Africa Resource invites you to the opening of Africa House, a multi-dimensional space.
Invitation
With pride and a great sense of accomplishment, we at Africa Resource Center, Inc., cordially invite you to the Grand Opening and Ribbon Cutting ceremony of our new 6500 sq. ft. multiplex Africa House, at 50 Washington Avenue, Endicott, New York, 13760.

Situated in the historic district of the Village of Endicott, Africa House is the home of the 2500 sq ft. Akégo Gallery and Boutique on the first level, the 2000 sq. ft. Sahara Gallery and Event Space on the lower level, and the 2000 sq. ft. office space of AfricaResource.com and Onira Media Production studio on the second level. Tastefully designed, with high imposing walls, warm radiant colors, beautiful ambiance and spot lighting, and a spectacular chandelier signature piece, the spaciously luxurious galleries and office space exude style, sophistication, and class. Africa House looks as impressive as it sounds.

Abiding by our mission to present the highest quality fine art, the Akégo and Sahara galleries will showcase the art of distinguished and exceptionally talented artists of African descent from all parts of the world. It will also exhibit the works of artists from any part of the world who creatively engage African designs and iconography. The gallery boutique will carry tastefully designed crafts and jewelry as well as the digital educational materials produced by Onira Media production. Our Event Space is available for rental; and lastly, we urge you to visit our award winning AfricaResource.com website for a taste of our extensive offerings.

Please join us on Friday, October 12, 2007 at 50 Washington Avenue for this august grand opening. Bring a group of friends and inform everyone you know who appreciates beauty, craftsmanship and originality to join us in this celebration.
Opening Ceremony starts at 4:00 p.m.

Thousands of youth risk forced recruitment into militia
James Mapundo, who just turned 18, speaks French, English and Swahili and would really like to go back to school to learn another language. Instead, he is stranded in an expanding camp for displaced Congolese called Bulengo, now home to 13,000 people in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo's North Kivu province.

Mapundo is one of an estimated 370,000 civilians to have fled their homes since hostilities resumed between dissident general Laurent Nkunda's National Congress for the People's Defence (NCPD) and the Congolese army in December 2006.

He, like thousands of other young people, is now at risk of forcible recruitment into armed groups who control much of North Kivu.

"[The NCPD] kill people and they take the young to go into the military formations," Mapundo told IRIN. "They asked me to go in the military, but I refused."

Despite his precarious situation, Mapundo is one of the lucky ones. Many other children have not escaped armed groups, though statistics are unclear because access to most of the population is hindered by ongoing fighting.

Humanitarian workers, though, say recruitment of children into armed militias has skyrocketed since the latest bout of fighting erupted six weeks ago.

"Organisations working in child protection have noticed a dramatic increase of the recruitment of kids into armed groups,” said Patrick Lavand’Homme, head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Goma.

Protection workers note that other disturbing trends have emerged since the current flare-up began.

"[The militia groups] are targeting schools,” said Pernille Ironside, a protection officer in Goma with the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF). “We have had numerous reports of secondary schools and technical schools being targeted, and children generally over the age of 15 being at greatest risk of being recruited.”

Girls targeted

While the focus is often on boys who have been recruited into armed groups, the situation for girls is equally critical, protection workers say.

Girls who are abducted are forced to become "wives" to the military commanders - relegating them to the role of sex slaves.

Unlike boys, girls always remain behind the scenes in rebel camps, making it more difficult for protection workers to gain access to them.

"It's always been a grave issue," Ironside told IRIN. "The difficulty is that girls who are kidnapped by armed groups … in some cases develop a tacit acceptance of their situation. They know that were they to go back to their home community they would be stigmatised as a result of the fact that they have been raped and borne children by an opposing group.”

The forced recruitment of children has struck fear into the hearts of many of the displaced who say they will not leave the camps and return home until their security can be assured.

“I have heard of a lot of children being recruited, even the little girls,” said Ame Muhima, the president of a grouping of 4,000 displaced families waiting to be integrated into formal camps for the displaced outside of Goma.

“There were 17 children who have escaped and come back to us here,” Muhima said.

Protection workers say children are no longer being recruited by the Congolese army but by any one of three main militia groups operating in the region; and they face the risk of recruitment in more ways than one.

