International Rescue Committee | Talks at Google

My name is Matt Fuhrman. I'm the director of corporate communications at Google, and it's my pleasure to welcome representatives from the International Rescue Committee here. This is an organization with rich history. They date back in this country to Albert Einstein's concerns in 1933 for Germans fleeing the emerging Nazi regime. They now have a presence in more than 25 countries around the world, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, and the Sudan. And they've emerged as perhaps the preeminent organization of its kind. It's led by Dr. George Rupp, the IRC's chief executive officer. Dr. Rupp is the former president of Columbia University and was the president of Rice University. He was also the former dean of the Harvard Divinity School. Doctor received his undergraduate degree from Princeton University, a master's degree from Yale, and a PhD from Harvard, which means he could probably get hired at Google. He's the author of five books, including 2006's Globalization Challenged Commitment, Conflict, and Community. Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. George Ruck.

Thank you, Matt. Since some of you may not know a lot about the International Rescue Committee, I'll elaborate just a little bit on what Matt has described and then leave on almost all of our program for our distinguished panel. Our core purpose and identity. I can summarize in four words. From harm to home. From harm to home. As Matt indicated, we have a very distinguished history, and that history tells our story. We were founded in 1933 when Albert Einstein concluded it would be very important to have a committee of notable people in this country who worked with counterpart committees in Europe to rescue refugees from Nazi occupied countries and then help them resettle in this country. We continue to do that. We have 25 offices across the United States that work to resettle refugees here, including offices in San Jose and in San Francisco and up and down the rest of the West Coast. That's exhilarating work. But the vast majority of people uprooted by conflict and persecution are not going to be resettled in this country. And for that reason, we work in other areas of conflict around the world. Matt mentioned some of them. We work in Iraq, we work in Afghanistan and Pakistan, in Sudan, Congo, Liberia, just to take a little over a handful of instances. For 75 years, we have gone to regions of conflict and persecution, rescued people in emergency situations, and then worked with them to rebuild their lives and their communities. We have three absolutely critical resources for doing that. The first is private donations that allow us to move immediately into emergency situations. The second is an outstanding staff. Worldwide, we have 13,000 employees, over 97% of them are indigenous to the other countries where we work. You'll hear from a small selection of our headquarters staff in our program in just a minute. The third crucial resource we have is a long history of very distinguished volunteer board members. Back with Albert Einstein, we also had people like John Dewey and Reinhold Niebuhr on that first board, and we've had a distinguished succession of board members up until the present time. One of them who's very active is Susan Dentzer. She is a member of the board and also chair of our health committee. You will know her as the health correspondent on the Jim Lehrer News Hour, where she leads a team that covers breaking news in health care and health policy. Before Joining the Lehrer NewsHour, she worked with U.S. news & World Report as their chief economics correspondent. She is an alumna of Dartmouth College and has chaired the board at Dartmouth College. She's also been a Nieman Fellow. She's a very distinguished and active member on our board, and I'm delighted to turn this program over to you, Susan, thank.

You. Thank you so much, George. I see my mother got to you and asked you to say all kinds of nice things about me. So thanks so much. It's great to be here with all of you. We really are honored that you came to this presentation, and we're very happy to be here at Google. I was thinking this is only the second time in my life as a journalist that I visited a company whose name became a verb. The first one was Xerox. So I know that dates me a bit. It's been a few years. But and as happy as we are to be here with you today in glorious Mountain View, California, we know this is a long way from the places we at IRC typically work. So what we thought it would be useful to do is open up today with a little bit of a video that gives you a sense of those areas George described a moment ago, in which we work in close to 25 countries around the world, all the way from Darfur. Many of you obviously are aware of the ongoing attacks there. The Democratic Republic of Congo, which is my country that I always nominate as number one on the list of fragile states, very much having come out of a period of war, but always in danger of lapsing back into that. We also work in areas like Kakuma refugee camp in northwest Kenya. Those of you who know about the Lost Boys of Sudan will know about their presence there and the presence of the of really thousands of Sudanese and others there for going on 15 plus years. So we work in all these various settings, and they're very different from what most of us are accustomed to encounter in the U.S. so that's why we thought it would be useful to put together a video. And because we're having this discussion today in honor of International Women's Day, we're focusing on two areas that we're very involved in that really do pertain to the lives of women and girls, specifically our efforts to combat gender based violence and assist victims of gender based violence. This is rape, other forms of sexual violence enacted against women, and also what we do to assist women who are just engaged in the normal cycle of life, that is to say, bearing and raising children. So we're going to be talking a bit today about some of the work that we do to save lives through emergency obstetric services and other things that we do to assist women in their reproductive cycle. So with that, let me ask Kasia here to turn on a little video. The narrator of this video, I'm happy to say, is Liv Ullman. Those of you who are movie buffs will remember Lee from Cries and Whispers. She was one of Ingmar Bergman's favorite actresses, and she's been a member of our board for a number of years. And she was gracious enough to narrate the video for.

