Eid Message – Interfaith unity to fight global poverty

This is my video message I shot for the Tony Blair Faith Foundation for the day of Eid ul Fitr. Now more then ever as the word is divided there is a greater call for faith communities to unite to tackle the world biggest problems.

A Story..

Imagine starting off feeling flushed. The fever gets worse; it doesn’t go away, you feel weak, you lose your appetite, so weak you can’t even move.

Then imagine falling unconscious, and then waking up in a hospital surrounded by other sick people and strangers and you don’t know what’s happened. You’re miles from home, and for the next two weeks you’ll not be able to see your friends or your family, you won’t be able to go to school, play on your video games or watch your favourite TV shows.

And then imagine your nearest hospital is 3 hours away from where you live and your only transport is a bicycle. Imagine this is all because of one mosquito which bit you while you were sleeping, something that could have been avoided but wasn’t because your family couldn’t afford a bed net.

This is the reality faced by millions of young people, the same age as you, across sub-Saharan Africa and many other parts of the world.

Let me tell you about a young person I met in a town called Ifakara in Tanzania. His name is Antony, a dedicated Chelsea football supporter who loves nothing more than to impersonate his hero Drogba on the pitch. Antony lives 2 hours away from the hospital and had what is diagnosed as severe malaria. One afternoon he was found unconscious having fallen ill from it. When I met him in the hospital we asked him if he has a bed net. To that he replied “no, where I live we don’t have mosquitoes.” When I heard this I was shocked and surprised, and asked him how does he think he got malaria if he lived in an area such as this. He said he didn’t know.

More Than Just Malaria…

Staring at Malaria right in the face

We came to Africa with a goal and that goal was to speak to the communities out here, to hear their stories and to learn about the effects of Malaria. Being here for a week now we understand that the goal is much bigger then what we first anticipated and that malaria is just a smaller part of the bigger picture.

You see the Faiths Act Fellows program and what we are doing here is very unique and pioneering in many ways and if successful I whole heartedly believe that we truly change the world for the better.

Think about the impacts faith based NGOs have both on a grass root level in fundraising, capacity building and raising awareness and then in the field by understanding the cultures and religious observances of the community. From my experiences in working with Muslim faith based NGOs in disaster response situations in Muslim lands such as the Pakistan earthquake and Cyclone Sidr in Bangladesh it was these organizations that were the most effective. It is the faith of these organizations that really infuses the value of giving and compassion from people to the people.

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