Mayi-Mayi militia groups tell children it is their responsibility to fight to protect their villages from other armed groups. Spurred by a sense of duty, children often volunteer themselves for service. Those who resist are “volunteered” by their parents.

The Forces Démocratiques de Liberation du Rwanda (FDLR), an ethnic Hutu militia group with links to the perpetrators of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, employ a different tactic.

‘The FDLR are known to sweep into a village and literally scoop up all of the children of a certain age and march them off into the bush,” Ironside told IRIN.

If caught, children captured during the recent eruptions in violence are held in squalid prisoner-of-war (PoW) camps by the various armed groups. Forces loyal to Nkunda are widely reported to be holding underage PoWs.

Civilians caught in crossfire

Humanitarian workers hope for a cessation of hostilities but say they believe the situation in North Kivu could instead deteriorate, citing increased military activities in the region.

Resource-rich eastern Congo has long been a simmering cauldron of conflict as rag-tag militias aligned along ethnic lines fight for control of the region.

A 1998-2003 war pulled in seven neighbouring nations and cost an estimated four million lives, mostly from hunger and disease.

Humanitarian workers note that civilians, including children, bear the brunt of the fighting and will continue to do so as the conflict rages on.

Outside the Bulengo site, 13-year-old Gusanga spends his days wandering among the hastily constructed straw huts asking for someone to give him a pen.

Proud of his fluent French and Swahili, and mature beyond his years, the boy volunteers his services as a translator to visitors.

One month ago, he fled the risk of recruitment by FDLR militias in nearby Kitchanga town.

"Everyone who is 15 or older has to join them in the fighting," Gusanga told IRIN. "When I’m 15, I would prefer to be in school; but when we turn 15 then they catch us."

Elile Johne
Youth Empowerment Foundation
Program Assitant
LEAP Africa Alumni
+234-805-9260-736
1-773-2201
gozzle2002@yahoo.com
www.johnelile.8k.com
"The man of wisdom is never of two minds; the man of benevolence never worries; the man of courage is never afraid."

Nigerian President Umaru Yar'Adua recently declared the energy crisis a national emergency, but aid groups say he should also declare a state of emergency in the health service.

"So far there is no evidence the government will act quickly to bring succour to the poor," said Osita Ezechukwu, a volunteer at the anti-poverty group Social Rights Initiative.

In his inauguration speech on 29 May Yar'Adua included in his seven-point agenda a goal to alleviate widespread poverty. Yet four months on, details of how he will do this remain sketchy.

Civil society groups are calling for President Yar'Adua to make commitments to provide basic services.

Focus on oil

Yar’Adua told a delegation of Nigerian political leaders on 19 September: "We are very concerned about how other Nigerians live and will try very hard to evolve and implement policies and programmes to solve the problems of unemployment, poverty and disease.”

But he has also made it clear that rehabilitating the transport and electricity sectors is a priority, saying that the sectors’ current state of decay has “resulted in [a] lower quality of life for the majority of our population”.

Yar’Adua has frequently said he will make Nigeria one of the world's 20 biggest economies through better management of energy resources, improved security, reform of land laws and rule of law, and a resolution of the Niger Delta unrest.

On 17 August Yar'Adua declared the country's power crisis a national emergency. To deal with chronic shortages he said he would go ahead with the initiative of his predecessor, Olusegun Obasanjo, to break up the old power monopoly and bring in private investors to boost power generation.

Yar'Adua also announced the formation of a National Energy Council under his direct control and the breaking up of the Petroleum Ministry into departments for power, oil and gas, each headed by a cabinet-rank official who will report to him directly.

Health project ditched

But he has had far less to say about how he will provide basic services to the poor. Despite Nigeria’s being a top oil producer with huge mineral wealth, around two-thirds of the country’s 140 million people live below the poverty line. Life expectancy at birth is just 44 years and one in five children does not live beyond the age of five.

Aid workers were shocked when Yar’Adua recently announced he would suspend a project initiated by President Obasanjo to construct a modern health centre in each of the country's 774 local council districts. Obasanjo had called it an emergency response to the lack of access to health facilities in rural communities.

The government determined that the health centres project was unconstitutional because it would have federal government taking funds allocated to local councils. But health officials have criticised Yar’Adua’s decision, saying that he fails to recognise that the healthcare system is in crisis.

