NEWSBLOG: Behind the headlines - April 11, 2006

Romanian students make the number two by turning on a dozen lights in a 10-story dormitory in Cluj. World Vision

Today's blog ... an expos' of bad earthquake advice on the Internet, a novel aid funding idea from Romania and can school help children get over conflict?

There was a plane crash in Kenya yesterday. Very sad, but this wouldn't usually make a very loud bleep on the AlertNet radar, until we noticed in the Washington Post that the dead included politicians on their way to a peace conference to discuss violence on the Ethiopian border.

According to the Post, government officials say violence over scarce resources and cattle-rustling has broken out along Kenya's northern border during the drought that's blighting East Africa.

***

You know those well-meaning but annoying emails that circulate around the world for years. Have you been sent the one about what to do in an earthquake?

I got an email from a friend in Guatemala, forwarding a recommendation to ignore standard advice in the event of an earthquake. Instead of getting under a table, the writer says you should put yourself in a foetal position next to a large object, where you'll be saved by a triangle of air.

After checking with some disaster experts, not only did they criticise Doug Copp's "triangle of life" theory but they say the man has a strange history of dressing up as a rescue worker to get himself on film.

This is all incredibly bizarre, but it really isn't funny when you think about the consequences. So what should you do in an earthquake?

The mantra in the United States is is "Drop, Cover and Hold on".

This means:

• Get low on the ground, under something very sturdy like a table, and away from objects or structures which could fall on you, cover your head and neck, and hold on to the most stable thing you can find.

• Crouch on your knees and shins so you could still crawl to a safer place. This is better than curling up in a ball, which could make you roll around when the ground is shaking.

• Keep away from windows.

• If you're in bed, stay there.

• Most of the time, it's safer to stay inside. People often suffer serious cuts or broken bones running barefoot over broken glass. Marla Petal, a consultant at Kandilli Observatory and Earthquake Research Institute in Turkey, says running into the street will usually endanger more people than it will save. The only time she'd recommend trying to get to a safe place in the open is if you're in an adobe house you built yourself with no seismic-resistant design measures - the most dangerous structure in an earthquake.

• Fire is a risk after earthquakes, so avoid using matches or lighters since there could be gas leaks.

Petal says just one of Copp's recommendations is absolutely right: "Never go to the stairs."

Earthquake experts don't really like saying what you should do during a tremor, because most of the work you can do to keep safe should really be done beforehand.

To be fair, it's hard to come up with good advice that's valid wherever you are in the world. For a lot of people in California, it's realistic to say you should get your house assessed for safety by an engineer. For most people in Central America, that isn't really an option.

But there are some basic tips. The main thing is to try to have furniture -and anything with glass in it - fastened down so it's less likely to slide around.

Petal says: "When you have mass casualties, what would usually be a normal injury - a cut or a broken bone -- can become life-threatening. So hanging a picture on the wall with a hook instead of a nail can save a life."

I'd better write back to my Guatemalan friend. There are tremors in Central America all the time, and I don't want her to be crouched next to the refrigerator with her children thinking she's safe.

***

Cholera

is on the rampage in Angola, laying people low and stretching medical resources. Being a disease spread by faeces, it's usually worst during wet weather, when water supplies are more likely to be contaminated. Angola's rainy season has barely started - the wet weather lasts from March to October.

Average life expectancy for Angolan men is 39, and for women it's not much better - 42. Fifty percent of the population doesn't have access to safe drinking water and 40 percent eats less than the minimum food requirement, according to the 2005 Human Development Report from the U.N. Development Programme.

Cholera is easily treatable, but between 25 and 50 percent of people will die from the disease if they don't get treatment.

***

Education is in the news this week, with UK finance minister Gordon Brown in Africa to announce a $15 billion education aid pledge.

International aid agency ActionAid

says countries like Mozambique were told they would get extra aid if they showed a clear commitment to education by spending 20 percent of their budgets on it, but still haven't been given all the cash they were promised.

Mozambique's youth literacy has climbed at an astonishing rate, up to 62 percent from 49 percent in 1999, according to ActionAid. The country is building 6,000 primary schools a year but still has a million children not getting primary education. Classes have an average of 50 to 70 children, and the country would need 55,000 more teachers to meet the U.N.-recommended ratio of one teacher to 40 students.

ActionAid says over 100 million children worldwide are not in school, and that at least 15 million more teachers would be needed by 2015 to provide schooling for them.

***

Education can help children get over humanitarian emergencies, but it can also cause conflicts, according to researchers meeting at a two-day conference in Oxford, Britain.

They say education should be an automatic part of humanitarian response, because it helps give children back a normal life, keeps them in a safe place, and provides comfort for young children after hard times.

But it's not all good news. Obviously, if teachers exaggerate ethnic differences or tell their students one group is superior, or if schools are segregated, it can entrench prejudice and stoke conflict.

Some commentators say Northern Ireland - torn apart for years by sectarian violence along Catholic-Protestant lines, with Catholics broadly allied to resistance to British rule - is testing new approaches to post-conflict education.

Instead of glossing over differences, Northern Ireland is taking a path which strongly defines the two main religious groups, but seems to have led to a reduction in violence. Paul Nolan is the person to look up if you want to know more about this. He's the director of the Institute of Lifelong Learning at Queens University in Belfast.

If you want to know more about education in Afghanistan through the turmoil of the last 50 years, it sounds as if Jeaniene Spink from Oxford University's Department of Educational Studies is your woman. And she'd probably be your first port of call if you wanted to find out more about this whole subject of education and conflicts, since she's the one who's been working on it with UNICEF, the U.N. Children's Fund.

****

Did you know that Romanians can choose to put 2 percent of their income tax towards humanitarian work?

Well, neither do most Romanians, even though the measure was introduced two years ago. Students have pulled off a series of clever visual stunts to publicise the law more widely, in efforts watched by international Christian aid agency World Vision.

Students made the number two glow in lights 10 storeys high by turning off selected lights in a dormitory, trying to call attention to the option which was taken up by less than 3 percent of Romanian taxpayers last year.

Aid workers quoted a man in a crowd watching students launch 1,000 candles floating on Chios Lake in Cluj: "Directing 2 percent of our taxes to send children to school should be a powerful motivation for everyone ... I would direct all 16 percent of my taxes to such a noble cause if I could."

Leaving you with that nice humanitarian thought for the day,

Ruth Gidley AlertNet journalist

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