Children Show the Way to Helping Mine Victims, The Mercury News September 12 , 2006 MECURY NEWS EDITORIAL At an assembly Monday, the students of Thornton Junior High in Fremont honored the memory of those who died on Sept. 11 by launching a penny drive to protect children living in the dark shadow of the Taliban and three decades of war. Over the next few weeks, they will be participating in Roots of Peace, a campaign in schools across the nation to raise money to rid Afghanistan of land mines. Perhaps nowhere will that humanitarian effort resonate more than at Thornton. Fremont has the largest concentration of Afghan-Americans in the nation -- as many as 15,000 -- and Thornton is close to the city's small-business district known as Little Kabul. Some Afghans in Fremont have relatives and neighbors who have been maimed and killed by land mines. Cheap to make, expensive and dangerous to remove, the mines were scattered throughout Afghanistan during three decades of war. Heidi Kuhn, a San Rafael woman who spoke at the school Monday, founded Roots of Peace in 1997. Back then, the focus was on the Balkans; it has shifted to Afghanistan, where 100,000 land mines have been removed. Today, children play soccer and men harvest grapes on fields once too dangerous to walk on. A coalition of forces, led by America, liberated Kabul within months of Sept. 11. But the task of building a free, modern Afghanistan has stumbled. The Taliban and Al-Qaida are resurgent; corrupt warlords siphon off reconstruction money. School to school, child to child, efforts like Roots of Peace are vital to make a better world and to make America safe. They contradict the Taliban's propaganda and its message of intolerance and hate. Through generosity, they counter the image in the Muslim world of America as dominators. They remind the world that America is like Fremont, a place where people with many cultures, religions and ethnicities work together. For the students at Thornton, Roots of Peace offers the lesson that they, too, can build a better world, one penny at a time. © 2006 MercuryNews.com and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved. http://www.mercurynews.com back to top