Us. When war breaks out, humanity suffers. At least half the pain is borne by women. Even as conflict rages, the cycle of life goes on. The International Rescue Committee assists women throughout that cycle and provides for their care. In the vast majority of the nearly two dozen countries where IRC works, this means being there when women conceive, carry their unborn children, and ultimately give birth. The Tamhin refugee camp is home to more than 9,000 ethnic Karen refugees. Here, as elsewhere, we offer family planning, effective prenatal care, and help in curbing or preventing sexually transmitted infections, including hiv. Mostly, the reproductive health care is taking care for the women and.

Children. So we opened the clinic 24.

Hours, and then they can come anytime. In 2007, in the camp, IRC offered roughly 7,500 counseling sessions for family planning, provided care for pregnant women during more than 2,300 prenatal visits, and helped more than 320 babies come into the world. The IRC is also in Chad, the scene of protracted fighting among rebel groups. Recently, circumstances threatened the life of a mother giving birth to triplets. IRC security chief Eric Le Guin accompanied the women who needed a Caesarean section as she was driven across the desert to the hospital. In the end, she Got the operation that saved her life and the lives of her.

Babies. I had the first feeling of.

What a father must feel after a couple of hours waiting and was lucky enough to be allowed in the maternity ward and see the babies after the delivery. I was feeling a pride of.

Accomplishing a mission to, to help the woman and also making sure that everybody leads.

Safely. Just as childbearing makes women vulnerable in times of upheaval, so too does their status in society. Rape and other forms of sexual violence against women and girls are used as weapons of terror, humiliation and oppression. In Darfur in Western Sudan, more than 200,000 have died over the past five years. IRC's women's centers help roughly 10,000 women and girls every.

Month. We started really working with these women that have been affected by this conflict and to really reassure them that.

You know, it is not their fault and that not all that is lost, everything is not.

Lost. There is still.

Hope. For 15 years, Liberia was at the center of a number of civil wars raging in West Africa before peace finally came. In 2003, this woman was gang raped by 10 men. Since then, she's been sick and cannot walk. She says the rapes occurred because they had power and she did not. The same fighting that's devastated health care in the Democratic Republic of Congo also makes women the targets of sexual violence. Since 2002, the IRC has helped more than 40,000 survivors of that violence, like these Congolese women featured in a new documentary from hbo. Here in Congo, local organizations in grassroots women's groups supported by IRC help these survivors of sexual violence. They help them recover from the trauma, obtain needed health care, reintegrate them into their communities and rebuild their lives. We know this cycle of violence against women demands longer term solutions. We know it will not stop until communities promote and protect the rights of women and girls and until men, especially men, take action to prevent violence against them. The women the IRC helps need your support. You can help put an end to violence against women. You can help ensure women's health. You can help reduce the rate of HIV transmission, and you can assist us in the safe delivery of the next generation. For the International Rescue Committee, this is.

