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...In the News!
See news stories
about GCO on the Today Show, in Time Magazine, Los Angeles Times
Westside Weekly, People Magazine, and Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.
GCO
2006 Summer Camps recently featured in OSCE Mission to Bosnia and
Herzegovina Newsletter.
"In the 15
acre-wide European Centre for Therapy, Leisure and Memory, with
comfortable housing, horse stables and play areas, surrounded by lush
hills, 120 kids enjoyed each other’s company at the Global Children’s
Camp in the sunny July and August of 2006. The camp, located near
Rakavica, 20 kilometers from Sarajevo, was organized by the non-profit
Global Children’s Organization. . .During a visit to the camp in July
2006, Ambassador Douglas Davidson, Head of the OSCE Mission to Bosnia
and Herzegovina noted that the camp was a very worthwhile venture. . .
."
GCO on
the Today Show
On January
22,
2004, GCO was featured
on
NBC's top-rated morning news program, the Today Show. Special correspondent Summer
Sanders who visited the 2003 camp on Badija, introduced the five minute
segment
on Children Caught in the
Crossfire of War.
A variety of news media worldwide have also covered GCO. The June 10,
2002 issue of Time Magazine
ran the
article Getting
an Early Start on Peace.
GCO was featured in the Los Angeles Times Westside Weekly of
September 9, 2001 in Summer of Peace.
Additional articles appeared in the November/December 2000 issue
of Modern Maturity, the
September 11, 2000 issue of People Magazine,
and the June/July 2000 issue of Offspring
magazine.
GCO's Balkans camp is
poignantly depicted in the award-winning documentary, Memories Do Not Burn. This film,
directed by Paul Dukochitz and Marianne McCune, and narrated
compassionately
by Sarah Jessica Parker, illustrates the GCO experience with insight
and honesty.
The GCO volunteer
experience in
Ireland has also been documented in the recently completed film, Beyond the Troubles: Turning Neighbors Into Friends
by Gabriel Diamond. Gabriel, a volunteer himself, captured many of the
thoughts and hopes that made GCO's first camp in Ireland so dramatic
and special.
GCO has been reported on by
the Los Angeles Times, New York Post,
People Magazine, San Diego Tribune, Ireland Sunday People, Palisades
Post, The Irish News, The Oakland Tribune, The Sunday Telegraph, The
San Francisco Chronicle and Sacramento Bee, as well as
many Bosnian and Croatian papers. We have also been featured on the Roseanne Show, NPR, FOX News, ABC and CBS affiliates
in Honolulu. GCO's story has run in North Carolina, San
Francisco, Aspen, Minneapolis, New York, Florida, Hawaii and New
Mexico. Judith Jenya, GCO Founder, has been interviewed hundreds of
times, from CNN to KPFK
local LA radio, and has spoken at numerous conferences.
An
Enduring Crop
By Wendy Johnson
This article
originally appeared in the Fall 2005 issue of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.
Reprinted by permission of the author.
I remember
that late spring morning about seven years ago,
working in the lower fields of Green Gulch Farm, harvesting rainbow
chard for our local food bank with a group of elementary school
students from San Francisco. The kids were fanned out in a rainbow arc
themselves, spanning the field, chattering as they harvested crates of
greens. One child, a pale and strangely mute boy of about ten, wandered
away from his classmates to stand alone at the edge of the field, where
farm irrigation sprinklers were watering the next line of crops. The
May morning was warm, without a breath of wind. I watched as the child
took his place in the back-mist of the irrigation jets, holding his
thin, white hands out to the soft hiss of water. “He’s a new boy,” the
classroom teacher whispered, following my gaze. “From Bosnia. He never
says a word.”
I often
thought of that Bosnian child in the seasons that
followed and of his new life in the same Western culture that was
dismantling his Old World. So when about a year later a close farmer
friend entrusted me with a handful of speckled soup beans that had been
passed on to her from a refugee Kosovar family forced to flee their
garden, I eagerly sowed those seeds and grew them out over the next
five years with the help of hundreds of Bay Area children. We told the
story of the Kosovo beans every time we planted them, always with the
firm conviction that someday these beans would go home to their
original Balkan gardens.
The Kosovo
beans grew like wildfire, and no wonder. Beans
are an enduring crop, dating back some eight thousand years, native not
only to South America but also to Africa, China, India, and Europe. The
fertility of land and culture has long depended on the humble legume
for its ability to consolidate free atmospheric nitrogen on its strong
roots, helping, in active association with clouds of soil bacteria, to
bring wasted land back to life. Some six hundred genera and twelve
thousand species compose the legume family, and many members are
thoroughly integrated with land and people. Yet the domestication of
the tiny, hard-skinned wild bean of antiquity to the plump, thin-coated
bean of modern gardens has bred dependency as well as increased
harvest; for in order for the protein-rich beans of today to survive
they require their gardeners. We had inherited a gift not only of
Kosovo beans but also of Balkan culture.
Last summer
those Kosovo beans returned home, carried by
Suzy Stewart, a veteran science teacher of twenty years from our local
middle school, to Badija Island on the Adriatic Sea, just off the
Dalmatian coast of Croatia. Suzy and her husband were serving as
volunteers in a camp sponsored by Global Children’s Organization for
war-traumatized children from the Balkans. My farmer friend wove a bag
of richly patterned silk ribbon for the homecoming of the beans, and in
the old monastery on Badija Island where the GCO camp was held, 108
Muslim, Croat, Serbian, and Bosnian children received the well-tended
gift of their native beans. Suzy and the children tore strips of an old
blue sheet and wrapped tiny packages of a few seeds each tied with
bright red yarn for the children to take home. With the remaining yarn
the children wove friendship bracelets on each others’ wrists.
This
summer’s GCO camp, known as Friendship Without Borders,
will be held on a new fifteen-acre mountain retreat near Sarajevo, in
Bosnia. The retreat center may not yet have a garden, but just in case
it does, we’ll send along an extra handful of Kosovo beans to plant for
next year’s soup. We also sowed a line of the same beans in the kids’
garden at Green Gulch on July 3, in honor of Interdependence Day. One
of the older children at the planting read these words from
thirteen-year-old
Zelijka, of the Balkans: “Maybe some
people destroyed this world but in our hearts it is forever lovely.”
Balkan
Spring Bean Soup
From the
kitchen of Alma Elezovic
1 lb of new
soup beans, rinsed
2 tomatoes,
diced
1 bunch of
spring onions, chopped
1 bunch of
garden parsley, chopped
2 carrots,
peeled and chopped
3 large
soup spoons of vegetable oil
6-8 cups of
broth or vegetable stock
2
tablespoons of paprika
salt and
pepper to taste
Sauté
vegetables in oil for twenty minutes. Simmer in
broth with beans and seasoning for about a half hour.
Wendy
Johnson has been gardening and practicing meditation at
Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in northern California since 1975.
As GCO gives hope to
children in troubled parts of the world--from the Balkans to California
and beyond-- our message continues to make headlines by addressing
issues of global and topical relevance. And while the horrors of war
continue, we hope that awareness and support of GCO's mission will
follow. If you'd like a press kit and are interested in doing a story
on GCO, please contact the GCO office at (310) 581-2234.
3580 Wilshire Blvd.
Suite 1800
Los Angeles Ca 90010
Phone: (310) 581-2234
Fax: (213) 389-1237
gco@globalchild.org
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