Naseem’s Story 19 November , 2009

Naseem Mohammad Shaikh is from Vadodara, Gujarat, in India.  For seven years, she kept hoping her husband and parents would come back.

Naseem’s is a household name in Kalol.  This is not because she is the first woman in Gujarat to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, for her efforts for the survivors of the 2002 violent riots in Panchmahals.

Seven years ago, in Delol village, her neighbours had suddenly gone into a frenzy that February morning.  They were screaming hate, pulling out machetes and knives, and chasing their neighbors.  The killing lasted for the next two days and when it was over, Naseem had lost 27 of her own family members.  Some of the dismembered bodies were flung into the nearby Goma river, others were scattered in the slush of nearby fields.

Miraculously, as it now seems, Nassem was at a local maternity hospital that day. When Dr Macchi of Kalol Delivery Centre was putting the stitches on her, the mob was probably killing her husband, father, mother and her close relatives. Only her five-year-old son survived. “It was only later that village elders said they were all dead. None of their bodies were found,” she says.

Naseem continued to live on hope for a while. “A Hindu man in our village, Khoya Patel, saved my son, Shoaib. I kept believing some other kind souls would have saved the others too,” she says. All these seven years, the police never confirmed their deaths.

Since then, she has been living in a rehabilitation camp in Kalol and refuses to go back to the village. For good reasons. “My brother who survived the killing had earlier returned to our village. He was still in great trauma and when a bomb went off in the village bus stand, he lost his sanity. His wife returned alone to the rehabilitation camp,” she says.

In connection with Shakeel Basha in New Delhi, Naseem was agreed to start a World Faith Chapter in Gujarat.  Where Naseem could call for violence, justifying her loss, she has chosen peace.  Through her awesome work, we hope that no one in Gujarat will face the pain Naseem has.

Letter from Shakeel 28 August , 2009

Shakeel is our awesome National Director of India.  Starting a few months ago, he has switched to running World Faith India full-time.  He sent me a letter explaining the work they are doing, so far with only $1,000 and I wanted to share it with all of you:

Dear Frank,

Just wanted to update you on recent events in India.

The funds has been transferred. that;s a great relief bcos my team was not able to go on streets for street contacts bcos of lack of money plus the non-formal education center we started was also in danger closing down. BIG THANKS for sending the funds. With this money we were able to buy some books and stationery for the children ( from ragpicking community) attending this education center.

Now we are having 7 members working actively for world faith India Chapter- Haq A Campaign for the rights of Homeless. Nobody is paid salary we all are working for it for free. the names are shakeel, akbar, nandlal, radheshyam, jaiprakash, zenab and lalit. we also have a working group of 21 members which met once a month.

That’s some update. Please let me know any developments from your side on the funding thing. The Indian Chapter is really growing in a very short time. Without any institutional support it will be difficult to sustain it for longer period.Now we need a office, a helpline to deal with crisis, some staff to handle emergencies arising at night, So there are many things where we are not able to intervene due to lack of funds.

Do keep me posted on any development.

thanks and regards,
Shakeel

Photos from informal school:

The Next Chapter: Cairo 20 July , 2008

After an enjoyable weekend in Amman while basically living out of Book@Cafe, I took a bus to Aqaba and ended up waiting 10 hours for a ferry across to Noueba, which left at 4am, and unloaded at 1pm.  That was the worse experience of the trip so far, and if wasn’t for the fact that a friendly Syrian (who also happened to be a Druze from Souada, go figure) helped me out, I may have just totally gone nuts.

Cairo has been an enjoyable experience, as after spending some time here each summer I am finally mentally prepared for the insanity that is Cairo before arriving.  Cairo is essentially the same size as New York, only you take away the infrastructure and add heat.  

My host last week was the morning DJ for Nile FM, the largest english radio station in the Arab world.  After a few days, she invited me into the studio to talk about the hospitality club we are in for such hosting (www.couchsurfing.com), and I also got to talk a bit about the chapter we are working to start in Cairo for World Faith.  It was funny to do an interview on the radio that wasn’t focused on World Faith, but rather talking about someone else’s project.  The interview will be posted on the World Faith website soon.

So after getting settled here, I met with Mustafa Abdullah, the leader of the World Faith chapter in Winston-Salem, and with Catherine Manfre, who is going to be our new Regional Director for Egypt.  After some meetings we came up with our plan of attack, and are hosting an interest meeting for the chapter this Tuesday at Pottery Cafe, across from American University of Cairo (Where Catherine had studied).  We already have quite a few interested people, and I think it will be a very interesting meeting… these sort of things get me re-inspired and remind me why I even do this in the first place.  More to report as afterwards.

