Health Inequities for Undocumented Immigrants
Wednesday, April 7
12:45-1:45 PM, Room 100
Underground America editor Peter Orner will be speaking about the growing health crisis for undocumented workers, highlighting such topics as health and human rights in prison, occupational injuries and social vulnerabilities leading to health inequities. Hosted by The Boalt Healthcare & Biotech Law Society,
Berkeley La Raza Law Journal, and the National Lawyers Guild – Berkeley Law.
Below is an excerpt from our forthcoming book on Burma.
Lai Pa
34 years old, male, Chin
Former Prisoner and Army Porter
Kuala Lumpur
Lai Pa is an outgoing Chin man—a Burmese ethnic minority—who works for the Chin Refugee Center. It is a clear that he has a lot to say; he is passionate about telling people of his experience as a prisoner of the State Peace and Development Council (the military junta that rules Burma), as he believes the issue must be exposed.
I was a porter for nearly six months.
I stayed in Moulmein (the third largest city in Burma) prison until the day I became a porter. At the time, I was about thirty years old. One night they yelled for me to get out. They made me line up with …
Shep
ard Fairey and the Human Rights Action Center have generously donated Aung San Suu Kyi Freedom To Lead posters to support the completion of our book Nowhere to Be Home: Narratives From Survivors of Burma’s Military Regime.
Your donation today will help us finish this important project. Until May 31st, if you donate $50 or more, we’ll send you …
Voice of Witness is currently seeking native French speakers to translate and transcribe interviews from French to English for our book on Congo. We are asking for native speakers only, as the interviews require a very high level of French. Approximately 10-15 hours per week required. If you’d like to help us, please contact letters@voiceofwitness.com with “Congo: French translation” in the subject line.
An excerpt from one of our narratives will feature on the McSweeney’s iPhone app The Small Chair this week. We will also post this excerpt on our website. More about our Congo project below:
The situation in Congo represents one of the worst humanitarian emergencies today. We ask the people who know this complicated story best – the Congolese and Rwandan people who have endured (and hoped) across the years to tell their side of this …
In a packed Long Island courtroom, a prosecutor laid out in chilling detail the “sport” that she said the defendant and his friends had made out of attacking Hispanic men.
“On Nov. 8, 2008, the hunt was on,” Megan O’Donnell, the prosecutor, told 12 jurors and 4 alternates in State Supreme Court on Thursday.
The defendant, Jeffrey Conroy, 19, was one of seven Patchogue-Medford High School students who the police and prosecutors said attacked an Ecuadorean immigrant, Marcelo Lucero, in November 2008. The fatal stabbing of Mr. Lucero shocked many on Long Island and focused new attention on assaults and harassment of Latinos in the area.
You can read the full article here.
Voice of Witness is looking for a Development and Communications Associate to help us expand our fundraising and outreach capacities. If you believe strongly in our mission to illuminate human rights crises through oral history, and would like to help us grow as an organization, please consider joining us in our work.
We’re delighted to offer our 50% discount on class sets of English and Spanish editions of Underground America to colleges, schools and educational organizations. Educators, we hope that you’ll take advantage of this opportunity to bring these remarkable stories to your students.
Voice of Witness books have been taught in colleges and schools throughout the world, and have been adopted as key resources by national advocacy groups, and their member affiliates, including the ENOUGH project, STAND and the Save Darfur Coalition. We are currently working with the non-profit Facing History to develop teaching strategies, resources and lesson plans based on the book.
To order your class set, or request an exam copy, please contact Adam Krefman at adam@mcsweeneys.net
We are currently developing two new book projects in 2010:
Women in Prison will address the most significant issues currently facing women in the U.S. prison system. These include sexual assault, domestic violence, drug addiction, reproductive oppression and lack of adequate healthcare. We will work with advocates across the country to interview imprisoned and formerly imprisoned women who have had their human rights violated. Read an excerpt from our first interview in the “Justice” section of the San Francisco Panorama.
High Rise Stories: Chicago Public Housing will focus on the voices and experiences of Chicago Housing Agency residents. Tenants will tell the stories of their Chicago neighborhoods, documenting the high-rises, and sharing narratives of their passages out. Tenants’ stories of displacement, relocation and community are not only crucial to Chicago’s social history, but also key to a meaningful national discourse on …
By Sarah Morrison
There was widespread celebration earlier in the year when Obama’s administration announced an ambitious plan to transform the nature of national immigrant detention centers. But while there has been some movement towards law reform, immigrant and civil rights groups are concerned that the most vulnerable immigrant populations remain at risk.
John Morton, the assistant secretary for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), announced in August that the government would transform the way the nation detains immigrant violators, creating what he called a “truly civil detention system.” But while there have been small inroads made by the Administration – including the lifting of the twenty-two year long ban on travel to the U.S. by people with HIV – immigrants detained in the country with the virus are still not offered the care they desperately need.
The HIV travel ban was enacted in
…
En las Sombras de Estado Unidos, the newly released Spanish edition of Underground America, is featured in El Sol newspaper this week. Join us at the launch this Thursday 19 Nov at San Francisco Main Library, 6-7:30pm.
Voice of Witness is a nonprofit book series that empowers those most closely affected by contemporary social injustice. Using oral history as a foundation, the series depicts human rights crises around the world through the stories of the men and women who experience them. Voice of Witness was founded by author Dave Eggers and physician/
