Schedule of Public Events with the Najaf Delegation to Minneapolis
September 7th, 2009 by LukeA delegation of 14 men and women from Najaf, lraq – Minneapolis’ newest Sister City – will visit the Twin Cities this September 18 through October 2, 2009. The visit will be the first official exchange between the two cities.
The delegates will be hosted by the Minneapolis-based non-profit Iraqi and American Reconciliation Project, along with the Minneapolis Convention and Visitors Association, the University of Minnesota, Friends for a Nonviolent World, and other local organizations. The following is a list of events with the delegation open to the public. For other inquiries or opportunities to participate, please contact IARP at info@reconciliationproject.org.
9/26, 7:00 PM: “Art in Iraq” at the St. Mane Theatre, 206 Parkway Ave N, Lanesboro. Presentation by Sami Rasouli, Founder and Director of Muslim Peacemaker Teams. At 8:00 PM a reception at Cornucopia Art Center in Lanesboro will be held in honor of the fourteen delegates from Najaf.
9/30, 2:00-4:30 PM: “Water for Peace: An Iraqi-US Partnership.”
Event page: http://www.cehd.umn.edu/Events/Water-Peace/
Location: Room 64, Biological Sciences on the St. Paul campus of the University of Minnesota. (1445 Gortner Avenue in St. Paul, see this link for map: http://www1.umn.edu/twincities/maps/BioSci/index.html)
According to a recent report by the United Nations, lack of access to clean water poses a significant threat to the health of Iraqi children. In the province of Najaf, 100 miles south of Baghdad, a unique partnership has developed to help meet the challenge of providing clean water at schools, hospitals, and clinics. An Iraqi NGO, the Muslim Peacemaker Teams, has partnered with a Minnesota non-profit, the Iraqi and American Reconciliation Project, to install water filtration systems in important public sites in Najaf. This program will bring together a multi-disciplinary panel of speakers to discuss the impact of clean water on education, health, and other aspects of public life, and how a bilateral community organizing effort can mobilize citizens to impact community health issues. The program is sponsored by the Iraqi and American Reconciliation Project, the Muslim Peacemaker Teams, and College of Education and Human Development and Office of International Programs at the University of Minnesota.
You bring relief to the anxiety we Americans over about this endless endless war. You bring organization of tactile possibilities to envision helping the people of the cradle of civilization. To have stood by helplessly to watch our military’s visiting of human suffering on Iraq, the country we set out to help by rescuing it from the Sadam Hussein regime, yet have managed to replace that regime with devastation, is a cruel conundrum. The Iraq delegation first and foremost enforces over and over the Iraqi gratitude to The United States for freeing them from Hussein’s reign of terror.
They choose not to remonstrate about the long years of fallout in our accomplishing that: the loss of life; contamination often from our depleted uranium cluster bomb and its resultant rise in breast and stomach cancer rates; hunger; lack of labor rights; abuses of their families; our failure to educate our troops in the Iraq language, which has resulted in massive misunderstanding of Iraq customs; even in our troops having difficulty finding their way around neighborhoods.
No, they say they only look forward to a strong stable Iraq government. And they feel this will best be accomplished by the schools we are building for their children. They are jubilant at them. I pray we are helping the people themselves to staff their school with progressive teachers. because so their hope for their future lies in the promise of their children’s leadership.
Yes, and this is where the United States’ future lies also; in returning our out of control culture of stimulation to normalcy. Normalcy. How may we have normalcy when we’ve lived under the auspices of non stop war?
By giving our school children tools to live through the humanities. This is my hope and the hope of the Iraqi thinkers visiting us.
Thank you,
Molly Culligan, associate member, Veterans for Peace
Molly,
Thanks so much for your message in support of the delegation. I think you hit the delegates’ message right on the head. They’re here to help Iraq move toward a better future and build peace between our two cities and countries.
Thank you again.
Luke Wilcox
IARP