BOB ABERNETHY, host: The situation in Libya remains uncertain. The Gaddafi government Friday (March 18) announced a ceasefire following UN authorization of outside military intervention. On Thursday (March 17), after a week of vigorous international debate, the Security Council approved establishment of a no-fly zone over Libya as well as “all necessary measures” to protect civilians.

What are the moral considerations that should guide a decision to intervene in another country? Kim Lawton took a closer look.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: As the situation continued to deteriorate inside Libya, calls for international military intervention escalated. The UN’s resolution demanded a ceasefire, and if the violence doesn’t end, authorized enforcement of a no-fly zone and pledged to take “any necessary means” to protect civilians. But there are never easy solutions.

Shaun Casey is professor of Christian ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary.

SHAUN CASEY (Wesley Theological Seminary): Whether you act or whether you don’t act, the stakes are really quite high, and that’s what makes it so daunting from a moral perspective: trying to find the right way to know when to intervene and when not to because the consequences, the body counts are quite high.

LAWTON: In the wake of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the United Nations hammered out a set of principles known as the “Responsibility to Protect.” The principles say that nations must protect their population from genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing. And if a state doesn’t live up to that responsibility, the international community has a responsibility to step in. The United States has endorsed those principles.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA (from Nobel acceptance speech, December 209): I believe that force can be justified on humanitarian grounds, as it was in the Balkans, or in the other places that have been scarred by war. Inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later.

LAWTON: According to Casey, the principles draw heavily from the just war tradition, which says there must be a just cause for such intervention.

CASEY: What people need to be looking for, particularly with respect to Libya, is to what extent are war crimes being committed, are innocent people being directly targeted, is there something approaching genocide occurring on the ground at this point?

LAWTON: Once that has been determined, the next questions are who has the authority for approving an intervention and who has the responsibility of carrying it out?

CASEY: Simply because you may have a justification for intervention, that doesn’t answer the “who” question. Should France be the one who intervenes? Should Saudi Arabia intervene? Should the Arab League? Should the Africa Union? There are a lot of regional entities there that may actually have some resources that could be applied militarily.

LAWTON: Atrocities in and of themselves don’t automatically trigger intervention.

CASEY: Sure, we have a commitment to fighting injustice, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to go militarily instantly wherever injustice occurs. We have to ask the question “how large,” and do we actually have the empirical, sort of pragmatic capability to do anything about it?

LAWTON: Casey admits it’s difficult to know where that moral line is.

CASEY: Nobody is going to say, “Well, you have to have 50,000 people die before we go in.” So you have to take it case by case, and certainly in a situation like Rwanda, where hundreds of thousands of people were butchered, in retrospect you’d say, oh my goodness, of course that was on a scale that would’ve justified intervention.

LAWTON: Another question is whether there is what the just war theory calls a “reasonable chance of success.”

CASEY: So let’s say we do a no fly zone and Gaddafi still sends in ground troops and tanks and manages to defeat the rebels. Does the fact that we established a no fly zone mean we want to actually then put ground troops to deter Gaddafi if he continues to be successful?

LAWTON: Casey says concerns about potential success have so far prevented the international community from intervening in Darfur, even though there is strong consensus that atrocities continue to be committed there. He acknowledges that not acting in a particular situation can also be a moral failure.

CASEY: If you have the ability to intervene and to stop an injustice or stop an atrocity and don’t, I think you do have moral culpability as a result of that.

LAWTON: The moral questions are getting increasingly complicated, and Casey says they’re not going away any time soon.

CASEY: If history’s any guide, we’re going to see more of these failed states and more of these sort of nascent civil wars, and we’re going to be asked a lot more to intervene in these kinds of conflicts.

LAWTON: All the more reason, he says, to stay vigilant in doing the moral calculus.

I’m Kim Lawton in Washington.

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DE SAM LAZARO: Microlending began in the nonprofit world as a means to help poor people start enterprises that would make them self-sufficient.

VIJAY MAHAJAN (Founder, BASIX): We were from the world of development, and we spent a frustrating number of years trying to get small amounts of credit for poor people. Then there’s a limit to how much you can do as a nonprofit, and then eventually we restructured as for-profit.

