Skip to footer

World Humanitarian Day: 5 crises and how you can help

Here are five of the world’s worst humanitarian crises in 2013 – and what you can do to help. 

Sudan and South Sudan

Andreea Campeanu/Reuters
Women from the Murle tribe sit beside an abandoned tractor near their shelter in Pibor in Jonglei state, South Sudan, July 18, 2013. Fighting between government forces, rebels and rival tribes has cut off 100,000 people from urgently needed food and medical aid in South Sudan's east, UN and aid officials said.

Since the two countries split in July 2011, both Sudan and South Sudan have experienced significant internal conflict, which has displaced hundreds of thousands of people and weakened the governments' grip in both states.

In South Sudan, fighting between the Army and a local militia has displaced 100,000 people in recent months, and Doctors Without Borders warns that many are in dire need of medical care.

Meanwhile, in the Darfur region of Sudan long simmering conflict took a turn for the worse again this year, displacing 300,000 people since January. That brings the total number of people forced from their homes by the fighting there over the last decade to 2.3 million. 1.4 million people are currently living in refugee camps in the region. 

To help:

Donate to the UN High Commissioner on Refugees, the Zakat Foundation of America, or Doctors Without Borders. 

3 of 5
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.