Liebhermann. So I think that gives you a sense of the places where we work and why we're so passionate about what we do. And in order to give you an even smaller, fuller sense of that, I'm delighted today to introduce two spectacular women who help, as George said, oversee our efforts from headquarters in New York, but who also travel very frequently. To the field themselves and actually have spent a lot of time in the field themselves to assist in these two important areas of our activities. Let me introduce them to you now. First of all, on my far left, your far right, is Sue Susan Purdon, who is our senior technical advisor on reproductive health, which is a broad area which in our context covers safe motherhood, family planning, clinical care for survivors of gender based violence, HIV and so forth. She works at our headquarters in New York and in that position provides policy guidance on programming to meet reproductive health needs of people who are in armed conflict situations such as we've described and just shown you. She's got responsibility for overseeing all of our health programming in countries like Sudan, South Sudan in particular, and Darfur, and transitional post conflict states, countries moving out of a situation of war and hopefully into a situation of peace, Eritrea and Ethiopia. She's worked in almost two dozen countries around the world herself. Afghanistan, Afghanistan, Albania, Bosnia Herzegovina, Cote d', Ivoire, Croatia, Lebanon, Liberia, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But she got started out here on the left coast. She studied at Santa Clara University. I asked her if she studied and partied at Santa Clara University, but she said no, she mainly studied. She also went on to St. Mary's College and she has a master's in public health from Berkeley. She's also a registered nurse. So we're going to be looking forward very much to hearing from Susan. Also with us, I'm delighted to say, is Heidi Lehman, who is our senior technical advisor for gender based violence. And Heidi also has enormous experience, more than 10 years working in this field of gender based violence and working in almost every aspect of that, from one on one counseling of survivors of sexual violence to instruction of law enforcement officials in various countries about how to respond to situations of sexual violence. For the past five years she's worked for us designing and implementing our GBV programs, as we call them, in various settings. She spent two years in Sierra Leone developing a nationwide program there. Then she went on to do similar things in Liberia, Thailand, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan. And during the nine months when she was in Darfur, she established our gender based violence program there. And if you've been reading the papers or watching the news, you know how important that outreach activity has been for us there. She's based in New York, as I say, and responsible for leading not only our GBV efforts there, but all of our efforts to improve quality and make these responses as scientifically based and effective as possible in helping women, in particular in helping people, helping Communities to come together to solve the issues of gender based violence. So I'm delighted to welcome both of you here today. Let me start by asking you, Susan, to put into perspective for us just what the situation is for women in these conflict and post conflict settings with respect to their reproductive health needs. Just how bad a problem is it for women or to give birth in these conflict ridden.

Countries? Thanks, Susan. Actually, this slide shows a little bit about what we are trying to help with in complex emergencies. And in poor countries in general, globally, in the world, the risk of death from pregnancy is 100 times worse if you live in a poor country than if you live in a wealthy country. And this is actually the health indicator with the greatest disposition disparity between rich countries and poor countries. Poor countries are categorized as countries where people live on less than a dollar a day. And for this girl who is from South Sudan, the risk of dying in pregnancy is greater than the chance that she would finish sixth grade education in school. It's just really hard to understand how difficult it is for, for women being pregnant in poor countries. Most women deliver at home. Home has no electricity and no water. And globally 15% of pregnancies have a complication that require emergency intervention. So without access to a health facility, without access to a doctor and emergency obstetric care, there's a real risk of dying from pregnancy. It happens so rarely in the United States that it actually makes headlines in the newspaper. Whereas in developing countries it's a very common occurrence for a woman to die of pregnancy related causes. So that's between rich and poor and it's even worse in conflict zones. So in Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Sudan, the data are that much worse. And the one story that I would relate is from a visit I made to Liberia a few years ago. I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Liberia and then went back. That was before the war. The war started in 1989. I went back in about 2001 and visited the community where I was the Peace Corps volunteer and talked to the midwife that was a co teacher with me in the school. We were teaching Liberian girls to become midwives. And she said that they now had no doctors since the period of war and that they would be caring for women who were pregnant and trying to deliver. And there's a condition called obstructed labor where the baby can't get out, the woman's pelvis is too small and you require a cesarean section, a surgical procedure to help that baby out. But there were no doctors, so there wasn't an opportunity for a cesarean section. And there was no doctor for 500,000 people. So it wasn't just a little community. It was this whole region of the country. And for the midwives and for the women and for the family, it's a really heart wrenching and terrifying experience because it takes three days for that woman to die. She knows she's going to die. The baby dies, the family knows she's going to die. The midwife that's trying to help her knows she's going to die. And there's nothing you can can do. And you spend three days trying to ease that passage, but there's nothing that can be done. And so it's a really tragic and horrible situation. These are preventable deaths and the opportunity to be able to do something to prevent these deaths is a great boon to what we can.

Do. So let's talk about some of the things we, we do do to address these.

