ACTIONS FOR PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST
sponsored by Peace Life Center Middle East Committee. Public invited

Modesto Peace/Life Center Vigil for Peace: Please call the Center for time, place, and message themes, usually Fridays. Info: 529-5750.

Peace Camp

Friday thru Sunday, June 24-26

Camp Peaceful Pines

click here for info and registration

The GI Rights Hotline

A Gathering of Voices

Community Service: it’s more than just a grade

Juniors and seniors in Modesto City High Schools are required to do community service. Not only are the students required to write an essay about their experience for their English class, but their completed community service hours also accounts for 5% of their semester grade for their social science class. At Johansen , the Community Service Program encourages students to acknowledge their civic responsibilities and become active members in their communities. After interviewing several juniors at Johansen High School, I learned about the various activities that my fellow classmates completed for community service and what they gained from their experience.

Jenny Luangrath volunteered to help within the Lao community at the Ceres Lao Temple. Within the temple, she helped in the effort to attain funds for other Lao families in their time of need, such as a funeral. Luangrath stated we also helped to set up for religious and ceremonious times, such as the Lao New Year which lasted for three days. Luangrath learned “that you can’t always depend on yourself for everything. At certain times, people should be able to ask for and receive help from others in order for the community to be prosperous.”

During last year’s presidential election, Matt Palmer helped pass out flyers for the Democratic Headquarters in Modesto. Palmer learned about the effort and organization it takes to gain supporters.

Cami Gonella volunteered at the Family Redwood Center through Inter-Faith Ministries. The Center is an organization that helps support women who are trying to end drug and alcohol addictions.

Gonella said there is nothing she loves more than helping other people. Some day, Gonella wants to be a Medical Social worker and she takes this volunteer experience as a good opportunity to practice her social skills. She stated, “I learned how to teach women older than myself with respect and compassion. Every week I find myself looking forward to going to the center. Hearing their stories makes me feel so sad, but it is really encouraging to see the women turning their lives around. After the women move away, I know that they will be successful in whatever they put their minds toward.”

Maggie Johnson, a junior at Johansen, went to Tecate, Mexico, over spring break with her church’s youth group. There, she played with orphan children, went into poverty-stricken communities and did puppet shows, arts and crafts, and rollerskated with the poor children.

Johnson said that “the poverty in Mexico is so overwhelming; sewage runs down the streets, kids live in rat-infested houses, and crime is rampant. When we played with the local kids, they were overwhelmed with excitement over a simple puppet. In Mexico, I learned to appreciate what I have at home, but I also learned to respect the great sense of community and satisfaction that arises out of poverty stricken neighborhoods. When I came home, I not only appreciated running water and clean streets, but also my family and the love we share. Working in Mexico has taught me that throughout the world, people desire love and affection, not material comfort.”

I would have to agree that after completing my own community service hours, I walked away with something greater than just an ordinary experience. I learned that high school students are essential to a functioning community because they can effectively contribute to our communities.

Community Service is more than just a grade, it’s an eye-opener to the real world, real people, and real experiences.

How conservatives use language to dominate politics

When I read a web page with the above title, I had an “Ah Ha!” moment. Finally it all fell into place, why we hear so much from the conservatives that make us think government is bad. The article is an interview with George Lakoff, a professor of linguistics at UC Berkeley, and founder of the progressive think tank, the Rockridge Institute.

The article, by Bonnie Azab Powell, quotes Lakoff extensively. Here’s the part I thought was most telling:

“Conservatives understand what unites them, and they understand how to talk about it, and they are constantly updating their research on how best to express their ideas.”

“The conservative world view, the strict father model, assumes that the world is dangerous and difficult and that children are born bad and must be made good. The strict father is the moral authority who supports and defends the family—teaches his kids right from wrong. The only way to do that is through painful discipline. The good people are the disciplined people. Those children who remain dependent should be forced to undergo further discipline and be cut free with no support.”

“Project this onto the nation and you see that to the right wing, the good citizens are the disciplined ones—those who have become wealthy and those who are on the way. Social programs “spoil” people by giving them things they haven’t earned and keeping them dependent. Wealth is a measure of discipline. Taxes beyond the minimum needed for government take away from the good disciplined people rewards that they have earned and spend it on those who have not earned it.”

“The phrase “tax relief” began coming out of the White House starting on the very day of Bush’s inauguration. ….For there to be “relief” there has to be an affliction, an afflicted party, somebody who administers the relief, and an act in which you are relieved of the affliction. The reliever is the hero, and anybody who tried to stop them is the bad guy. So, add “tax” to “relief” and you get a metaphor that taxation is an affliction and anybody against relieving this is a villain.”

