The World's Children,Our Children, or Why Failure to Make Peace is Not an Option

[Guest]

.

[Jill]

Here are what I think are some truly superlative images.  I think they offer much to learn, much to hope for, much to reflect about, and much to inspire (in terms of both commitment and further learning).  They’re only a sampling.  You should go to the links, themselves, for more of all the above.  

The first two pictures, below, are from this link: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/02/pakistan_daily_life.html

#1- Boys gather by a vendor selling tropical fish on his bicycle on the outskirts of Islamabad (Pakistan). (Muhammed Muheisen/Associated Press)
#2- An Afghan refugee girl stands with others in an alley of a slum on the outskirts of Islamabad. (Muhammed Muheisen/Associated Press)

The next are a few of my many many favorites from this link, http://www.jonkaplan.com/jonkaplan_gallery1.html#
Be sure to check out all 9 galleries when you go there.  As the members on one of my teams already know, I LOVE these pictures.

#3-Patchwork girls from Senegal,
#4-Shepherd girls from India
#5-Lijang kids from China
#6-Monica & Panini from Guatemala
#7-Laughing Boy from Peru
#8-Alicia from Ecuador

and finally,
though I already gave you the link to the website, peacestartshere.org, let me suggest for those of you who haven’t yet checked it out that, for the flavor of it, you start with this video called “Giving Back.”  It’s a video vignette of how a 16 year old Palestinian girl from Gaza who was given the opportunity to attend a Human Rights workshop in Holland was affected by the experience, very likely, for life.
http://www.peacestartshere.org/points.php?id=3

[Amy-in-PHX]

The first two pictures, below, are from this link: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/02/pakistan_daily_life.html

#1- Boys gather by a vendor selling tropical fish on his bicycle on the outskirts of Islamabad (Pakistan). (Muhammed Muheisen/Associated Press)
#2- An Afghan refugee girl stands with others in an alley of a slum on the outskirts of Islamabad. (Muhammed Muheisen/Associated Press)

My favorite from that link is #12, "Two Afghan refugee sisters and a Pakistani girl attend a daily class to learn how to read verses of the Koran, at a mosque in a slum area on the outskirts of Islamabad."
I am glad to see that the girls are being permitted to learn to read something, even if it is not in their native language but Arabic.  And I am glad because Afghan refugee girls and Pakistani girls are learning together.  And the girls' faces seem pensive to me, but their beauty makes me glad.

And, Jill, I just began posting on this forum (other than entrepreneur photos) a couple of weeks ago.  So I am not sure what it felt like at the previous time you remember, to be a part of KivaFriends.  But I look forward to reading your posts to find out.  Are you looking for responses only from the people who have been on the forum for years, or can anybody play?  If I may ask, what is it about the tropical fish vendor photo that attracts your eye?

[David2051]

I love the fish vendor photo.  Who would ever think of selling tropical fish in that way?

[Jan & John]

I discovered this one day...
downloaded it to my iTunes...
and now play it most days at least once...
-jan-

[Jill]

Jan, thank you for posting the video this thread made you think of.  There are so many connections we all can draw.

Amy, of course anybody can play.  That's the whole point.  For me, that's the whole goal and dream of it. But listen, when you see the following, it might teach you to be more careful about who you direct your questions to.....

This is my quick answer to the question about what was it that caught my eye, that struck my fancy (David's apparently, too) in the picture of the Pakistani goldfish seller, above.  My immediate response when I saw that question was something like, Wow. Let me count the ways!

I Loved that picture because:

1- It came as such a giant surprise to me that pet goldfish could be/were sold that way.

2- I loved the ingenuity of display and marketing- whether it was that of the young serious-looking
goldfish seller or someone else’s.

3- The older I get, the more Kiva-and-KivaFriend-relating and diversity-and-worldpeace-and-tolerance-craving I become.   I tend to notice more the commonalities among the peoples of the world.  It’s become kind of an automatic selective perception or enhanced noticing for me.  I take great pleasure in all the things I see in life that remind me of the universality of human experience, of how, sometimes almost uncannily alike, it seems we are.

I have a feeling there’s probably a direct correlation between how much pleasure I feel in those instances, and the hurt, anger, and sadness I experience every time I’m exposed to some group’s prejudice against the members of some other group.  Correlation between the pleasure and the growing frustration I feel every time I’m exposed to some group’s or religion’s vaunted, self-celebrating and for me, totally inane claim or suggestion of superiority over another.  Frustration, sadness and anger-- because I know that some people are actually buying it.  