Situations. SUSAN so we said that a woman who has these kinds of complications requires access to emergency obstetric care, essentially care for complications of delivery. And one of the settings where we work is with refugees from Afghanistan who live in Pakistan. The conflict in Afghanistan started in 1979 when the Russians invited invaded and refugees fled into Pakistan. There's a row along about a 40 mile stretch of road where there are 11 refugee camps, about 130,000 people, and of course, women getting pregnant and having babies. Starting in 1996, our health coordinator there, who is himself an Afghan refugee doctor, started a minor operating theater, is what he called it. It was a delivery room, but the society limited women's access to anything outside the home. So he didn't even call it a delivery room. He said it was a minor operating theater. And by word of mouth, families and women learned that they could go there and get their lives saved if they had a complication from pregnancy. It was just a really exciting little step that this doctor made. Dr. Tilla. We love Dr. Tilla. He still works for us there. And so I visited there and saw what he was doing and met with the village health committee, which is a group of community leaders who meet together and talk about the health.

Services. And I just have to interject here. When you hear community leaders think warlords.

Beards, these guys are pretty amazing. The first time I saw them, I was quite intimidated. But they wear shawar kamis, the typical Pakistani dress, and you'd swear they had a Kalashnikov under there. I'm certain that some of them have used Kalashnikovs in their previous lives. So they all have bearded and they're all men. Then I visited that same place a few years later and met with that health committee again. And that minor operating theater had been functioning for five years. And these guys lived at the other end of that 40 mile stretch of road. And they said their women couldn't get to that place for those interventions because of insecurity. They couldn't drive at night, they didn't have transport. And they asked us to build a second emergency obstetric care delivery room at the other end of the road. So we did. And it's just been fabulous. The number of women who deliver in the facility now compared to home has gone from 18% to 65%. The number of women who die from pregnancy has gone from. It's a ratio between maternal death and live births. It's gone from over 250 down to about 85. It's an amazing success with a very conservative society. And a number of factors have fed into it. But I think key is Dr. Tillah. But it shows that even when we make assumptions about people, about these Afghan warlords and the status of women, that everybody is human and that we'll come around to seeing that access to health care care benefits the women, benefits the family, and the men are happy with that as well. So it shifted the attitude in that society. I wanted to talk about another aspect of saving women's lives related to pregnancy, and that's going back to Liberia. We did finally get a doctor to come there and I think it cost $1,000 a month and he was doing three cesarean sections a month. So that's what it cost to save those women's lives who were dying without that. The other part of reducing maternal death is reducing the risk of maternal death. And that's making it possible for women to space their pregnancies. Just access to family planning, if you reduce the frequency of pregnancy, it's safer for mothers, it's safer for children, it's healthier for families. And access to family planning is a pretty simple thing to do. And again, we make assumptions that people don't want it, that they want to have more kids. But when we ask, there are plenty of people who would be interested in using family planning if it were available. And the storage of the moment is that one of our doctors, a woman doctor who works for us in Darfur, had the opportunity to go to Kenya to receive training on family planning. When she came back, she trained the midwives in the Darfur clinic. And there's this huge demand. People Want it. The women are coming and accessing family planning. Again, a very conservative society, really desperately dealing with war, but and making services available is the key to helping save those.

Lives. Well, at the other end of the spectrum of our work with women, Heidi, is your work with gender based violence. And I wonder if you would put into perspective for us what is the risk of women in conflict settings and post conflict settings experiencing an episode of gender based bombs, sexual violence, rape, race, whatever directed directly against them?

Sure. I think that sexual and physical violence is one of the biggest public health issues facing women around the world. The World Health Organization tells us that one out of five women report being sexually abused before the age of 15. The World Health Organization tells us that women between the ages of 15 to 1444 have a better chance of being. Better chance probably isn't the right word, but have a better chance of being injured or killed because of an act of physical or sexual violence than dying from malaria, cancer and traffic accidents combined. So globally, sexual violence, physical violence is a major public health issue that women and girls are facing. In times of war, that threat increases to even more devastating proportions in the past 10 years or so in places like Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Sudan, the list is entirely too long. But we have seen those places garner headlines for the almost unbelievable use of rape in those conflicts. And an example of that is Liberia, where I had the opportunity to work and where IRC has been programming for some time, where it's estimated that up to 40% of Liberian women were raped at least once during the conflict. Okay, so we're looking at approximately 600,000 women. That's more. That's more than the entire state of Wyoming. That's a larger number than people live in Wyoming. So during war, the threat of sexual and physical violence is a tremendous.