Finally, after going to the Sudanese Embassy, I found out that my application for Sudan has to be personally signed by President Bashir, who was indicted by the ICC the same day I applied… I have no idea if I am going to get this visa or not.  Furthermore I have spent most the money I set aside for this trip already, so I am digging a little deeper than I feel comfortable with, but c’est la vie.  STILL reaching out to funders and seeing if we can get some real funding behind World Faith, as we still have done all that we have on less than $20,000 in the past two years.  I apologize that most of my blogs right now are commentary, but I hope to expand into more exploratory discussions when I am not traveling… Right now I am using the blog to keep people updated that I haven’t been able to single out and update.  More to come, as usual…

With Love from Beirut 4 July , 2008

Greetings from Beirut!

On this Fourth of July I will be celebrating with some friends here Beirut, most of which don’t know what the holiday is or what it represents, but are joining me for supposed “moral support.”

After graduating, I have decided to push World Faith full-time as a volunteer. While I am still sending our organizational plan to foundations and other contacts in search of funding that permits me to sustainably continue this pertinent work, I am also traveling to make it more “fundable.” Essentially, if there was something holding back a potential funder from supporting World Faith, I want to remove it.

So I am in Beirut now, working to help the local chapter here, 2gether, regroup after some of their key members left the country after the last bout of violence. The issue raises a more general trend, that the social entrepreneurs and promising leaders of the future leave, draining Lebanon of some of its greatest talent for the future.

Next week I will go to Amman, through Damascus, for a few days, finishing the week in Cairo. I’ll meet up with Mustafa Abdullah, the leader of Winston-Salem for World Faith chapter, to start cultivating our contacts there to see if a chapter can be started there as well. I look forward to returning to Cairo and seeing some good friends of mine, like Michael Esso, a fun-loving but dependable friend, and Angie Balata, a humbling and inspiring friend who is as quick-witted as she is sharp-tongued. Other friends await and I know it will be a good trip. I’m awaiting details, but it still looks I will continue on to Khartoum, Sudan to do the same.

While working here, at the moment from the United Lebanon Foundation’s office, I have been inspired at the value of human contact. For instance, when I flew into Beirut I had no reservation for a hotel, so I returned to the hotel we stayed at when we did the first trip of The Lebanon Project back in January. Not only did the manager, and most the staff, remember me, but he refused to charge more than half the listed price a night. Le Marly Hotel is a friend of World Faith.

Also, the frustrated state of the Lebanese population has never been more apparent. Upon passing a photo of Rafik Hariri, and digitized numbers next to him: 1 2 3 4. I asked my taxi driver what the numbers were… It has been 1,234 days since the (likely Syrian) assassination of Hariri. Yet in these few years, the Lebanese have survived more political stability than the US has since the US Civil War. Some have lost hope, resorting to accepting the status quo, or leaving Lebanon. Others retain hope, but wait for the blood-stained political leaders, virtually all guilty of crimes against humanity during the Lebanese Civil War, with non-regional and non-religious leaders who seek to unify Lebanon. However, I have found very few that are inspired enough to take action. One in particular sticks out to me.

If there were an interfaith project happening anywhere in greater Beirut, Nader Houella would be there, and there is a likely chance he had something to do with the planning. In a country of memories, Nader dreams. I don’t think I have talked to Nader on one occasion without him telling me of an idea he has had. Beyond this, he actually works to carry them out, a trait hard to come by in Lebanon. We are talking about putting together a unity concert for August, and I do believe it will happen. More to come as details progress.

World Faith Winston-Salem has First Event 19 April , 2008

Mustafa Abdullah, a Sophomore at Wake Forest University, recently founded the second Chapter of World Faith in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.  They just held their first event, which was a day of volunteering with Habitat for Humanity in Winston-Salem.  This is a sign that the World Faith model is definitely replicatable, and we look forward to seeing where else it goes!

The Lebanon Project: The Beginning and the Next Step 30 January , 2008

A vision is something that is extremely personal, hard to express, and harder to manifest. I know this as I have spent most my time and effort on building my own vision of World Faith. The Lebanon Project was not my vision, but the vision of some inspired and quick-to-mobilize NYU students who wanted to lead a service-learning project to Lebanon with the backing of World Faith. Organizationally this is ideal as each World Faith project should not require micromanagement, and decentralization is a key term I use frequently when describing the evolution of World Faith. However, on The Lebanon Project’s first service-learning trip, I had the blessing of joining them as a participant.

I arrived in Beirut as tired as the rest of us after two days of travel (and many unsuccessful attempts at solving a rubic’s cube I bought for the journey); a group of 10 students, diverse in many ways. From Muslims to Christians, Jews and Agnostics, We as a group had to have at least 17 passports among us, as we were such an ethnically diverse group. We immediately all expressed a touch of shock to find the irony of Lebanon: The nation which represents so many headlines of political instability and religious friction is not only clean and modern, but cosmopolitan and relatively calm.

The service-learning projects were varied but revealing. After touring the destruction in the south of Lebanon, we brought art supplies to an UNRWA refugee school for Palestinian children. As we encouraged the each student to draw their idea of peace, we were quickly shown the varied ideologies of peace: a map of Palestine with a fence around, a flaming building with rockets flying at it, and a field with what appeared to be children running in it. I inquired about the latter. The child said to me that he understood peace to be when, “children can play together; Christian and Muslim children, and even Jewish Children.” Amazing. What Martin Luther King spoke at age 34, this refugee child unknowingly reflected at age eight.

