Listen to the April 25th broadcast of Sundays at Five by clicking the play button below.

Executive Editor of The WIP, Kate Daniels, with The WIP film critic, Jessica Mosby, interview Nancy Sleeth, who has helped taken the environmental movement to faith communities around the world. The Sleeth family runs an educational non-profit organization called Blessed Earth, which seeks to inspire communities worldwide to be “better stewards of the earth.” Nancy explains that her organization serves as a bridge between faith and environmentalism and answers some interesting questions about the difficulties of connecting different paradigms.

Guest Biography: Nancy Sleeth is the co-director of the non-profit organization Blessed Earth and author of Go Green, Save Green: A Simple Guide to Saving Time, Money and God’s Green Earth and she will be having a new book coming out shortly entitled The Year of Living Without.

About the Broadcast: The WIP’s Executive Editor, Kate Daniels teams up with identical twin sister Ali Daniels to present Sundays at Five, a weekly radio broadcast on KRXA, Monterey Bay's Progressive Talk Radio station. The twins share stories and discuss topics ranging from campaign finance reform to the phenomenon of Facebook. Tune in every Sunday from 5-6 pm PDT or listen online. Podcasts of previous broadcasts are available on The WIP Talk.

Make a cup of tea and join the conversation!

Humanitarian aid initiatives organized by Haitian communities offer respectful, democratic contrasts to the multi-billion dollar aid effort of the international community, much of which is wasted at best and destructive at worst. “Embedded in the local humanitarian responses is the model of a society premised on generosity and dignity,” says a report released today by Other Worlds, “From Disaster Aid to Solidarity: Best Practices in Meeting the Needs of Haiti’s Earthquake Survivors.”

• This earthquake-displaced family is housed and fed through the solidarity of strangers. In this case, the Peasant Movement of Papay is helping underwrite the costs, in one of many humanitarian aid projects run by grassroots Haitian organizations. Photo: Roberto (Bear) Guerra.•

The report examines the problems of the U.S.- and U.N.-dominated aid operation in Haiti and documents ten effective alternatives created by Haitian community and peasant groups and by ally organizations throughout the world. The cases are just a sampling of many more. The report then offers ten recommendations for how international allies can be most effective and respectful in supporting Haitian-led recovery and reconstruction.

One core problem of the international aid operation is that it strips away national sovereignty, since the already weak Haitian government has been effectively sidelined. Other problems, as discussed in the report, are that it robs people of their dignity and leaves them no say-so in how they get the food they need. In the worst case scenario, the operation could turn people from agents of self-recovery and change into mere victims. Perhaps worst of all is that, at a time when Haitians must have confidence and social organization to reconstruct their lives and their country with equity and justice, the aid operation risks substituting their power for bags of imported rice and a tent.

Aid does not need to be given according to that model. In fact, most of it is not. Though their efforts have not been recognized, everyday Haitian citizens, acting on their own, have comprised by far the largest force of first responders, relief workers, and aid providers. Their labors are based on the long tradition of solidarity, or mutual aid, that has kept this people alive for centuries. The organized survivor assistance projects of grassroots groups are run on the same principles.

The outpouring of support from the community is a reminder of the collective resilience and resourcefulness that undergird the Haitian culture. As foreign powers, international agencies, and the national government marginalize the people from decision-making about aid and reconstruction policies, the initiatives are a living testament that people are neither passive nor victims.

The operations are run by diverse entities, from student groups to the Cuban government. Each provides at least one of the following: shelter, medical care, community mental health, food, water, children’s activities, leisure activities, security, or support for growing much-needed food. Some of the efforts also offer education and a platform for organizing and advocacy to shape the country’s future.

Together they serve as a guide through which Haiti can rebuild with a more mutual aid, people-before-profit economy and society. All the guiding principles toward a new, just, and equitable nation exist here, in practice.

Five of the programs have already been covered in this series. See “Putting ‘Humanitarian’ Back into Humanitarian Aid,” “Country Hospitality,” “Where Solidarity Means Survival Part I and Part II,” and “Healing Body and Heart, Cuban Style.”

Below are three more innovative programs. Each meets needs of survivors while contributing to - not undermining – the resilience, autonomy, and dignity of individuals and the community.

* Coordination to Rebuild the Nation (KORE N, meaning in Creole ‘support us’): The contribution of this Port-au-Prince-based activist group is medical care, based on a model of 24/7 accompaniment of the community’s health needs, located in their own neighborhoods.

KORE N opposes the idea of mobile clinics which show up at camps once or twice a week, staffed by doctors who do not know the community - or often even Haiti - and leave people sitting in long lines in the heat. As an alternative, KORE N has created four centers based on the idea of permanent accompaniment. KORE N sought out neighborhoods where there are shelters or camps and where KORE N members have influence. It located people in those neighborhoods with basic medical knowledge, like nurses and auxiliaries – ten in all – and gave them training. It set up shop either in a tent or in the medical staff’s home. Next, it solicited medicines from citizens’ groups, and identified doctors who serve as an information resource to the primary team.

According to KORE N member and doctor Rudy Prudent, community members know and trust the health workers, both as neighbors and as committed social activists. The ten workers go out each day for their jobs and their personal needs, but are otherwise generally available at any time of the day or night. “These are not just people who come do consultations and then run,” says Prudent.

KORE N says that what’s important for them is not to accompany many people, using the logic of many NGOs who need to show that they are servicing large numbers of clients in order to justify their funding or win new grants. The quality of the solidarity, not the quantity of patients, is what counts.

* School of Social Sciences, State University of Haiti: In the post-earthquake context, the School of Social Sciences relies on its faculty, students, and knowledge base, plus minimal funding, to educate the community, provide social psychology to survivors, and help the population respond to today’s political challenges. It also uses social psychology to ‘rebuild the house,’ meaning to help Haitian people rebuild themselves, their homes, and their country in ways which reinforce their strength and capacity, as individuals and as a people.

Thirty-five students from the school are offering social psychology to about 350 people in roughly ten shelters in metropolitan Port-au-Prince. The team calls its support ‘promotion of collective resilience.’ “We’re building off of what we have that is positive, to encourage people to reclaim control of their lives, to reconnect their ties with others, to find their confidence so they can resolve their problems,” says psychology professor Lenz Jean-Francois. The philosophy uses a five-step process to draw out in survivors the strong cultural values of resourcefulness and dignity.

The school also hosts discussions in camps and shelters to mobilize community members, help them organize, and help them understand the risks in the current context. All the school’s work carries the implicit and explicit message that to succeed, Haitians must have control over their lives and their environment. Reliance on aid, they insist, will only cause Haitians to lose their belief in their abilities.

* Lambi Fund of Haiti: Like so many institutions around the world which has raised money for Haiti’s earthquake survivors, the Lambi Fund has been inundated with donations. Unlike most of those institutions, though, the Lambi Fund’s response is based on reinforcing the strength and autonomy of Haitian community organizations. Based in both Haiti and the U.S., the Lambi Fund shows how the international community can give urgent assistance in a way that allows the peasant and women’s group to strengthen their production or commerce, their advocacy, and their organizations themselves.

Lambi’s post-earthquake work is based on its long-standing philosophy of providing financial resources, training, and technical assistance to peasant-led and/or women-led community organizations to strengthen people’s social and economic power. Its current collaborations build off of relationships of trust and respect.

Within days after the earthquake, Lambi staff convened regional assemblies of local peasants to define immediate needs and prioritize rebuilding. Lambi’s post-catastrophe work is to meet its partner communities’ self-defined needs for the immediate, while helping them rebuild and expand sustainable rural development and agricultural production for the mid- to long-term. The urgent aid involves cash disbursements to 43 grassroots groups in areas where large numbers of internally displaced people have relocated. The money helps the community groups organize themselves; provide clothes, food, medicine, tents, and other essentials; and fortify the local economy.

Haitian women have been increasingly vocal and active in social, political, and economic issues since the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship in 1986. Though it has not come easily, their progress in changing gender relations of power within the home, within social movements, and within the nation has been steady.

Women’s organizations have been key to these advances, helping create the space to foster and protect women’s activism. One network is helping women gain voice, literally: the Haitian Women’s Community Radio Network (REFRAKA by its Creole acronym).

The importance of radio cannot be overstated in a country where 45% of men, and 49% of women, are illiterate. Nor can the significance of women taking the microphone, in a country where aggressive patriarchy in the home and society, as well as violence from male partners and the state, have tried to keep them silent.

Founded in 2001, REFRAKA includes 25 member stations in nine of Haiti’s ten geographic departments. The network has trained about 150 women as journalists, program hosts, and production technicians.

Moreover, REFRAKA helps women in various radio stations make programs about local issues, while also producing national-level shows which are then aired on member stations. REFRAKA staff produces a special radio-magazine each month, one hour each, on specific gender-related topics such as women’s political advocacy, gender relations, Haitian women’s social realities, violence, HIV-AIDS, and news about women from around the world. They also produce 30-minute shows especially for girls aged 11-15 in community schools, called Own Your Body, Care for Your Body which discuss issues including girl’s bodies and health, and relations between girls and boys.

REFRAKA’s office was destroyed and all their archives, materials, and supplies were lost in the January 12 earthquake. Their work is temporarily on hold as they reestablish their institution. Soon they will resume their programs, this time with a sharp focus on the status of women in this catastrophe phase and the participation of women in the reconstruction.

Marie Guirlene Justin, program director of REFRAKA, tells more.

“When we started working, it was very hard because of the machismo from men who couldn’t accept women’s voices getting out like this. Before it was hard to find women speaking on the radio; now it’s not. Now women are advancing. More women are trained in reporting and production. There are more women on the radio, and there are more women’s radio programs. Now we have women who are directors of radio stations, though there are still no women owners. Men are starting to understand, and gender issues are crossing over into other radio programs.

“More women are speaking their own truth. For example, you have CONAP [the National Coalition to Advocate the Rights of Women by its French acronym]… When CONAP hosts something in Port-au-Prince, REFRAKA does a radio program on it and gets it out into the countryside. That way rural women don’t feel alone. We cover what groups like SOFA [Solidarity Among Haitian Women] are doing, which gives the women’s movement a lot of strength.

“We’re taking small steps. Today on the radio, you hear less music and proverbs discriminating against women. This has to be reinforced so that we don’t go backwards. You know that relations between women and men are fragile today, especially with all the displacement since the earthquake.

“One of the new concepts following the earthquake is reconstructing another form of participation, where women can participate in everything, in the big debates about reconstruction, in planning national development for another Haiti. A process where women and men put their hands together to build something new in this country will be very different than one where men are making decisions for everyone. When we have a society where women have a say in what they want and need, we’ll be closer to having a society based on social justice, an equitable society. Then we’ll have balanced relations, with the possibility for everyone to live in peace.

“Popular communications is a big part of this. It’s an important form for people to have their own voice to speak about questions that impact their lives with the reconstruction. Community stations are close to the people, and they give people a chance to understand what’s happening and insert themselves in it.

“In the context of Haiti’s reality today, we really need solidarity. In the earthquake, our office was smashed and we lost everything we had collected over nine years: our computers, records, cameras, office furniture… It’s all gone. Myself, I was trapped inside the office alone and I thought I would die. My ear was sliced open when a cement block fell on it. My home was destroyed.

“We don’t want the kind of international ‘help’ that we’re seeing throughout Haiti today, much of which is about domination. We want an exchange of experiences in the North and South where we each bring our own contribution. Today we need that type of solidarity, especially globally in the women’s movement.”

If past experience with authoritarian regimes is any guide, new sanctions on Iran will not succeed in curbing its nuclear power development and will, instead, strengthen the hardliners in government. Much more can be gained by improving the relationship between U.S. and Iranian citizens.

Ahmadinejad’s despotic behavior is not in itself enough to initiate a war against Iran that may have tragic consequences for the region and for the whole world. Despite Ahmadinejad’s rantings against Israel, Iranian leaders know that an attack against that country would be suicidal, unleashing terrible reprisals from Israel and the United States.

There is widespread suspicion that Iran’s possession of a nuclear bomb may initiate an arms race in the Middle East. However, what is now an open secret – Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons- has not ignited such a race. Since threats of punitive action against Iran are not weakening its nuclear ambitions, it is time to try a different approach.

Iranians insist that portraying them as a warmongering nation does not respond to historical precedent. They point out that the U.S. was responsible for overthrowing a constitutionally elected government in their country, and that it supported Saddam Hussein’s invasion of their country while Israel provided arms to Iran. In addition, Iranians claim that the U.S. and other Western countries supplied Saddam Hussein with chemical and biological weapons that caused hundreds of thousands of Iranian civilian deaths.

On April 23, 2010, Republican Congressman Ron Paul stated his opposition to sanctions on Iran stating, “…it feels as if we are back in 2002 all over again: the same falsehoods and distortions used to push the United States into a disastrous and unnecessary one trillion dollar war on Iraq are being trotted out again to lead us to what will likely be an even more disastrous and costly war on Iran….We need to see this for what it is: Propaganda to speed us to war against Iran for the benefit of special interests.”

