Shamima Ali, of the Fiji Women's Crisis Centre, said child rape is rife and rampant in many parts of the Pacific.

"But as far as trafficking is concerned, it should be of concern even if there's a little bit of it left happening," she told Pacific Mornings' Levi Matautia-Morgan. Read more

She runs programmes to help Maori and Pacific men break cycles of violence.

New Zealand is ranked as the worst developed country in the OECD for domestic violence.

Controlling or hitting is normal

Sang-Yum is seeing more and more Pacific men coming through her programme who think it's "normal to control or hit" their partners.

Many new migrants are just learning about behaviour types that are unacceptable, she says.

She says both female victims and male perpetrators are misinterpreting certain biblical texts.

These include texts concerning "women submitting to men" or being men's property because Eve was formed from Adam's rib, for example.

Many men believe it is a woman's role "to bear children and to help him to do what he wants" Sang-Yum notes.

But there's "no justification for domestic violence" Dunedin-based Samoan Reverend Alofa Lale says. "Jesus preaches the golden rule to love one another as he has loved us.

"Jesus showed us love, so we should love one another and especially our spouses."

Sang-Yum is urging Pacific men to take responsibility to love their partners in this deeply sacrificial manner.

Equal partners

"The Bible is harmless and we don't tell people to stop believing" Sang-Yum says.

Nonetheless, her programmes examine the Biblical text in a wider context and explore abusive behaviour.

Participants also explore "what the language of love looks like. Is love hurtful and abusive?"

"After these aspects, their mindset changes and we talk about equality and love" Sang-Yum says.

By highlighting the word "partner" during sessions with Pacific domestic violence perpetrators, she's helping redefine the way men view their wives as equals.

"When you pull the text out and highlight the word partnership, it changes their thinking and we talk about equality and what this means."

Cultural shift needed

Sang-Yum says Pacific Island gender norms are challenged when people move to New Zealand, where men and women are generally seen as equal.

At the same time, men are not taught to talk about their upbringing, or their traumas. They suppress their issues because they have been taught to "just deal with it" says Sang-Yum.

It's important to have deep conversations through cultural frameworks and language, and to examine beliefs and mindsets that are not true examples of love.

How to get help

If you're in danger now:

Phone the police on 111 or ask neighbours or friends to ring for you.

Run outside and head for where there are other people. Scream for help so your neighbours can hear you.

Take the children with you. Don't stop to get anything else.

Women's Refuge: Crisis line - 0800 REFUGE or 0800 733 843 (available 24/7)

Shine: Helpline - 0508 744 633 (available 24/7)

She Is Not Your Rehab//InnerBoy App

It's Not OK: Family violence information line - 0800 456 450

Shakti: Specialist services for African, Asian and Middle Eastern women and children

Crisis line - 0800 742 584 (available 24/7)

Ministry of Justice: For information on family violence

Te Kupenga Whakaoti Mahi Patunga: National Network of Family Violence Services

White Ribbon: Aiming to eliminate men's violence towards women.

How to hide your visit

If you're worried someone using the same computer will find out what you've been looking at, follow the steps here to hide your visit. Each of the websites above also has a section that outlines this process.

Source

• RNZ

Communities are shoring up seawalls with old tyres.

I was raised on the beautiful island of Tonga.

When I was a child, my parents and grandparents would come out every morning to look at the horizon. They would look at the clouds and see the patterns to understand what laid before us that day.

Nowadays, things are different.

Children playing and swimming at the beaches see the patterns in the clouds and run back to alert us to a disaster.

This is now becoming a regular occurrence.

After storms, I visit my people and I am always lifted by their resilience and their spirit of helping each other.

But when I delve deeper, they share their real emotions, which are full of pain, heartache and fear.

You see, in the Pacific our people are strong. We are resilient, but even we have our limits. And we have reached our limit.

Nowadays, when I wake up in the morning and look out to sea, I see two clouds. Two dark and looming clouds. One is climate change. This cloud brings rising sea levels, more frequent cyclones and king tides like we have never seen before.

