User talk:Narp gyneco

Sympathy is not enough, but it is a good beginning - 1/11/2006 10:53:57 PM

Elijah N. Wreh''' Contributing Writer'''

We are living in a century where the leaders described the strength of their country by announcing the number of missiles directed at another country. Sometime I want to cry, but I don`t want other children to see it. So I only cry when it rains. As Elice Wiessel, himself a child of war has said mother more than anything-more that hatred and tortured.

More than pain I do fear the world indifference. Sympathy is not enough, but it is a good beginning. It is my belief that I will never have fulfilled my potential as an international youth activist so long I have something of value to contribute to the youth especially in Africa.

But my compassion unlike my pity, must have a propinquity to the way I live, the way I make my plans, the way I make my choices. While I am now writing, little boys and girls are dying accessively as unknown to us in death as they were in life. But to those who care and love them and gave them life are not faceless, they are more statistics. They are sons and daughters.

There are two lives to each: the life of our actions and the life of our minds and hearts. We can allow these lives to exist together. Because we live in thoughts and feelings, not in figures and possessions. Time is counted by our heartbeats.

I think of my grandfather. The silvery hair of many years, shinning around a face marked lovingly by life. And a half smile, mysterious and shrewd. More than ever do we need to define strength, not as descriptive of how far and how fast a man can run, or how far a country can send a missiles, or how strong its destructiveness will be, but what ways we, as people was the catalyst for writing this article.

The right to be recognized as a human being is the first right. And every one must know this truth and also live by it, because every one is as real to himself as I am to myself. Because when you later make a choice in life, they are included as well, whether your choices made by individuals that do not include others. I am deeply hurt and in sorrow after the war and mayhem in my motherland Liberia.

Who will listen to my land that is resuscitating from it pre-war status? After the war, there are craters in my body. Although I was sad, sorry, and suffering. Who will know my feelings? I am sorry because of the people who can not use me rightly. According to UNICEF estimates (1986), about 80% of the casualties in these foreign countries are women and children. Women and children sufffer disproportionately when warring groups seek to control the hearts and minds of a populace. That children survive at all in the heart is a testimony to their resilience and to the efforts of adults who care for them: parents, relatives, friends and therapists.

Because so much of that suffering continues as a matter of conscious policy, policy which we as citizens of the global village are responsible for. Without meaning we tend to get lost and succumb to self-destructiveness or anti-social behavior or madness. Youths are the bedrock of any country sustainable future development in term of education, economy, infrastructures,politics, cultures, religions and social activities. Children manage to cope with the trauma of war by holding fast to an ideology that explains and justifies their lives, but when they grow up this same ideology spurs them to continue the war and subject another generation of children to suffering.

Human rights groups that have studied the life histories of proffessional torturers find that many are the result of a training program in which youths are brutalized and tortured. Dirty war against progressive and revolutionary political elements, it has been common to torture children in front of their parents and guardians to intimidate those parents for them to bye to the will of the hegemony. This is a special kind of war against children the effects of which are almost too painful to recount.

Kill the Israelis, they argued, because it is a noble religious mission to do so and in connection to the fifteen years war in Liberia kill the Gio, Mano and Krahn people because it is a war characterized by ethnicity. The path to heaven is open to those who die in this cause.

One ninth-grade English-Language teacher, Jorge Alberto said the chalk gave me away. After the bandits burned his school down to the ground, they hunted for the teacher Renamo who found a box of chalk in Jorge`s house, which betrayed his profession. He was fortunate the local villagers helped him hide in the bush and then escaped (UNICEF 1990). But many teachers have not escaped Renamo terrorims.

The People Redemption Council (PRC) assassinated president William R. Tolbert and other members of the True Whig Party (TWP) during the bloody 1980 coup d`etat that was characterized by chaos and mayhem on the ascendency of the constitutional TWP to political power.

The National Patroitic Front of Liberia (NPFL) launched a full scale war on the NDPL government that lasted for fifteen years and took away the lives of about million of Liberians and property damaged on the same question of the ascendency of the NDPL to power.

