Hidden Pacific: Why we're tackling poverty

The Herald’s latest appeal with World Vision will help our Pacific neighbours.

Shayne Currie, New Zealand Herald managing editor

NZME managing editor Shayne Currie. Photo / Nick Reed

Two years ago, World Vision and the Herald asked you to help the millions of people displaced by the humanitarian crisis in Syria.

The response to our fundraising appeal was overwhelming.

Your donations provided education for tens of thousands of children, clean water and safe sanitation for thousands of families living in camps.

Today we ask for your help once more. And for a cause much closer to home. Parts of the Pacific are among the most impoverished places on earth.

• Hidden Pacific: Q&A

They're blighted not by war but by drought, rising sea levels and lack of basic services.

Many people have little or no access to clean water and no reliable source of food.

But they're resilient. They just need the basic tools and amenities that would allow them to be self-sufficient.

Over the next three weeks our journalists will tell their stories, through words, photos and videos.

We ask that you read and watch and, if you can afford it, give whatever you can to help.

Chris Clarke, World Vision New Zealand chief executive

World Vision New Zealand CEO Chris Clarke.

Across the Pacific I have visited remote communities that draw their strength from each other.

In many ways their bonds are stronger than ours, which have become somewhat detached from one another.

If one family's crop fails they will be carried by the community, if a mother's child falls sick, the whole village is there to care for them. They are resilient and proud.

But increasingly these bonds are being stretched to the limit by circumstances beyond their control - natural disasters, preventable diseases, poor access to education and healthcare, and few economic opportunities.

I recently heard Dorrie's story from the New Zealand Herald's trip to Papua New Guinea.

Dorrie lives in Boroi, a remote village in the country's north.

Dorrie was forced to give birth on the side of the road while trying to get to the nearest health clinic, miles from her home.

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In the wet season this road becomes impassable, and mothers have no choice but to give birth in their village without the medical care they need.

Dorrie didn't want other mothers to go through what she went through and now wants to train as a Village Birth Attendant with World Vision.

But there are still so many women in Papua New Guinea forced to give birth without adequate medical services or resources.

It's not right, nor is it fair.

It's hard to believe this is happening in countries so close to home.

It's why the New Zealand Herald and World Vision have launched The Hidden Pacific campaign.

We're asking you to join with us, engaging with these stories and giving what you can, not out of a sense of pity or guilt but as an act of solidarity, which says it does not have to be this way.