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Online
Newsletter
May-June 2001
President's
Letter:
A World of Hurt, a World of Hate:
Kids' Pictures Worth 1,000 Words
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Before me is a stack of homemade
greeting cards drawn by Palestinian children who live in a
refugee camp in Beirut. Giving rein to their artistic
impulses, the kids have cut the construction paper in a
variety of patterns. Some have serrated edges, others have
the corners neatly clipped off. Many are in the shape of
hearts.
Some are drawn in pencil only while others show colors.
The most popular is gold, for the Dome of the Rock gleams
like a beacon from virtually every card, its dome the symbol
of the land these Palestinians believe is theirs by right.
Atop the dome in each drawing is the crescent of Islam.
Another theme runs through the collection. Bodies litter the
streets of these children's imaginations, some held in the
arms of survivors, some prostrate before a soldier wielding
a machine gun, a Star of David on his helmet. In some of the
pictures, a small person in civilian clothes throws rocks at
an Israeli soldier, his machine gun spitting bullets. Above,
Israeli warplanes fire rockets at the naked youth.
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Cards created by Palestinian children
focus on the Dome of the Rock.
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In Beirut, a relative sea of tranquility these days as
smoke rises from the West Bank and Gaza, these kids soak in
the images from their homeland on television and learn at
the knee of their elders. Many cannot attend school, but
they learn their lessons well.
It is not our purpose to venture into politics, and
certainly not to take a side in any such conflict, but
merely to highlight the grim reality of political
indoctrination. It begins in the cradle. Too often, it
continues to an early grave.
Palestinians and Israelis have no special claim on ethnic
enmity that goes back generations and centuries. We could
change the symbols and replay the same story in the Balkans,
the Caucasus, sub-Saharan Africa, Indonesia. A recent
missive from our Macedonian partner points out the
difficulties the world has in understanding the depth of the
ethnic hostility in the Balkans.
In every case, the hatred and loss of life that seem so
senseless to outsiders, especially in the West, impact the
delivery of compassion. Food and medicine hardly seem
controversial until they become fuel for machine of war,
often a war that impedes delivery of those supplies to those
most in need.
In many cases, the hatred is so consuming that men pursue
their vendetta at the cost of educating their children. So
go the wars.
As Debra Krych, our director of field services, was
returning from Beirut with that stack of cards you'll never
see in the Hallmark collection, various U.S. media were
reporting that Palestinians in Israel are advertising the
glory of martyrdom for Islam as an enticement to youngsters
to give their all for the cause. Dead kids, these accounts
continued, make good propaganda.
--Bill
Koops
In Beirut, a Mother Keeps the Faith
In a Refugee Camp With No Tents
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A former field worker in Beirut, Debra Krych, MRDS director of field
services, visited her former station this spring. At the Bourj Al Brajney
camp for Palestinian refugees, described in the January-February 2001
issue of Preface, she interviewed the mother of a student in the camp's
private school. MRDS workers in Beirut are active in support of the school.
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Sabaah hopes her son and two daughters have a better
life.
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The narrow street leading off the airport road
and winding down into the camp is so obscure that in my years in Beirut
I had never noticed it. Lebanon, of course, does not advertise the few
Palestinian enclaves in the capital. One problem with the camps is that
they betray their permanence at even a cursory glance.
No tents do we find here, nor are tin roofs commonplace. In more than
20 years, a "camp" takes on the look of a squatters' village. The Palestinians
who live here are fixtures in the landscape of Lebanon, as cedars once
were. Neither they nor their hosts may find that circumstance appealing,
but the Palestinians have no place to go. Here they will remain.
So haphazard is the placement of concrete block houses
that jut into the streets at odd angles that the streets
actually disappear at various points at which houses have
been built too close together. The visitor must abandon a
vehicle and proceed on foot through the maze.
The school MRDS supports in the camp has struggled
throughout its existence despite the determined efforts of
the principal, a tenacious young woman, and the camp's
leaders who have built the institution from dust and held it
together with saliva. The most imposing problem is the
inability of the parents of most of the 4- and 5-year-old
students to raise the $200 required annually to cover
tuition and supplies.
