Bukeni Tete Waruzi

Yesterday, human rights activist and film maker Bukeni Tete Waruzi visited Pope John XXIII High School in Everett, MA to speak out on behalf of child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. As Founder and Executive Director of AJEDI-Ka, a non-governmental organization, dedicated to reintegrating child soldiers into society, Waruzi is intimately familiar with the horror stories of child soldiers.

“Since working on the issue of child soldiers, I’ve been arrested four times and beaten twice. But we have still managed to demobilize over 300 child soldiers.”

In the DRC civil war has been raging on and off since 1996. Government forces under President Joseph Kabila (son of slain President Lawrence Kabila) face off against ten different rebel group, backed by neighboring countries, over the country's wealth of natural resources. The fighting is carried out by children aged 8 - 16. Thirty-five percent of soldiers on both sides (government and rebels) are children. Some of these child soldiers are abducted, while others are given over by their parents. Drugs are used to anesthetize child soldiers to the cruelties they are forced to commit.

The life of a child soldier can only be described as a nightmare, especially for girl soldiers who suffer abuse and sexual exploitation by commanders, raped and forced to birth the children of their tormentors. Waruzi has documented these abuses in two documentaries produced in conjunction with Witness, a foundation that teaches human rights workers how to use video to document abuses. The latest video, "A Duty to Protect: Justice for Child Soldiers in the DRC" tells the horrific tale of girl soldiers in the DRC. It is a direct appeal to the International Criminal Court, which chose Congo as its first investigation. The ICC considers the recruitment of child soldiers to be a war crime. Waruzi has been invited to speak before the ICC at The Hague. He plans to produce a third video on AIDS/HIV, one of the unspoken consequences of the sexual exploitation of child soldiers.

Traveling the countryside with a video projector and a white sheet, Waruzi screens his videos in villages throughout the DRC, making the plight of child soldiers better understood. His work in the DRC is two-fold, to convince parents not to send their children to fight, and to help reintegrate demobilized child soldiers into the life of their village. This reintegration is incredibly difficult, as villagers fear all soldiers. They know the atrocities these children have committed which makes them unwelcome in the only place they can call home. Waruzi regularly works with local priests and pastors to welcome back these child soldiers. He then helps to provide them with everything they need for the transition, including clothes and money for education. (There is no government funded education in this, the resource wealthy country.)

Internationally, Waruzi is hoping to raise awareness of the plight of theDRC's child soldier s to other young people. Screening both of his movies before the student body and faculty of Pope John XXIII, he found his target audience. The students were hungry to know more. One student, a new arrival from Liberia who understands better than anyone the plight of those in the war zone, asked what, exactly, Waruzi was able to do for the child soldiers. So far he has demobilized over 300 child soldiers, returned them to health and then to their villages, and helped them to begin their education.

In response to this important work, the students of Pope John presented waruzi with a check for $1200 to continue his work. In thanking the students, he promised to return next year and give them an update on his work.

Rosa Parks, RIP

Moday, at the age of 92, Rosa Parks died of natural causes at home with her family in Detroit. With Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Parks was the icon of the Civil Rights movement. Recognizing the singular contribution of Mrs. Parks, In December of 2000 the Rosa Parks Library and Museum was opened in Montgomery, AL to honor this icon. This status and recognition has been more richly deserved than most Americans realize. In the historiography of Mrs. Parks' infamous bus ride that ended in jail, the icon is referred to always as a seamstress. Now this is true, but there is so much more.

