Animals for Iraq (Stuffed, That Is)

I have only a few minutes before leaving for work but thought that some of you might like to participate in a fun and charitable project: sending stuffed toys to the kids of Iraq. More information can be found on the Change Becomes Change website. What I discovered there, I am copying here as is. Go there, though, for the links and other interesting information.

Here is the initial post:

Do you have a few stuffies, loveys or other gently loved soft animals that your children no longer enjoy? Need to make room for new things from the holidays or upcoming birthdays? We clean out our toys, clothes and items usually with the season's change, so guess what we're doing this week?

We're doing one thing different this season though. Our no-longer-beloved stuffed animals will be shared with the youngest victims of war in Iraq: the children. It's impossible for me to see the joy and comfort that special stuffed friends bring my own children and not want to give that opportunity to every child.

My friend Asha at Parent Hacks and Heather at Rookie Moms introduced me to Edmay Mayers, a member of the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers who is currently stationed in Iraq. She's bringing a little love and hope to children in the villages of Iraq who might not have either, in the form of stuffed animals. It's important work that she's doing and we're ready to help...you in?

So, clean out your closets, purses, cars and drawers (we know they like to hide) to find those gently loved stuffies to share.

Instructions from the Parent Hacks website are:

You can request a FREE mailing supply kit for sending items to military personnel. The kit includes boxes, tape, labels, and customs forms. This will allow you arrive at the post office ready to ship. Please note the the supplies are free, but you must still pay for postage.

Via the USPS website, here is how you can request this kit:

Call 1-800-610-8734 (Packing Supply)
Choose your language (1 for English, 2 for Spanish)
Choose option 1 (For Express Mail, Priority Mail, and Global Express)
When you reach an agent, request CAREKIT04.
The agent will get your address, and the kit should arrive in 7-10 days.

Thanks for the inspiration and introduction, Asha & Heather.

UPDATE: You're going to need the following APO Address for the post office when you request your kit.


Chaplain – Camp Warrior
FOB Warrior – Kirkuk
Toys for the Iraqi Children
APO AE 09359

Now let's go find some stuffed toys! What fun!

Dona Nobis Pacem

The blogosphere, as most of you probably know, is celebrating today as a peace movement day. More information can be found at Mimi's site, where you can read the contributions of other bloggers on this theme.

As so often happens in my life, I experienced a moment of synchronicity as I was preparing this blog post. In the afternoon, I was in Arizona to give a graduation speech to a class of Arabic specialists. Without giving any thought to today's peace blog, I nonetheless spoke about peace, beginning my speech in a way not atypical of graduation speeches I give whenever linguists are among the graduating students. The Cold War, I tell them, was not won with weapons. It was won with words -- the words of Americans who understood Russian language and culture and the words of Russians who understood American language and culture. I was thrilled back then to be one grain of sand in the cement of the span that bridged the two superpowers and brought both to a cautious ally status. So, too, today, it will most likely not be weapons but the efforts of the Americans who speak Arabic and understand Arabic cultures and Arabs who speak English and understand American culture who will bring the current hot war to an end. General Abizaid has ascribed the success of the surge in Iraq to the contribution of American linguists.

Years ago, at the approaching end of the Cold War (although no one knew at the time that the Cold War was going to end), I served as interpreter for a remarkable man, Pyotr Volkovich, then vice president of the Belarus Peace Committee. During the Cold War, every major city in the USSR had a peace committee, composed of citizens dedicated to promoting world peace. You see, the Russians were honestly afraid that the USA intended to start a war against them. The members of these committees can today be considered veterans of the Cold War, So, too, I would argue can be that handful of us Americans working and studying in Russia at the time and those Russian scholars living and studying in America. My daughter, Lizzie, cherishes a button that says "Veteran of the Cold War." As the only Westerner in her Soviet 7th grade classroom, coping with distrust and dislike of Americans at the time, she considers rightfully that she has earned the title.

Pyotr I knew from my work in Belarus, one part of which in 1989 was to prepare bilingual documents for the Ministry of Education for an exchange with the USA. Therefore, I was subsequently brought to Portland, Oregon in 1990 to put together the corresponding set of bilingual documents for one of the Portland school districts to establish an exchange with Belarus. Since the Peace Committee provided the financial support for the exchange from the Belarus side, Pyotr had come along with the superintendent of Minsk public schools. The timing had been manipulated to allow Pyotr to be the keynote speaker at the International Rotary Convention that took place in Portland that year. I went to the convention to provide moral support for Pyotr or so I thought. However, Pyotr surprised me by ditching his Soviet interpreter and called out as he approached the podium, "Beth, so mnoi." (Beth, come with me.) And that is how I ended up being the interpreter for his very moving speech which focused on the need for peace. (I have posted details of his speech on Mahlou Musings.)

