Formerly called Murder Victims Families for Reconciliation, now Murder Victims Families for Human Rights, the mission of this organization of people touched by tragedy continues to grow. Each member (they now number in the thousands) is a profile in moral courage.
Two years ago, my friends Torkin Wakefield and Ginny Jordan, both Colorado psychotherapists, found themselves in a slum village of mud huts on the outskirts of Kampala, Uganda. They had just visited with a young mother dying of AIDS and, shocked and saddened as they left, had nearly stumbled over a woman sitting on the sidewalk who was making colored beads from the pages of scavenged fashion magazines. Ginny came home and began selling the bead necklaces at farmer's markets and craft fairs, sending the money to Africa. It caught on. She started a foundation. Bead for Life was mentioned in a “O” magazine article, and demand skyrocketed. Today hundreds of women and girls from the displaced Acholi tribe, many living with AIDS/HIV--people who could only hope to make a dollar a day crushing rocks in a quarry-are supporting their families and bringing anti-malarial mosquito netting, TB medication, and school tuition to their community.
Burmese activist Ka Hsaw Wa and his wife and partner, attorney Katie Redford, are two of the kindest and most politically effective people I know. Championing human and environmental rights around the world, they have mounted successful legal challenges to transnational giants while holding to the ancient Burmese ideal of compassion even for their most implacable opponents. "We are committed to changing what is wrong in the world," Ka Hsaw Wa once told me. "But I know we have to change the human heart."
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