DE SAM LAZARO: In less than decade, microlending grew into a seven billion dollar industry. One company, SKS Microfinance, raised $350 million in an initial public stock offering. Salesmen from various new companies fanned out into rural areas like this village in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, offering money to people, no questions asked.

VILLAGE WOMAN: They came to us continuously for 10 days, and they offered loans. They said we will give you loans and you can pay them back in easy installments. It’s not a hard thing.

DE SAM LAZARO: No sooner had one company’s agents left than another’s would arrive. The goal, critics of these companies say, was to increase the volume of loans so as to attract or impress the big investors, even though many borrowers earned barely two dollars a day as agriculture laborers. Almost all of these women say they were coaxed into several high-interest loans ranging from $500 to $1000.

MARIA POLEPAKKA: I have loans from three different companies, about $700 in all. I use the money from one to pay off the others, and I’ll continue to do that until I can’t any more, and then I’ll stop making the payments.

DE SAM LAZARO: That won’t be easy, say others who’ve fallen behind. Pula Polepakka, a mother of two small children, says even though she and her husband had four loans they stayed current for three years. But they missed three weekly installments after her husband, a house painter, took ill. “The collection boys,” as she calls them, began to hound them.

PULA POLEPAKKA: We left for another village where we have relatives, but the collection boys tracked us down in that village, and we were humiliated. He didn’t say anything about committing suicide. He just went far away and took his life.

DE SAM LAZARO: Her husband’s suicide late in 2009, and those of several dozen other borrowers, gained the attention of media, politicians, and government regulators like Subramanyam Reddy.

SUBRAMANYAM REDDY: Some day it had to burst. The bubble had to burst.

DE SAM LAZARO: Last October, an ordinance written by Reddy was approved by the state’s legislature. It mandated credit checks, monthly instead of weekly installments, and it outlawed unfair collection practices that Reddy says also jack up administrative costs and interest rates to usurious levels. He says those rates are never fully disclosed to unsuspecting, often barely literate clients.

REDDY: If you really calculate, it comes to about 35 percent, about—the percentage of interest. So there has to be a lot of disclosure, that’s the first fundamental thing. They employ a number of unlawful elements to do their recovery.

DE SAM LAZARO: Intimidation?

REDDY: Intimidation.

Television news broadcaster: As the ordinance from the government would propose….

DE SAM LAZARO: Meanwhile, opposition political leaders upped the ante. They urged borrowers to stop making payments on their loans altogether. Repayment rates previously above 90 percent plunged, as did the stock of SKS Finance, and banks stopped lending to microfinance institutions. The industry’s Vijay Mahajan says these developments have paralyzed business and imperiled a critical source of credit for the poor.

MAHAJAN: Instead of going after a few incidents where, you know, extreme overlending had been done, or going after one or two institutions which had systematically engaged in such practices, the entire sector was converted into a demon.

DE SAM LAZARO: Mahajan defends several practices singled out for criticism, like weekly collections. Laborers get paid weekly, he says. As for interest rates, he says microlenders themselves borrow from banks at 12 to 13 percent interest and incur high costs going door to door to collect payments. However, critics say these commercial microloan companies cared more about the profit of their investors than the welfare of their clients. Ela Bhatt, who runs the much smaller nonprofit Sewa Bank, says people at the very margins of the economy need much more than credit, because many of their most basic needs are not met.

ELA BHATT (Sewa Bank): There are so many gaps, so many leaks in the life of the poor, and for them livelihood is very essential. Unless we have something really concrete to improve the livelihood conditions so that they have more income, all these have to be done. Otherwise, only microcredit is just flimsy.

DE SAM LAZARO: In other words, she says loans should be used to finance productive activities that generate new income. In Andhra Pradesh the government says two-thirds of the loans were used for everyday households needs. Bhatt and many development experts say commercialization has distorted the central mission of microlending. But Basix’s Mahajan says there’s simply not enough money in the nonprofit or charity world.

