Pinay to get Voices of Courage award

Noraida Adang Abdullah Karim, officer-in-charge of the Mindanao operations of the Community and Family Services International (CFSI), will receive this year’s "Voices of Courage" award given by the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children.

The Voices of Courage awards are given each year to individuals or organizations from around the world that have shown commitment to and leadership in promoting the well-being of displaced women and children. In addition to receiving the award, Noraida was chosen to deliver the keynote address at the awards luncheon in New York City on May 10.

In a telephone interview with The STAR from the CFSI office in Cotabato City, Noraida said she was overwhelmed when she received the news of her award yesterday morning. She sees this as a valuable opportunity to bring the issues of internally displaced persons (IDP) to the attention of a wider audience worldwide, and to discuss the issues in an international forum and hopefully find and effect solutions to the problems confronting IDPs.

Born in Cotabato City, Noraida spent her formative years in Datu Piang, Maguindanao. Her early years were marked by poverty and repeated displacement due to the armed conflict in the region. After finishing high school in 1988, she came to Manila and spent the next five years assisting other displaced Muslims in Metro Manila organize to meet basic needs and advocate for peace negotiations in Mindanao.

The peace agreement signed in 1996 between the government and the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) set the stage for Noraida to return to Mindanao, where she began working with local civil society organizations concerned with human rights, the situation of displaced persons and livelihood projects for poor women. She also returned to school, getting a degree in social work from the De La Vida College in Cotabato City, where she later taught social work.

When armed conflict broke out again in 2000, resulting in the displacement of over 900,000 people, CFSI, a Philippine-based humanitarian organization that initially worked among Vietnamese refugees in Bataan and Palawan, began its work helping displaced persons in Mindanao.

A licensed and trained social worker, Noraida joined CFSI in 2001 as community organizing officer, helping large numbers of internally displaced persons to return to their communities and begin the transition from conflict to peace.

Noraida is currently coordinator for the pilot food assistance program that CFSI is carrying out in conflict-affected communities in Maguindanao in partnership with the World Food Programme. The program’s Food for Education project has a take home component that provides elementary school children with 12.5 kilos of rice a month in an effort to keep the kids in school and elevate nutrition levels. The Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) registers the highest levels of malnutrition in the country. The on-site component of the project provides a corn-soya blend (CSB), oil and sugar that parents prepare into porridge (lugaw) or rice cakes (suman) for the children. Pregnant and lactating women are also provided with CSB. The Food for TB project, on the other hand, encourages tuberculosis patients to continue with treatment by not only providing free medicine through rural health units, but also gives 10 kilos of rice per month as incentive to patients who keep up their treatment. The prevalence of tuberculosis among the ARMM population is relatively high.

As officer-in-charge of CFSI’s Mindanao operations, Noraida also oversees other community projects, such as the Healthy Start project for pregnant women and newborn babies; and the Pro-Child Care project that initially built 100 Harmony Play Centers for children aged three to five years, and this year will build 75 more such centers in Maguindanao and Sharif Kabunsuan provinces.

The Mindanao Youth Leadership project currently involves over 70 Manobo youth leaders in Carmen, North Cotabato, providing leadership and skills training as well as organizational and finance management for livelihood projects like diversified farming, goat and chicken raising and running a bakery.

Noraida also played a leading role in the Literacy, Livelihood, and Food Sufficiency Project for women and male youth that CFSI field-tested for the World Bank. Following the test project’s success, it is now being implemented in over 500 barangays in the ARMM and is overseen by the Department of Social Welfare and Development.

Noraida headed the "Arms are for Hugging" project that initiated the rebuilding of an elementary school in Inug-ug, Maguindanao in 2002. With CFSI helping to raise the funds to rebuild the school razed by fire and parents doing the construction work, the Inug-ug Elementary School now has 14 concrete classrooms with 13 teachers and is part of the Department of Education’s primary school system. The school currently provides education for 632 students.

Noraida is married to Ustadz Hashem E. Abdullah Karim, a former Arabic language teacher now pursuing a degree in elementary education at the Notre Dame University in Cotabato. Noraida was nominated for the Voices of Courage award by CFSI board member Sheila Platt, wife of former US ambassador to the Philippines Nicholas Platt. Her nomination was strongly supported by partners and friends of CFSI around the world who recognized her hard work, strength of character, courage and significant contribution to the safety and well-being of very large numbers of people.