Threat to women and what we do. And a number of us with IRC have seen some of the efforts that we do to support women who've been through this. What we do is really a range of activities not only to help them address the immediate consequences of being raped, but also really to empower them to better their status in life. Let's talk a bit about.

That. Yeah, I think that it is extremely important that when we talk about this devastating violence that we recognize the strength of women. Right. Yes, they have been victimized, but they are not. And IRC does not see them as victims. And what we help them do is help them define their power. And one of the ways that we do that certainly and initially is through health.

Care.

Right. The Health consequences of being gang raped by 10 men, 12 men, are significant. So the first thing that we do is make sure that they have appropriate health care. Another thing that we do is support community based women's centers so women have a place to go, all women. Because in these situations, all women are vulnerable to this, to being raped or abused in some way. But we set up women's centers where survivors and women vulnerable to sexual and physical violence can go to get services. And when you talk about the range of services that are necessary, it makes me think to. When I first started working with IRC, I went to Sierra Leone, it was 2001, and Sabinti, who you saw in the film, came to me. I was managing the program there. And she said, well, we have a woman that needs some help. And I said, okay, what's the situation? And she said, well, the woman was raped multiple times. She had been abducted and held with the rebels for several weeks. Her family had rejected her, she was pregnant and had just given birth. And during, to top it all off, when she had tried to escape, they had cut off her hand. And so Binti looked at me and said, well, what should we do? And I said, okay, well, you know, and went through the litany, you know, the things that IRC could do to help, to help that woman, which would include, which would include, you know, an IRC trained counselor accompanying the woman to, to the IRC supported health clinic to make sure, number one, that she got the health care for sexually transmitted diseases and other health consequences. The fact that somebody listened to her story and did not judge her is huge. The stigma that's related to rape and sexual violence in the settings where we work contributes to what some IRC staff have called called social death, where these women are totally ostracized from their.

Communities. The other thing that we do, of course, and we do this throughout our programs at irc, which is we're not just interested in responding to crises, we would really like to prevent them. So one of the things we do do is help to educate communities about this issue. Talk a bit about some of the work we've done with men in these various settings to educate them about sexual.

Violence. Yeah, I think, you know, men play a critical role in this for a number of reasons. And, you know, as Susan's example illustrated, that men are often the gatekeepers of the health of women. Right. So there's a couple things going on here. First of all, convincing men to allow these women after they've been raped, to get health care. Okay. And to and another aspect of the work that IRC does is then working with men so they don't reject these.

Women.

Right. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, you know, it's estimated that more than 250,000 women have been sexually assaulted during the conflict. One of the things that our staff see there is that when husbands find out about this, the women are kicked out. The women, they divorce the woman. And one of the things that you do not want to be in these settings, right, is a divorced woman, a single woman, a woman without a husband. Right. In these communities, that is an extremely vulnerable thing to be. So we work with the men, we train our staff to. We call it mediation, but it's not mediation in a conventional sense, but it's mediation in terms of working with these husbands, working with the men in the community to continue to value women after this violence has happened to.

Them. We've referenced several times our health care related work and I do just want to introduce Rick Brennan here from, from our staff also. Rick heads our health unit. Rick, do you want to stand up and wave who's here as well? And when we get around to opening it up to questions, which I hope will be soon, he's available to talk about our work across the spectrum of activities we provide in healthcare delivery. I also just want to say a couple of things. We have a lot of our literature on the table over there and we really hope you'll avail yourself of that as you leave today. And we also have our 75th anniversary books here, From Harm to Home. And we certainly hope you'll take a copy of that with you and leaf through it. And also check us out on our website. We have a wonderful website as well with lots more information about what we do around the world. Let's take a pause here and open it up to questions because we're really interested in hearing what you all want to know about what we do and give you any sense of, of how we could potentially work with any of you who wanted to join us in terms of donors or other supporters of our efforts to deal with these situations around the world. So floor is open. While we're waiting for any questions to come forward, though, I just do want to come back quickly. Susan, in the video we have that wonderful scene of the triplets being saved. Have we ever taken any guess as to how many babies are alive today because of our work around the world who wouldn't have made it.

