WOMEN HELPING WOMEN

In 2004, I watched a PBS Frontline show called Ghosts of Rwanda. Then I read some books and information online about the genocide in Rwanda. Two organizations that I support are Rwanda Partners and Women for Women. Learning about the story of Rwanda, motivated me to get involved in ending genocide and specifically as a Darfur community activist leader with Save Darfur and Genocide Intervention which includes Stand Now.

I sponsor a Rwandan sister each year through Women for Women. This means I give $27 monthly to her and we exchange letters and pictures. It usually takes 3 months for the letters to get back and forth with the original letter and a translation. Last week, I received a letter (which was written November 21, 2008) from Odette, my sister, which reads:

To my beloved sponsor,

To my parent that I love and wish (you) to be with God's peace.

Sandra, are you fine? We are also fine. I was happy after seeing your (emotional) support. The love you loved me without knowing me - caused me to love you this kind of love that has no end. Now I wish to see your face.

I am also a mother of four children, three girls and one boy. I am a farmer. Now I do Cassova, g-nuts, soghum, potatoes. I am preparing for Christmas, so greet for me your family and tell them we wish them Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Thank You.

The one who loves you,

Odette

These words touched me tenderly and are most precious to me.

Odette, has no education, cannot read or write. And her house has no electricity and the main source of lighting is by kerosene lamp. There is no water in the house. And the reason two of her four children do not go to school is lack of funds. Whenever I feel sorry for myself, I think of Odette. And it puts my life in perspective. Many of the young women of Rwanda are raising orphans. Remember many people were killed during the 1994 100 day genocide.

Within days, I received another letter. For some reason, it was delayed in its coming as it was a letter written by my sister from last year, Immaculee, which was originally written July 25, 2008 to me:

Dear Sponsor,

How are you? Let me hope that you are fine. I am also fine and doing well with all my family members and they all send you their best regards.

I have purposely written to you to say good-bye. I thank you for the support you have given me for a year, now. My wish has always been to see you, though it has not been possible. But I hope one day we shall meet. Through, your support, I have been able to build myself a house.

Did you receive my photo? I, who with my son, my mum and my neighbor. I request you to one day come and visit Rwanda. Maybe, we could meet. If you love to still write to me, I have sent my address to you. Send my regards to all your family members.

God bless you.

Immaculee

In 2005, I received a letter from my first sponsored sister, another Odette. And would like to include it here as well:

To my dear sponsor, Sandra. What is your news? Mine is fine and we are praising God.

I and my children, the orphans that I bring up, and my real mother referred to as mother number one and you being mother number two. I can't easily explain this unless God helped us to meet face to face.

Let me first say sorry, please forgive me, bear with me. I will send my photograph to you next time.

You required to know how I joined Women for Women International Rwanda. We were in a group of women with variable problems of being widows, and victims of H.I.V. AIDS. We had been grouped together by the Vice-Mayor of the locality. Personally, I have been a victim of H.I.V. AIDS for three years, and yet a widow. Then we were made to join the very organization.

Among my needs, I desire to see you face to face. I do request for your prayers, as it's very hard to bring up the children.

I was born in 1976. I am the first born, my father died and my mother is still alive and present with me. Please try to write to me frequently for it does good to me.

Thanks.

Odette

My other sister from Rwanda was Patricie. And I sponsored a sister from Iraq, Mariam, however for security reasons we were not allowed to exchange letters.

WomenForWomen.org
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Rwanda is moving forward
Uploaded by AegisTrust February 18, 2009

I met Edwin and Edward Mutanguha from Kigali, Rwanda a year and a half ago. They are in their second year at Salve Regina University here in Newport, Rhode Island. Both were keynote speakers at Rhode Island's Torch Relay Ceremony in 2007. Their mother, Odette Mukazi Mutanguha, who is pictured here with them, was a guest speaker at the Pell Center in Newport, RI, September 17, 2008. Her presentation was:
"Build a Better Africa: Working for Women, Human Rights, Education and Peace"

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Call President Obama at 202-456-1111
or 1-800-GENOCIDE
and pressure him to immediately take steps
to ensure the protection of civilians in Darfur!

