My experience travelling throughout Iran by bus with a delegation of some  truly incredible fellow US citizen ambassadors began in the bustling capital Tehran and looped down through historic cities like Yazd, (with a day touring marvelous Persepolis), Shiraz, Esfahan, and even Natanz (the location of Iran’s nuclear research  facility).  Because political tension between our respective governments is at such an all time high right now, we really made a point to  tread ultra-carefully,  respectfully,  and conservatively.  We women always wore the Hijab head cover and often full manteaus for body cover.  We tried to blend as much as possible.  This allowed us to pretty fully immerse ourselves into fascinating and passionate Persian day-to-day life where we were warmly welcomed.  We were often invited into circles of people to gain deeper understanding of some of the values, traditions, loves, fears, heroes and issues straight from Iran’s own citizens.   Overall the outcome was a truly eye-opening, and thought-provoking.  It was an awesome reality check.  Our mission was to  meet with and make a personal one-on-one connection with as many of the generous, beautiful, and mainly American-loving Persian folks over our  two week trip as possible.  It was not difficult to accomplish a lot of this contact, I promise you.  They were as interested in meeting us as we were  them.

Home in LA, my heart is full, and my immediate identification with Iran, this austere yet modern and possibly threatening country, has shifted  completely and positively.  Sitting here today I re-envision Iran and see a family- oriented, culturally rich, colorful, community-based and hopeful people.  I now have that reality ‘imprinted’ in my mind.

All of us who travelled hope that our government and others will continue to favor talks, diplomacy and communication to reach a resolution of any disagreements with Iran, resolution that does not cost human lives with weapons and war.

Some Iranians talked of missile tests and a "show of might" by the Iranian government and we think that should be condemned, but we did note that tests occurred after threats of attack by the Israeli government and that there were Israeli aerial exercises geared towards an attack on Iran.  And now Congress prepares to vote on a naval blockade of Iran.

An attack on Iran would cause immense human suffering (Iranian, Israeli, and those in the American services).  It would destabilize the region, is bound to harm U.S. interests in the region, and do the global economy no good.

One of the reasons I am so drawn to international travel is because once I’ve physically been somewhere, it is no longer just a region on a map and images in the media.  It becomes a place I can forever relate to in my gut and heart, someplace full of new friends and memories.  I fully intend on staying connected and involved in these people’s lives now.

Finally, it was just so clear to me as we made our way through this country and its citizens, how insane it is to clump an entire people together with their governing leaders.  I mean, just imagine if we as Americans were seen only as we’re represented by the few men/women who head our state? What an unrealistic and unfair disadvantage that would be for us.  Of course the same applies to Iran and so many other countries of the world.  We can’t judge an entire nation based on the man or woman on the podium calling the shots, but instead we must give the people a face, a life and a voice. And with that we give them REAL worth, as human beings, who want the same things we all do in life: happiness, health, family, freedom, safety.  I encourage others to think about the things that are artificially imprinted in their minds and then maybe try looking at things through investigation and different eyes.  I know I’ve always valued figuring out the "real deal"  in the circumstances of my own life.  Don’t you?  And why not in the world?"

Eliza Dushku 

Road construction, logging, and land clearing for agriculture are endangering the health of the Amazon rainforest and the human society that it supports. The Amazon Conservation Association aims to protect the forests through a diverse array projects that both preserve imperiled ecological landscapes and support sustainable management of natural resources.  Scientific research guides ACA’s approach, which strives for concrete, measurable achievements.

ACA concentrates most of its resources in the field, where they can have the largest impact on conservation. That’s why they have such a small profile here in the USA.  Because long-term conservation depends on active and informed participation by local stakeholders, ACA collaborates with people who make a living from the forest and are working to improve their management of resources.  Projects in Peru are implemented by ACA’s sister organization, ‘ACCA’ (Asociación para la Conservación de la Cuenca Amazónica).

In early 2008, Eliza traveled to the Peruvian Amazon with her brother Aaron who was working with ACCA on several projects.  Eliza traveled to Puerto Maldonado, a small but growing city in the Southeastern Province of Madre de Dios, Peru.  Puerto Maldonado is an important stop on the new inter-oceanic highway being constructed between Brazil and Peru.  This road is the first to traverse the Amazon and it means access for Brazilian merchants and farmers to Peru’s resources.  The allure of Peru to Brazilian business-men is their Pacific Ocean ports and their fertile lands currently covered by rain forest across the border from one of the world’s biggest soy-bean and cattle producing regions.

