Posts Tagged as ‘land’

December 22, 2009

Tsunami: Five years on photogallery

Five years on from the Asian tsunami, people in Sri Lanka, Indonesia and India have safer, more comfortable homes, secure jobs and are better prepared for disasters. Please light a candle in remembrance of those who died in the tsunami, and support our vital emergency work You can play a crucial role in saving lives [...]

December 22, 2009

Indonesia: The right to land

As a result of the tsunami, a lot of people lost their documents proving which land they owned. The regional government office storing all the other copies had been destroyed too, so it became very hard to know who owned what. Some land was lost to the sea completely. The strength of the waves altered [...]

August 25, 2009

Brazil: Recovery, voice, transformation

Yesterday, shortly after Xavier and Aninha of the Pastoral Land Commission came to tell us about their work helping people out of bonded labour and slavery in the rural north of Brazil, we saw images of a violent eviction of participants in a CAFOD and EC-supported programme in São Paulo promoting housing for the poorest. [...]

February 25, 2009

Honduras: A country we thought we knew

Hot, dusty, sweaty, smelly Tegucigalpa is a city of 1.8 million. Its name means “hill of silver” in the local indigenous language, and it is indeed extremely hilly – which means many people are in danger from regular landslides. Some of the hills can move up to one metre a year – for example, we [...]

October 15, 2008

Brazil: Taming the urban beast

São Paulo’s metropolitan area is estimated now at over 23 million people. Until 2002, the Master Plan of the city had been gathering dust for thirty years. During that time, slum populations swelled. The rich moved into enclaves out of the city centre. The poor also were driven out of the centre, forced to occupy [...]