. If we put their sharing together, then we would get a complete picture of God’s purposes for the poor and the world. For this issue’s “Taking Action”, we invited CEDAR’s staff from different eras to share about their learnings and experiences along the way to put together a blueprint for CEDAR. “We were in Gansu’s Hui village working on the project… When we conducted home visits, we would ask: ‘Is anyone home?’, and if there were only women in the house, they would answered: ‘No!’” shares Alice, who served in Gansu, China. “We spent half a year to build relationship

Environmentally Sustainable Development in Thailand

Written by: Jojo Poon What is “development”? What kind of development will lead to better living? In what way will go by contraries? We might be able to find out more from the experience of the farming tribes in Northern Thailand. The aftermath of the Green Revolution The Lahus settled in the mountains in Northern Thailand as a result of a multi-generational search for farmable lands in the areas spanning across Thailand, Myanmar and Laos. They were caught in the Green Revolution[1] in 1960 when the Thai Government encouraged the farmers to focus on growing new types of valuable plants with synthetic fertilizers and pesticides that boosted their yields. The Lahus started to homogenize the crops they grow and

A Passion for Farming – An Interview with Hand the Farmer

Interviewer and Editor: Tsun Wan Yan In Hong Kong, we would often hear someone tell a person to “Go back to farming at your ranch” to tease one’s lack of wit. Now people don’t need to farm at a ranch, nor are they foolish to be a farmer. We found a perfect example of that in Wu Ying Luen, Hand—a young, humorous, and radiating farmer—from the Society for Indigenous Learning (SoIL) in Hong Kong, who differs greatly from our traditional image of a farmer. Hand did not grow up in a farming family, and he was just like any office young adults 4 years ago who would work in front of a computer every day from 9 to

Spread the Love to City Edges

Interviewing and editing: Canace Chiu & Tsun Wan Yan The rapid economic growth of India did not significantly reduce its population living in poverty. Although halved from the 90’s, the number of poor people living in India still reaches 600 million, with 300 to 400 million of them living under extreme poverty. The country is not spared from the plethora of social problems experienced by other developing countries, such as a large income gap and rural-urban migration. CEDAR hopes to share with you the stories that took place in the lesser known areas of India, and we wish you could remember the suffering people and God’s servants in your prayers in this New Year season. Love among the