I’ll be writing from there for the `Web Sight’ Fred Hollows page, which you’ll find down the right hand column of the Herald online home page. The address is smhhollows. To contribute to the Webpage, email hollows@fairfax.com.au

 

I’ll continue the Webdiary from South Africa but on a more irregular basis. Email me at mkingston@access.fairfax.com.au, or send to the usual email, which I’ll divert while I’m away.

 

I hope to be full of new ideas and new energy for the year ahead by the time I get back. I’ve received many ideas to redesign the Webdiary, and hope we can get into that too. Now is a time for hope.

 

 

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In case you missed the idea behind the Hollows project, I republish a piece I did on it this month. Thanks to all those who’ve given me the names and numbers of people to look up in South Africa.

 

Hollows Foundation trip should be a real eye opener

 

Australian politics is an arid place that isn’t going to change any time soon. But outside government there are reasons to be hopeful, writes Margo Kingston.

 

It looks like I’ve finally made a new year’s resolution I’ll keep – to do something useful – courtesy of, of all things, a work memo.

 

It landed in early October, post-Tampa/pre-Tampa election, after the ever-maverick Fred Hollows Foundation decided to ask my bosses not for free advertising but for a couple of free journalists. Was anyone keen to use their holidays working for the foundation, with Fairfax to pay for two air tickets?

 

Yes, please, said too many photographers, writers and editorial managers, so the foundation’s chief executive officer, Mike Lynskey, found sponsors to send about 20 around the world and to indigenous communities in Australia.

 

The Hollows lot lets blind, poor people see by removing cataracts and putting in intra-ocular lenses. They’ve systematically revolutionised the technology so the operation is cheap enough to do in countries such as Nepal, Eritrea and Cambodia. They’ve trained locals to do the work and administration. They’ve built and funded lens factories in Nepal and Eritrea which export to the world and keep the multinationals honest on price and the carpetbaggers honest on quality.

 

They’re a home-grown, home-managed international charity. They accept no more than 20 per cent of their funding from government, so that if needs be they can go it alone. It’s called independence.

 

I’m going to South Africa next month, where the foundation will launch its first program there, in Eastern Cape, the country’s poorest province. White South Africans say nothing ever works there. Time will tell.

 

When I mentioned the trip in the online Herald Web Diary, a reader, Keith Conley, who said he had worked as a medic in Soweto, wrote: “My strong advice is to leave your liberal assumptions at home if you want to survive. You’re white and therefore a rich and easy target for the boys. Your internationalism won’t really cut it with some of the characters you’re going to meet.”

 

“This is not meant to deter you. If you can stomach it, it’ll change your life. You might even start to appreciate your own country and what it has achieved with integrating a huge immigrant intake over a relatively short period. Mind you, there is still the lingering question of our indigenous brothers and sisters, but you won’t have to worry about them in the Eastern Cape. You can leave that to us while you expunge your Tampa guilt.”

 

True enough, Keith, but there’s also another motivation. I’m finding federal politics and the intellectual debate between Left and Right, reflecting the dead heart of Australian politics today, unbearable. New year’s resolution: escape the desert, renew hope. The foundation – which receives its cash and kind donations from Australians of all walks of life and of many political views – is a symbol of our identity most of us can sign up to, leaving us free to explore in relative harmony what the best face we can show to the world looks like.

 

Lynskey has two goals apart from free help. He wants us to record the untold stories of the people in some of the world’s poorest countries who have made it happen and to interrogate the foundation’s people to draw out what they are on about. The result will be a book and input into an international conference in Sydney in May.

 

Which got me thinking. Since so many hacks are interested, might some readers feel the same way? Late last year, I wrote in Last Word that the media needed to do more bottom-up reporting. So how about we start here? And why not go further and ask readers to join the process?

 

The Herald and The Age online team is designing a Hollows journos Web page to be up and running soon. The journos will tell you who they are and why they’re doing this, and on the road they’ll file whatever they like whenever they like. We’ll introduce you to the key Hollows players here and around the world. We hope readers will raise issues for debate, relate personal experiences and ask questions of the journos and the foundation. We’ll publish reader contributions alongside those of the journos.

 

Overseas aid – the politics, the philosophies, the cultural clashes, the successes and failures, the visions – is not a topic covered much by our media and, when it is, it is the abstract stuff about how our aid budget keeps getting cut.

 

The Web page will be open for business on all this and more, under the editorial control of Fairfax. Ideas welcome.