Heroes You Should Know: Faraaz Hossain

20 year-old  Faraaz Hossain wasn’t thinking about becoming a hero on the evening of July 1, 2016, as he met two former high school classmates from Dhaka, Bangladesh for a brief reunion at their old hangout, Holey Artisan Bakery in the business district of Dhaka.  The three friends were home for summer break from studying in America---Hossain as a graduate student at Emory University, Abinta Kabir (age 18) as an undergraduate at Emory, and Tarishi Jain (age 19), a student at Berkeley---and wanted to catch up over some bagels and coffee. 

But then heavily armed seven ISIS terrorists stormed the bakery shouting 'Allahu Akbar!' and took Hossain and more than thirty customers hostage.

The standoff lasted for almost twelve hours, during which time the terrorists questioned the hostages about their religions and nationalities, and then reportedly told them that if they could not recite passages from the Quran they would die. 

Muslims were separated from non-Muslims, and the terrorists had the staff cook meals for the Muslim hostages so they could eat before the Ramadan fast started at sunrise.  A group of women dressed in traditional Islamic hijabs were eventually allowed to leave, and then the terrorists told Faraaz that because he was Bengali and Muslim he too could leave.

Eyewitnesses report that Faraaz asked about his friends.   Because Abinta wasn’t Muslim and Jain admitted to being an American citizen he was told that they would have to die.  “Then, I’ll stay with them” was Hossain’s response.  Soon after 20 of the hostages, including Faraaz, Abinta, and Jain, were brutally hacked to death.

Faraaz’s brother Zaraif reported that the autopsy showed wounds consistent with someone who tried to fight back.  “Our mom has raised us to always protect and respect women.  And he (Faraaz) did so till the end.”

One can only speculate as to why Faraaz chose to stay when he could have left.  Did he think he could somehow overpower seven men, armed with guns and knives?  Did he believe the terrorists would eventually let them all go free?  Or did he simply feel that he couldn’t abandon his friends, even knowing that it meant his own death?

What we do know is that Faraaz Hossain was a brilliant and personable graduate student who, at 20 years-old, had a world of wonderful personal and professional options in front of him. And he could have left.  Some…perhaps many…would say he should have left.  He was destined for success.

Destined for success?  Faraaz Hossain was more than successful, he was significant.

Faraaz Hossain is a hero you should know.  And I’m Dr. Ross Porter.

Heroes You Should Know: William Kamkwamba

If ever there was an example of creativity finding a way, it would be William Kamkwamba. 

Born the second of seven children in a farming family in Malawi, he was forced to leave school at 14 when a devastating famine sucked the life out of his country’s soil and his parents could no longer afford the $80 annual school fee.  But William wasn’t about to stop learning, turning to the local library for educational material without missing a beat. 

Early on he’d shown talent with electronics, having started a radio repair business to make extra money for his family.  Even so, when he built his first electricity-producing windmill from spare parts and scrap at age 14 to power his family’s home---working only from plans he found in a library book---heads began to turn.

An international blogger heard about the young inventor, wrote about him, and the rest is history.  TED Global Conference director Emeka Okafor tracked down William and invited him to speak at the next conference about his windmill and his dream to build larger windmills to help his village.

Not surprisingly, a generous outpouring of financial support followed his presentation.

And as a result, William was able to improve his original windmill by incorporating solar power---and then adding this system to the new windmills he built.  He also developed a solar powered pump to help produce clean water, and a bio-gas digester that uses cow dung to generate gas for cooking.  His innovations have lowered dependence on firewood and overall deforestation.

William was also able to re-start his formal education as well, first as a student at the African Leadership Academy, and then at Dartmouth College where he graduated in 2014.

Somehow, he also found time to put his story into book form, with the internationally acclaimed The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind.

Named by Time magazine as one of the "30 People Under 30 Changing The World,” William remains committed to his country’s growth, and envisions building an innovation center in Malawi where other inventors can share their discoveries and their dreams.