Otherwise? I don't think we.

Have. We don't have a way of knowing, but it's Certainly numbers in the tens of thousands, I would guess, with all of our activities over the.

Years. Right. These are high birth rate locations, 9,000 people in Thailand and 300 babies that year. So you can guess that there are lots of babies being born, born in these settings. And it's. Any pregnancy has a 15% chance of having a complication. So everybody needs this access to.

Services. Yes. Question.

Here. I was just wondering, I've been reading about domestic violence in America recently. I was wondering just what kind of parallels you see between this kind of sexual violence and sexual violence in the.

Country. Yeah, one of the parallels definitely would be the devaluing of women and the objectification of women. Certainly. I've worked with perpetrators of domestic violence here in the US and one of the things that I hear again and again is this belief that they own the ownership of women and the right to treat women any way that they want. And it's a parallel that I've heard in Sudan and Liberia and the other places that I.

Worked. Do you think it comes from, like there's any path from our culture.

To that, or do you think that's.

Just something that they, an idea that they.

Had? That's interesting because I just got that question the other day. I wonder if there's an article out there that has indicated that the west is spreading domestic violence everywhere it goes. You know, I think that it's interesting because what gets headlines is the sexual violence in the DRC and in Sudan and these other places. But when you talk to these women, it's amazing how long domestic violence has been a part of their life. Okay. And I don't see. There's nothing that would indicate to me that there's a link between, you know, what's the west has imported and this treatment and domestic.

Violence. And if I could just add, when you go to these countries, you really are overwhelmed at the low status of women. Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, Polygamy is still quite widespread, despite there's a Catholic tradition there and religious tradition says no. But then there's the cultural tradition that says says yes. So very frequently you have situations where a man is living with 10 or 12 wives and 40 children. And it's pretty common for wives to be thrown overboard when they're no longer deemed suitable. So that's not too many steps away from an orientation that says, well, if the woman is bugging you, you can beat her up. And it's not too many steps away from the notion that if you come upon a woman in a field and you Happen to be a young soldier with nothing to do, why not haul her off into the forest and rape.

Her? Do you think polygamy is inherently abusive to.

Women? The thing that I would focus on there is that the risk, the ordering of importance of a human being. Okay, if you are the third wife, you are treated possibly worse than the first.

Wife.

Right. I think that there is an. That there are, you know, risk factors there then associated with, you know, is the third wife going to be.

Allowed to have health.

Care? Is the third wife going to get the same amount of food that the first wife is? You know, it's not so much a judgment of polygamy, but the risk factors that then come to the order of.

Wives. And I'll just tell you, our Gender Based Violence question coordinator in South Kivu is a wonderful woman who told us that as a child who had grown up in a polygamous family, she lived in dread that someday she would marry a man who would want to be polygamous. And fortunately, she found a man who also had grown up in a polygamous family and had the exact same fear. So they happily got together and they are monogamous. They do have 12 children, so they've been quite six of them. But it tells you polygamy is probably not the most desirable human life situation for men or women. Yes. Question at the.

Back. So I wanted to thank you. This is a fascinating presentation. And obviously you guys do extraordinary work. And I'm aware of the work. It was very vivid to see some of the details of the programs you have. I'd like to take a step sort of back or maybe sideways, and sort of inquire about the developmental perspective for these countries, because I see that the programs that you've described, and again, appropriately given Women's Day and all of that, focus on women's health issues. But I'd ask if, in a world of sort of scarce or limited resources, if the alternative might be, or how you balance the concerns here with a focus more on poverty alleviation, which unquestionably contributes to some of these problems, or a focus on public health, just the health issues, which again, would be another way of addressing some of these issues and how you balance investments in those kinds of programs with investments in these more targeted kinds of.

