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The Advocacy Project seeks to produce social change by helping marginalized communities to become advocates for social justice and claim their rights

Fellows > Blogging for Peace > 2004 > From the Field, J...

From the Field, July 19, 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 programs.

Sarah Schores (Georgetown University) is also working with the Afghan
Women's Network (AWN).

“I feel like finally, after two weeks of settling in and working out communication problems, I can begin the project I was sent here for.

AWN recently completed a project to register women voters in Kabul, Jalalabad, and Peshawar. Registration for the upcoming election has been slow throughout the country, but women have faced especially daunting barriers… Although legally all women here have the right to vote, many from conservative families are not allowed to. Security is also a concern for voter registration, and many people have been threatened, injured, or killed simply for registering to vote.

AWN set up a program to educate women about the importance of voting. Groups of approximately 30 women in [Kabul, Jalalabad, Peshawar] attended a two-day training program on voter registration awareness, information about the importance of political participation, an introduction to the new Constitution, and information on the presidential candidates. With eight training sessions in each city, this came to a total of about 250 women in each city that were made more aware of their political rights and the importance of voting. The vast majority of the women who completed the training program then registered to vote.

My job will be to monitor the success of the training sessions, to research the voter registration program, and to write a report chronicling the results. I hope to visit voter registration sites and talk to both the election registration monitors and the women registering. It is interesting to see how women in Afghanistan react to finally being able to have political voice in almost a decade of silence.”

Pia Schneider (Georgetown University) is working with Bosfam, a support group and weaving center for women in Eastern Bosnia.

“I am not sure where to begin or exactly how to write about July 11th, 2004 in Potocari (Srebrenica)…. I was an outsider, an onlooker and I almost felt like a tourist intruding into their very private emotions. At the same time, I feel that it is important for the international community to bear witness to this event, and it is in this tone that I have decided to write this blog.

…It was a strange feeling standing on that hill, seeing 20,000 gathered in the same place that 9 years before, 20,000 others were gathered across from the UN compound, hoping to get some protection. Instead, more than 7,000 boys and men were slaughtered as the women and children were bused to Tuzla.

… As I witnessed 338 green coffins being transported from hand to hand throughout the entire memorial site to individual graves, I finally understood that my presence and that of others not directly affected would work towards preventing similar future tragedies. Or that is the goal anyway, we have failed at this again and again. Maybe this time we have learned something. I know I did.”

Christina Fetterhoff (Georgetown University) is working with the Center for Economic and Social Rights (CDES), an organization in Quito, Ecuador that works on issues of human rights and development.

“I went to the doctor. The visit and the pharmacy’s worth of pills that he prescribed for me cost $62.55 in total. I was astonished at how inexpensive it was compared to the United States. However, as I have written before, roughly two-thirds of Ecuador’s population lives on incomes of less than $2.00 per day. What do they do, I asked myself, when they need medical attention? The answer, unfortunately, is that many people simply just do not get it.

How, in the end, can we work to ensure the right to health? Perhaps it is obvious to consider that someone being held in prison and not being given proper medications is suffering from a violation of his or her right to health—among others. But, is it not also true that a government that favors the desires of a multinational corporation over the needs of its citizens is not committing the same crime of conscience as the prison warden? Are the wealthy the only ones who deserve to be healthy? CDES and I would answer the first question with an emphatic YES and the second with an equally emphatic NO!”

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.

“… this, I guess, is what I’ve really learned in my month so far at Dzeno: the real heroes of the human rights crusade look like Jakub, the quiet man who sits to my right. He will never be photographed carrying a refugee child through the jungles of Darfur. He will never be shot at while speaking at a rally in Sri Lanka. He will never, ever be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. …

No, the frontlines of human rights work are very often in small offices in big cities, where driven individuals spend all day staring at computer screens and making phone calls. Sometimes they travel, as Ivan Vesely does, to a conference here or there. Sometimes they are even interviewed for the paper. For the large part, though, the work is tedious and unglamorous. …

In all of the thousands of offices all over the world where nothing of note seems to be happening, the cogs and wheels of the human rights apparatus are grinding along, providing fuel for those whose inspiring actions will become household names, for their work and for their sacrifice. What is truly inspiring, however, are those who drudge on through the exhaustion, knowing their names will never be known, and their actions never remembered.”