William Kamkwamba is a hero you should know.  And I’m Dr. Ross Porter.

Heroes You Should Know: Fe del Mundo

Fe del Mundo suffered significant losses early in life, and they sculpted her future.  Three of her eight siblings died in infancy.  And when her older sister---who’d dreamed of one day being a doctor to the poor---died at age 11 of appendicitis, young Fe decided she would be a pediatrician.

A brilliant student, she earned her medical degree from the University of the Philippines in 1933.  And because of her giftedness the President of the Philippines offered her a scholarship to any medical school in the United States, to further her training.  Fe chose Harvard Medical School, and was accepted there in 1936.  When she arrived, she was surprised to be escorted to her room in the male dormitory. 

It was then that she learned Harvard did not accept women to its medical school.  And Harvard learned that Fe was a woman.

However, because of her stellar record the head of the Pediatrics department decided to make an exception for del Mundo.   It would take nine additional years for the school to change its admission policies and begin accepting women.

After her studies at Harvard and at Boston College, where she earned a Masters in Bacteriology, Fe decided to return to the Philippines in 1941, just months before the Japanese invasion.  When the war began, she took a job with the Red Cross and worked with the children interned at the University of Santo Tomas.  In 1943 when the Japanese closed the camp, del Mundo headed up the Children’s Hospital in Manila and worked there until 1948

Growing tired of the governmental bureaucracy that seemed to limit the effectiveness of medical care, Fe sold her home and most of her belongings, obtained a sizeable loan, and founded her own 100 bed pediatric hospital that opened its doors in 1957.  One year later she ceded personal ownership of the hospital to a Board of Trustees.  Not having a home of her own now, del Mundo lived on the second floor of her hospital.

Doing pioneering work in the area of infectious diseases, and remaining active in the field of public health (she once created an incubator out of bamboo for rural clinics without electricity to use), del Mundo practiced medicine for eight decades---passing away just short of her 100^th birthday.

Shaped by early losses, this remarkable doctor, innovator, and humanitarian turned tragedy into triumph, and in the process made the world a healthier place---in mind, body, and spirit.

Fe del Mundo is hero you should know.  And I’m Dr. Ross Porter.

Heroes You Should Know: Aki Ra

Born in Siem Reap, Cambodia and orphaned as an infant when the Khmer Rouge killed both his parents, Eoun Yeak isn’t sure of his birthday…or even his birth year.  He believes it was either 1970 or 1973. 

And when he was big enough to carry a rifle he was conscripted into the Khmer Rouge army as a child soldier.  But when the Vietnamese Army invaded Cambodia, Eoun Yeak was taken captive and eventually joined the Kampuchean People's Revolutionary Armed Forces.  The young boy was so efficient planting landmines on the border of Thailand and Cambodia (as many as 5,000 a month) he was given the name ‘Aki Ra’, after the heavy-duty Japanese appliance company Akira, and the nickname stuck.

Having laid roughly 160,000 mines himself, and becoming an expert in the process, Aki Ra was hired by the United Nations in 1991 to disarm and remove landmines in Cambodia where Cambodian Mine Action and Victim Assistance Authority estimate up to 6 million had been laid in the three decades of war. 

Eventually he established his own business of de-mining areas, and selling the mines for scrap.  Word spread about this former child soldier who was hired by villages to disarm landmines with a stick.  Aki Ra began charging a dollar for visitors to see the grenades, bombs, mines, army uniforms, and rifles he’d collected and hear him teach about safety.  He put his earnings toward the founding of the Cambodian Landmine Museum.

When the Cambodian government heard of the museum, they quickly moved to shut it down, and to stop Aki Ra’s “uncertified” de-mining work.  He was briefly imprisoned twice, and eventually decided to receive special training and certification through London’s International School of Security and Explosives Education so that he could continue his work.