Perhaps the most potent advocacy for peace I have ever encountered is a poster drawn by a child, who contributed it to a contest for peace advocacy organized by the Moscow Peace Committee. Against a pure blue (sky?) background, the child had drawn a chalky white frame of a house encompassing a globe inside. At the top, the child had scrawled five words: "U nas net drugogo doma." (We have no other home.) No other words were needed, I think. That pretty much says it all, doesn't it? So, let's wrap the only home we have in the protection of peace!

Wishing Fourth of July Blessings to All

Because of my work-related travels, it is rare that I am in the USA for the Fourth of July, let alone have the day off! So, today is an exciting, if unusual, one for me.

Donnie and I are preparing for an afternoon BBQ. Shane, wife, and kids will come -- and yes, our little disassembled granddaughter, now in one piece, will be here, too! (We now have a name for what her "issue" is: OEIS complex. For those of you who can speak medicalese, you can find out more about it here. For those who prefer a lay description, that can be found in my earlier posts.)

Then, after mass, Donnie and I will drop in on an evening party thrown by one of the supervisors who works for me, an Iraqi born on the fourth. Somehow, being with Iraqi immigrants on our Independence Day is both ironic and appropriate. Iraq has yet to experience its day of independence, but perhaps it will soon, insha Allah (God willing), as Arabs say whenever they refer to the future. Insha Allah, freedom of speech will become a way of life for them. Insha Allah, they will experience the freedom to worship God each in his/her own way, without Shia and Sunni being pitted against each other and together against Christians and with Kurds, Sorranis, Assyrians, and Arabs all respecting each other.

It reminds me of my days in the former Soviet Union although there are significant differences. In the USSR, unlike in Iraq where people kill each other over religious denomination, religious practice was banned. Believers carried Bibles inside folded newspapers. The Moscow Baptist Church--there was only one during the heyday of the Cold War when I was there--was located in a warehouse; unless one knew that the church was there, one would never suspect it. The Orthodox churches were closed down and locked up, except for those few that had been kept open as tourist traps, such as St. Basil's Cathedral in Red Square. (My favorite picture of St. Basil's depicts an era before Russia was sovietized, and, as in so many cases in life, the beautiful outside is far different from the dark inside, which is mostly dirt from the erosion of time and the effects of a series of wars.) I remember when Orthodox friends of mine (a family with three children) fled Moscow for Leningrad in the summer of 1982 after a friend of theirs was arrested for her active participation in the then-underground Orthodox Church. My friends feared that they might be next. The series of events are permanently fixed in time for me. As my friends were fleeing, I was retiring to bed in my University of Moscow "blok" (dorm suite in which my roommate and I each had our own small bedroom and a shared bathroom and shared toilet room) when I saw a frightened face, seeming to ask for help, in my dorm window. I turned on the light, but the face remained. I ran to my roommate's bedroom and asked her to come see, but by then the face had disappeared. I knew that the face belonged to an acquaintance, but I did not put two and two together until the following week when my roommate and I were visiting Leningrad. As "luck" (?) would have it, my roommate ran across the mother of the fleeing family on Nevsky Prospekt, the main street of Leningrad; the mother asked my roommate to have me meet her in front of the Hermitage, the USSR's most famous art gallery, the next morning. I came and recognized instantly that it was her face I had seen the week before. An art historian, she gave me a wonderfully detailed tour that few docents could have given. Open discussion in the USSR being difficult and definitely prohibited, as we moved from room to room she sandwiched into the tour the details of what had happened to her neighbor, her fear for her family, and her plans for leaving the country through the help of a friend from Germany whom she had been able to contact after arriving in Leningrad. I asked her where she had been at 8:00 the evening of July 18, the time that I had seen her face in my window. She replied that she and her husband had hastily packed a few possessions and their children that evening, purchased tickets, and were at the very time I had "seen" her on the train to Leningrad where she was thinking very intently about me, hoping that I might be able to help her. As it turned out, I did not need to help her. An alternative had been found. Nonetheless, knowing that I was within reach seemed to comfort her. We exchanged coordinates in the way that coordinates were shared in those days: we took the time to memorize each other's personal information (she gave the me the phone and address of her German friends, which I recited until I knew them as well as I knew my own address and once I left Soviet soil wrote it down; being caught at customs or passport control, or even in my dorm room, with that information is not something that would have had a pleasant outcome).

Independence and freedom did come to Russia, and there has been quite a revival of Orthodoxy in Russia, along with the introduction of many new religious faiths. The Soviet Union today is but a memory (not always a pleasant one) for Cold War veterans like me and my daughter, Lizzie, who spent time going to school there one year when I was conducting research at the Academy of Sciences. It is even less than that to the young people of today both in Russia itself and in other countries. (One, of course, hopes that Putin will not walk back too far the flamboyant freedom that has overwhelmed Russia for nearly two decades now.)

No one thought that the Soviet Union would fall, that freedom would roam Russian streets again and come home to live in Russian cities. But it did. And, so it seems, it will in Iraq, as well. Insha Allah.