President Obama has repeatedly stated the danger represented by nuclear weapons falling into terrorists’ hands, thus suggesting the need to curb Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon. However, Pakistan is a far more serious danger in that regard, since it has a very unstable government and Al-Qaeda is already present in that country.

It is a common experience that many times countries behave like people. If a person is threatened and coerced by an infinitely more powerful adversary, the only way for that person to react is to become more fearful and find extreme ways of defending itself against that menace.

Three decades of sanctions against Iran have proved to be ineffective. Why are they going to be effective now, when the Iranian regime is more determined than ever to pursue its own road to nuclear development? Sanctions will also not stop the Iranian regime abuse of its own people. As Dursun Peksen, a political science professor and an expert on economic sanctions has written, “My research into the effect sanctions have on human rights conditions in authoritarian regimes shows that more abuses typically occur with sanctions in place and that the number of abuses is greater when sanctions on those regimes are more extensive.”

According to Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, who was the first president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, foreign governments which want to support the democratic movement in Iran should adopt a policy of active neutrality. As he recently stated, “Sanctions will be counterproductive because the threat of international crisis is the Iranian regime’s only remaining resource for legitimizing its despotic power.”

Also, for sanctions to succeed they have to be part of a broad international effort. In that regard, the possibilities for Russia and China’s support are very slim, since to do so would harm their own considerable economic interests in that country. Iraq’s president has already spoken against sanctions to its Iranian neighbors, Turkey has expressed reluctance to participate on sanctions and Brazilian President Inacio Lula da Silva has stated that isolating Iran is counterproductive.

History has shown that demonizing people only fosters hate between countries. We fear what we know but we fear even more what we don’t know. Parallel to efforts on the diplomatic front, dialogue between both countries should be actively fostered through an exchange of artists, scientists, writers and religious figures. In February of 2008 The New York Philharmonic gave a concert in Pyongyang, North Korea capital, one of the countries belonging to the “axis of evil” according to President Bush’s infelicitous expression. Why cannot it do the same in Tehran?

Iran is an ancient country which has given the world outstanding artists and thinkers. Let’s conduct an active exchange that will benefit both countries and diminish the atmosphere of confrontation and suspicion. Let’s change a paradigm geared for war for one geared for peaceful coexistence. It would be a logical next step in brokering peace in that troubled region.

After missing a week and a half of school due to an unexpected case of pneumonia, (it would have been two and half weeks if Spring Break hadn't cushioned the experience), I have been forced to come face to face with a truth I have long been avoiding due to my usual good health. I don't have a solid emergency sub plan in place, and though the old fall back "show a movie" works for a few days, when unexpectedly absent for a week and a half, "show a movie" doesn't cut it. I know that there are teachers out there who have their entire semester, maybe ever their entire year, mapped out in advance. I, however, am not one of those teachers. I like to go with the flow of my inspiration and imagination, and I never know what I might decide to read, explore, or assign until a week, or sometimes a weekend in advance.

Partially this is due to my student population. At continuation high, students come and go. Classroom makeup is constantly changing. I have combined grade levels, 10th-12th in every class, and for every student that breezes in and then breezes back out again, there are those that feel at home and don't leave until they graduate (sometimes as 5th year seniors). This means that I may have the same students three years in a row, and though they may seem as though they aren't paying attention, pull out a story we read two years ago and they are deeply offended, as if I am clearly not doing my job.

Much of my curriculum I glean from current events. What's going on in the world right now? What articles are in the news? What ballots are on the initiative? What natural disasters are giving us new perspectives on the world? Where are we bombing now? And these items quickly lose their pertinence. Topics that come up in class may drive our next essay assignment, and I may never use this particular topic, along with accompanying readings, again. This sort of fluidity in the classroom means a constant stream of successes and failures. The poems written from the perspective of people's dogs, for instance, fell flat. I'll never use those again, and am still recovering from the failure, (I thought they were really funny). The prison project, on the other hand, was widely well received, but now I can't do it for another two years, at least, at which point my statistical handouts will be out of date and I will have to assemble all new materials.

This is one way I keep class interesting -- by making sure the kids never know what to expect next. This also means if I am suddenly laid out on the couch and have a last minute sub showing up, I don't have anything for them to do. If the timing is right, the kids might be in the middle of a project. They know what they need to work on, so all the sub had to worry about is making sure no one smokes pot in the back room or starts a fight. But if we are between projects, I have nothing to offer the sub besides my emergency movie which, oh yah, half the kids saw last year, and if I show it again, you can bet I'm going to hear about it.

To deal with this problem I have decided to purchase a book of "never fail" language arts assignments that come on neat little ditto sheets with a line for the student's name, and easily understood instructions. Each ditto sheet has "fun" but "instructional" activities like "rewrite this four sentence story being more specific, and using lots of details", or "write a paragraph using only one syllable words", or "rewrite these sentences using hyperbole". The worksheets are simple, perhaps instructive in a vague, banal, and somewhat meaningless way, and they remind me of two things.

One, my job would be so much easier, I would sleep so much better at night, and I would have a huge weight of responsibility lifted from my shoulders if I stopped coming up with all of my own material. If I just bought a daily curriculum, copied worksheets, used the text book, and relied entirely on other people's ideas, I would be freed from the pressure of having to be endlessly creative, and having to beat myself up every time a lesson went sour, (think dog poems). I wouldn't have to worry that the story I am bringing in contains the word "cunt", because all of the stories we read in class would be conveniently pre-censored, and so tried and true, (as in, students have been reading these same stories for the last thirty years), there would be no risk involved whatsoever.

Two, maybe I am a flawed teacher in some way, because I find the text books available in all subjects, the prescribed worksheets and "creative" projects, and the "tried and true" materials to be so boring, so dull, so insipid I feel guilty participating in their dissemination. Not like everything I bring in is top notch, (think dog poems), but at least I am always striving to find things that are actually meaningful in some bigger sense of the word. Still, with this effort comes great responsibility, and I am never entirely sure if I am successful or not. Maybe I am blinded by my own agenda. Maybe my students would improve their skills at a higher rate if I stopped focusing so much on critical thinking, and spent more time doing skill building activities, boring or not.

I try to reach every one of my students -- and as chronic ditchers, school haters, drug takers, and English loathers, this is perhaps an impossible task. Still, I can tell you exactly which students, in any given quarter, I have been as yet unable to reach, and each one, in their own separate way, haunts me. For the most part, the students who I can't reach want exactly the type of materials I will be photocopying and leaving out for the sub should I ever get pneumonia again. They are annoyed by my contemporary fiction, by my persistent agenda to force them to think bigger thoughts. They just want a worksheet that has a little line for their name, a straight set of easy to understand instructions, and an assignment that involves no deep thought, that they can finish quickly and then forget about.

On my bad days, I wonder if maybe I should just give them what they want -- formulaic assignments designed to improve a very specific, easily testable skill set. On my good days, I swear, I'll quit before I'll give in. On my mediocre days, I can't decide if I'm right or if I'm wrong. But maybe that's what teaching is all about -- discovery, uncertainty, exploration, failure, and success. In the mean time, my new sub plan will be laid out, and hopefully, with any luck, it will gather dust. As well it should.

I am not welcome here in Arizona.
Or rather, my husband isn’t – and our future children won’t be either. You see, Mike is half-Korean. Why is this a problem, you ask? Because as of this afternoon in Arizona, any law enforcement has the right, and indeed the obligation, to demand proof of citizenship or legal immigration status from anyone that they suspect of being in the state illegally.

But why should this matter? Mike is not Hispanic, after all – which is the group that the “toughest immigration bill in the country” was attempting to reign in. The problem is the question of what constitutes an officer’s “suspicion.” Without probable cause – such as actually committing a crime for which he could be arrested regardless of race- there is nothing to go on besides of the color of his skin.

Even though he’s half German genetically (his dad has the same white/ruddy skin that I do), he has a nice olive glow which turns golden brown and then a deep tan in the summer. Already both of his arms have turned a mocha color from driving home into the blinding sun every afternoon, the white lines from his watch and sunglasses the only reminder of his winter shading.

Likewise, his dad has blonde hair and blue eyes, but they didn’t stand a chance against his mom’s dominate Korean dark brown eyes and dark, straight hair. Instead he got his dad’s physical build and some of his facial structure. How likely is it that from a distance, a cop is going to say to himself, “Well, gee – that man can’t be here illegally- look at his European frame and that German nose!” Instead, they will see the color of his skin, hair and eyes, and will have cause to demand his papers, especially if quotas or institutional incentives for high volumes of “inquiries” are in place.

It would not be the first time that he’d be mistaken for being Hispanic. With so many Latinos in Arizona and so few Koreans – and even fewer half Koreans- people could be forgiven for just assuming that anyone who looks unidentifiably dark could be from south of the border. An amusingly incorrect assumption in high school, something that he could laugh off as an easy mistake ten years ago, could now literally land him in jail.

You see, the Koreans are a feisty group. Mike has no intention of adopting some deferential stance as a second-class citizen, and will not quietly step out of the car and hand over his citizenship papers if pulled over for “driving while brown.” Not only is he guaranteed to give the officer a piece of his mind – which, although it should be a legal right, seems to be enough to get you tazered or arrested- but he doesn’t have a single document that he carries everywhere he goes that satisfactorily proves he is a US citizen. (Do YOU?)

Is a driver’s license enough? A passport? As someone who has devoted her academic and professional life to studying Russian and Central European societies and histories, that he should even have to consider carrying a passport domestically is troubling. Russia requires internal passports, documents that not only allow you to live in a certain area but which must be produced in order to accomplish even the most basic tasks. It is for this reason that they have one of their most famous sayings, “Nyet dokumenta, nyet cheloveka.” No documents, no person. In their system, people could literally vanish – at least under the communist era – for lack of the proper piece of paper or stamp.

Even if he did carry his passport around with him, it might not do any good. Case in point: he had to use a passport for identification while at a hospital in Atlanta two years ago upon a return from abroad, and the admin staff thought possessing a US passport meant he was a foreign national. I know it sounds insane, but no amount of logical, well-reasoned arguing could convince them otherwise, and we lost valuable time in scheduling an urgent surgery while they debated his citizenship. What kind of hope can we put in the local traffic cops (who also do not handle passports on a day to day basis, I imagine) that they will competently review this document?

Does he carry his social security card, then? Well that flies in the face of all recommendations for identity theft prevention. A birth certificate? Besides the obvious fact that we’re starting to dig pretty deeply into the filing cabinet here just to stay safe while driving across town, even this could present a problem. You see, he was born in Korea. To two American citizens, at a US military hospital, while his dad was serving his country at a US military base. But just like the passport, the good hospital admin folks thought this was proof that he was a resident alien. What are the risks that, if presented with this document, the cops will make the same mistake, throw him in jail over his objections and “sort it out later?”

This is all the more maddening because, unlike many of the state’s residents who have moved here in the past decade, my husband and I have spent almost our entire lives here. I’m a native, and until college, this was Mike’s only US home. Once his dad retired from the civil service, they bought a house in Glendale. We both grew up in the same school district during elementary school, went to the same high school (where he gave the graduation speech), and missed our gorgeous desert landscape when we went to Minnesota for college. After college, we moved straight back – despite knowing the risks of our cyclical economy, it was still our home in the truest sense, the place where we belonged. I got involved in ESL work in the same school district that raised me; he has worked for a local city government for almost his entire career, forfeiting the higher pay available in the private IT sector in exchange for serving his community.

I don’t think the Arizonans who supported this bill understand the full extent of its repercussions. In targeting what they thought was a convenient scapegoat, they have inadvertently but irrevocably targeted a much broader swathe of our society. Maybe old white retirees in Mesa and Sun City think that our world and “the other” are quite separate and distinct, but for my generation they are completely intertwined. My first childhood friend was half-Hispanic; her family has lived in Arizona since before mine got on a boat in Europe. One white female friend married a Japanese American; my Filipina friend is with a white man; her brother is married to a white woman. Two other friends – a couple that I’ve known since high school- are Filipina and of Mexican descent. Similarly, my husband’s work department consists of a Navajo man and two African American men, one of whom used to serve in the Air Force and is married to a Latina. Her large extended family are all Hispanic – and they are all Arizona natives. (Ironically, the only true immigrants I have ever known – people my age who left their country as children or young adults – were white, mostly from Poland and other Central European countries).