Still, they try. The alternative in the camps is no
school or a few operated by a United Nations agency. The
U.N. schools typically pack 50 children into a classroom and
suffer from outdated and substandard materials, thus the
struggle by some parents to keep their children in a private
school.
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The streets of Bourj Al Brajney in Lebanon are a maze of houses.
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I gained an appreciation for the difficulty at the home of one boy who
attends the school. An MRDS worker in Beirut and I entered by ducking
under the laundry that hung from the roof and shrouded the door. Inside,
among two sofas, a television set and a couple of pictures on the walls,
we met Sabaah, a petite woman of 27, a mother of three. She served stout
Arabic coffee, as custom demands, her children clinging to her skirts.
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She had completed eighth grade, she said, and her 30-year-old husband
had finished third grade. Lebanon allows Palestinians to hold only menial
jobs such as janitor and street cleaner, but her husband had managed to
buy a car to operate as a taxi. Palestinians may not hold the special
license necessary for a taxi in their names, but he was paying a Lebanese
to "rent" it from him.
Her husband, the woman said, earns about U.S. $200 a month. Even with
an understanding landlord who allows the family a reduced rent of $133
a month, the expenses she described, including a $100 license plate payment,
mounted quickly to a sum greater than their income. Pressed on how they
make do, Sabaah said, as though embarrassed, that she cleans houses and
her husband collects plastic bottles and other trash and resells it.
Sabaah described her husband's health problems and the
stresses in their marriage, most attributable to their mean
circumstances. Through all the privations, she said, she
manages to hold out hope for her children, for houses they
would own and education that would give them a chance
against the poverty that gnaws on them all.
--Ed Fowler
Can a Calendar Really
Grow Legs?
The Miracle of Life Goes on Tour
Pestilence recognizes no borders.
It is deterred not at all by differences of culture or
language. Fortunately, neither are some of the best
approaches to dealing with it.
The portability of compassion has found a new expression
in Uzbekistan, where an MRDS station has adapted the Miracle
of Life pregnancy calendar, first published by our Istanbul
station.
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Miracle of Life pregnancy calendar.
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That original version in Turkish has now been adapted for
use among Albanian and Macedonian speakers as well as
Uzbeks, but a convergence of events in Uzbekistan has
created an especially precious opportunity.
The director of the Andijon Development Center, an MRDS implementing
partner in eastern Uzbekistan, reports that a worker who arrived from
Turkey brought the calendar with her and called it to the attention of
her new colleagues.
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The Soros Foundation underwrote an initial printing in 2000. About the
time the calendar was published, the president of the former Soviet republic
in Central Asia declared 2001 the Year of the Mother and Child.
Seizing the opportunity, workers put the product before the vice minister
of health, who grasped the possibilities immediately and ordered the nation's
health clinics to make it available to all pregnant patients.
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Andijon Development Center is publishing an additional 10,000 copies
at a cost of $12,000, enough to make five copies available to each clinic.
An affiliate of the Central Asia Free Exchange, the center has arranged
distribution through other CAFE offices and through Peace Corps volunteers
in other cities.
The Andijon center had distributed the book Where There Is No Doctor,
originally published in Spanish for use in Latin America, in 2000, which
the president had declared the Year of the Family.
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Graphics are used to help explain concepts to parents-to-be.
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The Uzbek version, titled Everyman's Health Handbook, now circulates
alongside the pregnancy calendar, which promotes health care for pregnant
women, and a third publication, the Handbook of Child Development Games,
which focuses on the first year of a child's life.
The center has also developed 90-minute skits to illustrate the principles
outlined in the publications for health care professionals. The skits
and a seminar on pre-natal care will be videotaped for distribution to
health clinics throughout the country. The director said the skits and
the materials have enjoyed an enthusiastic reception among officials and
the public, proof that ideas hatched elsewhere can score victories along
the Silk Road. Beginners in the program need practice in pattern-making
and cutting, but the cost of new material is prohibitive for this purpose.
The solution: Buy used garments for a pittance in resale shops and turn
them into clothes for kids.
--Ed Fowler
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