Rachel Corrie

By Rachel Corrie, aged 10 _ 1990I__ here for other children.I__ here because I care.I__ here because children everywhere are suffering and because forty thousand people die each day from hunger.I__ here because those people are mostly children.We have got to understand that the poor are all around us and we are ignoring them.We have got to understand that these deaths are preventable.We have got to understand that people in third world countries think and care and smile and cry just like us.We have got to understand that they dream our dreams and we dream theirs.We have got to understand that they are us. We are them.My dream is to stop hunger by the year 2000.My dream is to give the poor a chance.My dream is to save the 40,000 people who die each day.My dream can and will come true if we all look into the future and see the light that shines there.If we ignore hunger, that light will go out.If we all help and work together, it will grow and burn free with the potential of tomorrow.

I got a number of very thoughtful responses to the email I sent out last night, most of which I don__ have time to respond to right now. Thanks everyone for the encouragement, questions, criticism. Daniel__ response was particularly inspiring to me and deserves to be shared. The resistance of Israeli Jewish people to the occupation and the enormous risk taken by those refusing to serve in the Israeli military offers an example, especially for those of us living in the United States, of how to behave when you discover that atrocities are being commited in your name. Thank you.

We are all born and someday we__l all die. Most likely to some degree alone.What if our aloneness isn__ a tragedy? What if our aloneness is what allows us to speak the truth without being afraid? What if our aloneness is what allows us to adventure _ to experience the world as a dynamic presence _ as a changeable, interactive thing?If I lived in Bosnia or Rwanda or who knows where else, needless death wouldn__ be a distant symbol to me, it wouldn__ be a metaphor, it would be a reality.And I have no right to this metaphor. But I use it to console myself. To give a fraction of meaning to something enormous and needless.This realization. This realization that I will live my life in this world where I have privileges.I can__ cool boiling waters in Russia. I can__ be Picasso. I can__ be Jesus. I can__ save the planet single-handedly.I can wash dishes.

I look forward to seeing more and more people willing to resist the direction the world is moving in, a direction where our personal experiences are irrelevant, that we are defective, that our communities are not important, that we are powerless, that our future is determined, and that the highest level of humanity is expressed through what we choose to buy at the mall.

Sometimes I sit down to dinner with people and I realize there is a massive military machine surrounding us, trying to kill the people I'm having dinner with.

I want to be a lawyer, a dancer, an actress, a mother, a wife, a children's author, a distance runner, a poet, a pianist, a pet store owner, an astronaut, an environmental and humanitarian activist, a psychiatrist, a ballet teacher, and the first woman president.

Follow your dreams, believe in yourself and don't give up.

Nothing could have prepared me for the reality of the situation here. You just can__ imagine it unless you see it. And even then your experience is not at all the reality: what with the difficulties the Israeli army would face if they shot an unarmed US citizen, the fact that I have money to buy water when the army destroys wells, and of course, the fact that I have the option to leave. I am allowed to see the ocean.