- ATD Fourth World

Every edition of Letter to Friends is packed with people who represent wonderful examples of humankind! As we read the articles, their faces appear before our eyes, we hear their voices in our heads, we can imagine these young people and adults on the move, joining together with each other, never to keep hard- won rights just for themselves but on the contrary to share them with others. Although they are not teachers, they hand on to us lessons of humanity, based on an astonishing conviction: for them, the actions they undertake are perfectly unremarkable.

It’s perfectly normal "to give others the same help I received", to return to school when you’re an adult "to learn more about yourself and how to take care of your family", there’s nothing extraordinary about "relieving not only physical hunger but also invisible hungers", about inventing ways "to succeed with even the poorest children", about "showing his unbinding love for his children",

and it goes without saying that this homeless man understands people "who’ve left everything and don’t even know what’s happened to their children". It’s also perfectly normal for young people to assert in a poem "We will fight you (poverty) To create a better world Yes, youth is on the move".

So it is also perfectly normal to launch a web site to make known our commitments to combat poverty, to learn about ourselves and to learn from each other. This site called www.overcomingpoverty.org is to be revamped in 2011 and will be your site, as participants in the Permanent Forum. It will be the site for everybody who celebrates the 17th October every year, the International Day for Eradication of Poverty, and for everybody who wants to build a fairer and more fraternal world. We will tell you more about this site in the next edition of Letter to Friends.

Huguette Redegeld

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In this issue of the Letter to Friends (click below to download it), you will discover concrete efforts being made in Australia, Francia, Central African Republic, Zambia and Peru.

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