Rosa Parks also served as a volunteer secretary for the NAACP offices in Montgomery. They had been searching for a test case to challenge the segregated bus system in the city, a system used predominantly by black workers traveling to their jobs. Mrs. Parks' refusal to surrender her seat to a white man, though unplanned, was a calculated decision she recognized would end in her arrest, thus providing a test case for the courts. Yes, she was tired after a long day at work, but it was Rosa Parks not serendipity that sparked the fifteen months of grassroots protests known as the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

One last bit of trivia. When Mrs. Parks was asked to surrender her seat, she was not sitting in the whites only section at the front of the bus. Following standard protocol of the time, Parks paid her fare to the driver at the front of the bus, then exited and re-entered the rear door. She was sitting in the properly designated "Colored" section three stops later when the bus driver ordered Mrs. Parks to surrender her seat to a white passenger, thus reducing the size of the "Colored" section while expanding that for the white passengers. This was common practice throughout the South prior to Montgomery.

If more people had the courage of their convictions and the determination to challenge what is wrong in this world, as Rosa Parks did, maybe, just maybe that world would become slightly more livable.

Anne Rice's Ultimate Supernatural Hero

When most people hear the name Anne Rice, images of vampires, witches, and New Orleans emerge. Astute readers can detect more than horror in the gothic queen’s oeuvre though. Rice’s investigation into the supernatural is imbued with the divine, revealing an intense theological interest in novels like Memnoch the Devil and Vittorio the Vampire. In her latest novel, Christ the Lord—Out of Egypt, Rice presents fans with her most personal work, a extended meditation on the hidden life of Jesus.

Libraries are filled with tomes on the life of Jesus Christ—whether literary, historical, political, or mystical. Rooted firmly in the Jewish tradition of midrash, that prayerful story-telling that seeks to open the Word of God to deeper understanding, Christ the Lord is technically a work of speculative theology posing as historical fiction. As with all her writing, Rice has done her research; she spent more than three years examining New Testament scholarship of every political and theological stripe. The result is an eye-opening encounter with first century Judea and the family life that Jesus might have lived.

If we think of the Gospels as trilogy, part one is Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem while the third part begins with Jesus’ baptism and ends with the resurrection. The middle section centers on a single story of Jesus in the Temple, lost for three days while his parents searched for him. For the rest of those in between years, the Gospels remains silent, saying simply that Jesus grew in grace and wisdom. Christ the Lord imagines a year in Jesus’ life from the time the holy family leaves Egypt and returns to Nazareth until that fateful trip Jerusalem and Jesus’ three days in the Temple.

Jesus bar Joseph, Yeshua as he is called in Aramaic, is seven years old, living in Alexandria, Egypt, surrounded by an extended family that includes his father Joseph (who Jesus knows is not his father), his mother Mary, his step-brother James (from Joseph’s first, dead wife), his uncles Cleopas, Alphaeus, and Simon (brothers of Mary and Joseph), their wives, and a gaggle of cousins. Like most Jews living in a Roman city as cosmopolitan as Alexandria, the young Jesus speaks Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic. He studies the Torah with a learned teacher in the morning, and he helps in the family trade, carpentry, in the afternoons.

Joseph, as head of this large clan, announces that it is time for the family to return home, saying, “We go home because it is our home, and because it is the Lord’s land. And because Herod is dead.” Over the next year, Jesus unravels the mystery that surrounds his own birth in Bethlehem, a mystery about which he is forbidden to ask. Uncle Cleopas tells the boy about the angel that appeared to Mary when she was betrothed to Joseph. From his brother James, Jesus learns of the appearance of shepherds and magi in Bethlehem who bow before the manger proclaiming Jesus a king. Finally, it is a Rabbi at the Temple in Jerusalem who informs Jesus of Herod’s slaughter of the innocents.

While learning of his past, the young Jesus experiences a severe loneliness brought on by his encounter with the miraculous. In one instance, he prays for snow and wakes to find the hillside covered in the white fluffiness, while at other times he cures the sick. Jesus’ isolation is further increased by a dream encounter with a winged being who tells him, “Your cause is lost, I know it’s lost, it’s lost every day and every hour, you know it is. You think your little miracles will help these people? I tell you, chaos rules. And I am its Prince.” Unable, or at least unwilling, to tell anyone about the dream, Jesus sinks further into seclusion finally turning to God with the words, “Lord, tell me who I am. Tell me what I am to do.”