The paving of the highway is only partly completed and already a great transformation is underway.  Soon a fully-paved highway and bridge network will be in place.  With fast access to ports and to Brazilian capital, the rain-forests of Madre de Dios will fall victim first to unsustainable logging and then to soy-bean and cattle ranching as have the forests across the border in Brazil.  While development like this will bring many benefits to the local economy, ACCA is working hard to assure that this growth is done in a sustainable way and that negative impacts from wealthy businesses are offset by them through positive ecological impacts elsewhere.

Such negative impacts may be,
1.    Livelihood activities that depend on healthy forests will become less profitable than soy or cattle production meaning that forests will be transformed to farms.  The losers will be small land-holders or traditional forest users (Brazil nut producers or small hunters and farmers).
2.    Climate change:  carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions come from the transformation of an expansive landscape of trees (many large, dense ones) to one of grasses, small plants or dirt.
3.    The physical displacement of native communities from their traditional lands.
4.    The cultural destruction of the societies of stone-age indigenous peoples living in Peru in voluntary isolation from the modern world.
5.    The loss of habitats for rare or unknown species in this rich transition-zone between Andean and Amazonian ecosystems.

Offsets and mitigation to these threats that ACCA supports:
1.    An innovative program of support of and institutionalization of Brazil nut production zones.
2.    Climate change projects paid for by companies that emit a lot of CO2 and need to offset those emissions through capture somewhere (in trees).
3.    Forest conservation through agreements with the government in critical areas.  These areas host international researchers in forest ecology and biology.
4.    Supporting sustainable logging so that the industry will last.  Not ‘one harvest and out’.

Eliza and Aaron traveled with Luz Marina Velarde and Cesar Moran of ACCA to sites where they are working to guarantee Brazil nut producers’ rights to perpetual use of the forests.  Eliza traveled deep into the forest with a family of producers along the routes they walk to collect their Brazil nuts.  She saw how collection happens and experimented with the tools of the trade.  She also learned how ACCA was the first organization to achieve Forest Stewardship Certification (FSC) in Peru.  FSC certification means that the product reached market by following a chain of custody (from the tree to the cash-register in Trader Joe’s) where the health of the forest and the workers met agreed-upon standards.  It is truly an innovative process and ACCA has been recognized internationally for this work.  The Brazil nut tree, or Castaño, is a beautiful and immense wonder of nature that can’t survive without its diverse surrounding forest.

Eliza also had the opportunity to visit with a saw-mill in Puerto Maldonado where logs arrive from forests.  Some forests are logged indiscriminately and the forests are left as a wasteland of mud and destroyed vegetation while others are selectively and sustainably managed so as to only extract the largest trees while leaving smaller ones to grow up for harvest in coming years.  The mill Eliza visited was one which managed forests sustainably and was working towards their own certification similar to that of the Brazil nut forests.

Supporting ACCA means supporting the future of the people living along the Inter-Oceanic highway.  It means a contribution to the mitigation of global climate change and sustainable production of wood (trees) and food resources (Brazil nuts, soy and beef) that we all need.  ACCA is a non-profit organization that relies on grants from the government, from foundations and from concerned world citizens like Eliza.  It is her wish that readers will be inspired by Eliza’s support and will find ways to donate to ACCA’s important activities.  ACCA’s website allows for quick and easy, tax-deductible donations.  Please reference Eliza Dushku when making the donation so that they know about her efforts to promote them and her love for their work:  http://www.amazonconservation.org/getinvolved/index.html

The maps behind me identify the first ever protected districts for Brazil Nut harvesting in the Amazon forest. And that’s my brother Aaron who invited me to Madre de Dios, Peruto join him on one of his environmental trips. Aaron does mapping on the ground long with photography under the cloud cover from a Cessna and by satellite mapping (GSI). The project aims to help protect the world’s greatest rain forest, especially an area now threatened by a huge highway being paved through the forest to the Pacific Ocean. Okay, roads are good, but with roads come more deforestation, more slash-and-burn plantations, destructive secondary roads, and disruption of local life through immigration, mining, ranching, and logging. The realists among you will not be surprises that some roads are created for nothing but profitable purposes regardless of the cost to local life (people, plants, animals).

The stations we visited, run by the Amazon Conservation Association, fight to preserve some areas of the forest. One of their first areas was a Brazil nut concession in the Castana Corrido. It sustains 420 families and I got to meet some of them. The Brazil nut industry is important because it is a sustainable industry (existing naturally in a healthy rain forest).