"Our maternal mortality is one of the highest in the world; our infant mortality and life expectancy [are] embarrassing," said Daniel Gana, president of the Nigerian Medical Association. "But surprisingly our president has not declared a health emergency and is not intending to do so."

Elile Johne
Youth Empowerment Foundation
Program Assitant
LEAP Africa Alumni
+234-805-9260-736
1-773-2201
gozzle2002@yahoo.com
www.johnelile.8k.com
Time is neutral and does not change things. With courage and initiative, leaders change things.

A report in an American medical journal that children in northern Nigeria have been infected with polio by the vaccine designed to prevent it have raised fears that Nigeria’s already lagging polio prevention efforts could be further delayed.

Such vaccine-derived outbreaks have occurred previously in other parts of the world, usually in regions where there is low polio immunisation coverage, but the 69 cases recorded in Nigeria are the largest on record, the scientists said in the study.

The finding could be a “serious setback” for the global polio eradication campaign, because it is occurring in a region where rumours about vaccine safety “derailed vaccination efforts” several years ago, scientists warned in the study, released on 28 September by the US Centre for Disease Control (CDC) in its publication Morbidity and Mortality Weekly.

Nigeria accounts for at least 70 percent of all new polio cases worldwide, while almost all other countries in the world have successfully eradicated the disease.

The CDC’s results have been reported in the leading scientific journal Science Magazine and confirmed by the World Health Organization (WHO). But a spokeswoman for the WHO’s Polio Eradication Imitative pointed out that around 2,000 cases of polio were reported in the same area at the same time and they were not caused by the vaccine.

“All vaccines have risks associated with them. From a public health perspective it is important for people to weigh the risks with the benefits,” spokeswoman Sona Bari told IRIN on 3 October. “We hope that people don’t focus now on the vaccine as the problem when it is the disease that still poses a far greater problem.”

Polio mainly affects children under the age of five. Once contracted, it can disable people for life. Polio cannot be cured though vaccination can provide a lifetime protection.

The vaccine, like the disease, is passed on through faecal matter. Bari said that many of the children who contracted the vaccine-derived polio may have never been administered the vaccine but rather ingested it indirectly.

“The vaccine mutated and they had no other vaccine to protect them,” she said.

That may be difficult for many people in northern Nigeria to understand. Radical Muslim radical religious leaders there have made unfounded claims that the polio vaccine was laced with agents causing AIDS and sterility. As a result three northern Nigeria states suspended polio vaccination in 2004, including Kano State which halted vaccinations for nearly a year, resuming only after tests confirmed the vaccines were safe.

Nigerian and international officials said people in northern Nigeria had recently started to accept vaccination though the uptake is still low in some areas. Currently six northern states - Kano, Kaduna, Sokoto, Zamfara, Kebbi and Jigawa - account for over 70 percent of all polio cases in the country.

Nigerian health officials say they are concerned that the progress that has been made will be undermined when people learn that the polio vaccine can cause the disease. "These cases seem to confirm fears that that there may be something unwholesome about the polio vaccines and could lead to further boycott of vaccination," a senior official of the National Programme of Immunisation in Nigeria's Health Ministry told IRIN on condition of anonymity.

"Yet the fact remains that these infections were the consequence of low immunisation coverage caused by the initial boycott in the north,” he said. “So it poses a major public health advocacy challenge to make the people understand the real facts and that it calls for more not less vaccination," he added.

Elile Johne
Youth Empowerment Foundation
Program Assitant
LEAP Africa Alumni
+234-805-9260-736
1-773-2201
gozzle2002@yahoo.com
www.johnelile.8k.com
Time is neutral and does not change things. With courage and initiative, leaders change things.

I will like to use this great opportunity to wish every well meaning 9ija a HAPPY INDEPENDENCE.

However, there is an opportunity for students in UNIPORT, UNIABUJA, ABU Zaria and Benue State Universities to come out enmasse to watch Drama and free HIV Testing, students are to participate for free, ands lotsof goodies and free gifts.
for more info. send a mail to gozzle2002@yahoo.com



Elile Johne
Youth Empowerment Foundation
Hotline Coordinator
LEAP Africa Alumni
+234-805-9260-736
1-773-2201
gozzle2002@yahoo.com
www.johnelile.8k.com
Time is neutral and does not change things. With courage and initiative, leaders change things.