MAHAJAN: The capital investment that’s required to meet all the, you know, unmet needs of poor people in this country and the world, for all kinds of things—it runs into trillions of dollars and you need, therefore, mainstream capital to actually underpin any attempts at addressing this in a business-like way.

DE SAM LAZARO: Mahajan agrees microlenders will have to return to lending strictly for income-generating activities. For now, banks have slowly resumed lending to the companies, and both he and regulator Subramanyam Reddy say it’s critical that borrowers now resume paying back their loans, though Reddy says they’ll have to be rescheduled with lower payments and longer payback periods.

(speaking to Mahajan Reddy): So you would like for people in distress to have loan modification, not loan forgiveness, basically?

REDDY: Absolutely, absolutely. Clearly many of these loans are unsustainable, but yes, I mean no loan forgiveness.

DE SAM LAZARO: There’s broad consensus that microfinance can be an effective tool to bring hundreds of millions of poor people into the global economy as participants in one of the world’s fastest growing economy. But the more immediate task is to clean up the microfinance industry that’s been spawned in India, one that right now looks very much like the American subprime mess.

For Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Hyderabad, India.

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James Wolfensohn led the World Bank from 1995 to 2005. While he was at the helm, he pushed the Washington-based institution to develop an unprecedented relationship with religious groups. Wolfensohn recently returned to Washington to promote his new autobiography, “A Global Life” (Public Affairs Books, 2010). Kim Lawton sat down with him at the Aspen Institute.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: During his decade as president of the World Bank, James Wolfensohn was a force to be reckoned with. And whether he was being praised for pushing new efforts to help the world’s poor or people were protesting against him for not doing enough, Wolfensohn sparked an unprecedented international conversation about poverty and development. I asked him if he believes the United States has a moral obligation to help poorer countries.

JAMES WOLFENSOHN: Personally, I believe so, and it is the stated intention of just about every president to make a contribution on the field of poverty and in the field of development. And I think they make the assumption that the nation agrees with that. That it is something that is part of the American ethic and that if we can help we should. What we haven’t done is to do it at the level of many other nations and I’m not sure we’ve done it always as effectively as we might. But in terms of intention and in terms of the right thing to do, I think we are absolutely where we should be.

LAWTON: Promoting international development is not only the right thing to do, he says, but the practical one as well.

WOLFENSOHN: I regard it as a moral responsibility. I think also though in terms of peace and security on our planet, it’s important to have economic development because countries that are moving forward economically by and large don’t attack other countries. If you can develop a more peaceful and prosperous world, it makes opportunities for export, it makes opportunities for business, but at the other end of the spectrum, it makes less likely terrorist acts and wars.

LAWTON: But with a relentless recession and high unemployment rates, Wolfensohn acknowledges it can be difficult to convince Americans that they should still send aid to other countries.

WOLFENSOHN: And at a time like that it’s not surprising that we tend to look inwards to try and see how we can do something that would solve our own problems. But what you can’t do is just forget outside the country to deal with that.

LAWTON: During his tenure at the World Bank, Wolfensohn raised eyebrows by developing a new dialogue between his very secular institution and top leaders of the international religious community.

WOLFENSOHN: A very substantial part of aid to people in poverty goes through religious organizations. And secondly, the people that are in the field significantly, in addition to aid workers, are religious workers. And so it occurred to me that if we could get a dialogue between the people that were interested in development and religious leaders, we might have the basis for far greater cooperation and far greater understanding of the learning of each group.

LAWTON: Was that a hard sell within the World Bank itself, within that culture?

WOLFENSOHN: I think they all thought I was mad, to be quite honest. I won’t say all, but I don’t think I had a lot of support. But one of the great things about the World Bank is that if you’re president of it, you have quite a lot of discretion on what you do. And I would have to say that personally I found it amongst the most important initiatives that I took—very little talked about, by the way.

LAWTON: On three separate occasions, Wolfensohn and other bank officials met with religious leaders across the spectrum to discuss how they could work together to address global poverty.

WOLFENSOHN: And it was sort of fun for me as a nice Jewish boy from Australia bringing together all these great religious leaders.

LAWTON: Wolfensohn says he believes the meetings accomplished a lot.