Programs. Well, we're glad you asked. We're just focusing on these particular issues today, really, in honor of International Women's Day. But we have. We very much approach all of this, and I'd love George to address this from the perspective of we would love it if someday the IRC were out of business and we're out of business because there was not conflict around the world. Well, how do you get there? That really speaks to a number of activities we have in the post conflict realm. And George, why don't you talk about our activities in as you all should as well start. I'm. Well, just to give you an example, going back to the Democratic Republic of Congo, we have a couple of large grants now from the British Foreign Affairs. It's called dfid. It's essentially the foreign investment, it's like the USAID of Britain and also from the World bank to work on essentially creating the kind of stability in a community that would militate against violence in the future. So for example, we're doing essentially creating community councils to try to empower communities and giving them small grants where the community councils can come together and make decisions about what they want to invest in as a community. And these are in situations where none of this has ever happened. You know, it's not like America sort of town halls and, you know, all of that. So. And we're actually even doing a kind of an extension experiment where in some of these situations we're having 50% of the community council has to be female. So we're doing a kind of an empirical trial, randomized clinical trial to see if you get better results when you have half the people on the community council are women. But basically to try to teach communities and empower communities to make decisions and do things at the local level in ways they've never been able to.

Do. And George, say more. I can't resist saying a little more about that. Susan has just described a process that we call community driven reconstruction. And we've done this not just in Congo, but in Afghanistan, in Rwanda and a number of countries where we work. And it does begin just the way that Susan described, with locally elected councils who make their own decisions about the highest priority for the development of those communities. So the question is right on the money. We have focused on really the horrific treatment of women and gender violence because of International Women's Day. But we realize that is embedded in much larger problems that we have to address systemically and in a coherent way in these local villages. We also have a substantial presence in, in Washington, in New York, at the un, in Geneva, in Brussels, in London to try to advocate the development of larger scale policy frameworks for addressing these issues. We didn't want to inflict all of that in this one session, but there are a lot of Activities that we do across that whole range of.

Activities. And again, coming back to our motto, from whom harm to home. I mean, if people have a home in the broadest sense, a community they value with stability, that they cherish, education, the ability to send their kids to school, that's a very powerful force to resist conflict. And that's really what we're aiming to deal with. Question in the back. Oh, in the way.

Back. First, thinking about root causes, the spasmodic of gender based violence against women tend to accompany ethnic or other kinds of conflicts. Seeing as women, the primary education providers, caregivers of children, is it a role that women can play in educating kids to somehow help with these ethnic tensions? I realize development is of course the important contributor to alleviating ethnic tensions, but is there an education role as well? And would you help women in.

What do we do on that.

Screen? I mean, you know, a couple things. I think rather than looking at it as a spasm of violence, I look at it as a continuation of violence. You know, the different violences. You know, when we talk about emergency obstetric care, you were saying that it bride death. Right. In one country it's referred to as bride death because these 12 year old girls are forced to.

Marry.

Right. And forced marriage is a type of gender based violence. They become pregnant and they're not developed enough to deliver.

Safely.

Right. So it's one of those long painful deaths. And that's just one aspect of the continuum of violence that women face throughout their lives. So I think it's important to, you know, keep it in that context. What we hear about in the news is, you know, when it gets to these horrific levels or what we, you know, what we in the west say are these horrific levels. So, you know, and do women have a role in educating their children about these ethnic. I would say that everybody has a.

Role.

Right. And you know, going to your question in terms of looking at it in broader terms instead of, as opposed to only looking at it in terms of women, we have to be realistic when we go out there and program who has the power in these.

Communities.

Right. Susan talked about talking to these men because they are the decision.

Makers.

Right. So I think it's important to, you know, to get everybody at the table and, and recognize who has power and who.

Doesn'T. And just a comment, we're talking today about our health programming. We also do education programming. So there's a whole process in the work that we do in communities that hits many aspects that can contribute.

To well being and we also have an entire unit at IRC that focuses directly on children and the needs of children. And so just to give you an example, again, one of the things we do in emergency settings is create child friendly spaces. Places that they're kind of like schools, kind of like kindergartens, but really mainly a safe place for children to be amid instances of crisis and conflict or emergency. For example, we did a lot, we created a lot of child friendly spaces after the tsunami in Aceh several years ago. And those are settings, I think, where children very often see compassion at work. They're cherished, they're nurtured and cared for. We hope that that has a role over time too, in educating people about what it's like to be a human being and to respond to love and nurture. I wonder if you could talk.

Just a little bit about the role of religion and if that impacts what.

