Camp Darfur: Pasadena Preview on Sunday

Area Amnesty International volunteers are planning to join a coalition of human rights and religious activists at Camp Darfur this April. For five days, Camp Darfur will bring attention to the genocide and refugee crisis in Darfur, Sudan. Organizers aim to educate people across Los Angeles and the country about life in a refugee camp and the horrors being faced every day by refugees in Darfur, by recreating life in the camps and including interactive presentations, music, video, film, photography, expert speakers, legislators and dialogue (click for details). Camp Darfur begins April 7 at 6:30 p.m. and runs until April 11 at Lennox Middle School, 11033 Buford Ave., Lennox. Organizers Lorna Miller and Gabriel Stauring of Camp Darfur will be offering a preview of the event at All Saints Church (132 N. Euclid Avenue) in Pasadena, this Sunday, April 2 at 10:15 AM. Drop by on Sunday for more info about how to get involved or if you want to volunteer via Amnesty, contact Amy at the Western Regional office: aiusala@aiusa.org.

For June: The Noodle Maker

We have selected the short story collection, The Noodle Maker, by Ma Jian for June. Please note that the paperback edition of this book will be released in April 4.

From the highly acclaimed Ma Jian comes a satirical and powerfully written novel--excerpted in The New Yorker--about the absurdities and cruelties of life in post-Tianamen China. Two men, a writer of political propaganda and a professional blood donor, meet for dinner every week. During the course of one drunken evening, the writer recounts the stories he would write, had he the courage: a young man buys an old kiln from an art school and opens a private crematorium, delighting in his ability to harass the corpses of police officers and Party secretaries while swooning to banned Western music; a heartbroken actress performs a public suicide by stepping into the jaws of a wild tiger, watched nonchalantly by her ex-lover. He is inspired by extraordinary characters, their lives pulled and pummeled by fate and politics, as if they were balls of dough in the hands of an all-powerful noodle maker.

Triangle Anniversary and Child Labor Today

Rights Readers who enjoyed David Von Drehle's Triangle: The Fire that Changed America will appreciate this opinon piece, "The Factories of Lost Children", in the NYT on the recent anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. The author, Katherine Weber, (who has written a forthcoming novel on the fire Triangle), makes the connection between child labor then and now:

But we will also never know how many children were among the dead on May 10, 1993, in Thailand when the factory of the Kader Industrial Toy Company (a supplier to Hasbro and Fisher-Price) went up in flames. Most of the 188 workers who died were described as teenage girls.

We will never know with any certainty how many children died on Nov. 25, 2000, in a fire at the Chowdhury Knitwear and Garment factory near Dhaka, Bangladesh (most of the garments made in Bangladesh are contracted by American retailers, including Wal-Mart and the Gap), where at least 10 of the 52 trapped in the flames by locked doors and windows were 10 to 14 years old.

And we will never know how many children died just last month, on Feb. 23, in the KTS Composite Textile factory fire in Chittagong, Bangladesh. The official death toll has climbed into the 50's, but other sources report that at least 84 workers lost their lives. It's a familiar story: crowded and unsafe conditions, locked exits, hundreds of undocumented female workers as young as 12, a deadly fire. There may never be another tragic factory fire in America that takes the lives of children. We don't lock them into sweatshops any more. There are child labor laws, fire codes.

But as long as we don't question the source of the inexpensive clothing we wear, as long as we don't wonder about the children in those third world factories who make the inexpensive toys we buy for our own children, those fires will occur and young girls an d boys will continue to die. They won't die because of natural catastrophes like monsoons and earthquakes; they will die because it has become our national habit to outsource, and these days we outsource our tragedies, too.

New Amnesty Report on Brazil

Amnesty's lastest report on Brazil "We have come to take your souls": the caveirão and policing in Rio de Janeiro is another in a long line of reports concerned with policing the favelas. This summary from a similar report from 2005 contains a compelling rundown of statistics on the on-going violence in these communities. Here's an action related to the current report: Link

At our last meeting I recalled that there is a documentary attached to the City of God DVD about violence in the favelas. I've confirmed that-- it's called Notícias de uma Guerra Particular. Of course I recommend City of God itself, as well as the documentary Bus 174 which I saw at the Amnesty International Film Festival a few years ago.

Brazil: Landless Movement

A little bit about the Landless Movement-- Friends of the MST has a news ticker and photos about what's going on with the movement. The BBC has this slideshow. Multimedia can be found at the Landless Voices Web Archive including this gallery of photos by Sebastiao Salgado. And of course I can't resist this gallery of children's drawings.

Brazil: Photography

Robb highlights the work of several Brazilian photographers in A Death in Brazil. First there is the war photography of Flavio de Barros including this haunting image described in the book. Robb compares this image to the work of Sebastião Salgado. Here is a gallery of this work on the Landless Movement: Terra and here are the photos he refers to depicting workers "like ants." Finally, at the very end of the book there is a reference to Pierre Verger, who has his very own Foundation with lovely online photo albums. I'm a sucker for the Bolivian masked dancer.

Pasadena Events: Solovky Power, Sister Janet Harris

This Sunday, March 26, at 10:15 AM, Documentary filmmaker Marina Goldovskaya will be speaking about her efforts to document the history of the Soviet gulag and her film "Solovky Power" at All Saints Church in Pasadena (132 N. Euclid Avenue). This event is in Sweetland Hall on the ground floor. Solovky Power is a groundbreaking documentary on the history of a concentration camp that was one of the first to become known as the Gulag. For more information check out this CNN interview with the filmmaker. Amnesty International Group 22 volunteers will be there making the modern-day "gulag" analogy with actions on Guantanamo and the US practice of outsourcing torture.

Also at All Saints this Sunday, Sister Janet Harris, advocate for incarcerated youth, will be speaking, (same time, only downstairs in the "Forum." I blogged a few months back about this case and the story keeps getting better:

Six years ago, a persistent nun persuaded a large law firm to take, pro bono, the case of a young man she believed to be wrongfully accused of murder. In December 2005, Mario Rocho's conviction was overturned. All Saints' Senior Warden Bob Long, a partner at Latham & Watkins, was the lead attorney on the case. Sister Janet Harris was Mario's advocate. This journey to justice attracted a documentary team who captured the story on film, a short segment of which will be shown in this presentation. Harris came to know Mario Rocho at the Inside Out Writing Program she founded at LAÕs Central Juvenile Hall. A former high school teacher and chaplain, Harris has been an advocate for troubled youth in Southern California for 35 years. Come and be inspired by what happens when individuals put their heart for justice together with their education and training and don't give up!

Hope to see a few of you at these events!