Judging by the explosion of outrage on facebook, I can say that we are all concerned. Those of us who are not Hispanic are afraid of being mistaken as such for our own safety; those who are actually Hispanic are in an even more precarious position. You could say it is an overreaction, which is how I’m sure it looks if you are at no risk whatsoever of being targeted. But listen to this story: my friend’s mom told me how her Hispanic brother-in-law was almost arrested by police as he went running with his Anglo wife along a desert trail. They were both citizens from birth, but the assumption, just based on looks, was that the Hispanic husband must have been an illegal immigrant that for some reason was trying to chase this good white woman. Even when the wife insisted that they were actually married, the police had difficulty believing them. And this was before the insanity of Sheriff Joe Arpaio and ICE round-ups began.

In this globalized world, people with skills have choices about where they settle and make their lives. We are teachers, IT managers, programmers, writers, musicians, accountants and business professionals – what will Arizona do if we all leave? Is the frightening answer that the state really doesn’t care? The predominately white industries of mining and ranching won’t be enough to float the economy, I can tell you that. I also wonder if they stopped to consider what our global pariah status will do to our tourism industry. (Arizona leaders might consider reading international news from time to time – they’d see that we’ve been a top story on the BBC lately).

I also wonder how we are going to pay for all of this increased law enforcement, jail time, processing and court appearances when our economy is still failing and we already have a tremendous backlog in our legal system. When even a one cent (that really is one cent, not one percent) tax for saving our education system is controversial, what is the likelihood that we’ll be able to raise enough money to start pulling people over at random because of their skin tone? And isn’t this kind of police state counter to the Republican virtue of small government?

Clearly, there are a lot of inconsistencies that haven’t been sorted out or thought through in the passing of this epically disastrous bill. That doesn’t matter to its supporters, because it wasn’t really about fighting crime or getting the drug cartels out of our national parks or ending border gun violence or any other laudable goal. It was only ever about hate. It is a vindictive gesture – a retaliation by the angry white mob for the fact that our country is changing. It’s a blind rejection of the reality that America now has many colors, that citizenship and heritage can live side by side and thrive. And while it may succeed today, it’s ultimately a Pyrrhic victory. The state will lose, and so will this broken ideology.

In the meantime, we’ll be making our lives elsewhere. ¡Hasta luego!

Forty years ago, in the small village of Awere, Uganda two young adolescents were growing up under grass thatch roofs. One was a smart, poor young girl with old shoes on her feet, the other a rambunctious young boy with fire in his eyes. Both had very different destinies. The boy, Joseph Kony, would grow into a war monster with revenge for the south in his heart. He would turn the gun and machete against his own people, the Acholi tribe, and kidnap young boys and girls from their villages in the middle of the night. The girl, Jolly Grace Okot, would go on to be the most prominent female to rise from her clan, a symbol of peace and honor for the Acholi people. Both fight in a battle against time, as the war edges on its 25th year in Uganda.

Never did I imagine I would be sitting in front of this great woman of Africa in a living room in Southern California. Her story is of hope for women and children in Northern Uganda and she is reshaping history with her hands and her heart.

• Author Garrett Glick with Jolly Okot.•

Jolly, you grew up in a family where the majority of your siblings were girls. What was that like in Northern Uganda?

The majority of us were girls, but we had two brothers. One passed away and one remained, but still we were the majority and we were girls. We were bigger girls and the boys were little. For me that was a very challenging time. First of all, families that had boys undermined us. They thought that for us, since we were only girls that my mother would end up with a bunch of prostitutes in her house.

People in your village said that?

Yeah, even my uncles said to my mother, ‘you don’t deserve to stay in our family, because you are a curse to this family, because you have only girls.’ As such, we had difficulties going to fetch water and firewood, because you’re worried that you might meet a group of boys and they will beat you up and you don’t have a brother to defend you. It happened so much.

People would attack you?

Yeah, people would beat us because we are only girls. Either they would make fun of you, you know like talk sexual language. They would say, ‘come on and sleep with us.’ So if you say, ‘No!’ then they will come and beat you up. One day I remember there was a boy who came and said, ‘You, I don’t think I can even sleep with you, because you look so ugly.’ Then he came and started beating me and water that I was carrying on my head came and fell down. My father came and scared him away. These events were very difficult for us and we stayed with a lot of fear. We stayed in a situation where we felt that we were so vulnerable to abuse. I even remember one night we were sleeping in the house, and someone sneaked into our house and entered the house. All of a sudden my three sisters and I woke up and saw that there was a man in our house, so we started making an alarm and this guy broke the door and ran.

While all of this was going on, how did your parents, your mother and your father instill value in yourself? Even though there were people in the village that were demeaning you.

Especially for my dad, he valued education so much. I think he was very exposed to the outside world. My dad grew up a lot with the British and he went through the British training. I would say that he valued children as children. Besides, especially for me, people used to call me a walking stick, because I am always with my dad. My dad was very proud of us. For my mother, it was a challenge, because everything was a struggle for her. However, they were very positive and my mother used to boast that, ‘even though I have only girls, these girls will help me in the future.’ You know naturally enough in that culture, when you have girls and they get married definitely you will receive cows.

Dowry?

Yeah, dowry.

What are some of the accomplishments that you have made for the Acholi people, especially the women?

I would say for the last fifteen years I have done a lot for Acholi people. First of all, being in a family of girls I was fortunate enough that I got a job at an early age and that helped me so much to support, you know? I lived as a role model for many girls. I started in my own home by paying everyone in our home in school. These were all girls and I put them through high school and university.

Were you disrespected in the classroom too for being a girl? Did people tell you that your education was worth less?

In the classroom, I was so bright that I would be number one. I was always first or second position in class and definitely boys will want to beat you. ‘How can you beat me? I am a man.’ That was also a challenge. Since that time, I have done a lot for girls. Since 2003, when I finished paying everyone in our home in school I started supporting other girls in school, because that is the only way. Today as I talk, I still support a lot of women in many ways. I am a member of two village savings and loans associations where women can come and save money and work. I help twenty women to make paper beads and I help them to sell the beads in the markets and the US. I have done a lot for women and being a woman and being successful has encouraged so many girls.

It has been a good influence on their lives.

Yes, it has been a good influence, because my family grew up with nothing. We used to go for casual labor when war came. We would go and dig ditches and get a quarter dollar for a days work and that is what we would use for food. My mom was very miserable, but I changed that from our home. Definitely being the first woman from our clan to drive a car changed a lot. In Africa in those days women were not supposed to drive or put on trousers, you know?

What did people say when they saw that?

When they saw that, people started following girls and today the proverb goes, "When you educate a girl, you will have the money and the vehicles around you." So people have started following girls so, so much. Today when I talked with my husband, he said, "How are the scholarships going?" I said, "Oh, we got 38 scholarships." He said, "This time don’t only put girls," and I said, "Definitely, I will put many girls!" Today as I talk, I am sponsoring over 400 girls and out of the 400, I have 144 in the university and the rest in secondary.

That is amazing. How are women mistreated in times of war in Northern Uganda, especially when the villages are pillaged by the rebel forces and when some of those girls are abducted?

A woman is definitely always vulnerable. These hungry men want to have free sex and normally they get raped. Besides, when it is time for war women are the ones who stay with children. Men always run away, because during war men think that they are more vulnerable than women. I don’t know why. Men think that they will be abducted, but women suffer the most. When you have a young baby alone with you at home and you are hiding, that baby will not understand that you are hiding and make a noise or cry and the rebels will hear it. Sometimes they will try and run away and they are caught. They are either raped or killed. Some women were found pregnant, their stomachs have been slit and the baby killed. Most of these things happen and the two most challenging things have been rape and caring for children.

How do you help these women who come back from the conflict? They have seen these things, they’ve been mistreated, and some of their children have been killed.

The only thing appropriate for a woman that has been wronged is empowering them. Empowering them in the sense that they are not only supposed to work in the kitchen and make food. Women in Africa are treated as slaves, because the man will come and sit on the table and say, "Bring for me water, bring for me food." Then in the morning both of you, you and your husband, you go to the garden together. You dig the same digging. You come back home. The man will now retire and sit underneath the tree and relax. You have to make food for the man. You have to bring water for the man to shower. You have to go and fetch water. You have a baby on your back, all of those kinds of things. As such, I feel like empowering them to be to a level of contributing equally at home. The reason why African women have a lot of challenges is because they have no contribution. They didn’t go to school.

They have no other choice.

Yeah, they don’t have choice. They don’t have control of anything. Empowering those that can’t afford to go to school to do business, that is what I do.

These women in your program, do they work together amongst other women so that there is a nice community of women and they can share some of their experiences?

They do, especially the women at Invisible Children’s MEND program. Those girls have been through hard times and most of them sit together and share a lot of the challenges. They become their own counselors. They counsel one another, because the challenge of an African woman is always the same. You are being battered, they restrict you, and you are like a slave, so they sit together and talk about it.

So, they are able to support their families, but also it’s a support group.

Exactly, exactly.

Rwanda has one of the largest women presences in their Parliament. Do you think that it’s possible to see that in Uganda one day?

Yeah, I think it’s possible in Uganda. These days it has changed. Rwanda definitely has the largest women representation in Parliament, but Uganda equally has a good number. It is just because Uganda is such a big country. I am very encouraged by the Rwandan lifestyle, because Rwanda is one country where women have started to get a lot of respect. That is a big achievement for Africa.

You have some daughters of your own. How do you empower and encourage some of your daughters to succeed?

I personally have seen from my life that I am strong willed. I do not allow myself to be stepped on, so it took a long time for me to select a man of my choice. I definitely could not handle an African man, a man who is going to order me around to do stuff. I want a man who shares equally. It doesn’t matter whether I have money or he has money. There has to be equal opportunities in the house. I started empowering my daughters very early. My daughter, Danica, she is a very strong girl and she believes in only winning. They become very independent at a young age. Danica at the age of three was showering with no help. The same thing with Daniella, she can do everything on her own. She dresses up for school, and she understands that mommy can’t stay home. Mommy has to work so they can get an education. She is now six years old, so what I am doing for them is telling them to be completely independent. I’ve started empowering them. One thing I’ve taught them to do, you know a piggy bank? Each one of them has a piggy bank. Every year they save and in December they open. Together we drive to the bank and we save it. That has empowered them. They know that they all have bank accounts. That is how I am trying to train them to be independent girls.

How do you encourage the families of the girls to keep their children in school? Dowry is so important and doing household chores is important for the women in Ugandan communities.

I keep them in school by leading as an example. I don’t do housework. I cook only when I love to cook something. It’s not that I have to come from work and cook. I feel so empowered. I feel that I have got everything I want. What I normally want to do, especially for a girl student is to tell them, educating a girl is educating a nation. I have tried so much. I have done radio programs, I’ve done home visiting, and I’ve gone to talk to girls in schools. I feel that it is very important to encourage them. The challenge is why does an African girl get married at such an early age? Sometimes it is because of material need, you know? They are desperate. When the time of war came I had one shoe. I grew up without an underpant. As such, if I wasn’t a strong girl and a man came to me with money I would go to him. I want to tell families that girls can take the ownership of anything. In our home, everything is shared equally.

Can you tell me how you were abducted?

Okay. For me, I was in high school, 9th grade, and I was in a boarding school. When I was returning from school, because our home was so remote, there was no means of transportation. If you are lucky you would get on a tractor that was carrying food or you would get on an army truck, but there was no public transport. Normally we stop on the way and we walk for twelve miles every time you are going to school. You pack your suitcase that is about 60 pounds. You have a mattress that is about 10 pounds. Definitely on top of you, you have about 70 or 80 pounds. So you walk. When I was walking coming back home, a group of rebels had started in our homes, but I didn’t know that the rebels were there. There were no means of communication, and that made it very difficult for us to get communication that there were rebels. When I walked home, coming closer to home I met a group of men who had put up a roadblock. They put trees, leaves and branches of trees in the road. When I came closer I would hear words they were telling me. I knew the language. I was a little scared, because I had never seen something like that in our home. I heard them say in Swahili, "Stop!" I kept walking and then I heard guns. I heard people cocking a gun. I stopped and then I would hear some gun shots. "TAR!" They were punishing people who refused to support them.

This is the LRA?

No, it wasn’t at that time. It was a group of armies who ran away from the former government. So, they were shooting people’s feet. "TAR!" They would shoot and leave you to walk with it. Put a pistol to your feet, directly on your feet and it would smash your feet and you walk and you go. I got scared because they lined us up for the same thing. I thought they were going to smash my feet, but fortunately it had reached about four people and then they stopped. They said, "You see, if you don’t listen to us we will do the same." Then I told them who my dad was and I told them that I would come back and walk with them. The news reached to my father and my father came and started talking to them. He said, "No problem, my daughter will come back. Please allow her to visit home."

He wanted to make sure you survived.

Yes, so that day I walked home and the next morning I came back. You definitely have to come back. If you don’t come back they will kill you. That is how my brother died. So I came back and started the training. Everyday that you are in training some commander will come and take you for a wife at night. That is how I got abducted and you cannot say no.

After seeing the way the men treated the women it put you in a mindset to say, "I never want to go through that again and I want to empower women so that they never have to be treated like this."

