Christmas Appeal: Tales of resilience and courage from the places our world of plenty prefers to ignore

You have been presented with the shocking. There was the boy who had a bullet fired across his skull as a punishment. There was the woman killed for chewing gum. There were the 30,000 youngsters living on the sub-zero streets of St Petersburg. There were the children of Bethlehem - plagued by bedwetting, nightmares and aggression because of the psychological trauma of war in that symbolic cradle of peace.

News is about the unusual, the sensational, the dramatic, the horrible. But there is much more to life, and one of the virtues of our Christmas Appeal - which ends today - is that it has enabled us to publish stories of a world where resilience, ingenuity, application and optimism are the norms.

It has not been, we hope, a comfortable experience. We have reported from places our world of plenty usually neglects, such as a school at the heart of the world's largest set of refugee camps on the edge of Khartoum, home to two million people who have fled three decades of civil war and famine in Sudan. One of the three charities being supported by the appeal, Education Action International, works quietly there to transform the lives of the camps' children.

And we have exposed our rich world's complicity in the hardships of the poor. Up in the Andes we encountered the indigenous Quechua people. Descendants of the Incas, they live at altitudes of up to 4,500 metres, and are used to harsh weather. But climate change, provoked by greenhouse gases omitted far away in our own world, has sent them a deadly new cold wind. Last year it sent temperatures plummeting to minus 35C, killing the hardy alpacas on which local people depend for a living. Another of our charities, Practical Action, is helping build special shelters for the animals.

Not all help from the West has proved so appropriate. Boats sent by aid agencies to replace the fishing fleet in Sri Lanka destroyed by the tsunami proved useless because one design of boat was sent to everyone, regardless of differing coastal conditions. Practical Action has worked with local people to produce fibreglass boats to a range of traditional designs, thus marrying the best of modern technology and ancient wisdom.

The inventiveness of local people working with Western technologists has been striking elsewhere too. In Kenya they found together that tsetse flies can best be trapped by a combination of blue cotton and cow's urine. In Sri Lanka they are creating cheap household gas from cow dung. In Bangladesh landless peasants are growing crops on rafts, built from water hyacinth weed, floating in the Brahmaputra river. And they are farming fish in a system of cages which Practical Action has designed so they cannot be swept away by the frequent flash floods.

Our three charities have not shied away from controversy. The third charity, Children in Crisis, as well as working in some of the world's poorest countries, also runs projects in the UK, where it has pioneered many of its techniques; in Leeds it has fine-tuned a way of working to enable children to cope with drugs by giving them the information they need to make sensible choices, and the skills and confidence to do so.

And, in the West Bank and Gaza, Education Action has set up nurseries and self-help groups to enable children and women to cope with the trauma of life in a conflict zone. It has trained Palestinian women as counsellors for bereaved mothers, including those of suicide bombers, teaching them how to speak well of a dead son without glorifying his death in a way which might inspire other children to follow his example.

Some things you have not heard of. It was too dangerous to report on the earth dams built by Practical Action, which have doubled the areas of land suitable for food production, in areas of Darfur where the Janjaweed still make their deadly raids. (We did report on a programme to accelerate education for children affected by years of war in Afghanistan - and found, only days later, that a headteacher had been beheaded by Taliban suspects for running a school for girls in Zabul province.)

There was no space to tell you of a Practical Action project to enable Kenyan farmers to swap seeds to escape the pressures from multinational agribusiness. Or of Education Action's programme to get the 1,049 refugees doctors in Britain back into health work. Or of Children in Crisis's work to get displaced children in the Congo back to school.

But what did emerge was a sense of the increasing interdependence of our globalised world. That was there in the ingenuity of the technological partnerships between local people and Western technical experts. But it was evident at a more profound psychological and even spiritual level too.

That was symbolised by the relationship that sprang up between Makoma Primary School in Uganda, where the pupils do not even have pencils, and Bishop David Brown School in Surrey. The twinning enriched both, bringing a revolution to teaching techniques in Africa and helping get the UK school out of the "special measures" status to which Ofsted condemned it two years ago.

We learnt of another school too. In Ephphatha Basic School in Juba, a 19-year-old soldier, who had been press-ganged into the army aged eight, returned to learn to read in the school it was once his job to attack. He spoke of how he, one day, went up to look at the body of a man he had shot in the bush, only to find that his enemy was a child even younger than he was.

Ephphatha, an Aramaic word meaning "Be opened", is a message intended for the schoolchildren of southern Sudan. But it speaks to the hearts of the inhabitants of our rich world just as well.

The amount received by the appeal to date is £174,628. Donations may still be made until 21 January, when the appeal will close.

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