| Salt Lake City |
 |
 |
| GER |
12 |
16 |
7 |
35 |
 |
| USA |
10 |
13 |
11 |
34 |
|
| NOR |
11 |
7 |
6 |
24 |
|
| CAN |
6 |
3 |
8 |
17 |
|
| RUS |
6 |
6 |
4 |
16 |
|
| AUT |
2 |
4 |
10 |
16 |
|
| ITA |
4 |
4 |
4 |
12 |
|
| FRA |
4 |
5 |
2 |
11 |
|
| SUI |
3 |
2 |
6 |
11 |
|
| NED |
3 |
5 |
0 |
8 |
|
|
|
|
Women to receive awards
By Lois M. Collins
Deseret News staff writer
They are, perhaps, among the best examples of the Olympic spirit, three young women who have learned to help people in trouble change their futures. Thursday, they will be honored by no less than Desmond Tutu as they accept cash awards for humanitarian work that has been transforming lives worldwide.
Nepal's Maili Lama's unpredictable journey to the podium where she will receive a Reebok Human Rights Award began five years ago when she tried to get medicine for her little girl. A "friend" offered her a ride to Katmandu, then tricked her and sold her into slavery where she spent more than two years in captivity, enslaved in Bombay's sex trade, her 30-month-old daughter a hostage to ensure compliance. The rescue by police, initiated by one of her customers who felt sorry for her, saw the young woman reunited not only with her little girl, but with her husband and family who, against all Nepalese custom when a woman has been sullied, embraced her.
The $50,000 that is the cash part of the honor will be used to help other women escape the life to which she was once conscripted.
Lama, 25, is one of four winners of the Reebok award, to be presented Thursday at the Capitol Theater. One of the winners, Dita Sari of Indonesia, at the last moment declined the award because she didn't think ethically she could take money from a large corporation. She was to be honored for her work as the founder of the first independent labor union in Indonesia. The other two, Kavwumbu Hakachima of Zambia and Malika Asha Sanders of Selma, Ala., on Tuesday told stories no less dramatic or life-changing than Lama's.
Sanders, 28, helped alter both the educational culture in post-activist Selma and the names of the politicians running the place. Today she directs a group called 21st Century Youth Leadership Movement, which helps children of color connect to their activist roots and to each other.
By the time she was 12, Sanders, the child of activists, knew she wanted to make a difference. The cause that chose her was an educational program called "ability tracking" that she said let schools discriminate based on color, while pretending to group children by their ability. She found that children of color, regardless of their circumstances, were put on an educational track that indicated they weren't bright.
Against blatant racism, she said, students convinced the school district's first black superintendent to institute ability testing. He was fired. But those fighting ability tracking prevailed — taking over the school for five days and four nights and eventually launching a vigorous voter registration campaign that later resulted in the longtime mayor getting tossed from office.
Hakachima, 28, is passionate in her efforts to curb the physical and sexual child abuse that runs just below the surface in her native Zambia. Coordinator of the Children in Crisis Center at the YWCA in Lusaka, she has developed training programs for police departments, ward counselors, parliamentarians, the medical community, Social Welfare workers and churches. She has brought the topic to national attention with TV and radio programs, and she's trained judges and court workers to help the children, in a system that has never been child-friendly. She's rescued children in abusive situations and even been forced to flee for her life more than once.
Paul Fireman, chief executive officer of Reebok, expressed regret that Sari, 30, had decided to decline the honor, for which she was selected from as many as 10,000 nominees. "She felt neither the customers nor the companies in our industry are doing all they can to improve conditions," he said. "We'll still honor her. We are doing the same kind of work and we will continue to work with her to improve working conditions, as we have in the past. There are certainly no hard feelings."
Reebok gives four of the $50,000 awards each year. This year, the company was invited to do it as part of the Cultural Olympiad in Salt Lake City.
E-MAIL: lois@desnews.com
|
|
February 6, 2002
|