Prejudice, fear, rejection and the ability to be heartachingly cruel seem usually to be enabled or facilitated by people’s inclination to view different people as “other,” as “strange,” as having absolutely nothing in common with (the pure-of-heart, caring, intelligent, apparently exclusively worthy) “us.”  I hate the hurt that prejudice, etc. cause, and so I love anything which makes them less likely.  Anything that refutes or belies the great chasm/gap/disparity that there’s supposed to be between near perfect Us and not even quite human Them.  

I know it’s probably a stretch, but I can’t help but feel that if people have the chance of realizing, “Oh, you mean that their kids like goldfish, too ?!?,” maybe it will be more difficult to regard people in the Middle East, specifically Muslims, as alien, as frightening, as someone we should bomb, bomb, bomb lest they bomb us first, etc. etc. etc.

4- It reminded me of my younger pet goldfish-wanting self when life felt so very very much simpler.  In this crazy way-materialistic society, it seems almost incredible now that kids could be entertained and made happy, really satisfied with a (poor) little 25 cent goldfish.

5- I loved the photograph itself.  Whether in Kiva entrepreneur pictures, in news photos, in books or on the Internet, I love pictures that give me a glimpse into the way that other people, other cultures live.

6- It reminded me of a joke I once heard.

[David2051]

Thanks for sharing that, Jan!  And Jill, come on now, what was the joke??   

[Amy-in-PHX]

Maybe the one from the 70's:  A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.   

[Jill]

To see some really exquisite photographs of some of the kids for whom all of us might want to try just a little bit harder, check out the 91 pretty priceless pics here:
http://www.fotopedia.com/wiki/Childhood    
(And since you’re going to be at fotopedia for awhile, anyway,  try some other search terms while you’re there.  For example, try punching in “Maasai people” and  “old age”, etc. where you’ll see some other real treasures).
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I don’t know about you, but there have been possibly a handful of times in my life when I’ve met some young person or another who caused this almost-wave of a really protective and kind of wistful feeling to come over me.   There was something about how they seemed just so infectiously fresh and open to life, so sweetly, almost impossibly innocent (not so much naïve-innocent  as just untouched, unjaded, unhurt-innocent), whose entire being(s) seemed to exude certainty that life was good, that it “always” would be good and the people in it kind and decent and everworthy of trust. ******* 


All this to the point that you (of course I mean that I) just so very very much wished that they’d be able to hold onto all of that, that life really could be that way --- at least, for someone.  Anyway, early this morning I saw a clip of some fifth graders from a glee club on New York’s Staten Island who evoked that same feeling in me.  (If you're only going to take the time to watch one short video, then watch the one at this first link, just following).
http://amfix.blogs.cnn.com/2011/02/18/staten-islands-p-s-22-chorus-to-perform-at-oscars/

This second clip doesn’t come close, even, to some of their best singing.  I just happen to love this song.


And our legislatures are saying that Arts Education is expendable?   I wonder, then, do they think that joy is expendable, too?

How my entire being wishes that all kids, kids everywhere in the world, could have this kind of opportunity, this kind of sweetness in their lives.

http://ps22chorus.blogspot.com/2011/02/ps22-chorus-press-conference.html
http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2010/04/12/2010-04-12_hes_teaching_to_a_gleeful_choir.html
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/feb/14/entertainment/la-et-oscar-choir-20110214

EDIT: *******  It just occurred to me that those of you who were blessed in life enough to have been able to have had your own children probably know, from very personal experience, countless intimations of those very same feelings that I described, above.

and David, I'll try to remember to tell you the joke when I come back, sometime next week.  It wasn't tha-ttttt funny, but sort of.

[brooke]

Thanks so much, Jill.  Spent 20 wonderfully full minutes browsing some of those photo sites.  I see sweetness and hopefulness in each face. Let us not disappoint such blessed children.

[iampaul]

I don’t know about you, but there have been possibly a handful of times in my life when I’ve met some young person or another who caused this almost-wave of a really protective and kind of wistful feeling to come over me.

Parenting instinct. A cry of fear will cause the heads of most adults in the vicinity to turn to find the source. A child bobbling unsteadily near the top of a flight of stairs or a curb or other brink of possible injury will draw a flurry of hands from those nearby reaching out to steady. And so on.

And our legislatures are saying that Arts Education is expendable?   I wonder, then, do they think that joy is expendable, too?

The arts, particularly the performing arts, have always been important to me. No, I don't think you will find a single legislator who will say that they don't bemoan reducing support of the arts. It is a difficult thing, sometimes, to prioritize spending when so many claim so many things are necessary. But, in the end, all things may have to come down to a model similar to Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs.

