Greetings from Wisconsin!

Most Loyal Readers know already that their Leader Reader has departed California for Wisconsin. Here's a little update on my reading exploits since moving here:

Apart from venturing into a community book discussion group, I arrived just in time for River Falls Reads 2008 and attended the kick-off event featuring Jerene Mortenson, the mother of Greg Mortenson, author of Rights Readers selection Three Cups of Tea. As noted before, River Falls is the birthplace of "Pennies for Peace", a program that educates American children about the world beyond their experience and raises funds for schools in Central Asia. A few things I learned from the talk: that there are over 400 U.S. schools now in the program, and that pennies were chosen to make sure children of all incomes could participate. I was also intrigued to learn that storytelling is part of the curriculum for students in Pakistan, thus incorporating the elders of the village and the oral tradition into the schools. I would love to hear some of those stories! My California readers will also be heartened to learn that steps are being taken to build new schools that are designed to better withstand earthquakes. The rest of the River Falls Reads event line-up looks interesting as well. Small towns have a lot to offer! I am sure I will have more reading adventures to share in the future...

R.I.P. Matt Reese

We learned recently of the passing of Amnesty International Group 22 - Pasadena member Matt Reese. Matt was especially dedicated to our work to abolish the death penalty and bring reform to the criminal justice system. Matt was involved in an astonishing number of social justice causes and will be missed by many, many activists in the NGO community. We will always remember Matt as he boldly led our 1998 Doo Dah Parade entry dressed as a Tibetan monk. March on, Matt, march on. We will always follow.

Happy May Day!

It's May Day and as usual people the world over are out on the streets celebrating my bir... er, parading for immigrant rights and other worthy causes.

And hey look, its a present from Senator Feinstein!

Have a great day even if you just celebrate by admiring some tulips or having a bit of fun on a swing.

Rights Readers Blog Anniversary

Last Tuesday was the one year anniversary of this blog! I decided to defer to World Poverty Day and then some of our local events before making this announcement. But now I've lit a candle to commemorate the occasion. Thanks to all who have encouraged this little experiment throughout the year!

(I borrowed this lovely candle from AIUSA Group 4 - Seattle's site - I recomend a a visit.)

Reflecting on Beasts of No Nation

Guest Post!!! I'm going to leave the last word on child soldiers before our non-virtual discussion on Sunday to one of our Esteemed Readers (Stevi). What might happen to Agu after the novel ends? Here's a possible answer:

Reading Beasts of No Nation by Uzodinma Iweala once again, reminds me of Ibrahim and Garbo. Even though the students where I taught brought more than 60 first languages with them, few of our students came from Africa.

Ibrahim was 19 when he arrived at our school from Sudan. He was tall, light skinned and soft spoken. Many USA students confuse the African continent with a single country and so one day, Ibrahim agreed to talk with our world history class about his country. On the large map tacked to the wall, he showed Sudan on the eastern side of Africa and told about what it looked like and his family there. Then quietly he mentioned war. The simple words slipped through his lips, “I was a soldier for five years.” My gaze traveled from Ibrahim’s face to those of my other students, and I could see the gleam of excitement like Agu had felt after watching war movies but before he experienced war on the ground.

A hand flew up and the question burst forth, “Did you ever kill anyone?” Tension filled our room. Ibrahim’s soft face clouded up, his jaw set and pain filled his eyes. I told him that was not a question he needed to answer. Now I don’t remember how we moved from his story back to our history text.

Shortly after this, I received a withdrawal notice for Ibrahim. When I asked the counselor what had happened, she told me Ibrahim didn’t believe high school was the place for him. He didn’t like being around all of the kids, and he wanted to work for money. He’d had to leave that teeming teenage environment.

Garbo arrived from Liberia during that country’s second civil war. He was 14, still growing, muscular, also soft spoken, and dark as a night without moon or stars. He joined his father who had left Liberia, his wife, two sons and at least one daughter when Garbo was less than a year old. Garbo had not seen him since then. In the States, Garbo’s father had acquired a new woman, an African-American, and had another son. He had come to the USA to go to college.