In 2008, the Cambodian Landmine Museum was reopened.  It serves to tell Aki Ra’s story and educate visitors of the ongoing horrors of landmines.  But Aki Ra has also turned the museum into a home for 29 children he’s met in his de-mining work --- victims of landmines, as well as polio, AIDS, and birth defects.  Some of these children are orphans, some were given up by parents who could not afford to keep them, and the proceeds from the museum go to feed, clothe, and educate them.

Today Aki Ra continues to lead his non-profit Cambodian Self Help Demining team, comprised of native Cambodians, and together they have cleared over 3.2 million yards of landmines in poor villages considered “low priority” by the government.  Lives have been saved and thousands of families have been able to return to farming as a result.

Orphaned and forced to plant landmines as a child, Aki Ra now chooses to risk his life to make his country safe again.

He is a hero you should know.  And I’m Dr. Ross Porter.

Heroes You Should Know: Zoya Krakhmalnikova

How much are you willing to sacrifice for love?  This isn’t a question too many of us are forced to face in the safety and comfort of the United States.  But for Zoya Krakhmalnikova, a Soviet Dissident in the Soviet Union, it was 24/7.

From an early age she understood the risks involved in fighting for freedom, and speaking truth in the face of a tyrannical regime.  As a nine year-old she’d watched as her father was arrested during one of Joseph Stalin’s many purges in the Ukraine.  And after she completed her undergraduate and post-graduate studies at the Gorky Literary Institute, and become a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences' Institute of Sociology, she could have played it safe.  And who would have blamed her for enjoying her hard-earned professional success as a writer, and wanting to preserve her scholarly standing along with her husband who was also an author and member of the Academy.

But in 1971, Zoya decided to be baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church.  This public statement of faith immediately led to her being fired from her job and dismissed from the USSR Union of Soviet Writers.  Essentially she would no longer have any of her writing published in her country.

But she kept writing…and writing about subjects that would eventually land her in hot water again.  She began with a series of articles concerning Christianity in the Soviet Union which she sent to a contact outside the Soviet Union to publish.  Then she resurrected a pre-revolution journal Nadezhda (Hope), focusing on the history of the Russian Orthodox Church and its role.  The journal which had been suppressed 60 years before by the Soviet hierarchy, was published in West Germany.  But before long it was being smuggled back into the Soviet Union. 

And when Zoya began writing about the “new martyrs’’ in the Soviet Union, she was arrested.  Encouraging Christianity and democracy was a crime for which she could have been executed.  But in a move designed to show itself as tolerant, the court sentenced her to “only” one year in the infamous KGB Lefortovo prison.  Secretly, though, they tacked on an additional exile of five years to a remote settlement near the Mongolian border.  Zoya was allowed one visit a month with her husband and daughter, but was prohibited from going to Church or having contact with a priest.

However, when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power she was given the chance to “repent” of her sins against the State.  She refused but was still pardoned in 1987.  

Undaunted and fearless she would spend the last 21 years of her life as a pro-democracy activist, speaking out against totalitarianism and even publicly challenging her own Russian Orthodox Church to apologize for the ways it too collaborated with the Soviet authorities.

When one considers that an estimated 12-20 million Russian Christians alone who were put to death by the Soviets for their faith, Zoya Krakhmalnikova seems to have gotten off easy.  But ask yourself if you’d be willing to lose your career, good standing, freedom, material wealth, home, friends, spouse, and child for the cause of faith and freedom…or anything.  If you wouldn’t chose instead to play it safe, get by, compromise conscience for comfort?  That’s certainly the typical human response, and any reasonable person would understand if Zoya had chosen that path of least resistance.  

But she didn’t.   That’s the point.

Zoya Krakhmalnikova is a hero you should know.  And I’m Dr. Ross Porter.

Peace Moms: Betty Williams and Maired Corrigan

On a sweltering afternoon in August 1976 Danny Lennon and John Chillingworth raced through the streets of Belfast.  They’d been identified by British police as Provisional Irish Republican Army members and were suspected of transporting guns.  At Finaghy Road North the police opened fire, killing Lennon the driver and sending the car careening onto the sidewalk.  It hit a mother, Anne Maguire, and her three children who were out shopping.  The eight year-old girl and her six week old brother were killed instantly, their 2 year-old brother died the next day.  Anne survived the tragic accident but would commit suicide four years later, unable to overcome her grief.

