What You Can Do Urge your Senators to authorize and appropriate critically needed funding for debt relief for impoverished countries. Use the general sample letter below to get started, or this sample letter from LOGA to Congress as a guide. Be sure to include your mailing address in your e-mail correspondence so that you will be identified as a constituent. This would help ease the debt burden of poor countries in Africa, Latin America, and Asia.
Many nations now spend four times as much on debt repayment as on health care.
Millions of children end up suffering needlessly. It is urgent that the U.S. Congress take action to help break the chains of debt of impoverished nations in order to free up resources that can be used to alleviate poverty and protect the environment. To address this problem, the ELCA is supporting the Jubilee 2000 movement, a worldwide effort to cancel the backlog of unpayable international debt of the poorest countries by the new millennium. I support legislation that would cancel such debts while promoting mechanisms to prevent recurrence of unpayable, crushing debts, ensuring that representatives from civil society participate in determining the conditions for both debt relief and new lending, and ensuring that any debt relief is not conditioned on reforms that perpetuate or deepen poverty or environmental degradation. This would give a fresh start to those deep in debt, benefitting millions of people.