“There’s a whole other way to think about it. Taxes are what you pay to be an American, to live in a civilized society that is democratic and offers opportunity, and where there’s an infrastructure that has been paid for by previous taxpayers. This is a huge infrastructure. The highway system, the Internet, the TV system, the public education system, the power grid, the system for training scientists — vast amounts of infrastructure that we all use, which has to be maintained and paid for. Taxes are your dues — you pay your dues to be an American. But, the wealthiest Americans use that infrastructure more than anyone else, and they use parts of it that other people don’t. The federal justice system is nine-tenths devoted to corporate law. The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commerce Department are mainly used by the wealthy. And we’re all paying for it.”

“Taxes are an issue of patriotism! It’s about being a member, being a member of a remarkable nation.”

Why aren’t we protesting the “tax relief” that the Bush administration gave to the wealthiest Americans? And Why aren’t we pointing out that cutting programs for the poor and sick (read this: 4 million American children have no health care — numbers climbing daily), is punishing them by taking away the services that everyone has paid for thru their taxes and that all citizens are entitled to. The “strict father” rubric of the conservatives says these people are poor because they are lazy (not true, many of them work full time at menial jobs, that don’t pay enough sometimes to even have a place to sleep at night.) “Tax relief” closed the shelter in downtown Modesto, as surely as night follows day.

And it comes right down here to Modesto: have you noticed all the letters to the editor about potholes? Guess why: the same “taxes are bad” rhetoric exists in the Schwarzenegger administration (dominated by Republicans). When he abolished the vehicle license taxes, he eliminated several millions that really belonged to local government. And it’s been downhill ever since.

When the “taxpayers’ association” protests the cost of putting in sewers and a new water system for Modesto, don’t you ever wonder what we would do if we refused to pay the taxes (or fees) that will pay for giving us clean water to drink? Of all the basic services that a city needs, this surely must be the most important one.

Nicaragua: “Learning in Community”

Jimmy Membreno from Nicaragua visited Modesto and Merced in April. He spoke about his organization, “Learning in Community,” which trains people in Nicaragua ways to show their beautiful country to tourist.

Jimmy also leads delegations to various Nicaraguan attractions. Nicaragua has hundreds of birds, lakes, turtles, and the biggest rainforests in Central America. It is a very safe country to visit and its people are very warm and friendly.

Today, May 9, is your birthday. You are 84. You wouldn’t remember me, though we’ve met and I’ve paid attention to you much of my life. For young people today, outside of students at Catholic universities taking theology courses on peace and social justice, you are at best a name, a tiny footnote of history. Yet for me you are a beacon of prophetic boldness and heroic moral courage. I write to wish you well and to thank you for your life poured out for others.

I first learned about you through articles in Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker newspaper. I was in high school in a Catholic seminary. I read about you and Trappist monk Thomas Merton, about your common commitment to bridge institutional Catholicism with the Gospel’s call to peace and justice activism. Merton was the wise oracle. You, with your brother Phillip, were the street prophet. You could not be muzzled.

I met you the first time when I was studying theology in Rome. A friend of mine from the North American College, Ed Gaffney, invited me to go with him to pick you up at the airport. The head of the Jesuits had called you there to try to clip your errant wings. The Vietnam War was raging. You were angry at the blind refusal of the institutional Church to see and follow the contemporary implications of Christ’s message of nonviolence. To arouse protest against the Vietnam War, you had poured blood on draft files.

Your Jesuit superior did not quiet you for long. Two years later, at Catonsville in 1968, you entered a draft board office, took the draft files into the street, and burned them over prayer. In the mid 1970’s the Modesto Peace/Life Center invited you to speak. Following your public talk at Modesto Junior College, you accompanied a small group of us to Yosemite National Park. There, on a day whose light on that meadow retreat remains indelible, you shared with us thoughts about peace making. After the discussion, you invited me to join your community of resisters back east. Looking back on that invitation, I feel like one of the fishermen who didn’t go with Peter, who kept mending his nets, or like the young good man who when asked to leave all and follow, yielded to reluctance.

In the years that have followed, to protest U.S. militarism and nuclear insanity, you’ve entered nuclear war-making sites several times and poured blood on missile cones. To denounce the ways of death and speak out for life, you’ve been arrested many times, experienced harsh loneliness in prison, and known the isolation of being a voice crying in the wilderness.