Carmen Morcos (Georgetown University) is working with Rights Action in Guatemala, a human rights organization working throughout the country.

“Right now, as I write this blog, 7 members of our dam-affected communities are in El Salvador at a MesoAmerica conference on dam-affected communities. It is a forum which is bringing together over 300 people who have already been affected by the construction of a dam, or will soon be affected by one and are fighting it.

…What is most important is to expose our communities to others who are going through the same struggle, to allow them an opportunity to meet others in the same situation as well as share their stories. They were all very excited to be going… They wanted to prepare themselves with maps and charts in case they were able to give a presentation of their case.

This past weekend I missed the second “muestra de ropa” which was the “showing of clothes” of the victims that were found in the exhumation well in Pacux. A total of 74 corpses were recovered, 73 of them men, 1 women and 1 dog. Many of the victims still wore clothes, which were taken off the bodies and then laid out in the community gym for people to come and see whether they recognized any of them.

In the 1st showing, 22 people recognized clothes of their husbands, brothers or sons, and in this 2nd showing 14 people recognized clothes. To think that people still remember what clothes their family members were wearing the day they were massacred is remarkable. [It goes] to show that it seems like yesterday for these people.”

Melinda Willis (Tufts University) is working with TAMPEP, the Turin, Italy branch of the Transnational AIDS Prevention Among Migrant Prostitutes in Europe Project.

“Italy has an article on protection in its immigration law that allows female victims of trafficking to obtain temporary work and residency permits if they denounce their traffickers. This law is the driving force behind much of the work of TAMPEP and other NGOs in Italy. Yet despite its existence as a remarkable exception to the way other migrants are received, sex workers – many of whom are victims of trafficking and exploitation – are still rounded up and placed into temporary detention centers to await mass deportation.

But recognition of the flaws in Italian immigration law is gaining some ground. A court in Rome condemned portions of the law as unconstitutional, saying that the rules regarding the arrest and detention of illegal migrants run counter to guarantees of equality and personal liberty. This is, at the very least, a step in the right direction.  

So I sat at my computer this week writing grant proposals and letters of inquiry to foundations with the goal of hiring someone to help TAMPEP do its work and improve its outreach. Nothing terribly exciting to put in a blog. But at the back of my mind every day lives the thought that someone is fighting, fleeing or being exploited for a chance to sit where I am sitting. So I write...”

Iain Guest has worked with the International Roma Women's Network (IRWN) and Bosfam, AP's partner in Eastern Bosnia this summer. He's now in the Middle East, researching the use of information technologies (ICTs) by civil society, and meeting with a number of AP partners in the region.

“Last summer I visited two computer centers in the Bethlehem area that are run by [AP Partner Middle East Non-Violence and Democracy] MEND. We would like to develop an AP project with MEND to connect several of these centers to each other and to the Internet. I’ll be writing about that shortly.

At heart, however, MEND’s mission is about non-violence, not the Internet, and I need to get a sense of what this involves before we start talking about IT and networking. IT, after all, is just one way of getting out the message. But first the message has to be clear. …

MENDS’s approach to non-violence seeks to help Palestinians resist occupation… As Lucy writes: “Palestinians practice forms of active non-violence every day simply by managing to survive or go to work.”

…MEND is convinced that both sides have to embrace non-violence for it to work. Following the assassination of the Hamas leader Sheikh Yassin by the Israelis, MEND called on Palestinians to respond with a “non-violent” uprising. But the underlying philosophy was still Gandhian – do not respond to violence with violence.

Is MEND’s embrace of non-violence an opportunistic way of telling timid donors what they want to hear, or is it a practical way to get out of this mess? If so, how does one start to change the “culture of violence” on both sides?” 

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