20 hours Ago
The American people need USAID Please, President Trump, don’t get rid of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
As the child of a USAID Foreign Service Officer growing up in North Africa and the Middle East and in my own many years working in sub-Saharan Africa with the Department of State, I was able to see firsthand some of the millions of lives USAID has saved. As U.S.
Ambassador to Cameroon, for example, it broke my heart to see infants and very young children living with HIV-AIDS, yet because of antiretroviral drugs provided by USAID and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control they were facing a future — a future — and not a death sentence.
I saw rail-thin refugees from the war-torn Central African Republic and internally displaced persons from conflicts within Cameroon’s borders whose lives literally depended day to day on food aid from American farmers distributed by USAID. I’d be a rich man if I had a dollar for every time I heard U.S.
military colleagues, from four-star generals and admirals to battle-hardened Green Beret and Navy Seal NCOs say that cutting funding for diplomacy, development and humanitarian assistance means funding for military hardware and personnel will have to increase and increase by a lot. To the many adherents of Catholic, Christian, evangelical and independent charismatic churches who voted for President Trump, I would humbly ask you to ask yourselves: What Would Jesus Do? And when you have answered that question, write to the White House and ask the man in charge to keep USAID. The American people need it.
Peter Henry Barlerin, Boulder The time to speak up and act is now My parents were immigrants who fled the atrocities of Nazi Germany for the safety of the United States. My mother and her siblings were forced to leave school and wear the gold star signifying Jewish heritage. Soon after, their family was separated.
Her parents (my grandparents) were placed in concentration camps and my uncle, then 14 years old, was placed in a “work camp.” My mother, a teenager, was left alone to look after her two younger sisters for an extended period of time, sometimes forced to forage in the woods for food. After the war, when her parents were finally released from the concentration camp, the border separating East and West Germany was hardened with barbed wire and land mines, and our mother had to sneak across the border and find work in West Germany to provide food to her family still in the east.
Ultimately, after fleeing East Germany, she immigrated to the United States seeking a place free from discrimination, a place that accepted the dispossessed, where all could thrive and work to their potential, and the government could be trusted. I read the news now, and see a country where the poorest and most desperate are deported, leaving families separated and wondering if they will ever again see each other; where fleeing families seeking safety from persecution and violence in their home countries are jailed and the children placed in camps, not knowing their fate; a country where people of different faiths and cultures are demonized and where division is cultivated based on fear and contempt for the truth. The similarities of today to the horrors of Nazi Germany are too great.
It does not matter your politics, your faith or your heritage, the time to speak up and act is now. George Gerstle, Boulder Selling ourselves and those we love to slavery I’m sharing this poem in honor of the fine public health professionals with whom I worked for many years at USAID, WHO, UNICEF and other fine organizations, beginning in 1956. “Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen.
To be led by a liar is to ask to be lied to. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love to slavery.” – Octavia Butler (1947-2006).
Barry Karlin, Lafayette.
