Pictures with stories By Deborah Ensor, UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER San Diego, CA, U.S.A.,Mar 24, 03- These are simple pictures. Innocent. Elegant. A tiny baby sitting on a dirty, tattered, old bed. Two young boys standing in a deserted and dusty soccer field. A child playing dead. Pictures, they say, are worth a thousand words. But these pictures may be worth even more. "Sometimes, I saw that my parents were sad," wrote Jose William Claros Conde, a 10-year-old boy from Colombia, who took an eerie photograph of his brother and a friend in an abandoned soccer field. "Because we couldn't go out to play because other kids had been kidnapped and taken by the guerrillas and all that." Jazmin Gonzalez Pindea, 11, took a picture of her sister playing dead, lying on her stomach. These children live in El Progreso, a barrio outside Bogota. The photos they took are part of a program, "Shooting Cameras for Peace," sponsored by the AJA Project, a nonprofit organization run out of a small apartment in Ocean Beach. The volunteers at AJA � the initials stand for "supporting self-sufficiency" in Spanish -are bright, young people with prestigious college degrees who take jobs as pedicab drivers or bouncers on the weekends so they can devote themselves full time to making the world a better place. Abdi Ali, a 15-year-old from Somalia, is one of about 20 children working with AJA in City Heights. Abdi said most of his family is in a refugee camp in Kenya. His immediate family was sponsored to come to the United States by an elderly woman in Florida, where he lived before coming to San Diego. "It's like a second chance in life to come here," he said. "People cope with difficult situations. Though they are very horrible, you get stronger from that." Abdi said he can't write letters to his family in Africa because the government won't allow them through. So the pictures will be valuable to show what his life has been like in the United States. [There is] a photo that Jose, the boy from Colombia, took of a young friend running through his back yard. He was trying to illustrate a dream he had. "I dreamt that a kid was running around looking for peace," Jose wrote about his photo. "Here's the kid's house, and he was looking for peace in another place, because he suffers a lot in this place and needs a new home." Click on http://www.ajaproject.org/sandiegoproject.html for a picture and further news --------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/articleshow?msid=41455121 Anti-war protest by Australian students turns ugly AP[ Associated Press] Sydney, Australia, Mar 26 '03- Angry schoolchildren protesting against the war in Iraq battled police in central Sydney on Wednesday, throwing plastic chairs, bottles and eggs and smashing street signs. Rattling tambourines and beating drums the schoolchildren, many in uniform, chanted "No War - No War" and fought running skirmishes with ranks of police. It shouldn't be violent but what are we going to do," said 15-year-old Hajir, wearing a T-shirt reading: "Make Chocolate, Not War." One placard read: "We are ready to fight, world peace is our right." Other students, who had also participated in a raucous rally by schoolchildren early this month, said they were embarrassed the protest was disintegrating into violence. "We came here for peace not to start a war," said Sian Parslow, 17. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/xml/uncomp/articleshow?msid=41013541 United colours of crayons by RITA SAWHNEY, The Times of India India,MARCH 22, 2003- ASK any school kid his favourite class in the school. Chances are seven out of ten will say drawing and painting class. There is no denying the fact that kids have a natural affinity towards colours. The popularity of colours can be gauged from the very fact that even before a child enters the portals of a formal school, his parents friends and relations begin gifting him colouring books and crayon boxes. Says Pooja Jain, director,Crayfun, ��Kids constitute our prime clientele and we provide them a comprehensive range to choose from. Crayola Crayons from the American brand, Binney & Smith, has recently entered the Indian crayon market with a big bang. Atul of Optimum Marketing Metrics says, ��our new range crayons are thicker than any other variety of crayons. Kids have the flexibility to use them on any place and make a new era of their imagination world. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20030326/ap_wo_en_ge/na_gen_us_wander_boy_1 Boy who wandered off with dog found after spending night in woods Associated Press EL DORADO, Arkansas, USA,Mar 26 '03 - A 3-year-old boy who spent more than 20 hours wandering with the family dog, crossing creeks and highways and navigating woods, was found unharmed, some four miles (6.4 kilometers) from home. Robert Lee Bennett disappeared Monday afternoon with Sassy, his Chinese pug. He was found late Tuesday morning along an old pipeline north of El Dorado, about 20 miles (32 kilometers) from the Louisiana border. "He just wandered away from the house with his dog," Sheriff Ken Jones said. "He got a good way. He swam some creeks and marshes and was in a little wooded area." Lee's grandmother, Cathleen Graham, said she thinks her grandson disappeared into the woods because he was upset with his mother that he couldn't go with her to the store. "I don't know how he ended up where he did," Graham said. "I can't tell you what he was thinking for sure. I'm not 3 years old." Deputies got a break Tuesday morning when a truck driver told them he had seen a dog and child cross U.S. 167 in front of his truck the afternoon before. "I blew my horn at this little, curly tailed dog. He ran across," driver Kenny Hamilton said. "Then this little boy ran across the road after him, right there in front of me." The next day he told deputies about the boy-and-dog pair when he realized they were the objects of a massive air-and-ground search that had so far turned up nothing. "We refocused the search and got the tracking dogs going the other way," Jones said, and the boy was found about two hours later. Scratched from brush and trees, the boy � whose family affectionately nicknamed him "Tadpole Pete with the Big Stinky Feet" � was checked out at a hospital and released. "Thank you, thank you, thank you ... for getting our Tadpole Pete back home," Graham told the crowd of searchers. This little kid got lucky. Not a good idea, though! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------