WOLFENSOHN: Once we got them talking, as you know better than I they don’t always share secrets with one another about what they’re doing because in a sense there is a competitive element amongst religious leaders. But when you get to the question of humanity and the question of poverty, I found that the competitive element disappeared and we were able to talk about these fundamental humanitarian issues on a very even basis, and it was one of the great experiences of my life was chairing those meetings.

LAWTON: The meetings planted seeds for religious activism that continues, such as a massive interfaith march in support of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. Wolfensohn believes such efforts must continue.

WOLFENSOHN: The most broadly based access to the developing world is through religious people. There are more of them out there. They’ve been there longer. They know the countries. They’re installed locally. They don’t all sit in a big office in the headquarters. They’re out in the field. And so it is a tragedy if they are not embraced, in my opinion, in the overall development process.

LAWTON: After he left the World Bank, Wolfensohn was appointed by President Bush to be a Middle East envoy. He says there the role of religion can be important but difficult.

WOLFENSOHN: It is not as though Islam, Judaism, or Christianity are monolithic. They’re not. And so I think you can, at the fringes, and at the margins and on particular issues, you can get help from the religious community. But I don’t think it is very easy to get them to come up with the solution for you.

LAWTON: Wolfensohn is still active in international development issues. One of his priority projects is an initiative helping train young Arabs to get jobs. He says he’s also concerned that young Americans be prepared for a globalized future.

WOLFENSOHN: We have to really revamp our education system, not just in maths and science, which I think we should, but in terms of humanities, and in terms of where our kids are going in the world, and we’re just not training them.

LAWTON: The world is getting smaller, he says, and America can’t afford to ignore that.

I’m Kim Lawton in Washington.

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BOB FAW, correspondent: Life is peaceful now for the Harshaw family since their eight-year-old adopted son Roman has been at a residential facility where he is being helped with his escalating violent behavior. Last year Roman tried to drown his sister, Grace, in their swimming pool. Another time, says his mother, Roman…

JULIE HARSHAW: …got mad because he wanted her to continue to play with him, and so he went over and found a two-by-four that was on the side of the yard and came up behind her and was going to hit her over the head to stop her from leaving. It would have killed her. I screamed at her to run, and Roman, you know, two minutes later didn’t even know what he had done.

FAW: The Harshaws adopted Roman from a Russian orphanage when he was 18 months old. They were told he was healthy, but as he got older Roman became hyperactive and aggressive. Eventually he was diagnosed with fetal alcohol syndrome, leaving him with the mental capacity of a three-year-old.

JULIE HARSHAW: He gets frustrated very easily, and when he gets frustrated or mad he basically can’t control any of those emotions.

FAW: Roman has punched holes in walls, nor does he sleep much. To keep him from wandering off, the Harshaws had to install alarms on every door and window. Watching Roman, never knowing what might trigger an eruption, has exhausted this family.

CHIP HARSHAW: Over the last six years, you get worn down. Every day is incredible stress here, and not just for mom and dad but for everybody. We are in a terrible dilemma. We look at him as our son. You know, what would you do if it was your biological child, you know? Is it just because he’s adopted that these questions are posed? To us he’s our son, and we’re fighting for him.

FAW: Other parents who have adopted troubled children from Eastern Europe have taken more drastic measures. Dr. Ronald Federici runs a clinic for families wrestling with difficult adoptions.

DR. RONALD FEDERICI (Developmental Neuropsychologist): I’ve picked up children at the baggage carousel at airports. I’ve had them left in my office, in my office—they drove off. I’ve seen some horrific situations where parents, good people, totally lost it and wound up in prison for murdering their child. The amount of child abuse cases have been enormous.

FAW: When a Tennessee mother packed off her adopted son on a plane back to Russia with only a note, many people were outraged. But others who have walked in that mother’s shoes, were more understanding.

JULIE HARSHAW: My first reaction was that I could empathize with her, knowing that she must have been going through probably a lot of the same things that we go through, and certainly don’t condone how it was done.

FAW: You could understand?

JULIE HARSHAW: I could understand, and unfortunately, people like to judge you before they know what you’re going through.

