Ambassador Baxter Congratulates the 2008 Fulbright Teacher Exchange Program

46 Uruguayan teachers from public schools across the country participated in this year's program

By Leigh Miller

U.S. Ambassador Frank Baxter welcomed 46 Uruguayan public school teachers and members of the Montevideo business community to his residence April 17 to congratulate them for their participation in the 2008 Fulbright Teacher Exchange Program.
The annual program, supported by the U.S.-based Fulbright Foundation and administered by the Fulbright Commission of Uruguay, sends Uruguayan teachers to the United States to spend three weeks teaching in American schools.
Following a three-day orientation with the Fulbright Foundation in Washington D.C. in February 2008, the 46 Uruguayan teachers traveled to various states in the U.S. where they were installed in public and private schools as temporary teachers. In these roles, they learned about the U.S. education system and shared their Uruguayan teaching expertise with their host schools and families. They collaborated on ideas for curriculum development with their American counterparts, focusing on teaching the English language in their classrooms upon return to Uruguay.
During the reception, Mr. Baxter praised the Fulbright Commission of Uruguay for its coordination of the program and encouraged the business community to participate in future Teacher Exchange Program activities.
Following an introduction by Primary Education Administration Director General Edith Moraes, three teachers - Andrea Musso, an English teacher from public school Nº 31 in Montevideo; Cristina Álvez, an English teacher from public school Nº 56 in Maldonado and Norma Quijano, teaching assessor from the Primary Education Administration - gave testimonials about their experiences in the U.S.
Each emphasized the value of the relationships they developed with American teachers for enriching the learning experiences of their own students. Each also highlighted the importance of the Fulbright program and the support of the U.S. Embassy for encouraging Uruguayan teachers to learn English and collaborate with U.S. schools through the exchange program.

Alliance for a Drug-Free Uruguay Unveils New Ad Campaign

A group of students from ORT University pose with U.S. Public Affairs officer Robert Zimmerman during the presentation of a new ad campaign by the Alliance for a Drug-Free Uruguay, held April 10, 2008.

The Alliance for a Drug-Free Uruguay (Alianza por un Uruguay sin Drogas) launched a new drug prevention ad campaign during a presentation held at the ORT University in Montevideo. The ads, prepared free of charge by Uruguayan PR experts, will target child drug abuse by encouraging parents to communicate with their children and talk about drugs. The campaign includes a parents' guide with tips on how to raise awareness in children of all ages including teenagers.
Several Uruguayan media outlets such as dailies, radio and TV, have donated space and air time to run the ads. The parent's guide, available online, will be distributed throughout the country in supermarkets, movie theatres and sporting events.

Martin Luther King’s Dream Lives on 40 Years After His Death

On April 4, 1968, an assassin took the life of Martin Luther King Jr. He was 39 years old. Forty years after his death, Americans honor King with a national holiday celebrated on the third Monday of each January. Above, DJ Lewis (left) and his father, Dennis Sr., join in a January 2006 march in honor of King in Oklahoma City.

Americans remember the days of anger and hope
By Michael Friedman

Washington -- On April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, an assassin’s bullet took the life of Martin Luther King, the main architect and the leader of the nonviolent civil rights movement in the United States. He was 39 years old. The medical examiners said King died with the heart of a 60-year-old, because he had for so long carried the burden of so many. Some 100,000 Americans stood outside the church at the time of his funeral.
The day before, as part of his “poor people’s campaign,” King was campaigning on behalf of striking -- and primarily black -- sanitation workers. His last address drew strongly on his lifelong study of the Bible. It would prove prophetic:
Well, I don’t know what will happen now; we’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life -- longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. And so I’m happy tonight; I’m not worried about anything; I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
The year 1968 was one of political upheaval throughout the world. In the United States, just two months later, on June 5, another assassin took the life of Senator Robert Kennedy, who as attorney general had provided timely assistance to civil rights activists.
DAYS OF ANGER
The murder of Martin Luther King sparked riots in Washington and more than 100 other American cities, threatening to turn a peaceful struggle of African Americans into a violent racial confrontation. Even before the tragic event, the movement seemed to be undergoing a transformation that many of King’s closest associates watched with apprehension.
By May 1966, Stokley Carmichael, veteran of numerous voter registration drives, had established himself as the new head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the principal student organization of the civil rights movement, whose leadership was growing increasingly impatient with the gradualist strategy of Martin Luther King and his associates.
In a speech at Greenwood, Mississippi, Carmichael raised a call for “Black Power.” Where people like Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King had sought integration, Carmichael instead sought separation. Integration, he said, was “an insidious subterfuge, for the maintenance of white supremacy.”
Meanwhile, the Black Panther Party (some accounts trace the name to a visual emblem for illiterate voters used in an Alabama voter registration drive), founded in Oakland, California, in October 1966 by activists Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, employed armed members -- “Panthers” -- to shadow police officers who, they believed, unfairly targeted blacks.
While the party briefly enjoyed a measure of popularity, particularly through its social services programs, armed altercations with local police resulted in the death or jailing of prominent Panthers, turned many Americans against its violent ways, and fragmented the Panther movement. It petered out in a maze of factionalism and mutual recriminations.
Many feared, however, that King’s assassination would increase the influence of militant elements within the movement. At that time, some questioned King’s life work. But the “Promised Land” that King described was in many ways far closer than it seemed during the riots of April 1968.
AMERICAN CONSENSUS
The African-American historical experience will always be unique. But meaningful federal enforcement of the right to vote equipped black Americans with the tools that immigrants and other minority groups long have used to pursue -- and achieve -- the American Dream. In the United States, people who vote wield real political power. With the vote -- and over time -- legal and political equality for African Americans has produced gains in nearly every walk of life.
John R. Lewis, for example, was one of the Freedom Riders beaten bloody by a Montgomery, Alabama, mob in 1961. Today he represents Georgia’s 5th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives. Nearly 50 of his congressional colleagues are African Americans, and several of them wield great political power as chairpersons of in?uential congressional committees.
In 1963, Denise McNair was among the girls killed when racist vigilantes bombed Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. In 2005, her friend Condoleezza Rice took office as the nation’s secretary of state.
Black secondary school graduation rates have nearly tripled since 1966, and the rate of poverty has been nearly halved in that time. The expansion of the black middle class is a widely noted social development, as are the many successful entrepreneurs, scholars and literary and artistic achievers who are African American.
Although Americans continue to wrestle with issues of race, those issues differ profoundly from those addressed by Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement generation.
Unquestionably, the civil rights movement forced the American people to confront squarely the contradiction between their ideals and the reality of segregation and inequality. In doing so, it launched the nation far along the path to full racial equality, a road it is still traveling.
Probably the most important measure of progress is the emergence -- not least among the younger Americans who will build the nation’s future -- of a broad and deep consensus that the shameful histories of slavery, segregation and disadvantage must be relegated to just that: history.
The materials above are adapted from Free At Last: The U.S. Civil Rights Movement, a book to be published on America.gov during summer 2008.