Because of my college experience working with poor people in Mexico during the summers in the 1960’s, I kept up with what was happening in Latin America in the 1970’s and 1980’s. I was inspired by Liberation Theology. I followed closely the Sandinista fight against Nicaragua’s long time dictator, Anastasio Somoza, and I was filled with hope when he was overthrown. But I remember your prophetic voice at that time, your steadfast adherence to nonviolence. Ernesto Cardenal, a fellow Jesuit priest, close friend of Merton, and well-known Nicaraguan poet, had sided with the Sandinistas and publicly justified their resort to armed rebellion as the lesser of two evils. You wrote him a public letter, not to condemn but to deepen dialogue and understanding. Your words reflected the tenacity of your conviction:

“I think how fatally easy it is, in a world demented and enchanted with the myth of short cuts and definitive solutions, when non-violence appears increasingly naïve, old hat, freakish—how easy it is to cross over, to seize the gun.”

In 1970 when you were in hiding from the FBI, you wrote: “The death of a single human is too heavy a price to pay for the vindication of any principle, however sacred.”

Today, in a country whose blinding compulsion is its pursuit, at all costs, of its “War on Terror,” when military spending yearly increases while budgets for social improvement get erased, appeals to nonviolence are the object of derision. And yet, Daniel, you continue to raise your voice. In “Hymn for Resisters,” your reflections on nuclear armaments in light of Psalm 90, you write: “What is positively forbidden is that we take to ourselves a spurious sense of power, a demented idolatry, and bring the creation down in wreckage. Or threaten to do so. . . . Through our machinations, on sea and land and air, the planet has become volcanic with terror, breathing ruin, ready to erupt. The lava has already flowed, time and again. The path of fire stretches from Hiroshima to Iraq, from Fat Boy to depleted Uranium, from a city in ruins to an entire country humanly and ecologically devastated.”

Amid your vocation to resist the evils of militarism, you don’t disregard the here and now: you visit and minister to AIDS patients in New York.

Thank you, Daniel, for being the prophetic conscience of America. For so many of us who try to live and promote nonviolence, you have been an inspiration. We may not live with your degree of courage and faithfulness, but your steadfast vision and compassionate witness are a legacy and a standard against which we judge ourselves. They will not let us rest.

Letter from Darfur: the tragedy continues

Ed. note: The author, who works with Save the Children (SC), wrote this letter to his wife and child, and then to his friends, including Dan Onorato, who has shared it with us. His wife lives in Bolivia.

It has been over 5 months since I arrived in Darfur and still I can’t answer Casey’s question, “When is dad coming home?” Most of the women, children and IDP [Internally Displaced Person] families we have been working with ask me the same question. When can we go home, back to our villages, back to our farms, back to our normal traditional way life? Due to the current security situation outside the IDP camps, nobody will be going home any time soon, nobody that wants to stay alive.

When I take a few minutes and think back on what our Save the Children team has been able to accomplish in assisting the African tribes of Darfur for the past 5 months, I have to admit it is impressive. We now feed over 300,000 people a month, have opened 15 clinics located right in the camps to provide much needed medical services, provide potable water for 73,000 families and also have 55,000 children a week participating in educational, protection and recreational activities. Being the jock I am, it lifts up my sprits to visit the camps now and see the kids, girls and boys playing soccer, making clay toys in arts and crafts class, interchanging with each other about the horrible events of the past 10 months and actually joining together to support each other and their families to rise above the hell they live in. The minute I set foot in IDP/Refugee camp, the girls and boys run over chanting Kawayja, Kaywayja (white man, white man). When I first arrived in West Darfur, I thought they were saying “ha ah ya, ha ah ya, New York style and I always answered, good buddy and you. They grab your hand, they rub the hair on your arm, they smile and just want to feel the human touch, someone that cares, some type of hope that the tragedy they have just lived was only a dream.

The rainy season is upon us now and will be a test. I don’t know how we are going to get the food and necessary supplies in from Khartoum, but we are planning together with the World Food Programme (WFP) on airdropping food rations to the inaccessible camps, in order to keep the IDPs alive. So far, the predictions by the international community that millions will die from malnutrition and starvation in Darfur have not come about, thanks to programs like ours. Before SC’s arrival, approximately 70,000 people from African tribes were murdered by the government-supported Janjeweed militia in such sadistic ways that it is hard for me to even describe. This brutal slaughter of innocent people continues daily, but thank God, at much less of a frequency, because of International Ex Pat presence in the camps.

Yesterday, an old village chief told me WE ARE DYING IN DARFUR and asked me to tell the world about it. I can tell you about it, and it seems that world is becoming aware of the Darfur massacre, but as far as I can see, nothing has been done to stop the violence.

