NEWS FROM
LUTHERAN WORLD RELIEF
October 22, 2003
In this news release:
- "We’re Here Because You Can Help," Colombian Peace Delegation Tells Midwest Audiences
For more information contact Jonathan Frerichs at (410) 230-2800.
"WE’RE HERE BECAUSE YOU CAN HELP," COLOMBIAN PEACE DELEGATION TELLS MIDWEST AUDIENCES
Baltimore, October 22, 2003--A peace delegation is now in the Midwest from rural Colombia, South America.
"We are here because we know that when the people of the U.S. hear the real story of Colombia they will educate the U.S. Congress and help the people of Colombia," Yanid Giraldo, one of three 'grassroots ambassadors' from Colombia, told audiences in Minnesota this week.
Giraldo is a local community leader, a mother, someone who has lost her father and a brother to the conflict, one of the nearly three million people displaced by Colombia’s interminable civil war, a member of a Lutheran church, and a person who risks her life for peace.
Giraldo and two other Colombian women from similar circumstances are visiting congregations, colleges and church leaders in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois and Michigan, October 18 to November 2, 2003. The delegation is sponsored by Lutheran World Relief, part of a humanitarian and advocacy campaign led by LWR called Give Peace A Place In Colombia.
"To be displaced is to be uprooted and to question all that you knew to be true," Giraldo tells her listeners. "Now you ask, what will I do? Where will I go? Who can I trust? Life itself is questioned." Then she adds: "The role of the church is to transform our hopelessness into faith and peace."
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L to R: Kirsten Anderson-Stembridge, Colombia Outreach Organizer for LWR; Yanid Giraldo, Community Leader in Colombia; Dr. Robert Holst, President of Concordia University; Irma Rodriguez, Church Leader and Human Rights Lawyer from Colombia. |
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"We stand in awe of your strength," a college president told the women at one of their stops this week, Concordia University in St. Paul. They met with the president, Dr. Robert Holst, the college chaplain and some 50 students there, one of six Twin Cities stops.
"When the citizens know what is happening they can and they will be able to help – their hearts will be moved to action," said Irma Rodriguez,
a second delegate and human rights lawyer for beleaguered communities and churches in Colombia. She is now a refugee herself because of threats to her life.
The delegates represent many in Colombia who believe that U.S. taxpayers have the power to advocate for peace and away from policies that focus on military and counter-narcotics programs. "U.S. military aid is building the war in our country, it creates fear and it is destroying the country by shutting down open democracy," said Rodriguez.
"There are many forces – churches, teachers, unions, women, Afro-Colombians, indigenous people – who are sustaining their own struggle for peace. The sum of this movement will help us to overcome the desire for war in Colombia," Rodriquez noted.
Hearing the women reduced St. Stephen’s, a suburban Minneapolis Lutheran parish, to tears, one parishioner said. A Twin Cities pastor, Rev. David Anderson, who met the delegates at El Milagro Lutheran Church in Minneapolis said, "Tonight two courageous and determined women from Colombia shared devastating, personal, yet all-too-common accounts of brutality perpetrated by the guerrillas on the left, the paramilitary on the right as well as the military of Colombia’s government. The audience was encouraged to contact their members of Congress to change U.S. policy."
"We are all one body and the pain of the Colombian people causes hurt for the people of the United States as well. Together we must work for peace," said Rodriguez.
"There are no borders that can separate the people of the body of Christ," Giraldo tells her listeners in the Midwest.
