NEWS
Nursing Program/free tuition
If you know of anyone between 18-28 years old, interested in the Nursing field, University of the District of Columbia (UDC) is offering FREE tuition, FREE books, a $250 monthly stipend, and guaranteed job placement as a nurse at Providence Hospital upon graduation (it's a 3 year program) with a starting salary of $40,000. The program is recruiting new students now!! Please contact Ms. Beshon Smith (202) 266-5481 or email Bsmith@urbanalliance.org

Japanese Student Needed
Thanks to Jane Fellman, a Peace activist in Glendale for passing this request along:

From Akemi Kayleng Knight:  A good friend of mine, Carole Miyashita, has an elderly father living in Whittier. He is no longer   able to live alone.   Carole is looking for a mature and reliable Japanese student who would be willing to live with them, rent free, in exchange for helping Carole take care of her dad. If you know of anyone please let me know.
Thanks.     
http://mysite.verizon.net/knight.physics      (310) 996-0342

United Nations Commission On The Status Of Women
I had been hoping to complete the write up about the Commission by deadline for this Edition. It is not going to happen. So rather than hold up publication, a separate, Special Edition will be coming later in the month. In the meantime, Ellen Snortland, also a Delegate at the Commission, gave me permission to reprint the following article which she wrote and which appeared in the Pasadena Weekly:

Fifty and counting -
Women still lag behind men on the world stage of global power politics
By Ellen Snortland

Every time I see the bank of flags from all over the world snapping and flapping in front of the United Nations buildings I am moved to tears. I'm the same way as I walk down the halls of the general assembly building to attend caucuses, and when I attach the little earpiece so I can have the simultaneous translation of the speakers who are here to tell us about the status of women in their countries. I am a United Nations Association-USA delegate to the Commission on the Status of Women. Along with my other US non-governmental organization colleagues, I am keenly aware of our privileges and embarrassed by our country's global arrogance. The status of women all over the world is dangerously low with the exception of Norway and other Scandinavian countries, and a sprinkling of a few other stand-out nations.

I so would like to light a fire under more Americans about the condition of female life on the planet. Surely gender apartheid can garner the same kind of moral indignation that racial apartheid did in the 1980s, can't it? Women are the canaries in the proverbial coal mine and many have stopped chirping. Women are illiterate, innumerate, murdered with impunity, sold, bartered and battered.

We are so low that we don't make the news. So low that some sessions are not even given the funds to pay for translation for delegates that have traveled from developing French-language countries in Africa. So low that most people don't even know about the Commission on the Status of Women, even though it was formed 50 years ago.

This is the 50th Commission on the Status of Women at the UN. In 1946, the CSW was a sub-commission born of the Economic and Social Council, which was a controversial move at the time. Virginia Gildersleeve, one of the four women to sign the UN Charter in San Francisco and the only American "founding mother," was against a separate commission, as was Eleanor Roosevelt. They felt splitting women away from the larger Human Rights Commission would give men the excuse to say, "Well, the 'girls' have their own little meeting. They're taken care of," and wash their hands of so-called women's issues. They felt staying in the larger human rights "tent" would declare once and for all that women are just as human as men.

There are hundreds of women from all over the world who are deeply committed to bringing up the status of women as the most powerful leverage we have to reach the Eight Millennium Development Goals by 2015 (www.un.org). It's lovely hearing all the languages, seeing all the clothing from different continents. No one got here accidentally. These are highly intentional activists and very frustrated because the general reporting concludes that women and girls' progress in the world is backsliding. With UN reform, the big topic these days, the "architects" of reform are repeating a millennium mistake: ignoring or minimizing women. Within the so-called "architecture" of reform, the women have a shack with no running water or electricity.

There's a serious campaign afoot to have the Security Council tap a woman for the secretary general position once Kofi Annan's term is up at the end of 2006. Equality Now is leading that effort. Please visit www.equalitynow.org to see what you can do to help.

It's surreal here at times. I was in a meeting where a woman from Kenya was testifying about the genocide of her particular ethnic group. She attested to alleged government sponsored massacres, looting and mass rapes. Then, a delegate's phone went off to the tune of "When the Saints Go Marchin' In." I wish the saints would go marchin' into Kenya to help this woman and her people but, alas, we seem to be plum short of saints these days, let alone marchin' ones.

The Darfur region of Sudan is hell on earth. The Great Lakes area of the Congo region is an ongoing living and killing nightmare of homicidal and environmental devastation being waged on the backs of women.

Meanwhile, official delegates from countries get five minutes to give a report on their country! Five minutes, and I think about how put-upon some people feel when they're asked to keep their comments short about, oh, let's say, the supply of toner in the office supply closet.

Pauline Field, who is another UNA-USA delegate traveling with me, told me about the Surinam situation. The women there still need their husbands' permission to do banking. (That was true in the US in the '60s.) On the good news front, Liberia managed to put Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf into the president's office in a massive move that mobilized the women there. They were ready for a "Mama Africa" top leader.

When some polls say that 50 percent of the US is not ready for a woman president, I am blown away by how low on the gender "totem pole" American women really are.

Is that OK with you?

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