The USAID under the Bush Administration says that first comes economic growth (which may reduce poverty), first comes their “macroeconomic framework” (and sustainability may follow). The USAID says that regulations discourage employment and inhibit firms from high productivity.It seemed to me the people on the ground were saying reducing poverty should be top of the list, not a maybe outcome. They were saying companies have to be regulated first, because they don’t care, and people regulated least of all. Shouldn’t sustainability come first and profits second? I think so. These are the two different ways of looking at the issue. I came away not liking USAID’s “The Goal is Growth” slogan. It should be about people first. But, still, everyone I met was full of hope.
Here I’m on millions of Brazil nuts. Yes, they come in shells not how they look in bags of Trail Mix. And first of all they come in giant pods and I got to use a machete for real:

You can see more about the Amazon Conservation Associations. They are working to get producers a higher price for their product and to win the first sustainable certification for a forest product in Peru.

They are an amazing group of people. I’ll just leave this little lecture with one of their forest posters.And I have to add one final picture from Machu Pichuu in Peru (taken by my friend Pablo Corral) where I hiked the Inca Trail and looked down on Machu Pichuu it in the early morning. Now that will take your breath away!Love and peace, Eliza

 Kaolack, Senegal is a few miles east of Dakar.  There is a great fledgling school there that I support.  The plan of the school is to offer educational opportunity to 10,000 Senegalese village girls and to build self-sustaining educational and business organizations run by the girls themselves. They already have a good start on the planTheir website can show you how 10,000 Girls is different. It was began by Viola Vaughn in 2001. Viola is a transplanted American grandmother and someone who knows how to build solid foundations.For dozens of reasons that you can imagine village girls drop out of schools in Senegal. 10,000 Girls provides the essentials to overcome this: a place to study, time to study, books and materials, and a reason to study with an interdependent entrepreneurship program and projects run by the girls themselves.I will write again of this project and include pictures.  But see their excellent website  now.Eliza

They call Senegal “Africa for Beginners,” a beautiful and easy country. My mom was Dean of a college there and I visited her during those years.Naturally we took lots of pictures. Here are a few that might fit into this BostonDivaLive.

Dakar, Senegal was the main “point of departure” for African slaves to the U.S. in the nineteenth century. Goree Island is the closest point on Africa to the U.S. and was a real point of departure for so many as they were loaded from an island prison onto the slave boats through a doorway called “Point of No Return.”And some pictures doing my thing. “Por nada, you guys.” I loved Senegal!

A beautiful place and a fine cause. The camp for boys has been in existence since 1900 to give inner city boys—mostly poor, mostly Black—a summer chance to experience an alternative environment. The camp is now sponsored by the South End Settlement Association and helped out mightily by the Camp Hale Alumni Association where my father and oldest brother Aaron are Directors. I’m a proud supporter.My father, who grew up in the South End, went to the camp in the 1950 and he has supported Camp Hale ever since as a counselor, a director, and through the Alumni Association. He taught public school for many years in the heart of Boston. My three brothers went to Camp Hale, and Aaron and Ben have been counselors.Below is a another picture of Squam Lake near where the camp is located and two other pictures. The counselor on the lefts is Aaron: Here is the description from the United South End Settlements website:

Camp Hale, which is located on Squam Lake in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, has been providing residential camping experience to approximately 125 boys every summer since 1900. The basic camping program serves 7 to 14 year old boys utilizing the natural setting of Squam Lake and the White Mountains to provide an alternative environment, opportunity for development, and realization of personal potential within the framework of an enriching experience and reprieve from the stresses of urban living. These experiences are broken into three parts of the day representing, individual achievement, peer group interaction, and community responsibility. The Leaders in Training program targets 14 to 16 year olds, generally former campers, as potential counselors and prepares them through work, special training sessions and mentor supervised leadership experiences.

Here I am doing a Q&A on the Camp Hale Alumni Association website talking about what the Camp means to me. I really appreciate the publicity that fans have given to Camp Hale.I am very happy to be able to bring attention to this fine place and good cause and to the work of the United South End Settlement, a product of the famous “sixties” in Boston. I remember, as a kid, singing at a fund-raising program at USES’s Harriet Tubman House named for an escaped slave and one of the workers on the Underground Railroad. My Aunt Patricia and my mother taught me the “Harriet Tubman” song and, at about four foot two, I belted it out:

Come on up, mm mm mm, I got a lifelineCome on up to this train of mineCome on up, mm mm mm, I got a lifelineCome on up to this train of mine.She said her name was Harriet TubmanAnd she drove for the underground railroad.