A Voice For the Voiceless

MISSION

The Advocacy Project seeks to help community-based advocates produce, disseminate and use information, and so become more effective advocates for human rights and social justice

From the Field, August 26, 2004

Summer Interns and AP Director Report from Partners Abroad

The Advocacy Project's summer interns, graduate students from Georgetown and Tufts Universities, are reporting on-line about their work with partners abroad in Afghanistan, Bosnia, the Czech Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Italy, the Palestinian territories and Sri Lanka. AP Director Iain Guest is also traveling and working with partners this summer, and issuing his own reports.

Excerpts of some of the most recent blogs follow, and will be sent weekly. Read an overview of all 2004 projects.

Stacy Kosko (Georgetown University) is working with Dzeno Association, an NGO working to promote awareness of, and strengthen, Roma culture in Prague, The Czech Republic.

"Almost as often as I have sat quietly and written at the office, I have also sat quietly and listened. I have heard again and again of how this organization or that claims to be helping the Roma, but is only truly interested in using a trendy political issue for its own gain. (For the record, I do believe that this is sometimes the case.) I have heard again and again the words "It is a dirty game." I have heard again and again how this person or that cannot be trusted, has ulterior motives, is blind and ignorant...

What I have not heard, however, is which organization is doing some real good in the world, who IS making a difference, what body really IS legitimate. Perhaps none? Maybe. More likely the problem is in a lack of anything resembling consensus in the Romany movement, a lack of consensus that results, it seems, in something like the crabs-in-a-bucket phenomenon.

The Roma - to their credit - are a phenomenally diverse Nation. They inhabit lands from the Eurasian steppe to the slopes of the Pyrenees. They speak countless dialects of an ancient Hindic tongue and worship a dozen gods, if any at all. But finally, and against all odds, this Nation is coming together to forge one voice, champion one cause, constitute one front with which to fight the discrimination, racism, and poverty that they have suffered for centuries in silence. But where there is no single, uniform Romany culture in Europe, there is also no single, uniform Romany voice..."

Michael Keller (Georgetown University) is working with the Home for Human Rights (HHR), a human rights organization in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

"This weekend I spent 16 hours on a train to get not even halfway across the island, a distance of less than 100 kilometers as the crow flies... In a hurry to get to my final destination (World's End, the top of a 700 meter high cliff at the end of a vast grassy plain) once I got off the train, I took the "shortcut" outlined on the map in my guidebook, conveniently forgetting that the same guidebook got me lost in the Thai countryside at night only a few months back. It turned out to be the most frightening hike of my life...

When I finally emerged from the woods onto the plain (actually rather hilly), I thought I'd made it. Then things got worse. Surrounded by herds of enormous barking (yes, barking) deer and grunting bear-monkeys in the trees, I walked through the knee-high grass in the direction of the only path I could see. Fearing more snakes - not to mention the wild  leopards that live there, which I thankfully did not encounter, unlike the French tourists I met on Sunday, who saw two in the plains - I started running until I was surrounded by nothing but fields of thick grass. It was getting late, not to mention cold (around 50 degrees Fahrenheit), misty and very windy. I had only one small piece of bread and a few sips of water left in my bag. So I simply kept walking, following my instincts rather than my useless map, which told me to go in the complete opposite direction. Finally, just as I'd begun to give up hope of finding a way out by nightfall, I reached the other side of a hill and saw a patch of pavement, then a road, and then a parking lot. I'd come out of the plains not 200 meters from the entrance to World's End; predictably, the ticket booth was already closed.

It was a fitting end to my Sri Lankan summer. The journey, like my hike in Horton Plains, has been tough; visa troubles, language difficulties, a repair shop's sabotage of my camera, LTTE checkpoints, assassinations, a suicide bombing, office politics, and countless other anticipated and unexpected obstacles threatened to derail my work like snakes in the grass..."