In all of this, the child Jesus is completely believable. Rice’s prose is both economic and effusive. She wastes not a single word, yet her style draws the reader into a world hitherto unknown in all its luxuriant reality. Whether the description of blood sacrifice in the Temple or a dying man singing the Psalms in the Jordan River or a mother telling her kith and kin what is to happen to her child when she dies, Rice places the reader in the scene, making you a participant. This is not just good writing, but it draws on Saint Ignatius of Loyola’s spiritual practice of Biblical contemplation.

In imagining the hidden life of Jesus, Anne Rice uses her gift for character development, so finely tuned after three decades of writing, to create portraits of the people who would have had the greatest influence on the young Jesus. Joseph, who disappears from the Gospels before Jesus begins his ministry, is portrayed as a rock of faith. He is an ethical man who follows the Law and he trusts in God when angels speak to him. When the local Pharisee, Rabbi Jacimus, gives a hard lesson on living water and the purification rituals, Joseph helps his boys understand the ways of the Pharisees. “See two paths on a mountain ridge. One is close to the edge, the other is farther away. The one farther away is safer. That is the path of the Pharisee—to be farther from the edge of the cliff, farther from falling off the cliff and into sin, and so Rabbi Jacimus believes in his customs.” Is it any wonder that the adult Jesus would accuse the Pharisees of laying undue burdens on God’s people?

Anne Rice set for herself a challenge that few, if any, in the last two thousand years have met. “The true challenge was to take the Jesus of the Gospels…and try to get inside him and imagine what he felt.” She has done just that. Christ the Lord is a gift—to the Church, to believers and non-believers alike. Everyone who wishes to know more about Jesus should read this book. Everyone who wants to know about first century Israel should read this book. Everyone who enjoys a good story should read this book. In short, everyone should read Christ the Lord—Out of Egypt.

1918 Pandemic: Avian Flu

Soon to be published in the journals Science and Nature, virologists have isolated the flu virus that caused the 1918 pandemic, killing 50 milling people, reports the NY Times.

It had been "like a dark angel hovering over us," said Dr. Oxford, the virology professor at St. Bartholomew's. The virus spread and killed with terrifying speed, preferentially striking the young and the healthy. Alfred W. Crosby, author of "American's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918," said that it "killed more humans than any other disease in a similar duration in the history of the world."

The story of how this flu virus was reconstructed over the last decade is facinating. In 1918 viruses were unknown, and therefore a sample had not been isolated. As luck (or some bizarre approximation) would have it, the Spanish Flu of 1918 swept through an Alaskan village; the permafrost burial plot served as a freezer for the virus.

Then Dr. Taubenberger received a third sample, from a woman who had died in Brevig, Alaska, when the flu swept through her village, killing 72 adults and leaving just five. The dead were buried in a mass grave in the permafrost. A retired pathologist, Johan Hultin, hearing of Dr. Taubenberger's quest, had traveled from his home in San Francisco at his own expense. He dug up the grave with the villagers' permission, extracted the woman's still frozen lung tissue and sent it to Dr. Taubenberger.

In the last 18 months, the media has been reporting on more isolated outbreaks of avian flu. Could a new bird flu jump to the human population and wreak havoc on the world? More importantly are concerns about using the 1918 flu virus in bioterrorism.

Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers, said he had serious concerns about the reconstruction of the virus. "There is a risk verging on inevitability, of accidental release of the virus; there is also a risk of deliberate release of the virus." And the 1918 flu virus, Dr. Ebright added, "is perhaps the most effective bioweapons agent ever known."

Is the science more important than the risk of terrorism? The short answer is yes. If the threat of possible terror use of the 1918 influenza virus as a weapon were to stop significant scientific research into how viruses mutate, thus leading to discoveries in an array of areas (including possibly AIDS research), then the terrorists have accomplished their goals while still snuggling up in their caves.