In the afternoon, we arrived in one of the IDP camps on the Chad border, some 70 kilometers north of our base in Geneina, to access the security situation of the IDPs and monitor our food distribution programs. We had just arrived when the elderly camp chief told me to come with him and talk to about 30 families that had just arrived from a village 40 km away. He explained that their village had just been pillaged, plundered and burnt to ground. They fled at night with only the clothes on their backs and their babies in their arms and walked half the day in the blistering heat, 45º Centigrade, 113º Fahrenheit. I thought the burning, the murders, the rape and slaughter had ended, but there I was experiencing the plight of IDPs first hand. “Where are the men?” I asked, “Where are the boys?” There were none excect for a few infants. The children were obviously malnourished, the women dirty, sweating and would not look us in the eye. Immediately we gave them the bottled water and some cookies we had brought along on for the trip. I told our Sudanese staff to separate part of the food being unloaded for distribution and make sure that these people received double rations.

The old chief explained that half of these women and young girls had been gang raped. Most of the husbands, the fathers and the brothers had been murdered by the Janjeweed. These women and children, the lucky ones, escaped while the only people left alive in the village were the old men and women and the handicapped who could not walk. There was one young 14 year old girl that looked so sad, so tired, so depressed. The Chief asked me to go with him and the girl. He led me behind a tree, away from the crowded camp. He wanted me to know what happened to this girl. He asked me to tell the world that they were dying in Darfur, that their women were being raped, their daughters violated, and their fathers and brothers massacred.

The teenage girl for the first time looked me in the eye and told me her story. As usual the Janjeweed horsemen rode into her camp in the early hours before dawn. It was about 2 a.m. Her father immediately ran outside to protect his family. Her mother took her children to the back of their grass hut and hovered in the corner. The girl knew what was happening. For ever since she could remember, at a certain time of year, the Janjeweed nomads would steal from the villages, allow their camels and cattle to graze on their farms and eat their crops before harvest. They would make fun of the men while beating them, but it was never like this before. She glanced out of the window and saw the horsemen throw torches into the village huts. She heard screaming and wailing of men and women, gunshots and the hoof beats of the horses. Then three young Janjeweed militia members entered her home, holding her father, who was bleeding from wounds inflicted by their swords. With a gun to his head, they made him kneel down and witness while all three of them took turns raping his wife and then raping her, his daughter. The inhuman atrocity did not stop. After raping the young girl, one of the horsemen took his sword, placed it on the coals of the fire, stripped her to her waist and then branded her as if she were cattle, laughing and telling her now she was his, marked for life as a Janjeweed. On their way out of the hut, they murdered her father in cold blood, execution style, with one shot to the head.

As this little girl told her unfathomable story, the chief did something that surprised me, something against Muslim tradition and customs. He took off the girl’s outer and under garment and exposed her upper body to show me the infected wounds of where she had been branded. It seemed that the girl was all out of tears. She didn’t have to cry. Her sunken eyes expressed her excruciating pain. The girl spoke of now being an outcast in her village, of never again being the same, of never being able to marry or have a husband, and never being able to have children of her own. For now she was no longer a virgin. No man would want her in her culture; she was stigmatized, marked for life with the hot iron of the Janjeweed.

I tried to find words of comfort, to have the translator assure her that we would help, that all was not lost. I spoke of the SC programs that we have under our protection unit that include gender-based violence group meetings, where our trained female national staff speak and work with the women and girls who have been raped and who have lost husbands and family members. Through psychosocial interventions, we try to restore these women to a semblance of normal life, with income generating programs, literacy education, and the idea that life must go on. If the women discuss their situation and hear from their neighbors and peers the similar atrocities that they suffered from the Janjeweed attacks on their villages, then they are able to form support groups to continue on with their lives. These types of programs that deal with the stigma, the mind and soul of the victims, are more difficult to succeed in than feeding people or providing health services and water. For these are the interventions that help restore hope, provide answers to behavioral change, and help heal the deep hurt inside that goes way beyond hunger and thirst.

The girl was listening to me, so I told her the story of another woman who now participates in our women’s protection groups and who had suffered a similar but even more devastating fate than hers.

I told the girl that last month in a gender based violence support meeting, I heard a young mother share her story with her peers. Likewise this woman’s husband had been killed in front of her, her sisters and she had been raped, her village burnt and her life destroyed. I continued that I had heard many first hand accounts of the slaughter in Darfur from the mouths of the victimized men, women and children. With glassy eyes I finished the story. The Janjeweed, after massacring her family and the families of her neighbors, and before riding out of the village, snatched her 3 month old baby from her breast and threw him into the blazing fire that was once her home. She tried to enter to save her infant. The Janjeweed blocked her way with their horses. Her baby burnt to death. She begged and screamed at her family’s assassins to kill her too, that she no longer had anything to live for. They just laughed, she said, and left behind her shattered soul.