Maguire’s neighbor Betty Williams, who happened to be driving home at the same time and witnessed the horror, decided enough was enough.  She began gathering signatures of both Catholics and Protestants for a peace petition, and organized 200 women to march through Belfast to raise awareness for this latest effort at peace.  The march passed close to the home of Maired Corrigan, the sister of Anne Maguire, and Corrigan joined in.

 

And ‘Women for Peace’, a movement committed to ending the Troubles in Northern Ireland was born. 

Soon after the initial march a second march took place, and this time 10,000 Catholic and Protestant women made their way through Belfast again, this time to the graves of the three Maguire children.  The protesters were met with violence by IRA members on the route, who accused them of colluding with the British government.  The response of Williams and Corrigan…a third march the following week where more than 35,000 people participated. 

In contrast to the past, Williams and Corrigan put forth a platform that called for an end to violence in Northern Ireland not through violence, but re-education.  The organization, which soon changed its name to the more inclusive ‘Community for Peace People’ began publishing a newspaper, Peace by Peace, and providing bus service for families trying to visit loved ones in Belfast’s  jails.  And Williams and Corrigan spoke out, and traveled, and spoke out some more.

Their impact was so significant that in 1977 the two moms from Belfast were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

In 2006 Williams and Corrigan joined with fellow Nobel Prize winners Shirin Ebadi, Wangari Maathai, Jody Williams and Rigoberta Menchu Tum (representing North and South America, the Middle East, Europe and Africa) to form the Nobel Women’s Initiative.  The goal of this initiative is to help support women's rights around the world.

Betty Williams and Maired Corrigan are heroes you should know.  And I’m Dr. Ross Porter.

Heroes You Should Know: Tegla Loroupe

Tegla Loroupe grew up in a small Kenyan village roughly ten miles from her school. There was no school bus, and her family had no mode of transportation. So beginning at age seven, she would run there and back, without shoes. And in the process she figured out she was pretty good at distance running.

Because of her size (fully grown, now, she stands five feet and weighs 86 pounds), the Athletics Kenya (the Kenyan governing body for track and field) did not take her seriously until she won a national cross country event in 1988 at the age of 15. The next year she received her first pair of running shoes and began competing in international competitions.

Her father, who had four wives and 24 children, did not believe running was an appropriate pursuit for women, and wanted Tegla to be more domestic. But Tegla persevered.

In 1994 and 1998 she won the gold medal at the Goodwill Games in the 10,000 meters, and a bronze medal at the IAAF World Championships in 1995 and 1999 at the same distance.

The United States met her up close when she won the New York City marathon in 1994 and 1995. In all, Loroupe has won 8 marathons around the world, and three world half-marathons. She has also held the world record for the women’s marathon, the world record for one hour running (where she covered 18, 340 meters), and at distances of 20, 25, and 30 kilometers.

But as passionate as she is about professional distance running, Loroupe has always been about more than just personal fame and money.

In 2003 she started the Tegla Loroupe Peace Foundation, with the motto “peace through sports.” Her foundation works to promote peace and economic development between under-served individuals and communities in Northern Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Yemen, Eritrea, Djibouti, and Sudan. Through her reputation and leadership skills, Tegla’s foundation has built an orphanage in Kenya, and also established a series of “peace races.”

These 10K events, which started in 2006, have high ranking government officials running alongside thousands of warriors from rival tribes---and bonding through the experience.

In 2006, Secretary General Kofi Annan of the United Nations named Tegla a United Nations Ambassador of Sport, and in 2008 Oxfam named her Ambassador of Sport and Peace to Darfur.

Today, this world-class athlete and world-class human lives in Germany and Kenya, while continuing her humanitarian efforts around the world.

Tegla Loroupe is a hero you should know. And I’m Dr. Ross Porter.