For A Change articles from April 1998

For A Change archives from April 1998

Home truths from Sri Lanka.
April 1, 1998... As violence rocked the peace process in Northern Ireland in February, an inter-communal group from another conflict zone, Sri Lanka, addressed a forum arranged by For a Change in London. The scale of carnage in Sri Lanka's civil war between...

Battle of Castle Vale: Britain, where more people are living longer and alone than ever before, may need up to 4 million new houses, prompting fears of rural destruction.
April 1, 1998... Britain, where more people are living longer and alone than ever before, may need up to 4 million new houses, prompting fears of rural destruction. But what about renovating existing housing stock? Michael Smith finds out how Birmingham's...

Castle Vale resident cleans up.
April 1, 1998... Stephen Meah was unemployed for six years before the Housing Action Trust helped him to set up his own small business. He had worked for 12 years as an electrician's mate in Birmingham when he opted for voluntary redundancy at the age of...

Prize-winning bread.
April 1, 1998... Many young people in today's South Africa are uneducated and thus unemployable. This is because revolution was given priority over education during the anti-apartheid struggle. Rev Spiwo Xapile, a minister of the Reformed Presbyterian...

Partnership pays.
April 1, 1998... A series of debates on the moral challenges facing industry isn't every family business's way of celebrating its centenary. Nor does every employer think that sacking employees during a slump is `too quick a fix'. But then, as the Swiss paper...

Indian teachers spare the road and build self-worth.
April 1, 1998... When Dilshad Shaikh gave up a lucrative job in Dubai in order to found a school in Panchgani, western India, he found himself confronted by a moral choice. Government officers wanted him to pay a bribe of 400,000 rupees to secure the school's...

Risk-taker par excellence: French businessman Jean Fayet has never jibbed at taking risks. He talks to Michael Smith about conscience, cars and the economic crisis in Asia.
April 1, 1998... The most surprising aspect of the collapse in Asian financial markets last year was that it didn't happen a lot sooner, believes French businessman Jean Fayet. As head of Siemens Automotive in France he was in South Korea last December, at the...

One last great service to their country: Mary Lean meets the British World War II veterans who are calling for reconcilliation with Japan.
April 1, 1998... When Emperor Akihito of Japan visits Britain in May, there is one group of veterans from World War II who will be glad to welcome him. `We hope the visit will lay the ghost of the past and let us start a new era,' says the Chairman of the Burma...

How to rule Britannia? Welshman Paul Williams asks what Scotland's and Wales's votes for devolved parliaments will mean for Britain.
April 1, 1998... Most countries contain different ethnic, language or historic national groups. How to accommodate this diversity politically is one of the hottest issues in the modern world. The price of failure may be the break-up of the state, as happened in...

Contributers write about books which have enhanced their lives ... a book which made him think twice about what it means to be British.
April 1, 1998... Inside every Englishman, I suspect, there is an Italian trying to get out. This is the only explanation that I have found for our strange cocktail of self-control and passion. We are a nation of deep feelings, with a mistrust of introspection...

Wilberforce and the anti-slavery campaigners in England.
April 1, 1998... Wilberforce and the anti-slavery campaigners in England by William Cameron-Johnson 36-minute video, MRA Productions Where I reside in south-east London, I am only three miles from Clapham Common which, 200 years ago, nurtured the Clapham...

Notes from heaven's anteroom: Janet Mace reflects on the discovery that she is getting old.
April 1, 1998... As I stood in a crowded underground carriage the other day, a middle-aged woman offered me her seat. I accepted it gratefully, inwardly muttering, `For heaven's sake--does she think I'm old?' The next shock came on a suburban train. A...

Looking back on an abortion: the writer has asked to remain anonymous.
April 1, 1998... It was that one-off occasion that did it. I don't blame him--I went into it quite deliberately, on the rebound from a relationship which had just broken up and which meant everything to me. All that it took was a lonely heart and too much wine....

SAS man hears it on the radio.
April 1, 1998... British Army chaplain Frank Collins has no doubt when the turning point in his life took place, even though his wife Claire claims she had seen it coming for some while. Collins was in the elite SAS (Special Air Services) and at the time...

Liverpool remembers Irish famine victims.
April 1, 1998... The names of 7,500 paupers who were buried in unmarked graves in the British port of Liverpool over 150 years ago were read out at a recent service of remembrance and reconciliation. The majority were victims of the Irish potato famine in which...

Italian apology to Ethiopia.
April 1, 1998... The Italian paper La Republica recently featured the first visit to Ethiopia of an Italian head of state since Italy's occupation of Ethiopia ended in 1941. `In your land we have written pages of blood and we do ask forgiveness,' said Italian...

Sun and rain meet in Lithuania.
April 1, 1998... Foundations For Freedom, a programme initiated by Moral Re-Armament to train young people for unselfish leadership and responsibility, held its second regional seminar at Birstonas, Lithuania, last December. Fifty participants from 15 countries...

When veterans and draft-dodgers meet.
April 1, 1998... A Vietnam War veteran describes how he held in his hands the heart of a buddy which had just been blown through his back. Another American of the same age tells of blowing off his toes to avoid being drafted to Vietnam. Both for the first time...

Crisis-proof?
April 1, 1998... Some 16 months ago, guests at a reception at the Japanese Embassy in Lima found themselves taken hostage. None of us knows what crises the day will bring. But imagining all the things that might befall you could be unhealthy. You might just...

Struggle to ban a diabolical weapon.
April 1, 1998... A total of 119 million anti-personnel landmines (AP mines) lurk just beneath the ground in 71 countries. They destroy the lives or limbs of 70 people every day. They can explode 100 years after they have been laid. The end of the Cold War...