Exactly! When I saw all of that, one thing that helped me a lot was that I used to love reading. I read a lot of stories about successful women. Some of them were stories like in the movies where a woman would go and kill someone. I thought, "Hmm, women can own a gun." So, with all of those challenges I went through growing up as a child, being abducted and being mistreated I developed a very strong will. With my will I want to call everything in my house mine. I developed the word mine. I am trying to use the word ours, but it doesn’t always come very easily. I have a lot of respect for my husband and he has a lot of respect for me, but those challenges are always there. Those are a few things I noticed as a girl growing up, and today as I talk I am a very strong woman. I stand to compete with men. I started my scholarship program through another organization, because I wanted my program to be affiliated with America. At first it was unsuccessful. But, when I started with Invisible Children I knew I would always have many children and school and here I am now.

Jason [Russell] always supported that vision you had? He was right behind you?

When you talk to the filmmakers they will say, ‘Invisible Children is Jolly’s dream.’ The first idea was to build a complex where I would do trauma counseling through dance, sports, and games.

Do the mentors in the scholarship program help with things like that?

In the mentorship program I have a mentorship handbook that I developed and all of those components are there. We do mentorship through sports. We do mentorship through games, dancing, and culture. We cover everything.

Being a mentor is difficult position to acquire isn’t it?

Yes, it is a difficult position to acquire, but everything we do in life is difficult. I knew what the children of Uganda were going through and I knew how to help them. So, I wanted to replicate it. One of the things that made me a powerful person was music. I am a public speaker because of singing. We have singing and debating programs through the mentorship and this builds confidence for the children.

What is it like being here in the United States and traveling? What is it like being on the road with Invisible Children as a part of the movement aspect we have here in the US? What is it like to see that and what has your experience been like so far?

It has been very challenging. One challenging bit of it as a roadie is that almost every night or two, you are sleeping in another bed. As a normal human being people say, "My pillow, my bed sheet," but you don’t have that. Another hard task is sitting in the car for such a long time, but the most exciting thing about it is the response of the people. The story in Northern Uganda inspires people. It has made me feel very happy. I appreciate Americans so much. It has been challenging to live with different people from different backgrounds, but all in all I am very pleased because it is for the right cause.

About the Author

I’m a 24 year old storyteller from North Carolina. I tell stories of those under the radar. Stories that make people think outside of their suburbs. I am driven by traveling. This started at 13 on a mission to Kingston, Jamaica. Since then I went to a liberal arts school nestled in the Appalachian Mountains and last year I moved to Seoul to experience life in the East. Experience breeds writing, so I have been stock piling journals of real characters, towns, and dialogue to unleash on the page in the near future. I hope that my writing, much like music can be a universal language that all can take from equally. Currently, my volunteer work with Invisible Children has moved my sights to beautiful Africa and I hope to encourage other global citizens to help in mending the motherland.

Listen to the April 18th broadcast of Sundays at Five by clicking the play button below.

Kate and Ali discuss the implications behind the radical right movement in this country with lawyer and SheSource expert, Tanya Acker. The focal point of the broadcast pivots upon the second amendment gun rallies which took place in Washington, D.C. on April 19th (a day that also happens to coincide with the Oklahoma City bombing); the overarching theme, however, grapples with trying to figure out ways to understand and deal with the radical elements of protest which we are facing here in the United States. Acker is a frequent participant on the media circuit, and serves as a key moderate voice which buffers the more extreme points of view.

About the Broadcast: The WIP’s Executive Editor, Kate Daniels teams up with identical twin sister Ali Daniels to present Sundays at Five, a weekly radio broadcast on KRXA, Monterey Bay's Progressive Talk Radio station. The twins share stories and discuss topics ranging from campaign finance reform to the phenomenon of Facebook. Tune in every Sunday from 5-6 pm PDT or listen online. Podcasts of previous broadcasts are available on The WIP Talk.

Make a cup of tea and join the conversation!

For most Haitians, when health care is available at all, it all too often treats the immediate problem only. Given the conditions under which the vast majority of Haitians live – dire poverty, malnourishment, and lack of access to water or sanitation – the next illness or physical challenge is an ever-present threat.

Advocacy for a more just and equitable political economy is required for Haitians’ health to prosper. So, too, is health care which addresses structural impediments to well-being. The Association for the Promotion of the Health of the Family (APROSIFA by its French acronym) is that type of health care. The multi-faceted program in the extremely low-income Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Carrefour Feuilles both offers a clinic and addresses social determinants. APROSIFA founder and technical advisor Roseanne August tells about the work.

There’s no social security system in Haiti. When you intervene in the health of a neighborhood, you have to identify the social programs that underlie the state of health.

Health is not just medical care. Health depends on many factors. It’s about people becoming responsible actors, questioning what’s happening in their neighborhood, improving the community. But health is something larger still. Health is the right of people to eat, to have a place to live, to love – yes, love, because love is part of people’s physical and emotional equilibrium – and to have a clean, healthy environment to live in.

We built APROSIFA with the support of Paul Farmer from Partners in Health in ‘93. From the beginning we gave priority to those who were most in need. We focused on women, youth, and children. We opened the clinic and we’ve accompanied them ever since. We refuse to become a big organization with a lot of money and a bureaucracy, which can intimidate people who are very vulnerable.

We struggle to provide services that respect the dignity of the people. During 17 years, more than 300,000 people have passed through APROSIFA. We’ve closely accompanied about 600 to 700 kids from the cradle on. We see about 200 people each day in the clinic. We have 40 staff, some in the clinic and some doing outreach in the region. We have doctors, nurses, nurse-midwife, auxiliary nurses, lab technicians, social workers, health outreach workers, and administrators.

In the beginning, we operated in the classic public health schema. You have a clinic, you provide contraception, you do vaccinations, you teach protection against AIDS, etc. But we’ve realized that’s not what health is. We had to reflect with the people to better understand what health really means. They’ve taught us to question the dominant model of health provision.

Our clinic is always open, but our work of social programs on the ground, we reevaluate and renew that every two years to reflect developments in the neighborhood. For example, there’s been a lot of violence around here in the past couple of years, so we’ve worked hard with youth for violence prevention. There aren’t any recreation centers in the area and the kids have nothing to do. We started an art program for them so they can transform themselves into responsible actors.

People say, “You’re a clinic. Why are you involved in painting, sculpture, photography, videography?” These people in conventional public health, they don’t know the relationship between painting or sculpture and health. They don’t know that when someone has a paintbrush in his hands, when he’s involved in something meaningful, he can free his mental state from being constantly burdened with problems. Plus he has can make some money and change the conditions of his life. We’ve seen good results from the youth we work with. We’re proud of them.

It’s not just to teach the kids and then send them away; we’re here to help them reflect on social issues. We have a crafts program for kids with recycled garbage, for example. The kids think, “I shouldn’t just throw my water sack or empty spaghetti bag on the street. In fact, I could reuse it, sell what I make, and help out my mother.”

When babies and little children come into the clinic, we weigh them. If they’re underweight, we put them into our program for six months. We embrace that child and help their mother out. They get enriched milk two or three times per day and a bowl of hot food in the afternoon, like soup enriched with peanut butter or porridge with enriched flour. We normally take between 25 to 35 malnourished children, from birth to three years. Since the earthquake, given the precariousness of the lives of women who’ve lost their homes, we’re up to 49 children, and we want to go up to 75. As soon as a child is better, we let him or her go and take in another.

We do literacy classes with the mothers, though we’ve had to pause since the earthquake. We also do workshops with them about sexual and reproductive rights, violence against women, and all issues related to women’s health. We give them a little financial support so they can run a little business, but we don’t do micro-credit because we don’t believe in it.

But we’re just a neighborhood association. We are neither an NGO nor the state. We work a lot with the Ministry of Health on tuberculosis vaccinations, for example, but we’re not the ones who are going to change the social conditions of people’s lives. We don’t delude ourselves.

What we do, we do with very little money. We can do it thanks to the support of our partners: Christian Aid, Oxfam Great Britain, ICCO, Partners in Health. Some agencies can’t understand our approach because they have a rigid schema in their head of what public health is supposed to be. They see us as rebels because we’re always reminding them that the reality isn’t how they understand it, though we always work it out.

I’d like to tell the international agencies that they have to work in alliance with the state. And that, after the earthquake, it’s important for them to connect with organizations whose philosophies correspond to the needs of the population. It makes me suffer to see how much money is wasted, going to programs that don’t do any good for the people. The agencies should learn from these small organizations that have developed different models for working with people. AFROSIFA isn’t like any other group, but there are other good models that the international agencies can use as a school.

I know Arevik's story from other Bulgarian bloggers. Briefly, Arevik Shmavonyan is a young Armenian woman. 5 years ago, she met on Skype David Arutyunyan, a young man of Armenian origin living in the city of Montana, Bulgaria. They fell in love and about 3 months ago Arevik came to Bulgaria to unite with her beloved. They could not marry because Bulgarian bureaucracy refused to clear their paperwork, but started living together. After Arevik's 1-month visa expired, she obtained a permission to remain for additional 14 days. However, despite this permission she was sent to the infamous detention facility in the Sofia district of Busmanci, where refugees and candidate immigrants are kept indefinitely without clear reasons (I have blogged about this facility in my earlier post Prison by any other name).
In Busmanci, Arevik found out that she was pregnant. Her pregnancy is problematic, causing cyclic vomiting and severe eating and sleeping problems. Arevik has been in Busmanci already for one month, and for this time has been taken twice to hospital unconscious. Nevertheless, she is still kept there, in a room with about 10 other women and without adequate care. Although Arevik has done nothing wrong, her release is not in sight, and her life is in peril as well as the life of her unborn child.
I appeal to you to try to help Arevik. Svetla Encheva in her April 18 post gives a beautiful model letter citing appropriate quotes from Bulgarian and European legislature, as well as the addresses of the Montana Police Department whose orders have led to Arevik's imprisonment. I shall not translate the letter - knowing the English proficiency of our average law enforcer, I think a short note comprised of simple words would do a better job. In fact, I think that the police will be more impressed by the mere obtaining of messages from abroad written in English than by their text.
Here are two e-mail addresses of the Montana Police Department: rdvrmon@net-surf.net, police@net-surf.net. You can also fill this form. At the top line, you must select "MBP - област Монтана" (Montana Police Department). The lines below are, respectively, for your first name, family name, e-mail, postal address, subject of your message and then comes the field for the text of your message. You are also advised to send a paper letter at the following address:

Comissar Valeri Dimitrov
Police Department - Montana
2 Aleksander Stamboliiski Blvd
BG-3400 Montana
Bulgaria

I also advise you to turn to the Ministry of Interior in the capital Sofia. Its contact form is here. The lines are (from top) for your first name, family name, address, telephone, e-mail and below is the field for the text of the message. The postal address is as follows:

Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov
Ministry of Interior
29, 6th of September Street
BG-1000 Sofia
Bulgaria

Their names are Chandrika, Hamida, Amod, Madhuri, Maria or Jenny. And as varied as these children's names are their nationalities: Indian, Bangladeshi, Nepalese, Nicaraguan or North American. What unites them is that they have been made to work as prostitutes and, in the process, have endangered their lives and well-being and seriously compromised their future.

It is estimated that 4 million women and girls worldwide are bought and sold each year either into marriage, prostitution or slavery. Approximately 1 million children enter the sex trade every year. (Although most are girls; boys are also involved.)

As many as 50,000 women and children from Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe are brought to the United States and forced to work as prostitutes or servants. In the United States during the past two years, the government has prosecuted cases involving hundreds of victims. In other countries where this problem is frequent, the prosecution rate is even lower.

Child sex tourism is worldwide phenomenon, but it is concentrated in Asia and Central and South America. According to UNICEF, 10,000 girls annually enter Thailand from neighboring countries and end up as sex workers. Thailand’s Health System Research Institute reports that children in prostitution make up 40% of prostitutes in Thailand. And between 5,000 and 7,000 Nepali girls are transported across the border to India each year and end up in commercial sex work in Mumbai, Bombay or New Delhi.

Although the greatest number of children working as prostitutes is in Asia, Eastern European children from Eastern European countries, such as Russia, Poland, Romania, Hungary and the Czech Republic, are increasingly vulnerable.

As a social pathological phenomenon, prostitution involving children does not show signs of abating. In many cases, organized groups kidnap children and sell them into prostitution, with border officials and police serving as accomplices.

The U.N. Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women called attention to the levels of state participation and complicity in the trafficking of women and children across borders. Because of their often undocumented status, language deficiencies and lack of legal protection, kidnapped children are particularly vulnerable in the hands of smugglers or corrupt and heartless government officials.

Commercial sexual exploitation of children is increasing worldwide. There are several reasons. These include increased trade across borders, poverty, unemployment, low status of girls, lack of education (including sex education) of children and their parents, inadequate legislation, lack of or poor law enforcement and the eroticization of children by the media, a phenomenon increasingly seen in industrialized countries.