It is joined by another cloud. This one is debt. Increasingly frequent and severe weather means that Pacific Island nations are struggling to rebuild. We feel like we are going backwards.

Vital infrastructure such as homes, bridges, farms and fisheries, take years to rebuild while crops and livestock take a similar period to restore. It is extremely expensive, and it is money we simply don't have.

Last year at the United Nations climate talks, nations agreed on a Loss and Damage fund; a fund created to compensate developing countries impacted by climate change, like my home of Tonga in the Pacific Island nations.

We don't contribute much to climate change. In fact, we contribute less than 0.5 per cent of all global emissions. But we certainly pay for it in our futures, and the futures of our children. We need compensation for this injustice.

The Loss and Damage fund is an important step towards climate justice, but we can't forget that the 2009 pledge to spend $100 billion a year in climate aid has still not been met. In fact, the pledge to spend $100 billion a year is far from achieved.

Right now, the Pacific region needs nearly US $1 billion per year in financing to adapt our infrastructure to climate change. We receive much less than this. Continue reading

• Cardinal Soane Patita Paini Mafi is Bishop of Tonga

The gathering focused particularly on climate change and specifically on the issue of the Cartaret islands in the autonomous region of Bougainville and the Manam islands in Madang province.

Matthew McGarry, of Catholic Relief Services, part of the Catholic Caritas network, said, "every day and every year that passes, we see climate change as one of the greatest advocates of misery and despair". Read more

It says human trafficking to the point of slavery is increasingly common in industries like logging, mining and fishing. Read more

Those allies are precious few.

Most nations are long on words and short on action.

Aotearoa New Zealand can be counted among the majority, having turned down applications from Kiribati and Tuvalu citizens for climate change refugee status and as a nation having year on year increases in carbon emissions.

If the inaction of Aotearoa is disappointing, the silence of our iwi and other tangata whenua representatives on the situation for Pacific Islands is incomprehensible.

We may be separated by years and distance, but we are Pacific Islands peoples and they are our tuakana.

When Tamatea returned to Rangiatea from Aotearoa, he sought the assistance of his cousin Waitaha to undertake the task of building the Takitimu canoe and returning to Aotearoa with new knowledge and skills.

Waitaha quickly agreed and as a start, gifted a large log named Puwhenua for the carving.

In that moment, the success and development of Tamatea's community depended on the knowledge and skill that was retained by their Pacific Islands cousins in Rangiatea; without hesitation, Waitaha and his people provided generous care and support.

Eight hundred years on, our tuakana in the Pacific Islands could be forgiven for wondering if we've forgotten our stories.

In the past three years the Pacific Islands nations have experienced the three most intense tropical cyclones on record: Winston, Pam and Gita.

The damage in various islands of Tuvalu, Solomons, New Caledonia, Vanauatu, Tonga, Samoa, and Fiji has been catastrophic and enduring.

Eight islands in Micronesia have disappeared as a signpost to the coming impacts of sea level rise due to climate change.

Kiribati in particular faces a challenging future, already experiencing a reduction in arable land as the water table becomes salinated by the rising ocean.

Yet at international forums on climate change and here in Aotearoa, our Pacific Islands cousins have spoken alone for support and action.

Yet iwi are well aware of the threat that climate change poses. Continue reading

• Graham Bidois Cameron (Ngati Ranginui) is a doctoral student in the Department of Theology and Religion at Otago University but is based in Tauranga Moana. He is a commentator on social and political issues concerning tangata whenua.
• Image: YouTube

No one is sure how big it is, but it's probably enormous.

A new study in Science Magazine tried to pin down some firm numbers by digging into various data: waste generation per person, the portion of that waste that's plastics, the size of populations near the coast, and the quality of countries' waste management systems.

