Fate of Children Triggers Student Action

By David Ashby
Special to the Herald News

When Jeff Chamberlain, professor of history at the University of St. Francis, assigned the memoirs of a physician during the wars in Chechnya as required reading for his Modern European History class, he had no idea how much it would inspire his students.

After reading "The Oath: A Surgeon Under Fire" and listening to the book's author, Dr. Khassan Baiev, speak at the university last month, about 20 students joined to raise money for the International Committee for the Children of Chechnya (ICCC), of which Baiev is the director.

Each of the students hopes to raise at least $100, with baby bottles serving as cash cans. The group also staged a luau and a Tupperware sale on campus to help raise money.

For their next fund-raiser, the students plan a karaoke night at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the university's Marian Hall Abbey in which faculty members will square off in a singing skirmish.

Reading and discussing Baiev's book was one thing but, for the students, meeting the human rights advocate and listening to him recount his experiences touched a nerve.

"The stories he told were just amazing," said student Brandy Malone. "It's hard to believe that something like this can be happening in the world today, and it opened up all of our eyes. We just felt like we had to do something, even if it's small."

The four students leading the fund-raising effort are Jessica Wilbanks and Brandy Malone, of Minooka, and Heather Heermann and Gandhi Schlote, of Joliet, two of which have children of their own. They said the photos of maimed and disfigured children that Baiev included in his lecture were difficult to look at.

Nicole Louis, a representative of the university's student government, made one of the biggest contributions to the effort when she asked the council for a donation.

Their finance committee recommended donating $1,500 to the ICCC, but questioned whether the student body would support such a large contribution. Louis, believing students would back the issue, got a few classmates to help her circulate a petition.

"We had two days to get 50 signatures," she says, "so after running around and making a lot of friends, we had 141 (signatures) to show the finance committee that students were interested."

Through their efforts, students also hope to educate people about the horrors that continue to take place in the former Soviet Union. According to Malone, when she took her baby bottle to work to raise money, the most common question was, "where's Chechnya?"

"This is a region that gives off this image that (all the people there) are a bunch of horrible terrorists, and that's not always the case," she said. "There's a lot of innocent people there and a lot of innocent children being hurt by these conflicts."

4/16/06