You'Re able to achieve with this focus.

On providing, you know, reproductive rights for.

Women. Talk about that a.

Bit. Yeah. Reproductive rights are part of human rights. Women's rights are human rights. And we actually have some of our description of our work as rights based.

Programming.

So. So that access to services, access to decisions about your family are right. And our responsibility is to provide services that people can exercise their rights to make decisions about using family planning, spacing their kids, accessing emergency obstetric care if they need it. So it's IRC is not a religious based organization and quite open to supporting the rights of women in the communities they live in. We comply with national laws wherever we work and work, as Heidi has said, to deal with the issues that are not only religious but also cultural issues that impinge on people's rights and to work around.

That. Great. I think there was one more.

Question. Yeah, I think I have the privilege of the last question. My question actually is how we can get involved. I know on an individual level we can donate time and money and.

Resources. But you are currently sitting at.

Google. So if you hadn't asked to us as Googlers, how would you like.

Us as a company or us as Google employees to help you with your.

Efforts? Well, we're very glad you asked that question, may I say. And we, we have with us today also Janet Harris, who's our director of development, who probably could offer a few thoughts about how we could do that. And Susan, you.

Too. Just a comment. 2 comments. 1, we have used GPS to locate where our clinics are. And so I put GPS in Google Map and show people where I'm working. My family, they love it. But Also there's the overlay and Darfur of all the flames. Those kinds of things are really powerful and really helpful so we can work together on things like.

That. Janet, I wanted to say. Oh, thank you. That we focus on three things. Educate, advocate and donate is the way we think. So if you'll go to our website, www.theirc.org, that's T H E I R C dot org, you'll find that there's some very specific further information, much deeper information, both about reproductive health and violence against women. There is actions you can take to sign petitions that ask our government to be a stronger voice in protecting the rights of women all over the world. And there's also ways that you can help by donating and showing the power of, you know, your financial support for the IRC for these specific programs and all of the work that we do all over. I think we've given you just a glimpse of, into some of the things that we do that are specifically focused around women's health and violence against women. But I think as you get to know the IRC better, you'll find that we're a very organic kind of organization addressing a lot of the questions that were asked today. And we allow you and invite you to educate, advocate and donate on all of those fronts. So thank.

You. One other very specific suggestion for Google, we would love to have you work with us as you have at times in the past, to make sure that when Refugee is Googled that the IRC is among the first hits that come up or other key terms in the work that we do. And that's not a request from nowhere because in fact, Google has been very helpful. But that is enormously useful for people to become more aware of the way work that we do. Because one of our major needs is to make people more aware of the important work the International Rescue Committee has been doing for 75 years. So you could just design that for.

Us. So we will now terminate the special pleading portion of our program here. But anyway, just to close this off, first of all, again, thank you so much for coming to hear a bit of our story. As George said, 75 years of helping people from harm to home. And one area we haven't talked much about today, but we also are actively engaged in is sometimes people can't go back to their own homes and we resettle them here in the United States. And so we have more than 20 offices around the US that do precisely that. Another whole very important aspect of our activity. But as you've heard today, we focus so much of what we do on the situations of harm around the world and whether it's, as Susan described, the work that we do in emergency obstetric services to attack this problem of women having 100 times greater chance of dying in pregnancy in those settings than is the case here, whether it's that or whether it's the work that Heidi described. I mean, I'm still stunned to contemplate the prospect of 40% of the Liberian female population having been raped during the time of that conflict. I think you said the population of Wyoming. I mean, can you imagine what it takes for a culture to recover from that? Well, those are the spheres in which we operate, and we operate there with your support and with the support of all of our donors. And we urge you once again to take with you some of our literature. Check out our website. Help us out in any way you can and help us, most important of all, do the work that we also stress, which is we would really love to be put out of business someday by preventing these kinds of conflicts and so help support us in our efforts to make the world a safer and more peaceful place around the world. So again, thank you so much. Please join us for a lunch that we're going to have afterwards. I think Jocelyn is the point person on that. If you'd like to come to lunch and hear some more about what we do. Rick Brennan from our health committee will be talking more directly about our health efforts. So Jocelyn's the person to speak to if you'd like to come and get a free lunch with us on that. And thank you very much once again. It's been great to be with you this morning.