FAW: Eighteen-year-old Elyana identifies with that little boy sent back home alone to Russia. She knows first-hand what it’s like to be cast away.

ELYANA GOLDWATER: When I heard about the Tennessee issue, I thought, “This is not a store. You can’t buy and return.”

FAW: Elyana was first adopted in 2000 by a family that wanted to help someone less fortunate. But it was not a good match, and the parents halted, or what caseworkers would say, disrupted the adoption.

GOLDWATER: It felt really, really bad, an it feels really bad right now, too.

FAW: It does leave scars?

GOLDWATER: It does, it does.

FAW: Elyana’s pain, her longing, was captured in a poem she later wrote.

GOLDWATER (reading poem): When I was little, little as you, I had a dream I thought would never come true. I dreamed of a family that would fill my heart with love.

FAW: For “disrupted” children, the wounds are lasting.

FEDERICI: Permanently scarred by having the hope of an attachment and then the disruption. The concern that I have on a lot of families is that when they adopt they may not always see it as a permanency nowadays, because there’s a lot of openings or availability to disrupt adoptions. Many of the agencies who know they may get sued will say we’ll take the child back.

JANICE GOLDWATER (Adoptions Together): The issue is how much a parent claims a child as their own, and so when parents claim their biological children as their own it comes naturally. We’re programmed hormonally to claim our children when they’re born. When we adopt children, it’s more of a process, and so once a parent has claimed a child as their own, you rarely to never see them give up on that child.

FAW: Janice Goldwater, who runs an adoption agency in Maryland, is Elyana’s mother. Elyana was adopted a second time by the Goldwater family in 2000 when she was eight. Janice found out everything she could about Elyana and knew the family would have to invest time and money in helping Elyana heal. When it comes to adoptions, she says, the best intentions are not enough. Love does not conquer all.

GOLDWATER: We actually had social workers that said, you know, as we looked at different children, “Oh, she just needs love. She just needs some love. She’s had really difficult years and just needs some love.”

FAW: And that’s naïve?

GOLDWATER: That’s very naïve. That’s very naïve.

FAW: Who is morally responsible, then, for the outcome of an adoption?

(speaking to Janice Goldwater): Morally, the parent has a responsibility to find out as much as he can.

GOLDWATER: Absolutely.

FAW: And the agency morally has a responsibility to reveal as much as they can.

GOLDWATER: To share everything. That’s right.

FAW: What’s the reality?

GOLDWATER: Families do get a tremendous amount of information, and in, you know, some instances they don’t.

FAW: The Harshaws, who spent over $25,000 to adopt their son, say they were not informed of Roman’s problems and are suing the adoption agency they used. The agency disputes their claims.

FEDERICI (speaking to patient): You are doing pretty good on this one.

FAW: Dr. Ronald Federici, familiar with hundreds of cases in the last 24 years, says agencies don’t work hard enough at getting the information about these children, and parents don’t push them enough.

FEDERICI: Both sides have not done due diligence. Families didn’t ask because they were told there’s nothing else available. Parents go in hopeful, trusting, pay a lot of money, but are often ill-informed and don’t do enough due diligence on their end on the part of the agency, and push them harder.

JANICE GOLDWATER: Sometimes nobody knew. Issues emerge as the kids grow. We’ve placed infants that appear to be healthy and grow up and have autism, Asperger’s. You have all kinds of issues that nobody had any idea was going to happen.

FAW: The moral choice facing the Harshaws in regards to their son’s future is difficult. Grace could be in danger if Roman returns home. Daniel, their 13-year-old son who’s stayed away from home because of Roman, may start doing so again. The family stress was so bad Daniel asked to see a therapist. And the Harshaws’ marriage has been severely tested.

JULIE HARSHAW: Chip and I basically are like two ships passing in the night. We don’t see each other, because one person has to control Roman while the other person has the other two. So the family unit’s kind of falling apart.

CHIP HARSHAW: We’ve considered everything, even in our marriage we have, and the truth is that we really need each other because of this issue. At the same time, sometimes it doesn’t feel like you’re married anymore, because of the amount of stress that we’ve become different people because of this situation.

