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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Today is World Refugee Day: Minnesota is home to over eighty thousand refugees. My show last week looks at the remnants of war in Laos: the loss of life and place that continues to this day.
Channapha Khamvongsa, the executive director of Legacies of War, uses art, culture, education, and community organizing to bring people together and create healing and transformation out of the wreckage of war.
During the U.S. bombing in Laos, an American educational adviser and his Laotian colleague collected illustrations and narratives from Laotian refugees. Etched in pencil, pens, crayons and markers, these accounts are raw and stark, reflecting the crude events that shaped the reality of these victims’ lives. Only a small circle of individuals knew of the existence of these illustrations.
Decades later, they were rediscovered by Legacies of War Executive Director Channapha Khamvongsa and were returned to the Laotian-American community. Today, accompanied by historical photos, maps and other relevant documents about the decade-long bombing, they form the core of the Legacies of War National Traveling Exhibition.
Apart from the context of the covert war, Khamvongsa touches on her identity crisis growing up with the legacy of her parents memory: of a land they knew before the war; and how straddling her multiple identities pushed her towards learning more about Laos.
A local immigration attorney, Loddy Elizabeth Tolzmann, also a Laotian refugee, joined us in the Mines Advisory Group. She talks briefly about how this organization works to stabilize regions that are left to deal with bombs that are leftover:
Too often landmines, unexploded ordnance (UXO), small arms and light weapons (SALW) are left behind after conflict and remain harmful to innocent civilians even after peace is established.
These remnants of conflict kill and injure an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 people a year - around one person every twenty minutes. And the devastation is much wider than physical. Remnants of conflict affect the way people live, work, and play, and prevent entire communities from escaping the poverty and suffering caused by conflict. They restrict people’s access to education and healthcare facilities, as well as to clean, safe water and land for cultivation. They hinder links between villages, preventing refugees from returning home and restricting local trade.Check out the Legacies of War website to see the important work that they are doing. For me, one of the thrills, and the privileges of being a journalist, is learning so much about issues that I would otherwise never have known about. For many of us, war is very removed from our daily lives, it is easy to forget that even during peaceful times there are communities around the world that are continuously dealing with the consequences of war. And some of these people are our neighbors are here in Minnesota as there are many Vietnam-era refugees (and other) living here in the Twin Cities.
Today (June 20th) is World Refugee Day and, tragically, a report from the United Nations shows that there are more people living as refugees around the world today than did fifteen years ago:
there were 43.7 million refugees and people displaced within their country by events such as war and natural disasters at the end of last year.
The Guardian has a good run down on the numbers, and where these refugees live today, their return rate (return to their motherland) and their socio-economic plight. Most striking, and unsurprising, is that most refugees flee to neighboring countries, most of which do not have the infrastructure to support them.
This show aired on June 18th, 2011; click here to download.
via newminnesotans
(Source: newminnesotans)
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Today is World Refugee Day: Minnesota is home to over eighty thousand refugees. My show last week looks at
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