For a brief time around the time of my birth, my parents opted to live in voluntary poverty in protest of certain aspects of our government and denying that government their tax income. I wasn't aware of it until much later in my life from a short conversation with my father about it. One comment he made about a lesson that he took away from the experience was that he found it very hard to find the energy for creative pursuits when so much of his energy was consumed in the pursuit of basic survival.

It just occurred to me that those of you who were blessed in life enough to have been able to have had your own children probably know, from very personal experience, countless intimations of those very same feelings that I described, above.

I am a birth parent and an adoptive parent and a foster parent. A child does not have to be of your own blood to be "your own" as far as experiencing such feelings. There are many opportunities to "borrow" the attention and care of children for a while and experience all the same feelings.

Paul

[Mona]

This post would have fit also into the Three cups of tea thread. But I think here is also a very good place.

I received today a very nice and interesting "Thank you" note from a teacher whom I had helped to fund his Three Cups of Tea project called Saving the World, One Student at a Time!. Here it is:
----------------------

I want to thank you so much for donating the money for this project. The book Three Cups of Tea is very close to my heart. I met Greg Mortenson in the spring of 2010 and he has been a hero of mine for a long time.

The important message in this book is one that I feel students must hear. We are becoming more and more a global community and we must learn to respect other cultures and other religions if we hope to live in peace. This book gives us a starting off place.

Discussions during this project were very lively. We talked about the basic principles of Islam and why they wear different clothes and cover their heads. Thirteen-year olds are a different breed of human some days, and they were visibly (and verbally) shocked that eighty students would sit writing their multiplication tables in the dirt with no teacher around. I asked them what they would do if they only had teachers three days a week. Party, play video games, get on the computer—these were the normal responses. Even my most studious of children said there's no way they'd work on their own!

The poverty in Pakistan was also something my kids didn't understand until we started reading the book and looking at some of the photos. It was difficult for my students to understand why these people just didn't get up and get a job. Why didn't they just build their own school if they wanted education so bad? Why didn't the government help them out?

As we read the book, the unrest in the Middle East grew. We began watching the protests in Egypt and my students came in each morning to give me an update on what was going to happen. They were disappointed with me when I told them I thought the regime would fall one day and then it didn't. They couldn't believe I was wrong!

After the book (which I read entirely aloud to all five periods—they even saw me cry a few times), we dove right into my "Challenge 2 Change" project. We talked about how Dr. Greg didn't have much money but still managed to get what he needed, and that my kids, even though they don't have much money, are very able to help others around them. We discussed local problems that they saw and then they got to work. Their project was to find a problem, create a non-profit, and figure out a way to solve the problem in a way that was real and tangible. The students really got on board and were very creative!

Once all the non-profits were created, we held a "Donation Station" day where each group got up and pitched their non-profit to the class and ask for money. Once each group presented, students were given five-hundred dollars to give to the charities of their choice. The winning charities got home-made Oreo cookies that I baked for them.

Students really worked hard, came to school in shirts, ties, skirts, and dresses, all to impress their classmates. A few of the students are actually going to take their non-profit further and try to work on helping the problem of their choice. One group of girls will be baking cupcakes to take to a local hospital for the kids in the pediatrics wing!

I have been so motivated by these kids throughout this whole project. I've learned just as much as they have. These kids have such big hearts and this unit was one of those moments when I am so proud to be a teacher. Seeing the lights turn on in their minds as we talked about the Middle East and how they can make a change, even here, even in what they might think is a small way, really inspired me.

I am now hard at work on my own project that was inspired through this unit. I am working on designing a website that will bring together information on how teens can help solve problems. I found that a lot of my kids would like to help, but they don't know how to get started. "Light a Fire Now" (LAF Now) is going to be a website that will bring together problems in the world with real-life kids who are making a difference. It will also give kids the information they need to know to start their own non-profits and ways they can help with other groups that are already started. I think when kids can find all that information in one place, they're more likely to help!

So there's no way to say how much this project has impacted students. I know that I will take the lessons I learned from this unit and carry it into other areas of my life. I also know that this book has touched my students' lives in so many ways and that they will take lessons with them as well. They know now, that no matter what the problem, they can take steps to solve it.

Thank you for helping change the world, one student at a time!

With gratitude,
Mrs. G.

[Jill]

For some of us, neither life nor Internet searches go, very often, in a straight line…..

Soldiers of Peace trailer


Tell Me Why-Declan Galbraith

Lyrics, here.

