OneWorld Magazine - Women's Opportunity Fund

OneWorld Magazine's "Hammer & Tongs" section focuses on individuals or organizations that have implemented dynamic and alternative problem solving techniques. Your suggestions concerning material are welcomed by OneWorld. We will seriously consider the work of any international individual or organization that you may recommend.

At OneWorld Magazine, we dedicate a large amount of its resources to cover, capture, and publish accounts of unique accomplishments of often epic proportions, like crossing icecaps or exploring a remote wilderness. We research little known mythologies and seek to understand the complexity behind our cultural differences. In our opinion, most of the western world has a relatively easy time earning a living, allowing our endeavors to be sophisticated and ambitious. Yet we are also aware that a larger part of the world's population faces more basic although greater challenges, such as feeding a family or finding a honest occupation that will raise an individual's value above the lowest poverty level.

Challenges should always be viewed within their context: a small loan whose amount would barely cover a day's food supply for one individual in a Himalayan mountaineering expedition could literally liberate another from a year of modern slavery in India. The differences in the scope of our endeavors are great but the methods by which we achieve success appear to have a lot in common. Therefore, we felt the need for a section to expose the more "basic" challenges of life and portray personal descriptions of individuals who have created new and unlikely solutions to once daunting, but familiar problems. An individual's power to change the course of events under the

most strenuous of circumstances can contribute to the creation of a better community and environment as well as guarantee the summit of the most challenging mountain. This is not a "cyber social/enviro infommercial section" and our intention is not to make the western reader feel guilt about his or her fortune or to encourage "aid" to less fortunate regions of the world. Handouts spoil poor people and make them dependent on them, and guilt is often "not so much a useless emotion as a dangerous emotion. "It leads us to take purgative or defensive actions where rational thought would be more appropriate."(*)

We hope that you enjoy this section and that its positive message will uncover optimism instead of cynicism and lift the veil of doubt over the ability of people to change their fortunes even in the most corrupt and unstable of circumstances. As we mentioned before we would also like to encourage you to write to us and tell us about people or organizations that you believe should be featured in this section. We will be glad to consider your suggestions of achievements to date which demonstrate that by empowering individuals a community can become a successful one. The success of any individual or organization's efforts magnifies the potential influence which all people possess to make a difference in their local communities and surrounding habitats.

(*) Philip Briggs