I told of this young mother who had lost everything. I mentioned the fact that although she still suffers from her nightmare, she also has been able to join other women as they mutually try to help each other overcome their fears and once again integrate into their communities. I told her that there are such meetings being held in a provisional women’s center right here in this IDP camp and asked the chief to help her become a member of the group. Finally I explained that she should not worry about being an outcast. The very high number of girls and women that have suffered from being brutally raped has changed the way the community thinks about innocent women being violated and how they should be accepted. The old Chief looked the girl in the eyes and assured her that what the Kawayja said is the truth. She cannot be blamed, she is part of the community, she must continue with her life, as difficult as that may be.

Mary, honey, I am sorry I rambled on but I had to tell someone. I have never in all my work in emergency disasters experienced anything like this--people from the same nation, Sudanese massacring innocent Sudanese. People who worship the same God, Muslims of the same sect killing innocent Muslims. People of the same race and color brutally murdering their brothers because their facial features differentiate. Inhumane atrocities, acts of violence outside the realm of our imagination and the catastrophe that no one seems able to halt.

In all calamities there is a double danger in responding: 1) of either becoming accustomed to the hardship, fate and suffering of the victims and thus not responding with 100% passion; or 2) overreacting to the horrific injustices and trying to bring justice into your own hands by physically or politically confronting those we think are the perpetrators.

What is the solution? Who has to intervene? Why did it happen? Having responded to the emergency on the ground for 16 hrs a day for the last 5 months, I just have not had time to delve into the philosophical analysis or the political answers to these questions. Colin Powell, Jan Pronk, Jessie Jackson, senators and governors and high-ranking UN and US officials have all been to Darfur and asked me the same questions.

In the meantime, the killings go on, there are no sanctions on the people responsible for arming the Janjeweed, there is no court or law or UN committee that wants to or can bring justice to the architects of one of the most brutal massacres of innocent human beings in our modern era.

Mary, please don’t let Casey read this letter. I know we have always wanted all our children to face reality and be knowledgeable of injustices in the world. I am afraid he is too young to understand how one human being could treat another in the ways described above. And maybe I am too old and involved to understand it. I am also afraid he may lose faith in our world leaders and humanity as a whole, for not stepping up and protecting innocent people, namely the Darfur African tribes.

I have not lost faith, although I have seen a race undergo the worst treatment humans can suffer from the hands of their own countrymen. Let me tell you why I still have hope. Because the victims themselves, the IDPs of Darfur have taught me what the words COPE WITH mean, what the will to SURVIVE can accomplish. I have grown to love the African Tribes of Darfur and know them as a friendly, hard-working, sincere community that once again has given me back more than I have given them.

I put myself right into their shoes. The IDPs have names and hearts and bleed. The UN commission on human rights and the media seem to treat the people of Darfur as figures or facts or even a thorn in their sides. In our modern day of media coverage, we usually get all the news the day it breaks. It is embarrassing that 50,000 people were murdered and raped and their villages were burned before anyone figured it out. But it is even more shameful that, although images of suffering and people dying in Darfur are now disseminated on our TV screens daily, the massacre, rape and abductions continue. It is humiliating that people are still herded into concentration-like camps not fit for animals, and that justice is not being served.

So, honey, maybe the best way to answer Casey’s question is to tell him and our children that Dad will not be home for awhile, because first he has to figure out a way to safely accompany some needy friends back to their villages and homes in West Darfur.

DEADLINE TO SUBMIT ARTICLES TO CONNECTIONS.

Tenth of each month. Submit peace, justice and environmentally friendly event notices to P.O. Box 134, Modesto, CA, 95353, or call 522-4967 or 575-4299, or email to Jim Costello. Free listings subject to space, availability and editing.

Online Edition: June 2005 Vol. XVII, No. 10

Peace Camp

Friday thru Sunday, June 24-26

Camp Peaceful Pines

click here for info and registration

The GI Rights Hotline

CONTENTS

A Gathering of Voices

COMMUNITY CALENDAR --CURRENT & COMING EVENTS

Community Service: it’s more than just a grade

How conservatives use language to dominate politics

Nicaragua: “Learning in Community”

Letter from Darfur: the tragedy continues

Relay for Life against cancer

DEADLINE TO SUBMIT ARTICLES TO CONNECTIONS.