If this young boy, Declan Galbraith, is famous, I am so far removed from what’s “in,” these days, that I’d never heard of him.  The only reason I even came upon this video was because it was on the same youtube page as the Soldiers of Peace trailer, above, and I clicked on it because I was curious as to why it was even there.  Plus,  that “why” of his song’s title is one of the more recurring and pressing questions of my own existence. I found myself listening to the song, in spite of myself, a few times while I was searching for something else.  Turns out it kind of grows on you, especially after you have the lyrics that go with it.


And the only reason I came upon the Soldiers of Peace trailer, that first video, above, was because I was looking for another documentary, entirely, -- one from years and years ago.  It was a powerful show I’d seen about the youth of Colombia, who were risking their lives every day to make a public stand for peace in their perpetually war-torn country.  


As I recall, I think those kids, the ones from Colombia, were even nominated, one year, for the Nobel Peace Prize.  And the only reason I was trying to find that documentary was because I’m sure that the reason I have a special affinity for loans coming from Colombia, like the one I highlighted in the “Work” thread, earlier this morning, is because of those brave kids whose courage, apparently, had moved me so.  This morning's young Colombian "sort of, sort of not rock"music loan had just gotten me to thinking about them again.


A few minutes later….
Neat, I just found them.  They are really extraordinary kids:
The Children of Peace Movement

(At that link, I saw that the documentary that I, originally, had gone looking for, had been entitled, Soldiers of Peace*, too, just like the one I’d chanced upon, above, and which “wrong video” was what got this post going in the first place!).

And that’s how I end up spending so much time traveling about on the Internet….

*but its full title, apparently, had been Soldiers of Peace; A Children’s Crusade, which distinguishes it from the one that I’d confused it with, above.

The picture, from a website unappealingly called, kidskillingkids,  
depicts “Members of the Children's Movement for Peace give a soldier a sticker that reads "soldier for peace" as part of their campaign”.

EDIT: Don't worry, I apparently am just trying to break the record (previously, undoubtedly, held by yours, truly) for the world's longest post that hardly anyone is going to read, anyway.  But, little matter, at least I'm having fun with it.  I just looked up little Declan Galbraith, whose song has grown and grown and GROWN on me over the passing of this day.  Turns out little Declan isn't quite so little anymore, since I found he was born in 1991.  My favorite part of my thirty three and a half seconds' research into him was the part that is written in the "Fame" section at this link.

[Jill]

It’s all interesting…..

I just now, to my great pleasure, discovered that that film about the Children’s Peace Movement in Colombia*, which got me started on a wild Internet ride this morning, is, in fact, available on DVD.  I was afraid from a fruitless search, earlier, that maybe it wasn’t.


I found it listed at this website, , at what, for me, was a reasonable price of $22, given the power and pleasure of the film-watching experience and how wonderful it is and it will be for sharing, for teaching. When I said, above, that it’s all interesting, it’s because I just noticed the top of the page at that link where it tells that the Creative Visions Foundation, the non-profit that's selling it, that its founding was inspired by the murder, in 1993, of a 22 year old Reuters photojournalist in Somalia, a Dan Eldon.  


The interesting part to me was that earlier this morning, I’d seen the name, Kathy Eldon, listed at the other websites I’d gone to, as the producer-(and maybe)-filmmaker of  this film, Soldiers of Peace; A Children’s Crusade.  Dan Eldon was her son.  And now I see that her daughter is listed on the website, too.  Kathy and her daughter evidently created the Creative Visions Foundation "for the purpose of supporting  ‘creative activists’ like Dan, to use their creative talents to change the world around them.” So, it turns out that it was she, Kathy Eldon, the mom, who had produced that film that maybe a decade ago, I'd fallen in love with.
A pretty special-sounding family…..


Check this link out, here, to read about the Eldons' latest venture, called “Extraordinary Moms,” about the power of mothers to change the world.

*I think that teachers, parents, students, and  anyone else who cares about peace, about nonviolence, and the well-being of our world’s children, and who delight, the rare times they get to see it, in those situations where “right” successfully ends up making “might,” that any and all of you would enjoy this film.

[Jill]

More kids from Afghanistan.  

These are taken from the website for the Boston Globe newspaper.  They’ve apparently decided they’re going to include a Big Picture photo story on Afghanistan each month, maybe, maybe not for the duration of the time that we are at war over there.   I’m thinking their purpose for doing so, at least, in part, is to try to remind those of us who may need reminding that those are human beings who are living and dying over there, who are, in many many ways, very very much like us.

I’m not including the captions, this time, because I want you to go over to the website yourselves to look, especially, at the caption for Photo #26 in the collection, or the third picture below.  I think it’s a travesty that the kids there or anywhere have to be subjected to something like this.  I also think it’s a perfect example as to why we might want to take the title of this thread to heart, and maybe even try to do something about it.