Within that year of civil unrest and bloodshed other warlords formed warring groups to annihilate the NPFL that had about 75% of the country major resources.

LURD and MODEL forces fought in Liberia in a long campaign of guerilla attacks to stimulate progress on the question of the ascendency to power of the NPP led government.

Officiallly, war is defined as a conflict in which at least a thousand people die. Violence is not something you get used to just because you are in a vicinity laced with violence does not mean is an okay way of life. Individuals who live in a war zone have an unidentifiable enemy and a sense that the conflict, no matter how long it has been going on, is essentially a temporary state of against that will end once the conflict is resolved. They also received societal for suffering and they generally live within a community united by its aim and strong cultural tradition. It is the support and validation that enables individuals to cope with the impact of war and to maintain family and cultural ties despite intense stress and sufferring. They can develop a personal and collective narrative that makes sense out of the horror they confront. They can find a political meaning in struggle. They can take solace in ideology.

Scrutinizing the children of war zones reminded me about the fifteen years civil unrest in my motherland Liberia and some of the worst consequences of "today wars not physical and psychological, but social". Wars produce social dislocation of which one consequence is a breakdown in the basic "infrastructure of life". All too often this include food, healthcare and education, the bedrock of any nation sustainable future development.

The economic crises that accompany and flow from war often means severe food shortages and inadequate nutrition at best and malnutrition at worst, are usually associated with war; for instance the fifteen civil war I experienced in my motherland Liberia. The children disproportionately poor to start with social class does not take a vacation in a war zone. War always hit the poor hardest. The opulent have the available resources to protect themselves and their children and to flee to safety if the war comes too close. And who can blame them for that no parental certainty.

Ironically, it is hard to look at these children of war. Even the success stories tend to remind you of the wastage to highlights what is lost to so many. Being willing to see clearly the effects of war to children is the first step. Doing something about it is the next step. First, we must take care of these children of war. To care for them we must put aside our political labels and get on with the business of helping. We must address the needs of children of war without regard for their political ideology or the ideology of their parents. Children who are victims of war are a "side" we must always abet them. Individually and through our collective political and philanthropic voices, we must do something to increase the resources available for abeting refugee children what ever their values may be.

For children who stilled have their parents, supporting families and seeking to relocate or repatraite them in safety zones should be the strategy of choice. For children who have lost their parents, we must find ways to create new homes and families for them as soon as possible. These efforts might categorize as psychological first aid programs. By supporting children who have parents will enable most of them to hold on to a positive reality.

First aid is about safety, and the most important elements of safety to children of war are in order of important parents, kin, home and prospects for the future. But the fact remains that one consequence of maintaining military forces is that children lose their parents for extended periods even if there was never a shot fired in earnest.

CONCLUSION

In a nutshell, it may seen an indulgence, a luxury of sorts, to worry about these "children of war-ravaged Liberia" when there are children bleeding and mourning because of what unprofessional soldiers do. But it is part of the allegory, if only a minor chapter in the grand scheme of things.

What happens to children because the Western World sell and trade antipersonal weapons to warlords who then use them to suppress and unseat constitutional governments? What happens when we arm or politically endorse a resistance movement that attacks the civilian populations in an quest and effort to weaken the national government? What happens when we allow guns to flood poor inner-city neighborhoods as if selling and buying them were normally equivalent to buying and selling kitchens utensils? What happens when we have unprofessional soldiers in a poor country, spreading venereal diseases and providing a market for prostitution that include not just only mothers but children as well? We have an obligation and task to know that we have done all these things, unless we stop. About the Author Elijah Wreh is a student at the Minnesota State University, Mankato, majoring in biology, cytotechnology option. He plnned matriculating to professional school of medicine after graduation. He is also in the Minnesota National Army Guard and will be commission as a second lieutenant in the US Army after graduation from MSU. He is a promising Liberian youth.

Elijah Narplah Wreh can be contacted by email at elijah.wreh@mnsu.edu, cooldunn1983@yahoo.com, narp_gynecologist1983@yahoo.com. By phone 507-254-3011