There are also special social and cultural reasons for children entering into the sex trade in different regions of the world. In many cases, children from industrialized countries enter the sex trade because they are fleeing abusive homes. In countries of Eastern and Southern Africa, children who became orphans as a result of AIDS frequently lack the protection of caregivers and are, therefore, more vulnerable to sexual abuse and exploitation. In South Asia, traditional practices that perpetuate the low status of women and girls in society are at the base of this problem. Children exploited sexually are prone to sexually transmitted diseases and HIV/AIDS. In addition, because of the conditions in which they live, children can become malnourished, and develop feelings of guilt, inadequacy and depression.

Besides the moral and ethical implications, the impact that sexual exploitation has on children's health and future development demands urgent attention. Throughout the world, many individuals and nongovernmental organizations are working intensely for the protection of children's rights. Many times, their work puts them in conflict with governments and powerful interest groups.

Among the U.N. agencies, UNICEF has been particularly active in calling attention to this phenomenon and in addressing the root causes of sexual exploitation by providing economic support to families so that their children will not be at risk of sexual exploitation, by improving access to education -- particularly for girls -- and by becoming a strong advocate for the rights of the child.

The work of such nongovernmental organizations and U.N. agencies should be a complement to governments' actions to solve this problem. Those actions should include preventing sexual exploitation through social mobilization and awareness building, providing social services to exploited children and their families and creating the legal framework and resources for psychosocial counseling and for the appropriate prosecution of perpetrators.

The elimination of the sexual exploitation of children around the world is a daunting task, but one that is achievable is effective programs are put in place. Only when this phenomenon is eliminated will we be able to say that the world's children are exercising their right to a healthy, and peaceful, life.

Dr. Cesar Chelala is an international medical consultant residing in New York.

Patrick Elie has long been a democracy activist. Moreover, during President Aristide’s administration-in-exile during the 91-94 coup d’etat, Patrick was coordinator of the anti-drug unit of the National Intelligence Service, where he was key to exposing the collusion between the U.S. government and the military coup leaders. He subsequently served as Aristide’s secretary of defense. Here Patrick discusses how the ‘shock doctrine’ is working in Haiti, why equality is essential to rebuilding the nation, and why Haitians need to break from the vision that the international community has for its reconstruction.

The Shock Doctrine, the book by Naomi Klein, shows that often imperialist countries shock another country, and then while it’s on its knees, they impose their own political will on that country while making economic profits from it. We’re facing an instance of the shock doctrine at work, even though Haiti’s earthquake wasn’t caused by men. There are governments and sectors who want to exploit this shock to impose their own political and economic order, which obviously will be to their advantage.

One thing to watch is a humanitarian coup d’état. We have to be careful. Especially in the early days, the actions weren’t coordinated at all and they overtook the goalie, which is the Haitian government. The little bit of state that’s left is almost irrelevant in the humanitarian aid and reconstruction. What is going to happen is that it’s not Haitians who will decide what Haiti we want, it’s people in other countries.

This doesn’t make sense from a moral perspective, and it also won’t work. A people can’t be developed from the outside. What’s more, in Haiti we have a very strong culture. If you ask people if they want the U.S. to take over the country, even among those who say yes: come back in ten years, and you’ll see that the same people will rise up against the occupation.

We know the Haitian government is weak, and we can’t count on it alone to lead the battle. We all, organized Haitians and our friends, have to stomp our feet and say, “No, this can’t happen. Haitians have to develop their own country.” We need help and support from others, as they say here, to grow the plantains. But they’re our plantains. Haitians have to be the ones to construct the country we need. We have to be in charge.

We have to speak of the role the international community played before the earthquake, and how that role contributed to the destruction of the earthquake: why there were so many victims and so much damage. The politics of certain foreign countries - especially the U.S. since the beginning the 20th Century and, before that, the French – have accentuated the inequality and impoverishment of the people, especially the peasantry.

The soul of the country is the peasantry, and that’s where the true resistance to attempts to put the country under foreign power lies. So foreign policies have focused on undermining the peasantry, as well as weakening the Haitian state. They [the U.S. government] destroyed the Creole pigs [on which peasants depended as their savings bank]; they destroyed local rice by putting Haitian producers in unequal competitors with American producers. That’s why small producers couldn’t survive in the countryside. That’s why the population of Port-au-Prince swelled so much, and why the houses were so poorly constructed and in places where people should never have constructed them in the first place. The result was an earthquake which should have killed some thousands of people, but which instead killed more than 200,000 people.

The peasant migration to the capital: it’s part of our history, in which Haitians are meant to be the lowest paid manual workers. Slavery was the cheapest labor force you could get. Afterward, following the U.S. occupation of Haiti of 1915-1934, Haitians were supposed to provide the hands to cut sugar cane on the plantations. Now it’s no longer sugar cane, it’s manual labor in the textile factories. For that, it’s important to have the political regime you want, but also a peasantry who has to go to work in the factories for the lowest price possible after they can’t any longer produce enough food even to support themselves, let alone feed the nation.

I’m afraid that this vision for Haiti exists from many sources, and that this is the plan that our new friends have for Haiti. We must be very vigilant, and our friends must be very vigilant.

Politically, Haiti’s situation today is like the one after November 18, 1803. That was the big, last battle that finished the war. Haiti was a devastated country, but in that case the devastation was caused by a war of liberation. Then as now, the people were contemplating how they would construct a new political structure amidst the debris.

Independence was proclaimed on January 1, 1804. The people were confronting very powerful enemies inside and out, who opposed their building the society they wanted, which was to be built on three rocks [on which Haitian cook stoves traditionally sit]: liberty, equality, and fraternity. As soon as they took away the rock of equality, fraternity became impossible. Since there was no cohesion, we lost liberty, too.

Today, we have to put the three rocks back under the stove, or it will tip over. What this new Haiti needs today is what Haitians wanted in 1804: equality. The riches of this country are distributed in an imbalanced way. I don’t say that everyone will have exactly the same riches, but everyone has to have the same chance in life.

One thing is land. I can’t believe how some people have such a quantity of land while others have none at all, even though we are all the inheritors of [revolutionary leader Jean-Jacques] Dessalines. I don’t say that we should cut up Haiti into many tiny pieces so each person has some; that would be stupid. But it has to be used in a way that gives others a chance to live.

Look at access to education, too, where inequality manifests today as historically. Education is one of the main tools which can bring equality between citizens. For centuries, the elite didn’t let people have education. Now we’re making progress in the number of children who are going to school, but still the quality isn’t good; it’s not equal.

A country with this kind of inequality doesn’t have a chance to survive this shock.

We have to highlight these questions and insist they get addressed forcefully, so the Haiti we’re rebuilding doesn’t look like the Haiti that the earthquake just ravaged.

You know that often earthquakes provoke tsunamis, huge waves that come after the quakes that sometimes cause more damage than the quakes themselves. I’m afraid that there may be a social tsunami after this earthquake. There are people – Haitian and foreign - who, for their own reasons, can use the frustration of the Haitian people to create disorder, and then use that to pursue their own agenda. I’m not scared of the plots of Haitian politicians, but when they marry them with other governments or businessmen, it’s always very dangerous for Haiti.

I can’t accept that there is no alternative. I see one, but it will take a lot of work. It will require the Haitian people to begin organizing themselves again. It will also require a new political class to enter the scene. This political class is finished; their capacity to propose valid things is spent. For this new political class to emerge, we need youth, but youth with training – not just formal education, but political education that can take from their minds the idea that we can model Haiti on the vision of other countries, and in which we have to play catch-up. The idea of our adopting the model of supposedly more advanced countries like the U.S., that’s a choice, too, but it’s a choice of death. I would rather see us, instead of always trying to catch up, break away and make another path for our own development.

Listen to the April 11th broadcast of Sundays at Five by clicking the play button below.

Kate, Ali, and WIP Contributor Jessica Mosby speak with Director Geralyn Rae Pezanoski about Mine, her documentary about the struggle many pet owners faced to reunite with their pets in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Guest Biography: Geralyn Pezanoski is a renowned photographer, producer and documentary filmmaker whose work has been showcased in several prominent venues. Her documentary, Mine, garnered many accolades as a poignant film which addresses several key moral issues faced in dealing with the aftermath of a disaster.

About the Broadcast: The WIP’s Executive Editor, Kate Daniels teams up with identical twin sister Ali Daniels to present Sundays at Five, a weekly radio broadcast on KRXA, Monterey Bay's Progressive Talk Radio station. The twins share stories and discuss topics ranging from campaign finance reform to the phenomenon of Facebook. Tune in every Sunday from 5-6 pm PDT or listen online. Podcasts of previous broadcasts are available on The WIP Talk.

Make a cup of tea and join the conversation!

Puede que sea una sorpresa para muchos, pero don Quijote todavía vive, y en un lugar donde nadie lo imaginaría. Don Quijote vive ahora en Tucumán, mi ciudad natal en el norte de la Argentina.

No viste armadura sino, a pesar de la temperatura, traje y corbata. Probablemente lleve fajos de papeles, algunos de ellos expedientes legales que le permiten perseguir y enfurecer a sus enemigos. Afortunadamente, sus enemigos son los de la civilidad, la decencia y el honor.

Es de estatura mediana, cara alargada con barba corta, nariz aquilina y ojos penetrantes, entre verdes y azules. Son ojos serios y decididos.

Aunque no es abogado, sus conocimientos legales son enciclopédicos y probablemente superiores a los de cualquier letrado, algo que utiliza para perseguir a los pillos. Trabaja como director de una empresa de construcciones, pero —para consternación de su mujer— deja de lado cualquier actividad para seguir su obsesión.

Lo que más lo identifica no es su aspecto físico, sino más bien su devoción por luchar por causas injustas. En español hay una frase maravillosa que lo define totalmente: «defensor de pobres, menores y ausentes».

Sus derrotas no le hacen mella. Protestó vigorosamente cuando el gobierno argentino otorgó una medalla de honor al general Augusto Pinochet, enviando docenas de cartas a las autoridades argentinas.

Sus protestas fueron desoídas y el general Pinochet recibió su condecoración. Presentó entonces una moción especial para prohibirle usar su medalla, alegando que Pinochet había ayudado a los ingleses contra los argentinos durante la guerra de las Malvinas. Su moción fue denegada una vez más.

Cuando Pinochet murió, nuevamente presentó una moción a las autoridades solicitando que la familia devolviera la medalla. La moción fue otra vez denegada. «Este no es el fin de esta historia», me dijo después, mortificado.

Un incidente reciente lo muestra de cuerpo entero. Durante mucho tiempo fue una fuente de irritación para los tucumanos que al lado de la casa de gobierno hubiera un edificio de departamentos de doce pisos cuya pared contigua estaba cubierta con el logo de una empresa internacional de bebidas gaseosas.

Para los tucumanos parecía que la empresa fuera dueña del gobierno de la ciudad. Aunque irritados, los ciudadanos comunes no podían hacer nada.

Vivo en Nueva York y visito a mi familia en Tucumán por lo menos una vez al año. Durante una de mis visitas caminaba con don Quijote cuando vi el logo que abarataba no sólo la casa de gobierno, sino todos los alrededores. No pude evitar comentar a mi amigo que ese enorme logo afeaba la zona.

«No se preocupe», me dijo, «muy pronto ya no estará allí». Me reí descreído.

«¿Quién va a borrarlo?», pregunté. Se dio vuelta y me contestó: «Yo».

Volví a reírme. Afortunadamente, no pareció enojarse por mi reacción. No se lo dije, pero me preguntaba cómo iba a hacer algo que ni los funcionarios del gobierno habían podido hacer: derrotar a una de las empresas internacionales más poderosas del mundo.

En mi siguiente visita a la ciudad ya no estaba el logo. La enorme pared estaba totalmente pintada de blanco. Sorprendido, llamé a mi amigo y le pregunté qué había ocurrido. «¿No le dije que lo borraría?», dijo orgullosamente. Entonces me dio algunos de los detalles de la operación.

Había contactado arquitectos y funcionarios de la municipalidad que estaban de acuerdo con él pero que no habían podido obligar a la empresa a quitarlo. Había intereses muy poderosos detrás del logo que ocupaba el mejor espacio de la ciudad, le explicaron. A pesar de eso, don Quijote presentó varias quejas legales a las autoridades, aunque inútilmente. Siguió luchando sin inmutarse.

Finalmente, después de nueve meses de incansable lucha («fue un parto», me dijo), encontró un resquicio legal y pudo obtener un decreto municipal que obligaba a la empresa a quitar el logo ofensivo.

Después de muchas derrotas, éste era obviamente un importante logro para mi amigo. No pude sino preguntarle, «¿Por qué continúa luchando por todas esas causas perdidas que son tan costosas, le insumen tanta energía, y no le producen ningún beneficio financiero?».