All God's Children

My last post got me to thinking about God's children. I am referring not to mankind as God's children, but to the little ones in our lives and our second generation regardless of age, the ones who call us Mom and Dad (or Ma and Pa, or Omy and Baba, etc.).

In this, I cannot imagine anyone with a greater sense of humor than God. I see that humor unfold in my life time and again. For example, I never particularly wanted children; I had a career lined up for myself (in my mind). Well, had that career happened as planned, it would not have been one iota as interesting as the career that unrolled, in zigs and zags, before me. And had that career not had to zig and zag around child after child, I would have missed the richest moments of my life.

In a display of great irony, the children that came into my life were not your everyday variety. Well, actually, those, too, ended up in my life, but as adults. My birth children, as well as those who came to live with Donnie and me as children and teenagers, were different: highly gifted, mentally and physically challenged, medically needy, discarded, bereft, foreign. First came my own birth children, one after the other, in spite of my best efforts not to get pregnant. (I hated being pregnant -- if I had a half hour of not being sick throughout all four pregnancies, I do not recall it. As best as I can figure, between all the kids, I have spent 26,298 hours vomiting or trying not to vomit.) On the other hand, once the children were born, all those maternal instincts took over and ran way ahead of me.

After my birth children along came Shura (a Siberian teenager with spina bifida),

All of these children I have talked about in various posts and books. The ones I have not mentioned are the ones that came later. They are the ones who need my help (and your prayers) today. Please meet Lana, Ibrahim, and Maha.

Leyla and Shem (not related to each other) are from Iraq. I met them in Jordan, where they worked for me as work-study students at the university where I was the chief academic officer.

Leyla would periodically come into my office and say, "Mum, may I cry in here?" It was usually because she had heard of a new bombing along Airport Road in Baghdad, where her family lived, or an attack on Baghdad University, where her father taught. Her family could not leave Iraq. She could not return, and communications, especially in 2003-2006 were very poor and, at times, totally lacking. Given a tendency to assume the worst, when she did not hear that her family was okay, she assumed that something bad had happened. And so, she started calling me "Mum" and looking to me for advice and moral support. I took to keeping an Islamic prayer rug in my office for her use, as needed, as well as provided guidance and hugs, as needed. Leyla recently ran into legal problems with an expired passport and the inability to return to Iraq to take care of that issue. I was in Jordan earlier this month for business purposes and called Leyla, worried because she has not responded to email for several weeks. Someone else answered her phone, and if my understanding of the Arabic conversation we had was accurate, that phone number no longer belongs to Leyla. I worry about her. She is as much my child now as my own children. I know that God will watch over her and take care of her until I find her again, but nonetheless I would welcome prayers from readers on her behalf.

Shem was my student as well as work-study assistant. An Iraqi Christian (a small and persecuted group), he thrived in school in spite of being separated from his family, graduating with a 4.0. He has done well also in graduate studies and in subsequent jobs. He, too, called me "Mom," although it did not seem like he needed another mother. Still, he was alone in Jordan and lonely. He emails and Skypes me regularly, and his first words are always, "I miss you sooooo much!" Seeing him in Jordan two weeks ago reminded me how families are families, whether blood or not and whether separated by physical distance or not. We spent hours together. It did not matter what we talked about. I do not even remember half of what we said and did. Rather, I savored the blessing of being able to be together, if only for one day and one night, in spite of living half a world apart in cultures that are rather alien to each other.

Maha's situation is much different. She lives in Bahrain, and she became my "daughter" when I was consulting extensively (over a period of 5 years) for the Ministry of Education there. Shia Muslims, her biological family became embroiled in political machinations over a year ago when her brother was arrested in the dead of the night on a trumped-up charge that has yet to have its day in court. The situation is personally emotionally difficult for me--and truly not understandable--for Donnie taught and I was academic dean for many university students from the ruling Sunni Muslim Al-Khalifa family. The Shia-Sunni hatred dates back to the struggle after the death of the Prophet Mohammed and the murder of Ali, a tragedy and travesty remembered to this day on the 10-day annual Ashara (the word ashara means ten) when Shias take leave from work and commemorate this piece of history, in part by flailing themselves with branches to the point of drawing blood. One would think that this hatred would have died out after 16 centuries, but emotions still run high. Emotions are part and parcel of the Arab world. And so, Maha's brother has been imprisoned for 14 months, during which time he has been beaten to the point of being almost blind. I tried my best to help, and a friend of a friend convinced a specialist in international human rights to go to Bahrain, but to no avail. The US Embassy did not want to get involved, nor did any other international body, and the Bahraini government repelled any appeal. So, we wait--and pray.

I am sure that I am not alone in having adult children who are experiencing difficulties that require assistance beyond what a normal parent like me can provide. If you are one of those "mothers" or "fathers", what have you done? How has God helped you out with these children?