FAW: People who watch this will say, at some point you’ve got to say to yourself we have tried everything, and that being the case we can walk away.

CHIP HARSHAW: There’s a bond there that has been created. He is our child, and we are his mom and dad. That he knows. That’s all he knows, that we are mom and dad, and to turn our backs on him and to walk away and say there’s nothing else we can do, that’s what is bothersome to Julie and I.

FAW: Even what they’ve done temporarily, putting Roman in a facility where he can get treatment, does not ease this family’s anguish.

JULIE HARSHAW: I was thinking about Roman, I’m thinking about what he’s doing. I’m thinking, about am I a horrible mom for having him there? If I let go of him permanently I don’t think I could ever live with myself. There is that part of him, that little boy, that is there that is trying to love the only way he knows how, and it’s not his fault that he can’t control himself.

FAW: When he does come home, what are you going to do?

GRACE HARSHAW: Give him a hug.

FAW: A big hug?

GRACE HARSHAW: A squeezie hug.

FAW: Ultimately, what happens to Roman is uncertain. For Elyana, the prospects are much brighter. Remember that sad poem she wrote? Listen to how it ends.

ELYANA (reading poem): First my heart said never. But now we are family forever.

FAW: Even her name now seems fitting. Translated, she says, Elyana means “God has answered.”

For Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, this is Bob Faw in Silver Spring, Maryland.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: Sudan’s Western Darfur province is considered one of the bleakest places on the planet. A state of humanitarian emergency has been in effect for more than seven years, since conflict broke out between the Sudanese military, government-backed militias, and various rebel groups. Hundreds of thousands of Darfuri civilians have been attacked, raped, and killed in what many in the world consider a campaign of genocide. Millions have been displaced. The Sudanese government has expelled most international relief groups. But dotted along Southern Darfur’s dusty terrain there are signs of ongoing aid, surprisingly, from a United Methodist church half a world away called Ginghamsburg.

REV. MIKE SLAUGHTER (Lead Pastor, Ginghamsburg Church): We see the purpose of the local church of going out into the world, being the hands and feet of Jesus to the hurting, the oppressed, the poor, and being the empowering center in that local community.

LAWTON: Ginghamsburg Church is located in Tipp City, Ohio, a predominantly blue-collar suburb of Dayton. The church has partnered with the United Methodist Committee on Relief, or UMCOR, for its humanitarian work in Darfur, and since 2004 the congregation has committed $4.4 million to those projects. Ginghamsburg lead pastor, Mike Slaughter, says his congregation members felt morally compelled to get involved.

SLAUGHTER: Often the church remains silent in the face of injustice, whether it’s slavery, segregation, genocide. I don’t have time as a pastor to just do religious services where people come and feel better about themselves. I want to lead a movement of people who want to make a difference, a God-difference, in the world.

LAWTON: About 4,500 people come to the Ginghamsburg Church every week. Their donations have built 173 schools in Darfur. Those schools serve about 22,000 students. They’ve also sponsored a sustainable agricultural project, which has now helped to feed an estimated 80,000 Darfuris. They’ve built water systems to provide clean water and sanitation to more than 60,000 people, and they’ve begun micro-enterprises, such as a brick-making factory, to help fund the projects. The programs are run by local staff on the ground. Most Darfuris are Muslim, but Slaughter says his church is not there to convert them to Christianity.

SLAUGHTER: Compassion doesn’t have any strings attached. You serve people because they’re human beings created in the image of God, loved by God.

LAWTON: Still, he admits, his church members don’t hide what motivates their work.

Rev. Mike Slaughter preaching to his congregation

SLAUGHTER: People ask us why sometimes, and at that point I share because I do this out of my faith, that I believe this is what it means to follow Jesus.

LAWTON: Because of the security situation, it’s difficult for outsiders to get in. But Ginghamsburg tries to send groups as often as possible to see the work firsthand. Slaughter led a delegation there late last year.

SLAUGHTER: I share with my own family that I need to do this kind of experience. I need to get into where these people are, you know, in dangerous places, about once a year for my own soul-health, and I really come back and realize what’s important.