Me miró tristemente y respondió: «Porque si no lo hago, me enfermo».

César Chelala es un médico y escritor argentino, co-ganador del premio Overseas Press Club of America por un artículo sobre derechos humanos.

I was watching TV recently when three news anchors, two females and one male, began speaking about Madonna’s new clothing line inspired by Lourdes, her teenage daughter. What upset me was that she was inappropriately referred to as an “aging rock star” by the two news anchors and their co-anchor standing by the sidelines. It started with the female anchor, sarcastically stating, “If you want a line by an aging rock star……”

I feel her tone of voice and choice of words was unnecessary and insulting to Madonna and to women as a whole because it screams of sexism. I’m not even sure I can call it sexism because it was perpetuated by women on a fellow woman.

It’s no news that the music industry is struggling and everyone including Madonna must find ways to reinvent themselves to remain relevant and make money by connecting to a wider audience and including younger demographics, however her creating a clothing line shouldn’t induce such negative comments.

Madonna at 61 is no spring chicken, but saying she’s “an aging rock star” is unfair. Who refers to Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger or Bono as aging rock stars? These men are all in the same category of recording artists who have passed their prime, but men “don’t age” only women do. In fact, as they get older they are considered hot. Ke$ha in her recent hit song, Tik Tok sings, “And now, the dudes are lining up cause they hear we got swagger. But we kick em to the curb unless they look like Mick Jagger.” At 66, Mick Jagger as far as Ke$ha and so many other women worldwide are concerned is still a hottie. Though in reality age is nothing but a number, we see the double standards clearly.

We women are sometimes our own worst enemies. These two female news anchors who are relatively young now think its funny referring to Madonna that way but what they forget is that they are all in the very vain looks based entertainment industry and as my mother says, when I laugh at the many things she can no longer do, “keep on living, your time is coming.” Needless to say, these tactless news anchors won’t be young forever, and they will become aging news anchors fearing being replaced by younger perkier versions.

If the male correspondence started it, I would have said he was just a male chauvinist pig being insensitive, but a female news anchor started it and he just laughed. When the other female news anchor repeated what the first one said, I just shook my head in disbelief. If the male news anchor had made the statement, I would’ve expected one or both of the women to make remarks to put him in his place but no, we woman can do a good job of saying something offensive to depict our fellow woman in a negative light as if we don’t have enough negativity coming at us already.

We all know that to men, women’s youth and beauty are prized possessions. That’s why many men trade their wives in for newer models, as aptly depicted in the movie, The First Wives Club but when women are the first to make unprompted disparaging remarks about another woman’s youth or beauty, I find it particularly offensive.

If you haven’t been privy to watching women talk negatively about other women’s looks, watch a couple of episodes of America’s Next Top Model. That will fill you in. Keep in mind that these are all gorgeous girls vying to become top models and you’ll be amazed at how they often have no problem bad mouthing each other’s looks so I guess after watching that, Madonna being called an aging rock star shouldn't be too surprising to me.

As people, we all age, Madonna included. I say shame on these news anchors that have nothing better to do than to make fun of her instead of commending her on how hard she works to look as good as she does for her age and her strength for staying relevant in the ever tumultuous entertainment industry for as long as she has.

I would like to implore all women to consciously remember to be kind when talking about other women. This is one of the simplest ways to pay it forward for other women.

Lenz Jean-Francois is a social psychologist. He is also a professor and provisional head of the psychology department of the School of Social Sciences of the State University of Haiti. He talks about how local organizations and institutions are using social psychology in Haiti’s post-earthquake context to help survivors heal.

Haitians’ humanity is threatened today. If there is a battle that Haitians don’t want to lose, it’s their humanity. Each one is looking for recognition that he or she is present, that he or she is among the living.

The difficult situation that Haitians are going through today makes them more fragile. But it can also be a force.

How do we encourage people to reclaim control of their lives [after the catastrophe]? How do they rebuild their control, reestablish their ties with others, and find their confidence so they can resolve their problems?

In Haitian families, the way they socialize their kids, they give a lot of importance to the capacity for endurance. They teach kids to always be ready for a tough situation, to struggle to hold onto their dignity.

In this adversity we’ve been living under since January 12, many people have been having the experience, individually and collectively, of realizing “I didn’t know I had all this strength, all this capacity. I thought I would crack. I thought I would collapse.” When people realize that they have a government which is extremely weak, and that they have together - with their fingers, with their little hammers, their machetes, their sticks – saved so many neighbors, so many family members… they realize that they have so much strength.

We say that what’s positive within the population, build on that. We’re saying that we’re not only rebuilding ourselves, we’re rebuilding our nation. Our slogan is ‘Rebuild Our House.’ We’re promoting collective resilience and tying it to a political vision.

We in social psychology are saying: Let’s recognize our strength, individually and collectively.

We have the strength to continue, to construct our country, to do it ourselves. Gandhi said, certain things have to be done by Indians. When they do something with their own hands, they come to believe in themselves. The Haitian people have to do things with their own hands so they can know they have the strength and the capacity, so they can say, “This was my dream.”

As long as people are depending on others, that’s going to challenge them. There are certain organizations that live off of victims; they have to have victims to survive. We say, instead, that Haitian people have their strength, their capacity: reinforce it.

If you do something for someone who has the confidence to do it him or herself, you make them more dependent, you make them lose their self-confidence. Let them valorize themselves. If people have the capacity to make their food, let them do it. It allows them to have control over their lives, over their environment.

The social psychology that we’re using [in today’s context] has five steps. First is verbalization. Haitians like to talk. We let people express themselves and talk about their experiences. Second is understanding and expressing their emotional reaction. Third is discourse about the false explanations of causes behind the event, that religious people are putting out. We objectify the earthquake as a natural event, historicize it, let people recognize its prior existence in their own history, and do comparison with other earthquakes that are happening all over. The next point is acceptance. You can’t change the earthquake, but how do you change your relationship with it? This is not resignation. Humans have an extraordinary capacity of adaptation. Last is what we call ‘Rebuild the House.’ This is projecting ourselves as actors into a positive future that we ourselves will construct.

That’s where this psychological approach sits: letting people retake control of their lives and letting them know they are the actors in advancing the people. We say to people, “Believe in your strength. In your capacity to rebuild this country.”

Their point of resistance is in conserving their humanity. They prove that capacity each day, the way they’re surviving since January 12.

Thanks to Gina Vrignaud and Ricardo Toussaint for their help with this interview.

Because I once home schooled my children, I have been forced into many a debate over the importance of public school as a necessary means of socialization. If you choose not to send your children to Kindergarten, the overwhelming belief system in our culture is that you are depriving them of something necessary as this is the arena where they will learn how to interact with others, to make friends, to socialize. Even my own students, many of whom have opted out of the mainstream public school because they find the social "scene" there intolerable, are convinced that attending school at the age of 5 was somehow integral to their social development. If you don't go to school, they say, than you will be a "social retard".

I've always found this argument mind boggling, and can only assume that my own experience in public school must have been somehow dramatically different than everyone else, otherwise, how could anyone possibly equate public school with "positive socialization"? In my experience, school was where you learned if you were a loser or not. It was where you found out you were too poor to ever be cool. It as where the "gay" kids got tortured and harassed. It was where the kid that played the flute got tossed down the hill everyday. It was where the German girl who smelled funny got taunted relentlessly every time she stepped onto the school bus and no one would let her sit down. It was where anyone who didn't fit in was taught, day in and day out, about humiliation. And it was where we all learned that negative personality traits, such as cruelty, selfishness, ego centrism, a propensity for violence, and homophobia were what made a person popular and powerful. The more vile you were, the more you were revered by your classmates. Positive socialization?!!! Are you kidding me?!!!

With the indictment of nine teenagers, following the suicide of the fifteen year old student Phoebe Prince , perhaps it is safe to say that the long accepted culture of bullying and oppressive social behaviors in our public schools is finally going to be overhauled. Maybe, now that teenagers and administrators are being held legally responsible for allowing or participating in student abuse, schools will finally become the places of "positive socialization" I have long heard about, but so rarely seen. However, I have my doubts.

Ideally, every child would be taught positive social behaviors at home. They would be taught to treat others with respect. They would be taught compassion. They would be taught to respect others regardless of sexual orientation, skin color, or religious beliefs. This way, our schools would be filled with children who, though imperfect as we all are, at least come prepared with a metaphorical tool belt for navigating the often overwhelming environment of too many kids forced to be together day after day, without enough adult supervision to keep them behaving at their personal best.

Schools are expected to somehow not only teach kids how to read and write, add and subtract and multiply, but how to be nice people as well. They are expected to control the behaviors of students -- students that can often number in the thousands. Looking back, I don't know what the adults in my schools could have done to make us be nicer to each other. Some of it could have been stopped. The stuff on the bus got out of hand everyday, and the bus driver never did anything. But most of it went on below the radar, and even if a teacher had intervened, what difference would that have made in the long run? Who was hated and who was not had been decided by some unspoken consensus and no adult could change that anymore than they could keep us from smoking in the bathrooms.

Our public schools are microcosms of the communities in which they reside -- very often mirroring the value systems, behaviors, and social paradigms that exist outside the school walls. While anti-bullying legislation is critical, and the fight to make our public schools safe for all children should never be given up, anyone who blindly believes that when they send their kid to school in the morning they are providing their child with a positive social experience is living in denial. My own children no longer home school, and one attends a public school. I am grateful for what his school is able to offer him, however, not for a moment do I fool myself into thinking that my son is in an environment of his peers designed to make him a kind and loving person. That's my job.

Today at 5 p.m. PST I will be on KRXA talking about the documentary Mine! The director, Geralyn Rae Pezanoski, will be on the show too! And you should call in to chat!

For people throughout the world, the election of Barak Obama to the U.S. presidency seemed to signal in a new era, that of the end of racism. Indeed, Obama’s election was a momentous occasion and, one would have hoped, a milestone on the road to reconciliation. However, some recent, very ominous events cast a worrisome veil over the democratic process in the United States.

There are many reasons that can explain Obama’s election as President: his penetrating intelligence, a well orchestrated campaign, and a life devoted to public service in which each action was like a brilliant chess move by a master of the game. But there were other factors of equal significance.

Before Obama’s election, not only was the country involved in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in what increasingly looks like a quagmire, particularly in the latter country. The economy was in a desperate state, and unemployment and health costs were rising. There was a feeling of widespread malaise in the country believed by many to be the result of an incompetent president manipulated by darker forces, an opinion widely shared throughout the world.

However, after the initial high of Obama’s election, there is now a changed atmosphere in the country. Violence is an inescapable companion to racism. And violence, or violent outbursts racially motivated, are certainly on the increase in the U.S. Threats against President Obama have increased by 400% since President George W. Bush left office, the highest numbers on record.

What makes this situation particularly worrisome is that they come not only from fringe elements in society. Thinly disguised, they also originate from certain political leaders who seem intent on creating an atmosphere of violence and disrespect around the President and the presidency.

How else can one interpret this statement by House Minority Leader John Boehner? “There is a political rebellion going on in America, and what we saw last night was just a glimpse of it,” he stated after last November’s elections. One doesn’t need to be a psychologist or a linguist to understand that such statements stoke the fires of rebellion, and are all the more dangerous when coming from a leader holding one of the most powerful offices in Washington.

As if this weren’t enough, Boehner added, “Clearly it’s been a difficult year. For us it’s been like standing in front of a machine gun--liberal ideas every single week, one after another. I think it really has the American people concerned. They are scared to death,
actually.”

Not to be upstaged, the ineffable Mrs. Palin, vice-presidential candidate of the Republican Party during the last presidential election—and an avid hunter--told her Tea Party supporters at a recent event in Nevada, “Don’t retreat, reload.”

If to these dangerous words--rebellion, machine gun, scared to death, reload--one adds the recent attacks on Democratic legislators during discussion of the health care bill in which they were spat on and threatened with racial and homophobic insults one has the makings of a racially charged –and extremely dangerous- atmosphere in the country.

Although there are other causal factors as well – political, social, economic - there can be no doubt that racism plays an important role.

The country is now facing an increase of 244 percent increase in the number of Patriot groups (militias and other organizations that see the federal government as their enemy) in 2009. At the same time, there has also been an increase in the number of anti-immigration groups throughout the country. These groups grew from 173 in 2008 to 309 in 2009, a rise of nearly 80 percent.

Are we facing a setback after so much work done in the last decades to overcome division and hatred in America? Mr. Doudou Diène, a former United Nations Special Rapporteur on Contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, stated after visiting several states in the U.S., “Racism and racial discrimination have profoundly and lastingly marked and structured American society. The U.S. has made decisive progress. However, the historical, cultural and human depth of racism still permeates all dimensions of life and American society.”

Cesar Chelala, a co-winner of an Overseas Press Club of America award, is a contributing editor to The Globalist.

