IMAGINE THE IMPOSSIBLE... For Every Child
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IMAGINE THE IMPOSSIBLE... For Every Child
We are redesigning our website. Please check back in the near future.
| Contacts: | |||
| Day Brown, Artistic Director | Mary Johnson, Founder | ||
| Email: | imagineworkshop@yahoo.com | ||
| Tele: | 214-752-8470 | ||
| Web: | www.imaginetheimpossible.org | ||
IMAGINE THE IMPOSSIBLE... for Every Child
A Dallas, Texas based 501 C 3 non-profit-organization founded by Mary Johnson, (sister of Laurie Johnson) reaches over 500 impoverished children weekly, through the discipline of classical ballet, arts education and professional performance training. Imagine The Impossible...has expanded its reach to include refugee children boys and girls ages 5-14, from the persecuted Somali Bantu Tribe & Republic of Congo. Resettled by the United Nations to Dallas, Texas in 2004, these young children some orphans, were born in refugee camps surviving famine, civil war and horrid devastation. (In addition to their need for dance attire, costuming and dance shoes, they lack basic essentials such as soap, toothpaste, etc.) To learn more about these refugee dancers please see fact sheets with these links:
Somali Bantu Refugees Facts | Republic of Congo Facts
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In the spring of 2003, the first Somali Bantu refugees arrived in the United States to begin new lives. This group of approximately 12,000 refugees have spent most of the past decade languishing in camps along the dangerous Somali-Kenyan border. Descendants of slaves taken from Tanzania and northern Mozambique in the late nineteenth century to the southern Somali coast, the Bantu have remained a persecuted minority in Somalia and cannot return to the homes they fled there.
For many years, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) sought a place of safe asylum where the Bantu could permanently resettle. Kenya, which struggles to meet the needs of its own population as well as the hundreds of thousands of refugees it hosts, was unable to provide permanent refuge. In 2000, the United State agreed to consider the group for resettlement in the United States.
After being moved from the border to a safer and more accessible site in Kenya, the refugees under went interviews with officers of the Immigration and Naturalization Service to determine if they are eligible for admission into the United States as refugees. In addition, rigorous security checks and medical examinations were performed on all applicants before they are approved for resettlement. The Bantu were also provided with literacy training and an extended program of cultural orientation in Kenya before arriving in the United States. They have been placed in extended family groups in up to fifty cities and towns across the United States throughout 2003 and 2004.
Upon arrival in the U.S., each Bantu family was assigned to one of the ten voluntary agencies under cooperative agreement with the Department of State to provide reception and placement services. These agencies are Church World Service, Episcopal Migration Ministries, Ethiopian Community Development Council, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Iowa Bureau of Refugee Programs, Immigration and Refugee Services of America, International Rescue Committee, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, and World Relief Refugee Services. They will assist with basic immediate needs such as housing, furniture, clothing, food, and referrals to employment, ESL, and other services. In addition, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service's Office of Refugee Resettlement provides funding to the states and voluntary agencies for longer-term programs for refugees.
For more information on the Somali Bantu, see the fact sheet on the Bantu on the Cultural Orientation website operated by the Center for Applied Linguistics: www.culturalorientation.net
Republic of Congo Facts | HomeBarack Obama spoke often and passionately about Darfur while campaigning. But the African holocaust that will confront him first is the ongoing slaughter in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. More than 5 million have died in that conflict since 1996, and there's no sign of a letup.
As rebels commanded by Laurent Nkunda, a renegade Congolese Army general, closed in on the city of Goma in recent weeks, the United Nations; 17,000 troops its largest peacekeeping force in the world proved too week to stop the push or to prevent a rampage of rape and looting by government forces who were there to defend the city.
The U. N. Security Council voted unanimously last week to send in 3,100 more troops, but you would need a minimum of 100,000 soldiers to have a credible peacekeeping force in Congo, says Knox Chitiyo, an African expert at the Royal United Services Institute, a London think tank. Chitiyo thinks only an envoy of Obama's stature might be able to impose a settlement.
What keeps the war going is eastern Congo's vast mineral wealth gold, diamonds, tin and coltan, a vital component in mobile phones, Nkunda imposes a tax on illegal miners in his area; other militias do their own digging. Either way, the puny salaries offered it fighters disarm and join the national Army provide scant incentive to give up mining. Most of the take is smuggled out through Rwanda and that may be a key. Enforcing a ban on minerals from militia held areas might at least slow the fighting. Still, it's a tall order. If there were something easy that could fix the Congo, it would have been done, says Anneke Van Woudenberg of Human Right Watch. There's no magic bullet.
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Somali Bantu Refugees Facts | Home