Because Liberia is an English speaking nation, Garbo was not put in an ESL class despite the reality that listening to him speak English was like listening to a foreign language, and I was never sure how much he understood. As Agu explains what he sees, feels and experiences in the novel, I could see Garbo talking with me. At least twice he stayed after school to talk for 45 minutes to an hour. Fortunately, I had just read an extended article about Liberia and her civil wars. As he recounted what he’d seen, soldiers, violence, cannibalism, his injured finger smashed under a rock, I could put the pieces together and wonder if in fact he had witnessed all of this, or like me, simply knew about it.

The social part of high school was hard for him. His dark skin caused the African-American kids to taunt him and call him “black shit.” When he came to me for help, I went to our African-American dean and asked her to intervene with preventative measures. She didn’t until Garbo finally lashed out and got into a fistfight in the locker room in gym. Another time when the kids would not stop harassing him, he just stopped, looked at them, and quietly said, “In my country, I would just kill you.” He finally made friends with the Latino boys he played soccer with, and it was a Latino family that took him in when his father and the son his father had with the African-American woman moved to Texas and did not want to take him along.

On his final day of high school right before graduation, he came to my room to thank me. As he hugged me, his body shook with sobs and tears of joy washed down his face. I think he was going to the junior college and would play soccer for them. A few years later, he stopped by school to give me a stuffed toy for my granddaughter and a photo of his son, a boy he had with an African-American woman without benefit of marriage. As I looked at the photo, I wondered about what will happen to this child of an African-American and an African. Will he be free of the dangers of war, or will he be lured into gang life and the war of the streets?

When I think of them, I send love and healing to Ibrahim and Garbo wherever they may be.

Remembering 9/11

The odd things that one remembers. On September 11, 2001, after taking in the news early in the morning I went to work as usual.  I parked my car and walking past Los Angeles Central Juvenile Hall on the way to the office, I encountered a parent and child headed away from the building.  Looking relieved, they told me the courts were closed.  Their judgement day, maybe their own family tragedy, had been postponed by our national tragedy. Mostly what I remember though, is that our Amnesty International chapter had a letter-writing meeting that evening.  Because Caltech closed its campus, regretably, we had to cancel it.  Some of us obeyed the instinct to be in community anyway and gathered at our favorite discussion spot, Vroman's bookstore, to debrief the day's events over coffee, but I think we would have felt even better if we had been writing.  For this reason, I think I will always associate 9/11 with Amnesty letter-writing. 

Sometime later, I observed that even though many felt the world changed on that day, for our then prisoner of conscience case, a Tibetan monk, nothing changed at all.  He was still in prison and the shift in geopolitics wasn't going to affect him.  We still needed to make sure he wasn't a "forgotten prisoner."  Now we have adopted a different prisoner of conscience case, Eritrean Estifanos Seyoum.  In his case, the world did change that week, but not in a way that the rest of us noticed.  He was arrested on September 18, 2001 and although never officially charged or brought to trial and he has been held incommunicado since that time. We still need to make sure he isn't forgotten. I still want to obey that instinct to connect with a wounded world and offer some small token of healing.  I can't think of anything better to do today then take action on Estifanos Seyoum's case and visit Amnesty International's Action Center for more letters to write.

Tags: 9/11, Amnesty International, Eritrea, Estifanos Seyoum

Happy May Day!

Let it be said, I am in favor of any sort of march or parade (with or without political overtones), wild dancing and prancing, flag (any kind) and streamer waving, song-singing (any language), silly hats, flowers, candles and inspired carrying-on in honor of May Day and its been that way since, er, the day I was born. So I'm down with the celebratory "we are all immigrants" spirit of the day. Have a piece of cake too!

Possible future Rights Readers selection? Death in the Haymarket. NPR has an interview with the author. [Link]

Happy Halloween!

(Testing my image upload capabilities...) Here's a mask made by one of my students at Villa Parke Art Project.

While we are on the topic of masks, take a look at some Ogoni masks here and here. I especially like the antelope masks. Try to picture antelopes grazing along the rivers and streams of Ogoniland. Just a little counterpoint to the slideshows of gas flares and oil spills in the Niger Delta I posted a few days ago.

Welcome

Rights Readers is an education and outreach project of Amnesty International Group 22 Pasadena - Caltech. We meet every third Sunday of the month at 6:30 PM at Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena, California. This blog is an effort to facilitate our on-going discussion of the fiction and non-fiction works we read and the human rights issues they illuminate.