Note:  I said that these pictures are from the Boston Globe's "Big Picture" feature.  If you'll click on the pics, you'll understand why they gave this collection that particular name.

[Jill]

HEALING A WOUNDED HEART
“Since 1998, Marichia Simcik Arese’s Spiral Foundation has raised more than $1.6 million selling handmade items fashioned by disabled youth in Hue.  The proceeds finance rehabilitation, job training and surgeries for Vietnamese suffering from congenital defects believed to be linked to the spraying of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War….*”
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-vietnam-spiral-20110409,0,3729836.story

*The United States government along with the Vietnamese government (the latter, very likely eager that the aid and the current U.S. investment in Vietnam keep coming) deny that Agent Orange had anything to do with the defects and disabilities that seem to be too prevalent and too "location-specific" to be coincidental.  Of course, the U.S. government has a history of denying, first, that Agent Orange even existed, and then once its existence became incontrovertible, of denying that Agent Orange had any long term deleterious effects at all.

Watch the Video Here.
It's About Selling Crafts Made by Disabled Vietnamese Youth to Fund, Especially, Heart Operations for Those Born with Congenital Heart Defects
Really, I promise that it’s much more uplifting than it is a “downer.” It’s actually pretty special.   Nonetheless, it very definitely represents a cautionary tale as to the suffering that is inevitably inflicted in modern warfare under the rubric of our somewhat obscenely phrased, and now very infamous “collateral damage.”  

Collateral damage**, that is, that’s inflicted on children, those living and those as yet, unborn, and upon other absolutely innocent noncombatants.  This is a 14 minute-long video in a world where there are so many videos to watch, things to do.  I really think you’ll be glad you watched it, though, if you’ll take the time.

http://www.spiralfoundation.org/

Check out this link to see the kind of free publicity most any non-profit would be really ecstatic to be able to display on their website.
http://www.spiralfoundation.org/celebrities.aspx?page=celebrities
The Spiral Foundation’s Accomplishments  (This is a fun page.  Check it out)
http://www.spiralfoundation.org/new_accomplish.aspx?page=accomplish

**For a poem demonstrating that each “collateral damage” has a name, that it wears a human face, go here:

**For an explanation of what collateral damage actually translates out into, that is, the approximate ratio of innocent victims versus soldiers who are struck down by war in this, the twenty-first century, listen, especially, to the first two to two and a half minutes of the video, here:

EDIT: I just went to reread, myself, the poem I’d pointed you to, above, the one about the murdered Palestinian boy whose death, supposedly, had been “an accident.”  While there, I found myself reading through some of the other poems that a whole slug of Kiva Friends have posted in the Poetry thread.  If you haven’t been there either ever or for awhile, take the time, sometime, to check that thread out.  It’s got some real treasures in it and a whole, whole, Whole lot of KivaFriend spirit.  And heart!

[Jill]

Sometime check out the movie, Innocent Voices.  It's superlative, and the people starring in it are tremendously affecting, especially the 10 or 11 year old protagonist.  That, and the film offers so much to learn and a spur to learn even more, to boot.

And that's true, even if some of it, like the travesty of the United States' for me unforgivable participation on the wrong side of this horror story in history, we'd so much prefer to have not be true.  If you do check it out, be sure to watch the special bonus feature about the making of the film, afterwards.

http://www.amazon.com/Innocent-Voices-Daniel-Jim%C3%A9nez-Cacho/dp/B000WC38IC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1309785012&sr=8-1


EDIT: If you happen to click on the link that I embedded in the title and feel inclined to read the story behind this movie, you might first want to scroll up this page in the thread to the video of little Declan Galbraith singing "Tell Me Why" (lyrics given) and have that song be running as background music in another tab for when you're reading the article. For me, it's pretty powerful stuff and very apropos.

EDIT #2: For me, the whole concept of "child soldiers" stopped being anything even close to a mere abstraction when I learned that little Jimmy Akana had been kidnapped by the LRA, the Lord's Revolutionary Army, and had come terrifyingly close to being conscripted as a child soldier, himself.  Jimmy Akana was the 9 or 10 year old penpal with whom Ryan connected in the Ugandan village where his first well was drilled. After Jimmy escaped from the LRA, his life was then forever endangered sufficient for him to attain refugee status. After going through a tremendous amount of hoop-jumping and red tape, Ryan's family was then able to bring him to their home in Ontario, Canada, where they have embraced Jimmy and treated him as a member of their family ever since.