Rupiah hides his failures by firing Defense Chiefs
Derrick Sinjela-A personal View point
PERHAPS as an indication of a failed leadership, President Rupiah Bwezani Banda avoided talking real issues at last weeks Press Conference opting to waste valuable time provided by tax payers through the event on the academic replacement of all three defense forces leadership.
Instead of taking advantage of the presidential platform, provided by State House Grounds, President Banda missed the opportunity to reassure the Zambian public and the international community on corrective measures being taken to address pertinent questions.
In a way justifying the failure, Press Aide Dickson Jere discouraged journalists from asked questions outside the perimeter of the Presidents sacking of defense force chiefs.
Making the changes a somewhat uninspiring but arrogant sounding, President Banda sought solace in the argument that the changes were meant to motivate junior officers to aspire for higher portfolio’s within the three arms of defense in Zambia.
However, barely before these words could dry on the lips of the Zambian Head of State, Andrew Sakala, an Easterner, like President Banda, was recalled from retirement to take step into the leadership shoes of Lieutenant General Mapala at the Zambia Airfare.
Secondly, seeking effective control of security wings ahead of heated contest for the Presidency in 2011, Banda reiterated that Zambia made been peaceful since 1964.
Though he praised the trio for working diligently, President Banda let the cat out of the hat by suggestively hinting on some semblance of lack of loyalty.
“Zambia has been peaceful and stable. The last three years, from the illness till the demise of President Levy Patrick Mwanawasa, a tense period has prevailed. The peace enjoyed in our country can be attributed to a number of reasons among them to the character of the Zambian people. The defense and security forces of Zambia have fought enemies meant to destabilize Zambia and served us well as peace keepers. I want to commend ZAF, ZNS, Zambia Army and the Zambia Police Force for defending Zambia and maintaining peace. I want to commend leadership for providing leadership. As Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, I am proud to have been associated with them and I thank. Even as I effect these retirements, I am confident that they shall continue to remain patriotic to Zambia. The retirements are in no way a reason of failure but necessary in the life,” President Banda made a case.
President Banda argued that several middle to high ranking officers had expressed concern at slow pace of appointments.
“These changes meant to encourage and motivate the next generation. I hope and trust that the changes I have made I urge new appointees to remain loyal and be above board. So that Zambia can continue to grow socially and economically.
In retiring Zambia Army (ZA) Commander, Lieutenant General Isaac Chisuzi, Zambia Air Force (ZAF) Commander, Samuel Mapala, and Zambia National Service (ZNS) Commander, Major-General Raphael Chisheta, President Banda acknowledged their loyalty.
“I wish to thank the trio for serving Zambia with diligence and loyalty. I do hope he will accept to be deployed elsewhere,” President Banda said.
As fate has always been, the trio and their deputies are most likely to be posted to the diplomatic service with one of them scheduled to replace recalled Zambian ambassador to Libya, Mulondwe Muzungu.
Major Sandy Lopa is new Zambia Army Commander. All Armed Forces Deputy Commandants were equally sacked.
“I have spoken to the three men at the top of the defense forces and the trio is convinced that I mean well. Do not read the opposite of my decision and I am certain that God knows that I mean well,” President Banda protested when quizzed by journalists.
Interestingly, President Banda shied away from discussing pertinent issues such Governments lasting solution to floods, given public concern that mere relocation of victims to the independence stadium land was not ideal.
Stakeholders expected President Banda to have addressed preparations for next year’s tripartite elections, his frequent and costly foreign trips, including the failure to address issues of bread and butter.
Critics would have been sent packing had President Banda assured the nation that the ruling Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD) was not interested in eliminating Patriotic Front (PF) leader Michael Sata and Hakainde Hichilema, viewed as his (RB) biggest threat on remaining a State House tenant after the September 2011 elections.

Laura Wagner, a U.S. anthropologist who survived – barely - Haiti’s earthquake in January, writes, “Social scientists who study catastrophes say there are no natural disasters. In every calamity, it is inevitably the poor who suffer more, die more, and will continue to suffer and die after the cameras turn their gaze elsewhere. Do not be deceived by claims that everyone was affected equally -- fault lines are social as well as geological.”

It is doubtful that anyone of any class was spared the horror of the 7.3-scale earthquake. In a country where one in every to 18 to 30 people died (no one knows the fatality figure), everyone knows someone no longer amongst the living. No one is sheltered from the jarring public visuals of catastrophe: rampant displays of wounds and freshly amputated legs; mountains of rubble on every city block; tents and improvised shelters clogging streets; houses and walls looming ominously over sidewalks. No conversation appears to veer long from the earthquake and its aftermath.

But the direct impact of the earthquake varies markedly between class. The solidity of housing construction was the primary variable in whose home stood and whose did not. The toll of lost family and friends is a direct result of that, too, as most died due to buildings collapsing on them. Income lost is also largely class-dependent, since the poor’s job security and access to the informal sector earnings are much more precarious.

For those in Haiti’s middle- and upper-income strata, before-the-earthquake privileges are returning. Lines are long in Port-au-Prince’s few grocery stores, where one can buy an array of imported goods and where one need not sweat, haggle over prices, or stand next to fly-filled garbage piles while shopping. Jazz clubs are reopening in tony Pétionville. Easter celebrations were, for some, lavish.

For most, though, post-earthquake ‘normalization’ means adaptation to even higher levels of social and economic precariousness. Life was somewhere between unsustainable and miserable for most Haitians before. Then - in what were, inconceivably, better times - 80% lived below the poverty line and 54% lived in abject poverty. Then, Haiti was the third hungriest country in the world, after Somalia and Afghanistan, and ranked 149 out of 182 countries on the United Nations Human Development Index. Life expectancy at last count was 55 years for women and 53 years for men, while adult literacy stands at about 62%.

For those already exiled to the absolute margin of survival through government neglect, unchallenged concentration of land and other resources by a few, and foreign economic policies, the effects of the earthquake ripple in ever-expanding circles. These survivors lost not only family members, homes, and all their personal belongings. Many have also lost the merchandise they were selling, their informal sector jobs, and whatever else might have given them a little protection from hunger, suffering, and accelerated death.

No reliable statistics exist to demonstrate the socio-economic impacts of the earthquake. And no metric can measure how poverty has increased the emotional and psychological suffering of Haiti’s defavorize, disfavored, as they are called. For now, anecdotes will have to do.

* In a collective taxicab, I ask the driver the same question I ask all day long. “Did you lose anyone?”

He nods. It was his 8-year-old daughter Wesline, named for him, Wesner.

“She was playing in the yard and a big house fell one her. I had to pull her out from under the house.”

Wesner lifts up a swatch of carpet covering his dashboard, and pulls out a miniature Bible. He rifles through the pages to find a postage-stamp-sized snapshot of Wesline, a slim girl resting one hand stiffly on a table, surely under instructions from the photographer.

“You know no morgues or hospitals were working. I wanted to bury her in the countryside but I didn’t have money for transportation. I tried to get the money, but after three days she started to rot so I couldn’t wait anymore. I had to put her beside the road.

“The tractors came with their buckets in front. But I couldn’t stand for them to scoop her up. So I wrapped her up tightly in a sheet – two sheets, in fact – and placed her in the scoop in front myself.”

Do you know where they took her? “They dumped her.” He flicks his hand out, away.

I ask how he’s faring with this loss. His stoicism gives out, and his face crumples like a balloon when the air rushes out. “I’m resigned to it. But I never stop thinking about her for one minute.”

* An elderly woman lives in a small maroon tent in the middle of a courtyard. She spends her days sitting on a wooden stool under an almond tree, listening to a little radio in her lap. I don’t know her name, as she’s rarely during the two months in which I have passed her on the way to and from my apartment. One day, she began returning my smiles. Yesterday she suddenly informed me, “It’s so hard. Sometimes my courage gives out, and I don’t know what to do.

“I rented a house before. It wasn’t destroyed, but now the landlord took it back. I don’t have any money to rent another one. I used to work, I sewed for people, but my sewing machine got destroyed during the event. I’m old, I don’t have any other way to make money.

“Shabim [another neighbor] gave me the tent, but I can tell the owner of this place doesn’t like me being here. I used to bathe in the courtyard” – I have seen her washing from a tin of water behind a tree, trying to shield her bare top from public view – “but now I’m too ashamed.”

“I can’t see what I’ll do or how this will end.” She whispers, “It’s hard, it’s hard.

“This morning I went to church. I didn’t have anything to say to God so I just lifted my arms up” – she does this now, straight up toward heaven – “and I said, ‘God, I’m here. Please see me.’”

* Getro Nelius gives a tour of the stadium, on whose field his family now lives with more than 700 others. Do they feed you? “They gave us a bag of rice, nine big cans, when we first got to the stadium. They haven’t given us anymore.”

They don’t give you any food?

“I think they don’t want us to get too comfortable here, thinking we can get food and water and a tent.”

“Well, once they gave us a card to get cans of Spam. But otherwise we have to find it.”

Find it? With what money? Not one homeless person that I know is working. Even if they came upon something to sell – a few pairs of shoes donated from the U.S., say – who has money to buy?

* The sociology student Fito Beaubrun talks often about his daughters, 8-year-old Vanya, who died in the earthquake, and 2-year-old Lexia, who did not. His wife Rosette and Lexia have gone back to the countryside to be with family, because Rosette could no longer take living in the street. Fenelon worries aloud about the problems that have come between them due to the separation and the anxiety, and fears that he will soon lose Rosette to another man.

He also worries about Lexia. He had difficulty meeting her 2-year-old needs even before the earthquake, but now the situation has become dire. Take milk which, Fito claims, is Lexia’s main passion. “The quality of the milk I can give her corresponds to the quantity of the money I have.”

Lexia now gets the lowest quality of milk available. Even that her parents give her with twice the standard ratio of water.

* My old friend Alina “Tibebe” Cajuste is, inconceivably, even skinnier than last time I saw her.

Her life has been hard ever since her enslaved mother birthed her in the middle of an intersection, but it has just grown harder.

Tibebe used to live in a 15’ x 15’ house next door to her landlord on the noisy, polluted, stinking Carrefour road. The walls of her house collapsed during the quake, leaving nothing but a cement floor and a tin roof. Tibebe, one of her daughters, and two other families – eight people in all - now sleep on the slab. One family has gotten hold of a Coleman tent; another has a thin single mattress. Tibebe and her daughter sleep on the cement. They own nothing except one suitcase of clothes that they managed to rescue from under the rubble.

Blocks fell on Tibebe during the earthquake, breaking her toe and injuring her back. She mentioned in passing one day that she was spitting up blood. Another of her daughters was badly injured when a cement wall fell on her during the earthquake, but it was weeks before Tibebe was able to get money for her medical care. She worries constantly about the daughter, but doesn’t have the bus fare to go visit her.

Tibebe says, “It’s only the heat of the sun keeping us alive.”

Theodore Roosevelt the 26th president of the United States stated, “Do what you can with what you have where you are.” For many people especially in countries like the United States this is a given. Everyone is encouraged to use his or her talents and abilities. Everyone despite age, size, or gender. Sadly, this is not the case everywhere. In those places they have to learn to follow the children’s fable called “The Bundle of Sticks”. The story shows how alone people can break easily, but as a group they stay strong. The more and more people the stronger the bundle. This fact is not acknowledged everywhere though. Some people discourage a major part of society from using what they have and helping the bundle to become stronger. Some people believe women cannot contribute to society and the best job for them is called ‘housewife.’ Of course, it is an option and if a woman chooses to be a housewife no one can blame her. On the other hand, if people in general have abilities and talents that they can contribute to make our world stronger and more efficient they should not be hidden from society. Fighting against gender inequality can help achieve a more efficient and successful world.

The first action that can be taken is stopping female infanticide and feticide. Directly this may not seem to be connected to global achievement, but indeed it is because every year we lose millions of female brains that could be the next Marie Curie or Mother Teresa. The mere reason for their lives being taken away is their gender. Even though, female infanticide is well known throughout the world there is not much being done to stop it. If people used half the energy they use to stop global warming for stopping female infanticide we would have a group of bright women helping the world progress. Many Asian countries where sons are always preferred over daughters and in society males are valued more than females, infanticide is prominent. China and India are two countries where female infanticide and feticide has been in the millions. According to the U.N. and national census or population studies by Valerie Hudson, BYU: In 2000, China had 40,617,103 victims of female infanticide and feticide while just a year later India had a similar number of 39,284,065. Imagine if your mother, daughter, sister, or female friend died. You would expect many of their loved ones to attend a funeral and mourn. Maybe over a 100 people would miss your loved one. This means about 4,000,000,000 people should miss these victims. Sadly, that is not the case. These children are unloved because of their gender and if they had the chance to grow up a 100 would have missed them and loved them.

