Human Rights Heroes at Home 2009 - Peace

Sasha Crow, a 60 year-old grandmother who back in 2003 joined 400 volunteers from 34 countries in Baghdad in a last ditch effort to stop George Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq, began the Collateral Repair Project soon after her return to the United States on a battered laptop in a rented room in Seattle Washington. CRP took life in 2005 as a grassroots person-to-person endeavor to counter the collateral damage the U.S. government has inflicted upon the citizens of Iraq in our name.

One day in the fall of 2005, Sasha spotted an item on the Internet about the family of an Iraqi ambulance driver who had been strafed and killed by U.S. aircraft while trying to rescue victims during a U.S. military operation in western Anbar province of Iraq and together with Mary Madsen, a peace worker in southern Oregon, the two somehow raised $5000 to buy the driver's widow and five kids a new home and some livestock as a means of providing them with some basic security. That was how CRP began.

When sectarian strife flared after the Golden Dome bombing in Samara in 2006, Sasha and Mary began tracking Iraqi refugees forced from their war-torn country into Syria and Jordan. By the next year, they began ferrying back and forth between the United States and Amman where Sasha has settled, providing direct emergency assistance and Micro-Projects for Iraqi families whose reception in Jordan was not alike the treatment Mexican undocumented workers receive in the U.S.

Over the past two years, Sasha and Mary have advocated for Iraqi refugees before international relief organizations. Collateral Repair Project has provided food baskets for impoverished refugee families, portable heaters and winter coats (it snows in Amman) and supplies for school children. CRP has granted dozens of Micro-Projects (tools, equipment and supplies for cottage industry) – such as: sewing machines, bread ovens, laptops with printers, and construction tools to Iraqi refugees so they can earn a living in a hostile economic environment. The list is a lengthy one (for a list of projects see www.collateralrepairproject.org)

Every day Sasha walks the hills of Amman visiting refugee families and recording their stories (collateralrepairprojec.blogspot.org) but as the carnage in Iraq fades from memory and the world economy has plummeted into despair, CRP's cupboard has gone achingly bare. It is a syndrome that many grassroots peace organizations are confronting today.

Sasha Crow and Mary Madsen are unsung heroes of the movement for world peace. Their quiet, insistently determined work is emblematic of the debt that we as Americans owe to the people of lands that U.S. weapons and hubris has destroyed. As Global Exchange founder Medea Benjamin has written, the Collateral Repair Project represents "the soul of America."

I am honored to nominate Sasha Crow and Mary Madsen and the Collateral Repair Project for a Global Exchange 2009 Heroes of Human Rights Award