I was listening to Ontario's public Television Channel, and a young Black woman was talking about her school which is a Black high School, public/private school, and how she wasn't taught any black history in the public school system, and now she is learning her Black History.
So the debate is happening that each ethnic and racial group needs to have it's own history and customs taught. My first thought was go home, and learn the customs and rules applicable to wherever you came from.
But what if the world knew that theSerbs had as much right to sue the Bosnians for war crimes as the Bosnians had for suing the Serbs for war crimes. What happens if we start to supply the world with some of the truths about the conduct of Islam in the world.
Read this........
SUDAN -- The reed-thin voices of small children rise from the brush and with small feet pounding the dirt, they tear past mud houses just to get a glimpse and maybe a wave back.
"Khawaja! Khawaja! Khawaja!," the children shout. Most stop and wave, but some get so excited they slide belly first into the dust, laughing. "White people! White people! White people!" Not just white people. White women, lots of them, hanging onto the edges of the trucks.
When the trucks stop under a tree in the village of Rumrol, in southern Sudan, dozens gather around. The women, from London, Ont., jump out in the dust and stir up hope. They're determined to help out. With goats, sewing machines, grinding mills, even schools and medicine.
Another parade of children sing and dance and beat drums. Somehow word of the women has spread from village to village during the week.
Here, in Rumrol, they are invited to jump over a cow before it is slaughtered for the feast. Then they walk down a dusty path and stop. What the hell is this? Hundreds of flimsy, small straw huts crowd the dirt, only steps apart from each other. Women and babies peer out of the darkness inside.
Almost 800 people fleeing Darfur have reached Rumrol and are housed in these huts. Simon Dhol, the women's friendly interpreter, has seen his father killed and was enslaved by Arabs and fought as a child soldier. "No human beings should have to live like this," he mutters.
All the white people do is listen and nod, but hundreds of the hut dwellers rush after them, waving and shouting and smiling. The Canadians have come. That means food and mosquito nets for the rainy season and other help must come soon.
The pickup trucks go deeper north to Majok, where even more refugees, an estimated 8,000, have arrived since October. Several hundred people are waiting in line in what must be 40 degrees C heat -- there are no thermometers anywhere -- at the water truck. The small medical clinic has run out of medicine and two teenagers have just died of meningitis.
Jong Koor pushes his way to the front of a circle of 50 people surrounding two of the white people. He squats beside an interpreter. "There were clashes with the Arabs," he says. He and his family ran away from the genocide in Darfur, where a civil war has killed an estimated 400,000 people and displaced 2.5 million. It took the family one month and four days of walking, with little food, to get to this village. "I am waiting for you to come. We have heard of you," he tells the women. "When are you going to supply food?" The people from London have no answer to that. This is not what they signed up for.
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The 11 women, one girl and three men from London arrived in Sudan Jan. 18 to assess several projects that are supposed to be helping a small village called Gordhim and the surrounding villages in Aweil East County. The county was a battleground in the 20-year-civil war between north and south Sudan that ended with a shaky peace agreement two years ago. That agreement allows a countrywide referendum on southern independence in 2011.
Already, the area's community leaders report, the north is trying to buy their votes and redraw boundaries to take in large parts of the resourcerich south if the country is split into two. Military leaders in the north and south are said to be gathering arms. Meanwhile, the separate conflict in Darfur is sending thousands into the county, refugees like the ones the Londoners saw.
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The Londoners seem like the unlikeliest aid workers to ever put food in the dust of the dry season. A flamboyant, opinionated Muslim woman, Samira El-Hindi, started the mission to head into a maledominated, Christian enclave, more than a year ago.
Inspired by a speech from Glen Pearson, co-director of Canadian Aid for Southern Sudan (CASS), El-Hindi invites 25 women to her backyard in May 2006. Also invited is CASS co-director and Pearson's wife, Jane Roy.
The women toy with the idea of raising money to buy goats for families, sewing machines for young business women, and a grinding mill for an entire village: Three projects.