Another major problem arising out of female infanticide is the imbalance in the sex ratio of male to female. This imbalance has a great possibility of causing the resurrection of gender unequal ideas and traditions. According to “Growing Gender Inequality in India” by Cami Martin: in 1981 there were 962 girls for every 1,000 boys and in 2001 this number decreased to 927. This decrease in the population of women is more likely due to new technology that allows parents to easily find the gender of the child before birth and abort them instead of having the child and being unsure about murdering it. Feeling, abortion more humane prompts couples against the idea of female children to commit feticide. The most important factor of the change in sex ratio is not why it happens though, but the impact it will cause. Joseph Chamie, research director at the Center for Migration Studies and former director of the United Nations Population Division, writes in “The global abortion bind”, “By 2020, it’s estimated that the number of young “surplus males” unable to find brides could be more than 35 million in China and 35 million in India.” These great imbalances will cause men to buy brides and maybe even resort to child marriages. Trafficking of females will increase due to their demand. We will be going backwards in our road of progress. Child brides and kidnapped women do not have the ability to go out into the world to be educated and help development of society.

The simple raising of awareness can impact this problem. Join a facebook group against this atrocity or create one. Make your twitter status as ‘I hereby will help stop female infanticide’ and let your friends know that they can, too. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.” Never think that your contribution has no worth because that one step you take is just a step closer to seeing the whole staircase. Even if your involvement can only save one life out of millions that only means that you have given life to a person that will be a loved one and family of many. Any role you play allows you to pat yourself on the back for you were someone that helped save the future of our society. You were one who helped the great minds of the future survive. You helped destroy gender inequality. Equal view of both genders will be the end to the majority of detrimental problems to society and the beginning to a successful future so play your part.

CITATIONS

Chamie, J. (n.d.). The global abortion bind - On Line Opinion - 13/6/2008. On Line Opinion - Australia's e-journal of social and political debate. Retrieved March 7, 2010, from http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=7484&page=0

Martin, C. (n.d.). Growing Gender Inequality in India | Global Envision. Global Envision | The Confluence of Global Markets and Poverty Alleviation. Retrieved March 7, 2010, from http://www.globalenvision.org/node/1769

Where Have All the Girls Gone?. (n.d.). Free Website Hosting – Angelfire free website templates to make your own free website. Retrieved March 7, 2010, from http://www.angelfire.com/planet/femaleinfanticide/fanticide.html

Last night I attended the 14th annual Youth Speaks Grand Slam poetry competition at the Warfield Theater, in San Francisco. The event was exciting, inspiring, and, on more than one occasion, moved me to tears. I am currently trying to recover my voice which I believe I lost towards the end of the three and a half hour show, due to a righteous amount of screaming -- I always try and do my part.

The young poets who performed awed me with their talent, their courage, and their stories. Though any young adult can compete, many of those in the grand finals had participated in a Youth Speaks workshop -- free, after school, spoken word workshops that are offered at various locations across the Bay Area.

I brought with me five teenage boys, ranging in age from 13-16. I also had eight student attendees, scattered about the auditorium -- lured there by a promise of a generous dose of extra credit, should they attend and write about their experience afterward. Of the boys in my attendance, none of them are currently writers, or poets, nor would I consider them to be of an "artistic" or "poetic" temperament. One of my sons, in fact, had threatened me repeatedly before the show with some form of bodily harm should he become bored during the performance.

Luckily for the state of my forearm, no one was bored. Boredom, in fact, would have been nearly impossible. The performance pieces were mind blowing, the DJ was rocking the house, the MC, at four foot nine, was somehow epic in proportions, and I was reminded, for three and half hours straight, what education is supposed to be like.

Teaching is a dichotomous profession. On one hand, it's about the students and meeting their needs, and on the other, there are the very real policy decisions that keep the job forever political. But watching these young people perform last night, brought me back for a moment -- away from the budget cuts, the No Child Left Behind debacle, the upcoming STAR tests, and the President's loathsome Race to the Top. It brought me back from my fears and doubts in the classroom, to a place of remembrance.

Imagine if every public school had creative writing and spoken word built into their curriculum -- if instead of forcing elementary school students to craft five paragraph essays, we taught them how to tell their stories, and perhaps even more importantly, how to value each others stories. How to truly listen.

Not everyone is a writer, just as not everyone is a painter, or an illustrator, or gardener, or a cook. But until we begin to integrate the arts into our schools as thoroughly and as adamantly as we have integrated US History, English Literature, and Math, our children will lose, and we, as a culture, will continue to be negatively impacted by our collective ignorance.

Camp Ashraf, 50 miles north of Baghdad, is home to 3,400 Iranian dissidents, including 1,000 women, all members of the Iranian opposition group, the People’s Mojahedin Organization (PPO) of Iran, living as political refugees for nearly 3 decades and under the Fourth Geneva Convention after 2003. My name is Maryam Zoljalal, 28, and I am one of these women. Due to the oppression of my people in Iran by the ruling mullahs’ regime, I left my life and education in Sweden and relocated to camp Ashraf in Iraq. I have lived in Ashraf for the last 10 years for the freedom of my people, being the voice of the oppressed women of my country. Currently I spend part of my time as a nurse in the Camp Ashraf clinic.

• Maryam in her clinic at Camp Ashraf. •

The Iranian regime has used every opportunity to terrorize and oppress Ashraf residents, especially in the past two decades. My mother, Efat, was gunned down in an Iranian regime’s Quds Force terrorist attack in Baghdad on May 17, 1995. I loved her very much.

After the occupation of Iraq in 2003, residents of camp Ashraf were granted the status of protected persons under the Fourth Geneva Convention, legally obligating the U.S. government to protect them. However, after 2009 when security of Camp Ashraf was handed over to the Iraqi government, an all-out and inhumane siege has been enforced on Camp Ashraf residents under Prime Minister Maliki’s orders, at the behest of Tehran’s mullahs. This siege is endangering and jeopardizing the simple daily needs of Ashraf residents, especially to medical care. Former Iraqi National Security Advisor Moaffaq al-Rubaii, shortly after the Iraqi government gained control of Ashraf, said they intend to make life for the residents of Camp Ashraf “intolerable.”

During the 15 month-long siege of Camp Ashraf, including blockade on everyday needs and fuel to be delivered to the camp, a severe limitation has been placed on access to medicine and urgent medical services, especially for women, causing a status of crisis in some cases. Among the 1,000 women in Camp Ashraf, at least 541 of them need medical specialists, although they have been deprived of this care for months. 90 of them have critical cases and finally, seven of them are in urgent need of special medical care. At the current status, none of the women patients in Ashraf receive appropriate medical services due to the limitations implemented by the Iraqi authorities. A number of these women are suffering from cancer and need imperative care. There are also patients suffering from cancer whose cases, due to the medical limitation placed on Ashraf, are recognized belatedly and are either no longer treatable or are cared for within very difficult conditions. Some of the patients are in danger of losing their vision.

The above mentioned are only a glance at the small portion of the difficulties for the women of Ashraf. These inhumane measures are all part of the Iranian regime’s suppressive conspiracies against its main opposition. The goal of Tehran’s mullahs and their allies in the Iraqi government is to suppress and annihilate the camp and its residents, especially the women.

Following the latest political developments in Iraq, and the Iranian regime and its proxy's severe setback in the recent elections, threats against Ashraf residents are on the rise. The Iranian regime is furiously trying to take back the momentum of establishing the next government, gained by democratic and nationalistic forces, and maintain its dominating influence in Iraq. Due to the Iraqi people’s wide ranging resistance to the Iranian regime’s interference in their country, odds of such a plan are very slim. Therefore, threats against Ashraf residents, before the formation of a new government by nationalists and anti-Iranian regime forces, have raised international concerns. Many human rights organizations around the world, European and N. American MPs have insisted on these worries regarding the residents of Ashraf. Along with the majority of parliamentarians in the UK, Norway and Finland, the majority of the US Congress, in Resolution 704, with 230 sponsored to this day, have called on President Obama and the UN to play a more effective role in protecting Ashraf residents. Any hesitation and wavering by the US administration and the UN, in acting more decisively regarding the protection of Ashraf residents, will result in a human catastrophe in this camp.

It may come as a surprise to many, but Don Quixote is still alive, and in a most unlikely place. Don Quixote is now living in Tucumán, my hometown in Northern Argentina.

He is not dressed with body armor but rather, despite usually scorching temperatures, with suit and tie. He will probably be carrying bundles of papers, some of them legal sheaves which enable him to persecute and enrage his enemies. Fortunately, his enemies are also those of civility, decency, and honor.

He is of medium height, a narrow face with a short beard, an aquiline nose, and penetrating eyes, a mixture of green and blue. They are serious, determined eyes.

Although he is not a lawyer himself, his legal knowledge is encyclopedic and probably greater than that of any lawyer, something he uses to full advantage when suing miscreants. He works as a director in a construction company but—to his wife’s dismay—he will sideline any activity to pursue his obsessions.

What identifies him most is not his physical aspect. It is rather his devotion to fight for unjust causes. There is a wonderful phrase in Spanish that totally defines him, “Defensor de pobres, menores y ausentes,” (Advocate for the poor, the children, and the absent.)

His defeats leave him undaunted. He strenuously protested when the Argentine government awarded a medal of honor to General Augusto Pinochet, sending dozens of letters to the Argentine authorities.

His appeals were denied and General Pinochet received his decoration. He then made a special motion to forbid him from using his medal, on the grounds that Pinochet had helped the British against the Argentines during the Malvinas/Falkland war. His motion was denied once more.

When Pinochet died, he again presented a motion to the authorities to have Pinochet’s family return his medal. Again that motion was denied. “This is not the end of this story,” he later told me, chagrined.

A recent incident shows him at his best, though. For a long time, it had been a source of irritation to Tucumánians that, on the side of the Government House there was a 12 floor tall apartment building whose wall, contiguous to it, was totally covered with the logo of an international soft drink company.

To Tucumánians, it looked as if that company owned the city government. Although greatly irritated, common citizens were unable to do anything about it.

I live in New York and visit my family in Tucumán at least once a year. During one of my visits I was walking with Don Quixote when I saw the logo cheapening not only the Government House next to it but all the surrounding area. I couldn’t help commenting to my friend how that huge logo belittled the whole area.

“Don’t worry,” he told me, “very soon it will not be there.” I could only laugh in disbelief.

“Who is going to erase it?” I asked. He looked at me and answered, “I will.”

I laughed again. Fortunately, he didn’t seem annoyed by my reaction. I didn’t tell him then but I wondered how he was going to do something that not even government officials had been able to do: Defeat one of the most powerful international companies in the world.

On a later visit to my hometown I no longer saw the logo. The huge wall was totally painted in white. Surprised, I called my friend and asked him what had happened. “Didn’t I tell you that I would erase it?” he said proudly. He then gave me some of the details of the operation.

He had contacted architects and government officials at City Hall who agreed with him but had been unable to force the company to remove it. There were very powerful interests behind the logo which occupied the city’s best space, they explained. In spite of that, Don Quixote presented several legal complaints to the authorities, but to no avail. He still continued his fight, undaunted.

Finally, after nine months of unrelenting struggle (“just like a pregnancy,” he told me) he finally found a legal loophole and was able to obtain a municipal decree ordering the company to expunge the offending logo.

After many defeats, this was clearly a major achievement for my friend. I couldn’t but ask him, “Why do you continue fighting all these mostly lost causes which are so costly, take so much of your energy, and don’t give you any financial gain?”

He looked at me sadly and responded, “Because if I don’t do it, I get sick.”

Dr. César Chelala is an award-winning writer on human rights issues.

Listen to the March 28th broadcast of Sundays at Five by clicking the play button below.

Kate and Ali speak with public school teacher Gianna De Persiis Vona about both her experiences in the classroom as well as her belief that the standardized testing system imposed by the government proves detrimental to both students and teachers alike.

In the second half of the show, Bill Monning, California Assembly Member of the 27th district, connects us to the pulse of what is going on in our state government by explaining why education is typically the first victim of budget cuts. He also explains the ramifications of the 2/3 vote rule in Sacramento and gives us citizens some advice on what we can do to help remedy the situation.

Guest Biographies:
Gianna De Persiis Vona is a public school teacher in Sebastapol, CA, who works with disadvantaged students in a continuing education program. She is also a writer who chronicles her experiences and airs her frustrations with educational bureaucracy on her blog The Whiteboard Report.

Bill Monning is the Assembly Member for the 27th district of California who specializes in mediation and has a vested interest in ensuring that the government is changed to better help California’s citizens.

About the Broadcast: The WIP’s Executive Editor, Kate Daniels teams up with identical twin sister Ali Daniels to present Sundays at Five, a weekly radio broadcast on KRXA, Monterey Bay's Progressive Talk Radio station. The twins share stories and discuss topics ranging from campaign finance reform to the phenomenon of Facebook. Tune in every Sunday from 5-6 pm PDT or listen online. Podcasts of previous broadcasts are available on The WIP Talk.

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