U.S. Funding Helps Fight One of the “Worst Forms of Child Labor”

Initiatives aim to protect, educate child soldiers, other young victims
By Jane Morse
Washington -- U.S. programs are tackling the problems faced by many of the millions of children around the world who are exploited as laborers. Among the most unfortunate are children pressed into service as soldiers.
The U.N. International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that there are 218 million child laborers worldwide. Of these, some 300,000 are child soldiers, according to UNICEF.
Child soldiering has been designated as one of the “worst forms” of child labor by the United Nations in the ILO International Convention 182, which was adopted in 1999 and ratified by 163 nations, including the United States. U.S. efforts to protect and aid these children have been vigorous and consistent, and many agencies are involved in the effort.
The U.S. Department of Labor, for example, has spent $595 million since 1995 to help victims of child labor abuse. These programs, according to department estimates, have touched the lives of at least 1 million children.
In 2003, Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao held a conference on child soldiers titled “Children Caught in the Crossfire.” During the conference, she announced initiatives for on-the-ground services. Prior to this, the Department of Labor had funded research to look at the issue.
At the time of the conference, Chao said: “There are two faces of the child soldier issue -- the face of despair, and the face of redemption. ... We can’t give child soldiers their childhood back, but we can help them to rebuild their lives.”
To this end, the department launched a $13 million global initiative to help educate, rehabilitate and reintegrate former child soldiers. The initiative included a $7 million project funded through the ILO’s International Program on the Elimination of Child Labor to develop comprehensive strategies to help former child soldiers in Africa, where most current and former child soldiers live.
The Department of Labor currently funds more than 19 projects to educate children and protect them from exploitation in countries recovering from armed conflict. In fiscal year 2007, the department funded two new projects that target war-affected children -- including child soldiers -- in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The Labor-funded project in Uganda -- by promoting awareness campaigns and by providing increased access to educational opportunities -- is expected to help save more than 11,000 children from the worst forms of child labor. The project will reach an additional 14,725 indirect beneficiaries, who will attend target schools or join households that benefit from activities designed to enhance livelihood opportunities.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, some 12,000 youths will be aided by programs designed to prevent them from being exploited in a country still recovering from decades of conflict.
CHILD SOLDIERING AND TRAFFICKING
At the U.S. Department of State, child soldiering is considered to be “a unique and severe manifestation of trafficking in persons that involves the unlawful recruitment of children through force, fraud or coercion ….”
The Presidential Initiative on Trafficking in Persons has provided $2.5 million for post-conflict projects. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has been the biggest source of funds for projects working with child soldiers, providing $1,875,000 for fiscal years 2003 through 2006.
Because programs to help child soldiers are scattered through so many U.S. government departments and agencies, the State Department has taken the lead in serving as coordinator and information clearinghouse. In 2007, it launched a “Children in War” Web site, available to government personnel only, which collects information from a wide array of sources to serve as a resource tool for future programs.
Tu Dang, the foreign affairs officer who manages that Web site at the State Department’s Office of International Labor and Corporate Social Responsibility in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, told America.gov that the site covers a number of broader issues as well, such as vulnerable children and orphans.
“There’s a real need for coordination and information sharing,” she said. “It’s difficult, because there isn’t enough consistent information out there.”
Additional information on the worst forms of child labor and the Children in the Crossfire 2003 International Conference is available on the Labor Department Web site.
The full text of the 2007 Trafficking in Persons Report is available on the State Department Web site.