An example of your phone call text can be found below.
It is encouraged that you make it personally your message. *

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And call the USA Secretary of State

The USA State Department public comment line works 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. Please, call as soon as possible.

Call the State Department's public comment line 24/7 at 202-647-6575

The White House (9 AM - 5 PM EST weekdays) at 202-456-1111

or 1-800-GENOCIDE with a similar message as the one below.

If you have called already, please call again:

* I'm calling to ask President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton and Ambassador Rice to protect innocent civilians in Darfur in the wake of Bashir's arrest warrant. Please issue immediate warnings to Bashir and the government of Sudan specifying consequences of attacks on civilians. Please also prepare an emergency response plan to address further violence and appoint a full-time senior level envoy. Lastly, please stand firm in support of the ICC indictment and veto any delay in the prosecution of Bashir.

Call your Senators and Representative Today!

Find your elected politicians contact information at this link:

http://www.usa.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml
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Genocide Ends

When Enough of Us

Stand Up Against It

JOIN US
1-800-GENOCIDE
www.savedarfur.org
www.genocideintervention.net
www.standnow.org

www.miafarrow.org


Write President Obama
www.whitehouse.gov
You can also call or write to the President:

The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Comments to President Obama: 202-456-1111

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IF NOT,

THEN,

YOUR SILENCE

CONTRIBUTES

TO

ANOTHER

GENOCIDE.

www.savedarfur.org/content

CHINA OLYMPIC THEME One World One Dream PROBLEM WITH THE TRUTH

HUMAN BEINGS SHAME

CATS IN CHINA
AND TIBETANS
Please read the article China Kills 500,000 Cats- in Death Camps. If anyone has read my blog posts, you know that I don't reserve my criticsm for countries other than my own. But, this post that I am directing you to is about China. China will have the Summer Olympic Opening Ceremonies August 8, 2008. Protestors disrupted the Olympic Flame Ceremony which was related to the Chinese crackdown continuation in Tibet. An article, Protests China should stop using force against Tibetans is printed in an Indian paper from Geneva, Switzerland.

Protesters picket Chinese consulate
Toronto, Canada STAR

A Pragmatic Solution for China in regards to Tibet

CHINESE TORTURING ITS OWN
FOR SPEAKING OUT
China Rights Activist Sentenced to Jail

By ANITA CHANG –

BEIJING (AP) — A Chinese activist who had petitioned for land rights was sentenced Monday to five years in prison and then shocked with electric batons when police scuffled with his family, his lawyer said.

Yang Chunlin had gathered more than 10,000 signatures for an open letter titled "We want human rights, not the Olympics." Most of the signatures came from farmers demanding redress for land taken from them by officials for development.

Yang, a former factory worker, was convicted of subverting the power of the state, a charge that authorities commonly use to clamp down on dissidents.

Family members tried to talk to Yang as he was escorted from the courtroom, but police pushed his son to the ground, his lawyer, Li Fangping, said. When Yang tried to intervene, he was repeatedly shocked with electric batons, the lawyer said.

"Since we haven't seen him, we don't know how he's doing," Li said.

Yang's sentencing came as China tries to stifle activists whose criticisms might tarnish the Beijing Olympics, which begin Aug. 8.

...The Jiamusi City Intermediate People's Court in northeast China's Heilongjiang province handed down Yang's five-year sentence Monday afternoon, court clerk Nie Lei said. Yang can appeal, he added.

Yang, 54, has maintained his innocence and called the legal proceedings against him illegal because freedom of speech is supposed to be guaranteed in China, his lawyer said.

"But he's said before that he would not appeal because he has lost confidence in China's judicial system," Li said.

To rally support, Yang had posted his letter on the Internet. It was not clear for whom the letter was intended.

He was detained in July in Heilongjiang and formally arrested a month later. His sister said in October that during his detention Yang was tortured, including having his arms and legs stretched and chained to the corners of an iron bed... Full article

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Trouble for China

DARFUR
The five year old genocide in Darfur, Sudan is also connected to China. In an article written August 5, 2004, the following was written:

"China is Sudan's largest trading partner and the main foreign investor in Sudan's oil industry. China National Petroleum Corp. has a 40 percent share in the international consortium extracting oil in Sudan, and it is building refineries and pipelines, enabling Sudan to benefit from oil export revenue since 1999.