LAWTON: Slaughter believes the Sudan work has had a profound impact on the Ginghamsburg congregation. When he proposed the first Darfur project at Christmastime in 2004, some people were apprehensive.

SLAUGHTER: I said, “Hey, Christmas is not your birthday. It’s Jesus’ birthday,” because Christians have made Christmas one of the biggest, hedonistic kind of self-focused, materialistic feast. What would Jesus really desire? So I said, “Whatever you spend on yourself, bring an equal amount for this agricultural project we’re going to do in Darfur.”

LAWTON: They raised $318,000, and in the following year it yielded 18 bags of food for every seed planted. Slaughter says his people learned what a difference they can make. It’s a lesson they begin learning here at an early age. The children’s programs hold special projects not just to raise money, but to teach about life for kids in Darfur.

NICKOLAS STEFANIDIS: It’s rough. There’s a war going on, and some of their parents are dead, and they have to live by themselves and take care of their younger siblings.

Waiting in line for water

HAYDEN HARTMAN: They walk many miles to get their water, but it still might not be very clean.

HANNAH BINGHAM: It’s just nice to help them, because they don’t have all that stuff that we have.

LAWTON: This past December, the church’s “Christmas Is Not Your Birthday” campaign raised almost $700,000 for Darfur. Slaughter was especially impressed because the community, which was heavily dependent on the automotive industry, has been hard hit by the recession.

SLAUGHTER: These people are serious in their commitment to follow Jesus in sacrificing for the needs of others.

LAWTON: The work in Darfur is not done at the expense of helping people locally. Unemployment in the Dayton area is about 15 percent. Ginghamsburg runs two community food pantries, and Slaughter says while they were serving about 300 people a week last year, now the number has jumped to about 1,500 people a week. The church also has a nonprofit arm called New Path that includes a car ministry, in which donated vehicles are fixed up and given to the needy. There’s Anna’s Closet, which provides used clothing and shoes and actually makes money to support the work by selling items to those who can afford them. And there’s JJ’s Furniture, which provides household goods especially to women coming out of domestic violence situations. In all of it, the operating philosophy is that everyone has something to give.

MARCIA FLORKEY (Director, New Path Ministries): So we’ll have folks who come to us for needs, but then they see what this does and how it has impacted their lives and then they come back to us and volunteer. So it’s a really neat cycle to see people who are the receivers become the givers.

LAWTON: Slaughter believes it’s a holistic view of helping your neighbor, wherever that neighbor may be.

SLAUGHTER: So you need to look at the needs in your local community, your city, your county, your country, and then out into the world as events continue to unfold in places like Darfur.

LAWTON: For Slaughter, helping people in Darfur is more than just hands-on humanitarian work. He also supports an interfaith coalition that advocates for Darfur at the national and international levels. Christians, Jews, and Muslims are all part of the effort which has been pushing the US Congress and the Obama administration to do more to intervene in the situation.

SLAUGHTER: So it’s very important that the faith community keeps reminding our governments, our economies, that there are moral mandates that we have as human beings toward the treatment of other human beings.

LAWTON: Many in the coalition worry that Sudan’s upcoming elections will not be fair. They fear it could result in even more violence and instability. Slaughter has another worry as well: that in the face of so many seemingly intractable problems, people will grow weary.

SLAUGHTER: But it’s for churches, synagogues, mosques, people from clubs or organizations to really focus on a place of great need and become involved with that place and stay in that place, you know, until we begin to solve some of the world’s problems.

LAWTON: From the devastating earthquake in Haiti to the ongoing problems after Hurricane Katrina, there are many places of need competing for the world’s attention. But Slaughter says Darfur must not be pushed to the backburner.

SLAUGHTER: There’s much still to be done in the Gulf, but the work’s not done, yet money is running out. Haiti? There’s going to be a need in Haiti for years. So you know, again, compassion fatigue is what we have to fight in our own life. Faith is not easy. It is hard work.

LAWTON: Hard work, he says, that cannot be abandoned.

I’m Kim Lawton in Tipp City, Ohio.