The researchers surveyed 192 countries, and found that, between them, humanity dumped 10.5 billion to 28 billion pounds of plastic waste into the oceans in 2010 alone — about 1.3 times the weight of Egypt's Great Pyramid at Giza.

The study also contains some valuable lessons about the nature of economic development, and how wealth creation can paradoxically be both friend and foe of the environment.

Now, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch isn't actually a "patch." It's more like a vortex that circulates along the natural currents of the Pacific Ocean: millions of small, often microscopic bits of plastic junk in the water column, stretched over about 5,000 square kilometers.

And there's at least two, a western and an eastern patch.

There's circumstantial evidence that it's killing filter-feeding animals and birds — especially albatrosses that mistake the plastic for food — and it's definitely allowing certain invasive species to thrive and spread, throwing whole marine ecosystems out of whack.

The sizable majority of the trash originates on land instead of coming from ships or boats. But what the study found that's really interesting is who's contributing.

The United States isn't exactly doing great here. It's in the top 20 offenders out of 192 countries. (And if you treated Europe as one entity, it would be in the top 20, too.) But as you can see from the chart, America is a minor contributor compared to poor and developing countries, especially Indonesia and China. Continue reading

Source and Image:

• The Week

At the G20 summit in Australia on the weekend, Prime Minister John Key pledged $3 million to the Fund, but said New Zealand would continue to focus on the Pacific in bilateral climate change funding initiatives.

The United Nations fund aims to support developing countries to limit or reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate change.

Caritas Aotearoa New Zealand is also prioritising direct support to our Pacific partners, with an additional $200,000 being budgeted in 2015 for projects which support Pacific communities to respond to the impacts of climate change.

"The urgency of the need for small, often low lying islands among our Pacific neighbours means it's right to continue to focus on what we can practically do here," says Caritas director Julianne Hickey.

"While New Zealand should also contribute to multilateral responses being coordinated by the international community, our neighbours in the Pacific cannot wait for the international fund to get fully up and running."

Caritas research this year highlighted communities around the Pacific fending off rising sea-levels and coastal erosion with makeshift seawalls, built from sticks and stones, shells and coral; or relocating temporarily or permanently to escape sea inundation and groundwater salination.

"We met women from low-lying Popua, in Tonga, banding together to truck in coral and soil to try to keep their homes out of the water. The authorities told them 'If you want to reclaim the land, reclaim it," says Mrs Hickey.

"Among the people we spoke with, there wasn't much evidence of climate funding getting to where people need it the most, so we welcome New Zealand's priority of the Pacific over general climate change funding. However, we need to ensure our projects prioritise the most poor and vulnerable in our region - like the women of Popua who are doing what they can with what they've got."

New Zealand and the world need to do more to cut emissions, adapt to widespread changes already underway, and prepare for an uncertain future - a future that is already hitting the poor the hardest.

Read Caritas' environment report: Small yet strong: Voices from Oceania on the environment here.

Read Caritas' environment report: Small yet strong: Voices from Oceania on the environment here.

But for Bishop of Papua New Guinea's Kimbe province Capuchin Bill Fey such events are not especially unusual.

"On that instance, I was part of a procession carrying a relic of Blessed Peter To Rot, martyred by the Japanese during World War Two for opposing their planned legalisation of polygamy," he said.

"We were carrying the relic throughout parishes in my diocese which is on the western side of the island of New Britain.

"The occasion was the one hundredth anniversary of his birth.

"The tradition in the villages is that important people have to step over a pig which is then speared to death to make a welcoming banquet for the guest.

"So the relic of Blessed Peter was lifted over the waiting pig."

Bishop Fey wanted to diffuse any tendency to superstition that the arrival of the saint's relic might create.

"So I would joke that this guy's a hundred years old but can still jump over pigs," he said with his typical quiet chuckle. Continue reading.

Source: Catholic Leader

Image: Catholic Leader

For those who don't know, the Republic of Kiribati is a remote island nation straddling the equator in the Pacific Ocean.

