Helping hands across the world...

Quaker Service Sweden (Kväkarhjälpen) http://www.kvakare.se/kvakarhjalpen.shtml is a small, conscientious and effective service organisation where every single Swedish crown donated is sent to those in need. Everyone involved in Quaker Service Sweden’s fund-raising and project administration activities are volunteers. The organisation comes under the auspices of the Religious Society of Friends in Sweden and its financial accounts are audited by a qualified chartered accountant. As far as possible we try to secure support from SIDA (Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency), which enables us to send up to ten times the money collected from donors to the projects.

Bangladesh is one of the world’s poorest countries. Quaker Service Sweden (QSS) has been supporting Sabalamby Unnayan Samity (the Bengali equivalent of “organisation for self-help”) since 1994. SUS http://www.sabalamby.org/was founded in 1985 by a local teacher who, together with ten other like-minded people, was determined to create a better future for the country’s women and children. SUS is based in north-east Bangladesh, in the district of Netrakona, a rural area of around 2.4 million inhabitants. To date SUS been able to establish self-help projects in about 45 % of the district.

One of Quaker Service Sweden’s first initiatives was to help SUS to build a Model Farm to provide local training in organic cultivation, compost-making and the production of domestic gas from manure. A heritage seed bank has also been created for the collection of hardy rice varieties and other crops for demonstration and distribution purposes. The project has now expanded to include training in aquaculture (‘paddy-cum-fish’ farming).

QSS has continued to support SUS’ work with extremely poor people in the different villages. This work is based on an integrated approach that includes the provision of basic education, helping the poor to become economically self-supporting by means of micro-finance, organising training courses to prevent violence against women and to create better relations between the sexes, providing training to help combat disease, providing pre-natal and post-natal care, educating women about health issues, and organising human rights groups and training. SUS has also built a hospital for the very poor and a sheltered home for vulnerable and battered women.

At the beginning of 2008 Tofte and I visited SUS in Netrakona and the projects that QSS supports. The following diary extracts posted above some of our experiences.