The challenge is that, and what we’ll wait and see, is whether the actions follow through with the dialogue and that, you know, it’s a very challenging place to work. There’s a lot of things that could go wrong, and so we’re hopeful that this dialogue that’s starting now, that these positive indications are then carried through into actual policy decisions and actions on the ground. In terms of our perspective as a faith-based organization, we’re extremely explicit that we’re not in Afghanistan to proselytize, to convert anyone. That’s not the way we work anywhere. It’s one of the guiding principles of our organization is that we are not missionaries. We’re serving people based on need, not on creed. We’re not—in any of the 99 countries where CRS [Catholic Relief Services] works we don’t do that kind of thing. All the more so in Afghanistan, where that’s completely unacceptable to the local population, to the government. It’s actually illegal. It’s not something that would enable us to be a useful or productive or helpful organization, so—but just, you know, from our perspective, I guess anyway, it is important as the higher level policy discussions go on to bear in mind kind of the, you know, the faithfulness of the people of Afghanistan, the extreme commitment to their values, to their religion, to their beliefs, that every step that’s made in terms of security, in terms of development needs to bear that in mind, that religion, that people’s faith is central to every aspect of their daily life in Afghanistan, and not taking that into account can undermine every other positive thing that the [Obama] Administration might want to do.

In terms of, you know, interfaith, I do try to be pretty conscientious about not discussing religion with people, again, just because of the nature of who we are and kind of the sensitivities around individuals’ faith and the need to be absolutely respectful, and we completely keep our work completely separate from that and never have the slightest perception that we’re trying to influence anyone or, you know, change their beliefs or anything like that. We don’t have much in the way of explicit conversations for their safety, for my safety, for the safety of the organization. I would just say that having been there for a year now and having been in Pakistan for several years before that and having been in Sudan for about a year and a half before that I’ve had the opportunity to celebrate a number of Ramadan celebrations, or Ramazan, depending on where it is, you know, various Eids – Eid al Fitr and Eid al Adha, you know, and being able to participate in those and really observe, from a certain distance certainly, the degree of faithfulness and just the impact that people’s beliefs, that, you know, Muslim colleagues, that their faith has on their work, everything they do, every aspect of their life, and to be welcomed into that, into these societies, into these cultures where hospitality is another central, foundational aspect of daily life, and to be allowed to witness it and to a limited degree participate in it has been very, you know, rewarding and pleasing for me.

The discussion about the militarization of aid, kind of the blurring of the lines between some of these provincial reconstruction teams and more traditional development actors, CERP [Commander’s Emergency Response Program] funding, things of that nature, is a significant concern for us on a variety of different levels. One is just purely in terms of the safety perspective—that the only thing that really keeps us safe in places where we work is community acceptance. We don’t have armed guards. We don’t travel in armored vehicles. We do have secure compounds and we do have guards on staff, but we do not have a major deterrent capacity, so what keeps us safe is the communities where we work, where we live, being willing to accept us and welcome us into their communities. If the line is blurred with the military, and if it’s not clear, you know, who development actors are, who the military is, much of that goes away, and then we’re no longer safe, and similarly for our beneficiaries, for the villagers who we work with, if they’re perceived as openly collaborating with military efforts that could make them much less safer. So just purely from a security perspective it’s not something we can engage in. We can’t be perceived as being, you know, closely linked or partnered with the military because we will become targets if that happens. From an operational perspective it’s also a concern, because one of our strengths as a development organization is the fact that we have long-term presences in these communities, that the vast, vast majority of our staff are Afghans who speak the language, who know the culture, who understand the communities, who know the operating environment, and who have been there their entire lives and are going to be there for the foreseeable future. From my perspective that gives us a distinct advantage over a military organization on a six-month or one-year rotation with a very, very light reliance on Afghans—maybe the only Afghan staff are actually translators. So I think that if you’re looking to do sustainable, long-term development that actually has some sort of an impact, that’s not quick impact, that’s not just trying to win hearts and minds for today but actually will have some sort of sustainable positive impact on people’s lives, the way to do that is the way that we do it, and I don’t know that that’s—that’s not something we can negotiate on. That’s not something we can change.