Friends,
We have some distressing news.
Last week, we told you about our three 2012 FOR Peace Award winners. Our International Pfeffer Peace Prize winner was Dr. Hakim, also known as Wee Teck Young, a Singaporean physician who founded Afghan Peace Volunteers.
This week, as our nation was celebrating independence and freedom, we learned that the U.S. government was denying Hakim a visa to enter the United States. Hakim is hoping to join the U.S.-Mexico Caravan of Peace with poet-activist Dr. Javier Sicilia.
Join FOR, Voices for Creative Nonviolence and RootsAction in calling on the State Department to grant Hakim a visa.
Hakim, a medical doctor schooled in Gandhian nonviolence, gave up a private medical practice and moved to Afghanistan's Bamiyan Province more than nine years ago. For two years prior to moving to Afghanistan, he worked as a public health doctor in an Afghan refugee camp in Pakistan. Because the U.S. government sees no conventional signs of a family, income or job for Hakim in Afghanistan, they worry he won't return when his visa expires. Yet Hakim's life's work is in Afghanistan, despite the fact that he earns no salary and has no more possessions than would fill a duffel bag.
The name he uses, Hakim, was given to him when he served as a public health doctor among refugees on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. In the Dari language, "Hakim" means "learned one and local healer," and he prefers this name to Wee Teck Young.
 Hakim's efforts with the Afghan Peace Volunteers have reached people in Afghanistan and around the world with courageous interethnic solidarity walks, a campaign of Internet video messaging, monthly "Global Days of Listening" (an FOR affiliate), and hosting scores of international visitors in Kabul.
The Afghan Peace Volunteers' aims are simple. They want others to understand why they want to live without war. They don't want their futures dictated by others, and they are tired of being defined as people desiring revenge and retaliation. That Hakim is traveling to the United States to participate in the Caravan of Peace along the U.S.-Mexico border speaks to his global view of the power of nonviolence.
Hakim has no intention of abandoning his work with the Afghan Peace Volunteers, and his is a message that needs to be heard in the United States.
The Caravan of Peace will be traveling throughout the United States in the late summer -- view the caravan route to see if it's coming near you! With your help, Dr. Hakim will be a part of it, spreading his message of nonviolence and reconciliation.
In peace,
Mark C. Johnson, Ph.D.
Executive Director
Fellowship of Reconciliation
P.S. If you didn't get to read about Dr. Hakim and our other awardees, be sure to check out our article from last week, "FOR 2012 Peace Award Winners Act Locally and Make Change Globally."
P.P.S. FOR's ongoing work supporting nonviolence and reconciliation in the Middle East, Mexico and around the world is only possible because of your support. Can you chip in $10 to help? |