It's also where a small group of Good Samaritan Sisters have been ministering since 1991. I was there to witness the perpetual profession of Kakare Biita as a Sister of the Good Samaritan. She is the second I-Kiribati woman to do so.

Kakare's profession ceremony was held in Abaokoro, a village in North Tarawa where one of our Good Samaritan communities is based.

The other is in Temaiku, South Tarawa, a more densely populated area. Getting to Abaokoro isn't a straightforward journey.

After crossing the Tarawa lagoon by boat, in the equatorial heat we walked up the 200-metre gravel pathway to the sisters' community house.

As I walked up that pathway, lined with over 2,000 small stones packed closely together, I was struck by the importance and power of storytelling.

Patricia Comerford, one of our Australian sisters who lived in Kiribati, slowly and painstakingly, in the hot, humid conditions of Kiribati, built this pathway, lining it with local stones and plants.

The story of her patience and fidelity to the community she loves, as well as her love of the earth, continues to be told and retold among the I-Kiribati sisters, who now live out their own story at Abaokoro. Continue reading.

Clare Condon, the Congregational Leader of the Sisters of the Good Samaritan of the Order of St Benedict, is the recipient of the 2013 Human Rights Medal.

Source: The Good Oil

Image: Sisters of the Good Samaritan

Archbishop Krebs (56) was born in Essen, Germany. He was ordained priest in 1983, and after obtaining a doctorate in Canon Law entered the diplomatic service of the Holy See in 1991.

Archbishop Krebs has wide experience, working in a number of Apostolic Nunciatures in Burundi, Japan, Austria, the Czech Republic, the European Union and the United States of America.

In September 2008 Monsignor Krebs was appointed Apostolic Nuncio in Guinea and Mali. He was ordained Archbishop in November 2008.

As well as German, Archbishop Krebs speaks English, Italian, French, Spanish and Czech.

Vatican Radio reports Archbishop Krebs was in Guinea in 2009 when, despite church appeal for calm, a demonstration against the military junta ended in a 'bloodbath', the military killing 128.

Speaking with Vatican Radio, Archbishop Krebs said Guinea was a small country and urged the world community not to forget the terrible violence.

The main religion in Mali and Guinea is Islam. Catholics in Guinea number 250,000, representing 3% of the population, while Mali catholics number 200,00, just 1.5% of the population.

Image: Liebfrauen Parish

Pacific Islanders in Canberra have been working with Australia's Greens Party and the Government in the Australian Capital Territory to allow consumption of the alcoholic drink.

The ban was imposed in 2009, after several deaths in Europe were linked to Kava tablets.

The report surveys Pacific states for a breakdown of the aid and loans they have received from China. It states that China's aid to Pacific nations over five years totals just over $NZ800 million. The bulk of China's aid is through soft loans for infrastructure projects.

It expresses concern at the level of debt some of the poor Pacific states, especially Tonga, are accumulating. Its debt to China is 32 per cent of its GDP.

The institute noted China was not the only lender in the Pacific. The Asia Development Bank reported a total of public and private loans to the region of $2.8 billion in 2009. "There is anecdotal evidence some island countries are taking on Chinese loans with the expectation that China will forgive the debts after an appropriate time has elapsed and if requested."

The Lowy Institute is an independent international policy think tank based in Sydney. Its objective is to generate new ideas and dialogue on international developments and Australia's role in the world.

Source
Stuff

Photo Credit
blogs.vetteweb.com

Representatives from a number of Christian churches recently attended a course in Suva entitled "Hope, Healing and Wholeness'. The course which was organised by by the South Pacific Association of Theological Schools (SPATS) and UNAIDS

Despite HIV and AIDS being present in Fiji for nearly two decades, it was the first time some of the participants have had the opportuniy to learn about the virus and be introduced to those whose worlds have been turned upside down.

The keynote speech was given by Reverend Dr Cliff Bird, a lecturer in Theology and Ethics at the Pacific Theological College.

Source
Fiji Times