From the varied service-learning projects and dialogue events we had, one theme was definitely revealed to me, which completed some unfinished thoughts from previous travels in the region. After this trip (in which I also went to Syria), I have now personally been in Palestine/Israel, and every country that borders it. I have the heard the same stories from many perspectives; more than one per country. This trip, especially with our time spent in the south, particularly in the Beqa’a Valley, had a tendency to come back to the wars and occupations with Israel, being in 1975, 1982, or 2006. I realized that as Americans, we have a tendency to only see the headlines and the numbers at best, if we are even informed of that much. After meeting our volunteer guide through the south Mohammad, I learnt that his home had been leveled in 2006, “collateral damage.” Now I can no longer think of the situation of 2006 in sheer numbers and headlines. I suffered from this disconnect before this trip, even though in 2006 I was only 100 miles away, working on the US State Department’s evacuation, but I still had missed this great lesson that was revealed to me: When you go and meet people on their terms in their homeland, and you hear their story, regardless of your political opinions, you must put a human face to the headlines and statistics. The humanization of all parties makes you see conflict in new light. THIS IS A MODERATING FORCE.

When the service-learning trip ended, and my fellow participants returned to New York, and I began my next journey (after a slight detour to Damascus, in which I was ridiculously ill). I met with several leaders of interfaith work in Beirut to learn about the history and past failures of interfaith work in Lebanon (including some projects that ended in death threats), and I met with young minds frustrated with the current state of affairs who have the ideas but not the forum to share them. After my week of learning as much as I could about the role of religion in politics and media, I rented out a local café’s meeting room and held an open meeting for anyone interested in interfaith projects in Lebanon, about three hours before I had to be at the airport for my return flight.

Ten religiously diverse young people, from age 19 to 26, met me there. After briefly sharing my own experience, I allowed the attendees to share their own views and frustrations. I noticed a theme, so I asked a friend of mine present, Ziad, why when we met and I asked how he identified himself, he answered, “a citizen,” and not “Christian,” or “Muslim.” He answered, and the others agreed, that, “Our political parties, the structure of our society, is all built on religious lines, which is hurting the unity of Lebanon, we need to secularize!”

I responded to him with a dilemma, “But then if our generation is fixated on secularization, what is left in the discourse of religion in politics and the media? The conversation is dominated by those who use the religious language for division and disunity.” So I proposed, “Rather than secularizing, what if we pluralize, in that we respond in the public discourse with religious language applied to unity and peace-building?” The conversation stretched over two hours, and it resulted in everyone in attendance agreeing to meet a week later to design their own interfaith service team, as a World Faith chapter in Lebanon. I was ecstatic. I flew back, worn out yet inspired, and solved the rubic’s cube in the Moscow Airport. A week later, they came together and met, bringing in some new friends, and agreed on a name (“2gether”), and slated their first event for March 1. As one of them recently wrote me, “The journey begins…”

What is both inspiring and frustrating is that with all the groundbreaking work I have seen World Faith be blessed with in contributing, inciting, inspiring and facilitating, we have done it with relatively little funds. Everyone is volunteers, and we are still waiting for our non-profit status to finalize. We are a few weeks away from opening applications for our Humari Dunya project in India slated for June (led by the amazing and inspiring Soofia Ahmed), which we need to fundraise for, and since I have returned to the US less than two weeks ago, I have received messages from people interested in start local World Faith chapters in four more locations. We are also working with a local organization and the City of New York to create a pilot program of developing a protocol for houses of worship to mobilize as proselytizing-free Ready Receiving Centers in emergency situations of different sorts, which I hope to export to other World Faith chapters in the world. Even in publicity, we have been hugely blessed, as in the past four months I have personally done three TV interviews (including Good Morning America), two radio interviews and one print. I am three months away from graduating and pray that I will be blessed with the opportunity to go full-time with World Faith, and the biggest uncertainty is the financial viability of such a plan. I am working on sustainability programs as well, but even those require starting capital. So I am going to continue with what we have, but in the coming months I will be also begin reaching some of the limits of what we can do. So I work in faith that the means will become available as the scope of our projects increase, even as the speed of growth continues to amaze me week by week.

Relavant links: http://www.worldfaith.org

http://www.worldfaith.org/tlp

http://www.myspace.com/worldfaith

Successful Scarf Making Event 18 November , 2007

The scarf-making event was a hit! We cut and fringed almost 100 scarves in under two hours! Thanks to all those who came!

World Faith Recieves Youth Venture Grant 15 March , 2007

World Faith received it’s first grant from Youth Venture, a project incubator underneath the Ashoka umbrella.  This grant will be used to assist in programming in the 2007-2008 academic year.  We are very happy to receive this grant and hope that it is the first of many.