Roy has another idea. Why not go to Sudan as well? It's more important you go, Roy says. These women need to see you to give them hope.
Of the 25 women, six decide to go. A seventh joins later. The seven call themselves Passion for Sudan and start raising money to support two existing projects -- buying goats for families and training young women how to sew and start their businesses. They also raise enough to buy and ship a grinding mill, which will allow women to get their flour faster than the six hours it takes to grind by hand.
MUD HOMES
The grinding machine never makes it by the time the women leave Sudan. There's no plane big enough and empty enough at the time to carry the heavy machinery. The women's disappointment over the grinding mill is eased by their interviews with young seamstresses in the markets and older women tending their goats outside their mud homes.
Training and sewing machines are giving many young women a chance for self-sufficiency and a chance to avoid getting pregnant and married at a young age.
The goats make the difference between an empty and not-quite-as-empty stomach for many children. The women have raised several thousand dollars to buy more goats and more machines for the two programs. But the women also learn from talking to Sudanese people that the country needs much more than goats and sewing machines. The only secondary school in the area was destroyed in the war. The closest is a five-day walk away and students would have to pay $300 a term in tuition and board.
Schooling. That must be a priority, the London women tell themselves.
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But they begin to learn of another problem. Each morning dozens of people line up at the medical clinic at the mission in Gordhim. A mother holding a child says her daughter has stomach problems. "She is crying all the time. I walked and stayed at the home of a relative."
How long did it take to walk here. "Only," she says, "one day."
Nurse Jennifer Katende opens the clinic six days a week at 10 a.m. and by the end of each day is in despair. "Sometimes I don't know what I am doing here," she says. "We can't help people."
Katende's clinic is a bandage on a wounded area that has no latrines, e-coli laced drinking water, a struggling public health system, and soon, no hospital. The list of diseases and problems seems endless: Malaria, respiratory tract infections,sexually transmitted diseases, birth complications, tuberculosis, physical and mental trauma. All of this Katende can handle. At the end of March, however, she doesn't know what she'll do. The biggest hospital in the area, operated by Medicins Sans Frontiere (Doctors Without Borders), will close, shattering Katende's already fragile state.
Her clinic refers its toughest cases to the hospital. Now, hundreds of patients will come to her clinic at the Gordhim mission, Katende fears. "I call it a disaster. We are just looking to God for help."
EMOTIONAL DEBATE
God, say the refugees and returnees spilling into Aweil East, has already sent help: The Londoners. The white people.
The desperate need for food and water and medical supplies, now, in the refugee camps at Rumrol and Majok, threatens to derail the plans of the Londoners to continue raising money for goats and sewing machines, and start raising money for schools and clinics.
After returning from the refugee camps to the mission, the team begins an emotional debate about the refugees. Some argue the team should pool the money raised for goats and sewing machines and buy food immediately for the camps. Others resist.
The group decides to keep on course, but let individuals do what they want. That starts a two-day rush of giving. Women buy goats and deliver them to Sudanese families that have none. Some buy material for the sewing school. Two decide to sponsor a student to go to secondary school. They all pool leftover medicine and toiletries to give to nurse Katende. When they fly out of Sudan, they have left behind all the clothes but those they need to wear.
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Now what do they do? The question still plagues them. Raise money for schools? For sponsoring students? For a better medical clinic? For refugees?
Pearson, a Liberal MP, has begun trying to get all-party support for $6 million in aid to the area swamped by refugees and returnees. That money, he says, could be used for emergency food, rainy season kits and transportation to areas further south where many have families.
The London women, of different political stripes, say they will lend their support to Pearson.
Meanwhile, they still have to meet soon to decide what projects to take on next. "I had no idea until that trip was over what they expected from us," says Passion for Sudan member Lynn Blumas, a photographer and fundraiser. "They see a white person, they see hope. "I won't leave them and I can't let it go
Now change the word Arab to Muslim, you see, this is what Islam is doing. This is the hiding face of the emmisaries of Mohammed. And they want Christians to feed and cloth and house them. not Muslims. |
