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The 63rd. Annual United Nations DPI/NGO Conference

The 63rd. Annual United Nations DPI/NGO Conference held in Melbourne has just come to an end. 
Over 2000 delegates from all over the world representing 350 Non Governmental Organization gathered together for three days to discuss the theme:
Advance Global Health: Achieve the MDGs. 
Global health places a priority on achieving equity in health for all people. 
It emphasizes transnational health issues, determinants and solutions and involves many disciplines within and beyond the health sciences. It also promotes interdisciplinary collaboration.

The Augustinians for the first time ever took part in one of the Workshops of the DPI/NGO Conference to introduce to the delegates of the Conference the various social and humanitarian work being done by the Augustinians in various parts of the world and how as a member of the UN, the Order of St. Augustine is facing the challenge to reach the Millennium Development Goals by 2015.

The workshop was introduced and chaired by Fr. Emeka Obiezu OSA, the new head of the Augustinian UN team.
The first presentation was made by John Szura OSA and Alicia Mujzr on Health Care Outreach to the Poor as an Experiential Context for Human Rights Education.

The project regards children from a rural poor parish in the Philippines who are suffering from serious and rare diseases and who are unable to pay for surgery or other medical care. 
In the Aspnet Programme of the UNesco the School in the Philippines St. Augustine’s twinned with the Augustinian school in Canada and developed a human rights programme to help and fund raise money to help the cure of these poor children from the Philippines.

It is an ongoing programme that is saving the life of quite a number of children secluded from the right to live a decent life and to have an adequate healthcare.

Another presentation in the workshop as presented by Sr. Rosemary Ukata and Sr. Francis Uti Ngozi on their work in alleviating health and hygiene problems in their mission parish in Nigeria, lack of toilet facilities, no water and lack of nutrional food, serious relationship problems of battered woman and their human dignity. 
The sisters talked about their educational programme of not only woman and children but also of men who are still living in cultural environment that marrying a woman gives them the right of property of the person too.

Finally Hilary Tagliaferro, from the Augustinian province of Malta presented a totally different and innovative project of opening An Oasis of Peace - a Chapel - in the heart of a tourist and entertaining town of Paceville to help people of all cultures and religion to find the Inner Peace and to help those with their addictive problems of the inner city nightlife of alcohol and drug abuse, relationship, suicidal tendencies and other related problems.

The WOW (Wishing Others Well) project , as it is called , relates to the education of the  Community from the so called affluent society to the MDG by promoting  awareness of the needs of poor countries and their human rights.

Young pre-and University students from all over the country take part in the WOW (Wishing Others Well) Xperience programme to educate themselves in the Millennium Development Goals and the UN Human Rights programme as well as using  sports as a powerful educational tool to build the characters of young people.

At the end of the Workshop Fr. Obiezu invited all participants to put up comments and questions to the presenters of the various Augustinian projects and there were many who accepted this offer and made their contribution.