Although most Western oil companies have withdrawn from Sudan under pressure from human rights organizations, Chinese companies have turned a blind eye to the brutal way in which Sudan forced 200,000 to 300,000 of its citizens from oil-rich lands without compensation. Nor have these companies shown concern that Sudan uses oil revenue to purchase arms for its wars against its black African population.

...Were China to use even a small part of its leverage to call Sudan to account, it would go a long way toward saving lives in Sudan.

In an interview with Mia Farrow the Chinese Olympics and the genocide of the Darfuri people is discussed rfaunplugged. Here is a small portion:

Q: what prompts you to use the Beijing Olympics to pressure China on Darfur?

MF: Well, we’ve seen now - it came to my attention in the past year - that China has two immense oil companies pouring billions of dollars into Khartoum. And, noboby knows exactly how much money, but 60 to 80% of that money - it’s a good guess - is being used to attack civilians in Darfur. So, we have hoped that the government and leadership of China will now assume a more responsible role. It has a unique point of leverage.

I just saw this week a poll - a very important opinion poll - by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and World Public Opinion, and it showed that 58% of Chinese citizens polled thought that the UN Security Council has the right and the responsiblity to authorize an intervention, even, to stop the killing in Darfur, and this is higher than almost - ah - many many countries of the world. So, we see the people of China feeling as frustrated and distressed, I’m sure, as the rest of the world, or certainly as the Western world at the suffering in Darfur.

It remains for big business when you see this amount of money; we look at a big Monopoly game going on where the people of Darfur just seem to be the expendable chips. But we would look to our leadership and to our businesses to assume responsibility here, and China has that power.

Now with the Olympics coming it really is a unique time for China to uh say to - it seems to us in the West it seems a sort of calling card - China wants to be included in the rest of the negotiating world, well it is …but it isn’t just One World, One Dream, which is the slogan for the Olympics, but there is one nightmare that is Darfur.

Q: “The Genocide Olympics”: was this word coined by you?

MF: No, it wasn’t coined by me. By the time I wrote the piece together with my son, this saying was going viral amongst advocacy groups and I was even given a T-shirt, but it has “Genocide Olympics” with a question mark after it, because it need not be the Genocide Olympics, and indeed our piece - I hope it was clear in the piece that we wrote - that it is a call to the leadership of China and the sponsors of the Olympic Games and everyone to say: “before we can say ‘One World, One Dream’, let us make it true. And I would really hope that you know we would see the kind of leadership we would hope for from China to say whatever they have to do in Khartoum behind closed doors to stop the suffering, to stop the genocide in Darfur...."

Like the United States of America with multitude of lies about Iraq,

rendition, (heroes of rendition),

Abu Ghraib,

Nineteen Videos of Abu Ghraib,

Guantánamo Bay

and our history of human rights abuses including the indigenous peoples and the slaves,

China needs a mirror to see some reality of itself. The problem is that countries like the United States of America and England who claim to stand for human rights have hypocritical legs to stand on to hold up the mirror for China. And even if I as a citizen of the United States of America stands up against China for what it is doing in any or all of the above issues, I get criticized by people who point at what the USA has done and is doing.

So, what do we do? Be still, hide our disgusts?

Our leaders let us down. And we must not cower and let fear of criticism make us shrink.

The USA media is so narcissistic, which is a huge hole in the answer of simply spotlighting abuses. There are hours and hours of cable news shows which never mention anything but what is going on in the USA. There is shame in that.

So, as a human being who has a simple blog, a voice, I spotlight China.

ONE DREAM, ONE WORLD ~ the Beijing, China Olympics theme is hypocritical.

HERE IS MY ONE VOICE TO SAY SO.




Pictures (except the hunger strike one in Canada) are from Athens, Greece where the Olympic Torch was lit. Source: Sky News