Sulayman’s Stories

In Sudan and in Darfur, your brothers and sisters are so starved that many eat the roots of trees to stop the hunger pangs.

In South Asia, the mafia kidnaps and disfigures children to make them beg on the streets, even amputating limbs.

Bangladesh is about half the population of America packed into a country smaller than Iowa. Every year, gastroenteritis and diarrhoeal diseases kill 110,000 children below the age of five. Nearly every death is preventable with clean water and sanitation, but the average person makes less than $2 a day.

People in Indonesia work in Nike and Adidas factories for less than $2 a day, inhaling toxic chemicals and occasionally losing fingers in a cutting machine.

25 Million children in Africa will be orphaned because of AIDS by the year 2010. In Kenya, they roam the streets, starving and turning to drugs.

Thailand’s and Burma’s regimes brutally represses the Rohingya people, a Muslim ethnic group. The Burmese army throws them off land and denies them human rights. The Thai army tows their engineless boats out to sea and leaves them there to die, with survivors saying hundreds perished.

In 2002, Hindu extremists went on a pogrom against Muslims in the Indian state of Gujarat. Thousands of Muslims were killed, and many raped and brutally lynched, leaving 30,000 displaced refugees.  Narendra Modi, a BJP leader, was blamed for instigating the attacks and holding the police back as the mob continued their slaughter. However, he still serves a high government position in India to this day, despite being blamed by human rights groups and denied entry to the US for his human and religious rights violations.

Mosques have been burned down recently by Israeli settlers, Christian extremists, and bigots in Mozambique.

My heart is so small
it is almost invisible.
How can you place
such big sorrows in it?
“Look” He answered,
“your eyes are even smaller,
yet they behold the world”
–Rumi

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~ by Sulayman on February 14, 2009.