A message from Neil Watkins

When I wrote a few weeks ago, I told you about the victories we have achieved and the ambitious work plan that we have for the 2007 Sabbath Year. Today, I want to tell you a story about our work.

One month ago, I helped lead a delegation of about a dozen Jubilee supporters from across the country — Minnesota, Oregon, California, Washington, DC, and Connecticut — on a delegation to Nicaragua with Witness for Peace.

Our mission was to study the impact of debt and the economic policies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Nicaragua.

We met with economists, professors, doctors, civil society leaders and activists.

We studied the profile of Nicaragua’s debt. We learned that 4 out of 5 Nicaraguans live on less than $2 per day.

We couldn’t believe that 60 percent of the school-age population — 60 percent! — are not in school.

But a month later, back in Washington, it’s not the statistics I have held onto. There are two powerful images that I can’t seem to get out of my head.

On our first day, we visited the city dump in Managua, the capital city of Nicaragua.

We bussed to a trash-strewn area of town which was the entrance to the dump. Several hundred families live inside the dump along with more than 2,000 people who make their living by sorting through the mounds and mounds of trash every day.

Trash was everywhere: across the road, burning in piles. We also learned that trucks deliver loads of decomposing chicken each day, which people — many of them children — sort through and eat.

As we walked around, I wondered, “What kind of economy forces hundreds to live in a dump? What kind of economy forces thousands to make their living there?”

A few days later, we visited Hospital Lenin Fonseca, one of the main public hospitals in Managua.

As the delegation took a tour of the hospital, we saw a long line at the door.

Patients wait for hours and are often sent home because they are more likely to get an infection in the hospital than in their own houses.

Later, we all squeezed into a tiny room, entirely filled by an ancient X-ray machine. Because spare parts are no longer available for such an old machine, the entire hospital has to share the one remaining X-ray machine next door. We also visited the hospital’s laboratory, which was vastly under-equipped, even to our untrained eyes.

“We need everything,” Dr. Elio Artolo, head of the doctor’s union, told us. “We need medicines. We need materials.”

But in Nicaragua, like so many other countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia, debt and the restrictive economic policies of the International Monetary Fund make it impossible to spend the funds needed for public health, education or housing. The recent decision by the Inter-American Development Bank to cancel debts owed by Nicaragua and four other Latin American countries is an important step, and will begin to ease some of the pain we witnessed in Nicaragua.

That victory could not have been won without the advocacy and support of you and people like you around the world.

Sadly, this recent victory is not enough.

The 2007 Sabbath Year is an opportunity to bring forward a bold and prophetic call to change these unacceptable realities. In the Sabbath Year we will call for the cancellation of debts for all impoverished countries, without harmful economic conditions.

The Sabbath Year is an opportunity to bring the Jubilee call for right relationships, equity, and justice to the attention of our political leaders.